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

A truly fascinating interview with Jonathan Spence on the BBC World Service.

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Posted at 9:01 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

An excerpt from an essay by Kissinger.

…As a start, I offer the following prescriptives:

The first imperative is to recognize that these problems are the blemishes of great success. Debate about shortcomings of the process should not degenerate into attacks on its basic conceptual framework, as has happened too frequently in the U.S. presidential campaign. Political leaders must avoid - not encourage - the protectionism that led to disaster in the 1930s.

The parameters of the national security limits to globalization should be established on a national basis rather than left to pressure groups, lobbyists and electoral politics. In the United States, the next administration should establish a bipartisan commission at the highest level to study what constitutes an indispensable strategic U.S. industrial and technological base and the measures to preserve it. High among its priorities must be a hard look at an educational system that creates too few engineers and technologists in comparison with our competitors. The criterion should be what is essential for national security, not to shield enterprises from the competition essential for global growth. That line will not be easy to draw, and the effort risks political manipulation. But the problem will not go away and at some point will become unmanageable…

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LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: May 29, 2008

SHANGHAI: This has been a good month for China’s government, and especially for its ruling Communist Party.

That may sound like an odd thing to say after an earthquake whose final death toll could reach 80,000 or more, but to say so is neither flip nor insensitive. Rather, it is giving political reality its due.

China entered the month of May riding a head-spinning streak of bad political news and even poorer political judgment. The uprising by Tibetans and rumblings among Uighurs in the country’s vast far west simultaneously had brought severe damage to the “China brand” internationally, while raising serious questions about the fragility of what even most Chinese forget is still very much a patchwork nation.

Seemingly overinvested in the prestige value of hosting the Olympics, Beijing responded to the gathering crises with rhetorical excess, officially elevating the ersatz event of the global Olympic torch rally to a “sacred cause.”

Despite lots of recent nationalist sentiment against perceived unfair criticism from the West, day in and day out many Chinese feel alienation and cynicism about their country’s political system and its leaders.

It was against this backdrop that the test of the earthquake arrived. In the words of the China expert David Shambaugh, in his new book, “China’s Communist Party, Atrophy and Adaptation”: “The challenges the CCP faces in maintaining its power and legitimacy increasingly involve governance and providing public goods. This is a new kind of revolution for a Leninist party: the revolution of rising expectations.”

By this important standard, China’s government passed this month’s test with flying colors. This, mind you, is as much a matter of perceptions as it is objective measurements, but in matters of cachet and legitimacy, perceptions loom large.

In many countries, after a tragedy of this magnitude, heads would be rolling as angry voices demanded that political leaders be held to account. This is particularly true given the widespread collapse of flimsy school buildings that killed thousands of students, or the equally grave, but largely unmentioned, general lack of preparation for a major quake in an area of known high risk.

Remarkably instead, China has managed to turn this tragedy into an event of self-affirmation, and even celebration of its reborn competence and confidence. This fact is captured in the spirit of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s pithy inscription on a school blackboard in Beichuan, one of the most devastated places of all. “Distress regenerates a nation,” he wrote.

The system’s ability to flip the mood, as if by switch, from sheer grief to nationalist pride, without ever passing through the intermediate step of anger, was accomplished through the unstinting use of propaganda, served up in unsubtle dollops that would have revolted people in many other places: endless focus on the doings of the leaders; saturation coverage of relief efforts replete with tear-jerking themes and melodramatic music; and slogans like “love makes us stand together,” solemnly intoned over and over.

It would be wrong to conclude, though, that propaganda explains everything here. China increasingly obsesses in measuring itself in almost everything these days against the United States, and in the case of this disaster, it found ready self-encouragement in comparisons to America’s experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

A widely circulated item that first appeared on the Xinhuanet.com Web site drew a comparative timeline of the emergency response in the two disasters, claiming - among many other telling details - that China had an emergency plan within one hour of the earthquake, while the United States took 36 hours to establish a rescue command center.

“A hurricane tracked for more than a week beforehand, with warnings 48 hours in advance, hit a large city in the world’s most powerful country, which was in a state of emergency two days beforehand, and still caused more than 1,000 people’s death,” sneered one online commentator. “Everybody, make your own comparisons.”

Appraisals of the Chinese government during this month of crisis invite evaluations of other players and factors, too. Among the latter is China’s relations with the world. Fresh on the heels of the torch relay controversies, China entered the month with a common refrain that “the world is against us.”

With foreign relief donations flooding in, that became a difficult thought to sustain, and to Beijing’s credit, the tune quickly changed. “Not only is the support and assistance from the international community a form of material aid to China’s relief work, it is also a form of spiritual encouragement,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said last week.

An exception of sorts has been the private attitude toward the United States, which many online commentators have scorned for the perceived stinginess of its donation.

After an encouragingly vigorous initial response to the quake, the Chinese press has largely disappointed anyone who imagined it would work tirelessly or courageously for real accountability. Of course, there have been some standouts, but the media have largely stuck to safe and predictable story lines and contributed to nationalist sentiment.

A Chinese colleague who traveled to the site of a school collapse and interviewed parents who were demanding government action said he was flatly turned away by several Chinese publications who all said the story was “too negative.”

Another major untold story in the disaster is the performance of the People’s Liberation Army, which only began air rescues several days into the crisis, and seems to have been ill-prepared in other important ways, too.

Its long-term impact is hard to discern, but China’s civil society must be listed tentatively as the other big performer in the crisis. The outpouring of volunteer work, charity and activism of all sorts may someday come to be seen as a turning point in civic culture here, and this brings one back to Shambaugh’s observations.

Involved citizens bring demands for change from below, rather than waiting for it to be delivered to them. Could this be China’s future?

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: May 27, 2008

SHENXI, China: Since returning to this mountain village a few days after fleeing from the earthquake that devastated this region of Sichuan Province, Xiong Fuquan has made two or three daily round trips to the nearest town for supplies.

The earthquake two weeks ago destroyed the road to his small hamlet, so he has walked, tightrope-fashion, over the roof beams of collapsed houses, and skirted the freshly sheared faces of mountainsides that have rained enormous boulders on the valleys below for a couple of hours. It has meant enduring the overwhelming stench of dead salmon from fish farms that line the river leading into the mountains.

“We didn’t have any choice but to come back to this place,” said Xiong, 37, who has led his village’s emergency response. “We ordinary people depend on this place for a living. We came back to see if we could find a way to survive, because relying on the government to provide food and housing is no solution.”

By a long measure, Shenxi, which lies only 11 kilometers, or 7 miles, from the epicenter, is far from the most stricken place in Sichuan, where the death toll has risen above 67,000. Of the hamlet’s 180 residents, four died; two remain missing. Still, the obstacles the survivors face, and their pluck in attempting to refashion their lives, are emblematic of the struggle faced by countless others in small towns throughout the thousands of square kilometers of the earthquake zone.

On May 15, three days after the earthquake, Xiong and others from the village had picked their way off the mountain, taking a dozen hours to reach the nearest town. Most ended up at a resettlement site in central Chengdu, the large provincial capital. But many said the idea of living as refugees, paired with distaste for city life, drove them to return home.

“I just couldn’t see myself living there for the rest of my life,” Xiong said.

For Wang Suqing, a 70-year-old who walked at a brisk pace up the pathless, rubble-strewn mountainside with a large load on his back, the decision to return hinged on what he called his only worldly possession, a 45-kilogram, or 100-pound, pig.

“I had to go back to check on things, because there’s a pig waiting to be fed,” he said. “It was fine when I left him, but it was deeply frightened and refused to eat at first. At least I have something left, though.”

Well over half the villagers are now back. Though they found that most buildings had collapsed outright and virtually all the rest were heavily damaged, they said they experienced a powerful sense of homecoming.

One after another spoke of being moved to find their neighbors had also returned, and by the strong communal spirit that has sent able-bodied men like Xiong up and down the mountain repeatedly for badly needed supplies.

But sitting amid the rubble of their homes or sleeping in crowded tents, they have also faced a profound sense of helplessness, and a question with no easy answers: What next?

The Chinese government is rushing to restore infrastructure throughout the earthquake zone, clearing roads and restoring electricity, water and telephone service as fast as it can. But the villagers said they believed it would be a year or more before the government would get around to rebuilding their winding little mountain road. Right now, for long stretches, there is no road at all. Almost absurdly, a man working single-handedly labored away with a shovel, trying to create a path along the crest of a huge mound of earth from the freshly cleaved mountainside.

Economically, one of the village’s mainstays has been spending by summer visitors from Chengdu; residents have built popular, cozy little guesthouses in the high hills. “If the road isn’t repaired, we can never do tourism again,” said Zhang Shiwen, one of three brothers who lived in a shared family compound and ran a guesthouse, both reduced to rubble.

A little farther up the hill, Wu Yan, 33, who was to have been keeper of the newly built Nong Jia Le, or Happy Country Home Inn, had still not recovered from her shock at its destruction.

The government has offered to help relocate people into apartments it plans to build in safe areas, or to give grants of about $4,000 for people who decide to rebuild on their own, a pittance compared with the $30,000 Wu said her family had borrowed to build the inn. “All my thoughts are on how to pay back the money we owe,” she said.

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I heard this guy in a radio interview, which I wasn’t paying attention to, frankly, until they started playing some of his music. My attention perked up because I thought it was something delicious from Sun Ra. It turns out this guy Rothenberg (on bass clarinet) is capable of some mean jazz with whales. Yes, with wales. He has done recordings of whale sounds and improvised over it on clarinet, keyboard and various electronic instruments, and the results are astounding, especially if you like Sun Ra.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

I used to be a newspaper reporter myself. I got my basic training as a college kid covering police headquarters in Newark in 1959. Although I had worked on school newspapers, I did not know what news was—that is, what events would make a story and what combination of words would make it into print after passing muster with the night city editor. When events reached headquarters, they normally took the form of “squeal sheets” or typed reports of calls received at the central switchboard. Squeal sheets concerned everything from stray dogs to murders, and they accumulated at a rate of a dozen every half hour. My job was to collect them from a lieutenant on the second floor, go through them for anything that might be news, and announce the potential news to the veteran reporters from a dozen papers playing poker in the press room on the ground floor. The poker game acted as a filter for the news. One of the reporters would say if something I selected would be worth checking out. I did the checking, usually by phone calls to key offices like the homicide squad. If the information was good enough, I would tell the poker game, whose members would phone it in to their city desks. But it had to be really good—that is, what ordinary people would consider bad—to warrant interrupting the never-ending game. Poker was everyone’s main interest—everyone but me: I could not afford to play (cards cost a dollar ante, a lot of money in those days), and I needed to develop a nose for news.

I soon learned to disregard DOAs (dead on arrival, meaning ordinary deaths) and robberies of gas stations, but it took time for me to spot something really “good,” like a holdup in a respectable store or a water main break at a central location. One day I found a squeal sheet that was so good —it combined rape and murder—that I went straight to the homicide squad instead of reporting first to the poker game. When I showed it to the lieutenant on duty, he looked at me in disgust: “Don’t you see this, kid?” he said, pointing to a B in parentheses after the names of the victim and the suspect. Only then did I notice that every name was followed by a B or a W. I did not know that crimes involving black people did not qualify as news.

Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves. A study of news during the American Revolution by a graduate student of mine, Will Slauter, provides an example. Will followed accounts of Washington’s defeat at the Battle of Brandywine as it was refracted in the American and European press. In the eighteenth century, news normally took the form of isolated paragraphs rather than “stories” as we know them now, and newspapers lifted most of their paragraphs from each other, adding new material picked up from gossips in coffeehouses or ship captains returning from voyages. A loyalist New York newspaper printed the first news of Brandywine with a letter from Washington informing Congress that he had been forced to retreat before the British forces under General William Howe. A copy of the paper traveled by ship, passing from New York to Halifax, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, where the paragraph and the letter were reprinted in a local newspaper.

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LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
May 22, 2008

CHENGDU, China: The colleague trembled as she spoke. Tears welled up in her eyes and poured forth. A question was formulated, but had barely been posed before the emotion became too great, and she excused herself and left the room.

What was the point, she wanted to know, of American journalists asking so many probing questions about the proper response to the earthquake that devastated Sichuan Province last week? What good was served with people still dying and desperate rescue efforts still under way, she demanded, second-guessing the coverage of the Chinese press and asking why they hadn’t posed harder questions?

The colleague in question is not alone. Waves of emotion have washed over all of China throughout this crisis, and from a human standpoint there is nothing more understandable. But for this working journalist, there was an equally deep sense of puzzlement. What does a deep sense of pain and compassion for the victims have to do with the requirements of journalism? To put an even finer point on things, should tough questions ever go unasked?

Already, the Sichuan earthquake is being seen here in generational terms. As widely observed, it is the first time China has suffered a natural disaster on this scale since the Tangshan earthquake in July 1976, when at least 250,000 people died. Back then, international aid was spurned by a xenophobic China, and even within the country news of the event was suppressed for weeks.

As it happens, that same year was also the last time that China conducted an exercise in national mourning, not for Tangshan’s victims, but to mark the passing of Mao Zedong, who died that September.

Another generational watershed has been reached with the Sichuan earthquake this month, but it is one that many Chinese journalists may never realize, and for those who do, it is the kind of event that is too delicate to risk discussing in print.

During the Tiananmen protests of 1989, China’s hitherto tightly controlled media were as much part of the wave of social ferment as the students who occupied the Beijing square. Even while worried old veterans of Mao’s revolution led by Deng Xiaoping plotted the restoration of order that ended with a violent show of military force, China’s media were giving vent to an extraordinarily free range of opinion about the protests. State television even got into the act.

It was, as a Shanghai television producer told me last week, simply a question of covering matters of vital national importance. “This is about China,” said Shi Hong, the coordinator of the Shanghai Media Group television network’s earthquake coverage, explaining why his station could not afford to follow orders from the powerful Propaganda Department not to send reporters into the quake zone.

Subsequent events showed that China’s propaganda authorities still have a lot of tools in their kit. State ownership of all media is the most obvious lever, followed by the careful vetting of top editors, who amount to political appointees chosen for their trustworthiness. Most powerful of all, though, was a straightforward appeal to nationalism that most people, reporters included, eagerly responded to.

Three days of national mourning were declared, and the entire nation was called to order. Television earthquake coverage went wall to wall, including endlessly repeated footage of President Hu Jintao stiffly cheering up the victims during his inspection tour of the disaster zone. Front pages across the country were printed in somber black and white. A ban on popular entertainment was applied so broadly that even the use of popular songs as telephone ring tones was suspended.

As if with a snap of the fingers, overnight, the entire Chinese press corps was solemnly marching to the same drummer, hammering away at the need for national unity, and echoing familiar propaganda themes from the past.

Much has changed in China since his passing, but Mao himself would have been proud of the resilience of the system he created, with all of its attendant instincts of emotional nationalism, of fluid mass mobilization and of indoctrination.

Many of the young journalists didn’t even wait for the signal to fall into line. They felt it was the normal thing suspending hard questions about the disaster, applauding the rescue effort and the wave of patriotism and civic spirit washing over the nation.

“Once the disaster has passed, we will look back and question why so many buildings have fallen,” said a young reporter from Shanghai who violated the initial propaganda order by reporting from the field right after the quake. “We can question things later, but at a time like this, what sense does it make? It’s not the moment to inquire whose responsibility it is. We should devote all our energy instead to getting over the difficult moment.”

So many others invoked America’s experience of 9/11, at once an overly facile and inexact parallel, that one suspects guidance from the propaganda authorities.

One wishes to say to these young reporters, just as I tried clumsily to explain to my colleague, that there is no inevitable tension between compassion and love of nation and the hard-headed pursuit of the truth.

One wishes to say that government-encouraged expressions of nationalism and rallying around the flag pose potentially troubling questions wherever they arise. I would say that there is no better time to ask the difficult question than in the midst of crisis. That is the calling of a good press.

Raising questions about the slowness in opening doors to foreign rescue experts, or about disaster preparedness, or building safety and corruption, to name but a few issues, is neither gratuitous troublemaking nor divisive. It is meant to serve the public interest, not harm it.

One wishes, finally, to say that knowledge of China’s modern history suggests that the greatest catastrophes have occurred in times of enforced unanimity, precisely when the urgency of following a common call ruled out asking questions.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
May 22, 2008

CHENGDU, China — When the earth finally stopped bucking, only one building was left standing in the vicinity of the Yinxing Township Central Primary School, and that was the school itself.

All around, houses and shops lay flattened under a sky turned black with dust kicked up from the heaving hillsides. Yet in a catastrophe that has left 51,151 confirmed dead and crushed an estimated 7,000 schools, all but three of the primary school’s 268 children survived.

Of those survivors, 193 students whose families never made it to Yinxing to join them were flown out by helicopter with 10 teachers, arriving Tuesday night in Chengdu, the provincial capital. It was one of China’s first airborne rescue missions after a natural disaster.

Safe for the first time since disaster struck on May 12, the children enjoyed showers and a good meal, alternately laughing and crying as they relived their ordeal, still unaware that many, if not most, of their parents had died.

The next morning the children lined up for attendance drills and romped in the courtyard of the university where they are being lodged, just as they might in their regular playground back home. To hear their stories, however, it is clear that nothing in recent days has been normal, and that for many, perhaps, nothing will be ever again.

Lei Huazhen, 36, a teacher at the school, said, “I was playing games with preschool kids in the playground, teaching them dances, when all of a sudden the sky turned all black.

“It was like daylight turning to darkness in a split second, and there was dust everywhere blocking my sight,” she said. “The whole sky was black, and I realized it was an earthquake, and I shouted to my students, ‘Hurry up, run!’ ”

Many of those who ran to safety mentioned Wang Sen, a fourth grader who was in a music class on the school’s second floor when the earthquake struck. Some students immediately jumped out the window of the heaving building. But among those who rushed toward the stairway, by all accounts Wang Sen was the fastest.

“He was the first to run out of the building,” said Li Jiaxing, 12, who was in the same music class. “But a boulder as big as a washbasin hit him and knocked him on the ground, and he couldn’t move. He was yelling for help.”

Another classmate, gazing somberly at the ground, said, “We all rushed out the door, and we had to step on him to make our way out.” She said Wang Sen was crying out for help. But with boulders thundering down the steep mountainsides surrounding the school and rocks flying everywhere, it was not long before the fallen boy was struck again and killed.

The others raced to a vegetable garden beyond the range of the falling boulders, and waited about 20 minutes for the dust-blackened skies to brighten.

When things cleared a bit, teachers took attendance and confirmed that Wang Sen was absent, said Luo Yuwen, who is 10. The students whispered among themselves that he was dead, and a short while later teachers carried off his body for burial while telling the children not to look.

Two other children died, a girl in the first grade whose body was found in the rubble with no apparent external injuries, and a girl in the fifth grade whose legs were crushed and who died two days after being injured.

With no safe shelter, no electricity and no telephone contact with the outside world, the teachers established a camp of sorts in an open field, making improvised tents from whatever materials they could find.

Just before sunset, the skies opened up with torrential rains, which continued for most of the next two days. Later that first sleepless night, the first powerful aftershocks came, unleashing boulders larger than the school’s classrooms from nearby slopes.

An English instructor who gave her name as Wang said the teachers struggled to contain the panic, pleading with students to stop wailing by telling them that it might cause more earthquakes.

The coming days brought equal measures of boredom and despair. The school had limited stores of food, so only small rations of corn and porridge were allowed twice a day. Water quickly ran short, requiring people to drink what rainfall they could collect.

A farmer’s generator powered a television, which brought news of the mounting national rescue operation, including a visit by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to a nearby city. But for the first several days helicopters merely flew overhead, sometimes dropping supplies in the vicinity. They never stopped.

“We got quite used to having helicopters flying by,” Ms. Lei said.

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By Howard W. French
Published: May 20, 2008

CHENGDU, China:

When China began a three-day national mourning period, people across this country quietly understood it as marking an unofficial end to the search and rescue phase of recovery from the devastating earthquake that has killed at least 40,000 people.

A rule of thumb in disasters of this kind is to expect few survivors after the passage of 72 hours. But Tuesday, eight days after the earthquake struck, news of the rescue of 129 students and 10 teachers in an isolated town in Wenchuan County has overturned these rules, and with them, perhaps an understanding of the nature of the crisis.

Early reports about the rescue carried by Xinhua, the official news agency, provided few details about the condition of the students or the circumstances of their rescue, except to say that they were ferried to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, by military helicopters and taken immediately for medical care.

Earlier reports said that 1,100 troops had been dispatched to the valley surrounding the small town of Yinxing, and were proceeding from hamlet to hamlet, redoubling rescue efforts in an area that appears to have been largely overlooked in the initial emergency response.

The discovery of so many survivors in an area where little effort had previously been made to look raises questions about the statistics employed by the government and the media in establishing a tally throughout the crisis. The numbers have risen steadily, day by day. On Tuesday the government raised the confirmed death toll to 40,075, with the number of missing put at 32,361. Earlier officials had said the final number killed by the quake was expected to surpass 50,000.

But how solid these numbers are seems subject to doubt, particularly for those in categories like “missing” or “believed dead” that are by definition vague.

In their rush to save people, China’s rescue workers often sped past small villages, sometimes even within sight of people who needed emergency help. This was done in the spirit of a kind of triage, focusing efforts on places where the largest numbers of people could be saved. In the mountains of central Sichuan, where road networks have been cut off by landslides and bridge collapses, how many villages and hamlets have been overlooked even now is unclear.

With questions like this looming, China’s propaganda authorities have moved to reassert their control over the nation’s media.

Newspapers around the country have adopted solemn, color-free front pages and headlines with strongly nationalistic overtones, inviting readers to rally around the government.

The near lock-step uniformity that began with the start of the three-day mourning period on Monday comes immediately on the heels of a remarkable, if fleeting, breakout by the Chinese press from the government’s strict controls.

In the early days of the crisis, hundreds of reporters effectively ignored orders from the Central Propaganda Department not to travel to the earthquake zone and a later order telling them they were only free to travel with authorized rescue groups.

Little of the resulting coverage posed questions that were directly critical of the government, but the spirited response of the country’s press corps, including its disregard for orders from above, seems to have prompted more aggressive attempts at state control.

One element of this new control, confirmed by several Chinese reporters, has been an order not to speak with their Western counterparts.

The propaganda conformity has also coincided with the emergence of the country’s president, Hu Jintao, in a more visible command role in the crisis. In the early aftermath of the earthquake, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had been virtually the sole face of the Chinese government, flying immediately to the disaster zone and working seemingly tirelessly to encourage rescue operations.

Through front-line performances like these, Wen has developed an image as a thoroughly modern politician, almost in the Western mold, whereas Hu, by contrast, seems much more comfortable in formal, carefully scripted roles, enhancing his reputation as a more conservative figure.

“This is the same thing as diminishing other problems through the overwhelming attention to the Olympics,” said a Shanghai editor of a Communist Party newspaper, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “This way people will shy from raising issues, because, ‘The nation is suffering, so how can you make trouble?’ That’s the idea.”

“There’s no talking about problems when we’re happy, and no talking about problems when we’re sad.”

Many reporters and editors said that while a coordinated propaganda campaign was unmistakably under way, the overwhelming emphasis on upbeat stories, national unity and the avoidance of hard questions was something that most members of the media here approved of anyway.

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Copyright The Washington Post

We should all be able to agree that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was “confrontational.” He was also wise, measured, visionary, good-natured and generous of heart. Like most great figures in history, he was complicated. But he didn’t ask for an end to Jim Crow repression, he demanded it; he didn’t request equal justice, he required it. Confrontation, basically, was the whole point.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts apparently believes otherwise and has kicked off a useful debate — more of a reality check, actually — about how King is remembered. It seems to depend on who’s doing the remembering.

At issue is the statue that will stand as King’s official monument in Washington. The arts commission, which rules on the aesthetics of such memorials, has sent a letter to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation complaining that the depiction is “a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character.”

What they thought they were getting, commissioners wrote, was a “dynamic” and “meditative” King. Leave aside for the moment the question of how any sculptor is supposed to make someone look dynamic and meditative at the same time. The point is that the arts commission, for some reason, was not comfortable with the image of a stern-faced, 28-foot-tall black man who has his arms crossed.

That’s what Lei Yixin, one of China’s most celebrated sculptors, is concocting. There was grumbling from American artists, especially black American artists, that a Chinese sculptor was chosen to create our nation’s monument to King. Now, however, African American commentators are rushing to defend Lei’s “confrontational” vision — or, at least, to slam the arts commission for trying to make a righteously angry man look like Mister Rogers without the cardigan.

Here’s what is really going on: It’s clear that some people would prefer to remember King as some sort of paragon of forbearance who, through suffering and martyrdom, shamed the nation into doing the right thing. In truth, King was supremely impatient. He was a man of action who used pressure, not shame, to change the nation. The Montgomery bus boycott, to cite just one example, was less an act of passive resistance than a campaign of economic warfare. Yes, he knew that televised images of black people walking miles to work would help mold opinion around the world. But he also knew that depriving the bus companies of needed revenue would hit the Jim Crow system where it really hurt.

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Copyright World Affairs

The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt

For years I’ve been active in Freedom House, the oldest of the private organizations advocating for international freedom and democracy. We’ve seen progress, especially since 1989. We’ve seen backsliding. And we’ve seen stasis, notably 1.3-billion-persons’-worth of stasis in China. Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.

Yet we at Freedom House cannot be exactly right. A mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

Freedom and democracy are abstract. Daily life is concrete. This is not to denigrate the importance of the abstract. God himself is abstract, until he strikes us with a bolt of lightning. The monks and nuns of political science may be overwhelmed by abstraction, as are the victims of such abstractions as Mao Thought. But, mercifully, quotidian existence is conducted mostly in the world of things and stuff.
I went to China for a month in 2006 and ended up taking a tour of the world of things and stuff. I didn’t mean to. I was just sightseeing. I’d only been to the mainland once and then only to Shanghai. I wanted to visit the Three Gorges before the new dam turned the Yangtze into a cesspool. I wanted a look at the Terracotta Warriors. And that sort of thing.

I was traveling with old friends from Hong Kong, whom I’ll call Tom and Mai. Tom has spent decades in the mining and metallurgy business. He was breaking ground on an ore-processing plant in Nanjing. He seems to know everyone in China who has anything to do with iron, steel, coal, or beer. And Mai and her brothers owned a company in Hong Kong that brokered textile machinery. When China initiated its “Open Door” economic policy, Mai would take mainland clients to Europe (where they’d encounter their first fork) and arrange for the purchase of used spinning and weaving equipment.

I took a lot of notes, with Mai doing most of the translating. But I didn’t know what to do with the notes when I came back. It took me almost two years to realize that what I have is a survey of “the tacit consent of the governed.” Not that the Chinese I talked to were taciturn. They were forthcoming enough about their government, but they didn’t care much about the political theory of it. Tom said, “Their attitude is, ‘Shhh, politics is sleeping, don’t wake it up.’”

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it. We need to listen to what they don’t say. Here is a record of what Chinese think of politics when politics isn’t what they’re thinking of.

I had been to Shanghai in 1997, and it looked like a knock-off of a great city, a sort of Made-in-Hong-Kong Hong Kong. Everything had been built yesterday. And they’d built a lot of it—more than they seemed to have any use for. There was a marsh called Pudong on the far side of the Huangpu River, where the ground was so low-lying the water and sewer pipes had to be laid above the pavement. Pudong was dotted with empty office complexes and buildings full of unrented apartments.

Now Pudong is some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Mai, Tom and I stopped at a condominium where the sale price was $10,000 per square meter. Despite arriving in a chauffeured car wearing our corporate boardroom clothes, we were turned away at the gate. An attractive but severe young lady in black Prada told us we’d need to make an appointment days in advance.

From Pudong, I took a train with Tom and Mai west a couple of hours to Wuxi, a city of five million people that I’d never heard of. It’s the size of ten Clevelands. And if you wonder what happened to Cleveland, Wuxi is where it went. Industrial parks spread for miles, with neat, sleek, enormous buildings set in swaths of lawn and landscaping—Volvo, GE, Panasonic, Sony, Westinghouse, Nikon, Bridgestone, Bosch, and The Nature Factory (I’d wondered where that was made).

We were given a tour by Mr. Chen, a manufacturer of fleece and plush fabrics. He was proud of Wuxi and so proud of his own fabrics that, although he’s the CEO of the company, he carries samples in the trunk of his Audi Quattro.

Mr. Chen sent us on in his car to Nanjing, where Tom took me to a steel mill he used to run. The company that Tom used to work for bought the mill from the Chinese government for $1 on the understanding that it would be kept in operation. The mill was eventually sold, for considerably more than $1 to Mr. Liu and Mrs. Sung.

The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the two or three hundred “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over. Plus the thousands of workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the local family that had the “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole an entire railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if the train didn’t have a track that led directly to them.

“Here’s where one guy threw a wrench at me,” Tom said as we climbed the tower to the blast furnace.

“What’d you do?”

“I tossed him down the stairs,” Tom said. “Rule of law is the cornerstone of capitalism.”

Tom’s worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Amidst the throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit frizzier than is usual in China, survived.) The man’s widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill’s gates. As compensation for her husband’s death, she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband’s gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.

“I had to call in the Communist Party officials,” Tom said.

“Did they ship everybody off to prison camp or something?” I asked.

“They didn’t do anything. They said it was my problem. I settled with the widow for a couple of hundred bucks.”

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Copyright The Guardian

Condoleezza Rice today entered the race debate that has been a simmering undercurrent of the presidential campaign when she said it had been “important” for Barack Obama to give his landmark speech on race and defended the patriotism of African Americans.

The US secretary of state also decried the “birth defect” of slavery that she said has left Americans struggling to confront racism.

“Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together - Europeans by choice and Africans in chains,” Rice told the Washington Times. “That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

Rice, the second African-American and second female in US history to lead the state department, grew up in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement in America. One of her childhood playmates was killed in an infamous 1963 church bombing committed by white supremacists, whom Rice has called “terrorists”.

She declined to comment directly on the presidential campaign in the Times interview, saying only that it was “important” that Obama “gave it for a whole host of reasons”, but strongly defended the patriotism of African Americans. Video clips of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, shouting, “God damn America,” ignited the race row that has been dominating the Democratic presidential race. Conservatives have also accused Obama and his wife, Michelle, of displaying insufficient love for the country.

“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them - and that’s our legacy,” Rice said.

When Rice addressed race in the incendiary aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she told the New York Times that the US “is about 100 percent ahead of any place else in the world in issues of race”.

In today’s interview, she did note the “enormous progress” in race relations that is reflected by her ascendance in politics.

Republican strategists often mention Rice as a possible running mate for John McCain in this year’s election, but she expressed a preference for returning to her California home after George Bush leaves office.

Rice’s success drew heated criticism in 2003 from Reverend Wright, who dubbed her “Condoskeeza” in a sermon.

“For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10m blacks who cannot read,” Wright said at the time. “For every one Condoskeeza Rice, you’ve got 1m in prison.”

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Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: May 18, 2008

SHANGHAI — Two and a half hours after a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province on Monday, an order went out from the powerful Central Propaganda Department to newspapers throughout China. “No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone,” it read, according to Chinese journalists who are familiar with it.

When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at a Shanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu. A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reporters from the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and Wang Juliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from the heart of the disaster zone.

Their article filled an entire page of the next day’s Post, one of the first unofficial accounts of the tragedy by Chinese journalists. It included a graphic description of the scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child and corpses wrapped in white bunting. The paper further risked offending censors by printing an all-black front page that day, stressing the scale of the catastrophe.

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including a death toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and the logistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainous region with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated, sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors found themselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried to micromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major news stories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

One reporter from The Oriental Morning Post, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because the workings of the propaganda system are often treated as state secrets, described the widespread defiance as “stepping beyond the boundaries collectively.”

He described with pride the proliferation of articles that had suddenly appeared, adding, “clearly they were not just from Xinhua,” China’s official news agency, which under propaganda rules generally has a monopoly on firsthand reporting of major breaking news events.

Another Shanghai reporter, who arrived early on the scene and also spoke on condition of anonymity, described his trepidation at having violated the censors’ orders. He initially asked his editors to keep his byline off his dispatch. “I was afraid they would track me down,” he said. “But then I found it was fine, not just me, a lot of reporters were actually doing the same thing. Everybody was free to move and free to write whatever they could.”

China’s censors operate in secret. Their orders are issued verbally to senior editors at thousands of newspapers, Web sites and television outlets so that there is no written record of their mandates, editors say. The Propaganda Department does not have a public address or phone number and does not answer queries about its operations.

A handful of publications consistently skirt the edges of censorship on delicate topics, like land disputes, environmental problems and corruption. But editors who regularly defy the letter or the spirit of propaganda guidance are punished, replaced or sometimes prosecuted.

Coverage of major accidents, epidemic diseases and natural disasters has long been a source of contention. Editors and some officials have argued publicly that overly restrictive propaganda controls can result in deaths if people remain uninformed about risks.

Even so, efforts have been made in recent years to restrict the leeway the news media have to report on major events viewed as having the potential to “disrupt social order,” reporters and editors say.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH and EDWARD WONG
Published: May 16, 2008

MIANYANG, China — With the death toll from this week’s earthquake rising rapidly, China has departed from past diplomatic practice, seeking disaster relief experts and heavy equipment needed for rescue operations from neighbors it has long shunned as rivals or renegades.

Officials on Thursday asked a longtime rival, Japan, to send 60 earthquake rescue experts, the first such team China has accepted from a foreign country during the current crisis and one of the few official relief missions China has ever accepted from abroad. This week it also accepted help from at least three private relief teams from Taiwan, the self-governing island with which China has long had tense relations.

On Friday, access was extended to teams from Russia, South Korea and Singapore.

The decision to seek outside help reflects the fact that the search for survivors of Monday’s massive earthquake and the struggle to accommodate hundreds of thousands of displaced people from the mountainous region around the epicenter of the quake are too much for China to handle all alone, even after it mobilized 130,000 army soldiers, security forces and medics for relief work.

But the selective invitations to Japan and Taiwan — some foreign nations that have offered aid have so far been told that their services are not needed — may also show that China sees disaster relief as a tactical tool to improve ties with neighbors and soften its international image ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

China is struggling to provide humanitarian aid to the hundreds of thousands left homeless even as it tries to increase search-and-rescue efforts for 40,000 buried or missing people scattered across remote villages in the serpentine valleys of Sichuan Province.

Officials estimated Thursday that the death toll, now nearly 20,000, could rise to 50,000. Doctors say those who are alive but buried are running out of time.

In his first visit since the disaster, President Hu Jintao flew into Sichuan on Friday. He called for relief efforts to be stepped up and said rescue work had entered its “most crucial phase,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Many of the troops involved in rescue efforts appear to have little training in disaster relief and lack proper tools and equipment. On Thursday, in the devastated county seat of Beichuan, thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers stood around with little to do. Some languidly picked at the rubble with their hands, unequipped with power tools to drill or saw through debris.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who is being portrayed in the Chinese media as exercising minute-to-minute supervision of the effort, sent 100 more helicopters to ferry supplies and workers into areas inaccessible by road.

The government also issued a detailed request for equipment needed to clear mountain roads. The list included thousands of pieces of earth-moving equipment, mechanized hammers, shovels and cranes, as well as satellite communications technology.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday that China so far had received pledges of $100 million in international disaster aid and $10 million in relief materials.

The three Taiwanese groups invited to participate in relief operations are the Red Cross and two Buddhist organizations without government ties. One of the Buddhist groups, Tzu Chi, had been granted permission a while ago to do charity work on the mainland. Charter planes carrying relief supplies from Taiwan have also been allowed to fly directly to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Because of their long history of political rivalry and tension, China and Taiwan do not have regular direct flights.

One Chinese relief official called the invitations to a relatively small number of overseas teams “rescue diplomacy.” China has been eager to secure international good will in what has so far been a trying diplomatic year for the country, with crises involving Tibet, human rights and pressure to reduce support for the Sudanese government.

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I’ve just come across this link to a picture from my Shanghai gallery show of February 2008. Thought it was worth sharing. This is a show of one of the two rooms where the images were displayed. The other room, which can’t be seen here, contained much larger prints from medium format (Rolleiflex) photographs.

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Copyright The Online Photographer

Today, May 15th, is the 50th anniversary of the day Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published by Robert Delpire in Paris. That was 1958. Today we realize that The Americans has more in common with beat poetry and club jazz than it has with many other kinds of photography; it’s one of the high water marks of 1950s culture. And throughout an era when photographers communicated with each other and with their audiences mainly through the vehicle of published books, The Americans has had only a handful of competitors (Walker Evans’ American Photographs, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, a few others) for the title of the most important single photography book ever published. For thirty years after its publication it was deeply influential. And although photography has moved on now, the echoes of its impact reverberate still.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer

Knopf, 275 pp., $24.00
1.

Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer’s account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer’s gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.[1]

On the afternoon of March 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959—Tibet had come under the control of the People’s Republic of China following the Chinese invasion of 1950—three hundred or more monks from Drepung Monastery began an orderly march toward the center of Lhasa, five miles to the east. Instead of calling for independence as in previous protests, they made specific demands such as the release of five monks detained the previous October for celebrating the award in Washington of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. They were still well outside the city center when they were stopped at a checkpoint, ringed with China’s People’s Armed Police (PAP), a special paramilitary force that deals primarily with internal dissent. Some fifty of the monks were arrested straightaway and their colleagues staged a sit-down in the street where, joined by another hundred or so monks during the afternoon, they remained for some twelve hours. A new form of protest had taken hold.

Tibetan exiles have long made the claim—denied by the Chinese government—that several hundred thousand Tibetans were killed by the Chinese between the 1950 invasion and the beginning of “liberalization and opening up” in 1979. Conditions improved markedly for several years after that, but a spate of official criticism of the Dalai Lama in 1987 led to a series of protests in Lhasa calling again for Tibetan independence. There were, according to unofficial reports I compiled during the nine years that followed, some 213 pro-independence protests in Tibet. Some 160 of these have been independently confirmed. Only five involved more than ten or twenty people in Lhasa, and four of those had escalated only when laypeople witnessed police beating the initial handful of protesters. In 1990 the police were ordered to switch from what Jiang Zemin, then Chinese Party secretary, called “passive” to “active” policing, the former meaning (crudely) that you beat or shoot protesters once they start their demonstrations, the latter that you take action against them in advance or within moments of their arrival. The authorities learned to handle these incidents within two or three minutes after they began, taking protesters out of sight quickly before a crowd could gather.

By 1996 Tibetans had largely given up street protests, perhaps sensing that the state was immune to them or that the foreign press would publish little or nothing unless violence was involved. Besides, the average prison sentence was 6.5 years for each participant, and upward of three thousand were detained during this period for peaceful protests or possession of forbidden documents and videos. Alternatives were devised, but were rare—a solitary gesture in August 1999 by a Tibetan carpenter who climbed a flagpole with a Tibetan flag during a sports convention and later died in custody, apparently by his own hand; a protest in Lhasa by Drepung monks within their monastery confines in November 2005; a wave of protests against the wearing of fur from endangered species in 2006; and a march about the lack of jobs for graduates. But since the mid-1990s there had not been a political protest in the streets of Lhasa.

The young monks of Drepung Mon-astery meet each afternoon to practice their skills in philosophical debate, and it was one such session that spilled out into the protest on March 10. They had several reasons to be antagonized about China’s policies in Tibet, besides what some probably see as nearly sixty years of foreign occupation. Many of these reasons can be traced to restrictions on religion and culture introduced in 1994 in order to erode the suspected sources of Tibetan nationalism.

Such measures include campaigns forcing Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama; an unprecedented ban on pictures or worship of him; a prohibition on the construction of new monasteries and on any increase in the number of monks; and a ban on students and government employees having religious possessions or carrying out religious practices. During the last two years, tension has been further increased by the forced relocation of 250,000 farmers to roadside houses, partly at their own expense; the much-publicized opening in 2006 of the Chinese railway line connecting Tibet to neighboring Qinghai Province, with its implicit encouragement of yet more Chinese migration to Tibetan towns; and the announcement by the Chinese government of a plan for the settlement of 100,000 Tibetan nomads. It was made clear by the Chinese authorities that public criticism of any of these policies would be unwelcome if not dangerous.

No doubt the monks were aware—through leaflets sent secretly from Tibetans in exile or foreign radio broadcasts in Tibetan—of exile protests taking place that day in India. They may have also calculated that heightened international attention on China because of the Olympics would deter the police from using lethal force. Chinese government claims of outside instigation are thus not necessary to explain why the monks chose to mark this anniversary with public action.

The police and the paramilitary forces that stopped the demonstration in Lhasa on March 10 were clearly under orders to use restraint. They did not open fire, and after some scuffles they allowed negotiators to talk the monks into returning to the monastery. Early that evening things got tougher in Barkor Square, in the center of Lhasa, when fifteen monks carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag and called for independence: all were dragged away and were later charged with “gathering to create a disturbance by shouting reactionary slogans” and “premeditatedly carrying homemade reactionary flags” (they are currently in detention awaiting trial).

The last two men to bear the flag in Lhasa had been shot dead on the spot by the People’s Armed Police in December 1988—this time the protesters were arrested without immediate violence, at least in public view. When five hundred monks marched from Sera Monastery the following day on behalf of those fifteen arrested monks, the PAP used tear gas briefly, but did not open fire and the monks succeeded in holding a seven-hour sit-down in the street. It looked like a new era of protest had begun, one in which the monks had won themselves a little negotiating space within the Lhasa body politic. But within three days, what had at first seemed a Burmese form of peaceful protest turned into something much more violent. Tibet was about to experience its most serious unrest since the 1960s.

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Copyright Washington Monthly

I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one area, where metals were being chemically treated, workers squatted at the edge of steaming pools as if contemplating a sudden, final swim. The dormitories were filthy: the hallways were strewn with garbage—orange peels, tea leaves—and the only way for anyone to bathe was to fill a bucket with cold water. In a country where workers normally suppress their complaints for fear of getting fired, employees at this factory couldn’t resist telling us the truth. “We work so hard for so little pay,” said one middle-aged woman with undisguised anger. We could only guess how hard—the place kept no time cards. Painted in large characters on the factory walls was a slogan: “If you don’t work hard today, look hard for work tomorrow.” Inspirational, in a way. Subscribe Online & Save 33%

I was there because, six years ago, I had a job at a Los Angeles firm that specialized in the field of “compliance consulting,” or “corporate social responsibility monitoring.” It’s a service that emerged in the mid-1990s after the press started to report on bad factories around the world and companies grew concerned about protecting their reputations. With an increase of protectionist sentiment in the United States, companies that relied on cheap labor abroad were feeling vulnerable to negative publicity. They still are. (See “Disney Taking Heat Over China” in the Los Angeles Times this March.)

Today, labor standards are once again in the news. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have criticized trade deals such as NAFTA as unfair to American workers, and the new thinking is that trade agreements should include strict labor standards. Obama has cited a recent free trade agreement with Peru as an example of how to go forward. I hope he’s right, but let’s remember that NAFTA was also hailed, in its day, for including labor protections. Our solutions on paper have proved hard to enforce. Peru attempts to remedy some of the problems of NAFTA, but we’re still advancing slowly in the dark.

In the meantime, as governments contemplate such matters on a theoretical level, what’s happening on the ground is mostly in the hands of the private sector. Companies police themselves, often using hired outside help. That was the specialty of my company. Visit the Web site of almost any large American retailer or apparel manufacturer and you’re likely to see a section devoted to “ethical sourcing” or “our compliance program.” (Those are terms for making sure that your suppliers aren’t using factories that will land you on the front page of the New York Times.) Read on and you’ll often see that the company boasts of having a code of conduct that its suppliers must follow—a code of labor standards by which the factories in question will be regularly measured and monitored. Are they to be believed? Well, yes and no. Private monitoring, if done properly, can do a lot of good. But it’s a tricky thing.

Asimplified story of Nike may be the best way to introduce the origins of the type of work I was in. In the 1960s, Nike (before it was named Nike) based its business on the premise that the company would not manufacture shoes—it would only design and market them. The physical goods would be produced by independent contractors in countries such as Japan or Taiwan, where labor was, at the time, cheap. In short, Nike would be offices, not factories. The idea was innovative and hugely profitable, and countless companies producing everything from sweaters to toys to exercise equipment have since adopted it. It is now standard.

The problem that arose for Nike and many other companies, however, was that the media, starting in the 1990s, began to run stories on terrible labor conditions in factories in Asia. When consumers started to get angry, Nike and many other companies were nonplussed. We’re just buying these shoes, they said—it’s not our business how Mr. X runs his factory. And they had a point. If, for example, I learned that my dry cleaner was paying his employees less than minimum wage, I might feel bad about it, but I doubt I’d spend hours vetting alternative dry cleaners for labor compliance. I’ve got too much else to worry about in life, including my shirts. But such musings hardly make for a great press release, and Nike’s case included nasty allegations about child labor—twelve-year-old Americans playing with soccer balls sewn by twelve-year-old Pakistanis, that sort of thing. The company’s stock value sank.

In this same period, the U.S. Department of Labor, led by Robert Reich, began cracking down on sweatshops within the United States and publicizing the names of firms who were their customers. Because of this, companies such as mine began to offer their services as independent, for-profit monitors of factory labor conditions. We would act as early-warning systems against shady suppliers who mistreated their workers. Based on the reports we provided, our clients could choose either to sever their relations with a given supplier or to pressure them to improve. Business at my old company is still going strong.

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Copyright The Washington Post

Dang. From his radio show a few minutes ago:

“All I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer,” he said, which is likely not something that anyone under the age of 30 will ever say again. “This other stuff is great, but I don’t care about it,” he continued. “In my mind that’s what it says on the headstone, it says ‘newspaper guy.’ “

But he also said he signed the papers to take the Post’s buyout last night, after working here for, I believe, 29 years. He said he still might contract with The Post to do his Talking Points videos and his Page 2 excerpts, and he said some people in the leadership asked him to stay but didn’t really insist, and even though he’ll keep doing PTI and the radio show and MNF, he said he feared he’d never have the moral high ground again.

He has seven days to reconsider, but he said “I’ll have somebody kidnap me and tie me down so I don’t change my mind.” And, as any longtime listeners would expect, he was plenty wistful when discussing what happened yesterday.

“There was not enough wine in the world, there wasn’t, not last night,” he said. “I’m watching ‘Idol,’ and I’m thinking about all these things, and I don’t know who I’m supposed to talk to about this….It just feels odd. It feels odd and it feels bad. It doesn’t feel sad, there’s no sadness to it, it just feels wrong.”

He also said “the Web site is sort of the future on some level,” which I guess might be accurate, on some level, maybe. Then again, newsprint might make a dramatic comeback.

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A fantastic and fantastically concise look at intellectual thought in China about the country’s economic and political development and their implications for the future of the country and the world.

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Copyright The Star

The female ideal pushed by laddie magazines has become as smooth and lifeless as an iPhone
May 03, 2008

Megan Fox is the sexiest woman alive. Last year she wasn’t sexy at all. In 2007, the 21-year-old starlet didn’t even make the top 100 in FHM’s annual ranking of the world’s women. In 2008, she’s number one. The obvious reason for her sudden rise up the charts is the popularity of Transformers and its key scene in which she appears in a short skirt bent over a 1976 Camaro. But she couldn’t have entered the list at all if she hadn’t made the wise career decision to change her last name from “Foxx” to “Fox.” One more x and she’s a porn star; one less and she’s an object of aspiration – perfect for FHM.

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

In some ways, it’s a surprising development. If the lad mag is the latest chapter in the long, toxic and ancient book called “Men Staring at Women,” it’s very different than anything that’s come before. The nude throughout the history of art offered a social expression for forbidden sensuality, which is why the women, sprawled on exotic beds or on picnic lawns, emerging from the bath or from the sea foam, are always sexually available. In FHM, the women are totally unattainable – “too good for you, buddy” – and their way of dressing, in the context of a world in which seemingly every celebrity has a home sex video on the market, is comparatively modest. The subjects of nudes were womanly – whether the plump nymphs cavorting in pastoral scenes of Rubens or the cubistic chest-thrusting models in Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Their womanliness reminded male audiences of their manliness. The women in FHM’s top 100 are almost all rail thin, with whittled down bodies and faces. Every year there is less and less to them.

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Copyright The Financial Times
May 9 2008

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has unveiled details of a controversial $9.25bn agreement that pledges millions of tonnes of copper and cobalt to China in exchange for roads, railways and other infrastructure.

The deal, finalised last month, could prove one of Beijing ’s most ambitious forays into Africa yet. On paper it secures 10.62m tonnes of copper and 620,000 tonnes of cobalt for resource-hungry Chinese industries, but this is dependent on overcoming operational challenges that are as great as anywhere in Africa .

The deal comes at an uncertain cost to Congo , a country the size of western Europe that has been left, after decades of dictatorship, conflict and political turmoil, with less than 5,000km of tarred roads.

Like many of Beijing ’s big state-backed projects in Africa , this one pits a Chinese commercial model for engagement with the continent against the bureaucracy of western development assistance.

The Congo government was at a delicate stage in negotiations to secure a write-off of around $8bn of external debt when news broke last year of its plans to enter a barter agreement with Beijing .

Officials from multilateral lending institutions have been tight-lipped about the consequences but warn privately that, should the deal result in the state contracting fresh debt, it could scupper the write-off.

Benedicte Christensen, director of the International Monetary Fund’s African Department, said last month the agreement posed a “dilemma”.

Pierre Lumbi, Congo ’s infrastructure minister, outlined to parliament details of what the country stands to gain, listing hundreds of clinics, hospitals and schools, two hydro-electric dams, 3,300km of road and 3,000km of railway.

Major routes, to be constructed by Chinese companies, would link the mineral- rich south of the country to its ports in the west and connect the north to the south. Mr Lumbi argued that the provision of this infrastructure would consolidate reunification of the country and bring down prices for basic goods. “This contract is the foundation on which the growth of our economy is going to be built,” he said, comparing it to the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after the second world war.

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Posted at 12:44 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright National Geographic

May 2008

Chinese history has become the story of average citizens. But there are risks when a nation depends on the individual dreams of 1.3 billion people rather than a coherent political system with clear rule of law.

My students wrote essays on paper so cheap and thin that it felt like the skin of an onion. The brittle pages tore easily; if held to the light, they glowed. The English was flawed, but sometimes that only gave the words more power. “My parents were born in poor farmer’s family,” wrote a young man who had chosen the English name Hunt. “They told us that they had eaten barks, grass, etc. At that time grandpa and grandma had no open minds and didn’t allow my mother to go to school because she is a girl.” Another classmate described his mother: “Her hair becomes silver white, and some of her teeth become movable. But she works as hard as ever.” Those were common themes—my students valued patience and diligence, and they liked to write about family. National events often left them perplexed. “I’m a Chinese, but I feel it difficult to see my country clearly,” wrote a woman named Airane. “I believe there are many young people are as confused as I’m.”

Her teacher felt the same way. In 1996 I had been sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer, and that was the first time I had lived in the country and studied the language. The only thing I knew for certain was that the place was bound to change. Deng Xiaoping was still alive, although there were rumors that he was in poor health. Hong Kong still belonged to the British; China had yet to join the World Trade Organization; Beijing had recently failed in its bid to host the 2000 Olympics. On the middle Yangtze, the government was building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Three Gorges project, and I was assigned to a teaching job in Fuling, a small city that would be affected by the new dam. The Yangtze was visible from my classroom, and with every glimpse I wondered how this mighty river could ever become a lake.

In the beginning much of what I learned about China came from reading the onion-skin essays, layer by layer. The past could be painful for my students—when they wrote about history, it was usually personal. Even a distant event like the 19th-century Opium War made them indignant, because the Chinese believed that such foreign aggression had initiated the country’s long decline. When it came to modern disasters—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution—they left much unsaid. “If I had been Mao Zedong,” wrote a tactful student named Joan, “I wouldn’t have let the thing happen between 1966 and 1976.” But they refused to judge their elders. Eileen wrote: “Today, when we see [the Cultural Revolution] with our own sight, we’ll feel our parents’ thoughts and actions are somewhat blind and fanatical. But if we consider that time objectly, I think, we should understand and can understand them. Each generation has its own happiness and sadness. To younger generation, the important thing is understanding instead of criticizing.”

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
May 8, 2008

SHANGHAI: The view has taken hold in recent weeks in China that unrest in Tibet has been trumped up to be used as a cudgel to beat up this country by false friends and outright antagonists in the West.

As China’s ambassador to Britain, Fu Ying, wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph in London, “Many who had romantic views about the West are very disappointed at the media’s attempt to demonize China.”

Even columnists at The South China Morning Post, an English-language paper in Hong Kong that champions a liberal vision for that city, adopted that view, with one of them writing, “Most people who have watched television footage of the Tibetan riots seem to have given the benefit of the doubt to the mainland authorities over their use of force to restore order.”

Like lab experiments demanding exacting conditions, this theory of China as victim also depends on tight control over the terms of argument, hence a story line that emphasizes the West and focuses on riots in Lhasa, insisting that what China did in putting them down is what any government would do under the circumstances.

In the past two weeks, though, this keenly embraced view of China as the West’s victim has faced a stern test, and it is one for which its proponents seem ill prepared.
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First came the ugly behavior by Chinese students counterprotesting against South Koreans who turned out peacefully in Seoul to support the rights of Tibetans and of escapees from North Korea, whom China often returns to North Korea against their will.

An even bigger test arrived this week with the five-day visit to Japan by President Hu Jintao of China. Lately, Tokyo, which is rarely a forceful presence in international diplomacy, has found its voice on Tibet. Unlike his former boss, Junichiro Koizumi, who sometimes baited China, Japan’s current prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, has built his career, in part, on the notion that Japan needs strong and healthy ties with its fast-rising neighbor.

In that sense, Hu, who this week became the first Chinese leader to visit Japan in a decade, could not have wished for a better partner in reconciliation. The Chinese leader came bearing pandas, a traditional symbol of warming relations in Chinese diplomacy, and the two sides have made up for time lost to the long chill that has separated them, agreeing to annual summit meetings, which is good news for all of Asia.

This did not prevent Fukuda, however, from speaking frankly about Tibet last month with the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, who was in Tokyo to prepare for Hu’s visit.

The Japanese account of Fukuda’s meeting with Yang is telling. “Prime Minister Fukuda stated that there was a need to face up to the reality that the matter has become an international issue,” according to a Japanese Foreign Ministry statement.

In a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, Masahiko Komakura, Yang countered with a warning over Tibet. “If you say anything further on this matter, it will consist of an infringement on our domestic affairs,” The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported. To this, Komakura replied, “I am annoyed to be told of an infringement on domestic matters while I am advising you as a friend.”

These remarkable exchanges are important for a variety of reasons. For one, although categories are sometimes stretched, Japan is not a Western country. If not mutually exclusive, its reasons for caring deeply about events in Tibet are rather different from those of the West, whose traditional human rights discourse has been painted, cynically or perversely, as a hostile doctrine by some in China.

Japan’s Buddhist roots incline it toward natural sympathy with the people of Tibet and toward concern for religious freedom there. To be sure, China may see still Japan through the mirror of its violent past, but today Japan sees China through the mirror of its own constitutional pacifism and it worries deeply what kind of neighbor is China becoming.

The same question, naturally, arises in South Korea, where the Chinese boom of the past three decades has changed people’s feelings about this country in strongly positive ways. Beijing has worked with both savvy and patience toward this end, fashioning itself as a new kind of global power, one capable of a peaceful rise, one whose arrival marks a win-win for partners everywhere.

The lesson of recent weeks, though, is that behavior trumps slogans, and for China’s neighbors, that is why what really happened in Tibet, rather than the carefully crafted official line, matters so much.

Putting down a localized riot, even violently, may be sellable, but what about the arrest of large numbers of Tibetans who protested peacefully in other places, and the punitive “re-education campaigns” reportedly under way?