A Glimpse of the World: March 2008 Archives

Seven Questions: What Tibetans Want

March 31, 2008 11:20 PM

The most vigorous Tibetan protests in decades have been crushed by Chinese soldiers and police. Tibet expert Robert Barnett explains why the most significant action is taking place outside Lhasa and what we can expect the Chinese to do next.

Foreign Policy: What does the average Tibetan want? Is it independence, or a greater share of Tibet’s modernization and economic growth, which has been dominated by Han Chinese?

Robert Barnett: Not really either of those things. We have to be very careful not to confuse exile politics, which is a demand for anti-China this and anti-China that, with internal politics, which is much more pragmatic, complex, and sophisticated.

A very important sector of Tibetans have become very wealthy because China has poured money into creating a middle class in Tibetan towns, though there hasn’t really been a dividend for the countryside and the underclass. So, we can’t explain this as just economic modernization. We could explain the violence against the [Han] Chinese in that way. It could have to do with that. But the violence is present in just one demonstration out of 50 in the past two weeks.

These protests are really about two things: A huge sector of the rural population has said, “Tibet was independent in the past. We reassert that belief. That doesn’t mean we demand that it be independent again, but we are reinserting that into the discussion.” And, “The Dalai Lama represents our interests.” I suppose a possible third thing is, “We are certainly not happy with Chinese President Hu Jintao.” This is a huge political statement that nobody anticipated.

FP: We’re primarily seeing photos of protests in Lhasa and the protests abroad. But you suggest the real significance is the groundswell of protests in the countryside?

RB: It’s not a groundswell; it’s a tidal wave. It’s the biggest thing to happen in Tibetan history for 40 years. In Lhasa, you get a protest as we [normally] recognize one. But that’s not really significant for China except in a PR way. They deal with those things with security operations; they crack down and put people away. This has nothing to do with the significance of what’s happening. The most significant of the 50 protests are the rural peasants taking over the countryside. These are people who get on horseback or march down to the local government office or police post, burn it to the ground, and raise the Tibetan flag. You can be shot on sight for having a Tibetan flag in Tibet in a non-Olympics year. Nothing like this has been seen in Tibet for decades, and it has untold political significance for China.

FP: Will the protests just fade away, or will they grow and spread?

RB: They’ll definitely fade away because the [Chinese] force level is just so high, and anyway [the Tibetans’] point has been made. We [in the West] think that people do politics by saying, “I’m going to stage this protest in order to get X.” But nobody gets X in China. It just doesn’t work like that. You’re dealing with one of the biggest power systems in the world. Instead, burn a government building, put a flag up, and then you’ve achieved this huge victory because China has created a symbolic form of politics in which everyone is supposed to have forgotten that they were independent once. So, just by doing that, you have completely changed the political equation.

FP: Is there any kind of generation gap in the exile community wherein older exiles are more dovish and the younger exiles want to confront China?

RB: There is certainly a growing group, generally young and English- or Hindi-speaking, who are very strongly animated by the idea that diplomacy doesn’t work—and will never work—in China, and instead you must go for independence. In this case, independence stands for a criticism that China can’t be trusted and an implication that a spiritual figure like the Dalai Lama can’t be tough enough. But it’s quite complicated. These people feel they are adding muscle because they are doing what he can’t as a monk and spiritual figure. But even they do not generally question his standing, and they certainly see him as the solution. Inside Tibet, nobody is questioning his standing or his potential to be key to the solution. If George Bush had 1 percent of the support this man has, George Bush would be a happy man. You cannot beat him for polling figures.

FP: Is there any chance that the Chinese recognize that mandate and sit down with the Dalai Lama in the near future?

RB: It certainly is a possibility. But this is the problem: The Dalai Lama’s mandate and most of what he’s been saying is now visibly reinforced many times over by these events. It gets more difficult for the Chinese to sit down at the table with him. Hu Jintao could talk to the Dalai Lama, and he would get enormous dividends internationally in the short term if he did. But he’s thinking about what might come back and bite him. The Chinese understand history. They’re not unreasonable in recognizing that nationalism is no longer a tameable force. You can’t assume that your own political mandate will never be challenged, so you have to constantly go back to the people and say, “We’re listening to your grievances.”

FP: Will India find it harder to tolerate the Tibetan government in exile?

RB: India is clearly moving in the direction of distancing itself from the exiles. Some people think it’s preparing for the death of the Dalai Lama, and then it will distance itself even more. There were indications of a sea change after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in America last October. The Indians issued an order, presumably under pressure from China, that their cabinet ministers were not allowed to meet him or receive him upon his return. This was seen as very unusual. I don’t want to suggest some major realignment, but the indications are very much that India is maintaining ambiguity but showing that it largely wants to engage with China. That said, it hasn’t taken any irreversible steps yet in terms of the Tibetans.

FP: What is absent from press coverage of Tibet that you think people need to keep in mind?

RB: We have to put aside these questions that fascinate some people, such as, “Is the Dalai Lama losing his power?” That’s the opposite of the issue here. The exile complaints are not about power. And we have to put aside suggestions that the protests in Tibet are because people are unhappy about economic loss. That really is reductive. And I think we have to get over any suggestion that the Chinese are ill-intentioned or trying to wipe out Tibet. It’s obviously horrible that people are being savagely beaten up and killed. But crucially, this is a historic change in the profile of Tibetan politics. We’re looking at something much larger than any immediate anxiety about Olympics, or whether somebody planned one of these things, or whether people are upset about economic disadvantage. Historians are going to tell us that we missed the big picture if we didn’t notice that this is the big story here. All the party cadres are going to be sent to the countryside areas to listen to the Tibetans’ complaints and find out what has gone so wrong with the policy machine in China.

Robert Barnett is director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and author most recently of Lhasa: Streets with Memories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an ad for some stool-loosening wonder drug squeezed into a corner.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

There’s a lot of noise and not much signal. Everywhere there is flux and the reaction to it: the quest, sometimes violent, for national or religious identity. These alternate faces of globalization — fluidity and tribalism — define our frontier-dissolving world.

But in all the movement back and forth, basic things shift. The world exists in what Paul Saffo, a forecaster at Stanford University, calls “punctuated equilibrium.” Every now and again, an ice cap the size of Rhode Island breaks off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

I’d been thinking about this at Dubai airport in the middle of the night, as the latest news came in from the United States of the bloody end to the mother of all spending binges. I was watching the newly affluent from other parts of the world — Asians and Arabs principally — spend their way through the early-morning hours.

The West’s moment, I thought, is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America’s little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off the worst but cannot halt the trend.

Then I arrived in Hong Kong. The talk was all about how U.S. economic woes could impact Chinese growth. Might it tumble to 8 from over 11 percent? And what of India, powering along with growth of a mere 8 percent or so?

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Writer and the World

March 31, 2008 1:19 PM

Naipaul treats the world to his very special acid bath.

“I travel to discover other states of mind. An if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.

It is a writer’s curiosity rather than an ethnographer’s or a journalist’s. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don’t force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. The kind of understanding I am looking for comes best through people I get to like….”

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

The Writer and the World

March 31, 2008 1:19 PM

Naipaul treats the world to his very special acid bath.

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

Goin’ Down Slow - Chess Blues: 1960-1967

March 31, 2008 12:16 AM

Sheer genius from master.

Man, you know I done enjoyed things that Kings and Queens will never have; in fact Kings and Queen ‘caint never get. And they don’t even know about. And good times, mmmmm.
I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. Ohhh, my health is fading on me. Oh yes, I’m going down slow…
… Please write my mother. Tell her the shape I’m in. Tell her to pray for me. Forgive me for my sins.

Posted at 12:16 AM · Comments (0)

‘Killing Fields’ Survivor Dith Pran Dies

March 31, 2008 12:11 AM

A good friend and true colleague has passed.

Dith Pran, 65, a journalist and human rights advocate who became a public face of the horrors in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime and whose life was portrayed in the influential movie “The Killing Fields,” died today at a New Jersey hospital. He had pancreatic cancer.

For much of the early 1970s, Dith Pran was a resourceful guide and interpreter in Cambodia for Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times, whose reporting on the country’s civil war and rise of the Khmer Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize.

“Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg told the Associated Press when announcing his death. “When cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made my brother so special.”

Schanberg’s partnership with Dith Pran became the basis for the film “The Killing Fields” (1984), which conveyed in personal terms the brutality of the Khmer Rouge under despot Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during those years.

“The Killing Fields” had a major impact on public opinion, said Ben Kiernan, who directs Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. “A mass audience saw the story of what happened in a way that had never been done before, a dramatic and accurate depiction of a horrifying experience for millions of people,” he said.

“Pran was one of the major figures in the United States in bringing the issue of justice for Cambodian genocide to public attention, and in pushing the U.S. government to support the accountability of the Khmer Rouge,” Kiernan said.

In speeches and lectures, Dith Pran gave vivid and compelling accounts of the genocide, including the death of 50 members of his family. During a famine, he said he was nearly beaten to death for stealing more than the daily ration of a spoonful of rice. He was told one of his brothers, who served in the Cambodian army, was thrown to crocodiles by the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge, which followed a radical communist path of social engineering, tried to remake the country by killing anyone with political opinions or who seemed educated. Dith Pran spent four years disguising his middle-class background by dressing as a peasant and working in rice fields.

Of the killing fields, or mass graves in the countryside, he once told Schanberg, “In the water wells, the bodies were like soup bones in broth. And you could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried.”

Peter Cleveland, a foreign affairs expert working for then Sen. Charles Robb (D-Va.), said Dith Pran worked with other outside groups to help influence passage of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994.

The act, which Robb sponsored, created the State Department’s Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, which gathered evidence against Pol Pot and his deputies for crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot died in Thailand in 1998 without answering to an international tribunal. United Nations-backed trials began last year, after years of resistance from the Khmer Rouge’s supporters.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:11 AM · Comments (0)

The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq

March 28, 2008 5:00 PM

The echo of Japan’s colonial project in the 1930s resounds in the policies of today’s actual and aspiring global powers, says Jeffrey N Wasserstrom

27 - 03 - 2008

The Chinese government’s plans for the Olympic games did not include a revolt in Tibet. The immediate aftermath of the widespread demonstrations and riots in Tibetan-inhabited areas in mid-March 2008 - from Lhasa in the Tibetan Autonomous Region to Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces to the east - has seen intense efforts by the authorities to restore control and manage access to information. The disruption by monks at the Jokhang temple in Lhasa of a choreographed visit of foreign journalists on 27 March indicates that the strategy is not working.

Beijing’s worried officials will do their best to defuse the potential of these unfolding events to subvert their larger understanding of what the event in their city on 8-24 August means for China. It is notable in this respect that China has avoided stressing the precedent of the Olympic games in Tokyo in 1964, and has at best only suggested in passing that there might be a parallel in the impact of the respective events on the countries’ global profile.

In principle, one attractive way for the Beijing authorities to think about the 2008 Olympics is that they will come to be seen as comparable to 1964. The Tokyo games - and the Osaka world Expo that followed in 1970 - globally promoted a vision of a Japan that had bounced back from a period of extremism and defeat to become a stable country with modern cities and forward-looking aspirations. These two high-profile international gatherings also symbolised the concurrent processes of economic development that would see Japan’s own rise to its current status as the world’s second biggest economy.

China’s leaders might consider the Tokyo 1964/Beijing 2008 analogy at least privately compelling on several levels - even if their suspicion of a historic adversary (and present competitor) might make them reluctant to voice this senti-ment too openly. China too has been climbing rapidly in the global economic hierarchy and wants to move still higher. It is preparing to follow its hosting of the Olympics with its own Expo - set to start in Shanghai on 1 May 2010, the country’s first-ever world fair. Its own modern history has seen moments of destructive extremism (the “great leap for-ward” and resulting famine, for example) and moments of defeat (including the foreign occupation of Beijing in 1900 and Japanese invasions of the 1930s) that it has good reason to want to put far behind it.

The Manchukuo lens

At the same time, a very different analogy can be drawn between China in 2008 and Japan at another moment in its past (as Howard W French points out, in one of the most thoughtful and historically minded commentaries on the current crisis in Tibet; see “Beijing’s claims of an ‘unwavering stand’ in support of Tibet are groundless”, International Herald Tribune, 20 March 2008). This alternative line of argument, however, would be much less palatable to the Chinese regime than the 1964/2008 one. Why? Because the other era in Japanese history that has lessons for China today is the 1930s - a decade that is remembered in China as one when Tokyo acted in despicably aggressive ways towards it.

Howard W French’s background as an experienced reporter of Africa, a continent that has been ravaged by many forms of imperialism, may inform his emphasis on a time when Japan was an imperial rather than a post-imperial power to highlight the colonialist aspects of Chinese policy in Tibet; in so doing, he evades the common trap in commentary on Tibet that Pankaj Mishra identifies in another insightful article - namely that of viewing any confrontation between the Chinese leadership and those challenging its policies through a distorting cold-war lens (see “At war with the utopia of modernity”, Guardian, 22 March 2008).

For both these authors, the place to start in unravelling the Tibetan crisis is not with communist ideology or Leninist state structures, but rather by appreciating what often happens when any power justifies its control by saying that it is bestowing modernity on a backward people - a view of the Tibetans held by many everyday Chinese as well as their rulers.

Beijing insistently claims to be delivering the benefits of progress and modernity to Tibetans. The recurrent problem it faces is that (in French’s words) “few indigenous people want progress ‘given’ to them”. This is not only because “they don’t see themselves as inferior, as such patronage would require”, but also because “they know of the many strings attached and of the slippery road to losing one’s soul.”

More specifically, French points out that the “Chinese, of all people, should understand” the outrage that colonial pro-jects of this sort can engender. After all, they were “offered the ‘gift’ of modernization by Imperial Japan under its erstwhile Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”. There are even, he points out, “eerie echoes of Japan’s Manchukuo with its bogus Emperor Puyi in China’s attempts to pick religious leaders on Tibetan’s behalf.”

The Chinese regime’s official Xinhua news agency seemed to confirm the thrust of this argument by issuing a statement on 22 March that, inadvertently, buttressed the Manchukuo parallel. The piece - entitled “China Garners Broad Interna-tional Support Over Tibet Riots” - provides a list of countries that had issued official declarations expressing solidarity with Beijing over its handling of Tibet; they ranged from nearby lands such as North Korea and Kyrgyzstan to distant ones such as Syria and Serbia.

The list is reminiscent of the ones that the Japanese authorities and the rulers of Manchukuo circulated in the 1930s when trying to convince local and international populations that the newly formed state was widely viewed as legitimate. To distract attention from all of the statements by world leaders dismissing Puyi as a puppet of Japan, those 1930s pronouncements trotted out a list of eleven countries - Poland, El Salvador, Romania, Spain, among them - that recognised him as a legitimate ruler (on the larger Manchukuo background, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern [Rowman & Littlefield, 2003]).

But lest anyone jump to the conclusion that there is something distinctively “east Asian” about this particular ploy, it is worth remembering what George W Bush and Tony Blair did in 2003: namely, use smoke-and-mirrors talk of a broad “coalition of the willing” to encourage people to overlook the lack of United Nations support for the invasion of Iraq. It is interesting too to see how far the set of countries that lined up behind Washington in 2003 had in common with that which once viewed Puyi as a true ruler rather than just a puppet. The above-mentioned four states - Poland, El Salvador, Romania and Spain - were all there again, for example, notwithstanding the great discontinuities in their own political development across the decades.

Brothers in arms

George W Bush has belatedly expressed concern over events in Tibet in a lengthy phone conversation on 26 March with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. If the discussion between the two presidents is extended, one relevant topic would be the troublesome nature of historical analogies involving 1930s Japan in relation to another contemporary issue, Iraq.
Here, it was post-war Japan that was again supposed to be the key reference-point (in this case for the United States). The influential neo-conservatives who provided the Iraq adventure with ideological varnish built upon the strained but prevalent comparison of 9/11 to Pearl Harbour by arguing that the American occupation of Japan, by leading to the emergence of a grateful democratic ally to the US, provided a preview of what would happen after Saddam Hussein fell.

It is not just retrospect that undermines this perspective - for anyone who really knew their history would not have ex-pected events on the ground to develop in this way. John Dower, the leading American historian of mid-century US-Japanese interaction, expressed such a view in various periodicals just before and during the early stages of the invasion, highlighting a host of specific ways in which the situation in Iraq differed from that in post-war Japan (see, for example, “A warning from history”, Boston Review [February/March 2003]).

But Dower went a step further, arguing that the best Japanese parallels for contemporary US policy and rhetoric lay in how much Bush and company seemed to have in common with the militarists who led Japan in the 1930s. As he wrote in mid-2003 in an online publication linked to the Nation: “Regime change, nation-building, creation of client states, control of strategic resources, defiance of international criticism, mobilization for ‘total war,’ clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, winning hearts and minds, combating terror at home as well as abroad - all these were part and parcel of Japan’s vainglorious attempt to create a new order of ‘co-existence and co-prosperity’ in Asia” (see “The other Japanese occupation”, TomDispatch.com, 20 June 2003).

When Bush and Hu meet in Beijing in August, the subject-matter of their conversation is more likely to be a new record in the high-jump or pole-vault than about Pu Yi’s similarities to the Panchen Lama; which country heads the medals-table than parallels between American actions in Iraq and Japan’s in Manchukuo.
That is a pity, since a modicum of historical self-awareness - perhaps especially among the powerful - is one of the best defences against political misjudgment.

But even if the exchange between the leaders of an actual and an aspiring global power remains focused only on current affairs, they may find some common ground. Each man, thinking of a different quagmire, could commiserate with the other about how vexing it can be when people you “liberate” aren’t properly grateful for what you’ve done for them.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the_perils_of_forced_modernity_china_tibet_america_iraq

Posted at 5:00 PM · Comments (0)

Weeping monks’ cry for freedom gives the lie to peace in Lhasa

March 28, 2008 4:13 PM

Lhasa
Mar 28, 2008

Weeping and shouting, Tibetan monks interrupted a government tour of Lhasa for foreign media yesterday - showing grievances persist in the Tibetan capital despite the apparent restoration of calm following the worst unrest there in nearly 20 years.

The journalists, the first from Hong Kong and overseas media allowed to visit Tibet since reporters were barred last week, had been scheduled to meet victims of the riots and see some of the damage to property, apparently to show how bad the Tibetans’ protests had been.

But government officials bowed to the journalists’ repeated requests to visit the Jokhang Monastery, one of the most important centres of religious life in the Buddhist region.

A temple official, Ngawang Choedra, began the tour by briefing journalists on the history of the monastery and repeated the official line about the riots, then went on to show reporters around one of the monastery’s sanctuaries.

Suddenly, a group of about 30 young monks in red robes rushed to the door of the sanctuary and began shouting in Tibetan. Some wept. After about five minutes they were able to contain their emotions enough to switch to Putonghua and tell of their grievances.

Authorities say 19 people were killed in the city, most burned to death when rioters set fire to shops owned by Han Chinese migrants on March 14 and 15.

The Tibetan government-in-exile headed by the Dalai Lama claimed this week it had confirmed 135 deaths in Tibet.

The young monks said 117 of their number had been locked in their dormitories since March 10, but that authorities had accused them of involvement in the March 14 riots.

“We did not go out since March 10 so how could we get involved in the smashing, beating and looting?” said one tearful monk, who requested not to be named for fear of reprisals.

Another young monk with a picture of the Dalai Lama around his neck, said: “The monastery has been locked. It is the first time that people could enter. We don’t have freedom.”

Asked what they were fighting for, several shouted: “Freedom.”

They said about 400 monks had been detained by the government and 1,000 Tibetans arrested. The monks demanded the detainees’ release.

Their figures were countered by Pelma Chiley, vice-chairman of the Tibetan government. He said the government had detained 414 people, but would not say how many of them were monks. Thirty had been charged with crimes so far.

The young monks said they wanted the authorities to talk to the Dalai Lama but denied their actions were incited by the exiled spiritual leader.

“We are in our twenties and we have not seen the Dalai Lama in our lives. How can they say the Dalai Lama has been telling us what to do?”

They added: “We want peace for Tibet.”

The central government has accused the “Dalai clique” of masterminding the disturbances, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the uprising in Tibet in 1959 which led the spiritual leader to flee into exile in India.

Asked what made the rioters so angry, the monks said: “The Tibetans are not happy.” Some shouted: “We want the Dalai Lama to come back.”

Pelma Chiley confirmed that monks from the Sera, Ganden and Drepung monasteries had been detained to “help the police collect evidence about the riots” since “a handful of unlawful monks have taken part in the riots”.

Dorji Tsedrup, Lhasa’s mayor, said the monks were emotionally unstable and they might affect the stability of the city if released.

But he denied reports that electricity and food supplies to the monasteries had been cut off.

The Jokhang Monastery was sealed off by paramilitary officers in the afternoon, witnesses said.

The monks who took the risk to talk to reporters said they expected reprisals. Pelma Chiley was asked whether they would be punished.

“No government would do such things,” he replied.

http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a0a0/?vgnextoid=664e4688411f8110VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=China&s=News

Posted at 4:13 PM · Comments (0)

Rejecting dissent, China exposes its candor gap

March 28, 2008 1:25 AM

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
March 27, 2008

SHANGHAI: Over the past couple of weeks, two of the world’s biggest news stories were the outbreak of protests and riots in Tibetan areas of China and the repression that followed them, and the uproar over comments by the pastor of the American presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Two continents, two very different topics. What, pray tell, could possibly link them?

In the most immediate sense, the answer is that China’s response to the events in Tibet, in particular its ferocious denunciations of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, reminded me of one of the most distinguishing characteristics of my own country.

I don’t just mean the right to free speech. I refer to an American character not enshrined anywhere in law, but a vital trait nonetheless.

Although Americans may often take it for granted, at their best they enjoy a largeness of spirit that permits them to air their dirty laundry in public, not to shy from controversy, and to be able to visit and revisit even the most painful aspects of their past and to explore them in the light of day.

I refer to the intellectually refreshing sensation they can receive in seeing conventional wisdom formed on any given topic and then just as surely challenged. Finally, I refer to the right to be wrong, and the right even to make a fool of oneself in public.

The sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. and Obama’s response have involved all of these things, while the Chinese conversation about Tibet, carefully policed through censorship and through myriad other methods that China’s authoritarian government employs to enforce consensus has involved none of them.

In the United States, while political correctness may occasionally grate, in China, it is suffocating. Although the Dalai Lama has repeatedly renounced all claims of independence for his homeland, the Chinese press universally dismisses him as a “splittist,” scarcely bothering to report opposing views.

The Chinese press is similarly full of claims of Western media bias and distortion, a charge made straight-faced in a country that routinely blocks foreign media, strictly censors its own news, and has only allowed the media to cover street violence by Tibetans. The Chinese government has effectively banned coverage of the use of force by the authorities in clamping down not just on dissent in Lhasa, but on the largely peaceful protests by Tibetans that swept much of western China.

On the face of it, the Dalai Lama and Wright would seem to have precious little to do with each other. Scratch the surface just a bit, though, and a relationship emerges. Although the nature of their rhetoric is quite different, one serene and the other angry, each man is a member of a historically aggrieved minority group who has condemned the behavior of a powerful ethnic majority in his society.

The Dalai Lama has earned fevered denunciations as a “wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” from China’s state-controlled media for, among other things, warning of what he has called “cultural genocide” in Tibet.

Wright, a former marine, seems to have drawn the most ire for the phrase “Goddamn America,” for what he perceives as his country’s abuses of power around the world. In the clips of his sermons played endlessly on television these last two weeks, he has also spoken of the “U.S. of KKK A.,” an in-your-face and, to many, offensive critique of American racism.

Others were outraged by his characterization of the Sept. 11 attacks as “chickens coming home to roost,” although thoughts like these fit within a broader narrative of dissent, one animated by the likes of the late Susan Sontag, who provocatively asked shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world,’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

In hearing his words, though, I wondered what would happen to a Wright in China, were there to be someone with the temerity to publicly damn this country for, say, tens of millions of deaths in politically caused disasters, or wave after wave of political witch hunts, which destroyed countless lives in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, or the atrocities committed against Tibetans, or Uighurs or Mongolians in various drives to bring ethnic minorities under control?

The likely answer should give pause to those who are quick to take offense at speech that goes against the grain: He would be sent for re-education, like the monks in Lhasa today, or he would be locked up, never to be heard from again, and certainly not in the Chinese media.

Wright sustained self-inflicted wounds with statements about the U.S. government being the source of the AIDS epidemic and with offensive language about Hillary Clinton’s privileged life as a white person.

For much of the rest of what he has been exhaustively quoted as saying, though, Americans can actually feel proud. Not because they approve of his views on the use of American power or his calls for our damnation, but because the capacity for vigorous, even bruising discussion of our failings is a sign of health in a society and not cause for lamentation.

In some quarters, people obsess about China’s rise, focusing on its GDP figures or military spending, but there is a gap that shows no sign of closing and that is at least as fundamental as these: Call it the candor gap, and until Chinese society can learn to get over its seemingly allergic aversion to conflicting views, to the airing of controversy, and to unsparing exercises in truth-telling, it is hard to imagine this country truly fulfilling its potential.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:25 AM · Comments (0)

Growing Gulf Divides China and Dalai Lama

March 28, 2008 1:18 AM

SHANGHAI — Across much of the Western world, the Dalai Lama is known as the beatific spiritual leader of a humble community of Buddhists, beloved in Hollywood, Congress and the White House, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Chinese leaders cast him in a different light. They call him a separatist and a terrorist, bent on killing innocent Han Chinese and “splitting the motherland.” That gap in perception, which has grown immeasurably wider in the two weeks since violent unrest rocked Tibet, is breeding pessimism that Chinese leaders are willing — or perhaps even able — to embark on a new approach to Tibet even as it threatens to cast a long shadow over their role as hosts of the Olympic Games this summer.

President Hu Jintao, whose rise to leadership of China’s Communist Party was built partly on his record as party boss in Tibet during a period of unrest in 1989, has shown no signs of making a historic gambit for peace there.

Rather, he seems to be wagering that China can hunker down, keep a tight lid on Tibet through the Olympics and wait for the Dalai Lama, who is 72, to die, analysts say.

“I would obviously like for there to be a policy debate, but I see no suggestion of one,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese expert on Tibet and a signer of a recent petition by Chinese lawyers and scholars urging the government to resume discussions with the Dalai Lama. “There has been a big failure, but to see the government change its path or policy right before the Olympics isn’t likely.”

The inflexibility in Beijing’s position leaves Western countries with a problem. President Bush and a roster of European and Asian leaders have called for Mr. Hu to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama as a first step toward reducing tensions in Tibet. If Mr. Hu declines to do so, those leaders seem likely to face pressure from their own constituencies to take stronger diplomatic or political steps against Beijing at the moment it had expected to bask in the international limelight.

Already, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has suggested that he might consider using his presidency of the European Union this summer to organize a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. An embarrassing protest at the lighting ceremony of the Olympic torch in Greece, and the cries of monks in Lhasa who disrupted a scripted tour of the Tibetan capital for foreign reporters on Thursday, portend a steady drum roll of criticism of China.

The call for some kind of Chinese-Tibetan talks continues to mount. On Friday, the Dalai Lama, speaking in India, made his most extended comments on the violence, accusing China’s state-run media of trying to “sow the seeds of racial tension” there but calling for “meaningful dialogue” with Beijing about how to defuse tensions.

President Bush, speaking of the possibility that Mr. Hu might pursue diplomatic talks with Tibetan exiles, said “it’s in his country’s interest.” Standing by Mr. Bush’s side, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new, Chinese-speaking prime minister, who was visiting Washington, said, “It’s absolutely clear that there are human rights abuses in Tibet.”

Mr. Hu told Mr. Bush during a phone call on Wednesday that he was willing to talk to the Dalai Lama, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency. But what was most striking about the exchange was the consistency of Beijing’s language on Tibet, which analysts say provides little reason to expect new initiatives.

Mr. Hu’s formulation, which has been used almost word for word since the time of Deng Xiaoping, in the 1980s and ’90s, was that China would resume contact with the Dalai Lama as long as he abandoned advocating Tibetan independence, stopped activities aimed at “splitting the motherland” and accepted that Tibet and Taiwan were inalienable parts of China.

The problem with Beijing’s line is that even when the Dalai Lama insists that he does not seek independence, as he and his representatives have repeatedly done, the Chinese government has merely repeated this trope, leaving little room for progress.

As it is, the Tibetan protests of the last two weeks seem to have taken Beijing by surprise, spreading quickly outside of the province officially known as the Tibetan Autonomous Region and into areas of neighboring provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers. The unrest has been the broadest in scale since sustained riots and a bloody crackdown in 1989.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:18 AM · Comments (0)

Africa without Africans: The Mecca of the Mouse

March 27, 2008 10:39 AM

The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney’s Animal Kingdom reveals that theimagineers deliberately left the parking lots out in front of this Disney-style zoo as bleak and barren as they could. A wasteland, with no strips of grass to interrupt the endless asphalt slab. They wanted to heighten the contrast we feel when entering into the lush, wooded Animal Kingdom park. The scheme “ensures that the immersion into nature … will be very impactful.”

My first thought upon reading this was: Screw you, imagineers! Parking lots suck enough as it is. You’re saying you made yours even more depressing than necessary, just so you could showcase some cutesy landscaping idea? Go imaginuck yourselves!

Once I’d gotten this indignation out of my system, my second thought was: Gosh, they sure do put a lot of thought into this stuff. Leafing through these behind-the-scenes books (I also have The Imagineering Field Guide to Epcot) brings to light, yet again, the insane attention to detail you find at every Disney property.

For instance, once you’ve made that transition from the parking lot, through the gates into the Animal Kingdom entrance area, the imagineers’ next goal is to carefully orchestrate your first glimpse of the massive Tree of Life. (It’s one of this park’s two wienies—the other being a replica Mount Everest.) Various inclines, berms, and hollows have been arranged so that you’re forced to ascend a small rise before suddenly stumbling onto a gorgeous, unimpeded view of the tree. (The tree itself is an impressive feat of engineering. And is, of course, totally fake.)

I’ve been curious to see how this obsessive nano-focus would be reconciled with the challenges of a zoo. Live animals seem decidedly un-Disney, as they can’t be compelled to perform a repeated, synchronized sequence. (Unlike an animatronic robot. Or a low-wage employee.) With the animals’ free will involved, it’s impossible to ensure that every guest will receive the same, focus-group-approved experience. This sort of thing makes the imagineers extremely uncomfortable.

Their response was to make the animals into a sideshow. In many cases, you don’t even get to watch the animals from a static viewing point, as you would at a regular zoo. Instead, there’s a “ride” with a silly narrative structure (about, for instance, chasing poachers), during which you get quick, oblique glimpses of the animals as you speed by. The true stars of Animal Kingdom aren’t the lions, apes, and elephants. The stars are the precision-crafted environments you walk through.

Here, come with me as we visit the delightful little village of Harambe. Harambe is the perfect East African port town of your mind’s eye. When you first come upon it, it’s hard not to feel you’ve been teleported to Kenya.

All the signs are in the right typeface. The buildings are lovingly dilapidated. The paint-color choices are perfect. (The imagineers say they took paint chip samples on research trips and did surface rubbings to get the building textures right.)

Having traveled to Africa myself, I can tell you that Harambe gets only two minor details wrong. The first is that Africa has many more flies than this. And the second is that Africa has black people.

Given the otherwise remarkable accuracy of Harambe’s set design, I’m sort of surprised that Disney didn’t manufacture 15,000 animatronic Africans. OK, so they did import a few actual, nonrobot Africans to work the snack stands. Jambo! But perhaps the bigger issue is: Where are the black tourists visiting the park? I’ve seen maybe two black families all day. As in the rest of Disney World, there are literally more French people here than African-Americans.

Another population dynamic I’ve noticed: the dearth of children at this supposed family destination. I’ve seen lots of adult couples with no kids in tow. Even when there’s a token toddler present, there are often six or seven grown-ups attached to it. I’m beginning to suspect it’s the adults who really want to be here, while the kids are just serving as fig leaves.

This theory is bolstered by a scene I witness while waiting in line for food. An elderly, gray-bearded gent is in front of me, trying to buy a soda, when all of a sudden he’s interrupted by his twentysomething daughter, who is scurrying toward us. “Daaaaaad! She’s not tall enough to go on the ride!” whines the woman, gesturing with a pout at the tiny girl clinging to her thigh. “So now I can’t go! And you wandered off!” The man says nothing. “Take her hand,” the woman demands. The poor old fellow is mortified by this behavior (and is in the middle of his beverage transaction, to boot). But he silently takes his granddaughter’s hand so his horrid daughter can go enjoy her fricking roller coaster.

Admittedly, Disney has some pretty great roller coasters. Toward the end of the day, I walk over to Anandapur (a fake Himalayan village, complete with Tibetan-style prayer flags) and board the Expedition Everest ride. I’m seated in a rickety rail car, which creaks up to the top of the 200-foot mountain before swooping, banking, and dropping at insane speeds. Everyone screams together. It’s a group outpouring of white-knuckle terror. When the ride’s over and I disembark, I find I’ve broken out in a light sweat. My dazed fellow riders look at each other in total awe: Can you believe what we just went through?

The same thing happens on the nearby Kali River Rapids ride. There are seven other people on my raft, and as we float down the rushing river, I can feel us starting to gel into a team. We shout warnings to each other when the white water rages ahead. (“Look out, here it comes!”) We catch each others’ eyes and can’t help but smile. The little girl sitting next to me cackles every time we get hit with a splash. She’s shouting, “I’m soaked!” with a big, adorable grin.

If I’ve found one redeeming feature of the Disney World experience, it’s the community spirit that’s fostered when strangers all join together for a primal shriek of fear—or joy.

Click to read more

Posted at 10:39 AM · Comments (0)

Backgrounder: Historical facts of Tibet

March 26, 2008 2:17 PM

BEIJING, March 25 (Xinhua) — China is a unified multi-ethnic country and Tibet is an inalienable part of China. The Tibetans cultivated a close relationship with Han and other ethnic groups from the Chinese interior since ancient times.

In the 7th century, this relationship reached its peak when Srong-btsan Sgam-po (Songtsan Gambo, the king of the Tubo kingdom who ruled the Tibetan Plateau at that time twice sent envoys to the Tang Dynasty emperor to propose to Princess Wen Cheng who he later married. The Tibetans and Hans had through the marriage of their royal families and various meetings, formed close economic and cultural relations laying the groundwork for the ultimate foundation of a unified nation.

After Tibet became part of the territory of China in the 13th century, the central governments of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and the Republic of China, while assuming the responsibility of approving the local administrative organs, and deciding and directly handling important affairs concerning Tibet, maintained, by and large, the region’s original local social setup and ruling body, widely appointed upper-strata ecclesiastic and secular members to manage local affairs, and gave the Tibetan local government and officials extensive decision-making power. This played a historically positive role in safeguarding the unification of the country, but as the feudal autocratic rulers in various periods exercised an ethnic policy marked by ethnic discrimination and oppression, keeping the original social system and maintaining the power of the local ruling class for their administration of Tibet, they did not solve, nor could they possibly solve, the issue of ethnic equality and that of enabling the local people to become masters of their own affairs.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, Tibet remained a society of feudal serfdom under theocracy, one even darker and more backward than medieval Europe. The ecclesiastical and secular serf owners, though accounting for less than five percent of the population of Tibet, controlled the personal freedom of the serfs and slaves who made up more than 95 percent of the population of Tibet, as well as the overwhelming majority of the means of production. By resorting to the rigidly stratified 13-Article Code and 16-Article Code, and extremely savage punishments, including gouging out eyes, cutting off ears, tongues, hands and feet, pulling out tendons, throwing people into rivers or off cliffs, they practiced cruel economic exploitation, political oppression and mental control of the serfs and slaves. The right to subsistence of the broad masses of serfs and slaves was not protected, let alone political rights.

After the Opium War of 1840, China was reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. Tibet, like other parts of China, suffered from the aggression of imperialist powers, which grabbed all kinds of special privileges by means of unequal treaties, subjected Tibet to colonial control and exploitation, and, at the same time, groomed separatists among the upper ruling strata of Tibet, in an attempt to sever Tibet from China. Therefore, the removal of the fetters of imperialism and feudal serfdom became a historically paramount task for safeguarding the unification of the country and realizing the development of Tibet.

The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 ended the dark history of the semi-colonial, semi-feudal China, realized unification of the country, unity of ethnic groups and people’s democracy, and brought hope to the Tibetan people that they could control their own destiny in the large family of the motherland.

Peaceful liberation laid the foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. On May 23, 1951, the “Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” (“17-Article Agreement” for short) was signed, and Tibet was peacefully liberated. The peaceful liberation put an end to imperialist aggression against Tibet, enabled the Tibetan people to shake off political and economic fetters, safeguarded the unification of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, realized equality and unity between the Tibetan ethnic group and all other ethnic groups throughout the country as well as the internal unity of Tibet, and laid the foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.

In April 1956, the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region was established in Lhasa, with the 14th Dalai Lama as the chairman, the 10th Panchen Lama the first vice-chairman and Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme the secretary-general. The establishment of the Preparatory Committee enabled Tibet to have a consultative work organ with the nature of a political power, and vigorously promoted the realization of regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.

The Democratic Reform cleared the way for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. When Tibet was peacefully liberated, in consideration of the reality of Tibet, the “17-Article Agreement,” while confirming the necessity for reform of the Tibetan social system, provided that “The Central Government will not use coercion to implement such a reform, and it is to be carried out by the Tibetan local government on its own; when the people demand reform, the matter should be settled by way of consultation with the leading personnel of Tibet.” But in face of the ever-growing demand of the people for democratic reform, some people in the upper ruling strata of Tibet, in order to preserve feudal serfdom, and supported by imperialist forces, staged an armed rebellion all along the line on March 10, 1959, in an attempt to separate Tibet from China. On March 28 of the same year, the State Council announced the dismissal of the original local government of Tibet, and empowered the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region to exercise the functions and powers of the local government of Tibet, with the 10th Panchen Lama as its acting chairman. The Central People’s Government and the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region led the Tibetan people in quickly quelling the rebellion, implemented the Democratic Reform, overthrew the feudal serfdom under theocracy, and abolished the feudal hierarchic system, the relations of personal dependence, and all savage punishments. As a result, a million serfs and slaves were emancipated, and became masters of the country as well as of the region of Tibet, acquired the citizens’ rights and freedom specified in the Constitution and law, and swept away the obstacles, in respect of social system, to the exercise of regional ethnic autonomy.

The establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region marked the full implementation of the regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. After the Democratic Reform, the Tibetan people enjoyed all the political rights enjoyed by people of all other ethnic groups throughout China. In 1961, a general election, the first of its kind in Tibetan history, was held all over Tibet. For the first time, the former serfs and slaves were able to enjoy democratic rights as their own masters, and participated in the election of organs of state power at all levels in the region. In September 1965, the First Session of the First People’s Congress of the Tibet Autonomous Region was convened, at which the organ of self- government of the Tibet Autonomous Region and its leaders were elected, and the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region was officially proclaimed.

The establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region marked the establishment of the people’s democratic power in Tibet and the commencement of exercise of regional ethnic autonomy in an all-round way. From then on, the Tibetan people were entitled to enjoy the right to administer their own affairs in the region and, together with the people throughout the country, embarked on a socialist development road.

Posted at 2:17 PM · Comments (0)

Olympic Fallacies

March 25, 2008 4:18 PM

“We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations, and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this.” Thus spoke Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing it any concern. Coca-Cola, another Olympics sponsor, has stated that while it would be inappropriate “to comment on the political situation of individual nations,” the company firmly believes “that the Olympics are a force for good.” The chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, was also quick to declare that “a boycott doesn’t solve anything” — just as he was quick to dismiss the demonstrators who waved a black banner showing interlocked handcuffs, in mockery of the Olympic symbol, at yesterday’s lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece. “It is always sad to see such a ceremony disrupted,” he declared, rather pompously.

And no one was surprised: Companies that have invested millions in sponsorship deals and Olympic bureaucrats who have spent years trying to justify their controversial decision to award the 2008 Games to Beijing are naturally inclined to use those sorts of arguments. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to believe them.

Look a bit closer, in fact, and none of those statements holds up at all. “A boycott doesn’t solve anything.” Well, doesn’t it? Some boycotts do help solve some things. The boycott of South Africa by international competitions was probably the single most effective weapon the international community ever deployed against the apartheid state. (“They didn’t mind about the business sanctions,” a South African friend once told me, “but they minded — they really, really minded — about the cricket.”) The boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics helped undermine Soviet propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan and helped unify the Western world against it. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later was successful, too. Presumably, it was intended to solidify opposition among the Soviet elite toward the United States in the Reagan years, and presumably it helped.

Click to read more

Posted at 4:18 PM · Comments (0)

Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?

March 25, 2008 1:22 PM

March 31, 2008

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

As Pico Iyer writes in his new book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama” (Knopf; $24), it is easy to imagine that the Dalai Lama is “the plaything of movie stars and millionaires.” Certainly, like all those who stress the importance of love, compassion, gentle persuasion, and other unimpeachably good things, the Dalai Lama can appear a bit dull. Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room.”

His simple-Buddhist-monk persona invites skepticism, even scorn. “I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” Rupert Murdoch has said. Christopher Hitchens accuses the Dalai Lama of claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and of enforcing “one-man rule” in Dharamsala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that serves as a capital for the more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile. The Chinese government routinely denounces him as a “splittist,” who is plotting to return Tibet to the corrupt feudal and monastic rule from which Chinese Communists liberated it, in 1951. Many Tibetans in exile grumble that he is too attached to nonviolence, and too much in the grip of Western event coördinators, to prevent the Chinese from colonizing Tibet.

But the events of recent weeks are a reminder of the fervor he inspires among the six million ethnic Tibetans. It was a protest on the forty-ninth anniversary of his exile that led to the current civil unrest in Lhasa; the initial peaceful demonstrations met with a predictably harsh response from the Chinese authorities. As the prominent Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong acknowledges, “Virtually all Tibetans have the Dalai in their hearts.” And the more that their economic prospects and traditional culture are undermined by Han Chinese immigration, the more this long-distance reverence is likely to grow.

Iyer writes that “the heart and soul, quite literally, of the Dalai Lama’s life existed precisely in parts that most of us couldn’t see.” His arduous daily regimen begins at 3:30 A.M., after which he proceeds, as he told Iyer, to “meditation, prostration, reciting special mantras, then more meditation and more prostrations, followed by reading Tibetan philosophy or other texts; then reading and studying and, in the evening, ‘some meditation—evening meditation—for about an hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep.’ ”

This sounds like a lot of meditation and reading for a monk in his seventies—especially someone who, beginning at the age of six, underwent a gruelling education for nearly two decades in Buddhist metaphysics, Tibetan art and culture, logic, Sanskrit, and traditional medicine, and eventually secured a geshe degree (roughly equivalent to a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy). But Buddhist spiritual practice is relentlessly exacting. “Strive on diligently” were the Buddha’s last words, and even the Dalai Lama can’t presume to have reached a summit of wisdom and serenity. It is his fairy-tale childhood that exalts him above most mortals. Born in 1935 to a family of farmers in the outer reaches of the Tibetan cultural domain, he was a two-year-old toddler when a search party of monks from Lhasa identified him as the potential reincarnation of the recently deceased Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Rainbows arcing across the northeastern skies of Lhasa were among the colorful portents that alerted the monks to his presence. In 1939, the child was brought ceremonially from his mud-and-stone house to Lhasa, and given the run of the marvellously labyrinthine Potala Palace.

The Dalai Lama learned calligraphy by copying out his predecessor’s will—which, in its prophetic cast, is one of the spookiest documents in Tibetan history. It was written in 1932, when Tibet, after centuries of uneasy coexistence with its big neighbor in the East, enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. Mao Zedong’s Communists were still far from winning their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Nevertheless, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama sensed that Tibet’s isolation would soon be shattered by “barbaric red Communists”:

Our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated. Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased… . The Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away… . We will become like slaves to our conquerors … and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:22 PM · Comments (0)

Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?

March 25, 2008 1:22 PM

March 31, 2008

Click to read more

Posted at 1:22 PM · Comments (0)

No. 98 Mardy Fish upsets No. 1 Roger Federer in Indian Wells semifinal

March 23, 2008 10:21 AM

Federer’s loss, even more surprising because it was so lopsided, continued his frustration this season. The once invincible-seeming Swiss star has lost three times this year, beaten by Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals and Andy Murray in the opening round at Dubai….

….Federer looked like just another player Saturday, with his backhand especially mediocre. He hit just one winner and had 13 unforced errors with his backhand against his American foe.

Posted at 10:21 AM · Comments (0)

Using jet lag as an excuse just wouldn’t fly

March 22, 2008 11:37 PM

March 22, 2008

TOKYO - I am here to tell you that this whole jet lag thing is overrated. I know Mike Mussina is still trying to recover from his 2004 trip to Japan with the Yankees, but most Red Sox players should be OK by the time they play the Hanshin Tigers at the Tokyo Dome this afternoon.
more stories like this

That’s not the conventional wisdom, of course. We’re trained to think that jet lag is worse than childbirth and water boarding. Seasoned travelers, physicians, and the Players’ Association would have you believe that a 12-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo is equal to NFL two-a-days or 15 rounds with Floyd Mayweather. For those truly in need of an excuse, a long plane ride across the international dateline gives you plenty of ammo.

The Red Sox official handbook for this trip includes more than a page under the heading “Fighting Jet Lag.”

“Jet lag is a very real factor that all international travelers must deal with,” started the memo, which went on to suggest drinking plenty of water and avoiding coffee and alcohol. Sox team internist Dr. Larry Ronan also suggested the players avoiding sleeping on the plane to get their body clocks on Japan time.

“That went out the window for me in the middle of the flight when I saw Dr. Ronan snoring with the mask over his eyes and a glass of wine in front of him,” said manager Terry Francona. “I feel like [expletive] today, but I feel like [expletive] every day, so I’m fine. We’re fine.”

Click to read more

Posted at 11:37 PM · Comments (0)

What we talk about when we talk about love…

March 21, 2008 7:02 PM

I get my magazines late here in China and tend to let them pile up before reading them. I was completely floored by this issue of The New Yorker, which appeared in late December, and contained a lot of stuff about Raymond Carver and his troubling relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. It also included the unedited version of one of his most famous stories: “What we talk about when we talk about love.”
Carver had called it “Beginners,” and the original is as powerful and elegant a piece of short fiction as you’re likely to encounter. I highly recommend people read it through the link below.

First, from the article about Carver and Lish:
In the years following the book’s publication, Carver seemed determined to keep Lish as a friend and “brother,” even as an editor, but he now set stricter editorial boundaries. There was a shift in power. Carver demanded his autonomy. “Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now,” he wrote in August, 1982, about his latest stories. “I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close.”

Carver’s next story collection, “Cathedral,” was published in 1983, and was an even greater success, winning praise again on the cover of the Times Book Review, this time from Irving Howe, who wrote that in Carver’s more expansive later work one saw “a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.” In an interview with The Paris Review that year, Carver made clear that he preferred the new expansiveness: “I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end––writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn’t want to read myself, and that’s the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a ‘minimalist’ writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn’t like it.”

Click to read more

Posted at 7:02 PM · Comments (0)

Beijing’s claims of an “unwavering stand” in support of Tibet are groundless

March 20, 2008 10:36 PM

XINING, China: Count the ways that China has sought to bring Tibet to heel since the People’s Liberation Army rolled into the country in 1950, brutally ending a phase of nominal independence.

It has tried decapitation. No, heads didn’t roll, but one of the heads of Tibetan Buddhism has disappeared. Here, I speak of Gendun Choekyi Nyima, a 6-year-old boy who was apprehended by Beijing after the Dalai Lama named him Panchen Lama, the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995. Nyima, ostensibly one of the world’s youngest political prisoners, has not been seen or heard from since.

It has tried cartographic dismemberment, gerrymandering western China to place heavily Tibetan areas under non-Tibetan jurisdictions. That is why when protests broke out in Lhasa last week, they were followed quickly by sympathetic demonstrations by Tibetans here in Qinghai Province, and in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan.

It has tried ethnic drowning, flooding Tibetans with officially encouraged westward migration of members of China’s Han majority, who may already outnumber Tibetans in Lhasa and control both the political administration and every meaningful sector of the economy.

It has attempted suffocation, as well: not literally smothering Tibetans, but rather rewriting the region’s history to take out every politically inconvenient or embarrassing fact. Such ambitious management of history is hard and never-ending work, which partially explains why Chinese news accounts of recent events have been so one-sided, and in the end, believable only to people who have been raised within the intellectual garden zealously roped off and tended by the Chinese state.

As I prepared to leave home for work Thursday, I overheard via the Internet an interview with China’s ambassador to Canada, Lu Shumin, who likened China’s use of heavily armed police and military forces to put down protests in Tibetan areas to the responses of the authorities in the United States and France when there are civil disturbances. “This is normal,” he said, striving for a reassuring line. Others have spoken of China’s “utmost restraint” and pledges to avoid lethal force.

What, then, was I to make of the pictures that greeted me in the foreign press that showed Tibetans gathered around the corpses of several of their brethren slain near a monastery in Sichuan Province the other day?

Many Tibetans think of Chinese as faithless, but the people who govern China believe firmly in one thing, the irresistible power of the state. Under Mao Zedong, under the guise of Marxism, this ideology was unleashed on man and on nature alike, the first of which Mao repeatedly sought to remake, and the second, to tame.

A war on religion soon followed in the 1960s, with marauding youths and troops smashing temples and burning relics all over China, but nowhere more fiercely than in Tibet, which suffered more than most places during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

But while most of China has succumbed to official teaching that religion is superstition, replacing spiritual pursuits with the quest for money and personal advancement, the events of the last week or so suggest strongly that in the Tibetan world, dialectical materialism has met its match in the Tibetan’s people’s attachment to their own culture, to their identity and to their beliefs.

Tibetan anger, and the willingness to die for a cause, is more than a routine minority grievance, such as one sometimes sees in civil disturbances in the West. It is about survival as a people with cultural and religious integrity in the face of state-sponsored migration and Chinese-style modernization.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao may have thought he addressed this in saying that China “not only has the ability to maintain stability in Tibet and normal social order, but also will continue to support Tibet’s economic and social development, to raise the life standards of all ethnic groups in Tibet, and to protect Tibetan culture, ecology and the environment. This is an unwavering stand.”

To Tibetans, it is a stand with no ground to support it. All along China’s northern periphery, once strong local cultures are being supplanted or just plain wiped out. Kerry Brown, in his book “Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century,” writes this about Inner Mongolia, which has already been largely homogenized:

“Dressing up in colorful clothes, dancing exaggerated dances, eating mutton and drinking white spirit are all O.K. But musing about just what the historical claims of the current Chinese state on Inner Mongolia are, or writing more trenchant articles in Chinese about the gradual annexation of the region are good ways to be rewarded with unwanted police attention and very probably lengthy prison sentences.”

Click to read more

Posted at 10:36 PM · Comments (0)

Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey

March 20, 2008 7:19 PM

April 2008
Copyright Vanity Fair

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

The shop was hidden away in the shadow of a Confucian temple in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, China, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing, where Frank had come as an honored guest of a photography festival. The city is a photographic dream, a 2,700-year-old dollhouse of clay brick, camels, coal embers, and carved cornices. So many photographers had descended upon the place that a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a picture was considered interesting enough and yet nobody at the dead man’s table had so much as a sketching tablet.

Frank had not looked well even before the soup arrived. He was lumpy and disheveled, his eyes rheumy, the lids bloated. He carried the general form of a man who had been pummeled senseless with a feather pillow. His Dunkin’ Donuts cap had the flat, leathery texture of a dead cat on a highway. His shirt was misbuttoned, his shoes untied, his trousers—his trusted friend the trousers: he had not changed them in a while. They became such companions during his road trip to China—the old Beatnik and these new blue leggings—that I gave the trousers a name: Billy. Frank liked the name. It seemed unsentimental in some way. Frank liked things unsentimental.

Frank had arrived in this coal-choked outpost without a proper pair of pants. The cuffs were tattered on his other ones, ragged from being worn every day for three consecutive years. This would never do, as the titan of postwar film—the “Manet of the new photography,” the critic Janet Malcolm had called him—would be expected by the Chinese authorities to make speeches and grand statements about the world’s newest superpower and say something to encourage the awakening sensibilities of its artists. Robert Frank had consented to hang the photographs from his seminal book, The Americans, at the Pingyao International Photography Festival late last fall—only the second time the complete work has ever been displayed since the book was published 50 years ago.

And to mark the occasion, a junior Communist Party official was dispatched to purchase a pair of trousers for him: size-44 waist, 29 leg.

Frank is old now. At 83 he has reached that age when a man does not have to apologize for his cruelties, his eccentricities, or his grooming habits. His prints have sold for more than a half-million dollars, but he shambles around looking like a Bowery bum. He has by turns been described by people who do not know him as ornery, reclusive, hard, manipulative to the point of destructive, and cold as a bowling ball. He rarely gives interviews. He speaks in short, elliptical snatches and views life with the detached outlook of an undertaker. He came to China to have a look before he dies. “To travel the road of possibilities,” he said. “Turn on a whole new audience.”

But it’s a long trip for an old man. From the day he arrived from New York, Frank’s health began to disintegrate. During the opening ceremonies, he was asked to say a few words. He took the dais and spoke in a lugubrious, Mitteleuropean accent that sounds something like Bela Lugosi in the Dracula pictures.

“I am very moved to be here because it is the first time I’ve come to China and I am moved looking at the landscape and the people and there is my love of mystery,” he said, looking somewhat overwhelmed among the drums and dancers and military guard. Some wise guy dressed as Mao was ranting on about the evils of capitalism. He was bringing the whole party down and was soon muscled away by the police.

“At my age to see all this for the first time—I am proud to be here and I am almost proud to be a photographer,” Frank continued, the Chinese interpreter bleaching out the “almost” bit.

When he finished, Frank was showered in confetti. The crowd of hungry lenses grew ravenous, mugging him now, mauling him, pinning him to the wall at the back of the stage. He looked like a veal calf at slaughter.

Frank began to swoon, but rather than take his wife’s arm, he grasped the belt loops of his trousers and wrenched them around as though he were churning butter, like a seasick sailor grabbing for the gunwale. He was taken by the elbows and squired away into an anteroom behind the stage. It was an old torture chamber, by the look of things. Frank sat in a chair and pondered the genius of the stretching rack.

Frank and his wife, June Leaf, at 78 a long-boned, large-eyed woman, needed to collect themselves. The weather was hot. The air gray with coal vapors. The time was 12 hours ahead of New York. They were disoriented and tired and they stole away with their interpreter for a quiet lunch. I went along, as did the ubiquitous trousers.

It was a drab place of five or six tables, with a bar in one corner, a sink in another, and two large plate-glass windows. Outside you could see beggars near the public toilet, and Frank commented on this China—a place of dung and diesel and dragon-ornamented rooftops and breakfast cabbage and Mercedes-Benzes and flaking bicycle chains and brown rain and traffic. There seemed to be nothing left of Mao but his likeness on the currency.

Frank’s chicken soup arrived in a large bowl. He slurped it, pronounced it tasty, and took several spoonfuls more.

It is important to note here that Leaf had said earlier that the most difficult thing about living with the master was his honesty. “It is quite painful sometimes to live with such honesty,” she said. “But it makes life worth it if you can.”

I did not understand what she meant by this exactly until Frank took his last slurp of broth.

Click to read more

The article is a great read. Carry on through the link above.

Posted at 7:19 PM · Comments (0)

In Tibetan areas, parallel worlds now collide

March 20, 2008 10:50 AM

By Howard W. French
March 20, 2008

GABU VILLAGE, China: For farmers whose lives in this traditionally Tibetan area revolve around its Buddhist temple, an aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is less a symbol of material progress than a daily reminder of Chinese disregard.

“Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said a 40-year-old Buddhist peasant named Caidan. The big factory, said a man sitting next to him, benefits only members of the Han Chinese majority.

“Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs,” the man said. The Han, he said, “are all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.”

In Tibet and the neighboring provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, Tibetans live in closer proximity than ever with the Han, who have flooded in with a wave of state-driven investment. But they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.

After decades of heavily financed efforts on the part of China to strengthen its control over Tibet and to tame the country’s far west through gigantic infrastructure projects and resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, the outbreak of protests and a fierce crackdown by Chinese security forces in and around Tibet have laid bare a harsh reality of policy failure.

There is no legalized ethnic discrimination in China, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

Chinese news programs on the events in Lhasa have reinforced an impression of separate universes that scarcely intersect — one Han and one Tibetan. The programs were clearly intended as propaganda to place the blame for riots on Tibetans and rally Han Chinese in support of a government-led suppression. Over and over, television broadcasts have repeated the same scenes of rampaging Tibetans smashing shop windows and of injured, hospitalized Han, while making no mention of the widely reported deaths among Tibetans during the police crackdown that followed, nor of the underlying grievances that sparked them.

Since the last widespread unrest in Tibet two decades ago, Beijing has sought to undermine separatists in what it calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It has invested billions of dollars, encouraged an influx of Han Chinese and inserted itself deeply into the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism to eliminate the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who fled China for exile in India in 1959 after a failed uprising. But real assimilation, if it were ever the goal, remains elusive.

Caidan, the peasant in Gabu Village, part of Qinghai Province, said there was only one way to solve the grievances of Tibetans under Chinese rule: allow the Dalai Lama to return. “We are unhappy that the state suppresses us, and as long as the Dalai isn’t allowed to return, we will remain unhappy,” he said. “Tibet is the Dalai’s home.”

In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.

“Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,” Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of handicraft shops, said in an interview in Lhasa. Wang’s shops sell Tibetan-themed trinkets to tourists. One of his shops was smashed and burned in the riots. “Just think of how much we’ve invested in relief funds for monks and for unemployed Tibetans,” he said. “Is this what we deserve?”

Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness.

“The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.

“We believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but they might think we’re greedy and have no faith.”

Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

A Tibetan university student in her early 20s who declined to give her name explained relations this way: “I really don’t want to talk about politics, saying whether or not Tibet is part of China. The reality is that we are controlled by Chinese, by the Han people. We don’t have any say, so in my family we don’t even talk about it.”

Although the young woman said that her family was relatively well off and that she was receiving a good education, the future was bleak here even for someone like her because the system favors the Han.

“I’m not even sure I can get a job after graduation,” she said. “For rich Tibetans and for officials, they send their children out to Chengdu or Beijing.”

A sense of the fear many Tibetans live with could be heard in the comments of a religious leader in Aba Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the site of a protest by monks and others this week in solidarity with the Lhasa demonstrations, and the scene of a subsequent fierce crackdown.

“I only know that the Communist Party is good, that they are good to us,” said the religious leader, Ewangdanzhen, when asked about official explanations that have blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests. “I only believe in the Communist Party. Splitting is bad. We want unity and harmony. We don’t have any contacts with him and we don’t need to contact him.”

Far from giving up on their way of life, though, or renouncing their attachment to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader whom the Chinese government has long vilified as a separatist, or “splittist,” most Tibetans interviewed while dodging heavy police checks during a 450-mile road trip through Tibetan areas in Gansu and Qinghai Provinces professed near-universal devotion to the Dalai Lama, and vowed to continue resisting government attempts to control their faith.

“All Tibetans are the same: 100 percent of us adore the Dalai Lama,” said Suonanrenqing, a 40-year-old resident of a Tibetan village in Jianzha County, in Qinghai Province. Asked about China’s decision to commandeer an ancient Tibetan religious rite and select the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995, and the implications for how Beijing would manage things after the Dalai Lama, who is 72, dies, Suonanrenqing’s response suggested indefinite tensions between Chinese and Tibetans.

“We’re not sure if it’s true that the Panchen was appointed by the government, but if it is true, we cannot support him,” he said. “We wouldn’t support a Dalai Lama appointed by the government either. These people should be chosen by monasteries.”

Although Suonanrenqing spoke candidly, worrying only at the end of a lengthy conversation if his comments could bring him trouble, many conversations with Tibetans began with nervous denials that they knew anything at all of the events of Lhasa. Their wariness was warranted by a severe security crackdown in clear evidence wherever Tibetans live in large numbers.

After dodging one police roadblock, a reporter making his way late at night toward a town in Gansu Province where Tibetans had protested in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrators the day before was set upon by plainclothes police officers at a highway tollbooth and forced into a nearby building for questioning before being turned away.

The following day, when visiting Taersi, an important Tibetan monastery in Qinghai Province, the reporter was closely followed by plainclothes police officers who were seen videotaping his conversations with local monks.

“I have no idea what’s happening in Lhasa,” said one 32-year-old monk, who agreed to sit and chat in a small restaurant with a foreign visitor but apparently felt the topic was too dangerous to touch upon. “We don’t have anything to do with that.”

Despite the vigilant police, the nearby Lijiaxia Valley, a starkly beautiful area dominated by the Yellow River with craggy, desiccated mountains and wind-swept farmland, Tibetan villages were easy to spot by the colorful prayer flags that flew from roofs and hilltops.

Click to read more

Posted at 10:50 AM · Comments (0)

The Quiet Heroes of Tibet

March 19, 2008 1:16 AM

Click to read the entire article

However, Chinese claims about Tibet present a very different picture; and after allowing for some inflation in official statistics, they have to be taken into account, partly to understand the extreme Chinese distrust of the Dalai Lama. Woeser is right to claim that not many Tibetans can enter the utopia of “development” promised by the Chinese—a consumer lifestyle in urban centers. Most Tibetans living in rural areas have seen few benefits of economic growth. But the Chinese have announced plans to improve facilities for education, health care, sanitation, and transport in large parts of rural Tibet. Both the ongoing extension of the railroad to the southern city of Shigatse and an ever more ambitious highway construction plan are expected to integrate the remotest regions of Tibet into the national economy.

To allay fears that the railroad would worsen Tibet’s already very serious environmental crisis, the Chinese government has announced many measures, including systems to store garbage and waste water and treat them in designated facilities.[7] The official Chinese documentary on the railroad offers a touching story about Chinese construction workers nursing orphaned baby antelopes, and claims that thirty-three “animal underpasses” have been put in place under the tracks.

State-imposed modernization tends to incite more resentment than gratitude among the supposedly backward people it aims to uplift. Still, in view of the hectic Chinese efforts to appease it, the Tibetan mood struck me as extremely sullen. “Virtually all Tibetans,” Wang Lixiong claimed in an article in 2002, “have the Dalai in their hearts.”[8] Five years later, the Tibetans remain defiantly loyal to their long-exiled spiritual leader. That the Chinese have brought, in the meantime, many more roads, bridges, schools, electricity, regular jobs, and salaries to Tibet has not changed their allegiance to him.

Pictures of the Dalai Lama are banned in Tibet. Yet a Tibetan farmer I met claimed that every house in his village concealed an image of the spiritual leader. Last year the Dalai Lama’s disparaging remarks about fur-wearing Tibetans sparked bonfires of animal skins and fur-trimmed clothes across Tibet.[9] Mass protests erupted this year in the town of Lithang after police arrested a Tibetan nomad who climbed on a stage erected for Chinese officials at an annual horse festival and, seizing a mike, pleaded for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet.[10] In October, after monks celebrated the awarding of the US Congress’s highest civilian honor to the Dalai Lama, the Chinese police sealed off the biggest monastery in Lhasa.[11]

Not surprisingly, Chinese authorities are trying hard, if often clumsily, to undermine the Dalai Lama’s authority. In 1995, Chinese authorities kidnapped the boy—called Gendun Choekyi Nyima—whom the Dalai Lama had identified as the eleventh Panchen Lama, and installed their own child candidate in this important position in Tibetan Buddhism. (The whereabouts of the kidnapped boy remain unknown.) In an attempt to forestall the Chinese regime from usurping his position, the Dalai Lama announced that he will be reincarnated outside Tibet, guaranteeing that his successor will be born among the Tibetan community in exile. In August this year, the officially atheist Chinese regime passed legislation effectively banning Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which stipulates the procedures for rebirth, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

Wang Lixiong, who is one of the very few Chinese intellectuals to have met the Dalai Lama, told me that Tibetans have no faith in the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, whom they refer to as “that little brat.” He thinks that the Chinese missed an opportunity in suppressing Gendun Choekyi Nyima, the Dalai Lama’s candidate for the seat of the Panchen Lama. Traditionally, Panchen Lamas have had a crucial part in choosing the Dalai Lama, and had the Chinese respected the choice of Nyima and educated him carefully, they would have had a good chance of legitimizing their choice of the next Dalai Lama. As things stand now, few Tibetans are likely to accept the decisions of China’s substitute.

Remarking on the missteps the Chinese have made in Tibet, Wang said that market reforms have weakened Beijing’s authority. Communications between central and provincial governments have broken down, leading to arbitrary and thoughtless decisions such as the expulsion of Woeser from Lhasa, which has led to her acquiring bolder views and a higher profile in Beijing. Communist Party officials correctly feel themselves most vulnerable in regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, where Han Chinese are a minority; the oppressive atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution still lingers in Tibet, where villagers are required to fly the Communist flag and display a picture of a laughing President Hu Jintao flanked by Tibetans in colorful ethnic costumes. Tibetans talking to foreigners invite the attention of the police. By contrast, small spaces for dissent have opened up almost imperceptibly in Beijing and the coastal cities, escaping the scrutiny of officials who are busy either pursuing private fortunes or grappling with corruption, social breakdown, and environmental disasters.

This seemed true when I returned from Lhasa to Beijing, and found that I could talk to Woeser without fear of police harassment. I met her a few times in my hotel room and once in an Indian restaurant. On two occasions she was accompanied by Wang Lixiong, who was born in 1953 and is thirteen years older than Woeser; his calmly cerebral and courtly presence contrasts attractively with her ebullient manner. Woeser told me that she first heard of him through his outspoken writings on Tibet; Wang was, she said, the first Han Chinese writer to have written honestly about Tibet. They e-mailed each other for a year before finally meeting in 2000 when Wang visited Lhasa to research an article.

Wang said that Woeser had helped him shed his condescending Han Chinese perspective on Tibet as an integral part of China and on Tibetans as a backward people. He said, “It is widespread in China. I still have to be on my guard against it.”

Shortly after corresponding, Woeser sent Wang some revealing photos taken during the Cultural Revolution by her father, an officer with the PLA in the late 1960s, when Red Guards rampaged across Tibet. Wang, who had himself been a Red Guard, encouraged her to interview the people in the photographs, which show scenes of mob fury and individual humiliation, and to write a text to accompany the photographs.

The book was subsequently published in Taiwan. Chinese authorities tend to be very sensitive to anything related to Taiwan and Tibet. But Wang spoke equably of the double hazards for a China-based writer on Tibet publishing in Taiwan. Certainly he now takes risks that would have struck his parents as near suicidal.

Like Woeser, Wang, too, had been born into China’s ruling elite. His father, an early member of the Communist Party, received his education at a Moscow polytechnic at the same time as Jiang Zemin, China’s former president. Then, in 1968, at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, his father, denounced as a “capitalist-roader” and “Soviet-revisionist spy,” committed suicide after months of detention in a cowshed, and his mother, an editor at a film studio, was sentenced to hard labor in the countryside.

Wang spoke with remarkable detachment about the destruction of his parents’ lives. As a Red Guard, he said, he had even wondered if his parents were suffering for a noble ideal. He told me that he first became interested in Tibet in the mid-1980s, when, after giving up a conventional career as an engineer, he built a raft out of the rubber inner tubes of truck tires and floated down the entire great length of the Yellow River.

In 1991, he published a novel titled Yellow Peril, which became a best-seller before being banned by the Chinese authorities. In 1999, while researching a book about Xinjiang, he was arrested and detained for forty days in the Uighur-majority province. Undaunted, Wang traveled to the United States in 2001, and published an account of his meetings there with the Dalai Lama.

Wang is a member of a “lost generation” of Chinese youth that was unmoored by the chaos created by Mao in his last years. He struck me as someone who had become fearless while improvising his life. He told me that ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and the Uighurs desperately needed courageous public intellectuals. Tibetans were lucky to have Woeser, who could articulate, both at home and abroad, their wishes and aspirations. He added that it would be a mistake for foreigners to see her simply as protesting human rights violations, for she represented something new: a Tibetan who had come through the Sinicized education and literary system, and who now used her fluency in Chinese to bypass the system of state patronage and participate in the transnational free market in culture that had opened up for Chinese writers in recent years.

On my last afternoon with Woeser and Wang I asked them if I could visit the apartment they share with Wang’s elderly mother. Woeser had earlier told me that this was not a good idea since it risked provoking suspicions by the policemen monitoring her home. Now it was Wang who looked doubtful. He said that I could go but that he was very likely to be followed and would rather not accompany us.

Woeser’s apartment looked far from downtown on the city map. But the taxi took a freeway running across Beijing’s six ring roads, and brought us very quickly to what looked like the edge of the city. Her apartment house seemed new but, like most new construction in China, already touched by decay. I glimpsed uniformed men in the guardroom watching us, and was reassured to see Woeser indifferently walking past them to the elevator.

Wang’s mother opened the door. A small, gray-haired, gentle-looking woman, she smiled faintly at us and then abruptly left the apartment—in order to give us, Woeser explained later, more privacy. I remembered what Wang had told me of his father’s suicide and his mother’s three-year imprisonment in a cowshed during the Cultural Revolution, followed by four years of hard labor in the countryside. I couldn’t help staring at her, half-expecting her face to hold some trace of her ordeals. But she looked serene, like many of the old Chinese of her generation I often saw sitting in public parks, on whose faces a cruel history had finally bestowed a kind of grace.

Carefully organized, the apartment looked bigger than its two small bedrooms and kitchenette leading off the living room. Woeser busied herself with tea. I walked over to her desk in one of the bedrooms. The shelf beside her desk held Chinese translations of books by Susan Sontag, V.S. Naipaul, Edward Said, and Orhan Pamuk, among other writers.

Woeser had been dismissive about the few Chinese writers I mentioned. Wang had explained, “None of them really say what they feel about China today, so it is hard for us to respect them.” The books on her shelf revealed something of how Woeser, who has never left Chinese territory, had formed her sensibility; how she had arrived at the aesthetic and political judgments that depend on a deep acquaintance with the experiences of other societies.

From where I stood I saw the view from the window: Beijing sprawling to the west, light wintry mist blurring a harsh landscape of new anonymous city blocks, freeways, factory chimneys, construction cranes, and planes hanging low in the sky, waiting to land at the airport to the north—the airport which, like much else in the city, is presently being expanded and renovated for the Olympics next year.

Wang had told me that he saw the Communist system in China in serious peril. The Party could not control China anymore; it had allowed no other political institutions to grow and when it collapsed the whole oppressive structure was bound to crumble. But looking out Woeser’s window—the planes circling in the sky, as if in homage to the feverishly blooming city—the power and wealth of China could seem unassailable, and Tibet a forgotten, perhaps lost, cause.

Returning to the living room I noticed pictures of the Dalai Lama hanging from one recessed corner; DVD recordings of his teachings were stacked below them. The casual display of the prohibited image in a Beijing apartment, a few hundred feet from a policeman below, startled me. Woeser saw me examining the DVDs on her shelf. She said, “Tibetan friends of mine often get together to watch them. We dim the lights and project the films on a big screen. It feels wonderful, even though the evenings usually end with all of us in tears.”

Woeser had not spoken to me of her religious beliefs. I wasn’t even sure if she, a writer in the modern secular mode, had any. More likely, images of the Dalai Lama keep alive an idea of Tibet as much for Woeser and her friends in their suburban exile as for the devout farmers in the Tibetan fastness. Such private affirmations of Tibetan identity, and Woeser’s and Wang’s testing of the limits of intellectual freedom in China, may not accomplish much at present. Nevertheless, they show how the great consolidation of Chinese power today obscures many collective and individual gestures of dissent and defiance in Tibet—gestures that may yet cohere into a movement, not so distant perhaps, of political change.

—December 19, 2007

Posted at 1:16 AM · Comments (0)

State Inc.: The most important new forces in global business are aggressive, wealthy, and entrepreneurial. But they aren’t corporations: they’re authoritarian governments.

March 18, 2008 12:07 AM

IT WAS THE biggest corporate deal in the history of sub-Saharan Africa: Last October, a foreign firm spent nearly $6 billion for a chunk of Standard Bank, the South African company that has long dominated finance on the continent.
more stories like this

Yet the foreign suitor was not Citigroup, or UBS, or some other titan of private commerce. It was the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a company owned wholly by the Chinese government.

On a business level, the deal gave ICBC’s Chinese customers access to banking across Africa, and set the stage for closer relations between Chinese companies and African nations. In a bigger sense, it embodies a change that is reshaping the dynamics of global business.

In the past five years, governments around the world have been transforming themselves into deal makers and business players on a scale never seen in the modern era. In China, state-owned oil giant PetroChina has become the largest company in the world, worth more than $1 trillion. In Russia, state-owned Gazprom has grown into the world’s largest gas company. States are also wielding influence by directly buying into major private firms: The investment fund run by the Arab emirate of Abu Dhabi is now the world’s largest, and recently spent $7.5 billion to become the top shareholder of the American financial giant Citigroup. Singapore’s state-controlled wealth fund, Temasek Holdings, sank $5 billion into Merrill Lynch, the largest US brokerage. By 2015, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley, such state-owned funds will control a staggering $12 trillion, far outpacing any private investors.

The rise of states as global economic players marks a sharp reversal from decades in which private enterprise seemed an unstoppable force in global finance, commerce, and culture. It represents a new and unexpected fusion of state control with the business principles of capitalism. And it is already causing a significant shift in global power.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:07 AM · Comments (0)

The professional way to protect a marriage

March 16, 2008 12:05 PM

Bracing contrarian provocation from the Times of London (Copyright).

I lived in my early twenties in Hong Kong for five years, and was at first rather shocked when business colleagues of my husband’s, visiting from London, asked almost as soon as they got off the plane for directions to the red-light district. Soon I realised that almost every one of our many visitors, happily married or not, was determined to find a hooker. These were normal, youngish, attractive men, many of them devoted to their families. The Far East, like London today, was awash with beautiful and clever girls for hire; in most of the world, for most of history, that has been normal.

Right up and down the scale, a man can rent a girl a great deal better and more cooperative than the woman he lives with. She will be probably be much more sexually experienced and more accomplished than most wives too. In plain English, or so I am told by perfectly nice men, prostitutes tend to be better at it. They tend to be younger and more energetic. They are also prepared to do things which her indoors might draw the line at. Some prostitutes provide tender loving care, too; the famous madam Cynthia Payne provided her suburban clients with comfort food after the act in the form of poached eggs on toast.

The other awkward fact, which most people must know, but somehow prefer to ignore, is that men often prefer sex without a relationship. Perhaps that is wrong of them, but one must concede that relationships can be wearing, particularly marriage, and sometimes a man just wants time out, and sex without strings is clearly a source of great pleasure, at least for men. If you were an evolutionary biologist you might argue that unfettered sex is entirely natural to men. One might at least agree that hogamous higamous, man seems to be a bit polygamous.

If so, prostitutes have an invaluable function - meeting such inconvenient needs without undermining the institutions of marriage and family. In my view a man - even a man like Eliot Spitzer - may be doing a far better thing in using prostitutes than in having torrid affairs with his wife’s best friends. It is far less threatening to the marriage - so it’s odd that people reserve their strongest disapproval for sex without strings.

Besides, we can know nothing of the mysteries of other people’s marriages, many of which survive long beyond sexual interest. Mr and Mrs Spitzer may have reached an accommodation that suited them. Some Hong Kong wives used to talk of a pink ticket - a sort of carte blanche with a blush: whatever their husbands got up to, or down to, in Manila or Jakarta, or even in the shadier corners of Hong Kong, didn’t count. A few said they were glad “to have the heat taken off”.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:05 PM · Comments (0)

Playing the Racist Card: FERRARO’S COMMENTS ABOUT OBAMA WERE RACIST. WHY CAN’T WE SAY THAT?

March 15, 2008 10:57 AM

March 14, 2008

There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not. Last year, Bill O’Reilly took a jaunt up to Harlem’s famed Sylvia’s and returned with the news that blacks had learned the basics of table manners and developed opposable thumbs. When Media Matters attacked O’Reilly for his voluminous ignorance, he angrily accused his critics of distorting “a positive discussion on race and accusing me of racism.”
As Don Imus was being drummed off the air, journalists and Washington oligarchs assembled to assure us all of Imus’ decency, pointing to his good deeds on behalf of children with cancer and claiming that despite his penchant for caricaturing black people, he surely was no racist. Michael Richards marred his career by laying into a couple of hecklers with a textbook deluge of hate speech, but what disturbed him most was the fact that someone out there may have inferred that he was, you know, racist. “I’m not a racist,” Richards told David Letterman. “That’s what’s so insane.”
It gives me no joy to report that Geraldine Ferraro has now applied to join the ranks of the obviously nonracist. I was 8 when she ran for vice president and vaguely aware that a party that would promote a woman for an executive office might be a party that would one day give a kid like me a fair shake. Thus I’ve retched while watching Ferraro beeline to any television studio that would have her, flaunting her rainbow bona fides, and claiming that she’s being attacked “because she’s white” and demonized as a racist.

“The sad thing is that my comments have been taken so out of context,” Ferraro told Diane Sawyer, “and been spun by the Obama campaign as racist.”
When the New York Times reached Ferraro at home, having resigned from the Clinton campaign, she doubled down: “If you point to something that deals with race, you’re immediately a racist?” When asked whether she was sorry, she responded, “I am sorry that there are people who think I am a racist.”
The racist card is textbook strawmanship. As opposed to having to address whether her comments were, as Obama said, “wrongheaded” and “absurd,” Ferraro gets to debate something that only she can truly judge—the contents of her heart.
It’s a clever and unassailable move: How would you actually prove that Ferraro is definitively a racist? Furthermore, it appeals to our national distaste for whiners. It’s irrelevant that the Obama campaign never called Ferraro a racist. It’s also irrelevant that Ferraro said the same thing of Jesse Jackson in 1988. And it’s especially irrelevant that Ferraro apparently believes that Obama’s Ivy League education, his experience as an elected official, and his time of service on the South Side of Chicago pale in comparison with the leg-up he’s been given as a black male in America. By positioning herself as a victim of political correctness run amok, Ferraro stakes out the high ground of truth telling.
Ferraro may be the most strident, but she’s far from the first to join the rogue’s gallery of public figures who have made patently foolish claims about black people, then ducked beneath the shield of nonracism.

Posted at 10:57 AM · Comments (0)

Across West Africa, democracy reborn

March 15, 2008 10:40 AM

WINNEBA, Ghana — Ama Maysiema danced down the main drag of this seaside town in sweaty exultation. Rumors had spread that opposition leader John Atta Mills had died. But there he was, standing up through the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser, waving to supporters as they drummed, sang and cheered their support.

“He’s our savior!” shouted Maysiema, 49, whirling in a blue dress to celebrate the apparent resurrection of her candidate. “People said he’s dead, but he’s alive!”

Reborn as well, over the past decade, has been democracy itself here in Ghana and among its neighbors along West Africa’s Atlantic coast.

From Sierra Leone east to Nigeria, stability and at least a tentative version of multiparty politics have begun taking hold after many years of coups, military dictatorships and civil war.

As Kenya has become the latest East African nation to descend into conflict, these West African countries have moved toward politics that are vigorous but rarely violent.

Maysiema, a divorced mother of seven struggling to support her family by selling bread on Winneba’s streets, said she could not imagine Ghana’s partisan enthusiasms ever turning bloody, no matter what the outcome of the presidential vote scheduled for December.

“Ghanaians are a naturally peace-loving people,” said Maysiema, a divorced mother of seven struggling to support her family selling bread on Winneba’s streets. “They will make the noise, but there’s no way they will draw blood.”

The progress in the region is far from uniform. Ghana and Benin have held several free elections with peaceful transfers of power; Togo, on the other hand, is still run by the son of a longtime strongman but in October had its first vote in which all major parties participated.

Civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast have ended, and although Ivory Coast has yet to hold its first postwar vote, Liberia and Sierra Leone have elected leaders with popular mandates. Regional giant Nigeria, where military rule ended in 1999, has had a series of deeply flawed votes, but the disputes are being settled in an increasingly independent court system.

These countries are all freer, more stable and more democratic than they were a decade ago, regional analysts say. Peace, however fragile, is the norm rather than war. And citizens of these nations increasingly are demanding responsive governance from their leaders.

“There is a clear direction where people more and more are asserting themselves,” said Emmanuel Bombande, executive director of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding. “So even where there is slow progress, things are much better.”

Click to read more

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004281591_ghana14.html

Posted at 10:40 AM · Comments (0)

Liberia: Taylor ‘made rebels eat enemies’

March 14, 2008 2:00 PM

Copyright The BBC

Ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor ordered militias to eat the flesh of their enemies, a former death squad leader has told his war crimes trial.

Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah said Mr Taylor had instructed his fighters in Liberia to even eat UN peacekeepers to “set an example for the people to be afraid”.
Mr Taylor is on trial at The Hague for backing rebels in Sierra Leone in an 11-year war in which thousands died.
He has denied the 11 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The trial at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone has been moved away from West Africa because of fears that it could lead to renewed instability in the region.
It began last June, but was adjourned until January after only one day when Mr Taylor dismissed his lawyer. Many witnesses have since testified behind closed doors.
Cannibalism
Mr Marzah, a key prosecution witness, agreed to appear in open court only after lengthy negotiations over the protection provided for him and his family.
He said we should eat them… Even the UN white people - he said we could use them as pork to eat
Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah
Describing himself as Mr Taylor’s former chief of operations and commander of a death squad in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Mr Marzah said the former leader ordered militias to eat the flesh of enemies in Liberia, including African and UN peacekeepers.
“He said we should eat them. Even the UN white people - he said we could use them as pork to eat,” Mr Marzah said, adding that it was to “set an example for the people to be afraid”.
He said repeatedly that nothing was done without an explicit order from Mr Taylor and that anyone who violated his commands would be executed.
Mr Marzah then recalled how the victims of the cannibalism were usually members of the Krahn tribe of Liberia’s former president, Samuel Doe, who was in power in 1989 when Mr Taylor started the country’s six-year civil war.
However, he said they had also included troops from the West African Ecomog peacekeeping force, which was deployed in 1990, and some UN peacekeepers.
The international peacekeepers eventually helped stabilise Liberia, leading to a peace agreement in 1995 and a presidential election two years later that Mr Taylor won.
“We ate a few [Ecomog soldiers], but not many. But many were executed, about 68,” Mr Marzah said.
‘Throw away the head’
When asked by defence lawyer Courtenay Griffith about how the militiamen would “prepare a human being” for eating, Mr Marzah described the splitting, cleaning, decapitating and cooking of the corpse with salt and pepper.
“We slit your throat, butcher you… throw away the head, take the flesh and put it in a pot… Charles Taylor knows that,” he added.
Mr Marzah also described how he had killed so many men, women and children that he had lost count, and also slit open the stomachs of pregnant women on Mr Taylor’s orders.
Earlier in his testimony, Mr Marzah told the court he had taken weapons, some stored at Mr Taylor’s presidential mansion, to Sierra Leone and returned to Liberia with diamonds which he then delivered to Mr Taylor.
Mr Taylor is accused of funding Sierra Leone’s former rebels, the Revolutionary United Front, by selling diamonds on their behalf and buying weapons for them.
The RUF became notorious for hacking off the hands and legs of civilians during their armed rebellion in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/7295300.stm
Published: 2008/03/13 19:39:12 GMT
© BBC MMVIII

Posted at 2:00 PM · Comments (0)

An unsanitised history of washing: To modern Westerners life without showers is unimaginable, but mankind somehow survived before the advent of soap and deodorants

March 14, 2008 12:54 AM

For the modern, middle-class North American, “clean” means that you shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail. For the aristocratic 17th-century Frenchman, it meant that he changed his linen shirt daily and dabbled his hands in water, but never touched the rest of his body with water or soap. For the Roman in the first century, it involved two or more hours of splashing, soaking and steaming the body in water of various temperatures, raking off sweat and oil with a metal scraper, and giving himself a final oiling - all done daily, in company and without soap.

Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious.

It follows that hygiene has always been a convenient stick with which to beat other peoples, who never seem to get it right. The outsiders usually err on the side of dirtiness. The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea. Late 19th-century Americans were scandalised by the dirtiness of Europeans; the Nazis promoted the idea of Jewish uncleanliness. At least since the Middle Ages, European travellers have enjoyed nominating the continent’s grubbiest country - the laurels usually went to France or Spain. Sometimes the other is, suspiciously, too clean, which is how the Muslims, who scoured their bodies and washed their genitals, struck Europeans for centuries. The Muslims returned the compliment, regarding Europeans as downright filthy.

Most modern people have a sense that not much washing was done until the 20th century, and the question I was asked most often while writing this book always came with a look of barely contained disgust: “But didn’t they smell?” As St Bernard said, where all stink, no one smells. The scent of one another’s bodies was the ocean our ancestors swam in, and they were used to the everyday odour of dried sweat. It was part of their world, along with the smells of cooking, roses, garbage, pine forests and manure. Twenty years ago, aircraft, restaurants, hotel rooms and most other public indoor spaces were thick with cigarette smoke. Most of us never noticed it. Now that these places are usually smoke-free, we shrink back affronted when we enter a room where someone has been smoking. The nose is adaptable, and teachable.
Background

* Video: Spa baths of chocolate, wine and coffee

To modern Westerners, our definition of cleanliness seems inevitable, universal and timeless. It is none of these things, being a complicated cultural creation and a constant work in progress.

The most menacing aspect of the smells that came with poor-to-middling hygiene was that, as we were constantly warned, we could be guilty of them without even knowing it. There was no way we could ever rest assured that we were clean enough. For me, the epitome of feminine daintiness was the model who posed on the cover of a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation, titled: You’re a Young Lady Now. This paragon, a blue-eyed blonde wearing a pageboy hairdo and a pale blue shirtwaist dress, had clearly never had a single extraneous hair on her body and smelled permanently of baby powder. I knew I could never live up to her immaculate blondness, but much of my world was telling me I had to try.

While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that’s why the second most frequent question I heard during the writing of this book - almost always from women - was a rhetorical: “How could they bear to have sex with each other?”

In fact, there’s no evidence that the birth rate ever fell because people were too smelly for copulation. And, although modern people have a hard time accepting it, the relationship between sex and odourless cleanliness is neither constant nor predictable. The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma.

Most ancient civilisations matter-of-factly acknowledged that, in the right circumstances, a gamey, earthy body odour can be a powerful aphrodisiac. Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote to Josephine from a campaign: “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” As I read about cleanliness, people began taking me aside and confessing things: several didn’t use deodorant, just washed with soap and water; some didn’t shower or bathe daily. Two writers told me separately that they had a washing superstition: as the end of a long project neared, they stopped washing their hair and didn’t shampoo until it was finished. One woman confided that her husband of some 20 years takes long showers at least three times a day: she would love, she said wistfully, to know what he “really” smells like.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:54 AM · Comments (0)

Beijing’s unofficial Olympic slogan: Take pride, but no politics, please

March 13, 2008 10:38 PM

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: March 13, 2008
SHANGHAI: The official slogan of this summer’s Beijing Olympics may be “One World, One Dream,” but Beijing’s real mantra has been something more prosaic, and in the end, much more problematic: no politics.

Over the coming months, China will offer the world an astounding spectacle. Not the Games themselves, but rather the spectacle of a nation that is in the midst of breathtaking change and yet clings to habits of statecraft so dated that they seem like relics of the Middle Ages.

In elevating the Olympics to an official source of national pride, China has put its most precious commodities on the line: national face. And by investing so much face in the successful execution of the Games, it is making extreme demands on its citizens and on the world.

The following list is not exhaustive, but it gives an idea of what is being demanded: Smile, approve of us, behave, do not criticize, don’t dare protest and, back to the mantra, banish all thoughts of politics from your minds.

That’s asking an awful lot, and like requiring someone to hold their body rigid for an extended period, it will demand an immense and painful effort, and it brings the risk of self-injury.

Consider the government’s cascade of systematic denials of the pertinence of just about every critical issue that comes up, including human rights in Tibet, China’s Muslim northwest and the rights of the tens of thousands of migrant workers whose round-the-clock work in Beijing has made the hosting of the Games possible. All too often, they are phrased in the antique wooden tongue of an old imperial court.

On the migrant issue, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, responded to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing exploitation of the workers with a verbal equivalent of the stiff arm: “I believe that everybody is well aware that Human Rights Watch has some problem with its sight. It is biased. It has some problems with its eyes. It has weakness in seeing things properly.”

Boy, I guess that settles things.

Foreigners who persist in touching upon what are quaintly known in China as sensitive issues, thereby putting the government on the spot, risk being treated as unfriendly to the country, or even downgraded further to the status of enemies.

And this brings us to another aspect of the Olympics. As with so much the Chinese government does, the promotion of the Games and their protection from criticism contains a mildly disturbing element of popular manipulation, of managing people’s feelings for them, and of policing the divide between things Chinese and foreign.

The Olympics are intended to quicken Chinese heartbeats in their love for the motherland, and people will be encouraged to see nitpicking foreigners (Steven Spielberg, for example) for what they supposedly are, offensive outsiders who fall into a long tradition of hostility to China.

This brings to mind a saying about propaganda, which is defined as a kind of magic practiced by people who don’t believe in it for people who do.

A crude, practical example of how this all works was delivered last week after the Icelandic singer Björk ended a concert performance of her song “Declare Independence” in Shanghai with the cry “Tibet! Tibet!” Beijing said that act not only broke Chinese law, but even more preposterously, “hurt Chinese people’s feelings.”

Presumably, the infraction was the singing of a song not approved by the censors, who decide even what foreign performers can say here. Expect tighter controls in the future.

Let’s pause here to get an important item of business out of the way. China’s successes are good news for the world, not just for Chinese people, and one hopes that the Olympics will succeed. May they bring people closer, allowing curious outsiders to appreciate China as it really is, the scene of awesome recent achievement, but like every other country, also a dynamic mixture of good and bad.

The problem is that by turning the Games into a massive exercise in national face, it is the Chinese government itself which has politicized them. This all but compels anyone who is even slightly curious to meditate on what has been accomplished here, how this nation arrived at the place it finds itself today and where it is headed in the future.

And if in the end, the Chinese government finds it has to rethink its outdated communications strategy, a stubborn leftover of a not-too-distant past - when the state had almost total control over the lives and minds of its people, and foreign relations were limited at the height of Cultural Revolution to a single embassy in Albania - all the better.

Click to read more

Posted at 10:38 PM · Comments (0)

From Jack Johnson to Eliot Spitzer: The troubling history of the White-Slave Traffic Act

March 13, 2008 10:31 AM

March 11, 2008—When a self-righteous crusader like Eliot Spitzer is caught with his pants down, a lot of onlookers might feel a tinge of glee to see such hypocrisy revealed. But the law under which he may be prosecuted, the Mann Act, is a relic that should give pause to anyone looking to hold Spitzer accountable in court on counts of prostitution.

Spitzer, the former TIME magazine “Crusader of the Year,” who has previously directed his righteous fury at “high-end prostitution rings” and “sex tourism,” now looks to be another law-breaking John stung by wiretaps, bank disclosures, and his own hubris and stupidity. Two big questions loom: will he resign and will he serve time?

On the latter question,The New York Times reported that Spitzer might be charged, like the four “ringleaders” of Emperors Club VIP, under the Mann Act. The nearly century-old law prohibits transporting across state lines “a woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

The history of the Mann Act raises serious questions about the use of federal law enforcement to investigate the private lives of consenting adults. Amid early twentieth century media hysteria and a moral panic about white farm girls being lured into cities and forced into prostitution, progressive Illinois Congressman James Robert Mann sponsored the White-Slave Traffic Act. Against the wishes of states’ rights advocates, the legislation federalized vice crimes that had previously been the purview of local law enforcement.

Though primarily intended to fight prostitution, the Act substantially expanded the scope of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and soon became the starting point for a wide-range of cases, including many against consenting but unmarried couples. The first person prosecuted under the law was legendary boxer Jack Johnson.

Long before special prosecutors like Ken Starr came along, the Mann Act made fishing expeditions into private sex lives a common and controversial part of federal law enforcement.

According to the Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness, “The U.S. Department of Justice began investigating Jack Johnson for possible violations of the Mann Act almost from the moment the law went into effect in 1910, but prosecutors did not find an incident on which to build a case for over two years.”

His crime had little to do with prostitution and everything to do with success in the ring and a succession of white girlfriends out of the ring. As the first black heavyweight champion, Johnson was the focus of enormous racist hostility. The Department of Justice, after failing to get Johnson’s white fiance to testify against him, found a former lover and prostitute who persuaded a jury to convict. He was sentenced to the maximum penalty of one year and one day. Though Johnson and his fiance fled to Europe and, later, Latin America, he eventually served his sentence at Leavenworth.

As with the selective prosecution of Johnson, the Mann Act proved to be a powerful tool for federal authorities to harass and incarcerate other prominent but disfavored figures.

Charlie Chaplin, a longtime target of J. Edgar Hoover because of his left-wing political views, was prosecuted in 1944 under the Mann Act, though was later acquitted. Likewise, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, writer Elizabeth Smart, and University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas were charged, respectively, though each ultimately was acquitted or saw the charges dropped.

Though Wright, Smart and Thomas were each in consensual relationships, like Johnson and Chaplin, they had angered powerful people through their views or actions and the Mann Act proved a useful means of retaliation.

Unlike Johnson or Chaplin, however, Spitzer has actively worked to incarcerate people for their roles in the very crime he is now alleged to have committed. Such sanctimonious duplicity would seem especially worthy of sanction even if such prosecutions at the federal level are now rare. Sending Spitzer to jail for his “sex trafficking” would certainly teach him, and others, a lesson. Unfortunately, part of the lesson would be that the private acts of consenting adults should continue to occupy the energies of federal law enforcement. A better outcome would draw attention to the immorality of the Mann Act itself.

Omar Wasow is pursuing a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies, and an M.A. in Government at Harvard University. He was the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com.

Click to read more

Posted at 10:31 AM · Comments (0)

Japan Through The Looking Glass

March 12, 2008 12:29 PM

Based on a fantastic David Piling piece in the FT (snippet available elsewhere on this site), I expected this to be a very strong book.
Sorry. It isn’t. There are interesting tidbits here and there, but way too much slogging through banal, discursive observations about a society that the author discovered late in life and given his lack of the language, had to rely on “distinguished” guides to get to know.

Posted at 12:29 PM · Comments (0)

Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century

March 12, 2008 11:30 AM

An excellent primer on China, the weight of its past on its future and the country’s place in the world’s future. It has the merit of being brief and tightly focused and draws on a rich personal experience of the country. I’ve read too many recent China books, and this one stands out from the crowd.

Posted at 11:30 AM · Comments (0)

Vietnamese demonstrate how to recover from atrocity

March 6, 2008 10:57 PM

HANOI: A conspicuous sign in the immaculate baggage collection area at this city’s recently built airport proclaimed the availability of CNN, anywhere, anytime.

During a weeklong stay, I couldn’t rigorously test out this boast, but arriving here from China, I did know one thing, that such prominent ads for Western news outlets can’t be found there at all.

Hmm, I thought, as my taxi sped along the highway into the city, passing billboard after billboard announcing “Intel Inside,” along with the presence here of a host of other major Western companies.

I had read of the extraordinary growth of the Vietnamese economy, nearly on a pace with that of its giant neighbor, China; of the blossoming of a frothy stock market; and of the culture of entrepreneurship and of acquisition that often goes with such things.

What I had not heard much of lately or frankly bothered to think of very often was of the bloody and costly war that the United States waged in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975

Memories of that war had come back to me powerfully some weeks before my arrival here when I read Denis Johnson’s long and intensely imagined Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” whose story is woven together from the strands of numerous characters’ lives. Most central, though, are Colonel Francis X. Sands and his nephew, Skip Sands. They are both operatives in military intelligence, one a legend and rogue, and the other an eager novice who eventually also becomes a rogue.

The Vietnam War has, of course, already been fought and refought in literature, much as in American politics. Before Johnson dropped his massive novel on us, many might have asked what the point was, 40 years after the Tet offensive that demonstrated the power of the Vietcong to strike ferociously in the south.

Without stooping to polemic, but rather by delving into the language of myth and of religion, Johnson turns that question on its head, as his characters slog, driven by duty, folly or sheer inertia through the increasingly patent meaninglessness of the war.

The question why is asked and answered over and over again in the book, albeit never in the same way, reinforcing an impression of moral quicksand, and challenging us to ask ourselves just that: What was the point?

“We’re in a worldwide war, have been for close to twenty years,” says the colonel in one exchange with his nephew. “It’s a covert World War Three. It’s Armageddon by proxy. It’s a contest between good and evil, and its true ground is the heart of every human. I’m going to transgress outside the line a little bit now. I’m going to tell you, Skip: Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the goddam Alamo. This is a fallen world. Every time we turn around there’s somebody else going Red.”

Through history’s rearview mirror, this domino theory can look risible these days, and nowhere more than in today’s Vietnam, where the Communists “won,” and where Intel signs and the stock market players and the CNN that I faced everywhere here, and in a stop in Saigon, too, had me asking myself Denis Johnson’s questions.

There was more to it than the facile accoutrements of the capitalist West that are on plain display, though. Given our readiness to believe in good and evil, more disorienting still were the quick and genuine smiles of the people, complete strangers who welcomed me into their neighborhoods and homes, the easy conversations that I was able to have, scarcely haunted by the awful shared history of our two countries.

No, the Vietnamese have not forgotten what happened, but they have given us a humbling demonstration of the human capacity to get on with things, to get over even the most atrocious of life’s chapters and to recover.

This was brought home to me most powerfully late one afternoon when I lingered in the densely packed Ngoc Ha neighborhood, where the wreckage of an American B-52 bomber sits belly up in a shallow pond, where it fell out of the sky during the December 1972 bombing campaign. A modest commemorative plaque hangs on a wall nearby.

I was, myself, a year or so too young to have been drafted and but for that accident of birth, might have come to Vietnam as a pilot or a rifleman. Instead, I wield a notebook and camera today.

A nearby school had just let its students out, and the youngsters tagged along with me smiling and playfully testing out their English as I tried to imagine the terrible scene here decades before they were born. Adults smiled warmly too.

As a visitor, the least it seemed I could do was to reflect on the seemingly banal and yet truly profound truth that war is awful, and indeed very seldom just. It pushes us to think of others as subhuman, in terms like chinks and slopes and gooks, numbing our sensibilities and draining away our compassion.

This isn’t, by the way, even remotely an American phenomenon or an American criticism. Everywhere, mass mobilization, armament and organized killing have required it. Powerful narratives take root and carry us along, playing on our emotions bolstering self-justification and suppressing doubt.

“War is 90 percent myth anyway, isn’t it,” Johnson’s colonel says. “In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow’s gods too.”

Click to read more

Posted at 10:57 PM · Comments (0)

Dispatches From China’s Wild West

March 4, 2008 9:25 AM

NEAR THE CHINESE BORDER, Kyrgyzstan—Bundled into my sleeping bag against the high-altitude chill, unable to sleep, I peered through the bus window. But there was only darkness. I was on a 24-hour bus ride through the desolate borderlands between Kyrgyzstan and China. A combination of harsh geography and paranoid superpowers—the Soviet Union and China—discouraged anyone from settling here in the last 90 years, and this road was opened to travelers only in 2002. The going is still rough. It took us nine hours to travel the 150 miles from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, to the Chinese border, with only one roadside “bathroom” stop at 3 a.m.

Whenever I fell into a shallow slumber, I would be jostled awake by the enormous ruts in the dirt road that constantly rattled our bus or the glaring headlights of oncoming trucks. But also contributing to my insomnia were the butterflies in my stomach as I thought about where I was headed: Kashgar! Closer to Turkey than Beijing, surrounded in every direction by 20,000-foot mountains or harsh desert, for thousands of years it has been a vibrant but remote outpost on the Silk Road between Europe and Asia and the very definition of the middle of nowhere.

Kashgar’s Silk Road history has made it a popular tourist destination with Western backpackers and, increasingly, with Chinese tourists. But it was Kashgar’s more recent history that interested me and drove me to spend the next few weeks exploring the city and the surrounding province of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is the traditional home of the Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) people, Muslims who speak a language related to Turkish and whose European features and olive skin easily distinguish them from the Han Chinese, who represent more than 90 percent of the people in China but who are a minority in this province. China has exerted some sort of influence here for millenniums, and the Chinese presence has ebbed and flowed—exactly how much is hotly debated between the Chinese and Uighurs. Since their first contact, the Uighurs have stubbornly resisted assimilation.

Now China is making a renewed push to cement its control, driven by a confluence of geopolitical factors: its mounting consumption of oil and gas (Xinjiang is home to about one-third of China’s total petroleum reserves), growing fear of Islamist extremism (Uighurs have been captured in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan), and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Independence for countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, whose people are closely related to Uighurs, has renewed hope among Uighurs and fear in Beijing that Xinjiang, too, could become an independent state.

Aiming to nip that ambition in the bud, Beijing is cracking down on the slightest sign of Uighur nationalist sentiment and is rapidly moving Han Chinese people into Xinjiang in an apparent effort to change the demographic balance there. Think Tibet, but without the Dalai Lama or the Beastie Boys.

When we reached the Kyrgyz border station just after dawn, the bus driver collected 500 Kyrgyz som—about $13—from each passenger to bribe the border guards. I was exempted, as was the only other tourist on the bus, a soft-spoken Russian named Ilya who planned to bicycle to Tibet. The other passengers were Uzbek or Kyrgyz suitcase traders re-creating a poor man’s version of the Silk Road. They were on their way to buy cheap Chinese clothes and electronics they would then sell in their ruined post-Soviet hometowns, and they were at the mercy of the border guards.

We lined up inside the border post, our breaths visible in the unlit room, the wooden floor creaking under our feet. For an extra 100 som, the Kyrgyz guards gave us the option of purchasing a piece of paper declaring that we did not have AIDS. This, it was stressed, was optional, but we were warned that the Chinese border guards might ask for it. All the traders bought one, and on their recommendation Ilya did, too. Naturally, the “certification” was made without the benefit of a medical examination. When it was my turn in line, the guard simply noted my American passport and smiled. It was Sept. 11, and in fair English he said he was sorry about what happened six years earlier. He didn’t even offer me a certificate.

Of course, on the Chinese side of the border no one asked for my AIDS papers. After lengthy border procedures and several hours of traveling through a barren, rocky landscape of reds and browns, we reached Kashgar after dark.

Far from the remote outpost of my imagination, Kashgar was a dynamic city with new, wide, and well-lit streets and battery-powered mopeds humming by noiselessly. The city’s taxis were metered—something that, after several months of haggling with Azeri, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz hacks while traveling through the former Soviet Union, seemed the height of modernity. Neon signs greeted me in Chinese and a brand of English with which I would soon become very familiar: “WELCOME TO KASHGAR. THE TOUR WITHOUT KASHGAR IS NOT CONSIDERED THAT YOU HAVE BEEN XINJIANG.”

In the morning, though, it was easier to see Kashgar’s character through the sleek veneer it has acquired over the last few years. Sure, too many of the buildings in the ancient city center are new, obviously cheap knockoffs of Kashgar’s traditional, bricked Islamic architecture. And, yes, the street commerce that has existed here for thousands of years has now been overwhelmed by tourist kitsch (miniature Uighur lutes, engraved teapots with “Made in Pakistan” stamped across the bottom). But the spirit was still there. Groups of bearded men in embroidered four-cornered skullcaps sipped scalding-hot tea out of bowls in dark teahouses, and women in bright multicolored silk dresses bought vegetables from carts in the narrow alleys.

Kashgar is one of the most heavily Uighur cities in China. According to official figures, just 10 percent of its people are Han, but more and more Chinese people are arriving. Han are heavily overrepresented in government jobs—most policemen, for example, are Chinese, including the ones, posted in the sparkling-clean pedestrian underpasses, who sit in front of back-lit propaganda posters, which declaim, in Chinese and Uighur:

A stable Kashgar is my responsibility,
A friendly and open Kashgar is my responsibility,
A harmonious Kashgar is my responsibility.

And in case there is any doubt about who is in charge, a 59-foot statue of Mao Zedong, one of the largest in China, dominates the vast main square.

After a short stroll, I got a haircut in a shop decorated with the same placards you see throughout the Middle East—posters of praying cherubs in front of the Kabaa in Mecca. Included in the price of the haircut (about 75 cents) was a quick but efficient massage. Invigorated, I set out to find a translator and guide.

The first man I met, a friend of a friend of a friend, was nervous. The first thing he said to me was, “If you are a writer, I think it’s better to stay away from you.” (I was afraid even to utter the word journalist—because of its political sensitivity, Xinjiang is off-limits even to credentialed journalists, unless they have special permission, and I was posing as a tourist.) “But call me in an hour or so, and I’ll see if I can find something,” he said, vaguely.

Five minutes later, he found me and explained that he had watched me walk away and hadn’t seen anyone following me. So we stopped for a tea and he explained that over the last year, the police had tightened their grip on all types of political activities and he didn’t want to risk being seen with a journalist. “But call this guy,” he said, scribbling down a cell phone number. “He’ll help you.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2185456/entry/2185457/

Posted at 9:25 AM · Comments (0)

China’s new intelligentsia

March 3, 2008 5:32 PM

March 2008 | 144
Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony

Mark Leonard is the executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. His book What Does China Think? has just been published by 4th Estate
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy’s vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx’s Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers.

As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain’s entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe’s in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

At the beginning of that trip, I had hoped to get a quick introduction to China, learn the basics and go home. I had imagined that China’s intellectual life consisted of a few unbending ideologues in the back rooms of the Communist party or the country’s top universities. Instead, I stumbled on a hidden world of intellectuals, think-tankers and activists, all engaged in intense debate about the future of their country. I soon realised that it would take more than a few visits to Beijing and Shanghai to grasp the scale and ambition of China’s internal debates. Even on that first trip my mind was made up—I wanted to devote the next few years of my life to understanding the living history that was unfolding before me. Over a three-year period, I have spoken with dozens of Chinese thinkers, watching their views develop in line with the breathtaking changes in their country. Some were party members; others were outside the party and suffering from a more awkward relationship with the authorities. Yet to some degree, they are all insiders. They have chosen to live and work in mainland China, and thus to cope with the often capricious demands of the one-party state.

We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story of China’s intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.

Paradoxically, the power of the Chinese intellectual is amplified by China’s repressive political system, where there are no opposition parties, no independent trade unions, no public disagreements between politicians and a media that exists to underpin social control rather than promote political accountability. Intellectual debate in this world can become a surrogate for politics—if only because it is more personal, aggressive and emotive than anything that formal politics can muster. While it is true there is no free discussion about ending the Communist party’s rule, independence for Tibet or the events of Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading newspapers and academic journals about China’s economic model, how to clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or North Korea. Although the internet is heavily policed, debate is freer here than in the printed word (although one of the most free-thinking bloggers, Hu Jia, was recently arrested). And behind closed doors, academics and thinkers will often talk freely about even the most sensitive topics, such as political reform. The Chinese like to argue about whether it is the intellectuals that influence decision-makers, or whether groups of decision-makers use pet intellectuals as informal mouthpieces to advance their own views. Either way, these debates have become part of the political process, and are used to put ideas in play and expand the options available to Chinese decision-makers. Intellectuals are, for example, regularly asked to brief the politburo in “study sessions”; they prepare reports that feed into the party’s five-year plans; and they advise on the government’s white papers.

So is the Chinese intelligentsia becoming increasingly open and western? Many of the concepts it argues over—including, of course, communism itself—are western imports. And a more independent-minded, western style of discourse may be emerging as a result of the 1m students who have studied outside China—many in the west—since 1978; fewer than half have returned, but that number is rising. However, one should not forget that the formation of an “intellectual” in China remains very different from in the west. Education is still focused on practical contributions to national life, and despite a big expansion of higher education (around 20 per cent of 18-30 year olds now enrol at university), teaching methods rely heavily on rote learning. Moreover, all of these people will be closely monitored for political dissent, with “political education” classes still compulsory.

Zhang Weiying has a thing about Cuban cigars. When I went to see him in his office in Beijing University, I saw half a dozen boxes of Cohiba piled high on his desk. The cigar boxes—worth several times a Chinese peasant’s annual income—are fragments of western freedom (albeit products of a communist nation), symbols of the dynamism he hopes will gradually eclipse and replace the last vestiges of Maoism. Like other economic liberals—or members of the “new right” as their opponents call them—he thinks China will not be free until the public sector is dismantled and the state has shrivelled into a residual body designed mainly to protect property rights.

The new right was at the heart of China’s economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Zhang Weiying has a favourite allegory to explain these reforms. He tells a story about a village that relied on horses to conduct its chores. Over time, the village elders realised that the neighbouring village, which relied on zebras, was doing better. So after years of hailing the virtues of the horse, they decided to embrace the zebra. The only obstacle was converting the villagers who had been brainwashed over decades into worshipping the horse. The elders developed an ingenious plan. Every night, while the villagers slept, they painted black stripes on the white horses. When the villagers awoke the leaders reassured them that the animals were not really zebras, just the same old horses adorned with a few harmless stripes. After a long interval the village leaders began to replace the painted horses with real zebras. These prodigious animals transformed the village’s fortunes, increasing productivity and creating wealth all around. Only many years later—long after all the horses had been replaced with zebras and the village had benefited from many years of prosperity—did the elders summon the citizenry to proclaim that their community was a village of zebras, and that zebras were good and horses bad.

Zhang Weiying’s story is one way of understanding his theory of “dual-track pricing,” first put forward in 1984. He argued that “dual-track pricing” would allow the government to move from an economy where prices were set by officials to one where they were set by the market, without having to publicly abandon its commitment to socialism or run into the opposition of all those with a vested interest in central planning. Under this approach, some goods and services continued to be sold at state-controlled prices while others were sold at market prices. Over time, the proportion of goods sold at market prices was steadily increased until by the early 1990s, almost all products were sold at market prices. The “dual-track” approach embodies the combination of pragmatism and incrementalism that has allowed China’s reformers to work around obstacles rather than confront them.

The most famous village of zebras was Shenzhen. At the end of the 1970s, Shenzhen was an unremarkable fishing village, providing a meagre living for its few thousand inhabitants. But over the next three decades, it became an emblem of the Chinese capitalism that Zhang Weiying and his colleagues were building. Because of its proximity to Hong Kong, Deng Xiaoping chose Shenzhen in 1979 as the first “special economic zone,” offering its leaders tax breaks, freedom from regulation and a licence to pioneer new market ideas. The architects of reform in Shenzhen wanted to build high-tech plants that could mass-produce value-added goods for sale in the west. Such experimental zones were financed by drawing on the country’s huge savings and the revenues from exports. The coastal regions sucked in a vast number of workers from the countryside, which held down urban wages. And the whole system was laissez-faire—allowing wealth to trickle down from the rich to the poor organically rather than consciously redistributing it. Deng Xiaoping pointedly declared that “some must get rich first,” arguing that the different regions should “eat in separate kitchens” rather than putting their resources into a “common pot.” As a result, the reformers of the eastern provinces were allowed to cut free from the impoverished inland areas and steam ahead.

But life today is getting tougher for the economists behind this system, like Zhang Weiying. After 30 years of having the best of the argument with ideas imported from the west, China has turned against the new right. Opinion polls show that they are the least popular group in China. Public disquiet is growing over the costs of reform, with protests by laid-off workers and concern over illegal demolitions and unpaid wages. And the ideas of the market are being challenged by a new left, which advocates a gentler form of capitalism. A battle of ideas pits the state against market; coasts against inland provinces; towns against countryside; rich against poor.

Wang Hui is one of the leaders of the new left, a loose grouping of intellectuals who are increasingly capturing the public mood and setting the tone for political debate through their articles in journals such as Dushu. Wang Hui was a student of literature rather than politics, but he was politicised through his role in the student demonstrations of 1989 that congregated on Tiananmen Square. Like most young intellectuals at the time, he was a strong believer in the potential of the market. But after the Tiananmen massacre, Wang Hui took off to the mountains and spent two years in hiding, getting to know peasants and workers. His experiences there made him doubt the justice of unregulated free markets, and convinced him that the state must play a role in preventing inequality. Wang Hui’s ideas were developed further during his exile in the US in the 1990s, but like many other new left thinkers he has returned to mainland China—in his case to teach at the prestigious Qinghua University. I met him last year in “Thinker’s Café” in Beijing, a bright and airy retreat with comfy sofas and fresh espressos. He looks like an archetypal public intellectual: cropped hair, a brown jacket and black polo-neck sweater. But Wang Hui does not live in an ivory tower. He writes reports exposing local corruption and helps workers organise themselves against illegal privatisations. His grouping is “new” because, unlike the “old left,” it supports market reforms. It is left because, unlike the “new right,” it worries about inequality: “China is caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst elements of both… I am in favour of orienting the country toward market reforms, but China’s development must be more balanced. We must not give total priority to GDP growth to the exclusion of workers’ rights and the environment.”

The new left’s philosophy is a product of China’s relative affluence. Now that the market is driving economic growth, they ask what should be done with the wealth. Should it continue accumulating in the hands of an elite, or can China foster a model of development that benefits all citizens? They want to develop a Chinese variant of social democracy. As Wang Hui says: “We cannot count on a state on the German or Nordic model. We have such a large country that the state would have to be vast to provide that kind of welfare. That is why we need institutional innovation. Wang Shaoguang [a political economist] is talking about low-price healthcare. Cui Zhiyuan [a political theorist] is talking about reforming property rights to give workers a say over the companies where they work. Hu Angang [an economist] is talking about green development.”

The balance of power in Beijing is subtly shifting towards the left. At the end of 2005, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao published the “11th five-year plan,” their blueprint for a “harmonious society.” For the first time since the reform era began in 1978, economic growth was not described as the overriding goal for the Chinese state. They talked instead about introducing a welfare state with promises of a 20 per cent year-on-year increase in the funds available for pensions, unemployment benefit, health insurance and maternity leave. For rural China, they promised an end to arbitrary taxes and improved health and education. They also pledged to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent.

The 11th five-year plan is a template for a new Chinese model. From the new right, it keeps the idea of permanent experimentation—a gradualist reform process rather than shock therapy. And it accepts that the market will drive economic growth. From the new left, it draws a concern about inequality and the environment and a quest for new institutions that can marry co-operation with competition.

In February 2007, Hu Jintao proudly announced the creation of a new special economic zone complete with the usual combination of export subsidies, tax breaks and investments in roads, railways and shipping. However, this special economic zone was in the heart of Africa—in the copper-mining belt of Zambia. China is transplanting its growth model into the African continent by building a series of industrial hubs linked by rail, road and shipping lanes to the rest of the world. Zambia will be home to China’s “metals hub,” providing the People’s Republic with copper, cobalt, diamonds, tin and uranium. The second zone will be in Mauritius, providing China with a “trading hub” that will give 40 Chinese businesses preferential access to the 20-member state common market of east and southern Africa stretching from Libya to Zimbabwe, as well as access to the Indian ocean and south Asian markets. The third zone—a “shipping hub”—will probably be in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. Nigeria, Liberia and the Cape Verde islands are competing for two other slots. In the same way that eastern Europe was changed by a competition to join the EU, we could see Africa transformed by the competition to attract Chinese investment.

As it creates these zones, Beijing is embarking on a building spree, criss-crossing the African continent with new roads and railways—investing far more than the old colonial powers ever did. Moreover, China’s presence is changing the rules of economic development. The IMF and the World Bank used to drive the fear of God into government officials and elected leaders, but today they struggle to be listened to even by the poorest countries of Africa. The IMF spent years negotiating a transparency agreement with the Angolan government only to be told hours before the deal was due to be signed, in March 2004, that the authorities in Luanda were no longer interested in the money: they had secured a $2bn soft loan from China. This tale has been repeated across the continent—from Chad to Nigeria, Sudan to Algeria, Ethiopia and Uganda to Zimbabwe.

But the spread of the Chinese model goes far beyond the regions that have been targeted by Chinese investors. Research teams from middle-income and poor countries from Iran to Egypt, Angola to Zambia, Kazakhstan to Russia, India to Vietnam and Brazil to Venezuela have been crawling around the Chinese cities and countryside in search of lessons from Beijing’s experience. Intellectuals such as Zhang Weiying and Hu Angang have been asked to provide training for them. Scores of countries are copying Beijing’s state-driven development using public money and foreign investment to build capital-intensive industries. A rash of copycat special economic zones have been set up all over the world—the World Bank estimates that over 3,000 projects are taking place in 120 countries. Globalisation was supposed to mean the worldwide triumph of the market economy, but China is showing that state capitalism is one of its biggest beneficiaries.

As free market ideas have spread across the world, liberal democracy has often travelled in its wake. But for the authorities in Beijing there is nothing inexorable about liberal democracy. One of the most surprising features of Chinese intellectual life is the way that “democracy” intellectuals who demanded elections in the 1980s and 1990s have changed their positions on political reform.

Yu Keping is like the Zhang Weiying of political reform. He is a rising star and an informal adviser to President Hu Jintao. He runs an institute that is part university, part think tank, part management consultancy for government reform. When he talks about the country’s political future, he often draws a direct analogy with the economic realm. When I last met him in Beijing, he told me that overnight political reform would be as damaging to China as economic “shock therapy.” Instead, he has promoted the idea of democracy gradually working its way up from successful grassroots experiments. He hopes that by promoting democracy first within the Communist party, it will then spread to the rest of society. Just as the coastal regions were allowed to “get rich first,” Yu Keping thinks that party members should “get democracy first” by having internal party elections.

Where the coastal regions benefited from natural economic advantages such as proximity to Hong Kong, the Cantonese language and transport links, Yu Keping sees advantages for party members—such as their high levels of education and articulacy—which make them into a natural democratic vanguard. What is more, he can point to examples of this happening. At his suggestion, in 2006 I visited a county in Sichuan province called Pinchang that has allowed party members to vote for the bosses of township parties. In the long run, democracy could be extended to the upper echelons of the party, including competitive elections for the most senior posts. The logical conclusion of his ideas on inner party democracy would be for the Communist party to split into different factions that competed on ideological slates for support. It is possible to imagine informal new left and new right groupings one day even becoming formal parties within the party. If the Communist party were a country, its 70m members would make it bigger than Britain. And yet it is hard to imagine the remote, impoverished county of Pinchang becoming a model for the gleaming metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen. So far, none of the other 2,860 counties of China has followed its lead.

Many intellectuals in China are starting to question the utility of elections. Pan Wei, a rising star at Beijing University, castigated me at our first meeting for paying too much attention to the experiments in grassroots democracy. “The Sichuan experiment will go nowhere,” he said. “The local leaders have their personal political goal: they want to make their names known. But the experiment has not succeeded. In fact, Sichuan is the place with the highest number of mass protests. Very few other places want to emulate it.”

Chinese thinkers argue that all developed democracies are facing a political crisis: turnout in elections is falling, faith in political leaders has declined, parties are losing members and populism is on the rise. They study the ways that western leaders are going over the heads of political parties and pioneering new techniques to reach the people such as referendums, opinion surveys or “citizens’ juries.” The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen “à la carte.”

Chongqing is a municipality of 30m that few people in the west have heard of. It nestles in the hills at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialin Jiang rivers and it is trying to become a living laboratory for the ideas of intellectuals like Pan Wei and Fang Ning. The city’s government has made all significant rulings subject to public hearings—in person, on television and on the internet. The authorities are proudest of the hearings on ticket prices for the light railway, which saw fares reduced from 15 to just 2 yuan (about 14p). This experiment is being emulated in other cities around China. But an even more interesting experiment was carried out in the small township of Zeguo in Wenling City—it used a novel technique of “deliberative polling” to decide on major spending decisions. The brainchild of a Stanford political scientist called James Fishkin, it harks back to an Athenian ideal of democracy (see “The thinking voter,” Prospect May 2004). It involves randomly selecting a sample of the population and involving them in a consultation process with experts, before asking them to vote on issues. Zeguo used this technique to decide how to spend its 40m yuan (£2.87m) public works budget. So far the experiment has been a one-off but Fishkin and the Chinese political scientist He Baogang believe that “deliberative democracy” could be a template for political reform.

The authorities certainly seem willing to experiment with all kinds of political innovations. In Zeguo, they have even introduced a form of government by focus group. But the main criterion guiding political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Can a more responsive form of authoritarianism evolve into a legitimate and stable form of government?

In the long term, China’s one-party state may well collapse. However, in the medium term, the regime seems to be developing increasingly sophisticated techniques to prolong its survival and pre-empt discontent. China has already changed the terms of the debate about globalisation by proving that authoritarian regimes can deliver economic growth. In the future, its model of deliberative dictatorship could prove that one-party states can deliver a degree of popular legitimacy as well. And if China’s experiments with public consultation work, dictatorships around the world will take heart from a model that allows one-party states to survive in an era of globalisation and mass communications.

China scholars in the west argue over whether the country is actively promoting autocracy, or whether it is just single-mindedly pursuing its national interest. Either way, China has emerged as the biggest global champion of authoritarianism. The pressure group Human Rights Watch complains that “China’s growing foreign aid programme creates new options for dictators who were previously dependent on those who insisted on human rights progress.”

China’s foray into international politics should not, however, be reduced to its support for African dictators. It is trying to redefine the meaning of power on the world stage. Indeed, measuring “CNP”—comprehensive national power—has become a national hobby-horse. Each of the major foreign policy think tanks has devised its own index to give a numerical value to every nation’s power—economic, political, military and cultural. And in this era of globalisation and universal norms, the most striking thing about Chinese strategists is their unashamed focus on “national” power. The idea of recapturing sovereignty from global economic forces, companies and even individuals is central to the Chinese worldview.

Yang Yi is a military man, a rear admiral in the navy and the head of China’s leading military think tank. He is one of the tough guys of the Chinese foreign policy establishment, but his ideas on power go far beyond assessments of the latest weapons systems. He argues that the US has created a “strategic siege” around China by assuming the “moral height” in international relations. Every time the People’s Republic tries to assert itself in diplomatic terms, to modernise its military or to open relationships with other countries, the US presents it as a threat. And the rest of the world, Yang Yi complains, all too often takes its lead from the hyperpower: “The US has the final say on the making and revising of the international rules of the game. They have dominated international discourse… the US says, ‘Only we can do this; you can’t do this.’”

One of the buzzwords in Chinese foreign policy circles is ruan quanli—the Chinese term for “soft power.” This idea was invented by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, but it is being promoted with far more zeal in Beijing than in Washington DC. In April 2006, a conference was organised in Beijing to launch the “China dream”—China’s answer to the American dream. It was an attempt to associate the People’s Republic with three powerful ideas: economic development, political sovereignty and international law. Whereas American diplomats talk about regime change, their Chinese counterparts talk about respect for sovereignty and the diversity of civilisations. Whereas US foreign policy uses sanctions and isolation to back up its political objectives, the Chinese offer aid and trade with no strings. Whereas America imposes its preferences on reluctant allies, China makes a virtue of at least appearing to listen to other countries.

But while all Chinese thinkers want to strengthen national power, they disagree on their country’s long-term goals. On the one hand, liberal internationalists like Zheng Bijian like to talk about China’s “peaceful rise” and how it has rejoined the world; adapting to global norms and learning to make a positive contribution to global order. In recent years, Beijing has been working through the six-party talks to solve the North Korean nuclear problem; working with the EU, Russia and the US on Iran; adopting a conciliatory position on climate change at an international conference in Montreal in 2005; and sending 4,000 peacekeepers to take part in UN missions. Even on issues where China is at odds with the west—such as humanitarian intervention—the Chinese position is becoming more nuanced. When the west intervened over Kosovo, China opposed it on the grounds that it contravened the “principle of non-intervention.” On Iraq, it abstained. And on Darfur, in 2006 it finally voted for a UN mandate for peacekeepers—although Beijing is still under fire for its close ties to the Sudanese government.

On the other hand, China’s “neocons”—or perhaps they should be called “neo-comms”—like Yang Yi and his colleague Yan Xuetong openly argue that they are using modern thinking to help China realise ancient dreams. Their long-term goal is to see China return to great-power status. Like many Chinese scholars, Yan Xuetong has been studying ancient thought. “Recently I read all these books by ancient Chinese scholars and discovered that these guys are smart—their ideas are much more relevant than most modern international relations theory,” he said. The thing that interested him the most was the distinction that ancient Chinese scholars made between two kinds of order: the “Wang” (which literally means “king”) and the “Ba” (“overlord”). The “Wang” system was centred on a dominant superpower, but its primacy was based on benign government rather than coercion or territorial expansion. The “Ba” system, on the other hand, was a classic hegemonic system, where the most powerful nation imposed order on its periphery. Yan explains how in ancient times the Chinese operated both systems: “Within Chinese Asia we had a ‘Wang’ system. Outside, when dealing with ‘barbarians,’ we had a hegemonic system. That is just like the US today, which adopts a ‘Wang’ system inside the western club, where it doesn’t use military force or employ double standards. On a global scale, however, the US is hegemonic, using military power and employing double standards.” According to Yan Xuetong, China will have two options as it becomes more powerful. “It could become part of the western ‘Wang’ system. But this will mean changing its political system to become a democracy. The other option is for China to build its own system.”

The tension between the liberal internationalists and the neo-comms is a modern variant of the Mao-era split between bourgeois and revolutionary foreign policy. For the next few years, China will be decidedly bourgeois. It has decided—with some reservations—to join the global economy and its institutions. Its goal is to strengthen them in order to pin down the US and secure a peaceful environment for China’s development. But in the long term, some Chinese hope to build a global order in China’s image. The idea is to avoid confrontation while changing the facts on the ground. Just as they are doing in domestic policy, they hope to build pockets of an alternative reality—as in Africa—where it is Chinese values and norms that increasingly determine the course of events rather than western ones.

The western creations of the EU and Nato—defined by the pooling rather than the protecting of sovereignty—may one day find their matches in the embryonic East Asian Community and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. Through these organisations, China is reassuring its neighbours of its peaceful intent and creating a new community of interest that excludes the US. The former US official Susan Shirk draws a parallel between China’s multilateral diplomacy and her own country’s after the second world war: “By binding itself to international rules and regimes, the US successfully established a hegemonic order.”

The UN is also becoming an amplifier of the Chinese worldview. Unlike Russia, which comports itself with a swagger—enjoying its ability to overtly frustrate US and EU plans—China tends to opt for a conciliatory posture. In the run-up to the Iraq war, although China opposed military action, it allowed France, Germany and Russia to lead the opposition to it. In 2005 when there was a debate about enlarging the UN security council, China encouraged African countries to demand their own seat, which effectively killed off Japan’s bid for a permanent seat. Equally, Beijing has been willing to allow the Organisation of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new UN human rights council. This diplomacy has been effective—contributing to a big fall in US influence: in 1995 the US won 50.6 per cent of the votes in the UN general assembly; by 2006, the figure had fallen to just 23.6 per cent. On human rights, the results are even more dramatic: China’s win-rate has rocketed from 43 per cent to 82 per cent, while the US’s has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 per cent. “It’s a truism that the security council can function only insofar as the US lets it,” says James Traub, UN correspondent of the the New York Times. “The adage may soon be applied to China as well.”

The debate between Chinese intellectuals will continue to swirl within think tanks, journals and universities and—on more sensitive topics—on the internet. Chinese thinkers will continue to act as intellectual magpies, adapting western ideas to suit their purposes and plundering selectively from China’s own history. As China’s global footprint grows, we may find that we become as familiar with the ideas of Zhang Weiying and Wang Hui, Yu Keping and Pan Wei, Yan Xuetong and Zheng Bijan as we were with those of American thinkers in previous decades; from Reaganite economists in the 1980s to the neoconservative strategists of the 9/11 era.

China is not an intellectually open society. But the emergence of freer political debate, the throng of returning students from the west and huge international events like the Olympics are making it more so. And it is so big, so pragmatic and so desperate to succeed that its leaders are constantly experimenting with new ways of doing things. They used special economic zones to test out a market philosophy. Now they are testing a thousand other ideas—from deliberative democracy to regional alliances. From this laboratory of social experiments, a new world-view is emerging that may in time crystallise into a recognisable Chinese model—an alternative, non-western path for the rest of the world to follow.

Posted at 5:32 PM · Comments (1)

Irving Penn: He photographed the most important artists of the last half-century—and in the process joined their ranks.

March 3, 2008 5:12 PM

Irving Penn photographed so many prominent cultural figures of the 20th century that, over the years, he came to be regarded as an equal among them. But his stature grew not just because of his venerated subjects—he advanced the genre of portraiture. His formal rigor, graphic daring, and studied simplicity brought the portrait to a new level of representation. The rich, mottled tones with which he crafted his portraits are less about creating mood than about rendering pure physicality. With bold, contrasting light, he cast his accomplished subjects in nothing less than monumental terms—as if each one is chiseled, for the ages, in stone.

The 90-year-old photographer has been actively securing his own legacy in recent years, methodically placing bodies of his work in several important museum collections. In 2002, he donated 85 one-of-a-kind platinum prints to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the museum subsequently exhibited the work in a large show, “Irving Penn: Platinum Prints,” in 2005. Earlier this month, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced their acquisition of 250 Penn prints from his blue-collar series of portraits called “The Small Trades.” The museum purchased 125 of the prints, and Penn donated the rest. The same arrangement was made with the Morgan Library and Museum in New York last year; Penn donated 35 portraits, and they purchased an additional 32 for their collection, currently on display in the museum’s inaugural exhibition of photographs.

It’s fitting that the Morgan, known as a preserve for the very best of the humanities, would choose Penn’s visual pantheon of arts and letters for its first photography show. Some of the greatest writers, artists, and musicians of the last half-century posed for Penn; among those in the Morgan show are W.H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Carson McCullers, Igor Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams.

Penn is the natural heir to Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen, both of whom photographed cultural figures central to the early half of the 20th century for Vanity Fair and other lavish publications of the day. Beaton and Steichen shared an element of theatricality in their portraiture. Each of them constructed for their subjects a public persona out of ambient lighting, elegant clothing, and props—chaise lounges, grand pianos, bouquets of flowers, swank cigarette holders. But while Penn followed in the footsteps of Beaton and Steichen, he established a style all his own. Penn, for the most part, banished the accoutrements. He relied on manner, attitude, and countenance to represent a subject’s legacy.

At the beginning of his career, Penn would not have gained access to such a significant group of artists and writers without his affiliation to Vogue. Alexander Liberman hired Penn to work for Vogue in 1943, initially as an art director. Within a year, however, Penn had published his first cover photograph for the magazine, and his career as a photographer was launched.

Penn made this portrait of Jean Cocteau during a 1948 trip to Paris for Vogue. Each thread of Cocteau’s tie, vest, and suit is etched in light and shadow; the patterns and the texture pop out in vivid, tactile detail. The drape of his coat over an extended arm adds drama and balance to the composition. Cocteau is dressed in the sartorial attire of a dandy, which, by all accounts, he was. There is an air of flamboyance about him, until you look at his face. His dead-serious expression registers the fierce intelligence of a keen observer, as if he is taking our measure while deigning to allow us to take his.

Penn believed that the portraitist must appear as a servant to the sitter, nurturing and encouraging the sitter’s self-revelation. At the same time, he once told a reporter that while many photographers consider the subject to be the client, “my client is the woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.”

Click to read more

Posted at 5:12 PM · Comments (0)

An Obama for France? It won’t happen soon

March 3, 2008 5:12 PM

The rise of Barack Obama to the forefront of the race for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination is holding a mirror to France as its citizens prepare to vote next month in 36,781 municipal elections. Moussa Deme laughs out loud at the idea that the French would elect someone like Obama, 46, to any political office.

“In France? Never,” Deme, a 22-year-old Senegalese-born student, said on the way home from his job at a restaurant in Paris. “In France, it is impossible for a black man even to be mayor. They think it is enough that we are on their football team.”

While France has Europe’s biggest population of sub-Saharan and North African immigrants and their descendants, it doesn’t have any black or Arab mayors currently in office, according to Adil Jazouli, a sociologist who is an adviser to a government committee on urban affairs. There are also no members of the National Assembly from France’s first- or second-generation immigrant population, he added.

“The French political system is archaic,” Jazouli said. “In business, sports, music, entertainment, you find diversity in France. Not in politics.”

Holding to the “republican” principle, France makes no distinction among its citizens by race, religion or ethnic origin. Still, minority representation in its political sphere remains a distant dream.

“Sadly, France is not even close,” said Chris Simakala, a 32-year-old black Frenchman who teaches economics. “Not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow.”

Granted, France’s experience with non-European settlers is relatively recent. In the past 200 years, it has taken in more immigrants than any other European country, according to a study by the University of Sunderland in Britain. While those in the 19th century came from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, most post-1950s immigrants have been black or Arab and came from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia or sub-Saharan Africa.

The country did have a black mayor in 1989: Kofi Yamgnane, of Togolese origin, was elected in the small, practically all-white village of St. Coulitz in Brittany.

In Nicolas Sarkozy’s successful presidential campaign, he called for stricter criteria for immigrants as well as “positive discrimination” for disadvantaged citizens (an idea called “affirmative action” in the United States). Sarkozy has awarded several high-profile jobs in his administration to people of Arab or African descent, including Rachida Dati, minister of justice, whose parents were born in North Africa.

Dati, 42, is now the candidate from Sarkozy’s party, the conservative Union for a Popular Movement, for mayor of the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris. Other minority candidates vying in the municipal elections include Nordine Nachite, a member of Sarkozy’s party of Moroccan descent who is running for mayor of Creil, a low-income town northeast of Paris.

Still, France has a lot more work to do to politically integrate its immigrants, said Natalie Sombie, a 30-year-old grade-school teacher who is French and of Caribbean origin. It will be while before the country accepts a black man running for president, she says.

“Until France reconsiders its history with its colonies, it won’t be able to deal with its immigrants,” she says. “We know this. We live it daily.”

Obama’s personal history - the son of a white mother and an African father, his four childhood years in Indonesia and his early career as a community organizer in Chicago - has impressed many people in France.

His candidacy holds out hope for France’s minorities, says Christine Ockrent, host of a popular French TV talk show and author of a book on Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“The fact that he is of mixed blood brings out the idea of reconciliation,” she says. “For all sorts of reasons, the U.S. is more advanced than France in terms of race relations. Remember, until eight or nine months ago, we had an all-white government. France is in no way an example.”

Place Carrée, an atrium at the center of Les Halles, an underground shopping mall, offers a cross-section of a fast-changing France, where 1 out of every 10 inhabitants is of Arab or African descent.

That ratio is even higher at this junction of two suburban rail lines and the Paris subway system. About 800,000 people pass through the transport hub each day, many of them from the capital’s outlying suburbs, where the city’s minority populations are concentrated.

Most of the commuters on a recent weekday were on their way to or from their jobs or university classes. For some, the United States seems a distant, different place; still, they’ve been following the presidential contest closely.

Click to read more

Posted at 5:12 PM · Comments (0)

China Discovers the Permissive Society

March 3, 2008 8:52 AM

BEIJING (AP) — The no-tell motels in Beijing’s university districts pulsate with sex.

Every weekend, lusty college couples make a beeline past greasy spoon restaurants and bootleg video game shops for the dim hotel lobbies to book three-hour blocks of privacy. Students fill half the simple but tidy rooms at the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, a 10-minute walk from Beijing Normal University.

China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm.

But the revolution is taking place largely behind closed doors, and the word “sex” — or “xing” (pronounced shing) is spoken only among close friends, and then usually in a whisper.

As a result, sex education has not kept up with sexual activity, with some unwelcome consequences. High school girls make up 80 percent of the patients at Shanghai abortion clinics during one-week school holidays, state media reported last year.

As recently as the 1980s, a couple holding hands in public would draw stares. Now, a government that once had say over when and whom people could marry is more concerned about regulating interest rates. And rising incomes have allowed urban Chinese to pursue much more than mere survival.

While the countryside remains more traditional, at least outwardly, public benches in cities are filled at night with young couples necking openly. Hipsters pack sleek clubs to flirt, chain-smoke imported cigarettes and sip green tea mixed with whiskey. Vibrators are sold in vending machines and at ubiquitous “adult health product” stores. Even the Web site of the government’s Xinhua News Agency has a photo slideshow titled “Paris Hilton goes sexy for birthday party.”

Studies indicate that 60 to 70 percent of Chinese have had sex before marriage, up from 15 percent in 1989, according to Li Yinhe, a sex expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In that time, the average urban marriage age has crept steadily higher, reaching 31 for men in Shanghai last year. There has also been a notable shift in attitudes, particularly among those born in the booming ’80s.

At the Pepper bar in Beijing, a 20-year-old manager who did not give her name said without hesitation that young women’s attitudes toward sex is casual. Her friends often show up and pick up men.

Cai Junjie, a strapping 23-year-old golf coach who calls himself Tank, saw no reason for a long mating ritual before sex.

“If two people want to be together, time isn’t an issue,” he said, still avoiding the word “sex” when talking to a stranger.

Chu Yanyang, an unemployed 21-year-old, said she once went to a bar known as “One-Night Stand,” just to see if it lived up to its reputation. It did.

“They’ll … write their phone number on a little slip of paper. And if you drink a beer with him, then he’ll give you the slip of paper,” she said. “That way, you can get in touch if you want to hook up another day, or some people might even just leave together then and get a hotel room.”

Maintaining a relationship can be too much work, Chu added. “If when we eat I always put food on your plate for you and one day I don’t, then you might get mad and fuss at me. These little fights are really hard,” she said. “So you might have a one-night stand. It’s just so much easier.”

Those without their own apartments can turn to hourly rate motels. Dorm rooms in China are generally crowded with a half-dozen students each, while many follow tradition — or economic necessity — and live with their parents long after high school graduation.

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, one young woman flounced into the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, beau in tow, brushing past another couple in the lobby to negotiate loudly with the receptionist for her favorite room (No. 112) and a break on the rate ($12 for three hours).

At a shabby basement hotel around the corner, where every room is decorated with a poster of a scantily clad Western woman, a young couple straightened the sheets and blanket before leaving. A sign on the wall warned: “If the linens are too dirty, you will lose your deposit.”

Families and schools remain shy when talking about sex, and teenage sex has flourished in the gap between awkward discussions and silence.

Psychologist Deng Jun fields 15 to 20 calls a day, mostly about sex, on a hot line for teens she runs out of her office, tucked in a corner of the fifth floor of the dingy Beijing No. 2 Hospital. Most of her callers are high school or college age, though sometimes they are as young as 10.

“With society opening up, our attitudes about sex are changing,” the 52-year-old said. “(Adults) don’t approve of premarital sex … because when you have sex, it brings a series of unavoidable problems. These problems, as they increase, become society’s problems.”

A vocational high school in Xinjiang, a region about 1,500 miles west of Beijing, briefly enacted a rule last year requiring female students to take pregnancy tests as part of their annual school physical. An outcry about privacy forced the school to retreat.

Abortion is readily available and viewed as a much better alternative to the searing shame of being an unwed teenage mother in China.

A walk-in abortion costs $140 at the Haidian Maternal and Child Health Hospital, a large public hospital in northwest Beijing. Too pricey? Skip the anesthesia and the price falls to $55.

Still, the rising number of abortions among younger Chinese alarms educators, who blame outdated sex education. Students learn about sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS, but the discussions about sex itself are vague and condom use is rarely addressed.

“They don’t talk directly about sexual relations,” said Li, the sex expert. “If you don’t talk directly about sex, it’s an incomplete sex education.”

Frisky blogger “Bamboo Shadows” embodies the contradictions of a changing China, with one foot entrenched in traditional values and the other swinging forward toward a modern kind of free love.

On her site, the Beijing resident openly discusses her breasts, orgasms and struggles to control arousal during yoga classes. But the husky-voiced tech worker, who refused to give her real name in an interview, illustrated in one posting that even in an increasingly permissive China, standards still exist.

She had wrapped her arm around her boyfriend’s waist while riding on the back of his bicycle, caressing him as he pedaled the streets of the Chinese capital. But later, she wrote, “He wanted to be very affectionate in public. I refused. I said we had just eaten and hadn’t brushed our teeth.”

Posted at 8:52 AM · Comments (0)

Amazing Grace: The Art and Ordeal of the Kimono

March 2, 2008 10:20 PM

An excerpt of a piece about a Western woman’s apprenticeship in wearing the kimono:

As I would learn, subtlety and understatement are the underpinnings of the kimono mystique. Before I changed out of my jeans, Ms. Fujii showed me the one-size-fits-all undergarments, which, I decided, looked like an Amish trousseau. Arranged on the floor were a susoyoke, or floor-length apron; a hadajuban, or short jacket that wraps around the waist; and a nagajuban, which is a longer robe that goes directly beneath the kimono. White tabi socks finished the look.

By the time I was suited up, my breasts and hips (which had been padded) had disappeared. So had my freedom of movement: to sit, I found myself sinking onto my shins like a camel; rising required pushing back on my heels and unfolding like a lotus. I did well enough with those bits, but only because they felt like familiar yoga postures.

Learning to swish noiselessly while trussed, however, obviously required more than one lesson. I was told to step lightly but deliberately on the tatami mat.

“We walk like this,” explained Ms. Fujii, “to echo the way the heart beats. As in Zen.”

Click to read more

Posted at 10:20 PM · Comments (0)

The Mental Kitchen

March 2, 2008 9:51 PM

Excerpts from a piece that appeared in the Readings section of Harper’s in Dec. 2007.

Judging a work of art is virtually the same mental operation as judging human beings, and requires the same aptitudes: first a real ove of works of art, and inclination to praise rather than blame, and regret when a complete rejection is requires; second, a vast experience of all artistic activities; and last, an awareness, openly and happily accepted, of one’s own prejudices. Some critics fail because they are pedants whose ideal of perfection ins always offended by a concrete realization. Others fail because they are insular and hostile to what is alien to them; these critics, yielding to their own prejudices without knowing they have them and sincerely offering judgments they believe to be objective, are more excusable than those who, aware of their prejudices, lack the courage to enter the lists to defend their personal tastes.

The best literary critic is not the one whose judgments are always right but the one whose essays compel you to read and reread the works he discusses; even when he is hostile, you feel that the work attacked is important enought to be worth the effort. There are other critics who, even when they praise a book, cancel any desire you might have to read it…

… In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand…

… Propaganda is the use of magic by those who no longer believe in it against those who still do.

Posted at 9:51 PM · Comments (0)

Do Not Disturb: Sex is a hassle

March 2, 2008 10:15 AM

“Sex is a hassle,” declares a 35-year-old Tokyo salaryman. Since age
19, he’s found his hormonal urges could be satiated with adult sex aids.

“As long as I’ve got a place to do it with my omocha (toy), I don’t
need a woman,” he says. “And anyway, sex is a turnoff. It’s just as
enjoyable to do it alone and not have to worry about having to please
a partner.”

“The Ice Age of Sex,” proclaims Shukan Asahi (March 7), has arrived.

The Japan Family Planning Association, which periodically surveys
young people, observed a marked decline in interest in sex from
around 1999.

Take males in their third year of middle school — an age when puberty
should be in full bloom. Males who said they desire sex plummeted,
from 86 percent in 1987 to 36.9 percent in 2005. For females in the
same age group, the figure peaked at 37 percent in 1993; in 2005 it
had declined to 22.6.

What’s to blame for this? Could it be computer games? Or economic
factors?

“For me, games are good enough,” admits a 21-year-old woman, who
works part-time. She’s completely addicted to otome gemu (computer
games for young maidens) such as “Angelique.” “I’ve decided I’ll
never engage in sex in my life. But I’ve seen adult videos and books,
so I know what men like.”

“Girls these days are saying it’s better to have ‘pure love,’ ”
popular novelist Ira Ishida explains to Shukan Asahi. “But they’re
being overly influenced by novels distributed via cell phones and the
Internet. Before, when they weren’t under the spell of so much
information, I think they could pick up the signals from their own
bodies, and respond more directly to their curiosity.”

“I don’t have the money or the sense of responsibility,” shrugs a 30-
year-old man. “If I bring a child into this world, I can’t support
it. So I don’t have sex.”

He’s even gone so far as to enroll in the Japan Cherry Boys’
Association, an organization of male virgins (http://
www.cherrybb.jp), where he’s got plenty of company. Founded in 1998,
the organization’s membership now exceeds 600.

The Japan Times: Sunday, March 2, 2008

Posted at 10:15 AM · Comments (0)

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