As mentioned earlier, my wife and I were having some trouble seeing how things turned out for Coach Taylor and the Dillon Panthers in the new series Friday Night Lights. Thanks to our Shanghai-based friend Tom Carter, we got .AVI files of the final two episodes, which allowed us to watch them on a laptop computer (hey, the rigors of the foreign-correspondent life) without the 30-seconds-on, 45-seconds-off herky-jerky effect of watching "streaming" video from NBC's own site while based in China.
So now we know the first-season fate of Coach, Mrs. Coach, Smash, Riggins, Buddy, Tyra, Landry, Lyla, Street, Matt Saracen, and all the rest of the Dillon population. (An important virtue of the series: every one of these people, plus many more, comes across as a fully-rendered non-cliche character. Eg Tyra's mother, Matt's father and grandmother, Riggins's neighbor and her son, Smash's mother and girlfriend, Jason Street's parents, Herc, and Coach and Mrs. Coach's daughter.)
Concluding remarks:
1) I cannot easily come up with a more impressive series on network TV than this one.
I've read histories and analyses of the Cultural Revolution years in China, plus some of the memoirs available in English. Still, it's hard to get a sense of what it was like.
Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.
For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.
Here is a brilliant addition to the existing evidence: Confessions, by Kang Zhengguo, now a professor at Yale (and with an introduction by Perry Link of Princeton). Kang makes it sound as if he would have been a handful under any regime at any time. He said just what he thought, especially when he thought powerful people were being stupid; and he liked doing things exactly his own way. The book's subtitle is An Innocent Life in Communist China, and in his deadpan, innocent way Kang describes his downward process through the stages of horror as a prisoner and labor-camp inmate in those years. A depressing subject matter but never a depressing or uninteresting book. Very highly recommended.
A month ago, my working arsenal of machinery included two Vista laptops and one Mac iBook. Now, as explained earlier, I'm using one Mac, one ThinkPad "downgraded" to XP, and the other ThinkPad still with Vista. I've kept the Vista machine for two main reasons: it's quite a chore to get Vista off a computer and XP back on (hard-disk reformatting recommended), so I stopped after doing it once; and now I can use the machine as a test bed, to see how Vista changes and, I hope, improves as new patches and updates arrive. Also, I bought and paid for legit copies of Vista, so I might as well make some use of them.
Here is the recent good news and bad news on the Vista front.
Good:
1) Vista has a very nice feature I didn't mention among its virtues: the "ReadyBoost" cache. This allows you to use a "flash drive" or "memory stick" -- one of those little storage devices you plug into a USB port -- to speed up overall operations. Details below* for anyone who's interested: essentially, it allows the computer to read frequently-used information from the flash drive, which is very fast, rather than from the hard drive itself, which is much slower. The feature is elegantly designed, it works easily, and it's apparently fool-proof.
I am sorry to disagree with someone from my home town and someone from my own magazine at the same time, but I think it's silly to complain that David Petraeus's 20-year-old PhD dissertation from Princeton has lots of vapid passages. I'll make this challenge (though I probably won't take the time actually to carry it out): give me any 20-year-old PhD dissertation in the social sciences, and I will show you lots of vapid passages.
The significant points are these: first, the relevant document for which Petraeus can claim credit, if not as author then as supervising editor/publisher/protector, is the new Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, on counterinsurgency. This is not a vapid or silly piece of work -- certainly not if taken in context with previous Field Manuals.In fact, it's arguably the most scathing indictment of the Administration's entire approach to Iraq, with its discussions about the need to solve political problems politically rather than with brute force, its emphasis on the importance of low-tech human interactions as opposed to reliance on high tech, its calculations of the force presence needed for a successful occupation, etc.
And, second: the "New Jesus" use to which Petraeus, his reputation, and his counterinsurgency doctrine are being put is shameful. With the release of the vaunted Petraeus Report over the next month, we'll see whether his destined role is as victim of the Administration's policy ("we brought in this guy Petraeus, but he screwed up the surge and didn't solve the political problems") or as enabler of it ("Dave -- that's General David Petraeus -- has been on the scene and confirms that our strategy against Al Qaeda/Iraq is working, and that we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. Above all we must not cut and run...")
What Petraeus is doing now, and will do in coming months, is all that matters. Not whatever "the future lies ahead" passages he may have cranked out to get his dissertation done.
Recognizing generosity: David Valentine and Raider Ramstad
This week in his Wall Street Journal "Middle Seat" column, Scott McCartney* compliments Denny Flanagan, a United Airlines captain who goes to unusual lengths to make sure his passengers enjoy rather than endure their flights with him. (Placing mass orders for food from McDonald's if passengers are stranded for hours, calling the parents of children traveling unaccompanied on his plane, etc.)
I have compliments to pass along to two of Flanagan's colleagues, United captains David Valentine, whom I have met, and Raider Ramstad, whom I haven't.
Last Saturday morning China time, when I was in the rural hinterland, I got a very early-morning mobile phone call from a friend on the U.S. east coast, where it was Friday night. For medical reasons I won't go into, it was a matter of life-and-death importance that a close friend of his in New York receive a certain medical supply, available in Shanghai, as soon as possible.
He had contacted the international courier companies -- DHL, UPS, FedEx -- and had learned that, between weekend-service issues and time allowed for customs clearance, they could not deliver it fast enough. Also, it wasn't clear that they could keep it cold, in its insulated box, long enough to survive all the stages and formalities of the journey Did I happen to know anyone flying from Shanghai to the US in the next day, who might hand-carry it?
Most ads by Western companies tut-tutting about counterfeiting and piracy in China come across as strictly tut-tutting, and therefore don't do much good. Yesterday in Chengdu airport, in Sichuan province near the middle of China, I saw a series of eye-catching very large ads by Microsoft warning against the (ubiquitous) pirate copies of their software.
The ads were variations on a theme: a serpent coiled inside a computer, ants climbing into the back of a computer, other sort of vermin getting into the machinery. Two samples below:
My colleague Matthew Yglesias quotes the latest (very good) Newsweek article detailing how the war in Iraq undercut the original "war on terror."
By the beginning of 2002 -- when Osama bin Laden was still on the run after his narrow escape at Tora Bora, when the United States still enjoyed vast, strong international support in its effort to evict the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan, when no member of the Bush Administration had publicly discussed the prospect of invading Iraq -- preparations to invade Iraq were already underway. They gutted the effort in Afghanistan.
It is easy to prove now, and was easy to figure out at the time, that the more the United States concentrated on Saddam Hussein, the less it could concentrate on Osama bin Laden. This was one of many reasons to oppose the war before it began: not just the direct costs it would bring inside Iraq but what we could bloodlessly call its opportunity costs elsewhere.
The story of this tradeoff is an old one. It has been told many places, including in a cover story I did for the Atlantic three years ago. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Even then, when Iraq was less obviously a disaster, people let me put them on the record saying things like this:
"Had we seen Afghanistan as anything other than a sideshow," says Larry Goodson, a scholar at the Army War College who spent much of 2002 in Afghanistan, "we could have stepped up both the economic and security presence much more quickly than we did. Had Iraq not been what we were ginning up for in 2002, when the security situation in Afghanistan was collapsing, we might have come much more quickly to the peacekeeping and 'nation-building' strategy we're beginning to employ now."...
Last month I mentioned the poignantly predictable cycle of laptop computer aging -- specifically, aging of the ThinkPads I've used for years.
Keyboard lettering goes first, with N the first letter to show wear. Then one by one the other letters vanish. Later on: screen issues. Two or three years in, when the whole system is starting to seem obsolete (new models come with much more RAM, much larger disks, much better graphics, etc) some ThinkPads develop video-board issues, for reasons mentioned after the jump.*
(So why stick with ThinkPads? Because so much else about them seems nice: feel of the keyboard; solidity of the chassis, hinges, and other hardware; very good battery life; no scalding-hot areas unlike some other popular notebooks I've used; very good service; etc. In theory, you could wonder whether the IBM->Lenovo shift will mean some change in quality. In reality, as explained at length in my Shenzhen article here the "Lenovo" ThinkPads are made by the same Taiwan-based subcontractors that produced the "IBM" models.)
For research purposes, I thought it was time to get scientific about the aging process. My latest ThinkPad, a T60, is four months old. This is its keyboard today:
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N was first to go but still has a vestigial presence; E is entirely eliminated; A is 99.9% on its way; M, D, and S showing the wear; first tell-tale little breach of O; shiny patch on right side of spacebar showing that I always hit that with my right thumb. But the ~` key is pristine! (Not sure that I have touched it even once.) I'll try another picture in two months, and so on through the system's lifetime. My bet is that Z, Q, ?/, plus other oddball keys will survive, but few or no "normal" letters will be legible at the end.
Olympics air-quality countdown: first results are in
Friends in Beijing said that the recent four-day experiment in ordering half the cars off the road was encouraging in two ways: It really sped up commute times (for those still driving), and it reflected some civic spirit about the Games. I'd be skeptical if this impression came solely from the (state-controlled) press, but independent email and blog reports suggest that people mainly did observe the restrictions -- only odd-number license plates some days, only evens the other days -- and demonstrated some "let's improve our city for the Olympics!" sentiment about it.
Unfortunately, by all accounts other than those of the state media, the experiment did little or nothing about Beijing's woeful air quality. For instance, this report from the recent "Beijing Air" blog, or this from the Guardian's Jonathan Watts:
Prayers for strong winds look set to become a major component of Beijing's Olympic preparations after a traffic-reduction trial failed to shift the smog that hangs over the city.
More than a million cars were taken off the roads for the four-day test period, but there was no improvement in the air quality, according to city officials.
Yesterday the skies above Beijing were the same dirty grey shade as when the test started on Friday.
From the start, everyone has assumed that the government would do whatever it takes to make the atmosphere acceptable for the Games. The question is becoming: will "whatever it takes" be enough? I hope more experiments are in store.
Tales from the everything's-slightly-substandard economy
I love the recent TV series Friday Night Lights. Better than the movie with Billy Bob Thornton. Better than the (very good) book by H.G. Bissinger.
We left the U.S. before the series began and caught up with it only when visiting friends, Rita and Ted Schell, told us about it and bought a first-season boxed set as a gift from the local pirate video store. After they left my wife and I started watching, and... great! Rings true about America (I tell Chinese students that to understand the U.S. they should watch this rather than their current favorites: 24 and Prison Break.) Rings true about football, and small-town life, and the inexhaustible possibilities of high school as a metaphor for American life.
Then the first problem: the eight DVDs in the "first season" set go through episode 18. We get to that episode and think: this can't be the end! No resolution about the football season, or about anything else.
I look on IMDB and see: there are 22 episodes in season one. Hmm. I go back to the pirate video store, "Even Better than Movie World" (across the street from "Movie World"), and ask where the other disks are. I'm willing to pay the extra 87 cents per disk! 没有, I hear. Mei you. We ain't got any. Hmm.
Is it just me? Or is China's mobile phone system getting ragged?
Is this just me? A year-plus ago, when I arrived in Shanghai, I marveled at the coverage and reliability of China's mobile-phone network. (Yes, I know, that's an advantage of building the system from scratch fairly recently, compared with America's patchwork system that has evolved for several decades.)
The coverage is still impressive: inside elevators, underground on the subway, on the MagLev train going 250 mph, in basement shopping malls. Any place any time, the same consistent 4-bar signal. (I'm using the China Mobile network, vs China Unicom.) And for the main purpose that Chinese mobile phones serve -- as vehicles for text messages to other mobile phones -- it still works fine.
But over the last two months, more and more often I find cruddy call quality when I use the phone to talk. Dropped connections. "Say that again, you've cut out for a while" comments. Simple garble that makes you dial again or just give up. It's like all the bad things I remember about mobile coverage back in the U.S.
Coincidence? Sign that the network has been adding new customers too fast (5 million for China Mobile last month alone)? Therefore one of many indications of strain in the Chinese infrastructure? Or just something wrong with my own phone?
I don't know, but this will be interesting to follow. I'll be watching for the next time I get a really good voice connection on my mobile phone.
With Dave Berns on KNPR's "State of Nevada" program. Real-time description of watching welders working in the dark on nearby Shanghai skyscraper, plus real-time coughing from my once-very-healthy lungs.
Aerodynamics 101 (following JFK Jr crash discussion)
Four main questions from readers about previous post on the recent crash in Nantucket:
1) Was I suggesting that JFK Jr. was somehow negligent in not using this kind of parachute-equipped airplane? No. The very first Cirrus SR-20 was delivered to the very first customer within days of Kennedy's crash in July, 1999. Before that, FAA-certified planes with parachutes not for passengers but for the entire airplane didn't exist. The initial waiting list for these airplanes was very long. I placed an order not long after, and got mine in November, 2000.
2) If this kind of plane is so great, why don't I have one any more? Sold it before moving to China. For a while I fantasized about flying here. Hah.
3) Is it really true that, if you are in the dark or in a cloud and can't see the horizon (and are not flying by instruments), you will crash? Yes. Explanation after the jump. It has nothing to do with the risk of running into something you can't see.
4) Is it really true that, as claimed in William Langewiesche's article The Turn, if you have your eyes closed you can't tell if a plane is right side up or upside down? Yes. Explanation also below. Visual proof in this famed clip showing Bob Hoover, world's greatest pilot, pouring iced tea continuously into a glass while performing a barrel roll.
The saga of Macau, from September issue of the Atlantic, now online here. (Subscribers only. I've said it before, I'll say it again: subscribe!)
Slide show for one and all here. Main regret: that I wasn't allowed to take pictures on the gambling floor of any of the casinos -- tried once and was hustled out. On the other hand, I was allowed, even encouraged, to take one of the tasteful lineup of greeter girls just inside the main door of the locally-owned Star World casino.
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And I can't wait until the "Prague Harbour View" hotel opens, perhaps to be followed by the "Miami Mountain Top" resort:
You learn something every day. Recently I made the off-hand comment that, short of a home metallurgy lab, families couldn't tell whether the paint on their children's toys contained too much lead.
Well, it turns out (with thanks to readers) that there are fairly cheap counterparts to the home metallurgy labs, for instance this one.
This doesn't change the main point -- people really shouldn't have to be checking toys this way after they've bought them, any more than they should have to check the drinking water for e. coli or each carton of eggs for salmonella. This is what public health departments are for. But it could be useful info for people who already have questionable products at home.
A small plane apparently crashed last night on Nantucket Island. First reports are never quite right, but it appears that the weather was terrible -- dark; very low clouds; mist and fog; sea, sky, and land in a blur. These are deadly conditions to fly in, and the same conditions in the same area killed John F. Kennedy Jr. 8 years ago.*
Here's the difference: the two people in the plane over Nantucket lived. They (reportedly) pulled the parachute on their small Cirrus airplane and came down safely on the island. A lot of hard-boiled aviators say that pilots shouldn't "need" a parachute, that if you're good enough you can always "glide it in," that they'll lose their edge if they have this security blanket, and so on. Anyone outside aviation thinks: that is nuts! If John Kennedy's plane had a parachute, he might have been scolded for being reckless and getting himself into a bad situation. But he would be alive to hear the scolding, and so would his two passengers.
Alan Klapmeier, president of the company that makes these parachute-equipped Cirrus airplanes (one of which I used to own), likes to say: The penalty for bad judgment should not be death. Amen.
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* Short explanation of the problem: if you can't see the horizon when you are flying, eventually you will lose control of the airplane and crash. Details for another time -- see William Langeweische's classic Atlantic article "The Turn" for more. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) In practice this means that you don't fly in such circumstances -- unless you have an instrument rating, which teaches you to fly without seeing where you are, and you're on an instrument flight plan, with controllers telling you where to go. Kennedy did not have an instrument rating, and the Nantucket plane appears not to have been on an instrument flight plan.
... the WSJ runs an editorial I agree with. It's this one on mis-reaction and over-reaction to the Chinese toy recalls. Eg, about the magnet problem that is responsible for the highest volume of recent recalls:
This is not the fault of the Chinese manufacturers that made the toys. It seems to be the fault of the engineers who designed them and would have been a hazard even if the toys had been manufactured in the U.S.
As mentioned earlier, China has lots and lots of problems, and manufacturers here take lots and lots of shortcuts -- unless foreign outsourcers insist on higher standards. It weakens the case against the real dangers, the ones that clearly are Chinese companies' fault, to mix them up with ones that aren't.
(Nagging little thought: I'll take this at face value as a moment of reasonableness on the WSJ ed-page's part -- which after all hews to the page's tradition in including attacks on Congressional Democrats and regulation in general. I'll assume it's not the beginning of a new Master Narrative of the WSJ under Rupert Murdoch: discouraging hostile talk about China in any form. Nah, let's stick to the positive view. On its own, the editorial makes sense, which is something!)
How to protect your children against those lead-covered Chinese toys?
Take it from me, someone who lives on scene (Shanghai) and has been through scores of Chinese factories: I have no idea.
No family without its own metallurgy lab can reliably tell safe toys from risky ones. This is a useful reminder that while market forces are marvelous, they're not the answer to all problems. (Let's spell it out: a strictly market-based answer would mean waiting to see which kids got sick, hoping parents could figure out why, and assuming that their knowledge would guide future parents' purchases.) Public health regulations, enforced in both China and America, are a crucial part of the answer.
But I know who's responsible at the moment: less the Chinese manufacturers than the American "outsourcing" purchasers. China is a big, sprawling, under-regulated, and still very poor country. Its factories can produce first-rate products: if you own any hardware from Apple, Sony, Siemens, HP, Bose, or any fancy-sounding brand name, chances are it came from China.
When those products are good, that is because the brand-name company insisted that they be good. This is essentially the saga I laid out in my recent Atlantic article on Chinese factories. (Article itself subscriber-only; free slide-show here.) The companies I wrote about came to China because its suppliers were fast, and cheap. But to make their output good, the purchasers invested the necessary time, money, and effort.
Purchasers just looking for something cheap from China will get it -- cheap in every sense of the term. That's not China's fault: it's early stage industrialization. Britain's factory life was dirty, slipshod, and dangerous in Charles Dickens's era, and America's was in the day of Upton Sinclair. And, frankly, American consumers just looking for something cheap will get it too.
So avoid Chinese toys if you feel you must. But let's not make this the basis for a big fiesta of anti-China-ism. The factories here can be perfectly safe -- as the best ones are, when middlemen and consumers around the world are willing to pay the price. And before you imagine a giant Chinese plot to poison Americans, think of the people who pay the greatest personal price for unsafe food and products: the average Chinese citizens who eat and use this stuff every single day. Along with me.
In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, and since I'm not sure this has yet been posted by my colleagues on the Atlantic's site, two links to Dick Cheney's jaw-dropping and incredible (because so lucid and prescient) comments about the folly of trying to occupy Iraq:
YouTube version (with branding from "Grand Theft Country") here.
Arguably the most important 82 seconds of political footage you'll see -- well, in quite a while.It's one thing to read quotes from G.H.W. Bush's book to the same effect. To see Cheney himself making the case and juxtapose that with the man we've come to know..... Too bad Charles Ferguson didn't have this for his movie.
Update: As I should have guessed, Andrew Sullivan actually mentioned this same video a couple of days ago. That's what he gets for cryptic references that don't come up in a search for "Cheney and video" or "Cheney and Iraq"!
Let me stay out of the fray over Michael Gerson's behavior in the White House. On the one hand, when I worked with Gerson ten years ago (after hiring him at US News, and liking and respecting him there), he did not behave in anything resembling the way described in Matthew Scully's article. On the other, circumstances were different, and Scully certainly has a lot of names, dates, places, and quotes on his side.
Instead let me reinforce a point made recently by Matthew Yglesias, Brian Beutler*, and others about Gerson's fundamental miscasting in his new role as regular newspaper columnist. There are two big problems Gerson will have to surmount if he wants to succeed.
We know and love the hoary jokes on this theme: You write "How to keep an idiot busy (please turn over)" on both sides of a card, or send people to an animated site like this.
My nominee, from an otherwise very interesting new Wall Street Journal story (subscribers only) about tensions between China and Japan:
Keeping the peace has benefits for both sides. Japan's top trading partner is China, and China is Japan's No. 3, after the European Union and the United States.
There is a certain "I'm my own grandpa" charm to this passage, in addition to its ability to keep anyone busy for hours trying to figure it out. And it's delightful to speculate about where it came from.
While riffling through the desktop pile of pirate videos this evening, I saw one I hadn't expected to find: a pre-release version of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, the very powerful documentary about the origins of catastrophe in Iraq. (No, this wasn't just another DVD I'd picked up for 87 cents at the local video store -- and I'll explain my Chinese video-store ethics some other time. It was an early copy Ferguson had sent me, because I'd discussed the project with him at its start. I thought I'd sent it back, but...)
My wife and I watched it again this evening, while eating dinner. Pretty soon it was hard to eat. Nothing in the film is "new" in a technical sense -- we all have heard that there was too little preparation for occupying Iraq, we all know that it was idiotic for Americans not to have stopped the scorched-earth looting of Baghdad, etc. But to see it all take place again, accompanied by the feckless comments of our national leaders.... It would be in Donald Rumsfeld's interest to use some of his wealth to buy up all available tickets to the movie, to minimize the number of people who see it and become newly and furiously contemptuous of him. Walter Slocombe, Paul "Medal of Freedom" Bremer, and Dick Cheney would also be wise to chip in.
I actually recommend mass viewings of this film as a way to mark Rove's departure and reflect upon the way he has changed America. He is the unacknowledged offstage actor through much of this drama, and not simply in winning reelection for the team that created the disaster. He is also there, in spirit, as the occupation staff in the Green Zone is re-populated by 23-year olds whose main qualification was service in College Republicans. In honor of Karl, check this movie out.
Both are based in Florida and have rundowns of news from Eclipse, Epic, Cirrus, Dayjet, Cessna, etc. and commentary on trends in the small-jet and "air taxi" industries.
One blog:
Esther Dyson's Flight School blog, about the annual for-pay conferences she holds on the industry.
One article:
In the new issue of Portfolio, Gabriel Sherman's report on the most controversial person in the small-jet movement, Vern Raburn of Eclipse Aviation. One of the two companies I focused on in Free Flight has gone on to be an out-and-out success: Cirrus Design, which has sold thousands of its innovative, parachute-equipped small propeller planes and dominates its part of the market. The other, Eclipse, has had a much rockier path. Many people still think it will transform the world of travel; many others think it's a house of cards. This article explains both sides.
One sample skeptical post:
From (my friend) Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, who hints here at the reasons he appears in most VLJ stories as the "but there are critics" expert who says, "This is all a dream."
One video:
OK, this is to look at rather than to read, but still: Honda's new light jet in flight. Site is slow to load but interesting.
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The blog world is brimming with other VLJ-related information -- for instance, try the VLJ tag at del.icio.us -- but this is enough for now. (Past Free Flight updates here, here, and here.)
Yesterday I spoke with a Chinese-American scholar who I'm not sure at the moment I should name. (I need to check with him, since it was a chat rather than an interview.) Among other things I asked him why the Chinese leadership, skillful in so many ways, did so many other things that were pointless and self-damaging. Clumsy censorship, to take a recent example; or firing off an anti-satellite weapon early this year, which gave Japan, America, South Korea, Russia, and many other countries a whole new reason to wonder about China's military plans.
My friend's answer boiled down to: a Chinese version of the "tragedy of the commons." It was bad for the "brand image" of China when the censors were heavy-handed or annoyed the foreign media. It was bad for the central Communist leadership too. But it was good for the censors in the propaganda ministry. No censor had ever been fired for being too restrictive, so they kept on doing it. The larger interest of the country, even the narrow interests of the regime, took second place.
I thought of that when I heard of Karl Rove's departure. I suspect that historically he will be seen as a "tragedy of the commons" type. Or at least he should.
My colleague Josh Green, in his (well-timed!) new story* about Rove, makes clear what Rove's divide-and-conquer strategy has done for his party. It has also done something terrible to the country, in particular in the change it wrought in George Bush some time early in 2002.
Recently I've mentioned a run of ham-handedmedia controlefforts by the information ministry here. They're mainly related to the Olympics, and they're mainly efforts to keep up an all-good-news premise.
All along I've felt like adding a balancing note that is obvious on scene but probably isn't in the United States. (Or, reinforcing an argument I made earlier.) The reason I've called these efforts clumsy and misguided is not simply that they backfire so badly in affecting Western perceptions of China. It's also that, in a way not so apparent from outside China, they're unrepresentative of the way most life, most of the time, seems here.
I guess I wasn't hallucinating (Beijing Olympics watch, cont.)
I spent Wednesday of this week going with my family to Nanjing, which is fascinating but which on that day fully justified its reputation as one of the "Three Furnaces of China" (with Wuhan and Chongqing). It was so hot and the trains there and back were so packed that soon after we reached Shanghai we fell asleep with the room lights still on and the TV news droning in the background.
In that hallucinatory state I half-noticed the shots of celebrations from Beijing, as the one year countdown to the Olympics began. Then I thought I heard the head of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, say something truly astonishing: that the air in Beijing was so bad that some events (like, the ones where athletes have to breathe) might have to be postponed!
In the morning I couldn't be sure whether that had been dream or reality.
Steve Riley is a security expert at Microsoft; John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at Ohio State.
I know and like John Mueller (who is also a leading expert on Fred Astaire), and in my Atlantic article "Declaring Victory" one year ago I talked about his argument that America's over-reaction to the threat of future terrorist attack had damaged it more deeply than attacks themselves were ever likely to. He laid out this theory at length in his book Overblown.
I don't know Riley but was intrigued by this report, on the Australian tech website APCMAG, of his saying that the unthinking attempt to remove all possible security threats often destroys the efficiency, value, and integrity of the thing you are trying to "protect." What's intriguing is that Riley, unlike many tech officials, drew the explicit comparison: too many security features can make software unusable, and too much security can make free societies unrecognizable. (Or just hopelessly inefficient, as with the recent impossible legislative requirement that every single shipping container entering the United States be scanned before it leaves a foreign port.)
This leaves only two questions: Did the report accurately reflect Riley's views? I emailed him via his site to ask. And if so, why did he let his company include in Windows Vista something called "User Account Control," which exemplifies the overkill approach to security that he so astutely warns about?
Actually, there's one more question: Who will be the first historian to say of America in the years after 9/11: they had to destroy the country in order to save it?
Today was Olympic Countdown day in China, with the opening ceremonies in Beijing scheduled for one year from tonight. Eight -- ba -- is the luckiest Chinese number, so the games will begin on 08/08/08, at 8 pm. Auspicious enough for me!
Two items of media interest from the festivities:
* CNN International began its report talking about what is obviously the main deal-breaking threat to the Olympics: the air. The correspondent had gotten far enough into the story to say, "Some foreign athletes fear..." and then the screen went blank for the next two minutes or so. The same PR wizards who were at the satellite cut-off switch yesterday were apparently at work again today.
* As part of its extensive coverage today, the (state-controlled, English-language, China's-face-to-the-world) China Daily had a lead editorial that mentioned every possible threat to the game -- except the one that matters:
... but not many of them seem to work for the state propaganda apparatus.
I know there is constant Western talk about the cunning Chinese image-manipulation machine and how slyly it is currying favor worldwide. The concept in American minds seems to be of an information campaign guided by the spirit of the old commissar Zhou Enlai. Westerners found it so charming that Zhou could make jokes in French that they tended to forget that he was about as tender-hearted as Mao himself. And now -- ah, the clever Chinese are pulling it off again!
if you're actually exposed to the info-machine day by day, the image that occurs is not the suave Zhou but instead Scott McClellan, flop-sweating his way through an agonizing White House press conference.
There are two kinds of food I simply can't get enough of here in China. One is peanut butter, usually Chinese-made Skippy and usually slathered on a piece of toast. The other is deep-fried Chinese peanuts, which I buy at the corner Quicky Mart-style store in 20-cent packets like this (shown with Chairman Mao):
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In my previous life I liked peanut butter OK but didn't wolf down greasy peanuts. Do I crave them now because fried peanuts are one of the foods in China that perfectly satisfy all three taste needs at once: salty, oily, and sugary too? Is it because of something now missing from my normal fare that peanuts replace? Lord knows. I haven't been putting on pounds, so the peanuts must be crowding out something else. I have recently heard of several people who were diagnosed with heavy-metal poisoning after spending a few years in China. I will no doubt be diagnosed with the peanut-induced equivalent of that malady... for starters!
More on the "smiley curve": China makes, Apple takes
My current Atlantic article about the Chinese factory-world of Shenzen talks about the famous-in-China concept of the "smiley curve." This is a way of expressing the principle that although Americans import huge volumes of manufactured goods from China, most of the money spent on those imports stays in American hands. (Quote from the article, explaining the smiley curve, after the jump.)
An academic study I had heard about during my reporting, but which wasn't ready in time for my article, sets out a detailed and dramatic illustration of "smiley curve" principles. It involves the Apple iPod (which I have seen manufactured in China).
According to a summary of the report, in the new issue of Richard McCormack's Manufacturing News:
Not much of Apple's iPod is manufactured in the United States, but the majority of value added is captured by Apple... Apple made $80 in gross profit on a 30-gigabyte video iPod that retails for $299. Its profit is 36 percent of the estimated wholesale price of $224. [Not to mention the retail profit, if it is sold in an Apple store.] The total cost of parts was $144.
Many more dollars-and-cents details in the Manufacturing News story and the original academic study, from the Personal Computing Industry Center at the University of California, Irvine, here.
Study the picture below for as long as you like, before answering two reading-comprehension questions after the jump. It shows two papers that arrived on the same day here in Shanghai. The one at the top is the state-controlled China Daily. The one at the bottom is the Asian edition of the not-yet-Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal.
I've started reading Stacy Schiff's 1997 biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, about which I've heard only rave reviews and which indeed is wonderful so far. Every good omen that it will join A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh and Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville on my list of first-rate biographies of fliers. I suppose that list should be extended to include Robert Coram's Boyd, about the military theorist and one-time fighter pilot John Boyd, and The Right Stuff, and....
But on the second page of her book, Stacy Schiff says something that rings completely wrong. Rather, it suggests to me that while she has admirably researched her subject, she has not made the imaginative leap to understanding what flying is about. She notes the obvious -- that Saint-Exupery was both a renowned writer and a career aviator -- and says:
Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events; the other must nimbly accommodate them.
My experience and observation suggest exactly the reverse.
There are areas where, as best I can tell, the Chinese authorities actually struggle to Do the Right Thing when it comes to international responsibilities. For instance, a U.S. business bigshot who visited Shanghai yesterday said that not one of the Chinese officials he'd recently met in Beijing had "been in denial" about the country's food safety problems. They didn't pretend that the poison-pet food stories and related horrific accounts were somehow anti-Chinese or unfair; instead they admitted that there were big problems to deal with.
Then there is the realm of intellectual property, where to a first approximation the government doesn't lift a finger to prevent counterfeiting. Maybe that's unfair -- I'm only judging on what I see. Like, the video stores full of 90-cent DVDs of all recent movies. Or a report like this, from a state-controlled English-language newspaper, about the abundance of Chinese translations of the last Harry Potter book available free, on line. Howard French of the New York Times has just written a related story.
Oh well. On the brighter side, and with a sustained literary theme: it is now August 2 in China, which means that it is time to offer birthday greetings to my friend Lawrence Wright, author of the widely-acclaimed The Looming Tower; and to my friend Erik Tarloff, author of the acclaimed-by-those-in-the-know Face Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book; and to the departed James Baldwin and the still-with-us Peter O'Toole and others (like Judge Lance Ito!) i know only from a distance; and all of this from their fellow member of the August 2 fraternity. Update: I see that my friend-via-correspondence, Caleb Carr, author of many books from The Alienist to The Lessons of Terror, is also part of this select club.
I had thought that my problems with Windows Vista were mainly my problems -- the result, that is, of my (new) ThinkPad T60 and its (sizable by most standards) 105-gigabyte hard drive being overwhelmed by an operating system really meant for heavy-duty desktops, if not mainframes.
It turns out that the heavy-duty guys are worried too. This week's report in Computerworld suggests that business clients with Windows setups are overwhelmingly sticking with what they have rather than buying Vista. Highlight:
In a just-released poll of more than 250 of its clients, PatchLink noted that only 2% said they are already running Vista, while another 9% said they planned to roll out Vista in the next three months. A landslide majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version(s) of Windows....
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