BEIJING - Many Chinese people dream that their country will one day become "number one". The dream is legitimate - as with any race, you want to win; or in any economic competition, you want to outperform your competitors. This is part of the nature of the capitalist system that has spread from the West to countries all over the world.

In international politics, this competition has a delicate appendix involving dangerous military matters.

Will China's military catch up with America's? And if so, when? Many strategists in Beijing wonder about these questions, and the main drive of the thinking is on China's economy.

When China's economy is big enough it will "naturally" sustain greater military expenditures, and thus in due time it will outperform the US in military might. There are some snags to this linear thinking. One is related to technological advances: China lags behind America in many technological areas, and it is hard to catch up.

The US might become economic "number two" but could well retain its technological prominence in military matters for several decades after China overtakes it economically. Still, even if China were to catch up in military technology, one wonders whether it would have the intellectual freedom necessary for the research innovation needed to manufacture effective and ground-breaking technology that would lead Beijing to be a giant in this sphere, as the US presently is.

These problems are all real, and Beijing might have some solutions. However, the problems of China's military rise are possibly not solved by simple projections of China's economic growth in future decades.

But first, let's assume that economic growth can take care of everything. One can simply think that in 20 years, China's gross domestic product (GDP) may be larger than America's. Then, because of its new economic might, China's military could be in a position to overtake the US's, and China might think this could happen in the following 10 or 20 years (around 2040-2050). Yet, even then, by the middle of the century, China's military challenges would be far from over.

China would still be alone against an alliance made of America plus European countries, Japan, India and other Asian countries. All these states might prefer to side with America and not with China in the event of military confrontation.

Such a grouping would represent a technological, military and economic power far bigger than China in the foreseeable future, even if we were to stretch ourselves to the end of this century. China would not be able to take on all of them, and in fact, in the next decades, China will have to rely heavily on US involvement in the region to ease tensions with its neighbors. [1]

Could China grow stronger by about 2030-2040 and then replace America in this broad pattern of alliances? To a certain extent, yes, but in the event of a real military confrontation, this is most unlikely because all these countries are scared of China's rise. This is because China is a newcomer, and thus largely unpredictable. It is too big, growing too rapidly, and too ''new'' to modern international diplomacy. But mostly, all of these countries are scared because China's politics are not transparent and Beijing is not forthcoming about its political decision-making because China is not, in one word, democratic.

If China is ever to become "number one", it would need first not a mighty and technologically advanced military, but real allies and real friends - not friends like North Korea or even Pakistan, a country that if pressed to choose between China and America most likely now would still pick America. To have friends, China has to become democratic, and while this would also not be a total solution, it would be a necessary step.

Given the US's status, the road to greatness in China is bound to go through some sort of political compromise and agreement with America. One difficulty in this is that China will have to build its new friendship with America without leaving other countries behind.

That is, China would have to build good ties with many countries that are presently friends with America, as well as continue building ties with America. Only if China can weave a complicated web of new political ties can it realistically hope to become politically "number one" sometime after it becomes economic "number one". And then it could be poised to naturally inherit the US's reach in the world and its web of alliances.

This leaves a few open questions: what is the use of China's present military build-up? Will the new Chinese weapons realistically be used to conquer Taiwan or to impose its rule in the South China Sea? In the foreseeable future, China could meet both goals, but if that were to happen, China would economically and politically be suffocated immediately after the conquest. China knows it and will try not to pursue this course, as it would end all its dreams at once.

But China's present tendency to not give up its military threat to Taiwan is motivated by domestic reasons: the push of nationalists who have no real and clear idea of the ways China could realistically become "number one".

Certainly, China's dream to become "number one" has many enemies, many of whom call themselves Chinese. Take, for instance, the case of Mao Zedong. Some Chinese neo-nationalists consider him the greatest Chinese hero of the past century. However, his 30 years of political experiments stopped China's economic growth for many decades.

At the end of World War II, Japan's and China's GDPs were at the same level. If we take this as a standard, without Mao, China's GDP could have become two-thirds of America's GDP by the late 1980s. If we more realistically take Taiwan's GDP per capita as a standard of China's potential overall GDP growth, China's economy could have overtaken that of America by the late 1970s.

These projections are debatable but are a useful intellectual exercise as from here we can see that China, thanks to Mao, lost some 50 years of development. Then, in retrospect, Mao was China's enemies' best friend, and at present the best weapon China's enemies could invent would be to create a second Mao.

This thought could perhaps become important in the next couple of years, as China is readying itself to put in power a batch of new rulers coming from the ultra-Maoist experience. The Chinese rulers after the 2012 Communist Party Congress will likely all be former Red Guards, and thus they will have experienced firsthand the disasters of the times when China lost ground. Yet they might also have an important Maoist mindset: "wu tian, wu fa" ("no heaven, no law"), open to all possibilities and daring to do anything in the best interests of their country.

Note
1. See my The blessing of China's threat, La Stampa, June 4, 2007.

(Conversations with Huang Jianping, Paul Shao and Amir Shadab helped in the conception of this article.)

Francesco Sisci is the Asia Editor of La Stampa.

(Copyright 2010 Francesco Sisci.)

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ON THE hilly streets of Chongqing, men with thick bamboo poles loiter for customers who will pay them to carry loads. The “stick men”, as they are called, hang the items from either end of the poles and heave them up over their shoulders. In a city where the Communist Party chief, Bo Xilai, likes to sing old revolutionary songs, these workers should be hymned as heroes. Yet few of them are even classed as citizens of the city where they live.

Most of the stick men were born in the countryside around Chongqing. (The name covers both the urban centre that served as China’s capital in the second world war, and a hinterland, the size of Scotland, which the city administers.) Since 1953, shortly after the Communists came to power, Chinese citizens have been divided into two strata, urban and rural, not according to where they live but on a hereditary basis. The stick men may have spent all their working lives on the streets of Chongqing, but their household registration papers call them “agricultural”.

The registration system (hukou, in Chinese) was originally intended to stop rural migrants flowing into the cities. Stick men were among the targets. In the early days of Communist rule in Chongqing the authorities rounded up thousands of “vagrants” and sent them to camps (vagrants, said Mao Zedong, “lack constructive qualities”). There they endured forced labour before being packed back to their villages.

Rapid industrial growth over the past three decades has required tearing down migration barriers to exploit the countryside’s huge labour surplus. Hukou, however, still counts for a lot, from access to education, health care and housing to compensation payouts. To be classified as a peasant often means being treated as a second-class citizen. Officials in recent years have frequently talked about “reforming” the system. They have made it easier to acquire urban citizenship, in smaller cities at least. But since late last year the official rhetoric has become more urgent. Policymakers have begun to worry that the country’s massive stimulus spending in response to the global financial crisis could run out of steam. Hukou reform, they believe, could boost rural-urban migration and with it the consumer spending China needs.

In early March 11 Chinese newspapers (it would have been 13, had not two bottled out) defied party strictures and teamed together to publish an extraordinary joint editorial. It called on China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which was then about to hold its annual meeting, to urge the government to scrap the hukou system as soon as possible. “We hope”, it said, “that a bad policy we have suffered for decades will end with our generation, and allow the next generation to truly enjoy the sacred rights of freedom, democracy and equality bestowed by the constitution.” Not since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 had so many newspapers simultaneously cast aside the restraints imposed by the Communist Party’s mighty Propaganda Department, which micromanages China’s media output.

The editorial said that “gratifying” progress had already been made with reform, but the system’s “invisible and heavy shackles” were still causing distress. Reform could inject “more dynamism” into the economy and help counter the effects of an ageing population.

Party leaders resented the newspapers’ boldness. Zhang Hong, a deputy chief editor of the Economic Observer, a weekly newspaper, was stripped of his title (though allowed to keep working) for his role in organising the editorial. Within a couple of hours of its appearance on newspaper websites, the authorities ordered its removal. Hukou reform was fine, but the government did not want to be hassled.

Urban citizens benefit from the hukou system, but those who migrate between cities are also irked by it. In 2003 some Chinese newspapers, independently of one another, pressed for reform after a college-educated migrant was detained by police for failing to produce a required identity document, and was beaten to death. The outcry led to the scrapping of regulations that allowed the police to detain people and deport them to their home towns for similar misdemeanours.

This time, says an editor involved in the hukou editorial, the impact was the opposite. Among many of the party-picked delegates to the NPC, he says, hukou reform became “a taboo topic”. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, told the session in March that the government would carry out reforms and repeated that requirements would be relaxed in towns and smaller cities. But he offered few details.

The complexity of hukou reform daunts Chinese leaders. It would have a huge impact on crucial aspects of the economy, from the system of land ownership in the countryside to the financing of public services. But the downsides of an unreformed system are much more obvious. The influx of migrants has caught local governments badly unprepared. Budget pressures have made them highly reluctant to spend money on helping the incomers. Registered urban residents are none too keen either. Few want their children sharing classes with kids they regard as country bumpkins.

In a cold classroom
In urban and rural China alike, the first nine years of schooling are supposed to be free. But not for rural migrants. In Beijing, as in other big cities, hundreds of privately run schools have sprung up in recent years to cater for them. At the Xiangyang Hope School in Huangcun township on the southern edge of the capital, the basic fee is 1,100 yuan ($165) a year: a snip for many urban residents, but the equivalent of several weeks’ wages for many migrants. There is an extra charge for heating; children complain that they are cold in the bitter winters. One parent says she is preparing to take her child back to her village, because conditions are better there.

The authorities have tried to muzzle the principal, Luo Chao (a migrant himself). Mr Luo was until recently the headmaster of another school to the north-east of Beijing. He says local officials told him just before the lunar new year holiday in February that the school would be demolished to make way for a private development project, and could not reopen after the break. Officials briefly detained Mr Luo and the head teacher of another condemned migrants’ school to prevent them petitioning higher authorities. Officials promised that the children would be found new places, but Mr Luo says there is no way that the local government-run school would have enough room for them.

In education, the hukou system’s absurdity is particularly glaring. Migrant children, though classified as “agricultural”, usually have no more than one brief exposure to rural life every year when they are taken to their parents’ home towns for the lunar new year festivities. School places in urban areas are so scarce that some pupils will drop out and others, though old enough for secondary school, will have to stay in primary classes. Tens of millions of children of migrant workers are, in effect, forced to stay in the countryside for schooling, looked after by other relatives. If they do move to urban areas with their parents, they may not sit exams for senior high school in the city where they live. They must return to their place of registration.

Until the late 1990s, a child’s hukou could only follow its mother’s. This meant that even a child who grew up in Beijing with a father registered as a Beijing citizen might have to travel hundreds of miles to sit the exam in his mother’s registered home town. Hukou can still affect a student’s chances of getting into top universities, for which each province has a quota of places. The quotas for provincial-level cities like Beijing and Shanghai are disproportionately large. Such privileges fuel a lively black market in highly priced hukous of favoured cities.

The relaxation of hukou rules in recent years has been half-hearted. Chongqing last year offered urban hukou to any rural resident who had graduated from senior high school and who was prepared to give up his entitlement to farm a plot of land and own a village homestead. Those are big provisos. Shanghai announced with fanfare last year that seven years’ work in the city—along with the required tax and social-security payments—would entitle a resident to hukou. But rural migrants often work without contracts and do not pay tax or contribute to welfare funds; only 3,000 of Shanghai’s millions of migrant workers would qualify, said Chinese press reports. On May 1st Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province and a magnet for migrants, began phasing out the “agricultural” distinction in its hukou documents, but the effect of this is mostly cosmetic. Beijing has been among the slowest to change. One Shanghai urban hukou-holder who has lived in Beijing for well over a decade says he still cannot get registered there.

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The Chinese-Canadian writer Denise Chong’s 1994 book “The Concubine’s Children,” a memoir of her maternal grandparents, won admiring reviews and spent more than a year and a half on The Globe and Mail’s best-seller list. But when her later book, “Egg on Mao,” came out in 2009, many people responded with trepidation. “What I heard most often was, ‘Is this a China-bashing book?’ ” Chong told me over the phone. When I saw the cover, I understood. It features a photo of Chairman Mao’s paint-splattered face underneath the bold type: “The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship.” The book tells the true story of Lu Decheng, who threw paint-filled eggs at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 protests.

Uneasy Engagement: At Book Fair, a Subplot About Chinese Rights (October 19, 2009)
Chong had under estimated the fear of offending Beijing — not in China but in the West. She cited some strongly uncomfortable reactions. A Canadian nonprofit economic development group that had invited her to appear at a fund-raiser began playing down its association with her book once learning of the title, Chong said. (The organization was trying to encourage Chinese investment in Canada.) A reporter for a Chinese-language television station backed out of an interview because of fear of Beijing, according to a conversation Chong had with a producer there.

The nervousness wasn’t limited to Canada. The United States Library of Congress declined an invitation to hold an event with Chong, suggested by the Canadian Embassy. In a recent telephone interview, a library employee involved in the discussions acknowledged that the political sensitivity of the book was one factor in the decision, along with the library’s relationship with the National Library of China.

Taken in isolation, these incidents may seem minor, but they are part of a much larger trend. As China’s influence spreads throughout the world, so does a willingness to play by its rules. In March, Google shut down its Internet search service in mainland China, saying it no longer wanted to self-censor its search results to comply with “local” law. But these laws may not be local anymore. Interviews with a number of writers and China watchers suggest that Chinese censorship is becoming an increasingly borderless phenomenon.

“I remember clearly the days when you could safely assume that as long as you wrote something abroad, it was free and clear from repercussions within China,” said Orville Schell, the director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations (where I am a fellow) and author of nine books on China. One turning point, he said, was the growth of the Internet, which increasingly unites the once “discrete worlds” of Chinese and Western reading material. Another factor is the growing business entanglement between China and the rest of the world.

“Suddenly we’re all Hong Kong, where no one wants to offend the mainland because it’s too close,” Schell said.

Last fall, in advance of the Frankfurt Book Fair, China pressured organizers to disinvite two dissident writers to a symposium on “China and the World.” (They were reinvited after a public outcry.) But more often, potential critics silence themselves pre-emptively. In a 2002 essay in The New York Review of Books called “China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier,” the China scholar Perry Link described Beijing’s censors as a dangerous creature coiled overhead. “Normally the great snake doesn’t move,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to. . . . Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments.”

I asked Link, a professor emeritus at Princeton, about the anaconda’s effects on writers outside China today. “It’s just become so taken for granted that it isn’t even recognized as self-censorship,” he said in a telephone interview. Link himself has been repeatedly denied a visa to China since the mid-’90s, apparently for helping the Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi seek refuge in the American Embassy during the 1989 protests.

Link’s predicament casts a long shadow over other China watchers. “Three or four times a month I get questions from students: How can I avoid getting on a blacklist like you?” Link said. He adds that he’s seen doctoral students avoid writing about democracy in China out of fear of the blacklist.

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In the months before his death in 1993 at the age of 88 (or, as widely rumored, as old as 100) and after 33 years in power, the president of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, fondly repeated a formula he had once announced publicly to the nation.

“A king of the Baoulé has no right to know the identity of his successor,” he is reported to have said.

Mr. Houphouët-Boigny may have belonged to royal lineage, but critics said he seemed to be forgetting that the Baoulé were only one of Ivory Coast’s 50 or so ethnic groups, and that he was the president of a would-be modern country. Few were fooled about the old leader’s real intention to rule as president for life, come what may in his aftermath. And the aftermath in Ivory Coast has indeed been grim.

West Africa’s most prosperous country has been ripped apart by a civil war whose roots trace directly back to the contested circumstances of his succession, and the old regime has been replaced by a predatory authoritarianism under new leaders determined to hang on at all costs.

If discouraging African plotlines like these were limited to Ivory Coast, few would dwell on these circumstances nearly two decades later.

Unfortunately, the muddled and forestalled succession story of Ivory Coast has become a prevalent narrative across much of the continent, symptomatic of what political analysts increasingly regard as a kind of African disease.

With increasing frequency, leaders are scheming to modify the rules governing the transfer of power with the aim of hanging on as long as possible, and in an increasingly common twist, Africa’s presidents are positioning their children to assume the reins of power after their demise.

The latest African country to be visited by this leadership crisis is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation by a big margin, and one of the world’s 10 largest oil exporters. Nigeria walked a tightrope for the last six months as its elected president, Umaru Yar’Adua, who finally died last week, disappeared from public view, while being treated for a number of serious ailments. During most of that time, he was hospitalized in Saudi Arabia and silent, save for a few words weakly uttered into the microphones of the BBC, in a bid to quell rumors that he had died or was comatose.

Ostensibly aimed at reassuring the public, Mr. Yar’Adua’s whispered mini-interview did nothing of the sort. By that point, Nigerians and foreign diplomats alike were worried about the maneuverings not of the president but of his handlers, who seemed mostly determined to prevent the constitutional transfer of power to the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, who persevered for several months as an acting head of state, but one with sharply limited powers, and a cabinet, bureaucracy and possibly even security forces reluctant to accept his leadership.

These were vulnerable times for Nigeria. What was most dangerous about this stretch was not the mere fact of a power vacuum, though. As with Ivory Coast, forestalled and unresolved successions often invite ethnic polarization and heightened competition along other identity lines, from geographic to religious to linguistic.

The Nigerian presidency has recently rotated between northerners (who are predominantly Muslim) and southerners (who are often Christian). In this instance, in Nigeria, that meant northern elites grumbling about the loss of their “turn” at the presidency with the disappearance before the end of his term of Mr. Yar’Adua, a northerner, and his replacement by Mr. Jonathan, a southerner.

Nigerians have, of course, been down this road before. Their civil conflict, the Biafran War, fought between 1967 and 1970, is one of the worst episodes of violent identity politics in post-independence Africa.

“The pathology here is the failure of elites to transfer their loyalty from their precolonial identities to the postcolonial state,” said Makau W. Mutua, the dean of the University at Buffalo Law School. “Instead of a tool for governance, the office of the president becomes a tool for domination, in which the resources of the nation are husbanded for the benefit of a family, a clan or an ethnic group.”

Although war is the most spectacularly costly consequence of fudged presidential transitions in Africa, it is far from alone in stunting the continent’s development. More common than civil war, and yet quietly devastating, due to its atrophy of the state, sycophancy and corruption, is the effective presidency-for-life.

Although few have openly proclaimed it since the days of Idi Amin in Uganda, it has become the virtual quest of so many African heads of state that it ranks today as a near standard.

Between 2005 and 2009, the presidents of three African countries, Togo, Guinea and Gabon, died in office, after a cumulative 104 years in power; two of these leaders, Omar Bongo of Gabon (42 years) and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (38 years), were succeeded by their sons. Political analysts say that similar scenarios could unfold in countries as diverse as Egypt, Libya, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso, where long-ruling African leaders appear to be grooming their children to follow them.

“What we’re seeing is what happens in places where the only way to get rich or to stay rich is through political power,” said Patrick Keenan, a scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. “This is not about resource wealth alone, but wealth in general. The people in these regimes hang on for dear life.”

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Review — May / June 2010

By Howard W. French

My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times | By Gerald M. Boyd | Lawrence Hill Books | 402 pages, $26.95

The entire arc of Gerald Boyd’s remarkable life is contained in the first few pages of his posthumous memoir, My Times in Black and White. In the opening paragraphs, he sketches out his duties as second-in-command in the newsroom—a job that had once seemed unimaginable for “a little black boy from the streets of poor St. Louis.” We are still in the prologue when Boyd is summoned to the fourteenth-floor suite of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, one afternoon in June 2003.

By this point, only one dream remained for the fifty-two-year-old Boyd: to ascend to the post of executive editor. This would be the final, defining triumph in the classic life of an American striver. Instead, he was abruptly dismissed as managing editor, and cut loose by the institution that had defined his life, The New York Times.

The Jayson Blair scandal had exploded earlier that spring, and Sulzberger was desperate to shield the Times from further damage. Unfortunately, two separate feeding frenzies had already been set in motion. One involved the schadenfreude of industry competitors, who were delighted to see America’s greatest newspaper being brought low by a reporter who plagiarized and made things up. The other fueled a head-hunting expedition within the company itself, whose goal was to bring down a hard-driving (and now widely hated) executive editor—and along with him, his deputy, a black man who had dared to dream about reaching the very top.

As recounted by Boyd, the scene in Sulzberger’s office is brief, yet it packs an electric tension. In sum, the publisher did little explaining. Boyd, like his boss, Howell Raines, had to go. At the time, the dismissed man was unable to muster even a single question.

In retrospect, Boyd (who died prematurely of cancer in 2006) imputes his downfall to a crude act of racial association. Both he and Blair, the troubled young reporter at the heart of the plagiarism scandal, were black: if Blair were guilty, then Boyd must have been guilty of something, too.

Many people will be drawn to this book for its implicit promise of behind-the-scenes gossip about the Times. Their curiosity is understandable—although the paper is an institution committed to openness, transparency, and accountability in public life, its own internal workings can be often as difficult to parse as, say, procurement at the Pentagon.

Many others, of course, will consider this story old news—to the relief, one suspects, of various higher-ups at the paper. Boyd himself gained clarity on many things during his final, ruminative years. But perspective about the lasting importance of the Jayson Blair affair was not one of them. He seemed to imagine that historians would long remember the scandal that brought him down.

They will not. The industry has undergone such radical transformations since then, between the rise of the Internet and the gradual, agonizing death of the old newspaper business model, that the details of this episode already feel like ancient history.

This observation takes little away from Boyd’s book, which strongly deserves to be read. My Times in Black and White manages the rare feat of pulling off at least three distinctive narratives without any of them feeling forced or contrived.

The first of these is an affecting up-from-poverty story of the sort that used to be common in American letters. Boyd traces his family from places like Itta Bena, Mississippi, where they were Delta cotton farmers, to inner-city St. Louis, where the author wore painstakingly patched clothing and played with toys from the Salvation Army.

Boyd’s trajectory was lifted by Upward Bound, a forgotten element of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. While he was still a teenager, Boyd was placed in an integrated summer program on a college campus, where he became the layout editor of the program’s newspaper.

“I had always liked writing, but I had never experienced the high that came from having my words in a newspaper,” he recalls. “I could be angry or didactic or whimsical and light-hearted. And I could hide behind my byline, engaging and enraging readers as I saw fit. . . . I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

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From the Letters desk:

Published: April 25, 2010
To the Editor:

In “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” (Op-Ed, April 23), Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. Despite Mr. Gates’s contention that “there is very little discussion” of this fact, it hardly qualifies as news; today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information.

Mr. Gates’s point is that the African role complicates the process of assigning blame for slavery and thus discussion of apologies and reparations by the United States. I believe that apologies serve little purpose and that reparations are unworkable. But the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808.

It was Americans, not Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave system the modern world has known, a system whose profits accrued not only to slaveholders but also to factory owners and merchants in the North. Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade within the United States, in which an estimated two million men, women and children were sold between 1820 and 1860.

Identifying Africa’s part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront the institution’s central role in our own history.

Eric Foner
New York, April 23, 2010

The writer is a professor of history at Columbia University.

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China's foreign publicity has always been subjected to two main factors: Lack of a platform for publicity and published information are not in line with the mainstream discourse of the international public opinion.

We do have some foreign television and broadcasting but most of them cannot be received in many countries due to political or marketing reasons. So China, in fact, has few channels to get its voice heard internationally.

Moreover, Western media tend to highlight reports on China according to their preferences, including misleading or negative information on certain crucial issues.

In addition, Western media have a firm grip on the global market share of audiences and the political and social doctrines inherent in their reports have been widely accepted. China's current discourse hierarchy cannot match the international "mainstream discourse" and the gap and difference had resulted in our plight in foreign publicity.

This author believes that it would be useful to improve China's national image through neutral culture publicity in commercials of domestic enterprises. In this regard, China can learn from Russia's experience.

Dobolyi Alexandra, a Hungarian politician and Member of the Party of European Socialists, who visited Beijing on Sept 20, 2008, talked about Russia's publicity experience toward Europe with me. She said that she provided for Russian leader Vladimir Putin a public relation proposal for improving Russia's deteriorating image in Europe. The method is that three Russian energy giants, including Gasprom, Rusatum and Luckoil, jointly fund releasing commercial advertising in various media outlets of one European media group.

As a pilot project, they first focused the publicity in Hungary through RTL (Radio & Television LUX) owned by Dutch and Luxembourgers, which hold large local market coverage. According to the contract, except for commercials (five minutes per day before news), RTL also provides golden hours once a week for broadcasting short film series about Russian conditions and customs. The short film series on various subject matters were projected in a non-political, light-hearted, and funny manner to display Russia's history, culture and geography. Cost for the public relations exercise totaled $1.5 million a year.

According to two surveys with samples carried out in Hungary before and after the program started, the image of Russians among Hungarians had improved remarkably, beyond the expectation of the program's designers and investors.

There are three factors contributing to such good effect of this simple and low-cost publicity plan.

First, the publicity took advantage of Western media as the carrier. The reliability of the publicity was raised when targeted audiences received information about Russia through Western media.

Second, the advertising contents are non-political, which are conducive to water down Russia's negative image or perception among the local audience.

Third, as the Russian government becomes the de facto commercial client of the media group, the media would inevitably think twice before they criticize the programs, or Russia for the matter.

Dobolyi believes that it is worthy for China to invest on a public relation exercise in Western mainstream media. Publicizing China through Western media could yield twice the result with half the effort. The audience in Western countries is liable to accept the non-political short films, which could in turn soften or challenge negative news of China.

In the process of forging their self-owned brand, Chinese enterprises certainly need to launch commercials worldwide. If this market resource could be organized and exploited, the Chinese government will obtain influence on major media in different countries. The following are some concrete suggestions.

First, set up an international advertising association of Chinese enterprises affiliated to the State Council Information Office. The association could sign long-term contracts of commercial release with the world's major media groups, which at the same time could broadcast or publish non-political short films or articles about China. The short films and articles could be supplied by China or jointly made by the concerned media group and China.

Second, the association could transfer the commercial time periods to Chinese enterprises at a preferential price. On the one hand, this could promote Chinese manufacturing enterprises to improve international competitiveness; on the other, it is a new approach for China's foreign publicity, which could further fuel the growth of China's soft power.

The author is an associate professor at Renmin University of China.

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A new biography of Barack Obama, The Bridge, takes its cue from his youthful struggle with identity but, Howard W French writes, race is far from the whole story.

Just who is Barack Obama?

Fifteen months into his presidency, we may have acquired an intuitive sense of the answer to this question, and yet Obama remains elusive, like a fidgety subject posing for a daguerreotype. He nods and bobs forward and back, in and out of focus, never altogether fixed.

By now we have all been sufficiently exposed to the Obama act to suspect real method. The recent passage of major healthcare reform presents one case in point: early in his term, Obama placed healthcare at the centre of his domestic agenda, and yet he long seemed content to avoid defining his own parameters for the reform, or even, for that matter, establishing a bottom line.

Along the way, compromise with irredentist Republicans was treated as an almost sacred virtue – maddeningly so for Obama supporters, who began to suspect that he was weak, or worse, fired by insipid conciliatory instincts. Until, at the 11th hour, the president revealed a hitherto unseen mailed fist, and the bill was pushed through Congress without a single supporting vote from an opposition that had been marginalised by its very refusal to negotiate.

The key to this unusual style, if one is to be found, would seem to exist in Obama’s own life story, uncommonly rich in crossed genes and mixed signals. This story has now received its third major retelling, in the form of a massive new biography by the New Yorker editor David Remnick. The first version, of course, was Obama’s own extraordinary memoir, Dreams from my Father; the second was a more collective affair, composed of thousands of articles about candidate Obama that obsessively excavated his mixed racial background.

It is a story that begins with the shadowy figure of Obama’s father, a familiar-seeming character of the African independence era. Barack Obama Sr came to the United States in 1959 in pursuit of a first-rate education, and his clear hope was to use this gift as a springboard to leadership of his own newly born nation. There is breathtaking ambition here, to be sure, though the arrogance is leavened in part by something like altruism: the desire to modernise his country and to help realise the potential of Africa.

But as a member of Kenya’s emerging elite – or, more pointedly, as one of what the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah called the “been-to generation” who spent quality time in the West – he experienced a kind of schizophrenia as he struggled to reconcile new and old world views.

The senior Obama would leave an unfulfilled legacy in both places: his American record is that of a selfish husband and abandoning father, and when the prodigal son returns to Kenya, he discovers that far from preparing him to become a transformative national hero, his exposure to the broader world has somehow ruined him for his own country, where he’ll never quite fit in. He had earned fancy degrees and lost the African art of palaver; no longer could he bring himself to listen or persuade, preferring to bluntly speak his mind instead.

The tragic beauty in this story is that the Obama we know, the abandoned son, seems to have studied his father’s example intently. There is a similar ambition, and even arrogance, and yet the son manages a reverse trajectory, realising his extravagant goals through mastery of his tongue, through sublimation and restraint.

From his mother Barack Obama would seem to have inherited many of the traits that made this possible: a serene faith in things working out, equipoise and bedrock idealism. Her roots may be less exotic to most Americans than his father’s, but hers is a story with its own deep and abiding mystery: of corn-fed Kansans (her parents) who married young and in secret and quickly grew restless, moving all about the country as they reared their only child. Having dreamed of a boy, they named her Stanley Ann.

As Ann was graduating from high school, in Seattle, the family made a final move – to Hawaii, then a still truly remote American outpost in the Pacific. The family wanderlust impacted her lastingly. Amid the generalised conformity of the Eisenhower era, while her high school peers amused themselves with sock hops and Elvis records, she developed a taste for jazz, for progressive politics, and for challenging books on sociology and cultural anthropology.

As her intellectual curiosity blossomed, its focus turned increasingly overseas, toward the developing world, in particular, which in the occurrence meant toward darker skinned peoples, to whom she would seem to have had precious little exposure as a girl.

In spite of this, with time it is she, not Barack Sr, who will prove easily the more adaptive of the two parents, the most comfortable in her skin, the best at assimilation. Years later, while doing field research, she would appear more at home in the villages of rural Indonesia than urban Indonesians; it was she who tutored her young son on the moral power of Martin Luther King’s oratory and the brilliance of the black gospel giant Mahalia Jackson.

At the University of Hawaii, Ann met and was promptly swept off her feet by the significantly older, self-prepossessed intellectual newly arrived from Kenya. One strains to imagine their story unfolding in Moline or Omaha, or to be fair, in anything but the most cosmopolitan of American cities of the day. And even then it would have been an unusual coupling. But the backdrop turns out to have been special.

“Since the 1920s,” as Remnick writes, Hawaii had been celebrated “as a kind of racial Eden”, where no group, including whites, was numerous enough to become an oppressive majority.

Shoulder rubbing, and more, between natives, whites, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and even a tiny dash of African-Americans, usually brought to the mid-Pacific by the United States Armed Forces, was typically relaxed. So much so that when Paul Robeson visited Hawaii in 1948 on a concert tour, Remnick quotes him telling reporters: “It would be a tremendous impact on the United States if Hawaii is admitted as a state. Americans wouldn’t believe the racial harmony that exists here. It could speed democracy in the United States.”

I know more than a little of this world myself, having brought my own heterogeneous family here – a West African wife and me, her pale-skinned African-American husband – between assignments on her continent and in East Asia, and watching my nappy-headed sons settle in with few of the strained racial vibes I had known growing up or working on the mainland.

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DO CHINA’S GRAND DESIGNS PROMISE THE TRANSFORMATION,AT LAST, OF A STAR-CROSSED CONTINENT? OR MERELY ITS EXPLOITATION? THE AUTHOR TRAVELS DEEP INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA, SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS.

By Howard W. French
PHOTOGRAPHY BY THE AUTHOR

A PORTER HELPED ME with my bags as I made my way, sweating, into the train station in Dar es Salaam. In addition to my normal complement of luggage, I had brought a carton full of provisions, including several gallons of water, for a trip of uncertain duration. With the carton perched on his head, the porter led me through the vast, densely packed concourse and into the waiting salon.

There, a clock sat high on the wall, its hands frozen since who knows when. Around the perimeter of the room, above the upholstered benches, the faded yellow walls bore what looked like a generation’s worth of oily stains, laid down in layers in the shape of heads and shoulders by people leaning back, like me, bludgeoned by the thick afternoon heat and waiting for the call to board.

I was about to embark on one of the world’s great train rides, a journey from this muggy Indian Ocean port city, the commercial capital of Tanzania, to the edge of the Zambian Copper Belt, deep in the heart of southern Africa. The official who’d sold me my ticket had seemed puzzled when I asked when the train would arrive at its final destination, and he refused to guess; in recent years, the 1,156-mile trip has been known to take anywhere from its originally scheduled two days to an entire week.

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The railroad—known as the Tazara line—was built by China in the early 1970s, at a cost of nearly $500 million, an extraordinary expenditure in the thick of the Cultural Revolution, and a symbol of Beijing’s determination to hold its own with Washington and Moscow in an era when Cold War competition over Africa raged fierce. At the time of its construction, it was the third-largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in Africa, after the Aswan Dam in Egypt and the Volta Dam in Ghana.

Today the Tazara is a talisman of faded hopes and failed economic schemes, an old and unreliable railway with too few working locomotives. Only briefly a thriving commercial artery, it has been diminished by its own decay and by the roads and air routes that have sprung up around it. Maintenance costs have saddled Tanzania and Zambia with debts reportedly as high as $700 million in total, and the line now has only about 300 of the 2,000 wagons it needs to function normally, according to Zambian news reports.

Yet the railway traces a path through a region where hopes have risen again, rekindled by a new sort of development also driven by China—and on an unprecedented scale. All across the continent, Chinese companies are signing deals that dwarf the old railroad project. The most heavily reported involve oil production; since the turn of the millennium, Chinese companies have muscled in on lucrative oil markets in places like Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, and Sudan. But oil is neither the largest nor the fastest-growing part of the story. Chinese firms are striking giant mining deals in places like Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and building what is being touted as the world’s largest iron mine in Gabon. They are prospecting for land on which to build huge agribusinesses. And to get these minerals and crops to market, they are building major new ports and thousands of miles of highway.

In most of Africa’s capital cities and commercial centers, it’s hard to miss China’s new presence and influence. In Dar, one morning before my train trip, I made my way to the roof of my hotel for a bird’s-eye view of the city below. A British construction foreman, there to oversee the hotel’s expansion, pointed out the V-shaped port that the British navy had seized after a brief battle with the Germans early in the First World War. From there, the British-built portion of the city extended primly inland, along a handful of long avenues. For the most part, downtown Dar was built long ago, and its low-slung concrete buildings, long exposed to the moisture of the tropics, have taken on a musty shade of gray.

“Do you see all the tall buildings coming up over there?” the foreman asked, a hint of envy in his voice as his arm described an arc along the waterfront that shimmered in the distance. “That’s the new Dar es Salaam, and most of it is Chinese-built.”

I counted nearly a dozen large cranes looming over construction sites along the beachfront Msasani Peninsula, a sprawl of resorts and restaurants catering mostly to Western tourists. Near them, sheltered coyly behind high walls, lie upscale brothels worked by Chinese prostitutes. In the foreground, to the northwest, sits Kariakoo, a crowded slum where Chinese merchants flog refrigerators, air conditioners, mobile phones, and other cheap gadgets from narrow storefronts. To the south lies Tanzania’s new, state-of-the-art, 60,000-seat national sports stadium, funded by China and opened in February 2009 by President Hu Jintao.

“Statistics are hard to come by, but China is probably the biggest single investor in Africa,” said Martyn Davies, the director of the China Africa Network at the University of Pretoria. “They are the biggest builders of infrastructure. They are the biggest lenders to Africa, and China-Africa trade has just pushed past $100 billion annually.”

Davies calls the Chinese boom “a phenomenal success story for Africa,” and sees it continuing indefinitely. “Africa is the source of at least one-third of the world’s commodities”—commodities China will need, as its manufacturing economy continues to grow—“and once you’ve understood that, you understand China’s determination to build roads, ports, and railroads all over Africa.”

Davies is not alone in his enthusiasm. “No country has made as big an impact on the political, economic and social fabric of Africa as China has since the turn of the millennium,” writes Dambisa Moyo, a London-based economist, in her influential book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo, a 40-year-old Zambian who has worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and as a consultant for the World Bank, believes that foreign aid is a curse that has crippled and corrupted Africa—and that China offers a way out of the mess the West has made.

“Between 1970 and 1998,” she writes, “when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to a staggering 66 percent.” Subsidized lending, she says, encourages African governments to make sloppy, wasteful decisions. It breeds corruption, by allowing politicians to siphon off poorly monitored funds. And it forestalls national development, which she says begins with the building of a taxation system and the attraction of foreign commercial capital. In Moyo’s view, even the West’s “obsession with democracy” has been harmful. In poor countries, she writes, “democratic regimes find it difficult to push through economically beneficial legislation amid rival parties and jockeying interests.” Sustainable democracy, she feels, is possible only after a strong middle class has emerged.

In its recent approach to Africa, China could not be more different from the West. It has focused on trade and commercially justified investment, rather than aid grants and heavily subsidized loans. It has declined to tell African governments how they should run their countries, or to make its investments contingent on government reform. And it has moved quickly and decisively, especially in comparison to many Western aid establishments. Moyo’s attitude toward the boom in Chinese business in Africa is amply revealed by the name of a chapter in her book: “The Chinese Are Our Friends.” Perhaps what Africa needs, she notes, is a reliable commercial partner, not a high-minded scold. And perhaps Africa should take its lessons from a country that has recently pulled itself out of poverty, not countries that have been rich for generations.

“I would say this is a transformational moment for Africa,” Moyo told me from London last spring. “I see the explosive development of infrastructure. I see people producing more food and having more jobs … And besides, I don’t see how otherwise you are going to get a civil society, except by building up a middle class.”

Even taking the recent global downturn into account, this has been a hopeful time for a historically downtrodden continent. Per capita income for sub-Saharan Africa nearly doubled between 1997 and 2008, driven up by a long boom in commodities, by a decrease in the prevalence of war, and by steady improvements in governance. And while the downturn has brought commodity prices low for the time being, there is a growing sense that the world’s poorest continent has become a likely stage for globalization’s next act. To many, China—cash-rich, resource-hungry, and unfickle in its ardor—now seems the most likely agent for this change.

But of course, Africa has had hopeful moments before, notably in the early 1960s, at the start of the independence era, when many governments opted for large, state-owned economic schemes that quickly foundered, and again in the 1970s, another era of booming commodity prices, when rampant corruption, heavy debt, and armed conflict doomed any hopes of economic takeoff.

China’s burgeoning partnership with Africa raises several momentous questions: Is a hands-off approach to governmental affairs the right one? Can Chinese money and ambition succeed where Western engagement has manifestly failed? Or will China become the latest in a series of colonial and neocolonial powers in Africa, destined like the others to leave its own legacy of bitterness and disappointment? I was heading south on the Tazara—through the past and into the future, to the sites of some of China’s most ambitious efforts on the continent—to try to get some early sense of how the whole grand project was proceeding.

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7 February 2010

Challenge is a word that carries a heavy burden of nuance: it can convey a sense of threat, it can be an inspiration, it poses questions – often difficult ones – and it can also be double-edged, in that the challenge frequently applies as much to the alleged challenger as it does to those on the receiving end. Where China is concerned, the word is appropriate in every sense; but an important part of the challenge is precisely to decide which aspect is of the greatest importance. Only having done this can we attempt to frame policies, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policymakers, which will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s — and tomorrow’s — China poses to us, and to itself.
If there is a single word that should be applied to China, whether speaking of its international impact [1] or its domestic situation [2], it should be ‘complexity’. There is simply nothing simple about China; and this being the case, we should be distrustful of any simple descriptors or characterisations, be they benign — China’s peaceful rise, harmonious world, harmonious society — or the opposite, such as comparisons of a rising China with Wilhelmine Germany at the beginning of the last century.
And with complexity comes size: expectations that China will take any path, the nature of which can be predicted from the experience of other countries are almost certainly going to be proved wrong. This was so of American hopes for a Westernised, democratic China emerging from World War II; it was so of the expectation post-1949 that China would become a clone as well as a client of the Soviet Union; and expectations have similarly been disappointed in both the pre-and post-1989 phases of the era of reform and opening.
China is just too big, and carries too great a civilisational and historical throw-weight to be anything other than sui generis. As Lu Xun, one of the greatest Chinese writers of the first half of the 20th century, told his readers, you make your path by walking it. This is as true of China now as it was then, but the implications for the rest of the world are now even greater — far greater — than when he wrote these words.
It is relatively easy to predict that in such and such a year China’s GDP will have reached a certain figure, that it will occupy such and such a global ranking in terms of size or in terms of per capita income, that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will be rated at such and such a level in terms of relative size, procurement, capabilities, and the like. These are all of course vital judgments to be made, and whatever the specifics, it seems clear enough that whatever difficulties China faces, domestically and internationally, in pursuing its growth goals, it is going to play an ever greater role in world affairs. Indeed, for better or for worse, it is doing so already. But the more difficult, and more crucial question is, assuming that China’s comprehensive strength, or global ranking, will place it amongst the most powerful and influential nations in the world by, say, 2020, or 2030, what sort of a China is it going to be?
Here our task is complicated not only by the sheer complexity of the issues to be addressed, and by the often unhelpful cacophony of foreign comment, but by the fact that the Chinese government — not just the present Chinese government, but others before it (although the Chinese Communist Party state has greater ideological inclinations and more effective tools than most of its predecessors) — is committed [3]to presenting a single narrative [4] of China’s rise as interpreted and enunciated by its official organs.
Yet anyone who has the slightest understanding of contemporary China will know that behind the editorials of the People’s Daily, the statements of Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespeople, the presentation of the news by CCTV, or the work of officially approved film directors, there is a hugely complex world of debate, current and counter-current, introspection, historical and cultural revisionism, as much within the organs of state and party as outside. The degree to which this debate is tolerated waxes and wanes, and things can be said by some people, or within some bodies, that are forbidden to others. Some of this debate we can see, some of it is largely hidden. Some of it is inspiring, encouraging, some of it is more than a little scary or plumb crazy. But it is here, as much as in the more ostensibly transparent narratives approved for public — and foreign — consumption and edification, that the vital question of what sort of a China we are going to be dealing with 10, 20 or 30 years from now is being worked out.
Globalisation is another complicating factor that cuts both ways. As China becomes increasingly involved in the rest of the world, and vice-versa, the simple binary division between domestic and foreign — encapsulated in the once much-used formulation nei wai you bie — is increasingly untenable. Whatever they may wish, China’s rulers, and for that matter ordinary Chinese, are just going to have to get used to the fact that things that happen at home will impact on the way they are viewed from outside, and that this will in turn impact on decision-making relative to China by other countries. By the same token, foreign companies [5] will find it increasingly difficult to regard with insouciance events in China that disturb their shareholders. The same, of course, applies to the treatment of Chinese, whether individuals, companies or representatives of the state, in other countries.
This means that in order to judge what sort of a country China is going to become, there is virtually nothing that happens in China that doesn’t matter, or that we don’t need to know about. The days when we could just look at steel and grain production figures, imports and exports, look at the PLA training and recruitment cycle, work out the pecking order in the standing committee of the Politburo, are over. Of course all these things are of the utmost importance. But as we seek to understand a country that is reassuming its historical place as one of the leading nations of the world, we need to know so much more: arguments about history and culture are important, not only to the Chinese, but to us.
To give only one obvious example: whether the standard for judging previous dynasties should be their achievements in culture and learning, or the degree to which central authority was imposed and borders expanded, matters to us. Similarly, the whole question of the reappraisal of traditional Chinese culture; how the modern Chinese state maintains the multinational character of the Manchu Qing Empire; questions of centralism versus federalism; the reappraisal of the achievements of the Nationalist government and its model of modernisation (not to mention its territorial claims largely inherited by the PRC, including, topically, the South China Sea); the debates about democracy; the rethinking of the post May-4 modernisation project . . . to name but a few issues that may once have seemed arcane, but in fact have major implications for all of us, not just the Chinese themselves, as they continue the process of walking a path that is increasingly going to merge with the global highway.
The first and greatest challenge, especially for those of us who grew up under the comfortable protection of British and US naval supremacy, and in a cultural world made in Palestine, Greece, Rome and Europe, is the challenge of understanding.
This essay is featured in the latest issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ [6]).
Richard Rigby is head of the China Institute at the Australian National University and was formerly an Australian diplomat and analyst specialising on Chinese and Asian affairs.

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In his own words, he describes the books as: "a look at what happens to those of us who venture into streets not our own in pursuit of the awareness those streets (one hopes) can offer -- what happens morally and psychologically within us, and what subsequently happens to us as writers, photographers, filmmakers, or academic researchers."

In a brief but intense book, Coles delivers.