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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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BY HOWARD W. FRENCH
999 words
31 August 2010

© 2010 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

The rush hour crush had just subsided on a stifling recent summer evening, when I stepped into the subway car on the circular line that serves the central city as part of the brilliant public transportation system Shanghai has built in what seems like no time at all.

Hot and bothered from hours of photographing on the street, I was relieved to find an empty seat by the door and promptly collapsed into it, savoring the refreshing gusts of air-conditioning.

A moment passed before I looked up and paid any attention to the other passengers. As the lone foreigner usually in situations like these, I had become accustomed during my summer stay in the city to finding all eyes focused on me. This time, though, commuters had something further out of the bounds of their daily commute to focus on.

Seated directly opposite me, two teenage girls were kissing in an unmistakably romantic way. They appeared to be no older than 17. One of them, strong of build and with short hair, was dressed and coiffed in a masculine style. Her longhaired companion, who was dressed in a pretty pastel skirt, was the picture of classic, old-school sweet 16.

I tried to do what I immediately noted few of my fellow passengers could accomplish: not stare. But as I looked up from time to time, it struck me that among other things, amid all of the sustained touching, billing and cooing, there was willful, if mild, provocation taking place before my eyes.

The statement that was being made seemed to say: ‘‘This is a new age, and people of our generation are free to do as we wish in our love lives, so get over it.’’

It has become a truism to observe that contemporary China is the scene of the most rapid, transformative change of any large country in the world today. Usually, discussion focuses on industry and trade, or on China’s conquest of new markets in faraway regions, or perhaps most common of all, on the breathtaking roll-out of infrastructure, like the subway I was riding on, which puts its ancient forerunner in New York, where I live, to shame.

The scene unfolding before me was a jolting reminder that the nuts and bolts transformation of China is the least of it. As this society rapidly grows richer, its social fabric and mores have been changing in ways far more dramatic than even the physical landscape, and sexual choice and expression are arguably in the leading edge of this upheaval.

Places like Shanghai, an island of particular affluence, provide a privileged bird’s-eye view of the changes under way. When I lived here between 2003 and 2008, the public emergence of gay men became an increasingly evident fact of daily life. For the most part, at least as far as an anecdotal sense of things could confirm, though, open same-sex relationships among females here lagged far behind.

Returning to Shanghai each summer since then has sharpened my awareness of incremental social change. Last year, I noticed apparently lesbian couples for the first time, in any substantial number. I have vivid memories, in particular, of dinner one night in a favorite restaurant, where two nearby women in their late 20s and dressed as professionals engaged in ever more passionate embraces.

There were other scenes observed like this that I tucked away and made little of until I returned in June and immediately began encountering examples of public intimacy between women. I also began noticing the far greater prevalence of what I’ve thought of as masculine styling by women, which Chinese friends say parallels the emergence of what they call a unisex style that has become very popular among young men.

Had something big changed here in such a short period of time? ‘‘During the recent 10 years we have seen the opening up of many previously forbidden or repressed voices around sexuality, and homosexuality is one of them,’’ said Lucetta Kam, an associate professor at Shantou University, who specializes in gender studies. As causes she cited the influence of the Internet, which ‘‘has given rise to social networking of people with similar experiences, aspirations and thinking.’’

Ms. Kam also cited the easing of ‘‘ideological restrictions,’’ which tracks the rapid decline of ideology in most every aspect of Chinese life. Most interestingly for me, though, she mentioned the ‘‘sudden media exposure of lesbian and gay people’’ in prime-time television in China.

According to Feng Hui, an 18-year-old student and self-described lesbian whom I met at a shopping mall, a critical breakthrough occurred in 2005 with the victory of Li Yuchun, the 21-year-old winner of China’s ‘‘Super Girl’’ contest, a discontinued ‘‘American Idol’’-like talent show. Throughout Ms. Li, who has sidestepped questions about her sexuality, wore her hair short and dressed in boyish fashions. Moreover, she won singing love songs written for men about women.

‘‘Super Girl’’ had more than 400 million viewers, and its balloting has been called the largest voting exercise ever conducted in China. After Ms. Li’s victory, the authorities denounced the show as vulgar, but she has gone on to prominent roles in advertising and cinema here, and has stuck to her style.

‘‘Li Yuchun is the mother of unisex in China, and her comfort with herself inspired a whole generation of women like me,’’ said Ms. Feng.

Another researcher on sexuality here, Zhu Jianfeng, of Fudan University, was more reserved about the role of Li Yuchun but agreed that things were changing fast. ‘‘The society has become much more accepting than in the past, and fewer people will challenge you and ask, ‘How could you live that way?’’’

The last barrier remains the family, she said. ‘‘People can be open about their sexuality with their friends, but within the family, it is still uncommon.’’

Read "Barriers fall as a society changes; Letter from China"

Posted at 8:58 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Newsweek

To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. The story chronicles the adventures of the fictional Miss Du as she moves up the corporate ladder. The book spent 141 weeks on the Chinese bestseller list and spawned two sequels, one of this year’s top films at the box office, and an online drama series that has had more than 100 million page views since starting in mid-August. One fan, Liu Danhui, a 28-year-old with a marketing job at a foreign company, says she admires Du’s persistence and believes that “there will be more and more women like her in China in the future.” In fact, there are so many people like Liu that Du Lala’s Rise has left in its wake a thriving subgenre of Du-inspired literature portraying the aspirations and dilemmas of the country’s ambitious young urbanites.
Decades after Mao Zedong declared that “women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts in the United States. According to a study completed earlier this year by the New York–based Center for Work-Life Policy, just over one third of all college-educated American women describe themselves as very ambitious. In China that figure is closer to two thirds. What’s more, over 75 percent of women in China aspire to hold a top corporate job, compared with just over half in the U.S., and 77 percent of Chinese women participate in the workforce, compared with 69 percent in the U.S.
Women In Leadership
The Women Who Want to Run the World
Q&A: Amway China’s Chairwoman Eva Cheng
Chinese Women Go Shopping
Great Female Artists? Think Karachi.
Q&A: Indonesia’s Sri Mulyani Indrawati
One reason for this is that China is changing at such a blistering speed that new opportunities are becoming available to skilled workers of both genders. Ripa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement,” and builds on a cultural and historical legacy in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to. When the authors of the Work-Life study conducted focus groups, one of the things they frequently heard was that communism “always emphasized that women can do whatever men can do.” Indeed, for decades in China, the communist government has provided equal access to education. “Mao’s revolution inflicted enormous pain upon society,” says Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it did empower women.”
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite. In the U.S., that shift followed decades of pitched battles over equality and women’s rights. It was considered a big deal, for instance, when Madeleine Albright became the first female secretary of state in 1990s. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi’s rise to become the speaker of the House was seen as monumental. In China, though, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally, says Judi Kilachand, an executive director at the Asia Society, which organized a conference on women in leadership in Hong Kong in June. Female leaders are therefore viewed as more common. One of the most familiar public figures responsible for the country’s economic openness is the now retired vice premier Wu Yi, who trained as a petroleum engineer before a career in government that included negotiating World Trade Organization admission for China. Today China has a greater percentage of women in its Parliament—21.3 percent—than the U.S. does in Congress.

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Read "The Women (in China) Who Want to Run the World"

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Copyright The Sydney Morning Herald

THREE years ago China had planned to roll out 13,000 kilometres of high-speed railway by 2020, which would be more than the rest of the world combined. Then the global financial crisis intruded and Beijing brought that 2020 deadline forward by eight years while redefining ”high speed” to mean faster than 350km/h, rather than 250km/h.

China’s bullet train project is as ambitious and potentially nation-changing as the 19th-century railways that opened up the US. Already it has created millions of Chinese jobs, pushing up wages for the country’s workers, and sucked in tens of millions of tonnes of Australian iron ore to produce the high-tensile steel for tunnels, bridges and track.

One of the 42 new lines, which began construction in 2008, will next year begin zipping passengers over 1300 kilometres and across 244 bridges between Beijing and Shanghai in just four hours. Another is already taking passengers 114 kilometres from Beijing to Tianjin in less than 30 minutes.

The Word Bank describes China’s standing-start leap as “the biggest single planned program of passenger rail investment there has ever been in one country”. And, unlike in many countries, it says fast rail in China has been well planned and makes economic sense. Last month, the country’s long-distance trains carried 160 million passengers, 18 million more than the previous July.

China’s provincial cities are being dragged into the world economy. Rail space is opening up for freight, taking the burden off the roads.

Lu Xiwei, the general manager of China Railway Vehicles Co, is working around the clock to put rolling stock on all that new track.

“I never have even one day’s rest a year,” says Lu, at his sprawling factory headquarters in Changchun, yet another booming city of 5 million people in the country’s far north. “In 365 days I can guarantee I work 364.”

Downer EDI’s $3.8 billion contract (via a separate finance vehicle) to supply and maintain 78 double-decker, eight-carriage “Waratah” trains to Sydney’s Railcorp was seven-times bigger than any train order that the company had previously handled. Downer subcontracted the 624 railway car shells and undercarriage bogies to China Railway because it could not justify building a huge workshop for what may be a one-off contract.

China Railway erected a 9000-square-metre factory in just seven months. That, says an awe-struck manager, “is the time it would take in Australia to get building approvals”. And yet that 360-metre-long facility is one small dot on the map of China Railway’s sprawling empire.

At the signing in 2006 - after the NSW government had spent 13 years promising and unpromising a 14-kilometre rail link from Parramatta to Epping - the Waratah trains were a huge political matter for NSW and a prestigious contract for China Railway.

No Chinese train company had ever won an export contract to the developed world before. Only last month, Australia’s ambassador in Beijing, Geoff Raby, told the Communist Party secretary of Jilin province that the world would be watching how China performed.

Lu says he values the Australian project experience and it remains a priority. But the money involved would seem to barely justify such status.

He reveals he will receive just $150 million from Downer for building the stainless steel car bodies and undercarriages, given that higher-value components are imported from elsewhere. That’s $240,000 for each Australian carriage compared with $4.7 million Lu receives for each finished bullet train carriage.

“For €5 billion ($A7.1 billion), I have to build 1500 high-speed cars in three years” says Lu. “And that’s not all, there will be more”.

Lu has built a factory complex on the outskirts of Changchun to house his bullet trains. Here it quickly becomes clear that Australian concerns about China’s train-building competence are wide of the mark.

Liu Lihui, who manages the bullet train aluminium fabrication plant, wears plastic shower caps on the soles of his shoes to keep the polished concrete sufficiently pristine for train carriages to glide around on air-cushioned platforms. These hover-lifts reduce the need for roof-hanging cranes, he says, which reduces the number of roof-supporting pillars, which maximises room where space is at a premium. Nevertheless, despite making the most of the space he’s got, after he’s doubled production to two cars a day he will build another two identical workshops, each 180 metres wide and 1.6 kilometres long.

“High-speed rail is the top priority of the Ministry of Rail and this reflects the priorities of the people and the state,” says Liu.

China Railways Vehicles is technically owned by another arm of the state, but it is the Ministry of Railways that makes its executives jump. The ministry exemplifies China’s unrivalled political capacity to marshal resources and march the country towards a common objective to get extraordinary things done. It is the only line ministry that gives itself the power to issue its own government bonds, even though it has no trouble persuading state-owned banks to lend to projects in need.

“High-speed and mass-transport trains are good for the environment, save a lot of energy and promote industry,” says Lu. “It’s very easy to get money from the banks.”

The ministry employs 2.5 million people and has its own police force and courts. Last year, the ministry successfully killed efforts by the top leadership to dilute its power within an integrated “super-ministry” of transport.

But the flipside of all that concentrated power to produce and control hardware is recurrent glitches with the software.

China’s new trains are exceedingly comfortable, they all tend to depart and arrive on time and passenger numbers are among the highest in the world. But, for an ordinary person, obtaining a ticket can be a nightmare. At peak periods, such as Chinese New Year - when 200 million migrant workers and family members struggle to get home - tickets mysteriously disappear inside the Ministry of Railways and reappear in the hands of scalpers outside ticket offices.

Downer EDI never expected to have to train so many trades people - steel welding, laying rubber flooring, mixing graffiti-proof paint and installing vandal-proof windows - only to find some of those workers disappear out of their workshop and vanish to other corners of the China Railway empire.

The Waratah trains are running eight months late and costs are blowing out.

The troubles have already cost Downer three chief executives, two chairmen and a $190 million write-down.

That $190 million breaks down into three roughly equal parts: rising wages and unforseen engineering costs, rising materials costs (caused by runaway Chinese demand) and late penalties issued by Railcorp. Sydney’s 78 Waratah trains seem jammed between Railcorp and China’s Ministry of Railways. The two companies, Downer EDI and China Railways, are learning to be flexible, which often means leaving formal notices and contractual details on the shelf.

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Read "China riding the fast train to wealth"

Posted at 9:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

An excerpt

“…Chinese universities are modelled after civil services where most of those who are in charge are party members, not scholars. The chancellor of a top national university enjoys the equivalent ranking of a national government minister, and provincial universities’ chancellors, provincial government ministers. Instead of being isolated ivory towers of academic research where quality research is the ultimate criterion for recognition, Chinese universities are places of hierarchy, patrimony, control and power struggles where personal networks outweigh academic ability.

In my experience, interviewing established professors is sometimes akin to having an audience with a ranking mandarin. They respond anecdotally from a position of superiority, confident with their privileged access to information, their influence on policy and their status in society. Attempts at engaging in academic debate are often dismissed with sighs of “you just don’t understand China” and if pressed a little harder, accusations of western imperialism are almost inevitable.

Some of the younger generation of scholars complain privately of having to produce research on demand, of having to censor themselves on “sensitive topics” and having to deal with an unfair system that recognises seniority rather than originality and quality. But those who are unhappy with the system are in the minority; the majority of them are satisfied with their lot and are biding time until they too take up more senior positions….”

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Read "Understanding China’s academic woes: China’s position as an economic superpower may be hampered by the patrimony and poor academic ethics of its universities"

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Copyright The Economist

A HUNDRED years ago it was perhaps already possible to discern the rising powers whose interaction and competition would shape the 20th century. The sun that shone on the British empire had passed midday. Vigorous new forces were flexing their muscles on the global stage, notably America, Japan and Germany. Their emergence brought undreamed-of prosperity; but also carnage on a scale hitherto unimaginable.

Now digest the main historical event of this week: China has officially become the world’s second-biggest economy, overtaking Japan. In the West this has prompted concerns about China overtaking the United States sooner than previously thought. But stand back a little farther, apply a more Asian perspective, and China’s longer-term contest is with that other recovering economic behemoth: India. These two Asian giants, which until 1800 used to make up half the world economy, are not, like Japan and Germany, mere nation states. In terms of size and population, each is a continent—and for all the glittering growth rates, a poor one.

Not destiny, but still pretty important

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This is uncharted territory that should be seen in terms of decades, not years. Demography is not destiny. Nor for that matter are long-range economic forecasts from investment banks. Two decades ago Japan was seen as the main rival to America. Countries as huge and complicated as China can underachieve or collapse under their own contradictions. In the short term its other foreign relationships may matter more, even in Asia: there may, for instance, be a greater risk of conflict between rising China and an ageing but still powerful Japan. Western powers still wield considerable influence.

So caveats abound. Yet as the years roll forward, the chances are that it will increasingly come down once again to the two Asian giants facing each other over a disputed border (see article). How China and India manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those that scarred the 20th century disfigure this one.

Neither is exactly comfortable in its skin. China’s leaders like to portray Western hype about their country’s rise as a conspiracy—a pretext either to offload expensive global burdens onto the Middle Kingdom or to encircle it. Witness America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea, its legal obligation to help Taiwan defend itself and its burgeoning friendships with China’s rivals, notably India but also now Vietnam.

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Read "Contest of the century: As China and India rise in tandem, their relationship will shape world politics. Shame they do not get on better"

Posted at 11:52 AM · Comments (0)

An insightful post on the potential parallels between China’s economic emergence and Japan’s recent history by Michael Pettis. An excerpt:

“One option might be for Beijing to engineer a huge shift of state wealth to the household sector through, say, a massive privatization program. This could drive up consumption significantly by boosting household wealth, but the likelihood of mass privatization is slim, given the political realities in China.

Another option, and ultimately the only sustainable path forward, would involve reversing the subsidies that generated such furious growth. Wage growth must at least keep pace with productivity growth; interest rates must rise substantially; and the currency must be revalued. But if any of these happen too quickly, we could expect a surge in bankruptcies — as old businesses struggle to survive without familiar subsidies.

Unfortunately, the longer China waits to make the transition from this model of growth, the more difficult the transition will be. Forcing banks to fund projects at artificially low interest rates inevitably raises non-performing loans, and these eventually become government debt. The longer China waits, the more debt there will be and the more dependent growth will be on the subsidies.

“…For a worrying case study, one need only look to Japan, which grew very rapidly thanks largely to very high rates of investment forced through the banking system. For a long time the problem of misallocated investment — which was whispered about in Tokyo but not taken too seriously — didn’t seem to matter. Everyone “knew” that Japan’s leaders could manage a transition easily. After all, they were extremely smart, with a deep knowledge of the very special circumstances that made Japan unique, with real control over the economy, with a strong grasp of history and penchant for long-term thinking, and most of all with a clear understanding of what was needed to fix Japan’s problems. Sound familiar?…”

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Read "Is China Turning Japanese?"

Posted at 9:58 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Project Syndicate

2010-08-06

TOKYO – Revolutions, it is often claimed, do not happen when people are desperate. They occur in times of rising expectations. Perhaps this is why they so often end in disappointment. Expectations, usually set too high to begin with, fail to be met, resulting in anger, disillusion, and often in acts of terrifying violence.

Japan’s change of government in 2009 – when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) broke the almost uninterrupted monopoly on power held by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955 – was not a revolution. But, rather like the election of the first black president of the United States, it was fizzing with popular expectations, promising a fundamental shift from the past.

This was even truer of Japan than the US. The DPJ not only put many new faces into power, it was going to change the nature of Japanese politics. At last, Japan would become a fully functioning democracy, and not a de facto one-party state run by bureaucrats.

To judge from the Japanese press, as well as the DPJ’s plunging poll ratings, disillusion has already set in. The permanent bureaucracy proved resistant, and DPJ politicians, unused to power, made mistakes. One of the worst was Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s announcement in June of a consumption-tax hike just before the Upper House elections, which the DPJ went on to lose badly.

The other disappointment has been the government’s failure to get the US to move its Marine airbase out of Okinawa. This promise by the DPJ was meant to be part of Japan’s new assertiveness, a first step away from being a mere “aircraft carrier” for the US, as a former LDP prime minister once described his country.

If Japan’s status quo is to change, the country’s oddly skewed relationship with the US is one key factor. Too much dependence on American power has warped the development of Japanese democracy in ways that are not always sufficiently recognized by the US.

Japan’s one-party state, under the conservative LDP, was a product of World War II and the Cold War. Like Italy, the old Axis partner during the war, Japan became a front-line state in the battle against Communist powers. And, as in Italy, a right-wing party, backed by the US, dominated politics for decades in order to crush any chance for the left to take power. Even former Japanese war criminals, one of whom became prime minister in the late 1950’s, became subservient allies of the US in the wars (hot and cold) against Communism.

In fact, Japanese dependence on the US was even greater than that of Italy and other European powers. West European armies were embedded in NATO. Japan, whose armed forces were entirely blamed for driving the country into the catastrophic Pacific War, was not even supposed to have an army or navy after the war. During their occupation of Japan in the 1940’s, Americans wrote a new pacifist constitution, which made the use of Japanese military force abroad unconstitutional. In matters of war and peace, Japan abdicated its sovereignty.

Most Japanese were happy to be pacifists and concentrate on making money. Japanese governments could devote their energy to building up the country’s industrial wealth, while the US took care of security, and by extension much of Japan’s foreign policy. It was an arrangement that suited everyone: the Japanese became rich, the Americans had a compliant anti-communist vassal state, and other Asians, even Communist China, preferred Pax Americana to a revival of Japanese military clout.

But there was a steep political price to pay. A democracy that is over-dependent on an outside power, and monopolized by one party whose main role is to broker deals between big business and the bureaucracy, will become stunted and corrupt.

Italy, under the Christian Democrats, had the same problem. But the end of the Cold War in Europe changed the political status quo – with mixed results, to be sure. Old parties lost power, which was a good thing. The vacuum was filled in Italy by the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, which may have been less of a good thing. In East Asia, by contrast, the Cold War is not yet entirely over. North Korea still causes trouble, and China is nominally a Communist state.

But it is a very different world from the one left in ruins in 1945. For one thing, China has become a great power, and Japan, like other Asian countries, must adapt to new circumstances. But, while it is the only Asian democracy able to balance the power of China, the system established after WWII is not best suited to this task.

This was recognized by the DPJ, which would like Japan to play a more independent role, as a more equal ally, rather than a mere protectorate, of the US, and thus be a more assertive political player in Asia. Hence, the first symbolic step was to get the US to move its marines from Okinawa, an island that has carried the burden of a US military presence for much too long.

The US did not see things that way. The DPJ threatened to change comfortable old arrangements, whereby the US could more or less tell the Japanese what to do. As a result, the US showed little patience with Japan on the question of Okinawa, and has barely concealed its contempt for the DPJ government, feeding popular disappointment with its performance so far.

The US seems to prefer an obedient one-party state to a difficult, faltering, but more democratic partner in Asia. The Obama administration, struggling to fulfill its own promises of change, should be more understanding of its Japanese counterpart. If the US is as serious about promoting freedom abroad as it claims, it should not be hindering one of its closest ally’s efforts to strengthen its democracy.

Click to read more

Read "Japan’s Unfinished Reformation"

Posted at 9:50 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Project Syndicate

2010-08-06

TOKYO – Revolutions, it is often claimed, do not happen when people are desperate. They occur in times of rising expectations. Perhaps this is why they so often end in disappointment. Expectations, usually set too high to begin with, fail to be met, resulting in anger, disillusion, and often in acts of terrifying violence.

Japan’s change of government in 2009 – when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) broke the almost uninterrupted monopoly on power held by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955 – was not a revolution. But, rather like the election of the first black president of the United States, it was fizzing with popular expectations, promising a fundamental shift from the past.

This was even truer of Japan than the US. The DPJ not only put many new faces into power, it was going to change the nature of Japanese politics. At last, Japan would become a fully functioning democracy, and not a de facto one-party state run by bureaucrats.

To judge from the Japanese press, as well as the DPJ’s plunging poll ratings, disillusion has already set in. The permanent bureaucracy proved resistant, and DPJ politicians, unused to power, made mistakes. One of the worst was Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s announcement in June of a consumption-tax hike just before the Upper House elections, which the DPJ went on to lose badly.

The other disappointment has been the government’s failure to get the US to move its Marine airbase out of Okinawa. This promise by the DPJ was meant to be part of Japan’s new assertiveness, a first step away from being a mere “aircraft carrier” for the US, as a former LDP prime minister once described his country.

If Japan’s status quo is to change, the country’s oddly skewed relationship with the US is one key factor. Too much dependence on American power has warped the development of Japanese democracy in ways that are not always sufficiently recognized by the US.

Japan’s one-party state, under the conservative LDP, was a product of World War II and the Cold War. Like Italy, the old Axis partner during the war, Japan became a front-line state in the battle against Communist powers. And, as in Italy, a right-wing party, backed by the US, dominated politics for decades in order to crush any chance for the left to take power. Even former Japanese war criminals, one of whom became prime minister in the late 1950’s, became subservient allies of the US in the wars (hot and cold) against Communism.

In fact, Japanese dependence on the US was even greater than that of Italy and other European powers. West European armies were embedded in NATO. Japan, whose armed forces were entirely blamed for driving the country into the catastrophic Pacific War, was not even supposed to have an army or navy after the war. During their occupation of Japan in the 1940’s, Americans wrote a new pacifist constitution, which made the use of Japanese military force abroad unconstitutional. In matters of war and peace, Japan abdicated its sovereignty.

Most Japanese were happy to be pacifists and concentrate on making money. Japanese governments could devote their energy to building up the country’s industrial wealth, while the US took care of security, and by extension much of Japan’s foreign policy. It was an arrangement that suited everyone: the Japanese became rich, the Americans had a compliant anti-communist vassal state, and other Asians, even Communist China, preferred Pax Americana to a revival of Japanese military clout.

But there was a steep political price to pay. A democracy that is over-dependent on an outside power, and monopolized by one party whose main role is to broker deals between big business and the bureaucracy, will become stunted and corrupt.

Italy, under the Christian Democrats, had the same problem. But the end of the Cold War in Europe changed the political status quo – with mixed results, to be sure. Old parties lost power, which was a good thing. The vacuum was filled in Italy by the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, which may have been less of a good thing. In East Asia, by contrast, the Cold War is not yet entirely over. North Korea still causes trouble, and China is nominally a Communist state.

But it is a very different world from the one left in ruins in 1945. For one thing, China has become a great power, and Japan, like other Asian countries, must adapt to new circumstances. But, while it is the only Asian democracy able to balance the power of China, the system established after WWII is not best suited to this task.

This was recognized by the DPJ, which would like Japan to play a more independent role, as a more equal ally, rather than a mere protectorate, of the US, and thus be a more assertive political player in Asia. Hence, the first symbolic step was to get the US to move its marines from Okinawa, an island that has carried the burden of a US military presence for much too long.

The US did not see things that way. The DPJ threatened to change comfortable old arrangements, whereby the US could more or less tell the Japanese what to do. As a result, the US showed little patience with Japan on the question of Okinawa, and has barely concealed its contempt for the DPJ government, feeding popular disappointment with its performance so far.

The US seems to prefer an obedient one-party state to a difficult, faltering, but more democratic partner in Asia. The Obama administration, struggling to fulfill its own promises of change, should be more understanding of its Japanese counterpart. If the US is as serious about promoting freedom abroad as it claims, it should not be hindering one of its closest ally’s efforts to strengthen its democracy.

Click to read more

Read "Japan’s Unfinished Reformation"

Posted at 9:50 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Review of Books

While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by Wikileaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before Wikileaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.

Party archives in China exist at local, provincial, and central levels and have always been secret and extremely closely guarded. At local levels, some, in recent years, have been digitized, but at the highest levels the original paper is guarded physically, and rules of access are complex and extremely rigid.

The importance of the July 21 meeting, which was officially called an “All-China Work Meeting on Party History,” is plain from its list of attendees, which included not only President Hu but his heir-apparent Xi Jinping, chief of propaganda Li Changchun, and dozens of other high officials. In his widely-publicized keynote, Xi Jinping said:

We must resolutely oppose any mistaken tendency to distort or defame the Party’s history [and] must use only authorized Party history to educate Party members, officials, and the masses, especially the young.

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Read "Waiting for Wikileaks: Beijing’s Seven Secrets"

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Copyright Project Syndicate

2010-08-09

CAMBRIDGE – On a recent Saturday morning, several hundred pro-democracy activists congregated in a Moscow square to protest government restrictions on freedom of assembly. They held up signs reading “31,” in reference to Article 31 of the Russian constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly. They were promptly surrounded by policemen, who tried to break up the demonstration. A leading critic of the Kremlin and several others were hastily dragged into a police car and driven away.

Events like this are an almost daily occurrence in Russia, where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rules the country with a strong hand, and persecution of the government’s opponents, human-rights violations, and judicial abuses have become routine. At a time when democracy and human rights have become global norms, such transgressions do little to enhance Russia’s global reputation. Authoritarian leaders like Putin understand this, but apparently they see it as price worth paying in order to exercise unbridled power at home.

What leaders like Putin understand less well is that their politics also compromise their countries’ economic future and global economic standing.

The relationship between a nation’s politics and its economic prospects is one of the most fundamental – and most studied – subjects in all of social science. Which is better for economic growth – a strong guiding hand that is free from the pressure of political competition, or a plurality of competing interests that fosters openness to new ideas and new political players?

East Asian examples (South Korea, Taiwan, China) seem to suggest the former. But how, then, can one explain the fact that almost all wealthy countries – except those that owe their riches to natural resources alone – are democratic? Should political openness precede, rather than follow, economic growth?

When we look at systematic historical evidence, instead of individual cases, we find that authoritarianism buys little in terms of economic growth. For every authoritarian country that has managed to grow rapidly, there are several that have floundered. For every Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo.

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, ultimately produce economies that are as fragile as their political systems. Their economic potency, when it exists, rests on the strength of individual leaders, or on favorable but temporary circumstances. They cannot aspire to continued economic innovation or to global economic leadership.

At first sight, China seems to be an exception. Since the late 1970’s, following the end of Mao’s disastrous experiments, China has done extremely well, experiencing unparalleled rates of economic growth. Even though it has democratized some of its local decision-making, the Chinese Communist Party maintains a tight grip on national politics and the human-rights picture is marred by frequent abuses.

But China also remains a comparatively poor country. Its future economic progress depends in no small part on whether it manages to open its political system to competition, in much the same way that it has opened up its economy. Without this transformation, the lack of institutionalized mechanisms for voicing and organizing dissent will eventually produce conflicts that will overwhelm the capacity of the regime to suppress. Political stability and economic growth will both suffer.

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Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.”
We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it’s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”
Oceans of ink have been spilled on these developments, yet hardly any attention is paid to the one institution—friendship—that could pick up some of the interpersonal slack. But while sizzling eros hogs the spotlight these days—sex sells, after all—too many of us overlook philia, the slower-burning and longer-lasting complement. That’s ironic, because today “friends” are everywhere in our culture—the average Facebook user has 130—and friendship, of a diluted kind, is our most characteristic relationship: voluntary, flexible, a “lite” alternative to the caloric meshugaas of family life.
But in restricting ourselves to the thin gruel of modern friendships, we miss out on the more nourishing fare that deeper ones have to offer. Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue—the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.
It’s possible that Aristotle took all this too seriously, but today the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and in our culture we take friendship—a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn’t primary—far too lightly. We’re good at currying contacts and we may have lots of pals, but by falling short on Aristotle’s third and most important category of friendship, we’ve left a hole in our lives. Now that family life is in turmoil, reinvigorating our notion of friendship—to mean something more than mere familiarity—could help fill some of the void left by disintegrating household arrangements and social connections frayed by the stubborn individualism of our times.
Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should). The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations, which are better understood as boundaries. Think of it as the moderate passion—constrained, yet also critical. If friendship, as hardheaded Lord Byron would have it, really is “love without his wings,” we can all be grateful for its earthbound nature.
But we live now in a climate in which friends appear dispensable. While most of us wouldn’t last long outside the intricate web of interdependence that supplies all our physical needs—imagine no electricity, money, or sewers—we’ve come to demand of ourselves truly radical levels of emotional self-sufficiency. In America today, half of adults are unmarried, and more than a quarter live alone. As Robert Putnam showed in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, civic involvement and private associations were on the wane at the end of the 20th century. Several years later, social scientists made headlines with a survey showing that Americans had a third fewer nonfamily confidants than two decades earlier. A quarter of us had no such confidants at all.
In a separate study, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009), surveyed more than 3,000 randomly chosen Americans and found they had an average of four “close social contacts” with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time. But only half of these contacts were solely friends; the rest were a variety of others, including spouses and children.
Here, as on so many fronts, we often buy what we need. The affluent commonly hire confidants in the form of talk therapists, with whom they may maintain enduring (if remunerated) relationships conducted on a first-name basis. The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people’s best friends. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who studies loneliness, says he’s convinced that more Americans are lonely—not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.
Developing meaningful friendships—having the kind of people in your life who were once known as “intimates”—takes time, but too many of us are locked in what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has called “the cult of conspicuous busyness,” from which we seem to derive status and a certain perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another. Throw in two careers and some kids, and something’s got to give. The poet Kenneth Koch, whose friends included the brilliant but childless John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, laid out the problem in verse:

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two.

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Copyright The University of Sydney

5 August 2010

Transcript of the fourth annual Michael Hintze Lecture in International Security
Delivered by Professor John Mearsheimer
4 August 2010

It is a pleasure and an honor to be here at the University of Sydney to give the annual Michael Hintze Lecture in International Security. I would like to thank Alan Dupont for inviting me, and all of you for coming out this evening to hear me talk.
The United States has been the most powerful state on the planet for many decades, and has deployed robust military forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the early years of World War II. America’s presence in your neighborhood has had significant consequences for Australia and for the wider region. This is how the Australian government sees it, at least according to the 2009 Defence White Paper: “Australia has been a very secure country for many decades, in large measure because the wider Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace and stability underwritten by US strategic primacy.” The United States, in other words, has acted as a pacifier in this part of the world.
However, according to the very next sentence in the White Paper, “That order is being transformed as economic changes start to bring about changes in the distribution of strategic power.” The argument here, of course, is that the rise of China is having a significant effect on the global balance of power. In particular, the power gap between China and the United States is shrinking and in all likelihood “US strategic primacy” in this region will be no more. This is not to say that the United States will disappear; in fact, its presence here is likely to grow in response to China’s rise. But the United States will no longer be the preponderant power in your neighborhood, as it has been since 1945.
The most important question that flows from this discussion is whether China can rise peacefully. It is clear from the Defence White Paper—which is tasked with assessing Australia’s strategic situation out to the year 2030—that policymakers here are worried about the changing balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region. Consider these comments from that document: “As other powers rise, and the primacy of the United States is increasingly tested, power relations will inevitably change. When this happens there will be the possibility of miscalculation. There is a small but still concerning possibility of growing confrontation between some of these powers.” At another point in the White Paper, we read that, “Risks resulting from escalating strategic competition could emerge quite unpredictably, and is a factor to be considered in our defence planning.” In short, the Australian government seems to sense that the shifting balance of power between China and the United States may not be good for peace in the neighborhood.
I would like to argue tonight that Australians should be worried about China’s rise, because it is likely to lead to an intense security competition between China and the United States, with considerable potential for war. Moreover, most of China’s neighbors, to include India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and yes Australia, will join with the United States to contain China’s power. To put it bluntly: China cannot rise peacefully.
It is important to emphasize, however, that I am not arguing that Chinese behavior alone will drive the security competition that lies ahead. The United States is also likely to behave in aggressive ways, thus further increasing the prospects for trouble here in the Asia-Pacific region…

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These are links to the audio from a series of talks hosted by the educational exchange outfit, CET, at the Glamour Bar in Shanghai.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom was the host, and the guest speakers were: Tess Johnson, Paul French, Zhang Lijia, Graham Earnshaw, and yours truly.

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Copyright The Age

August 12, 2010
A CHINESE general has warned his conservative Communist Party masters and People’s Liberation Army colleagues that China can either embrace American-style democracy or accept Soviet-style collapse.
While officers of similar rank have been rattling their sabres against US aircraft carriers in the Yellow and South China seas, General Liu Yazhou says China’s rise depends on adopting America’s system of government rather than challenging its presence off China’s eastern coast.
”If a system fails to let its citizens breathe freely and release their creativity to the maximum extent, and fails to place those who best represent the system and its people into leadership positions, it is certain to perish,” writes General Liu in the Hong Kong magazine, Phoenix, which is widely available on news stands and on the internet throughout China.
His article suggests China’s political and ideological struggles are more lively than commonly thought, and comes before a rotation of leaders in the Central Military Commission and then the Politburo in 2012.
”The secret of US success is neither Wall Street nor Silicon Valley, but its long-surviving rule of law and the system behind it,” he says. ”The American system is said to be ‘designed by genius and for the operation of the stupid’. A bad system makes a good person behave badly, while a good system makes a bad person behave well. Democracy is the most urgent; without it there is no sustainable rise.”
General Liu was recently promoted from deputy Political Commissar of the PLA Airforce to Political Commissar of the National Defence University. His father was a senior PLA officer and his father-in-law was Li Xiannian, one of China’s ”Eight Immortals” and one time president of China.
While many of China’s ”princelings” have exploited their revolutionary names to amass wealth and family power, General Liu has exploited his pedigree to provide political protection to push his contrarian and reformist views.
But his article is extraordinary by any standards. It urges China to shift its strategic focus from the country’s developed coastal areas including Hong Kong and Taiwan - ”the renminbi belt” - and towards the resource-rich central Asia. But he argues that China will never have strategic reach by relying on wealth alone.
”A nation that is mindful only of the power of money is a backward and stupid nation,” he writes. ”What we could believe in is the power of the truth. The truth is knowledge and knowledge is power.”
But such national power can only come with political transformation. ”In the coming 10 years, a transformation from power politics to democracy will inevitably take place,” he writes.
”China will see great changes. Political reform is our mission endowed by history. We have no leeway. So far, China has reformed all the easy parts and everything that is left is the most difficult; there is a landmine at every step.”
General Liu inverts the lesson that Chinese politicians have traditionally drawn from the collapse of the Soviet Union - that it was caused by too much political reform - by arguing reform arrived too late.
”Stability weighed above everything and money pacified everything, but eventually the conflict intensified and everything else overwhelmed stability,” he writes.
Since 2008 the Communist Party has steadily tightened the political screws to stifle all manner of civil organisation and dissent. Many Chinese are concerned that China’s political reforms have been blocked by powerful military, corporate and princeling interest groups that benefit from the status quo.
General Liu was famously outspoken until he stopped publishing his essays about five years ago. Sources close to General Liu say those early published essays have cost him opportunities for promotion.
It is unclear how his latest article appeared in Phoenix and whether he has backing from allies within the system. Last year, Hong Kong’s Open magazine published a leaked report of one of General Liu’s internal speeches which raised the taboo topic of how some generals refused to lead troops into Tiananmen Square in 1989.
General Liu returned to the subject of Tiananmen in his Phoenix article, writing that ”a nationwide riot” was caused by the incompatibility of China’s traditional power structures with reform.

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Copyright The New Yorker

The red-eye from Beijing to Delhi was sold out, as usual, the other night, and I squeezed into my seat beside a young Chinese scientist who struck up a conversation. He wore glasses and a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and he was fidgeting anxiously as the plane took off. “Where are you headed?” I asked. “Congo,” he said and gave me a weak smile.
The red-eye is operated by Ethiopian Airlines; it stops in Delhi and then Addis Ababa, where passengers like my seatmate would fan out across the continent. Someday, I thought, archeologists will look at the passenger manifest from a flight like this and learn all they need to know about what China meant to the world in the early moments of the twenty-first century: about a third of the passenger list was composed of Indians and other visitors like me; another third comprised African businesspeople and diplomats, heading home from the country that has emerged as arguably Africa’s single largest investor; the final third encompassed the Chinese sojourners, wiry laborers, in cotton shoes and military surplus pants, heading to construction sites and road crews, and a scattering of technical personnel like the scientist seated to my right.
He was a pharmaceutical researcher by training, but he had been picked by his company to join an agricultural project in Congo. They would be growing rice to ship back to China, he said. Being a part of the project made his company look good and patriotic in the eyes of local Chinese officials, and the scientist had “been volunteered,” as he put it, to be the company representative. “To be honest, I didn’t want to go, but it’s the right thing to do,” he said and stared at the darkness outside his window.
China has stepped up the growth of large-scale agricultural projects in Africa over the past five years. As Howard French described, in The Atlantic, in a terrific piece in May, large Chinese-run farms designed to export rice and other staples to China are one of the new and least-understood elements of China’s push into Africa. Two years ago, the Chinese government earmarked five billion dollars for farm projects in Africa, intended to ease China’s concerns about food security. But ceding land to foreigners, to manage it and claim the products, are acutely sensitive issues in Africa. In 2007, French notes, Chinese and Mozambican officials reportedly agreed to have three thousand Chinese settlers begin farming the fertile soil in Zambezi River Valley, but the news prompted an uproar, and Mozambique’s government now denies all reports of the idea.
My seatmate, the scientist, had his own reasons to be concerned. “I’ll be expected to communicate in French, but I’ve only had three months of French training,” he said. “I’m not very confident in it.” He pulled out a hand-held electronic translator with the name “The French King” stamped in Chinese across the top. He spent much of the flight thumbing words into the French King, and silently mouthing the results. In front of us, a screen showed stats about the flight, listed in French and English. He glanced at the screen, typed “vitesse au sol” into The French king, and held it up for me to see the Chinese: “Groundspeed.”
His assignment would last twelve months, he said, with no vacations or trips home. He had told his wife that he felt he had no choice but to go. To their six-year-old daughter, he explained, “I’m going on assignment, and I’ll call you from Africa.” A few hours into the flight, he punched a Chinese phrase into the French King and held up the results for me to read in French: “The time will pass quickly.”

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The Lens Blog’s feature on Disappearing Shanghai:

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

Kissing the Mask:
Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines
by William T. VollmannEcco
504 pp., $29.99

Some twenty years ago, William T. Vollmann wrote a remarkable novel, entitled Whores for Gloria,1 about prostitutes plying their trade in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He has written about prostitutes in other books too, notably in The Royal Family and Butterfly Stories, about an American’s adventures in Southeast Asia. In “The Shame of It All,” an essay reprinted in Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (2004), he writes:

I have worshiped them and drunk from their mouths; I’ve studied at their feet. Many have saved me; one or two I’ve raised up. They’ve cost me money and made me money. People might say that we’ve “exploited” each other. Some have trusted me; a few have loved me—or at least said so. They’ve healed my loneliness, infected me with diseases and despair.

Vollmann likes to do his homework. To research Whores for Gloria, he spent many hours with whores, drinking and smoking crack, paying them to tell him stories, and whatever else was required. But unlike many others afflicted with nostalgie de la boue, he does not romanticize his subject:

The kitchen floor was black with dirt. Nicole lay down on it and raised her legs to make her cunt so nice and tight for him, and Jimmy stood over her watching the groping of those legs, which were speckled with boils and lesions, until her left ankle came to rest on the chair that she had sat on, while the sole of her right foot had to be content with bracing itself against Jimmy’s refrigerator.

One of Vollmann’s literary tics is to repeat certain images in unexpected ways—in the case of Whores for Gloria, flowery images. Jimmy, observing Nicole’s genitals, which “glistened under the kitchen lights with the brightness of metal foil,” remarks: “Your pussy is just like a flower.” This elicits another Vollmann tic, the footnote displaying the author’s quirky erudition, often about some historical example of horrific violence:

“I still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Gala tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes,” wrote Vittorio Mussolini. “I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was entertaining.”

It might seem a very, very long way from the scuzzy, crack-addicted denizens of San Francisco’s Tenderloin (or indeed the bombing of hapless tribesmen in Ethiopia) to the refinements of Japan’s Noh theater, and yet, once one gets the drift of Vollmann’s preoccupations, the transition is not as radical as one might think. The main character in Whores for Gloria is Jimmy, an alcoholic Vietnam vet, seedy, fat, and unprepossessing in every way, but for one odd kind of grace: he is a romantic, forever searching for his great love, the ideal woman, his adored wife, his goddess, Gloria, who may or may not have existed.

In Kissing the Mask, not a literary fiction this time, Vollmann sets out on an equally romantic quest, for the secret of female grace, feminine beauty, the source of man’s dreams of erotic fulfillment. He seeks it, this time, not in the sweaty stink of cheap Skid Row hotel rooms, where the promise of love and beauty is grotesquely out of sync with reality, but in the masked dramas of the Noh stage, where male actors express the ancient passions of female beauties with a flick of an exquisite fan and the tilt of a pale mask. Something no less artificial, of course, but of a very different order. Artificiality is in fact the point, for grace and beauty in Vollmann’s books are not the unadorned products of nature. Adornment is everything; what leads men on in their never-ending chase after female beauty is less a matter of biology than of art and performance. And no performance of femininity is more stylized, more artificial than Noh.

fter spending much time in such rugged places as Afghanistan and the murderous US–Mexican borderlands, Vollmann has picked his destination well. For Japan is the right place to observe artificial beauty, from the plastic cherry blossoms that adorn city streets in spring to the mincing steps of the (male) actor of female roles (onnagata) in the Kabuki theater. Few cultures have developed the refinements of erotic performance more than the Japanese. Japan has the reputation of a country soaked in exquisite beauty (once you know how to pick your way around the neon and concrete jungles) and kinky sexual adventure. These things are there, to be sure, but beauty and grace are rarely approached directly; they are represented rather than revealed, and thus elusive. And that is what interests Vollmann: the dream, the way our desires act on the imagination, whether they be that of an old drunk trying to find Gloria in the eyes of every whore he meets or the Californian author stalking Noh stages and the straw-matted rooms of geisha establishments.

Some believe, in defense of the great art of men playing women in Noh, Kabuki, or in pre-Communist days the Chinese opera, that men can represent the allure of female beauty better than women can. For the idea is not to mimic reality but, as in a Chinese painting, to express an idea of reality, an abstraction almost. Men can represent the idea of women better, because they can take a distance from the real thing and reinvent it as art. 2

Vollmann does not quite buy this: “My own opinion is that telling other people what they are incapable of expressing is always absurd.” Yet he is mesmerized by the great Noh actor Kanze Hideo playing the ghost of an old woman who was once a celebrated beauty. “Played by Mr. Kanze,” writes Vollmann, “she still is. When I remember that performance now, I am moved almost to tears.” Elsewhere he writes that “one of the many astonishing achievements of Noh is when a dumpy old man becomes a lovely young girl, all the while showing his swollen feet in the white tabi socks and working his Adam’s apple as he sings in his old man’s bass.”

I know exactly what he means. One of the most extraordinary Kabuki performances I have ever seen was in Osaka, in the late 1970s. It was a famous love scene in the eighteenth-century play Chushingura between a samurai, Kambei, and his young wife, Okaru. Compelled by tragic circumstances, she is to be sold to a brothel, and he is about to commit suicide. Their last scene together is unbearably sad. But what sticks in my mind is the grace of the young woman, played by a great actor, Nakamura Ganjiro, then in his late seventies. The samurai husband was played by Ganjiro’s own son.

Like Jimmy, the protagonist of Whores for Gloria, Vollmann is clearly a romantic, a man given to hopeless quests. The impression you get from his writing is of a somewhat nerdish romantic; his obsessions lead to voluminous research, and not just in libraries. To write Kissing the Mask, he not only read everything he could find in English on Japanese art and theater, but he paid geishas to perform for him (this can cost thousands of dollars for a short session), interviewed cross-dressers and transsexuals, pestered Noh actors with endless questions, and even had himself made up and dressed as a woman by a lady in Tokyo who caters to men with secret transvestite yearnings.

ollmann is not someone who wears his hard-earned learning lightly, despite his almost Oriental disclaimer of any academic expertise. The opening sentences of the book are immediately disarming: “Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese, innocent of formal study in any discipline of art, a graceless dancer afflicted with bad eyesight, I may not be the perfect author for an essay on Noh drama. Fortunately, this is no essay, but a string-ball of idle thoughts.”

His thoughts are rarely idle, however, and Vollmann has the prolixity of the autodidact. All his inquiries, and the possible answers, are laid out at great length, even though this book of 504 pages is actually slender compared to some of his other works.3 There is something bold and even refreshing about a writer who shows so little concern for the shrinking attention spans of modern readers. Vollmann will go where he has to go. This can be wearying. And so can the occasional tangles of woolly prose:

We have said that the Japanese concept of aware refers to the beauty and harmony beyond direct expression which shines uniquely from various entities in their own occasion—for instance, cherry blossoms about to fall.

But even though he can sometimes come across as the bore at a drinks party who pins you to the wall as he holds forth on his latest theory, Vollmann has a fascinating mind, which makes up for the patches of boredom. And his research turns up some highly arresting facts, such as the famous woodblock artist Utamaro’s categories of the ideal vagina: “takobobo, todatebobo and kinchakubobo (octopus, which sucks; trapdoor, which grips; purse, which is tight).” What makes this book particularly interesting is the way Vollmann mixes personal experience with intellectual sleuthing. Ideas and feelings are often in a state of tension, which means that in the end we learn as much about the author as about Japan, and that distinguishes this literary work from an academic tome. One can’t somehow imagine Professor Donald Keene, say, one of the great American experts on Noh, telling us all about his love life.

Here is Vollmann on the mask of the zo-onna, the ideal of pure female beauty, which he has compared to the face of a contemporary Japanese porn star. The Noh mask, no matter how exquisitely carved, comes to life only on stage. The zo-onna, writes Vollmann,

awaits the ceremony of being inhabited by yet another man, a man whose true flower sweetly guides him, like the woman I love who sometimes sits astride me to better control her pleasure; he inhabits her in order to bring her back to life in the manner that he expresses life, so that we may watch and experience the joyousness of our own desire, which he and the zo-onna have understated into metaphysics.

This might strike some readers as unbearably pretentious, but I think Vollmann has caught something important about Noh. For Noh is the art of making live drama out of the most minimalist, stylized means: a masked man gliding very slowly across a stage of cypress wood, which is bare except for a simple painting of a pine tree. This is what Vollmann calls “understated.” Again, as in a Chinese landscape painting, with its large empty spaces, much is left to the imagination. By reducing the expression of life to the barest of means, the art form increases its intensity.

ike many (perhaps all) ancient forms of drama, Noh has religious origins. Once called sarugaku, monkey music, because the first practitioners were supposedly monkeys mimicking the gods, the earliest dances were performed at Shinto shrines to pray for good harvests. These dance dramas were refined and made into a high art during the fourteenth century by a father and son, Kan’ami Kiyotsugu and Zeami Motokiyo. They wrote most of the plays that are still performed today. Noh might actually not have survived if General Ulysses S. Grant had not arrived in Tokyo on a goodwill tour in 1879 and declared that this fine art should be preserved.4 His was an important encomium, because Japanese at that time were keen to jettison all kinds of traditions in their efforts to look Western.

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Sinograph

BEIJING - Many Chinese people dream that their country will one day become “number one”. The dream is legitimate - as with any race, you want to win; or in any economic competition, you want to outperform your competitors. This is part of the nature of the capitalist system that has spread from the West to countries all over the world.

In international politics, this competition has a delicate appendix involving dangerous military matters.

Will China’s military catch up with America’s? And if so, when? Many strategists in Beijing wonder about these questions, and the main drive of the thinking is on China’s economy.

When China’s economy is big enough it will “naturally” sustain greater military expenditures, and thus in due time it will outperform the US in military might. There are some snags to this linear thinking. One is related to technological advances: China lags behind America in many technological areas, and it is hard to catch up.

The US might become economic “number two” but could well retain its technological prominence in military matters for several decades after China overtakes it economically. Still, even if China were to catch up in military technology, one wonders whether it would have the intellectual freedom necessary for the research innovation needed to manufacture effective and ground-breaking technology that would lead Beijing to be a giant in this sphere, as the US presently is.

These problems are all real, and Beijing might have some solutions. However, the problems of China’s military rise are possibly not solved by simple projections of China’s economic growth in future decades.

But first, let’s assume that economic growth can take care of everything. One can simply think that in 20 years, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) may be larger than America’s. Then, because of its new economic might, China’s military could be in a position to overtake the US’s, and China might think this could happen in the following 10 or 20 years (around 2040-2050). Yet, even then, by the middle of the century, China’s military challenges would be far from over.

China would still be alone against an alliance made of America plus European countries, Japan, India and other Asian countries. All these states might prefer to side with America and not with China in the event of military confrontation.

Such a grouping would represent a technological, military and economic power far bigger than China in the foreseeable future, even if we were to stretch ourselves to the end of this century. China would not be able to take on all of them, and in fact, in the next decades, China will have to rely heavily on US involvement in the region to ease tensions with its neighbors. [1]

Could China grow stronger by about 2030-2040 and then replace America in this broad pattern of alliances? To a certain extent, yes, but in the event of a real military confrontation, this is most unlikely because all these countries are scared of China’s rise. This is because China is a newcomer, and thus largely unpredictable. It is too big, growing too rapidly, and too ”new” to modern international diplomacy. But mostly, all of these countries are scared because China’s politics are not transparent and Beijing is not forthcoming about its political decision-making because China is not, in one word, democratic.

If China is ever to become “number one”, it would need first not a mighty and technologically advanced military, but real allies and real friends - not friends like North Korea or even Pakistan, a country that if pressed to choose between China and America most likely now would still pick America. To have friends, China has to become democratic, and while this would also not be a total solution, it would be a necessary step.

Given the US’s status, the road to greatness in China is bound to go through some sort of political compromise and agreement with America. One difficulty in this is that China will have to build its new friendship with America without leaving other countries behind.

That is, China would have to build good ties with many countries that are presently friends with America, as well as continue building ties with America. Only if China can weave a complicated web of new political ties can it realistically hope to become politically “number one” sometime after it becomes economic “number one”. And then it could be poised to naturally inherit the US’s reach in the world and its web of alliances.

This leaves a few open questions: what is the use of China’s present military build-up? Will the new Chinese weapons realistically be used to conquer Taiwan or to impose its rule in the South China Sea? In the foreseeable future, China could meet both goals, but if that were to happen, China would economically and politically be suffocated immediately after the conquest. China knows it and will try not to pursue this course, as it would end all its dreams at once.

But China’s present tendency to not give up its military threat to Taiwan is motivated by domestic reasons: the push of nationalists who have no real and clear idea of the ways China could realistically become “number one”.

Certainly, China’s dream to become “number one” has many enemies, many of whom call themselves Chinese. Take, for instance, the case of Mao Zedong. Some Chinese neo-nationalists consider him the greatest Chinese hero of the past century. However, his 30 years of political experiments stopped China’s economic growth for many decades.

At the end of World War II, Japan’s and China’s GDPs were at the same level. If we take this as a standard, without Mao, China’s GDP could have become two-thirds of America’s GDP by the late 1980s. If we more realistically take Taiwan’s GDP per capita as a standard of China’s potential overall GDP growth, China’s economy could have overtaken that of America by the late 1970s.

These projections are debatable but are a useful intellectual exercise as from here we can see that China, thanks to Mao, lost some 50 years of development. Then, in retrospect, Mao was China’s enemies’ best friend, and at present the best weapon China’s enemies could invent would be to create a second Mao.

This thought could perhaps become important in the next couple of years, as China is readying itself to put in power a batch of new rulers coming from the ultra-Maoist experience. The Chinese rulers after the 2012 Communist Party Congress will likely all be former Red Guards, and thus they will have experienced firsthand the disasters of the times when China lost ground. Yet they might also have an important Maoist mindset: “wu tian, wu fa” (“no heaven, no law”), open to all possibilities and daring to do anything in the best interests of their country.

Note
1. See my The blessing of China’s threat, La Stampa, June 4, 2007.

(Conversations with Huang Jianping, Paul Shao and Amir Shadab helped in the conception of this article.)

Francesco Sisci is the Asia Editor of La Stampa.

(Copyright 2010 Francesco Sisci.)

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Copyright The Economist

ON THE hilly streets of Chongqing, men with thick bamboo poles loiter for customers who will pay them to carry loads. The “stick men”, as they are called, hang the items from either end of the poles and heave them up over their shoulders. In a city where the Communist Party chief, Bo Xilai, likes to sing old revolutionary songs, these workers should be hymned as heroes. Yet few of them are even classed as citizens of the city where they live.

Most of the stick men were born in the countryside around Chongqing. (The name covers both the urban centre that served as China’s capital in the second world war, and a hinterland, the size of Scotland, which the city administers.) Since 1953, shortly after the Communists came to power, Chinese citizens have been divided into two strata, urban and rural, not according to where they live but on a hereditary basis. The stick men may have spent all their working lives on the streets of Chongqing, but their household registration papers call them “agricultural”.

The registration system (hukou, in Chinese) was originally intended to stop rural migrants flowing into the cities. Stick men were among the targets. In the early days of Communist rule in Chongqing the authorities rounded up thousands of “vagrants” and sent them to camps (vagrants, said Mao Zedong, “lack constructive qualities”). There they endured forced labour before being packed back to their villages.

Rapid industrial growth over the past three decades has required tearing down migration barriers to exploit the countryside’s huge labour surplus. Hukou, however, still counts for a lot, from access to education, health care and housing to compensation payouts. To be classified as a peasant often means being treated as a second-class citizen. Officials in recent years have frequently talked about “reforming” the system. They have made it easier to acquire urban citizenship, in smaller cities at least. But since late last year the official rhetoric has become more urgent. Policymakers have begun to worry that the country’s massive stimulus spending in response to the global financial crisis could run out of steam. Hukou reform, they believe, could boost rural-urban migration and with it the consumer spending China needs.

In early March 11 Chinese newspapers (it would have been 13, had not two bottled out) defied party strictures and teamed together to publish an extraordinary joint editorial. It called on China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which was then about to hold its annual meeting, to urge the government to scrap the hukou system as soon as possible. “We hope”, it said, “that a bad policy we have suffered for decades will end with our generation, and allow the next generation to truly enjoy the sacred rights of freedom, democracy and equality bestowed by the constitution.” Not since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 had so many newspapers simultaneously cast aside the restraints imposed by the Communist Party’s mighty Propaganda Department, which micromanages China’s media output.

The editorial said that “gratifying” progress had already been made with reform, but the system’s “invisible and heavy shackles” were still causing distress. Reform could inject “more dynamism” into the economy and help counter the effects of an ageing population.

Party leaders resented the newspapers’ boldness. Zhang Hong, a deputy chief editor of the Economic Observer, a weekly newspaper, was stripped of his title (though allowed to keep working) for his role in organising the editorial. Within a couple of hours of its appearance on newspaper websites, the authorities ordered its removal. Hukou reform was fine, but the government did not want to be hassled.

Urban citizens benefit from the hukou system, but those who migrate between cities are also irked by it. In 2003 some Chinese newspapers, independently of one another, pressed for reform after a college-educated migrant was detained by police for failing to produce a required identity document, and was beaten to death. The outcry led to the scrapping of regulations that allowed the police to detain people and deport them to their home towns for similar misdemeanours.

This time, says an editor involved in the hukou editorial, the impact was the opposite. Among many of the party-picked delegates to the NPC, he says, hukou reform became “a taboo topic”. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, told the session in March that the government would carry out reforms and repeated that requirements would be relaxed in towns and smaller cities. But he offered few details.

The complexity of hukou reform daunts Chinese leaders. It would have a huge impact on crucial aspects of the economy, from the system of land ownership in the countryside to the financing of public services. But the downsides of an unreformed system are much more obvious. The influx of migrants has caught local governments badly unprepared. Budget pressures have made them highly reluctant to spend money on helping the incomers. Registered urban residents are none too keen either. Few want their children sharing classes with kids they regard as country bumpkins.

In a cold classroom
In urban and rural China alike, the first nine years of schooling are supposed to be free. But not for rural migrants. In Beijing, as in other big cities, hundreds of privately run schools have sprung up in recent years to cater for them. At the Xiangyang Hope School in Huangcun township on the southern edge of the capital, the basic fee is 1,100 yuan ($165) a year: a snip for many urban residents, but the equivalent of several weeks’ wages for many migrants. There is an extra charge for heating; children complain that they are cold in the bitter winters. One parent says she is preparing to take her child back to her village, because conditions are better there.

The authorities have tried to muzzle the principal, Luo Chao (a migrant himself). Mr Luo was until recently the headmaster of another school to the north-east of Beijing. He says local officials told him just before the lunar new year holiday in February that the school would be demolished to make way for a private development project, and could not reopen after the break. Officials briefly detained Mr Luo and the head teacher of another condemned migrants’ school to prevent them petitioning higher authorities. Officials promised that the children would be found new places, but Mr Luo says there is no way that the local government-run school would have enough room for them.

In education, the hukou system’s absurdity is particularly glaring. Migrant children, though classified as “agricultural”, usually have no more than one brief exposure to rural life every year when they are taken to their parents’ home towns for the lunar new year festivities. School places in urban areas are so scarce that some pupils will drop out and others, though old enough for secondary school, will have to stay in primary classes. Tens of millions of children of migrant workers are, in effect, forced to stay in the countryside for schooling, looked after by other relatives. If they do move to urban areas with their parents, they may not sit exams for senior high school in the city where they live. They must return to their place of registration.

Until the late 1990s, a child’s hukou could only follow its mother’s. This meant that even a child who grew up in Beijing with a father registered as a Beijing citizen might have to travel hundreds of miles to sit the exam in his mother’s registered home town. Hukou can still affect a student’s chances of getting into top universities, for which each province has a quota of places. The quotas for provincial-level cities like Beijing and Shanghai are disproportionately large. Such privileges fuel a lively black market in highly priced hukous of favoured cities.

The relaxation of hukou rules in recent years has been half-hearted. Chongqing last year offered urban hukou to any rural resident who had graduated from senior high school and who was prepared to give up his entitlement to farm a plot of land and own a village homestead. Those are big provisos. Shanghai announced with fanfare last year that seven years’ work in the city—along with the required tax and social-security payments—would entitle a resident to hukou. But rural migrants often work without contracts and do not pay tax or contribute to welfare funds; only 3,000 of Shanghai’s millions of migrant workers would qualify, said Chinese press reports. On May 1st Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province and a magnet for migrants, began phasing out the “agricultural” distinction in its hukou documents, but the effect of this is mostly cosmetic. Beijing has been among the slowest to change. One Shanghai urban hukou-holder who has lived in Beijing for well over a decade says he still cannot get registered there.

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