A Glimpse of the World: December 2009 Archives

Eastern bloc rising: China and Japan’s emerging symbiosis could shift the locus of modern power completely away from the West, Howard W French writes.

December 31, 2009 11:46 AM

For the span of a few weeks this autumn, the theatre of global diplomacy found a rare focus in the audiences of Emperor Akihito of Japan, a figure without constitutional powers whose life is ordinarily spent in the shadows.

The first half of the minuet in question is likely to be familiar, at least to news junkies in the West: the “scandal” that ensued, if only on American cable networks, after Barack Obama honoured the emperor with an unusually deep and deferential bow at his palace in Tokyo.

But the second act – which received far less attention in the headlines of the world’s newspapers – was by far the more significant one. On unusually short notice for such a thing, Xi Jinping, China’s number two and the slated successor to President Hu Jintao, was granted an audience with Akihito. Many warm words were exchanged, but there was no bow, at least none recorded by the cameras.

Obama had come to Japan in part to soothe nerves – one might even say to curry favour – with a historically subservient but suddenly prickly ally whose new leadership is determined to chart a much more independent course for the country. Xi’s visit, by contrast, was a shrewd mixture of bluster and tact, intended to press China’s advantage as the country engineers a return to its customary role as the paramount force in Asian affairs.

Though Japan remains the world’s second-largest economy, a decade of flat growth and a succession of mostly unremarkable leaders has left the world unaccustomed to looking toward Tokyo for important geopolitical signals. But the reorientation under way – best symbolised by the contrasting complexion of Obama and Xi’s visits – marks one of the most significant new dynamics of our age.

During his trip, Obama called himself America’s first “Pacific president”, a proclamation that is said to have unsettled some European chancelleries, and rightly so. The statement is a form of recognition, albeit belated and indirect, of a monumental shift in world affairs, whose centre of gravity is rapidly moving from the mid-Atlantic to the western Pacific.

That the tectonic plates of the international system, ordinarily so slow to move, have begun to reconfigure themselves with such speed is not merely a matter of China’s impressive economic rise, which has been abundantly acknowledged. Far subtler, and yet potentially as important, has been Japan’s new balancing act, as a new government in Tokyo emerges from America’s politico-military apron.

Under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan ended decades of virtually uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party at the end of August, Japan has embarked on a journey toward greater equidistance between its patron of the last six decades, the United States, and China, the country that has loomed largest in the island nation’s life for 1,400 years.

While Japan learns to say no to the United States on important security matters, like the contentious issue of hosting US Marines on Okinawa Island, or on refuelling American military vessels bound for Afghanistan, it is placing increasing store on relations with China.

China is already Japan’s largest trading partner, and the prospect of decades of strong growth in the world’s largest consumer market is almost certain to bring Tokyo closer to Beijing. America’s long run of uncontested influence in Japan is doubtlessly ebbing.

Where might this all lead? In the last two decades, Japan has invested tremendous political capital and huge sums of money in trying to rebuild its relationship with Asia. At nearly every turn, however, it has been blocked by China, which has been much more successful at corralling the nations of South East Asia and conserving the most important diplomatic trump cards on the Korean peninsula.

Today, many commentators have begun speaking a little hastily of a newly bipolar world; a condominium of sorts between the United States and China. But 20 years from now, this moment is likely to stand out for another important turning point, when China and Japan began to co-operate meaningfully on building Asian economic and eventually, perhaps, political bodies to rival the European Union.

The two countries will come to need each other not just for their markets and for investment, but for the management of their human resources. China, with its economic growth perhaps beginning to slow, needs to export people, and Japan, its own population nosediving, finally accepts the need to import them.

If pursued successfully, this new symbiosis built on capital, technology and especially a growing cultural convergence between East Asia’s two main powers will shift the locus of modernity for the first time from West to East. The US will not be suddenly chased from East Asia, but its era of predominance there will become a thing of the past.

As it increasingly discovers that getting things done means going through Beijing, Japan will abandon all pretence of containing China. But not wishing to kowtow to a new master any more than it did to an old one, it will resort to a classic game of balancing and will consequently find itself with an increasingly fine line to walk.

Howard W French covered East Asia for the New York Times from 1998 to 2008, serving as bureau chief in Tokyo and Shanghai. He is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, and teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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The Great Leap

December 28, 2009 10:56 PM

(Ed.’s note: very much a first-time visitor’s China piece, but with all of its faults, far better than most, and nicely written, too.)

In the heart of downtown Chongqing, a sprawling city-state in Western China on the banks of the Yangtze River, a six-story tower commemorates those who died in what the Chinese call “the anti-Japanese war.” After Japan invaded in 1937, the government moved the capital of China upriver from Nanjing to Chongqing. That decision brought with it Japanese bombs, and the city was destroyed during the war. A year after Mao Zedong founded the New China in 1949, he commemorated the fallen with the People’s Liberation Memorial Tower. I was told by a guide at the city’s exhibition center that just twenty years ago the memorial was the tallest building in the city. Today, the tower sits in the shadow of at least three mountainous skyscrapers in the central business district. Situated at the intersection of a pedestrian shopping mall, the tower looms about as large on the Chongqing skyline as a hotdog stand on Manhattan’s.

My first trip to China—sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation—came just over a month after the People’s Republic celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Those six decades can be cleaved in half: the first act, 1949-78, were the years of Mao, famine and the cultural revolution; the second, the three decades since then, the years of Deng, “reforms” and the “opening up,” as the Chinese call it. And yet as far as China has come in terms of wealth (and the concentration thereof), it remains a very poor country: it ranks 100 among the world’s nations in terms of per capita GDP, according to the IMF. “Our biggest challenge is not from without but from within,” Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told us, citing (obliquely, as the Chinese we talked to were wont to do) the potential for instability as China continues on its trajectory. “It has become the consensus of the elites that China should stay on the right track: the past thirty years have resulted in remarkable achievements in all aspects of China. We hope that in the same vein, but in different emphasis, China could have another thirty years.”

But is another thirty years like the past thirty even possible? The third act of New China begins as a world financial crisis reveals the deep flaws of global neoliberal capitalism and as a diminishing fossil fuel supply and rising global temperatures escalate the competition for resources. Meanwhile, China is in the midst of the largest project of industrialization and urbanization in human history, one that requires massive amounts of capital and fossil fuel. It’s like watching a jeep race up a mountain road as an avalanche begins to cascade downward from above.

At a tour of a car factory in Chongqing, the guide from Chang’an Motors pointed to the boxy gray minivans rolling off the assembly line and, beaming, said, “There are 800 million Chinese peasants who need these cars!”

He’s right, of course. China “should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom,” as Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, told us. But 800 million new cars—think about that for a moment.

What’s happening in China is at once awe-inspiring and monstrous. Its mixture of planning and markets, autocracy and federalism, competence and corruption both supports and refutes every argument one could make about models of political economy. There is a risk, after two weeks in a country of 1.3 billion people, of falling prey to false certainties: like a traveler airlifted onto the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro who returns home to tell everyone that Africa is covered in snow.

This danger was compounded by the fact that the trip was sponsored by an independent, Hong Kong-based nonprofit whose founder, Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chinese chief executive of Hong Kong, is very close to the Chinese leadership; and our hosts on the mainland side, who chaperoned us from interview to interview, were Communist Party members and former government officials. We had a few painfully staged interactions with “ordinary people” (including an elderly tangerine farmer who couldn’t remember the year of a specific agricultural reform but knew that it was during the “5th plenary of the 16th Central Committee”).

We did, however, have an opportunity to speak with dozens of members of the Chinese elite: officials, academics and businessmen. And China happens to be a country where the elites hold tremendous power. Indeed, they seem to have seamlessly melded Leninist vanguardism with American-style best-and-brightest meritocracy: “Let me put it simply,” said former Shanghai mayor and current president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xu Kuangdi. “Most successful businessmen or scholars or engineers—they have become party members of the CPC.”

China’s New Deal

There is no formal social contract that regulates the relationship between members of this ruling class and the people they rule, but there does seem to be an implicit one. It is roughly this: we (the government) provide you (the citizens) with 8 to10 percent annual GDP growth, 24 million new jobs a year and the chance to win the capitalist lottery of sending your son or daughter off to a prestigious school with the promise of a life of industrialized luxury. In exchange: you don’t question the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is not the easiest contract for the government to uphold, and it has already shown some signs of fraying. As recently as 2007, there were 80,000 protests a year in China, and the Internet has given a platform to increasingly rambunctious critics of government policies. The most potent issue is corruption, which captured wide public attention in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when many blamed corruption for the fact that school buildings that collapsed had dodged building codes. Several Chinese officials told us corruption was the biggest threat the party faces, the “threat from within,” as one put it. Despite high-profile “crackdowns” (such as a trial currently under way in Chongqing involving 9,000 suspects), a recent China News Agency poll shows that corruption remains the number-one issue on the minds of Chinese citizens.

Corruption aside, there are also the raw economic challenges of maintaining hypergrowth, particularly at a moment of global contraction. Exports make up 35 percent of Chinese GDP; in the past year they fell by 25 percent. There are 6 million recent college graduates who need to find jobs. One Chinese hedge fund manager showed us an article for a newspaper about new graduates flooding a job fair, where the ratio of attendees to jobs was 7.5 to 1. What would happen, I asked one local party official in Yinchuan, a city near the infamous Three Gorges Dam, if unemployment in China went to 10 percent? Before he answered by saying that such a situation would be impossible under the current system, one of our chaperones, a very savvy diplomat who had served in the foreign ministry, leaned over to me and said, sotto voce, “The government would collapse.” He chuckled after he said it, but I think he was only half joking.

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The Known World of Edward P. Jones

December 28, 2009 10:28 PM

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author may be the most celebrated writer Washington has ever produced. He also may be the most enigmatic.

November 15, 2009

Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo’s restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he’s arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation’s capital has ever produced.

His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic’s Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur “genius grant,” the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He’s won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

And yet he hasn’t written a word of fiction in four years. There is not a draft in a drawer, not a scrap of paper with notes for a story or a novel. He’s knocked off some nonfiction introductions to classic works and edited a couple of anthologies, but nothing of the sort that made him a name.

So when he swirled the wine around in his glass, looked up and asked if I’d like to hear the opening and closing lines of the first short story he’s worked on in nearly half a decade, “The Waiting Room,” a story that won’t be published for who knows how long, I was startled.

Jones dictated the opener:

“In late May 1956 — a little more than a year after my mother bought the Fifth Street NW house that was the beginning of her small empire — she heard a rumor that my father was dying.”

Here’s how it ends:

“And it would have been a great church had it not been for the dead man and all his flowers way down in front.”

When I scribbled it in my notebook, Jones told me that this was the first time it had been written down anywhere. Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, “The Known World,” in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. “The Waiting Room” is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

“I write a lot in my head,” he says. “I’ve never been driven to write things down.”

Jones is 59. The bar he has set for himself, to more or less to do for black Washington what James Joyce did for Dublin, is in the literary stratosphere. He has done this, so far, in 28 short stories, collected in “Lost in the City” (1992) and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” (2006). The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley wrote after “Hagar’s” that Jones was “in the first rank of American letters” and “one of the most important writers of his own generation.” In the New York Times, novelist Dave Eggers said “The Known World” was widely considered to be one of the best American novels of the past 20 years, as “its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose” made it seem not so much written as “engraved in stone.” “Hagar’s” he noted, merely had the ability to “stun on every page; there are too many breathtaking lines to count.”

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How China Stiffed the World in Copenhagen

December 21, 2009 10:52 PM

During the frantic final two days of negotiations at Copenhagen over the weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set a clever trap for Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Having just announced that the United States would establish and contribute to a $100 billion international fund by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the challenge of climate change, Clinton added a nonnegotiable proviso: All other major nations would first be required to commit their emissions reduction to a binding agreement and submit these reductions to “transparent verification.” This condition was publicly reaffirmed by Obama, who argued that any agreement without verification would be “empty words on a page.”

Everyone in the room knew that “all other major nations” primarily meant China. From the beginning, China has steadfastly refused to place its commitments within a binding framework or accept outside monitoring and verification of its progress toward any promised targets. But the eleventh-hour U.S. proposal immediately isolated China. The onus was now on Beijing to agree to standards of “transparent verification.” If it did not, poorer countries standing to benefit from the fund would blame China for breaking the deal. Clinton’s proposal had cunningly undermined Beijing’s leadership over the developing bloc of countries.

Chinese officials retreated to their well-worn negotiation mantra, namely arguing that such demands were an insult to China and would be a violation of Chinese sovereignty and national interests. Wen had been outflanked and was angry, even leaving the conference center and subsequently snubbing Obama in a couple of previously planned bilateral and multinational meetings involving the U.S. president.

Which raises the question: Why such an extreme response? As Mark Twain reportedly said, there are three kinds of deceptions: lies, damned lies, and statistics. China has long been engaging in a dangerous game of manipulating important economic numbers and concealing domestic commercial realities. Despite all its progress over 30 years, Beijing is afraid to shine too bright a light in dark places, and even more afraid that outsiders might be allowed to do so. In important respects, the government actually embraces opaqueness as a perceived advantage. The thought of “transparent verification” was seen as the thin end of the wedge, allowing outside experts broad authority to peer into the workings of middle China. It would have caused Wen to feel the distinct pang of panic that guilty men feel when they realize the jig might soon be up.

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Ghadaffi, Compaore Named External Actors in Liberian Conflict

December 14, 2009 9:08 AM

Ghadaffi, Compaore Named External Actors in Liberian Conflict
December 14, 2009

MONROVIA – Several international players in the decade-long Liberian armed conflict have been identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

In its final report, the TRC indicated that the Liberian war was complicated by regional politics, personal connections and insecurity.

It quoted former U.S. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, who some months ago testified before the Commission in the US, as saying, “We knew that these guerilla fighters had been trained in Libya and that their arms had come from Burkina Faso, and they were getting full support from Côte d’Ivoire.”

For example, in the first civil war, Taylor’s forces secured experts from Libya and Burkina Faso to embed land mines in Liberia. Côte d’Ivoire served as a transit route for equipment and personnel sent from Burkina Faso and Libya. Gaddafi loaned Taylor planes for use by the arms dealers with whom the former warlord dealt, the report added.

Côte d’Ivoire
The TRC’s final report indicated that the backing of Côte d’Ivoire was politically, personally, geographically and financially important to Charles Taylor.

“Côte d’Ivoire’s combination of geographical convenience and unstable government provided Taylor the platform he needed to eventually gain power in Liberia,” it reads.

The late president Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire was, at the time, one of the principal regional supporters of Taylor’s military campaign in Liberia.

The report said Côte d’Ivoire was geographically strategic in allowing Taylor to establish his base, given that its “corridor … provided convenient, regular passage for truckloads of arms and ammunitions destined for Taylor’s rebel forces.”

“Its border with Liberia allowed the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) to recruit fighters along the Ivorian frontier in preparation for its attack on Liberia. Côte d’Ivoire’s political leverage was also a significant factor in Taylor’s war efforts.”

At the time of Taylor’s campaign, Côte d’Ivoire was France’s most prominent ally in West Africa. Arguably, this international recognition, along with Côte d’Ivoire’s political connections and diplomatic facilities, was one of the most important benefits to Taylor.

One possible factor affecting the onset and duration of Liberia’s war was the French influence in the region. France’s wariness of Nigeria’s rise as a regional power led to chilly relations between the two states, the report indicated.

“As a result, France had discouraged its former colonies, such as Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, from engaging in any peace agreements which would have raised Nigerian influence in the region,” TRC further reported.

The Ivorian government, the report pointed out, also provided Taylor and his rebels with other material goods and services, including cantonment, “military intelligence, transportation facilities, safe haven for retreating rebels, and medical assistance for wounded rebels.”

It also played a role in Liberia’s diamond and arms trade. Côte d’Ivoire facilitated the smuggling of diamonds from Liberia, as well as weapons shipments into Liberia. Taylor’s financial backers also used Abidjan as a venue to convene and cut their deals on arms, communication resources and training.

Furthermore, the TRC final report added, Côte d’Ivoire provided protection to Taylor’s relatives, who resided there.

After Houphouet-Boigny’s death in 1993, Taylor maintained close relationships with both successors, Henri Konan Bedie and Robert Gueï. Those connections, the report maintains, enabled him to continue the arms transfers and other activities. When Gueï was ousted from the presidency after the 2000 elections, the alliance shifted toward plotting a coup against Ivorian President, Laurent Gbagbo.

The TRC further indicated that Taylor opposed Gbagbo and sought to destabilize the Côte d’Ivoire, whose government had developed relationships with and recruited combatants from Liberians United For Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).

“Also, Taylor purportedly wanted to establish a base in Côte d’Ivoire should he need to leave Liberia; gain control over Ivorian seaports that were vital to Liberia’s timber exports; and establish an armed line of defense to stop LURD and MODEL incursions into Liberia. Thus, Taylor supported two rebel groups, the Popular Movement of the Ivorian Great West (MPIGO) and the Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP), which launched an offensive on Danané from Liberia on November 28, 2002,” TRC pointed out.

The final report added that while the Liberian government denied any involvement, Danané residents reported that Liberian security, Anti-terrorist Unity (ATU) or former NPFL fighters, constituted 90 percent of the rebels.

Burkina Faso

The report pointed out that Burkina Faso played a supporting role to Taylor and the NPFL, and that its president, Blaise Compaore, was a significant figure in the events leading up to Taylor’s armed rebellion.

“It is likely that at least part of the motivation for Burkinabe support for Taylor was personal. Accounts suggest that Compaore ordered [the assassination of] former Burkinabe President, Thomas Sankara… and that Taylor, who arrived in Burkina Faso at approximately the time of President Sankara’s assassination in October 1987, was involved in the murder. Compaore was also married to Ivorian President, Houphouet-Boigny’s daughter, the widow of Adolphus Tolbert,” said the TRC.

Given the strong relationship between Compaore and Houphouet-Boigny and their shared hostility toward former Liberian president, Samuel Doe, it is believed that Houphouet-Boigny persuaded Compaore to support Taylor’s efforts to overthrow Doe as revenge for Tolbert’s murder.

Compaore continued his support for Taylor despite international pressure and the humanitarian disaster that ensued in Liberia: “He kept going because he had an investment in Charles Taylor, and he wanted absolutely for Charles Taylor to win, and he did not trust the West African forces because he opposed the operation.”

Perhaps one of Compaore’s most significant acts was his introduction of Taylor to the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi. It was Compaore who convinced Gaddafi that Taylor possessed the military and diplomatic credentials necessary to overthrow the Doe government.

Burkina Faso also helped facilitate arms transfers to Taylor by serving as a transfer site for weapons en route to Liberia.

Despite assurances he would stop supplying arms to Taylor, Compaore continued his support for Taylor. Burkinabe banks also harbored diverted funds for Taylor, who had at least two Burkinabe bank accounts under the name of Jean Pierre Somé.

Burkina Faso also served as a recruiting ground for the NPFL’s ranks, the report added.

A generation of young Burkinabe men was alienated during the country’s economic crisis in the mid 1980s, and it was largely these disaffected youth who traveled to the NPFL training camps in Libya and Burkina Faso. In fact, Taylor’s 1989 invasion involved not only Gio and Mano combatants, but also Burkinabe soldiers, according to the Commission.

Statement givers confirmed the belief that Burkina Faso’s support enabled Taylor to train his soldiers.

Libya

The TRC asserted that while the full extent of Libya’s involvement in the Liberian conflict may never be known, NGOs and other scholars have documented Libya’s role in facilitating the Liberian civil war – particularly through the actions of its leader, Gaddafi.

A portion of the resources and training that fueled the war is believed to have been supplied by Libya. When Doe took power in 1980, Libya was the first to recognize the new regime and readily acted to foster diplomacy between the two states.

In addition to the diplomatic ties with the Doe regime, Libyans had also established a business presence in Liberia during the 1980s, owning the Pan-African Plaza office block and Union Glass Factory.

The relationship cooled as Doe accepted more and more American support – including a purported $10 million in cash on condition that Doe would cancel a scheduled visit to Libya. Liberia’s diplomatic overtures toward Israel further abated relations between Liberia and Libya, which led to the expulsion of Libyan diplomats and Libya’s severance of ties with Liberia.

In 1985, however, as his relationship with the U.S. began to sour, Doe re-initiated dialogue with Libya and paid the country a visit in 1988. Even with reestablished ties and warmer relations with the Doe government in the mid- to late 1980s, Gaddafi pursued other avenues of influence in Liberia and acted to support Liberian dissidents.

Moses Blah, who served as Charles Taylor’s Vice President, testified that Gaddafi’s Libyan government ran training camps, which taught fighters how to use AK-47 assault rifles and surface-to-air-missiles. In response to Doe’s involvement with the United States, Gaddafi directed Libyan agents to begin recruiting, arming and funding Liberian dissidents throughout the region, including Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Ghana.

It has been reported that “several hundred Liberians were trained in Libya at least three different terrorist camps.” Those who trained in Libya included, inter alia, former Ministers, Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh and Samuel Dokie; Prince Johnson; and Benjamin Yeaten, future head of Taylor’s Special Security Service, the TRC final report added.

Perhaps the most important figure to be trained in Libya was Charles Taylor, who was reportedly trained in one of Libya’s camps at Mathaba in 1985.

Following Taylor’s release from a Ghanaian jail, he began traveling between a new home in the capital of Burkina Faso, paid for by Libyan funds, and Tripoli. The al-Mathabh al Thauriya al-Alamiya (“World Revolutionary Headquarters”) was an operation set up by the Libyan secret service to provide training on counter-insurgency warfare. Thus, when the Libyan government chose to support the NPFL, Taylor suddenly had access to a foreign government with the finances to support a large scale insurgency.

Taylor was reportedly personally encouraged by Gaddafi to recruit fighters in preparation for the December 1989 assault against Doe.

Libya furnished the NPFL leader with a cache of weaponry and millions of dollars to support his insurgency. The relationship between Gaddafi and Taylor apparently continued through Taylor’s presidency. After his inauguration, President Taylor made several trips to Libya for talks with Gaddafi.

Even in the closing days of his presidency, Taylor received support from Libya, reportedly flying to Libya to obtain weaponry in 2003. Just prior to Taylor’s departure from Liberia in 2003, Nigerian peacekeepers controlling the airport confiscated a shipment of weapons, believed to have come from Libya.
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Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?

December 13, 2009 11:58 PM

When I first moved to Kyoto in 1999, I knew about 50 words of Japanese. My attempts to string together a few broken phrases were met with excessive praise, and I assumed everyone was being nice. “No,” I remember my friend Yuki saying. “People mean it. They really are impressed.”
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Drugs cartels open another front in a futile war

December 10, 2009 11:44 PM

As west Africa slips slowly towards a mire of ungovernability, Burkina Faso has tabled a United Nations Security Council session in an attempt to focus attention on what is being called Africa’s new war. Over the past five years the coastal countries of west Africa have fallen like dominoes to an assault launched from distant Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico as some of the world’s most ruthless drugs cartels seek to bring these territories under their control.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has been warning that drugs traffickers have corrupted politicians and security officials up to ministerial level from Guinea-Bissau, dubbed the world’s first narco-state, to Ghana, long been regarded as the region’s model democracy. Now Burkina Faso and other African countries claim that this a genuine threat to security. They point to African criminal networks, spawned by the cocaine trade, which are linking up with terrorist and insurgents groups in the Sahel and Maghreb regions.

The problem for west Africa began in the 1990s when drugs groups decided to stimulate European demandfor cocaine and crack. The cartels had argued that the US, which consumes 40 per cent of the world’s cocaine, had reached supersaturation point. The rise of cocaine usage in Europe has been exceptional. South American exporters now use west Africa as a hub for drugs for Europe.

The amount of cocaine transiting west Africa has rocketed. In 2001, 273kg were seized off the coast, but by 2007 this had reached 14.5 tonnes. The UNODC estimates that the total trafficked through the region is 50 tonnes (rising every year) with an annual value of about $2bn (€1.35bn, £1.22bn).

The power of this money in a region of fragile states is overwhelming. The sub-region has been carved out by “narco-barons” into two hubs, with Guinea-Bissau servicing the north and Ghana the south. But the problem extends far beyond. Cape Verde, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Togo are all major ports of entry for the cocaine trade. This is hurting Sierra Leone and Liberia, both recovering from traumatic civil wars.

Having invested some military and political effort in bringing these conflicts to a close, the west is largely standing by as the Colombians take over. The US Drugs Enforcement Agency and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency have courageous officers on the ground but the meagre resources in the region mean their impact is limited.

The situation in west Africa underlines the catastrophic implications of western drugs for its security policy in hotspots around the world. Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan does not appear to have made reference to the fatal impact of the opium trade in the conflict. It is not just that the Taliban earns more than $100m a year from drugs, ensuring it has resources both to sustain an impressive war effort and compete with Nato in the hearts and minds game. It is that one of the primary drivers of corruption within the government is the opium trade.

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US-Japan: an easy marriage becomes a ménage à trois

December 10, 2009 11:41 PM

Tokyo these days is full of Americans with furrowed brows. US pre-eminence in Asia is being challenged by the rise of China. Barack Obama’s administration is searching for a grand strategy to safeguard its place as the region’s pivotal power. Now, Japan is challenging the terms of its long-standing security alliance with Washington.

The proximate cause of the angst is an argument about the relocation of one of the US military bases on the island of Okinawa. Behind the spat, however, is an emerging divergence of perspective. Bluntly put, the new generation of politicians that has swept to power in Japan is unwilling to accept the subservient role allotted to them by Washington.

The election victory in September of Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan marked a revolution in Japanese politics after half-a-century of virtually uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. The US has struggled to grasp the significance of the transfer of power from its faithful allies in the LDP to a party of political insurgents.

The military base dispute has become a lightning rod for differences about how to respond to a changing geopolitical landscape. The strategic challenge shared by Washington and Tokyo is how to engage a rising China while balancing its regional ambitions. The difficult question is how.

The US-Japan relationship has thus far been defined by US occupation, the imperative of cold-war unity, and, until recently, by unchallenged US hegemony in Asia. But the world has moved on. China has entered the bedroom, turning a comfortable marriage into an awkward ménage à trois.

No one is talking about tearing up the 50-year-old security agreement between Washington and Tokyo. The US military presence and nuclear guarantee offer Japan security against the immediate threat from a nuclear-armed North Korea and reassurance against China’s military modernisation. The alliance simultaneously provides reassurance to Beijing about Japanese intentions and the US with a big military “footprint” in East Asia.

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Why Obama does not want a multipolar world order

December 4, 2009 11:09 PM

As recently as five years ago, it was not possible to talk seriously about the international system without the premise of an American superpower wielding the power of life and death over the planet.

Today, the simplification works the other way round. It has become common currency that the US is in decline and President Barack Obama represents an America that gladly accepts we live in a multipolar world.

Yet, at the very least, this hypothesis is debatable. If the world is multipolar, it is very imperfectly so, and American diplomacy aims to keep things this way.

Power is currently expressed in terms of three assets: material wealth, without which nothing is technically possible (the collapse of the Soviet Union is a case in point); strategic power, which implies the capacity to project force to one’s periphery and beyond; and, finally, what might be called the power instinct – that is, the will to weigh in on world affairs. This last can be through one’s ideas, capabilities or attractiveness.

The evolution in power relations is most palpable on the material front, even if, contrary to general wisdom, the shift in power from the west to Asia has been a relatively slow process. There are now four great economic centres of power: the US, Europe, China and Japan. They are very distantly followed by India, Brazil and Russia. However, it is important to note that Russia’s gross domestic product, for instance, accounts for only 1 per cent of global GDP, compared to a 22 per cent share for the US. This is a long way from economic multipolarity, which would require that the power of various centres should be roughly equivalent.

On the strategic front, the imbalance is even more striking: there is one military superpower that surpasses all the others by far (the US); a rising power (China); a power that lives on its past and can only maintain its rank by dint of its energy resources (Russia); and a plethora of middle-sized actors whose projection capacity remains very weak.

There is no evidence whatsoever of movement towards strategic multipolarity; aside from China, which has the will and the means, and Russia, which has the will but not necessarily the means, no credible aspiring global power has emerged. Brazil and India are certainly becoming stronger militarily. Their strategic ambitions will, nonetheless, remain regional for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, China’s ascendance might reinforce Japan’s strategic dependence on the US, notwithstanding any short-term rifts in Japanese-American relations.

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Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

Oil Must Benefit Ordinary Ghanaians

December 3, 2009 6:32 PM

An excerpt from a fascinating blogpost.

China has an active policy of seeking to extend its influence in Africa, at the expense of Western influence. The Kosmos deal, and indeed the development of Ghana’s petrochemical resources, has become mixed up in this. As known to the Western embassies in Accra from their government contacts, rather than Exxon Mobil, the Ghanaian government wishes the stake to go to the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation.

That has made international news headlines, as a competition for an African mineral resource that pits China and the USA in head to head conflict. The US Embassy in Accra and the Obama Adminstration certainly see it that way. I suspect the Chinese Embassy do too.

Having just come back from Washington, I would assure you that the Americans are going to be very unhappy with Ghana if Exxon Mobil are blocked by the government, just in order to give it to the Chinese instead. If the Ghanaian government forces the sale to the Chinese for less than the Americans were prepared to pay, that would cause widespread outrage in the international community.

The clue is in what I just wrote: “Competition for an African mineral resource”. Those who kid themselves that either side is in this primarily for altruistic reasons, are easily deceived. Outsiders want African resources; that has been the truth of African contact with the rest of the world for centuries. That is not to say that there is no altruism in the relationship. From the West, I think of it as guilt money for slavery and colonialism. But whatever the motivation, the truth is that Ghana has over the years received hugely more free aid money from the UK and US than it ever has from China - totalling billions of dollars - and that it will do so this year too.

When asked by Ghanaian friends about .the relationship with China. I always tell them that, if offered genuinely free money, they should certainly take it. Equally, if these Chinese buses are reliable (time will tell) and cheap with good credit terms, certainly buy them. But the much vaunted billions in Chinese aid for Ghana is not readily apparent. Have you seen it? There are some football stadia - not a huge economic driver. The Bui project is a soft loan, not a gift, and the capital price is inflated.

Aspects to the Chinese way of doing things come with what aid there is. In particular the importation of low level Chinese labour, including convict labour, rather than giving jobs to local people, and some very unfortunate Chinese attitudes to employee relations and to Africans in general.

The government is working on a plan whereby the Chinese would get Kosmos’ part of the Jubilee field in exchange for building undersea gas pipelines, and the Chinese would also develop the onshore storage facilities, and perhaps refining and downstream industry too.

The problem with this plan is that that the Chinese do not want to pay 4.5 billion dollars upfront for the Kosmos concession. But if not they, who would pay Kosmos? Kosmos can certainly be taxed. Kosmos can within reason be controlled over to whom they sell. But the absolute right which Kosmos must retain is to sell their share at the market price.

The sums of money involved are mind boggling - that a share of less than a quarter in just one field is selling for over 4 billion dollars, shows how the economics of oil will dwarf the rest of the Ghanaian economy. That is why so many companies are anxious to be involved. That goes not just for the production from fields, but for all the downstream activity too. What worries me is that there appears a government determination to hand control of the bulk of Ghana’s nascent hydrocarbon related development to the Chinese, rather than deal on the basis of fair and open competition.

To say that there is a lack of transparency would be an understatement. A convoluted deal with the Chinese over Jubilee, pipelines, processing and downstream is being put together without anyone else being invited to tender. As far as I can see, it would give the Chinese Kosmos’ stake in the Jubilee field, with the Chinese paying much less than it is worth.

I may be wrong. It may well be that the Chinese proposal genuinely involves a huge aid component, or is of high quality and competitively priced. But in that case, they would only benefit from an open process.

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Posted at 6:32 PM · Comments (0)

Obama in China, Who was the ultimate winner?

December 3, 2009 12:49 PM

As translated by David Kelly, Professor of China Studies, China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney

Obama’s first visit to China was a major historical event, the full significance of which will take some time to interpret. In terms of its direct impact on domestic politics in the two countries, Obama clearly seemed to be the loser. Not only failing in arguing for a substantial appreciation of the yuan, and on the emission reduction issue, he also failed to obtain satisfactory commitments from China.

What made many Americans unhappy was that, in return for his humility and sincerity, Hu Jintao in response baited and humiliated Obama. Hu Jintao openly showed the international community and the Chinese people said that he was not afraid to use means harmful to the national and personal character, to impede and close down Obama’s exchanges with the Chinese people. This makes it difficult to say whether Hu lost rather than won points in domestic political terms.

Frankly I was not expecting Hu Jintao to bait Obama so boldly. There were certainly personal factors behind this: Obama excels in rhetoric and making speeches, while Hu Jintao never speaks in his own words, which would surely make himuncomfortable. Personal factors, however, should not be exaggerated. To a greater extent, what Hu Jintao’s baiting of Obama conveyed to the US and Obama was the collective message of the CCP power elite that their core interest is to oppose the “universal values” of the US and maintain their one-party dictatorship. To this end, they would not hesitate to use any means. Obama was told he shouldn’t naively imagine that switching from America’s previous arrogance about human rights to preaching them sincerely would make any impression on these hardened hearts.

This China trip will impact heavily on Obama’s judgment as to whether China’s rise is a curse or a blessing for the world and the US, and the correctness of his judgment will likewise impact significantly both on the US and China and indeed whole world. The potential threat of China’s rise to the US and the world is not so much that China aims to rule the world, but rather that should civil unrest occur in China, it would have enormous impact on the world economic and political order. Obama, if he is smart enough, should be able to see that behind the Chinese elite’s arrogance is an extreme lack of self-confidence that can’t be concealed.

The power elite is very clear that the people, the peasantry in particular, have paid a heavy price for China’s economic rise. Hundreds of millions of migrant peasants work all year round but are not accepted in the cities. It has become the norm for their families to be divided. According to official media, the total number of so-called “left-behind children” has reached 58 million. The health and environmental problems accumulated by economic growth that are heedless of the cost, have become time bombs that cannot be removed and will start to detonate one after another. The garbage [incinerator] incident at Panyu, Guangdong, and another recent one, in which over a hundred Hunanese migrant workers suffering from pneumoconiosis went to Shenzhen to petition for help, are just the tip of the iceberg. How to solve China’s increasingly serious issue of social injustice given the imperative of maintaining political stability? Hu hasn’t a clue. Indeed, he doesn’t even hide the fact.

The following statement occurred in Hu’s speech at the recent APEC summit in Singapore: “The contradictions and problems encountered by China in its development process are, in terms of scale and complexity, rare in the world.” The implication was “I do not know what to do, nor does anyone else in the world.” [1]

But it is also true that he not only lacks the courage to do a lot of things he knows he should do, such as disclosing the private assets of officials, but also lacks the courage to make way for capable people, but rather allows China’s crisis to keep deepening. The mediocrity and incompetence of the leadership not only exacerbates the power elite’s frantic grabbing for wealth, but also incites more wealthy people, including many rich senior officials, to lose confidence in China’s future, and make preparations to flee the country at any time. One recent story which upset netizens concerns an official ruling by the Shenzhen government that those senior officials whose spouses and children have emigrated overseas may not be re-appointed to key positions. This amounts to open acceptance that many senior officials have already quit China for overseas locations in their minds. As for China’s wealthy, it is even more routine that many middle class families, even when on the verge of bankruptcy, are sending their children abroad. [2]

In this context, were China actually to substantially appreciate the yuan, as is hoped for in the West, it would mean the sharp appreciation of the assets of the government and the wealthy, and relatively sharp depreciation of those of the peasants, because the Chinese system severely restricts peasants’ share in urban and non-agricultural benefits. As a result, China’s internal crisis must rapidly deteriorate, and the mass exodus of capital and talent this would likely cause would trigger a full-scale crisis.

Is the US fully prepared for this? Does it know how to help China avoid this possibility? Evidently not. But only if the Americans and Obama have a better understanding of China, and in particular understand why Chinese people always “only bully their own rather than outsiders” (Qin Hui), can it help China out of this cultural trap. [3] Obama has decided to send one hundred thousand students to China over the next four years. This was an important decision that may well make him the ultimate winner. I place hope in a new generation of American politicians, capable of directly communicating with a new generation of Chinese elites and public, because only in this way is a Sino-American win-win possible.

* Liang Jing, “Shui shi zuihoude yingjia” [Who was the ultimate winner], Xin shiji, 2 December 2009 [梁京： “谁将是最后的赢家？”，新世纪，2009年12月 2日 (here).].

[1] Zhao Yonggang, “Hu Jintao: Zhongguo fazhan suoyu wenti shijie hanjian” [Hu Jintao: problems China encounters in its development of a rare kind], Dazhong wang, 14 November 2009 [赵永刚： “胡锦涛:中国发展所遇问题世界罕见”，大众网，2009年11月 14日 (here).].

[2] “Shenzhen: ‘Luo guan’: bu de danren dang zheng ‘yibashou’” [Shenzhen: ‘exposed officials’ not to be ‘in charge’ in party or government], Nanfang ribao, 26 November 2009 [： “深圳：“裸官”不得担任党政“一把手””，南方日报，2009年11月 26日 (here).].

[3] Qin Hui, “Dui Xifang meiti ‘dadong ganhuo’ you shenme yong?” [What’s the use of ‘flaring up’ against the Western media?], Fenghuang zhoukan, no. 33, 27 November 2009 [秦晖： “对西方媒体“大动肝火”有什么用？”，凤凰周刊 2009年33期 2009年11月 27日 (here).].

Posted at 12:49 PM · Comments (0)

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