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.

Posted at 8:56 AM · Comments (0)

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