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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The New York Review of Books

Lovers, who, with the turn of the head once had the power to crush, or lift me into the realms of impossible elation are gone, gone, gone. Yet they have returned with the flash of Ron’s camera. I see our lives, and am cognizant of the absurdity of some of my choices, even though they were such very sweet encounters for awhile. But what I am ultimately confronted with is the hard fact that there is no permanence for any of us… ever. Permanence can only be found in the immortality promised by the results of the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as quickly as the photograph doesn’t.

In the end I’m glad to be among the Dean’s cavalcade of celebrities, not just for the recognition value, which I can’t deny I once pursued with a relish I am ashamed of, but also because of the education he gave me.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20778

Posted at 3:16 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

Continuing its relentless march toward the magical summit of $100, the price of a barrel of oil hit an intra-day high of $92.22 on Friday. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, demand for a piece of PetroChina’s IPO is so intense that the entire rest of the stock market is being squeezed, say analysts, due to all the funds being directed toward the huge oil company.

PetroChina recently passed General Electric to become the second largest company in the world, as measured by market capitalization, and some observers think it has a shot at unseating the perennial champion, Exxon-Mobil.

But Warren Buffett, sad to say, won’t be enjoying any of that bounty. In a rare display of bad market timing, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company sold off its last remaining stake in PetroChina a week ago. Buffett claims that his decision to sell had nothing to do with the Save Darfur disinvestment campaign — PetroChina’s corporate owner, China National Petroleum Co., is heavily involved in Sudanese oil — and even expressed regret at having sold too soon. But one has to wonder, especially given the latest news from Africa, where rebel forces attacked the Defra oil field on Tuesday.

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Posted at 6:31 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Newsweek

Not long ago, China’s Communist party would never have picked Xi Jinping as its next boss. For one thing, he’s a “princeling”—a derogatory term for the offspring of party leaders, who are resented by many Chinese because they’re thought to benefit from guanxi (personal connections) and to put on airs. For another thing, Xi is known for his free-market prowess, not necessarily his ideological purity. Accordingly, when his name first appeared in Party Congress ballots in 1992 and 1997 as a candidate for the Central Committee, Xi got low marks. But over time, his carefully cultivated down-home image began to win over top leaders. They were impressed by Xi’s agriculture background (he spent part of his teens on a farm) and the way he shunned Western suits and private cars for windbreakers and riding the bus. Xi seemed competent as well, with a solid record in every region he’d overseen. So by the time senior leaders held a secret poll shortly before this month’s 17th Party Congress, Xi, according to Li Datong, a former editor turned political commentator, “got the highest vote.”

As a result, Xi has now emerged as front runner to become China’s most powerful man. His coming out last week startled many analysts. For some time they’d thought party boss and President Hu Jintao was grooming Li Keqiang to take over when he retired in 2012. Li, like Hu, came out of the clubby Communist Youth League system. But it turns out party elites didn’t want Hu 2.0 as heir apparent. When leaders reshuffled the personnel deck last week, last-minute horse trading reportedly grew intense. Hu managed to get Li on to the nine-man leadership committee and to push out a key rival, Vice President Zeng Qinghong. But Hu had to give up something in return—his pick for the top slot. Thus Xi, 54, joined the party’s lineup one rank above Li, 52. Now, if all goes according to script, Xi will become party boss in five years, while Li will succeed Wen Jiabao as prime minister.

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Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Time

In the pre-internet days, neither of us would have even thought of calling each other friends. We’d have called ourselves friends of friends who met once and yet, for some reason, kept sending each other grammatically challenged, inappropriately flirty letters with photos of ourselves attached. Police might have gotten involved.

But now we’re definitively friends, having taken a public vow of friendship on friend-based websites, wearing metaphorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, the punky MySpace, the careerist LinkedIn and the suddenly very Asian Friendster. As if that wasn’t enough friendship for you, some of you have also asked me to be friends on the nerdy Twitter, the dorky-élitist Doostang and the Eurotrashy hi5. You message me and comment about me and write on my walls and dedicate songs to me and invite me to join groups. More than once you have taken it upon yourself to poke me.

This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take up too much of my time. It’s weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person—whom I propose we distinguish by calling “non-metafriends.” In fact, I know more about you than I know about myself. I have no idea what my favorite movie or song or TV show is. Last I checked, they all involved Muppets.

Also, you’re a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say, “Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me”? Or tell me he’d colored in a map of all the places he’d ever been? Or inform me, as Michael Hirschorn did in his Facebook status update, that he “is not making decisions; he’s making surprises”? It’s as if I suddenly met a new group of people who were all in the special classes.

The horror is, I can’t opt out. Just as I can’t stop making money or my non-metafriends will have more stuff than I do, I can’t stop running up my tally of MySpace friends or I’ll look like a loser.

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Posted at 10:54 PM · Comments (0)

Editor’s note: This is my favorite baseball writer. Honorable mention for the deliciously sardonic Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News.)

So here’s how I found out about the Hall of Fame honoring Buck O’Neil: I was in the Tokyo Airport desperately trying to figure out how to get to Sapporo for the Japan Series. I was beyond exhausted, of course, jet lagged out of my mind, and a certain airline had screwed up my ticket, and 57 very nice Japanese people were trying (and generally failing) to help me. The world cell phone I had ordered specially for the occasion was not dialing out (well, it was dialing, but I kept getting this recording of a Japanese woman telling me, “Oh no, you may not call out of our country, you silly American” — well, that’s what it SEEMED like she was saying).

And generally, I had this feeling that absolutely nothing was right in the world. People sometimes ask me what the worst part of my job is, and I always tell them that there is no worst part of being a professional sports writer, but that’s a bit disingenuous. Travel sucks. It doesn’t suck once you get to the place, but the actual process — dealing with screwed up airline tickets, canceled flights, last minute arrangements, lost luggage, hotel mix-ups, impossible-to-park situations, etc. — sucks because you are entirely helpless. One person’s incompetence can leave you sweating through your shirt in a Tokyo airport and furiously dialing your phone again and again into the recording of the peppy Japanese woman who is saying something you don’t understand but is definitely not letting you dial out.

So I tried to get on the Internet. You might think that Japan, being Japan, would have the greatest Internet access on earth. You might think that in a country this advanced you don’t even need a computer, you just think real hard and you get on the Internet. Well, it isn’t true. Wireless Internet, apparently, has not been a big priority here, which means that there’s only one wireless provider at the airport in Tokyo and it — let me speak technically here for a moment — doesn’t work. Well, it works for a minute, and then it goes off, and then it works again, then it goes off again. And every time the wireless comes back to life, it charges you several hundred Yen to get back on. So for a good 30 minutes or so, I had managed to spend about 200,000 yen and once almost made to my email account before the wireless died again.

You hear people say it all the time: How did we live before the Internet and cell phones? I’ll tell you how: We screamed a lot.

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Posted at 10:42 AM · Comments (0)

The myth and the reality

Saturday October 27, 2007
Copyright The Guardian

Modern technology has taken the angst out of achieving the perfect shot. For me, the only thing that counts is the idea behind the image: what you want to see and what you’re trying to say. The idea is crucial. You have to think of something you want to say and expand upon it.

By default I am a travel photographer. I work on a combination of commissions and personal projects that take me around the world. But I am also a tourist photographer and, as such, I explore the ambiguity between mythology and reality through photography. We are sold a very romantic vision of tourist destinations, but most of the images you see are propaganda. You are being sold a cliche that you are conditioned to accept as reality. In fact, the reality of that destination will be very different. You’ll find too many people, queues and tourists eager to perpetuate the myth that inspired them to travel in the first place.

In Small World, a project I began in 1995, this ambiguity is exposed by photographing what is actually there: tourists lining up to be processed on to a gondola; passengers trying to relieve the tedium of a 10-hour flight to Kingston, Jamaica; a Korean tour group posing for a photograph in front of the Acropolis…

..For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it’s a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money. If you want to inject your own personality into a shot, veer off the beaten track. Find the backstreets, the markets, the small independent shops, and look for situations that are going to reveal real individuals (I often take photos in barber shops). Although most photographers won’t admit it, I acknowledge that there is an element of exploitation to this - but I see it as exploitation with responsibility.

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Posted at 1:24 AM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Published: October 26, 2007

SHANGHAI: As a Congressional Gold Medal was bestowed upon him in Washington recently, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called him “a shining light for all those fighting for freedom around the world.”

For an angry Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party boss of the Tibet Autonomous Region, he was “a person who seeks to split up his country, and doesn’t even recognize his country.”

The man, of course, is the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, who has lived in exile for nearly 50 years now, since fleeing his homeland in 1959.

One is tempted to ask how, after all these years, such divergent views persist. Zhang, sputtering in indignation over Washington’s reception of the Tibetan spiritual leader, even went so far as to assert: “If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.”

One suspects that “the world outside of China,” where the state is able to maintain perfectly rigid orthodoxy on the Tibet question, is what he really meant to say. Here, the view on Tibet and the Dalai Lama is clear and leaves no room for discussion: Tibet has always been China’s, period. And anyone who says differently is a vile “splittist.”

Compared to this, the common American view of Tibet is toxin-free, which is not to say unproblematic. For outsiders, Tibet is reduced to a magical kingdom, and the red-robed Dalai Lama, with his ever-smiling countenance and his wise and gentle homilies, fits perfectly.

Hollywood, which did much to create this image, has summarized it better than anyone, as in the opening words of Martin Scorcese’s 1997 film “Kundun,” which claims: “Tibetans have practiced nonviolence for over a thousand years.”

Tibet was heaven on earth until the Chinese Army stormed the place and took it over in 1950, in a campaign mapped out by Deng Xiaoping himself, according to this view, which conveys more hagiography than geography.

With the possible exception of China’s insistent claim that it has always controlled the place, nothing could be further from the truth.

As with most long-running disputes, the facts that underpin the Tibetan question are full of nuance and subject to competing interpretations. That no major party to this situation has been particularly generous in acknowledging this has only reinforced the overall air of intractability.

China’s rulers, accustomed to controlling the flow of information and ideas, and hence how history is taught, skim over - or edit out - parts of Tibet’s past that are inconvenient to their narrative.

Tibet’s formation as a recognizable nation began as far back as the fourth century. In the early seventh century, Tibetans, under Songtsen Gampo, converted to Buddhism and adopted a written language based on the Ranjana script - both imported from India, it is worth noting.

Tibetans came to control much of their region, including parts of Nepal, Burma, India and present-day Xinjiang (China), and they did it the old-fashioned way, through warfare. They pointedly refused to defer to Tang Dynasty emperors, and in the late eighth century even briefly captured Changan, the Chinese capital, leading to the negotiation of borders between the two states.

Effective Chinese control over Tibet didn’t come until the late 18th century and even then was mostly supervisory. Early in the last century, even that began to fall apart, as did China’s hold on other parts of its periphery.

To enhance their position in India, the British worked intermittently to reinforce the de facto Tibetan state, which China wiped out in 1950 amid since-flouted promises of “broad autonomy,” and an understanding of this leads to the second important acknowledgement.

Chinese insecurity is driven, and understandably so, by the involvement of Western powers on its periphery. Even as the People’s Liberation Army marched into Tibet, Chinese troops were girding to repulse the United States from the Korean peninsula.

Where President Truman saw Communism on the march, China’s eyes were fixed on another prize: ending a so-called century of humiliation, which required establishing buffers of its own. The Dalai Lama’s popularity in the West arouses Chinese suspicions for much the same reason.

The third unpleasant fact is the ugly record of feudal rule by Tibetan lamas, which China naturally enjoys highlighting.

“Do you know how cruel the lamaism was?” asked Lu Xiuzhang, Tibet’s former deputy chief of propaganda. “People were dismembered to be served up in ceremonies, and ordinary people were slaves.” The characterization may not be the fairest, but the man has a point.

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Posted at 10:07 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By Howard W. French
SHANGHAI, Oct. 24 — A song often heard on the radio these days begins with a light and upbeat melody, and lyrics that are even bubblier.

“Don’t care about loneliness,” croons the lead singer. “I don’t think it really matters.”

Another much played song tries even harder to soothe. “Ah, little man, ah, succeed quickly,” it counsels. “Enjoy being poor but happy every day.”

Marxists once referred to religion as the opium of the people, but in today’s China it is the music promoted on state-monopolized radio that increasingly claims that role. China’s leader, Hu Jintao, has talked since he assumed power five years ago about “building a harmonious society,” an ambiguous phrase subject to countless interpretations.

But Chinese musicians, cultural critics and fans say that in entertainment, the government’s thrust seems clear: Harmonious means blandly homogeneous, with virtually all contemporary music on the radio consisting of gentle love songs and uplifting ballads.

In recent weeks, television networks have come under intense pressure from Beijing to purge their programming of crime and even mildly suggestive sexual references. Variety show producers are subject to new rules aimed at enforcing official notions of dignity. Art galleries and theatrical productions, meanwhile, have always been subject to review by censors.

Even without resorting to direct censorship, the state has formidable powers for controlling popular music and shaping tastes. They include state ownership of all broadcast media, the screening of lyrics for all commercial music and strict control of performance sites.

Many say one result has been the dumbing down and deadening of popular music culture. Fu Guoyong, an independent cultural critic in Hangzhou, likened today’s pop music culture to the politically enforced conformity of the Cultural Revolution, when only eight highly idealized Socialist “model operas” could be performed in China.

“Nowadays singers can sing many songs, but in the end, they’re all singing the same song, the core of which is, ‘Have fun,’” Mr. Fu said. “Culture has become an empty vessel.”

Nowhere is conformity enforced more vigorously than on broadcast radio, where pop music programs are saturated with the Chinese equivalent of the kind of easy listening often associated in other countries with elevators and dentists’ offices.

Rock ’n’ roll is mostly limited to special programs that are allowed brief windows of airtime during the graveyard shift, and even then there are few hints of angst, alienation or any but the very mildest expressions of teenage rebellion.

Rock enjoyed a wave of popularity in China the early 1990s, but the works of the country’s most famous performer, Cui Jian, disappeared from the airwaves around that time because, many fans believe, his lyrics began to flirt with political themes.

By this year, the rock groups felt so unwanted that when the Chinese Olympic Committee called on musicians to submit songs for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, virtually none stepped forward, according to Shen Lihui, a music company executive who was consulted by the committee.

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Posted at 1:57 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The Guardian

Anyone looking for sex in a public place is in effect asking to be looked at and perhaps found out. The likelihood of exposure - of being recognised by a partner or featured one day in the police blotter - is so high it should be factored into any sexcapade in a city park or an airport restroom. For some, this calculation no doubt stokes the heat of the encounter. Anyone who just wants to get it on with a stranger can usually do so in relative privacy. That’s why God invented escort services.

The American public’s fascination with the Larry Craig case has a lot to do with the insane risks he allegedly took in his quest for sex and, of course, the delicious hypocrisy of a family-values US senator caught in a bathroom stall with his pants down. The arrest report also turned a flashlight on the rituals of a hitherto underground world. The elaborate codes that initiate gay dalliances in public restrooms, the toe-tapping and under-the-partition hand wipes, were news to many and probably invented, as were those in espionage tradecraft, to heighten the illicit thrill for the participants as well as to cloak the action from the uninformed.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs of Japanese having sex at night in Tokyo’s public parks, which ran at the Yossi Milo gallery in New York and now moves to the Doug Udell gallery in Vancouver on November 22, are revelatory in much the same way. They would simply be tawdry and exploitive if they weren’t also, like the Craig saga, so odd and funny. The behavior they record has to my knowledge never been recorded before on film. In an essay that accompanies a reissue of The Park, the long out of print book that for most people has been the only source until now about Yoshiyuki and his work, the critic, Vince Aletti, calls them “among the strangest photographs ever made”.

Taken between 1971 - 1979 at a time when sex all over the world was more crazy-casual than it is now, the pictures show both straights and gays getting their rocks off under trees and on the bare ground. Yoshiyuki shot with infrared film and a discreet electronic flash so that he himself was all but invisible. The figures loom in the foreground as bright smears, their limbs entangled and eyes glowing monster-like from the tiny explosions of light. Faint traces of the city can be seen in the distance in a few pictures. But civilisation is for the most part beyond the frame, as black night swallows the actors in primeval darkness.

What makes the work extraordinary are the many levels of voyeurism expressed or implied. Yoshiyuki has trained his camera on his countrymen as an African wildlife photographer might track lions by moonlight, or Jacques Cousteau might descend in a bathysphere to study unusual creatures on the ocean floor. The general tone here is amazed but also tender, one of wonder at what a photograph can and can’t convey about so intimate (and ludicrous) a human act. The sexual gestures are seldom explicit. Genital close-ups, the money shots so crucial to pornography, are nowhere to be seen.

As with any voyeuristic activity, especially one involving sex in public, there is a contagious furtiveness to the work. It can be sensed in the denizens of the park themselves, hiding under bushes and behind tree trunks. But a wary stance is also evident from Yoshiyuki, crouched low and trying to focus without being seen, and from viewers, who will be uncertain if it is proper or even legal to gaze at these kinds of photographs. (During the only other time this body of work has been exhibited, at a Tokyo gallery in 1979, the space was kept dark and visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the prints on the walls.)

Yoshiyuki adds further complicating layers when in several pictures he captures small groups of Japanese men who have taken their cameras into the parks to take snapshots of couples in flagrante delicto. It may be the predatory nature and pack behavior of the enterprise, like a stag club on a nocturnal picnic, that makes their behaviour seem creepy while Yoshiyuki, who of course is doing much the same thing, albeit alone and ostensibly for other purposes, is spared such a judgment. Even if he is undeniably complicit in peeping, he stands coolly apart from the acts of lust and longing he has captured.

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Posted at 11:10 AM · Comments (0)

Here it is. Some wrote and wrote well what I was speaking about in my diary entry.

Copyright Slate

For the second time in four seasons, the Boston Red Sox came out from under a whopping deficit to win the pennant. There are those who believe that the momentum swung in this series when Josh Beckett stood the Indians on their heads in Game 5, forcing a return to Fenway Park, and prompting some ominous quotes from out of the Cleveland clubhouse about how much they were going to miss their home field support staff, as though there were no chance that they’d be coming back there to tip them a World Series share. Quite simply, the Cleveland Indians came to Boston wrapped so tightly they made Mitt Romney look like Wavy Gravy. They played that way last night; the third-base line at Fenway might as well have been the Bermuda Triangle. (I think several Cleveland infielders may never be seen again.) And that’s why the true turning point came last week, when Manny Ramirez spoke the truth about baseball.

It came at the end of a lengthy chat with the media, a rare enough occurrence over the past two seasons in which Ramirez has frozen them out. Already he had said that he would trade all his records for a chance at another World Series, which is exactly the right kind of thing to say to people who judge your dedication by the kind of dumbshow you perform in front of the camera. Then, he said that, if Boston were to lose the ALCS, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Which is exactly the wrong thing to say to those same people. He stood accused, on the front pages of America’s finer tabloid newspapers, and all across the sporting airwaves, in between commercials for auto glass and male-enhancement nostrums, of insufficient grit, of Non-Moxie in the third degree, of Conspiracy To Convince America’s Fans To Lighten the Hell Up. Guilty on all counts.

However, it was impossible to watch the Red Sox over these last three games and not see Ramirez’s words in vivid action. Boston did not play an inning of baseball in which the team was not cool, and loose, and utterly in command of the circumstances. Not even when the double plays killed rally after rally last night, and a 3-2 lead that should have been 9-2 took God’s own time to get to the 11-2 final. You had Dustin Pedroia, swinging from his heels—or swinging from Dave Kingman’s heels, judging from the ferocity of the contact—and the vividly swift Jacoby Ellsbury, a little afterburner at the bottom of the lineup, and Kevin Youkilis bombing the coup de grace off the giant Coke bottles above the leftfield wall. Even the final out, which Coco Crisp ran down a millisecond before getting a face full of wall in centerfield, was a recklessly obtained one. This was a team that realized that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and therefore, losing was nothing of which to be afraid. Manny saw that first and brought the rest of them along.

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Posted at 9:57 AM · Comments (0)

I interviewed this guy in Paris years ago for a profile I did in the Times. Also covered some of his exploits in Africa.

Copyright The Economist
THERE were usually several versions of any story involving Bob Denard. To explain how he came to be found, in the early hours of November 26th 1989, standing over the blood-soaked and pyjama-clad body of the president of the Comoros Islands, there were three alternatives. One: Mr Denard had shot him. (He denied it in court; though he had been in the same room, and very close to him, he had not pulled the trigger.) Two: the palace bodyguard had burst in wildly, filling the president with bullets. (“Inexplicable,” Mr Denard agreed, but true; “an accident arising out of a general state of madness.”) Or perhaps—mad theory three—an army commandant had fired off an anti-tank missile by mistake, which had crashed through the window of the presidential bedroom.

The French courts never worked it out, and in 1999 acquitted Mr Denard for lack of evidence. His long dark history as a mercenary in Africa, from 1961 onwards, had blurred everything about him. His name was Bob Denard, or Gilbert Bourgeaud, or Colonel Bako, or Mustafa M’hadjou. The wound that made him limp had come from a bullet in Congo, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascination with all things military sprang from a boyhood in the French resistance in the Médoc, or alternatively from his first entranced sighting of the shiny helmets, boots and guns of the German troops invading his village. He had been cashiered from the French navy, at 16, for running riot in a Saigon whorehouse or for burning down a restaurant. Fact or fiction: few knew for sure.

Mr Denard could look gentlemanly, smart in grey suits or his spurious colonel’s uniform. He thought the word “mercenary” insulting and torture “repugnant”. Visitors to his beach house in the Comoros might find him, surrounded by his children from seven different pretty women, sipping tea under a frangipani tree. Dom Perignon and paté de foie gras would be shipped out after him when his plots failed. But he was also a brawny, flamboyant soldier in camouflage fatigues, leader of “les affreux” (“the terrible ones”) in the Congo—in fact, le plus affreux des affreux, as he boasted to his men. He did a job in which killing was necessary, sometimes alongside underlings who stubbed out their cigarettes on prisoners’ feet or roughly removed their teeth and eyes.

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Posted at 11:56 PM · Comments (0)

Yes, I am a huge Boston Red Sox fan. I was in Fenway for Carlton Fisk’s walkoff homer 32 years ago today. And I watched, riveted, as the Sox pulled away from Cleveland today, and then stomped them.
I’m waiting, meanwhile, for someone to write something that breaks with the facile conventional wisdom on Manny Ramirez, a hero of this team and of this post season if there ever was one.
There was endless grief after Manny stated a few days ago that the world wouldn’t end if the Sox didn’t prevail. There was always next year, he said.
Wasn’t he right, though? And is there any clearer turning point in this series than the back to back to back home runs in Game Four, of which Manny’s was the last?
The Sox lost the game, but they showed the kind of fight and spirit that the remainder of the series would be made of. And then there was the Manny quote.
They Sox called themselves Idiots four years ago on their way to the first World Series triumph in decades, and Manny, using his own formulation, did as much again. Only a team as loose and comfortable with itself, as fearless of failure as this bunch could have come back from down 1-3 against the strong Indians, and Manny’s quote said it all.

For a great read about Manny and the Sox and baseball in general, read:
http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2007/10/19/announcers-being-announcers/

Posted at 11:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

“The glory of Our Empire shines on this universe with brilliance,” a ruler once declared in a letter to courtiers in London. “Not one single person or country is excluded from Our kindness and benevolence.” He had good reason to be pleased. His country sat astride the global economy. His army was large, his domains vast. He believed his country to be the center of the world, and a good chunk of the world agreed.

And yet, despite the fulsome satisfaction of this 1805 letter, its author, the head of the Manchu Qing dynasty and emperor of China, had cause for anxiety. Less than twenty years before, China had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam and continued to have difficulty besting the Burmese, Tibetans and Zunghars. Trade with Europe was still expanding rapidly. But the European powers were quickly getting the upper hand by controlling shipping and financial flows, and China was developing a dangerous dependency on silver and opium. Until the late nineteenth century, China’s economy was the largest in the world, but then it headed precipitously downward. The Chinese knew practically nothing about the modern firearms with which Europe was taking over the world.

Did the advisers to the Jiaqing Emperor warn him of the coming conflict with Europe and the potential collapse of the Chinese Empire? Perhaps some courageous and far-seeing mandarin spoke of Europe’s rise, of the dangerous trajectory of the terms of trade, of the military modernizations of Britain, of the equally pernicious soft power of missionaries and merchants. The documentary evidence makes no mention of such a pundit. In 1816, after dealing with barbarians from Britain who refused to kowtow to the emperor, the Chinese court sent another letter to London: “The Celestial Empire has little regard for foreign things.” By the time China learned the value of foreign things and adopted the Japanese approach of “Eastern thought, Western machines,” it would be too late. The Chinese Empire had been carved up like a crisp Peking duck.

Two hundred years later, the roles are reversed. As John Quincy Adams once accused the Chinese of “arrogant and insupportable pretensions,” so now America is subjected to the slings and arrows of the world’s disgruntled and disaffected. Yet the US President surveys his realm and sees only cause for satisfaction: America is God’s country and Americans his chosen people. There are barbarians at the gate, of course, repudiators of American benevolence who must be crushed. A small clutch of imperial cheerleaders, the Max Boots and Niall Fergusons, thrill to the President’s muscular stance. Pundits, meanwhile, play the latest intellectual parlor game: name that imperial analogy. Will the US empire end with a Roman bang or a British whimper? Or, blind to the desperate need for reform and a tempering of arrogance, will the United States suffer China’s nineteenth-century fate? In place of opium, there are the distracting pleasures of Chinese goods for sale at Wal-Mart. Instead of the redoubtable Vietnamese, there are the recalcitrant Iraqis.

In contrast to the emperor’s court, an army of advisers are scrambling to warn Washington of the only threat on the horizon that could displace the United States in the next few decades. Their books assess China’s potential at the periphery and in the Eurasian heartland. China is using trade and no-strings-attached aid to inveigle its way into the hearts of Africans and Latin Americans. It is building up its military and risking a showdown with the United States, most likely over Taiwan. Internal weaknesses such as poverty and corruption threaten to undermine the current Chinese system and create international havoc. President Bush is certainly getting more advice than the Chinese emperor did 200 years ago. But the warnings of impending confrontation reflect less the realities of China’s new global stance than the unrealities of the US foreign policy establishment, which believes that the laws of geopolitics require an equal but opposite fall on the other side of the globe.

The “yellow peril” was once feared for the damage it could do near home. Washington strategists stayed up late at night worrying about Mao knocking down dominoes the length of the Asian littoral. There was also the Chinese influence in South Asia, and the Kremlin’s worries about the Soviet Union’s borders and millions of land-poor Chinese swarming into Siberia. But although China inspired the leadership of Albania, some Maoist guerrillas in Peru and a handful of French and American students in the 1970s, Beijing’s influence outside its neighborhood was marginal.

Now that the Big Red Checkbook has replaced the Little Red Book, China has expanded its reach into far-flung regions. Journalist Joshua Kurlantzick has been writing about the rise of China’s soft power for several years, and in his recent book Charm Offensive he describes a chessboard world in which one side’s advancing pawns grab power from the other side’s retreating rooks. “As the United States remains unpopular in many parts of the world, China finds willing partners,” Kurlantzick writes. “In the worst-case scenario, China eventually will use soft power to push countries to choose between closer ties to Washington and closer ties to Beijing.”

China is simply doing what the United States did during the cold war: cozying up to the powerful, extracting resources and buying influence. Kurlantzick expands Joseph Nye’s classic formulation of soft power to include formal diplomacy and economic leverage alongside the more informal export of cultural values and norms. He describes a China of deep pockets that provides more loans to Africa than the World Bank, has promised $100 billion of investments to Argentina and Brazil, snatched up factories the world over and replaced striking workers with compliant Chinese, and outmaneuvered Japan to conclude a recent free-trade agreement with Southeast Asia.

Economic influence is not even the half of it. Nearly three millennia of fearing the outside world, which stretched from the Great Wall to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, have abruptly ended. Multilateralism is the new watchword for China’s 4,000 diplomats, half of whom are younger than 35, according to a 2005 study. China has become the great joiner—facilitating the six-party talks over the North Korean nuclear crisis, convening the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Central Asia, even becoming an observer in the Organization of American States. It has created its own version of the Peace Corps that sends Chinese youth to developing countries. With the Beijing Olympics set for next year, China is doing a credible imitation of a good sport.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: October 19, 2007

SHANGHAI: Each night this week the television news has opened with images from the biggest event on China’s political calendar, the once-every-five-years congress of the Communist Party.

In a country where political cartoonists are unheard of, and a sense of humor, never mind satire, about politics doesn’t get much of an airing, it was fitting that the camera shots were mostly solemn: long slow pans over audiences seated in a giant hall draped in red, bent over their desks, taking careful notes or studiously reading the interminable texts.

It is not hard to feel sympathy for the 2,213 congress delegates.

China’s political discourse remains some of the most stultifying you’ll find anywhere, a fact made all the more strange for the startling dynamism on display almost everywhere else one looks in this country.

Much of the dutiful study this week has been of the opening speech by the country’s leader, Hu Jintao, a man with the inscrutability of a sphinx and a penchant - this may be by now a requirement for the job - for stuffy slogans that are difficult to parse.

Building a “harmonious society” through something called “scientific development” is Hu’s trademark idea, and in a long, omnibus speech he touched on so many familiar problems and goals that retaining any one thought as the centerpiece or overriding priority became a task worthy of hard study.

There is something else about congresses like these that makes the exercise seem unsettling and almost incongruous. Talk of the real work at hand - choosing the country’s next generation of leaders - is scrupulously managed, to the point of suppressing the topic altogether.

Chinese party congresses live up to the maxim that important things are decided in small meetings, and trivial things decided in large ones.

Accordingly, who will follow Hu in five years is being hashed out in the smokiest of political back rooms, reducing the delegates who pore over the reports before the cameras, and who will eventually vote to ratify the new leadership lineup, to the role of movie set extras.

Just to make sure that none of the rank and file get the wrong idea, and begin thinking they are actually meant to have a say, it has been reported that the delegates have been warned to follow instructions and to vote as told when the big moment comes.

This week, the Chinese magazine Caijing summed up this reality by citing comments by Deng Xiaoping, the leader in the 1980s, who said that “economic reform will not work if political reform is not keeping pace.”

The magazine then boldly asserted what many citizens, particularly in the booming cities of the east, may think as they watch political theater that owes more to the Stalinist past than it does to the mores of a self-confident and resurgent country: “At the center of political reform is democratization. Just as economic reform cannot divert from the road toward market reform, political reform cannot divert from democratization.”

Indeed, China’s leaders find themselves at an interesting moment, perhaps even a fulcrum point; their staid governing style, their reluctance to accept more openness and stronger checks on their powers and privileges, and most of all, their unwillingness to treat the public in mature rather than old-fashioned, deeply patronizing ways risks placing them increasingly out of synch with the fast evolving world of the big, rich cities.

No one is expecting an upheaval, certainly not now. What may be in store, however, is a steady erosion of legitimacy, which does not augur well for the medium and longer term.

This is what can happen, though, to authoritarian systems that constantly invoke the need for reform and never muster the courage to actually undertake it, and likewise to those who constantly promise to tackle corruption, while never actually moving beyond fingering scapegoats.

The signs of this slow fade in credibility could be heard in the voices of many Shanghai residents who were asked in sidewalk interviews this week what they make of the ongoing political show and how they see the future.

There was lots of grumbling about the high cost of food and housing, which was to be expected, but skepticism and outright disaffection loomed large, too.

A 50-year-old engineer who gave his name as David Yuan said he had paid “zero” attention to the congress, because he felt politics were beyond people’s control.

“Our lives are like bits of leaves blowing in the wind,” he said. “We can only hope to land in a good place.”

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Posted at 7:45 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Telegraph

As divorce looks imminent for the Sarkozys, ex
French president Nicolas Sarkozy is finding that Jimmy Goldsmith’s famous dictum – that when you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy – works with men as well.
Happier times? The Sarkozys’ dirty washing has been left out for public viewing
He has gone from lover to husband to cuckold in 11 years.
Many think it is a predictable ending to his relationship with the former model Cécilia Sarkozy. Mention her name in France today as speculation about the couple’s future grows and you get a raised eyebrow and an “Ooh la la! Well, the way you get them is the way you lose them.”
As mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, it was Sarkozy’s job to oversee the civil marriage of Cécilia to her first husband, Jacques Martin, a French television host.
It was three years before Sarko saw Cécilia again. He was also married but that didn’t stop him being “struck by lightning”. The couple duly had an affair, before eventually leaving their respective spouses. They married in 1996.
Then, in 2005, Cécilia broke the cardinal French rule of being discreet concerning illicit affairs and had a very public liaison with PR executive Richard Attias, a dashing 49-year-old Moroccan.
The pair moved to New York and pictures of them were published on the front cover of Paris Match. The editor was fired, but the damage was done. Eventually Nicolas wooed Cécilia back, although he did manage to fit in a quick affair with a young political journalist beforehand.
Infidelity in France is nothing new; sharing it with the rest of the nation is. François Mitterrand, for example, was tight-lipped about his affairs.
“There is a rumour, Mr President, that you have a mistress and a love child,” a journalist once said to the President. “Et alors?” was Mitterrand’s response. “So what?”
His mistress, Anne Pingeot, could be credited with starting the trend for hanging out the presidential washing in public, although she at least waited until her lover was dead. Then she showed up at his funeral with their lovechild in tow.
The French don’t mind infidelity.
It is well known that President Jacques Chirac has been constantly unfaithful to his wife Bernadette. Félix Faure apparently died at the Elysée Palace while having oral sex with his mistress in 1899. There are worse ways to go.
For the French, a leader’s sex life has no bearing on whether or not he can or should run the country. Public trust and private lust are kept separate.
They were astounded by the fuss made of the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky liaison. “For us, if the President has sex with an intern it’s not a bad thing,” one friend told me. “Because men are terrible if they don’t have sex.”
Women are just as entitled to their petites aventures, which is why the public has not turned against Cécilia, despite rumours of a divorce being imminent. “I would imagine most Frenchwomen would applaud her for getting out of what I presume has become a loveless marriage,” says another French friend. “Or has she been bonking someone else? In which case they’d applaud even louder!”
The French rather like Cécilia. A mother of three, she is everything a chic French woman should be: tall, slim, elegant. Most people don’t care what goes on between her and her husband. “We’ve had enough of this!” said one commentator on the Nouvel Observateur website commenting on a possible divorce. “With all the problems going on in France, this is really insignificant.”
Another reader pointed out that they didn’t vote for Cécilia, they voted for her husband – something Cécilia apparently failed to do herself during the election.
Since Sarko took office in May, she has been conspicuous by her absence from his side. “I don’t see myself as a first lady,” she has been quoted as saying.
“That bores me. I am not politically correct.” She refused to have tea with President Bush when the couple visited America. She skipped a visit to Bulgaria last week, where she was due to receive the country’s highest award for her part in freeing six Bulgarian medics from a Libyan jail. Nor did she show up at the Rugby World Cup semi-final on Saturday.
Maybe she had a premonition of the final score – or another rendezvous?
The latter is more likely. Let’s face it, if Frenchmen are sleeping around, then so are Frenchwomen. They see their petites aventures as one of the good things in life that one shouldn’t deny oneself, rather like a mature piece of Brie or a square of exquisite dark chocolate.
French female infidelity has a long and illustrious past.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, cuckolded her husband Louis II way back during the second crusades. Nobody in France disapproves of literary heroine Emma Bovary for cavorting with the young Léon in the back of a horse-drawn carriage.
“Our culture of l’amour libertine is a heritage we cannot avoid,” says a friend of mine. “We have grown up with Les Liaisons Dangereuses and with characters such as the Marquis de Sade and Colette.”
It is said that if you cut a Frenchwoman in half, you will see the words liberté, égalité, fraternité written throughout, like a stick of rock. Of these the most important is liberté. Women are free to marry, and then to misbehave.
“Everyone does their own thing in their own corner,” the French designer Chantal Thomass told me. But what Frenchwomen do insist on is discretion.
If they criticise Cécilia it is not for being unfaithful but for getting caught out. Never before has a first lady publicly humiliated a president.
So are we seeing a new generation of Frenchwomen who will not put up with infidelity, or who will stray before their husbands get the chance?
The stoical behaviour of women such as Bernadette Chirac is seen as old-fashioned and weak. “Women are not willing to put up with being treated badly any more,” says a businesswoman acquaintance in her mid-thirties.
“And now that they have their own careers and incomes, I think we will see a lot more women acting like Cécilia.”
Rumour has it that she has left the Elysée Palace and moved to a suite at the five-star Beau Rivage Hotel in Geneva.
The occasional presence of Richard Attias in the city has been hinted at as a factor but he is known to be dating the French actress Mathilda May.
It is claimed that the first lady is to give an interview next week putting her side of the story, and if, as one Swiss newspaper is claiming, Cécilia has simply tired of Sarko’s multiple infidelities, then the rules of love and fidelity in France have been dramatically redrawn.
And it is Sarkozy who looks like becoming the first victim of the new regime.
• Helena Frith Powell is the author of ‘Two Lipsticks and a Lover’, published by Arrow at £6.99

Posted at 11:22 PM · Comments (0)

This photography site has just run a feature about my Shanghai photography, and can be seen here:

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: October 12, 2007

BEIJING: It might have been called the greatest show on earth, except it’s not a show. No, not a show at all.

The ruling party of the world’s most populous country opens what is arguably its most important meeting Monday, a once-every-five-years affair that has traditionally determined who will lead China in the years ahead, and has set broad ideological directions for the country.

This year, it would seem that factional struggles are the main item on the menu, with the current leader, Hu Jintao, and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, battling it out for influence.

But the truth be told, few really know what’s going on at the summit of power in one of the most important places in the world, and those who do aren’t saying.

President Hu has maintained a longtime Chinese tradition of creaky, wooden-tongued slogans, things like “harmonious society,” and “scientific development,” whose meaning some interpret to include regularizing the rules of succession in Chinese politics.

If one seeks truth from facts, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this country’s authoritarian political system remains densely opaque. Yes, it has delivered the bacon of very rapid economic growth over nearly three decades, but in doing so its leaders have excelled at something else, too: suppressing discussion of the negative consequences of their actions, muddying the waters and covering their own tracks.

Much has been made lately about China’s global role as an emerging power of the first order. China’s rise is pregnant with a big question that can be summarized as follows: how not to feel uneasy about a country that treats equally, or better yet, indifferently, with countries that safeguard their citizens’ rights and places like Sudan, which commits genocide, or Myanmar, which uses brute force to put down peaceful protests by monks and others?

China’s own murky political system has drawn less attention lately, especially with profits to people doing business in or with the country, and benefits to consumers, spread so widely.

Beijing gives its own people an offer they can’t refuse, for now: trust us to make all the decisions that need making, behind closed doors. We’ll fill you in on an as-needed basis, no questions asked.

Eventually, some theorize, the middle class in China will grow so large as to make this proposition untenable. People endowed with good education, property and experience of the outside world will begin to insist on being part of the conversation, of knowing about decisions that affect their families and fortunes in real time, and on having a say.

The outside world need show no such patience, however. China’s rising prominence and its growing importance to the rest of the world give rise to a natural sense of uneasiness about a closed system that remains a throwback to the first half of the last century, and the normal response to Beijing’s trust-us proposition is: “Why?”

The tea leaves do not suggest that this will be the long-awaited party congress of political reform, and things don’t seem to augur well for “scientific development,” either, however construed.

What is left? For the most part, a peculiarly Chinese struggle for power between factions which, according to the system’s own rules, are not supposed to exist. Under the circumstances, politicians are sometimes easily tempted to manipulate emotional issues, foremost and most dangerous among them being that old reliable fallback, Taiwan.

How much more reassuring would it be to have a gathering of Chinese leaders openly discussing problems, and better yet, constructively debating solutions? This is simply not the “Chinese way” the system would have its people believe.

Indeed, Taiwan is often trotted out as an example of the horrors of democracy. From time to time, Chinese television viewers are treated to the spectacle of a parliamentary scrum in Taipei, supposed proof of the indignity of legislative debate. What the public here never sees is the serious side of democratic process, where Taiwanese debate an issue on its merits and decide for themselves, starting in fact with how to deal with China itself.

Of course the surface unanimity here has always been a sham, even during the sternest days of Maoist totalitarianism.

A gentle reminder of this comes these days in the form of pre-congress letters published by old men who worked long, loyal years in the system. One can easily think of the two men as representing Chinese analogs to the Republican and Democratic parties, yet they are both lifelong Communists.

The point is not to thrust America’s political model onto China, or even to push the parallel very far. Both men represent strong, distinct currents, though, and there is a natural tension between their views, which can be assumed to be shared by many others.

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Copyright The Boston Globe

IN THE PAST few weeks, the secretive nation of Burma suddenly landed on the world’s front pages, as small demonstrations by monks spiraled into massive protests and triggered a violent crackdown by the military government.

Such an impromptu uprising surprised many observers. Searching for explanations, some have cited the rising price of fuel, which is subsidized in Burma; this summer, the regime allowed the price to skyrocket, adding to the economic misery of average Burmese people.

But behind the unrest also lies a larger explanation, one that makes the isolated country a critical test of foreign policy. Burma’s brutal ruling junta, which has long kept power through force and fear, is taking the next step and transforming itself into one of the world’s few totalitarian regimes.

It has recently moved beyond its years of authoritarian rule, in which it controlled politics but allowed some degree of personal freedom, toward more absolute control of its citizens’ lives. As totalitarian regimes die out in other parts of the world, Burma has been clamping down on the last vestiges of dissent, creating a personality cult around the junta’s leader, and isolating itself by moving Burma’s capital away from Rangoon to a remote town.

Burma’s transformation bucks the global trend away from such tightly repressive societies. For years, totalitarianism loomed as the West’s mortal enemy, a terrifying force that drove the massive purges of Stalinist Russia, the bizarre personality cult of Albania, and the wholesale eradication of intellectuals in Maoist China.

But in the years since the Cold War, totalitarianism has appeared to be in wide retreat. With the advent of mobile phones, satellite television, and cheap, fast Internet access, it has become nearly impossible for any government to totally isolate its people from the world, or to dominate their private lives.

In Laos, where the Communist government once created a personality cult around its revolutionary founder, city-dwellers can watch news reports about their country on television from Thailand. In China, the Communist Party continues to stamp out organized dissent but no longer tracks ordinary citizens’ every movement, and many people can afford to buy homes and give themselves a degree of domestic privacy. Even in North Korea, which spent decades walling itself off, cheap cellphones smuggled across the border from China have created some tiny cracks in Kim Jong-Il’s regime.

But in Burma, the junta has headed in the opposite direction. Last week’s protests most immediately speak to the sufferings of the average Burmese, but they also send an important signal at a moment when a handful of governments - including Zimbabwe and Venezuela - are showing fresh signs of totalitarian rule, building personality cults and infiltrating their citizens’ private lives. As it quickly becomes a central topic for the UN and the Bush administration, Burma will prove a test of whether these repressive regimes have any future at all.

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Posted at 1:35 PM · Comments (0)

Two magazines have featured my photography in the last couple of weeks.

New Weekly magazine (China) ran several of my Shanghai photographs in its October 1, 2007 edition. The images were featured as part of a special, all-photography issue that looked at how foreign photographers, many of them quite famous, depict China. I was very honored to have been included.

The Polish arts magazine, Autoportret, also featured my Shanghai work in its Autumn edition.
http://www.autoportret.pl/

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
Published: October 5, 2007

SHANGHAI: A certain amount of peril attaches to the statement of anything definitive about the Korean Peninsula.

The events of recent weeks, nonetheless, strongly suggest the approach of something like an endgame.

By the end of this year, much will be known about the will and intentions of the main parties to the multidimensional diplomacy aimed at ending the five-decade-old state of war that persists between the Koreas, about the possibility of disarming a nuclear power through political and economic engagement and about the Bush administration’s willingness to live and work with a regime it had included as a charter member of the Axis of Evil.

All of the recent diplomatic advances could, of course, come to naught. By Dec. 31, North Korea must give a thorough and convincing accounting of its nuclear assets, weapons included. And elements in the Bush administration which have never accommodated themselves to the idea of normalizing relations with Pyongyang must finally come to terms with this idea.

This means putting aside last-minute objections about supposed North Korean nuclear cooperation with Syria, and other leaked, murky plotlines that are sure to surface between now and the New Year.

Assuming this can happen, though, now is a good time to ask: how have things even come this far?

The answer lies in the creeping hold of realism that seems to have reached out and grasped most of the main protagonists. The apparent Korean endgame, it would seem, is built on certain other, national endgames, as well as on the important changes in countries like China that have pushed hard, if discreetly, to make things move.

In each of the main players there has been a tacit recognition that the other principal parties have real and fundamental interests, and the potential implications of this, after years of diplomatic futility, are profound.

In addition to being treated as a pariah, the North Korean regime has long been caricatured in ways that have served no useful purpose, and have certainly not helped understand the region’s complicated dynamics.

To be sure, Kim Jong Il’s government has a long history of abhorrent behavior, most especially toward its own people. For all of their cruelty and eccentricity, what Kim and his cronies are not, however, is crazy.

Like most states, this one is deeply preoccupied with its own survival. It does not take paranoia to conclude that the international order has turned harshly unfavorable toward the North Korean regime since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Seen from the vantage point of Pyongyang, Bush’s 2002 Axis of Evil speech came only as confirmation that the country’s leadership figured high on a global hit list of candidates for regime change. This, not some wacky Austin Powers-type Dr. Evil mind-set, explains much of North Korea’s behavior since.

The country expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, pushed hard to advance its weapons-making capabilities, detonated an atomic device and then, with a strengthened hand, and greatly enhanced deterrence, accepted more negotiations.

In truth, Pyongyang had tried negotiating an end to hostilities before. Madeleine Albright visited the country in the final days of the Clinton administration, and for a brief moment, it appeared that a major settlement might be within reach.

The urgency from the North Korean perspective today derives from an understanding that America’s presidential alternation often wipes out diplomatic momentum, and indeed, where the last two changes in Washington were concerned, wiped the policy slate clean toward Pyongyang altogether, requiring long, costly efforts to get going again.

Kim Jong Il, who is widely believed to have serious health concerns, and also appears to be preoccupied with engineering his own dynastic succession, likely feels that now is the best time to strike a deal that would end the state of war, win badly needed economic assistance, establish diplomatic guarantees for his regime and help ensure its survival.

If so, he is likely counting on the near lame-duck status of President Bush, and on the search for a legacy by his outgoing South Korean counterpart, Roh Moo Hyun, whose tenure has been broadly ineffectual but who now has a chance to boost his own name, as well as the prospects of his political party in upcoming elections.

Though in many ways South Korea is the weakest of all the parties, Roh has played a strong hand by resisting Washington’s hard line from the outset, leaving few other choices besides engagement. He was also astute enough not to expand Pyongyang’s options by over-promising during his summit there this week.

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Shanghai Journal
Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: October 3, 2007

SHANGHAI, Sept. 28 — Somehow all conversations at the Paramount ballroom in Shanghai manage to wend their way toward what might ordinarily be considered an unwelcome topic: the ballroom dancers’ ages.

The Paramount Ballroom, built in 1933, once again beckons to Shanghai in the night.

The Paramount is just that kind of place, a palace of retro in a city with its gaze fixed far more intently on a bright-looking future than on its often brilliant but tumultuous past.

But more often than not, it is the dancers who bring up the question, proudly daring a visitor to try to guess their age.

It might be a rich business tycoon in his 90s who shuffles through halting steps propped up by a fine-boned dance partner seven decades his junior. Or it might be a well-heeled tai-tai, a Shanghai homemaker out for her regular escape from tedium.

The reason the age question comes up with such regularity is not because this relic of a place makes its habitués feel old — quite the contrary. Whatever their description, the regulars here are all but unanimous on one point: it’s their frequent turns at the fox trot or the tango or the rumba that help keep them feeling young.

“Look at me, I’m still upright,” said a slim and stylishly dressed woman who gave her name only as Yoshimi. “I don’t go the gym and I don’t diet, either. My regimen consists of coming here twice a week and enjoying myself dancing.”

With a wink, the woman, a 49-year-old Paramount regular, who is half-Chinese, half-Japanese and divorced, added: “And it works.”

In a city that is rapidly losing the remaining traces of its last great boomtown era in the first decades of the 20th century, the Paramount has not only somehow managed to survive. It stands out.

By early evening, its approaches are clogged with hurrying commuters talking quickly into cellphones and dodging sidewalk vendors hawking everything from copied DVDs to Shanghai-themed Monopoly boards on narrow, hectic side streets.

Turn onto Yuyuan Road, though, and no matter how many times one has seen it, there is a moment of surprise. With its bright neon Art Deco trimmings, the building could be a giant and lavish set prop from the Buck Rogers era, or a gaudy transplant from the old Miami Beach.

That the building has survived to stand in this form today, though, has been a small miracle, considering the countless reincarnations it has undergone since it was built in 1933 by Chinese bankers. It started out as a casino and favorite gathering place of high society, but went steadily down the economic ladder, first as a favorite after-work stop for government clerks and other members of a growing Chinese middle class, and then deteriorating into a preferred hangout of wiseguys and their molls.

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Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

This is a freelance piece I contributed to Michael Johnston’s “The Online Photographer”:

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