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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Copyright Slate

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole’s term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist’s daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak�in the sense of erasing, or silencing�any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life, he writes. Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Poole’s list of suspicious phrases rolls on for more than 200 pages. Tax relief and tax burden, which covertly argue that lowered taxes automatically relieve and unburden everybody. Friends of the Earth casts its opponents as enemies of the earth and implies that the Earth is befriendable, a big, huggable Gaia.

Poole cautions readers not to confuse unspeak with doublespeak, a word that grew out of the concepts of Newspeak and doublethink that George Orwell introduced in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Poole writes, “But Unspeak does not say one thing while meaning another. It says one thing while really meaning that one thing,” and the confusion unspeak generates is almost always calculated and deliberate.

Poole calls community one of the most perfect political words in English because it

can mean several things at once, or nothing at all. It can conjure things that don’t exist, and deny the existence of those that do. It can be used in celebration, or in passive-aggressive attack. Its use in public language is almost always evidence of an Unspeak strategy at work.

The plasticity of community allows it to encompass geography, ethnicity, profession, hobby, or religion, and in the mouths of diplomats and journalists can expand to include everybody, as in the international community, a concept that Justice Antonin Scalia once described�rightly�as “fictional.”

We’re drawn to the “semantically promiscuous” word, Poole writes, because it allows us to simultaneously express our tolerance for a group and our discomfort. For example: the homosexual community and the black community. People rarely refer to the heterosexual community, the white community, or even the Christian community, because in the United States and Britain, they are the “default” positions and carry the “privilege of not having to be defined by a limiting ‘identity.’ ” Likewise, a group defined by the majority as transgressive, say, the Ku Klux Klan, would never qualify as a “community” even though it organizes itself with the same conscious effort as the “anti-war community.”

For the complete article please see the link below.

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Copyright China Daily

President Hu Jintao will visit Sudan and South Africa in the near future as part of an eight-nation trip to Africa to broaden the nation’s reach and strengthen ties with the continent.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Thursday that dates and detailed arrangements for the trip were still being negotiated, but would be announced soon.

The tour will possibly start at the end of the month. The South African Foreign Ministry has said the country will receive the president in early February.

It will be Hu’s third trip to the continent, following trips to three African countries in 2004 and another three in April last year.

Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing has just concluded a seven-nation African tour, mostly focusing on smaller countries. He returned on January 8.

China’s diplomatic drive in Africa culminated last November with Beijing hosting a China-Africa Summit that drew leaders from more than 40 African nations.

Response to ministry upgrade

Liu yesterday also urged Japan to make further efforts to improve and develop bilateral ties instead of making trouble.

Liu made the comments in response to Japan’s recent upgrading of its defense agency to defense ministry as well as Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s recent talks with his British counterpart Tony Blair in which Abe asserted that the European Union lifting its arms embargo on China would impact security in Asia.

Liu stressed that adhering to the road of peaceful development by Japan conforms to the fundamental interests of Japan itself and benefits regional peace, stability and development.

UN Habitat executive director Anna Tibaijuka (C) receives a statue representing a Chinese drum as a present from Chinese President Hu Jintao (L) at the UN compound in Nairobi, Kenya, April 28, 2006.

He noted that Japan’s concern over the EU’s plan to lift its arms embargo on Beijing “is none of Japan’s business and will not impose any threat to the country.”

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In the early 1990s, a story circulated among Chinese taxi drivers about an �eight-�car traffic accident in Guangzhou that resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The story fueled Mao fever (Mao re) in China, with shopkeepers offering busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks with Red Guards waving Mao�s little red book at each tick of the clock. Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. Transmuted uses of Mao continue today. Nightclub singers in Beijing croon songs that cite Mao�s words. Youths dine in �Cultural �Revolution-�style� caf�s off �rough-�hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock �market.

This nonpolitical treatment of Mao Zedong (1893�1976) is an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangzi valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous. Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of �faith.

But where is Mao the totalitarian? Each of the major nations that experienced an authoritarian regime in the 20th century emerged in its own way from the trauma. Japan, Germany, Italy, even Russia departed politically from systems that brought massive war and repression. China, still ruled by a communist party, has been ambiguous about Mao. Although Mao�s portrait and tomb dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, Mao �himself��unlike Stalin in Russia or Hitler in �Germany��has floated benignly into a nether zone as if somehow he was not a political figure at all, let alone the architect of China�s communist �state.

The cab drivers, farmers, pop singers, and shopkeepers are really only following the lead of the Chinese Communist Party, which does not quite know how to handle Mao�s legacy. New history textbooks approved for initial use in Shanghai have largely brushed Mao out of China�s 20th-century story. China has abandoned Mao�s policies but not faced the structural and philosophical issues involved in �Maoism��and probably won�t until the Party�s monopoly on political power comes to an end. Yet unless China gets the Mao story correct, it may not have a happy political �future.

The moral compass of the Mao era has gone, unregretted. But �money�making, national glory, and a veil over the past in the name of �good feelings� are not enough to replace it. Can a society that lived by the ideas of Confucianism for two millennia, and later by Mao�s political athleticism, be content with amnesia about the Mao era and the absence of a believed public �philosophy?

In a recent biography, Mao: The Unknown Story (2006), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday pile up evidence that Mao was a monster to eclipse Stalin and probably Hitler and Lenin as well. �Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao�s outlook� from his teens to his dotage, say the authors. In a second influential volume, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995), Mao�s physician Li Zhisui portrays the Chairman as exceedingly selfish, jealous, and promiscuous. Soon after his book came out, Dr. Li came to speak at Harvard, and I showed him around the campus. �Three words did not exist for Mao,� the gentle doctor remarked as we strolled. �Regret, love, mercy.� These two �books��both written from outside �China��explain the Mao era in China as essentially the consequence of having an evil man at the �helm.

Certainly Mao�s rule was destructive. Tens of millions of Chinese died in the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward of 1958�59, victims of Mao�s willful utopianism and cruelty. Millions more died, and tens of millions had their lives ruined, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Practicing brinkmanship toward India, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union, Mao declared that a loss of hundreds of millions of Chinese in a nuclear war would be a setback China could readily �digest.

Yet �bad man� does not adequately sum up Mao and his legacy. To believe so would be to embrace the moral absolutism of communism itself, with its quick verdicts (�enemy of the people,� �hero of the proletariat�), and to repeat the manipulations of official Chinese imperial history, in which even a flood or earthquake �proved� the evil character of the emperor. Were the �good men� around bad man Mao blind to his failings for so many decades? Were the hundreds of millions of Chinese who bowed before Mao�s portrait and wept at the sight of him out of their �minds?

Mao made history; at the same time, history made Mao. In addition to looking at Mao�s failings as a human being, we must look at the structures and pressures that turned whim into tyranny. At the ideas Mao wielded. At the �evaporation��in Mao�s case, as in that of several other �dictators��of youthful idealism and exactitude. Above all, at the seduction of a �freedom� bestowed from above by a �party-�state that believed it knew what was best for the �citizenry.

In a Jesus was dismembered for speaking out… . He who speaks out does not necessarily transgress, and even if he does transgress, this is but a small matter to a wise man.� Immediately we face a puzzle: Young Mao was an ardent individualist. In his years at the teachers� training college he attended in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, Mao�s credo became the �self-�realization of the individual. �Wherever there is repression of the individual,� he wrote in the margin of a translation of Friedrich Paulsen�s System of Ethics (1889), �wherever there are acts contrary to the nature of the individual, there can be no greater crime.� His first published newspaper work, written in 1919, was a plea for the liberation of women, a passionate �nine-�part commentary on the suicide of a young woman in Changsha moments before her arranged �marriage.

Mao at 24 saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an outbreak of freedom for the individual that lit the way for China. A young female friend objected, �It�s all very well to say establish communism, but lots of heads are going to fall.� Mao, who had recently read Marx and Engel�s Communist Manifesto, retorted, �Heads will fall, heads will be chopped off, of course. But just think how good communism is! The state won�t bother us anymore, you women will be free, marriage problems won�t plague you anymore.� Although these words hint at Mao�s later callousness about human life, it is striking that he viewed Lenin�s revolution in terms of the �marriage problems� of individual �women.

The anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid (1902), had a strong hold on Mao until he was nearly 30. A great virtue of the Russian anarchist, Mao felt, was that �he begins by understanding the common people.� Anarchism in Mao�s perception was linked with Prometheanism; Friedrich Nietzsche was also among his early enthusiasms. The Promethean individual would prepare for his heroic role by taking cold baths, running up mountains, and studying books in the noisiest possible places. This prefigures the fascism to come in Mao�s Cultural Revolution, just as fascism in Europe owed a debt to Nietzsche. At the time, however, Mao�s individualism was nurtured by the influence of a Chinese professor at Changsha who had imbibed the idealist liberalism of T. H. Green, the late-19th-century British �philosopher.

Mao was a rebel before becoming a communist. The psychological root of his rebelliousness was hostility to his father, and, by extension, to other authority figures. The political root was dismay at China�s weakness and disarray in the face of foreign encroachment, shared by most informed Chinese of the period. Mao�s chief use for the steeled individual was as a fighter for justice and China�s salvation. �The principal aim of physical education,� he wrote in 1917 in New Youth magazine, �is military heroism.� The authoritarian strain in Mao�s individualism was already �present.

Eventually, Mao�s respect for individual freedom collapsed. There were four causes. One was the powerful current of nationalism in early-20th-century China; the cry to rescue the nation eclipsed the cry for the �self-�realization of the individual. A second was the large role of war in China from the 1920s to the �40s. Pervasive violence made political debate a luxury and favored repression. A third was Mao�s embrace of Marxist ideas of class, central economic planning, and communist party organization. Fourth was the hangover in Mao�s mind and Chinese society generally of a paternalistic imperial �mentality.

In the end, Mao Zedong, facilitated by Stalin, put the population of the world�s largest nation under a regimen that combined Leninism, the paternalism of early Chinese �sage-�rulers, and, by the 1960s, a hysteria and military romanticism that amounted to fascism Chinese-�style.

The imperative of national salvation was the first factor working against Mao�s attraction to freedom. Mao was mildly attracted to a movement comparable in spirit to Europe�s Enlightenment that sprang into existence in China in 1919. Named May Fourth (after the date of an initial student demonstration), it aimed at modernizing China by embracing �quasi-�Western ideas of individualism, democracy, and science. Liberated individuals would rescue China. But May Fourth soon split in two, a left wing jumping to Marxist collectivism and a right wing sticking with individualism. Leftists, including the 27-�year-�old Mao, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in �1921.

Bolshevism helped Mao be progressive and �anti-�Western at the same time. Opposition to the West was necessary to many young Chinese leftists, despite the appeal of Western ideas, because of British and other foreign bullying of China since the Opium War of 1839�42. From Lenin, Mao learned that social justice and national salvation could come as one package. �Leninism��and to a lesser degree �Marxism��joined anarchism, nationalism, and individualism in the �rag�bag of Mao�s political ideas. It was Lenin who showed Mao his road to power. �Anti-�imperialism was going to be for Mao, as it was for Lenin, the framework for revolution. But this �anti-�imperialist��soon �anti-�Japanese��nation�alism that Mao injected into the Chinese Revolution negated individual �freedom.

In the 1930s, Mao argued to the �semi�criminal secret society Gelaohui (Elder Brother Club) that its principles and the CCP�s were �quite �close��especially as regards our enemies and the road to salvation.� Of course, the threat of enemies was the central point. In his appeal to �non-�Han �minority� peoples during the Long March of 1935�36, when Mao emerged as the CCP�s top leader as the Communists retreated before Chiang �Kai-�shek�s Nationalist forces, Mao challenged Mon�golians to �preserve the glory of the era of Genghis Khan� by cooperating with the Communists. Pressing the Muslims to support him, he told them that this would ensure the �national revival of the Turks.� Of course, Chinese nationalism had turned Mao into a trickster. After the wars with Japan and Chiang �Kai-�shek were over, there would be no common cause with the Gelaohui, no freedom for the Mongolians or the Muslims of �Xinjiang.

The violence that continually rippled through China was another force militating against individual freedom. After the death in 1925 of Sun �Yat-�sen, a leader in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and a founder of the Nationalist movement, the gun was prominent in Chinese public life. Sun�s wavering leadership gave way to warlordism, a violent rupture of the tenuous coalition of Nationalists and Communists in 1927, and growing incursions by Japan beginning in 1931. Guns were to freedom as a cat is to mice. From the time Mao used force to confiscate the holdings of Hunan landowners in 1925, when he was just one of many CCP leaders, his political life cannot be understood aside from violence, both the wars he waged and those waged against him. As he sought to organize farmers in a remote mountain region, he remarked, �The struggle in the border area is exclusively military. The Party and the masses have to be placed on a war footing.� Mao spoke of �criticizing the Nationalists by means of a machine gun.�

A third enemy of freedom was the class, organizational, and economic theory Mao drew from Marx and Lenin. Here Mao�s story is similar to that of Stalin, Castro, and others. Class theory has intrinsic distortions; people often do not act as members of an economic class. Class labeling became especially inimical to freedom when Mao was forced to rely on farmers rather than workers as the key class in
Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

China�s revolution. Anyone who pointed out this departure from Marx�s theory of proletarian revolution was stamped out as a �renegade.

Eventually, class became little more than a convenient way to demarcate friends and enemies of the moment. Hence, longtime colleague and expected successor Liu Shaoqi was �discovered� by Mao in the 1960s to be a �bourgeois� who had �sneaked into the Party.� Never mind that Mao and Liu had worked together as leftist organizers on and off since �1922.

For the complete article please click the link below.

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(This guy, I’m honored to say, is my uncle. HF)

January 19, 2007

After a career of more than 50 years in which he chronicled the civil rights movement, became the first full-time black reporter at the Washington Post, and opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau, Simeon Booker is retiring.

A retirement reception is scheduled for Booker, 86, on Wednesday at Washington’s National Press Club.

Among those expected are Linda Johnson Rice, CEO of Johnson Publishing Co., publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines; retired Ebony editor Lerone Bennett; Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet; retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw; and Eleanor Clift, Newsweek Washington correspondent.

Simeon Booker
Booker’s office said the veteran journalist was not up to sharing his story again for this column, but in 1982, the Washington Post’s Jacqueline Trescott put it this way:

“After 27 years in Washington, Booker is a mini-institution. The second black reporter to win a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he became The Washington Post’s first full-time black reporter in 1952. His coverage of the murder of Emmett Till, a young black who allegedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi, in Jet during 1955 is credited with mobilizing support of the southern civil rights movement. His column is the only weekly news-gossip column about black politicians and professionals, and he has a special personality, all the rough edges of the old-fashioned movie reporter and the charm of a Runyonesque character. His office is an-office-away-from-the-office for a lot of black Washington bureaucrats, who periodically stop by for some scotch, some often raucous talk and, occasionally, a fast poker game.”

Booker is obviously walking history. Hired at the Post after stints at the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call & Post, organs of the black press, and a Nieman fellowship, he described his two Post years as “almost as a nightmare.”

“One men’s room was open to him in the Post building,” on the newsroom floor, Howard Bray wrote in his 1980 book, “The Pillars of the Post.” “He avoided the inhospitable company cafeteria; many other eating places were closed to him. Booker’s editors kept him in the office for a long spell, but when they finally sent him out to cover a robbery the police nearly arrested him as a suspect. He had trouble getting white cabbies to take him back to his office in time to write his stories before the deadline. Booker’s copy was sometimes scrawled with racial epithets.”

Moreover, some of the stories he wanted to write about black grievances conflicted with the political priorities of publisher Philip Graham, and those were buried or spiked.

It is the Till case for which Booker’s name will forever be linked, however. Twenty-first century journalists will have a difficult time imagining a courtroom ruled by a Southern sheriff where black reporters were shunted to a less desirable part of the courtroom, denied access to the washrooms and drinking fountains, and greeted by “Mornin,’ niggahs,” as Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, wrote with Christopher Benson in the 2003 book “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America.”

A big part of the trial drama was finding � and persuading � justifiably frightened black witnesses to testify, as Booker recounted in a piece he wrote for the January 1956 issue of Nieman Report. The black reporters � 12 of them covered the trial � became part of the backstage story.

After the all-white jury failed to convict the perpetrators, it fell to Booker to help keep Till’s story alive. The FBI reopened the case in 2005, but decided that the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations had expired.

Booker made a different kind of history in Washington, where he opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau in 1955 and has remained there ever since, writing his familiar Jet “Ticker Tape” column.

“In his office Booker is never still. Tall and husky, he moves rapidly. His thick hair is almost white, and his plain shirts are brightened with bow ties. He turns down his hearing aid if he doesn’t want to be bothered. His voice, a rumble like a vacuum cleaner, reverberates through the office. As he talks, he never finishes what he starts, and that’s the style of his column, always punchy, leaving the end dangling,” Trescott wrote in 1982.

No successor has been named, a Johnson spokeswoman said.

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Jan 18th 2007
Copyright The Economist
A rare piece of good news about news-gathering in China
IN A quaint tradition the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing used to mark the end of foreign correspondents’ stints in China with a gift. There was probably no irony intended in the choice of memento: a plate emblazoned with a picture of the Great Wall. China’s most famous architectural deterrent to foreign interaction was a fitting symbol for those reporting on the country. They were hemmed in by rules banning much that, elsewhere, would seem routine. Not any more. On January 1st looser rules came into force. It is too early to cheer; but this may be an important reform to a woefully repressive system.

Before, foreign journalists had to obtain permission from the relevant local government for any reporting outside the capital. Journalists are an unruly lot and of late most have simply ignored the rule. The central government has turned a blind eye. Not, however, local governments, which would routinely expel foreign journalists on their patch, sometimes after detaining them and roughing them up first.

The new rules, however, in force until after next year’s Beijing Olympics, allow foreign reporters to go more or less where they please. The implications are wide-ranging: for the first time, the foreign press can legally cover breaking news outside Beijing, as it unfolds. To take just three run-of-the-mill events that have until now usually been out of range, these might include a protest against an official land-grab, a disastrous explosion in a coalmine or a chemical spill. The scandalous cover-ups that have blighted China’s response to SARS and avian influenza should become harder. All this, of course, depends on whether the new rules are respected.

In an early test of this, our Beijing correspondent has been investigating one outrageous cover-up: over the fate of the tens of thousands infected with HIV/AIDS during a botched blood-collection drive (see article) in Henan province. Cynicism about the government’s intentions appeared justified. Soon after arriving in an �AIDS village�, local officials turned up and told him to go away. His phone call to the foreign ministry in Beijing, however, led the local authorities to co-operate.

A sporting chance

A single swallow does not make a journalistic summer. A spate of negative stories and the government may backtrack. It is motivated not by a new-found love of freedom but by practicalities: how to manage 20,000 reporters expected for the 2008 Olympics; how to stop nasty stories about press restrictions; and, perhaps, how to rein in errant local governments. More likely than a repeal of the new rules is that local governments will shift from the arbitrary enforcement of the old ones to the use of deniable thuggery to frighten reporters and their sources. Just this month a Chinese reporter investigating an unlicensed coalmine was beaten to death. Already, at least one of our interviewees in Henan is feeling the heat.

In other ways, there is no let-up in Chinese censorship of all media, including the internet. Journalists and bloggers risk losing their jobs and freedom. This week it was reported that the Communist Party had actually tightened its grip��pre-censoring� the local press by demanding it seek permission to cover sensitive events. But the new freedoms allowed foreign reporters are at least a step forward, and evidence to support those who argued that the Olympics would force China into greater openness. Those, like this newspaper, who argued that the games would be taken as a badge of global respectability but would have next to no lasting impact on China’s viciously repressive politics would be delighted to be proved wrong.

Posted at 11:49 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
January 17, 2007

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion � they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign � a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, those programs wouldn’t use up even half our money pot.

So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.
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The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place � better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation � could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as the economist William Nordhaus has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom.

The operation itself � the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq � is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: When in 1980 I started returning to Shanghai � the city where I had attended elementary school � my relatives had to use ration coupons to purchase meager quantities of meat and cooking oil. I helped them buy bicycles with my foreign-exchange certificates at the Friendship Store, which catered only to foreign visitors and overseas Chinese. Otherwise they would have had to wait six months to obtain sufficient coupons and pay half a year’s salary to get one. The 11-story Jinjiang Hotel where I lived towered over the French Quarter. It was impossible to imagine what the city would become 26 years later.

Today, that elegant old art deco hotel is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. City residents shop at foreign-owned supermarkets that are as well-stocked as their Hong Kong or American equivalents. Buick sedans have replaced bicycles as the most coveted transportation in China. As of 2005, more are sold in China than in the United States. They are manufactured at the Shanghai General Motors plant.

But even these remarkable changes pale next to the astonishing transformation of the Communist Party. Around 1980, the party leadership admitted that three decades of orthodox Communism had produced little economic gain and constant political upheaval. In a 180-degree turn, party leaders began to push a market economy, encouraging people to get rich fast instead of striving for equality.

The initial experiment was carried out at Shenzhen, a town across the border from Hong Kong, because the party did not trust that it could keep Shanghai’s notoriously capitalist-minded people under control. It was only in 1991, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, when Beijing desperately needed to appease popular discontent, that the party leadership finally “opened” Shanghai. Once let loose, the city wasted no time.

The people of Shanghai, whether rich or poor, have always believed themselves to be more rational and efficient than their countrymen. They have always reproached the people of Beijing for wasting time talking about politics, while they themselves get things done. They are especially proud of their trademark way of doing things � the so-called haipai style. True to that tradition, the city offered generous incentives to attract foreign investment: cheap office space, low taxes and, most of all, the promise to cut red tape. Foreign firms rushed to Shanghai. In a short 15 years, the city rebounded to overtake Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta as China’s major industrial and consumer-goods production center.
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But in the rush to join the ranks of the world’s leading business centers, Shanghai’s Communist leaders have evicted tens of thousands of families and razed block after block of charming old dwellings so that foreign developers could erect high-rise office complexes, hotels and apartment buildings that would look equally appalling in Paris or New York. The intended awe-invoking effect of the showcase skyline of the Pudong financial district designed by renowned Italian, Japanese, Spanish and American architects across the Huangpu River from the old Bund is usually lost in dense layers of smog. More visible is the new affluent lifestyle, reminiscent of that enjoyed by the select group of foreigners, gangsters and corrupt government officials and supported by an invisible sea of servants, handlers, singsong girls and coolies during Shanghai’s glory days of the 1930s.

Today, as then, members of the moneyed elite � foreign businessmen, overseas Chinese investors and high party officials � reside in the best part of the old French Quarter, shop at international stores, frequent health spas in five-star hotels, and wine and dine in clubs with initiation fees as high as $10,000.

For average residents, including members of the growing middle class, this lifestyle is just a pipedream. Worse off are the city’s 3 million migrant workers (out of a population of 20 million), forced by poverty into jobs reminiscent of their service-providing predecessors escaping the civil war before 1949.

Please see the link below for the entire article.

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Copyright The New English Review (Jan. 2007)

I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn�t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there�s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry.

Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish?

My medical practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced me of the prevalence of evil. I was surprised. I had spent a number of years in countries wracked by civil wars and thereby deprived of even minimal social order, precisely the conditions in which one might expect evil to be widely committed, if only because in such situations the worst come to the fore. But nothing prepared me for the sheer malignity, the joy in doing wrong, of so many of my compatriots, when finally I returned home. Every day in my office I would hear of men who tortured women - torture is not too strong a word - or commit the basest acts of intimidation, oppression and violence, with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. I would once have taken the opening sentence of Adam Smith�s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a truism:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

But now I no longer think it is even a truth, let alone a truism. I would be more inclined to write:
How good soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the suffering of others� etc., etc.

I have seen so much, both at home and abroad, that I am not easily taken aback. When you have heard of baby-sitters who impale babies on railings in order to quieten them during a televised football match, or of men who suspend their girlfriends by their ankles from the fifteenth floor balcony, and this kind of thing daily for many years, you develop a kind of emotional carapace. One almost begins to take a pride in one�s own unsociability, which one takes to be a kind of sophistication. It is a form of spiritual pride, I suppose. Still, I nevertheless read a book that shocked me. It was about the Rwandan genocide, called A Time for Machetes, by a French journalist called Jean Hatzfeld. He interviewed several men who had taken part in the genocide, probably the most murderous in human history, at least in terms of numbers of deaths per day while it lasted, and were now imprisoned. One of them was under sentence of death.

As it happens, I had been to Rwanda only a handful of years before the genocide. I was travelling across Africa by public transport, so that I could see African life from below, as it were. I passed through several extraordinary countries, for example Equatorial Guinea, where the first (democratically elected) president after independence from Spain had been overthrown and executed by his nephew. Francisco Macias Nguema was one of the great unsung political monsters of the Twentieth Century, the century par excellence of political monsters. He kept the national treasury under his bed, had all people who wore eyeglasses executed on the grounds that they were dangerous intellectuals, introduced forced unpaid labour and killed or drove into exile a third of the population. His nephew who overthrew him, who until then had been his accomplice, was somewhat of an improvement, though still a dictator (and to this day is President): whenever he left the capital, the power supply was switched off as no longer being necessary.

I am ashamed now of the superficiality of my understanding of Rwanda of those days. I knew, of course, that Burundi (through which I had also just travelled) and Rwanda were mirror images of one another: that in Burundi it was the Tutsi minority that massacred the Hutu people, whereas in Rwanda it was the other way round, and that it was rather difficult to decide who had started this most vicious of vicious circles. But by comparison with many African countries, Rwanda seemed a well-run state, comparatively uncorrupt, its people industrious to a fault, and far from wretchedly poor, despite being one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, if not the world, with an astonishingly high natality. I knew, of course, that it was a dictatorship, the dictator being Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana, and that every Rwandan, ex officio as it were, was a member of the one party of the one-party state, the Mouvement national revolutionnaire pour le developpement (MNRD), from birth. But at the time, I was not very optimistic that multi-party politics, of the kind that the dictator was forced to introduce in 1991, would necessarily represent an improvement. In a way, I was right: the most efficient slaughter in human history took place three years later.

In that slaughter, in the space of three months, neighbours killed without compunction those with whom they had been friendly all their lives, only because they were of the different, and reputedly opposing, ethnic designation. They used no high-tech means, only clubs and machetes. Women and children were not spared; husbands of mixed marriages killed wives, and vice versa. The participation of the general population in the slaughter was its most remarkable feature: usually in mass murder, it is the state that does the killing, or rather the state�s agents, since the state is an abstraction without an existence independent of those who work for it. Hatzfeld, the African correspondent of the French left-wing newspaper, Liberation, went to interview some of the perpetrators a few years after the genocide. They were friends who took part in the murder (if that is not too slight a word for it) of 50,000 of the 59,000 Tutsis who lived in their commune.

Oddly enough, being in prison gave them the ability to talk about what they had done, if not honestly, at least with some degree of freedom. I do not know to what degree Hatzfeld, who interviewed them individually and at length, edited the transcript of his interviews, and of course we have no way of knowing how representative his witnesses are: but their testimony is perhaps the most startling ever committed to paper.

There is no real remorse for what they did, only regret that it landed them in their current predicament. They feel more sorry for themselves than for their victims, or the survivors. They are not even altogether unhappy in prison, and look forward to resuming their lives where they left off (before the genocide) as if nothing too much had really happened - or should I say been done by them? They hoped for, and expected, forgiveness on the part of the survivors, amongst whom they would have to return to live, because resentment and bitterness are useless emotions and because they (the perpetrators) had all been gripped by a collective madness. This, of course, absolved them in large part from personal responsibility.

For three months, the men would get up, have a hearty breakfast, gather together, and then go on hunting expeditions of their former neighbours, who had fled to the nearby marshes. They would hack anyone they found to death; and then, when the whistle blew in the evening for them to stop their �work� (they regarded it as such), they returned home, had a quick wash, had dinner and socialised in a jolly way over a few beers. Their wives would be - for the most part, though not universally - content, because Tutsi property was thoroughly looted, and distributed according to the individual efficiency and ruthlessness of the killers. One of the most haunting things in this book, if it is possible to pick anything out in particular, is that many of the victims did not so much as cry out when caught by the murderous genocidaires: they died in complete silence, as if speech and the human voice were now completely worthless, redundant, beside the point. I have often wondered why the people went into the gas chambers silently, without fighting back, but I suppose that when you witness absolute human evil committed by the people with whom you once lived, and who, at least metaphysically, are just like you, you see no point in the struggle for existence. Non-existence, perhaps, seems preferable to existence.

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were �earning� by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

Let us not console ourselves with the thought that these were unsophisticated Africans, without the mental capacity to know better: in short, mere savages. Again, I do not know how much Hatzfeld has edited their words, but his perpetrator interlocutors seem to me more articulate than most of the people with whom I have had to deal in Britain as patients over the last decade and a half. Indeed, their language occasionally becomes poetic: though poetic language in this circumstance is mere euphemism.

Besides, the few comments of the survivors, mostly women, that Hatzfeld inserts into the text, are of considerable moral and intellectual sophistication, and certainly not those of unreflecting primitives with few powers of cerebration. Here is Edith, a Tutsi schoolteacher, on the question of forgiveness:
‘I know that all the Hutus who killed so calmly cannot be sincere when they beg pardon, even of the Lord. [Many now pray fervently: the Rwandans were fervently religious long before the genocide.] But me, I am ready to forgive. It is not a denial of the harm they did, not a betrayal of the Tutsis, not an easy way out. It is so that I will not suffer my whole life asking myself why they tried to cut me. [Cut is the euphemism used by victim and perpetrator alike for �kill,� since most of the death was dealt with a machete.] I do not want to live in remorse and fear from being Tutsi. Of I do not forgive them, it is I alone who suffers and frets and cannot sleep� I yearn for peace in my body. I really must find tranquillity. I have to sweep fear far away from me, even if I do not believe their soothing words.’

Francine, a Tutsi farm woman and shopkeeper, on the other hand, says this:
‘Sometimes, when I sit alone in a chair on my veranda, I imagine this possibility: one far-off day, a local man comes slowly up to me and says, �Bonjour, Francine, I have come tospeak to you. So, I am the one who cut your mama and your little sisters. I want to ask your forgiveness.� Well, to that person I cannot reply anything good. A man may ask for forgiveness if he has one Primus [beer] too many and then beats his wife. But if he has worked at killing for a whole month, even on Sundays, whatever can he hope to be forgiven for? We must simply go back to living, since life has so decided� We shall return to drawing water together, to exchanging neighbourly words, to selling grain to one another. In twenty years, fifty years, there will perhaps be boys and girls who will learn about the genocide in books. For us, though, it is impossible to forgive.’

No, it is impossible to console ourselves with the thought that the Rwandans are so different from us that they and their experiences have nothing to say to us. Edith and Francine are, indeed, more dignified, more articulate, more intelligently reflective, than most of the victims of small-scale evil in an English slum whom I have met.

This book penetrates deeper into the heart of evil than any other I have ever read. The author makes no claims for his work: he is still mystified by it himself. But if you want to know what depths man can sink to - an important thing to know, when your argument is that things are so bad that they cannot get any worse, so prudence is unnecessary - read this book. At the very least, it will put your worries into perspective.

A TIME FOR MACHETES, Jean Hatzfeld, Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Posted at 1:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

The author of a new book about gender in Japan sets aside Western stereotypes and talks about how ordinary women are fueling a feminist revolution that’s transforming the country.

Jan. 17, 2007 | The American media loves Japanese women, especially when they’re dressed in kimonos or school uniforms, or covered head to toe in brand names. But according to Veronica Chambers, a journalist, a novelist and the author of “Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation,” those stylish stereotypes distract us from the real story. Chambers claims that there’s a major cultural power shift taking place in Japan — and it’s ordinary working women who are shaking things up.

Chambers first sensed the tremors of revolution when she visited Japan on a media fellowship in 2000; her interest piqued, she set out to find enterprising Japanese women who were bucking the corporate system and creating financial and personal success on their own terms. The task turned out to be harder than she expected — not because the women didn’t exist (to the contrary) but because they didn’t think their stories were worth sharing with each other — or with nosy journalists.

Chambers says she started to feel like one of the Western men of the 19th century who were obsessed with the myth of the exotic Japanese female. But instead of following the flash of red lips or the clatter of geta sandals down the alleyways of Gion, Chambers tracked groundbreaking businesswomen and iconoclastic entrepreneurs to their offices and homes. She spent three years discussing ideas of autonomy and ambition with more than 74 women, including young hipsters like a hip-hop DJ and an extreme snowboarder; barrier breakers like a senior executive at Canon and an openly gay Osaka assemblywoman; and dozens of small-business owners, artists and creative types. Through her interviews, Chambers discovered that feminism is alive and even thriving in Japan — albeit in a way that might seem a little, well, foreign to American women. And as American women continue to strive for true equality in the workplace, the White House and beyond, she hopes it may be helpful to hear how our counterparts across the globe — who don’t have mandatory maternity laws, who have fewer female representatives in government than most other industrialized nations and who earn half of what men do — are doing.

Salon spoke to Chambers about “empowered” office ladies, fed-up salarymen, and power-suited female execs who shamelessly play geisha on weekends.

When did you first realize “regular” Japanese women were in the middle of a major cultural shift?

The year I was in Japan for my fellowship was the year of the yamamba girl. Those were the girls with the extremely suntanned faces, the platform shoes and the bleached-blond hair. Also, the subways were filled with these signs that said “No Touching,” because there was a big problem with girls being groped on the trains. I read in newspapers that part of the reason some of the girls adopted yamamba dress was to make themselves unappealing to Japanese businessmen. I felt like something really interesting was going on. It wasn’t exactly “feminism,” but I was hearing girls and women talk about wanting things to be different. I was curious about how women in Japan were changing, and I wanted to look beyond the shop-happy girls in Omotesando, the yamamba girls in Roppongi, the street-fashion girls in Harajuku, and find three-dimensional women doing interesting and pioneering things.

How did you go about finding them?

I started going to the newsstand and picking up magazines and newspapers that looked like they had profiles or stories about women. I’d come back to the U.S., pay to get these articles translated, then fax the translations [about] women who seemed interesting to the Japan Society, with requests for them to help me find them. My contacts at the Foreign Press Center in Japan were almost all women. I’d usually bring a translator with me on interviews, and the women from the Foreign Press Center would say to me, “Can I come with you? I’ve always wanted to meet someone like this.”

Now, these are the people who set up press conferences when Hillary Clinton or Sofia Coppola comes to Japan — they’re not easily impressed. But you don’t see a lot of People magazine-type stories or Oprah segments in Japan about regular people doing inspiring things. So the women at the center were really excited to interact with these Japanese women, and that made me feel like I was on the right track.

Just about every major Japanese company is filled with “office ladies,” who are uniformed secretaries and administrative assistants. Why is it so hard for them to advance up the corporate ladder?

When I’d go to meetings at companies, I’d meet almost all men. There’d be one woman, maybe — and she’d be pouring tea. Even at the copier giant, Canon, all the women who work at the front desk wear pink blouses, pink skirts, white gloves. It’s like Ren�e Zellweger in that movie “Down With Love.”

When I interviewed Canon’s Masako Nara, one of the few women in Japan who is a senior executive at a traditional company, she didn’t even acknowledge these women. Here in the U.S. it’s understood that you’ve got to get on the good side of the secretaries and the receptionists, because they tell you everything that’s going on. But there it felt like a huge divide between Masako and her female subordinates. Masako later told me that once she got on the corporate track, another woman — her mentor — warned her to never pour tea. “Once you do,” said the woman, “the men in the office associate you with the women in pink who pour tea; they’ll think that’s all you can do. You’ll never gain back their respect.”

If the few women who are making strides in corporate Japan aren’t lending a hand to those below them, who is?

It’s true that Masako Nara wasn’t really feeling the sister-woman thing. She was at a point in her career where she was realizing that she had seven or eight years left to make a mark on the company, and then she was just going to be waiting out retirement. For her, making her mark meant bringing about innovation, it meant becoming powerful — it didn’t necessarily mean bringing in more women. But the fact that she is a woman in a high-level position at a big company like Canon means something, and because she’s really good at her job, it will make it easier for the next woman who comes along.

There will always be individuals slipping in the door; the question is, how do you open the door wider so that more women can participate? When Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian head of Nissan, announced in late 2005 that he was going to double the percentage of women in the company’s Japanese sales force from 5 to 10 percent, people said it wasn’t a big deal. But at car companies like Honda and Nissan, you have to do all the jobs — including selling cars — before you can become a V.P. So Ghosn is actually giving a lot of female Nissan employees an opportunity they didn’t have before. But it was telling that it took a foreigner to make that decision.

Is there even a female equivalent for the Japanese word “salaryman”?

No. But then again, who wants to be a traditional salaryman? They work long, grueling hours and have little time to spend with their families.

Here’s the classic Japanese situation: A salaryman puts in for his vacation, which he’s entitled to. The dedicated thing to do is to show up at work on the first day he’s supposed to be out. His supervisor sees him and says, “What are you doing here?! Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?” The salaryman replies, “I was, but I have too much work to do!” Another example: It’s rare for salarymen to have a lunch hour or to go out for a big expense-account lunch. They usually take about 15 minutes to slurp noodles at the train station, or they eat quickly at their desks. At lunchtime, restaurants are all full of nicely dressed Japanese women — no men.

How does the presence of modern women in the office affect the way men behave?

The women tend to take their vacations, and their sick days too. Men see their female co-workers taking advantage of their vacation time, and enjoying long, leisurely lunches, and they think, “Hey, the world didn’t fall apart while they were gone. And besides, I’m entitled to this, too!” The men start taking their vacations; they start going out to a real lunch. Their world opens up a little.

The women you talked to didn’t seem negative or bitter about their position, though. One woman even said that being an office lady can be empowering. What did she mean by that?

If a Japanese man leaves a company, it’s not like here, where you can quit and find a new job at the same level or even higher. It’s a huge risk. Even though the financial bubble has burst in Japan and lifetime employment there isn’t what it used to be, the fact is that most people still spend their lives at one company. But so few women really have a chance within corporate Japan; they’re not on the fast track at a major company, so they can afford to leave and start their own businesses, or to take a couple of years off from work to travel and study different languages.

If Japanese women aren’t clawing their way to the top in the traditional sense, what are they doing instead?

There are more women entrepreneurs than men. They’re exploring new paths to economic and personal fulfillment — like Makiko Fujino, who ran for office after years of being a television chef and won a seat in the Diet, and Junko Asazuma, who became an internationally ranked snowboarder after spending years as a “freeter,” or part-time worker.

What about working moms? You write that in Japan, maternity leave isn’t that common, and neither are nannies or day-care centers. How on earth do Japanese women balance work and family?

You have to really love your job to go back to work after having a kid, and there aren’t many women in corporate Japan who love their jobs. So, once they get married and pregnant, most women simply quit. The women who do make it to the upper levels at corporate companies tend not to have kids. For example, Masako Nara was divorced, and didn’t have any children. It’s not that there’s a stigma against working women or mommy executives, it’s just that there aren’t that many of them. It will be the younger generation that will have to test that out.

What kinds of messages about work, family and home are young Japanese women getting from their mothers?

Out of the 75 women I interviewed, there were five, maybe 10, women whose moms were not housewives. If the family had a business or owned a farm, the mother might work, but for the most part, if you grew up in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s in Japan, your mom stayed at home. They’re now telling their daughters, “I was trapped by the money. If I had the financial means now, if I knew what to do with myself, I’d get a divorce. Don’t let yourself get into this situation.”

Japanese women are delaying marriage and not having as many kids — if any — and it’s because they got smart. They hear this stuff from their moms, And they’re like, “Once you get married and have kids, you’re locked into an 18-year job.” If you can delay that, then you can travel, you can learn languages, you can make your own money, do your own thing. So there’s actually this worldliness and sophistication that you see in young, single working women.

For the complete interview, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated January 19, 2007

The U.S. government’s search for classified evidence of Japanese war

crimes finds many documents scattered throughout its holdings

Whether it is the hunt for the last surviving perpetrators of the

Holocaust, the restitution of looted artworks, or new evidence of the

complicity of governments in that immense crime against humanity by

Germany and its allies, U.S. public interest in European war crimes has

not flagged since the end of World War II.

But the war crimes committed by Japan � including biological warfare,

human experimentation, and massacres � have attracted much less attention

in the six decades since the war’s conclusion, though events such as the

publication of Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten

Holocaust of World War II in 1997 created spikes in public interest.

Indeed, when the U.S. Congress created a commission to find and declassify records related to World War II war crimes still held by the United States

in 1998, the bill was explicitly titled the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure

Act. Only a new bill passed in 2000 formally extended the efforts of that

commission � renamed as the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial

Government Records Interagency Working Group (or IWG) � to Japan’s war

crimes.

“As in World War II,” says Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist at the

National Archives who worked on the project, “we first tackled Germany and

then Japan.”

Since 1999, the working group has released eight million pages of

previously classified documents on Nazi crimes. But this week, the group

will release 100,000 pages of newly declassified documents related to

Japanese war crimes, along with a new guide to U.S.-held materials on that

topic. (A book of introductory essays, Researching Japanese War Crimes,

will accompany the release.)

“Japanese war crimes have not received the intense scrutiny from the

public or from scholars that has been given to Nazi materials,” says Allen

Weinstein, archivist of the United States and chairman of the working

group.

The tremendous disparity in the amounts of material turned over has raised

eyebrows. Some scholars have wondered if the U.S. government retains files

on its complicity in saving Japanese war criminals. Other researchers

question why files captured by the United States were returned to Japan

after the war.

Members and staff of the working group hope that the new material puts

many questions to rest. For one thing, they note that much of the relevant

material on Japanese war crimes has already been declassified, but is

scattered widely.

Yet scholars also say the new material helps fill holes in understanding

the war in the Pacific as a whole.

“There’s a huge gap between what we know about the European theater and

the Asian theater,” says Carol Gluck, a professor of history at Columbia

University. “Any filling of that gap with primary materials, rather than

conjecture and speculation, is critical.”

Destroy and Search

Part of the gap in the knowledge of Japan’s war crimes is the result of that nation’s wholesale destruction of documents.

In the case of Germany, the effective seizure of documents from the Nazis by the Allies at the end of the war frustrated efforts to destroy them.

Efforts to recover Japanese documents were less successful.

Edward Drea, who recently retired as the chief of the research and

analysis division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, writes in an essay introducing the working group’s new work on Japan that many key records were destroyed by Japanese authorities “between the announcement of a cease-fire on August 12, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28.”

That destruction was so immense that many copies of Japan’s wartime cables now exist only in translated American records. “Because the United States was able to decrypt so much of the Japanese military communications,” he says in an interview, “a great number of those documents exist only in English.”

Ms. Gluck says that inattention by American military and intelligence

officials to details of atrocities also played a role. The new documents, she says, help trace “the disparity of interest on the part of the United States in the closing months of the war and immediately after in the details of the Japanese wartime operations in Manchuria and China.” Where the Allies made documentation of the Holocaust a priority in Europe, she says, agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, did not take similarly intensive action

when operating in Manchuria and elsewhere in Asia.

Mr. Bradsher also notes that some crimes took precedence over others. Gen.

Douglas A. MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific, took a

personal interest in crimes related to the Philippines and to American

captives. “MacArthur was personally really upset about the Filipino people

and U.S. prisoners of war,” he says. “He put the word out to gather

information, and we started to document it, as did the Australians.”

Ms. Gluck says that the lack of documents and the lesser degree of

interest in war crimes in Asia underscore the point that, as far as the

war went, “we knew less about Asia, less about the Pacific. All the way

through we knew less � from the beginning of the war to the end. We didn’t

care then. We do now. And not to blame us for not caring, but it explains

why we don’t have these documents.”

Hiding in the Open

Scholars hope that newly released U.S. files will shed new light on

particularly contentious issues, including the operations of Japan’s

notorious biological warfare group, Unit 731. That unit conducted various

experiments during the war on live subjects, including germ warfare,

vivisection, and hypothermia. Scholars’ hopes were also raised by the fact

that Unit 731’s commander, Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, evaded prosecution for

his crimes and apparently cut a deal with U.S. authorities in exchange for

data gathered through his crimes.

Daqing Yang, an associate professor of history and international relations

at George Washington University, writes in an essay included in

Researching Japanese War Crimes that both Lt. Gen. Ishii’s deal and his

data remain partial mysteries. “What happened to the data produced by Unit

731 remains largely unanswered,” Mr. Yang writes.

Those involved in the project say that some records, including documents

concerning Unit 731, have not been included in the new batch of releases

because they have already been declassified.

In his introduction to the volume, Mr. Drea writes that “during the search

for classified records, it soon became apparent that historians,

researchers, and concerned parties have not fully exploited the many

records about Japanese war crimes previously declassified and made

available at the National Archives.” Other records about Unit 731, he

adds, were at the Library of Congress.

So the creation of a guide by Mr. Bradsher and other colleagues to locate

such materials and make them more accessible became a high priority. (The

guide is included as a CD-ROM with Researching Japanese War Crimes.)

“Many Japanese intellectuals believe that the United States still has vast

amounts of classified material,” says Mr. Drea. “In point of fact, no such

materials were found. Most of the Ishii material, for instance, that we

found was in open sources, already declassified, albeit scattered about.”

Returning Records

Another nagging question raised by the search for records was the American

decision to return many captured documents to Japan in the 1950s.

This issue was reignited by Chang’s book on Nanjing, in which the author

(now deceased) accused the United States of returning key records to Japan

without keeping copies.

Mr. Drea praises Chang’s book as “very good at raising public

consciousness and awareness of Japanese crimes in China.” But, he

continues, “her allegations that the U.S. government simply returned

documents to the Japanese under some sort of Japanese government pressure

does not stand up under scrutiny.”

Indeed, Mr. Bradsher’s detailed essay on the return of the records in the

new book concludes that “the records were thoroughly exploited for war

crimes purposes … and also for historical and intelligence purposes

prior to their return to Japan. There is virtually no likelihood that

captured Japanese records relating directly to war crimes were returned to

Japan without having been copied or explored.”

In an interview, Mr. Bradsher says that “I turned myself into a historian

and a detective” to follow the various twists and turns of the saga. He

also observes that “traditionally, in the archival field, captured records

are eventually returned to their country of origin.”

Worth the Effort?

The release of the documents may not satisfy all critics, says Mr. Yang.

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he writes that “for skeptics, I

doubt this book/project will completely eliminate their doubts. The

Japanese government has not come out and said: ‘We’ve opened every file

returned from the U.S.’; nor has the U.S. government said they’ve opened

every file on such individuals or fully accounted for the whereabouts of

some Unit 731-related files.”

“But on the whole,” he concludes, “I think this project has gone a long

way toward opening the U.S. side of the documents.”

Mr. Drea admits to some disappointment that smoking guns on Japanese war

crimes did not turn up, especially when compared with documents on Nazi

crimes that have led to new conclusions on what American officials knew

about the Holocaust.

“To be honest, I’d hoped we’d find something,” Mr. Drea says. “That’s the

historian’s dream: fresh information that illuminates a dark problem. It

just wasn’t there.”

Nonetheless, scholars say that the material has furthered study in other

areas. An essay in the new volume by Michael Petersen, a working-group

staff member, examines conflicts between Army intelligence officials and

the fledgling CIA in postwar Japan, including the use of gangsters and war

criminals as informants.

Ms. Gluck says that such work demonstrates the utility of poking around in

the files. The conflict described by Mr. Peterson, she observes, “is not

directly concerned with Japanese war crimes, but it’s really useful and

really helpful and adds to what we already know about the conflicts

between these intelligence services, which were huge.”

As the working group’s activities wind down, Mr. Weinstein says he is

satisfied with the “labor of devotion” that has characterized the work on

Japanese war crimes.

“The things that have been revealed have been more than adequate to

justify the cost,” he says. “I feel privileged to have been a part of it.”

Posted at 9:19 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

[from the January 29, 2007 issue]

As the November 7 election approached, Jon Tester was getting hit with the full force of Karl Rove’s still considerable arsenal. The White House political czar had decided that the way to maintain Republican control of the Senate was to concentrate GOP resources on traditionally “red” states like Montana, where Tester, an organic farmer and state senator, was mounting a populist campaign against scandal-plagued Republican incumbent Conrad Burns. The airwaves filled with attack ads that savaged the Democrat for criticizing the Patriot Act and declared, “Tester is backed by radicals.” Former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge described Tester’s championship of civil liberties as “unfathomable, almost inexplicable.” Vice President Cheney arrived to paint the Burns-Tester race as a test of “whether this government will remain strong and resolute on the war on terror or falls into confusion, doubts and indecision.” President Bush, who carried Montana by twenty points in 2004, showed up to close the deal, as some pundits began to predict a Burns comeback.

Tester, a darling of liberal bloggers, was not going to be saved by flaming posts now. He needed a trusted Montana voice, or better yet a chorus of voices, to come to his defense. As election day approached, he got it. The daily newspapers of the Big Sky State came out, one after another, with endorsements of the challenger. Conrad Burns may have had the President and the Vice President singing his praises, but the Helena Independent Record, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the Great Falls Tribune, the Montana Standard and the Billings Gazette were telling Montana voters that Jon Tester was one of their own, and that he belonged in the Senate. The Tester camp scrambled on the last Sunday of the campaign to get the word out, sending e-mails that urged supporters to print out a hastily assembled leaflet highlighting the endorsements to pass along to friends, slip under doors and post on grocery store bulletin boards.

Two days later, Tester bested Burns by about 2,800 votes. How did Tester beat back the full-court press of the Bush White House? Before the election, a local conservative commentator had tried to argue that the newspaper endorsements were no more influential than “visits of luminaries or stars or political mucky-mucks coming in from the national scene,” while a prince of the blogosphere, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, had posted his prediction that the hometown endorsements would still carry weight in Montana. Daily Kos was right. When the votes were counted, it could fairly be argued—and indeed it was—that endorsements from local papers had tipped the seat to Tester and the Senate to the Democrats.

Newspapers may be the dinosaurs of America’s new-media age, hulking behemoths that cost too much to prepare and distribute and that cannot seem to attract young—or even middle-aged—readers in the numbers needed to survive. They may well have entered the death spiral that Philip Meyer, in his recent book The Vanishing Newspaper, predicts will conclude one day in 2043 as the last reader throws aside the final copy of a newspaper. But, as the Tester win illustrates, the dinosaurs still have enough life in them to guide—and perhaps even define—our politics.

Especially at the local and state levels, where the fundamental fights for control of a nation less red and blue than complexly purple play out, daily newspapers remain essential arbiters of what passes for news and what Americans think about it. For all the talk about television’s dominant role in campaigns (less and less because of its importance as a source of news for most Americans, more and more because of campaign commercials) and all the new attention to the Internet, newspapers for the most part continue to establish the parameters of what gets covered and how. Moreover, neither broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the level of credibility that newspapers enjoy. So candidates for the House, the Senate and even the White House still troop into old gray buildings in Denver and Omaha, Louisville and Boston, Concord and Des Moines in search of a forum where they can talk with reporters and editors about issues and where those conversations will, they hope, be distilled into articles and editorials that set so much of the agenda for the political debate at the local, state and national levels.

Thus, while George W. Bush may say he rarely reads newspapers, he sat down in 2000 and 2004 to talk with individual newspaper publishers and editors in hopes of winning the support of publications in such battleground states as Pennsylvania and Ohio. So did Al Gore and John Kerry. And Illinois Senator Barack Obama, a newspaper junkie, is busily making the rounds as he ponders a bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The attention on news pages and support on editorial pages that newspapers can provide is even more important for candidates trying to elbow their way into the competition by raising new issues.

Former Senator John Edwards learned this three years ago, after a Des Moines Register endorsement focused on his ideas about the disturbing development of “two Americas” and ignited his campaign in Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses. “We were talking about issues, such as poverty, that didn’t necessarily lend themselves to soundbites,” explained Edwards, who said his campaign, which eventually finished a solid second in the caucuses, experienced a “massive upsurge” after receiving the endorsement. “When a newspaper that people know says, ‘Hey, people should be paying attention to what this guy is saying,’ it makes a huge difference.”

And it’s not only in the heat of a campaign that newspapers help set the agenda. Consider, for example, the Chicago Tribune’s relentless focus on the injustice of the death penalty, which led a Republican governor to declare a moratorium on executions in Illinois six years ago and, ultimately, to clear death row. Ground-breaking revelations regarding the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida were uncovered by the Orlando Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. And while there is no question that bloggers raised the alarm about Diebold’s dubious voting machines before the 2004 election, newspapers were dramatically more aggressive in picking up on concerns about paperless ballots and election abuses than TV networks or local stations during the 2006 campaign.

This is not to suggest that most newspapers do their journalism as well or as wisely as they should, nor that the role of newspapers is still as vital as it was in the 1950s, when President Dwight Eisenhower, worried about the financial difficulties of the New York Herald Tribune, personally wrote millionaire John Hay Whitney and urged him to take charge of the publication because, he argued, it had a “great and valuable function to perform for the future of America.” But newspapers remain necessary, at least for now. Unfortunately, necessity does not translate to the sort of profits that contemporary newspaper owners demand—nor to any assurance of the long-term survival of journalism as we know and need it.

Crises like that of the Herald Tribune a half-century ago are now the norm rather than the exception. The newspaper industry is in trouble. Big trouble. In 1950 newspapers in the United States had a weekday circulation of 54 million. The circulation figures are roughly the same today, but the number of households has more than doubled. The Los Angeles Times’s daily circulation was down 8 percent in a single six-month period in 2006, while the Philadelphia Inquirer was down 7.5 percent, the Boston Globe 6.7 percent, the New York Times 3.5 percent and the Washington Post 3.3 percent.

With drops in circulation have come declines in revenues—not because subscriptions provide all that much money but because media companies collect money from advertisers based on the number of homes they reach. Big advertisers long ago began shifting from the printed page to television, but now classified advertising, the meat-and-potatoes of local and regional daily newspapers, has begun migrating at dramatic speed to websites like craigslist.

What’s happening is not just a temporary downturn. From 1990, when newspaper circulation peaked at 62.3 million, readership has been in steady decline. That might lead some to the casual conclusion that the Internet is the problem. But as veteran journalist and media writer Ben Compaine explains, “The heyday of newspapers was in the late nineteenth century, as expanding literacy combined with the development of the steam-driven rotary press, a market economy and wood pulp-based newsprint to make the mass-circulation penny press possible. From the mid-1800s to the 1920s, newspapers were the only mass-circulation daily news and information medium in the media barnyard. That changed with radio. It accelerated with television. The Internet is just the latest information technology that has added to the choices that consumers and advertisers have for obtaining and creating information.” All true, but there is powerful evidence that the breaking point for newspapers may finally be coming.

Individual owners and powerful families—who often, though by no means always, settled for reasonable profits in return for the ego boost that went with putting out a quality newspaper—are exiting the stage. Increasingly newspapers are owned by the shareholders of national chains, who do not even know—let alone care about—the names of the papers from which they demand profit margins that are generally twice the average for other industries. Where a local family might have grudgingly accepted a weak quarter and a downturn in revenues, shareholders greet any softness on the bottom line with demands for draconian cuts. If a paper’s current managers are unwilling to make them, investors look for more ruthless managers. Investors forced the breakup and sale, in 2006, of the venerable Knight Ridder chain, which owned Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News and the Miami Herald. Similar pressures have forced the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Hartford Courant and several Florida dailies, to put itself on the block.

For the complete article please see the link below.

Posted at 11:48 PM · Comments (0)

In the “sic” category…

(Xinhua)
2006-08-25

The People’s Court of Yinan County, in east China’s Shandong Province, Thursday sentenced Chen Guangcheng to four years and three months in prison on charges of willfully damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.

The sentence was passed in a public court session.

Xinhua was provided with a document by the court that provided only the following details of the proceedings.

The document says, Chen was upset with workers who were sent to carry out poverty-relief programs in East Shigu Village, in Shuanghou Town of Yinan County.

It says on February 5, 2006, Chen (who is known to be blind) rushed to the office of the village committee and damaged doors and windows. The court document says Chen was given guidance by his wife Li Weijing and others. Following this incident, the court document says Chen then went to the home of Chen Guangyu and instigated Chen Guanghe, Chen Guangdong and Chen Gengjiang to damage and smash cars belonging to the Shuanghou Police Station and the town government.

The court document does not indicate if any of the other individuals had been charged or convicted.

The court document says Chen Guanghe and Chen Guangdong also instigated other villagers to damage government cars, and they chased and beat officials from the town government.

Using clubs and stones, the mob smashed the windows of three cars from the police station and the town government, overturned the cars in roadside ditches, and beat police officers from the Police Bureau of the county, according to the document.

It goes on to say that on the evening of March 11, Chen Guangyu, who was then drunk, claimed he was beaten by some people, and he attacked the office of the village committee and damaged things in the office.

Later, at about 6:00 pm, according to the document, Chen Guangcheng organized a group of people, including Chen Guangyu, Chen Guangjun and Yuan Weijing, under the excuse of seeking justice for Chen Guangyu. They interrupted traffic in the Yinghou Village section of the National Highway 205.

The document says Chen Guangcheng stood in the middle of the road to stop vehicles and directed the mob, including Chen Guangjun and Chen Guangyu to yell out and stop traffic.

It goes on that police arrived to reopen the road, and to try to persuade Chen Guangcheng to desist from leading the mob and stopping the traffic. Chen refused to comply and continued to direct the mob to block vehicles.

The document says the mob stopped the traffic for three hours and delayed more than 290 vehicles, including an ambulance carrying a pregnant woman to hospital.

The court document says Chen’s rights were completely protected, and his two lawyers expressed their views in full.

Comments follow

Posted at 11:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist
Jan 11th 2007

China is choking on its success at attracting the world’s factories. That has handed its Asian neighbours a big opportunity

AS A vote of confidence in Vietnam, the decision by Intel early in 2006 to spend $350m building a new factory in the emerging South-East Asian economy was hard to beat. And yet, before the year was out, the American chipmaker went further and raised its investment to $1 billion. In eight months Intel had committed as much money to Vietnam as it had to China in the previous ten years.

In the Johor region of Malaysia, another global firm, Flextronics, has fired up the production lines of a new M$400m ($110m) factory to make computer printers for another American firm, Hewlett-Packard. One of the largest contract electronics manufacturers, Flextronics already has vast facilities in China. But it chose Malaysia as the site for its latest investment.
Further east, in Indonesia, Yue Yuen, a Hong Kong-based shoemaker, has been ramping up its output of trainers and casual footwear for brands like Nike and Adidas. Production is increasing at the firm’s factories in China and Vietnam too, but output in Indonesia is growing the fastest.

Although all three companies had different reasons for their decisions, the outcome was the same: they chose to avoid China’s thundering economy in order to put their factories elsewhere in Asia. These companies are not alone. In the calculus of costs, risks, customers and logistics that goes into building global operations, an increasing number of firms are coming to the conclusion that China is not necessarily the best place to make things.

With its seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour and the rapid acquisition of technological prowess, China appears to be unstoppable. Indeed, the perception is that every factory closing in America or Europe is destined to reopen in China. Many have, helping China’s share of the world’s exported goods to triple to 7.3% between 1993 and 2005. In comparison, every member of the G8 group of rich nations, with the exception of Russia, saw its share fall. It is a similar story with manufacturing output. Whereas China doubled its share of global production to almost 7% in the decade to 2003, most of the G8 saw their shares fall. Interestingly, only the United States and Canada saw their shares rise�with just over a quarter between them. Most things nowadays might seem to be made in China, but North America remains the true workshop of the world.

Yet it is not only China that is booming as a base for low-cost production. Manufacturing and exports are growing rapidly in other parts of Asia (see chart 1). Taken together, South Korea, Taiwan, India and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) increased their share of global manufacturing from less than 7% to more than 9% in the decade to 2003. Exports also rose across the board. China is the emerging giant, but the investments that are being diverted away from the Middle Kingdom present the rest of Asia with a huge opportunity to become manufacturing hubs in their own right. The question is whether they can seize it.
Too far, too expensive
Scott Brixen, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, a Hong Kong-based investment bank, gives two big reasons why China has not found itself at the top of the list for some new factories: �Rising costs and a natural desire by companies for diversification.�

So far, most industrial development in China has taken place in the country’s eastern coastal regions, particularly around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong. But costs in these centres are now rising sharply. Office rents are soaring, industrial land is in short supply and utility costs are climbing. Most significant of all are rocketing wages. In spite of the mass migration of workers from China’s vast interior to the coast, pay for factory workers has been rising at double-digit rates for several years. For managers, the situation is worse still.

�China has become a victim of its own success,� sighs Peter Tan, president and managing director of Flextronics in Asia. He finds it especially hard to hire and retain technical staff, ranging from finance directors to managers versed in international production techniques such as �six sigma� and �lean manufacturing�. There are not enough qualified workers to go around, causing rampant poaching and extremely fast wage inflation. �China is definitely not the cheapest place to produce any more,� he says.

An analysis of labour rates across Asia by CLSA’s Mr Brixen supports that view. Average wages for a factory worker, combined with social security costs, came to almost $350 a month in Shanghai in 2005 and almost $250 a month in Shenzhen. By comparison, monthly wages were less than $200 in Manila, around $150 in Bangkok and just over $100 in Batam in Indonesia. Although the productivity of Chinese workers is rising, in many industries it is not keeping pace with wages.

One solution is for companies to move inland where many costs are much lower than on China’s heavily developed coastline. Indeed, the government has been promoting such a policy since 2000, to spread the benefits of development to China’s poor interior. Domestic Chinese companies have led the charge into the hinterland and a small, but growing, number of foreign firms have followed them.

Intel is one. In 2004 it decided to invest $525m in a new plant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to complement its existing factories on the coast in Shanghai, 1,600km (994 miles) away. Brian Krzanich, general manager of Intel’s test and assembly business, says the company’s decision was based on cost. The government was keen to promote its �go west� policy, so it offered Intel generous incentives. Needless to say, being so far inland raises transport costs for exporters. But Mr Krzanich reckons there are compensations, because labour and utilities are much cheaper than on the coast.

But not everyone is convinced. At Flextronics, Mr Tan’s China factories are all located in eastern coastal provinces. �We have no interest in going west,� he says, because it is too expensive to get products to America and Eur