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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This amazing lady died the other day, deepening our collective loss of a generation or two of sheer and irreplaceable female vocal talent: Sarah, Ella, Dinah, Betty (Carter), Shirley (Horn). I’ll stop there. It’s too awful to contemplate.
Anita was a soul sister. Doubt it? Listen to this record, a bargain bin special that is one of the densest collections of great recordings you’ll encounter from any Jazz vocalist. The voice ranges from gritty sass to pure milk and honey, and it does so effortlessly, through drink and smoke and heroin.

“Say Joe, Have you been uptown,” she asks Roy Eldridge, who informs her his name ain’t Joe.

Great, great music from an amazing woman.

Posted at 9:56 PM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French / Copyright The New York Times
November 29, 2006

SHANGHAI: Just who was Mao Zedong?

According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China’s modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as “a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese.”

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong’s reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

In recent weeks, the Chinese government has demonstrated its hostility toward the emergence of a credible source of reference material that escapes its control by frequently blocking access to Wikipedia, whose Chinese version, though still far smaller than its English-language counterpart, is growing by leaps and bounds.
Today in Asia - Pacific
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Click here to find out more!

But on sensitive questions of China’s modern history or on hot-button issues, the Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.

This gulf in information and perspective comes across powerfully in the entry on Mao, which is consistently one of the most frequently searched and edited topics in the Chinese version, and in the entry on historical watersheds, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Chinese Wikipedia users and critics say that the differences highlight the resilience here of a system of information control whose reach goes well beyond simple censorship.

In each of its language versions, Wikipedia is collaboratively written and edited by online enthusiasts, and contributors to the Chinese-language site explain the differences in content by citing the powerful influence of Chinese education, which often provides a neatly sanitized national perspective on sensitive aspects of the country’s past.

This parochialism is reinforced by the blocking of foreign Web sites, and by the conformism of the carefully censored mass media. Alternative viewpoints are sometimes available, but usually only to a restricted circle of people who have the means and determination to seek them out.

For some, the Chinese version of Wikipedia was intended as just such a resource, but its tame approach to sensitive topics has sparked a fierce debate in the world of online mavens over its objectivity and thoroughness.

In a recent discussion on the encyclopedia’s Web site about the Mao legacy, a user with the online name Manchurian Tiger wrote, “If anyone can prove that Mao’s political movements didn’t kill so many people, I’m willing to delete the wording that ‘millions of people were killed.’” Rather than contribute to encyclopedias, those who wish to pay tribute to Mao, he added, should “go to his mausoleum.”

Another user replied angrily: “If you want to release your emotions, use a bulletin board. Wikipedia is not your toilet.” In the end, the entry on Mao included no death toll from either famine or political purges.

Indeed, in its present form, the Chinese Wikipedia introduction to Mao Zedong could hardly be more anodyne: “One of the main founders and leaders of the Communist Party of China, the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Republic of China,” it reads. “He introduced a series of political movements such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He had a great influence over 20th-century China and the world.”

On the evidence of entries like this, for the moment, the fight over editorial direction of Wikipedia in Chinese is being won by enthusiasts who practice self-censorship.

“Most of the people who contribute to Wikipedia rarely touch upon political topics,” said Yuan Mingli, a frequent contributor from Shanghai. “They prefer to write about things like technology. There are other things in life.”

For the complete article please follow this link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/29/news/wiki.php

Posted at 12:32 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Dissent

Fall 2006

China did not qualify for the 2006 World Cup, yet there was almost fanatical enthusiasm for the games in Beijing. Because the matches were played in the middle of the night, many Beijingers slept during the day. This gave a brief respite from Beijing�s notorious traffic jams, and the number of emergency calls to the city hotline decreased by 11 percent during the hours of the games. My son�s end-of-year examinations were scheduled during the three-day interval between two rounds. I was told that the dates were purposefully chosen.

A Soft Spot for Great Historical Powers
What explains the passion that people showed for the game? It is hard to imagine Americans, say, getting so excited about victories by other nations in an international tournament for which their national team had failed to qualify. In the United States, although there is some ethnic-based enthusiasm for particular teams�Italian Americans support the Italian team, Mexican Americans support the Mexican team, and so on�the World Cup does not occupy center stage of social life. But the United States may be an outlying case. In many parts of the world�from South Africa to India to China�the bulk of ordinary citizens became crazed about soccer during the World Cup, even without any national team in the competition. This worldwide obsession can be explained partly by the usual commercial considerations: clever branding and marketing that tap the widespread desire to be part of a global event in countries of rising affluence.

In China, though, there may also be more particular political factors. As Yu Maochun of the U.S. Naval Academy notes, China�s decision, for the first time in its history, to allow live broadcasting of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina was a turning point in China�s political history because of the excitement it generated. For the first time since the revolution, the Chinese nation, exhausted by the Communist Party�s incessant political campaigns, realized that the world could be excited by something other than Marxism and class struggle. Francesco Sisci, the distinguished correspondent for La Stampa, offers an explanation for current interest. The two best-read newspapers in China, selling well over a million copies each every day, are Cankao Xiaoxi and Huanqiu Shibao. They cover mainly international news. Many popular local papers cover local news. In both cases, the reporting does not stray too far from the facts and deals with issues that people care about. All national news, however, is official propaganda and thus uninteresting. So the Chinese develop strong local and international interests but pay less attention to national affairs than do most citizens of liberal democratic countries.[1]
One might predict that there will be a rise in interest in national affairs if the media open up and the political system democratizes, with controversial national issues being publicly aired and discussed. There may also be a corresponding decrease in interest in international affairs. In Taiwan, arguably, democratization has focused debates on national affairs and there is, consequently, less interest in international affairs, including international sports. The recent political opening may help to explain why the World Cup did not generate the same level of enthusiasm in Taiwan as in mainland China (there are other factors, such as Taiwanese enthusiasm for baseball).
Educated Chinese in particular have a special interest in international affairs, including international sports.

Still, the sheer beauty of global soccer cannot be discounted as the key reason for interest in the sport. The more interesting question, perhaps, is why the Chinese support particular teams with such passion. In the 2002 World Cup, I expected that Asian solidarity would play an important role. The Chinese team had been eliminated in the first round, but the South Korean team performed unexpectedly well. I watched the quarter-final match between Germany and South Korea in a Beijing bar, and to my surprise the crowd burst into applause when Germany scored and eventually won the match. I was told that support for Germany can be explained by the fact that German soccer is shown on Chinese television, and most Chinese are more familiar with German players. One friend said that Koreans (along with the Taiwanese) are known to be the most exploitative employers of Chinese workers. But I also detected a certain amount of resentment at the fact that the �younger brother� was upstaging his elders.

This year, I did not have such illusions.[2]
Paik Wooyeal has noted that the tendency to cheer against neighboring country teams may be more universal. For example, the Swiss Germans cheer against the German team, the English against the French, and so on. Could it be that the history of warfare between neighbors still forms preferences in sports? Or perhaps there is a natural tendency to be jealous of a neighbor�s success?
There was enthusiasm for the Korean team in the Wudaokou area of Beijing, home to many Korean students. But the �lao Beijing� (old-time Beijingers) I spoke to rejoiced at Korea�s early exit. In the case of Japan, the antagonism is more obvious. There were few public spaces to observe the performance of the Japanese team during the World Cup. Most bars in the Wudaokou area did not show the games with Japan, and there was an unusually heavy police presence during the games, purportedly because the government feared anti-Japanese riots that could spin out of control. Fortunately for the authorities, the Japanese team did not win any games and failed to advance to the next round.

MY OWN LOYALTIES lie with underdog teams. In 2002, I was a big fan of Korea. My Korean friends took great pride in what they called the �spiritual power� of their team, which compensated for lack of talent and experience, and their enthusiasm rubbed off on me. In 2006, I supported Ghana, the best-performing African country, which played with such heart and excitement. Perhaps left-wing political sensibilities naturally lend themselves to support for teams from relatively poor and not-so-famous countries. A win would give a great boost to their national confidence, and it might have positive economic spillovers. Surely Ghana needs more of a boost than the United States.[3]
Ghana eliminated the United States from the 2006 World Cup with a thrilling two-to-one victory, but I could not make my joy too explicit during the game itself. I watched the game with my son, who holds an American passport, and since he was cheering for the U.S. team I did not want to upset him. It is difficult to persuade children that their team loyalties should be determined at least partly by principles of international economic justice.
There may also be psychological reasons to support underdogs. They appeal to the romantic element in the soul. Think how many Hollywood movies end with the triumph of underdog athletes and teams.

There is no such preference for the underdog in China. Quite the opposite, in fact. Chinese fans support traditional soccer powers such as Germany, England, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It is difficult to overestimate the passion for such teams. In the 2002 World Cup, the CCTV hostess Sheng Bin wept openly at Argentina�s early exit. When England went down in defeat against Portugal in 2006, my son�s piano teacher�s husband was so depressed he could barely get out of bed. Partly, the preference for traditional soccer powers can be explained by the love of the game: Chinese fans support teams that have performed well in the past and are likely to generate exciting games in the future. But there may also be a special form of internationalist nationalism at work. The support for established teams may be an expression of a more general appreciation for nations with long and rich histories and cultures. As director of the Institute of Italian culture in Beijing, Francesco Sisci could find common ground with his Chinese counterparts by appealing to their love of history, by showing how Italy served as a cradle of Western civilization just as China served as the cradle of East Asian civilization.

Conversely, the Chinese won�t cheer for underdogs or relatively small teams and countries without substantial talent, global impact, or long histories. In soccer, this means they won�t cheer for teams like Australia (�Would you cheer for a bunch of beer-guzzling upstarts?� as one friend put it) if they�re up against the more established soccer powers. In politics, it means that they won�t sympathize much with the aspirations of small nations or minorities, such as the Francophones of Quebec (not to mention Taiwan and Tibet). The only way to address this concern is for such small powers to show that they are worthy of global admiration. If Australia develops into a global soccer power over, say, thirty years, as opposed to scoring occasional fluke victories, it will gain the sympathy of the Chinese. If Quebec produces great achievements that the rest of the world can appreciate, it may gain the admiration of the Chinese. (Even though I�m from Quebec, I�m hard-pressed to explain what�s great about my home province; nobody in China has ever heard of Guy Lafleur.)

What�s Wrong with Being Biased?
In 2006, the most striking public display of passion for a traditional soccer power occurred at the end of the quarter-final match between Italy and Australia. China�s best-known soccer announcer, Huang Jianxiang, was unable to control his enthusiasm when Fabio Grosso went down in the penalty area and a last-minute penalty kick was awarded to the Italians.

It is worth quoting in full the official Chinese translation by the Xinhua news agency. Huang screamed,

Penalty! Penalty! Penalty! Grosso�s done it, Grosso�s done it! The great Italian left back! He succeeded in the glorious traditions of Italy! Facchetti, Cabrini and Maldini, their souls are infused in him at this moment! Grosso represents the long history and traditions of soccer, he�s not fighting alone at this moment! He�s not alone! Grosso represents the long history and traditions of Italian soccer! He is not fighting alone!
As Francesco Totti prepared to take the penalty kick that would win the match, Huang shouted himself hoarse.

Totti! He is about to take the shot. He shoulders the expectations of the whole world. Goooooal! Game over! Italy wins! Beat the Australians! They do not fall in front of Hiddink again! [Hiddink, the Australian coach, had led the South Korean team that ousted Italy in the 2002 World Cup.] Italy the great! Left back the great! Happy birthday to Paolo Maldini! Long live Italy! The victory belongs to Italy, to Grosso, to Cannavaro, to Zambrotta, to Buffon, to Maldini, to everyone who loves Italian soccer! Hiddink lost his courage faced with Italian history and traditions! He finally reaped what he had sown! They should go home. They don�t need to fly as far as Australia as most of them are living in Europe. Farewell!
As I listened to Huang�s outburst, I could hear similar cries of joy from my neighboring flats (it was about 1 a.m.). I was deeply moved by this manifestation of enthusiasm for another country�s triumph, by the love shown for another country�s history and traditions. I was also amused, because the Chinese formulation of the �Long Live� idiom�literally, �Italy, Ten Thousand Years!��used to be invoked by enthusiastic crowds for Mao and the Communist Party (�Chairman Mao, Ten Thousand Years!�).

To my surprise, Huang�s comments generated a storm of controversy. Popular Chinese portals such as sina.com and sohu.com�s online discussion forums were flooded with opinions for and against them. Beijing blogger Fly Show had a post titled �Huang �Long Live Italy� Jianxiang, you can go home now… . Sorry, Australia, please forgive our crazy man!� According to an unconfirmed text circulating on the Internet, more than thirty Australian soccer supporters surrounded the Australian embassy in Beijing the next day, demanding that the ambassador make a formal complaint to the Chinese government about Huang�s commentary. A couple of days later, Huang issued a letter of public apology:

Dear soccer fans and TV viewers around the country, I have attached too much personal feeling to the match. After I woke up this morning, I reviewed the video of the match and I feel there is some injustice and prejudice in my comment. I will make formal apologies to viewers. I am familiar with Italian football and I hope that the Italians can gain a berth in the last eight, which will make the matches in the future more exciting, but I have mingled my feeling with … my job. It is not a standpoint that a TV commentator should have … I will draw the lesson from this case and … keep my personal feeling and job balanced. When we broadcast the matches, we hope referees can be just, and as a commentator, I will try my best to be fair and to do a good job.
Are announcers supposed to be neutral and unbiased? I suggest that Huang may not be drawing the right lesson from this episode (assuming that his apology was sincere; more likely, it was forced upon him). For one thing, there may be political reasons to favor passionate and controversial announcers. The key political catchword in China is �stability,� and the government closely monitors the media (not to mention political organs) to ensure that controversial views are not aired. If the system fails to live up to the �ideal,� then �stability� is threatened, and the government uses various carrots and sticks to restore the status quo. In this case, the government-run television station repeatedly ran footage of Australia�s achievements in soccer along with the subtitles proclaiming �Australia bows out like true heroes,� presumably to appease the pro-Australia contingent that may have been angered by Huang�s outburst. And Huang himself was dismissed from further World Cup commentary on Italian games. In my view, Huang was sorely missed. The announcer for the next two Italy games�including its win over France in the final�was dreadfully dull, and he did not seem nearly as well informed as Huang. But the more worrisome point is that the government also invoked the sort of harsh tactics meted out to political opponents of the regime, such as depriving them of job opportunities. Is that what the Australian supporters really wanted? Is this the way to deal with controversy in society, particularly in the context of a political system that frowns upon public expressions of passion and emotion?

There may also be cultural reasons to question the assumption that announcers are supposed to be neutral. Another model, perhaps more deeply rooted in Chinese culture, is that announcers should be like well-informed teachers, explaining to the viewer which players and teams express certain qualities and virtues. Announcers are not merely transmitting factual information; they are supposed to draw moral lessons for the viewers/students. It is up to the viewers/students to decide whether they agree with the announcers/teachers. And those who disagree should gently remonstrate with the teachers, not use force to show disagreement. The fact that many Chinese bloggers supported Huang suggests that the normative model of the teacher/announcer still resonates in contemporary China (according to an online survey by sina.com, nearly half the respondents said Huang�s comments were not unfair; one of the most popular new cell phone rings mimics Huang�s now famous enthusiasm for the Italian victory over Australia). I do not deny that there may be other explanations, such as widespread support for the Italian team in Chinese society; but it is difficult to imagine such a level of approval for outwardly biased announcers in, say, Sweden or Canada. The ideal of neutrality as applied to various spheres of social life�not simply for judges and referees, but also for announcers, officials, teachers, even parents and friends�seems too deeply ingrained in Western societies.

The Dangers of Self-Regarding Nationalism
The most moving aspect of Huang�s outburst is the love he showed for another country. He was celebrating �the glorious traditions of Italy�! If the same outburst had been made by an Italian announcer, it would have seemed distasteful, at least to an outsider. The talk of �Italy the Great!,� with the announcer almost foaming at the mouth, would have conjured up images of Italy�s fascist past. Shortly after the controversial game, Huang�s off-the-cuff response pointed to more dangerous manifestations of nationalism: �Australia reminded me of the lousy team that eliminated China in the World Cup qualifiers in 1981 … Australia will now fight for an Asian World Cup berth and it may not be good enough to handle South Korea and Japan. But it will very likely take advantage of the Chinese team. So I don�t like it.� Such sentiments may be magnified when Chinese athletes achieve world-class status, say, in the Olympics, or perhaps in soccer a couple of decades from now. At that point, the Huangs will be cheering for their own team, and they may show an aggressive hostility to opponents, with potentially dangerous political consequences. There was a significant wave of anti-Americanism in China when the Americans beat the Chinese in the 1999 Women�s World Cup, to the point that the U.S. State Department issued a warning to Americans in China to keep a low profile (but this was also shortly after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War[4]
The Clinton administration claimed that the bombing was unintentional and apologized for the bombing and the loss of life, but there is widespread skepticism in China regarding the official U.S. explanation.
).

Perhaps I overstate the concern. Just as orthodox religious groups sometimes have respect for each other�s commitments (and contempt for agnostic liberals and atheists), so soccer fans can find mutual joy in national commitments. In the leadoff to the game between Portugal and Germany, enthusiastic fans wrapped in the flags of their respective countries engaged in joint celebrations. Such fans appreciate each other�s passionate commitment to their own teams; they have far more in common with each other than with people indifferent to soccer. Moreover, self-regarding nationalism can be trumped by love of the game. In the case of China, its own fans turn on the team when it performs poorly, as in the 2002 World Cup match when China was crushed by Brazil four to nothing. Even if China becomes a world power in soccer, there is no guarantee that its fans will give it unconditional support, judging by the experience of other soccer powers. French fans could not muster much enthusiasm for their own team following Zinedine Zidane�s vicious headbutt in the final game against Italy. Fans will often be critical if their own national team fails to display virtues that are universally honored.

STILL, THERE are real dangers associated with self-regarding nationalism. The Chinese state�s pursuit of Olympic gold medals illustrates these dangers. China�s best athletes are selected at a very young age and made to undergo rigorous state-sponsored physical education, with little attention paid to other forms of learning. The athletes are used by the state to score political points, and the announcers at Olympic Games make less-than-subtle claims about the greatness of the Chinese nation. As the influential journalist Sang Ye puts it, �For China, athletics has little to do with sport per se. It is not concerned with either physical health or personal well-being. For the Chinese, athletic competitions are a struggle between political systems. They are a heady opiate administered to salve dreams of national glory� (see Sang Ye�s revealing interview with an elite athlete in China Candid [University of California Press, 2006]). The near-term goal is to surpass the U.S. gold medal tally at the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing.

Ironically, such an approach to sports owes its origins to ancient Greece, where city-states engaged in intense military competition, fighting for either survival or expansion. There was naturally much emphasis on the training of soldiers, and state-sponsored physical education�designed to toughen bodies and (as Aristotle says) to �foster the virtue of courage��developed as a by-product. Greek states actively promoted interstate sporting competitions�most famously, the Olympics�and the main point of competing was to bring glory to the state. The whole system was geared to a �winner-take-all� mentality: there wasn�t even a prize for second place. The winners were treated as conquering heroes by their home states, and they were showered with material benefits, such as free meals for life.

China�s own political tradition (and, to a certain extent, earlier political practice) points to an alternative approach that may be more desirable for modern societies. The Confucian view is that physical activity should be tied to the pursuit of nonmilitaristic virtues and that the test of success should be its contribution to moral and intellectual development rather than to victory in sporting competitions. Such an ideal is realized by means of rituals that civilize and elevate, particularly in the context of competitive relationships that might otherwise degenerate into hostility and antagonism, if not warfare. This ideal is not entirely unrealistic in contemporary societies. Mencius�s account of the archer�s psychological reaction to �failure���an archer makes sure his stance is correct before letting fly the arrow, and if he fails to hit the mark, he does not hold it against the victor. He simply seeks the cause within himself��is not dissimilar to the tennis player who graciously shakes the winner�s hand after the game and pursues a rigorous self-improvement program afterward. Confucius�s account of the gentleman-archer echoes the rituals of sumo wrestlers: �Exemplary persons are not competitive, but they must still compete in archery. Greeting and making way for each other, the archers ascend the hall, and returning they drink a salute. Even during competition, they are exemplary persons.� In soccer, the relevant rituals include helping opponents up after a fall and exchanging sweat-soaked shirts at the end of the game. These rituals need not be incompatible with passionate support for one team. In the 2002 World Cup, the Koreans were fanatical supporters of their own team. But after the team�s loss to Turkey for the third-place spot in front of its home crowd, the Korean team formed a circle and collectively bowed to the audience as a show of gratitude. The crowd responded with a tremendous ovation, for the Korean team and, more surprisingly, for the victorious Turkish team. There may be particular reasons for this response�many South Koreans are grateful to Turkey because of its support in the Korean War half a century ago�but such moving scenes show how Confucian-style rituals can tame the excesses of national bias. It is no coincidence that Korea is widely held to be the most Confucian country in East Asia. For the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, perhaps the Chinese can seek inspiration from Confucian rather than Greek athletic ideals.[5]
I do not mean to imply that the quest for gold medals should be entirely subordinated to the concern for Confucian civility. I�ve yet to recover from the disappointment that Canada did not win any gold medals during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal (nor am I proud of the fact that Canada remains the only country ever to host the summer Olympics without winning a gold medal). My point is that Confucian civility should be an important concern and that national glory should not simply be focused on the quest for victory. Nations engaged in international sporting competitions can also take pride in their civility, decency, and sense of justice.

The idea for this essay emerged from exchanges that took place during the 2006 World Cup on ChinaPOL, an e-mail list of academics and journalists working on Chinese politics. I would like to thank the participants in these exchanges. Special thanks to Richard Baum, Avner de-Shalit, Bruce Jacobs, David Kelly, Donald Keyser, Parag Khanna, Paik Wooyeal, Francesco Sisci, Michael Walzer, and Yu Maochun for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Daniel A. Bell is Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His latest books are Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton University Press, 2006) and the co-edited volume (with Jean-Marc Coicaud) Ethics in Action: The Ethical Challenges of International Human Rights NGOs (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He can be reached at daniel.a.bell@gmail.com.

Footnotes:
1.) One might predict that there will be a rise in interest in national affairs if the media open up and the political system democratizes, with controversial national issues being publicly aired and discussed. There may also be a corresponding decrease in interest in international affairs. In Taiwan, arguably, democratization has focused debates on national affairs and there is, consequently, less interest in international affairs, including international sports. The recent political opening may help to explain why the World Cup did not generate the same level of enthusiasm in Taiwan as in mainland China (there are other factors, such as Taiwanese enthusiasm for baseball).
2.) Paik Wooyeal has noted that the tendency to cheer against neighboring country teams may be more universal. For example, the Swiss Germans cheer against the German team, the English against the French, and so on. Could it be that the history of warfare between neighbors still forms preferences in sports? Or perhaps there is a natural tendency to be jealous of a neighbor�s success?
3.) Ghana eliminated the United States from the 2006 World Cup with a thrilling two-to-one victory, but I could not make my joy too explicit during the game itself. I watched the game with my son, who holds an American passport, and since he was cheering for the U.S. team I did not want to upset him. It is difficult to persuade children that their team loyalties should be determined at least partly by principles of international economic justice.
4.) The Clinton administration claimed that the bombing was unintentional and apologized for the bombing and the loss of life, but there is widespread skepticism in China regarding the official U.S. explanation.
5.) I do not mean to imply that the quest for gold medals should be entirely subordinated to the concern for Confucian civility. I�ve yet to recover from the disappointment that Canada did not win any gold medals during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal (nor am I proud of the fact that Canada remains the only country ever to host the summer Olympics without winning a gold medal). My point is that Confucian civility should be an important concern and that national glory should not simply be focused on the quest for victory. Nations engaged in international sporting competitions can also take pride in their civility, decency, and sense of justice.

Posted at 10:51 PM · Comments (0)

14 October 2006

All Africa
English
(c) 2006 AllAfrica, All Rights Reserved

Lagos, Oct 13, 2006 (This Day/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) —

I once believed that capital was another word for money, the
accumulated wealth of a country or its people. Surely, I thought,
wealth is determined by the money or property in one’s possession.
Then I saw a Deutsche Bank advertisement in the Wall Street Journal
that proclaimed: “Ideas are capital. The rest is just money.”

I was struck by the simplicity of such an eloquent and forceful idea.
I started imagining what such power meant for Africa. The potential
for progress and poverty alleviation in Africa relies on capital
generated from the power within our minds, not from our ability to
pick minerals from the ground or seek debt relief and foreign
assistance. If ideas are capital, why is Africa investing more on
things than on information, and more on the military than on
education? Suddenly, I realized what this idea could mean for Africa.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, why does a general earn more
than the work of a hundred writers combined? If ideas are indeed
capital, then Africa should stem its brain drain and promote the
African Renaissance, which will lead to the rebirth of the continent.
After all, a renaissance is a rebirth of ideas. And knowledge and
ideas are the engines that drive economic growth.

When African men and women of ideas, who will give birth to new ideas,
have fled to Europe and the United States, then the so-called African
Renaissance cannot occur in Africa. It can only occur in Paris, London
and New York. There are more Soukous musicians in Paris, than in
Kinshasha; more African professional soccer players in Europe, than in
Africa. African literature is more at home abroad than it is in
Africa. In other words, Africans in Europe are alleviating poverty in
Europe, not in Africa. Until the men and women of ideas - the true
healers of Africa - start returning home, the African Renaissance and
poverty alleviation will remain empty slogans. After all, the
brightest ideas are generated and harnessed by men of ideas.

The first annual report by J.P. Morgan Chase, a firm with assets of
1.3 trillion dollars, reads: “The power of intellectual capital is the
ability to breed ideas that ignite value.” This quote is a clarion
call to African leaders to shift purposefully and deliberately from a
focus on things to a focus on information; from exporting natural
resources to exporting knowledge and ideas; and from being a consumer
of technology to becoming a producer of technology.

For Africa, poverty will be reduced when intellectual capital is
increased and leveraged to export knowledge and ideas. Africa’s
primary strategy for poverty alleviation is to gain debt relief,
foreign assistance, and investments from western nations. Poverty
alleviation means looking beyond 100 percent literacy and aiming for
100 percent numeracy, the prerequisite for increasing our
technological intellectual capital. Yet, in this age of information
and globalization when poverty alleviation should result in producing
valuable products for the global market and competing with Asia, the
United States, and Europe - shamefully, diamonds found in Africa are
polished in Europe and re-sold to Africans.

The intellectual capital needed to produce products and services will
lead to the path of poverty alleviation. Intellectual capital, defined
as the collective knowledge of the people, increases productivity. The
latter - by driving economic growth - alleviates poverty, always and
everywhere, even in Africa. Productivity is the engine that drives
global economic growth.

Those who create new knowledge are producing wealth, while those who
consume it are producing poverty. If you attend a Wole Soyinka’s
production of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” you consume the
knowledge produced by Soyinka and Achebe as well as the actor’s
production, much like I consume the knowledge and production of Bob
Marley’s through his songs.

We will need wisdom, that which turns too much information - or
information overload - into focused power, not only to process, but
also to evaluate the overwhelming amount of information available on
the Internet. This wisdom will give us the competitive edge and enable
us to find creative solutions.

The following story illustrates the difference between information and
wisdom. Twelve hundred years ago, in the city of Baghdad, lived a
genius named Al-Khwarizmi, who was one of the fathers of algebra. In
fact, the word algebra comes from the title of his book Al-jabr, which
for centuries was the standard mathematics textbook. Al-Khwarizmi
taught in an institution of learning called the House of Wisdom, which
was the center of new ideas during Islam’s golden age of science. To
this day we computer scientists honor Al-Khwarizmi when we use the
word algorithm, which is our attempt to pronounce his name.

One day, Al-Khwarizmi was riding a camel laden down with algebraic
manuscripts to the holy city of Mecca. He saw three young men crying
at an oasis. “My children, why are you crying?” he enquired. “Our
father, upon his death, instructed us to divide his 17 camels as
follows:

‘To my oldest son I leave half of my camels, my second son shall have
one-third of my camels, and my youngest son is to have one-ninth of my
camels.’” “What, then, is your problem?” Al-Khwarizmi asked.

“We have been to school and learned that 17 is a prime number that is,
divisible only by one and itself and cannot be divided by two or three
or nine. Since we love our camels, we cannot divide them exactly,”
they answered. Al-Khwarizmi thought for a while and asked, “Will it
help if I offer my camel and make the total 18?” “No, no, no,” they
cried.

“You are on your way to Mecca, and you need your camel.” “Go ahead,
have my camel, and divide the 18 camels amongst yourselves,” he said,
smiling.

So the eldest took one-half of 18 - or nine camels. The second took
one-third of 18 - or six camels. The youngest took one-ninth of 18 -
or two camels. After the division, one camel was left: Al-Khwarizmi’s
camel, as the total number of camels divided among the sons (nine plus
six plus two) equaled 17. Then Al-Khwarizmi asked, “Now, can I have my
camel back?”

These young men had information about prime numbers, but they lacked
the wisdom to use the information effectively. It is the manipulation
of information to accomplish seemingly impossible purposes that
defines true wisdom.

Today, we have ten billion pages of information posted on the Internet
- more than enough to keep us busy the rest of our lives, and new
information is being added daily. More information has been created in
the last 100 years than in all of the previous 100,000 years combined.
We need the wisdom to sift through and convert these billions of pages
into information riches.

The genius of Al-Khwarizmi was not in his mathematical wizardry or
even his book knowledge: It was in his experiential knowledge - his
big-picture, right-brain thinking; creativity; innovation; and wisdom.
It was his wisdom to add a camel to make the total 18 and still get
his camel back.

Prime numbers are to whole numbers what the laws of physics are to
physics. Twenty years ago, I used an Al-Khwarizmi approach to solve a
notoriously difficult problem in physics. I added inertial force,
which enabled me to reformulate Newton’s Second Law of Motion first as
18 equations and algorithms, and then as 24 million algebraic
equations.

Finally, I programmed 65,000 “electronic brains” called processors to
work as one to solve those 24 million equations at a speed of 3.1
billion calculations per second.

Like Al-Khwarizmi, I derived my 18 equations through out-of-the-box
thinking in an in-the-box world, adding my metaphorical camel:
inertial force. In other words, I applied wisdom to known knowledge to
generate intellectual capital.

Unless Africa significantly increases its intellectual capital, the
continent will remain irrelevant in the 21st century and even beyond.
Africa needs innovators, producers of knowledge, and wise men and
women who can discover, propose, and then implement progressive ideas.
Africa’s fate lies in the hands of Africans and the solution to
poverty must come from its people.

The future that lies ahead of Africa is for Africa to create, after
the people have outlined their vision. We owe it to our children to
build a firm foundation to enable them go places we only dreamt. For
Africa to take center stage in today’s economic world, we have to go
out and compete on a global basis. There is simply no other way to
succeed.

- Philip Emeagwali was voted history’s greatest scientist of African
descent - and the 35th greatest African of all time - in a survey for
the September 2004 issue of the London-based New African magazine. He
won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, the Nobel Prize of supercomputing.

Document AFNWS00020061013e2ad000m1

Posted at 10:39 PM · Comments (0)

Corruption comes in many forms, from the intellectual to the monetary.
I was reminded of this and disabused of my illusions about the existence of an impartial, high-end photographic press as I’ve researched the newly released Leica M8, which I still — as of this moment — plan to buy.
One is used to the notion that the specialty computer and camera and stereo and car and other industry magazines whore for the biggest brands, but I’d expected, or hoped, however naively, that some of the better photographic websites would be different.
Suffice to say the list of who I feel I can read with trust has substantially dwindled in recent days. One site that I liked, and indeed still like for qualities other than product reviews, fell off the short trustworthy list when they belatedly acknolwedged that they knew about some of the major problems that Leica’s new product has suffered, but they submitted their review to Leica and were asked not to mention the problems because they were about to be fixed.
I wrote to the operator of that site directly to express my shock at the practice of submitting a product review for review by the manufacturer prior to publication and was told politely that this is standard practice and that it’s done to protect against… errors.
Nevermind about protecting the potential buyer from surprise or disappointment or equipment failure with an expensive piece of new gear.
Readers of the site in question were given a rather less polite response, “vocal observers” (read critics of the design flaws and quality control problems in the $5000 Leica) were chastised and readers told that the Leica issues were a “tempest in a teapot.”

A quick writeup of the Leica issue and the controversy surrounding can be found at the link below:

http://www.auspiciousdragon.net/photowords/?p=162

Posted at 7:03 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright provisions don’t allow me to post this entire article, the first dispatch of my friend, James Fallows, from his new Shanghai perch.

The entire piece makes for good reading, though, and for me is deeply reminiscent of the experience of reading Fallows’ work 20 years ago when he packed up with family and moved to East Asia for what turned out to be a four year stint.

We can expect a lot more interesting stuff from James after this opening flourish.
HF

Copyright The Atlantic

Twenty years ago, my wife and I moved with our two young sons to Tokyo. We expected to be there for three or four months. We ended up staying in Japan and Malaysia for nearly four years. We traveled frequently in China, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines, and we dodged visa rules to get into Burma and Vietnam. One year our children attended Japanese public school, which helped and hurt them in ways we�re still hearing about. After our family moved back to Washington, I spent most of another year on reporting trips in Asia.

Not long ago, my wife and I moved to Shanghai for an indefinite stay. You can�t do the same thing twice, and we know that this experience will be different. Our children are twenty years older and on their own. We are, well, twenty years older. The last time, everything we saw in Japan and China was new to us. This time, we�re looking at Shanghai to compare its skyscrapers and luxury-goods shopping malls with the tile-roofed shop houses and rundown bungalows we first saw here in 1986. The whole experience of expatriation has changed because of the Internet, which allows you to listen to radio programs via Webcast and talk daily with friends and family via Skype.

But it still means something to be away from the people you know and the scenes and texture of daily home-front life: the newspapers, the movies, the range of products in the stores. (Most of America�s ubiquitous �Made in China� merchandise is hard to find in China itself, since it�s generally destined straight for export.) And the overall exercise is similar in this way: the Japan of the 1980s was getting a lot of the world�s attention; today�s China is getting even more. My family and I saw Japan on the way up. During the first few months we were there, the dollar lost one-third of its value against the yen. On each trip to the money-changing office the teller�s look seemed to become more pitying, and on each trip to the grocery store (forget about restaurants!) we ratcheted our buying targets another notch downward. The headlines trumpeted the yen�s strength and the resulting astronomical valuation of Japan�s land, companies, and holdings as signs of the nation�s preeminence. The dollar�s collapse made us acutely aware of the social bargain that affected everyone in Japan: high domestic prices that penalized consumers, rewarded producers, and subsidized the export success of big Japanese firms.

China has kept the value of its currency artificially low (as Japan did until 1985, just before we got there), and because it�s generally so much poorer than Japan, the daily surprise is how inexpensive, rather than expensive, the basics of life can be. Starbucks coffee shops are widespread and wildly popular in big cities, even though the prices are equivalent to their U.S. levels. But for the same 24 yuan, or just over $3, that a young Shanghai office worker pays for a latte, a construction worker could feed himself for a day or two from the noodle shop likely to be found around the corner from Starbucks. Pizza Hut is also very popular, and is in the �fine dining� category. My wife and I walked into one on a Wednesday evening and were turned away because we hadn�t made reservations. Taco Bell Grande is similarly popular and prestigious; the waiters wear enormous joke-like sombreros that would probably lead to lawsuits from the National Council of La Raza if worn in stateside Taco Bells. Kentucky Fried Chicken is less fancy but is a runaway success in China, as it is in most of Asia.

Through my own experiment in the economics of staple foods, I have been surprised to learn that there is such a thing as beer that is too cheap, at least for my tastes. On each of my first few days on scene, I kept discovering an acceptable brand of beer that cost half as much as the beer I�d had the previous day. It was the Shanghai version of Zeno�s paradox: the beer became steadily cheaper yet never quite became free. I had an early surprise discovery of imported Sam Adams, for 12 yuan, or $1.50, per 355-ml bottle, which is the regular U.S. size. The next day, I found a bottle of locally brewed Tiger, which is the national beer of Singapore, for 7 yuan, or 84 cents per 350 ml. Soon I had moved to 600-ml �extra value� bottles of Tiger at 6 yuan (72 cents per 600 ml), then Tsingtao at 3.90 yuan (45 cents per 600 ml), then Suntory at 2.90 yuan (35 cents per 600 ml). It was when I hit the watery, sickly-sweet Suntory that I knew I�d gone too far. There was one step further I hesitated to take: a local product called REEB (ha ha!), which is what I often see the illegal-migrant construction workers swilling, and which was on sale for 2.75 yuan. One night, in a reckless mood, I decided to give REEB a try. It was weaker than the Suntory�but actually better, because not as sweet.

The signs of China�s rise are of course apparent everywhere. We can still see many parts of Shanghai that have escaped the building boom of the last two decades�the streets lined with plane trees in the old French Concession district, the men who lounge outside in pajamas or just boxer shorts when the weather is hot. But to see them we have to look past everything that�s new, and the latest set of construction cranes or arc-welding teams working through the night to finish yet more projects. From a room in the futuristic Tomorrow Square (!) building where we have been staying, I can look across People�s Square to see three huge public video screens, which run commercials and music videos seemingly nonstop. The largest screen, nearly two miles away, is the entire side of the thirty-seven-story Aurora building in Pudong, Shanghai�s new financial district. In the daytime, the sides of the building are a shiny gold reflective color. At night, they show commercials to much of the town. �People under thirty can�t remember anything but a boom,� a European banker who has come to Shanghai to expand a credit-card business told me. �It�s been fifteen years of double-digit annual expansion. No one anywhere has seen anything like that before.�

My family arrived in Japan just at the beginning of what is widely considered to be its collapse. About the strange nature of that �decline�one that left Japan richer, and its manufacturing and trading position stronger, than it was during its �boom�there will be more to say in later reports. But obviously it raises the question: Is this ahead for China? Have we arrived in time to watch another bubble burst? I don�t know�no one can�but as a benchmark for later reports, I will mention some of the things that have surprised me in my first few weeks, and I�ll do so via lists.

Numbered lists are popular everywhere�the Ten Commandments, the Four Freedoms�but they seem particularly attractive in this part of the world. When I first arrived in Japan, everyone was talking about the �Three Ks�the three kinds of work for which the country was quietly tolerating immigrant labor. These were what translated as the �Three Ds�: the jobs considered too kitanai (dirty), kiken (dangerous), or kitsui (difficult) to attract native-born workers in modern, rich Japan. During World War II, Japanese forces were notorious for applying a policy of �Three Alls� to occupied China: kill all, burn all, loot all. Memories of that slogan made for hard feelings when a Japanese-owned firm recently tried to register the trademark �Three Alls� (sanguang) in China; because of protests, the application was turned down. Early this year the Chinese government put out a widely publicized list of �Eight Honors and Eight Dishonors,� or more prosaically �Eight Do�s and Don�ts,� to express what President Hu Jintao called the �socialist concept of honor and disgrace.� For instance: Do strive arduously; Don�t wallow in luxury. I bought a poster with the full list at the local Xinhua bookstore.

In a similar constructive spirit, I now offer �Four Cautions and Two Mysteries.� These are meant to illustrate what has surprised me so far and what I am most curious about. It is also a partial and preliminary agenda for future inquiry.

Caution One:
Watch out, Japanese people!

From Atlantic Unbound:

Slideshow: “Our Man in China”
A virtual tour of China’s skyscrapers, fashion trends, and beer festivals, with photos and narration by James Fallows.

T o get into a talk with a Japanese intellectual or statesman is sooner or later to ponder the effects of World War II. When will Japan emerge from the war�s shadow as a �normal� nation, with a constitution written by its own people (versus the one created by Douglas MacArthur) and with a bona fide army, as opposed to something that has to call itself the �Self-Defense Force�? When will the Chinese and Koreans�and for that matter the Singaporeans and Filipinos and Australians�stop mau-mauing Japan with their wartime complaints? What special mission and message does Japan have for the world, as the first and only country to have suffered a nuclear attack? Will Japan�s view of America always be skewed into an inferiority/superiority complex, because of the U.S. role as conqueror in the war? The process is similar to discussions in Germany�except that Germans tend to be preemptively apologetic about the problems their forebears caused the world, and Germans make no special claim to suffering like Japan�s.

The process is not at all similar to discussions about the war on this side of the Sea of Japan. I put this item first because for me it has been the most startling. �Frankly, we hate the Japanese,� an undergraduate at a prestigious Chinese university told me, in English. The main difference between his comment and what I heard from countless other young people was the word frankly.

Why should this be surprising, given the centuries of tension between China and Japan? Mainly because of the people who expressed their hostility in the most vehement form: students in their teens and early twenties. They had not been born, nor had their parents (nor even, in many cases, their grandparents), when Japanese troops seized Manchuria in the 1930s, bombed and occupied Shanghai, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians during the Rape of Nanking. Wartime memories die hard, but you expect them to be most intense among actual participants or victims, and therefore to fade over time. Israeli teenagers aren�t obsessed with today�s Germans. I was not able to spend much time at universities talking with students when I was in China in the 1980s, but I don�t remember anything comparable to today�s level of bile.

The breadth of hostility surprised me for another reason. For years I have been skeptical of the idea of an anti- Japanese resurgence in China, viewing it as government-manufactured sentiment designed to deflect potential protest toward external enemies and away from the Chinese regime. In a new book called China: Fragile Superpower, Susan Shirk of the University of California at San Diego gives a detailed account of occasions when the Chinese government has deliberately drummed up anti-Japanese sentiment�or damped it down, when it seemed to be getting inconveniently robust.

In a country where media and education are as carefully controlled as they are in China, all public opinion is to an extent manufactured. �The students are excited,� a professor at a leading Chinese university told me. �They can be calmed down.� Still, I don�t view anti-Japanese sentiments as a ploy anymore. �You say anything at all about Japan [on a blog or computer bulletin board], and there will be 10,000 posts immediately,� an official of a Chinese high-tech firm told me. �The mob effect can get out of control.�

Partisans of Baidu, the main local search-engine company (which is listed on NASDAQ and has Americans as its main investors) recently ran a blog campaign touting it over Google. One illustration was Google�s supposed inability to return any results for searches on �Nanjing Massacre� (or �Nanking,� the older Western spelling) whereas Baidu returned plenty. There was a technical reason�Google�s servers are outside China and thus must cross the government�s �Great Firewall� to send results to users in China. The firewall routinely screens out references to �massacre,� as in �Tiananmen Square massacre,� and so it blocked Google�s results. Baidu�s servers and resources are all inside the firewall, and have been pre-scrubbed to remove references to Tiananmen and other prohibited topics. Google has since made adjustments so that it too can report on Nanking, but the episode showed the sensitivity of the issue.

The main trigger for renewed Chinese protest against Japan has been the (idiotic) persistence of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan�s former prime minister, in paying ceremonial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo, where fourteen Class-A war criminals from World War II are among the 2.5 million Japanese war dead the shrine honors. Koizumi recently stepped down after five years in office, but his successor, Shinzo Abe, has refused to rule out continuing the visits. When I�ve asked Chinese students what they want from Japan, they often say an end to the Yasukuni visits and �an apology.� Formal apologies have in fact been offered many times by Japanese officials, and even by the current emperor. If the Chinese are looking for something like German-style ongoing contrition, this is not in the cards. Twentieth-century history, as taught in Japan, holds that Japan itself was the ultimate victim of the �Great Pacific War,� because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is one tantalizing further twist to the syndrome. When I have asked young people why they should be so wrapped up with events seventy years in the past, the reply is some variant of: �We Chinese are students of history.� There are certain phrases you hear so often that you know they can�t be true, at least not at face value. Yes, China�s years of subjugation by Western countries and Japan obviously still matter. But the history that is more recent but less often discussed is that of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, when the parents of today�s college students were sent into the countryside and often forced to denounce their own parents. In an eloquent new book called Chinese Lessons, John Pomfret of The Washington Post recounts the ways that his classmates from Nanjing University, where he was an exchange student in the early 1980s, bore the emotional and even moral imprint of those years. They�d been made to do things they knew were wrong, and they found ways to rationalize away that knowledge. So far every student gathering I�ve been to has included a volunteered reference to the evil Japanese, and none has included a reference to the evils of Chairman Mao (whose picture is still on every denomination of paper money) and his Cultural Revolution.

Posted at 5:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Los Angeles Times

As ocean seafood populations plummet, catching is mostly unhindered — only Alaska is willing to self-police. Big business is starting to lend a hand.

Nov 26 2006
Los Angeles Times

Taku River, Alaska
Fish counters in green rain slickers patrol a narrow channel of glacier-fed river, keeping close tabs on the thousands of salmon that migrate upstream to spawn.
Elsewhere along the coast, observation teams slosh through waterways in waders, carrying rifles to ward off aggressive bears. Still others monitor the migration from low-flying planes, or take inventory at fish weirs and atop counting towers placed strategically throughout the wilds of Alaska as part of an elaborate surveillance of returning fish.
At the first hint of a decline in salmon numbers, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is quick to shut down coastal fishing grounds and order fishermen to pull in their nets and lines.
State officials do this without protest from fishermen. Rather, they work together, to protect not just a prized fish, but an economic bonanza and a leading source of private-sector jobs in the state.
“We don’t want to catch fish this year, but in future years too,” said Juneau fisherman Jev Shelton, who remembers when the collapse of Alaska’s salmon fisheries from overfishing was declared a national disaster about 50 years ago.
Threatened with the loss of one of its top industries, Alaska began limiting the number of boats and fishermen, restricting the size of their catches, and giving fishermen a stake in the long-term viability of salmon and other fish.
If only the rest of the world had learned from Alaska’s response to the crisis. Today, records show that 90% of the big fish — tuna, cod and swordfish — are gone from the oceans. If the serial depletions continue unabated, a group of scientists recently predicted, major seafood stocks will collapse by 2048.
Alaska’s policy shifts are still an exception. By and large, ocean fishing, especially in international waters, remains a free-for-all with too many boats chasing too few fish.
Only about 6% of the global fish catch is certified as “sustainable,” meaning that fish are not pulled from the ocean faster than they can reproduce and are not caught in ways that destroy other sea life or undersea habitat. Much of it comes from Alaska.
Though other U.S. regions and nations have been reluctant to rein in their fishing fleets, help has emerged from an unexpected quarter.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has pledged within three to five years to sell nothing but wild-caught seafood that meets standards for sustainability set out by the nonprofit Marine Stewardship Council. Founded in 1997, the council grants a blue and white label to fish that stand up to independent certification.
Wal-Mart’s shift in policy has rippled through the global seafood trade. The National Fisheries Institute, the seafood industry’s principal lobby, has become a booster of the sustainable seafood movement after years of resistance.
McDonald’s is now nudging its suppliers to come up with sustainably caught fish for its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, which consume 110 million pounds of Alaskan pollack, New Zealand hoki and other whitefish from around the globe.
Meanwhile, Darden Restaurants, the parent of Red Lobster, is taking similar steps, as is the Compass Group, America’s largest food-service provider to corporate and university cafeterias.
In turn, commercial fisheries are seeking certification, for flounder caught off Japan, herring in the North Sea, Chilean hake and albacore off California.
“This is supply-chain pressure of the best kind,” said Rupert Howes, chief executive of the London-based Marine Stewardship Council. “The Wal-Mart commitment is actually catalyzing commitments from other retailers around the world. We have a major Japanese retailer that wants to launch MSC-labeled products.”
Yet there could be even more risks for precarious fish stocks as megagrocers such as Wal-Mart enter the seafood market, creating increased demand for the types of fish that the sustainable seafood movement is trying to save.
“That’s what fundamentally undermines the market-based approach,” said Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. “You create more customers for fish and invariably increase the pressure on the stocks.”
Pauly and other critics believe it’s too late for the market alone to protect fish when the world’s population is growing and two-thirds of the world’s commercial stocks are already being fished at or beyond their capacity.
The only solution to overfishing, they say, is for governments to muster the political will to restrict catches and take other measures to slow the plunder of the sea’s diminishing bounty…

For the complete article please see latimes.com

Posted at 3:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Japan Times

Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki’s work start by pointing out the contradictions “monster,” “genius,” “pornographer,” “artist,” etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo’s ancient past or Tokyo’s modern sexual underworld.

News photo
View from a cemetery of the construction on Roppongi Hills (2000; above); High school students returning home in the afternoon (1997; below) PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOKYO-EDO MUSEUM
News photo

But this kind of moralistic approach doesn’t quite fit a subject like Araki, wo is more a force of nature, existing, in some Nietzschean space beyond good and evil, or at least “good and evil” as defined by middle-class Western journalists like Adrian Searle in The Guardian. In a review of the show “Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death,” at London’s Barbican last year, Searle slyly hinted that Araki’s depictions of women placed him beyond the pale of some liberal leftwing acceptability, before trying to find some level on which he could be “redeemed.”

Araki’s present book and show, “Tokyo Jinsei,” covers much of the same ground as the Barbican show with a similar 40-year-plus range, although, typically, the “pornographic” element has been watered down for a Japanese audience.

While moral concerns are always going to surface among those keen to damn his work, they are less helpful for those wishing to develop a true understanding of his frantic photographic framing and capturing of Tokyo’s unique energy. With such a variety of subject matter, formal concepts are also useless. This leaves just one device that is the key to all Araki’s art — Araki himself. Looking at the people in the photographs — and even the scenery — we see the chemistry of their reaction to the cheerful, relentless, comical ball of energy that is Araki.

Why are you calling this book and exhibition “Tokyo Jinsei”?

I was born and bred in Tokyo. Almost my whole life has been lived here. Tokyo is my mother. It is my womb. I still have a kind of lingering attachment.

This implies a kind of childishness, like you haven’t grown up yet.

Yes, just by looking at me you can understand that!

My first impression was that you looked like someone who worked in a circus. I think your appearance is very important for taking photographs — you can be very intrusive and maybe even rude with the camera, but people will forgive you because your appearance makes them smile.

But it’s not calculated. This is just my natural style. Although when I take photographs, I try to dress to fit the occasion. It is very important to suit the object or the person. For example, when I photograph in Shinjuku, I wear jeans, a T-shirt and sports shoes; but when I go to Ginza, I usually wear a suit. I change my costume depending on where I’m taking pictures. If the person I’m photographing is naked, then I, too, will be naked — a naked photographer!

How does it help to make such a picture better if you too are naked?

News photo
Araki’s 2004 photograph series of Minori Miyata is emblematic of his celebration of beauty and transience. Miyata, a tanka poet who died from breast cancer a year later, contributed poems to Araki’s photobook of her.

Why are you even asking!? When two people make love, both people have to be naked. This is exactly the same thing.

In other words, taking a picture of a naked woman is the same as making love?

Yes, “naked love,” that sounds good, doesn’t it? “Naked love” — yes, I like that.

Tokyo is not the most beautiful city in the world. Why do you focus on it?

Photographing a city that is not my own is bothersome. To be honest, I don’t have any interest in any city besides Tokyo. The most important thing for me is to take pictures of the people I love the most and the city I love the most, and that’s Tokyo. Before, I tried taking pictures in Paris and New York, but actually I’m not interested in other cities because I love Tokyo. I wen to the Barbican in London last year for an exhibition, but even if I go to London or Paris, I don’t take pictures of Paris or London. I can only take a picture of something in Paris or London, I can’t take a picture of Paris or London.

By focusing on Tokyo over 44 years, your book and exhibition reflect Tokyo’s constantly changing fashions, styles, architecture, and even the body language of the people. Isn’t the effect of all this simply to create a great nostalgia trip?

In a way, I guess so. People say photography should try to avoid being nostalgic, but I simply say photographs are nostalgic. The meaning of nostalgia for me is not sad memories or something that has disappeared; not just memories. For me nostalgia is like the warmth in a mother’s belly.

That’s like staying close to the womb, both in space or time. You stay in the same place, Tokyo, and by embracing the nostalgia of photographs you attempt to stay in the same temporal space.

If you say that, it sounds too concrete. It includes that, but not so concretely. I would use the term “transmigration” or the “wheel of life” to describe it.

It’s very interesting that you have such nostalgia and attachment to place in Tokyo,because Tokyo has as much permanence as a Bedouin encampment. Every few years everything is knocked down and rebuilt, like Roppongi Hills. Your attitude is like someone clinging onto a rock during a storm at sea.

But that’s what Tokyo is. The movement and change are what makes it. If it didn’t change it wouldn’t be any good at all. It means the city is alive. Anyway, I feel it’s not changing at all. It’s simply moving! This is what makes Tokyo very attractive. This is why I can’t leave it.

Does that create problems for you as a photographer? The old Tokyo with its ramshackle appearance seems easier to take interesting photographs of than the new glass and concrete. If it becomes too modern, does it become more difficult to photograph?

There’s nothing that is difficult for me to photograph! Everything is attractive. For example women, if they are beautiful, of course that’s attractive, but, even if they are ugly, they are attractive for me.

A good example is the picture of Minori Miyata in the exhibition, the beautiful tanka poet who later died from breast cancer. She had an ugly scar where her left breast had been. That somehow made the image all the more beautiful.

When I took this picture, I wasn’t trying to make her look beautiful. It wasn’t to solve any problem. There is no conclusion. It’s completely open. It doesn’t go anywhere.

It’s very intimate in a way that a lot of sexual pictures aren’t. Why did she ask you or allow you to take the picture?

Because she loved me, because I am the greatest photographer in Japan! What’s important in my work is always the relationship between me and the object — it’s a kind of love story. I don’t concern myself with why a relationship starts or where it goes. The most important thing is just the relationship between the two of us at that moment. This world becomes our world.

In the case of this picture of Minori Miyata, if you had pushed the button one or two seconds later, would it have been a very different photograph?

Yes, because the time when a picture is taken is like an emotion, it’s like a sexual encounter. It’s like a f**k! So, timing is very important.

When you take a picture, what is it that makes you push the button?

It must be kami (god). What makes a photographer take a picture? What makes an artist paint a picture? It can’t really be explained. It’s a kind of instinct or impulse.

But you must take thousands of pictures that you simply discard.

If you consider that I have published 357 books of photos, I almost don’t throw any pictures away. Soon I will be producing a book of my best photos, but every photo is great and wonderful, so I can’t throw any away. Taking pictures is a lot like sexual foreplay. Even though sex ends in an orgasm, it is not just a f**k. A lot of my pictures are foreplay but the best ones are orgasms.
Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Tokyo Jinsei” runs till Dec. 24 at the Edo-Tokyo Museum; open 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (closed Mon.). For more information call (03) 3626-9974 or visit www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp
The Japan Times: Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006
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Posted at 3:03 PM · Comments (0)

From correspondents in Tokyo

November 26, 2006 04:58pm

A FORMER medical officer in Japan’s WWII navy has admitted to conducting vivisection in the Philippines on some 30 prisoners of war, including women and children.
It was the first time such testimony had been given on experiments on human beings by a Japanese officer in the Philippines during WWII, Kyodo News reported late today.

Similar experiments were conducted in northern China by the notorious germ warfare Unit 731, which is blamed for the deaths of up to 10,000 Chinese and Allied prisoners of war, the report added.

Akira Makino, 84, a former officer of the medical corps of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s No.33 patrol unit, said the experiments on live prisoners began in December 1944, shortly after he was assigned to Zamboanga air base on the Philippines’ Mindanao Island.

Makino was ordered to take two local men captured as US spies to a school which had been turned into a hospital, where they were undressed and tied to an operating table, Kyodo said.

Makino was told by his superior to insert a surgical knife into their bodies after the prisoners’ faces were covered with an ether-soaked cloth so that they became unconscious.

“I thought ‘What a horrible thing I’m doing to innocent people even though I’m ordered to do it’,” Makino told the news agency, after keeping the information secret for six decades.

The experiments, which included amputating arms and legs, suturing blood vessels and abdominal dissections, continued until February 1945, and resulted in the deaths of some 30 people, including women and children, he said.

After the experiments, the captives were strangled with a rope to make sure they were dead, he said, adding that their bodies were buried and the deeds kept strictly secret.

“I would have been killed if I had disobeyed the order,” Makino said. “That was the case in those days.”

US forces landed on the Philippine island in March 1945, sending Japanese soldiers into hiding in the jungle.

Little Japanese testimony about what happened in Southeast Asia during the war has emerged. But the new information should throw light on Japan’s malicious wartime acts, Kyodo said, quoting experts.

Makino has talked about his war experiences to primary and junior high school students for the past several years without telling them about the human dissections.

He told Kyodo: “I want to tell the truth about war to as many people as possible. If I’m given the opportunity, I’ll continue to testify in atonement.”

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Copyright Business Week

NOVEMBER 27, 2006

American importers have long answered criticism of conditions at their
Chinese suppliers with labor rules and inspections. But many factories
have just gotten better at concealing abuses

Tang Yinghong was caught in an impossible squeeze. For years, his
employer, Ningbo Beifa Group, had prospered as a top supplier of pens,
mechanical pencils, and highlighters to Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) and
other major retailers. But late last year, Tang learned that auditors
from Wal-Mart, Beifa’s biggest customer, were about to inspect labor
conditions at the factory in the Chinese coastal city of Ningbo where
he worked as an administrator. Wal-Mart had already on three occasions
caught Beifa paying its 3,000 workers less than China’s minimum wage
and violating overtime rules, Tang says. Under the U.S. chain’s labor
rules, a fourth offense would end the relationship.

Help arrived suddenly in the form of an unexpected phone call from a
man calling himself Lai Mingwei. The caller said he was with Shanghai
Corporate Responsibility Management & Consulting Co., and for a $5,000
fee, he’d take care of Tang’s Wal-Mart problem. “He promised us he
could definitely get us a pass for the audit,” Tang says.

Lai provided advice on how to create fake but authentic-looking
records and suggested that Beifa hustle any workers with grievances out
of the factory on the day of the audit, Tang recounts. The consultant
also coached Beifa managers on what questions they could expect from
Wal-Mart’s inspectors, says Tang. After following much of Lai’s advice,
the Beifa factory in Ningbo passed the audit earlier this year, Tang
says, even though the company didn’t change any of its practices.

For more than a decade, major American retailers and name brands have
answered accusations that they exploit “sweatshop” labor with elaborate
codes of conduct and on-site monitoring. But in China many factories
have just gotten better at concealing abuses. Internal industry
documents reviewed by BusinessWeek reveal that numerous Chinese
factories keep double sets of books to fool auditors and distribute
scripts for employees to recite if they are questioned. And a new breed
of Chinese consultant has sprung up to assist companies like Beifa in
evading audits. “Tutoring and helping factories deal with audits has
become an industry in China,” says Tang, 34, who recently left Beifa of
his own volition to start a Web site for workers.

A lawyer for Beifa, Zhou Jie, confirms that the company employed the
Shanghai consulting firm but denies any dishonesty related to wages,
hours, or outside monitoring. Past audits had “disclosed some problems,
and we took necessary measures correspondingly,” he explains in a
letter responding to questions. The lawyer adds that Beifa has “become
the target of accusations” by former employees “whose unreasonable
demands have not been satisfied.” Reached by cell phone, a man
identifying himself as Lai says that the Shanghai consulting firm helps
suppliers pass audits, but he declines to comment on his work for
Beifa.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Wyatt says the giant retailer will
investigate the allegations about Beifa brought to its attention by
BusinessWeek. Wal-Mart has stepped up factory inspections, she adds,
but it acknowledges that some suppliers are trying to undermine
monitoring: “We recognize there is a problem. There are always
improvements that need to be made, but we are confident that new
procedures are improving conditions.”

CHINESE EXPORT manufacturing is rife with tales of deception. The
largest single source of American imports, China’s factories this year
are expected to ship goods to the U.S. worth $280 billion. American
companies continually demand lower prices from their Chinese suppliers,
allowing American consumers to enjoy inexpensive clothes, sneakers, and
electronics. But factory managers in China complain in interviews that
U.S. price pressure creates a powerful incentive to cheat on labor
standards that American companies promote as a badge of responsible
capitalism. These standards generally incorporate the official minimum
wage, which is set by local or provincial governments and ranges from
$45 to $101 a month. American companies also typically say they hew to
the government-mandated workweek of 40 to 44 hours, beyond which higher
overtime pay is required. These figures can be misleading, however, as
the Beijing government has had only limited success in pushing local
authorities to enforce Chinese labor laws. That’s another reason abuses
persist and factory oversight frequently fails.

Some American companies now concede that the cheating is far more
pervasive than they had imagined. “We’ve come to realize that, while
monitoring is crucial to measuring the performance of our suppliers, it
doesn’t per se lead to sustainable improvements,” says Hannah Jones,
Nike Inc.’s (NKE ) vice-president for corporate responsibility. “We
still have the same core problems.”

This raises disturbing questions. Guarantees by multi-nationals that
offshore suppliers are meeting widely accepted codes of conduct have
been important to maintaining political support in the U.S. for growing
trade ties with China, especially in the wake of protests by unions and
antiglobalization activists. “For many retailers, audits are a way of
covering themselves,” says Auret van Heerden, chief executive of the
Fair Labor Assn., a coalition of 20 apparel and sporting goods makers
and retailers, including Nike, Adidas Group, Eddie Bauer, and Nordstrom
(JWN ). But can corporations successfully impose Western labor
standards on a nation that lacks real unions and a meaningful rule of
law?

Historically associated with sweatshop abuses but now trying to reform
its suppliers, Nike says that one factory it caught falsifying records
several years ago is the Zhi Qiao Garments Co. The dingy concrete-
walled facility set near mango groves and rice paddies in the steamy
southern city of Panyu employs 600 workers, most in their early 20s.
They wear blue smocks and lean over stitching machines and large steam-
blasting irons. Today the factory complies with labor-law requirements,
Nike says, but Zhi Qiao’s general manager, Peter Wang, says it’s not
easy. “Before, we all played the cat-and-mouse game,” but that has
ended, he claims. “Any improvement you make costs more money.”
Providing for overtime wages is his biggest challenge, he says. By law,
he is supposed to provide time-and-a-half pay after eight hours on
weekdays and between double and triple pay for Saturdays, Sundays, and
holidays. “The price [Nike pays] never increases one penny,” Wang
complains, “but compliance with labor codes definitely raises costs.”

A Nike spokesman says in a written statement that the company, based
in Beaverton, Ore., “believes wages are best set by the local
marketplace in which a contract factory competes for its workforce.”
One way Nike and several other companies are seeking to improve labor
conditions is teaching their suppliers more efficient production
methods that reduce the need for overtime.

The problems in China aren’t limited to garment factories, where labor
activists have documented sweatshop conditions since the early 1990s.
Widespread violations of Chinese labor laws are also surfacing in
factories supplying everything from furniture and household appliances
to electronics and computers. Hewlett-Packard, (HPQ ) Dell (DELL ), and
other companies that rely heavily on contractors in China to supply
notebook PCs, digital cameras, and handheld devices have formed an
industry alliance to combat the abuses.

A compliance manager for a major multinational company who has
overseen many factory audits says that the percentage of Chinese
suppliers caught submitting false payroll records has risen from 46% to
75% in the past four years. This manager, who requested anonymity,
estimates that only 20% of Chinese suppliers comply with wage rules,
while just 5% obey hour limitations.

A RECENT VISIT by the compliance manager to a toy manufacturer in
Shenzhen illustrated the crude ways that some suppliers conceal
mistreatment. The manager recalls smelling strong paint fumes in the
poorly ventilated and aging factory building. Young women employees
were hunched over die-injection molds, using spray guns to paint
storybook figurines. The compliance manager discovered a second
workshop behind a locked door that a factory official initially refused
to open but eventually did. In the back room, a young woman, who
appeared to be under the legal working age of 16, tried to hide behind
her co-workers on the production line, the visiting compliance manager
says. The Chinese factory official admitted he was violating various
work rules.

The situation in China is hard to keep in perspective. For all the
shortcomings in factory conditions and oversight, even some critics say
that workers’ circumstances are improving overall. However compromised,
pressure from multinationals has curbed some of the most egregious
abuses by outside suppliers. Factories owned directly by such
corporations as Motorola Inc (MOT ). and General Electric Co. (GE )
generally haven’t been accused of mistreating their employees. And a
booming economy and tightening labor supply in China have emboldened
workers in some areas to demand better wages, frequently with success.
Even so, many Chinese laborers, especially migrants from poor rural
regions, still seek to work as many hours as possible, regardless of
whether they are properly paid.

In this shifting, often murky environment, labor auditing has
mushroomed into a multimillion-dollar industry. Internal corporate
investigators and such global auditing agencies as Cal Safety
Compliance, sgs of Switzerland, and Bureau Veritas of France operate a
convoluted and uncoordinated oversight system. They follow varying
corporate codes of conduct, resulting in some big Chinese factories
having to post seven or eight different sets of rules. Some factories
receive almost daily visits from inspection teams demanding payroll and
production records, facility tours, and interviews with managers and
workers. “McDonald’s (MCD ), Walt Disney, (DIS ) and Wal-Mart are doing
thousands of audits a year that are not harmonized,” says van Heerden
of Fair Labor. Among factory managers, “audit fatigue sets in,” he
says.

Some companies that thought they were making dramatic progress are
discovering otherwise. A study commissioned by Nike last year covered
569 factories it uses in China and around the world that employ more
than 300,000 workers. It found labor-code violations in every single
one. Some factories “hide their work practices by maintaining two or
even three sets of books,” by coaching workers to “mislead auditors
about their work hours, and by sending portions of production to
unauthorized contractors where we have no oversight,” the Nike study
found.

THE FAIR LABOR ASSN. released its own study last November based on
unannounced audits of 88 of its members’ supplier factories in 18
countries. It found an average of 18 violations per factory, including
excessive hours, underpayment of wages, health and safety problems, and
worker harassment. The actual violation rate is probably higher, the
fla said, because “factory personnel have become sophisticated in
concealing noncompliance related to wages. They often hide original
documents and show monitors falsified books.”

While recently auditing an apparel manufacturer in Dongguan that
supplies American importers, the corporate compliance manager says he
discussed wage levels with the factory’s Hong Kong-based owner. The
2,000 employees who operate sewing and stitching machines in the multi-
story complex often put in overtime but earn an average of only $125 a
month, an amount the owner grudgingly acknowledged to the compliance
manager doesn’t meet Chinese overtime-pay requirements or corporate
labor codes. “These goals are a fantasy,” the owner said. “Maybe in two
or three decades we can meet them.”

Pinning down what Chinese production workers are paid can be tricky.
Based on Chinese government figures, the average manufacturing wage in
China is 64 cents an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics and demographer Judith Banister of Javelin Investments, a
consulting firm in Beijing. That rate assumes a 40-hour week. In fact,
60- to 100-hour weeks are common in China, meaning that the real
manufacturing wage is far less. Based on his own calculations from
plant inspections, the veteran compliance manager estimates that
employees at garment, electronics, and other export factories typically
work more than 80 hours a week and make only 42 cents an hour.

BusinessWeek reviewed summaries of 28 recent industry audits of
Chinese factories serving U.S. customers. A few factories supplying
Black & Decker, (BDK ) Williams-Sonoma, and other well-known brands
turned up clean, the summaries show. But these facilities were the
exceptions.

At most of the factories, auditors discovered records apparently meant
to falsify payrolls and time sheets. One typical report concerns
Zhongshan Tat Shing Toys Factory, which employs 650 people in the
southern city of Zhongshan. The factory’s main customers are Wal-Mart
and Target. (TGT ) When an American-sponsored inspection team showed up
this spring, factory managers produced time sheets showing each worker
put in eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, and was paid double
the local minimum wage of 43 cents per hour for eight hours on
Saturday, according to an audit report.

But when auditors interviewed workers in one section, some said that
they were paid less than the minimum wage and that most of them were
obliged to work an extra three to five hours a day, without overtime
pay, the report shows. Most toiled an entire month without a day off.
Workers told auditors that the factory had a different set of records
showing actual overtime hours, the report says. Factory officials
claimed that some of the papers had been destroyed by fire.

Wal-Mart’s Wyatt doesn’t dispute the discrepancies but stresses that
the company is getting more aggressive overall in its monitoring. Wal-
Mart says it does more audits than any other company—13,600 reviews of
7,200 factories last year alone—and permanently banned 141 factories
in 2005 as a result of serious infractions, such as using child labor.
In a written statement, Target doesn’t respond to the allegations but
says that it “takes very seriously” the fair treatment of factory
workers. It adds that it “is committed to taking corrective action—up
to and including termination of the relationship for vendors” that
violate local labor law or Target’s code of conduct. The Zhongshan
factory didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

An audit late last year of Young Sun Lighting Co., a maker of lamps
for Home Depot, (HD ) Sears (SHLD ), and other retailers, highlighted
similar inconsistencies. Every employee was on the job five days a week
from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a lunch break and no overtime hours,
according to interviews with managers, as well as time sheets and
payroll records provided by the 300-worker factory in Dongguan, an
industrial city in Guangdong Province. But other records auditors found
at the site and elsewhere—backed up by auditor interviews with
workers—revealed that laborers worked an extra three to five hours a
day with only one or two days a month off during peak production
periods. Workers said they received overtime pay, but the “auditor
strongly felt that these workers were coached,” the audit report
states.

Young Sun denies ever violating the rules set by its Western
customers. In written answers to questions, the lighting manufacturer
says that it doesn’t coach employees on how to respond to auditors and
that “at present, there are no” workers who are putting in three to
five extra hours a day and getting only one or two days off each month.
Young Sun says that it follows all local Chinese overtime rules.

Home Depot doesn’t contest the inconsistencies in the audit reports
about Young Sun and three other factories in China. “There is no
perfect factory, I can guarantee you,” a company spokeswoman says.
Instead of cutting off wayward suppliers, Home Depot says that it works
with factories on corrective actions. If the retailer becomes aware of
severe offenses, such as the use of child labor, it terminates the
supplier. A Sears spokesman declined to comment.

Coaching of workers and midlevel managers to mislead auditors is
widespread, the auditing reports and BusinessWeek interviews show. A
document obtained last year during an inspection at one Chinese fabric
export factory in the southern city of Guangzhou instructed
administrators to take these actions when faced with a surprise audit:
“First notify underage trainees, underage full-time workers, and
workers without identification to leave the manufacturing workshop
through the back door. Order them not to loiter near the dormitory
area. Secondly, immediately order the receptionist to gather all
relevant documents and papers.” Other pointers include instructing all
workers to put on necessary protective equipment such as earplugs and
face masks.

SOME U.S. RETAILERS SAY this evidence isn’t representative and that
their auditing efforts are working. BusinessWeek asked J.C. Penney Co.
(JCP ) about audit reports included among those the magazine reviewed
that appear to show falsification of records to hide overtime and pay
violations at two factories serving the large retailer. Penney
spokeswoman Darcie M. Brossart says the company immediately
investigated the factories, and its “auditors observed no evidence of
any legal compliance issues.”

In any case, the two factories are too small to be seen as typical,
Penney executives argue. The chain has been consolidating its China
supply base and says that 80% of its imports now come from factories
with several thousand workers apiece, which are managed by large Hong
Kong trading companies that employ their own auditors. Quality
inspectors for Penney and other buyers are at their supplier sites
constantly, so overtime violations are hard to hide, Brossart says.

Chinese factory officials say, however, that just because infractions
are difficult to discern doesn’t mean they’re not occurring. “It’s a
challenge for us to meet these codes of conduct,” says Ron Chang, the
Taiwanese general manager of Nike supplier Shoetown Footwear Co., which
employs 15,000 workers in Qingyuan, Guangdong. Given the fierce
competition in China for foreign production work, “we can’t ask Nike to
increase our price,” he says, so “how can we afford to pay the higher
salary?” By reducing profit margins from 30% to 5% over the past 18
years, Shoetown has managed to stay in business and obey Nike’s rules,
he says.

But squeezing margins doesn’t solve the larger social issue. Chang
says he regularly loses skilled employees to rival factories that break
the rules because many workers are eager to put in longer hours than he
offers, regardless of whether they get paid overtime rates. Ultimately,
the economics of global outsourcing may trump any system of oversight
that Western companies attempt. And these harsh economic realities
could make it exceedingly difficult to achieve both the low prices and
the humane working conditions that U.S. consumers have been promised.

Posted at 5:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

November 21 2006

China’s poor grew poorer at a time when the country was growing
substantially wealthier, an analysis by World Bank economists has found.

The real income of the poorest 10 per cent of China’s 1.3bn people fell by 2.4 per cent in the two years to 2003, the analysis showed, a period when the economy was growing by nearly 10 per cent a year. Over the same period, the income of China’s richest 10 per cent rose by more than 16 per cent.

“Preliminary analysis on Chinese data indicates that average income of the bottom decile went down slightly between 2001 and 2003, whereas all other income categories saw significant increases,” said Bert Hofman, the bank’s lead economist in China.

“Our analysis suggests that a considerable number of people below the poverty line were hit by an income shock � they only kept up consumption by spending their savings.”

The findings challenge the basis of government policies aimed at narrowing the country’s politically sensitive wealth gap.

Hu Jintao, China’s president, who came to power in 2002 and is likely to win a second five-year term next year, has made narrowing the gap between rich and poor a centrepiece of his administration’s economic policies.

China, which had relatively even income distribution in 1980 when it
embarked on market reforms, is now “less equal” than the US and Russia, using the Gini co-efficient, a standard measure of income disparities.

But the way to close this gap has been the subject of an intense and highly politicised debate in China, with many arguing that economic growth alone was the best way of addressing poverty, even if the results were uneven.

> The bank’s finding was “very significant” in this respect, said Arthur
> Kroeber, of Dragonomics, a consultancy, in Beijing, as it shows that the
> argument that a “rising tide lifts all boats” was wrong. “If there is
> evidence that some people are worse off in absolute terms, then that will be
> an issue of concern for the government,” he said.
>
> The fall in income for the poor cannot be explained by declining farm
> incomes, as food prices were rising at a faster rate than urban prices in
> December 2003.
>
> Over the period that the study covers, inflation was low and in one year,
> 2002, negative.
>
> Yasheng Huang, of the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that although the
> bank’s finding did not surprise him, he believed that poverty in China could
> be even worse.
>
> He said the Chinese defined poverty at a level that understated the size of
> the problem, at about Rmb650 ($83) a year in income, equal to about five per
> cent of average per capita income, compared with the US benchmark of 12 per
> cent.
>
> “The Chinese definition of the income threshold for poverty is set extremely
> low,” he said.
>
> Rural residents were also forced to buy services, such as health and
> education, in the cities where they were much more expensive, he said.

Posted at 6:15 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The South China Morning Post

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The mainland’s environmental problems are grave and local governments are bent on economic growth at the expense of the country’s ecology, according to the majority of respondents to a nationwide online survey.

The survey, organised by the China Youth Daily and Tencent, China’s largest instant messaging service provider, found that about 95 per cent of the 6,600 respondents rated the nation’s environmental degradation as severe and 70 per cent felt local government paid little regard to green priorities.

Water pollution topped the list of respondents’ concerns, with 87.1 per cent of people worried about its effects, followed by air pollution, domestic and industrial waste, food contamination, desertification and noise pollution.

The poll was conducted in response to the China Meteorological Administration’s (CMA) announcement earlier this month that Beijing had been classified for the first time as an “acid-rain city” and 80 per cent of the city’s rainfall in August was acid rain.

But the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau responded by saying its tests found that in July and August only 5.9 per cent of precipitation in the capital was acid rain.

More than 60 per cent of the respondents said they were not surprised by the CMA’s conclusion and about 80 per cent feared their communities suffered acid rainfall.

Prominent environmentalist Li Hao , from the Beijing Earthview Environment Education and Research Centre, said she believed the survey results reflected feelings in the community.

“Many of my friends are more and more concerned about the environment, a stark contrast to their casual attitude towards it years ago. And they have started to link the problems it poses to their health,” Dr Hao said.

Although most of those polled thought the central government should assume the most responsibility for the poor environmental situation, Dr Hao said mid-level cadres should shoulder the blame.

“I think they’re really indifferent and do their jobs just for the leaders to see, not for the public good.”

Dr Hao said her attempts to generate interest in recycling and better waste management among staff at sub-district offices had not paid off.

“Although the Beijing government said garbage sorting in communities had been successfully implemented, they just get the result from the number of rubbish bins they’ve delivered. The fact is, few residents are actually doing it because of the inadequate publicity by sub-district offices,” she said.

Cheng Mei, part of the China Youth Daily team that organised the one-week online survey, said the poll was in direct response to the CMA’s acid-rain results and [was] designed to gauge people’s awareness of the problem.

“If people are aware of acid rain, which is something that can’t be easily detected, then we think it shows that people are aware that there are many problems lying behind environmental issues,” Ms Cheng said.

Posted at 9:19 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The United States has some concerns about a rising China,
including a military expansion that may be excessive,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

Beijing has spent heavily in recent years on adding
submarines, missiles, fighter planes and other high-tech
weapons to its arsenal and extending the reach of the 2.3
million-member People’s Liberation Army, the world’s
largest fighting force.

Its reported military budget rose more than 14 percent
this year to $35.3 billion, but outside estimates of
China’s true spending are up to three times that level.

“There are concerns about China’s military buildup,” Rice
told a television interviewer. “It’s sometimes seemed
outsized for China’s regional role.”

Beijing insists its multibillion-dollar buildup is
defensive, but it has alarmed some Asian neighbors and
U.S. military planners who see China as a potential
threat to U.S. military pre-eminence in the Pacific.

Asked whether U.S. foreign policy toward China is aimed
at containing China’s ability to flex military power,
Rice turned the question to politics and economics.

“U.S. policy is aimed at having China be a responsible
stakeholder in international politics,” she replied.
“That means that Chinese energy, Chinese growth, Chinese
incredible innovation and entrepreneurship, would be
channeled into an international economy in which
everybody can compete and compete equally.”

Rice, in Asia with President Bush for a regional economic
forum, said China’s economic growth “has been a net gain
for the international system.” But she also ticked off a
list of U.S. concerns including questions of economic
fairness and China’s record on human rights.

“There are concerns about a rising China, concerns about
China’s transition, concerns about whether the Chinese
economy will in fact act in a way that is consistent with
the level playing field that the international economy
needs,” Rice said in the interview with CNBC Asia.

U.S. concerns are manageable within a relationship she
described as strong overall, Rice said. She visited China
last month to shore up United Nations sanctions against
China’s ally, North Korea, and she credited Beijing with
cooperation in opposing the North’s nuclear development.

Bush and Rice were both meeting with their Chinese
counterparts during this weekend’s Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation summit.

A congressional advisory panel on Thursday questioned
China’s willingness to be a more responsible
international player, saying world prosperity depends on
China’s abandoning a single-minded pursuit of its “own
narrow national interests.”

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission
made 44 recommendations in its annual report to
lawmakers. It calls on the United States to combat
Chinese attempts to isolate Taiwan by supporting the
island’s membership in various world bodies, and urges
Washington to pressure Beijing to help end the bloody
conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“While China is a global actor, its sense of
responsibility has not kept up with its expanding power,”
said Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission, which
Congress created in 2000 to investigate U.S.-China
issues.

The panel also admonished U.S. intelligence agencies,
urging the United States to set up “a more effective
program” for gathering information about China’s military
buildup and development.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu
said she had not seen the report, but “we are against the
attempt by any country or any organization to interfere
with China’s internal affairs under the pretext of the
Taiwan question and impede our reunification course.”

The report said China’s global reach extends beyond East
Asia to the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin
America, where China “is coming to be regarded almost as
a second superpower.”

Posted at 11:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French / The New York Times
Published: November 16, 2006

SHANGHAI: The traffic has returned to its normal sluggish pace in Beijing after a week of absolute gridlock, and the banners touting China’s eternal friendship with Africa - including an unfortunate one that showed Papua New Guineans in festive attire - have come down.

Outsiders should resist the urge to smirk at the event that caused all of the commotion, or to regard it with cynicism, though, as some have. The convocation of 41 African presidents and prime ministers to a high-level summit meeting should be seen for what it is: the consecration of a new era in relations between the world’s most populous nation and the fastest-growing major economy, and its second-largest continent, home to the greatest collection of failed states and underdeveloped nations anywhere.

The speed with which China has achieved its African breakthrough is nothing short of stunning. For the last four decades, it was France alone among global powers that paid consistent, high-level attention to Africa. French-African summits became fixed biannual rituals, a sort of geopolitical high mass, as they came to be called, meant to bolster France’s place in the world and to harness Africa’s economies to France’s.

Suddenly, even France’s ties to the continent, which date back centuries and include periods of slavery, conquest, colonization and what some have called neocolonization, look decidedly old hat.
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The new Chinese player on the block carries none of the historical baggage of its Western counterparts, and has been completely uninhibited in its new African embrace.

Having begun not long ago from a very small base, in the last year or so, China surpassed Britain as Africa’s third-largest trading partner, behind the United States and France. China may still be a developing country in some respects, but it has also recently zoomed past the World Bank as a lender to the continent, which should tell us something both about China’s ambition and Western generosity.

China’s leaders have not only summoned their African counterparts to Beijing. In recent years, they have also traveled to Africa with a frequency that leaves their Western counterparts in the dust. This year, in the space of six months, the Chinese president, prime minister and foreign minister all made multicountry visits to the continent.

The political classes in Africa resent few things more than the neglect of the outside world, and they have responded to China’s attention with great enthusiasm.

Just listening to the words of Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, during the visit to his country last April by Hu Jintao gives one the flavor.

“From our assessment, this is the century of China to lead the world,” Obasanjo said. “And when you are leading the world we want to be very close behind you.”

For the entire article, please click the link below.

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Posted at 12:43 PM · Comments (0)

My “Disappearing Shanghai” catalog is still available for anyone who would like to order one. That’s 50 black and white images shot the od fashioned way with a medium format Rolleiflex camera, using film, and printed by a high quality four-color press.

globetrotter@howardwfrench.com

A slight variation on this collection, which was displayed solo last month in Berlin, will be featured at the Angkor Wat Photography Festival’s 2006 show, which begins November 25. I have also been invited to be a judge of the submissions for an amateur photographers’ contest sponsored by the festival. Click to read more

Going forward, I am making something of a break with past practice. I’ve long been a believer in achieving the best photography I can with bargain rate equipment, favoring vintage cameras (Rolleiflex, Yashica Mat, and Olympus OMs), and brands that often unaccountably don’t enjoy towering prestige and therefore don’t command outrageous prices (my Konica Hexar RF and 1970s-era Yashica Electro rangefinders, for example, both plausible Leica competitors costing far less money).

All of these cameras use film, which I love to work with and will continue to use, perhaps forever. For reasons of time and practicality, I have always wanted to move more into digital, though. Scanning negatives takes a great deal of time, as does, needless to say, any darkroom work.

I’ve never felt that any digital camera I’ve owned has been able to compete image for image with my great film cameras. Not even my most recent purchase, a Canon 20D. I have reason to believe the Canon 5D, a camera I’d love to own could, but I’ve opted in another direction. I’ve decided to buy the very expensive new Leica M8, that company’s first digital model in the famous M line.

One rational is that I already have lenses that will work for it. Another is that I love rangefinders. Unlike the big digital SLRs from Canon, Nikon and others, they are small and discreet and favor the kind of intimacy I like to achieve in my work. Furthermore, I’ve seen the kind of images the Leica produces, and I’m a believer.

Charging for prints and catalogs, by the way, is not a huge profit center for me. It merely allows me to support the cost of doing the kind of photography I love and sharing it with others. If you enjoy it and can afford to, please support it.

I am planning on some new offerings in the near future. Stay tuned.

Posted at 12:32 PM · Comments (1)

Mr. Ham�Hold the Mao! Explains Much to Beijing: �The World. Is. Flat.�

Date: 11/20/2006
Copyright The New York Observer

BEIJING�I had just begun haggling for a silk comforter at the Yuexiu Market on Chaoyangmen Street when I got a phone call saying that New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman was on his way to a bookstore nearby. I wrapped up the deal, disadvantageously, and grabbed a cab.

You can learn a lot wandering around a foreign country in the first person. Mr. Friedman does it all the time. He looks around and talks to somebody and learns something important. Now I was the one in a cab in a foreign country. Conversations with cab drivers are the sort of things that lead Mr. Friedman to larger truths about globalization and the world we live in today.

This was Nov. 12. I had asked the driver to go to Yuexiu Market, and he had gone to Yaxiu Market. I�d even writaten out �Yuexiu� in Chinese characters. So I told the cabbie, �No, this is Yaxiu; I want to go to Yuexiu, on Chaoyangmen.� For me, this was a fairly in-depth cabbie exchange.

The bookstore was the Bookworm, a foreigner-run place that offers Wi-Fi and crostini, on the upper floor of a building near Workers� Stadium. The side room had been set up for a lecture, with rows of chairs, and every chair was taken�either by a person or by a bag or coat in lieu of a person. There was a television in the main room and another in the back room, for overflow spectators.

Mr. Friedman was not there. It was 10 minutes after 5 p.m. A Bookworm staffer, looking slightly dazed, explained that the talk was not scheduled till 7:30. The roomful of people had showed up more than two hours early.

Two hours was enough time to go get dinner. Outside, murk had fallen on the city. It has been a strangely clear and bright fall in Beijing, which is usually choked with thick, impenetrable pollution, like Industrial Revolution�era London. The normal tailpipe smell of the air had been replaced by crisp breezes. But there had been a golden tinge in the air all afternoon, and toward sundown, the gold had deepened to the old familiar mud-and-cement color.

What to eat, while waiting for a globalization lecture? There was a Pakistani-Xinjiang restaurant up the street, on the top floor of yet another multi-level market. A subcontinental dance-music cover of �Eye of the Tiger� played on the sound system.

By the time I got back to the Bookworm, there were two or three dozen people lined up outside at the foot of the stairs, and employees were announcing that no one else could come up. �I feel like this is a rock concert,� one of them said. �I want it to be a rock concert, actually.�

The crowd did not disperse. Some were carrying copies of Thomas Friedman books. The staffers guarding the stairs asked for a look at a book. �Does it have a picture, so we know who not to bar?� one asked.

The lack of a Thomas Friedman lecture seemed possibly more informative than the lecture itself would be. But I got in, because I write for a newspaper. Writing for a newspaper means you get a somewhat different set of experiences than other people get.

The bookstore was packed and steaming. All the rooms, the lecture room and the TV rooms, were full of people. It was so crowded that most people didn�t see Mr. Friedman come in�a small, roundish figure escorted by the Bookworm�s owner, a woman much taller than him. He wore black trousers and a dark sweater with a zipper at the neck.

With a smile, Mr. Friedman perched on a tall stool. He had the genial assurance of a children�s television host. �If you get a small enough room, you can feel really important,� he told the audience.

His talk, he said, would be an update on his thinking about his latest book, The World Is Flat, which he said is now out in its 2.0 version. His new thoughts will be incorporated into a 3.0 version. �The whole subject is alive,� he said.

Mr. Friedman explained how he had come to write the book. It had begun in 2004, he said, with a planned documentary project, part of The Times� involvement with the Discovery Channel, in which he was going to go to call centers around the world and report on the people who �spend their days imitating Americans.� Then outsourcing became an issue in the American Presidential campaign, and he decided to focus on Bangalore, India, and report on the �other side of outsourcing.� After 11 days of interviews, he ended up being told that the global economic playing field was being leveled�which, in a much-recounted eureka moment, he concluded meant that he should write a book called The World Is Flat.

Losing the call-centers story seemed like a shame. But Mr. Friedman�s mind moves forcefully from the specific to the general; the general makes for best-sellers. Perhaps someone else can still do the call centers.

Mr. Friedman moved on to the subject of what he called �Ten Days That Flattened the World.� He was speaking without notes, playing on names and numbers, repeating his points. The first world-flattening day was 11/9, he said. Not 9/11. No, 11/9 was, by �Kabbalistic accident,� the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Someone moved around, breaking his train of thought. He went back to 11/9 and 9/11. A young woman came in, carrying shopping bags, distracting him again. �Everybody settled?� Mr. Friedman asked. �Anybody want to stand up and say something?� 11/9. A cell phone rang.

The awkwardness passed, and Mr. Friedman settled back into his timeline of global techno-unification and leveling: Microsoft Windows, the Netscape I.P.O., the fiber-optic infrastructure buildout. The �workflow revolution.� Mr. Friedman speaks with his hands and arms, sometimes his whole body. He pantomimed an old-fashioned worker hand-carrying a piece of paper from one place to another. He pulled and stretched imaginary objects in the air, as if he were in one of those notebook-computer commercials like Jay-Z or Shaun �The Flying Tomato� Wright. He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.

The language was flourishy to match: �Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda� � �from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.� Metaphors flourished themselves into trouble. �What these steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration,� Mr. Friedman said. Also: �Mother Nature always bats last.�

�Whatever can be done will be done,� Mr. Friedman said. �Will it be done by you or to you?� He repeated the question. By you or to you?

He told a story about going to Hungary and being driven around. His driver had asked him��Mister Tom, Mister Tom��to refer friends to him, if they visited Hungary. The driver, Mr. Friedman said, had given him the U.R.L. of his Web site: a hired Hungarian driver with his own Internet presence. Imagine!

More metaphor: Mr. Friedman compared the C.E.O.�s who understand the scope of the ongoing transformation to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They know the secret. �None of our political leaders were talkin� about it,� Mr. Friedman said. Mr. Friedman was with the pods.

�The world. Is. Flat,� he said.

In the question-and-answer period, he was asked about the midterm elections. The 2008 election, he said, is �going to be about China.� What about Hillary vs. Obama? �I think Obama is a really, really serious candidate, and if you asked me to bet today, I�d bet he�d be the Democratic nominee.� Mr. Friedman talked about the liabilities that Al Gore and John Kerry had brought, and the baggage that Hillary Clinton has. �We�re looking for a uniter, not a divider,� he said.

�But I don�t do domestic politics,� he said.

A tall young man in a Brandeis T-shirt raised the issue of Mr. Friedman�s personal wealth, and whether that might shape his views of globalization. �If George Soros were here, giving a speech from the far left, would you have asked him that question?� Mr. Friedman asked.

�Um, sure,� the questioner said.

But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being �a prophet of globalization� or �the Panglossian avatar of globalization.� Not so. �I didn�t do this,� Mr. Friedman said. �I didn�t start this. I just wrote about it.�

On it went, prosecution and defense, in one man. He has been called a �spokesman for global capitalism.� A �shill.�

�It�s stupid,� Mr. Friedman said.

His foes have their facts and figures, criticizing him for not weighing the costs of globalization. �Thank you very much for those statistics,� Mr. Friedman said, apostrophically. �They�re all from my book.�

There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis�antithesis�thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.

Earlier, for instance, the subject of the environment had come up. Mr. Friedman had said that he thought he knew how his next column, the Nov. 15 column, would begin. He would talk about being in Beijing, he said. Every time he comes here, he said, �people here speak with greater ease, and breathe with greater difficulty.� He described landing that day at the Beijing airport and hearing the stewardess announce that the weather outside was �clear.�

�And you could not see the terminal,� Mr. Friedman said. The crowd laughed knowingly. Old Beijing joke. But couldn�t you?

And the next day dawned crystalline and brilliant, without a trace of smog. That night, the sky over Beijing was strewn with stars.

For the entire article please see the link below.

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Copyright Slate

Posted Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006, at 11:49 AM ET

Sun sets on Lugu LakeSun sets on Lugu Lake

LUGU LAKE, China�Elvin, the bus driver, is about to be pissed. Luoshi village, on the southern side of the lake, has all the hallmarks of hasty development. Freshly hewn logs are stacked in piles, raw materials ready for the next strip of guesthouses and souvenir shops. The accommodations Elvin is pushing are smack in the middle of Luoshi, and the parking lot is packed with tour buses. The place reeks of diesel and kickbacks.

Candy smells it, too. “I think he gets money from that hotel. He says all passengers must stay there�that other places are too expensive and not safe.”

Lugu Lake and the Mosuo people were put on the map by a songstress known as Namu. Brash and beautiful, Namu spent her childhood herding yaks in the high Himalayas before making a break for the bright lights of Beijing. Vocal talent secured her spot at the prestigious Shanghai Music Conservatory, but self-promotion (and fascination with her free-loving heritage) made her a star. Soon, all China knew about a land where lovely girls sang at courtship dances and picked lovers as casually as flowers. This exotic ethnic erotica was particularly interesting to the Han majority, who make up about 92 percent of mainland China’s population. The tourists�mostly men, mostly Han�began to arrive in droves, hoping to spend some time in a Mosuo girl’s babahuago (bedroom). Good Time Chao Li can do a little dance, make a little love, and get back on the bus.

The practice of “walking marriage,” where women choose no-strings-attached lovers (for a night or a lifetime), grabbed the world’s attention. But the relationships are almost never one-night stands, and the reality of the Mosuo’s matriarchal society is considerably more complex than most titillated tourists seem to grasp. The family structure is indubitably matrilineal. For the majority of modern Mosuo, a “family” is a household consisting of a woman, her male and female children, and the female children’s offspring. The “grandmother’s room” is command central of the family compound, and only women have private bedrooms to call their own. Children and adult males sleep in the grandmother’s or mother’s room. An adult male will join a lover for the evening, then return to his own place each morning. Bed, but not bed and breakfast.

Any children resulting from stays at these bed-not-breakfasts belong to the female, and it is she and her relatives who share the responsibility for raising them. In the past, male kinfolk (on the mother’s side) helped to support the family by fishing or by joining caravans that transported goods such as salt or silk through the harsh Himalayas to markets in other regions. Today, they still row tourists out onto the lake and work on the never-ending construction projects.

The advent of roads and electricity initiated many changes in the Asian equivalent of Appalachia. More than a decade after Namu splashed Lugu Lake onto mainstream China’s cultural scene, the Lugu Lakers have begun to go Hollywood. There are more buses and more tourists, including families that come for a canoe ride to a photo op with the local scenery. (For every passenger on our minibus except Candy and me, Lugu Lake is strictly a one-night stand.) Namu has opened a large hotel in Zuosuo, on the northern shore of the lake. Luoshi has Internet cafes and an espresso bar, Sichuan prostitutes dressed in Mosuo costumes, and souvenir stands selling everything from postcards to prayer wheels. What it does not have, to our distress, is something that I need very badly. Contrary to what we were told in Lijiang, Lugu Lake does not have an ATM.

This presents a problem. The other passengers are being driven a few kilometers down the road for a canoe excursion, and we take advantage of the free transportation but pass on the lake tour. No sooner do the small crafts shove off than clouds gather. A cold wind springs up, and rain starts to lash the lake. Candy and I take shelter on a porch and start making friends.

Fortunately, this does not take long. Joe’s real name is Xiao, but he says “Joe” will be fine. He wears a rakish cowboy hat and a confident air. The nearest bank, we learn, is two hours back in the town of Yanyuan. Joe waves his hand to encompass the neat buildings and the perfect lake. “What,” he asks, “would we need a bank for?”

As luck would have it, one of Joe’s cousins will rent us a clean room very cheaply, providing we don’t demand amenities like hot water. I count our currency while Candy makes discreet enquiries as to the cost of beer. If we’re frugal, we’ll have enough cash to carry us through our stay. Deal.

For the entire article please see the link below.

Posted at 9:30 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Entry 1
Posted Monday, Nov. 13, 2006, at 1:59 PM ET
Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There’s something nicely easygoing about it. You’ve got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people’s inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they’re still lazing around at the end of a Sunday. But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, “OK, gang, up and at ‘em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!”
Our high-rise in Shanghai
Today has been a typical Monday in Shanghai. We moved here a few months ago, abandoning our home and friends in Washington, D.C., to come learn about China. We’re reaching the point now where I can call a few things typical. Early each morning, for example, I go down 22 flights in the elevator of our 59-floor high-rise�which resembles a rocket ship�to walk outside and check the weather. It has been warm and pleasant almost every day this fall, although the biggest fluctuations have not been in temperature or wind, but in pollution. Even though Chinese television tends to report the weather in euphemisms�”misty in Chengdu; foggy in Shenyang; cloudy in Beijing”�I would describe it differently: “polluted in Chengdu; quite polluted in Shenyang; really polluted in Beijing.” Today would be “foggy.”
It was about 7 a.m., and everyday rituals were already in full swing in the little lane behind our building. One guy squatted curbside in his boxers brushing the heck out of his teeth and spitting into the gutter. A woman in her blue flannel jammies and black kitten heels rushed from the little wet market back to her second-floor walk-up with a bag of tomatoes and another of greens. I was watching several workers up on bamboo ladders applying plaster-facing to a beautiful old lane house they were renovating when a middle-aged woman on a bike, looking kind of official with her notebook of receipts, stopped next to me. This was not so typical. She started talking quickly; I can usually get the gist of something by now, but I think she was speaking Shanghainese, the local dialect, which is very different from Mandarin. She seemed to be beckoning me to follow, which I did.

We passed a block or two of all the places familiar to me: the tea shop; the vet; the stalls with baby turtles, small birds, goldfish, and crickets, each in their tiny personal teacup size baskets. I like this neighborhood�there is a tenderness here that is hard to find in Shanghai�and I often come prowling around to watch the day unfold. People seem comfortable on the street. Some wear jammies all day long. Many share their meals at common tables from the big pots of chicken and rice one lady serves up on the corner. They set up folding chairs with big comfy quilts and hang out.
The bike woman pulled up to a small building, pointed upstairs, started flicking the outdoor light switch off and on, and pointed to her book. My life in charades! I finally guessed there must be a Westerner who lived in this building (I realized about an hour later that bike woman must have been collecting for electricity bills), and�since we probably all look quite similar to her�she figured I must be that person. I managed to explain that, no, I wasn’t her woman. After much bowing and many apologies, we went our separate ways. This was not typical, but having an unexpected, often inexplicable, adventure is.
Later, I headed for my language class in a little school called “Miracle Mandarin.” It truly is. I meet daily with my young teacher, one of the hundreds, or even thousands, of young twentysomething women who have a college degree in teaching Chinese as a second language. They are surprisingly good and inventive teachers, and our books have modern, even hip, lessons called, “Can you make it a little cheaper?” or, “Anna nearly went against the red light.”

For the complete article see the link below.

Posted at 9:17 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

November 12, 2006

HOWARD W. FRENCH

KASHGAR, China, Nov. 6 � The story of Almijan, a gaunt 31-year-old former silk trader with nervous eyes, has all the markings of a public health nightmare.

A longtime heroin addiction caused him to burn through $60,000 in life savings. Today, he says, all of his drug friends have AIDS and yet continue to share needles and to have sex with a range of women � with their wives, with prostitutes, or as he said, �with whoever.�

For now, Mr. Almijan, whose name like many here is a single word, seems to have escaped the nightmare. His father carted him off to a drug treatment center hundreds of miles away in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region here in China�s far west.

When he relapsed, he was arrested during a drug deal. That landed him in a new methadone clinic, opened last year in this city, where he spent three months cleaning himself up. He says he has repeatedly tested negative for H.I.V.

This day, fresh from a clinic just off of People�s Square here, watched over by a huge statue of Mao, Mr. Almijan slurred thickly after drinking the dose that keeps his cravings at bay. �If I can help other people, I�d be happy to tell you my story,� he said. He explained why he had embraced treatment: �My friends were dying, and I was very afraid.�

The way the authorities handled Mr. Almijan, including his treatment with methadone, is part of a sea change by the Chinese public health establishment, which is struggling to confront an increase in intravenous drug use and an attendant rise in AIDS cases in Xinjiang, an overwhelmingly Muslim region close to the rich poppy fields of Afghanistan and near the border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

With a population of about 20 million and an officially estimated 60,000 infections, Xinjiang has one-tenth of China�s AIDS cases and the highest H.I.V. infection rate in the country. Chinese authorities estimate that Kashgar Prefecture, with a population of about three million, has 780 cases, but public health experts here say the real figure is probably four times that and rising fast.

Until recently, addicts were largely left to the police, who regarded them as simple criminals whose drug use was to be combated mercilessly. Resistance to treating drug addiction as a public health concern has been high, mirroring what some international health experts say was a slow response to the virus generally in China as AIDS first gained a foothold.

�Some cadres are not willing to launch a public campaign against AIDS, fearing it would affect their image and investment in their locality,� said Parhat Halik, the deputy commissioner for Kashgar Prefecture, in a speech in June. �Some are still having endless debates about whether to promote the use of condoms, methadone treatment and needle exchange programs, or standing in the way of initiatives to work with high-risk groups. That is our biggest problem in the fight against AIDS.�

For the entire article please see the link below:
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Copyright The Financial Times

Published: November 10 2006 18:11

Time Out has an English-language edition in China that provides
listings for the expatriate community. The latest edition poses a stark
question on the front cover: Beijing or Shanghai?

Many countries have two cities that engage in a fierce rivalry over
which is the more modern and interesting. In China, the foreign
residents are also only too happy to take part in the debate. I picked
up the magazine this week at a hotel in Beijing, where I was visiting
from Shanghai on a trip that has made me rethink some assumptions about
China�s top two cities.

For a start, I reckon it is Beijing rather than Shanghai that is
undergoing the bigger building boom. The Shanghai skyline was
transformed in the 1990s, and the city is constructing the tallest
building in the world. But Beijing is currently putting more of those
huge construction cranes to use. Entire blocks of buildings that I
visited only a few months ago have been levelled to make way for new
offices and flats, most of them in districts of the city that will have
little to do with the 2008 Olympics.

Shanghai likes to boast about its greater openness to international
influences. Yet Beijing also seems to be teeming with new Tapas bars
and shopping malls lined with the latest Italian fashions. And it is
Beijing, rather than trend-obsessed Shanghai, that has the better
modern art on show.

The real surprise for a visitor to Beijing from Shanghai, however, is
the number of financial institutions with a presence in the city.
Shanghai is the financial capital of the Chinese mainland, or so the
city�s leaders would like to think. It is home to the main stock
exchange, and is the only city with a shot at competing with Hong Kong
to be the international financial bridgehead for China�s soar-ahead
economy.

Yet Beijing�s planners do not seem to be following the same playbook.
In the late 1990s, the city renamed one of its nondescript
thoroughfares Financial Street. The initial reaction was a good deal of
derision. But judging by a brief visit, the area is beginning to take
shape. I had thought all those gleaming skyscrapers in Shanghai�s
Pudong district were built specifically to house American investment
bankers.

Yet in one building alone on Beijing�s Financial Street, Goldman
Sachs, UBS and JPMorgan have all recently installed their China
headquarters (though their staff complain they have few places to go
for lunch and there is not a Starbucks in sight).

While Shanghai is getting the new financial futures exchange that the
government is setting up, Beijing retains the real engines of the
country�s financial system: the big four commercial banks. China
Construction Bank, the first of the four to list overseas, has its
headquarters on Financial Street, just along from the stock market and
insurance regulators.

More than local pride is at stake here. There is a symbolism that is
important for investors to understand. If foreign investment banks are
hugging close to the seats of government rather than following the
commercial flows in Shanghai, it says something about the way financial
markets work in China. The stock market may be based in Shanghai, but
professional investors are divided over where is the best place to
predict what will happen to share prices.

For some institutions, the role of the government in the economy means
that Beijing is the ideal looking-post. The only way to pick stocks,
they say, is to keep an ear close to the ground for new directives
coming out of the ministries, because it is these, rather than cash
flow or valuations, that move the market. They point out that the lion�
s share of listed companies in China are state-owned, which can make
them even more susceptible to changes in political mood.

To be fair, Shanghai has its own army of institutional investors who
believe that the stock market is becoming transparent enough for them
to use the sort of valuation methodologies they have developed for
other markets. But none disputes the importance of good government
contacts.

For any retail investor who has seen the mainland market soar this
year and is beginning to look at Chinese stocks for the first time,
Beijing�s Financial Street contains a critical message. In spite of
all the reforms that have been introduced in the past two decades and
all the giddy statistics about the potential growth in the country�s
economy, politics is still a hugely important factor in Chinese
business.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/pri/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&sid=10&id=979136&pid=1023

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Copyright The Washington Post

Saturday, November 11, 2006; Page C01

Jack Palance made ugly beautiful — all 6 feet 4 of him.

You may remember him as Curly, the ornery cowboy from the “City Slickers” movies, or maybe the obnoxious, wizened 73-year-old who — after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1992 for his first time playing that role — looked down on host Billy Crystal and made a joke we love and respect but can’t repeat here. After which, he performed a series of one-hand push-ups while Crystal looked on in mock amazement. It was a wonderfully squirmy moment, in which the message was clear, as he bobbed up and down: I’m a man. You can measure me like this. And this. And this.

His ugly mug was his fortune: Jack Palance, working with Billy Crystal on
His ugly mug was his fortune: Jack Palance, working with Billy Crystal on “City Slickers,” which netted Palance an Oscar in 1992. (Associated Press)
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Was he serious or twitting himself? We’d like to think he was enjoying the doubt — that embarrassing silence when hushed onlookers aren’t sure whether someone’s read their postmodern handbook or not.

Regardless, he was cool in his own way. You imagined his brawniness was earned from old-fashioned lugging, hefting and swinging of heavy stuff like rocks, bricks and metal pipes, not on Nautilus equipment with wall-to-wall mirrors and some trainer named Serge looking on. And you didn’t think about inconvenient facts, like his real name: He was born in Lattimer Mines, Pa., in the bone-chilling middle of February 1919, and got slapped with Vladimir Palahniuk, which was no name for a cowboy.

Some of you will remember him as Jack Wilson, the relentless bully in 1953’s “Shane” who drew guns on Alan Ladd — that reluctant White Hat — and took two in the gut. It was always Palance’s role to be the dead guy in the final reel. He was the hero’s best friend, in a way. After you shot Palance dead, there wasn’t much left to do except walk into the sunset. You had gunned down Palance; you were the man.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

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Copyright The Village Voice

November 2nd, 2006 5:07 PM

These yaoi books push past taboos with love stories that pair stepbrothers, a boy and his magically transformed dog, and a teacher and his high school student.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally in SF Weekly.
The ponderous glass chandeliers dim in the hotel ballroom as the emcee takes the stage in front of a chattering crowd. It’s past 10 on a Saturday night, and time to give the attendees what they’ve been waiting for since the convention began on Friday afternoon: “fanservice.”

“I know you’ve all been having fun so far, because there’s been a lot of discussion of DICK,” the announcer says, with a grin for the crowd. “There’s also been some discussion of COCK. But the primary topic of discussion has been about … ” � he holds the microphone out to the audience.

“BUTT SEX!” shriek almost 2,000 women, rearing up from their chairs. This isn’t a convention of wild, wanton sodomites, however; these women aren’t clamoring to perform the act themselves. Instead they want to see, read, and think about the man-on-man version.

The event is Yaoi-Con 6, an annual gathering of those who live for yaoi � Japanese comics that tell stories of beautiful young men falling desperately, passionately in love, and often having enthusiastic butt sex. The twist is that the comics are created almost entirely by women artists and writers for an audience that’s primarily female, satisfying a craving that few knew existed. Each October, the most dedicated fans pay $60 for a weekend pass and often travel across the country to gather in a pair of bland hotels across from the San Francisco International Airport for “a celebration of male beauty and passion,” as the convention’s Web site explains it.

The genre bubbled up in the United States as an Internet-fueled, underground fan phenomenon over the past decade, and began seeping into the mainstream only in the last three years, when importers and publishers of manga � the umbrella term for Japanese comics � realized that the market was there. Since 2003, at least five new publishing companies or imprints have launched to bring English-language yaoi to the fans, and they say they can’t publish quickly enough to keep up with demand.

In most stories, the boys don’t identify as gay � they’re just hot for each other.
The books are also becoming increasingly popular with preteens and teenagers, creating an audible split in the fan base: The word yaoi is pronounced “yah-oi” by those with some knowledge of Japanese, and “yowee” by the legions of young girls who discover it on the Internet before they’ve ever tasted sushi. While some older fans who’ve come to Yaoi-Con since its beginning in 2001 are irritated by the infusion of giggly youth, they’re concerned about more than just the expansion of a previously exclusive club: Underage fans put the genre as a whole at risk. Since mainstream stores like Borders started stocking their shelves with yaoi, it’s become much easier for teenagers to bring home books that look like harmless comics to their parents, but which often feature graphic sex scenes. The proliferation of young fans has already led to the shutdown of a few beloved yaoi Web sites when outraged parents figured out what their kids were looking at and started making threats.

While one should never underestimate the anger of a cultural conservative forced to confront gay sex, yaoi can also push the buttons of people who consider themselves open-minded. The broad genre encompasses a number of titles that go no further than light romance, but others deal with unsettling themes like rape, incest, and bestiality. Add in the fact that many of the boys drawn in the manga style look like they’re about 12 or are identified as being under 18, and it begins to seem like yaoi is inviting lawsuits.

The genre has reached that difficult passage where many subcultures have foundered, in which surging popularity makes old fans feel uncomfortably crowded. But yaoi has an especially tricky course to chart: The source of its appeal, the touch of sexual subversion, also has the capacity to destroy it.

The American version of yaoi has two antecedents, one on each side of the Pacific Ocean. The word yaoi is a dismissive acronym from the Japanese phrase “no climax, no point, no meaning.” In Japan, critics applied the term to the amateur comics created by fans in the 1970s who took two male characters from preexisting manga and threw them together. Some of those first comics may have been short on plot or depth, but as the genre proliferated and talented artists got involved, the quality quickly rose.

For many Japanese fans, yaoi was a way to escape the confining story lines of shojo, manga intended for girls. In those books, the male almost always took charge, and if the female had the bad fortune to fall in love, she quickly turned into a blathering idiot. As the first yaoi authors began to gather fans, Japanese publishers helped some of them turn pro, publishing their work in magazines and manga compilations. The new stories were angsty and romantic: Boys fell in love despite their best intentions, and, after brief struggles with their feelings, plunged into deep, soulful bliss.

The word yaoi is pronounced “yah-oi” by those with some knowledge of Japanese, and “yowee” by the legions of young girls who discover it on the Internet before they’ve ever tasted sushi.
Meanwhile, in the United States, women were playing with slash fiction � that is, stories in which male pop culture characters hooked up (for example, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock). Yet yaoi and slash involve little casual sex. When couples couple, it’s an emotional maelstrom; even after a rape scene, the two men lie tenderly in each other’s arms and profess their love. It’s a visual treat with an emotional payoff, a dynamite combination for the ladies.

Untranslated Japanese comics began to arrive in the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s. With the arrival of the Internet came a new labor of love � the “scanlation,” for which die-hard fans scanned each page of a comic and painstakingly added translations. To avoid such toil, Americans began writing English-language slash based on their favorite characters from anime (Japan’s animated TV shows and films) and manga.

“Then Gundam Wing happened,” explains Eliza Cameron, whose manuscript on the history of yaoi is being considered by a Berkeley publisher. In 2000, the sci-fi anime series about a team of teenage fighter pilots began airing on the Cartoon Network, and thousands of new fans ventured online to look for pictures of the cute heroes. What they often found instead was a slash universe that dedicated yaoi fans had already created around the Gundam Wing characters. “It was the ‘gateway yaoi’ of my generation,” Cameron says.

In 2001, a small group of Bay Area fans threw the first Yaoi-Con, and about 450 people showed up to swap photocopied fan fiction and buy Japanese books. “All these people who had been in the closet came out,” remembers 32-year-old Anneke, a fan who doesn’t use her real name because her family doesn’t know about her yaoi fascination. “When the dealer’s room opened on the first day, people were three deep, waving money in the air.”

Anneke � wearing, on this last day of Yaoi-Con 6, a bright pink wig and a red-and-black military outfit, meant to evoke the anime character Revolutionary Girl � came to the first Yaoi-Con without fully understanding what it was all about, and promptly experienced a revelation. She says, “I thought, ‘OK, that makes my life make sense now. I’m not a fag hag, I’m a yaoi fan!’”

Many others at the convention report having felt relief and delight similar to Anneke’s when they first stumbled on a community of yaoi enthusiasts, and then found their way to the convention. “First I felt disbelief, and then a sense of celebration,” Cameron says. “It was like, ‘You mean we’re all into this?’” But now that American publishers have brought what Cameron calls a “revolution” to yaoi � that is, more books and more fans � the glee among older devotees has faded somewhat. “I’m still amazed when I walk into Borders,” Cameron says. “How are they going to deal with this? That’s our next hurdle: How do we get this into the mainstream without a huge backlash?”

The source of yaoi’s appeal, the touch of sexual subversion, also has the capacity to destroy it.
Such worries are on the back burner at the convention’s Saturday-night auction, the highlight of the weekend. Bishounen � beautiful boys � climb onto the stage, elaborately costumed as their favorite characters from manga, anime, and literature. If a character doesn’t already have queer tendencies, he gets some via a skit or song. Audience members pool their money or make injudicious use of their credit cards, bidding wildly for a few hours of companionship. Those without serious cash reserves rush the stage and tip the fellows, strip club-style.

The next three hours are a riot of stripteases, dirty limericks, and S/M skits. A Slytherin � perhaps Draco Malfoy himself, from the Harry Potter books � strips off his schoolboy outfit, down to bright green briefs. “Show us the one-eyed snake!” screams a blowzy woman, but the boy just smiles demurely. A mob of women rushes the stage to slip dollar bills into his waistband, and a girl dressed as the luscious and swishy Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean locks lips with the schoolboy, to the most piercing screams yet. In the world of yaoi fandom, everyone and everything is potential subject matter: popular movies, Pokemon, and even Friends (with a long leap of imagination).

It’s nearly 1 a.m. when the final two boys go up for auction. A tall, well-built young man dressed as the despotic President Shinra from the Final Fantasy videogames struts about the stage in a white suit, beckoning a delicate Asian boy with a white rose. When the boy reaches tentatively for the flower, Shinra tosses it away and grabs his young victim. They’re playing the typical yaoi roles of seme and uke, which can be translated as “predator” and “prey,” “top” and “bottom,” or, most commonly, “pitcher” and “catcher.” The two go up to bid as a package deal; the lucky winners will have the pleasure of their company for the rest of the night.

“You don’t need to eat tomorrow; you don’t need to pay rent!” exhorts the auctioneer, a plump woman bursting out of a black vinyl bustier. “Multiple credit cards welcome!” The two boys eventually go for $700 to a team of young girls in schoolboy outfits, who jump up and down, squealing with delight at their purchase.

How will they fulfill their desires, now that they’re in possession of two of the prettiest boys at the auction? As with most yaoi fans, the girls seem more practiced in fantasizing than in fulfillment. For all the wildness of the auction, and for all the innuendo about what the winners would do with their bishounen, “President Shinra,” whose real name is Devon Jacobson, later says that they had a pretty tame night. They went to the dance organized by the convention, “but it was hot and they were playing pretty bad music,” he explains. So the group of girls just took some pictures together, snapped a few shots of the boys embracing, and drove around looking for fast food at 6 in the morning.

English-language manga is one of the fastest growing segments of the American publishing industry. Sales of that category amounted to about $175 million in North America last year, around triple the sales in 2002, according to Milton Griepp, who tracks the manga and anime industries on his trade news Web site, www.icv2.com. National chain bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble are scrambling to find more shelf space for these hot-ticket items, and are installing benches and couches at which readers can lounge. In that context, yaoi is the success story within the success story: According to Griepp, a light yaoi series called Loveless is No. 5 on his list of manga best-sellers in the United States.

Yaoi’s success with its target audience has surprised even comic industry insiders. “When it was first presented to us, we were very skeptical,” says Joshua Hayes, associate director of sales and marketing for Diamond Book Distributors of Maryland, the largest U.S. distributor of graphic novels. “Even though everyone told us that it was going to be sold to female consumers of a certain age level, we just couldn’t believe that was true. I was looking at the first volume, untranslated, and thinking, ‘There’s no way; surely this would sell to a homosexual audience.’”

In fact, yaoi has collected only a small contingent of gay fans in America. “Here’s a personal take on it: I don’t think most gay men find yaoi very hot,” says Justin Hall, who curated a show on queer comics for San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum earlier this year. “At least for me, I tend to like more masculine men. Most of the yaoi men are very androgynous, and just not hot,” he says. Beyond the visual element, Hall says the stories don’t resonate with many gay readers: While many queer comics deal with themes like gay identity and the struggle to come out, yaoi almost always ignores such knotty issues. “It’s more about titillation and fantasy than about cultural context,” says Hall.

Meanwhile, the girlish impulse to gaze at pretty boys is an old and powerful one. Within the yaoi tradition, the ideal bishounen is usually slender and pale, with a heart-shaped face and enormous eyes, like two fishponds. His smooth pectoral muscles are hairless, but his head is covered by a tousled and feminine mop, with strands that fall fetchingly across his face when he’s feeling shy. The genre’s appeal to women and girls isn’t hard to fathom: Put two of these pretty boys together on the page, and it’s double the fun. Plus, the female reader isn’t forced to compare herself with some idealized girl or woman, because there are none. “I know what I look like naked,” says one San Francisco fan, who goes by the name Betsy Tea (she preferred not to give her real name to protect her privacy). “I don’t want to have competition… . I’d rather see a couple of beautiful boys.” Yaoi, then, is the female equivalent of the girl-on-girl porn made for straight men.

If one does feel the need to psychoanalyze the phenomenon, however, academics have arrived at a standard interpretation. “It’s a way for young women and girls to explore sexuality without it being too intimately connected to them,” says Susan Napier, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Without a female character in the book, readers can choose which male character to identify with, instead of feeling forced into one role. “They can enjoy seeing sexual situations with handsome young men, and can play out different sexual scenarios without having to put themselves into it, so it’s less intimidating or threatening,” Napier says.

To read the complete article, please see the link below.

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Copyright The Financial Times

Published: November 3 2006 17:55

A few weeks ago, some young Chinese women wearing identical red uniforms were walking across the countryside near Beijing. It was a fine afternoon but a bitter north wind whipped across from the mountains in the distance and they looked cold as they paused every few yards to listen to a man in white overalls giving instructions. A couple of decades ago they might have been party members receiving education.

But these young women weren�t being indoctrinated with the teachings of Mao. The fields they were crossing were perfectly manicured and the rites they were learning were those of a very capitalist recreation. At Beijing Willow Golf Club, not far from the Summer Palace, caddies train for three months before they carry anyone�s clubs and they receive two more months on-course supervision before they are allowed out on their own with golfers.

Plenty of clubs elsewhere in the world are less fastidious about the caddies they inflict on paying visitors. This professionalism, backed up by plenty of hard cash, is characteristic of the People�s Republic�s approach to golf. It may also be why the first ever match between a team of American and European golfers against the Rest of the World is taking place next week at Mission Hills, near Shenzhen in mainland China.

The teams are captained by Scot Colin Montgomerie, Europe�s most famous nearly man, and South African Retief Goosen, twice US Open Champion, but it�s easy to imagine, a decade from now, the Rest of the World being led by a Chinese-born golfer. The game may be in its infancy in this fast-changing country, and at present largely confined to the business community, but it is taking root and the emergence of indigenous golfing stars is only a few years away.

Next November, one of the prestigious World Golf Championships events, the elite series that brings together the best players from the American and European tours, will be held at the bunker-strewn Olaz�bal course at Mission Hills. Even if the claims that golf began in the far east rather than in Europe are flimsily based, the way the world�s most populous country is taking to golf can only be good for the game. China may even soon be competing with more traditional golfing destinations such is the rate at which new courses are being built.

Willow Golf Club is 40 minutes from downtown Beijing, a journey that costs only �5 by taxi. It opened four years ago and the first nine holes are floodlit, allowing night golf between May and October against a backdrop of apartment blocks. After you�ve played these on foot, your caddy fetches a cart and drives you across a bridge over an eight-lane highway to the more scenic and peaceful back nine, closer to the mountains and further from the city.

Charlie Zhang, the club�s friendly executive manager, told me that 400 members each pay an annual subscription of �30,000. For this, they get a well-maintained, high quality 18-hole course with another nine holes planned and the services of 300 staff, two thirds of whom are caddies. The two-storey clubhouse is as comfortable as any in Europe and the practice ground is conveniently close. Like most Chinese clubs, it�s expensive, service oriented and professional.

My game at Willow was part of a journey of discovery about how golf is developing in China. Two hundred courses have been built here in the past decade, a boom reminiscent of 19th-century Britain and America in the 1920s. My tour started at one of the oldest, Fanling in Hong Kong, where the game was first played 100 years ago and where little has changed since the 1997 handover.

Only when you cross into China itself does evidence of the new interest in golf hit you. At Shenzhen, the first advertisement, even before the official poster showing male and female police officers saying �Welcome to China�, is one promoting the ten courses at Mission Hills. The strap line is �World�s No One� and the ad features golfer Vijay Singh, designer of one of the courses. Mission Hills is proud to be recognised by The Guinness Book of Records as the world�s largest golf complex.

Like other Chinese cities, Shenzhen has grown apace, spawning tower blocks and heavy lorries. After battling through Friday afternoon traffic, I finally reached Mission Hills, where sentries saluted smartly as I entered the gates.

Everything at Mission Hills is vast, from my suite overlooking two floodlit courses to the ballroom in the clubhouse by the 18th fairway of the Olaz�bal course, where 3,000 can sit down to dinner. The courses, were each designed by leading golfers including Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Annika S�renstam. At their opening, the designers were invited to perform karaoke at the celebration dinner. Only Singh refused, giving rise to the nickname Vijay �No Sing�.

The countryside is hilly with mature trees and ideal for golf but using fertile terrain for a land-hungry sport is controversial. Both the environmental lobby and the government disapprove, the latter discouraging officials from playing. This attitude, coupled with the cost of the game, means that at present it mainly attracts wealthy businesspeople, a category whose ranks are swelling on the back of the growing economy.

Golf on the scale of Mission Hills only pays through property development and 2,000 villas are sold or under construction. I went by caddy cart past more saluting sentries to a 9,000 sq ft show house where I had to step on a machine that automatically wrapped my shoes in a protective cover before I was allowed inside. The property contained a cinema, mahjong room, pool table and lift.

Not having brought along $300,000 in cash for the deposit, I didn�t join the throng of buyers next afternoon when 160 building plots were released at prices of $1m to $3m apiece.

By then I had enjoyed a round on the Olaz�bal course, beautifully situated in the mountains 15 minutes from the hotel. My host Charles Cheung, group chief executive, invited Singapore�s consul general in Hong Kong and the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia to form what is probably a typical four-ball match here.

Our progress was smoothed by uniformed sentries at every crossing point, their elaborate hand gestures indicating where we should go. The pleasure of the round was greatly enhanced by Lud, my elite gold class caddy, in her uniform of baggy red trousers, gold jacket and broad-brimmed white helmet, who rode perilously on the back of the caddy cart as we hurtled from hole to hole.

From Mission Hills, I flew to Shanghai. Arriving after dark with suitcases, laptop and golf clubs, I sought a taxi. Although this was the international airport, no drivers spoke English and it took me some time to find one who could read the name of my hotel. Next morning, at his modern office near the Bund, Yongie Fu, the urbane chairman of Binhai Golf, gave me a PowerPoint analysis of the 16 courses around Shanghai, broken down by distance in miles and time from the centre and by prices for members and visitors, a typically hard-headed approach.

His driver then whisked me past Pudong to Binhai where I played a Peter Thompson-designed course, which used the flat countryside to create a linksy feel. It was in good condition with firm true greens and a charming 21-year-old caddy, who described each hole as we stood on the tee rather as the waitresses at Prestwick run through the choices for lunch.

The facilities are aimed at corporate events of which, given Shanghai�s headlong growth, there are plenty to support the third course that is under construction. Weddings are also held here, a useful arrangement that might catch on since it enables golf-mad grooms to abandon their brides and guests in favour of golf as soon as the ceremony is over. Fu said houses might be built here though none had been started so far.

From Shanghai, I headed to Beijing where I encountered a rare taxi driver trying to rip off an innocent foreigner on my way to the Beijing Links Club. This isn�t a links in the British sense since it�s in a built-up area and miles from the sea. It�s not the most scenic course but, in the VIP locker room, a smiling male attendant, with whom I shared not a syllable of common language, ministered to my every need, lovingly folded up my discarded boxers and dried my feet when I came out of the shower.

An explanation for this attentiveness was provided at my next stop, Beijing CBD International, a smart layout close to the centre of town that was in remarkable condition for a course that�s only been open a year. CBD�s manager Connie Jlang, a golf addict who studied hospitality management at Thames Valley University in London, told me the staff liked western visitors because they treated them well, a thinly veiled hint that some of the nouveau riche golfers from closer to home did not.

This club has 500 members paying $65,000 a year each. Houses are being built around the course and those facing north and south, thereby enjoying good feng shui, are already sold. The Volvo China Open, co-sponsored by the PGA European Tour and the Asia Tour, will be played here just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

I had not sought any prior introduction or special treatment at CBD, simply faxing a request for a tee time to test how unsolicited visitors were treated. Both the smiling receptionists in an entrance hall that resembled a large hotel and the course starter, who doubles as caddy mistress, were as welcoming as they could be, an object lesson in friendliness that a few club staff in other parts of the world would do well to emulate.

CBD is controlled by property tycoon Li Hao, who also owns Beijing Honghua International, designed by Nick Faldo and the venue for the 2006 Volvo China Open. Mel Pyatt, who runs Volvo�s event management operations worldwide and has championed the growth of professional competition here, invited me to this event, which he hopes to make Asia�s premier golf championship, an aspiration likely to be challenged by others eyeing this market.

This was the 12th China Open and the official programme featured descriptions of the 12th US Open at Onwentsia in 1906 and the 12th British Open at Prestwick in 1872. Although the galleries were not huge, the corporate hospitality marquee behind the 18th green would not have been out of place at Wentworth.

That evening, I attended a dinner at which Pyatt announced higher prize money for the following year and Volvo�s commitment to support the event for the next decade. This year the European Tour has three official events in China and the country�s place on the professional calendar is established.

Even if it�s too far from Europe or America to become a regular holiday destination, visitors to the country who enjoy the game should make a point of experiencing the sea of smiling faces, which is my abiding memory of a remarkable fortnight�s golf and one I hope to refresh before long.

Tim Yeo�s golf column appears fortnightly

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

But not everyone gets golf

It’s not all plain sailing for golf in China. Still seen as the epitome of capitalist pastimes, the game continues to get caught up in the shifting political mood of the country. Peking University president Xu Zhihong, for example, had no idea of the fuss he would create when he announced this summer a plan to build a golf driving range.

The idea seemed to make perfect sense: the university is one of the cradles for China’s future leaders, while the high-level networking that goes with golf makes it a valuable business skill. And surely modern China is no longer worried about the “bourgeois” stigma of individual sports?

Instead Peking University, also one of the birthplaces of the Cultural Revolution, was widely accused of encouraging elitism. “I did not realise it would be so sensitive,” said Xu this week when he dropped the plan.

At a time of widening inequality, golf can still raise hackles in China because it cuts across two of the most sensitive social and political issues - the scarcity of land, which is a regular source of popular protest, and growing water shortages. Over the past two years, planning officials have started to call for a halt in new courses. “The sport has come to symbolise some of the nation’s biggest potential threats,” the South China Morning post commented this week.

The backlash has limits, though. Xiamen University on the south-east coast announced last month that all business majors would have to take compulsory golf lessons. Construction of a campus golf course is going ahead as planned.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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November 9, 2006

BEIJING (Copyright Reuters) - Being a reporter is the third most dangerous
occupation in China, the official Xinhua news agency said, second only to miners and policemen.
“An increasing number of reporters are obstructed, scolded, even beaten during interviews,” Xinhua said in a late-night report seen on Thursday.
To help journalists injured on the job, a hospital in the northeastern
city of Shenyang had set up a foundation, it said.
“We decided to set up the foundation to arouse people’s concern about
>reporters’ health and safety,” Xinhua quoted Zhang Chengpu, vice-director
>of Shengjing Hospital, as saying.
>”The foundation will help reporters to pay part of their medical fees if
>they were attacked or wounded by accidents while doing interviews around
>Shenyang,” Zhang added.
>China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with at least 32 in
>custody, and another 50 Internet campaigners also in prison, according to
>Reporters Without Borders.
>Chinese journalists who report crime and corruption in the newly
>competitive media environment face increasing incidents of violence,
>according to the group.
>In February, it said a Chinese newspaper editor had died from injuries
>months after traffic police beat him for an expose about exorbitant
>electric bicycle licence fees.
>The government, which brooks little dissent, keeps a tight grip on the
>state-run media.
>The country has a history of blacking out negative news such as mine
>disasters — China is also home to the world’s deadliest mining industry
>— fearful about the impact of such incidents on social stability and the
>ruling Communist Party.

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Copyright The New York Times

Published: November 6, 2006

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America�s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.

Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange�s images � nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time � tell a starkly different story.

The pictures in �Impounded� (W. W. Norton) bear the hallmarks of Lange�s distinctive documentary style. (She is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.) Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

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Copyright The New York Times

BAODENG, China � If having children is a mark of wealth, Gao Shenmu and Wang Xiuying, a farming couple in their 70s, surely rank as rich.

They raised six children in this rolling, fertile countryside before China imposed its single-child policy. What�s more, as the cities of the distant east flourished and boomed, three of their four sons migrated along with millions of others, landing jobs and joining the cash economy.

But for just that reason, their very Chinese dream of security in old age, built on the next generation�s obligation to them, has badly foundered.

The sons moved, but they left their own two young children behind to be cared for. They rarely visit and collectively send just $30 or $40 a year home. Mr. Gao and Ms. Wang make do at harvest time, spending two weeks in backbreaking labor that once took them less than a week to perform.

The couple�s experience is increasingly commonplace. The chief of their hamlet put its predicament this way: �Knock on 10 doors, and 9 of them will be opened by old people.�

And across much of the Chinese countryside the situation is the same, with villages emptied of their working-age populations, leaving behind small children and grandparents.

China is a rapidly aging society, but in villages like this, more than anything else the abrupt shift toward a preponderance of old people is driven by migration. Since the era of economic reforms got under way a little more than a quarter century ago, hundreds of millions of people have been on the march, most of them peasants looking for better economic opportunities in the urbanized east.

And as China�s economy has developed, old customs � like the ironclad obligation to venerate and care for the elderly � with roots in 2,500-year-old Confucian doctrine, are breaking down.

�The reality of China today is that the needs of the elderly cannot be taken care of by the social system,� said Zhai Yuhe, a member of the Heilongjiang Provincial People�s Congress. �Most of them must rely on younger people, but today�s young people pay attention to their own children, and not to their elders.�

Mr. Zhai, who is also an executive of a private coal company, personally financed a study of the situation of the elderly in the countryside so that he could recommend new laws to the government concerning care of senior citizens. He said he was shocked into action by the death of an old couple in his own hometown, who had essentially been abandoned and were not discovered for days.

�In our society, children have become the highest good, and old people have become nothing,� he said.

He Xuefeng, an expert in rural governance at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said that although the central government has begun re-emphasizing development of the countryside since last year, in a push to reduce the gap between haves and have-nots, the situation for the rural elderly is deteriorating.

�New priorities have been set, but all of the emphasis is on economic development,� Mr. He said. �The traditional values of our villages have been devastated. One half of the population is changing very fast, and the other is clinging to its values. Under the circumstances, life becomes tougher and tougher for the elderly.�

Some who have been abandoned have sued their children for support.

For the entire article, please see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/asia/03aging.html

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Copyright The Columbia Journalism Review

The Associated Press bureau that operated out of Saigon starting in mid-1965 was a great one � a place of legends, a bureau created by arguably the most underrated editor of that era. Wes Gallagher was new at his job as general manager of the AP, and determined from the start to show that this story and this war, whether his constituent papers liked it or not, and whether the news was good or not, was a very important one. All three of the bureau members, Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and Horst Faas, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize, Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 (the first of two), and Arnett in 1966.

They were very good, the men and in time the women of the AP bureau. Like the other reporters in Saigon in those days, they lived the life of the obsessed. No one had a personal life. No one ever took a day off. Vietnam was a great crucible for anyone who wanted to become a serious journalist, not just because it was dangerous and you had to calibrate the value of every operation you went on, but because of the immense political pressures involved. Washington had invested so much in the appearance of the war that you were always under scrutiny. Since the war did not work, not from the beginning, any story that was important, and that had any significant dimension of truth, was bound to draw the anger of both Saigon and Washington. That meant any reporter working in Vietnam knew it was important to have your facts beyond dispute every time you filed.

For the ten years he was in Vietnam no one drew more anger than Arnett. He seemed to be a lightning rod for the Johnson administration, in part because he was so good and in part because he was from New Zealand; the White House was filled with young men and women studying his stories, looking for mistakes. �Peter, you�re a great reporter,� Gallagher told him as they were leaving the luncheon where Arnett had been awarded the Pulitzer, �but don�t be wrong on a story � there are too many people out there just itching to get you.�

Arnett had seemed like something of a journalistic hitchhiker in the beginning, taking whatever job was available. He started out running a small English-language newspaper in Laos in 1960, and first got the AP�s attention during one of those inevitable Laotian coups that brought down all communications for a couple of weeks. With all the news agencies cut off from the news on the Thai side of the river, Arnett had swum the Mekong, carrying his and other reporters� stories in a plastic bag so they wouldn�t get wet, and filed them from a post office on the other side. It was a swim, as much as anything else, to a better job, and in time the AP offered him one.

Arnett met Faas when both men were on assignment for the AP in Laos in 1962. Faas, who had worked previously for the AP in the Congo, thought Arnett had a certain cockiness he had seen before � quick and brave and boisterous. �There was a lot of Fleet Street in Peter when we first met, and I could see him getting an offer from one of the British papers and ending up there.� But as Faas said, Arnett kept getting better and better, wanting to know why things were happening and why the war was not being won; in addition, he had an almost pure instinct for combat reporting � like a man with his own personal radar that told him when and where to go. He had two kinds of courage, the courage to go into battle again and again, and the rarer kind of courage to report stories that the American mission and Washington hated because they went against the official optimism.

The AP reporters who had been there when the first American combat troops arrived had, like a handful of other colleagues from the earlier days, a distinct advantage in covering the war. They had more sources, of course, but they were more rooted as well. By rooted I mean that because they had gotten there long before it was an American war, they tended to see it more through the prism of Vietnamese history, not American history. Unlike many reporters who arrived with the big American buildup, they did not see it as connected to how well we had done in World War II; rather, they saw it more through the legacy of the French Indo-China War. They understood that the flaws of the South were political, bound up in Vietnam�s modern history and in the colonial war from which this current post-colonial war was so derivative. Thus, even as the war was Americanized, they possessed a certain skepticism that many of their more newly arrived journalistic colleagues lacked. They understood that you could have, in the technical sense, a series of victories, but that because the other side had absolute political superiority, the ability to recruit eager young men and to keep coming, they might not really be victories at all.

Perhaps Arnett�s most symbolic clash with the American military authorities came right after the first American combat units arrived in country, three years after he first got there. In mid-August 1965, at the very start of the American war, the Marines received intelligence of the presence of a Vietcong regiment in the village of Van Tuong near the Marine base at Chu Lai, all of this just south of Danang. The Marines decided to attack, even though their own forces were still in the process of building up.

The entire operation was kept secret � there was to be no coverage, even though it was the first major use of the Marines in Vietnam. Lieutenant General Lew Walt, the Marine commander in Vietnam, went on a very public inspection tour of Marine outposts to the north, taking most of the Danang press corps with him; clearly the Marines wanted coverage after the battle. The ground fighting in the Van Tuong operation, known as Operation Starlite, turned out to be very fierce. Probably, though there is no empirical proof of this, the Vietcong had decided to test the new American military machine, trying to find out both its strengths and weaknesses. Instead of breaking contact as they often did in the face of superior western firepower, they held their ground and fought hard. There were heavy casualties on both sides.

Arnett had watched the arrival of major American units in mid-1965 with a sinking feeling. He was very wary of what American technology might do and, equally important, might not do. To win, he thought, the Americans would not merely have to fight the Vietnamese, they would have to become Vietnamese, and that was not likely to happen…

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 8:59 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
The New York Times

Writers have an honored history of staying ahead of convention. Whether through muckraking, parody, irony or dissidence, fiction maintains its relevance, and when it’s good, its prescience, too.

This point was brought home to me recently, when in the midst of a major, continuing corruption scandal here with huge political overtones, I discovered a new author.

Watching the Shanghai scandal unfold, one conclusion seemed inescapable: The authorities were struggling to have it both ways - to take credit for a cleanup and yet to decide at their own convenience just how far it would go.

For a couple of days, the news was splashed around abundantly that a crack team of Communist Party investigators had descended on Shanghai to root out high- level corruption. The city’s powerful party secretary, Chen Liangyu, was cast as the fall guy and hustled off into detention.

A sprinkling of juicy details was allowed to circulate to reinforce the picture that Chen was indeed rotten.

The media reported that he maintained 11 known mistresses, for example, and that he controlled bank accounts that contained at least $80 million.

When the authorities figured the people had gotten the picture - just the right picture - discussion of the scandal was declared out of bounds. Even bloggers were warned off mentioning the central government, invoking any kind of political struggle or satirizing the scandal - warnings taken by some as a sign that there was a lot more to hide than had been revealed.

As rumors of more scandal investigations spread to Beijing, Tianjin and other cities, Chinese news junkies would mostly have to make do with stale speeches about the imperative need to stop corruption, and with displays of high-level party solidarity. The last generation of leaders was even trotted out of their usually discreet retirement to show that all who mattered were truly aboard.

Just as the news ban was put in place, I happened to be starting in on a novel, “When Red Is Black,” by Qiu Xiaolong.

Qiu, a native of Shanghai who lives in St. Louis, writes detective stories that take place in his hometown; in other words, entertainments.

Or so I thought, until I got a few pages into it.

In the guise of a simple detective story, “When Red Is Black” is a very effective account, albeit fiction, of Shanghai’s recent history. One page- turning passage early on describes a deal among senior government officials, organized crime groups and developers to build up a section of prime real estate in Shanghai.

Even the party secretary is involved.

Together, all boast about how they are going to sell their projects politically and restore Shanghai to its reputed status as the “Paris of the East” or the “Oriental Pearl.”

“Of course, the city government is all for the project,” says a character named Gu, who is a developer. “When the New World goes up, it will not only enhance the image of our great city, but also bring in huge tax revenues.”

A moment later, he continues: “Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. I applied for use of the land for cultural preservation. One of two small museums may be included in the concept as well. A museum for ancient coins is one idea; I have already been contacted by someone. But most of the new Shikumen houses will be for commercial use. Really high-end, luxury properties.”

In miniature, the passage would be taken by many Shanghainese as a fair description of how their city has been developed in such a hurry, with poor people being evicted from central locations to make way for luxurious apartment and office complexes built after lucrative sweetheart deals.

It is particularly evocative of the development of Xintiandi, a pioneer development in post-reform Shanghai in which an old, historic area was razed to build a new neighborhood of Shikumen, or stone-gated brick structures designed to look historic, and to house high-end shops and restaurants.

I cast about to learn more about Qiu Xiaolong and found he had recently been interviewed in the United States on National Public Radio.

“Everywhere, at every level you meet with different kinds of corruption,” he said of his homeland, to which he returns from time to time. “What worries me is that it is more and more out of control. It is a really big problem facing China right now, and I cannot write about modern China without touching upon it.”

Qiu’s detective books have never been banned in China, only censored. “Officials say, ‘No, this cannot have happened in Shanghai,’” he said, explaining how the city had been given another name in the Chinese editions.

“They’ve changed a lot,” Qiu added. “Some paragraphs or sentences they simply cut.”

For the complete article, please see the link below:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/02/news/letter.php

Posted at 8:07 PM · Comments (0)

Thu Nov 2, 2006 8:23 AM GMT

BEIJING (Copyright Reuters) - China will be projecting soft power and seeking
hard
deals as it hosts dozens of African leaders at a summit this weekend
that
cements the Asian superpower’s deepening trade and political ties with
the
continent.

China’s investments and lending in Africa, fuelled by its voracious
appetite
for oil and commodities, have been criticised for ignoring human rights
and
governance, but at the summit its self-styled role as a champion and
leader
of the developing world will be on full display.

“I expect that all of Africa will look at China’s great transformation,
that
we’ll see the cooperation that is now going on between Africa and China
and
identify new means by which we can support each other,” Liberian
President
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf told reporters in Beijing.

Trade between China and Africa has boomed to a projected $50 billion
this
year from $11 billion in 2000 and China’s president, premier and
foreign
minister all toured the continent in the past year, visiting 15
countries
between them.

And while summits of this scale are about handshakes and photo ops,
analysts
say the event could spur new deals.

“It’s not entirely symbolism. It could provide some very critical force
to
push through some deals,” said Chu Tianshu, an associate professor of
economics at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in
Chengdu.

Chinese investments include a $3 billion iron ore mine, rail and port
deal
in Gabon and an agreement by offshore producer CNOOC to pay $2.3
billion for
a stake in a Nigerian oil and gas field — China’s largest-ever
overseas
acquisition.

“I do expect more coming,” said Kang Wu, of the East-West Center in
Hawaii,
referring to oil deals. “China’s imports of African crude oil and real
growing very fast.”

China fought off rival Taiwan to restore diplomatic ties with oil-rich
Chad
earlier this year and now sources more than one-third of its crude from
Africa, with Angola its largest supplier on the continent.

HEARTS AND MINDS

But with its relationship with Africa criticised by everyone from
lenders
urging China to consider debt sustainability and social standards, to
miners
in Zambia who rioted over pay and working conditions at a Chinese-owned
copper mine, Beijing will use its position as host to project a kinder,
friendlier image.

China has embassies in every African country it has diplomatic ties
with and
has been pushing education and cultural exchanges, a strategy analysts
say
is about carving a role for itself in the hearts and minds of Africans.

“They do a lot of very big, very public infrastructure projects —
universities, sports stadiums — all of these things get them noticed,”
said
one Western diplomat in Beijing.

China, oft-criticised for buying oil and selling arms in Sudan, also
quietly
broke with its traditional mantra of non-interference in domestic
affairs by
supporting the African Union peacekeeping force in Sudan’s troubled
Darfur
region.

It has cancelled 10.9 billion yuan worth of African debts, and analysts
say
it could announce further cancellations at the summit as a gesture of
goodwill.
All of the courting is not just with business in mind, it also has a
strategic aim — African countries represent a bloc vote that can sway
decisions in global bodies like the World Trade Organisation and the
United
Nations.

While the red carpets and commemorative stamps that characterise the
summit
may on the surface be only ceremonial, the gathering reinforces a
message to
Africa’s leaders that they are important to China at a time when the
continent gets little attention from investors in the West.

“It’s giving status to African leaders and telling Africa that China is
a
country that takes Africa seriously,” said Chris Alden, of the London
School
of Economic and Political Science.

“And that’s very important to the countries that are participating.”

Posted at 12:53 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Many of the African leaders coming here for the Chinese-African summit meeting are attracted not only by opportunities for aid and trade, but also by the Chinese model of development.

They know that only three decades ago, China was as poor as Malawi . But while the latter remains among the world’s poorest, China ‘s economy has expanded nine-fold. Indeed, the Chinese model has in many ways challenged the conventional wisdom in the West on how to fight poverty and ensure good governance. Its key features are:

People matter. Since 1978, China has pursued a down-to-earth strategy for modernization, and has focused on meeting the most pressing needs of the people. The architect of China ‘s reform, Deng Xiaoping, argued that China could only “seek truth from facts,” not from dogmas, and all reforms must take account of local conditions and deliver tangible benefits.

Constant experimentation. All changes in China first go through a process of trial and error on a small scale, and only when they are shown to work are they are applied elsewhere.

Gradual reform, not big bang. China rejected “shock therapy” and worked through the existing, imperfect institutions while gradually reforming them and reorienting them to serve modernization.

A developmental state. China ‘s change has been led by a strong and pro-development state that is capable of shaping national consensus on modernization and ensuring overall political and macroeconomic stability in which to pursue wide-ranging domestic reforms.

Selective learning. China has retained its long tradition of “selective cultural borrowing” - including from the neoliberal American model, and especially its emphasis on the role of the market, entrepreneurship, globalization and international trade. It is inaccurate to describe the Chinese model as the ” Beijing consensus” versus the ” Washington consensus.” What makes the Chinese experience unique is that Beijing has safeguarded its own policy space as to when, where and how to adopt foreign ideas.

Correct sequencing and priorities. China ‘s post- 1978 change has had a clear pattern: easy reforms first, difficult ones second; rural reforms first, urban ones second; changes in coastal areas first, inland second; economic reforms first, political ones second. The advantage is that the experiences gained in the first stage create conditions for the next stage.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:29 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist

America and China
Grand vision and petty deceit when Nixon met Mao
Oct 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The first visit to China by an American president was notable, above
all, for its symbolism. A new book analyses the characters involved
and
what they got from it

RICHARD NIXON’S visit to China in 1972, stage-managed by his national
security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was a diplomatic coup de maître. It
all but guaranteed Nixon’s re-election, transformed superpower
politics, opened China to the outside world and dazzled the media. It
has even been celebrated in an opera.

A third of a century later, however, the visit looks less bright than
it did at the time. Nixon himself survived politically for little more
than two years. More to the point, the gambit failed to relieve the
pressure on America in Indochina, which was one of its chief purposes.
Within three years, with Chinese aid pouring in to help the Vietcong,
America had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Nixon and Mr
Kissinger tried to avoid betraying their ally, Taiwan, but could not
resist making grand statements to impress their Chinese hosts. “There
is one China,” Nixon told the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, at
their first private meeting, “and Taiwan is part of China.”

Today China loudly asserts that Taiwan is indeed a part of China, but
it manifestly is not governed as such. Though the fiction is observed,
it is still a fiction. China remains a Communist state, albeit one
that
has embraced capitalism. Yet the American president’s visit
acknowledged that China was a great power, encouraged American
companies to do business there and helped China in its relations with
the Soviet Union. On balance, China gained more from the transaction
than America.

Mr Kissinger was not good at economics. This was never more clearly
shown than by his dismissive judgment that “the maximum amount of
bilateral trade possible between us, even if we make great efforts, is
infinitesimal in terms of our total economy.” Today America’s trade
deficit with China is running at about $215 billion a year, and
America’s debt to China is increasingly seen as a problem.

However mistaken many of the assumptions made by all four principals
at the Beijing poker table—Mao Zedong, the dying emperor surrounded
by
pretty, scheming nurses, the urbane Zhou, grumpy Nixon and the
neurotic
Mr Kissinger—this was international politics on a grand scale.
Margaret
MacMillan, a Canadian historian whose masterly evocation of the Paris
peacemakers of 1919 has been a bestseller on both sides of the
Atlantic
since it was published in 2001, has now done fitting justice to
another
great diplomatic episode.

With a sharp eye for the ironic and the bizarre, she describes the
intrigues, the insults and the betrayals of her characters. Mr
Kissinger, for example, preferred to use Chinese interpreters because
they could be trusted not to talk to the American press. He handed
over
reams of classified American intelligence about the Soviet Union to
its
Chinese enemies. Ms MacMillan gives abundant examples of the spite
with
which he sidelined the secretary of state, William Rogers, who was
kept
ignorant of America’s secret talks with the Chinese for over two
years,
until Mr Kissinger had returned from his first visit to Beijing. Yet
Mr
Kissinger’s intelligence, and his excitement at the sheer scale of his
undertaking, shine through the narrative.

Nixon emerges as an ungracious figure, but also as the original
architect of the whole daring project. He also comes across as a
shrewd
analyst of the great game. Some of the most revealing discoveries Ms
MacMillan has made in her researches are the haiku-like memos Nixon
wrote on his yellow pads. One, which he scribbled before the talks
started, begins:

What they want:
1. Build up their world credentials
2. Taiwan
3. Get out of Asia

What we want:
1. Indo China (?)
2. Communication—To restrain Chinese expansion in Asia
3. In future—Reduce threat of confrontation by China Super Power

What we both want:
1. Reduce danger of confrontation & conflict
2. A more stable Asia
3. A restraint on USSR

The question-mark against Indochina alone deserves a volume of
explanation. This is a great story, entertainingly told.

Posted at 11:15 PM · Comments (0)

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