• Updated March 31, 2013, 7:20 p.m. ET

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Color-drenched historical dramas involving endless struggles for power are a mainstay of Chinese television. Why should it be otherwise in a country with 5,000 years of history that has seen dynasties rise and fall in mind-numbing succession? Yet in the past year, a real-life political drama has presented a compelling alternative.

In a bold push for power, a provincial politician named Bo Xilai tried to use his family’s revolutionary pedigree, his charisma and his good looks to leapfrog onto the highest rung on China’s Communist Party ladder, the Politburo Standing Committee. He came close but was ultimately undone by a combination of missteps and bad luck. “A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel,” by the Chinese journalist Pin Ho and the writer and literary translator Wenguang Huang, is the most revealing work on the Bo episode to date. What emerges is an immensely complicated tale of behind-the-scenes power struggles as full of scandal, ambition and betrayal as anything that ancient history has to offer.

The Politburo Standing Committee was reshuffled last year as part of China’s once-a-decade leadership succession. In the lead-up, Mr. Bo had achieved a remarkably high profile for himself as governor of Chongqing, a center-west province, roughly the size of Austria, of 32 million people. Most everything he did there was exceptional for a high-level Chinese politician and thus unusually risky: He espoused his own brand of ideological politics, mixing statist populism with elements of nostalgic Maoism. He tirelessly drew attention to himself, building something approaching a local personality cult in his crackdown against organized crime. And he all but openly campaigned for the big promotion he craved, buttering up the likes of China’s former president and power broker Jiang Zemin and his successor and main factional rival, the outgoing party leader Hu Jintao.

The proximate cause of Mr. Bo’s downfall was a staple of historical dramas: the villainous wife. As the authors detail, the governor’s position swiftly and spectacularly unraveled after his spouse, the almost equally attractive, pedigreed and ambitious Gu Kailai, was connected to the murder by cyanide poisoning of one Neil Heywood, a British national. The revelation emerged after Mr. Bo’s theatrical and thuggishly overzealous handpicked police chief, Wang Lijun, sought asylum at the U.S. consulate in the city of Chengdu, spilling the beans on the Heywood murder.

A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel

By Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang
(PublicAffairs, 334 pages, $27.99)

Please click the link to read the entire article.

 

Paris has exhibited great difficulty in conveying a clear aim or speaking with one voice, saying contradictory things in rapid succession — promising that this will be a limited intervention quickly handed over to the Africans, while vowing to do whatever is required to stamp out terrorist movements in Mali and restore legitimate government.

To understand what is really going on in Mali and in the broader Sahel today, though, it is vital to think through decades of colonial and independent history in the region. And when one does, it becomes clear that, apart from the trendiness of al Qaeda, a relative newcomer as factors go, what is most striking is the remarkable continuity of this region’s crises.

One of my first big stories as a foreign correspondent came in 1983 when freelancing in West Africa for the Washington Post. I made a river crossing into Chad from Cameroon aboard a dugout piroguein order to cover a flare up in fighting between France and Libyan-backed insurgents there who threatened to topple the government of the day.

Less than 24 hours and a helicopter ride to the front later, I observed from a sandy trench as French jets pounded rebel positions in the desert. Their aim was to stop the insurgents’ advance toward the capital, much as it was in Mali last week.

The lifelong geopolitical dream of the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi took many guises, but his goal, at bottom, was always to opportunistically project power southward, across the Sahara and far and wide into the Sahel, a region that for these purposes extends from Sudan to Senegal.

Already in the early 1970s — long before anyone had heard of al Qaeda — Qaddafi had formed an Islamic legion of Sahelian recruits. Although the Libyan leader’s rule was essentially secular at home, he was an opportunist abroad, using Islam and his own peculiar brew of pan-Arabism as both intoxicant and glue for rebellions aimed at challenging the political order left in place by European colonialism. The Libyan leader’s bag of tricks involved annexation (Chad), merger (Sudan) and most grandiosely, pan-African union.

Please click here to read the full article.

 

I had only travelled two stops in the deep chill of Hong Kong’s immaculate metro from Central, the city’s main business district and financial centre, which was all suits and banks, and even higher-end shopping, populated by enough white faces that one could imagine Britain’s purchase on Hong Kong had never quite come to an end. By comparison, Tsim Sha Tsui was a world removed. The whites, mostly tourists, appeared like speckles in a crowd that was mainly yellow, but also—and this was new to my senses here—significantly brown and black. South Asians, who barely account for one percent of Hong Kong’s population, were all of a sudden conspicuous where they had barely been in evidence before. And Africans, all but invisible in Hong Kong’s business district, were out in abundance, and after their own particular fashion, they were doing business, too.

My destination, a massively hulking apartment block of heavily weathered concrete named Chungking Mansions, loomed ahead, but I got a sense of the neighbourhood’s flavour even before reaching the entrance. “Copywatch, copywatch? Handbag, sir? Massage?” came the voices as I crossed the street in a crowd during my final approach to the building.

At the entrance to the mansions, a low staircase that led to a darkened pavilion inside, my final obstacles were the milling touts from South Asia who blocked the doorway, trying to scare up customers for the Indian restaurants that are one of the building’s claims to fame.

I took a name card from one of them, but moved past. It was not food that had drawn me here. My first order of business was to find cheap lodging for a few days in Hong Kong, and it had been suggested to me that a hostel run by a Nigerian man named Joseph might fit the bill nicely. But a cheap room wasn’t the main draw to this building either. The very first inklings of what had really brought me here could instead be heard in the calls that rang out from every direction as I made my way through a crush of people down the narrow alleys of the ground floor, lined with endless stalls of merchandise, toward the rear of the airless cavern that functioned like a bazaar.

“SIM cards! International calling cards! Mobile phones, sir,” came the cries, almost all in accents of South Asia. It was this last item that had, in fact, drawn me. The Chungking Mansions, a sprawling and enormous single building, built in five adjoining blocks—and something of a slum at that, despite the grand name—was many things: a claptrap collection of cheap hostels, a collection of Indian restaurants known to be some of the best in Hong Kong, a hiding place for would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers, an emporium for bric-a-brac and odds and ends of every type, an exotic crossroads, platform and assignation spot for prostitutes from Africa or drugs from Kashmir or Nepal.

In a city that can sometimes feel sterile, all of this was surely enough to make this place more than a passing curiosity. But what made it truly interesting, dare one say important, was its place in the trade of the dominant consumer technology of our time: the cellphone.

That commerce had turned the Mansions into the magnet around which was built a human ecosystem like none I’ve ever seen or heard of, and drawn together in its churning slag people from three of the world’s main population centres: China, South Asia and Africa. For the building’s neighbours, merchants in diamonds and pearls and photo gear for rich tourists, Chungking Mansions was simply an eyesore, an abode for undesirables, a place they associated with crime. But the building’s secret—the reason it brought these races together like perhaps no place else on earth—was that it was supplying as many as one fifth of all of the cellphones sold in the booming markets of Africa.

Please click here to continue.

James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Scott Straus: Remaking Rwanda:State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

Filip Reyntjens: Ruling Under a Volcano: Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Yukio Mishima: The Decay of the Angel

Chinese Characters (Edited by Shah and Wasserstrom)

Olen Steinhauer: The Tourist

John Garnaut: The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo: How a Murder Exposed the Cracks in Chinese Leadership

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Another Day of Life,

Marie Ndiaye : Three Strong Women

Curt Kraus : The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

Charles Robertson: The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution

Richard Burger: Behind the Red Door: Sex in China

James McGregor : No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism,

V.S. Naipaul : The Enigma of Arrival

Andrew Nathan and Robert S. Ross: The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security

Chinua Achebe: There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Wole Soyinka: Of Africa

James N. Stewart : Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction

Errol Morris: Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

Noo Saro-Wiwa: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria

James Fallows : China Airborne

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Stephen Ellis : Season of Rains: Africa in the World,

Jean-Michel Severino, Olivier Ray : Africa’s Moment

Edward Thomas: The Kafia-Kingi Enclave: People, Politics and History in the North-South Boundary of Western Sudan

Douglas H. Johnson: When Boundaries Become Borders: The Impact of Boundary Making in Southern Sudan’s Frontier Zones

E.O. Wilson: The Social Conquest of Earth

Sebastian Barry : On Canaan’s Side

Michael Ondaatje : The Cat’s Table

Eric Newby : A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Artur Domoslawski: Ryszard Kapuscinski: a Life

Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People (re-read)

Gordon Mathews: The Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

Chan Koonchung: The Fat Years

MORE ON SUSAN RICE
	Susan Rice’s Controversial Record in Africa

Right now, Africa is changing with extraordinary speed and in surprising ways, but American policy there remains stale and stuck in the past: unambitious, underinvested and conceptually outdated.

This holds true at a time when the continent is growing demographically and urbanizing faster than any place before in history. Africa is booming economically as well, with an overall growth rate faster than Asia, and an emerging middle class larger than India’s.

China, the United States’ preeminent global rival, clearly gets this, and treats Africa not just as a place from which to extract mineral wealth — which of course it does — but also as a vital source of growth for the world economy going forward. China also views Africa as a geopolitical space of rapidly developing markets and huge business opportunities, including a nearly endless supply of new and underserved consumers.

China is not alone, either. Brazil, India, Turkey and Vietnam, to name just a few of the other fast-growing players, see Africa in much the same way, and are racing to establish a new, mature style of relations with the continent — one driven by promise, and not by the pity and strong paternalism that have characterized so much Western engagement for so long.

The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in an approach whose foundation dates to the Cold War, when we cherry-picked strongmen among Africa’s leaders, autocrats we could “work with,” according to the old diplomatic cliché.

These were men like Zaire’s late dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, whose anti-democratic politics, systematic human rights violations, and high tolerance for corruption we were willing to overlook so long as they stayed on our side in the great strategic struggles of the day. We counted on them to hold down the fort in their respective countries and regions, and in so doing, as the thinking went, to protect U.S. interests.

The binary jousting of the Cold War that seemed to justify this strategy is long gone, along with our old adversary, the Soviet Union. But the American approach to Africa remains strangely stuck in that mold even now, and this fact owes far more than the public recognizes to the diplomacy of Susan Rice.

When I first encountered Rice in Mali, during a visit there by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1996, she was a well-connected and high-achieving senior NSC staffer in her early thirties. She was possessed of a quick step and a look of complete self-confidence.

Most unusually for someone her age, she already had a career-defining crisis behind her, one in which she has played an important role: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

According to Samantha Power, Rice’s advice to the Clinton White House in the critical early phases of the killing there was to avoid any public recognition that actual genocide was being committed, because to do so would legally require the United States to take action, and this (echoes of Benghazi?) might affect upcoming congressional elections.

Former senior State Department officials who knew Rice in her next job, as assistant secretary for African affairs, give her great credit for not giving up on Africa. Stephen Morrison, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a policy planning official at the State Department during this period, told me that Rice’s predecessor, George Moose, had been told by higher-ups to “keep Africa off the screen, because it doesn’t matter.”

“Well, she took a different approach, and said it does matter, and we’re not doing enough in Africa,” Morrison said. “And she got the president to make two trips to the continent, and deserves some credit for that.”

An enormous part of why it mattered, however, was bound up in America’s failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda. And it is Rice’s takeaway from that tragedy, and from her role in it — arguably more visceral, personal and emotional than rational — that shaped her approach to the continent ever since.

Rice’s public response to the genocide was to issue a number of powerfully worded statements with the air of mea culpa about them. They have amounted to a paraphrasing and elaboration on the famous post-Holocaust oath of “Never again.”

Put to the hard test of African realities, however, this pledge quickly shrunk and withered into something far more narrow and selective. Indeed, it failed its first test, in Congo, right next door to Rwanda. Since Rice’s famous expressions of contrition began, more than five times as many people have died in a series of wars in Congo than were killed in the Rwandan genocide.

Most pertinent to this discussion, as the United Nations and reports by a variety of international human rights organizations have exhaustively documented, a great many of these people were killed in wars of targeted ethnic extermination, implicating the U.S.-supported post-genocide Rwandan armed forces and a number of surrogates, who have invaded the vastly larger and richer Congo repeatedly. Even in times of relative peace, they have sought to control large swaths of the country’s territory.

“[Rice] venerates the ‘new leaders,’ who over the years have come to be repressive autocrats and despots.”

What this leaves us with, in effect, is a policy stripped of any real moral force. Never again, in effect, has come to mean never let down Rwanda’s post-genocide regime and its leader, Paul Kagame.

On a broader level, the old paradigm of Cold War policy, with its momentous ideological competition, has been repurposed to work for something far more inchoate and hollow: the War on Terror. Accordingly, the United States has persisted in its embrace of leaders who align with Washington on that basis in places like Sudan and Somalia, mirroring the style of cherry-picking allies during the struggle against communism.

Susan Rice isn’t by any means the sole person responsible for this approach. She was, however, present at its creation, when the Clinton administration began to elevate a group of youngish autocrats who all came to power by the gun (and who have clung determinedly to personalized power ever since), as Africa’s new generation of so-called “renaissance leaders.” And although this phraseology has been dropped, ever since two of the countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea, fought a calamitous war with each other in the late 1990s, Rice has clung enthusiastically to most of these loyalties ever since.

“Susan venerates the ‘new leaders,’ who over the years have come to be repressive autocrats and despots who feel like they can manipulate the outside world to give them lots of space,” said Morrison of CSIS. “It has been an enduring attachment that hasn’t softened over time.”

Two recent episodes provide compelling evidence of this. As the United States’ representative to the United Nations, Rice worked hard last year to block the release of a U.N. experts report detailing Rwandan atrocities in the Congo, reportedly drawing pushback over this even within the State Department.

When blocking the report proved impossible, diplomats and human rights experts who were involved in this struggle say that she sought to have it sanitized. In the end, it was leaked, which amounted to an end-run around Rice and assured its publication.

“It ultimately comes down to why would the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. not want things that are true [about that part of the world] to be reported,” said Laura Seay, an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. “It is really not clear why it was worth it.”

In September, Rice paid fervent and emotional tribute at the funeral of the late Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi, praising him unreservedly as “uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game”.

Zenawi’s Ethiopia was a country where journalists and dissidents regularly disappeared and imprisoned.

Asked about Washington’s enduring fondness for the people it had once dubbed Africa’s renaissance figures, people like Meles Zenawi, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and Yoweri Musveni of Uganda, John Shattuck, a former Clinton Administration assistant secretary of state, who is now president of the Central European University in Budapest said: “These were authoritarian leaders from the beginning and over time they all became worse. I think Africa has become very poorly served by this kind of rule, and that’s very clear. This has been true for most of the past 20 years.”

Some have argued that steadfast American support for a circle of autocrats is justified by their reputation for strong public administration or fast economic growth, but this has always been a specious justification. If the United States says it favors countries with booming economies no matter how undemocratic or repressive their leaders are, then we have curiously embraced a position not unlike that of China, which has always said it is not its business how other countries conduct their internal affairs. Besides, there is simply no lack of fast-growing economies in Africa now.

There are two obvious ways for the United States to help Africa consolidate its recent gains and move forward into an era of greater prosperity and representative government. This, at the same time, would position Washington to advance its interests and preserve its influence and prestige on this continent in the decades ahead.

The first involves engaging much more strongly in the Congo crisis, helping one of the continent’s biggest countries to finally establish control over all of its territory and begin delivering services to its people for the first time in history.

The other requires treating African democracies as our real friends, matching our diplomacy for once with our rhetoric and values. What is less clear, given her record, is whether Susan Rice is the right person to accomplish this.

Please click to see the original.

Howard W. French

I was a new resident, though, and not just a visitor, so it did not take me long to exhaust Shanghai’s tour book highlights. Once I had done so, my wanderings led me steadily away, not just from the Shanghai of familiar landmarks, but from a certain way of seeing the city, indeed of seeing China. It was a way colored by a constant shock and awe over the huge scale and impressive numbers that attach to so many things in a country one easily associates with rapid and nearly across-the-board progress.

I came to call the Shanghai realm that I subsequently discovered and began photographing ‘‘disappearing,’’ not just because the tattered old neighborhoods that drew me in were vanishing before my eyes under the onslaught of wrecking balls and bulldozers. More interesting to me than the startling pace of physical change to the city was the fact that, along with it, a highly distinctive way of life was ending as the residents of these quarters were evicted and dispersed.

It was easy to dismiss the demolished neighborhoods, all of which were centrally located, as little more than eyesores and slums. The more I got to know these places, the more I came to feel, though, that to do so would be, at a minimum, an oversimplification, and arguably wrong.

As much as the more famous parts of Shanghai that were created by and for Europeans, they were the relics of a unique form of Chinese urbanization, one born of an early wave of East Asian industrialization that married Western capital with the labor of Shanghainese and of poor migrants who were drawn from nearby provinces by the novel lure of jobs in the modern cash economy.

The densely populated neighborhoods that housed those workers and their families became the stage of an extraordinarily intimate community lifestyle, where food was bought and sold in street markets, meals were cooked and often eaten in the open, and people lounged in chairs right in front of their doors and socialized freely. These were worlds where everyone knew their neighbors and often enough looked out for them.

Howard W. French

Although the comparison isn’t perfectly exact, while walking around and photographing in these places, I often imagined another great urban environment and melting pot: the stickball streets of prewar Brooklyn.

Long before neighborhoods like these were flattened to make way for an unending landscape of high-rise buildings, they had become all but invisible to Shanghainese who didn’t reside in them, despite their central location. There was no room for them in the image that China’s spiffiest city sought to promote for itself.

As a result, when these photographs first began to be shown in China they tended to receive two kinds of responses: ‘‘How did you get so close to these people?’’ some would ask, including many Chinese photographers. Another question, even more revealing to me, came from people who proclaimed themselves genuine Shanghai natives who wondered, sometimes challenging me, whether these photographs were really taken in their city or, alternately, whether the people in them were ‘‘real’’ Shanghainese.

This world, where everything was lived up close, was as real as could be while it lasted. My aim was to leave some record of it before it was gone.

For the entire piece and photo gallery, please click here.

Photographs Copyright Howard W. French

“It’s not often a writer learns to make photographs. Howard has, big time. These rooms glow with light. The intimacy of stepping into a bedroom; a child reads on the bed, a father, with his laptop, a room of mahjong players, grandpa crashed on a chair, the TV always on. These are tiny spaces, intensely alive in black and white, the future of towering apartments looming outside, the market in the street, the Brooklyn burst of pigeons, crossing the old Shanghai neighborhood, the beds and people on them filling half the room. All doomed to live forever in these gentle loving docs.”

- Danny Lyon, Photographer, author of Memories of Myself, and Deep Sea Diver: An American Photographer’s Journey in Shanxi, China.

“Looking at Howard French’s Shanghai, one thinks of Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott, photographers who captured Paris and New York on the cusp of great change. This is ambitious work, with compositions that are balanced and tight, with beautiful light, devoid of hard shadows, that renders the old Shanghai in vibrant detail. We should thank the photographer for realizing that no number of articles written about these communities could ever bring us this close to the lives he has immortalized on film.”

- Ken Light, Photographer, author of Valley of Shadows and Dreams and Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers.

In the Shadow of the Banyan

By Vaddey Ratner
(Simon & Schuster, 322 pages, $25)Soon after, he is led away along with others who are presumably marked for elimination. This grim turn of events sounds one of the book’s most endearing themes: Raami, who has been afflicted since infancy with polio, is stricken with a profound and abiding guilt over having revealed her father’s true name to the soldiers. She will spend the rest of the story grieving over his loss, recalling his words and their love, and searching for him in glimpses of strangers. She begins to seek refuge in tales and legends drawn from Buddhist tradition, which inspire in her a kind of rapture.

Please follow this link for the full piece.

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Looking at the world today it is easy to be awed by the pace and scale of global change. From America’s recent, brief moment of unipolar pre-eminence, we have suddenly stepped into a new and uncertain age, with big, fast-growing new actors, China and India chief among them, rising to claim a place on the world stage. Meanwhile, as the global furniture is rearranged, many regard whole regions, even all of Africa, as coming into play. And yet the change, for all its dramatic implications, has been remarkably mild in execution. For a sense of historical perspective on how convulsive things might have been, it helps to cast an eye back a little more than a century, when a different clutch of powers was rising to challenge the global order, with results that were far more sweeping and traumatic.



At the turn of the last century, with the European “Scramble for Africa,” as it was known, only recently completed, three assertive new major powers were fast emerging: Germany, Japan and the United States. Most of the world had already been claimed by more established actors. But decrepit, late Qing Dynasty China, with its hundreds of millions of people, centuries of accumulated wealth and vast territory, loomed as the final big prize on the imperial frontier. The New York Times at the time called China “the greatest potential market of the world,” and circling foreign powers, old and new, were drawn by its weakness and misrule.

Such is the stage of David J. Silbey’s thoughtful and concisely told “The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China.” The war that gives the book its title was the last of the West’s repeated armed confrontations with the Qing, but compared with other Chinese conflicts of the era, notably the midcentury, overlapping Taiping Rebellion and Second Opium War, it was a far smaller affair, both in duration and scale, essentially lasting through the long summer of 1900.



Mr. Silbey places the war in a tradition that he says was long familiar to the British but brand-new to the Americans, one where empire is created “on the scene, and to the surprise of the mother county,” by free-lancing representatives of faraway Western capitals. In the case of the Boxer Rebellion, this meant a conflict that pitted the assembled forces of the world’s major powers against China. The unforeseen result, soon after the defeat of the Qing, was the end of thousands of years of dynastic rule and arguably the beginning of the end of the imperial age itself.



The Boxer Rebellion—its name derives from the uprising’s practitioners of martial arts—had its roots in China’s 19th-century demographic explosion, as well as crop failures and drought, which served as a catalyst for one of the era’s many Chinese peasant uprisings. What was different this time was the target. The Boxers, who arose in Shandong Province, were not mobilized against the Qing state but rather against the large Western presence in the country, especially that of Christian missionaries, who were attacked by the rebels in the summer and fall of 1899.

According to Mr. Silbey, a historian a Cornell University’s Washington, D.C., campus, the Boxers’ problem was not with the Westerners’ religion per se. The rebels were incensed because, in the vacuum left behind by a failing Qing administration, the foreign church-based organizations were becoming local administrators. As such they were direct competition for the Chinese secret societies, like the Boxers, that were also moving to fill the void.

The Boxers were leaderless, largely illiterate peasant militants whose alliance in loose, improvised networks made them hard to stop. The movement quickly gained momentum in 1900, when spring rains failed to arrive: Unable to plant their crops, peasants were idled, frustrated and receptive to the Boxers’ recruiting efforts. In May, rallying under the slogan “Support the Qing. Exterminate the Foreigners,” the Boxers descended on Beijing and laid siege to the foreign quarter. Forced to choose sides, the Empress Dowager Cixi ordered foreign legations to quit the capital. (please follow the link below to continue reading)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577285872628265712.html?KEYWORDS=Boxer+Rebellion

Will US-China relations improve under Xi Jinping’s leadership? Or are they likely to deteriorate under the 5th generation of party leaders?

(Several experts weigh in on these questions. Here’s my take. The full article can be accessed via the link below.)

Howard French, Columbia University

There are simply too many variables and unknowns to confidently predict the direction of U.S.-China relations under Xi Jinping and the so-called Fifth Generation of leaders.

What stands out for me at this moment, nonetheless, are a number of signs that point more toward turbulence than to smooth sailing.

What are these signs? To begin with, leadership politics in China seem to be entering a major new phase with the prospect of increasingly open and contentious jousting between individuals and factions. There is every prospect of this extending beyond merely patronage, position and favors and extending into the realm of real contests over policy and direction. This will happen in the absence of a strong elder statesman figure to mediate and adjudicate matters.

The relevance for bilateral relations is indirect, but potentially important. A situation of such fluidity and turbulence could encourage leaders to play the nationalist card to shore up their credentials and popular appeal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a new leadership under almost any circumstances staking its reputation and prestige on accommodation of the U.S.

This leads to a second and related consideration. There is a lot of tension inherent to a dynamic that involves the relative rise of a rising power at the expense, both real and perceived of the established superpower. This is an unavoidably awkward and potentially dangerous situation, with one side reluctant to concede and the other sometimes over-eager to assert its new prerogatives. In both countries, public opinion plays an important and sometimes capricious role, reducing the room for maneuver of leaders or pushing them toward bad decisions.

Having said all of this, ten years, which is the nominal term of the incoming Chinese leadership, is a very long time, during which much can happen, including not just unpleasant outcomes. Under the right circumstances, a successful beginning to the new leadership’s mandate could make it a much more confident and relaxed working partner over the longer term.

http://beta-site.themorningsidepost.com/2012/02/22/whither-u-s-china-relations/

This, meanwhile, is a good, basic journalistic introduction:

“Wang Fuchuan lies in bed wearing a quilted black jacket, with two comforters pulled up to his chin to keep out the chilly November air. The heating at Beijing Songtang Caring Hospice is broken and the 90-year-old’s nostrils are stuffed with toilet paper to stop them dripping.

Cockroaches scurry across the floor of his room, which has no running water or toilet. His possessions, a few articles of clothing, are in a plastic bag under his bed next to a pink wash bowl with a sliver of soap. His only entertainment is a transistor radio.

Wang counts himself lucky. While he has no family or savings, he fought against the Japanese and Kuomintang in the 1940s, so the government pays the clinic’s monthly fee of 2,000 yuan ($318). His 200-yuan pension buys food.

“A lot of people my age can’t afford to be here,” Wang says. “The food isn’t too good, but I have nothing else to complain about.”

Wang is in the vanguard of a looming demographic shift for China, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Jan. 9 issue. The latest government census shows 178 million Chinese were over 60 in 2009. That figure could reach 437 million — one third of the population — by 2050, the United Nations forecasts. While the elderly were looked after in the past by their children, urbanization and the nation’s one-child policy have eroded the tradition of family care.

“It’s a demographic tsunami,” says Joseph J. Christian, a fellow at the Asia Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and former DLA Piper partner in Hong Kong, who specializes in senior housing issues in China. “The whole multi­generational housing model has disappeared.

” …

Please follow the link to continue: China’s Demographic Decline Begins

Great books written by foreigners about Africa are truly uncommon. The last, by my reckoning, was 2010′s The Teeth May Smile, but the Heart Does Not Forget, by Andrew Rice, which was an exceptionally fine exploration of Ugandan history and of the limits of reconciliation. One need not be fixated on Africa to enjoy and indeed to profit from the reading of Rice’s book. (links to all of the books named here appear below)

Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters takes place on a much vaster tableau than this, but the two authors nonetheless share an unfortunately altogether too rare quality among outsiders who write about Africa. Both of their work is built on a foundation of authenticity that can only come from listening to Africans, not as a matter of technique, or much less to check off a box on a to-do list, but rather because they are genuinely interested in knowing what Africans have to say about their own lives and experiences.

Every word of this is the truth, but even here I may not have given sufficient credit. African lives are not a story in their narratives, they are the story.

For Stearns, writing about the Congo in the wake of some of the most horrific violence and destruction the world has seen in recent decades, this commitment can be measured in the thousands of miles he must have traveled across a country as large as Western Europe, reaching towns and villages in seemingly every region.

I covered the first of the Congo’s wars, which brought the fall of Mobutu, and I know firsthand what a poor job WE in the Western media did, getting to the bottom of the story, really covering the action on the ground, understanding the local strategic and geopolitical implications of what was going on. I say we readily if not happily, because I must share some of the blame for this failure myself.

Part of this is down to the sheer size of the country, its lack of roads and other infrastructure, the danger involved, especially at the time, but even taken together, these explanations are not sufficient. The remaining piece of the failure was lamentably due to a lack of sufficient commitment to the story itself by news organizations and by the reporters ourselves. In this business, unfortunately, people measure the risks they are they willing to take in relation to the rewards: how important are the historical stakes, how big is the story, how great are the rewards?

If anything, the second war, and its aftermath in Congo, have been covered far worse, which is to say more lackadaisically and with less regard for big questions, for facts, and especially for history. In cynical moments I am reminded of the way a seemingly never-ending war in Lebanon was once covered, decades ago, as artillery barrages between rival factions, and other outrages, went from front page news to tiny briefs buried on the inside pages.

Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters shows the deepest regard for history, and not just in the necessary but too often neglected where Africa is concerned reading-up-on-books sense, although there is evidence of plenty of that. This regard shines through in the persistent way he has talked to the players he can find at every level, in finding where the bodies are buries, quite often literally, in taking the time to hear people’s stories of incredible suffering and survival, and finally, in weaving it all together in an accessible, compelling and lasting piece of writing. Bravo Jason.

With his bouffant hair and elevator shoes, a fear of airplanes, an obsession with Hollywood movies, and an indulgent fondness for Scotch and caviar and other delicacies even amid famine, Kim was colorful and eccentric, and one might even argue evil. The one thing that he wasn’t, though, was crazy.

The focus on Kim’s foibles and on his reputed unpredictability always hampered understanding of the man and of the real nature of the regime. From beginning to end during 17 years of rule, he was capable of minutely sliced and, it must be stressed, rational calculations about how to stay in power and how to keep the world at bay.

The word rational will irk many, who find the images of craziness easier to swallow, given the immense suffering the Kim regime has visited on its people. Normally, most of us would like to believe that reason serves good ends and nudges people and nations toward relatively better outcomes. But that is a matter of our delusion, and not Kim’s.

To understand another person, it is usually helpful to try to put oneself in his or her place, and with countries I can think of few examples where this exercise is more useful than on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong Il inherited power on his father’s death in 1994, an era when the bloom had come suddenly off of the rose for North Korea.

It is hard to imagine this today, given the astonishing prosperity of South Korea, but during much of his father’s rule, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was more prosperous than its neighbor to the south. Even during the early years of relative decline, the economy remained fairly robust, thanks to the balancing act that Kim Il Sung, the regime’s founding father, played with his two big, mutually suspicious allies, China and the Soviet Union. It was on this foundation of success that the regime built much of its legitimacy.

By the time Kim Il Sung took power in 1994, though, the Soviet Union, along with its financial subsidies and spare industrial parts, was but a memory. The younger Kim was underestimated right from the start, but he keenly understood how weak his hand was and quickly learned how to play it to maximum advantage.

The shtick of apparent madness flowed from his country’s fundamental weakness as he, like a master poker player, resolved to bluff and bluff big. Kim adopted a game of brinkmanship with the South, threatening repeatedly to turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.” And while this may have sharply raised the threat of war, for the North, it steadily won concessions: fuel oil deliveries, food aid, nuclear reactor construction, hard cash-earning tourist enclaves and investment zones.

As a bureau chief for the New York Times in northeast Asia in the 1990s and 200′s, reporting from Japan, the Koreas, and later China, I had a front row seat for much of this. Up close, I covered the Nobel laureate and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s moneybags approach to the North, which he labeled Sunshine Diplomacy. It won the South’s Kim a summit meeting with his counterpart, which the “crazy” Kim hosted and managed to totally dominate. At the level of appearances, which was all-important for the internal propaganda purposes of a “hermit regime,” he reduced Kim Dae Jung to a mere supplicant.

I flew to Pyongyang with Japan’s most successful and assertive prime minister in a generation, Junichiro Koizumi, as he sought to confront Kim over Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped over the years and effectively held hostage by North Korea. Once again, Kim extracted maximum benefit, while conceding little.

In 2002, I took passage on a ship to the North Korean city of Kumho to witness work on a United States-backed $4.6 billion nuclear reactor that was being built as part of an elaborate diplomatic scheme to get the country to close down its two decrepit but proliferation-prone graphite-style reactors. American officials did not have an easy time explaining why the arrangement shouldn’t be considered appeasement, but the fact was that North Korea’s hardline approach to playing its very weak hand, otherwise known as brinkmanship, had won it these big concessions.

From China I watched as even Beijing, North Korea’s sole putative ally, grew frustrated as it tried to nudge its small, destitute neighbor toward less provocative behavior. Even though his country had no other powerful friends in the world, Kim managed to maneuver Beijing into the classic patron-client conundrum, where the former concludes that it mustn’t push too hard lest it risk losing its influence with the latter. In situations of such embarrassing impotence, the real question is whether the patron — in this case, China — actually has much influence at all.

Where does all this lead? Don’t believe anyone who says they have insights into who the new leader, Kim Jung Un, the baby son now dubbed “the great successor” really is or how he will rule. What we do know is that the country’s hand, in rational terms, is steadily weaker, making big concessions less, not more likely.

Imagine what the world looks like from the leadership compounds in Pyongyang. Embracing China means the risk of being smothered. Reconciliation or rapprochement with South Korea means admitting inferiority and the loss of legitimacy. Détente and disarmament in negotiation with the United States means becoming another Libya.

The country may sometimes look crazy to us, but count on its leaders doing everything they can to stay in power.

Against All Odds: How ‘Crazy’ Kim Jong Il Outfoxed the World

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve come to realize, though, that if I don’t get this out more quickly, I’ll be the last person in the world to recommend this novel. In recent weeks, I’ve seen it touted in year’s-best lists just about everywhere, NPR, The New Yorker, The new York Times, Atlantic, and on, and on.

But anticlimactic as this might be in one sense, I feel good for having discovered this novel early in its publishing run, before many reviews had appeared at all. Indeed, I remember my puzzlement as I plugged it to friends and relatives while some of those early critics seemed not to know what to make of this highly original, deeply wonderful voice.

In retrospect, there’s little wonder. Teju Cole doesn’t fit easily into in the crude and reductionist landscape of American notions of race. Here is a man who is black, and yet European, African and yet American, luxuriantly at ease in the street, but as a purest sort of flaneur, and as someone unwilling to comply with anyone else’s projected notions of what, or who he should be.

We’re not used to this kind of stuff, and for some readers the effect is apparently confusing. What to make of a black man whose curiosity and learning are near universal, who loves classical music, and poetry, and visiting museums and is comfortably at home in the realm of ideas? For some of the early critics, Cole was pretentious. As I understood it, that meant that he was a kind of trespasser; someone who had no business straying from the themes we are accustomed to assigning to or expecting from black authors.

Open City is not a big novel, but it is a grand one, and that is down to the freedom of its author, and of its main character, Julius, to explore identity and beyond the question-asking, to assert identity as a genuine individual. In this, he is an equal opportunity defender of a hard-won independence. Witness, for example, the scene when an African taxi driver in New York City reproaches him for not engaging in a breezy “brotherly” banter when he enters his cab in a rain storm. “He said I’m African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused. I said, I’m so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don’t be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing, and faced the road. I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.” In some ways, this scene is characteristic of the entire book, which is built around encounters that bring Julius up short, or cause him to reevaluate things; to question himself and most certainly to question others.

Cole’s Julius  calls himself “one  of those people, the overinterpreters,” and this is an apt description for his way of being, for his M.O.

Alone, Julius goes to the movies and settles into his seat in the darkened cave. “The jaunty credit sequence featured music from the right time, but not from the right part of Africa: what had Mali to do with Kenya? But I had come prepared to like some things about the film, and I expected some other things would annoy me. Another film I had watched the previous year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, had left me feeling frustrated, not because of its plot, which was plausible, but because of the film’s fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa. Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities.”

It wouldn’t do to lay out a synopsis here, or even to give a clearer sense of the story. There is an important back story about a failed relationship, and there are many other meditations on loss. Give the book a chance, and you’ll be grateful to Cole for sharing his deeply layered world with you. One wishes to say a word about the writing itself, though, which is one of the book’s great pleasures.

Listen here, as Cole renders Manhattan:

“This strangest of islands, I though, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey shore across.”

Or this.

“I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on those rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so… But on this occasion, I stopped and looked into the brightly lit interior which, with all its mirrors and tufted seats upholstered in vinyl, reminded me of an empty barbershop. An elderly black man I hadn’t noticed stood up, waved, and said, Come in, come in, I’ll shine them very well for you. I shook my head quickly, and raised a hand to decline but, not wanting to disappoint him, gave in. I stepped inside and got up on the little stepping stool, and sat in one of the buffoonish red thrones, toward the back of the shop. The air was laced with lemon oil and turpentine. His hair was curly and white, as were his sideburns, and he wore a dirty aprom, striped blue and white. It wasn’t easy to guess his age; he was no longer young, but he was sprightly. A bootblack, not a shoeshiner: the older term seemed right for him. He said, You just relax, I’ll make this black as black as night for you. And, with that peculiar sense of metamorphosis one experiences on waking up from an afternoon nap to find that the sun has set, I heard for the first time the faint trace of a Caribbean French accent in his clear, quiet baritone. My name is Pierre, he said…”

There are many, many such vivid and textured flourishes throughout the novel, which from start to finish this reader found acutely observed, refreshingly thoughtful and richly rewarding.

My other picks so far:

Li’s extraordinary book (published late in 2010) is a collection of dense yet luminous stories of women’s lives, alternately lived in claustrophobic or numbingly pragmatic ways in response to the brutal and alarming changes that China has undergone from late in the Cultural Revolution until the recent past.

The subtext throughout is about the coping mechanisms that these people adopt to manage their inner lives and shield themselves from despair, as they settle for far less n life than they once might have dreamed. Most of the stories pack intense emotional power, and yet the language is restrained and delicate and tightly controlled throughout.

Li’s unforgettable characters include a young female inductee into the People’s Liberation Army, whose childhood with unusually remote parents has forged its own distance from others in her. The results are seen through poignant, arms-length ties with her much older childhood tutor, and with a young female officer who eagerly seeks to befriend her.

In another story, a couple of emigrants to the U.S. have lost their child and return to China  to ”replace” her. This results in search in one of China’s innumerable half-developed inland towns for a surrogate mother, who they find, with striking results in terms of the dynamics between husband and wife, and wife and birth mother.

These stories resonated with all the more emotional truth for me because I read them during a year of extensive travel in Africa, where I met with scores of uprooted Chinese who have been driven by a very similar pragmatism as they have traveled far from home in middle age in search of more livable lives; in search of relief from the untold, disorienting stresses of the booming China of newspaper headlines.

Many of them were uncomplaining survivors of the Cultural Revolution, each in possession of an extraordinary oral history, and yet often surprised in our encounters that their lives could be of interest to a stranger at all.

A Review from The Guardian: http://bit.ly/auSyTW

Yiyun Li interview, NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130538242

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=34504

My other picks so far:

One doesn’t come across books that exhibit such extraordinary learning very often, and yet Mann, in the 535 pages he takes to tell his story, wears his deep erudition with uncommon grace. That’s because he is an unusually good storyteller, and as with all the books on this list, a fine writer.

At the simplest level, this is a book about the virtual recreation of Pangaea, a reference to the supercontinent that existed before the Americas split from the African landmass.

Christopher Columbus, through his trans-Atlantic voyages, is of course the agent who initiates the great reconnection of the continents. And we are all superficially familiar with the ecological consequences that flowed from this, i.e. the introduction of unfamiliar plants, animals and diseases from one locale to another, as well as the mass movement of peoples.

Mann takes his research so far beyond the superficial that he will have you reconsidering your understanding of globalization, along with whole chapters of history and of how regions of the world have related to each other over the last 500 years. Almost literally, nowhere is left untouched, from Ming Empire China, Tibet and Japan, to the Central Asian Khanates, to kingdoms like Songhai, Kongo and Mutapa in Africa, to the Native peoples of both North and South America.

One could give highlights with a book like this, but the problem would be where to begin and to end. The influence of malaria on the drawing of the Mason Dixon Line? The intricacies of African-Native American relations in the ‘New World’? A The possible Chinese origins of the game of golf? The history of global commodity crazes – first tobacco, then silk, then ceramics? The birth of the world’s first polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises, Mexico City (where Chinese immigrants drove down the cost of haircuts, pushing Spanish barbers out of business)? The role of sweet potatoes and corn in dynastic collapse in China?

Whether through direct argumentation or implicitly, historians have long held that the triumph of Europeans and of their civilization was due to their inherent superiority vis a vis Asians, Africans, and Americans. Mann’s ideas, which build on the theories of Alfred Crosby, hold that Europe triumphed largely out of a kind of ecological imperialism; in other words through advantages gained through the swapping and transplantation of organisms from one part of the world to another.

One would do better to listen to author’s fascinating interview on Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, which is what led me to the book.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/138924127/in-1493-columbus-shaped-a-world-to-be

The New York Times review: http://nyti.ms/pLsitm 

My previous recommendations are:

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, by Daniel J. Sharfstein

and The Origins of AIDS, by Jacques Pepin

Some reviews:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/02/20/tracing_lives_of_three_white_families_and_their_black_forebears/?page=full

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F02%2F25%2FRVVS1HFMPD.DTL

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/escape-whiteness/?pagination=false