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

• home
• diary
• writings
• sounds
• snippets
• reading table
• on photography
• public speaking
• photos

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

Buy from Amazon

Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

September 29 2006
Copyright The Financial Times

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s new prime minister, on Friday pledged to create a
“new Japan” that was more assertive abroad and more proud of its
traditions at home.
In his first policy address since becoming prime minister, Mr Abe, 52,
told a joint session of parliament that his administration would make
education more patriotic, diplomacy more robust and act to rewrite a
constitution “drafted almost 60 years ago when Japan was under
occupation”.
He also said his administration, packed with like-minded social
conservatives, would try to instill greater pride and patriotism, which
he argues has been stifled by an exaggerated sense of guilt following
defeat in the second world war.
“The time has come for us to step forward, with quiet pride in our
hearts to create a new country.” He added: “I want to undertake reform
of awareness so society as a whole shares family values.”
Mr Abe, the first prime minister born since the end of the second world
war, is attempting to set a different tone from the administration of
Junichiro Koizumi, which came to power in 2001 at a time of economic
crisis.
Mr Abe argues that, with the economy returned to a modicum of health,
it
is time to address issues postponed throughout the post-war period when
Japan was primarily concerned with generating fast economic growth.
He said he would seek to strengthen the prime minister’s office, a
process begun by Mr Koizumi as a way of neutralising what he often
considered the dead hand of the bureaucracy. Mr Abe has handpicked more
advisers to work in his office than is customary, with some of the top
appointments aimed at establishing a US-style national security
council.
Mr Abe did not spend much time in his speech addressing how to improve
strained relations with China and South Korea, aside from saying he
would work for “future-oriented discussions”, a phrase often employed
by
his predecessor.
His administration is pushing hard for early summit meetings with both
China and South Korea, and government officials said on Friday that an
early meeting with Roh Moo Hyun, South Korea’s leader, was possible
following a positive telephone conversation between the two leaders the
previous day.
On the economy, Mr Abe said he would put more priority on cutting
expenditure than raising taxes and pledged to keep government borrowing
below Y30,000bn. However, he would not “run away” from tax increases,
he
said.
He also said he would push to revive local economies, some of which are
not experiencing the near-boom conditions of big cities such as Tokyo
and Nagoya, and ensure that those left behind had a “second chance”.
In an interview with the Financial Times on Friday, Akira Amari, trade
and industry minister, played down suggestions that Mr Abe’s
revitalisation plan would be expensive or lead to more government
interference.
“What we are aiming at is equality of opportunity in all stages of life
and in all places,” he said. “Since we have a free market economy we
are
obviously not aiming at equality of results. It is obvious that there
will be disparities of outcome.”
Copyright The
Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 10:43 PM · Comments (0)

Sep 28th 2006 | DAR ES SALAAM

DEVELOPMENT economists use it as a measure. If Tanzania can haul itself
out of poverty, others can too. But if it cannot, there will have to be
another rethink about the way that aid money is spent.

For the moment, Tanzania is one of east Africa’s few good-news stories.
That isn’t saying much. The country remains wretchedly poor,
inefficient, with little medical care in its remote areas, few roads and with
frequent power cuts, even in Dar es Salaam, the largest city. But donors,
disillusioned by the corruption and/or brutality that goes on
elsewhere, are happy to pour money into somewhere that is, at least, both
peaceful and stable.

And in Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania has found a president committed to
doing his best to cut poverty. A long-serving former foreign minister, Mr
Kikwete was elected in December with 80% of the vote. He remains hugely
popular.

He is helped by the efforts of his predecessors, particularly the
sturdy Benjamin Mkapa. The country’s GDP growth is expected to be 5.8% this
year, rising to 6.7% next year, and inflation has been low for years.
Tanzania’s relative lack of graft means that some donors now put their
money directly into the national budget with few strings attached.
Britain hopes to deposit $170m a year into Tanzania’s coffers in this way
for the next few years?ust the kind of predictability of giving that the
aid community has called for.

The question is whether the Tanzanian government will be able to spend
the money wisely. Prioritising is difficult. For instance, it takes Mr
Kikwete over an hour, in an interview, just to outline the basic needs:
more schools, universities and hospitals; more roads. Mr Kikwete’s
party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has set ambitious targets for all these
shortages. Lack of clean water is a particular worry. “It tortures our
women,” says Mr Kikwete, with feeling. CCM’s manifesto calls for
doubling the access to drinking water by 2010.

Overhauling the largely subsistence agricultural sector could be even
more important. If yields can be increased through subsidised irrigation
and fertilisers, and if peasants can diversify their production from
maize, “we can say bye-bye to poverty,” promises Mr Kikwete. That is an
old tune?gronomists have been humming it since the 1960s. But this time
the plans are backed by road-building schemes, new technologies, market
mechanisms and, just possibly, enough donor money to underwrite the
subsidies.

Much also rests on how CCM performs. The party has dominated national
politics since independence, with disastrous economic results in the old
days. It is no longer socialist?he old mantra of self-reliance is more
of a sentiment than an ideology now?ut nor is it yet a businessman’s
party. Though the past few years have brought in some foreign investors,
especially in gold mining, there are few signs of the kind of
innovative policies that might attract significant investment or lure back
educated Tanzanians from abroad.

Still, CCM can take credit for Tanzania’s strong sense of
“togetherness”: it is a place where loyalty to the country often counts for more
than tribal or religious identity. Mr Kikwete is an observant Muslim. The
first president, Julius Nyerere, was a pious Roman Catholic; the church
is considering him for sainthood. Togetherness may also explain why CCM
remains as dominant as it still is: at last year’s election, it won 202
of the 232 parliamentary seats.

Mr Kikwete travels with minimal security. He scrolls through several
hundred text messages on his mobile phone each day, most of them from
ordinary citizens who have somehow obtained his number. Sometimes he texts
back. He is clearheaded on international issues. He is happy to
contribute three battalions to a prospective UN peacekeeping force in the
Darfur region of Sudan, he says, so long as someone else foots the bill.

Perhaps the biggest reason for hope lies glittering below the ground.
The government’s demand for a bigger cut in revenues means that its
relations with foreign gold-mining concerns are strained. But the country
remains rich in deposits of gold and other minerals. Some reckon that
there is $20 billion in nickel deposits alone, somewhere down there in
the earth.

Copyright ?2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights reserved.

Posted at 5:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Financial Times

Zambia’s Copperbelt, an industrial hub set amid torrid African bush, is one of the world’s richest stores of the metal. During British rule the region formed the backbone of the colonial economy and served as a cradle of Zambian nationalism. In the 1970s Maoist China, in a mark of solidarity with southern Africa’s newly independent states, built the Tanzam Railway linking Zambia’s Copperbelt with the Indian Ocean ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa.

Today China - as an emerging economic colossus hungry for raw materials - is back in Zambia as a direct investor. Like past foreign patrons, the Chinese are taking no chances with their new prize.

In July six workers at the Chinese-owned Chambishi mine were shot and wounded after rioting over wages. This was the company’s second serious incident in just over a year. In April 2005 a massive and still unexplained blast levelled an explosives factory on the premises, owned by China’s NFC Mining Africa, killing 46 people. A witness says rescue workers were still retrieving body parts from the scene the next day.

Both incidents had a brief impact on world copper prices. They also stirred resentments in Zambia against the Chinese, a growing economic and diplomatic force there as they are around Africa. Now the issue has ricocheted directly into Zambian politics as the country prepares to vote in today’s general election. Michael Sata, a maverick populist challenging the investor- and donor-friendly incumbent Levy Mwanawasa for the presidency, has accused Chinese investors of underpaying and neglecting the safety of Zambian workers, and vows to limit foreign ownership of Zambian mines to 51 per cent.

In an unusual diplomatic intervention, this month Li Baodong, Beijing’s ambassador to Lusaka, said Chinese investors were holding back from committing funds pending the outcome at the polls. He also warned that China might sever relations with Zambia if Mr Sata won. While Beijing later distanced itself from Mr Li’s remarks, the incident starkly illustrated China’s ascendancy on a continent traditionally dominated by the US, France and other western powers.

Elsewhere in Africa, the growing Chinese presence has been greeted with a mixture of appreciation and resentment. Lax regulatory regimes have allowed Chinese goods, traders and workers to move into the continent’s underserved markets with relatively little hindrance. On the positive side, poor African consumers like the cheap goods China exports to their countries. Beijing has also proved a pragmatic, sleeves-up economic partner for governments at odds with the US, from Sudan to Zimbabwe.

But tensions have flared over various issues, from China’s use of its own nationals to rebuild war-ruined infrastructure in Angola to its export of cheap clothing to South Africa, which trade unions there say is destroying local industry. In Zambia, in addition to mining, Chinese investors have moved into sectors as diverse as farming, timber and retail.

In some cases, the newcomers have angered Zambians by importing Chinese citizens for unskilled jobs in areas such as construction. “We need capital and we need skills but we take exception to someone bringing labourers in,” says Chileshe Mulenga, director of Zambia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and a supporter of Mr Sata.

Chinese investors have also been criticised for deploying poorly-paid and under-equipped Zambians in dangerous jobs. In June Zambian authorities closed the Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mining Industries, based in southern Zambia. This followed reports that workers were being sent underground without protective clothing or boots.

The workers involved in last year’s explosion at Chambishi were unskilled and, according to unions, unprepared for work with hazardous materials. “That explosion happened due to negligence,” says Albert Mando, general secretary of Zambia’s National Union of Mining and Allied Workers. “You need experienced people to work there, but they decided to employ casual labour and cheap workers who didn’t know the dangers of an explosion.”

NFC was greeted as a saviour when it paid Dollars 20m (Pounds 11m, Euros 16m) for 85 per cent of the Chambishi mine in a 1998 privatisation deal, averting a threat of closure. But since then, against a background of soaring copper prices, tensions have flared between workers and management over wages and other issues.

In the July clash, one worker was shot by Zambian police at the plant after employees rioted, according to Xu Riyong, Chambishi’s company secretary. Another five were taken to hospital after they stormed into the Chinese residence, prompting expatriate management to open fire, says Mr Xu, who expresses regret for the incident.

Labour relations have recently improved since the implementation of a new collective agreement with workers. “When we came, conditions of service for employees were quite bad,” says Mr Mando. “We negotiated with them and conditions started improving.”

In addition to criticising foreign investors, Mr Sata has also promised a more assertive relationship with donors, who finance a large portion of the poor country’s government budget. “I think China’s relationship (with Zambia) is very imperialistic and that the attitude of western donors is also very imperialistic,” says Guy Scott, general secretary of Mr Sata’s PF party. “We had the western powers and then the Russians here in the Seventies,” he says. “Now we have the Chinese.”

Recent opinion polls show Mr Mwanawasa’s government fending off the threat from the PF leader. But even if he loses the election, Mr Sata does appear to have put Mr Mwanawasa’s government on the defensive. The Zambian president last week ordered the arrest and prosecution of investors in the copper industry who violated labour laws.

Support for the opposition candidate certainly runs high in Kamwala, an area of modest trading shops in Lusaka. Mabvuto Nkoma, a 24-year-old trader selling gauzy women’s skirts made in Dubai for Hong Ling, a Chinese-owned trading company, is one of many local people who say they will vote for Mr Sata. “I like the way he talks,” Mr Nkoma says of the candidate. “I want a government that will encourage people to build (infrastructure) - not just investors who will come here to start trading.”

Posted at 1:44 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Council on Foreign Relations

September 25, 2006

China caused an uproar in Western media this month when it announced new press restrictions, dictating that foreign news agencies must distribute their stories through the state-controlled Xinhua news agency. The move targets wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg that provide financial information directly to clients (Asia Times), and is part of a recent surge in protectionist provisions (TIME) limiting international companies in China from doing business ranging from real estate investment to mergers acquisitions. Chinese officials responded to Western criticism by defending the new regulations (NYT), saying they are a means to standardize the news and not a way for Xinhua to get a cut of the wires’ profits. Premier Wen Jiaobao backtracked on the measures (BBC) during a visit to London when he said Beijing “will ensure the freedom and rights of the foreign news media.”

The controversy over new media restrictions highlights Chinese media censorship, discussed in this new Backgrounder, which watchdog organizations say Beijing has stepped up under President Hu Jintao. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports the regulations tighten a 1996 agreement allowing direct distribution of financial news to clients. CPJ also says there are more than thirty journalists currently jailed in China, including reporters and researchers employed by The New York Times and The Straits Times of Singapore. In their 2006 report on the state of the media in China, Reporters Without Borders says “nothing escapes the censors who stoke up a climate of fear within editorial offices.” The organization ranked China 159th out of 167 countries in its 2005 index on press freedom worldwide.

Beijing exerts media controls through systematic restrictions as well as through financial incentives for journalists to exercise self-censorship, explains Ashley Esarey, an expert on East Asian media, in a Freedom House report (PDF). The Congressional-Executive Commission on China outlines the government agencies that institutionalize censorship. U.S. companies such as Yahoo! and Google are complicit in building the “Great Firewall of China,” reports Human Rights Watch, summarizing how the government blocks information moving from the global Internet to China’s Internet. In the International Herald Tribune, Howard W. French writes about a Chinese web portal editor who was fired after the site posted a survey asking respondents if they would choose to be Chinese in a future life and 64 percent answered “No.” He suggests Beijing could dub September “Thought Control Month” if this and other recent moves to control freedom of speech weren’t so troubling.

Despite Beijing’s attempts to step up media control, it may only be a matter of time before the censorship wall comes down. An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor says that as China becomes a thriving participant in the global economy, even if its leaders believe they can keep bolstering repressive press censorship measures, “The tide of history and the inexorable flow of news is against them.” Experts say the determination of young Chinese—including more than 100 million internet users—to gain free access to news means “Beijing will ultimately lose the information war (LAT).” The blogosphere has proven a difficult space to grasp for China’s censoring bodies. Despite official pronouncements in July that blog and chat room supervision would be tightened (South China Morning Post), Beijing can’t control leaks about domestic unrest, as shown by the recent case of a reappearing riot video (GlobalVoices.org).

Posted at 9:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006, at 7:07 PM ET

Once upon a time my night table groaned from the weight of the magazines I piled onto it: weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and one-offs; U.S. and international; men’s magazines, political rags, the newsweeklies, and all the various city, computer, sports, car, and music titles. Paris Review. Science. The Nose. National Lampoon. Outside. Mondo 2000. Stereo Review. Fortune. Sight & Sound. Raygun.

My magazine ocean refused no river, including fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which I had come to appreciate through the interpretive lens of a junior-high school classmate, with whom I routinely served detention-hall sentences. We did our time in the home-economics classroom, which was well-stocked with fashion magazines, and it was under his tutelage that I learned to appreciate the fashion spreads and lingerie advertisements as a kind of subversive, highly stimulating pornography.

But some time in the late 1990s, I lost my magazine jones. I still bought magazines but didn’t consume them the way I once did. Had they become too formulaic, or had my familiarity with the magazine template inured me to being impressed anymore? Or had the Web replaced my magazine habit?
Click Here!

I got rejonesed about magazines last year, when the editors of Stop Smiling put me on their press list. After a couple of issues of the five-or-six times a year Chicago-based arts and culture magazine, I found myself looking forward to the next, something I can’t say about any other periodical. Stop Smiling is smart. It’s idiosyncratic. It’s a little like Dave Eggers’ old magazine Might in that it’s beautiful to look at, only it’s irony-free. And it brims with the romanticism for magazines that Harold Hayes applied to Esquire, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter squeezed into Spy, and Louis Rosetto drenched Wired with.

By calling Stop Smiling my favorite magazine, I don’t intend to cripple it with praise. It’s not ready to be cast in bronze and join the magazine pantheon of Esquire, Spy, Wired, the late-1960s Playboy, and Andre Laguerre’s Sports Illustrated. Yet no other magazine in print commands my cover-to-cover attention the way Stop Smiling does. And the miracle of the magazine is that it does most of its magic with interviews!

I’ve always disdained the long magazine interview, regarding it as the low-budget way to pad an issue with copy. Real magazines hire reporters to write real articles. The exception to this rule has been Playboy, which once put as much energy into interviews as other magazines do to features.

Stop Smiling pinches a little of its interview philosophy from the Charlie Rose program and a tad from the Paris Review. Like the Rose show, it surrenders to its subject a platform for their views. Like the Paris Review, it doesn’t interrogate as much as it encourages subjects to talk about their work, their methods, and their muses. So the interviews of Ralph Steadman, Jim Jarmusch, Philip Gourevitch, Stuart Dybek, Lewis Lapham, Robert Wyatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Johnson, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer (interviewed by his son), George Lois, Bruce Robinson, et al., end up belonging to the subjects more than they belong to Stop Smiling. This sounds like a prescription for a flaccid, indulgent magazine, but it doesn’t work out that way. By picking interesting people to talk to and allowing them to say what’s on their minds, the editors produce beguiling copy. Stop Smiling’s oral history of Hunter S. Thompson bested Rolling Stone’s similarly constructed special issue about the Doctor in every way.

As romantics of a bygone era, Stop Smiling’s editors can’t resist republishing old A.J. Liebling and Mike Royko or resuscitating unpublished Terry Southern. The magazine’s two top editors are old men trapped in young men’s bodies—editor in chief and founder, JC Gabel, is 30, and Managing Editor James Hughes is 27—and their cultural compasses point to the past.

Sure there are interviews with Dave Eggers, Ricky Gervais, and Vince Vaughn, and pieces about Sufjan Stevens and Laura Dawn, but old guys and dead guys are the magazine’s main event. Gabel writes about New Yorker founder Harold Ross. An essay about the Grove Press calls its history “the secret playbook for the birth of everything cool.” Stanley Kubrick’s archivist tells all. Saul Bellow is eulogized. Harriet Monroe is remembered. Kenneth Patchen, George Plimpton, Studs Terkel, Orson Welles, William S. Burroughs, City Lights Book Store—practically anything gray or rotting can provide Stop Smiling with editorial sustenance.

Viewing culture through a rearview mirror can be disastrous for a magazine, especially one staffed by young people who don’t know as much as older people. But I’ve yet to read a Stop Smiling’s cultural retrospective and not learn a lot. Each issue of Stop Smiling boasts a theme—”the Boxing Issue”; “the Chicago Issue”; “the Rebels + Outlaws Issue”; “the Downfall of American Publishing”; and “the U.K. Issue,” to name a few. I find myself imagining future issues I hope the magazine gets around to doing—the art of drugs, war and peace, gangsters, the West, and H.L. Mencken.

Stop Smiling isn’t everybody’s magazine of choice. Earlier this year when the magazine published its love poem to the city of Chicago, the Chicago Reader (PDF) rightly accused it of boosterism. “When you cuddle up with your subjects, are you serving your readers?” the Reader asked less than rhetorically.

I guess it depends on who you’re cuddling, and who your readers are. I’m as ready for Abu Ghraib-style interviews of novelists, filmmakers, poets, and painters as anybody, but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve. But I could be wrong. Every journalistic spine I’ve ever cracked could have benefited from a little more starch.

Stop Smiling brings analogue pleasures to a digital world. I salute it for its lack of pretension (something that being in Chicago, rather than New York, may account for), its intellectual legibility, and its graphic soundness. Thanks to it, my night table groans once more.

******

Posted at 12:18 PM · Comments (0)

My first solo photography show, the fruit of three years of regular shooting of Shanghai’s fast-disappearing old neighborhoods in medium format black and white, is opening October 3 at Galerie Zero, in Berlin, on Oct. 3. (Visitors welcome!) The details can be found in the link below.
High quality, 4-color print catalogues including reproductions of 50 of the images are available upon request for $15. Please contact me at: globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
Gelatin silver prints are also available.
Disappearing Shanghai will also be showing at the Angkor Photography Festival, in Cambodia, from 11/25 to 12/1/06.

For details of the Berlin show, please seee:

Posted at 12:41 AM · Comments (0)

My first solo photography show, the fruit of three years of regular shooting of Shanghai’s fast-disappearing old neighborhoods in medium format black and white, is opening October 3 at Galerie Zero, in Berlin, on Oct. 3. (Visitors welcome!) The details can be found in the link below.
High quality, 4-color print catalogues are available upon request for $15. Please contact me at: globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
Gelatin silver prints are also available.
Disappearing Shanghai will also be showing at the Angkor Photography Festival, in Cambodia, from 11/25 to 12/1/06.

http://www.zero-project.org/next.html

Posted at 12:41 AM · Comments (0)

Africa: Girl Power

AfricaFocus Bulletin
Sep 23, 2006 (060923)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“Girls who complete secondary school are up to five time less
likely to contract HIV than girls with no education,” according to
a new ActionAid review of over 600 research studies. But in Africa,
an estimated 22 million girls have never been to primary school.

The contribution of girls’ education to development is widely
acknowledged by international agencies and researchers, the report
notes. But obstacles such as school fees, as well as armed
conflicts, poverty, and other factors still hinder rapid expansion
of girls’ education. Expanding secondary as well as primary
education is critical to combatting HIV/AIDS, this new report
stresses.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the press release and executive
summary from the ActionAid report on Girl’s Education, Sexual
Behaviour and AIDS in Africa. The full report is available on the
ActionAid UK website (see
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html).

A wide variety of reports and data on girls’ education is available
at the website of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative
(http://www.ungei.org), including announcement of a CD-ROM with
more than 100 recent resources on girls’ education and HIV
prevention (http://www.ungei.org/infobycountry/247_950.html).

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++++++++

Girl Power: Girls’ Education, Sexual Behaviour and AIDS in Africa

ActionAid
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html

14 August 2006

Girls educated to secondary and tertiary levels are more likely to
wait before having sex, are much more likely to use condoms when
they do have sex, and are therefore at much less risk of
contracting HIV, according to a new report released on 15 August.

One of the latest trends in the development of AIDS in Africa is
its increasing feminisation. In Africa, 6.3 million young people
aged 15-24 are living with HIV & AIDS, and 74% of those are young
women and girls.

In a systematic review of over 600 pieces of research on girls’
education, sexual behaviour and HIV, ActionAid has shown that
secondary education provides African girls with the power to make
sexual choices that prevent HIV infection.

The research shows that before 1995, educated girls were more
vulnerable to AIDS. Post 1995, as sex education improved and a
greater understanding of HIV prevention developed, more educated
girls became less likely to contract HIV.

Report author, Tania Boler said: “Young women receiving higher
levels of education are likely to wait longer before having sex for
the first time, and are less likely to be coerced into sex.
Strikingly, girls with more education are far more likely to use
condoms and they are less likely to contract HIV.”

The report’s findings challenge the increasingly vocal lobby which
claims it is inappropriate to promote condoms widely in the fight
against HIV.

“This report demonstrates the value of promoting condoms to a broad
population including young people, and not only to high risk groups
such as sex workers,” said Tania Boler.

ActionAid finds that education gives girls power, reduces
vulnerability and helps them make more independent, confident
choices about their sexual behaviour.
The report shows that:

* Schools and teachers are the most trusted source for young people
to learn about HIV, and that school attendance ensures greater
understanding of prevention messages. It also strengthens girls’
control, confidence and negotiating abilities to decide if to have
sex, and when they do, whether to use a condom.

* Peer group solidarity within school strengthens girls’ social
networks and creates more responsible attitudes to sexual
behaviour, safer sex and HIV.

* Conversely, girls who drop out of school are more likely to enter
into adult sexual networks, where older partners with more
experience and power dictate the ‘rules’ of sexual engagement.

* Poverty and vulnerability to HIV are closely linked. More
educated women have better economic and social prospects and
consequently have more choices.

Despite the role of education in protecting girls from HIV
infection, 110 million children worldwide do not receive an
education. In Africa, 22 million girls have never been to primary
school. Children still have to pay to go to primary school in 92
countries.

ActionAid recommends the abolition of school user fees in
developing countries to achieve maximum access to education,
broadening the curriculum to include sex education, encouraging
teenage mothers back into education and that condoms should be more
widely available for young people.

************************************************************

The Impact of Girls’ Education on HIV and Sexual Behaviour

ActionAid
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html

August 2006

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosis of
AIDS. This year, over one hundred countries pledged to ensure
universal access to AIDS prevention, treatment and care by 2010.
However, despite these grand promises, countries and donors are
failing to launch the type of large-scale prevention efforts that
are needed to reverse the spread of HIV.

The AIDS epidemic continues to evolve, staying one step ahead of
our attempts to prevent it. There are 13,500 new HIV infections
every day. One of the latest facets of this dynamic disease is the
increasing feminisation of AIDS: in Africa, where the HIV and AIDS
epidemic has hit hardest, 74% of young people living with HIV are
women.

HIV prevention campaigns often fail to address the increased
vulnerability of young women because they fail to deal with the
simple fact that many women lack the power to determine who to have
sex with, or when and how to have sex. The new challenge is how to
empower young women to assert their sexual and reproductive rights.
Of the possible solutions, giving girls an education is widely
recognised as the best way to provide this girl power.

However, in the rush to tackle the AIDS crisis, our response has
forged ahead of the evidence, especially as some of the research on
girls’ education and vulnerability to HIV has yielded mixed
results. The most rigorous way to make sense of the different
pieces of evidence is to conduct a systematic review examining all
possible evidence according to a predetermined set of criteria. To
date, there has only been one such review, which was conducted four
years ago a long time in the context of a rapidly evolving AIDS
epidemic.

Given the importance of basing our response to HIV on solid
evidence, ActionAid collaborated with the researcher from the
original review James Hargreaves and conducted a systematic review
of all the research published between 1990 and 2006 in eastern,
southern and central Africa to address the following research
questions:

1 What is the impact of girls’ education on sexual behaviour and
HIV?

2 What difference does primary or secondary education make to
women’s vulnerability to HIV?

3 What are some of the possible mechanisms underlying the
relationship between HIV and girls’ education?

The results show strong evidence that, early in the epidemic
(before 1995), more highly educated women were more vulnerable to
HIV than women who were less well educated. The most likely reason
is that more highly educated people had better economic prospects,
which influenced their lifestyle choices such as mobility and
number of sexual partners. They were also more likely to live in
urban areas where HIV prevalence rates were highest. At that stage,
there was also a general information vacuum about HIV and AIDS in
Africa.

However, as the epidemic has evolved, the relationship between
girls’ education and HIV has also changed. Now, more highly
educated girls and women are better able to negotiate safer sex and
reduce HIV rates. The more education the better. Across all the
countries reviewed, girls who had completed secondary education had
a lower risk of HIV infection and practised safer sex than girls
who had only finished primary education. Put simply, education is
key to building “girl power”! There are also inter-generational
benefits of education, with more highly educated adults having a
positive bearing on young women’s condom use. Moreover, more
education empowers boys and men to practise safer sex, thus
reducing their own, and their partners’, risk of infection.

Despite the power of girls’ education and numerous international
commitments to education, the reality is that the vast majority of
girls in Africa will not complete primary education, let alone
manage to get to secondary school. A key obstacle is the rising
cost of education. Most children in Africa have to pay to go to
primary school, paying increasing amounts as they rise through the
grades, particularly if they enter secondary school. This leads to
the exclusion of many children from education, especially girls.

If we are to see the real benefits of educating girls, then fees
need to be removed and governments and donors need to be urged to
invest more in primary and secondary education. Any increase in
funding to education should not be seen as an alternative to the
universal goals of HIV prevention, care and treatment but rather as
a complementary response that lays a solid foundation for our HIV
prevention efforts.

The gap between the epidemic and the response is - in some
countries - narrowing. This report shows that it is possible to
stay ahead of the virus but only when individuals (particularly
women and girls) have the power to choose who they have sex with,
and when and how they do so. Educating girls and women is one huge
step towards turning around the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Summary of results

Formal education can influence vulnerability to HIV in five
different ways:

1 Expose girls to HIV and AIDS education, which helps prevent HIV.
2 Provide psychosocial benefits for young women, helping them to
build their self-esteem and capacity to act on HIV prevention
messages.

3 Lead to better economic prospects, which in turn lead to
lifestyle changes that can influence HIV vulnerability.

4 Influence the level of power within sexual relationships.

5 Affect the social and sexual networks of girls.

Impact of girls’ education on HIV rates

In total, over 600 articles were identified for the review, of
which only 45 met the review criteria. Of these, 22 articles
examined the impact of education on HIV rates and revealed the
following findings:

* Before 1995, 10 out of 13 articles showed girls’ education had a
negative impact on HIV infection rates (more education, more HIV).

However,

* After 1995, none of the research showed more highly educated
women to have higher rates of HIV infection. Half of the articles
reviewed showed no association between HIV and education, and the
other half showed girls’ education to have a positive impact on HIV
vulnerability (more education, less HIV).

* An additional five studies examined HIV rates over time and found
HIV vulnerability to be decreasing in the most educated groups and
increasing or remaining stable in the least educated groups.

These findings suggest that the impact of girls’ education on HIV
is changing as the epidemic evolves. The evidence shows that, as
the epidemic matures, the impact of girls’ education reverses and
starts having a positive impact. This changing relationship between
education and HIV rates is strongly supported by studies taken over
time in four countries. A change is occurring in which more highly
educated women are becoming less vulnerable to HIV and at the same
time, less well educated women are becoming more vulnerable.

Impact of girls’ education on sexual behaviour

The studies looked at a wide range of sexual behaviour outcomes and
the results can be summarised as follows:

* Six out of eight articles showed that girls who had received more
education were more likely to start having sex at a later age. None
of the articles showed a link between more education and earlier
sexual activity or sexual debut.

* 10 out of 13 articles showed that higher levels of girls’
education were related to higher levels of condom use. Again, none
of the articles suggested that more education might lead to less
condom use.

* Education was also related to levels of coercive sex,
transactional sex, age difference between partners, and
relationships with commercial sex workers. However, the number of
studies are too small to find any trends.

The most striking finding is that more highly 5 educated women are
more likely to use condoms during sex. The finding on earlier
sexual activity is slightly more difficult to interpret as it is
also likely that the relationship actually works the other way:
earlier sexual activity impacts negatively on education. Put
simply, young women who are sexually active are more likely to get
pregnant and therefore drop out of school.

Boys’ or girls’ education?

Is the impact of education on HIV vulnerability different for young
women and men? Our analysis shows no striking gender differences.
The fact that education helps to protect against HIV holds true as
much for boys as for girls. Although the focus of this report is on
young women, empowering young men through education is as much a
part of the solution to the HIV epidemic as targeting young women.
However, focusing on girls’ education remains important as girls
tend to have less access to education and are therefore more
vulnerable to HIV and AIDS.

Primary or secondary education?

There were six studies that compared the results for primary and
secondary education. In all of these studies, completion of
secondary education was related to lower HIV risk, more condom use
and fewer sexual partners compared with completion of primary
education. These results tentatively suggest that more education is
linked to better protection against HIV. The relative importance of
investing more resources in primary or secondary education is less
clear but self-evidently, no girl will be able to access secondary
school unless she has been to primary school. Tens of millions of
girls are still excluded even from the first grade at school.

Of course, it should be noted that even when they have completed
secondary education, women are still vulnerable to HIV infection.
In other words, education helps protect women but many other
measures are also needed.

Mechanisms

Very few of the studies reviewed attempted to look at the
underlying mechanisms through which girls’ education might impact
on HIV vulnerability. The scant evidence that does exist suggests
that increased condom use is likely to be a factor. Economic status
is clearly also a factor, although it is hard to separate this from
education. Eight studies tried to show the relative strengths of
education and economic status and their bearing on HIV
vulnerability:

* One study shows education is more important than economic status.
* Two studies show economic status is more important than
education.

* Five studies show it is impossible to separate education and
economic status.

Recommendations

1 Prevention messages need to address gender and power dynamics
within sexual relationships, so that both girls and boys can become
confident enough to overcome negative stereotyping and peer
pressure.

2 The education sector response to HIV and AIDS needs to be
prioritised and all schools should provide comprehensive sexual
health education with a special focus on HIV and family planning.
Promoting condoms is a message that is working and should be
encouraged.

3 Schools should foster gender equality, promote positive role
models and challenge negative gender stereotyping. Zero tolerance
should be shown towards sexual violence and towards teachers having
sexual relationships with students.

4 Schools need to respond to the problem of teenage pregnancy by
providing comprehensive sex education to reduce pregnancy and
improve sexual health. Part of the response should include policies
on how to encourage teenage mothers to return to education.

5 In order to expand girls’ education, all forms of school fees in
primary education should be abolished. This policy must be
accompanied by adequate planning and resources to cover the loss in
funding from the fees and also to meet the increased demand when
education becomes free. The quality of education provision must not
suffer and governments should resist the practise of hiring
non-professional teachers.

6 Expansion of the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) a pledge made by the
international community to make sure that all countries have enough
resources to provide basic education should be encouraged. Donors
need to prioritise filling the immediate resource gap in FTI ($510
million) and the long-term gap of $10 billion.

7 Macroeconomic constraints that prevent governments from expanding
their spending on girls’ education need to be removed. To get all
girls into school and to keep them there requires the recruitment
of millions of new professional teachers. This means lifting public
sector wage bill caps imposed by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and generating open public debate about the trade-offs
between driving towards low inflation targets and ensuring adequate
spending on education and HIV and AIDS.

8 More focus needs to be placed on removing the bottlenecks between
completion of primary school and access to secondary school,
particularly for girls. This will require significant expansion of
secondary schooling in many countries and specific interventions to
remove the obstacles faced by girls wishing to continue their
education.

9 More research on young people, HIV vulnerability and teenage
pregnancy is desperately needed. All data should be separated by
gender. More longitudinal studies are also needed to understand the
reasons why education might protect against HIV, as well as
research comparing the impact of primary and secondary education on
HIV vulnerability. Finally, systematic reviews of existing
literature should be encouraged in order to build upon the research
that already exists, rather than reinventing the wheel.

*************************************************************
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
reposted material, please contact directly the original source
mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
http://www.africafocus.org

Posted at 9:25 PM · Comments (0)

Click to hear the program

Posted at 2:01 AM · Comments (0)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: September 22, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
For the complete article, please see the link below.

SHANGHAI, Sept. 21 — Every weekday this summer, Rose Lei drove her daughter, Angelina, 5, to a golf complex at the edge of central Shanghai for a two-hour, $200 individual lesson with a teaching pro from Scotland.

Chinese students play with teachers in the FasTracKids program in Shanghai. The goal of the program is to teach teamwork and leadership skills.

But now that the school year has started, little Angelina will have to cut back on the golf, limiting herself to weekend sessions at a local driving range. In addition to her demanding school schedule, she will be attending private classes at FasTracKids, an after-school academy for children as young as 4 that bills itself as a junior M.B.A. program.

Ms. Lei, 35, a former information technology expert and the wife of a prosperous newspaper advertising executive, is part of a new generation of affluent parents here who are planning ways to cement their children’s place in a fast-emerging elite.

A generation ago, when people still dressed in monochromes and acquiring great wealth, never mind flaunting it, was generally illegal, the route to success was to join the right Communist Party youth organization or to attend one of the best universities.

Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead. In addition to early golf training, which has become wildly popular, affluent parents are enrolling their children in everything from ballet and private music lessons, to classes in horse riding, ice-skating, skiing and even polo.

The intense interest in lifestyle training speaks not just to parents’ concern for their children’s futures but also to a general sense of social insecurity among China’s newly rich.

“These people are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation,” said Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Of the 35 million Chinese who traveled overseas last year, he said, many were shocked to discover that they were often viewed as having bad manners.

To address that, some of the newly affluent, like Ms. Lei, take their young children for extended stays overseas. London and New York are popular choices, because the children can get a head start on speaking Western-accented English.

Others are signing up for finishing schools popping up in China, which promise to train youngsters how to become proper ladies and gentlemen in the highest Western tradition.

The best known of these programs is run by a bluntly spoken Japanese woman, June Yamada, who charges about $900 for a two-week course that includes a brief stay at a five-star hotel here. Teenagers must bathe before dinner, take afternoon tea, wear formal dress and relearn how to walk, how to eat, how to dance and how to engage politely with members of the opposite sex.

“I don’t just teach them what to do and what not to do, I teach the girls how to be women, and the boys how to be men,” said Ms. Yamada, a former fashion writer who wrote a popular book on manners here. “We’re probably the most expensive school in Shanghai, but nobody is complaining and they keep coming back, so we must be doing something right.”

Ms. Yamada said she insisted that a parent attend the classes with any student she accepted, “because if the parent is spitting watermelon seeds or chicken bones right out of their mouth at home, what is the use of all the fine things we are teaching?”

Click to read more

Posted at 1:26 AM · Comments (0)

Click to read more

It’s late on a Friday afternoon in summer, and the city has the deserted feel that it gets just before a weekend. The streets are empty; taxis have their for hire lights on at the witching hour, the time when they’d normally be headed for the garage. But on the fifth floor of 1755 Broadway, a nondescript office building on the corner of West 56th Street, work—serious work—is in progress. The “Fall Books” issue of The New York Review of Books is being put to bed. “I’ll be here all weekend,” says Robert Silvers cheerfully.

On my way up in the elevator, I had wondered if Silvers would be wearing a tie: I’ve never seen him without one. The tie is there but askew, the top button of his white shirt undone. Instead of his usual dark suit, he’s got on a red cardigan. For anyone else, this would be like showing up at the office on casual Friday in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans.

It’s been a difficult time. In June, Barbara Epstein, Silvers’s co-editor at the Review for 43 years, died of lung cancer at the age of 77. He has been commuting from Lausanne, Switzerland, where his longtime companion, Grace, Countess of Dudley, is recovering from a serious car accident.

Between us on a table in the windowless conference room is a recent issue: volume LIII, number 13. The cover lists a sampling of its contents: the venerable Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman on three books about American foreign policy; Russell Baker on Roger Angell’s memoir, Let Me Finish; and a dispatch from Bolivia by the Latin American journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. It’s an eclectic but impressive mix—one that has made The New York Review of Books the premier journal of the American intellectual elite virtually since its inception during the New York newspaper strike of 1963.

Also in this issue are eleven brief tributes to Epstein by such old friends as Larry McMurtry and Gore Vidal. I myself knew her only from literary cocktail parties, but Luc Sante’s portrait brings her back: “She was funny, mischievous, infectiously enthusiastic, occasionally prodigal, sometimes incorrigibly teenaged, the best sort of company. The world is a much lonelier place without her.”

So is the masthead, which now contains, after editor, the single name Robert B. Silvers. Magazines are not, by nature, co-edited: Their identities depend upon the imposition of a single voice and sensibility. Paris Review was the expression of George Plimpton; Granta was the expression of Bill Buford. But The New York Review of Books was the co-expression of Silvers and Epstein, two strikingly original people who managed to speak with one editorial voice. The question being asked these days by the magazine’s loyal readers and contributors is, can it survive under the editorship of a 76-year-old literary widower who, however robust, hardworking, and determined, will now have to grapple with the burden of going it alone?

There are larger questions, too. Can The New York Review of Books survive without its founders’ specific genius. political and literary journalism it practices? A typical Review piece runs to 4,000 or 5,000 words, is pitched to readers who often have several advanced degrees, and may contain footnotes. Its intellectual and physical heft—the “Fall Books” issue came in at 100 pages—requires the kind of attention that becomes harder and harder to sustain with every new technological gadget we hitch to our belts or curl around our ears. The audience that grew up reading the Review is now in its fifties or older. Will the Review find a new audience with a younger demographic, or will it wither away like the state in Friedrich Engels’s prophecy, to be supplanted by new vessels of intellectual content? For its overwhelmingly liberal, hypereducated urban readership, it’s hard to imagine a Reviewless world.

The genesis of the Review is a literary legend by now. One night during the early weeks of the strike, Jason Epstein, then an editor at Random House, and his wife, Barbara (they were divorced in 1980), were having dinner with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, the Epsteins’ neighbors on West 67th Street.

Their block, between Central Park West and Columbus, is on a leafy street lined with elegant old apartment buildings known for their wood-paneled walls and double-height living rooms—“the last gasp of true?/?Nineteenth Century Capitalistic Gothic,” as Lowell once described it. But the artists for whom these grand ateliers were originally built had long since departed for more affordable neighborhoods, replaced by editors and writers who held down actual jobs.

Jason Epstein had already made his name in the literary world by figuring out, as a 25-year-old editor at Doubleday, that a market existed for quality paperbacks. Thus was born Anchor Books, which offered to a newly literate middle and upper-middle class cheap yet elegant editions of the classics, along with new titles destined to become classics—the “backlist,” as such books are called in the business. By now, of course, it would be hard to imagine publishing without Epstein’s discovery: If you removed every trade paperback from the shelves of Barnes & Noble, there would be nothing left but the “frontlist” hardcover titles allotted their six-week window before being returned to their publishers or pulped.

Among the books on the first Anchor list was To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson, the dean of American letters. Wilson’s narrative account of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution, which he traced back to the works of Marx, Engels, and their philosophical precursors Hegel, Taine, and Michelet, was an ideal prototype for Epstein’s concept: Written in workmanlike prose, it combined the virtues of journalism and scholarship. It was informative and easy to read—upper middlebrow.

In the early days of the Epsteins’ marriage, Barbara was “the wife,” a familiar type in that pre-feminist era, when in even the most progressive intellectual circles smart and sexy women deferred to their husbands. Born in Boston of Russian- and German-immigrant parents, she entered Radcliffe at the age of 16 and fell in with the arts-and-letters crowd. “The day we met she was sitting in the Radcliffe College cafeteria, smoking,” wrote the novelist Alison Lurie in one of the memorial tributes published over the summer in the Review. “Her black turtleneck Jersey, unstructured hair, and stack of books not on any assigned list instantly marked her as what would presently be called a beatnik.” She was known around campus as “Bubsey.”

The poet John Ashbery was also a classmate and friend. They met their freshman year, in the fall of 1945, on the steps of Widener Library. “I was struck by her clothes,” Ashbery recalls. “She had a ragbag, pre–Annie Hall look, odd bits of costume.” They “took tea” at the Window Shop on Brattle Street and attended chic Brit films like Black Narcissus and Whisky Galore.

Epstein’s first post-college job was at Doubleday, where she discovered and edited Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. A stint at Partisan Review—a useful training ground with its stable of high-strung, at times bellicose contributors—prepared her for the next and last chapter of her long working life in literature.

“There is a whole sort of Cultural Establishment,” Wilson noted in the journal he kept, chronicling the literary life. The Epsteins and Lowells were “the headquarters of the literary department.” Still only in their thirties, they were a celebrated pair, Scott and Zelda minus the alcohol-fueled marital theatrics—a power couple, to invoke the groveling term of our own status-obsessed day. They even made it onto the guest list for Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza, destined to become a mythic social event. Held in honor of the Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, the ball was attended by 500 of the host’s glamorous friends, from Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow to Lionel and Diana Trilling—in a literal sense, the smart crowd.

Their parties were famous. On any given night, you might find in the Epsteins’ high-ceilinged living room a cross-cultural crowd of iconic sixties figures: Lillian Hellman, Jane Jacobs, Abbie Hoffman, Philip Roth. “One was always aware that there was a large and complicated world out there,” recalls the Epsteins’ daughter, Helen, now a science writer at work on a book about aids in Africa. (The Epsteins’ other child, Jacob, is a TV writer in Hollywood.) “The whole place would be flung into turmoil—servants running around everywhere, a hundred people gathered in the living room. Then there would be Dad’s oddball interests, some guy who had invented the first mail-order catalogue, this person who had made a high-end cooking pot, or the great mathematician Norbert Wiener.” It was before the age of militant moderation that has seized the aging boomer intelligentsia of Manhattan—before the Death of Fun. “These evenings at the Epsteins’ are so strenuous that I am usually a wreck the next day,” Wilson complained.

Posted at 6:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Published September 22, 2006

For the entire article please see:

Click to read more

THE alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, one of the last of the truly imposing figures from a generation of jazz players that was full of them, seldom talks about other people’s music. People generally want to ask him about his own, and that becomes the subject he addresses. Or half-addresses: what he’s really focused on is a set of interrelated questions about music, religion and the nature of being. Sometimes he can seem indirect, or sentimental, or thoroughly confusing. Other times he sounds like one of the world’s killer aphorists.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

Ornette Coleman in his apartment in Manhattan. At 76, he remains busy; “Sound Grammar” is the name of both his new album and his new record label.
Related
Tunes Worth Talking About (September 22, 2006)
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Jazz

Enlarge This Image
Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

“There is no bad music, only bad performances,” Mr. Coleman said. His current band includes his son.

In any case, other people’s music was what I wanted to talk to him about. I asked what he would like to listen to. “Anything you want,” he said in his fluty Southern voice. “There is no bad music, only bad performances.” He finally offered a few suggestions. The music he likes is simply defined: anything that can’t be summed up in a common term. Any music that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ ” he said. “But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style — I don’t hear that much anymore.”

Then he went up a level. “I would like to have the same concept of ideas as how people believe in God,” he said. “To me, an idea doesn’t have any master.”

Mr. Coleman was born, in 1930, and raised in Fort Worth, where he attained some skill at playing rhythm and blues in bars, like any decent saxophonist, and some more skill at playing bebop, which was rarer. He arrived in New York in 1959, via Los Angeles, with an original, logical sense of melody and an idea of playing with no preconceived chord changes. Yet his music bore a tight sense of knowing itself, of natural form, and the records he made for Atlantic with his various quartets, from 1959 to 1961, are almost unreasonably beautiful.

Following that initial shock of the new came a short period with a trio, then a two-year hiatus from recording in 1963 and 1964, then the trio again, then a fantastic quartet from 1968 to 1972 with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman (who died three weeks ago), then a period of funk-through-the-looking-glass with his electric band, Prime Time. Mr. Coleman is still moving, now with a band including two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, and his son, Denardo Coleman, on drums.

He has a kind of high-end generosity; he said that he wouldn’t think twice about letting me go home with a piece of music he had just written, because he would be interested in what I might make of it. But there is a great pessimism in his talk, too. He said he believes that most of human history has been wasted on building increasingly complicated class structures. “Life is already complete,” he said. “You can’t learn what life is. And the only way you die is if something kills you. So if life and death are already understood, what are we doing?”

Posted at 6:05 PM · Comments (0)

By Howard W. French - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2006

SHANGHAI The question seemed innocuous enough when it appeared in an online poll this month on the popular Chinese Internet portal Netease: Would you like to be Chinese in the next life?

It is the answer that proved dangerous. Sixty-four percent of respondents replied no, with some of them commenting that to be Chinese lacked dignity.

Many foreign readers of such news might have felt a sense of surprise by the results. After all, why would such a clear majority of respondents prefer not to be citizens of a country that has progressed so dramatically on so many levels in the last generation? Moreover, with signs of prosperity springing up everywhere, what would motivate a large number of the participants to invoke a lack of dignity in their lives?

The Chinese government supplied the beginnings of an answer in the days that followed the poll. The editor of Netease was removed from his job, effectively banned from meaningful work for having conveyed opinions deemed contrary to the official view.

Upon further inquiry, it turns out there may be other contributing factors behind the disciplining of the Netease journalist. One that was advanced by people with knowledge of the case is that the editor had also recently run a news item about the Uighur opposition figure Rebiya Kadeer.

Never mind that the one and only source for the Netease story was an official statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. That statement was meant for circulation by foreign journalists outside of China in relation to the Uighur activist’s nomination for a Nobel prize, and was not meant for use domestically, where she is all but officially a nonentity. As one can easily see, adding this supposed infraction to the mix hardly improves the picture.

China has been on a such a roll lately in terms of the exercise of an antiquated style of control over news and information that in a cheekier moment one might be tempted to propose officially proclaiming September “Thought Control Month.” To get a picture of why cheekiness isn’t called for under the circumstances, and of how a nation’s sense of dignity could be imperiled, it helps to count the ways.

Advancing with dual motives, economic gain and censorship, the government has recently announced measures that would tighten control over foreign media, namely their distribution of information within China. Under the new setup, Xinhua, a state organ with strong roots in China’s totalitarian past, would be both agent and censor.

Article 11 of the new regulations contains the kind of vague, omnibus language that animates this country’s national security laws, which conceivably allow the arrest of anyone at any time for anything. It suffices to invoke national security. In that spirit the new Xinhua guidelines prohibit news being released in the country from “endangering China’s national security, reputation and interests.”

Facing mounting foreign criticism over this announcement, Beijing has been at pains to say that Xinhua will not seek unfair competitive advantages from the arrangement, and that foreign news operations will not be restricted in their work because of it.

Would that were so. The Xinhua move comes on the heels of a proposed law that prohibits both foreign and domestic media from unauthorized reporting on “sudden news.” News, by its very nature, tends to be sudden, so it would be hard for anyone who values access to information to find a charitable interpretation for this, no matter the spin.

For the complete article, please see the link below:
Click to read more

Posted at 10:18 AM · Comments (0)

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20060920/

Posted at 1:54 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The South China Morning Post

Saturday, September 16, 2006

A restaurant themed on the Cultural Revolution has opened on a narrow
street in Guangzhou’s military district, but its owners are worried
coverage in a local newspaper yesterday could invite unwanted attention
from the authorities. At the Da Guo Fan Restaurant, waiting staff
outfitted like Red Guards greet customers with “Tong zhi [comrade] ni
hao”. Customers are shown into rooms with red and yellow decor, the
walls lined with photos and posters of Mao Zedong , Lin Biao , Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping - key figures of the turbulent period between
1966 and 1976.

There is a statue of Mao, group photos of Red Guards and slogans
exhorting intellectual youths to go to the countryside and be
courageous, but no sign of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution which
might upset the authorities. Red Guards are seen studying and
celebrating the Lunar New Year, not leading struggle sessions against
enemies of the revolution. “It’s very sensitive now because of the new
law that bans businesses from using pictures and statues of leaders.
Besides, we are still applying for our licence,” said a restaurant staff
member, who identified himself only as Zhang.

“After this we might also have the cultural department supervising us,”
he said. “Nobody has bothered us in the past two months and normally the
commerce bureau will not give us any problem, but now that it’s in the
news, higher-up authorities might require them to do something.” One of
the owners, Wen Xuedong , a Guangzhou native, declined a request for an
interview. Mr Zhang said Mr Wen had moved the restaurant from Zengcheng
to downtown Guangzhou because “farmers there could not afford to dine at
the restaurant and did not appreciate history”.

Touched by his own experience of the Cultural Revolution - his father
was sent to a cadres’ school to reform his thinking - Mr Wen had
collected the posters and photos and downloaded Cultural Revolution
material from the internet. A customer said he had been to the
restaurant a few times but “the food is common country cuisine” and he
expected it to lose money if it counted on history to draw customers.
“That period made us feel uncomfortable. Why remember it when we are
living so comfortably now?”

Posted at 12:49 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Slate

Posted Monday, Sept. 18, 2006, at 11:40 AM ET

Pope Benedict XVI. Click image to expand.Pope Benedict XVI
There are many popes within Christianity—the Coptic Church has one, and the Eastern Orthodox Church also boasts a patriarch or holy father—but we have acquired the habit of using the term to describe only the bishop of Rome (as the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church describe him), and this is a pity for many reasons. It confers a sort of supreme authority on the leader of only one Christian sect, and it therefore helps to give non-Christians the impression that the representative of Roman Catholicism represents rather more of the “West” than he actually does.

Attempting to revive his moribund church on a visit to Germany, where the Roman congregations are increasingly sparse, Joseph Ratzinger (as I shall always think of him) has managed to do a moderate amount of harm—and absolutely no good—to the very tense and distraught discussion now in progress between Europe and Islam. I strongly recommend that you read the full text of his lecture at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday.

After the most perfunctory introduction, Ratzinger goes straight to his choice of quotation, which is taken from 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. This potentate supposedly once engaged in debate—the precise time and place is unknown—with an unnamed Persian. The subject was Christianity and Islam. The Byzantine asks the Persian to “show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” (On the face of it, not a very open-ended inquiry.) But, warming to his own theme, the purple-clad monarch of Constantinople allegedly added that “to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”
Click Here!

Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion. To take Islam’s own favorite self-pitying example: It was the Catholic crusaders who sacked and burned Christian Byzantium on their way to Palestine—and that was only after they had methodically set about the Jews, so the Muslim world was actually only the third victim of this barbarity. (Sir Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades is the best source here.) Yet of all the words he could have chosen, to suggest that religion might wish to break its old connection with conquest, intolerance, and subjugation, Ratzinger had to select an example that was designed to remind his hearers of the crudest excesses of the medieval period. His mention of Manuel II was evidently not accidental or anecdotal. He refers to him repeatedly and returns to him again in the closing paragraph, as if to rub it in.

And of course now we hear, as could have been predicted, the pathetic and unconvincing apologies issued by his spokesmen and finally Ratzinger himself. These will only serve to convince infuriated Muslims that by threatening reprisal, calling for the severing of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and issuing a few more sanguinary fatwas, they can force yet another retreat. The usual things have happened: the shooting of a nun in Somalia and the desecration of Christian churches in Palestine. And so the ecumenical “dialogue” goes on.

To read the bulk of the speech, however, is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim. He may well distrust Islam because it claims that its own revelation is the absolute and final one, but he describes John, one of the apostles, as having spoken “the final word on the biblical concept of God,” and where Muslims believe that Mohammed went into a trance and took dictation from an archangel, Ratzinger accepts as true the equally preposterous legend that St. Paul was commanded to evangelize for Christ during the course of a vision experienced in a dream. He happens to get Mohammed wrong when he says that the prophet only forbade “compulsion in religion” when Islam was weak. (The relevant sura comes from a period of relatively high confidence.) But he could just as easily have cited the many suras that flatly contradict this apparently benign message. The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion’s “revelation” and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.

The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either “the word” or “reason,” which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of “revealed” truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really “offended” the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day’s work, and one that we could well have done without.

Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright AP

Monday September 18, 12:19 AM

The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday _ laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.

A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.

The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible victims of Tokyo’s shadowy wartime experiments on live prisoners of war _ an atrocity that has never been officially recognized by the Japanese government, but is well documented by historians and participants.

The neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo is deeply troubled.

“I feel sorry for remains with such a sad history,” said Teppei Kuroda, a college senior who lives there. “I think they should be dug up and mourned properly.”

Their first burial was anything but dignified.

Former nurse Toyo Ishii says that during the weeks following Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts _ she doesn’t know how many _ before the Americans arrived.

A mass grave of between 62 and more than 100 possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in a nearby area in 1989. But Ishii’s account _ publicly released in June _ could yield a far larger number and a firmer connection to Unit 731, Japan’s dreaded germ and biological warfare outfit.

“If the bones are actually there, they are likely related to Unit 731 itself, because the facility that used to stand in that part of the compound was closely linked to the unit,” said Keiichi Tsuneishi, Kanagawa University history professor and expert of Japan’s wartime biological warfare.

Ishii’s disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with Health Minister Jiro Kawasaki and a government pledge to investigate. But it may be a long time before anything is confirmed. Health Ministry official Jiro Yashiki rules out a speedy exhumation.

“People still live there and we can’t visit each family to remind them of the bones … just imagine how they feel about it,” he said. “What if we find nothing after all the trouble?”

The 84-year-old nurse’s story is the latest twist in the legacy of Japan’s rampage through Asia in the 1930s and ’40s.

From its base in Japan-controlled Harbin, China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other disease as research into germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 also is believed to have performed vivisections and frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.

The 1989 find, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute at the former army medical school site in Tokyo, revealed dozens of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out.

Police denied any evidence of a crime, and the bones weren’t properly analyzed until two years later. In 2001 the Health Ministry concluded that the remains _ many of them of non-Japanese Asians _ were most likely from bodies used in “medical education” or brought back from the war zone for analysis at the medical school.

The ministry said the bones could not be directly linked to Unit 731, though it acknowledged that some interviewees had suggested they were shipped from Manchuria, northern China, where the unit was based.

In 2002, the Health Ministry built a memorial repository for the bones. But it has refused repeated requests for DNA tests from relatives of several Chinese believed to have perished in Unit 731.

Ishii says she was never involved in nor knew about experiments on humans. Her account dwells on the final chapter of the war and the rush to conceal it.

In an interview at her Tokyo home, she said she was assigned to the hospital’s oral surgery department in 1944.

She said the hospital had three morgues, where bodies with numbered tags around their necks floated in a formalin-filled pool, awaiting dissection. Body parts were preserved in bottles.

After the surrender, workers piled the bodies and bottles in carts and brought them to empty lots in the compound, she said.

“We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole,” she wrote in a statement to the government in June. “We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens.”

She said a hospital official told her years later that a public housing complex for the families of senior doctors and hospital officials, including himself, was built at the site to cover up the mass grave. That complex was later replaced by Toyama No. 5.

Posted at 3:39 PM · Comments (0)

The following link contains details of my first solo photo exhibit, which opens at the Zero Gallery in Berlin on Oct. 3. Visitors welcome!:

http://www.zero-project.org/howard_french.html

Posted at 10:05 AM · Comments (1)

http://www.npl.co.uk/blueskies/

Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

An intriguing part of the conversation between the Byzantine Emperor
Manuel
II Paleologus and “an educated Persian” now made world-famous by Pope
Benedict XVI, is that the Persian seems to have no name. There is no
mention
of it in the speech made by the Holy Father during his “Apostolic
Journey”
to the University of Regensburg on 9/12.
The Persian must have been an intellectual of some importance if he was
good
enough to merit an audience with an “erudite” emperor. Does his name
exist
in the original text, since it was “presumably the Emperor himself who
set
down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and
1402”? Was the name mentioned in the version produced by Professor
Theodore
Khoury, which the Pope has read, and which he used in a speech on a
critical
aspect of a sensitive theme at a time of conflict, on the Islamic
doctrine
of “holy war”? I ask because names lend greater credibility to text.
Was the
name omitted because Muslims of the educated kind preferred anonymity?
Not
at all. Imam Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun were household names at the time
of
this dialogue.
There are other uncertainties in the Pope’s speech, which purports to
be
about “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” in
which
he quotes Manuel’s ignorant, but, given the history of the early and
medieval Church’s continual diatribe against Islam and its Prophet,
predictable view. This discussion on “holy war” appeared in the seventh
conversation and was “rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole”. It
is
interesting that Pope Benedict should select what was “rather marginal”
for
emphasis and ignore the apparently more substantive issues that were
discussed. What is genuinely disconcerting is that the Holy Father
should
accept Manuel’s taunting, erroneous and provocative depiction of the
Prophet’s message without any qualification. Pope Benedict is not at
all
disturbed by phrases as insulting as “evil and inhuman, such as his
command
to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. This is utterly wrong,
as
even a cursory understanding of Islam would have made apparent. Are the
Pope’s speechwriters equally biased or ignorant? The Pope treated
Manuel’s
observation and commentary as self-evident truth.
I have a further question: Why didn’t the Pope quote the Persian
scholar’s
answer to Manuel? It was a conversation, after all. Are we to believe
that
the Persian gave no answer, that he did not challenge such a rant? He
could
not have been much of a scholar in that case. If he did not reply he
justifies his anonymity.
I am not erudite enough to have read the dialogue in the original
Greek, or
Professor Khoury’s edited version of it. I can only go by the Pope’s
speech
in Germany.
Some uncertainties can be explained by the distance of six centuries,
as for
instance the sentence that the conversation took place “perhaps in 1391
in
the winter barracks near Ankara”. The fact that we are reading Manuel’s
record, rather than the Persian’s, also explains why it lays more
stress on
the emperor’s view of theology.
What is aggravating is that the Pope has been free with assumptions,
and
liberal with its first cousin, innuendo. The peaceful piety of Manuel
becomes an indictment of Islam, which is held to be violent in
preference
and doctrine. The innuendo is cleverly expressed, indicating that some
effort has been taken to be clever. The famous verse of the Quran, that
“There is no compulsion in religion”, is juxtaposed with the
proposition
that “According to the experts, this is one of the Suras of the early
period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”. The
implication
is that when he was not under threat, he drew out his sword and went on
a
rampage. This is the kind of propaganda that the Church used to put out
with
abandon in the early days, adding gratuitously comments about believers
and
“infidels”. This is the line that those who have made it their business
to
hate Muslims, use till today. But the Vatican had stopped such
vilification,
and it is unfortunate that Pope Benedict has revived it.
If he had consulted a few experts who understood Islam, he might have
been
better educated on “holy war”.
It is absolutely correct that no war verse was sent down to the Prophet
during his Mecca phase. Despite the severest persecution, to the point
where
he almost lost his life, he never advocated violence. There are
innumerable
verses in the Quran extolling the merits of peace, and a peaceful
solution
to life’s problems — including a preference for peace over war. The
Quran
treats Christians and Jews as people of the Book, despite the fact that
they
did not accept the Prophet’s message. It praises Jesus as “Ruh-Allah”,
or
one touched by the spirit of Allah (this is the best translation I can
think
of). Mary, mother of Jesus, is accepted as virgin, although the Quran
is
equally clear that Jesus is a man, and not the son of God.
The war verses are sent to the Prophet only when he has been in Medina
for
some time, and has become not only a leader of the community but also
head
of a multi-faith state. War, in other words, is permitted as an
exercise in
statecraft, and not for personal reasons, including persecution.
Further, it
is circumscribed with important conditions. Surely no one, including
Pope
Benedict, believes that a state cannot ever take recourse to war?
Indeed,
the history of the Vatican is filled with war. The Quran’s view of war,
as
an answer to injustice, certainly merits more understanding than
censure.
Manuel’s view is better understood in the context of his times. He was
monarch of a once-glorious but now dying empire. The Ottomans had been
slicing off territory for centuries; the first Crusade had been called
by
Pope Urban II three centuries before to save the Byzantines from Muslim
Turks. The heart of the empire, Constantinople, was now under serious
threat. If Tamerlane (another Muslim) had not suddenly appeared from
the
east and decimated the Ottomans, Constantinople might have fallen
during
that siege which so depressed Manuel. It was hardly a moment when the
Byzantines could have the most charitable view of an Islamic holy war.
What
is less understandable is why Pope Benedict should endorse a fallacy.

The present Pope is not a successor to the great and wise John Paul II.
He
is heir to predecessors like Pope Nicholas V who issued “The Bull
Romanus
Pontifex” in January 1455. This Holy Father sought “to bestow favours
and
special graces on Catholic kings and princes, who … not only restrain
the
savage excesses of the Saracens (that is, Muslims) and of other
infidels,
enemies of the Christian name, but also for the defence and increase of
the
faith vanquish them…” He then praises King Alfonso for going to
remote
places “to bring into the bosom of his faith the perfidious enemies of
him
and of the life-giving Cross by which we have been redeemed, namely the
Saracens and other infidels…”
And so on. This was the philosophy that created the Inquisition in
which
Muslims and Jews were killed and driven out of Catholic kingdoms in
Spain
and Portugal after the Christian reconquests. Do note that Muslims did
not
have any exclusive copyright over the use of the term “infidel”.
I have no particular desire to introduce 16th century dialectic into
contemporary attempts to bridge inter-faith misunderstanding, but it is
pertinent that Nicholas V became Pope some sixty years after Manuel’s
conversations with the unnamed Persian. Equally, there is no point in
quoting from, say, Dante’s rather bilious descriptions of the Prophet
and
Hazrat Ali for that language belongs to a different world.
A suggestion to those who believe in an “international outcry”.
Hyper-reactions tend to suggest nervousness. Islam is not a weak
doctrine;
it is built on rock, not sand. Reason is a more effective weapon than
anger.

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Excerpts from Ian Buruma’s review of the Frank Rich book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina.

…Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.

This is how the war was sold: We were told by Dick Cheney in late 2001 that an official Iraqi connection with the 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta was “pretty well confirmed.” In the summer of 2002, Cheney said that Saddam Hussein “continues to pursue a nuclear weapon” and that there was “no doubt” he had “weapons of mass destruction.”…

…How could this have happened? How could some of the best, most fact-checked, most reputable news organizations in the English-speaking world have been so gullible? How can one explain the temporary paralysis of skepticism? This is perhaps the most painful question raised by Rich’s book, since his own newspaper was clearly implicated. An air of intimidation, which hung over the United States like a noxious vapor after 9/11, is part of the explanation. Susan Sontag became a national hate figure just for saying that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with violent anti-Americanism.

Newspaper editors should not have to feel the need to prove their patriotism, or their absence of bias. Their job is to publish what they believe to be true, based on evidence and good judgment. As Rich points out, such journals as The Nation and The New York Review of Books were quicker to see through government shenanigans than the mainstream press. And reporters from Knight Ridder got the story about intelligence fixing right, before The New York Times caught on. “At Knight Ridder,” Rich says, “there was a clearer institutional grasp of the big picture.” Intimidation is only part of the story, however.

The Republicans, being more populist than the Democrats, have exploited this new climate with far greater finesse. Accusing the media of bias is an act of remarkable chutzpah for an administration that pitches its messages straight at radio talk show hosts and people in public relations.

Rich gives many examples. One of the more arresting ones is of Dick Cheney appearing on a TV show with Armstrong Williams, a fake journalist on the government payroll, to complain about bias in the press. Something has gone askew when one of the most trusted critics of the Bush administration is Jon Stewart, host of a superb comedy program. It was on his “Daily Show” that Rob Corddry, an actor playing a reporter, lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the government, which had created “a whole new category of fake news - info-ganda.” Rich is right: “The more real journalism fumbled its job, the easier it was for such government info- ganda to fill the vacuum.”

There may be one other reason for the fumbling: the conventional methods of American journalism, marked by an obsession with access and quotes. A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally underused. The problem is that there are not always two sides to a story.

Someone reporting on the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 would not have added “balance” by quoting Joseph Goebbels. And besides, as Judith Miller found out, what is the good of quotes if they are based on false information? Bob Woodward, one of Rich’s chief bêtes noires, has more access in Washington than any journalist, but the weakness of his work is that he never seems to be better than his sources…

For the complete article, please see the link below:

Posted at 11:33 AM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French - Copyright The New York Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

SHANGHAI On subjects where almost everyone sings from the same choir book, it often makes sense to listen to the lonely, discordant voices that emanate from the corners.

A notable voice of dissonance heard in China recently was that of a young foreign policy expert from Shanghai named Wang Yiwei, who published an article in the Global Times newspaper under the attention- grabbing headline, “Preventing the U.S. from Declining Too Rapidly.”

The writings of this relative unknown mostly aroused bemused curiosity in China-watching circles overseas. Foreign experts wondered how serious the author was, and whether the article represented anything more than his own views.

One sort of answer came from within China, where he was immediately attacked by members of the foreign policy establishment, sometimes harshly, who said he did not understand his own country and should go back to studying the classics. Others insisted, as is the convention here, that China has too many problems of its own to be worried about a much greater place in the world.

“Paul Kennedy can reimburse people for the erroneous predictions in his book with millions of the copies he sold,” Luo Yi, a journalist wrote in reply in the same newspaper, referring to the well-known prophet of American decline. “Yet, if China is credulous about U.S. decline, and bases its policy on that belief, it will be a strategic mistake that’s not reimbursable.

“The fundamental issue for China’s rise,” Luo continued, “lies in whether China can solve its internal problems well. That should be the base of all foreign policies.” Indeed, for years, with relatively minor variations, the choir book in China has called for a very different tune from Wang’s summons to manage American decline.

Sometimes its leading refrain has been built around a catchy phrase, “peaceful rise,” and sometimes not. But its main elements are remarkably consistent: China should keep its head down and work hard at getting rich. The problems of others should not overly concern the country. We don’t seek to be leaders. No one should feel threatened by our growth. By our very culture, we are benign.

These thoughts resound like the playing back of an endless loop when talking to mainstream Chinese scholars, and can lend the impression of cant. Like the “sleeper hold” of professional wrestling legend, it might seem designed to subdue rivals with no sudden or dramatic exertion.

What is most intriguing about Wang’s article is that, wittingly or not, it raises the possibility that much of this is nonsense. Here, refreshingly, is a Chinese thinker who is saying that the United States’s role in the world is due for decline, and that China must abandon its habitual pose of passivity and take actions to shore up the international system in its own interest.

In fact, Wang is unhappy with the eye-catching headline. The United States is not simply due for decline, he says. Its place in the world is bound to shrink to the point where it will be reduced to a mere regional power.

For the complete article, please see the link below:

Posted at 1:54 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Asia Times

“The United States has nothing to fear from China’s emergence as a global economic power … We want you to succeed … The tasks faced by Beijing are so daunting that the biggest risk we face is not that China will overtake the US, but that China won’t move ahead with the reforms necessary to sustain its growth and to address the very serious problems facing the nation.”
- US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who is due in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese officials next week.

“China can’t dominate Asia; there are too many governments in Asia.” This comment by a senior Chinese official during a recent
interview in Beijing reflects realities of power that make Chinese leadership in Asia unlikely under foreseeable circumstances.

The findings of private interviews and discussions with 75 officials in China and seven other Asian governments about China’s rise, the balance of influence in Asia, and Asian regional dynamics contradict much public discourse that depicts a powerful China coming to the leading position in Asia at a time of US decline.

Although prevailing commentaries focus on Chinese strengths and US weaknesses, government officials in Asia privately show an equal awareness of Chinese weaknesses and US strengths.

They also recognize that independent-minded governments in Asia maneuver and “hedge” in reaction to China’s rise. These governments work quietly among themselves and with the United States to ensure that their freedom of action will not be negatively affected as China rises. Such actions reinforce US leadership in Asia.

US policymakers and regional observers can choose to adopt the one-sided view of those commentators who predict China’s dominance and US decline in Asia. They tended to do the same thing in the late 1970s, when the US was weak and divided after the defeat in Vietnam and when it was predicted that the rising power, the Soviet Union, would dominate Asia. The same pattern prevailed in the late 1980s, when respected US commentators said that Japan would dominate Asia as US influence in the region declined.

Of course, those earlier predictions were dead wrong; they focused on the strengths of the rising powers, the USSR and Japan, and did not adequately consider their weaknesses; and they focused on the weaknesses of the US and did not adequately consider its strengths.

A more sensible path is to listen to the more balanced and carefully calibrated views of Asian government officials, summarized below. While media, vocal non-government elites and public opinion matter in some Asian countries, it is government officials who make foreign policy.

Chinese strengths and limitations
Growing Chinese prominence in Asia is based on rapidly growing economic interchange and adroit diplomacy. Chinese and most Asian officials play down the implications of China’s impressive buildup of military power, though Japanese and some Taiwanese officials focus on this perceived Chinese threat.

Burgeoning trade and growing Asian investment in China are the most concrete manifestations of greater Chinese prominence in Asia. China has become the largest trade partner of many Asian neighbors, and Chinese trade expands at almost twice the rate of China’s fast-growing economy.

Entrepreneurs from the more advanced Asian economies provide the bulk of the US$60 billion in foreign investment China receives annually. Chinese wealth and economic importance support growing popular exchanges in tourism and education.

Attentive Chinese diplomacy involves an often dizzying array of leadership meetings and agreements with Asian neighbors and increasing adroit Chinese interchange with the growing number of Asian regional organizations. As a result, China’s positive image has grown, particularly in South Korea, much of Southeast Asia, and Australia.

Heading the list of limitations and weaknesses of China’s rise in Asia is strong Chinese nationalism; this seriously complicates Chinese relations with Japan and Taiwan, and causes significant difficulties with South Korea, Singapore and India, among others.

Chinese territorial claims are a serious concern in the East China Sea, a major drag on improving relations with India, and an underlying concern in Southeast Asia. China’s authoritarian political system is unattractive to many, though certainly not all, of China’s neighbors.

Chinese economic and diplomatic strengths also reflect significant limitations and complications. More than half of Chinese trade with Asia and the world is processing trade, which leads to double and triple counting as a product crosses borders, sometimes several times, before completion and (often) export from China to the US and Europe.

The value added by China in this trade is frequently low, and the trade depends heavily on US and European consumers. Reflecting this reality, Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2005 said his country was “a major trading country” but had not yet become “a major trading power”.

Chinese economic competitiveness means that Asian manufacturers often cannot compete directly with China. In response, Asian entrepreneurs increasingly invest in and integrate their businesses with China, but Asian workers cannot move to China and often suffer. Investment in Asian economies declines and Chinese investment and foreign assistance in Asia remain very small and do not offset these negative implications.

China’s “win-win diplomacy” focuses on common ground, which receives great positive publicity but does little to resolve differences or deal with issues. With few exceptions, China does not do hard things; it carefully avoids major international commitments or risks.

US weaknesses and strengths
US weaknesses dominate public discourse on the United States in most of Asia. They center on the decline in the US image amid widespread criticism of the US war in Iraq, the US position on North Korea, unilateral US actions on significant international issues, and perceived inattentive US policies regarding the economic development and other concerns in Asia.

Nevertheless, Asian government officials were almost uniform in emphasizing the importance of the US role as Asia’s security guarantor and vital economic partner. The main exceptions were a Communist Party of India (Marxist) official and, to a degree, some Chinese officials, who criticized the US security role in Asia.

Asian government officials are well aware that Asian governments generally don’t trust one another. The suspicion and wariness one sees today between China and Japan characterize most relationships between and among Asian governments.

And yet Asian governments need stability to meet their nation-building priorities. In this context, the US looms very large in their calculations. Unlike their Asian neighbors, the US does not want their territory and does not want to dominate them. It, too, wants stability and, in contrast with China’s reluctance to undertake major risks and commitments, the United States is seen to continue the massive expenditure and major risk in a US military presence in Asia, viewed as essential in stabilizing the often uncertain security relationships among Asian governments.

Not only does the US continue to occupy the top security position as Asia’s “least distrusted power”, the US also plays an essential economic role in the development of Asian governments, most of which are focused on export-oriented growth. It continues to allow massive inflows of imports essential to Asian economic development, despite an overall US trade deficit approaching $700 billion annually. Against this background, when asked if overall US power and influence in Asia were in decline, Asian officials were uniform in saying no.

Asian maneuvering and hedging
All Asian government officials consulted acknowledged that China’s rise added to incentives for most Asian governments to maneuver and hedge with other powers, including the US, to preserve their independence and freedom of action.

A Singapore official said that “hedging is the name of the game” in Southeast Asia, while an Indian official said that Asian governments “are not going to put all their eggs in one basket”.

Asian governments hedge against the US and other powers as well, but their recent focus has been on China’s rise. The governments tend to cooperate increasingly with China in areas of common concern, but they work increasingly in other ways, often including efforts to strengthen relations with the US, to preserve freedom of action and other interests in the face China’s rise.

In sum, such hedging by Asian governments in an Asian order supported by undiminished US security and economic power and influence adds to factors that preclude Chinese leadership or dominance in Asia; it reinforces US leadership in Asia.

The majority of Asian government officials assumed that China sought eventual “pre-eminence” in Asia, but Chinese officials said no, even though Chinese foreign-policy specialists said that secret Chinese Communist Party documents over the years had continued to refer to a general goal of Asian leadership.

As noted, when asked whether China sought leadership or domination in Asia, a senior Chinese official acknowledged the complications of US power and influence and the role of many independent-minded Asian governments; he responded that “China can’t dominate Asia, there are too many governments in Asia”.

He nonetheless went on to advise that China’s influence in the region would grow as China’s “weight” would become increasing important to the governments in the region and China would have increasing success in reassuring Asian governments of Chinese intentions.

Robert Sutter (sutterr@georgetown.edu) is professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

Posted at 11:05 PM · Comments (0)

By Howard W. French - Copyright The New York Times

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

XI’AO, China Where as many as 10,000 fishing boats once docked, today only a few bob in a long, serpentine harbor here still flecked with wrecks. All along the shoreline, families that only recently made a rich living from the sea, stare glumly at reminders of their loss.

Clearly, this fishing village and others near the mouth of a bay on China’s southeast coast suffered catastrophic damage when Typhoon Saomai blew through on the afternoon of Aug. 10, a Category 4 storm packing sustained winds of 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, per hour. Yet the following day, initial reports listed only 17 people dead and 138 missing in all of Fujian Province.

The emergency response was trumpeted as a triumph. By noon that day, according to news reports distributed nationwide, over 500,000 people had been evacuated, and 5 million others had been alerted to the impending danger through short messages sent to cellphone users.

In a visit to the area two days later, the Chinese deputy prime minister, Hui Liangyu, praised the local authorities for their “proper direction, for effectively limiting the damage, for strong measures and for orderly rescue work,” adding that “the Party is here” to support you.

In the storm’s aftermath, however, a very different account of events has gradually taken shape. Although it is unlikely that an accurate death toll will ever be established, the actual numbers appear to far surpass the official totals.

“I’ve never seen such a big wind, and neither has anyone who has lived here in the last 60 years,” said Wei Dingxian, a 34-year-old fisherman whose boat was destroyed, and whose brother drowned on another craft.

Wei told one Chinese magazine that he saw bodies floating in the bay for several days as he searched for his brother.

An internal news agency report compiled in the days after the storm and intended just for the authorities, bluntly contradicted the official picture. In succeeding days, Chinese news media also took an increasingly skeptical view of the official accounts.

After consulting with local fishermen, these publications, among them Chinese Newsweek, concluded that about 900 boats from the area had been lost at sea. Since each fishing boat typically has a crew of two, they estimated that in the vicinity of 2,000 people had died just in the immediate area, where the storm hit the hardest.

During events like these it often seems that the Chinese authorities are at war with the news, or even with the truth itself. Even weeks after the storm, local residents complained bitterly that the deputy prime minister had been led to a village where the damage was minimal, and wittingly or not, participated in a masquerade.

In a further indication of official sensitivities, a foreign reporter’s visit to the site was interrupted by a video camera- wielding crew of local propaganda office officials who stopped the reporter’s tour of the area and escorted him out of the province.

Earlier this year, the country’s State Council, or cabinet, approved a law that would assess large fines against “news media that violate the regulations and release reports about the situation regarding management of sudden incidents.”

Added to that, just this week, China announced new regulations prohibiting foreign news organizations from distributing news, photos or graphics in China, and warning them against reports that “endanger national security.”

In the case of Typhoon Saomai, however, it was the Chinese news media themselves who confronted, however tentatively, the fictional picture of a monster storm masterfully handled.

Two days after the storm, and a day after Hui visited the area, reporters from the headquarters of the official Xinhua press agency in the neighboring Zhejiang Province arrived here to discover scenes of devastation unlike anything that had been reported.

For the complete article, please see the link below:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/13/news/china.php

Posted at 10:44 PM · Comments (0)

Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 11, 2006; A01

BEIJING — In the studios of Capital Life Radio’s No. 1 rated show, “Tonight’s Whisperings,” the co-host leaned in close to the microphone. “Tonight we’re going to talk about love and sex,” Sun Yan said in a deep voice, launching into a text message sent in by a student.

The young listener said that he and his girlfriend had experimented sexually the month before, but “both of us wore underwear.” He wanted to know what to do. “What if she’s pregnant?” he asked. “Will her life be in danger if we have an abortion? Which hospital can guarantee a successful abortion?”

Sun’s co-host, the author and lecturer Wu Ruomei, clasped her hands together. She explained patiently that the girlfriend was unlikely to be pregnant, but she also issued a warning. Experimentation should be avoided, she said, because it could lead to sex, and then “you might be headed for a visit to an abortion doctor.”

The exchange kicked off an hour and a half of discussion on a subject that is still taboo in much of China, even as magazines, music videos and the Internet increasingly promote sex to the country’s trend-conscious youth. Adults, many of whom came of age during the ideologically driven Cultural Revolution, have struggled to keep up. The result is a growing gap between how teens behave and what older generations are doing to educate them.

“Tonight’s Whisperings” targets college students but enlightens thousands of younger teenagers who are hard-pressed to find answers to their questions elsewhere. It also worries anxious, tradition-bound parents who believe too much information about sex will corrupt their children.

Adults now in their fifties would have been teenagers during the Cultural Revolution, a time of such puritan attitudes that couples rarely held hands in public. Openness about sex was already considered bourgeois by the Communist Party, which came to power in 1949 battling Western influence and the corrupt excesses of the ruling Nationalist Party. Under the Communists, the smallest romantic gestures could lead to a person’s being labeled a “bad element,” subject to persecution along with rich peasants, landowners and counterrevolutionaries.

“It was a very cold time. You did your romance in darkness, in secret,” said He Guanghu, a Renmin University professor who was 16 when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. By the time it ended a decade later, a generation of young people had lost not only their chance for an education, but also the ability to speak openly about love and sex and display the emotions of a loving marriage.

Even today there are limits. “We cannot say too much in the radio program and should be careful how we speak, in case some listeners appeal to higher authorities to cancel the show,” said Wu, who has co-hosted “Tonight’s Whisperings” for eight years.

Most of the queries come by e-mail or text message from listeners who want to avoid being overheard by parents or roommates.

On a recent Friday, there were questions about masturbation, sexual harassment and feelings for those of the same sex, as well as a question about whether a virgin bleeds when she has sex. A high school student pining for a boy she slept with two years ago was told to forget him and move on. A girl who had gone swimming with her boyfriend was told that sperm could not swim into her body and make her pregnant.

“Sex education in China does exist, but it’s useless,” said Zhang Yinmo, author of a best-selling book about high school sex and adolescent yearning. “They stand there and tell the students to read it themselves, or they tell them to study it at home.”

The most common form of sex education today is a 45-minute class offered just once, in the middle of a physical hygiene course, in the second year of middle school. Most teachers are too embarrassed to discuss this chapter in the course textbook, which identifies body functions, periods and wet dreams, experts said.

“If you want to date in middle school, you have to act like a guerrilla,” said Su Ran, a 17-year-old student who said she kissed her first boyfriend at 13. “You talk secretly, you kiss in a small alley. The teacher is always like a ghost, she will appear at any time.”

Liu Xiaoqing, a recent graduate of an elite Beijing high school, said her girlfriends were too embarrassed to ask questions about sex. She rates her own sex ed — the screening of one film that explained how the egg meets the sperm and another that showed animals having sex — as woefully inadequate.

But attitudes are changing.

“Twenty years ago, if you looked at a guy or a girl for more than 20 seconds, you would be judged as sick,” said Liu, 18. “Now, more and more kids hold hands and kiss in public.”

In some schools, sex education is taught several times a year.

“Different districts have different textbooks. Sex education is a comparatively sensitive topic, and it’s still in a pilot phase,” said Xu Zhenlei, vice secretary of the China Sexology Association, a group of academics that advises government officials. “Generally speaking, most parents are against sex education. If you’re talking about the sex education that says, ‘Don’t date and focus on your studies,’ of course they support that.”

When Wu, the radio co-host, first volunteered to lecture in schools in 1992, she was often rejected immediately. She now speaks at about 50 schools a year. “The people in the Education Ministry are already more open than they were 10 years ago,” she said. “But they still can’t keep up with what students need.”

It’s no better at home, where parents who have had no sex education themselves don’t understand why it’s necessary.

Zhang’s second book, “Roses Hidden in a Book Bag,” published in 2004, is full of stories of high school students having unprotected sex and parents unable or unwilling to discuss the issue. Zhang is now working on a third book, about sex and middle school students. The students featured in her first book were born in the early 1980s, and they prized their virginity and worried that too much sex was harmful.

One boy told Zhang he was in elementary school when his mother slapped him after he accompanied her to a museum exhibit and asked what a penis was. Back home, his mother demanded, “How can you get married if you act like a hooligan at so young an age?”

“The most important thing is Chinese traditional ideas about sex,” Wu said. “You cannot tell exactly what sex is. And that is exactly what the students want to know. China used to hide this subject under the table. They considered it dirty, and changing attitudes takes a long time.”

In the absence of frank discussion, teenagers turn to the Internet or easy-to-find adult videos. Most of the 600,000 registered users of the sites in a large online pornography case were juveniles, prosecutors in Shaanxi province said. Eight out of nine suspects charged were about 20 years old.

High school and college students in urban China increasingly accept premarital sex, surveys show. While the majority remain more conservative than their peers in more developed countries, Chinese students are having both sex and abortions at increasingly younger ages.

Now, at the close of summer — after holidays that gave female students time to see their boyfriends — gynecologists say they expect to see a rise in the number of unwanted pregnancies. And many of those girls and young women will seek abortions.

Some experts attribute that to widespread advertising describing abortions as cheap and painless. Only hospitals are allowed to prescribe the RU-486 abortion pill, but it is easily obtained from illegal clinics for about $15.

In Shanghai, a hotline for pregnant girls that opened last summer was immediately flooded with calls, including from girls as young as 13, according to the Shanghai Youth Daily. A year later, the hotline has handled 11,000 calls; 47 percent of the cases involved first-time abortions, 35 percent second abortions, and 18 percent of the callers had had three or more abortions.

“All these surveys are compatible,” Wu said. “Last month, the Beijing Evening News says 90 percent of university students think it’s okay to have premarital sex and only 16 percent use condoms.”

Girls are too embarrassed to buy condoms and worry that carrying them will ruin their reputations, said Su, the 17-year-old high school student. Boys never think to bring them and don’t like to use them, she said.

With her kohl-rimmed eyes, long false eyelashes, blue fingernails and stylishly permed hair, Su looks the part of a rebel. She moved in with her boyfriend, against her mother’s wishes. A friend of hers has had two abortions.

But Su said she holds traditional values and is prepared to marry her boyfriend. He is the first boy she has slept with, which she did nine days after her 17th birthday.

At the same time, Su said she already likes someone else.

“For kids our age, dating is just for having fun. It has nothing to do with love. You should have sex and talk about love when you’re older, when you have a stable life, a job, a salary, when you understand everything,” she said. “I’m too young, I know that.”

Researchers Jiang Fei and Jin Ling contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 10:06 AM · Comments (0)

It’s a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week? Gaby Wood meets David Remnick, its big-brained editor, and talks speed writing, 30-hour days and meeting Little Ant and Little Dec

Sunday September 10, 2006

‘Everybody has a cartoon of themselves,’ suggests David Remnick, the editor of a magazine famous for them. ‘Mine is: I write very fast, and I’m ruthlessly efficient with my time.’

As New Yorker cartoons go, the image wouldn’t appear to hold much promise of a punch line, but Remnick doesn’t mind it, and it contains, after all, a certain amount of truth. ‘I’m not the slowest writer that you know,’ he admits, adding with characteristic wryness: ‘For better or for worse, by the way. AJ Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I’m one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.’

Article continues
Remnick, who was for many years the New Yorker’s star reporter, covering - in the tradition of AJ Liebling - an almost alarming range of subjects with grace and dexterity, has edited the magazine for the past eight years and quietly, seriously, changed its fortunes. He is the fifth editor in the New Yorker’s 81-year history and, by reputation - as his thumbnail self-portrait implies - its least eccentric.

So many memoirs have now been written about the distinguished publication that Harold Ross, its founder and first editor, has gone down in history as a maddening, well-connected workaholic who sacrificed three marriages to his literary invention. It is widely known that his successor, William Shawn, was neurotic, nuanced, almost pathologically shy, and that Robert Gottlieb, a gifted interloper, possessed a museum-worthy collection of plastic purses. In more recent memory, Tina Brown hired big-name writers at vast expense, threw celebrity-strewn bashes to promote the magazine (all of which resulted in a rumoured loss of up to $20m annually) and was supposed to have rejected any story that couldn’t hold her attention on the StairMaster.

It could be said that Brown’s methods were not eccentric but merely attuned to the demands of Eighties and Nineties culture. Equally, Remnick’s non-partying ethic and commitment to world affairs might be thought the only appropriate way forward for a post-9/11 magazine. Remnick, who was hired by Brown, has never been critical of her tenure, and is inviolably modest about his own contribution. ‘My background is as a reporter and foreign correspondent, but it’s hard to separate what one’s natural inclinations are from the times,’ he tells me. ‘My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.’ Remnick’s colleague Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink, says, similarly, that ‘we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics’.

Yet how can Remnick’s editorial strategy be considered inevitable when no one else is doing what he does? However frequently Graydon Carter may address the bungles of the Bush administration in his letters from the editor in Vanity Fair, he feels compelled, more often than not, to feature a cover star in a bikini. Meanwhile, on another floor of the Conde Nast building, the New Yorker puts Seymour Hersh’s investigations of national security on the cover and has the highest subscription renewal rate of any magazine in the country. It has a circulation of over 1m, and although it is privately owned and such figures are not publicly available, it is thought to be turning a profit of around $10m.

Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: ‘If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.’

Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. ‘So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.’

You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick’s most winning eccentricity.

We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: ‘Coffee? Water? Drip?’ His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs - a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer’s wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.

He has just returned from Arkansas, where he met Bill Clinton for a long profile he is writing, and he spent the end of last week editing a cover story on Hizbollah by John Lee Anderson with an exceptionally fast turnaround. Another reporter calls from the Middle East as I arrive. Yet here is Remnick, blithe and witty as anything, behaving more or less as Fred Astaire would, if only a role had been scripted for him by Philip Roth.

Reporting, a new collection of Remnick’s writing from the New Yorker, has just been published. It reveals not only the scope of his interests - he is as lucid about the PLO as he is touching about Solzhenitsyn, as excruciatingly accurate about Tony Blair as he is compelling on the subject of Mike Tyson’s trainer - but also the deceptive straightforwardness of his style.

Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Lenin’s Tomb, in 1994, and the great pleasure of that book, which gives a kaleidoscopic account of the fall of the Soviet Union, was that you felt party to the open mind of a reporter (originally at the Washington Post) who followed his instincts at every turn. He didn’t mind telling you, for instance, that his wife’s family had been interned in camps in the country to which they were now returning; if he saw someone handing out flyers in the street, he would delve deeply into their purposes; he was not shy of doorstepping ancient members of the KGB. In that first book, as in his others - a follow-up about Russia called Resurrection; a collection of pieces entitled The Devil Problem; a story about Muhammad Ali called King of the World; and Reporting - simply turned sentences open up vistas of complication. Yet the quality that Remnick shows most in conversation is his capacity for self-deprecation. He opens a profile of Katharine Graham, the imperious proprietor of the Washington Post and his sometime boss, with a story about his own involvement in the Post’s historic interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1988:

‘As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. I would not insist that Moscow was short on luxury in those days, except to note that I did not so much find a hairdresser as create one. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. I rang her up and explained the situation. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs Graham, and a hundred dollars.

“You’re on,” she said.

‘Apparently, the interview went well. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next day’s edition of Pravda. Mrs Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. I felt close to history.’

In a piece about Tony Blair written just before the last election, Remnick witnesses, behind the scenes, the Prime Minister’s utter humiliation at the hands of Little Ant and Little Dec. In a profile of Al Gore he reveals that Gore employs a private chef who still addresses him, years after his presidential defeat, as ‘Mr Vice-President’. He gets to hang out with the famously publicity-shy Philip Roth in his most feverishly creative period; he visits Solzhenitsyn and his wife as they prepare to return to Russia. Yet in a preface to the book, Remnick alerts the reader to the fact that most of his subjects are public figures who do their best not to let their guard down. Why offer the warning? To suggest we’ll never find out about them?

‘No,’ he replies, ‘so that you’ll find out about them in a different way.’ With politicians, ‘you’ve got press secretaries, and you’ve got a very, very self-conscious actor, who’s performing in public and the course of whose career is dependent on how he’s going to appear to some degree. And he’s very experienced at it. And any question you ask him, he’s heard, and he has a little tape loop in his head. So when something like Ant and Dec comes along,’ - Remnick grins broadly and looks up to the skies in gratitude - ‘Happy birthday. The gods of non-fiction have provided an unscripted scripted moment!’

Remnick pauses for a moment to tell a story about the glorious predictability of journalism. ‘There was a wonderful thing Slate did years ago, when it was just getting started, called the Hackathlon. It was Michael Specter, Malcolm Gladwell and I forget who else.’ (Specter and Gladwell are both old friends of Remnick’s from the Washington Post, and both now colleagues at the New Yorker.) ‘Each day there would be an event. You had to write a 500-word lede [an American term for an article’s opening paragraph] in the Vanity Fair style to a Richard Gere profile: Ready, begin. Then you had to do an Economist situationer on Tanzania - first 400 words. Then maybe a Rolling Stone lede to a … you know: Mick Jagger is angry. Period. Paragraph. Very Angry. Period. The limo is late. You know, one of those. And then maybe a New Yorker thing on the history of sand. I don’t remember the specifics.’

Remnick leans in with a smile of utter glee, and goes on: ‘Specter beat Gladwell. He came from behind, but his lede on the Richard Gere, comparing the colour of his hair to his grey cashmere sweater, was just so brilliant that he overwhelmed him in the Hackathlon. I mean, he could do nothing else in his career and his New York Times obituary would read: “Michael Specter, winner of the 1997 Slate Hackathlon, died today of complications of a hernia operation. He was 98.”’

David Remnick was born in 1958 and grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, where his father was a dentist and his mother an art teacher. The extent of his early gifts, to hear others tell it, borders on the embarrassing. Richard Brody, a close friend Remnick met at Princeton, remembers a story Remnick told him at the time about his activities in high school.

‘He was interested in journalism already, and in literature and poetry,’ Brody tells me. ‘So he interviewed poets, and put together a collection of those interviews for a small literary magazine, and I think some of them were collected in a book. So even in high school he had not only the idea, but let’s say the lack of false modesty to go ahead and do something which many people much older would not have dared to do. ‘

Brody and Remnick found that they shared a love of Bob Dylan, a Jewish upbringing in the suburbs, and ‘a literary school of sorts’. As Brody puts it: ‘There was a whole generation of Jewish American writers - when Saul Bellow won his Nobel Prize, I guess when we were all freshmen or about to enter school. There were people like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer and Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller. We sort of had a canon of fathers. I think we weren’t postmodernists, temperamentally. We had read our Thomas Pynchon and our John Barth, but that wasn’t what excited us. We were excited by the late flowering, among the children of Jewish immigrants, of the late 19th-century novel.’

(Remnick, still an enduring fan of Roth, tells me that he would have published Roth’s latest novel, Everyman, in its entirety in the magazine, but Roth’s agent wouldn’t allow it.)

When he left Princeton with a degree in Comparative Literature, Remnick got a job at the Washington Post, where his early days were occupied by covering the night-cop beat, or doing celebrity interviews for the Style section, or writing about sport. In 1987, the Post decided it needed a second person in Moscow, and, as Remnick now recalls, ‘Nobody else wanted to go. It’s cold, in those days if you wanted a box of coffee, you had to order it from Denmark. Nowadays there are rich people and stores and all kinds of stuff. (It’s still cold - pace global warming.) So I got to go - I was 28, 29 - and it was the best kind of foreign story: really exciting, constantly changing, intellectually fascinating, ethnically various. It was heaven for a reporter.’ Before he left he married Esther B Fein, a reporter for the New York Times, who also filed stories from Russia.

‘When we were at the Post he was a kind of legendary figure and I was a little underling,’ remembers Malcolm Gladwell. ‘People have forgotten that - and this is not by any means an exaggeration - David was the great newspaper reporter of his generation. And had he never been anything but a newspaper reporter he would be, right now, the best. At the Washington Post there was one day when he had three stories on the front page, which I don’t think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.’

When Remnick was offered the editorship of the New Yorker, he had never edited anything before - with the exception, as he likes to remind people, of his school magazine. The decision to abandon writing - which, for the most part, he has (he now only writes two long pieces a year, plus commentary in the magazine) - was made on the basis of ‘a very simple calculation’: ‘I had about two days - a day - I had seconds to decide, actually. Where could I make the bigger contribution? The ability to affect this magazine and its place in the culture - now, I may cock it up as an editor, I don’t know, but the capacity for potential was greater doing this.’

Tina Brown left on a Wednesday in 1998. Remnick, who had written over 100 pieces for the magazine in the six years he’d been there, and who was, as Brown put it, ‘a key member of my dream team’, consulted on all kinds of editorial matters, was offered the job the following Monday, and took over straightaway, rallied by a five-minute ovation from his colleagues. ‘And then Tina was gone and the magazine had to come out the next week - and the week after that, and on and on,’ says Remnick now, looking amusingly baffled. ‘And I was an absolute novice. And the only saving grace is that there were these people around who were so good.’

It wasn’t easy. There have been times, even recently, when his instinct has failed him. He came out in favour of the war in Iraq, for instance, on the grounds of concern about weapons of mass destruction, and says now that ‘I was wrong about that, totally wrong, as events proved very quickly.’ The job, as Robert Gottlieb once memorably described it, is ‘like sticking your head into a pencil sharpener’. To make matters worse, in some quarters Schadenfreude kicked in early; a profile of Remnick in the New York Times took offence at his choice of interview venue - a formica-topped table in a coffee shop, which was seen to suggest that the ‘buzz’ of the Tina years had fizzled out on the spot.

Michael Specter, Remnick’s close friend of 20 years, tells me that a couple of months after Remnick took over, they went to Paris. ‘We took a walk and he said, “The worst thing is, everybody comes up to me and says: ‘Oh my God! You must be enjoying it so much!’ And I just want to say: ‘Yeah, it’s like enjoying cancer!’” Because it was really scary, and I think it was a lot to take on that job, never having been an editor, when the magazine was financially in trouble. ‘

In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: ‘Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it’s about inspiring the enlisted.’ It’s a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, ‘gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out’. He adds: ‘I don’t believe in swagger. I think it’s infantile.’

The magazine’s editorial director, Henry Finder, says drily that Remnick ‘has something very scarce in this city: an aura of sanity. He exudes a sort of calm that most New Yorkers get to experience only with prescription medication. As an editor, I think that aura of equipoise turns out to be very helpful, because you have so many people here who are professional neurotics, always acting out, drama queens, who have one form of craziness or another. And I think he sees it as his job to be… sane.

When I ask Malcolm Gladwell what he thinks the legend of Remnick’s tenure will be, he says: ‘How exactly things got so effortless.’

Specter says he’d like some sort of atomic clock so he could ‘divide 24 by Remnick time’ and work out how he fits everything in. (Remnick himself has minted the immortal dictum: ‘There are only 30 hours in the day - and that’s if you’re lucky enough to change time zones.’) It’s not just the work: he has a family too. Remnick and Esther Fein have two teenage sons and a seven-year-old daughter. He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn’t do anything other than spend time with his family and work. ‘It’s not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don’t go surfing. I don’t know: what do people do?’

He admits that certain pleasures have largely fallen by the wayside. ‘My son said to me - we were reading one night, he his book for school and I a stack of manuscripts - and he said: “You don’t read anything with covers any more.”’ Remnick cringes. ‘Dombey and Son immediately came down from the shelf!’

Yet there are other things he seems to make time for, somehow. Specter says the only person he knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own ex-wife, Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic for the New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick when one of their old favourites, the BBC version of John le Carre’s Smiley’s People, came out on DVD. ‘I said, “Are you watching it?” He said, “Yes.” He was writing a piece. He said: “I’m giving myself three hours of writing, one hour of Smiley.” And I just thought, Jesus Christ. I watch three hours of Smiley, then I have lunch, then I write for a couple of minutes. ‘

I tell Specter how proudly Remnick told me of his triumph in the Hackathlon, and that I wondered afterwards what he meant by extolling such bare-faced bad writing. ‘If you do it to change the world, you can get really bummed out,’ replies Specter. ‘The Hackathlon was a celebration of the fact that it’s a day job.’ He thinks for a second and laughs. ‘I think he’s happy when we do well. But he was much more excited about the Hackathlon than he was about any science writing or global health award I’ve ever received.’

‘The things about him that I wish …’ Specter goes on, a little awkwardly. ‘He’s an incredibly good friend. I mean, he’s a better friend than he is an editor. And he’s very funny. My daughter thinks he’s hilarious. She said: “You know, David’s the coolest of your friends, Dad.” Then she said: “Actually, he’s not cool, but he’s the best of them.”’

· Reporting by David Remnick is published by Macmillan at £18.99

Posted at 10:54 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Far Eastern Economic Review

September 2006

If you want to know what the world thinks about China’s economy, best keep track of what the typical international corporate executive is reading. For the past year or two he has been reading some very provocative books about the mainland business climate. Four in particular top the current “best-seller” list: The China Dream by Joe Studwell (second edition reissue), Mr. China by Tim Clissold, China Inc. by Ted Fishman and China Shakes the World by James Kynge. All four are aimed at the mass market and are very entertaining, but they also have significant things to say about the broad economy: how it works, why it works and what’s driving growth.

HARRY HARRISON

Anyone deciding to read all four volumes, however, would come away bewildered and confused. Messrs. Studwell and Clissold essentially portray China as a house of sand, presaging the downfall of a bubble economy that has propped itself up through a potent cocktail of free capital and distorted resource allocation. Meanwhile, Messrs. Fishman and Kynge show an unprecedented, world-beating dragon, a success story that is changing the world in myriad ways.

How to explain the difference? It helps to remember the timing. The first two books deal with the events of the mid- to late-1990s, when China was reeling from a sharp economic slowdown: profits were collapsing, the government was putting millions of state workers out of jobs, and cynicism was widespread. The other two are focused on recent trends, essentially written at the top of the cycle: enormous growth, a massive export boom and seemingly unstoppable momentum.

There is, however, one overarching theme that comes screaming through in all four books—and indeed, from almost everything we read today: Whether success or failure, boom or bust, China is the story. Completely sui generis in scale and scope, different from everything that came before, the most dramatic event of the century, China “matters” in a way that no other emerging market has.

But what if this turned out not to be true? What if China were, in fact, little different from its neighboring countries, in terms of size, speed and importance? In short, what if China were boring?

This is not a rhetorical question, because from a macroeconomic point of view China’s growth dynamic is nowhere close to the unprecedented, world-changing phenomenon that boosters would claim—nor does it look particularly imbalanced or precarious, as the naysayers would have it. In fact, looking back 50 years from now the mainland will probably not be seen as special at all; economic historians will place China as a fairly regular part of a growth chain that began with Japan, filtered down through the Asian tigers and subsequently passed on to the Indian subcontinent.

If this sounds strange, it shouldn’t. But then, most of us have probably forgotten what the world felt like a few decades ago when the original Asian growth boom was still in full swing. And many observers, if not most, lack the formal economic background required to dissect the regional growth story and determine what really makes it tick. So before we think about China, or India, we need to step back and revisit the experience of their neighbors.

An Asian Digression

It’s safe to say that the world had never seen anything even close to the growth statistics coming out of Asia in the second half of the 20th century. Between 1950 and 1980, Japan grew at an average real rate of nearly 8%, more than twice the pace of its industrialized counterparts over the same period. In fact, in inflation-adjusted U.S. dollar terms the economy was doubling every six or seven years, an astounding feat by any standard. And this was just the beginning. A few years later an even faster-growing Asian contingent appeared on the scene: From 1960-95, the Hong Kong economy grew at an annualized real pace of 7.7%, South Korea grew at 8.1%, Singapore at 8.4% and Taiwan at a stunning 8.6%. In Southeast Asia, “quasi-tigers” like Thailand and Malaysia were not far behind.

These growth rates were not only orders of magnitude higher than in the industrialized world, but also much faster than most other developing economies. By the 1980s, with the world’s richer countries in recession and Asia still growing at a near-record pace, the questions began to mount. Had Asia discovered something that the rest of the world had missed? A new way to organize economic activity? In short, was Asia a miracle?

Suddenly, the “Asian growth model” appeared in business-school lecture halls, in academic conferences, and most of all in the popular press, where titles like Japan as Number One and Rising Sun ruled the day. What was the actual model? On this point most observers differed, but there was a general feeling that whatever Asia was doing, it was somehow better than the atomistic, consumer-driven laissez-faire economic culture of the Western democracies. Tight-knit corporations were not beholden to outside shareholders and thus achieved better industrial performance. Traditional Asian values and social cohesion made for a more optimal climate than the competitive “me-first” Western model. The main worry was that Asia was consistently outperforming all of its neighbors, and that even in the long term the rest of the world would not be able to keep up.

There were detractors, of course, and for the most part they skewed to the other extreme. Not only was high growth not a miracle, but Asian countries basically got to where they were by cheating. Companies were force-fed cheap capital by state-led banks. Foreigners were not allowed to compete. Exchange rates were hugely undervalued, providing an unfair cost advantage. Governments were mercantilist, suppressing imports and running large surpluses to fund growth. The result may have been resource misallocation on a massive scale, but it didn’t matter as long as U.S. and European consumers were willing to buy up all their products.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that economists got around to looking at these stories using formal economic tools. What they found blew away both views—and also established one of the most famous findings in modern international economics.

They started with the traditional growth model found in almost every college economics textbook. Stripped of extraneous bells and whistles, the basic formulation offers precisely three ways for an economy to expand: Add more labor, invest more capital, or combine labor and capital in new and better ways, which allows for more growth at every level of physical input. This last element is productivity, or using the proper terminology, “total factor productivity” growth.

Thinking about growth in this way provides a surprisingly easy test of the “Asian model.” If Asia really did create a miracle, in the sense of a fundamentally new way of doing things, then a large share of the region’s 8%-plus real growth rates would be attributed to total factor productivity expansion. If, on the other hand, governments were forcing superheated growth through heavy-handed, distortive policies, then TFP growth would be negative, a sign that Asia was actually destroying value over time.

Economists had been measuring growth in individual countries for a long time, but with 30 years of statistical data behind them, researchers finally had a chance to test the “Asian growth model” hypothesis across the entire region. One of the first, and the most famous, to do a systematic study of the Asian tiger economies was Alwyn Young. In a series of papers in the early 1990s, he reached two very interesting conclusions.

First, the average rate of total factor productivity growth was decidedly … well, average. From a productivity perspective, Asia looked exactly the same as the U.S. or EU, with TFP contributing around 1.5 percentage points to total annual growth. Some countries in the region did worse, and some did better, but the overall conclusion was clear: Asia had not discovered a wonderful new growth formula, nor was it any less productive than the developed West. So much for the Asian “miracle.” And so much for Asian “cheating.”

But if productivity wasn’t the main differentiating factor, what did explain the growth gap between Asia and the rest of the world? This was Mr. Young’s second major finding: As it turns out, almost all of Asia’s growth outperformance was due to its extremely high rate of capital creation, more than three times faster than in the U.S. or the EU. Simply put, Asia grew faster because it invested more, full stop.

As you can well imagine, this was a highly controversial conclusion. Instead of finding world-beating new ways to produce, it turns out that Asia’s main advantage lay in putting large amounts of capital on the ground (and, to be sure, in finding underemployed rural workers to populate the factories). In Paul Krugman’s famous phrase, the region’s success came from “perspiration, not inspiration”.

Now for the most important question: How did Asia manage to generate so much more investment? And so uniformly across countries? After all, the region was a relatively diverse place: large countries, small city-states, some rich, some poor. Japan and Korea depended heavily on state-led banks and repressive financial polices to channel savings into productive investment. Taiwan and Hong Kong had more liberal economic environments. Political arrangements varied enormously. Yet everyone managed to grow at virtually identical rates.

The answer is that Asia invested more because it saved more. In fact, with the possible exception of a common focus on export markets, a high domestic savings rate was the only common element that tied all the fast-growing Asian economies together. Just look at the chart nearby, which shows historical savings and investment ratios for Japan and the Asian “tigers” compared to the United States.

From 1965-95, the U.S. gross domestic savings rate averaged 18% of GDP, and the U.S. economy invested 17% of GDP over the same period. In high-growth Asia, meanwhile, the average domestic saving ratio was an astonishing 32%—and as a result Asia was able to generate sustainable investment rates of 31%, nearly twice as high as in the developed West.

The bottom line finding was an extremely powerful one. Institutions, organizational models, specific ways of doing business, none of these mattered very much at the end of the day. What did matter is savings, and the lesson of Asia is that when you have domestic savings rates of 30% of GDP or more, it’s awfully hard not to grow at 8%.

And So to China

Turning to china, the reason for our long detour should be immediately apparent. Over the past 25 years, the mainland economy recorded an average real growth rate of more than 9.5% per annum, making it the new world record holder among major economies. Does this make China different? Are there unique factors that push the mainland to the head of the pack? Or is this just one more example of an Asian high-growth economy in action?

Most casual observers would respond that China is very different indeed—but the broad bulk of serious research on the mainland economy says they’re wrong. Despite China’s seemingly world-beating rise and the hype surrounding China’s “special circumstances,” from a macroeconomic perspective the mainland looks almost exactly like its Asian predecessors.

We know this because over the past 10 years analysts have applied the same decomposition tools to Chinese growth as they did to the rest of Asia. Even if we bring those headline numbers down a notch (most economists assume an average growth rate of perhaps 8.5% to 9% over the past few decades), the Chinese growth story is hauntingly familiar to anyone studying the earlier Asian experience: a reasonable but respectable TFP role, another modest share coming from labor force growth, and an overwhelming contribution from capital investment. As it turns out, the only reason mainland growth has exceeded the rest of Asia is because China saves and invests even more than its neighbors, as you can see from the chart.

Meanwhile, many of the “China specifics” that investors invariably cite turn out to be common Asian characteristics as well. An artificially low cost of capital? Nothing could be further from the truth. Low interest rates are a classic economic result of Asia’s high gross domestic savings rate of 35% to 40% of GDP, especially when you consider that these funds are invariably funneled through overdeveloped banking systems across the region. Chinese real interest rates may look very low by historical emerging market standards, but not by Asian standards; in fact, average rates in China are no different from the four Asian tigers over the past few decades—and much higher than in Japan during its high-growth phase.

An undervalued yuan? Current account and balance of payments surpluses are yet another natural corollary to high domestic saving rates. Asian countries don’t import capital; they export it, and this makes their exchange rates look chronically undervalued even under the best of circumstances. Even China’s recent cyclically high current account surpluses are well below the historical peak surpluses in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as a share of GDP. And anyone involved with international economics in the 1980s would find today’s preoccupation with the level of the yuan eerily similar to the widespread obsession with the yen, the won and the Taiwanese dollar back then.

What about China’s planned economy? Surely this is one crucial difference between the mainland and the rest of Asia, as China’s socialist, state-led model uniquely forces excessive amounts of capital into unproductive activities, with high growth rates but low social benefit?

Not according to the numbers. Nearly every academic study shows that the TFP contribution to overall growth in China has been slightly higher than the Asian average, which means that China actually has a better productivity record than its neighbors. In part, this is a reflection of the rapidly growing private sector; the state accounted for more than two-thirds of the economy 15 years ago, but only one-third today. And in part, it reflects the mainland government’s surprising commitment to some core market principles…

…India, the “Stealth” Tiger

And it doesn’t end with China. If the mainland economy is simply the latest in a long chain of Asian success stories, then it makes sense to assume that more are on the way. In terms of the broad macroeconomic factors above, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that India will soon be joining the fray.

This may sound incredibly optimistic to anyone who’s ever been to India, where the economy is, if anything, seen as the “anti-China”: highly politicized, fraught with a dysfunctional bureaucracy, overly regulated in every area and fragmented in the extreme. The physical infrastructure is in sorry shape. Economic indicators don’t seem very promising: The budget is in large and chronic deficit, the balance of payments is prone to fragility, and capital costs are significantly higher than in East Asia. In this light, the recent it services boom looks like a small oasis in a sea of troubles. India has never been able to generate any dynamism in the manufacturing sector, and receives less than one-tenth of the FDI inflows that China does.

But keep your eye on the macroeconomic fundamentals. As we saw above, what really matters is savings, savings and more savings. How does India fare? Twenty years ago, the gross domestic savings rate was well under 20% of GDP, more a Latin American-style laggard than an Asian tiger, and as a result Indian real GDP growth was idling at around 4.5% per annum. However, as the chart nearby shows, over the past decade India’s savings ratio has risen to nearly 30% of GDP, and the trend is still strongly upward. Suddenly the economy is generating 7% real growth or higher—and no longer looks that much different from its East Asian counterparts.

Where will the savings go? Eventually, into export manufacturing. Unlike China, India still has a rapidly growing population, and again unlike China, India has had a difficult time raising agricultural yields and productivity—it does not have anything remotely close to China’s equitable land distribution. This makes it imperative to achieve rapid employment growth outside the rural economy, and despite the celebrated success of the Indian services sector, services are simply not capable of generating hundreds of millions of new jobs. Looking at the Chinese and Asian experience, labor-intensive export manufacturing has always been a key destination for savings and the strong initial driver of new income growth.

This hardly seems like a reasonable expectation for India. But remember that when China was starting out in the late 1980s, it looked far worse than India does today. The state accounted for most employment in the nonagricultural economy, and labor restrictions were very onerous. There were very few truly private firms, and private capital had no legal protections whatsoever. Inflows of FDI were a paltry $2 billion per year, much less than in India currently. On paper, the economy was almost completely closed, and the authorities had only a tenuous interest in market-led reforms.

Moreover, when China’s export economy began to develop, it was not led by central policy decisions, nor was it due to the formal easing of economic controls or restrictions. And it didn’t happen nationwide; instead, it happened in one province, Guangdong. In order to take advantage of cheaper labor, Hong Kong manufacturers gradually began opening factories over the border. In order to create jobs, local authorities were more than willing to ignore formal restrictions and provide incentives on the ground. Because of the labor-intensive nature of the industries, the initial dollar amounts of investment were relatively small.

It wasn’t until a half-decade later, when other provinces started to replicate Guangdong’s successes, that the central government took notice and undertook a more fundamental liberalization of the economy, allowing greater leeway for FDI and export manufacturing on a nationwide basis.

And the most interesting thing in this regard is that from the chart on the previous page, India now looks almost exactly like China did in the early 1990s, with an export-to-GDP ratio of around 15%—and increasing rapidly. The lessons for India are simple: China isn’t a dysfunctional outlier. High Indian savings rates are already in place. And it doesn’t necessarily take a revolution to get the export story going. Sometimes all it takes is a little push.

We even have a likely candidate for that push, as rising mainland unskilled wages are already starting to put pressure on low-end export industries. And as China’s costs go up, India could start to look attractive indeed. So keep an eye on the Indian export sector over the next five years—this just might be the catalyst that finally launches the country’s career as a tiger.

Mr. Anderson is chief Asian economist at UBS.

For the complete article, please see feer.com

Posted at 1:05 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Bloomberg News

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2006

If there were a museum dedicated to extravagance and excess, Mimi Monica Wong, a Hong Kong banker, might warrant a plaque. The 61-year-old agreed to pay two Latin dance instructors 120 million Hong Kong dollars, or $15.4 million, for eight years of lessons, and that’s not a typographical error. Here’s the best part: Wong is the head of HSBC Holdings’ Asian private-banking unit.

Granted, Wong won’t be paying all that money; last week, a court ordered that a 62 million dollar advance she paid be returned (things reportedly unraveled after one of the instructors called Wong a “lazy cow” at a practice session in a Hong Kong restaurant).

Even so, I wouldn’t want anyone willing to pay that kind of cash for cha-cha, samba and rumba lessons telling me where or how to invest my money in Asia.

The Chinese government, on the other hand, could be a different story. The fast- growing wealth of currency reserves in the No.2 economy in Asia is approaching the $1 trillion mark. There are rainy-day funds, and then there are hoards of cash that reach bubble-like proportions. One wonders if China’s reserves are now just like the latter.

The reason for the cash buildup is to maintain a stable exchange rate. When you rely on exports, an accommodative currency regime certainly makes sense. What makes less sense is how Asia’s reserve fetish seems to be taking on a life of its own. It’s a trap of sorts: as Asians buy more and more U.S. Treasuries, it becomes harder to unload them, causing huge capital losses.

Asian central banks are in the odd position of being bigger clients of U.S. government debt than hedge funds are - hardly their intention. Rather than just steering economies with interest rates, central bankers are managing their investments as never before. Simply put, Asia’s reserve buildup - about $3 trillion at the moment - has become absurd.

Enter Wong, of HSBC, whose job it is to advise folks with lots of cash on their hands where to invest. Perhaps she could sit down with Chinese officials and suggest they use their reserves more productively, rather than parking them in dollars. She could encourage them to spend some money shoring up weak banks (something China has done in the past). Why not use it for poverty reduction, education and cleaning the environment?

Or Wong could counsel China to take a page from her own cha-cha excesses. Heck, China could take that money out for a ride. Who knows - perhaps officials in Beijing could even have a little fun.

Here are eight things China could do with some or all of its $1 trillion in reserves.

Buy India. Why not just put to rest all these China- versus-India analyses and grab the fourth-biggest Asian economy? With the flick of a pen, China could get its hands on a nation of over one billion, more than 50 percent of whom are younger than 25. Overnight, China’s English-proficiency rankings would get a big boost. So would its software and service industries.

What’s more, the price tag for the Indian economy - $775 billion - leaves plenty left over to grab New Zealand, home to lots of natural resources that Chinese industry needs.

Scoop up all of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. In May, an 1890 Van Gogh portrait titled “L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux” sold for $40 million in New York. China could corner the market for the Dutch master’s most coveted works. And it could spend the rest of its money building huge new museums to house the art.

Put Bill Gates on the payroll for life. China wants to raise its technology game and cultivate entrepreneurship. It could hire Gates to help do just that. Forbes magazine put his net worth at $50 billion this year. Beijing could pay him 10 times that, and then some. It also could buy Google. Why bother getting the most-used Internet search engine to help you censor cyberspace when you could own it?

Build 833 Stephen Wynn casinos. Last week, thousands of mainland Chinese flocked to Macao, the Las Vegas of Asia, to check out Wynn Resorts’ new $1.2 billion casino. China could scatter its own Wynn-like joints around the country. Given demand for gaming tables in China, it’s hardly a gamble.

Purchase 77 million Rolex Daytona watches at $13,000 each. And if you walk the streets of Shanghai, or any sizable Chinese city, pirated versions can be had much, much cheaper.

Buy Sony, and about 20 other companies with its market value. The good news is that China could grab stock in the world’s biggest maker of video-game players on the cheap. News last week of setbacks in bringing the PlayStation 3 to market this year sent Sony shares down 1.6 percent.

Finance 729,000 Nobel Peace Prizes. China could buy itself Nobels for chemistry, physiology, you name it. Of course, if China figures out how to slow the economy to avoid overheating, while also creating hundreds of millions of jobs to maintain social stability, it would deserve a peace prize for sure.

Pay for 526,000 years of Latin dance lessons. Wong’s original deal with her dance instructors breaks down to about $1.9 million per year. At that rate, China’s current currency reserves could have officials dancing for joy pretty much forever.

Posted at 10:49 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

The battle of Dimawe

Who won the battle of Dimawe between the Boers and the Tswana in 1852? Dr. James Livingstone, the famous English missionary, lived nearby at the time. No fan of the Boers, he wrote that the Tswana, under the leadership of their canny chieftain, Kgosi Kgolo Sechele, managed to defend themselves until nightfall and then slipped away in the dark, albeit suffering the loss of hundreds of captured women and children. But some modern historians declare that the Tswana defeated the Boers outright, with the help of guns and a cannon stockpiled by Sechele.

One thing is not in dispute: the advance of the Boers from their south African stronghold stopped there. And the borderlines of what eventually became the modern country of Botswana were formed.

As development economists survey the wreckage that is sub-Saharan Africa, the battle of Dimawe rages on. Because Botswana is an African mystery — for 30 years, from the 1960s to the 1990s, it boasted the fastest growing economy in the world. In 1965, at the moment of independence, it was the third poorest nation in the world. In 2001, per capita income was $7,280, placing it squarely in the ranks of the world’s upper-middle-income nations, leaps and bounds beyond the vast majority of its sub-Saharan brethren. It is rated the least corrupt country in Africa, has a rock-solid credit rating, and substantial foreign reserves.

A country the size of Texas with a population of 1.6 million, Botswana is no paradise. Inequality and unemployment are high, and AIDS is a nightmare. But in a continent of failed states, Botswana is a beacon. How did it do it? And can its example be copied?

There seems to be near universal agreement that good leadership and sound policy choices were critical to Botswana’s success. The first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama, a tribal chieftain educated at Balliol College in the U.K., is widely credited with being a great leader. Taxation rates have historically been low and rule by law effective. The prudent use of revenues from Botswana’s lucrative diamond mines to fund government expenditure was also crucial.

But the most interesting question is whether Khama and Botswana benefited from historically contingent forces related to colonialism that ended up giving the country a leg up. “An African Success Story: Botswana,” by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (three economists, two from MIT and one from Harvard), argues that the Tswana tribes enjoyed pre-colonial institutions that encouraged cooperation, tolerated dissent, and in general provided solid support for the development of a mature civil society. Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, those institutions survived the colonial era.

The battle of Dimawe was part of that. But so was Sechele’s subsequent plea to Britain to place his nation under its protection, as defense against the Boers. The British resisted for a few decades, then acceded when the German seizure of what later became Namibia threatened their imperial ambitions. But the British never paid much attention to the Protectorate of Bechuanaland. Distracted by the rest of their empire, convinced that there was nothing to be gained from direct exploitation, they left the Tswana essentially to themselves.

Whereas elsewhere in Africa, colonial incursions by the British, the French and, most notoriously, King Leopold’s Belgians in the Congo made havoc of whatever pre-colonial institutions existed, typically practicing divide-and-rule strategies that set tribe against tribe, setting in place resentments that have lasted to this day, with awful consequences.

The theory put forth by Acemoglu et al. is not holy writ. In “Explaining Botswana’s Success: The Critical Role of a Post-Colonial Policy,” Scott Beaulier, an assistant professor of economics at Mercer University, takes direct issue with the thesis. Beaulier argues that the policy choices of Khama were far more important than the lack of an exploitative colonial legacy, and that much of the rest of Africa’s failures can be laid at the door of bad leaders who went down ill-fated Marxist paths.

Historical arguments that attempt to explain economic success (or failure) can rarely be settled, one way or another. But in this corner, attempts to explain away the impact of colonialism on Africa are viewed with suspicion. Great historical crimes do mean something.

Kgosi Sechele, writes Livingstone in his memoir “Missionary Travels,” responded to demands by the Boers that “he surrender himself as their vassal, and stop English traders from proceeding into the country with fire-arms for sale,” with the declaration, “I was made an independent chief and placed here by God, and not by you.” His efforts to get British protection against Boer incursions are reminiscent of the concurrent successful strategy thousands of miles away by Mongkut, the King of Siam, to avoid direct colonization by the French and English. When one reviews the disasters that befell Thailand’s neighbors in the 20th century, including Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that direct colonial rule had some serious drawbacks for future stable political and economic development.

In the contemporary debate over how to nurture economic development, Africa often gets the worst of it, blamed for its failures because of its own mistakes. And no doubt about it, mistakes have been made aplenty. Nor are there any easy answers offering a road map to ridding oneself of corruption or escaping the poverty trap. But Botswana does offers a counter-example, a model for what can happen when good leaders make good decisions in an environment where traditional social structures survive intact in the face of Western imperial domination. It is not at all clear how to apply the Botswana model to other countries with more tragic histories, but at the very least, a contemplation of its circumstances gives rise to hope.

Posted at 7:03 PM · Comments (0)

Link

A fascinating account of the 10 years of horror and criminality of the Cultural Revolution, although one longs occasionally for a broader, more interpretive view rather than the astoundingly well researched and minute to a fault tick-tock that characterizes much of the material.
This is not a good first, or even second book to read about the era. When the reader brings to the task a little grounding, though, it becomes an indispensible reference, and a powerful counterpoint to some of the less impartial recent briefs against the Helmsman (i.e. Jung Chang, in particular.)

Posted at 1:52 AM · Comments (0)

Snippets to come… Somehow this had escaped me as a poly-sci student. Not light reading, but never tedious, and often delicious as “Socrates” plays with some putative peers on the nature of justice and truth and the ideal organization of society.
I suggest the Penguin Classics edition, which is ably translated and annotated with intelligent but unobtrusive interpretations and other guidance.

Posted at 1:41 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2006

TOKYO The other day I received the results of a DNA test administered by the Genographic Project, a joint project by the National Geographic Society and IBM, whose goal is to analyze human DNA samples and understand the route which mankind took in populating the world.

After submitting my DNA - obtained by simply swabbing the inside of my mouth - along with about $100, I received two months later information about my paternal ancestors.

I’ve always been interested in trying to find the origins of my ancestry. I am a Japanese male, born in Japan. Both of my parents are ethnically Japanese and as far as I know, all my recent ancestors for at least the past three centuries were born in Japan.

The Genographic Project, which I happened to stumble upon while surfing the Internet, gave me an opportunity to satiate my curiosity about my ancestral origins.

The results of the DNA test told me that my earliest human male ancestor was born in Africa about 50,000 years ago.

About 45,000 years ago, another male ancestor came from somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula or present- day Iran.

Five thousand years later, it seems, another ancestor was born in Central Asia. Then, some time 35,000 years ago, my most recent identifiable ancient ancestor was born in an isolated region of central China while the Ice Age was in full swing.

China, according to the Genographic Project, is where my genetic journey ends, or rather, where my most recent ancestor comes from. I now know that genetically I am related to more than half of all present-day Chinese males and that there is someone at the moment living in China with whom I share a common ancestor dating back some 1,000 years…

…Some conservative elements in Japanese society take pride in the alleged homogeneity of the Japanese “race,” and ardent nationalists and racists look disparagingly upon other ethnic groups. Such DNA test results should make them think twice about what they say or think about other peoples - or about themselves, for that matter.

If we employ notions of racial superiority, look down upon other ethnic groups or consider them as “others,” we are in effect insulting our ancestors, who traveled far and wide over tens of thousands of years under unimaginably harsh conditions to get to where we are now.

We may be Japanese according to notions of ethnicity and citizenship, but genetics tells us beyond doubt that we are all related to the peoples of China, Korea and the rest of Asia. And, ultimately, all of us in the human race are Africans.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Nation

[from the September 18, 2006 issue]

According to the official North Korean version, the Americans were the culprits. In October 1950, the first year of the Korean War, American soldiers massacred tens of thousands of innocent people in the North Korean city of Sinchon. In perhaps the most horrifying incident, US soldiers led 900 residents, including 300 women and children, into an air-raid shelter. After the victims passed three days in thirst and fear, the GIs poured gasoline into the dark, confined space and threw in a match. Today in Sinchon, the North Korean authorities have memorialized this slaughter with burial mounds for the victims. The nearby American Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum holds tours for school groups and the occasional foreign visitor. In September 1998 I visited the Sinchon museum and listened to the guide itemize the many wartime cruelties committed by American troops. She took our delegation to the burned-out shell of the air-raid shelter and, on the basis of survivor accounts, reconstructed the atrocities. It would be another year before the Associated Press published the first revelations of the US killings of civilians in July 1950 under a railway bridge near the South Korean hamlet of Nogun-ri. But based on what historian Bruce Cumings and others had described of US conduct during the Korean War—the saturation bombings, the threatened use of nuclear weapons—the museum guide’s well-rehearsed stories seemed plausible, even accounting for the embellishments of North Korean propaganda.

In the 1980s South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong visited the same museum. He subsequently interviewed several survivors of the Sinchon massacre who had immigrated to the United States. Their description of what transpired in the fall of 1950 diverged so radically from the North Korean account that Hwang was driven to write about the incident. His novel The Guest provoked fierce controversy among readers in South Korea, where it was published in 2001.

Finally available in English, in a translation by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West, The Guest joins the handful of Korean novels published in the United States. While Japanese and Chinese literatures have established footholds in intellectual circles here—from the classics of Sun Tzu and Junichiro Tanizaki to Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and the postmodern fictions of Haruki Murakami—Korean literature remains terra incognita. Japan and China, of course, built empires. Korea suffered the indignities of colonialism at the hands of its neighbors and now endures the frustrations of relative cultural invisibility in the eyes of the West. American novelists such as Chang-Rae Lee and Nora Okja Keller have drawn inspiration from Korean material, but no Korean author has become a household name in the United States—despite the brilliance of Yi Munyol’s meditation on authoritarian psychology in Our Twisted Hero or Ahn Junghyo’s blistering portrait of South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War in White Badge.

But Korean literature is finally attracting more of its rightful share of the limelight. In October 2005 South Korea was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As part of the festivities, sixty-two South Korean writers gave readings to enthralled German audiences. One of those present in Frankfurt, poet Ko Un, has appeared on the Nobel shortlist for several years. A clutch of Korean translations have recently appeared, from classics like Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations and Lee Mu-young’s Farmers to avant-garde short stories and the work of too-often-overlooked women writers. Even North Korean fiction, perhaps the least accessible of any Communist literature, is attracting renewed attention.

Korean culture has a certain pungency that complicates its entry into the global mainstream. Korean movies, traditional songs and fermented dishes are acquired tastes. This pungency has been sharpened by Korea’s recent historical experience. The twentieth century, after all, was not kind to the Korean peninsula. The first fifty years were marred by Japanese colonialism, the second fifty by division, fratricidal war and the dictatorial politics that dominated both North and South. Famine and its attendant diseases killed as much as 10 percent of the North Korean population in a few short years at the end of the 1990s. Added to these unspeakable horrors are the quotidian but no less heartbreaking tragedies that accompanied rapid industrialization, despoliation of the environment and the cold war separation of so many families.

The depiction and re-evaluation of these tragedies, both large and small, constitute a major driving force of Korean literature. Suffering does not necessarily produce great art. Like the Irish and the Polish before them, though, Koreans have created a language of suffering capable of attracting not only world sympathy but artistic appreciation as well.

Koreans once called smallpox, one of the most homicidal pathogens in human history, their “guest.” Uninvited and virulent, this guest left behind many dead and generations of scarred survivors. In The Guest Hwang has in mind two very different uninvited scourges that infected Korea in the modern era: Christianity and Marxism.

Of the two culprits that Hwang fingers at the outset of the novel, Christianity is perhaps the more surprising. Though it is difficult to recognize after fifty years of anti-religious policy, the present capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, was once known as the “Jerusalem of the East” for its concentration of churches and the fervor of its converts. When former guerrilla fighter Kim Il Sung began introducing Marxism in earnest in 1946, he strategically incorporated aspects of Christianity into the official political ideology and, later, into his personality cult (much as Christianity absorbed woman-centered pagan rituals into a Marian cult to gain adherents in medieval Europe). Between 1948 and 1950, during the undeclared war between North and South that preceded the Korean War, Christianity and Marxism battled each other for the soul of the peninsula.

Here The Guest departs from the official script. In the fall of 1950, the American army did not reach Sinchon in time to participate in any massacres. Instead, Koreans inflicted the damage on themselves. For a country accustomed to blaming others—the Chinese, the Japanese, the Americans—this history is not easy to swallow. Hwang, though, is comfortable in this role of truth-teller. His earlier fiction catalogued the human losses associated with Korea’s economic miracle and its participation in the Vietnam War. He spent five years in jail for his unauthorized visit to the North. Now he is taking full advantage of the more liberal climate of free speech in the South and the warming of relations between the two halves of the peninsula to tell a story that will haunt even those who have no connection to the events described.

The Guest follows Ryu Yosop, a minister in a Korean-American community in Brooklyn, as he prepares to visit North Korea and the family he left behind as a young child. “Hometown” is a cherished concept in Korea. It is bound up not only in friendships and family relations but also in the rites of ancestor worship that have survived more than a century of Christian evangelism. For Yosop, though, his hometown conjures up decidedly mixed feelings: “The word started out with the scent of a mountain berry, lingering at the tip of one’s tongue—but then the fragrance suddenly turned into the stench of rotting fish.” He wants to visit his family—one of the millions of families divided by the Korean War—but he worries that his family background and religious affiliation will scotch his visa application. So he puts down the North Korean capital of Pyongyang as his birthplace on the visa form and trusts that somehow he will find his way back to Sinchon.

A few days before his flight, Yosop checks in with his older brother in New Jersey. A retired minister who has become practically a recluse in his suburban home, Yosop’s brother doesn’t want to talk about the old days. Yosop sees the visit to the North as an opportunity to confront the dimly remembered horrors of the past, to repent for sins and forgive those who sinned. Yosop’s brother, whose memories are considerably more precise, disagrees. “Why should I beg for forgiveness,” he angrily retorts. “I was on the side of Michael the archangel and those bastards were the beasts of the Apocalypse!”

Several days later, overwhelmed by guilt and anger, Yosop’s older brother takes to his bed and quietly passes away. His stories, however, do not die with him. As Yosop makes his way to North Korea, he is visited by a succession of ghosts, including his brother’s. These uninvited apparitions, yet another of the novel’s guests, supply details about the blood-soaked days of 1950 and the events that Yosop had been too young to experience or fully understand.

With its supernatural events and chorus of spirits, The Guest would seem to belong to the tradition of magic realism. And like so much magic realism, it involves the remembrance of unspeakable atrocities. The novel that launched the genre, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, revolves around a massacre of banana workers. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children draws its considerable power from the tragic partition that divided India from Pakistan. As a trauma can provoke a derangement of the senses, so can a terrible crime push a writer toward fabulism. It is as though conventional storytelling has become incapable of conveying the magnitude of atrocity.

Yet for all its affinities with García Márquez and Rushdie, The Guest’s magical elements are faithful renditions of Korea’s traditional shamanic culture. And when Yosop arrives in Pyongyang, what might appear to be magic realism turns out to be straight narration. Here, after all, is a country where the first leader, though dead, still occupies the highest office, where tens of thousands of young children perfectly synchronize their movements in mass games that celebrate the system, where a mammoth unfinished (and unfinishable) hotel dominates the cityscape and, like an embarrassing goiter, is pointedly ignored by guides and minders. North Korea is truly a land of “make-believe,” as Hwang has remarked in interviews.

When Yosop eventually makes it to Sinchon and his surviving relatives, the tenor of the novel changes. The carefully constructed North Korean reality of Pyongyang, with its fixed itinerary of sights and sites, gives way to a very different world. Here, in the countryside, North Koreans let down their guard. They become real characters, rather than the brainwashed automatons of the “totalitarian” model. Yosop’s family reunion is accompanied by tears, accusations, explanations. As we move deeper into the reconstructed events of 1950, Hwang resists shifting the narrative to the past in order to dramatize the action. Instead, he allows a chorus of the living and the dead to step up to the microphone and testify, as if at some celestial truth and reconciliation commission. No single narrative can capture the truth of the past, Hwang suggests. We are reduced to sifting through an array of often contradictory first-person accounts.

The witnesses tell Yosop of how, in the wake of MacArthur’s pivotal landing at Inchon in mid-September 1950, a Christian paramilitary in Sinchon worked clandestinely with an anti-Communist youth corps from the South to seize the county administration from the Communists. These men of God show no mercy. “In the beginning, there is no rape,” one ghost relates. “Far from it. Many times, after a kill, the young men stand together in a circle to pray together.” Later, as the body count mounts, there is time for neither prayer nor proscriptions against rape. When the Communist Party cadres regroup and regain control, their vengeance is equally unsparing. The wounded are shot on the spot. Prisoners are lined up against the wall and executed. Young men are dragged into military service against their will and then, when the fortunes of war shift and they fall into “enemy” hands, they are killed as surely as the true believers.

By the time The Guest reaches the atrocity in the air-raid shelter, the question of culpability is almost beside the point. The war has become a swirl of thrust and counterthrust, and the reader can be forgiven for losing track of who has done what to whom. So much blood has been spilled, and it has stained all hands. But in Sinchon, those hands are all Korean. The Americans, for their overall stage management, barely qualify as accomplices. After the dust has settled and permanent battle lines have been drawn, the exigencies of nationalism and group psychology have reduced this complex tale of revenge to simple anti-Americanism. The Americans, after all, were responsible for a great number of atrocities in the war, so why not add a few more in the interests of smoothing the path toward eventual Korean reunification?

A novel that so closely follows historical fact raises the question: How much literary license has Hwang taken? I asked Bruce Cumings, the foremost American historian of the Korean War and another visitor to the Sinchon site. Hwang’s take is plausible and convincing, he told me.

The Guest is worthwhile not only for its heterodox version of Korean history and its intriguing portrait of North Korean society. It is a finely rendered work of fiction—disturbing yet somehow beautiful. Hwang’s achievement should resonate long after the controversies over its illumination of one dark corner of the Korean War subside.

The preoccupations of The Guest are not peculiar to Hwang Sok-Yong. Pak Wanso, one of Korea’s most celebrated postwar women authors, tells a very similar story in “Mother’s Hitching Post” in the new collection Modern Korean Fiction, translated by Kim Miza and Suzanne Crowder Han. The guilt-ridden relationship of the two brothers in Hwang’s novel is transposed in Pak’s 1980 story onto a mother and daughter. Now in her 80s, the mother has repressed a horrifying memory from the Korean War, when she was fleeing with her children from war-ravaged Seoul. Her son, conscripted into the North Korean army, has deserted. The mother cannot save him from the cat-and-mouse games of the North Korean officer who discovers the family. Nor, when the son dies at the hands of the officer, can she bury him properly in the family’s burial ground, which lies over the border in the North. While the suppressed guilt destroys Yosop’s brother in The Guest, the mother in Pak’s story manages to relieve some of her burden by revealing the painful memories to her daughter.

Koreans call this experience of suppressed guilt and suffering han. The epiphany of the traditional short story in the Western canon can often be found in Korean fiction in the cathartic unburdening of han. Though painful, it is a powerful source of creative energy. Writers who explore the theme of collective oppression and its psychological consequences, from the Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki to Toni Morrison, would have no difficulty translating han into their own tongues.

The tragedies of Korea are not confined simply to times of war. The short stories in Modern Korean Fiction are full of the language of hunger and sickness, of the poverty of workers and farmers. The stories from the colonial period are particularly poignant, published as they were under difficult circumstances. Between 1919, when the Japanese authorities brutally suppressed a national uprising, and the late 1930s, when the colonial administration imposed Japanese culture and a forced labor system, Koreans were granted a measure of breathing room. During this interregnum, characterized by the more ordinary debasements of colonial rule, Korean writers were still able to place short stories in the daily newspapers. Even as late as 1938, Ch’ae Man-shik could publish in a Seoul daily his satiric story “My Innocent Uncle,” about an oafish collaborator with the Japanese.

In the 1930s, too, Yom Sang-seop published what is considered one of the masterpieces of early modern Korean fiction, Three Generations, which recently appeared in a new translation by Yu Young-nan. Far from describing the atrocities of Japanese rule, Yom’s novel depicts a stultified society in which the old depart from Confucian values and the young cannot build a new world for themselves. Several characters engage in an almost halfhearted conspiracy against the colonial authorities and inevitably fail. A father who fails to honor his ancestors or set a proper example for his son is brought low by his misdeeds. Characters speak to one another with a bluntness that seems awkward when set against, for instance, the Japanese aesthetic of indirection. The structure of the novel is uneven, the prose unremarkable. Nevertheless, in its way, Three Generations successfully portrays a society throttled by the “modernization” that Japan inflicted upon the peninsula. This delayed development, as much as the more violent policies of the era, constituted the tragedy of the colonial experience.

Ko Un, Korea’s most renowned living poet, remembers the privations of the colonial era. Figuring prominently in his poems is the “barley hump” of the spring, when the winter stores have been eaten, the new barley crop has yet to ripen and the annual starvation sets in. As a young boy during the Korean War, Ko Un watched the deaths of friends and family and could do nothing to save them. At the end of the war, he worked as a gravedigger. Fertilized by all this death, his poetry bloomed:

Mow down parents and children
This, that, and the others,
everything else.
Knife them in the dark.
Next morning
the world is piled with death.
Our chore is burying them all day

and building a new world on it.

During his varied life, Ko Un has been a youthful scalawag, Buddhist monk, drunkard, teacher, political activist, jailed dissident and, now, Nobel Prize contender. He has published more than 100 books of poetry and prose. But his greatest claim to fame is Maninbo, or Ten Thousand Lives, which the American poet Robert Haass has described as “one of the most extraordinary projects in contemporary literature.” Ko Un conceived of this project holed up in a military prison with other prominent dissidents. He vowed to write a poem for every person he had ever known, from his closest relatives to historical figures he’d only met in books. Green Integer has published a one-volume selection of this vast work for the first time in English, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim and Gary Gach.

Missing from the collection, unfortunately, is Ko Un’s original introduction, in which he issued a declaration of independence from all foreign literary influence. No longer would he be seduced by graceful Chinese evocations of nature or the cryptic modernism of the West. In their place, Ko Un has constructed a rustic vernacular, a poetry of the Korean countryside as earthy as the mountain vegetables that deepen the flavor of Korean food. In these poems, a woman has “a laugh like cold bean-sprout soup,” a man is so dull that he is “cousin of water,/or of watered-down soy-sauce.” Each poem resembles a miniature folk tale, expressed with koan-like simplicity, cautious of metaphors or abstraction. Much of South Korean history is poured into this folkloric mold, from the partisan fighter who gave birth in her cell before being hanged at the scaffold in the early 1950s all the way to dissident Kim Dae Jung, “the embodiment of suffering/at a time when suffering was needed,” who became president in the 1990s.

This commemoration of Korean history and countryside, freed from strictures of form and diction imposed from the outside, follows in the tradition of minjung, or “people’s” culture. Ko Un has “gone to the people” for his inspiration, much like the narodniks, the Russian radicals of the nineteenth century, and the South Korean student movement activists of the 1980s who emulated them. But Ko Un has not summoned up some ethereal concept of the People. Maninbo, his masterpiece, is the People made flesh. Thanks to Ko Un, they continue to walk among us, all 10,000 of them.

Ko Un’s counterpart has not yet emerged—or been allowed to emerge— in North Korea. The Soviet bloc was rich with the samizdat of dissident poets and the semi-official work of writers during one thaw or another. North Korea has none of that. Even among the several thousand North Koreans who live in South Korea, no literary work has appeared (though one defector has written a musical about the North Korean prison labor camp at Yodok). Very little of the official literature has even been translated into English. One novel, Han Sorya’s Jackals, has appeared, as have several short stories. Since North Korean author Hon Sok-jung’s novel Hwangjini won a prestigious South Korean prize in 2004 and official North Korean literature is more available in the South, some of this work might soon make its way into English.

In the meantime, we are left with a tantalizing glimpse of literary changes afoot in North Korea in a 1999 story nimbly translated by Stephen Epstein and published in a recent issue of the online magazine Words Without Borders. Han Ung-bin’s “Second Encounter” draws on the usual North Korean boilerplate about building a strong and prosperous nation. But Han also alludes to the hardships of the famine years of the mid-1990s. And most of the story involves an encounter during a 1989 youth festival in Pyongyang between a foreign journalist and a literal-minded North Korean, mediated by the story’s narrator. The misunderstandings are nearly comic, for the journalist can’t quite believe that this average North Korean might live an ordinary life with an ordinary job and family, in a society with functioning schools and hospitals, with soft drinks for the kids and trips to the amusement park.

Such an ordinary existence was once within reach. North Korea’s social system suffered enormous strains during the famine years. Schools and hospitals did not function as before. The merry-go-rounds rusted. “We have lost nothing,” the narrator reflects upon the intervening years, referring more to patriotic fervor than material comforts. But North Koreans might read wistfulness or even concealed anger into Han’s story. “Second Encounter” lends itself to more than one interpretation, which suggests a movement from simple propaganda toward actual literature.

It is still a far cry, of course, from an appraisal of North Korea’s labor camps, extrajudicial killings, history of purges and the like. This catharsis, whenever it comes, will be unspeakably painful. Korean novelists, poets and short-story writers have mined the atrocities of the colonial period, the Korean War and the South’s authoritarian era. These are, unfortunately, rich veins. When North Koreans can openly testify like the ghosts of The Guest, when the han of North Koreans is given proper voice, when a North Korean Ko Un can tell us about the people and not just the People, Korean literature will have a fresh infusion of horror and inspiration.

Posted at 12:21 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

Published: August 19 2006

Li Yaoyun, one of only a handful of Chinese cooks awarded the title master chef, spends most of his time these days training young pretenders. One of his favourite tricks, which he demonstrated recently in a Shanghai restaurant, involves only a simple piece of tofu, the soft, cheese-like curd that crumbles in the hand.

Taking out a cleaver, he swiftly cut a 5cm slab - the size of a pinky finger - into 18 horizontal wafers. Then with a rapid-fire cutting movement he sliced vertical strips the width of a hair. “It shows them what can be done with a lot of practice,” he says.

Chinese chefs divide their skills into two broad categories - cutting and cooking. The way meat or a vegetable is sliced can make as much difference to the “mouth-feel”, as the Chinese call taste, as the preparation does. Li claims to be a master of both but his real speciality is cutting. As a young man he won a knife-skills competition after he extracted the bones from inside a duck without breaking the skin in less than two minutes.

China has not always treasured such skills. Mao Zedong was quite a gourmand, taking a personal chef on his travels to make him pork mixed with hot peppers. But after the communists took over in 1949, China’s cooking culture came under assault, especially during the 1966-76 cultural revolution, which elevated the bland and uniform to a political ideal. “There were many times when I nearly gave up,” says Li.

As China strives to rediscover parts of its lost aesthetic sense, Shanghai has been at the forefront of a culinary renaissance. A dozen new restaurants seem to open every week, many serving classic local dishes.

Yet that dining culture had to be patiently rebuilt. Li was one of a small group of Shanghai chefs who tried to restore traditions learned as young men, digging out old recipes and reviving cooking skills. After five turbulent decades, Shanghai’s restaurants have come full circle. Li and his chef colleagues have seen it all.

Little known outside China, Shanghai’s style of cooking is based on freshwater seafood and braised meat, with plenty of oil and sweetish flavours. By the early 20th century the city had the most vibrant dining scene in the country, as the emerging Chinese middle class stepped out to eat eel with leeks and spare ribs in sweet and sour sauce.

Restaurants, however, were part of a hedonistic Shanghai that was also rife with prostitution and opium-smoking. When the communists took power, they pledged to transform what they viewed as a parasitic city. Over the next few years, Shanghai’s restaurants were nationalised and most became pubic dining halls serving basic meals to residents or workers.

The city’s chefs were culled. Some with political associations considered dubious, such as cooking for gangster bosses, were dispatched to labour camps. Many fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chefs say cooking standards really started to deteriorate with Mao’s”great leap forward”, a 1959 plan to accelerate industrialisation rapidly. As farmers abandoned their land to produce steel, a gigantic famine ensued that claimed 20m lives.

Restaurants had to prune their menus dramatically. Li Yaoyun began working in 1960 in a Shanghai restaurant specialising in Sichuan food. “When I started we offered around 70 different dishes,” says Li. “But gradually we reduced the number and eventually had only 20.”

Most evenings he cooked the same hotpot dishes with a few vegetables and meat if they had some, he says. Chicken or ham stocks were often replaced by monosodium glutamate, the artificial flavour enhancer.

A popular winter dish in Shanghai is pork dumplings wrapped in cabbage but on some nights the chefs used rabbit instead of pork, Li says. On others, they took it off the menu altogether: because of a lack of fertiliser it was hard to find cabbage leaves large enough to wrap around the meat.

The spread of backyard furnaces - in which people melted down metal to boost steel output - had a further impact: good cutting knives began to disappear. “Materials were very scarce,” he says.

Matters got worse for the city’s chefs in 1966 with the cultural revolution, which became an assault on the so-called “four olds” - customs, habits, culture and thinking. With schools and colleges closed, millions of young people attacked all forms of authority.

In the chaotic atmosphere, any acquired skill became suspect. Some restaurants were engulfed in the turmoil, with Red Guards - the shock-troops of the cultural revolution - burning books that contained old recipes and dragging chefs off to “struggle sessions”. Shanghai’s cooking schools, including the one Li studied at, were closed down.

A few chefs joined the Red Guards and some of Li Yaoyun’s former colleagues recall Li flirting with joining himself to keep out of trouble. Li says he kept his head down and worked on his cutting skills. “I was not regarded as a good comrade as I was more interested in cooking than political awareness,” he says.

Li says the cooking also began to mimic the political climate. During the famine, chefs were encouraged to serve the same dish under several regional names, to give an impression of plenty. But in the cultural revolution, regional dishes were downplayed in favour of a single national cuisine that suggested unity. Spicy Gong Bao chicken, one of the most popular dishes in China, was shunned because it was named after a Qing dynasty official.

Wang Huisheng, another veteran chef, was shocked at the collapse in dining standards when he returned home in the late 1960s, having spent a few years cooking at the Chinese embassy in Yemen. At Xinghualou, one of the city’s famous old restaurants, the food served was bland, no one cared what they were eating and the waiters were rude and ill-dressed. “When my [cooking] teacher told me about the loss of his recipe books, he looked destroyed,” he says.

Henry Kissinger put on 5lb during a three-day trip in 1971 to negotiate with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, but even the few good restaurants suffered from shortages. Many visitors returned with tales of dreary meals of rice and cabbage. Lu Bo Lang, the most famous restaurant in the old city, was turned into an office. When King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia visited Shanghai in 1973 and decided to visit the restaurant, officials had to borrow a table for the dinner and could find only disposable chopsticks.

Historian Lynn Pan returned to Shanghai in the early 1980s for the first time since her childhood - shortly after the death of Mao and the end of the cultural revolution. “Pretty much everywhere you went the food was ghastly,” she says. The one meal that took her back was at the house of a former servant who had spent 24 years in a labour camp because of his association with her construction magnate father. “And he had to use guanxi [connections] to buy the shrimps and yellow fish,” she says.

But she also noticed that even in those early days of economic reform, 24-hour food markets were popping up. “That was when I realised that it was going to be a great city again.”

Private restaurants were among the first businesses to take off when the economy started to open up. Enterprising individuals began to serve meals at a few tables in their front room: sometimes the food was memorable, at others inedible.

The best Chinese chefs were still in Hong Kong and Taiwan but in Shanghai a small group of cooks began trying to restore the old dining culture.

In the early 1980s, Li Yaoyun worked in a restaurant specialising in the cuisine of Yangzhou (a city near Shanghai), which is celebrated for its subtle flavours. “I spent most of my spare time in old bookshops and libraries or chatting with older colleagues, trying to remember recipes,” he says.

At the Guji bookshop in the old city centre, he came across a book called Tiao Ding Ji (Ancient Collection of Ingredients), which was about the cuisine of eastern China. From there, he found a lost dish called three-in-one duck - a wild duck, a free-range duck and a baby pigeon wrapped inside each other like a Russian doll. “From that book I learned again the spirit of Chinese cuisine,” he says.

He also introduced new recipes with ideas from his research. From a traditional starter of pine nuts and corn he created Fuel Delivered in Snow, a mixture of pine nuts and smoked fish.

Traditional Chinese medicine was another source of inspiration. Hedgehog fungus, a form of mushroom, was widely used in northern China to treat ulcers: he sliced it and then lightly fried the mushroom with pine nuts.

“We have to nourish our traditional cuisine and, using it as a base, be creative,” he says.

Just as it was in the 1930s, Shanghai is again a city where plenty of people have plenty of money. But it is also a city that is still not quite sure of its new personality. Opening to the world brings exciting influences, yet the full force of modern consumer culture can also overwhelm countries, especially those that have lost a strong sense of identity.

With that in mind, a new generation of chefs is trying to cook food that blends the traditional and the modern, picking up where Li Yaoyun and his colleagues left off. Mention the world “fusion” and the corner of Jereme Leung’s lips turn down in a scowl. “It is everything I want to avoid,” he says.

Leung is probably the most prominent Chinese chef in Shanghai. His Whampoa Club restaurant is in one of the old colonial buildings that line the riverfront Bund. As we talked at one of the window tables, a boat carrying an enormous construction crane drifted past outside.

Leung wants to create a “New Shanghai Cuisine”, by which he means authentic but creative food elegantly served in individual portions. “I want Chinese cooking to look and taste as good as French food, without sacrificing on technique or flavour,” says Leung.

A 35-year-old Hong Kong native with a string of international awards, he initially thought about Cantonese cuisine but decided that a showcase restaurant on the Bund had to be Shanghainese. There was only one problem: he did not know much about Shanghai food.

Leung set up his own personal culinary institute, enlisting the services of five old chefs (the youngest was 60, the oldest 72). Twice a week for six months one of the chefs would prepare him his signature recipes. Leung put on 20lb.

From there, he developed his New Shanghai recipes, such as a new version of the classic “drunken chicken”, poached chicken marinaded in shao-xing wine, which is a starter in almost all Shanghaiese restaurants. The dish should be served chilled but, according to Leung, most restaurants leave the cooked chicken in the fridge for a few days, so that by the time it arrives on the table the flavour is lost. To achieve the right taste and temperature he puts slivers of iced wine over the boneless chicken pieces, with some salad at the bottom to soak up extra liquid. The dish is served in a martini glass.

“I want to try to preserve the tradition of classic dishes but make them look better and taste better,” he says.

So has Shanghai toppled Hong Kong as the place to find the finest Chinese cooking? Not yet, seems to be the verdict. Li Yaoyun has spent the past two years advising a chain of Shanghai restaurants that has opened in Hong Kong. “The dining standard in Hong Kong is higher than in Shanghai,” he says.

Jereme Leung agrees but recalls that a few months ago an old Shanghainese gentleman, who once ran one of the city’s main banks, came to his restaurant. Leung saw this as a test of his cooking and asked the man to taste some dishes with his eyes closed, so he could compare the flavours with his memory.

The old man did not comment on the meal at the time but returned a week later with some poster-size calligraphy in Chinese characters that he had written to articulate his thoughts. The last line read: “Chinese _expression of modern and correct.”

Leung admits the story is a little self-serving. “But that is what I am trying to achieve,” he says.

Geoff Dyer is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 10:12 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL
September 7, 2006

BEIJING — With gala concerts and flowery tributes, China’s Communist
rulers are paying homage to Mao Zedong this week, marking the 30th
anniversary of his death without any mention of the damage he
inflicted on millions of victims.

More than 500 performers and thousands of elite guests will gather at
the Great Hall of the People tomorrow night to venerate the Communist
leader at a concert titled: “The sun is the reddest and Chairman Mao
is the most beloved.”

Eleven of Mao’s poems will be recited at the gala performance of music
and dance in the palatial building on Tiananmen Square where China’s
parliament holds its annual sessions.

It’s the culmination of a week of exhibitions, plays, essays and other
celebrations in praise of the revolutionary leader who dominated China
until his death at the age of 82 on Sept. 9, 1976.

Even three decades after his death, China’s rulers are unwilling to
question the official verdict that Mao was a great leader whose
mistakes were made only in his old age. No serious debate on his
legacy is permitted. The mythology about Mao is deemed vital to
preserving the Communist Party’s legitimacy.

China’s state-controlled media have lauded the Great Helmsman this
year, giving a glowing portrait of vignettes from his life. They
trumpeted the news that a massive 35-tonne granite monument of Mao was
being erected in his honour in a town in Tibet.

Senior leaders have studiously ignored the millions of Chinese who
perished as a result of Mao’s decisions, including his brutal purges
of party members, the persecutions of his Cultural Revolution in the
1960s and 1970s and the man-made famines that resulted from his
industrial policies in the late 1950s.

A much different portrait of Mao was offered yesterday by Sidney
Rittenberg, an 85-year-old American and former Communist who first met
Mao in 1946 and worked closely with him for many years.

Mao, he said, was a “philosopher king” who was “terribly corrupted by
power.” He could be compassionate, but he could also be ruthlessly
cruel and reckless, and the Cultural Revolution became a “holocaust,”
Mr. Rittenberg said.

“Mao felt he had the right to launch these huge social upheavals,
affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people, when he
admitted that he didn’t know what the outcome would be,” he said.

“In his later years, he turned into exactly the kind of despot that he
had fought against for half of his life. And I can’t help but think
that he was aware of it … His every word was law — like an
emperor.”

Mr. Rittenberg, who translated documents for Mao and often played gin
rummy with him in the 1940s, later spent 16 years in Chinese prisons
and labour camps, accused of being a spy. When he was interviewed by
Chinese state television recently, he was asked to summarize Mao in a
sentence. He said Mao was “a great historical leader and a great
historical criminal.” The line was deleted when the interview was
broadcast.

Posted at 10:05 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: September 6, 2006

JIAJU, China — The three smiling sirens leaning on a rope-drawn gate would like visitors to forget Shangri-La. Indeed, the large sign just ahead on the steep alpine road proclaims this place to be China’s most beautiful village.

This area of Tibetan-speaking hamlets perched stunningly on 8,000-foot-high mountainsides that loom over the town of Danba, has long been a way station on a circuit through the country’s southwest, which is home to some of China’s most exotic travel destinations.

The sudden rise of a travel industry here in remote western Sichuan Province has all the markings of a fairy tale, one complete with beautiful sisters and an errant knight who arrives from far away, changing their lives forever.

That was the past, though, distant by all of eight years. Today, the gorgeous hillsides here buzz with activity: the felling of trees to build the distinctive Tibetan houses, with their maroon and white trim, which are nowadays put into service as guest lodges, and the smoke-belching, horn-blowing buses carrying tourists who arrive each month in ever greater numbers.

The takeoff has been so pronounced, in fact, that some of the villagers of Danba are wondering whether their success might not one day soon recall another fairy tale, the killing of the goose that laid the golden egg. But that is perhaps getting ahead of the story.

This settlement’s break with timeless isolation came in 1998, when a mysterious adventurer from Hong Kong drifted through the area, making his way up the rugged slopes that overlook Danba and discovering this village and a remarkable local family.

There were three young women in the household, already known locally as the “three beautiful sisters,” including one who had recently won third place in a regional beauty contest. If that didn’t get the traveler’s attention, it soon became clear that this was no ordinary family, and that these were no ordinary sisters.

In a region of poor subsistence farmers, where many peasants speak little Chinese and few girls go far in school, the three sisters had been raised by farsighted parents to speak Mandarin, and they were full of spunk.

“Our father would use a tape recorder to record other people speaking Mandarin, so that we could practice it,” said the middle sister, Da Lamu, who is 25. “He was very strict, and made us practice Jiang Zemin’s speeches. If we answered him in our native language, he would insist that we speak Chinese.”

When the adventurer from Hong Kong lodged in the family’s house, an idea was born: this area was so beautiful, and the Tibetan-style houses strung along the steep hillsides so fabulous, the family should turn the house into a hostel.

Neighbors watched skeptically as Da Lamu’s family expanded its pine-beam home, with wooden floors and stunning mountain views through glassless windows.

They watched grudgingly as travelers began showing up there as paying guests. And then a few years ago, as if a switch had been flipped, they all began converting their homes or building lodges from scratch.

For the complete article, please see the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/world/asia/06sichuan.html?hp&ex=1157601600&en=cd4b53391d700122&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Posted at 6:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: September 5, 2006

SHANGHAI, Sept. 4 — In a reversal of fortunes that may say as much about Chinese power politics as it does about corruption, China’s richest commercial city has come under investigation by the central government for a huge pension fraud scheme.

So far, the budding scandal, which has been written about in unusual detail in the country’s news media, has ensnared the chief of the city’s Labor and Social Security Bureau, or pension fund, along with the chairman of the Shanghai Electric Group, a municipal utility.

The two, along with the heads of at least two of the city’s districts, including a former top aide to the city’s Communist Party leader, have been taken to Nanjing, where they are being held by investigators for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the presence of more than 100 investigators from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who have been sent here from Beijing and have taken up residence in a historic old hotel, has fed widespread speculation that the arrest or demotion of others, possibly including more senior municipal and party officials, may follow.

The Chinese government routinely bans publication of articles on subjects it deems sensitive or embarrassing, so the widespread reporting on the scandal here has led many to conclude that it is the first act in what may be a long season of political jockeying leading up to the 17th Communist Party Congress next year, in which the next generation of national leaders will be selected.

In recent years Shanghai appeared to be all but immune to high-level scandals, with the city’s leaders benefiting from the patronage of Jiang Zemin, the country’s former leader, who rose to national prominence as mayor of the city and cultivated it as a power base.

Indeed, three years ago a large team of investigators descended from Beijing to look into collusion between officials and real estate developers, only to be recalled abruptly to Beijing, reportedly at Mr. Jiang’s insistence.

That scandal began with residents’ claims that they had been forced to relocate after developers secured rights to their land through illegal payments to city officials. After the investigation was quashed, the news media were ordered not to write about corrupt land deals, and the lawyer for the displaced residents, Zheng Enchong, was jailed for contacting international human rights groups.

But with Mr. Jiang having relinquished the last of his important titles in 2004, many here say, the way has been opened for a new investigation that many see as an attack on Mr. Jiang’s old power base by allies of a younger generation of leaders.

In the current scandal, according to reports in the Chinese news media, city officials arranged for $1.2 billion of municipal pension funds to be lent to an obscure private holding company for investment in a toll expressway between Shanghai and the nearby city of Hangzhou.

For the complete article, please see the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/world/asia/05china.html

Posted at 6:13 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - American Scientist

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: What happened to the people who created them?

click for full image and caption
Figure 1. British artist William Hodges…

In the prevailing account of the island’s past, the native inhabitants—who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui—once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island’s population grew slowly at first. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse.

Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. “In just a few centuries,” he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, “the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?” In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources.”

Two key elements of Diamond’s account are the large number of Polynesians living on the island and their propensity for felling trees. He reviews estimates of the island’s native population and says that he would not be surprised if it exceeded 15,000 at its peak. Once the large stands of palm trees were all cut down, the result was “starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism.” When Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they found only a small remnant of this civilization.

Diamond is certainly not alone in seeing Rapa Nui as an environmental morality tale. In their book Easter Island, Earth Island, authors John R. Flenley of Massey University in New Zealand and Paul G. Bahn worried about what the fate of Rapa Nui means for the rest of human civilization: “Humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn…. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction.”

When I first went to Rapa Nui to conduct archaeological research, I expected to help confirm this story. Instead, I found evidence that just didn’t fit the underlying timeline. As I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui’s prehistory was speculation. I am now convinced that self-induced environmental collapse simply does not explain the fall of the Rapanui.

Radiocarbon dates from work I conducted with a colleague and a number of students over the past several years and related paleoenvironmental data point to a different explanation for what happened on this small isle. The story is more complex than usually depicted.

The first colonists may not have arrived until centuries later than has been thought, and they did not travel alone. They brought along chickens and rats, both of which served as sources of food. More important, however, was what the rats ate. These prolific rodents may have been the primary cause of the island’s environmental degradation. Using Rapa Nui as an example of “ecocide,” as Diamond has called it, makes for a compelling narrative, but the reality of the island’s tragic history is no less meaningful.

Early Investigations

click for full image and caption
Figure 2. Often referred to as the most isolated…

More than 3,000 kilometers of ocean separate Rapa Nui from South America, the nearest continent. The closest habitable island is Pitcairn (settled by the infamous Bounty mutineers in the 18th century), which lies more than 2,000 kilometers to the west. Rapa Nui is small, only about 171 square kilometers, and it lies just south of the tropics, so its climate is somewhat less inviting than many tropical Pacific islands. Strong winds bearing salt spray and wide fluctuations in rainfall can make agriculture difficult.

The flora and fauna of Rapa Nui are limited. Other than chickens and rats, there are few land vertebrates. Many of the species of birds that once inhabited the island are now locally extinct. Large palm trees from the genus Jubaea long covered much of the island, but they, too, eventually disappeared. A recent survey of the island found only 48 different kinds of native plants, including 14 introduced by the Rapanui.

click for full image and caption
Figure 3. Although it is a small island…

Accounts by European visitors to Rapa Nui have been used to argue that by the time of European discovery in 1722 the Rapanui were in a state of decline, but the reports are sometimes contradictory. In his log, Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who led the first Europeans to set foot on Rapa Nui, portrayed the island as impoverished and treeless. After they left, however, Roggeveen and the commanders of his three ships described it as “exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas, potatoes, sugar-cane of remarkable thickness, and many other kinds of the fruits of the earth…. This land, as far as its rich soil and good climate are concerned is such that it might be made into an earthly Paradise, if it were properly worked and cultivated.” In his own account of the voyage, one of Roggeveen’s commanders later wrote that he had spotted “whole tracts of woodland” in the distance.

A 19th-century European visitor, J. L. Palmer, stated in the Journal of the Royal Geographic Society that he had seen “boles of large trees, Edwardsia, coco palm, and hibiscus.” Coconut trees are a recent introduction to the island, so Palmer might have seen the now-extinct Jubaea palm.

Clearly the historical record leaves many gaps to be filled. Scientists have long tried to provide more definitive answers about Easter Island’s prehistory, but at times have instead contributed to the confusion.

Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, for example, visited Rapa Nui in the 1950s and sparked widespread interest in the moai and the large stone foundations, or ahu, on which they were often placed. But he also helped to spread some misleading conclusions. Heyerdahl believed that the Polynesian islands, including Rapa Nui, were settled by voyagers from South America rather than from the western Pacific. In 1947, he launched his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, directing a small craft made of wood and other basic materials from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands to prove that the journey would have been possible for prehistoric peoples.

click for full image and caption
Figure 4. Thor Heyerdahl…

In 1955, Heyerdahl led an archaeological expedition on Rapa Nui. He argued that the island had been settled from the east, and he pointed to similarities between the island’s statues and South American stonework. Linguistic and genetic evidence have firmly established the Polynesian origin of the Rapanui, but Heyerdahl’s conclusions still cloud the archaeological record.

A charcoal sample uncovered on Poike Peninsula—marking, presumably, the site of an ancient hearth—was dated to about 400 A.D. Combined with the then-prevailing idea that the Rapanui language showed many centuries of isolation from other Polynesian groups, the radiocarbon date from this charcoal sample led scholars to conclude that human settlement here began about 400 A.D.

More recently, however, archaeologists have rejected the Poike Peninsula date. Likewise, others have questioned whether the linguistic evidence reflects Rapanui’s isolation instead of early settlement. This later phase of research began to point to 800-900 A.D. as the earliest likely date of human colonization.

Although archaeologists have indeed focused a great deal of effort on establishing just when the island was settled, much of their work has been dedicated to studying the changes that these colonists brought about, especially deforestation. Heyerdahl’s team took pollen samples that showed that palm trees had once been abundant on the island. In the course of their excavations, members of the expedition also found telltale features where roots had once grown, indicating more widespread vegetation in the past and pointing to the possibility that humans had caused the loss of forest cover.

Flenley has provided much of the more recent detailed evidence in this area. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he collected and analyzed sediment core deposits from three areas: Rano Aroi, a crater near the island’s center; Rano Raraku, a crater adjacent to the quarry where many of the statues were carved; and Rano Kau, a crater in the southwest corner of the island. Each of these depressions hosts a shallow lake, which collects wind-blown sediment from elsewhere on the island.

The best evidence came from a 10.5-meter core from Rano Kau, which showed that the island had been forested for tens of thousands of years before the trees disappeared, a process that took place between 800 and 1500 A.D. But more recently Flenley and other scientists have raised doubts about the validity of these dates, which were derived from measurements of the radiocarbon age of lake sediment samples. In 2004, Kevin Butler of Massey University, Christine A. Prior of Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory and Flenley showed that bulk sediment samples from such locales often contain some carbon that is considerably older than the time of deposition, suggesting that the chronology Flenley first proposed may be hundreds of years too old in dating human-induced forest clearance.

Other recent archaeological and paleo-environmental work has also challenged long-held assumptions about Rapa Nui’s prehistory. Catherine Orliac of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France has conducted a remarkable study of 32,960 specimens of woods, seeds, fibers and roots. In addition to identifying 14 taxa not previously observed on the island, she showed that the primary source of fuel for the Rapanui changed in a dramatic fashion. Between 1300 and 1650 A.D., inhabitants burned wood from trees, but they used grass, ferns and other similar plants for fuel after that point. Orliac also argued, however, that at least 10 taxa of forest vegetation may have persisted until Europeans began visiting the island.

In another study, Orliac examined the remains of the hard shells surrounding the seeds of the Jubaea palm. Those samples that were carbonized, gnawed by rats or found in association with human materials provided evidence of human habitation on the island. She dated a number of such remains and found that they all fell after 1250 A.D.

Ecologists Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork of Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel in Germany have studied the process of deforestation on Rapa Nui. Using a variety of evidence, primarily from Poike Peninsula, they concluded that Jubaea palms once covered most of the island. Around 1280 A.D., they argued, deforestation began. The Rapanui largely abandoned the peninsula within 200 years, but then they resettled it in some areas from about 1500 A.D. to 1675 A.D.

In 2003, geologist Dan Mann and several colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates not from bulk samples, but from bits of charcoal found in soils from a number of locations around the island. They also documented ancient episodes of severe erosion, which according to their radiocarbon measurement began soon after 1200 A.D. Their study, like that of Mieth and Bork, pointed to deforestation taking place between 1200 and 1650 A.D., with no sign of human impact prior to that period.

Both Mann’s team and Mieth and Bork reconciled their findings with earlier work by arguing that the population during the centuries prior to 1200 A.D. must have been small or transient. It was only once the number of permanent inhabitants grew larger that indications of human presence would have become clear in the paleoenvironmental record.

But this scenario makes several questionable assumptions. It requires a small founding population with a slow rate of growth and little ecological impact. After conducting our own research on Rapa Nui, we began to wonder whether the lack of evidence of human presence prior to about 1200 A.D. should be taken at face value—maybe the island hadn’t actually been settled as early as most people assumed.

Timing Is Everything

I did not expect when I first visited Rapa Nui, in May 2000, that I would end up questioning what I thought I knew about the island’s past. Indeed, my initial trip to the island was primarily as a tourist, not as an archaeologist. But while I was there, I ran into Sergio Rapu, the first native Rapanui governor of the island and a former student of mine—Rapu had studied archaeology as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. He invited me to do research on Rapa Nui.

Before that point, the thought of doing work there had not really crossed my mind. I had been planning to lead a continuing archaeological field school in Fiji later that summer, but when a violent coup d’état began there that May, my enthusiasm waned. Rapa Nui now seemed an increasingly appealing place to hold the field school sessions.

I anticipated that the work of my students and I, which we began in August 2000, would help put the finishing touches on a well-established story. But as I began to review archaeological survey data, studies of the moai and evidence for environmental changes, I realized that there were a number of gaps in what was known about Rapa Nui, and I grew increasingly skeptical of everything said about the island’s prehistory.

Over the next few years, my students and I conducted field work for one or two months each year. My colleague Carl P. Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, joined the effort and introduced me to the potential of satellite imagery, which we used to explore features such as the ancient roads on which the Rapanui transported the moai from the quarry at Rano Raraku to every corner of the island. Following road alignments also led to the documentation of a number of moai that were previously unrecorded.

In 2004, we began new excavations at a locale called Anakena. This white sand beach would have been the most inviting spot for the first colonists to land their boats (the shore in other places is for the most part made up of cliffs or rocky crags). Hence most anthropologists suspect the areas around Anakena to be the site of the earliest settlements. We intended to study subsistence and environmental change, not basic chronology, which we assumed was already settled.

We dug through sand whose beautifully undisturbed stratification proved to be an archaeologist’s dream. The integrity of the layers would be helpful in determining when things happened, both in an absolute sense and relative to other events. But the excavations were not easy. The sand at Anakena is soft and unconsolidated. As we dug down a few meters, the pits became increasingly dangerous. Horses trotting by on the beach would cause nerve-wracking vibrations in the layers of sand; we worried someone would be buried alive in the pit.

Finally, we reached the bottom of the sand. In the top 3 to 5 centimeters of the underlying clay we unearthed abundant charcoal fragments (indicating the use of fire), bones (including those of the Polynesian rat, a species that arrived with the colonists) and flaked obsidian shards (a clear sign of human handiwork). Below, we found nothing suggesting human activity. Instead, the ancient clay was riddled with irregular voids—places where the soil had once molded itself around the roots of the long-gone Jubaea palm tree.

click for full image and caption
Figure 5. In 2004 and 2005, the author led excavations…

We had clearly found the layer with the earliest human-related materials at Anakena, and assuming that Anakena was likely the location of the first settlements on the island, we were in an excellent position to ascertain the timing of the initial colonization. So I was disappointed when I received an e-mail from the lab that did the radiocarbon dating on these samples. There seemed to be a mistake. The oldest dates were only about 800 years old, implying that occupation began around 1200 A.D. The dates from layers closer to the surface were progressively younger, which is inconsistent with the possibility that somehow our samples were contaminated with modern carbon. There was really no way to explain these numbers, at least not within the conventional model of Rapa Nui’s development. I put aside the discouraging message for the moment and decided to try to figure out later what had gone wrong.

When the hardcopy of the report arrived a couple of weeks later, I examined the data again. The closer I looked, the more it seemed that our results were not the problem. I spoke with my friend and colleague Atholl Anderson of the Australian National University. He had done a careful screening of radiocarbon dates from New Zealand and concluded that the first settlers arrived there around 1200 A.D., several hundred years later than archaeologists had previously believed. The reaction to his ideas was initially quite cool, but time and additional evidence have proved him correct. Having had this experience, Anderson advised me to keep an open mind and to trust my data more than any preconceptions.

In 2005, Lipo and I returned with our students to Anakena and located another part of the dune where the deepest layers containing vestiges of occupation would be easier to expose. We uncovered a large area of the clay beneath the sand and took samples for more radiocarbon dating. The two additional dates from the basal layer were completely consistent with our earlier results.

click for full image and caption
Figure 6. Prior studies of samples…

Was the conventional chronology just plain wrong? Lipo and I took a closer look at the evidence for earlier human settlement. We evaluated 45 previously published radiocarbon dates indicating human presence more than 750 years ago using a “chronometric hygiene” protocol. We rejected dates measured from unreliable sources, such as marine organisms, which require corrections for the older carbon from the marine environment. We also rejected single dates that were not confirmed by a second date from the same archaeological context. Using only paired dates helps ensure the reliability of the data. Our standards were more inclusive than those used by Anderson in his study of New Zealand, but we still were left with only nine acceptable dates. With this culling, the evidence for first occupation around 800 A.D. simply fell apart.

Although our results did not fit with the accepted settlement date for Rapa Nui, they did match the chronology for deforestation that Orliac, Mann, and Mieth and Bork had worked out. You merely have to abandon the idea that a small or transient population endured for centuries. Instead, we posit that from the start the environmental impact was widespread.

The notion that humans did not arrive on Rapa Nui until about 1200 A.D. was not the only thing causing me to rethink my assumptions about the island. Research on other Pacific islands provides a compelling parallel and a possible explanation for the damage done to Rapa Nui’s environment.

Rats in Paradise

For thousands of years, most of Rapa Nui was covered with palm trees. Pollen records show that the Jubaea palm became established at least 35,000 years ago and survived a number of climatic and environmental changes. But by the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of these large stands of forest had disappeared.

It is not a new observation that virtually all of the shells housing palm seeds found in caves or archaeological excavations of Rapa Nui show evidence of having been gnawed on by rats, but the impact of rats on the island’s fate may have been underestimated. Evidence from elsewhere in the Pacific shows that rats have often contributed to deforestation, and they may have played a major role in Rapa Nui’s environmental degradation as well.

click for full image and caption
Figure 7. For thousands of years…

Archaeologist J. Stephen Athens of the International Archaeological Research Institute conducted excavations on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and found that deforestation of the Ewa Plain took place largely between 900 and 1100 A.D. but that the first evidence of human presence on this part of the island was not until about 1250 A.D. There were no climatic explanations for the disappearance of palm trees, but there was evidence that the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), introduced by the first human colonists, was present in the area by about 900 A.D. Athens showed that it was likely rats that deforested large areas of Oahu.

Paleobotanists have demonstrated the destructive effect of rats on native vegetation on a number of other islands as well, even those as ecologically diverse as New Zealand. In areas where rats are removed, vegetation often recovers quickly. And on Nihoa Island, in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, where there is no evidence that rats ever became established, the island’s native vegetation still survives despite prehistoric human settlement.

Whether rats were stowaways or a source of protein for the Polynesian voyagers, they would have found a welcoming environment on Rapa Nui—an almost unlimited supply of high-quality food and, other than people, no predators. In such an ideal setting, rats can reproduce so quickly that their population doubles about every six or seven weeks. A single mating pair could thus reach a population of almost 17 million in just over three years. On Kure Atoll in the Hawaiian Islands, at a latitude similar to Rapa Nui but with a smaller supply of food, the population density of the Polynesian rat was reported in the 1970s to have reached 45 per acre. On Rapa Nui, that would equate to a rat population of more than 1.9 million. At a density of 75 per acre, which would not be unreasonable given the past abundance of food, the rat population could have exceeded 3.1 million.

The evidence from elsewhere in the Pacific makes it hard to believe that rats would not have caused rapid and widespread environmental degradation. But there is still the question of how much of an effect rats had relative to the changes caused by humans, who cut down trees for a number of uses and practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. I believe that there is substantial evidence that it was rats, more so than humans, that led to deforestation.

Our work on Anakena, as well as previous archaeological studies, found thousands of rat bones. It seems that the Polynesian rat population grew quickly, then fell more recently before becoming extinct in the face of competition from rat species introduced by Europeans. Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island show signs of having been gnawed on by rats, indicating that these once-ubiquitous rodents did affect the Jubaea palm’s ability to reproduce. Reason to blame rats more than people may also be revealed in the analysis of sediments obtained at Rano Kau, which, like the Hawaiian evidence, appears to show that the forest declined (leaving less forest pollen in the sediment) before the extensive use of fire by people.

A Misplaced Metaphor?

By the time the second round of radiocarbon results arrived in the fall of 2005, a complete picture of Rapa Nui’s prehistory was falling into place. The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.

click for full image and caption
Figure 8. New evidence casts doubt…

It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

There is no reliable evidence that the island’s population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui’s shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island’s name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island’s inhabitants.

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile. It remains part of that country today.

In the 1930s, French ethnographer Alfred Metraux visited the island. He later described the demise of Rapa Nui as “one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas.” It was genocide, not ecocide, that caused the demise of the Rapanui. An ecological catastrophe did occur on Rapa Nui, but it was the result of a number of factors, not just human short-sightedness.

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island’s prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today’s problems.

Ecosystems are complex, and there is an urgent need to understand them better. Certainly the role of rats on Rapa Nui shows the potentially devastating, and often unexpected, impact of invasive species. I hope that we will continue to explore what happened on Rapa Nui, and to learn whatever other lessons this remote outpost has to teach us.
Bibliography

* Bahn, P. G., and J. R. Flenley. 1991. Easter Island, Earth Island. New York: Thames and Hudson.
* Butler, K., C. A. Prior and J. R. Flenley. 2004. Anomalous radiocarbon dates from Easter Island. Radiocarbon 46(1):395-405.
* Diamond, J. 1995. Easter’s end. Discover 9:62-69.
* Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.
* Hunt, T. L., and C. P. Lipo. 2006. Late colonization of Easter Island. Science 311:1603-1606.
* Lipo, C. P., and T. L. Hunt. Mapping prehistoric statue roads on Easter Island. Antiquity 79:158-168.
* Mann, D., J. Chase, J. Edwards, R. Beck, R. Reanier and M. Mass. 2003. Prehistoric destruction of the primeval soils and vegetation of Rapa Nui (Isla de Pascua, Easter Island). In Easter Island: Scientific Exploration into the World’s Environmental Problems in Microcosm, ed. J. Loret and J. T. Tanacredi. New York: Kluwer Academic, pp. 133-153.
* Metraux, A. 1957. Easter Island: A Stone-Age Civilization of the Pacific. London: Andre Deutsch.
* Mieth, A., and H.-R. Bork. 2003. Diminution and degradation of environmental resources by prehistoric land use on Poike Peninsula, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Rapa Nui Journal 17(1):34-42.
* Orliac, C. 2000. The woody vegetation of Easter Island between the early 14th and the mid-17th centuries A.D. In Easter Island Archaeology: Research on Early Rapanui Culture, ed. C. Stevenson and W. Ayres. Easter Island Foundation.
* Palmer, J. L. 1870. A visit to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, in 1868. Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 40:167-181.

Posted at 5:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Weekly Standard

09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47

Globalization is real, but its power to improve the lot of humankind has been madly oversold. Globalization enthralls and binds together a new aristocracy—the golden crust on the human loaf—but the remaining billions, who lack the culture and confidence to benefit from “one world,” have begun to erect barricades against the internationalization of their affairs. And, from Peshawar to Paris, those manning the barricades increasingly turn violent over perceived threats to their accustomed patterns of life. If globalization represents a liberal worldview, renewed localism is a manifestation of reactionary fears, resurgent faiths, and the iron grip of tradition. Except in the commercial sphere, bet on the localists to prevail.

When the topic of resistance to globalization arises, an educated American is apt to think of a French farmer-activist trashing a McDonald’s, anarchist mummers shattering windows during World Bank powwows, or just the organic farmer with a stall at the local market. But the swelling resistance to globalization is far more powerful and considerably more complex than a few squads of drop-outs aiming rocks at the police in Seattle or Berlin. We are witnessing the return of the tribes—a global phenomenon, but the antithesis of globalization as described in pop bestsellers. The twin tribal identities, ethnic and religious brotherhood, are once again armed and dangerous.

A generation ago, it was unacceptable to use the word tribes. Yet, the tribes themselves won through, insisting on their own identity—whether Xhosa or Zulu, Tikriti or Barzani, or, writ large, French or German. In political terms, globalization peaked between the earnest efforts of the United Nations in the early 1960s and the electoral defeat of the European constitution in 2005 (the French and Dutch votes weren’t a rebuff, but an assassination). In Europe, which was to have led the way in transcending nationalism, the European Union will stumble on indefinitely, even making progress in limited spheres, but its philosophical basis is gone. East European laborers and West European farmers alike will continue to exploit the E.U.’s easing of borders and transfers of wealth, but no one believes any longer in a European super-identity destined to supplant one’s self-identification as a Dane or Basque.

Far from softening, national and other local identities are hardening again, reverting to ever-narrower blood-and-language relationships that Europe’s dreamers assumed would fade away. Who now sees himself as fundamentally Belgian, rather than as a Fleming or Walloon? Catalans deny that they are Spaniards, and the Welsh imagine a national grandeur for themselves. In the last decade, the ineradicable local identities within the former Yugoslavia split apart in a bloodbath, while a mortified Europe looked away for as long as it could. The Yugoslav disaster was written off as an echo from the past—anyway, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars were “not our kind”—but the Balkan wars instead signaled a much broader popular discontent with pseudo-identities concocted by political elites. The collapse of Yugoslavia hinted at the future of Europe: not necessarily the bloodshed, but the tenacity of historical identity.

Even as they grabbed from one another in Brussels, European elites insisted that continental unification was desirable and inevitable. Until the people said no.

Now, in 2006, we see one European state after another enacting protectionist measures to prevent foreign ownership of vital industries (such as yogurt-making). France paused, as hundreds of thousands of its best and brightest protested the creation of new jobs for the less-privileged in a spectacular defense of the ancien régime. And a new German chancellor has called for saving the European project by destroying it—or at least by hewing down te massive bureaucracy in Brussels that alienated the continent. The future of Europe lies not in a cosmopolitan version of the empire of Charlemagne, but in a postmodern version of the feudal fragmentation that succeeded the Frankish empire. Brussels may be the new medieval Rome, its bureaucratic papacy able to pronounce in limited spheres, but there is ever less fear of excommunication.

Elsewhere, the devolution of identity from the state to the clan or cult is more radical, more anxious, and more volatile. In Iraq, religious, ethnic, and tribal identities dictate the composition of the struggling national government—as they do in Lebanon, Canada, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries (we shall not soon see a Baptist prime minister of Israel—or a Muslim Bundeskanzler, despite those who warn of Eurabia). Even in the United States, with our integrative genius, racial, religious, and ethnic identity politics continue to prosper; we are fortunate that we have no single dominant tribe (minorities might disagree).

Still, the success of the United States in breaking down ancient loyalties is remarkable—and anomalous. While the current American bugbear is Hispanic immigration, most Latinos establish worthy lives in the American grain, just as the Irish and Italians, Slavs and Jews, did before them. American Indias may still think in tribal terms (especially when casino profits are involved), and there is no apparent end to the splinter identities Americans pursue in their social and religious lives, but not even Rome came remotely so close to forging a genuinely new, inclusive identity.

Our peculiar success blinds us to failures abroad. Not only have other states and cultures failed to integrate Einwanderer or to agree upon composite identities, they do not desire to do so. The issue of who and what a Frenchman or German is appeared to idealists to have been resolved a century ago. It wasn’t. Now, newly forged (in both senses of the word) identities in the developing world are dissolving in fits of rage.

European-drawn borders have failed; European models of statehood and statecraft have failed, and, in global terms, European civilization has failed. Unable to see beyond those models, the United States fails to exert influence commensurate with its power, except in the field of popular culture (even Islamist terrorists like a good action flick). With the end of the colonial vision and the swift crack-up of postcolonial dreams—not least, of a socialist paradise—there is a worldwide vacuum of purpose that the glittering trinkets of globalization cannot fill. From the fear-mongering of our own media to the sermons of Moktada al-Sadr, the real global commonality is the dread of change. Whether in Tehran or Texas, the established orders have gone into a defensive crouch.

Men dream of change, but cling to what they know. Far from teaching the workers of the world to love one another (or at least to enjoy a Starbucks together), the economic and informational effects of globalization have been to remind people how satisfying it is to hate. Whether threatened in their jobs, their moral code, or their religion, human beings dislocated by change don’t want explanations. They want someone to blame.

The new global aristocracy

There is, indeed, a globalizing class, and hundreds of millions of human beings share the consumer tastes that announce their membership: Prada handbags for the striving women of Tokyo and Manhattan; the poverty-born music of Cesaria Evora for well-off fans from Frankfurt to San Francisco; the Mercedes sedan and the credit card; voyeuristic leftism for professors in Ann Arbor, Buenos Aires, and Vienna; computers for the literate and solvent from Budapest to Bangalore; wine from the region-of-the-week for London suburbanites or Shanghai’s nouveaux riches; media conglomerates that eschew patriotism; and, for the platinum specks on that golden crust of humanity, private jets and $30,000-per-week vacation rentals when they weary of their own three or four homes.

Such people may well be more at home with foreigners of their own cultural stratum than with their less-fortunate countrymen. For the upper-tier of these new aristocrats of globalization, place of residence and citizenship are matters of convenience, tastes, and tax codes. This is a nobility with no sense of responsibility to the serfs, and its members are shielded as never before from life’s inconveniences.

For the billions remaining, globalization and its consort, the information revolution, merely open a window into an exclusive shop they are not allowed to enter. A second-hand Pittsburgh Steelers shirt on a Congolese beggar isn’t globalization, but only the hind end of global trade. The new awareness of the wealth of others is hardly pacifying. On the contrary, it excites the conviction (which local demagogues are delighted to exacerbate) that they can only be so rich because they stole what was ours.

The uneven ability to digest the feast of information suddenly available even in the globe’s backwaters doesn’t bring humanity together (even if Saudi clerics and American bureaucrats visit the same online porn sites). Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had been ordered, and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of previously unimagined possibilities while having one’s essential verities challenged. Feeling helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization turns to the comfort of explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia that assures him that, for all his material wants, he is nonetheless superior to others.

The confident may welcome freedom, but the rest want rules. The conviction that a new man freed of archaic identities and primitive loyalties can be created by human contrivance is an old illusion. Rome believed that the new identity it offered not only to its citizens, but also to its remote subjects, must be irresistible. Yet imperial Rome faced no end of revolts from subject tribes, from Britain to Gaul to Palestine. In the end human collectives with stronger, undiluted identities conquered the empire. From the brief, bloody egalitarianism of the French revolution, through socialist visions that promised us the brotherhood of man and an end to war (a conviction especially strong in 1913), to the grisly attempt to create Homo Sovieticus and export him to the world, there has been no shortage of visions of globalization.

Even the most powerful attempts to unite humanity failed: the monotheist campaigns to impose one god.

One god, one way, one world

Monotheism replaced Rome’s law codes with the law of God. The first near-success of globalization was the bewildering survival and spread of Christianity, the transitional faith between the exclusive tribal monotheism of Judaism and the universal aspirations of Islam. Beginning as a cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing among those of different inheritances, Christianity quickly developed a taste for salesmanship, adapting its message from one of local destiny to one of universal possibility. Furthermore, its message to the poor (a constituency contemporary globalization ignores) had as exemplary an appeal among the less-fortunate of the bygone Mediterranean world as it does today in sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity was an outsider’s religion co-opted by rulers, while Islam meant to rule—and include—all social classes from the years of its foundation.

Globalization really got moving with the advent of Islam. Open to converts from its earliest days, Islam moved rapidly, in just a few centuries, from voluntary through coerced to forced conversions. While the latter were never universally demanded, they were frequent (as were forced conversions to Christianity elsewhere). The immediate and enduring conflict between Christianity and Islam involved different visions of globalization, a competition of quality, design, and power (think of it as Toyota vs. Ford in a battle for souls). Those Christian and Muslim visions continue to experience drastic mutations in the battle for new and local loyalties, having now reached every habitable continent. Their success has blinded us to their weakness: Neither religion has been able to subdue their old antiglobalist nemesis: magic.

When we speak of religion—that greatest of all strategic factors—our vocabulary is so limited that we conflate radically different impulses, needs, and practices. When breaking down African populations for statistical purposes, for example, demographers are apt to present us with a portrait of country X as 45 percent Christian, 30 percent Muslim, and 25 percent animist/native religion. Such figures are wildly deceptive (as honest missionaries will admit). African Christians or Muslims rarely abandon tribal practices altogether, shopping daily between belief systems for the best results. Sometimes, the pastor’s counsel helps; other times it’s the shaman who delivers.

The Anglican priest in South Africa decries witchcraft, but fails to see that his otherworldly belief system offers no adequate substitute for solving certain types of daily problems. Quite simply, Big Religion and local cults are inherently different commodities. From Brazil to Borneo, local Christians don’t see imported and traditional belief systems s mutually exclusive, any more than a kitchen fortunate enough to have a refrigerator should therefore be denied a stove.

There’s an enormous difference between Big Religions—Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and the others—and the local cults that endure long beyond their predicted disappearance. This distinction is critical, not only in itself, but also because it is emblematic of the obstacles that local identities present to globalization as we imagine it. Big Religion interests itself in a world beyond this world, while the emphasis of local faiths has always been on magic (bending aspects of the natural world to the will of the practitioner of hermetic knowledge). Magic affects daily life in the here and now, and its force and appeal can be far more potent than our rationalist worldview accepts: What we cannot explain, we mock. (An advantage Christianity enjoys among the poor of the developing world is the image of Jesus the Conjure-Man, turning water into wine and walking on water—he’s a more-promising shaman than Muhammad.)

Another aspect of identity that we, the inheritors of proselytizing world religions, fail to grasp is that local cults are exclusive. They not only do not seek new members, but can’t imagine integrating outsiders (the politicized tribal beliefs of the Asante in Ghana are a limited exception, since they were devised to confirm the subjugation of neighboring tribes). Cult beliefs are bound to the local soil, the trees, the waters. Tribal religions are about place and person, an identity bound to a specific environment. While slaves did take voodoo practices with them to the new world, the rituals immediately began to mutate under the stress of transplantation. Tribal religions form an invisible defensive wall, as local practices do today, from the Andes to the Caucasus.

Even ancestor worship, one of the commonest localist practices, supposes the intervention of the dead in the affairs of living men and women. Built on bones, local religions are cumulative, rather than anticipatory. While both Big Religions and local belief systems proffer creation myths, universal faiths are far more concerned with an end-of-times apocalypse (in the Hindu faith, with recurring apocalypses), while local cults rarely see beyond the next harvest. The great faiths lift the native’s heart on one day of the week, while local beliefs guide him through the other six.

What we lump together under the term “religion” is better divided into the distinct categories of religion and magic. The reason that so many local cults, from Arizona to Ghana, persist under Christianity or Islam, and whythey remain a source of endless frustration to Wahhabi and evangelical missionaries alike, is that they answer different needs. Big Religion is about immortal life. Magic is about acquiring a mate, avoiding snakebite or traffic accidents, gaining wealth. African tribes, as well as the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere, can accept a global faith with full sincerity, while seeing no reason to abandon old practices that work.

Even as they change their names, the old gods live, and our attempts to export Western ideas and behaviors are destined to end in similar mutations. Our personal bias may be in favor of the frustrated missionaries who try to dissuade the Christians of up-country Sulawesi from holding elaborate, bankrupting funerals with mass animal sacrifices (death remains far more important than birth or baptism), but the reassuring counter is that in the Indonesian city of Solo, where Abu Bakr Bashir established his famed “terrorist school,” the devoutly Muslim population drives Saudi missionaries mad by holding a massive annual ceremony honoring the old Javanese Goddess of the Southern Seas. Likewise, Javanese and Sumatran Muslims go on the hajj with great enthusiasm (on government-organized tours), but continue to revere the spirits of local trees, Sufi saints, and the occasional rock.

In Senegal, I found local Muslims irate at the condescending attitudes of Saudi emissaries who condemned their practices as contrary to Islam. With their long-established Muslim brotherhoods and their beloved marabouts, the Senegalese responded, “We were Islamic scholars when the Saudis were living in tents.”

From West Africa to Indonesia, an unnoted defense against Islamist extremism is the loyalty Muslims have to the local versions of their faith. No one much likes to be told that he and his ancestors have gotten it all wrong for the last five centuries. Foolish Westerners who insist that Islam is a unified religion of believers plotting as one to subjugate the West refuse to see that the fiercest enemy of Salafist fundamentalism is the affection Muslims have for their local ways. Islamist terrorists are all about globalization, while the hope for peace lies in the grip of local custom.

Uninterested in political correctness, a Muslim from Côte d’Ivoire remarked to me, “You can change the African’s dress, you can educate him and change his table manners, but you cannot change the African inside him.” He might have said the same of the Russian, the German, or the Chinese. By refusing to acknowledge, much less attempting to understand, the indestructible differences between human collectives, the 20th-century intelligentsia smoothed the path to genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan, as well as to the age of globalized terror. Denied differences only fester; ignored long enough, the infection kills.

Our insistence that human beings will grow ever more alike defies the historical evidence, as well as practical and spiritual needs. Paradoxically, we make a great fuss of celebrating diversity, yet claim that human values are converging. We, too, have our superstitions and taboos.

Magic vs. jihad

The spread of Islam into Europe and Africa struck very different, but equally potent, barriers in the north and south. In Europe, it could not overcome a rival monotheist faith with its own universalist vision. In West Africa, Islam stopped, roughly five centuries ago, when it left the deserts and grasslands to enter the African forest, that potent domain of magic.

It should excite far more interest than it has that a warrior faith with an unparalleled record of conquest and conversion dead-ended when it reached the realms of illiterate tribes that had not mastered the wheel: In the forests of sub-Saharan Africa, Islam could not conquer, could not convert, and could not convince. On their own turf, local beliefs proved more powerful than a faith that had swept over “civilized” continents.

Forests are the abdes of magic. Look to forested areas for resistance to innovation. Even European fairy tales insist on the forest’s mystery. Islam, with its abhorrence of magic, had nothing to offer African forest tribes to replace the beliefs that enveloped them. In northern Europe, too, monotheism faced its greatest difficulty in penetrating forested expanses, and the persistence of essentially pagan folk beliefs in the forested mountains of eastern Europe can startle a visitor today.

The forest, with its magic, is the opponent of globalization. Unlike the monotheist faiths with their propulsive desert origins, it only menaces those who insist on entering it. Now the worrisome question is whether the vast urban slums of the developing world are the world’s new forests—impenetrable, exclusive, and deadly. From Sadr City to Brazil’s favelas, slum-dwellers are converting the great monotheist religions back into local cults, complete with various forms of human sacrifice. Far from monolithic, both the Muslim and Christian faiths are splintering, with radical strains emerging that reject the globalization of God and insist that His love is narrow, specific, and highly conditional. The great faiths are becoming tribal religions again.

The limits of globalization

After approximately a century of Christian expansion inward from its coasts, Africa remains a jumble of faiths: Muslim in the north states such as Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, or Kenya, while Christian in the south—and persistently fond of local beliefs throughout. Christian televangelists (the real advance guard of globalization) rail against traditional practices in Ghana, while, at the continent’s other extreme, on remote islands off the coast of Mozambique, the population remains strictly Muslim by day, but brings out the drums and incantations at night.

The attitude of missionaries, Christian or Muslim, is that such beliefs and practices are a combination of bad habits, naive superstitions, and general ignorance. But the conviction has grown in me as I travel that the missionaries themselves are—willfully—ignorant of systems they cannot respect and so refuse to understand. Religions are like businesses in the sense that they must provide products that work with sufficient regularity to keep customers coming back. Results matter. The psychological comfort and beyond-the-grave promises of Christian ity and Islam function transcendently, but leave immediate needs unanswered.

In developed societies, civil, commercial, and social institutions fill the gap; elsewhere, magic must. Magic endures because local populations experience sufficient evidence of its power. This is hard for Westerners to accept, but, whether training African militaries or running an aid program in Peru, those who ignore the role of magic in the lives of others will always fall short in their results: When Global Man goes home, the shaman returns.

We laugh at this “mumbo-jumbo” from the safety of our own parochial worlds, but the hold of magic remains so tenacious that it continues to inspire human sacrifice in up-country Ghana and self-mutilation from New Mexico to Sulawesi. One way to read the grave discontents of the Middle East is that Sunni Islam, especially, annihilated magic, but, unlike Western civilization, failed to substitute other means to satisfy human needs. There is a huge void in the contemporary human experience in the Islamic heartlands: no reassuring magic, no triumphant progress. Islam in the Sunni-Arab world—the incubator of global terror—is all ritual and no results, while even modern, Western Christianity imbues its rituals with satisfying mysticism, from the experience of being “born again” to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood.

What if magic—ritual transactions that address spiritual, psychological, and practical needs—is a strategic factor that we’ve missed entirely? We would not wish to send our troops anywhere without good maps of the lcal terrain, but we make no serious effort to map the spiritual world of our enemies or potential allies. Even if magic and local beliefs are merely a worthless travesty of faith, our convictions are irrelevant: What matters is what the other man believes.

The power of local beliefs and traditions will continue to frustrate dreams of a globalized, homogenized society beyond our lifetimes. If we can recognize and exploit the power of local customs, we may find them the most potent tools we have for containing the religious counterrevolution of our Islamist enemies. If, on the other hand, we continue to deny that local traditions, beliefs, and habits constitute a power to be reckoned with, we will lose potential allies and many a well-meant assistance project will falter as soon as we remove our hand.

As for the potential for violence from insulted local beliefs, consider this statement: “They can preach holy war, and that is ever the most deadly kind, for it recks nothing of consequences.”

This doesn’t refer to mad mullahs and postmodern suicide bombers. It’s a quotation from a historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth. Published half a century ago for adolescents, it describes a Druid revolt against the Romans in Britain.

Globalization isn’t new, but the power of local beliefs, rooted in native earth, is far older. And those local beliefs may prove to be the more powerful, just as they have so often done in the past. From Islamist terrorists fighting to perpetuate the enslavement of women to the Armenian obsession with the soil of Karabakh—from the French rejection of “Anglo-Saxon” economic models to the resistance of African Muslims to Islamist imperialism—the most complex forces at work in the world today, with the greatest potential for both violence and resistance to violence, may be the antiglobal impulses of local societies. From Liège to Lagos, the tribes are back.

Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer, is the author of 21 books, including, most recently, Never Quit the Fight. He has traveled extensively in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Indonesia.

© Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Posted at 1:00 PM · Comments (0)

Queen and harlot, dark and fair, heroine and murderer, she has been an object of fascination for writers, artists and film directors down the centuries. Lucy Hughes-Hallett examines the many faces of Cleopatra

Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

Frances Barber, Elizabeth Taylor and Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatras
Her infinite variety … Frances Barber, Elizabeth Taylor and Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatras. Photographs: Tristram Kenton/PA

Cleopatra - the last queen of Egypt; one of the most formidable enemies Rome ever faced; the woman whose two husbands, both of whom were also her brothers, died in their teens (one in battle against her, the other possibly murdered on her orders); the lover who thereafter chose her own partners with an eye not only to pleasure, but also to the augmentation of her own power. She appears on the Glyndebourne stage this summer, portrayed by Danielle de Niese, in an unfamiliar character: that of a sweet helpless girl desperately in need of a male protector. Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare (libretto by Nicola Haym) introduces a surprising vision of Cleopatra. She is recognisably linked to the Cleopatra of Dryden’s All for Love, a fluttery creature who describes herself as a “silly, harmless household dove”. But she bears almost no resemblance to the more familiar Shakespearean “serpent of old Nile” currently to be seen at the Globe, where Frances Barber plays up her violence, forcing the unwelcome messenger’s hand down on to a brazier full of hot coals, and at Stratford, where Harriet Walter endows her with fierce intelligence and sorrowful majesty.

Article continues
All legends have a tendency to mutate, to be reshaped in each successive era according to the prejudices and preoccupations of those who retell the tale. But Cleopatra’s is more than usually protean. It was first formulated in her own lifetime by her enemies’ propaganda. Its primary purpose was to discredit her lover Mark Antony.

Cleopatra and Antony had formed a partnership that was as much a political alliance between two mutually useful potentates as it was a love affair. But the story, as Roman poets and historians tell it, was that Antony had become so besotted with the queen of Egypt that he was willing to give up his chance of ruling Rome in order to enjoy the pleasures of her bed. So Antony, the canny politician and commander with empire-building ambitions to rival Alexander’s, was reinvented as a degenerate hedonist and a traitor to Rome. As a by-product of that successful exercise in news manipulation, Cleopatra was cast as the woman for whose love’s sake the world would be well lost.

Cleopatra - the gratification of every conceivable desire - has been repeatedly reimagined by writers, artists and film-makers in accordance with desires of their own. She was one of the most powerful women in the ancient world, and she was defined by the Romans and their heirs as the foreigner - at once the menacing stranger and the temptress, offering the chance of escape from the tedious limitations of one’s own known world. So sexual and racial politics have shaped the variations on her story, transforming her from serpent to dove and back again to suit her public’s yearnings and fears.

Her moral status fluctuates. Cecil B de Mille offered the leading role in his sumptuous movie about her to Claudette Colbert with the words: “How would you like to play the wickedest woman in history?” His question anticipated the answer: “Very much indeed, please.” “Wicked” was already, in the 1930s, a term of approbation meaning sexy, edgy, thrilling, an infinitely more alluring epithet than boring old “good”: the hypocrisy at the heart of our culture has been part of Cleopatra’s legend for most of 2,000 years. But back in 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer made Cleopatra the first heroine of his Legend of Good Women. To him and his contemporaries she was the paragon of feminine virtue, the proof of her goodness being that she didn’t wish to outlive her man. In an age when love-matches were rare and widowhood the only condition in which a woman could be truly independent, men, it appears, found it hard to trust their wives.

The emphasis of her story wavers as often as her claim to virtue. To the Renaissance painters, it was about sex and money. They produced quasi-pornographic images of her suicide. Although all the ancient historians agree that Cleopatra had herself dressed in all her royal robes before applying the asp to her arm, artists almost invariably picture her dying in the nude, with the snake at her breast. Or they show her presiding over a magnificent banquet, in the act of demonstrating her prodigality and her wealth by drinking down a pearl dissolved in vinegar.

To the English and German dramatists who took up the theme after Shakespeare, it was about the relative status of wives and mistresses. In the Protestant cultures of post-Reformation Europe there was a lively debate about the new ideal of companionate marriage, one which spilled over into Cleopatra’s story: the reason Dryden’s Cleopatra feels so feeble is that she lacks a wedding ring. Next, in versions written in the period leading up to the American and French revolutions, the story became about the clash between rival systems of government. In some dramas (notably those produced under Louis XIV and his successors), Cleopatra and Antony represent the feudal nobility as opposed to Octavius’s centralising and modernising regime. In others, Cleopatra stands for the decadence (and romance) of ancient monarchy contrasted with Roman republicanism.

The storyline shifts. So does Cleopatra’s appearance. For several hundred years she was blonde. She was a famous beauty, and so medieval poets ascribed all the conventional attributes of beauty to her: hair like spun gold, sky-blue eyes and breasts “as white as ivory billiard balls”. The tradition was persistent. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may have been darkened by “Phoebus’s amorous pinches”, but in Tiepolo’s magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn’t until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra’s exoticism became once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller, dark-eyed and tousle-haired.

Over the next century, as the European powers scrambled for territory in Africa and the Middle East, Cleopatra’s legend became the vehicle for theories about racial difference and justifications of imperialism. Artists represented her as an enticing Turkish dancing girl in gauzy harem pants and sparkly bra; lolling indolently on a divan, she became representative of a terminally decadent culture ripe for annexation by a benignly energetic western power. In the latter pose, she is usually surrounded by slaves bearing cups of sherbet and peacock-feather fans. Or, in many cases, writhing in agony on the floor.

In the 19th century the Cleopatra plot ceased to be the familiar, more or less historical one of Antony, Actium and the asp. In 1837 Pushkin revived a scurrilous piece of fourth-century gossip alleging that Cleopatra used to offer a night in her bed to any man willing to pay for the privilege with his life. He expanded on the theme. Cleopatra, presiding over a banquet in a mood of idle boredom, makes her terrible offer. Her courtiers are aghast, but a line of men beg for the prize. She rejects princes and generals, accepting instead a fresh virgin boy, whose execution she watches with relish the following dawn.

Romantics and decadents alike adored the story. Cleopatra was reborn as the femme fatale, the personification of the bourgeois male’s sexual guilt and the realisation of his most deliciously painful self-castigating fantasies. Plutarch had recorded that, in preparation for her own death, she tested poisons on her household slaves: the scene was represented repeatedly on canvas and on the stage, while Pushkin’s scenario became the basis for dozens of later versions. The tragedy of Cleopatra in which Sarah Bernhardt starred repeatedly over three decades (doggedly continuing even after she had lost a leg) was not Shakespeare’s, but one written to the actress’s order by Victorien Sardou, in which the queen is a sadistic voluptuary given to performing elaborate striptease. Meanwhile, the bestselling novelist H Rider Haggard came up with a new twist when he revealed that the youth Cleopatra took to bed was actually her own son.

Cleopatra had become the personification of vice, flouter of every convention, breacher of every taboo. She was barely human. Algernon Swinburne, in an essay that is part art criticism, part masochist reverie, enthused about Michelangelo’s drawing in which queen and asp seem to fuse into one Medusa-like being, while Gustave Flaubert called her “the pale creature with a fiery eye, the viper of the Nile who smothers with an embrace”. Ruthless, beautiful, bestial, this fantastic Cleopatra seemed to offer Europeans, feeling cramped in an increasingly regulated society, an escape into a Nietzschean wonderland of moral irresponsibility and violent pleasure.

By the time the Ballets Russes staged Fokine’s Cleopatra in Paris in 1909, she had become the figure of death. The dancer who played her, Ida Rubinstein, was carried on in a sarcophagus, wrapped mummy-fashion in yards of multicoloured gauze from which she was gradually unwound, her face chalk-white, her hair bright blue.

The fantasy of the death-dealing vamp flourishes in peacetime. In the face of the 20th century’s wars it came to seem a bit of a joke, and a sick joke at that. In 1917 the movie Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara (described by the Fox publicity team as the “Ishmaelite of femininity” and the “torpedo of domesticity”), bombed at the box office. In a world where young men were being slaughtered en masse, the femme fatale was redundant. Bernard Shaw scoffed at the idea of sublime passion, and wrote a Caesar and Cleopatra in which the queen of Egypt is a petulant teenager. Claudette Colbert played her as a flirty good-time girl and, in 1945, Vivien Leigh brought to the part, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, “the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag”. Cleopatra had become camp.

In the notorious 1963 movie she arrives in Rome on a mobile sphinx as high as the Senate house, accompanied by belly dancers, whirling dervishes, wheeled pyramids that open up to release flocks of white doves, scores of chariots, archers and armies of well-oiled, buff attendants in fetching pink loincloths. Arriving before Caesar, Elizabeth Taylor, heavily made up in early 1960s style with lots of eyeliner, false lashes and pale lipstick, bows deeply, her bosom looming large around the edges of her deeply cut gold-lamé bodice. And then, looking up at Antony, she winks. The scandal generated by Taylor’s on/off-screen affair with her Antony, Richard Burton, was gleefully welcomed by the film’s producers. To the 19th-century Romantic, the wages of sin might be death. To the 20th-century entrepreneur, it was good publicity. To a postwar generation avid for life and pleasure, Cleopatra offered not a fatal passion, but history’s best ever holiday romance.

In the last three decades of the 20th century, Cleopatra got serious again. She was allotted a role in a debate about race relations. Afrocentrist historians, led by Martin Bernal, argued that the culture of ancient Egypt had been played down by racist scholars unwilling to acknowledge that Greek civilisation, and therefore all subsequent western civilisation, had African origins: it became fashionable to describe the pharaohs as black.

But whatever colour the pharaohs were, Cleopatra was not one of them. She was the direct descendant on her father’s side of one of Alexander’s generals, a Macedonian Greek. We do not know who her mother was: her ethnic inheritance can’t be fully established. But we do know that when the director of a 1990s production of Shakespeare’s play, who had cast a black actress in the role of Cleopatra, talked about emphasising her “earthiness” and “the kind of non-European regality which allows someone to sit on the floor”, she was imposing yet another set of anachronistic preconceptions on to the image of the Hellenistic queen. Already, only a few years later, that director’s remarks sound insulting: we do not now think of “earthiness” and a reluctance to use the furniture as particularly “black” traits. In fact, Cleopatra shocked the republican Romans by sitting not on the floor, but on a throne of solid gold.

More recently, Cleopatra’s Middle Eastern identity has come to seem even more interesting than her African one. In 1929 the Egyptian dramatist Ahmad Shawqui, a campaigner against the British authorities, made her a nationalist heroine struggling to defend her country’s independence. The theme is ready for further development. No one retelling her story today could do so without an awareness that she was the ruler of what is now an Islamic state, at the moment of its invasion by a western superpower.

In Cleopatra’s lifetime, racist Roman propaganda characterised Egyptians as self-indulgent, sex-fixated and unmanly in their readiness to treat women as their equals, while Romans congratulated themselves on their abstemiousness, the austerity of their religion and their readiness for war. The stereotypes are still recognisable, but their ascription has been reversed. A militant Islamicist from the region that Cleopatra and Antony once ruled must now think of the west much as Rome once thought of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

Cleopatra is still changing, and she will continue to do so as long as her name is remembered. The forces that have repeatedly transformed her image, the forces of anger and anxiety and covert desire, are still at their lethal work in the world.

· Giulio Cesare is at Glyndebourne (01273 813813) until August 26. Antony and Cleopatra is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 (020-7401 9919), until October 8, and at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0870 609 1110), until October 14.

· Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend (Pimlico).

Posted at 11:00 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 2006

DUJIANGYAN, China There are no boundary markers at the edge of this town to signal to travelers that they are entering a different world, but the feeling could not be more distinct even if there were.

It hits in multiple ways: the sudden change in grade to the roads as they work their way toward the clouds and beyond; the rugged look of the people, stout and tawny folk wrapped in chubas, blanket-like outerwear, instead of coats.

Most remarkable, though, is the change in the greetings, or rather, what is no longer said. In the east of China, everywhere a Westerner goes, he can be expected to be greeted with cries of “lao wai,” literally old outsider, but meaning foreigner. Here it was just “hello.”

This region of China’s rugged west is inhabited by people of Tibetan descent, people whose universe has been rearranged by more powerful people to the east.

For them, singling out a Westerner as an “old outsider” would seem a very strange notion indeed.

A voyage through western Sichuan Province provides a particularly vivid lesson in political geography and in the insecurities of the Chinese leadership, which usually projects a carefully groomed image of serenity and self-assuredness to the world, all the while managing problems unimagined by most outsiders.

The mask of serenity dropped briefly recently over the issue of Tibet, with intemperate outbursts from Beijing about the visit of the Dalai Lama to neighboring Mongolia, where Tibetan lamas have been revered for centuries, from his 47-year exile in India.

The Chinese press has carried articles attacking the Dalai Lama, with one column denouncing him as being “a loyal tool of anti-Chinese forces,” and another, published in the Tibet Daily in July, exhorting the people to realize his “reactionary nature.”

The headlines, accompanied by widespread reports of stepped-up repression in Tibet, betray a profound uneasiness about China’s cohesiveness. This came through most clearly in a rare interview accorded to the foreign media by Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party secretary for Tibet, with the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The party leader spoke of the “peaceful liberation of Tibet,” and the existence of religious freedom in China. Then he began an attack against the Dalai Lama, accusing him of inciting rebellion and separatism.

“The core issue is this: Everyone must love his motherland,” he said. “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.’”

For the complete article, please see the link below:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/31/news/letter.php

Posted at 1:05 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Village Voice

August 31st, 2006 4:53 PM

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 241 pp., $24
Have all of Cormac McCarthy’s fictional odysseys been leading to this, a world blasted gray and featureless by human folly and cosmic indifference, inhabited only by pitiless predators and (arguably) lucky survivors? Or is The Road just further rumination from a man who, metaphorically or otherwise, finds himself on unrecognizable terrain in the final years of his life?

Take your pick. The genius of Mc- Carthy’s work, whether you find it risible or profound, is in its bold, seamless melding of private revelation, cultural insight, and unabashed philosophizing. Sci-fi divination is new for him, though, and the freshness he brings to this end-of-the-world narrative is quite stunning: It may be the saddest, most haunting book he’s ever written, or that you’ll ever read.

His previous novel, No Country for Old Men, was nothing if not pre-apocalyptic, and The Road fulfills that bitter promise in spades. Its stripped-down story, however, couldn’t be more removed from the doggedly elliptical No Country: A man and his young son trek southwesterly through an unnamed, nuclear-winterized landscape in search of warmth and on the run from bands of cannibalistic outlaws. As the pair scavenge for food and comfort among eerily abandoned towns and withered forests, they provide each other with—just barely—a reason not to lie down and die.

Never one to indulge in explosive action (he’s more the propulsive type—”they went on” is this tale’s Blood Meridian–like mantra), McCarthy holds back even more than usual here. The milieu—a sprawling, horizonless vale of drifting ash and spindly rubble, “the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be”—is startling for its lack of customary descriptive detail, and the book is all the more wrenching for it; the degree of ruin might make even Judge Holden blanch. McCarthy underplays the familiar last-man-on-earth pulp accoutrements as well, making The Road more Time of the Wolf than Mad Max, and more Kuroi Ame than either of those (devoid of that novel’s debatable reassurance that the world was more or less intact after Hiroshima’s incineration).

It’s also McCarthy’s purest fable yet. The troubled bond that links the man, a compulsive isolationist tyrannized by his fading memories (“The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true”), and the boy, who longs to stop and make contact with other “good guys” on the road, is key to the book’s mythic scope: Its argument exists in the tension between the rank self-centeredness necessary to survive as an individual and the altruism required to survive as a species. As such, it seems as much McCarthy’s second response to the West’s accelerated social erosion (the frankly bewildered No Country being the first) as a heartsick accounting of irretrievable extinction.

The Road also represents a more personal reckoning, albeit a less angry one than its predecessor. Despite the apocalyptic setting, McCarthy lets down his cynical guard enough to suggest that the future—to say nothing of the present—invariably resembles a wasteland when viewed from the vantage point of someone with an abundance of past. (Not that he’s lost his edge; there are plenty of robust allusions to Western lit’s better-known Father and Son act here, too.) It’s a gentle, compassionate gesture, and hints that this could well be McCarthy’s swan song—potential bad news for his fans.

Whether or not that’s the case, they should be satisfied with the current offering’s characteristic helpings of hypnotic, gut-punching prose and bracing depictions of emotional longing (“She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned” )—qualities McCarthy’s detractors seem bizarrely content to underestimate or overlook. Indeed, for all its allegorical underpinnings and stark grandeur, the tender precariousness of The Road’s human relationships is what finally makes it such a beautiful, difficult, near perfect work.

Posted at 12:30 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright © 2010 Howard W. French. All rights reserved. Reproductions of any portion of this Web site only with expressed permission.

A Glimpse of the World is a hirefrank production using Moveable Type and Gallery with XHTML and CSS. Design consulting by pixelflexmedia.

Questions, concerns or comments about the site? Drop us a line.