In case you haven't seen it, check out Elliott Gerson's op-ed in the Washington Post today, offering an unexpected measure of what has gone wrong with America's economic and social structure. Gerson is the American secretary of the Rhodes scholarship trust, and his data track follows... what Rhodes Scholars do with their lives once they come home from England.
Precis: in the olden days, they wanted to be big shots, a la Bill Clinton. Politicians, professors, writers, people paid in part or full in currency other than plain cash. Now, they want to be rich. And Gerson has a theory about what that change shows.
There is a reverse-backflip aspect to this shift that Gerson is certainly aware of but doesn't have the space to mention: Over the past 20 years or so, the selection process for Rhodes scholars has shifted to place less emphasis on Clinton-style BMOC traits and more on expressed or proven commitment to "service." So a group that starts out being more interested in social service ends up being more likey to go to Wall Street. Read and reflect.
It's not just me. Two colleagues with different perspectives -- from each other's, and sometimes from my own -- marvel at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama's just-ended tour of Asia.
First, Howard French -- long of the NYT, now of the Columbia Journalism School, friend of mine in both Tokyo and Shanghai. He has a new online Q-and-A with the Columbia Journalism Review, here, in which he says that the traveling press covered Obama's meetings with Asian officials as if this were a bunch of stops in a presidential campaign tour, and as a result missed or misrepresented what was going on. Read the whole thing, but here are two samples:
From the set-up to the interview, by Alexandra Fenwick:
"In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic."
Howard French goes on to say that these assumptions were flat wrong. He offers many explanations, including this:
"I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They're at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can't be an expert on every question, and so you're part of the Washington press corps and if you're really good and really diligent, you're going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China."
If you have seen Howard French's coverage over the years, including the five years he was based in Shanghai, you will know that no sane reader has ever put him in the category of "soft" on the Chinese leadership or China's faults. Yet his wonderment and exasperation at what he reads is palpable.
Tish Durkin, who has written for the Atlantic from Iraq and elsewhere, arrived in China recently. The subhead on her new column for The Week gets across the point:
"Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese
people managed a clearer view of Obama's visit than the US media did."
While I'm at it, here's one more: a story quoting the new US Ambassador to China, former Republican governor of Utah Jon Huntsman (a Mandarin speaker), to exactly the same effect.
"Washington's ambassador to Beijing hit out on Friday at negative US media coverage of President Barack Obama's visit to China, saying it failed to take into account important progress on many issues...
"The trip was the top news story in China, drawing strong interest from the mainland public who, surveys suggest, are largely positive in their view of the American president.
"However, much of the US media coverage was strongly negative, accusing Obama of failing to gain concessions on key issues such as Iran's nuclear programme and climate change, as well as being weak on human rights."
"I attended all those meetings that President Obama had with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao," Huntsman said, referring to the Chinese president and premier. "I've got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren't talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings," he said.
I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at the way our colleagues had missed the main point of what just happened in America's relations with a very important part of the world. We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race." As you can tell, this really bothers me.
I have what I think is some interesting new info coming on this front over the weekend; stay tuned, starting Saturday afternoon. For the moment, two more installments in my argument, previously here and here, that Barack Obama's recent swing through Asia was a relative success, and certainly nothing like the disaster that most U.S. coverage implied.
Installment one: me talking with Bob Garfield of NPR's On The Media just now, about why American fantasies of an omnipotent, rising China may have distorted American press reaction to what Obama said and did.
Installment two: the before-and-after analyses from a private client newsletter by Damien Ma, Divya Reddy, and Nicholas Consonery of the Eurasia Group, reinforcing the idea that what actually happened on the trip was almost exactly what informed observers expected to happen, and not some humiliating disappointment.
November 11, just before the trip:
"President Barack Obama's first visit to China on 16 November will produce positive rhetoric, but achieve little on a range of issues from North Korea to economic rebalancing. Washington and Beijing will continue to highlight areas of mutual cooperation and interests, but domestic political agendas will pose serious constraints on the extent of near-term progress....
"Little to be expected on economic rebalancing and trade... Obama will likely raise the currency issue as part of a broader economic rebalancing framework. But the Chinese will continue to reject greater emphasis on the rebalancing issue, because Beijing interprets it as Washington shifting more of the blame on China for the global recession....
"No bilateral agreement will be reached on emissions reduction targets that might precipitate an ambitious global climate change treaty next month in Copenhagen. Obama's more modest task is to prevent China from aligning too closely with the G77 developing country bloc in global negotiations, although he has limited bargaining chips to encourage cooperation from China." [emphasis mine]
November 20 (today), post-action assessment, which boils down to, it went just as expected, and maybe a little better:
"President Barack Obama's first visit to China met the modest expectations set by the White House, making some progress on creating a more expansive relationship and on clean energy and climate change cooperation...Obama appears to have effectively reassured Beijing that the US does not intend to contain China's rise, creating a framework for mutual assurance that could augur a more mature relationship in the longer term.
"The US-China presidential summit involved a genuine attempt by both sides to push toward closer cooperation -- producing a robust joint statement that highlighted a range of common interests. In particular, Obama's first visit to China saw deliverables on clean energy and climate change cooperation, as expected. By dampening Copenhagen expectations in Singapore, Obama avoided a potential collision with China at next month's meeting... But Chinese domestic politics prevented Beijing from publicly discussing contentious issues such as currency and economic rebalancing during the trip...
"While policy disagreements and trade frictions will continue in the near term, Obama took an important step with a very public reassurance for Beijing that the US does not seek to contain China's rise. Beijing's receptiveness to this appeal indicates the intent of both countries to reduce the mutual distrust that has colored aspects of the relationship -- from currency, military engagement, and Taiwan to human rights and climate change. The Obama administration's more public approach, if successful, can promote longer term stability by engaging China on a broad range of issues within the context of a more mature and pragmatic relationship -- and in preventing specific, contentious issues from defining the relationship."
Why bring this up? Because it's bad all around when American press coverage makes people feel that perfectly predictable results constitute a shameful failure for the country and its leadership. More on this theme tomorrow.
After an outstanding ten-and-a-half year run, the website "Defense and the National Interest," better known as d-n-i.net, will close down next Monday, November 23. Chet Richards, who with his wife Ginger has run the site through that time, says that for various logistical and practical reasons he is ready to move on to day-job concerns.
Chet (shown here), a retired Air Force colonel and math PhD, has been one of the most committed and effective proponents of the ideas of combat developed in the 1970s and 1980s by another retired Air Force colonel, the late John Boyd -- background here and here. Chet is an original thinker and strategist himself and has written about theories of conflict as they apply to modern business, technological innovation, "soft power," and so on.
There's an immediate reason for mentioning the site's pending close, apart from an appreciation of Chet and Ginger Richards, William Lind, Chuck Spinney, and others who have contributed to d-n-i's success. This is the main online repository for a lot of Boyd's briefings and papers, so if you think you might ever be interested in them, set aside a little downloading time over the weekend. Handy shortcut to some downloads here. Thanks to all involved.
Update: more on d-n-i, Richards, Boyd, and maintaining the archives here and here.
... because of its opaqueness in certain circumstances (and more to say when next I am at a computer), let me mention a different Google project notable for its transparency. That is the "Chromium OS" -- a new operating system optimized for "netbooks," which was announced yesterday as an open-source development project. Google has made the source code available free, along with some design documents and results of early user testing. First video below is the hour-plus announcement session. At the bottom is a three-minute product intro.
Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart
your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code.
If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with
a reboot."
How well will this actually work? Obviously we'll have to watch as it unfolds -- the watching process being much easier because it will be open-source. Here's an early Network World look at strengths and apparent weaknesses. Google's related Chrome browser has had both pluses and minuses, about which more later. A beta version of Chrome (Windows only; Mac promised) has just been announced with bookmark-sync and further progress toward support of "extensions," which is one of the areas where Firefox is most obviously superior to Chrome. Will check it out, with reactions later on. (Routine disclosure: I have many friends who work at Google -- but, to my knowledge, none of them directly involved in this project.)
Well, at least I know what the problem was. It was China's fault! When I was living in Beijing early this year, I tried to reserve a domain name and pay for it using the Google Checkout system. Google's fraud-detection system flagged the transaction as likely fraudulent. It then canceled the deal and put a hold on my account.
This happened to me all the time in China. Maybe once a week my wife or I would find that our Visa or Master Card account had been frozen, because any online purchase we tried to make from a China-based Internet connection would trigger all the fraud detectors. Then we would spend 30 minutes on the phone, via Skype, getting the cards re-upped. We should have remembered always, always, to fire up the VPN before trying to buy something online -- so that the credit card company would think we were logging in from San Francisco or suburban Washington -- but sometimes we forgot. I hadn't tried to pay for anything else by Google's system until this week, so I didn't know until now that my account had been put on the watch list.
A product manager for Google's Checkout utility sent me the following explanation, and said I was free to quote it:
"I am the product manager responsible for fraud prevention on Google Checkout, and I want to follow up with you about the recent issues with your account.
"The issue with your Checkout account actually begun shortly after you placed the first order on January 28, 2009 for domain [XXX] which was cancelled because the IP address that was used for the order had a high rate of attempted fraud. [The IP address was our apartment building in Beijing.]
"Google's algorithms automatically review IP addresses when orders are placed on Checkout to catch attempted fraud with stolen credit cards. Fraud is a pressing issue in the electronic payment industry, and merchants bear the financial risk associated with these transactions so Google (and most online merchants) collect additional signals to determine the risk of online orders. Where our algorithms see suspicious transactions, we will often ask for additional proof of identity.
"While Google employs an advanced fraud detection system, it does occasionally catch legitimate user orders, which was what happened in your case. An error can occasionally arise when people share the same IP addresss on WiFi or VPN networks. For more info about Checkout fraud detection, take a look at the Checkout Security Center and our recent blog post."
Tomorrow some time, an elaboration on the security/usability trade-off in online commerce, which has surprising similarities to the comparable trade-off in air travel. The same Google official who sent the note above re-instated my account long enough for me to enter new credit card info and re-up my bona fides. Responding one-by-one to people who complain in public is obviously not a solution that "scales." But if I hadn't complained in public, I would simply never have used Google Checkout again: I am not about to send a scan of my passport or driver's license to some random email address, which is the only option offered for "verification." More on what this means anon.
I noted here recently, as I have since time immemorial, that Chinese government spokesmen can often seem deaf to the concerns and mindset of their potential audience overseas. A reader from France says that maybe my own ears need to be inspected for metallic content:
"Put simply, I reacted myself mostly to the following phrase of Obama [in his Shanghai town hall presentation]: "We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation,"
"Read again slowly: 'We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation.'
"My take: the disconnect is as old as the CIA, Mossadegh or Cuba... I would have not reacted strongly when told the same by Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton. But now it is different. And my epidermic intolerance is now quite wide ranging, not only relating this affirmation as concerns Iraq, but extending to the sermons about sclerotic European Market, Global warming [etc].
"I understand that Obama's task is among others to sell the American Brand, and marketing people have a tenuous obligation to stick to the product. Or if we want to be kind, they want to mold the public perception of a brand new product they are bringing to the market. Nonetheless: I suspect you didn't even react yourself to this sentence. Could you comment on the state of the American eardrums, as you did for the Chinese ones?
"My background: French with (European) multi-countries experience...and close relatives living in the US. As I consequence, I lost my patriotic Innocence, and often smile at the overblown universal moralistic discourse of my Presidents or Intellectuals. You?"
On the state of American eardrums, I've often explicitly compared the inward-looking nature of Chinese officials and much of the Chinese population to their counterparts in the U.S. These are both big, continental nations that are finally more interested in themselves than in how those teeming, confusing, often-touchy outsiders might feel, think, or act. This can lead to blunders and offense-giving, innocent and otherwise. Part of Obama's appeal in the outside world has been the sense that by background and mindset he should be more attuned to outside sentiments. And of course this very sense is what some Americans don't like about Obama -- that he seems "foreign," or "cosmopolitan," very much as John Kerry seemed "French."
When I read the "do not seek to impose" line again, slowly, of course I understand the "hey, wait a minute" retorts that might spring up from half a dozen sites around the world. I suppose the reason it didn't strike me the first time is that I was also assuming the background that many Americans would: that Obama marked a change from the "seek to impose" policies of recent years, that he could say that line without taking responsibility for complications of the past and some in the present. But I see, and take, the reader's point.
Last week some of Barack Obama's critics were upset that he ducked a question in Japan about whether he approved of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I cannot begin to say how short-sighted that criticism is.
When I lived in Japan for several years in the 1980s, I learned about the various realms of the things you could say in public (建前, tatemae) and things you actually believed (本音, honne). Although not strictly a matter of tatemae/honne, the atomic bomb decision is a particularly thorny and awkward one for Americans to discuss with Japanese. The normal way to consider the topic in Japan involves the country's status as the only object of an atomic attack in history, the suffering its people underwent, and the status it therefore possesses to talk about the importance of avoiding any such event again -- all of which is understandable. There is a lot of history the prevailing Japanese account leaves out, but that is a point better raised in internal Japanese debate than by American officials. Americans may believe that Harry Truman saved both Japanese and Allied lives by this decision. But there really is no mileage in a U.S. official saying that to people in Japan. Probably the worst thing I did in my time there was to propose that argument to a man who had been a doctor in Hiroshima in 1945. The conversation came to an abrupt and hostile end. And I was just a reporter, not the American president who has the power to order nuclear weapons used again.
Here's the best analogy I can think of: suppose you were a sheriff who had gunned down a group of terrorists who were threatening to blow up a town. In the crossfire, some innocent children were killed. If you run into their parents long afterwards, do you say: "Tough luck, it was in a good cause! And I'd do just the same thing again!" Or do you recognize their great sorrow and loss and do everything possible to avoid rubbing it in?
In avoiding a direct answer to the question from a Japanese reporter about whether the bombing was justified, Obama did what any American president or diplomat should do when this topic is raised in Japan. There is no answer that would have worked out better for him than his not answering at all.
He has just done a followup on his own site, about some preceding Chinese and Western exercises in the same spirit. Very much worth reading, here, along with this post on a related theme.
Update: To be clear about it, any suggestion from the discussions above that Patrick Chovanec's map was in some way "unoriginal" is entirely unwarranted, from my point of view. The concept that big, monolithic "China" is better understood as a variety of diverse sub-units is a well-established, even obvious one. The plus of Chovanec's presentation is the execution, which makes the point interesting and accessible for people in a new way. And as he points out on his own site, in his initial (very long!) submission to the Atlantic, he catalogued a variety of previous efforts in this same direction. That history would have fit well into a long, print version of his analysis, but not so well into the kind of interactive online feature we have presented. So, congratulations to him for making an important concept interesting and vivid for readers.
"Relating to comments on the Shanghai town hall, enough of the parsing of what he said on issues and how he said them, I think the most significant sentence was "That's why I'm pleased to announce that the United States will dramatically expand the number of our students who study in China to 100,000." Even without details (per year (I hope) or over what period, college and/or high school students, how funded, etc), I am surprised you have not remarked on it (and that the NY Times did not even report it). It is of major significance."
Good point. I did noticed this while listening to the speech, but have not yet tracked back to see exactly how, when, and through what institutions this will occur. It's worth following up -- as I will, soon. But in the meantime, it's welcome news.
On reflection, I still stick with my initial reaction to the Shanghai Town Meeting appearance, rather than being won over by the on-scene complaints of my Shanghai friend Adam Minter as described here. If you combine Obama's opening statement (White House version here), with his answers to the questions about the Great Firewall, it seems to me that he said just about as much on censorship and liberties as a visiting dignitary could say, in the circumstances.
I mean, seriously -- consider what he said in the opening statement. He talked about America's founding documents and the long struggle to match American reality to their promises. Then he said:
"Those documents put forward a simple vision of human affairs, and they
enshrine several core principles -- that all men and women are created
equal, and possess certain fundamental rights; that government should
reflect the will of the people and respond to their wishes; that
commerce should be open, information freely accessible; and that laws,
and not simply men, should guarantee the administration of justice....
"And that is why America will always speak out for these core principles
around the world. We do not seek to impose any system of government
on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that
we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression
and worship -- of access to information and political participation --
we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all
people, including ethnic and religious minorities -- whether they are
in the United States, China, or any nation. Indeed, it is that respect
for universal rights that guides America's openness to other countries;
our respect for different cultures; our commitment to international
law; and our faith in the future.
The Chinese students in the audience were smart. They understood what he was saying. In the circumstances, how much more obvious did he need to be? Those circumstances included: Obama's being in China for his first official visit; his knowing (as he must have, from his briefings) that the big Chinese bugaboo is "outside interference" from foreigners telling them what to do; and his knowing that he had business on many fronts ahead of him in Beijing. Even in those circumstances he clearly said: America believes that openness and liberties are not quaint American practices but are in fact universal and should be available to everyone, including in China. In domestic American politics, Obama has been known for doing his work with the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer. How much less deft would we like him to be on a foreign visit?
Similarly with his answer about censorship and the Great Firewall:
"I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness
when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely
information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then
citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments
accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates
new ideas. It encourages creativity.
"And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use.
I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition
of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that
different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in
the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or
unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength, and I think
should be encouraged."
"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship" is ungainly. But what's wrong with the statement as a whole?
Foreign leaders do not typically go to other countries and frontally criticize the way those places they're run -- at least not if they're smart, or serious. For instance, when Hugo Chavez made his famous "I smell the devil!" crack after following G.W. Bush to the podium at the U.N., this was not a sign of his wanting to do business with America. Yes, you got Chavez's point, in all its gross clownishness. Who could miss Obama's point in Shanghai? Would we welcome a French or German prime minister coming to a US town meeting in the Bush years, shortly before a negotiating session at the White House, and saying, "Of course we condemn waterboarding, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib"? I condemn those things too, but is that the shrewdest thing for a foreign president to say while here?
More later, but I thought the words stand up well and got across the intended message.
As I never tire of mentioning, the big opportunity -- and challenge -- of the Obama Administration's interaction with China is finding ways for the countries to work together on climate, energy, and pollution issues. The countries are two of the main sources of the problem, as the two leading emitters in the world. And they're two of the main sources of solutions, China with its manufacturing ability and the U.S. with (we hope!) its R&D.
I am not equipped to judge how the slew of clean-energy initiatives prepared for approval at the Hu-Obama meeting will turn out in practice -- which ones are serious, which ones are for show. That's what I'll be asking my expert friends in the next while. But if you were wondering what US-China "cooperation" might mean in practice, here's a list of seven joint initiatives, announced today in Beijing. Convenient summary highlight below, with links that open up fact-sheet PDFs:
For the record: - Last night's panel discussion with Jim Lehrer on the News Hour about China, Obama, et cetera, here;
- Also last night on BBC America with Matt Frei, also about Obama and China, here;
- This morning on CSPAN Washington Journal, with Bill Scanlan, also about Obama and China, not on line at the moment but I will find it at some point (here);
- Interview last week on The Kindle Chronicles, with Len Edgerly, about e-reading devices, here;
- Radio interview two weeks ago, when I was in Australia, with Margaret Throsby of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- closest U.S. counterpart would be Terry Gross -- here. Her interviews are Fresh Air-like in combining policy and personal info. Also discussing my upcoming collaboration with the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney on future-of-media issues, a topic for another day.
- Just to round this out, plan to be on KQED "Forum" with Michael Krasny at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST today. (Audio here.)
- Charlie Rose this evening, with Elizabeth Economy and Nicholas Burns.
First, the unsurprising part: yet another convenient, beneficial feature from Google for practically no money. Indeed, the only surprise about this one is that it is not literally free. Since the debut of Gmail five years ago, Google has offered ever-increasing amounts of free storage for each account. It started out at one gigabyte and is now over 7 GB. (Background from the Official Gmail Blog here.) Since you can create multiple accounts, in theory you can have as much storage as you'd ever want, all without cost.
I have a bunch of accounts for various purposes -- different mailing lists etc. But it's convenient to have one main account, so you can search for old messages or attachments without skipping around. My main personal Gmail account is so clogged with pictures, PDFs, article drafts, etc that it is closing in on the 7GB ceiling. Since Gmail does not let you search or sort past messages by size, there is not a quick and easy way to get rid of the lunkers with the 10MB attachments. So I was glad to see the good-news announcement last week: a lot more Gmail storage, for a ridiculously low price.
The first 20GB of additional storage is $5 per year, and onward at proportional rates up to 16TB ( > 16,000 GB) of storage. Pricing details here; Google account sign-in required.
Great! What a deal! So I decided to sink a full $5 per year into tripling my online storage. I hit the purchase button -- and that is when the bad part of the interaction began.
After my real-time late-night note a few hours ago saying that I thought things had gone OK for Obama in Shanghai, I wake up to see this report from my friend Adam Minter, on the scene in Shanghai, about ways in which Obama's answers seemed disappointing from the local perspective:
"Obama's performance this afternoon reminded me of nothing so much as an
overly coached American businessman on his first trip to China, so
concerned about what he should or should not say that he forgets what
he wanted to say in the first place."
I dunno. I understand the pattern Minter is talking about, and I'll watch the session again with that in mind. His account is worth reading for his assessment and for many amusing logistics details about the event. Adam Minter also did our dispatch on "Obama mania in China" over the weekend. UPDATE: Chris Good has more of the full transcript of Obama's talk, which shows that especially in the opening remarks he made about as explicit an argument in favor of liberties and freedom of expression as one can expect in the circumstances.
Related China/US rhetoric point: in two recent items, here and here, I tried to explain what a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman could have been thinking when comparing Chairman Mao to Abraham Lincoln, the Tibetan serfs whom Mao "freed" from the lamas as being similar to the black slaves whom Lincoln freed, etc. A reader's reponse:
"I agree with you on Chinese officials' lack of skills in
communication and persuasion (part of this is due to political inward-looking,
as you said, but the other part is cultural---Confucius said "a gentleman should
be modest in speech but quick in action", and so eloquence in public speech,
oration, etc, is never highly valued in Chinese tradition.)
"With regards to Qin Gang's [the foreign ministry spokesman] comment on Obama,
Tibet, and slavery, however, I think he (as well as many other Chinese
people) is genuinely thinking that the Chinese and American cases
are comparable, or genuinely believe there are some valid points in Chinese
views on Tibet that westerners tend to ignore, and they want to bring these
points to the fore. I know you are a big Obama fan and obviously not a
fan of Mao or Hu Jintao, but I think no one is really making personal
comparisons. Now, Qin Gang's view (and the Chinese view) might be
wrong---by the way you didn't explain why it's wrong on your blog---but it does
not mean he cannot express his view. Why shouldn't Qin or any other Chinese
official express their genuine opinion (be it right or wrong), but pander
to Western thinking or adapt their expressions to suit Western ears?
"To me Qin's comment does not reflect a Chinese
communication problem, but rather the vast difference between Chinese
thinking and Western thinking on Tibet (after all, most westerners want to
believe Seven Years in Tibet while most Chinese do not). Not that China does not
have communication problems---the problems abound---but this is not a good
example."
This is a useful opportunity for clarification. I agree with the writer that most Chinese officials (and, in my experience, most Chinese people) sincerely believe the Mao=Lincoln point. That's exactly what I said in the original post. The "communications problem" would be the failure to recognize that people outside the country generally don't think that way and will view the argument as bizarre at best. So Qin's holding the view does not illustrate the tin-ear problem I'm talking about; the question is why he said it that way to outsiders. Someone whose job is to address a foreign audience needs to know something about foreign assumptions, reactions, and so on. American politicians routinely say to home audiences, "This is God's country" and similar thoughts amounting to "We are better than the foreigners." But a State Department person who said those things to visiting reporters would be foolish or tin-eared. It's what Qin said, not what he thought, that's illustrates the problem.
I got up to watch the live stream on the White House site, out of nostalgia for my Shanghai days.
No very shocking questions from the students, though some had swathed edges to them: What about harmonious relations and arms sales with Taiwan? Obama doesn't answer about arms sales but does, carefully, about the harmonious relations. What about the Great Firewall and free access to info? Obama explains why free exchange of info makes leaders do a better job, even if he doesn't like the criticism some times. What about the risk that an intentionally- and historically-diverse nation like the US will misunderstand the situation of countries with different histories and makeups? Obama gives a defense and celebration of diversity, in his country and in his family. And says that he doesn't use Twitter.
Tomorrow's chore is a omnibus wrap-up on several recent Obama pronouncements, from the Ft. Hood eulogy to the Japan and China speeches. Main impression here is that he did well -- charming the students in the room itself, though almost any president can do that through the sheer magnetism of the office, but also talking in ways that will play well to Chinese sensibilities without saying a word that would go over wrong back home. Listening to him, I am not 100% sure that Obama has spent a lot of time conversing with non-native speakers of English. There is a different way you learn to talk: not condescending or stripped down, but more direct and less allusive. (For example, you wouldn't say "allusive." And I wouldn't say "swathed" in the paragraph above, to indicate questions that had a kind of protective wrapping to blunt their edge. I'd say something like, "The questions from the students were polite, but some had a slight edge.") People without experience doing this either talk in needlessly complex ways or talk in an insultingly clumsy oogah-boogah style. Sometimes Obama sounded as if he knew this approach; sometimes, as if he thought he was talking to a domestic audience.
It was also heartening for me to see these students, who resembled those I'd dealt with over the years -- and the truest moment of all came with the final question, where a student asked him frankly what was the right educational background that could lead to a Nobel prize. Now back to bed and more tomorrow.
... about that picture on the front page of today's NYT, showing a little shop in Beijing with Obama-related memorabilia in honor of the president's visit? There's a prominent hand-lettered Chinese sign in the upper left-hand part of the picture. Wonder if it says, "Welcome President Obama"? Or, "Resolutely support the development of mutually-respectful relations between China and America"? Or, "Strongly resist splittism"? Or some other topical greeting?
Actually, no. It says "Help wanted -- shopgirl." [ 招店員(女) ] Nice to see the practical-mindedness of the Chinese business class shining through. And a welcome indication that retail sector hiring is underway!
Even if President Obama weren't getting to China just now, it would be worth checking out the illustrated feature "Nine Nations of China," by Patrick Chovanec, which has just gone up on our site. Given the visit, it's all the more timely.
I've mentioned time and again over the years how the big, unified- and imposing-seeming "China" of American imagination should really be thought of as a billion-plus individuals, tens of thousands of contending companies and small businesses, dozens of provincial or regional-loyalty groups, and lots of other subdivisions. In some circumstances, this agglomeration can act as one big, momentarily-unified "country" - especially when the national dignity is thought to be under attack from overseas. In most other cases, the big country of "China" is really a fluid congeries of interests and ambitions.
Patrick Chovanec -- who teaches in Beijing, and whom I knew there -- has provided another way to think about how China is organized and divided. You can see it here. Congrats to him and to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz and Anup Kaphle of the Atlantic's web site for putting it together.
... so I'll start with the positive. Very good combo Outlook/Book Review section today, including a nice number, by Neil Irwin, on the fat target of Super Freakonomics. Sports section always excellent. Tom Toles remains the best editorial cartoonist I'm aware of. Keith Richburg does a good exploration of racial attitudes in China, in the wake of the Lou Jing controversy (the charming fashion model from Shanghai with a Chinese mother and a black American father, who has run into lots of prejudice in China; previously here, also here). And much more! Glad that I subscribe.
But I do have to keep wondering, as before and here, about such basics as copy editing. Consider this cover line for the (also good) story about the writer Edward P. Jones in today's Washington Post magazine.
The detail worth noticing:
C'mon!!! The intention behind this line is clear. But it is literally nonsensical unless it has a word like "other" or "before" in there some place. ("...has rendered the soul of black Washington in a way no other writer ever has"; "in a way no writer ever has before"; etc.) Or, making the second "has" into "had" ("in a way no writer ever had.") This is the kind of thing they put on the basic command-of-English portion of the SAT. In a blog post or a late-breaking story, OK. I make hasty errors like this all the time in email messages and drafts of stories. But on the cover of a magazine? How many people had to have seen this before it was published?
Back to the positive: lots of good stories! I'll leave it on that note.
I mentioned yesterday the oddity of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman welcoming Barack Obama to China with a triple-backflip metaphor linking Chairman Mao to Abraham Lincoln, since both Lincoln and Mao fought against secessionist rebels. From a reader with experience in China and America this response:
"Thank you for pointing
out the strange logic of the foreign ministry spokesman in this bizarre
lecture to President Obama. I have been living in the U.S. for twenty
years and as a citizen for the last ten, but i often can't help feel
ashamed often by remarks like these.
"I know I shouldn't, but I lived my
first 26 years in this great country [China] after all. What a shame it is
represented by such cynical officials. I say cynical because I think
they often know better than what they say. They say it that way because
it is not only safe but potentially profitable politically. They don't
really care about the effect of their remarks globally. Their audience
is inside the ministry and the government. I once had lunch with [a very prominent government official], while he was [in an important position] in the Washington embassy. He
said when he wrote reports to the ministry, he needed to know what the
ministry's opinion was so he would not be too out of line.
"Maybe this
is true for all bureaucracies, but it is practiced to such a degree for
so long in China that it is one of its most deep-rooted diseases. Reading the histories of Qing and Republic of China, once sees many
examples of how officials often opted for the politically safe path at
the expense of national interests. Today, one also sees the same
practice in dealing with tough political issues such as ethnic tension. Because harsh measures and blaming the "splittists" is always safe and
potentially rewarding for their careers, they become the only chosen
policy options, even when that create more problems for the county in
the future and draw international scolding."
Let me say that this rings 100% true to my observation of the situation. Individuals are often very sophisticated about outside realities; the system keeps their attention directed inward.
My discussion of this and related Obama/China questions this afternoon on All Things Considered, with Guy Raz, here.
Chet (shown here), a retired Air Force colonel and math PhD, has been one of the most committed and effective proponents of the ideas of combat developed in the 1970s and 1980s by another retired Air Force colonel, the late John Boyd -- background 
