From an organization holding a conference I plan to attend in Beijing starting tomorrow, whose sessions have been scheduled for a government-run meeting site:
Change of Venue Due
to the concerns of the H1N1 virus, the Chinese government has banned
gatherings of groups larger than 50 people at all government
facilities. Due to this new circumstance, we are no longer able to host
the forum at the [xxxxx]. We
have now changed the venue to the [xxxx] Hotel. The schedule of the forum will
remain the same, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have
caused you.
I have no independent information about whether, when, by whom, and with what geographic extent such an order might have been issued. And of course it's hardly the first time I've heard of a last-minute change of site (or cancellation) for a long-scheduled gathering in China, for reasons having nothing to do with flu.
Whatever the back story here, to me the announcement is an interesting historical document concerning the management of public opinion in China during the current flu episode -- and the success of the government in making any measure, no matter how hazily connected to systematic public health reasoning, seem part of a resolute effort to protect the Chinese people against lax standards elsewhere, notably including the United States. No other countries are imposing quarantine rules as strict as China's? So much more to the credit of the government protecting us here!! Yes, Americans too are familiar with such "security theater" -- just not when it comes to flu. And I can't help remembering that in recent hours I passed through airports in Kunming and Beijing, "government facilities" in both cases, where tens of thousands of people were gathered. So far we all survived.
Win in China screening - Tuesday in NYC
Reminder (earlier notice here): If you're in New York this Tuesday evening, June 2, consider checking out the screening at the Asia Society of a new documentary on the Chinese reality TV show for budding entrepreneurs, Win in China. Screening details here; my 2007 article about the show here.
At the main web site for the film, here, you can see a short trailer. I was going to embed a playable link to the trailer, but the opening image on the embed is a headshot of me being interviewed about the show, and that seemed too weird. So here's a different static shot from the trailer, below. It depicts one of the PK phases of the show, for "Player Kill." See my article, and presumably the film, for explanation of PK and much else.
May 30, 2009
Lost memory of Tiananmen
As I write, at the equivalent of 11pm Saturday night in New York -- 11am Sunday morning in Beijing -- links to three of the four NYT essays about the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square are broken. (The page with links to the four essays is here: as of this moment, items #2, #3, and #4 are instead linked to essays about the recession from three months ago.)
I am sure that will be fixed soon. A quick note about the one essay that is readable at the moment, this one from Yu Hua, the author of Brothers. He says he is writing about the event for the first time ever in order to emphasize two points:
The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a
one-time release of the Chinese people's political passions, later
replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the
summer of 1989 the incident vanished from the Chinese news media. As a
result, few young Chinese know anything about it.
The first point is continually thrashed out in all articles about the current state of China's economic and political evolution. For the moment I want to underscore the accuracy of the second.
I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country's past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family's experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can't assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it's just another day.
What do you notice in this view of Kunming?
This morning, looking north out the window of the Green Lake View ( Cui Yi Hu*) hotel in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southern China:
Click above for larger, detailed view. Or, see this closeup of the building nearest the hotel:
Clue, in case you didn't spot it yourself: Every roof as far as you can see has solar-thermal panels for hot water heating. More to come shortly on China's general environmental/climate situation, but I think this vista is different from that in many US cities -- among other details you might notice, in the prevalence of the panels. __ * Originally thought we'd stayed in the Green Lake, Cui Hu. On correction from higher authority, ie my wife, I realize it was the Green Lake View, Cui Yi.
May 27, 2009
Offline
I am in rural China and away from the internet until Sunday. Greetings from the road.
You learn something every day
In this case, about the history of the LA freeways. Recently I mentioned the I-10 / I-405 interchange in west Los Angeles, familiar to many headed to LAX --especially before the completion of the Century Freeway, I-105, in the 1990s.
From reader BF, now living in Pennsylvania, this recollection of that very interchange:
I wanted to pass on two things. First, that during the
decade I was navigating the freeways in LA, the soaring transition from
the Santa Monica Freeway west to the San Diego Freeway south was always
the high point. The designer of that interchange launched your car into
the sky, banked it over 8 (10?) lanes and landed it full speed in the
southbound lane.
Second, is that the designer, Marilyn Jorgenson Reece, was the first
female civil engineer licensed in California. This link describes the
dedication ceremony when CalTrans named the interchange for her. [Link is here.]
Here, from the linked CalTrans website, is Marilyn Reese as she looked during construction; below, a clearer sense of the design she had in mind.
The designer:
Her work:
Not death of newspapers but death of advertising
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of response on the "who's killing the press?" theme. Because the theme has been so very heavily worked over in recent months, I'm not reposting much of this. But here is a note that reflects a theme in a number of messages: that the newspapers are only the first casualties in what will be a more sweeping elimination of ad revenue in general. It is a response from a reader named Hal:
Among my friends, we've had this discussion before. Here's what I said then, edited to fit addressing you directly: *^*^*
The real problem is, advertising is dying. It's just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.
This is why I was warning anyone who would listen that traditional media's schadenfreude when the internet bubble popped in 2001 was probably misplaced. Because the reason it popped was one finally had the metrics to show Advertising Doesn't Work. Google has forestalled the inevitable by doing the Net equivalent of the "tiny little ads" schtick of a decade or two back, but I think they see the writing on the wall, which is why they keep trying so desperately to find something, anything, other than search that'll make money....
The Atlantic's latest issue has a brief article by me about a very unusual new hotel in Beijing called the Opposite House. For details -- get the magazine!
Here are a few amateur shots of what makes the place a noticeable exception among the other fancy Western hotels that have sprung up all over Beijing. Giant version of a traditional Chinese medicine chest, with (mainly) workable drawers, in the atrium:
Scando-Japanese minimalism in the rooms -- I mean, "studios":
Enormous woven-metal drape or sail hanging from the upper stories down through the atrium:
There are genuine, professional photos in the magazine, and this brings me to my real point. Seriously, you should read articles like this in the magazine itself, not on line.
Some written material is merely "text" and can be absorbed equally well regardless of medium. I've claimed that I like reading novels just as much on a Kindle as in printed form. All that matters is a novel is the words. But some material is designed for something other than a computer screen, and is best absorbed from printed pages, with illustrations and thought-through layout. Most of what's in a good magazine is in this category. Long, narrative articles are simply better to read on a sequence of pages, with illustrations and margins and call-out text, than as clicked-through screens.
I'm saying: subscribe to our magazine because you'll enjoy it more that way. And: subscribe because you should! Anyone who worries about the "crisis of the press" has a chance to do something about it for two bucks a month.
Herdict: now, in Arabic and Chinese!
Several months ago I mentioned a new web site from Harvard's Berkman Center called "Herdict," which allows people around the world to pool information about web sites being blocked.
For instance: late last year, I suddenly found that I couldn't reach the New York Times web site from my apartment in Beijing without using a VPN, and I heard from a friend in Shanghai that she was having trouble too. We didn't know if it was a problem on the Times's end, coincidental problems with our local connections, some other unknown issue -- or a conscious crackdown in China. As it emerged, Chinese officials had imposed a nationwide blackout on the NYT site. But it took a while to determine what was going on.
Herdict is meant to be a quick, crowdsourced way of reporting such developments -- and it has recently come out with Chinese and Arabic language versions of its site. It looks as if it's getting more traffic than the last time I checked a few months ago, but it could use more participants to produce finer-grained reports. Even now it's a quick way for people in, say, China to figure out that if they're having problems reaching YouTube, Blogger, China Digital Times, or Huffington Post, the fault lies not with them but with the Great Firewall. A useful tool.
May 25, 2009
On Memorial Day
Consider the Map the Fallen project, here. It is an overlay on Google Earth that provides details on the lives and deaths of 5600+ U.S. and coalition men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sample:
Details for installing the overlay at the site above. (Mac users: it definitely does require the latest release of Google Earth, here.) As the project's originator says:
I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each
of their stories--you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit
memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore
the places they called home and where they died.
Respect to him, and to those he is honoring. (And, yes, I do realize that there could be a much more densely-populated map of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. That takes nothing away from the power of this project or the sacrifice it commemorates.)
May 24, 2009
Back to the gaokao....
... following this discussion of Chinese education, Chinese management and research styles, and whether there is a "creativity" problem for people trained in China. Main theme so far about the gaokao, or 高考 -- the standardized, nationwide, make-or-break test for university admission: no one likes it, but many Chinese people feel that it is fairer than any likely alternative.
Today, two dispatches. First, a short one from a young Irish high-tech entrepreneur now working in the United States. Then, a long one from a foreigner teaching at a mainland Chinese university.
From the young Irish technologist:
Am enjoying posts on the gaokao. As it happens, the Irish education system functions virtually identically. The "Leaving Certificate" is taken by every Irish student in their final year. It consists of three core subjects (English, math, a language), plus three tertiary subjects; your results in each subject add up to a single score (max of 600); this score is the sole determinant of undergraduate college admission. There's much hand-wringing over students' foreign-language abilities--or lack thereof--even after years of study. It's often criticized for excessive emphasis on rote learning. And it is ultimately brutally fair: students rank courses in order of preference, and a computer program fills them by allocating places to successively lower-scoring students.
Despite the similarities, I've never heard accusations of a lack of creativity in students... and having gone through school in Ireland and college in the US, I can't say I noticed much difference in creativity or critical thinking. All of which may mean that the Chinese education system (or at least its superficial attributes) are not the problem.
(As it happens, I never sat the Leaving Cert, so I don't have direct experience with it. Unlike the gaokao, you can't sit it early, so I dropped out of school and taught myself the A Levels (British equivalent) instead. Also, I guess I should qualify the US/Ireland comparison. At college, the students were certainly smarter on average, but I don't think they were relatively more creative.)
From the teacher:
I'm another foreign university English teacher in China. I'm currently
in Yantai, Shandong Province. I'm an experienced teacher from the U.S.
and I've been in China for almost three years. One of my standard
classroom practices is to pose a general question and ask for
responses. I find that after a couple of weeks, when the students have
gotten used to me, most of them are willing to risk raising their hands
and offering their opinions.
One of my regular discussion subjects is the students' experiences so
far with the Chinese educational system. More than any other, this one
is greeted with groans and rolled eyes.
First picture: Google satellite view of the I-10 / I-405 intersection on the west side of Los Angeles. This is where the Santa Monica freeway meets the San Diego freeway, an extremely busy piece of thoroughfare. The only airline flight I've ever missed in my life was because of a jam at this very intersection -- my mother was driving me to LAX for a flight back to college after my first year's Christmas break, and we sat for two hours on one of the connectors shown below. (Part #1 of the Beijing construction triptych here.)
Next picture: the Guomao intersection in Beijing, where Jianguo Lu meets the East Third Ring Road. Our apartment building is just off screen on the lower right corner of the picture; subway entrances are on the other three corners but not on ours:
From my point of view, main difference between these intersections: no sane person would try to cross I-10/I-405 on foot. But many tens of thousands of pedestrians, including me, have to cross the Guomao intersection every day.
... that this issue is still with us, three clips from web-based environment sites, all taken within a few-minute span.
1) Real time map of particulate pollution across the US. This map shows PM2.5, the smallest particulates which are most damaging to the lungs:
2) EPA explanation of what the color-coding means.
3) What today's real-time monitoring of PM2.5 in Beijing shows. (Background here.) Note that the EPA charts have no reading or category for levels above 300, like the current 311 in Beijing.
Substantive update on anti-pollution efforts in China coming shortly, following this item a week ago. For now, think I will skip the gym today.
May 23, 2009
Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc
Thanks for numerous responses to yesterday's message from my Google friend about how newspapers could, and presumably still might, take advantage of the shift to web-based advertising. Short version: the need to have the business (as opposed to purely journalistic) swagger of predecessors like William Randolph Hearst:
Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
This is a very thoroughly discussed issue, so only a few reactions -- then back to queued-up reactions on Chinese education!
First, from a reader in Australia, about what brought on the crash and a hoped-for solution:
My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet. The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%. (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames. On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.
I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste. I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism. However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.
After the jump, another reader's suggestion of a potential opportunity. It begins:
It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could
fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking
more creatively.
More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers
A few hours ago I mentioned that a friend from Google had tipped me to a new Pew study showing how big a hole Craigslist (and similar services) had blown in the classified-ad portion of newspaper revenue. I signed off by saying that the distinction -- Google's not killing the news business, Craigslist is! -- was "worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting."
My friend, who was up in the middle of the night in California, immediately wrote back to say that I'd misunderstood the point. With his stipulation that he is speaking for himself and not the company, and with my clarification that he is not one of the household names at Google who by definition are always speaking for the company, here is his note:
It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for
treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified
revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely
self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then
they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news
aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt
Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new
visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously
infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick
faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will
hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers.
Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar
compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not
been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though
doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but
publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than
racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you
can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you
get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis
is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are
all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again.
Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the
future of shopping.
These are the issues for papers to agonize about;
to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve.
Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented
and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot
his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
Extra thought on my end: if this is what someone not in the writing biz can crank out at 4:40am his time, while up with eye problems and a splitting headache, maybe the publishing industry has even more to worry about from web-based competition than we thought!
Who exactly is killing the press
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting. ___ * Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
PR updates: NPR, Stanford Review, WNYC, plus NYT Mag
- On the Media interview with Bob Garfield, here, about the media-politics of health care reform. Back in 1995, I wrote this Atlantic article about the way the Clinton health-care proposal fell apart -- including the damaging role played by a hugely misleading article by Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. Interview covers whether it could happen again.
- Online Q-and-A with the Stanford Review's Bellum project, here.
- Interview last week about China with Brian Lehrer of WNYC, here. These all for the record.
Also for the record, let me join others congratulating the Atlantic's Megan McArdle for what she has reportedabout Edmund Andrews' gripping account of his descent into deadbeat hell.
Having had some experience with writing confessional, "here's a mistake I made, and what I learned from it" articles, I understand the fundamental premise of the tell-all bargain. You're asking for the reader's trust and, if not forgiveness or respect, at least forbearance because of your brave candor in facing unflattering truths. But in those tell-all circumstances, you really do have to tell it all. There would ordinarily be no reason whatsoever for Andrews to embarrass his wife by talking about her past financial problems (two declarations of bankruptcy) -- unless he undertook to write a warts-and-all book about how his household got into financial trouble. This is also connected to the first item, above, about the health care debate. For all the mixed effects of the internet on mainstream journalism, there is a fast-feedback loop now that can correct errors that would otherwise have stood.
May 22, 2009
Now I truly feel like Mr. Beijing
I know people who've lived here for decades, for their entire lives, and have not had the full immersion in Beijing-ology that I have recently been exposed to: an air journey from Nanyuan Airport!
"Thirteen kilometers south of Tian'anmen, deep in Fentgai district, likes the purgatory of Beijing air travel: Nanyuan Airport. Only travelers with frightening karmic debt end up here -- and all clients of China United Airlines, formerly a military carrier, which bases its operations at Nanyuan."
Probably I have the karmic debt, and for sure I was traveling on CUA -- but I found the experience weirdly charming. It was like a little trip back into the Beijing I first saw in the 1980s: an airport in the middle of a rural neighborhood, trees all around the runways, little hutongs and five-story Mao-era apartments just outside the airport fence. Few intrusions of modernity, like: taxicabs with meters (you bargain) or the for-sissies effect of translated signage. This is definitely not the new Beijing Capital Airport. (Below, my fellow travelers for Linyi, headed toward our CUA airplane on the tarmac at Nanyuan. Linyi, in Shandong province, is another of those Chinese cities few foreigners have heard of but is larger than nearly any city in the US.)
I'll take my nostalgia wherever I can find it. This was an unexpected dose.
Beijing construction triptych #1: Mandarin Oriental
Three and half months ago, during the climax of the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year fireworks insanity bacchanalia, the nearly-completed Mandarin Oriental Beijing hotel, designed by Rem Koolhaas, was engulfed in flames. It soon emerged that fireworks on the nearby CCTV tower, also by Koolhaas, had been the source. (Reuters photo of the fire, Feb 9)
The fire and its aftermath will make a great book topic for someone (not me), because of all the intriguing "this is modern China!" strands involved. The climax of architectural ambition / hubris in Beijing. News media intrigue about exploring the cause of the fire. Backlash against CCTV, for whom the complex (including famous odd-shaped tower) is being built. Many, many other subplots -- as suggested eg here.
What strikes me at the moment is that the building stands untouched, looking months later just as it did when the ashes cooled. Two days ago, looking east from about half a mile away, across the Third Ring Road:
Sometimes structures in big Chinese cities appear -- or disappear -- practically overnight. Other times, they sit for a very long period in limbo. I'm not sure of all the reasons why the hotel has this frozen-in-time aspect, but it's startling whenever I see it.
May 21, 2009
On Obama's security speech
Carried overseas on BBC, and in prepared text here from the Washington Post. WhiteHouse.gov site, by the way, is once again weirdly behind-the-curve in getting material up.
Argumentative crux of the speech to the left (emphasis added):
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that
our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver
accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there
are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced
interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can
work through and punish any violations of our laws.
This is the reply to people, including me, who think there needs to be some kind of investigatory commission. Taken at his word, he's saying: Congress can do the investigating, the courts (and my Department of Justice) can prosecute. In theory, this works out well. A new president moves ahead; the System provides accountability. We'll see.
Argumentative / explanatory crux of the speech to the right:
I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda. Because the
terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate
America from our allies, and they will never be able to do that if we
stay true to who we are.
This has been, from the start, the central indictment of the Bush-Cheney approach to al Qaeda. Anything-goes tactics may or may not win battles, but they certainly lose wars. Dick Cheney's speech, cut off by BBC about ten minutes in, is ineffective not just because of its anger/contempt but also because what is billed as a response is in fact one cycle late, simply re-stating the claims Obama went out of his way to rebut (rather that keeping up with the cycle by answering anything Obama said).
Subtle harpoon crux of the speech, in the last paragraph:
We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides
America - it can and must be a cause that unites us as one people, as
one nation. We have done so before in times that were more perilous
than ours.
The entirety of the Bush-Cheney approach rested on the assumption that there had never been a threat as great as the one demonstrated by 9/11. Condi Rice said this explicitly, in her disastrous (and, in a just world, career-damaging) "al Qaeda was more dangerous than the Nazis" comment at Stanford. The parts of Cheney's speech I saw today, and everything we know about Bush's decisions and statements in office, assumed without argument that they faced choices between due-process and national security more painful than those that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or FDR wrestled with. A reminder that others have faced difficult choices and dire threats is useful for judging our response and placing it in the long context of American values that Obama repeatedly emphasized.
For you fans of Chinese reality-TV
In the spring of 2007 I wrote about a campy / idealistic Chinese reality show called Win In China, which was designed to select, train, and motivate future entrepreneurs. The film maker Ole Schell has produced a documentary about the program and its aftermath, which will be shown at the Asia Society in New York on Tuesday evening, June 2. Details here.
I haven't seen the film, though I was one of the "what it all means" interviewees, but I watched Ole Schell getting lots of background footage as the show was underway. I think this should be very interesting. Make your Gotham travel plans accordingly!
May 20, 2009
Compare and contrast: "quarantine" in the US and China
Below on the left, the image from the recent diary of a (perfectly healthy) AP correspondent who, with his wife, ended up in Chinese quarantine for a week, simply because their plane had stopped at a Mexican airport. Starting on the right, an account from a reader in the US who has an actual swine flu patient in her house. The eccentricities of each country's approach are on display here -- along with, as discussed earlier, the reasons why China's reaction might understandably differ from America's or Europe's. The reader begins:
"In striking contrast to the story of quarantine in China, I am here in
Illinois with a house guest with the swine flu, and only the vaguest
instructions about avoiding spreading the infection. The young woman
came down with the flu Monday morning, after not feeling great on
Sunday. Since her health insurance is an HMO from another part of the
country, it took several phone calls to insurance companies, doctors,
etc., to get an appointment - not that the current round of health care
reform is likely to address this ridiculous bureaucracy, but that's
another topic.
You should, of course, start by reading my description of the casino economy as it was fully opening up two years ago, here and here.
But on the remote chance that's not enough, it is surprisingly interesting to get the email updates from an operation called "Destination Macau." At first glance I thought it was just another local-booster site. But here is a representative passage from the latest newsletter:
"If a president of most companies we know were to stand up in public, after having recently posted a solid rise in quarterly earnings amid a bearish economic environment, and announce he is looking to cut nearly a quarter of his workforce, his audience might be forgiven a gasp of astonishment. Not when that president runs the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
"This week, the company's recently installed president, Mike Leven, announced in Las Vegas that he was going to cut another 3,000 to 4,000 jobs at the Macau subsidiary, taking the total workforce to around 13,000-14,000 from its current level of around 17,500, and down from a high that once scraped the 20,000 mark. This is despite the fact that the Venetian Macao posted a 10 per cent rise in first-quarter EBITDA and continues to hoover up the city's visitor market... Job cuts and the redrawing of organization charts seem to have become routine at Macau's most profitable gaming concessionaire as it struggles under the weight of a massive debt load.
"Needless to say, the Venetian Macao is not a happy camp for an expatriate to be in at the moment. Given that locals are protected by divine right to employment in an election year, every Filipino, Nepalese, Malaysian, Singaporean and, yes, American and Australian that walks the floors of LVS's Macau properties can be forgiven their long faces...
"A black joke doing the rounds yesterday was that all of these cuts could be made without having to go beneath the vice-president level."
For specialized tastes only, but engagingly done.
About corruption, meritocracy, and "fairness" in Chinese life
A recent "Red-diaper perspective" on Chinese schooling and the nationwide "gaokao" admissions tests said that distortions in Chinese education were related to the nervousness of a Chinese elite that was not sure it could pass its advantages on to its children. Here, from another Chinese reader, is a dissent. Climax of the argument below; full text after the jump.
The anonymous reader blamed that China
gaokao system is brutal. I got news for him: The reality in China is
brutal. A population of 1.4 Billion makes any resource and opportunity
extremely scarce. This is why a fair system is so important: if you
deny the poor the educational opportunity to climb the social ladder by
reserving the precious slots in elite school for those who have, the
next thing will be that the poor overthrow the elite class physically,
as it happened several times in Chinese history.
The article notes that mainland China had a large number of entries and won many
minor prizes. But it had no real successes -- and the question
was why.
The three overall grand-prize winners were all young women from
American high schools, shown here. For individual best-in-category prizes -- 18
total according to People's Daily, 19 total according to Intel -- all
but one went to American students. That one exception was from Taiwan.
What's the problem? The article discussed some obvious barriers -- language, resources -- but quoted a number of Chinese authorities saying that the real problem lay in the way Chinese schools taught people to think for themselves -- or, didn't. Too much emphasis on rote, detail, and following procedures; too little encouragement to reflect about the process of discovery. An analysis very similar to what we originally heard from a foreigner. I do not pretend to be able to follow arguments in the Chinese press with any nuance. I offer this (tipped from a contact at Intel, then labored-through by me) as evidence of a parallel, and obviously authorized, Chinese-language discussion, and as a resource for any Chinese reader who might have missed it.
May 18, 2009
Very interesting flu-quarantine diary
Will Weissert, an AP correspondent based in Havana, traveled with his wife to China for a wedding -- and ended up spending a week in quarantine. His account of the quarantine, here and with pictures beginning here, is very interesting on the nuts and bolts of how the system works. It's not a complaint, though there are some complaining details. Mainly a chronicle, with details I hadn't seen elsewhere.
Here is his wife in the quarantine-hotel room, as Chinese officials take notes on her condition.
And here is the intro to his account of how they ended up in this situation:
My wife and I are in perfect health, but after flying to China
for my college friend's wedding we're being quarantined in a remote
hotel for seven days. The reason: Our flight from our home in Havana included a layover in Cancun, and China is taking no chances with swine flu.
Never
mind that we were in Cancun for only two hours, that we didn't leave
the airport and that Mexican doctors with electronic thermometers
checked us for fever on arrival and departure. Never mind that when our
Continental Airlines flight from Newark
touched down in Shanghai, we and everyone else on board were not
allowed to leave our seats until health workers clamored aboard and
pointed a blue beam at our foreheads to take our temperatures.
The Mexican
stamps in our passports -- my wife is Chilean, I'm American -- are enough
for authorities to pull us out of line at immigration and send us to a
medical room where attendants in white lab coats take our temperature yet again and give us surgical masks...
After 3 1/2 hours, a man in uniform -- speaking by phone with a
communist official everyone calls "the leader" -- announces we will be
confined to a hotel room for seven days.
We say we'll simply fly back home. He tells us that isn't possible.
Worth reading the rest. (Thanks to Daniel Lippman.)
Cross cultural exchange
Above-the-fold picture on China Daily special weekly business supplement. Caption says:
"The official dance troupe of the Dallas Cowboys (a US National Football League team) perform with local elderly at a downtown park in Shanghai."
How it looked on the page:
In the circumstances, the "local elderly" don't look that bad! Must be the morning tai chi.
More Chinese education! Or, is it really "Chinese"?
Previously in our series, the complaint has been that the Chinese school system pushes students too hard and in too rote-memorization a way, leaving the victors undeniably tough but maybe drained of their spark and inventiveness. Along the way, many contrary views and debates about the role of the Chinese nationwide university-admission exam, the gaokao.
Now, two bits of testimony more or less on China's behalf. First, from a Westerner now teaching in Japan, who says that these problems are hardly confined to China. Then from an American (of Chinese ancestry) about an American counterpart to gaokao-style training.
First, the Westerner teaching at a university in Japan.
China, Eastern Europe, Japan, it's all the same story. No, it's not a legacy of Communism. The saying here in Japan is similar to the one mentioned by the teacher in Eastern Europe: "The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down."
I cannot get my students to voice an opinion for love nor money. They do not want to call attention to themselves; stand out from the crowd, or be different in any way. This is the Japanese way. If, by chance, they do have an opinion, they keep it to themselves.
As a result, they are totally incapable of creative/critical thinking or problem solving abilities.
First Al Gore, buffeted Democratic champion ca. 2000, propagates boiled-frog ignorance in his (otherwise laudable) An Inconvenient Truth.
Now Barack Obama, victorious Democratic champion ca. 2008, relies on bogus boiled-frog imagery in a Newsweek interview (as my comrade Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out).
Did you consult any former presidents or celebrities about the fishbowl effect in raising the girls?
Well, you know, the truth of the matter is that the campaign was the
equivalent of me being the frog in the saucepan of water and the
temperature slowly being turned up. By the time the inauguration had
taken place, we had pretty much gotten accustomed to it.
Say what you will about the linguistic habits of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Palin; but at this moment I don't remember any of them talking about boiled frogs. The image of young Dickie Cheney in 8th grade science lab with a frog, though, is one to force from the mind. And if these people did in fact talk about boiled frogs, I'll have to join the Greens.
What should they be talking about instead? The kitty-litter box analogy, as so brilliantly laid out by Don Rose in the Chicago Daily Observer a few months ago. You have cats in your house; you think everything is great; then visitors walk in through the door, reel back in horror, and say, "What is that godawful smell?" And I say this as a lover of cats. Or as Rose put it, in a column about the colorful ex-governor Rod Blagojevich:
Out of towners often ask me how it is that folks in Chicago and
Illinois put up with all the hanky and panky that goes on in our
political snakepits.
I tell them about my cat litter box.
Currently I have two cats--once I had nine. In any case, I used to
think I kept their potty clean and odor free. Then, every so often
someone would come to the door, sniff the air and whisper in
confidence, "I think your cat box needs changing."
They were right, of course. They came from cat-free environments and
could sense a drop of urine at 30 paces, while I had grown so
desensitized to the aroma that my schnozz would tell me I was romping
through a fresh pine forest.
So it is with the denizens of our city and state.
And so it should be with us all. As recently as a few hours ago, I was impressed by Obama's use of language. And now....
On eloquence vs. prettiness
Based on its transcript -- here at the Washington Post site, oddly not yet in any obvious place at WhiteHouse.gov [Update: it's now on the White House page, here]-- Barack Obama's Notre Dame commencement speech was another extraordinary performance. "Extraordinary" meaning that it was like his speech last year in Philadelphia about race relations, his speech last month in Prague about nuclear weapons, and, only slightly less impressive, his speech last month at Georgetown University laying out his long term economic plan. Or, on a small scale, his answer in Strasbourg about "American exceptionalism."
What made these presentations extraordinary was not any single phrase or sentence, nor any paragraph-long flight of fine language. Indeed, I can hardly remember any phrase or sentence from any speech Obama has ever given. (Phrases or sentences are to be distinguished from campaign slogans, like "Yes we can" or "not 'red states' or 'blue states' but the United States of America.") Instead the power of those speeches comes from the quality of their thought -- from the ideas and truths the speaker is trying to grapple with:
In the case of the race speech, the different burdens and resentments Americans of all background held, and why we had to face and work through them. In the nuclear speech, the dangers that remained long after the Cold War had ended, and America's special opportunity and responsibility to find a solution. In the Notre Dame speech, the difficulty of resolving, in an open democracy, differences of moral certainty that are fiercely held on all sides. And so on. A passage from this latest speech after the jump.
This kind of eloquence is different from what I think of as rhetorical prettiness -- words and phrases that catch your notice as you hear them, and that often can be quoted, remembered, and referred to long afterwards. "Ask not..." from John F. Kennedy. "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" from Winston Churchill. "Only thing we have to fear is fear itself" from FDR. "I have a dream," from Martin Luther King. Or, to show that memorable language does not necessarily mean elevated thought, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" from the early George C. Wallace.
At rare moments in history, language that goes beyond prettiness to beauty is matched with original, serious, difficult thought to produce the political oratory equivalent of Shakespeare. By acclamation Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is the paramount American achievement of this sort: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right as God gives us to see the right..."
The reason to distinguish eloquence of thought from prettiness of expression is that the former tells you something important about the speaker, while the latter may or may not do so. Hired assistants can add a fancy phrase, much as gag writers can supply a joke. Not even his greatest admirers considered George W. Bush naturally expressive, but in his most impressive moment, soon after the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a speech full of artful writerly phrases, eg: "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our
enemies, justice will be done." Good for him, and good for his staff.
Rhetorical polish, that is, can be a staff-enhanced virtue. The eloquence that comes from original thought is much harder to hire, or to fake. This is the sort of eloquence we've seen from Obama often enough to begin to expect. ___
US no-show at Shanghai Expo: the hows and whys (updated)
Last month Adam Minter of ShanghaiScrap, did our initial Atlantic report on the looming self-inflicted embarrassment of America's no-show status at the 2010 Shanghai Expo / World's Fair.
The strands of the story are tangled, to put it mildly, and have been hard to follow in scattered press reports. So Minter's latest detailed backgrounder is very useful in explaining how things reached this point, why it matters, and what if anything could be done. Among the points he clarifies, in a list of problems that have affected the proposed US pavilion:
A. Cost. Shanghai Expo 2010's [one of the US contenders] $61 million pavilion
budget - down from an earlier $84 million budget - is inordinately
expensive, and surely the most expensive national pavilion after the
elaborate Chinese design. "For that kind of money [$61 million]," an
experienced American businessman in Shanghai told me. "You could build
a thirty-story residential tower on that site and still have money left
over. But these people want that money for a two story pavilion." In
comparison, Germany's elaborate pavilion design is projected to cost US$40.8 million; Norway's elegant structure,
a comparatively minor US$22 million. And even those might be
overpriced. At the Beijing 2008 Olympics, major commercial pavilions
were built for around $1000 per square meter - that is, less than US$5
million. So far, Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., has failed to provide a
detailed public accounting of how it plans to spend its proposed US$61
million, leading to wild and unsubstantiated speculation among
experienced China hands in Shanghai.
[UPDATE: I hear from informed sources that there is some controversy about the importance of whole cost issue, with some other pavilions costing more than this US figure -- and the real question being whether the US can spend this much money in a sensible way with so little time to go. More details as they come in.]
One image of the proposed US structure Minter is referring to, from this site:
Full set of images of other countries' structures here. One example I like from that site: the Israeli pavilion, with components of the Whispering Garden, the Hall of Light, and the Hall of Innovations. Israel is a tiny country and this is a relatively small structure, but FWIW Israeli's entire budget for the expo, including construction, is $6 million.
And here is Italy's (no budget listed). The story is worth following.
Europe, America, China respond to the flu
From Kevin Miller, of the University of Michigan, an observation on why the differing European, American, and Chinese approaches to the current spread of flu might be explained by the respective health threats the areas face:
I have
a colleague, a native German, who went to Germany last week and
reported that the general attitude was that Americans were being
crazily hysterical about this. It makes sense to me that a) the Chinese
are really being hysterical, b) Germans are calm, and c) we're
somewhere in between.
If you look at the medical safety net in
each country, this makes perfect sense (plus the big worry that this
could combine with bird flu, which they have in China. H1N1 seems to be
easy to catch but rarely serious; bird flu is hard to catch but often
fatal; flu viruses seem good at swapping DNA within host nuclei. If the
same person had both bird flu and H1N1, this could lead to something
really bad).
I recognize that it is both heartbreaking and potentially cruel to keep going into details of what exactly led to the commuter-plane crash in February that killed all 49 people aboard the airplane and one person on the ground. (Previously here.)
But this story in The Buffalo News, based on the previous week's Federal investigative hearings, clears up one question and raises others about the flight crew's performance.
The newly answered question is why the plane's airspeed had decreased so much that an automatic "stick-shaker" warning was triggered, indicating that an aerodynamic stall was imminent. Because the earliest reports mentioned that the accident took place in cold and cloudy conditions, I had assumed that ice on the wings and airframe was slowing the plane down.
But according to NTSB evidence, the effect of icing was minimal. Instead, the flight crew had deliberately or inadvertently slowed the plane themselves, by pulling the throttle back to nearly the "flight idle" position -- and leaving it there. Reduced power is normal when descending or deliberately slowing for an approach, but apparently the power was left too low for too long as the plane's speed decayed to a dangerously low level.
The extraordinary NTSB animation of the flight's last 2 minutes and 39 seconds dramatizes how it happened. At time 1:40, the plane begins slowing from its cruise speed of about 185 knots. By 2:04 -- with the autopilot holding a constant altitude and the power setting still low -- it had slowed all the way down to 140 knots. That is where the power should have come back in, because the plane had reached its proper approach speed and shouldn't safely go much slower. But the crew left the power at idle, and within four seconds the plane was slowing below 130 knots - at which point the "stick shaker" gave its warning and, tragically, the pilot reacted in exactly the wrong way. The animation shows how quickly this all could happen, and what it looks like when a plane goes into aerodynamic "stall."
The effect of the pilot's wrong reaction to the stall warning has been frequently discussed in the wake of these hearings. The inattention to approach speed is in a way more puzzling, since it was not an instantaneous, instinctive thing.
Lots of fascinating testimony has piled up, on the topic previously covered here. (Gaokao = nationwide university-admission exam in China.) Will parcel it out soon. Here is one from a reader who wishes not to be named. I have omitted only a few comments about people who have written before, using their real names. He starts with his bona fides:
I have been following the discussion on your blog, on the subject of
Chinese gaokao, with interest. Now, before I go on, I feel compelled to
state the facts: I had taken the SAT, and received 2400 on it (Yes, one of the less than few hundred a year ones with this
result. It is utterly insane in my opinion.) So, I do want to make it
clear that this isn't a loser's rant against meritocracy.
If you're thinking about coming to China from the US, you should know that visa rules have recently tightened up dramatically, as they did before the Olympics last year. Here's why.
Inside China, the detected flu cases have doubled, from one person to two, and the quarantine-and-tracking efforts are stepping up. Newspaper charts have shown the infected people's progress through the country and reported the efforts to find and quarantine everyone who was, say, riding in the same railroad car. A report I saw this morning said that most of the people who had been on the same Beijing-Jinan train with Victim #2 were still "at large."
[Reader R. Skinner points out the inventive West-to-East rendering of the Toronto->Vancouver-> Beijing flight.] Meanwhile, in mail from Chinese readers and in Chinese and English news sources I've seen more and more frequent mentions of the need to crack down on the "real" source of the problem: the United States. Both of the infected people had, after all, come on flights originating in the US (flights from Mexico having been cancelled for quite a while.) Eg this lead editorial in yesterday's Global Times, the new state run voice to the outside world.
I am at a computer for about 90 seconds until late tonight, but: the reported selection of Utah's Republican governor Jon Huntsman Jr as the Obama Administration's new ambassador to China is an interesting and surprising choice -- and at face value, a shrewd one. Huntsman is reportedly fluent in Mandarin, based on his time as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan; has an adopted Chinese daughter (plus another from India, in addition to biological children); is experienced in Asia, as a boy-ambassador to Singapore (at age 32) during the first Bush administration; and -- so I gather -- is on the modern-science as opposed to the flat-earth side of the debate about the environmental + climate issues that constitute the most important impending business between the US and China. More later, but on first impression a clever choice from American-interest point of view (completely apart from what it means for internal party politics in the US). Will also give the Chinese leadership something to think about: why the new Democratic president has appointed a rising Republican politician. Sign of bipartisan US views toward China? Etc?
Subject to revision if there is something important I don't know about Huntsman and his record!
May 15, 2009
Not sure exactly which Chinese people Paul Krugman met...
... before writing his column today in the NYT, but:
While his conclusion -- that China has to be part of global efforts to control carbon emissions -- is obviously correct and important, his premise -- that no one in China admits this -- does not square with my observation over these past three years.* As it happens, I spent this very day at a conference in Beijing where the first five presentations I heard were about emissions-reductions and sustainability in one specific domestic industry. (Also, I wrote in the magazine, a year ago, about Chinese people and organizations making similar efforts in a variety of other fields.)
If blunt-instrument outside pressure like this column makes it more likely that Chinese authorities will keep making progress, then as a pure matter of power-politics I say: fine. But my guess and observation is that it is just as likely to get their back up -- and encourage the ever-present victimization mentality that makes it less rather than more likely that Chinese authorities will behave "responsibly" on the international stage.
As I've written a million times (most recently here and here and generally here), arguably the most important thing that will happen on Barack Obama's watch is reaching an agreement with China -- or not -- on environmental and climate issues. We'll see what's the best means toward that end. _____ * Krugman says:
"Each time I raised the issue during my visit, I was met with outraged
declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of
fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar
constraints during its development; while China may be the world's
largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions
are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the
global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the
past carbon emissions of today's wealthy nations. And they're right...But that unfairness doesn't change the fact that letting China
match the West's past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it."
I've heard that Chinese response too many times to count. But it's mainly a throat-clearing prelude to talking-turkey discussions about what the country will and can do, and under what circumstances.
May 14, 2009
The CIA vs. Sen. Bob Graham: how to keep score at home
It's easy! If the CIA says one thing and former Sen. Graham says another, then the CIA is lying. Or, "in error," if you prefer.
(Background here and here, in which Graham says that some of the briefings in which he was allegedly filled in about waterboarding and related techniques never occurred. This matters, because the CIA's claims are part of the same argument that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress had known about and acquiesced to waterboarding all the way along.)
Part of the payoff of reaching age 72 and having spent 38 years in public office, as Graham has, is that people have had a chance to judge your reputation. Graham has a general reputation for honesty. In my eyes he has a specific reputation for very good judgment: he was one of a handful of Senators actually to read the full classified intelligence report about the "threats" posed by Saddam Hussein. On the basis of reading it, despite a career as a conservative/centrist Democrat, he voted against the war and fervently urged his colleagues to do the same. "Blood is going to be on your hands," he warned those who voted yes.
More relevant in this case, Graham also has a specific reputation for keeping detailed daily records of people he met and things they said. He's sometimes been mocked for this compulsive practice, but he's never been doubted about the completeness or accuracy of what he compiles. (In the fine print of those records would be an indication that I had interviewed him about Iraq war policy while he was in the Senate and recently spent time with him when he was on this side of the world.)
So if he says he never got the briefing, he didn't. And if the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf challenges him, they are stupid and incompetent as well as being untrustworthy. This doesn't prove that the accounts of briefing Pelosi are also inaccurate. But it shifts the burden of proof.
In defense of the 高考: Chinese, foreigners rally to its support!
Yesterday, two reader-arguments (here and here) that the gaokao or 高考, the standardized, nationwide college-admissions exam for students in China, plays a central role in the parts of Chinese education that people inside and outside the country dislike. (On that larger debate, here.)
Since then, a flood of correspondence from people generally offering a "Yes, but..." defense of the gaokao. Yes, it's not connected to "real" education. Yes, it makes students' lives hell. Yes... But: it has other advantages. Or, the obvious alternatives would be even worse -- especially given widespread Chinese fear that any more "subjective" system would certainly be rigged.
Here is a sampling. Judge for yourself -- and be convinced, at least, that allocating educational opportunity in a country with the scale and extremes of China is a complicated business.
1. From a reader in China:
I just read your posts on the nationwide college-admissions exam, the
gaokao. While I agreed that this system did focus too much on
memorizing books and exam preparation, it cannot be replaced for the
current sociaty. The advantage of this universal exam system is
relative fairness.
Yes, there are much unfairness in the exam system, i.e. Beijing and Shanghai got too many quotas for the colleges entries, minority groups got extra points, and some can get in based on their privilege and wealth. However, this system is the most fair and practical one compared to all other alternative systems. The American system including essays, reference letters, community service experiences...all too subjective and easy to manipulate in China. The privileged ones will benefit even more from American system and squeeze the poor talented ones out of the best schools.
I am all for a reformed education system to promote innovation. But the first thing the education should achieve is fairness: the best students can be selected to get the best education.
2) From Ella Shengru Zhou, a Chinese student who has just finished college in Beijing and will enroll in a Harvard graduate school this fall. She has worked with me as a interpreter and assistant.
Officially done with my college study today, I feel I just have to say
something about the discussion on China's education. I don't think gao
kao is the problem in China's education.
About the public hearings on the terrible crash in Buffalo three months ago, in which 50 people died:
- Authoritative wrapup of the situation here by Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, who has had well-informed stories on this topic from the beginning.
- This more-complete information supports the hypothesis Pasztor raised early on, as discussed previously here, that the cause of the crash was a basic and fatal failure of airmanship. That is, at a moment when saving the airplane would have required pushing the plane's nose down -- to regain airspeed and avert an aerodynamic stall -- the pilot apparently fought the autopilot, which was trying to push the nose down, and succeeded in pulling the nose up. This further reduced airspeed and, apparently, put the plane into a full stall, at which point it stopped flying and fell to the ground. If you're not 100% confident on the difference between aerodynamic "stalls" and normal stalls, see the note after the jump.*
- The complete transcript of over-the-airwaves transmissions and in-cockpit chatter, available in PDF from the WSJ site here, has the intrinsic horrific fascination of any document of this sort. You know you are observing the routine preoccupations and chit-chat of people who don't realize, as you do, that they are in their final moments of life. I don't share the total astonishment of some commentary about how much of the en route talk is "unprofessional" -- about career plans and family problems and the rest. Given how things turned out, any banter whatsoever now looks very bad. But none of it would have mattered save for the one horrible error in judgment and reaction. Had the pilot pushed forward on the stick rather than pulled back, in all likelihood it would have been another normal flight -- albeit in rough winter conditions -- and he and everyone else would now be going about their regular lives.
- Of course the big question is how much the loosey-goosey atmosphere in the cockpit had to do with that awful error. Miles O'Brien, a pilot and ex-correspondent for CNN, has his thoughts on the subject here.
- This is NOT crash related, but for a way to see what it is like to descend into a cloud bank on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) landing, check out this YouTube video taken from inside the cockpit of a Cirrus SR-22 in the last three minutes of its approach to runway 16R at Van Nuys airport. (The Cirrus is a four-seat single-engine plane of the type that, as it happens, Miles O'Brien flies and that I used to own and fly before coming to China.) The shot does not concentrate on the instrument panel during the descent, which is what the pilot is obsessively scanning when he can't see anything outside the window. Also,the propeller appears to "stop" or move jerkily at times, just because of a strobe effect with the camera. But the beginning and end of the clip conveys something most passengers never see: how it looks to enter the clouds, and then finally to see the runway -- in this case, underneath quite a low cloud ceiling. Really, watch this and you'll have an idea of the mantra drummed into your head a million times in instrument-flight training: that you've got to watch the instruments and trust the instruments, because there is no other guide to where you're headed.
(UPDATE: YouTube appears to be getting Firewalled again in China, as happens from time to time. I posted this link while using a VPN, as I do most of the time to get around the firewall. But after hearing complaints from others, I turned the VPN off and couldn't reach YouTube from Beijing. Oh well.)
- Speaking of runway 16R at Van Nuys Airport, here is the site for a movie called One Six Right, about that very runway and the activity that surrounds it. It's for sale on DVD rather than free download, but it is visually very rich, eye-opening, and fascinating to watch. It also talks about all the routine safety measures that are normally built into aviation, and which in this Buffalo case didn't prevent a huge tragedy.
From Joshua Davis, a foreigner teaching English in China, a further critique of the nationwide college-admissions exam, the gaokao, following this one earlier today by another foreign teacher. These are worth noting less for the novelty of the complaint (objecting to the effects of the test on Chinese education is like objecting to the effects of money on American politics) than for giving examples of how central and powerful the test's effects are. Mr. Davis writes:
Earlier this year, I decided that one of the things that stifles creativity in China more than anything else was high school. All Chinese students are required to take an all inclusive,
end-all, be-all exam at the end of their high school careers called the
Gao Kao.. If I can remember from the top of my head, this test includes
physics, biology, math, politics, Chinese, English, history, geography,
and maybe 3 or 4 others.
Because this is the only grade that actually matters in high school,
it's the sole determiner for students going on to college. There is no
college essay, interviews, etc. The only thing that matters is the gao
kao.
From Benjamin, a foreign teacher who recounts what his Chinese students don't like about their educational experience. The big focus here is the 高考, or gaokao, the nationwide college entrance exam that, as in some other Asian countries, is the make or break moment for many life prospects. Americans think their kids are stressed by the SAT. Hah!
The ripple effects of the gaokao (and its Japanese and Korean counterparts) are a familiar theme in complaints about Asian school systems. But after the jump, Benjamin gets his students to explain what a better Chinese school system would look like. He writes:
Having taught English here for the past year, mostly to recent high
school and college graduates (and a few primary and middle school
students), I have had countless opportunities to hear what Chinese
students have to say about their educational system.
They don't like it that much, and it goes beyond ideas about
critical thinking and creativity. They have said that they find it a
very stifling experience, filled with long days focused on boring books
and lectures with rote assignments to ensure that they've memorized the
essential facts (and pre-decided interpretations) and mastered the
essential skills.
Design aspects of software: maps as "thinking tools"
I don't talk about it as often as, say, small-plane aviation or, recently, Chinese education, or my doomed quest in Asia for good beer. But for many many years I have been fascinated by the relationship between "pure" acts of thinking - logic, memory, argument, expression, the process of making connections and finding distinctions; all of which rely fundamentally on words - and the various tools, cues, shortcuts, and stimuli other than words that can play an important part in what we think of as thought.
I'm not talking about entirely separate realms of expression - like music, which obviously conveys meaning beyond words, or the emotional or imaginative power of artwork, photography, illustrations, and other visual representations. Rather I mean systems specifically designed to help the plain old reasoning parts of the brain do their job better, by shoring up common weak spots or by giving more or better material for the "real" brain to work on. For an Atlantic article on this topic from 2007, go here. Things have changed since then, mainly for the better, in ways I'll go into in coming days.
Today's design theme: the potential of argument maps. These are something like sentence diagrams, without the drudge-work overtone. I was introduced to them through two programs from the Austhink company of Melbourne, Australia: bCisive, whose name is I think a pun on "decisive" and is a tool for decision-making, and Rationale, which is supposed to help students improve the logic of their presentations. Tim van Gelder, who teaches philosophy at the U of Melbourne and founded Austhink, weighed in here yesterday on the Chinese education, defending the proposition that critical thinking can be taught.
Here's one illustration of an argument map, a small portion of a complex map prepared by Austhink director Paul Monk (an author and former intelligence officer) to weigh arguments about who "really" killed JFK. Different kinds of maps, and reading about them, after the jump. (His argument map on the proposition "The war on Iraq was illegal" is here.)
Expats in China: NOT being called in for health checks (updated)
Yesterday I posted a report from a teacher in Hangzhou who, along with other foreigners on the staff, was being called in for special health checks as part of anti-flu precautions. The teacher wondered whether this was a Hangzhou localism or a wider policy.
Since then I have received no reports of special health checks for foreigners, and many comments to the effect that "all is routine here." So it appears to be a one-city or even one-school policy. Worth noting.
Update: Have heard from one teacher in Suzhou about health checks there too (not far from Hangzhou, so maybe....) and an expat in Beijing about getting temperature checked on the way into his apartment building gym. Adding: "(lucky they didn't take it one the way out. Would have been quarantined for sure. Or perhaps shipped out to a morgue)."
May 12
News and events in China today are dominated by commemorations of the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008.
In that spirit, here is a link to a video released today by Afterquake, a project by Abigail Washburn and Dave Liang, American musicians living in China, to document and assist the recovery effort.
I think most people will find the video affecting but not depressing. It certainly makes clear why this event so dominated the country's consciousness last year. The only thing the post-earthquake scenes don't convey is how vast the devastated area was. You could drive for hours, far away from the epicenter, and still see crushed buildings and shaken-down mountains like those depicted here.
Further links: Sichuan Quake Relief charity Additional site on Vimeo for English version of video Sites for Chinese version of video on Tudou and Youku SexyBeijing.TV, whose Luke Mines shot and edited the video
May 11, 2009
Here it comes: more on Chinese & non-Chinese education!
From a Chinese person teaching in America; then an American teaching somewhere else; and finally the man who kicked the whole thing off, Randy Pollock himself. (Previously here.)
First, from a Chinese reader:
I had a pretty low opinion on Chinese education when I was in China. Certain subjects such as history and Marxist philosophy are just crammed in without any critical discussion. But when I came to US and worked as TA for a top state university, I changed my mind a bit. Almost none of my students (first-year economics) are interested in understanding the materials critically. Most of them are just looking for a good grade. Also the math preparation some of my students received are so inadequate, I doubt they would be able to graduate from high school in China, not mentioning entering a top university. My classmate told me a story that one of his student could not do 7*7 by hand. From what I read in newspapers about quality of inner city schools in US, the situation may be even worse than I see. So the conspiracy theory one of your reader talked about that the poor quality of rural area schools is set on purpose by Chinese government to keep people ignorant is far-fetched. Compared with some of the public schools in US where so much resource are spent with so few results, I think the education system in China is not so bad.
I don't think Nobel Prize is a valid measure to compare different education systems. Most of the best scientific talents in China are attracted to US, studying and working here. This alone can make any comparison meaningless. Also scientific research in US was weak till 20th century. I remember reading Schumpeter's discussion about why there were so few first-rate American economists till very late in the 19th century, his explanation was that the best talents in US were attracted to entrepreneurial adventures in a fast growing economy. Similar things may be happening in China right now.
Next, from an American expat:
I've been reading your series on Chinese education because it so greatly resembles my daily life as an English teacher. The thing is, I don't teach in China, I teach in a Eastern European country.
For expats in China: being called for health checks?
A foreign teacher in Hangzhou writes with a question:
I was informed this past Friday by my school's Foreign Affairs Dept. that we should report our "health status" by 3 pm daily. Only the foreign teachers have been asked to report their health (whatever that means, we are still not really sure) according to my Chinese colleagues. I was wondering if you had A. heard any other reports of such behavior and B. Does this indicate that the virus is in Hangzhou? (It doesn't seem likely if Chinese teachers aren't also being "checked") Or is this just another example of over-response (since none of us have been out of the country in over a month)?
I have not heard of or experienced anything like this, and my default explanation for regional variations is that it's a great big country with lots of different things going on. But if anyone has experienced something similar, let me know and I'll collate results. Meanwhile, stay healthy!
If you're looking for something new to worry about...[IMPROVED!!]
... how about the prospect that the GPS system will be the next part of America's neglected infrastructure to be in trouble, with ripple effects on modern commercial life?
It is impossible to overstate the importance of GPS to the worldwide modern economy. Trivial recent example: the other night in Beijing, my wife and I were lost getting to an address. Didn't see street signs around, although streets in big Chinese cities are usually very well marked. We pulled up the Google Map function on my Blackberry, and it showed us (via the "my location" function) that the street we were looking for was the one we just passed rather than the one still ahead. [This cut is an important improvement to the post! On the reasons for this improvement, see below*] Multiply this a million-fold each day in operations of the world's navigation and transportation functions, and you see how economic life is being built on GPS almost in the way it has been built on electricity over the last hundred years. The world's airlines, to choose one obvious case, would be in huge trouble without reliable GPS.
And so it is with heavy heart that we learn about a new Government Accountability Office study (here in PDF), via Michael Cooney's story in NetworkWorld, saying that the U.S. Air Force, which runs the GPS satellites, has not managed to get new "IIF"-model satellites ready in time to replace the ones that are wearing out.
For years, other countries have said they needed their own alternative to the GPS system, precisely because it was run by the U.S. military and, in times of crisis, could be used as a strategic tool. Simplest version of the fear: that in an emergency the US could block or encode signals so that only its own receivers could interpret them, meaning the American military would know where it was going and no one else would. You can get the idea from the illustration below, included in the GAO report, showing sample "aviation" and "ground navigation" uses for GPS.
There's a long history on this score, mainly involving the European
Galileo project, plus Russian and Chinese efforts; plus the Pentagon's
gradual willingness to make high-precision signals available to the
world generally, rather than deliberately fuzzing the open-use civilian version. All for
another time; I invite you to look it up for yourself.
But the nightmare scenario no one thought to
worry about was that the US-run system would start to crumble and wear
out. Arrrgghh! _____ * IMPROVEMENT!!!: Let me quickly shift from Arrrggghh to OOOOOPSSS! Let's entirely forget that struck-out part above, in light of this item from TelecomAsia.net that a technically sophisticated friend just sent me.
Ummm, I don't know what I could have been thinking. Of course my Blackberry couldn't do anything like that....
May 10, 2009
While I'm at it, a Chinese and an American view on Chinese education
Recently we've had Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives on Chinese schools (background here). For balance, a Chinese and a non-Chinese view in the same post!
Reasons I'm offering such long first-hand testimony: (1) no one has to read it! (2) many things about life in China -- and yes, life in other places -- are conveyed not in theoretical summaries but in accumulations of day by day experiences, like those recounted here. Several more still in the queue. Also, bear in mind that the foreigners writing in are ones who generally came to Chinese schools to "do something good." They're not here for the big bucks or the easy life but because they thought it would be valuable as well as interesting to be part of China's development at this stage.
First, from a foreigner now teaching in China:
The articles that you have featured are focused largely on University
students in China. I teach English in the public middle schools (what
we call grades 6, 7, and 8). The problems in Chinese education show in
the University students, but to fix them you need to look at what's
happening with students who are much younger.
First, from reader Terry Foecke. After the jump, from a non-Chinese person currently teaching in a Chinese school who doesn't want his (or her) name to be used. I'm not planning to run every letter that comes in -- lots have -- but these are very representative of views from non-Chinese people working inside Chinese schools or companies and valuable in that way. They also resonate with Randy Pollock's LA Times op-ed about his business students.
Foecke writes:
My connection with these effects is through working with second- and third-tier Chinese suppliers to US-based companies. My job was to improve the production process (mostly electroplating, with some heat treating and stamping/machining) enough to assure consistent results.
After a personal run-in period, I finally got it through my head that even my own (Chinese) engineers were extremely reluctant to deliver bad news. Furthermore, their definition of "bad news" was far broader than I could have imagined. This leads to a lively chase when Step 1 is "Identify Problem(s).
We did our best work when we had a late night and stopped for their kind of Chinese meal.
From Jiang Qian, an overseas Chinese physicist trained at Harvard, about the "is Chinese education any good?" theme introduced here and here. The LA Times article, by Randy Pollock, that started this discussion talked consistently about "critical and creative" thinking as being the weak spots of the Chinese system; Jiang Qian's criticism is mostly about the "critical" part. Still an interesting complement. More on the way.
I do not doubt that some reform in the educational system de-emphasizing rote learning would be helpful, nor do I deny that there are anxieties among Chinese educators in promoting "creativity" or "critical thinking."
But just to point to the other side of the story, I would like to suggest that it is not clear whether "liberal art", or anything being taught in school, can improve "critical thinking". In fact, as [an attached article] points out, "critical thinking" is not a skill like reading or carpentry that can be taught, but rather something attached to a specific set of knowledge. And the American schools' efforts to actively promote "critical thinking" have at best a mixed track record.
Given the torments that await those who try to bring cheese into China (see here, here, here, and here), it is with mixed emotions that I see the banner ad now running on many parts of the Atlantic's site, including mine.
Elements of the emotional mix: Honor, in being associated with such fine cheese! Tantalized despair, in knowing it's out of my own reach. Gratitude, in seeing such a precise advertiser/ medium matchup. And exhortation, that all of you who are able to do so go out and buy Comte Cheese. I'd be doing it if I could...
Nonfiction writing class: how it should be done
Suppose you were writing about the financial-policy mistakes that helped bring on the Great Depression. And you wanted to dramatize the damage done by adherence to the gold standard, which meant that the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, etc could issue only as much money as they happened to have gold in their vaults.
As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way -- or you could write this:
"Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy -- a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton -- that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to 'earmarking' the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abernon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, 'This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.' "
This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the "small rubber tires" detail and mot juste "trundling" term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.
Policy announcement: reader mail
For me, 49% of the point in having an online site is the scrapbook/diarist function: having a place to note developments, oddities, events I have come across that I won't put to "real" journalistic use. This is part of the way we all try to make sense of our progress through time.
51% of the payoff is hearing from other people about related thoughts, incidents, and phenomena they have come across. It's like having a conversation with people you hadn't known before but who turn out to have common interests and experiences.
So I appreciate hearing from readers (see the "email JF" button at the right). I try to answer but ... no offense if I don't.
Here is the policy announcement: to save myself the back and forth of asking permission to quote this or that, I will assume that material anyone sends me IS quotable, unless you say otherwise. And, I will assume that I should NOT use your real name with the quote, unless you say "feel free to use my name." That is a safer default assumption, if I make a mistake, than the opposite one would be.
So, again: please do write; I'll try to answer; and I'll consider this all "on the record" unless you say otherwise, but not attributable by name unless you explicitly say it is.
May 8, 2009
Clash of the titans: Harvard v. China
Several replies queued up to the post yesterday about problems with Chinese education. Leading off: Jerome Doolittle of the Bad Attitudes site -- a novelist, a former writing instructor at Harvard, and long ago my colleague on the Jimmy Carter speechwriting staff. Here is his response to Randy Pollock's observation that when he asked his class in China to brainstorm about a problem, they all answered the same way:
Some years ago I assigned my class of Harvard freshman a paper describing the college they would create if they had unlimited money. I did my best to convince them to take a zero-based budgeting approach: to reinvent the whole notion of "college" from the ground up. Of the 30 papers I got back, 29 described something that looked very much like Harvard, except a little farther out of town. The single exception came from an Alabama girl whose paper began, "My idea of the perfect college would be to spend four years in bed with Aldous Huxley."
So I had at least one live one, which is more than Randy Pollock had. But not by much. The Harvard admissions office seems to be just about as effective as its Chinese counterparts at screening out the undesirably creative.
I think Doolittle is missing a chance as a successful lecturer on the university circuit here in China. He could draw big crowds on the theme of "Catching up with Harvard: Almost there!" To wax earnest for a moment, it's worth being clear that the complaint by Pollock and others concerns the educational system, as opposed to the students themselves. As is well known around the world, many of them flourish when they get a chance someplace else. More to come.
Sugar Sync
I've mentioned several times before (like here and here) that SugarSync has become one of the programs I would hate to do without. Others, for reasons explained in those previous posts: VMWare Fusion and Google's Calendar Sync tools for Outlook and Blackberry.
SugarSync has just come out with a free edition (with limited storage), and an easier-to-use graphic interface, with example below:
The "what it's for" description of the program is: it lets you work on files on a variety of computers and never have to worry about copying them from one to another when you travel or work someplace else. Like your own personal "cloud" computing. Easily crosses the Mac/PC membrane. In the process, keeps an online up-to-date backup of your files. Only thing it really is stumped by: Outlook .PST files.
Similarly on the tech theme: I've been using the latest Firefox beta, 3.5b4, in both Mac and PC versions over the last week, without a single hang or crash. If you're having instability problems (as I did) with the latest release version, 3.0.10, consider the beta. It is here.
Last month Adam Minter, of the wonderful Shanghai Scrap site, reported for the Atlantic.com about the ongoing follies surrounding the U.S. exhibit at the Shanghai Expo 2010 (aka World's Fair) that starts less than a year from now. Short version of the story: this is sizing up as a big embarrassment for the United States.
He is back today with an update on the strange process that is leading to the loss of face. Worth checking out -- and figuring out how to correct, soon.
Left, Haibao Classic, symbol of Expo 2010. Right, American Haibao, who due to U.S. fumbling may tragically not have a chance to appear at the Expo.
FAQ: Does Haibao look like Gumby? Though with a different color, and a cowlick on the opposite side? A: Yes, so maybe there's a kind of residual US presence or influence even if the US Pavilion doesn't get built.
UPDATE: Check out the comments thread on Adam Minter's post, especially #s 9 and 10. In brief, Minter outed someone boosting one of the participants -- from an IP address registered to the US State Department.
May 7, 2009
Three related articles about education and values in China
My internet circumstances at the moment (on the road, Shandong province) don't permit more than a list of three links, but: Anyone who is interested in the implications of China's educational system for China's future and for the rest of the world should read these three articles, ideally in one sitting.
First, "China's Boxed Itself In," an op-ed by Randy Pollock two days ago in the Los Angeles Times.
Then, "Cry for Freedom," a nearly full-page illustrated feature by Gong Yidong in China Daily this morning.
American press reports about Chinese education tend to have a 70/30 split. The 70% is: Oh my, China is producing a billion engineers a year! They are sure to take over the world! Woe is us. Why can't we learn from them? The 30% is: Chinese education is terrible and it means that Chinese organizations will never truly "innovate." Woe is them.
Obviously both are oversimplifications, but read these articles and consider which is a grosser distortion of the truth. More to say later. Also bear in mind (as a reminder for the zillionth time) that China Daily is the state controlled voice to the outside world, and two long, related articles with the same somewhat edgy theme don't appear on the same day by accident.
Last crop of political-art nominees
Starting with a late favorite in the polling, Rembrandt's The Night Watch (two other Rembrandts among previous nominees, here). The main resonance is of course between the central figure in one scene and his counterpart in the other.
The chart below, from David Wolf's Silicon Hutong site, is not meant to be taken in 100% straight-faced earnest -- I think. It's a flow chart for deciding whether to buy a book as a new hard cover, a used hard cover, or a Kindle-style ebook, including the complication that Wolf is based Beijing and can find only so much in the local shops. (I say: choose whatever form you want, but just buy the damned book!!!)
It's connected to a more earnest but quite interesting discussion by Wolf of the role of physical books in a personal library, even when ebooks are available. And I'll use it as an intro to the next running meta-theme here: various aspects of design.
I realize that many of the leads and items I am interested in discussing and thinking about -- once the art course is over and the flu has passed and I'm caught up with, ahem, my "real" work -- really concern design in several aspects.
Design of cities, including the ones springing up all over China, as hinted at in this introductory Beijing-vs-Shanghai post several weeks back.
Design of "tools for thinking," which generally includes software and which I find particularly provocative and rich in the emerging (for me) intersection of straight text and graphics. I don't mean photo illustrations; I mean "mapping" and "visualization" programs of several sorts that I, as a pure-text guy from way back, find increasingly useful.
Design of hardware for thinking and learning, not excluding the familiar Kindle and the even more familiar PC and Mac.
Design of the working environment, the reduce the threat posed by the Number One Killer of Modern-day Thought, non-stop distraction.
More on all of that later. This is fair warning. Now, real work again for a while.
Paradise Beijing, late spring edition (updated)
Looking north from Jianguomen intersection, today at noon. Air not that great, but trees in full leaf and a strong, warm wind on the face. Feels good to be outside.
Uh-oh! On coming back home, I find signs of trouble in paradise. The real-time metering of the most dangerous form of small-particulate pollution, here, has a result I'd rather not see. Maybe the moral is the same as in an earlier tale of destruction of Paradise. There are some questions better not asked. The warm wind still feels good to me.UPDATE!!! on re-reading the fine print, the maxed-out code for the air-quality reading indicates "electric fault" with the meter. Never mind! I'll start re-enjoying the day. [Alarming bogus chart now removed]
May 5, 2009
One more on China, India, and the Western media
In two previous posts, here and here, overseas Chinese readers have presented very different views on whether Western press outlets were ganging up against China, and whether India was by comparison getting a free ride.
As a worthy complement to these arguments, an email from reader Shreeharsh Kelkar, giving an overseas Indian perspective:
I was pleasantly surprised to read the email you published from an
overseas Chinese citizen who thinks the western media treats China
unfairly and that he would like to see China being treated the way
India gets treated. As an Indian who lives in the US, I have many many
Indian friends who complain that the media here only talks about the
poverty in India, that they emphasize only what's wrong with the
country and not what's going right with it, that they talk only of the
poor and not of the middle class. Etc, etc.
I think both these complaints -- the Chinese and the Indian -- are, in some sense, two sides of the same coin.
Embarrasingly literal-minded note on "First they came for..."
A peril of today's interconnected world is that people from widely varying language backgrounds can read the same
material and come to widely different conclusions, based largely on
command of the language itself. This is especially true right now of
English, which hundreds of millions of people use as their native
tongue -- and hundreds of millions more can understand as the dominant language of international business and media, but naturally with different levels of comprehension and subtlety.
In a way this is like the problem I've recently described for politicians, who simultaneously address an internal and an external audience. A U.S. or British leader needs to assure the local citizens that he or she is defending their interests -- without doing so in a way that will offend the rest of the world. It's hard.
This is on my mind because of a post earlier today about quarantine for Canadian students in China, on the basis of nationality rather than exposure to disease, following similar handling of Mexican citizens. The post was called, "First they came for the Mexicans. Then, the Canadians...."
The "internal" audience for this post would generally recognize the title as a joke. Or at least a joking allusion. That audience -- of native speakers of English, especially native speakers of American English, especially native speakers of American English who had paid attention to politics and political sloganeering -- would know how often the "First they came for..." trope is used as the conclusion of any speech about excessive government control. If you're not already 100% familiar with it, start here. If, on the other hand, you've listened to (especially) American political speeches, you have heard this a million times, often in hyperbolic ways -- including the way I was using it, ironically, here.
But not every reader is a native speaker of English or familiar with Western political rhetoric. So I have heard from a number of people who took offense at the idea that I was describing super-seriously a systematic manhunt for various national groups. Sigh. I have dealt with enough languages over the years to be humble about the challenges of operating outside one's native language terrain (and to recognize the convenience of being able to write to an international audience in my native language). But I don't know the way out of it. This magazine, in print and on line, is deliberately aimed at high-end readers of English who will understand allusions and tricks of language. We can't water that down, or take on the lead-weight of stage direction footnotes -- "I'm being ironic here!" -- on parts that some people might misread. But the multiplicity of audiences is worth bearing in mind. And I try to.
So apologies to any who took offense. Except to those who wrote huffily about what my words "meant," when that was the very thing they didn't really understand.
More political artwork
We're nearing the end here. Four more proposed Old Master precursors for the memorable Obama group portrait. Previous candidates here. Probably one more crop to come, then the exciting lessons of our brief look at art.
First, Governors of the Wine Merchants Guild, by Ferdinand Bol. I won't pretend that this was the Old Master I was thinking of, since I'd not aware of having seen it before. But still:
Next, a detail from Raphael's School of Athens, featuring the raised-finger gesture we see from Obama.
After the jump, two more with the raised-finger motif.
First they came for the Mexicans. Then, the Canadians...
I awake* to find numerous dispatches from Canadian and Canandian-friendly sources pointing out that a group of students from Canada has been placed in quarantine in China strictly because of their nationality -- not because they've come from flu-infected areas or fit any other rational criterion for quarantine. This is happening in the northeastern** city of Changchun, a regional industrial hub with a population about the size of New York's. According to the CBC account,
Chinese officials in Changchun pulled the group aside after their
plane landed in the northeastern city on Saturday, according to Martin
Deslauriers, a Quebecer who is part of the language exchange group.
An official came on board and asked all the Canadian passengers to present themselves, Deslauriers said. Health officials then took them to a room at the airport to have
their temperatures taken, he said. No one in his group had a fever, but
they were still informed they would be placed in quarantine, he said.
And there they'll be for seven days. The story suggested that some students were disgruntled but others were considering it as much an adventure as an ordeal.
Policy point: At one level, this is as arbitrary as the more widespread quarantining of Mexican passport holders, discussed in many posts here -- and more obviously nutty. Canadians? Is it because they come from someplace close to Mexico? If so, isn't there some other big country right in between those two? What about all its citizens? Therefore, by this train of reasoning, the case shows the unprincipled power of the Chinese state etc.
But I am more struck by the additional element of illustrating how uneven, inexplicable, and anything-but-thorough the application of that power can be. For one thing, this appears to be policy free-lancing on the part of the local authorities. The story quoted its student interviewee thus: "Deslauriers said the students have been told by officials that the
quarantine is a provincial measure and not part of a national plan by
the Chinese government."
And, it's a "quarantine" that appears to be in the tradition of "quarantine theater," like the "security theater" so familiar at airports around the world. The students have to stay inside the hotel -- but apparently the staff that serves them comes and goes normally! Now, if any of those staff members held a Canadian passport... I hope everyone keeps feeling fine.
___ * Although there is a coals-to-Newcastle superfluity in linking to anything on Andrew Sullivan's site, the video he posted today exactly depicts how every day of my life begins. This is a lot of the reason I have avoided holding "normal" jobs. ** China's northeastern region -- known in Chinese as 东北, or "EastNorth" -- is the part of the country that first came under Japanese control in the 1930s when it was known to the outside world as Manchuria. Within China today, Manchuria is not an in-favor term; 东北 is the way to go.
More on the Western media and "beating up" on China
Provoked in part by China's reaction to the world flu threat, a rich flow of responses about the country's sensitivity to outside criticism, its responsibilities as a major world power, the current state of its public morals, and the rest. In response to this recent message asking for greater Western "understanding" of China and saying that outsiders go much easier on Indian than on China, an eloquent reply from Xiaoxiao Huang:
I am also an overseas Chinese, but I don't share the sentiment the
Chinese reader has shown in his two messages to you. I'd like to share
with you my opinion of his take on the role of the media, and China's
human rights issue.
I am always suspicious of the whole concept of a united "Western Media"
against China as if Fox News, Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung were
controlled by a multi-national Central Propaganda Department. As a
Communications major, my understanding of the news media is that they
should truthfully report and inform to the best of their knowledge. It
is not the job of the Western media (or media of any origin) to
"encourage" and babysit a foreign country. Maybe it's time that the
Chinese try getting used to the fact that every Western country is
"unique" as well, some of them believe in things that we do not
believe, and it's OK.
More on the F-22, the F-35, and big expensive airplanes
The Atlantic has been your one-stop site for all aspects of the "F-22 question" -- the decision on whether to buy more copies of the Air Force's latest fighter plane. Mark Bowden's article in the magazine here; various perspective from me here, here, and here; SecDef Robert Gates's rationale in calling off purchases discussed here and here.
Apart from the F-22, the other fighter in gestation over the past decade has been the "Joint Strike Fighter," known as the F-35, shown here in vertical take-off mode for use by the Marine Corps. (Photo via Discovery channel). It is also designed to take off and land "normally," from a runway, for the Air Force version, and a from an aircraft carrier deck for the Navy's.
The case for this airplane (discussed at length in this article back in 2002) was that it would avoid the cost and complexity problems that plagued the F-22. The case against it, as presented in a recent document by the legendary military analyst and designer Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler of America's Defense Meltdown, is that it too has turned into an example of those very same disorders. Their article about the two airplanes, "What 'Sweeping Reforms' in DOD?", takes a skeptical view of Sec. Gates's current procurement reforms and is available here. Worth reading not just about these aircraft but for the overall approach to defense spending.
How it's playing here
There's no mention in the English-language story (from state-controlled China Daily) of Mexicans being placed in quarantine just because they're Mexican, as in today's WSJ story and previously here.
As best I make out the Chinese language People's Daily version, it has a lot more details about the quarantine but nothing (that I saw) on the Mexican-citizen front. The ChinaSMACK blog, which translates fascinating and sometimes hair-raising posts from Chinese language blogs, has a lot of Chinese people expressing support for a very tough line.
The
China Daily special coverage does include a quote from a Chinese citizen saying "no
one is moaning about being quarantined, everyone knows it is
necessary." It also says that the relief flight to take stranded
Chinese citizens back home from Mexico, announced yesterday, has been
cancelled because of trouble reaching "landing agreements" with Mexican
airport authorities. I wonder why that could be.
May 3, 2009
WSJ on detention of Mexicans in Beijing
Andrew Browne, the WSJ's Beijing bureau chief, has a powerful story just now with names and details of Mexicans being detained and quarantined in China because they are Mexican, not because they've necessarily been in Mexico recently or exposed to flu patients. He has names, details, and quotes about cases like those I mentioned on Saturday:
Gustavo Carrillo, a 36-year-old manager of a Mexican technology
company in China who lives in Beijing, was taken off his Continental
Airlines plane Saturday and rushed into quarantine at a Beijing hotel.
He had traveled to the U.S. from China on a business trip and hadn't
visited Mexico.
Mr. Carrillo said health officials took the temperatures of other
passengers after the plane landed, but didn't check his after they saw
his Mexican passport. Instead, they led him down the aisle past gawking
passengers. "It was embarrassing and humiliating," he said.
And:
According to accounts from Mexicans in the hotel, Mexican travelers
arriving on various flights from Mexico and the U.S. were singled out
by health officials who boarded the aircraft wearing white protective
suits, masks and rubber gloves. They led away Mexican passport holders.
Several travelers said Chinese television camera crews surprised them
at the doors of their aircraft as they emerged. They said the filming
continued through the windows of an isolation ward at the Beijing Ditan
infectious diseases hospital.
"We felt like we were in a zoo," said Angel Yamil Silum, a
27-year-old business student, who arrived in Beijing with his
girlfriend Saturday en route to Bangkok for a holiday, and ended up at
Ditan and then the Guo Men Hotel.
Again, China has every reason to be careful about this disease, given the memory of SARS. I've assumed this was a panicky overreaction by local officials, which would be corrected once calmer heads prevailed. The calmer-heads stage does not seem to have started yet.
More on public health, PR, and China's role in the world
From a reader with a Chinese surname, in response to my suggestion that Chinese officials stick to scientific data, rather than claims about national dignity, when discussing public health issues like the current flu situation:
"Western journalists are accustomed to the shrewd answers from their own politicians facing offensive/aggressive questions. It's well known that they, the western politicians, are afraid of negative reports for their own political skins. Therefore you may also assume that Chinese officials should behave the same way, if they ever want to be accepted by the western world.
"Unfortunately, I have to say that three years stationing in China has not made you thinking like a Chinese. For most Chinese officials, their reaction toward negative western media reports is mostly about domestic consumption. They have to be resolute and principled when it comes to rebutting the 'western defamations' driven by 'ulterior motives'. It's not only about national pride, but has more to do with not being perceived by Chinese people as weak and not being able to stand up to hostile westerners. This may help you better understand why nationalism is so useful for communist government."
This rings true, and reinforces a point I made several months ago about why the voices of official China -- the government and its spokesmen -- were often so inept in presenting their case to the outside world, even though many individual Chinese people could be quite sophisticated and skillful. As this reader suggests, the root cause is that the system here is mainly inward-looking.
The complications of addressing both internal and external audiences is hardly unique to China. American politics provides examples of this every day. Same with Japan, where bone-headed politicians often play to domestic right-wingers by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, not knowing or caring that this drives people crazy here in China.
But at the moment, the internal/external problem is particularly acute for China, because its scale and foreign interactions are so great and its officials' awareness of how things sound to foreign ears seems so limited. For instance, I don't even think they would recognize the irony of hearing that their current detention of Mexican passport holders, whether they have been to Mexico recently or not, might "hurt the feelings of the Mexican people."
UPDATE: After the jump, a further note just received from the same reader ______
I'm going to start moving through these more briskly now. A pattern is emerging in the elements that make the Obama group portrait seem Old Masterish. Previously here. For now, three from Frans Hals. First, Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse -- as with The Anatomy Lesson, thematically strangely appropriate for the Chrysler-bankruptcy team.
If all but six people were removed from the Obama portrait, leaving only (from left) Geithner, Summers, Obama, Browner, Rattner, and Bernstein, they would match the positions and angles of the six Regents surprisingly well.* Though Carol Browner probably wouldn't be wild about the one matched with her.
Next, Officers and Sergeants of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard
And, the famous Meagre Company, apparently so named because the figures are all thin. On this basis, the Obama group portrait should be called Somber Company.
More coming. __ * Geithner, Summers, and Obama you know. The woman is Carol Browner; Steve Rattner is behind her with round glasses; Jared Bernstein is just in front of him with gray hair.
Latest touch in Chinese-Mexican relations
Lots of local news here about the plight of Chinese nationals who were left stranded in Mexico when China Eastern airlines cancelled its direct Mexico-China flights. Fortunately for them, a special China Southern Airlines (CSA) flight will be in the air within hours, to rescue them and bring them home! English version of the Xinhua story here.
One Boeing 777-200 plane of CSA will leave Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, at 9 p.m. Sunday for Los Angeles before flying to Mexico to repatriate 120 or so passengers there, said a CSA spokesman....It is expected these group of passengers will be in the Pudong Airport in Shanghai at 11 a.m. Tuesday.
Somehow the stories don't mention whether these repatriated travelers, who after all have been in Mexico itself, will taken straight into quarantine when they return, alongside people being held for observation because they have Mexican passports. Or, whether an Aeromexico evacuation flight might be arranged for those stranded Mexicans.
Mexican government protests detentions in China
Via Reuters, this official protest about the detentions in mainland China (as mentioned here last night) and the sealing off of hundreds of people in a hotel in Hong Kong.
The apparent waning of worldwide panic about the virus's lethality and ease of transmission probably means that we'll see fewer stories about over-reaction as the days go on. As always, it is instructive to see the way governments and institutions react in time of stress.
May 2, 2009
News as art, continued
Back to the "what does this scene remind me of?" category, previously here, while still looking into further flu news in China. Many nominations for this painting, usually with apologies for the larger Messianic implications:
After the jump, for greater clarity of detail, an early non-Leonardo copy of the painting as it once may have looked. Plus another version not by Leonardo. More to come, with eventual wrap-up thanks to all contributors.
Flu news from China: Mexican citizens being detained
This is developing news here in Beijing about treatment of those who hold Mexican passports. It is based on first-hand reports from people I trust:
- A family of tourists -- two parents; a son age 8; and daughters ages 6 and 4 -- were staying in a five-star Beijing hotel. Like all foreigners in China, they had presented their passports for inspection on arrival. Their passports were from Mexico. At 4 am last night they heard a pounding on the door. Public-security officials asked them to come to the hospital for a few quick tests. In fact they were taken to a hospital and not allowed to leave. They received no drugs or treatment of any sort and were placed in a room where the beds and sheets still bore the marks of the previous ill and bleeding patients. They managed to contact Mexican officials by phone -- which was the first the Mexican government had heard of their situation. There is no indication that they are sick. They were assured that they would be treated as well as "any Chinese citizen." (!) This evening, another family of three has been taken from a hotel because they are Mexican.
- As international flights arrive in Beijing, from any destination, passengers are being asked to show their passports before the plane comes to the terminal. Those with Mexican passports are not allowed to enter the city. They have been taken to a hotel for quarantine and are still there. Some 40 to 50 people are now being detained in this way. To be clear, this is not being applied to people who've recently been to Mexico, or who are showing signs of disease, or who have been exposed in some other way. It has been purely a matter of whether they are Mexican citizens.
- A Mexican official in Guangzhou booked a round trip flight to Cambodia. On arriving back from Cambodia (ie, a million miles away from Mexico), he too has been detained, on the basis of his passport.
You can understand why China is nervous, given its dense urban populations and its experience with SARS. You can understand quarantines based on recent presence in a diseased area or possible exposure to diseased people. You can comprehend why direct flights between Mexico and China have for now been called off.
But there is no decent reason for quarantine and detention based solely on nationality. To the best of my information, this blanket quarantine of Mexican citizens is not being applied anyplace else on earth. Let's hope this is a panicky mistake by Chinese and Beijing-area officials and will soon be reversed. It is also worth recognizing the overall aplomb and openness that the Mexican government has been showing in handling the flu outbreak.
Still on the fence about those flying lessons?
Here's the news that will make it all worthwhile! According to Mary Grady of AVweb, the easiest (legal) way for Americans to get to Cuba is, under new rules, to fly their own little planes there. Story here.
This has been theoretically possible for a long time, and in 2005, just before coming to China, I spent weeks trying to satisfy the Cuban and U.S. paperwork and preclearance requirements for flying a Cirrus SR-20 to Havana on a Christmas trip. I finally ran out of patience and time. But now...
Grady's podcast interview with the CEO of the company organizing the trips is here; that company's site is here. And for lessons there are little airports all over the place in the US. I'd be signing up for the trip if I were on that side of the world. Just trying to be constructive here.
Another nominee from Rembrandt...
...in the "art prefigures" life category, previously here and here. The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Some obvious differences in composition. But some nice similarities. In the role of the instructive Prof. Tulp we have the instructive Pres. Obama. In the role of the cadaver, we have the Chrysler Corporation, though out of view. (Yes, yes, I have owned several Chrysler cars and know it will be stronger than ever after the restructuring, etc.) More to come.
May 1, 2009
Browser update
Reports keep trickling in of people having crashes with the latest official release of Firefox, as first mentioned here. I have no way of knowing whether this is signal or noise -- an actual trend, or merely random blips among FF's millions of users.
I do know that the latest Firefox beta, 3.5b4, has been running smoothly around the clock, at least for me. Available here. And as previously indicated, I will indeed try Opera when I get some "spare" time.
FWIW, this sociology of browsers from Marty Manley:
Am testing a site these days, so I keep 3 browsers open: IE,
FF 3.0.1 and Chrome. In two days, I have had four hard FF crashes -- unheard
of. FF also lost track of all saved passwords, although it recovered (maybe
thanks to Xmarks).
BTW, Chrome seems ever stronger. If this were college, IE would be the entitled
rich kid who acts smart, but isn't, Firefox the impressive high achiever who is
actually a bit lazy and dilettantish, and Chrome the kid who works nights to
pay bills, is rock solid, and is steadily getting stronger and stronger.
Or, if you prefer, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. As to Opera --
the garden variety A student of sound quality but without a compelling or
differentiating architecture -- I think she makes a fine Secretary of State.
The Syndics of Pennsylvania Avenue
The nominees are coming in for the Fine Arts precursor to yesterday's news photo of the Obama auto-industry task force, as explained here, with several plausible contenders. First up: Rembrandt, with Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild, 1662. More nominees on their way. And in the meantime, on the general phenomenon of Fine Arts precursors to current images, see Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, with excerpt here.
I like some of the matchups of Tim Geithner and Gary Locke with their Amsterdam counterparts. Also, a fact worth mentioning to viewers of the second picture: surprising as it might seem given this picture, Lawrence Summers is actually quite a good athlete. The more I look at this picture, the richer it is.
