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

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
May 22, 2008

CHENGDU, China: The colleague trembled as she spoke. Tears welled up in her eyes and poured forth. A question was formulated, but had barely been posed before the emotion became too great, and she excused herself and left the room.

What was the point, she wanted to know, of American journalists asking so many probing questions about the proper response to the earthquake that devastated Sichuan Province last week? What good was served with people still dying and desperate rescue efforts still under way, she demanded, second-guessing the coverage of the Chinese press and asking why they hadn’t posed harder questions?

The colleague in question is not alone. Waves of emotion have washed over all of China throughout this crisis, and from a human standpoint there is nothing more understandable. But for this working journalist, there was an equally deep sense of puzzlement. What does a deep sense of pain and compassion for the victims have to do with the requirements of journalism? To put an even finer point on things, should tough questions ever go unasked?

Already, the Sichuan earthquake is being seen here in generational terms. As widely observed, it is the first time China has suffered a natural disaster on this scale since the Tangshan earthquake in July 1976, when at least 250,000 people died. Back then, international aid was spurned by a xenophobic China, and even within the country news of the event was suppressed for weeks.

As it happens, that same year was also the last time that China conducted an exercise in national mourning, not for Tangshan’s victims, but to mark the passing of Mao Zedong, who died that September.

Another generational watershed has been reached with the Sichuan earthquake this month, but it is one that many Chinese journalists may never realize, and for those who do, it is the kind of event that is too delicate to risk discussing in print.

During the Tiananmen protests of 1989, China’s hitherto tightly controlled media were as much part of the wave of social ferment as the students who occupied the Beijing square. Even while worried old veterans of Mao’s revolution led by Deng Xiaoping plotted the restoration of order that ended with a violent show of military force, China’s media were giving vent to an extraordinarily free range of opinion about the protests. State television even got into the act.

It was, as a Shanghai television producer told me last week, simply a question of covering matters of vital national importance. “This is about China,” said Shi Hong, the coordinator of the Shanghai Media Group television network’s earthquake coverage, explaining why his station could not afford to follow orders from the powerful Propaganda Department not to send reporters into the quake zone.

Subsequent events showed that China’s propaganda authorities still have a lot of tools in their kit. State ownership of all media is the most obvious lever, followed by the careful vetting of top editors, who amount to political appointees chosen for their trustworthiness. Most powerful of all, though, was a straightforward appeal to nationalism that most people, reporters included, eagerly responded to.

Three days of national mourning were declared, and the entire nation was called to order. Television earthquake coverage went wall to wall, including endlessly repeated footage of President Hu Jintao stiffly cheering up the victims during his inspection tour of the disaster zone. Front pages across the country were printed in somber black and white. A ban on popular entertainment was applied so broadly that even the use of popular songs as telephone ring tones was suspended.

As if with a snap of the fingers, overnight, the entire Chinese press corps was solemnly marching to the same drummer, hammering away at the need for national unity, and echoing familiar propaganda themes from the past.

Much has changed in China since his passing, but Mao himself would have been proud of the resilience of the system he created, with all of its attendant instincts of emotional nationalism, of fluid mass mobilization and of indoctrination.

Many of the young journalists didn’t even wait for the signal to fall into line. They felt it was the normal thing suspending hard questions about the disaster, applauding the rescue effort and the wave of patriotism and civic spirit washing over the nation.

“Once the disaster has passed, we will look back and question why so many buildings have fallen,” said a young reporter from Shanghai who violated the initial propaganda order by reporting from the field right after the quake. “We can question things later, but at a time like this, what sense does it make? It’s not the moment to inquire whose responsibility it is. We should devote all our energy instead to getting over the difficult moment.”

So many others invoked America’s experience of 9/11, at once an overly facile and inexact parallel, that one suspects guidance from the propaganda authorities.

One wishes to say to these young reporters, just as I tried clumsily to explain to my colleague, that there is no inevitable tension between compassion and love of nation and the hard-headed pursuit of the truth.

One wishes to say that government-encouraged expressions of nationalism and rallying around the flag pose potentially troubling questions wherever they arise. I would say that there is no better time to ask the difficult question than in the midst of crisis. That is the calling of a good press.

Raising questions about the slowness in opening doors to foreign rescue experts, or about disaster preparedness, or building safety and corruption, to name but a few issues, is neither gratuitous troublemaking nor divisive. It is meant to serve the public interest, not harm it.

One wishes, finally, to say that knowledge of China’s modern history suggests that the greatest catastrophes have occurred in times of enforced unanimity, precisely when the urgency of following a common call ruled out asking questions.

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Copyright The Washington Post

We should all be able to agree that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was “confrontational.” He was also wise, measured, visionary, good-natured and generous of heart. Like most great figures in history, he was complicated. But he didn’t ask for an end to Jim Crow repression, he demanded it; he didn’t request equal justice, he required it. Confrontation, basically, was the whole point.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts apparently believes otherwise and has kicked off a useful debate — more of a reality check, actually — about how King is remembered. It seems to depend on who’s doing the remembering.

At issue is the statue that will stand as King’s official monument in Washington. The arts commission, which rules on the aesthetics of such memorials, has sent a letter to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation complaining that the depiction is “a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character.”

What they thought they were getting, commissioners wrote, was a “dynamic” and “meditative” King. Leave aside for the moment the question of how any sculptor is supposed to make someone look dynamic and meditative at the same time. The point is that the arts commission, for some reason, was not comfortable with the image of a stern-faced, 28-foot-tall black man who has his arms crossed.

That’s what Lei Yixin, one of China’s most celebrated sculptors, is concocting. There was grumbling from American artists, especially black American artists, that a Chinese sculptor was chosen to create our nation’s monument to King. Now, however, African American commentators are rushing to defend Lei’s “confrontational” vision — or, at least, to slam the arts commission for trying to make a righteously angry man look like Mister Rogers without the cardigan.

Here’s what is really going on: It’s clear that some people would prefer to remember King as some sort of paragon of forbearance who, through suffering and martyrdom, shamed the nation into doing the right thing. In truth, King was supremely impatient. He was a man of action who used pressure, not shame, to change the nation. The Montgomery bus boycott, to cite just one example, was less an act of passive resistance than a campaign of economic warfare. Yes, he knew that televised images of black people walking miles to work would help mold opinion around the world. But he also knew that depriving the bus companies of needed revenue would hit the Jim Crow system where it really hurt.

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Copyright World Affairs

The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt

For years I’ve been active in Freedom House, the oldest of the private organizations advocating for international freedom and democracy. We’ve seen progress, especially since 1989. We’ve seen backsliding. And we’ve seen stasis, notably 1.3-billion-persons’-worth of stasis in China. Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.

Yet we at Freedom House cannot be exactly right. A mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

Freedom and democracy are abstract. Daily life is concrete. This is not to denigrate the importance of the abstract. God himself is abstract, until he strikes us with a bolt of lightning. The monks and nuns of political science may be overwhelmed by abstraction, as are the victims of such abstractions as Mao Thought. But, mercifully, quotidian existence is conducted mostly in the world of things and stuff.
I went to China for a month in 2006 and ended up taking a tour of the world of things and stuff. I didn’t mean to. I was just sightseeing. I’d only been to the mainland once and then only to Shanghai. I wanted to visit the Three Gorges before the new dam turned the Yangtze into a cesspool. I wanted a look at the Terracotta Warriors. And that sort of thing.

I was traveling with old friends from Hong Kong, whom I’ll call Tom and Mai. Tom has spent decades in the mining and metallurgy business. He was breaking ground on an ore-processing plant in Nanjing. He seems to know everyone in China who has anything to do with iron, steel, coal, or beer. And Mai and her brothers owned a company in Hong Kong that brokered textile machinery. When China initiated its “Open Door” economic policy, Mai would take mainland clients to Europe (where they’d encounter their first fork) and arrange for the purchase of used spinning and weaving equipment.

I took a lot of notes, with Mai doing most of the translating. But I didn’t know what to do with the notes when I came back. It took me almost two years to realize that what I have is a survey of “the tacit consent of the governed.” Not that the Chinese I talked to were taciturn. They were forthcoming enough about their government, but they didn’t care much about the political theory of it. Tom said, “Their attitude is, ‘Shhh, politics is sleeping, don’t wake it up.’”

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it. We need to listen to what they don’t say. Here is a record of what Chinese think of politics when politics isn’t what they’re thinking of.

I had been to Shanghai in 1997, and it looked like a knock-off of a great city, a sort of Made-in-Hong-Kong Hong Kong. Everything had been built yesterday. And they’d built a lot of it—more than they seemed to have any use for. There was a marsh called Pudong on the far side of the Huangpu River, where the ground was so low-lying the water and sewer pipes had to be laid above the pavement. Pudong was dotted with empty office complexes and buildings full of unrented apartments.

Now Pudong is some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Mai, Tom and I stopped at a condominium where the sale price was $10,000 per square meter. Despite arriving in a chauffeured car wearing our corporate boardroom clothes, we were turned away at the gate. An attractive but severe young lady in black Prada told us we’d need to make an appointment days in advance.

From Pudong, I took a train with Tom and Mai west a couple of hours to Wuxi, a city of five million people that I’d never heard of. It’s the size of ten Clevelands. And if you wonder what happened to Cleveland, Wuxi is where it went. Industrial parks spread for miles, with neat, sleek, enormous buildings set in swaths of lawn and landscaping—Volvo, GE, Panasonic, Sony, Westinghouse, Nikon, Bridgestone, Bosch, and The Nature Factory (I’d wondered where that was made).

We were given a tour by Mr. Chen, a manufacturer of fleece and plush fabrics. He was proud of Wuxi and so proud of his own fabrics that, although he’s the CEO of the company, he carries samples in the trunk of his Audi Quattro.

Mr. Chen sent us on in his car to Nanjing, where Tom took me to a steel mill he used to run. The company that Tom used to work for bought the mill from the Chinese government for $1 on the understanding that it would be kept in operation. The mill was eventually sold, for considerably more than $1 to Mr. Liu and Mrs. Sung.

The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the two or three hundred “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over. Plus the thousands of workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the local family that had the “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole an entire railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if the train didn’t have a track that led directly to them.

“Here’s where one guy threw a wrench at me,” Tom said as we climbed the tower to the blast furnace.

“What’d you do?”

“I tossed him down the stairs,” Tom said. “Rule of law is the cornerstone of capitalism.”

Tom’s worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Amidst the throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit frizzier than is usual in China, survived.) The man’s widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill’s gates. As compensation for her husband’s death, she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband’s gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.

“I had to call in the Communist Party officials,” Tom said.

“Did they ship everybody off to prison camp or something?” I asked.

“They didn’t do anything. They said it was my problem. I settled with the widow for a couple of hundred bucks.”

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Copyright The Guardian

Condoleezza Rice today entered the race debate that has been a simmering undercurrent of the presidential campaign when she said it had been “important” for Barack Obama to give his landmark speech on race and defended the patriotism of African Americans.

The US secretary of state also decried the “birth defect” of slavery that she said has left Americans struggling to confront racism.

“Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together - Europeans by choice and Africans in chains,” Rice told the Washington Times. “That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

Rice, the second African-American and second female in US history to lead the state department, grew up in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement in America. One of her childhood playmates was killed in an infamous 1963 church bombing committed by white supremacists, whom Rice has called “terrorists”.

She declined to comment directly on the presidential campaign in the Times interview, saying only that it was “important” that Obama “gave it for a whole host of reasons”, but strongly defended the patriotism of African Americans. Video clips of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, shouting, “God damn America,” ignited the race row that has been dominating the Democratic presidential race. Conservatives have also accused Obama and his wife, Michelle, of displaying insufficient love for the country.

“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them - and that’s our legacy,” Rice said.

When Rice addressed race in the incendiary aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she told the New York Times that the US “is about 100 percent ahead of any place else in the world in issues of race”.

In today’s interview, she did note the “enormous progress” in race relations that is reflected by her ascendance in politics.

Republican strategists often mention Rice as a possible running mate for John McCain in this year’s election, but she expressed a preference for returning to her California home after George Bush leaves office.

Rice’s success drew heated criticism in 2003 from Reverend Wright, who dubbed her “Condoskeeza” in a sermon.

“For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10m blacks who cannot read,” Wright said at the time. “For every one Condoskeeza Rice, you’ve got 1m in prison.”

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Copyright The Online Photographer

Today, May 15th, is the 50th anniversary of the day Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published by Robert Delpire in Paris. That was 1958. Today we realize that The Americans has more in common with beat poetry and club jazz than it has with many other kinds of photography; it’s one of the high water marks of 1950s culture. And throughout an era when photographers communicated with each other and with their audiences mainly through the vehicle of published books, The Americans has had only a handful of competitors (Walker Evans’ American Photographs, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, a few others) for the title of the most important single photography book ever published. For thirty years after its publication it was deeply influential. And although photography has moved on now, the echoes of its impact reverberate still.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer

Knopf, 275 pp., $24.00
1.

Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer’s account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer’s gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.[1]

On the afternoon of March 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959—Tibet had come under the control of the People’s Republic of China following the Chinese invasion of 1950—three hundred or more monks from Drepung Monastery began an orderly march toward the center of Lhasa, five miles to the east. Instead of calling for independence as in previous protests, they made specific demands such as the release of five monks detained the previous October for celebrating the award in Washington of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. They were still well outside the city center when they were stopped at a checkpoint, ringed with China’s People’s Armed Police (PAP), a special paramilitary force that deals primarily with internal dissent. Some fifty of the monks were arrested straightaway and their colleagues staged a sit-down in the street where, joined by another hundred or so monks during the afternoon, they remained for some twelve hours. A new form of protest had taken hold.

Tibetan exiles have long made the claim—denied by the Chinese government—that several hundred thousand Tibetans were killed by the Chinese between the 1950 invasion and the beginning of “liberalization and opening up” in 1979. Conditions improved markedly for several years after that, but a spate of official criticism of the Dalai Lama in 1987 led to a series of protests in Lhasa calling again for Tibetan independence. There were, according to unofficial reports I compiled during the nine years that followed, some 213 pro-independence protests in Tibet. Some 160 of these have been independently confirmed. Only five involved more than ten or twenty people in Lhasa, and four of those had escalated only when laypeople witnessed police beating the initial handful of protesters. In 1990 the police were ordered to switch from what Jiang Zemin, then Chinese Party secretary, called “passive” to “active” policing, the former meaning (crudely) that you beat or shoot protesters once they start their demonstrations, the latter that you take action against them in advance or within moments of their arrival. The authorities learned to handle these incidents within two or three minutes after they began, taking protesters out of sight quickly before a crowd could gather.

By 1996 Tibetans had largely given up street protests, perhaps sensing that the state was immune to them or that the foreign press would publish little or nothing unless violence was involved. Besides, the average prison sentence was 6.5 years for each participant, and upward of three thousand were detained during this period for peaceful protests or possession of forbidden documents and videos. Alternatives were devised, but were rare—a solitary gesture in August 1999 by a Tibetan carpenter who climbed a flagpole with a Tibetan flag during a sports convention and later died in custody, apparently by his own hand; a protest in Lhasa by Drepung monks within their monastery confines in November 2005; a wave of protests against the wearing of fur from endangered species in 2006; and a march about the lack of jobs for graduates. But since the mid-1990s there had not been a political protest in the streets of Lhasa.

The young monks of Drepung Mon-astery meet each afternoon to practice their skills in philosophical debate, and it was one such session that spilled out into the protest on March 10. They had several reasons to be antagonized about China’s policies in Tibet, besides what some probably see as nearly sixty years of foreign occupation. Many of these reasons can be traced to restrictions on religion and culture introduced in 1994 in order to erode the suspected sources of Tibetan nationalism.

Such measures include campaigns forcing Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama; an unprecedented ban on pictures or worship of him; a prohibition on the construction of new monasteries and on any increase in the number of monks; and a ban on students and government employees having religious possessions or carrying out religious practices. During the last two years, tension has been further increased by the forced relocation of 250,000 farmers to roadside houses, partly at their own expense; the much-publicized opening in 2006 of the Chinese railway line connecting Tibet to neighboring Qinghai Province, with its implicit encouragement of yet more Chinese migration to Tibetan towns; and the announcement by the Chinese government of a plan for the settlement of 100,000 Tibetan nomads. It was made clear by the Chinese authorities that public criticism of any of these policies would be unwelcome if not dangerous.

No doubt the monks were aware—through leaflets sent secretly from Tibetans in exile or foreign radio broadcasts in Tibetan—of exile protests taking place that day in India. They may have also calculated that heightened international attention on China because of the Olympics would deter the police from using lethal force. Chinese government claims of outside instigation are thus not necessary to explain why the monks chose to mark this anniversary with public action.

The police and the paramilitary forces that stopped the demonstration in Lhasa on March 10 were clearly under orders to use restraint. They did not open fire, and after some scuffles they allowed negotiators to talk the monks into returning to the monastery. Early that evening things got tougher in Barkor Square, in the center of Lhasa, when fifteen monks carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag and called for independence: all were dragged away and were later charged with “gathering to create a disturbance by shouting reactionary slogans” and “premeditatedly carrying homemade reactionary flags” (they are currently in detention awaiting trial).

The last two men to bear the flag in Lhasa had been shot dead on the spot by the People’s Armed Police in December 1988—this time the protesters were arrested without immediate violence, at least in public view. When five hundred monks marched from Sera Monastery the following day on behalf of those fifteen arrested monks, the PAP used tear gas briefly, but did not open fire and the monks succeeded in holding a seven-hour sit-down in the street. It looked like a new era of protest had begun, one in which the monks had won themselves a little negotiating space within the Lhasa body politic. But within three days, what had at first seemed a Burmese form of peaceful protest turned into something much more violent. Tibet was about to experience its most serious unrest since the 1960s.

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Copyright Washington Monthly

I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one area, where metals were being chemically treated, workers squatted at the edge of steaming pools as if contemplating a sudden, final swim. The dormitories were filthy: the hallways were strewn with garbage—orange peels, tea leaves—and the only way for anyone to bathe was to fill a bucket with cold water. In a country where workers normally suppress their complaints for fear of getting fired, employees at this factory couldn’t resist telling us the truth. “We work so hard for so little pay,” said one middle-aged woman with undisguised anger. We could only guess how hard—the place kept no time cards. Painted in large characters on the factory walls was a slogan: “If you don’t work hard today, look hard for work tomorrow.” Inspirational, in a way. Subscribe Online & Save 33%

I was there because, six years ago, I had a job at a Los Angeles firm that specialized in the field of “compliance consulting,” or “corporate social responsibility monitoring.” It’s a service that emerged in the mid-1990s after the press started to report on bad factories around the world and companies grew concerned about protecting their reputations. With an increase of protectionist sentiment in the United States, companies that relied on cheap labor abroad were feeling vulnerable to negative publicity. They still are. (See “Disney Taking Heat Over China” in the Los Angeles Times this March.)

Today, labor standards are once again in the news. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have criticized trade deals such as NAFTA as unfair to American workers, and the new thinking is that trade agreements should include strict labor standards. Obama has cited a recent free trade agreement with Peru as an example of how to go forward. I hope he’s right, but let’s remember that NAFTA was also hailed, in its day, for including labor protections. Our solutions on paper have proved hard to enforce. Peru attempts to remedy some of the problems of NAFTA, but we’re still advancing slowly in the dark.

In the meantime, as governments contemplate such matters on a theoretical level, what’s happening on the ground is mostly in the hands of the private sector. Companies police themselves, often using hired outside help. That was the specialty of my company. Visit the Web site of almost any large American retailer or apparel manufacturer and you’re likely to see a section devoted to “ethical sourcing” or “our compliance program.” (Those are terms for making sure that your suppliers aren’t using factories that will land you on the front page of the New York Times.) Read on and you’ll often see that the company boasts of having a code of conduct that its suppliers must follow—a code of labor standards by which the factories in question will be regularly measured and monitored. Are they to be believed? Well, yes and no. Private monitoring, if done properly, can do a lot of good. But it’s a tricky thing.

Asimplified story of Nike may be the best way to introduce the origins of the type of work I was in. In the 1960s, Nike (before it was named Nike) based its business on the premise that the company would not manufacture shoes—it would only design and market them. The physical goods would be produced by independent contractors in countries such as Japan or Taiwan, where labor was, at the time, cheap. In short, Nike would be offices, not factories. The idea was innovative and hugely profitable, and countless companies producing everything from sweaters to toys to exercise equipment have since adopted it. It is now standard.

The problem that arose for Nike and many other companies, however, was that the media, starting in the 1990s, began to run stories on terrible labor conditions in factories in Asia. When consumers started to get angry, Nike and many other companies were nonplussed. We’re just buying these shoes, they said—it’s not our business how Mr. X runs his factory. And they had a point. If, for example, I learned that my dry cleaner was paying his employees less than minimum wage, I might feel bad about it, but I doubt I’d spend hours vetting alternative dry cleaners for labor compliance. I’ve got too much else to worry about in life, including my shirts. But such musings hardly make for a great press release, and Nike’s case included nasty allegations about child labor—twelve-year-old Americans playing with soccer balls sewn by twelve-year-old Pakistanis, that sort of thing. The company’s stock value sank.

In this same period, the U.S. Department of Labor, led by Robert Reich, began cracking down on sweatshops within the United States and publicizing the names of firms who were their customers. Because of this, companies such as mine began to offer their services as independent, for-profit monitors of factory labor conditions. We would act as early-warning systems against shady suppliers who mistreated their workers. Based on the reports we provided, our clients could choose either to sever their relations with a given supplier or to pressure them to improve. Business at my old company is still going strong.

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Copyright The Washington Post

Dang. From his radio show a few minutes ago:

“All I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer,” he said, which is likely not something that anyone under the age of 30 will ever say again. “This other stuff is great, but I don’t care about it,” he continued. “In my mind that’s what it says on the headstone, it says ‘newspaper guy.’ “

But he also said he signed the papers to take the Post’s buyout last night, after working here for, I believe, 29 years. He said he still might contract with The Post to do his Talking Points videos and his Page 2 excerpts, and he said some people in the leadership asked him to stay but didn’t really insist, and even though he’ll keep doing PTI and the radio show and MNF, he said he feared he’d never have the moral high ground again.

He has seven days to reconsider, but he said “I’ll have somebody kidnap me and tie me down so I don’t change my mind.” And, as any longtime listeners would expect, he was plenty wistful when discussing what happened yesterday.

“There was not enough wine in the world, there wasn’t, not last night,” he said. “I’m watching ‘Idol,’ and I’m thinking about all these things, and I don’t know who I’m supposed to talk to about this….It just feels odd. It feels odd and it feels bad. It doesn’t feel sad, there’s no sadness to it, it just feels wrong.”

He also said “the Web site is sort of the future on some level,” which I guess might be accurate, on some level, maybe. Then again, newsprint might make a dramatic comeback.

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Copyright The Star

The female ideal pushed by laddie magazines has become as smooth and lifeless as an iPhone
May 03, 2008

Megan Fox is the sexiest woman alive. Last year she wasn’t sexy at all. In 2007, the 21-year-old starlet didn’t even make the top 100 in FHM’s annual ranking of the world’s women. In 2008, she’s number one. The obvious reason for her sudden rise up the charts is the popularity of Transformers and its key scene in which she appears in a short skirt bent over a 1976 Camaro. But she couldn’t have entered the list at all if she hadn’t made the wise career decision to change her last name from “Foxx” to “Fox.” One more x and she’s a porn star; one less and she’s an object of aspiration – perfect for FHM.

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

In some ways, it’s a surprising development. If the lad mag is the latest chapter in the long, toxic and ancient book called “Men Staring at Women,” it’s very different than anything that’s come before. The nude throughout the history of art offered a social expression for forbidden sensuality, which is why the women, sprawled on exotic beds or on picnic lawns, emerging from the bath or from the sea foam, are always sexually available. In FHM, the women are totally unattainable – “too good for you, buddy” – and their way of dressing, in the context of a world in which seemingly every celebrity has a home sex video on the market, is comparatively modest. The subjects of nudes were womanly – whether the plump nymphs cavorting in pastoral scenes of Rubens or the cubistic chest-thrusting models in Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Their womanliness reminded male audiences of their manliness. The women in FHM’s top 100 are almost all rail thin, with whittled down bodies and faces. Every year there is less and less to them.

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Copyright The Financial Times
May 9 2008

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has unveiled details of a controversial $9.25bn agreement that pledges millions of tonnes of copper and cobalt to China in exchange for roads, railways and other infrastructure.

The deal, finalised last month, could prove one of Beijing ’s most ambitious forays into Africa yet. On paper it secures 10.62m tonnes of copper and 620,000 tonnes of cobalt for resource-hungry Chinese industries, but this is dependent on overcoming operational challenges that are as great as anywhere in Africa .

The deal comes at an uncertain cost to Congo , a country the size of western Europe that has been left, after decades of dictatorship, conflict and political turmoil, with less than 5,000km of tarred roads.

Like many of Beijing ’s big state-backed projects in Africa , this one pits a Chinese commercial model for engagement with the continent against the bureaucracy of western development assistance.

The Congo government was at a delicate stage in negotiations to secure a write-off of around $8bn of external debt when news broke last year of its plans to enter a barter agreement with Beijing .

Officials from multilateral lending institutions have been tight-lipped about the consequences but warn privately that, should the deal result in the state contracting fresh debt, it could scupper the write-off.

Benedicte Christensen, director of the International Monetary Fund’s African Department, said last month the agreement posed a “dilemma”.

Pierre Lumbi, Congo ’s infrastructure minister, outlined to parliament details of what the country stands to gain, listing hundreds of clinics, hospitals and schools, two hydro-electric dams, 3,300km of road and 3,000km of railway.

Major routes, to be constructed by Chinese companies, would link the mineral- rich south of the country to its ports in the west and connect the north to the south. Mr Lumbi argued that the provision of this infrastructure would consolidate reunification of the country and bring down prices for basic goods. “This contract is the foundation on which the growth of our economy is going to be built,” he said, comparing it to the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after the second world war.

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Copyright National Geographic

May 2008

Chinese history has become the story of average citizens. But there are risks when a nation depends on the individual dreams of 1.3 billion people rather than a coherent political system with clear rule of law.

My students wrote essays on paper so cheap and thin that it felt like the skin of an onion. The brittle pages tore easily; if held to the light, they glowed. The English was flawed, but sometimes that only gave the words more power. “My parents were born in poor farmer’s family,” wrote a young man who had chosen the English name Hunt. “They told us that they had eaten barks, grass, etc. At that time grandpa and grandma had no open minds and didn’t allow my mother to go to school because she is a girl.” Another classmate described his mother: “Her hair becomes silver white, and some of her teeth become movable. But she works as hard as ever.” Those were common themes—my students valued patience and diligence, and they liked to write about family. National events often left them perplexed. “I’m a Chinese, but I feel it difficult to see my country clearly,” wrote a woman named Airane. “I believe there are many young people are as confused as I’m.”

Her teacher felt the same way. In 1996 I had been sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer, and that was the first time I had lived in the country and studied the language. The only thing I knew for certain was that the place was bound to change. Deng Xiaoping was still alive, although there were rumors that he was in poor health. Hong Kong still belonged to the British; China had yet to join the World Trade Organization; Beijing had recently failed in its bid to host the 2000 Olympics. On the middle Yangtze, the government was building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Three Gorges project, and I was assigned to a teaching job in Fuling, a small city that would be affected by the new dam. The Yangtze was visible from my classroom, and with every glimpse I wondered how this mighty river could ever become a lake.

In the beginning much of what I learned about China came from reading the onion-skin essays, layer by layer. The past could be painful for my students—when they wrote about history, it was usually personal. Even a distant event like the 19th-century Opium War made them indignant, because the Chinese believed that such foreign aggression had initiated the country’s long decline. When it came to modern disasters—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution—they left much unsaid. “If I had been Mao Zedong,” wrote a tactful student named Joan, “I wouldn’t have let the thing happen between 1966 and 1976.” But they refused to judge their elders. Eileen wrote: “Today, when we see [the Cultural Revolution] with our own sight, we’ll feel our parents’ thoughts and actions are somewhat blind and fanatical. But if we consider that time objectly, I think, we should understand and can understand them. Each generation has its own happiness and sadness. To younger generation, the important thing is understanding instead of criticizing.”

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Copyright The Times

April 27, 2008

The boycott of a Chinese ship laden with weapons for Zimbabwe has cast new light on the connections between the African country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and a secretive Chinese arms-trading firm with a controversial track record from the Congo to Darfur.
The ship steamed towards China last week after dock workers in Durban refused to unload it and a South African court blocked the transit of its cargo of mortar and small arms ammunition.
The 15,000-tonne An Yue Jiang is registered in the southern city of Guangzhou and has been operated for about 20 years by Cosco, a state-owned cargo line.
When Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, called on every country in the region to reject it, the ship became an embarrassment to Beijing, which has made a huge political and financial investment in Africa.Company documents show that Poly Technologies, the manufacturer of the weapons on board the ship, is ultimately controlled by a clique from China’s preeminent military clans with close ties to the Communist party leadership and army.
Major General He Ping, the company’s chairman, is the son-in-law of Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader; its president, Wang Jun, is the son of a vice-president and a Deng ally. Its upper ranks are stuffed with military veterans and their offspring, who have greatly enriched themselves with arms sales to some of Africa’s bloodiest trouble spots.
Diplomatic sources say Mugabe forged links with the Poly Technologies management on state visits to China. Since Zimbabwe is all but bankrupt, the arms are paid for by barters of agricultural products and raw materials.
On paper, Poly Technologies is a subsidiary of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation. Analysts of Chinese financial affairs say, however, that Poly is actually a front for an elite within the country’s military-industrial complex and that it reports to the general staff department of the People’s Liberation Army.
“People call it the supreme headquarters of the China princeling party,” commented one analyst. “It’s a power centre beyond civilian control.”
Although Poly discloses almost no financial details, its customers for small arms and ammunition include Sudan and Burma. Chinese AK-47 assault rifles made by Poly have turned up in the war-torn eastern Congo, among other African battlefields. Its other sales include short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles to Iran and Pakistan.
In 1996 Poly was named by prosecutors in connection with an attempt to smuggle 2,000 AK47s into the United States.
“China has done nothing wrong with regard to weapons exports to Zimbabwe,” said Guo Xiaobing, a researcher quoted by the Guangzhou Daily, in the ship’s home port.
“This is only a topic for the western media to use to put pressure on China. There is no United Nations embargo on arms to Zimbabwe, so China’s business is legal.”

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Copyright The Japan Times

BASHO: The Complete Haiku, translated, annotated and with an introduction by Jane Reichhold; artwork by Shiro Tsujimura. Kodansha International, 2008, 432 pp., ¥2,600 (cloth)

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) is not only Japan’s most revered poet, he is also the one most translated into other languages. Yet, until now, no one has gathered into one volume, translated into English, the complete works.

Having spent a decade at her task, the American poet Jane Reichhold here presents 1012 haiku, complete with much of the relevant historical material surrounding them and some indication as to how each is to be appreciated.

Makoto Ueda has defined the haiku as “a comparison between the finite and the infinite which are brought together in the one experience which is the poem.” This presumes that it is not only the writer but also the reader who creates this experience.

In her introduction Reichhold indicates how this works: “Instead of saying ‘autumn dusk settles around us like a crow landing on a bare branch,’ Basho would write: ‘on a bare branch / a crow settled down / autumn evening.’ The simplicity and economy of the words demand that the reader goes into his mind and experiences the darkness of bird and night, autumn and bareness, and even how a branch could move as the dark weight of a crow presses it down. The reader is writing the rest of the verse and making it poetry.”

This is explicated not only by the finished translation but also (in the note accompanying the poem) by the original Japanese, its Romaji transliteration, and a literal translation of this. Added is the known history of the verse, and the reasons the translator chose as she did: the use of the past tense, the use of a single crow when the original did not specify, etc.

It is often maintained that poetry is untranslatable. While this is probably so, it is equally true that some kind of parallel structure can be erected alongside a poem that will at least indicate the nature and approximate the effect of the original. This is something that relies on the skill and discretion of the translator.

Such are various. Take, for example, Basho’s well known haiku: “nomi shirami / uma no shitosuru / makura moto.” This is romanized by Reichhold as, “fleas lice / horse’s pissing / pillow close by” and is translated as, “fleas and lice / now a horse pisses / by my pillow.”

This lyric seems to communicate all that a haiku ought — a salient shift of observation, a seasonal sensibility, an open-ended experience. The translator is to communicate this as economically as did the poet. Here are some attempts.

Nobuyuki Yuasa translates it as: “Bitten by fleas and lice, / I slept in a bed, / A horse urinating all the time / Close by my pillow.” Dorothy Britten gives it as: “Fleas and lice did bite; / and I’d hear the horse pass water / Near my bed at night.” Donald Keene has versified it as: “Plagued by fleas and lice I hear the horses staling — / What a place to sleep!” Toshiharu Oseki gives it as : “Plagued by fleas and lice, / Still worse, hearing the horse urinating / Close by my pillow!” and David Bamhill recently translates the haiku as: “Fleas, lice, / a horse peeing / by my pillow.”

The original “story” is the same in all these translations but its “treatment” varies with the translator. Reichhold and Bamhill are among the more literal, giving the reader what is necessary and nothing else. In addition Reichhold uses more colloquial language, indicating that this is also what Basho did. He, says his translator, “experimented with common words and words considered too vulgar for poetry.”

Most modern translators, she says, “have hesitated, or even refused, to use the words ‘piss’ or ‘shit,’ as Basho did.” Yet he could be direct without coarseness and in so doing he could approach each reader on a common level.

This is something approximated by Reichhold who uses plain, direct language to echo Basho’s effects. Her approach is also seen in the notes, the glossary, and the valuable section on haiku techniques. Here is her definition of the aesthetic term “wabi.” It is “the result of living simply … frayed, faded, and worn Levis have the wabi that bleached designer jeans can never achieve.”

Basho was a major influence on the democratization of poetry. His ability to be both up to date and ageless distinguishes him from the poets of his day and many in our own times. Readers join him in the experience of the haiku because they trust him.

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Copyright The Boston Herald

…For those who know Ramirez and have the opportunity to observe his work habits, nothing is more bothersome than allusions to him as a “hitting savant” or a “natural.” There is no disputing that he possesses a great deal of ability, but to infer that he is clueless and simply relies on his instincts is insulting. Ramirez is a tireless worker who works in nontraditional ways. He is usually the first player to report to the ballpark, often in the late morning for night games, and works out in the weight room or on cardio equipment when few others are around. Ramirez then heads home or back to the hotel, naps and returns in the early afternoon for baseball work.

Said Sox infielder Alex Cora [stats]: “My brother (Joey) played with him in Cleveland in ’98 and told me about him and how his work ethic was already above a lot of people, but when I got here (in July 2005), I found out for myself. We were on a road trip in Chicago and he said, ‘Hey, Alex, I’ll see you at 10 (a.m.) tomorrow.’ I said, ‘You know it’s a night game, right?’ That’s just how he is. He’s there in the morning for a night game to work out.”

Ramirez, who began working out with teammates Kevin Youkilis [stats] and Dustin Pedroia [stats] at Athletes Performance Institute in Arizona last offseason, is also famous for his visual exercises. One routine involves a mini Hula Hoop adorned with different colored baseballs. It is tossed in the air in front of him and Ramirez (often with one eyed covered) must grab the colored ball shouted out by a trainer. And prior to at-bats, when it appears that he is staring off into space or into the upper deck, Ramirez is simply looking up at a person or object in order to sharpen his focus before facing his first pitch.

“He always has a plan and he sticks with it,” Red Sox [team stats] third baseman Mike Lowell said. “You joke around with him and say, ’What are you looking at, Manny?’, and he says, ’Oh, no, I’m just getting my focal point.’ If that’s what works for him, perfect.”

In some visiting clubhouses, where back rooms and alcoves aren’t available for video scouting, Ramirez can be seen poring over videos of the next day’s starting pitcher and his recent at-bats, often deftly working two laptops.

“You don’t see what he does every day (although) you hear about his routine, getting up early, getting to the park early,” Thome said. “One thing that always impressed me about him was that he always was relaxed. He played the game tension-free as a hitter, and that’s the gift he has.”

Lowell admitted that he was surprised to discover how hard of a worker Ramirez is when he came to the Sox after the 2005 season.

“I thought he was a little more aloof, just because of what you read about him,” he said. “When I was traded over here, I was curious and actually pleasantly surprised to find out what a hard worker and perfectionist he is. Even when he’s going well, he’s trying things in the cage to really lock himself in. I feel like telling him, ’Hey, Manny, you’re already locked in!’ He’s on a constant pursuit for what he feels is the right swing.”…

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May 1st 2008
Copyright The Economist

CHINA is in a frightening mood. The sight of thousands of Chinese
people waving xenophobic fists suggests that a country on its way to
becoming a superpower may turn out to be a more dangerous force than
optimists had hoped. But it isn’t just foreigners who should be
worried by these scenes: the Chinese government, which has encouraged
this outburst of nationalism, should also be afraid.

For three decades, having shed communism in all but the name of its
ruling party, China’s government has justified its monopolistic hold
on power through economic advance. Many Chinese enjoy a prosperity
undreamt of by their forefathers. For them, though, it is no longer
enough to be reminded of the grim austerity of their parents’
childhoods. They need new aspirations.

The government’s solution is to promise them that China will be
restored to its rightful place at the centre of world affairs. Hence
the pride at winning the Olympics, and the fury at the embarrassing
protests during the torch relay. But the appeal to nationalism is a
double-edged sword: while it provides a useful outlet for domestic
discontents (see article), it could easily turn on the government
itself.

A million mutinies

The torch relay has galvanised protests about all manner of alleged
Chinese crimes: in Tibet, in China’s broader human-rights record, in
its cosy relations with repellent regimes. And these in turn have
drawn counter-protests from thousands of expatriate Chinese, from
Chinese within the country and on the internet.

Chinese rage has focused on the alleged “anti-China” bias of the
Western press, which is accused of ignoring violence by Tibetans in
the unrest in March. From this starting-point China’s defenders have
gone on to denounce the entire edifice of Western liberal democracy as
a sham. Using its tenets to criticise China is, they claim, sheer
hypocrisy. They cite further evidence of double standards: having
exported its dirtiest industries to China, the West wants the country
to curb its carbon emissions, potentially impeding its growth and
depriving newly well-off Chinese of their right to a motor car. And as
the presidential election campaign in America progresses, more
China-bashing can be expected, with protectionism disguised as noble
fury at “coddling dictators”.

China’s rage is out of all proportion to the alleged offences. It
reflects a fear that a resentful, threatened West is determined to
thwart China’s rise. The Olympics have become a symbol of China’s
right to the respect it is due. Protests, criticism and boycott
threats are seen as part of a broader refusal to accept and
accommodate China.

There is no doubt genuine fury in China at these offences; yet the
impression the response gives of a people united behind the government
is an illusion. China, like India, is a land of a million mutinies
now. Legions of farmers are angry that their land has been swallowed
up for building by greedy local officials. People everywhere are
aghast at the poisoning of China’s air, rivers and lakes in the race
for growth. Hardworking, honest citizens chafe at corrupt officials
who treat them with contempt and get rich quick. And the party still
makes an ass of the law and a mockery of justice.

Herein lies the danger for the government. Popular anger, once roused,
can easily switch targets. This weekend China will be commemorating an
event seen as pivotal in its long revolution—the protests on May 4th
1919 against the humiliation of China by the Versailles treaty (which
bequeathed German “concessions” in China to Japan). The Communist
Party had roots in that movement. Now, as then, protests at perceived
slights against China’s dignity could turn against a government
accused of not doing enough to safeguard it.

Remember the ides of May

Western businessmen and policymakers are pulled in opposite directions
by Chinese anger. As the sponsors of the Olympics have learned to
their cost, while consumer- and shareholder-activists in the West
demand they take a stand against perceived Chinese abuses, in China
itself firms’ partners and customers are all too ready to take
offence. Western policymakers also face a difficult balancing act.
They need to recognise that China has come a long way very quickly,
and offers its citizens new opportunities and even new freedoms,
though these are still far short of what would constitute democracy.
Yet that does not mean they should pander to China’s pride. Western
leaders have a duty to raise concerns about human rights, Tibet and
other “sensitive” subjects. They do not need to resign themselves to
ineffectiveness: up to a point, pressure works: China has been
modestly helpful over Myanmar, North Korea and Sudan. It has even
agreed to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives. This has
happened because of, not despite, criticism from abroad.

Pessimists fear that if China faces too much such pressure, hardliners
within the ruling elite will triumph over the “moderates” in charge
now. But even if they did, it is hard to see how they could end the
30-year-old process of opening up and turn China in on itself. This
unprecedented phenomenon, of the rapid integration into the world of
its most populous country, seems irreversible. There are things that
could be done to make it easier to manage—including reform of the
architecture of the global institutions that reflect a 60-year-old
world order. But the world and China have to learn to live with each
other.

For China, that means learning to respect foreigners’ rights to engage
it even on its “internal affairs”. A more measured response to such
criticism is necessary not only to China’s great-power ambitions, but
also to its internal stability; for while the government may distract
Chinese people from their domestic discontents by breathing fire at
foreigners, such anger, once roused, can run out of control. In the
end, China’s leaders will have to deal with those frustrations
head-on, by tackling the pollution, the corruption and the
human-rights abuses that contribute to the country’s dangerous mood.
The Chinese people will demand it.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
Published: May 1, 2008

SHANGHAI: A milestone of sorts was reached on Wednesday with the reporting in China’s carefully controlled media of the death of a Tibetan in a clash with Chinese security forces.

Estimates by Tibetan advocacy groups and international human rights groups of the numbers of Tibetan dead have ranged from scores of victims to the hundreds.

Remarkably, though, this was the very first such report of a Tibetan death since the outbreak in early March of demonstrations by Tibetans in their “autonomous region” and in the surrounding provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers.

A rolling thunder of nationalist anger has swept China in recent weeks, as Chinese have seethed over the demonstrations that have greeted the Olympic torch on its circuit around the world.

Given little context for understanding why foreigners should be moved to demonstrate in the first place, Chinese counterprotesters and countless voices in the media and on the Internet have reduced the entire matter to the realms of prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment.

This effort has been advanced tremendously by the prominent use of a quote by the ever-gruff CNN commentator Jack Cafferty. Speaking about China at the time of the San Francisco leg of the torch relay, Cafferty described the Chinese as “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.”

Amid the predictable uproar, Cafferty issued a clarification saying that his comments were aimed at the Chinese government and not the people, but this has made little impression here, particularly among the campaigners for whom the original quote, without that context, was simply too good to let go of.

Many Americans will still be unaware of what Cafferty said, while few Chinese who follow the news could have missed it. Americans are used to sharing jaundiced views of politicians. One of the more venerable expressions in the political culture, after all, is “throw the bums out,” meaning to vote despised politicians out of office. Chinese, of course, have no such option.

The heavy amplification of Cafferty’s words here and the belated admission of a Tibetan death, albeit a single death ascribed to a gunfight, however, share more than a purely coincidental association. They form part of a much larger phenomenon acknowledged by Chinese journalists who work within the system: an information war being waged to channel opinion and nationalist sentiment in this country.

Earlier this month, an editor from a Beijing newspaper told The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, of a notice circulated by the Chinese Communist Party calling for an “unprecedented, ferocious media war against the biased Western press.”

Another editor, who confirmed the directive, said in an interview this week: The Cafferty incident “is being used to demonize the Western media, reducing their credibility here. It’s a good opportunity for the official media and for the Communist Party.”

As “wars” go, this is one that relies on a particular asymmetry that depends upon keeping people here in the dark about all sorts of details. The public asks “why is the West brandishing Tibet to demonstrate against us” because it genuinely has little information about events, whether recent or more distant in that part of their country, save for a carefully pruned and officially sanctioned story line. While the Western media are accused of bias for supposedly giving short shrift to violence committed by rioting Tibetans in Lhasa on March 14, there is no mention in the Chinese media, not even at the level of allegations, of the deaths of numerous Tibetans in the ensuing crackdown. Tibet, meanwhile, has been closed to outsiders, enhancing the asymmetry.

Recent Chinese press accounts have endlessly reminded the public of Beijing’s beneficence in ending “slavery” in Tibet and lifting Tibetans out of dire poverty since then. There has been no mention of the cultural, religious or environmental costs involved or almost anything else as seen from the perspective of Tibetans, many of whom fear forced assimilation and the destruction of their religion.

Tibetans in Lhasa and elsewhere report that their homes have been invaded by security forces searching for images of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. At monasteries and temples all over western China, “re-education campaigns” have begun to force monks and others to recite the official line on Tibet, that the province has essentially always been part of China, and to renounce the Dalai Lama as a villainous “splittist.”

The re-education drive is uncomfortably reminiscent of fumie, a practice in Japan’s 16th century campaign against Christians, in which those who were suspected as believers were forced to trample on images of Jesus.

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Copyright Slate

April 30, 2008

The “Special Committee” assigned to shield the Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence from the meddling of new owner Rupert Murdoch was reduced to a set of high-paid flunkies last week as the media mogul squeezed Journal Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli out of his job without consulting them.

The committee—composed of Louis Boccardi, Thomas Bray, Jennifer Dunn, Jack Fuller, and Nicholas Negroponte—was created as a condition of the sale of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones & Co., to Murdoch’s News Corp. The Bancroft family, which controlled Dow Jones, feared that having purchased the newspaper, the rotten old bastard would want to exercise the prerogatives of ownership and start making radical changes.

Hence the committee, given explicit “rights of approval” over the hiring and firing of three key Dow Jones positions—the managing editor and the editorial page editor of the Journal, and the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires. But those familiar with Murdoch’s legacy knew that he would soon shirk his part of the bargain.

On this point, Murdoch never disappoints. For instance, when he bought the Times of London in 1981, he promised new editor Harold Evans editorial independence. He started breaking his promises almost immediately, and when Evans confronted him, Murdoch allegedly said, “They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.” As Evans writes of Murdoch in his 1984 book, Good Times, Bad Times, he’s like “the philanderer who convinces each new girl that she’s the one who’ll change him.”

Like Brauchli, Evans had a committee “protecting” him. This one, established at government insistence, required a majority vote in the event that Murdoch wanted to sack an editor. But when Murdoch wanted Evans gone, he performed the same end run that just eliminated Brauchli—a big shove and a settlement agreement.

The denutted Dow Jones Special Committee issued its wimpy statement yesterday, vowing that it “intends to exercise fully its role in the approval of a successor managing editor and to take the steps necessary to prevent a repeat of the process it has just been through.” What they meant to say was, We’re each paid $100,000 annually, a lot of money for very little work, so if Rupert wants to drive by and hose us down with a swift, hard piss again, just make sure the checks clear.

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Copyright The Australian

April 30, 2008

CHINESE artist Ai Weiwei spoke out like a true rebel in Sydney
yesterday, criticising Beijing’s adoration of the Olympic Games and the
torch relay.

“I don’t see myself as a dissident artist, I see them as a dissident
government,” the Beijing-based artist said at the opening of a major
installation of beams and tables called Through at the Sherman
Contemporary Art Foundation.

Courting an official reprimand, he also took aim at the state-run
Chinese newspapers, which continually referred to the Games as the “Holy
Games” and the torch relay as the “Holy torch”.

Holiness, he said, wasn’t even a communist concept. “I think they (the
Chinese Government) encourage nationalist behaviour,” he added,
referring to the torch relay.

“It’s blind; it’s sentiment without a clear intellectual concept. It’s
crazy, what they’re so excited about.”

An internationally esteemed artist, Ai helped design the Beijing Olympic
Stadium, now usually referred to as the Birds Nest Stadium.

He hasn’t been invited to the opening ceremony, but he said he didn’t
care. “It’s such a bureaucratic society we have, they don’t even dare to
invite someone like me,” he said. “The architect is nothing to such an
official society.”

China has never taken kindly to criticism, but Ai refuses to self-censor
too much.

“I think I could get into trouble because all the journalists ask me
these questions,” he said.

Told he didn’t have to answer, he replied: “That’s not my style.”

He is ready for a stern official reaction. “I’ve been waiting for that
moment. Everybody warns me of this. If nothing happens, it will be a big
disappointment.”

Still, he said he was not sorry he was involved in the design of the
stadium. “It’s for the people and for the city. The stadium is good work.”

Ai is in Australia for a week, with an exhibition called Under
Construction at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney. It features a
work commissioned for the centre titled Marble Chair.

He said he was surprised at how slowly China was changing - yet he
agreed that massive changes had occurred over the past decade. “You can
talk about sex, you can talk about anything, society is so free. There’s
no strong moral discipline.”

But he said politics was the exception, with much forbidden.

“I hope China will learn a bit from this event (the Olympics), and
really try to rethink its position and its own values,” Ai said, adding
that he hoped values such as democracy, freedom and human rights would
begin to take hold.

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Copyright Newsweek

The recent crisis over the Olympic torch and Tibet represent an epic clash: not just between Tibetans and Beijing, but between a self-congratulatory Western worldview and the very different vision of a billion-plus Chinese. Until Western leaders start trying to understand the Chinese perspective, friction is likely to grow, and the victims will include the Tibetans themselves—the very people Western leaders say they want to protect.

According to the current U.S. and European narrative, the popular protests in Tibet and elsewhere were entirely justified. The demonstrators pushed a moral cause: to free the poor Tibetans from an oppressive communist government. And the European leaders who decided to boycott the Olympics’ opening ceremonies, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, deserved nothing but praise for their courageous stance.

The Chinese view could not be more different. Before describing it, however, it is vital to dispel a major Western misconception. Many Americans and Europeans think that China’s furious reaction to the protests—a reaction that has now inspired a massive boycott of Western goods and businesses in China—has been the result of media manipulation and information control by Beijing. If only the Chinese public had access to real facts, Westerners think, their attitudes would be different. This is a huge mistake. The reality is that some of the strongest anger toward the West at the moment is coming from liberal Western-educated Chinese intellectuals who have access to accurate information. China today enjoys the most competent governance it’s ever had, and its elites are intelligent, well educated and sophisticated—the exact opposite of the “goons and thugs” described by CNN’s Jack Cafferty.

The Chinese are so angry because virtually all of them believe that the Western protests have had little to do with human rights, Tibet or Darfur. Instead, the Chinese think, the West’s real motivation is to deny China the triumph it deserves for its enormous successes. According to this view, Westerners cannot stomach the thought that China is poised to hold the best Olympics ever. Such a spectacle would vividly demonstrate how power has shifted from West to East. This would be intolerable, and thus Americans and Europeans are dead set on finding some way to disrupt the Games—and if Tibet or Darfur won’t suffice, they’ll find some other method. As several Western-educated Chinese friends have whispered to me, “Kishore, this is pure racism. The West cannot bear the thought of China’s succeeding.”

Chinese skepticism about the Western commitment to human rights is well founded. Indeed, there is something ironic about those who have committed genocide against American Indians or Australian Aborigines now castigating China on Tibet. Furthermore, Guantánamo—which Amnesty International has described as “the gulag of our times”—plus Abu Ghraib and European complicity in Washington’s extraordinary rendition program have badly damaged the West’s credibility and legitimacy.

Most Chinese also believe that Tibetans have received special treatment from Beijing. After the disastrous Cultural Revolution, in which all Chinese suffered, Deng Xiaoping adopted a more pragmatic approach to the region. Ruined religious sites were repaired, monasteries were reopened, new monks were allowed to join orders and the Tibetan language was permitted to be used more extensively than before. Chinese leaders believe that China has exercised sovereignty over Tibet for 700 years now, ever since the Yuan dynasty—one reason the “Free Tibet” slogan angers them so much. Then there’s the recent territorial disintegration of the Soviet Union and memories of how the West seized Chinese territory in the 19th century: still more reasons why Chinese suspicions run deep.

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