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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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Sometimes after reading a novel, a blessing in itself when its good, the words of praise one can find seem trite.
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is just such a novel. I read it in three sittings, quaking, shivering, and half-expecting tears in many passages. Here one finds real life and real feeling, and a kind of thoughtfulness and care with language that is rare. I’ll be posting a quick excerpt here soon.

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Copyright The New York Times

THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.

“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.” He went on to request extra troops and equipment. “Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time,” he said.

These sound as if they could be the words of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama in recent days or weeks. In fact, they were spoken by Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.

Soviet forces were then in the seventh year of their nine-year-long Afghan conflict, and Marshal Akhromeyev, a hero of the Leningrad siege in World War II, was trying to explain why a force of nearly 110,000 well-equipped soldiers from one of the world’s two superpowers was appearing to be humiliated by bands of “terrorists,” as the Soviets often called the mujahideen.

The minutes of Akhromeyev’s meeting with the Politburo were recently unearthed by American and Russian scholars of the cold war — these and other materials substantially expand our knowledge of the Soviet Union’s disastrous campaign. As President Obama contemplates America’s own future in Afghanistan, he would be well advised to read some of these revealing Politburo papers; he might also pick up a few riveting memoirs of Soviet generals who fought there. These sources show as many similarities between the two wars as differences — and may provide the administration with some valuable counsel.

Much of the fighting during the Soviet war in Afghanistan was in places that have grown familiar to us now, like Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. The Soviets’ main base of operations was Bagram, which is now the United States Army headquarters. Over the years, the Soviets changed their tactics frequently, but much of the time they were trying and failing to pacify the country’s problematic south and east, often conducting armed sweeps along the border with Pakistan, through which many of the guerrillas moved, as the Taliban do now.

That war was characterized by disputes between soldiers and politicians. As Russian documents show, the politicians ordered the invasion against the advice of the armed forces. The chief of the Soviet Defense Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, raised doubts shortly before Soviet forces were dispatched on Christmas Day 1979. He told Dmitri Ustinov — the long-serving defense minister who had been a favorite of Stalin — that experience from the British and czarist armies in the 19th century should encourage caution. Ustinov replied: “Are the generals now making policy in the Soviet Union? Your job is to plan specific operations and carry them out … . Shut up and obey orders.”

Ogarkov went further up the chain of command to the Communist Party boss, Leonid Brezhnev. He warned that an invasion “could mire us in unfamiliar, difficult conditions and would align the entire Islamic East against us.” He was cut off mid-sentence: “Focus on military matters,” Brezhnev ordered. “Leave the policymaking to us.”

The Soviet leaders realized they had blundered soon after the invasion. Originally, the mission was simply to support the Communist government — the result of a coup Moscow had initially tried to prevent, and then had no choice but to back — and then get out within a few months. But the mujahideen’s jihad against the godless Communists had enormous popular support within the country, and from outside. Money and sophisticated weapons poured in from America and Saudi Arabia, through Pakistan.

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Copyright The New York Times

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Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas, becoming one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling the lives of its ordinary people and its jazz giants, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who has written about his work.

Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work he began to gravitate toward photography, partly because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”

Over a career of almost 60 years, Mr. DeCarava — who fiercely guarded the manner in which his work was exhibited and whose visibility in the art world remained low for decades — came to be regarded as the founder of a school of African-American photography that broke with the social documentary traditions of his time. While an outspoken crusader for civil rights, he felt that his pictures would speak louder as a record of black life in America if they abandoned the overtly humanist aims of mentors like Edward Steichen.

“I do not want a documentary or sociological statement,” he wrote in his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he won in 1952, becoming the first black photographer to do so. His goal, he explained, was “a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.”

His books, like “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” a best-selling 1955 collaboration with Langston Hughes, and his most famous photographs — a girl in a pristine graduation dress heading down a desolate, shadowed street; a man ascending wearily from the subway; a stage portrait of John Coltrane playing with closed-eyed fury — were hugely influential, paving the way for younger photographers like Beuford Smith and Carrie Mae Weems.

“One of the things that got to me,” Mr. DeCarava told The New York Times in 1982, “was that I felt that black people were not being portrayed in a serious and in an artistic way.”

Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized a retrospective of Mr. DeCarava’s work there in 1996, said of him on Wednesday: “He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle. No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively.”

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in New York on Dec. 9, 1919. He was the only child of Elfreda Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant, who separated from Mr. DeCarava’s father not long after his birth. As a child he shined shoes and delivered newspapers and ice to make ends meet, while his mother, an amateur photographer, made sure that his artistic talents were nurtured with music lessons and drawing supplies.

He was one of only two black students at a high school for textile studies in the Chelsea section and one of only a few at the Cooper Union School of Art, to which he had won a scholarship to study art and architecture. After two years there, discouraged by the hostile attitude of many white students toward him, he left and enrolled at the Harlem Community Art Center on 125th Street, where he pursued painting while also using his brushes to make signs for the Works Progress Administration. After a stint in the Army during World War II, he returned to New York and left painting behind for printmaking, which he juggled with a job in commercial illustration.

But soon his field work with a camera, meant to feed his printmaking, became his primary interest, and he joined the great postwar street photography world, where practitioners like Helen Levitt, William Klein and Lisette Model were at work with their 35-millimeter rangefinders.

Mr. DeCarava (pronounced dee-cuh-RAV-ah) told Charlie Rose in a televised interview in 1996 that photography was an ideal way to get at the directness he desired from art. “Going outside and meeting the challenge of taking what is and making it yours, that’s what photography does for me,” he said. “It’s not the subject that interests me as much as my perception of the subject.”

Avoiding flash whenever he could, his pictures explored the nuances of shadow perhaps more than any other photographer of his day. The critic Vicki Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, described his best work as “bafflingly dark, suffused with stillness,” adding: “DeCarava reads the city’s small secrets as it goes about its business unawares, and comes in so close that everything outside his concentration falls away.”

The $3,200 he received from his Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to shoot in Harlem full time. Steichen used some of Mr. DeCarava’s work in the landmark “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. At the same time — after he had approached Hughes for help in finding a publisher — he published “Sweet Flypaper of Life,” which uses his work with Hughes’s prose poetry to weave a fictional narrative of Harlem life as told by a grandmother named Sister Mary Bradley.

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Copyright Yale Global Online

China’s participation as the guest of honor at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair was filled with plenty of histrionics: walk-outs, gag orders, and a firing. There were, however, over 2000 copyright deals inked with various Chinese publishers. But beyond the sensational, the event shows China’s uneasy practice of soft power, according to author Jonathan Fenby. Beijing is striving to present itself to the world not just as a manufacturing hub, but also as a country rich in the domain of ideas, art, and culture. This endeavor includes, among other things, participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair as well as allowing the publication of seedier fare on Chinese life that would have been unheard of even a decade ago. What it has not allowed is diversity of political opinion. While the reasons for this may be as diverse as the makeup of China itself, maintaining order is certainly one motivating factor. Whether the fear of loss of control is natural to China or a phenomenon that can be shrugged off as Beijing becomes more comfortable with its stature on the world stage remains an open question. What can be answered is how the rest of the world chooses to respond to such a stance. – YaleGlobal

YaleGlobal , 26 October 2009
Hard edge of soft power: Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (top) speaks at the opening of Frankfurt Book Fair; the show was stolen by dissident poet Bei Ling (left) and writer Dai Qing.

LONDON: For all its prowess in exporting manufactured goods in a globalised world, China has difficulties when it comes to ideas. This was dramatically demonstrated at this autumn’s Frankfurt book fair, which was marked by walk-outs by Chinese officials, the attempted gagging of dissident voices, and the firing of one of the organizers.

In recent years, the People’s Republic has stepped up its efforts to extend its ‘soft power’ through the propagation of its culture to show the world it is not simply a manufacturing hub that lies at the core of the global supply chain and whose current bounding growth figures contrast with the soggy results shown by other major economies. That can lead to clashes as the freedom essential for the propagation of ideas conflicts with Beijing’s insistence on clamping down on anything it sees as a political challenge. The issue is not confined to China. Governments and organizations round the world, which are often loath to antagonize Beijing, often pre-emptively bend to potential pressure from the heirs to the Mandate of Heaven, as these heirs seek to expand their country’s reach culturally as well as materially.

China was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt fair, the world’s biggest marketplace for literature. The reason it was chosen reflects the dual nature of books. On the one hand, they are physical products which are bought and sold. On the other, they are a vehicle for ideas, imagination, controversy, political positioning and dissidence. The choice of China was motivated both by the growing importance of its book business in domestic and international terms, and by a feeling on the part of the organizers that it was time to pay more attention to the development of modern Chinese literature. For its part, China spent an estimated $7.5 million on the event at which more than 200 mainland publishing houses participated.

While the fair saw more than 2,000 copyright deals involving Chinese publishers, it also showed up China’s insistence on exercising control over what is written and published. With 270,000 titles published in 2008, China is anxious to establish its position in global literature and Frankfurt offered an ideal opportunity to do that. The man who will probably be the next leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, underlined the importance Beijing attached to the occasion by visiting the fair. A government body arranged for 100 Chinese books to be translated into English and German for the event. A list of Chinese writers who were to be officially approved for appearance at the fair was drawn up by the Chinese authorities. It included some authors whose frank books about the less decorous side of Chinese ordinary life, complete with sex and narcotics, would not have seen the light of day on the mainland in the past.

Their inclusion was in line with the increase in individual freedom that is evident in China today. Where the control mechanism comes into play, however, is in anything that involves politics – in particular, anything that is seen by the Communist Party as challenging its monopoly of political power.

On October 1, the Party chief, Hu Jintao, presided over an elaborate celebration in Beijing of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The occasion was symbolic of the regime for at least three reasons – it was dominated by a display of military hardware; Hu donned a suit of the kind worn by Mao Zedong to stress his links with the Great Helmsman; and ordinary people were not allowed to go into the streets of the capital to see the procession. They had to stay indoors and view the whole thing on television – they were not even permitted to go out on their balconies to watch the parade.

That was redolent of the insistence on control and security that underpins the regime in Beijing. So when the Frankfurt organizers invited a leading Chinese writer on the environment and social matters and a poet and critic who has leveled pointed questions at the Party, they were walking into trouble. The Chinese delegation protested and the Frankfurt organizer reacted by cancelling the invitations to the environmentalist, Dai Qing, who has been a trenchant critic of the Three Gorges Dam but is no longer published in her homeland, and to the poet, Bei Ling.

Undeterred, Dai went ahead and got a visa to enter Germany with the help of the writers’ organization, PEN, made it to the fair and gave a round of interviews in which she attacked China’s censorship and jailing of dissident writers. She was not given a place on the platform but spoke in a discussion from the floor, provoking another walkout by the official Chinese delegation, which brought an apology from festival organizers. In a less than apt phrase, at least for a Western audience, the former ambassador to Berlin, Mei Zhaorong, declared: “We didn’t come for a lesson on democracy.” To which Dai responded that she could speak freely in Frankfurt, and the fair organizer wrote that it was “not offering instruction in democracy, to be sure, but it is democracy in action.” A project manager at the fair was then sacked, according to German radio, because he had stopped Dai and Bei from speaking at the closing ceremony – he said that he had acted on instructions from the German Foreign Ministry.

Frankfurt is not the only place where China has sought to shape cultural events outside its borders to its agenda. Chinese directors withdrew from a film festival in Melbourne in protest at the showing of a documentary about Kadeer, whom Beijing blames for the deadly rioting in the western region of Xinjiang earlier in the year – she denies any role. Closer to home, China also protested against the projection of the film at a festival in Taiwan.

Behind all this lies the dual nature of China today. On the one hand, the country has become much more relaxed and more open in the thirty years since Deng Xiaoping launched the market-led economic reform. On the surface, urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai look like other world cities, sometimes outdoing Western metropolises in their display of consumerism. People in the streets do not appear cowed or regimented. But the underlying reality of control is still present everywhere from the secretive discussions in the ruling Politburo to the arrest of dissidents and the instruction to judge that their first duty is to serve the interests of the Party. China has made enormous steps forward materially in the last three decades, but its leadership is still unable to grasp the nettle of allowing free debate and seeks to use its hard methods to support its claims of influence in the realm of culture and ideas.

The fracas at Frankfurt showed that all too clearly. One of the great imponderables about the regime that has just celebrated its 60th anniversary is whether the straitjacket it imposes is endemic to its nature and rule. The challenge for foreign governments, companies and organizations that believe in the values of democratic freedom is to find a way of accepting China’s emergence on to the global stage without giving tacit approval to the silencing of voices like those of Dai and Bei.

Jonathan Fenby’s Penguin History of Modern China has now appeared in an updated paperback edition.

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Copyright The Economist

IT HAS become a tedious tradition for Westerners dealing with China to garnish their speeches with wisdom from the Chinese classics. Barack Obama, addressing Chinese and American leaders in July, used not just a banal quotation from Mencius, a Confucian sage, but a punchier one from Yao Ming, a Chinese basketball player: “No matter whether you are new or an old team member, you need time to adjust to one another.” Though it is 30 years since the two countries re-established diplomatic ties severed by the Communist takeover, both sides still badly need to adjust.

The heart of the problem is a profound uncertainty in both countries about where the relationship may lead. In many respects the two countries are in the same bed. Their economies have become interlocked, especially in the past decade. America is the world’s biggest debtor and China its biggest creditor. From climate change to the economic recovery, the world faces problems that demand China and America work in concert.
Prussian blues, Chinese reds

Yet relations are dogged by fears of a new cold war, or even a hot one, breaking out. Some Americans in Washington, DC, talk of China as “the new Prussia”. China has engaged in a rapid military build-up that could challenge America as the defender of Asian peace (and Taiwan’s sovereignty). Unannounced, China is building its first aircraft-carrier, yet its generals often refuse even to talk to their American peers.

Underlying the strategic competition is China’s economic rise. Its companies are “colonising” swathes of Africa and Latin America, cosying up to regimes Westerners shun. Its huge foreign-exchange holdings and its sniffing of bargains mean Chinese investment in the West will grow rapidly in the coming years. And to cap it all, China owns $800 billion of American government debt—enough to give it power of life and death over the American economy.

Tensions will get worse in the next few years for two reasons. The first is unavoidable: 2012 witnesses important political transitions in the form of elections in Taiwan and America and a Communist Party Congress in China. Second—and more generally—there has been a recalibration of perceived power. There is now talk of a G2 of China and America, implying that their global weights are nearly equal. In fact, as our special report argues, this is a misperception, and a dangerous one.

China’s economy is still less than a third the size of America’s at market exchange-rates. Its GDP per head is one-fourteenth that of America. The innovation gap between the two countries remains huge. America’s defence budget is still six times China’s. As for the Treasury bills, dumping them is not an option for China: a tumbling dollar would hurt its own economy (see article). And as American consumers spend less, while Chinese stimulus boosts its domestic spending, the huge and politically troublesome trade imbalances are shrinking. In the meantime, the danger of overegging China’s economic expansion abroad is that it will fuel protectionism at a time when American unemployment is painfully high.

In terms of geopolitical power, China has neither the clout nor the inclination to challenge America. Confidently though China’s leaders now strut the world stage, they remain preoccupied by simmering discontent at home: there are tens of thousands of protests each year. For all the economic progress, all sorts of tensions—social, cultural, demographic, even religious—haunt the regime and help explain why it resorts to nationalism so often. So it is odd, and wrong, that America’s approach towards China is driven by its own insecurities.

To simplify enormously, the danger is that a frightened United States will be too tough on China over the economy, especially trade; and not tough enough on human rights. On money matters, Mr Obama’s foolish decision to slap tariffs on Chinese tyres has given dangerous encouragement to protectionists in America. As unemployment there climbs inexorably towards 10%, the pressure will grow for Congress to fuel a self-defeating attack on Chinese exports and the undervalued yuan. This is bad economics: both China and America would lose enormously from a trade war.

If economic freedom is one American value that Mr Obama should not sacrifice on his first visit to China next month, the other is personal freedom. Chinese authoritarianism is not somehow more acceptable because China is a rising power; nor are human rights bargaining chips to be played only when expedient. That Mr Obama needs Chinese help to fix the global economy and on climate-change mitigation does not mean the leader of the free world should stifle criticism of its political system. Avoiding a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington this month was an unnecessary sop to his hosts. The Communist Party, keen to bolster its image at home, wants the trip to appear successful as much as Mr Obama does.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Philip Roth’s 30th book finds him in the middle of an unusual project: a series of four short novels. His new work, “The Humbling,” is the third in the quartet, and it’s among his darkest yet.

Like his recent two short novels, 2006’s “Everyman,” and 2008’s “Indignation,” “The Humbling” is deeply melancholy—a meditation in which all things fade, happiness is a deceit, and health, both mental and physical, is fragile. The book focuses on Simon Axler, a renowned actor who has lost his gifts. His wife leaves him, he is briefly institutionalized, and after he is released, he falls into a spiritless routine. Then he meets a younger woman and is recharged, even hopeful.

At 76, Mr. Roth continues to explore the themes that have defined his work: the eroding of family ties; man’s struggle with depression and loneliness as he ages; and the expectations that frame and inevitably isolate sexual partners. Although a British gaming company placed him among the favorites for this year’s Nobel Prize, he didn’t win. “I don’t expect anything from them,” he says. “And they usually reward my expectation.”

In an hour-long interview at the New York office of his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, he talked about great actors, literature, buying old books on the Internet and the life of married couples.

The Wall Street Journal: What are you reading these days?

Mr. Roth: Mostly what I’m doing is rereading stuff that I read in my 20s, writers who were big in my reading life who I haven’t read in 50 years. I’m talking about Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Turgenev, Conrad. I’m trying to reread the best before… I die.

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Copyright ZimEye

Harare(ZimEye) “We are enjoying Chinese food,” says the caption on a photograph of Zimbabwean children eating rice with potatoes and drinking Coca Cola at the recent Tianjin international arts festival in China.

Posted outside the old Chinese embassy building here, this is the image Beijing wants the world to see. It is the story they want people to believe. That of China as the benevolent ‘co-operating partner’ filling the shoes of the ‘evil’ West that has imposed personal sanctions on Zimbabwe’s ruling elite and withdrawn its investments after exploiting the country’s wealth for more than a century.

All over Africa, the story is the same. Overly polite Chinese diplomats taking part in small functions, giving teddy bears to children and trying hard to please the locals. This is what they do in public. In private, however, the story is entirely different.

The recent announcement by China that it is providing $7.9 billion in ‘loans’ to the Camara military junta that recently took power in Guinea through a coup d’etat has re-ignited debate about China’s real intentions in Africa.

“Blood and money in the streets” screams a headline on the investigative website Africa-Asia-Confidential.com. The story is all too familiar: China using its financial might to prop up and abet an unelected, unpopular military regime in exchange for the country’s fabulous oil wealth.

The pattern is familiar and it has been repeated many times across Africa. Unelected officials are by nature jittery. They are not popular at home, so they need weapons to pulverize the local population and keep themselves in power. They are under constant pressure internationally, so they need diplomatic support at the United Nations. A ‘friend’ like China can provide all that. For a price.

Official statistics show that 800 Chinese state firms are managing some 900 projects in Africa, mostly in oil production and mining. China’s trade with Africa is expected to rise to $100 billion annually in 2010, a significant part of that involving the exploitation of Zimbabwe’s platinum mines. Sources say the Chinese military has a special interest in Zimbabwe’s aluminium and zinc.

But the big question is, why is China so enthusiastic about a continent in turmoil, where corruption, mismanagement and political strife have forced even the most resilient Western firms to give up? Zimbabwe in particular is littered with failed deals and broken promises for international investors. Having failed to honour international investment agreements, the regime of Robert Mugabe has developed a standard strategy for dealing with the disgruntled investors: kick them out, using violence and threats!

So why are the Chinese rushing in where angels fear to tread?

The answer, though speculative, may lie in China’s own plan, which may be more ruthless than what the most ruthless of African leaders, like Mugabe can conceive.

Pinning down a dictator

After Mugabe was defeated by arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for democratic Change at the polls in March 2008, his most trusted aide, Emmerson Mnangagwa devised a new survival plan. Instead of giving up power as expected, Mnangagwa and a small band of senior army officers known as the Joint Operations Command (JOC) took over the running of the country. They deliberately delayed announcing the results while figuring out what to do next. They told Mugabe to stay put until their plan came together.

In the meantime pressure was mounting all over. The United States and other members of the UN Security Council were demanding tough action on Harare. In essence some people were calling for Mugabe’s removal by force and a swift trial at the Hague – Saddam Hussein-style.

The Chinese could help. And the Russians. Provided there was sufficient incentive for it.

In 2007, the Chinese government had been forced to abandon a deal to supply a consignment of weapons to Harare due to international pressure. The Beijing Olympics were looming. China was in no position to be seen violating international codes, in particular an arms embargo against Zimbabwe. China was forced to issue a statement re-affirming a commitment to only supply ‘humanitarian assistance’ to Harare.

However, in the confused and confusing atmosphere following Mugabe’s defeat, Harare became desperate and some say, China was tempted by the offers made by Mnangagwa.

In exchange for F-1 jetfighters, vehicles and an assortment of weapons, Mugabe would give the Chinese platinum, lithium, aluminium, zinc and diamonds.

Above all the Chinese could actually get farms, which they had been promised for many years but which had never been delivered. With a worldwide food crisis looming, China could use Zimbabwean land to grow food crops. They had tried Zambia, with a measure of success after Mugabe failed to deliver in 2004, but Zimbabwe’s infrastructure offered better prospects for commercial agriculture in the long run, at lower cost since many of the people required to run the enterprises were already well-trained by the British. So the weapons came, amid much controversy and Zimbabwe is now at the mercy of the Chinese, who now control most facets of business in the country.

Platinum and diamond mines have been seized from their owners and given to the Chinese. Farms and even buildings have been mortgaged for weapons.

Fake goods

The Chinese have courted controversy after taking over most retail outlets vacated by their Western owners who fled persecution by Mugabe. ‘Zhing zhong’ is a derogatory term referring to the flood of second-rate and fake Chinese goods flooding the Zimbabwean market. Black empowerment advocates are furious that Mugabe could chase out the British only to hand the country on a silver platter to the Chinese.

This is seen as the new face of colonialism, this time sugar-coated with patriotic language and coming from the east.

Workers complain that the Chinese employers either do not pay them or pay them a pittance with no prospects of ever holding management positions that are reserved for fellow Chinese.

All over Africa, the story is the same: The Chinese are getting much more than they are giving, with the active help of the continent’s corrupt leaders.(ZimEye, Zimbabwe)

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African countries ranked according to governance, rule of law, economic opportunity, etc.:

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African countries ranked according to governance, rule of law, economic opportunity, etc.:

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Copyright The New York Times

A FEW years ago, I accepted a Golden Globe award by barking out an expletive.

One imagines President Obama did the same when he heard about his Nobel, and not out of excitement.

When Mr. Obama takes the stage at Oslo City Hall this December, he won’t be the first sitting president to receive the peace prize, but he might be the most controversial. There’s a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven’t a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.

Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype. It starts with a quotation from a speech he gave at the United Nations last month:

“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”

They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity — if the words signal action.

The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further — all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.

Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.

These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.

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Copyright The Guardian

THE EXACT number of protesters shot dead at a demonstration in Guinea last month is unknown. Estimates vary between 150 and 200. Soldiers of the ruling junta beat and raped survivors.

The massacre was condemned by the EU, the UN secretary-general and the African Union. On what foundations, observers asked, does the Guinean regime stand other than murderous repression?

The answer came last week, with reports that Chinese investors are planning infrastructure, oil and mining projects in the country worth up to $7bn. The deal appeared to confirm a trend: China propping up noxious regimes in Africa in exchange for natural resources, no questions asked.

That process rightly provokes outrage. But such opprobrium would have more impact in Africa if China’s approach did not happen to mirror much of western policy over the last 150 years.

In 1996, trade between China and Africa was worth $3.5bn. Last year it was worth at least $66bn. Just behind the US, China is Africa’s largest trading partner. Some 900 Chinese companies operate in the continent bringing with them an army of at least 750,000 ex-pat managers and migrant labourers. This burgeoning partnership will be one of the most important economic and strategic axes of the 21st century. Its nature is generally interpreted in two ways.

First, it is said to be a modern remake of European colonialism. At best, that view casts Chinese investors as adventurers on a wild economic frontier. At worst, it casts them as plunderers taking mineral wealth from under the feet of dispossessed Africans, buttressing bad governments – in Zimbabwe for example – and corrupting good ones.

The second interpretation is that China simply invests in Africa to the mutual benefit of both.

Beijing does not just use natural resources, it finances infrastructure. New roads and bridges appear on a daily basis across the continent. China, goes this view, is building the new Africa that the west only ever talked about.

Both accounts contain truth and distortion. China is clearly unperturbed by human rights abuses except, occasionally, when they generate unwelcome publicity. It is also clear that officials bearing cash from China’s notoriously corrupt state-backed enterprises are unlikely to raise standards of governance and transparency in recipient countries.

Also, China desperately needs new markets for its mass-produced cheap goods, and work for its surplus of unskilled labour. African countries could become the arena for a Chinese-run commercial structure leaving no room for local businesses to grow. Beijing has no political or economic incentive to foster a self-sufficient African middle class.

But if the charge is that Chinese involvement is bad for Africa, it presumes western investment would be better. Perhaps it would. In recent years, trade and aid policy in the west has started taking seriously anti-corruption, governance and democracy issues.

But those principles have never been implemented to an extent that mitigates what Africans have actually experienced from the west: support for apartheid, military dictatorship, monopolisation of natural resources.

African governments face a choice between a new partner, accused of bad intentions, and the old one, proved guilty of bad practice.

And choice is key. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the west acquired a near monopoly in African trade. That it made human rights part of the terms of discussion is laudable; that it failed to make much progress is a tragically wasted opportunity. Now the monopoly is lost. If western democracies want to influence African development they must compete with the offer from Chinese autocratic state capitalism.

It is meaningless just to assert the moral superiority of trade with conditions of good governance and transparency attached. It is time to start proving it with sustained investment aimed at fostering civil society that will yield real political benefits for Africa.

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Copyright The Los Angeles Times

That the current ruler of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao, is a bore will no doubt be a relief to most people, including 1.3 billion Chinese. Hu’s dullness is remarkable given the high drama of China’s fairly recent transformation from a poor, blood-soaked totalitarian country to a rich (in patches) superpower aspiring to take over America’s lead in the not-so-distant future. But perhaps his lack of charisma is part of the point. The first 27 years of the People’s Republic, under Chairman Mao, when millions died in almost constant purges and upheavals, and tens of millions died of starvation in bizarre economic experiments, were so awful that most Chinese are quite sick of charismatic leadership.

China is the only ancient civilization in human history to have reemerged as a major force in the world. And Chinese are rightly proud of this. So why rock the boat? It is better to be ruled by boring technocrats like Hu who will keep things nice and steady.

This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights.

But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity — the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses. None are communist ideologues. All have taken the late leader Deng Xiaoping’s “To Get Rich is Glorious” slogan seriously. And not a few of them, now in their 40s, were among the Tiananmen Square demonstrators in 1989 who demanded democratic freedoms and an end to corruption.

One pokes into this contradiction at one’s peril, especially if one is a foreigner. A prominent figure in the new Beijing elite, a highly sophisticated woman who personifies the glories of getting rich in today’s China, also happens to be a daughter of the Communist aristocracy. Hong Huang is a round-faced, expensively dressed media mogul who runs a string of trendy magazines. Her mother was Mao’s English teacher. Her stepfather was Mao’s minister of foreign affairs. Hong was partly educated in New York, and one of her husbands was the filmmaker Chen Kaige, another player in Beijing’s gilded age.

A few years ago, I was taken to Hong’s lovely country house in the mountains. I had been introduced by a mutual friend, the avant-garde poet Yang Lian, who lives in London with his wife, Yo Yo, a novelist. Neither Yang Lian nor Yo Yo are, strictly speaking, political dissidents. They don’t write about politics much, but they are free-spirited authors who chose not to put up with the restrictions of an authoritarian society.

The evening started off amicably, with gossip about acquaintances on the Beijing scene. Then Hong started giving Yang advice. Why was he still living abroad? Why didn’t he come back home? Things were great in China now. Lots of money to be made. Yang should get with the program. All that modernist poetry might fool foreigners, but life had moved on in Beijing. He should do some advertising, or maybe pop lyrics. There was no need to worry about censorship and all that, if you knew how to play the game.

A certain edginess crept into the bracing mountain air. Hong’s advice began to sound more like bullying. Tiananmen had not been mentioned, but it was the elephant in the room. It was one of the reasons Yang and Yo Yo opted for residence abroad. Suddenly, Hong brought it up, turning to me as well. “Tiananmen, Tiananmen,” she said, “foreign journalists are always going on about Tiananmen. I think it’s time to forget about all that. We should move on and feel proud of our country. Foreigners just use it to bad-mouth China.”

I felt I had to say something, but I didn’t feel like picking a fight as Hong’s guest. So I put it to her that the Chinese still insist on remembering the Nanking massacre of 1937, when Japanese troops went on an orgy of rape, looting and murder in what was then the Chinese capital. Indeed, this terrible event is a central part of what is now called “patriotic education.” Japanese nationalists, on the other hand, want young Japanese to forget about it because they feel that it is time to move on and that the young should feel proud of their country.

Of course, I had picked a fight. And I will never forget the way Hong — charming, cosmopolitan, New York-educated — turned into a ranting Red Guard, screaming abuse at me, at foreigners in general and at Yang Lian and Yo Yo for defending me. Clearly a very raw nerve had been touched.

Yes, what Hong said was true. People, especially educated people with a certain cosmopolitan style, were doing all right in post-1989 China. There was money to be made, a lot of money. Fashion was booming. And so on. But at a price. And that price is what Hong called “playing the game” — knowing what subjects to avoid, how to trim your views, how to stay out of politics. Let the dull technocrats rule China with a velvet glove — and an iron fist for those who refuse to play the game.

To opt for this is entirely understandable. Exile is tough. And who wants to go to prison? Besides, life really is sweet for those who have made enough money and the necessary compromises. But they are compromises.

Because most foreign journalists, businessmen, diplomats and academics tend to meet educated, privileged Chinese like Hong, most reports from China reflect their views: that soft authoritarianism is good for China; that the Chinese masses are not ready for democracy; that to give them the right to vote would only create chaos. But the main argument for technocracy, heard not just from the Chinese elites but increasingly in Western countries too, is that it is more efficient. Once the rulers put their minds to something — the Olympic Games, birth control, economic reform, perhaps even tackling pollution — nothing and no one stands in the way of success.

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Copyright The Japan Times

Through much of its history, Japan has been peopled from highest to lowest with folk bearing no family names or ones not really theirs. Then after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, all that changed

We can be grateful to the reformers of the Meiji Period (1868-1912) for cutting Japanese names down to size. Renaming the Japanese people was part and parcel of their overthrow of feudalism. The system currently in use — surname followed by personal name — comes so naturally to us we tend to forget its revolutionary impact. The way the Japanese identify themselves today would have shocked their ancestors.

The Mr. Saito introducing himself above is imaginary, but his name, long enough to overwhelm a modern meishi (business card), was typical in pre-Meiji samurai or upper-class peasant circles. (Yes, contrary to popular supposition, most commoners had full names, sometimes very imposing ones).

Here’s how it breaks down: Saito, the family name, refers to a real or fictitious ancestor’s official post as head of ritual purification (sai) at Ise Grand Shrine in present-day Mie Prefecture, the nation’s holiest Shinto site. Ichiro, meaning “first-born son” (just as Jiro means “second son,” Saburo “third son,” and so on) isn’t so much a name, as it would be today, as a kind of decoy — more on that in a moment. Sama-no-kami means “Head of the Left Horse Stables,” an ancient title evocative of ancestry serving in the Imperial Palace, where all duties were divided for symmetry into “left” and “right.” Minamoto is a clan name. Ason is another ancient title, of the sort known as kabane — there were eight in all, awarded to clan chieftains most eligible for hereditary government office. And Tadayoshi is the personal name, whose utterance in everyday situations that decoy “Ichiro” made unnecessary. Why was that desirable? Because in Japan until the Meiji Era, personal names — used sparingly even today — were taboo.

There is no Western equivalent to the Japanese name-taboo. Westerners think of names as John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century British philosopher, defined them: “Meaningless marks set upon things (or persons) to distinguish them from one another.”

That’s more or less what the Meiji name-revolution made of Japanese names. But Japan’s past had been radically different in that respect.

“In many ancient cultures, names are animistic,” explains Herbert Plutschow, an eminent authority on the subject. “They were believed to be identical with the essence of things … The name was the thing and the thing the name.”

So it was in Japan of old.

“Given the identity of man, territory and name,” Plutschow writes in his 1995 book “Japan’s Name Culture,” “people treated names as sacred and surrounded them with taboo. Names were given and treated with the care and circumspection typical when dealing with things sacred and powerful … . Misuse of names (could) bring forth nefarious results, hence the need to control these sacred forces with ritual and taboo.”

A 12th-century episode involving a carelessly titled poetry anthology illustrates the point. It was called “Shika Wakashu.” The shi of shika means “words,” but is a homonym of the kanji character for “death.” When, shortly after the anthology’s release, both the Emperor who had commissioned it and the poet who had compiled it died, the sages of the day had little doubt as to the reason.

It is not strictly true to say that this kind of thinking has no Western equivalent. Sigmund Freud found one, and gave it a name — neurosis. “Obsessional neurotics,” he wrote in “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “behave exactly like savages in relation to names … One of these taboo patients of my acquaintance had adopted a rule against writing her own name, for fear that it might fall into the hands of someone who would then be in possession of a portion of her personality.” European kings in the 15th century began requiring their subjects to assume surnames, the better to supervise, tax and conscript them.

Some 400 years later, Meiji Japan followed suit, and for similar reasons. But pre-Meiji Japan moved to different rhythms. Its name-animism and name taboos turned a name into a special mark of divine or (what was perhaps not so different) political favor, bestowed only on those deemed deserving. Once conferred, it was to be used as sparingly as possible.

Custom and decree combined to constrict the diffusion of names, from the ninth-century Emperor Ninmyo’s injunction, “If there is anyone in the nation’s provinces whose name coincides with the Emperor’s name, he must change his name,” to supreme warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s so-called sword hunt of 1587 — a rigid class system (samurai, peasant, artisan and merchant, in that order) whose clearest symbol was a ban on non-samurai bearing either swords or surnames. (The surname ban, as we shall see, was honored more in the breach than in the observance.)

“Given the awesome power of animistic language and its intricate system of references,” Plutschow observes, “the Japanese have preferred to avoid direct naming.”

Emperors, holders of the most sacred names of all, were never addressed by them; 20th-century Western journalists broke the mold with Emperor Showa, blithely referring to him by his taboo personal name Hirohito, just as 400 years earlier the first Europeans in Japan had ignorantly — certainly not defiantly, since their own kings, queens and popes were known by their first names — addressed the likes of Hideyoshi by his name rather than by his title. That was something no Japanese would have dared do.

It makes for an eerie, formless world, this aversion to personal names — at least it does to moderns, foreign and Japanese alike.

The 11th-century classic “The Tale of Genji” mirrors it well. Imagine a 1,000-page novel, almost none of whose 430-odd characters is ever identified by a personal name, though modern translations generally assign fixed “names” in the interest of readability.

Characters in the original are referred to by transient nicknames or by titles — “captain,” “councilor,” “mistress of the west wing,” and so on — which change as they are promoted or demoted, and are shared by many besides. The royal characters are known by numbers: First Prince, Second Princess. Lady Rokujo, one of Genji’s conquests, takes the name she is traditionally known by from her residence on Kyoto’s Rokujo (Sixth Avenue). Genji himself goes by his various titles; he is rarely named in the original text.

And Murasaki Shikibu is not the “name” of the court lady who wrote the Tale: Murasaki means “purple” and is one of the nicknames given to the novel’s fictional heroine, Genji’s consort; Shikibu refers to the Ministry of Ceremonial (Shikibusho), where the author’s father had served.

Prior to 1875, when the Meiji reformers “modernized” the entire system (or, if we accept Freud’s terminology, cured it of its neuroses), Japanese children received their taboo personal name not at birth but in an initiation ceremony held for boys at 15, for girls at 13.

Modern first names like Ichiro (first son) and Jiro (second son) are reminders of earlier times when these were convenient substitutes for tabooed personal names. There were equivalents for girls — Aneko, for example, meaning “first daughter”; but girls seem on the whole to have drawn more interesting everyday name-substitutes such as Ako (Cute), or — more interesting still — Kusako (literally, “Shit Child”). The point was not to disparage females but, explains Plutschow, “to keep demons away from them.” Boys on occasion were vulnerable to similar protection. The 10th-century poet Ki no Tsurayuki was known in infancy as Akoguso — “Cute Little Shit.”

Early Japan was a loose agglomeration of some 1,000 clans paying vague deference to the Emperor — a deference stoked by essentially meaningless but dignifying Imperial titles, of which the “Ason” displayed by our fictitious Mr. Saito above was one.

That arrangement (though not the titles) came to an end with Japan’s first revolution, a centralizing drive known as the Taika Reform, whose opening act was a palace coup in 645. Prime architect of the coup, and of the ensuing constitution that (in theory at least) invested absolute, nationwide power in the Emperor, was one Nakatomi no Kamatari (614-669).

The Nakatomi clan in ages past had been high-ranking Shinto ritualists. Buddhism eclipsed them after it arrived from Korea and its supporters gained increasing influence at court. But with the coup, the Nakatomi were on the cusp of new power and prosperity. Symbolic of fresh beginnings, the Emperor, in gratitude for Kamatari’s backing, accorded the clan a new name.

Like most clan names, and in accord with the age-old Shinto view of land as being divine, the name was toponymic — a place name, that of the Fujiwara region of the Nara Plain. For centuries thereafter the Fujiwara carried all before them. They presided over the brilliant cultural flowering of the Heian Period (794-1185), in which Murasaki Shikibu and Ki no Tsurayuki — to name only two literary luminaries — flourished.

By marrying their daughters to emperors, the Fujiwara effectively controlled the throne, so dominating the court bureaucracy and its hereditary offices that some designation more precise than “Fujiwara” became necessary.

How to distinguish one Fujiwara branch from another? A device we noticed in the “The Tale of Genji” seemed to come naturally — ministers were referred to by the location of their residences: Ichijo (First Avenue), Nijo (Second Avenue) and so on. Thus Fujiwara no Michinaga, the greatest power in the land around the time Murasaki Shikibu was serving at court and writing her masterpiece, was known in his own day as Mido Kampaku — Mido referring to a temple he built and at which for a time he resided, Kampaku being his title, one translation of which is “civil dictator.”

Because Fujiwara ministers commonly resided on the estates of their wives’ families, these “names” (Ichijo, Nijo, and so on) were not transmitted down the generations, and so cannot properly be called surnames. But in them at least the notion of surnames was born. It was to mature later as family groups solidified at the expense of the more unwieldy clans they emerged from amid the political chaos of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

No equivalent evolution occurred in China or Korea, which is why Japan today has so many more surnames than its closest neighbors and cultural parents.

Two other Heian Period clans must be mentioned, if only because their names are famous even now. These are the Minamoto and the Taira. Both were offshoots of the Imperial family, claiming descent from ninth-century ancestors born royal but, as younger sons, divested of royal status.

Three hundred years later, with the Fujiwara in decline, they fought Japan’s first and greatest civil war. The Minamoto emerged victorious to inaugurate the Kamakura Period (1192-1333) and spawn the unique breed of warrior-noble known as the samurai.

Our Mr. Saito, we notice, claims (probably fictitiously) Minamoto ancestry.
Michael Hoffman is the author of “Birnbaum: A Novel of Inner Space” (Printed Matter Press, 2008). His Web site is at www.michaelhoffman.squarespace.com

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Copyright The New York Times

(A lovely lede to a review of a favorite author, Ishiguro.)

“The owl of Minerva,” wrote Hegel, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” By this he meant to say that an epoch or an era cannot really be judged or estimated until it has entered its closing phase. For those of us fated to lead smaller and less portentous existences, it is still the gathering shade of evening that very often gives rise to our most intense, and sometimes necessarily our most melancholy, moments of reflection and retrospect.
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NOCTURNES

Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

By Kazuo Ishiguro

A whole musical repertoire has been consecrated to (one of my favorite words) the crepuscular. Many of these compositions, too, are marked by a certain mournfulness, though some of Debussy’s nocturnes can strike the ear as relatively affirmative. It has been proposed that Debussy was influenced by the nightfall paintings of James McNeill Whistler, and it would certainly be apt for the purposes of this article if that turned out to be true. The best-loved of Whistler’s “moonlights,” as he called them, is the hauntingly lit “Nocturne” that gives us Battersea Bridge as a long London day fades to black. Critics seem to agree that Whistler’s main influence at that time was the Japanese woodblock master Hiroshige, whose marvelous work, along with other Japanese aesthetic achievements, was just then being made known to the West.

So Kazuo Ishiguro has quite a tradition on which to draw in these five tales of human emotion in the waning hours of light. It’s the time of day that isn’t quite day when some people — such as myself — start to feel truly awake. It’s also pre-eminently the moment, especially if moonrise chances to be involved, when life may seem rather stale without music. This is all well known to the cafe proprietors of Venice — the location of the first and last of these stories — who make sure to employ bands or orchestras that never cease to perform. Indeed, the narrator of “Crooner” tells us that as a freelance guitarist on the Piazza San Marco he can remember “once last summer, going from band to band and playing ‘The Godfather’ nine times in one afternoon.”

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

QAPQAL, China — Hasutai gingerly turns on the tape recorder and places it on a table. Out of it emanates something he thought he’d never hear: his native tongue, Manchu, spoken by a living person.
Revival of a Language

Listen to a traditional story in Manchu and read along with an English translation. Plus, learn some key phrases and see how they compare to Mandarin.
[manchu]

Hasutai is a Manchu, descendant of a nomadic warrior tribe that conquered China in the 17th century and ruled it for more than 250 years. Generations of persecution have all but eliminated the Manchus’ language.

So Hasutai, who in the Manchu tradition goes by the one name, has come to this remote corner of China on a quest. His goal is to connect with members of the Xibe tribe — a reclusive group who speak a forgotten dialect similar to his people’s. Along with a band of like-minded young people in half a dozen Chinese cities, Hasutai has started schools, Web sites, written textbooks and recorded the few remaining Manchu speakers for posterity. “At some point you realize that the first language you’re speaking isn’t your mother tongue,” says Hasutai. “You feel like an orphan. You want to find your mother.”

Hasutai is at the vanguard of an explosion of ethnic awareness and pride across China. The nation’s 1.3 billion people are overwhelmingly Han Chinese, but roughly 9% of the population are ethnic minorities: Manchus and Mongolians, Uighurs and Tibetans as well as dozens of others. Although their numbers are small, minorities live on nearly half of China’s territory, including most of its borderlands. Over the past two years they have been at the center of bloody riots that claimed hundreds of lives.

As China’s Communist Party marks its 60th year this week with a series of festivities to symbolize national unity, Chinese society is struggling to overcome growing ethnic rifts.
[Puyi, China’s last Manchu emperor, in 1956.] Associated Press

For decades, China’s authoritarian policies kept a lid on ethnic expression. Now, as the party loosens control over society, individuals are defining themselves by their culture — embracing who they are, what language they speak and what their ancestors accomplished. “This is not a hobby or an interest,” says Hukshen, a 22-year-old Manchu language student. “This is a burning emotion I feel, a need to find out who I am.”

On some levels, this search can be a positive force, helping to give meaning to people’s lives. “Having these outlets helps stability,” says Sara Davis, director of Asia Catalyst, a non-governmental organization that promotes grassroots organizing. “If [people] feel proud of their culture, they’re invested in their society.”

But because many of China’s 55 minority groups still feel marginalized, expressions of anger and violence are on the rise. Over the past two years, China has suffered serious ethnic rioting, something rare in China’s recent history. Earlier this year, riots in China’s vast region of Xinjiang left nearly 200 dead and 2,000 wounded.

A heightened sense of ethnic identity also poses challenges because China has few national symbols or myths to hold the groups together. Most Manchus, for example, are unimpressed with the Great Wall, a defensive fortification built by Chinese to keep them out. Ma Rong, a prominent writer and thinker at Peking University, says society is fragmenting.

“We should rethink a new framework of nation building,” Mr. Ma wrote in a recent essay. He called upon people to “endeavor to make the country consider the ‘nation’ as the most essential and the most fundamental identification group.”

The princes of the Manchu dynasty circa 1900. In the Manchu tradition one name is often used. From left, Tsai Tao, Ah, Su, Tsai Fu, Gen. Yin Tchang, Tsai Hsuen, Na Tung, Hsue, the president Tsao and Chia-Lai.
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The princes of the Manchu dynasty circa 1900. In the Manchu tradition one name is often used. From left, Tsai Tao, Ah, Su, Tsai Fu, Gen. Yin Tchang, Tsai Hsuen, Na Tung, Hsue, the president Tsao and Chia-Lai.
The princes of the Manchu dynasty circa 1900. In the Manchu tradition one name is often used. From left, Tsai Tao, Ah, Su, Tsai Fu, Gen. Yin Tchang, Tsai Hsuen, Na Tung, Hsue, the president Tsao and Chia-Lai.
The princes of the Manchu dynasty circa 1900. In the Manchu tradition one name is often used. From left, Tsai Tao, Ah, Su, Tsai Fu, Gen. Yin Tchang, Tsai Hsuen, Na Tung, Hsue, the president Tsao and Chia-Lai.

Much of the identification can be traced to the Communists’ policies. Soon after the party took power in 1949, it adopted minority programs imported from the Soviets. The population was divided into ethnic groups. Today there are 56. For those who didn’t fit neat categories, social scientists created classifications. Even the Chinese majority got their own label, “Han.” The basic idea was to keep an eye on minority groups — especially those in strategically important regions of the country like Tibet and Xinjiang — in order to prevent uprisings.

The policies have been a double-edged sword. By emblazoning people’s ethnicity on their identity cards and passports, few can forget their past. Yet newer policies push assimilation. Officially, Beijing encourages minorities to learn languages and offers schooling, broadcasts and publications in minority languages. In practice, these offerings are minimal.

Minority education often takes place for a few grades in elementary school, while broadcasts are often just for an hour or two a day, or even a week. Coupled with economic forces that push them to learn Chinese, this neglect means that many young minorities have only a rudimentary understanding of their mother tongues.

For Manchus, the sense of loss was particularly acute. Manchus originated from China’s northeast, which under the country’s last dynasty, the Qing, was off-limits to Han Chinese immigration. As the dynasty collapsed toward the end of the 19th century, Chinese migrants flooded in. When Japan occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, Manchu language education was replaced by Japanese. Once China retook the region at the war’s end, Japanese classes were replaced by Chinese. The Manchu language was never again taught on a wide scale.

As a result, virtually no Manchus today have heard Manchu spoken by their parents. For many, it was taboo. Gebu Algika, a 30-year-old sports promoter who helps run one of the Manchu classes in Beijing, said his grandfather, a prominent Manchu, was executed by the Communists shortly after the 1949 takeover for being a “reactionary.” His family fearfully changed its ethnic registration from Manchu to Han. “People born after 1950 don’t speak it,” he says. “It was politically dangerous.”

As rulers of China’s last dynasty, Manchus suffered especially under communist rule. Members of the court underwent ideological indoctrination: Most famously the last emperor, Puyi, whose life story was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci, became a gardener. His relatives were forbidden to speak Manchu, and Manchu schools in Beijing closed down.

Today, only one elementary school in the country teaches Manchu, and that only as an elective. In universities and a handful of private schools, written Manchu is still taught but purely as a means to reading the Qing dynasty’s archives.

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RECENT SPEAKING APPEARANCES

November 9, 2009 - Featured Guest National Public Radio, “Talk of the Nation” (along with Madeleine Albright and others) NPR “Talk of the Nation” show about the end of the Cold War around the world, inc. Africa: NPR “Talk of the Nation” show about the end of the Cold War around the world, inc. Africa: Click to hear the show (My segments are at 25:19, 37:30, and 45:00 minutes into the program.”

November 4, 2009 - Dean’s Roundtable Speaker: “China’s Expanding African Frontier and its Global Consequence. The School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California at San Diego

October 21, 2009 - Panelist - The U.S. and China, Partners or Enablers, Action Speaks Radio, Providence, Rhode Island Click to hear the program

October 9, 2009 - Moderator: New Media and Global Transformation, The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

October 7, 2009 - Featured co-speaker - The Goldstein Program in Public Affairs, Washington College

September 24, 2009 - Panelist - Communicating Africa: Transcending Borders with Digital Media, a one-day conference at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

March 6, 2009 - Speaker, China in Africa Symposium, organized by the African Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Center, The University of Indiana, Bloomington. Same date, Featured Guest Speaker of the Department of Journalism, University of Indiana.

April 14, 2008 – Featured Speaker, Crain Series Lecture, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

April 9, 2008 - Featured Speaker, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Africa Encounters Global China Symposium

April 8, 2008 – Featured Speaker, Carleton College: “China’s new African frontier and the implications for the continent?” I also gave a guest lecture on Disappearing Shanghai, my three-year photography project.

February 12, 2008 – Featured lecturer, Washington University: The Great Transformation: China’s Rush to Urbanize and the Fate of its Cities. This talk included a museum gallery exhibition of my Disappearing Shanghai photography at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis.

February 26, 2007 – Regent’s Lecture, University of California – Berkeley: On China’s Future. Also guest lectured on Disappearing Shanghai, my three-year photography project.

September 25, 2008 - Keynote speaker, China and Africa, Emerging Patterns in Globalization and Development, hosted by the China Quarterly and The School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

November 2005 – Featured speaker, The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. On a changing China.

October 2005 – Guest Lecturer, University of Wisconsin, Madison: “The Politics of Memory: World War Two and Sino-Japanese Relations Today.”

May 2005 – Featured Speaker, Washington University

May 2005 – Guest Lecturer, Dartmouth College: A View of the World, Reporting from Asia, Africa and the Americas.

May 2005 – Featured Speaker, The Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois’s Annual Media Symposium

April 2005 – Guest Speaker on Africa and China, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

January 2005 – Featured Speaker, The Winter Series, Calvin College, Flint Michigan

November 2003 – Featured Guest Speaker, African Studies Program, Whitman College

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There’s been a lot of attention to this ancient book, driven by the appearance of a new translation. I’ve bee reading the Meredith McKinney version, which was first published in 2006 from Penguin, and is accompanied by a very astute essay by the translator.

What is most striking for me about this book is the power of observation exhibited in Shonagon’s writing. The author, a 10th century lady of the court in what is now Kyoto has one of the most acute eyes for setting and for clothing a reader is likely to encounter, and she consistently conveys a sense of atmosphere that is infused with poetry.

There are no outright politics, such as we would recognize them, in this work, but there is something very particular occurring throughout that flows from the author’s own deep wellsprings of culture and intelligence. In what was a deeply unequal society, we have a wry and powerful statement about the capabilities and wit of women.

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Brief, luminous and wise. Revisiting a classic 1953 text that depicts the process of apprenticeship with a Zen master archer.

“As soon as we reflect, deliberate, and conceptualize, the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought interferes.We no longer eat while eating, we not longer sleep while sleeping. The arrow is off the string but does not fly straight to the target, nor does the target stand where it is. Calculation, which is miscalculation, sets in.”

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