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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 The Boston Globe

If recent headlines are any indication, China’s rap sheet of capitalist crimes is growing as fast as its economy. Having exported poison pet food and toothpaste laced with antifreeze earlier this year, the world’s emerging economic powerhouse has diversified into other, equally dubious product lines: scallops coated with putrefying bacteria, counterfeit diabetes tests, pirated Harry Potter books, and baby bibs coated with lead, to name but a few.
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Politicians are belatedly putting China on notice. Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia delivered one of the more stinging counterattacks last month, warning that the United States “must be vigilant about protecting the values we hold dear” in the face of China’s depredations.

His anger reflects the mounting disgust with how recklessly China plies its trade, apparently without regard for the things that make commerce not only dependable but possible: respect for intellectual property, food and drug purity, and basic product safety. With each tawdry revelation, China’s brand of capitalism looks increasingly menacing and foreign to our own sensibilities.

That’s a tempting way to see things, but wrong. What’s happening halfway around the world may be disturbing, even disgraceful, but it’s hardly foreign. A century and a half ago, another fast-growing nation had a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit, and it was the United States.

As with China and Harry Potter, America was a hotbed of literary piracy; like China’s poisonous pet-food makers, American factories turned out adulterated foods and willfully mislabeled products. Indeed, to see China today is to glimpse, in a distant mirror, the 19th-century American economy in all its corner-cutting, fraudulent glory.
A tragic lesson (By Stephen Mihm )

China may be a very different country, but in many ways it is a younger version of us. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can realize that China’s fast and loose brand of commerce is not an expression of national character, much less a conspiracy to poison us and our pets, but a phase in the country’s development. Call it adolescent capitalism, if you will: bursting with energy, exuberant, dynamic. Like any teenager, China’s behavior is also maddening, irresponsible, and dangerous. But it is a phase, and understanding it that way gives us some much-needed perspective, as well as some tools for handling the problem. Indeed, if we want to understand how to deal with China, we could do worse than look to our own history as a guide.

A bit of empathy might even be in order. One hundred and fifty years ago, even America’s closest trade partners were despairing about our cheating ways. Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, was, like many Britons, stunned by the economic ambition of our nation’s inhabitants, and appalled by what they would do for the sake of profit. When he first stepped off the boat in Boston, he found the city’s bookstores rife with pirated copies of his novels, along with those of his countrymen. Dickens would later deliver lectures decrying the practice, and wrote home in outrage: “my blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice.”

In the United States of the early 19th century, capitalism as we know it today was still very much in its infancy. Most people still lived on small farms, and despite the persistent myth that America was the land of laissez-faire, there were plenty of laws on the books aimed at keeping tight reins on the market economy. But as commerce became more complex, and stretched over greater distances, this patchwork system of local and state-level regulations was gradually overwhelmed by a new generation of wheeler-dealer entrepreneurs.

Taking a page from the British, who had pioneered many ingenious methods of adulteration a generation or two earlier, American manufacturers, distributors, and vendors of food began tampering with their products en masse — bulking out supplies with cheap filler, using dangerous additives to mask spoilage or to give foodstuffs a more appealing color.

A committee of would-be reformers who met in Boston in 1859 launched one of the first studies of American food purity, and their findings make for less-than-appetizing reading: candy was found to contain arsenic and dyed with copper chloride; conniving brewers mixed extracts of “nux vomica,” a tree that yields strychnine, to simulate the bitter taste of hops. Pickles contained copper sulphate, and custard powders yielded traces of lead. Sugar was blended with plaster of Paris, as was flour. Milk had been watered down, then bulked up with chalk and sheep’s brains. Hundred-pound bags of coffee labeled “Fine Old Java” turned out to consist of three-fifths dried peas, one-fifth chicory, and only one-fifth coffee.

Though there was the occasional clumsy attempt at domestic reform by midcentury — most famously in response to the practice of selling “swill milk” taken from diseased cows force-fed a diet of toxic refuse produced by liquor distilleries — little changed. And just as the worst sufferers of adulterated food in China today are the Chinese, so it was the Americans who suffered in the early 19th-century United States. But when America started exporting food more broadly after the Civil War, the practice started to catch up to us.

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Posted at 3:50 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Foreign Affairs

China’s environmental problems are mounting. Water pollution and water scarcity are burdening the economy, rising levels of air pollution are endangering the health of millions of Chinese, and much of the country’s land is rapidly turning into desert. China has become a world leader in air and water pollution and land degradation and a top contributor to some of the world’s most vexing global environmental problems, such as the illegal timber trade, marine pollution, and climate change. As China’s pollution woes increase, so, too, do the risks to its economy, public health, social stability, and international reputation. As Pan Yue, a vice minister of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), warned in 2005, “The [economic] miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.”

With the 2008 Olympics around the corner, China’s leaders have ratcheted up their rhetoric, setting ambitious environmental targets, announcing greater levels of environmental investment, and exhorting business leaders and local officials to clean up their backyards. The rest of the world seems to accept that Beijing has charted a new course: as China declares itself open for environmentally friendly business, officials in the United States, the European Union, and Japan are asking not whether to invest but how much.

Unfortunately, much of this enthusiasm stems from the widespread but misguided belief that what Beijing says goes. The central government sets the country’s agenda, but it does not control all aspects of its implementation. In fact, local officials rarely heed Beijing’s environmental mandates, preferring to concentrate their energies and resources on further advancing economic growth. The truth is that turning the environmental situation in China around will require something far more difficult than setting targets and spending money; it will require revolutionary bottom-up political and economic reforms.

For one thing, China’s leaders need to make it easy for local officials and factory owners to do the right thing when it comes to the environment by giving them the right incentives. At the same time, they must loosen the political restrictions they have placed on the courts, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the media in order to enable these groups to become independent enforcers of environmental protection. The international community, for its part, must focus more on assisting reform and less on transferring cutting-edge technologies and developing demonstration projects. Doing so will mean diving into the trenches to work with local Chinese officials, factory owners, and environmental NGOs; enlisting international NGOs to help with education and enforcement policies; and persuading multinational corporations (MNCs) to use their economic leverage to ensure that their Chinese partners adopt the best environmental practices.

Without such a clear-eyed understanding not only of what China wants but also of what it needs, China will continue to have one of the world’s worst environmental records, and the Chinese people and the rest of the world will pay the price.

SINS OF EMISSION

China’s rapid development, often touted as an economic miracle, has become an environmental disaster. Record growth necessarily requires the gargantuan consumption of resources, but in China energy use has been especially unclean and inefficient, with dire consequences for the country’s air, land, and water.

The coal that has powered China’s economic growth, for example, is also choking its people. Coal provides about 70 percent of China’s energy needs: the country consumed some 2.4 billion tons in 2006 — more than the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined. In 2000, China anticipated doubling its coal consumption by 2020; it is now expected to have done so by the end of this year. Consumption in China is huge partly because it is inefficient: as one Chinese official told Der Spiegel in early 2006, “To produce goods worth $10,000 we need seven times the resources used by Japan, almost six times the resources used by the U.S. and — a particular source of embarrassment — almost three times the resources used by India.”

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Posted at 5:05 AM · Comments (0)

Published: August 8, 2007
Copyright New Music Box

The colonization of silence is complete. Its progress was so gradual that even those who watched it with alarm have only now begun to take stock of the losses. Reflection, discernment, a sustainable sense of tranquility, of knowing where and how to find oneself—these are only the most obvious casualties of marauding noise’s march to the sea. Much more insidious has been the loss of music itself.

But wait, this can’t be: Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt’s Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

And, of course, since silence—unless one is in an anechoic chamber—is never wholly silent, its presence, its expression, allows us to distinguish between sounds that are and are not music. Thus is not-music given entry into music; Cage aside, the sounds in the hall, in the street, in the club, are not music, though they become part of the shared discourse that is; they are the fragments of conversation overheard but not comprehended by speakers of a different language, passionately engaged in their own dialogue amidst the whirl of an alien culture. Thus is music’s wonderful strangeness amplified by a silence that is always trying to tell us something. Exactly what it tells us can be very precise, at least in musical terms.

A few examples: The spaces that enfold the last phrases of Webern’s Three Orchestral Songs of 1913-14 open a door for us into an understanding of “O neige Dich, O komme wieder, Du grüst und segnest…” (O incline to us, O come back…You greet and bless\The breath of evening takes away the light\I see your dear face no more) that most of us cannot access through a reading of the text alone. We are drawn into a time-sense that seems to pull us across an event horizon, where things seem both very big and very small. Thus, with the solo whispering of “Du grüst und segnest,” the surrounding silence amplifies the softness of Du, the sibilance of segnest; the intimacy of this direct entreaty is made almost overpowering, embarrassing even, by the varied acoustical richness of each syllable. “You greet and bless” becomes a sacred utterance of hushed sensuality that transforms the “Mother of grace” whose “dear face [we] see no more” into a departed lover.

In Webern’s Variations Op. 30 something wonderfully different happens. At the work’s outset, individual attacks are set off from each other by the silences that separate them. Our sense of the attacks, their lengths and intensities, is determined by the lengths of the silences. As we move through the piece and individual attacks are layered with others of varying durations, finally yielding extended lines, our apprehension of shape is fueled by the recollection of past silences in our present, echoic memory, on that level of consciousness where past remains present; we continue to experience silence through the welter of polyphony, a silence of varying degrees, each given its own feeling-tone by the different sounds that eventually overtake it. This form-giving potentiality of silence, that is to say the active memory of silence as an agent in the musical discourse, is so important in Webern’s music as to be generalized as a basic principle.

This can be said of much other music as well, of course, really of all musics on some level. But what was a tacit understanding for most composers before Webern became for him a core expressive value. Thus we can say that without a silence within which to develop, and in which the listener is deeply immersed, Webern’s music only half-exists at best.

This is true also of Morton Feldman, in whose late works a different—but no less dynamic—sense of silence is at play. In For Samuel Beckett, to take just one example, a massive texture unfolds slowly, almost imperceptibly, with columns of sound fanning out inch by sonic inch, their relationships to each other constantly changing through a gradual process of temporal displacement. The effect at first could be described as prismatic, with shafts of light intermittently piercing the slow turning of these huge shapes. Further on, however, it begins to feel as if the texture is breathing, with dynamic swells resulting naturally from the juxtaposition of different timbres. Listen further still and we now find silences parting the texture and defining the large-scale motion of the piece. In constructive terms these silences are the result of ever-widening spaces created by the gradual slowing of the canons that run from the work’s beginning to its end. The affective sense, however, is just the opposite: It is silence that drives the work’s pulmonary rhythm; silence asserts itself with greater and greater confidence, with a stronger sense of self, until it clears away the texture and is left with only itself, only its own perfect wholeness. For those who love Feldman’s music and are able to stay with it to the end the effect is tonic, serving to endow one’s own cluttered life with a sense of space.

What do Webern and Feldman have to tell us about our lives and our time? Do they speak directly to the experience of life in a century of clanging metal and unabated trivia? Or does their work simply tell us about them? For Webern it seems to have been the composing-out of a singular view of art as the willful emanation of nature, the incarnation in pure, formal sentience of the structural purity of the cosmos, that constellated his unique sense of the delicate and the hushed. Feldman’s view was equally rich and evocative, colored as it was by his friendship with Cage, though expressed in more workaday terms (he once remarked that like a tailor, he was a craftsman, committed to quality of detail; “the suit fits better” he said.). On a personal level one could conclude that Webern, a small, modest, and introspective man was born to write small, quiet music. How then to explain Feldman? Big, garrulous, fun, brilliant, obscene, he seemed to present a persona that defied connection with his art.

Whatever their sources in the personal histories and genetics of their composers, the musics of Webern and Feldman (and countless others from recent years) make possible for us a relationship to silence, and the room it gives us, that would seem otherwise impossible in a deafening age. The properties in their musics that accomplish this are not unique to them, of course, any more than the perception that the world is getting louder is unique to us as moderns. These are both matters of degree. It is probable that in two hundred years—if we are still in a position have this discussion—the level and din of information exchange, aural, digital, and (who knows) psychic, may make our current age seem a veritable Walden. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem.

For us to be able to enter the world that music creates for us, we need a silence within which to listen. It will be said in response that in many cultures music is not presented as an object of veneration within a temple of adoring quietude, but rather as part of the rush and tumult of everyday life; thus we should not need the expectant hush of the concert hall ourselves in order to go into our music. These are valid points that do challenge the clear subject/object separation that classical music traditions have tended to enforce.

In many world societies, however, there are still spaces—if only interior, or metaphorical, or temporal—set aside for contemplation, for noiseless recalibration of the soul, and in contemporary American culture there are almost none. Our social rituals are constrained by the incessant soundtrack imposed in our public spaces, and our places of worship, by and large, have given themselves over to a muzak-based sense of liturgy that tells us at every step of the way what to feel and with what intensity. Many of us, turning away from both mainline- and mega-church, have sought peace in new-age bookstores, but these, even with their palmists and meditation rooms, surround their patrons with a noxious haze of synthesizers, pennywhistles, and Inuit drums. But beyond shopping, what primary experience are we having here? Are we listeners seeking an archetype of beauty or seekers listening for the godhead? It turns out we are neither—though we may have been duped into one or the other conviction. We are simply consumers. The hope is that, like dairy cattle, we will become more productive if encouraged in our purchases by this kind of marginal musical discourse.

This, of course, is the common denominator in all the examples above, and it extends beyond the ritual into the political. If we frequent any number of the hipper clothing chains we will find ourselves buoyed by emo or hip-hop beats that serve to wash away the sense of complicity we feel in supporting a sweatshop economy; the music is telling us that we belong here, that we’re different, we’re aware, we’re not the problem. We’re down with all the world’s peoples, with the losers and dreamers, with the left and the right. We’re down with EVERYONE; we don’t want any trouble, we just want to buy a pair of cargo pants. Once again, the absence of silence makes it impossible for us to decode the onslaught before we’ve succumbed to it. And this is not just a function of capitalism. It’s worse.

We find ourselves as a culture unable to assuage our loneliness except through the ceaseless accompaniment of our everyday actions. In such a world buying a book or a shirt is not merely to acquire a thing, to fill a need; it is, rather, to participate in the forced scripting of our lives according to commercial archetypes that tell us, through the imaginary film score by which we buy, eat, make love, crap, worship, and, eventually, die, not who we are but who we wish we were, who the music tells us we want to be. Even our sense of time becomes hopelessly distorted, as we float through our lives according to the dreamlike spans of musical phrases rather than the waking rhythms of clock-time. Thus our capacity to be present for our lives, for our work especially, is compromised by a time-sense that is artificially constructed along unconscious models in order to give perspective on the conscious experience of time’s passing, not to replace that experience entirely. In losing silence, and the corresponding potential for musical discernment that silence engenders, we lose ourselves, our native sense of our motion through life.

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Posted at 12:20 AM · Comments (0)

Published August 21, 2007
Copyright The New York Times
By Lydia Polgreen and Howard W. French

KABWE, Zambia — The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air.
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New Power in Africa
Winners and Losers

This series explores China’s deepening economic and political ties with Africa.
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The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 years ago, the vast compound had shuddered to the whir of rollers and the clatter of mechanical weaving machines spooling out millions of yards of brightly colored African cloth.

Today, only the cotton gin still runs, with the company’s Chinese managers buying raw cotton for export to China’s humming textile industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen.

“We are back where we started,” said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.”

Chinese officials and their African allies like to call their growing relationship a win-win proposition, a rising tide that lifts all boats in China’s ever-widening sea of influence.

This year, China pledged $20 billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over the next three years. In Zambia alone, China plans to invest $800 million in the next few years.

From South Africa’s manganese mines to Niger’s uranium pits, from Sudan’s oil fields to Congo’s cobalt mines, China’s hunger for resources has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping push some of the world’s poorest countries further up the ladder of development.

But China is also exporting huge volumes of finished, manufactured goods — T-shirts, flashlights, radios and socks, just to name a few — to those same countries, hampering Africa’s ability to make its own products and develop healthy, diverse economies.

“Most of our countries have been independent for 35 to 50 years,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African entrepreneur and a political analyst. “Yet they have failed to develop manufacturing for a variety of reasons, and for the Chinese that’s a huge opportunity. We are a very important market for China.”

On the one hand, Chinese imports give Africans access to goods and amenities that developed countries take for granted but that most people here could not have dreamed of affording just a few years ago — cellular telephones, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, computers. And cheaper prices on more basic items, like clothing, light bulbs and shoes, mean people have more money in their pockets.

“There is no doubt China has been good for Zambia,” said Felix Mutati, Zambia’s minister of finance. “Why should we have a bad attitude toward the Chinese when they are doing all the right things? They are bringing investment, world-class technology, jobs, value addition. What more can you ask for?”

But across Africa, and especially in the relatively robust economies of southern Africa, there are clear winners and losers. Textile mills and other factories here in Zambia have suffered and even closed as cheap Chinese goods flood the world market, eliminating jobs in a country that sorely needs them.

The Chinese investment in copper mining here has left a trail of heartbreak and recrimination after one of the worst industrial accidents in Zambian history, a blast at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in Chambishi in 2005 that killed 46 people, most of them in their 20s.

“Who is winning? The Chinese are, for sure,” said Michael Sata, a Zambian opposition politician who campaigned in last year’s presidential election on an anti-China platform. He lost, but with a surprisingly strong showing, and his party, the Patriotic Front, won many seats in local and parliamentary elections in Lusaka, the capital, and the Zambian industrial heartland, where China has made its biggest investments.

“Their interest is exploiting us, just like everyone who came before,” he said. “They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the country’s role in Zambia. But Chinese diplomats across Africa and top officials in Beijing have emphasized the money and opportunity they bring to Africa. In Zambia, for example, government officials say that the Chinese are sending dozens of workers for training in China and that their investments will create thousands of high-wage jobs.
Skip to next paragraph
New Power in Africa
Winners and Losers

This series explores China’s deepening economic and political ties with Africa.
Previous Articles in the Series »
World View: Lydia Polgreen on China’s new role in Africa (mp3)
Multimedia
China’s Investment in Africa Comes With a PricePhotographs
China’s Investment in Africa Comes With a Price

Measured in some ways, Zambia’s economy is booming. Copper prices have soared from 75 cents a pound in January 2003 to more than $3 a pound this year, driven in large part by Chinese demand. That demand has pushed Zambia’s long-dormant copper mines into record production.

China’s Nonferrous Metals Corporation, a state-owned company, purchased rights to develop a mine in Chambishi, in the heart of the copper belt, in 1998, and it plans to build factories in an export processing zone that will bring as many as 60,000 jobs, according to government officials.

But China’s growing presence in global trade is wiping out thousands of jobs in countries with fledgling manufacturing sectors like Zambia and South Africa.

Despite relatively low wages in many countries, African manufacturers find it very hard to compete, arguing that China’s currency policies undervalue the yuan and give Chinese exporters a huge advantage.

Many industries in China also benefited at various points from subsidies and free or low-cost government financing, making their costs lower. Beyond that, there are major infrastructure problems in Africa, where industry struggles with inadequate roads and railways, and unreliable electricity and water supplies.

“So who do you blame?” said Martyn J. Davies, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “You can’t blame China for being too competitive. China is doing what every other emerging market is doing.”

The textile and clothing industry, one of the engines China used to fuel its own economic expansion in the 1980s, has been particularly hard hit in Africa. For decades, African countries exported large quantities of clothes and textiles to developed countries under a trade agreement intended to protect European and American markets from competition from China and others, while encouraging exports from the world’s poorest nations. But the trade provision, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, expired in January 2005, putting these countries in direct export competition with China.

Africa found itself once again on the losing end of globalization. If copper is Zambia’s bread and butter, manufacturing should have been its main meal — just as many economies across the globe have progressed from producers of raw materials to low-tech manufacturing and beyond, a well-trod path to development.

Ms. Zimba, 40, a quality-control worker at the plant here who asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country with her brother.

She earned a little less than $100 a month, as well as free health care and a pension, and a little three-room house in the workers’ compound. But since she lost her job, her family’s standard of living has plummeted. The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will come up with next semester’s tuition for her 20-year-old daughter’s trade school.

“We will see what God brings me,” Ms. Zimba said.

For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she thought she had escaped — her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 and reduced to selling in the market as well.

“I am right back where I started,” Ms. Zimba said.

As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as “briefcase investors.”

“They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave,” she said.

Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was nasty. A trip to the site of China’s big new investment, Chambishi, had to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely understood.

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Posted at 11:57 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Project Syndicate

The Western media have a habit of going on feeding frenzies. Ironically, when it comes to China, the latest frenzy concerns food itself. The execution this week of the former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), Zhen Xiaoyu, who accepted almost $1 million in bribes, shows that the frenzy has now seeped into China as well.
First came a spate of stories about pet food laced with melamine (a coal derivative), cough medicine and toothpaste adulterated with diethylene glycol (a sweet-tasting industrial chemical used in anti-freeze and brake fluid), toy trains decorated with lead-based paints, bacteria-infected antibiotics, exploding cell phone batteries, and defective car tires.
Now, attention has now turned to food. The world press is filled with stories about honey laced with industrial sweeteners, canned goods contaminated by bacteria and excessive amounts of additives, rice wine braced with industrial alcohol, and farm-raised fish, eel, and shrimp fed large doses of antibiotics and then washed down with formaldehyde to lower bacterial counts.
In response, China’s government acted almost instantly. The General Administration of Quality and Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine conducted a survey and reported that nearly one-fifth of all products made in China for domestic use did not measure up to safety and quality standards. At the same time, regulators increased inspections, closed down some 180 food manufacturers and now post the names of violators on their Web site.
Moreover, not only was Zhen Xiaouyu executed, but Cao Wenzhuang, who was in charge of drug registration at the SFDA, was sentenced to death for accepting roughly $300,000 in bribes from drug manufacturers. Both verdicts were doubtless calculated, as a famous Chinese proverb puts it, to “kill some chickens in order to scare the monkeys.”
But why does this surprise us? After all, “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” has been a chaotic free-for-all for some time. Roughly 75% of China’s food is now produced by small, private, and un-licensed operations that are difficult to regulate.
With little knowledge of China’s tectonic changes, foreigners have been investing, buying, trading, and extravagantly praising its amazing, but hell-bent, “economic boom.” Fear of “China bashing” has made it difficult for so-called “friends of China” to discuss its darker side openly.
The Chinese people themselves, however, have been far from unaware that the purity of their food, medicine, water, and air is in doubt. The xiadao xiaoxi (back alley news) has long been replete with rumors of things going awry. One small-time operation ground up sheet-rock and put it in gel-caps to sell as medicine. A peasant village raided a hospital dumpster to reclaim discarded surgical equipment, wash it in a nearby canal, re-package it in sealed plastic saying “sterilized,” and sell it back to the hospital at cut-rate prices.
It has not helped, of course, that the Communist Party loathes a free press and a robust civil society, both of which are essential information feedback loops in ensuring any country’s well-being.
Nor has it helped that China’s regulatory agencies lag far behind the growth of its economy. For example, the Beijing office of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration has less than 300 employees, whereas the United States Environmental Protection Administration has over 17,000.
China’s mad rush toward fuqiang (wealth and power) has given it little chance to develop all the compensatory institutions that any truly developed, not to say enlightened, society needs to achieve equilibrium and social health.
But in today’s globalized world, where national boundaries have morphed into synapses for myriad kinds of uncontrollable interactions, each country’s problems have become everyone’s problem. So, before we in the West becomes too censorious of China’s quality control problems, we should remember our complicity in making China the world’s industrial park and global dumping ground for many toxic industries. While we may lament the loss of manufacturing jobs through “outsourcing,” we certainly do not lament exporting massive amounts of pollution to China.
China may come to rue the wanton eagerness with which it has embraced industrialization. Already, the Chinese are beginning to awaken from the infatuation with development that besieged them as they began to emerge from the commodity-starved Cultural Revolution. In a world of scarcity, more always seemed better.
But now, just as the West began to understand decades ago that the natural environment has limits, China is showing the first signs of entering a post-industrial phase. So, rather than simply shutting our doors to Chinese products, we might contemplate helping China by opening the doors of our regulatory agencies to Chinese regulators.
To do so would actually help ourselves. For, even with “strategic competitors” like China, we now live in a global commons in which we share air, water, manufactured goods, and even food.

Posted at 1:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

August 19, 2007

CHINA claims that its economy is growing at 10 to 11 percent a year,
and China’s official analysts say that their nation will catch up with
the United States long before the 22nd century arrives. Don’t believe
it.

First, let’s deal with the implausibility of the official Chinese
statistics. Mathematically, if the overall economy were to grow 10
percent annually, and the 70 percent of the economy that is based in
rural areas were not growing (as stated by the Chinese government), the
economy in China’s cities would have to be growing by 33 percent a
year. The urban economy is growing rapidly, but not at a 33 percent
pace.

Furthermore, Chinese statistics conflict with those of Hong Kong, the
semiautonomous territory that serves as the financial capital of much
of southern China. In 2001, Hong Kong had a recession, which is to say
that it reported that its gross domestic product fell. Guangdong, the
adjacent Chinese province, has a population of around 200 million. In
2001, it reported that its G.D.P. grew by 10 percent. What are the
chances that both of those numbers are correct? Very slim.

Economic growth rates can be inferred from electricity consumption. In
every country in the world, electricity use has generally grown faster
than the G.D.P. Electricity is necessary for nearly all productive
activities, and because of inefficiencies, consumption of electricity
has generally outstripped economic growth. Rising energy costs have
resulted in more efficient use of electricity, but especially in the
developing world, economic growth has still generally lagged growth in
electricity.

But if China’s official numbers are to be believed, there are
provinces in China where the G.D.P. has been growing faster than energy
use. That is unlikely, since the central government’s statistics also
say that energy use per unit of G.D.P. is going up — not down, as
claimed in provincial G.D.P. statistics.

Among the world’s 12 most rapidly growing economies over the last 10
years, the G.D.P. has grown only 45 percent as fast as electricity
consumption. In the early 1970s, Japan was shutting down its
electricity-guzzling aluminum industry. During this period, the G.D.P.
grew 60 percent as fast as electricity consumption, the highest
recorded level among industrialized nations.

Using those numbers as a guide, if we consider China’s actual
electrical use, which is relatively easy to measure, and do a little
math, we come up with this estimate: The G.D.P. in China has been
growing somewhere between 4.5 percent (using the average for a rapidly
growing country) to 6 percent a year (using the highest rate for
Japan), not at the 10 percent rate claimed in official statistics.

The official statistic for China’s overall growth rate is best
regarded as an approximate growth rate of the economy of its cities.

China also officially claims that it will catch up with the United
States and become the world’s largest economy well before the 22nd
century arrives.

There is an equally simple reason that neither of these predictions is
likely to be realized. It simply takes more than 100 years for a large,
less economically developed country to catch up with the world leader
in per capita income. One need look only at the history of the United
States, which had a much higher growth rate than Britain in the 19th
century, yet did not catch up until World War I. Or consider Japan and
the United States. Some 150 years after Japan started to modernize
during the Meiji restoration, the country’s per capita G.D.P. is still
only 80 percent of that of the United States in terms of purchasing
power parity — although, in nominal terms, it has caught up.

The United States is not standing still. In fact, its per capita
income grew faster than nearly all other big countries from 1990 to
2007. Europe’s per capita income fell from 85 percent of that of the
United States in 1990 to 66 percent in 2007, according to International
Monetary Fund statistics.

So let’s say that the inflation-adjusted growth rate for China is 4
percent a year. This is optimistic, because China will certainly have
some bad years in the next century. Every country does — remember the
Great Depression in the United States. A 4 percent rate is faster than
any big country has ever grown for 100 years. But assume that China can
do it. Assume, too, that America grows at the 3 percent rate it has
averaged for the last 15 years.

Now project the two growth rates forward: the inflation-adjusted per-
capita G.D.P. of China would be less than $40,000 in 2100, versus
almost $650,000 in the United States. That’s because China starts at
$1,000 per capita and the United States at $43,000. If, in 2100, China
has four times as many people as the United States, as it does now,
China would still not have a total G.D.P. equal to America’s.

But it is unlikely to have four times as many people. It is always a
mistake to project population growth rates for a century, but let’s do
it anyway: With a one-child policy and a sex ratio that favors boys
(many men won’t find wives) — China should experience a decline in
population in the 21st century. Yet let’s assume for a moment that
China’s population remains constant, at 1.3 billion. If immigration to
the United States continued at the current rate, America’s population
would rise. If the population grew at 1 percent a year, as it has
recently, it would more than double by 2100, reducing the enormous
population gap between the two countries. Are these projections likely
to be realized? Who knows?

What is clear is that China is unlikely to surpass the United States
in G.D.P. in absolute or relative terms anytime soon.

There may be a Chinese century, but it will be the 22nd century — not
the 21st.

Posted at 12:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright SPIEGEL - ONLINE

August 15, 2007

It’s a story that has made headlines around the world: Slave laborers have
been found in Chinese brick factories. The authorities have freed many of
them, but some fear there could be hundreds more being imprisoned, beaten
and starved. Some parents have begun searching for their sons on their own.

The 22-year-old farmer’s son Ma Yongqiang from the village Yubao in the
fertile fields near China’s Yellow River wanted finally to get married, but his chances were limited. Before tying the knot, a groom has to have a house
>or at least a decent job to show his prospective father-in-law. But Ma
>didn’t have either. Making things worse, he didn’t make a particularly
>handsome catch with his diminutive stature, droopy right eyelid and his mere
>six years of education.
>
>
>
>And so he left his job at his uncle’s construction company where he was
>being trained to become a welder. His salary of 500 yuan a month, roughly
>€50, wasn’t nearly enough to find a bride.
>That was just before Chinese New Year. On February 28, Ma boarded a bus and
>traveled 60 kilometers to the old imperial city of Xi’an. Once there he
>asked for directions to a job agency near the train station, where he
>promptly got an offer. “I was supposed to become a watchman,” Ma says. “They
>promised me 1,500 yuan a month.”
>
>The next morning he piled into a small car known in China as a “breadbox”
>with three other men. During the trip Ma asked if he could call home once
>more, but was told: “Not any more.” That’s when Ma realized his job search
>had taken a turn for the worse.
>
>Three Tortuous Months
>
>His trip ended some 60 kilometers outside of Xi’an on the other side of the
>Yellow River in a village called Houfeng in Shanxi province. Ma and his
>three companions were then imprisoned in a narrow space already occupied by
>others. Three tortuous months followed.
>
>
> >From 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. each day, Ma was forced to push a cart filled
>with bricks. The first meal was at 2:30 p.m. and the second only after the
>workday was done. “We got cabbage and steamed buns,” says Ma. He was never
>paid for his labor. The foremen holding them captive beat anyone who was too
>slow, complained, or even simply talked to other laborers. One morning at 3
>a.m. he managed to escape. He fled through a pepper plantation in a remote
>valley.
>But it was all in vain. Ma got disoriented and found himself right back at
>the brick factory. The barking of a guard dog gave him away. The foremen
>beat him while screaming: “We’ll have to keep you chained up.” Ma begged on
>his knees for forgiveness, promising he’d never try to escape again.
>
>Mercifully, it was all over a few weeks later. In early June, the police
>raided the factory and freed the laborers. They slapped 100 yuan in Ma’s
>hand and told him to take the bus home. He did what the men in the blue
>uniforms told him.
>
>Shady Job Agencies
>
>Ma is only one of several slave laborers that China’s authorities have
>discovered working in brick factories in Shanxi and Henan provinces in
>recent weeks. Pictures of the raids showing confused and abused men and
>youths shocked the world. The photos showed a different China from the one
>normally seen in the West — those portraying the unstoppable rise of an
>economic superpower. This China on display was an undeveloped country from a
>pre-industrial age. The proud hosts of the 2008 Olympic Games are now
>confronted with the ugly accusation that they’ve tolerated hordes of forced
>laborers for far too long — modern slaves sold off as chattel by shady job
>agencies.
>
>
>
>Chinese intellectuals like Hu Shuli, the editor in chief of the business
>magazine Caijing, are questioning whether the country — with its poorly
>paid labor market, exploitation of migrant workers, and even outright
>slavery — is denying many of its citizens “the right to freedom and
>dignity.” Has China after almost 58 years of communist rule completely lost
>its soul? “These incidents are truly ignominious for a civilized society,”
>says Jia Fenyong, a columnist for the state-run news agency Xinhua.
>Those looking into the causes of the scandal have uncovered the unsavory
>shadow world existing alongside China’s remarkable economic rise in recent
>years. It is a realm of provincial cities hoping to join the country’s march
>of modernization and countless villages that have a few simple brick
>buildings, horrible roads, and inhabitants that can barely read and write.
>
>It’s here that traditional family clans and mafia-like organizations have
>the say. Police have little power relative to local business magnates. No
>one is surprised when an official from a regional supervisory agency sells a
>recently freed young man from one brick factory to the next — and charges
>him 300 yuan for the service.
>
>Part 2: Prison Time, Executions — and Cover Up?
>
>
>
>But ever since the first slave laborers stumbled out of their imprisonment
>in Shanxi, the regime in Beijing has attempted to limit the damage to
>China’s reputation. The Olympics are not far off; the official countdown
>started last week with a huge fireworks show and the government is eager to
>show its best face to the world. It’s bad enough that international
>organizations are currently using the upcoming sporting spectacle to
>vociferously demand that the government improve its record on human rights
>and press freedom. China’s premier Wen Jiabao has promised that human
>traffickers will face severe punishment in the future.
>Even more indicative of China’s dedication to ending the practice of forced
>labor, members of the political elite are demanding a thorough investigation
>and state-controlled television is broadcasting images of the unfortunate
>victims. Yu Youjun, the governor of Shanxi, admitted there had been
>incidents of “dereliction of duty by officials and corruption of
>individuals” and said he personally had “pangs of remorse” and was
>”inconsolable.”
>
>Concrete steps have been taken. The communist leadership first shut down the
>dubious job agencies near train and bus stations in both provinces and it
>also, at least temporarily, closed down the brick factories — including the
>one in Houfeng. The large kiln for making bricks is now cold, a small
>official notice attached to it reads: “Closed by the Yuncheng Administration
>for Industry and Trade, Department Development Zone Fenglingdu, June 16.”
>
>’Become Rich and Find Happiness’
>
>Wang Tong, a laborer from Henan province, keeps watch over the factory from
>a nearby barracks. He’s worked there loading bricks onto trucks since the
>beginning of the year. Forced labor? Beatings? “I don’t know anything about
>that and I haven’t talked with other workers,” he says. “The foremen brought
>the people here.”
>
>Brick factory owner Yao Zhengye lives around the corner in a gray farmer’s
>house. The walls are adorned with the phrases common throughout the
>countryside: “Become rich and find happiness.” But the boss is not at home,
>having fled far away.
>
>At least village leader Yao Fusheng, 54, is around. The 2,000 inhabitants
>recently re-elected him after he improved the roads and had new streetlights
>installed. Aside from his municipal duties he runs his own small
>construction firm specializing in concrete walls.
>
>”I knew nothing about it,” says the mayor with sorghum moonshine on his
>breath. “When the police came, I was in Shandong province.” He honestly
>never visited the most important factory in his village? “No, I never went
>there.”
>
>
>The main thoroughfare in Ruicheng district is called “Create Harmony Road,”
>which is dotted with brick factories. Most of them have been deserted, but
>one remains a scene of activity — if not of actual production. Workers play
>cards with a bottle of liquor on the table. “I only employ local labor,”
>says the owner, a squarely built man with closely cropped hair.
>His license hangs near the door. “We’re legal,” he says, “but we’re still
>not allowed to work. But, if we don’t fulfill our contracts we’ll have to
>pay fines.” He’s heard of the use of slave labor in the area: “It was greed.
>Pure greed.”
>
>Fast, Hard and Unfair
>
>Some 150 kilometers to the north in Linfen, the country’s justice system is
>working double time. The first defendants had to face trial in early July as
>the authorities try to demonstrate how hard they are cracking down.
>
>A brick factory owner, his foreman and three other men have been charged for
>imprisoning 31 people for months in the district of Hongdong. The boss is
>the son of the local Communist Party leader. One of his men supposedly
>killed a 60-year-old man in November 2006 because he wasn’t working enough.
>”I hit him with a shovel on the head. Then he fell over,” says the accused.
>He’s charged with deprivation of freedom and intentional assault. It’s a
>trial typical for China: fast, hard, and unfair. Only one of the defendants
>has an attorney.
>
>There are no witnesses. The radio of a policeman crackles with the orders
>not to let the press into the courtroom. Around six in the evening the trial
>is over, but the judges do not hand down a sentence. As is common in
>politically sensitive cases, the verdict will first need to be cleared with
>the Communist Party.
>
>
>
>It comes two weeks later: The factory owner gets nine years in prison, the
>foreman life. The killer with the shovel is sentenced to death. By early
>August the courts sentenced 27 factory bosses and foremen to prison for
>terms up to three years. Only four officials, including one policeman, get
>put behind bars. Ninety-five party members receive warnings or slaps on the
>wrist.
>It’s unclear how many men and youths the police ended up freeing from
>captivity. The last official information from mid-June listed 600. But where
>are the others?
>
>’No Sign of Our Children’
>
>After regional television in Henan broadcasted its first report about slave
>labor, more than a thousand parents announced that their children were
>missing. Others called lawyers and police stations. Some haven’t heard from
>their relatives in almost 10 years.
>
>Probably not all ended up as forced laborers in brick factories or coal
>mines, but a majority of them likely did. Are they being hidden until the
>latest crackdown blows over? Have the factory owners possibly killed then in
>order to get rid of incriminating witnesses?
>
>That’s the greatest fear haunting around 400 fathers who have appealed to
>the government in an open letter posted on the Internet: “The liberation
>operations are ending, but how come there is no sign of our children?” The
>fathers avoid blaming the party directly, but their desperation is clear.
>”There are still thousands of people’s lives in danger.”
>
>Fu Zhenzhong, a journalist from the local broadcaster Henan TV Metro,
>uncovered the story in early May while traveling with a few parents looking
>for their missing children in the neighboring province Shanxi. It was like
>looking for a needle in a haystack. The brownish-yellow soil there is ideal
>for making bricks and the craggy landscape hides thousands of kilns both big
>and small.
>But Fu and the parents still managed to find children, youths and men held
>captive. Some were so broken by then that they couldn’t speak. Fu wanted to
>take one boy with him, but the remorseless brick factory boss remained
>stubborn: “I bought him for 400 yuan,” he said.
>
>The troubling pictures of abused slave laborers are slowly fading in the
>minds of the Chinese public. Word has come down from the party’s propaganda
>department to “wind down” the uproar. The journalist Fu is not allowed to
>speak to Western correspondents, and families questioned by the foreign
>media are visited by the police, who strongly urge them to avoid contact
>with outsiders.
>
>One of the key figures in the scandal, Xin Yanhua, is also keeping a low
>profile. She is the aunt of a 16-year-old victim and she helped write the
>letter posted in the Internet by the fathers. She has declared she only
>wanted to help promote “society’s harmony and stability,” but now she’s
>afraid. She fears the factory owners and even local officials could try to
>take revenge. Xin has since gone underground. “I shiver when I think about
>my future,” she wrote in a newspaper before disappearing.
>
>Looking for Haipeng
>
>The Hao family in the province of Henan, though, is talking. In recent
>weeks, they have gone from the party office to the petition office, from the
>police to the local government authority — and as the farmer Hao Xing’an
>says, they have been “warded off, sent away, and pushed around.”
>
>His son Haipeng has been missing since 2004. In March of that year, a
>recruiter visited the village and took the boy, then 14 years old, with him.
>He promised him a job in a restaurant in the neighboring province and 500
>yuan (€50) a month plus food and shelter. “We trusted the man,” says the
>father. “He was an acquaintance of a neighbor.”
>
>The family is desperately poor: The grain and peanut harvest brings in 2,000
>yuan (€200) a year before taxes. Fortunately, the 26-year-old daughter Nana
>has found a job with the Korean firm Samsung in southern China. Now she is
>pregnant and waiting at home to give birth.
>
>During the first six months he was away, her brother called often from his
>mobile phone. Then he asked for €320, explaining to his parents that he
>wanted to open a restaurant with a few friends. They believed him and
>borrowed money from the neighbors. They had a number for the bank account —
>9559981680160115414 — but no name.
>
>That was on Aug. 8, 2004. Afterwards, every trace of the boy was lost. His
>uncle Xingwei finally set off to look for him in May of 2005. But when he
>arrived at the restaurant where Haipeng was supposed to be working, all he
>discovered was that the recruiter who took his son was in prison for robbery
>— and that the name he had given was false.
>
>When Chinese television this May first reported on slave workers in the
>country, Haipeng’s uncle got back on the bus. He travelled from one
>brickyard to the next but found nothing. In June, he headed north. There,
>roof tiles are manufactured and according to some reports, children from the
>tropical province of Yunnan are being held there. Maybe Haipeng is among
>them?
>When he got there, though, the local police told him: “There are no
>brickyards here.” But a few hundred meters from the main road, he found one
>kiln after the other. They have been closed down since, with just a few
>workers remaining to pull the last remaining tiles from the ovens. Some of
>them even run away at the sight of the stranger. Some youths are from the
>province of Szechuan, with traffickers having paid their families prior to
>taking their sons away. Now, the bosses refuse to let the boys return home
>even though there is no work — they have paid for them, after all.
>
>One Last Hope
>
>Hao visited as many kilns as he could find, passing out cigarettes and
>showing people his nephew’s photograph. He found no one who recognized the
>picture, nor was his trip to the provincial capital successful. The police
>allowed him speak to a few freed workers, but no one knew his nephew.
>
>The family has one last hope. The man who hired their son is being held in a
>prison in Taiyuan, the provincial capital. Perhaps, the family hopes, he
>might know something about the son’s fate.
>
>Getting to the desired information requires crossing provincial frontiers,
>in China often as tight as international borders. First the family wants to
>convince the police in their own village to take the case. Then the officers
>need to be prepared to drive to Shanxi with them in order to request
>assistance from the local police so that the prisoner can be interrogated —
>an expensive proposition.
>
>But the question remains how such blatant human trafficking could take place
>under the watchful eye of the Communist Party, which once proclaimed it
>wanted to free the people from their feudal bondage and slavery.
>
>The Beijing-based journalist and historian Wu Si blames the “local tyrants”
>that have existed in China for centuries and continue to exist under the
>communists. The 50-year-old Wu is the deputy editor in chief of the magazine
>Yanhuang Chunqiu and his book “Hidden Rules,” which details the history of
>power in China’s smaller municipalities, has been banned by the censors.
>
>Just like in the old days, Wu says “the political functionaries surround
>themselves with the local businessmen, who pay for their food, trips and the
>education of their children. As compensation they allow the bosses to do as
>they please.” That’s at least how it was in Shanxi. Of the 3,347 brick
>factories in the province, 2,036 didn’t have a license to operate. The
>officials pocketed the regular fines for such offenses, but left it at that.
>
>’They Promised Me That Much’
>
>In order to avoid such injustices in the future, Wu urges “allowing real
>trade unions. We should ease the access to information and let the people
>elect their government. If there’s an opposition, no village mayor will
>tolerate forced laborers.”
>
>In Yubao, the town where young Ma Yongqiang lives, the brick factory slavery
>isn’t discussed. Ma’s parents are ashamed to tell their neighbors about
>their son’s fate. They believe they’ve lost face because he came back —
>regardless of what he experienced — just as he left: poor and unsuccessful
>in life. They found in the newspaper the name of a lawyer who wants to fight
>pro bono for Ma and the other victims.
>
>But first the brick boss Yao has to be found. Ma isn’t asking for much — no
>compensation for the beatings or his imprisonment. “I want 4,500 yuan, 1,500
>for each month,” he says. “They promised me that much.”
>
>Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Posted at 11:58 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
August 18,2007
Lilongwe, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.

What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.

“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.

Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.

Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.

During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.

Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.

At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.

Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.

Chinese Expansion

You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”

Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.

His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:28 AM · Comments (0)

College Park, Md., August 14, 2007—The people who run the nation’s journalism and mass communication schools are overwhelmingly white, and two-thirds of them are male—even though about two-thirds of JMC students today are female.

Those findings come from a new survey of JMC administrators by Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Kunkel is the new president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, and his study was released by ASJMC at its annual meeting over the weekend in Washington.

The purpose of the survey was to take a snapshot of the nation’s JMC administrators and learn more about some of the key issues and pressures they face—among them the growing expectations to raise private funds, adaptation of their schools’ curricula in a digital world, and faculty hiring challenges.

Of responding deans, directors and department heads:

• 90 percent are white.
• 64 percent are male.
• Their average age is 55.
• 73.5 percent hold a doctoral degree.
• 48 percent said journalism is their area of experience or expertise (the rest cited advertising, public relations, media studies and other areas of mass communication).
• 40 percent said they had at least a decade of professional experience in their field prior to becoming an academic head, and another 22 percent said they had between five and 10 years of working experience.

In other areas, the study revealed:

• JMC administrators spend one-third or more of their time raising private funds for their programs, and 78 percent said fund-raising pressures had “increased” or “increased significantly” in the past five years. On the other hand, 57 percent indicated they value or enjoy that aspect of the job.
• Nearly 70 percent say their universities “always” or “almost always” expect them to fill a faculty position with someone holding a Ph.D., even if that job is specifically meant to deliver practical skills. That pressure too, they report, has increased markedly in the past five years.
• Two-thirds of the administrators say that their universities credit “substantive journalism” (e.g., journalistic books, major newspaper and magazine articles, documentary films, media criticism) as much as traditional peer-reviewed journal research for promotion and tenure purposes.
• But 73 percent report that their universities would hold faculty work published only online in less esteem than work published in traditional venues.
• More than 90 percent say they are “actively reviewing” their curricula with an eye toward doing more with new media and digital developments, and 47 percent report that their units will be adding at least one new digital-related or multimedia course to their programs starting this fall.

Kunkel said the survey raises a variety of concerns, especially about the field’s lack of diversity in leadership.

“Collectively, the people running our journalism and mass-comm programs don’t look much like America, and they don’t even look a lot like their own student bodies, which are now pretty much two-to-one female,” he said. “Like the media industries, we’ve got to work harder and smarter on this problem. That means everything from better mentoring of female and minority faculty to cultivating media interest among students of color when they’re still in our elementary and secondary schools. We simply need more talent in the pipeline.”

He also sees a growing conflict in the need for more media-skills experts at the same time that universities are pushing schools to hire Ph.D. holders almost exclusively. “The digital world is so new that there are people who study it and people who do it, but few who are accomplished at both,” he said.

Kunkel also said he was glad to see JMC programs working hard to incorporate digital developments and multimedia into their programs, “but it’s clear to me we’re doing it about as confidently and coherently as the media industries themselves.”

The online survey was distributed to 165 ASJMC administrators, and 89 responded.

The survey was underwritten by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: August 13, 2007

KOUDJIWAI, Chad — The small plane flew in low over a scorched, peppercorn scrubland, following a broad, muddy river that was all elbows on its run to the southeast.

The first hint of humanity came with the appearance of an immense grid for seismic testing, laboriously traced through the brush. Finally, a lonely, hulking steel drilling platform popped into view.

Chad is as geographically isolated as places come in Africa. It is also among the continent’s poorest and least stable countries, the scene of recurrent civil wars and foreign invasions since it gained independence from France in 1960.

None of that has put off the Chinese, though. In January, they bought the rights to a vast exploration zone that surrounds this rural village, making the baked wilderness here, without roads, electricity or telephones, the latest frontier for their thirsty oil industry and increasingly global ambitions.

The same is happening in one African country after another. In large oil-exporting countries like Angola and Nigeria, China is building or fixing railroads, and landing giant exploration contracts in Congo and Guinea.

In mineral-rich countries that had been all but abandoned by foreign investors because of unrest and corruption, Chinese companies are reviving output of cobalt and bauxite. China has even become the new mover and shaker in agricultural countries like Ivory Coast, once the crown jewel in France’s postcolonial African empire, where Chinese companies are building a new capital, in Yamoussoukro, paid for by Chinese loans.

Surging Chinese interest in this continent has helped bring about what many Africans believe is the most important moment since the end of the cold war, when democracy was spreading in Africa and Western nations spoke of a “peace dividend” that might ease African poverty.

That blush of interest in Africa quickly faded, though, as did several of the new democracies, and Africans and Westerners have regarded each other warily ever since. Westerners complain about chronic corruption and ineffective government, while Africans lament broken promises on aid and a hostile international economic system.

The Chinese have stepped into this picture, coming to struggling countries like Chad with deep pockets, fewer demands on how African governments should behave and an avowed faith in everyone’s ability to prosper.

As Beijing’s ambassador to this country, Wang Yingwu, said at his residence in Ndjamena, Chad’s capital, where the electricity repeatedly failed, “We are exempting Chadian goods from import duties.” When the interviewer noted that Chad produced almost nothing besides oil, Mr. Wang was undaunted, saying, “If they don’t produce things today, they will tomorrow.”

To help make that happen, China plans to build the country’s first oil refinery, lay new roads, provide irrigation and erect a mobile telephone network, for starters.

With such intensive efforts across the continent, China’s trade with Africa topped $55 billion in 2006, up from less than $10 million in the 1980s. To achieve this growth, it has bypassed multinational institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and flouted many of their lending criteria, including minimum standards of transparency, open bidding for contracts, environmental impact studies and assessments of overall debt and fiscal policies.

In some ways, the new Chinese model of doing business in Africa is a throwback to an earlier era of Western involvement that is now widely seen as disastrous. In that era, borrowing countries typically had to work with companies from the lending nation, limiting competition and giving priority to business over development. Today, China takes things even further, signing long-term deals for rights to natural resources that allow countries otherwise unworthy of credit to repay their debt in oil or mineral output.

“In what manner has Africa progressed, in what sector?” said the Chadian president, Idriss Déby, referring to decades of close ties to the West. “Whatever the good will of Africa’s old friends and the old partners in its development, it has not progressed at all.”

Still, major doubts hang heavily in the air. Will China’s hunger for raw materials enable this continent to take off? Or will Beijing’s willingness to spend whatever it needs in Africa, without regard to fiscal prudence, democracy, honest business practices and human rights, produce a replay of booms past, enriching local elites but leaving the continent poorer, its environment despoiled and its natural resources depleted?

A Test Case for China

Despite advanced prospecting by French and other Western firms dating back to the 1970s, Chad’s oil had never been tapped. The nation was simply too unstable and the price of oil too low to justify investing much here. The oil that had been found was of low quality, and there was no practical way to get it out.

That changed in 2000, when the World Bank agreed to help finance a $4.2 billion, 665-mile pipeline connecting Chad to Cameroon on the condition that oil revenues be used to fight poverty.

Chad’s revenues quickly outstripped expectations, but have not gone into quelling its immense poverty. Mismanagement and fraud have beset the World Bank plan from the start.

Beyond that, Chadian rebels with bases in Sudan have been trying to depose Mr. Déby, so he pressed the World Bank to relax its rules on how to spend the country’s oil money. A compromise was reached, and he went on a military spending spree, buying guns, aircraft and armored vehicles for his troops, along with a fleet of armored Humvees that stop traffic as they zoom about Ndjamena’s dusty, potholed streets.

Seeking an even freer hand with the country’s oil bonanza, Mr. Déby’s government also hinted that it could find other partners willing to invest in Chad, especially with the price of oil so high.

Then, in 2006, Chad ended a relationship with Taiwan and recognized mainland China, and the floodgates opened. China bought the rights to several oil exploration zones in the country from a Canadian company and has gone from bit player to center stage in Chad’s affairs, confident that it can wring smart profits from the most inhospitable conditions.

“The Canadians and the Americans are only interested in really big finds,” said a veteran Western oil production engineer who works under contract here for the China National Petroleum Company, the C.N.P.C. “Anything else they think is not worth their time. The Chinese have a different approach. They are happy with the smaller finds, just lots of them. “They seem to have a different time frame, too,” the engineer added. “They plan to be here for a while.”

Indeed, the Chinese dream in this region consists of making finds here and there, using the World Bank financed pipeline to transport the oil and eventually building new pipelines to connect with a Chinese-built grid in Sudan.

This vision requires not only finding more oil, but establishing peace between Chad and Sudan. Darfur, the chaotic western Sudanese region where at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million been displaced in a government-backed counterinsurgency campaign, lies next to China’s exploration zones. Human rights groups maintain that Chinese weapons have played a major role in the carnage in Darfur.

Beijing’s recent diplomatic activity in the region may be explained by these Chinese oil interests as much as by American pressure on China to help stop the killing in Darfur.

“It used to be that when we had problems with our neighbor sending mercenaries to invade us that none of our complaints before the United Nations would pass, because China blocked them,” said President Déby. Since breaking relations with Taiwan and opening the door to Chinese investment, he added, “we have been able to raise our concerns without taboo.”

One topic that neither side was willing to say much about was the World Bank’s foundering efforts to ensure that petroleum revenues were well spent here. “I know the current pipeline is part of a project involving the World Bank and Esso,” said Dou Lirong, the general manager of C.N.P.C. International in Chad, calling the authority over revenues “a very complicated” matter. “I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Dou continued, “but I’ve read a little bit on the Web.”

In fact, the very idea of the World Bank project is anathema to China’s deeply held noninterference policy, which has for decades governed China’s foreign policy and development. Underlying both is a kind of golden rule — China considers other countries meddling in its affairs unacceptable, and it assumes its friends feel the same way.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
August 10, 2007

SHANGHAI: The newspaper headlines spoke of a miracle. Sixty-nine men had been rescued from a flooded coal mine in central Henan Province, a veritable cause for celebration.

For this reader, the very next reaction came a moment later in the form of a little voice of caution. “Wait a minute, miracles, if they exist, are exceedingly rare things,” it said. “If the media is so eagerly proclaiming one, there must be more to the story, or perhaps even another story altogether that the ‘miracle’ line was being used to obscure, to cover up.”

As often happens in such instances, it took several days for the other shoe to drop, but drop it did, when it emerged that in the same county at roughly the same time as the coal miners were being extricated, 78 people were confirmed dead and perhaps hundreds of others had perished in mudslides.

Why one subject made the news right away and the other, more serious incident, only managed to filter out slowly says a lot about where China finds itself today.

The “bad” news was suppressed by provincial propaganda authorities who forbade coverage of the heavy death toll in the flooding. This was ostensibly done so as not to step on the “good” news of the mine rescue, and to allow local authorities to put the best possible face on the situation.
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The words bad and good deserve quotation marks because this is how the Chinese government manages information and encourages its citizens to understand the news: There is good news, which is to be spotlighted and emphasized, and there is bad news, which at least when it involves Chinese affairs is to be covered up, minimized, managed and massaged.

The Chinese public is in the grips of an unreliable narrator. But unlike the novelist who leads you seductively down a story’s path only to reveal to you at the conclusion of the tale that you’ve been fooled by his devices, the system here never comes clean.

Instead, the censors and a universe of complicit or compliant media keep going to the same well, filtering and bending information to obey laws which insist that the first duty of public information is that it reinforces the legitimacy of the country’s system and strengthens public order.

It must be said that the U.S. government and every other government lies - both white lies and whoppers, often told with the same motives as the officials in Henan- to minimize a calamity, to hide corruption or incompetence, or even to cover up an atrocity.

This happens naturally enough because governments are seats of power, and people in power and the institutions they occupy relish control over their own narratives. More interesting are the ways in which China’s situation differs from that of so many other places, including the different expectations of the news-consuming public.

In places where a relatively free press exists, there is expectation of relative truthfulness from the authorities, or as is perhaps more often the case, an expectation that failing that, the media will quickly perform its most important duty, setting the record straight. If honest politicians are too much to ask for, a rough system of accountability is not. The diversification of news sources and of media of recent decades has led to a sort of Moore’s Law of the news, according to which revelation and disclosure tend to come ever faster.

Trained by a tradition that has changed surprisingly little over the decades, the Chinese reader brings no such expectations to her news reading habits. If China’s leaders are no longer demigods, as was the case under Mao Zedong, they are nonetheless exempt from any discussion of their flaws or any critical examination of their records.

Foreign leaders are merely human. President George W. Bush’s wearing of “Crocs,” a recently popular style of plastic sandal, with socks, drew mention in the press here, as did Hillary Rodham Clinton’s display of cleavage. Their Chinese counterparts remain untouchables, though. Little wonder, then, there are virtually no political cartoons, and no political gossip columns.

The only exception comes after a fall from grace, when the authorities can carefully stage manage a story whose narrative thrust is all about how the system successfully policed itself, how errors were corrected. And so, onward and upward, history marches on.

Sometime quite soon, China will be treated to a prime example of this with the trial for corruption of Shanghai’s once all-powerful Communist party boss, Chen Liangyu. Already, to prepare opinion, the system is speaking of making an example of Chen for the future.

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Copyright Salon

Economic war! China prepares to deploy the “nuclear option”! Duck and cover! Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is very excited:

The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of U.S. treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.

The report immediately rocketed through financial markets, affecting treasury bond prices and rattling investors who are already nervous about stresses in the credit sector. And why not? According to Evans-Pritchard, “two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning — for the first time — that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the U.S. Congress.”

Let’s everyone take a deep breath.

First, consider the source. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has some history. As in, the man was famous in Washington, D.C., in the ’90s for promulgating some of the more, uh, whacked-out conspiracy theories involving Bill and Hillary Clinton. Take a trip in the Way Back Machine, to Salon’s review of his 1997 book “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton” (published, incidentally, by the inimitable Regnery Press, most recently notorious for foisting “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” on our poor, benighted nation).

Of the many homicides he lays at the president’s feet, “the Rosetta Stone” is what Evans-Pritchard calls the “extra-judicial execution” of White House counsel Vince Foster. He sees in this “murder,” allegedly carried out at the behest of the White House inner circle and possibly on the direct orders of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a sign of “incipient fascism” in the United States.

With that bit of background in mind, let’s move on.

Evans-Pritchard takes as his primary evidence a section of an opinion piece published Aug. 7 in the China Daily under the byline of He Fan, who is identified by China Daily as “a researcher with the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the China Academy of Social Science.” (Evans-Pritchard calls He Fan an “official” and says his quotes came in an “interview” with the China Daily, but to harp on such minor trivia seems like quibbling.)

In the context of defending China’s snail-paced upward revaluation of the yuan, He Fan writes:

Thanks to the trade surplus, China has accumulated a large sum of U.S. dollars and its world largest foreign exchange reserve is mostly in U.S. dollars. Such a big sum, a considerable portion of which is in the form of U.S. treasury bonds, contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the U.S. dollar as an international currency.

Russia, Switzerland and several other countries have restructured their foreign exchange reserve and reduced the U.S. dollars they hold. China is unlikely to follow suit as long as yuan’s exchange rate is stable against the U.S. dollar.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks Hillary Clinton may have ordered the murder of Vince Foster, then I can see how this passage could easily be interpreted as an implicit threat to go nuclear: Don’t force us to revalue the yuan, or we’ll pummel your dollar.

But how likely is that, really? I called Nick Lardy, a China analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and asked him if China might try to send such a message to the United States.

“The chances of the Chinese doing this are approximately zero,” said Lardy.

China, said Lardy, has about $900 million worth of U.S. dollar assets. But it could only sell a tiny fraction of those assets at any one time, and by doing so, would put immediate downward pressure on the value of the dollar. But if the value of the dollar dropped, so would the value of China’s remaining dollar-denominated assets.

“They would take a loss of potentially massive proportions,” said Lardy. “And since the No. 1 priority of central bankers everywhere is to maintain the value of their assets, it seems very unlikely.”

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
August 9, 2007

Sorry, Barry Bonds. You’re still 112 home runs away from the home run record, the real record, that is. Hitting 756 dingers is certainly quite an achievement, more than anyone else has hit in Major League Baseball history. But it is far behind the world record, the 868 homers slugged by Sadaharu Oh when he played for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants from 1959 to 1980.

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Many naysayers in America play down this achievement. They argue that it doesn’t really count because Oh played in Japan, where the players are smaller and the fences are closer than they are in North America. But that view is narrow-minded and misinformed.

There are 127 million people in Japan, where, in contrast to the United States, baseball is still the national pastime. Most of them, it is safe to say, care more about Sadaharu Oh then they do about Barry Bonds or his home run record. Oh’s home runs were usually wicked line drives, not high fly balls, and they sometimes put dents in the outfield seats. And he hit all of his circuit blasts in 127 fewer games and 524 fewer at-bats than Bonds needed just to pass Hank Aaron.

Oh batted against some of the toughest pitchers ever to play the game, wickedly effective breaking-ball artists. Like Oh, they were kept from playing in the United States by a restrictive reserve clause that bound players to their Japanese teams, even after their contracts expired, and by the quaint notion of loyalty. During Oh’s era, Major League Baseball players who ended their careers in Japan reported that two or three pitchers on each Japanese team could have played, and in some cases even starred, in North America.

Playing for the dominant Giants, Oh always faced the absolute best pitching the opposition had to offer. Teams would abandon their normal pitching rotations. In a three-game series with the Giants, it was not unusual for the opposing club’s ace to start twice and also appear in relief.
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The son of a Chinese immigrant father and a Japanese mother, Oh overcame discrimination as a child, and he led his team to victory in the hugely popular high school spring championship tournament. He pitched four complete games in four days with bleeding, infected blisters on his pitching hand.

After he joined the pros and was moved to first base, he overcame a hitch in his swing through special sessions with a martial arts sensei. Oh learned to hit while standing on one leg, giving birth to his famous flamingo swing. He strengthened his wrists by swinging a heavy samurai long sword each night, slicing in half sheets of paper suspended from the ceiling. Nearly everyone in Japan knows that Oh was so dedicated to his sport that when his father died, he did not miss a game. Invariably, he signs autographs using the Chinese character for the word “doryoku,” which means effort.

When Oh passed Hank Aaron, on Sept. 3, 1977, with the 756th home run of his career, all of Japan celebrated. Even the American ambassador joined in the festivities. Yet Oh has refused to compare his record to Aaron’s. “I’m just a man who happened to hit a lot of home runs in Japan,” he has said.

Barry Bonds is not without a fan base in Japan. Millions followed his quest for the single-season home run record in 2001, when he hit 73. They cheered him when he visited Japan with Major League Baseball all-stars on postseason tours, and they smiled in appreciation when he made a commercial in Japan , a rare sign of popularity for a foreign athlete.

But that was before the steroid scandal. Steroids have not been a problem in Japan, and most Japanese fans are not as familiar with them as their North American counterparts are. But Japanese fans now have a little less interest in Bonds’s exploits because they have been told by their news media that his home runs may be a product of cheating.

It is rare to see Bonds on Japanese television these days. You have to look hard in the popular sports dailies to find an article about him. When Bonds passed Aaron, he got the requisite headlines, but the only other time this year he drew such attention was when he criticized Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Japanese rookie pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, for intentionally walking him.

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Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 — “I have a dream,” Chen Liangyu, Shanghai’s disgraced Communist Party secretary, was fond of intoning before his aides, consciously echoing the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And as the leader of China’s richest city, Mr. Chen had the power to make most of those dreams come true.

The “hai” in the word Shanghai means ocean, but the city had no beach, he would lament. So city officials built a six-mile beach in Shanghai’s suburbs, using 128,000 tons of sand shipped in from southern China.

Mr. Chen liked tennis, too, so a world-class tennis complex was built at a reported cost of $290 million, even though few Shanghai residents play the game. In a city where relatively few can afford personal cars, Mr. Chen’s government built a $300 million racetrack that critics say is the fanciest on the Formula One circuit.

Most fatefully, perhaps, he strongly backed a $4.5 billion expansion of a magnetic levitation, or maglev, rail line to Hangzhou, a neighboring city, a widely criticized project that raised something relatively new for China: a storm of public protest.

Along the way, Mr. Chen openly defied calls by the central government to rein in growth in Shanghai and, in keeping with President Hu Jintao’s emphasis on a “harmonious society,” to pay more attention to the widening gap between China’s rich and poor. The drive for wealth, he said, was more important.

The government came down on Mr. Chen last September, arresting him on suspicion of involvement in a huge municipal fraud scandal. He was expelled from the Communist Party in July and simultaneously removed from his position as a delegate to China’s People’s Congress, stripping him of immunity in preparation for what is expected to be a swift, secret trial.

But for many here, the symbolic end came in May, with the suspension of the maglev project, his greatest, and certainly the Chen era’s most extravagant dream.

For many, the suspension in the face of widespread public opposition signaled the end of an era of top-down, megadevelopment, with attendant opportunities for high-level corruption, and the beginning of an era one in which the voice of China’s growing middle class can no longer be ignored.

“The public is concerned with the electromagnetism of the train, and the government is studying this, and that is one of the reasons the project has been stopped,” a People’s Congress official was quoted as saying in The China Business Journal in one of many news reports that suggested that residents’ complaints had played a major role in the suspension.

Under Mr. Chen, as the Shanghai government raced to complete a basket of gigantic projects remaking the central city before the World Exposition scheduled for here in 2010, public discontent steadily mounted.

Tens of thousands of inner-city residents were evicted, relocated in most cases in remote, unfinished suburbs and offered compensation well below the market value for their property.

In recent years, as rumors of high-level corruption spread, Mr. Chen’s government could not convene without large security deployments worthy of a visit by a foreign head of state, because of the persistent turnout of demonstrators.

Unlike the crowds of poor and elderly people who often braved repeated arrests to protest the evictions, the opponents of the maglev line have mostly been members of Shanghai’s new and fast-growing middle class who live along the proposed train route, in the Minhang District.

Residents of the area, which is already heavily laced with train tracks and highways, had petitioned the government against the project, complaining about the supposed dangers of magnetic radiation, noise pollution and the effect of yet another transportation line on property prices.

When their petitions had no effect, they stepped up their protests, blocking roads in the area, demonstrating outside of their district’s government headquarters and hoisting banners on their residential high rises that were visible from miles away.

Eventually, some also began raising questions about how state revenues were being spent, a subject that had scarcely ever entered public discussion here. In this case, that meant questioning the start of a costly high-tech train project to Hangzhou the very year that another expensive, high-speed line similar to Japan’s bullet trains linking Shanghai to Hangzhou entered service.

Many of them also pointed out that the existing maglev route has been a commercial failure. Attaining a top speed of 259 miles per hour, it takes only seven minutes to cover the 19 miles from the city’s international airport to a spot on the opposite side of the Huangpu River from central Shanghai. But ticket prices are high and passengers have been few.

“This maglev is not a necessity at all,” said Chen Qi, 36, an account executive with an online trading company who lives along the line and has worked with neighbors to oppose the project. “It is not clear who is going to benefit from it. If it is for the World Expo, what happens after the Expo, and who would go straight to the Expo from the airport? People go to their hotels from the airport.”

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Trust Fall
Copyright The New Republic
08.08.07

> In recent weeks, anyone paying attention to the news has been swamped
> with articles about shoddily made, unregulated goods produced in China.
> Responding to the avalanche of stories, many governments have vowed to
> crack down harder on Chinese goods, and the White House has stepped up
> a
> dialogue with China about how the improve product safety. (The Bush
> White House, to be fair, is partly responsible, as it has consistently
> gutted the Food and Drug Administration and now has to come up with new
> guidelines to strengthen import regulation.) China itself, which now
> dominates many food export markets, has sought to reassure the world,
> by
> promising to strengthen its own national regulations.
> But the food scandals point to a much broader question about China:
> Despite becoming more transparent in recent years, Beijing’s first
> instinct, when presented with crises, is to slam the door. And as long
> as it does so, it will never truly enjoy the world’s confidence.
> China’s opaque political and economic systems are hardly new—for
> decades Sinologists have scrutinized each new generation of Chinese
> leaders, wondering how they fight it out within the Communist Party to
> choose a new boss like current leader Hu Jintao. But today China is far
> more interlinked with the world, and its problems cause global problems.
> When Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome hit China four years ago,
> stonewalling by officials in Beijing may have allowed it to spread
> across Asia and to other continents. When China responded slowly to more
> recent outbreaks of avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease, it increased
> the risk of the disease spreading into Southeast Asia. When Beijing
> released little information about a series of recent mass deaths of pigs
> in southern China, it terrified its neighbors.
> Even when China takes steps applauded by the world, other nations have
> trouble determining why it did so. For years, non-governmental
> organizations like Global Witness criticized China for abetting the
> illegal timber trade in northern Burma, home to valuable virgin forests.
> Over the past year, Chinese officials apparently cracked down, reducing
> the amount of timber imported from Burma and apparently helping to
> repatriate some Chinese migrants from Burma back to southwestern China.
> What caused this change? I asked many Burma experts. Few had a ready
> answer.
> An authoritarian political system necessarily must be less transparent
> than a democracy. Yet in many ways China’s system is even more opaque
> than other authoritarian regimes, like Taiwan or South Korea in the
> 1970s and 1980s. Because China simply is so much bigger than those
> countries, it contains provincial governments often able to act without
> the consent of Beijing. As a result, initiatives like progressive
> environmental planning by the central government, which has focused on
> renewable energy, fall on deaf ears in many provinces. So, too, any
> national attempts to clean up China’s food and drug regulations may
> falter in provinces, where officials are focused on growth above all
> else.
> Because China also is so much bigger and more powerful than those
> countries, it can defy foreign pressure to become more transparent. If
> international financial institutions, unsatisfied with how China
> cooperates on aid projects, pull out of the People’s Republic, Beijing
> would hardly be in a dire situation—it has the vast cash reserves to
> do
> what it likes. By comparison, the World Bank was able to pressure the
> authoritarian but impoverished regime of Chad, which desperately needed
> a new oil project, to agree to use some of the proceeds for social
> welfare. What’s more, the Chinese media, forced to be more financially
> self-sustaining than in the ’80s, tends (like much of the world’s media)
> to focus on scandals. Sometimes, this scandal-mongering has a positive
> effect, since it may expose massive corruption or environmental
> destruction. But the Chinese media rarely stays focused, over a long
> period of time, on improving government transparency, and journalists
> who push too hard still face the strong arm of the law.
> In recent years, China has made enormous gains in global stature. As I
> often write, its diplomatic corps, staffed by younger and more
> sophisticated diplomats, has begun to engage with media, think-tanks,
> and diplomats in other nations. Its booming economy, and its willingness
> to take the lead on trade talks, has won it friends in many parts of
> Asia. It has surpassed the United States in popularity in several
> studies of global opinion. But it has not yet convinced many nations of
> what China will be like as a great power. Though it now publishes white
> papers on its defense industry, its neighbors—and the United
> States—still worry about its military ambitions. Though it assures
> other countries it will build a viable food and drug regulator, many
> nations doubt it can police its exports. When Beijing’s first instinct,
> in crises, is to share what it knows, that fear will dissolve.
> HYPERLINK “http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=65&sa=1”Joshua
> Kurlantzick is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

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Copyright The East African Standard
OPINION
6 August 2007
By Zhu Jing [Press Attache, Chinese Embassy]
Nairobi

China practises a unique democratic experience, which
is beneficial, reasonable and fruitful because it
suits the country and has stood the test of time.

The political party system that China adopts is
consultative under the leadership of the Communist
Party of China (CPC), which is different from the
Western two-party or multi-party and the one-party
system practised in some countries.

There are nine political parties in China: The CPC is
the ruling party, but the other eight participate
fully in the exercise of State power and
administration.

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference
committees, which have been established at national,
provincial, municipal and county levels, comprise
members from all parties, people without party
affiliation, NGO representatives, ethnic minorities
and people of all walks of life.

They exercise the functions of political consultation,
democratic supervision and participate in the
administration and discussion of State affairs. Like
Kenya, China is a multi-ethnic country with 56 ethnic
groups.

To enable all groups, minority ones in particular, to
enjoy equal political, economic, social and cultural
rights, China practises ethnic regional autonomy.

Under the central leadership, organs of
self-governance exercise regional autonomy in areas
where minority groups live. The organs manage the
internal affairs of the ethnic groups independently in
the autonomous regions and in accordance with the law.

The constitution of China stipulates that the State
respects and safeguards human rights and citizens’
basic rights and freedom. After enormous efforts under
the socialist system, the Chinese have improved and
safeguarded survival and development rights.

China has solved the problem of feeding 22 per cent of
the world population with less than 10 per cent of the
world’s arable land.

In less than 30 years, the number of people living
below the poverty line has reduced by 228 million to
21 million. Per capita of GDP has increased from less
than $200 (Sh13,400) to $2,003 last year. The average
life expectancy has jumped from 35 years in 1949 to 72
years today.

Nine-year compulsory education has been popularised
and the social security system established and
perfected.

China’s constitution protect citizen rights to freedom
of religion, speech, Press and association. In China,
there are five major religions - Buddhism, Taoism,
Christianity, Catholicism and Islam, and more than 100
million believers, 300,000 members of the clergy and
more than 100,000 venues for religious activities.

By the end of 2004, there were 290,000 NGOs. In 2004
alone, 26 billion copies of newspapers, 2.7 billion
periodicals and 6.5 billion books were published. At
present, the number of Internet users has reached 150
million.

The livelihood, democracy and civil rights people
enjoy in China are unprecedented in Chinese history.
It is unfair and dishonest to disregard the great
achievements China has made in the economic, political
and social fields in recent years.

The history and reality of human political
civilisation has proved that there is no single and
absolute democratic mode that is universally
applicable.

China’s democracy is different from that of the US and
Europe because our history, economy, culture,
tradition, society and national conditions differ.
China cannot just copy democratic modes of others.

China not perfect

Therefore, it is unreasonable to accuse China of
lacking a democratic environment simply because her
practices differ from those of the US and Europe.

Of course, the democratic mode and practice in China
is not perfect, especially in a country with 2000
years of feudal tradition and 1.3 billion people. It
will be a long way for China to realise its
modernisation. With its economy, society and culture
changing, China will definitely advance, mature and
perfect its democratic mode and practice gradually and
steadily.

More than 2,000 years ago, one of the students of
Confucius, the great ancient Chinese philosopher and
educationalist, asked him how to rule a country.
Confucius replied: “Do not do things in haste and do
not seek petty gains. More haste, less speed. You
cannot accomplish a great cause if you only see small
gains.”

China pursues steady and sustainable development. If
we look at China as a cart on its way to
modernisation, political and economic reform are her
two indispensable wheels.

To move the cart smoothly and unceasingly, China
should try its best to balance two wheels prudently to
avoid overturning or shock therapy. The Chinese
democratic system aims at the long-term welfare of the
people.

China will spare no effort to do appropriate things at
the appropriate time and maximise and sustain the
interest and welfare of her people, and ensure that
democracy brings more benefits.

China has no intention of imposing her political
system and mode of development on others, or even on
Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions or
Taiwan.

Under the policy of One China, two systems, the
country relinquished sovereignty over Hong Kong and
Macao in 1997 and 1999 respectively, maintained their
social system and lifestyle and promoted economic
prosperity and social stability.

Hong Kong and Macao residents enjoy many rights and
freedom than during the colonial rule.

The writer is the Press Attache at the Chinese Embassy
in Kenya

http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200708060963.html

Posted at 2:03 PM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
August 3, 2007

SHANGHAI: What is there to say about a country where something masquerading as the newest Harry Potter book comes out on the market 10 days before the genuine item?

I’m talking about a country where unauthorized versions of each book in the series exist in both English and the local language. A place where the rush to cash in on something commercially popular has seen a proliferation of wholly “original” Harry Potter books, tomes with titles like “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel,” and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter,” that are more numerous even than the originals themselves.

That country is, of course, China, a place where no commercial stone seems to go unturned, whether that means refilling plastic bottles and selling them as mineral water, or ginning up reasonable facsimiles of Apple’s popular iPhone and selling them on street corners, or even pushing fake blood products into hospitals.

One must begin with the obvious. China has a weak regulatory system, where scammers and flimflam artists and hard-working entrepreneurs, both ethical and not so ethical, contend in one gigantic scrum.

This often reminds me of the scene of the drifting salesman in the 1970 Dustin Hoffman film “Little Big Man,” who gets tarred and feathered for selling what amounts to snake oil. The problem is that until recently, when a stink was raised among China’s rich trading partners about product safety issues, there was scarcely any risk of being tarred in China’s freewheeling markets, where just about anything can be sold for the right price.

This picture presents the outside world with one of the central paradoxes of contemporary China. It is a country with a steely and determined brand of authoritarianism that aspires to be in total control. At the same time, as with product safety problems or intellectual property issues, the government is much like the greyhound on a racetrack chasing the mechanical rabbit. Reality exceeds its grasp, and there is no hope of catching up.

Since the Deng Xiaoping era, China’s watchword has been getting rich. In practice this has brought dramatic results, lifting hundreds of millions of people with unimagined speed, propelling China to the first rank of world economies and creating a large and fast-growing middle class where none existed before.

It has also led to a ravaging of the environment, stark social inequalities, a looting of the public treasury by corrupt officials, and perhaps most dangerous of all, an explosion of an old ethical order that bound this country together. Life in China today often seems purely situational, not governed by rights and wrongs so much as by what one can get away with.

As vital as it has been to national revival, Deng’s dictum is also a key to understanding the widespread culture of industrial counterfeiting and fraud in China. The dirty little secret here is that these practices have thrived in significant part because city, county and provincial level governments have found it convenient to have things work this way.

When the least protest arises on the streets of Shanghai, the police turn out in force to clear the streets and arrest the demonstrators. How else to explain that the main streets of the central city here teem with people flogging counterfeit goods of every description, rarely provoking even a raised eyebrow from the authorities?

When growth is elevated to godliness, it is the froth in the economy and the jobs that it creates that count most, not niceties like intellectual property or fussy product safety details.

Another Deng dictum, less celebrated, but arguably just as important in terms of China’s current problems, was “no debate.” The lack of vibrant civil society, the existence of a weak and corralled press, which easily succumbs to analyzing questions in national terms rather than rational ones, is a heavy weight for any developing society to bear.

I have searched in vain for signs of a serious, sustained discussion of counterfeiting and intellectual property violations in the Chinese press. Yes, there are occasional statements to the effect that intellectual property must be respected, but few have bothered to take a close look at the problem, to acknowledge its extent in China or vigorously debate its consequences.

If the government, with its weak regulatory enforcement and conflicting priorities and a press which finds it unnatural and sometimes dangerous to engage in searching, critical appraisal of the society’s problems are the most obvious elements in this puzzle, what is the final piece?

The answer seemed to come in the form of a long letter from a reader who wondered why there was such a fuss about a proliferation of Harry Potter knockoffs in China. After all, the reader wrote, this “is an old story that Western media has tirelessly elaborated on for years.”

Click to read more

Posted at 12:57 PM · Comments (0)

Jul 26th 2007
Copyright The Economist

A FEW years ago a cranky French cheesemaker called José Bové drove his tractor to the site where a McDonald’s restaurant was being built. As journalists and camera crews looked on, he and a band of rustic confrères tore the place apart. They did this, Mr Bové explained, not only because burgers are a disgusting expression of American culinary imperialism but also in protest at “what the WTO and the big companies want to do with the world”.

Quite a lot of us derive our patchy understanding of globalisation from such well-publicised high jinks. Often, little in the way of independent thought is brought to bear on the “burgers plus big companies equals bad” style of arithmetic. Nayan Chanda, director of publications at the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalisation, provides background facts for less lazy thinking in a lively book that is packed with incident, anecdote and derring-do.

He points out that globalisation is a new word to describe an old process. The word was introduced in the late 1970s and had gained widespread currency by 1999, the time of Mr Bové’s visit to McDonald’s. Many thought it described a wholly novel phenomenon. But globalisation really began about 60,000 years ago, when the first migrants walked out of Africa. Human history ever since has been a process of growing interconnectedness.

Mr Chanda organises his argument around what he takes to be the four groups that have done most to bring about this interconnectedness: traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors. Though the motives of these groups—to profit, convert, learn or conquer—have usually been selfish, the overall effect of their actions has been to draw us all closer together.

The four groups are still with us, though some have changed more than others over the centuries. The preachers are going strong, but they now have competition from secular NGOs whose “missionaries” preach human rights and the need to take care of the environment. And while some of us might fancy ourselves as adventurers, we have for the most part degenerated into cheap-flight-enabled tourists—Vasco da Gama and Ibn Battuta would not be impressed.

Mr Chanda traces advances in trading practices and technology—from donkeys and camels to container ships and cargo planes—but is just as good at pointing out deep historical continuities. Frequently he lets figures from the past speak for him in their own words. “The extension and use of railroads, steamships, telegraphs, break down nationalities and bring peoples geographically remote into close connection commercially and politically. They make the world one, and capital, like water, tends to a common level.” The diction aside, it might be a World Bank press release written this morning. It is, in fact, David Livingstone, reflecting on his experiences in Africa in the 1850s.

What makes globalisation today appear so dramatic and sometimes controversial, Mr Chanda reckons, is its visibility. He points out that in 1453 it took 40 days for the pope to learn that Constantinople had fallen to the Turks. In 2001, by contrast, “the twin towers of the World Trade Centre fell in real time, on live television, as the world watched on in horror.”

Such examples hint at the fragility of a globalised world. The closer the connections between the parts, the more vulnerable the whole system becomes to any major wobbles. The fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, the collapse of trade and migration in the interwar years of the 20th century: all these either slowed the process of globalisation or stopped it in its tracks, albeit only temporarily. The threats we face today—from a superbug like SARS, for instance, or from Islamist terrorism—can go global faster than any of the threats in the past. On the positive side, so can our response to them.

Mr Chanda makes a solid and attractive case for globalisation and its potential as a force for good. But he also has a great deal of sympathy for globalisation’s losers. In his closing chapter he notes coolly that “more than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have travelled beyond their place of birth.” In view of all that has gone before, this one simple point has more impact than any number of tractor-borne assaults on American fast-food restaurants by over-subsidised continental gourmets.

Posted at 12:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By Howard W. French
SHANGHAI: China could not wait for the official release date of the seventh book in the worldwide Harry Potter publishing franchise, a little more than a week ago. It came out here with an identical title a full 10 days before the official worldwide English language release - in a wholly unauthorized version.

Chinese writers and their fans are not having it with the idea that the seventh installment is the last word in the best-selling series, either. No one can say with any certainty what the full tally is, but there are easily a dozen fake Harry Potters on the market here already, and that is counting only bound versions of the mystery/adventure stories that are sold on street corners and can even be found in school libraries. Still more versions exist online.

Although they may bear her name, the proliferation of Harry Potter books here has nothing in common with the originator of the series, the British author J.K. Rowling, save for the appropriation of her famous characters’ names. Here, the global Harry Potter phenomenon has mutated into something altogether Chinese: a combination of remarkable imagination and startling industriousness, all placed in the service of counterfeiting, literary fraud and copyright violation.

Wang Lili, editor of the China Braille Publishing House, which published “Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll” in 2002, one of the numerous knockoffs here, said: “We published the book out of a very common incentive. Harry Potter was so popular that we wanted to enjoy the fruits of its widely accepted publicity in China.”

The attitude reflected in Wang’s comment goes a long way toward explaining not only the explosion of unauthorized Harry Potter literature in China, but also the much larger problem of rampant piracy in China, where travelers can find six different knockoffs of Viagra - without prescription - on display at airport drugstores, and where fake DVDs, fake Picassos, fake bottled water, fake cellphones and even near-identical copies of automobile models are widely available.

China has recently stepped up efforts to rein in the production, and especially the export, of fraudulent, dangerous and substandard goods, in the face of strong criticism from the United States and the European Union. Authors and editors say, however, that the sphere of literature and publishing is, at best, an afterthought.

Wei Bin, editor of the Writers’ Publishing House, which investigates book piracy, said that his group’s last survey, in 2001, showed that as many as 30 to 40 percent of the books on sale in China may be pirated.

“The focus of the government is not to fight against piracy,” Wei said. “It seems they fight harder for banned publications, like pornography, political books, such as things written about the leadership, the government, and historical matters like the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

“They maintain tight control over such things, but as literary books, such as the ones we identify as being pirated, when we report the matter to the relevant authorities, they settle matters by leaving them unsettled.”

An Boshun, editor of one of the biggest-selling works of Chinese fiction in recent years, “Wolf Totem,” whose author has maintained his anonymity, said there were at least 15 million fake copies of the book in circulation here, compared with two million legal ones.

“I once even got a call from someone who said that he represented two pirate book businessmen and they wanted him to say thanks to me for my work,” An said. “They wanted me to know that ‘Wolf Totem’ had brought many job opportunities to country folks working in printing shops in Hebei and Shandong Provinces.”

The zest with which the Potter series has been copied can be seen in the titles available for sale in China.

These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” whose name in Chinese closely resembles a genuine title in the series, as well as many others that are pure inventions, blending everything from story lines lifted from J.R.R. Tolkien, to plots and snippets taken from famous kung fu epics and characters from Chinese literary classics, like “Journey to the West.”

Although not exhaustive, the list includes “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel,” “Harry Potter and the Golden Armor,” “Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase,” and on and on.

In a story heard from one publisher after another, Wang said she was introduced to an aspiring author by a third party.

“I did not believe it at first, since it only took the person 20 days to write 200,000 words,” she added. “But after reading it, I found that it was not bad. The author did not plagiarize Rowling’s novels because the story was full of his own imagination. There was creativity and even magic in some of the plotting.”

The iterations of Potter fraud and imitation are so copious they must be peeled back by the layer.

As in some other countries, there are unauthorized translations of real Harry Potter books and sometimes more than one version of a particular title may be available here.

There are books masquerading as works written by Rowling. There are copies of the genuine items - both English and Chinese - scanned, reprinted, bound and sold for a fraction of the authorized texts.

There are Harry Potter books published under names, real or assumed, of Chinese authors. There are books published under the imprint of major, established Chinese publishing houses, which the publishers themselves claim no knowledge of. And there are books by budding Chinese writers hoping to piggyback the series’ fame and make it as authors, sometimes only to have their fake Potters copied and distributed by underground publishers who, naturally, pay them no royalties.

“I bought Harry Potter 1-6 for my son a couple of years ago, and when he finished reading them he kept asking me to tell him what happens next,” said Li Jingsheng, one such author, a manager at a Shanghai textile factory. “We couldn’t wait, so I began making up my own story and in May last year I typed it up on my computer. I had to get up early and go to bed late to write this novel, usually spending one hour, from 6 to 7 in the morning and 10 to 11 in the evening to write it, averaging about 3,000 words a day.”

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.

“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”

Click to read more

Posted at 12:32 PM · Comments (0)

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