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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Copyright Slate

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole’s term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist’s daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak�in the sense of erasing, or silencing�any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life, he writes. Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Poole’s list of suspicious phrases rolls on for more than 200 pages. Tax relief and tax burden, which covertly argue that lowered taxes automatically relieve and unburden everybody. Friends of the Earth casts its opponents as enemies of the earth and implies that the Earth is befriendable, a big, huggable Gaia.

Poole cautions readers not to confuse unspeak with doublespeak, a word that grew out of the concepts of Newspeak and doublethink that George Orwell introduced in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Poole writes, “But Unspeak does not say one thing while meaning another. It says one thing while really meaning that one thing,” and the confusion unspeak generates is almost always calculated and deliberate.

Poole calls community one of the most perfect political words in English because it

can mean several things at once, or nothing at all. It can conjure things that don’t exist, and deny the existence of those that do. It can be used in celebration, or in passive-aggressive attack. Its use in public language is almost always evidence of an Unspeak strategy at work.

The plasticity of community allows it to encompass geography, ethnicity, profession, hobby, or religion, and in the mouths of diplomats and journalists can expand to include everybody, as in the international community, a concept that Justice Antonin Scalia once described�rightly�as “fictional.”

We’re drawn to the “semantically promiscuous” word, Poole writes, because it allows us to simultaneously express our tolerance for a group and our discomfort. For example: the homosexual community and the black community. People rarely refer to the heterosexual community, the white community, or even the Christian community, because in the United States and Britain, they are the “default” positions and carry the “privilege of not having to be defined by a limiting ‘identity.’ ” Likewise, a group defined by the majority as transgressive, say, the Ku Klux Klan, would never qualify as a “community” even though it organizes itself with the same conscious effort as the “anti-war community.”

For the complete article please see the link below.

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Copyright China Daily

President Hu Jintao will visit Sudan and South Africa in the near future as part of an eight-nation trip to Africa to broaden the nation’s reach and strengthen ties with the continent.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Thursday that dates and detailed arrangements for the trip were still being negotiated, but would be announced soon.

The tour will possibly start at the end of the month. The South African Foreign Ministry has said the country will receive the president in early February.

It will be Hu’s third trip to the continent, following trips to three African countries in 2004 and another three in April last year.

Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing has just concluded a seven-nation African tour, mostly focusing on smaller countries. He returned on January 8.

China’s diplomatic drive in Africa culminated last November with Beijing hosting a China-Africa Summit that drew leaders from more than 40 African nations.

Response to ministry upgrade

Liu yesterday also urged Japan to make further efforts to improve and develop bilateral ties instead of making trouble.

Liu made the comments in response to Japan’s recent upgrading of its defense agency to defense ministry as well as Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s recent talks with his British counterpart Tony Blair in which Abe asserted that the European Union lifting its arms embargo on China would impact security in Asia.

Liu stressed that adhering to the road of peaceful development by Japan conforms to the fundamental interests of Japan itself and benefits regional peace, stability and development.

UN Habitat executive director Anna Tibaijuka (C) receives a statue representing a Chinese drum as a present from Chinese President Hu Jintao (L) at the UN compound in Nairobi, Kenya, April 28, 2006.

He noted that Japan’s concern over the EU’s plan to lift its arms embargo on Beijing “is none of Japan’s business and will not impose any threat to the country.”

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In the early 1990s, a story circulated among Chinese taxi drivers about an �eight-�car traffic accident in Guangzhou that resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The story fueled Mao fever (Mao re) in China, with shopkeepers offering busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks with Red Guards waving Mao�s little red book at each tick of the clock. Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. Transmuted uses of Mao continue today. Nightclub singers in Beijing croon songs that cite Mao�s words. Youths dine in �Cultural �Revolution-�style� caf�s off �rough-�hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock �market.

This nonpolitical treatment of Mao Zedong (1893�1976) is an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangzi valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous. Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of �faith.

But where is Mao the totalitarian? Each of the major nations that experienced an authoritarian regime in the 20th century emerged in its own way from the trauma. Japan, Germany, Italy, even Russia departed politically from systems that brought massive war and repression. China, still ruled by a communist party, has been ambiguous about Mao. Although Mao�s portrait and tomb dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, Mao �himself��unlike Stalin in Russia or Hitler in �Germany��has floated benignly into a nether zone as if somehow he was not a political figure at all, let alone the architect of China�s communist �state.

The cab drivers, farmers, pop singers, and shopkeepers are really only following the lead of the Chinese Communist Party, which does not quite know how to handle Mao�s legacy. New history textbooks approved for initial use in Shanghai have largely brushed Mao out of China�s 20th-century story. China has abandoned Mao�s policies but not faced the structural and philosophical issues involved in �Maoism��and probably won�t until the Party�s monopoly on political power comes to an end. Yet unless China gets the Mao story correct, it may not have a happy political �future.

The moral compass of the Mao era has gone, unregretted. But �money�making, national glory, and a veil over the past in the name of �good feelings� are not enough to replace it. Can a society that lived by the ideas of Confucianism for two millennia, and later by Mao�s political athleticism, be content with amnesia about the Mao era and the absence of a believed public �philosophy?

In a recent biography, Mao: The Unknown Story (2006), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday pile up evidence that Mao was a monster to eclipse Stalin and probably Hitler and Lenin as well. �Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao�s outlook� from his teens to his dotage, say the authors. In a second influential volume, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995), Mao�s physician Li Zhisui portrays the Chairman as exceedingly selfish, jealous, and promiscuous. Soon after his book came out, Dr. Li came to speak at Harvard, and I showed him around the campus. �Three words did not exist for Mao,� the gentle doctor remarked as we strolled. �Regret, love, mercy.� These two �books��both written from outside �China��explain the Mao era in China as essentially the consequence of having an evil man at the �helm.

Certainly Mao�s rule was destructive. Tens of millions of Chinese died in the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward of 1958�59, victims of Mao�s willful utopianism and cruelty. Millions more died, and tens of millions had their lives ruined, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Practicing brinkmanship toward India, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union, Mao declared that a loss of hundreds of millions of Chinese in a nuclear war would be a setback China could readily �digest.

Yet �bad man� does not adequately sum up Mao and his legacy. To believe so would be to embrace the moral absolutism of communism itself, with its quick verdicts (�enemy of the people,� �hero of the proletariat�), and to repeat the manipulations of official Chinese imperial history, in which even a flood or earthquake �proved� the evil character of the emperor. Were the �good men� around bad man Mao blind to his failings for so many decades? Were the hundreds of millions of Chinese who bowed before Mao�s portrait and wept at the sight of him out of their �minds?

Mao made history; at the same time, history made Mao. In addition to looking at Mao�s failings as a human being, we must look at the structures and pressures that turned whim into tyranny. At the ideas Mao wielded. At the �evaporation��in Mao�s case, as in that of several other �dictators��of youthful idealism and exactitude. Above all, at the seduction of a �freedom� bestowed from above by a �party-�state that believed it knew what was best for the �citizenry.

In a Jesus was dismembered for speaking out… . He who speaks out does not necessarily transgress, and even if he does transgress, this is but a small matter to a wise man.� Immediately we face a puzzle: Young Mao was an ardent individualist. In his years at the teachers� training college he attended in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, Mao�s credo became the �self-�realization of the individual. �Wherever there is repression of the individual,� he wrote in the margin of a translation of Friedrich Paulsen�s System of Ethics (1889), �wherever there are acts contrary to the nature of the individual, there can be no greater crime.� His first published newspaper work, written in 1919, was a plea for the liberation of women, a passionate �nine-�part commentary on the suicide of a young woman in Changsha moments before her arranged �marriage.

Mao at 24 saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an outbreak of freedom for the individual that lit the way for China. A young female friend objected, �It�s all very well to say establish communism, but lots of heads are going to fall.� Mao, who had recently read Marx and Engel�s Communist Manifesto, retorted, �Heads will fall, heads will be chopped off, of course. But just think how good communism is! The state won�t bother us anymore, you women will be free, marriage problems won�t plague you anymore.� Although these words hint at Mao�s later callousness about human life, it is striking that he viewed Lenin�s revolution in terms of the �marriage problems� of individual �women.

The anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid (1902), had a strong hold on Mao until he was nearly 30. A great virtue of the Russian anarchist, Mao felt, was that �he begins by understanding the common people.� Anarchism in Mao�s perception was linked with Prometheanism; Friedrich Nietzsche was also among his early enthusiasms. The Promethean individual would prepare for his heroic role by taking cold baths, running up mountains, and studying books in the noisiest possible places. This prefigures the fascism to come in Mao�s Cultural Revolution, just as fascism in Europe owed a debt to Nietzsche. At the time, however, Mao�s individualism was nurtured by the influence of a Chinese professor at Changsha who had imbibed the idealist liberalism of T. H. Green, the late-19th-century British �philosopher.

Mao was a rebel before becoming a communist. The psychological root of his rebelliousness was hostility to his father, and, by extension, to other authority figures. The political root was dismay at China�s weakness and disarray in the face of foreign encroachment, shared by most informed Chinese of the period. Mao�s chief use for the steeled individual was as a fighter for justice and China�s salvation. �The principal aim of physical education,� he wrote in 1917 in New Youth magazine, �is military heroism.� The authoritarian strain in Mao�s individualism was already �present.

Eventually, Mao�s respect for individual freedom collapsed. There were four causes. One was the powerful current of nationalism in early-20th-century China; the cry to rescue the nation eclipsed the cry for the �self-�realization of the individual. A second was the large role of war in China from the 1920s to the �40s. Pervasive violence made political debate a luxury and favored repression. A third was Mao�s embrace of Marxist ideas of class, central economic planning, and communist party organization. Fourth was the hangover in Mao�s mind and Chinese society generally of a paternalistic imperial �mentality.

In the end, Mao Zedong, facilitated by Stalin, put the population of the world�s largest nation under a regimen that combined Leninism, the paternalism of early Chinese �sage-�rulers, and, by the 1960s, a hysteria and military romanticism that amounted to fascism Chinese-�style.

The imperative of national salvation was the first factor working against Mao�s attraction to freedom. Mao was mildly attracted to a movement comparable in spirit to Europe�s Enlightenment that sprang into existence in China in 1919. Named May Fourth (after the date of an initial student demonstration), it aimed at modernizing China by embracing �quasi-�Western ideas of individualism, democracy, and science. Liberated individuals would rescue China. But May Fourth soon split in two, a left wing jumping to Marxist collectivism and a right wing sticking with individualism. Leftists, including the 27-�year-�old Mao, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in �1921.

Bolshevism helped Mao be progressive and �anti-�Western at the same time. Opposition to the West was necessary to many young Chinese leftists, despite the appeal of Western ideas, because of British and other foreign bullying of China since the Opium War of 1839�42. From Lenin, Mao learned that social justice and national salvation could come as one package. �Leninism��and to a lesser degree �Marxism��joined anarchism, nationalism, and individualism in the �rag�bag of Mao�s political ideas. It was Lenin who showed Mao his road to power. �Anti-�imperialism was going to be for Mao, as it was for Lenin, the framework for revolution. But this �anti-�imperialist��soon �anti-�Japanese��nation�alism that Mao injected into the Chinese Revolution negated individual �freedom.

In the 1930s, Mao argued to the �semi�criminal secret society Gelaohui (Elder Brother Club) that its principles and the CCP�s were �quite �close��especially as regards our enemies and the road to salvation.� Of course, the threat of enemies was the central point. In his appeal to �non-�Han �minority� peoples during the Long March of 1935�36, when Mao emerged as the CCP�s top leader as the Communists retreated before Chiang �Kai-�shek�s Nationalist forces, Mao challenged Mon�golians to �preserve the glory of the era of Genghis Khan� by cooperating with the Communists. Pressing the Muslims to support him, he told them that this would ensure the �national revival of the Turks.� Of course, Chinese nationalism had turned Mao into a trickster. After the wars with Japan and Chiang �Kai-�shek were over, there would be no common cause with the Gelaohui, no freedom for the Mongolians or the Muslims of �Xinjiang.

The violence that continually rippled through China was another force militating against individual freedom. After the death in 1925 of Sun �Yat-�sen, a leader in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and a founder of the Nationalist movement, the gun was prominent in Chinese public life. Sun�s wavering leadership gave way to warlordism, a violent rupture of the tenuous coalition of Nationalists and Communists in 1927, and growing incursions by Japan beginning in 1931. Guns were to freedom as a cat is to mice. From the time Mao used force to confiscate the holdings of Hunan landowners in 1925, when he was just one of many CCP leaders, his political life cannot be understood aside from violence, both the wars he waged and those waged against him. As he sought to organize farmers in a remote mountain region, he remarked, �The struggle in the border area is exclusively military. The Party and the masses have to be placed on a war footing.� Mao spoke of �criticizing the Nationalists by means of a machine gun.�

A third enemy of freedom was the class, organizational, and economic theory Mao drew from Marx and Lenin. Here Mao�s story is similar to that of Stalin, Castro, and others. Class theory has intrinsic distortions; people often do not act as members of an economic class. Class labeling became especially inimical to freedom when Mao was forced to rely on farmers rather than workers as the key class in
Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

China�s revolution. Anyone who pointed out this departure from Marx�s theory of proletarian revolution was stamped out as a �renegade.

Eventually, class became little more than a convenient way to demarcate friends and enemies of the moment. Hence, longtime colleague and expected successor Liu Shaoqi was �discovered� by Mao in the 1960s to be a �bourgeois� who had �sneaked into the Party.� Never mind that Mao and Liu had worked together as leftist organizers on and off since �1922.

For the complete article please click the link below.

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(This guy, I’m honored to say, is my uncle. HF)

January 19, 2007

After a career of more than 50 years in which he chronicled the civil rights movement, became the first full-time black reporter at the Washington Post, and opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau, Simeon Booker is retiring.

A retirement reception is scheduled for Booker, 86, on Wednesday at Washington’s National Press Club.

Among those expected are Linda Johnson Rice, CEO of Johnson Publishing Co., publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines; retired Ebony editor Lerone Bennett; Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet; retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw; and Eleanor Clift, Newsweek Washington correspondent.

Simeon Booker
Booker’s office said the veteran journalist was not up to sharing his story again for this column, but in 1982, the Washington Post’s Jacqueline Trescott put it this way:

“After 27 years in Washington, Booker is a mini-institution. The second black reporter to win a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he became The Washington Post’s first full-time black reporter in 1952. His coverage of the murder of Emmett Till, a young black who allegedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi, in Jet during 1955 is credited with mobilizing support of the southern civil rights movement. His column is the only weekly news-gossip column about black politicians and professionals, and he has a special personality, all the rough edges of the old-fashioned movie reporter and the charm of a Runyonesque character. His office is an-office-away-from-the-office for a lot of black Washington bureaucrats, who periodically stop by for some scotch, some often raucous talk and, occasionally, a fast poker game.”

Booker is obviously walking history. Hired at the Post after stints at the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call & Post, organs of the black press, and a Nieman fellowship, he described his two Post years as “almost as a nightmare.”

“One men’s room was open to him in the Post building,” on the newsroom floor, Howard Bray wrote in his 1980 book, “The Pillars of the Post.” “He avoided the inhospitable company cafeteria; many other eating places were closed to him. Booker’s editors kept him in the office for a long spell, but when they finally sent him out to cover a robbery the police nearly arrested him as a suspect. He had trouble getting white cabbies to take him back to his office in time to write his stories before the deadline. Booker’s copy was sometimes scrawled with racial epithets.”

Moreover, some of the stories he wanted to write about black grievances conflicted with the political priorities of publisher Philip Graham, and those were buried or spiked.

It is the Till case for which Booker’s name will forever be linked, however. Twenty-first century journalists will have a difficult time imagining a courtroom ruled by a Southern sheriff where black reporters were shunted to a less desirable part of the courtroom, denied access to the washrooms and drinking fountains, and greeted by “Mornin,’ niggahs,” as Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, wrote with Christopher Benson in the 2003 book “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America.”

A big part of the trial drama was finding � and persuading � justifiably frightened black witnesses to testify, as Booker recounted in a piece he wrote for the January 1956 issue of Nieman Report. The black reporters � 12 of them covered the trial � became part of the backstage story.

After the all-white jury failed to convict the perpetrators, it fell to Booker to help keep Till’s story alive. The FBI reopened the case in 2005, but decided that the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations had expired.

Booker made a different kind of history in Washington, where he opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau in 1955 and has remained there ever since, writing his familiar Jet “Ticker Tape” column.

“In his office Booker is never still. Tall and husky, he moves rapidly. His thick hair is almost white, and his plain shirts are brightened with bow ties. He turns down his hearing aid if he doesn’t want to be bothered. His voice, a rumble like a vacuum cleaner, reverberates through the office. As he talks, he never finishes what he starts, and that’s the style of his column, always punchy, leaving the end dangling,” Trescott wrote in 1982.

No successor has been named, a Johnson spokeswoman said.

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Jan 18th 2007
Copyright The Economist
A rare piece of good news about news-gathering in China
IN A quaint tradition the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing used to mark the end of foreign correspondents’ stints in China with a gift. There was probably no irony intended in the choice of memento: a plate emblazoned with a picture of the Great Wall. China’s most famous architectural deterrent to foreign interaction was a fitting symbol for those reporting on the country. They were hemmed in by rules banning much that, elsewhere, would seem routine. Not any more. On January 1st looser rules came into force. It is too early to cheer; but this may be an important reform to a woefully repressive system.

Before, foreign journalists had to obtain permission from the relevant local government for any reporting outside the capital. Journalists are an unruly lot and of late most have simply ignored the rule. The central government has turned a blind eye. Not, however, local governments, which would routinely expel foreign journalists on their patch, sometimes after detaining them and roughing them up first.

The new rules, however, in force until after next year’s Beijing Olympics, allow foreign reporters to go more or less where they please. The implications are wide-ranging: for the first time, the foreign press can legally cover breaking news outside Beijing, as it unfolds. To take just three run-of-the-mill events that have until now usually been out of range, these might include a protest against an official land-grab, a disastrous explosion in a coalmine or a chemical spill. The scandalous cover-ups that have blighted China’s response to SARS and avian influenza should become harder. All this, of course, depends on whether the new rules are respected.

In an early test of this, our Beijing correspondent has been investigating one outrageous cover-up: over the fate of the tens of thousands infected with HIV/AIDS during a botched blood-collection drive (see article) in Henan province. Cynicism about the government’s intentions appeared justified. Soon after arriving in an �AIDS village�, local officials turned up and told him to go away. His phone call to the foreign ministry in Beijing, however, led the local authorities to co-operate.

A sporting chance

A single swallow does not make a journalistic summer. A spate of negative stories and the government may backtrack. It is motivated not by a new-found love of freedom but by practicalities: how to manage 20,000 reporters expected for the 2008 Olympics; how to stop nasty stories about press restrictions; and, perhaps, how to rein in errant local governments. More likely than a repeal of the new rules is that local governments will shift from the arbitrary enforcement of the old ones to the use of deniable thuggery to frighten reporters and their sources. Just this month a Chinese reporter investigating an unlicensed coalmine was beaten to death. Already, at least one of our interviewees in Henan is feeling the heat.

In other ways, there is no let-up in Chinese censorship of all media, including the internet. Journalists and bloggers risk losing their jobs and freedom. This week it was reported that the Communist Party had actually tightened its grip��pre-censoring� the local press by demanding it seek permission to cover sensitive events. But the new freedoms allowed foreign reporters are at least a step forward, and evidence to support those who argued that the Olympics would force China into greater openness. Those, like this newspaper, who argued that the games would be taken as a badge of global respectability but would have next to no lasting impact on China’s viciously repressive politics would be delighted to be proved wrong.

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Copyright The New York Times
January 17, 2007

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion � they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign � a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, those programs wouldn’t use up even half our money pot.

So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.
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The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place � better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation � could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as the economist William Nordhaus has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom.

The operation itself � the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq � is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: When in 1980 I started returning to Shanghai � the city where I had attended elementary school � my relatives had to use ration coupons to purchase meager quantities of meat and cooking oil. I helped them buy bicycles with my foreign-exchange certificates at the Friendship Store, which catered only to foreign visitors and overseas Chinese. Otherwise they would have had to wait six months to obtain sufficient coupons and pay half a year’s salary to get one. The 11-story Jinjiang Hotel where I lived towered over the French Quarter. It was impossible to imagine what the city would become 26 years later.

Today, that elegant old art deco hotel is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. City residents shop at foreign-owned supermarkets that are as well-stocked as their Hong Kong or American equivalents. Buick sedans have replaced bicycles as the most coveted transportation in China. As of 2005, more are sold in China than in the United States. They are manufactured at the Shanghai General Motors plant.

But even these remarkable changes pale next to the astonishing transformation of the Communist Party. Around 1980, the party leadership admitted that three decades of orthodox Communism had produced little economic gain and constant political upheaval. In a 180-degree turn, party leaders began to push a market economy, encouraging people to get rich fast instead of striving for equality.

The initial experiment was carried out at Shenzhen, a town across the border from Hong Kong, because the party did not trust that it could keep Shanghai’s notoriously capitalist-minded people under control. It was only in 1991, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, when Beijing desperately needed to appease popular discontent, that the party leadership finally “opened” Shanghai. Once let loose, the city wasted no time.

The people of Shanghai, whether rich or poor, have always believed themselves to be more rational and efficient than their countrymen. They have always reproached the people of Beijing for wasting time talking about politics, while they themselves get things done. They are especially proud of their trademark way of doing things � the so-called haipai style. True to that tradition, the city offered generous incentives to attract foreign investment: cheap office space, low taxes and, most of all, the promise to cut red tape. Foreign firms rushed to Shanghai. In a short 15 years, the city rebounded to overtake Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta as China’s major industrial and consumer-goods production center.
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But in the rush to join the ranks of the world’s leading business centers, Shanghai’s Communist leaders have evicted tens of thousands of families and razed block after block of charming old dwellings so that foreign developers could erect high-rise office complexes, hotels and apartment buildings that would look equally appalling in Paris or New York. The intended awe-invoking effect of the showcase skyline of the Pudong financial district designed by renowned Italian, Japanese, Spanish and American architects across the Huangpu River from the old Bund is usually lost in dense layers of smog. More visible is the new affluent lifestyle, reminiscent of that enjoyed by the select group of foreigners, gangsters and corrupt government officials and supported by an invisible sea of servants, handlers, singsong girls and coolies during Shanghai’s glory days of the 1930s.

Today, as then, members of the moneyed elite � foreign businessmen, overseas Chinese investors and high party officials � reside in the best part of the old French Quarter, shop at international stores, frequent health spas in five-star hotels, and wine and dine in clubs with initiation fees as high as $10,000.

For average residents, including members of the growing middle class, this lifestyle is just a pipedream. Worse off are the city’s 3 million migrant workers (out of a population of 20 million), forced by poverty into jobs reminiscent of their service-providing predecessors escaping the civil war before 1949.

Please see the link below for the entire article.

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Copyright The New English Review (Jan. 2007)

I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn�t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there�s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry.

Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish?

My medical practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced me of the prevalence of evil. I was surprised. I had spent a number of years in countries wracked by civil wars and thereby deprived of even minimal social order, precisely the conditions in which one might expect evil to be widely committed, if only because in such situations the worst come to the fore. But nothing prepared me for the sheer malignity, the joy in doing wrong, of so many of my compatriots, when finally I returned home. Every day in my office I would hear of men who tortured women - torture is not too strong a word - or commit the basest acts of intimidation, oppression and violence, with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. I would once have taken the opening sentence of Adam Smith�s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a truism:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

But now I no longer think it is even a truth, let alone a truism. I would be more inclined to write:
How good soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the suffering of others� etc., etc.

I have seen so much, both at home and abroad, that I am not easily taken aback. When you have heard of baby-sitters who impale babies on railings in order to quieten them during a televised football match, or of men who suspend their girlfriends by their ankles from the fifteenth floor balcony, and this kind of thing daily for many years, you develop a kind of emotional carapace. One almost begins to take a pride in one�s own unsociability, which one takes to be a kind of sophistication. It is a form of spiritual pride, I suppose. Still, I nevertheless read a book that shocked me. It was about the Rwandan genocide, called A Time for Machetes, by a French journalist called Jean Hatzfeld. He interviewed several men who had taken part in the genocide, probably the most murderous in human history, at least in terms of numbers of deaths per day while it lasted, and were now imprisoned. One of them was under sentence of death.

As it happens, I had been to Rwanda only a handful of years before the genocide. I was travelling across Africa by public transport, so that I could see African life from below, as it were. I passed through several extraordinary countries, for example Equatorial Guinea, where the first (democratically elected) president after independence from Spain had been overthrown and executed by his nephew. Francisco Macias Nguema was one of the great unsung political monsters of the Twentieth Century, the century par excellence of political monsters. He kept the national treasury under his bed, had all people who wore eyeglasses executed on the grounds that they were dangerous intellectuals, introduced forced unpaid labour and killed or drove into exile a third of the population. His nephew who overthrew him, who until then had been his accomplice, was somewhat of an improvement, though still a dictator (and to this day is President): whenever he left the capital, the power supply was switched off as no longer being necessary.

I am ashamed now of the superficiality of my understanding of Rwanda of those days. I knew, of course, that Burundi (through which I had also just travelled) and Rwanda were mirror images of one another: that in Burundi it was the Tutsi minority that massacred the Hutu people, whereas in Rwanda it was the other way round, and that it was rather difficult to decide who had started this most vicious of vicious circles. But by comparison with many African countries, Rwanda seemed a well-run state, comparatively uncorrupt, its people industrious to a fault, and far from wretchedly poor, despite being one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, if not the world, with an astonishingly high natality. I knew, of course, that it was a dictatorship, the dictator being Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana, and that every Rwandan, ex officio as it were, was a member of the one party of the one-party state, the Mouvement national revolutionnaire pour le developpement (MNRD), from birth. But at the time, I was not very optimistic that multi-party politics, of the kind that the dictator was forced to introduce in 1991, would necessarily represent an improvement. In a way, I was right: the most efficient slaughter in human history took place three years later.

In that slaughter, in the space of three months, neighbours killed without compunction those with whom they had been friendly all their lives, only because they were of the different, and reputedly opposing, ethnic designation. They used no high-tech means, only clubs and machetes. Women and children were not spared; husbands of mixed marriages killed wives, and vice versa. The participation of the general population in the slaughter was its most remarkable feature: usually in mass murder, it is the state that does the killing, or rather the state�s agents, since the state is an abstraction without an existence independent of those who work for it. Hatzfeld, the African correspondent of the French left-wing newspaper, Liberation, went to interview some of the perpetrators a few years after the genocide. They were friends who took part in the murder (if that is not too slight a word for it) of 50,000 of the 59,000 Tutsis who lived in their commune.

Oddly enough, being in prison gave them the ability to talk about what they had done, if not honestly, at least with some degree of freedom. I do not know to what degree Hatzfeld, who interviewed them individually and at length, edited the transcript of his interviews, and of course we have no way of knowing how representative his witnesses are: but their testimony is perhaps the most startling ever committed to paper.

There is no real remorse for what they did, only regret that it landed them in their current predicament. They feel more sorry for themselves than for their victims, or the survivors. They are not even altogether unhappy in prison, and look forward to resuming their lives where they left off (before the genocide) as if nothing too much had really happened - or should I say been done by them? They hoped for, and expected, forgiveness on the part of the survivors, amongst whom they would have to return to live, because resentment and bitterness are useless emotions and because they (the perpetrators) had all been gripped by a collective madness. This, of course, absolved them in large part from personal responsibility.

For three months, the men would get up, have a hearty breakfast, gather together, and then go on hunting expeditions of their former neighbours, who had fled to the nearby marshes. They would hack anyone they found to death; and then, when the whistle blew in the evening for them to stop their �work� (they regarded it as such), they returned home, had a quick wash, had dinner and socialised in a jolly way over a few beers. Their wives would be - for the most part, though not universally - content, because Tutsi property was thoroughly looted, and distributed according to the individual efficiency and ruthlessness of the killers. One of the most haunting things in this book, if it is possible to pick anything out in particular, is that many of the victims did not so much as cry out when caught by the murderous genocidaires: they died in complete silence, as if speech and the human voice were now completely worthless, redundant, beside the point. I have often wondered why the people went into the gas chambers silently, without fighting back, but I suppose that when you witness absolute human evil committed by the people with whom you once lived, and who, at least metaphysically, are just like you, you see no point in the struggle for existence. Non-existence, perhaps, seems preferable to existence.

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were �earning� by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

Let us not console ourselves with the thought that these were unsophisticated Africans, without the mental capacity to know better: in short, mere savages. Again, I do not know how much Hatzfeld has edited their words, but his perpetrator interlocutors seem to me more articulate than most of the people with whom I have had to deal in Britain as patients over the last decade and a half. Indeed, their language occasionally becomes poetic: though poetic language in this circumstance is mere euphemism.

Besides, the few comments of the survivors, mostly women, that Hatzfeld inserts into the text, are of considerable moral and intellectual sophistication, and certainly not those of unreflecting primitives with few powers of cerebration. Here is Edith, a Tutsi schoolteacher, on the question of forgiveness:
‘I know that all the Hutus who killed so calmly cannot be sincere when they beg pardon, even of the Lord. [Many now pray fervently: the Rwandans were fervently religious long before the genocide.] But me, I am ready to forgive. It is not a denial of the harm they did, not a betrayal of the Tutsis, not an easy way out. It is so that I will not suffer my whole life asking myself why they tried to cut me. [Cut is the euphemism used by victim and perpetrator alike for �kill,� since most of the death was dealt with a machete.] I do not want to live in remorse and fear from being Tutsi. Of I do not forgive them, it is I alone who suffers and frets and cannot sleep� I yearn for peace in my body. I really must find tranquillity. I have to sweep fear far away from me, even if I do not believe their soothing words.’

Francine, a Tutsi farm woman and shopkeeper, on the other hand, says this:
‘Sometimes, when I sit alone in a chair on my veranda, I imagine this possibility: one far-off day, a local man comes slowly up to me and says, �Bonjour, Francine, I have come tospeak to you. So, I am the one who cut your mama and your little sisters. I want to ask your forgiveness.� Well, to that person I cannot reply anything good. A man may ask for forgiveness if he has one Primus [beer] too many and then beats his wife. But if he has worked at killing for a whole month, even on Sundays, whatever can he hope to be forgiven for? We must simply go back to living, since life has so decided� We shall return to drawing water together, to exchanging neighbourly words, to selling grain to one another. In twenty years, fifty years, there will perhaps be boys and girls who will learn about the genocide in books. For us, though, it is impossible to forgive.’

No, it is impossible to console ourselves with the thought that the Rwandans are so different from us that they and their experiences have nothing to say to us. Edith and Francine are, indeed, more dignified, more articulate, more intelligently reflective, than most of the victims of small-scale evil in an English slum whom I have met.

This book penetrates deeper into the heart of evil than any other I have ever read. The author makes no claims for his work: he is still mystified by it himself. But if you want to know what depths man can sink to - an important thing to know, when your argument is that things are so bad that they cannot get any worse, so prudence is unnecessary - read this book. At the very least, it will put your worries into perspective.

A TIME FOR MACHETES, Jean Hatzfeld, Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Posted at 1:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

The author of a new book about gender in Japan sets aside Western stereotypes and talks about how ordinary women are fueling a feminist revolution that’s transforming the country.

Jan. 17, 2007 | The American media loves Japanese women, especially when they’re dressed in kimonos or school uniforms, or covered head to toe in brand names. But according to Veronica Chambers, a journalist, a novelist and the author of “Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation,” those stylish stereotypes distract us from the real story. Chambers claims that there’s a major cultural power shift taking place in Japan — and it’s ordinary working women who are shaking things up.

Chambers first sensed the tremors of revolution when she visited Japan on a media fellowship in 2000; her interest piqued, she set out to find enterprising Japanese women who were bucking the corporate system and creating financial and personal success on their own terms. The task turned out to be harder than she expected — not because the women didn’t exist (to the contrary) but because they didn’t think their stories were worth sharing with each other — or with nosy journalists.

Chambers says she started to feel like one of the Western men of the 19th century who were obsessed with the myth of the exotic Japanese female. But instead of following the flash of red lips or the clatter of geta sandals down the alleyways of Gion, Chambers tracked groundbreaking businesswomen and iconoclastic entrepreneurs to their offices and homes. She spent three years discussing ideas of autonomy and ambition with more than 74 women, including young hipsters like a hip-hop DJ and an extreme snowboarder; barrier breakers like a senior executive at Canon and an openly gay Osaka assemblywoman; and dozens of small-business owners, artists and creative types. Through her interviews, Chambers discovered that feminism is alive and even thriving in Japan — albeit in a way that might seem a little, well, foreign to American women. And as American women continue to strive for true equality in the workplace, the White House and beyond, she hopes it may be helpful to hear how our counterparts across the globe — who don’t have mandatory maternity laws, who have fewer female representatives in government than most other industrialized nations and who earn half of what men do — are doing.

Salon spoke to Chambers about “empowered” office ladies, fed-up salarymen, and power-suited female execs who shamelessly play geisha on weekends.

When did you first realize “regular” Japanese women were in the middle of a major cultural shift?

The year I was in Japan for my fellowship was the year of the yamamba girl. Those were the girls with the extremely suntanned faces, the platform shoes and the bleached-blond hair. Also, the subways were filled with these signs that said “No Touching,” because there was a big problem with girls being groped on the trains. I read in newspapers that part of the reason some of the girls adopted yamamba dress was to make themselves unappealing to Japanese businessmen. I felt like something really interesting was going on. It wasn’t exactly “feminism,” but I was hearing girls and women talk about wanting things to be different. I was curious about how women in Japan were changing, and I wanted to look beyond the shop-happy girls in Omotesando, the yamamba girls in Roppongi, the street-fashion girls in Harajuku, and find three-dimensional women doing interesting and pioneering things.

How did you go about finding them?

I started going to the newsstand and picking up magazines and newspapers that looked like they had profiles or stories about women. I’d come back to the U.S., pay to get these articles translated, then fax the translations [about] women who seemed interesting to the Japan Society, with requests for them to help me find them. My contacts at the Foreign Press Center in Japan were almost all women. I’d usually bring a translator with me on interviews, and the women from the Foreign Press Center would say to me, “Can I come with you? I’ve always wanted to meet someone like this.”

Now, these are the people who set up press conferences when Hillary Clinton or Sofia Coppola comes to Japan — they’re not easily impressed. But you don’t see a lot of People magazine-type stories or Oprah segments in Japan about regular people doing inspiring things. So the women at the center were really excited to interact with these Japanese women, and that made me feel like I was on the right track.

Just about every major Japanese company is filled with “office ladies,” who are uniformed secretaries and administrative assistants. Why is it so hard for them to advance up the corporate ladder?

When I’d go to meetings at companies, I’d meet almost all men. There’d be one woman, maybe — and she’d be pouring tea. Even at the copier giant, Canon, all the women who work at the front desk wear pink blouses, pink skirts, white gloves. It’s like Ren�e Zellweger in that movie “Down With Love.”

When I interviewed Canon’s Masako Nara, one of the few women in Japan who is a senior executive at a traditional company, she didn’t even acknowledge these women. Here in the U.S. it’s understood that you’ve got to get on the good side of the secretaries and the receptionists, because they tell you everything that’s going on. But there it felt like a huge divide between Masako and her female subordinates. Masako later told me that once she got on the corporate track, another woman — her mentor — warned her to never pour tea. “Once you do,” said the woman, “the men in the office associate you with the women in pink who pour tea; they’ll think that’s all you can do. You’ll never gain back their respect.”

If the few women who are making strides in corporate Japan aren’t lending a hand to those below them, who is?

It’s true that Masako Nara wasn’t really feeling the sister-woman thing. She was at a point in her career where she was realizing that she had seven or eight years left to make a mark on the company, and then she was just going to be waiting out retirement. For her, making her mark meant bringing about innovation, it meant becoming powerful — it didn’t necessarily mean bringing in more women. But the fact that she is a woman in a high-level position at a big company like Canon means something, and because she’s really good at her job, it will make it easier for the next woman who comes along.

There will always be individuals slipping in the door; the question is, how do you open the door wider so that more women can participate? When Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian head of Nissan, announced in late 2005 that he was going to double the percentage of women in the company’s Japanese sales force from 5 to 10 percent, people said it wasn’t a big deal. But at car companies like Honda and Nissan, you have to do all the jobs — including selling cars — before you can become a V.P. So Ghosn is actually giving a lot of female Nissan employees an opportunity they didn’t have before. But it was telling that it took a foreigner to make that decision.

Is there even a female equivalent for the Japanese word “salaryman”?

No. But then again, who wants to be a traditional salaryman? They work long, grueling hours and have little time to spend with their families.

Here’s the classic Japanese situation: A salaryman puts in for his vacation, which he’s entitled to. The dedicated thing to do is to show up at work on the first day he’s supposed to be out. His supervisor sees him and says, “What are you doing here?! Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?” The salaryman replies, “I was, but I have too much work to do!” Another example: It’s rare for salarymen to have a lunch hour or to go out for a big expense-account lunch. They usually take about 15 minutes to slurp noodles at the train station, or they eat quickly at their desks. At lunchtime, restaurants are all full of nicely dressed Japanese women — no men.

How does the presence of modern women in the office affect the way men behave?

The women tend to take their vacations, and their sick days too. Men see their female co-workers taking advantage of their vacation time, and enjoying long, leisurely lunches, and they think, “Hey, the world didn’t fall apart while they were gone. And besides, I’m entitled to this, too!” The men start taking their vacations; they start going out to a real lunch. Their world opens up a little.

The women you talked to didn’t seem negative or bitter about their position, though. One woman even said that being an office lady can be empowering. What did she mean by that?

If a Japanese man leaves a company, it’s not like here, where you can quit and find a new job at the same level or even higher. It’s a huge risk. Even though the financial bubble has burst in Japan and lifetime employment there isn’t what it used to be, the fact is that most people still spend their lives at one company. But so few women really have a chance within corporate Japan; they’re not on the fast track at a major company, so they can afford to leave and start their own businesses, or to take a couple of years off from work to travel and study different languages.

If Japanese women aren’t clawing their way to the top in the traditional sense, what are they doing instead?

There are more women entrepreneurs than men. They’re exploring new paths to economic and personal fulfillment — like Makiko Fujino, who ran for office after years of being a television chef and won a seat in the Diet, and Junko Asazuma, who became an internationally ranked snowboarder after spending years as a “freeter,” or part-time worker.

What about working moms? You write that in Japan, maternity leave isn’t that common, and neither are nannies or day-care centers. How on earth do Japanese women balance work and family?

You have to really love your job to go back to work after having a kid, and there aren’t many women in corporate Japan who love their jobs. So, once they get married and pregnant, most women simply quit. The women who do make it to the upper levels at corporate companies tend not to have kids. For example, Masako Nara was divorced, and didn’t have any children. It’s not that there’s a stigma against working women or mommy executives, it’s just that there aren’t that many of them. It will be the younger generation that will have to test that out.

What kinds of messages about work, family and home are young Japanese women getting from their mothers?

Out of the 75 women I interviewed, there were five, maybe 10, women whose moms were not housewives. If the family had a business or owned a farm, the mother might work, but for the most part, if you grew up in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s in Japan, your mom stayed at home. They’re now telling their daughters, “I was trapped by the money. If I had the financial means now, if I knew what to do with myself, I’d get a divorce. Don’t let yourself get into this situation.”

Japanese women are delaying marriage and not having as many kids — if any — and it’s because they got smart. They hear this stuff from their moms, And they’re like, “Once you get married and have kids, you’re locked into an 18-year job.” If you can delay that, then you can travel, you can learn languages, you can make your own money, do your own thing. So there’s actually this worldliness and sophistication that you see in young, single working women.

For the complete interview, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated January 19, 2007

The U.S. government’s search for classified evidence of Japanese war

crimes finds many documents scattered throughout its holdings

Whether it is the hunt for the last surviving perpetrators of the

Holocaust, the restitution of looted artworks, or new evidence of the

complicity of governments in that immense crime against humanity by

Germany and its allies, U.S. public interest in European war crimes has

not flagged since the end of World War II.

But the war crimes committed by Japan � including biological warfare,

human experimentation, and massacres � have attracted much less attention

in the six decades since the war’s conclusion, though events such as the

publication of Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten

Holocaust of World War II in 1997 created spikes in public interest.

Indeed, when the U.S. Congress created a commission to find and declassify records related to World War II war crimes still held by the United States

in 1998, the bill was explicitly titled the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure

Act. Only a new bill passed in 2000 formally extended the efforts of that

commission � renamed as the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial

Government Records Interagency Working Group (or IWG) � to Japan’s war

crimes.

“As in World War II,” says Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist at the

National Archives who worked on the project, “we first tackled Germany and

then Japan.”

Since 1999, the working group has released eight million pages of

previously classified documents on Nazi crimes. But this week, the group

will release 100,000 pages of newly declassified documents related to

Japanese war crimes, along with a new guide to U.S.-held materials on that

topic. (A book of introductory essays, Researching Japanese War Crimes,

will accompany the release.)

“Japanese war crimes have not received the intense scrutiny from the

public or from scholars that has been given to Nazi materials,” says Allen

Weinstein, archivist of the United States and chairman of the working

group.

The tremendous disparity in the amounts of material turned over has raised

eyebrows. Some scholars have wondered if the U.S. government retains files

on its complicity in saving Japanese war criminals. Other researchers

question why files captured by the United States were returned to Japan

after the war.

Members and staff of the working group hope that the new material puts

many questions to rest. For one thing, they note that much of the relevant

material on Japanese war crimes has already been declassified, but is

scattered widely.

Yet scholars also say the new material helps fill holes in understanding

the war in the Pacific as a whole.

“There’s a huge gap between what we know about the European theater and

the Asian theater,” says Carol Gluck, a professor of history at Columbia

University. “Any filling of that gap with primary materials, rather than

conjecture and speculation, is critical.”

Destroy and Search

Part of the gap in the knowledge of Japan’s war crimes is the result of that nation’s wholesale destruction of documents.

In the case of Germany, the effective seizure of documents from the Nazis by the Allies at the end of the war frustrated efforts to destroy them.

Efforts to recover Japanese documents were less successful.

Edward Drea, who recently retired as the chief of the research and

analysis division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, writes in an essay introducing the working group’s new work on Japan that many key records were destroyed by Japanese authorities “between the announcement of a cease-fire on August 12, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28.”

That destruction was so immense that many copies of Japan’s wartime cables now exist only in translated American records. “Because the United States was able to decrypt so much of the Japanese military communications,” he says in an interview, “a great number of those documents exist only in English.”

Ms. Gluck says that inattention by American military and intelligence

officials to details of atrocities also played a role. The new documents, she says, help trace “the disparity of interest on the part of the United States in the closing months of the war and immediately after in the details of the Japanese wartime operations in Manchuria and China.” Where the Allies made documentation of the Holocaust a priority in Europe, she says, agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, did not take similarly intensive action

when operating in Manchuria and elsewhere in Asia.

Mr. Bradsher also notes that some crimes took precedence over others. Gen.

Douglas A. MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific, took a

personal interest in crimes related to the Philippines and to American

captives. “MacArthur was personally really upset about the Filipino people

and U.S. prisoners of war,” he says. “He put the word out to gather

information, and we started to document it, as did the Australians.”

Ms. Gluck says that the lack of documents and the lesser degree of

interest in war crimes in Asia underscore the point that, as far as the

war went, “we knew less about Asia, less about the Pacific. All the way

through we knew less � from the beginning of the war to the end. We didn’t

care then. We do now. And not to blame us for not caring, but it explains

why we don’t have these documents.”

Hiding in the Open

Scholars hope that newly released U.S. files will shed new light on

particularly contentious issues, including the operations of Japan’s

notorious biological warfare group, Unit 731. That unit conducted various

experiments during the war on live subjects, including germ warfare,

vivisection, and hypothermia. Scholars’ hopes were also raised by the fact

that Unit 731’s commander, Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, evaded prosecution for

his crimes and apparently cut a deal with U.S. authorities in exchange for

data gathered through his crimes.

Daqing Yang, an associate professor of history and international relations

at George Washington University, writes in an essay included in

Researching Japanese War Crimes that both Lt. Gen. Ishii’s deal and his

data remain partial mysteries. “What happened to the data produced by Unit

731 remains largely unanswered,” Mr. Yang writes.

Those involved in the project say that some records, including documents

concerning Unit 731, have not been included in the new batch of releases

because they have already been declassified.

In his introduction to the volume, Mr. Drea writes that “during the search

for classified records, it soon became apparent that historians,

researchers, and concerned parties have not fully exploited the many

records about Japanese war crimes previously declassified and made

available at the National Archives.” Other records about Unit 731, he

adds, were at the Library of Congress.

So the creation of a guide by Mr. Bradsher and other colleagues to locate

such materials and make them more accessible became a high priority. (The

guide is included as a CD-ROM with Researching Japanese War Crimes.)

“Many Japanese intellectuals believe that the United States still has vast

amounts of classified material,” says Mr. Drea. “In point of fact, no such

materials were found. Most of the Ishii material, for instance, that we

found was in open sources, already declassified, albeit scattered about.”

Returning Records

Another nagging question raised by the search for records was the American

decision to return many captured documents to Japan in the 1950s.

This issue was reignited by Chang’s book on Nanjing, in which the author

(now deceased) accused the United States of returning key records to Japan

without keeping copies.

Mr. Drea praises Chang’s book as “very good at raising public

consciousness and awareness of Japanese crimes in China.” But, he

continues, “her allegations that the U.S. government simply returned

documents to the Japanese under some sort of Japanese government pressure

does not stand up under scrutiny.”

Indeed, Mr. Bradsher’s detailed essay on the return of the records in the

new book concludes that “the records were thoroughly exploited for war

crimes purposes … and also for historical and intelligence purposes

prior to their return to Japan. There is virtually no likelihood that

captured Japanese records relating directly to war crimes were returned to

Japan without having been copied or explored.”

In an interview, Mr. Bradsher says that “I turned myself into a historian

and a detective” to follow the various twists and turns of the saga. He

also observes that “traditionally, in the archival field, captured records

are eventually returned to their country of origin.”

Worth the Effort?

The release of the documents may not satisfy all critics, says Mr. Yang.

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he writes that “for skeptics, I

doubt this book/project will completely eliminate their doubts. The

Japanese government has not come out and said: ‘We’ve opened every file

returned from the U.S.’; nor has the U.S. government said they’ve opened

every file on such individuals or fully accounted for the whereabouts of

some Unit 731-related files.”

“But on the whole,” he concludes, “I think this project has gone a long

way toward opening the U.S. side of the documents.”

Mr. Drea admits to some disappointment that smoking guns on Japanese war

crimes did not turn up, especially when compared with documents on Nazi

crimes that have led to new conclusions on what American officials knew

about the Holocaust.

“To be honest, I’d hoped we’d find something,” Mr. Drea says. “That’s the

historian’s dream: fresh information that illuminates a dark problem. It

just wasn’t there.”

Nonetheless, scholars say that the material has furthered study in other

areas. An essay in the new volume by Michael Petersen, a working-group

staff member, examines conflicts between Army intelligence officials and

the fledgling CIA in postwar Japan, including the use of gangsters and war

criminals as informants.

Ms. Gluck says that such work demonstrates the utility of poking around in

the files. The conflict described by Mr. Peterson, she observes, “is not

directly concerned with Japanese war crimes, but it’s really useful and

really helpful and adds to what we already know about the conflicts

between these intelligence services, which were huge.”

As the working group’s activities wind down, Mr. Weinstein says he is

satisfied with the “labor of devotion” that has characterized the work on

Japanese war crimes.

“The things that have been revealed have been more than adequate to

justify the cost,” he says. “I feel privileged to have been a part of it.”

Posted at 9:19 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

[from the January 29, 2007 issue]

As the November 7 election approached, Jon Tester was getting hit with the full force of Karl Rove’s still considerable arsenal. The White House political czar had decided that the way to maintain Republican control of the Senate was to concentrate GOP resources on traditionally “red” states like Montana, where Tester, an organic farmer and state senator, was mounting a populist campaign against scandal-plagued Republican incumbent Conrad Burns. The airwaves filled with attack ads that savaged the Democrat for criticizing the Patriot Act and declared, “Tester is backed by radicals.” Former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge described Tester’s championship of civil liberties as “unfathomable, almost inexplicable.” Vice President Cheney arrived to paint the Burns-Tester race as a test of “whether this government will remain strong and resolute on the war on terror or falls into confusion, doubts and indecision.” President Bush, who carried Montana by twenty points in 2004, showed up to close the deal, as some pundits began to predict a Burns comeback.

Tester, a darling of liberal bloggers, was not going to be saved by flaming posts now. He needed a trusted Montana voice, or better yet a chorus of voices, to come to his defense. As election day approached, he got it. The daily newspapers of the Big Sky State came out, one after another, with endorsements of the challenger. Conrad Burns may have had the President and the Vice President singing his praises, but the Helena Independent Record, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the Great Falls Tribune, the Montana Standard and the Billings Gazette were telling Montana voters that Jon Tester was one of their own, and that he belonged in the Senate. The Tester camp scrambled on the last Sunday of the campaign to get the word out, sending e-mails that urged supporters to print out a hastily assembled leaflet highlighting the endorsements to pass along to friends, slip under doors and post on grocery store bulletin boards.

Two days later, Tester bested Burns by about 2,800 votes. How did Tester beat back the full-court press of the Bush White House? Before the election, a local conservative commentator had tried to argue that the newspaper endorsements were no more influential than “visits of luminaries or stars or political mucky-mucks coming in from the national scene,” while a prince of the blogosphere, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, had posted his prediction that the hometown endorsements would still carry weight in Montana. Daily Kos was right. When the votes were counted, it could fairly be argued—and indeed it was—that endorsements from local papers had tipped the seat to Tester and the Senate to the Democrats.

Newspapers may be the dinosaurs of America’s new-media age, hulking behemoths that cost too much to prepare and distribute and that cannot seem to attract young—or even middle-aged—readers in the numbers needed to survive. They may well have entered the death spiral that Philip Meyer, in his recent book The Vanishing Newspaper, predicts will conclude one day in 2043 as the last reader throws aside the final copy of a newspaper. But, as the Tester win illustrates, the dinosaurs still have enough life in them to guide—and perhaps even define—our politics.

Especially at the local and state levels, where the fundamental fights for control of a nation less red and blue than complexly purple play out, daily newspapers remain essential arbiters of what passes for news and what Americans think about it. For all the talk about television’s dominant role in campaigns (less and less because of its importance as a source of news for most Americans, more and more because of campaign commercials) and all the new attention to the Internet, newspapers for the most part continue to establish the parameters of what gets covered and how. Moreover, neither broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the level of credibility that newspapers enjoy. So candidates for the House, the Senate and even the White House still troop into old gray buildings in Denver and Omaha, Louisville and Boston, Concord and Des Moines in search of a forum where they can talk with reporters and editors about issues and where those conversations will, they hope, be distilled into articles and editorials that set so much of the agenda for the political debate at the local, state and national levels.

Thus, while George W. Bush may say he rarely reads newspapers, he sat down in 2000 and 2004 to talk with individual newspaper publishers and editors in hopes of winning the support of publications in such battleground states as Pennsylvania and Ohio. So did Al Gore and John Kerry. And Illinois Senator Barack Obama, a newspaper junkie, is busily making the rounds as he ponders a bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The attention on news pages and support on editorial pages that newspapers can provide is even more important for candidates trying to elbow their way into the competition by raising new issues.

Former Senator John Edwards learned this three years ago, after a Des Moines Register endorsement focused on his ideas about the disturbing development of “two Americas” and ignited his campaign in Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses. “We were talking about issues, such as poverty, that didn’t necessarily lend themselves to soundbites,” explained Edwards, who said his campaign, which eventually finished a solid second in the caucuses, experienced a “massive upsurge” after receiving the endorsement. “When a newspaper that people know says, ‘Hey, people should be paying attention to what this guy is saying,’ it makes a huge difference.”

And it’s not only in the heat of a campaign that newspapers help set the agenda. Consider, for example, the Chicago Tribune’s relentless focus on the injustice of the death penalty, which led a Republican governor to declare a moratorium on executions in Illinois six years ago and, ultimately, to clear death row. Ground-breaking revelations regarding the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida were uncovered by the Orlando Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. And while there is no question that bloggers raised the alarm about Diebold’s dubious voting machines before the 2004 election, newspapers were dramatically more aggressive in picking up on concerns about paperless ballots and election abuses than TV networks or local stations during the 2006 campaign.

This is not to suggest that most newspapers do their journalism as well or as wisely as they should, nor that the role of newspapers is still as vital as it was in the 1950s, when President Dwight Eisenhower, worried about the financial difficulties of the New York Herald Tribune, personally wrote millionaire John Hay Whitney and urged him to take charge of the publication because, he argued, it had a “great and valuable function to perform for the future of America.” But newspapers remain necessary, at least for now. Unfortunately, necessity does not translate to the sort of profits that contemporary newspaper owners demand—nor to any assurance of the long-term survival of journalism as we know and need it.

Crises like that of the Herald Tribune a half-century ago are now the norm rather than the exception. The newspaper industry is in trouble. Big trouble. In 1950 newspapers in the United States had a weekday circulation of 54 million. The circulation figures are roughly the same today, but the number of households has more than doubled. The Los Angeles Times’s daily circulation was down 8 percent in a single six-month period in 2006, while the Philadelphia Inquirer was down 7.5 percent, the Boston Globe 6.7 percent, the New York Times 3.5 percent and the Washington Post 3.3 percent.

With drops in circulation have come declines in revenues—not because subscriptions provide all that much money but because media companies collect money from advertisers based on the number of homes they reach. Big advertisers long ago began shifting from the printed page to television, but now classified advertising, the meat-and-potatoes of local and regional daily newspapers, has begun migrating at dramatic speed to websites like craigslist.

What’s happening is not just a temporary downturn. From 1990, when newspaper circulation peaked at 62.3 million, readership has been in steady decline. That might lead some to the casual conclusion that the Internet is the problem. But as veteran journalist and media writer Ben Compaine explains, “The heyday of newspapers was in the late nineteenth century, as expanding literacy combined with the development of the steam-driven rotary press, a market economy and wood pulp-based newsprint to make the mass-circulation penny press possible. From the mid-1800s to the 1920s, newspapers were the only mass-circulation daily news and information medium in the media barnyard. That changed with radio. It accelerated with television. The Internet is just the latest information technology that has added to the choices that consumers and advertisers have for obtaining and creating information.” All true, but there is powerful evidence that the breaking point for newspapers may finally be coming.

Individual owners and powerful families—who often, though by no means always, settled for reasonable profits in return for the ego boost that went with putting out a quality newspaper—are exiting the stage. Increasingly newspapers are owned by the shareholders of national chains, who do not even know—let alone care about—the names of the papers from which they demand profit margins that are generally twice the average for other industries. Where a local family might have grudgingly accepted a weak quarter and a downturn in revenues, shareholders greet any softness on the bottom line with demands for draconian cuts. If a paper’s current managers are unwilling to make them, investors look for more ruthless managers. Investors forced the breakup and sale, in 2006, of the venerable Knight Ridder chain, which owned Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News and the Miami Herald. Similar pressures have forced the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Hartford Courant and several Florida dailies, to put itself on the block.

For the complete article please see the link below.

Posted at 11:48 PM · Comments (0)

In the “sic” category…

(Xinhua)
2006-08-25

The People’s Court of Yinan County, in east China’s Shandong Province, Thursday sentenced Chen Guangcheng to four years and three months in prison on charges of willfully damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.

The sentence was passed in a public court session.

Xinhua was provided with a document by the court that provided only the following details of the proceedings.

The document says, Chen was upset with workers who were sent to carry out poverty-relief programs in East Shigu Village, in Shuanghou Town of Yinan County.

It says on February 5, 2006, Chen (who is known to be blind) rushed to the office of the village committee and damaged doors and windows. The court document says Chen was given guidance by his wife Li Weijing and others. Following this incident, the court document says Chen then went to the home of Chen Guangyu and instigated Chen Guanghe, Chen Guangdong and Chen Gengjiang to damage and smash cars belonging to the Shuanghou Police Station and the town government.

The court document does not indicate if any of the other individuals had been charged or convicted.

The court document says Chen Guanghe and Chen Guangdong also instigated other villagers to damage government cars, and they chased and beat officials from the town government.

Using clubs and stones, the mob smashed the windows of three cars from the police station and the town government, overturned the cars in roadside ditches, and beat police officers from the Police Bureau of the county, according to the document.

It goes on to say that on the evening of March 11, Chen Guangyu, who was then drunk, claimed he was beaten by some people, and he attacked the office of the village committee and damaged things in the office.

Later, at about 6:00 pm, according to the document, Chen Guangcheng organized a group of people, including Chen Guangyu, Chen Guangjun and Yuan Weijing, under the excuse of seeking justice for Chen Guangyu. They interrupted traffic in the Yinghou Village section of the National Highway 205.

The document says Chen Guangcheng stood in the middle of the road to stop vehicles and directed the mob, including Chen Guangjun and Chen Guangyu to yell out and stop traffic.

It goes on that police arrived to reopen the road, and to try to persuade Chen Guangcheng to desist from leading the mob and stopping the traffic. Chen refused to comply and continued to direct the mob to block vehicles.

The document says the mob stopped the traffic for three hours and delayed more than 290 vehicles, including an ambulance carrying a pregnant woman to hospital.

The court document says Chen’s rights were completely protected, and his two lawyers expressed their views in full.

Comments follow

Posted at 11:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist
Jan 11th 2007

China is choking on its success at attracting the world’s factories. That has handed its Asian neighbours a big opportunity

AS A vote of confidence in Vietnam, the decision by Intel early in 2006 to spend $350m building a new factory in the emerging South-East Asian economy was hard to beat. And yet, before the year was out, the American chipmaker went further and raised its investment to $1 billion. In eight months Intel had committed as much money to Vietnam as it had to China in the previous ten years.

In the Johor region of Malaysia, another global firm, Flextronics, has fired up the production lines of a new M$400m ($110m) factory to make computer printers for another American firm, Hewlett-Packard. One of the largest contract electronics manufacturers, Flextronics already has vast facilities in China. But it chose Malaysia as the site for its latest investment.
Further east, in Indonesia, Yue Yuen, a Hong Kong-based shoemaker, has been ramping up its output of trainers and casual footwear for brands like Nike and Adidas. Production is increasing at the firm’s factories in China and Vietnam too, but output in Indonesia is growing the fastest.

Although all three companies had different reasons for their decisions, the outcome was the same: they chose to avoid China’s thundering economy in order to put their factories elsewhere in Asia. These companies are not alone. In the calculus of costs, risks, customers and logistics that goes into building global operations, an increasing number of firms are coming to the conclusion that China is not necessarily the best place to make things.

With its seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour and the rapid acquisition of technological prowess, China appears to be unstoppable. Indeed, the perception is that every factory closing in America or Europe is destined to reopen in China. Many have, helping China’s share of the world’s exported goods to triple to 7.3% between 1993 and 2005. In comparison, every member of the G8 group of rich nations, with the exception of Russia, saw its share fall. It is a similar story with manufacturing output. Whereas China doubled its share of global production to almost 7% in the decade to 2003, most of the G8 saw their shares fall. Interestingly, only the United States and Canada saw their shares rise�with just over a quarter between them. Most things nowadays might seem to be made in China, but North America remains the true workshop of the world.

Yet it is not only China that is booming as a base for low-cost production. Manufacturing and exports are growing rapidly in other parts of Asia (see chart 1). Taken together, South Korea, Taiwan, India and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) increased their share of global manufacturing from less than 7% to more than 9% in the decade to 2003. Exports also rose across the board. China is the emerging giant, but the investments that are being diverted away from the Middle Kingdom present the rest of Asia with a huge opportunity to become manufacturing hubs in their own right. The question is whether they can seize it.
Too far, too expensive
Scott Brixen, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, a Hong Kong-based investment bank, gives two big reasons why China has not found itself at the top of the list for some new factories: �Rising costs and a natural desire by companies for diversification.�

So far, most industrial development in China has taken place in the country’s eastern coastal regions, particularly around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong. But costs in these centres are now rising sharply. Office rents are soaring, industrial land is in short supply and utility costs are climbing. Most significant of all are rocketing wages. In spite of the mass migration of workers from China’s vast interior to the coast, pay for factory workers has been rising at double-digit rates for several years. For managers, the situation is worse still.

�China has become a victim of its own success,� sighs Peter Tan, president and managing director of Flextronics in Asia. He finds it especially hard to hire and retain technical staff, ranging from finance directors to managers versed in international production techniques such as �six sigma� and �lean manufacturing�. There are not enough qualified workers to go around, causing rampant poaching and extremely fast wage inflation. �China is definitely not the cheapest place to produce any more,� he says.

An analysis of labour rates across Asia by CLSA’s Mr Brixen supports that view. Average wages for a factory worker, combined with social security costs, came to almost $350 a month in Shanghai in 2005 and almost $250 a month in Shenzhen. By comparison, monthly wages were less than $200 in Manila, around $150 in Bangkok and just over $100 in Batam in Indonesia. Although the productivity of Chinese workers is rising, in many industries it is not keeping pace with wages.

One solution is for companies to move inland where many costs are much lower than on China’s heavily developed coastline. Indeed, the government has been promoting such a policy since 2000, to spread the benefits of development to China’s poor interior. Domestic Chinese companies have led the charge into the hinterland and a small, but growing, number of foreign firms have followed them.

Intel is one. In 2004 it decided to invest $525m in a new plant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to complement its existing factories on the coast in Shanghai, 1,600km (994 miles) away. Brian Krzanich, general manager of Intel’s test and assembly business, says the company’s decision was based on cost. The government was keen to promote its �go west� policy, so it offered Intel generous incentives. Needless to say, being so far inland raises transport costs for exporters. But Mr Krzanich reckons there are compensations, because labour and utilities are much cheaper than on the coast.

But not everyone is convinced. At Flextronics, Mr Tan’s China factories are all located in eastern coastal provinces. �We have no interest in going west,� he says, because it is too expensive to get products to America and Europe from there. Other observers add that the shortage of management talent inland is even greater than on the coast. And it is not easy persuading expatriate workers to take their families to places like Chongqing and Chengdu, where foreign companions and international schools are thin on the ground. So many firms decide they would rather invest elsewhere in Asia.

Costs are only part of the equation. Just as important is diversification. Having already moved a big chunk of their production to China, many firms are reluctant to put any more of their eggs in the same basket. A research report written last year by the Japan External Trade Organisation concluded: �Due to the country’s increasing business risks and rising labour costs…Japanese firms employing a �China-plus-one� strategy�in which they invest in China and another country, namely in ASEAN�should consider placing more emphasis on the �plus one� country.�

Japanese companies may be particularly wary, but such nervousness is now shared by managers from other countries. Some of their firms are concerned about growing unrest in China as swathes of the country’s rural population, particularly in the west, fall behind the thriving east. Official figures record 87,000 incidences of rioting and social disturbance in 2005, much of it following the forced appropriation of farmers’ land in the name of development. The actual number of cases of civil unrest could be far larger.

Equally important are concerns about growing protectionism. The United States and the European Union are becoming more assertive in holding China to account over its World Trade Organisation obligations. Companies worry that this could lead to sudden interruptions to trade.

Ask Yue Yuen, the world’s largest contract shoe manufacturer. The company produces more than 180m shoes a year from factories in China, Vietnam and Indonesia, most of them bound for America and Europe. So when the European Union imposed anti-dumping duties in October 2006 on leather shoes imported from China and Vietnam, the firm was quick to raise its production in Indonesia. �Trade relations with other nations and the tariff and quota situation are vital considerations for where we invest,� says Terry Ip, a spokesman for the company.

So too are wage rates. With each shoe passing through up to 200 pairs of hands on the production line, Yue Yuen’s operations are highly labour-intensive. In China the firm is experiencing rapid wage inflation. Although this is partly offset by productivity improvements which mean that overall unit labour costs are rising by 8% a year. Pay for factory workers is rising in Vietnam and Indonesia too, notes Mr Ip, but labour costs there are as much as 35% lower than in coastal China.

Another company with a China-plus-one strategy is Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing retailer. Last year it decided to reduce the share of clothes it sources in China from 90% to 60% as a hedging strategy against future trade disputes. New factories in Cambodia and Vietnam will make up the shortfall. Intel, with facilities in Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and China, is creating a diversified portfolio also.
Keeping secrets
China also has other risks, notably a lack of protection for intellectual property rights. Stories abound of foreign investors finding local companies churning out identical goods to their own, but under a different brand. For that reason a number of companies in industries such as medical devices have instead set up shop in Singapore. Often these products are capital-intensive, so labour costs are less important than strong intellectual property laws. Several chemical companies have even built facilities in Singapore with the intention of shipping most of their products to China. Feedstock is more easily available in Singapore, but just as important is confidence that valuable industrial processes will not be stolen…

Managers also worry about the rising value of the Chinese currency. Although nobody expects sudden leaps, the yuan does appear to be on a steadily upward trajectory, having risen by a further 4% against the dollar since the government first revalued the currency by 2.1% in July 2005. Pundits expect it will continue to rise by around 5% in the year ahead, which will do little to bolster China’s attractiveness for export-based manufacturing.

Of course, cost and risk are not the only considerations in choosing where to put a factory. The quality of a country’s infrastructure, the presence of suppliers and the size of the local market all count… For such reasons, China will remain an attractive place to invest.

Kumar Bhattacharyya, a professor of manufacturing at Britain’s University of Warwick, believes the lure of China’s burgeoning domestic market will outweigh the various concerns over cost. �Why do people go to India and China? The standard answer is for cheap labour, but most big technology companies go there for the market,� he says.

Naturally, industries such as textiles and clothing will always seek places with cheap labour, hopping from country to country as wages rise and equalise. However, for more complex and capital-intensive manufacturing, it is clear that foreign direct-investment flows are aimed at accessing local markets rather than low costs.

In emerging Asia markets simply do not come any bigger than China, with its 1.3 billion people. Individual wealth is still extremely low compared with figures for the United States and Europe, but a vibrant middle class is emerging in the big cities. With growth rates of more than 10% a year, China offers huge potential. Transport and other infrastructure in China is also in better shape than many other Asian countries and the quality and availability of suppliers is improving all the time, enabling highly integrated supply chains to develop within the country.

Yet other parts of Asia also offer sizeable markets. India has 1.1 billion people, an emerging middle class of its own and will grow at around 8% this year, although the country is a good deal poorer than China. To date, foreign investment in manufacturing has been limited�total investment inflows in 2005 amounted to a meagre $7 billion, compared with more than $70 billion for China (see chart 2). Hugely inadequate infrastructure is one of the chief obstacles in India, as is a business climate famous for its bureaucracy. Yet even there, more foreign companies are starting to open factories.
Manufacturing graduates
The car-parts industry is a good example, with both Toyota and Hyundai investing recently to take advantage of the almost 700,000 engineering and science graduates that India produces every year. It has even been suggested that Indian technicians could re-engineer some of the West’s highly automated car-production lines to make them more labour-intensive for the Indian market. Firms making specialty chemicals are keen to combine technical expertise with low costs and a growing market. Even low-technology industries are interested: Yue Yuen is close to building its first shoe factory in India, attracted not only by the country’s vast pool of cheap workers but also by efforts to set up special economic zones that offer tax breaks.

Most observers reckon India’s manufacturing evolution is ten years behind China’s, but progress is unlikely to be as swift or as smooth. A country that puts a higher value than China does on democracy and the rights of the individual will inevitably find it harder to push through infrastructure projects and reform to sensitive areas such as the rigid labour market.

With 560m people, the ASEAN trade bloc also offers a big population. South-East Asia has been the chief beneficiary of companies’ decisions to diversify out of China. The problem is that the ten ASEAN nations have yet to form a single market. Although the region offers plenty of opportunity for export-based manufacturing, as a single market it remains highly fragmented. Companies want to be able to set up one factory to serve the whole region, but numerous barriers prevent them from doing so.

Governments in the region have announced bold plans to create the ASEAN Economic Community by 2015, with a free flow of goods, services and investment. Following a free-trade agreement in 1992, tariffs on the majority of goods traded in the region have fallen below 5%. Much harder to achieve will be the removal of non-tariff barriers, which would call for harmonising thousands of industry standards and customs regulations, and setting up independent bodies to govern regional trade and mediate in disputes.

Few believe that the ASEAN Economic Community will come about as its architects hope. Less developed nations, such as Myanmar and Laos, will integrate at a slower pace than countries like Singapore and Malaysia�if they integrate at all. Nonetheless, progress is being made and the rapid rise of China and India has added urgency to the process. Twelve areas, including electronics, health care, textiles and logistics, have been singled out as the first to be worked on.

AFPTrainers to peddle harder
In the meantime, governments must also think how to get their industries into higher-value manufacturing. Although ASEAN received record levels of foreign direct investment in 2005, at $37 billion, much of the manufacturing coming into the region is basic, labour-intensive assembly work that adds only a little value.

�I get worried about ASEAN,� says Roland Villinger, a Bangkok-based partner at McKinsey, a consulting firm. He thinks the region urgently needs to add to the sophistication of its manufacturing�partly because India and China are improving so fast. He agrees that a lot of factories in ASEAN are part of a �China-plus-one or plus-two� strategy. However, he believes South-East Asia needs to be more than just a hedge against risk in China. And ASEAN has its own share of risks. Thailand’s new military government seems to be doing its utmost to deter investment, including tighter curbs on foreign ownership and botched currency controls.
Smart but tiny
Bright spots do stand out. Singapore has a highly educated workforce, although its population is only about 4m. The country has a solid history of attracting sophisticated manufacturing that calls for strong technical skills and often involves extensive research and development. Malaysia too has had some success in moving into higher-value manufacturing. In May last year, for example, Intel opened a new research centre in Kulim employing 900 people to design microprocessors, chipsets and motherboards for use in its products worldwide. And in Thailand efforts to make the country the �Detroit of the East� are starting to pay dividends�at least they were until the present troubles. Thailand was set to overtake the United States last year as the world’s largest maker of one-tonne pick-up trucks. Toyota recently set up a new research-and-development centre in Thailand for its light truck business.

Elsewhere in the region, though, governments talk a good game, but have yet to make enough progress. For the moment, as foreign investors choke on their China investments and look elsewhere, that does not matter too much. But as India sorts out its problems and as China grows into an ever bigger market, South-East Asia needs to integrate its own markets or see its newly found popularity among manufacturers slowly fade.

Posted at 9:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Yorker
Posted to the Web: Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, overleaf, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city�then comprising three million people�into an efficient modern metropolis. As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick.

The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs�sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east�form a floating mass by the piers. Smoldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen�s shanties, the blackened facades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low dirty sky. Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, and auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

The bridge descends into Lagos Island and a pandemonium of venders� crammed with spare parts, locks, hard hats, chains, screws, charcoal, detergent, and DVDs. On a recent afternoon, car horns, shouting voices, and radio music mingled with the snarling engines of motorcycle taxis stalled in traffic and the roar of an air compressor in an oily tire-repair yard. Two months earlier, a huge cast-iron water main suspended beneath the bridge had broken free of its rusted clip, crushing a vacant scrap market below and cutting off clean water from tens of thousands of the fifteen million people who now live in Lagos.

In the absence of piped water, wealthier residents of the waterfront slum at the end of the bridge, called Isale Eko, pay private contractors to sink boreholes sixty feet deep. All day and night, residents line up at the boreholes to pay five cents and fill their plastic buckets with contaminated water, which some of them drink anyway. Isale Eko is the oldest and densest part of Lagos Island. Every square foot is claimed by someone�for selling, for washing, even for sleeping�and there is almost no privacy. Many residents sleep outdoors. A young man sitting in an alley pointed to some concrete ledges three feet above a gutter. �These are beds,” he said.

In the newer slums on the mainland, such as Mushin, rectangular concrete-block houses squeeze seven or eight people into a single, mosquito-infested room�in bunks or on the floor�along a narrow corridor of opposing chambers. This arrangement is known as “face me I face you.” One compound can contain eighty people. In Mushin, Muslim Hausas from the north of Nigeria coexist uneasily with mostly Christian Yorubas from the south. Armed gangs represent the interests of both groups. On the night of February 2,2002, a witness told me, a Hausa youth saw a Yoruba youth squatting over a gutter on the street and demanded, “Why are you shitting there?”

In a city where only 0.4.per cent of the inhabitants have a toilet connected to a sewer system, it was more of a provocation than a serious question. The incident that night led to a brawl. Almost immediately, the surrounding compounds emptied out, and the streets filled with Yorubas and Hausas armed with machetes and guns. The fighting lasted four days and was ended only by the military occupation of Mushin. By then, more than a hundred residents had been killed, thousands had fled the areas, and hundreds of houses had burned down.

Newcomers to the city are not greeted with the words “Welcome to Lagos.” They are told, “This is Lagos”�an ominous statement of fact. Olisa Izeobi, a worker in one of the sawmills along the lagoon, said, “We understand this as “Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive?” It is the singular truth awaiting the six hundred thousand people who pour into Lagos from West Africa every year. Their lungs will burn with smoke and exhaust, their eyes will sting; their skin will turn charcoal gray. And hardly any of them will ever leave.

Immigrants come to Lagos with the thinnest margin of support, dependent on a local relative or contact whose assistance usually lasts less than twenty-four hours. A girl from the Ibo country, in the southeast, said that she had been told by a woman in her home town that she would get restaurant work in Lagos.

Upon arrival, she discovered that she owed the woman more than two hundred dollars for transport and that the restaurant job didn�t exist. The girl, her hair combed straight back and her soft face fixed in a faraway stare, told me that she was eighteen, but she looked fifteen. She is now a prostitute in a small hotel called Happiness. Working seven nights a week, with each customer spending three and a half dollars and staying five minutes, she had paid off her debt after seven months. She has no friends except the other girls in the hotel. In her room, on the third floor, the words” I am covered by the blood of Jesus. Amen” are chalked on a wall three times.

A woman named Safrat Yinusa left behind her husband and two of her children in Ilorin, north of the city, and found work in one of Lagos�s huge markets as a porter, carrying loads of produce on her head. She was nursing a baby boy, whom she carried as she worked. She paid twenty cents a night for sleeping space on the floor of a room with forty other women porters. In two months, she had saved less than four dollars. Considering that the price of rice in Lagos is thirty-three cents per pound, it is hard to understand how people like Yinusa stay alive. The paradox has been called the “wage puzzle.”

When Michael Chinedu, an Ibo, arrived in Lagos, he knew no one. On his first day, he saw a man smoking marijuana�in Lagos, it�s called India hemp � and, being a smoker as well, introduced himself. On this slim connection, Chinedu asked the man if he knew of any jobs, and he was taken to the sawmill, where he began at once, working long days amid the scream of the ripsaw and burning clouds of sawdust, sleeping outside at night on a stack of hardwood planks. After three months, he had saved enough for a room. “If you sit down, you will die of hunger,” he said.

The hustle never stops in Lagos. Informal transactions make up at least sixty per cent of economic activity; at spotlights and on highways, crowds of boys as young as eight hawk everything from cell phones to fire extinguishers. Begging is rare. In many African cities, there is an oppressive atmosphere of people lying about in the middle of the day, of idleness sinking into despair. In Lagos, everyone is a striver. I once saw a woman navigating across several lanes of traffic with her small boy in tow, and the expression on her face was one I came to think of as typically Lagosian: a look hard, closed, and unsmiling, yet quick and shrewd, taking in everything, ready to ward off an obstacle or seize a chance.

In 1950, fewer than three hundred thousand people lived in Lagos. In the second half of the twentieth century, the city grew at a rate of more than six per cent annually. It is currently the sixth-largest city in the world, and it is growing faster than any of the world�s other megacities (the term used by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements for “urban agglomerations” with more than ten million people). By 2015, it is projected, Lagos will rank third, behind Tokyo and Bombay, with twenty-three million inhabitants.

When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.

Recently, Lagos has began a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World�s megacities have become the focus of in� tense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis�s “Planet of Slums,” Suketu Mehta�s “Maximum City,” and Robert Neuwirth�s�s “Shadow Cities.” Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world�s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market. “Today, the world�s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,” he wrote.

What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: “Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.

Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Mann County, California, goes even further. “Squatter cities are �vibrant,” he writes in a recent article on megacities. “Each narrow street is one long bustling market.” He sees in the explosive growth of “aspirational shanty towns” a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit� making opportunity. “How does all this relate to business people in the developed world?” Brand asks. “One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.”

In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth�s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand�s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.

Around a billion people � almost half of the developing world�s urban population�live in slums. The United Nations Human Settlements Program, in a 2003 report titled “The Challenge of the Slums,” declared, “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and illegal� world�in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid, and where public services are not provided.

Officially, they do not exist.” According to the report, “Over the course of the next two decades, the global urban population will double, from 2.5 to 5 billion. Almost all of this increase will be in developing countries.”

In 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals. One of them is to improve the lives of a hundred million slum dwellers by 2020, in terms of shelter, water, sewers, jobs, and governance. This will require enormous expenditures of money and effort, but even if the goal is achieved nearly a quarter of the world�s population � more than two billion people� will still be living in conditions like those in Lagos.

To some Western intellectuals, Lagos has become the archetype of the meg�city�perhaps because its growth has been so explosive, and perhaps because its city- scape has become so apocalyptic. It has attracted the attention of leading writers and artists, who have mounted international exhibitions in London and Berlin. All this interest has somehow transformed Lagos into a hip icon of the latest global trends, the much studied megalopolis of the future, like London and Paris in the nineteenth century or New York and Tokyo in the twentieth. For several years, the Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas has been working with his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on a project to study the future of cities; he has gone to Lagos four times and produced several articles as well as a book to be published early next year, “Lagos: How It Works.” Koolhaas once described Lagos to an interviewer as a protean organism that creatively defies constrictive Western ideas of urban order. �What is now fascinating is how, with some level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme underdevelopment and development,” he said.

“And what particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructure of modernity in the city trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions, so that there is a kind of mutual dependency that rye never seen anywhere else.” With its massive traffic jams creating instant markets on roads and highways, Lagos is not “a kind of backward situation,” Koolhaas said, but, rather, “an announcement of the future.”

As a picture of the urban future, Lagos is fascinating only if you�re able to leave it. After just a few days in the city�s slums, it is hard to maintain Koolhaas�s intellectual excitement. What he calls “self-organization” is simply collective adaptation to extreme hardship. Traffic pileups lead to “improvised conditions” because there is no other way for most people in Lagos to scratch out a living than to sell on the street. It would be preferable to have some respite from buying and selling, some separation between private and public life. It would be preferable not to have five-hour “go-slows”�traffic jams� that force many workers to get up well before dawn and spend almost no waking hours at home. And it would be preferable not to have an economy in which millions of people have to invent marginal forms of employment because there are so few jobs.

I asked Paul Okunlola., an editor at the Nigerian newspaper the Guardian, why people kept coming to Lagos, when there seemed so little chance of getting ahead. “They never believe there�s no chance,” he said. Okunlola described the largest market in Lagos: the Mile 12, on the highway heading north out of town, where foodstuff coming into the city is bought and sold wholesale. It is a muddy area�much of Lagos is reclaimed swampland�and workers with buckets of water earn seven cents washing the feet of market women. “That is the kind of entrepreneurship that keeps a lot of people in Lagos,” Okunlola said.

“If you took that to my home town, who would wash feet�and who would pay money for it, anyway? That is what drives Lagos.”

Folarin Gbadeboo-Smith, the chairman of a district on Lagos Island, said that globalization, in the form of mass media, attracts Nigerians to Lagos as a substitute for New York or London. A distorted picture then flows back to the village. “Come Christmas, everybody in Lagos�the successful and the unsuccessful�packs their bags and goes off to the rural areas to show off what they have achieved,” Gbadebo-Smith said. “Some achievements are real, for some it�s just a mirage, but everybody�s there showing off. So the young people in the villages very quickly come to the conclusion that �Hey, have got to go to Lagos,

make enough to be able to come back here, and to show off.� ” In this way, the West African countryside is being rapidly depopulated.

Adegoke Taylor, a skinny, solemn thirty-two-year-old itinerant trader with anxious eyes, shares an eight-by-ten-foot room with three other young men, on an alley in Isale Eko several hundred feet from the Third Mainland Bridge. In 1999, Taylor came to Lagos from lle� Oluji, a Yoruba town a hundred and thirty miles to the northeast. He had a degree in mining from a polytechnic school and the goal of establishing a professional career. Upon arriving in the city, he went to. a club that played juju�pop music infused with Yoruba rhythms�and stayed out until two in the morning. “This experience alone makes me believe I have a new life living he said, in English, the lingua Ca of Lagos. “All the time, you see crowds everywhere. I was motivated by that. In the village, you�re not free at all, and whatever you�re going to do today you�ll do tomorrow.” Taylor soon found that none of the few mining positions being advertised in Lagos newspapers were open to him. “If you are not connected, it�s not easy, because there are many more applications than jobs,” he said. “The moment you don�t have a recognized person saying, This is my boy, give him a job,� it�s very hard. In this country, if you don�t belong to the elite”�he pronounced it “c-light”�� “you will find things very, very hard.”

Taylor fell into a series of odd jobs: changing money, peddling stationery and hair plaits, and moving heavy loads in a warehouse for a daily wage of four hundred naira�about three dollars. Occasionally, he worked for West African traders who came to the markets near the port and needed middlemen to locate goods. At first, he stayed with the sister of a childhood friend in Mushin,

then found cheap lodging there in a shared room for seven dollars a month, until the building was burned down during the ethnic dots. Taylor lost everything. He decided to move to Lagos Island, where he pays a higher rent, twenty dollars a month.

Taylor had tried to leave Africa but was turned down for a visa by the American and British Embassies. At times, he longed for the calm of his home town, but there was never any question of returning to lle-Oluji, with its early nights and monotonous days and the prospect of a lifetime of manual labor. His future was in Lagos, and he kept trying various small-business plans, none of which had worked out, for a simple reason. “There�s no capital to start,” he said. For this, he blamed the Nigerian government. “Most of the people who lead us embezzle instead of using that money to create factories,” he said. “Our parents� generation was O.K. But this generation is a wasted generation�unless God comes to the aid. Because we know there is money in Nigeria.” In fact, oil-export revenue exceeded fifty billion dollars in 2005.

Taylor escorted me along the alley to my car, which was in the shadow of the bridge. We slipped past a menacing group of “area boys,” who act as parking attendants and shake down anyone who drives onto their turf;

“There�s no escape, except to make it,” Taylor said.

Stephen Omojoro, a fifty-two-year-old taxi-driver and father of four, with broad horizontal and vertical tribal scars carved into both cheeks, took me around Lagos in an aging Mercedes. In his version of the arrival story, Omojoro came to Lagos when he was seventeen, in the early seventies, after his father�s death forced him to quit school. He spent the first night with a relative, who gave him enough money for one dinner. After that, he was on his awn. The following morning, having heard about the sawmills, he showed up and was given a job carrying planks and logs. At night, he slept outside. Many people in Lagos sleep where they work�in markets under flyovers, in truck cabs parked in truck yards, inside tiny shops, on the handlebars of their motorcycle taxis.

As we drove around the meg�city, Omojoro described his recent history in a harsh, hoarse voice that seemed to have been seared by the polluted air. In his view, Lagos has been deteriorating since shortly after his arrival, owing to a general moral collapse brought on by the oil boom of the seventies. What he remembered as a city of enterprising family men like himself is now overrun with corrupt soldiers, politicians, and police, and with a mass of young people willing to do anything for money except honest work. He believes in order, and he disdainfully pointed out planned residential neighborhoods that are now overgrown with roadside markets, and “temporary” settlements that have survived for decades. (Omojoro once got into a shouting match with a woman in Mushin who had put out a display of wigs on a stretch of roadside pavement that theoretically belonged to traffic, not commerce.) He also condemned the heedless, often lethal driving of young men who, fortified at dawn by palm� wine gin or India hemp, make their living behind the wheel of the ubiquitous yellow passenger minibuses known as danfo. Omojoro described such drivers as irresponsible somebodies�they don�t care for nobody, nobody cares for them.” (The wooden-backed pickup trucks used to carry produce and other goods are called bole kaja, which means “get down and let�s fight.”)

What is missing from Omojoro�s declinist account is the effect of national and international economic policies on the city. There was once a master plan for Lagos. One day, Oyesanya Oyelola, the director of the regional- and master-plan department in the state government, spread a faded map across his desk. The plan, jointly drawn up in the seventies by the firm of Wilbur Smith and Associates, the United Nations Development Program, and the Lagos state government, was intended to guide the growth of the city in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

There were to be thirty-five self-sufficient district centers, represented on the map by dusters of dots, each with commercial, industrial, and residential zones, to prevent congestion on Lagos Island. A fourth mainland bridge would connect the Lekki peninsula, extending east from Victoria Island along the coast, to the towns popping up on the north shore of the lagoon, which would disperse traffic heading into the city. There was to be a light-rail and ferry system bringing commuters to the major business centers on the mainland and across to Lagos Island. To the east and west of the city, wetlands, forest, and agricultural land were reserved.

On New Year�s Eve, 1983, a bloodless coup overthrew civilian rule, and for the next sixteen years a series of military dictators from northern Nigeria treated Lagos, the country�s center of democratic activism, as a source of personal enrichment. While the military rulers cut themselves in on the city�s commercial action, the master plan “was abandoned,” Oyelola said, along with any thought of investing in the infrastructure necessary to absorb millions of new arrivals. He showed me the result, Unfurling a second map of Lagos, as it is today: a sea of yellow spreading out across the mainland. “Most of the green land has been eaten up by the flow of people�it has become residential,” he said. On the master plan, there were forty-two areas identified as “blighted” and scheduled for improvement; now there are fifty-four.

Shina Loremikan, who runs an anti-corruption organization, lives in Ajegunle, Lagos�s biggest and most dangerous slum, across a canal from the port. The drainage ditches of Ajegunle are frequently blocked, and during the rainy season they overflow into houses and across streets, which fill up with sludge, sacks, scraps of clothing, and plastic bags, so that some of Ajegunle�s streets seem to be wholly composed of trash. I asked Laremikan to show me the slum areas on a map of Lagos. With his finger, he drew a line from the southeast corner all the way to the northwest. “From here to here, they are all slums,” Loremikan said flatly. “Refuse is everywhere, either in Victoria Island or Ikoyi”�Lagos�s two relatively upscale districts�”or in Agege or Mushin. Black water is everywhere.

They are all slums.”

Other megacities, such as Bombay, Dhaka, Manila, and S~o Paulo, have spawned entire satellite cities that house migrants and the destitute, who lead lives that often have nothing to do with the urban center to which they were originally drawn. Lagos expanded differently: there is no distinct area where a million people squat in flimty hovels. The whole city suffers from misuse. Planned residential areas�such as Surulere, built for civil servants on the mainland�are gradually taken over by the commercial activity that springs up everywhere in Lagos like fungus after the rains. Areas reclaimed from swamps give rise to economic dusters whose nature depends on location: for example, Mushin became one of the city�s central spare-parts yards when the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway was built near it, in the seventies. “Everywhere is market,” Stephen Omojoro said as we drove around. “There�s no dull area at all.” It�s hard to decide if the extravagant ugliness of the cityscape is a sign of vigor or of disease�a life force or an impending apocalypse.

For the complete article, please see the New Yorker web site.

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Howard W. French

Copyright The International Herald Tribune - Published: January 11, 2007

SHANGHAI: There has been much talk these days about whether the war in Iraq can be won, and if so, how.

The debate over questions like these will only accelerate in the wake of President George W. Bush’s speech Wednesday laying out his newest strategy for the war, which includes the deployment of more than 20,000 additional troops.

Inevitably, most often the outcome, good or bad, is framed in terms of what happens on the ground in Iraq itself. But the news of recent days has provided a powerful reminder of another war, one for hearts and minds that extends well beyond Iraq’s borders.

While Europeans have long and loudly voiced their disapproval of war in Iraq, East Asia has been more of a quiet, distant spectator.

Japan, Korea and others may have sent small units to participate in coalition efforts in Iraq, but for the most part, public opinion in this part of the world seems to have been less concerned with the American war effort than has been true in, say, France or Germany.
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The execution of Saddam Hussein, however, has stirred feelings in this part of the world as nothing else has since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

East Asians have no particular brief for Saddam. He was not a great friend of any government in this region, and his passage here has not been mourned. Yet in each of the area’s two most powerful countries, Japan and China, the handling of Saddam’s trial, and particularly his violent and unseemly end, have left a bad and perhaps lasting taste.

In China, where the government works hard to control the flow of information, official accounts of the execution left no doubt about how to interpret the news.

“The execution of Saddam was a political farce controlled by the United States from behind the curtains,” wrote one Chinese newspaper, The Legal Evening News, in one fairly typical commentary. “The U.S. feigned not to interfere, pretending that the execution of Saddam was a decision made by Iraq’s own government.”

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, took a slightly different, though no less withering, tack before delivering this summation.

“The United States considers itself the patriarch of the world,” it wrote. “Whenever someone doesn’t please its eyes or obey its words, it will use its own ways to punish them, imposing sanctions or using force.”

Judging from the reams of commentary like this in the wake of Saddam’s execution, official China saw the event as a propaganda godsend. At least as far back as the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Beijing has labored hard to counter notions of collective international responsibility for injustices committed by regimes against their own peoples.

Terrible things may be happening in places like Sudan, according to Beijing’s line, but outsiders have no business passing judgment, and even less imposing their will.

The twin watchwords of this approach have been “noninterference” in other people’s affairs and its corollary, respect for the sovereignty of states. And now, with a hasty execution of an arrested head of state under the most tawdry of circumstances, China had an undreamed-of exhibit to buttress this dubious position.

Public opinion does not enjoy free rein in China, where Web sites and blogs that touch upon forbidden topics are closed and, if need be, their authors followed and persecuted. Still, there is no reason to believe that the outcry among Chinese Internet users about Saddam’s hanging is not a genuine reflection of popular sentiment.

Comments like “Bush is the biggest terrorist,” were posted online with abandon by a Chinese population that can only dream about expressing its real feelings about its own leaders, but exulted in the chance to unload on Bush.

The odd voice may have denounced Saddam, but far more typical were comments like this: “The United States sanctioned Iraq for 10 years, making a country as rich as Western Europe even poorer than African nations, with millions of children starving to death. The president of the United States is the real despot.”

The reaction in Japan, nearby, may have been more muted, but for that longtime American ally the ugly end of Saddam gave even people who don’t often second-guess their country’s ties with the United States reasons for pause.

Click to read the complete article.

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Copyright The Village Voice

After hundreds of thousands of black Muslim corpses, is the genocide at last over?

January 7th, 2007 3:29 PM

“It is hard to find a crueler or more duplicitous government than Sudan’s.” - The Economist, December 9, 2006

It is horrendous to see how grown men can waste time to discuss how many U.N. staff should there be�as opposed to African Union staff�while women and children die every day in the field.
Jan Egeland, United Nations coordinator for humanitarian efforts, National Public Radio, December 12, 2006

Shortly before Christmas, there were tidings of the possible beginning of the end of the so-called civilized world’s most abject betrayal, since the Nazi holocaust, of its so-called values�justice, human rights, the intrinsic worth of every individual. The Black Holocaust, the genocide in Darfur, now extending from Sudan into neighboring Chad, might at last be stopped.

On December 24, Agence France-Presse reported from the capital city of Khartoum, “Sudan has responded ‘favorably’ to a United Nations plan bolstering the embattled contingent of African Union observers in war-torn Darfur.” This news reinforced an Associated Press story on December 22: “The Sudanese government has accepted the U.N. package for Darfur, including the deployment of … a ‘hybrid’ peacekeeping operation of the U.N. and African Union troops.”

The development followed a message by George W. Bush to Sudan’s murderous president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, that Sudan must allow a team of U.N. personnel into Darfur and formally accept an international force there by January 1�or face unspecified consequences.

Khartoum, however, apparently did not relay this warning to its militia, the Janjaweed (“devils on horseback”)�al-Bashir’s hired killers and rapists. On December 22, after the Janjaweed had razed two villages in Chad, killing Sudanese refugees and Chad civilians, the government of Chad told a Reuters reporter that the “attackers” gouged out the eyes of [some of its] soldiers and disemboweled one civilian.”

Pleaded a displaced village chief, “You have to move us from here. We are poor people and we don’t have the means to defend ourselves.”

As I write this during the week of January 1, there is no word as to whether these black Darfurian refugees have been moved to safer ground, if such ground exists�or how long it will take for General al-Bashir to disarm the barbarous Janjaweed, a pledge he has previously made and never honored.

Meanwhile, Romeo Dallaire, the U.N. general on the ground at the start of the Rwanda genocide�who repeatedly, desperately, and unsuccessfully begged the then U.N. chief of peacekeeping operations, Kofi Annan, to let him stop the mass murders�weighed in on the present horrors. Now a senator in the Canadian legislature, Dallaire told The Vancouver Sun: “That border [between Darfur and Chad] is just waiting to explode… . There is no doubt that the Janjaweed are [in force] on both sides” of the border.

If the Khartoum government fails to implement the U.N.’s plan�as it has so often broken its word in the past�there will be expanded regional genocide. Should that happen, George W. Bush’s special envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, says the Bush administration will put into force its “Plan B.”

What is “Plan B”? That, of course, is classified.

In the last days before he left office on December 24, Kofi Annan, still painfully cognizant of his complicity in the Rwanda genocide, was pressing the National Islamic Front government in Khartoum to fulfill its agreement to this most recent U.N. resolution to save untold thousands of black Muslim lives in Darfur and the refugee camps. But he was honest enough to say, the day before he left, that he takes “nothing for granted,” in view of his experiences with General al-Bashir.

The doomsday prospect of another monstrous shell game by al-Bashir was laid out last month by Eric Reeves, the single most continuously authoritative analyst of Khartoum’s crimes against its own people. A professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, Reeves has for years devoted most of his life to alerting the world to this black holocaust. As prospects seemed to brighten for a change in al-Bashir’s cold, cold heart, Reeves set the scene on his website, sudanreeves.org:

“The U.S. attempts to bluff Khartoum’s genocidaires with ‘Plan B’; Kofi Annan seeks to burnish his legacy … the European Union and Canada offer nothing but more bluster; the Arab League continues its mendacious ways; the African Union is a shambles … .

“Full-scale humanitarian collapse in Darfur looms ever closer even as the violence that will occasion the collapse relentlessly increases. Hundreds of humanitarian workers have been evacuated in recent weeks from North Darfur and eastern Chad… . This is the ghastly, inescapable syllogism of genocidal destruction in Darfur.

“Nothing will change until a force of the sort authorized by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1706 (August 31, 2006) deploys to Darfur with or without Khartoum’s consent.” (Emphasis added.)

To save hundreds of thousands of lives, force may have to displace diplomacy�and soon. From Agence France-Presse (December 24): “Seven civilians were killed by the pro�government Janjaweed militia and one policeman was shot dead in separate incidents in North Darfur, Sudanese media reports.”

The Security Council Resolution 1706 to stop the killing called for a U.N. force of 20,000 to supplement the African Union’s fewer than 7,000; but the U.N. has since reduced those numbers. And whether or not General al-Bashir does begin to implement the resolution, what, if anything, happens to the general and the other principal perpetrators of the genocide?

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has a list of suspects. But he has not dared go to Darfur to personally interview witnesses and inspect evidence because it is too dangerous to venture there. And strangely, he has told the Sudanese Tribune, “I am not putting the blame on the Sudanese government. I have never made a statement against the government. My job is to investigate individuals, not governments.”

In that case, if the U.N. resolution is implemented by the Sudanese government will General al-Bashir be nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?

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Copyright The Guardian

In the last decade China has emerged as a powerful, resurgent economic force with the muscle to challenge America as the global superpower. But, in his controversial new book, Will Hutton argues that China’s explosive economic reforms will create seismic tensions within the one-party authoritarian state and asks: can the centre hold?

Sunday January 7, 2007
The Observer

For more than 2,000 years, China’s conceit was that it was the celestial kingdom, the country whose standing was endowed by heaven itself and whose emperors tried to reproduce heavenly harmony on Earth. All China basked in the reflected glow; foreigners were barbarians beyond the gilded pale who should not be allowed even to learn the art of speaking and writing Chinese.

When I first visited China in the autumn of 2003, such articles of Confucian faith seemed very far away, submerged by the lost wars and the 26 humiliating treaties of the 19th century, subsequent communist revolution and now the economic growth to which Beijing’s motorway rings and Shanghai’s skyline are tribute. This was a new China that had plainly left behind obeisance to the canons of Confucianism and the later cruelties of Mao. More than three years and a book later, I am less convinced.

Article continues
All societies are linked to their past by umbilical cords - some apparent, some hidden. China is no different. Imperial Confucian China and communist China alike depended - and depend - upon the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible centre: either because it was interpreting the will of heaven or, now, of the proletariat. In neither system have human rights, constitutional checks and balances or even forms of democracy figured very much. As a result, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions of accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. Sooner or later, it is a failing that will have to be addressed.

China is both very confident about its recent success and very insecure about its past, a potent mix that breeds a deep-seated xenophobia and shallow arrogance. China’s economy in 2007 will be nearly nine times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping won the power struggle with the Maoists and began his extraordinarily sinuous, gradualist but successful programme of market-based economic reforms, groping for stones to cross the river, as he called it. China is now the fourth largest economy in the world - after the United States, Japan, and Germany - and is set to become the second largest within a decade. More than 150 million workers have moved to China’s booming cities and 400 million people have been removed from poverty. It is a head-spinning achievement.

China is the new factor in global politics and economics, and its rulers and people know it. It now has more than $1 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, the world’s largest. It is the single most important financier of the United States’ enormous trade deficit. It is the world’s second largest importer of oil. Before 2010, it will be the world’s largest exporter of goods. It is, comfortably, the world’s second largest military power. Last year, the Pentagon’s four-yearly defence review stated that China is the power most likely to ‘field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages’. A new great power is in the making, but one whose pursuit of its self-interest takes the amorality of power to a new plane. It is not just the Chinese who should be concerned about its institutional and moral failings; all of us should be.

In China, you can almost smell the new self-confidence: it is in the skyscrapers built in months; it is in the brash and unashamed willingness to rip off and copy Western brands; it is in the well-groomed and inscrutable demeanour of the rich entrepreneurs, self-confident officials and assured academics.

I sat in a Beijing bar just over a year ago with a typical member of China’s new class of rich businessmen who double up as members of the party, a combination of commercial and political power that China knew well as the old Confucian mandarinate, now strangely reproducing itself in a new guise after Mao tried to eliminate it forever in the Cultural Revolution.

In surprisingly fluent English and with his Mercedes waiting outside, he praised China’s communist regime and its curious mix of capitalism and communism with all the enthusiasm of a Tory businessmen praising Thatcher. Chinese corruption? Think of Enron and party-funding scandals in London, he declaimed. Double standards between communist rhetoric and practice? What about the US and Britain’s invasion of Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay? What I failed to realise, he insisted, betraying both assurance and insecurity, is that China will not surrender again the natural rank that it should never have lost. Western values, institutions and attitudes were being revealed for being straw men, blown away by resurgent China and the pragmatism of its communist leaders.

Yet Western values and institutions are not being blown away. The country has made progress to the extent that communism has given up ground and moved towards Western practices, but there are limits to how far the reformers can go without giving up the basis for the party’s political control. Conservatives insist that much further and the capacity to control the country will become irretrievably damaged; that the limit, for example, is being reached in giving both trade unions more autonomy and shareholders more rights. It is the most urgent political debate in China.

The tension between reform and conservatism is all around. For example, the party’s commitment now is no longer to building a planned communist economy but a ‘socialist market’ economy. The 26,000 communes in rural China, which were once the vanguard of communism, were swept away by the peasants themselves in just three years between 1979 and 1982, the largest bottom-up act of decollectivisation the world has ever witnessed. Hundreds of millions of peasants are, via long leases, again farming plots held by their ancestors for millenniums. China’s state-owned enterprises no longer provide life-long employment and welfare for their workers as centrepieces of a new communist order; they are autonomous companies largely free to set prices as they choose in an open economy and progressively shedding their social obligations.

Equally amazing, China’s communists have declared that the class war is over. The party now claims to represent not just the worker and peasant masses but entrepreneurs and business leaders, whom it welcomes into its ranks. The party refers to this metamorphosis as the ‘three represents’: meaning that the party today represents ‘advanced productive forces’ (capitalists); ‘the overwhelming majority’ of the Chinese (not just workers and peasants); and ‘the orientation … of China’s advanced culture’ (religious, political and philosophical traditions other than communism).

Party representatives say that the country is no longer pledged to fight capitalism to the death internationally, but, instead, wants to rise peacefully. China has joined the World Trade Organisation and is a judicious member of the United Nations Security Council, using its veto largely in matters that immediately concern it, such as Taiwan.

But for all that, it remains communist. The maxims of Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought have to stand, however much the party tries to stretch the boundaries, because they are the basis for one-party rule. Yet the system so spawned is reaching its limits. For example, China’s state-owned and directed banks cannot carry on channelling hundreds of billions of pounds of peasant savings into the financing of a frenzy of infrastructure and heavy industrial investment. The borrowers habitually pay interest only fitfully, and rarely repay the debt, even as the debt mountain explodes. The financial system is vulnerable to any economic setback.

Equally, China is reaching the limits of the capacity to increase its 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 ships and ports on sufficient scale to move such volumes - and will Western markets stay uncomplainingly open? Every year, it is also acquiring $200bn of foreign exchange reserves as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. Can even China insulate its domestic financial system from such fantastic growth in its reserves and stop inflation rising? Already, there are ominous signs that inflationary pressures are increasing.

These ills have communist roots. It is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lie behind the massive waste of investment and China’s destruction of its environment alike. The pace of desertification has doubled over 20 years, in a country where 25 per cent of the land area is already desert. Air pollution kills 400,000 people a year prematurely. A hacking cough in the Beijing smog or the stench when the wind comes from the north in Shanghai are reminders of just how far China still has to go.

Energy is wasted on an epic scale. But the worst problem is water. One-fifth of China’s 660 cities face extreme water shortages and as many as 90 per cent have problems of water pollution; 500 million rural Chinese still do not have access to safe drinking water. Illegal and rampant polluting, a severe shortage of sewage treatment facilities, and chemical pollutants together continue to degrade China’s waterways. In autumn 2005, two major cities - Harbin and Guangzhou - had their water supplies cut off for days because their river sources had suffered acute chemical spills from state-owned factories.

Enterprises are accountable to no one but the Communist party for their actions; there is no network of civil society, plural public institutions and independent media to create pressure for enterprises to become more environmentally efficient. Watchdogs, whistleblowers, independent judges and accountable government are not just good in themselves as custodians of justice; they also keep capitalism honest and efficient and would curb environmental costs that reach an amazing 12 per cent of GDP. As importantly, they are part of the institutional network that constitutes an independent public realm that includes free intellectual inquiry, free trade unions and independent audit. It is this ‘enlightenment infrastructure’ that I regard in both the West and East as the essential underpinning of a healthy society. The individual detained for years without a fair trial is part of the same malign system that prevents a company from expecting to be able to correct a commercial wrong in a court, or have a judgment in its favour implemented, if it were against the party interest.

The impact is pernicious. The reason why so few Britons can name a great Chinese brand or company, despite China’s export success, is that there aren’t any. China needs to build them, but doing that in a one-party authoritarian state, where the party second-guesses business strategy for ideological and political ends, is impossible. In any case, nearly three-fifths of its exports and nearly all its hi-tech exports are made by non-Chinese, foreign firms, another expression of China’s weakness. The state still owns the lion’s share of China’s business and what it does not own, it reserves the right to direct politically.

Mark Kitto, a former Welsh Guardsman, has found at first-hand how difficult it is to sustain private ownership in China. He built up three Time Out equivalents in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou but, after seven years of successful magazine publishing, learnt last year that he was about to become a partner of the state. The only terms on which his licence to publish could be retained was if he were to accept a de facto takeover from China Intercontinental Press, controlled by China’s State Information Council, the propaganda mouthpiece of the Communist party. It did not matter that he owned the shares, wanted to retain his independence and had been careful to stay within the party’s publishing guidelines. The party now wanted control of his magazines and simply took it. It is an example repeated many times over.

China must become a more normal economy, but the party stands in the way. Chinese consumers need to save less and spend more, but consumers with no property rights or welfare system are highly cautious. To give them more confidence means taxing to fund a welfare system and conceding property rights. That will mean creating an empowered middle class who will ask how their tax renminbi are spent. Companies need to be subject to independent accountability if they are to become more efficient, but that means creating independent centres of power. The political implications are obvious.

China’s future is shrouded in uncertainty. My belief is that what is unsustainable is not sustained. Change came in the Soviet Union with the fifth generation of leaders after the revolution; the fifth generation of China’s leaders succeed today’s President Hu Jintao in 2012. No political change will happen until after then, but my guess is that sometime in the mid to late 2010s, the growing Chinese middle class will want to hold Chinese officials and politicians to account for how they spend their taxes and for their political choices. What nobody can predict is whether that will produce another Tiananmen, repression and maybe war if China’s communists pick a fight to sustain legitimacy at home or an Eastern European velvet revolution and political freedoms. Either way, China’s route to becoming a world economic power is not going to proceed as a simple extrapolation of current trends.

This book has been something of a personal intellectual odyssey. My hypothesis when I began was that China was so different that it could carry on adapting its model, living without democracy or European enlightenment values. I have changed my mind and now see more clearly than ever the kinds of connection I identified in The State We’re In between economic performance and so-called ‘soft’ institutions - how people are educated, how trust relations are established and how accountability is exercised (just to name a few) - are central. They are equally important to a good society and the chance for individual empowerment and self-betterment.

Early in my research, I tried out the still-emergent thesis at a small dinner in Lan Na Thai, one of the restaurants in Shanghai’s Ruijin guest house, a complex of refurbished old mansions and traditional pavilions in the French quarter where communist leaders reputedly once ate and slept.

Over stir-fried curried chicken and crispy fried flying sea bass, the Chinese guests repeated politely and persuasively that China was making up new economic and political rules. Afterwards, I chanced to have a few words alone with one of the local rising government stars as we walked out of the complex. He kept his eyes on the ground. ‘Don’t allow yourself to be dissuaded, despite what you have heard. You are right that China is not different. I want my children to see a China with human rights and democratic institutions. And I am not alone.’ He jumped into a taxi and was gone.

I have often thought about that chance exchange. Britain and the West take our enlightenment inheritance too easily for granted, and do not see how central it is to everything we are, whether technological advance, trust or well-being. We neither cherish it sufficiently nor live by its exacting standards. We share too quickly the criticism of non-Western societies that we are hypocrites. What China has taught me, paradoxically, is the value of the West, and how crucial it is that we practise what we preach. If we don’t, the writing is on the wall - for us and China.

China’s quest for oil

China’s foreign policy is increasingly driven by the need to feed its growing appetite for oil. General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of the Chinese general staff, has said that China’s energy problem needs to be taken ‘seriously and dealt with strategically’.

That means less reliance on the Middle East; less transportation of oil via sea-lanes policed by the US navy; more capacity for the Chinese navy to protect Chinese tankers; and more oil brought overland by pipeline from central Asia.

Over the past two years, China has pulled off a string of strategic oil deals. In April 2005, Petro China and Canadian company Enbridge signed a memorandum to build a $2bn ‘gateway’ pipeline to move oil from Alberta to the Pacific Coast. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is to build a Chinese-financed pipeline to the Pacific coast through Colombia, having given China oil and gas exploration rights in 2005. Saudi Arabia surrendered to Chinese courtship in 2004 and accorded exploration rights.

In Sudan, a major source of oil, China’s blind eye to human rights and mass murder if it hinders its interests is demonstrated by Zhou Wenzhong’s comment when Deputy Foreign Minister about the situation in Darfur where more than 250,000 have died.’Business is business,’ he said. ‘We try to separate politics from business and, in any case, the internal position of Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to influence them.’

Wrong: China has substantial influence on Sudan if it chose to exercise it. It does not, a commentary on China’s approach to foreign policy and an awesome warning of the future if an unreconstructed China became yet more powerful.

Tiananmen: the legacy

The image of a single student halting a tank in Tiananmen Square is one of the most arresting in modern history. But the protests spread well beyond Beijing for six weeks in spring 1989 to encompass demonstrations in 181 cities.

The party and army were divided over how to respond; 150 officers openly declared that they would not fire on demonstrators after martial law was declared, and at least a third of the central committee wanted to reach a compromise with the protesters. The party’s then general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, proposed a partial meeting of demands for reform. Nobody should be killed.

That was not the view of Deng and the party elders - the eight ‘immortals’, veterans of the Revolution. A ‘counter-revolutionary’ riot had to be suppressed. But before Deng could act, he had to leave Beijing to ensure that army groups 28 and 29, personally loyal to him, would provide the core of the force rather than the uncertain army groups based around the capital. Once in place, Zhao was then brutally deposed, remaining under house arrest until his death in 2005. Martial law was imposed on 19 May and a fortnight later the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. Official estimates were that 5,000 soldiers and police officers were wounded and 223 killed. Civilian losses - 2,000 wounded and 220 killed - were lower. Many still languish in prison.

Tiananmen is the event that cannot be discussed in China; websites mentioning it are blocked. It was no ‘counter-revolutionary riot’ but a demand for freedoms that infected all China and very nearly succeeded.

Current leader Hu Jintao and his successors know they are not Deng and cannot command the loyalty of key elements of the army in the same way. Their best strategy is to deliver growth and jobs while trying to keep the lid on China’s growing but still disconnected social protests. Whether the policy will carry on working is the open question asked daily in Beijing’s inner circles.

� An edited extract from The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century to be published by Little, Brown on 15 January, �20.

�Will Hutton 2007

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Copyright Salon

Jan. 10, 2007 | It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing from their lives: the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena. It is so lumpen, so sad that nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy — a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.

Whether you’re sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a hitching post or with your brogans on a desk, a newspaper gives you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture. You open it with a flourish and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world’s sorrows and moving on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rolling it, folding the paper in halves and quarters, tucking it under the arm or tapping it against the palm. Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, all the greats, used the newspaper to demonstrate cool. Sitting and staring at the profile of Kerri (“Dreamer of dreams”) Jodhpur, 18, of Muncie, Ind., and her cat Snowball is not cool.

A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone. Where is the nobility here? He hunches forward, his eyes glaze, and beads of saliva glitter in the corners of his mouth and make their way down his chin as he becomes engrossed in the video of the fisherman falling out of the boat. A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye. Holding a newspaper frees you up to express yourself, sort of like holding a sax did for Coltrane. Just observe a few simple rules.

1. If you want to make a serious impression, don’t buy one paper, buy three or four. A person walking into Starbucks with four papers folded under his wing is immediately taken for a mogul. If he’s young, he’s a software mogul. If he is unshaven and wearing pajamas under his raincoat, he is an eccentric mogul, perhaps a Mafia kingpin.

2. Take your sweet time opening the paper. You already know what’s in it, boss man, you only read it so you’ll know how much other people know, so there’s no big rush.

3. Once you open it, never look up unless someone speaks your name. Don’t be distracted just because a leggy blonde has crossed the room, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. You’re the actor so let others be the audience, you be the scene.

4. Scan the front page, check out the headlines, but don’t pore, don’t be a drudge. Be cool. Jump to the sports page, then the comics, then the society page, then editorials. That’s the beauty of the inverted pyramid news story. A glance is usually good enough.

5. Always rip out a story or two and tuck it in your pocket. Not casually, like it was a recipe for meatballs, but with urgency and purpose. This creates an indelible aura of mystery.

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Copyright The New York Times

By Howard French
Published: January 3, 2007

SHANGHAI: A lawsuit that has been filed by one of China’s largest newspapers against one of the country’s leading Internet portals over the issue of massive copyright violations is being described here as the opening salvo in a media war.

In the suit, which was filed in October and is expected to go to court soon, The Beijing News is seeking $400,000 in damages from a popular Internet site called Tom.com for having copied and republished more than 25,000 articles and photographs without authorization since 2003.

In recent years, China has acquired a reputation as a sort of no-man’s land for intellectual property rights, with companies in virtually every industry freely copying designs and other content both from foreign companies and from domestic rivals with little fear of punishment.

The Beijing News lawsuit, however, comes at a time of accelerating legal reform efforts and signs of increased attempts by law enforcement agencies to protect copyrights and other forms of intellectual property. The suit also comes at a critical time for China’s newspaper industry, which has experienced explosive growth in the past decade or so only to find itself confronted with an even faster growing rival in the form of new Internet-based media.

Now, as has happened in the United States and many other countries, with computer usage and broadband access both booming here, newspapers are losing readers � especially among young, prosperous city dwellers � to large corporate-owned Web sites. What set China apart from much of the rest of the world, until recently, was that these Web sites faced no legal obstacles in copying material from newspapers, often wholesale.
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“There is a very brutal competition between newspapers, with seven or eight big ones just in Beijing, and now a big new player, the Internet, wants to wipe them all out, to change the landscape,” said Yu Guofu, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property matters.

“The press is leading a hard life and facing an unpleasant future, but it has decided it is better to protect its rights than just sit and wait to die,” Yu said.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

A major presumed cause for the decline is that big Internet content providers, or portals, have become one- stop sources for all manner of information, from news and entertainment to blogs. Until recently, for most portals the general practice involved lifting news and other information directly from other sources, sometimes crediting the original source and sometimes not, but rarely paying for it.

In Europe, Google is awaiting a ruling, likely this month, in a copyright dispute with Belgian newspaper publishers after the introduction of Google News Belgium. In November, Google settled with two Belgian groups representing photographers and journalists for undisclosed terms.

Google News, which made its debut in 2002, scans thousands of news outlets and highlights articles in various categories. Google asserts that its service benefits publishers by bringing readers to their Web. But the French news agency Agence France-Presse has sued Google in U.S. District Court in Washington, arguing that the Google service adds little value because its news site looks much like those of AFP subscribers. Meanwhile Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for articles and photographs. But neither Google nor the AP has disclosed financial terms.

The Beijing News lawsuit comes a little more than a year after a meeting of major newspaper publishers in Nanjing at which strategies were discussed to shore up the industry’s base and combat the loss of content � and readers � to China’s large Internet companies.

Representatives of The Beijing News declined to comment on the lawsuit. A spokesman for Tom.com, Tu Jianglu, denied the alleged violations.

“As a big company, we respect copyright and property rights,” he said. “I can only say that there are other facts that make this more complicated.”

Until recently, China’s laws have generally been anything but clear on intellectual property issues. Moreover, they made it difficult to successfully sue over an alleged infringement.

Such an environment may have served the country’s needs well earlier in China’s industrial takeoff, amid a huge push to master new technologies.

The battle in the news media reflects part of a broader shift in the intellectual property landscape as China’s growing place in world trade has brought strong new pressures to rein in wholesale piracy.

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Copyright The Boston Globe
| December 31, 2006

ABOUT THE KARAOKE MACHINE, that most prophetic of postmodern leisure devices, almost any number of intelligent-sounding things can be said: Like the cellphone and the iPod, it seems to have invented us more than we invented it.

You can say, for example, that ours is a karaoke age, in which the arts of mimicry and simulation are more esteemed than originality or sincerity, and the retread preferred to the real thing. You can say that in the trash democracy of global pop culture, where the anonymous soul has been replaced by the undiscovered star and the celebrity-in-waiting, it is karaoke that has ritualized the emergence of this inner performer. And you can talk about tribute bands, “American Idol,” and so on.

None of this, however, will get you near the true nature of karaoke. Deeply awful at times, even sordid, it is never less than interesting — and it can be revelatory. I once saw a friend of mine do Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak” at the Courtside Pub in Cambridge, and I’ve never been able to look at him the same way again. At the instant that he sang “See the boys and me mean business …” he became legendary to me.

“Karaoke,” a new book by Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco forthcoming from the University of hicago Press, tracks the westward spread of the phenomenon, from its birth in Japan in 1971 with the low-rent keyboardist and vibraphone player Daisuke Inoue — who built a little box called the 8-Juke that played backup music for amateur singers — to the intallation of a karaoke machine in an English church, 30 years later, as a replacement for a recently departed organist. (“I’m afraid singing unaccompanied just wasn’t the same,” explained the vicar.)

As the book suggests, something of the mystery of karaoke is contained in its etymology: The word is a compound abbreviation of two Japanese words meaning “empty” and “orchestra.” Karaoke is above all a space, an absence haunted by the missing vocal line. The instrumental accompaniment, generally a synthetic redaction of the original track, is ghost-music, tinkling with its own deadness — and that unsung melody is spectrally beckoning, beckoning. The heart of the karaoke performer swells: Into this vacancy he must project his beautiful essence, his soul. He — or she (karaoke knows no gender) — may be emboldened or confused by alcohol; wild with a private grief; or, worst of all, suffering from a genuine desire to excel before his peers. Regardless, in the performance that ensues, something will be brought to light.

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Copyright Slate

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1.
Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.
2.
Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.
3.
Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about “healing,” and of the “courage” that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a “long national nightmare,” but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford’s ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of “healing” celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don’t mind living in a banana republic.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 31, 2006

KASHGAR, China

THE sun is setting fast and early over Yarbeshe, a hillside neighborhood of crumbling brick houses, dark alleys and a creaky wooden drawbridge that sways uneasily over a stream in this fabled gateway city that links far western China to the recesses of central Asia.

It is early November, and one can already feel winter arriving. You would know it instantly by looking at the director Marc Forster, who is bundled in a parka as he paces the chilly interior of a smart two-story villa built specially for his film in one of the poorer parts of town.

But winter is not arriving fast enough for the demands of this evening’s scene, which is set in Kabul, Afghanistan. So a crew on the villa’s rooftop busies itself operating an artificial snow machine that blows out a respectably thick simulacrum. The lights go on, and for the next few hours — indeed long into the night — the cameras roll.

There are many challenges involved in turning a runaway best-selling novel into a Hollywood film. But when the novel is largely set in Afghanistan, and ranges widely over that country, which after Iraq is perhaps the second most dangerous place in the world for Americans, making snow is the least of the filmmakers’ problems.

Khaled Hosseini’s novel, “The Kite Runner,” has the added complication of being an epic, once a staple of big-budget Hollywood productions but nowadays an increasingly lost art. The story, about the doomed friendship between two Afghan boys, sprawls over generations, and roams well beyond Kabul, notably to parts of Pakistan and to San Francisco, where Afghan exiles live bound and haunted by a common sense of loss.

“For me from the very beginning this was a story that needed to be told on an epic scale, and you tell a story on an epic scale with a little bit of fear,” said Mr. Forster, whose film is scheduled for release by DreamWorks and Paramount Vantage in November 2007. Specifically, he said, he tried to recreate a feeling of Kabul in the 1970s, of streets filled with color and of life in a country whose middle class brimmed with hope, and then revisit the city years later, after the Soviet invasion, to explore the sense of lost identity among exiles and returnees “whose country has been raped and destroyed.”

Hollywood does not have a happy history of managing what has been two of the film’s most daunting problems: finding the ideal remote location and casting a large-canvas story about brown-skinned people from a faraway and little-understood country. Traditionally big films have required Western actors in lead roles, and preferably stars at that. The needs of marketing typically dictate that the dialogue be in English, very often resulting in inconsistent or even ridiculously stereotypical accents. Extras could be relied upon to help moviegoers suspend their disbelief, uttering a few incomprehensible lines and stumbling colorfully about. And once these details have been nailed, location has never loomed terribly large.

For “The Kite Runner,” though, filmmakers have placed a huge wager on authenticity. They are betting, among other things, that American audiences can be persuaded to sit still through two-plus hours of subtitled plot development — something moviegoers have become more accustomed to lately, thanks to studio films like “Apocalypto,” “Letters From Iwo Jima” and “Babel,” all of which unfold completely or largely in languages other than English.

The crux of this gamble is here in Kashgar, where a large slice of the film was shot, and the story of how this came to pass is something of a tale itself.

The production team spent three months researching locations, giving little thought to Afghanistan itself, for obvious reasons, as they drew up an initial list of 20 countries and deliberated on which one would get them closest to Afghanistan’s look. The possibilities ranged from India to Morocco to South Africa, but E. Bennett Walsh, who oversaw the search, said the conversations kept returning to Kashgar, a place that few people in Hollywood had ever heard of and where no Western film had ever been made.

Mr. Walsh was initially attracted to Kashgar through the stories and pictures of backpackers, photographers and other adventurers, most of which he found online. “This place is a kind of Lonely Planet’s greatest hits,” he said. “The kind of travelers you see out here are basically people who rough it and Silk Road fanatics.”

Very quickly other charms came into evidence. Kashgar had almost no history of filmmaking, but China’s movie industry had started booming, and the authorities, eager to put the country’s far west on the map quickly, warmed to the idea of making “The Kite Runner” here. That in itself represented a huge turnabout. Not long before, foreigners were barred from traveling to the region, where separatist sentiments have long existed.

Beyond the cooperation of authorities and the availability of highly skilled filmmakers in China, Kashgar was always the best fit in terms of appearance, beginning with a diverse but overwhelmingly Muslim population and a countryside that plausibly resembles Afghanistan. “In some locations you are limited to working small, little corners, whereas here you can shoot 100 yards down the road,” Mr. Walsh said. “The streets of this city are just dripping with production value. All you have to do is change the signs.”

The search for a cast proved even more challenging. The streets of Kashgar, teaming with bearded men and women in burkhas, might fool the eye into thinking one is seeing Kabul. But dialect cannot be finessed so easily, and the producers needed to find a Dari-speaking cast once the decision was made to film in the original language. Homayoun Ershadi, a 59-year-old Iranian actor who played the lead in “Taste of Cherry,” which was one of the winners of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, was recruited from Tehran to play the role of Baba, the father of the principal character, Amir.

Khalid Abdalla, a British actor of Egyptian extraction who starred in “United 93,” plays Amir as an adult. He traveled to Kabul to learn Dari in a crash effort that left a deep impression on the author, Mr. Hosseini, who spent time on the set here, and on all of the native speakers involved in the film. And Shaun Toub, the Iranian-born actor who appeared in the movie “Crash,” appears as Rahim Khan, Baba’s close friend and a mentor to Amir.

In an interview Mr. Abdalla emphasized the desire to get the portrayal of Afghan society right, echoing a sentiment common among many of the actors. “One of the things about this film that is particularly wonderful for me is that the starting point is not violence but rather, ordinary people,” he said. “When you say Afghanistan, the first thing most people will think about is the Taliban or Al Qaeda, which is horrendous. One of the most common reactions to the book is surprise at how rich and interesting Afghan society is.”

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Copyright The Guardian

Lauren Bacall was tough, funny and sexy; Catherine Deneuve was meek, passive and expressionless. Germaine Greer laments the decline from feisty broad to simpering Barbie

Saturday December 30, 2006

The movie phenomenon known as Lauren Bacall took time to put together. The woman who began life as Betty Joan Perske studied dancing for 13 years, then acting, and became a stage actress and model called Betty Bacall. Her picture on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar caught the eye of the wife of movie producer Howard Hawks, who cast her in To Have and Have Not (1944) and created the movie star Lauren Bacall. She was not a regular beauty; her face was too broad, her mouth too wide, her eyes too far apart, and her ears too big. She was also neither blonde nor dark, but sallow and mousy.

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Catherine Deneuve is the opposite. Everything about her is perfect: eyes beautifully set in perfect oval face, mouth neat, skin transparently fair, a body that could serve as the template for the first blow-up doll. Only her name and her hair colour were fake. She was born Catherine Dorléac, daughter of stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and his actress wife, whose maiden name she eventually took. Deneuve got her first screen role when she was only 13, and she has been in movies non-stop for 50 years. She never thought of doing anything else, and at 63 she still doesn’t. She says she never works more than half of any year, but what she does with the other half is unknown.

Bacall was 19 when she played her first scene opposite Humphrey Bogart; within a few weeks she was in his bed and his marriage to Mayo Methot was over. Already she was doing stuff that would reverberate through the decades. You can still see her as Slim Browning standing in the doorway, saying: “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.”

Slim Browning - hotel thief, real name Marie - has won her new name from Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) because, when faced with extreme danger, she lost no smidgen of her cool. The name she was given was that of Hawks’s second wife, the person who identified her as a Hawksian woman in the first place. Slim’s coolness and courage also give her the right to initiate a sexual encounter, and to challenge her male partner, who has to challenge her right back. Their mutual wariness and occasional gruffness with each other builds the sexual tension between them to the point that when they finally get it on, we all feel like cheering.

Try as I might, I can’t remember anything said by any character that Deneuve ever played, but the difference is as much one of era as of talent or personality. When Bacall came into the limelight the war was still on, and women were still self-sufficient, bouncing around in short skirts and chunky heels, talking loud and drawing a crowd. Before the Hays Code sanitised the movies in 1934, a series of remarkable actresses, including Bebe Daniels, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow, had created female characters who managed to be tough, funny and sexy all at once.

The type of spunky working girl was established by ex-chorus-girl Joan Crawford in the 1930s - most unforgettably as Flämmchen in Grand Hotel, which won best picture at the 1932 Academy Awards. Crawford was soon joined by Rosalind Russell, who was in her element playing feisty women such as the divorced reporter who ends up working for her ex-husband in His Girl Friday (1940), also directed by Hawks.

Hawks directed another unforgettably stylish, wisecracking, sexually aggressive female in Bringing up Baby (1938), namely Katharine Hepburn. In Only Angels Have Wings, made by Hawks the next year, Jean Arthur’s character tells her male counterpart: “I’m hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me.” These were women with their own agenda, who took risks knowingly, and took the consequences.

It was 1944 when Bacall joined the select group of Hawksian women. By the time Hawks had finished directing her in The Big Sleep two years later, time was running out for women who could give as good as they got. With all his clout in Hollywood, Hawks couldn’t keep them alive. The war was over and women were back in the bedroom and the kitchen, working on the baby boom. Hawks’s next starring ladies would be Marilyn Monroe and Joan Collins in the cinch-waisted, pointy-breasted, simpering 1950s.

By the time Bacall was teamed with Bogart again in 1948 in Key Largo, directed by John Huston, hemlines had dropped and lipstick was pink, and nobody knew what to do with her. All she had to do in Key Largo was mime the family feeling and warm-hearted wifely innocence that went with high-heeled rope-soled espadrilles and a scraped-back hairstyle that showed her big ears. The thing Bacall always knew was how to pace a scene, how to time her lines, how to balance a word with a look. She didn’t emote in any obvious way. It was all in the stillness, the upward glance, the few words. She had some successes in the 1950s, notably in Young Man with a Horn (1950), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Designing Woman (1957), but they only went to prove that nobody was writing films for grown-up women.

Which is where Catherine Deneuve comes in. Her big breakthrough was Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), a masterpiece of romantic French whimsy devised, written and directed by Jacques Demy, in which 20-year-old Deneuve played Geneviève, the 16-year-old daughter of the proprietress of a shop called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. She and her mechanic boyfriend are in love and want to get married but he is called up for military service in Algeria. They go to bed together, he leaves, she bids him farewell at Cherbourg railway station - et voilà, she is pregnant. In fact, Deneuve had just given birth to her son by Roger Vadim when she started work on the movie.

Geneviève was a role for a French Olivia Newton John, and Deneuve was probably the nearest thing they had, but without a voice. What she did have was hair, as much hair comparative to the rest of her as any Barbie doll, and bleached beyond an inch of its life. The mass of hair did all the acting and most of the dancing for her. Under the hair was the perfect face, virtually expressionless, endlessly caressed by the camera. Though the plot requires Geneviève to jump the gun and have premarital sex with her boyfriend, Deneuve conveys not one scintilla of sexual desire. She might as well be going to the dentist as going to lose her virginity. Bacall could signify sexual interest with a glance; Deneuve cannot project it at all. This is not so much a matter of personality as of changed priorities.

Deneuve’s film career began in 1963, when Roger Vadim cast her as Virtue in his film Le Vice et la Vertu. He had already moulded one young actress into the phenomenon called Brigitte Bardot, and it was only to be expected that he would create the Deneuve brand as well. Once he had identified Deneuve as Virtue, given her a baby and dumped her, she would continue in the same mould through film after film - meek, passive, expressionless. With a brow never furrowed and not a single laugh-line, she would take over from Bardot in 1985 as the face of Marianne, the symbol of the French republic, and her face would still be on the money 15 years later.

Deneuve’s is what they call “time-less beauty”; she preserves it by keeping her revs very low. She comes to every role immaculately prepared, and she follows every directorial instruction to the letter. She begins by underplaying and allows the director, in her own phrase, to push her up, if he can be bothered. She has been described as “a receptacle for every conceivable imagination”, and this is her strength in cinematic terms. Her cinematic presence is like the dress “the colour of time” that she wore in another of Jacques Demy’s fantasies, Peau d’Âne, on which different images and colours were projected. Her effortless blankness allows her to take the imprint of her viewers’ fantasies, and so she has achieved a reputation as one of the sexiest film actresses ever to grace the screen.

Belle de Jour (1967) has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche - the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor - is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life. As Séverine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, director Lous Buñuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.

The decision to have her dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent adds a bizarre dimension to the nonexistent plot; we seem to be living within the pages of a glossy magazine, with product placement everywhere. Everywhere Séverine goes, she is conspicuous by her catwalk presence, from her shiny patent leather pumps to the helmet that holds in her mane of Barbie-doll hair. The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn’t. Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.

Buñuel used Deneuve again in Tristana (1970), a far better film than Belle de Jour but much less successful. Again, his real subject was not Tristana but himself. What activates the film is Buñuel’s deep hostility to the hypocrisy of Spanish provincial society. Deneuve acts as the surrogate for his child self, the innocent orphan who is seduced by her guardian, who tries to express her own sexuality with a younger man who uses her; mutilated and helpless, she is forced to regularise a union with the man who took her virginity. What remains in the memory is not the shocking last scene or Deneuve’s performance, but Buñuel’s evocation of 1930s Toledo, seen as through the lens of childhood, wonderfully shot by José F Aguayo. Again, Deneuve’s impassivity is exactly what Buñuel needs. It is the still point in his turning world.

Lauren Bacall’s film career foundered in the 1950s, and never recovered. She has since played cameo parts and had considerable success on the stage. Meanwhile, Catherine Deneuve has been, as well as the face of the republic, the face of Chanel No 5, and most recently the face of cosmetics companies MAC and L’Oréal.

The Hawksian woman was an idea that flourished at a time of crisis, in the depression and during the war, when the full energies of women were needed if they were to survive. After the war she was supplanted by the female eunuch, weighed down with huge hair and false eyelashes, unequal to any challenge - all things to all men and nothing to herself.

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