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 Salon

Tuesday April 24, 2007 08:25 EST

David Halberstam’s death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.

But modern American journalists — as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized — have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation’s most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.

In several of the posts below, I have posted just a few excerpts from what I think are among the best essays and interviews from Halberstam over the past several years. But let us begin with his understanding of the intended role of political journalism and contrast that with how our current press functions:

On the adversarial relationship between journalists and political officials

David Halberstam, Speech to the Columbia School of Journalism, May 18, 2005:

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be. (So, if you seek popularity, this is probably not the profession for you.) … .

There are a few things I would like to pass on to you as I come near to the end of my career.

One: It’s not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides, fame does not last. At its best, it is about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a rare chance to grow as a person… .

I want to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don’t let them do it… .

Probably the moment I am proudest of in my career is this: By the fall of 1963, I was one of a small group of reporters in Saigon — we had enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war. In particular, my young colleague, Neil Sheehan, and I were considered the enemy. The president of the United States, JFK, had already asked the publisher to pull me.

On day that fall, there was a major battle in the Delta (the Americans were not yet in a full combat role; they were in an advising and support role). MACV — the American military command — tried to keep out all reporters so they could control the information. Neil and I spent the day pushing hard to get there — calling everyone, including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins. With no luck, of course.

In those days, the military had a daily late afternoon briefing given by a major or a Captain, called the Five O’clock Follies, because of the generally low value of the information.

On this particular day, the briefing was different, given not by a Major but by a Major General, Dick Stilwell, the smoothest young general in Saigon. It was in a different room and every general and every bird Colonel in the country was there. Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.

General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.

And I stood up, my heart beating wildly — and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.

I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.

So: Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story a little better.

Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, on the press’ coverage of President George W. Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq:

I think we were very deferential, because in the East Room press conference, it’s live. It’s very intense. It’s frightening to stand up there. I mean, think about it. You are standing up on prime time live television, asking the president of the United States a question when the country is about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and I think it made — and you know, nobody wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.

Tim Russert, at the Lewis Libby Trial, February, 2007 (recounted by The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin)

If you’re a journalist, and a very senior White House official calls you up on the phone, what do you do? Do you try to get the official to address issues of urgent concern so that you can then relate that information to the public?

Not if you’re NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert…

When then-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby called Russert on July 10, 2003, to complain that his name was being unfairly bandied about by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Russert apparently asked him nothing.

And get this: According to Russert’s testimony yesterday at Libby’s trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That’s not reporting, that’s enabling.

That’s how you treat your friends when you’re having an innocent chat, not the people you’re supposed to be holding accountable…

For Russert, yesterday’s testimony was the second source of trial-related embarrassment in less than two weeks. The first came when Cathie Martin, Cheney’s former communications director, testified that the vice president’s office saw going on Russert’s “Meet the Press” as a way to go public but “control [the] message.”

In other words: Sure, there might be a tough question or two, but Russert could be counted on not to knock the veep off his talking points — and, in that way, give him just the sort of platform he was looking for.

Russert’s description of how he does business with government officials came when prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked him whether there were “any explicit ground rules” for his conversation with Libby.

According to someone taking meticulous notes at the courthouse yesterday, Russert replied: “Specifically, no. But when I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission.”

On the collapse of the American press

David Halberstam — November 7, 1999:

I thought that with the end of the century approaching, it might be a good time to take stock of where this profession is. Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture …

But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us… .

What I think is happening is something extremely serious,nothing less than a change in the value system in a very important part of the news business.

At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money — almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.

What has changed is not the talent and idealism and passion of the journalists out there, but the value system which governs the way they work, and finally what gets in the paper or on the air… .

A number of things stand out in the change of values which has come about in the last decade or so. Because of its growing power and influence and because of the ever-greater competition, not just network against network, but network against cable show, the television executive producers have redefined what constitutes news — often going for stories that television likes to cover, stories which are telegenic, because they have action or are sexy or are tabloid- or scandal-driven.

We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism — where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations.

But the quantum change had come with the coming of cable, and the fierce new competition generated by cable news shows, which were primarily about sex, scandal and celebrity. Or celebrity, sex and scandal. Soon, we began to see a willingness on the part of the networks — their own audience fragmenting, their ratings down — to embrace, particularly in their magazines, these tabloid values as their own.

Magazines which were essentially tabloid were inexpensive to produce, more so than sitcoms, seemed to have acceptable ratings, and so they proliferated under the guise of being news. And a great many of our colleagues went along with it — for immense salaries and a great deal of air time, of course… .

Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks.

Television’s gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.

The viewpoint seemed to be — from their testing and polling — that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

Posted at 10:41 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright - The Nation

The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring. These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists predict for their country this century if current climate change is not addressed. Yet China’s leaders pay about as much attention to the issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China’s wheat, rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China’s seven major river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.

Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the size of Portugal along China’s eastern seaboard—home to more than half the country’s population and 60 percent of its economic output. Already climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In 2006 such disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage. Finally, a study by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests that the lethal H5N1 virus will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and migratory patterns of birds.

CONTINUED BELOW
Bill Moyer Buying the War Phase 1
Yet China’s leaders show little inclination to move aggressively to forestall such calamities. As a result of China’s reliance on coal to fuel its economy, its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have tripled over the past thirty years and are now second only to those of the United States. In late 2006 the International Energy Agency predicted that China would surpass the United States as the largest contributor of CO2 by 2009, a full decade earlier than anticipated. China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined and is the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States. (India, which lags well behind China in its overall consumption of coal, is nonetheless on track to become a major CO2 contributor over the next ten years and is already the fifth-largest contributor of greenhouse gases globally.)

China’s development strategy suggests that little will change in the foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts. And China’s love affair with the private car is set to rival that of the United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian Development Bank predicts that the number of cars in China could increase by fifteen times present levels over the next thirty years, more than tripling CO2 emissions.

If China’s development trajectory continues as planned, its increase in greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all industrialized countries combined over the next twenty-five years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol sought. In short, it’s a nightmarishly bad picture.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize China as doing nothing to address climate change. The leadership’s worries about both energy security and domestic air pollution—five of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China—are propelling them to set bold targets for reshaping their energy mix and enhancing energy efficiency.

The Chinese government has called for renewable energy to provide 10 percent of the nation’s power by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020. Key state-owned enterprises and provincial governors must make 20 percent reductions in their energy intensity (that is, energy consumed per unit of GDP) over the next three years. On that front there is a lot of room for improvement: China’s buildings consume 250 percent more energy than buildings in other countries with comparable climates. Beijing has responded with a raft of tough new building codes for energy efficiency. Much like the United States, cities and provinces are now taking matters into their own hands. Shenzhen, for example, has passed a regulation that solar power be used to supply hot water in all new residential buildings under twelve stories.

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Copyright The Financial Times

April 21 2007

The morning after Francois Mitterrand’s funeral, Le Monde reported that the late president’s mistress and illegitimate daughter stood by the grave alongside his wife and sons. That tableau has become famous internationally as proof that the French are not like you and me - at least when it comes to affairs of the heart.

In fact, although French presidents seem to have an infidelity record approaching 100 per cent, they don’t deserve to be pilloried alone. Even supposedly more prudish countries have had legendary philanderers, from England’s Henry VIII to the US’s John F. Kennedy.

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But ordinary middle-class adulterers are harder to pin down. Despite the French public’s apparently unconcerned response to Mitterrand’s infidelity, most French citizens are quite faithful spouses and partners. According to a 2004 national survey, just 3.8 per cent of married men and 2 per cent of women said they had had more than one partner in the past year (the best approximation of infidelity) - fewer than in similar surveys in the US and UK. Alain Giami, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, says the French are also more faithful than Americans during courtship, and that both marriages and affairs last longer in France than they do in the US. “In France, a relationship that has a sexual component appears to involve a higher degree of commitment than in the US,” says Giami in a paper he co-authored.

If France isn’t the world capital of adultery, which country takes the prize? Global sex research is patchy and incomplete. In Russia, for instance, there’s never been a national sex survey. Soviet governments barely permitted public discussions of sex, let alone the sort of poll that might prove comrades were engaging in banned activities such as extramarital affairs. And now religious groups there have taken up where their atheist communist forebears left off, putting pressure on Moscow not to fund any research related to sex.

Official sanction and funding are only the first hurdles. Contemporary researchers can’t even agree on what to call infidelity. In Nigeria, they prefer the term “sexual networking”, while Finnish scientists call affairs “parallel relationships”. One French team was so eager to appear morally neutral it opted for what sounded like a term you might learn in an accounting course: “simultaneous multi-partnerships”.

That’s just linguistics; what exactly constitutes cheating is also up for debate. A poll in one South African magazine created separate categories for men who cheat and men who cheat while drunk. And where some surveys ask Americans about “either vaginal or anal intercourse”, others include a much wider range of activities. A 1992 survey defined sex as a “mutually voluntary activity with another person that involves genital contact and sexual excitement or arousal, that is, feeling really turned on, even if intercourse or orgasm did not occur”.

Although it is easy to laugh at tongue-tied researchers, it is actually possible to get a handle on not just how many people cheat, but how they do it. Infidelity may seem like a secret, lawless realm in which people make private decisions about how to behave, but affairs do have rules. These differ by country, even by neighbourhood, and they dictate the valid excuses for cheating and the emotional narrative of affairs.

Art can show us these subtle distinctions: in American movies, having an affair usually means you’re the villain, while in French films, it more often means you’re the protagonist. I found, while travelling the world to research a book on the subject, that simple conversation can also whittle out the emotional rules. In Japan, a married woman was confused when I asked if she felt guilty about having a lover; the thought hadn’t occurred to her, as she was otherwise meeting her obligations to her family.

In Moscow, a family psychologist perked up when I brought up the subject of adultery. “It’s obligatory,” she said. Surely I had misunderstood her? “No,” she insisted, “I think it’s wise,” and went on to explain that she had enjoyed a number of extramarital affairs during her own 15-year marriage - although lately she had cut back because she was so busy at work. Then she wrote her name in my notebook to make sure I got the spelling right.

Since the 1970s, Americans have grown more tolerant about most social issues related to sex. They are more accepting of homosexuality, of unmarried people living together, of divorce and of having sex and babies out of wedlock. But on the topic of extramarital sex they have become stricter. In 1973, 70 per cent of Americans said affairs are “always wrong”. By 2004, the figure had risen to nearly 82 per cent. And in a Gallup poll in 2006, Americans said adultery was morally worse than either polygamy or human cloning. A comparison of attitudes in 24 countries found that Americans were tied with the Irish and Filipinos as the world’s most prudish when it comes to infidelity.

I felt the full force of this taboo in Memphis, Tennessee, when I sat down for a barbecue lunch with a married couple, Kevin and April (I changed all names). April’s affair with a co-worker had ended nearly two years earlier, and it was the only time she had been unfaithful during her 20-year marriage. But moments after our food arrived, she was weeping into her pork platter as Kevin went through a catalogue of her offences, ending with a moral: “There should be total honesty in relationships, no secrets.” Apparently this was one of their good periods: “Neither of us cries as much as we used to, because of the anti-depressants,” Kevin said.

April’s infidelity - or the echo of it - dominates their marriage. Kevin, 62, has put his 48-year-old wife in a kind of suburban purdah. She only leaves the house for work or to go out with him. If she’s a few minutes late coming home, he leaves increasingly hostile messages on her mobile phone. He searches her purse, checks her mobile phone bills and randomly presses the redial button on the home phone to see who she has been calling. Several times she has discovered a voice-activated tape recorder in her car.

When they’re together, which is most of the time, Kevin and April have agonising “cry talks” about the affair. Kevin learns more about the topic of affairs by reading self-help books and attending a weekly recovery group. Recently, he drove to Nashville for a weekend seminar on affairs, and came home convinced that infidelity runs in families and that - despite her denials - April’s parents must have had affairs too.

April and Kevin might seem extreme, but in many ways their experience is typically American. Two years of trauma after an infidelity is fairly common. So is the fact that their private infidelity crisis is being managed by specialists. In the US, an affair is an occasion for consulting therapists, adultery gurus, relationship coaches, support groups, internet chat rooms and self- help books. It’s also an opportunity to attend seminars, healing weekends and religious retreats dealing with affairs. No other country has anything approaching the scale of the US’s marriage counselling industry, and some of the bodies involved warn couples to expect “thousands of hours” of conversation about what happened.

The American mantra on affairs is: “It’s not the sex, it’s the lying.” Thus telling the truth has become the country’s cure. Although US therapists have different methods, many believe that the “betrayed spouse” is entitled to ask the “offending spouse” for every dirty detail of the affair. Some couples create detailed chronologies covering several years. The process only stops when the betrayed spouse can’t take it anymore, or when he or she is satisfied that every lie has been overturned. If stray lies trickle out afterwards, the spouse may suffer traumatising flashbacks.

There’s no empirical evidence about whether this does any good. For April, being cast as the villain in this moral fable is hard to swallow. “I don’t think it was me, I think it was almost like a different person,” she says. “I’ve never thought of myself as being the type to have an affair.”

It is tempting to blame such affair-induced angst on the the country’s religiosity, but that’s not a good marker of which Americans commit adultery. In 2001, researchers found that among people who rated their marriages as “pretty happy” or “not too happy”, even going to religious services two or more times a week barely affected whether they’d had extramarital sex. For all those hours in church to matter, their marriages had to be “very happy”.

In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country and one of the most religious, the attitude toward affairs is almost casual, at least in middle-class circles. Local slang sums up the attitude: a no-strings-attached affair is called a bobok bobok siang, or just B.B.S., meaning an “afternoon nap”, and a brief love affair is known as a selingkuh or a “wonderful interval”.

Unlike Iran, where convicted adulterers can be stoned to death, Indonesia handles adultery in secular courts, and metes out jail sentences as punishment - still a harsh method of dealing with the act, but relatively mild in the Muslim world. The factor that is really supposed to keep men from cheating is that if they’re not satisfied with one wife, they can take three more; although sanctioned polygamy seems to legitimise the idea that men cannot be content with just one woman.

The middle-class women and men I met in Indonesia consistently told me that adultery was absolutely wrong because the Koran forbids it, but then went on to reveal that many of their friends had lovers. “Polygamy is something that induces adultery, because before they get married for the second time there’s a period of adultery,” says Paulus Wirutomo, who heads the sociology department at the University of Indonesia. “Islam is not permissive, but there’s an emphasis on formality.”

Indonesia’s most famous polygamist, a fried-chicken magnate called Puspo Wardoyo, agrees. “Most of my friends are cheaters - they cheat with prostitutes just for play,” he says. Meanwhile Ria, a petite 24-year-old with a three-year-old child, a husband who earns a good living and an unmarried boyfriend she sleeps with once a week and text-messages a dozen times a day, says: “Look at me. I am a Muslim, I wear this veil. But I have another life.” She wears a diamond ring from her husband and a gold band from her lover.

Ria knows she is risking the wrath of both her husband and her very devout, middle-class family. She also knows that not only are the men around her cheating, but so are many of her girlfriends. And while she married young to a man her family approved of, she still craves intimacy and adventure. “I love my husband, but I need someone else to make me feel alive,” she says.

There is a staggering amount of bad data on adultery, but the figures we can trust come largely thanks to HIV. As the virus gathered velocity in the 1980s and 1990s, scientists managed to get funding for an unprecedented amount of large-scale sex research. These data sets, while imperfect, reveal that men in poor countries are generally much more unfaithful than those in rich ones. Married or cohabiting men in Togo top the list at 37 per cent, followed closely by those in the Ivory Coast. Urban parts of China show about 18.3 per cent of the married men cheating. Latin men live up to their amorous reputation, with 18 per cent of married or cohabiting men in the Dominican Republic, 15 per cent in Mexico City and 12 per cent in Brazil having multiple partners. Levels of women admitting to cheating in these countries, meanwhile, are extremely low or negligible.

Men in rich countries are more faithful. In Switzerland, just 3 per cent of married or cohabiting men said they cheated in the past year, according to a 1997 survey for the New Encounter Module Project; compared with 2.5 per cent in Australia. The exception is Scandinavia. In Norway, nearly 11 per cent of married or partnered men and 6.6 per cent of women had more than one lover in the past year. The UK follows close behind, with 9.3 per cent of married or cohabiting men and 5.1 per cent of married or cohabiting women confessing to multiple sex partners.

The fact that women everywhere report less cheating than men poses a conundrum for researchers: are married men just bedding single women or out-of-towners? Or is there, as some researchers suggested in the 1990s, a group of women - possibly prostitutes, possibly just freelance mistresses - running around serving many married men?

Japan seems a good place to investigate this, since salarymen in Tokyo spend much of their free time carousing with each other. James Farrer, a sociologist at Tokyo’s Sophia University, says: “If you go to a party in America and you don’t bring your wife, you’re asked, ‘Why is your wife not here?’ Your leaving her at home is a kind of insult to her and an insult to your marriage. Whereas here, in Japan, to bring your wife to a lot of social occasions is seen as out of place and inappropriate.”

Perhaps more importantly, the intimacy, openness and good sex that’s supposed to be the glue for American couples isn’t something Japanese couples appear to strive for. Hiromi Ikeuchi, a divorce counsellor in Tokyo, says some men are proud of having a chaste marriage. “There are some Japanese men who believe you shouldn’t bring either sex or work into the home,” she says. Yoko Itamoto, a matchmaker who conducts state-funded field research on marriage, says husbands and wives often grow so distant that sex seems embarrassingly personal. “We start to have a sense of sex as a dirty act - the physicality of it, the liquid, people touching each other… Both men and women get this idea,” Itamoto says.

Japan’s live sex industry brought in 2.3 trillion yen in 2001, up from 1.7 trillion 10 years earlier, according to an economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. Whether these encounters count as cheating depends on who you ask. I didn’t hear about any Japanese marriages breaking up over a husband’s visits to sex clubs. A divorce lawyer told me that paid sex doesn’t even meet the legal standard of adultery or furin. Customers of these clubs apparently don’t consider it furin either. Several quoted a saying: “If you pay for it, it’s not cheating.” Men say their wives don’t ask them where they’ve been. The wives apparently have a saying, too: “As long as he’s safe, it’s good that he’s out.”

But the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy is wearing thin among some middle-class urbanites. Satoshi, a 39-year-old who works for a construction company, told me that after he got back from a business trip, his wife of 10 years searched his bag and found a flyer for a call girl in Sendai, a coastal city two hours north of Tokyo. Rather than being bothered by the infidelity, his wife seemed to envy his freedom. After that, she made a new group of friends at her sports club and took up scuba diving. Divorce papers soon followed.

Others couples are trying to work things out. But, for some, the model for reconciliation isn’t western-style psychotherapy - it’s the sex industry. Atsuko Okano, who runs a a marriage counselling service of sorts in Tokyo, brings in female sex workers - known as “soap ladies” - to tutor husbands and wives. The soap ladies introduce men to mood lighting, candles and compliments. Wives get a makeover that begins with a purging of oversized t-shirts and granny underwear. Instead of shouting “hello” from the stove, the women learn to greet their husbands with full-body hugs. A visualisation exercise helps them understand the seductive atmosphere in sex clubs. Okano’s three-month programme costs about $2,500. She also runs a six-month programme, costing about $4,200, for cases where the wife “isn’t pretty”.

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Copyright The New York Times
April 22, 2007

IT is easy to underestimate Jacques Chirac.

Today the French will begin to vote for a new president, and soon Mr. Chirac, the 74-year-old incumbent, will pass from the scene unmourned. Over a political career spanning nearly five decades, during which he was mayor of Paris, prime minister (twice) and president for 12 years, Mr. Chirac appears to have achieved little.

As mayor from 1977 to 1995, he oversaw a steady rise in political corruption and municipal graft (albeit both at insignificant levels by American big-city standards). As president, he abandoned his promises to resolve shortcomings in France’s employment laws and social services in the face of street protests. And he has done little to redress the grievances of France’s minorities or the anxieties of young people. On both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Chirac’s political obituary is being written in distinctly unflattering terms.

But is the French situation really so dire? From every quarter one hears calls for “reform” to bring France more in line with Anglo-American practices and policies. The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed.

In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.

Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls.

Meanwhile, recall what Jacques Chirac has done. In 1995 he became the first president to acknowledge openly France’s role in the Holocaust: “The occupier was assisted by the French, by the French state,” he said. “France accomplished the irreparable.” This was a phrase that would have stuck in the craw of his much-lauded predecessor, François Mitterrand, and, it must be said, of Charles de Gaulle himself.

However low his political fortunes, Mr. Chirac forbade his supporters to ally or compromise with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front — again in contrast with Mr. Mitterrand, who cynically manipulated French election laws in 1986 to benefit Mr. Le Pen (and thus weaken the moderate right).

Conscious of Europe’s links to the Muslim world — and the cost of rebuffing and humiliating Islam’s only secular democracy — Mr. Chirac has steadfastly supported Turkish admission to the European Union, an unpopular stance among his conservative constituents. In 2004 he created the first French administrative agency with explicit powers to identify and fight discrimination.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: April 19, 2007

SHANGHAI: When Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China set off for a historic visit to Japan nearly two weeks ago, pundits in this region set the bar remarkably low: the very fact of the first visit by a Chinese leader in almost seven years was an achievement in itself, the line went.

If the trip could proceed without ugly incident, Wen’s speech to the Diet, the first in 22 years by a Chinese, would secure a place for the visit in diplomatic annals.

Fortunately for the prospects of the most important relationship in Asia, there was no incident. Some have complained about scant progress in the two areas that have most bedeviled China-Japan relations of late: a dispute over an area of the East China Sea thought to be rich in petroleum reserves, and then - surprise - the “history issue,” whose persistence so long after World War II can only honestly be seen as a failure of both countries.

In two and a half days on Japanese soil, it must be said that Wen made an extraordinary effort to move things forward, leading to the most important development from the trip and one that transcends China-Japan relations altogether.

The Japanese trip capped an impressive period for the Chinese leader, during which he has emerged as perhaps Asia’s most accomplished and sure-footed politician.
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To understand what a minefield Sino-Japanese relations can be, the last visit by a Chinese leader to Japan melted down when President Jiang Zemin lost his temper before Japanese audiences. He ended up ranting about history in ways that only comforted Japanese, who hold stereotypes of China as pushy and more than a little uncouth.

Irrepressible nationalist currents exist in both countries, and they lie in wait to bait or to chastise public figures from either side. Whether officials are making demands or seen to be making concessions, there is bound to be static.

To his very great credit, Wen largely escaped that pattern. Eschewing threats, he virtually smothered his hosts in good grace and good will.

In a 40-minute speech before the Diet, Japan’s parliament, he acknowledged that “Japanese leaders have stated many times their stance on history-related problems, publicly acknowledged their invasion, and expressed their deep remorse and regret to victimized nations.”

This, mind you, came on the heels of a major flap over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s controversial comments to the effect that there was no evidence that Japan’s military had forcibly recruited sex slaves to serve at its pleasure.

But that was not all. Wen cited Japan’s massive development assistance to China during the postwar period, something that is seldom mentioned in Chinese discussions of the relationship, and offered the comment that “the Chinese people will never forget this.”

Wen then went the extra mile, literally, interrupting his morning jog to chat with the locals.

“Are you happy to see Sino-Japanese relations improving?” he asked one woman. “This is the result of our joint effort.”

More than mere graciousness for its own sake, Wen has very astutely backed his Japanese counterpart into an even more difficult position. Without even mentioning the words “Yasukuni Shrine,” Wen has made it far harder for Abe to visit the Shinto memorial for the country’s war dead, which has become an emotional touchstone in both Japan and China, than if he had lectured his hosts.

Pressure from nationalist voices in Japan for Abe to visit the shrine are certain to grow, but to do so now, after Wen’s inspired soft shoe, would be judged by the world as a gratuitous insult.

Wen, like an unusually large number of Chinese leaders, has an engineering background. Many of his peers, including his boss, President Hu Jintao, wear a certain look - stiff and distant and, well, slightly engineered. But in his four years in office, Wen has emerged as a compassionate and nimble public figure: in short, a new kind of Chinese leader who comes across as a real human being and is more comfortable ad-libbing where others hew to the script in a slumber-inducing manner.

In reality, Wen, too, mostly sticks closely to the script - a fact that he himself revealed in an unusually candid discussion of his preparation for the Japan trip. “This is the most important task since I took office,” he told an audience of Chinese residents in Japan. “I did a lot of preparation. Every sentence is written by myself, and I did all the research work myself.

“Why? Because I feel our nation’s development has reached a critical moment. We need to have a peaceful and conducive international environment.”

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Copyright Slate

April 17, 2007
Isoroku Yamamoto. Click image to expand.Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
The following essay is adapted from Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z. (Note: There is no “X” in the Clive’s Lives series.)

If we are ordered to do it, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months or a year, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.
—Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to Prime Minister Prince Konoe, in late 1940

Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) was the son of a schoolmaster named Takano, and the famous surname by which we know him belonged to the family into which he was adopted. After his education at Japan’s naval academy, he was wounded at the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War. He studied at Harvard after World War I and served as a language officer in the early ’20s before becoming naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington later in the decade. His wide knowledge of the United States extended to the factory floors, where he was impressed by American powers of production, and to the gambling joints, where he always fancied his chances.
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As chief of the aviation department of the Japanese navy in 1935, and as vice navy minister from 1936 to 1939, he argued both for a main force based on aircraft carriers and for avoiding any policy that would lead to a fighting alliance with the Axis powers in World War II. But after being promoted to admiral and placed in command of the Combined Fleet, he dutifully planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Romance continues to surround his name, not least in Japan, where he is a cult figure, and not exclusively on the political right. His distaste for a war with the Western allies has always rung a bell with postwar liberals aware that, if the enemy had been as pitiless as the Japanese High Command, the defeat could have been more disastrous, the occupation more humiliating, and the subsequent resurgence of both the culture and the economy much less impressive.

The Yamamoto romance benefits from his artistic tastes. Like America’s General Patton, Yamamoto wrote accomplished poetry. Again like Patton, and like other romantic commanders such as Rommel and Guderian, Yamamoto probably experienced battle as an aesthetic event: the most likely reason for his participation in a war of which he disapproved. Superior military minds share with poets the uncomfortable position of waiting for lightning to strike, and having to act on it when it does. Yamamoto knew that World War II was the wrong war, but it was the only war he had.

On at least two occasions, Prince Konoe asked Yamamoto what Japan’s chances would be in a war against the United States. Each time, Yamamoto gave roughly the same answer. Variously translated into English, and variously rendered even into Japanese, Yamamoto’s declaration of uncertainty is probably the second most famous thing any Japanese of the Pacific war period ever said, ranking only slightly behind the passage in the emperor’s surrender broadcast that conceded, in impossibly ­high-­flown court language, that the war had developed in ways not necessarily favorable to Japan.

Yamamoto’s advice to the government seems to have predicted that the unfavorable developments would be inevitable in the long term. Later on he was much criticized for not having expressed himself more firmly, but he must have felt that he didn’t need to. Yamamoto, sometimes at the risk of his life, had spent the whole of the ’30s preaching the necessity of staying out of a war with the United States. He had seen America’s factories and knew more than any other top-ranking Japanese officer about America’s war potential. What else could he advise Konoe?

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Copyright - In Character

Generations of college freshmen, asked to read Walden, have sputtered with indignation when they learned that Henry David went back to Concord for dinner with his family every week or two. He’s cheating; his grand experiment is a fraud. This outrage is a useful tactic; it prevents them from having to grapple with the most important (and perhaps the most difficult) book in the American canon, one that asks impossibly searching questions about the emptiness of a consumer economy, the vacuity of an information-soaked era. But it also points to something else: Thoreau, our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time � nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.

Consider the sheer number of people who happened to drop by the cabin of an obscure eccentric. �I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,� he writes. Often more visitors came than ould sit � sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. �Half-witted men from the almshouse,� busybodies who �pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,� a French-Canadian woodchopper, a runaway slave �whom I helped to forward toward the north star,� doctors, lawyers, the old and infirm and the timid, the self-styled reformers. It�s not that Thoreau was necessarily a cheerful host � there were visitors �who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.� Instead, it was simply a visiting age � as most of human history has been a visiting age, and every human culture a visiting culture.

Until ours. I doubt if many people reading these words have had a spontaneous visit from a neighbor in the past week � less than a fifth of Americans report visiting regularly with friends and neighbors, and the percentage is declining steadily. The number of close friends that an American claims has dropped steadily for the last fifty years too; three-quarters of us don�t know our next-door neighbors. Even the people who share our houses are becoming strangers: The Wall Street Journal reported recently that �major builders and top architects are walling off space. They�re touting one-person �internet alcoves,� locked-door �away rooms,� and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house.� The new floor plans, says the director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, are �good for the dysfunctional family.� Or, as another executive put it, these are the perfect homes for �families that don�t want anything to do with one another.� Compared to these guys, Thoreau with his three-chair cabin was practically Martha Stewart.

Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we�ve derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We�ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world�s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we�ve built a culture much the same � the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don�t need a helping hand from a soul � save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in it benign grip.

There are a couple of problems with this fine scenario, of course. One is: we�re miserable. Reported levels of happiness and life-satisfaction are locked in long-term one-way declines, almost certainly because of this lack of connection. Does this sound subjective and airy? Find one of the tens of millions of Americans who don�t belong to anything and convince them to join a church, a softball league, a bird-watching group. In the next year their mortality � the risk that they will die in the next year � falls by half.

The other trouble is that our self-reliance is actually a reliance on cheap fossil fuel and the economy it�s built. Take that away � either because we start to run out of oil, or because global warming forces us to stop using it in current quantities � and our vaunted independence will start to lurch like a Hummer with four flat tires. Just think for a moment about that world and then decide if you want to live on an acre all your own in the outermost ring of suburbs.

The idea of self-reliance is so deep in our psyches, however, that even when we attempt to escape from the unhappy and unsustainable cul-de-sac of our society, we�re likely to turn toward yet more �independence.� The �back-to-the-land� movement, for instance, often added the words �by myself.� Think about how proudly a certain kind of person talks about his �off-the-grid� life � he makes his own energy and grows his own food, he can deal with whatever the world throws at him. One such person may be left-wing in politics (� la Scott and Helen Nearing); another may be conservative. But they are united in their lack of need for the larger world. Not even to school their kids � they�ll take care of that as well.

Such folks are admirable, of course � they have a wide variety of skills now missing in most Americans; they�re able to amuse themselves; they work hard. But as an ideal, especially an economic ideal, that radical self-reliance strikes me as being almost as empty as the consumer society from which it dissents. Consider, for instance, the idea of growing all your own food. It�s clearly better than relying on food from thousands of miles away � from our current industrialized food economy, which figures �it�s always summer somewhere� and so orders take-out from that distant field every night of the year. Compared with that, an enormous garden and a root cellar full of all you�ll need for the winter is vrtue incarnate. But if you believe in many of the (entirely plausible) horror stories about what�s to come � peak oil, climate change � then the world ends with you standing shotgun in hand above your vegetable patch, protecting your carrots from the poaching urban horde.

Contrast that with another vision, one taking shape in at least a few places around the country: a matrix of small farmers growing food for their local areas. Farmers� markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, with sales showing double-digit growth annually. Partly that�s because people want good food (all kinds of people: immigrants and ethnic Americans tend to be the most avid farmers� market shoppers). And partly it�s because they want more company. One team of sociologists reported recently that shoppers at farmers� markets engaged in ten times more conversations per visit than customers in supermarkets. I spent the past winter eating only from my valley; a little of the food I grew myself, but the idea of my experiment was to see what remained of the agricultural infrastructure that had once supported this place. And the payoff was not only a delicious six months, but also a deep network of new friends, a much stronger sense o the cultural geography of my place.

Or consider energy. Since the 1970s, a particular breed of noble ex-hippie has been building �off-the-grid� homes, often relying on solar panels. This has been important work � they�ve figured out many of the techniques and technologies that we desperately need to get free of our climate change predicament. But the most exciting new gadget is a home-scale inverter, one that allows you to send the power your rooftop generates down the line instead of down into the basement. Where the isolated system has a stack of batteries, the grid-tied solar panel uses the whole region�s electric system as its battery: my electric meter spins merrily backward all afternoon because while the sun shines I�m a utility; then at night I draw from somewhere else. It�s a two-way flow, in the same way that the internet allows ideas to bounce in many directions.

You can do the same kind of calculation with almost any commodity. Music doesn�t need to come from Nashville or Hollywood on a small disc, for instance. But you don�t have to produce it all yourself either. More fun to join with the neighbors, to make music together or to listen to the local stars. A hundred years ago, Iowa had 1,300 oper houses. Radio doesn�t need to come from the ClearChannel headquarters in some Texas office park; new low-power FM lets valleys make their own. Even currency can become a joint local project � all it takes is the trust that underwrites any system of money. In hundreds of communities, people are trying to build that trust locally, with money that only works within the region.

Thinking this way won�t be easy. We�re used to independence as the prime virtue � so used to it that three quarters of American Christians believe the phrase �God helps those who help themselves� comes from the Bible, instead of Ben Franklin. �Love your neighbor as yourself� is harder advice, but sweeter and more sage. We don�t need to live on communes (though more and more old people are finding themselves enrolling in �retirement communities� that are gray-haired, upscale versions). But we will, I think, need to figure out how to stop relying on both oil and ourselves, and instead learn the lesson that the other primates and the other human cultures never forgot: we�re built to rely on each other.

…..

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and the author of many books, including Enough, Wandering Home, The End of Nature, Hundred Dollar Holiday, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Posted at 6:48 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Herald
April 16, 2007

Major League Baseball should be applauded for the manner in which it commemorated the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers yesterday.
But the next time the league chooses to celebrate the life and times of Robinson, I have an idea that’s far more symbolic than having a collection of players and coaches wear No. 42 on their backs.
Kick Tom Yawkey out of the Hall of Fame.
Perhaps that’s not an opinion shared by a lot of ex-Red Sox [team stats] players and longtime fans who regard the team’s late owner as a lovable old codger who “saved” baseball in Boston. And, no, I don’t expect MLB to get into the business of ripping plaques off the walls in their hallowed Cooperstown museum.
But can somebody explain why Yawkey was enshrined there in the first place? (The Veterans Committee elected him in 1980, four years after his passing.)
The short answer, naturally, is money: As Glenn Stout and Dick Johnson pointed out in “Red Sox Century,” still the best book ever written on the team: “… Yawkey had been a benefactor of the Hall for years, and his enshrinement was a kind of belated thank you.”
In other words, Yawkey bought his way in.
It seems strange that Robinson is celebrated for breaking baseball’s color line, while the man who did more than anyone to keep that color line in place has a plaque in Cooperstown.
It should never be forgotten that the Red Sox were the last team in baseball with an African-American on their big league roster. When Pumpsie Green pinch ran for Vic Wertz in the top of the eighth inning of the Sox’ 2-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox on July 21, 1959, it was more than 12 years after Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers.
And the shame of it all, as most New England baseball fans know, is that Robinson could have played for the Red Sox. Under pressure from city officials, notably City Councilor Isadore Muchnick, the Red Sox granted a tryout to Robinson and two other Negro League players (Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams) at Fenway Park [map], on April 16, 1945 - 62 years ago today.
The Red Sox, though, never contacted the players.
The organization has come a long way since.
Dan Duquette, the team’s general manager from 1994-2002, had a solid track record of scouting, signing and developing minority players. And just last week, current GM Theo Epstein became perhaps the first club executive to speak openly of the Sox’ troubled racial history when he referred to “some of the shameful episodes of the past.”
To understand the absurdity of Tom Yawkey being in Cooperstown, consider this: Jacob Ruppert, the New York beermeister who owned the Yankees from 1914 until his death in 1939, is not in the Hall of Fame. This is the same man whose teams won 10 pennants and seven World Series titles. This is the same man who built Yankee Stadium and put the likes of Ed Barrow and Miller Huggins in place to run baseball operations. And this is the same man who wrote the check that liberated Babe Ruth from Boston.
The issue here is not that Ruppert should be in the Hall, but that Yawkey should not be.
Ever read the words on Yawkey’s Hall of Fame plaque? They’re just laughable, including such gems as “Set precedent for AL in 1936 as first to have team travel by plane,” and, “His club won pennants in 1946, 1967 and 1975 - and narrowly missed in 1948, 1949 and 1972.”
Yes, we all know the Yawkeys gave millions to charity. But this is the baseball Hall of Fame, not the philanthropy Hall of Fame. And when travel itineraries and second-place finishes make it on to a Hall of Fame plaque, you know the writers were hurting for material.
Somewhere on that plaque, it should be noted that Yawkey was the last owner to integrate.
Either that, or it should be taken down.

Posted at 6:34 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

April 13 2007

The nation and its failures are ubiquitous subjects in African writing. In the 1950s and 1960s, the period of decolonisation witnessed both the birth and maturity of the continent’s literature, thanks to the appearance of a gifted group of writers. These included Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, Ayi Kwei Armah of Ghana, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria and the latter’s compatriot, Nobel prize-winner Wole Soyinka.

Their writing reflected on the encounter with European colonialism and the progress of the post-independence African nation. It debated the realities and the obstacles that might stand in the way of African hopes at this time: political intolerance, the authoritarian state, corruption, and the manifold oppression of women, young people and minorities. At its core, though, was a radical faith in the progress of the nation, and the role that writing could and should play in this through its critical and moral engagement with events.

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As it transpired, the retreat of European colonialism was followed by the relentless collapse of African nations. This was not only for the reasons so many of the writers had feared, but also because no one had fully realised the havoc and division that lurked behind the appearance of colonial order. Nor was the retreat as full as it had at first seemed. Numerous western institutions continued to pursue their own ends in post-colonial Africa. But the mayhem was real enough. No amount of faith could ignore the failings of the African post-independence state. So how has contemporary African fiction engaged with this disappointing reality?

One of the triumphs of the anti-colonial struggle in this dark era was the collapse of white rule in southern Africa: in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia and, most remarkably of all, apartheid South Africa.

Christopher Hope’s excellent My Mother’s Lovers takes place mostly in South Africa. The author depicts his colonial Europeans with amused disgust. They are a crowd of hunters, adventurers and chancers who move effortlessly back and forth across Africa. Their hubris enlarges their bland dramas into significance through epic gossip sessions.

Hope’s real loathing, though, is for the self-delusions and small-minded greed of white South Africa, a place ruled ”by a small bunch of demented bores who said they were the sons of God” and which is populated by descendants of gold-crazed land-grabbers.

Hope’s novel begins - as the author’s life did - in Johannesburg in 1944. As with his earlier writing, the subject of this book is the tragic absurdity of human intolerance, with South Africa’s racial fevers as the obscene example. The narrator, again like Hope himself, grew up in the years of Afrikaner-led Nationalist party governments. South Africa already had plenty of racial laws before the Nationalists came to power in 1948 - preventing blacks from owning land, voting or moving freely. But, through the introduction of a series of detailed laws, they introduced a terrifying regime based on racial segregation, which they implemented with clumsy brutality.

It is this failed state that Hope mocks with relish. The architect of modern apartheid, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, even makes an appearance - his bungling bodyguard is one of the lovers of the novel’s title. Hope depicts the Nationalists as grasping and malicious bunglers rather than God’s chosen people, never mind the clever fanatics they seemed to those who viewed them from afar.

The narrator escapes South Africa for a while. When he returns, the country is in the midst of its transition from a settler colony to a decolonised African republic. And Hope loves unsettling the self-righteous. His new South Africa turns out to be a place where callousness and violence are prevalent, where a new kind of fear menaces the prosperous, and where anxieties about personal assault are paramount. The novel’s focus on these loveless lives, HIV/Aids and deep unease about the lying state, is a protest against a rhetoric of deliverance so prevalent in the new order. Apartheid South Africa was manifestly a failed nation. Hope cautions the new South Africa lest its moral smugness leads to another failure.

Early in My Mother’s Lovers, Hope makes his narrator consider that colonial Africa, especially in its southern tip, suffered from racial fever, but independence brought a ”killer disease” called nationalism. It is only a partial explanation for the horrors that have befallen African states. And it is not one that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o shares. In his huge new novel, Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi lays the blame on the rapacity of African rulers and the west’s cynical manipulations to safeguard its prosperity and power. From his 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat onwards, Ngugi has argued that post-independence governments in Kenya have ignored the aspirations of its citizens for nothing nobler than the fraudulent enrichment of its officials.

In 1977, Ngugi was imprisoned without trial for a year for his views. The then vice-president Daniel arap Moi signed his detention order. Ngugi was released only after an international outcry, and on condition that he leave Kenya to preach his sedition elsewhere. The experience radicalised his thinking on the politics and culture of his homeland. Henceforth, his subject became the cynicism and corruption of Kenya’s government.

Wizard of the Crow is subtitled ”a translation from Gikuyu by the author”, so it pointedly requires the reader to engage with it as a narrative constructed to different linguistic and cultural conventions. Its tone is often one of exaggerated irony, reminiscent of Ngugi’s first Gikuyu novel, Shetani Msalabani (”devil on the cross”). It has a familiar biblical register, which Ngugi has found irresistible over the years. This gives his mocking metaphors of the grossness of power a mythic quality. For example, the ruler has a secret chamber of bones where he keeps the remains of his enemies and bathes in the blood of his victims. This ruler, as it happens, is unmistakably a caricature of arap Moi, Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002.

The prevailing style is grand comic satire. The ruler and his henchmen are crass and immoral; the people are wise and resisting. The comedy is sustained and bitter, more so than in any other Ngugi novel. It is also often directive and insistent on the lesson it wants the reader to draw from it. The national problem the novel addresses, though, finds no solution. The ruler’s grossness makes him an embarrassment to his sponsors in the west. He is consequently replaced by someone more malleable to the democratic lexicon of our times. One absurdity follows another and the satire on misrule becomes a farce - a comic but predictable critique of the grossness of African governments.

If Ngugi writes about a Kenya that has repeatedly failed to behave as a nation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun describes a nation that has hardly had time to come into being. It is the story of Biafra and the years of the civil war in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. The novel rejoices in the sense of community the founding of the breakaway Republic of Biafra produced - at least in its early days, before war and its aftermath corroded its people’s humanity.

The story begins in the years before the January 1966 coup in Nigeria, with the arrival of a boy, Ugwu, on his first day as a servant to an academic, Odenigbo, at the University of Nsukka. Ugwu eavesdrops on his master’s conversations and affairs throughout the novel. He keeps the reader informed of the passionate debates about the nation that Nigerian intellectuals engaged in during these first post-independence years. Towards the end, Ugwu himself becomes a child soldier in the Biafra army. Through him and his actions we witness the dehumanisation of a people.

The other consciousness with which Adichie escorts us through these events is the beautiful Olanna. She is Odenigbo’s lover, but also the daughter of a cut-throat businessman, who in African writing has often come to symbolise corruption, the betrayer of national morality. This set type’s crassness in Adichie’s version, though, is over-staged and hard to believe. In any case, as a rich man’s daughter Olanna dramatises issues of wealth and worth in the novel. Through her, we observe the massacres of Igbos in northern Nigeria after the July counter-coup, and the persecutions that led to the secession of Biafra in 1967. The book is not a history lesson but it stays close to the events. And its sympathies with Biafra are never in doubt.

Olanna has a twin sister, Kainene, who is difficult and sullen and dates ”white men”. One of these, the Englishman Richard, provides the third route through the plot. An expatriate who falls in love with Kainene and later with Biafra, he is the outsider who endorses the justice of Biafra’s cause.

The novel’s greatest strength is its unflinching account of life behind the war: the deprivations of refugees, the swift brutalisation of ordinary people and the bullying and horror of armed lawlessness. Decency flees as Biafran soldiers murder and rape their own people. This powerful thrust of the novel, though, is dissipated by a melodramatic domestic plot of half-hearted sexual transgressions that comes to dominate sections of it. The book could have done with less souping-up in this respect. It could also have benefited from more of Kainene, whose acid tongue is often more observant than the mushiness of other voices.

Shimmer Chinodya’s Chairman of Fools is set in Zimbabwe, which, in recent years, has become a dramatic example of the African nation in the throes of self-inflicted chaos. But this novel is not about the failure of the state in the style of Hope or, more dramatically, Ngugi or Adichie. It focuses on an individual vulnerability that clearly relates to the ongoing wider social and political havoc.

For example, it contains a description of a market where stallholders wash their tomatoes in the sinks of the public toilets, which are caked in grime and overflowing. The novel’s central figure, Farai, is briefly back home from a writing fellowship in an unnamed university in the US. He is a boozer and a womaniser. Women of various ages troop in and out of the story as the novel builds up gradually to Farai’s breakdown. Misreported stories and gossip about the protagonist abound. They feed his self-pity to paranoid levels. He calls the police, runs out armed with two knives, crashes his car and sees ghosts.

This madhouse, then, is real life in Zimbabwe. The only sanity is to be found in the asylum, where most of the rest of the novel takes place. The chairman of fools of the title is the position Farai is elected to by his fellow inmates. He becomes the leader of a kind of shadowy Zimbabwe of the incarcerated. The problem is that too often the larger argument fails to materialise, or it arrives too abruptly at a banal conclusion (such as when Farai leaves to return to his writing fellowship). Despite this, some of the scenes of disorientation and violence are powerful, and the metaphor of Zimbabwe as a madhouse is deeply unsettling.

These four novels, in their very different ways, describe how African nations have failed their citizens. They do not all tell the same story. And perhaps these are not, despite appearances, uniquely African stories. The details of each are important in grasping the complexity of these disasters. But the intelligence and the courage of the writing make it clear that the betrayals and the bullying will not go on forever. African writing has not lost its critical and moral engagement with events.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is author of ”Desertion” (Bloomsbury).

Posted at 12:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
When ExxonMobil Came to Chad

April 5, 2007

Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil by John GhazvinianThe United States now imports more of its oil from Africa than it does from Saudi Arabia. How is oil and the money it brings to the continent’s treasuries transforming Africa? For his new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, John Ghazvinian traveled from the parched dust bowls of Chad and Sudan to the swamps and jungles of Nigeria and the Congo, and from the corridors of Washington to the gleaming offices of “Big Oil.” Does oil-producing Africa live up to the hype? Why is it impossible to buy bananas in Gabon, when they grow in profusion in the nation’s virgin rainforest? Can an underdeveloped country like São Tomé and Príncipe learn from other nations’ mistakes and avoid the “curse of oil”? What effect does the establishment of an oil-company compound in the middle of Chad have on the neighboring land and people? This week, we are publishing four excerpts from Untapped that answer these questions.

In 1996, ExxonMobil discovered between 800 million and 1 billion barrels of oil in the Doba basin of southern Chad. Chadian crude is of the heavy and sour variety that fetches low prices on the international market, and the country’s landlocked geography adds formidable transportation costs to any venture. Besides, with civil war and political instability a fact of life from 1965 until the early 1990s, there was never much chance of Chad’s oil industry getting off the ground. In 1996, however, there seemed to be just enough oil in Chad, and nearly enough political stability, to justify giving the country another look. ExxonMobil began to examine financing and feasibility options, setting into motion what would become one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of African oil exploration.

N’Djaména, Chad—Disagreements between multinational corporations and destitute African villages often turn into a needlessly polarized ideological battle between proponents and opponents of globalization and free-market capitalism, or into an oversimplified David and Goliath tale. I wanted to see for myself the situation around the Doba basin and whether critics were justified in heaping so much blame onto ExxonMobil. Getting there from N’Djaména, Chad’s capital, was going to be a challenge, though. In 2005 Chad’s national airline, Toumaï Air Chad, was down to one functioning plane, a battered 737 servicing six African destinations and one domestic airport in the east of the country, as well as the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Until such time as it was able to purchase a second aircraft, Toumaï regretted that it would not be providing service to southern or northern Chad.

I asked about how I might make the journey by land, but received bewildered looks and was sternly warned that it would be a rough and dusty 200-mile trek across the blazing heat of the Sahel, and very much not for the faint of heart.

None of this was a problem for ExxonMobil staff, of course, because the company had its own airport and chartered a fleet of planes making regular flights between N’Djaména and Doba. In the early days of the project, when it was still being hailed as a “model” for African oil exploration, Exxon had been happy to fly journalists south, and had bent over backward to set up tours and meetings with local managers. But this was 2005, and ExxonMobil had been burned by a slew of negative stories in the international press. So, when I approached the company six months in advance, I was told by its Houston PR department that arranging a flight would not be possible. Even if I somehow made it to Doba under my own auspices, in fact, it would not be possible to have a tour of the company’s project in southern Chad. Nor was I allowed to speak to Exxon staff at any point while I was in the country, not even off the record. Any questions I had would be answered by Houston.

Given the cost of hiring a car and driver for the two-day round-trip south—at least $200 a day—public transport rapidly emerged as my only option. At the crack of dawn one Thursday, I watched as my suitcase was lifted to the roof of a beaten-up old Land Cruiser and steadily squashed under a small mountain of accumulating bags and boxes and threadbare trunks. Off to one side, a young man unscrewed the vehicle’s fuel cap and stuck a piece of rubber tubing into the tank, to the other end of which he stuck a small plastic funnel. Out of nowhere, several glass jugs appeared, filled with gasoline, which the man steadily poured into the funnel, taking great care not to spill any.

It was as powerful an image as one could possibly ask for. Chad may have recently joined the ranks of the world’s oil-producing countries, but the country still lacks a downstream oil sector, and its citizens have yet to see what an actual gas station looks like. There is no refinery for Doba crude to be sent to, so every last drop of Chad’s crude goes straight into the ExxonMobil pipeline and straight onto supertankers parked off the Cameroonian coast. There are few cars in Chad, but those that exist (almost all of them taxis or official vehicles) operate not on Chadian oil but on Nigerian gasoline. The refined product is driven—often smuggled—across the border, and sold from glass jars in shaded spots along the side of the road that look like little more than American-style lemonade stands.

Inside, the Land Cruiser had been converted into a sort of cattle truck, with two hard wooden benches running along its length. Ten people had already squeezed in, along with more belongings, and were looking intensely uncomfortable in the scorching early-morning heat. I plumped for a $25 “first-class” ticket, thinking that sitting in the passenger seat and facing forward would make the ten-hour journey more pleasant. What I had not been told was that a first-class ticket entitled me to only half the passenger seat.

It was just as well, then, that the vehicle broke down at least eight times during the journey. (I lost count after the seventh.) The passenger seat was tilted so far forward that my neighbor and I had our arms pressed against the dashboard for the duration of the journey, and every time the driver pulled over to fiddle with the fan belt, it was a welcome chance to step out into the blessed relief of the 120-degree heat and walk around among the camels and stray goats and round mud huts, silently cursing ExxonMobil until feeling returned to my arms and legs. On the way back, two days later, I treated myself to both first-class seats. After all, it was my birthday.

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Copyright Slate

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Nigerians want Americans to know they’re serious about tackling corruption. You can tell because they speak in quotes they know no reporter could resist scribbling down. Suleiman Hameen of Lagos’ Port Industry Anti-Corruption Committee told our group of visiting U.S. journalists, “The two greatest evils in the world are terrorism and corruption. Of the two, corruption is the worst. Terrorists kill a specific number of people. Corrupt people kill the whole nation, and sometimes whole generations.”

Of course, it’s not like they can avoid the topic. Nigeria and corruption go together in the Western imagination like breaking and entering or doom and gloom. As Nuhu Ribadu, the boyish face of Nigeria’s anti-corruption crusade, put it, “A few people more or less destroyed our image in the world.”

Looking back over his eight years in office, departing President Olusegun Obasanjo takes pride—too much pride—in Nigeria’s movement up Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. In 2000, Nigeria was dead last, but only 90 nations were listed on the index. In 2006, there were 13 countries ranked below Nigeria—but now the list runs to 163 countries. No one prints up T-shirts to celebrate a nine-way tie for 142nd place. Still, even Obasanjo’s enemies credit him with making an effort to expose and prosecute crooked pols.

The most visible effort is the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, described by a Western diplomat as “the most effective law enforcement agency in West Africa.” Former prosecutor and police commissioner Ribadu, 46, serves as its executive chairman. When we visited the EFCC’s financial-intelligence unit in Abuja, about 25 cubicle-bound analysts stared at computer screens, examining bank records for “suspicious transactions” that gave off a whiff of fraud or money-laundering. It was Office Space meets The Wire. Going after “Yahoo Boys”—e-mail scammers—built up the agency’s profile overseas, especially when it returned hundreds of millions of dollars to victims in Europe, Brazil, and the United States. In the last six months, though, it is the EFCC’s pursuit of “lootocrats” that has drawn the country’s attention, much of it negative.

Since Nigeria’s oil boom in the 1960s, there has been a psychological disconnect between citizens and politicians: Voters don’t hold corrupt politicians accountable because they don’t feel they have a stake in the system. In most countries, paying taxes is what motivates citizens to keep a close watch on politicians, but because oil revenues flow into their coffers year after year, few Nigerian states make more than a token effort to collect taxes. Most Nigerians have become resigned to the notion that elected officials will siphon public funds into their private accounts. One oil exec told us that the EFCC’s efforts to bring corrupt governors to justice—five were impeached between 2003 and 2006—have helped citizens to recognize their potential role in good governance.

In early February, the EFCC released a list of 135 politicians it deemed too corrupt to take part in the April elections, including Vice President Atiku Abubakar—one of the leading presidential candidates and a sworn enemy of President Obasanjo—as well as almost 30 candidates for governor. (The EFCC claims Atiku misappropriated millions of dollars from the Petroleum Technology Development Fund, and after following up a referral from the FBI, also says that some of those funds were transferred to the United States for a business transaction with Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., now the target of a corruption probe relating to those curious dealings.) At that point, complaints that the EFCC’s choice of targets was politically motivated became deafening. Human-rights attorney Festus Okoye told us, “Most Nigerians believe EFCC is wrapped around the president’s finger.” Atiku put it more straightforwardly: “[Ribadu] is absolutely being used.”

Okoye, who applauds the establishment of the EFCC, nevertheless has concerns about its practices. The EFCC moves to arrest targets before gathering all the evidence—and has held suspects in custody for up to six months before bringing them to trial, sometimes without informing them of specific charges. “That’s not fighting crime,” he says, “that’s a serial violation of human rights.” Okoye believes that only the courts—and no other body, including the EFCC or the Independent National Electoral Commission—are empowered to disqualify candidates from office. This question is at the heart of Atiku’s ongoing legal struggle to contest the April 21 presidential election.

Of course, as political scientist Jibrin Ibrahim acknowledged, “In law, once you’ve committed a crime, it’s not an excuse to say, ‘Others too have committed it. Why are you picking on me?’ ” Ibrahim wonders if Ribadu is simply acting rationally by targeting the president’s enemies: “Maybe it makes sense to tackle the cases where the political fallout won’t be massive, so that [he] can continue to work and finally generate sufficient steam to go all the way. If so, Obasanjo should watch out. Eventually, it will be politically expedient to get to him.”

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

April 10, 2007

The world’s fastest growing source of oil is West Africa. The United States imports more crude from West Africa than from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined; Angola has become China’s biggest supplier; the European Union imports almost one fifth of its oil from Africa.

The African petrodollars, however, benefit only kleptocratic elites. Angola is a case in point. Five years after the end of the civil war, people are still waiting for a development dividend from the country’s oil riches while Luanda’s elite is awash in oil cash.

The word is out on the “oil curse.” But there is nothing (super)natural about the mismanagement of Africa’s oil revenues. It is the direct result of the longstanding partnership between oil producing states, oil companies and consumers. As long as Africa supplies the oil, no further questions asked.

The Group of 8 industralized countries has finally started to challenge the one-dimensional realpolitik approach. Under German and British leadership the issue of transparency and good governance in Africa’s oil producers will feature prominently at the approaching Heiligendamm summit meeting.

The bad news is that the G-8’s proposed remedy is insufficient. The G-8, along with well-meaning donors such as Norway, has placed all its hope on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Under this initiative, producer governments and companies can voluntarily commit themselves to disclosing all payments from corporations to governments, and all government revenue from oil. Civil society is supposed to act as a watchdog.

Since its launch in 2002, the initiative has attracted more than 20 member countries as well as the support of leading NGOs and corporations.

The results on the ground are far less impressive. The purely voluntary initiative lacks teeth. It is easy for corrupt elites to sign the EITI principles, since they do not have to fear real sanctions. Civil society in African oil countries, moreover, is often too weak and divided to effectively push for transparency.

Still, we should not stick our heads in the sand. The West has significant market and consumer power that it has not even tried to leverage. If we are serious about promoting good governance, we should not count only on voluntary initiatives. We should base an enhanced strategy based on four key pillars:

First, move good governance to the center of the discussion on energy security, alongside security of supply, price stability and environmental sustainability. Good governance in African producer states should be a cornerstone of EU energy policies.

Second, impose travel bans on the corrupt elite. The elite in African petro-states like to indulge their consumerism in Paris, Lisbon, Brussels and London.

Third, promote transparency of financial flows not just within the producer countries but throughout the global financial system.

Offshore and onshore banking centers and tax havens (not just on the Cayman Islands but also in London, Zurich and elsewhere) allow the corrupt elite to move around and invest the stolen money at will.

A broad civil society campaign against dirty money that finds its way into the global financial system is long overdue. It is also time to change the law in all OECD countries so that holding and handling stolen funds becomes illegal.

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Thorsten Benner is co-founder and associate director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, author of “Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea,” is a fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and at GPPi.

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Copyright The Far Eastern Economic Review

April 2007

Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform, and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.

FRED HARPER

Foreign academics must cooperate with academics in China to collect data and co-author research. Surveys are conducted in a manner that is acceptable to the Party, and their content is limited to politically acceptable questions. For academics in China, such choices come naturally. The Western side plays along.

China researchers are equally constrained in their solo research. Some Western China scholars have relatives in China. Others own apartments there. Those China scholars whose mother tongue is not Chinese have studied the language for years and have built their careers on this large and nontransferable investment. We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections. Everybody is happy, Western readers for the up-to-date view from academia, we ourselves for prospering in our jobs, and the Party for getting us to do its advertising. China is fairly unique in that the incentives for academics all go one way: One does not upset the Party.

What happens when we don’t play along is all too obvious. We can’t attract Chinese collaborators. When we poke around in China to do research we run into trouble. Li Shaomin, associate professor in the marketing department of City University in Hong Kong and a U.S. citizen, spent five months in a Chinese jail on charges of “endangering state security.” In his own words, his crimes were his critical views of China’s political system, his visits to Taiwan, his use of Taiwanese funds to conduct research on politically sensitive issues, and his collecting research data in China. City University offered no support, and once he was released he went to teach at Old Dominion University in Virginia. One may wonder what five months in the hands of Chinese secret police does to one’s psyche, and what means the Party used to silence Mr. Li. To academics in Hong Kong, the signal was not lost.

China researchers across different disciplines may not all be equally affected. Economists and political scientists are likely to come up against the Party constraint frequently, and perhaps severely. But even sociologists or ethnographers can reach the forbidden zone when doing network studies or examining ethnic minority cultures.

Our self-censorship takes many forms. We ask Western instead of China-relevant questions. We try to explain the profitability of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by basic economic factors, when it may make more sense to explain it by the quality of enterprise management (hand-picked by the Party’s “Organization Department”), or by the political constraints an enterprise faces, or by the political and bureaucratic channels through which an enterprise interacts with its owners, employees, suppliers and buyers. But how to collect systematic information about the influence of the Party on the operation of a state-owned or state-controlled enterprise, when these are typically matters that nobody in the enterprise will speak about?

We talk about economic institutions and their development over time as if they were institutions in the West. “Price administration” regulations, central and local, abound, giving officials far-reaching powers to interfere in the price-setting process. Yet we accept official statistics that show 90% of all prices, by trading value, to be market-determined. We do not question the meaning of the Chinese word shichang, translated as “market,” but presume it to be the same as in the West.

Similarly, we take at face value China’s Company Law, which makes no mention of the Party, even though the Party is likely to still call the shots in the companies organized under the Company Law. Only if one digs deeper will one find unambiguous evidence: The Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and the Shaanxi government in a joint circular of 2006 explicitly require the Party cell in state-owned enterprises (including “companies”) to participate in all major enterprise decisions; the circular also requests that in all provincial state-owned enterprises the chairman of the board of directors and the Party secretary, in principle, are one and the same person. At the national level, the leadership of the 50 largest central state-owned enterprises—enterprises that invest around the world—is directly appointed by the Politburo. Economists do not ask what it means if the Party center increasingly runs enterprises in the U.S. and Europe.

The governor and Party secretary of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, writes extensively in Chinese about “comprehensively accelerating central bank work” based on the “three represents” (the Party represents the “advanced productive forces, the advanced Chinese culture and the basic interests of the Chinese people”). He describes the three represents as “guiding macroeconomic policy” in ways that defy any Western concept of logic. And yet we take this person as seriously as if we were dealing with the governor of a Western central bank, as if China’s central bank were truly setting monetary policy, and as if the channels through which monetary policy operates in China and the impact monetary policy has on the economy are the same as in the West.

Are we naïve? Or are we justified in ignoring the central bank governor’s second—or rather, first—life as Party secretary? Are we subconsciously shutting out something that we do not comprehend, or something we do not want to see because it doesn’t fit into our neat, Western economic concepts?

Article after article pores over the potential economic reasons for the increase in income inequality in China. We ignore the fact that of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2, 932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors—finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities—85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.

With the introduction of each new element of reform and transition, cadres enrich themselves: the dual track price system, the nonperforming loans, the asset-stripping of SOEs, the misuse of funds in investment companies and in private pension accounts. The overwhelmingly irregular transformation of rural into urban land may well qualify as “systematic looting” by local “leaders.” Local cadres are heavily invested in the small, unsafe coal mines they are supposed to close, and nobody knows how they obtained their stakes in these operations.

A general dearth of economic information shapes our research. Statistics on specific current issues are collected by the National Bureau of Statistics on special request of the Party Central Committee and the State Council. None of this information is likely to be available to the public. The quality of the statistics that are published comes with a large question mark. Outside the realm of official statistics, government departments at all levels collect and control internal information. What is published tends to be propaganda—pieces of information released with an ulterior objective in mind. One solution for China economists then is to resign themselves to conducting sterilized surveys and to building abstract models on the basis of convenient assumptions—of perfect competition, profit maximization given a production technology, household utility maximization with respect to consumption and subject to financial constraints, etc. How much this can tell us about China is unclear.

Other China economists openly accept favors from the Party. We can use our connections to link up with government cadres. We may be hosted in field research by local governments and local Party committees. A local Party committee, at one point, helped me out by providing a car, a Party cadre and a local government official. They directed me to enterprise managers who, presumably, gave all the right answers. The hosts were invariably highly supportive, but I ended up working in exactly the box in which they were thinking and operating. (This seems to be the only research project that I never completed.) Furthermore, those who go to the field and interview cadres may not only unwillingly become a tool of the Party, but also a tool in departmental infighting.

Our use of language to conform to the image the Party wishes to project is pervasive. Would the description “a secret society characterized by an attitude of popular hostility to law and government” not properly describe the secrecy of the Party’s operations, its supremacy above the law and its total control of government? In Webster’s New World College Dictionary, this is the definition of “mafia.”

We speak of the Chinese “government” without further qualification when more than 95% of the “leadership cadres” are Party members, key decisions are reached by leadership cadres in their function as members of Party work committees, the staff of the government Personnel Ministry is virtually identical to the staff of the Party Organization Department, the staff of the Supervision Ministry is virtually identical to the staff of the Party Disciplinary Commission, and the staff of the PRC Central Military Commission is usually 100% identical to the staff of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Does China’s government actually govern China, or is it merely an organ that implements Party decisions? By using the word “government,” is it correct to grant the Chinese “government” this association with other, in particular Western, governments, or would it not be more accurate to call it the “government with Chinese characteristics” or the “mafia’s front man”? Who questions the legitimacy of the Party leadership to rule China, and to rule it the way it does?

The Party’s—or, the mafia’s—terminology pervades our writing and teaching. We do not ask if the Chinese Communist Party is communist, the People’s Congresses are congresses of the people, the People’s Liberation Army is liberating or suppressing the people, or if the judges are not all appointed by the Party and answer to the Party. We say “Tiananmen incident,” in conformance with Party terminology, but called it “Tiananmen massacre” right after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, when “incident” would have made us look too submissive to the Party.

Which Western textbook on China’s political system elaborates on the Party’s selection and de facto appointment of government officials and parliamentary delegates, and, furthermore, points out these procedures as different from how we view political parties, government and parliament in the West? By following the Party’s lead in giving the names of Western institutions to fake Chinese imitations, we sanctify the Party’s pretenses. We are not even willing to call China what its own constitution calls it: a dictatorship (a “people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants, which is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat”).

Who lays out the systematic sale of leadership positions across Chinese governments and Party committees? The Heilongjiang scandal provides the going price list from the province down to the county level, a list not to be found in any textbook. The publicly known scope of the sale of positions does not leave much room for interpretation. For these salesmen and saleswomen of government positions to have nothing to fear, the rule of the mafia and its code of silence must be powerful beyond imagination.

What is not normal is accepted as normal for China. Hackers were collecting the incoming emails of a faculty member of the University of Hong Kong from the university’s server until they were found out in June 2005, when they accidentally deleted emails. The hackers came from three mainland Internet provider addresses, and all three IP addresses are state telecommunications firms. Within China, the staff of the foreign students’ dormitories includes public security officials who keep tabs on foreign students and compile each student’s file. In a Shanghai institution of tertiary education, typing “Jiang Zemin” into a search engine from a computer located on campus, three times in a row, leads to the automatic shutdown of access to that search engine for the whole campus. The Party is rumored to employ tens of thousands of Internet “police.” Phone calls are listened to, if not systematically recorded. Emails are filtered and sometimes not delivered. Who will not learn to instinctively avoid what the Party does not want them to think or do?

Party propaganda has found its way deeply into our thinking. The importance of “social stability” and nowadays a “harmonious society” are accepted unconditionally as important for China. But is a country with more than 200 incidents of social unrest every day really socially stable, and its society harmonious? Or does “socially stable” mean no more than acceptance of the rule of the mafia?…

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Mr. Holz is an economist and professor in the social science division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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This book is subtitled “Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone,” and that sums up the author’s rationale, repeated ad infinitum, for the destabilization of the Congo.
I’m writing a full length piece on this book, so don’t want to say too much more here. I’m not eager to plug it, but it instantly becomes an almost must-read for anyone interested in the early independence period in sub-Saharan Africa. Devlin was in the thick of things, stirring the pot.

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Copyright The Financial Times

April 6 2007

I am due to meet Jeffrey Sachs in his choice of restaurant, La Porte des Indes, on a quiet central London backstreet. It’s an unremarkable entrance, but once inside the space opens up to give the impression of colonial India, complete with wicker furniture and palm trees growing from the floor below.

The Columbia University economics professor, and director of the Earth Institute, is already there, in conversation with his assistant, Margot. I realise that Sachs is no longer just an eminent academic, he is a brand, and travels the world with an assistant in tow, spreading his economic gospel. I introduce myself, and Margot goes off to have some lunch at another table while ensuring that we don’t overrun our tight schedule.

Sachs is in London to deliver the first of five BBC Reith Lectures, a sought-after honour for academics. The lectures give a chance to talk to a worldwide radio audience. ”[The lecture] is unique as a global discussion. It’s hard to think of another way to reach such a wide audience,” Sachs says, and then pauses. Referring to the BBC, he says: ”They quote a 100 million audience - rather more than that, a 150 million audience.” Then he asks me if I know how many people will listen. I haven’t a clue, I admit, but tell him that the audience figure might need an ”up to” added before the numbers. This first encounter persuades me instantly that his voice - courteous, engaging and persuasive - will work well on radio. Even his slightly unshaven neck, a crime on television, will go unnoticed.

Audience size clearly matters to Sachs. His website says he is ”widely considered to be the leading international economic adviser of his generation”, and his mission is to solve the problems of poverty, disease, global warming and globalisation. Although his current views are highly controversial, he knows that the bigger the audience, the bigger the impact.

Economics splits analysis into the ”positive”, describing and explaining the world as it is, and the ”normative”, articulating how it should be. Now in his early fifties, Sachs has left positive economics behind. He is proud to have been listed among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004 and 2005. He campaigns for a better world, and is certain he knows how to get one. With such meaty topics to discuss, there is little time for chitchat. As we discuss the colonial feel of the restaurant, Sachs launches into a quick destruction of the view that the British Raj was good for India: ”The rail[way] is quite useful… but most of the good things could have come from the diffusion of good ideas without all the downsides of empire.”…

I change the subject as I don’t want to get bogged down in matters of British history…

… The theme continues as we move on to talking about poverty in Africa. This has been the focus of his more recent work. Immediately, he shows his anger at those who claim aid fails because Africa remains desperately poor, even after some $2,300bn of aid - the figure comes from Professor William Easterly of New York University. Sachs manages a masterly dismissal; he calculates the amount as only $16 per poor person per year over the past 60 years. ”I see the number and say, well, that’s a pretty modest sum. The rest of the world sees the same number and says that’s a horrendous failure that’s nearly bankrupted us.”

Worse, Sachs thinks that Easterly’s criticisms of aid are having an impact on giving. ”The difference between Mr Easterly and myself is that I’m actually trying to get something done practically… But I know that since he has launched this tirade, it makes it harder to do.” He insists that for $16 a person a year, aid has ”done extremely well”. Trying not to fall into either the ”aid works” or ”aid fails” camp, I try to challenge Sachs, and say that just as it is probably wrong to pin African failure on aid, success stories are also not necessarily the result of aid. Sachs doesn’t engage. He is now on a mission and wants to ram his point home.

”People are dying in large numbers. The triumph of politics over economics is not that money is being lost in Africa, it is that money is not going in.” He vehemently denies that big aid has been tried before and not worked, and challenges me to name studies proving him wrong, knowing full well that I can’t.

We move on to talk about a specific project Sachs is currently involved in, Millennium Villages, where his ideas on fertilisers, malarial bed-nets and the like are tried on the ground. My less-than-ecstatic reaction to his reports of their success is clearly the same as that of many aid agencies. It instantly raises his hackles. I suggest there are many examples where success in pilots does not translate into something that can be replicated on a large scale, and that you don’t necessarily need to try something to know it won’t work. ”I’m sorry,” he is almost shouting now. ”That, I disagree with completely. That’s preposterous.”

I realise I have exaggerated for effect, and counter that it is equally preposterous to insist they will work. ”I know,” he says, ”but how do you actually do something in life? Do you list all the things that may go wrong and then decide we won’t do it, or do you actually try?”

We talk about global warming. It’s easily solvable, Sachs insists, because the costs of doing something about carbon emissions are exaggerated - so people will soon realise that they can cut carbon emissions without much pain. We talk about global trade - all the US has to do is offer an aid, trade and climate change deal to the rest of the world and a solution is within reach. We talk about US healthcare - within a few years, people will see sense and the uninsured will be covered, he predicts.

As coffee arrives, I wonder aloud whether economics really can solve these big global challenges. In Sachs’s world, problems aren’t really problems because there is always an easy solution. I suggest vested interests, national differences and the fact that reforms tend to throw up winners and losers make issues rather more intractable than he believes. Bringing the subject full circle back to his lectures, he says: ”The key word of all of these lectures is ’choice’. A generation has a choice, and we have choices we make collectively… We have some absolutely terrific opportunities… but we miss opportunities all the time. That’s why it is really important to understand what these choices are - and that is what I’m trying to explain in these lectures.”

The conversation drifts into small talk, and Margot reappears, telling us our time is up. Sachs leaves, telling me the conversation was fun. As I pick up the very reasonable bill and leave, I feel more positive about the world. A few minutes later I get snarled up in London’s creaking public transport system and realise that some problems really are intractable.

Chris Giles is economics editor of the Financial Times.

Se ft.com

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 7, 2007

SHANGHAI

WHEN Qiu Xiaolong reflects on his life, the path has an air almost of inevitability.

The arc includes an inquisitive childhood in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution; studying poetry in Beijing, where he translated the complete works of T. S. Eliot; traveling in the early days of détente to the United States, where he eventually became a professor; and finally his status today as perhaps the most successful author of detective stories set in China.

Nothing, of course, seemed clear or preordained at the time. Not even, he says, for a single moment.

Life for Mr. Qiu (pronounced Cho) has been a series of accidents, though for him often very fortunate ones. At 54, like most Chinese people of his generation, he has been through an awful lot. But in telling his own story, there is a particular grace about this optimistic man, who pauses at the mention of great coincidences and laughs deeply at the mystery of it all.

Mr. Qiu, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, was ostensibly visiting the city of his youth to attend an international literary festival here, and to promote his latest book, “A Case of Two Cities.” This too, however, would be a gross oversimplification.

Shanghai is much more than his hometown. It is his muse, and it has been the one consistent subject of his fiction, the four Inspector Chen detective novels he has written so far, which have sold over 700,000 copies and have been translated into 16 languages, including Chinese.

Chinese? Yes, since leaving the country at the age of 35 in 1988 on a Ford Foundation fellowship, Mr. Qiu has written in English instead of his native language. The choice, which today sometimes displeases Chinese authorities, he said, has been forced upon him by circumstances in his own country — from the bloody antidemocracy crackdown at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, to the many restrictions on speech, especially anything construed as political speech, that have followed.

He was reminded of these restrictions during his current visit home, when he wrote an article in homage of Yang Xianyi, an aging and infirm translator of Chinese classics into English. Mr. Yang became a hero to his generation of intellectuals for his decision to resign from the Communist Party over its handling of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

When Mr. Qiu approached Chinese magazines to get it published, they were unfailingly polite but unyielding. “We’re sorry,” he said editors would announce with a smile. “It’s very interesting, but for certain reasons, we’re afraid we can’t publish it.”

Mr. Qiu’s first inklings that he might be able to write date from an experience that still looms large in his life: the hounding and humiliation of his father, a businessman who was labeled a class enemy, or tagged “black” in the language of the Cultural Revolution.

While his father was hospitalized for cataract surgery and temporarily unable to see, he was ordered to write a self-criticism. Mr. Qiu, who was in his early teens at the time, stood in for him, writing the document.

Later, while working as an Eliot scholar in St. Louis, the poet’s native city, Mr. Qiu tried his hand at detective fiction. “I had trouble putting all of my thoughts together in poems,” he said. “Mystery gave me a framework, because you start with a body and end with a conclusion.”

His editor liked his first effort so much that she said he would have to write more. “So you see, I had no choice,” Mr. Qiu said with a laugh.

Mr. Qiu received a visitor in the rickety two-story walkup where he grew up, in central Shanghai. It lies in an area of narrow streets buzzing with activity, where neighbors live in a closeness bordering on promiscuity, of the sort that is fast disappearing in a city racing toward a homogenized vision of modernity.

Back then the Red Guards, the enforcers of a cult of Mao Zedong worship who held sway during the Cultural Revolution, were present even in hospital wards, he said. Schools were all but closed during that decade, from 1966 to 1976, and young people were sent by the tens of millions to the countryside to learn from peasants.

“People would use drums and gongs and chant slogans to call out the names of those who did not go,” he said of his neighbors. “Every day I was scared I’d be called out by name. But I was lucky and they never called me.”

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Posted at 10:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Yahoo

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A world away, millions of men and women and children wrecked their circadian rhythms to watch him. In Boston, hundreds of thousands shrugged off their duties at work to steal a glance. And here, smack dab in the middle of the country, tucked away from much of the fanfare that has accompanied him the last six months, Daisuke Matsuzaka satiated them all Thursday with a debut equal parts brilliant and fulfilling.

For those who questioned the Boston Red Sox spending $103 million to bring him to Major League Baseball from Japan, here was a strikeout. To others who wondered how he would adjust to the greatest league in the world, here was an inning-ending double play. And if those weren’t convincing enough, here was his entire repertoire of pitches, emptied out for the Kansas City Royals and still unscathed by the end of the afternoon.

While his final line sparkled – seven innings, six hits, one run, one walk, 10 strikeouts and a win in the 4-1 victory – nary a number could define what Matsuzaka had accomplished over his 108 pitches. It transcended any language barrier.

Here I am, he said with his gait.

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Hit me if you can, he said with his stare.

Because I’m fairly certain you can’t, he said with his pitches.

“Up to now,” Matsuzaka said, “given all the expectations that have surrounded me, I felt happy about those expectations at the same time feeling that, perhaps, they were a little bit extreme.”

Perhaps? No player had entered baseball with such a burden since Michael Jordan tried and failed to hit Double-A curveballs. Expectations are like puff pastry, thin layers stacked by the dozens that expand under heat and pressure.

Cook too long and they’ll burn.

Only Matsuzaka seems impervious, his skin Teflon-coated. At 26 years old, he has lived the life of a teen pop star: practically sainted at 18 after helping his high school win Koshien, the national baseball tournament that is equivalent to the NCAA tournament, and almost instantaneously a national celebrity thereafter, and forever since a national hero worthy of staying up until 3 a.m. to see his first pitch.

It was a fastball, 93 mph, fouled off by David DeJesus. Matsuzaka threw it quick from his molasses windup, in which he seems to will his limbs forward. It’s a delivery comparable to Roger Clemens’, though every measurement of Matsuzaka tends to be against an all-time great, whether his slider is like John Smoltz’s or his fastball like Tom Seaver’s.

“The expectations, from what I’ve heard so far, are unreachable,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “He’s got this thing figured out better than anybody else. He loves to pitch. He enjoys the heck out of the game. And he’s pretty damn good.”

Kansas City will attest. Once Matsuzaka found his rhythm, it was like he was dancing on the mound, his arm twirling in step. In the fourth inning, he struck out the Royals’ Nos. 2, 3 and 4 hitters on 14 pitches. He blew away rookie Alex Gordon with a 95-mph fastball one at-bat and stymied Ryan Shealy with an 82-mph curveball on the next.

Wherever catcher Jason Varitek asked for the ball – inside, outside, up, down – Matsuzaka found the target like a dart thrower hitting treble 20s.

“It’s tough adapting to his style at different times,” Varitek said. “He’s not locked into any one pitch in any one count and he doesn’t favor either side of the plate. It makes me have to think ahead.”

To force Varitek, one of the game’s great minds, to truly use his cleverness takes some kind of talent. Matsuzaka’s is good enough that Varitek was blaming himself for the day’s lone gaffe, a DeJesus home run to lead off the sixth inning.

“I think it was a gyroball,” DeJesus said.

He was joking, of course, playing into the Matsuzaka mythology. Even though he doesn’t throw the gyroball – a pitch long and erroneously attributed to him – it will accompany Matsuzaka everywhere he goes, and so long as it gets into hitters’ heads, it’s for his benefit.

In this manner, the expectations have created an air of invincibility around Matsuzaka, one that simultaneously invokes a fear of him – of the unknown – while adding incentive to crack him, like he’s some sort of unbreakable code.

“We would’ve liked to be the team that hit him, that knocked him around, especially with this being his first game out,” Shealy said. “We weren’t. And a lot of teams are going to say the same thing.”

The Royals, a team destined for at least 90 losses, were still stupefied an hour after the game. DeJesus knows he hit a fastball for a home run but wasn’t sure what else Matsuzaka threw. Shealy couldn’t correctly identify the pitches. Catcher John Buck thought he saw two or three.

Behind home plate, scouts consulted with one another to figure out what was what. The consensus was seven pitches: a straight four-seam fastball that rides up to 95 mph, a sinking two-seam fastball that sits at 91, a cut fastball that jumps in on the hands of left-handers around 91, a curveball that spins slowly at 72 or tight at 78, a classic changeup at 80, a power slider at 86 and a shuuto, the Japanese pitch that sinks like a screwball, at 81.

“But I don’t care about the pitches,” said Art Stewart, the Royals scout in his 55th year of organized baseball. “Kid’s got moxie. He’s got something, all right.”

The world in the palm of his hand for one. His next start comes Tuesday in Boston, where the cheers will be even greater than those for Manny Ramirez or David Ortiz, and he faces the Seattle Mariners, the team of Ichiro Suzuki, Japan’s greatest success in the major leagues and, like Matsuzaka, still idolized in his home nation.

Frankly, it would have been the perfect setting for his first start. Instead, Matsuzaka steeled himself to pitch for a half-empty ballpark in 36-degree weather against a team that lost 100 games last season.

“It was really such a normal day for me,” Matsuzaka said, and though his words came through interpreter Masa Hoshino, they sounded genuine.

“When I look back, my first start at Koshien, there was definitely something emotional about that day,” Matsuzaka said. “As for today – the day I’ve been waiting for a very long time – even given that fact, it felt surprisingly normal.”

Because he was here.

He had asked the Royals to hit him.

And he wasn’t just fairly certain they couldn’t.

He knew it.

Jeff Passan is a national baseball writer for Yahoo! Sports. Send Jeff a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

Posted at 12:18 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Tribune Media Services

To world historians, there is nothing more fascinating than to notice a coincidence or a disjuncture across space but within roughly the same time.

Was it just a coincidence, for example, that the new but fast-growing states of Germany, Japan, Italy and the United States “came of age” at the same time, after 1870 or so? And wasn’t it an odd disjuncture that the political culture in Britain, France and America in the interwar years was so pacifist, whereas the mood in Germany, Italy and Japan was so aggressive and militarist, virtually making World War II inevitable?

Then go back in time and consider one of the oddest disjunctures in world history. In the very first decades of the 15th century, the great Chinese admiral Cheng Ho led a series of amazing maritime expeditions to the outer world, through the Straits of Malacca, into the Indian Ocean, across even to the eastern shores of Africa. Nothing at that time compared with China’s surface navy.

Yet, within another decade, the overseas ventures had been scrapped by high officials in Beijing, anxious not to divert resources away from meeting the Manchu landward threat in the north and about how a seaward-bound open-market society might undermine their authority.

Coincidentally, on the other side of the globe, explorers and fishermen from Portugal, Galicia, Brittany and southwest England were pushing out, across to Newfoundland, the Azores, the western shores of Africa.
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Meanwhile: France’s flat-footed political gods
Meanwhile: The curious case of the severed head
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While China’s great fleets were being dismantled by imperial order, Western Europe was beginning to move into “new” worlds, full of ancient peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Any place vulnerable to Western naval and military power was at risk. Above all, as the American naval captain A. T. Mahan taught us over a century ago in his classic book, “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” (1890), the West valued navies as the key to global influence.

So let us come forward to today’s complex, fragmented and hard-to-understand world. There is occurring, most interestingly - and not covered (so far as I can see) by any of the world’s main media outlets - another remarkable global disjuncture at work. And it involves, as it did six centuries ago, massive differences in the assumptions of European nations and Asian nations about the significance of sea power, today and into the future.

Let me make clear that I am not talking here about American attitudes regarding naval power. The United States, with a relative maritime force-projection capacity that probably exceeds that of the Royal Navy in 1815, is not planning to do anything other than reinforce its naval muscle.

I am also not talking about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Russian Navy has suffered many hard blows, severe cutbacks in spending and personnel, and the obsolescence of rusting warships over the past 25 years. But there is no doubt that it is rebuilding. It may not be able to come to the relative strength of the Soviet Navy in its heyday, the I970s and 1980s. Yet Russia truly believes that it has to be strong at sea.

So, too, do the governments of the fast-growing economies of East and South Asia. On two recent visits to South Korea, both times to give lectures about strategic affairs, I was intrigued to notice that Seoul had a 15-year plan for the expansion of its maritime power in all dimensions, including military capacities.

Right now, for example, South Korea is constructing three large destroyers that displace more than 7,000 tons and possess extremely powerful armaments. Clearly, these are not designed to stop little North Korean submarines from sneaking down the coast.

But, as the Koreans point out, Japan is in the midst of an even greater naval build-up. The 2006 publication of “The Military Balance” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies records that the Japanese Navy includes 54 “principal surface combatants” - that is, destroyers and frigates, warships that possess guns, missiles, torpedoes and depth charges. The Japanese, however, will point to the extremely rapid build-up of the Chinese Navy, which already deploys 71 destroyers and frigates, not to mention 58 submarines (compared with Japan’s 18 subs).

Yet the Chinese naval build-up is only in its early stages, like, say, the U.S. Navy was in the 1890s. Just last month the Congressional Research Service, a body not known for hyperbole or dramatic statement, issued a remarkable 95-page report entitled “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities.” The details are extensive, and look impressive. Perhaps the most important facts are tucked into the first footnote: “By 2010, China’s submarine force will be nearly double the size of the U.S. submarine feet The entire Chinese naval fleet is projected to surpass the size of the U.S. fleet by 2015.”…

…But let us return to the European scene. Here the trend seems to be in the opposite direction, with naval budgets being held down and (given the inexorable rise in the cost of weapons systems and personnel) actual fleet sizes being reduced. The most publicized case here is the news that the Royal Navy may be planning to “mothball” many of its fleet of destroyers and frigates (which, being only 25 in number, is now less than half of Japan’s total).

Angry Conservative members of Parliament are demanding a debate on the fact that defense expenditures represent a smaller percentage of GDP than at any time since the 1930s - and we all know what that implies. Those critics appear even more outraged that the French Navy now possesses more major surface combatants than Britain for the first time in 250 years.

Still, France’s naval budget is not rising by very much, and the navies of Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands are also being held in check. Yet nobody in Europe, so far as I can see, is paying any attention to the naval arms race in Asia. And nobody in Asia is paying any attention to the severe retrenchments of maritime power that are going on in Europe.

This leads to an obvious, final question: What do naval strategic planners in the one continent assume about the future of the world that the planners in the second continent do not? Why is Chinese public television showing programs about the rise of Elizabeth I’s navy at the same time that the British Ministry of Defense is mothballing or scrapping warships with names that go back over 400 years?

Armchair strategists will rush in with many answers to that question: For example, that Asia is more likely to see interstate conflicts in the future than Western Europe, China is determined to curb U.S. hegemony in the Pacific and everyone else is scared of China’s military build-up, and, in any case, these faster-growing economies can afford both guns and butter. All of that may be true. But the plain fact remains that, in an age of great geopolitical uncertainties, the leading European nations are ignoring the ancient Elizabethan caution: “Look to thy Moat.” Can that really be wise?

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

This is the first part of a multi-part effort by the author.

Does Africa Measure Up to the Hype?
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil by John Ghazvinian
The United States now imports more of its oil from Africa than it does from Saudi Arabia. How is oil and the money it brings to the continent’s treasuries transforming Africa? For his new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, John Ghazvinian traveled from the parched dust bowls of Chad and Sudan to the swamps and jungles of Nigeria and the Congo, and from the corridors of Washington to the gleaming offices of “Big Oil.” Does oil-producing Africa live up to the hype? Why is it impossible to buy bananas in Gabon, when they grow in profusion in the nation’s virgin rainforest? Can an underdeveloped country like São Tomé and Príncipe learn from other nations’ mistakes and avoid the “curse of oil”? What effect does the establishment of an oil-company compound in the middle of Chad have on the neighboring land and people? This week, we are publishing four excerpts from Untapped that answer these questions.

Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude skyrocketing, and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between major powers that recalls the 19th-century scramble for colonization. Already, the United States imports more of its oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia, and China, too, looks to the continent for its energy security.

Does Africa measure up to the hype? After all, the entire continent is believed to contain, at best, 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, making it a minnow swimming in an ocean of seasoned sharks. Africa is unlikely ever to “replace” the Middle East or any other major oil-producing region. So why the song and dance? Why all the goose bumps? Why do so many influential people in Washington let themselves get so carried away when they talk about African oil?

The answer has very little to do with geology. Africa’s significance as an oil “play,” to borrow the industry lingo, lies beyond the number of barrels that may or may not be buried under its cretaceous rock. Instead, what makes the African oil boom interesting to energy-security strategists in both Washington and Europe (and, increasingly, Beijing) is a series of serendipitous and unrelated factors that, together, tell a story of unfolding opportunity.

To begin with, one of the more attractive attributes of Africa’s oil boom is the quality of the oil itself. The variety of crude found in the Gulf of Guinea is known in industry parlance as “light” and “sweet,” meaning it is viscous and low in sulfur, and therefore easier and cheaper to refine than, say, Middle Eastern crude, which tends to be lacking in lower hydrocarbons and is therefore very “sticky.” This is particularly appealing to American and European refineries, which have to contend with strict environmental regulations that make it difficult to refine heavier and sourer varieties of crude without running up costs that make the entire proposition worthless.

Then there is the geographic accident of Africa’s being almost entirely surrounded by water, which significantly cuts transport-related costs and risks. The Gulf of Guinea, in particular, is well positioned to allow speedy transport to the major trading ports of Europe and North America. Existing sea-lanes can be used for quick, cheap delivery, so there is no need to worry about the Suez Canal, for instance, or to build expensive pipelines through unpredictable countries. This may seem a minor point, until you look at Central Asia, where the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, stretching from Azerbaijan through Georgia and into Turkey, and intended to deliver Caspian crude into the Mediterranean, had to navigate a minefield of Middle East politics, antiglobalization protests, and red tape before it could be opened. African oil faces none of those issues. It is simply loaded onto a tanker at the point of production and begins its smooth, unmolested journey on the high seas, arriving just days later in Shreveport, Southampton, or Le Havre.

A third advantage, from the perspective of the oil companies, is that Africa offers a tremendously favorable contractual environment. Unlike in, say, Saudi Arabia, where the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco has a monopoly on the exploration, production, and distribution of the country’s crude oil, most sub-Saharan African countries operate on the basis of so-called production-sharing agreements, or PSAs. In these arrangements, a foreign oil company is awarded a license to look for petroleum on the condition that it assume the up-front costs of exploration and production. If oil is discovered in that block, the oil company will share the revenues with the host government, but only after its initial costs have been recouped. PSAs are generally offered to impoverished countries that would never be able to amass either the technical expertise or the billions in capital investment required to drill for oil themselves. For the oil company, a relatively small up-front investment can quickly turn into untold billions in profits.

Yet another strategic benefit, particularly from the perspective of American politicians, is that, until recently, with the exception of Nigeria, none of the oil-producing countries of sub-Saharan Africa had belonged to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Thus they have not been subject to the strict limits on output OPEC imposes on its members in an attempt to keep the price of oil artificially high. The more non-OPEC oil that comes onto the global market, the more difficult it becomes for OPEC countries to sell their crude at high prices, and the lower the overall price of oil. Put more simply, if new reserves are discovered in Venezuela, they have very little effect on the price of oil because Venezuela’s OPEC commitments will not allow it to increase its output very much. But if new reserves are discovered in Gabon, it means more cheap oil for everybody.

But probably the most attractive of all the attributes of Africa’s oil boom, for Western governments and oil companies alike, is that virtually all the big discoveries of recent years have been made offshore, in deepwater reserves that are often many miles from populated land. This means that even if a civil war or violent insurrection breaks out onshore (always a concern in Africa), the oil companies can continue to pump out oil with little likelihood of sabotage, banditry, or nationalist fervor getting in the way. Given the hundreds of thousands of barrels of Nigerian crude that are lost every year as a result of fighting, community protests, and organized crime, this is something the industry gets rather excited about.

Finally, there is the sheer speed of growth in African oil production, and the fact that Africa is one of the world’s last underexplored regions. In a world used to hearing that there are no more big oil discoveries out there, and few truly untapped reserves to look forward to, the ferocious pace and scale of Africa’s oil boom has proved a bracing tonic. One-third of the world’s new oil discoveries since the year 2000 have taken place in Africa. Of the 8 billion barrels of new oil reserves discovered in 2001, 7 billion were found there. In the years between 2005 and 2010, 20 percent of the world’s new production capacity is expected to come from Africa. And there is now an almost contagious feeling in the oil industry that no one really knows just how much oil might be there, since no one’s ever really bothered to check.

All these factors add up to a convincing value proposition: African oil is cheaper, safer, and more accessible than its competitors, and there seems to be more of it every day. And, though Africa may not be able to compete with the Persian Gulf at the level of proven reserves, it has just enough up its sleeve to make it a potential “swing” region—an oil province that can kick in just enough production to keep markets calm when supplies elsewhere in the world are unpredictable. Diversification of the oil supply has been a goal—even an obsession—in the United States since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. Successive U.S. administrations have understood that if the world is overly reliant on two or three hot spots for its energy security, there is a greater risk of supply disruptions and price volatility. And for obvious reasons, the effort to distribute America’s energy-security portfolio across multiple nodes has taken on a new urgency since September 11, 2001. In his State of the Union address in January 2006, President Bush said he wanted to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East crude by 75 percent by 2025.

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Posted at 10:41 AM · Comments (0)

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
April 5, 2007

SHANGHAI: A glimpse of China’s future popped up last week as furtive as a groundhog emerging from its hole.

To trust appearances, it is a future involving some significantly greater measure of pluralism. And because the evidence made its appearance in broad daylight, and not in the realm of shadows, this does not, as some would have it, have the feeling of a dream.

When exactly this future arrives is, of course, unclear, but this harbinger of recent days suggests that it is not so far off. What seems clearer are the hints about how this future will and will not take form.

The event was the remarkable battle of a homeowner against the city of Chongqing and powerful allied property developers, who had earmarked a large site for fancy redevelopment and excavated a huge ditch around what came to be known as the “nail house,” because of the couple’s success in stalling its demolition until they could achieve a shift in what old-fashioned Marxists often used to call “the correlation of forces.”

On the face of it, theirs was a hopeless task, two simple citizens against a mighty and murky alliance of an authoritarian state and big development money.

In reality, though, the couple was anything but alone. They won out in the end, receiving a handsome compensation for their property where so many others had merely been bulldozed - because not only did they realize this fact, in a society where people have been effectively atomized, but because they also figured out how to glue millions of discrete individuals together in sympathy for a cause not directed from above.

Crossing the river by feeling the stones, they figured out how to paste concerned elements of the ever-anonymous Chinese masses into one coherent picture, drawn together by common concerns, and for once animated by an active sense of citizenship instead of powerlessness and resignation.

None of this mobilization would have been possible without media to transmit the message, and Chinese journalists, both traditional and virtual, carried the ball, spreading the word far and wide, turning this into a truly national story. Not so long ago national stories existed only when the government wanted to launch a campaign or put across some message.

The victory was so unusual, and the imagery of the scene of their holdout so powerful - with the wife, Wu Ping, a stylish and skilled dramatist holding forth each day before street audiences and journalists (and vitally, to the foreign press as well) against the backdrop of a single house perched dramatically atop a thimble of earth, with her banner-writing husband holed up inside - that there is a temptation for giddiness.

Giddiness should be resisted. The Chinese state, which sees the growth of a more vibrant civil society as a threat, is strong. It is resourceful and it is committed to do everything it can, in the language of the Ministry of Public Security, to “consolidate the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position.” This is in candid contrast to, say, the language of the kinder, gentler prime minister, Wen Jiabao, who speaks of democracy as a distant goal.

One thing is certain: that the Chinese media did not miss the importance of these events. In a front-page commentary, The Beijing News, for example, spoke of an “emerging age of civil rights.” Commentary like this would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

Other commentators who spoke with relief about how the Chongqing standoff had been resolved without violence showed how far China has come since what one blogger quoted by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project called “a replay of the situation back in those years,” a distinct if discreet reference to the bloody events of Tiananmen Square in 1989. At the same time, the fact that expressions of this kind of relief were so common, though, suggested how much further China has to go before fear is eliminated from public life.

Reading China’s future, like seasonal forecasts based on groundhog appearances, is a risky business. In light of events, a few directions appear relatively clear nonetheless.

China is unlikely to be delivered unto a new era by a Gorbachev-like figure. Indeed, since the Soviet meltdown, the leadership has policed itself vigilantly to prevent such a turn and, under President Hu Jintao, has, if anything, grown more conservative.

It seems unlikely to be delivered by China’s intellectuals, either. The country’s scholarly class is for the most part too cowed and too cosseted, too thoroughly co-opted by the system and by the country’s new affluence to make many waves.

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Posted at 10:33 AM · Comments (0)

The following entry appeared today on Mike Johnston’s photography blog, The Online Photographer , which I’ve followed admiringly for a good while.
Thanks very much, Mike, and thanks to all of the others who commented, or who have taken a moment to look at my flickr stream (Click to access my Flickr stream)

Some of the commentators inquired about prints. A nicely produced catalog of my Berlin show is available for $15 plus handling, which strikes me as a very good deal. Numbered, gallery quality prints are also available on request.

A Mysterious Photographer

“A Glimpse of the World” (Howard French): The local tailor.
Danba, Sichuan Province. October 2006. Rolleiflex 2.8, Ilford Delta.

For me personally, one of the important outcomes of the “Jonathan Greenwald: Conscientious Street Photographer” thread was a modest comment that included a flickr link from someone calling him- (or her-) self “A Glimpse of the World” (hereinafter referred to as Glimpse, with male pronouns, and apologies from me if the latter is incorrect). Glimpse apparently prefers not to be known, but has amassed an impressive amount of unusually fine work on flickr—I’ve returned to his page three times over the past few days, each time discovering more to look at. He practices a sort of street/travel/environmental photography in various cities around the world, and has a fine eye for honest documentary and found portraiture.

You’ll notice that he switches formats (35mm and medium format), cameras, and films, and mixes black-and-white and color. I normally find that photographers who do this create an obstacle for themselves that’s difficult to overcome, with the technical inconsistency fracturing the integrity of the message. (It’s difficult enough to create, and conform to, a consistent style in photographs.) While I still have some reservations about Glimpse’s work in this respect—at least as it’s presented on flickr—I think his vision survives the self-imposed handicap pretty well. See what you think.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Mea culpa: A number of commenters have (correctly) identified Glimpse as Howard French. I don’t know why my reportorial/researcher abilities abandon me whenever I get on flickr, but it’s happened before. For some reason I seem to have a congenital lack of affinity for the flickr interface—the pictures are too small, navigation confuses me, and I never seem to know exactly what the heck I’m doing. I swear I looked for Glimpse’s identity on flickr for 15 minutes before concluding that it just wasn’t there, hence the title of this entry. What can I say? Write it off to my incompetence, I guess.

Posted at 12:31 PM · Comments (0)

Barely half a year into his premiership, Japan’s Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia and mixed feelings in his country’s key ally, the United States. But will the Bush administration use its influence to nudge Abe away from inflammatory behavior?

Abe’s predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, was a mold-breaking leader, reviving Japan’s economy, reforming the postal savings system, and smashing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s faction system. But Koizumi also legitimized a new Japanese nationalism, antagonizing China and South Korea by his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. If anything, Abe is even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan.

Anyone who believes that the Yasukuni controversy is an obscure historical matter that Chinese and Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the 12 Class-A war criminals interred at the shrine; the real problem is the Yushukan military museum next door.

Walking past the Mitsubishi Zero, tanks, and machine guns on display in the museum, one finds a history of the Pacific War that restores “the Truth of Modern Japanese History.” It follows the nationalist narrative: Japan, a victim of the European colonial powers, sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, for example, is described as a “partnership”; one looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.

One might be able to defend the museum as one viewpoint among many in a pluralist democracy. But there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of Japan’s twentieth-century history. Successive Japanese governments have hidden behind the Yushukan museum’s operation by a private religious organization to deny responsibility for the views expressed there.

That is an unconvincing stance. In fact, unlike Germany, Japan has never come to terms with its own responsibility for the Pacific War. Although socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama officially apologized to China in 1995 for the war, Japan has never had a genuine internal debate over its degree of responsibility, and has never made a determined effort to propagate an alternative account to that of Yushukan.

My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990’s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher (unbeknownst to me) to translate my book The End of History and the Last Man into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote The Japan That Can Say No and is now the governor of Tokyo.

In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of large public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is thus the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, but, unlike his German counterparts, he easily draws large and sympathetic audiences. (I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers that “explain” how the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.)

Moreover, there have been several disturbing recent incidents in which physical intimidation has been used by nationalists against critics of Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits, such as the firebombing of former prime ministerial candidate Kato Koichi’s home. (On the other hand, the publisher of the normally conservative Yomiuri Shimbun attacked Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits and published a fascinating series of articles on responsibility for the war.)

This leaves the US in a difficult position. A number of American strategists are eager to ring China with a NATO-like defensive barrier, building outward from the US-Japan Security Treaty. Since the final days of the Cold War, the US has been pushing Japan to rearm, and has officially supported a proposed revision of Article 9 of the postwar constitution, which bans Japan from having a military or waging war.

But America should be careful about what it wishes for. The legitimacy of the entire American military position in the Far East is built around the US exercising Japan’s sovereign function of self-defense. Japan’s unilateral revision of Article 9, viewed against the backdrop of its new nationalism, would isolate Japan from virtually the whole of Asia.

Revising Article 9 has long been part of Abe’s agenda, but whether he pushes ahead with it will depend in large part on the kind of advice he gets from close friends in the US. President Bush was unwilling to say anything about Japan’s new nationalism to his “good friend Junichiro” out of gratitude for Japanese support in Iraq. Now that Japan has withdrawn its small contingent of troops, perhaps Bush will speak plainly to Abe.

Posted at 10:18 AM · Comments (0)

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