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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Copyright The New York Times

Letter from China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 28, 2009

SHANGHAI — For the last couple of months I have spent the first part of each day either teaching at a Chinese university or writing.

Nearly every afternoon, though, in what has distinctly felt like the start of a new day, I have set off with camera in hand by motorcycle and subway to some of the fast-disappearing old neighborhoods of this city, to knock on the doors of hundreds of ordinary, working-class people.

These encounters with strangers have plunged me deep into a world experienced by few foreigners, and indeed, one might venture, few Chinese — particularly those of the middle class.

Through the time spent in the cramped, dimly lit homes of my subjects — people whose portraits I’ve taken for a long-term photographic project about the city’s oldest neighborhoods — I may have learned as much about Shanghai and about China as I did in five busy years as a correspondent here.

Typically, I enter their world by climbing up a rickety, twisting wooden staircase, ducking to avoid bumping my head in the near-total darkness. This experience, eerie at first, but now utterly familiar, has come to feel appropriate for a photographic adventure, like the adjustment of one’s eyes, and perspective, upon entry into a darkroom.

My subjects come fresh to the experience, so it has been unexpected and unquestionably strange for each of them, at least initially. Once they have overcome their surprise at the sight of a very tall, camera-bearing, Chinese-speaking foreigner in the sanctum of their tiny homes, the most common question has been: What could possibly be interesting about a place like this?

The answer is: plenty.

The demographics of this city, said to have the oldest population in a country that has begun to age rapidly, has come to life before my eyes. I had not expected to find so much evidence of China’s thriving quasi-underground religious culture here. In house after house, I found people worshiping privately as Christians or Buddhists. Asked how she had come to the church, a woman who had been sent to the countryside as a youth in the Cultural Revolution told me she had been converted by her neighbors. “Everyone in this building believes in Christ,” she said.

We are ever more accustomed to dazzling images of China, the fast-rising nation that may soon surpass the United States and lead the world, according to one increasingly widespread trope. Those who know a bit about the country will be aware that there are still many hundreds of millions of people in the countryside who have not yet found a spot on China’s economic escalator.

Even in China’s richest city, huge numbers of people eke out a very modest existence. To be sure, these are very often migrants from provinces like Anhui or Jiangsu, or even further afield. But more than most Chinese would suspect — particularly the proud, newly affluent generations of Shanghai people who look at my photographs and sniff “wai di ren,” or “outsiders” — a great many of the denizens of the city’s dilapidated but character-rich old quarters are natives.

Much has been written lately about growing social inequality in China. The country’s social divisions, however, are much more complicated than statistics suggest, involving lots of fine-grained, identity-based prejudices.

I think, for example, of the poor and jobless Shanghainese parents in the old garment district who told me of their eagerness to be relocated across the river to Pudong, where the environment would be better, in part they said, because there would be fewer of the “wai di” people, whom they dismissed as having “no culture.”

Others pessimistically dismissed the likelihood that China’s increasing prosperity would continue to lift all boats. “I’m frightened for my son’s future,” said a migrant from Henan. “China’s biggest problem is the population. There are just too many of us, and the competition for opportunity is murderous.”

Inevitably, the theme of relocation comes up often in encounters like these, given the frantic pace of redevelopment. Some people are pleased with the take-it-or-leave-it buyout arrangements the government has offered to pave the way for the construction of high-rises; others respond with fatalism. “If the country needs this land, what can I do?” said one elderly man.

A great many people spoke bitterly and with surprising candor, though, about what they see as a crisis of social justice. Here, I think of the 75-year-old owner of a tiny barbershop whose neighborhood came down before my eyes this summer.

“What they are doing here is simply unfair,” he said, telling me how thugs had been dispatched to beat up residents who refused to quietly make way for the demolition. “There is no rule of law. The ‘lao bai xing’ have no rights at all.” That old phrase, meaning the nameless masses, never seemed more appropriate.

Others told me the stories of corrupt local officials, whom they said offered higher compensation for relocated people who were willing to pay bribes. These anecdotes took on special potency in a summer where a nearly completed apartment building fell on its side, killing a worker and setting off lurid rumors of government corruption.

I learned that large numbers of Chinese understand and value democratic ideals and yearn for them to be applied here. “We may have gotten richer, but our politics have not really evolved since imperial times,” said one elderly man. “Chinese people want democracy as much as anyone else, and one day we will have it.”

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Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
Survivors’ Stories From China

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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 24, 2009

One of the most curious forms of tourism in recent years has to be that of Chinese who travel to North Korea for the nostalgic gag of visiting a country that abounds in echoes of their past.

WOMAN FROM SHANGHAI
Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp
By Xianhui Yang
Translated by Wen Huang. 302 pages. Pantheon Books. $24.95.

Stories from these travelers typically focus on things like material poverty and a kind of totalitarian kitsch: the proliferation of statues and other symbols of a revered absolute leader, the spartan uniformity of dress, big state-owned stores bereft of goods to sell, broad avenues manned by traffic cops gifted in mechanized gyrations but missing that other basic ingredient of traffic, cars.

I have spoken with many of these Chinese travelers and have always been struck by how seldom their accounts dwell on the stark human costs of a system like North Korea’s, or on the political system that makes such extreme repression and deprivation possible on a national scale.

Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. As the circumstances of the publication of “Woman From Shanghai” help us understand, these are memories that the Chinese state still works hard to suppress.

Mr. Yang’s stories, which he painstakingly collected over a three-year period a decade ago, are those of people branded by the Chinese state as “rightists” in the late 1950s and sent to Jiabiangou, a notorious camp for “re-education through labor” in the northwestern desert wastelands of Gansu Province. In his introduction the translator, Wen Huang, explains that the camp, which was originally built to hold 40 or 50 criminals, came to hold roughly 3,000 political prisoners between 1957 and 1961. All but 500 of them would perish there, mostly of starvation.

When word of the soaring death toll reached the capital, Beijing began an investigation. In October 1961 the government ordered Jiabiangou closed and then mounted an exhaustive cover-up. After it was shuttered, a doctor who was assigned to the camp spent six months fabricating the medical records of every inmate. In letters to family members, the cause of death was attributed to all manner of illness except starvation, a word that was never mentioned.

Though less well known in the West than two other immense political disasters visited upon the Chinese people by Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the so-called Anti-Rightist Movement to which the subjects of Mr. Yang’s stories fell victim remains difficult to research because of continuing censorship. Chinese historians say this is partly because of the central role in these ideological purges played by Mao’s much revered successor, Deng Xiaoping, credited today with putting the country on the path of economic liberalization.

Mr. Yang first encountered stories of Jiabiangou’s horrors as a self-described idealistic youth working on a collective farm in the 1960s, and though he was unbelieving at first, they stuck with him. Years later, when he was denied access to archives from this period and when queries to the government on the subject of Jiabiangou went unanswered, his research turned to what he calls China’s human archives: living people and their oral histories.

In this regard, “Woman From Shanghai” represents a remarkable contribution to a growing literature based on personal histories. Mr. Huang, the translator, has played an important role in bringing such work to an English-language audience, having recently translated a work by a giant in this budding field: “The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up,” by the muckraking Sichuan journalist Liao Yiwu.

Readers of Mr. Yang’s book should not be put off by the frequent recurrence of common elements in these stories: the exposure to bitter cold; hunger so intense as to cause inmates to eat human flesh; the familiar sequence of symptoms, beginning with edema, that lead down the path to death; the toolbox of common survivor techniques, from toadyism to betrayal, from stealthy theft to making use of the vestiges of privilege, which survived even incarceration in this era of radical egalitarianism. It is through the accumulation and indeed repetition of such things that this utterly convincing portrait of a society driven far off the rails is drawn.

In one story, a man without medical training who is pressed into service as a camp doctor relates his dismay at watching a starving patient die when the one available remedy for the critically ill, glucose injections, fails. “Don’t blame yourself,” a real doctor tells him. “It was not your fault. We had brought him back to life twice already. His time had come. Nobody could have saved him.”

The stories contain no sugarcoating and are frequently grim in theme, and yet here and there one encounters the stubborn persistence of humanity’s best qualities. In the title story, a young woman travels to the labor camp to visit her husband, only to learn from reluctant fellow inmates that he has just died. In the face of threats from the camp authorities, she collects his remains from a shallow grave and carries them home for proper burial.

Most moving of all, perhaps, is “The Love Story of Li Xiangnian,” about the persecution of a young man and the persistence of his ardor for his girlfriend. The haggard Li escapes from detention to be reunited with her, only to be arrested again. Their touching reunion many years later, after the woman is married, would not be out of place in a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

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Maintained by: Professor William A. Joseph
Department of Political Science
Created By: Giuliana Funkhouser ‘04 and Joyce Hsu ‘05; revised by Devyani Parameshwar ‘06 and Mimi Lai ‘06

Posted at 9:27 AM · Comments (0)

An extraordinary piece of reporting. I’ve dredged it up because of the recent news of deaths in Chinese “reform”centers:

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Copyright The New York Times

(A snippet from the end of an interesting piece about the effort to build anti-aging drugs.)

Some species seem to be imperishable. A tiny freshwater animal known as a hydra can regenerate itself from almost any part of its body, apparently because it makes no distinction between its germ cells and its ordinary body cells. In people the germ cells, the egg and sperm, do not age; babies are born equally young, whatever the age of their parents. The genesis of aging was the division of labor in the first multicellular animals between the germ cells and the body cells.

That division put the role of maintaining the species on the germ cells and left the body cells free to become specialized, like neurons or skin cells. But in doing so the body cells made themselves disposable. The reason we die, in the view of Thomas Kirkwood, an expert on the theory of aging, is that constant effort is required to keep the body cells going. “This, in the long run, is unwarranted — in terms of natural selection, there are more important things to do,” he writes.

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Copyright Newsweek

Back in early 2007, it seemed as if China and America were so intertwined they’d become one economy: I called it “Chimerica.” The Chinese did the saving, the Americans the spending. The Chinese did the exporting, the Americans the importing. The Chinese did the lending, the Americans the borrowing.

As the Chinese strategy was based on export-led growth, they had no desire to see their currency appreciate against the dollar. So they intervened consistently in currency markets, and as a result, they now have international reserves totaling $2.1 trillion. About 70 percent of these are in dollar-denominated securities, and a large proportion of these are in U.S. government bonds. The unintended effect of this was to help finance the U.S. current-account deficit at very low interest rates. Without those low long-term rates, it’s hard to believe that the U.S. -real-estate market would have bubbled the way it did between 2002 and 2007.

For a time Chimerica seemed like a marriage made in heaven: both economies grew so fast that they accounted for about 40 percent of global growth between 1998 and 2007. The big question now is whether or not this marriage is on the rocks. America’s highly indebted consumers just can’t borrow anymore. The U.S. savings rate is soaring upward, and U.S. imports from China have slumped, down 18 percent between May 2008 and May 2009. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Chinese are going to stop buying dollars. They dare not allow their currency to appreciate when so many jobs in the export sector are under threat. But it does mean that they are questioning the Chimerica strategy.

It ’ s a bit like one of those marriages between a compulsive saver and a chronic spender. Such partnerships can work for a certain period of time, but eventually the penny-pincher gets disillusioned with the spendthrift. Every time Chinese officials express concern about U.S. fiscal or monetary policy, it reminds me of one of those domestic tiffs in which the saver says to the spender: “You maxed out on the credit cards once too often, honey.”

Let’s look at the numbers. China’s holdings of U.S. Treasuries rose to $801.5 billion in May, an increase of 5 percent from $763.5 billion in April. Call it $40 billion a month. And let’s imagine the Chinese do that every month through this fiscal year. That would be a credit line to the U.S. government of $480 billion. Given that the total deficit is forecast to be about $2 trillion, that means the Chinese may finance less than a quarter of -total federal-government borrowing-whereas a few years ago they were financing virtually the whole deficit.

The trouble is that the Chinese clearly feel they have enough U.S. government bonds. Their great anxiety is that the Obama administration’s very lax fiscal policy, plus the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing (in layman’s terms, printing money), are going to cause one or both of two things to happen: the price of U.S. bonds could fall and/or the purchasing power of the dollar could fall. Either way the Chinese lose. Their current strategy is to shift their purchases to the short end of the yield curve, buying Treasury bills instead of 10-year bonds. But that doesn’t address the currency risk. In a best-selling book titled Currency Wars, Chinese economist Song Hongbing warned that the United States has a bad habit of stiffing its creditors by letting the dollar slide. This, he points out, is what happened to the Japanese in the 1980s. First their currency strengthened against the dollar. Then their economy tanked.

What is China’s alternative if it seeks a divorce from America? Call it the empire option. Instead of continuing in this unhappy marriage, the Chinese can go it alone, counting on their growing economic might (according to Goldman Sachs, China’s gross domestic product could equal that of the United States by 2027) to buy them global power in their own right. In some ways they’ve already begun doing this. Their naval strategy clearly implies a challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Their investments in African minerals and infrastructure look distinctly imperial too. And now the official line from Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is to “hasten the implementation of our ‘going out’ strategy and combine the utilization of foreign exchange reserves with the ‘going out’ of our enterprises.” That sounds like a Chinese campaign to buy up foreign assets-exchanging dodgy dollars for copper mines.

At the same time, crucially, the Chinese need to have their own domestic consumers step up to take the place of over leveraged Americans. China’s economy is, above all, a manufacturing concern; if no one is going to the shopping malls, China’s companies are just building their inventories. So a post-Chimerican China needs to be not only an empire, but also a consumer society. This will boost China’s internal market as well as trade with its Asian neighbors, and will spur the development of an Asian economic bloc.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 14, 2009

SHANGHAI — When Beijing won the right to hold last year’s Olympics, all of China celebrated, but somewhere in Shanghai’s heart there must have been a twinge of envy.

History has encouraged Shanghai’s people to feel a certain entitlement to the spotlight. After all, this is China’s first truly modern city, its first world city, and it remains China’s largest city, even if nowadays just barely so.

Shanghai’s day in the sun is fast approaching, however. In May, it will host the 2010 World Expo, an idea with a pedigree that dates back to the 19th century and which Paris, New York and Montreal, among other metropolises before it, have used to highlight their claims to trend-setting modernity and distinctive cosmopolitanism.

For some, hosting a somewhat anachronistic event like the Expo may seem a modest consolation prize compared with the glitter of the Olympics, but that does not mean that Shanghai is approaching things with anything less than the utmost seriousness. Official Shanghai, that is. Unwilling to be outdone by China’s old capital, this city is reportedly outspending Beijing’s vast Olympic preparations by a large margin.

For months now, that has meant extraordinary things for the neighborhoods of this city. Extensive new subway lines are being rushed into service. The finishing touches are being placed on flying cloverleaf expressways. And as buildings rise like plants in some Miracle-Gro commercial, construction cranes can be seen wheeling in every direction.

Much of this theater of change is occurring in the places one would expect, like main streets of central Shanghai, where the sidewalks are being ripped up for the umpteenth time in the seven years I’ve known this town. The police, meanwhile, are already stepping up their vigilance against perceived eyesores, like the unlucky beggar I saw being escorted away after he had squatted on the sidewalk on Nanjing Road for momentary relief from the heat in the plume of chill air that streamed out of a downtown shopping mall.

Shanghai is also reportedly rushing into effect new smoking regulations aimed at bringing this tobacco-friendly city into line with increasingly widespread global standards requiring smoke-free zones in restaurants, shopping centers and other public places.

The most interesting action, though, is taking place in slightly more out-of -the-way places, namely in the neighborhoods where Shanghai’s working-class people, the masses, dwell. Many of these areas have until now been bypassed by the ongoing Chinese economic miracle, and with just a few months to go, the city is pressing an all-fronts beautification drive.

The bulldozer is the most obvious tool in this drive, with whole neighborhoods, including some of Shanghai’s most architecturally and historically interesting places, being razed after decades of woeful neglect. But this uniquely Chinese campaign has other important facets worth dwelling upon.

Anyone wondering about the roots of North Korea’s political style, with Pyongyang’s showcase boulevards and its mass games, those carefully orchestrated displays of unanimity, could do worse than to visit workers’ quarters here. Shiny new aluminum facades are being hastily stapled onto grubby family storefronts, and fresh coats of paint and mortar are being applied, often for the first time in decades. This Potemkin salubrity is regarded with frank skepticism by many locals as a gigantic, government-run “face operation.” Its aim, they say, is to impress foreign visitors, even those who wander off the beaten path, with Chinese living standards.

Another key element in the city’s drive has equally deep roots in the revolutionary past, with its endless movements and campaigns. In any of these neighborhoods, one can’t fail to be impressed by the proliferation of red propaganda banners and slogans, festooned on buildings or hanging above the streets, that exhort the masses to help promote the Expo by being more “civilized.”

But amid all of this busy re-engineering, both physical and social, Shanghai has overlooked what is perhaps the most basic campaign of all: a hospitality campaign aimed at persuading Chinese people that they are the common siblings of the rest of mankind.

Why, one might ask, should there be such a need? The answer lies in the daily experience of any foreigner who wanders off the main streets, and it sometimes includes experiences on the main streets as well. Foreign visitors can often still draw stares as if freshly descended from the moon. People may talk about you in your presence, on the assumption that you don’t understand their language or, worse, that it doesn’t matter if you do. And the term “lao wai,” a less than endearing word for foreigner, hangs thickly in the air. Even the English word “hello” can take on a strange new meaning here, delivered as it sometimes is more as a sing-song taunt than as a true greeting.

The divide that lingers between the Chinese and the outside world has its roots, of course, in the political choices of the state, which has long taught people to regard foreigners with suspicion — the better to foster nationalism and control. In a chapter titled “Can We Be Friends?,” James Kynge captures this quality perceptively in his book, “China Shakes the World.” Chinese officials, he writes, are taught “that intimacy is forbidden and that making friends with foreigners is ‘work.”’

Observations like these certainly do not represent a judgment on the innate friendliness or unfriendliness of the people — Chinese, like people everywhere, come in all types, and that is indeed the point. For Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the country and the one that has arguably benefited more than any other from globalization, though, the time is past due to finally de-exoticize the “other,” and as good a place to begin as any would be with a sincerely meant “hello.”

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Copyright The Washington Post

A poor headline on a fascinating piece about the future of labor, machines and the welfare state. An excerpt.:

For much of the past 200 years, unskilled workers benefited greatly from capitalism. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, skilled construction workers earned 50 to 100 percent more than unskilled laborers; today, that premium has fallen to 33 percent in the United States. The era of the two world wars, 1914 to 1945, was one of particularly sharp gains for the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the rest.

Why have the unskilled fared so well? After all, machines — whether steam engines, internal combustion engines or electric motors — have replaced people as deliverers of brute force. But even today they cannot replace many of people’s manipulative abilities, language skills and social awareness. The hamburger you eat at McDonald’s is still put together and delivered to you by human hands; even a fast-food “associate” deploys an astonishing repertoire of spatial and language skills.
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But in more recent decades, when average U.S. incomes roughly doubled, there has been little gain in the real earnings of the unskilled. And, more darkly, computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man.

I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never once spoke to a human; my mechanical interlocutor seemed no less capable than the Indian call-center operatives it replaced. Outsourcing to India and China may be only a brief historical interlude before the great outsourcing yet to come — to machines. And as machines expand their domain, basic wages could easily fall so low that families cannot support themselves without public assistance.

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A Book Review of When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World
by Martin Jacques
London, Allen Lane, 2009

Copyright Political Affairs.net

“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go: downtown.” So warbled the British singer, Petula Clark in the 1960s. However, today if solitude is your constant companion, I would suggest that you purchase a copy of this riveting book and read it on the bus and in airports – as I have been doing in recent days, with the dramatic words on the bright red cover of this weighty tome blaring insistently – and no doubt you will find, as I have, that your reading reverie will be constantly interrupted by a stream of anxious interlopers curious to know what the future may hold.

For like Petula Clark, the author too hails from London, though the startling message he brings decidedly differs from her melancholy intervention. For it is the author’s conclusion that sooner rather than later, China – a nation ruled by a Communist Party – will have the most sizeable and powerful economy in the world and that this will have manifold economic, cultural, psychological (and racial) consequences. Strangely enough, Jacques – one of the better respected intellectuals in the North Atlantic community – does not dwell upon how this monumental turn of events occurred. To be sure, he pays obeisance to the leadership of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, who in 1978, opened China’s economy to massive inward foreign direct investment, which set the stage for the 21st Century emergence of the planet’s most populous nation. Yet, for whatever reason, Jacques – who once was a leading figure in the British Communist Party – does not deign to detail to the gentle reader how Beijing brokered an alliance with US imperialism, that helped to destabilize their mutual foe in Moscow, which prepared the path for the gargantuan capital infusion that has transformed China and bids fair to do the same for the world as a whole.

Still, it is noteworthy that this book’s back-cover carries blurbs from the conservative economic historian, Niall Ferguson of Harvard (Henry Kissinger’s authorized biographer); the leading historian, Eric Hobsbawm; the well-known Singaporean intellectual and leader, Kishore Mahbubani (who has written a book that mirrors Jacques’ earthshaking conclusions); and a raft of Chinese thinkers who do not seem displeased nor surprised by his findings.

Within a few decades, according to the author, the size of China’s economy will surpass that of the US (intriguingly, he envisions that Mexico’s will be in fifth place behind India and Brazil – a result that may have more impact on imperialism’s declining fortunes than the rise of Beijing). Thus, the author is unsparing in his critique of US imperialism; having experience with the decline of Great Britain from its once stratospheric heights, he speaks with authority when he avers that “imperial powers in decline are almost invariably in denial of the fact.” However, the changing of the guard today will be much more sweeping that that which led to Washington supplanting London. For not only will the new hegemonic force be a Communist Party, he argues – despite imperialism expending trillions of dollars to precisely forestall the flourishing of Moscow Communists – but, likewise, this will not be just a switch from European to Euro-American elites. “For reasons of both mindset and interest,” he asserts, “the United States and the West more generally, finds it difficult to visualize, or accept, a world that involves a major and continuing diminution in its influence.” Repeatedly, he argues, “we have come to take Western hegemony for granted. It is so deeply rooted, so ubiquitous, that we think of it as somehow natural”; instead, he says, “Western hegemony is neither a product of nature nor is it eternal. On the contrary, at some point it will come to an end” – and that time has arrived, he avers. Choosing his words carefully, the author says China’s rise “threatens Western societies with an existential crisis of the first order, the political consequences of which we cannot predict but will certainly be profound. The assumptions that have underpinned the attitudes of many generations of Westerners towards the rest of the world will become increasingly unsustainable and beleaguered.” For, says Jacques, “the emergence of Chinese modernity immediately de-centers and relativizes [sic] the position of the West. That is why the rise of China has such far-reaching implications.”

There are signs of this decline: it cannot be avoided that “the United States has ceased to be a major manufacturer or a large-scale exporter of manufactured goods, having steadily ceded that position to East Asia.” Yet, as the author sees it, the rise of China is simply a reassertion of historic trends with the era of British, then US ascendancy, seen as the anomaly. For, he declares, as late as 1800, China was the planet’s leading economic force but it was then that the accumulated wealth and power brought by the African Slave Trade and colonial dispossession began to assert itself more forcefully, leading to what has been referred to colloquially, as “the rise of the West and the decline of the rest.” Echoing historians like Walter Rodney, the author cogently writes, “without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did.”

As he sees it, the heretofore ubiquitous “Washington Consensus” of “free markets”, privatization and deregulation will be replaced by a “Beijing Consensus” wherein “the state is hyperactive and omnipresent…..the Chinese model of the state is destined to exercise a powerful global influence, especially in the developing world, and thereby transform the terms of future economic debate. The collapse of the Anglo-American model in the wake of the credit crunch will make the Chinese model even more pertinent to many countries.”

He discounts the perception that China’s apparent failure to comport with democratic norms as perceived from Washington, compromises its model of development. In Britain, he says, it was only in 1918 “over 130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that women (over 30) won” the right to vote and in the U.S., it was not until 1965 that voting rights for African-Americans were solidified in law. Moreover, those in Washington who obsess about “democracy,” rarely – if ever – examine the dearth of democracy “at the global level” – e.g. the Security Council of the United Nations (where Africans do not have a permanent seat and Asians are under-represented) or the World Bank (where US nationals rule) or the International Monetary Fund (the bailiwick of Western Europeans). The “global order,” concludes the author accurately, “has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian” with little objection from Washington – and China’s rise will complicate this scenario tremendously, he suggests.

However, Jacques does seem to be concerned about how China approaches the matter of “race.” He acknowledges the obvious, which – tragically – is not the norm in the North Atlantic community: “white racism has had a far greater and more profound – and deleterious – effect on the modern world than any other.” Jacques, no dummy, is sufficiently perspicacious to acknowledge that “Jesus was whitened in the Western Christian tradition” as a function of the rise of white supremacy. As the author view things, “American supremacy has been associated with the global dominance of the white race and, by implication, the subordination and subjugation of other races in an informal global hierarchy of race.” This is bound to change, he says, for “the rise of China to surpass the West will, over time, inevitably result in a gradual reordering of the global hierarchy of race.” Jacques asserts that “with the rise of China, white domination will come under serious challenge for the first time in many, if not most, areas of global activity.”

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Copyright Southern Weekend

I’ve wanted to write about Xinjiang and the aftermath of events because I lived there for several years. Despite trying several times, I have not written anything for a month. Many people have asked me over the past few weeks what I think really happened. They obviously have their doubts about the official version of events. So do I.

The issue of terrorism is an important one to address. The government maintains that the violence on July 5 was the result of an organized effort. Frankly, this seems dubious to me. Whether it is factual or not, the question of why would Uyghurs would want to do this remains. What conditions would lead to such violence?

I can only speak from my experience living and working there for several years. I only have stories to tell, some of which are based on hearsay. But they will give a sense of the frustrations in Xinjiang.

The day I arrived to teach at Xinjiang University, I noticed that none of the minorities wore traditional hats or veils. A student explained to me that it is not allowed. Nor are mustaches. He said if students are caught praying they face punishment, even expulsion. A fellow teacher confirmed this later.

One day a supervisor who was Han Chinese told me that Uyghurs have it very good because of preferential policies. They can have two children and it is easier to get into college. Later that week a Uyghur friend told me of a protest by Uyghur college graduates. He said none of them could find jobs and that the rate of unemployment is much higher than for Han Chinese.

One day I was teaching a group of seniors in college who were looking for jobs. One young man was frustrated because he said he encountered signs at a job fair that said: “Minorities need not apply.”

One day a Uyghur friend invited me to a traditional muslim banquet. I was the only non-Uyghur among several hundred. Drinking alcohol is not permitted in Islam but there was plenty of baijiu. Near the end of the night, one guest leaned over and said to me unconvincingly, “We are not supposed to do this but the Han make us [get drunk].”

One day I was teaching a class and asked, “What will Xinjiang be like in 50 years?” A Han Chinese girl raised her hand and answered, “All Uyghurs will finally be able to speak Chinese.” The government had just begun implementing a policy of Chinese only in all schools.

I answered: “It is very important for the development of Xinjiang for minorities to speak Chinese. It’s the only way to find good jobs. But what do you think will happen to the culture? Many of my Uyghur friends are worried that they will lose it. According to the research I am familiar with, there are better ways to implement this kind of language policy.” A Uyghur student behind her looked up at me with an expression of gratitude and awe. No one is allowed to point out weaknesses in government policy and get away with it except in a situation like this. I’m sure he had never heard that before.

For the past month I have censored myself because I did not want to criticize or even seem to criticize government actions in Xinjiang. I fear for my friends and my job. I’m also waiting for Southern Weekly to print more articles on the situation with interviews of people who can explain the situation more clearly and authoritatively than I can.

The only salient point I can make at this point is that while terrorism is a real danger, it tends to obscure the core issues. And as long as these issues go unresolved, the threat of violence will continue. Public discussion would help resolve these issues.

Perhaps my words are too late now that Xinjiang is largely out of the news cycle. But for my own peace of mind I need to write this. I have censored myself for the past month, contributing nothing to my column but editorial translations. This is because there is a culture of fear regarding Xinjiang which has caused me to keep quiet. This too is a kind of violence.

Posted at 12:16 PM · Comments (3)

Copyright The Washington Post

Sunday, August 2, 2009

WALIKALE, Congo — Death came quietly for Bahanuzi Mihigo.

Unconscious from a soaring fever, his body full of infection, the 36-year-old farmer lay under a white hospital tent in this tiny village, a place that floats like an island in a vast sea of roadless jungle.

It was a cool evening, and the fighting that had chased Mihigo from his home was far away now. Still, its aftermath surrounded him in the tent, where ants crawled up the wooden posts of beds occupied by others weak or dying from their own jungle odysseys: three babies listless with malaria; a woman wheezing from tuberculosis; another with a raging infection ballooning her left arm.

Justin Balaluka, Mihigo’s friend, sat with him into the night, noticing how he had changed. He looked old, exhausted. Just before 11 p.m., Mihigo trembled slightly and, as Balaluka put it, “lost the spirit.”

Though doctors listed the cause of death as suspected typhoid fever, Balaluka, 26, who fled for weeks with Mihigo through the jungle, named another.

“I blame the war,” he said.

By some estimates, at least 5 million Congolese have died in more than a decade of conflict touched off by the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, which sent a flood of militiamen across the border into mineral-rich eastern Congo. Although the conflict has surged, receded and changed over time — at some points involving eight countries and at others breaking into smaller conflicts among a mess of armed groups — the cumulative death toll in eastern Congo is the largest since World War II.

For the most part, though, people in eastern Congo have not died in a blaze of bullets or in large-scale massacres. More often, the conflict has set off a chain reaction of less spectacular consequences that begins with fleeing through an unforgiving jungle and ends with deaths such as Mihigo’s. In eastern Congo, people die from malaria and diarrhea, from untreated infections and measles, from falling off rickety bridges and slipping down slopes, from hunger and drinking dirty water in the hope of surviving one more day.
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Arguably, people die because of the wider social impact of the conflict. Entire villages have been scattered across hundreds of miles, atomizing extended family networks that people depend upon in difficult times. The conflict has overwhelmed already-dysfunctional government hospitals and left roads rutted and overgrown, isolating people in villages like Walikale from help.

At the moment, the conflict in eastern Congo is surging once again. Since January, at least half a million people have fled a U.N.-backed Congolese army operation targeting Rwandan rebels, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss in a visit to Congo this month. The rebels are retaliating against villagers with whom they have lived for years.

In early May, one of those attacks ravaged the village of Busurungi, where Mihigo lived with his wife and three children, about 75 miles from here. In many ways, the story of his death — pieced together from interviews with neighbors, doctors and nurses who treated him — begins there.

Despite the occasional menace of rebels who lived in the village, Mihigo led a relatively healthy life. He ate decently, drank water from spring water taps and could go to a local health clinic for basic medicine. He was known as one who shared what he had, and as a mentor to young men tempted to take up the AK-47.

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Posted at 9:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Lost in Uganda

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 29, 2009

As a matter of convention, we constantly say and write things about Africa that would be unimaginable with any other continent. An often thoughtless broad-brush treatment belies the fact of diversity on a continent of 53 countries (even this is not a settled number) and close to a billion inhabitants, a place of light and dark, rich and poor, increasingly well-governed and still appallingly ill-­governed people.

THE TEETH MAY SMILE BUT THE HEART DOES NOT FORGET

Murder and Memory in Uganda

By Andrew Rice

Illustrated. 363 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $26
Related
Mission From Africa (April 12, 2009)

Once in a while, though, the experience of much of the continent is crystallized in the story of a single country, and when that story is told with a combination of attentiveness to historical background and genuine care for the lives of real people, the small world of serious Africa books for nonspecialists becomes enriched. With “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda,” Andrew Rice has written just such a book.

“Africa the place is forever obscured by the shadow of Africa the notion,” Rice observes with characteristic insightfulness, as he sets about exploding much of the mythology surrounding Uganda’s notorious former tyrant, Idi Amin. “If one historical figure could be said to embody the continent as it is stereotypically imagined — dark, dangerous, atavistic and charged with sexual magnetism — it would be Idi Amin Dada.”

Though offstage through most of Rice’s book, Amin, who ruled his country from 1971 to 1979, manages nonetheless to be a central character. At its core, “The Teeth May Smile” is a keenly reported private detective story and police procedural about a son’s search for justice many years after his father’s betrayal and disappearance at the hands of Amin’s military henchmen.

At the same time, Rice’s book is an ably presented drama about the workings of a Ugandan courthouse. It is also an efficient primer on Uganda’s tumultuous history and a political précis of a succession of regimes, culminating with that of the current president, the increasingly authoritarian Yoweri Museveni.

And on the broadest level, it is a vivid prism for examining some of the largest themes in Africa’s history. Uganda’s guerrilla war of the 1980s, waged successfully by Museveni, with its heavy use of child soldiers, would prove to be prologue for horrific conflicts clear across the continent, notably the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Amin’s expulsion of the country’s ethnic Indian population in 1972 would pave the way for economic nationalism elsewhere, from Zaire to Nigeria. And the country’s ethnic politics, rooted in prejudices inherited from Europe, in some ways prefigured the murderous Hutu-­Tutsi cleavage next door in Rwanda.

Rice, who has written for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, perceptively describes the background of British colonialism, with its unmistakable patterns of divide and rule, including the literal invention of tribes. This involved propelling certain groups into education and pushing others, through coercive devices like the imposition of the “hut tax,” into military service. Such decisions had lasting, often bloody consequences.

Finally, “The Teeth May Smile” is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of memory, on forgiveness and reconciliation. In 2002, Rice read about the arrest of Amin’s second-in-command and two other men on the charge of murdering the local political leader Eliphaz Laki three decades before. “The country appeared rehabilitated, but the past always lurked just a few steps down the garden path,” he writes. “I was intrigued by the ways Ugandans accommodated that past: what they chose to remember, what went unspoken.”

As he recounts the efforts of Duncan Laki, an American-educated lawyer, to investigate his father’s murder, Rice achieves a near memoir-like intimacy. Peace may come, Laki learns as he watches the accused killers leave the courthouse as free men, but justice and reconciliation are more elusive.

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.” He is currently completing a novel about Africa.

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Posted at 8:31 PM · Comments (0)

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