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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

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
November 30, 2007

SHANGHAI: Last October, as Ma Shaofang prepared to travel from the Chinese city of Shenzhen to Beijing to attend a writers’ conference, he received a menacing call from the police.

Why trouble a businessman who wants to attend a conference? The problem was that as a student hunger strike organizer during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, Ma had a “dossier” that still trails behind him wherever he goes in China.

The Chinese calendar is filled with special dates, “sensitive moments” whose association with events either historical or current put the authorities on alert and the people on guard.

October 2007 happened to be the month of the Communist Party’s 17th Congress, a once-in-five years affair whose political significance is such that the capital is locked down, potential “troublemakers” rounded up and even the airwaves scrubbed with extra vigor by censors whose job it is to see that nothing can sully the image of a serene and clear-sighted leadership.

So with that backdrop in mind, the police “invited” Ma for tea. Ma’s account of the meeting, which he recently published, and which was subsequently translated by the University of California at Berkeley’s China Digital Times, offers a chilling glimpse of a Chinese reality that few foreigners ever see.

It is a side of China that not only persists, but also thrives. Of a state whose leaders are fond of proclaiming their attachment to advancing the rule of law but who cling to thuggery to intimidate the populace, silence critics and generally to enforce their will.

The police: You must be busy lately. Is business going well?

Ma: Enough of this. I’ve heard from the “relevant departments” that people like us are not allowed to make big bucks. We’re just doing enough to make a living.

The police: We haven’t bothered your business, have we?

Ma: Really? Unless I remember it wrong, you guys once talked to my partner and said, “if we see him dealing with your company, your business will end.”

The police: That’s because you did something we didn’t want you to do. Over the last few years you haven’t made any trouble for us, so we haven’t made any trouble for you.

Ma: Is that so? You asked me to come here today. Isn’t this trouble?

The police: How can you say this is trouble? We’re friends. Isn’t it O.K. to have a cup of tea together?

Ma: It’s a pity we’re not sitting here as friends. Enough beating around the bush, let’s talk about why I am wanted here today.

The police: O.K., are you or are you not planning to go to Beijing soon?

Ma: I am. I’m flying there tomorrow. Any problem?

The police: You have to go?

Ma then insists that he is only going for business, and the police reply that if that’s the case, they won’t try to stop him. But they warn him, for good measure.

The police: We’re just kindly reminding you. If you break the law, of course there are corresponding punishments, and it will surely not be like this, sitting here drinking tea.

Ma: You mean interrogation? I’ve already been through that. But what is this reminder, really, a warning or a threat?

The police: We’re friends, and we don’t want our friends to run into trouble.

Ma: But as I’ve said, we’re not sitting here as friends. We are the ruler and the ruled.

It would be bad enough if such harassment were limited to former Tiananmen protesters, but goon tactics like these are widespread in China, and the thuggery doesn’t stop there.

Chinese assistants for foreign news publications, for one, are regularly called in for debriefings over tea by state security agents who treat foreign journalists as intelligence targets and darkly wield an implicit threat about the consequences of noncooperation to squeeze information from local researchers.

This sort of thing pales, of course, in comparison to areas in which the authorities believe they enjoy more thorough impunity, where the use of fear and control over the media mean that their actions will remain cloaked in darkness.

In cities where huge urban redevelopment projects are underway, places like Shanghai, for example, residents who resist forced relocation without anything resembling due process are known to have been summoned to the police headquarters and retained there just long enough for the wrecking crews to knock down their homes in their absence.

Those who protest too much are often simply carted off to teach them a lesson.

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Copyright Commentary

Of the ways one might choose to visit China for the first time, traveling with a delegation of American journalists, as I did in September, is not ideal. In addition to the usual frustrations of group touring, there is the burden of being “media friends,” as our Chinese hosts liked to call the nine of us (six from newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Boston Globe, two from magazines, and one from a Texas television station). Our primary job was to attend official meetings—that is, to sit at long tables in dreary conference rooms, listening to bureaucrats run through their talking points and repeat the Delphic slogans (“peaceful rise,” “harmonious society,” “putting people first”) with which the Communist party makes known its priorities. If we were lucky, the bureaucrats spoke English; often, we had to endure line-by-line translations. Though the standard tourist stops were also on our itinerary—we wandered the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, sampled the shopping bounty of Shanghai, cruised Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor—free time was scarce. Leisurely exploration was not on the agenda.

But such travel has its advantages, too, especially in terms of access to the Chinese government, an organism notoriously closed to outsiders. One co-sponsor of our trip was the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based education and research institute funded primarily by the U.S. government and involved in various kinds of foreign-policy wonkery and trans-Pacific bridge-building. The other co-sponsor, the Better Hong Kong Foundation (BHKF), is a very different sort of enterprise.

When Fortune ran a cover story in 1995 entitled “The Death of Hong Kong,” arguing that the British colony’s handover to China in two years would make it a “global backwater,” the adverse publicity caused a panic among local business interests. Some of the savvier tycoons—many of them with substantial investments on the mainland—launched the BHKF in order to provide a brighter picture. In the common parlance of Hong Kong politics, the foundation is “pro-Beijing”: it has friends in high places and the standing to ask them for favors. As one member of our group, a writer who covers Asia for the Economist, told me about our itinerary, “Meetings like this are no easy thing to get.”

For the Chinese government, every visitor, even the casual tourist, represents an opportunity to make a positive impression—to let the world know of China’s progress under the sage guidance of the Communist party. But American journalists fresh off the plane are potential troublemakers and have to be handled with special care. Predisposed to criticize government policy and to distrust official pronouncements, they have to be brought around gently to the desired image of a dynamic, prudently modernizing China. There are several ways to try to shape the experience of “media friends” so as to bring about this result: through flattery and bonhomie, with creature comforts and small luxuries, and, most of all, by regulating the sort of contacts they make during their short stay.

To be on the receiving end of such treatment is no bad deal, I can attest; my two-week trip was a pleasure in many ways and, for a China neophyte like myself, an extraordinary education. But I was often reminded of Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981), the cold-war classic about the manipulation of wide-eyed Western intellectuals who visited the Communist bloc. Today’s China is not the Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba, and none of us was a credulous fellow traveler. But we, too, were subjected to what Hollander called, in his memorable phrase, the “techniques of hospitality.”
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From the recording New Ancient Strings, which is consistently sublime music from Mali played with the kora, a traditional West African stringed instrument whose sound is vaguely reminiscent of the sitar. This CD great strength are its duets, which are just magical.

Link

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Distilled languor. Brilliant and cool as can be.

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Copyright The new York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007

… By the late 1960s, the Ministry of Hydrology in which my father-in-law had worked was preoccupied with the overwhelming task of trying to deal with the ongoing ecological disaster created by the Great Leap. Even my father-in-law’s hometown in Jixian County, Hebei province, had been devastated. His village had been submerged when they dammed the Jizhou River to create the Yuqiao Reservoir, less than one hundred kilometers from the Guanting Reservoir. The inhabitants of 141 villages had been resettled during the building of that project. There probably wouldn’t have been any complaints if the dam had really benefited local farmers.

But as was the case with so many grandiose dam-building projects, the local cadres behind the Yuqiao Reservoir had failed to ascertain the geological makeup of the area. The two-kilometer-long dam was built on sandy soil. Within a few years water was seeping out to create a vast marshland downstream. The result was the destruction of 50,000 acres of land that had provided food for the population of nearly one million people in the six major counties downstream. What was left, so Dejia told me, was a bumpy moonscape that could no longer support agriculture of any consequence. The farmers had long since been forced to leave their homes, but they snuck back to their ruined towns and eked out a living, harvesting only a fraction of the food they used to produce. To this day those villagers are still on state welfare.

Meanwhile, the authorities in Beijing are preparing for the competitors and visitors who will descend on the Chinese capital next August for the 2008 Olympics. Unprecedented efforts have gone into transforming the city. Of course, international audiences will mostly be concerned with who jumps the highest or runs the fastest. But Beijing, the capital of a “rapidly rising” China, is anxious to show off its architectural magnificence: the grand Olympic Stadium (the “Nest”), the “Water Cube” built for swimming events, all the new luxury hotels, the Rem Koolhaas–designed China Central TV building, and the multilane ring roads around the city.

While the farmers living on the outskirts of greater Beijing are given strictly controlled allocations of water, in central Beijing the people in charge are celebrating the construction of the ultimate “water follies” which will be ready in time for the Olympic year. These include the vast lake that will surround the titanium, egg-shaped National Grand Theater next to the Great Hall of the People, just off Tiananmen Square, as well as the largest fountain in the world at the Shunyi “Water Heaven”—one that can shoot 134 meters high. The Shunyi water park has been built on the dried-out remains of the Chaobai River—no irony intended. And then there are the hundred golf courses that have been laid out in greater Beijing. These infamous “water guzzlers” occupy over 20,000 acres of land and their imported turf has become a serious drain on the city’s dwindling water resources.

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Copyright The New York Times

… In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world.

In the World Economic Forum survey, the U.S. comes in just ahead of Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany (China is 34th). The U.S. gets poor marks for macroeconomic stability (the long-term federal debt), for its tax structure and for the low savings rate. But it leads the world in a range of categories: higher education and training, labor market flexibility, the ability to attract global talent, the availability of venture capital, the quality of corporate management and the capacity to innovate.

William W. Lewis of McKinsey surveyed global competitive in dozens of business sectors a few years ago, and concluded, “The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry.”

Second, America’s fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most stable of assets — its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under 40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a decade older.

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Copyright The Washington Post
Monday, November 26, 2007; Page A01

FUKUOKA, Japan — Salarymen — the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to long-suffering wives — have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.

Divorce. A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband’s company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives — hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect — are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they’re in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization — the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association — preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one’s wife.

“I can’t win. I won’t win. I don’t want to win,” they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

The pork was scrumptious and the mood jolly, but throughout the dinner meeting there was an undertow of not-too-distant domestic disaster.

“The fact that a wife can now get 50 percent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages,” said Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher in this city of 1.3 million in western Japan. The word chauvinist in the group’s name, Amano says, is not intended to refer to bossy men. Instead, it invokes the original meaning of the Japanese word that today translates as chauvinist, kanpaku, a top assistant to the emperor.

Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. “To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead — because we can’t take care of ourselves,” Amano said.

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was “99 percent” certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.

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Posted at 11:10 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Monday, November 26, 2007; Page A01

FUKUOKA, Japan — Salarymen — the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to long-suffering wives — have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.

Divorce. A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband’s company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives — hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect — are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they’re in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization — the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association — preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one’s wife.

“I can’t win. I won’t win. I don’t want to win,” they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

The pork was scrumptious and the mood jolly, but throughout the dinner meeting there was an undertow of not-too-distant domestic disaster.

“The fact that a wife can now get 50 percent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages,” said Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher in this city of 1.3 million in western Japan. The word chauvinist in the group’s name, Amano says, is not intended to refer to bossy men. Instead, it invokes the original meaning of the Japanese word that today translates as chauvinist, kanpaku, a top assistant to the emperor.

Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. “To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead — because we can’t take care of ourselves,” Amano said.

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was “99 percent” certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.

Click to read more

Posted at 11:10 PM · Comments (0)

Q: Do you care if people read your novels 100 years from now?

A: If somebody writes a book and doesn’t care for the survival of that book, he’s an imbecile.

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From a Time magazine on comely first ladies. June 8, 1962

African Orchid. No caged bird, but a delicious, capricious worldling, the Ivory Coast’s sensuous, luxury-loving Marie-Thérèse Houphouet-Boigny, 31, delights Parisians even more than Jacqueline Kennedy or the Empress Farah. Sinuous and creamy-skinned (her grandmother was white), Marie-Therese was one of six children of an Ivory Coast customs official who sent her to France to finish high school. There she soon caught the eye of Félix Houphouet-Boigny, an able politician who even in 1956 was plainly destined to lead his country after it won independence from France.

Houphouet-Boigny stirred a scandal and risked his career by divorcing his wife and marrying Marie-Thérèse, who is 25 years younger. Today the Ivory Coast’s First Lady is coifed by one of the most exclusive Parisian hair dressers (Carita), and dressed by Dior, whose salon is strategically located across the street from the Houphouet-Boignys’ apartment. She prefers pastels and bright colors and, says her Dior salesgirl, “would never touch anything black.” The affluent Houphouet-Boignys also have a villa in the stylish Swiss resort of Gstaad (her six-year-old adopted daughter, Hélène, is attending school in Switzerland), an Ivory Coast beach house, an ultramodern five-story tower in the fashionable Cocody sector of Abidjan, the Ivory Coast’s capital.

Thérèse loves orchids and sables, pilots a fast Lancia. She writhes with impatience at official occasions when her position restrains her from doing the twist. Asked her opinion of France’s then Premier Michel Debré after the Ivory Coast’s Independence Day Ball, Thérèse allowed that “He’s nice,” but added that “he doesn’t cha cha half as well” as another statesman at the party. Frenchmen, who call her the Ivory One and see her as the forerunner of a new, Europe-influenced African woman, delight in her exuberant, ultrafeminine wit. It did not go unappreciated at a recent luncheon party at Bobby Kennedy’s house, at which, latching on fast to New Frontiersmanship, she switched tables after every course. Murmured Thérèse, raising male expectations: “I suppose I’ll be in the swimming pool for dessert.”

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China’s Xinmin Weekly ran this article about my Shanghai photography in its 11/2-11/11/2007 edition. (Sorry for the late notice.)

Qiu Xiaolong, a native Shanghainese and celebrated author of Detective Chen novels, wrote an essay to accompany the images.

我感谢傅好文为留住上海历史和文化记忆所做的这一切努力，因为充满了”我们对这个城市和人民的共同热爱”。

撰稿／裘小龙 摄影／傅好文

认识傅好文（Ｈｏｗａｒｄ Ｆｒｅｎｃｈ），是因为他对上海这个城市的”情结”。如他在一个电子邮件里所说的，这也是我们共同的”情结”，在我的小说和诗 歌里，在他给《纽约时报》和《国际先驱论坛报》撰写的文章里。接着却有新的发现：他的上海激情不仅仅洋溢在文字里，也在摄影中。最近我在校看《红旗袍》的 清样，与他说起，就像因为窗外一个偶然的意象，福克纳开始创作了《愤怒与喧嚣》，”文革”年间，因为父亲书柜里一张劫后余生的老照片，我在许多年后萌发了 写这本书的冲动。他获悉后，立刻给我寄来了他许多关于上海的摄影作品。

我喜欢摄影，仅在业余意义上，他却是专业，作品曾多次获 奖，去年在德国办过一个摄影展，名为”消失中的上海”，最近还要在上海办一个，也是有关这个城市的。我很难从专业的角度说什么，但他的作品给我带来一种诗 意的震撼，就仿佛自己也给摄入进去，身临其境般地获得了全新的经验和观念。

从一种角度说，摄影有与诗歌相通的地方，都要在寻常的 生活场景中发掘出不寻常的一瞬间。诚然，摄影者不可能像诗人那样直抒胸臆，只能通过镜头中的一切来激发读者（观众）相应的情感和思考。我们来看看傅好文的 照片，标题《不再下注了》，下面一行短注说，”麻将间，经过了漫长一天。”作品呈现出一间相当拥挤，显然综合了厨房、客厅、饭厅功能的房间。居中一张麻将 桌，仍乱摊着麻将牌，旁边是放烟灰缸的茶几；前面一张饭桌，还搁着一缸子菜；左侧叠放着冰箱、微波炉、茶壶，紧挨一张不再用来写字的写字桌；右侧竖着一架 老式移动梯子，可以小心翼翼地爬上加搭出来的小阁楼，阁楼墙上悬挂日光灯、黑底白字的电钟，时针指着５点４７分。灯光洒在麻将桌上，成了整个画面的聚焦， 恰到好处地与朦胧的前景与后景形成对照。打麻将的人都已离去了，桌上仅蹲着一只白猫。

这样的场景对打麻将的人来说，应属司空见惯。典型的一幕老里弄房子场景，再普通不过的市民生活方式。只是在摄影者对这个城市独特的观照角度中，在快门按下的”决定性一瞬间”，才发生意义。

我这样说，因为我就是在这种老房子中长大的。家里还要拥挤一些，房间的功能除了客厅、饭厅，更要加上卧室，只有一张桌子，要兼顾写字与吃饭。左邻右舍住房 条件（甚至到现在）也都差不多，大伙儿挤在公用厨房、客堂，一起做饭、聊天，偶尔也会在过道里摆开餐桌、牌局。我还想到一个朋友，他家里也有这样一个加搭 出来的阁楼。那还是在７０年代初，他给我钥匙，让我白天去他的阁楼，一个人躲在里面读书；真有好几个早晨，在爬上梯子前，我看到了就似乎是这张照片中的场 景，唯一不同的是桌上摊着纸牌。这张照片使我感到亲切而又震动，倒又不仅仅因为怀旧。回想起来，还隐隐感到其中隐含的不同生活方式和价值。或许，因为空间 局限而密切起来的人间关系，人们到处都能在生活中发现、享受欢乐的精神，条件艰难却依然生动的知足——用孔子的话来说，”居陋巷不改其乐”吧。这似乎也可 以说是上海文化中正在消失的一种特色。

对于我来说，在傅好文众多的上海摄影作品里，正是脉动着城市的这种精神：夏日的傍晚，一家 三口在路边用餐，椅子、凳子、竹躺椅，却没有餐桌，孩子光顾着瞅前面的稀奇玩意儿，不肯吃饭，母亲一边呵责，一边把碗端到他嘴边，父亲抽着烟，回过头来看 一眼，都那么自在，就像在家里一样；一个废品回收者，踩着堆满杂货的三轮车，车前一大块牌子像黑板，写满要从街头巷尾回收的废品，慢吞吞驶过狭隘而拥挤不 堪的小街，恰如闲庭信步；一个在街头修自行车的工人，没有生意上门，索性放倒塑料折椅，躺下身子，摊开报纸仰面阅读，让写满了磨难的额头埋在了新闻世界 下……

关于这个城市，傅好文在柏林摄影展的序言中这样写道：”在上海，这些正迅速消失的居民区所最吸引我的地方，正是弥漫其中的 亲密无间。这里，人们知道相互的名字，愿意停下步子来谈一谈生活的痛苦和欢乐、季节的变迁、世代的更替。老人和孩子受到大伙的照顾，人们在屋子外面吃饭， 空气中混杂着上百家厨房的芳香。在街头，随时随地都会冒出小市场，可以买到各种各样好吃的东西。人们关爱地饲放鸽子，让中午的天空布满白色的翅膀。”

他写得诗意洋溢，还真让我想到周邦彦的名句：”雁背夕阳红欲暮。”当然，他清楚地意识到，尽管快速消失中的上海老城区充满了魅力，同时也充满了众多问题。 他的视角决不是单一的。或许又是一种巧合吧，在美国生活了近２０年后，在那些有关上海的小说中，我自己也这样想象着。

这里我所想 到的与他镜头中所摄到的，相对应关系或许并不一定那么直接、精确。用读者反应理论说，人们自身的经验各异，感受难免有差别。举个例子，照片的注说，”漫长 的一天后”。我的第一个反应却是：”漫长的一夜后”。换句话说，是清晨五点三刻的场景。我老房子所在的里弄里，方城之战多在夜间展开，而且常通宵达旦。

不过再仔细看，他的注也可能是故意含混。麻将牌局夜以继日，打麻将的人一味沉溺其中，要说成漫长的一天自有反讽意。现代社会如此充满多样性和复杂性，摄影作品也不得不是多义性的。其中意象层层叠加，更丰富了内涵，诸多细节完全可以有不同的解释。

再看照片中的中心意象——麻将。我不会麻将，说不上好恶。然而，对那些憎恶麻将的人来说，会有什么样的感受呢？打麻将的人已不在，却仿佛更突出了存在，在 一夜的激情与挥霍之后，如同”春潮带雨晚来急，野渡无人舟自横”的意境。在光的中心，静寂；仅有一只猫映衬着所有的输赢得失，背景中的幢幢阴影。

是的，使这一切静物生动起来的，是蹲在麻将桌上的白猫。这确实是神来之笔。如布列松所说的，摄影不能干涉拍摄的对象，无法像诗歌创作那样随意添加细节。这 里，谁也都没有办法让一只猫蹲在桌子上静静面对镜头（尽管在作品构图、光影和角度的选择上，摄影者还是加入了自己的观念，多少介于王国维所说的”有我”与 “无我”之间）。这是摄影者与被摄影的物体中间相互发现的一瞬间，偶然性的捕捉，无法干涉或复制。猫俯身在一盘麻将残局上，俨然君临天下，神情神秘莫测， 显得悠然，又有些慵懒，凝视着，批判着－－－－我们仿佛也突然融入了猫的视角，观照着这个城市的一幕独特场景。

关于他的摄影作 品，傅好文在《纽约时报》中曾写道，”街坊里的人们曾多次问我，我拍摄他们的生活场景，目的是什么？是不是要显示中国的阴暗面？或嘲笑穷人？回答并不难， 因为我的答复是真诚的，所以常常为人们接受。’我在你们的街头拍照，是因为你们生活方式中一些美好的东西。’我说，’任何事物也许都不十全十美，但这是一 个极其特殊的地方，不用多久，这一切恐怕都会消失了。’”

在上海经历的巨大变迁中，傅好文所关注的，不是物质主义意义上的繁华竞 逐，而是在城市重新发展过程中消逝的传统生活方式与价值，尤其涉及到社会的底层，这一切正在摩肩接踵的高楼群下黯然失色。他摄影作品的意象因此唤起我们身 上相应的复杂感受，我们进而也获得看世界以及自己的新视角。

或许像卞之琳先生当年对我说的那样，要写诗歌评论，最好自己写诗。对于傅好文的摄影，我也只能作为一个非专业的爱好者，用自己较习惯的读诗方式写下一些感受。不过，在中国传统文学批评中，也有诗中有画，画中有诗的说法，所以也可以这样来说摄影吧，

作为在他摄影作品背景中生长起来的一个读者，我感谢傅好文为留住上海历史和文化记忆所做的这一切努力，因为充满了”我们对这个城市和人民的共同热爱”。（作者系旅美作家）

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RED MANDARIN DRESS by Qiu Xiaolong. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur,
2007, 320 pp., $24.95 (cloth)
In the latest saga of Police Chief Inspector Chen Cao, Shanghai is
abuzz over the shocking murder of a young woman, whose suffocated
corpse is found in a public place clad in a red qipao (pronounced
CHEE-pow), as “mandarin dress” (aka cheongsam) is called in standard
Chinese.

The victim had worked at a mundane job in a cheap hotel and spent the
rest of her time caring for her enfeebled father, a former cadre
during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” launched in 1966,
when hordes of youthful radicals were mobilized to purge Chinese
socialism of reformist elements.

When an identically clad victim appears at another location, it’s
clear a serial killer is at work.

This time, however, Inspector Chen is on sabbatical, leaving his
dedicated subordinate Yu Guangming and the other cops to track down
the killer through conventional legwork — with absolutely no results.
The dresses in which the victims are clad offer no useful clues, and
in the mid-1990s, when this story takes place, Chinese police were
skeptical toward the science of criminal profiling and more inclined
to consider political motives.

While by no means a genius sleuth, Chen, by fortuitous circumstance,
happens to be researching a scholarly paper about the tendency to
vilify certain women who figured in Chinese history as vamps who
seduced men. This gives him insights into the crime, and his
unorthodox methods eventually succeed where his colleagues’ failed.

Chen’s investigation leads to an old magazine photograph that depicts
a heartwarming, innocent moment, but one with horrible consequences.
Once again, Qiu Xiaolong provides readers with another gut-wrenching
microcosm of the cultural revolution’s appalling brutality, which not
only brought untold misery to millions in the 1960s, but generated
enduring hatreds leading to murder even decades later.

The melodramatic scene in which the killer is exposed smacks just
slightly of the old British drawing-room mysteries. But “Red Mandarin
Dress” is every bit as exotic as the gourmet meal Chen arranges —
with the torturous preparation of a live creature at the tableside as
the piece de resistance — to sweat the truth out of his suspect. This
is Qiu’s best work to date, artfully interspersing past politics, a
man’s deep-seated psychological trauma and literary scholarship, with
the added bonus of a rare inside view into Chinese family life,
particularly mother-son relationships, during the years of the
Cultural Revolution.

Copyright The Japan Times: Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007

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Edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. Bergahn Books, NY, 2007. 433 pp.

Reviewed by Jeff Kingston (11/14/07)


This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, but it is not yet a time for quiet reflection about the horrors of the past. Instead, vitriolic recriminations, denials, minimizing and shifting of responsibility define and shape the discourse about this tragedy. There is little middle ground and prospects for a consensus among Japanese scholars and between Japan and China remain remote because political agendas continue to resonate loudly within the discourse.

Thus, this outstanding collection of essays detailing what is known about what actually happened at Nanking, and overview of the historiographical battle lines, is an invaluable contribution to an understanding of the Atrocity. These essays provide a compelling refutation of the tired and implausible arguments typically espoused by the deniers and minimizers and also vividly portray the various atrocities committed by the Imperial Armed Forces. This collection also offers refreshing counterpoints to the hyperbole that biases –and undermines-Chinese accounts of the tragedy.

It is no longer possible—if it ever was- to cast doubts on the extent and nature of the horrific crimes Japanese soldiers perpetrated on Chinese civilians and POWs in and around Nanking. Certainly much can never be known, but so much is known and verified that any further attempt by reactionaries and apologists to minimize, mitigate or shirk responsibility for these appalling malefactions demonstrates willful ignorance. For a taste of this ignorance readers are encouraged to visit the Yushukan Museum adjacent to Yasukuni Shrine; where else will one find a film clip that cuts from the scene of a triumphal collective “Banzai!” atop the city walls to a Japanese soldier ladling out soup for the young and elderly while the narrator asserts that the Japanese restored peace to Nanking?

So what are the complications suggested in the subtitle? Well the exact number of victims will never be known. So what? The focus on the numbers game casts a huge shadow over the Nanking discourse, but whether it was 10,000 or 300,000 is hardly the main issue and deflects attention away from an understanding of the causes and consequences of this atrocity. Holding Nanking hostage to the slippery numbers game is a gambit by conservatives to artificially constrain scholarly inquiry—we can say nothing until we know with precision everything— and ignores more important questions like why these soldiers were permitted to run amok, why did they do what they did, who was responsible and why attempts at airbrushing this atrocity persist.

Complications also arise from the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Atrocity. Depending on where one draws the boundaries—the city walls, the surrounding six counties or along the invasion route from the coast—and the initial six weeks or some longer period, makes a difference in the magnitude of the crimes. It is also inconvenient that conservative historians have been right in insisting on solid empirical research based on sound historical methods rather than instrumentalizing war memory for political purposes. The horrors of Nanking encapsulate a consummate evil that needs no embellishment.

There are sixteen chapters by eleven authors, including eight Japanese or Japanese-American contributors, demonstrating that Iris Chang was wrong in suggesting that Japanese suffer collective amnesia about Nanking. Clearly, Japanese researchers are conducting some of the finest scholarship on Nanking and the absurd arguments of the deniers featured in the mass media are not representative of Japanese public opinion or scholarly consensus…

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Copyright The New York Times

Choking on Growth - Part V

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: November 24, 2007

QINGTONGXIA, China — When the central government in Beijing announced an ambitious nationwide campaign to reduce energy consumption two years ago, officials in this western regional capital got right to work: not to comply, but to engineer creative schemes to evade the requirements.
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Choking on Growth

This is the fifth in a series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.

The energy campaign required local officials to raise electricity prices as a way of discouraging the growth of large energy-consuming industries and forcing the least efficient of these users out of business. Instead, fearing the impact on the local economy, the regional government brokered a special deal for the Qingtongxia Aluminum Group, which accounts for 20 percent of this region’s industrial consumption and roughly 10 percent of its gross domestic product.

Local officials arranged for the company to be removed from the national electrical grid and supplied directly by the local company, exempting it from expensive fees, according to an electricity company official who asked not to be named, an official of the aluminum company and the official Web site of the nearby city of Shizuishan. As a result, Qingtongxia continued to get its power at the lowest price available.

It was a cat-and-mouse game grimly familiar to Chinese officials, who have a long tradition of spearheading ambitious nationwide campaigns that are all too often thwarted at the local level, partly because local priorities clash with national ones.

Concerned about China’s roaring economic engine consuming too much energy, national officials aimed to cut energy use by 20 percent per dollar of output within five years. China’s energy consumption has more than quadrupled since 1980.

The environmental toll is staggering. The country is already the world’s largest user of coal, the dirtiest type of energy. China’s coal consumption alone is projected to double in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency.

Beijing has so fixated on the 20 percent goal that it has become the centerpiece of its overall strategy to reduce pollution in addition to consumption, as well as its main talking point in diplomatic negotiations to curb the output of gases that cause global warming. The target has elicited support among environmentalists in China and abroad. They regard it as ambitious given the explosion of heavy industry in China, which consumes vast amounts of electricity and, as it expands, makes the overall economy less energy efficient.

Drive to Conserve Sputters

Even so, the drive has mostly sputtered. According to official estimates, which in China are often overly generous, the country saved only 1.23 percent of energy per unit of output last year. In the first half of 2007, the authorities claim to have achieved 2.4 percent, double the previous year’s rate. Energy experts say they believe that the savings will increase over time, but to meet the goal of a 20 percent reduction by 2010, the country will have to reduce energy per unit of output by 4 percent a year on average, so the chances of achieving it look increasingly slim.

Officials in Beijing, faced with the likelihood that they will fall short of their target, have issued uncharacteristically scathing assessments of the performance of some local leaders, and they have vowed to use more of their powers to bring wayward officials into line. In May, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, complained bitterly. “Understanding is not adequate, responsibilities are unclear, measures are not complementary, policies are incomplete, investment doesn’t arrive, and coordination is ineffective,” he said of efforts to cut energy consumption. “If these problems are not turned around, it will be difficult to achieve any obvious progress.”

More recently, Zhang Lijun, a deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, warned that China was likely to miss its targets for emissions controls for the current five-year plan, which ends in 2010. “We haven’t spotted any substantial indicators of a slowdown in the expansion of energy-intensive sectors,” Mr. Zhang said.

The struggle to meet the target highlights the challenge of making China greener at a time when China’s top leaders have continued to emphasize breakneck growth, even as they worry about its costs. Officials at all levels arguably still face greater risks to their careers if they allow economic performance, job creation or tax revenue to lag than if they fail to curb pollution. Slower growth also means fewer opportunities for friends and relatives of people in power to cash in on the country’s boom.

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LETTER FROM ASIA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
November 23, 2007

SHANGHAI: The dawning of a new Asia seemed just possible in September 2002, as the prime minister of Japan then, Junichiro Koizumi, met in Pyongyang with the leader of North Korea and exchanged apologies.

Japan and North Korea had never had diplomatic relations, never mind an exchange of visits between leaders, and Koizumi had come to try to bring to a close the most difficult issue that still separated the two countries: the kidnapping by North Korean intelligence agents of 11 Japanese nationals who disappeared decades earlier into the Stalinist kingdom.

A delicate minuet was required of both sides involving statements of regret and future promises. Koizumi said that Japan “humbly recognized the historical fact that it caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of Korea through its past colonial rule and expressed feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology.”

There was more. “Progress in Japan-North Korean ties does not just benefit the two countries,” Koizumi said. “It affects peace on the Korean Peninsula and all of northeastern Asia. It also contributes greatly to the peace and stability of South Korea, the United States, Russia, China, other neighboring nations and the international community as a whole.”

Kim Jong Il, the dictator who is incessantly lampooned for his bouffant hairdo and elevator shoes, among other eccentricities, sounded just the right notes on the kidnappings. “This is truly regretful, and I offer my candid apology,” a Japanese official quoted him as saying, adding, “This will never happen again.”

Kim was not finished, either. Nine months after being named as a charter member of the Axis of Evil by President George W. Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address, he asked Koizumi to convey to the Bush administration that the “door is open for dialogue” and said he would observe an open-ended moratorium on testing ballistic weapons.

But Japan and North Korea failed to consolidate what certainly appeared to be a monumental breakthrough. Suffice to say that there was plenty blame to go around.

By now, painting North Korea as villainous does not even count as sport. The dynastic Kim regime has a tremendous amount to answer for, from the death of untold hundreds of thousands of its citizens from famine, to the stunted lives of countless others, to the fierce repression that is a rule of daily life.

In its diplomacy with Japan, however, North Korea was trying to break out of the economic and political deep freeze it found itself in and had signaled a willingness to make concessions on important issues in order to do so - and not for the first time, either.

The Bush administration was deeply disappointed with Japan’s North Korean diplomacy, which had been played much closer than usual to the chest by an ally that usually walks in lock step with the United States. And Washington quickly began to ratchet up the pressure on Tokyo to avoid coming to terms with Pyongyang in any way that would involve large economic aid, which unsurprisingly was what the North Koreans craved most.

It was not American pressure alone that made this promising diplomatic opening suddenly slam closed. Japanese politicians led by Koizumi’s hapless successor, Shinzo Abe, who was then a top aide to the prime minister, whipped up public sentiment on the kidnapping issue to the point where the fate of the disappeared people became a national obsession.

Japan escalated its demands on the issue as public opinion grew almost hysterical, and soon Tokyo and Pyongyang were back to their traditional stance, at loggerheads, treating each other to disdain and insults.

The birth of a new Asia has gotten well under way since then, but Japan, which once might have been the midwife, has been mostly absent from the proceedings. Even the United States has begun to come around on North Korea, raising the prospect of an end to the official state of war that still exists on the peninsula it shares with South Korea, and nuclear disarmament, which is a precondition for full normalization.

Japan, meanwhile, remains dug in to its position that without a complete resolution of the kidnapping matter there can be no normalization with North Korea. A Japanese diplomat told me in Beijing not long ago that there was “no possibility” of Japanese financing for the energy assistance that North Korea has demanded in exchange for its nuclear cooperation until it was satisfied on the kidnapping front.

Already, the Bush administration has been preparing its Japanese ally for the moment, ostensibly soon, when Washington will reach its own accommodation with Pyongyang. That would begin with removing it, for example, from the list of countries the United States designates as state sponsors of terrorism, a vital step toward ending the country’s deep isolation.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

The vast majority of those who traveled in the holds of the slave ships from the Gold Coast passed through one of three major castles: a Dutch one at Elmina, the Danish Christiansborg at Accra (now the office of the president in Ghana), and the British one at Cape Coast. Cape Coast Castle has become a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the main stops on the path that brings African-Americans in Wright’s footsteps to Ghana. The castle’s extensive archives have now been put to good use by William St Clair, whose remarkable new book, The Door of No Return, is a sort of biography of the building. The Atlantic slave trade was a great capitalist enterprise: its cargo was insured; its fleets financed by borrowing. It depended, St Clair makes plain, on written agreements, files upon files of lists and memoranda. About the white men’s records, at least, Wright wasn’t entirely accurate.

The castle was constructed by Europeans, but on land rented out by the Efutu king, who behaved like a shrewd landlord, playing European competitors off against one another to squeeze out better deals. At various times, amid extensive negotiations, tenancy passed among Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and British traders. Despite the superiority of European weapons technology, it was the local rulers who had the upper hand. The 1970s miniseries Roots popularized the image of white slave raiders in embroidered silk vests stalking their quarry through the countryside. But most of the Europeans who lived in, worked in, or visited the castle stayed within a few miles of the coastline, never venturing further inland.

The building was not fundamentally a military installation; it was a place to make deals and store the goods—and the people—being bought and sold. Its imposing ramparts and cannons were all bluff: the walls consisted mostly of small stones, bound with lime and mud; the cannons were rusted. The castle could probably not have withstood being attacked with cannons from the sea (as it nearly was by the French in 1756) or by a large well-armed force (as it nearly was by the Asante in 1825). It was, as St Clair says, not so much a fort as a “defended warehouse.”

But Cape Coast Castle does have a place in military history. It was the source of many of the slaves who made up Britain’s West India Regiment, which stood ready to protect the Brit-ish planters of the West Indies from their potentially rebellious New World bondsmen. In a further irony, that regiment was the main British force in the castle through much of the nineteenth century; indeed, it helped the British in their wars against the Asante. Some of those who garrisoned the castle after Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 must have been returning to the site of their initial departure from the continent years earlier. The castle’s seaward gate, through which the enslaved were taken to the ships in the harbor, was known as the Door of No Return. Time and again, this menacing boast has proved mistaken.

Indeed, almost as soon as the Atlantic slave trade began, there were natives of the continent who made their way back. The earliest returnee whose life story we know was probably Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, born in 1703 between the Senegal and the Gambia rivers. Ayuba, a Fulani Muslim, set off in 1730 to sell slaves in Joar on the Gambia River, two hundred miles from home. Unable to agree on a price with the English captain of the slave ship Arabella, which lay at anchor there, he traveled south to find other buyers; but on the way home, he was captured. Captain Pike of the Arabella received him now not as a trader but as chattel, and Ayuba ended up on a Maryland plantation.

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There was a time when slimness was the absolute prerequisite for urban Japanese women, when designers like Shinichiro Arakawa and Yohji Yamamoto professed a flat refusal to make clothes for women who weren’t fragile and thin, whose chests and hips were barely discernable through the fabric.

That aesthetic went out when the health and exercise boom came in about seven years ago - the new Japanese woman, according to the fashion critic Ikuko Hirayama, is: “strong, robust, bursting with energy. She takes care of her body but is not obsessed with being thin. She’s proud of her biceps and also proud of her sexuality.” Accordingly, the most popular relaxation sport for single working women nowadays is “boxercising,” or the combination of boxing moves plus aerobics, which is said to increase adrenaline flow by 80 percent and is an ideal way to blow off aggression and stress.

In stark contrast, it’s the men who want to be slender, vulnerable and protected. Young males between the ages of 18 and 30 make up the slimmest segment of the population and the ideal fashion weight as decreed by the apparel industry is 57 kilograms, or about 125 pounds, for a height of 175 centimeters, or 5 feet 8 inches. Many men try to adhere to that figure and some claim they want to be even skinnier.

Twenty-five-year-old Junichi Shirakawa, who works at the denim boutique 45 RPM, said that his goal is to get his weight down from 57 to 55 kilograms, although his height is 182 centimeters. “Being really skinny is essential, not just for fashion and work purposes but also because girls seem to go for thin guys,” he said.

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Possibly the sexiest song I have ever heard. Definitely not the Blues. Transport me, Rosa! From the collection Samba Bossa Nova.

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Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Think about the photographs in our lives, the ones we keep on our desks, load on Facebook, take with cellphones and digital cameras, and attach to e-mail messages. Although the word may now be out of fashion, for nearly 100 years these images were known as snapshots. That term, however, covers some very different kinds of photographs — and some very different meanings they have for us. Indeed, in recent years, scholars and curators have been drawn to unpacking those meanings in a thriving study and display of images.

It should not surprise us that this subject has become a growing focus of interest. There has been a revolution in the past decade in digital imaging and visual technology. We live in a world of pixels — picture elements — not only on our monitors but also in our everyday lives. Ours is as much a visual culture as a written or oral one, and of late, images, more than print and speech, have had the greatest impact: Visualize Katrina, Abu Ghraib, 9/11.

All such images are, in effect, snapshots. The word is derived from shooting quickly with little or no aim. The catalog that accompanies a new exhibition, “The Art of the American Snapshot,” which runs through the end of the year at the National Gallery of American Art, in Washington, explains that snapshots became popular in the 1890s, with the invention of the Kodak camera and new technologies for the reproduction of images in newspapers and books.

The National Gallery’s story is thus in part the story of Kodak and technical improvements in camera and film, from the Brownie, in 1900, to the “modern Kodak,” in 1927, to the introduction of Kodacolor, in 1942, and the Instamatic camera, in 1963. Competing with Kodak was the Leica, a mass-market 35-mm camera introduced in 1925, and the Polaroid Land Camera, released in 1948.

But, as the catalog also tells us, snapshots “exert an undeniable power,” and the exhibition, which surveys the genre from the 1880s to the 1970s, makes clear why. It is not merely the sheer number of the mainly private, everyday pictures that makes them compelling. (According to Sarah Greenough, one of the curators, as of 1977 nearly nine billion snapshots were taken each year, more than double the rate of 10 years earlier.) Rather it is the way the snapshots of each era capture particular moments and yet also transcend time.

Gazing at the images gathered here, which come from the collection of Robert E. Jackson, an art historian and businessman, I was struck by the recurrence of themes: domesticity, laughter, clowning, leisure activities. Through the decades, Americans hide their faces, cavort at the beach, take portraits of their children, and are caught unawares, asleep, or sometimes in acts of intimacy. Comparisons across the century become suggestive of larger cultural changes: Three swimming pictures, from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s, provide an opportunity to think about shifts from companionship to solitude, from self-reliance to consumption. One portrays two naked friends with their dog; one shows a swimmer in the water from the neck down; one displays a red-headed woman lying on a float in her backyard pool.

I am also struck by how our memories and vision of the past are inseparable from the form of the prints. I stare at the sepia-toned, fading images from the 1920s and see my parents and grandparents; I look at the serrated-edge prints of the 1950s, with month and date stenciled in the margin, and see my brother and me. Each photograph is personal, and yet for each era, every photograph is also in some essential way the same.

Very different, less private snapshots are the pictures taken by photojournalists, which can reach millions of viewers. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, professors of communication, are interested in the transmission of social knowledge. They argue in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy that iconic images like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and Joe Rosenthal’s “Flag Raising on Mt. Suribachi” are essential to a “liberal-democratic citizenship” that demonstrates “the relationship of the abstract individual to the impersonal state.” Thus “Migrant Mother” becomes a brief for social welfare, and “Flag Raising” a testament to the American character.

Such images, however, are not fixed in meaning. Iconic photographs become so for a variety of reasons — their composition, the way they evoke other images in our visual memory, their impact at the moment — and they are also put to various purposes, become clichés, or are drained of original understandings. An icon of poverty like the stark, bleak portrait of Lange’s migrant mother is enlisted in a television campaign for the good life in California when a woman in a red convertible drives down Rodeo Drive and we see the image among the palm trees, a relic clearly from the past; a flag-raising mutates from civic piety to slapstick humor in an episode of The Simpsons when Bart plants the flag at a beach party.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

Supercapitalism is Robert Reich’s account of the way we live now. Its story is familiar, its diagnosis superficial. But there are two reasons for paying attention to it. The author was President Clinton’s first secretary of labor. Reich emphasizes this connection, adding that “the Clinton administration—of which I am proud to have been a part —was one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” Indeed, this is a decidedly “Clintonesque” book, its shortcomings perhaps a foretaste of what to expect (and not expect) from another Clinton presidency. And Reich’s subject—economic life in today’s advanced capitalist economy and the price we are paying for it in the political and civic health of democracies—is important and even urgent, though the “fixes” that he proposes are unconvincing.

Reich’s theme goes as follows. During what he calls the “Not Quite Golden Age” of American capitalism, from the end of World War II through the 1970s, American economic life was stable and in comfortable equilibrium. A limited number of giant firms—like General Motors—dominated their predictable and secure markets; skilled workers had steady and (relatively) safe jobs. For all the lip service paid to competition and free markets, the American economy (in this respect comparable to the economies of Western Europe) depended heavily upon protection from foreign competition, as well as standardization, regulation, subsidies, price supports, and government guarantees. The natural inequities of capitalism were softened by the assurance of present well-being and future prosperity and a widespread sentiment, however illusory, of common interest. “While Europeans set up cartels and fussed with democratic socialism, America went right to the heart of the matter—creating democratic capitalism as a planned economy, run by business.”[1]

But since the mid-Seventies, and with increasing ferocity in recent years, the winds of change—”supercapitalism”— have blown all that away. Thanks to technologies initially supported by or spun off from cold-war research proj-ects—such as computers, fiber optics, satellites, and the Internet—commodities, communications, and information now travel at a vastly accelerated pace. Regulatory structures set in place over the course of a century or more were superseded or dismantled within a few years. In their place came increased competition both for global markets and for the cataract of international funds chasing lucrative investments. Wages and prices were driven down, profits up. Competition and innovation generated new opportunities for some and vast pools of wealth for a few; meanwhile they destroyed jobs, bankrupted firms, and impoverished communities.

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Copyright Asia Times

HONG KONG - Do Chinese leaders ever kiss their wives or hug their
children? Surely they do, but you would never know it from the state
media, which portray them all as somber look-alikes in dark suits who
talk only of weighty national affairs before lining up for group
photos that are as stiff and colorless as most of their rhetoric.

That deliberate dullness - no doubt a response to the cult of
personality developed by Mao Zedong and, to a lesser extent, his
successor, Deng Xiaoping - may soon change. When President Hu Jintao
finishes his final term in 2012, in his place China may get not only a
leader but also something akin to the American “first family”. And it
will not be the pedestrian version represented by the current
occupants of the White House, President George W Bush and his wife,
Laura. Rather, it will approach the glamour of the Kennedy
administration.

Although the Communist Party’s 17th National Congress concluded just
last month with the re-anointment of Hu for another five years, the
central government is already preparing the country for its next
leader. Remarkably, he seems to come with a visible conjugal
attachment - and a talented and attractive one at that. Strong spouses
are not totally foreign to Chinese politics - let’s not forget
one-time actress Jiang Qing, or Madam Mao, who was instrumental in
unleashing the Cultural Revolution’s reign of terror - but this is the
new China and a very different kind of first lady is required.

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Posted at 12:43 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
Nov. 17, 2007

I doubt that there have been five major exhibitions of Japanese photography in UK institutions in 20 years. A good but rather dutiful overview was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1979. But Black Sun (Serpentine Gallery, 1986) was exciting. It was curated by Mark Holborn, a long-time advocate to the west of Japanese photography, and introduced (to me and I suspect to the majority of its British viewers) a quartet of photographers of such obvious and luminous brilliance that the memory of the show has remained sharp, and the four photographers have remained favourites.

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Copyright The New York TImes

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: November 18, 2007

SHANGHAI, Nov. 17 — Roger Federer followed up a routine-looking performance Friday against a player he usually dominates with a dominating performance Saturday against the only player who routinely challenges him.

For the first eight taut games of the Masters Cup semifinal pitting Federer against Rafael Nadal on Saturday, it was Nadal who perhaps played the cleaner tennis, if only just. From that point, though, it was almost all Federer, as he found his rhythm, renewed his acquaintance with a serve that had been the consistent highlight of his week here and ran away with the match.

Federer’s 6-4, 6-1 victory over Nadal roughly mirrored his performance against fifth-ranked Andy Roddick on Friday night.

“If he is playing very good, I have to play unbelievable,” Nadal said, before adding, “If not, it’s impossible, especially if he’s playing with good confidence.”

Federer, who like Nadal lost a match in the first stage of this round-robin tournament, seemed particularly pleased with his performances against Nadal and Roddick. He all but said the efforts should put to rest the idea that he was becoming more vulnerable after recent back-to-back losses.

“I’m happy to have proved myself, you know, yet again,” Federer said. “It was similar at the U.S. Open. I was struggling a little bit to get to the last 16 or quarters, and then I beat everybody in straight sets.”

In the final, Federer will face David Ferrer, a counterpuncher for whom this tournament has been something of a coming-out party. In Saturday’s first semifinal, Ferrer’s 6-1, 6-3 victory over Roddick was even more comprehensive than Federer’s had been.

Roddick was unable to trade shots for long from the baseline against Ferrer, whose speed, conditioning and a vastly improved forehand left a string of exasperated players. And when Roddick attempted to rush the net, often following ineffective approach shots, Ferrer, who has not lost in this tournament, passed him at will.

“I don’t think you can underestimate speed,” Roddick said. “I think everybody was predicting, you know, in the late ’90s that power was taking over the game.”

Of Ferrer, he added: “He’s fast. I mean, I don’t think you can say that lightly, you know. That’s a big factor in today’s game.”

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Posted at 12:18 PM · Comments (0)

Letter from China

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
November 16, 2007

SHANGHAI: As reported in the news, the announcement sounded ominous.

China’s chief censor has launched another round of crackdowns to eliminate what he labeled the “four fakes.”

When the Chinese state assigns a numeric label like this - the three this, or the four that - they are usually talking about something they deem to be truly wicked, or something that is phenomenally good.

In this case, it was definitely a matter of denouncing the wicked, to wit: sham publications, sham news bureaus, fake journalists and bogus news reports.

Hearing this announcement, one might think that one of China’s biggest problems is the grave threat posed by something called false information.

What is really under threat, though, is the absolute monopoly the Chinese state has long enjoyed - and still claims - over the right to control the news and most other forms of information, and hence its control over what citizens know of affairs in their own country and the world.

I have witnessed authoritarian regimes wrestle with this issue the world over, and usually the government’s insecurity, revealed in this announcement and others like it here of late, such as the creation of a database of profiles to keep track of the thousands of foreign journalists who will cover the Olympics, augurs poorly for future stability.

This is not, of course, due to any threat posed by information, or even because of any objective element of instability in the country. Rather, it is because governments that are this defensive tend to create instability all by themselves, through overreactions and mistakes of one kind or another that are driven by their own insecurity.

It would shock many Chinese to learn that many African countries have already put behind them these fake pretenses for extending control over the media, well ahead of the world’s newest great power.

Typically, the breakthrough has come after a ham-handed attempt by a government to reign in a newly vigorous news media by imposing draconian permits and licenses, or tests of professional ethics and procedures. Libel laws are strengthened to protect the powerful, and when all else fails, journalists are harassed, beaten and imprisoned.

China, in fact, is already a world leader in this last category, according to Human Rights Watch, which counts “some 30 known cases of journalists currently imprisoned for their reporting activities.”

Smart and privileged young Chinese frequently deride Western journalists for the mere mention of the word Communist in articles about China, as if this automatically qualified the reporter as a cold warrior, as anti-Chinese, or most patronizingly, as someone who just doesn’t grasp how much China has changed.

But when one reflects on matters like these, one realizes that where control of the media and of information is concerned, China today is closer to North Korea than it is to the African countries that have made their breakthrough, throwing in the towel on censorship despite their relative poverty and supposed lack of social development.

Consider the gem in my library that goes by the title “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” supposedly penned by the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. I found it at an airport souvenir shop in Pyongyang a few years ago, and was intrigued to read this advice to aspiring reporters on page 116: “It is advisable that the newspapers carry articles in which they unfailingly hold the president in high esteem, adore him and praise him as the great revolutionary leader.”

China, in fairness, long ago jettisoned baroque Mao-type personality cults. The essence of Kim’s thought, however, applies just as much to Chinese journalism today as it does to the North Korean variety: a leader is never criticized.

The Chinese corollary to this thought need not be stated in North Korea, where everything begins and ends with Kim. Here, the next piece of advice to journalists would be: “Be careful in criticizing the system and all of its shibboleths. Be very careful.”

That the media is so tightly controlled here is not incidental to the rule of the Communist Party either, by the way. Susan Shirk lays this out in her excellent recent book, “China, Fragile Superpower,” when she says, “Two organizations within the Communist Party have the status of sacred cows because the top leaders depend on them to stay in power. The Organization Department, responsible for appointing CCP and government officials, controls patronage. And the Propaganda Department, responsible for the political content of the media, textbooks, books and movies, controls public opinion.”

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Posted at 11:55 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, Nov. 14 — Is men’s tennis finally becoming more competitive?

Certainly, there has been a proliferation of hints to that effect, judging from the second half of a long season. And the hints have continued here this week in the year-ending Masters Cup, a round-robin tournament that brings together the world’s eight top-ranked players.

Already, the top-four seeded players have been defeated, including Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, who have divided most of the big prizes between them the last three years.

Federer was defeated by Fernando González of Chile, who has been regarded for much of his career as a journeyman with a somewhat one-dimensional game, built around a cannon of a forehand.

Against González, Federer, the world’s No. 1 player, said that he played so solidly that he could find any fault with his own game. Bit González, who has shown flashes of promise elsewhere in the past year, served impressively and repeatedly froze Federer with what had always been an afterthought in his game, his backhand.

González’s victory broke a streak of losing 10 matches in a row against Federer.

Even more unusual was that González’s victory marked Federer’s second consecutive loss, coming a few days after his defeat at the hands of another player who has long been thought of as a journeyman, David Nalbandian of Argentina.

The last time Federer lost two matches in a row was more than four years ago. Nadal, the world’s No. 2 player, won his first match Sunday against Richard Gasquet of France, but it was not easy.

Gasquet won the first set, 6-3, repeatedly answering Nadal’s sharply angled forehands with powerfully struck forehands of his own, and proving he had Nadal’s game thoroughly figured out.

That Gasquet could dominate with his forehand, with a well-struck serve and with convincing net play, and not with his backhand, which is one of the game’s most celebrated strokes, made his performance even more remarkable.

Nadal went on to win the match, but through his sheer perseverance more than anything else, and he seemed relieved at the end.

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Posted at 1:26 PM · Comments (5)

Copyright The Financial Times
(The FT has asked me not to post their articles here, so I am limiting myself to this very small, fair-usage snippet from a very interesting article.)

November 13 2007
In a little-noticed mid-summer announcement, the Asian Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China¡¯s economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China¡¯s size using purchasing power parity methods.
The results tell us that when the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this year, China¡¯s economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than previously stated.
This more accurate picture of China clarifies why Beijing concentrates so heavily on domestic priorities such as growth, public investment, pollution control and poverty reduction. The number of people in China living below the World Bank¡¯s dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m ¨three times larger than currently estimated.

Posted at 11:56 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

With ten days to go until Australia’s federal election on Nov. 24, the campaigns of incumbent Prime Minister John Howard and challenger Kevin Rudd officially kicked off Wednesday. But there’s an odd twist to this showdown: Howard, the leader of a conservative coalition who has served as PM since 1996 and is seeking his fifth term in national office, is running behind not just in national polls, but in a fight to keep a seat in Australia’s House of Representatives that he has held for 33 years.

How could that happen? One possible reason: The longtime crusader against “multiculturalism” and lover of tough talk on immigration now represents a district that is 41 percent Asian, compared to 2 percent in 1974, when he was first elected.

It’s quite a pickle for a politician who in some ways is the Australian analog to Ronald Reagan, who successfully played on racial fears while campaigning first for Governor of California and then for President. In “Race: John Howard and the Remaking of Australia,” historian Andrew Markus wrote that “it was Howard who was to bring racial issues to the forefront of federal politics… In contrast with the other Liberal Party leaders during the party’s thirteen years in opposition… Howard was willing to campaign on issues of race and break the bipartisanship which had characterized the Whitlam-Fraser years.”

Howard is particularly famous for a statement made on Asian immigration into Australia in 1988.

I do believe that if it is — in the eyes of some in the community — that it’s too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.

And in 2001:

I don’t think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say “we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.”

The “we” of which he spoke did not just refer to white Australia in opposition to Asian immigration, but also as counterposed with Australia’s indigenous Aborigines. Howard’s “One Australia” immigration and ethnic affairs policy explicitly rejected Aboriginal land rights, and until very recently he has steadfastly denied even a government statement of “reconciliation.”

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Posted at 9:39 AM · Comments (0)

A very solid and competent survey of how China is governed today and what the world looks like from the seat of power in Beijing. Subtitles in books can be the most unreliable of things. This one is worthy of the content.

Posted at 11:46 PM · Comments (0)

Gerald Boyd was the Jackie Robinson of the New York Times. He dreamed of going all the way to the top. He got close. Then he took a tragic fall.

Copyright New York magazine
Published Nov 12, 2007

A year ago this month, nearly 400 people filled a hall at Harlem’s Schomburg Center to honor Gerald Boyd, the highest-ranking black man in the history of the New York Times, dead of lung cancer at 56. It was a factional throng; around the grief and fond anecdotes, the air crackled with contention. Three years earlier, the Times’ burly managing editor—Howell Raines’s handpicked No. 2—had been jettisoned in the wake of Jayson Blair, an addict who cast plausible fictions in the paper of record. Boyd’s career was wrecked, his reputation blighted. But his legacy, it turned out, would be made of more durable stuff.

The memorial reflected Boyd’s two worlds, conjoined: predominantly African-American, save for a large pocket of Times people. Among them were the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and all four living executive editors—the one who tapped Boyd to go where no minority journalist had gone before, the one who befriended him and broke his heart, the one who took him to the heights and then to disaster, the one who has the job Boyd thought could one day be his.

From the podium, the pallbearers drew a bead on those white titans of print journalism, seated captive for this frozen moment. Bernie Weinraub, Boyd’s partner at the White House in the eighties, assailed “the brutal weight” his friend had carried “to represent his race every single moment he walked into the paper.” George Curry, a big-shouldered comrade from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, denounced the Times obituary for “besmirching” Boyd by referencing Blair in its lead sentence. (In defense, Joe Lelyveld, a former executive editor, would observe a truism of his trade: The most recent news tends to float to the top.)

“I am here tonight to reclaim a friend,” Curry said. “I am here to restore his good name. I am here to set the record straight.” As his call found its cadence, the black chorus responded in collective grievance—over a man they’d seen used up and discarded by a smug, white institution. But in the Times section, there were winces and pursed lips. (“I was quite angry with the guy who decided to make a political stump speech,” said Max Frankel, Lelyveld’s predecessor—though the “honest feelings” Frankel added, were “good for white folks to hear.”) Here was the 500-pound irony in the room: that a man who’d aimed to bridge the great divide—to live and work color-blind—would now be mourned compartmentally.

He was one of us, the Times’ incumbent, Bill Keller, had intoned to his staff via e-mail, but that last pronoun seemed up for grabs. To whom did Boyd belong? To the paper whose cause he’d served and power he’d wielded for twenty years? To the community of black journalists, who’d claimed him as their paladin—or the waves of young reporters he’d terrorized and inspired? Or was he bound, at the end, to the few who remained by his side after he’d been banished from the place he loved too much?

Race, said Ginger Thompson, a Times reporter who worked with Boyd, “very much defined Gerald’s career. I think it defined a lot of how he felt about himself, how he felt about his rise at the Times, his potential future at the Times—race was very much a part of that.” But if Boyd’s blackness was the instrument for his rise, it was also the overwhelming factor in his plummet from grace. Despite his smarts and drive and unassailable integrity, race ran him to ground. His friends still feel the anger he’d rarely let himself express.

“Jayson Blair didn’t bring Gerald down,” said Don Terry, a former Times writer. “The New York Times brought Gerald down. Arthur Sulzberger punked out.” For Terry, and for many of those gathered last November, Boyd was scapegoated into ruin for Ascending While Black.

“I was not the black managing editor,” Boyd would say of the title he held for 21 triumphant, calamitous months. “I was the managing editor.” In the annals of good runs at the Times, he’d had one of the best. For a brief stretch, it seemed that he might be proved right—that he could beat the odds and flourish at the top.

Until he was proved wrong.

The formative theme of Gerald Boyd’s childhood, played out on the threadbare west side of St. Louis, was that he kept losing people. He was 3 years old when sickle-cell anemia stole his mother, eight months pregnant with a never-named fourth child; she’d be forever adored in the hazy space between memory and imagination. He was 11 when his father, a delivery-truck driver who drank too much, left their home for good. He was 13 when his baby sister was packed off to a relative in California, rarely to be seen again.

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Posted at 11:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

TOKYO —

So says Tsunenori Iida, and he ought to know. His family has been buying and selling tuna for seven generations here at the world’s largest fish market. Six mornings a week for 43 years, Iida has been casting his eyes and running his fingers over the torpedo-shaped carcasses of bluefin tuna, the most precious fish in the sea. They are brought here to Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, where a dawn auction sets the global price.

Japan eats more tuna than any other country in the world, consuming about a quarter of the global catch. As other countries increase their imports of tuna, Japan is making major quota cuts to protect the fish. Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, the largest wholesale fish market in the world, is making major adjustments to cope with the limited supply of tuna. Wholesale prices are on the rise, but restaurants are hesitant to pass the price hikes on to customers.

“I look for beauty and balanced plumpness,” Iida said. “I am looking for a Catherine Zeta-Jones type of tuna.”

Alas for Japan, which wolfs down a quarter of the global tuna catch, and for the rest of the world: An increasingly voracious appetite for sushi is driving the supply of plump pulchritude served raw perilously low.

Japan — after years of overfishing a species that is as much sacrament as food — is feeling the pinch more than any other country.

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Posted at 11:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

A very funny excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s appreciation of Normal Mailer on his death:

As early as the 1980s Mr. Mailer observed that most of his ideas — about God and art and violence, as well as his view of America as a kind of spiritually impoverished Cancer Gulch — developed during the 1950s, when he found himself opposing the country’s repressive mores. Increasingly, he said, he was engaged in “less of an exploration and more of an occupation of territories I reconnoitered years ago.”

“What happens is you become the hat on your own head,” he said. “You’re not having the pleasure of enjoying your own mind the way you used to when you were young, but you have the product of your mind to work with. You know, I ran into Henry Kissinger years ago, and I asked him if he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work, and he said in effect: ‘I am working with the ideas that I formed at Harvard years ago. I haven’t had a real idea since I’ve been on this; I just work with the old ideas.’ I certainly know what he means now — I think there are just so many ideas you can have in your life, and once you have them, you have to develop them.”

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Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard French
Published: November 9, 2007

SHANGHAI: It won’t be long before there are so many China-related Olympic Games stories in the news that anyone but the most devoted sports fan will be pining for the end of the Beijing Games.

Each time I land at the Beijing airport and am bombarded with Games promotions as I stand in a long taxi line, I spare a sympathetic thought for any residents of the capital who may already feel that way.

Those who do must do so all but clandestinely, since the unsubtle message from on high about the Games is “enjoy them, be proud of your country, don’t embarrass your country and especially don’t dare cause an incident.” Under the circumstances, there isn’t much room, publicly, for even a slightly jaundiced view of the big fun.

This is China’s coming out party, and, as countless others will note in due course, the equivalent of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, when Japan announced its return to vigor after the devastation of the war along with its arrival as a first-rank economic power.

China, like Japan, which had rolled out its bullet trains for the occasion, is eager to create new associations for its national “brand.” The watchwords may not be announced, per se, but they can be easily intuited: modern, technologically advanced, forward looking.

For all that, it must be said that there is something very old fashioned about this whole business. I am talking about both the mass inculcation about how to behave and how to feel and the corralling of a nation behind a single, prestige oriented goal.

At the same time, China is putting astronauts in orbit, sending rockets to the moon and talking about building its own space station. I mean not to raise strenuous objections, even if environmental, scientific and even social questions deserve being posed, such as budgetary priorities in a land where despite extraordinary economic growth, the housing, health care and education needs of many still go largely unmet.

Such issues won’t be aired, of course, because public questioning of national priorities for the most part doesn’t exist yet in China. The people’s goals are still very much determined for them, and to the extent they are solicited at all, it is to get with the program.

I note the old déjà vu quality of the Games and the space program in passing to highlight the utter conventionality of the government’s thinking about what it means to be modern and about what will reflect best on this country’s image.

One detects the conventionality in the massive architecture that is transforming China’s cities. Between the faceless and imposing skyscrapers shooting up left and right to the glittering gadget buildings, the outright prestige projects that are proliferating, there is scant room left for real neighborhoods, for life on an intimate human scale, and most ironic of all in a country of 5,000 years of proud history, even for celebration of the past.

Yet more of this conventional thinking is evident in the various behavior campaigns in the run-up to the Games, and to Shanghai’s World Expo, act two in China’s global coming out party, which will be held in 2010.

Chinese people are being urged to be “civilized,” that being a word plucked directly from many of the slogans and banners. China’s nanny state implores them to stop spitting, to form lines, to respect traffic signals when crossing the street, and on and on.

Fine ideas, but there is something touching about the sudden rush to drum these messages home in time for the massive arrival of foreigners: It leaves one with the feeling that face and image matter more than substance in such things. After all, rampant grubby behavior had been just fine up until now.

If making the right impression is paramount, however, I would like to contribute another suggestion that could go a long way. Living in Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, for the last four years I have been continually struck by the vast gulf that seems to exist in people’s minds between Chinese and foreigners.

I first discovered this through my hobby, photography, which led me to wander through the city’s working class neighborhoods, where at every turn I hear cries of “lao wai.”

The words constitute a slightly uncouth slang for foreigner. Literally, they mean “old outsider.”

Quite often, these murmurings are accompanied by a mocking, sing-song uttering of the English greeting “hello.” The tone is unmistakable, and it is not friendly. This is not to say that it is hostile, either, rather it is said in a way that suggests that foreigners are not merely an object of novelty here, which should certainly no longer be the case by now, but also of slight ridicule.

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Copyright Slate

“Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.”

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Posted at 9:31 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

* A woman bakes a circuit board on a coal-fired stove in a pool of melted tin, so as to more easily sort out its components.

* A woman burns the corner of a piece of plastic with a cigarette lighter, hoping to discern the grade of plastic by its smell.

* A man stirs a soup of circuit boards and acid in a large tub that gushes red smoke, separating out traces of gold.

A lifetime of blog posts decrying the environmental toll of high-tech industrial production does not begin to approach the impact of Michael Zhao’s 20-minute documentary on the processing of e-waste in Guiyu, China. The images are extraordinary and unforgettable. The land, air, and water of Guiyu, a town in Guangdong province that imports a million tons of e-waste a year, are polluted beyond redemption. There are points where Zhao has to stop filming because he cannot physically stand the fumes — the air “permeated with the smell of baked plastics and burnt circuitry.”

Responsibility for the debacle that is Guiyu rests on many Chinese shoulders, from local officials in China who profit off a toxic disaster zone to the central government officials powerless to enforce their own environmental decrees. But the United States cannot escape its own share of shame. 170 nations have signed the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, an international treaty that aims explicitly at preventing the export of hazardous waste from the developed to the developing world. Of those 170 nations, only three have so far failed to ratify it: Afghanistan, Haiti, and the United States.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world in which it is not illegal to export hazardous waste to less developed countries. This is not to say that e-waste from other countries doesn’t make its way to China, but at least in Europe, there are laws on the books that require electronics manufacturers to eliminate toxic materials in their products.

Another compelling image in eDump is a river bank in southern Taiwan that appears to consist almost entirely of used circuit boards. 20 years ago, the Taiwanese equivalent to Guiyu thrived along this river, until local outcry and environmental authorities shut it down. You could interpret that as evidence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which holds that at a certain point in a nation’s economic development, environmental degradation begins to slow, or even reverse. But you could just as easily point to it as proof that all that really happens once a certain point of development is reached is that the nasty stuff gets exported somewhere else.

But even in the shadow of the toxic cloud emanating from Guiyu, a silver lining struggles to break out. Zhao interviews Chinese members of Greenpeace and researchers at the nearby Shantou University Medical College who are monitoring and publicizing the dire health effects of e-waste pollution on the citizens of Guiyu. They represent a side of China that doesn’t get as much exposure in the West as the sweatshop employees pumping out export goods or the endless accounts of environmental devastation and growing income inequality that plague China’s path to modernization. These men and women are the backbone of China’s emerging civil society, the people who ultimately must prevail if China is to somehow escape choking on its own industrial progress. The documentary maker, Michael Zhao, born and raised in Wuhan, China, is another representative of this new class. One has to hope that he signifies the true future of China, and not the dead soil, poisoned water, and damaged children of Guiyu.

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Posted at 9:36 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve had a couple of this guy’s cds for a while now and had scarcely paid them any attention for some reason.
That changed last night when I was busy writing and had left my iTunes to play on and on without minding what I was hearing.
The volume was low, but about half way into this album I began to wonder what it was that I was listening to. Quiet, powerful, soulful Jazz piano played with an utter lack of cliche.
Bill Evans? No. I know his whole oeuvre. Couldn’t be. Brad Mehldau? No. There was too much bottom to this.
I looked at my iTunes to discover it was Gonzalo. I turned up the volume, too. Then I played the whole thing again.
This was a hidden gem.
Besame Mucho, which is deconstructed and played with such imaginative flair, was the giveaway that this was a Latin artist. Silver Hollow, too, more Bill Evans like in style, is also pure genius.

Posted at 6:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Atlantic

A very quick excerpt from the latest of Jim’s China dispatches. Highly recommended read.

Superficially, Japan’s boom of the 1980s seems like China’s today. Yes, both happened in Asia, both led to mammoth trade imbalances, both arose from combined governmental and private-industrial efforts, and both unnerved the United States. But the differences are more numerous than the similarities, and more important. Japan was and is rich; for China, that is decades away. Japan’s debut as an international host with its Olympic Games was already 20 years in the past (Tokyo, 1964); China’s is still ahead. To me the most striking difference was cultural and moralistic: specifically, Japan’s cocksureness. Japan and many neighboring nations saw its rise as a challenge to the American idea, and they didn’t care who knew it. No one thinks that today’s China lacks cultural confidence. By now I should have programmed auto-text keys to use when transcribing interviews, so that I can plug in the rote passage about “our 5,000 years of history” or “the world’s longest continuous civilization” with one stroke. But I have encountered virtually no lecturing from Chinese friends, officials, students, passersby, or interviewees.

People inside China have a vivid sense of the whack-a-mole challenge they face at every level. For rural people, staying alive. For the urban-employed class, finding enough money to pay for an apartment (with prices soaring), get kids into school (also expensive, with fees required even at public schools), fend off health emergencies (ditto), plus somehow save enough for retirement (in the midst of a huge demographic shift, driven by the one-child policy, toward a society with many more dependents and many fewer active workers). For company officials, managing China’s current “brand image” disaster, plus the soaring costs of water, energy, and raw materials, plus the competition from thousands of other companies just like them. For regional officials, fending off complaints about pollution and corruption while still bringing in jobs. For the national government, managing all this and political and international crises too. Based on their record over the last 20 years, Chinese at all levels will probably find a way to stay just ahead of these disasters. But the situation doesn’t leave many people I’ve met sounding boastful.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

The planned purchase of a 20 percent stake in South Africa’s highly successful Standard Bank by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, is the biggest foreign direct investment in South Africa since the demise of apartheid.

This signifies a degree of engagement by China that is way beyond the “resources grab” that many have accused China of in its recent dealings with Africa. This, as the Financial Times reported, “is evidence that China is looking for a deeper relationship.”

For the ICBC this is an important step in its quest to become a global bank. Its chairman, Jiang Jianqing, says, “We are focusing on merger and acquisition in emerging markets in Asia and Africa because these places enjoy high growth rates and have great potential.”

As Chinese and Indian investors almost pour into Africa one wonders if their European and North American competitors have woken up to the fact that Rip Van Winkle is waking up in Africa.
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The fact that a top Chinese banker brackets Africa with Asia is one more sign that the Asians themselves see what is happening in Africa as a repeat of what happened to them 20 and 30 years ago.

They can see the potential while Western commentators, their spurious words tasting of sour grapes, point an accusing finger at China in particular, accusing it of planning to rape Africa as the Europeans did a century ago.

This is not rape, by any stretch of the imagination. This is business opportunity. Africa in many countries is on the way to booming and Africa is looking for marriages of convenience with willing investors in railroads, toll roads, ports, motorbike and cement factories. Already there are over 900 Chinese companies working in Africa.

The International Monetary Fund in its new “Regional Economic Outlook” estimates that next year the growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa should reach almost 7 percent. This is an average figure, pulled down by including the likes of the Congo, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Sudan. But most of black Africa is on a sustained upswing, helped by high commodity prices (which the IMF says has not been a critical factor) and successful debt relief.

It is happening, despite stagnant aid, because of increased private capital inflows and rising domestic investment and productivity. The significant decline in deadly armed conflicts has also helped. The ex war-riven states, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo are growing at 5 percent.

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Posted at 3:19 PM · Comments (0)

I was sent a pre-publication copy of this memoir by John Nathan, the author and translator, and have enjoyed it immensely. It mostly deals with life at the center of the arts and intellectual scene in Tokyo (and elsewhere) in the 1960s. Look for it to come out very soon from Simon and Schuster.
Nathan has written a beautiful and intimate account of his charmed, often self-absorbed and sometimes lonely life round-tripping between Japan and the United States, and one reads it marveling at how he was able to changing metiers almost by the season and always regain his footing.

Posted at 2:32 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: November 2, 2007

BEIJING: What if the doubters have been wrong all along?

Big government and an all-powerful state are good, not bad.

What if the business cycle, hitherto thought to be inevitable, if completely unpredictable, could be repealed? After all, China’s economy is growing at an 11.5 percent annual clip, after years and years of similar performances, and inflation, though up a bit, still seems well controlled.

If that’s not impressive enough, consider what the Shanghai stock exchange has done. Since the beginning of this year, stocks are up twofold, and over the last five years, the total increase has been nearly fourfold.

These thoughts came to me as I drove the streets of central Shanghai the other days, only half listening at first as a driver mumbled, mostly to himself, about the new buildings going up there. He caught my attention when he started pointing out city government office towers I’d never given a second thought to.

“All of these were built by Chen Liangyu,” the man said, referring to Shanghai’s recently disgraced Communist Party secretary. “Every one of them is bigger, taller and nicer than the last.”

By now, what China has achieved in the last couple of decades legitimately lays siege to many of our most deeply held notions about the realities of government and economics. The Chinese experience of success is too short - and the Chinese themselves make few claims about the universality of their model - to speak of new laws, or even of amending old ones.

But whether they stem from Chinese achievement or Chinese rhetoric, certain billboard questions loom large.

What if popular consent in the form of real democratic participation by the citizenry had no bearing on a state’s ability to conducts its affairs with success? In myriad ways in today’s China, the government all but commands people to keep their minds off of politics, and consultation with the people is all but nonexistent.

From the red banner slogans that hang in every neighborhood and on every factory floor, the people are still exhorted to behave in “civilized” ways as defined by their rulers, and yet no clear corresponding mechanism exists for the message to pass in the opposite direction, from the bottom up.

Here, popular entertainment, down to the kind of music that makes the radio airwaves, passes through a filter whose manipulators remain scrupulously hidden behind the scenes, unsuspected by most consumers, who take the menu of publicly available choices as the natural reflection of what is popular, as opposed to what it is: something deliberately served up to help forge a “new man” in China’s brave new world.

What if personality were rendered irrelevant to the public practice of politics? Since China’s leaders are not chosen in any meaningful way by the people, there is almost no pandering to the base of the kind that often seems to keep American politics welded at election time to issues that arguably have little to do with the nation’s real destiny.

Yes, Chinese politicians sometimes pander a bit, on the Taiwan issue in particular. But that is the closest thing there is here to a hot-button issue, something like abortion in the United States.

And yes, political leaders here all emerge from bases. President Hu Jintao’s launching pad, for example, was the Communist Youth League. But on this score the difference between Chinese and American politics is an order of magnitude.

What if politics with a capital “P” could be eliminated altogether, or very nearly so, at least, and a secretly selected circle of wise men (and infrequently, women) could proceed straight to policy formation and execution based purely on their own - and this is Hu’s own favorite description - “scientific” assessment of the nation’s needs and priorities?

In such a world, long-term strategic planning could be carried out forthrightly and without the distractions and abrupt course changes brought about by that inherently unstable system known as democracy, with its fixation on rival parties and alternation.

What, moreover, if sure-footed bureaucrats - chosen purely on the basis of merit, rigorously trained and ideologically vetted - were allowed to implement and execute, free of harassment from a meddlesome congress? Might that not be the explanation, for example, for the extraordinary marshaling of resources here to create world-class infrastructure, majestic cities, airports, highways and dams rising in record time out of the economic rubble of the Maoist past?

What if a country could become great and powerful without ever becoming a “great power,” or at least not with any of the connotations that we have come to expect with such a label?

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Posted at 11:58 AM · Comments (0)

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