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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright East Asia Forum

7 February 2010

Challenge is a word that carries a heavy burden of nuance: it can convey a sense of threat, it can be an inspiration, it poses questions – often difficult ones – and it can also be double-edged, in that the challenge frequently applies as much to the alleged challenger as it does to those on the receiving end. Where China is concerned, the word is appropriate in every sense; but an important part of the challenge is precisely to decide which aspect is of the greatest importance. Only having done this can we attempt to frame policies, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policymakers, which will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s — and tomorrow’s — China poses to us, and to itself.
If there is a single word that should be applied to China, whether speaking of its international impact [1] or its domestic situation [2], it should be ‘complexity’. There is simply nothing simple about China; and this being the case, we should be distrustful of any simple descriptors or characterisations, be they benign — China’s peaceful rise, harmonious world, harmonious society — or the opposite, such as comparisons of a rising China with Wilhelmine Germany at the beginning of the last century.
And with complexity comes size: expectations that China will take any path, the nature of which can be predicted from the experience of other countries are almost certainly going to be proved wrong. This was so of American hopes for a Westernised, democratic China emerging from World War II; it was so of the expectation post-1949 that China would become a clone as well as a client of the Soviet Union; and expectations have similarly been disappointed in both the pre-and post-1989 phases of the era of reform and opening.
China is just too big, and carries too great a civilisational and historical throw-weight to be anything other than sui generis. As Lu Xun, one of the greatest Chinese writers of the first half of the 20th century, told his readers, you make your path by walking it. This is as true of China now as it was then, but the implications for the rest of the world are now even greater — far greater — than when he wrote these words.
It is relatively easy to predict that in such and such a year China’s GDP will have reached a certain figure, that it will occupy such and such a global ranking in terms of size or in terms of per capita income, that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will be rated at such and such a level in terms of relative size, procurement, capabilities, and the like. These are all of course vital judgments to be made, and whatever the specifics, it seems clear enough that whatever difficulties China faces, domestically and internationally, in pursuing its growth goals, it is going to play an ever greater role in world affairs. Indeed, for better or for worse, it is doing so already. But the more difficult, and more crucial question is, assuming that China’s comprehensive strength, or global ranking, will place it amongst the most powerful and influential nations in the world by, say, 2020, or 2030, what sort of a China is it going to be?
Here our task is complicated not only by the sheer complexity of the issues to be addressed, and by the often unhelpful cacophony of foreign comment, but by the fact that the Chinese government — not just the present Chinese government, but others before it (although the Chinese Communist Party state has greater ideological inclinations and more effective tools than most of its predecessors) — is committed [3]to presenting a single narrative [4] of China’s rise as interpreted and enunciated by its official organs.
Yet anyone who has the slightest understanding of contemporary China will know that behind the editorials of the People’s Daily, the statements of Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespeople, the presentation of the news by CCTV, or the work of officially approved film directors, there is a hugely complex world of debate, current and counter-current, introspection, historical and cultural revisionism, as much within the organs of state and party as outside. The degree to which this debate is tolerated waxes and wanes, and things can be said by some people, or within some bodies, that are forbidden to others. Some of this debate we can see, some of it is largely hidden. Some of it is inspiring, encouraging, some of it is more than a little scary or plumb crazy. But it is here, as much as in the more ostensibly transparent narratives approved for public — and foreign — consumption and edification, that the vital question of what sort of a China we are going to be dealing with 10, 20 or 30 years from now is being worked out.
Globalisation is another complicating factor that cuts both ways. As China becomes increasingly involved in the rest of the world, and vice-versa, the simple binary division between domestic and foreign — encapsulated in the once much-used formulation nei wai you bie — is increasingly untenable. Whatever they may wish, China’s rulers, and for that matter ordinary Chinese, are just going to have to get used to the fact that things that happen at home will impact on the way they are viewed from outside, and that this will in turn impact on decision-making relative to China by other countries. By the same token, foreign companies [5] will find it increasingly difficult to regard with insouciance events in China that disturb their shareholders. The same, of course, applies to the treatment of Chinese, whether individuals, companies or representatives of the state, in other countries.
This means that in order to judge what sort of a country China is going to become, there is virtually nothing that happens in China that doesn’t matter, or that we don’t need to know about. The days when we could just look at steel and grain production figures, imports and exports, look at the PLA training and recruitment cycle, work out the pecking order in the standing committee of the Politburo, are over. Of course all these things are of the utmost importance. But as we seek to understand a country that is reassuming its historical place as one of the leading nations of the world, we need to know so much more: arguments about history and culture are important, not only to the Chinese, but to us.
To give only one obvious example: whether the standard for judging previous dynasties should be their achievements in culture and learning, or the degree to which central authority was imposed and borders expanded, matters to us. Similarly, the whole question of the reappraisal of traditional Chinese culture; how the modern Chinese state maintains the multinational character of the Manchu Qing Empire; questions of centralism versus federalism; the reappraisal of the achievements of the Nationalist government and its model of modernisation (not to mention its territorial claims largely inherited by the PRC, including, topically, the South China Sea); the debates about democracy; the rethinking of the post May-4 modernisation project … to name but a few issues that may once have seemed arcane, but in fact have major implications for all of us, not just the Chinese themselves, as they continue the process of walking a path that is increasingly going to merge with the global highway.
The first and greatest challenge, especially for those of us who grew up under the comfortable protection of British and US naval supremacy, and in a cultural world made in Palestine, Greece, Rome and Europe, is the challenge of understanding.
This essay is featured in the latest issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ [6]).
Richard Rigby is head of the China Institute at the Australian National University and was formerly an Australian diplomat and analyst specialising on Chinese and Asian affairs.

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading about photography, both in gearing up mentally for the end of winter (hopefully soon) and a busy season of new work in the spring, as well as because of some new teaching I’ll be doing in the summer.
This is one of the most interesting titles I’ve come across, and although it is aimed primarily at photographes, its insights are readily applicable across a variety of documentary forms, including reportage and writing.
Coles’s thinking is particularly acute on the psychology, politics and ethics implicit in the relationship between “author” and “subject.”

In his own words, he describes the books as: “a look at what happens to those of us who venture into streets not our own in pursuit of the awareness those streets (one hopes) can offer — what happens morally and psychologically within us, and what subsequently happens to us as writers, photographers, filmmakers, or academic researchers.”

In a brief but intense book, Coles delivers.

Posted at 7:38 PM · Comments (0)

There’s no explaining tastes and fads, I suppose. There is a way to explain why this music will never lose its urgency, though. On the piano, Tristano speaks in his own vigorous, organic tongue, with a left hand as distinctive and idiosyncratic, shall I say it? As Monk. I’m not placing the two on the same pedestal, that would be unfair to both, especially to Thelonious, who was active for far longer, and whose work was far more influential and in the end iconic. Still, the drive, the time, the Amazonian flow of Lennie merits respect and rewards frequent listening.

Posted at 7:26 PM · Comments (0)

Fantastic African Rumba from the Senegalese masters. Here, the orchestra fronts Youssou N’dour. I particularly enjoyed El Son te Llama.

Posted at 7:20 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve been on a major Japan enka bend lately, and love this album, whose song “Urami Bushi” plays as the final credits to the Tarantino movie, Kill Bill, roll. Gorgeous, moody, affecting music.

Posted at 7:11 PM · Comments (0)

I’m late to this. Reich has spent quality time in Ghana steeping himself in traditional African percussion. This album, the proximate result, is a monster.

Drumming by Steve Reich

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Copyright The Financial Times

Two bronze heads stand on a table-top in a back room at the British Museum. Meticulously incised lines run down smooth, elegant features that exude a stylised, “Egyptian” serenity. Yet there is at the same time something startlingly realistic about these faces: the sense, caught in the subtle curve of a mouth or cheek, that these are real people, who walked the streets of the Nigerian city of Ife some 700 years ago.

When the German archaeologist Leo Frobenius set eyes on the first of these heads to be unearthed in 1910, its bronze features “of perfect mould”, he declared that he had seen the face of Poseidon, sea god of the ancient Greeks – proof, he claimed, of the existence of an African Atlantis. Nonsense, of course, and since their discovery in a series of remarkable finds in the early and mid-20th century the so-called “Ife heads” have attracted much rash speculation and many even rasher acts.

The controversial bronze head called ‘Olokun’, now considered to be an early 20th-century copy of a lost 14th-century original
There are only 20 of them in existence. Made between the 13th and early 15th centuries, using the lost-wax process, they challenge ideas about the primitivism of black Africa that are widely held even today. Who they represent – deities, kings or ordinary people – and why they were created remain mysterious. Several of them have been removed from Nigeria in dubious circumstances, others simply stolen (then returned); at least one is a fake.

Now 12 of these heads and one half-length figure are to be displayed at the British Museum, along with a wealth of terracotta sculpture, pottery and other objects, almost all of it lent by Nigeria’s Commission for Museums and Monuments. While much of the terracotta work is extraordinarily refined, it is the bronze heads that tug most at the imagination. Does their realism and technical sophistication provide evidence of links between tropical Africa and the ancient Mediterranean? Or was medieval Africa far more advanced than was previously imagined? As our views on Africa have developed over the past century, the political dimensions of such questions have been magnified.

A web of intrigue and controversy surrounds these extraordinary objects. It centres on the most famous of them, the Ori Olokun – the so-called Head of the Sea God – unearthed by Frobenius in 1910. A freebooting Indiana Jones figure, part visionary, part charlatan, Frobenius arrived in Ife, the spiritual capital of the Yoruba people, with the aim of finding evidence of a lost “white” African civilization. The Yoruba are Nigeria’s largest ethnic group, numbering some 35m. According to Yoruba beliefs, Ife is the place where the world began. While the city’s heyday lasted from 1000 to 1600AD, its ruler, the Oni of Ife, retains a degree of spiritual authority in beliefs that spread into the neo-African religions of the New World, including Voodoo and Santería.

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THE POKER BRIDE

By Christopher Corbett
Illustrated. 218 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24

It’s astonishing to think that there was once a time when news from California could reach Hong Kong long before it came to the attention of the president of the United States, but that’s exactly what happened when gold was discovered in the winter of 1848. California wasn’t even a state when the developer of a sawmill took a morning stroll and noticed a nugget gleaming in a stream, a discovery that was to transform America.

Christopher Corbett’s new book, “The Poker Bride,” documents one aspect of that transformation: the little-known story of the tens of thousands of immigrant Chinese who arrived in the West over the next decades, hoping to strike pay dirt. Though some became wealthy, theirs is generally a horrific tale of violence, exploitation and sex slavery. It culminated in one of the most shameful chapters in America’s sad history of racial prejudice.

Before the gold rush, as Corbett explains, most Americans were familiar with only two ethnic Chinese: the “Siamese twin” brothers who had toured the country as “professional freaks” with P. T. Barnum. The brothers, Chang and Eng, became household names, amassed enough money to buy land in North Carolina, married two American sisters, fathered many children and owned black slaves. Within the span of their lives, they would see the rise of a significant anti-Chinese movement.

As immigrants arrived in ever greater numbers, taking jobs not only in mines but as carpenters, laborers, laundrymen and porters, American newspapers began to warn the public about a “deluge of yellow men.” Even though the Chinese never became a significant proportion of the national population, they were the focal point for antipathy toward outsiders — partly out of concern that “cheap Chinese labor” was taking jobs from white workers, and partly, as Corbett notes, because most didn’t expect to stay. Rather than integrate into the community at large, they settled in sequestered Chinatowns. They remained the Other. By 1880, virulently racist labor agitators were organizing “Chinese Must Go” rallies. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, barring the entry of Chinese into the United States for 10 years. It was later extended.

Chinese men willing to work in the gold mines endured lives of hardship and disease. Violence was rampant and punishment harsh. Corbett describes the squalor of the mining camps, the chaos of the pack trains, the isolation and danger of the work itself. But at least the miners — whether Chinese, Irish, Australian, French or Mexi can — had come voluntarily. “Long after blacks were freed in the United States,” Corbett writes, “practices involving Chinese women were tolerated in California and elsewhere in the American West that were, in essence, bondage.” Accounts of Chinese sex slave disputes can be found in Idaho newspapers as late as 1917.

Most of the Chinese women and girls arrived in San Francisco, often kept in “holding pens” to be auctioned in what became a flourishing sex trade, as lucrative as selling opium and gambling. “During the early 1890s,” Corbett writes, “prices ranged from about $100 for a 1-year-old to $1,200 for a girl of 14, which was considered the best age for prostitution.” These women were called “daughters of joy” or “100 men’s wives,” and were at the bottom of the class system even among prostitutes, working in filthy, crowded “cribs” or “hog farms.” Many had been kidnapped in China or sold there by families in desperate poverty. A girl in China at the time, Corbett notes, “was nearly worthless… . The streets of Chinese cities were often littered with abandoned babies.”

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Copyright Michael Deibert

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 09, 2010
Thoughts on recent Haiti commentaries
As a progressive reporter and analyst working on the ground in Haiti, I have gotten fairly used to reading ignorant commentary on the Caribbean nation of 9 million over the years.

Last month, the dust had not even settled from the earthquake that destroyed large sections of Port-au-Prince and killed some 2000,000 people when the voices of intolerance and opportunism set about savaging a country that was already on its knees.

The irony of Rush Limbaugh - a man so obese that he can barely stand maligning a nation of the chronically underfed - telling listeners not to support the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the quake met the venomous snake-oil rhetoric of Pat Robertson, who denounced those buried under the rumble for having made “a pact with the Devil.” Further libeling the dead, the American basketball player Paul Shirley wrote that “shouldn’t much of the responsibility for the disaster lie with the victims of that disaster,” a remark that got him wisely fired by ESPN.

Unfortunately, though, the right are not the only ones whose views of Haiti seems to have been colored by political prejudice and misunderstanding. In recent years, a small but noisy sector of the international left has been equally irresponsible in its commentary about Haiti, with some commentators wishing to see all foreign countries in terms of facile good guy-bad guy scenarios

Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot - a man so intellectually lazy he often gets the basic details of Haiti’s history wrong - characterizes despotic former Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide as “Haiti’s democratically elected president…kidnapped by the US and flown to exile in Africa,” Naomi Klein, interviewing Aristide in his gilded South Africa exile (where the South African government underwrites his expenses to the tune of that of a government minister), wrote that Aristide is proof of her own anti-globalization credo, as she credulously repeats Aristide’s contention that he was ousted because of his resistance to the “privatization” of Haiti’s state industries. Writing in the Guardian after having spent only two months in Haiti and having written of his support of Mr. Aristide before having ever set foot in the country, the academic Peter Hallward concludes that “Aristide’s own government…was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment.”

These assertions would likely be news to the people I spoke to in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, when the city was still reeling from the impact of the quake, the fires still smoldering and the bodies still perfuming the air with the sickly-sweet decay of human flesh. To the people I did speak to in places like the capital’s crowded Delmas road, along, the busy Route Freres and even in Aristide’s former home of Tabarre, the reaction to the former president’s January offer to be flown to Haiti veered between disparaging comments that Aristide was a criminal to bitter observations that Aristide should buy a ticket and come dig with his hands through the rubble like everyone else, rather than waiting to be ferried home like a returning emperor. During a visit to Haiti’s countryside last summer, I found the response to the mention of Aristide’s name even more hostile. The president’s Fanmi Lavalas party, badly divided and unwisely banned from upcoming legislative elections, can still rouse a few thousand people for street rallies in the capital, but the movement seems largely a spent force and Haitians seem largely to have moved on.

In Haiti, a small, poor country where few people can speak or write English proficiently, the left, like the right, seems to feel that they have found the perfect canvas on which to outline their own theories and agendas, no matter how irrelevant they may be to the struggles of Haitians as whole. This cock-eyed view of history is only heightened by the habit of visiting foreigners to surround themselves with the capital’s political class, a strata of society that the Haitians themselves have learned to despise to such a degree that many poor people I spoke to last month openly hoped for a U.S. occupation of the country (something I think would be a mistake).

Perhaps the palme d’or of recent ignorant commentary on Haiti may belong to Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University and the former director of the USAID mission to Haiti from 1977 to 1979.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harrison lays the blame for Haiti’s ills at the altar of the country’s indigenous religious construct of vodou, opining that “its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies…a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.”

Further, Harrison informs his readers, following the overthrow of the French in 1804, free Haitians “were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture” and quotes the economist Sir Arthur Lewis (“himself a descendent of African slaves”) as saying that former slaves “inherited the idea that work is only fit for slaves.”

Let me say this plainly: Lawrence Harrison would collapse of exhaustion if he put in half a day’s work that I have seen peasant farmers and urban laborers put in during the course of a single day in Haiti. In Haiti, securing the most basic necessities of existence is a daily, titanic struggle that people like Harrison, Limbaugh,Weisbrot et al, secure behind their desks and probably never having had to put in a strenuous day’s work in their lives, will never understand as they hide behind their pompous theories.

Vodou and its value system, in the nearly 15 years I have been traveling to Haiti, are no more arcane or nonsensical than the cosmology of Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. I have, in fact, seen vodou act as an important spiritual succor for people in a place where death, premature and unnatural, is a blighted daily companion, and a sense of disconnect from one’s heritage a real concern.

Several years ago, while chatting with a vodou priest known as Ti Papi in the crowded Bizoton quarter of Port-au-Prince, he told me the following:

When there’s tires burning in the streets, when there’s coup d’etat, when there’s everything else, we are still doing our ceremonies, we are still beating our drums. Politicians come and go but voodoo is always here. If it wasn’t for voodoo, we would already be occupied, either by the Americans or the Dominicans. Voodoo? It’s been our sovereignty, over the years.

It’s a Haitian point of view, like the political point of view of Haiti’s people, that outsiders would do well to listen to.

Between the corrosive racism of some on the right and the tired rhetoric of some on the left - each based in no way in the reality on the ground in Haiti - we have an irresponsible, ahistorical approach to the country that in no way helps to ameliorate the situation of Haiti’s poor majority. When novice commentators try and shove Haiti into their own unsophisticated binary worldview, it damages, rather than advances, the cause of Haiti’s poor. By attempting to bestow a sheen of legitimacy on a disgraced leader or by maligning Haitians’ spiritual beliefs, these commentators, far from engaging in genuine inquiry and scholarship, are in fact showing the most grievous disrespect to Haiti and its people.

Haiti deserves better than this, and it is time that foreign commentators on the country actually spent some time there, away from their comfortable desks and apartments, speaking to actual Haitians in the back of sweltering camionettes, in crowded shantytowns and in hardscrabble peasant fields, far away from the echo-chamber of the intelligentsia in which so much of the right and the left often marinate.

The Haitians, the everyday Haitians who have struggled so long against such great odds to build a decent country and to provide for their families despite so many obstacles, deserve to have their voices heard without the filter of the prejudices of perhaps well-meaning but ignorant foreigners. We owe them at least that, I think. The Haitians have a lot more to teach us about their country than we can teach them.

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Copyright The Economist

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN the registry filled up with smoke, and he realised the building was on fire, Percy Cradock knew it was time to leave. The date was August 22nd 1967. For months, both tension and noise had been gradually increasing. Drums, gongs and loudspeakers blaring revolutionary songs had made earplugs standard issue in the British Mission in Beijing. The diplomatic round had gone on much as normal; but dinner with the Danish chargé d’affaires, amid the gleam of silverware, had also featured scenes outside the window of people being dragged out of buses and beaten in the street. Now mobs of Red Guards were storming the mission as Mr Cradock, then political counsellor, and the rest of the staff retreated. There was only one thing for it. He raised his arms “in a generally reassuring way” and cried, “We’re coming out.”

Some would call it surrender. Mr Cradock knew, on the contrary, that it was the only realistic response. Confrontation would be useless. Besides, having made that concession, he went no further. He was asked by the Guards, as they beat him round his back and shoulders, to cry “Long Live Chairman Mao!” He refused, “and fortunately the demand was not pressed.” Forced to bow his head in the ritual kowtow, he kept trying to raise it. He was asked afterwards why he could not make just one small gesture of obeisance. He replied, with that opaque courtesy beloved of both Chinese officials and Whitehall mandarins, that it could not be done.

He was a figure who might have been at home in the Middle Kingdom, where professional scholar-officials, with the equivalent of his double starred firsts in English and law from Cambridge, kept the vast realm ticking like clockwork. Like them he was low-key but razor-sharp, happy to let ministers have their say first, but with an impish glint in his eye, or a slow steepling of his fingers, that showed he had instantly grasped the danger, or the absurdity, of a situation.

His regret was that he could not always lead others to grasp it too; that they could not learn to see things from the Chinese point of view. “Know your enemy” was his motto, as well as the title of his book about a late stint as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. But for the British governments he served from the 1960s to the 1990s, China was simply unfathomable. Even he—on his scattered tours of duty in 1962, 1966-69, 1978-84 (as ambassador) and secretly thereafter—found the changes baffling. One decade uniformed crowds would be chanting to Mao as the red sun shining in their hearts; the next, “louche young men in T-shirts” proclaimed Deng Xiaoping’s drive to open and modernise. In one dispatch, in his literary way, he resorted to Auden to describe the fading of the Cultural Revolution in 1968:

The vases crack, the ladies die,
The Oracles are wrong:
We suck our thumbs or sleep; the show
Is gamey and too long.

Beneath it all, however, he believed China preserved a self-sufficiency, secrecy and superiority that would not change, and had not done since Britain had been dismissed as “a handful of stones in the Western Ocean”.

Giving up Hong Kong
His fascination was first sparked by reading Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese at school. He stayed intrigued after years of meetings with Chinese leaders who smoked, spat or pickled themselves with mao-tai. A Beijing autumn, calm and golden, with persimmons hanging like lanterns in the trees, would enchant him. But the romance of China was soon eclipsed by the struggle to live, as a free-thinking foreigner, within the communist system. China was, he confessed, an addiction with him. But it was also “an acquired taste, much of it bitter”.

The toughest episode—though also, in his view, a triumph—came in 1983-84, with the talks that arranged the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Sir Percy, as he now was, eschewed a showdown. Britain “had virtually no cards”; it was therefore essential to make a deal, while pressing for whatever freedoms could be salvaged. Margaret Thatcher, still fiery from the Falklands war, at first disagreed with him; popular newspapers talked of betrayal. Chris Patten, who became governor of Hong Kong in 1992, pressed democracy a good deal too much for Sir Percy, who knew it would unnecessarily upset the Chinese. He accused him, in Prospect magazine, of a “fatal miscalculation”.

This was uncharacteristic. Sir Percy usually made his points, and got his way, stealthily and quietly. He would steal upstairs, when foreign-policy adviser at Number 10, to watch Wimbledon on television; he would travel incognito to Beijing, once to negotiate the new Hong Kong airport, and would be snapped pacing in the grounds of the Summer Palace, looking much like George Smiley. But he was provoked into open war with Mr Patten by his very hatred of confrontation. Dealing with China and its arcana imperii was a matter for professionals, not politicians. And his method was not surrender, though it might look as though he had put his hands up, or made a cringing kowtow to the Chinese. It was just, as he saw it, a nod in their direction, in a coolly realistic way.

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Copyright Foreign Policy

Amid the haste and confusion that has followed January’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, outside experts have suggested a wide range of solutions for getting the country back up and running. Battle lines are already forming over how reconstruction should be led, who should lead it, and what the priorities should be. Countless proposals have been floated, even as daily life in the disaster zone churns on.

What most fixes have in common is the assumption that Haiti can’t do the job itself, even given the funds. A recovery project of this magnitude requires a large number of talented and capable leaders. And Haiti, many fear, has too few. Look no further than the Haitian government’s early response to the crisis, in which the president, René Préval, was largely invisible, and the deficit in local capacity becomes painfully clear.

Yet most proposed Haiti recovery plans risk entrenching the very hollowing out that made the earthquake so deadly. Foreign governments, international organizations, and NGOs have tried to rebuild Haiti before. To be sure, some of their plans were ill-conceived, but many have left with a shrug and the discouraged understanding that Haiti won’t change until the country’s institutions do. What is most remarkable about the amnesia this time is the failure from both the international community and Haiti to seize on what might be the country’s single most valuable asset: its large, competent, and highly motivated diaspora. Unlike many failed states, Haiti does, in fact, have much of the expertise and talent it needs to start changing the country’s trajectory for the better. Those people just happen to be living abroad.

How did Haiti’s domestic capacity become so terribly depleted? Dictatorship and misrule have driven away talent for generations, but the international community bears some share of the blame. In times of past crisis, foreigners — armed with their vastly superior financial and technical means — have swooped in to impose their own remedies. They often hold minimal consultation with locals, preferring to hash out details on the op-ed pages of papers (and websites!) in countries thousands of miles away.

For these visitors, Haiti’s chronic political disarray is often seen as an obstacle rather than something that needs rebuilding. Poor institutions, internationals complain, are a holdup in discussions; the treacherous local bureaucracy pre-empts rapid solutions. As a result of this, together with the perceived shortage of local expertise and professional talent, foreign donors have increasingly bypassed the Haitian government altogether, channeling their aid through a huge proliferation of NGOs, both effective and not.

This has had the insidious effect of drawing already scarce talent and funds away from the government. Twenty years ago, when I first covered Haiti, foreign NGOs vied to hire Haitian local talent. Nowadays, Haitians themselves operate thousands of NGOs, seeing them as the only way of gaining support from abroad. “The donors have steadily contributed to the emasculation of the Haitian state,” says Robert Fatton, a University of Virginia professor of government.

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Introductory Observations

The Truth is not one-sided. It is a reality made up of many aspects. One must note that the truth about the tragic events of 1994 in Rwanda is especially difficult to get the mind around. Here, nearly 16 years after they happened, and while the attack of 6 April 1994 has been universally recognized as the spark that set off the genocide, the United Nations, which was assigned to help Rwandans in the difficult search for peace, has never found it worthwhile to conduct an international investigation of this attack. After which the entire region of the African Great Lakes was turned into an enormous battlefield, where the victims are numbered in the millions.

The current document is a contribution to this search for the Truth. It is the result of the work of a collective, and only a synthesis of that group-work is presented. But this document should nonetheless allow the reader to come to a more personal understanding of the complexity of the Rwandan situation, in general, and of the intrinsic quality of the Mutsinzi Report, in particular.

If this collective endeavor is signed by only one person, that is because of concern for preserving the security of those who took part in this writing.

The different paragraphs that follow are in the order of the chapters of the Report.

General Introduction

Composition of “Independent Committee of Experts”

The real independence of the Committee is, to say the least, difficult to determine when one considers that its title was subject to the approval of the Chief of State, who, himself, was under official investigation by two European judges.

On the other hand, one cannot help but notice the total absence of any international-grade experts on this exclusively Rwandan Committee that, throughout its work, had to deal with technical areas well outside strictly national bounds.

It is very difficult, in such a configuration, to calm all the concerns over the real independence and expertise of this Committee. Especially when its presiding director [Mutsinzi] is a founding member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

Methodology employed

Right away the Committee postulates that the authorities in post-genocide Rwanda had nothing to do with the attack of 6 April 1994, and that accusations to the contrary are motivated by ideology, and made by génocidaires and their allies. It is most astonishing that an “independent” commission whose objective is, specifically, to tweeze the true from the false, would begin its work with such an a priori judgment. If this is the starting point for the Mutsinzi Committee, there is every reason to fear that all the elements of its Report will be oriented toward showing the pertinence of its postulate and not the reality of the facts.

As to the selection of witnesses, about all that can be said at this stage of the analysis of the Report is that nearly all of them were found in Rwanda. A more nuanced comment might be possible after we have looked at the quality of theses witnesses. It is mentioned that General Dallaire was contacted, unsuccessfully, to get his testimony, so it seems strange that the same effort was not made toward Mr. Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General and the official head of the mission [i.e., Dallaire’s boss].

In the chapter on methodology, it is stated that the Committee placed a great deal of importance on testimony drawn from officials of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). In particular from those blue helmets assigned to Kanombe airport the night of 6 April 1994, certain of whom were working at key positions, like in the control tower. As the chief of the Kigali Sector of the UNAMIR, I can state specifically that no blue helmets were working in any capacity or were even present inside the control tower.

Political context leading up to the 6 April 1994 attack

No one is arguing that this context was anything like simple or peaceful. It would be chancy to try to present a systematic analysis of the Committee’s version of the political scene, which, in any case, winds up being a pretty feckless polemic. Let’s note, after reading this part of the Report, that the Committee imputes the entire responsibility for the degradation of the political atmosphere in Rwanda to President Habyarimana and his inner circle, as well as to the hard core of politicians and military officers opposed to any form of democratization of the regime and, more specifically, to the Arusha peace deal[2].

In a general way, let’s look at some of the evidence that might have been included in this part of the Report to make it reflect a more realistic description of the political climate of that time.

1. The four attacks carried out by the RPF (October 1990, January 1991, June 1992, February 1993) are simply passed over in silence. Is it really imaginable that this military violence had no negative effect on the relations between Hutu and Tutsi?
• How can one explain the attack of June 1992, considering that since April a coalition government, led by a Prime Minister (Dismas Nsengiyaremye) from a party in opposition to President Habyarimana and his MRND, had been in place?
• What should be said of the major attack of February 1993, launched in the middle of peace negotiation in Arusha?

2. Not a single word about the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, run off their hillside homes by RPF troops, who found themselves in unspeakable misery at the gates of Kigali. One wonders, could this strategy of terror conducted by the RPF have caused direct blowback against the Tutsis inside Rwanda?

3. The role played by Radio Rwanda and Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in exacerbating the tensions between communities is emphasized. If it is appropriate to consider this reality, why was there not a word about Radio Muhabura (the RPF’s station) nor of the equally radical discourse that it broadcast.

4. One should also consider concepts like “Akazu, death squads, Network Zero, and AMASASU[3],” presented as indisputable realities, evidence of the criminality of the ruling regime. Whether one likes it or not, the innumerable hours of recorded hearings at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) contain nothing at all that would confirm the material existence of these expressions, which over the years have come to be used as vaporous dogma.

However, the declarations of several witnesses who held no particular sympathies for the President’s Movement, put evidence on the record of the existence of an actual strategy directed at demonizing President Habyarimana. This strategy was aimed as much at Rwandans as it was at the International Community. An example of this is the famous letter sent to General Dallaire on 3 December 1993. It was written by so-called loyalist officers and was meant to bring Dallaire up to speed on Habyarimana’s Machiavellian plans to carry out multiple mass killings and then blame them on the RPF. In fact, Mr. Alphonse Marie Nkubito, the former Justice Minister in the first RPF government, acknowledged that this letter was a fake, written by the Opposition and typed by his own brother.

5. Having personally attended the meeting of the Crisis Committee that followed the attack, I can confirm that, contrary to what is stated in the Mutsinzi Report, the officers present were not “essentially extremist officers.” Far from it. Moreover, it was General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the Chief of Staff of the Gendarmerie, who presided at the meeting. At the end, he pleaded with General Dallaire to convince the International Community that the Army was not trying to pull a coup d’état and that the greatest desire of the military was to hand off authority to the politicians as set forth in the Arusha Accords. As for the others present, if there had been some other purpose for that meeting than to bring an end to the emergency measures necessitated by the absence of the Head of State, neither General Dallaire nor I would have been invited to take part.

6. Last but not least, this Independent Committee of Experts should be reminded that, after 410 days of hearings held over five years and with 30,000 pages of reports, 1,600 pieces of evidence and 4,500 pages of conclusions, the Judges at the ICTR acquitted Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, for years depicted as the “brains of the genocide,” along with his co-defendants, of leading an organization intent on committing genocide. This is a judicial reality that the Committee should have had to incorporate into its presentation.

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Copyright The National

The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
Deborah Brautigam
Oxford University Press
Dh112

For the better part of a decade, China’s profile has risen with extraordinary speed in Africa, with its trade, investment and aid primed to transform the world’s poorest continent on a scale that some say is unrivalled since most African nations declared their independence in the early 1960s. Chinese companies have left few corners of the continent untouched, breaking ground on dams and highways, railways and ports, hospitals and universities, new stadiums and airports.

This is not altruism at work. The Chinese are drawn to Africa for the same reason that powerful foreigners have come since the start of the European slave trade in the early 16th century: resource extraction. Alongside their big infrastructure projects in countries like Nigeria, Angola, Gabon and Congo, Chinese have muscled their way into lucrative markets for oil, iron ore, copper and cobalt, and many other commodities.

China’s successes have produced one of the most unbecoming spectacles in the recent history of international relations: cascading howls of moral outrage in the West over Beijing’s “economic conquest” of Africa. The bill of particulars in this indictment is long, but the common thread is a sense of western superiority about China’s record on issues ranging from democracy and human rights to the environment, transparency and corruption.

The West’s tone of high dudgeon leaves little room for irony – yet if ever there was a situation filled with irony, the West’s new-found scruples toward Africa would seem to fit the bill.

China, for its part, has responded to western indignation mostly with its own clumsy propaganda. But in Africa, at least, the Chinese don’t have to work hard to outshine the West – for reasons that Europeans and Americans now seem eager to forget.

To begin with, the scars inflicted by the West in Africa are legion. Not only do they still loom in living memory, many of them remain open and unhealed. When Guinea’s first leader, Sékou Touré, opted for independence from Paris in 1958, for example, France immediately cut off financial aid, withdrew its technicians from the country and carted away whatever it could to cripple the new African government. This included administrative records, telephones, typewriters, air-conditioners and, it is said, even copper wiring.

For a long time after this humiliation, Guinea mouldered in isolation and autarky and it has never really recovered from this false start as a nation. France may have granted the rest of its African colonies independence two years later, but it held them in a smothering paternalistic embrace that would gradually turn extraordinarily corrupt.

The point here is not to pick on France. The West’s record of awfulness in Africa is generalised. At the same time Paris was kicking the Guineans, Belgium was proclaiming its ambition to indefinitely hold onto Congo, a mineral-rich colony larger than all of Western Europe. In 1960, when the Congolese demanded and won independence, they inherited a country with only three African managers in its entire civil service. The new country began life with no military officers, a mere 30 university graduates and a single lawyer.

As if that were not challenge enough, from the start, Belgium conspired with the United States to undermine and quickly overthrow and assassinate Congo’s first leader, the democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, replacing him Mobutu Sese Seko, a dictator who ran a regime of ruinous corruption for three decades.

One could go on and on in this vein, up to the present day, like the blind eye turned to some of the worst despotism in the world today in Equatorial Guinea, because of a similar thirst for its petroleum. Suffice to say that in most places, the Western record is appalling.

There are, however, more immediate reasons why the Chinese need no fancy public relations. The implicit signal they are sending to the continent is one of the most refreshing messages that Africans have received from any quarter in decades.

For China, Africa does not conjure the gut responses that have become common in the West of a dreary burden or a guilty memory. On the contrary, Chinese interest, from eager investment to booming trade, fairly exclaims “we see you not as some hopeless or repugnant cesspool, but as a huge and largely open frontier of opportunity.”

For China’s cash-rich and nimbly opportunistic corporate sector, in particular, what Africa represents can be summed up quite neatly: the future.

Deborah Brautigam, the author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, understands all of this far better than most who have written on this subject. Her richly detailed book has many technical merits, but its greatest strength may in fact be her understanding of this psychological dynamic.

There is a central African proverb that says: “The hand that gives is the hand that commands.” China has come to pay cash on the barrel, eschewing most of the belittling rituals and hollow generosity of the aid game. Brautigam mounts a stout defence of this kind of growing engagement with Africa; so stout and systematic, in fact, that one can imagine many of its arguments being made by Chinese themselves.

But one would be wrong to hastily dismiss the author for what some will perceive as Chinese sympathies in this matter. The universe of third-party experts who are deeply familiar with both China and Africa is vanishingly small, and Brautigam is easily one of the best qualified members of this select tribe. Her observations about China and the continent come hard-earned. Some of the book’s best material draws on her experiences early in her academic career as a young researcher travelling in places like rural Sierra Leone in the early 1980s.

Her involvement with China coincidentally dates to the same period, when she travelled there as one of the first generation of foreign students after the country opened up to the outside world following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

One of the main achievements of The Dragon’s Gift is shattering the many myths and misperceptions that have fuelled the almost-Victorian western depiction of a weak and defenceless Africa, seduced and ravaged by the Chinese interloper. And in this, the media, which are careless with their facts and quick to accentuate the negative, emerge as an ever-ready foil.

For starters, the Chinese haven’t just arrived in Africa. Beijing has been conscious of the continent as an important source of both political support and natural resources since it began mounting assistance projects there in the 1960s. Though much poorer then, China was already taking a long view of its prospects in Africa, forging relationships that have endured through investments large and small.

China makes no pretence that its aid to Africa is selfless or altruistic, and for Brautigam, this is exactly how things ought to be – especially for a country that still has hundreds of millions of its own poor. According to Brautigam, the roots of China’s African strategy lay in the country’s experience with Japan during the early years of China’s opening and reform era in the 1980s, when Japan allowed a capital-poor China to finance its imports of badly needed modern industrial equipment with oil and other natural resources, rather than cash.

Emulating Japan, China has gone on to broadly apply this pattern in Africa, where in countries like Angola and Congo it has engineered huge and controversial resource for infrastructure deals.

Brautigam handily disproves, however, the commonplace assertion that China concentrates its energies disproportionately on the continent’s mineral storehouses, with findings that show Chinese aid and investment are present nearly everywhere in Africa. What is even more interesting is the way that she illustrates how tightly the two are bound together.

A central motif in the recent Western panic over China’s supposed takeover of Africa is the booming Chinese aid to the continent. By 2006, when China organised a grand summit, hosting leaders from all over the continent, it announced it would commit $20 billion over three years to support Chinese exports and business in Africa. By comparison, the World Bank’s commitments over the same period amounted to $17 billion. Headline writers everywhere rushed to the conclusion that China was outstripping the West as a source of aid.

Exhibiting a care for detail rare to this topic, Brautigam explains that the bulk of China’s development assistance in Africa has not taken the form of foreign aid: most often it is lending from the country’s Export-Import Bank and other official entities, for which Beijing expects a profitable return, even if a slim one.

China’s true aid, which is still relatively modest, is typically given as part of a package not just to obtain minerals, as the stereotype would have it, but to leverage open African economies to Chinese exports, to Chinese industry, and even, increasingly, to Chinese migration.

The shrillest notes of the alarmists – that China is pillaging the continent and undermining good government by showering no-strings packages on resource-rich countries while propping up their pariah regimes – merit much of the scorn the author accords them. It is equally clear there is upside potential to China’s massive push. Africa, for one, is desperately in need of infrastructure, and China is suddenly building more of it than anyone else. What is more, China is helping to integrate the continent into the global economy with a vigour that surpasses anything that Western-driven aid or extractive enclave industries like oil have managed to do before.

There remain, nonetheless, many reasons for concern. Resource-based investments that go straight through the president’s office in undemocratic countries rarely turn out well, and China has had nothing to say about democracy, and too little about transparency and accountability.

Where Brautigam sees a strong potential upside in a kind of trickle down industrialisation, through which China casts off undesired factories to Africa, because they are too polluting or not hi-tech enough, others warn of the makings of new environmental disasters and industrial dead-ends.

Where some may applaud the access to new capital from China, others worry reasonably that Beijing’s export financing amounts to a seductive new mercantilism that will dump cheap manufactures into African markets, dooming indigenous industry.

To its great credit, The Dragon’s Gift takes a well-informed look at much of this scepticism before the author delivers, time and again, her reassuring best guess that the Chinese impact will be, as the book’s name implies, a net positive.

Brautigam is at her best by far, though, with Chinese sources, Chinese explanations, and in the end, Chinese rationales, and it strikes this reader as odd that someone so acutely aware of the skewed presentations of the Western press could have come up substantially short on considered African voices and analysis.

The world is already long accustomed to the West knowing what’s best for Africa. Here, we are told why China’s approach is good for the continent. One still awaits, indeed yearns for a critical missing piece of this picture: how Africans see themselves fitting into our shifting global puzzle.

Howard W French, who covered both Africa and China for the New York Times, is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.

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Copyright The Diplomat

For fans of Casablanca, Google’s encounter with the Chinese government may be reminiscent of Police Captain Renault, who claimed to be ‘shocked, shocked!’ that gambling was going on inside Rick’s casino.

Although recent events might tempt many to tell Google ‘I told you so,’ the company has still garnered sympathy around the world for standing up to Beijing. And anyone who cherishes the wealth of information generated by unfettered Google searches and hates the idea that secret police might have access to the keys to their e-mail boxes should indeed wish Google luck.

Yet, regardless of the outcome of this contest between a politically vengeful autocratic government and a technologically savvy US firm, the Google episode will likely remain a crucial moment in China’s relations with the West in general, and with Western companies doing business in China in particular.

This is not to suggest that Google’s defiance will force a crack in the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ Indeed, in the short term, the effects of Google’s confrontational tactic will be negative as the Chinese government will almost certainly impose tighter restrictions on the flow of information; Beijing understands clearly the risks of allowing Google to set a precedent by encouraging others to challenge its political control.

Sadly, despite Google’s stand, it has received practically no solidarity from Western companies, most of whom are either afraid of retaliation by Beijing or convinced that Google has made a horrible mistake by giving Beijing no ‘face’ – a Chinese expression for the public humiliation of the government. This disappointing response from the West’s corporate community suggests that it has not fully understood China, especially the political calculations behind its policy toward Western companies.

Among Western business leaders, China stands out as a shining example of what developing countries should do when it comes to foreign direct investment (FDI). Since 1979, China’s pro-FDI policies, including tax concessions, low environmental and labour standards, and speedy approval times, have turned it into a magnet for FDI. And both China and Western investors have benefited greatly from the arrangement, with the love-fest between Beijing and foreign businesses reaching such intensity that many Western corporate leaders have often cited China’s low tax, easy rules approach an example of how their own countries should conduct business. And in the process they have become effective advocates for Beijing, downplaying human rights issues. For them, the business of China is strictly business.

The truth, of course, is completely different.

For Beijing, business is not about business — it is about politics. This is clear from the way Beijing treats both domestic and foreign businesses. China initially welcomed foreign investment because the ruling Chinese Communist Party desperately needed capital, technology and management expertise to revive China’s moribund economy in the wake of the disastrous Cultural Revolution. In their political calculations, private Western capital was preferable to private domestic capital because a strong indigenous business community might have the potential to support social and political forces that would challenge the rule of the party. As a result, Beijing has treated foreign capital much more generously than the domestic private sector. Many important sectors, such as banking, financial services, petrochemicals, energy exploration and automobile production were opened to foreign investors but not to domestic private firms.

While favouring foreign capital over private domestic capital, Beijing has also maintained its bottom-line: it will not allow foreign firms to control and establish a significant presence in what it considers strategic sectors, such as telecom services, banking (foreigners are passive minority investors at best) and energy. Above all, no private capital — foreign or otherwise — is to be allowed into the sector most critical to regime security: the media.

Today, flush with $2.3 trillion in hard currency, China no longer has the same need of foreign capital and its government has readjusted its economic policy accordingly. Because state-owned enterprises are both national champions and political patronage machines (the Communist Party can reward its loyalists with lucrative appointments in these state-owned firms), Beijing’s policy now clearly favours them over both domestic and foreign capital.

As for Google, it has committed a double offense. Its search technology poses a clear and present threat to the party’s regime security, while its capacity to dominate the Internet search business would deprive China of its own national champion, Baidu (which, although a private business, is easier to control).

Google’s senior management may have learned a thing or two about dealing with a one-party regime through its unhappy foray into China. It’s unclear, though, whether other Western firms have learned anything at all at Google’s expense.

Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Copyright China Daily

SHANGHAI: China, the world’s largest metal consumer, will add to last year’s record $32 billion spending on resource acquisitions as demand for iron ore, copper and oil soars with the fastest economic growth since 2007.

Chinese companies will hunt for iron ore, coal, oil, copper and gold assets, said Jing Ulrich, the chairwoman of China equities and commodities at JPMorgan Chase & Co in Hong Kong.

China Minmetals Corp and China Petrochemical Corp led an acquisition spree last year, as companies snapped up zinc mines in Australia, oil reserves in Nigeria, and gold deposits in the Philippines. Owning resources will give China more control over pricing and reduce its dependence on suppliers including BHP Billiton Ltd, the world’s largest mining company.

“There are still many opportunities for mergers and acquisitions overseas this year, even though asset valuations would be much higher,” Huang Dongmei, deputy general manager at Minmetals Exploration and Development Co, a unit of China Minmetals, said by phone from Beijing. “We’re considering several projects,” Huang said, without giving details.

Aluminum Corp of China, the nation’s largest maker of the metal, will “utilize all its resources and energy” to speed up acquisitions this year, Chairman Xiong Weiping told staff in a speech posted on its website on Jan 25.

The State-owned company was rebuffed in June by Rio Tinto Group from investing $19.5 billion in the world’s second-biggest iron ore supplier amid objections from shareholders and Australian politicians. The Beijing-based company is London-based Rio’s largest shareholder.

China’s imports of iron ore, copper and oil leapt to records in 2009, as demand from carmakers and builders including Volkswagen AG and China Vanke Co expanded.

The economy grew 10.7 percent in the fourth quarter, the fastest pace since 2007, on the $586 billion stimulus spending and record lending.

“You’ll have a lot more Beijings and Shanghais coming up over the next 20 and 30 years and to feed all of that, the amount of iron and steel is huge,” said Eric Lilford, head of Australia mining at Deloitte Corporate Finance in Perth. Chinese demand “has been relatively strong even during the global financial crisis and it’s stronger now.”

China’s refined copper demand may jump 14.8 percent to 6.81 million metric tons this year, said Qu Yi, a Beijing-based analyst at CRU International Ltd. Iron ore imports may rise 27 percent to 800 million tons by 2012, up from the record last year, as steel consumption surges, researcher Umetal.com said.

Before the global recession last year depressed asset prices, China’s investments in overseas resource and energy companies rose every year but one from just $578 million in 2004, according to Bloomberg data.

Yanzhou Coal Mining Co, a unit of China’s fourth-largest coal producer, bought Australia’s Felix Resources Ltd for A$3.5 billion ($3.1 billion). China Petrochemical purchased Addax Petroleum Corp for C$8.3 billion ($7.8 billion) last year to add oil reserves.

Related readings:
China firms continue global hunt for lucrative commodities China offers opportunity to global mining sector: China Minmetals
China firms continue global hunt for lucrative commodities China leads record iron ore spending
China firms continue global hunt for lucrative commodities Yanzhou Coal mulls overseas acquisitions
China firms continue global hunt for lucrative commodities Sinopec spends $7.5b on China’s largest overseas takeover
Minmetals, the nation’s largest metals trader, agreed in June to pay $1.4 billion for most of the assets of OZ Minerals Ltd, then the world’s second-largest zinc producer.

“The total size of such deals is expected to reach a new record,” said Li Luhui, a Beijing-based analyst with Zero2IPO, a research company which counts China’s National Council for Social Security Fund as a client. “The Chinese government will continue to support large State-owned companies with related policies and capital to go overseas.”

China may focus on energy targets in South America and Central Asia, and metals in Africa this year, Li said. Smaller companies may struggle to raise funds as the government seeks to curb lending, Li said.

China’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, which pumped about $10 billion into commodity-related companies in the second half of 2009, is in “early talks” for investments in Brazil, the world’s second-biggest iron ore exporter, and Mexico, Chairman Lou Jiwei said on Jan 20.

Bloomberg News

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Copyright Michael Pettis

An excerpt from a discussion here of Tom Friedman’s recent writing on China. The link to the entire piece follows this snippet.

He (Friedman) also says:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

Aside from perhaps his overestimating the quality of the education system, this is very bad statistics, and perhaps shows how easily we can get intellectually overwhelmed by large numbers. If China indeed has the same distribution of geniuses, or talent, as other countries, the fact that it has so many people won’t make it richer (and what about India?). After all if you cut China into four countries, each country will have only one-fourth the number of geniuses. Does that really mean that the four countries together are stupider? If we combine the US, Canada and Mexico into one country, its a pretty safe bet that the total number of geniuses will be more than any of the three countries currently possess, but will average intelligence rise? Can we really make the three countries richer that way (of course there may be good economic arguments for suggesting that unifying North American into a single country will make it richer, but the larger number of geniuses is not one of these arguments).

Ok, we can argue about these things, and we can agree to disagree, but where he completely blew it was, I suspect, on the one topic are where he was absolutely certain he could not be wrong.

Too bad, because he was. Friedman proposed, yet again, a common misconception over the meaning of China’s huge accumulation of foreign reserves. He argued that thanks in part to the size of the reserves it would be impossible to make money by shorting China. “First,” he warned, “a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with US$2 trillion in foreign currency reserves.”

Really? Friedman proposed the rule sarcastically – as both untestable and too obvious to need testing. It is so obvious that no country has ever had such high levels of reserves, so you can’t really test the hypothesis, but it’s also pretty obvious that a country with $2 trillion in reserves is in great shape. Anyone who wanted to short it must be pretty stupid, right?

But it turns out that reality is not as obvious as he imagines. Let us leave aside that the PBoC’s reported reserves are a lot more than $2 trillion, and that if correctly accounted they would be pretty close to $3 trillion. China’s foreign reserves are certainly huge. They add up to an amount equal to about 5-6 % of global gross domestic product.

But they are not unprecedented. Twice before in history a country has, under similar circumstances, run up foreign reserves of the same magnitude.

The first time occurred in the late 1920s when, after a decade of record-beating trade and capital account surpluses, the United States had accumulated what John Maynard Keynes worriedly described as “all the bullion in the world”. At the time, total reserves accumulated by the US were more than 5-6% of global GDP. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this was probably the greatest hoard of central bank reserves ever accumulated as a share of global GDP, but please check before you accept this claim.

The second time occurred in the late 1980s, when it was Japan’s turn to combine huge trade surpluses, along with more moderate surpluses on the capital account, to accumulate a stockpile of foreign reserves only a little less than the equivalent of 5-6% of global GDP. By the late 1980s, Japan’s accumulation of reserves drew the sort of same breathless description – much of it incorrect, of course – that China’s does today.

Needless to say, and in sharp rebuttal to Friedman, both previous cases turned out badly for long investors and brilliantly for anyone dumb enough to have gone short. During the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, US stock markets lost more than 80 per cent of their value, real estate prices collapsed, and the US economy contracted in real terms by an astonishing 30-40 per cent before recovering in the 1940s.

Japan’s subsequent experience was economically less violent in the short term, but even costlier over the long term. During the period following its astonishing accumulation of central bank reserves, its stock market also lost more than 80 per cent of its value, real estate prices collapsed, and economic growth was virtually non-existent for two decades.

The idea that massive levels of reserves are a guarantor of economic stability is, in other words, based on a profound misunderstanding both of history and of the nature of reserves. Reserves of course are not useless as an enhancer of financial stability, but their use is for very specific forms of instability. Having large amounts of reserves relative to external claims protects countries from external debt crises and from currency crises.

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Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. Penguin, 2009.

Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

By Howard French

During his first trip to China recently, Barack Obama was excoriated by pundits for his meekness on a host of issues, from Tibet to exchange rates to human rights. Newspaper commentary in the United States went on endlessly about the curtailment of American influence in an age where a fast-rising China has become this country’s main creditor. The event that supposedly crystallized all of this was the American-style town hall meeting the president had planned, but which the Chinese government appeared to control. In the end, Obama was limited to a stilted forum with an audience of carefully screened and coached students, and a previously negotiated national television audience was denied him.Jacques cover

It’s an open secret that many in the publishing industry see book subtitles as vehicles for shameless hype, pushing their claims to the limit in order to juice reader interest. During the week of Obama’s East Asian sojourn, though, the subtitle of Martin Jacques’ new offering, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order, may have suddenly seemed like it wasn’t such a stretch. At the very least, the appearance of a book like this from a major publisher like Penguin Press is a telling measure of a profound and ongoing shift in perceptions about the staying power of American — and, more broadly, Western — might and vigor, in the face of the challenge of a fast-rising China.

On this subject, a recent Pew survey highlighted the gap between perception and reality, showing that 44% of the American public already believes that China is the world’s leading economic power. Just 27% named the United States.

This, then, surely is a great time for a book to take a hard look at the relative decline of American power along with the stirring rise of China, followed by a host of other emerging global actors, and come to some informed and well-reasoned conclusions. Most see this story as fundamentally based in economic history, but on this subject, and indeed on economics in general, Jacques has little of interest to say. China will probably continue to grow quickly for another 20 years (186), the author asserts, placing much stock in the hazy art of economic projection, whether quoting the track records of previous takeoffs, from those of Britain, the U.S., and the so-called Asian Tigers, to the now famous work of Goldman Sachs. By 2050, its forecast anticipates the United States ranking a close second behind China, followed at some distance by India (3).

Almost defiantly, though, Jacques proclaims this is not a book about China’s “economic wow factor”(415). Make no mistake, the growth is important. Among other feats, China doubled its economy between 1977 and 1987 (159), and its GDP went from twice the size of Russia’s to more than six times larger between 1990 and 2003 (161). But this analyst is impressed by other things and wants us to share in his awe.

Principal among these features are: the length of China’s history; a population as large as the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan and Australia combined; a land mass that Jacques repeatedly describes as “continental”; and, most of all, the extraordinary potency and cohesiveness of its culture.

Indeed, culture gradually becomes the main story here. China is not so much a nation on the move, but a single-minded civilization bent on regaining its natural place in the scheme of things as number one, the author insists, with grating frequency, and the West is woefully ill-prepared for the challenge.

Conclusions like this, paired with such a sensationalist title, might suggest an alarmist tract in the old “yellow peril” tradition, but the reality is almost the opposite. Jacques, a former editor of Marxism Today, all but cheers the West’s comeuppance. I, for one, found a Chinese friend’s response to the title more compelling. Noticing the book on my desk, her one-word comeback was, “Really?”

I mouthed this same question with dismaying frequency as I read When China Rules the World, and serious doubts about Jacques’ reliability as a guide mounted.

For such a timely subject, this is unfortunate. One is especially dismayed because the book is not bereft of interesting ideas. Among them, the author challenges common, deeply held notions of Western exceptionalism, beginning with the idea that modernity itself is the exclusive preserve of Europe and its American offshoot. “Europe was the birthplace of modernity,” he writes. “As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies left a huge and indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other; they appeared synonymous” (21). Apart, however, from “an accident of birth it had, and has, no special connection to that continent and its civilization.”

Problematically for a book that is nominally about the future, it is here, and not with his frequently credulous predictions about the coming world order, that the author is most compelling.

In his book’s early passages, Jacques takes pains to show that the West’s dominance is a relatively recent development in world history, and by implication probably a transitory one, too. But for a handful of ancient Chinese inventions — things like paper, gunpowder and the compass — the story of the past in the popular mind is one of long-uninterrupted Western superiority in science, in technology, and more broadly in the process we nowadays fancy as “development.”

However, drawing on a variety of recent economic and historical scholarship, notably that of Kaoru Sugihara and Kenneth Pomeranz, Jacques makes a claim of parity between East and West before Europe and the United States pulled far ahead in late 19th century. “The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them,” he writes. “In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious” (25).

While our conventional narratives would have it that the West’s advantage lay in byproducts of the Enlightenment, things like reason and law and the scientific method, the factors that Jacques emphasizes are much less flattering. Around 1800, the fortunes of East Asia and Western Europe began to diverge sharply, after Britain discovered large and easily accessible deposits of coal, relieving the dependence on wood and helping drive the technological innovations that would propel the Industrial Revolution. More crucial still was the conquest of the New World, opening up a continental expanse of “new” land, to be worked in large measure by African slave labor. “Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did.”

China also had large coal deposits in its northwest, but they were remote from the main population centers, and most importantly, far removed from the emerging textile industries and canal networks of the lower Yangzi Valley. It “also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World” (27).

With few notable exceptions, the ideas that Jacques develops to get us from this world of the recent past to the future of the book’s title are considerably less compelling. This is the case, in part, because of the author’s failure to get beyond China’s own official cant. The book often reads like a compilation of ideas gleaned by the water cooler at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the state’s official think tank.

“Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 percent between 1950 and 1980, more than quadrupling the country’s GDP and more than doubling its per capita GDP,” Jacques writes at one point. “This compares favorably with India, which only managed to increase its GDP by less than three times during the same period and its per capital GDP by around 50 percent. China’s social performance was even more impressive” (99).

This might seem like a straightforward recitation of fact, but there is far more going on here. Jacques frequently makes sweeping and shallow statements about East Asian cultures, and especially about Confucian societies. But rather than compare growth figures with these putative Chinese peers — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — he has cherry-picked India to bolster his claims.

In the same passage, he goes on to invoke the United Nation’s Human Development Index to hammer home the point that China did well under Mao. What to make, then, of a death toll of 30 million during the Great Leap Forward, millions killed and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and the countless other victims of less famous campaigns that almost continuously punctuated Mao’s rule? With Jacques’ bland treatment of this material, we are not far from Beijing’s own bloodless official reckoning that Mao was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad.

Part of Jacques’ problem is that no matter how prodigious his readings (the footnotes run for 70 pages), the author comes across as a relative latecomer to his subject, and this lack of grounding results in any number of embarrassments. For example, contrary to the prevailing historical record, he asserts that the Communists, and not Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, “played the key role in the resistance to the Japanese” (94).

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