A Glimpse of the World: Writings Archives

A Vigorous, Quiet Revolt: Things Fall Apart At Fifty

May 23, 2009 5:31 PM

May 4, 2009

When it was published fifty years ago, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart caused a stir for its revelation of something hitherto strange and unfamiliar in the world of literature: genuine African voices. Achebe was not the first African novelist, as he has sometimes wrongly been called, but his use of standard English to produce believable characters who inhabited a complex and authentic world marked two existing traditions of writing about Africa as evolutionary dead ends.

Before Achebe’s breakthrough, there had been folklore-based African narratives, more entertainments than novels, written in English vernaculars that sought to reproduce the aural texture of African pidgins. The most famous of these, The Palm Wine Drinkard and my Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was written by another Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, and published six years before Things Fall Apart was released by Heinemann. Today it is hard not to hear a condescending ring in Dylan Thomas’s praise of Tutuola’s book for what he called its “young English.”

Earlier still, there had been yet another tradition of European writers ventriloquizing what they imagined to be an African voice. The classic example is a novel published in 1939 called Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary, a former British colonial officer in Nigeria. It is an ostensible tragedy written in a comical style with a central African character, the titular Johnson, whom Cary described as someone who “swims gaily on the surface of life.” Two decades ago, an essay about Cary in The New York Review of Books described the book’s lightheaded eponymous figure in terms that un-self-consciously echoed one of the oldest and ugliest stereotypes of Africans—their inability to master the concept of time: “A fragrant breeze, a blazing tropical sunrise, a pretty girl—such things so overwhelm him that past and future alike momentarily disappear.”

In interviews Achebe has suggested that his book, which has been translated into some fifty languages, was written partly in reaction to the patronizing caricature of Johnson. Things Fall Apart, however, unlike Mister Johnson, is tragedy pure and simple, both deeply personal—in the case of its main character, the excessively proud Okonkwo, whose Sophoclean fall is foretold by any number of omens—and collective, as Okonkwo’s society is sundered and then subjugated by the British empire’s one-two combination of missionaries and colonialists.

However remarkable on this score, Achebe’s first novel achieved far more than revealing genuine African voices. Things Fall Apart was the first novel in English to depict Africans who exist in an intricate moral universe; one that resonates with indigenous thought and values and concedes nothing, even in the face of the arrival of far more powerful outsiders. In place of the ignorant and superstitious “oogah-boogah”-muttering natives served up by generations of Westerners in literature and film, Achebe breathes life into sentient and articulate characters, people like Akunna, who delights in refuting a white missionary who insists that the Igbo divinities are false idols. “Yes,” says Akunna, referring to a carving. “It is indeed a piece of wood. The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like yourself. You are the head of your church.”

Among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland. Indeed, without ever stooping to polemic, Achebe sustains this quiet rebellion on nearly every page. One way is through an accumulation of anecdotal detail. In passage after passage he remarks on differences both subtle and dramatic between the customs and laws of various clans in his Igbo ethnic group, and less frequently with references to the world beyond. Briefly, sometimes, he even resorts to wicked humor, yet still manages to be pointed, as in a discussion of alien marriage rites. “But what is good in one place is bad in another place,” a character remarks. “The world is large,” replies Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” comes the incredulous reply. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.” Achebe’s defiance of Western contempt is married to a subtle but unmistakable appeal to Africans not to submit to feelings of inferiority, and this achievement is all the more remarkable for the book’s utter lack of mawkishness.

One could fill a small library with books examining Africa’s failings from the standpoint of economics, political science or even culture, which is usually taken to mean something that Africans lack. Things Fall Apart suggests a different answer. In a recent interview with the NPR program Studio 360, Achebe described the novel as “the story of colonial rule, one people imposing themselves on another people, who in this case happened to be the owners of the land. So you had a situation in which people come from somewhere else and say to the people they encounter, Everything you do is wrong. Your religion is wrong. You have no education. You have no culture. So it was that kind of situation, and it triggers by itself tremendous resistance.” The complications from this wound and the manifestations of this struggle echo down through the entire fitful, shambolic and half-realized experience of a half-century of post-independence Africa, and as if by miracle, so much of the coming disaster is anticipated in Achebe’s prose.

The full weight of this tragedy dawns on the reader late in the book in a scene where Okonkwo and some of his fellow clansmen are summoned by the district commissioner in the nearest city after villagers have burned down the white man’s church after its congregants profaned their clan’s god. “An Umofia man does not refuse a call,” Okonkwo says. “He may refuse to do what he is asked; he does not refuse to be asked.” The men are persuaded that their grievances will be heard, only to be brought before a colonial tribunal, disarmed, humiliated and broken.

“We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy,” the commissioner says, adding a moment later as he announces their punishment: “I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their place of worship. That must not happen in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world.”

For the self-righteous outsider, the entire encounter is about justice. For the natives, it is little more than a lesson in deceit and power. There are echoes here of the old lament often attributed to Native Americans: when the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible and he has the land.

In the words of the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria’s great musician of protest and one of Achebe’s legion of spiritual descendants, these modern institutions the white man has brought, from the statehouse to the courthouse, all ostensibly in the name of progress, but really as a means of imposing and extending their control, were but new “instruments of magic,” ill-fitting, alien ones that African leaders have eagerly appropriated nonetheless to “turn green into red” and “blue into white.” Indeed, the apprenticeship of the arbitrary and unjust begins in the wake of the tribunal’s judgment of Okonkwo, when the commissioner’s African messengers go to his village to demand payment of the imposed fine, secretly fattening the penalty by fifty bags of cowry shells to pocket the difference themselves.

What is most refreshing here is how deftly Achebe avoids the siren calls of neat moral conclusions that so often make literature of victimization unsatisfying. Tragedy and blame flow in two directions in his rare universe. “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” Okonkwo asks late in the novel. “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” comes the answer from a friend.

“But he says our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that hold us together and we have fallen apart.”

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DRAGON FIGHTER: One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace With China

April 23, 2009 1:14 AM

Books of The Times
China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009

Rebiya Kadeer:
DRAGON FIGHTER
One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace With China

It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.

China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.

Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.

In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.

Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.

Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.

Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.

One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”

Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.

In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.

On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.

Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.

By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”

Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”

If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.

This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.

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The Darfur the West Isn’t Recognizing as It Moralizes About the Region

March 30, 2009 8:08 AM

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 29, 2009

For many who survey an African landscape strewn with political wreckage, nowadays merely to raise the subject of European colonialism, which formally ended across most of the continent five decades ago, is to ring alarm bells of excuse making.

SAVIORS AND SURVIVORS
Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
By Mahmood Mamdani
398 pages. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region, Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scholar at Columbia University and the author of “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,” is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror,” he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles. It is a brief, he writes, “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”

Mr. Mamdani does not dismiss a record of atrocities in Darfur, where 300,000 have been killed and 2.5 million been made refugees, yet he opposes the label of genocide as a subjective judgment wielded for political reasons against a Sudanese government that is out of favor because of its history of Islamism and its suspected involvement in terror.

At his most provocative Mr. Mamdani questions the distinction between what is often labeled counterinsurgency and genocide, saying the former, even when it kills more people, is deemed “normal violence” while the latter is considered “amoral, evil,” and typically it is the West that does the labeling.

Although he uses the United States war in Iraq as an example, with the International Criminal Court recently issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Mr. Mamdani’s most compelling example is the treatment of a crisis in neighboring Uganda.

In Uganda, long one of Washington’s closest African friends, Mr. Mamdani traces the history of ethnically targeted “civilian massacres and other atrocities” against the brutal insurgency known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. In 1996, under President Yoweri Museveni, a second phase of that war began “with a new policy designed to intern practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts in northern Uganda,” Mr. Mamdani writes. “It took a government-directed campaign of murder, intimidation, bombing and burning of whole villages to drive the rural population into I.D.P. (internally displaced persons) camps.”

In 2005 Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the government’s tactics, saying, “An entire society is being systematically destroyed — physically, culturally, socially and economically — in full view of the international community.”

But as elsewhere in Africa, Mr. Mamdani says, the International Criminal Court has brought a case against only the enemy of Washington’s friend, the Lord’s Resistance Army, remaining mute about large-scale atrocities that may have been committed by the Ugandan government. In this pattern the author sees the hand of politics more than any real attachment to justice.

Many argue that what makes Darfur different from other African crises is race, with the conflict there pitting Arabs against people often called “black Africans,” but here again Mr. Mamdani takes on conventional wisdom. “At no point,” he states flatly, “has this been a war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ ”

Much foreign commentary about Sudan speaks of its Arabs as settlers, with the inference that they are somehow less African than people assumed to be of pure black stock. If whites in Kenya and Zimbabwe, not to mention South Africa, vociferously maintain their African-ness, what then to make of the Arab presence in Sudan, whose slow penetration and widespread intermarriage, Mr. Mamdani writes, “commenced in the early decades of Islam” and “reached a climax” from the 8th to the 15th century, “when the Arab tribes overran much of the country”?

More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”

Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.

In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.

Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.

He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.

This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.

Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.

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War Child: Surviving a Hitch in an Army of Boys

February 17, 2009 9:44 AM

Books of The Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
February 16, 2009

Barely pages into Emmanuel Jal’s fast-paced memoir about growing up amid modern African warfare, the reader is brought up short by the following sentence: “There was peace in Sudan for the first three years of my life, but I cannot remember it.”

WAR CHILD

A Child Soldier’s Story

By Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies

262 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.
***

It is the first of many stark, declarative statements about a human condition of cruelty and wretchedness that afflicts the lives of countless young people in distant African lands, people whose stories we are unaccustomed to hearing.

Mr. Jal’s tale, of a lengthy and devastating civil war between northern and southern Sudan (not the conflict in Darfur, more familiar to readers today), begins in the mid-1980s when he is somewhere around the age of 7 — though he is not altogether sure because he inhabits a world where time is marked by seasons, including one for hunger, rather than calendars.

At the very outset we are introduced to the boy’s family as they move southward through their country in a convoy of trucks from an area controlled by “African Arabs” to their own ethnic heartland, inhabited by “pure Africans,” in the book’s somewhat overly reductive language of ethnicity.

Four Arab men with angry eyes speak among themselves about a rebellion brewing in the country. It will fail, and the pure Africans who seek to revolt “will remain slaves beneath us just as they are meant to be,” one vows.

Moments later, a fight breaks out when the Arabs steal the meager rations of Emmanuel’s family; after they begin to beat his uncle, the boy throws himself onto one of the men’s ankles and bites it.

The scene ends with a fadeout to unconsciousness. Thus started, time rushes past in this recollected tale of appalling violence, “like sand,” in the words of the narrator, “running through my fingers as I look back.”

The attack in the truck marks Emmanuel’s loss of innocence, and with it is born a burning hatred for Arabs that will drive his behavior, often with tragic consequences, through most of the story.

Emmanuel is taken by his mother from one village to the next in the south, each time under the pretext that the new destination will be safer. There is little respite, though, as Sudan’s relentless army, bent on ethnic cleansing, unfailingly closes in and attacks anew.

At one early stop the boy learns that his father has absented himself from the family to undergo officer training in the rebel southerners’ Sudan People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.).

In quick succession the young boy witnesses the rape of an aunt and then is separated permanently from his mother amid another army onslaught. At the next way station he is taken in with scores of other children who are told they are being moved to Ethiopia to go to school. But once there, he is told he must join the southerners’ rebellion as a fighter. It is his father’s will, the boy is told.

For good measure, an elder intones, “The gun does not know who is old or young.” Emmanuel, for the record, is 9.

Despite these grim contours, the story sometimes has the cloying feel of a fairy tale. This, perhaps, is a risk of the “as told to” genre. Mr. Jal, who received little schooling until well into his teens, after he was rescued by an aid worker, immigrated to England and eventually became a successful musician. His co-writer is Megan Lloyd Davies.

The writing is usually sturdy, and in a middle section that relates a long death march through the south it even rises to an urgency that recalls Jerzy Kozinski’s novel “The Painted Bird.” Elsewhere, though, it sometimes feels dreamily like Technicolor when color would do, and admits insufficient room for reflection on many themes, notably fear and hatred.

Some of the book’s most interesting observations seem almost inadvertent, depriving the reader of context that is important to understanding this conflict, and African conflicts in general. From Biafra to Rwanda, and now Darfur itself, the West has a long tradition of reducing them to good-versus-evil stories bereft not just of nuance but also of politics, history and complexity.

There is no gainsaying Mr. Jal’s experience of terror, but amid his frequent loathing for Arabs the book provides only a glimpse of the geopolitics of the war, with Ethiopia hosting hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees near their common border and allowing rebels to train on its territory.

In one recollection, the young Emmanuel, at the time he thinks he is being sent to school, astutely wonders why the Western aid workers are “nowhere to be found except in food lines or the hospital.” A few pages later he says that “while the khawajas” — a local expression for whites — “thought they ran the camp, it was the S.P.L.A. who were really in charge.”

These words amount to a provocative challenge to the myth of the beneficent and powerful Western humanitarian worker whose impact is thought exclusively good. Too often in African conflicts these workers’ presence has amounted to unacknowledged collusion.

Mr. Jal’s narrative makes another important point, but again almost incidentally. As horrible as civil conflicts are, often their collateral damage is worse. After lusting for vengeance against the Arabs, the boys’ first “battle” is a murderous raid against an Ethiopian village. The next combat is against the Ethiopian state, whose army evicts the rebels.

“War Child” ends with its least compelling material, a made-for-Hollywood account of how Mr. Jal succeeds as a antiwar musician, playing concerts around the world and toasted by the likes of Peter Gabriel. “I’m still a soldier,” he writes, “fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the day I cease.”

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What Should Obama be Reading about China?

February 4, 2009 10:12 PM

Recommendations by Howard French:

Africa’s World War, by Gerard Prunier
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, by Nicholas Shaxson

Why two books that are nominally about Africa for a conversation about China? Because unheralded though it is, Africa will be the great economic and political frontier of the next quarter century, and China, which has understood this far better than the United States and Europe, is building an immense lead in terms of its relations with the continent.

The first book paints a compelling picture of how badly wrong the U.S. has gotten Africa policy since the Clinton Administration, reaping death and destruction through reckless policies in Central Africa, and helping create the big openings China enjoys today.

The second book explains the pitfalls of the African oil sector, which has been America’s principal draw to the continent, and could help reinvent policies in ways that help African countries to use their very real wealth for development.

China: Fragile Superpower, by Susan L. Shirk
China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh

Neither Obama nor any of his top advisors seem to have any deep history of involvement with China. Shirk and Shambaugh’s books are as good a primer on the way the country’s politics work as any I’ve seen recently, and would be a very solid starting point for understanding the country.

Struggling Giant, China in the 21st Century, by Kerry Brown

In the same vein of advice, this slim volume provides a very good feel for the upside potential of China as a fast-rising world power, but also of just how creaky the whole enterprise remains.

Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian
The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, by Liao Yiwu

When the “other half” amounts to 650-800 million people, depending on who is doing the counting, it pays to have a sense for how they live. Ma Jian, the novelist, and Liao Yiwu, the New Journalist, will place you firmly in their midst, and give you some real and unforgettable people’s history along the way.

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Thinking Globally: America’s Rise to Dominance, With Slips Along the Way: FROM COLONY TO SUPERPOWER U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776

November 24, 2008 9:27 AM

A review of FROM COLONY TO SUPERPOWER U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776
By George C. Herring

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
November 23, 2008

Any book aiming to explore American diplomatic history from the Revolution until now necessarily involves some serious skimming. George C. Herring’s weighty yet fast-paced “From Colony to Superpower” is no exception. At 1,000-plus pages, its first achievement is its feat of inclusiveness, managed by making quick work of many interesting subplots of the United States’ rich and complex relations with the world.

What distinguishes the effort is not so much the sturdy précis that the author serves up on the traditional obligatory highlights in the American story but his narrative abilities. The narrative power lies partly in identifying themes that gradually give a strong organizational cohesion to his story.

Mr. Herring is a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky who is best known for a history of the Vietnam War. In this latest book his themes are all the more refreshing because many of the ideas he returns to again and again are still largely ignored by our school curriculums and the popular history mills of the book industry.

“From Colony to Superpower” anchors its ideas through accretion. Where it works, it is revisionism of the best kind, quiet but insistent, reinforced by archival evidence and deftly drawn parallels.

The cascade of ideas begins with the rejection of the widely accepted notion that the United States has often been an isolationist power.

Right from the start, Mr. Herring says, the generation of founding fathers was outward looking and consumed by diplomacy. What is more, expansionism, first beyond the original 13 colonies, then into the Caribbean and Pacific and eventually culminating in a political and economic domain spanning the world, has almost always animated American leaders.

Already at the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in 1787, no less than James Madison spoke of “laying the foundation of a great empire.” By 1821 John Quincy Adams was mocking the fast swelling British Empire: “I do not know what you claim nor what you do not claim.” When his British interlocutor replied sarcastically, “Perhaps, a piece of the moon,” Adams issued a blunt warning about North America: “Keep what is yours and leave the rest of the continent to us.”

Less than a decade later President Andrew Jackson had embraced gunboat diplomacy to East Asia and exploration of the South Pole, and spoke of showing the flag “to every portion of the globe, to give to civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess.”

Attitudes like this were steadily fed by a fast-growing population, an economy that became the envy of the world and by a creed of American exceptionalism, whose roots could already be discerned in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson drew a sharp distinction between the “high moral purpose” of the United States and the “low motives of power and expediency that drove others.” At the time, Mr. Herring notes, one-fifth of the American population were slaves.

Less conventionally, in terms of the mainstream way history has been taught for generations, Mr. Herring paints a potent picture of the role of race as an important and frequently central motive behind American actions.

This story line begins with the annihilation of American Indians, who conducted lively foreign relations of their own, with the government in Washington, with the European powers and even with the Confederacy until its subjugation.

His story continues with the politics of black bondage, as the young nation pushed west, extending the frontier of slavery and precipitating the Civil War.

The narrative of frank racism, a word Mr. Herring employs frequently, gains momentum in a discussion of Manifest Destiny, which he says had more to do with an ideology of racial superiority than with altruism. The examples, in 19th-century dealings with continental neighbors like Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, are as painful as they are numerous.

A persistent target was Mexico, which lost huge chunks of its territory to American expansionism. “Americans scorned Mexicans as a mixed breed, even below free blacks and Indians, ‘an imbecile and pusillanimous race,’ ” Mr. Herring writes. He adds a few pages later, “The very racism that drove the United States into Mexico limited its conquests.”

Quoting Andrew Jackson Donelson, the former president’s nephew, Mr. Herring recounts, “We can no more amalgamate with her people than with negroes.” Much later, we learn, the same thinking prevented Puerto Rico from becoming a state.

When he gets to the 20th century, Mr. Herring labors to portray Woodrow Wilson as the figure who “towers above the landscape of modern American foreign policy.” But in Mr. Herring’s telling it is Franklin D. Roosevelt who leaves the biggest impression, despite his frequent criticisms of Roosevelt’s maddening management style.

Wilson and Roosevelt began their presidencies by minimizing foreign policy. Wilson spent six months in Paris pursuing a peaceful new world order. Through cunning and vision, Roosevelt dragged the United States into the next great war and not only emerged victorious but remade the world.

Trends of the past carry steadily forward throughout the book, with idealism, self-regard and seemingly ever-increasing power combining with condescension and arrogance, particularly toward non-Western peoples, causing the United States to underestimate others and overplay its hand, perhaps most notably in Korea and Vietnam.

In historical retrospect the stalemated United States war in Korea clearly heralds the emergence of China as the next big thing, while not long afterward Vietnam, which one of Andrew Jackson’s agents once called home to “the most filthy people in the world,” would become the place where America finally discovered its limits.

Mr. Herring concludes by advising Americans to prepare for their relative decline: “They must cast away centuries-old notions of themselves as God’s chosen people. In today’s world, such pretensions cannot fail to alienate others.”

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.”

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Obama and Africa: The Change We Have Been Waiting For?

November 6, 2008 6:06 PM

By Howard W French
Posted Nov. 6, 2008

In the momentary lull that follows a presidential election, between full-out campaigning and real decision-making, the media has a few time-honored rituals that center on parlor games and policy speculation.

This election has been no different. While we wait for an Obama administration to start taking shape, one of the favorite exercises has been gazing into crystal balls about the foreign policy crises the new president will face. Others, a bit more boldly, make forthright statements about what the incoming government’s foreign policy priorities should be.

Fred Kaplan’s take in Slate on Wednesday was a fairly typical offering of this kind. Under the heading, “A Foreign-Policy Repair Manual: Six priorities for President Obama,” he went on to detail a fairly typical laundry list of crises and opportunities, from getting out of Iraq to “laying the initial groundwork for renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks.”

As priorities, the lists were fine as far as they went. The problem is that for a new leader promising change, they have tended to reflect the most traditional sorts of Washington priorities, neglecting other parts of the world that are starving for American moral and political leadership; places where Obama, by virtue of his unique background, offers particularly compelling potential for impact.

The most obvious and important omission by list keepers like Kaplan is Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people today that according to United Nations projections will count an astounding two billion people by mid-century.

Today, for example, a new war looms in the Congo, a place where unbeknown to most Americans the United States has played a critical and mostly disastrous role since independence from Belgium in 1960. According to respectable international estimates some four million people have died in the Congo as a result of wars there since 1996, the greatest toll anywhere since World War II.

There is a powerful argument to be made that this disaster, along with the Rwandan genocide that preceded it, is Bill Clinton’s most important foreign policy legacy, and an Obama policy toward Africa run by many of the same people and carrying forward Clinton era thinking would be a sign of disdain for the continent and its problems.

The Congo’s apocalyptic dissolution began in earnest when Washington gave Rwanda the green light to invade the country, setting off a free for all that sucked in many of the Congo’s neighbors.

Washington has spent money on the crisis through the United Nations, but in terms of showing political leadership it has run from the problems of the Congo ever since, leaving a vast and potentially rich country that is the effective crossroads of north, south, east and west in Africa crippled and unattended.

Africa has never long retained the attention of our foreign policy elite, journalists included, and yet today this fast-growing continent, the homeland of our new president’s father, teeters on a fulcrum point, credibly capable of veering off in radically different directions in ways that will profoundly affect Americans and indeed mankind.

An Africa that can douse its conflicts, build functioning institutions and continue to lay the foundations of democracy stands to become an important player in the next phase of globalization, as labor costs rise in much of Asia, and capital begins to prospect for productive opportunities elsewhere.

An Africa pocked by neglected failing states will increasingly become a nexus of catastrophe, and contrary to the wishes of our foreign policy establishment, which always seeks to confine Africa to the realm of our lowest priorities, the blowback from its ever-larger disasters will inflict high costs and pain everywhere.

During the last decade of political neglect of Africa, China has made extraordinary inroads on the continent, eclipsing the commercial presence of Europe’s old colonial masters, and lapping fast at the heels of the United States as Africa’s most important trading partner.

China’s trade with Africa has more than doubled in the last two years alone, reaching roughly $120 billion this year. It is important to state that China is pushing into Africa not as some charity project, but because of two very carefully reasoned conclusions.
China, for one, badly needs priority access to Africa’s storehouse of minerals, petroleum and even farmland. Even more jarringly for Americans, who have embraced a deep and abiding bigotry of low expectations about the continent, though, China sees Africa as a frontier of opportunity; a place whose future is bright.

Today, all across Africa Chinese, not Western companies, are building vital infrastructure — ports, railways, roads, schools and hospitals — at a rhythm and scope that surpasses anything the continent has seen before, including during the heyday of colonialism.

For the most part, for Africa and for the world, this is good news. The problem with leaving the African playing field to China alone relates to the most profound shortcomings in Beijing’s emerging foreign policy, just as it relates to some of the United States’ most special qualities, as well as to the unique potential of our new president as a game changer in America’s relationship with the continent.

For reasons of deep-seated diplomatic tradition and because of its own underrated insecurities, China still clings to the idea that the so-called internal problems of other countries, be they harsh dictatorship, rampant corruption or even genocide are none of its business — or indeed even ours.

Africans are grateful for China’s intense interest in the continent, and they rightfully find inspiration in China’s example of a stirring rise from poverty largely on the strength of concerted and sustained national effort.

Africans have no illusions, though, of Chinese leadership in resolving the conflicts that continue to tear their continent apart and hold them back. And for good reason there is even less hope among the civil societies that have sprouted in country after country, even in the seemingly least fertile of soils, that China will help Africa democratize, which is a key to the continent’s future.

While much of the world has gone sour on the United States’ claim of being a beacon of hope, the 53 countries of Africa have by and large remained profoundly attached to a vision of America as land of justice, opportunity and freedom. Obama’s election will only make such feelings much more intense, a fact I can attest to from correspondence from friends across the continent of prayer vigils in every faith for his candidacy and for his success in office.

To waste this moment would be more than a lost opportunity. For the United States, for Africa and for the world, it would be a tragedy.

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Dynamic Young Engines Driving China’s Epic Boom

October 22, 2008 12:11 PM

Books of the Times - A review by Howard W. French

FACTORY GIRLS

From Village to City in a Changing China

By Leslie T. Chang

Spiegel & Grau. 420 pages. $26.

Some day the manic thrust of China’s continuing dash for development will have passed, and the quest for leisure so cherished in developed countries will become as commonplace among Chinese as their current thirst for achievement.

Perhaps by then, new heroes will have emerged to help explain how the world’s most populous nation rejoined the ranks of the rich.

For now, the familiar story line credits the former leader Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) for breaking the dismal, decades-long run of misrule and foreign subjugation, feudalism and civil war, and finally the fanatical excesses of Mao Zedong.

Often lost in the telling are the invisible foot soldiers who made China’s stirring rise possible: the country’s 130 million migrant workers, the subject of Leslie T. Chang’s “Factory Girls.” This vast and ceaselessly renewed workforce has built China’s cities, throwing up skyscrapers at a rate never seen before, and has filled China’s factories, churning out ever cheaper goods in ever greater quantities to fuel the double-digit growth that has reshaped the world’s economy.

Ms. Chang, a former China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, describes this endless flow of labor from the hinterland to the booming cities of the east as the “largest migration in human history.” But she gives us something more personal as well, including an extended aside in which she explores her ancestors’ roots in China. The results are deeply affecting.

Her focus, as suggested by the title, are the young women who overwhelmingly staff the factory assembly lines in the new industrial supercities of the Pearl River Delta of southern China. In the course of her narrative, she builds a quiet but powerful case that through their tireless work and self-sacrifice, these women, invisible to the outside world and to most Chinese, are this era’s true heroes.

Ms. Chang’s story centers on Dongguan, a giant factory town whose population is estimated at 70 percent female, where the economy has grown at a 15 percent annual clip for two decades.

Dongguan is one of China’s hyper-dynamic new boom towns and a place seemingly without history, boasting a pseudo Ikea, pseudo K.F.C.’s and even a Hyatt hotel knockoff. Here, as in China itself, “everything is in the process of becoming something else.”

The factories are a world of brutal 12-hour shifts and minimal leave, Spartan dormitories, six-month minimum commitments enforced by the withholding of the first two months’ salary, and monthly wages that often hover in the $100 range. Fines are assessed for talking on the job, and bathroom breaks are allowed once every four hours.

Despite exploitation like this, the supply of girls willing to trade the dead-end life of the village for the cheating and discrimination of the factory appears limitless. As one chapter title puts it, to die poor is a sin.

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China’s Ode to Legerdemain

August 14, 2008 7:50 AM

From the Huffington Post - Posted August 13, 2008 | 06:36 PM (EST)

I have a small confession to make.

I slept through much of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

I could blame my flagging interest on jet lag, since I had just arrived in the United States from China, where I had lived for the last five years, and there would be an element of truth in that. Or I could emphasize the feelings that these mass exercises induced in me as they stretched on.

Yes, there was an irresistible twinge of admiration for the production effort that went into such a gigantic spectacle, just as I have felt real respect for China’s national reconstruction effort that I’ve watched firsthand. Ultimately, as I watched other night, though, I felt a mild sensation of repugnance accompanied by a creeping sense of boredom.

To be truthful, there were moments of sheepishness over the next couple of days, as messages poured in from friends, including some from ordinarily skeptical Chinese, about what an awesome, even life changing experience the opening ceremony had been.

Explaining the boredom, though, is a snap.

Leni Riefenstahl has never been remembered so well as in recent weeks, as one commentator after another (myself included, in my former column in the International Herald Tribune) has compared Beijing 2008 to Berlin 1936, and invoked the name of Hitler’s filmmaker to try to come to terms with such an ambitious marshaling of imagery in the direct and obvious service of propaganda that we have witnessed by the Olympics’ Chinese hosts.

Paeans to the grandeur of the state and the manipulation of history in an unsubtle celebration of racial identity and doctrinaire solidarity seem terribly old hat. The effacement of the individual and the glorification of a sacred, but never clearly defined national cause are of a piece with nasty ideologies of bygone eras.

Beijing’s favorite director of politically correct cinema blockbusters, Zhang Yimou, directed the Beijing spectacle using every high-tech trick he could muster, but the event’s intellectual lineage goes back to the bygone tenors of the Hollywood epic, masters of the mass, anonymous screen extra, like Cecil B. DeMille and William Wyler.

Fortunately nowadays, most of the world is suspicious of the all-powerful state that brooks no contradiction from the individual. For all the talk of the ceremonies’ tightly choreographed “one-from-many” message being an expression of a uniquely Asian social paradigm, Beijing and its Mini Me ally, North Korea are in fact the only true believers in the values trumpeted on opening night.

My confession continues. I was wrong to be so blasé as to fall asleep. Beijing communicated to the world in an unmediated fashion on 8/8/08, and it delivered a deeply revealing message and one that is properly worrisome: behold us in awe and pay tribute to our greatness, fall in line and ask no meddlesome questions.

The repugnant side of the Games has been there all along, but during the buildup was somehow kept mostly out of view. That is until the cynicism, dishonesty and power worship that lies at the heart of the Chinese state’s program was laid bare through an embarrassing revelation: the little pixie who enchanted the world on opening night, singing Ode to Motherland, just as the flag bearing Chinese team entered the stage wasn’t in fact the little girl who sang the anthem.

Chinese television viewers were further mislead, during the ceremonies’ long discursion about the grandeur of the country’s supposed 5,000 years of history by a fireworks display that was not the fireworks display that those in attendance at the National Stadium, the ‘Bird’s Nest’ actually saw.

The state’s worry that anything but a carefully handpicked crowd might lead to spontaneous protests or some other mortifying embarrassment led it to ratchet up security to the point that ordinary people feel it’s not worth attending. So when the stands have been too empty, the government has trucked in ersatz fans, including many of its own eugenically selected youthful volunteers.

The occasion of the Olympics was too important to leave anything to chance, or indeed to leave any room for reality. Embellishing the face of China, and thereby enhancing the prestige of its rulers, required something better, a painstakingly idealized hyper-real, and whether that required trickery or deception, so be it.

There are indications that even ordinary Chinese people are tired of such games, complaining in large numbers online about the government’s manipulative handling of the Opening Ceremony.
The official answer to such complaints came from Chen Qigang, a Politburo member whose interview Beijing Radio was quoted in The New York Times. “Everyone should understand this in this way,” Chen urged. “This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture, especially during the entrance of our national flag. This is an extremely important, extremely serious matter.”

One might add that such overriding emphasis on flag and anthem and face-driven notions of national interest, as decided entirely behind closed doors by something called a politburo is extremely old fashioned.

The corollary to this episode, of course, has the government’s response to skeptical minded foreigners, journalists or otherwise, who come to the festivities armed with all sorts of questions about the nature of the Chinese system, the restrictions on liberties, the use and purpose of Chinese power. “Aw shucks,” the system has seemed to answer. “These are just games, meant to be enjoyed by the Chinese people, and for the people of the world. Don’t sully their purity with politics. Don’t spoil our wonderful party with talk about rights or ideals.”

For remaining doubters, the veil lifted on the stage management of the opening ceremonies should clarify things. These games are and always have been about something most serious: China’s global resurgence. The Chinese people themselves have few outlets for a national conversation about what their country’s rise means for themselves and for the world. The government won’t tolerate it.

That makes it all the more imperative that the rest of mankind to come to grips intelligently with this country’s remarkable rise, and not to be put off by anodyne slogans like the ephemeral erstwhile favorite “peaceful rise,” or by the equally airy, and content-free current ones, like “harmonious society,” and “scientific development,” or indeed by the razzle-dazzle of the games themselves.

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Despite Flaws, Rights in China Have Expanded

August 2, 2008 1:14 PM

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
August 2, 2008

SHANGHAI — For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff.

New flexibility in rules that dictate where people live has allowed Song Daqing to escape poverty in Sichuan to sell vegetables in Shanghai.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But as the Olympic Games approach, training a spotlight on China’s rights record, that view obscures a more complex reality: political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

“Some people will tell you, look at the walls, and say they are still pretty high, while others will tell you that there is a lot of space between the walls,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch. “Both things are true.”

Chinese who try to challenge the one-party state directly say authorities are no more tolerant of dissent than they were in the 1980s, and in some cases they are tougher on citizen-led campaigns to enforce legal rights or stop environmental abuses.

On the other hand, the definition of what constitutes a political challenge has changed. Individuals are far less likely to run afoul of a system that no longer demands conformity in political views or personal lifestyles.

The shift toward a more diverse society helps explain some anomalies in perceptions of life inside China. Amnesty International, the human rights group, reported this week that the rights situation had deteriorated significantly in the months before the Olympics despite China’s pledges to improve its record as a condition for hosting the games.

But a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project this spring and issued last month found that an astounding 86 percent of Chinese said they were content with their country’s direction, double the percentage who said the same thing in 2002. Only 23 percent of Americans polled in the survey said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.

The speeches of China’s leaders, with their gray imagery and paternalistic phrasings, have changed relatively little, emphasizing unity, harmony and economic growth under party rule. The reality on the ground, though, has been transformed, partly because a more dynamic economy necessitates a more dynamic society, partly because money gives people options they did not have when they were poor.

Arguably the most dramatic change in the freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese has been the gradual erosion of a population registration system that tied people to their places of birth, preventing internal migration or, at its height, even tourism.

China has not formally abandoned the system, known as hukou, and it can still prove a nuisance. But as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the inland provinces to wealthier coastal cities in search of economic opportunity, authorities in one place after another have found themselves making concessions to this new reality.

Song Daqing, who lives in a single-room home here with his wife and three children, counts himself as a beneficiary of these changes. Born into poverty in Sichuan Province, he worked as a cattle herder, bricklayer and coal miner, earning as little as 60 cents a day before coming to Shanghai in 1998. His early years in this city were marked by frequent mass roundups of migrants by the police, and he was twice held in crowded detention centers before being expelled from the city.

“Now we all have residence permits,” said Mr. Song, who supports his family by selling vegetables. “The police don’t check our paperwork anymore, and even if they found you without a permit, they won’t arrest you, but rather would suggest you get one as soon as possible.”

Reality Trumps Ideology

The relative flexibility the government has shown in allowing this to happen is more a matter of pragmatism than any overt ideological shift, a grudging concession to economic reality.

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A columnist’s parting thoughts on China

July 31, 2008 11:10 PM

SHANGHAI: This is it for me, folks. I’m finished. Done, meaning this is the last of the regularly scheduled columns readers will see from me in this spot.

I’ve had the distinct privilege of writing for this space for the past three years, most of that time holding forth on a weekly basis. As much as a privilege, it has been a deeply pleasurable challenge trying to say something interesting and, hopefully, new each time about China and its place in the world.

As a rhythm sets in, so does a humbling sense of hits and misses, guided in great measure by the invaluable feedback of one’s readers, and whether one reaps criticism or praise, nitpicking or expansive analysis, it is readers that the column writer comes to cherish most.

As a final installment, this is an occasion meant for parting thoughts, and I offer them herewith. First, as a writer with an innately and sometimes intensely critical bent, one wishes to offer some general observations about China.

What this country has accomplished in the last generation deserves all of our respect. If any doubters remain, the China phenomenon is real. I have eschewed the use of the word miracle, which is often attached to China’s development these days, not simply because it has become a cliché, but because it subtly detracts credit where credit is due.

China has achieved the tremendous momentum of growth and change that we journalists are always writing about not by miracle at all, but rather through the hard work and ingenuity of its people. These same factors, along with this society’s extraordinary resilience, after experiences in the 20th century that were among the cruelest anywhere, should serve as an inspiration to downtrodden people on other continents.

China’s example shows what kinds of remarkable results can follow when governments stop committing colossal blunders and grossly shackling or preying upon their own people. Add universal education to the mix, economic openness and basic law and order almost anywhere, and the results will soon attract that clichéd descriptive: a miracle.

China has had the great fortune of good timing, too, with its reforms coming at the start of a great wave of globalization. And there have been countless other factors behind its success that space won’t allow exploring here, but any number of plodding states around the world would do well to learn from its example, from lagging regional giants like Nigeria and Pakistan to borderline failed states like Haiti and Myanmar.

A more interesting question may be, How appropriate is China’s model for China itself? Rather than highlighting the country’s many successes, the run-up to the Beijing Olympics has ironically spotlighted this country’s more retrograde qualities, from environmental devastation and vast class disparities, to a repressive instinct that seems to lurk everywhere here.

This is supposed to be a grand, global celebration, but the people who run the country are so uptight they’ve frightened their own people, and risk turning off many of their overseas guests - that is, the guests who will make it here despite restrictive visa policies and an atmosphere that leaves no room for spontaneity.

Events of recent months have revealed this to be a deeply reactionary government, a state with manifold reasons for self-confidence, and yet one that seems spooked by its own shadow.

How else to explain the embarrassing need to carefully censor the Internet during the Games, as detailed in this newspaper on Thursday, or the need to jail lawyers, or buy off parents whose children were killed in flimsy schoolhouses during the recent Sichuan earthquake, or to tightly censor journalists, or to ban protests of all sorts?

What this all points to is the emergence of China as a new kind of Potemkin state: a place that invests heavily in the very old-fashioned idea that if you manipulate appearances and control the field of view, reality will gradually bend in the desired direction.

Most have learned from cartoons that the ostrich, by burying its head in the sand, does nothing to make predators disappear. And sure enough, the harder China has tried to exert control, to enforce illusions, the more noticeable the cracks in the façade become.

Draconian censorship of domestic journalists, for example led to the mysterious appearance of forbidden photographs from the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 in one of Beijing’s most popular newspapers last week. The creation of authorized “protest zones” during the Games reveals itself upon closer inspection to be little more than a public relations ploy, inaccessible to all but the most intrepid protesters.

Similarly, the desperation to achieve the appearance of clean air for the Games has brought all manner of artifice, from exempting ozone and very small particles from air quality benchmarks, to widely rumored plans to seed clouds for rain. And yet the image that is likely to prove most lasting will be of endurance athletes protecting their lungs with masks.

Then there was the strange spectacle of a Chinese television reporter recently announcing proudly, but not altogether truthfully, that foreign journalists would enjoy total freedom during the Games. What of Chinese reporters? Question not allowed.

Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, waxed Orwellian when he parried complaints about censorship of the Internet, saying that foreign media would enjoy “sufficient access” to information. He then added: “I believe our policy will not affect reporters’ coverage of the Olympic Games.” He was wrong.

China’s model has a lot to offer the world, but one senses that it has taken China itself about as far as it can. This government has stopped making the massive, brutal blunders it committed in the 20th century, which killed or stunted the lives of huge numbers of its citizens. What it needs most now is to get out of the way of ideas and enterprise, and to learn, bit by bit, the virtues of trust.

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Beneath Olympic glitter, a 20th-century mindset

July 24, 2008 8:59 PM

SHANGHAI: The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing in a few days will turn Shakespeare on his head. Suddenly from the whole world being a stage, China will own the entire stage - and the whole world will be its rapt audience.

Such a big moment and grand opportunity is exactly what China has labored toward for so many years: More than a chance to tweak its “brand,” from the inception this occasion has been seen as a chance to make a gigantic statement to the Chinese people and to the world that says, “Behold, for we have arrived.”

Modern Olympic Games have long been about making statements, and, more indirectly, they have always said interesting things about the hosts’ self-regard. In this case, few will escape the impression of an overweening monumentalism in the way that China’s grand old imperial capital has been rebuilt for the occasion, with huge sums lavished on buildings that have been clearly designed with awe in mind.

Monuments, though, function on several levels, one of which is to ask questions. And the bigger the plinth or pyramid, the bigger and the more irresistible the urge toward puzzlement.

As the authorities here would have it, the Beijing festivities are a celebration of an unprecedented success story: the resurrection of the world’s largest country and one of its older cultures, and the placement of China on a breathtakingly fast track of wealth accumulation and economic advancement - all of this, of course, under the leadership of the Communist Party.

That’s plenty to chew on, and it doesn’t hurt that, as far as it goes, this story line mostly conforms to reality. Things don’t really become interesting, though, until one starts thinking in terms of what’s worked well and what hasn’t in China, and asking why.

For all of the rumble and vroom of the Chinese economy and all of the glitter mustered on behalf of the Games, people who think with care will be hit with the unmistakable impression that China is fundamentally a rather old-fashioned place, fast pushing forward by most of the standard yardsticks used to measure global powers and yet, paradoxically, still far from any cutting edge. One might even argue that the country remains woefully behind in terms of addressing its people’s real needs.

What, you ask? This is a country that has just built the world’s biggest airport in record time; a place laying down new roads and highways at a pace matched by the speed with which it is throwing up skyscrapers. And by the way, just this week, didn’t a new poll by Pew find that the people, or at least urban residents, are overwhelmingly happy with the direction of their country?

This is all true, and indeed even impressive, but this frantic activity merely raises a bigger question - and it’s one in which the Chinese people have not been invited to participate: What’s it all about?

Six decades ago, with Mao’s Marxist revolution, China set out to create a New Man who would thrive in a country where class distinctions had been eliminated. The dictatorship of the proletariat by a vanguard party, applying arcane but scientifically sound dialectical reasoning, would ensure that the country remained on a path of progress and triumphed over its capitalist rivals.

Marxism is above all a materialist ideology, and as the faith in this creed has all but vanished from the society, the materialism has remained, propelled in equal part by Chinese enterprise and thrift.

What are we left with? Since the time of Deng Xiaoping, the answer is a people who have been freed to pursue wealth but encouraged not to meddle with bigger questions about their place in their own society - or about their society’s place in the world.

The state, meanwhile, has taken an utterly conventional approach to nation-building, racing in headlong pursuit of utterly 20th-century goals - retracing old steps like creating a smokestack economy or sending men to the moon, for example - even as the new and very different demands of the 21st century, from a revolution in the use of energy and respect for the environment to a redefinition of human development, make themselves ever more pressing.

Channeling Nietzsche, who believed that Christianity was a disaster from which Western civilization was still recovering, Kerry Brown, the author of “Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century,” said that China’s industrialization “is a disaster we will never recover from.”

Ironically, there is no better symbol of this before-the-flood mindset than the Olympics themselves. From the athletes who are its tools to the big new buildings, Beijing has conceived the entire project as a paean to the old-fashioned state, and although other comparisons to Nazism are not warranted, the parallels with Berlin’s 1936 Games are, replete with propaganda efforts that eclipse those of Leni Riefenstahl and company.

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Who’s Your Buddha?

July 18, 2008 2:22 PM

By Howard W. French

This article appeared in the August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003. A tiny man with small, darting eyes and ears that were extremely hard of hearing, Deng had survived despite an irremediable fondness for his old pipe, which he relighted and puffed every few minutes as he spoke to Liao. A couple of pages into Liao’s account of their conversation in The Corpse Walker, one quickly grasps that surviving a fondness for tobacco was the very least of the old man’s exploits. We commonly think of monks as living quiet lives in retreat, and that indeed was Master Deng’s chosen path. Instead, and through no choice of his own, he ended up living a most eventful life in a country that one can credibly claim experienced the most brutal twentieth century of any place on earth.

The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up
by Liao Yiwu; Wen Huang, trans.

When we recall China’s many traumas, what typically loom large are its long decades of political decay and warlordism, the civil war that pit Nationalists against Communists, and an invasion by Japan. This story line, of course, is even more indomitable in the officially sanctioned accounts of the century that exist in China, where even now serious research on things like the Cultural Revolution is still largely proscribed. For Master Deng, though, whose twentieth century was roughly split in two by the victory of Mao’s forces in 1949, the troubles of the pre-“liberation” period seem trivial in comparison with what would follow. “A couple of sentences are sufficient,” he tells Liao, dismissing the travails suffered in the early decades of his life.

Readers should be thankful that the old man dispensed with such radical economy in describing what followed. In his telling, as in the other twenty-six oral histories in Liao’s book, we are granted a robust new understanding of the modern Chinese experience. “Over the centuries, as old dynasties collapsed and new ones came into being, the temple remained relatively intact,” Deng explains, giving his interviewer an understated introduction to the upheaval inflicted on his place of worship. “This is because changes of dynasty or government were considered secular affairs. Monks like me didn’t get involved. But the Communist revolution in 1949 was a turning point for me and the temple.”

Soon after Mao’s victory, Deng was dragged out of his temple and stood up before a crowd, accused of accumulating wealth without engaging in physical labor, and spreading “feudalistic and religious ideas that poisoned people’s minds.” People stepped forward to denounce him, and the crowd that gathered responded on cue, howling slogans like “Down with the evil landlord” and “Religion is spiritual poison.” Some spat on him. Others punched and kicked. “No matter which temple you go to, you will find the same rule: monks pass on the Buddhist treasures from one generation to the next,” Deng says. “Since ancient times, no abbot, monk, or nun has ever claimed the properties of the temple as his or her own. Who would have thought that overnight all of us would be classified as rich landowners! None of us has ever lived the life of a rich landowner, but we certainly suffered the retribution accorded one.”

In this single incident, one already finds crystallized many of the signal features of the revolutionary era’s mass politics: flamboyant and typically baseless scapegoating, slogan-based campaigns aimed not just at inciting the fury of the masses but at channeling it against ever-shifting ideologically designated “enemies,” and vicious and often unrelenting sectarian attacks. By Master Deng’s reckoning, between 1952 and 1961 this meant he endured more than 300 “struggle sessions,” as these organized hazings were known in the revolution’s euphemistic terminology. In his area of Sichuan Province, he tells Liao, by 1961 “half of the people labeled as members of the bad elements had starved to death.”

In 1978, a ban on religious teaching that dated from early in the revolution was lifted, and a few years later the rebuilding of the Gu Temple, and hundreds of others around China, got under way in earnest, aided by donations from people who had kept their faith in secret. No longer the target of punishing political campaigns, Master Deng has other worries: the designs of predatory local officials who see temples like his as cash cows or comfortable digs for their gambling parties. “A couple of months ago, some officials showed up and set up their mah-jongg tables right inside the temple,” he says.

They played that gambling game all day. Some ended up losing money. They walked into my room and wanted to get a loan from me. I did “lend” some to them. You know they will never pay back…. The officials are so powerful, and can destroy you at a whim. The chief of the Religious Affairs Bureau shamelessly calls himself the parent of all gods.

With a little variation, the phrase “parent of all gods” entered the news during the recent crisis in Tibet, when the “autonomous region’s” party secretary declared that the Communist Party was the “real Buddha” for Tibetans.

In its standard telling abroad, the story of the China that Mao built is all neatly hewn sections paved with well-worn flagstone. Who hasn’t heard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward? The well-read will also know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, during which the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Thus, the country lurches back and forth between famous moments of almost hallucinatory revolutionary madness and a semblance of normalcy about which we hear very little.

As histories go, this manner of relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. This is the ultimate sense of the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.

Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up, gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”—with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Read alone, many of them invite questions of believability, especially for people without the benefit of familiarity with China. None have the feeling of pure artifice, but as with much of the writing of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, with whom Liao shares more than a passing likeness, each provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.

The 49-year-old Liao was born in Sichuan Province just as China’s mad dash to become an economic superpower, the Great Leap Forward, was getting under way. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, his late father, a small landlord, was jailed as a “class enemy.” In fact, the family had been targeted for persecution since 1959 when his mother, a music teacher, was fired from her primary school job for “bourgeois thinking.” After being caught trading ration coupons for food, Liao’s mother ran away with her son and a younger sister to Chengdu, Sichuan’s big provincial capital, where they lived a precarious life without a residence permit. Liao left home two years later, at age 10, hoping to find his father and eventually making a living through a succession of small hard-knock jobs, hauling rocks or rolling cigarettes. In the early 1970s, his father was released from jail and allowed to teach at a rural middle school. Schools had been closed throughout the country amid the political chaos, and Liao, already in his early teens, went to primary school in the same town where his father worked.

In 1982 Liao’s first poem, “Dawn,” appeared in Xing Xing, an influential poetry journal, winning him wide attention. By 1988 Liao had just turned 30, and his poems had already won him a national reputation, along with twenty poetry prizes and awards. When the Chinese army violently put down the student-led protests at Tiananmen Square, Liao wrote an epic poem, which he titled “Massacre.” Knowing it could not be published in the country, he recorded it on cassette, giving a tape to a friend and allowing it to be copied and passed along from person to person. Word of the poem spread fast, leading to the author’s arrest, and in March 1990 Liao was imprisoned and spent the next four years locked up.

If the author’s sensitivity for injustice, a consistent focus of his writing, springs from the treatment of his parents that he witnessed as a child, much of his technique, including a finely honed sense of voice and dialogue, was forged in prison, where he shared cells with hardened criminals, eccentrics and outcasts from China’s socialist order. In The Corpse Walker Liao’s interviews are presented in standard question-and-answer format, a method that would seem to leave little room for style, but the effect of reading them is almost akin to that of reading the work of a skilled short-story writer, one with a talent for getting out of the way and letting the yarn unravel, as if all on its own. Part of this stems, undoubtedly, from what might be called remarkable people skills—the ability to sidle up to someone and get a sympathetic current flowing, without the subject ever the wiser that he is being pumped.

One safely assumes, too, that many of the interviews are reconstructions of conversations, and far from strictly literal transcriptions. This allows the author to control their pace and to stamp them, albeit judiciously, with his own style. There is much more to the effort, though. To pull together work like this one must be a tireless researcher and interviewer. If it is true that most people have an interesting story, even those who are not aware of it, Liao’s characters, at once regular and extraordinary, are not the product of a random cull. Some of his subjects resulted from prolonged wanderings in a particular area. Some have been introduced to him by friends, typically other writers. And some of the most striking pieces, finally, are reconstructions of conversations he had with fellow prison inmates.

As to what one should make of the result, Liao is a kind of pointillist, bravely doing what one writer can to fill in the vast blank spaces that constitute China’s modern artistic and social record. Since the revolution, Beijing has been obsessed with few things more than controlling China’s story, which runs the gamut from rewriting history to censorship of the news and exercising tight control over publishing to arresting, monitoring or outright “banning” writers who stray too far within, or often from, the official fold.

Liao has faced all these repressive measures. In its first edition, in September 1999, 30,000 copies of the book were printed by a medium-sized Beijing publishing house. The book was reprinted five times over the first few months, then was suddenly banned. Two years later, a large Chinese house published an expanded version under a new title, but it too was quickly banned. Liao’s other twenty-odd works were mostly published overseas in Chinese or self-published

through foreign websites. The government will not issue him a passport, preventing him from traveling abroad, and he has been reduced to the status of a nonperson by China’s domestic media, which amounts to a ban. Still, in a testament to his persistence and the ways of change in China, where the government, despite its best efforts, can no longer control everything, he is widely read within the country, his books published in black market underground editions.

Liao secures a small measure of safety, perhaps, in collecting the words of others, instead of describing Chinese society himself. Yet given the invisibility of nearly all but the sanctioned stories within China, out of the voices of Liao’s would-be ordinary folks emerges a powerful counterhistory, whose authenticity derives in no small part from his chosen stylistic format.

As such, Liao’s tales are not suited for reading in isolation, an experience that risks leaving the reader merely charmed or enchanted by the seeming whimsy at work in the choice of many of the subjects, and indeed in the facts of their lives: a safecracker who escapes from prison by swimming through a cesspool, hides in a morgue to escape arrest and later takes refuge in an army bus; a peasant who fancies himself emperor; and the “corpse walkers” of the title, who face mob justice for their role in carrying out an obscure rite for the deceased wife of a former Nationalist officer.

Read four or five of these interviews, though—there is little chance of stopping there—and something powerful begins to happen. Doubts about the plausibility of this or that detail begin to morph into doubts of an altogether different kind, ones that seem close to the heart of the author’s project. And these big new doubts go to the very nature of the China that we think we have known.

Through Liao’s characters, the reader familiar with the standard histories comes away with a feeling that the high-water marks of supposed madness are exaggerated, in the sense that what has passed for more “normal” times emerge as far crazier than is generally allowed for. The new new China, meanwhile, the booming post-reform China of seemingly unending high-speed growth, also comes across as a place of unrelenting trauma and even craziness. Yes, this China is qualitatively different from the Maoist China of old—and certainly less violent—but it is just as disorienting, just as hard to fully come to terms with, for the Chinese and for foreigners.

The elderly in this book spend their time contemplating a past that is too mean and grotesque to digest properly. At one point Zhang Meizhi, the 84-year-old widow of a former local official in southern China who was executed, along with Zhang’s brother, in front of her during the 1952 Land Reform campaign, tells Liao, “I’m trying to make peace with the past.” If the summary executions for having been declared a class enemy were not enough, the tongues of the two men were cut out for use in traditional medicine. Zhang was then locked up for forty days, during which time her 2-year-old daughter starved to death. As the persecution of these so-called rich peasants continued, Zhang’s eldest son fled the village, taking refuge in an underground vegetable cellar next to a cultivated field, where he stayed in secret for two years. Eventually he was discovered, and a younger brother who fed him surreptitiously was shot dead by the police. The fugitive son was given a life sentence for antirevolutionary crimes, which was commuted only after thirty years in prison. “I grew up in a family with generations of educated people,” Zhang tells Liao. “We had a glorious family history. I used to keep a record of my family history. The Poor Peasants Revolutionary Committee dug it out and burned it. My house was so thoroughly searched that there was no place for a mouse to hide.”

The rootless younger people who figure in this book, meanwhile, spend their time trying to find a footing in a world stripped of the normal bearings. There is the migrant worker from Sichuan Province, whose life reads like a précis of China’s new “masses,” those hundreds of millions of commoditized laborers who drift anonymously into the cities, hoping to catch a break. Zhao Er has toiled as a farmer, in a wildcat coal mine, as a construction worker and a restaurant hand, and has slept in a plastic tent in Chengdu owned by an enterprising woman who barks on the sidewalk at dusk each day to pile in as many short-stay “tenants” as she can.

“In the wintertime, when bodies are crammed in together, you get pretty warm,” Zhao says. “Sometimes it’s so warm that you sweat simply by blowing a fart.” Later he recounts the tale of a woman he knew from his village who masquerades as a shoeshine lady to cover for her real trade, prostitution. “I don’t blame those poor women. Luckily my wife had three kids, otherwise, she would also be turned into a whore.”

One cannot read Liao’s book and not be impressed by how many people survive by lying, often confessing to imaginary charges or reciting accusations back to one’s accuser, accepting them as one’s own. This is brought to particularly vivid life by the story of Tian Zhiguang, a “grave robber,” or at least someone who has been arrested for supposedly robbing graves. “From the unexpected discovery of fortune to our sudden arrest, everything happened so fast,” Tian said, explaining how the discovery of antique gold coins buried beneath his house led to his arrest on a false pretense. Police dismissed his explanation with a laugh and carted him off to jail, where the inmates initially took Tian for the leader of a grave-robbing “triad,” or gang, and treated him with respect. Weeks later, when they learned he was an ordinary inmate, he was given a belated initiation, which consisted of vicious beatings while being forced to hoist a fully laden prison cell chamber pot on his head. This causes Liao, the author, to remark with bemusement, “I guess prisoners are getting more creative when it comes to torturing people.”

Two weeks after his initiation, Tian is offered a chance at redemption through the detention center’s “Confession Leads to Leniency” campaign. Three hundred inmates from nine cells are called into the courtyard to appear before local police and Communist Party leaders, who repeat over and over that “confessions will lead to reduced sentences.” Later, the bullying overlord among the inmates urges him to recant. “Those officials out there are all liars. Under normal circumstances, they trick you into confessing, promising you the reward of a reduced sentence. Once you tell everything, they never keep their promise. You probably end up with a bullet in your head. However, this campaign is different. The media has written about it. If those officials renege on their promises, they will lose face and credibility.”

Throughout his ordeal, Tian has remained scrupulous, and he responds by saying what he has told the authorities from the start: “I don’t really have anything to confess.” The boss of the cellblock, sensing a chance to win points, orders his underlings to rough up Tian in order to change his mind. “The cell was like a classroom and every ‘student’ was asked to write a paper,” Tian relates. “Your confession needs to be sensational,” the boss tells them. “Don’t try to simplify and whitewash. The more serious your crimes are, the better it makes me look.”

Old Master Deng has a wonderfully pithy explanation for the toll that this kind of behavior has on a society—a toll that remains in China today, thick with rampant distrust and unmoored by the erosion of values one encounters at so many turns here. As Deng has said, “There’s a Chinese saying. When a snake bites a human being there is an antidote. But when a human being bites a fellow human being, there is no hope.”

About Howard W. French
Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, covered China from 2003 to 2008. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.

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Hands-off foreign policy a collapse of creativity

July 17, 2008 9:51 PM

LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
July 17, 2008

SHANGHAI: Think of it this way. The Olympic Games are in the bag. World leaders are lining up to attend the opening ceremonies, and even Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who made a brief stand over repression in Tibet, has fallen in with the crowd.

It’s as safe now as it ever will be to fly one’s true colors, and in the last week, that’s precisely what China has done, joining Russia in a veto of sanctions on Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and expressing opposition to a warrant sought by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for the arrest of the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Let’s be clear for a moment about what this column is not. This is not an argument in favor of a boycott of the Olympic Games, in which China has invested stupendous sums, both in cash and cachet.

It is also not an out-of-hand dismissal of China’s long-held conservative views about the power of the United Nations Security Council, where Beijing enjoys a veto, to respond to the “internal” crises of other countries.

What follows instead is a double expression of regret that China has summoned so little creative energy filling the huge void that one encounters in the space that most major powers reserve for their foreign policy.

Plainly spoken, as a global actor, China remains an essentially reactive force, one keen to limit the power or the range of action of others in the name of principles such as democracy, human rights and self-determination.

In recent months, in response to international criticism over its ties with Sudan and Zimbabwe, with the Olympics looming, China had labored to put its best face forward, sending peacekeepers to its Sudanese ally in a largely symbolic gesture of acknowledgment of the crisis in the Darfur region of that country.

Beijing also quietly downgraded its ties with Robert Mugabe, an erstwhile friend and client. What is happening in Darfur has often been described as an ongoing genocide. Mugabe, for his part, places new demands on our vocabulary. Genocide does not fit, but what does one call a leader who takes an entire country down with him?

What the week’s events suggest is a China that has coolly calculated that these modest gestures are enough, and that it is time to get back to business as usual, which means a foreign policy that remains mute about fires that burn on distant shores. And it is hard to read the words of Liu Jianchao, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, without feeling a blush of cynicism. The actions of the International Criminal Court “must be beneficial to the stability of the Darfur region and the appropriate settlement of the issue, not the contrary,” he said.

With the Olympics three weeks away, one wishes to hear from China what, in fact, it believes in. Is stability the be-all and end-all, or does Beijing actually have some useful ideas about what an “appropriate settlement” would be to crises in countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe?

Questions like these go beyond the countries named. Everywhere they go, visitors to the Olympics will encounter the slogan, worthy of Madison Avenue, devised for the games: One World, One Dream.

What kind of dream, pray tell? Is it a see-no-evil world where we place faith in the idea that minding one’s own business will make for a better life; a place where the sovereign power of governments accounts for everything, and the power and rights of people for naught?

One suspects here that giving a moral dimension to China’s foreign policy would do more for the country’s image and prestige than the creation of 100 more of the pharaonic monuments of the type that have sprouted in Beijing with next month’s big Olympic show in mind.

It’s easy enough, of course, for China to dismiss this kind of thinking as typical American criticism. America’s own inconsistency on human rights issues often hinders its leverage and credibility on such questions. That’s why the sounds coming from Africa itself - for example - these days are so important, and are worth listening to carefully.

One of these new voices is Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, who called herself part of the “new Africa” during a visit to South Africa this month, where she said she had come to “express my solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe as they search for solutions to the crisis in their country.” The critical word here, of course, is “people.”

“In 1985, Liberia held a sham election that was endorsed by Africa and the world,” Johnson-Sirleaf continued, explaining why such advocacy mattered. “Thirty years of civil war and devastation followed, with thousands dead and millions displaced. It need not have happened.”

I was in Liberia at the time, and witnessed the sham, and heard then-Secretary of State George Shultz endorse the results with a visit to the country. Years later, I would return to cover a war that killed as much as a tenth of the population, as the country all but disintegrated because of the stolen vote.

Fresh on the heels of its own stolen election, the parallels to Zimbabwe today are compelling, and while China can take cover behind vague and dilatory formulations about the importance of sovereignty or the need for unimpeded negotiations between the players there, its hollow voice does nothing to advance the causes of peace and social harmony that Beijing so often proclaims.

“Adopt a low profile and never take the lead,” was Deng Xiaoping’s advice to China’s diplomats early in this country’s reform era.

After two-plus decades of booming growth and interests that extend into every corner of the world, an axiom like this sounds awfully self-centered and cramped. And for the people of Sudan and Zimbabwe, coming up with something more fitting to the times has become a matter of life and death.

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As China rises, the pre-eminent U.S. may raise its game

July 10, 2008 10:24 PM

LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
July 10, 2008
SHANGHAI: For the last three years, this space has been intended as a column about China, or at the limit, one that looks at East Asia and tries to relate developments here to the rest of the world.

I begin this week’s installment with a partial disclaimer. With what follows, it may appear that I am setting off perilously into uncharted territory: the world of sports. For me, though, the most compelling event of last week took place far from the world of politics.

To be exact, it took place on Center Court at Wimbledon, and continued - in my time zone - so far into dawn Monday that I’ve experienced jet lag for the first time without flying.

That’s O.K., though, because it was worth it. I’ve been playing and watching and dreaming about tennis since I was about 10 years old, and I gladly join my voice to the many others who have described the Federer-Nadal pitched battle as the greatest match they have ever seen.

Note to the upcoming Beijing Olympics: sport at its best obliterates divisions between peoples, such as ostentatious flag waving and exaggerated national sentiment. All we cared about during the glorious four-plus hours of drama was the manifest excellence of the contest.

One could go on and on reeling off superlatives, about aces struck in extremis and the mind-bending geometry of winners hit on the run by both men under pressure, but that’s best left to the sports writers. What interests me here is something slightly different.

Roger Federer has been spoken of for some time now as tennis’s incipient GOAT - greatest of all time - and for just as long, this has struck me as a bit premature. While racking up his 12 Grand Slam victories, just two short of the record set by Pete Sampras, Federer has in my view lacked something more important than impressive statistics: an opponent cut to his own measure.

That was true, at least, until his loss Sunday to Rafael Nadal in the longest final ever played on Wimbledon’s Center Court.

One doesn’t wish to underestimate the feeling of devastation that comes with losing, especially after having had a stranglehold on that title for so many years, but Federer’s comments in defeat were ever so lacking in graciousness. He seemed unable to find anything redeemable in the experience. Indeed, it sounded for a cringe-worthy moment as if there was nothing worthwhile in life but being No. 1.

Contrast that with Nadal’s post-match remarks, in which he told how he had coped with letting the third and fourth sets slip away from him. “Well, is the final of Wimbledon, so I have to continuing fighting all the time with positive attitude,” he said. “I am playing well, so why I have to go down, no? I won two sets 6-4, 6-4. I lost two tiebreaks. A little bit unlucky.” He continues: “So just tried continuing focusing on myself, playing well. If he has a break and beat me the final, so just congratulate him and go at home, no? That’s it.”

It’s hard not to admire this sentiment, and it brings me to the reason for my topical detour: great sporting events have a lot to teach us about life, and this goes beyond us as individuals, and extends to the realm of nations.

Federer would have done better to have simply thanked Nadal for helping produce something so sublimely transcendent, and that’s not merely public relations strategy. Only by being bested by such a worthy opponent can the long-reigning No. 1 rise in our estimation and attain new heights.

As extraordinary as his talents are, it had all looked too easy for him up to this point. He may no longer win great titles at the incredible rate of recent years, but with a real peer for once, we will probably think more of him when he does. Nadal has a well-proven ability to defeat Federer. Let’s also hope that both men can continue to coax out the very best in each other.

And now, in the language of television, we return to our regular programming. For many years running, the United States has been in a position somewhat analogous to Federer’s: an unchallenged leader ranked leagues ahead of the nearest rival.

Not to draw the Federer comparison too far, but might it not also be said that unrivaled supremacy has induced signs of entitlement and complacency? The realm of global affairs offers no measuring sticks like a Wimbledon final, but experts report China’s economy will surpass the American economy in size by 2035, and there is a growing sense that the United States has found its Nadal.

The question this longtime pre-eminent nation now faces was put well by Fareed Zakaria in his recent book, “The Post-American World”: Can America “thrive in a world it cannot dominate?”

Learning that pre-eminence is guaranteed to no one can be a bitter pill, or an opportunity. Nations are defined by how they respond to new challenges.

China’s rise is mostly an immense good news story for the improving fortunes of its giant population, and therefore for humanity. One must hedge, only because the environmental consequences are far from being worked out, and because the purposes to which China’s newfound national power will be put are still unclear.

China has long measured itself against the United States and has improved itself in many ways as a consequence. Increasingly now, as it gains momentum, the shoe will be put on the other foot. For both countries, the challenge will be resisting the winning-is-everything mentality and learning to bring out the best in each other by bringing out the best in themselves.

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Behind the reluctance of China and Africa to criticize Mugabe

July 3, 2008 10:29 PM

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: For a crisis involving African despotism, the decibel readings in the West over Zimbabwe have reached almost unprecedented levels.

Beyond the din of condemnations of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging, power-obsessed tyrant, however, a great many questions have gone unexamined.

Western governments led by London and Washington look at Mugabe’s rule and see such a clear-cut case of evil that they are at a loss to understand why the rest of Africa - or China, for that matter, a Security Council member with fast-deepening ties with the continent - doesn’t rush to join in on their condemnation.

The Zimbabwe case should be more, though, than a tragedy for its own people, for it presents an invaluable opportunity to think about how differently the world can look from different vantage points. And far from an idle thought exercise, this might helpfully lead to a rethinking of diplomatic strategy in Africa and in other parts of the world.

As the second most important country in southern Africa, Zimbabwe, like that region itself, has long functioned like a kaleidoscope, serving up dramatically different perspectives to different viewers.

I was reminded of this fact by the recent news that a South African citizen of Chinese ancestry, Patrick Chong, had won a lawsuit enabling him to be legally considered black. The outcome was a triumph over a history of double discrimination. Like other ethnic Chinese, the plaintiff, who is chairman of the Chinese Association of South Africa, was denied many basic rights during the apartheid era, and he had also been denied the compensation won by the country’s black majority with the demise of a system of legally enshrined racism.

As the perverse language of apartheid would have put it, Chong has now become an “honorary black.”

What does this all have to do with Zimbabwe? Before Zimbabwe became a majority-ruled, independent country in 1980, and during the long years of apartheid in South Africa, both of those countries were treated with similar perversity as honorary members of the West.

While China was building the Tazara Railroad, to connect Zambia’s mines to Tanzania’s ports in order to loosen white-ruled South Africa’s economic grip on the southern half of the continent, the United States and Britain were running diplomatic interference for apartheid rule in Pretoria.

Washington often went further, backing South African guerrilla proxies in places like Angola, prolonging devastating wars there and elsewhere, and staving off independence for South African-occupied Namibia in the name of fighting communism.

Short memories abound, but in Africa this is not yet ancient history. In 1987, while South Africa was actively pursuing a policy of sabotage against its neighbors, devastating vital infrastructure and supporting mass killers like the Renamo rebels in Mozambique, Washington reserved most of its indignation for “necklacing,” a small-bore terror tactic practiced by blacks in South Africa. An amendment passed with overwhelming support in the U.S. Senate requiring southern African countries to condemn these lynchings or lose American aid.

Mugabe said it himself when he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1987: “Political and material support of desperate bandit groups, dissidents and self-seeking, discredited individuals by a superpower like the United States is a prescription for chaos and instability in the international political system. Calling such a hodgepodge of individuals ‘freedom fighters’ does not make them any such thing.”

Looking back, it isn’t hard to conclude that China was in many ways closer to being on the right side of history in southern Africa than the United States, for all of America’s vaunted attachment to freedom, democracy and human rights.

It is anything but clear that China has maintained that position today, as it pursues neo-mercantilist policies and abstains from pressuring Mugabe to end the campaign of terror and economic devastation waged against his own people.

Still, if one pauses to consider, it is relatively easy to grasp why African leaders might question the good faith behind the West’s admirable sounding values and abstain from the chorus of condemnations, or why the Chinese might themselves be skeptical.

An African journalist wrote me this week, comparing the vociferous Western response to Mugabe to the customary silence that attends atrocities, political hijackings and despotism on the continent, especially where critical Western interests are in play. A former U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe had told her: “Everyone felt they had invested something in the success of Zimbabwe, so when it all began unraveling, everyone felt personally disappointed and let down.”

This looks too easy by half, and it is hard to avoid the heretical question whether the vociferous response, especially by Britain, isn’t somehow related to race?

Unlike most of the continent, Rhodesia, like South Africa and Kenya, were places where whites settled and became attached.

Ivory Coast, another erstwhile showcase, was allowed to cycle through stolen elections, coups, ethnic cleansing and civil war, registering scarcely a ripple on the global agenda.

But telling Africans they will be judged by how they line up on Zimbabwe is counterproductive for other reasons, too. The West’s constant search for African leaders to anoint or vilify is resented on the continent, and its track record, moreover, is riddled with spots.

Paranoid African dictators look at the calls to denounce Mugabe and worry they might be next. The more democratically inclined know better. They see Washington’s embrace of dictators in places like Equatorial Guinea, or even former enemies, like the robber baron former Marxists who run Angola, and see a pattern of highly selective outrage. Might the fact that these countries - to name but two - are swimming in oil have something to do with escaping the Mugabe treatment?

China looks at this inconsistency, too, and naturally suspects it is being discriminated against. The only African country that has drawn more Western critical fire than Zimbabwe recently is Sudan, for its genocidal campaign in Darfur. It’s an emerging oil power, too, but unlike so many African kleptocracies, its product flows east, not west.

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Chinese Tennis No Longer Overlooks Zheng

July 3, 2008 6:39 PM

SHANGHAI — As a child athlete, Zheng Jie was always looked down upon — literally — for her diminutive size, passed by in favor of the taller, faster girls that China’s tennis establishment thought were the answer to the burgeoning arms race in the women’s game, where power and size have been the trends for a generation.

When players were selected for training in the United States, or for other marks of confidence from a state sporting system that tightly controls the destinies of most athletes, Zheng was always left standing in the wings, treated as an insufficiently promising second fiddle to bigger girls like Peng Shuai and Li Na.

“She was really upset because she knew that she was no worse than the others in terms of her skills,” said Chen Yuwen, a former coach of Zheng’s on her native Sichuan’s provincial team. “We had to counsel her, and I told her frankly there was nothing wrong with the nation wanting the best athletes to be trained, and that physique was an important factor they had to take into account.”

Over the years, the 5-foot-4 ½ Zheng became used to being consoled in this way, but she never let it dull her competitive fire. In the end, she took inspiration from another coach’s advice. He told her that her best strategy would be to always be ready to compete, in case a sudden opening came about.

“You might not be among the great hopefuls, but you can make yourself available when they need you,” the coach told her. Another coach gave her a picture of Michael Chang, the relatively short American who won the French Open in 1989, for encouragement.

The biggest opening of Zheng’s career materialized last week at Wimbledon, when she was offered a wild-card entry into the women’s singles bracket despite being ranked No. 133 in the world.

The 24-year-old Zheng has made the most of the opportunity, counterpunching a succession of bigger players into submission — including the newly ranked No. 1 player, the 6-foot-2 Ana Ivanovic, who could find few answers for Zheng’s deep, flat ground strokes and superior court coverage in a third-round match last Friday.

Zheng won that encounter, 6-1, 6-4, in one of the biggest upsets in recent memory. Expectations have been rising as Zheng has made victories over much bigger — and far higher-ranked — women appear increasingly routine.

Next up for Zheng is a semifinal match Thursday with Serena Williams, a two-time Wimbledon champion who, with her sister Venus, helped popularize the push for greater size and strength in women’s tennis.

“Anything is possible,” the China women’s coach, Jiang Hongwei, was quoted as saying in an interview published Wednesday by the news service sina.com. “We shouldn’t be scared by big names.”

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Howard W. French: With life’s journey as goal, little can disappoint

June 26, 2008 11:55 PM

LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard W. French
June 26, 2008

SHANGHAI: The movers come Saturday morning, and for the sixth time in my career as a journalist, I will oversee the odd spectacle of uniformed strangers trooping through my house, filling boxes with my belongings, taping and labeling them and hauling them off toward their next destination.

What’s most unusual about this move is the destination itself. A few weeks from now, I will be returning to the United States. Yes, it is my country of origin, in the language of the hundreds of airport customs forms I have filled out, but since 1979, for all but three and a half years, I have worked overseas.

A lesson I have learned over those years is that the prudent don’t wait for the packers, so for several days now, what passes for free time has been spent sifting through all manner of belongings, throwing away whatever is deemed unneeded, of course, but also savoring a chance to revisit a life lived to a very great extent on the road.

By fortuitous coincidence, I have been rereading “Remembrance of Things Past” by Proust, one of whose guiding thoughts was about the way we are defined by the objects that we surround ourselves with. They become our compass points and, consciously or not, the stuff of most every routine.

The storage boxes I have sifted through have surprised me in any number of ways. There have been reminders of the kindness of strangers who have written to me over the years to comment, often at great length and in neat longhand, which seems almost quaint in our e-mail age, on things I have reported, chiding me gently over perceived mistakes or nudging my thoughts in new directions.
There have been the photographs, tucked away in unsuspected places, that have reminded me of long-forgotten trips to obscure destinations. There have been the faded legal pads and notebooks filled with my own squint-inducing scrawl: countless to-do lists, fragmentary thoughts that eventually coalesced into story ideas, bons mots and investment tips, both great and not so great.

There has been reminder after reminder of technology’s grand march of obsolescence, with 1.44 megabyte floppy disks and memory cards and video adapters and dial-up modems and video cassettes and much, much more, consigned to the junk pile.

A particular surprise has involved language study. Crate after crate has disgorged an unimagined haul of study tools, from Spanish dictionaries to instructional tapes of Haitian Creole. I almost feel like I should open a school.

The real language blizzard, though, began with the move to Asia in 1998, and with my soon to be warehoused materials. I’ve got the gamut of complexity covered: from Easy Hiragana to Japanese for Busy People; from the Power of Suru (perhaps the most widely used Japanese verb) to Power Kanji.

In moments of long past virtue and linguistic ambition, I have bought box after box of Japanese character flashcards, which I studied in elevators and on trains. I had stacks of beautifully homemade ones, too. They contain compound words (right-wing, business trip, export, import) written out for me in brush on small slips of paper in the midst of my hundreds of hours of lessons at the knees of Nagao sensei. With her prim smile and perfect posture, she encouraged me to keep climbing the mountain until my very last week in Japan.

The hard effort, she averred, would take me to the top.

Not to contradict my sensei, but as game as I was to study, I knew that one never makes it to the top. A Haitian proverb says it best: Behind a mountain is the next mountain. For me the next mountain was Chinese, and when I came to Shanghai, I exhausted my ambition during the first six months studying eight hours a day using teachers who tag teamed me. Today, my collections of Chinese character cards and homework assignments jostle mutely with the Japanese ones.

“Like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy.” Proust wrote this phrase in gentle ridicule of people who would seek the unattainable.

If one takes one’s journey for the goal instead of fixing on a destination, there may be less opportunity for disappointment. It’s certainly been that way for me, setting out for Africa right out of school for a year and staying for six; plunging as deeply as possible into each new place, from Haiti, Cuba and El Salvador to Liberia, Mali and the then-Zaire.

To borrow a cliché, language is just a tool, and though true that may be, I remember the terror I experienced my first day of Japanese class, arriving two weeks late for a course at the University of Hawaii, and seeing students half my age write their homework on the blackboard in the language.

Good teachers make for good journeys, though, and fortunately for me, Omura sensei, my first Japanese instructor wouldn’t allow me to be discouraged. What ensued was the greatest ride of my life, as East Asia, with its immense energy, has opened up, sharing its secrets with me, first in Japan and Korea and now in the biggest dynamo for change of all, China.

Three decades ago, I set out on a journey desiring the world, and though one is humbled to know how much there is to be seen, and how little any one person can understand, there is little room for disappointment.

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China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold

June 20, 2008 1:37 PM

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 20, 2008

SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.

The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”

But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.

“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”

Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.

“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”

Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.

The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.

Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”

‘Don’t Retreat’

These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”

So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”

For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.

Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.

Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”

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A sense of community elusive for East Asia

June 19, 2008 10:51 PM

SHANGHAI: The ground is moving again in East Asia. Tectonic plates are not involved this time, but the rumblings are just as unmistakable, and potentially as significant.

The movement can be seen and felt in a series of steps taken here and there in the region. Each might seem modest, even tiny, for some, but assessing them that way would be to miss the bigger picture.

The first thing that must be said about East Asia is that for all of its economic achievements, it lags woefully behind much of the rest of the world in important ways.

While the Europeans have found a way to discard their suspicions and hatreds and forge a growing community, this region is stuck with problems that date from World War II and the Korean conflict.

To be blunt, there is no community. Each of the major countries - China, Japan and South Korea - clings to its own vision of the future, to its own self-serving version of history, and relates to the outside world as a sole actor, and almost never in terms of regional interests or priorities.

It is against that uninspiring backdrop that one must view the sort of news this week about Japan and China coming to terms over exploitation of disputed offshore gas fields located in the East China Sea.

One says sort of news because of the timid way this development has been presented. Japanese officials began hinting at an agreement early in the week, and sure enough by Wednesday, two senior officials could be seen in a press conference, smiling as they stood in front of a large map.

The problem was that the happy men were both Japanese ministers hailing the breakthrough. So far, no Chinese official has done so, and Beijing has gone out of its way to play down the agreement, even muddying the waters over its substance.

“I would like to reiterate that China’s consistent position and stance on the East China Sea issue have remained unchanged,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told the press in Beijing the same day. “Chunxiao Oil and Gas Field falls completely within China’s sovereignty rights, and has nothing to do with joint development.”

There has indeed been an agreement. What the divergent announcements amount to is the squeak of a very rusty wheel: the wheel of Chinese-Japanese cooperation.

Having played Japan as the boogeyman for so long, Beijing now looks almost ludicrously timid. This is for fear of appearing to have made any concessions, fear of a photo-op with Japan, and most of all, fear of its own public, especially what The China Youth Daily recently called the “Online Red Guards.”

These are the Internet-based nationalist rabble-rousers who rail at every imagined slight or perceived signal of Chinese weakness, one of whom promptly denounced the agreement as “the typical behavior of those who sell out the country,” and called for them to sent before a firing squad.

Beijing’s dilemma inspires little sympathy. The understanding with Japan, by contrast, should be saluted and encouraged. Taken together with the recent agreements between Beijing and Taipei over travel, the oil field diplomacy roughly amounts to the first few turns of a Rubik’s Cube in a region that will require many, many more turns in order to bring its diplomatic and geopolitical realities in line with its economic achievement.

All credit to Beijing for having found the political will and courage to come this far, and one hopes for much bigger steps ahead. Defusing relations with Taiwan and achieving a long overdue genuine normalization with Japan would each be rich in payoffs for Beijing and for the world.

Taiwan’s newly elected leader, Ma Ying-jeou, has helped make this clear, putting flesh on his vision of accelerated economic cooperation and political détente with Beijing in an interview this week with the International Herald Tribune.

It is hard to imagine anything doing more to validate China’s claim to becoming a new kind of power, a peace-minded nation, than cutting back on the forces arrayed against Taiwan in southern China, and committing to a political and economic engagement with its neighbor that acknowledges the importance of Taiwanese opinion.

In recent months, China’s leaders have taken real steps forward with Japan, with both Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao visiting, and agreeing to regular high level exchanges.

Bigger steps are still needed, though.

China has an opportunity to establish a relationship of real trust and confidence that would have far-reaching consequences. Close working ties would ease the natural insecurities of the Japanese and others in this region as China rises, and could eventually even bring dramatic adjustments in America’s hitherto central role in the region’s security.

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