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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The Financial Times

An excerpt.

Talk to retail planners and finance teams at the major brands and they’ll enthuse about the world as if it were an Emirates route map - units opening in Bahrain, 20 new stores in China, the possibility of shops in the “stans” and freestanding outlets in Mumbai.

To them, the years ahead will be won solely in emerging markets while the pace of European and US openings will slow. Sit front row at the shows of these same brands, however, and the world extends no further than 20 kilometres inland from the shores of the Baltic. The face of menswear is still, after far too many years, tall, slender-hipped, sharply-cropped, aged between 18 and 22 and has a name like Timo or Andreas. Men’s fashion is hoping to attract new buyers in markets like Pune, Almaty, São Paulo, Johannesburg and Busan but the bodies they’re using to bait these new consumers hail from Lübeck, Tartu, Malmö and Tampere.

Which brings me back to my questions. Do you respond to fashion images that are vaguely convincing or pure fantasy? For the better part of a decade, I’ve found it difficult to connect with a £2,000 suit carried down a catwalk by an 18-year-old Finn who is narrow of frame but wide of the core target.

At assorted shows on Monday and Tuesday, I watched the faces of new buyers and press who are now taking up ever-larger blocks of seats and wondered what they made of this somewhat dated look. Where was the strapping lad from Seoul? The athletic young man from Goa? The high-cheekboned chap from Harbin? If I were a shareholder in a major luxury goods company, I’d be asking some sharp questions about the marketing plans of various brands in the seasons to come. The all-white, under-20 face of men’s fashion looked very old-world this week.

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Copyright Salon

An excerpt.

… Not only can too much loud noise damage your hearing, or disrupt your sleep, it can literally suck the life out of you thanks to the human body’s fight-or-flight response. “The human auditory system is designed to serve as a means of warning against dangers in the environment,” explains Louis Hagler, a retired internal medicine specialist in Oakland, Calif. “Noise above a certain level is perceived by the nervous system as a threat.” The body responds to that threat with an outpouring of epinephrine and cortisol, the so-called stress hormones. “Your blood pressure goes up, your pulse rate goes up, there is a sudden outpouring of sugar into the bloodstream so the body is prepared to meet whatever threat there is in the environment.”

If exposures are intermittent or rare, the body has the chance to return to normal. But if the exposure is unrelenting, the body doesn’t have a chance to calm down, and blood pressure and heart rate may remain elevated, Hagler explains. That’s why what seems like a mere annoyance can actually have long-term health effects. “There is no question that people who live near a busy roadway are experiencing effects on their blood pressure,” says Hagler.

As Bean attests, once you tune into the din, it’s hard to tune out again. “It’s like an allergy — once you get sensitized to one of these things then they all bother you, and then each one builds on the other,” he says. And what’s a mere nuisance to one person is another’s bête noire. “There is no evidence that noise causes mental illness itself, but there is little doubt that it may accelerate or intensify some kind of mental disorders,” explains Hagler. He adds that symptoms of exposure to noise pollution include anxiety, nervousness, nausea, headaches, emotional instability, argumentativeness and changes in mood. No wonder excessive noise has been used as a form of torture. …

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard W. French
June 26, 2008

SHANGHAI: The movers come Saturday morning, and for the sixth time in my career as a journalist, I will oversee the odd spectacle of uniformed strangers trooping through my house, filling boxes with my belongings, taping and labeling them and hauling them off toward their next destination.

What’s most unusual about this move is the destination itself. A few weeks from now, I will be returning to the United States. Yes, it is my country of origin, in the language of the hundreds of airport customs forms I have filled out, but since 1979, for all but three and a half years, I have worked overseas.

A lesson I have learned over those years is that the prudent don’t wait for the packers, so for several days now, what passes for free time has been spent sifting through all manner of belongings, throwing away whatever is deemed unneeded, of course, but also savoring a chance to revisit a life lived to a very great extent on the road.

By fortuitous coincidence, I have been rereading “Remembrance of Things Past” by Proust, one of whose guiding thoughts was about the way we are defined by the objects that we surround ourselves with. They become our compass points and, consciously or not, the stuff of most every routine.

The storage boxes I have sifted through have surprised me in any number of ways. There have been reminders of the kindness of strangers who have written to me over the years to comment, often at great length and in neat longhand, which seems almost quaint in our e-mail age, on things I have reported, chiding me gently over perceived mistakes or nudging my thoughts in new directions.
There have been the photographs, tucked away in unsuspected places, that have reminded me of long-forgotten trips to obscure destinations. There have been the faded legal pads and notebooks filled with my own squint-inducing scrawl: countless to-do lists, fragmentary thoughts that eventually coalesced into story ideas, bons mots and investment tips, both great and not so great.

There has been reminder after reminder of technology’s grand march of obsolescence, with 1.44 megabyte floppy disks and memory cards and video adapters and dial-up modems and video cassettes and much, much more, consigned to the junk pile.

A particular surprise has involved language study. Crate after crate has disgorged an unimagined haul of study tools, from Spanish dictionaries to instructional tapes of Haitian Creole. I almost feel like I should open a school.

The real language blizzard, though, began with the move to Asia in 1998, and with my soon to be warehoused materials. I’ve got the gamut of complexity covered: from Easy Hiragana to Japanese for Busy People; from the Power of Suru (perhaps the most widely used Japanese verb) to Power Kanji.

In moments of long past virtue and linguistic ambition, I have bought box after box of Japanese character flashcards, which I studied in elevators and on trains. I had stacks of beautifully homemade ones, too. They contain compound words (right-wing, business trip, export, import) written out for me in brush on small slips of paper in the midst of my hundreds of hours of lessons at the knees of Nagao sensei. With her prim smile and perfect posture, she encouraged me to keep climbing the mountain until my very last week in Japan.

The hard effort, she averred, would take me to the top.

Not to contradict my sensei, but as game as I was to study, I knew that one never makes it to the top. A Haitian proverb says it best: Behind a mountain is the next mountain. For me the next mountain was Chinese, and when I came to Shanghai, I exhausted my ambition during the first six months studying eight hours a day using teachers who tag teamed me. Today, my collections of Chinese character cards and homework assignments jostle mutely with the Japanese ones.

“Like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy.” Proust wrote this phrase in gentle ridicule of people who would seek the unattainable.

If one takes one’s journey for the goal instead of fixing on a destination, there may be less opportunity for disappointment. It’s certainly been that way for me, setting out for Africa right out of school for a year and staying for six; plunging as deeply as possible into each new place, from Haiti, Cuba and El Salvador to Liberia, Mali and the then-Zaire.

To borrow a cliché, language is just a tool, and though true that may be, I remember the terror I experienced my first day of Japanese class, arriving two weeks late for a course at the University of Hawaii, and seeing students half my age write their homework on the blackboard in the language.

Good teachers make for good journeys, though, and fortunately for me, Omura sensei, my first Japanese instructor wouldn’t allow me to be discouraged. What ensued was the greatest ride of my life, as East Asia, with its immense energy, has opened up, sharing its secrets with me, first in Japan and Korea and now in the biggest dynamo for change of all, China.

Three decades ago, I set out on a journey desiring the world, and though one is humbled to know how much there is to be seen, and how little any one person can understand, there is little room for disappointment.

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Copyright The New Republic

Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City

By Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey, and Haili Kong (Palgrave Macmillan, 321 pp., $27.95)

Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China

By Susan Brownell (Rowman & Littlefield, 213 pp., $24.95)

Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008

By Xu Guoqi (Harvard University Press, 359 pp., $29.95)

China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges

Edited by Minky Worden (Seven Stories Press, 331 pp., $18.95)

Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China

By Anne-Marie Brady (Rowman & Littlefield, 231 pp., $75)

Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China

Edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (University of Michigan Press, 416 pp., 26.95)

I.

The two million foreign guests who are expected to visit Beijing in August will encounter a largely familiar and exceedingly cosmopolitan environment. They will find clean air, smooth traffic, easy Internet access, and standardized restaurant menus, all intended to provide them with seventeen days of physical, mental, and moral ease. Beijing has trained 1,500 “civilized bus riding supervisors,” appointed 5,000 anti-jaywalking monitors, held “queuing awareness days,” and mounted campaigns against spitting and slurping. The planners have paved over old neighborhoods to make way for five-star hotels, malls, and theme restaurants. Migrant workers who built the Olympic venues will have been dispatched back to the countryside, beggars and petitioners shipped home to their villages, and dissidents and would-be demonstrators placed under temporary house arrest or jailed. Visitors will see an edited Beijing, the way its governors and many of its residents would like it to be seen, a world capital with its exotic side under control.

And yet these same visitors may detect a deep ambivalence in the city’s welcome. The pride may seem leavened with insecurity, the greeting tinged with rejection, the celebration not quite drowning out the whispers of doubt. China has arrived at the modernity it has been seeking for over a century, but it is not quite the modernity that we—and many Chinese—have been expecting.

Visitors may be struck first by Beijing’s monumentalism. Old Beijing’s charm lay in the narrow alleyways known as hutongs, courtyard houses, streetside handicrafts, and slow savors of life—all built, to be sure, on a system of class and gender exploitation that could not survive. Mao Zedong’s new government after 1949 tore down the city walls and built Tiananmen Square as a vast public space to celebrate communist rule. But thanks more to economic stagnation than to city planning, much of the old city was preserved. The first stage of urban revolution happened indoors and underground. Multiple families were crammed into old houses, street trades were eliminated, and tunnels were dug for civil defense. The peddlers and handicraftsmen disappeared, and street life turned drab. But the alleyways and the low buildings of the capital remained largely untouched, at least physically.

Deng Xiaoping’s commercial revolution after 1979 created crowds, bustle, supermarkets, fast food outlets, high rises, bland sprawling residential districts, and wide congested roads. Several international athletic events, such as the Asian Games in 1990, contributed new construction. And this year’s Olympics has finally completed the destruction of the historical city, with a huge new airport terminal, thirty-one competition venues, new roads, subway lines, hotels, bridges, neighborhoods, and parks. What remains of the old-style houses and streets, crafts, means of transportation, and ways of life is mere outdoor museum displays, according to Lillian M. Li and her co-authors in their narrative of the city’s lost past. Visitors should carry this readable book with them as an aid to imagining what is no longer there, and to understanding the political sources—including hubris and corruption—of what they see.

The main Olympic site north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sits at the top of the city’s cosmologically significant north-south axis, explains Susan Brownell in her book on the anthropology of Chinese sports. It thus expresses the unity of sports and politics that the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee have been at such pains to deny. Brownell says that planners at one point wanted the main stadium, referred to as the “Bird’s Nest” because of its lattice-like construction, which was contrived to accommodate 11,000 VIPs so that the whole hierarchy of power could display itself before the people on this most auspicious occasion. The stillsecret opening and closing ceremonies that have been designed for the arena will be global and glitzy, but they need to convey the same power, dignity, and order as did the old PRC aesthetic of massed gray suits, red ties, and primary-color potted flowers. After all, Hu Jintao’s chief contribution to Chinese political thought in his six years in power has been the concept of the “harmonious society.”

The Olympic buildings are diverse, and some of them are innovative. Yet in both the process of their construction and, I expect, in their use, they embody the dominance of the state. The public scale overwhelms the private scale, national power trumps personal comfort, and society’s interests supersede individual rights. China’s systems of land ownership, construction approvals, contracting, and labor discipline allowed quick and efficient displacement of residents (often through police and court collusion with developers, and the threat and use of violence), along with quick decisions on design, quick letting of contracts, and quick completion of projects. The buildings together announce that this is a society able and willing to consummate the Hegelian overcoming of its own past.

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Copyright Slate

(A great read on hypocrisy in Africa policy.)

A pop quiz: Who is the worst dictator in Africa?

a) Robert Mugabe
b) Robert Mugabe
c) Robert Mugabe
d) None of the above

The answer seems obvious. Thanks to extensive coverage in the news media and abundant criticism by Western governments, everyone knows that Zimbabwe’s leader is trying to hang onto power by crushing his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who would roll to victory in the final round of elections on June 27 if his followers were not being killed, beaten, jailed, or harassed by state thugs. Even President George W. Bush described Mugabe’s rule as a “nightmare.”

But Mugabe may not be Africa’s worst. That prize arguably goes to Teodoro Obiang, the ruler of Equatorial Guinea whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre. Years of violent apprenticeship in a genocidal regime led by a crazy uncle? Check. Power grab in a coup against the murderous uncle? Check. Execution of now-deposed uncle by firing squad? Check. Proclamation of self as “the liberator” of the nation? Check. Govern for decades in a way that prompts human rights groups to accuse your regime of murder, torture, and corruption? Check, check, and check.

Obiang, who seized power in 1979, had promised to be kinder and gentler than his predecessor, but in the 1990s, even the U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea received a death threat from a regime insider, the ambassador has said, and had to be evacuated. Not long after that, offshore oil was discovered, but the first wave of revenues—about $700 million—was transferred into secret accounts under Obiang’s personal control. The latest chapter, written in the last month, may be the least surprising, because Obiang’s ruling party won 99 of the 100 seats in legislative elections. A government press release, hailing Obiang as the “Militant Brother Founding President of the PDGE,” carried the headline, “Democracy at Its Peak in Equatorial Guinea.”

If you haven’t heard any of this, don’t worry; as far as I can tell, the only American journalist who has reported on Obiang’s electoral theft is Ken Silverstein, who writes for Harper’s and has for many years poured out a primal scream of investigative reports into Obiang’s misrule. Other than Silverstein’s recent postings and several wire-service stories that were not picked up in America, there has been a vacuum of coverage about a suppression of democracy in Africa that is more complete than what Mugabe is trying to get away with. True, Equatorial Guinea is a small country with a population of less than 1 million, its economy is expanding in an oil boom, and Obiang’s “victory” did not require the obvious and crude violence of Mugabe’s ongoing terror. But Obiang’s enforcers don’t need to club people on the streets. His would-be opponents are too frightened to openly demonstrate against him. His is the Switzerland of dictatorships—so effective at enforcing obedience that the spectacle of unrest is invisible.

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Posted at 10:48 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright New York

An excerpt

…More than any other recent politician, Obama is a literary phenomenon. Like America itself, he’s addicted to origin myths. He’s built his political success on the back of compulsive autobiography, the brilliant telling and retelling, and then retelling some more, of his divinely unorthodox life story: the great sweeping legend of Obamerica, the fusion of man and nation, whose manifest destiny extends all the way to the White House. It’s significant that he used his first appearance in the national spotlight, the keynote speech at Kerry’s DNC, to meta-sketch the inspirational origin of that very keynote speech: “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” he said, and then unleashed, in about 60 seconds, a pithy intergenerational family saga spanning three continents and all the major events of mid-twentieth-century America (Depression, Pearl Harbor, postwar boom)—complete with such unlikely details as goat herding, a tin-roof shack, oil rigs, and Patton’s army marching across Europe. It was like a brilliant movie trailer designed to promote the incalculably awesome feature attraction of his future political career. To deny his candidacy, after that, would be to deny a very powerful narrative logic—the goats, the tin-roof shack, Patton, all of it. Every politician tries to tell stories, of course, to harness the emotional momentum of narrative in the service of an agenda. But few do so as naturally as Obama. All serious candidates have a maniacal ambition—in retrospect, Hillary’s looked unflattering because she didn’t nest it quite deeply enough in a persuasive narrative logic; Barack’s is so embedded in an attractive story that we hardly even notice it…

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Copyright The Globe and Mail
June 22, 2008

LHASA - It was the loud man with the megaphone, herding us relentlessly onto the buses, who symbolized the worst of our escorted tour of Tibet.

The official press tour is one of the rituals of Communist China, as time-honored as the ceremony to raise the Chinese flag at Tiananmen Square every morning. It’s far from the ideal way to gather news.

But with Tibet still tightly sealed off from the outside world, I accepted an invitation to join a government-sponsored press tour to Lhasa this weekend, realizing it was the only way to get even a limited glimpse into this locked-down region.

It was only the second time that foreign journalists have been permitted to enter Tibet since the wave of sometimes-bloody protests that began on March 10, so I was keen to get a first-hand look into the forbidden territory.

But an official press tour can be a humiliating experience. Our itinerary was filled with weirdly irrelevant events, including a handicrafts exhibition, a visit to a tourist village, and a press conference to announce a performance of traditional dance. The man with the megaphone was constantly barking at us, hectoring us to move faster. The schedule was packed with activity from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., to keep us busy and distracted from the real news.

Every moment was pre-programmed. To ensure that we didn’t miss anything, we were given unsolicited wake-up calls at 6:15 a.m., urging us out of bed and into the program.

We were lodged in a government hotel, far from the historic centre of Lhasa, to make it even harder for us to have any independent contact with monks or other malcontents.

At the allocated time for dinner on Friday, I managed to slip away from the hotel and hail a taxi to the old town, where I was able to see the massive security presence, including thousands of paramilitary police in camouflage uniforms, in advance of the Olympic torch relay the next day. There were paramilitary troops and regular police on every corner.

A few other journalists also slipped away from the hotel. The next day, we were reprimanded by a government minder, who claimed to be worried about our personal safety. “This is Lhasa,” she warned ominously. “You could get lost, you could be detained. It could happen anywhere, particularly Lhasa. When you’re out, we’re really concerned. Anything could happen.”

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Copyright Foreign Affairs

ELIZABETH C. ECONOMY is C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. ADAM SEGAL is Maurice R.
Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On the night of July 13, 2001, tens of thousands of people poured into
Tiananmen Square to celebrate the International Olympic Committee’s
decision to award the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. Firecrackers
exploded, flags flew high, and cars honked wildly. It was a moment to be
savored. Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other leaders exhorted the
crowds to work together to prepare for the Olympics. “Winning the host
rights means winning the respect, trust, and favor of the international
community,” Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympic official, proclaimed. The
>official Xinhua News Agency reveled in the moment, calling the decision
“another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical
event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation.”

Hosting the Olympics was supposed to be a chance for China’s leaders to
showcase the country’s rapid economic growth and modernization to the rest
of the world. Domestically, it provided an opportunity for the Chinese
government to demonstrate the Communist Party’s competence and affirm the
country’s status as a major power on equal footing with the West. And
wrapping itself in the values of the Olympic movement gave China the
chance to portray itself not only as a rising power but also as a
“peace-loving” country. For much of the lead-up to the Olympics, Beijing
succeeded in promoting just such a message.

The process of preparing for the Games is tailor-made to display China’s
greatest political and economic strengths: the top-down mobilization of
resources, the development and execution of grand-scale campaigns to
reform public behavior, and the ability to attract foreign interest and
investment to one of the world’s brightest new centers of culture and
business. Mobilizing massive resources for large infrastructure projects
comes easily to China. Throughout history, China’s leaders have drawn on
the ingenuity of China’s massive population to realize some of the world’s
most spectacular construction projects, the Great Wall, the Grand Canal,
and the Three Gorges Dam among them. The Olympic construction spree has
been no different. Beijing has built 19 new venues for the events, doubled
the capacity of the subway, and added a new terminal to the airport.
Neighborhoods throughout the city have been either spruced up to prepare
for Olympic visitors or simply cleared out to make room for new Olympic
sites. Official government spending for the construction bonanza is
nearing $40 billion. In anticipation of the Olympics, the government has
also embarked on a series of efforts to transform individual behavior and
modernize the capital city. It has launched etiquette campaigns forbidding
spitting, smoking, littering, and cutting in lines and introduced programs
to teach English to cab drivers, police officers, hotel workers, and
waiters. City officials have used Olympic projects as a means to refurbish
decaying buildings and reduce air pollution, water shortages, and traffic jams.

Yet even as Beijing has worked tirelessly to ensure the most impressive of
Olympic spectacles, it is clear that the Games have come to highlight not
only the awesome achievements of the country but also the grave
shortcomings of the current regime. Few in the central leadership seem to
have anticipated the extent to which the Olympic Games would stoke the
persistent political challenges to the legitimacy of the Communist Party
and the stability of the country. Demands for political liberalization,
greater autonomy for Tibet, increased pressure on Sudan, better
environmental protection, and an improved product-safety record now
threaten to put a damper on the country’s coming-out party. As the Olympic
torch circled the globe with legions of protesters in tow, Beijing’s
Olympic dream quickly turned into a public-relations nightmare.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080701faessay87403/elizabeth-c-economy-adam-segal/china-s-olympic-nightmare.html

Posted at 10:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 20, 2008

SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.

The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”

But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.

“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”

Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.

“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”

Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.

The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.

Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”

‘Don’t Retreat’

These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”

So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”

For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.

Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.

Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”

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Copyright The Associated Press
15 June 2008

Michael Norton — who spent nearly two decades covering Haiti’s coups, rebellions and disasters for The Associated Press — died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.

Norton chronicled the turmoil that followed former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ouster, spent almost a decade watching the rise and fall of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and wrote compelling accounts of Haiti’s crushing poverty that has created a cycle of despair in the country.

His wife said he died in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where they lived.

Born in Minneapolis, Norton left the United States in 1969 for Ireland, but soon moved to Paris, where he found work as an English teacher and fell in love with Haitian singer and activist, Toto Bissainthe.

The couple moved to Haiti in 1986, just months after “Baby Doc” Duvalier was forced into exile following a popular uprising. Bissainthe died in 1994.

Known for his trademark ponytail and corncob pipe, Norton began working for the AP in 1988 after hosting a series of local radio shows in English, French and Haitian Creole.

For many journalists who covered Haiti, a visit to Norton’s house on the outskirts of Petionville was one of the first steps toward understanding Haiti’s turbulent undercurrent.

Unlike many who covered Haiti from hotels, Norton lived like many Haitians — struggling through power cuts, water shortages, street violence and constant political upheaval.

“I swore I would never sacrifice the truth to any cause, no matter how good,” Norton recently recalled of his time in Haiti.

It was this conviction that often enraged Haiti’s power brokers.

In 2004, when anti-Aristide groups reported a turnout of 60,000 people at a protest in Port-au-Prince, the capital, Norton stuck to his principles.

Using police standards for counting crowds, he reported a far lower number. The result: death threats, angry mobs and Norton’s name singled out on opposition radio programs.

David Beard, who was the AP’s Caribbean news editor from 1992 to 1995, said Norton “helped a generation of readers worldwide understand the despair, joy, and mysteries” of Haiti.

“His diligence and respect for the nation translated as well for writers, reporters, and policymakers who followed his path,” Beard said in an e-mail from Boston, where he works as editor of The Boston Globe’s Web site.

Norton tirelessly covered Haiti until the end, leaving with a final scoop.

Through sources he had built over 20 years, Norton was the first journalist to report that Aristide was ousted Feb. 29, 2004, after a three-week revolt led by gangs and former soldiers.

He left soon after to seek medical attention for a melanoma that had returned.

“He sustained me through difficult times with unconditional friendship,” said Dan Whitman, a friend of Norton’s who worked at the U.S. Embassy in 1999-2001. “Though our professions put information to somewhat different purposes, we had an identical interest in accuracy.”

Norton’s most colorful stories came from covering Haiti’s regular Voodoo pilgrimages. The religion was officially sanctioned during his time in the country.

“We just lost a Haitian journalist, someone who belonged to us,” said Joseph Guyler Delva, a Haitian reporter who heads an association of local journalists and recalled Norton’s fluency in Haitian Creole, a blend of French and African words and syntax.

He said Norton, who was white, was never considered a “foreign” correspondent by Haitians.

Norton joined the AP’s San Juan bureau in 2004, returning to Haiti briefly in 2006, to cover the election of Rene Preval as president.

He retired months later, listening to jazz and writing poetry until the end.

He penned several books, including “And When the Weeds Began to Grow,” and his latest, “Eschatology,” which was published this year. Another book, written in Spanish, was titled, “A quien pueda interesar” or “To Whom It May Concern.”

He often said two books that captured Haiti best were “Alice in Wonderland” and “Exodus.”

“You can’t piece together points of view,” Norton said in 2007 of writing about Haiti.

“You can stack them or align them. But that is like bringing together all the trees in the forest, which becomes impenetrable, like forging a fence from wooden planks. You have to depend on your own intuition, your own capacity to enter into another world, to fall with Alice (in Wonderland) down the hole and subsequently not to lose your sanity or be persnickety about the incomprehensible.”

Norton is survived by his wife, Domnina Alcantara de los Santos.

Posted at 11:51 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
LETTER FROM CHINA
By Howard W. French
June 19, 2008

SHANGHAI: The ground is moving again in East Asia. Tectonic plates are not involved this time, but the rumblings are just as unmistakable, and potentially as significant.

The movement can be seen and felt in a series of steps taken here and there in the region. Each might seem modest, even tiny, for some, but assessing them that way would be to miss the bigger picture.

The first thing that must be said about East Asia is that for all of its economic achievements, it lags woefully behind much of the rest of the world in important ways.

While the Europeans have found a way to discard their suspicions and hatreds and forge a growing community, this region is stuck with problems that date from World War II and the Korean conflict.

To be blunt, there is no community. Each of the major countries - China, Japan and South Korea - clings to its own vision of the future, to its own self-serving version of history, and relates to the outside world as a sole actor, and almost never in terms of regional interests or priorities.

It is against that uninspiring backdrop that one must view the sort of news this week about Japan and China coming to terms over exploitation of disputed offshore gas fields located in the East China Sea.

One says sort of news because of the timid way this development has been presented. Japanese officials began hinting at an agreement early in the week, and sure enough by Wednesday, two senior officials could be seen in a press conference, smiling as they stood in front of a large map.

The problem was that the happy men were both Japanese ministers hailing the breakthrough. So far, no Chinese official has done so, and Beijing has gone out of its way to play down the agreement, even muddying the waters over its substance.

“I would like to reiterate that China’s consistent position and stance on the East China Sea issue have remained unchanged,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told the press in Beijing the same day. “Chunxiao Oil and Gas Field falls completely within China’s sovereignty rights, and has nothing to do with joint development.”

There has indeed been an agreement. What the divergent announcements amount to is the squeak of a very rusty wheel: the wheel of Chinese-Japanese cooperation.

Having played Japan as the boogeyman for so long, Beijing now looks almost ludicrously timid. This is for fear of appearing to have made any concessions, fear of a photo-op with Japan, and most of all, fear of its own public, especially what The China Youth Daily recently called the “Online Red Guards.”

These are the Internet-based nationalist rabble-rousers who rail at every imagined slight or perceived signal of Chinese weakness, one of whom promptly denounced the agreement as “the typical behavior of those who sell out the country,” and called for them to sent before a firing squad.

Beijing’s dilemma inspires little sympathy. The understanding with Japan, by contrast, should be saluted and encouraged. Taken together with the recent agreements between Beijing and Taipei over travel, the oil field diplomacy roughly amounts to the first few turns of a Rubik’s Cube in a region that will require many, many more turns in order to bring its diplomatic and geopolitical realities in line with its economic achievement.

All credit to Beijing for having found the political will and courage to come this far, and one hopes for much bigger steps ahead. Defusing relations with Taiwan and achieving a long overdue genuine normalization with Japan would each be rich in payoffs for Beijing and for the world.

Taiwan’s newly elected leader, Ma Ying-jeou, has helped make this clear, putting flesh on his vision of accelerated economic cooperation and political détente with Beijing in an interview this week with the International Herald Tribune.

It is hard to imagine anything doing more to validate China’s claim to becoming a new kind of power, a peace-minded nation, than cutting back on the forces arrayed against Taiwan in southern China, and committing to a political and economic engagement with its neighbor that acknowledges the importance of Taiwanese opinion.

In recent months, China’s leaders have taken real steps forward with Japan, with both Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao visiting, and agreeing to regular high level exchanges.

Bigger steps are still needed, though.

China has an opportunity to establish a relationship of real trust and confidence that would have far-reaching consequences. Close working ties would ease the natural insecurities of the Japanese and others in this region as China rises, and could eventually even bring dramatic adjustments in America’s hitherto central role in the region’s security.

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Copyright The Washington Post
June 17, 2008

BEIJING, June 16 — America may be discussing whether Barack Obama is tough enough to field a 3 a.m. phone call, but for the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, the real issue is his race.

“Obama’s skin color is the biggest focal point of this year’s U.S. election,” said the opening line in a front-page editorial in the overseas edition of Monday’s People’s Daily newspaper.

The editorial, while perhaps stark in its analysis, gave voice to a fascination among many Chinese at the sight of a black man running for president in the world’s most powerful nation. The U.S. campaign, and Obama’s victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton, have provided them with a noticeable contrast to China’s own situation, where Han Chinese eclipse minorities by their overwhelming majority and show no sign of relinquishing their hold on the levers of power.

The race issue has become particularly sensitive here in recent months, with the Public Security Bureau accusing Muslim Uighur separatists in the Xinjiang region of plotting terrorist attacks in Beijing, and Tibetans rioting against Han Chinese rule in Lhasa, the Tibetan regional capital, and several other Tibetan-inhabited areas.

The editorial sought to explain that Obama’s breakthrough should not be understood as a demonstration that race relations have crossed a threshold in the United States that China has yet to approach. Obama, it said, became the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee because, as a Harvard lawyer, he shares the same “background” as others in the U.S. elite.

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Copyright Caijing

International Children’s Day was celebrated with sadness in Mianyang, a city in the heart of earthquake-shaken Sichuan Province. Parents in mourning arranged photos of the 128 children they lost atop debris from the collapsed Fuxing No. 2 Primary School. They renamed the event “Children’s Day in Heaven.”

Bi Kaiwei, father of a deceased 12-year-old, said his daughter was a dancer with beautiful eyes. Ever since her body was pulled from the rubble, the mother has followed a daily routine – in memorial. Each morning she carries her daughter’s photo to what used to be the school, and each night she brings it home.

Parental grief has spread like a pall over Sichuan. Thousands of schools with children inside collapsed during the magnitude 8 earthquake on the afternoon of May 12. Many young victims were killed by falling concrete and bricks.

Afterward, many parents demanded explanations. They wanted to know why the buildings collapsed so easily. Official data and a Caijing investigation of five crumbled schools has helped shed light on the answer.

A Ministry of Education official, Han Jin, told the media May 16 that 6,898 classrooms collapsed across Sichuan. Two weeks later, the publication 21st Century Business Herald reported that nearly 2 million square meters of school space had crumbled in the quake, killing 4,737 students and injuring more than 16,000.

A government investigation of the tragedy continues. Currently, the central government’s education and construction ministries are divided over whether to blame the size of the earthquake or poor quality construction. At the core of the debate is a simple question: Are schools in China more prone to collapse than other buildings?

A graphic reply to that question can be found at the Fuxing school site. The building where Bi’s daughter was busy studying with classmates was completely shattered when the quake struck. But many buildings surrounding the school survived and stand intact even today, towering over the debris.

What happened at Fuxing mirrored tragedies in cities across Sichuan. Two buildings at the Juyuan Middle School were the only structures that completely collapsed in the city of Dujiangyan, killing 240 students. Similar stories were told in communities across the region, including Mianyang, Mianzhu and Shifang.

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Copyright Joe Posnanski

Here a couple of very entertaining riffs from one of my favorite sports writers.
His blog is usually a very good read, and the entire item, which I’m only excerpting here is both fun and illuminating.

… *I used to have an old newspaper editor who weaned me off the word ”arguably“ because, he said, ”Everything is arguable.“ He’s wrong about that. Kobe vs. Michael is not arguable.

Yes, this is the first time I feel really EMOTIONAL about an athlete of my childhood. I really do mean no offense to Kobe — OK, maybe a little offense, I don’t like him much, and I am partial to others like Tim Duncan, and I’d rather have Chris Paul or LeBron — but I appreciate that he’s a great player, one of the best of his time. But comparing him to Michael? What? I can’t help it … that infuriates me….

… In any case, I was thinking about this again while watching the NBA Finals end on Tuesday in ignominy and disgrace for Kobe Bryant and the Lakers. I mean, seriously, the Lakers lost by THIRTY NINE POINTS. I won’t lie: That gave me some old man joy. The Lakers seemed to think they were playing a preseason game in Dubuque. They didn’t just get outclassed, they played like they didn’t care. Kobe was laughably bad. He was 7 for 22 from the field, he had one assist, four turnovers — you got the sense he only brought a carry-on bag with him to Boston.

And the argument is over. Forever. I don’t care what happens from here on out, I don’t care how many points Kobe scores or how many good years he has left, nobody with sense will ever have the gall again to compare Kobe and Michael. It’s not even worth saying that what happened to the Lakers on Tuesday could not possibly have happened to a Michael Jordan TEAM. What is worth saying is that Michael Jordan playing BY HIMSELF would have put up a better fight….

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
June 18, 2008

SHANGHAI — For weeks after the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan Province last month, the public grew accustomed to a grim daily ritual as the Chinese government provided precise daily updates on the rising numbers of dead and missing.

In the past few days, the updates have all but stopped, frozen for now with grim precision at the figure 69,172. Behind this seeming clarity, however, lies a far messier reality.

Officials involved in the data collection quietly acknowledge that the publicly available death toll is little more than a rough guess of the number of people killed in the May 12 earthquake.

In some ways, China’s response to the disaster was a break with past practices of secrecy and tight government control. Chinese journalists reported from the scene with unaccustomed freedom in the early days after the quake, and volunteer workers and donations poured into Sichuan Province from all over the country, as well as from abroad, demonstrating a kind of civic activism new to China.

In other respects, though, the crisis has revealed a country ill prepared for a major emergency, with an emergency response system unused to satisfying the public’s hunger for information.

Few matters highlighted these shortcomings more than the process of accounting for the dead and the missing. Methods of tallying the two categories varied widely from place to place. In some localities, the toll was ascertained through body counts, other direct physical evidence or witness accounts. In other areas, mostly guesswork prevailed.

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Copyright Portfolio.com

An excerpt from an amusing and insightful piece about “Romenesko” by Howell Raines:

… It’s true that the late Gerald Boyd and I, then the top two editors at the Times, were among the first to get Romenesko’d out of our jobs. According to Roy Peter Clark, the senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the verb form of ­Romenesko’s name quickly established itself as journalistic shorthand for getting zapped, often fatally, by unflattering publicity. I never really blamed the messenger. Since then, however, hard times have hit the newspaper business, and today, many editors are doing just that, grousing that Romenesko’s blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation’s newsrooms with its instantaneous reporting of layoffs, declining ad revenues, and fire-sale prices being paid for metropolitan dailies.

Romenesko himself sees the irony. With typical Midwestern modesty, he says he didn’t set out to create a media-economics monitoring service but rather a national “community of journalists” for “people like me who are obsessed with newspapers.” That his site has become a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe was merely a side effect. In a sense, Romenesko is both the medium and the message. Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product—verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

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Copyright Slate

I have nothing against Tim Russert. He hosted two decent programs, Meet the Press and the less-watched Tim Russert, and ably helmed NBC News’ Washington bureau. According to his colleagues and competitors, he was a contentious journalist and a fine leader. He was said by all to be a good husband, father, and son.

So Russert’s death at 58 is a sad occasion. Yet is it of such importance and momentum that his network, the other networks, and newspapers should continue to salute, remember, and otherwise memorialize him?

Russert’s own networks, NBC and MSNBC, have bathed him in appreciation. On Friday, MSNBC broke in with coverage announcing the death and started collecting reactions. NBC Nightly News mourned his passing. Dateline NBC was given over to Russert’s memory, as was MSNBC’s Hardball. The fallen newsman’s Saturday show, Tim Russert, memorialized him, as did the Saturday edition of Today, which fielded the reminiscences of Bob Schieffer, George Stephanopoulos, and Tom Brokaw, who appeared at almost every juncture to talk about his friend. Sunday’s Today reprised the coverage. The Chris Matthews Show devoted itself to Russert’s memory, and the contestants—I mean, guests—on a special edition of Meet the Press competed to see who could loft the highest praise for the show’s departed host. (See this Meet the Press reel for a few examples.)

As if all the NBC News airtime isn’t enough, MSNBC plans to broadcast a private memorial service for Russert from the Kennedy Center on June 18 at 4 p.m.

What has possessed NBC News to televise a never-ending video wake? Almost nothing aired contained much in the way of news. After reporting his passing and a postmortem by his physician, nearly every minute of NBC and MSNBC coverage tried to convey the loss felt by his peers—David S. Broder, Andrea Mitchell, Al Hunt, Mike Barnicle, Al Roker, Brian Williams, Dennis Murphy, Barbara Walters, Bob Woodward, Gwen Ifill, Sally Quinn (“I feel almost like we did when somebody—when Jack Kennedy or even Katharine Graham died”), Chuck Todd, Wolf Blitzer, Kelly O’Donnell, Maria Shriver, and others. They loved him. They admired him. He was their mentor. He raised the bar for all journalists. He was thoughtful. He was kind. Of the highest integrity. Generous. Loyal. And so on. Just because it’s true doesn’t make it news.

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Copyright The New York Times

June 16, 2008

About a quarter-century ago, I was in West Beirut at the Commodore Hotel, once described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. You lined up to use the telex. There was a war on in a divided city. There was also plenty of Black Label.
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It was hard to get in, harder to get out. The airport was closed. You sailed from Cyprus to Jounieh, a village north of Beirut. The ship couldn’t dock there so you transferred at sea to small fishing boats that took you ashore. Jumping from one to the other across a yard of heaving water caused some women to scream or balk.

We were comfortable enough at the Commodore. You got used to the shelling. Some Beirut kids, it was said, could not sleep without the sounds of war because that was all they had known.

It was good to be cut off. As a journalist, that’s what you wanted to be: cut off, except for that telex line.

I became a journalist because I wanted to tell stories. To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.

Beirut gave you time. Most of war is sitting around. I watched kids on the sidewalks, facades of buildings blown away behind them, constructing elaborate castles of cigarette cartons, flimsy creations that defied shelling as the spirit defies measurement.

At the Central Bank, I met a young woman. I was waiting. There was a lot of that. Her name was Sana. Later she took me to her family’s shuttered apartment. All but she had fled to Europe. There were heavy drapes over the ornate furniture and the airless, opulent rooms spoke of a rich life eclipsed.

I felt like a trespasser on family secrets, gazing at formal portraits. But perhaps we story tellers are trespassers. There is something indecent about what we do, plunderers of others’ lives. The faster we move on, the more indecent it is. I’ve been the unseemly chronicler of too many tears.

That abandoned apartment taught me something essential about Beirut’s cosmopolitan soul, a truth deeper than all the labels of the war’s militias, Christian, Shia, Druse and the rest. Sana taught me about the defiance of loss. The universal in the particular is all we can aspire to.

It helps to be cut off, to have nowhere to go, nowhere but your story, and no excuse for not telling it. I would gaze at the blank sky and think of kids that smiled at me. Gulls swooped.

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Copyright Tribune Media Services via The International Herald Tribune

June 11, 2008

Hot night, New York: a little breeze in the trees in the deep stone canyons as I look out my window, thousands of little lighted windows of private lives, one of which is mine.

I’m reminded of this by the fact that a hundred feet away, a man stands at a window looking through binoculars that seem to be trained precisely on me, and though he surely would prefer looking at someone more exciting than a tall bespectacled man in black T-shirt and jeans, a man who is not jumping around playing air guitar or fastening his hair to his head with strips of tape or unzipping the dress of a beautiful woman, nonetheless he is focused on me, and I don’t leap back from the window in horror - I feel (slightly) honored by his attention.

This is what we do in the big city: we look at each other. I take my sandy-haired daughter on the subway down to Houston Street and she sits, holding my hand, gazing into faces and because it is the subway and not the Cold Spring Harbor Sailing Regatta, there is an astonishing variety of faces, all shades, all shapes, all hairstyles from punk to post-hair.

Back where I come from, we are rather similar - it’s like the old joke about the little ant who was confused because all his uncles were ants - but in New York there’s plenty to catch your eye. I have to remind her of the five-second rule. You can stare at anybody for five seconds but then you have to look away. Look but don’t make a scene. And now we are all staring at Barack Obama, who is - if you listen to him on the radio - a commanding presence and a towering candidate for president.

I heard the speech he gave in St. Paul to an arena full of supporters and the man can give a speech. Nobody else surfs on applause like Obama and drives his point home and it all sounds as if he were telling you what he thinks and not reading off a Plexiglas reflector. But when you look closely at him he is a skinny young black guy and this is going to be a problem for some folks.

The year my father graduated from high school, Duke Ellington toured the country with his 15-piece orchestra, playing his hits “Mood Indigo” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” to ballrooms packed with his fans, but things being what they were, they traveled in a private railroad car because you just never knew if you could get a hotel room or a meal in a restaurant or be turned away by some jerk in a suit and tie.

They were all black, but Juan Tizol, the trombonist, was fairly light-skinned and had to wear blackface so nobody would think the band was integrated. Ellington didn’t complain. He loved his work and he was cool and he didn’t deign to address bigotry - he just played right through it.

That era is not so distant. A culture doesn’t turn on a dime. Race is a part of this race, even though nobody wants to think so. But Obama has gifts that transcend race and his own slim resumé. On the radio, he is an orator resurrected from a distant time when people had higher standards for that sort of thing.

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LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
June 12, 2008

DUNHUANG, China: There has never been a marker on the ground in this area, and had there been, it would have been long ago removed, but through much of its long history, the country we know today as China has largely petered out somewhere in the vicinity of this Silk Road outpost.

A visitor today can imagine that spot as towering dunes with their shifting sands that sit at the edge of this sleepy town. You could just as easily place it somewhere in the forbidding badlands that lie within a few hours’ drive from here.

I visited them recently to get a taste of the history in this desolate corner of the country, wandering into gigantic sandstone formations cut and shaped over the ages by the wind into a sight as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon.

Intrigued by the travel stories of the exiled Chinese author, Ma Jian, along the way, I had my driver wander off the simple, two-lane road that winds through the region in search of western end of the Great Wall. Throughout the morning, my mind had raced with images of what I might find. I had imagined myself climbing atop the structure, as every visitor who travels to the wall near Beijing surely does.

When I mentioned this to my driver, he shot me a look that suggested I was crazy. He was having trouble enough finding this section of the Great Wall, which was built during the Han Dynasty two millennia ago. There would be no climbing, he informed me. What remains of the wall is scarcely high enough, and rather brittle.

When we finally caught sight of it, I was chastened but not disappointed. The voyage had been all about understanding China’s definition of itself over time, and its relationship with the “other.”

Quite rightfully, the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province has captivated the world’s attention and drawn unprecedented sympathy and support for China from countries all over the world. From the perspective of Beijing, it has also conveniently pushed out news from beyond the Great Wall of unrest that had roiled Tibet and Xinjiang - provinces that are known as “autonomous regions,” in an administrative fiction that Orwell would have appreciated.

Xinjiang alone comprises one-sixth of the land of the People’s Republic of China, and Tibet, such as it is defined today, is only marginally smaller. At various times in its history, including recently, Tibet has been much larger, comprising parts of several other provinces.

On the surface, Tibetans and the indigenous Uighur population of Xinjiang would seem to have little in common. The Tibetans are Buddhist and the Uighurs are largely Muslim. But they are united in their sense of oppression, as native people of distinctive cultural spheres with a history of autonomy and even independence, all of which has been recently snuffed out by China.

The point here is not to revisit the protests that swept Tibet in March, or the murmurs in Xinjiang that followed, but rather to think about the fragile, changeable thing that is China and to revisit the way sands have shifted dramatically in this part of the world over the ages.

Most nations have founding myths, and China is no different. Beyond the central narrative about the liberation of the country by Mao’s Red Army lie other legends, more distant in time, but equally essential to this nation’s idea of self. One of them is the notion of Chinese as being fundamentally nonhegemonic, as opposed to the violent and greedy expansionists of the West.

The warm and fuzzy story that Chinese have adopted is of a country that grew organically, gradually embracing closely related neighboring peoples, seducing them with the allure of a superior culture and sealing the deal with marriages between royal lines and other courtly statecraft.

The use and threat of force are consistently played down, leading most people to remember only the most convenient facts, and one summary conclusion, that places like Tibet and Xinjiang have been Chinese for a very long time.

The facts are stubborn, though, and that is part of the reason why history seems unlikely to go away in this part of the world. Few places have seen more to-ing and fro-ing by rival armies, contending empires, competing religions and languages than western China. It is an area that, despite the simplifying myth, has rarely remained securely in China’s grasp and has indeed often outright eluded it.

For roughly 1,000 years, until the 18th century, Xinjiang lived under a succession of names - Qarluq, Chaghatayid, Moghulistan and Yarkan, to name a few. For much of this time, a Tibetan empire was a leading power in the region, leaving its mark clearly on the Buddhist cave frescoes of Dunhuang.

Turks and Mongols, Arabs and yes, Han Chinese, were all part of it, all contending in an extremely complex mix, where flux was constant, and nothing certain beyond the now crumbling wall.

One doesn’t recall all of this history to wish China ill, much less to split it, as Beijing says its enemies are wont to attempt. Rather it is to say that as game as China’s current attempt to freeze what it holds in place, the past may offer useful alternative lessons, chief among which may be a more worldly flexibility, such as practiced by the Tang.

“Tang music was played on the lutes, viols and percussion instruments of Central Asia and India; Tang poets sang of infatuation with western dancing girls,” wrote James Millward in his exhaustively researched “Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang,” who added that some in the Tang court spoke Turkic in preference to Chinese. “For these and other reasons the Tang period was one of imperial China’s most open and cosmopolitan.”

Compare that to western China today, where locals cannot practice their religion freely, and where Tibetans and Uighurs are badly underrepresented in their own “autonomous” governments, never mind Beijing, and one’s appreciation is renewed for why history beyond the old wall may not yet be finished.

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Copyright Foreign Affairs

An excerpt

THE BIG TWO

In part, the strategy proposed here would treat old issues in new ways, recasting conflicts as opportunities for progress. The United States and China could agree to construct their regional trade agreements in ways that support, rather than impede, subsequent multilateral liberalization — and even permit eventual linkage between the regional bodies. Failures to offer significant new market-opening opportunities in the Doha Round would be addressed not as legitimate mercantilist behavior but as threats to the WTO that would jeopardize both countries’ stake in an open world economy. Competitive currency misalignments would be treated as deviations from IMF norms that hurt all trading partners, especially poor countries. Washington would concede that its errant fiscal policy has contributed to the overvaluation of the dollar, just as Beijing would concede that undervaluation of the yuan has reflected inadequate Chinese internal demand and excessive government intervention. The United States could escort China into the International Energy Agency to help organize the response of consuming countries to high oil prices.

More far-reaching steps might involve the creation of new international norms and institutional arrangements to govern issue areas that are important but currently unregulated, such as global warming and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date, China has steadfastly refused to even contemplate binding constraints on its greenhouse gas emissions. So has the United States, but that stance seems likely to change dramatically after the presidential election in November, no matter who wins. An emissions regime, however, may well lead to the installation of trade barriers in participating countries against carbon-intensive products from nonparticipating countries. Moreover, global warming cannot be seriously addressed without China, which has become the world’s largest polluter. Unless Washington and Beijing find ways to cooperate in attacking the probem together, the result could be a trade war between them and little or no action on the environment.

China has already indicated some skepticism about the adoption of new international guidelines, even if voluntary and nonbinding, regarding the structure and investment activities of SWFs. But the United States is championing such codes in order to permit continued foreign investment and head off the risk of protectionist domestic reactions. Since the U.S. economy is especially dependent on Chinese capital, without some new agreement a frontal clash could develop over this issue, triggered either by China’s rejection of proposed new guidelines or by the United States’ rejection of Chinese investments in particularly sensitive areas.

Whether in dealing with old or new issues, the basic idea would be to develop a G-2 between the United States and China to steer the global governance process. Other major powers, such as the EU and, on some issues, Japan, would of course need to be deeply involved as well. The new rules, codes, or norms could frequently be implemented through existing multilateral institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO. Some of them might work better through new worldwide organizations created to deal with truly new issues, such as a global environmental organization to manage climate-change policy. But effective systemic defenses against international economic challenges in today’s world must start with active cooperation between its two dominant economies, the United States and China.

Given other powers’ sensitivities, of course, it would be impolitic for Washington and Beijing to use the term “G-2” publicly. But for the strategy to work, the United States would have to give true priority to China as its main partner in managing the world economy, to some extent displacing Europe. Nothing less is likely to attract China or engage the United States sufficiently to create the effective leadership that the world so desperately needs.

Some initial stes have already been taken in this direction. After I floated the idea of a G-2 in late 2004, Robert Zoellick, in his new capacity as deputy secretary of state, which he undertook in February 2005, launched initial discussions with Chinese counterparts. In 2007, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson escalated the engagement to what is now known as the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, which involves the leaders of ten or so cabinet agencies in each country. The beginnings of an institutional framework for a working G-2 have thus already been put in place, and patterns of cooperation are already developing on topics such as the environment and international finance. But it is not nearly enough for China to be seen as a “responsible stakeholder.” It must be seen, and accorded full rights, as a true leadership partner.

Such a relationship between a rich developed country and a poor developing one would be unprecedented in human history — as is there being a poor economic superpower, which is what China is. There are enough examples of similar cooperation on specific issues, however, to suggest that converting U.S.-Chinese disputes into systemic management issues can be extremely effective. In the late 1970s, for example, the United States was applying countervailing duties to scores of Brazilian products because Brazil’s export subsidies accounted for almost half the value of all of its foreign sales. A frontal assault on the subsidies was politically unacceptable in Brazil, but the two countries agreed to cooperate closely in negotiating a new subsidy code for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the WTO): this agreement turned out to be simultaneously the linchpin of a successful Tokyo Round of trade talks, a basis for adding an injury clause to the U.S. countervailing-duty law, and a foundation for phasing out the Brazilian subsidy policy.

Are the United States and China ready for such a substantial reorientation? Washington would need to accept China as a true patner in managing global economic affairs, the development of an intimate working relationship with an Asian country rather than its traditional European allies, and constructive collaboration with an authoritarian political regime rather than a democracy. All these changes would pose substantial challenges for U.S. policymakers and would likely encounter domestic political resistance.

China is rapidly approaching a moment when its chosen strategy of integration into the world economy will force it to assume increased responsibility for the successful functioning of that economy. China’s own interests, in other words, should lead it to accept an invitation from the United States to help steer the system in a mutually acceptable direction. The Chinese today are hotly debating whether their country should proceed unilaterally or work within the international system, and an offer of true partnership could tilt the outcome of that debate decisively and constructively, raising the possibility that China could continue its upward trajectory without provoking the clashes that previous rising powers have.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

June 11, 2008

BEIJING — China is using double the amount of water, land and other natural resources that its ecosystem can provide over the long term, according to a new study by Chinese and international scientists.

The study of China’s “ecological footprint” — which measures use of a range of natural resources such as farmland, timber, water, coal and even land for garbage dumps — found that China still ranked low relative to the size of its population.

Still, China’s use of resources has roughly doubled since the 1960s, said the study, published Tuesday by international environmental group WWF and the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development.

The study warned if China were to consume as much as the U.S. on a per-person basis, “China would demand the available capacity of the entire planet.”

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Copyright Literary Review

SPARTANS OF THE PLAINS
The Comanche Empire
By Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale University Press 500pp £25)

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Comanches were a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in New Mexico. Once they acquired the use of horses, in three generations they evolved into the ‘Spartans of the plains’ and provided the fiercest of all Native American resistance to the Anglo-Hispanic conquest of the American West. For a hundred years from 1750, the Comanches dominated New Mexico, Texas and even parts of Louisiana and northern Mexico. As Amerindians, the Comanches were even more impressive than the Aztecs or the Iroquois, for until the American Civil War they largely forced Europeans to bend the knee, and did so moreover when the European imperialist impulse was at its height. Although the word ‘empire’ may be author’s hyperbole, the Comanches ruled an extensive domain that worked on a melange of kinship ties, trade, diplomacy, extortion and violence.

So why were the Comanches so exceptional among American Indians? Pekka Hämäläinen, a Finnish scholar of the American West, currently at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that, like the Iroquois, the Comanches were fortunate geographically, since their heartland was at once central and peripheral, and at the intersection of Spanish and Anglo spheres of influence. They were inventive and flexible, using a nuanced division of labour in everyday life and operating a dual economy of hunting and pastoralism; they had a unique ability to make use of the horse; and their culture enabled them to incorporate change better than other Indians. They depended on two animals, the horse and the bison, which in the early days were present on the Great Plains in vast numbers. They had 120,000 horses in their herds and access to another two million wild ones.

Hämäläinen’s most detailed scholarly labours concern the eighteenth century: he claims that by 1730 the Comanches had all their people on horses and had reached what he calls ‘the critical threshold of mounted nomadism’. The narrative, firmly based on admirable scholarship, shifts from warfare to diplomacy and back in the Comanche’s dealings both with the colonial Spanish (for in those days the white-occupied American West was wholly Hispanic) and with the other Indian tribes of the Great Plains - principally the Utes, Navajos, Apaches, Osages, Pawnees and Wichitas. With the exception of the Lakota (Sioux) and the Blackfeet, every western Indian tribe was linked to the Comanches’ informal ‘empire’. Far from being bit players in the drama of the Spanish colonial empire, the Comanches, especially after obtaining guns from French traders in the 1740s, had the edge in the continuing conflict with ‘New Spain’. One single statistic is eloquent on the Comanches’ rise to dominance in the American Southwest. Their population, 15,000 in 1750, had ascended to 45,000 by 1780 because of their superior diet and plentiful food supply. Their heartland was the so-called Comancheria - an area covering the valleys of the Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian and Red Rivers, plus all the plains of northern Texas, especially the Llano Estacado in the Panhandle.

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Copyright IPS

Q&A: ‘Unlike the Wolf, Sheep Are Afraid of Freedom’

BEIJING, Jun 6 (IPS) - The censored world of Chinese contemporary writing is an unlikely place for the rise of literary mystery. But ‘Wolf Totem’, which has sold millions of copies in China and won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize last fall, is the ultimate whodunit.

The identity of its reclusive author, Jiang Rong, remained a mystery for much of the four years during which the book broke sales records at home, weathered fierce polemic and managed to attract the attention of foreign publishers along the way. Up until the book’s English language debut in Penguin’s edition this year, few interviews with the author — now revealed to be a dissident intellectual who spent 18 months in prison after participating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests — have appeared. But even as his real name, Lu Jiamin, has come to light, the mystery surrounding the book has not faded away.

Chief among the mystifying questions is how so scathing a criticism of China’s autocratic culture managed to escape the watchful eyes of communist propaganda department’s censors and become a bestseller. All the more because it makes its critical points of Han Chinese people’s numbness to despotism by raving about the independent spirit of borderland, non-Han ethnic cultures like the Mongols.

IPS correspondent Antoaneta Bezlova talks with Jiang Rong, in a rare interview, about the many mysteries surrounding the controversial work. IPS: By some estimates your book - the “Wolf Totem”, is the most widely read book in China since the little red book of Chairman Mao Zedong’s quotations? Is this true?

Jiang Rong: I believe it is. The official print of the book has sold between 2.5 and 2.6 million copies but the pirated versions have sold many more. Virtually everybody in the provinces — from migrant workers to government officials and taxi drivers, is reading pirated copies of the book. I don’t mind. These pirated versions are cheap and by now there are so many that even if the government decides to ban my book these copies would ensure its life underground.

IPS: How do you explain the continuing popularity of the book?

JR: It is quite a phenomenon. For the first three years after its 2004 publication, “Wolf Totem” was, continuously, the most read book in China. Now, in its fifth year, the book is still at number five on the most popular books charts. I don’t think there has ever been another Chinese novel to preserve its popularity for so long. It is not only the pirated copies that prove it. Some big companies have financed its reprint themselves and distributed it to their employees. Corporate executives like the book. So do people in the military.

IPS: Why?

JR: Because it attacks the weakness of the Chinese national character. Chinese people are inherently weak; they can’t stand up for themselves. They need an emperor to protect them. Even when they rebel, ultimately they still want to install a better, more enlightened emperor. In my book, I have compared Han Chinese (the dominant ethnic group) to sheep. Sheep are always afraid of freedom. Unlike the wolf, which roams free, the sheep needs shelter and protection. It is cattle. “Wolf Totem” summarises my own experiences in organising liberal democratic movements in China. Each time, I had people who rallied with me. But at the end, they all ran away and I was always the one left to suffer the consequences. I was labeled a “counter-revolution ary” five times in my life. I was sent to prison twice.

IPS: What is the meaning of the wolf in your story?

JR: The wolf symbolises the free spirit. In traditional Chinese culture, which is inspired by Confucianism, all wolf stories are bad. Wolf is a swear word. But in my book, the wolf totem revered by nomadic Mongols, stands for freedom, independence, competition, strength and teamwork. If Chinese people want to be free, they need to nurture these characteristics. They need to change their national character. National character is the reason behind the failure of Chinese political movements.

IPS: What about the role of Mongolian grasslands in your book?

JR: The book is based on my own experiences as an educated youth sent for “re-education” in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. But there is more to the autobiographical element. I wanted to write a book attacking China’s sheep like mentality and criticising our nation’s cultural roots. Unlike Japan, which has learned to embrace Western ideas, China has always resisted the West’s influence. Chinese people resist Western culture because they believe their own culture is superior. In the past this way of thinking has often prevented them from advancing. Obviously, I couldn’t use the West as comparison to make my point. I had to choose the grassland culture of nomadic people, which lies between China and the West.

IPS: Some foreign critics have called your book racist. What is your opinion?

JR: I wrote the book as a self-reflection. I needed to make Chinese people look inside themselves and see their weaknesses. In my original epilogue I explain the motives for my call to emulate the wolf as a way to make Chinese people stand up and fight for freedom. Unfortunately, the English translation didn’t carry my epilogue and some foreign critics interpret the book as a prod to Chinese people to be more forceful in their dealings with the West. But I believe that the wolf character needs to be both nurtured and controlled.

IPS: Did you not worry about the book being banned?

JR: I concealed my identity knowing that if I had revealed my name, at the very beginning, the book would never have been published. Five days after it came out, “Wolf Totem” made it to the number one on the bestselling lists. There were many government officials and senior leaders who liked it. They thought the story was good. Some said they have never read a book like this before. I wrote about culture and not politics. Culture may seem far from politics but it goes deep down to the nation’s roots. It was only six months later that the censors found out about my identity. By then the book was very popular. That is how it went.

IPS: Do you think you have succeeded in your intention to transform the national character?

JR: I recently saw a sign on one of the public buses in Beijing, which read: ‘A wolf can walk a thousand miles’. I think I have succeeded in undermining the traditional thinking of Chinese people. The wolf has now become quite a fashionable thing for young people. They like its rebellious element. And the wolf stands for freedom. (END/2008)

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Copyright Slate

June 4, 2008

BEIJING, China—For China’s 31st annual National College Entrance Exam, which takes place on the first Thursday and Friday of June, at least 10 million Chinese high-school students have registered to sit the gaokao, as it is colloquially known. They are competing for an estimated 5.7 million university spots.

Kao means test, and gao, which means high, indicates the test’s perceived level of difficulty—and its ability to intimidate. It is China’s SAT—if the SAT lasted two days, covered everything learned since kindergarten, and had the power to determine one’s entire professional trajectory.

As economic development in China careens forward, interest in and the ability to pay for a college education swell. So does competition. Getting into a top-tier university such as Beijing’s Tsinghua or Peking University—the former the alma mater of four of the nine members of China’s current Politburo, the latter China’s oldest university—might lead to an interview with a major multinational or an elite political gig. At the least, a college education can circumvent a blue-collar job with a slow journey up a long, bureaucratic ladder. (Manual labor is generally reserved for poor farmers left with no recourse other than migrant work.)

Students become aware of the gaokao, the sole criterion for university admission, at an early age. Pressures and preparations begin accordingly. All schooling, especially middle- and high-school curricula, is oriented toward gaokao readiness. Students often joke that it takes 12 years to study for the test. Angel, a freshman studying at the China Foreign Affairs University, where I currently teach, remembers walking out after the first day of testing and hearing her best friend remark, “Well, there goes six years.”

Essentially, Chinese universities accept those students who are good at taking tests. This makes sense for an educational system historically oriented toward rote learning, where students are tested on how well they’ve memorized their teachers’ lectures. Mary, who is about to graduate from the Beijing Foreign Languages University, admitted she had many brilliant friends who simply didn’t test well. They retook the test after another year of studying (the gaokao is offered just once a year) and enrolled wherever their scores permitted.

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© 2008 Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

Thomas A. Johnson, a Vietnam War correspondent and pioneer black journalist who for a time in the 1960s was the only identifiable black reporter at the New York Times, died Monday in New York. He was 79 and had Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma.

As Earl Caldwell wrote elsewhere on the Maynard Institute Web site, “In the black journalist movement, Thomas A. Johnson holds an important piece of history — he was the first black reporter on a major daily to serve as a foreign correspondent.

“As a reporter on the staff of the New York Times, he broke that barrier in 1966. He worked in Africa, Asia (Vietnam), Europe and the Caribbean. He won numerous awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his series on the black solider and the war in Vietnam… . Tom Johnson was a founding member of Black Perspective, the first organization of black reporters which was formed in New York City in 1967. He was also a founder of Black Enterprise magazine.”

“Indeed, we were lucky to have attracted Johnson to the paper,” former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb wrote in his 2003 memoir, “City Room.” “He brought with him his experience covering protests in Washington, Selma, Harlem and Watts. He had studied journalism at Long Island University on the G.I. Bill, but, for several years after graduation, he had trouble finding work as a reporter. He became a social investigator for the city’s Welfare Department and, with the rise of the civil rights movement and the scarcity of black reporters to cover it, had finally been hired by Newsday in 1963, where he quickly established a reputation as unflappable on difficult assignments… The thirty-eight-year-old Johnson, who had joined our staff in February 1966, was at that time our only black reporter.”

Gelb went on to describe how Johnson and another well-known journalist who rose to prominence in the era, Richard Reeves, discovered through their reporting that a 17-year-old had been falsely accused of shooting an 11-year-old black youth.

“We’re blessed by freedom of the press,” the lawyer for the accused teen-ager said. “It wasn’t until the New York Times sent reporters onto the streets and byways of East New York that the truth came out in this case.”

Johnson told some of his own story in “Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History,” by the late Wallace Terry, completed last year by Terry’s wife, Janice Terry.

A native of St. Augustine, Fla., Johnson and his family moved to New York when he was 11. His mother was a seamstress and his father an undertaker.

After his Army service, where Johnson spent three years in Japan during the Korean conflict, he went to Long Island University, graduating in 1955, and performed a variety of jobs when he could not find one in journalism. Among them was writing a column for the New York edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, the well-known black newspaper. Noted black journalist Louis Lomax suggested that Johnson apply to Newsday, the Long Island paper, which in 1962, Lomax said, was “looking for one” — that is, a black journalist.

When Johnson went to the editor’s office, he wrote, “I found a short muscular man sitting with his feet on the desk and a Confederate flag on the wall behind him.

“He said, ‘Tom, we talk about integration around here, but we ain’t got a single nigra in this place. We’ve been reading your stuff, and we want to talk to you about coming over here.” Johnson said he “had to listen carefully when he said, ‘nigra,’ because I wasn’t sure what he was really saying. But we became good friends.”

It wasn’t long before Johnson was covering race relations, including the historic disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Johnson was the only black journalist on a trip to look into the situation. Once there, he decided to follow a delegation of members of the New York branch of the NAACP who were looking for information, rather than joining the other reporters.

“I learned that the journalists in the lobby, maybe the photographers and cameramen, were assaulted and beaten by some of the white crowd.

“David Halberstam later said to me, ‘You are a journalist, aren’t you? You should have been downstairs with us.’

“I said, ‘F—- you.’

“I was in enough danger as it was.”

At the Times, Johnson covered race relations among the troops in Vietnam, and accepted a job as assistant city editor when he returned. But he found “there was no creativity, certainly none of the creativity that goes into being a reporter or a foreign correspondent.”

On a trip to show his children black Mississippi, Johnson wrote that he began to think about the years he covered Africa, based in Lagos, Nigeria. “I asked one of my servants what he would do if I gave him a hundred dollars. He said, ‘I’ll buy a piece of cloth and cut it into four pieces and sell it. Then I’ll buy more cloth and sell it.”

“A journalist found it difficult to move into the commercial area, because as a journalist you were accepted immediately by all kinds of people and taken as an authority on one subject or another. I found it hard to even think of getting away from that. But I realized that Africa had changed my life in terms of what I wanted to do with it.

“So I left the Times and set up a private business as an international trade specialist.” Thomas A. Johnson & Associates, a New York-based public relations firm, was founded in 1981.

He had been living in the New York State Veterans’ Home in St. Albans, Queens, N.Y., where he died. Survivors includee his wife, the former Josephine Holley; daughters Sondi Johnson of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Jo Holley Johnson, of Queens, N.Y.; a son, Thomas Jr., of Oakland, Calif.; and three grandchildren. Another son, Craig Johnson, is deceased.

Added June 4: Funeral services are scheduled for Monday at the J. Foster Phillips funeral home, 179-24 Linden Blvd., Queens, N.Y. Viewing is from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m., followed by the service at 11.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard W. French
June 5, 2008

DUJIANGYAN, China: America’s presumed Republican candidate for the presidency delivered an intriguing line about disaster relief in a campaign speech.

“We must also prepare, far better than we have, to respond quickly and effectively to a natural calamity,” Senator John McCain said Wednesday. “When Americans confront a catastrophe they have a right to expect basic competence from their government.”

As someone who has spent several days touring China’s earthquake zone in recent weeks, I have seen the kind of future McCain was talking about, and it works.

There are, of course, many things that China - as would be true of any society - does not get right. Indeed, a few of them specific to the catastrophic earthquake last month are worth naming.

Perhaps most seriously, little care or attention went into preparing for a foreseeable tragedy, indeed one that China’s own scientists had warned about. In the interest of making sure this tragedy turns into a good news story and to prevent dissent, the government has handled information about deficiencies in schools and other buildings with a disappointing lack of transparency, and its actions have prevented parents from grieving normally.

A reporter’s job is to bring a critical mind to the events of the day. Recent weeks have provided plenty of opportunity for such things. The task at hand on this occasion, however, is altogether different. In matters of disaster response, it is time to give China its due.

In an aside that has lastingly stained her reputation, France’s first woman prime minister spoke in the early ’90s of the Japanese as “yellow ants trying to take over the world.” Subsequent explanations by the prime minister, Édith Cresson, didn’t help matters. With its racist overtones, her complaint centered on the idea that the West faced unfair competition from an Asian nation where collective discipline and action and the cohesiveness of groups was more important that the needs of the individual.

Rank stereotypes aside, China’s response to the earthquake has many aspects of the very qualities that Cresson, with all of her oversimplification and misunderstanding, sought to criticize.

Drive on the highways in this part of Sichuan Province in the early morning or at nightfall and you are likely to come across immense convoys of trucks, filled with supplies on their way to badly stricken cities like this one, or on their way back home for resupply.

The trucks roll in convoys organized by place of origin. They might be carrying cement from Hubei, or tents from Shandong, or heavy equipment from Shanghai. Virtually every province has gotten into the act, but there is more to it than merely pitching in: One already detects a spirit of competition to see who can help the most.

The actions of individuals and small groups have been no less impressive, and have undoubted long-lasting, if still hard to define consequences for the country’s future. There is no great tradition of civic activism in post-revolutionary China, and this is not accident. The Communist Party has systematically blocked free association, and it has undoubtedly looked at the outpouring of public relief volunteerism with a mixture of pleasure and dread.

The state has done a remarkably nimble job of transforming this activism into a patriotic movement, replete both with the proliferation of “I love China” T-shirts and echoes of historic outpourings of nationalism in the past. The fact remains, though, that millions of Chinese have found ways to get involved, and for most, the reflex began at home and not with the authorities.

Yes, there have been disturbing notes, like nationalist demagogues active on the Internet who fulminated against tentative plans to have Japanese military planes fly in aid, causing the government to reverse course, or the online mobs that have urged boycotts of foreign companies that they claim have failed to donate enough money for the relief effort.

Despite this, watching the way ordinary people have behaved in this crisis, one is impressed by the growth in the kind of reflexes proper to real citizens, as opposed to “lao baixing,” the nameless masses. Civic pressure over corruption, for example, has caused the Chinese Red Cross to submit to auditing.

More than most, the Chinese government reels from crisis to crisis, often giving the impression that its main function is that of a national firehouse, rather than the serene custodian of a carefully planned future that it often pretends to be. Pressure from popular opinion has forced it to respond quickly, though, to remedy serious failures in public safety policies. This week, for example, a sweeping law was introduced requiring strict building standards for public structures like schools and hospitals.

In a nation that has grown increasingly wealthy on the backs of peasants and on the labors of exploited migrant workers, the word “people” in the country’s official title, the People’s Republic of China, is an easy target for mockery. Something has changed in the response to this crisis, though, and Beijing has seized the opportunity to renew its credentials among the populace.

“When we rebuild, we will make Dujiangyan the world’s safest city,” Qu Jun, the planning bureau chief told me. “There will be special rooms in buildings where people can take refuge and survive for up to a month. If there’s another earthquake in China, Dujianyan will be the kind of place people flee to.” No one who has watched the way cities like Shanghai and Beijing have been rebuilt can doubt China’s will to carry such visions out, and with a speed that would make New Orleans envious.

A soldier who was dispatched to Tangshan, after China’s last great earthquake there, in 1976, only to experience the latest one here, spoke in a proud but understated way of the great change that has come over his country. “In 1976, the only thing the government offered people was treatment for diarrhea,” he said. “Little by little, things have gotten better.”

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Copyright The New York Times
June 4, 2008

FOR three days last month, China’s national flag flew at half-staff in Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the first time in memory that China has publicly commemorated the deaths of ordinary civilians.

Crowds were allowed to gather in the square to express sympathy for their compatriots. Despite a death toll that has risen to nearly 70,000, the earthquake has shaken the nation back to life. The Chinese people have rushed to donate blood and money and join the rescue efforts. They have rediscovered their civic responsibility and compassion.

Their grief, shock and confused solidarity recall the hours that followed the Tiananmen massacre 19 years ago today, when the Communist Party sent army tanks into Beijing to crush a pro-democracy movement organized by unarmed, peaceful students.

The protests had been set off by the death of the reform-minded party leader Hu Yaobang. College students had camped out in the square — the symbolic heart of the nation — to demand freedom, democracy and an end to government corruption. There they fell in love, danced to Bob Dylan tapes and discussed Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.”

The city had come out to support the protesters: workers, entrepreneurs, writers, petty thieves. After the tanks drove the students from the square in the early hours of June 4, 1989, nearby shop owners turned up with baskets of sneakers to hand out to protesters who’d lost their shoes in the confrontation. As soldiers opened fire in the streets, civilians rushed to the wounded to carry them to the hospital.

But even as doctors were caring for students hurt in the melee, the party was rewriting history. It branded the peaceful democracy movement a “counterrevolutionary riot” and maintained that the brutal crackdown was the only way of restoring order. As leaders of the movement were rounded up and jailed, people who had donated food and drink to the students during their six-week occupation of the square began reporting them to the police.

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Copyright The Financial Times

(Eds. note. This brings back all kinds of memories from my west African freelance days.)

May 31 2008
West Africa isn’t widely known for its seaside resorts but Limbe, on Cameroon’s coast, would do any tourist brochure proud. Atlantic surf roars over beaches formed from volcanic rock, the fish is fresh, the beer cold. It is, in essence, an ideal place to be trapped.

In early March, I checked in at the Fini Hotel, overlooking the shoreline. A US Navy warship was silhouetted off the coast, its grey hull spectral in the haze. The Calypso Bar was deserted, even the karaoke man gone, but I found a more makeshift affair set up with lawn furniture outside the hotel. Two middle-aged businessmen named Larry and Theodore were sipping Guinness and discussing the country’s ongoing riots. “They’ve looted a brewery,” Larry said, with a trace of glee. “And handed out the crates.”

It transpires that crowds had burned tax offices to the ground, young men barricaded major roads, and a mob had surrounded a unit of 20 gendarmes, stripped them and stolen their guns. Almost the entire country was paralysed.

Cameroon, occupying the place where the trigger would be if you imagine Africa is shaped like pistol, rarely figures alongside Zimbabwe or Kenya when it comes to making headlines. Only the exploits of its Indomitable Lions football team tend to reach the papers. Having arrived by chance in the middle of what was, for Cameroon at least, the story of a decade, it seemed a shame to miss out. I asked Larry and Theodore if they might be able to use some local connections to get me to Douala, the port city where the unrest had started, about 40 minutes’ drive away. They sipped and looked doubtful. “You call me at six tomorrow morning,” Theodore said. “I will see what I can do.”

I called before dawn, but the road was still blocked. As I headed to the Calypso Bar for breakfast the receptionist told me the hotel owner, a Mr Dima, had left for Douala before sunrise. I felt a flush of annoyance. I rang his mobile and the voice that answered sounded like it would be comfortable giving orders, even to guests. “If you had seen what I had seen, you would not take that road,” Dima said. “It is impossible, absolutely impossible. You must stay where you are.” “Might I ask how you managed to make it?” I asked. “I am an authority,” he said, and hung up. The receptionist explained that Mr Dima was close to government, protected by soldiers.

I found my way to the shack where Larry and Theodore were drinking Guinness. The reports were getting worse: protesters were dragging people from cars on the road to Douala then torching their vehicles. Young men were even building barricades in Yaoundé, the capital. Larry had related the first day’s trouble as if the uprising was a sporting event. But foreboding had clouded his enthusiasm. “If I know Cameroon, this cannot last beyond Friday,” he said, perhaps a tad too cheerfully. “You wait and see what the president says.”

President Paul Biya had recently hinted that he wanted to change the constitution to prolong his quarter-century rule. Perhaps it was just that I had come at a bad time, but I was beginning to suspect he was not widely loved. Larry, Theodore and much of the anglophone minority reserved a particular antipathy for Biya, in part because he represented the francophone majority. But the protests had convulsed much of the country, crossing the linguistic divide.

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