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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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Letter from Shanghai
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
Thursday, December 28, 2006

SHANGHAI

The streets of certain districts in Shanghai this time of year have an almost dreamlike quality to them. The dream in question would be that of a prosperous and happy China.

Walk down Nanjing Road at lunchtime and you’ll be treated to sights of finely coiffed and impeccably dressed people, especially women in their 20s and 30s, whose sense of style is as smart as anything you’re likely to see in Tokyo.

Take just one step downscale and stroll Huaihai Road, the city’s second most famous shopping street, on any weekend day and in many ways the sights are even more impressive. There may not be so much polish in evidence, but the people are out en masse and, despite the Chinese reputation for holding on to money, a great many of them are consuming.

At moments like this, the image of a rising China comes into its most compelling focus, and doubts about what the future holds for the world’s most populous nation seem to dissolve amid the hubbub of content consumerism.

Call it the graph paper and ruler moment, when you take the stunning growth rates of China’s last quarter-century and project them merrily forward. There has been a lot of this sort of thing lately, and not just about China, either.

Goldman Sachs helped launch this brave new notional world with a report in 2003 that spoke of the rise of the BRICs, meaning Brazil, Russia, India and China. Collectively, according to the report’s projections, these four incipient powers will enjoy a greater gross domestic product than today’s G-6 nations.

Regrettably or not, daily life in China, even here in this showcase city, offers periodic disruptions to the dream, moments when skepticism is warranted, or better yet, compelled.

These come with the discovery of ad hoc communities of squatters that one runs into here and there during errant wanderings. It even comes on Nanjing Road, where between clumps of newly affluent pedestrians the attentive will spot people in rags picking through the trash for a living. It comes with glimpses of the stooped and deeply wrinkled old ladies who plead for alms at street corners, all but ignored by the vast majority of happy passers-by.

The intent here is not to slight China’s economic achievement, which in the past quarter-century has truly been all but miraculous. The point is to say that so much remains to be done here, including most of the hard work.

China’s outstanding tasks tend to be of the kind that evade quick and simple measurement and will certainly not loom large in the calculations of the graph paper and ruler gang.

The people who inhabit the world’s oldest unitary state have a common nationality, but they have yet to construct commonly held bonds of citizenship, which allow for the sharing of other people’s problems and of each other’s dreams.

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Posted at 11:47 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright 2006 Slate/The Washington Post

Dec. 26, 2006, at 5:34 PM ET

In the spring of 1965, James Brown went into a Charlotte, N.C., studio to cut a new record. The song’s lyrics were little more than a laundry list of dance crazes, but the music was eerie and unusual—a jittery blues vamp, with oddly accented beats and horns darting and honking in the vast, empty spaces between whip-crack snare hits. “I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums,” Brown would recall in his autobiography. Sure enough, the guitar sound was heavily percussive, clanking like a sledgehammer striking a rail spike. Brown flubbed a couple of lyrics during the recording, but when he heard the playback he decided, correctly, that the piece was too good to warrant a second take. “When I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance,” Brown remembered, adding, in the understatement of all-time, “I had discovered that my strength was … in the rhythm.”

The song was called “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and for once it’s not glib to say that the rest was history. With “Brand New Bag,” Brown created funk and laid the groundwork for disco, hip-hop, techno, and virtually every other style of modern popular music that has come since. He taught the world to wring percussive noise from every instrument—to hear drums everywhere—and to treat every song as the occasion for a riotous party. And he embarked on his most fertile period, a decade that produced dozens of the hottest records ever made: “I Feel Good,” “Sex Machine,” “Brother Rapp,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Super Bad,” and “Mother Popcorn” (my personal vote for funkiest song in the universe), among many others.

But Brown’s achievement is larger than his own oeuvre and the genres that it begat. Flip on the radio virtually anywhere on earth today, and you will hear the sound of the Brown Revolution, the blare of propulsive, polyrhythmic dance music. Beats have conquered the world, even the West, where polyphony was born and melody and harmony have traditionally held sway. No other musician—not Louis Armstrong, not Elvis Presley, not Bob Dylan—can claim so central a role in this momentous cultural shift. “Make It Funky,” James commanded, and from Boise to Berlin to Bangkok, they have.

The obituaries that have appeared in the wake of Brown’s death yesterday at the age of 73 have sketched the milestones and curiosities of his life: his hardscrabble childhood in Georgia, where he was raised by an aunt who ran a brothel; his rise through the chitlin’ circuit; his marriages and arrests; his big hits, black pride anthems, and strange fondness for Richard Nixon. And his nicknames: “the Godfather of Soul,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “Minister of Super Heavy Funk,” “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “Mr. Dynamite.” No one who ever saw Brown in concert could doubt that he earned those titles. Even in his dotage, he led a band as tight as any in the world and executed his signature shimmies, slides, and splits in dance shoes buffed to a high gloss.

Brown’s showmanship merged the fervent emotionalism of the black church with pure showbiz—flashy clothes, vaudevillian theatrics, sweat-drenched movement, and a pompadour flamboyant enough to inspire Al Sharpton (and countless pimps). He was the model for all pop performers who followed him. After Brown, even the whitest white boy felt compelled to shake it a little onstage.

The world is a quieter and duller place now that Brown will never again stride the boards, although you can relive the excitement by playing the volcanic Live at the Apollo (1963). That record, by far the best live album ever made, is a good place to begin listening, along with the Star Time box set, which includes most of the big hits. But digging into the Brown discography is the task of a lifetime. He made at least 70 albums, and there are brilliant moments on all of them. His earliest recordings, from the late 1950s, prove that his raw-throated ballad singing would have made him a legend even if he’d never found the funk. (Hunt down his 1959 debut Please Please Please.) He recorded jazz standards and gospel testimonials and disco, rap, showtunes, instrumentals, and dozens upon dozens of hilarious numbers like “For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes” and “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”—which I suppose you could call novelty songs, if the grooves weren’t so seriously ferocious.

The relentless groove was Brown’s specialty, and he proved its pleasures were as profound, its mysteries as rich, as any that art has to offer. He worked hard to refine his craft. Earlier this year, critic and occasional Slate contributor Douglas Wolk gave me an extraordinary collection of MP3s he’d compiled of nearly every single ever produced by James Brown. Listening to these hundreds of songs by dozens of artists, it becomes clear that Brown is a bandleader and musical auteur on par with Duke Ellington. Like Ellington, he presided over a steady cast of players (including, among other greats, bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield), composed to their strengths, and kept pushing the music into new territory. Listen closely, with a good pair of headphones, and the thousand pointillist details of Brown’s genius open up to you: the shifting accents and registers, the variations in dynamics and attack, the disconcerting spaces and silences, the beats piled atop beats. But, of course, that genius is never more apparent than when the headphones come off and you lose yourself in the steamy blur of a packed dance floor.

A subtler, often overlooked achievement is the words that Brown wrote and sang. He was capable of writing traditional pop lyrics, but by the late ’60s, straightforward narratives and confessions were largely replaced by a surreal flow of catchphrases and exhortations that gushed out over the inexorable beat: “Give it up or turn it a loose”; “Gimme some air!”; “Take it to the bridge!”; “Mama, come here quick/ Bring me that lickin’ stick”; “Hit me!”; “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud”; “Sometimes I feel so nice/ Good Lord!/ I jump back, I wanna kiss myself”; and, passim, “Unh!,” with which Brown proved, again and again, that in pop music, sound is sense, and that a single well-placed, wordless guttural can carry more meaning than a thousand poetaster’s stanzas. Of course, in between grunts, Brown slipped in some worldly wisdom. To wit: “Get up offa that thing, and shake ‘till you feel better/ Get up offa that thing, and shake it/ Sing it now!” In other words: Dancing is joy’s end and its means. As philosophies of life go, it’s not too shabby, and it’s the best user’s guide to James Brown records that I know.
Jody Rosen is Slate’s music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.

Posted at 10:12 PM · Comments (0)

December 26, 2006 02:32pm

THE South Korean Government is handing out gifts for office workers who promise not to visit brothels this holiday season.

“If you promise yourself to make it a healthy night out at the end of the year, and if you recommend this to others, we are giving lots of prizes,” the Ministry of Gender Equality said in an internet posting.

The ministry is offering to pay companies whose employees pledge not to buy sex after what are typically alcohol-soaked, year-end parties.

A ministry spokesman confirmed the campaign but declined to answer questions about it.

But a ministry official told the Korea Times daily: “Korean corporate culture that includes heavy drinking is also what makes buying sex acceptable as a way for male-bonding, which is proving to be a hard-to-break ritual.”

The ministry is offering movie tickets based on the number of employees who pledge not to visit prostitutes as well as a cash prize of 1 million won ($1365) for the company which enlists the most employees in the campaign.

Many South Koreans were bewildered by the plan, saying it was a waste of money and gave the impression that South Korean men cannot keep away from brothels.

“Do they really think men buy sex every time they have a dinner party?” wrote one Korean on a comment page of the South Korea’s largest daily Chosun Ilbo

Posted at 8:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Published: December 26, 2006

James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died early yesterday in Atlanta. He was 73 and lived in Beech Island, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga.

Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas.

Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.

Mr. Copsidas said that Mr. Brown had participated in an annual Christmas toy giveaway in Atlanta on Friday but had been hospitalized on Saturday. After canceling performances planned for midweek, Mr. Brown on Sunday night got his doctor’s approval to perform on Saturday in New Jersey and on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s nightclub in New York.

Mr. Copsidas said Mr. Brown used one of his best-known slogans to convey his dedication to his fans: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.”

Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.

His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.

“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.

Posted at 6:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Standard
12/25/2006, Volume 012, Issue 15

Nothing else pumps up th municipal pride of once- glorious cities, now moribund, like the pertinent anniversaries of their artistic native sons long dead.

Amsterdam may have capitulated to the whoremongers, real and metaphorical, years ago, but the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth evokes the Dutch Golden Age, when piety and prosperity honored each other, and when artistic excellence served them both. This year, at several removes from gold, Amsterdam department store façades sported outsized Rembrandt reproductions; Rembrandt Square featured a Night Watch consisting of 22 life-size bronze figures, in the midst of which the admirer can stand and be photographed; and Rembrandt the Musical regaled the theatergoer with the dirt on “‘the master of light’ whose life had very shady sides to it,” in the words of the publicity agent’s all-too-resistible come-on.

It is hard to blame the Dutch for trading on a homegrown brand name that everyone else has been cashing in on for ages. Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt’s has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great. The 400th provides a fine occasion to consider why that should be so.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s lineage was almost as honorably homespun as a 19th-century American president’s: His father was a miller, his mother a baker’s daughter. The ninth of ten children, with his shining intelligence, Rembrandt embodied his parents’ hope for better things, and they sent him first to the Latin School in Leiden, then to Leiden University, the Dutch Oxford. Like many another born artist, Rembrandt soon realized the university route was not for him, and he signed on as apprentice to the painter Jacob van Swanenburgh, who went in for ever-popular (and lucrative) history and architectural painting, though his most famous work shows a fiendish set of jaws macerating sinners in the depths of hell.

Rembrandt never did paint any infernal landscapes, but his three-year stint with Swanenburgh served him well; his progress so heartened his father that he sent Rembrandt to Amsterdam for six months to learn what he could from the eminent Pieter Lastman. Upon his return to Leiden in 1625, Rembrandt established himself in a master’s studio of his own, and took to cranking out history paintings—the Bible being his principal historical source, as in The Stoning of Saint Stephen, The Apostle Paul, Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver—which were always in hot demand and which secured his early reputation. The impression he made on the connoisseur Constantijn Huygens, secretary to Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, gained him some choice princely commissions; and the prospect of incalculable triumph lured him to Amsterdam in 1632.

The capital city did not disappoint him, and there he certainly lived up to his own vision of himself. He continued with history painting, added portraiture—notably self-portraiture—and the occasional landscape to his repertoire, and taught many able students. Riches and high esteem were his reward, and Rembrandt evidently thought well enough of himself to take after Leonardo and Michelangelo in signing his works with his first name alone. He took after Peter Paul Rubens more directly, investing clinically precise realism with dashing brilliance.

Marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of an art dealer who helped set him up in business, not only brought him personal happiness but provided him with a nonpareil artist’s model. In perhaps their most famous collaboration, Rembrandt sits as well as paints: Self-Portrait with Saskia on His Lap (The Prodigal Son in the Tavern) presents him as a laughing, hard-drinking rascal, holding aloft a lass flute of ale long as a telescope. His wife is cast as that evening’s pick-up, disdainfully peering over her shoulder at the viewer, who probably wishes he could order some of what the Prodigal is having. This spirited roistering in the Frans Hals manner efies homebound Dutch respectability, and in this strangely joyous image that seems to celebrate renegade sexuality within marriage, love declares that it lives strictly on its own terms, glowingly.

However, the glow would tragically fade, or rather become the hectic flush of tuberculosis on Saskia’s cheeks: In 1642 she died at the age of 30, and was buried in the plain cloth shroud prescribed by Calvinist law. In 1639 Rembrandt had produced a prescient etching that showed a newly married couple paying their obeisance to Death: To the skeleton arising from the grave, the bride holds out a flower, an offering to tide Death over until He can claim her beauteous self. No sacrifice—not even the three infants who preceded Saskia to the grave—could propitiate the Reaper. He took what He wanted when He wanted it.

Work and love—or at any rate, work and sex—remained Rembrandt’s way of holding off the darkness. Saskia was not long gone when her surviving son’s nurse, Geertje Dircx, took her place in Rembrandt’s bed. During the years of their affair, Rembrandt turned out sexual etchings so frank and coarse as hardly to be considered erotic: a faceless monk in a cornfield plowing some faceless woman whose clenched feet and straining legs are all one sees of her; a cavalier whose plumed headgear dangles from the bedpost servicing a lady who demonstrates no particular thrill at the privilege.

In 1649 the arrival in Rembrandt’s household of a younger and much prettier servant, Hendrickje Stoffels, announced a new romantic dispensation, and Geertje was not pleased to be sent packing. No doubt this is the stuff that has Rembrandt the Musical salaciously wailing the blues: Geertje’s charging Rembrandt with breach of promise and his publicly denying her claims that she was his mistress; the pregnant Hendrickje’s being hounded before an ecclesiastical court and officially proclaimed Rembrandt’s whore, while Rembrandt, who had left the Reformed Church, skates by without reprimand; Rembrandt’s getting his own back against Geertje and then some, by contriving to have her declared mentally incompetent and confined to a virtual dungeon for five years.

The sexual scandal was topped off by financial ruin as dissatisfied customers for grand commissions, and the artist’s own insatiable taste for the finer things in life, plunged Rembrandt into bankruptcy. When death came at last, in 1669, it may not have seemed entirely unwelcome.

Few lives have known the tempestuous ethical and emotional amplitude of Rembrandt’s, and in his work one sees the sun-graced uplands and the pits of degradation, sometimes at once. His Bathsheba (1654), for which Hendrickje was likely the model, shows the nude Hebrew beauty having her feet washed by a gray-visaged servingwoman; in Bathsheba’s hand is the letter from King David commanding her to come to him, for he has fallen in love at the sight of her, though she is the wife of Uriah.

Rich adornments—an earring, a necklace, a bracelet—bespeak her familiarity with luxury, and Bathsheba’s sensuality is palpable, her lush body radiant where the light falls on her breasts and belly. But her lower body is in shadow, as the darkness of David’s longing and her own—David shall arrange Uriah’s death, and David and Bathsheba’s infant son shall die—falls across her purity like advancing night. And it is with a strange melting ache that Bathsheba looks at her servant, who in turn is utterly absorbed in the job at hand. Importunate longing is in the mistress’s look, and one cannot but think that she is wishing she were not Bathsheba anymore but could be this lowly servant instead.

It is, of course, but a pang of misgiving Bathsheba feels, not a moral compulsion strong enough to overcome the king’s lust, or her own. Rembrandt captures the moment of trial for a woman whose taste for finery, even for grandeur, and whose regard for her own beauty, already proclaim her lost. The artist understands what it means to want the thing you want most,even though it might cost you your decency and self-respect and the life of someone you once claimed to love…

…Although the current academic industry is out to make the chief interest of Rembrandt’s painting “the way he applies his paint” (in the words of one fashionable art historian), the ordinary cultivated viewer can always hope to find in him the traditional artistic virtue inherent in the word vision: a species of wisdom, connected in representational art with insight into human, inhuman, and divine nature, as acquired by the most attentive observation, a working knowledge of great literary texts, and some sharp-elbowed acquaintance with philosophizing.

Rembrandt thinks in paint, and it is the quality of the thinking that makes for the greatness of the painting. Eye and hand do their genial part, but it is principally the mind of Rembrandt that we still remember today, and that will be remembered 400 years from now.

is a writer in Florida.

© Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

For the entire article please see the link below.

Posted at 11:52 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 19, 2006

SHENZHEN, China — When Zhang Feifei lost her job in this booming Chinese factory town, she was not terribly concerned. Jobs had always been plentiful in Shenzhen’s flourishing economy.

(Articles in this series are examining the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen from a sleepy fishing village near Hong Kong to a booming Chinese metropolis.)

Part 1: In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back (December 18, 2006)

Then Ms. Zhang, a 20-year-old migrant laborer, lost her identity card and was shocked to find that no factory would hire her without a bribe that she could not afford. Desperate for money, she ended up working in a grimy two-room massage parlor in a congested alley here, where she has sex with four or five men each day.

“I was terrified at first, and I was really embarrassed not even knowing how to use a condom,” said the soft-spoken young woman, casting her eyes downward as she spoke. “I didn’t have any choice, though. Little by little, you have to get used to it.”

Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migrant workers, Ms. Zhang among them.

Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village in the Pearl River delta, next to Hong Kong, when it was decreed a special economic zone in 1980 by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, the city has grown at an annual rate of 28 percent, though it slowed to 15 percent in 2005.

Shenzhen owed its success to a simple formula of cheap land, eager, compliant labor and lax environmental rules that attracted legions of foreign investors who built export-based manufacturing industries. With 7 million migrant workers in an overall population of about 12 million — compared with Shanghai’s 2 to 3 million migrants out of a population of 18 million — Shenzhen became the literal and symbolic heart of the Chinese economic miracle.

Now, to other cities in China, Shenzhen has begun to look less like a model than an ominous warning of the limitations of a growth-above-all approach.

While grueling labor conditions exist in many parts of China, Shenzhen’s gigantic plants, employing as many as 200,000 workers each, have established a particular reputation for harshness among workers and labor advocates. Monthly turnover rates of 10 percent or more are not uncommon, labor groups say.

The tough working conditions, in turn, have helped spawn one of the most important labor developments in China in recent years: large-scale wildcat strikes and smaller job actions for better hours and wages. The Guangdong Union Association, a government-affiliated group, said there were more than 10,000 strikes in the province last year.

Among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen’s recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor.

“This path is now a dead end,” said Zhao Xiao, an economist and former adviser to the Chinese State Council, or cabinet. After cataloging the city’s problems, he said, “Governments can’t count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness.”

As the limits of the Shenzhen model have grown more and more apparent, other cities in China’s relatively developed east are increasingly trying to differentiate themselves, emphasizing better working and living conditions for factory workers or paying more attention to the environment.

“Some inland cities have started to provide migrants social security, including pension and other insurance,” said Wang Chunguang, an expert in class mobility at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “In Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, residency controls are loosening up and education for migrant children is getting more attention.”

Migrants do still arrive here, of course, drawn by the promise of work and undaunted by stories of the difficult life that awaits them. Some, like Ms. Zhang, who come here for the $100-a-month sweatshop salaries, end up trapped, literally too poor to leave. But many others quickly become disillusioned and return home.

Increasingly short of workers, factories recently have increased assembly-line wages by as much as 20 percent. But even so, critics say, Shenzhen’s boom has spread little wealth.

While the city is dependent on migrant labor to keep its factories running, onerous residency rules discourage migrants from settling here permanently and make it difficult for them to obtain public services from education to health care.

“The government has evaded its responsibilities toward migrant workers,” Jin Cheng, a member of an influential local civic forum, Interhoo, said bluntly.

The resulting rootlessness has fed a wave of crime of a sort hardly ever seen elsewhere in China. Gunfights, kidnappings and gang warfare are rife, and crime rates are skyrocketing.

Video features accompanying both part one and part two of this series can be found on the New York Times website. Click the link below.

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Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Monday, December 18, 2006

GLASGOW, Scotland — At 2:42 p.m. on Oct. 11, Dean Collins heard a thunderous explosion as he worked at his computer in his 30th-floor apartment in Manhattan.

Collins looked out his window and saw a small plane crashing into a building right in front of him — the accident that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor. Instinctively, he recalled, he pulled his Fuji digital camera from a drawer and started shooting, thinking to himself, “This is going to be on the news.”

Onlookers used camera phones to snap former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos in Manila recently. Celebrities worldwide have been stung by the new technology.
Onlookers used camera phones to snap former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos in Manila recently. Celebrities worldwide have been stung by the new technology. (By Bullit Marquez — Associated Press)
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Collins, a consultant for a software company, said he remembered reading about Scoopt, a year-old agency in Scotland that brokers photos for “citizen journalists.” Within minutes, he had e-mailed his digital shots to Scoopt. Hours later, his picture of a smoking Manhattan high-rise was in three British newspapers, including a front-page splash in the Times of London. He earned $650 for his work.

The rapid rise of digital technology, which enables ordinary people almost anywhere to record images and post them quickly on the Internet, is changing the way the world witnesses history, not to mention the dependable misbehavior of celebrities. Events that once were recorded only by human memory may now endure in full, pixelated detail, available in seconds around the globe.

The trend is driven by the proliferation of camera-equipped cellphones, introduced in Japan in 2000. Worldwide sales topped 460 million this year and will reach 1 billion by 2010, according to industry analysts.

With the proliferation of images, prosecutors are increasingly relying on photos as evidence in cases against accused muggers, terrorists and other criminals. Insurance companies balance cellphone photos against recollection as they assess auto accidents.

And the presence of cellphone cameras in handbags and coat pockets means that for the famous, private space is shrinking fast. Scoopt has also sold cellphone photos of Michelle Rodriguez, star of the television show “Lost,” drinking and partying wildly in a bar in New York, and shots of Paris Hilton dancing on a table in Las Vegas.

Celebrities everywhere have been stung by stealthy camera phones. Grainy photos of supermodel Kate Moss snorting what appeared to be cocaine, apparently shot with a camera phone, appeared in newspapers worldwide last year. Britain’s Prince Harry was forced to apologize last year when a fellow reveler at a costume party used a camera phone to snap the prince wearing a Nazi uniform — then sold the photos to tabloids for thousands of dollars.

Forty-three years ago, a single person with a home movie camera captured the only detailed images of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. If today’s technology had existed then, dozens or even hundreds of people with cellphones and pocket-size digital cameras probably would have recorded the shooting from every possible angle.

“We might actually know if there was somebody on the grassy knoll,” said Dan Gillmor, a California-based journalist and author who has written extensively about what he calls “grass-roots journalism.”

Governments have always controlled information, from the Nazis to South American dictators hiding evidence of their “disappeared” enemies, said David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair. “But now the photograph has suddenly changed the equation — the power is in the hands of the average citizen,” said Friend, whose 2006 book, “Watching the World Change,” explores the rising power of images. “Whatever you do now, you will be held accountable. You will be seen.”

Friend noted that camera-equipped cellphones were not common in the United States at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The historical record of events would have been richer if people in the twin towers or on the hijacked planes had been able to send out photos and video of their ordeal.

For the entire article please see the link below.

Posted at 12:01 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 18, 2006

SHENZHEN, China — When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall.

Articles in this series are examining the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen from a sleepy fishing village near Hong Kong to a booming Chinese metropolis.

Ryan Pyle for The New York Times

Housing costs in Shenzhen have been growing by about 30 percent a year. A buyers’ boycott was organized, to the authorities’ displeasure.
The New York Times

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. It became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.

And it was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26-year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China’s breakneck economic expansion and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.

Increasingly, though, with its growing pains multiplying, Shenzhen looks like a preview, even a warning, of the limitations of the kind of growth-above-all approach that has gripped much of China.

Shenzhen’s 28 percent average annual growth rate since 1980 is likely to stand as a record in China for some time, but the price of this phenomenal success is painfully evident. Throughout most of the year its skies are thick with eye-burning smoke. Street crime is high. And the workers it has drawn so effortlessly in the past from the countryside are becoming harder to recruit, as their options increase elsewhere.

But Shenzhen may also herald more promising changes. Possibly the greatest force taking shape here is the quiet expansion of the middle class, thicker on the ground here than perhaps anywhere else in China. This middle class is beginning to chafe under authoritarian rule, and over time, the quiet, well-organized challenges of the newly affluent may have the deepest impact on this country’s future.

“Many people laughed at me, because they don’t have confidence in the government,” said Qian Shengzeng, a 62-year-old former rocket scientist who led the movement against the expressway. “They think the government is hopelessly rotten. However, our view is that maybe there is a remaining sliver of hope, and the government needs to be pushed.”

In newly rich Shenzhen, as in much of China, social change is being driven by economic transformation and, more than anything else, property ownership.

Red-hot real estate markets have given birth to a new class of people, known as mortgage slaves, because the financial burden of buying into the middle-class dream of home ownership has suddenly become so great. The new property owners have poured their energy into everything from establishing co-op boards to spar with landlords, to organizing real estate market boycotts to force down prices.

Others, meanwhile, have begun running for office in district-level elections, where they hope to make the city government more responsive to their needs, though, like governments at every level in China, the ultimate power here rests with Communist Party officials.

Shenzhen has also spawned a local research group known as Interhoo, an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.

“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”

Academics and others who study the city’s development say it is no surprise that Shenzhen is emerging as the cradle of movements like this. From the start, its proximity to Hong Kong has made it unusually open to outside influences. The city is also new, founded in 1980, and populated by migrants who contribute to a culture of greater individualism and risk-taking than anywhere else in China.

Even with all of this political activity, China is a long way from participatory democracy, even at the local level. Yet a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that Shenzhen’s expanding middle class now accounts for about 10 percent of the city’s population of 12 million — a higher percentage, most here believe, than in any other city in China, though reliable figures are hard to come by. As the middle class grows, civic leaders say they expect to see a steady growth in citizen involvement.

“This is a process of struggling for our interests,” said Jiang Shan, a computer software expert who works in advertising. “It’s difficult, with serious obstacles from the administration and pressure from the powerful. In the long term, to have a good outcome we have to speed up education about law, including election law.”

More than most, Mr. Jiang knows how hard that fight is. Together with a small number of other middle-class Shenzhen residents, he has been at the forefront of a battle to turn what has been a symbolic neighborhood elective office into a real force in people’s lives.

It started when Mr. Jiang filed a series of lawsuits to try to resolve a number problems related to property management. After a string of defeats, he sought help from his local representative, only to discover that the man was a party to one of his lawsuits.

“It was only then that I realized that according to the election law, if I could get enough votes in the community, I could become a representative myself,” Mr. Jiang said. Or so it appeared.

Click to read more

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This is a very efficient cookie, even at 1534 pages; opinionated, trenchant and very often brilliant in its take on this great music.
If you love Jazz, you should have it. If you don’t have your bearings with the music, all the more reason.

Link

There’s an equally indispensable Penguin guide the Blues, too, by Tony Russell and Chris Smith, with Neil Slaven, Ricky Russell and
Joe Faulkner. Plunk for them. They are well worth it.

Posted at 7:30 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Esquire

A brilliant young economist’s surprising ideas about HIV.

December 2006, Volume 146, Issue 6

At just twenty-six, economist Emily Oster may have the highest controversies-generated-to-years-in-academia ratio of anyone in her field. That’s because, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, she chose to hop the fence and explore a topic already claimed by doctors, social scientists, and policy wonks: the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Her studies suggest some uncomfortable possibilities—not least that the so-called experts have gotten their approach to the crisis dead wrong.

Now a Becker Fellow at the University of Chicago, Oster continues to blur academic boundaries with further work on AIDS and a volatile new interest: the reported wave of female infanticide in Asia.

When I began studying the HIV epidemic in Africa a few years ago, there were few other economists working on the topic and almost none on the specific issues that interested me. It’s not that the questions I wanted to answer weren’t being asked. They were. But they were being asked by anthropologists, sociologists, and public-health officials.

That’s an important distinction. These disciplines believe that cultural differences—differences in how entire groups of people think and act—account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn’t know how to deal with it.

Economists like me don’t trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions, including decisions about sex and disease.

I’ve studied the epidemic from that perspective. I’m one of the few people who have done so. And I’ve learned that a lot of what we’ve been told about it is wrong. Below are three things the world needs to know about AIDS in Africa.

1. It’s the wrong disease to attack.

Approximately 6 percent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV; in the United States, the number is around 0.8 percent. Very often, this disparity is attribu ed to differences in sexual behavior—in the number of sexual partners, the types of sexual activities, and so on. But these differences cannot, in fact, be seen in the data on sexual behavior. So what actually accounts for the gulf in infection rates?

According to my research, the major difference lies in transmission rates of the virus. For a given unprotected sexual relationship with an HIV-infected person, Africans are between four and five times more likely than Americans to become infected with HIV themselves. This stark fact accounts for virtually all of the difference in population-wide HIV rates in the two regions.

There is more than one reason why HIV spreads more easily in Africa than America, but the most important one seems to be related to the prevalence of other sexually transmitted infections. Estimates suggest that around 11 percent of individuals in Africa have untreated bacterial sexually transmitted infections at any given time and close to half have the herpes virus. Because many of these infections cause open sores on the genitals, transmission of the HIV virus is much more efficient.

So what do we learn from this? First, the fact that Africa is so heavily affected by HIV has very little to do with differences in sexual behavior and very much to do with differences in circumstances. Second, and perhaps more important, there is potential for significant reductions in HIV transmission in Africa through the treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases.

Such an approach would cost around $3.50 per year per life saved. Treating AIDS itself costs around $300 per year. There are reasons to provide AIDS treatment in Africa, but cost-effectiveness is not one of them.

2. It won’t disappear until poverty does.

In the United States, the discovery of the HIV epidemic led to dramatic changes in sexual behavior. In Africa, it didn’t. Yet in both places, encouraging safe sexual behavior has long been standard practice. Why haven’t the lessons caught on in Africa?

The key is to think about why we expect people to change their behavior in response to HIV—namely because, in a world with HIV, sex carries a larger risk of death than it does in a world without HIV. But how much people care about dying from AIDS ten years from now depends on how many years they expect to live today and how enjoyable they expect those future years to be.

My studies show that while there have been very limited changes in sexual behavior in Africa on average, Africans who are richer or who live in areas with higher life expectancies have changed their behavior more. And men in Africa have responded in almost exactly the same way to their relative “life forecasts” as gay men in the United States did in the 1980s. To put it bluntly, if income and life expectancy in Africa were the same as they are in the United States, we would see the same change in sexual behavior—and the AIDS epidemic would begin to slow.

3. There is less of it than we thought, but it’s spreading as fast as ever.

According to the UN, the HIV rates in Botswana and Zimbabwe are around 30 percent, and it’s more than 10 percent in many other countries. These estimates are relied on by policymakers, researchers, and the popular press. Yet many people who study the AIDS epidemic believe that the numbers are inflated.

The reason is quite simple: bias in who is tested. The UN’s estimates are not based on diagnoses of whole populations or even a random sample. They are based on tests of pregnant women at prenatal clinics. And in Africa, sexually active women of childbearing age have the highest rates of HIV infection.

To eliminate the bias, I took a new approach to estimating the HIV infection rate: I inferred it from mortality data. The idea is simple: In a world without HIV, we have some expectation of what the death rate will be. In a world with HIV, we observe the actual death rate to be higher. The difference between the two gives an estimate of the number of people who have died from AIDS, and we can use that figure to estimate the prevalence of HIV in the population.

My work suggests that the HIV rates reported by the UN are about three times too high. Which sounds like good news—but isn’t. The overall number of HIV-positive people may be lower than we thought, but my study, which estimated changes in the infection rate over time, also drew a second, chilling conclusion: In Africa, HIV is spreading as quickly as ever.

Posted at 7:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The South China Morning Post

Friday, December 15, 2006

Report says oil deals with continent could sour Sino-western relations

Prev. Story
China’s growing investment in Africa’s oil and gas resources could eclipse the political influence of the west in the energy-rich continent and sour Sino-western relations, according to an international security journal.

Western powers like the US, Britain and France played significant roles in African politics - a legacy of colonial rule and cold war alignment on the continent - but China’s “no strings” financial and technical assistance was allowing it to exert wider influence, according to a report by Jane’s Intelligence Review coming out next month.

Coincidentally, South African President Thabo Mbeki was quoted by the Sapa news agency as saying on Wednesday that Africa must guard against lapsing into a “colonial relationship” with China in which Africa remained a mere supplier of raw materials.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said yesterday: “China’s co-operation with Africa, including that with South Africa, aims at being mutually beneficial and realising a win-win situation.”

Human rights groups have also claimed that China’s close ties with countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe, both ruled by what the west considers to be unsavoury regimes, undermined efforts to improve human rights and promote democracy in Africa.

The report in the Review highlights last month’s Sino-African summit in Beijing, attended by leaders from 48 African nations, as evidence of China’s growing influence on the continent.

Sino-African trade rose 34.9 per cent last year to US$39.8 billion according to the central government. And Chinese investment in Africa totalled nearly US$1.6 billion at the end of last year.

Although sub-Saharan Africa still accounts for only 7 per cent of global oil production, it is one of the fastest-growing oil and gas suppliers, according to the report. China imports a third of its oil from Africa.

Development in most African countries has been hindered by poor infrastructure, and the report sees China’s willingness to invest in rail, telecommunications and a range of construction projects across the continent as helping to secure further energy deals.

However, He Wenping , director of the African studies section at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of West Asian and African Studies, played down the concerns expressed in the report.

“There is always a possibility of competition in commercial activities,” she said. “However, countries these days can carry out joint exploitation of oil resources and they can also co-operate in other areas to help Africa grow or promote peace.”

Ms He said China’s energy demand might not grow as rapidly as African production because China was trying to curb its energy consumption and lower its dependency on oil imports.

Posted at 10:28 PM · Comments (0)

Fair disclosure: I’m a died in the wool Red Sox fan.

The bad and the good from Jack Curry of the New York Times:

“Everybody told me I should say I’m going to beat the Yankees,” Matsuzaka said, through a translator. “I thought it was a joke, so I didn’t say that.” …

As a high school senior, Matsuzaka became an instant legend when he threw 250 pitches to win a 17-inning quarterfinal game in the Koshien tournament and returned two days later to twirl a no-hitter in the championship. Over all, he pitched four straight days and threw 535 pitches.

Posted at 9:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Prospect

If China does not abandon one-party rule, will it stumble under the stresses of state capitalism? Or will it show that there can be a successful authoritarian road to modernity?
Will Hutton
Meghnad Desai

Will Hutton is author of “The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century,” published in January by Little, Brown

Meghnad Desai is a former director of the Centre for Global Governance and an emeritus professor of economics at the LSE. He is also a Labour peer
Dear Meghnad
29th November 2006

It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.

All that, however, is predicated on two very big “ifs”—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.

Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process. If Chinese communism can transform itself, then China could, like Japan before it, smoothly integrate into the world power system. If not, severe convulsions lie ahead.

China’s economic growth is based on the state channelling vast under-priced savings into huge investment projects driven by cheap labour. Some 200m of China’s 760m workforce are migrant peasants employed in factories, construction sites and offices in its new towns and cities—the biggest migration in history. The Communist party has permitted free movement of prices, encourages profit-seeking and has sharply lowered tariffs on imports and obstacles to inward investment. Its success in creating annual growth of some 9.5 per cent for a generation, lifting 400m people out of poverty, is widely acknowledged. But the party keeps firm control of ownership, wages and company strategies—and of the state. In other words, China occupies an uneasy halfway house between socialism and capitalism; its private sector, although growing, is still puny. It is a system of Leninist corporatism—and it is this that is breaking down.

The breaches in the model are all around. How much longer can China’s state-owned banks carry on directing billions of dollars of savings into investments that produce tiny or even negative returns and on which interest is irregularly paid? Poor peasants’ ability to create the savings needed to fuel growth is reaching its limits. And in any case, for how long can a $2 trillion economy save at more than 40 per cent of GDP? It is reaching the limit of its capacity to increase exports (which in 2007 will surpass $1 trillion) by 25 per cent a year; at this rate of growth they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today’s world trade. Is that likely? Are there sufficient ships and ports to move such volumes—and will western markets stay open without real reciprocity on trade? Every year China acquires $200bn of foreign exchange reserves, mainly dollars, as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. It is absurd for a poor country like China to be lending to a rich one like the US; in fact, it is unsustainable, and the financial markets seem to agree.

China would like to lower the current feverish growth rates, but the tools available in the west—raising taxes, cutting spending and lifting interest rates—are not available to China. The party dare not trigger protests by raising taxes; officials in state enterprises and provincial governments ignore orders to lower spending because their careers depend on generating growth and jobs. And raising interest rates could create a credit crunch as loans go sour.

Nor are the limits solely economic. The 200m migrants resent seeing others grow rich as they languish in poverty. Inequality is soaring and corruption is endemic, infecting chief executives of banks, provincial governors and judges. About 400,000 people a year die of respiratory diseases caused by polluted air. China’s GDP is a fifth of America’s, but it releases nearly as much carbon dioxide into the air. To cap it all, the Communist party is in ideological crisis: it says the class war is over even while claiming monopoly power as the trustee of the 1949 revolution. Without continued economic growth, the party’s legitimacy would be in question.

Behind all these problems lies China’s only partial conversion to capitalism. Everything in China is subject to the party. Yet capitalism is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices that China’s reforms have permitted. The effective use of resources also depends upon a network of independent processes of scrutiny and accountability, undertaken by people in multiple centres of power and backed by rights and private property. A democratic election system is but the coping stone of this structure.

Judges who rule on evidence to deliver justice, newspapers reporting events and even corporate whistleblowers are crucial to the operation of western capitalism. It is the interaction of these hard and soft processes—what I call an “Enlightenment infrastructure”—that allows technological progress to be exploited efficiently and relatively honestly. China had markets, property and technology in the 18th century; it fell behind because it didn’t have Enlightenment structures. It lacked the “trinity” of pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).

The Chinese Communist party, despite local piecemeal experimentation, is repeating the mistake of the Confucian imperial system. It is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lies behind the massive waste of investment and China’s destruction of its environment. The reason so few people can name a great Chinese brand or company, despite the country’s export success, is that there are none. China needs to build them, but doing that in an authoritarian state is impossible. In any case, more than 55 per cent of China’s exports, especially high-tech ones, are made by foreign firms—another sign of China’s weakness.

China needs to become a more normal economy. Chinese consumers need to save less and spend more, but people without property rights or state welfare are understandably cautious. Giving them more confidence would require secure property rights and taxation to fund a welfare system. That would mean creating an empowered middle class that would want to know how its taxes are spent. This is a political impossibility.

If this argument is right, the terms of debate about China must change. Instead of frightening ourselves about China’s rise, we need to recognise our own strengths and its weaknesses. We need to be confident about so-called western values and processes—and strengthen them at home and abroad. The best way to meet the China challenge is not to close our markets and build our armies—a strong impulse in the US. It is to stay open, confident that China will only be able to truly compete with the west if it becomes more like us.

Yours
Will

Dear Will
1st December 2006

For a liberal pluralist, you sound oddly like a monist, if not a monotheist. For you, there is only one road to capitalism—the western one—and only one political system—ours.

China has achieved rapid growth with a policy of under-consumption and over-saving, and exports rather than domestic consumption. But this is not an unusual path, nor one that China is stuck on. Japan and South Korea used the same model and are now part of the OECD club of rich countries. Moving millions of peasants to urban manufacturing centres is neither totalitarian nor sinister. It was proposed as the standard development model by Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate, in 1954, and is indeed the classical model. (If it was less dramatic in parts of Europe, this is partly because a third of Europeans moved to North America in the second half of the 19th century.) There are no other ways of shaking off poverty. The services sector alone will not do it, and nor will a green revolution, as India is finding out.

China’s very large numbers do not in themselves make its development unsustainable. If India can achieve 8 per cent growth on a 25 per cent savings rate, China (which now has 10.4 per cent growth on a 44 per cent savings rate) will surely manage the same. Moreover, China has been reforming its banking sector and the world has shown its approval by buying up the shares of Chinese banks.

China has a lot to learn about macroeconomic management, but its failings have nothing to do with totalitarianism. India is also shy about liberalising its capital account. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 taught China and India to keep a pool of liquidity handy, even at the cost of forgoing a better use for the money.

Yes, there is a Leninist party in power within a state capitalist system. But capitalism has no unique path, nor does it require a liberal democratic infrastructure to flourish. Japan’s economic rise took place without a fully liberal infrastructure, and most European states, including Britain and Germany, were capitalist before they were democratic. What the most recent phase of globalisation has shown is that capitalism requires neither the Weberian Protestant ethic nor liberal democracy; any country with a decent savings rate, mass education and access to western markets can “do” capitalism. It is not a western Christian monopoly. Indeed, some Asians are proving better at it than the Europeans.

Many people simply find it hard to believe that countries like China and India, which were famine-stricken and miserable only 40 years ago, are now wiping out western industry. But this was the American complaint in the 1960s when facing European competition in the car market. How could these upstarts compete with Detroit? But compete they did, and they were soon followed by Japan and South Korea. Today the upstarts are China and India, and tomorrow they will be Ghana or Kenya.

Capitalism is not, as you say, about “much more than profit.” It is first and foremost about profit and capital accumulation. It has accommodated a variety of institutional arrangements and only in the most recent phase of globalisation have we thought that an Anglo-Saxon-style liberal democracy is its sine qua non.

Let me now come to the political issue. The Chinese Communist party is at one level Leninist, but it is unlike the Russian Bolshevik party. The Chinese communists had to struggle to win the support of the peasantry for a decade and a half before they won power in 1949. They developed a philosophy of responding to popular needs within the confines of a single party. This is what they call people’s democracy, and it is much more real than it was in eastern Europe. My colleague at LSE, Chun Lin, argues in The Transformation of Chinese Socialism that the Chinese concept of people’s democracy is viable. In her view, the tradition has some strength left in it, although the party will have to become even more responsive. Deng Xiaoping encouraged inegalitarian capitalist growth for a period, but there may now be a reaction against it. At the recent People’s Congress, Hu Jintao made some noises about the distress in the rural areas; the system can respond.

You fear that China’s arrival at the top table will be harmful for the international liberal order. Yet the UN security council had the Soviet Union as well as China at the top table for decades. And I scarcely need to remind you of the many times since 1945 that the US and Britain have deviated from liberalism and multilateralism. We do need a liberal multilateral order, but not one based on western hegemony. The arrival of China and India will compel the west to learn to be truly plural and multilateral rather than a liberal bully.

Your rendering of history is the old Whig account. Everything we do is progressive and liberal and has always been so; all our cruelties as colonial powers are forgotten. Yet your trinity of pluralism, capabilities and justification is both very recent and very Anglo-Saxon. Rights have been established only recently; ask any black or Native American or a Catholic living in Ulster. (And a large minority in the US, including its president, believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation about Jewish rights to Palestine.)

It would be nice if individualism, liberty and pluralism were necessary for capitalism. But he fact is that it can manage without those things. Capitalism does release forces that undermine authoritarian regimes, but unevenly and never inevitably. China may yet move towards liberal individualism. But it does not have to, and it would be unwise to bet on any imminent move in that direction.

Sincerely
Meghnad

Dear Meghnad
3rd December 2006

You have failed to address most of my points about Chinese weakness. Instead you suspend your critical faculties when it comes to China—dazzled by its growth and keen to show how China’s strength is proof of the frailties of western capitalism and liberal democracy. But it isn’t.

China requires ever more investment to secure the same growth rate. Qu Hongbin and Ma Xiaoping of HSBC calculate that the additional output produced by every extra dollar of investment is now below what it was in the late Mao years. Outside the foreign-owned private sector, China’s productivity is lamentable. In agriculture, the latest figures show that Chinese value-added is $490 per year per head compared with $1,040 in the Philippines and $4,851 in Malaysia. The labour productivity of China’s state-owned enterprises, still constituting a third of GDP, is 4 per cent of US levels; one third of their workforce is only semi-employed.

You liken China’s experience to the rest of Asia. But China is far more reliant on foreign direct investment (FDI) to deliver its export growth. Only 20 per cent of Taiwanese manufacturing exports and 29 per cent of Indonesia’s were made by foreign companies at parallel stages in their development; in 2005, 55 per cent of China’s exports were made by foreigners—and over 80 per cent of its telecommunication and electronic exports. China needs FDI to make good the deficiencies of its indigenous institutional infrastructure. China set itself a target of 50 companies in the world’s top 500 by 2010. It will do well to have one.

Capitalism is far more subtle than either free market fundamentalists or Marxists accept. Of course, China has to move its peasants to its cities in order to develop. But capital still has to be allocated efficiently. And if an economy is to produce self-sustaining productivity growth, its companies must do more than exploit cheap labour. They must develop the “soft” processes that spur productivity and innovation. China’s have not.

The political inequities in the way China handles migration—every worker has to have a licence to migrate and most migrants do not, thus rendering them illegal—and the frequent confiscation of peasant land have the same roots as the weaknesses in the enterprise system. China lacks the Enlightenment trinity.

The growing peasant and worker protests (4m protesters and 800,000 strikers in 2005) suggest that many Chinese want enforceable property rights and the legal right to strike—these are not western idiosyncrasies. You are right to say that Hu is raising the issue of social justice—but efforts in this direction are tiny. The tax burden on peasants was reduced by 0.1 per cent of GDP in 2005. Hu dare not increase the tax burden in cities. Why? Because there would be a demand for accountability.

Amartya Sen argues that many third world intellectuals are unable to get past the experience of colonialism to see the value of western institutions and values—and the parallels they have with the best of their own traditions. You conform to Sen’s model. Why don’t you include China’s 18th-century imperial land grab of central Eurasia—nearly doubling China’s land area—and the subsequent ethnic cleansing as part of your list of past robbery and state crime? Because it wasn’t western?

The paradox is that the best way to challenge the west is to beat it at its own game. Japan’s response to its economic crisis, the growth of democratic institutions in Taiwan and South Korea and the increasing success of an open India (sadly held back by caste and sexism, especially in the countryside) support my thesis. But I am not complacent about the west: the last third of my new book is about how the US, Britain and others fail to practise what we preach.

Best
Will

Dear Will
4th December 2006

Whatever else I may be, I am not a third world intellectual, having spent two thirds of my life in Britain! Nor am I a postcolonial postmodernist. I have a simple position: no nation, no region, no empire has any monopoly on virtue. East and west have both indulged in ethnic cleansing. China’s imperial past is like any other country’s, except the Chinese do not suffer from western amnesia.

Back to economics. Chinese agriculture is not as bad as your figures imply. It has been concentrating on grains (it had a terrible famine 40 years ago) while Malaysia and the Philippines have been commercial crop growers for a long time. The latter are higher value-added items.

China doubled its manufacturing labour force between 1983 and 2003, to number slightly over 100m. But China’s rural economy, like India’s, still suffers from scarce land and surplus labour, and this is why many more millions need to be taken off the land—something only achievable by rapid manufacturing growth. Public enterprise in China, as in India, is capital-intensive and inefficient. But the private sector is not as puny as you imply. If productivity is low in public sector manufacturing and agriculture, town and village enterprises and the genuine private sector, plus the foreign-owned sector, must conversely be productive. China exports low-tech products where there are few brand names, but that is where its expanding market is.

China has chosen to invest in infrastructure, unlike India (or the USSR when it was growing fast). This is a slow process. When you go to China you see new airports and empty highways and the Shanghai maglev. In India, the airports are slums.

China is also less centralised than it seems. It has large regional centres which run their own economic policies, with regional party bosses often disobeying the centre. Beneath the Leninist façade, China is making a transition to an economy where the centre is nominally in charge of certain things—foreign exchange policy or defence—while the people do whatever they think will make them better off. And, yes, protests arise out of inequities, as they do in India. But the fact that they occur and that China has an active “new left” (see Chaohua Wang’s One China, Many Paths) tells me that China is not monolithic. It is just not a liberal democracy along Anglo-Saxon lines.

I do not defend the inequities or brutalities thrown up by China’s growth. But I don’t think they are a sign of weakness. Despite similar problems in most other economies in the past, none collapsed because of excessive growth. The USSR died because of stagnation.

You do not think China can repeat Asian success. But I recall when Americans didn’t believe Japan could compete with them. They said that the Japanese could only copy and not innovate, because Japanese culture was too conformist. Yet China filed 130,000 patents in 2004, the fourth highest in the world (after Japan, the US, and South Korea), three times more than Britain. This represents a growth of 517 per cent since 1995, and equal proportions of residents and non-residents were responsible.

You see the inequities and brutalities of China’s growth as unique to China’s communist system, and it offends your liberal sensibilities. You want these inequities and brutalities to be swept away. I see them as part of the historic path of rapid accumulation that many economies pass through. This is how income growth occurs in capitalism. What’s new?

Good wishes
Meghnad

Dear Meghnad
4th December 2006

China’s model may have served it well in mobilising the saving for industrialisation, but it is now reaching the limits of its possibilities. Your own figures show that half China’s patent applications come from foreign-owned companies. China’s own resident patents place it 17th in the world league table, and only 30 per cent are for new inventions. Most of China’s new jobs since 1980 have come from services, not manufacturing as you imply, and productivity in services is nearly as poor as in agriculture and state enterprises.

I am not predicting China’s collapse. What I am saying is that it faces a profoundly difficult transition to a more normal economy with normal levels of savings, investment and consumption and less dependence on exports. My argument is that the direction of change has to be the same as that emerging in the rest of Asia. This means China needs to incorporate my three-cornered cluster of Enlightenment processes—pluralism, capabilities, justification—into its internal workings. They will look very Chinese and not western, but their function will be the same.

It is in our interests for this change to happen—both to allow China to carry on growing and for it to have a greater vested interest in maintaining a rules-based international system. China’s indifference to Africa’s authoritarian despots, as it courts the continent for energy and raw materials, is a foretaste of what an unchanged China will be like.

You contrast the west’s amnesia about its past with China. But nobody in China knows about the doubling of China’s land area under the Qing, any more than they know about China’s war against Vietnam in 1979, or even Tiananmen. They are written out of the history books; the websites are blocked. It is shocking that a leading British intellectual like yourself can excuse such manipulation of the truth while being so ready to criticise the open society of which you have been part for most of your life. This debate would have been impossible in China. Until it changes, it will be condemned to a colossally inefficient and socially cruel form of development, because it is disdainful of human dignities and the imperative of accountability.

Yours
Will

Dear Will
4th December 2006

So anything China does which is good is foreign and everything else is sinister. So China is exploiting Africa’s resources, and this is an indicator of China’s authoritarianism. How unlike the Belgians and the French and the British, with their Enlightenment trinity and liberal freedoms, who nurtured Africa lovingly, never coveted its resources and cured its poverty!

You say services are generating more jobs in China than manufacturing. Perhaps, but the same is true of India and Britain. So what?

Non-residents filed 50 per cent of China’s patents, 47 per cent of EU patents and 81 per cent of US patents. So what? China has just surpassed Japan in spending on R&D but you will no doubt say that is all foreign. If China is weak in every sector—agriculture, manufacturing, services, innovation—why do you fear it will rise inexorably and pollute the global top table where only virtuous western powers should rule?

You say China must join a rules-based international system. Yet when it joins the WTO and exports bras and shoes to the EU, they are locked up in warehouses while Peter Mandelson soothes the Italian and French producers, telling them why they don’t have to obey the rules.

China is going through a fascinating experiment of growth at rates never achieved by any other country for such a sustained period. It needs to go on doing so. It has the second or third largest GDP, yet it is desperately poor in per capita terms. It solved the problems of mass illiteracy and extreme poverty with a dictatorship. I am curious to see if it can achieve this impossible combination of capitalism with a Leninist party. No one else has tried. It may fail, but why not let it go through the experiment and leave it to the Chinese people to revolt if they want a different regime?

In the 18th century, Voltaire thought China was enlightened compared to France. Now you say China is benighted because it is not like us. It is easy to forget how we got from there to here. It is a bit like the environmental damage caused by development. We rich countries tell the latecomers that they cannot do what we did when we were poor: you must behave like us now, even if it condemns you to remain poor. We shall see.

Merry Xmas
Meghnad
End of the article

Posted at 6:11 PM · Comments (1)

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: 2006-12-14 10:02:36

SHANGHAI: What’s the fastest-growing industry in China? Mobile phones? Computer components? Toys? The last wouldn’t be too far off, but not in the sense that the word toys is conventionally understood. Call them playthings.

Anecdotal evidence is the best one can do for a field such as this, but a bet could be placed on the sex industry. Yes, prostitution.

It is scarcely possible to walk for 10 minutes in any big Chinese city without coming across the sex trade in one of its many guises. Prostitutes work in most hotels, and are indeed employed by the hotels, including the state- owned ones. They work the streets, the clubs, and massage and sauna parlors, which range from monstrously gaudy to grimy holes in the wall.

They can be found in barber shops and beauty salons; sometimes they are the only people working in such establishments. And they are present — no, ubiquitous — at every class level of society, down to the poorest neighborhoods of Shanghai and the lowliest villages.

Numbers range all over the board, from the official estimates one sees from time to time of 3 million prostitutes nationwide, to U.S. State Department reports that have placed the figure at 10 million, to a Chinese economist, Yang Fan, who has estimated there are 20 million sex workers in the country, accounting for fully 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Coming back to anecdotal impressions, it would not surprise this writer if all of these figures were low. Beyond the numbers, though, it is when one considers that before economic changes were introduced a quarter- century ago, there was essentially no open prostitution in China at all — none — that one is most astounded.

Ordinarily, a phenomenon that had grown so fast and become this vast would be grist for all manner of conversation, from the public health implications of near-universal prostitution, to the social causes of gender inequality, high unemployment and blossoming organized crime, just for a start. From there one might move on to a discussion of profound changes in social values to the need for legal reform.

One of the most basic notions in law is that an unenforceable law is a bad law. The existence of millions of prostitutes makes a mockery of China’s legal code, whose formal banning of a deeply entrenched activity forces women into the hands of organized crime and furthers their vulnerability and marginalization.

Perhaps the most striking feature of China’s booming prostitution industry, though, is how little ink is expended on it, how seldom its extent is even acknowledged.

In a relaxed moment the other day, a Chinese official made this startling confession: “I read the foreign press to learn about things that are happening in China. The Chinese press doesn’t write about bad news.”

When I moved to object to categorizing news as “good” or “bad,” he waved me off, saying: “Don’t worry. When there are problems, I think it is good to focus on them.”

Although generally invisible and passed under silence in polite society, two very different kinds of prostitution have managed to work their way into China’s national conscious in the last few weeks, and they speak volumes about a huge and yawning class divide here.

At the end of November, officials in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown, got the bright idea of reviving the Cultural Revolution for the purposes of temporarily cracking down on its prostitutes. This came to pass as a face-preserving measure after a regional television station broke with decorum by mentioning the existence of this industry in a city famous throughout Asia for its sex trade.

To send the message that Shenzhen was actually a clean and proper place, the police dressed several dozen prostitutes in identical yellow smocks and marched them through the streets of Futian district, to be shamed by a jeering crowd and have their names and hometowns announced to all.

A few weeks earlier, beginning with the still unfolding political corruption scandal in Shanghai, Chinese newspaper readers were treated to stories detailing the sex lives of public officials, including the city’s party leader, Chen Liangyu, who is said to have maintained 11 “mistresses.”

The quotation marks are warranted because in its apparently most common, high-level Chinese form, such relationships are typically as money- based as an hour with a sauna girl, only more elaborately contractual, sometimes including the frequency of sex, and are, of course, incomparably more lucrative.

Soon, Chinese blogs and Internet forums were competing to reveal the details — albeit rumored details — of public officials and their kept women from one end of the country to the other.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Click to read more

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Copyright The Boston Herald
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 - Updated: 01:01 AM EST

When they stop groveling, when they stop running around like some three-sport captain desperate for a prom date, the Red Sox [team stats] need to put their foot down. They need to stand up to Daisuke Matsuzaka and Scott Boras, and they need to tell them in no uncertain terms:
Either Matsuzaka pitches for the Sox next season, at a reasonable price, or he can straighten his seatback and put his tray table in the upright and locked position.
It’s either Hello, Boston …
Or Sayonara, Daisuke.
Fifteen million a year? Please. If Matsuzaka and Boras are still asking for that today, the Sox have one choice and one choice only. They should help Matsuzaka pack his bags, call him a cab, then drop him off on the street corner before they board owner John Henry’s private jet back to Boston. Matsuzaka can go back to Japan, back to the Seibu Lions, who paid him roughly $2.75 million last year to dominate a second-rate league.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened in these negotiations between Matsuzaka and the Red Sox: the tail started wagging the dog, the Red Sox started acting like the the ones that had something to prove. Boras is a brilliant negotiator and a master at leverage, and the Red Sox somehow came to believe that it was their responsibility to convince Matsuzaka to pitch for them.
The truth, of course, is that Matsuzaka is the one who has yet to prove a damn thing; if he goes back to Japan, it will be at least another year until he proves anything at all. For all that has been said during these “negotiations” regarding Japanese codes like honor and tradition, the irony is that Matsuzaka has spit in the face of Major League Baseball and the Red Sox.
Boras may be in the middle of these negotiations, after all, but he works for Matsuzaka.
Seriously: At what point does this madness stop? At what point does a team just say no to someone who has never thrown a pitch in the major leagues, yet demands to be paid as if he were a young Pedro Martinez?

For the complete article see the link below.

Posted at 4:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Asia Times

Used to widespread Western criticism on China’s human-rights record, lack of religious freedom, and Han chauvinism, and the inaccurate view that China’s ruling party is a monolithic entity obsessed exclusively with maintaining an unfair status quo, some fail to acknowledge the extent of China’s social pluralism and political opening-up.

In fact, the level of individual freedom enjoyed today by Chinese citizens has no equivalent in China’s past. Beijing’s elites are

gradually engineering political adjustments, and a process of managed democratization is reinforcing China’s economic re-emergence and will ensure the renaissance of the Chinese world. To understand current socio-political dynamics, one has to remember the long and tortuous post-imperial and post-colonial transition, to reflect on Chinese traditional values and their links with modernity, and to discuss some of the factors that will determine the nature of China’s future political system.

On his fourth visit to China as French president, Jacques Chirac told Chinese students in Peking University on October 26: “Tomorrow, China will be one of the great [powers] if not the greatest power in the world.” A member of the presidential delegation, former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, declared: “For our children the norm will not be American anymore but Chinese.” Such affirmation raises a fundamental question: What would be this norm and the exact content of its intellectual, social, economic and political dimensions?

It is particularly timely to reflect on the political dynamics of a re-emerging China. With the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approaching in the second half of 2007, one can expect a lot of debates on China’s politics, its main players and their priorities. The China Leadership Monitor of the Hoover Institution already published last spring a paper by Lyman Miller titled “The Road to the 17th Party Congress”.

Observers will ask to what extent President Hu Jintao has been consolidating his power since the 2002 Congress. Will the 17th Congress mark the end of Jiang Zemin’s influence and that of his allies? If yes, what does it mean for Shanghai which is known to be Jiang Zemin’s power base? Will the country’s fourth-generation leadership - that of Hu Jintao - take the necessary steps to ensure a better distribution of wealth and more social justice?

Does it mean more political reforms? Is there any difference between the 16th Congress’ xiaokang - “little prosperity” society - and the more recent emphasis on harmonious society (Sixth Plenum of the 16th CCP Central Committee, Beijing, October 8-11)? The list goes on.

One has to go beyond political theater and avoid journalistic “parochialism in time”. Hence, let us put China’s socio-political reality into both historical and intellectual perspective, even if this reality is a challenge for the analyst.

China is highly heterogeneous. It is, mutatis mutandis, the Europe of the Far East - a Europe without nation-states, with many languages but only one writing system. Four times the US population, one European Union plus one Africa, China’s population is so large that when we speak about the “Chinese” we are almost always making oversimplifications.

Of the 22 provinces, nine are more populated than France. Moreover, as an effect of post-Maoist China’s rapid economic growth, some coastal areas (Dalian, Shanghai, Xiamen or Shenzhen, soon Tianjin and Ningbo) are, to a certain extent, closer to London, Sydney or San Francisco than they are to most of the Chinese vast hinterland.

Even in the middle of the 18th century, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu tried with great difficulty to make sense of China’s contradictory elements (The Spirit of Laws, Book VIII, Chapter XXI). In the preface to My Country, My People (1935), Lin Yutang wrote: “China is too big a country, and her national life has too many facets, for her not to be open to the most diverse and contradictory interpretations.”

Contradictory interpretations often reflect contradictory events (for example, corruption cases but also the fight against corruption), or even current objective trends (for example, the growing interest in Confucian doctrine and practice but also signs of Westernization), and it is another reason to focus on longer-term dynamics that have the advantage of being less ambiguous and constitute a more solid basis for anticipating China’s future political orientations.

A century of political modernization
For more than 100 years China has been going through a process of democratization as a part of its overall modernization.

Less visible than the economic modernization, the political modernization has been a key feature of China’s 20th century history. In fact, today’s social pluralism and economic freedom (private economy is at the center of China’s re-emergence; for example, the private business sector accounts for 70% of Zhejiang’s total output value and pays 60% of the local taxes) would have been impossible without a concurrent political transformation. It is not that one dimension determines the others, but they are in constant interactions.

At least six major phases led to the current socio-political configuration.

The initial step was the Hundred Days Reform in 1898. Under the influence of such intellectuals as Kang Youwei (1858-1927) or Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who were inspired by the Japanese Meiji Movement initiated in 1868, reformists tried to prevent the Qing (1644-1911) Dynasty’s decline. During 100 days the young Emperor Guangxu (1871-1908) issued many decrees aimed at modernizing the Chinese state (creation of a university, building of railroad, etc). However, the Manchu establishment felt threatened, and the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), a highly complex and fascinating figure, staged a coup forcing Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to flee to Japan. The Hundred Days Reform failed but indicated the path toward modernization.

Only three years after the death of the conservative Cixi, the much better-known 1911 revolution opened a new chapter of China’s history. Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), the father of the modern Chinese nation, was elected president of the Chinese Republic. This was a decisive moment: imperial China was over. On one side, China’s collective memory carries 20 centuries of imperial rule and, on the other, not even one century of post-imperial politics. This certainly explains imperial reflexes or attitudes observed from time to time in the Chinese world.

For the entire article please see the link below.

Posted at 11:56 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Published: December 12, 2006

MUMBAI: In this Indian capital of glamour and commerce, there is a city of high-rises and a city of shanties.

At one extreme is the growing number of towers like Crescent Heights and Buckley Court, housing the rich and the aspiring. At the other extreme is a multiplying labyrinth of slums, covering a third of the city and sheltering more than five million people in squalid conditions, with a shortage of water and toilets, a surfeit of disease and the constant odor of feces mixed with garbage. They are separated by the Dickensian disparities of the new India.

But now a housing boom in this fast- growing economy is entwining their destinies. To make room for more high-rises, investors are doing what was once left to philanthropists: giving slum dwellers free apartments.

Under an inventive government program in Mumbai, builders raze entire slum neighborhoods and use part of the land for tenements to house the original residents. The apartments measure 225 square feet, or 21 square meters � the size of a typical shanty. In return, the developer wins the right to build lucrative towers on the rest of the land and pays nothing but the cost of the slum resettlement.

So far, 100,000 such apartments have been built in Mumbai, housing 600,000 people, said Debashish Chakrabarty, a civil servant who runs the city’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority.
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“Not only is there a component of providing good housing to people who cannot afford it,” Chakrabarty said. “It also promises good returns to many of these big-time developers.”

But in the topsy-turvy world of Indian real estate, it is the slum dwellers and their charitable backers who are tepid about resettlement, worried that horizontal slums will simply become vertical ones, without the vibrant street life and sense of community.

Wealthy investors, meanwhile, are eager to build them their homes for free.

“The moment you put them in a tower, you’re releasing 90 percent of the land,” said Pranay Vakil, chairman of the Indian arm of Knight Frank, a global real estate consultancy.

There are 933 million slum dwellers worldwide, according to the United Nations, and many methods of addressing their plight. A common approach is for the government to sanction slum clearance and then build low-cost housing paid for by the state. The UN currently is financing an alternative project to give slum dwellers small loans to improve the quality of their shacks on their own and, after natural disasters, to build new homes.

What makes the Mumbai program unusual is the deployment of profit- seeking investment to build free apartments, said Toshi Noda, the Asia director of the UN’s Human Settlements Program, also known as UN-Habitat.

“Free apartments is not common,” Noda said. “It is a new scheme. I think it will work, because the private sector can get their profit by developing the other half of the real estate.”

Major property developers and their financiers have noticed.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 11:42 PM · Comments (0)

There’s a lot of crap out there in photography writing: glibness, dishonesty, the re-writing of manufacturers’ press releases (and no one more than Leica’s) and other forms of barely disguised flacking for suppliers or for chums.

Here’s a refreshing exception:

http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/

Posted at 1:01 AM · Comments (0)

This is the blog of Pierre Haski, the former China correspondent of “Liberation.”

http://www.arenes.fr/cinqansenchine/index.php?2006/11

Posted at 12:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Vanity Fair

What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.

January 2007

From the John Springer Collection/Corbis.

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: “He’s really quite cute, and he’s kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he’s so funny � ” (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, “Funny? He wouldn’t know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce b�arnaise.”) However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own � [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] � and, man, does she ever make ‘em laugh.”

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right�try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter�I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight�well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a “funniness scale.” To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens � which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully’s attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: “the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows � ” But have no fear�it gets worse:

“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said the report’s author, Dr. Allan Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.” The report also found that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.”

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny�for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously). Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is�or they are�extremely stupid. Women aren’t like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?) Greatly daring�or so I thought�I resolved to call up Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)

In any case, my argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don’t dig her shtick to suck her dick�know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want�the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

For the complete text, please see the link below.

Posted at 5:44 PM · Comments (0)

It’s become an urban myth that at one time, one-quarter of the world’s construction cranes were in Shanghai. Indeed, it now has more skyscrapers than New York City.

Shanghai’s historical upheavals and rebirths can be traced through architecture, with its colonial legacy and capitalist boom. Ahead of the World Expo in 2010, the city is being transformed again, with mind-bogglingly ambitious plans.

The latest symbol of Shanghai’s urban hipness is Xintiandi, a bustling shopping and entertainment district. But these luxury boutiques, which appear to be housed in traditional lanehouses, are not what they seem.

In fact, Xintiandi is a re-imagining of Shanghai’s old streetscape as consumer experience, dreamed up by American architect Ben Wood.

“In order for a place to be fashionable, it has to transcend the nostalgia of historic preservation,” Wood says. “I was quite resourceful. Some preservationists say I was ruthless. � I made openings where openings didn’t exist if I thought it would improve the cinematic experience of walking the neighborhood.”

Traditional music wafts along the street, heightening the film-set feel of the place. This is Shanghai’s most hyped urban development of recent years. But the decision to leave some old buildings standing is the exception rather than the rule.

The more-accepted new face of Shanghai is an ever-growing labyrinth of skyscrapers. From an observation deck in Pudong, a district across the river from Shanghai’s original settlement, skyscrapers stretch out into the distance as far as the eye can see.

Twenty years ago, this area was just farmland. Now, this viral growth of skyscrapers, this city on steroids, symbolizes China’s urban future.

Architect Ma Qingyun, who has just been appointed dean of the school of architecture at the University of Southern California, says Pudong’s frenzied development “has certain dimensions of symbolic quality, to represent ambition and achievement in its new form of urbanization.”

But for Wood, the American architect, Pudong’s new cityscape is all about show.

“It’s designed to create plots of land for monuments to corporate power, the global economy,” says Wood.

He says you can’t cross the street in Pudong because the red lights aren’t long enough. “Sometimes it takes as long as three changes of the stoplight to get to the other side of the street. So it’s really not a humane place.”

Yet Pudong, too, is part of Shanghai’s strategy to build for its surging humanity. Almost 18 million people live in greater Shanghai. But that figure is expected to rise by one-third before 2020.

As a result, the city is spreading unbelievably fast. In just five years, nine new satellite towns have been built literally from scratch — each housing about the same number of people as the city of Atlanta.

Senior city planner Tang Zhiping says the need is pressing.

“We feel that the development and construction of these small towns is pretty urgent. But these experts are even more impatient than us, they want us to build lively, bustling towns in just two or three years. That’s impossible.”

So Shanghai is re-inventing itself anew, this time as the center of an urban megalopolis.

But as its lanehouses are leveled to make way for a forest of skyscrapers, is it in danger of losing its Chineseness?

No, says architect Ma Qingyun, because Shanghai’s soul is in its openness to change, its tolerance and its absolute pragmatism.

“That’s true Chineseness,” Ma says. “Everything is in constant mutation, nothing is set as a fixity. We don’t follow any spatial models. We don’t care about the look of the building, so much so everybody still lives in Shanghai in ugly buildings. We care about how convenient life is.”

Shanghai literally means “on the sea”: It’s the city that looks outwards to the rest of the world, to the future. But what will Shanghai of the future look like, in 20 years time? With change so rapid and overarching, even architects working here designing that future can’t answer that question. Ma worries about endless urban sprawl swallowing up the countryside.

“I have hope,” he says, “but what I’m so afraid of is my vision of the future.”

Posted at 4:16 PM · Comments (1)

Classic noir intrigue from the eve of the Second World War. I have been reading (and enjoying) Alan Furst off and on, until I stumbled on his eminently skippable “Foreign Correspondent.

Furst always cites Ambler as a hero. A chapter or two of this and you’ll understand why. You’ll also understand how far Furst has to go to match him.

Link

Posted at 10:52 AM · Comments (0)

You want to learn how to write? You want to re-learn how to write? Read Alice Munro’s stories. One of my favorites here is “Fits,” which opens a window on ordinary lives in small town Canada and proves in the process, lyrically and with profound psychological insight, that there is no such thing as an “ordinary life.”

Link

You read her for 20-30 pages and it sticks with you. You wonder, how can someone pack so much life and so many of its dilemmas in so few pages?

Highly recommended.

Posted at 10:38 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French

SHANGHAI: For people who saw the event on television, the scene was a chilling flashback from 30 years ago: Social outcasts and supposed criminals, in this case prostitutes and a few pimps, were paraded in front of a jeering crowd, their names revealed, and then taken to jail without trial.

The act of public shaming was intended as the inaugural event in a two- month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution. Chinese law enforcement often works on the basis of campaigns, and for its organizers the idea of marching 100 or so prostitutes, all dressed in identical yellow smocks, before the cameras must have seemed like a clever way of launching a battle against the sex trade.

What the authorities in Shenzhen, an industrial boomtown adjacent to Hong Kong seem not to have counted on was an angry nationwide backlash against their tactics, with many people around China joining in a common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing their outrage at the incident in one online forum after another.

So-called rectification campaigns like these were everyday occurrences during the Cultural Revolution, which officially ended in 1976. Popular justice was meted out and class enemies were publicly beaten, forced to make confessions and sent to work camps for re- education. That the practice saw a revival last week in Shenzhen, the birthplace of China’s economic reforms and one of its richest and most open cities, seems to have added to peoples’ shock.
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“Even people who commit crimes deserve dignity,” one person wrote on the popular Internet forum 163.com. “Must we go back to the era of the Cultural Revolution?”

“Isn’t this a brutal violation of human rights?” asked another poster, who likened the parading to an act out of the Middle Ages. “Shenzhen’s image has been deeply shamed.”

The incident has also reportedly elicited concerns from the All-China Women’s Federation, a state affiliated body, which is said to have addressed a letter to the Public Security Ministry in Beijing.

Meanwhile, at least one lawyer has stepped forward to defend the prostitutes, citing legal reforms in 1988 that banned acts of public chastisement.

“With the development of human civilization and law, this kind of barbaric punishment with its strong element of vengeance has been abandoned,” wrote Yao Jianguo, a Shanghai lawyer in a public letter addressed to the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature. Then, paraphrasing a letter by William Pitt during a debate over the excise tax in Britain in 1763, he wrote:

“Wind may come in, rain may come in, but the King may not, which is to say that even a poor person living in a slum has his own inviolable rights.”

While voices condemning the behavior of the city and its police were the most energetic, some spoke up in support of the crackdown.

“Perhaps you’ve never been to Shenzhen, or you’ve been there and you don’t have a thorough understanding of the place,” wrote one contributor to an Internet forum. “A person who really knows Shenzhen would feel that this is not harsh enough, because the prostitution industry has become so prosperous there.”

For the complete article, please see the link below:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/08/news/shenzhen.php

Posted at 1:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Scotsman

TWO per cent of adults on the planet command more than half of the world’s wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent possesses just 1 per cent, according to comprehensive new research.

While income is distributed unequally across the globe, the geographical spread of wealth - which includes property and financial assets - is even more skewed, the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN University showed.

“Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high-income Asia- Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 per cent of total world wealth,” the survey said.

The Helsinki-based institute said this was the first global research on the topic, for which there are only limited data. The study is based on figures from 2000. According to the report “the same degree of inequality would be obtained if one person in a group of ten takes 99 per cent of the pie and the other nine share the remaining 1 per cent”.

Researchers defined wealth as the value of physical and financial assets minus debts.

“Income inequality has been rising for the past 20-25 years and we think that is true for inequality in the distribution of wealth,” said James Davies, a professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, one of the report’s authors.

“There is a whole group of problems in developing countries that make it difficult for people to build up assets, which are important, since life is so precarious,” he said.

The gulf between rich and poor nations has long concerned politicians and economists, who say it is one of the biggest obstacles to development.

However, Mr Davies said there were some hopeful signs. China and India, both developing rapidly, are gaining wealth and in countries like Bangladesh, the spread of micro-credit institutions is helping people to increase their personal wealth, he said.

In other countries, land registration programmes allow the poor to own land for the first time, he said.

According to the report, individual assets of $2,200 (�1,110) placed an adult in the top half of the world’s wealth distribution in 2000.

Those in the richest 10 per cent of adults had assets of �30,840 or more, while those in the top 1 per cent - who now number 37 million - had at least �252,760.

This would place a large number of Britons in the top percentile, due to property wealth.

Global household wealth in 2000 was valued at �125 trillion, equivalent to roughly three times the value of total global production, or to �10,360 per person, the report said.

The two most asset-rich countries are Japan and the United States. In the US, average wealth amounted to �72,800 per person in the year 2000, and �91,500 in Japan.

In India, the figure was just �560 and in Indonesia, per capita wealth was �710.

Even among high-income nations, the amounts vary, from �18,700 per person for New Zealand and �35,390 for Denmark to �64,200 for Britain.

Although North America has only 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth.

China occupies much of the middle third of global wealth distribution, while India, Africa and the low-income Asian economies dominate the bottom third.

Anthony Shorrocks, another of the report’s authors, said that despite its rapid growth, China did not yet feature among the super-rich because average wealth is modest and is evenly spread by international standards.

“However, China is already likely to have more wealthy residents than our data reveals for the year 2000, and membership of the super-rich seems set to rise fast in the next decade,” he said.

“The US and Japan stand out because they have large populations and high average wealth.

“Although Switzerland and Luxembourg have high average wealth, their populations are small,” Mr Shorrocks explained.

Still, many in the wealthy West are house-poor, with assets well below this number due to mortgages and other debt.

“Many people in high-income countries have negative net worth and - somewhat paradoxically - are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth,” the report said.

Posted at 5:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Globe and Mail
5 December 2006

BEIJING — For years, China ‘s Communist rulers have coyly insisted that China is merely a developing country. Now a growing number of Chinese scholars and commentators are discarding the old bashfulness and beginning to talk openly of China ‘s rising power.

Their bold predictions of Chinese ascendance are a reflection of the surging sense of self-confidence here. There is a growing belief that China will soon be challenging the United States for leadership in the global arena.

One of its best-known academics, Yan Xuetong, has a new term for China ‘s mounting influence. Within the next decade, he says, China will become a “semi-superpower.”

And he has a warning for the United States : The gap between Chinese and U.S. power is dramatically narrowing.

The forecasts are especially remarkable because Prof. Yan, director of the International Studies Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing , goes far beyond the usual economic barometers of China ‘s rise. He measures the size of China ‘s expanding military arsenal, its rising political and diplomatic power and even its “soft power,” its cultural influence and its public image.

China’s official version of its progress, a shrewd form of ultramodesty, has been that it would remain an underdeveloped country for another 40 or 50 years at least.

Even the obvious phrases about a “rising” country were banned. Instead, they talked of China ‘s “peaceful development.”

But Prof. Yan says that by 2015, China will be second only to the United States in the global power game. Its superiority over Japan , Russia and India will be rapidly increasing. And the U.S. edge will be weakening every year.

Prof. Yan’s predictions are the latest sign of China ‘s new willingness to contemplate its own political muscle.

Chinese leaders are starting to face their destiny more candidly and ambitiously.

This is a country, after all, with a bristling nuclear arsenal, a fast-growing military, more than $1-trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, diplomatic power in every corner of the world and an economy that recently overtook Britain and France to become the fourth-largest in the world.

Today, there is widespread debate in China over the country’s mounting political strength and its place in the global power rankings. This month, for example, Chinese state television has been showing a 12-part series: The Rise of the Great Powers. The series is a close look at the ascendance of nine great nations since the 15th century, from Britain and Germany to Japan and the United States , and the lessons that China can draw from their rise. The clear implication: China is on the verge of the same historic rise.

“What is a great power?” asked the program’s director, Ren Xuean. “How does a nation become a great power? These are critical questions.”

The series has generated a large audience, spawning books and a lively debate on the Chinese Internet. ” China is on the verge of a great national renaissance,” one person commented on a website. “How can we borrow from the successful experiences of other countries?”

Another added: “Since the modern age, China has been bullied by the great powers. Now finally we feel we are strong enough or will be strong enough in the future.”

A recent poll of about 2,000 Chinese citizens, conducted for two U.S. think tanks, found that the Chinese are eagerly embracing their rush to greatness. Most expect China to become as powerful as the United States within a decade. Most are more bullish than people in other countries, with 87 per cent keen on China taking an active role on the world stage and 90 per cent pleased by the rise of China ‘s economic and military power. Only a small minority believe that the United States will still be the dominant world power in 50 years.

“The Chinese express unreserved enthusiasm for China playing an active role in the world and increasing its power and influence,” concluded the study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society.

“They are confident that in the near future China will match the United States ’ level of world influence.”

A slogan about “peaceful rise,” meanwhile, has been revived in the vocabulary of China ‘s top leaders and analysts. And Chinese scholars are openly talking about the decline of their U.S. rival. A controversial article by one foreign-policy expert, Wang Yiwei, argued that China should actually “prevent the United States from declining too rapidly” because China is still profiting from U.S. investment.

Prof. Wang predicts that the United States will soon fall to the status of a regional power, rather than a global power, because of its arrogance and imperial overreach, and he advises Washington to learn to accept Chinese power on the world stage.

Another scholar, Wang Jisi , gives this summary of the Chinese view: “In the long term, the decline of U.S. primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable.”

For the complete article please see the Globe and Mail’s website.

Posted at 11:07 PM · Comments (0)

December 2006

Thirty years ago this past September, Mao Zedong, hero to the Chinese nation, died in the Communist-party compound in the center of Beijing. During his tumultuous life he played many roles, but today the Chinese people are asked to remember him as a patriotic poet. Of all the memorable lines he left behind, they recall the one he used just before proclaiming the founding of the People�s Republic on October 1, 1949: �We the 475 million Chinese people have now stood up, and the future of our nation is infinitely bright.�

Because Mao, the Great Helmsman, is now a symbol of national assertion, the Chinese people are not officially permitted to remember that he essentially enslaved them. China�s Communist party has also forgiven him for some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century�crimes that led to the deaths of anywhere between 30 and 70 million people, virtually all of them Chinese.

Most of those deaths resulted from Mao�s attempts to remake Chinese society as he saw fit. After coming to power, he embraced the concept of �permanent revolution,� which soon evolved into �continuous revolution.� Beginning in 1957, he launched in quick succession the Hundred Flowers movement, the Anti-Rightist upheaval, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which ended shortly after his death in 1976.

Since then, Mao�s heirs have institutionalized themselves and transformed his revolutionary party into a ruling regime. Although, in theory, authoritarian systems are inherently fragile and eventually fall apart, the People�s Republic of China is now widely considered to be both resilient and durable. In the view of leading China specialists like Andrew Nathan, new mechanisms of governance developed by the Communist party since 1989 have given Chinese leaders the means to ensure the continuance of their rule despite rising popular discontent. Beijing�s autocrats themselves go so far as to credit these new institutions for creating some of the fastest economic growth in history.

This development has certainly given rise to profound geopolitical consequences. Asia�s small states now defer to the rulers in Beijing. Russia and India are learning to accommodate them. The United States hopes they will use their strength wisely. Although the 21st century has barely begun, many analysts have already decreed that it belongs to China, which the military historian Eliot Cohen has dubbed �the most important power in the world.�

China, the nation, will always be with us. But is the modern Chinese state, the Communist regime anchored in Beijing, similarly permanent? In fact, it is bedeviled today by a raft of problems: corrupt institutions, debt-ridden regional governments, a degraded environment, insolvent state banks, unprofitable enterprises, bankrupt pension funds, failed schools, and overburdened hospitals, just to name the most prominent. But the most serious challenge to the one-party regime is the Chinese people, who, almost independently of their government, are taking hold of their future. They also represent the greatest hope for the Chinese nation.

The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People�s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worker and peasant protests, such as the wave of labor riots in Shanghai in 1957, were of no lasting significance. So strong was Mao�s grip that there were virtually no disturbances even during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950�s and early 60�s, when his industrial and agricultural policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. Nor were there anti-state protests of consequence in the later 60�s or the 70�s.

After Mao�s death, however, and especially in the second half of the 1980�s, the Chinese people began to express discontent at almost every opportunity. In April 1985, hundreds traveled to Beijing without permission; there they staged a sit-in outside party headquarters to protest their continued exile dating to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the subsequent months and years, demonstrations�many of them directed against party rule�spread throughout the country. By January 1987 students were rallying in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China.

Deng Xiaoping, the country�s paramount leader at the time, declined to respond to this general mood of discontent, itself fueled largely by economic dislocation. Fortunately for him and the other veteran cadres, the Chinese people were not ready to demand revolutionary change. During the exhilarating days of the Beijing Spring in 1989, more than a million students, workers, and their allies would congregate in Tiananmen Square�but they came there to talk to their leaders, not to remove them. For me, the most powerfully suggestive image of the time was not of the euphoric crowds in Tiananmen Square, or the lone man in front of the tanks, but the three motionless students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People. This solitary trio had come to supplicate their leaders, who refused to see them.

This would be one of the last such moments. Six weeks later, Deng decided to use force to put down the protests. Beijing�s residents, armed with rocks and little else, fought back against the well-equipped soldiers of the People�s Liberation Army. By the time the tanks had pushed their way to the students gathered in Tiananmen Square, both soldiers and citizens had already died. The conflict was not inevitable�many senior party leaders and generals had urged conciliation�but Deng saw the need to reassert convincingly the supremacy of the party.

As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People�s Republic. By the end of the 1990�s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them�one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang�may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China�s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.

Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such �mass incidents�; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.

Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests�no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.

�China is facing enormous problems,� notes the scholar Steven Jackson, but �this characterization has been true for the past 150 years.� David Shambaugh writes similarly of China�s �curiously ambivalent state of �stable unrest.�� Because demonstrators have yet to link up across the country, and do not clearly exhibit the signs of a truly destabilizing movement�generalized anger, solidarity among the aggrieved, an ability to resist official action, strong leadership, a broad coalition, and the like�China�s citizens are still not seen as posing any particular danger to the People�s Republic

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Posted at 10:05 PM · Comments (0)

Happy New Year to all.

COPIES ARE STILL AVAILABLE of the catalog from my show in Berlin in October of Shanghai photographs - all shot in black and white, medium format. It was also shown at the end of November at the 2006 Angkor Photography Festival, in Cambodia.

The soft cover catalog contains 50 images in a 22x21 cm in a high quality printing. It makes a great holiday gift for people with a connection to Shanghai, or for people who are curious about life in the city and want to see it as it was throughout most of the 20th century, before all of the old neighborhoods are plowed under, which sadly means very soon.

The cost is a modest $15 plus shipping, and online payment is secure and convenient through PayPal using any credit card. Contact me at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com to place an order.

Here’s beautiful Italian blog item about the catalog, which appeared recently:

Click to read more

Posted at 11:25 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Project Syndicate

For a decade, the world has wondered when China�s leaders will recognize the staggering environmental crisis confronting their country. This year, we got an answer: a new Five-Year Plan that makes environmental protection a priority. A storm of green propaganda has followed, and the government now talks about using �Green GDP� to measure development. But will all this talk amount to real progress?

While the central government admits to some of the environmental degradation caused by rapid economic growth, the picture it paints is incomplete. Consider �Green GDP.� This spring, the State Environmental Protection Administration produced the country�s first official estimate of GDP adjusted downward for environmental losses. According to these calculations, it would cost $84 billion to clean up the pollution produced in 2004, or 3% of GDP for that year. But more realistic estimates put environmental damage at 8-13% of China�s GDP growth each year, which means that China has lost almost everything it has gained since the late 1970�s due to pollution.

China�s environmental problems, complex as the causes may be, can ultimately be attributed to our understanding of Marxism. For most of our recent history, we saw in Marxism only a philosophy of class struggle. We believed that economic development would solve all our problems. In the reform period, this misreading of Marx morphed into an unrestrained pursuit of material gain devoid of morality. Traditional Chinese culture, with its emphasis on harmony between human beings and nature, was thrown aside.

As a result, China�s economy is dominated by resource-hungry and inefficient polluters, such as coal and mineral mines, textile and paper mills, iron and steel makers, petrochemical factories, and building material producers. Our cities are exploding in size, depleting water resources and creating horrific traffic congestion.

One-quarter of China�s people drink substandard water; one-third of urbanites breathe badly polluted air. Moreover, the country recently witnessed a spate of environmental accidents. Indeed, on average, China suffers a major water pollution accident every other day.

Although China has signed the Kyoto Protocol and some 50 other international environmental accords, we do little to honor them. If we are not serious about upgrading our industrial structure, we will fail when it comes time to fulfill our commitments to cut emissions. And while the new Five-Year Plan sets fine goals, many provinces have failed even to meet the major environment protection targets of the last Five-Year Plan.

True, China has made the kind of economic advances in three decades that required 100 years in Western countries. But China also has suffered a century�s worth of environmental damage in 30 years. Unfortunately, unlike Western countries, we cannot afford to wait until our per capita annual GDP reaches $10,000 before tackling our environmental problems. Our experts predict that the environmental crisis will intensify to a critical stage by the time China�s per capita annual GDP reaches just $3,000.

Making matters worse, while we discarded the finer elements of our traditional culture, we failed to absorb the better aspects of modern civilization. The concept of a �social contract� based on rights and obligations � the essential values that constitute the most important precondition for effective environmental protection � goes largely ignored. As a result, environmental protection projects often fail to be included in calculating production costs. Scarcely anyone bothers to consider the environmental costs to � or rights of � the country�s poor and powerless.

It is imperative that environmental factors figure in China�s macroeconomic planning in a real way. This requires that a more rational strategy be mapped out in the planning of major industrial projects and energy-hungry enterprises. Careful studies need to be done to determine available energy, land, mineral, and biological resources before projects proceed. Land planning must be overhauled, with industrial monopolies broken up and development goals set according to population, resource volume, and the capacity to absorb pollution.

Finally, China needs a new energy strategy. Industrialized nations have developed and made great use of nuclear, solar, wind, and bio-gas, and other renewable energy resources. China�s technological capacities in this sector lag behind even other developing nations such as India and Pakistan, and its reliance on coal is one of the greatest threats to the global climate. For now, there is simply no alternative. But in the long run, clean energy will be the only way to bring economic growth without doing irreparable environmental damage.

Government cannot solve these problems on its own. China�s people have the biggest stake in environmental protection, and so must become the driving force. Local communities, non-governmental organizations, and businesses all must do their part. They cannot limit themselves simply to �supervision� and appeals to the authorities. They must expand into other avenues of appeal: public hearings, welfare lawsuits, enhanced media coverage, and other voluntary activities.

But ultimate power does rest with the government. China�s leaders need to make several concrete moves in order to move beyond rhetoric. They must give real power to environmental officials to implement existing laws and close gaping legal loopholes. This can only be done by introducing legal mechanisms to reward those who protect the environment, while making polluters pay, and by helping to unify the environmental watchdogs scattered across different sectors. Above all, a system needs to be established to monitor officials� performance in environmental as well as in economic terms.

China is dangerously near a crisis point. The country�s enormous environmental debt will have to be paid, one way or another. China must exercise the foresight needed to begin paying this debt now, when it is manageable, rather than allowing it to accumulate and, ultimately, threaten to bankrupt us all.
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Posted at 12:33 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Published: December 1, 2006

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania: The wheels seem to spin in the sand as we hurtle down the bush track mile after mile from Mtwara, a small town on the border of Tanzania and Mozambique. The land is parched, waiting desperately for the rains. In the villages we pass, little thatched houses give way to fields stripped bare of their meager produce. This is truly one of the poorest backwaters of this very poor country.

Suddenly there is a clearing and in it, well, what? The set for a James Bond film? Or a secret Tanzanian missile site, perhaps rented out to the encroaching Chinese-African empire?

The new president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, jumps out of our convoy’s lead car and briskly walks up to a white man in a white helmet and grabs his hand. Soon we are all ensconced in helmets and goggles and led past rows of large windowless containers to view a space-age machine that drives a pipe deep into the ground. A burly Canadian tells me he works 28 days - 12 hours a day, seven days a week - and then gets a free ticket home for 28 days off.

We have arrived at the saving grace of Tanzania’s mounting energy crisis. Tanzania has depended on plenty of rain, full lakes and cheap hydroelectric power, but the recent drought depleted the lakes and knocked nearly two percentage points off Tanzania’s once rapid rate of growth. God works in mysterious ways, however. Underneath these coastal sands a Canadian company, Artumas, last year discovered gas - enough to provide electricity to Mtwara for 800 years - and more is likely to be found.
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Before Christmas, Mtwara and nearby Lindi will have the gas flowing into the turbines and the electricity into their streets, factories and homes. The nearby villages will also be lit up. There will be no repeating the mistakes that have plagued Nigeria’s oil-rich delta region, where the locals have been bypassed.

Another field has been found to the north and is starting to power the capital, Dar es Salaam. Gas is going to save Tanzania’s economy and by next year its growth should be restored to last year’s 7 percent. The president tells me he believes it can go to 8 percent, and he yearns for 10 percent.

When I was here two years ago Western diplomats thought 7 percent was a pipe dream. But after the country’s stellar performance last year they have swallowed their doubts. As Lelde Schmitz, the International Monetary Fund’s Tanzania chief, told me, once they get over this energy hump, “Why not more than 7 percent?”

Even at 7 percent, Tanzania could achieve the United Nations millennium goals: cutting infant mortality by half and putting 10 years on life spans within a decade.

Kikwete won the presidency a year ago, after a bruising party primary and then an open general election (albeit against an opposition party that is only just finding its stride). Before him presided Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding father and benign semidictator, who ruined the economy with his radical socialist ideas but knitted the diverse tribes of Tanzania into a peaceful whole.

Later came Nyerere’s former press secretary, Benjamin Mkapa, who set Tanzania on the path to political and economic reform, producing handsome economic growth, a primary school in every village and a more open political system.

If Nyerere was Tanzania’s headmaster and Mkapa was its management guru, Kikwete is its font of youthful energy - but a thoughtful one. He is Africa’s Bill Clinton - driven by ideas, charismatic, clear minded, a communicator who likes nothing more than to step into a crowd and parley with it. A moderate Muslim in a dangerous neighborhood, he has become a favorite of President George W. Bush who has granted him the kind of access once reserved solely for Africa’s big economic powers, Nigeria and South Africa.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:21 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Republic

Mao’s Last Revolution, by Roderick Macfarquhar

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A Review by Andrew Nathan

I.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the start of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. According to a later Chinese Communist Party official, one hundred million people were killed, driven to suicide, beaten, convicted in “unjust, false, and erroneous cases,” “sent down,” or otherwise affected by what Chinese now call the “ten-year catastrophe.” Yet the anniversary was greeted by silence in China and abroad. At home, people are not allowed to commemorate Mao’s horrors, because the current leaders sustain their regime through the same internal secrecy and arbitrary repression that made the Cultural Revolution possible. Abroad, people think that China has changed so much that its old tragedies are no longer relevant. Besides, it is not polite to remind our trading partners of events that they wish to forget.

And so Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals have performed a great service in providing a masterful history of this important — and puzzling — event. In an earlier series titled The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, (the first volume was published by Columbia University Press in 1974, the second in 1983, and the third in 1997), MacFarquhar described the history of Chinese high politics from 1956, when Mao began to doubt the revolutionary potential of the Soviet model, to the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when he began to try to root revisionism out of China. These books were based on skillful Pekingological analyses of official Chinese statements and propaganda. That evidence was supplemented in the later volumes by information from memoirs, official chronologies, and documentary collections that the Chinese started to publish after Mao’s death in 1976.

The new book draws on still richer sources. The party has published thirteen volumes of Mao’s post-1949 papers, a two-volume authorized biography, and a chronology of the life of Zhou Enlai, Mao’s prime minister and chief enabler. Mao’s secretaries, aides, servants, guards, and family members have issued memoirs that contain revealing information even though they were vetted by the propaganda department. Overseas and free of party censorship, Mao’s personal physician, the late Li Zhisui, wrote a book about his years with the dictator called The Private Life of Chairman Mao (I must disclose that I wrote the preface), and Gao Wenqian, an �migr� party archivist, detailed Mao’s mistreatment of Zhou Enlai in a book on Zhou’s late years. And MacFarquhar’s co-author, Michael Schoenhals, has haunted Chinese bookstands and flea markets to find many precious original documents — manuscript diaries, privately published memoirs, Red Guard handbills, intra-party investigation reports, handwritten confessions, personal notes of meetings and speeches, and original mimeographs of party documents. (Ethnic Chinese scholars from abroad have been detained on state secrets charges for purchasing such materials.) Both authors have conducted interviews with party historians and the Cultural Revolution’s victims.

Before his academic career, MacFarquhar served as an international political reporter for the BBC and as a member of the British Parliament. His writing displays a fine sense of high politics. Schoenhals is a longtime student of Chinese language and rhetoric. Together they are exquisitely alive to the signals sent by nuances of timing, the editing of photographs, invitations to and exclusions from meetings, and small changes in formulaic utterances. They have created an unforgettable account of exceedingly traumatic events.

The narrative can be painfully vivid at the level of ordinary factory workers, students, intellectuals, and party members — the “masses,” in party-speak — who were both actors in and audiences for a public drama whose logic they seldom understood. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals bring to life the self-righteous anger of the Red Guards and the worker rebels, the suffering of their victims, the daily rituals of the Mao cult, the efforts of ordinary people to make sense out of what was happening and to bend their minds to believe in it. They quote from a series of three handwritten confessions by an interrogation victim who had to keep changing her story until she could satisfy her questioners that she had participated in a particular plot, even though she knew nothing about it. (In fact, the plot never existed.) Such stories rescue us from regarding the Cultural Revolution as something past and canned. They portray real people in real time who did not know what was going to happen next. One sees chillingly how a totalitarian regime traps people. Schoolteachers or factory managers got up in the morning and went to work knowing that they were going to be tortured and maybe killed, but they had no place to hide and nowhere to go. The torturers were trapped, too. Activism was a narrowing chute that led from speaking to shouting to beating, from which there was no exit unless one was willing to take one’s place among the victims. There was an alternative, though. It was suicide. Targets killed themselves not only to escape torture, but often to send a signal of protest. In return, the regime treated suicide as an admission of guilt and punished the victim’s survivors.

Some parts of the narrative are less successful. The authors have to cram so much incident into some passages that the story becomes abstract and unreal: a series of mass movements that they describe in a chapter aptly titled “Confusion Nationwide,” a seemingly meaningless wave of officially sponsored violence called “cleansing the class ranks,” or the endless purges of officials at the party center who were not particularly close to the Cultural Revolution’s main targets. Sometimes MacFarquhar and Schoenhals use extreme examples to stand in for a plethora of strange events, so that the story seems surreal rather than something that real people did. They present incomplete and rounded — indeed, probably fictional — numbers from their sources, saying, to give a few examples, that during the cleansing-the-class-ranks campaign in a particular province, 22,900 people died and 120,000 were maimed; that in a particular place “33 different forms and 290 variants” of torture were used; and that in the final investigation of Liu Shaoqi, 400,000 people were assigned to go through four million files. These numbers do not seem real, and they have a numbing effect. I suppose such narrative strategies are unavoidable, given the nature of the sources and the complexity of the story.

The first two-thirds of the book describes the years between 1965 and 1969, which might be called the Cultural revolution proper. This is the period of party “work teams” sent to “rectify” college campuses, Red Guards “smashing the four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes), worker “rebels” “seizing power” in factories, Mao’s mobilization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to suppress factional fighting, his “sending down” of the Red Guards to labor with the peasants, his purge of second-in-command and head of state Liu Shaoqi and other leaders, the paralysis of the party apparatus and government bureaucracies, the establishment of army-dominated “revolutionary committees” to take over the running of the country, and society-wide persecutions against imaginary enemies. This period ended with the Ninth Party Congress of April 1969, at which the Cultural Revolution was declared victorious and the leader of the military, Lin Biao, was designated as Mao’s “best student, comrade-in-arms, and chosen successor.” The master arc of this part of the story is a coup by Mao against the party: he calls up the masses to purge the leadership, then uses the army to demobilize the masses and puts his most loyal follower in the number two position.

The second part of the book uses half as much space to cover twice as much time, from the party congress in 1969 to Mao’s death in September 1976, which is considered the official end-date of the Cultural Revolution. These pages devote less attention to events in society and more to events at Mao’s court. Here the story becomes even more bizarre. Mao purges Lin Biao, rehabilitates and then re-purges Deng Xiaoping, denies Zhou Enlai treatment for a fatal cancer, empowers his wife Jiang Qing and three radical colleagues to launch a series of oblique political campaigns against other leaders, and designates an ill-qualified new successor, Hua Guofeng, whose rule was to last only a couple of years past Mao’s death. The main story line of this part of the book reverses that of the first part. Mao undoes the involvement of the military in politics, gets rid of his newly designated successor, unravels his purges of some party leaders to reinstate civilian rule, and pushes his personality cult and ideology over the edge of self-parody into destruction. This was, as the authors put it, “an ending [of the Cultural Revolution] so painfully drawn out, so tortuously slow, that it would last more than twice as long as the event it supposedly brought to a close.”

II.
Why did Mao do it? This has always been the master puzzle of the Cultural Revolution. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals do not formulate an overall answer, but two lines of interpretation emerge from their narrative. Neither of their arguments fully makes sense, and taken together they even leave the authors themselves dissatisfied.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals suggest, for a start, that Mao was motivated by revolutionary ideals. Thus, after asking, “Why did China’s supreme leader decide to tear down what he had done so much to create?,” they answer by describing Mao’s theory of revisionism. This theory had its source in Mao’s disappointment with the Soviet experiment, which he believed had created a privileged bureaucratic class that abandoned revolutionary ideals. To prevent the same thing happening in China, he set out to “smash the old culture,” “weed out capitalist roaders in the Party,” and create a “new socialist man.” Elsewhere the authors say that “the Cultural Revolution had always been about the rearing of revolutionary successors,” and that Mao sought to “temper” his successors in the “surging waves” of the mass movement because he believed that human nature could be remolded through struggle. The masses, he believed, “had to liberate themselves.”

The irony of this theory has been clear ever since Li Zhisui, in his memoir of his life as Mao’s personal physician, exposed the self-indulgent way Mao lived: his multiple villas, private trains, and serial mistresses; his personal cruelty to everyone around him; and his lack of interest in the suffering of the masses. Mao was given to apparently jocular but genuinely chilling remarks such as that China would do fine even if two-thirds of its population died in a nuclear war, and that the universe would survive even if the Earth were destroyed. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals do not cite these dicta, but they report him as saying: “This man Hitler was even more ferocious. The more ferocious the better, don’t you think?” And this: “Beijing is too civilized! I would say there is not a great deal of disorder … and that the number of hooligans is very small. Now is not the time to interfere.” At one happy private occasion, Mao offered this toast: “To the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war!”

Clearly, Mao was a hypocrite in his personal life and a terrorist-from-above in his politics. But none of this proves that he did not believe what he said about “continuous revolution.” If Mao was serious about his vision, however, why did he make such a hash of it? Even his closest colleagues found his demands vague, contradictory, and changing. First he endorsed the takeover of power in Shanghai by the workers, then he changed his mind and lodged what MacFarquhar and Schoenhals call a series of “absurd quibbles” as a way of ordering a reversal. First he ordered local military units to “support the left,” then he ordered officers to undertake self-criticism for doing so. First he encouraged the leftist acolytes Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu to promote “dragging out a small handful in the military,” then he ordered their arrest for being too radical. Over and over MacFarquhar and Schoenhals show that no one understood what Mao wanted. “After the session, the minister of education … said to his colleagues, ‘Now I am very confused.’” “Amazingly, it would seem as if the identity of the person or persons ‘like Khrushchev’ to whom the Chairman was alluding escaped even members of Mao’s inner circle.” “The participants [in the central work conference] had no idea what accorded with or violated Mao’s grand design.” “Misperceptions of Mao’s attitude, induced by his contradictory behavior, quite probably helped to precipitate the February Countercurrent.”

Still less could young students, workers, and cadres imbibe any reliable message from Mao’s cryptic words and contradictory actions. Those who committed themselves most strongly to the “ism” attached to Mao’s name — people such as the philosophy professor Nie Yuanzi, the Red Guard leader Kuai Dafu, and the ideologist Chen Boda — ended up in the countryside learning from the peasants, or in prison. The eventual result after Mao’s death was a society more cynically materialistic than perhaps any other on earth.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’s second line of interpretation is that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution as a form of power struggle, to bring down his rivals within the party. They quote him as saying, “Of all the important things, the possession of power is the most important.” After discussing Mao’s concern with revisionism, they segue into his antipathy for Liu Shaoqi, the number-two in the leadership, who, unlike the pliant Zhou Enlai, “had no intention of abandoning his critical faculties” when responding to Mao’s directives. In this view of the Cultural Revolution, Mao saw plots all around him. When his senior colleagues took over policy-making after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, he decided to take power back. He targeted officials in the cultural sphere first because they were less important, and used that stratagem to draw out their more powerful patrons. As he changed the party line, more and more cadres flunked the loyalty test, enabling him to widen the purge.

Only Zhou Enlai managed to tack and turn to stay consistently close to the helmsman, so Mao spared Zhou and used him to run the country. (Such was Zhou’s agility that he suddenly upgraded the protocol status of a purged leader’s funeral when Mao jumped out of bed in his pajamas to attend it, ordered an airplane in which other officials were traveling to circle so he could get his own plane on the ground first and be there to welcome them, and reversed the flow of the annual National Day parade so it would go toward instead of away from the symbolically revolutionary direction of east. And such was his sangfroid that he opined, “If someone is already dead, then you should not go too far in your attempts to determine [who was responsible].”) Mao held Deng Xiaoping in reserve in a factory job to back up Zhou, according to MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, because Mao unaccountably viewed Deng as less dangerous than other senior cadres. Even so, Mao constantly had doubts about everyone: Zhou and Deng, his ghostwriter Chen Boda, his wife Jiang Qing, and his final mistress Zhang Yufeng. To the end of his life he never found a leadership team, a wife, a lover, or a child whom he could trust.

For the entire review, please see the link below.

Posted at 9:47 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Christian Science Monitor
December 01, 2006

BEIJING - In a sweeping liberalization of its reporting rules, China Friday suspended decades-old restrictions on foreign journalists in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games.

The new regulations, allowing foreign reporters to travel throughout the country and to interview people without prior official permission, are clearly aimed at keeping the government’s promise to the International Olympic Committee that it would allow free reporting during and before the 2008 games.

Foreign correspondents in China greeted the news with cautious optimism.
“This is a welcome step,” says Melinda Liu, president of the Foreign
Correspondents Club of China and Beijing bureau chief for Newsweek
magazine. “The proof of how valuable the new regulations will be will
depend on their implementation, however,” she adds. “The biggest concern is
still the [authorities’] culture of non-transparency and the habit of not
being open to foreign or any other media.”
The strength of that culture is clearly evident in an official police
language-training manual obtained by the Monitor. It is being used to teach
Beijing policemen the English phrases they might need when dealing with
Olympic visitors.

Published by China’s Public Security Bureau University and the Beijing
Municipal Public Security Bureau, “Olympic Security English” contains a
practice dialog entitled, “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage”.
The dialog teaches policemen the English phrases they would need to detain
a foreign reporter found talking to a Chinese citizen about Falun Gong, an
outlawed spiritual movement.
Beijing city patrolmen are given the manual as part of a home study program
according to one city police officer who asked not to be identified. They
are taught how to say, “You’re a sports reporter. You should only cover the
Games,” and to tell the reporter that Falun Gong is “beyond the permit” and
“beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao, announcing the new regulations at
a press conference, would not say whether the manual would be withdrawn in
light of the decree promulgated Friday in the name of Premier Wen Jiabao.
He did say, however, that his ministry would “brief relevant domestic
agencies and departments on the new regulations and ask them to abide by
them. We will ensure that they are duly and responsibly implemented.”
Mr. Liu also pledged that foreign reporters’ new freedoms would not be
limited to the Olympic Games and their preparation, although the decree specifies that the regulations apply to “reporting activities carried out by foreign journalists covering the Beijing Olympic Games and related matters.”
“Foreign journalists will not limit their reporting activities to the Games themselves,” Liu acknowledged. “They will also cover politics, science, technology, culture and the economy. The ‘related matters’…expands the areas on which foreign journalists can report.”

For the complete article, please see the Christian Science Monitor website.

Posted at 9:14 AM · Comments (0)

Frances Wilson

Copyright Times Literary Supplement

384pp. Bloomsbury. �20.
0 747 57744 7

Casanova�s Women begins where many Lives of Casanova begin: at the end. His final scenes make an arresting image, the eighteenth-century James Bond who conned, charmed and gambled his way through a galaxy of Pussy Galores preparing for death in a remote Bohemian castle; the spy, adventurer, and lover turned harmless librarian, looking after Count Wallenstein�s collection of books. Hunched over his desk, the old man is working his memories into a gargantuan history of 3,600 manuscript pages which will become, when they are posthumously published, twelve thick volumes. Giacomo Casanova ended his days with one last triumphant act of indulgence, and by writing his Histoire de ma vie he fell in love all over again. �I love myself more than I love anyone else�, he remembered. Meanwhile, many miles away, in the city which for him represents the pinnacle of human achievement, the French Revolution is bringing to an end the world he once knew. Casanova, supreme advocate of liberty, is imprisoned for the second time in his life, but there will be no dramatic escape over the rooftops as there was in Venice, because he has nowhere else to go and nothing left to do. �You shall become free�, he wrote in a letter from Dux Castle, �when you have lost your freedom.�

*
To compare the libidinal and intellectual energy of Casanova with that of anyone else, even Byron, is like pitching the effect of a volcanic eruption up against the rearrangement of thimbles on a shelf. And yet it is not the events he relives in his Histoire which make his book so magnificent, but the fact of his having written it at all. He wrote, Casanova said, for people like him, �those who, having lived too much, have become immune to seduction and who, from having lived too long in the fire, have become Salamanders�. Not yet burned out, Casanova put into writing the same drive he had put into living, and the Histoire was his last seduction. In the attempt to achieve literary immortality he embraced every genre, every style, every discourse available, from the utopian bliss of pornography to the realism of politics, from journalism to farce, from theological and scientific debate to the aphoristic wit of La Rochefoucauld.

All of which makes Casanova something of a problem for his biographers. Not only is there not much new to say about him, but there is nothing that he did not say first himself and in perfect prose. What Judith Summers, does, therefore, as did Lydia Flem and Andrew Miller before her, is find new, and briefer, ways of telling the story he has already told.

For the complete article please see the link below.

Posted at 11:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French / International Herald Tribune
Published: November 30, 2006

SHANGHAI: It all began with a search for “Borat.” Yes, “Borat,” the popular and somewhat controversial comedy that spoofs life in the central Asia nation, Kazakhstan.

One of the cheap pleasures of life in Shanghai in recent years has been the almost instantaneous availability of just about any Hollywood movie of any size. Hereabouts, they are hawked, together with myriad other counterfeit goods, in the impromptu bazaars that constitute some of this city’s most famous streets.

When “Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” was late in coming, my first thought was that it was a victim of political correctness. Officials in Kazakhstan had been angered by the depiction of their country, and I briefly imagined the neighborly Chinese authorities blocking the DVD, or at least delaying it’s arrival here.

Come to think of it, though, I hadn’t seen any recent Hollywood titles being flogged on the streets here. I’d had my eye out for “The Last King of Scotland” and “Stranger than Fiction,” and they didn’t seem to be on sale either.

Curious, I visited the Ka De Club, the downtown DVD shop other foreigners had introduced me to with a knowing wink and smile when I first moved to Shanghai, three years ago. There, wide- eyed foreigners and a few Chinese customers circled the tables where the latest releases were stacked, snatching at them like sharks after chum.

I hadn’t been to the store for many months, though, and was told it had moved to another site.

The next weekend I went there, only to be told there were no Hollywood films. When I asked why, the smiling clerk said there was a crackdown under way. “Come back in 10 days,” she said, implying it would soon pass.

A Chinese friend introduced me to another shop, whose name he said was Blockbuster, just like in the United States, though with no affiliation. I went there during my lunch hour one day, only to discover that they, too, had nothing recent - and had changed their name to Hollywood Hits.

That was a couple of weeks ago, but the drought has continued. At this point, I kept looking, no longer desperate to watch “Borat,” just curious to know what was going on. Could it be that China was finally, genuinely living up to its repeated pledges to crack down on a major form of intellectual property theft?

A quick search online turned up a few clues. As it turns out, there has recently been something called the 100 Days’ Action Campaign Against Piracy. Nationwide, officials said, there had been 141 arrests and over 58 million counterfeit films, books and other products seized.

Asked for comment, officials in Shanghai’s Intellectual Property Administration bureau confirmed the campaign and said they were still carrying out orders from the central government to crack down on piracy. “We’ve been inspecting the locations where DVDs are sold, confiscating the fake ones, educating the sellers and fining them,” said Xu Hanping, an enforcement officer with the bureau. “We are assigning more people to this problem than we ever have before.”

Who knows if it will last, especially with a name that speaks of a 100-day campaign. There is certainly plenty of doubt online, where there has been a lively exchange of commentary among fans of black market DVDs, including this gem of skepticism: “After the forest fire, weeds will once again prosper once spring comes.”

On the basis of their experience, the cynicism is warranted. Chinese people have seen way too many campaigns come and go not to view them that way, especially amid a huge scandal here involving illicit enrichment of city officials.

If nothing else, though, the crackdown has already proved something important: that the Chinese government can do something about a problem it has often all but pleaded powerlessness over.

Indeed, all it takes to realize how unconvincing that pose is, is a small thought experiment. Just imagine what would happen to purveyors of DVDs featuring the banned religious group, Falun Gong, or the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama?

Perhaps, though, just perhaps, there is something more to this moment than an ephemeral crackdown. With the government pushing hard to create more value added for its industries, to foster the emergence of Chinese brands that can compete on the global stage, recent statements by senior Chinese leaders seem to suggest an appreciation of the double- edged sword that the country’s massive piracy represents.

For the complete column, please see this link:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/30/news/letter.php

Posted at 1:09 AM · Comments (0)

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