The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
Deborah Brautigam
Oxford University Press
Dh112

For the better part of a decade, China’s profile has risen with extraordinary speed in Africa, with its trade, investment and aid primed to transform the world’s poorest continent on a scale that some say is unrivalled since most African nations declared their independence in the early 1960s. Chinese companies have left few corners of the continent untouched, breaking ground on dams and highways, railways and ports, hospitals and universities, new stadiums and airports.

This is not altruism at work. The Chinese are drawn to Africa for the same reason that powerful foreigners have come since the start of the European slave trade in the early 16th century: resource extraction. Alongside their big infrastructure projects in countries like Nigeria, Angola, Gabon and Congo, Chinese have muscled their way into lucrative markets for oil, iron ore, copper and cobalt, and many other commodities.

China’s successes have produced one of the most unbecoming spectacles in the recent history of international relations: cascading howls of moral outrage in the West over Beijing’s “economic conquest” of Africa. The bill of particulars in this indictment is long, but the common thread is a sense of western superiority about China’s record on issues ranging from democracy and human rights to the environment, transparency and corruption.

The West’s tone of high dudgeon leaves little room for irony – yet if ever there was a situation filled with irony, the West’s new-found scruples toward Africa would seem to fit the bill.

China, for its part, has responded to western indignation mostly with its own clumsy propaganda. But in Africa, at least, the Chinese don’t have to work hard to outshine the West – for reasons that Europeans and Americans now seem eager to forget.

To begin with, the scars inflicted by the West in Africa are legion. Not only do they still loom in living memory, many of them remain open and unhealed. When Guinea’s first leader, Sékou Touré, opted for independence from Paris in 1958, for example, France immediately cut off financial aid, withdrew its technicians from the country and carted away whatever it could to cripple the new African government. This included administrative records, telephones, typewriters, air-conditioners and, it is said, even copper wiring.

For a long time after this humiliation, Guinea mouldered in isolation and autarky and it has never really recovered from this false start as a nation. France may have granted the rest of its African colonies independence two years later, but it held them in a smothering paternalistic embrace that would gradually turn extraordinarily corrupt.

The point here is not to pick on France. The West’s record of awfulness in Africa is generalised. At the same time Paris was kicking the Guineans, Belgium was proclaiming its ambition to indefinitely hold onto Congo, a mineral-rich colony larger than all of Western Europe. In 1960, when the Congolese demanded and won independence, they inherited a country with only three African managers in its entire civil service. The new country began life with no military officers, a mere 30 university graduates and a single lawyer.

As if that were not challenge enough, from the start, Belgium conspired with the United States to undermine and quickly overthrow and assassinate Congo’s first leader, the democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, replacing him Mobutu Sese Seko, a dictator who ran a regime of ruinous corruption for three decades.

One could go on and on in this vein, up to the present day, like the blind eye turned to some of the worst despotism in the world today in Equatorial Guinea, because of a similar thirst for its petroleum. Suffice to say that in most places, the Western record is appalling.

There are, however, more immediate reasons why the Chinese need no fancy public relations. The implicit signal they are sending to the continent is one of the most refreshing messages that Africans have received from any quarter in decades.

For China, Africa does not conjure the gut responses that have become common in the West of a dreary burden or a guilty memory. On the contrary, Chinese interest, from eager investment to booming trade, fairly exclaims “we see you not as some hopeless or repugnant cesspool, but as a huge and largely open frontier of opportunity.”

For China’s cash-rich and nimbly opportunistic corporate sector, in particular, what Africa represents can be summed up quite neatly: the future.

Deborah Brautigam, the author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, understands all of this far better than most who have written on this subject. Her richly detailed book has many technical merits, but its greatest strength may in fact be her understanding of this psychological dynamic.

There is a central African proverb that says: “The hand that gives is the hand that commands.” China has come to pay cash on the barrel, eschewing most of the belittling rituals and hollow generosity of the aid game. Brautigam mounts a stout defence of this kind of growing engagement with Africa; so stout and systematic, in fact, that one can imagine many of its arguments being made by Chinese themselves.

But one would be wrong to hastily dismiss the author for what some will perceive as Chinese sympathies in this matter. The universe of third-party experts who are deeply familiar with both China and Africa is vanishingly small, and Brautigam is easily one of the best qualified members of this select tribe. Her observations about China and the continent come hard-earned. Some of the book’s best material draws on her experiences early in her academic career as a young researcher travelling in places like rural Sierra Leone in the early 1980s.

Her involvement with China coincidentally dates to the same period, when she travelled there as one of the first generation of foreign students after the country opened up to the outside world following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

One of the main achievements of The Dragon’s Gift is shattering the many myths and misperceptions that have fuelled the almost-Victorian western depiction of a weak and defenceless Africa, seduced and ravaged by the Chinese interloper. And in this, the media, which are careless with their facts and quick to accentuate the negative, emerge as an ever-ready foil.

For starters, the Chinese haven’t just arrived in Africa. Beijing has been conscious of the continent as an important source of both political support and natural resources since it began mounting assistance projects there in the 1960s. Though much poorer then, China was already taking a long view of its prospects in Africa, forging relationships that have endured through investments large and small.

China makes no pretence that its aid to Africa is selfless or altruistic, and for Brautigam, this is exactly how things ought to be – especially for a country that still has hundreds of millions of its own poor. According to Brautigam, the roots of China’s African strategy lay in the country’s experience with Japan during the early years of China’s opening and reform era in the 1980s, when Japan allowed a capital-poor China to finance its imports of badly needed modern industrial equipment with oil and other natural resources, rather than cash.

Emulating Japan, China has gone on to broadly apply this pattern in Africa, where in countries like Angola and Congo it has engineered huge and controversial resource for infrastructure deals.

Brautigam handily disproves, however, the commonplace assertion that China concentrates its energies disproportionately on the continent’s mineral storehouses, with findings that show Chinese aid and investment are present nearly everywhere in Africa. What is even more interesting is the way that she illustrates how tightly the two are bound together.

A central motif in the recent Western panic over China’s supposed takeover of Africa is the booming Chinese aid to the continent. By 2006, when China organised a grand summit, hosting leaders from all over the continent, it announced it would commit $20 billion over three years to support Chinese exports and business in Africa. By comparison, the World Bank’s commitments over the same period amounted to $17 billion. Headline writers everywhere rushed to the conclusion that China was outstripping the West as a source of aid.

Exhibiting a care for detail rare to this topic, Brautigam explains that the bulk of China’s development assistance in Africa has not taken the form of foreign aid: most often it is lending from the country’s Export-Import Bank and other official entities, for which Beijing expects a profitable return, even if a slim one.

China’s true aid, which is still relatively modest, is typically given as part of a package not just to obtain minerals, as the stereotype would have it, but to leverage open African economies to Chinese exports, to Chinese industry, and even, increasingly, to Chinese migration.

The shrillest notes of the alarmists – that China is pillaging the continent and undermining good government by showering no-strings packages on resource-rich countries while propping up their pariah regimes – merit much of the scorn the author accords them. It is equally clear there is upside potential to China’s massive push. Africa, for one, is desperately in need of infrastructure, and China is suddenly building more of it than anyone else. What is more, China is helping to integrate the continent into the global economy with a vigour that surpasses anything that Western-driven aid or extractive enclave industries like oil have managed to do before.

There remain, nonetheless, many reasons for concern. Resource-based investments that go straight through the president’s office in undemocratic countries rarely turn out well, and China has had nothing to say about democracy, and too little about transparency and accountability.

Where Brautigam sees a strong potential upside in a kind of trickle down industrialisation, through which China casts off undesired factories to Africa, because they are too polluting or not hi-tech enough, others warn of the makings of new environmental disasters and industrial dead-ends.

Where some may applaud the access to new capital from China, others worry reasonably that Beijing’s export financing amounts to a seductive new mercantilism that will dump cheap manufactures into African markets, dooming indigenous industry.

To its great credit, The Dragon’s Gift takes a well-informed look at much of this scepticism before the author delivers, time and again, her reassuring best guess that the Chinese impact will be, as the book’s name implies, a net positive.

Brautigam is at her best by far, though, with Chinese sources, Chinese explanations, and in the end, Chinese rationales, and it strikes this reader as odd that someone so acutely aware of the skewed presentations of the Western press could have come up substantially short on considered African voices and analysis.

The world is already long accustomed to the West knowing what’s best for Africa. Here, we are told why China’s approach is good for the continent. One still awaits, indeed yearns for a critical missing piece of this picture: how Africans see themselves fitting into our shifting global puzzle.

Howard W French, who covered both Africa and China for the New York Times, is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.

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For fans of Casablanca, Google’s encounter with the Chinese government may be reminiscent of Police Captain Renault, who claimed to be ‘shocked, shocked!’ that gambling was going on inside Rick’s casino.

Although recent events might tempt many to tell Google ‘I told you so,’ the company has still garnered sympathy around the world for standing up to Beijing. And anyone who cherishes the wealth of information generated by unfettered Google searches and hates the idea that secret police might have access to the keys to their e-mail boxes should indeed wish Google luck.

Yet, regardless of the outcome of this contest between a politically vengeful autocratic government and a technologically savvy US firm, the Google episode will likely remain a crucial moment in China’s relations with the West in general, and with Western companies doing business in China in particular.

This is not to suggest that Google’s defiance will force a crack in the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ Indeed, in the short term, the effects of Google’s confrontational tactic will be negative as the Chinese government will almost certainly impose tighter restrictions on the flow of information; Beijing understands clearly the risks of allowing Google to set a precedent by encouraging others to challenge its political control.

Sadly, despite Google’s stand, it has received practically no solidarity from Western companies, most of whom are either afraid of retaliation by Beijing or convinced that Google has made a horrible mistake by giving Beijing no ‘face’ – a Chinese expression for the public humiliation of the government. This disappointing response from the West’s corporate community suggests that it has not fully understood China, especially the political calculations behind its policy toward Western companies.

Among Western business leaders, China stands out as a shining example of what developing countries should do when it comes to foreign direct investment (FDI). Since 1979, China’s pro-FDI policies, including tax concessions, low environmental and labour standards, and speedy approval times, have turned it into a magnet for FDI. And both China and Western investors have benefited greatly from the arrangement, with the love-fest between Beijing and foreign businesses reaching such intensity that many Western corporate leaders have often cited China’s low tax, easy rules approach an example of how their own countries should conduct business. And in the process they have become effective advocates for Beijing, downplaying human rights issues. For them, the business of China is strictly business.

The truth, of course, is completely different.

For Beijing, business is not about business -- it is about politics. This is clear from the way Beijing treats both domestic and foreign businesses. China initially welcomed foreign investment because the ruling Chinese Communist Party desperately needed capital, technology and management expertise to revive China’s moribund economy in the wake of the disastrous Cultural Revolution. In their political calculations, private Western capital was preferable to private domestic capital because a strong indigenous business community might have the potential to support social and political forces that would challenge the rule of the party. As a result, Beijing has treated foreign capital much more generously than the domestic private sector. Many important sectors, such as banking, financial services, petrochemicals, energy exploration and automobile production were opened to foreign investors but not to domestic private firms.

While favouring foreign capital over private domestic capital, Beijing has also maintained its bottom-line: it will not allow foreign firms to control and establish a significant presence in what it considers strategic sectors, such as telecom services, banking (foreigners are passive minority investors at best) and energy. Above all, no private capital -- foreign or otherwise -- is to be allowed into the sector most critical to regime security: the media.

Today, flush with $2.3 trillion in hard currency, China no longer has the same need of foreign capital and its government has readjusted its economic policy accordingly. Because state-owned enterprises are both national champions and political patronage machines (the Communist Party can reward its loyalists with lucrative appointments in these state-owned firms), Beijing’s policy now clearly favours them over both domestic and foreign capital.

As for Google, it has committed a double offense. Its search technology poses a clear and present threat to the party’s regime security, while its capacity to dominate the Internet search business would deprive China of its own national champion, Baidu (which, although a private business, is easier to control).

Google’s senior management may have learned a thing or two about dealing with a one-party regime through its unhappy foray into China. It’s unclear, though, whether other Western firms have learned anything at all at Google’s expense.

Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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SHANGHAI: China, the world's largest metal consumer, will add to last year's record $32 billion spending on resource acquisitions as demand for iron ore, copper and oil soars with the fastest economic growth since 2007.

Chinese companies will hunt for iron ore, coal, oil, copper and gold assets, said Jing Ulrich, the chairwoman of China equities and commodities at JPMorgan Chase & Co in Hong Kong.

China Minmetals Corp and China Petrochemical Corp led an acquisition spree last year, as companies snapped up zinc mines in Australia, oil reserves in Nigeria, and gold deposits in the Philippines. Owning resources will give China more control over pricing and reduce its dependence on suppliers including BHP Billiton Ltd, the world's largest mining company.

"There are still many opportunities for mergers and acquisitions overseas this year, even though asset valuations would be much higher," Huang Dongmei, deputy general manager at Minmetals Exploration and Development Co, a unit of China Minmetals, said by phone from Beijing. "We're considering several projects," Huang said, without giving details.

Aluminum Corp of China, the nation's largest maker of the metal, will "utilize all its resources and energy" to speed up acquisitions this year, Chairman Xiong Weiping told staff in a speech posted on its website on Jan 25.

The State-owned company was rebuffed in June by Rio Tinto Group from investing $19.5 billion in the world's second-biggest iron ore supplier amid objections from shareholders and Australian politicians. The Beijing-based company is London-based Rio's largest shareholder.

China's imports of iron ore, copper and oil leapt to records in 2009, as demand from carmakers and builders including Volkswagen AG and China Vanke Co expanded.

The economy grew 10.7 percent in the fourth quarter, the fastest pace since 2007, on the $586 billion stimulus spending and record lending.

"You'll have a lot more Beijings and Shanghais coming up over the next 20 and 30 years and to feed all of that, the amount of iron and steel is huge," said Eric Lilford, head of Australia mining at Deloitte Corporate Finance in Perth. Chinese demand "has been relatively strong even during the global financial crisis and it's stronger now."

China's refined copper demand may jump 14.8 percent to 6.81 million metric tons this year, said Qu Yi, a Beijing-based analyst at CRU International Ltd. Iron ore imports may rise 27 percent to 800 million tons by 2012, up from the record last year, as steel consumption surges, researcher Umetal.com said.

Before the global recession last year depressed asset prices, China's investments in overseas resource and energy companies rose every year but one from just $578 million in 2004, according to Bloomberg data.

Yanzhou Coal Mining Co, a unit of China's fourth-largest coal producer, bought Australia's Felix Resources Ltd for A$3.5 billion ($3.1 billion). China Petrochemical purchased Addax Petroleum Corp for C$8.3 billion ($7.8 billion) last year to add oil reserves.

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Minmetals, the nation's largest metals trader, agreed in June to pay $1.4 billion for most of the assets of OZ Minerals Ltd, then the world's second-largest zinc producer.

"The total size of such deals is expected to reach a new record," said Li Luhui, a Beijing-based analyst with Zero2IPO, a research company which counts China's National Council for Social Security Fund as a client. "The Chinese government will continue to support large State-owned companies with related policies and capital to go overseas."

China may focus on energy targets in South America and Central Asia, and metals in Africa this year, Li said. Smaller companies may struggle to raise funds as the government seeks to curb lending, Li said.

China's $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, which pumped about $10 billion into commodity-related companies in the second half of 2009, is in "early talks" for investments in Brazil, the world's second-biggest iron ore exporter, and Mexico, Chairman Lou Jiwei said on Jan 20.

Bloomberg News

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An excerpt from a discussion here of Tom Friedman's recent writing on China. The link to the entire piece follows this snippet.

He (Friedman) also says:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

Aside from perhaps his overestimating the quality of the education system, this is very bad statistics, and perhaps shows how easily we can get intellectually overwhelmed by large numbers. If China indeed has the same distribution of geniuses, or talent, as other countries, the fact that it has so many people won’t make it richer (and what about India?). After all if you cut China into four countries, each country will have only one-fourth the number of geniuses. Does that really mean that the four countries together are stupider? If we combine the US, Canada and Mexico into one country, its a pretty safe bet that the total number of geniuses will be more than any of the three countries currently possess, but will average intelligence rise? Can we really make the three countries richer that way (of course there may be good economic arguments for suggesting that unifying North American into a single country will make it richer, but the larger number of geniuses is not one of these arguments).

Ok, we can argue about these things, and we can agree to disagree, but where he completely blew it was, I suspect, on the one topic are where he was absolutely certain he could not be wrong.

Too bad, because he was. Friedman proposed, yet again, a common misconception over the meaning of China’s huge accumulation of foreign reserves. He argued that thanks in part to the size of the reserves it would be impossible to make money by shorting China. “First,” he warned, “a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with US$2 trillion in foreign currency reserves.”

Really? Friedman proposed the rule sarcastically – as both untestable and too obvious to need testing. It is so obvious that no country has ever had such high levels of reserves, so you can’t really test the hypothesis, but it’s also pretty obvious that a country with $2 trillion in reserves is in great shape. Anyone who wanted to short it must be pretty stupid, right?

But it turns out that reality is not as obvious as he imagines. Let us leave aside that the PBoC’s reported reserves are a lot more than $2 trillion, and that if correctly accounted they would be pretty close to $3 trillion. China’s foreign reserves are certainly huge. They add up to an amount equal to about 5-6 % of global gross domestic product.

But they are not unprecedented. Twice before in history a country has, under similar circumstances, run up foreign reserves of the same magnitude.

The first time occurred in the late 1920s when, after a decade of record-beating trade and capital account surpluses, the United States had accumulated what John Maynard Keynes worriedly described as “all the bullion in the world”. At the time, total reserves accumulated by the US were more than 5-6% of global GDP. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this was probably the greatest hoard of central bank reserves ever accumulated as a share of global GDP, but please check before you accept this claim.

The second time occurred in the late 1980s, when it was Japan’s turn to combine huge trade surpluses, along with more moderate surpluses on the capital account, to accumulate a stockpile of foreign reserves only a little less than the equivalent of 5-6% of global GDP. By the late 1980s, Japan’s accumulation of reserves drew the sort of same breathless description – much of it incorrect, of course – that China’s does today.

Needless to say, and in sharp rebuttal to Friedman, both previous cases turned out badly for long investors and brilliantly for anyone dumb enough to have gone short. During the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, US stock markets lost more than 80 per cent of their value, real estate prices collapsed, and the US economy contracted in real terms by an astonishing 30-40 per cent before recovering in the 1940s.

Japan’s subsequent experience was economically less violent in the short term, but even costlier over the long term. During the period following its astonishing accumulation of central bank reserves, its stock market also lost more than 80 per cent of its value, real estate prices collapsed, and economic growth was virtually non-existent for two decades.

The idea that massive levels of reserves are a guarantor of economic stability is, in other words, based on a profound misunderstanding both of history and of the nature of reserves. Reserves of course are not useless as an enhancer of financial stability, but their use is for very specific forms of instability. Having large amounts of reserves relative to external claims protects countries from external debt crises and from currency crises.

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Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

By Howard French

During his first trip to China recently, Barack Obama was excoriated by pundits for his meekness on a host of issues, from Tibet to exchange rates to human rights. Newspaper commentary in the United States went on endlessly about the curtailment of American influence in an age where a fast-rising China has become this country’s main creditor. The event that supposedly crystallized all of this was the American-style town hall meeting the president had planned, but which the Chinese government appeared to control. In the end, Obama was limited to a stilted forum with an audience of carefully screened and coached students, and a previously negotiated national television audience was denied him.Jacques cover

It’s an open secret that many in the publishing industry see book subtitles as vehicles for shameless hype, pushing their claims to the limit in order to juice reader interest. During the week of Obama’s East Asian sojourn, though, the subtitle of Martin Jacques’ new offering, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order, may have suddenly seemed like it wasn’t such a stretch. At the very least, the appearance of a book like this from a major publisher like Penguin Press is a telling measure of a profound and ongoing shift in perceptions about the staying power of American — and, more broadly, Western — might and vigor, in the face of the challenge of a fast-rising China.

On this subject, a recent Pew survey highlighted the gap between perception and reality, showing that 44% of the American public already believes that China is the world’s leading economic power. Just 27% named the United States.

This, then, surely is a great time for a book to take a hard look at the relative decline of American power along with the stirring rise of China, followed by a host of other emerging global actors, and come to some informed and well-reasoned conclusions. Most see this story as fundamentally based in economic history, but on this subject, and indeed on economics in general, Jacques has little of interest to say. China will probably continue to grow quickly for another 20 years (186), the author asserts, placing much stock in the hazy art of economic projection, whether quoting the track records of previous takeoffs, from those of Britain, the U.S., and the so-called Asian Tigers, to the now famous work of Goldman Sachs. By 2050, its forecast anticipates the United States ranking a close second behind China, followed at some distance by India (3).

Almost defiantly, though, Jacques proclaims this is not a book about China’s “economic wow factor”(415). Make no mistake, the growth is important. Among other feats, China doubled its economy between 1977 and 1987 (159), and its GDP went from twice the size of Russia’s to more than six times larger between 1990 and 2003 (161). But this analyst is impressed by other things and wants us to share in his awe.

Principal among these features are: the length of China’s history; a population as large as the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan and Australia combined; a land mass that Jacques repeatedly describes as “continental”; and, most of all, the extraordinary potency and cohesiveness of its culture.

Indeed, culture gradually becomes the main story here. China is not so much a nation on the move, but a single-minded civilization bent on regaining its natural place in the scheme of things as number one, the author insists, with grating frequency, and the West is woefully ill-prepared for the challenge.

Conclusions like this, paired with such a sensationalist title, might suggest an alarmist tract in the old “yellow peril” tradition, but the reality is almost the opposite. Jacques, a former editor of Marxism Today, all but cheers the West’s comeuppance. I, for one, found a Chinese friend’s response to the title more compelling. Noticing the book on my desk, her one-word comeback was, “Really?”

I mouthed this same question with dismaying frequency as I read When China Rules the World, and serious doubts about Jacques’ reliability as a guide mounted.

For such a timely subject, this is unfortunate. One is especially dismayed because the book is not bereft of interesting ideas. Among them, the author challenges common, deeply held notions of Western exceptionalism, beginning with the idea that modernity itself is the exclusive preserve of Europe and its American offshoot. “Europe was the birthplace of modernity,” he writes. “As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies left a huge and indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other; they appeared synonymous” (21). Apart, however, from “an accident of birth it had, and has, no special connection to that continent and its civilization.”

Problematically for a book that is nominally about the future, it is here, and not with his frequently credulous predictions about the coming world order, that the author is most compelling.

In his book’s early passages, Jacques takes pains to show that the West’s dominance is a relatively recent development in world history, and by implication probably a transitory one, too. But for a handful of ancient Chinese inventions — things like paper, gunpowder and the compass — the story of the past in the popular mind is one of long-uninterrupted Western superiority in science, in technology, and more broadly in the process we nowadays fancy as “development.”

However, drawing on a variety of recent economic and historical scholarship, notably that of Kaoru Sugihara and Kenneth Pomeranz, Jacques makes a claim of parity between East and West before Europe and the United States pulled far ahead in late 19th century. “The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them,” he writes. “In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious” (25).

While our conventional narratives would have it that the West’s advantage lay in byproducts of the Enlightenment, things like reason and law and the scientific method, the factors that Jacques emphasizes are much less flattering. Around 1800, the fortunes of East Asia and Western Europe began to diverge sharply, after Britain discovered large and easily accessible deposits of coal, relieving the dependence on wood and helping drive the technological innovations that would propel the Industrial Revolution. More crucial still was the conquest of the New World, opening up a continental expanse of “new” land, to be worked in large measure by African slave labor. “Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did.”

China also had large coal deposits in its northwest, but they were remote from the main population centers, and most importantly, far removed from the emerging textile industries and canal networks of the lower Yangzi Valley. It “also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World” (27).

With few notable exceptions, the ideas that Jacques develops to get us from this world of the recent past to the future of the book’s title are considerably less compelling. This is the case, in part, because of the author’s failure to get beyond China’s own official cant. The book often reads like a compilation of ideas gleaned by the water cooler at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the state’s official think tank.

“Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 percent between 1950 and 1980, more than quadrupling the country’s GDP and more than doubling its per capita GDP,” Jacques writes at one point. “This compares favorably with India, which only managed to increase its GDP by less than three times during the same period and its per capital GDP by around 50 percent. China’s social performance was even more impressive” (99).

This might seem like a straightforward recitation of fact, but there is far more going on here. Jacques frequently makes sweeping and shallow statements about East Asian cultures, and especially about Confucian societies. But rather than compare growth figures with these putative Chinese peers — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — he has cherry-picked India to bolster his claims.

In the same passage, he goes on to invoke the United Nation’s Human Development Index to hammer home the point that China did well under Mao. What to make, then, of a death toll of 30 million during the Great Leap Forward, millions killed and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and the countless other victims of less famous campaigns that almost continuously punctuated Mao’s rule? With Jacques’ bland treatment of this material, we are not far from Beijing’s own bloodless official reckoning that Mao was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad.

Part of Jacques’ problem is that no matter how prodigious his readings (the footnotes run for 70 pages), the author comes across as a relative latecomer to his subject, and this lack of grounding results in any number of embarrassments. For example, contrary to the prevailing historical record, he asserts that the Communists, and not Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, “played the key role in the resistance to the Japanese” (94).

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In 1661, Adam Schall, a Jesuit missionary from Germany and astronomer at the Chinese imperial court, fell victim to jealous mandarins, and was sentenced to death for teaching false astronomy and a superstitious faith. He was only just saved from being strangled, when a sudden thunderstorm convinced his judges that nature had spoken against their verdict. Father Schall died soon after. But the defensiveness of the mandarins, who saw his foreign ideas as a threat to their status, would be a recurring theme in Chinese relations with the outside world.

So, is it true after all, what they say about clashing civilizations? It is tempting to see the official Chinese response to Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom in that light. Spurred by Google's announcement that it might pull out of the Chinese market in protest over censorship, Mrs. Clinton talked about Internet freedom in terms of universal human rights. Her speech was promptly denounced in a Communist Party newspaper as "information imperialism." Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu claimed that China's regulation of the Internet (banning references to Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwanese independence and so on) was in keeping with "national conditions and cultural traditions."

The claim of universality is indeed an important facet of American culture, rooted in the American Revolution and Protestant ethics. It is considered proper for a U.S. secretary of state to give voice to the ideal of universal human rights. Just so, a Chinese official sees it as his duty to assert the uniqueness, or even superiority, of Chinese culture. This was true of Confucian scholar-officials in the imperial past. It is still true today.

Thought control, in terms of imposing an official orthodoxy, is a very old tradition. The official glue that has long been applied to hold Chinese society together is a kind of state dogma, loosely known as Confucianism, which is moral as well as political, stressing obedience to authority. This is what officials like to call Chinese culture.

One can take a more cynical view, of course, and see culture as a mere fig leaf meant to hide the machinations of political power. The latest Chinese salvo against the U.S., blaming the Americans for instigating rebellion in Iran through the Internet, reveals that the current spat has a hard (and opportunistic) political core. And the assumption that Google, as a Chinese editorial put it, is a "political pawn" of the U.S. government, is a clear case of projection.

In any case, instilling the belief that obedience to authority is not just a way to keep order, but an essential part of being Chinese, is highly convenient for those who wield authority, whether they be fathers of a family or rulers of the state. That is why in their efforts to promote democracy after World War I, Chinese intellectuals denounced Confucianism, with its rigid social hierarchy, as an outmoded orthodoxy which had to be eradicated.

It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism. Later, Confucianism actually made a comeback of sorts. But the most common ideology since the early 1990s is a defensive nationalism, disseminated through museums, entertainment and school textbooks. All Chinese schoolchildren are indoctrinated with the idea that China was humiliated for centuries by foreign powers, and that support of the Communist state is the only way for China to regain its greatness and never be humiliated again.

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an excerpt :

The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent. Instead of asking about Sicilian Defenses, journalists wanted to know about my diet, my personal life, how many moves ahead I saw, and how many games I held in my memory.

I soon realized that my answers were disappointing. I didn't eat anything special. I worked hard because my mother had taught me to. My memory was good, but hardly photographic. As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees, Russkin-Gutman makes much of the answer attributed to the great Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among others: "Just one, the best one." This answer is as good or bad as any other, a pithy way of disposing with an attempt by an outsider to ask something insightful and failing to do so. It's the equivalent of asking Lance Armstrong how many times he shifts gears during the Tour de France.

The only real answer, "It depends on the position and how much time I have," is unsatisfying. In what may have been my best tournament game at the 1999 Hoogovens tournament in the Netherlands, I visualized the winning position a full fifteen moves ahead—an unusual feat. I sacrificed a great deal of material for an attack, burning my bridges; if my calculations were faulty I would be dead lost. Although my intuition was correct and my opponent, Topalov again, failed to find the best defense under pressure, subsequent analysis showed that despite my Herculean effort I had missed a shorter route to victory. Capablanca's sarcasm aside, correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves "seen ahead"—that computers rely on.

There is little doubt that different people are blessed with different amounts of cognitive gifts such as long-term memory and the visuospatial skills chess players are said to employ. One of the reasons chess is an "unparalleled laboratory" and a "unique nexus" is that it demands high performance from so many of the brain's functions. Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software.

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Every medium of communication in the world is now overrun with pronouncements about Haiti. Many have been ill-informed, and a few maliciously intemperate. The extreme comments have the effect of making those that are mildly reasonable in tone seem more reliable; some, more so than they deserve. The New York Times, for instance, editorializes about Haiti’s “generations of misrule, poverty and political strife,” as if those nouns were enough to explain the history of Haiti.

Nations have beginnings, and then national histories, and the history of each is unique. I know how obvious that is. But the penchant among journalists and political scientists for creating phony categories such as “kleptocracies,” “developing nations,” and “failed states,” and then using these categories to obstruct serious talk, in this case about Haiti, immobilizes us and conceals the need to uncover the weight of local and particular history.

The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership, and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the worst imaginable circumstances. The Haitians declared their freedom in 1804, when the New World was mostly made up of European colonies (and the United States) all busily extracting wealth from the labor of millions of slaves. This included Haiti’s neighbors, the island colonies of France, Great Britain, Denmark, and The Netherlands, among others. From the United States to Brazil, the reality of Haitian liberation shook the empire of the whip to the core. Needless to say, no liberal-minded aristocrats or other Europeans joined the rebel side in the Haitian Revolution, as some had in the American Revolution.

The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.

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These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to Western imperialism in modern times. But the Far East was always another matter. Too far away to be a military or religious threat to Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled according to merit, not birth. Even those sceptical of the more extravagant claims for the Middle Kingdom – Montesquieu or Adam Smith – remained puzzled and impressed by its wealth and order.

A drastic change of opinion came in the 19th century, when Western predators became increasingly aware of the relative military weakness and economic backwardness of the Qing empire. China was certainly teeming, but it was also primitive, cruel and superstitious. Respect gave way to contempt, mingled with racist alarm – Sinomania capsizing into Sinophobia. By the early 20th century, after eight foreign forces had stormed their way to Pekin to crush the Boxer Uprising, the ‘yellow peril’ was being widely bandied about among press and politicians, as writers like Jack London or J.H. Hobson conjured up a future Chinese takeover of the world. Within another few decades, the pendulum swung back, as Pearl Buck and Madame Chiang won popular sympathy for China’s gallant struggle against Japan. After 1948, in a further rapid reversal, Red China became the focus of still greater fear and anxiety, a totalitarian nightmare more sinister even than Russia. Today, the high-speed growth of the People’s Republic is transforming Western attitudes once again, attracting excitement and enthusiasm in business and media alike, with a wave of fashion and fascination recalling the chinoiserie of rococo Europe. Sinophobia has by no means disappeared. But another round of Sinomania is in the making.

The title of Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World belongs to the scare literature of the first. But its function is little more than a commercial come-on, designed to clear the purchased display-table and the airport stall. The book itself is a sweeping contribution to the second. Its message consists of two parts. The first is the now well-known projection that – at present growth rates – the Chinese economy will be the largest in the world, overtaking the American, within about 15 years. With four times the population of the US, China already has the biggest foreign reserves, is the leading exporter, posts the most spectacular stock-market gains, and contains the largest car market on earth. So massive is the transformation its rise to economic supremacy will bring that – so Jacques – history can henceforward simply be divided into BC and AC: Before China and After China. This part of the argument is a straightforward quantitative extrapolation. Jacques hammers the impending figures home, without adding a great deal to what anyone with a certain economic literacy would know already.

Beyond altering international league tables, what will China’s emergence as an economic superpower signify? The second part of Jacques’s message is not about size, but difference. China is not like other nations, indeed is not really a nation-state at all. It is something vaster and deeper, a ‘civilisation-state’, inheritor of the oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic subjects more by moral education than force, and organising adjacent regions into a consensual tributary system. By absorbing feudal aristocrats into impersonal state service, they freed market forces from customary constraints to develop a commercial society of unparalleled dynamism and sophistication. Only the accident of more readily available coal at home, and ruthless colonial pillage of resources overseas, allowed 19th-century Europe to overtake this great proto-modern economy, as industrialised in its way as the West, and much larger. But this Western predominance will prove a brief interval. Today, China is returning once more to its historic position as the dynamic centre of the global economy.

What are going to be the consequences for the rest of the world? Traumatically for the United States, China will fairly soon replace it as hegemon, not only in traditional areas of Chinese influence in East and South-East Asia, but across former Third and First Worlds alike. The soft power of its sporting prowess, its martial arts, its costly painters, its multitudinous language, its ancient medicine, and not least the delights of its cuisine, will spread China’s radiance far and wide, as Hollywood, English and McDonald’s do America’s today. Above all, its spectacular economic success will not only inspire imitation wherever poor nations strive for betterment. It will reorder the entire international system, by holding out the prospect, not of democracy within nation-states, which the West vainly seeks to promote, but of ‘democracy between nation-states’. For we are entering a time in which the political and ideological conflicts that marked the Cold War are giving way to an ‘overarching cultural contest’, in which ‘alternative modernities’ will end the dominance of the West. In that emancipation a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect for the state, will lead the way.

How should this construction be judged? Enthusiasm, however well-meaning, is no substitute for discrimination. Chinese antiquity stretches back to 1500 BCE or beyond. But this no more makes today’s People’s Republic a special genus of ‘civilisation-state’ than comparable claims for la civilisation française make one of the Third or Fourth Republic. Talk of ‘civilisations’ is notoriously self-serving, and delimitations of them arbitrary: Samuel Huntington arrived, rather desperately, at eight or nine – including an African, Latin American and Eastern Orthodox civilisation. Nothing is gained by affixing this embellishment to the PRC. Like France in the 1930s or 1950s, contemporary China is an integrist nation-state, cast in an imperial mould, if with a much longer past and on a much larger scale. Nor are inflated claims for the age-old economic centrality or social wisdom of pre-modern China much help in understanding the present or future of the country. If, up through the Song, China was technologically and commercially far in advance of Europe, by the end of the Ming its science lagged well behind, and even at the height of Qing prosperity in the 18th century, agrarian productivity and average wage levels, let alone intellectual progress in a broader sense, were nowhere near vanguard developments in Europe. Nor are idyllic images of sage concern for the welfare of the masses much closer to the realities of rule by successive dynasties, which in the words of one of China’s finest historians, He Bingdi, were always ‘ornamentally Confucian and functionally Legalist’ – repression wrapped in moralising rhetoric.

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Reading a series of new books about the desperate excesses of today’s quest for crude, Howard W French finds progress and prosperity alongside misery and exploitation, as the threat of the end draws near.

January 21. 2010

In 1998, with the international oil business in the midst of one of its recurrent doldrums – prices had slumped to $10 a barrel, a 50-year low – executives at the company then still known as British Petroleum braced for a test supremely laden with significance for the company, and, as it would turn out, for the industry, too.

It was a $100 million gamble – for that was the cost of a test bore in Block 778, under 7,625 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The potential payoff was a staggering $50 billion over the next 10 years.

For months beforehand, ships dragging seismic equipment had crisscrossed the waters of the Gulf, firing bursts of sound into the seabed. And it was the harvesting of that echo data, recorded millisecond by millisecond, that had led the engineers to their precise quarry, a 12-inch hole they would drill through four miles of rock.

By reputation, this was the most complex geological area on the planet for oil prospectors. One of them likened recording sound through the thick salt formations that lay under the seabed to “photographing through frosted glass.” And yet the prospectors working out of BP’s Houston campus were not daunted: the oil business had been furiously reinventing itself to meet such challenges.

Looking for oil was no longer a game for old-timers. The seismic data that was once stored on miles of magnetic tape could now fit on an iPod, and the majors competed ferociously for the most talented young mathematicians and geophysicists.

On July 4, 1998, the company’s drill sensors reported oil. David Rainey, BP’s head of exploration, exclaimed: “Our sandbox has just got bigger.” But the immense size of his triumph would soon become clear: a billion barrels of oil – enough to boost the revived company into competition with Exxon and Shell, and set off a scramble toward ever more risky deepwater gambles that the majors have pursued around the Atlantic rim ever since.

By 2004, BP had commissioned the construction of the world’s largest oil platform, a 59,500-ton behemoth called the “Thunder Horse” – which they towed from South Korea to the warm Gulf waters off Louisiana – to tap an invisible gusher of crude. There, it would shunt the well’s output into a network of 25,000 miles of pipeline that traverse the ocean floor from Texas to Florida to fuel America’s cars and heat its homes.

This tale of technological triumph, breathlessly recounted in Tom Bower’s new book The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century, still retains an elegiac quality. Indeed, if not exactly an epitaph, the deepwater adventures of companies like BP and its traditional competitors, which Bower chronicles in great detail, hang in one’s thoughts like a chronicle of a death foretold.

Ingenuity is one way to describe the search for crude in deeper and deeper waters; another, equally apt, might be desperation. Once all-mighty, the large Western oil companies now control well under 10 per cent of the world’s known crude.

“Big oil never wanted to be here,” read the telling first line of a recent Wall Street Journal feature about the successful efforts of Chevron in very deep waters not far from BP’s big find.

“Chevron came here, an hour-long helicopter ride south of New Orleans, because so many of the places it would rather be – big, easily tapped oilfields close to shore – have become off-limits. Western oil companies have been kicked out of much of the Middle East in recent decades, had assets seized in Venezuela and seen much of the US roped off because of environmental regulations,” the article read. “Their access in Iran is limited by sanctions, in Russia by curbs on foreign investment, in Iraq by violence.”

We associate few products with the swings and cycles that we all but take for granted with oil. The rise and fall of prices, and the expansion and contraction of the economies that drive them, consume our quotidian attentions. But such vicissitudes are not the half of oil’s cyclical saga, and in many ways they are the least interesting part of the tale.

To really grapple with the history of this industry is to plunge into the rich essence of the story of mankind’s last century, give or take a few years. All of the elements are there, from the final sprint of what, only recently, one might have imagined to be the semi-permanent ascendancy of the West to the resurrection of China and the rise of a host of other new or rehabilitated powers.

In this time, we have gone from widely accepted notions of progress as an irreversible march of material wealth and abundance to an increasingly common acceptance that the heedless consumption that underpins our notions of satisfaction and self-worth has become a mortal environmental menace.

By the same token, that confidence in inexhaustible material abundance has faded, first into an only slightly less quaint belief that science can force the horizons of scarcity into perpetual retreat, and more recently to a gathering acknowledgement of all sorts of limits.

Haunting every one of these plot lines is a spectre that suffuses The Squeeze and two other new books, by the journalists Peter Maass and Michael Peel, about all manner of ravages and excesses committed in the quest for petroleum. It is the still vague and yet certain ghost of “peak oil”.

Western historians have long fixated on the great ideological struggles, hot and cold, of the last century. For many, this competition, and the putative triumph of democracy, is the greatest story of our times.

But the century-long arc of oil’s rise and eventual decline reveals a story whose significance is even greater than the political dispute that defined the Cold War. It is a story in which the West played a starring role, but to whose importance it has remained largely blind: the end of colonial subjugation, and the rise of the “the rest.”

Western hegemony during the colonial era, which began in the 17th century and ended in the wake of the Second World War, created “one of the great asymmetries of world history,” as the historian Niall Ferguson has written.

That asymmetry, as the journalist and analyst Martin Jacques notes in his new book, When China Rules the World, was no accident, for Europe “forcibly sought to prevent – by a combination of economic and military means – Asia from taking the same route”. Decolonisation, Jacques writes, was “arguably … the most important event of the 20th century, creating the conditions for the majority of the world’s population to become the dominant players of the 21st century”.

This is best illustrated, no doubt, by the example of China, which with 20 per cent of the world’s population may serve as a surrogate or indicator, if a leading-edge one, for the non-white populations of the planet as a whole.

China, as everyone knows, is on the march economically, followed by India’s billion-plus, and by people elsewhere in Asia, in Latin America and – although less widely acknowledged – in Africa, too, and the surge of production, consumption and new wealth among these recently-enfranchised populations will condition what’s left of oil’s long, wild ride down to the last drop.

Growth like this is projected to drive a one per cent annual rise in oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), whose forecasts have been criticised in many quarters for being too conservative. Power generating capacity during this time-span will rise by 4,800 gigawatts, or five times the United States’ present output.

Virtually all of this growth will come from non-OECD countries, the IEA claims, and 28 per cent of it from China alone – where oil consumption is expected to nearly double, to 15 million barrels a day, by 2030. The IEA’s 2009 World Energy Outlook warns that current investments fall far short of what will be needed to meet future demand; it is the prospect of this looming shortfall that has stoked fears that the “end of oil” may come sooner than previously expected.

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PETIONVILLE, HAITI -- Through decades of coups, hurricanes, embargoes and economic collapse, the wily and powerful business elite of Haiti have learned the art of survival in one of the most chaotic countries on Earth -- and they might come out on top again.
This Story

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Relief Efforts: Fears mount in lawless Haiti
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Elite are spared from much of the devastation
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'The earth shook to open people's eyes' to needy Haiti
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Officials try to prevent Haitian earthquake refugees from making trek to U.S.
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From a Haitian jail cell: Behind bars, feeling safe and anxious at the same time
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Reprieve for illegal immigrants: 'It's like joy and sorrow at the same time'
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In Miami: Churchgoers seek solace -- and some answers
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FIRST RESPONDERS: Coast Guard crews jump into triage effort, starting clinic for survivors
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The Government: President Préval 'overwhelmed' and largely absent
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Major earthquake hits Haiti
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Haiti Earthquake Videos

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Although Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake destroyed many buildings in Port-au-Prince, it mostly spared homes and businesses up the mountain in the cool, green suburb of Petionville, home to former presidents and senators.

A palace built atop a mountain by the man who runs one of Haiti's biggest lottery games is still standing. New-car dealers, the big importers, the families that control the port -- they all drove through town with their drivers and security men this past weekend. Only a few homes here were destroyed.

"All the nation is feeling this earthquake -- the poor, the middle class and the richest ones," said Erwin Berthold, owner of the Big Star Market in Petionville. "But we did okay here. We have everything cleaned up inside. We are ready to open. We just need some security. So send in the Marines, okay?"

As Berthold stood outside his two-story market, stocked with fine wines and imported food from Miami and Paris, his customers cruised by and asked when he would reopen. "Maybe Monday!" he shouted, then held up his hand to his ear, for his customers to call his cellphone.

So little aid has been distributed that there is not much difference between what the rich have received and what the poor have received. The poor started with little and now have less; the elites simply have supplies to last.

But search-and-rescue operations have been intensely focused on buildings with international aid workers, such as the crushed U.N. headquarters, and on large hotels with international clientele. Some international rescue workers said they are being sent to find foreign nationals first.

There is an extreme, almost feudal divide between rich and poor in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, up in the mountains, the gated and privately guarded neighborhoods resemble a Haitian version of Beverly Hills, but with razor wire.

Elias Abraham opened the door of his pretty walled compound, a semiautomatic pistol on his right hip and his family's passports in his back pocket.

His extended family's fleet of four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicles are filled with gas. He has a generator big enough to power a small hotel. And even if his kids are sleeping in the courtyard because they are afraid of the continuing aftershocks, his maids are dressed in crisp, blue uniforms and his hospitable wife is able to welcome visitors with fresh-brewed coffee.

Abraham has not been unaffected by the quake. His Twins Market grocery store collapsed Tuesday and fell prey to looters Wednesday.

"They took everything," said Abraham, the Haitian-born son of a Syrian Christian merchant family. "I don't care. God bless them. If they need the food, take it. Just don't take it and sell it for a hundred times what it is worth.

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Today is a good day to remember that in Haiti, nobody ever really dies. The many thousands who've had the breath crushed out of their bodies in the earthquake, and the thousands more who will not physically survive the aftermath, will undergo instead a translation of state, according to the precepts of Haitian Vodou, some form of which is practiced by much of the population. Spirits of the Haitian dead — sa nou pa we yo, those we don’t see — do not depart as in other religions but remain extremely close to the living, invisible but tangible, inhabiting a parallel universe on the other side of any mirror, beneath the surface of all water, just behind the veil that divides us from our dreams.

That extraordinary spiritual reservoir is the source of the Haitian religious view of the world — as powerful as any today. As often as it is misunderstood and misrepresented, Haitian Vodou, with all it carries out of the cradle of humankind’s birth in Africa and combines with Roman Catholicism, has enabled Haitians to laugh at death, as they have too often needed to do.

During the decade-long Haitian revolution that began in 1791 — the only event in human history where African slaves won freedom for themselves by force of arms — a prisoner of the French was awaiting execution by burning. Come, he is supposed to have said to his companions, let us show these people how to die. He climbed onto the pyre himself and stayed there, without uttering another sound, until the fire consumed him.

The energy of souls not lost springs back into the living world, not only through one of the few surviving religions that allow believers to converse face to face with the gods, but also in an extraordinarily rich, fertile and (in spite of everything) optimistic culture. Haiti offers, keeps on offering, a shimmering panorama of visual art and a wealth of seductive and hypnotic music, much of it rooted in the rhythms of ceremonial drumming. For the past 50 years a remarkably vivid and sophisticated Haitian literature has been flowing out of Creole, an ever-evolving language as fecund as the English of Shakespeare’s time. The Haitian world is not all suffering; it is full of treasure. Here are a few of the many voices, native and not, inspired by Haiti. —Madison Smartt Bell

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) - In early 2008, an official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a report to his superiors detailing what he called "the most significant development in the criminal exploitation of aircraft since 9/11."

World | Mexico

The document warned that a growing fleet of rogue jet aircraft was regularly crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. On one end of the air route, it said, are cocaine-producing areas in the Andes controlled by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. On the other are some of West Africa's most unstable countries.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was ignored, and the problem has since escalated into what security officials in several countries describe as a global security threat.

The clandestine fleet has grown to include twin-engine turboprops, executive jets and retired Boeing 727s that are flying multi-ton loads of cocaine and possibly weapons to an area in Africa where factions of al Qaeda are believed to be facilitating the smuggling of drugs to Europe, the officials say.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has been held responsible for car and suicide bombings in Algeria and Mauritania. Gunmen and bandits linked to the group have also stepped up kidnappings of Europeans, who are then passed on to AQIM factions seeking ransom payments.

The aircraft hopscotch across South American countries, picking up tons of cocaine and jet fuel, officials say. They then soar across the Atlantic to West Africa and the Sahel, where the drugs are funneled across the Sahara Desert and into Europe.

An examination of documents and interviews with officials in the United States and three West African nations suggest that at least 10 aircraft have been discovered using this air route since 2006. Officials warn that many of these aircraft were detected purely by chance. They warn that the real number involved in the networks is likely considerably higher.

Alexandre Schmidt, regional representative for West and Central Africa for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, cautioned in Dakar this week that the aviation network has expanded in the past 12 months and now likely includes several Boeing 727 aircraft.

"When you have this high capacity for transporting drugs into West Africa, this means that you have the capacity to transport as well other goods, so it is definitely a threat to security anywhere in the world," said Schmidt. The "other goods" officials are most worried about are weapons that militant organizations can smuggle on the jet aircraft. A Boeing 727 can handle up to 10 tons of cargo.

The U.S. official who wrote the report for the Department of Homeland Security said the al Qaeda connection was unclear at the time. The official is a counter-narcotics aviation expert who asked to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak on the record. He said he was dismayed by the lack of attention to the matter since he wrote the report.

"You've got an established terrorist connection on this side of the Atlantic. Now on the Africa side you have the al Qaeda connection and it's extremely disturbing and a little bit mystifying that it's not one of the top priorities of the government," he said.

Since the September 11 attacks, the security system for passenger air traffic has been ratcheted up in the United States and throughout much of the rest of the world, with the latest measures imposed just weeks ago after a failed bomb attempt on a Detroit-bound plane on December 25.

"The bad guys have responded with their own aviation network that is out there everyday flying loads and moving contraband," said the official, "and the government seems to be oblivious to it."

The upshot, he said, is that militant organizations -- including groups like the FARC and al Qaeda -- have the "power to move people and material and contraband anywhere around the world with a couple of fuel stops." The lucrative drug trade is already having a deleterious impact on West African nations. Local authorities told Reuters they are increasingly outgunned and unable to stop the smugglers.

And significantly, many experts say, the drug trafficking is bringing in huge revenues to groups that say they are part of al Qaeda. It's swelling not just their coffers but also their ranks, they say, as drug money is becoming an effective recruiting tool in some of the world's most desperately poor regions.

U.S. President Barack Obama has chided his intelligence officials for not pooling information "to connect those dots" to prevent threats from being realized. But these dots, scattered across two continents like flaring traces on a radar screen, remain largely unconnected and the fleets themselves are still flying.

THE AFRICAN CONNECTION

The deadly cocaine trade always follows the money, and its cash-flush traffickers seek out the routes that are the mostly lightly policed. Beset by corruption and poverty, weak countries across West Africa have become staging platforms for transporting between 30 tons and 100 tons of cocaine each year that ends up in Europe, according to U.N. estimates. Drug trafficking, though on a much smaller scale, has existed here and elsewhere on the continent since at least the late 1990s, according to local authorities and U.S. enforcement officials.

Earlier this decade, sea interdictions were stepped up. So smugglers developed an air fleet that is able to transport tons of cocaine from the Andes to African nations that include Mauritania, Mali, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau. What these countries have in common are numerous disused landing strips and makeshift runways -- most without radar or police presence. Guinea Bissau has no aviation radar at all.

As fleets grew, so, too, did the drug trade.

The DEA says all aircraft seized in West Africa had departed Venezuela. That nation's location on the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard of South America makes it an ideal takeoff place for drug flights bound for Africa, they say.

A number of aircraft have been retrofitted with additional fuel tanks to allow in-flight refueling -- a technique innovated by Mexico's drug smugglers. (Cartel pilots there have been known to stretch an aircraft's flight range by putting a water mattress filled with aviation fuel in the cabin, then stacking cargoes of marijuana bundles on top to act as an improvised fuel pump.)

Ploys used by the cartel aviators to mask the flights include fraudulent pilot certificates, false registration documents and altered tail numbers to steer clear of law enforcement lookout lists, investigators say. Some aircraft have also been found without air-worthiness certificates or log books. When smugglers are forced to abandon them, they torch them to destroy forensic and other evidence like serial numbers.

The evidence suggests that some Africa-bound cocaine jets also file a regional flight plan to avoid arousing suspicion from investigators. They then subsequently change them at the last minute, confident that their switch will go undetected.

One Gulfstream II jet, waiting with its engines running to take on 2.3 tons of cocaine at Margarita Island in Venezuela, requested a last-minute flight plan change to war-ravaged Sierra Leone in West Africa. It was nabbed moments later by Venezuelan troops, the report seen by Reuters showed.

Once airborne, the planes soar to altitudes used by commercial jets. They have little fear of interdiction as there is no long-range radar coverage over the Atlantic. Current detection efforts by U.S. authorities, using fixed radar and P3 aircraft, are limited to traditional Caribbean and north Atlantic air and marine transit corridors.

The aircraft land at airports, disused runways or improvised air strips in Africa. One bearing a false Red Cross emblem touched down without authorization onto an unlit strip at Lungi International Airport in Sierra Leone in 2008, according to a U.N. report.

Late last year a Boeing 727 landed on an improvised runway using the hard-packed sand of a Tuareg camel caravan route in Mali, where local officials said smugglers offloaded between 2 and 10 tons of cocaine before dousing the jet with fuel and burning it after it failed to take off again.

For years, traffickers in Mexico have bribed officials to allow them to land and offload cocaine flights at commercial airports. That's now happening in Africa as well. In July 2008, troops in coup-prone Guinea Bissau secured Bissau international airport to allow an unscheduled cocaine flight to land, according to Edmundo Mendes, a director with the Judicial Police.

"When we got there, the soldiers were protecting the aircraft," said Mendes, who tried to nab the Gulfstream II jet packed with an estimated $50 million in cocaine but was blocked by the military. "The soldiers verbally threatened us," he said.

The cocaine was never recovered. Just last week, Reuters photographed two aircraft at Osvaldo Vieira International Airport in Guinea Bissau -- one had been dispatched by traffickers from Senegal to try to repair the other, a Gulfstream II jet, after it developed mechanical problems. Police seized the second aircraft.

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As the Twittersphere exploded with news that Google may leave the China market rather than continue to operate a censored site, one Chinese Twitterer wrote: "It's not Google that's withdrawing from China; it's China that's withdrawing from the world."

For Google, the hacking of gmail accounts was the last straw. As a leading global company in technology and innovation, Google thrives on the open flow of information. Yet, since the company set foot on Chinese soil in 2006, it has been a constant target: Google search phrases are often reset. YouTube and Blogger cannot be accessed. Google docs is often interrupted. Search results on google.cn must be heavily censored.

Of course, Google is not the only foreign IT company to face such hurdles in China. The internet is a liberating force for Chinese citizens, and the government fears it as a threat to its monopoly on information. Google has constantly demonstrated its capacity to empower users in China and so has become a special target.

With over 360m internet users, including more then 10m bloggers, the will for political participation in China is growing. The internet has provided Chinese citizens with an unprecedented opportunity to express political views and criticise the state, despite the censorship, on a variety of issues from official corruption to peasants, from education to social security, foreign relations, human rights, and the economic gap.

The internet has become a key mainstream medium: a recent study showed that one news item on a well-known website can spread to more than 500 websites within in four hours, creating considerable traffic of public opinion. A simple keyword search of blog content over the past five years shows that use of terms related to, for example, "freedom of speech", "defending rights", or "political transition" are clearly increasing.

Online communities are becoming becoming quasi-organisational, and exist outside traditional methods of government control. In recent months, the Chinese government has become especially concerned that online speech will turn into action.

As a result, the Chinese government has made control of the internet a high policy priority, at the level of "state security", especially "political security". It has passed laws, established an internet police force, set up government spokespeople and trained the infamous "fifty cent party" of government-trained undercover commentators tasked with "guiding online opinion". They also force internet companies, foreign and domestic, to self-police content on their sites.

The Great Firewall now blocks hundreds of thousands websites outside of China. Fang Binxing, a computer scientist who is called the father of the Great Firewall, in recent public policy speeches has emphasised a unique Chinese government concept of "content security", which includes information surveillance, blocking and public opinion analysis and monitoring.

Google has decided it can no longer aid and abet the government in maintaining such "content security". Yet, even if the Chinese government does block all the services and products Google provides outside China, it is not the end of the story. The fact that most, if not all, Google services and products will not be available inside the Great Firewall will only generate stronger demand among Chinese netizens for circumvention tools.

This highly symbolic move by Google demonstrates the fundamental conflict between the free flow of information and an authoritarian regime; it also highlights the importance of defending internet freedom. Even if the company is not operating inside China, Google represents the force and future of the internet, which will continue to empower Chinese netizens to demand political change.

By standing up to the Chinese censorship regime, Google has won the respect and admiration of millions of Chinese netizens, myself included.

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