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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The Washington Post

From a review of VERMEER’S HAT: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

Timothy Brook is a distinguished professor of Chinese, holding appointments at both Oxford University and St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia. He’s written a dozen scholarly volumes about Asian social and economic history, including The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China and Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why such a formidable Sinologist should be bringing out a book with a 17th-century Dutch painting on the cover and the title Vermeer’s Hat.

But the explanation turns out to be quite simple: This book isn’t about Vermeer’s brushstrokes or the use of light in his paintings. Instead, it really does focus on the fur hats — and the old maps and the dishes of fruit and the silver coins — pictured in those paintings. As his subtitle suggests, Brook hopes to use these pictorial elements to describe “the dawn of the global world,” in particular the economic entanglements between the Netherlands and China.

Vermeer’s Hat thus aims “to capture a sense of the larger whole of which both Shanghai and Delft were parts: a world in which people were weaving a web of connections and exchanges as never before.” To do this, Brook looks at seven works of art — not all of them by Vermeer — “for the hints of broader historical forces that lurk in their details.” For instance, in the chapter titled “School for Smoking,” he notices that 17th-century Dutch porcelain, representing Chinese scenes, often shows people smoking. Where did the painter get the idea that the Chinese smoked? This leads to an overview of tobacco commerce and consumption in Asia, building on accounts of the shipping routes, the trade laws and the movement of silver, as well as tobacco, to the East. But Brook also takes time to discuss the social impact of chi yan or “eating smoke.”

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Copyright Boston Review

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

While India’s performance has been substantial, China’s has been truly dramatic. The particularly dramatic Chinese performance (like the earlier economic “miracles” in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) suggests, in the dominant narrative, that authoritarianism may be better than democracy for development—at least in its early stages. Regional economic decentralization provided local autonomy and incentives, and, even without democracy, led to broad-based local development. But the narrative warns that global capitalism has brought rising inequality, more in China than in India. The idea is that this may portend serious trouble for Chinese political stability, as China does not have the capability of democratic India to let off the steam of inequality-induced discontent.

This story contains a few elements of truth and provides many comforts to our preconceptions. But through sheer repetition it has acquired an authority that does not withstand scrutiny.

* * *

Start with the claim that global integration and associated market reforms resulted in high growth, which in turn produced dramatic declines in extreme poverty. Applied to China, the timing simply does not fit. China has indeed made large strides in foreign trade and investment since the 1990s, but well before then, say between 1978 and 1993, the country had already achieved an average annual growth rate of about nine percent—even higher than the impressive seven percent growth rate in East Asia between 1960 and 1980.

China’s poverty-reduction storyline is similarly flawed. While expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufactures lifted many people out of poverty over the past decade, the principal reason for the dramatic decline over the past three decades may lie elsewhere. World Bank estimates suggest that two-thirds of the decline in extremely poor people (those living below the admittedly crude poverty line of one dollar a day per capita at 1993 international parity prices) between 1981 and 2004 had taken place by the mid-1980s. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s may have been principally the result of domestic factors that have little if anything to do with global integration: a spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, in which output increased at 7.1% per year on average between 1979 and 1984, almost triple the 1970-78 rate; a land reform program, involving a highly egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights subject only to differences in regional average and family size, which provided a floor for rural income; and increased farm procurement prices.

As for India, market reforms may not be mainly responsible for its recent high growth. Reform has clearly made the Indian corporate sector more vibrant and competitive, but most of the Indian economy lies outside the corporate sector; for example, 93 percent of the labor force works outside the corporate sector, private or public.

Take the fast-growing service sector, where India’s IT-enabled services have acquired a global reputation while employing less than a quarter of one percent of the total Indian labor force. Service subsectors like finance, business services (including those IT-enabled services), and telecommunication, where reform may have made a significant difference, constitute only about a quarter of total service-sector output. Two-thirds of service output is in traditional or “unorganized” activities, in tiny enterprises often below the policy radar and unlikely to have been directly much affected by regulatory or foreign trade policy reforms. It is a matter of some dispute how much of the growth in traditional services (mostly non-traded) can be explained by a rise in service demand in the rest of the economy, and how much of it is a statistical artifact, since the way output is measured in these traditional services has been rather shaky all along.

As for poverty, the latest Indian household survey data suggest that the rate of decline, if anything, slowed somewhat in 1993-2005—the period of global integration—compared with the ’70s and ’80s. Moreover, some non-income indicators of poverty such as those relating to child health, already rather dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. (For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the past decade or so). Growth in agriculture, where much of the poverty is concentrated, has declined somewhat over the past decade, largely because of the decline of public investment in rural infrastructure such as irrigation. Little of this has much to do with globalization. Indeed, some disaggregated studies across districts in India have found trade liberalization slowing down the decline in rural poverty. Such results may indicate the difficulty displaced farmers and workers have had adjusting to new activities and sectors due to various constraints such as minimal access to credit, information, or infrastructural facilities like power and roads; the high-school-dropout rate; and labor market rigidities—even as new opportunities are opened up by globalization.

The pace of poverty reduction in India has been slower than that in China not simply because Chinese growth has been faster, but also because the same one percent growth rate reduces poverty in India by much less, thanks largely to higher wealth inequalities (particularly in land and education). The Gini coefficient (a standard statistical measure of inequality, with a value of one indicating extreme inequality and zero indicating perfect equality) of land distribution in rural India was 0.74 in 2003; the corresponding figure in China was 0.49 in 2002. To a large extent this difference reflects a higher proportion of landless and near-landless people in India. In addition, educational inequality in India is among the worst in the world. According to the World Development Report 2006, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of adult schooling years in the population was 0.56 in India in 1998/2000, which is not only higher than China’s 0.37 in 2000, but even higher than almost all Latin American countries. To a large extent, this indicator reflects the high number of illiterate and near-illiterate people relative to the rest of the population in India.

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Sweet Congolese Jazz from Tabu Ley from the 1960s and ’70s.
What a wonderful compilation. I listened to Kimakango Mpe Libala, just to pick one favorite, and was lofted high and carried far, far away. You close your eyes and you can see the sunsetting over the broad Congo River again, or if you’ve never had that pleasure, the music will conjure it for you.
The arrangements here are invitingly simple. With these recordings we’re on the cusp of the transition from mostly acoustic bands to the big, loud and lavishly choreographed shows that Tabu Ley and Franco and many others would soon make routine.

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Top of the pile of a slew of a books and recordings I’ve recently received. They were things long delayed somehow in the transit from the US.
This a collection of articles of the great and hard-to-classify author, Martha Gellhorn. I was drawn to her work from a little snippet of her extraordinary correspondence with Hemingway that appeared in Harpers last year, which I read on a fast train from Berlin to Frankfurt, where I attended the book fair. (I believe a sample is archived here somewhere.) Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

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Copyright The Financial Times
From a review of Jonse Saramago’s Death at Intervals.
Published: January 25 2008

The first half of Death at Intervals has little plot and considers the social and political consequences of death’s departure. The state ponders how future generations will support a burgeoning population on old-age and disability pensions. Insurance companies seek loopholes to relinquish payments to the permanently undying. Republicans agitate for a presidential system with fixed mandates rather than a monarch subsisting in a vegetative state. People euthanise their living-dead family members by transporting them across the frontier where death remains active. The undertaking industry is reduced to arranging funerals for animals.

This is obviously a satire on human vanity, with its yearning for immortality. But Saramago doesn’t have the science-fiction writer’s impulse to explain his scenario: why people continue to die outside the country’s borders, and death still happens to animals and plants. In fact, he deliberately refuses to dwell on the logic of the situation: “We confess that we are unable to provide explanations that will satisfy those demanding them.”

The octogenarian author has never reached for the consolations of an afterlife. His old-fashioned atheism is most clear in Gospel, which depicted a megalomaniac God who engineered the martyrdom of Jesus to expand his following beyond the Jews. Saramago’s new book again thumps his message home: despairing of the paradox whereby the cessation of death also spells the death of god, the clergy feverishly spin new myths to keep their straying flock within the fold.

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From a review of the book of this title.
Copyright The Financial Times

Loss, with its attendants love and hate, is the chief begetter of art. Words may not only offer release from loss but help recreate a life – take, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ elegiac Spring and Fall, with its opening line “Margaret, are you grieving?” and its plangent conclusion, “It is the plight man was born for/ It is Margaret you mourn for”, or John Donne’s impassioned lament, “I am rebegot/ Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.”

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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: January 27, 2008
Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI — Yang Yang, a 29-year-old saleswoman, had never imagined herself in the role of advocate.

The new maglev line is planned on the right side of the Ding Pu River, prompting protest from residents on both shores.

But when she learned from her housing development’s electronic bulletin board of the city’s plans to extend Shanghai’s futuristic magnetic levitation, or maglev, train line within 30 yards of her house, she was angered about the effect on property values and began networking with other middle-class opponents both in her neighborhood and all along the planned train route.

Word of the antitrain sentiment quickly gathered momentum, and on Jan. 12, a sunny Saturday afternoon, Ms. Yang found herself in Shanghai’s most important public square with a few thousand other similarly disgruntled residents, many of them carrying signs and chanting slogans denouncing the train project, in one of the largest demonstrations this city has seen in recent years.

The ordinary citizens like Ms. Yang who marched on People’s Square are wary of calling their event and the antitrain movement here a protest. Indeed, most even shy from the word “march,” preferring to speak instead of a “collective walk” to the square. But the coalescing of homeowners here around issues like property values, environmental safety, urban planning and how their tax money is spent is being seen as the strongest sign yet of rising resentment among China’s fast-growing middle class over a lack of say in government decision making.

“The more I learned about it, the more I understood how big a waste it would be,” Ms. Yang said. “The money is from us, the taxpayers. Shanghai may be relatively rich, and it enjoys fast growth, but this is no justification for them spending the money collected from us on a pure prestige project.”

Many of the early opponents of the route extension seized upon objections cited in a protest last year that forced a retracing of the line in which people voiced fears about radiation from the train’s powerful electromagnets, but grievances have multiplied.

Beyond the voicing of deep-seated skepticism about the government’s priorities and about what many feel is the waste of taxpayers’ money, what most distinguishes this wave of demonstrations from other recent protests is a new insistence that the government seek the public’s consent in decisions that directly affect their lives.

“You could say this is a sign of a rising middle class and the awakening of a sense of real citizenship,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics at Beijing Institute of Technology.

With its tradition of top-down decision making, secretive deliberations and little tolerance for dissent, the Chinese government has almost no practice of real popular consultation.

Recently, though, under President Hu Jintao’s policy of “harmonious development,” the state has made tentative efforts to solicit public opinion, but opponents of the maglev train and other critics say the Shanghai crisis has shown the government’s initiatives to be far too timid.

“Why are they so late to reveal their plans and why so secretly?” said Zhang Junying, 71, who lives along the projected train route.

He was referring to the government’s mention of the new route on an obscure environmental Web site in January, with an invitation for responses by letter or e-mail within two weeks. To many, the announcement seemed intended to attract as little attention as possible.

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Copyright The New York Times
January 27, 2008

TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.

And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.

“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.

The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.

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Copyright The Japan Times

OSAKA — It is time Japan realized that in order to deal with its population decline, it must accept 10 million permanent immigrants rather than a small number of migrant laborers, said the country’s most prominent advocate of a radical new immigration policy.

“By 2050, Japan’s population will have shrunk from the current 127 million to about 90 million, and to about 40 million by the end of the century. By my calculations, we need 10 million new immigrants by midcentury to survive as a nation,” Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau, said at a recent symposium in Osaka on Japan’s future as an immigrant nation.

Over the past few years, as the reality of the combination of a declining birthrate and rapidly aging population set in, politicians, the Justice Ministry, and powerful business lobbies like the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) have offered various proposals on how certain numbers of skilled foreign workers might be admitted.

Estimates by the government, the United Nations and various human rights groups have shown that, in order to maintain current living standards and economic output, Japan will need up to 30 million foreigners by 2050.

But over the past few years, most government proposals for bringing in foreign laborers have emphasized limiting their numbers and the length of time they are allowed to stay.

Sakanaka and other immigration experts worry such thinking will lead to policies that will discourage — rather than encourage — foreign workers from coming to Japan.

Tatsuhiro Nakano, an Osaka-based administrative consultant who works closely with foreigners seeking visas, said the first step toward accepting a large number of immigrants is for lawmakers and policymakers to change the legal framework to better accommodate the record number of foreigners who are already in the country.

“Japan is already a nation of immigrants, with over 2 million registered foreigners last year and nearly 40,000 people annually getting permanent residence. But current immigration laws are designed to control foreigners. There are no effective laws on the books to promote coexistence with foreigners living in Japan,” Nakano said.

While many local governments now have policies designed to promote coexistence with foreigners, politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders at both the local and national levels are usually ambivalent about, and often opposed to, introducing new legislation, insisting that what is first needed is a national debate on the social costs of accepting more foreigners.

But Sakanaka said a debate on accepting immigrants, as opposed to foreign workers, is lacking because most politicians, business leaders and the media want to avoid the issue altogether.

“There’s lots of talk about how to deal with Japan’s aging society, but the necessity of bringing in large numbers of foreign immigrants is taboo in policy circles,” he said. “Keidanren just wants fixed-term laborers, while the Diet and bureaucracy don’t want to even hear the word ‘immigrants’ and the media tend to focus on the need for foreign labor, not immigration.”

Accepting, and looking after, 10 million immigrants would require a major reorganization of the Immigration Bureau, which is currently part of the Justice Ministry. Sakanaka has proposed creation of a new Immigration Agency, an independent, Cabinet-level organ to handle such an influx of new immigrants.

But immigration experts like Nakano and Tokyo-based administrative consultant Yukio Enomoto said there is much the current Immigration Bureau can do to speed up the entry of foreigners into Japanese society.

“In Tokyo, it can take the Immigration Bureau up to a year or more to process permanent residency applications, which is far too long,” Enomoto said.

Foreign students who graduate from Japanese universities or technical schools and seek to work in Japan often find jobs, but are sometimes unable to take them because Immigration will refuse to grant work visas, Nakano said.

“I dealt with one case where Immigration refused to grant a visa to a Chinese university graduate who found work at a Japanese company because they said the company had no connection to China,” Nakano said. “Immigration’s stance toward foreign students seeking work in Japan often seems to be ‘go home,’ and that has to change.”

Sakanaka said that, while the current immigration procedures are not without problems, and while national debate on immigration is needed, it is also important that Japan’s political leadership create an immigration policy for the future.

“There is a lot of opposition in (the bureaucracy and government) to the idea of large numbers of foreign immigrants. To overcome the opposition, what’s needed is a prime minister who will be proactive on accepting large numbers of immigrants,” he said.
The Japan Times: Saturday, Jan. 26, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

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Copyright The New York Times
Published: January 27, 2008

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it “European patriotism.” The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It’s a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described “friend of America,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world’s “Middle Kingdom” to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America’s own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product — and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America’s grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country — friend of America’s or not — wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries — the so-called Stans — China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the “NATO of the East.”

Posted at 11:06 PM · Comments (1)

An old classic I read in college days.

When the person who knew the departed personally and by name also dies, then the former passes out of the horizon of the Sasa period; and in effect he now becomes completely dead as far as the family ties are concerned. He has sunk into the Zamani period. But while the departed person is remembered by name, he is not really dead; he is alive, and such a person I would call the living dead….

There is a terrific discussion here about the concept of time, the difficulty of conceiving of the future in the way we usually think of the future, and the implications for governance.

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January 25, 2008
Copyright ESPN

After the shocking semifinal just 24 hours prior, where Jo-Wilfried Tsonga stunned the No. 2 player in the world, Rafael Nadal, it seemed nothing could have upstaged that spectacle — or could it?

Novak Djokovic outplayed, outhustled and outmaneuvered Roger Federer in every facet, ending a remarkable run by the world’s top player Down Under. Djokovic’s growth and maturity from last September’s U.S. Open final was palpable. He counterpunched intelligently and was aggressive from the onset.

He also attacked Federer’s second serve consistently, applying relentless pressure on the two-time defending champion, not allowing him easy games. The Serb took advantage of the slightly slower Plexicushion Courts — just introduced this season — which subsequently neutralized Federer’s always-aggressive game. A frustrated Federer was flustered when his game did not have the same effect on Djokovic as it does with other players.

The slow surface hindered his attacking style and that manifested itself throughout the encounter.

This was one of the few times the Swiss looked like the slower player on the court. And that, in large part, is due to Djokovic’s phenomenal court coverage.

Federer tried to get himself motivated in this match. His second-set letdown really hurt after forfeiting a break, and eventually the set, in the first. By the time the third rolled around, though looking rejuvenated, it was too late for the two-time defending champ.

Roger Federer was broken four times in three sets in succumbing to Novak Djokovic.
The ramifications of this match are significant: For the first time in five years, there’s doubt as to who the year-end No. 1 player is going to be. Federer will unquestionably win more Grand Slam titles and likely break Pete Sampras’ all-time record of 14 majors, but it’s going to be an arduous process.

Federer, though, now has time to sit back, take it in and adjust. He’s rarely in this position. In 2005, he lost to Marat Safin in the exact same situation: the Australian Open semifinals. The Swiss won two Slams that year. He’ll enter Wimbledon as the predominant favorite and the U.S. Open will suit his game far better than the Aussie did.

It’s going to be an exciting year. Players realize that beating Federer at prestigious events is no longer a myth. Nadal is likely to dominate on clay again and will be a heavy favorite at the French. Djokovic has shown he’s adept on any surface — proven by four consecutive Slam semifinals. The emergence of Tsonga is intriguing along with other players: Andy Roddick, Nikolay Davydenko, David Ferrer, et al who occupy the top 10.

The idea that Federer will dominate as he has the last four years is far-fetched. He’s still the dominant player on tour, but his competitors now have confidence he is beatable and capable of off days.

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LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard W. French
Published: January 25, 2008
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
SHANGHAI: A quick look at his résumé suggests that Justin Lin Yifu is just the kind of person one would expect to occupy a top job in one of the most important global financial institutions, the World Bank.

Lin has a clutch of degrees, including a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. He founded a prestigious economic research institute in China, his home country. And the man who is about to be named as the World Bank’s chief economist has, appropriately, published a slew of scholarly articles.

But that is not the half of the story. Lin defected from the Taiwan Army in 1979, swimming to China, the country that he longed to make “prosperous and powerful.” Those were bold dreams coming the very year when Beijing began its market reforms, and just three years after the Cultural Revolution, the decade in which thousands died fleeing China.

Nor is Lin’s academic pedigree remotely half of the story of the significance of an appointment like his to an institution born of the ashes of World War II but one that has increasingly lagged behind the times since the end of the Cold War.

Before his appointment as head the World Bank recently, Robert Zoellick made waves as U.S. deputy secretary of state with the idea that a rising China should become a stakeholder in a global system largely created and maintained today by the United States.

Opening the doors of the World Bank to China at such a high level succeeds as a powerful symbolic fulfillment of this thought. It is also overdue.

The creaky postwar system of which the World Bank is a cornerstone has been slow to reflect the gigantic changes of the last two decades. This merely begins with the rise of China, and includes the stirring emergence of countries like India and Brazil, as well as Africa’s impatience with old-fashioned Western tutelage.

And how to explain that China, whose economy, which is growing at 11 percent a year, dwarfs those of most members, is not yet a part of another Western-run club, the Group of 8?

Though unstated, a logical corollary to Zoellick’s stakeholder theory is that as new global forces arise, the already powerful either find constructive ways to make room for them, or this happens through confrontation. Either way, the furniture gets rearranged.

Scarcely concealed, and yet never frankly acknowledged, ideology has long reigned supreme in institutions like the World Bank, and its sibling development aid agency, the International Monetary Fund. Chief among the doctrines is what is broadly known as free market capitalism. While touting its virtues, however, clubby Western powers have managed to take care of their own, while carefully looking after favored third world clients, sparing them when need be from the tough medicine the organizations are famous for.

Here again, Lin’s arrival as chief economist is both welcome and long overdue. China does not subscribe to the Western orthodoxies, but rather believes in doing whatever works, finding its way across the river by feeling the stones, in the famous words of Deng Xiaoping. Lin’s writings are full of this kind of refreshing pragmatism.

The recent takeoffs of East Asian countries like China and Vietnam, he argues, have come from shunning these orthodoxies - things like massive privatization, comprehensive market liberalization and strict fiscal discipline. At least since Ronald Reagan, the Western-supported development model has treated the market as the magical answer to nearly every problem, and quite often treated government suspiciously as the source of most woes.

By contrast, Lin has written that the government is the most important institution, and the quality of a government determines the success or failure of development. That, in itself, represents a sea change, and it will be fascinating to watch the degree to which the international financial institutions absorb this new thinking.

As a force for change, Lin has one ace up his sleeve: the World Bank’s creeping irrelevance in Africa, due in large part to China itself, which is mightily flexing its financial and diplomatic muscle on the continent.

Africans are as eager to learn from China as they are weary of the discourse of the West, which heaps blame on them for their failings but rarely acknowledges the errors of the solutions it imposes, or for that matter the many basic injustices built into the international economic system.

So, with the arrival of a new hope-giving force for change, will all suddenly be goodness and light in the world of multilateral development assistance? We are now reaching the portion of the column that will likely be censored by Chinese media that savor applause for Lin. The answer is, of course, no.

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Copyright Dissent

THE SUBJECT is small—a word. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. It isn’t always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great “isms” are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it’s remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text.

For truly the N word (as it has been known for several decades now) is the privileged American racial epithet. It sits at the heart of the American consciousness like the evil twin of “liberty” or “justice.” Its familiarity has outlived that of other racial epithets once commonplace. It so sums up the essence of the racial stereotype that it can be used as a slur against any group being portrayed as lazy, shiftless, and stupid—including, by the way, white Americans. “For much of the history of our fair republic, the N word has been at the center of our most volatile exchanges [to the degree that] no discussion of American race relations can be complete without it,” writes Asim.

The N word’s story is tortuous, but not always predictable. Its first written usage on New World soil may have been in the diary of John Rolfe in 1619, noting the arrival of the first African slaves in British North America. “Twenty negars,” wrote Rolfe. Charting the 1700s, Asim pays special attention to Thomas Jefferson’s 1785 Notes from the State of Virginia, a text that, coming from a man of Jefferson’s renown, “established a model of rationalized racism.” The N word itself may not appear in the section in which Jefferson discourses on race, but the word has at its foundation an image, and Jefferson’s sexually tempestuous, uncreative, and genetically inferior American Negro “conveniently codified truths held to be self-evident by most white Americans at the end of the eighteenth century.” The (pseudo) scientific racism that marked the 1800s—harebrained theories of human intelligence as determined by cranium dimensions—was occasionally dubbed by its practitioners “niggerology.”

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Copyright Atlantic Monthly

More important, in that year (1953) he also signed with the trendsetting, L.A.-based Capitol Records, a move that afforded him his greatest role: his own musical and stylistic reinvention. The 16 concept albums that followed, his most remarkable achievement and among America’s enduring cultural treasures, defied public taste and redirected it toward what would be known as the Great American Songbook. With his key collaborator, the arranger Nelson Riddle, Sinatra jettisoned the yearning, sweet-voiced crooning of his Columbia years in favor of a richer voice, greater rhythmic invention, and more knowing and conversational phrasing. He had always said that Billie Holiday was his most profound musical influence, and at Capitol, accompanied by Harry Edison, the former trumpeter for Count Basie, he was even more deeply open to jazz influence, as he invested up-tempo songs (which he had rarely performed at Columbia) with a tough, assured swing. For their part, jazz musicians overwhelmingly selected him “the greatest-ever male vocalist” in a 1956 poll, and Lester Young and Miles Davis—never partial to white musicians—ardently praised him.

And now, apparently because of his tortured relationship with Gardner, Sinatra burned off all remaining affectations and sentimentality and sang his ballads with bitterness, directness, and masculine vulnerability (“Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” Riddle said). A midcentury artist with an admitted “overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation,” Sinatra invested those largely decades-old ballads with a modern anxiety and ambivalence. In his album sequences and in such swinging songs as “Night and Day,” “Day In, Day Out,” “Old Devil Moon,” and especially his greatest recording, the 1956 “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” he juxtaposed bravado and panic, ecstasy and uncertainty.

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Copyright The Washington Post
Thursday, January 24, 2008

The optimism with which the October agreement with North Korea was welcomed has faded amid accusations that the North again is not keeping its commitments. First came word that “disablement” of nuclear facilities was slowing. Then there was the missed Dec. 31 deadline for North Korea to declare the full scope of its nuclear program, including its plutonium stockpile and uranium enrichment activities. And earlier in the fall, North Korea was accused of helping Syria construct a nuclear facility in its desert, reportedly a reactor.

The finger-wagging, told-you-so naysayers in and out of the Bush administration should take a deep breath. There is no indication that North Korea is backing away from its commitments to disable key nuclear facilities and every reason to expect this process to unfold slowly, with North Korea taking small, incremental steps in return for corresponding steps from the United States and others in the six-party discussions.

Disablement of the five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon slowed in part because the United States decided that unloading the irradiated fuel rods as fast as North Korea proposed could needlessly risk exposing the North Korean workers to excessive radiation. North Korea is unloading the rods and making steady progress on the other aspects of disablement at the Yongbyon site. Could it be happening faster? Probably, and North Korea would point out that promised shipments of heavy fuel oil are also slow in coming.

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Copyright Slate
Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 8:05 PM ET

Blurry film of a policeman beating a demonstrator; a photograph of angry slum-dwellers storming a food depot; headlines featuring the word violence. That, more or less, sums up the news from Kenya, or at least the news that has filtered into our general consciousness over the last several weeks. Unless you were paying very close attention, you were probably tempted, as I was at first, to dismiss these events as yet more evidence of Africa’s ungovernability. Uganda, Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone—tribal enmity plus poverty equals violence. Kenya is another country evolving into a failed state. Doesn’t it prove, once again, that Africa is an exception to all the rules about global development, democratization, and “progress”?

Actually, it doesn’t. In fact, the closer one looks at Kenya, the less exceptional Africa seems. What was most striking to me about the recent violence in Kenya was not how much the country resembles Rwanda, but rather how much it resembles, say, Ukraine in 2004 or South Korea in the 1980s. Perhaps the real story here is not, as one headline had it, about “The Demons That Still Haunt Africa,” but rather about how Africa is no different from anywhere else.

I am exaggerating, somewhat, to make a point. Of course Kenya is special, like all countries are special, and of course there are some notably bloody Kenyan ethnic conflicts. Kenya’s Kikuyu tribe, which constitutes about one-fifth of the country, has dominated the country’s politics and economics since independence and is profoundly resented for it. Among other things, the disturbances of recent weeks have included a wave of attacks on the Kikuyu sections of a Nairobi slum and Kikuyu-Luo violence in the Rift Valley.

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Every now and then I’ll read a book that fills me very powerfully with regret - regret that I had not read it earlier. This is one such book.
I read a ton of books about China and about Shanghai when I first moved here, so many that most of them began to run together in a blur.
This account of the rise of Shanghai, the place where I’ve lived for 4 1/2 years and the subject of my most important photography project to date is a compelling and informative read that’s both well researched and written in sturdy, serviceable prose. I’ve had moments of fun with it, and I’ve learned a lot.

Link

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LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: January 18, 2008

WUHAN: More than most places, it is tempting to see China today as a study in dichotomies.

The world’s fastest-growing large economy gorges itself on private - that is to say capitalist - investment, and yet is overseen and closely regulated by one of the world’s last surviving Communist-led governments.

At a casual glance, the giant boomtowns of the country’s east seem very much like first world cities, with the dizzyingly rapid proliferation of skyscrapers and expressways, shopping malls and traffic jams.

Travel a couple of hours inland to the west, though, and you can find parts of China that seem stuck in a past 20 or 30 years distant; places where subsistence is the rule and income levels hover closer to Africa than to the Group of 8-style wealth of Beijing’s dreams.

Or don’t travel at all. Poke around any big eastern city, and amid all of the frantic striving in this new culture of acquisition, and you can find deep pockets of the third world that persist just around many a street corner.

After decades of enforced egalitarianism, China has become one of the world’s most strikingly unequal societies, and the gap between rich and poor, that most fundamental dichotomy, yawns most startlingly in the showcases of new wealth.

China observers are fond of probing this jagged fault line in the society, often wondering aloud what will happen here if the extraordinary growth of recent years comes skidding to a halt. As gloom spreads in the world economy, speculation like this grows particularly rife. Never mind that looking too far ahead to predict the direction of the global economy, or China’s for that matter, is a fool’s task. All booms come to an end, but when is anyone’s guess.

There is another dichotomy, however, that is potentially even more important, and while it relates to the creation of great fortunes, sometimes under the murkiest of circumstances, it has everything to do with attenuating the volatile divide that great wealth gaps tend to foster.

This dichotomy involves an ongoing struggle for social justice, and can be seen as a race between protest and process as a means of addressing legitimate grievances.

The last few years have seen an explosion of social ferment in China, including a proliferation of what the authorities coyly refer to as mass incidents, tens of thousands of events that in most countries would simply be called protests. There can be any number of reasons for people to be up in arms: disputes over land rights, anger over environmental degradation, corruption and favoritism in local politics, a generalized lack of transparency and the arbitrary way that so many decisions are made here.

Many of these elements came together early this month near this central Chinese city, where residents of a village mounted a protest against a decision to build a garbage dump near their land. The local authorities appear not to have heeded their opposition, and dispatched the dump trucks anyway, prompting an effort by residents to block them.

Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a local construction firm, happened to be driving past the site when the commotion broke out. Instead of simply rubbernecking, he got out of the car to photograph the scene with his cellphone and was set upon by a mob and beaten to death.

The mob, in this instance, did not consist of unruly citizens, but rather of lawless authorities - members of a quasi-police force that operates in Chinese cities known as cheng guan. Their likely objection was to the man’s decision to film something that the authorities have always preferred to keep invisible: the forceful suppression of protest.

Their actions achieved exactly the opposite end, however, as protests of the killing spread through the area over the next few days, and the entire affair became a cause célèbre in the press and on Chinese Internet sites.

In recent months, citizens in China’s eastern cities have been nudging the system in a different direction, urging the authorities to give flesh to official calls for the development of a “harmonious society,” by expanding the say of people in decisions that affect them.

Mindful that they are unlikely to get any hearing at all without pressure, middle-class city dwellers have marched peacefully in Xiamen and more recently in Shanghai to demand that the government reconsider big development projects being built in their midst.

The citizens have been very careful to state up front that they are not dissidents opposed to the government or against the rule of the Communist Party, and yet the challenge they pose to the system could hardly be clearer.

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A brief excerpt from the book, drawn from the July 19, 2007 issue of the NYRB. Copyright New York Review of Books

The Seven Samurai is a film in complete command of its medium yet naive enough to deal simply and directly with first things. Specifically it deals with the birth of the state, and it does so with Shakespearean clarity and comprehensiveness. In fact, what The Seven Samurai offers is no less than the Kurosawan theory of the origin of the state.

Nice day, I said. Yes, she said, with her back to me. Are you new? I said, meaning was she new to Sydenham Towers, though other meanings were possible too, Are you new on this earth?, for example. No, she said. How it creaks, getting a conversation going. I live on the ground floor, I said. I am allowed to make gambits like that, it will be put down to garrulity. Such a garrulous old man, she will remark to the owner of the pink shirt with the white collar, I had a hard time getting away from him, one doesn’t want to be rude. I live on the ground floor and have since 1995 and still I don’t know all my neighbors, I said. Yeah, she said, and no more, meaning, Yes, I hear what you say and I agree, it is tragic not to know who your neighbors are, but that is how it is in the big city and I have other things to attend to now, so could we let the present exchange of pleasantries die a natural death.

The story told in the film is of a village during a time of political disorder—a time when the state has in effect ceased to exist—and of the relations of the villagers with a troop of armed bandits. After years of descending upon the village like a storm, raping the women, killing those men who resist, and bearing away stored-up food supplies, the bandits hit on the idea of systematizing their visits, calling on the village just once a year to exact or extort tribute (tax). That is to say, the bandits cease being predators upon the village and become parasites instead.

One presumes that the bandits have other such “pacified” villages under their thumb, that they descend upon them in rotation, that in ensemble such villages constitute the bandits’ tax base. Very likely they have to fight off rival bands for control of specific villages, although we see none of this in the film.

The bandits have not yet begun to live among their subjects, having their wants taken care of day by day—that is to say, they have not yet turned the villagers into a slave population. Kurosawa is thus laying out for our consideration a very early stage in the growth of the state.

The main action of the film starts when the villagers conceive a plan of hiring their own band of hard men, the seven unemployed samurai of the title, to protect them from the bandits. The plan works, the bandits are defeated (the body of the film is taken up with skirmishes and battles), the samurai are victorious. Having seen how the protection and extortion system works, the samurai band, the new parasites, make an offer to the villagers: they will, at a price, take the village under their wing, that is to say, will take the place of the bandits. But in a rather wishful ending the villagers decline: they ask the samurai to leave, and the samurai comply.

She has black black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word. As for the bright red shift, that is perhaps not the item of attire she would have chosen if she were expecting strange male company in the laundry room at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Red shift and thongs. Thongs of the kind that go on the feet.

The Kurosawan story of the origin of the state is still played out in our times in Africa, where gangs of armed men grab power—that is to say, annex the national treasury and the mechanisms of taxing the population—do away with their rivals, and proclaim Year One. Though these African military gangs are often no larger or more powerful than the organized criminal gangs of Asia or Eastern Europe, their activities are respectfully covered in the media—even the Western media—under the heading of politics (world affairs) rather than crime.

One can cite examples of the birth or rebirth of the state from Europe too. In the vacuum of power left by the defeat of the armies of the Third Reich in 1944–1945, rival armed gangs scrambled to take charge of the newly liberated nations; who took power where was determined by who could call on what foreign army for backing.

Did anyone, in 1944, say to the French populace: Consider: the retreat of our German overlords means that for a brief moment we are ruled by no one. Do we want to end that moment, or do we perhaps want to perpetuate it—to become the first people in modern times to roll back the state? Let us, as French people, use our new and sudden freedom to debate the question without restraint. Perhaps some poet spoke the words; but if he did his voice must at once have been silenced by the armed gangs, who in this case and in all cases have more in common with each other than with the people.

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Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Ours are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war.

But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy. Doctors offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Surely all this happiness can’t be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren’t we suspicious of this statistic? Aren’t we further troubled by our culture’s overemphasis on happiness? Don’t we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

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From a report by CBS News:

Obama went on to criticize Clinton for her comments at the debate on the bankruptcy bill.

“She explains, ‘well, sort of, I don’t know, here’s why I did this.’ And then she says ‘I voted for it but I was glad to see that it didn’t pass.’ What does that mean? No seriously, what does that mean? if you didn’t want to see it passed, then you can vote against it.”

The crowd roared with laughter as Obama pounced on the Clinton campaign for mailers that were sent out to Nevada voters stating that Obama supported Yucca Mountain. “What part of ‘I’m not for Yucca’ do you not understand?”

Obama ended by calling Clinton’s comments “tricks” and said voters will stop listening to politicians because of them. At the end of the event, a man yelled out to Obama that he will be a better president than George Bush. Obama responded, “So would you!”

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Copyright The Village Voice

January 15th, 2008 12:09 PM

The world’s oldest civilization is in some respects the world’s newest—which is why Jia Zhangke, the pre-eminent cine-chronicler of contemporary China, could well be the most contemporary narrative filmmaker on earth.

Jia’s fifth feature, Still Life, offers an eccentric guided tour of post-apocalyptic Fengjie—the ancient river city largely flooded and partially rebuilt several years ago as part of the monumental Three Gorges Dam project. But the movie, which won the Gold Lion at Venice in 2006 and was shown at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is also an open-ended progress report. The filmmaker arrives as if he were an explorer reaching the edge of the frontier. Still Life opens with a slow, majestic pan over the passengers on a Yangtze ferry— the Chinese masses eating, gambling, dozing, hustling, and texting—as they pass by the new towers that line the shore. To entertain them, the Wuhan Magical Arts Troupe performs the trick of turning ordinary paper into euros and euros into yuans.

This sleight of hand is hardly the film’s only metaphor. For the most part, Still Life broods like a cloud over Fengjie, its displaced inhabitants, and new arrivals. There are two protagonists and a pair of parallel narratives. In one, a stolid miner (Han Sanming) comes downriver from Shanxi in search of the bought wife who left him 16 years before and the daughter whom he’s never seen. Han, a former coal miner, has played similar roles in previous Jia films, giving Still Life the sense of unfolding in an alternate universe. So, too, does the other narrative, in which a young nurse (Jia axiom: Zhao Tao) arrives in Fengjie to look for a husband who has been too busy making his fortune to stay in touch.

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Research suggests the epic trek by Mao’s Red Army was more of a great flight than a strategic retreat. But survivors don’t buy that or other ‘new thinking.’

Copyright The Los Angeles Times
January 16, 2008

BEIJING — In his dreams, Tu Tongjin is back on the battlefield, a terror-stricken young medic wandering the Chinese countryside with Mao Tse-tung and his fledgling Red Army.

He is marching again, always marching. All around him are the bodies, including those of the 40,000 killed in one battle alone. He’s starving, eating only grass. He feels the nagging cold and desperation of being hounded by death and pursued by a relentless enemy army.

“What I remember most,” the 94-year-old says, “is the chaos.”

Tu is a survivor of the Long March, the epic trek by Red Army soldiers who fled southern China in the face of certain defeat at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang forces.

Between 1934 and 1936, more than 300,000 men and women, divided into several armies, trudged inland through a brutal terrain of frigid mountain passes, freezing rivers and marshes in search of a sanctuary to continue their nascent Communist revolution. Only one in 10 survived. Now, seven decades later, fewer than 500 are still alive.

For generations, their sacrifices have been considered legend, a Chinese version of America’s Valley Forge, where sheer grit and dedication drove a young revolutionary army to overcome unthinkable odds and help give birth to a nation.

An integral chapter of Mao’s legacy, the plot line has rarely been questioned by older Chinese. Today, however, younger Chinese increasingly view march veterans as willing puppets of the Communist propaganda machine.

“I know people like my father have been used to further the government agenda,” said Tu’s 50-year-old son, Mike Tu, who lives in Ohio. “It hurts. I think it diminishes the great sacrifices these people made.”

Several controversial new histories have also cast light on the watershed event, many of them critical of Mao. Historians now put the distance of the march at 6,000 miles, not the 8,000 Mao had long boasted. Some question whether it lasted into 1936 as legend goes.

New research also shows that desertion among Red Army troops was common and that peasants often didn’t want to join. The army traded opium for supplies, and women were forced to leave their newborns behind with peasant families because a crying infant could endanger troops.

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Copyright Slate

From Tim Hartford’s The Economics of Marriage
It’s a commonplace observation that the contraceptive pill wrought major changes in society. But when most people hear that, they probably think that the effects were mostly to do with college parties becoming a lot more fun. In fact, rational responses to the pill have had remarkably similar effects to those that come from imprisoning a significant chunk of the male population.

What’s the similarity? Both heat up competition among women in the marriage market. Young black men who stay out of prison in a place like New Mexico rarely marry, and this is probably because they realize they do not need to marry to get sex. The contraceptive pill also makes it easier for men to get sex outside of marriage. The logic of evolutionary psychology says that women should be choosy about who they have sex with, because pregnancy in the wrong circumstances is extremely costly—but the logic of a woman who has control of reliable contraception is quite different. The preferences that evolution has shaped still exert powerful influence on our instincts, and many women remain extremely choosy and refuse to have sex outside marriage. But others, once armed with the pill, decided they could afford to have a little more fun.

The choosy ones are unlucky: the existence of other women who are a little freer with their favors weakens the bargaining power of the Madonnas, and means that men have less incentive to marry. Some men will not bother at all, feeling that they can get all they want from a playboy lifestyle. Or they may delay marriage until middle age, cutting down on the pool of marriageable men and increasing male bargaining power.

As we have seen, the rational response is for women to go to college, bringing them both better prospects in the job market and better prospects in the marriage market. Meanwhile, the more capable women become of looking after children by themselves, the less men need to bother. It’s a textbook case of free-riding: with highly-educated women in excess supply, men have realized that they can get sex, and even successful offspring, without ever moving too far from the La-Z-Boy chair and the potato chips. Statistics seem to bear this out. There are nowadays four US women graduating from university for every three men, and this is not a particularly American phenomenon: in 15 out of 17 rich countries for which the data are available, more women are graduating than men. The most educated men in the United States were born just after the second world war and graduated in the mid 1960s—male graduation rates dipped after that, and have not yet returned to that peak. The rational choice perspective suggests it is probably not coincidental that this decline set in roughly when women got hold of the contraceptive pill.

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Copyright Taipei Times
Monday, Jan 14, 2008, Page 8

Opinion polls indicate that one-third of Americans believe that China
will “soon dominate the world,” while nearly half view China’s
emergence as a “threat to world peace.” In turn, many Chinese fear
that the US will not accept their “peaceful rise.” Americans and
Chinese must avoid such exaggerated fears. Maintaining good US-China
relations will be a key determinant of global stability in this
century.

Perhaps the greatest threat to the bilateral relationship is the
belief that conflict is inevitable. Throughout history, whenever a
rising power creates fear among its neighbors and other great powers,
that fear becomes a cause of conflict. In such circumstances,
seemingly small events can trigger an unforeseen and disastrous chain
reaction.

Today, the greatest prospect of a destabilizing incident lies in the
Taiwan Strait.

The US does not challenge China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, but it
wants a peaceful settlement that will maintain Taiwan’s democratic
institutions. In Taiwan, there is a growing sense of national
identity, but a sharp division between pragmatists of the pan-blue
alliance, who realize that geography will require a compromise with
the mainland, and the ruling pan-green alliance, which aspires in
varying degrees to achieve independence.

Some observers fear that President Chen Shui-bian ( $BDD?eY( (B) will seek a
pretext to prevent defeat in March’s presidential elections. He is
advocating a referendum on whether Taiwan should join the UN, which
China views as provocative. Chen has replied that it is China “that is
acting provocatively today.”

Washington is concerned. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told
reporters that “we think that Taiwan’s referendum to apply to the UN
under the name `Taiwan’ is a provocative policy. It unnecessarily
raises tensions in the Taiwan Strait and it promises no real benefits
for the people of Taiwan on the international stage.”

She also reiterated the administration policy opposing unilateral
threats by either side that change the status quo.

The same day, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates criticized China
for curtailing US naval visits to China over arms sales to Taiwan.
Gates said he told the Chinese that the sales were consistent with
past policy and that “as long as they continued to build up their
forces on their side of the Taiwan Strait, we would continue to give
Taiwan the resources necessary to defend itself.”

Gates added, however, that despite China’s rising defense budget, “I
don’t consider China an enemy, and I think there are opportunities for
continued cooperation in a number of areas.”

In principle, cross-strait tensions need not lead to conflict. With
increasing change in China and growing economic and social contacts
across the Strait, it should be possible to find a formula that allows
the Taiwanese to maintain their market economy and democratic system
without a placard at the UN.

The US has tried to allow for this evolution by stressing two themes:
no independence for Taiwan and no use of force by China. But given the
danger that could grow out of political competition in Taiwan or
impatience in the People’s Liberation Army, the US would be wise to
encourage more active contacts and negotiations between the two sides.

The US has a broad national interest in maintaining good relations
with China, as well as a specific human rights interest in protecting
Taiwan’s democracy. But the US does not have a national interest in
helping Taiwan become a sovereign country with a seat at the UN, and
efforts by some Taiwanese to do so present the greatest danger of a
miscalculation that could create enmity between the US and China. Some
Chinese already suspect the US of seeking an independent Taiwan as an
“unsinkable aircraft carrier” against a future Chinese enemy. They are
wrong, but such suspicions can feed a climate of enmity.

If the US treats China as an enemy, it will ensure future enmity.
While we cannot be sure how China will evolve, it makes no sense to
foreclose the prospect of a better future. Washington’s policy
combines economic integration with a hedge against future uncertainty.

The US-Japan security alliance means China cannot play a “Japan card.”
But while such hedging is natural in world politics, modesty is
important for both sides. If the overall climate is one of distrust,
what looks like a hedge to one side can look like a threat to the
other.

There is no need for the US and China to go to war. Both must take
care that an incident over Taiwan does not lead in that direction, and
avoid letting exaggerated fears create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Joseph S. Nye is a professor at Harvard University.

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Copyright People’s Daily
14 January 2008

The current situation in Kenya has derailed mediation
efforts by African Union (AU) Chairman and Ghanian
President John Kufuor and US Assistant Secretary of
State Jendayi Frazer,for the crisis following the
disputed elections shows no intention of ceasing. In
order to track down the root cause of Kenya’s turmoil,
we must look deep into the nation’s history. As it
seems, Kenya’s crisis has been years in the making.

Above all, transplanted Western democracy could not
take hold in Africa. The African people have been
living on the continent for generations; have forged
special links among different ethnic groups; and have
cultivated a unique African culture long before
falling victim to Western colonialism. As a matter of
fact, primitive culture already enjoyed democracy with
unique characteristics long ago. Tribal heads called
on all the tribe’s men to make a decision on any
matter, and a consensus from different groups was
sought after. When a disparity arose, they formed a
cabinet consisting of tribal elders.

Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan believes in a
popular saying from his mother country, Ghana: one
head cannot beat collective wisdom. Collective wisdom,
accumulated over years and passed down from generation
to generation, can not be readily replaced by a single
idea, injected from the outside and imposed upon by
the powerful.

The post-election crisis in Kenya is a product of
democracy bequeathed by Western hegemony; and a
manifestation of values clashing when democracy is
transplanted onto disagreeable land.

Secondly, colonialism is the worst offender to fuel
ethnic estrangement and hatred. Early colonizers set
foot onto the African continent to disseminate white
culture using ignoble means- a popular practice
adopted by strong cultures wiping out weaker ones -
utilizing ‘barbaric’ people to subjugate their own
races. This sinister design has triggered persistent
ethnic conflict in Africa.

Kenya has over 70 ethnic groups, ranging in size from
about 7 million Kikuyu to only 500 El Molo. The
largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, makes up a quarter
of the nation’s total population, and has ruled this
country for decades since its independence, with the
support of former colonial ruler: Great Britain. This
has brought about increasing discontent among other
ethnic groups - especially the opposition groups.

The bipartisan election system, introduced in 1963
when Kenya gained independence, and the multi-party
election, initiated in 1991, did nothing but aggravate
the situation.

Thirdly, the widening gap between the rich and the
poor catalyzes the ethnic clash. Despite the fact that
Kenya’s economic growth has been increasing steadily
in recent years – the growth rate jumped to 6.1
percent in 2006 - there is still a sizeable portion of
the country’s population living in abject poverty.
After all, half of the nation is currently living
below the poverty line – a yardstick established by
the UNDP with a $1 dollar a day average cost of
living.

The opposition group’s Orange Democratic Movement, led
by Chief Raila Odinga, has, as a result, won the great
support and respect from disadvantaged groups. The
strong aspiration of “becoming better-off’ has
prompted more and more poor ethnic groups to side with
them.

Kenya’s post-election crisis has thus far left 486
dead, over a quarter of a million homeless, and caused
as much as 1 billion USD in economic damages.

Fortunately, international mediation seems to be
making progress, as the various political groups have
finally decided to cooperate with the African
Celebrity Panel, spearheaded by former UN secretary-
general Kofi Annan, to find a way to settle
deep-seated problems.

Nevertheless, we still cherish the hope that one day
international mediation will be amply rewarded in the
way of different political groups setting aside
disputes and seeking common ground. Only by preserving
national stability can Kenya gain momentum in
developing its economy and benefit all ethnic groups.

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90780/91343/6337848.html

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Copyright The South China Morning Post

Jan 15, 2008
Much that is discussed about China’s foreign policy and security posture today revolves around its military - warships and fighter jets bought from Russia, 1,300 missiles aimed at Taiwan and the latest manoeuvres by the People’s Liberation Army.

There’s another side to China’s emerging might, however; what some pundits call “soft power”, “smiling diplomacy” or the “charm offensive”. Most of that effort is the application of China’s expanding economy to trade, aid and investment to achieve political ends.

In a wider context, China’s soft power seems integral to what may be a campaign to revive the Middle Kingdom, the China of yesteryear that dominated Asia. Chinese armies won’t march across international borders; rather, Beijing seeks to acquire such political, economic, and diplomatic clout that major decisions in every Asian capital will require Chinese approval.

According to China scholar Joshua Kurlantzick: “China may want to shift influence away from the United States to create its own sphere of influence, a kind of Chinese Monroe Doctrine for Southeast Asia [where] countries would subordinate their interests to China’s, and would think twice about supporting the US.”

US president James Monroe proclaimed in 1823 that outside powers would not be permitted to intervene in western hemisphere affairs.

In a fresh assessment, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) in Washington, asserts that China has been mostly, but not completely, successful in Southeast Asia: “Beijing has largely allayed Southeast Asian concerns that China poses a military or economic threat,” it says. In contrast, the US is perceived as having “waning or limited attention” to Southeast Asia.

China’s ability to influence Southeast Asians, the CRS report contends, “largely stems from its role as a major source of foreign aid, trade and investment”. In addition, overseas Chinese communities in almost every Southeast Asian nation “have long played important parts in the economies, societies and cultures of Southeast Asian states”.

One set of figures is illuminating. China’s imports of Southeast Asian goods from 1997 to 2006 soared 674 per cent, to US$89.5 billion. In the same period, US imports rose 57 per cent, to US$111 billion. When the 2007 figures are in, China will probably have bought more from Southeast Asia than the US.

The Chinese have concentrated their economic assistance on Myanmar and Laos, and on Cambodia, reached through Laos. They are the poorest countries in the region. Beijing has lent Vietnam large sums for railways, hydropower projects and shipbuilding yards. Compared with its influence in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, however, the CRS report says “China’s influence in Vietnam is relatively limited”.

See scmp.com to read the complete article.

Copyright © 2008 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All right reserved

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Copyright The Sacramento Bee
(An excerpt)
Media Savvy caught up with Schorr by phone from his home office in Washington, D.C., to talk about the current state of media and the state of Schorr.

Q: In the book’s introduction, you talk about adapting from one medium to another, having worked in newspapers, radio and television. I wonder what you think about the changing media landscape today.

A: At my age, I look at it and say, “Boy, I’m glad that’s for other people.” I couldn’t stand what’s going on today (as a reporter). Of course, the changes are partly technological. You no longer have to rely on a great newspaper like the Sacramento Bee or on a television network to get news. You can go on the Web and get anything you need.

And I’ve found that people are now deluged with information. In my day, as a newspaper man, radio man and television man, I had the feeling I was telling people something they wouldn’t otherwise know. That’s no longer true. I’m glad I’m not 20 years younger, because I’d be very discouraged.

Q: Are you discouraged because, in a lot of cases, we’re not sure of the veracity of the information?

A: That’s part of it. On a much larger scale, I’m discouraged by the fact that radio and television – and to some extent even newspapers – faced with a shrinking market, tend to go more and more for sensation, for scandal, for murders and sex stories and so on, because they’re trying to entice the public with something they otherwise wouldn’t have.

The assumption is, the public doesn’t want to know about big issues around the around. They want to know what O.J. Simpson is doing. The result is, the economics of news tends to drive our news media into worse and worse types of stories.

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Copyright The New York Times

KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.

A young boy catching crabs at the port in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, where fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.

The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.

Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.

“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.

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An excerpt:
“An enlightened society has some means, public or private, to support its artists, because their work is regarded as a spiritual triumph, and a claim to greatness for the entire tribe. But mere epicures would hardly achieve such fame.Even chef, perfumers, and upholsterers, who produce the means of sensory pleasure for others, are not rated as the torchbearers of culture and inspired creators. Only their own advertisements bestow such titles on them. If music, patterned sound, had no other office than to stimulate and soothe our nerves, pleasing our ears as well-combined foods please our palates, might be highly popular, but never culturally important. Its historic development would be too trivial a subject to engage many people in lifelong study, though a few desperate Ph.D these mught be wrung from its anecdotal past under the rubric of “social history.” And music conservatories would be properly rates exactly like cooking schools.

Link

Posted at 9:43 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

YANGMIAO, China — When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines. That is not a result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.

Poor families in villages like Zhangyoufang still struggle to pay the school fees for their children.

“We eat somehow, but it’s never enough,” Ms. Li said. “At least we’re not starving.”

In this region of southern Henan Province, in village after village, people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of this country, are seen as an impossible luxury. People here often begin conversations with a phrase that is still not uncommon in today’s China: “We are poor.”

China has moved more people out of poverty than any other country in recent decades, but the persistence of destitution in places like southern Henan Province fits with the findings of a recent World Bank study that suggests that there are still 300 million poor in China — three times as many as the bank previously estimated.

Poverty is most severe in China’s geographic and social margins, whether the mountainous areas or deserts that ring the country, or areas dominated by ethnic minorities, who for cultural and historic reasons have benefited far less than others from the country’s long economic rise.

But it also persists in places like Henan, where population densities are among the greatest in China, and the new wealth of the booming coast beckons, almost mockingly, a mere province away.

“Henan has the largest population of any province, approaching 100 million people, and the land there just cannot support those kinds of numbers,” said Albert Keidel, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Chinese poverty. “It is supposed to be a breadbasket, but there has always been major discrimination against grain-based areas in China. The profit you can get from a hectare of land from vegetables, or a fish farm or oils, is so much more.”

Other experts say Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what antipoverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of those areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, who pocket it or divert it to business investments.

Paradoxically, they say, they are overlooked precisely because of their proximity to the major economic centers of the east, forced to fend for themselves on the theory that they can make do with income sent home by migrant laborers and other forms of trickle-down wealth.

“Previous poverty alleviation policy focused more on western China, places like Gansu, Qinghai or Guizhou, which were poorer,” said Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute, a Beijing nongovernmental organization. “Besides, the situation in the border regions is more complicated, because if things go wrong there, it becomes more than a poverty problem. That’s why policy leaned toward them.”

Here in Henan’s rural Gushi County, only 73,000 of 1.4 million farmers fall below the official poverty level of $94 a year, which is supposed to be enough to cover basic needs, including maintaining a daily diet of 2,000 calories. “We should bear in mind that this poverty standard is very low,” Mr. Wang said, echoing the view of many Chinese economists.

Many more people in this part of Henan subsist between the official poverty line and the $1 a day standard long used by the World Bank. The World Bank’s estimate of the number of poor people in China was tripled to 300 million from 100 million last month, after a new survey of prices altered the picture of what a dollar can buy. The new standard was set according to what economists call purchasing power parity. By the new calculations, estimates of the overall size of the Chinese economy also shrank by 40 percent.

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Watch it.

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LETTER FROM CHINA
Chinese woman goes way off-message on the Olympics
By Howard W. French
Published: January 11, 2008
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: You could call it a highly unscripted moment, in a country whose government hates unscripted moments.

You could call it an affirmation of the classic old line about hell knowing no fury like a woman scorned.

Or you could call it the unofficial kickoff to China’s year of the Olympics.

In no case would you be wrong.

The matter in question arose last month when Hu Ziwei, a well-known Chinese television personality, burst onto the stage during a lavish ceremony where the state broadcaster, CCTV, was inaugurating its new Olympics sports channel.

There stood Hu’s husband, Zhang Bin, who is also a well-known sports anchor, and suddenly, the neatly dressed woman began speaking in a calm voice about her supposed discovery of his love affair with another woman.

From the outset it was clear that Hu was a surprise guest, and her message, too, was way off script. “Next year is an Olympics year, and people all over the world will be watching China,” she began calmly, her hands folded in front of her. Quickly, several men approached to try to get her off of the stage, but Hu held her ground, shaking off their attempts to grasp hold of her.

From the perspective of a government that obsesses over control of what is visible and what is not, what can be expressed publicly and recorded for posterity and what cannot, even in these first instants the makings of a nightmare were readily apparent. Voices could be heard offstage, “Please don’t take any pictures,” but it was already too late. Not only could one clearly hear the sound of snapshots being clicked off, but also within hours video footage was spreading on the Internet via Chinese Web sites, which the government attempted to block, and via YouTube, which it could not.

Hu continued, citing the words of an unnamed French diplomat, saying: “Until China is able to start exporting its values, it won’t be able to become a great power. For us to appear so prim and proper, yet Zhang Bin can’t even be brought to face his own - he won’t even face his hurt wife. I think China, as a - to succeed as a great power - don’t any of you have a conscience at all?” The men in suits approached yet again attempting to remove her, but the diminutive lady was having none of it. “You let me go,” she exclaimed, pulling herself free. “We’re so far from being a great country.”

On the surface, claims like hers that her conjugal betrayal had anything to do with the celebration of China’s upcoming Games may seem farfetched, even if Hu’s husband was the deputy of state television’s sports news department and she had recently hosted an Olympics-related program on Beijing TV.

But many Chinese received Hu’s words as far more than the hysterical ranting of woman wronged, unleashing a torrent of caustic commentary about a subject that Chinese have been endlessly told they are unanimously delighted about: the hosting of the Olympics.

The Games, which begin in August, are already inescapable in China. Everywhere one looks one finds the official logo, as sponsors of every stripe attempt to cash in on the event. The news is filled with countdowns (there are 209 days remaining), and snippets about milestones passed and great hurdles overcome.

To a certain extent, all of this is perfectly normal, but there is undeniably a dimension of political manipulation to the hoopla, a gigantic, carefully staged exercise in groupthink, that makes China’s hosting of Olympics quite unlike previous versions of the Games, say in Athens or Atlanta.

On the one hand, China is attempting to manage how the world sees it, sparing no expense to turn Beijing into a breathtaking showcase, and winning no points for subtlety as it sweats to conjure images of itself as modern, prosperous, powerful (but peaceful!) and forward-looking.

Even this part of the equation is not so unusual. Others, like Tokyo in 1964 and Seoul in 1988, have trod this ground before. But China is trying to manipulate how its own people think and feel about the Games, urging them to be excited, to be proud, of course, but also to be unquestioning and unanimous in support. Chinese who have dared criticize the Games have already been arrested and would-be protesters strongly cautioned.

It’s as if a stern music teacher had drilled all of her pupils for months, dressed them perfectly and told them to hold their breath in readiness for the start of the big recital, raising her rod to warn them “and remember, let there be no unscripted moments.” Hu’s off-key crashing of the launching of the new Olympics channel resonated like the sound an adolescent prankster armed with a whoopee cushion. From the perspective of the authorities in Beijing, the best thing one could say about it was its early timing. There are still months to recover.
See the YouTube clip

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWoFqbYBo6M

See Mark Focus Presents his work to Putney Swope

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Copyright: Slate

So much for the post-race horse race. The exit polls in New Hampshire were accurate for the Republicans and for the second-tier Democrats. The only miscalculation was the amount of support for Obama. That miscalculation is about race. Iowa caucus-goers stood by Barack, in part, because when voting with their bodies, in front of their neighbors, Iowans are held accountable. In the quiet, solitary space of the voting booth, some New Hampshire voters abandoned Barack.

The reasons are not simple. Some media believe that women voters want a woman president. But there is not a substantial gender gap in American politics. Historically, white women voters are as likely to be Democrats as Republicans; as likely to vote for male candidates as for female; and as likely to describe themselves as conservative or liberal. It is not as simple as gender solidarity. Some observers will argue that naked racism explains Tuesday’s result. But that argument ignores the thousands of white women and men who built Obama’s local organization in New Hampshire and worked tirelessly on his behalf for months.

The New Hampshire results are a reminder of why Obama’s strategy is so new and difficult. He is asking voters to believe that although he has a “funny” name and does not look like them, he is nonetheless like them. He is asking voters to peer through the veil of America’s racial history and actually see him. It is a hard thing to do. When Hillary Clinton’s eyes welled up with the strain of the campaign, she evoked immediate recognition from many white women of her generation. “Oh, yes,” they thought, “I remember feeling like that.” Former President Bill Clinton rallied angrily for his wife, as he claimed that the media were picking on her while being soft on Obama. This is a familiar American narrative of race and gender, and it resonated with thousands of New Hampshire voters. Clinton cried about being attacked in the debates, but there are no public tears shed for the strain Obama must feel as a result of death threats, which caused the doubling of his Secret Service detail.

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Copyright The Boston Globe
January 7, 2008

“THEY SAID this day would never come,” Barack Obama declared in Iowa last week, and the ghosts of this nation nodded. With an African-American competing seriously for the presidency of the United States, the last act of a centuries-old drama begins. Obama’s blood tie to the story of American slavery, ironically, comes through his white mother’s ancestry, which apparently includes both slave owners and those who fought for the Union to end slavery. That Obama’s father was a Kenyan links him more directly than anyone could have imagined both to Africa’s past as an exploited continent, and to its present, where the bloody legacy of colonialism plays itself out. (Obama’s father was a member of the Luo tribe, like Raila Odinga, the leader of the Kenyan opposition, whose people are protesting the recent election.)

In the American memory, slavery and then the war to abolish it are taken to be the two poles of the story, but it isn’t that simple. If racial injustice continued to be a hallmark of life in the United States, it was thought to be an inevitable, but essentially unchosen consequence of the “250 years of unrequited toil,” in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, that were imposed on kidnapped Africans and their descendants. Nearly a million Americans died in the war to end slavery, and - still in the American memory - the nation has felt badly ever since that slavery’s hangover includes discrimination against black people to this day.

The conventional wisdom, given powerful articulation a generation ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is that the plight of African-Americans - from broad family dysfunction, to almost unshakeable poverty, to disproportionate incarceration rates of black males - is a tragic consequence of the social evil that America nobly renounced in the mid-19th century. Black people are socially disadvantaged, according to this narrative, because of the unhealed wound that was inflicted on them across the early centuries. Innately equal, yes, but they have been made a crippled people, which accounts for their still inferior position.

But, as historians like Yale’s Harry S. Stout point out, there is a third pole to the story, and it destroys the moral symmetry of the conventional wisdom. First, Africans were enslaved. Next, a savage war was justified by the “freeing” of slaves. Then, in a distinct but insufficiently acknowledged act of the drama, black people were actively resubjugated in the decades after the Civil War. That resubjugation, embodied in a “reconstruction” bargain between North and South, according to which the other purpose of the Civil War, “union,” was given priority over “freedom,” led to the culture of Jim Crow, radical segregation, and the use of law to keep African-Americans in an assigned place. That actively nurtured system - not the crippling effects of a long-abolished injustice - defines the ongoing American crime.

African-Americans have not been passive victims of this heinous tradition. Blacks led the resistance to it, culminating in the triumphs of the civil rights movement, preparing the way for leaders like Obama. But his arrival, at a level below the surface of whatever policies he advances, calls into question the dominant way in which this nation thinks of itself - not only in terms of race, but in terms of war. After all, the American belief in the righteousness of mass killing for the sake of abstract values like “freedom” springs not from the Revolution, where the killing was relatively slight and the freedom limited to a merchant class, but from the Civil War, where a spirit of total killing was justified by a professed commitment to racial equality that simply did not exist.

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Saturday January 5, 2008
Copyright The Guardian

In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says many acute things about memory - about physical memory in the body, for instance, in Du cote de chez Swann . One thinks of Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”: “My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.”

Proust is good, too, on memory’s inaccuracy and its arbitrariness. Think of Albertine’s wandering beauty spot in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs or Marcel’s observation in Le temps retrouve that one forgets the duel one nearly fought but remembers the yellow gaiters one’s opponent wore as a child in the Champs-Elysees. A strikingly dramatic but implausible illustration, this, where sartorial details, revers and darts and flares, are given a Wodehousian precedence over world events. Less good, though, than Henry V’s prediction that soldiers at Agincourt will remember their part in the battle “with advantages”.

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

They are, then, these memories, super-charged with sensation. Can we describe this sensation - of significance, of occluded feeling? Can we say what it means?

Proust is interested in the particular sensation that accompanies remembering. The tea-soaked madeleine loses its force when it is repeatedly tasted. Tom Stoppard recorded something similar in the first issue of Talk magazine when he wrote “On Turning Out to be Jewish” (September 1999). He meets in Czechoslovakia a woman whose cut has been stitched decades before by Dr Straussler, the father he never knew: “Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.” A moving moment. But Stoppard has recorded unsentimentally that its power to move diminishes every time he tells the story.

Is the sensation simply nostalgia - like the nostalgic regret of Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch for the time when he was an effective methodist preacher in Islington’s Upper Row with an ambition to be a missionary? Or is it something more profound - like Proust’s meditation, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, on his Aunt Leonie’s sofa in the brothel? On that same sofa, Marcel has first experienced love with a girl cousin. Proust gives us a stereoscopic irony as the seedy and the pre-sexual amalgamate. There seems to be a hidden message in the coincidence. Is the coincidence merely a coincidence? Or has the coincidence been arranged? Elements of this supernatural innuendo emerge repeatedly in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory . General Kuropatkin is showing the young Nabokov tricks with matches on a sofa, when he is summoned away: “the loose matches jumping up on the divan as his weight left it.” Fifteen years later, the disguised, fugitive general asks Nabokov’s father for a light … Nabokov says the true purpose of autobiography is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life”.

In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about significant yet insignificant memories as “spots of time”:

There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress’d
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repair’d …

This is not so much an explanation as a statement of intrigued bafflement: “the hiding places of my power / Seem open; I approach and then they close.” And the example that Wordsworth gives is interestingly drab. It has a few meagre components - a “naked Pool, / The Beacon on the lonely Eminence, / The Woman and her garments vex’d and toss’d” - and its power is largely retrospective. It is “in truth, / An ordinary sight”. Looked back on, though, the dreariness becomes a “visionary dreariness” that Wordsworth would need colours and words unknown to man to paint. The discrepancy here, in Eliot, and in Proust, is between the original experience and that experience when it is hallowed by remembrance.

The effect is something like cropping in photography. At the beginning of The Waves, Virginia Woolf gives us the childhood memories of Rhoda, Louis, Bernard, Susan and Neville as highlights, ordinary epiphanies: Mrs Constable pulling up her black stockings; a flash of birds like a handful of broadcast seed; bubbles forming a silver chain at the bottom of a saucepan; air warping over a chimney; light going blue in the morning window. These mnemonic pungencies are different from the bildungsroman of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as that novel gets into its stride. They resemble rather the unforgettable anthology of snapshots Joyce gives us at the novel’s beginning - a snatch of baby-talk; the sensation of wetting the bed; covering and uncovering your ears at refectory. Or Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, when Augie is a kind of ship-board unofficial counsellor, the recipient of emotional swarf: “Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory”; “He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver”. Cropped for charisma.

Of course, memory itself is naturally cropped, as Stendhal records in Chapter 13 of Vie de Henry Brulard, where he notes that some memories are undated, vivid as fragmented frescoes, but surrounded by the blank brickwork of oblivion. Actually, anything fragmented, as the romantics knew from Percy’s Reliques, is granted a penumbra of suggestion that we mistake and read as vividness of outline.

Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity. The Paris of Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) is less vivid than the same material telescoped in the earlier “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1961).

This is A Moveable Feast:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

It isn’t just the clumsiness of the triple “where”. It’s the automatic, sentimental cliche that poisons A Moveable Feast - the flyblown yellowed poster, the unknown girl at the cafe “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek”. Nostalgia, as Kundera redefines it in Ignorance, is “the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return”. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway fails to return to his past, he is exiled from his memories, because his prose is writing itself and he is having a hard time keeping up.

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, on the other hand, the detail is seen and hand-picked:

There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tyres, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.

By 1964, Hemingway has forgotten the flower dye and the round square. His memory fails. So his memories fail.

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Posted at 9:37 AM · Comments (0)

This is a witness’s account of an unspeakable atrocity from the trial of the Liberian dictator, Charles Taylor. Courtesy of Ofeibea Quist Artcton.

PROSECUTION LAWYER MOHAMED A BANGURA:

SO YOU GOT TO SUNA MOSQUE AGAIN? – ALEX TAMBA TIEH: Yes, but my Lord, before we go to Suna Mosque, the things that happened at Igbale is what I want to speak about, because they killed a boy.

YES WHAT HAPPENED? After the SBU (Small Boys’ Unit) boys had told me you are no better than your colleagues and we are going to kill you, Rocky had to hang his bag over my neck and he asked his subordinates to take me along.

And I saw some SBU boys come closer to me with a small boy. He was screaming and asked them WHAT HAVE I DONE? They didn’t say anything to him, but the boy was screaming.

At first, they had to put his right arm on a log. They took a machete 223 and amputated it at the wrist. The boy was screaming shouting asking what have I done that you are doing this to me?

They took the left arm again and put it on the same log and sliced it off. He was still screaming, shouting. They took the left leg and put it on the same log and cut it off at the ankle.

At last, the took the right leg again and put it on the same log and cut it off with a machete. Some held him by his hand at that time now and I’m speaking about the same SBU boys, they are the same boys doing this.

Some held his foot, legs, they were swinging the boy. They threw him over into a toilet pit. I was there, I saw it myself. The boy was screaming, shouting crying. From the that, CO Rocky, his own subordinates told me, let’s go, let’s go and it was from then that we proceeded to Suna Mosque.

AND AT SUNA MOSQUE 237 WHAT HAPPENED? When we got to Suna Mosque, Rocky saluted Rambo and gave him…. He said Sir I have killed 101 people and they were men, except this pastor who is standing efore you now. I did not kill him.

WHAT WAS HIS RESPONSE? Rambo went angry. And he said Rocky, I as your commander 244, I have given you an instruction to do something and you refuse to accomplish it?

He turned to me and said you are a pastor hein? It is this time I believe that God is going to guide you. But Rambo went angry.

…That is myself?
YOU SAID THAT THERE WERE COMMANDERS THERE. HOW DID YOU KNOW THE NUMBER? DID YOU KNOW THAT IMMEDIATELY YOU GOT TO SUNA MOSQUE?

JUDGE: Ask one question at a time. Rephrase your question.

HOW DID YOU KNOW THERE WERE 30 COMMANDERS:

I knew that because Rambo referred to them as commanders. He said you who are commanders.

DID YOU KNOW THE NUMBERS?
He Rambo himself said it. We the 30 commanders who are here, including Rocky, we are going to vote about the pastor. He said they should vote, he said he was one, that wants me to be killed. Any other person who wants Pastor TIEH to be killed, they should come and stand on his own side and they should put their fingers up.

Those who are not in favour of Pastor Tieh being killed, they should go on the side of Rocky.

WHY ROCKY?
Because he had already given instructions to Rocky for him to kill all of us who were civilians in that group. But since Rocky refused to kill me, it means he was not determined and decided not to kill me. So he decided those who did not want me to be killed should go to Rocky’s side.

AND WHAT WAS THE RESULT OF THE VOTE ON YOUR LIFE? Well, 14 people came to us, his own position, and put up their fingers and he put the total to 15. And Rocky’s side…also 15.

FIFTEEN WHO WANTED YOU TO BE KILLED AND 15 WHO WANTED YOU TO BE SPARED? Yes, Sir. Well as God would have it, it was like now 30-30. Fortunately, he Rambo himself saw Sylvester KIEH coming from the other side and he was also a commander himself, because he was a Lieut.

SYLVESTER KIEH WHO YOU MENTIONED EARLIER AT THE IGBALE. When Sylvester came, Rambo had to address him. He said now you are here, but we who are here we are divided into 2. I and my own group have decided that the pastor should die. Rocky 254 and his own group have decided that the pastor should be spared. Now we are 30-30, now you are the only person who is going to determine this case.

Sylvester looked up and looked up the sky and he put up his hand as if he was going to say something. Rambo told him to shut up and he also turned his back against us. 254 And as he was speaking, he was demonstrating with his arms and he was saying I don’t want this man to die and he was going twds Rocky’s part and automatically the number went up to 16 as against 15.

SO MR WITNESS YOU WERE SPARED DEATH? Yes, after the vote, because those people who were interested in me not to die were 16 and those who wanted me to die were 15, so…wanted me not to die.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THIS? From there, Rambo said that Rocky, I am going to hand this man over to you. You are the one who has said he shouldn’t die until I have told Mosquito about him. So you have to keep this man until I have told Mosquito habout him.

WHO WAS MOSQUITO AS FAR AS YOU KNEW AT THAT TIME? At that particular mo, I never knew the person who was referred to as mosquito.

YOU LATER CAME TO KNOW WHO THIS PERSON WAS? Yes Sir.

AFTER YOU HAD BEEN HANDED OVER TO ROCKY, DID ANYTHING HAPPEN? Yes, sir. PLEASE TELL THE COURT.
Well Rocky was at WHENDEYDO, that was were he resided.

FEED FREEZES….@ T254

So, Rocky had to take me to his own place, called WHENDEYDO.

WHEN YOU GOT TO WHENDEYDO, WHAT DID YOU OBSERVE THERE. TELL THE COURT YOUR OBSERVATIONS?
I met other civilians there and I met other rebels there also.

DAMN FEED MESSING UP AGAIN.
They sometimes used them to cut palmnuts, palm fruits and sometimes the women, they take them to use as sexual objects.

CAN YOU BE CLEARER ABOUT WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO THE WOMEN. WHAT EXACTLY WAS HAPPENING TO THE WOMEN YOU MET AT WHENDEYDO?

Well the women at night, they used to forced to have sex with them. Sometimes you hear them scream…
T254 9’25

CONTD T 254 @ 11’05 …ANY CONSEQUENCES IF CIVILIAN USED GOVT PROPERTY
They will shoot you to death.

Posted at 10:11 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright In These Times

The explosion of capitalism in China has many Westerners asking when political democracy—as the “natural” accompaniment of capitalism—will emerge. But a closer look quickly dispels any such hope.

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism. The lower classes won them by waging long, difficult struggles throughout the 19th century. Recall the list of demands that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made in the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. With the exception of the abolition of private property, most of them—such as a progressive income tax, free public education and abolishing child labor—are today widely accepted in “bourgeois” democracies, and all were gained as the result of popular struggles.

So there is nothing exotic in today’s China: It is merely repeating our own forgotten past. But what about the afterthought of some Western liberal critics who ask how much faster China’s development would have been had the country grown within the context of a political democracy? The German-British philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf has linked the increasing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a “valley of tears.” In other words, after the breakdown of state socialism, a country cannot immediately become a successful market economy. The limited—but real—socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessary and painful. For Dahrendorf, this passage through the “valley of tears” lasts longer than the average period between democratic elections. As a result, the temptation is great for leaders of a democratic country to postpone difficult changes for short-term electoral gains.

In Western Europe, the move from welfare state to the new global economy has involved painful renunciations, less security and less guaranteed social care. In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself.

Dahrendorf, however, fails to note the opposite temptation: The belief that, if the majority of a population resists structural changes in the economy, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, to lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy. Along these lines, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria points out how democracy can only “catch on” in economically developed countries. He says that if developing countries are “prematurely democratized,” then economic catastrophe and political despotism will soon follow. It’s no wonder, then, that today’s most economically successful developing countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) have embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.

Isn’t this line of reasoning the best argument for the Chinese way to capitalism as opposed to the Russian way? In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted “shock therapy” and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism—with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)

China, on the other hand, has followed the path of Chile and South Korea in its passage to capitalism, using unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs and thus avoid chaos. The weird combination of capitalism and Communist rule proved to be a blessing (not even) in disguise for China.

The country has developed fast, not in spite of authoritarian rule, but because of it. With Stalinist-sounding paranoia, we are left to wonder, “Maybe those who worry about China’s lack of democracy are actually worried that its fast development could make it the next global superpower, thereby threatening Western primacy.”

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Copyright The Seattle Times
January 8, 2008

If my grandmother were still with us, she’d marvel that in the span of five decades, the opportunities for a man like Barack Obama have widened exponentially from porter to president.

I’d sit and marvel with her, my pleasure tempered by the reality that in 2008, Obama may ascend to the presidency but he’ll never transcend race. America just isn’t ready to move past the symbolism of an Obama presidential bid to the man within.

He would always be the black president. Similar to being the black columnist, the black CEO or the black coach. He should just think of it as a title preceding his name.

Race is always the subtext. No matter how broad our sensibilities become, racial identity remains the way our eyes make sense of what’s before us. This will get Obama votes in some quarters and hate mail from others.

Even those who deify the senator from Illinois are dazzled more by his skin tone than political hue. I swear, if I have to read another saga detailing the fine line Obama must walk being a racially mixed candidate, I may crawl back into yesterday’s champagne bottle not to emerge until after the election. It isn’t really a fine line; more like a major arterial, one navigated by many before him.

Obama may be the first black presidential candidate to come absent a racially identifiable agenda but corporate America is lousy with people walking the same path. He must appeal to a largely white electorate while not appearing to lose his black identity, so say the pundits. Been there, done that. I and others have the scars to prove it.

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Posted at 1:06 PM · Comments (0)

An absolutely stunning short novel by Graham Greene. It had been sitting on my bookshelf unread for years until one day recently it somehow beckoned to me. I read it totally unprepared for its powers of observation about social life in London at the war’s end, but especially and above all for the penetrating way he catalogs and dissects, stage by stage, the emotions that attend romantic separation.

Link

Posted at 10:38 PM · Comments (0)

Happy New Year everyone.
I’ve endured an enforced absence from the web for a while due to unexpected complications in switching web hosts. That’s all happily behind me now, though, and I’ll be updating this site with new material steadily in the weeks ahead. I’ve just posted the majority of the pieces I’ve written for the Times and the IHT over the last few weeks to the Writings section, and will be adding fresh new material on a daily basis to the other sections, as well.
My documentary photography project Disappearing Shanghai, has reached maturity, and will be making its premiere in China with a show opening February 16 at gallery M97 in Shanghai, alongside the work of the well-known photographer, Robert van der Hilst.
A smaller collection of this work is also showing at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, at Washington University, in St. Louis, opening on January 29, 2008.
Click to visit the museum

Click to see Disappearing Shanghai
Click to visit M97
There are still 50-image catalogs available of an earlier version of my show, which premiered in October 2006, in Berlin, and they can be ordered through this site, or by contacting me directly at: globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
While pulling together the definitive gallery version of Disappearing Shanghai, I’ve turned my photographic attentions in a totally new direction, and am building a portfolio of fine art nudes, which begin to make their appearance on my all-photography site howardwfrench.net as of today.
Click to see this gallery
If you have an interest in modeling, please contact me directly at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
There’s also a permanent link to my photography site in the upper right hand corner of this page.
Prints of the nudes as well as prints of my documentary work are available for sale through the link above.
Finally, there have been several publications of my work since I went offline. Newsweek Select featured it in late December, as did Shanghai’s “Hint” magazine. Stay tuned.

Posted at 3:12 PM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
Published: December 28, 2007
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: When is a country’s election no longer of principal concern to the voters themselves?

On the eve of the opening of their own long electoral season, Americans would do well to ask themselves this question. After all, foreigners in every corner of the world have made a habit of following American politics for years, unable to vote, of course, but also ever more aware of the powerful ways in which America’s choices affect life for everyone else on the planet.

Examples of this readily spring to mind in an era where an American-led war in Iraq and the war on terror shape much of the international political scene and where American deficits in trade and finance drive global markets.

But in order to be a powerful agenda shaper, one doesn’t need to be the world’s lone superpower, albeit one whose relative strength many experts believe to be in decline. And although it helps, one needn’t even be a fast-rising power, like China, or a seemingly resurgent one, like Russia, in order to exert a strong influence on the ebb and flow of international affairs.

We have grown so accustomed to speaking of an interconnected world that the image itself has become a truism. Still, the fact remains that in this transitional moment between a roughly symmetrical order that was organized around two rival poles and an uncertain but surely more complicated future, few policies of any consequence are decided in a vacuum

In recent years, South Korea, the prosperous, democratic half of a country once known as the Hermit Kingdom, has provided us with as good a reminder of this as anyone. When Roh Moo Hyun was elected president in 2002, few would have predicted that the ballot choices of his country’s 35 million registered voters would have played a determining role in international affairs over the next several years. And yet that is exactly what transpired.

Roh is leaving office as a deeply unpopular leader, a man lampooned as ineffectual, undisciplined and, for some, even mischievous. Seen narrowly, such a reputation would suggest the slimmest of legacies.

At least one thing that Roh believed in deeply will prove to have mattered greatly and will very likely stand the test of time, however, lending unexpected importance to his role and to the role of his country well into the future.

The South Korean leader was strongly attached to the idea of rapprochement with the estranged northern half of his country. In the end, this meant holding his ground under the most trying of circumstances, including a gale of hostile language directed at Stalinist North Korea from Seoul’s most important ally, the United States, whose president, George W. Bush, branded it a member of the “axis of evil.”

Few Americans outside of the small community of specialists in East Asian affairs have any sense of the role played by Roh. Indeed, exasperated with Roh over other issues, South Koreans appear not to give him much credit, either.

What we do know now, however, is that the Bush administration spent the new few years, following the famous 2002 State of the Union speech in which he first pronounced the words “axis of evil,” fighting a war in one of the constituent countries, Iraq, and steadily ratcheting up pressure on another, Iran.

For a time, tensions rose strongly with the third country, North Korea, too, especially after its leader, Kim Jong Il, expelled international atomic inspectors and exploded a nuclear device. Pyongyang’s nuclear breakout surely helps explain why the United States has not chosen a more confrontational approach, as it did with the other so-called axis members, but one could argue that the behavior of the supposedly feckless Roh was equally important.

Under the circumstances, avoiding conflict and enhancing engagement required a huge dose of determination and considerable diplomatic skill. At times, Washington was furious at what it perceived as Seoul’s appeasement of the North, so much so that people in both countries worried about irreparable damage to the alliance.

At considerable cost to his popularity back home, Roh, who was elected 11 months after the “axis” speech, bought diplomatic maneuvering space for himself, if not outright credibility in Washington, by becoming an early joiner of the “coalition of the willing” and sending troops to Iraq.

It is, of course, impossible to know what might have happened had South Koreans elected a more hawkish leader, or simply a more compliant one. It is not far-fetched to imagine, however, that the Bush administration could have taken a more confrontational approach toward North Korea than the path it ultimately settled upon.

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Posted at 3:09 PM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
Published: December 21, 2007
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI:

A mass of intriguing economic news is flowing from China as the year draws to a close - dramatic and discordant at the same time, leaving the world to puzzle.

To begin with, the Chinese economy appears to be nothing like as large as we have grown accustomed to thinking. Indeed, according to the new World Bank calculations using the often controversial Purchasing Power Parity measurement, or PPP, China’s production is a whopping 40 percent less than previously assumed.

Getting something so important as the size of the world’s second largest economy wrong would seem to be a pretty severe indictment of the field of economics. But that’s at least partly unfair. Measuring relative national output is a tricky thing under the best of circumstances, but figuring out China has long been an especially difficult proposition, and the Chinese themselves, in this regard, carry a large portion of the blame.

Calculations of PPP rest on thorough surveys of prices for commonly consumed goods and services. Reliable data of this sort have simply been unavailable in China. For its own purposes, for decades the country was essentially closed to much of the outside world, and since then, although China is improving rapidly in this regard, publicly available statistics are frequently subject to political manipulation or are simply otherwise unreliable.

Until recently, in determining China’s wealth, the World Bank has had to rely on price information that predated the ascendancy of private business and the replacement of free or deeply subsidized state services by the market, hence the appearance of an economy that was far larger than it really was.

What does it mean, though, to lose 40 percent of one’s economy?

The answer, in China’s case, is somewhat reminiscent of the fuzzy logic of quantum physics. The significance depends on where one is standing and ranges all the way from it matters a great deal to it scarcely matters at all.

The one reality these new wealth statistics help illustrate best is the harshness of life at the greasy bottom of society’s totem pole. The new PPP data suggest that there are three times more poor people in China than previously thought. If the numbers are to be believed, this means 300 million poor instead of about 100 million.

As a non-economist who knows the back roads of China well, and who has rubbed shoulders with the poor on every continent, I believe the numbers. If anything, in fact, I would say they are too conservative, because the $1-a-day income poverty line used to measure such things is mostly a matter of statistical convenience to bodies like the World Bank, helping them to compare apples to apples, or in this case, the poor in Kenya or Brazil with the poor in Uttar Pradesh or in Sichuan Province.

Does anyone really think for a moment, though, that someone living, say, on $1.50 a day isn’t poor?

In China even shavings this thin of the statistical pie change the results by dozens of millions or even hundreds of millions of people, hence the risible nature of declaring that there are “only” 300 million poor in the country.

The new statistics don’t even begin to get at the reality of east central China, where huge swaths of territory are populated by people whose lives bear almost nothing in common with the new wealth of the east, the new China whose imagery we have all become familiar with.

None of this is meant to take anything away from the recent economic achievement of this country. Whatever the number, and hopefully better work will be done to determine exactly what it is, China has lifted more people out of poverty in the last generation than anyone anywhere else has previously achieved, or even thought possible, and this experience is of deep and untapped relevance to the rest of the world.

This brings us to the other extreme vantage point in the quantum calculation of whether the new PPP figures matter. China played host this week to the newest World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, and the terms of the conversation showed dramatically why no smart money from the outside is tempted to downgrade China as a force in today’s world.

In the past, World Bank heads visited China to figure out how to lend it more money. Today, though, China’s balances are such that it can raise capital more cheaply than even the World Bank itself. China pays a small penalty to borrow from the bank and only does so because it wishes to involve the bank’s expertise and human capital in working out solutions to environmental, energy and poverty problems.

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By Howard W. French
Published: December 18, 2007
Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI: For weeks now the ranks of Chinese visitors to Hong Kong have swelled with a brand-new category of tourists: moviegoers.

In a response to the censoring of a film by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee about love and betrayal in Shanghai during the Second World War, mainland movie fans have flocked by the thousands to Hong Kong to see the full, uncut version of the film, “Lust, Caution.”

The phenomenon of so many people voting, as it were, with their feet has highlighted the public’s rapidly changing attitudes toward the long unquestioned practice of government censorship of the arts and prompted debate about the way films are regulated in China.

Travelers have made their way to Hong Kong to see movies before but always in much smaller numbers. Critics and commentators here attribute the interest in Lee’s movie to a variety of factors, from word of mouth about risqué sexual content stripped from the censored version, to a sensitive political subtext rarely seen in mainland cinema, to the fame of the Academy Award-winning director.

Perhaps most important, though, is the rise of a class of affluent urban dwellers in China’s prosperous eastern cities who have grown increasingly accustomed to ever more choice in their lives.

“I went to Hong Kong with my girlfriend to see ‘Lust, Caution’ because it was heavily censored here,” said Liang Baijian, 25, a businessman and stock market investor from the southern region of Guangxi. “We could have bought a pirated copy of the movie here, but we were not happy with the control and wanted to support the legal edition of the film.”

At least one Chinese movie fan has tried to sue the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which regulates the industry in China, for deleting some of the film’s content. The lawsuit has been repeatedly rejected by Beijing courts.

Lee, the director, has said that the censored material was regarded as politically unacceptable in Beijing because it reinforced the notion of sympathy between a young Chinese woman and a Japanese collaborator.

Many in the Chinese industry support the idea of a ratings system similar to the one used in the United States, which advocates say would lessen the need for outright censorship. The state film administration, however, has resisted this idea, notably saying that “films that are not suitable for children are not suitable for adults, either.”

Other travelers to Hong Kong, meanwhile, said they accepted the rationale of a censorship system in a country of stark disparities in regional income and education but thought the practice was no longer justified in wealthy urban centers.

“For myself, I strongly object to censorship, but for the country as a whole, I think I can still understand its necessity,” said Yan Jiawei, a graphics designer from Shanghai who saw “Lust, Caution” on a recent business trip to Hong Kong. “It has something to do with people’s educational level. In big cities like Shanghai, people will treat the deleted scenes as art, while those in less developed areas will only think of them as immoral.”

People within the Chinese movie industry said that the fact that a censored “Lust, Caution” was available at all in mainland China demonstrated how far the parameters of the acceptable have broadened since the beginning of China’s era of change more than two decades ago.

Not long ago, Chinese film was thoroughly dominated by plot lines that heavy-handedly reinforced conventional dividing lines between good and bad, with little room for moral complexities. Unquestioned love of country was a favorite theme.

While many have been drawn to “Lust, Caution” by the allure of sex scenes, which even now run the gamut from tame to nonexistent in most Chinese cinema, even more groundbreaking for a film released here is the notion of a traitor in a leading role depicted as an attractive character instead of a villain.

“The country has undoubtedly become more and more open and advanced, and this is the tide of history, which no one can prevent,” said Fang Li, a leading producer. “Compared to a market economy that’s developing so fast, I’ve never seen an industry in China as backward as the film industry, though.”

Fang said that much of the blame for this lay with the censors, a group of mostly elderly people who work in committee and invite critical comment on movies by different branches of government, from the All-China Women’s Federation to provincial governments, all seeking to present their constituency in the best light and to avoid offense. The censors “spend most of their time worrying how not to lose their post,” he said. “They are very careful not to make mistakes.”

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By Howard W. French
Published: December 14, 2007

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
SHANGHAI: The blast occurred at 11:15 at night in the village-run mine in Shanxi Province, the heart of China’s coal mining country.

At least 128 men were believed to be in the shaft, more than double the number allowed. But rather than notify the authorities to organize a proper emergency response, the mine operators’ first reflex was to hush things up. “As long as we can protect our boss, we’re protected,” one of them said, according to Southern Metropolis newspaper in China.

Determined to save their co-workers, miners started a rescue operation of their own. Some news reports speak of the mine operators trying to stop them. As many as 50 men proceeded into the earth, most of them never to be seen again.

Much remains unknown about the Xinyao Coal Mine disaster, the latest in a slow drum roll of tragedies linked to China’s coal economy. And having seen the way stories like these break every few weeks here, generating ritualized indignation, official apologies, government vows to punish the guilty and to regulate the mines more stringently, only to have things go quiet until the next deadly explosion, it is a sure bet that much will remain unknown, too.

Officially, 105 miners died in the Shanxi Province accident last week, but few in the know accept figures like these on the basis of trust. Up until October of this year, officially 3,069 miners had perished in coal mining accidents throughout China, an astounding rate of about 300 a month, and yet even an accident as large as the Xinyao blast, in which miners had to capture and beat a company executive before he would inform the police of the fatal blast, was not a sure ringer for front-page coverage for many Chinese newspapers.

For me the contrast with my vacation experience of last summer, which coincided with the Crandall Canyon mine accident in Utah, was instructive. For weeks, every time I turned on the radio there was coverage of that disaster, an accident that claimed nine victims.

Wherever one turned last August, one heard the angry voices of the victims’ families, claims of safety violations and potential fraud, the voices of miners telling what their lives were like in an uncommonly dangerous job, the findings of investigators, and the voice of the operator himself, backed into a corner and forced to answer questions.

Most striking is the invisibility of real human beings in China’s calamities, or to put it another way, the way that real lives are rendered into abstract news elements, data as it were, by the mostly perfunctory coverage.

The Utah hills crawled with reporters struggling and competing to humanize the victims, to uncover malfeasance, to explore regulatory weaknesses and to give a voice to the victims’ families as they simultaneously prayed for miraculous news and vented their anger.

The corruption in government and the shoddy application of regulations that surrounds the Chinese coal industry are incomparably greater than anything one can find in its American cousin, just as surely as the Chinese death toll dwarfs the American one. The reasons for righteous indignation, for tireless muckraking reporting and for concerned citizens to finally raise their voices abound here, and yet the Chinese press and the public mostly shrug. People literally turn the page.

How to explain, then, that China’s miners have become the equivalent of unknown soldiers, only more anonymous, because so little is made of their sacrifice?

As deplorable as this is, the reasons are not entirely negative, one of them perhaps having to do with the pervasive unfussiness that one encounters in so many areas of life here. A good motto for the China of today might be “Get Over It,” and this stands in stark contrast to the United States, where self-dramatization often reigns.

For all of the vaunted American work ethic, one searches to find a parallel to the common Chinese concept of “eating bitterness,” an expression which enjoins people to suffer if they wish to get ahead.

This is easier to accept, of course, when it is other people who are eating the bitterness, or suffering, as is the case with the mauled ranks of China’s coal miners. The anonymity of the coal miners relates to a far bigger injustice that is basic to Chinese life.

It is the existence of a deeply entrenched two-track society of eastern urban dwellers enjoying first world aspirations and a hinterland consisting of hundreds of millions of others - peasants who, for the wealthy, are little more than a statistical abstraction.

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Letter from China
By Howard W. French
Published: December 7, 2007
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: For the second time in as many months there was big trouble in an important allied country that sits on China’s borders, with huge crowds demonstrating, bombs exploding, opposition leaders being arrested and demonstrators killed.

This time it was Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf had proclaimed special emergency powers. A few weeks earlier it had been Myanmar, where pro-democracy demonstrations were put down with deadly force.

But despite the proximity and important interests in play, most Chinese newspaper readers had to content themselves with dry, narrowly drawn and sometimes inaccurate accounts of the events. Absent from the foreign news coverage was independent reporting from the scene or any in-depth analysis that referred to China’s strategic interests in the countries in question.

The contrast with domestic news coverage could not be more striking. Despite continuing censorship and restrictive government rules about ownership and registration of publications, Chinese news coverage at home is in the midst of something of a golden age. A large and growing variety of news sources and a new generation of journalists have steadily expanded the boundaries of the permissible.

Less than three decades ago, there were only a few dozen newspapers in the country, all of them state-run. In 2005, according to one survey, China had 2,000 or more newspapers and 9,000 magazines, providing more in-depth coverage of events inside the country.

But what Chinese readers are able to learn of events in the rest of the world from most mainstream media here remains sharply limited in context and tightly controlled.

On Sept. 27, for example, a day after Burmese soldiers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, including Buddhist monks, both Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post and the Beijing Youth Daily published an article from the official Xinhua news agency saying that the “Myanmar government has been restrained in handling the monks’ protest and didn’t use force” to disperse the protesters.

Only a handful of China’s conservative, state-run publications have permanent bureaus and correspondents in foreign countries. Even publications that use freelance journalists overseas, or that occasionally send out reporters of their own, rely heavily on what foreign publications publish, and carefully avoid delicate subjects.

The short list of Chinese media that maintain foreign bureaus includes Xinhua; the China News Agency; the official newspaper, People’s Daily; the state television broadcaster CCTV; and China Radio International. None of the publications that have made names for themselves with vigorous domestic reporting and investigative work make this list.

Asked why, editors pointed to a government rule requiring authorization to open bureaus or send reporters overseas. One editor said orders were sometimes received not to interview people overseas, and to avoid talking with representatives of the foreign media. An official at the State Council Information Office, a branch of China’s cabinet, refused to confirm or deny the existence of such a rule.

News media critics say one result of this lack of vigorous independent reporting is that what most Chinese news readers know of the world closely conforms with government policy and propaganda.

“By and large, China’s international reporting is a mirror of China’s diplomacy,” said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at People’s University in Beijing. “As government mouthpieces, their international reports are linked with the government’s diplomacy. It’s not free, so what we’re really talking about is China’s diplomacy, not its media.”

No Chinese publications, for example, have explored the intricacies of China’s deepening interests in Pakistan, including Beijing’s supplying as much as 60 percent of the country’s weapons, according to some Pakistani estimates.

Nor have they examined in any depth the use of a Chinese-built deep-water port at Gwadar, which together with a similar project in Myanmar will ease Beijing’s projection of naval power toward the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. The critical role China is widely believed to have played a role in helping Pakistan develop its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs is also rarely mentioned. In fact, when issues like these are raised, it is usually to dismiss them as malicious rumors.

Chinese news coverage of Pakistan typically depicts the United States as the only foreign country that is a factor in Pakistan’s affairs. This is in keeping with a general tendency to depict the United States as a meddlesome power, in sharp contrast with China, which frequently proclaims that it does not interfere in the affairs of other countries, and sees to it that this line is scrupulously echoed in the news media.

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LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
Published: December 7, 2007
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: Ships are not supposed to turn on a dime, especially American aircraft carriers that travel in large convoys.

But that’s exactly what happened with the USS Kitty Hawk as it approached Hong Kong for a long-scheduled Thanksgiving visit.

Hours before the ship was to dock, with the families of many of the crew members having flown to Hong Kong for reunions, the Chinese authorities notified the U.S. Navy that permission to dock had been revoked.

Surprised by the measure but eager to salvage something of the holiday, the Kitty Hawk made a quick U-turn and steamed toward Japan, saving time and returning China’s slight by sailing through the narrow Taiwan Strait, which the United States regards as international waters but China claims as its own.

Before the battle group had reached that point, though, the Chinese authorities radioed again announcing a change of mind: for “humanitarian reasons,” the Kitty Hawk would be welcome after all.

There would be no repeat U-turn this time, although the saga of the Kitty Hawk was, in fact, just beginning, and would come to involve an even more surprising flip-flop.

The U. S. Navy, whose ships make 50 or so port calls in Hong Kong each year, was incensed by what it saw as China’s bad form. The Pentagon must have been puzzled by the incident too, coming just two weeks after a visit to Beijing by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, during which the two sides agreed to establish a hotline between the two military commands and spoke of other ways to strengthen ties and build confidence.

“Mr. Cao and I discussed ways to build on positive momentum in our defense relations and how to use the interactions to improve communications and reduce the risk of misunderstanding,” Gates told the press after meeting with Cao Gangchuan, the Chinese defense minister.

When President George W. Bush personally asked the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, for an explanation of the Kitty Hawk incident during a visit to Washington, the White House said, Yang answered that it had all been a “misunderstanding” and the result of just the kind of “poor communications” that Gates and Cao had said they had agreed to eliminate.

Niceties like these have a long enjoyed an honored place in diplomacy, papering over differences and letting dark clouds blow past. Two days later, however, the niceties were exploded by Yang’s nominal subordinate, Liu Jianchao, a spokesman who denied the foreign minister had said anything like that at all.

“We have taken note of the reports,” Liu said. “I want to clarify that all the reports are not true.” He went on to assert that the Kitty Hawk incident had had nothing to do with miscommunication, which at least had the virtue of truth, even if it left many big questions unanswered, including: Who is in charge of Beijing’s security-diplomatic apparatus during moments like these?

Liu ascribed the last-minute port call about-face to China’s anger over the Dalai Lama’s visit in October to Washington, where he had been received by Bush and given a Congressional Gold Medal. At that time, the very same spokesman had fumed that “this move is a blatant interference in China’s internal affairs. It has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and gravely undermined bilateral relations.”

Later, and most unusually, the spokesman’s comments on the subject failed to appear on the Foreign Ministry’s Web site, where a record of each day’s commentary is regularly published.

Trying to make sense of Beijing’s actions, others quickly speculated about anger over a recent anti-missile arms sale to Taiwan. Still others spoke of large-scale, unannounced Chinese naval maneuvers simulating a pincer action against Taiwan, which were under way just as the Kitty Hawk drew near to Hong Kong, as a possible reason for the Chinese decision to keep the ship out of its waters.

Official media here observed a news blackout about the drills, even as they disrupted hundreds of commercial flights out of Shanghai and Guangzhou and angered neighboring Vietnam.

China has a right, of course, to be upset over both issues, Tibet and Taiwan, but one wonders if throwing fits about the Dalai Lama, in particular - as Beijing has done repeatedly in recent months - is in any way serving the country’s interests.

More seriously, at precisely the moment when China is projecting power and influence like never before, the handling of the Kitty Hawk matter highlights grave weaknesses for an incipient superpower: the lack of the kind of transparency essential to international confidence and an unwieldy decision-making process, with subterranean divisions over turf, that bodes ill for crisis management.

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LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
November 30, 2007
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

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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