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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: June 28, 2007

BEIJING: The Chinese state comes extremely well prepared for one of the key attributes of great-power status: controlling the terms of debate on issues of any consequence.

For decades, the Communist Party has told Chinese people in very direct terms what they can and cannot think. That tradition has softened during the current era of economic opening and fast growth, but the government still enjoys a striking amount of sway over the parameters of discussion of everything from world history to current affairs, defining for the public what is good, bad, right, wrong, true and untrue.

This great thought-orientation machine has been gearing up in recent weeks for a major new challenge, and one that won’t be going away anytime soon. According to a study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China has just surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, a year ahead of the earliest projections, putting this country in a position that its propaganda bosses have never been willing to countenance: the role of villain. It doesn’t help that the issue in question, global warming, is one that has the entire world’s attention right now.

According to well established rules of the propaganda game, China, as a nation, must never be at fault. But the ugly fundamentals of environmental degradation here are becoming increasingly obvious and increasingly grave, and for those who must spin the global warming issue, this has all the makings of an immense headache.

The country is becoming a world beater in many things, the less celebrated of which include dirty, high-energy-consuming industries - from steel, which it produces in immense quantities, often from antiquated plants, to cement, of which China produces 40 percent of the world’s output.
Today in Asia - Pacific
Indonesian Islam’s softer hard line
Former Prime Minister Miyazawa of Japan dies at 87
Japan ex-intelligence chief arrested over land deal with pro-North Korea group

China is building one to two coal-fired power plants every week, with plans for more than 500 new ones currently on the books. Even now, the country consumes more of this dirtiest of fossil fuels than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Indeed, China consumes almost as much coal as the rest of the world.

The industrial side of the ledger looks bleak, but as important as it is, it is only one piece of a disturbing picture. The passenger vehicle is in its infancy in China, but it, like so many things here, is growing by leaps and bounds. Each year, seven million new cars hit the road in a country that is enthusiastically mimicking America’s wasteful experience, pushing toward a vision of a country blanketed with highways, with a car in every garage, and with an automobile industry second to none.

Urbanization is a related problem. New and bigger cities are being created at a speed never before seen in human history. The purpose, as in just about everything here, is to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and to create a shot at prosperity for all of the country’s citizens.

It is not hard to sympathize with Chinese planners in this, but that does nothing to suspend questions about the wisdom of their approach or to allay fears about the consequences. As Elizabeth Economy, a leading expert on China’s environmental problem, wrote recently: “With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts.”

So far, Beijing’s message to the world on all of this could be neatly summed up as “bug off.” One could hear this in the voice of Chen Feng, the chairman of Hainan Airlines, who told a panel at the recent World Economic Forum in Singapore that the West deserved the blame for environmental problems, adding pointedly that Westerners were “robbers and bandits before you became right-minded people.”

The substance of the Chinese argument is unassailable. Cumulatively, China, a newcomer to mass industrialization, has contributed far less to global warming than, say, the United States, and even today, on a per capita basis, produces only about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that the rich states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development do.

This line is part of a game of hardball, still in its early innings, that pits China and a loose coalition of developing countries against the already rich and long-polluting West. This game consists of racing as far ahead with the current mode of development as possible and relying on the West to win a “better” deal for China within the framework of a new global agreement on greenhouse gases.

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Posted at 12:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: June 28, 2007

BEIJING: The Chinese state comes extremely well prepared for one of the key attributes of great-power status: controlling the terms of debate on issues of any consequence.

For decades, the Communist Party has told Chinese people in very direct terms what they can and cannot think. That tradition has softened during the current era of economic opening and fast growth, but the government still enjoys a striking amount of sway over the parameters of discussion of everything from world history to current affairs, defining for the public what is good, bad, right, wrong, true and untrue.

This great thought-orientation machine has been gearing up in recent weeks for a major new challenge, and one that won’t be going away anytime soon. According to a study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China has just surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, a year ahead of the earliest projections, putting this country in a position that its propaganda bosses have never been willing to countenance: the role of villain. It doesn’t help that the issue in question, global warming, is one that has the entire world’s attention right now.

According to well established rules of the propaganda game, China, as a nation, must never be at fault. But the ugly fundamentals of environmental degradation here are becoming increasingly obvious and increasingly grave, and for those who must spin the global warming issue, this has all the makings of an immense headache.

The country is becoming a world beater in many things, the less celebrated of which include dirty, high-energy-consuming industries - from steel, which it produces in immense quantities, often from antiquated plants, to cement, of which China produces 40 percent of the world’s output.
Today in Asia - Pacific
Indonesian Islam’s softer hard line
Former Prime Minister Miyazawa of Japan dies at 87
Japan ex-intelligence chief arrested over land deal with pro-North Korea group

China is building one to two coal-fired power plants every week, with plans for more than 500 new ones currently on the books. Even now, the country consumes more of this dirtiest of fossil fuels than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Indeed, China consumes almost as much coal as the rest of the world.

The industrial side of the ledger looks bleak, but as important as it is, it is only one piece of a disturbing picture. The passenger vehicle is in its infancy in China, but it, like so many things here, is growing by leaps and bounds. Each year, seven million new cars hit the road in a country that is enthusiastically mimicking America’s wasteful experience, pushing toward a vision of a country blanketed with highways, with a car in every garage, and with an automobile industry second to none.

Urbanization is a related problem. New and bigger cities are being created at a speed never before seen in human history. The purpose, as in just about everything here, is to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and to create a shot at prosperity for all of the country’s citizens.

It is not hard to sympathize with Chinese planners in this, but that does nothing to suspend questions about the wisdom of their approach or to allay fears about the consequences. As Elizabeth Economy, a leading expert on China’s environmental problem, wrote recently: “With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts.”

So far, Beijing’s message to the world on all of this could be neatly summed up as “bug off.” One could hear this in the voice of Chen Feng, the chairman of Hainan Airlines, who told a panel at the recent World Economic Forum in Singapore that the West deserved the blame for environmental problems, adding pointedly that Westerners were “robbers and bandits before you became right-minded people.”

The substance of the Chinese argument is unassailable. Cumulatively, China, a newcomer to mass industrialization, has contributed far less to global warming than, say, the United States, and even today, on a per capita basis, produces only about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that the rich states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development do.

This line is part of a game of hardball, still in its early innings, that pits China and a loose coalition of developing countries against the already rich and long-polluting West. This game consists of racing as far ahead with the current mode of development as possible and relying on the West to win a “better” deal for China within the framework of a new global agreement on greenhouse gases.

Posted at 12:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW

Tue 26 Jun 2007

In recent years, two main schools of thought have emerged about how to lift Africa out of its seemingly bottomless descent into war, poverty, and disease. To borrow labels used by the reporter Andrew Rice in an insightful review for the Nation two years ago, two predominant arguments are being advanced: the “governance-first” camp “holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way,” and the “poverty-first” camp “believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor.”

Each argument contains its own implicit demand: one puts the onus on Africans to throw out their more-often-than-not corrupt and kleptocratic leaders and find a way to take advantage of the rich resources of the continent to make it prosper. The other looks to the Western world to fulfill a moral responsibility to provide billions of dollars in aid to Africans so that an improved standard of living will lead to stronger and more stable countries.

With the exception of angry and often cruelly written op-eds by one-time Peace Corps volunteer and travel writer Paul Theroux, not much time and space is ever given here in the West to the “governance-first” argument. Mostly, there is one, overwhelming attitude that dominates the way we write and think about Africa in the West: we are the only possible saviors, obligated by our humanity to donate money and urge our government to both increase spending on aid and cancel any debts owned by these poor countries.

This “poverty-first” attitude also fits in nicely with the role that certain celebrities – i.e., Bono — have carved out as representatives of the continent, hoping to prick the conscience of Western leaders. It makes sense. When the guilt for Africa’s many problems lands totally on the West and not on Africa itself, an opportunity opens up for those with money and star power to set themselves up as spokespeople for hundreds of millions of Africans. It’s a precarious role, one that can easily tip over into a paternalistic and condescending tone that’s not that far away from the worldview of colonial powers who saw themselves as engaged in a civilizing mission.

All this as introduction to a look at the current issue of Vanity Fair, its “Africa Issue.”

First — it must be said — good intentions should never be undervalued. When you have a glossy magazine like Vanity Fair, whose existence depends on revenue from ads for expensive products — like the diamond-encrusted Dior watch that appears on the wrist of Sharon Stone on page twenty-five of the “Africa Issue” — it is always a risk to focus on subject matter that is not quite as sexy as, say, a photo shoot that features Scarlett Johansson’s bare bum. When you set yourself the task of capturing the essence of the continent in an issue, you can’t avoid AIDS, you can’t avoid disease, and you can’t avoid child soldiers. None of these are easy sells to the designers and car companies that pay for the magazine’s big bucks production costs.

That caveat out of the way, it’s worth examining how Graydon Carter and his guest editor for the issue – yes, none other than Bono – went about bridging this divide between the style of Vanity Fair and the substance of Africa. It turns out that the “poverty-first” view of Africa’s problems suits their purposes perfectly. With the emphasis on the West’s obligation — on Bono’s role in changing things, and not on some unknown African activist or opposition politician — than the issue can have all the glamour of every other Vanity Fair and still be ostensibly about Africa.

The cover, in a way, tells the story. Together with photographer-to-the-stars, Annie Liebovitz, Carter and Bono conceived of twenty different portraits that would appear on twenty different versions of the cover. According to Liebovitz, the concept was to present a group of people having a “conversation” about Africa. “It’s a visual chain letter,” she said in a note in the issue, “spreading the message from person to person to person.” The people having this conversation include, conveniently, Brad Pitt and Madonna, Oprah and Barack Obama. It’s not clear exactly what the connection of any of these people is to the continent. And, by my count, only three of them are actually from Africa – Desmond Tutu, Djimoun Honsou, and Iman. But the key indicator of what the issue’s character will be is that this a conversation about Africa by a group of well-known celebrities. They are the ones here with agency to tell the story of Africa in Vanity Fair.

What follows inside has much of the same tone. An article about all of humanity’s genetic connection to the continent reveals what the editors think of their task: “The world population that was spawned in Africa now has the power to save it. We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago. As their good sons and daughters, those of us who left, whether long ago or more recently, surely have a moral imperative to use our gifts to support our cousins who stayed.” Condescension might be too strong a word, but it is shocking to what extent the actual people, the Africans, seem to get totally lost here. They are certainly absent from the big features.

Predictably, there is a long, glowing profile of Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor who is the darling of the “poverty-first” crowd, uncritically endorsing his ideas about pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into Africa and breathlessly following him as he jets from village to village dispensing advice. Even more predictably, the piece is illustrated by a photo still from his MTV special with Angelina Jolie. The effect of Bono’s own (red) campaign is detailed in another article, self-congratulatingly titled, “The Lazarus Effect.” By getting companies, like the Gap, to promote products whose sales will go toward providing anti-retroviral drugs for free, the campaign has helped many people with HIV to live longer and healthier.

All good stuff, but the article reads more like an advertisement for Bono’s good works than about the lives of those affected by the disease. William Langweische, the resident narrative master, turns in an expertly told story about a family of Indians in the Congo that have an airplane transport company. He beautifully describes flying around in planes patched together with duct tape, but here again, the people remain small specks on the ground.

The whole concept of the issue seems to be about Westerners telling other Westerners about Africa (à la the cover). Bill Clinton muses about Nelson Mandela. An interesting music festival in the deserts of northern Mali, is described through the diary entries of an MTV executive. A photo portfolio of mostly Western-educated and urban-based Africans is meant to present a new face of the continent, but they are robbed of their own voices and are instead introduced by prominent Westerners, like Dave Eggers, Harry Belafonte, and Damien Hirst. Early in the issue Desmond Tutu is interviewed by, of all people, Brad Pitt.
In fact, an African is the author of only one single article in the issue. And Binyavanga Wainaina’s rambling and seemingly unedited (in an otherwise heavily edited magazine) memories of a changing Kenya do not do justice to the thousands of African writers who could have written so much more eloquently about their homes and their own people (which, by the way, are so diverse that the idea of a monolithic presentation of Africa seems a little silly to begin with).

I’m being harsh, I know. Maybe Vanity Fair is not the forum for Africans to present themselves on their own terms. But it is frustrating to think that what might be some people’s only exposure to Africa can’t come in a form that allows for some authentic voices to emerge, telling the real story of Africans themselves who are struggling to alter their realities, or even simply describing what those realities are, in their own words. One has to wonder: what an impact it would have had had Vanity Fair decided to put an unknown– or even a relatively known – African on their cover instead?
The issue does have a few bright spots. An excellent story about the intense Chinese influence on Africa told me something I did not know. And an overview of African literary stars also exposed me to some writers I’d like to read. But even these articles were written by Westerners. Why didn’t Carter and Bono allow Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (misspelled…should be Adichie), the Nigerian author who’s described here as the new “It girl” of African literature, to tell us about the richness of Nigeria’s literary scene, of the influence of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka on her own work?

I don’t mean to seem naïve by making these suggestions. I know that Graydon Carter, for all his caring for Africa, needs to think about what sells magazines. But it seems to me that it’s not just a market concern that drove the way the issue was put together. It goes back to that particular understanding about how to salvage Africa, and the popular notion that Westerners alone can do it.
Paul Theroux, in one of those angry op-eds, had a word or two for those who believe that: “Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth.”

I tend to agree with Theroux’s idea if not his tone. The Vanity Fair issue was, I’m sure, born out of good intention. But, in the end, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that what it actually achieves in the end is to convince us of those good intentions. Nothing more. And that, for Africans, both those who desire help and those trying to help themselves, is not even close to enough.

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_obscure_continent.php?page=1

Posted at 12:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The London Review of Books

Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public holidays like any other, or gatherings of tiny bands of militants or mourners, whose numbers dwindle to nothing as the years pass. In Los Angeles, you can see both kinds. If you ask people what Memorial Day stands for, virtually no one, not even professors of history, can tell you. As for the other sort, I myself stand every summer with a small band of friends outside the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the weather, light candles in memory of what happened then, and those who died as a result of it. I don’t think any other mass commemoration has lasted so long. But what is remembered so powerfully in Hong Kong cannot even be mentioned on the other side of the border that separates the Special Administrative Region from the rest of the People’s Republic of China.

Eighteen years is not a short time; it’s long enough for a baby to become an adult. On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.

The mothers the ad was honouring are a small group of elderly women who have become the symbol of the event the country cannot refer to. Ding Zilin, who organised the women, is now 71. She used to teach Marxist philosophy at the People’s University in Beijing. In 1989, when Tiananmen Square was occupied by thousands of students, her 17-year-old son, who was still at school, got caught up in the movement. On the evening of 3 June, as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense, she feared the boy might join other demonstrators in the streets and locked him in her apartment. He escaped through a bathroom window, and was killed that night, when troops marched into the centre of the city. No one knows how many died alongside him. Government repression has been so complete that the number of victims remains a mystery. When Li Hai, a former activist from Peking University, tried to collect information about them in the early 1990s, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘leaking state secrets’. Despite constant police harassment and repeated house arrests, Ding persisted in her inquiry, and in 1994 published, in Hong Kong, a verifiable list of victims. Every year the list has expanded, and it now has 186 names. More and more people who lost family members have gathered around Ding. Inspired by the example of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, and with help from human rights activists in Hong Kong, Ding and her friends some time ago named themselves the Tiananmen Mothers. Actually, the group also includes fathers, wives and husbands of those who were killed, as well as some of those who were injured during the repression. Qi Zhiyong, a worker, lost a leg from a bullet wound near Tiananmen. For trying to get redress and compensation, he has repeatedly been beaten by police thugs in his home; this year he was put under precautionary arrest before 4 June, and only released when the anniversary was over. His case is typical.

The government’s fears are not irrational. Over six weeks, what began as a student demonstration became a national political crisis, in which the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power was seriously challenged for the first time since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The government resolved the crisis by ordering regular troops, brought in from the provinces, to enforce martial law in Beijing, even at the cost of opening fire on the crowds and rolling tanks over peaceful protesters in order to seize control of Tiananmen Square, the most powerful symbolic space in modern China. For a whole week after the first gunshot, not a single political leader came out to face the nation, leaving the capital in the control of a professional army, a situation Beijing had not seen since the Allied Expedition against the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

With Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crush the demonstrations the Party recovered its monopoly of power, but not its legitimacy or its authority. To fill the ideological void Deng set China on an accelerated path of economic change, announced to the nation by a speech in the southern city of Shenzhen in the spring of 1992, and expressed in the message ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Plastered on billboards across the country, the Party’s new slogan dismissed any possibility of discussion of ideas or principles, proclaiming simply: ‘Development is the Irrefutable Argument.’ Fifteen years later, China is the industrial wonder of the world. The average standard of living has improved, poverty has been reduced, urbanisation has exploded, exports and financial reserves are sky-high. Abroad, admiration for the People’s Republic has never been higher. National prosperity and pride typically go together. With such achievements to boast of, why should the Communist Party still be so fearful of something that happened an epoch ago? Why does it go to such lengths to distort and repress the past, and where it is unable to erase people’s memories entirely, why does it try to portray the demonstrations of 1989 as senseless turmoil and the movement’s activists as conspiring tricksters? But the real question is this: what was the conviction that led the protesters to stand up to the military machine?

Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.

Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.

It is true that socio-economic discontent, especially following on the rapid inflation of the summer of 1988, played an important role in generating support for the student protests of the next year. But these economic grievances were unambiguously transformed into political protests in the movement of 1989. Their target was the way Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, then secretary-general of the Communist Party, ruled the country. Particularly powerful in mobilising protest was Zhao’s description of his reforms as ‘crossing a river by stepping one by one on stones under the water’. If all you can do is test the stability of unseen stones on the riverbed, what entitles you to a monopoly over policy-making? Why should we wait while you pick your way through the current, now and then finding yourself on the right stone, and letting us drown when you step on the wrong one? That was more or less the feeling of the movement. The economic slogans of 1989 were mostly attacks on past policies that had gone wrong, and especially on corruption among high officials. But these never took the form of specific economic demands, nor did any demands of that kind come into the many attempts at ‘dialogue’ – i.e. negotiations – between protesters and officials, before talks finally broke down. What dominated were unequivocally political demands for freedom of speech, civil rights and citizen participation.

As for the movement’s ideology, one must remember that this huge social upheaval erupted very quickly. When a hunger strike among the students put pressure on the government in mid-May, the news media, including the People’s Daily, enjoyed a week of press freedom unprecedented in the history of the PRC. On the streets people from the most varied social backgrounds were suddenly able to voice their ideas and debate among themselves. In the ensuing hubbub, it was easy to overinterpret a few isolated symbols. Popular imaginings of America are an example. A highly abstract idea of the US, based on very little knowledge, became one of the vehicles – a shell, if you like – in which people’s imaginative energy was invested. This shell was filled, however, with understandings – and critical reflections – based on life in the socialist, or semi-socialist, society of the previous decades. Socialist discourse and notions of an idealised America were mixed together in people’s minds. This can be a disappointment for today’s intellectuals, who occupy much more clear-cut ideological positions, liberal or leftist. Yet below the Goddess of Democracy, armbands on the picket line were red. The historical significance of the upheaval of 1989 in Beijing does not lie in one paradigm or another, espoused by this or that spokesman or leader. It lies in the space the movement opened up for creative imagination and the opportunities it offered for experiment. The focus was always on the right of citizens to participate in the public life of the country, and the channels that would enable them to do so.

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Posted at 12:27 AM · Comments (0)

From “The Bund” newspaper’s feature about my work.

　　记录一座变化中的城市

　　作为一名资深记者，Howard French反复要求记者在采访过程中记录下他的每一句话。“你必须用我的原话。”他强调说。在看待这个世界的其余方面时，这位摄影爱好者也抱有同样坚决、明确和自信得近乎固执的观点。例如，在他作为《纽约时报》上海分社社长在上海生活的3年多时间里，他坚持用自己的眼光拍摄心目中最珍贵的城市即景，即便在他人眼中，这些并非上海的精华。文/许佳　图片提供 /Howard W. French　图片编辑/金婕

　　2006 年夏天，一个非常炎热的傍晚，方浜路上低矮房子里的居民们，照例从室内搬出小桌小凳，坐在上街沿边吃晚饭。在这些露天纳凉的人当中，有个寻常的三口之家，小男孩正赤着上身坐在板凳上。面前的饭食引不起他的兴趣，令他感到为难。

　　高温加上不肯吃饭的小孩，使得一旁的年轻母亲急躁起来。她端起碗，向儿子高声吐出一连串训斥。小男孩不知如何辩解，他明白面前这碗引不起食欲的饭必须要吃下去，又发觉邻居正在近处饶有兴致地注视着这一幕，因而郁郁不乐地垂下了脑袋。

　　进食的难题是如此困扰着他，以至于直到快门按下的一刻，他才刚刚抬起头来，注意到面前不远处正单膝跪在他们面前地上、手举相机的一个外国人。

　　Howard French 使用的相机是Rolleiflex 2.8。因为不能调焦，所以当他从中华路拐进方浜路，远远看见这个三口之家的时候，他必须悄悄靠近，以达到理想的拍摄距离。“在拍摄时，我不希望人们意识到我的存在，”French 说，“我不需要他们‘向外国人摆姿势’。”

　　他尽可能不被察觉地走到很近的位置，单膝跪地，按下快门——就在这一刻，那个小男孩才刚抬起头注意到他。“有人在拍我们。”这可能就是小男孩向正训斥自己的妈妈说的话。

　　“我感到自己像是一场亲密的古老仪式中的贵客。”在为《纽约时报》撰写的文章《局外人的相机，秘密世界的入场券》(An Outsider’s CameraProvides a Ticket Into a Secret World)中，French 这样描述自己穿梭于上海旧城区大街小巷、拍摄本地人生活场景的感受。方浜路上这个三口之家的晚餐场面，成为了他的摄影集《消失中的上海》 (Disappearing Shanghai)的封面图。在这本画册中，French 向我们展示了一个令他着迷的上海。

　　“上海城里的大多数地方我都去过”

　　“上海城里的大多数地方我都去过，我对中心市区很熟悉。”HowardFrench 自信对这座城市有着广泛的了解。自从2004 年开始担任《纽约时报》驻上海分社社长的职务之后，他就一直带着相机在城市各处探索。在《局外人的相机，秘密世界的入场券》开头，他写道：“我仍清楚记得在上海第一年的那些时刻—下午晚些时候，这个城市独特的美仿佛被黄昏澄澈的光线过滤了一般，变得纯净起来。”

　　就像许多生活在上海的外国人一样，French 选择旧法租界作为自己的居住地。他在永嘉路附近买了一栋房子，宣称：“我住在一个所有邻居都是中国人的地方。”说到与社区中其他人的关系，他简单地形容为 “友好，但不常交谈”。有趣的是，在他拍摄的照片中根本不出现他自己居住的社区。“我不知道为什么，”他说，“也许 .天都会看到的东西，就会不想拍吧。”

　　作为《纽约时报》的外派记者，French 曾经在五大洲的100 多个国家采访工作过。海外从业对他而言就是日常生活。在来上海之前，他的工作地点是东京。而在任何地方，他都会带着自己的相机到城里漫游。French 保留着步行上下班的习惯，在工作之余，他的唯一消遣就是前往山西路、中华路、方浜路、董家渡路和天潼路这些他钟爱的马路，为自己的镜头寻找目标。“我不爱购物，也不喜欢去酒吧。我每天的工作很忙，除此之外，拍照对我而言就足够有趣了—我为什么要去寻找别的乐趣呢？”

　　在French 的照片中，各色各样的人总是主体—光顾排档的、饥肠辘辘的人，吃着一支粉色棉花糖过马路的小男孩，在街心摆黄鱼车卖蘑菇的小贩，坐在弄堂口聊天的人，在路口等待通行的骑车人，这些人物全部拍摄于上海的一些陈旧的，甚至可称为破败的区域，比如山西路和方浜路。在这些区域里分隔出一条条幽深里弄的房屋，并不是如今被热炒的老洋房，也不是典型意义上的上海传统建筑石库门，而是从1920 年代开始就陆续建造起来，并且因为人世变迁而住进了越来越多居民，因而也变得越来越面目全非。

　　“我最爱去正在被毁坏、逐渐消失的区域。”French 说。“我只问他们，这个地方就要消失了，你怎么看？”

　　在2007 年6 月16 日出版的《金融时报》上，记者Geoff Dyer 撰文写道：“为了给数千玻璃幕墙的摩天大楼让路，成群老建筑被扫平，其中一些具有相当可观的历史价值。批评者认为，在这个过程中，城市将失去社区和街道生活，而这正是城市活力的源头。”

　　French对山西路上那些不带电梯的两层公寓非常感兴趣，他称这种独特结构是“数百万前来工厂打工赚钱的移民为了适应随着领取薪酬而来的新的生活方式而建造的”，是“工人阶级的社区”。由于年代久远，许多这里的原住民已经搬离，新的外来者住了进来。French认识的一些上海人问他：“你为什么关心这些地方？他们不是上海人。”对此，他的回答是：“我不关心这个。上海人本来也是从别的地方来的。你们说的差别没意义。”

　　这些老旧地段的“里弄生活”深深吸引着French。他不仅拍摄这里的居民，还同他们聊天。“我对这些人很熟悉，恐怕比很多上海人还熟悉。”他说，“对于拆迁，每个人的想法都不同，很矛盾，并不是‘改善生活环境’那么简单。”这些面临翻天覆地的变化的居民，几乎每个人都愿意对French 说两句。有的人说：“我们没有好的环境，没有卫生间，没有足够的空间。”有的则说：“我不愿意跟这里的那么多人分开。”还有人说：“我不想搬到浦东那么远。”对于从小生长在上海的人而言，这都是再自然不过的想法。而对于一个外国人，它则带有新鲜的意味。作为新闻记者的French 感兴趣的是一个正在变化的城市，和这个城市中一些正在消失的历史。

　　由于工作的关系，French 去过中国的许多城市，且这些城市与普通外国旅游者的目的地不一样。然而在所有城市当中，他最感兴趣的还是上海。他强烈排斥所谓的“旧上海情结”：“我拍摄这些照片，不是因为我对旧上海有什么浪漫的想象。一般人概念里的那种‘典型外国人’形象是一派胡言。我对这个改变中的城市感兴趣——本能地有兴趣。”

　　“你每天过自己的生活。早上出门，晚上回家。你不认识周围的人。”French 这样描述在上海，以及在全国各地正如雨后春笋般冒出来的新式小区居民。“上海正在改变。可能你们拥有更好的生活环境，但却失去了自己的社区文化。当旧的社区消失时，旧的上海也没有了。”对于不同的人，这个结果有不同的意义。对于French 来说，这意味着“上海不再像原本那样特殊。”

　　不过，在与居民们交谈和拍摄他们的过程中，French 不常流露出自己的看法。“我不会告诉他们‘笑’或者‘表现得悲伤些’。我只问他们，这个地方就要消失了，你怎么看？”

　　《消失中的上海》在加州大学伯克利分校展出时，曾经惹来一些中国
留学生的不满。他们向French 提问说：“你为什么要拍这些？”他则简单答道：“难道这不是上海吗？”

　　类似的问题曾经很多次出现。而French 站在个人的角度作出的回答总是：“作为一个艺术家，我只想拍普通人的生活，想拍一些不同的东西。”他也会在南京路上拍摄路人，因为“人永远是有意思的”。不过与此同时，他坦率地说：“我是从纽约来的，南京路对我而言并不特别。”他坚持自己所记录的是大多数上海人的生活。

　　French 在上海的朋友全都是中国人，其中也有许多城市中的精英。但是在他看来，“他们的生活没什么特别之处”。通过对老社区的探寻，他找到了一段“比乘坐时光机器回到过去更为逼真”的岁月，因而也成为了这座城市正在发生的一切改变的亲历者。

　　面对如此巨大而迅速的变化，每个人都抱有复杂的感受。城市本身的生命力使一切评论都成为徒劳。我们所能做的唯有经历和记录。

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I am just getting around to reading Coetzee for the first time. Sat down with this novel at lunch, and read half of it in one go. It’s slim, don’t worry, but it’s also got a subterranean pull that made it almost impossible to put aside. How often do you find literature like that? Not often enough, that’s for sure.
Coetzee draws you into the life of a middle aged college professor, a lonely divorcee who loves women and begins making a series of fatefully bad decisions involving them. I’ll leave it that. Someone blurbed the book likening Coetzee to Camus. I scoffed. That’s still a pretty tall order, but even after a couple of chapters you know you are in that realm.

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The Shanghai weekly that goes by the name The Bund in English (外滩 画报 or Wai Tan Hua Bao in Chinese) ran a cover story in their Lifestyle section on my Disappearing Shanghai work in their editions of June 28.
It is a five-page spread, in all, with nine of my images, including two full-page reproductions.
The paper also ran an extensive interview with the photos. It’s not online, though, so I can’t share this here. This comes on the heels of the Berlin magazine Tip’s publication of some my Shanghai images.
All of the images can be seen on my new website. Click to visit the site.

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[Editor’s note: As much as I admire Federer’s game, I have problems with the efforts, thus far premature, to coronate him as the greatest ever. I suspect I’ll continue to feel that way even if, or as is likely when, he surpasses Sampras’s tally of Slam titles.
The reason is no fault of Federer’s, but it lingers nonetheless: competition.
There is simply no comparing the caliber of the elite players faced by Sampras (or Borg, and arguably Laver, for that matter) with the crowd at the top of the game today. Just think who Sampras contended with: Agassi, Rafter, Courier, Wilander, Becker, Edberg, Chang, and even in-form Safins and Hewitts, and this list is not exhaustive. Kuper’s piece makes the case very nicely what a different era we’re operating in.]

June 23 2007
Copyright The Financial Times
I have some sense of what watching the men’s tournament at Wimbledon will be like this next fortnight, because I recently tried watching the men at the French Open.

You arrive at a match well-intentioned. Two brilliant players appear, each of whom has lived off steamed broccoli and sacrificed his life to tennis since the age of two. They begin blamming away, harder and better than any legends of the past. And minutes into their four-hour extravaganza your thoughts drift to lunch, always the day’s signature event in Paris. You know the match is irrelevant, because either Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal wins every grand-slam tournament anyway.

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This Wimbledon, busy fans can save time by watching only one men’s match: the Federer-Nadal final. But do catch that one, because during it the balance of power in male tennis may shift, from the Swiss to the Mallorcan.

Since 2005 we have lived in extraordinary times. In Federer, we have possibly the best male player ever; in Nadal, possibly the best clay-court player ever. Like the US and USSR in the cold war, they have divided the world between them. Nadal has ruled European clay courts, including the French Open. Federer got the rest of the world, notably Wimbledon, and the US and Australian Opens.

Between them, Federer and Nadal have won the last nine grand-slam tournaments. No two men have so dominated tennis since the Open era began in 1968. Even Pete Sampras, the previous most dominant male player in history, was less omnipotent.

“Not long ago I was surfing the internet,” says Nadal. “I compared the points of Federer and Sampras” - that is, the rankings points they earned playing tournaments. “Sampras was number one with about 5,500 points. Federer has 7,500. That’s an enormous difference.” Nadal himself, currently on 5,225 points, may soon outstrip Sampras.

No other male players really exist anymore. Take the Russian Nikolai Davydenko, a fantastic player, currently fourth-best in the world. When he reached the quarter-final at the French Open, someone pointed out to him that to win the tournament, he would now have to beat Guillermo Cañas, Federer and Nadal.

“Listen,” replied Davydenko, “If I beat those guys, I’ll quit tennis next Sunday. I won’t even just quit, I’ll die.”

Predictably, Davydenko lost in straight sets to Federer. He thus joined the “nine-zero club” of luminaries who have lost nine consecutive matches to the Swiss. The club’s other members include Andy Roddick (the world’s number three) and Lleyton Hewitt (number one before Federer arrived). For these players, the question applies that an apocryphal child once asked about Randolph Churchill: “Mama, what is that man for?”

Tennis crowds, although notoriously ill-informed about the game, are starting to grasp the pointlessness of almost all men’s tennis, as witness the banks of empty seats on centre court in Paris before the final.

The British media bang on about Andy Murray, the Scot ranked eighth in the world, but in truth the only story in men’s tennis is Federer versus Nadal. Probably not since Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe has male tennis had a rivalry between two such brilliant performers. Rivalries, ideally featuring players whose personalities can be distilled into cartoon versions, give tennis some of the appeal of Tom and Jerry. Would Borg (“The Iceman”) catch McEnroe (“Superbrat”) this time, or have his hair set on fire?

The obvious dynamic between Federer and Nadal is older brother versus younger brother. Whereas Nadal plays in clubbers’ gear, Federer dresses as if for a Sunday round-robin at a suburban Basle club. Federer plays in old-fashioned silence, while Nadal is all grunts and cheers. Off court, Nadal is giggly and vague, Federer stern and precise in three languages. Nadal is a kid, Federer a Roman emperor. Ideally there would also be an element of “goodie” against “baddie”, but unfortunately they are both nice guys.

The one thing lacking in their rivalry is great tennis. Whereas McEnroe and Borg brought out the best in each other, Federer usually disappoints against Nadal. “He wears you down,” Federer said after losing in Paris. “He’s the kind of a guy who makes you miss, so you can never say you played really well against him.”

This summer their rivalry should climax. Their Yalta-style division of the world seems about to break down. In Paris, Nadal showed he has all the tools to beat Federer on any surface. His “heavy” forehand shots are already legendary, but his serve has improved over the last year, and he makes as few errors on a tennis court as is given to a human. Admittedly, he won a mere 16 of the 17 break-points in the French Open final, but he is only 21 and will improve.

Nadal may not win Wimbledon, because growing up he got about as much experience on grass as the average fish. On the other hand, last year he reached the final. Certainly he ought to win one of the next three grand-slams on Federer’s turf. If that happens, all other male players might as well retire.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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A friend in Shanghai asked me how I can bear to listen to the kinds of music I am drawn to. “It’s so serious. It’s so heavy. It’s so sad….”
I beg your pardon, young lady.

I was listening to Billie Holiday tonight, singing the Kurt Weil/Ogden Nash classic, “Speak Low,” after a sweltering day on the streets taking pictures that ended in a diluvian downfall - pardon the neologism. Billie didn’t write this song, but if you’ve ever heard her sing it, you know she owns it

Here are the lyrics:

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we’re swept apart, too soon
Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon
Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief
We’re late, darling, we’re late
The curtain descends, ev’rything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Letter from Africa

By Howard W. French
Thursday, June 21, 2007

LILONGWE, Malawi: The world is getting smaller all the time.

Information, placed at our fingertips by technology, is driving massive and accelerating change. With the spread of increasingly cheap, near-universal telephone access, the day is near when no one is more than a phone call away.

These are some of the most optimistic and ubiquitous clichés of globalization, assumptions that many of us take as a simple matter of faith. Life in this city provides a vivid illustration of the fact, however, that in Africa, the globalization of our imagination is just that - an imagined thing.

There are many nice things one can say about Malawi, beginning with the fact that it is a stable democracy that has peacefully managed political succession since 1994. What cannot be said with confidence is that this out-of-the-way country in southern Africa has hitched itself to the broader current of change sweeping the world. And while some may celebrate the persistence of quaint backwaters like this, for an Africa that is falling behind the rest of the world, insularity only compounds matters.

Many observers have noted that in 1960, at the peak of the independence era, the better-off African countries - places like Ghana, to name one - were as wealthy as East Asian counterparts like South Korea.

All manner of analyses, whether economic or political, have been proffered to try to explain why these two countries and their respective regions have diverged so sharply. Failed industrial policies, low savings rates and excessively large states with corrupt and heavily managed enterprises have all been advanced as reasons for Africa’s failings.

Other more basic possibilities, perhaps even more important than classic explanations like these, tend to be overlooked, but after only a couple of days in Malawi, it became hard to understand how that could be.

This feeling began with my search for a bookstore and the subsequent discovery - yes, I know it is hard to believe - that there is nothing quite deserving of the name, even here, in the capital of this country of 13 million.

I asked and asked again, at my hotel, among local teachers and among expatriates alike, and I kept getting directed to the same wan little store, the Maneno Bookshop, which in reality is a stationery store on the main commercial strip here that deals in a couple of dozen textbook titles - “Tutorials of Anesthesia,” was one - and not enough fiction to fill a single, small shelf.

Later, I went to the two international-style hotels in the city, and discovered that international periodicals are no easier to come by in this country.

Access to books in Malawi seems to be limited to two routes: attendance at churches, which are abundant here, and which provide religious reading material to their members, or attendance at one of the highly elitist private academies, like the Kamuzu Academy. There, the lucky few have access to a library stocked with 25,000 volumes, including a large Webster’s Dictionary signed by Ronald Reagan as a gift to the school.

This discussion of globalization and its sputtering failure in Africa might very well have begun with the Internet, access to which is treated like a rare and expensive privilege in country after country in the world’s poorest continent. In Ethiopia, Malawi and Chad, I sat in Internet cafés, paying by the minute at rates which would be considered impossibly expensive by most of the citizens of these countries, and was sometimes exorbitant even by the standards of a Westerner’s purse.

Ditto for mobile phones, which are indeed spreading rapidly on the continent, but are still so costly that they have only a fraction of their potential impact in connecting people to each other and to the outside world.

There is something much more fundamental, however, which needs to be addressed first. Africa is paying a painfully high price for its failure to educate its people. Of course this means a failure to bring down illiteracy rates in the poorest of its countries. Take Mali, for example, where only roughly 19 percent of adults are literate, according to the United Nations Development Program, and where learning to read is heavily skewed toward males. What sort of long-term development is possible in such a barren landscape?

In many other African countries, reading rates may be substantially higher. They rise to 64 percent in Malawi. But the promise inherent in globalization involves more than simply being able to read. It requires actual reading, of a rich and constantly renewed variety of material, of science and technology, of the arts, of current affairs and of history. Yet for the overwhelming majority of Africans in whatever country they may find themselves, the choices remain appallingly few.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
June 18, 2007

SHANGHAI: When stories of hundreds of people being forced to work under slavelike conditions in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province burst forth in the Chinese news media last week, many readers were horrified by a picture of their country that they hardly recognized.

Most shocking of all was the fact that a great many of the workers were children, in a country where employment in factories under the age of 16 is illegal. According to the reports they made, many of the children had been kidnapped, held against their will and forced to work unusually long hours under brutal conditions.

After the torrid initial burst of news reports, the government, through the Central Office of External Communication of the Communist Party, instructed the news media to stop reporting “harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government,” China Digital Times reported.

The arrest Saturday of Heng Tinghan, the manager of a factory where one enslaved worker had died and 31 others had been rescued - and the closest thing in this story to an official villain - seemed to assure an early end to coverage.

However reprehensible, in some ways, the words attributed to Heng by a newspaper in Hubei Province, where he was caught, are the most revealing comments yet about this scandal of worker abuse and the exploitation of minors.
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“I felt it was a fairly small thing, just hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them wages,” Heng said, according to The Shiyan Evening News. “The dead man had nothing to do with me.”

Under President Hu Jintao, the Communist Party has made the creation of what it calls a harmonious society one of the government’s main tenets, and as part of that effort, in fact, a major revision of laws governing the rights of children took effect just this month. The reality on the ground here, however, is often far closer to Heng’s world than it is to the government’s vision of things, with working conditions in many areas approaching what might be called brutal capitalism.

From the densely packed factory zones of Guangdong Province to the street markets, kitchens and brothels of major cities, to the primitive factories of China’s relatively poor western provinces, child labor is a daily fact of life and one to which the government typically turns a blind eye.

“In order to achieve modernization, people will go to any ends to earn money, to advance their interests, leaving behind morality, humanity and even a little bit of compassion, let alone the law or regulations, which are poorly implemented,” said Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at Beijing University of Technology. “Everything is about the economy now, just like everything was about politics in the Mao era, and forced labor or child labor is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today’s reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery.”

Indeed, even if conditions at Heng’s brick kiln were considered unusually harsh, experts said that the withholding of pay or otherwise cheating minors, and holding them and forcing them to work against their will, were commonplace.

In the same week that the Shanxi Province kiln factory horrors were revealed, child labor abuse of an entirely different sort emerged, illustrating how widespread such practices are and how government attitudes make them all but impossible to suppress.

This story began with reports in a Guangdong newspaper, where junior high school students from faraway Sichuan Province complained that they were being abused through a work-study program that supplied young workers from western China to an electronics assembly plant in the southeastern industrial boomtown of Dongguan, where labor shortages are common, as a form of compensation for their school fees.

Students complained that they worked 14-hour days, including mandatory overtime, and that their money was withheld from them. In some instances, those who wished to quit the program had no way of telephoning their families or paying for transportation home.

Zhang Ronghua, the mother of one of the Sichuan students, described her 15-year-old daughter’s situation in an interview by telephone. “My daughter promised to call every week, but she’s been gone for three weeks and has only called once,” Zhang said. “She said that she wants to come home, that she’s worked from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and that she’s constantly busy and tired.”

A moment later, the mother added, “If it wasn’t because we couldn’t afford her tuition, I would never have allowed her to go.”

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Copyright - The Nation

In 1967, when Time magazine managed to get an Australian reporter by the name of John Cantwell into mainland China, his dispatch read like what a report from North Korea—or from another planet—would look like today. “Red Guards march around in vigilante groups, stern-faced and forbidding…. I saw them surround and berate an old man who dared look at an anti-Mao poster…. Hostile crowds sometimes surrounded me, and people shouted: ‘What are you doing here, white devil?’” A delicate beauty from the Chinese travel service informed him, “Chairman Mao has taught us that we must crush the American aggressors. We must kill, crush, destroy all imperialist monsters.” “Practically no one smiles,” Cantwell wrote. Good thing, readers might have concluded, we were fighting a war in Vietnam to contain these lunatics.

A scant forty-two months later, America was introduced to a China where everyone smiled. American Ping-Pong players, invited on a surprise visit in April 1971, received hospitality so overwhelming a team member started crying. One player, Tim Boggan, reporting back in an article for the New York Times, affectionately described a “large playground where perhaps 200 children of all ages were playing soccer, basketball, and other sports,” the kind of camaraderie he said he’d like to see more of in the United States. Less than a year after that, on Richard Nixon’s historic visit, the nation saw this busy, happy, industrious people for themselves on TV: families picnicking at the Ming Tombs; a chef at the Peking Hotel transforming a turnip into a chrysanthemum for the First Lady; Pat Nixon, fetching in a white lab coat, cheered by the adorable moppets at Peking Children’s Hospital.

Study the tourist snaps on Flickr.com from the Ming Tombs, the Great Wall, all the stops on the Nixons’ itinerary: America’s China is now the place where everyone smiles. One typical stop for upper-middle-class tourists on tightly scripted itineraries even recalls Tim Boggan at the playground and Mrs. Nixon at the children’s hospital: the Shanghai Children’s Palace, a lovely old mansion where adorable children dance ballet, play accordions, learn computer programming, practice Chinese opera. An affluent American couple I talked with upon their return from China rhapsodized about it, gushing that every child in this nation of 1.3 billion—this they had been given to understand by their guide—is provided such opportunities free. It seemed, I responded, better than anything a typical American child can expect. “A lot better,” the wife responded. I pressed; she allowed some skepticism to creep into her voice: “It’s possible they made it look better than it was.” No such skepticism, though, when the subject turned to their tour of the site of the Three Gorges Dam, which soon will cause the Yangtze River reservoir to rise to 175 meters over sea level. “It’s going to solve a lot of their problems,” the husband gushed, noting the high-rises being built to house the million exiles who will be displaced, who now live in “shacks like you wouldn’t believe.” “They’re really on the cusp of an economic revolution.”

CONTINUED BELOW
This man, retired after many decades building a successful business in the Midwest, is a car nut who long ago became dismayed by, then resigned to, the slow decline of American industrial dominance. He didn’t see any American cars on China’s newly teeming roads; China, he pointed out, is “going to start exporting cars to the US in the next few years.” He couldn’t imagine America building a Three Gorges Dam. That was for the Chinas of the world—civilizations of destiny.

This capitalist sounded like the kind of pilgrim who used to visit Soviet steel mills, or cut sugar cane beside Cuban peasants, and returned singing panegyrics to a new, better world being born.

Mission accomplished, you could imagine China’s commissars murmuring. China still has commissars, it’s easy to forget; it is still run, James Mann reminds us in his striking little hand grenade of a book The China Fantasy, “by a Communist Party governed, in hierarchical ascending circles, by a Central Committee, a Politburo, and a Standing Committee of the Politburo.” They still do what commissars do. That’s the point of Mann’s book.

My tourist retirees visited Tiananmen Square. Good American innocents abroad, they asked their guide about the event that made it familiar to them. “He wouldn’t answer questions. He didn’t want to talk about it.” Few American visitors come back better informed than before they arrived about the hundreds (thousands? we will never know) massacred in the democracy demonstrations of 1989; or the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Chinese jails at any given time (some for the “crime,” officially stricken from the books, of “counterrevolution”); or the dozens of criminals killed every day by the state (by one count there were 12,000 executions in China in 2005); or the hundreds of antigovernment protests in rural China. Or, say, about the retired military doctor Jiang Yanyong, who in 2003 became a national hero and international symbol of China’s strides toward democracy for publicizing the SARS epidemic and who, a year later, was thrown in jail for criticizing the Tiananmen massacre.

Those who return no better informed about this record than when they arrived include, it would appear, tourists who should know better. Nicholas Kristof dishonored the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in 2004, Mann points out, with a column titled “The Tiananmen Victory.” The democracy activists had won: “After the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”

There haven’t been any multiparty ballots for China’s middle class to mark yet. And there won’t be, Mann argues in an elegant formulation: The urban middle class is “a tiny proportion of the country’s overall population,” and in any election candidates representing their interests would be swamped by those of the peasantry; thus it is just as easy, or easier, to imagine them as “a driving force in opposition to democracy.”

That’s not what you used to hear from Bill Clinton. He claimed that with the rise of market economics, and the exploding middle class these reforms have wrought, the road to Chinese democracy was smooth: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty,” he said in 1997. “And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy…. Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”

No, wait. That was George W. Bush, in his November 1999 opening foreign policy address. This one is from William J. Clinton: Trade with China, he told President Jiang Zemin, will “increase the spirit of liberty over time…. I just think it’s inevitable, just as inevitably the Berlin wall fell.”

Clinton’s NSC head, Sandy Berger, said in 2000 that “there is an unstoppable momentum” toward democracy in China.

No, wait. That was Tony Blair in 2005. Berger said, “Just as NAFTA membership eroded the economic base of one-party rule in Mexico, WTO membership…can help do the same in China.”

China has become rather like Israel: No matter the party, no matter the leader, certain de rigueur formulas must be uttered. Mann strips the hustle bare: “Every single American president since Nixon has, in one way or another, either ignored or quietly given up on the issue of Chinese democracy.” Since this abandonment has been hemmed around by strenuous presidential representations that democracy is precisely what American policy toward China is all about, this has required some fancy ideological footwork. Mann lays out the steps. He says that the apostle of human rights, President Carter, made the second breakthrough, after Nixon’s: He came up with the rationalization that whatever the abuses evident in the 1970s, the situation was much better than it had been during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Ronald Reagan, President during Deng Xiaoping’s first moves toward market liberalization, was able via that patented Reagan magic to explain away China’s Leninist state with a verbal wave of the hand: He referred to the People’s Republic as “so-called Communist China.” “Mr. Deng, keep up this wall!”

The first President Bush was presented with an irritant: that inconvenient 1989 massacre, the same year citizens staged democracy demonstrations in East Germany, where, on the orders of a weak and intimidated Kremlin, the army stepped aside. Incredibly, this became the excuse to downplay Tiananmen: The cold war was over. What was the point of undue hostility? Bush 41 promptly announced a “comprehensive policy of engagement,” making it the United States’ priority to restore the $2 billion in interest-free loans the World Bank had withheld from China in punishment. It was Clinton who “managed to turn black into white and white into black—to persuade Americans that it was somehow politically progressive and intellectually sophisticated to accept Chinese repression and uncouth or unenlightened to attempt to combat it.” He revoked his own executive order on trade sanctions, written to honor his campaign promise of “an America that will not coddle dictators, from Baghdad to Beijing.” “Why bother to protest a crackdown or urge China to allow political opposition,” Mann archly concludes, “if you know that democracy’s coming anyway by the inexorable laws of history?”

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If Monk could sing, this is what he might have sounded like. Oh my, Abbey has got soul, and chops and smarts - this is above all music for the mind, so well is everything here conceived. And if that conveys even a little hint of coldness, banish the thought. You’ll shiver, yes, but in warmth. A word should be said, too, for the accompanyists, too, another reflection of Abby’s smarts.
Metheny and Hargrove and Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron are anything but revelations, but you can tell they’re drinking at the source with Lincoln and digging it. What to make of Julien Lourau and Rodney Kendrick, respectively tenor sax and piano. Hardly household names, these guys bring the highest art to the table.

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Copyright The Financial Times

June 16 2007

If China were to choose a new symbol for its national flag, an architect joked recently, the competition would be between a crane and a bulldozer.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have been growing rapidly for more than a decade but in recent years they have gone into hyper-speed - Beijing to prepare for next year’s Olympics and Shanghai for the 2010 World Expo.

Driven by a voracious appetite for the new and the modern, the boom has delivered some striking constructions, from the Water Cube swimming complex in Beijing to the night-time skyline in Shanghai whose futuristic shapes and massive LED screens entrance visitors.

But to make way for the thousands of glass and steel high-rises, vast swathes of old buildings have been swept aside - some of considerable historical interest. In the process, critics say, the cities could lose the sense of community and street life that are important sources of vitality.

“There are plenty of places that have built new cities almost overnight,” says Greg Girard, a Shanghai-based photographer who has just published a book chronicling the dramatic changes in the city’s landscape. “But Shanghai is maybe the first to do so while tearing down an old city at the same time.”

Chinese heritage officials have long grumbled about the destruction. But the issue came centre-stage this week when a senior government minister said the current wave of urbanisation was responsible for as much damage to the country’s traditional heritage as the Cultural Revolution.

In unusually blunt comments, Qiu Baoxing, deputy minister for construction, said local officials “were totally unaware of the value of cultural heritage”. He added: “It is like having a thousand cities with the same appearance.”

Both Beijing and Shanghai boast unique architectural styles. Beijing used to be lined with hutongs - long, windy lanes flanked by courtyard houses. As well as notable art deco and neo-classical buildings, Shanghai has lilongs, a blend of European and Chinese influences with walk-up apartment blocks that look on to semi-secluded alleys. It was in these ambiguous mixtures of public and private space that the city’s social life used to be rooted.

According to Hu Xinyu, head of Friends of Old Beijing conservation group, half of Beijing’s 3,000 hutongs had been destroyed by 2003 and since then “the speed has been very fast”. In Shanghai, architect Chen Guang reckons that of the historical architecture not included in the city’s protection scheme, only 2-3 per cent will be left by 2010.

At the same time, both cities have developed endless suburbs studded by anonymous high-rise blocks and reached by eight-lane highways that make car ownership a near necessity.

The risk is that China’s urban centres will end up looking identical to a procession of other cities around the region. “In terms of style, the building boom of the last decade has been a total failure,” says Ruan Yisan, an architecture professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. “It has been a totally market-led, profit-driven, commercial exercise.”

Yet conservationists in China face huge practical difficulties. With the communist authorities allocating one family to each room of old houses, many became over-crowded and in poor repair. One recently destroyed mansion in Shanghai’s French Concession housed 40 families.

When the wrecking ball arrives, residents often have an ambivalent attitude to the buildings, mixing nostalgia with the desire to move to more modern surroundings with toilets and central heating. “We would love to be moved to a better flat, as long as it is not too far away,” says Zhang Yi, who lives in a 1920s house behind Fuxing Road in Shanghai.

Moreover, the debate in China takes place in a very different context. For Europeans, old buildings are one of the principal ways of connecting to the past. But in China, food, dialect, or social relations can be more important.

“There is a whole western tradition of classical archaeology and visiting the Parthenon,” says Lynn Pan, a Shanghai-born historian. “But there is no such tradition in China.”

Against this backdrop, however, there is a growing conservation lobby, especially in Shanghai, where the government has now issued protection orders for 632 buildings. Recent achievements include preserving parts of the old Jewish area in Hongkou.

Architects point out that China is still a work in motion. As in Hong Kong, some of the worst high-rises can be replaced by better ones as the city becomes richer.

Christopher Choa, an architect who recently left Shanghai after a decade, says the energy of a city could eventually impose itself on the blander new constructions. “Inside every modern Chinese city there is an old Chinese city trying to get out,” he says. “The issue is whether the lilong life will seep out into the empty spaces.”

Mr Choa also argues that western attitudes to current Chinese construction mirror European responses to the 1890s boom in New York, mixing fascination with “an undercurrent of contempt for the naivety of some of the new Chinese buildings”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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One of two great reads in the FT today. Bravo to David Piling.

Copyright The Financial Times

June 16 2007

It is three in the morning and I am on a fishing boat, drinking cheap sake from a plastic cup, and gnawing through my second hunk of dolphin meat. My day had started an hour earlier when, roused by a bashing on the door, I had left the warmth of my futon for the blistering cold of northern Japan in early spring. Cherry blossoms were budding in Kyushu, much further south. Here, the grass was streaked with snow.

Fumbling down an incline through the pitch black, I dimly made out the shape of a boat - more of an industrial barge - purring in the bay below. Nearby, a dozen or so fishermen, seated on tatami mats and drinking canned hot coffee, began zipping up their windbreakers against the cold. “Didn’t you bring your boots?” asked one, scanning my leather shoes as though they were ballet slippers. Some rubber boots were fetched. I pulled them on and ambled towards the boat as the fisherman played with the name of my unfamiliar publication in the rough accent of northern Honshu: “Fai-nan-sharu Tai-mu-zu.”

I had arranged to hitch a ride on a fishing boat from Iwate prefecture because I wanted to trace one of the thousand threads that connect Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market to the ocean. Even as we set out, hundreds of miles away, the market - both a throwback to the rough, mercantile culture of Edo Japan and the hub of the modern global fishing industry - is stirring into life. More fish flows into Tsukiji and out of it, into the sushi bars, restaurants, hotels, fishmongers and supermarkets of Japan’s fish-devouring capital - than into any other location on earth. That makes Tsukiji, in the phrase of Theodore Bestor, an American anthropologist who has devoted much of his life to this extraordinary place, “the fish market at the centre of the world”.

To get an idea of the scale of Tsukiji (roughly pronounced “Skiji”), compare it with Billingsgate, its British equivalent. According to a 2006 Oxford University study, Billingsgate handles roughly 25,000 tonnes of fish a year, enough to make it the world’s third-biggest fish emporium. But at an annual 615,000 tonnes, Tsukiji handles in two weeks what goes through Billingsgate in a year. Given the massive volumes, what happens here affects ports, markets and sometimes dangerously depleted fish stocks the world over. Prices set at Tsukiji, which move to the rhythms of Japanese fashions, holidays and the whim of its traders, set the global tone. Tsukiji is synonymous with “fish”, much as, in the US, Hollywood means “movies” or Wall Street means “finance”. And few things loom so large in Japanese consciousness as fish. Archaeologists have found shell mounds, dating from 3,000BC, indicating that Japanese have been raiding the oceans for sustenance from the late Stone Age. Even today, fish account for between 40 and 50 per cent of Japan’s animal protein intake, according to Bestor, compared with just 5 per cent in the US and New Zealand.

More than the sheer quantity is the extent to which fish permeate everyday life. Parents fly painted carp windsocks to celebrate each boy born to the family. Fans at baseball games munch dried squid or fried octopus balls and watch teams with names like the Hiroshima Carp. At weddings, guests are served sea bream, or tai, an aquatic pun based on the fact that omede-tai means “congratulations”. Fish crop up in everyday idioms, too. A sharp rise, what might be called a “spike” in English, is unagi nobori, literally “climbing eel”. Samehada, shark skin, means goose bumps. A kingyo, or goldfish, is a novice smoker who doesn’t inhale, while a “goldfish poo”, trailing behind, is an obsequious sidekick.

So deeply ingrained are images of the sea that, according to testimony in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a mother, looking up in awe at the spreading mushroom cloud, mouthed: “It moves like a sea slug.”

I had been on the boat only 20 minutes, but my stomach was already moving like a sea slug, too. We had slipped quietly out of the bay and chugged through the cold, squid-ink blackness. I climbed up to the deck and joined the captain in his tiny lookout, warmed by a single bar heater. He peered anxiously at the menacing black water below, ignoring the pulsing GPS screens above.

About 30 minutes out, he slowed the boat and snapped a giant floodlight on to the ocean’s surface. Hundreds of white seagulls flocked through the darkness like ghosts towards us. Another boat, the mirror image of ours, pulled near. Both crews, wrapped from head to toe against the cold, began winching in the net. No one talked. As the net drew to the surface, a few flashes of silver illuminated the dark. Soon it was a wriggling mass of sardines. The boats were now close enough for the crews to shake hands, though no one did.

A yellow cylindrical net was winched into the fishy mass and then back to our boat, where it spilled its silver contents. The crew erected wooden blocks to section off the deck, which became a knee- deep soup of thrashing sardines. Suddenly it was over. The boats pulled apart, the captain turned off the floodlight, plunging the ocean back into darkness.

Now, I am pressed into the boat’s tiny mess with some of the crew. We face each other in monk-like silence, our knees wedged against a rickety table on which sits my morning libation of sake. One of the crew is grilling scraps of fish. He thrusts a piece towards me, skewered on a toothpick. “It’s dolphin,” he says, “drowned in the nets.” Surrounded by men who eke their living from the sea, it hardly occurs to me to refuse.

We visit three more fishing grounds that morning, and each time the routine is the same. In a month’s time, they will be hauling tuna onto this deck, but today the crew must content itself with one 20lb king salmon, a dozen or so cod and a slew of sardines. The sun has risen as we head back to port. When the catch is good, about half is loaded off the dockside and trucked eight hours to Tsukiji. As we near shore, women, like anxious miners’ wives, are waiting. They have prepared breakfast. There is rice - and lots and lots of fish.

Tsukiji’s origins are said to lie with the fisherman who followed Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogunate ruler of a united Japan, on his 1590 march to Edo, the swampy ground that would one day become Tokyo. By 1700, Edo, originally a fishing village, had become the world’s biggest city.

By order of the shogunate, all fish had to be sold through the central market at Nihonbashi, the city’s gatepost. Much of it came from the then-teeming Edo bay and, by the early 19th century, restaurants in Nihonbashi had developed a new form of cuisine that capitalised on the fish’s freshness. Called Edomae sushi, “in front of Edo”, it differed from the traditional fermented fish of Osaka. The new delicacy was squeezed by hand around a ball of vinegared rice and eaten raw.

Those licensed to trade fish soon came to regard their monopoly as a birthright. It provided them with funds needed to attend the kabuki theatre, to drink and to visit the nearby Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.

After the Meiji Restoration, when Japan opened up to the west, pressure grew on the market to move. Theodore Bestor, the author of The Fish Market at the Center of the World, tells me: “It was considered a messy, smelly place right in the centre of what was supposed to be the financial centre of the east.” The market traders held out for years until the matter was settled by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Shortly after, it moved to its present site on reclaimed land: the literal meaning of Tsukiji, a place with a thousand romantic associations, is “Landfill.”

Its next move could be to an equally unglamourous location - a vacant lot once owned by Tokyo Gas (see Raw deal: Tsukiji’s move page 31). Market traders are already fighting to keep Tsukiji going, at the heart of city life.

The day after my Iwate fishing trip, I am up again at the crack of dawn, heading for Tsukiji by taxi. It is 4am and Tokyo - in so far as a conglomeration of 12 million people can ever be thus described - is sleeping. Harumi Avenue, the boulevard that ploughs through the normally elbow-to-elbow Ginza shopping district, is empty. But just a little further on, through an anonymous entrance lined by thrumming trucks, one enters a world where the rules and rhythms of everyday Japan do not apply.

The first thing that hits you - almost literally - is the traffic. Vehicles in Tokyo proper move with the neatness one would expect of a well-organised society. In Tsukiji, which has the atmosphere of a Turkish bazaar, there is what looks like anarchy. Despite the efforts of traffic policemen (Tsukiji has its own police force, not to mention a branch of Mizuho bank and a dedicated press corps), the rule inside the market appears to be every man for himself. Several generations of traffic compete for the same piece of road. Men on bicycles, men on foot, men pulling blood-stained wooden carts, men on motorcycles; all thread hither and thither, their Styrofoam boxes packed with fish, squeaking and wobbling as they go. Now and then, there is a scattering, as a truck lurches in. Everywhere, sputtering mechanised carts buzz like angry bluebottles through the maelstrom.

I am heading to see Keiichi Suzuki, president of Tsukiji Uoichiba, one of seven auction houses licensed to operate. Most of Tsukiji has been alive with activity since midnight, when trucks unload their supplies and handlers begin laying out the fish for that morning’s auctions. But here, in the market’s administrative centre, the long stone corridor is deserted.

Suzuki, a 70-year-old who has worked in the industry for half a century, is waiting in his office. It is the second time we have met. At our first meeting, in daylight hours, he was wearing a grey tweed suit that matched his neatly trimmed British accent. He spoke unromantically about the market, saying it was being throttled by giant supermarket chains and was in need of modernising. He also spoke in alarming terms about fish stocks, saying that, as China, Russia and others developed a Japanese-style appetite, he feared for the industry - and the planet.

Today, he looks quite different, dressed in blue overalls and rubber boots. “Shall we go?” he asks, trotting off briskly. “First we’ll go and see uni, the sea urchin. Uni are always first.” He opens an unmarked door, and we step into what looks like a gem shop. Arranged in little wooden trays are row upon row of amber- coloured sea urchin, a creamy delicacy mostly served as sushi. In a high-class establishment, a single mouthful can cost anything from $10.

Men, each with a number pinned to their cap, are milling around, inspecting the uni. Each type is slightly different; this one from Russia is paler than that from Hakodate, which differs again from the Aomori, Shikoku and Boston uni. To preserve delicate distinctions, smoking is prohibited.

Suddenly, a few men who have been lolling on child-sized wooden bleachers spring into action, engaging in a series of mysterious hand movements. (The market has its own slang and even its own counting system where, for example, three is geta, after wooden sandals with a three-grooved sole.) Within minutes, the secret gestures stop, and the uni that will be gobbled in Tokyo that day has been sold.

The people in caps are the nakaoroshi gyohsha, the “intermediate wholesalers”, who work for the 1,677 Tsukiji stalls licensed to sell to outsiders. Many of these licences have been in the same family for generations and, without one, it is not permitted to bid, however deep one’s pockets. This makes the intermediate wholesalers one tier in an immensely complex stack of suppliers who aggregate catches from thousands of boats before sorting them on the way to the customer. The nakaoroshi gyohsha stand, according to Bestor, at least two - and as many as five - stages removed from both the boat that caught the fish and the person who will eventually eat it.

After the sea urchin, Suzuki leads me through several other auctions, including live fish and shrimp, to the tuna floor. The vast auction hall is laid out with hundreds of neatly arranged whole tuna, maguro, each with its tail removed and placed like a decoration in the gills. Unlike the flash-frozen tuna hunted by vessels that spend months at sea, these are fresh. A few have been caught off the Japanese coast, but most are from Guam, Sri Lanka, Spain and Mexico. They have been air-freighted in via Tokyo’s Narita airport, “Japan’s leading fishing harbour” as it is jokingly known, so dependent on global fish stocks have the Japanese become.

As the tuna are auctioned off, they are wheeled out on long thin carts to the adjacent stalls. This is the impenetrable, water- soaked labyrinth where Tsukiji’s wholesalers sell to the many thousand buyers from the sushi bars, restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets that keep Tokyo fed.

Among them is Kajibashi-san, and the first thing to know about him is that he is late. He is always late. For more than 20 years, he has been arriving at the market at around 10am, several hours after most buyers have come and gone. He probably would not like the term, but Kajibashi-san is the catfish of Tsukiji, picking up leftovers others have neglected. “At this time of day, we are shoulder to shoulder with housewives,” he says on the morning I accompany him, referring to the few retail customers who venture into the market’s inner sanctum. “The difference, of course,” he says, patting his substantial wallet, “is that I have the buying power and I have the face.”

The second thing to know about Kajibashi-san is that his real name is Andy Lunt, and he hails from Leicester, England. He is a Tokyo institution: the only foreigner to buy regularly from Tsukiji’s intermediate wholesalers, and a constant presence in Shin Hinomoto, a sashimi-and-grilled-fish restaurant wedged beneath an overhead railway line. Kajibashi-san is his yago, the guild name bestowed on each of the Tsukiji regulars.

Lunt, a tall, muscular 48-year-old with a shiny shaved head, cuts a distinctive figure in Tsukiji. Once a rock musician, he came to Tokyo in 1985 with the Japanese bride he had married in Britain. “I arrived on a Saturday and on the Monday I was taken to Tsukiji, where I was told to meet my father-in-law. And that was it,” he says. “I was handed a bag of money and for a year I followed him around the market. At the end of the year he said: ‘Right, you’ve seen the four seasons. Off you go.’”

Lunt makes the rounds of Tsukiji most mornings, prepares fish all afternoon and presides over his restaurant until midnight. The family he married into has owned restaurants for generations, moving to Tsukiji from Nihonbashi when the market was relocated in the 1920s. His father-in-law, who still does the Tsukiji buying run every Monday, conducts business the old way. “He has five or six stalls that he goes to religiously, because they’re the people he can trust to give him a decent deal,” says Lunt, who feels the younger Tsukiji generation has a different take on things. “Those comfortable relationships have just disintegrated. They mean nothing. This is a market. What’s available and the price of everything fluctuates daily according to supply and demand - it’s up to me to take advantage of that.”

Following Lunt around is halfway between a trip to an aquarium and a slaughterhouse. Some 400 varieties of seafood are on sale, many still alive in tanks or shallow vats of water. Live crabs are covered in sawdust to keep them moist; octopuses are kept in mesh bags to stop them from cannibalising each other.

The Japanese are obsessive about freshness, sometimes to the point of eating sashimi while the fish’s tail still wriggles, or swallowing tiny live fish, a style known as odori gui, “dancing in the mouth”. At the back of each cramped stall - whose position in the market is regularly changed by lottery to prevent lasting advantage - is a chopping board. Most are saturated with blood. The squeamish would not last long at Tsukiji, yet even here they acknowledge the term zankoku ryori, “cruel cuisine”. Each year, says Bestor, eel dealers make the trek to Mount Takao near Tokyo to pray at a temple for warding off eye disease. The idea is to stop revenge from the spirits of eels, skinned alive while pinned to the chopping board by their eye.

Lunt is hunting bargains. Today, Iwate oysters, normally pricier than those from Hiroshima, are good value. He picks up some kanpachi, a type of amberjack, and a tachiuo, “belt fish”, a dazzling silver creature as long as a human arm. At another stall, Lunt rejects farmed green sea slugs in favour of wild red ones and debates the quality of monkfish liver, ankimo, a pate-like delicacy. At yet another, he stops for nodoguro, a Japanese blue fish, which he grills whole if he can get the price down.

It turns out that Lunt has been sucked into Tsukiji’s way of doing things more than he realises. He wants to treat it like a spot market but, over two decades, has become entangled in the relationships that bind the market together. His rare days off from the restaurant are regulated by the weddings and funerals of business associates. Despite his protestations, like his father-in- law, he too drops in on the same stalls each morning, even if he doesn’t always buy. “Relationships, yes. They come without you realising. This guy really brought it home to me,” Lunt says, gesturing to a man busily gutting a fish. “We were at the funeral of the grandmother, and we were having a few drinks afterwards, and they started reminiscing about the first time I came to Tsukiji,” he says. “It was honestly the first time I realised that I am part of this world and that their histories and mine are intertwined.”

Not far from Tsukiji, in a back street near Kachidoki Bridge, is a sushi restaurant. One enters through a sliding, slatted door. Behind a long wooden counter stand three sushi chefs, each in white apron and white cap.

In a glass case running the length of the counter are fish from Japan and far beyond: small, precious, quantities of fatty tuna, red clam, octopus, squid, sea urchin, plump orange salmon roe, fluke, horse mackerel, eel, sweet shrimp, yellow tail and more. The chef wields his $1,000 blade in silence, slicing a tiny strip of fish before pressing it, with a daub of green wasabi horseradish, onto a perfectly formed oblong of rice.

The mystery of sushi, as every Tokyoite knows, is that it can only be eaten at the counter, never at a table. I ask the sushi master why. He smiles, perhaps not wishing to offend those customers without a counter seat. “Ah, that’s because of the time and the distance,” he finally ventures. “Sushi loses its taste between here and the table.”

It seems a nonsensical thing to say about a piece of fish that has been shipped hundreds, if not thousands, of miles before ending up in this corner of Tokyo. Yet any sushi addict knows that the final few feet can be deadly. I am sat safely at the counter, savouring a sublimely tender piece of sea bream. That its journey and mine should both have ended here is down to fate - and to Tsukiji.

David Pilling is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief.

Raw deal? Tsukiji’s move

Tsukiji may soon go the way of markets the world over if, as planned, it is banished to the suburbs in 2014, to a vacant lot once owned by Tokyo Gas. Supporters of the move argue that Tsukiji is cramped and dilapidated, incapable of meeting modern hygiene standards. It also sits on prime real estate; outside its gates glitzy department stores and overpriced hostess bars jostle for space.

Theodore Bestor, an American expert on Tsukiji, says pressure for the move parallels the government push in the 1920s to drive the market from the Nihonbashi financial centre: “The sentimental side of me thinks it is a shame that the city will lose something it will never get back - Tokyo’s only viable remnant of an old mercantile culture.”

Yet at least some in the market - including Keiichi Suzuki, president of one of the auction houses - favour a move to better- equipped facilities. Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy, leans to the practical view. No one, he says, laments the move of Fulton Fish Market a few years ago from downtown New York. And while Tsukiji cannot be compared with the old Fulton - it is more hygienic and less tainted by mob rule - international logistics make a market’s location less relevant to a city’s life. Tokyo, Issenberg says, can live without its “smelly monument to nostalgia”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 16, 2007

SHANGHAI, June 15 — Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they disappeared.

Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.

The next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.

This story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.

The children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work under brutal conditions — scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little more than water and steamed buns — in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.

As the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved workers were recently rescued.

Mr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to make bricks. “You will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, and don’t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,” he said the children were told. “They also charged them 50 renminbi for a blanket.” That is equivalent to about $6.50.

Mr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.

In some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed kilns and resold them to other factories.

The director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker’s Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in isolated areas.

“Those factories are located in very remote places and most them are illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for people outside to know what is going on there,” said the union official, Zhang Xiaosuo. “We are now doing a province-wide investigation into them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.”

Liu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a different explanation. “My first reaction is that this seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance,” Mr. Liu said. “Forced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local governments don’t care too much.”

Zhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to Shanxi Province in search of him.

“You just could not believe what you saw,” Ms. Zhang said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Some of the kids working at these places were at most 14 or 15 years old.”

The local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, she said, they even demanded bribes.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:58 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright BBC

The Venice Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion lifetime achievement award has been presented to a photographer for the first time.

Malick Sidibe, from Mali, has spent decades recording the transformation of his country and its music scene.

“No African artist has done more to enhance photography’s stature,” said Biennale art director, Robert Storr.

“This prize honours all the world’s photographers, Mali and myself,” said Sidibe, 72, as he picked up the award.

Organisers of the Biennale said Sidibe was “the signal portraitist of his city and nation and the intimate observer of the Malian musical scene”.

“He has preserved the likenesses of countless individuals while in the process recording the face of the rapidly changing society they, as citizens, have collectively brought into being.”

Sidibe initially trained as a goldsmith, but later apprenticed himself to a French photographer, Gerard Guillat , before opening his own business in 1962.

The Biennale is one of the art world’s most prestigious exhibitions, and this year features about 100 artists from 77 countries.

Tracey Emin is representing the UK with a series of pictures based on the abuse she suffered as a child, and her abortion in 1990.

Posted at 1:54 PM · Comments (0)

Letter from Africa
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
June 14, 2007

ADDIS ABABA: I had a jarring exchange after boarding a packed Ethiopian Airlines flight to Beijing recently following an extended African trip.

One of the last passengers to board, a Chinese man, stopped at my row and gestured to the empty window seat, urging me to move over, so that he could enjoy the aisle.

“Let the foreigner sit on the inside, and let the Chinese sit together,” he said, in Chinese, probably not expecting his new “foreign” neighbor to understand. Startled, I replied: “We are in Ethiopia. We are all foreign here, aren’t we? Besides, this is my seat.”

I quickly got over his pushiness, and the two of us became friends for the rest of the flight, enjoying stories about his business dealings in Angola, and much else. More importantly, when the gust of his presumptuousness had blown over, a quick glance around the cabin showed that he had a point.

Virtually the entire plane was filled with Chinese people, a broad gamut of men and women from grizzled laborers to small investors to polished executives, and the 14-hour flight was abuzz with conversations among them, swapped stories of plantations in Ivory Coast, public works projects in Angola, mining ventures in Zambia, construction workers in Nigeria.

We were taking off from Ethiopia, aboard that country’s flag carrier, but the point was made: With their customary speed and unfussiness, the Chinese have made themselves at home in Africa, and given that things are just getting started, the Chinese footprint, already impressive, is likely to grow and grow. Indeed, Chinese airlines are starting direct flights to several African destinations.

My return flight to China spurred me to search my memory for experiences flying back and forth to the United States during two periods of lengthy residence and work on the African continent. I dimly recalled a time when an American carrier, the long defunct Pan Am, flew directly to West Africa. For most of the last three decades, though, American carriers have shunned the region and the continent generally.

As I remembered them, the passengers one finds aboard the few existing flights linking the United States to Africa make for an interesting comparison with my Chinese fellow travelers. Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research.

There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.

To be sure, China will not forever be the fresh-faced and idealized suitor that many in Africa take it to be today. This is clearly a special, honeymoon-like moment. But the very appeal of China owes a great deal to disillusionment in Africa with the West, whose preachiness and shifting prescriptions, whose unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa’s failures, free of critical self-examination, have left many Africans exasperated.

This exasperation has been the all but unacknowledged backdrop to a string of recent events, from the Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank to the recent Group of 8 summit meeting, the common threads being Western posturing about helping Africa, a failure to deliver on promises and the dearth of African voices heard, or even admitted into the debate.

Speaking of the lack of transparency at the World Bank, and the failure of its projects in her country, Thérèse Mekombé, a member of a Chadian commission created to supervise the use of that country’s oil revenues, was categorical in an interview, saying, “The World Bank is not a partner in development, and can never be a partner in our development.”

Another recent exception was an op-ed column by the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, which was published in this newspaper, urging G-8 nations to invest in Africa “like India and China.”

Implicit in his remarks is the widespread feeling that Western promises typically amount to little more than lip service and that it is Africa’s new partners, led by China, that are showing the kind of decisiveness that can change the landscape.

Click to read the complete article

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Copyright Salon

The popularity of Bollywood movies outside India is usually, at least initially, an outgrowth of homesick Indian expatriate communities. But in West Africa, without any significant help from Indian audiences, Bollywood flicks developed a large African following as early as the 1950s.

I stumbled on this assertion in the middle of a dry treatise on India’s “burgeoning relationship” with West Africa. Following the footnote led to “Bollywood Comes to Nigeria,” a remarkable article originally published in 1997 by Brian Larkin, now a professor at Barnard University.

Larkin’s research focused on the movie choices of Muslim Hausas in Nigeria.

Hausa fans of Indian movies argue that Indian culture is “just like” Hausa culture. Instead of focussing on the differences between the two societies, when they watch Indian movies what they see are similarities, especially when compared with American or English movies. Men in Indian films, for instance, are often dressed in long kaftans, similar to the Hausa dogon riga, over which they wear long waistcoats, much like the Hausa palmaran. The wearing of turbans; the presence of animals in markets; porters carrying large bundles on their heads, chewing sugar cane; youths riding Bajaj motor scooters; wedding celebrations and so on: in these and a thousand other ways the visual subjects of Indian movies reflect back to Hausa viewers aspects of everyday life.

In a strict Muslim culture that still practices a form of purdah, Indian movies are praised because (until recently) they showed “respect” toward women. The problem with Hollywood movies, many of my friends complained, is that they have “no shame.” In Indian movies, they said, women are modestly dressed, men and women rarely kiss, and you never see women naked. Because of this, Indian movies are said to “have culture” in a way that Hollywood films seem to lack. The fact is that Indian films fit in with Hausa society. This is realized by Lebanese film distributors, and Indian video importers as well as Hausa fans. Major themes of Hindi films, such as the tension between arranged and love marriages, do not appear in Hollywood movies but are agonizing problems for Nigerian and Indian youth…..

The themes of Indian movies are often based on the reality of a developing country emerging from years of colonialism. The style of the movies and plots deal with the problem of how to modernize while preserving traditional values — not usually a narrative theme in a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Spielberg movie. Characters choose between wearing Indian or Western-style clothes; following religious or secular values; living with the masses or in rich, western style bungalows. Women often decide whether they should speak shyly to their lover or stand up, look him in the face and declare their love forcefully. Male stars are often presented with the choice between a “traditional” lover, who respects family and dresses modestly, and a modern woman who lives a rich, fast, life hanging around discos and hotels. The use of English by arrogant upper-class characters or by imperious bureaucrats; and even the endemic corruption of police and state officials, all present familiar situations for postcolonial Indian and African viewers.

In the context of discussing India’s relatively new interest in boosting its African economic profile, the relevance of the shared experience of Africa and India with colonialism should be obvious. Although not quite to the same extent as China, India also forged ties of solidarity with the newly independent countries of Africa in the ’60s and ’70s and it is trying to capitalize on those bonds now in the new scramble for African resources. According to a briefing paper released in April by the U.K.’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, “India and West Africa: A Burgeoning Relationship,” India is sill something of a poor sister to China, but it is working hard to catch up.

But the days when Nehru was avidly “advocating decolonization … and India’s policy was wholly influenced by his missionary zeal to end racial domination and discrimination in the African territories” are long gone. The relatively non-ideological priorities of globalization rule the day now. “Current global equations and recent Indian policies confirm that India’s engagement with West Africa has shifted from the old issues of colonialism, non-alignment and South-South cooperation to issues of trade and energy.”

This has led to some unseemly incidents that carry echoes of the sins of a previous era of colonization — notably, a $900 million deal cooked up between the Indian steel giant Mittal and the Transitional Government of Liberia that allowed Mittal “to opt out of national and human rights laws.”

Which brings us back to Bollywood, because as long as a decade ago, moviegoers in Nigeria could see this coming.

For years, Indian movies have been an accepted, admired part of Hausa popular culture compared favorably with the negative effects of Western media. Indian movies offered an alternative style of fashion and romance that Hausa youth could follow without the ideological baggage of “becoming western.” But as the style of Bollywood has begun to change over the last few years this acceptance is becoming more questioned. Contemporary films are more sexually explicit and violent. Nigerian viewers comment on this when they compare older Indian films of the 1950s and 1960s that “had” culture to newer ones which are more Westernized. One friend complained about this saying that “when I was young, the Indian films we used to see were based on their tradition. But now Indian films are just like American films. They go to discos, make gangs, they’ll do anything in a hotel and they play rough in romantic scenes where before you could never see things like that.”

Indian films are just like American films, and it’s hard to tell any significant difference between Chinese oil companies and Indian steel companies and the robber barons of yesteryear. One world, indeed.

Posted at 10:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Globe and Mail
June 12, 2007

WASHINGTON — China ‘s military spending soared last year, vaulting Beijing into second place by some measures in the global arms bazaar, but still lagged far behind the United States .

U.S. military spending, fuelled by war in Iraq and Afghanistan, reached $529-billion (U.S.) last year, or nearly half of all the world’s total defence spending, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“The large increase in the USA ‘s military spending is to a great extent due to the costly military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ,” it said. The Pentagon burned through $1.4-billion every day last year, or $1,756 for each American over the course of a year.

By comparison, Canada is ranked 13th in the world in overall military spending, at $13.5-billion a year, or $414 a person.

While total U.S. defence spending dwarfs the rest of the world, it remains a relatively small part - roughly 4 per cent - of the total U.S. economy. That’s more than double the Canadian defence spending level but less than half the proportion spent in some countries such as Saudi Arabia , Pakistan and South Korea .

But it was China , not the United States , that boosted its military spending the most in recent years. Last year, China spent an estimated $188-billion (measured in terms of purchasing power parity), the institute said in its annual report released yesterday in Stockholm .

By that measure, Beijing is now the world’s second-biggest military spender, well ahead of India , Russia and Britain . Even when China ‘s spending is expressed at the official exchange rate, widely viewed to significantly undervalue the yuan, it drops to an estimated $50-billion, which tops Asian countries in spending.

(Chinese spending is also skewed by the relatively low cost of paying a huge conscript army where each of 2.2 million soldiers gets paid the equivalent of less than $100 a month).

There’s little good news in the institute’s 2007 yearbook. The brief decline in post-Cold War defence spending has been eclipsed by significantly greater military expenditures, up 37 per cent in the past decade.

The so-called war on terror is largely responsible for soaring military expenditures by the United States and some of its allies.

Still, China ‘s ambitious push to transform its military from an unwieldy conscript-based army into a powerful, modern force capable of projecting power throughout Asia and beyond is also redefining the military balance.

“In 2006, China ‘s military expenditure continued to increase rapidly, for the first time surpassing that of Japan and hence making China the biggest military spender in Asia ,” the report said.

Last year, China also successfully destroyed an orbiting satellite with a missile, pushing the arms race into space. It is also investing massively in new warships and longer-range combat aircraft.

Even Beijing ‘s own official figures, almost universally regarded as massively understating Chinese military spending, called for an 18-per-cent increase this year.

Washington and Beijing are in a war of words, both accusing the other of unnecessary military spending.

Beijing still lacks “the military capability to accomplish with confidence its political objectives on the island [of Taiwan ] particularly when confronted with the prospect of U.S. intervention,” a Pentagon report on China ‘s military power concluded last month.

China shot back, claiming the Bush administration was “in pursuit of absolute military advantage” despite already having “the world’s most powerful military.”

Yesterday’s report ranged far beyond the big arms spenders.

“There are roughly 1,700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium and 500 tonnes of separated plutonium in the world, sufficient to produce over 100,000 nuclear weapons,” it noted.

The institute also reported that the world’s poorest countries tended to spend the most on defence. “The ratio of military spending to social spending was found to be highest in those countries with the lowest per-capita incomes,” it said.

“It is worth asking how cost-effective military expenditure is as a way of increasing the security of human lives,” said Elisabeth Skons, who headed the team compiling the report. “Millions of lives could be saved through basic health interventions that would cost a fraction of what the world spends on military forces every year.”

THE BIG SPENDERS

The United States still has the world’s highest military budget, but China is coming up fast. Figures in U.S. dollars.

TOP FIVE MILITARY SPENDERS, 2006

Rank

Country

Military spending, 2005*

1

United States

US$528.7-B

2

United Kingdom

$59.2-B

3

France

$53.1-B

4

China

$49.5-B**

5

Japan

$43.7-B

13

Canada

$13.5-B

*Expenditure in U.S. dollars, at constant 2005 prices and exchange rates. **Estimated figure.

SOURCE: SIPRI YEARBOOK 2007

Posted at 10:59 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve been taking this collection with me to lunch for the last week, and what a great companion it is. I’d read some of the stories years ago, in the original, but the pleasure upon rediscovery is unalloyed.
A particular favorite is “The Graveyard Sisterhood.” Wow!

Posted at 4:40 PM · Comments (0)

BEIJING (AP) — China’s rapid urbanization has devastated the country’s architectural and cultural heritage sites, state media reported Monday.
“Senseless actions” by local officials in their pursuit of renovation and modernization have “devastated” the sites, Qiu Baoxing, the vice minister of construction, was quoted as saying by the China Daily.
He said the destruction was similar to what happened during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, when relics and sites of historical value were destroyed.
China’s cities have been transformed in recent years, with old neighborhoods being pulled down to make way for high rises and highways. But many historic buildings have also been destroyed in the rush to build.
“They are totally unaware of the value of cultural heritage,” Qiu said about some officials.
“This is leading to a poor sight — many cities have a similar construction style. It is like 1,000 cities having the same appearance,” Qiu said on the sidelines of an international conference on urban culture and city planning.
Tong Mingkang, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, accused some local governments of pulling down valuable historical sites in need of repair and replacing them with fakes.
“It is like tearing up an invaluable painting and replacing it with a cheap print,” Tong was quoted as saying.
Tong said a $130 million, five-year nationwide survey on cultural relics has been launched to get a clearer picture of their status.

Posted at 4:30 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 10, 2007

I CAN still perfectly recall those moments, a handful of times late in my first year here in Shanghai, when the late afternoon light was at its limpid best and the very special beauty of this city seemed distilled for me in all its clarity.

Click to see slideshow

There was the scene around a blackened wok in which thick sections of river fish had been freshly deposited in dancing, golden oil, drawing a hungry and animated crowd that was more interested in focusing on matters at hand than in locking in on the foreigner with the big, old-fashioned camera who was busily taking their pictures.

There was the pudgy boy taking his time with a mass of cotton candy as he clung to a street sign post, circling it now and then like a game park carousel. He eyed me more warily, probably never having seen anything like my Rolleiflex, with its bulging eye-like twin lenses. But eventually his pink snack provided just enough distraction, allowing me to get a shot that even now feels like a ticket into a secret world.

There was the grizzled man in the wool cap and greatcoat, perfectly still, with one foot perched on his bicycle cart stacked high with mushrooms. He had parked his cart smack dab in the middle of the street, as if he were holding the line against the encroachments of a new and unwelcome kind of lifestyle: one built around honking automobiles and fluorescent-lit supermarkets.

All three of these scenes were shot on a street so obscure that I found most taxi drivers needed directions to get there. It is not that the neighborhood is so far from the center of the city. It is not. Rather, Shanxi Road, just north of Suzhou Creek, had been more or less spared the unsparing onslaught of demolishing crews that precedes the breakneck redevelopment of this city, making it a very special, if neglected place.

Standing in the middle of Shanxi Road along with its salt-of-the-earth traders in those early days couldn’t have been more of a revelation for me than if I had I stepped into a time machine and strapped myself in for a journey. Here was a slice of that increasingly rare thing in China, indeed anywhere — the authentic.

Neighborhoods like these, and the city that was built from them, were Shanghai’s unique contribution to a culture whose experience of cities was long and distinguished, going back at least 3,700 years, but which had nonetheless never seen anything like this before.

Other large Chinese cities had in fact always been more like oversize villages; the greatest of them, Beijing, being a gigantic imperial village. But Shanghai, a precocious forerunner of today’s globalization, with its influx a century ago of bankers and industrialists from the world over, was new and different. And byways like Shanxi Road with their busy grid layouts, their European-influenced housing of two-story walk-ups, their internal courtyards and endless alleyways were built to accommodate a new kind of lifestyle created for and by millions of migrants drawn by the novelty of cash-paying jobs in factories.

My love of Shanxi Road gradually led me toward other discoveries, and over the last three years, I have come to relish nothing more than finding these unspoiled outposts of the past in the middle of Shanghai’s ever thickening forest of skyscrapers and losing myself in them for hours at a time, camera in hand.

None of the neighborhoods that I began to plunge into were truly hidden. Rather, they lived on in their quiet timeless way, wholly unsuspected from just a block or two away, obscured as it were by flashy new neighborhoods composed of jostling tall structures or roped off by looping expressways. I stumbled upon one after a stroll down Huai Hai Road, one of Shanghai’s great modern shopping boulevards. The telltale sign of traditional black Chinese-style roof tiles, just barely visible, lured me down a narrow, gently winding side street, which I followed for a short distance until it spilled onto a larger street, which took my breath away.

This street, Fangbang Road, in all of its slightly shabby glory, became one of the centers of my photographic world over the next two years, drawing me back again and again, as surely as I was pulled along that late afternoon that fall day by the swift current of foot traffic of people returning home in time for an early dinner. Busier by a good measure than Shanxi Road, with small shops open to the street on the ground floor of just about every building — a fish monger chopping up his catch here, a poultry dealer depluming chickens for a customer by dunking them in scalding water there, the incessant beckoning cry of the fresh fruit and vegetables ladies — it took me a while to catch the rhythm of this place.

Eventually, though, I learned to isolate people taking a break from the bustle, and now and then I managed to freeze, as it were, those moments of absolute calm.

One of the most pleasurable of these moments happened as I came upon a shirtless young boy on a stultifying summer afternoon. He sat on the curb in front of his empty bicycle cart, having sold or delivered its cargo and wearing a look of deep fatigue.

Click to read more

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve been back for a while from an exciting and productive African trip and have been busy at work writing up the stories that will flow from the reporting there.

There’s other big news on the photography front. My new, all photography website, Glimpse, is finally up, open and online and I invite fans of documentary photography to visit it: Click to visit the new website

The catalog from my October 2007 Berlin showing of Disappearing Shanghai is still available, although I’m down to a little over 100 copies now, from an initial printing of 1000. It’s $20 plus shipping. Order yours now!

One more item on the photography front. The New York Times Travel section is running an article and slideshow featuring my Shanghai photography in its editions of Sunday, June 10, 2007. Please have a look: Click to read more

Posted at 5:46 PM · Comments (1)

Letter from Africa
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
June 7, 2007

NDJAMENA, Chad: When I last visited this country, in the late 1990’s, watching CNN at a French-run hotel here, or for that matter in many former French colonies in the region, meant carrying a screwdriver and readjusting the television’s tuner to have some choices beyond French-language fare.

Less than a decade ago, the French claim on this region was still so strong, and Africa’s importance to France’s view of its own place in the world correspondingly so, that the French were paranoid about expanding American influence on the continent. This went so far as to interpret the American-aided ouster of Zaire’s longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, as Washington’s bid to supplant France in Africa.

Amid such a climate, even CNN was regarded in Africa by the possessive French as an arm of an encroaching American empire to be held at bay.

Imagine my surprise then, arriving in Ndjamena late at night on a visit from China, when I turned on my television at the French-run Sofitel Hotel to find that the program blaring from Channel 1 was a starchy variety show in Chinese, courtesy of that country’s state broadcaster CCTV.

The point here is not to lament the arrival of the Chinese in what has for so long been a pillar of the economic, military and political empire that France has labored to maintain in this part of the world. It is rather to pronounce the inevitable conclusion of its demise.

Virtually wherever one looks in French-speaking Africa today, one finds evidence of a postcolonial policy in tatters, and more startling still, given the tenacity of French claims over the decades, an open sense of failure, of exhaustion and of frank resignation.

There was a time, not long ago, when virtually every car on the street in France’s cloistered African client states was French, when no big deal was let without a French contractor’s securing a big payday, and where the downtowns of African capitals pulsed with French businesspeople and “cooperants,” or aid workers.

Fast forward to the present, and here in Chad what one finds is a U.S.-based oil multinational, Exxon, running the country’s biggest and most lucrative business, with Chinese companies investing heavily to match or surpass it.

Despite the recent oil wealth, Chad seems poorer and far more decrepit than when I first visited more than 20 years ago. Nowadays, the only French cars rolling on Ndjamena’s dusty streets are battered old taxis of that vintage. All the new vehicles are Japanese.

From oil to telecommunications, all the big new investments seem to be Chinese. And to the extent there is any construction going on, as in so much of the continent today, it is Chinese companies landing the contracts.

A reminder of the French presence comes every morning with the roar of fighter jets that take off from a military base at the edge of town. Americans and Chinese seek riches, Chad gets ever more corrupt, and by appearances poorer, and puzzlingly, even to itself nowadays, France is left holding the bag, maintaining a military base that is probably the only thing that stands between this country and outright warlordism.

“Why are we still here?” said François Barateau, the first counselor at the French Embassy here. “By naïveté, by nostalgia, no doubt, out of solidarity with Africans. I think we’re here because we’ve always been here.”

The diplomat went on to make a startling admission: “It must be recognized that 20 to 30 years of cooperation have not produced many results.” From there, just as remarkably, he lamented the fact that the U.S. Agency for International Development was not present in Chad, Britain has no embassy, and that other traditional donor countries, from Japan to Switzerland, have only small, symbolic operations.

“Nowadays it is the Chinese who are coming, and I guess we’ll see,” Barateau said with a sigh.

Chad, in fact, is anything but an anomaly. From next door in the Central African Republic, to Ivory Coast, once Paris’s proudest showcase, France’s positions in Africa have been overtaken by chaotic events and by competitors, most pointedly of late the Chinese, who recognize a good vacuum when they see one. Here and there, through the deployment of troops, France has been able to hold the line against disorder, if barely, but a country that for so long punched above its weight has proved utterly incapable of helping its African clients move forward.

How did things reach this pass? During the long tenure of Jacques Chirac, France underestimated Africans and China alike, while mistaking America as its rival in a part of the world where Washington has never had grand ambitions or even much vision.

Click to read more

Posted at 11:32 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Atlantic

(This is just an introductory passage from a very long and interesting piece. See the link below to go to Atlantic’s site.)

H alf the time I have spent in China I have spent in factories. At least that’s how it feels—and it’s a feeling I sought. The factories where more than 100 million Chinese men and women toil, and from which cameras, clothes, and every other sort of ware flow out to the world, are to me the most startling and intense aspect of today’s China. For now, they are also the most important. They are startling above all in their scale. I was prepared for the skyline of Shanghai and its 240-mph Maglev train to the airport, and for the nonstop construction, dust, and bustle of Beijing. Every account of modern China mentions them. But I had no concept of the sweep of what has become the world’s manufacturing center: the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province (the old Canton region), just north of Hong Kong. That one province might have a manufacturing workforce larger than America’s. Statistics from China are largely guesses, but Guangdong’s population is around 90 million. If even one-fifth of its people hold manufacturing jobs, as seems likely in big cities, that would be 18 million—versus 14 million in the entire United States.
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One facility in Guangdong province, the famous Foxconn works, sits in the middle of a conurbation just outside Shenzhen, where it occupies roughly as much space as a major airport. Some 240,000 people (the number I heard most often; estimates range between 200,000 and 300,000) work on its assembly lines, sleep in its dormitories, and eat in its company cafeterias. I was told that Foxconn’s caterers kill 3,000 pigs each day to feed its employees. The number would make sense—it’s one pig per 80 people, in a country where pigs are relatively small and pork is a staple meat (I heard no estimate for chickens). From the major ports serving the area, Hong Kong and Shenzhen harbors, cargo ships left last year carrying the equivalent of more than 40 million of the standard 20-foot-long metal containers that end up on trucks or railroad cars. That’s one per second, round the clock and year-round—and it’s less than half of China’s export total. What’s in the containers that come back from America? My guess was, “dollars”; in fact, the two leading ship-borne exports from the United States to China, by volume, are scrap paper and scrap metal, for recycling.

And the factories are important, for China and everyone else. Someday China may matter internationally mainly for the nature of its political system or for its strategic ambitions. Those are significant even now, of course, but China’s success in manufacturing is what has determined its place in the world. Most of what has been good about China over the past generation has come directly or indirectly from its factories. The country has public money with which to build roads, houses, and schools—especially roads. The vast population in the countryside has what their forebears acutely lacked, and peasants elsewhere today still do: a chance at paying jobs, which means a chance to escape rural poverty. Americans complain about cheap junk pouring out of Chinese mills, but they rely on China for a lot that is not junk, and whose cheap price is important to American industrial and domestic life. Modern consumer culture rests on the assumption that the nicest, most advanced goods—computers, audio systems, wall-sized TVs—will get cheaper year by year. Moore’s Law, which in one version says that the price of computing power will be cut in half every 18 months or so, is part of the reason, but China’s factories are a big part too.

Much of what is threatening about today’s China also comes from its factories. Many people inside China, and nearly everyone outside, can avoid the direct effects of the country’s political controls. It is much harder to avoid its pollution. The air in Chinese cities is worse than I expected, and because the pollution affects so many people in such a wide range of places, it is more damaging than London’s, Manchester’s, or Pittsburgh’s in their worst, rapidly industrializing days. The air pollution comes directly from the steel works, cement plants, and other heavy-industry facilities that are helping the country prosper, and indirectly from the electric power plants that keep everything running. (Plus more and more cars, though China still has barely one-thirtieth as many per capita as the United States.) The sheer speed and volume with which factories and power plants across China increase their output of soot and gases make the country’s air-pollution problems the world’s. The heightened competition for oil, ore, and other commodities to feed the factories affects other nations, as do slapdash standards of food purity and safety, which may have led to tainted worldwide supplies of animal food. The ultimate fear in the developed world, of course, is that as China creates millions of new factory jobs unknown millions will lose such jobs in America, Canada, Germany, even Japan.

But these factories are both surprising and important in a less obvious, though also fundamental, way. Almost nothing about the way they work corresponds to the way they are discussed in the United States. America’s political debates about the “China opportunity” and, even more, the “China threat” seem distant, theoretical, and imprecise from the perspective of the factories where the outsourcing and exporting occur. The industrialists from the United States, Europe, or Japan who are deciding how much of their production to move to China talk about the process in very different terms from those used in American political discussion. One illustration: The artificially low value of China’s currency, relative to the dollar, comes near the top of American complaints about Chinese trade policy. (The currency is the yuan renminbi—literally, “people’s money”—or RMB). This is more like the eighth or tenth issue that comes up when business officials discuss the factories they are opening in one country and closing in another. And when it does come up, the context is usually whether the RMB’s rise will force a company to put its next factory not in China’s crowded coastal region but someplace with even lower costs, like the remote interior provinces, where salaries are lower and commercial space is cheaper—or perhaps Vietnam or Cambodia.

So too with complaints about Chinese government subsidies for exporting industries, widespread abuse of intellectual property, and even “slave labor” inside the vast factories. Some of these complaints are well-founded, others are not; but even if all were true, they would misdescribe and undervalue what is going on here. Talking about Chinese industrial growth, Americans are in the position of 19th-century Europeans who acted as if America’s industrial rise could be explained simply by its vast natural resources and its exploitation of immigrant and slave labor, plus its very casual attitude toward copyright and patent laws protecting foreign, mainly British, books and inventions. (Today, Americans walk the streets of China and see their movies, music, software, and books sold everywhere in cheap pirate versions. A century and a half ago, Charles Dickens walked the streets of young America and fumed to see his novels in cheap pirate versions.) All those factors played their part, but they were not the full story of America’s rise—nor do the corresponding aspects of modern China’s behavior fully explain what China has achieved.

I can’t pretend to know the complete story of China’s industrial rise. But I can describe what I have seen, and the main way it has changed my mind.

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Posted at 6:55 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright Der Spiegel

> China is conquering Africa as it becomes the preferred trading partner
> of the continent’s dictators. Beijing is buying up Africa’s abundant
> natural resources and providing it with needed cash and cheaply
> produced consumer goods in return.
>
> Thomas Mumba was a devout young man. He spent his free time studying
> the Holy Scriptures and directing the church choir at the United
> Church of Zambia in his hometown of Chambeshi. Mumba, a bachelor, was
> also committed to abstinence — from beer and from sex before
> marriage. A larger-than-life depiction of Jesus Christ surrounded by a
> herd of sheep still hangs in his room. The poster is pure “Made in
> China” kitsch, like most things here in the Zambian copper belt,
> located more than a six hours’ drive north of the capital Lusaka.
>
> Mumba, a shy, slight young man, bought the Chinese-made religious
> image at a local market and hung it up at home. It was cheap, cheaper
> than goods from Europe, at any rate. Mumba’s Chinese Jesus cost him
> 4,000 kwacha, or about
> 75 cents. “It was his first encounter with the evil empire,” says
> Thomas’s mother Justina Mulumba, two years after the accident that
> would change her entire life.
>
> Thomas Mumba died on April 20, 2005 when an explosives depot blew up
> in the Chambeshi copper mine. He had just turned 23 and had been
> working in the mine for two years. To this day, no one knows how many
> people died that day, because the mine’s Chinese owners attempted to
> cover up what they knew about the accident. Besides, they had kept no
> records of who was working near the explosion site on the day of the accident.
>
> According to the memorial plaque, there were 46 victims, but it could
> just as easily have been 50 or 60. Only fragments of the remains of
> most of the dead were recovered. Mukuka Chilufya, the engineer who
> managed the rescue team, says that his men filled 49 sacks with body
> parts that day. The Chinese have deflected all inquiries about the explosion.
>
> Justina Mulumba wears a mint-green dress as she kneels at her son’s
> grave, whispering almost inaudibly: “Forgive them, Lord, for they know
> not what they do.” The cemetery is by the side of the road, only a
> short distance from the plant gates. Chinese trucks drive by, churning
> up the dry African soil and briefly coating the entire cemetery in a
> cloud of red dust.
>
> The drivers are in a hurry to get their trucks, filled with copper, to
> the port of Durban on the Indian Ocean, where the copper will be
> loaded onto ships bound for China. Mumba wasn’t the only one whose
> fate was sealed by copper. All of Zambia depends on copper, which is
> by far this southern African country’s most important export, well ahead of cobalt.
> Copper accounts for more than half of all its export revenues.
>
> The precious metal attracted scores of white colonizers to the country
> north of the Zambezi River in the early 20th century. The British flag
> flew over Northern Rhodesia, as Zambia was then called, until 1964.
> That was followed by the era of independence and of Socialist leader
> Kenneth Kaunda, who initially benefited from rising copper prices.
>
> Kaunda, a religious man, was obsessed with bringing education to the
> people of his country. But he had little understanding of economic
> matters. He had so many schools built that the government eventually
> found itself lacking the funds to pay the teachers. When Kaunda
> decided to nationalize the foreign-owned mines to raise cash for the
> government’s coffers, it was his bad luck that copper prices soon
> plunged.
>
> Feeding China ‘s Hunger for Raw Materials
>
> In the early 1990s, Zambia abandoned its socialist planned economy,
> Kaunda withdrew from politics and the ongoing slump in copper prices
> precipitated an economic crisis. In the late 1990s, when
> then-president Frederick Chiluba felt compelled to give in to pressure
> from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to privatize
> the unproductive, unprofitable state-owned mines, the price of a ton
> of copper was barely $900.
>
> At the time, no one in Africa — or, for that matter, in New York,
> London or Geneva — foresaw India’s and China’s rise as economic
> powers, or the attendant thirst for resources. When rising demand
> suddenly drove up copper prices to previously unanticipated levels, it
> was yet another stroke of bad luck for poor Zambia that the country
> had already sold off much of its copper-mining rights to the
> Australians, Canadians, Indians and Chinese.
>
> A ton of copper costs $8,000 today. Zambian mines are currently
> producing 500,000 tons a year, a number that could soon increase to
> 700,000. This is good for the foreign mine owners, but the Zambians
> see next to nothing of the profits.
>
> The Chinese need the copper for their booming industry. The metal is
> used primarily to make wires, cables, integrated circuits and metal
> products like pipes and toolmaking machines — in other words, in
> almost every branch of industry, from automobile manufacturing to the
> construction industry.
>
> By 2004 China was already the world’s second-largest importer of
> copper ore, after Japan. “If copper scrap and residues are added,
> China imports a quarter of the world’s copper production,” writes the
> research department of Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank in a report
> titled “China’s Commodity Hunger.”
> The report concludes that the demand for copper will “remain high.”
>
> Privatization couldn’t have gone worse for the Zambians. But in the
> age of the dragon descending upon Africa, things could get far worse.
> Michael Chilufya Sata sits in a cramped, smoke-filled office behind
> mountains of paper, smoking one cigarette after another. Sata, who as
> head of the Patriotic Front is Zambia’s most important opposition
> leader, is also a demagogue.
>
> For many Zambians Sata is a saint, but for others he is a
> reincarnation of the devil — that includes the government, which has
> had him thrown in jail repeatedly. In one instance he was accused of
> sabotage when he and his supporters allegedly smuggled explosives into
> a copper mine, and he was recently arrested on charges of having
> provided false information about his financial circumstances.
>
> Sata captured more than 29 percent of the vote in the September 2006
> presidential election, while the winner in that race, current
> President Levy Mwanawasa, claimed 43 percent. But Sata believes that
> the election was rigged. According to opinion polls, he was initially
> clearly in the lead in the capital and in the copper belt. But when
> the tide turned in favor of the incumbent, Sata cried election fraud
> and violence erupted in the streets of Lusaka for several days.
>
> If there is one issue which Sata uses to mobilize the masses, it is
> the Chinese. He has warned voters that they plan to export their
> dictatorship to Africa, colonize the continent and introduce
> large-scale exploitation.
> Unlike Western investors, says Sata, the Chinese have little interest
> in the Africans’ well-being.
>
> The politician quickly talks himself into a rage. Chinese have little
> interest in human rights, he says. They are only interested in
> exploiting Africa’s natural resources, which they have carted off
> using their own workers and equipment, and without having paid a
> single kwacha in taxes.
> Sata sums up his position as follows: “We want the Chinese to leave
> and the old colonial rulers to return. They exploited our natural
> resources too, but at least they took care of us. They built schools,
> taught us their language and brought us the British civilization.”
>
> A majority of Zambians likely agree with Sata. On his recent and third
> trip to Africa, Chinese President Hu Jintao canceled his planned visit
> to the Zambian copper belt at the last minute, fearing demonstrations
> by disgruntled workers and the resulting embarrassing TV images. Only
> last year, protestors in Chambeshi were injured when police fired into
> their midst.
>
> Part 2: ‘At Least Western Capitalism Has a Human Face’
>
> Thousands of workers felt they had been conned out of their wages and
> had staged a protest march in front of the local mine. These
> demonstrations have become almost a ritual in Chinese-owned mines. The
> Chinese pay wages of only $30 a month, less than the Indians and
> substantially less than the salaries paid by the Canadians and
> Australians.
>
> While Zambians may have long considered Western capitalism barbaric,
> it now seems practically idyllic compared to the supercharged Chinese
> version. “At least Western capitalism has a human face,” says Sata,
> “the Chinese are only out to exploit us.” Indeed, the Chinese are
> currently toying with the idea of establishing two Special Economic
> Zones within Zambian borders. “Then they will have their state within
> a state,” Sata believes, “and will truly be able to do as they please.”
>
> ‘The Silent Invasion’
>
> It is especially irksome to many Zambians that the Chinese have
> created relatively few jobs in the country. According to Sata, there
> are already 80,000 Chinese in Zambia, “former prisoners who are housed
> in labor camps and mine the copper.” The metal is shipped to China in
> the form of copper ore and processed there. Even the machinery comes
> from China. The Zambian government allows it to be brought in without
> imposing any duties. The Chinese workers don’t even leave their camps
> for lunch or to drink beer, says Sata, who calls them “a strange people.”
>
> Resentment over the behavior of the Chinese is also smoldering
> elsewhere in Africa. China’s involvement in the continent creates few
> jobs, says political scientist Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari. Instead, he
> says, “we solve China’s problems by giving Chinese workers jobs in our backyard.”
>
> According to Hengari, who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris, Africa is
> the only continent on which Chinese companies “apply for government
> contracts, get them and then import Chinese workers.” Kenyan monthly
> magazine New People calls it a “silent invasion.” Even South African
> President Thabo Mbeki, whose country maintains close ties to China,
> has warned that Africa threatens to become an “economic colony” of China.
>
> When China Non Ferrous Metal Industry acquired the Chambeshi mine in
> 1998, copper prices had hit rock bottom and the mines were in terrible
> condition.
> The Zambians were desperate to find a buyer for the ailing state-owned
> mine, a business most investors deemed too risky.
>
> When the government’s initial favorite, Canadian-run Ivanhoe Capital,
> withdrew its bid after sluggish negotiations, the path was clear for
> the Chinese. They were awarded the contract for the bargain basement
> price of $20 million.
>
> >From that point on the Chinese investors began celebrating what they
>
>> called
>>
> their “staunch solidarity” with their new business partners. “There is
> a long history of friendship between the Chinese and the Zambian people,”
> the buyers pointed out, reminding the Zambians of the activities of
> their Maoist predecessors, who had built an 1,860-kilometer
> (1,156-mile) railroad, called the Tazara, from Zambia’s copper belt to
> the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. But back then Beijing’s rulers
> were still dreaming of world revolution and those in Lusaka of a
> Christian communism.
>
> At first China’s involvement was greeted with open arms from the Cape
> to Cairo. Suddenly the Africans were business partners of the Chinese
> and no longer dependent on arrogant Westerners, with their colonial
> attitudes and talk about democracy, good governance and human rights.
> And suddenly Africa was attractive once again, and not just for armies
> of aid workers and their allies in the international entertainment
> industry.
>
> Turning a Blind Eye to Human Rights Abuses
>
> The Chinese promised to bring salvation from Africa’s woes. They
> flattered the many African leaders who were mainly interested in
> securing their power.
> The new investors couldn’t have cared less about human rights
> violations in Zimbabwe, corruption in Nigeria or atrocities in Darfur.
> On the contrary, they awarded an honorary doctorate to Zimbabwean
> dictator Robert Mugabe in
> 2005 and named him “China’s No. 1 Friend.” Any sanctions the United
> Nations Security Council seeks to impose on Sudan are routinely
> blocked by the country’s new allies in Beijing.
>
> The Chinese People’s Daily newspaper praises the relationship between
> China and Africa, calling the Africans “good friends, good partners
> and good brothers” and highlighting what it calls a common history of
> old civilizations, both having had their “experiences with colonial
> devastation.”
>
> For this reason alone, said former President Jiang Zemin, there is a
> natural partnership between “China, the largest developing nation on
> earth, and Africa, the continent with the largest number of developing
> nations.”
> Initially most Africans did not see the Chinese as pillaging
> conquerors, the way they had perceived the British and the French in the past.
>
> The legendary Admiral Zheng He, the first Chinese person to reach
> Kenya when he arrived with an enormous fleet in the 15th century, left
> the locals in peace. All he took home was a giraffe.
>
> China’s current ascent in Africa is all but unstoppable. Whether it
> will be a blessing or a curse for the continent remains to be seen.
> But it is already clear that hardly any other region in the world is
> deriving as much benefit from the economic boom in the Far East as
> Africa. It could even make Africa a player — and a winner — in the
> globalization game, which so far has passed the continent by.
>
> What is most critical for African countries now is whether they will
> be able to take advantage of the enormous opportunities with which
> they are currently being presented. If they could manage to sell their
> mineral resources for a reasonable price and invest the proceeds in
> their own development, they could even confidently do without the
> copious aid they now receive from industrialized nations.
>
> According to the Deutsche Bank study, the countries of Africa and
> Latin America are the “greatest beneficiaries of China’s hunger for
> raw materials,” and they “should use their profits from raw materials
> to expand their manufacturing industries and service sectors, so as to
> enable themselves to generate lasting growth in the long term.”
>
> The world’s hunger for raw materials is set to continue, so all
> current predictions for Africa are favorable. The demand for copper
> could increase from 3 million tons a year at present to 20 million
> tons in 2020, the demand from oil from 91 to 1,860 million tons and
> for wood from 34 million cubic meters to 150 million. “The results of
> our forecasts show,” says Deutsche Bank’s research department, “that
> the exporters of crude oil and metals will be the main beneficiaries
> of the insatiable Chinese hunger for raw materials.”
>
> Part 3: A Fatal Tendency to Accept Charity
>
> The upswing in the Far East could give Africa a much-needed boost.
> According to Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is aligned
> with the center-left Social Democrats, Africans see China “as the
> model and potential motor of their own economic development.” This
> raises the prospect that a modern market economy could replace the
> foreign aid-based, planned economy that is currently crippling Africa.
>
> It would be about time. Ironically, one of this oppressed continent’s
> biggest problems is that the availability of aid from the affluent
> world makes it far more attractive to be poor than rich. The
> industrialized countries, of course, are more willing to help the poor than the rich.
> But this understandable tendency to accept charity is disastrous for
> Africa, richly blessed as it is with natural resources.
>
> Africans have to begin to liberate themselves from this trap of their
> own accord. They should improve the infrastructures of their countries
> dramatically, fight corruption, liberalize markets and privatize large
> swathes of government land. All of this would also make the continent
> more attractive for urgently needed foreign direct investment. The
> substantial revenues from the countries’ business dealings with China
> could be used to embark on such a course.
>
> It shouldn’t take much for Africans to recognize that China, a future
> superpower, maintains a much stronger presence in Africa than it would
> seem at first glance. Last year’s volume of trade between the Chinese
> and the Africans amounted to $55 billion, a rise of 40 percent over
> 2005 and more than five times as high as in the year 2000. China’s
> share of the African market is currently 6.8 percent, compared to a US
> share that has declined to only 5.8 percent.
>
> This makes China Africa’s third most important trading partner, with
> trade volume expected to increase to $100 billion within the next
> three years. The Chinese seem to be everywhere: prospecting for
> uranium in Namibia, buying manganese, iron ore and gold in South
> Africa, drilling for oil in the Gulf of Guinea and Sudan and exporting
> tropical hardwood from Congo.
>
> China has invested $4 billion in oil production and the development of
> ports and pipelines in Sudan alone. Angola’s highly corrupt regime
> supplies China with more than 500,000 barrels of oil a day and,
> representing 18 percent of all Chinese oil imports, has already
> replaced Saudi Arabia and Iran as the country’s most important oil supplier.
> Almost half of the lumber cut down in Gabon is shipped to China, which
> also buys up 60 percent of Equatorial Guinea’s lumber exports.
>
> In a memorandum, the US State Department even cites experts who refer
> to China’s expansion as a “tsunami.” According to the report, “after
> decades during which the Chinese built soccer stadiums for dictators,
> railroads and highways in Africa in exchange for political support,
> their interests are now almost exclusively economic.”
>
> China imports everything the continent produces: tropical hardwoods,
> oil, metals and even a small amount of cotton. Africa’s five most
> resource-rich countries — Angola, South Africa, Sudan, Equatorial
> Guinea and Congo — account for more than 80 percent of all African
> exports to China.
>
> Cheap Consumer Goods for Africa
>
> In return Africa gets cheap, mass-produced items, basic consumer goods
> like household devices, television sets and clothing. From South
> African supermarket shelves to Uganda’s flea markets, the products
> with the strange characters printed on their packaging are available everywhere.
> In fact the flood of cheap Chinese goods has already destroyed the
> textile industries in Swaziland and Lesotho.
>
> “When it comes to production, it is difficult for Africa to compete
> with China,” writes the Brenthurst Foundation, a South African think
> tank, in a report titled “China’s Economic Takeoff: Implications for Africa.”
> According to the report, despite low wages in Africa “the continent’s
> disadvantages, such as poor infrastructure and high transport costs”
> make African products too expensive.
>
> The initial enthusiasm is slowly turning into fear of these successors
> to Africa’s former colonial masters. This explains why Chinese
> President Hu Jintao makes so many trips to the continent, courting the
> Africans and making statements like: “China is a peaceful nation and
> will most certainly take no steps that would damage the interests of
> Africa and its people.” Be it in Cameroon, the Seychelles, Liberia or
> Zambia, Hu has forgiven debts and handed out low-interest and even
> interest-free loans. He has lifted trade barriers on many products,
> 440 at last count, from 28 particularly poor countries.
>
> Beijing is building power plants, hospitals, roads and schools, and it
> is installing railroad tracks and water pipes. The country has sent
> 16,000 doctors and nurses to Africa over the last 50 years. “China is
> doing things in a big way in Africa,” writes Germany’s Frankfurter
> Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
>
> In Nigeria, it was not the World Bank but the state-owned China Civil
> Engineering Construction Corporation that secured the construction
> contract for a new railroad from Lagos to Kano. The project is worth
> $8.3 billion.
> The Chinese offered the Nigerians better terms than all other bidders,
> and Chinese banks will provide the financing. And unlike the World
> Bank, the Chinese demand neither proper accounting of funds nor the
> fair treatment of workers.
>
> The two countries also appear to see eye-to-eye in the weapons business.
> The Nigerian air force has purchased 14 Chinese warplanes, while the
> navy has ordered patrol boats to fight rebels in the oil-rich Niger
> Delta.
>
> The Chinese, for their part, are in Nigeria mainly for the oil. CNOOC,
> China’s state-owned oil company, paid $2.3 billion for almost half of
> the OML 130 oil field, and another $4 billion for drilling licenses.
> Fu Chengyu, the company’s chairman and CEO, called the deal a
> “milestone in our efforts to expand one of the world’s richest oil and gas fields.”
>
> Black Gold in the Gulf of Guinea
>
> It is easy to understand why China is eying the black gold in the Gulf
> of Guinea so covetously. Experts estimate oil reserves in West Africa
> alone at about 110 billion barrels. It’s an enormous prize, and the
> Chinese are not exactly holding back in the fight for this wealth.
>
> To elbow out foreign competitors from the competition for a large oil
> field, the state-owned China Eximbank granted the Angolan government a
> low-interest loan for $2 billion. The contract was promptly awarded to
> Chinese energy company Sinopec. Oil deliveries will serve as
> collateral for the loan.
>
> Meanwhile, the American oil giants are increasingly coming away
> empty-handed, prompting Newsweek to talk about a “Sino-American war
> for future petroleum supplies.”
>
> China’s rulers are also busy wooing Africa’s political leaders. Last
> fall the Chinese Communist Party invited 53 African heads of state to
> a summit meeting in China, the largest international conference the
> Chinese had ever hosted. Forty-eight Africans attended, prompting the
> Beijing leadership to draw comparisons to the old days, when Mao
> Zedong (who famously said: “We will never forget our black friends”)
> celebrated his partners from the nonaligned world.
>
> Hu’s promises to his guests included 30 hospitals, 100 village
> schools, low-interest loans valued at $3 billion, the construction of
> a giant conference center for the African Union and preferred loans
> for the purchase of Chinese goods valued at $2 billion. He also
> announced plans to train 15,000 young Africans in technical professions.
>
> The Daily Nation, a Kenyan daily newspaper, was ecstatic: “China gives
> without demanding anything in return.” For this reason, the paper
> continued, “Africa’s leaders, who are tired of the West’s big brother
> attitudes, are willingly accepting China’s generosity.” The
> Nairobi-based East African Standard issued this recommendation to the
> continent’s political leaders:
> “Forget the West and embrace China.”
>
> But what Africans see as a stroke of luck only strikes fear into the
> hearts of European development aid ministers: China’s indifference to
> the misdeeds of African potentates and cleptocrats, and its avowed
> commitment not to intervene in the internal affairs of another country.
>
> The most alarming example of such an amoral alliance is China’s
> attempt to liberate Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, whose foreign aid
> the West cut off long ago, from international isolation.
>
> Since the Chinese stepped in, things have been going downhill for
> Zimbabwe, but Chinese weapons help the unstable government to retain
> its grip on power. China has already provided Mugabe with military
> aircraft worth $200 million. In return, the Chinese were given a stake
> in the country’s platinum mines.
>
> The Sudanese shopping list for Beijing, which Amnesty International
> recently published, is also long. According to Amnesty, China provided
> the Sudanese army with Chinese-made Z-6 helicopters, its “East Wind”
> military trucks and many other weapons which can be used to hunt down
> rebels in the Darfur region.
>
> China has good reason to be so accommodating to the government in
> Khartoum.
> The China National Petroleum Corporation now owns 40 percent of
> Sudan’s Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, which controls the
> country’s biggest oil fields. State-owned company Sinopec has built a
> 1,600-kilometer
> (994-mile) pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where another
> Chinese state-owned company has already built a tanker port. Sudan
> already exports about 60 percent of its oil to China.
>
> Part 4: Chinese Trade Props up African Tyrants
>
> It is precisely because of these close trade relations that German
> political scientist Denis Tull calls China’s growing political
> influence in Africa “overwhelmingly negative.” Tull is the author of
> the study “The Africa Policy of the People’s Republic of China” for
> the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and, as he
> sees it, China’s unconditional willingness to engage in trade and its
> vehement “defense of the principle of sovereignty,” far from forcing
> the Africans to bring about democracy and transparency, is only
> helping Africa’s tyrants.
>
> This Chinese-African relationship is governed by the old principle of
> give and take. In return for defending the Chinese government against
> criticism for the Tiananmen Square massacre or even, as former
> Namibian President Sam Nujoma did, congratulating the Beijing regime
> for putting down the “anti-revolutionary” democracy movement, Africans
> receive Beijing’s blessing for their own ruthless treatment of dissidents.
>
> According to the Washington-based International Institute for
> Strategic Studies, “China’s willingness to arm and seek political
> support from African regimes jars with international efforts to foster
> democratization and good governance.”
>
> Pressing Sudan
>
> Only recently, however, Beijing had to abandon its generous posture
> toward Sudan. Concerned that American celebrities could call a boycott
> of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics because of China’s cynical
> position on Sudan, the Chinese government dispatched a special envoy
> to the Sudanese capital city of Khartoum.
>
> The Chinese envoy finally managed to convince the Sudanese to agree,
> at least in part, to a United Nations peace plan for Darfur. The
> Chinese move was prompted in particular by the initiative of US
> actress Mia Farrow, who was already calling the Olympics the “Genocide
> Games” and had sharply attacked fellow Hollywood figure Steven
> Spielberg, who is involved in the planning of the opening ceremonies
> in Beijing. In response to Farrow’s criticism, Spielberg wrote a
> concerned letter to President Hu.
>
> But according to He Wenping, director of the Institute of West-Asian
> and African Studies at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, it
> is not access to raw materials alone that is driving the Chinese to
> the Congo, the Nile and the Niger. She believes that political goals
> also play an important role. China, says Wenping, wants to become an
> influential player on the international stage, and a budding
> superpower needs to develop a following.
>
> Hardly any region seems as open to providing favors as Africa, which
> has many votes in the UN. China hopes to win these votes, especially
> when it comes time to position itself against the powerful United States.
> Wenping, a petite scientist who wears her hair short and has an office
> in the former imperial ministry of the navy, is convinced that
> “nothing can happen without Africa.”
>
> There is yet another reason to explain China’s growing push into Africa.
> More and more Chinese workers and farmers are settling in Africa
> because they can earn more money there.
>
> In the first 10 months of 2006, more than 270,000 Chinese were already
> working in Africa. More than 100,000 of them have put down roots
> permanently
> — as merchants, farmers and bar and restaurant owners. They include
> people like Li Shaofu, who wasn’t earning enough money in China to pay
> his children’s tuition and decided to work for a Chinese company in
> the Niger Delta.
>
> A Wave of Chinese Immigration
>
> Like dozens of others, Shaofu was hired by Teleken Engineering Co., a
> state-owned telecommunications firm. Intermediaries obtained passports
> for the workers, none of whom spoke any English, and put them on an
> Ethiopian Airlines flight to Africa. “All the boss told us was that we
> should not laugh or smile in front of strangers, say little and not
> wander around,”
> says a worker from Jianqiang, a village in Sichuan Province.
>
> The Chinese were tempted by relatively high wages. Shaofu brought home
> 50,000 yuan (EUR5,000) for slightly less than one year of work in
> Africa. He would have been lucky to earn 13,000 yuan in China in the
> same amount of time. “If there is an opportunity next year,” says a
> farmer from Guanzi, “I want to go abroad. Even if it is dangerous, it
> is still better than working in the fields at home.”
>
> The excursion to the Niger delta almost ended in tragedy for Shaofu
> and his fellow Chinese. Nigerian rebels kidnapped him and four other
> Chinese workers from Sichuan Province, and only released them after
> holding them for two weeks. The nine Chinese oil workers in eastern
> Ethiopia who died the previous week in a rebel attack were less fortunate.
>
> It is a fate that is unlikely to befall Si Su, a farmer from Jiangsu
> Province. Together with his wife and two children, Su settled near the
> Zambian capital Lusaka and founded the Sunlight Farm. He now stands in
> the fields every day, supervising his roughly 50 Zambian employees as
> they plough or pull weeds in his cornfield. He feels as if he were in
> his own paradise.
>
> “The people are peaceful and friendly,” he says, “I liked them right
> away.”
> Su and his family entered the country in 1992 as workers in a
> Chinese-Zambian agricultural cooperative. Despite widespread
> anti-Chinese sentiments, they plan to stay in Zambia, and have already
> learned English.
>
> They miss China sometimes, especially for its food. But they have not
> returned home yet, not even for a visit. Su is too worried about his
> farm to leave. There is a Chinese saying, he says, that goes like this:
> “When the tiger is in the mountains, the ape becomes king.”
>
> Behind Su, Mr. Enson, the Zambian tractor driver, confidently drives
> his red Chinese-made Dongfeng (“East Wind”) brand tractor. Enson,
> feeling unobserved and playful, sings an African song about Zimba the
> lion as he works. Su is appalled. “Careful, careful!” he calls out.
>
> But he collects his composure quickly. “We human beings must enrich
> one another. They will learn discipline from us, and they will teach
> us how to carry sunshine in our hearts.”
>
> Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Posted at 6:37 PM · Comments (0)

Saturday, May 26, 2007

There are Poles who say Ryszard Kapuscinski was lucky to die last January, before his fellow citizens learned that he served as a secret informant for the old communist government. There are others who believe that any damn fool should have guessed decades ago that Kapuscinski had a private deal with the state.

Reporting for a government news agency, Kapuscinski visited dozens of countries. The material he gathered formed the core of his internationally celebrated books, including The Emperor and Shah of Shahs. Without exit visas, he could never have become the journalist who (as Geoff Dyer wrote in the Guardian) “has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive and vivid account of what life is like on our planet,” particularly in the Third World. But those visas came with a price: co-operation.

Kapuscinski’s childhood was bitterly hard, beginning with his Second World War boyhood in Pinsk (then in Poland, now in Belarus). His family survived for years on nothing but a pastry made of flour and water. He went to school without books or pencils or even shoes, his feet wrapped in bark. (Decades later, he remarked that footwear still obsessed him.)

Deprivation may have created his empathy for the wretched of the earth, whose chronicler he became. He approached a failed, anarchic society with richly subtle understanding as well as compassion.

At 16, he joined the communists (“We all thought we were doing the right thing. We were full of hope”) but by his early 20s, during the last years of Stalin, he realized that communism was dedicated, among other things, to keeping the public ignorant of the world. He began thinking of escape, and finally managed it in the only way that presented itself. The record indicates that he told the authorities little of value, and did no one harm. Still, “police spy” will be a permanent item in his dossier.

His secret was revealed this week through the process that Poland calls “lustration,” an uncommon word meaning purification. In ancient Rome, lustration involved sacrificing animals. Today, Poland sacrifices reputations.

It seems a shame that Kapuscinski didn’t pre-empt the government by telling the story himself, a year or two after communism died. He could have written a delightful piece about it, maybe even a small book. Spy services following preposterous rituals in search of trivial information are inherently funny. It was perfect material for Kapuscinski. But he remained silent. He also refused to make himself a hypocrite by supporting lustration.

In the old days, curiously, he developed a reputation for covertly satirizing rather than helping the communists. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted on Thursday, many Poles considered him communism’s sharp critic. A former Warsaw correspondent of the Washington Post claims that readers believed Kapuscinski’s reporting was often coded criticism of the Warsaw government. So did many outsiders. Discussing The Emperor, a New York Times reviewer remarked that “one is never quite sure whether one is in the world of Ethiopian fact or Polish political fable.”

Kapuscinski insisted that this wasn’t his intention. He quoted a palace worker describing Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia: “I must explain to you, my friend, that in those days thinking was a painful inconvenience and a troubling deformity.” Was that not also Kapuscinski describing Stalinism? Not at all, he said. Bill Buford, of Granta magazine, told him in an interview that it’s easy to see parallels between the politics in his books and the Polish situation. Kapuscinski replied that he wasn’t looking for parallels. Buford tried again, pointing out that many Polish readers considered Kapuscinski’s books allegories. Kapuscinski: “No, they are not allegories.”

In Imperium (1994), his account of the former Soviet Union’s disintegration, Kapuscinski wrote of the old Soviet spy system: “The NKVD held the nation in bestial fear.” Possessing endless amounts of information, it could deploy endless terror. East Germany copied the Soviet system and went one better; it appears to have had proportionately more spies than any other state in history. Other communist governments, such as Poland’s, were less intrusive; but even the least vicious considered it the absolute right of the state to pry into every corner of society.

Those who have never lived under such a situation, depending on government favour for even the most routine documents, will hesitate before condemning Kapuscinski. Communist policy was grounded in an all-encompassing infringement on private life. It recognized no limits, which is what totalitarianism means. At certain times, any means of eluding its infinite power must have seemed justifiable.

Robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
© National Post 2007

Posted at 1:29 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

Why can’t Africa be more like Taiwan? Or South Korea? Or Thailand? Or Indonesia? Nothing obsesses development economists more than the question of whether today’s poor nations can replicate the success of the handful of mostly Asian countries that escaped poverty by achieving sustained economic growth in the decades since World War II.

Often the conclusions are dour. The answers provided include “culture” or U.S. geopolitical influence — attributes that aren’t easy to duplicate in alien contexts. Sometimes the answers are maddening — such as Robert Wade’s thesis that East Asian prosperity was achieved through the application of industrial policy tactics that are now effectively forbidden by the rules of the World Trade Organization.

Only rarely, as is the case with The Prospects for Sustained Growth in Africa: Benchmarking the Constraints, an IMF working paper by economists Simon Johnson, Jonathan D. Ostry and Arvind Subramanian, do you encounter even a shred of optimism. “Fatalism is unwarranted,” they declare, a pronouncement that can only be seen as a resounding vote of confidence when the subject is Africa. (Thanks to Jonathan Dingel at Trade Diversion for the link.)

To be sure, it’s a backward-facing kind of optimism. The authors argue that many sub-Saharan African nations are no worse off now than countries such as Indonesia or Thailand were when they initiated their growth spurts, and they may even be, in some respects, better off. So there’s hope!

We compared Africa today with countries that were similarly weak in the past — in terms of their institutional development — and yet managed to escape from poverty. Looking at the data suggests (but does not prove) that these “deep” indicators, especially for a group of “promising” African countries, are not much worse in Africa today than they were in much of East Asia in the early 1960s (e.g., Indonesia and Thailand) or in Vietnam and China circa 1980. There are inherited institutional weaknesses in Africa — and internal conflict and societal fractionalization remain concerns — but the East Asian experience definitely demonstrates that some institutional weaknesses can be escaped. So the good news is that breaking away from a country’s institutional legacy is possible because it has been done by others, including some East Asian countries which were not that dissimilar from some promising performers in Africa today.

Of course, just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it is inevitable. But right now may be a particularly fruitful time to revisit development strategy questions, because Africa’s current economic health is rosier than anything the continent has witnessed in decades. GDP growth rates across the board are averaging between 3.5 and 4 percent. If managed adroitly, could the current economic expansion turn into something more long-lasting?

There’s no easy answer there. As the authors observe, Africa’s current economic growth is largely commodity-driven. The global economy has been growing strongly, and China’s incredible demand for all kinds of raw materials has been floating everyone’s boat. But rare indeed is the poor country that has become permanently rich by selling off its natural resources or agricultural bounty. The stark reality is that, of the 12 countries that the authors chose as their examples for how to get ahead, the vast majority did so by boosting exports of manufactured goods.

And that puts Africa in something of a paradox. Because if Africa wants to boost its exports of manufactured goods, it won’t be enough just to remove regulations that slow down exporters or keep currency exchange rates under tight control. Africa will also have to figure out how to compete effectively with … China — the very same country whose voracious appetite for fossil fuels and minerals and timber and everything else is fueling current African growth.

That’s a tall order. When China pumps out 7 billion pairs of shoes in a single year, is there room for anyone else?

Posted at 10:28 AM · Comments (0)

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