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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Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

As journalist Robert Kaplan flew into Bamako, Mali, in 1993, he saw tin roofs appear through thick dust blowing off the presumably advancing desert. He used this image of a “dying region” to conclude his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy,” in which he drew a connection between environmental degradation and growing disorder in the Third World, a hypothesis that certainly seemed to fit not only Mali but most of West Africa. When the article was published in February 1994, it made a considerable splash in Washington policy circles.

But even as Kaplan predicted doom, the situation on the ground in Mali did not quite fit his thesis. Yes, life was hard in this impoverished West African nation of 12 million people, and remains so. The 2005 United Nations Human Development Index, based on a combination of economic, demographic, and educational data, lists Mali as fourth from the bottom among 177 countries. Only Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra Leone rank lower. But despite persistent poverty and ongoing turmoil in neighboring states, in a single decade Mali has launched one of the most successful democracies in Africa. Its political record includes three democratic elections and two peaceful transitions of power, a transformation that seems nothing short of amazing.

When I served in Mali as American ambassador, from 1987 to 1990, I had never spent time in a country with such an apparent absence of political life of any kind. The military ruler, Moussa Traoré, presided over a typical single-party African dictatorship. In the early years after he took over in 1968, he survived several coup attempts, but by the time I arrived everyone seemed to have given up and gone to sleep. The government controlled all print and radio news, and, at first, there was no sign of dissident activity.

Mali, along with the rest of the region, had been wracked by drought in the late 1970s and again in the mid-1980s, and the government was making a serious effort to improve an economy dominated by peasant agriculture. Although the United States’ significant interests in this poor, landlocked country were solely humanitarian, American economic aid to Mali almost tripled during my tour as ambassador. But I never imagined that tradition-bound, predominately Muslim Mali might soon become something of a poster child for African democracy.

There was a clue to what was coming, if I’d recognized it. On my daily commute to the embassy through the potholed streets of Bamako, Mali’s capital, my driver would listen to the seemingly endless half-song, half-chant recitals that were standard fare on the only radio station. He told me that the singers were griots, the hereditary musician-historian-entertainers of West Africa, singing about Mali’s ancient history. He was a griot himself, and could explain some of the songs, often about the epic of Sunjata, the outcast-turned-hero who became the first emperor of old Mali in the 13th century. I recall wondering how people facing such a daunting present could be so preoccupied by stories from a distant past. I certainly did not envision how they might put their history to creative political use.

By the time my ambassadorial tour ended in 1990, Mali was on the cusp of momentous change. People were weary of the old dictatorship, which like many in Africa was vaguely Marxist-Leninist in organization; further, the demise of communism in the Soviet Union had destroyed whatever legitimacy such regimes still had. In March 1991, Mali’s military dictator made the fatal mistake of ordering his troops to fire on students protesting in the capital, and several hundred were killed. In the wave of shocked public reaction that followed, a key military commander, Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré, joined the pro-democracy forces, and the dictatorship collapsed. Touré, better known as “ATT,” promised to hand over power to an elected government. Like Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who took up arms and then returned to his fields, Touré kept his word, surprising many of his fellow Malians.

Mali’s new leaders immediately convened a national assembly, a kind of constitutional convention with representatives from all social classes. The government that emerged was influenced by the example of France, Mali’s former colonial master. It included a specifically secular constitution, a strong executive, and a weak legislature. But most remarkable, and radically different from the French model, was a wholly Malian emphasis on decentralized administration that gave real authority to previously voiceless local governments. From the beginning, Mali’s founding fathers claimed that decentralization was a return to traditional practice. The term for it in Bambara, the principal local language, is mara segi so, which means “bringing power home.”

Mali’s electoral track record since 1991 has been just messy enough to suggest that the country’s democracy is genuine, not the creation of one strong, quasi-permanent leader in the background, as is the case in a number of other African states. The new constitution established a five-year presidency with a limit of two terms. Alpha Konaré, a journalist who had led the pro-democracy movement, won the first election in 1992. It was generally free and fair. Konaré and his ADEMA party also won in 1997, but this second election was a procedural shambles because of an inadequate electoral commission, and the opposition boycotted it. The electoral commission was expanded and repaired, and the third national election, in 2002, went much more smoothly.

After his second term, Konaré—who reputedly once said that what Africa needs is more living ex-presidents—gracefully accepted retirement. Malian law wisely provides a comfortable personal residence for term-limited ex-chiefs of state, on the theory that it will help to discourage post-retirement coup plotting. But Konaré didn’t need it: He is now chairman of Africa’s top regional organization, the African Union. With Konaré out of the picture, ATT, Mali’s erstwhile Cincinnatus, retired from the army, ran for election in 2002, and won handily. Meanwhile, the former dictator, Traoré, had been tried and sentenced to death for political and economic crimes. But Konaré pardoned him, and he is now living comfortably in Bamako with his once-controversial wife, whose extended family had been the economic power behind his regime.

During its first decade, Mali’s democratic government settled a serious rebellion in the Saharan north, halted endemic student unrest, and established comprehensive political and religious freedom. These accomplishments were all the more remarkable given the chain-reaction conflicts that had spread across the region to Mali’s south, from Liberia to Sierra Leone and most recently to Ivory Coast, once a model of developmental progress.

Was Mali’s record simply the result of fortuitous good leadership, or was something more fundamental at work? To find out, I returned in 2004 and traveled throughout the country conducting interviews. When I asked Malians to explain their aptitude for democracy, their answers boiled down to “It’s the history, stupid,” of course expressed more politely.

That history is intimately intertwined with Mali’s geography. The country lies at the center of the great bulge of West Africa. Its northern half is part of the Sahara desert and mostly uninhabitable. Moving south toward the Atlantic Ocean, rainfall increases steadily, and Mali’s southern half is arable. Bamako, in the country’s midsection, gets as much rain as Washington, D.C., although precipitation falls entirely during the summer months. The once-fabled city of Timbuktu, on the desert’s edge, receives less than one-tenth that amount. Roughly dividing Mali’s two halves is the 2,600-mile-long Niger River, which rises in the hills of Guinea, not far from the coast, makes a vast arc to the northeast through near-desert, then plunges south through Niger and Nigeria to the sea. Halfway through Mali, this “strong brown god” meets progressively flatter territory, losing momentum and spreading into a vast, seasonally flooded wetland or “inner delta,” home to manatees, hippos, migrating birds, a mosaic of farmers, herders, and fisher folk, and a huge, French-era irrigation project. Mali’s population still consists primarily of peasant farmers and herders.

The Niger River was the launching point for trade routes across the Sahara until they were marginalized by colonial-era commerce through coastal ports. Trans-Saharan trade nurtured ancient cities, the most famous in Mali being Jenné and Timbuktu. There were three early states: Ghana (eighth to 11th centuries), Mali (13th to 15th centuries), and Songhai (14th to 16th centuries). Two of the three lay largely outside modern Mali: Old Ghana inspired the name of modern Ghana, but was located in today’s Mali and Mauritania, while old Mali was mainly in modern Mali, with a portion in Guinea. There were other states, but it is these three that the Malians refer to when they talk about the “Great Empires.”

It is because of the Great Empires that Malians—from villagers to college professors—believe they have a gift for democracy and its twin, conflict resolution. The history they cite is not merely their extensive experience of precolonial, multiethnic government, unusual elsewhere on the continent, but also an associated system of beliefs and customs. The centerpiece of this tradition is the epic of Sunjata Keita, who overcame exile and physical handicap and founded the Mali Empire in the 13th century. Sunjata’s story, primarily oral and circulated in numerous versions, has played a role in West Africa similar to that of the Homeric epics in Western civilization.

In Mali, it is fashionable to cite the “Constitution of Sunjata” as the inspiration for democratic decentralization. According to one of several versions of the epic, Sunjata gathered his chiefs on the slopes of a mountain not far from Bamako after his final unifying victory, and each chief presented Sunjata with his spear, in a symbolic act of submission. Sunjata then assumed the title of mansa, often translated “emperor,” and returned all the spears, signifying that the chiefs would rule autonomously. Today, some Malians see this oral constitution as equivalent to the Magna Carta.

Malians have redefined the term “consensus” to comport with the decentralization model. Whereas under the dictatorship “consensus” meant African-style democratic centralism, often smacking of communist practice, today it is understood to suggest reaching compromise on tough issues—more in the mode of Daniel Webster than Vladimir Lenin. No doubt this revisionism owes something to the fact that democracy is now the regime du jour, especially among big foreign-aid donors, while democratic centralism has been consigned to history’s dustbin.

Malians believe that the Great Empires encouraged intermarriage and an almost-but-not-quite melting pot, which they refer to by the French term brassage (brew). Mali’s ethnic diversity is about average for an African state. Malians speak a half-dozen major languages, none of which is used by a majority, although Bambara is widely used as a lingua franca. French is still the official language.

Malians say that their history and culture have nourished interethnic tolerance. They cite a whole tool kit of conflict resolution and avoidance mechanisms. There are, for example, “joking relationships” between clans and tribes. People involved in such relationships are licensed to greet each other with jocular insults. My Tuareg research assistant liked to remind my Dogon driver that the latter’s ancestors had once been slaves of his Tuareg ancestors. The driver would joke back in kind. While it always made me a bit nervous, this traditional practice seems to relieve tensions among Malians, perhaps because it is well understood as a substitute for tribal hostility. In a more subtle way, the joking relationships are an affirmation of a broader Malian identity.

Malian griots do double duty as conflict resolution specialists. So do Muslim imams. In the Ségou region, queens, descended from founding monarchs, traditionally acted as peacemakers. There is a tremendous corpus of customary law, varying from region to region, that still regulates issues of land, inheritance, and relations between communities and ethnic groups. Although most of the tool kit is oral, there is also a written element contained in ancient, often privately owned libraries in Timbuktu and elsewhere that were, until recently, maintained in secret. For years their contents were assumed to be overwhelmingly Arabic, hence not quite African. It is now becoming more apparent that the old libraries, like the ancient trade routes, are highly diverse. They include material in black African languages transcribed in Arabic script, much as these languages are written with the Roman alphabet today. There is even material in Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jewry. The subject matter is fascinatingly various, ranging from science to interethnic governance, as well as Islam. A Malian commentator recently observed that the old books are “like a lamp at our feet.”

From these many materials, Malians are creating a national foundation mythology. Like Americans, they are selective. We stress the Bill of Rights, not the Pullman strike or what we did to Native Americans, and we like to believe the story about the young George Washington making a clean breast of it after he chopped down his father’s cherry tree, even when we know that this appealing story was invented by an early biographer. The Malians emphasize the three Great Empires and pass lightly over their ancestors’ later complicity in the Atlantic slave trade, though they do not deny it.

What is most important about Mali’s mythology is not whether or to what extent history is being embellished, but rather the underlying assumption that reason and creativity can maintain harmonious relations among people of different cultural backgrounds. The Malians believe that equitable, responsive government has become a national tradition in part as a response to harsh conditions. Malian historian Doulaye Konaté, a leading scholar of the subject, notes, “It is precisely because violence was omnipresent that West African societies developed mechanisms and procedures aimed at preventing or, if that didn’t work, at managing conflict.” The value of such a mindset in a modern African setting, with warring, unsettled, or dictatorial neighbors still all too common, is hard to overestimate.

Mali’s new decentralization has created a three-tiered system: regions (think states), circles (think counties), and communes, which usually comprise several villages. Commune inhabitants elect local councils, which choose their own mayors and send representatives to the two higher tiers of the system. The 702 rural communes are widely regarded as the backbone of Malian democratization.

During my recent trip to Mali I visited Keleya, a commune an hour’s drive south of Bamako that includes 22 villages and a total population of 17,200. Mayor Manguran Bagayoko was greeting constituents in front of his office, a modest but attractive building in traditional adobe style. He has succeeded in getting more primary-level classrooms, he explained later. Now he needs secondary-level classrooms for their graduates. He also wants an improved marketplace, a local radio station, and some small irrigation works, all listed in his development plan (required by the central government). About 80 percent of Keleya’s citizens have paid their development tax, levied on all adult Malians, which is earmarked for commune expenditures—a very good record given that Malians do not like paying taxes any more than anyone else does. But Bagayoko is still perpetually short of funds.

As I proceeded down the road to visit other communes, I saw that Keleya was not typical—indeed, there was no such thing as typical. While some communes, like Keleya, seemed to be doing well, others were floundering amid apathy, corruption, or divided leadership. But for all its teething troubles, decentralized local government has already transformed rural Mali. Fifteen years ago the countryside was bowed under a resented, opaque central authority. Now political springtime is in the air.

The symbol of the new order is the ubiquitous speed bump, installed by communes on highways where the vehicles of the relatively rich and powerful used to roar through with scant regard for chickens or children. Whether villagers are doing well or poorly, they are certainly enjoying a new sense of hope and potential. In areas where daily life is not only hard but often boring, the jet contrails overhead have signaled, especially to village youth, an exciting realm of wealth and modernity as inaccessible as the aircraft miles above them. Now, thanks in part to decentralization, they can begin to feel part of a nation and the greater world beyond.

In Bamako, there is less optimism. The educated middle classes complain about poor education, a dysfunctional justice system, and political parties whose leaders have no agendas beyond landing as many ministerial positions for their members as possible. They say that corruption has been democratized, that in the bad old days it was monopolized by the dictator and his family, but now everyone is on the take, from schoolteachers to hospital workers. Decentralization, which is praised by foreigners and emulated in some neighboring countries, is under fire in Mali itself, especially from the professional civil servants who ran the old centralized system. Proponents of decentralization believe that these mandarins are deliberately starving the rural communes of resources and then complaining that the resulting ineffectiveness shows the need to restore central control. In one sense this is a healthy democratic debate, but it’s not clear who’s winning.

Mali has as much political freedom as anyone could ask. There are about 15 daily newspapers, compared with the single government-run sheet prior to democratization. Most seem to exist on thin air, and reporters can be bought. Nevertheless, the better papers do not hesitate to criticize the government, and a leading editor insisted to me that if his paper uncovered a serious scandal involving the president, he would not hesitate to report it. But newspapers are a product available only to the elite. Most of them cost 50 cents a copy, the equivalent of at least $10 for the average Malian. None has a distribution network outside Bamako.

It is FM radio, not print, that has truly democratized the media in Mali. One popular program features two elderly men sitting around the Malian equivalent of a cracker barrel, poking fun at the contents of the day’s newspapers, in a manner reminiscent of Finley Peter Dunne’s immortal character Mr. Dooley. Indeed, with some 140 radio stations in Mali, broadcasters have little choice but to rely heavily on the newspapers (and each other) for content. The spread of rural radio got a big boost from a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program that introduced suitcase-size FM transmitters developed for use in the Canadian north and Alaska. These little stations are a mainstay of decentralized local government. They also can be quite creative. A favorite entertainment is to tap a newly arrived American Peace Corps volunteer to play disc jockey and practice his or her Bambara language skills on the air, a performance that Malian audiences find most entertaining.

In general, Malians deeply appreciate their new liberty. In the countryside, the once-feared Department of Water and Forests, which controls a great deal of Mali’s rural land beyond village boundaries, no longer uses its quasi-police powers to persecute the rural dwellers for sometimes-fictional infractions. In the cities, political intimidation is absent; instead, some complain that the police can’t or won’t get tough about anything anymore. Most important, Malians seem well aware that their new freedom depends on the continued democratic alternation of political power, and as yet display no nostalgia for the old dictatorship.

After Mali’s highly successful local elections of 2004, Yaroslav Trofimov of The Wall Street Journal wrote a front-page article headlined “Polling Timbuktu: Islamic Democracy? Mali Finds a Way to Make It Work.” Malians were gratified by the big-time publicity but mildly annoyed by the assumption that Mali’s democracy is “Islamic” and by the implication that any Muslim country with a democracy qualifies for freak-show status.

Mali has indeed assumed new importance in America’s eyes, not only because it is democratic but also because it is a 90 percent Muslim country in the middle of a rough neighborhood. U.S. strategists, especially at the European Command, which is responsible for Europe and Africa, worry that the Malian Sahara, with its huge expanses and uncontrolled borders, could become a haven for terrorism. Islamic extremism could then move from desert redoubts through the impoverished, conflict-plagued states of West Africa, eventually threatening U.S. oil interests in the Gulf of Guinea. It is assumed that such extremism would be doubly dangerous in a poor, weak region where Islam has long been gaining ground. It is also assumed that Malian Islam is increasingly polarized between a moderate but enfeebled traditional variety and a virulent fundamentalist strain with growing foreign support.

The truth is messier but less alarming. Mali has a centuries-long history of conflict stoked by fundamentalist, back-to-the-Qur’an reformers who sometimes waged jihads against their opponents. These included both non-Muslims and members of still-powerful Muslim brotherhoods that performed rituals often steeped in magic and mysticism. This historical tension is embodied in the famous 14th-century mosque of Jenné, the world’s largest adobe building, which was destroyed by a jihadist reformer in the mid-19th century because he considered its man-made beauty heretical. It was later rebuilt by less fundamentalist Muslims, with a little help from the French.

Today the degree of polarization among Mali’s Muslims is routinely exaggerated by global strategists who know little of its long history. There are, to be sure, still Islamic extremists in Mali, some influenced by Wahhabi doctrine as well as by other fundamentalist traditions. But there are also moderate clerics willing, for example, to help USAID promote family planning, as long as this is done in the interest of maternal health, and condoms are not brandished in public. Christian missionaries, including evangelicals, are free to proselytize in Mali, although they don’t make much headway. Most telling, there is as yet no significant movement to revise Mali’s secular constitution and incorporate Islamic sharia law, a major issue in nearby Nigeria and elsewhere in the region.

U.S. policymakers routinely conflate two separate issues: the danger of Islamic extremism and unrest in the Saharan north bordering Mauritania and Algeria. Desert unrest is serious but has little, if anything, to do with Islam. For decades the Malian state has been struggling to integrate the north, which covers more than half of Mali’s land area but is home to less than five percent of its population. The people of the north are a complex group including Tuareg nomads, the famed “Blue Men” of the desert, so named because the men’s traditional head wrappings leave blue pigment on their faces. The Tuaregs were romanticized and given special privileges by the French, and were therefore regarded with suspicion by Mali’s post-independence rulers. From 1990 to 1995, the north seethed in a bitter rebellion led by local Tuaregs trained in Libya. To achieve peace, the newly democratized Malian government withdrew its military forces from much of the north and offered local self-government, which has been highly successful.

While the rebellion is over, the desert has remained hospitable to bandits, smugglers, and traffickers in illegal immigrants heading for Europe. The trans-Saharan road through Mali, safe for tourists before the rebellion, is no longer. There has been at least one case of infiltration by Algerian Islamist rebels, who in 2003 fled into Mali with 15 captured European tourists, mostly Germans. The tourists were ransomed without loss of life, save one woman who died of heat stroke, and the Algerians retreated into Chad, where they were allegedly captured with the help of U.S. Special Forces.

In formulating its policy on Mali’s northern unrest, the United States has displayed a certain degree of inconsistency. Washington welcomes and praises Malian democratization. But when it comes to the north, the U.S. government would like Mali to forget about due process and get tough with suspected terrorists, in the manner of neighboring Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania, none of which is exactly democratic. The Malians welcome U.S. military assistance but are deeply concerned that rough tactics could unravel the hard-won peace in the north. Those knowledgeable about northern Mali, including Malians and officials of foreign nongovernmental organizations, agree that economic aid crafted to the special needs of the desert region, not strong-arm tactics, is more likely to keep the peace.

For all its political progress, Mali has yet to break the vicious cycle of poverty. Although there has been no catastrophic drought since 1983–84, per capita economic growth—the best measure of progress against poverty—averaged only 3.4 percent from 1993 to 2003. In part, that is because the population is growing rapidly: 2.4 percent in 2003. People still have many children because it is economically rational to do so in a labor-intensive agricultural economy where the infant mortality rate is high. Mali’s official debt, owed mainly to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, is more than 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Aid donors are eager to reward Mali for its democratic record—it was by 2003 the leading per capita aid recipient in West Africa—but much of the new aid must be recycled to pay off old debt. Thus far it is clear that Mali’s decade-old democracy is not producing sufficiently rapid economic growth to meet popular expectations. Malians are agreed that until it does, democracy will not be on firm ground.

Cotton and gold, the country’s chief exports, are both unstable sources of revenue. Gold production depends on unpredictable future discoveries, while cotton is notoriously vulnerable to a world market depressed by developed countries’ self-subsidization. The U.S. government’s payments to its own cotton farmers probably cost Mali more, by depressing world cotton prices, than Mali gains financially from U.S. economic aid. The Malian economy remains reliant on traditional rain-fed agriculture, including cotton, grain, and cattle raising, all of which suffer in dry years.

Yet the country is not threatened by inexorable economic catastrophe, as the popular image of the advancing desert suggests. Scientific research shows with some precision that the Sahara has been both wetter and drier over the past 40,000 years than it is at present. Most of the land degradation now evident, and there is plenty of it, results from human activity—population increases combined with the use of primitive technology and overgrazing. There is nothing inexorable about it.

Moreover, Mali does not lack for economic resources. It has an abundance of irrigable land, especially along the Niger River and its tributaries, which could produce fruit and vegetables for winter export to Europe. It has spectacular tourist possibilities—ancient cities, elephants in scenery reminiscent of Arizona’s Monument Valley, and an increasingly renowned array of art and music. But neither agriculture nor tourism has been significantly developed since I served in Mali 16 years ago, despite shelves of donor-financed studies. Malian conservatism, an almost instinctive tendency to move slowly and favor traditional values, has been a tremendous political asset, but at the same time it sometimes induces lethargy and resistance to needed change. Commercial agriculture, for example, requires skills and attitudes alien to a society in which subsistence is the primary objective and noneconomic values are sometimes entrenched. Malians still prefer to accumulate cattle as symbols of wealth until a bad rain year requires surplus animals to be sold at fire-sale prices. What venture capitalism exists remains in the hands of foreign ethnic minorities—Lebanese and, now, even Chinese, who have arrived in the wake of recent Chinese construction projects.

Malians have made the most of their dependence on foreign aid by managing and manipulating their aid donors, a complex and fluctuating congregation of foreigners with the World Bank in the lead. (The United States contributes only a small fraction of Mali’s total aid.) In so doing, they employ all the diplomatic skills and persistence derived from centuries of multiethnic politics. They are developing a reputation for signing aid agreements and then avoiding implementation if it requires doing something distasteful. Thus, in 2004 Mali backed away from a key agreement with the World Bank to privatize the government-owned cotton-processing company. Malians are quite aware that the donors are not about to abandon democratic Mali, especially with conflict raging nearby in the once-prosperous Ivory Coast. As one leading Malian academic told me, “For us, democracy is as good as money in the bank.”

Foreign aid remains essential to Mali as a source of new ideas and needed policy changes as well as financial support. To cite only one example, foreign donors, led by the United States, prodded the Malians into reforms that have made the country self-sufficient in food production except in drought years. But Mali’s democratization will not be complete until Malian leaders take charge of economic as well as political policy, and develop a vision for Mali’s economic future and a strategy for reaching it. In general, they need to worry less about securing foreign aid and more about realizing Mali’s own potential. And they should eschew their customary politesse with foreign friends who do unconscionable things. To the United States their message might well be, “If you want us to worry about your survival (and help thwart terrorism), you should worry about ours (and support our agriculture).”

The most striking thing about Malian democracy is its success in drawing intellectual and spiritual sustenance from an epic past, and actively incorporating homegrown elements, such as decentralization. If there is occasional fiddling with historical truth, the past provides plenty of room for differing viewpoints and for shaping tradition to meet modern needs. It is this aspect of the Malian experience that is least appreciated, and it deserves more attention from policymakers, both African and foreign, who have a tendency to assume that “tradition” equates with “bad.”

Not every African country has Mali’s wealth of history and culture, but all of them, no matter how wracked by war or poverty, can draw on the positive aspects of their own experience for support. Aid donors can help by encouraging cultural preservation, exemplified by the U.S. embassy–sponsored small projects program, which in Mali is helping to preserve the old libraries in Timbuktu. Schools across the continent remain woefully deprived of textbooks that could, among other things, help preserve and stimulate pride in the positive aspects of local tradition. Where customary law is of critical importance, as it is in Mali, both government officials and their foreign advisers should be trained to make better use of it, rather than dismiss it out of hand as an awkward anachronism.

The underlying message from foreign friends to Malians and other Africans should be that they can proudly use the past to help make a better future.

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Robert Pringle, a historian and retired foreign service officer, served as U.S. ambassador to Mali from 1987 to 1990. He is the author of three books on Southeast Asian history, most recently A Short History of Bali—Indonesia’s Hindu Realm (2004).

Reprinted from Spring 2006 Wilson Quarterly
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Posted at 9:11 PM · Comments (0)

July 14, 2006 - Copyright People’s Daily Online

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway becomes a major event of world focus, and
some Western media have sent reporters to take trains along the new rail
route for field coverage.
However, we feel quite soured and saddened after reading some of these
reports and commentaries from the Western media colleagues. The wheel
of history has run into the 21st century, but the mentality of these
people remained in those days over a century ago, still with doubts and some
hostilities against China.
Why the railways, which had “worked wonders for industrialization in
United States and brought “benefits for the people in India”, would sabotage
the “ethnical culture of Tibet.”
More than a century ago, American President Abraham Lincoln signed the
“Pacific Railroad Act”, so that a railway linking coasts of the Pacific
and the Atlantic became a reality. Even today, we can still read such high
evaluations from textbooks and history books as the one that “railway
has written down a new chapter in American history.”
Last year, the “Guardian” newspaper from Britain spoke highly of Indian
railways, noting that “in India, nothing can link up the whole country
but rail route?- From a broader sense, railways gives India a sense of
unity.”
But in their eyes, nothing seems worthwhile for a new railway is built
in China. A recent article in the New York Times is entitled “Last Stop
Lhasa: Rail Links Ties Remote Tibet to China”. But Tibetan and foreign critics
say that “the railway benefits Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group,
at the expense of Tibetan natives.”
Likewise, the British Broadcast Company on its website said in the
words of critics that the Qinghai-Tibet Railway built at a cost of 4.2 billion
US dollars constituted part of Beijing’s destruction of Tibetan culture.
As a mater of fact, railroads all over the globe are more or less the
same, and they are featured by a line with two tracks. But the psychologies
and eyesight of the people who look at these railways are different.
Some personages from the West have passed themselves off as those who
are very much concerned with the development of Tibet for a long period of
time.
But, in fact, they only care for their own ideas politically and how to
use the political ideology to appraise China’s development, whereas the
interest of the Tibetan people is merely the tool they use to realize the
political aim.
In so doing, they have enabled us to see what is on their mind as well
as the “objectivity” and “fairness” preached by the Western media.

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) — Today, just a quarter of the Shanghai neighborhood of old brick-and-stone houses where film-maker Shu Haolun grew up still stands.

Most of the 34-year-old’s childhood playground has given way to high-rise apartment blocks and hotels, and the old area in which he was brought up is now surrounded by what he calls “the concrete monsters”.

For many Chinese, replacing old and dirty houses with well-equipped apartment blocks seems entirely appropriate.

But for Shu, a way of life is slowly dying. He mourns the loss of the intimate warren of streets that cars can barely squeeze through, to the way people wander in and out of each other’s homes because no one locks their front door.

“In 2002, I came back from the U.S. for a summer break just as the local government announced that our area was slated for imminent destruction, so that was the first reason I thought about making a documentary,” said Shu, who studied at film school in the United States.

“But my main inspiration came in 2001, reading a few articles in a Shanghai literary magazine that had been written by famous Shanghai writers about their respective birthplaces,” he said.

“Nostalgia”, first screened in late June, is a 70-minute portrait of life in the old brick houses that characterized Shanghai’s residential construction from the 1920s to early 1940s.

Known as “Shikumen”, a reference to their stone gates, the architectural style of old houses such as the one Shu grew up in is the exclusive preserve of Shanghai, created as a new hybrid of European and local forms. Many have since disappeared.

Much of the film follows Shu’s own family, who first moved to the “Da Zhongli” complex from the countryside in the 1935. His grandmother, who had just married, was 16 at the time.

“My father loved the film. He was born in the house in 1936 and my parents lived with my grandparents but, according to the party, my grandfather was a capitalist, so his room, and art, was confiscated during the Cultural Revolution,” said Shu.

The audience at the film’s first screening loved it too, said Shu, and many of them cried. Although it won’t reach the cinemas, there will be a number of public screenings at independent venues and Shu plans to release 5,000 DVDs for sale at around 20 yuan ($2.50) each.

China’s Communist Party leadership embarked upon a massive scheme after the revolution in 1949 to build a new country after decades of civil war and battles against Japan.

Many of China’s most senior political leaders are engineers by training, with a fondness for massive and symbolic building projects, like the Three Gorges Dam.

Fewer have a preference for preservation, though Shanghai’s early 20th century European-styled buildings are protected by the government as “heritage architecture”, in what Shu sees as a social comment.

“It’s because they are better-preserved, and because they belong to high-class people,” says Shu. “But the shikumen are for ordinary people. They are neither slums nor are they for the nouveau riche.”

Though Shu has his sympathizers, even many of his old neighbors are ready to move, or think they can get a good deal on compensation, he says.

Shu admits the old houses have disadvantages — his family used chamber pots and had sponge baths. Shu’s father moved out in 1992, though his grandmother refuses to.

But Shu opposes the appropriation and commercialization of old housing compounds, even though they help restoration, on the grounds that the interests of local people should come first.

One such development, known as “Xintiandi”, features in Shu’s film. Financed by money from Hong Kong, the shopping plaza is full of renovated old buildings, upscale boutiques and wealthy foreigners, something Shu considers inappropriate.

“The film’s not about making a statement per se, but there is a message there. When you destroy someone’s old home, you should be very careful,” said Shu.

“People have been there for 70 years, so the homes are old and sacred to their residents. You must at least show care and kindness to them.”

But for Shu’s old compound it is already too late. Banners throughout the neighborhood express thanks to locals for their “understanding” over the move, and Shu says that these days the local residents’ committee has no committed residents left — just government appointees.

Indeed, he sees no possibility of salvation for his old home.

According to notices pasted on the old brick walls, the compound will be destroyed later this year.

“People here don’t have a high income but they love their lifestyle. It’s a community, and they play mahjong and chat together every day. I just wanted to commemorate it.”

Posted at 10:30 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Updated Wednesday, July 19, 2006, at 6:19 PM ET
When I hear the word “bloggers,” I tend to think of the A-listers. But the top 100 are not the quarry of the Pew Internet & American Life Project telephone survey of bloggers, published today. They’re stalking the larger universe of 12 million adult Americans who blog.
Who are all those bloggers? Why do they blog?
The Pew report, written briskly and ably by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox, delivers an array of provocative findings about bloggers. The most immediately startling for me was the repetition of the phrases “about half ” or “nearly half” to describe various blogger attributes. About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know. Half say changing people’s minds is not a major reason behind their blog, and about half had never published before starting their blog. (The margin of error for the telephone survey was plus or minus 7 percentage points.)

Pew’s blogging masses couldn’t be more different than the American A-listers. Most A-listers are men over 30; have published before; are in it primarily to change public opinions and not to share their experiences; know only a fraction of their readers; and don’t conceal their identities.
Continuing the Pew half-theme, we learn that about half the bloggers surveyed say they don’t know anything about the size of their audience, and only 13 percent claim to get more than 100 hits a day. Are these bloggers telling the truth about their 100 hits, or are they inflating? The 10 highest reports of blog traffic came from males, a gender well-known to exaggerate size when given the opportunity.
If few people are reading all these blogs, they’ve got good reasons. Most bloggers tell Pew they post material for themselves, not an audience, with 37 percent describing their blogs as personal diaries or journals. About half post less often than “every few weeks,” which means even if people want to listen they won’t hear anything new, and about six in 10 spend only one to two hours a week tending their blog.
So, who listens with any frequency? Other bloggers and family. Pew reports that 90 percent of bloggers say they’ve read other blogs. Only 39 percent of the Internet audience says it has read someone else’s blog. Of the surveyed bloggers, 52 percent say family members check in, and 9 percent claim that the news media has paid attention or cited them. But 9 percent of 12 million bloggers comes out to about 1 million bloggers. Have radio, TV, newspapers, and other official news media really acknowledged that many blogs or bloggers? I wish Pew had supplied the gender information on this one. Another reflection of male size syndrome, I’ll bet.
I’m not disparaging bloggers, so please don’t treat me to a high-tech lynching. But this study shows that at this early point in the blog era, the great mass of bloggers aren’t set on replacing reporters. The top 100 or top 1,000 may consider themselves “citizen journalists” of one sort or another, but the survey finds that 65 percent of bloggers don’t consider their output journalism at all. They’re just expressing themselves in a leisurely fashion, inspired by a personal experience (78 percent, says the survey), and their blogs are a “hobby” or “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on” (84 percent).
Again, I’m not disparaging hobbies or navel-gazing: I have hobbies I can bore you with, and I navel-gaze. But the Pew report indicates that only a tiny fraction of current bloggers have any ambition to fulfill the blogs über alles designs some media theorists plotted for them.

Lenhart and Fox write that the blogging-world snapshot they present could change quickly. The blog audience is growing, with 57 million Americans confessing to the habit. (I, for one, read a dozen each day via RSS and monitor blogs’ coverage of my work.) New readers and writers are still coming online, and teenagers—not represented in this survey—are learning the craft of self-expression on social networking sites. Will the next Pew snapshot find bloggers engaging the outside world in greater numbers instead of cataloging their own? Will teenagers give up navel-gazing when they graduate from MySpace to the greater Web? If all these people really want from the Web is a hobby and to talk to their friends and family, they’d be better off taking pottery lessons and purchasing more cell-phone minutes.

Posted at 12:55 AM · Comments (0)

Updated Wednesday, July 19, 2006, at 6:19 PM ET
When I hear the word “bloggers,” I tend to think of the A-listers. But the top 100 are not the quarry of the Pew Internet & American Life Project telephone survey of bloggers, published today. They’re stalking the larger universe of 12 million adult Americans who blog.
Who are all those bloggers? Why do they blog?
The Pew report, written briskly and ably by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox, delivers an array of provocative findings about bloggers. The most immediately startling for me was the repetition of the phrases “about half ” or “nearly half” to describe various blogger attributes. About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know. Half say changing people’s minds is not a major reason behind their blog, and about half had never published before starting their blog. (The margin of error for the telephone survey was plus or minus 7 percentage points.)

Pew’s blogging masses couldn’t be more different than the American A-listers. Most A-listers are men over 30; have published before; are in it primarily to change public opinions and not to share their experiences; know only a fraction of their readers; and don’t conceal their identities.
Continuing the Pew half-theme, we learn that about half the bloggers surveyed say they don’t know anything about the size of their audience, and only 13 percent claim to get more than 100 hits a day. Are these bloggers telling the truth about their 100 hits, or are they inflating? The 10 highest reports of blog traffic came from males, a gender well-known to exaggerate size when given the opportunity.
If few people are reading all these blogs, they’ve got good reasons. Most bloggers tell Pew they post material for themselves, not an audience, with 37 percent describing their blogs as personal diaries or journals. About half post less often than “every few weeks,” which means even if people want to listen they won’t hear anything new, and about six in 10 spend only one to two hours a week tending their blog.
So, who listens with any frequency? Other bloggers and family. Pew reports that 90 percent of bloggers say they’ve read other blogs. Only 39 percent of the Internet audience says it has read someone else’s blog. Of the surveyed bloggers, 52 percent say family members check in, and 9 percent claim that the news media has paid attention or cited them. But 9 percent of 12 million bloggers comes out to about 1 million bloggers. Have radio, TV, newspapers, and other official news media really acknowledged that many blogs or bloggers? I wish Pew had supplied the gender information on this one. Another reflection of male size syndrome, I’ll bet.
I’m not disparaging bloggers, so please don’t treat me to a high-tech lynching. But this study shows that at this early point in the blog era, the great mass of bloggers aren’t set on replacing reporters. The top 100 or top 1,000 may consider themselves “citizen journalists” of one sort or another, but the survey finds that 65 percent of bloggers don’t consider their output journalism at all. They’re just expressing themselves in a leisurely fashion, inspired by a personal experience (78 percent, says the survey), and their blogs are a “hobby” or “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on” (84 percent).
Again, I’m not disparaging hobbies or navel-gazing: I have hobbies I can bore you with, and I navel-gaze. But the Pew report indicates that only a tiny fraction of current bloggers have any ambition to fulfill the blogs über alles designs some media theorists plotted for them.

Lenhart and Fox write that the blogging-world snapshot they present could change quickly. The blog audience is growing, with 57 million Americans confessing to the habit. (I, for one, read a dozen each day via RSS and monitor blogs’ coverage of my work.) New readers and writers are still coming online, and teenagers—not represented in this survey—are learning the craft of self-expression on social networking sites. Will the next Pew snapshot find bloggers engaging the outside world in greater numbers instead of cataloging their own? Will teenagers give up navel-gazing when they graduate from MySpace to the greater Web? If all these people really want from the Web is a hobby and to talk to their friends and family, they’d be better off taking pottery lessons and purchasing more cell-phone minutes.

Posted at 12:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Monday, July 17, 2006; Page A15

Before things can turn a corner in the Middle East, we need the diplomatic equivalent of electric-shock therapy. We may need $100 oil to jolt the Europeans and the Chinese. We may need the Russians to be told that they can forget joining the World Trade Organization. And we’re going to need something dramatic to reward India, whose response to terrorism last week was exemplary.

The India-Israel comparison is startling. Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorists shower rockets on Northern Israel and carry out a raid that inflicts eight deaths and two abductions. Israel justifiably responds by bombing the headquarters of the Hezbollah leader, but it also rains fire on Beirut’s airport, roads and apartment towers, destroying the props of a new and hopeful Lebanon.

No Shame, and a $296 Billion Bill

» Robert Samuelson | For those who believe politicians are utterly shameless, there was dreary confirmation last week. President Bush publicly bragged about the federal budget.
Voinovich: Why I’ll Vote for Bolton
Broder: Barney Frank’s Reminder for Bush
PostGlobal: Readers’ Views from the Mideast
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Almost everybody understands that failed states are good for terrorists. With their bitter experience of the Palestinian territories and the Lebanon of old, Israelis ought to grasp that better than anyone. But their leaders seem determined to re-create a failed state to their north. They complain that the Lebanese government has failed to rein in Hezbollah terrorists, then destroy the infrastructure that provides that same Lebanese government with its only chance of functioning.

Now consider India. Coordinated bombings in Bombay commuter trains kill 182 people and wound hundreds. On the same day a grenade attack at a bus station in Kashmir injures at least six tourists. The Indians announce that a new incarnation of a Kashmir independence group called Lashkar-e-Taiba is the main suspect in the Bombay attacks. Just as Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s ruling coalition, the group operates openly in Pakistan and is said to be backed by the country’s intelligence services.

India’s response? No reprisals, no bombings. No threat to cut off diplomatic communications with Pakistan and no massing of troops on the India-Pakistan border. Instead, the Indians tell Pakistan that a forthcoming meeting of foreign ministers must be postponed. And they seek support from the Bush administration and the United Nations to get Pakistan to clamp down on the terrorists.

They certainly had better get that support. Israel’s iron-fist approach is partly a poor bet: a gamble that bombing will smash the terrorists’ structures, even though they are more likely in practice to smash civilian ones, radicalizing the Arab world and undermining the moderates who seek peace with modernity. But to be fair to Israel, its military offensive also reflects the absence of a viable diplomatic option. There already is a U.N. resolution calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed, but the big powers show no interest in applying the muscle to make disarmament happen.

So the challenge in the Middle East and beyond is to show that diplomacy can function. In the wake of the Bombay attacks, Pakistan is a good place to start: China, a traditional Pakistani ally, should join with the United States in telling Pakistan to close down its jihad network. Until now, of course, China has regarded India-Pakistan tensions as a strategic plus. But it needs to update its worldview. Trade and investment between China and India are growing, and China depends on imported oil. War in India, or the emboldening of Pakistani jihadists with links to the Middle East, is not in its interest.

But Pakistan is only a beginning. On every major security challenge, from North Korea’s missiles to Iran’s uranium enrichment, diplomacy is undermined by Chinese, Russian and sometimes Western European foot-dragging. These powers are happy to criticize unilateralism and belligerence at every turn. But when there’s a chance to make diplomacy work, they call for U.S. leadership and hide behind the curtains.

There’s a direct causal link between this freeloading irresponsibility and Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon. The Chinese and Russians ensure every day that diplomacy is limp, and then they sound surprised when Israel chooses the military option.

Western Europeans lament the fact that the Bush administration, its energies sapped by the Iraq war, has not shown much appetite for the shuttle diplomacy that brokered the last Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire in 1996. But if France and others had not undermined sanctions on Iraq in the late 1990s, the case for the military alternative would have been weaker — and the war might not have happened.

Even today, many of these freeloaders see mayhem in Iraq as America’s problem. You’d think that chaos in a major oil exporter, with the potential to seed extremism all over the Middle East, would alarm all responsible governments. But the freeloaders think it’s a joke. Pressed over the weekend about democracy in Russia, Vladimir Putin quipped that he didn’t want a democracy like Iraq’s.

It’s going to take something drastic to change this mind-set. But until it changes, diplomacy will be weak; there will be more wars and more radicalization of extremists. I’m not sure what that mind-set changer ought to be. But maybe it’s going to take $100 oil to shock the Chinese and the reluctant Europeans into seeing that Islamic extremism does hurt them. And maybe it’s going to be necessary to block Russia’s quest for membership in the World Trade Organization, which Putin pressed aggressively last week. Why should the Russians expect the benefits of international trade if they won’t contribute to the security that underpins it?

Posted at 12:32 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Open Democracy

28 - 6 - 2006

Nations have always requisitioned and utilized art works. If anything, this process proliferated in the 20th century, when art was widely adopted for propaganda purposes and those who produced it were strictly controlled by totalitarian states. It was the Soviet Union that initially kept the tightest control on cultural output and defined the needs of the state.

In many ways, art for the state in Kim Il-song’s North Korea followed on from and copied that of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China, notably the development of Socialist Realist art. Many features of the organisation of artists and the works of art produced are similar, and can be seen as standard features of art in totalitarian societies. In most circumstances, art for the state can be characterised as being essentially large-scale, dramatic and message-laden.

According to the official account, from the 1960s onwards, Socialist Realist art in North Korea took a new development and was independently guided by the philosophy of Juche. Juche was Kim Il-song’s most important political idea, which he used to promote himself as leader of the North Korean people. Juche is usually translated as “self-reliance”, although the academic Dae-sook Suh describes it in practise as “nothing more than xenophobic nationalism”.

More articles in openDemocracy on North Korea:

Kim Kook-Shin, “Don’t let a cloud stop the sunshine: the new president and the legacy of South–North relations”
(December 2002)

Jasper Becker, “A gulag with nukes: inside North Korea” (July 2005)

Hwang Sok-yong, “The ghosts of North and South Korea”
(December 2005)

David Wall, “North Korea and the ‘six-party talks’: a road to nowhere” (April 2006)

Socialist Realism is now referred to in North Korea as Juche Realism. Juche art theorists in North Korea divide world art history into two kinds: “peoples’ art”, reflecting the needs of the masses, and “reactionary art”, reflecting the ideology of the exploiting class. Kim Il-song’s 1966 instruction, “Let’s develop our National form with Socialist content”, is still regarded as the absolute guiding principle of Juche art. This “call” for a new Juche Art was in fact a paraphrase of both Stalin and Mao. Stalin had defined Socialist Realism as “national in form, socialist in content”, while Mao called it “national in form, new democratic in content”.

The “national form” of painting naturally meant traditional Korean ink painting or Chosonhwa, but oil painting (an imported western technique) was also encouraged. Large public wall paintings, which would normally be expected to be carried out in oils, were therefore also produced in ink painting, encouraging ink painters to paint realistically. Still today, there are many more ink painters classed as Merit Artists or Peoples’ Artists than there are oil painters, as a matter of principle.

The subjects originally required by Juche art were limited to such themes as: portraying the General, the relationship of the military and the people, the construction of socialism, National Pride and such like. However, in the 1970s landscape was also approved, when Kim Jong-il instructed: “The idea of describing Nature in a socialist country is to promote patriotism, heighten the national pride and confidence of the public in living in a socialist country.” The result has been a huge increase in the production of oil paintings of natural scenes.

All artists in North Korea are registered as members of the Korean Artists Federation and receive monthly salaries, for which they are expected to produce a certain number of works. Some artists work “on the spot”, at factories or construction sites, whereas others go to an office. Both would be expected to work regular hours and have about two hours of study or discussion in the evenings with regular reports and evaluations. Abstract or conceptual art is forbidden and the subjects and themes of works of art are limited.

There is no question of arranging a solo exhibition but there is a National Art Exhibition every year and an Industrial Art exhibition every two years. There is no museum or gallery of contemporary art and no private galleries, but modern art is included in the displays of the National Gallery “because past tradition is a process by which the present can be understood”. However, most of the works on display are also the ones that appear in all the books on contemporary art – there is no uncertainty as to which are the masterpieces.

In fact, there is no uncertainty at all expressed in North Korean contemporary art, no individual hopes or expressions, no mystery. As Kim Jong-il said: “A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture.”

Posted at 10:10 AM · Comments (0)

Friday, July 7, 2006 - Copyright - Slate

Like many people, I dislike having my picture taken, and the fact that I love to look at photography, to think about it, and sometimes to write about it, has done little to leaven my antipathy toward participating in it. Having a camera pointed at me makes me self-conscious, a feeling I do my best to avoid; and it pricks my vanity. (I used to tell myself I was simply unphotogenic, but in time I came to realize that, no, in fact I just look like that.) Moreover, I always wind up feeling slightly violated: My countenance is among my most intimate possessions, and when a photographer makes off with an image of it I feel like I’ve been fleeced. Anthropologists have described isolated tribes who would not allow themselves to be photographed by Western visitors because they were convinced that some part of their soul was being stolen. There is something to be said for such a belief.

Exploitation is photography’s true métier: I take that to be a fact, though not such a damning one as it may appear to be. There are other professions, after all, that traffic in similar kinds of advantage-taking (psychoanalysis is one; journalism is another), and exploitation, like anything else, can be well or badly done. Some photographers negotiate it nimbly, with a kind of moral intelligence, and the art they make is brilliant and enlightening; and some are clumsy or crass. Which brings me to the work of Jill Greenberg and the quarrels that have sprung up around it in the past few weeks.

Greenberg is an L.A.-based photographer whose work, judging from her Web site, the all-too-aptly named www.manipulator.com, has generally been commercial and editorial: ads for Target, portraits of celebrities, that sort of thing. But she also has a small art career, showing more conceptual work in galleries, and she has an exhibit up now at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. The show is titled End Times, and it consists of a few dozen large photographs of infants and toddlers throwing tantrums: sobbing, red-faced, staring furiously. Fair enough. But they’re not meant to be read as mere baby pictures; they’re meant to be a statement. As Greenberg herself explains in the gallery’s press release, “The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterically upset. It reminded me of helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation.” “As a parent,” she continues, “I have to reckon with the knowledge that our children will suffer for the mistakes our government is making. Their pain is a precursor of what is to come.”

This is the sort of art that makes one groan and roll one’s eyes. It’s political in the worst way: literal-minded, preachy as a bumper sticker, and, well, infantile. Moreover, the pictures themselves don’t look very interesting (for one thing, Greenberg seems to think that size—the photos are 42 inches by 50 inches—is a substitute for power). But lots of people make bad art without inspiring the kind of fury that Greenberg drew down upon herself. Her mistake was not in her meaning, but in her method.

It turns out that Greenberg doesn’t just hang around her studio waiting for one of her toddler subjects to melt down: She induces the tantrum, by, say, giving the child a lollipop, and then suddenly taking it away. When a photography enthusiast who goes by the pseudonym of Thomas Hawk discovered as much, he pilloried Greenberg on his blog, in a post that can be summarized by its headline: Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse. The post generated a few hundred comments, and the discussion spread to Flickr, and then to other blogs, and then finally to BoingBoing. Most of those who weighed in came down on Hawk’s side. Greenberg responded in an interview on PopPhoto.com.

It looks like what’s going on here is the standard “can good art be made by bad people” debate, but to the extent that that’s so, it’s uninteresting. As Faulkner once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” But Greenberg isn’t Keats, and bad art neither deserves nor receives the kind of moral pass that Faulkner was endorsing. An asshole who makes great art is an asshole who makes great art; but an asshole who makes lousy art is just an asshole.

On the other hand, Greenberg isn’t Leni Riefenstahl, either. Small children, as she points out in the PopPhoto interview, often have tantrums, and they usually blow over quickly, and are just as quickly forgotten. To provoke tears in order to take a picture is objectionable, and worthy of some condemnation. But it’s not as if she beat them with a belt because she wanted to photograph their bruises. On this front, it seems to me, Greenberg was wrong, and Hawk overreacted, and there isn’t much more to be said.

But an insight can be sifted out of Greenberg’s peccancy and Hawk’s cant. Photography tends to magnify and distort both deeds and misdeeds—more so than other art forms, and in fact more than almost any activity I can think of. The specter of exploitation hovers over it, and it’s this, I think, that accounts for Hawk’s disproportionate outrage. If Greenberg were making infants weep in the service of a psychological experiment, one might feel uneasy, but the dismay would no doubt be tempered by one’s sense that a greater good was to come of it. If she were doing it because she wanted to, say, draw them, or write poems about them, many people might still find it objectionable, but not, I don’t think, to quite the same degree. Indeed, if she were doing it just for the hell of it, we would consider her cruel and culpable; but the fact that she made them cry so that she could take their pictures somehow makes it worse.

The point becomes clearer, or at any rate starker, by comparison with pornography. In most states, the age of consent is 16 or 17, but federal law stipulates that you can only be photographed having sex if you’re 18 or older. Two 17-year-olds can copulate to their hearts’ content, and their friends can watch: However creepy it may be, no laws would be broken. But they can’t be photographed in the act, nor can anyone, of any age, so much as look at such a photo. The picture has a legal status quite different from the thing it pictures.

This is as it should be, for many reasons; but one of them is simply that photography is, in its essence, a form of predation, and its being so transforms the meaning of the scenes it shows. The power of the photographer over his or her subject is immense, and not just because one can manipulate the other, or even because one acquires and owns an image of the other. A photograph is, as the vernacular has it, something you “take,” but the taking isn’t simply material: It’s metaphysical, and it’s moral (I would say it’s spiritual, if the word didn’t seem vapid).

Exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between a photographer and a human subject, and every photographer worth a damn knows this. It is unavoidable, it is intrinsic to the very act taking pictures, and the most sophisticated photographers work their understanding of it into their practice, in various subtle ways. I’ve watched dozens of them at work, and each has a different method: Some bond with their subjects, some boss them around, some flirt and seduce, some ignore, some distract, and some just watch. But with the best of them you can see something in their eyes, and in their work, that proves their trustworthiness and creates a kind of complicity. Jill Greenberg is decidedly not one of the best, but her clumsiness inadvertently reveals a fundamental truth: Taking a picture is a deep and ethically complex thing to do, and everyone who engages in it is compromised, right from the start.

I don’t mean this as a condemnation of photography. On the contrary, I love the medium, and it fascinates me endlessly, precisely because it’s so freighted with the problem of power and responsibility. It is born in a bed of plunder and abuse; but in the right hands it can end in beauty, and how we get from one to the other is as profound a grace as any art can manifest.
Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead.

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Posted at 11:26 AM · Comments (0)

July 10, 2006 - London based Global Witness recently published a scathing report entitled Digging in Corruption: Fraud, Abuse and Exploitation in Katanga’s Copper and Cobalt Mines. The report documents the corruption, abuse and rank exploitation taking place in the formal and informal mining sectors in Congo’s Katanga province (one of the world’s richest copper and cobalt producing areas).

The report is yet another lucid documentation of the pilfering of the Congo’s wealth. The United Nation’s four reports from 2001 – 2003, reports by Human Rights Watch, Fatal Transactions reports, independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow’s work and the Congolese parliament’s Lutundula Commission Report all clearly identify the link between corrupt Congolese officials and foreign mining companies, mainly from Europe, Canada, United States, Australia, South Africa and of late India and China. Global Witness says the mining sector in Katanga is characterized by “widespread corruption and fraud at all levels.” See the reports section of the FOTC website!

The rapid pace at which the wealth of the Congo is being sold at below bargain basement prices is shameless. The rebels, turned so-called politicians, and multi-national corporations are the primary beneficiaries of the Congo resource grab. Gerhard Kemp of the Rand Merchant Bank, of Johannesburg, SA is quoted in the Global Witness report (p.34) saying “The Congo is so rich in mineral wealth, you can’t just ignore it. You don’t want to be the last guy at this party.” Without a doubt this is the greatest land grab party of the modern era.

The South African Mail and Guardian reported that there is an international scramble for the wealth of the Congo and that “billions of dollars will be made.” Juxtaposed to the billions to be made and the estimated $1 billion that left Katanga province in 2005, is the unending suffering of the average Congolese. One Congolese miner interviewed by Global Witness says “We know that the Congo is rich. But despite this - we do not even have enough to eat. Only one category of people profits.” Congolese live on an average of $100 per year and 80 percent of the population lives on 30 cents per day. The Congo is a classic case of modern day serfdom and the depravity of those seeking to benefit at the expense of others even if millions more Congolese must die. Surely, King Leopold II would have a rye smile on his face knowing that over 100 years later the plunder and pillage that he began continues uninterrupted with impunity.

According to Global Witness, the majority of the contracts signed over the past five years give the Congo less than 25% share and in some cases, significantly less. An example of the type of deals signed is represented by the worlds richest copper mine, Tenke Fungurume; the foreign companies Phelps Dodge of Phoenix, Arizona and Tenke Mining Corp. of British Columbia, Canada own 82.5%, while the Congo owns a paltry 17.5% of its own resources through the parastatal, Gecamines. Many of these contracts are signed for an entire generation, 30 – 40 years, which for all intents and purposes condemn a generation of Congolese to serfdom and poverty, whereby their resources are plundered to benefit foreign corporations. In fact, Global Witness reports that deals signed with Phelps Dodge, Global Enterprises Corporate Ltd and Kinross-Forrest (Kinross Gold Corporation of Toronto, Canada and George Forrest International of Belgium) deliver 70 percent of the Congo’s known copper reserves to these foreign corporations.

Should the pilfering continue unchecked, Katanga province will serve as a precursor of what is to come for the entire country. The province is under government control, unlike some of the other eastern provinces embroiled in conflict, yet the people are subject to abject poverty and deprivation. While the world’s eyes are on the upcoming July 30th elections, the wealth is going out the back door at warp speed. This reinforces what Congolese say is the under-belly of the election process whereby the international community is working feverishly and spending heavily to legitimize the current client regime so that the unfettered pilfering of the Congo can continue (See interview with Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja by Pambazuka News).

A window of opportunity exists to break the cycle of pillage of the Congo’s human and natural resources; a process, which began in its modern form under King Leopold II of Belgium in 1885, continued under Belgium Colonialism for a half-century and perpetuated for over 3 decades by the Western-imposed and backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

The underdevelopment and impoverishment of an entire generation is being carried out while a perverse alliance between corrupt government officials and big business line their pockets. Surely such a proposition is repulsive to any nation or people who claim to be moral, just or civilized. No human rights group or concerned celebrity can claim to be fighting poverty with any moral veracity and be silent or ignore the plunder and rape of the Congo. People of conscience and goodwill can hardly sit idly and do nothing as another generation of Congolese is in the process of being condemned to forced labor, poverty, and mass death.

Friends of the Congo
Email: info@friendsofthecongo.org
Voice: 202-584-6512
web: http://www.friendsofthecongo.org

Posted at 7:08 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Telegraph

In pictures: Modigliani and His Models

Amedeo Modigliani doesn’t get a mention in the National Gallery’s recently opened Rebels and Martyrs show - but, in terms of proving a point, he could have had a whole room to himself. For the Italian-born artist was the paradigm of the romantic bohemian, the outsider painter who pursued his own vision amid a swirl of drugs, alcohol and dissolution in the Paris of the early 20th century.

‘Extraordinarily dramatic’: Portrait of Jeanne
Hébuterne, 1919
He died in penury and squalor in January 1920 at the age of 35, discovered by a neighbour in the final throes of tubercular meningitis, his bed strewn with bottles of alcohol and cans of sardines, his mistress Jeanne Hébuterne nursing him. She hadn’t thought to call a doctor, but her devotion to her lover was so great that, two days after his death, she threw herself backwards from a fifth-floor window. She was nine months pregnant with their second child.

Yet compare that sordid story with Jeanne Hébuterne, A Door in the Background (1919), on display in Modigliani and his Models at the Royal Academy. In this radiant portrait, Jeanne sits slightly off-centre, her head to one side, her falsely elongated, white-sleeved arms to the other. The painting is full of warmth and richness, the red of Jeanne’s shawl in subtle contrast to the red of the door and the lower wall behind her. Her blue eyes stare blankly, lost in inner contemplation, like some latterday Madonna, bringing serenity and warmth to the troubles of the world.

It is recognisably a portrait of Jeanne, suffused with a kind of tenderness and intimacy. But it is also a painting that pulls Modigliani away from biographical messiness and into a sphere where you see absolutely the seriousness and assurance of his work.

It’s one of the achievements of this lovely show of 52 paintings - the first major Modigliani exhibition in Britain for 40 years - that it reveals so clearly what his intentions were in what was effectively a seven-year career.

He started out as a sculptor and devoted four years to that, before picking up his paintbrush in 1913. The years remaining to him were interrupted by war and ill-health but produced more than 250 oils, the majority of his extant paintings.

Early sub-Fauvian daubs are soon replaced by what is recognisably his own style of portrait painting, in which African-influenced, heavily outlined forms take their place against thinly sketched backgrounds. Each portrait seems to be an experiment in providing the minimum of information that will allow an individual to emerge from this dominant style.

As Simonetta Fraquelli points out in her catalogue essay, “Modigliani’s purpose is neither to aggrandise the sitter nor to record him or her for posterity, but rather to capture the image of an individual at a specific moment in the artist’s life”.

Nude, 1917: Modigliani’s sprawled figures caused a scandal when first exhibited
Within this context, they are surprisingly recognisable - intelligent Beatrice Hastings, with her feather in her hat, the bow-lipped Elena Povolozky, the portly Oscar Miestchaninoff, the arrogant dealer Paul Guillaume - but they are all bound within the same vocabulary.

The other myth this exhibition lays to rest, however, is that Modigliani’s style did not develop. You can see this in the wall of nudes that dominates the second room of the Sackler Galleries. These sprawled figures caused a scandal when they were exhibited in 1917, and they still have the power to shock, not because of the presence of pubic hair (which was the problem then) but because of the aggressive way the lushly painted torsos are thrust compositionally to the front of the canvas.

Without feet, or hands, lying on a flatly painted red bedcover, her head supported on a turquoise cushion, Reclining Nude with Outstretched Arms (1917) turns her frank, kohl-eyed gaze on the viewer. Unlike the portraits, these nudes were painted using models, not friends, and they have no personality. They are sculptures made on canvas, images of erotic beauty, not real women.

But by Reclining Nude (c. 1919), Modigliani’s approach has changed. He no longer outlines his figures in thick black lines, and the ground on which she lies is even more freely painted and abstract, her body more fiercely elongated. She is at one and the same time more and less real.

The same progression is also apparent in the portraits. In 1918, to escape the German shelling of Paris and for the sake of his failing health, Modigliani and Jeanne moved to the South of France. Blues and greys replace the muted browns and blacks of his palette; instead of friends, he paints peasants and servants; the influence of Cézanne becomes ever more apparent.

His debt is clear in The Boy (Youth in Blue Jacket) (1919). But this painting makes something else blazingly obvious: what Modigliani finds of interest is not only the portrait itself, but the shapes made within the shallow frame of his composition. Here the strong right-angle of the table on which the boy rests his arm is counterbalanced by the strongly sloping shoulder and over-stretched arm on the other side. The background may be thinly painted, but it is rich in colour and tone, and its perspectives serve to push the sitter forward, claiming the viewer’s attention.

It appears effortless, but it is not, and this is the great, confident style of the mature Modigliani. Time again in these last portraits, the sheer verve of the way he blocks colour and shape takes the breath away.

Jeanne Hébuterne, a Door in the Background, 1919
In the magnificent Anna Zborowska (1917), he places her figure in black against a dappled brown background in a pose reminiscent of a formal 18th-century portrait. But the power of the painting springs from the way her elongated body and neck create a diagonal that is balanced by her folded hands. The canvas itself becomes a pattern, dominated by her superior, mask-like face.

In Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne (1919), this formal dynamism is even more evident. Modigliani paints his pregnant lover in flat black, her body defined by her white collar and white sleeves. The circle made by her characteristically folded hands is mimicked by the shape of the chair she sits on, and these curved shapes are in turn challenged by the sharp verticals in grey, black, white and beige that form the background. It is extraordinarily dramatic.

Paintings such as these have made Modigliani hugely collectable. He seems modern without being too challenging, protecting an old idea of beauty even as he distorts it.

But these works also show that his aim is nothing less than a concerted and serious attempt to reinvent classical portraiture for the modern age. Where his friends Picasso and Juan Gris shattered form, he kept it unified, while holding it up for scrutiny.

This, to some extent, explains why he chose to depict most of his subjects as half-figures or busts: the poses with their folded hands instantly recall the grand masters of portraiture such as Titian and Ingres, whose work he sought to redefine.

The value of this show is that it helps us see that. This is a show that takes Modigliani out of the attractive bohemian backwater in which he is always in danger of languishing and asserts his right to be considered as a thoughtful and important artist.

‘Modigliani and his Models’ is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (0870 8488484), from Sat until Oct 15.
Richard Dorment is away
27 June 2006: The naked and the dead [Richard Dorment reviews Rebels and Martyrs]

Posted at 6:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright New America Media
Commentary, , Jun 28, 2006

Editor’s Note: Amid the hype over billionaire Warren Buffett’s mega-gift to the Gates Foundation it might be time to consult India’s Jains, who know a little something about giving away a fortune to gain the world. Sandip Roy is an editor for New America Media and host of “UpFront,” a NAM weekly radio program on KALW-91.7 FM, San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO—When Jain diamond merchants in India decide to renounce the material world, they don’t call press conferences in public libraries. They deck themselves in jewels and silks and ride down the streets on caparisoned elephant, scattering handfuls of rice and gold coins and rupee notes to the crowds. Then they shave their hair, wrap themselves in white cotton sheets and walk away barefoot from their families and their fortunes. Their first act as renunciates is to beg for food from the very houses they left behind. Then they turn their backs on their hometowns.

They will probably not be appearing on “The Charlie Rose Show.”

But in the feverish excitement of the arranged marriage between the world’s richest man and the world’s second richest man, Warren Buffett is not giving up his wealth to find God. He is seeking to become God.

A vaccine for AIDS. A cure for tuberculosis. Worthy goals indeed, but the Hindu sacred books say we must look inward during the last stage of life. After being a student and a householder, the Hindu was supposed to embrace renunciation and go into the forest to try and find moksha, or self-liberation, not a way to stop global warming.

To the West, that might sound like a colossal waste of potential when your largesse could benefit public health, agriculture, U.S. education. Naysayers sound like petty-minded cynics when they sneer at cutthroat capitalists suddenly investing in the future of the world. They’re just buying their way into heaven, they say.

In his book “Maximum City,” Suketu Mehta writes that when the Jain millionaire prepares to give away his wealth, he folds his hands and says to all around him, “I have made many mistakes. Forgive me if I’ve hurt anyone.”

I don’t know that Mr. Buffett or Mr. Gates, or for that matter Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Ford, ever could bring themselves to utter something like that.

Instead, we are witnessing the morphing of the world’s richest foundation into a state unto itself. Already, when Bill Gates travels the world he has more clout than most elected presidents and prime ministers. My Vietnamese friend says more Vietnamese look up to him than Ho Chi Minh. A George W. Bush lasts only two terms. There is no term limit for the world’s No. 1 philanthropist.

Buffett says he chose to give his money to the Gates Foundation over the U.S. government because the foundation has a greater ability to maximize per-dollar benefits. Fair enough. The relentless drive that made Microsoft No. 1 in the world will surely make the Gates Foundation just as much of a streamlined super-force for good. Hopefully.

Because it’s a little scary. After all, when you’re talking $31 billion, rivers change course. You can be sure that if the Gates Foundation makes clean drinking water a priority over HIV/AIDS tomorrow, a thousand NGOs in Kinshasa and New Delhi will switch course as well. They know an all-you-can-spend buffet when they see one.

Once we had a messy world of WordStar, WordPerfect and so many other word processing programs. Now Gates assures us we are much better off behind the one banner of Microsoft Word. Choices are overrated, really, Buffett seems to be saying, as he puts 31 billion eggs for our future into one Gates basket.

I don’t mean to sit in my comfortable apartment and ignore the millions who will die from AIDS in the next decade — millions who could be helped or even spared the ravages of AIDS thanks to Buffett’s billions. People like me are quick to condemn the likes of Buffett (who, to be fair, doesn’t ask that his name be attached to his gifts) as selfish, tax-break gluttons. Now we can’t seem to give them a break even when they want to turn the spigot of the trickle-down economy to full blast.

So I say good luck to Mr. Buffett, and to the world he is dreaming for us. As Superman returns to screens around the globe this week, Mr. Buffett and his friend Mr. Gates must be having the last laugh. The muscled man in red and blue tights seems like yesterday’s hero — an out-of-date model. It’s the bespectacled, nerdy Clark Kent types who are the new superheroes of this world.

Superhero Warren Buffett might yet save the world. He might even find happiness. But moksha will have to wait for another day. For that, like the Buddha, he might have to chop off his hair to shear his ego, not sign a check to secure his legacy.

Posted at 12:48 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Slate

One of the most bruising critiques of China’s emerging role in the global economy holds that the nation is not only taking the jobs of manufacturing workers in rich countries, but is also simultaneously battering the livelihoods of workers in the poorest regions of the world. In this fomulation, China is a kind of black hole, combining cheap labor, economies of scale, and ever-increasing technical sophistication to suck the life force out of everyone else.

If one were to judge by the press coverage of a new report from the United Nations Development Program unveiled in Cambodia last Thursday, “Trade on Human Terms: Transforming Trade for Human Development In Asia and the Pacific.” the worst fears are being realized. “China’s Boom a Threat to Neighbors, UN report says,” blasted the Wall Street Journal. Since the removal of international quotas on textiles two years ago, China’s clothing and textiles industry has boomed, but some of the poorest nations in Asia have seen their once thriving textile sectors decline. Since these same nations are also some of the leading practitioners of trade liberalization in the developing world, the conclusion is hard to avoid: the poor are getting screwed by free trade.

A close look at the chapter of the report that deals with Asia’s evolving textile markets reveals a more complicated story than the headlines, however. Most countries in Asia have continued to experience growth in textile exports since the end of quotas. Understanding why some of those countries are succeeding, even in the shadow of the Middle Kingdom, is useful.

For one thing, China isn’t the only beneficiary of the end of quotas. China has gained the most, but India is also growing fast. This is worth noting, because, as the report points out, the dismal performance of Nepal, which has seen its textile exports contract more than any other Asian nation, is largely due to the withdrawal from Nepal of Indian textile entrepreneurs, who had previously set up offshore operations in Nepal to take advantage of Nepal’s quota allotment.

Furthermore, many of China’s “neighbors” — such as Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, are doing reasonably well. (The worst four performers in Asia are Nepal, the Philippines, Pakistan and Thailand.) Cambodia offers an especially interesting example. According to the UNDP report, (and believe me, the authors of this hugely informative report are not interested in carrying water for free trade evangelists,) Cambodia has experienced success in attracting foreign buyers for locally produced textiles in part because it has made great efforts to improve factory conditions, including voluntarily taking part in an International Labor Organization inspection program. In a world, where, according to the report, “international retailers and garment manufacturers are closely scrutinized in their home countries with regard to the labor conditions in the factories of their suppliers,” this has become a selling point.

If true, this is a critical development — the inclusion of human welfare concerns as part of the calculus of capitalist investment. I’ve mentioned here a few times before that in a global economy where “branding” is everything, consumers must demand that being “cool” includes treating workers well. That would be a major step forward for civilization. But I always wince inwardly when I write something along those lines, because I’m as cynical as anyone in believing that ultimately, the bottom line is the bottom line, and cheap labor will win out over image. But if the UNDP says that “Cambodia, for example, has already demonstrated how improved working conditions can help boost exports,” well, that’s my takeaway headline.

The report also observes that China is now the fourth largest market for apparel in the world. It is time, therefore for China (and India) to start acting like developed nations, and start enabling preferential access to their own markets to the least developed countries in the world. The sooner that consumer demand in China and India begins to exert a gravitational pull on the rest of the world, the better. China is already boosting economies in Latin America and Africa because of its voracious demand for raw materials. The next step is to find ways to translate that hunger into an appetite for finished goods.

But the most troubling aspect of the report, which covers far, far more than just the textile industry in Asia, and is worth reading for scores of reasons, has little to do with anything that can be solely pinned on China’s back. The most alarming observation is that despite being a region that has seen some of the highest rates of economic growth in the world over the last thirty years, Asian nations have not experienced a similar growth in employment rates. Wages have gone up in many areas — the report says wages in China are rising by 11 percent a year. Productivity has surged. But employment isn’t keeping pace.

There are a number of reasons for this. But chief among them may be the double-edged sword of productivity. As Asian nations ascend the economic ladder, they are becoming increasingly technologically sophisticated, trading in their sweatshops for robots and automated factories. Some labor economists in the United States argue that technological innovation has been much more damaging to manufacturing workers than foreign competition. The data in the UNDP report suggests that the same process is working its way through the economies of the developing world.

Where that will end is anyone’s guess.

Posted at 9:18 AM · Comments (0)

Posted Friday, June 30, 2006 - Copyright Slate

China has one of the world’s most straightforward industrial policies: Identify successful foreign industries, determine what makes them successful, and clone them. This strategy has worked well in telecommunications, where China’s Huawei makes products so similar to Cisco’s that Cisco has sued for patent and copyright infringement. Similarly, China Unicom just launched the RedBerry, which, as you might guess, is a cheaper version of the BlackBerry. Next on the list: copying Hollywood.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, China won over the film world by developing quality art-house movies that brought home international festival prizes. But the American commercial film industry offers more than a Palme d’Or: It’s lucrative both domestically and overseas, and it serves to spread American ideals and culture. That’s why both the Chinese film industry and Chinese politicians want their own version of Hollywood, to create blockbusters of proportions. It’s a strategy that’s half-succeeding; the Chinese industry is managing to make a few films that sell in the United States. But the other side of Hollywood—domestic box-office success—is proving elusive. As a result, the Chinese industry is increasingly making films designed to fit American tastes, like the Wal-Mart factories in China that make baseball mitts for American Little-Leaguers.
So far, China’s main strategy has been to repurpose its existing assets with filmmaker Zhang Yimou at the forefront of the movement. Zhang is known to film snobs as a director of movies like the critically acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern—productions about the bitterness of life consisting mainly of actress Gong Li looking forlorn and tormented. But that’s the old Zhang. Over the last few years he’s metamorphosed into a big-time martial-arts director, responsible for two successes (or sellouts, depending on your point of view): the epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, which have made the bulk of their money in the United States.

The retooling strategy, however, doesn’t always work. Take the 2005 film The Promise, which put Chen Kai Ge, director of Cannes-winning Farewell My Concubine, at the helm of a martial-arts romance. In addition to an A-list Chinese director, the movie boasted the largest budget in Chinese film history and starred Hong Kong actors Cecilia Cheng and Nicolas Tse. What could go wrong? Everything. The Promise features a hero who struggles to act through his giant golden helmet, costumes more Flash Gordon than Tang dynasty, and some of the worst CGI since Jar-Jar Binks. The Weinstein brothers planned to distribute the film in the United States but pulled out after getting a whiff of it.
China’s not alone in producing such duds; Hollywood has its share of Jersey Girls, too. But the Chinese movie industry is further hampered by the fact that it’s very difficult for a big film to make money without international distribution. While successful American films make money in the domestic market, and supplement that with ticket sales overseas, the big Chinese films need foreign distribution to break even. Ironically, government policies designed to protect the film industry brought about this state of affairs.
Last week I was in the Beijing cafe Zha Zha, and I asked the barista how often she goes to the movies. “I’ve never been to a movie theater,” she replied—encapsulating the problem. In China, there is less than one movie theater for every 1 million people: That’s something like 2,000 people for every seat.
Why so few theaters? There would be more movie theaters if they made more money, but theaters can only make money if they have something good to show. For trade and ideological reasons, China maintains a quota of about 20 foreign films a year; it even blocks films made with Chinese actors, like Memoirs of a Geisha.
Censorship policy adds another level of unpredictability. The Da Vinci Code made its world debut in China (four hours before Cannes). The movie seemed poised to become a giant domestic hit, but on June 9, theaters were abruptly ordered to stop screening the film. No one knows exactly why.
Finally, the bootleg DVD industry doesn’t help. As most people know, bootleg DVDs are everywhere in China; my local grocery store in Beijing carries everything from Birth of a Nation to The Bicycle Thief, all for about $1 apiece. Film enthusiasts benefit, but the DVDs compete with films that are still in theaters and gut legitimate DVD sales—a key source of revenue in the United States. While Hollywood complains about losing money to bootleg DVDs, the Chinese bootlegs hurt the local industry, too. The greatest consequence may be cultural: The omnipresence of bootleg DVDs has created a generation of Chinese consumers accustomed to watching cheap DVDs on inexpensive large-screen TVs instead of buying popcorn and movie tickets.
What does this all mean for Chinese film? It means America is the best place for a Chinese film to make money, after all. We’ll likely see less funding for films that Chinese people enjoy—like those of director Feng Xiao-Gang, filled with quirky Chinese humor—and more movies designed for American tastes (kung-fu aplenty). For better or for worse, it’s less beating Hollywood than serving it. Consider it the Kung Pao Chickenization of Chinese film.

Posted at 9:28 PM · Comments (0)

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