A Glimpse of the World: November 2009 Archives

Not For All the News in China, Part I

November 23, 2009 4:17 PM

Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia

The past week’s flurry of stories and opinion pieces chronicling President Barack Obama’s fortunes in the Far East made much of the global recession and China’s role as a major investor in the U.S. In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic.

Former New York Times Shanghai bureau chief Howard French says that negative narrative failed to take several things into account: the strict Chinese image control that doesn’t allow the sort of media celebrity that Obama enjoys elsewhere in the world; progress made in backroom diplomatic discussions; Obama’s stated objectives; and his quiet diplomatic style that doesn’t produce the kind of sound bytes that a scorekeeping-focused press Washington press corps feeds on. French lived in China for five years. He returned to the U.S. last August as a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches a seminar on reporting on China. The second part of this interview can be found here.

Howard French:

“I don’t think that [the press] have gotten it right, to put things very simply. I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.

“The piece that really relates directly to China, I think, and the signals I get from this coverage are equally distressing. The unstated element for me in all of this coverage of Obama’s visit is a kind of hysterical insecurity in the American mind about the possibility—or reality, depending on how you look at it—of American decline. China being the most obvious and immediate symbol of American vulnerability and decline. You put these two things together, the hysterical insta-pundit on the one hand and the hysterical anxiety on the other hand, you end up with this kind of coverage that says essentially that Obama goes to China and doesn’t get instant, public, overt gratification on issues A through Zed and therefore it was a failed trip, or we’re losing ground to China or we have no more standing or we have no more clout or the Chinese moment is upon us—any number of variations on this decline-related theme.

“A great irony of this, and I’m making generalizations about the coverage, but one great irony is that the fact the Chinese had to pack an audience in Shanghai with Communist party youth and people who were trained to ask very anodyne questions or to ask very obvious political questions. You can look at this on the one hand as a sign of American lack of influence with China, as many people were quick to do, or you can look at it on the other hand as a sign of, ‘Hey we’re talking about China like the next great thing and they’re so insecure they can’t even allow a Q and A with the president?’ That to me is a more interesting interpretation.

“Obama went into this trip saying beforehand that he planned to do things a bit differently, that he was going to try to establish some mutual confidence and trust with the Chinese and to work in the long range sense on achieving things on a variety of different issues. This was pretty much declared prior to the trip and made explicit and it’s consonant with a number of things that we know about Obama’s style in other areas. So then to see the trip having almost not even been completed and people becoming very excited that he ‘Didn’t say this’ or he ‘Didn’t do that,’ meaning that he didn’t say this or do that publicly, strikes me as being rather forgetful of the premise that the president himself had tried to establish for his approach in this aspect of his foreign policy.

“I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They’re at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can’t be an expert on every question, and so you’re part of the Washington press corps and if you’re really good and really diligent, you’re going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China.

“And now you’re in China on a three- or four-day trip and all of a sudden you’re having to weigh in on in important things and you don’t speak any Chinese and you don’t know any Chinese people and you’re in the security bubble of the president and you’re traveling from stop to stop on a stopwatch with the guy and being pumped all the time by the president’s aides—and this is true of all presidents—and subject to their spin and you’ve got these short deadlines and you’ve got to write these things. So they operate within those constraints. It’s a very difficult process, so I’m being critical of the press but I don’t see any obvious ways around that particular piece of things. “

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History is repeated as tragedy in the new scramble for Africa Chinese disregard for standards of governance has become a leitmotif

November 16, 2009 4:30 PM

Monday, 16 November 2009

For the past few months Guinea has been ruled by a young army captain who led a
successful coup. Not that you’d necessarily know about it: the regime has only
hit the world news twice. The first time was for shooting 150 pro-democracy
demonstrators: international protest at this abuse has now escalated into an
arms embargo. The second time was when the regime signed a $7bn
resource-extraction deal with the Chinese. This infusion of money has made a
mockery of international pressure.

But to grasp the deeper affront, the sheer scale of the deal must be
appreciated. Guinea is currently a no-go area for reputable resource-extraction
companies and so the Chinese faced no competition. If under these conditions
they are prepared to pay $7bn for the rights to resource extraction, it is
reasonable to suppose that they are worth much more. Yet the national income of
Guinea is only $3bn. These natural assets, vast relative to its income, were the
society’s lifeline out of poverty. They have been disposed of in haste by a
regime without legitimacy.

Guinea is an extreme instance, but the disregard of the Chinese for standards of
governance in winning resource-extraction contracts has become a leitmotif. The
result has been not only a scramble for Africa, but a race back to the bottom.
After decades of shaming behaviour, by the Millennium the major
resource-extraction companies of the OECD were being pressured into decency.
New legislation across the OECD ensured that if they bribed, they committed a
criminal offence within their home country. They became subject to scrutiny
from NGOs. New awareness among young people ensured that employees expected
their companies to behave in a socially responsible manner.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), launched in 2003,
rapidly gained over 30 signatories from governments and companies committed to
transparent reporting of their activities. China is not party to the EITI and
so has a massive competitive advantage over firms constrained by honesty.

Yet Chinese involvement in African resource extraction can be a force for good.
They have provided a welcome infusion of competition, raising prices for
African resources and reducing prices for the construction projects on which
many Chinese firms now bid. The Chinese innovation of offering a package of
infrastructure in return for extraction rights can also be socially useful. It
ensures that the natural assets are replaced by some other asset instead of
being used exclusively for consumption.

Resource extraction in Africa has been problematic because of the way in which
the rights to extract natural resources have been sold, and because African
governments have not been sufficiently accountable to their citizens. Wherever
rights are sold through secret bilateral negotiations, the outcome is suspect
due to problems of agency and asymmetric information. The agency problem is
that the citizens who are the rightful owners of the rights to natural assets
cannot adequately control their political representatives who conduct the
negotiation. The information problem is that companies know far better than
governments what extraction rights are worth. There is a simple solution to
these problems: auctions between informed bidders, properly verified, are not
subject to corruption and reveal fair value.

Addressing the lack of accountability of government to citizen is more
difficult. Elections are not enough: typically in resource-rich countries they
work very badly as politicians divert resource revenues to finance the
patronage systems that keep them in power. Citizens need to understand the
chain of decisions involved in harnessing natural assets for development. New
technology has made the information problem less daunting.

Historically, Africa’s natural resources have been plundered. The few have
stolen from the many, and the present has stolen from the future. The foreign
companies and governments that extract Africa’s resources in circumstances in
which the revenues are unlikely to benefit ordinary people, alive and to come,
connive at plunder. By any reasonable assessment that is what the Chinese have
done in Guinea. In all African societies there are brave people struggling for
change: 150 of them were just murdered in Guinea. The international community
has a responsibility to ensure that their bravery is not in vain.

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Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP

November 15, 2009 6:11 PM

Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP rankings says PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

* Shanghai projected to rise from 25th to 9th place in the global city GDP rankings between 2008 and 2025 and show the strongest growth rate of any current top 30 city
* Mumbai to rise from 29th to 11th and Beijing from 38th to 17th place

London, 5 NOV 2009 — Emerging market city economies are projected to rise significantly up the global GDP rankings between 2008 and 2025 according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP research. The figures provide an insight into how the global economic landscape looks set to change and which cities may provide the most compelling draw for capital and labour in the future.

The largest 100 cities accounted for around 30% of global GDP in 2008 and some have bigger economies than medium-sized countries like Sweden or Switzerland. However, systematic global data on the size of city economies has been lacking and has tended to focus on ranking by population which gives only part of the picture. PwC published the first set of global city GDP rankings in March 2007 and has now updated these rankings to 2008 with projections to 2025.

John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said::

“Global economic activity is concentrated in the world’s largest cities and it is important to understand how those cities compare, especially when many developed economies are experiencing economic difficulties while countries like China and India continue to grow.”

Looking at the 2008 rankings (see table below), Mexico City and Sao Paulo are the emerging economy cities already in the top 10 when ranked by GDP, but Buenos Aires is not far behind in 13th place and Moscow in 15th. Shanghai and Mumbai have jumped into the top 30 with their strong growth between 2005 and 2008. There are also a number of fast-growing emerging economy cities just outside the current top 30, including Istanbul (34th), Beijing (38th), Manila (40th), Cairo (42nd) and Guangzhou (44th).

Looking ahead to 2025, the study sees the rise of the emerging economy cities continuing. Shanghai, Mumbai, Beijing, Delhi, Guangzhou, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul and Cairo are all expected to rise significantly in the global city GDP rankings as the attached table shows.

Hawksworth added:

“If you look at the projected percentage GDP growth from 2008 to 2025 of the top emerging and the top advanced economy cities, the comparison is stark. Cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Mumbai, for example, are projected to grow at around 6-7% per annum in real terms, whereas cities such as New York, Tokyo, Chicago and London grow only at around 2% per annum on average. In absolute terms, the projected rise in Shanghai’s GDP between 2008 and 2025 is greater than the combined GDP increase for London and Paris together.”

Nonetheless, Tokyo has retained the top ranking it held in 2005, remaining narrowly ahead of New York, with both having economies worth nearly $1.5 trillion in 2008 (broadly similar to national economies such as Spain) and projected to grow to nearly $2 trillion by 2025. Los Angeles is in clear third place with Chicago, London and Paris vying for the next three places (each of which has an estimated GDP significantly higher than national economies such as South Africa and Belgium).

The most notable changes in top 10 rankings since 2005 have been London edging ahead of Paris to 5th place and Sao Paulo jumping into 10th place. Aside from London and Paris, only two other European cities (Moscow and Madrid) made the top 30 in 2008. This reflects the fact that countries like Germany and Italy (which only became unified nation states in the 19th century) have several major cities that are medium-sized in global terms, rather than one dominant capital city as in the UK or France.

In 2008 the total number of emerging economy cities in the top 100 was 39 with the advanced economies providing 61. As shown in the attached table (in note 2 below), in 2025 this gap is projected to narrow sharply with the emerging economies providing 48 of the top 100 cities and the advanced economies 52.

Top 30 urban agglomeration GDP rankings in 2008 and illustrative projections to 2025
(using UN definitions and population estimates)

Click to read more">Click to see the tables

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Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP

November 15, 2009 5:59 PM

Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP rankings says PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said::

Hawksworth added:

Top 30 urban agglomeration GDP rankings in 2008 and illustrative projections to 2025
(using UN definitions and population estimates)

Click to read more">Click to see the tables

Posted at 5:59 PM · Comments (0)

Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP

November 15, 2009 5:59 PM

Emerging market city economies set to rise rapidly in global GDP rankings says PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said::

Hawksworth added:

Top 30 urban agglomeration GDP rankings in 2008 and illustrative projections to 2025
(using UN definitions and population estimates)

Click to read more">Click to see the tables

Posted at 5:59 PM · Comments (0)

Before Sunrise Will Obama seize a rare opportunity for change in U.S.-Japan relations?

November 14, 2009 11:40 AM

When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has never been an American ally. It was first a rival, then an enemy, and finally, after it lost the war it foolishly started with the U.S., it became a protectorate, not an ally.

The distinction matters. An alliance is an institution negotiated between two sovereign governments in which each agrees to a series of reciprocal obligations that have the force of law. A protectorate arrangement, by contrast, sees the protectorate retaining a degree of control of its internal affairs, but surrendering authority to manage external relations—most crucially, in the area of military decision-making. In return for the protectorate’s ceding of this key aspect of sovereignty, the dominant partner in the arrangement agrees to provide for the defense of the protectorate.

By these lights, Japan has been a protectorate of the United States since 1951. As a condition for ending the Occupation that year, the United States essentially required Japan to agree to the terms that have governed relations between the two countries ever since. Japan’s security would be seen to by the United States; the U.S. would enjoy unrestricted access to a network of military bases throughout the Japanese archipelago. Japan would pay lip service to American foreign policy goals without being expected to do anything substantive outside Japan to support them; inside Japan, leftists were to be kept away from the levers of power and no one could interfere with American military operations. Japan was no longer to be the beneficiary of direct American aid and was not to be permitted to trade with China, its historically most important external market; to compensate, Japan was to receive unrestricted access to the American market at an undervalued exchange rate, and it was allowed to develop its own economy in whatever ways it saw fit—trade with China excepted—including the construction of barriers to foreign goods and capital.

These arrangements were bitterly opposed by both the left and the right in Japan. The left felt betrayed by a United States that had started the Occupation with talk of genuine economic and political democracy, only to end up handing control of Japan’s key governing institutions back to the men who had run the war economy. Meanwhile, many on the right believed the legacy of the Occupation and the terms on which it had ended had emasculated their country in both a cultural and a political sense.

Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who had negotiated the 1951 Peace Treaty, pleaded that he had gotten the best deal for Japan that he could, and he was probably right—it had become obvious that the U.S. was simply unwilling to end the Occupation on any other terms and Japan had no way to force it to do so.

But as Japan set about rebuilding its economy, the intense domestic opposition to Japan’s status as a dependent protectorate began to dissolve. For without being fully conscious of what they were doing, the leaders of Japan’s corporations and economic bureaucracies found that they had constructed a model for economic growth that over time delivered both global supremacy in key industrial segments and higher economic growth rates than had ever been enjoyed to that point in human history. True, the model depended on circumstances that were likely to prove temporary—an undervalued currency, access to a limitless external market for export of goods and capital without a quid-pro-quo, and relief from both the financial and political burdens of maintaining a large military establishment. But that did not lessen the model’s effectiveness in providing both rapidly rising living standards and a renewed sense of national purpose and pride.

Nominally overseeing the system that grew out of the postwar arrangements was an entity known from its formation in 1955 as the Liberal Democratic Party(“LDP”). To paraphrase Voltaire, this loose confederation of interest groups was neither liberal, nor democratic, nor a political party in the sense of the French Socialists or the UK Conservatives. Essentially power brokers, they adjudicated conflicts among the various semi-autonomous fiefdoms that constitute Japan’s political economy. And they managed the relationship with the United States. The LDP did what was necessary to soothe Washington’s periodic spasms of irritation when Japan’s economic methods caused political problems for the White House, or when Tokyo was found insufficiently ardent in cheering on America’s latest obsession, whether that be falling dominoes in Southeast Asia or tin-pot dictators in the Middle East. Indeed, no country save Israel devoted more zealous attention to cultivating America’s good opinion than Japan. And the mark of the really effective Japanese politician was his ability to mollify the United States and whatever domestic interest groups had to be made to swallow the concession of the moment necessary to keep the Americans from grumbling too much.

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Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy Author Cormac McCarthy, 76, talked about love, religion, his 11-year-old son, the end of the world and the movie based on his novel ‘The Road.’ He was just getting going.

November 14, 2009 11:36 AM

(an excerpt)

The Wall Street Journal: When you sell the rights to your books, do the contracts give you some oversight over the screenplay, or is it out of your hands?

Mr. McCarthy: No, you sell it and you go home and go to bed. You don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.

WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw “The Road” in your head?

CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in “The Road” did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

WSJ: When you discussed making “The Road” into a movie with John, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story?

CM: A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

WSJ: “The Road” is this love story between father and son, but they never say, “I love you.”

CM: No. I didn’t think that would add anything to the story at all. But a lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say that he’s the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid [in the book] says are things that John said. John said, “Papa, what would you do if I died?” I said, “I’d want to die, too,” and he said, “So you could be with me?” I said, “Yes, so I could be with you.” Just a conversation that two guys would have.

WSJ: Why don’t you sign copies of “The Road”

CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.

WSJ: How many did you have?

CM: 250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, “I have a signed copy of the ‘The Road,’” and I say, “No. You don’t.”

WSJ: What was your relationship like with the Coen brothers on “No Country for Old Men”?

CM: We met and chatted a few times. I enjoyed their company. They’re smart and they’re very talented. Like John, they didn’t need any help from me to make a movie.

WSJ: “All the Pretty Horses” was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

CM: It could’ve been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

WSJ: People have said “Blood Meridian” is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.
Fathers and Sons

‘The Road’ is part of a long history of films about dads and their boys. It’s often the kid who does the most teaching.

A boy named Dink (Jackie Cooper) sticks by his dad, a boozy fighter, through Tijuana boxing matches, desperate gambling and the misfortunes of their race horse Little Champ. Wallace Beery earned an Oscar as the father who insists on a final fight to redeem himself and provide for his son.

When the key to a poor man’s livelihood, his bicycle, is stolen, he desperately tracks the culprit through Rome, shadowed by his son Bruno. Director Vittorio De Sica’s intimate study of postwar poverty is a prime example of Italy’s neorealist movement, which prized authentic detail over plot.

Tackling two then-daring subjects for Hollywood—divorce and single fatherhood—Dustin Hoffman played a career-obsessed dad who learns to care for his young son. His misadventures in the kitchen are played for laughs, but Mr. Hoffman’s performance (and that of co-star Meryl Streep) reflected serious social shifts, resulting in a box-office smash.
[ mccarthyside ] Everett Collection
Life Is Beautiful (1997)

The film opens in 1939 as Roberto Benigni’s clownish Guido courts his future wife, then shifts to a concentration camp, where Guido convinces his son that their imprisonment is just part of an elaborate game. Also, the film’s director, Mr. Benigni, walked a risky line between Holocaust drama and comedy, and was rewarded with multiple Oscars.

Playing a coal miner, Chris Cooper joined a long line of overbearing celluloid fathers who oppress gifted sons, inadvertently driving them to greatness. The boy in question, Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal), was a real-life rocketry buff in West Virginia during the Sputnik scare, and grew up to be a NASA engineer.
[ mccarthyside ] Walt Disney/Everett Collection
Finding Nemo (2003)

Pixar scored points with critics for its trademark animation style—The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called the movie “a prodigy of visual energy”—but audiences also responded to a father-son story heavy on loss. A clownfish named Marlin loses his mate to a predator, then goes on a quest for his son, who’s been plunked into a dentist’s aquarium.

CM: That’s all crap. The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

WSJ: Can you tell me about the book you’re working on, in terms of story or setting?

CM: I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl.

WSJ: Some critics focus on how rarely you go deep with female characters.

CM: This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She’s committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

WSJ: You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in Tennessee. Why did you end up in the Southwest?

CM: I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic.

CM: I did, a bit. It wasn’t a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don’t even remember religion ever even being discussed.

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in “The Road” questions and curses?

CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

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The China Awaiting President Obama

November 10, 2009 6:08 PM

BROOKINGS NORTHEAST ASIA COMMENTARY | NUMBER 33

David Shambaugh, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies
The Brookings Institution
NOVEMBER 2009 —
As President Obama prepares for his first personal and presidential visit to the People’s Republic of China, expectations are high concerning the U.S.-China relationship.
Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary

What kind of China will President Obama encounter? What mood will he find the Chinese leadership in? What is China’s government wrestling with at present? How will these considerations impact the Sino-American relationship?

The kind of partner that Beijing can be for Washington is always very much conditioned by the state of China’s myriad domestic concerns. This is the prism through which Chinese leaders view the world, and their ability to pursue and respond to external partnerships is very much conditioned by internal pressures. The following are some personal impressions gained over the past three months of living in Beijing.

The Present Political Balance

While some analysts outside of China see factional divisions and coalitions in the current leadership (notably Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Cheng Li), inside of China the leadership appears remarkably cohesive. Occasionally one hears marginal complaints about one or another person or policy, but on the whole the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership enjoys widespread credibility and legitimacy. Not only do they appear generally united, but they also are incredibly active. The sheer pace of leadership politics and activities is impressive. So is the substance of politics, as the party and government come forth with a steady stream of policy initiatives. They are definitely not on the political defensive.

At present, the CCP and its leadership are approximately half-way through the five-year transition from the 17th to 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congresses and Central Committees, and hence the transition to a new leadership. In 2012, at the 18th Congress, many current leaders—importantly including Premier Wen Jiabao and President/CCP General Secretary/Central Military Commission Chairman Hu Jintao—will retire in favor of the so-called “fifth generation” leadership.

Thus, in the Chinese political calendar, the early stages of leadership transition have begun. The heirs apparent seem clearly identified and signals of continuity are being sent at home and abroad. The activism of Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, who is slated to become Premier, has been particularly noteworthy. Vice President Xi Jinping, widely believed to be Hu Jintao’s successor, has also been increasingly active at home and abroad. He played a significant role in the CCP’s Fourth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee in September and took a highly-publicized trip to Europe in October. The fact that Xi was not appointed vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission at the Fourth Plenum surprised some, but actually it would have been very unusual for this to have occurred at this early juncture. Li Yuanchao, currently head of the powerful CCP Organization Department, just concluded a successful visit to the United States and has been the point-man overseeing internal political reform. Bo Xilai, party secretary of Chongqing and another key “fifth generation” leader, has also been very visible (some feel too visible), initiating an unprecedented crackdown and trial of local gangsters and officials. The activism of these leaders-in-waiting is an important signal to the party and population (as well as the outside world) of continuity. But, as Cheng Li’s research shows, this new generation of leaders are likely to be even more assertive and many hold more reformist visions than the current incumbents.

Beyond the leadership, the CCP is also moving ahead with internal political reform of the party apparatus. The Fourth Plenary Session, noted above, added important impetus to advancing and deepening political reform. Experimental direct elections of party committee members in Jiangsu and Sichuan were praised, and the Plenum’s concluding “Decision” approved a nationwide program to promote “intraparty democracy,” increase transparency of decision making, strengthen fiscal accountability of party committees and members, and crack down on corruption. While the Plenum acknowledged “unprecedented challenges,” the CCP has clearly decided to advance political reform (albeit within a one-party dominant system). President Obama may wish to probe this subject in his discussions with Chinese leaders.

President Obama will also encounter a People’s Republic of China that has recently celebrated its sixtieth anniversary with a massive military parade and celebration in Tiananmen Square on October 1st. This event spiked patriotic sentiment, and President Obama should understand that he is dealing with a both a confident leadership and an increasingly nationalistic nation. The rebounding economy (see below) adds further fuel to China’s growing confidence.

If there is an underbelly to this confidence it pertains to the ethnic problems in Tibet and Xinjiang, which makes the leadership very nervous. Unprecedented riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi this summer and last year in Lhasa, Tibet have resulted in judicial trials, imprisonments, executions, and strong security clampdowns in each “autonomous region.” Despite all the official rhetoric concerning ethnic harmony flowing from the government in recent months—and there has been a deluge of it—the reality is that ethnic tensions remain sharper than ever. Externally, China’s campaign to demonize the exiled Tibetan and Uighur communities, particularly the personas of the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer, has only aggravated China’s relations with several countries.

Economic Optimism & Uncertainty

Fueling China’s general confidence has been the strong rebound in the domestic economy since the second quarter of 2009. The government’s unprecedented RMB 4 trillion ($585 billion) stimulus package has produced a boom in several production sectors. GDP growth is on pace to achieve 8.9 percent this year, the financial section is flush with credit and liquidity, the housing and stock markets have rebounded strongly, infrastructure projects are underway everywhere, demand for raw materials is up, inventories are declining, industrial production is recovering, re-employment is increasing, retail sales are up, and purchasing power is expanding.

The economy is back on track, and is likely to be the international engine to pull other major economies out of recession. This subject of global economic recovery will be high on President Obama’s list of priorities to discuss with China’s leaders.

However, many Chinese economists are worried that that the economy recovery is proceeding too quickly, is potentially inflationary, and there are widespread concerns about “rebalancing” the economy. There is also concern that a new injection of stimulus funding will be needed when the current round is spent. Most importantly, stimulation of domestic consumer spending is still quite inadequate—thus many economists fear China is missing a golden opportunity to reorient its growth model away from export-oriented growth to domestic consumption-stimulated growth, as the premier and government have repeatedly emphasized. Such a rebalancing is several years overdue, but the government’s stimulus package has been primarily aimed at revitalizing the export sector and hard infrastructure projects, in attempts to re-employ workers and maintain social stability. Local economists argue that the stimulus money should be targeted more directly at stimulating consumption and capital markets, while allowing the renminbi currency to appreciate more rapidly so as to lower overall exports. This would ease China’s massive trade surpluses to some extent (the surplus with the United States through August, $143.7 billion, was actually down 15 percent over 2008).

America’s and China’s contribution to global economy recovery is likely to be high on the agenda as Presidents Obama and Hu meet. They will carry forward progress made earlier in the year at the G-20 summits in London and Pittsburgh, and more recently in a bilateral context at the Joint Committee on Commerce & Trade meeting in Hangzhou.

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How volleyball and pop have shaken China’s idea of race

November 8, 2009 12:59 PM

Earlier this year, China picked Ding Hui, a young man from Hangzhou, for its national volleyball team. Last month a 20-year-old Shanghainese, Lou Jing, made the last 30 in the Chinese version of Pop Idol. Neither event would have attracted unusual notice but for the one thing the two young people have in common: they are in a small, and for China, novel category of mixed-race citizens, children of black fathers. Their emergence into the limelight has forced the country into an uncomfortable and often shocking debate about what it means to be Chinese.

Both have been widely discussed on the Chinese internet in terms that have not been publicly acceptable in the US or Europe for half a century. Both Lou Jing and Ding Hui have been treated as frank curiosities: netizens comment on their white teeth, Ding Hui’s athleticism and Lou Jing’s sense of rhythm. On the show, the presenters repeatedly referred to Lou Jing as “chocolate”. Contributors to the nation’s websites indulged in altogether cruder epithets, indulging their imaginations on the subject of sex between a black man and a Chinese woman.

Lou Jing was brought up by her mother, a single parent, after her African American father had left China for reasons not explained. The crude abuse directed at her mother on the internet uncovered a deep well of prejudice that comes as no surprise to foreigners living in China, but which for years has been papered over by the official rhetoric of socialist solidarity with the developing world, including Africa.

Solidarity, however, does not necessarily denote acceptance or equality, let alone full citizenship. China has not been a country of immigration: its ethnic diversity has come from expanding borders rather than inward migration. Who is really Chinese is not the easiest question to answer in a country that officially has 56 ethnic groups – and in reality many more – but in which one group, the Han Chinese, is so dominant that it has the power to define the cultural and racial content of nationality.

The non-Han citizens – Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, Koreans and the many other cultural and ethnic groups – suffer accordingly: they are regarded as “civilised” to the degree that they come to resemble the Han majority. Many among that majority regard the relationship between the Han and the others as one of frank tutelage in preparation for assimilation. The Han, in other words, have a civilising mission to the more backward corners of the empire.

For decades following the revolution in 1949, marriages between foreigners and Chinese were rare and, in the xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, they were banned. It wasn’t until as recently as the mid-70s that the first petitions for permission were accepted, and such marriages remained relatively unusual for a further two decades.

Racism in what has thought of itself as a monocultural society is certainly a large element in the discussion. But the ambivalence about race is a reflection of profound and unresolved questions about the identity of modern China, as the world’s most populous state reaches for a role in the 21st century after the painful dislocations of more than a century of political and social upheaval.

The government that relies for its legitimacy on the twin pillars of economic growth and resurgent nationalism has crafted a national story of an unbroken line of political and cultural descent that stretches, implausibly, for 5,000 years. China, the story goes, is immutable as the current rulers invoke the mystique of past imperial dynasties to bolster their own authority.

There are many difficulties in this narrative for China today, not least the fact that the modern idea of the Chinese nation, expounded by Sun Yat-sen 100 years ago, rested on overthrowing the hated Qing dynasty and expelling China’s Manchu rulers. National purity would be restored and China would be strong again. Once the emperors had gone, though, China’s new rulers found that retaining the territories the Manchu had conquered demanded a different narrative – that of a multinational state. The imperatives of the nation state and the realities of contemporary China have been in conflict ever since.

Today this fragile construct is threatened by what for China is a new phenomenon – that of inward migration. In Lou Jing’s home town of Shanghai, for instance, there have been some 3,000 mixed-race marriages each year for the past decade and in Guangzhou, according to local reports, as many as 100,000 Africans have settled in what is known locally as “chocolate city”.

If China continues on its current trajectory, there will be many more cases like those of Lou Jing and Ding Hui, Chinese citizens whose appearance and personal history will force the world’s most populous nation to confront the ambiguities of its own identity.

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What Now?: 1972 - Nixon visits People’s Republic of China

November 7, 2009 12:09 AM

A broadcast discussion I participated in about US-China relations.

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Africa’s elite and the Western media

November 2, 2009 9:31 AM

Greek mythology has it that Sisyphus, once the king of Ephyra (Corinth), was condemned by the gods to roll a big chunk of stone up a steep hill. Whenever he reached up the top, the stone tumbled back. And he began all over again, day in, day out. Albert Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy. In certain contexts, I can do so. In most cases though, I find it difficult to believe that rolling a boulder up a steep hill with the knowledge that it will tumble back down would ever satisfy a rational mind.

I think that this is exactly what the African elite do in their God-given task of defending Africa against the Western media, who, is it said, are to the African social and moral malaise what vultures are to carcasses along the Serengeti. The average African intellectual is in a bind; they stand between the unacceptable social conditions in their homeland and the need to fight the West for its exclusive interest in those conditions.

It is with a measured anguish that I watched Chimamanda Adichie’s extraordinarily beautiful speech, ‘The danger of a single story’,[1] in defence of the African image. I couldn’t help but think of Chinua Achebe’s dogged defence of the same, a project that has shaped the more than 50 years of his intellectual life. There is little doubt that Achebe and others such as Wole Soyinka and Ngg wa Thiong’o have demonstrated that the African has his story. Thus, decades after their efforts to redress the battered image of the African, there are reasons to believe that we have moved beyond the world shaped by the 19th century ideas of the African. If the European thinkers of said time – or even Joseph Conrad in Achebe’s thinking – saw the African as bereft of rationality and therefore incapable of helping himself, the African elite of today have, without doubts, got all it takes to turn Africa’s fortunes around. Yet I cannot easily shake off the nagging suspicion that they might, indeed, be on the wrong trajectory toward that goal.

I was five years old when the Nigerian civil war broke out. By the time it ended, three and half years later, I had already seen more of the ugly side of humanity, experienced more pains than most people would ever imagine in their lifetime. My impulses to dream have been tempered by the shocking realisation, during the war, that I could die any minute without my people halting their breath even for a second. This pessimism has been hardened not only by the steady deterioration of life in Nigeria, but also by wars and instances of human rights abuses in many parts of Africa. I have seen death; I have not seen much of the brighter side of life in Nigeria to suggest that the civil war has indeed ended.

Not that I have a good personal story to tell. Quite the contrary, my life is one single example of humanity’s capacity to love and to withstand adversities. Having survived malnutrition and its attendant diseases during the civil war, thanks to the extraordinary intervention of world relief agencies such as Irish Concern, and helped by Catholic institutions that granted me a free scholarship in various stages of my academic career, I have attained the highest degree possible in my chosen academic discipline. To me, life is a miracle.

I survived, I thrive. But many, alas, too many Nigerian children of my age weren’t as lucky as I am. Millions and millions more, born years after the war, have become victims of the gross misrule that has characterised Nigerian governments since independence. Most were as talented as I am. Some even more. Some would never be able to feed their families.

Perhaps, I shouldn’t write about Africa in ways condemned by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina in ‘How to write about Africa’.[2] I shouldn’t write that Africa has been left to crumble by African leaders, or that far too many Africans lose their lives to senseless acts of brutality. I would indeed love to sing in praise of Mama Africa.

Perhaps it was the naïve part of me that forced me to tears when I visited Nigeria in July 2009 and learnt that Nigerian national universities have been on strike since April? The strike continued till early October. Being as realistic, or perhaps just dubious, as I have been conditioned to be, I did not travel to Nigeria with my laptop. I knew there wasn’t going to be constant electric supply. Sure enough, the four days I spent with my brother and his family in Lagos confirmed my realism. Like many sincere, hardworking Nigerians, not ready to succumb to Nigeria’s darkness, my brother had an electric generator. So did his neighbours in the other three flats of the house. For the greater part of the night, these four generators huffed and puffed in dutiful service to their owners. To hear one another, we had to almost shout because the generator was on the veranda. I had difficulty breathing because of the smoke that got into the flat. And when I woke up in the middle of the night to ease myself – the generator was turned off at 12 – I had to feel my way to the bathroom with the help of the faint light of my cheap Nokia cell phone.

Over the next weeks I spent with my mother in the village I was literally cut off from the world. I had to manage the time I spent on my cell phone not out of fear of running out of my prepaid credit, but of my battering running down. In that case I had to go to Enugu (30 kilometres away) to recharge it – if indeed Enugu had an electric supply at the time. Is it this bad in Nigeria, the one-time self-proclaimed giant of Africa? I don’t even want to talk about the Nigerian roads, or water supply, or public health. They are all in appalling condition, yet the Nigerian minister of information thought it necessary to re-brand the country.

I am afraid I am making the mistake of telling a single story – of the failure of my beloved country. Given that I came from a very poor background, and given that my family hasn’t yet escaped poverty, there is the likelihood that I see African reality from a largely negative perspective. In respect to this fact, I need to state right away that my story is not representative of the experiences of all Nigerians. Thank God, it is not. There are well-situated Nigerians out there, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie eloquently stated in her speech. But while it is true that not all Africans live in abject poverty and ignorance and disease, the more troubling issue, however, is that many do, far too many. And there is no excuse for that.

My thinking is that if at least 50 per cent of Africans could boast of average education and basic infrastructure like a constant electric and water supply, good roads and security, our intellectuals wouldn’t occupy themselves with the European gaze. But since many Africans are still wallowing in poverty, their rights denied them, one is left to wonder whether it is more important to explain and re-brand Africa than to change it? Could it be possible to examine why African leaders have no respect for their own people?

It is perhaps one of the ironies of Africa that hardly a year after Binyavanga Wainaina published his well-regarded essay, Kenya was roiled by political violence in the wake of the 2007 elections. What the world saw in the wake of that crisis hinted that perhaps the intellectual leaders of that country might have failed to write about their country in ways that would have exposed the evil that had been festering all the while.[3] Many concerned Africans are still trying to figure out how it could be possible that a 46-year-old soldier, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, would hold Guinea – a country of more than 10 million people – hostage. To be sure, on 28 September 2009, security forces turned on demonstrators who had gathered in the national stadium in the capital, Conakry, to demonstrate against the government. More than 200 people were shot dead instantly. Many women were raped in the open by soldiers. Perhaps the silver lining in that outbreak of violence is that most of the reporting was done by the locals who captured scenes of violence on their cell-phones.[4] Thus in capturing scenes of violence and in wanting these scenes exposed to the world, they took a stance against the forces of darkness. They didn’t think of what it would mean to the image of Africa; they were prompted by a feeling of decency and the need to save what is human in them.

In J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Age of Iron’, Mrs Curren, a white South African professor of classics, had lived a sheltered existence much of her life. Her life begins to unravel however when she is diagnosed with cancer. Coming home from her doctor, she finds that a homeless man has chosen her compound for camping. By the grace of a string of incidents, her black house help, Florence, takes her to Guguletu, a black township, where she experiences first-hand the horrors of apartheid and police brutality. Her life, or what remains of it, would change. In one of her many epiphanies, she asks herself a morally relevant question: ‘And I? Where is my heart in all of this?’

I see no reason why the tide of bad news in Nigeria will not be stopped. Perhaps all it takes is a change of heart that begins with a radical rejection of the thought that the West is only interested in grubbing in the African compost. If Chinua Achebe’s attack of Joseph Conrad and co. was timely 50 years ago, doing the same in this new century, I think, is a bit counterproductive to the African mind.

Yet I share Camus’s idea that we should imagine Sisyphus happy with his task. Sisyphus could be happy if he knew he was pushing the right stone; if he knew that reality was absurd and the only thing in the face of absurdity was to confront it. Yes, confront it with the grits of the Yoruba god, Ogun, whose uncompromising moral stance and promethean instinct of rebellion, according to Wole Soyinka’s Ogun,[5] released man from a destructive despair.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Chielo Zona Eze is a Nigerian writer and philosopher. He teaches English and post-colonial literature at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. He is the author of ‘The Trial of Robert Mugabe’. He blogs at chielozona.blogspot.com and africanliteraturenews.blogspot.com.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
[2] www.granta.com/Magazine/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1026884.stm
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/world/africa/06guinea.html
[5] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World. London: Cambridge UP. 1976. (146)

Posted at 9:31 AM · Comments (0)

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