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

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright The New York Times

July 24, 2008

One result of the economic crisis facing newspapers and most other media outlets is that the number of foreign correspondents is plummeting. Here at the New York Times, we still have all of our foreign bureaus — partly because our strategy is to compete for readers who seek international news and analysis — but most newspapers and TV networks have been pulling back. Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks. And for a network, it’s very expensive to base a correspondent in London or Tokyo, and so much easier to film two people yelling at each other in a studio.

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Copyright The Zimbabwe Independent
17 July 2008

THE recent veto against the UN targeted sanctions on the key people in President Mugabe’s regime by China and Russia despite a deluge of international condemnation of Zimbabwe’s human rights violations before and after the run off must certainly be a cause of worry for all those who are working for substantive political change in Zimbabwe and other troubled spots in Africa.

While China played a critical role in supporting African decolonisation struggles such as in Zimbabwe itself, its current laissez-faire policy in Africa’s post-independence struggles for democracy certainly raises more questions than answers about the country’s moral and ethical commitment to Africa’s sustainable socio-economic and political development.

China’s Africa policy –– a document that describes the framework of its trade with Africa espoused by the communist government in January 2006 –– shows that China’s relationship with Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, is fraught with not only some head-swaying contradictions, but also a serious ethical and moral vacuum that exposes China to be shrewd, selfish, calculating, greedy and primitive because it prioritises its economic and political interests over ordinary people’s human rights in its dealings with African countries.

For example, regardless of Zimbabwe’s international isolation due to its human rights abuses, China continues to be Zimbabwe’s biggest investor strategically positioning itself to exploit our valuable natural resources to develop its ever burgeoning economy at the expense of the basic freedoms and entitlements of the ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe.

According to the Jamestown Foundation, a leading source of information about the inner workings of closed totalitarian societies, since the Zimbabwean crisis began in 2000, Chinese firms such as China International Water and Electric, National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation (Catic) and North Industries Corporation (Norinco) have clinched mouth-watering deals in mining, aviation, agriculture, defence and other sectors in an avowed all weather friendship with Mugabe’s regime. While some critics argue that China’s relentless support for Zimbabwe in the Security Council is based on the close historical ties dating back to the struggle for independence, it is now crystal clear to everybody that China has always pursued self-serving policies that are solely based on its economic and political considerations. If indeed –– as the available evidence seems to suggest –– China’s current policy position in Zimbabwe is primarily motivated
by its economic greed, then Zimbabweans will have no reason not to believe the growing suspicion that the support for the liberation struggle in the seventies was simply based on China’s need to spread communism and create geopolitical alliances in the cold war and halt the spread of free market and liberal principles across Africa. The fact that ethics therefore may have played no part presents China as an opportunistic power whose development can be directly linked to the tears, pain and in some cases, blood of African men, women and children.

China’s cold war geopolitical manoeuvres in Africa would certainly not only explain why, for example, Mugabe pursued a one-party state policy immediately after independence, but also why China itself continues to ignore pertinent issues of human rights, good governance and accountability which it fallaciously believes to be a property of the West –– a logic that unwittingly condescends on the struggles for independence and justice by Africans in general and Zimbabweans in particular. China must know that the quest for human rights and democracy in Africa did not start with the spread of neo-liberal values in the nineties, but that human rights, no matter how differently articulated by Africans, have always informed African struggles for justice since the cradle of African resistance.

While Wang Guangya, the Chinese UN ambassador, used a seemingly plausible excuse that it was improper to slap sanctions on Mugabe and his aristocratic clique in Harare while Sadc negotiations were still going on in South Africa, this position does not explain why China has always supported autocratic regimes in Africa whose legitimacy is based on nothing but rivers of blood of innocent citizens.

For example, China’s non-interference policy in Darfur, where according to the UN and Amnesty International reports, more than 200 000 people have been killed, countless numbers raped and tortured, and 2,5 million displaced, does not only expose China’s insensitivity to the plight of the black people living in the southern parts of Sudan, but also smacks of a downright racist attitude by China whose Africa policy falsely pledges support for
peace and development for the African continent.

In the midst of a what others have dubbed a genocide in Darfur, China continues to be not only the biggest importer of Sudan’s oil (importing about 80% of the precious liquid), but also to illegally deliver weapons that include ammunition, tanks, helicopters and fighter aircraft that, according to the UN, the Arab government has allegedly used to bomb and massacre poor and defenceless black people living in grass huts.

True African democrats would surely wonder how on earth China thinks it can support and bring about development, peace and stability in Africa when it works tirelessly to defend pariah states and blood gobbling regimes such as the Sudanese and Zimbabwean regimes in the UN Security Council. Given the shaky Sadc negotiations and China’s selfish and unconditional support for Zimbabwe, it is not surprising that the words of the British UN Ambassador John Sawers that the Chinese and Russian vote on Friday was “deeply damaging to the long-term interests of Zimbabwe’s people … (and to) prospects for bringing an early end to…the oppression in Zimbabwe” captured the imagination of most Zimbabweans who yearn for the restoration of the political and economic rights.

Yet it’s not about whether UN sanctions would work in Zimbabwe or have worked in Sudan, but that China’s African trade must be predicated on ethical and moral principles and trade preconditions that motivate African governments to open up and democratise because history attests to the fact that democracy is a basis of all sustainable and enduring development all over the world. The Darfur example and the recent daring
attempt by China to deliver weapons and ammunition to the Zimbabwean government in the midst of an election crisis in March show that if no quick measures are taken, the Chinese would give a helping hand to Mugabe to plunge Zimbabwe into a civil war regardless of the moral responsibility implied in China’s status as a voting member of the Security Council.

As long as Chinese state companies continue to harvest profits in Harare and Khartoum and sell their shares on the New York and London stock markets, then the fight for democracy by the ordinary people in Zimbabwe and other countries like Sudan continues to be peripheral to China. Given this uncritical and immoral stance on the violation of human rights by China, perhaps the time has come for Zimbabweans and all conscientious Africans to see China as part of the problem that calls for political action in their legitimate quests for democracy on the continent.

African civic groups need to start mobilising people to confront the Chinese government by demonstrating at the doors of its diplomatic missions in different parts of the world to protest against its activities in Zimbabwe and Darfur. The people of Africa must not allow China to claim that it will always maintain a policy of non-interference and the respect for sovereignty of African countries, yet be more than ready not only to illegally export weapons to African dictorships, but also use its veto power in the Security Council to block any punishment intended for those who commit crimes against humanity.

In the face of the cosmetic criticism by most of the African countries on the complicit actions of the Zimbabwe, Sudanese and Chinese governments, ordinary people’s hopes in Zimbabwe and Darfur must now lie with international civil society and their national NGOs and pressure groups to force China to review its Africa policy and stop viewing Africa as an unoccupied continent in space run by wealth dispensing vampires. It must be impressed on China that Africans are not less deserving of the human rights enjoyed by its own citizens.

Dr Moyo writes from Wales, UK. He can be contacted at lastmoyo@yahoo.com

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Copyright Gawker

The good news: Everything you ever read about the sexual perversities of the Japanese may still by true. The bad: If you read it in the “WaiWai” column of the Mainichi Daily News, it probably isn’t. The English-language version of popular Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun has been inventing all its best kinky features, or rather deliberately mistranslating them from the original. As it turns out, moms are not blowing their sons to get them to study harder, there is no bestiality restaurant in Tokyo, and housewives probably aren’t turning tricks in suburban coin showers. The paper vows to start over fresh by hiring women to scrutinize the legitimacy of its seedy reporting, and the internal investigation was said to rival the Times’s after the Jayson Blair fiasco. The editorial apology after the jump (it does no good to nettlesome national stereotypes that the URL actually ends with “So sorry”).

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Copyright The China Beat

7/17/2008

It seems that boycott fatigue has finally hit the Chinese, in a year that has lurched from one boycott to another—against such entities as a French supermarket chain, a Hollywood star, and an American cable channel. When the latest clarion call was issued by a performance artist named Zhao Bandi赵半狄 against Kung Fu Panda, he was greeted with jeers and mockery. Zhao presented his case in a blog: Hollywood is morally corrupt for churning out loathsome personalities like Sharon Stone (who betrayed schadenfreude over the Sichuan earthquake as “karmic retribution” for Tibet) and Steven Spielberg (who quit his role as artistic advisor to the Olympics over Sudan). Therefore it should not be allowed to profit, in China, and so soon after the earthquake, from China’s most iconic “national treasure” (国宝)—the panda. And for Chinese to help line the pockets of the Hollywood reprobates would be tantamount to stripping valuables off the bodies of the quake victims.

The banner that Zhao strung up outside the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, telling Kung Fu Panda to go home (《功夫熊猫》滚出去！), was taken down within 20 minutes by plainclothes police (see picture above). The movie opened in multiple cities on June 20 as scheduled to huge mirthful crowds. But Zhao’s effort was not a complete failure: the release of the movie was delayed for one day in Sichuan—home of the panda reserve and site of the earthquake—over concerns about possible “misperceptions” and hurt feelings. For this minor victory, Zhao received a phone call from an irate Sichuanese who gave him a bank account number and demanded that a suitable sum be deposited into it. For what? To compensate for the psychological loss he allegedly sustained for being prevented from enjoying the movie simultaneously with his dear compatriots throughout the rest of the country (全国人民)!

Most of the detractors simply regarded Zhao as a clown and a hypocrite, asking tongue-in-cheek if he had come down with a case of “boycott disease” (抵制病), or if he was jealous of Hollywood’s high-tech virtuosity. Zhao has indeed made a name for himself (“the Pandaman” 熊猫人) with his panda-themed performance art, most notably a goofy line of black-and-white and furry fashion gear (picture below). Apparently his being Chinese not only entitles him to playful (and gainful) appropriation of his national patrimony, but also obligates him to guard it against profiteering interlopers.

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Copyright City Journal

16 July 2008

The taxpayers’ predicament over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is already grave enough. The Bush administration has asked Congress for a massive rescue package for the twin “government-sponsored” mortgage investors and insurers, and the Fed has announced that it will extend short-term lending to both Fannie and Freddie. Graver still, though, is the fact that the rest of the world of supposedly “high” finance is becoming more like Fannie and Freddie, with potentially disastrous consequences for the American economy and taxpayer.

What are Fannie and Freddie—and why should we care? The two behemoths sponsor about half of the nation’s home mortgages, mostly of the old-fashioned, fixed-rate variety. They’ve guaranteed three-quarters of recent mortgages since the credit crisis began, up from 40 percent a couple of years ago, when investors were so optimistic about housing prices that they didn’t find the guarantees necessary. These mortgage guarantees, as well as the companies’ borrowing to support their own investments in mortgages, account for virtually all of Fannie’s and Freddie’s $5.4 trillion in liabilities.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and soon you’re talking about real money—more than one-third of the annual gross domestic product, in fact. Yet this mass of obligation sits on a razor-thin base. Fannie and Freddie hold only about $80 billion in actual capital, or under 2 percent of all of those potential liabilities. They get the rest of their money through borrowing. And because their borrowing matures regularly, they must raise new billions every month.

What this precarious capital structure means is that Fan and Fred have scarily little room for error. If the value of the mortgage loans they hold or guarantee declines by just a few percent, their capital is wiped out. William Poole, former chief of the St. Louis Fed, helped set off a run on the firms’ shares last week by noting that Freddie was already technically insolvent, thanks to the decline in home values over the past two years (though the situation had been clear in May). Why did lenders and shareholders, then, give such dangerous companies money to play with, especially on Fan’s and Fred’s customarily cheap terms?

The answer is that while Fannie and Freddie are technically private firms, their debt has come with an implied government guarantee. Everyone has long believed that Fannie and Freddie are “too big to fail”: that is, that the feds would never let them fall into bankruptcy, for two reasons. One, they’re crucial to the nation’s mortgage markets, partly because it’s hard for other firms to compete with their once-implicit government backing. Two, they’re crucial to the nation’s broader financial markets, having wrapped themselves in a web of guarantees, insurance contracts, and derivatives that makes Bear Stearns’s business look as straightforward as a lemonade stand.

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Read "America, Too Big to Fail … Probably: The feds can bail out Fannie and Freddie, but who will bail out the feds?"

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Copyright Joe Posnanski

Sure, I’m fascinated by Tiger Woods. I’m fascinated by him because I cannot figure him out. I have no idea what drives him, what inspires him, what makes him laugh (other than a misplayed chip bouncing into the hole). I don’t know if he’s happy living the most luxurious and public life imaginable, or if happiness is beside the point. I don’t know if he plays otherworldly golf because it’s pivotal to his existence, or because it gives him a high he cannot get anywhere else, or because that golf has won him a billion dollars and the hearts of men on Wall Street and a Swedish supermodel, or if he’s inescapably bound to the dreams of his father and a poster of Jack Nicklaus that he had on his wall as a child.

I don’t know if Tiger Woods hears the cheers and shrieks as he walks through the crowd, stonefaced, distant, alone, like a prison guard walking the line past the cages while a ring of keys swings and sways off his belt buckle. Maybe he really does not hear them, does not hear us, maybe he really is insulated by gallery ropes and five layers of concentration. It’s worth nothing that when he stands over a golf ball he can hear a camera shutter release seven football fields away. I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I don’t know why he throws his clubs like a petulant child when he hits a bad shot or how he climbs into his soul like an old man at peace when he needs to hit a shot close to the hole. I don’t know if hits a thousand golf shots a day through pain and aching monotony because he still rages to become the greatest golfer who ever lived or because he doesn’t really know what else to do, his destiny has been declared, his coronation has been scheduled, his status as the greatest golfer who ever lived has been prophesied — or as Jim Murray said: “Carmen was announced, Carmen will be sung.”

All I know about Tiger Woods can be summed up in about seven words: “I knew he would make that putt.”

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Copyright Vanity Fair

August 2008

Beijing is flat and sprawling and smoggy and jammed with traffic and nearly all new, which is why an American friend who’s been working there for the last couple of years calls it “the People’s Republic of Houston.”

When it comes to urban analogies, though, New York City actually seems more apt. Beijing’s historic core—the area with Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the main national government buildings, and some of the few remaining hutong neighborhoods—contains 1.3 million people in its 24 square miles, almost exactly the same as Manhattan; fully urbanized Beijing closely tracks the five boroughs of New York City in area and population; and the greater Chinese capital is about the same size as metropolitan New York.

But having just visited for the first time, I realized that what early-21st-century Beijing even more deeply resembles is New York at the turn of the 20th century. That’s the moment at which modern New York was inventing itself by showstopping leaps and bounds—swallowing adjacent cities and towns and farms, booming in population, and erecting what would become its defining landmarks.

The parallels are uncanny. Beijing’s population has doubled during the last 30 years, just as New York’s did between 1880 and 1910. The first great river span, the Brooklyn Bridge, was built in the 1880s, and New York’s first subway line opened in 1904. Beijing’s dominant piece of urban infrastructure—its five concentric Ring Roads, which loop around the city—was begun in the 1980s and has just been finished. Beijing’s new subway system—100 miles built, 250 more to come over the next seven years—is proceeding apace.

Architecturally, today’s New York is primarily an artifact of that earlier turn of the century. Indeed, most of New York’s greatest iconic buildings sprouted in one breathtakingly brief period. Between 1902 and 1913, the city got Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, and both the Flatiron and Woolworth Buildings—and within the next two decades the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. The rich, state-of-the-art metropolis that suddenly emerged was this country’s swaggering announcement to the world—Hey, get a load of us!—that the American Century had commenced. The 1939 New York World’s Fair was an exclamation point.

Just as today Beijing is hosting the Summer Olympics and entering its own modern architectural golden age. During the last 30 years, China’s economy has grown sixfold. Like a classic nouveau riche, eager to impress the Establishment of which it has just become a member, China is bragging about the sheer scale of its new go-go monuments: Lord Norman Foster’s new, $3.8 billion terminal at the Beijing airport is among the largest buildings on earth, Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television will be the world’s second-largest office building after the Pentagon … and so on.

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Copyright The Telegraph

It was time to admit, a prominent Chinese academic said recently, that Beijing’s ambitions for the Olympics had changed.

The authorities no longer expected them to be the Best Games Ever, he said: it would be enough if they just passed without trouble.

This seemed a sad conclusion to draw. We may expect other Olympics to be more about making hoopla than history, but surely with the glamorous stadiums, the new subways and skyscrapers, all that fawning over China’s rise, this was going to be something special?

It seems it is not to be. Fun has been sacrificed to security. It may have been predictable that Russian prostitutes would be expelled along with free Tibet activists, but it seems absurd that the very people we thought China was trying to impress - tourists, sports fans and businessmen – are finding it hard to get visas.

Now that food lorries are being turned back from the city boundaries for having the wrong licence plates, we can be sure that making life difficult for everyone is considered a small price to pay to prevent the merest glimpse of a Tibetan flag.

With this in mind, we should not be surprised at the vastly more important news that China opposes attempts to bring Sudan’s President Bashir to justice over his government’s crimes in Darfur; nor that its United Nations ambassador is happy to block, block and block again any motion that might hold Robert Mugabe to account for Zimbabwe’s election fiasco.

The Communist Party seems to be doing the least it can to mollify western public opinion precisely when it is supposed to be most concerned with how the world sees it.

But in fact, such policy decisions are all part of the same ruggedly consistent, if misunderstood, thinking on the part of those in Beijing’s halls of power.

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Read "Why China is standing by its basket-case allies"

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Copyright The Guardian

July 14, 2008
I live and work in China, but it’s easy to forget how special China can be.
I’ve just returned from travel abroad, and the main topic of conversation
was the Euro 2008. Everyone I met was
overjoyed with Spain’s victory over Germany.

In Israel, my friends cheered against Germany for obvious reasons. In
Austria, they cheered against Germany for less obvious reasons: Germans are
viewed as arrogant and somewhat uncouth. In Hungary, my friends cheered
against Germany for more widely-shared reasons: the Spanish play more
exciting football, they were clearly the better team throughout the
tournament, and it seemed just that they should win after such a long
drought.

More than once, I was told that only Germans cheer for Germany. But there’s
one exception: in China, Germany was the clear fan favorite. On the way home
from the airport, our driver, a serious football fan, explained why. Their
disciplined and team-oriented form of football, to her, is more inspiring
than the fancy moves of Spanish players. She knows the German players and
developed an attachment for the team by following German football on Chinese
TV over the years.

There are other factors at work. Chinese fans support traditional football
powers such as Germany, England, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It is
difficult to overestimate the passion for such teams. In the 2002 World Cup,
the CCTV hostess Sheng Bing wept openly at Argentina’s early exit. In 2006,
China’s best-known football announcer,
Huang Jianxiang, was
barely able to control his enthusiasm when Italy beat Australia on a last
minute penalty kick.

Partly, the preference for traditional football powers can be explained by
love of the game: Chinese fans support teams that have performed well in the
past and are likely to generate exciting games in the future. But football
lovers elsewhere tend to prefer the stylish Spaniards over the dull Germans,
so that can’t be the whole story.

The key underlying emotion is a special form of internationalist
nationalism. The support for established teams may be an expression of a
more general appreciation for nations with long histories and cultures. As
director of the Institute of Italian Culture in Beijing, Francesco Sisci
could find common ground with his Chinese counterparts by appealing to their
love of history, by showing how Italy served as an important cradle of
western civilisation, just as China served as the cradle of East Asian
civilisation.

Conversely, the Chinese won’t cheer for underdogs – in fact, it is
impossible to translate the word “underdog” in Chinese with the right
nuances. Nor will they cheer for teams with a long track record of losing
(such as Spain prior to this year’s European Cup) or relatively small teams
and countries without substantial talent, global impact, or long histories.

Does any of this matter, other than for Hollywood producers marketing movies
that end with the triumph of underdog athletes and teams? It matters for
those of us who sympathise with the aspirations of small nations or
minorities, such as the francophones of Quebec. A sure way to upset my
Chinese father-in-law – a veteran of three revolutionary wars – is to tell
him that my francophone mother supports independence for Quebec. Why would
she want to break up the country, he wonders? Bigger is better, isn’t it?

In the same vein, the Chinese are often baffled by Tibetans who seem to
value political autonomy and religious freedom over material wellbeing. The
Chinese government is bringing economic benefits to the Tibetans, why can’t
they appreciate it, why do they want to separate from a big country?

The way to address the concerns of Tibetans is not by asking the Chinese to
change their mental outlooks. For one thing, political independence for
Tibetans is a complete non-starter: I’ve yet to meet a single Chinese person
who favours breaking up the country so that a minority group can enjoy its
own way of life.

What is feasible as a way of securing the interests of minority groups –
and culturally-sensitive, in a Chinese context – is to promote Confucian
ideals of soft power. When China was weak and bullied by foreign powers, it
seemed natural to emphasise military power to unify the country and build
the state’s capacity to protect itself from foreign interference and
internal chaos. Mao himself justified his actions with reference to such
legalist ideas
and compared himself to the anti-Confucian first Qin emperor who used brutal
tactics to unify China after centuries of chaos and warfare.

But now China is stronger than before, and it doesn’t have to worry as much
about foreign incursions. The political context allows for the reassertion
of traditional Confucian ideas of virtue: moral example and persuasion
rather than force is the right way to win the “hearts and minds” of people
in outlying lands. The Confucian ideal of “tian xia” defended by such
contemporary intellectuals as Zhao Tingyang of Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences is a peaceful and harmonious unified world where rulers rule by
means of informal norms and rituals.

In the Confucian moral framework, it may be the case that other cultures and
moral systems are implicitly downgraded to second-class status. But that’s
no different than Christianity and other universalising traditions that aim
to spread their values to the rest of the world. And for minority groups in
China, the practical choice is between harsh legalism and hands-off
Confucianism. Clearly the latter is preferable.

Let Tibetans have freedom to worship as they see fit, but the Chinese should
also have the freedom to show the moral power of their way of life within
unified boundaries, so long as no coercion is involved. And both sides
should interact with an open-minded attitude. Buddhism has enriched Chinese
culture in the past (and vice versa) and such engagements can continue in
the future.

Just as the Chinese won’t cheer for underdogs in sports, so they won’t
sympathise with minority groups that seek to wall themselves off from larger
countries.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/> guardian.co.uk,

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Copyright The New York Times
July 13, 2008
BEIJING: If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it is understandable. It is not just the grandeur of the space. It is the inescapable feeling that you are passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.

The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.

Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory.

Critics have incessantly described these high-profile projects as bullish expressions of the nation’s budding global primacy. Yet these buildings are not simply blunt expressions of power. Like the great monuments of 16th-century Rome or 19th-century Paris, China’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do with intellectual ferment as economic clout.

Each building, in its own way, embodies an intense struggle over the meaning of public space in the new China. And although at times terrifying in their aggressive scale, they also reflect the country’s effort to give shape to an emerging national identity.

Foster’s airport terminal, the world’s largest, is the purest expression of China’s embrace of the Modernist creed. Its swooping form, which suggests two boomerangs placed side by side, has been compared to a dragon. Yet its real precedent is Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, a monument to air travel conceived by Albert Speer in the 1930s as a gateway to a new Europe. Both are part of a vision of a mobile society, one that extends back through Grand Central Terminal in New York to the great train halls of Paris.

Like Tempelhof, the Beijing air terminal boasts a sweeping concourse that evokes the glamour of air travel while enclosing a surprisingly intimate interior. But Foster pushes the ideal of mobility to a new extreme. Guided by twinkling lights embedded in the terminal’s ceiling, arriving visitors glide up ramped floors and across broad pedestrian bridges before spilling out onto the elevated concourse. From there they can disperse along a fluid network of roads, trains, subways, canals and parks whose tentacles extend out through the region.

This sprawling web has completely reshaped Beijing since the city was awarded the Olympic Games seven years ago. It is impossible not to think of the enormous public works projects built in the United States at midcentury, when faith in technology’s promise seemed boundless. Who would have guessed then that this faith would crumble for Americans, paving the way for a post-Katrina New Orleans just as the dream was being reborn in 21st-century China at 10 times the scale?

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Copyright Scientific American

(Editor’s note: A really fascinating read. Worth pursuing the link.)

A development company controlled by Osama bin Laden’s half brother revealed last year that it wants to build a bridge that will span the Bab el Mandeb, the outlet of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. If this ambitious project is ever realized, the throngs of African pilgrims who traverse one of the longest bridges in the world on a journey to Mecca would pass hundreds of feet above the probable route of the most memorable journey in human history. Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans—a few hundred or even several thousand—crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return.

The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish stocks vanished. But some things are fairly certain. Those first trekkers out of Africa brought with them the physical and behavioral traits—the large brains and the capacity for language—that characterize fully modern humans. From their bivouac on the Asian continent in what is now Yemen, they set out on a decamillennial journey that spanned continents and land bridges and reached all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America.

Scientists, of course, have gained insight into these wanderings because of the fossilized bones or spearheads laboriously uncovered and stored in collections. But ancestral hand-me-downs are often too scant to provide a complete picture of this remote history. In the past 20 years population geneticists have begun to fill in gaps in the paleoanthropological record by fashioning a genetic bread-crumb trail of the earliest migrations by modern humans.

Almost all our DNA—99.9 percent of the three billion “letters,” or nucleotides, that make up the human genome—is the same from person to person. But interwoven in that last 0.1 percent are telltale differences. A comparison among, say, East Africans and Native Americans can yield vital clues to human ancestry and to the inexorable progression of colonizations from continent to continent. Until recent years, DNA passed down only from fathers to sons or from mothers to their children has served as the equivalent of fossilized footprints for geneticists. The newest research lets scientists adjust their focus, widening the field of view beyond a few isolated stretches of DNA to inspect hundreds of thousands of nucleotides scattered throughout the whole genome.

Scanning broadly has produced global migratory maps of unprecedented resolution, some of which have been published only during recent months. The research provides an endorsement of modern human origins in Africa and shows how that continent served as a reservoir of genetic diversity that trickled out to the rest of the world. A genetic family tree that begins with the San people of Africa at its root ends with South American Indians and Pacific Islanders on its youngest-growing branches.

Read "The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents DNA furnishes an ever clearer picture of the multimillennial trek from Africa all the way to the tip of South America"

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An excerpt:
Copyright The Washington Post

…Now, far be it from me to begrudge the Vietnamese their moment in the sun before global capital finds them too costly and moves on to Bangladesh and Somalia. But didn’t we fight a war to keep Vietnam from going communist? Something like 58,000 American deaths, right? And now American business actually prefers investing in communist Vietnam over, say, the more or less democratic Philippines? In all likelihood, it would prefer investing in communist Vietnam to investing in a more chaotic, less disciplined democratic Vietnam, if such existed.

Let’s imagine, just as an exercise, that we’re trying to explain this to those 58,000 Americans and their loved ones. We could argue that by investing in communist countries, we’re pushing them toward democracy. But everything we know about China suggests that, in reality, such investments merely make authoritarian regimes stronger. We could argue that what we’re really doing is bringing communist nations into the world capitalist system. Then again, the effect of bringing into the global labor pool hundreds of millions of low-wage workers — people whose wages are held in check by both capital mobility and communist repression — is to hold down wages in democratic nations with advanced economies and with no national strategy to preserve and expand good jobs at home (i.e., in the United States).

Or we could argue that our onetime opposition to communism was noble and all that but that, unburdened by the illusions of the past, American business, backed by the American government, has realized that the problem with communism wasn’t that it was undemocratic but that it was anti-capitalist. And that once communism was integrated into a world capitalist system, its antipathy toward democracy not only wouldn’t be a bad thing but would actually be good. That is clearly the political logic that underpins our involvement with China. It’s a little dicier to say this about our growing involvement with Vietnam, since all those Americans whose names are on that wall on the Mall probably didn’t realize how compatible with global American enterprise Vietnamese communism would turn out to be or how the cause of democracy would turn out to have been of no real importance at all.

I guess a note from the American establishment to those men and women with their names on the Wall would be in order. Something like: Say, guys — sorry ‘bout that!

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Copyright The Los Angeles Times

(editor’s note: I’ve just recently discovered this person’s writing, which has been fantastic on Wimbledon, showing real spark and playful Sports poetics.)

July 7, 2008
WIMBLEDON, England — Computers, both the lifeblood and the bane of human existence, have begun lying again.

These lying computers would not be the same lying computers who had their little sniveling get-together in 2003 to keep USC out of the Sugar Bowl, but they’re surely distant cousins of those other lying computers.

These would be the tennis rankings computers, and while they basically do an upstanding job keeping track of all the Russians and Serbs and Russians and Spaniards and Russians on the men’s and women’s lists, they’ve frozen their cursors and lost their minds at the top of both.

This nascent week, they continue to have Roger Federer at No. 1 in the world for a 232nd consecutive week and Rafael Nadal at No. 2 for a 155th consecutive week. That’s their 12-month judgment and all — and they’re soooo judgmental as they think they’re always right — but this Wimbledon dispensed a tectonic shift.

Men’s tennis pivoted this momentous Wimbledon, as the top player in the world for the most recent eternity, Federer, yielded to the top player in the world at the moment, Nadal.

He yielded ever so narrowly, by a few points here and a few shots there, by 9-7 in the fifth set in one of the most riveting and doubly ennobling matches anybody ever saw, but he yielded. His elegantly despotic five-year reign at Wimbledon had remained one of his most secure compounds, free from the hounds forever yapping meekly upward at him, until the one from Spain with the biceps and the backhand worthy of an aria got through.

With those walls penetrated, Federer is the second-most prominent player in the world, and what a strange sound that carries, seeing as how he’s been ensconced as a joy-to-watch No. 1 for so long it seems he’s built a mansion there.

So elongated had been his Wimbledon reign that it looked positively surreal seeing him walk around in the dark Sunday night, in his white cardigan with the “RF” logo, with that plate they give to the thanks-for-coming guy in the Wimbledon final.

It felt befuddling just seeing him at the interview dais, unable to conceal a crestfallen state that seemed to leak out into view through his pores. “Probably my hardest loss, by far,” he said, thereby using the word “loss” — at Wimbledon! — after all this time.

His countenance bore the unmistakable suggestion of — dare we say — No. 2. Just to observe it made the computers seem daft, even as they arrogantly assume they’re so fail safe.

They try to tell us No. 2 would be the guy who just showed the uncanny versatility to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same June-July, the first time that’s been done since the North Star of fortitude, Bjorn Borg, won both in 1980.

No. 2 would be the one who beat No. 1 by 6-1, 6-3, 6-0, on Paris clay, then came to Federer’s domain and wound up lying on the grass behind the baseline in a very uncommon state of mirth? If that’s No. 2 after these last four Sundays, then let’s just say somebody’s loopy in the hard drive.

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Copyright The Financial Times

An excerpt:

…Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. “But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn’t reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race.”

I wonder whether there isn’t some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti-consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald’s, why shouldn’t they? He responds: “I don’t want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different … I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn’t metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket … What I’m talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilisation. We don’t know where it’s going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race.”

Pointing to a mobile phone, he says: “Fifty years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined this little device could be used to make calls all over the world, to make video recordings, and to send images. If someone had told me about this then, I would have thought the future world would be a wonderful one when people would have these things and would be able to communicate better. But that didn’t happen. The world today is worse, and it is full of more traps and contradictions than it was 50 years ago.”…

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Copyright The Washington Post
DISPATCH: A BULLISH FRONTIER

July 6, 2008

P ssst. Have I got a great stock tip for you: Now’s the time to buy shares on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. No, really.

I know that may sound like an e-mail from the spam box, but it’s actually good investment advice. While U.S. markets have been struggling with the effects of the subprime mortgage debacle and threats of a looming recession, the total value of the stocks traded on the Nigerian Stock Exchange has doubled over the past year.

A lot of that growth can be attributed to new companies listing on the market. But next door, Ghana’s stock exchange has already returned more than 33 percent this year, and is expected to end the year as one of the world’s top growth markets. And it wouldn’t be for the first time.

It used to be that when the U.S. economy sneezed, the rest of the world caught a cold. Today, with globalization, everybody has a pretty bad flu — except for Africa, where many of the more than 20 stock markets are reporting gains similar to those of the Nigerian exchange. I’ve been working on a film exploring Africa’s frontier markets for the past couple of years, and the returns I’ve found can only be described as eye-popping. African markets have outperformed Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and many other indexes over the past decade. I’ve met people who have doubled and even tripled their investments.

Africa today is a fast-moving continent that has made tremendous changes. And yet we in the West cling to age-old stereotypes that undermine confidence in its markets. Africa needs to be able to compete fairly for investment funds, because trade and investment are the only sustainable way out of poverty. And the rest of the world needs to take a new look at the continent, because trust me, we’re missing out on some great deals.

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Copyright The Financial Times

An excerpt.

Talk to retail planners and finance teams at the major brands and they’ll enthuse about the world as if it were an Emirates route map - units opening in Bahrain, 20 new stores in China, the possibility of shops in the “stans” and freestanding outlets in Mumbai.

To them, the years ahead will be won solely in emerging markets while the pace of European and US openings will slow. Sit front row at the shows of these same brands, however, and the world extends no further than 20 kilometres inland from the shores of the Baltic. The face of menswear is still, after far too many years, tall, slender-hipped, sharply-cropped, aged between 18 and 22 and has a name like Timo or Andreas. Men’s fashion is hoping to attract new buyers in markets like Pune, Almaty, São Paulo, Johannesburg and Busan but the bodies they’re using to bait these new consumers hail from Lübeck, Tartu, Malmö and Tampere.

Which brings me back to my questions. Do you respond to fashion images that are vaguely convincing or pure fantasy? For the better part of a decade, I’ve found it difficult to connect with a £2,000 suit carried down a catwalk by an 18-year-old Finn who is narrow of frame but wide of the core target.

At assorted shows on Monday and Tuesday, I watched the faces of new buyers and press who are now taking up ever-larger blocks of seats and wondered what they made of this somewhat dated look. Where was the strapping lad from Seoul? The athletic young man from Goa? The high-cheekboned chap from Harbin? If I were a shareholder in a major luxury goods company, I’d be asking some sharp questions about the marketing plans of various brands in the seasons to come. The all-white, under-20 face of men’s fashion looked very old-world this week.

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Copyright The New Republic

Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City

By Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey, and Haili Kong (Palgrave Macmillan, 321 pp., $27.95)

Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China

By Susan Brownell (Rowman & Littlefield, 213 pp., $24.95)

Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008

By Xu Guoqi (Harvard University Press, 359 pp., $29.95)

China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges

Edited by Minky Worden (Seven Stories Press, 331 pp., $18.95)

Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China

By Anne-Marie Brady (Rowman & Littlefield, 231 pp., $75)

Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China

Edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (University of Michigan Press, 416 pp., 26.95)

I.

The two million foreign guests who are expected to visit Beijing in August will encounter a largely familiar and exceedingly cosmopolitan environment. They will find clean air, smooth traffic, easy Internet access, and standardized restaurant menus, all intended to provide them with seventeen days of physical, mental, and moral ease. Beijing has trained 1,500 “civilized bus riding supervisors,” appointed 5,000 anti-jaywalking monitors, held “queuing awareness days,” and mounted campaigns against spitting and slurping. The planners have paved over old neighborhoods to make way for five-star hotels, malls, and theme restaurants. Migrant workers who built the Olympic venues will have been dispatched back to the countryside, beggars and petitioners shipped home to their villages, and dissidents and would-be demonstrators placed under temporary house arrest or jailed. Visitors will see an edited Beijing, the way its governors and many of its residents would like it to be seen, a world capital with its exotic side under control.

And yet these same visitors may detect a deep ambivalence in the city’s welcome. The pride may seem leavened with insecurity, the greeting tinged with rejection, the celebration not quite drowning out the whispers of doubt. China has arrived at the modernity it has been seeking for over a century, but it is not quite the modernity that we—and many Chinese—have been expecting.

Visitors may be struck first by Beijing’s monumentalism. Old Beijing’s charm lay in the narrow alleyways known as hutongs, courtyard houses, streetside handicrafts, and slow savors of life—all built, to be sure, on a system of class and gender exploitation that could not survive. Mao Zedong’s new government after 1949 tore down the city walls and built Tiananmen Square as a vast public space to celebrate communist rule. But thanks more to economic stagnation than to city planning, much of the old city was preserved. The first stage of urban revolution happened indoors and underground. Multiple families were crammed into old houses, street trades were eliminated, and tunnels were dug for civil defense. The peddlers and handicraftsmen disappeared, and street life turned drab. But the alleyways and the low buildings of the capital remained largely untouched, at least physically.

Deng Xiaoping’s commercial revolution after 1979 created crowds, bustle, supermarkets, fast food outlets, high rises, bland sprawling residential districts, and wide congested roads. Several international athletic events, such as the Asian Games in 1990, contributed new construction. And this year’s Olympics has finally completed the destruction of the historical city, with a huge new airport terminal, thirty-one competition venues, new roads, subway lines, hotels, bridges, neighborhoods, and parks. What remains of the old-style houses and streets, crafts, means of transportation, and ways of life is mere outdoor museum displays, according to Lillian M. Li and her co-authors in their narrative of the city’s lost past. Visitors should carry this readable book with them as an aid to imagining what is no longer there, and to understanding the political sources—including hubris and corruption—of what they see.

The main Olympic site north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sits at the top of the city’s cosmologically significant north-south axis, explains Susan Brownell in her book on the anthropology of Chinese sports. It thus expresses the unity of sports and politics that the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee have been at such pains to deny. Brownell says that planners at one point wanted the main stadium, referred to as the “Bird’s Nest” because of its lattice-like construction, which was contrived to accommodate 11,000 VIPs so that the whole hierarchy of power could display itself before the people on this most auspicious occasion. The stillsecret opening and closing ceremonies that have been designed for the arena will be global and glitzy, but they need to convey the same power, dignity, and order as did the old PRC aesthetic of massed gray suits, red ties, and primary-color potted flowers. After all, Hu Jintao’s chief contribution to Chinese political thought in his six years in power has been the concept of the “harmonious society.”

The Olympic buildings are diverse, and some of them are innovative. Yet in both the process of their construction and, I expect, in their use, they embody the dominance of the state. The public scale overwhelms the private scale, national power trumps personal comfort, and society’s interests supersede individual rights. China’s systems of land ownership, construction approvals, contracting, and labor discipline allowed quick and efficient displacement of residents (often through police and court collusion with developers, and the threat and use of violence), along with quick decisions on design, quick letting of contracts, and quick completion of projects. The buildings together announce that this is a society able and willing to consummate the Hegelian overcoming of its own past.

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Copyright Slate

(A great read on hypocrisy in Africa policy.)

A pop quiz: Who is the worst dictator in Africa?

a) Robert Mugabe
b) Robert Mugabe
c) Robert Mugabe
d) None of the above

The answer seems obvious. Thanks to extensive coverage in the news media and abundant criticism by Western governments, everyone knows that Zimbabwe’s leader is trying to hang onto power by crushing his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who would roll to victory in the final round of elections on June 27 if his followers were not being killed, beaten, jailed, or harassed by state thugs. Even President George W. Bush described Mugabe’s rule as a “nightmare.”

But Mugabe may not be Africa’s worst. That prize arguably goes to Teodoro Obiang, the ruler of Equatorial Guinea whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre. Years of violent apprenticeship in a genocidal regime led by a crazy uncle? Check. Power grab in a coup against the murderous uncle? Check. Execution of now-deposed uncle by firing squad? Check. Proclamation of self as “the liberator” of the nation? Check. Govern for decades in a way that prompts human rights groups to accuse your regime of murder, torture, and corruption? Check, check, and check.

Obiang, who seized power in 1979, had promised to be kinder and gentler than his predecessor, but in the 1990s, even the U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea received a death threat from a regime insider, the ambassador has said, and had to be evacuated. Not long after that, offshore oil was discovered, but the first wave of revenues—about $700 million—was transferred into secret accounts under Obiang’s personal control. The latest chapter, written in the last month, may be the least surprising, because Obiang’s ruling party won 99 of the 100 seats in legislative elections. A government press release, hailing Obiang as the “Militant Brother Founding President of the PDGE,” carried the headline, “Democracy at Its Peak in Equatorial Guinea.”

If you haven’t heard any of this, don’t worry; as far as I can tell, the only American journalist who has reported on Obiang’s electoral theft is Ken Silverstein, who writes for Harper’s and has for many years poured out a primal scream of investigative reports into Obiang’s misrule. Other than Silverstein’s recent postings and several wire-service stories that were not picked up in America, there has been a vacuum of coverage about a suppression of democracy in Africa that is more complete than what Mugabe is trying to get away with. True, Equatorial Guinea is a small country with a population of less than 1 million, its economy is expanding in an oil boom, and Obiang’s “victory” did not require the obvious and crude violence of Mugabe’s ongoing terror. But Obiang’s enforcers don’t need to club people on the streets. His would-be opponents are too frightened to openly demonstrate against him. His is the Switzerland of dictatorships—so effective at enforcing obedience that the spectacle of unrest is invisible.

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Copyright New York

An excerpt

…More than any other recent politician, Obama is a literary phenomenon. Like America itself, he’s addicted to origin myths. He’s built his political success on the back of compulsive autobiography, the brilliant telling and retelling, and then retelling some more, of his divinely unorthodox life story: the great sweeping legend of Obamerica, the fusion of man and nation, whose manifest destiny extends all the way to the White House. It’s significant that he used his first appearance in the national spotlight, the keynote speech at Kerry’s DNC, to meta-sketch the inspirational origin of that very keynote speech: “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” he said, and then unleashed, in about 60 seconds, a pithy intergenerational family saga spanning three continents and all the major events of mid-twentieth-century America (Depression, Pearl Harbor, postwar boom)—complete with such unlikely details as goat herding, a tin-roof shack, oil rigs, and Patton’s army marching across Europe. It was like a brilliant movie trailer designed to promote the incalculably awesome feature attraction of his future political career. To deny his candidacy, after that, would be to deny a very powerful narrative logic—the goats, the tin-roof shack, Patton, all of it. Every politician tries to tell stories, of course, to harness the emotional momentum of narrative in the service of an agenda. But few do so as naturally as Obama. All serious candidates have a maniacal ambition—in retrospect, Hillary’s looked unflattering because she didn’t nest it quite deeply enough in a persuasive narrative logic; Barack’s is so embedded in an attractive story that we hardly even notice it…

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Copyright The Globe and Mail
June 22, 2008

LHASA - It was the loud man with the megaphone, herding us relentlessly onto the buses, who symbolized the worst of our escorted tour of Tibet.

The official press tour is one of the rituals of Communist China, as time-honored as the ceremony to raise the Chinese flag at Tiananmen Square every morning. It’s far from the ideal way to gather news.

But with Tibet still tightly sealed off from the outside world, I accepted an invitation to join a government-sponsored press tour to Lhasa this weekend, realizing it was the only way to get even a limited glimpse into this locked-down region.

It was only the second time that foreign journalists have been permitted to enter Tibet since the wave of sometimes-bloody protests that began on March 10, so I was keen to get a first-hand look into the forbidden territory.

But an official press tour can be a humiliating experience. Our itinerary was filled with weirdly irrelevant events, including a handicrafts exhibition, a visit to a tourist village, and a press conference to announce a performance of traditional dance. The man with the megaphone was constantly barking at us, hectoring us to move faster. The schedule was packed with activity from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., to keep us busy and distracted from the real news.

Every moment was pre-programmed. To ensure that we didn’t miss anything, we were given unsolicited wake-up calls at 6:15 a.m., urging us out of bed and into the program.

We were lodged in a government hotel, far from the historic centre of Lhasa, to make it even harder for us to have any independent contact with monks or other malcontents.

At the allocated time for dinner on Friday, I managed to slip away from the hotel and hail a taxi to the old town, where I was able to see the massive security presence, including thousands of paramilitary police in camouflage uniforms, in advance of the Olympic torch relay the next day. There were paramilitary troops and regular police on every corner.

A few other journalists also slipped away from the hotel. The next day, we were reprimanded by a government minder, who claimed to be worried about our personal safety. “This is Lhasa,” she warned ominously. “You could get lost, you could be detained. It could happen anywhere, particularly Lhasa. When you’re out, we’re really concerned. Anything could happen.”

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