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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Copyright The New York Times

Letter from China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009

SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.

The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.

What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.

This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.

The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.

The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.

Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.

China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.

Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.

At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.

I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.

A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”

Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.

Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.

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Copyright The Washington Post

In South Korea, shopping “is a kind of competition,” said Sabina Vaughan, who travels to Seoul every summer and sees how her cousins spend.
In South Korea, shopping “is a kind of competition,” said Sabina Vaughan, who travels to Seoul every summer and sees how her cousins spend. (By Jean Chung — Bloomberg News)

A consumer shops for high-end computer gear in Seoul. “It is not recognized as a virtue to save, not anymore,” investment adviser Lee Sun-uk said.
A consumer shops for high-end computer gear in Seoul. “It is not recognized as a virtue to save, not anymore,” investment adviser Lee Sun-uk said. (By Ahn Young-joon — Associated Press)

Thursday, July 30, 2009

SEOUL — In pursuit of middle-class prosperity, South Koreans have looted their household savings like no other people on Earth.

They have collectively binged on private schools and fancy cars, language camps and new apartments, foreign travel and designer shoes.

Americans, the longtime avatars of consumerism gone mad, will save next year at double the rate of South Koreans, according to a report this month from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in developed countries.

When it comes to buying high-priced, brand-name stuff as if there were no tomorrow, Sabina Vaughan concludes that Americans are relative wimps. “Koreans spend more, way more,” said Vaughan, 35, who travels to Seoul every summer with her Korean-born mother and spies on her cousins as they shop. “It is a kind of competition for them. It doesn’t matter what their income is.”

Her conclusion is supported by a mountain of data and a chorus of concerned economists. The household savings rate in South Korea will have plummeted from a world-beating 25.2 percent in 1988 to a projected world low of 3.2 percent in 2010, according to the OECD. Government policies have encouraged borrowing, while Korea’s aggressive culture has supercharged spending on signifiers of success, whether they be Ivy League degrees or Louis Vuitton handbags.

“It is not recognized as a virtue to save, not anymore,” said Lee Sun-uk, an investment adviser for an office of Samsung Securities that is located in a wealthy neighborhood of Seoul. “To maintain a certain status, people are willing to spend, even if their incomes have declined.”

In the past decade, average savings per household have plunged from about $3,300 to $525. On a percentage basis, it is the steepest savings decline in the developed world. Meanwhile, household debt as a percentage of individual disposable income has risen to 140 percent, higher than in the United States (136 percent), according to the Bank of Korea.

The consequences of South Korea’s collapsed savings rate are beginning to register in the country’s slowing rate of growth, economists said. For nearly 40 years, growth galloped along at between 6 and 8 percent, as banks were flush with household savings that fueled business investment and research. But growth slowed to about 4.5 percent after 2000, when the savings rate dipped below 10 percent.
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“The low savings rate is sapping our capacity to grow, and it is going to get worse,” said Park Deog-bae, a research fellow who specializes in household finance at the Hyundai Research Institute. “It will lead to credit delinquency. It will cause greater income disparity. It means less resources for our aging population.”

As South Korea changed from a war-battered farming society to Asia’s fourth-largest economy, its savings rate was almost certain to decline. Economists consider a fall in savings and a rise in consumer spending to be part of the normal development process, as government-backed social services increase, property values rise, and stock markets grow.

But the fall-off-a-cliff character of what has happened with household savings in South Korea strikes many experts as abnormal and worrisome. It is one of several trends suggesting that South Korea, as it wrestles with post-industrial affluence, is a society under extraordinary stress.

South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the OECD. They rank first in time spent online and second to last in spending on recreation, and the per capita birthrate scrapes the bottom of world rankings. By 2050, South Korea will be the most aged society in the world, narrowly edging out Japan, according to the OECD.

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Copyright Far Eastern Economic Review

July 2009
Will Japan Ever Grow Up?
by Masaru Tamamoto

Posted July 10, 2009

Japan stands on the threshold of a change that could signal a step toward political maturity. After six decades of being ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party, voters in the upcoming general election are expected to give a mandate to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. While this possibility is certainly an encouraging sign that Japanese people are ready for open competition over national policies, what’s really remarkable is that it has taken so long. And indeed there is still a long way to go for Japan to become a “normal nation,” in the words of opposition politician Ichiro Ozawa. Japan remains in many ways infantilized.

It’s easy to forget how unusual Japan is in many ways, both politically and culturally. This is, after all, a country that is largely content to exist under the wing of a foreign protector, and one in which Tokyo University-trained bureaucrats have long enjoyed unquestioned authority. It’s also a country where initiative is stifled in the workplace, and a worrying number of children never leave home or have the chance to compete with other children. There are some signs that Japan is being forced to change, but this change is coming excruciatingly slowly.

Child-Adults

To understand the sickness permeating Japanese society in recent decades, one must start with childhood. The Japanese used to like children and until recently would indulge the little ones. But that has changed. A Tokyo court recently ruled that voices of children gathered around a park fountain constitute noise pollution and ordered the fountain shut off. Society now widely constrains children, robbing them of their natural playfulness. In so many parks, there are signs written in the language of children and with illustrations, for those too young to read, prohibiting playing with balls. Teachers instruct children in schoolyards to keep the noise down to prevent neighbors from complaining. There is growing intolerance of children being children.

The distinction between preparing a child for adulthood and turning a child into an adult has been lost. A well-behaved child is a manageable child, one who is quiet, mild, obedient and passive. The Japanese word for such attributes, otonashii, is the adjective form of the noun adult. Passivity is understood to be the distinguishing mark of adulthood and maturity.

The adult world is wary of children, seeing in them the potential for nuisance and disorder. Whether it is a cause or effect, the number of children under 15 years of age has been shrinking continuously for about three decades. Japan registers one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and given present trends, the country’s population will decline to 95 million from 130 million in less than 50 years. With the burden of aging, social security and medical care are already in an insoluble mess. Still, the authorities have shown no sense of urgency in finding a solution. Meanwhile the number of unmarried adults living in their parents’ homes is growing, with one-third of those between the ages of 20 and 39 choosing to be “parasite singles.”

The Japanese definition of adulthood is highly specific: A grown-up is one who is accepted as a formal member by society. In liberal, more individualistic societies, maturity connotes the cultivation of independence, while in communitarian Japan, maturity depends entirely on social recognition. One study found that a very young Japanese child is likely to come to the aid of a friend being bullied, while an older child tends to turn a blind eye. This is counterintuitive, for growing up supposedly entails the development of the sense of right and wrong, of social responsibility. Yet the older child here is relieved that he is not the bully’s victim and does not intervene for fear of being turned into the next victim.

Absenteeism at school is a recognized social problem in many countries, usually among poor and minority communities. In harmony-stricken Japan, however, the problem is everywhere. Bullying is its major cause and even drives some to suicide. But there are usually no identifiable bullies to be disciplined. What the Japanese call bullying, ijime, is really ostracism. The problem is awkward, because society itself is the problem; in the classroom it is not uncommon to find the teacher participating in ostracism.

Passivity is the defense against certain humiliation and misery. This passivity is not withdrawal but its opposite. It demands active participation in society simply to remain an ordinary member-to be seen to show consideration even if not really concerned. It requires sophisticated communication skills in order to cover up conflict. To question general consent, to ask why, is the sign of a child.

For those endowed with personality and self-assurance, the passive life is full of stress and strain. Japan’s high suicide rate among industrialized societies is one symptom of this. Japan also has an increasing number of people not in education, vocational training or employment, especially among the presumably mature 35 to 44-year-olds. Then there are the estimated one million who simply shut themselves in their rooms for years on end, while family members leave food outside their doors.

The majority of Japanese, of course, are successfully self-alienated, otherwise society could not function. The well-adjusted embrace the adult ethic of loyalty and belonging, and are its keen enforcers. Even profit-seeking organizations tend to shun the dynamic, entrepreneurial ethic for fear of fragmentation and disorder.

Endless meetings mark Japanese organizational life. While organizations shaped by the bureaucratic ethic are strictly hierarchical and the chain of command is explicit, decision-making tends to disguise this top-down nature. The ultimate purpose of meetings is to make the decision into general consent, so meetings cannot end until at least all agree not to openly disagree. The decision then becomes the expression of organizational will. In this way, the location of responsibility is obscured.

The Japanese on the whole are educated and molded to perform fairly competently in clearly understood roles. The problem of the age is the quality of instruction, the paucity of effective leadership in a country that, revealingly, has had three prime ministers within the last two years—two of them having abruptly abandoned office. And this is not altogether surprising, for the generation in leadership positions today learned its ways as Japan crystallized the bureaucratic ethic and Japanese people became passive, equal and alike.

Finding a New Model

Change is coming, however. It was not long ago that more than 90% of Japanese responded in opinion polls that they belonged to the middle class. Now one hardly hears of such polls even being conducted. The issue for the last decade has been growing inequality of income and employment. The number of permanent employees has sharply declined, and the number of temporary and part-time employees, who earn substantially less and have no job security, is on an even sharper rise, making up more than one-third of the work force.

Middle-class Japan faces the onslaught of global capitalism, as firms have been forced to adjust their ways to remain competitive. Japan has begun to recapitulate the American transformation of the 1960s and 1970s from predictable lifetime employment to labor mobility and insecurity.

Pundits in Japan sound alarms about the demise of middle-class uniformity; some even asserting that being alike and equal is synonymous with Japanese culture and tradition. Such essentialism is utter nonsense, of course; inequality has been the norm during almost all of Japanese history. The life of conformist organization arose in the 1960s and began to decline in the early 1990s. This was the period of the “economic miracle,” which briefly inspired pundits around the world to assert that Japan had devised a very particular and superior form of capitalism. Now nearly two decades after the collapse of the Japanese belief that their economy can only grow, there is no counterculture in sight. The Japanese keep patiently waiting for the authorities to draw up a new set of social rules.

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has come up with a national rejuvenation plan that proposes to define the university baccalaureate. It aims to forge innovative graduates with enhanced productivity to carry the social burden of the aging population. To this end, the bachelor’s degree is to become a demonstration of the holder’s ability to work effectively, and to become internationally competitive and recognized. Paradoxically, it wants to standardize autonomy, innovation and creative thinking.

“Japanese education is mind pollution,” a 2008 Nobel laureate in physics, Toshihide Masukawa, lectured the minister of education. Japanese education is singularly geared toward memorizing the correct answer, to be parroted in examination. Mr. Masukawa deplored that students are given no room to think, no incentive to ponder possibilities and differences. Education extinguishes creativity and the life of the mind. Most Japanese Nobel laureates in the sciences had done their work in America. Almost all of them profess that their work could not have been done in Japan, where there is rarely support for the kind of work that takes risks and leads to breakthroughs.

Education bureaucrats and professors lament the quality of university students because of their lack of independent thinking and intellectual curiosity. But surely the students are being wise. They won their university places exactly because they snuffed out any tendency toward autonomous thinking, any sense of adventure and ambition. They accepted spoon-feeding from an early age. Challenging conventional wisdom, which means challenging nebulous and all-encompassing authority, is a sign of immaturity and undeserving of a university place.

Japanese education is geared toward supporting a standardized manufacturing economy. A manufacturing economy really requires no more than high school education that instills the ability to read and follow instructions. Here, the university’s function is to pull up the level of education through high school by making students prepare for the entrance examination. What is taught and learned at university is of little concern; it is the ability to enter that matters. Once in, the system assures and assumes graduation with little regard for quality. This kind of university education has served Japan tolerably well up to now, but it is woefully inadequate for global competition in the service economy.

Tokyo University stands at the pinnacle of the Japanese hierarchical education system; other universities are in one way or another clones of Tokyo. Founded in the late 19th century, the university was designed to churn out state administrators, the best and brightest who in recent decades have successfully standardized and mechanized society. These bureaucrats carefully plan the future, making unpredictable evolution obsolete. But there is a critical difference between Japan’s present and its recent past that began in the mid-19th century.

Japan playing catch-up with Western modernity always found an array of outside models from which to pick and choose. Now, having caught up, there are no more models upon which to base plans. Thus Japan has no choice but to stand on its own two feet instead of swaying with the current of world history. Modernizing Japan showed great ingenuity adopting foreign techniques; now modernized Japan needs to think creatively.

Still, true to form, the education ministry’s plan to foster innovation and creative thinking posits the American university as the model. After all, almost all of the top 10 ranked universities in the world are American. But investigating minutiae is a habit of the bureaucratic mind, and mistaking form for substance is its common failing. The education ministry has notified all universities, public and private, that courses should have electronically posted syllabi. So universities across Japan now require professors to present syllabi following a uniform list of required entries, each with a set word count. This form, conjured up by some government bureaucrat following American samples, does not give enough space to write a full and sufficient syllabus, yet no university dares suggest alteration.

Obviously, innovation and creative thinking are antithetical to institutionalized guidance. The Japanese university needs to be set free. Yet in its usual competent, bureaucratic manner, the Education Ministry’s plan clearly warns that leaving university reform to market forces will lead to unevenness and chaos, thereby making international recognition of the value of the Japanese baccalaureate impossible. Universities as state-run bureaucracies must remain equal and alike. Seeking intangible innovation is full of risk. Education must serve the goal of social harmony, to keep people in bondage. The ability to challenge authority fosters liberty, but liberty to the bureaucratic mind is chaos so not allowable. The bureaucratically controlled Japanese university is not designed to create individuals who act to change their fate.

Bureaucrats Disrespected

The bureaucracy is increasingly seen as incompetent, corrupt and self-serving. For instance, there is a shortage of doctors because not long ago the Ministry of Health and Welfare predicted an oversupply, and the Ministry of Education restricted the number of places in medical schools. There are underused roads everywhere and more money is always available to build new bridges, but not to repair crumbling ones. Demographic predictions are drastically revised almost every year—not because the bureaucrats can’t count, but because their job is to prepare documents with numbers that justify current policy. Records are forged or mysteriously go missing, officially generated statistics are phony, and social security is insolvent.

The number of applicants for national civil service has been declining noticeably. Top-tier Tokyo University graduates are turning away from the civil service toward private-sector jobs, and mid-career bureaucrats are resigning in record numbers. The old bureaucrats who epitomize a passive Japan remain, reveling in what they believe to be their and Japan’s mature development.

Jean-Marc Coicaud of the United Nations University recently posed a critical question: “Can Japan become open-minded and not self-centered so that it can exercise political influence that matches its economic weight?” The problem is that a country can only present to the outside world values by which it lives. In a recent survey conducted by Pacific Forum, an American think tank, Japanese foreign policy and opinion makers were asked to name key elements of Japan’s national identity. Tellingly, the respondents could not even begin to answer, so the question had to be rephrased: How do you think other countries see Japan? The self for Japan and the Japanese is determined by what others think.

There is a nebulous unease felt by the Japanese about a rising China. The feeling is that it is acceptable to be a subordinate of America but certainly not of China. So Japan must remain subordinate to America in order to fend off Chinese dominance. With this logic, the Bush administration’s push to strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance found resonance in Japanese policy circles. Simply put, if China’s transition to a middle-class society goes well over the next half century and more—as seems inevitable—then Japan’s relative position will be like that of Canada with America. Clearly, Japan ought to take the initiative in creating an international world in which having to choose between American and Chinese hegemonies holds no meaning, but that takes innovative thinking and open-mindedness.

Infants are innocent, and they trust their parents. The Japanese are willfully innocent infants who perhaps shouldn’t trust their protectors indefinitely. Parents in America are known to kick their adolescent children out of the house and make them fend for themselves. As for not competing with other children such as the Chinese, who seem intent on going through a belated adolescence as quickly as possible, the Japanese want to go in the corner and pretend there aren’t any other children around. Rather infantile, but perhaps a clever choice if you think you can count on your parents to protect you from the child down the block when it becomes an adult more vigorous and less distracted than your own parents. Perhaps Japan is destined to become the ultimate “parasite single.”

Masaru Tamamoto is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute in New York and resides in Yokohama, Japan.

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Copyright Foreign Policy

On his recent visit to Ghana, U.S. President Barack Obama condemned war, corruption, tribalism, and all the other ills that have bedeviled our continent. Many Africans in Africa and the diaspora were moved by the speech, as were many Africa observers in the West. The speech captivated imaginations because it appealed to people’s basic common sense.
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That is where its positive contribution ends.

Rather inconveniently, all the attention Obama’s speech has gotten disproves his opening remark: “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.” It is not the speech of an African leader on the future of the continent that is exciting debate in the media and finding space on the blogs; it is a speech by the U.S. president. This very simple contradiction reveals the world’s collective tendency to seek Africa’s solutions from the West.

Beyond its many good phrases and populist appeals, Obama’s speech did not deviate fundamentally from the views of other Western leaders I have read throughout my lifetime — on aid, on civil wars, on corruption, or on democracy. Obama repackaged the same old views in less diplomatic language. He had the courage to be more explicit on Africa’s ills because, due to his African heritage, Obama can say as he wishes without sounding racist — a fear that constrains other Western leaders when talking about Africa.

Even so, Obama said nothing new. He assumes that African countries have been mismanaged because leaders on the continent are bad men who make cold hearted choices. His solution is thus to extend moral pleas for them to rule better. Yet it is not the individual behavior of Africa’s rulers that demands our closest attention, destructive as that behavior may be. It is the structure of incentives those leaders confront — incentives that help determine the choices they make.
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Using this logic, we can start to ask more-useful questions. If the choices made by Africa’s rulers have destroyed their economies, under what conditions can they develop a vested interest in growth-promoting policies? If Africans are going to war much more often than other human beings on the planet, what causes them to do so? When is peace more attractive than military combat?

Governing is not about making simplistic choices on who is right and who is wrong. It requires making complicated trade-offs, some of which might be costly in the short term. Take negotiated conflict settlements, for example, a policy that has stabilized Liberia and Sierra Leone after the two countries’ brutal civil wars. That same policy wouldn’t have worked in 1994 in Rwanda, where it would have produced an unstable power-sharing arrangement between victims of genocide and their executioners. The lesson: We cannot have one blueprint for all of Africa’s problems. Even “good” moral decisions, such as those so often urged upon us by the West, can be bad sometimes.

Obama assumes that the fundamental challenge facing Africa is the lack of democracy and the checks and balances that come with it. But how does he explain why authoritarian Rwanda fights corruption and delivers public services to its citizens much better than its democratic neighbor, Uganda? In fact, the Ugandan brand of democracy has spawned corruption and incompetence more than it has helped combat them. The country’s ethnic politics makes patronage and corruption more electorally profitable than delivering services.

Obama’s preferred models of successful development, Singapore and South Korea, were not democratic when they rose to prominence. His proposals on ending corruption — “forensic accounting, automating services strengthening hot lines and protecting whistle-blowers” — are technocratic in nature. But the real challenge is how to give Africa’s rulers a vested interest in fighting corruption. In most of Africa today, corruption is the way the system works — not the way it fails.

The lesson for Obama is that Africa is likely to get better with less meddling in its affairs by the West, not more — whether that meddling is through aid, peacekeeping, or well-written speeches. Africa needs space to make mistakes and learn from them. The solutions for Africa have to be shaped and articulated by Africans, not outsiders. Obama needs to listen to Africans much more, not lecture them using the same old teleprompter.

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The BBC has just posted a slide show feature on my Disappearing Shanghai book project on its website.

Click here to see the BBC slide show

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Copyright The New York Times

DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.
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Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.

And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)

But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.

He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.

Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred … too cool, I guess.

Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.

Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.

So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a shot at getting there by 2015.

No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.

I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.

But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.

President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian anti-corruption official has said.

From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work of the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is one. There’s a growing number of others.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

The rioting by Uighurs in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi in early July has put the spotlight back on China’s handling of its ethnic minority regions. Coming just over a year after a similar outburst in Lhasa, the incident shows that hardline policies designed to suppress dissent have fostered bitter resentment. However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as a sign that China’s control over Tibet and Xinjiang are unraveling. Rather the incidents should be put into a broader context of rising tensions within Chinese society.

Certainly Tibet and Xinjiang pose their own unique challenges. The seeds of the current unrest were planted in the mid-1990s, when government strategy toward the restive regions shifted to a more hardline approach. That has shut off avenues for the expression of discontent, bottling up tensions until they explode.

Despite the obvious costs of this policy, Beijing apparently regards them as worth paying to maintain a tight grip on its sensitive border areas, which are regarded as vital national interests. From its perspective, the policies may even be regarded as a success because the migration of Han Chinese into the sparsely populated regions enhances government control over the longer term, regardless of the friction it may create.

However, seen in the context of the wider Chinese society, the upsurge in unrest raises some worrying questions for Beijing. Despite the strictest possible control, the spread of information and rights consciousness has encouraged Uighurs and Tibetans to take to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations, and violent repression has stoked further unrest. This mirrors events taking place elsewhere in China, where potent fault lines within society are bursting into the open, despite the government’s best efforts to foster a “harmonious society.”

This suggests that China may be entering a period similar to that in the late 1980s, when demonstrations began to break out over a variety of issues. As during that period, the Chinese economy is under stress, with rising expectations running up against the reality of limited opportunities. Add in anger about corruption and abuse of power by local officials and the stage is set for what are euphemistically known as “mass incidents.” While the government may be able to manage localized riots, there is a danger of a repeat of 1989, should an event provide the impetus for the formation of a wider national protest movement.

Widespread use of the Internet and mobile phones accelerates the spread of unrest beyond the capacity of the authorities to respond. The proximate cause of the rioting in Urumqi on July 5 happened thousands of miles away in Guangdong province. At a toy factory in Shaoguan, Han Chinese attacked young Uighur workers after rumors spread that they had raped several women. The state media reported that two Uighurs were killed, but graphic pictures and rumors of a higher death toll spread quickly over the Internet to Xinjiang. Complaining that the authorities were not doing enough to protect their compatriots, Uighurs took to the streets of Urumqi in an initially peaceful protest. Although the details are murky and the truth may never be known, the incident turned violent quickly after confrontations with the police.

This contagion effect must give Chinese leaders pause because it presages an era in which national stability is held hostage to the mistakes made by local leaders. When information flows were easier to control, violence in one area had little impact on the rest of the country. Today, by contrast, the Xinjiang violence dominates the consciousness of the whole Chinese population.
In part that’s because propaganda authorities are under pressure to be proactive about reporting incidents in order to pre-empt the spread of rumors. Even then, as we saw recently, this coverage itself may not be accurate or effective in reassuring the population. And in any case, the net effect may be to undermine confidence in the government’s ability to maintain law and order. It also tends to inflame Han nationalism, which, as with anti-U.S. and anti-Japanese protests in the past, can quickly spin out of control.

Paradoxically, the government’s strict control over the official media combined with underground channels for information of dubious origins can prove to be a combustible mixture. Because Chinese netizens do not trust the media, they are more inclined to believe reports passed along the electronic grapevine. In this case, the spread of rumors quickly polarized both Uighur and Han communities.

Moreover, even though the state has extensive mechanisms to censor online communications, it has never been able to develop the “surge capacity” to stop the flow of information during a crisis. This also tends to make the system more unstable, as people discontented over other issues latch on to the issue of the moment.

Economic considerations are also coming into play — it is significant that the initial rape rumors were spread by a Han Chinese angry that he lost his job in the factory where the Uighurs were working. While the macroeconomic statistics suggest China has been relatively insulated from the global financial crisis by massive government spending and new loans from the state-owned banks, on the ground the picture is more mixed. Privately owned export-oriented factories have closed, the fresh credit has tended to go into speculative investments, and infrastructure spending takes time to ramp up. The net effect may be to actually exacerbate tensions, as the poor struggle to find jobs while the rich and politically well-connected have access to government contracts and easy credit.

Several recent incidents suggest that society is becoming more volatile. Most dramatically, rioters fought a pitched battle with police in Shishou, Hubei, province, in late June after the suspicious death of the chef in a hotel with connections to the mayor. As is often the case in these incidents, the extent of the violence can be attributed largely to mishandling of the initial protest by local officials.

But it is not hard to conceive of circumstances that could lead to a wider protest movement. For instance, the scandal over melamine-contaminated milk powder last year was handled relatively well by the central government, with punishments handed down to those responsible and compensation paid to the victims. But were such an incident to implicate the family of top leaders, or the government fail to resolve it expeditiously, the same mechanism that spread protests from Guangdong to Xinjiang could come into play.

As the government increases its involvement in the economy through stimulus measures, there is an increased risk that corruption will again become a source of public anger. This would parallel to some extent the late 1980s, when a dual pricing system allowed Party officials in state enterprises to profit by buying commodities at state prices and then selling them on the open market. Today the mechanisms are different, such as the “land grabs” in which officials take plots from farmers and urban residents with minimal compensation and sell them on to real estate developers.

Another parallel to the 1980s is the increasing activism of intellectuals after decades of being silenced and coopted by the Party. Over the last five years, a loose grouping of legal professionals and academics haved tried to protect the rights of ordinary citizen against abuses of power by Party officials, a movement known as “Weiquan.”

The pressure for political change today differs from the 1980s, however, in its emphasis on bottom-up activism, using a combination of the courts, media and other channels to put pressure on local officialdom. The late Party Secretary General Zhao Ziyang’s recently published memoir highlights how the liberal wing of the Party that once pushed for political reform was eliminated after 1989. After that, he noted, the Party elite became increasingly enmeshed in the business world, creating vested interests that seek to preserve the Party’s monopoly on power.

How this shift will affect social stability remains to be seen. On the one hand, the leadership split within the Party in 1989 was one of the key contributing factors to the protest movement gaining momentum and the ensuing crackdown. Today the Party elite is relatively united at least on policy issues, and the main intra-Party conflict is between the center and the regions, as local officials seek to cover up their misdeeds at the risk of spreading instability.

In other ways, the current situation could prove more volatile. As the Xinjiang experience shows, when dissatisfaction reaches the point where people no longer feel they have much to lose, even a massive security force cannot deter violence. Tensions may be highest in the minority areas, but the feeling of marginalization and victimization by Party officials is widespread.

Mr. Restall is the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. This is an excerpted version of an article appearing in the July/August issue of the Review.

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Copyright Yale Global

Dru Gladney
YaleGlobal, 9 July 2009

Ethnicity without borders: Han Chinese mob in Urumqi in search of Uighurs (top); Supporters of Uighurs protest outside Chinese consulate in Istanbul

CLAREMONT: It took just a few minutes for news of the attack on Muslim migrant workers that left at least two dead in a toy factory in Southern China to travel 3000 miles to their homeland, the Uighur Autonomous Region known as Xinjiang. Ten days later, the ensuing riot in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and largest city in all of Central Asia, led to 156 dead and over 1500 arrested. Iranian-style, the Chinese government not only reacted swiftly and harshly to the protesters, but also attempted to seal off the region and shut down all international communications and access to global media. They did, however, cover much of the uprising on their own state-run television stations and allowed foreign journalists into the riot zone.

Sympathy protests have not only spread to the traditionally restive southern oasis towns of Kashgar and Khotan, but also as far away as the Netherlands, Munich and Istanbul, where large numbers of Uighurs have staged protests in front of the Chinese embassies.

The Chinese government has blamed a female Muslim American émigré Rebiya Kadeer, as well as international organizations based in Washington, DC, Munich and London, for “masterminding” the uprising from afar. At the same time, in Washington, the US government is preparing for the release of the remaining 17 Uighurs from Guantánamo, Cuba to the tiny island country of Palau (after previously resettling several others in Bermuda and Albania). From the South Pacific, to the Caribbean, to Southern China, to the heart of Central Asia, to the capitals of the major Western states, a previously unknown group of Muslims from a remote corner of China have captured the world’s attention. The new media of Twitter, Skype, YouTube, video- and text-messaging have linked these disparate peoples and places like never before, contributing to perhaps the world’s first “ethnic pandemic.” Spreading across China and around the globe almost instantaneously, the events in Urumqi have brought attention to a minority Muslim people of whom most had never heard.

After decades of civil war, the region known as Eastern Turkestan was brought firmly under Chinese control when it was “peacefully liberated” by the PLA in 1949. At that time, the Han population was approximately five percent of the total, with the Uighur population in the vast majority. The unchecked migration into the region of the Han, who have often received preference for both skilled and unskilled jobs, has further marginalized the indigenous Uighurs, especially the younger male working population. Not finding work at home, and prevented from travelling abroad, many of these Uighur men have been forced to look for work across China, leading to ethnic rivalry of the kind seen recently in the Xuji toy factory in Shaoguan, Guandong.

Some believe this contagion could have been stopped at the border. Resembling less the Tibetan unrest of 2008 than the Rodney King riots of 1990s Los Angeles (when a brutal beating of an African-American man by the police triggered widespread violence), this uprising is the worst violence in Xinjiang since the founding of the People’s Republic (which will celebrate its 60th anniversary this year); and it has nothing to do with separatism, terrorism or the Islamic religion. Yet China makes little distinction between separatists, terrorists, and civil rights activists – whether they are Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese or Falun Gong members. This “mass incident” was precipitated by fatal attacks on Uighur workers, mentioned above, due to an “unintentional scream” of a female Han Chinese worker who now admits being startled when she mistakenly walked into a male Uighur workers’ dormitory. This led to the spread of a false rumor that the Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, disseminated by Han workers disgruntled by over 800 Uighurs from Xinjiang receiving priority for jobs in the factory. (There are now approximately 1.5 million ethnic minorities working in Guangdong alone through a state-sponsored preferential employment program.) Yet the underlying ethnic tensions in Xinjiang that provided fertile pre-conditions for such an angry response suggests that a cure might not be easily found.

For the past 50 years, the Chinese government has tried through minority affirmative action policies and strict controls to integrate the region known as Eastern Turkestan into a “harmonious” part of the People’s Republic. The last census taken in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region revealed that though the nearly 8.4 million Uighur residents maintain a bare majority in their own land, the resident Han Chinese population has risen to 38% (the Uighur population stands at 42%). Nevertheless in terms of education, health and mortality, the Uighur lag far behind the Han in quality of life, and even behind most other Muslim groups in the region. (There are seven other official Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including over 1 million Kazakhs and 500,000 Hui, as well as Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others).

Despite the extraordinary transformation of the region due to economic investment and infrastructural development, with the goals of harvesting its vast mineral and oil deposits and further integrating the region into China, the Uighur people believe they have not benefitted as much as have the masses of Han migrants living in “their” homeland. The viral dissemination of this conflict suggests that global communications not only foster greater awareness of this region, but may even exacerbate its underlying problems.

The tensions between Han and Uighur in Xinjiang have been simmering for decades, but the downturn in China’s economy as part of the global fiscal crisis has caused further pressure, as the Uighurs feel discriminated against in their own region. The fact that protests took place initially in Urumqi, where Uighurs are only 12.8 percent of the population and Han are 75.3 percent, is significant in that previously most of the violent incidents took place in the southern oasis towns such as Kashgar, Khorla, and Khotan, where Uighurs are much more numerous. Due to the rural nature and inaccessibility of these towns, separated by vast deserts and high mountains, news rarely reached the outside world. Now, thanks to the widespread availability of electronic media, especially in urban centers like Urumqi, the Uighurs can give voice to their anger and seek world sympathy.

All pandemics have three aspects: the initial virus, the vector transmission and an available host. The viral pre-conditions for this epidemic include severe unemployment, unequal opportunities, uneven distribution of wealth and ethnic discrimination. The new media that allow for rapid global dissemination provide many different vectors for transmission of information as well as dis-information. The available hosts are now dispersed worldwide through an active and increasingly connected Uighur diaspora, who are concerned for their people and seek to effect change in their homeland. Some estimate that there are nearly a million Uighurs outside of China, with the majority of them dispersed across Central Asia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States. Increasingly, the Uighur community in Washington, DC, led by Rebiya Kadeer, is speaking with a more unified voice. Following the example of the Tibetan Government in Exile, it has disavowed independence, supported greater autonomy and peaceful resolution of conflicts, and rejected violence and radical Islam.

After the riots in Tibet last year, the world is beginning to see that Xinjiang faces many problems related to sovereignty and Chinese rule, and that these problems have less to do with religious conflict than with social justice, ethnic relations, and equal opportunity. Given the ubiquity of the new media, it will be impossible to quarantine the ethnic pandemic spreading across China and indeed the world. News and popular expression have continued to Twitter out of China despite the government’s efforts to halt its spread. A remedy needs to be found not in shutting down these new media, but in addressing the complaints and general well-being of its populace.

Dru Gladney’s most recent book is Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and other Subaltern Subjects. He is President of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College.

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© Copyright 2009 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

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Copyright New Dominion

The following is a letter from an anonymous foreign traveler currently in Kashgar, Xinjiang. The New Dominion presents this letter for the consideration and edification of its readers. There has been little news out of Kashgar since Sunday, and this may shed some light on Monday’s demonstrations and the events that followed.

Two days before rioting broke out over Xinjiang, I hopped a plane bound for Kashgar. I got stuck a little in Urumqi, but made it to Kashgar eventually. The events below record my adventure as you can call it, being stuck in the middle of the chaos in what basically became a police state for three days (and remains so today).

When I arrived in Kashgar, it was “business as usual”: Uyghurs being Uyghurs, i.e. speaking their Turkic language, praying five times a day, and living in and around the Old City. Of course, I was disappointed by the Chinese-built shopping malls, massive highways, and blatant destruction of Uyghur cultural sites (including tombs) and discrimination against the Uyghurs. There are signs everywhere in Chinese reading: “Follow the Communist Party for 10000 years.” “Give up superstition, embrace science, embrace modernity.” “The many peoples of China are one: Hate Separatism from the Motherland.” It’s not a good feeling entering the city.

But a cab drive away (one cab drive too long) and I was basically back in the Middle East. It felt like home. Kebabs everywhere. Hummus, tabouli, green tea with mint. The Old City was “heartening” if tragic… bulldozers, bulldozers, bulldozers. I saw a few mosques come down, probably a few hundred years old each.

Kashgar of course was magical… what was left. I went to centuries-old mosques with sublime Central Asian architecture. I went to “state approved official” tombs and got an “official” tour of the “official Old City.” (This is the 15% of the Old City that the government has decided not to destroy. What’s the catch: No one lives there. They hire actors to dress up as “traditional” Uyghurs for six hours a day.) They smile and proudly display pictures of the Chinese flag. This is the only part of the Old City that Western journalists are allowed to photograph. I got some pictures of the “unofficial” Old City, which was absolutely marvelous. I also went to the Sunday Market and the Livestock Market. I was offered a few camels for a good price, but very sadly I was unable to accept.

I met some reporters in the Old City from the West, but most of them were being followed and having their cameras taken away from them. What I saw was a Uyghur population in Kashgar feeling that they faced the immediate destruction of their cultural and historical heritage. Families were being evacuated from their homes. I honestly have no idea why they would even let Westerners in the city to see this. I still have no idea why they didn’t make me leave.

Waking up the second morning, I heard on the Chinese news that “terrorists” had struck the capital in Urumqi and that their goal was to divide the Motherland. I thought nothing of it honestly, until I went outside. Within about two hours, the city of Kashgar was filled with soldiers and riot police pouring into the “Uyghur” part of town. The internet had been completely cut, along with my phone. I was unable to have any contact with the outside world. But it seemed OK. I again just thought it was policy. When I went out for dinner that night, I saw the authorities arresting people, including old men.

The next day martial law came. The Uyghurs gathered in the Id Kah Mosque to protest the arrests, as well as the destruction of their city, etc. I was pretty close to the Id Kah Mosque. I heard the loud sounds, the screams, and honestly, the screams of people in great physical suffering. There was a stampede, and I knocked over a bunch of watermelons but got back to the hotel (the merchant didn’t hold it against me). The army marched in and all the Uyghur shops in the city were told that they would close for three days (the Chinese of the city were either leaving or behind locked doors). All the mosques were closed and the Uyghurs were clearly scared. Trucks with loudspeakers circled around the Old City, proclaiming: “Always listen to the Communist Party. Hate separation.” The Chinese news interviewed Uyghur women who happily said things like “Xinjiang has always been part of China for 2000 years. Uyghurs are Chinese, one of 55 minority groups. We hate independence and love the motherland.”

The police were just kind of amazed I was there, which is probably why they didn’t make me leave. One happily asked me if I had been to Shanghai yet. God. I asked a police officer what he thought of the situation, and he was optimistic, said that everything was going to be fine. He concluded by saying, “You know, in the next ten years, we’ll just send more Han here and that’ll just end the problem once and for all.”

Kashgar was amazing, and I’m glad I went. I wouldn’t tell anyone else to go to Kashgar in the future though, because I know that the Old City is going to be gone before next Christmas. Uyghur culture and Uyghur language are beautiful to hear and study, as all things become as they slowly disappear.

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Books of The Times
A review of MYTHS, ILLUSIONS, AND PEACE: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 7, 2009

It is the common occupational hazard of the nonfiction writer to have events move beyond the scope of one’s work by the time of publication.

This is a particular risk in the field of diplomatic writing, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the shifting and unpredictable sands of the Middle East, where conventional wisdoms come and go as quickly as national unity governments. Washington’s longtime Middle Eastern diplomatic negotiator Dennis Ross and the former journalist David Makovsky have written a book that reaffirms such caution as well as any in recent memory.

If not explicitly announced as such, “Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East” reads very much like a foreign-policy blueprint for the region for a new administration. And yet so much has happened in the presumably brief interval since the authors completed their manuscript that much of the text and many of its prescriptions seem surpassed by events.

Foremost among these, of course, are the formation of an unwieldy conservative coalition government around Benjamin Netanyahu, a second-time prime minister of Israel with a long history of right-of-center politics. Then there are the first strong stirrings of a fresh diplomatic approach to the region by the new administration in Washington. Add to this Iran’s election and the sociopolitical effervescence it has engendered and the landscape looks substantially different from even a few months ago.

Only time will tell whether President Obama’s approach succeeds, but it has already bypassed some of the notions most central to Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky’s writing. Here one thinks especially of the series of unusually strong statements in which Mr. Obama has very publicly pressured Israel to halt all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, calling it illegitimate.

For its part, “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” begins with a lengthy attack on the diplomatic concept of linkage, which the authors initially define, in ways that seem somewhat overstated, as “the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all other Middle East conflicts would melt away.”

The authors’ formulation attempts to debunk the notion that resolving the Palestinian question could pay dramatic dividends elsewhere, whether in dealing with Iran’s rising power and influence in the region or in defusing rage around the issue that ostensibly fuels Islamic radicalism more broadly. Curiously, though, late in the book, Mr. Ross, who has served until recently as special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, and Mr. Makovsky themselves seem to at least partially allow for this.

After an opening section interpreting the diplomatic failures in the Middle East policy of past United States administrations going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the authors set up two models of thought as virtual antipodes, the neoconservatives and the realists.

The book begins and ends with scathing evaluations of the neoconservatives who drove policy under President George W. Bush and whose disengagement from the region and “fatalistic optimism,” the authors assert, did “great damage to America’s standing in the Middle East.”

Its greatest intellectual energy, however, is expended attacking the so-called realists, who believe, the authors say, that the United States has been “too close to Israel,” and for whom, in what sounds like another overreach, “it is largely inconceivable that Israel could have a case or that the Arabs and Palestinians might not be living up to their side of the bargain.”

The authors go on to denounce “the realist concept of external blueprints, of pressuring Israelis while offering inducements to the Palestinians,” as “strangely divorced from reality.”

The authors rely excessively for foils on John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a political scientist at Harvard, who wrote “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (2007) and who are cited frequently. But with the warnings in “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” about pressuring Israel, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Obama administration’s initial moves in the Middle East would also fall under the authors’ realist banner.

For many readers another issue that will arise is one of balance. Mr. Ross has led a distinguished career that is all the more remarkable for his staying power in Washington during both Democratic and Republican administrations — as a high-level Middle Eastern troubleshooter, envoy and policymaker. (He was recently transferred to the National Security Council.) At virtually no point in this book, however, are Israeli actions depicted as problematic or troublesome.

The closest the authors come to this is a passage describing mounting Palestinian disbelief in the peace process, in which they write, “They saw Israeli obligations under Oslo flouted — prisoners not released, withdrawals not taking place as scheduled, and the status of the territory constantly being changed to Israeli advantage, in effect prejudging the negotiations and their purpose.”

Elsewhere, speaking of an increase in the Israeli settler population on the West Bank from about 5,000 around the time of the Camp David accords in 1977 to over 300,000 now, the authors employ a counterfactual, saying “things could have been different if the Arabs had chosen a more pragmatic course.”

Given Mr. Ross’s recent position as an adviser on Iran policy, many readers will be drawn to this book out of curiosity about his views on relations with that country, and in particular, how to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

The authors advocate secret, high-level diplomacy with Iran, while working in concert with other Middle Eastern countries, the European Union and Russia. And they suggest a short time frame: 90 days. More specifically, they say, beyond that 90-day period “dissuasion steps” should begin. At a minimum, Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky conclude chillingly, “the use of force against Iran will look dramatically different should good faith, direct negotiations be tried and fail.”

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Copyright Reason

On the third week of April in 2009, the news included stories about celebrity obsession, empty foreclosed properties, a young medical student who murdered prostitutes, and the death of the man who forecast this media landscape years ago. James Graham Ballard died of advanced prostate cancer on April 19 at the age of 78.

Apart from maybe Samuel Beckett, no other modern writer saw his ideas proliferate across so many platforms. Ballard influenced filmmakers from David Cronenberg to Mary Harron. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the American critic Susan Sontag were fans. Ed Ruscha quotes Ballard in one of his paintings. Joy Division, Hawkwind, and even Madonna have alluded to his work in their lyrics. There was an art show in Barcelona last year entirely devoted to his life and ideas.

J.G. Ballard is best known for Empire of the Sun (1984), a largely autobiographical coming-of-age novel based on his upbringing in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman, and his internment in a World War II prison camp during the Japanese invasion. For those with darker tastes, there is the cult classic Crash, a wild, transgressive 1973 novel about a community of car-crash fetishists that was eventually made into a Cronenberg film. His writing is obsessed with the territories where the organic meets the inorganic; it is absurdist, bleak, vivid, and awake to the psychological effects of media and manmade landscapes. In the words of the novelist Martin Amis, “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different—a disused—part of the reader’s brain.”

Ballard presents particularly gruesome details of his early years in Miracles of Life, a 2008 autobiography, without any sentimental navel gazing or bitterness. While interned, with his father’s encouragement, the boy ate weevils around his plate of mushy rice “for protein.” Ballard accepted the situation as it was and even looked back at the experience with some fondness. “The most important consequence of internment was that for the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents,” he writes. “I slept, ate, read, dressed, and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room, in many ways like the poorer Chinese families for whom I had felt so sorry in Shanghai.”

Ballard considered this childhood ordinary. “People who read Empire of the Sun have often said to me, ‘What a strange life, how unusual,’” he told the BBC World Service in 2002. “And I say to them, actually, the life I led in Shanghai before and during the Second World War was not strange; it wasn’t unusual. The majority of the people on this planet today and for most of this century and previous centuries have always lived lives much closer to the way I lived than to, say, the comfortable suburbs of Western Europe and North America. It is here where I live today that is very strange by the world’s standards. Civil war, famine, flood, drought, poverty, disease are the norms of human experience.”

Shanghai is an enormous city, but Ballard was isolated there. At the time it had only a small community of Westerners. He never learned a word of Chinese, and he had his first Chinese meal in Britain, long after he left Asia. But it was England, his home for the rest of his life, that bewildered him. In Shanghai fear and hunger and violence were right in front of him; there were dead bodies lying in the streets where he bicycled. As an adult in the comfortable London suburb of Shepperton, by contrast, Ballard had to look under the surface to find the darkest parts of the human psyche.

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