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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 2008, Universal Press Syndicate
August 30, 2008

DENVER — Is Barack Obama prepared to be president? No. Neither is John McCain.

I have written about 12 pounds of books on the presidency over the past 22 years, three long studies that focused on the day-to-day work of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. This is the most important thing I learned in doing that, a paragraph at the end of the introduction to “President Kennedy: Profile of Power”:

“John F. Kennedy was one of only 42 men who truly knew what it is like to be president. He was not prepared for it, but I doubt that anyone ever was or ever will be. The job is sui generis. The presidency is an act of faith.”

The Kennedy book was published during the presidency of Bill Clinton, so now 43 men know. Obama, as I said, is obviously not one of them. But in praise of his acceptance speech here after winning the Democratic nomination, I did think the senator from Illinois, four years older than Kennedy was when he was inaugurated, showed he had a clue when he said:

“We need a president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.”

That is not a particularly graceful or articulate line, but it is the most important fact about being president. The toughest job in the world is essentially reactive. The president does not run the country and is not paid by the hour. He is there to respond to events unanticipated: bizarre attacks on New York City, the blockade of a European city occupied by American troops, the rising of young black men and women against legal segregation, civil wars and genocides in places we never knew existed, the shelling of an American fort off South Carolina by other Americans.

Presidents are alone, facing the unknown. The job is not about running the country; it is about leading the nation in unexpected crisis or danger. No one remembers whether Lincoln balanced the budget.

Obama touched on what we anticipate will be the issues faced by the next president, as McCain will this week: a fading economy and place in the world, terrorism, health care, climate change. All important, critical, even, but no one knows what will be the issue that defines the next president. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated about defending Quemoy and Matsu, two islands off what we then called “Red China,” but Kennedy’s presidency was defined by surprising events in the Cold War against communism, and by civil rights and a civil war in what was called French Indo-China.

And if you are interested in what being president is like, look at the day 45 years ago, Aug. 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That made Kennedy realize that his historical destiny would be to put the government on the side of a minority, no small thing in a democracy of majority rule. Until that day, Kennedy had never allowed himself to be photographed with King, who was seen, rather suspiciously, as a man of the left.

That day, he invited the black minister to the White House. Waiting for King to arrive, Kennedy met with the National Security Council and signed off on a plot to depose President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, an action that turned that far country into an American military colony — an action that led to disaster.

That is what it was like to president. No one, least of all Kennedy, knew. In the end, we choose a president on our own sense of character and judgment. In the end, it is not about the candidate; it is about the character and judgment of the American people. We decide. It is a great gamble. Then, the president’s real job is to bring out the best in us.

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Posted at 8:40 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

August 22, 2008

BEIJING

I am Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, and ordinarily I am a man of perfect repose. My eyeglasses are without a smudge; my hair is impervious. As the American author Mark Twain once wrote, “The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.” I am supremely confident of my virtue. It has been tested in many regattas.

For years now I have worked tirelessly to fashion the Olympics into an event in which it’s possible to completely avoid ethical responsibility. I’ve used my skills as a yachtsman, member of the Belgian knighthood, and an impeccable wearer of blazers and boat shoes, to avoid a principled stand on any subject. It therefore grieves me to say that 10 days into the Beijing Games, I have met with a matter of the utmost seriousness: the unfortunate expressions of joy by Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, after winning the 100- and 200-meter dashes. This is truly an Olympic crisis.

It’s one thing for the Chinese government to jail dissidents, to forge the passports of underage gymnasts, and to set up official protest zones and then arrest anyone who applied to use them. These are matters that I met with disciplined silence, or as I so adroitly put it, with “quiet diplomacy.” But I cannot ignore Bolt’s disturbing spontaneity. Him, I feel compelled to rebuke.

“That’s not the way we perceive being a champion,” I said, after Bolt had completed his unprecedented feat of world records in both of the sprint events.

I was so scandalized as Bolt shimmied, posed, and chanted, “I am number one!” that when reporters came to ask me for a comment on his historical accomplishment, I could not recognize it without adding my personal criticism. I offered him some sound and useful advice on how to conduct himself, a product of my mature consideration after so many years as an Olympic athlete myself, sailing in the Finn class.

“I think he should show more respect for his competitors and shake hands, give a tap on the shoulder to the other ones immediately after the finish and not make gestures like the one he made in the 100 meters,” I said.

May I offer a further suggestion? For lessons in comportment, Bolt might study how our IOC representatives behaved when they attended one of the most important events of the Beijing Games, staged by a vital corporate partner: the McDonald’s build-a-hamburger contest.

Some people might ask what separates Bolt from other athletes who have celebrated unselfconsciously here. American sprinter Shawn Crawford said: “If you know you put in the work, you’re going to dance and celebrate and pop some bottles. I don’t think that’s disrespectful.”

How is he different, for instance, from the U.S. women’s beach volleyball team, which shrieked, hugged each other, cavorted, and fell about in the sand for several minutes, before congratulating its opponents?

Isn’t it obvious? They are women in bikinis.

This is not the first time in my distinguished career with the IOC that I have taken a principled stand. As an Olympic delegate, I fought with the energy of a thousand suns to persuade the Belgian authorities to go to the Moscow Games in 1980, and to accept their obvious rigging of at least five track and field events.

But it’s in the last seven years as IOC president, as I presided over a 40 percent increase in revenue, that I’ve truly shown my Olympic character. At the 2004 Games in Athens, I resolutely stood by Iran when its flag bearer, Arash Miresmaeili, refused to fight an Israeli in judo. Earlier this year, I defended the Beijing organizers when Hollywood director Steven Spielberg withdrew as artistic director of the Opening Ceremonies over China’s repeated broken human rights promises, such as detentions and forced demolitions of homes for stadiums. “Spielberg’s absence will not hurt the Games,” I declared, with my clarion voice. “The Beijing Games are much stronger than individuals.”

I’ve praised the Chinese organizers at every opportunity, remarking on the “excellent preparation of the Games” by their bulldozers and cleansings. I proudly cooperated in censorship, from the obfuscation of their air quality problems, to the gagging of athletes on the subjects of politics and religion. In July, I announced that, “for the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China.” Meanwhile, my people were arriving at a secret deal with officials to allow Internet censorship, without the knowledge of the media or the rest of the IOC.

All of these actions should be taken into account when the IOC decides whether to reelect me as president after the Beijing Games. As I said last month in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the question will be, “Have I been able to contribute to the [Olympic] values?”

To sum up, over the years I have been an ally to the Soviet Union, Iran and China, and now I have demonstrated that I am not afraid to take on a Jamaican. My expressions of moral leadership will hopefully win me reelection, but if not, anyone who is thinking of turning me out of office should consider who they would replace me with in the gallery of freedom fighters that is the IOC. As Twain also wrote, “I am clean — artificially — like the rest.”

With my public stance against Bolt, my legacy, I feel, is complete. You might apply to me an observation once made by the American civil rights scholar W.E.B. DuBois: perhaps no one “ever took himself and his own perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man.”

As for Bolt, something else DuBois once wrote, rhetorically, applies to him. “How does it feel to be a problem?” he asked.

Posted at 10:47 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Australian

Jamaica tops medals list in alternative tables
Article from: The Australian

Rowan Callick, China correspondent

August 22, 2008 12:00am

WHAT is the “true” medals table? There is always controversy at the Games where purists claim the tables count for little and the joy of competing and Olympic comradeship is all that counts.

The usual debate is whether the table should be measured by gold medals or total medals. Some even espouse a third option, whereby the medals are weighted, usually four for gold, to give winning its due, two for silver and one for bronze.

James Riordan, professor of sports history at Britain’s Surrey University, says: “The message that winning is everything is not the message the Games are supposed to convey. Why have silvers or bronzes?”

There are 10,500 athletes in Beijing, and for the International Olympic Committee, this is what counts, along with the number of world records achieved during the Games, and the number of countries that get to compete.

Simon Forsyth, a researcher based in Brisbane, produces tables that help assess how well countries are doing from a range of perspectives beyond the bottom line of just gold medals.

First, by gold medals measured against population.

Jamaica, not surprisingly, tops this list thanks to its extraordinary sprinters, led by superstar Usain Bolt. Then comes Bahrain, due to its Morocco-born 1500m runner Rashid Ramzi. New Zealand, with its three gold medallists (boardsailer Tom Ashley, women’s shot putter Valerie Vili and women’s double sculls rowers Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell), scores consistently well on such tables and is fourth, after Estonia.

Australia tends to rate around the same on such measures, as it does in the lists that merely measure total medals won. In this case, sixth.

Britain, which is soaring in the overall medals tables, comes 13th, Germany 22nd, Russia 26th, the US 29th and China 40th — pointing to the potential for China to keep improving its performance as it invests more and its population becomes wealthier.

It also hints that the US is boxing beneath its weight, possibly because of a lack of state investment in sporting infrastructure and in its athletes.

Measured by total number of medals per million population, Jamaica still comes top, followed by Slovenia, then New Zealand, with Australia fourth.

Britain slips further down on this list, to 21st, while Germany comes 36th, Russia 38th, the US 42nd, Japan 49th and China, whose gold outnumber its silver and bronze combined, well down at 60th.

On the weighted medals table, with a gold medal worth four points, a silver two and a bronze one, Jamaica stays top, followed by Bahrain, Slovenia, New Zealand, Estonia and Australia.

Britain comes 17th, Germany 30th, Russia 35th, the US 38th, Japan 47th and China 56th.

The table looks very different when medals are weighted against a country’s economic performance, measured by its gross domestic product.

With one big exception. Jamaica still comes in top. But poverty thrusts countries up on this scale, with Mongolia second with its single gold in judo, Zimbabwe sixth with its gold to Kirsty Coventry in the 200m backstroke, and North Korea 10th with two gold.

In total medals against GDP, Jamaica remains top, with Australia 31st, China 40th, Britain 49th, and the US 71st.

In the weighted medals score against GDP, Jamaica is top, Australia 31st, China 35th, Britain 45th and the US 62nd.

How do these performances at the Games measure against those at the Athens Olympics?

In gold medals against population four years ago, the Bahamas came first, Australia third, New Zealand seventh, Russia 22nd, Germany 27th, Britain 28th, the US 34th and China 53rd.

In total medals against population at Athens, the Bahamas again came first, Australia second, Britain 33rd, the US 39th and China a lowly 70th.

In the weighted medals table against population, the Bahamas again scored first, Australia second, with Britain 31st, the US 38th and China 67th.

Measuring gold medals against GDP, Georgia came top, with Australia 25th, China 27th, Britain 49th and the US 57th. Eritrea topped total medals against GDP, Australia was 29th, China 41st, Britain 62nd and the US 69th. And in the weighted medal score against GDP, Georgia came top, Australia 30th, China 36th, Britain 60th and the US 68th.

Posted at 11:51 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Times

An excerpt:

In my lifetime, conditions have grown immeasurably better, freer and more prosperous for a majority of humanity, yet hand-wringing about the miserable remains the reflex mode for most coverage of planet earth.

Nowhere more so than in Africa, from which I’d just returned when the e-mail landed. During a short stay in Ghana, which will hold free elections in December, Vodafone had bought a majority stake in Ghana Telecom for $900 million (entering a fiercely competitive mobile-phone market) and I’d heard much about 6 percent annual growth, spreading broadband and new high-end cacao ventures.

Accra, the capital, is buzzing. Russian hedge funds are investing. New construction abounds. Technology enables people in the capital to text money transfers via mobile phone to poor relatives in the bush.

I don’t think that picture is exceptional these days for Africa, where growth averaged close to 6 percent last year and I sense a fundamental change in attitudes to governance, trade, the private sector and political accountability.

Sure, corruption is still rampant; Omar Bongo has been ruling Gabon for 41 years; Robert Mugabe wants to emulate Bongo; and a commodity boom has helped the numbers. But if averages meant anything, Africa would be a good-news story these days.

Not least, because Africans care about democracy. They know tyranny too well to be tempted by the so-called new authoritarianism.

We’ve heard much — what with the Russian incursion into Georgia and China’s Olympics — of authoritarianism resurgent. It sure doesn’t look that way from Africa.

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Posted at 12:34 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Nanfang Zhoumou translation courtesy China Digital Times

Here is Part II of CDT’s translation of segments of a long interview with Zhang Yimou, the General Director of the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, from Southern Weekend. Read Part I of the CDT translation here.

Southern Weekend: After seeing the Opening Ceremony, foreigners are admiring, at least from the language in their comments, and cannot imagine that someone can have such tremendous resources, and can produce such a grand product. Do they have such questions or misunderstandings when they interview you?

Zhang Yimou: None of them said this to me. They only felt — actually, I felt that we had two things added together, one plus one, that made such an impact. The first one is a human performance. I often joke with them and say that our human performance is number two in the world. Number one is North Korea. Their performances can be so uniform! This kind of uniformity brings beauty. We Chinese can do it too. After hard training and strict discipline, Chinese achieved that as well. Like the moveble type cubes, they follow orders. Actors listen to the orders, and can do it like computers. Foreigners admire this. This is the Chinese spirit. We can make our human performance reach such a level, through hard and smart work. This many foreigners cannot achieve.

I have conducted operas in the West. It was so troublesome. They only work four and a half days each week. Everyday there are two coffee breaks. There cannot be any discomfort, because of human rights. This can really worry me to death. Wow, one week, I thought I should have rehearsed it very smoothly already, but they could not even stand in straight lines yet. You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations. ….they have all kind of institutions, unions. We do not have that. We can work very hard, can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month. Therefore our actors can give such a high quality performance. I think other than North Korea, no other country can achieve this in the world.

The second is our ideas and use of technology. The technology used very fresh ideas and really outstanding concepts. It is very hard to have both. They may have the technology and ideas, but they cannot have the same level of human performance. North Korea can have the same level of human performance, but their ideas are really backward, very sixties. So if you think about it, I feel that only China can have both. I am not kidding.

These foreigners who really understand, they saw our quality of performance, and they really believe that they cannot produce it. Even if his ideas and technology can make it, but his human performance cannot produce it to this level.

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Posted at 11:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The National Post

National Post Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes “the most sign-packed surface in the universe.” Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner’s experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious.

In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), Tallis sets out to make his readers into “astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror.” He begins his examination with the face.

Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, “Her face was a study.” In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.

Botox relaxes facial muscles and makes possible a smoothness where creases might otherwise appear, revealing the face’s age. In return, Botox exacts a harsh payment. The user becomes relatively dull-looking, more like a copy than an original. Will we eventually speak of pre-Botox faces as artifacts in a once-loved but now abandoned style, like the Victorian novel?

Newsreader Standard is a considerably older face produced by our civilization. It’s the universal mask, more or less the same from Tokyo to Brussels, through which we receive information on TV. By tradition, newsreaders show no emotion, so many of us every day spend time looking at faces that are by intention flat and generic, far from what we would regard (in private life) as human. Trying for an impassive manner, TV news people evoke an English term— “po-faced,” a shortening of poker-faced.

In ordinary life, what people want when they stare at the faces of others is acknowledgement. We want a sense that we exist. Tallis quotes Hegel’s view that humans hunger above all for recognition by other humans. Connection is the key. Knowingly or not, we all yearn for it and may fall to pieces without it.

The Kingdom of Infinite Space celebrates routine biological processes that usually slip below the radar of consciousness. That’s typical of Tallis. He habitually searches for reality that may be elusive until the right kind of imagination falls upon it.

He’s a medical doctor by profession, a philosopher by inclination. In 2006, at the age of 60, he retired as a professor at the University of Manchester. He wanted more time to work on his books, but it’s hard to imagine he will be more productive in his new life than in his old. Over three decades, getting up at 5 a. m. to write for two hours before going to the university, he turned out a longish shelf of books on everything from the inanities of postmodern literary criticism to artificial intelligence.

His subjects are life, death and consciousness, plus whatever else falls in his path. Four years ago, in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents, he blamed the British government for the erosion of professionalism among doctors, along the way throwing well-aimed rocks at the unquestioning devotees of “alternative medicine,” whose fatuous misunderstanding of medicine threatens to corrupt the whole profession. He’s a published poet and one of the most incisive essayists in England.

So far as Tallis knows, there’s nothing that’s uninteresting about the head. After all, a head can sneeze, kiss, laugh, yawn, vomit and cry, sometimes with the owner’s permission and sometimes not.

Blushing, for instance, enchants him. Sometimes, unbidden by our consciousness, blood flows to the face, turning it red. Why? Tallis doesn’t forget to quote Mark Twain’s curt summary, “Man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to.” As Tallis says, “We blush with embarrassment, with shyness, with uncertainty, with a sense of exposure.” Blushing is common in children but peaks in adolescence when social anxiety and self-awareness also peak. It results from undesired social attention and heightened self-consciousness. But it is above all a question of self-betrayal. Here Tallis produces one of the metaphors that lighten his pages: “Blushing is a kind of glass-bottomed boat enabling us to look at the depths upon which our ordinary moments float.”

That’s one of many instances where a system of reflexes takes charge, as if to remind us that its power dwarfs the intentions of human beings who claim to be in control. A more spectacular case is vomiting.

“There can be few experiences so all-consuming as vomiting,” Tallis points out. It begins without our consent and proceeds at its own rate, reminding us again that it has us in its grip. It’s experienced as a kind of terror, “a shouted reminder that we are embodied in an organism that has its own agenda.”

These are among the involuntary functions that are most awe-inspiring. On a lower level Tallis places yawning (“50% of people will yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn”).

He also examines willed behaviour, providing detailed data on kissing and possibly the first analysis ever of harrumphing.

Oxford defines a harrumph as an ostentatious clearing of the throat, expressing disapproval. Tallis says it’s close to a suppressed bark, typically triggered by a newspaper item about a fashion or trend the harrumpher deplores. “Harrumphs are particularly associated with the idea of a member of the Establishment, whose overweight body provides the perfect instrument for manufacturing it,” complete with jowls that shake while the sound emerges.

Few harrumphers practise this favourite tic in private. Like laughing, it’s not often a solitary indulgence. (Tallis says we laugh 30 times more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone.)

The harrumph probably deserves more space than Tallis gives it. Is it dying out? Does it express social attitudes only of the old and cranky? I have heard people fail miserably when trying to produce a satisfactory harrumph. All they can manage is a pathetic snort. Harrumphing is no simple matter. There is a rumour they still teach it in the better private schools.

Posted at 6:28 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright DPA

Beijing - Thousands of young Chinese women applicants for the 200 jobs to lead each country’s athletes into the National Stadium for last week’s opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games had to be at least 1.66 metres tall, have a pretty face - and strip naked for the job recruiters.

The Beijing News, in a story detailing the latest opening-ceremony outrage, said stripping naked for measurements was a requirement merely to apply for the position.

Thousands of young women from colleges and dance academies in Beijing competed for the chance to appear before a huge worldwide audience.

During the selection process, the women were required to strip so teachers judging whether they were qualified could measure their body proportions, The Beijing News said.

In an interview with one of the girls who competed for the high profile job, the 20-year-old college student Zhang Fan told the paper that the girls were put in a room and teachers measured them with a ruler.

No specifics were given but the measurements were called “bone measurements” which typically include measuring the width of shoulders and waists, length of waists and height.

The women had to be at least 1.66 metres tall, have a pretty face and possess youthful energy, the report said.

Zhang did not qualify but she was later selected to be one of the 400 cheerleaders on the stadium who were the longest performers during the three-and-a-half-hour long extravaganza on August 8.

Dressed in short white dresses, boots and caps, the women had to constantly dance and cheer, to create a good atmosphere and rouse the audience of 91,000 people at the stadium.

The 400 women also performed the smiling programme - in which they danced and opened umbrellas each with a smiling face on them.

For that three-minute performance, the women had to undergo half a year of training, rising every day at 5 am to get to the practice site by 6 am and returning to their school dormitory as late as 8 or 9 pm, Zhang said. Sometimes when the training starts at noon, the women would practice till 1 am or 2 am.

They practiced standing in a row at different positions on the stadium, and also rehearsed dance movements and the opening and closing of umbrellas - a simple task which each women had to practise doing for more than 1,000 times, the report said.

Zhang said she smiled so much during practice that her facial muscles stiffened, but she was glad to have been selected.

Details about how China put together the spectacular opening ceremony are slowly being revealed - including revelations that were controversial.

After the ceremony, organisers admitted that most of the fireworks display shown on television were actually not the fireworks set off that evening, but were recorded in advance.

They also said a girl whose song during the ceremony won wide praise did not actually appear in the stadium and her song was mimed by another girl who was considered more attractive to foreign audiences.

And on Friday, state media said the nearly 900 soldiers operating the huge scroll that formed the centrepiece of last week’s show had to stay hidden under the structure for up to seven hours, wearing nappies because they were not allowed toilet breaks.

Posted at 4:13 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Howard W. French

From the Huffington Post - Posted August 13, 2008 | 06:36 PM (EST)

I have a small confession to make.

I slept through much of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

I could blame my flagging interest on jet lag, since I had just arrived in the United States from China, where I had lived for the last five years, and there would be an element of truth in that. Or I could emphasize the feelings that these mass exercises induced in me as they stretched on.

Yes, there was an irresistible twinge of admiration for the production effort that went into such a gigantic spectacle, just as I have felt real respect for China’s national reconstruction effort that I’ve watched firsthand. Ultimately, as I watched other night, though, I felt a mild sensation of repugnance accompanied by a creeping sense of boredom.

To be truthful, there were moments of sheepishness over the next couple of days, as messages poured in from friends, including some from ordinarily skeptical Chinese, about what an awesome, even life changing experience the opening ceremony had been.

Explaining the boredom, though, is a snap.

Leni Riefenstahl has never been remembered so well as in recent weeks, as one commentator after another (myself included, in my former column in the International Herald Tribune) has compared Beijing 2008 to Berlin 1936, and invoked the name of Hitler’s filmmaker to try to come to terms with such an ambitious marshaling of imagery in the direct and obvious service of propaganda that we have witnessed by the Olympics’ Chinese hosts.

Paeans to the grandeur of the state and the manipulation of history in an unsubtle celebration of racial identity and doctrinaire solidarity seem terribly old hat. The effacement of the individual and the glorification of a sacred, but never clearly defined national cause are of a piece with nasty ideologies of bygone eras.

Beijing’s favorite director of politically correct cinema blockbusters, Zhang Yimou, directed the Beijing spectacle using every high-tech trick he could muster, but the event’s intellectual lineage goes back to the bygone tenors of the Hollywood epic, masters of the mass, anonymous screen extra, like Cecil B. DeMille and William Wyler.

Fortunately nowadays, most of the world is suspicious of the all-powerful state that brooks no contradiction from the individual. For all the talk of the ceremonies’ tightly choreographed “one-from-many” message being an expression of a uniquely Asian social paradigm, Beijing and its Mini Me ally, North Korea are in fact the only true believers in the values trumpeted on opening night.

My confession continues. I was wrong to be so blasé as to fall asleep. Beijing communicated to the world in an unmediated fashion on 8/8/08, and it delivered a deeply revealing message and one that is properly worrisome: behold us in awe and pay tribute to our greatness, fall in line and ask no meddlesome questions.

The repugnant side of the Games has been there all along, but during the buildup was somehow kept mostly out of view. That is until the cynicism, dishonesty and power worship that lies at the heart of the Chinese state’s program was laid bare through an embarrassing revelation: the little pixie who enchanted the world on opening night, singing Ode to Motherland, just as the flag bearing Chinese team entered the stage wasn’t in fact the little girl who sang the anthem.

Chinese television viewers were further mislead, during the ceremonies’ long discursion about the grandeur of the country’s supposed 5,000 years of history by a fireworks display that was not the fireworks display that those in attendance at the National Stadium, the ‘Bird’s Nest’ actually saw.

The state’s worry that anything but a carefully handpicked crowd might lead to spontaneous protests or some other mortifying embarrassment led it to ratchet up security to the point that ordinary people feel it’s not worth attending. So when the stands have been too empty, the government has trucked in ersatz fans, including many of its own eugenically selected youthful volunteers.

The occasion of the Olympics was too important to leave anything to chance, or indeed to leave any room for reality. Embellishing the face of China, and thereby enhancing the prestige of its rulers, required something better, a painstakingly idealized hyper-real, and whether that required trickery or deception, so be it.

There are indications that even ordinary Chinese people are tired of such games, complaining in large numbers online about the government’s manipulative handling of the Opening Ceremony.
The official answer to such complaints came from Chen Qigang, a Politburo member whose interview Beijing Radio was quoted in The New York Times. “Everyone should understand this in this way,” Chen urged. “This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture, especially during the entrance of our national flag. This is an extremely important, extremely serious matter.”

One might add that such overriding emphasis on flag and anthem and face-driven notions of national interest, as decided entirely behind closed doors by something called a politburo is extremely old fashioned.

The corollary to this episode, of course, has the government’s response to skeptical minded foreigners, journalists or otherwise, who come to the festivities armed with all sorts of questions about the nature of the Chinese system, the restrictions on liberties, the use and purpose of Chinese power. “Aw shucks,” the system has seemed to answer. “These are just games, meant to be enjoyed by the Chinese people, and for the people of the world. Don’t sully their purity with politics. Don’t spoil our wonderful party with talk about rights or ideals.”

For remaining doubters, the veil lifted on the stage management of the opening ceremonies should clarify things. These games are and always have been about something most serious: China’s global resurgence. The Chinese people themselves have few outlets for a national conversation about what their country’s rise means for themselves and for the world. The government won’t tolerate it.

That makes it all the more imperative that the rest of mankind to come to grips intelligently with this country’s remarkable rise, and not to be put off by anodyne slogans like the ephemeral erstwhile favorite “peaceful rise,” or by the equally airy, and content-free current ones, like “harmonious society,” and “scientific development,” or indeed by the razzle-dazzle of the games themselves.

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Posted at 7:50 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Chengdu, China
The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

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Posted at 5:28 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

An excerpt. Worth reading in full.

When China Starved
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; Page A13

Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, “ancient soldiers” marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremonies showed you China as China wants you to see it.

But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come — and of how odd its transformation continues to be — switch off the Olympics. Instead, spend a few minutes contemplating the existence of a new book: the first proper history of China’s Great Famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong.

“I call this book Tombstone,” the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. “It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.”

“Tombstone” has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade’s worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, “Tombstone” — in two volumes and 1,100 pages — establishes beyond any doubt that China’s misguided charge toward industrialization — Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” — was an utter disaster.

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Posted at 5:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright BBC

The African Union (AU) is to suspend Mauritania’s membership of the group following a coup which overthrew the democratically elected president.

The chair of the AU said that the suspension would last until a constitutional government was restored.

Renegade soldiers detained President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi on Wednesday after he tried to sack army officers.

The coup has been widely condemned by the international community and the US has suspended all non-humanitarian aid.

“The coup is a serious setback for Mauritanians because it has robbed the people of their basic right to freely elect leaders of their own choice,” said Tanzania’s Foreign Minister Bernard Membe, who holds the AU’s rotating presidency.

No poll date

President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi is being held along with the country’s prime minister in an undisclosed location.

We will not release the deposed president at the time being for security reasons
Coup leader Gen Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz

‘I fear for my father, the president’
What next for coup leaders?
Taking coup in their stride
Gen Muhammad Ould Abdelaziz, who led the military coup, has pledged to safeguard democracy in the country but has, as yet, set no date for an election.

A representative from the Arab League said he held talks with Gen Abdelaziz and was assured that democracy would be restored.

“We got guarantees that the parliament, the democratic institutions, the political parties and freedom will continue to exist,” Assistant Secretary General Ahmed bin Heli told reporters.

However, in remarks published on Saturday, Gen Abdelaziz said they would continue to detain the president to avoid any escalation.

“We will not release the deposed president at the time being for security reasons. We are now trying to make calm prevail,” he is quoted as telling the London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat.

The US has withheld more than $20m (£10m) in non-humanitarian aid to the country following the coup.

The funds include $15m (£7.5m) in military-to-military co-operation, more than $4m (£2m) in peacekeeping training, and more than $3m (£1.5m) in development assistance.

Mr Abdallahi became Mauritania’s first democratically elected leader in 2007 after a coup two years earlier, also instigated by Gen Abdelaziz.

It was the first free and fair poll in more than two decades in the country.

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Posted at 4:39 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Globe and Mail

An excerpt:

“The Chinese enjoy more freedom than at any time in recent history. Ordinary Chinese people enthusiastically support the Beijing Olympics, contrary to many critics who label the Games as a government propaganda showcase.

The protests against the Olympic torch relays in London, Paris, and other cities in Western countries strengthened that feeling. Though not very fond of many aspects of the government, most of the Chinese people were outraged by those who spoke of the “genocide Olympics.” They want to have a good sports party, and they want to have a good time, like everybody else around the world. Their passion is for the basketball star Yao Ming and the Olympic gold hurdler Liu Xiang. They don’t like to be lumped together with their government, and resent the exploitation of the occasion for political purposes.

Comparisons of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the Nazi regime’s 1936 Games in Berlin are profoundly ignorant. Whereas Hitler’s tyranny in Germany was intensifying through the 1930s, China has moved away from the personal dictatorship of Mao toward a more collective leadership. Whereas Germany went on to launch aggressive wars against other countries after the 1936 Games, leading to the disasters of the Second World War, China has in recent years pursued a good-neighbour policy and settled almost all its border disputes with the surrounding countries.

In addition to keeping a sense of balance in assessing where China is today, we also have to be realistic and patient about where China should be. Clearly, many human-rights advocates have strongly hoped and wished that the 2008 Beijing Olympics would follow the pattern of the 1988 Seoul Olympics in South Korea – that is, the Games would shortly lead to Western-style democratization. With a growing realization that this is unlikely to happen, some people have questioned the usefulness and even the legitimacy of having granted the Summer Games to Beijing in the first place.

Others, more moderately, have complained that neither human-rights groups nor the Western news media are doing a good job in highlighting China’s human rights-problems, with the result that this Olympic year will be a sadly missed opportunity.

Such a perspective, well intentioned though it is, seems to have ignored the lessons from the Tibetan crisis and the Olympic torch relay protests earlier this year: A well-organized movement intended to raise awareness of the Chinese government’s Tibetan policy overstepped into an attack on the Chinese people themselves, as if they were not worthy of hosting the Olympics. Scenes such as that of pro-Tibetan independence protesters violently seizing the Olympic torch from a wheelchair-bound female Paralympian in Paris were counterproductive; they angered the Chinese public and pushed them to rally around the government, strengthening the hand of the hardliners.

To have counted on the Beijing Olympics to deliver a fast political miracle inside China, or anything else that the outside world might have wanted, was both unrealistic and shortsighted. We need to ask: What happens to China, to all the problems and challenges it faces at the end of this month when the Games are over? What is the leverage then?

At the root of the “whatever China does, it is not good enough” attitude is a heavy dose of old colonial attitudes and racial prejudice, in the widely shared, although not always explicitly acknowledged assumption in both our elite and popular discourse that the West knows what is best for China, and must impose its values and guide the country in the direction the West wants.

Many critics do not understand that the real agent of change in China is neither foreigners nor the Chinese government. The Chinese people are the forces that move China forward. The media should refrain from portraying them as passive and ignorant followers of a Communist dictatorship or as a mass of nationalistic and xenophobic robots lacking in independent judgment.

With or without the Olympics, China’s long march toward modernity and democracy will be driven primarily by internal dynamics, managed by the Chinese themselves and at their own pace. The Chinese people want human rights and democracy no less than we Canadians do. We certainly should not think that they demand less or deserve less. For most Chinese, the key questions are not about whether China will become a democracy…”

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Posted at 4:35 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

An excerpt:

Essentially, the people of China think twice as many people in the world like their country as actually do. This isn’t a gap; it’s a chasm. And the information bubble around the Chinese people explains a lot.

Consider the Chinese reaction to the Olympic torch protests this spring. More shock than anger, the sentiment underlying the people’s responses was clear: How could foreigners behave so badly toward a country as loved and respected as China? An official from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs mournfully told me after the London and Paris protests in April: “China is smiling at the world, but the world is not smiling back.” She stressed how hurt the feelings of the Chinese people were by protests of Beijing’s human rights practices and its policy toward Tibet. Yet polling before the protests found widespread disapproval of Chinese policies toward Tibet in countries as diverse as India, South Korea, the United States and Germany.

The empty Beijing hotel rooms and the lower-than-usual interest in the Games outside China are attributable to more than the strict visa policies and security measures that have discouraged travel to Beijing. A year ago, an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that two-thirds of Americans surveyed had little or no interest in attending the Games. China’s image (which was not helped by its decision this week to revoke the visa of Olympian Joey Cheek) could affect the size of the international TV audience for the Games. The people in developed countries who think it was a mistake to award the Olympics to Beijing (43 percent of Americans, vs. 41 percent who told Pew it was the correct decision) are less likely to watch.

The fact that the Chinese people think the world loves China helps explain why it is so difficult to persuade Beijing to address human rights and other issues. The Chinese people, after all, see no need for changes to improve the country’s image. In contrast, polls have shown that Americans are aware that the United States’ image overseas has been badly damaged in recent years, and there is widespread agreement that work must be done to improve that image. In China, the Communist Party controls most of the information to which people have access, and that information does not include material showing how unpopular the country has become.

If the Chinese eventually come to understand how the world sees their country, they will ask why its image is so poor. They will learn, then, that there is concern about China’s economic growth and its impact on Western jobs and on the environment, as well as concern about China’s military expansion.

But most striking to the average Chinese may be the widely held view that their government does not respect personal freedoms. Majorities in 12 of 23 countries (including all of the top medal winners in the Athens Games except Russia) believe the Chinese government does not respect individual rights. In 10 countries, at least two-thirds hold that opinion. Only in four countries do a majority think the Chinese government respects personal freedoms.

It is not known whether the Chinese people think their government respects human rights: Pew wasn’t allowed to ask this question in China.

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Posted at 5:34 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The South China Morning Post

Aug 02, 2008

A representative of more than 100 property owners from Suzhou was detained and sent home yesterday when she tried to submit an application to protest in a designated zone in Beijing during the Olympics.

Ge Yifei , a retired doctor representing 140 owners from The Lakeview luxury development in Suzhou Industrial Park, in Jiangsu province , arrived in the capital in the morning. She went straight to the Municipal Public Security Bureau to file the application.

While she was explaining to an officer why she wanted to protest several men claiming to be officials from the Suzhou city government’s petition office rushed in and blocked her from leaving, according to Yan Lin , a Lakeview property owner who had accompanied Dr Ge.

Mr Yan said he was let go only after he showed his identity card to prove he was a Beijing resident, but Dr Ge was detained.

“The policeman on duty was telling her she should apply to the police station near the protest zone. But he added that it was useless to apply anyway,” Mr Yan said.

Dr Ge was later allowed to leave the police station, but the Suzhou officials followed her, telling her they would see her out of Beijing. She boarded a Suzhou-bound train last night.

Many of the owners Dr Ge represents are powerful businessmen, and they have been at loggerheads with the authorities, which have sided with developer Gasin (Suzhou) Property Development in a land dispute.

The developer started building in a recreational area that originally belonged to Lakeview.

Lakeview property committee chairman Zhu Yongxi said they had decided to file a protest after learning that officials had authorised protest zones in three Beijing parks. He said he was deeply disappointed by yesterday’s outcome.

“How could the Suzhou officials suddenly show up? They had to have been informed,” Mr Zhu said. “We cannot voice our discontent through legal means. It is fake democracy.”

He Bing , a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law and the lawyer representing the owners, said the handling of the application was unlawful.

“If they don’t approve the application, they should [accept it and then] turn it down. These homeowners were not even given a chance to submit their protest application,” he said.

The residents are not the first to report such difficulties. Du Liangcai - nephew of Yok Mu-ming, chairman of the New Party in Taiwan - said he had filed a complaint on behalf of a dozen Taiwanese property owners to the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

“We are testing to see if the pledge [about the protest zone] is fake or genuine by filing the application; it appears that it is a fake,” he said.

Members of the Chinese Civilian Association for Safeguarding the Diaoyu Islands, a group of anti-Japanese activists, asked Beijing police last week if they could apply to protest in Ritan Park, but were told no, according to one of the activists. One member was asked to return to his home province, Hunan .

Posted at 1:07 PM · Comments (0)

On Monday August 4, I leave China, ending five years of extraordinarily rich residence in Shanghai.
As I depart China, I am also leaving The New York Times, ending a fulfilling 22 year career at the newspaper, and joining the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
For more biographical information, please refer to the “About” item on this page.
So what does this change mean for me? It means that I have to reinvent myself as a teacher. It’s actually a return to something I did very early in my working life, when I taught English literature in the 1980s at the University of Abidjan, in Ivory Coast.
It also means a return to my roots, sunk back in that same era, as a freelance writer. My plan is to stay very busy as a writer, and during the fallow portions of the academic calendar, the idea is to continue traveling and exploring the world. My first effort in this direction is a review of The Corpse Walker, by the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, in The Nation, which can be found on this site.
In the near term, this will undoubtedly mean continuing to pay a lot of attention to China. I’ve invested a lot of effort in coming to grips with this country, including becoming fluent in the language and photographing the withering old neighborhoods of Shanghai in an in-depth and arguably unique way.
With its velocity of change, and a population that amounts to 1/5th of humanity, the China story will only get better, and I plan to be involved in it, both as a writer and a photographer. Stay tuned.
Other specific plans include more work in Africa. A trip back to the continent last year after several years away merely whet my appetite for much more work there.
I’m also thinking about India, about the Caribbean, where I worked in the early 1990s, about southeast Asia, and about that newest of all subjects of exploration for me, the United States.
My hopes also include a rapid conclusion to my first attempt at fiction, a big push to get Disappearing Shanghai into print in book form, and some embryonic non-fiction projects.
For people who are interested in my work, you will find regular updates on all of this right here.
Finally, before long, visitors will also discover a long overdue redesign of this website.

Posted at 11:49 AM · Comments (2)

Copyright The Boston Globe

August 2, 2008

ONE OF THE biggest challenges facing the next president is how to restore US credibility in the world. Despite military assets unparalleled in history, US global standing has hit rock bottom.

The United States government is widely perceived today to be a violator of human rights. A poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corp. last year in 18 countries on all continents revealed that 67 percent disapproved of US detention and interrogation practices in Guantanamo. Another poll in Germany, Great Britain, Poland, and India found that majorities or pluralities condemned the United States for torture and other violations of international law. A third poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that majorities in 13 countries, including traditional allies, believe “the US cannot be trusted to act responsibly in the world.”

The gap between America’s values and its actions has severely eroded US global influence. How does it get it back?

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© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 11:45 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
August 2, 2008

SHANGHAI — For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff.

New flexibility in rules that dictate where people live has allowed Song Daqing to escape poverty in Sichuan to sell vegetables in Shanghai.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But as the Olympic Games approach, training a spotlight on China’s rights record, that view obscures a more complex reality: political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

“Some people will tell you, look at the walls, and say they are still pretty high, while others will tell you that there is a lot of space between the walls,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch. “Both things are true.”

Chinese who try to challenge the one-party state directly say authorities are no more tolerant of dissent than they were in the 1980s, and in some cases they are tougher on citizen-led campaigns to enforce legal rights or stop environmental abuses.

On the other hand, the definition of what constitutes a political challenge has changed. Individuals are far less likely to run afoul of a system that no longer demands conformity in political views or personal lifestyles.

The shift toward a more diverse society helps explain some anomalies in perceptions of life inside China. Amnesty International, the human rights group, reported this week that the rights situation had deteriorated significantly in the months before the Olympics despite China’s pledges to improve its record as a condition for hosting the games.

But a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project this spring and issued last month found that an astounding 86 percent of Chinese said they were content with their country’s direction, double the percentage who said the same thing in 2002. Only 23 percent of Americans polled in the survey said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.

The speeches of China’s leaders, with their gray imagery and paternalistic phrasings, have changed relatively little, emphasizing unity, harmony and economic growth under party rule. The reality on the ground, though, has been transformed, partly because a more dynamic economy necessitates a more dynamic society, partly because money gives people options they did not have when they were poor.

Arguably the most dramatic change in the freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese has been the gradual erosion of a population registration system that tied people to their places of birth, preventing internal migration or, at its height, even tourism.

China has not formally abandoned the system, known as hukou, and it can still prove a nuisance. But as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the inland provinces to wealthier coastal cities in search of economic opportunity, authorities in one place after another have found themselves making concessions to this new reality.

Song Daqing, who lives in a single-room home here with his wife and three children, counts himself as a beneficiary of these changes. Born into poverty in Sichuan Province, he worked as a cattle herder, bricklayer and coal miner, earning as little as 60 cents a day before coming to Shanghai in 1998. His early years in this city were marked by frequent mass roundups of migrants by the police, and he was twice held in crowded detention centers before being expelled from the city.

“Now we all have residence permits,” said Mr. Song, who supports his family by selling vegetables. “The police don’t check our paperwork anymore, and even if they found you without a permit, they won’t arrest you, but rather would suggest you get one as soon as possible.”

Reality Trumps Ideology

The relative flexibility the government has shown in allowing this to happen is more a matter of pragmatism than any overt ideological shift, a grudging concession to economic reality.

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Posted at 1:14 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Aug. 1, 2008

I was driving home late in the last afternoon of the Manny Ramirez Era in Boston, listening to the local ESPN radio outlet, when, suddenly, it seemed that the two hosts had decided that what the situation called for was the opinion of Margaret Hamilton’s character from The Wizard of Oz.

… disgrace to the game … I get sick of people in Boston adoring a guy who didn’t play hard. … blackmailed the Red Sox … an affront and an embarrassment … What about the integrity of playing the game right? … When it comes to the Hall of Fame, there will be a lot of people who have more a lot more questions about Manny Ramirez than they do about Mark McGwire.

And his mangy little dog, too, one supposes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the sources of this particularly violent magma displacement was ESPN’s Peter Gammons. This is like being heckled by one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. It’s also gloriously unmoored from reality. Gammons’ own record on covering the Steroid Era is a decidedly mixed one. Not that I care, because that cause was never my frenzy of choice, either.

But, glorioski, it’s transcendentally silly to argue that Manny Ramirez has done more palpable damage to the game of baseball than Mark McGwire did simply because McGwire dragged his well-perforated ass to the plate every time he was asked. Anybody who casts a vote for the Hall of Fame on that basis, or who counsels someone else to do so, not only should be kept far away from the process, but probably shouldn’t be allowed to handle their own money, either. (Can we please, finally, pry the ballot out of the hands of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and hand it to somebody less self-important, like the College of Cardinals?)

Nevertheless, Gammons’ outburst was the perfect coda to a symphonic performance of local hysteria that had been building for at least a month and that will now continue for a while. How long will depend entirely on how the trade works out. The more Ramirez hits in Los Angeles, or the worse Jason Bay plays in Boston, the more stories will come filtering out of the Red Sox establishment about what a schlub Ramirez was, although, admittedly, the bar’s already set fairly high. (The gist of a column in today’s Boston Herald: Manny hates kids with cancer.)

For the nearly eight seasons he was with the Red Sox, Ramirez was as essential as he was infuriating, something he shares historically with two other Red Sox left fielders, Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams. Yastrzemski was accused of dogging it in the field for most of his early career, and Williams was eight kinds of strange on the most normal day he ever lived.

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Posted at 12:05 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Yahoo

NEW YORK – Nope. He wouldn’t bite.

“I’m not smart enough to try to dissect whether I’m happy or sad,” Brian Cashman said, and somehow he held a straight face.

Manny Ramirez was off to Los Angeles and gone from the American League – ding, dong, the witch is dead! – and Cashman, the New York Yankees’ general manager, was at his composed best, even if everyone in the room knew that he’d have spent the entire day cart-wheeling around the Bronx were his true feelings on display.

“This game will break your heart when you think you can get ahead of it and figure it out that way,” he rationalized, and maybe he’s right, and – oh, who the hell is he kidding? Cashman spent all of July making moves to strengthen his team, trading for Xavier Nady and Pudge Rodriguez and Damaso Marte, and with one move, his team’s greatest rivals, the Boston Red Sox, did more for the Yankees than Cashman could.
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Gone, at least for the next two months, is their greatest foil. Take David Ortiz and his dramatics if you will, but know that there was no one – no one – Yankees pitchers feared more than Manny, and the feeling of horror that once came along with the facing the middle of Boston’s lineup exists no longer.

Whether Boston traded Manny because it feared he would channel Derek Bell and pull an Operation Shutdown or because the Red Sox went against their style and valued the personal side over the business side, the fact remains: Boston, in all likelihood, weakened itself in the throes of a three-way race with Tampa Bay and New York, and the vivisection was remarkable to watch.

Once word leaked around Yankee Stadium at 4:30 p.m. that Ramirez was headed to the Dodgers, prospects to the Pirates and Jason Bay to the shadow of the Green Monster, players approached one another to see if they’d heard the news. The conversations were spiked with glee. Batting practice turned giddy, if only for a moment.

Not just from the idea of Manny playing for Joe Torre, the longtime Yankees manager now in Los Angeles. It’s difficult, really, to qualify how thoroughly Ramirez hit the Yankees, other than to say: He wasn’t a thorn in their side. He was the whole rose bush.

In 200 games against them, Ramirez hit 55 home runs, the most against any team. No one knew how to solve him. Mike Mussina? Nine home runs in 101 at-bats. Andy Pettitte? A .416 batting average. Chien-Ming Wang? Even better: .536.

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Posted at 9:11 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

July 30 2008

China is readying to move into Africa on a scale that far outstrips
its acquisitions on the continent to date, according to the South
African bank that is laying the groundwork.

High-level groups of bankers from Industrial and Commercial Bank of
China and Standard Bank, respectively China and Africa’s biggest
banks, are examining potential targets in Africa’s oil and gas,
telecoms, base metals and power sectors, executives at the
Johannesburg-based lender have told the Financial Times.

Clive Tasker, chief executive of Standard Bank’s business in Africa
excluding South Africa, said the resultant deals were likely to be at
least as large as ICBC’s $5.5bn (£2.7bn, €3.5bn) purchase last year of
a 20 per cent stake in Standard – itself the largest foreign direct
investment in post-apartheid South Africa.

But Standard bankers admitted that building a relationship with their
Chinese colleagues is proving more difficult than they had
anticipated. Billed as a “combination of giants” by ICBC chairman
Jiang Jianqing, the union was finalised on February 14, months after
the initial overtures.

Beijing expects trade with Africa to hit $100bn by 2010, which makes
the rationale for ICBC to gain access to Africa’s biggest pan-African
banking network clear.

For Standard, apart from the capital injection to bolster its
reserves, reward shareholders and fund expansion, the most tempting
fruits of the deal depend on using the connection with ICBC to open
doors to Chinese investors and guiding them into Africa.

“The honeymoon is over,” said Tim Thackwray, Standard Bank’s head of
investment banking for Africa. “Now the hard work starts.”

Beyond the tribulations of marrying Chinese and South African
corporate cultures, negotiating the upper echelons of ICBC – including
establishing links with their counterparts – is taking time, Standard
executives said. ICBC is majority-owned by the communist-run state.

All the same, Mr Thackwray added: “I would be disappointed if I
couldn’t point to a big juicy deal by Christmas.”

Standard is establishing a 20-strong team in Beijing.

Standard and ICBC “can build a superhighway that connects China and
Africa,” said David Munro, Standard’s chief executive for corporate
and investment banking across Africa.

The first child of the banks’ “strategic partnership” is a global
resources fund they are finalising and which they hope will grow to
$1bn once third-party investors come on board.

Standard has 1,000 branches in 18 sub-Saharan African countries and a
presence in a further 21 nations worldwide. In the past year it has
made acquisitions in Nigeria, Kenya, Turkey and Argentina. This week
it expanded its operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where
Beijing last year signed an infrastructure-for-commodities deal worth
up to $8bn.

It expects to finalise a licence next month to operate in Angola, one
of the world’s fastest growing economies whose burgeoning oil wealth
has already attracted significant Chinese interest.

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, and Ghana, a bastion of
political stability, were also ripe for Chinese deals, Mr Thackwray
said, with Mozambique and Congo close behind as they emerge from
conflict.

Several executives said that corporate China was looking at targets
beyond the mining sector, which has dominated the Asian giant’s
African investments as it seeks to satiate its thirst for commodities.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Posted at 1:40 AM · Comments (0)

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