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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7/17/2008

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

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

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

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16 July 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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By Howard W. French

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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