I think this is it for a while, in three extensive sub-parts! Background here.
1) Today the Columbia Journalism Review published part 2 of its interview with Howard French; first part was here and was discussed here. It is long and convincing, but here is the heart of its criticism of the dominant "Obama was a wimp" coverage. French says:
"I am known for having had a pretty consistent focus
on human rights in my work as a journalist [JF note: this is very true], so the comments that will
follow should not in any way suggest that I believe in a de-emphasis in
human rights with regard to China.... But the problem with the way the press has covered this is there's
a kind of implicit premise [that...] is misleading,
I think. Maybe disingenuous is even a better word, because it seems to
suggest that if Obama had pulled a Khrushchev and banged his shoe on
the table on these issues and really jumped up and down and made a lot
of noise, then this would have achieved a markedly different result for
the better. I don't think there's any evidence of that. It may have
made certain people in this society feel better about themselves, but
if the goal is changing behaviors in China or obtaining political or
diplomatic results with China, I think the evidence is the contrary."
2) From the U.S. government official who has appeared twicebefore, these final comments on the trip and its consequences:
On atmospheric payoffs of the trip:
"Two of the press conferences, in Japan and South Korea, both began with
the same elements. In Japan, Prime Minister Hatoyama got up and gushed that
"my friend Barack calls me 'Yukio.'" Then the Korean
press conference began with [president] Lee Myung-bak saying, 'We have
become close friends.' That says something. Those are not just routine
polite words. It meant that Obama is profoundly popular in those
countries. Hatoyama's poll numbers are high but dropping, Lee
Myung-bak has been embattled, though recovering.
But both saw it as enormously important in terms of their own agenda to be
identified with Barack Obama. In my mind, the personal popularity and respect
for him is a strategic asset. And not one that gets you results in a day. If
you have foreign leaders who see their own fate tied up with Obama, that
becomes a chip you can draw on. If you need a last minute shift on climate
change, they do not want to separate from Barack Obama. Everyone wants to be
his best friend."
What about the view that Obama caved to the Chinese on human rights?
"Here are the things we tried to do. Number one, he made a robust statement
in Shanghai. Number two, have that reach as many tens ofmillions of Chinese as possible. You can argue about the degree of
success, but the message got out. They had a chance to see him in a setting no
Chinese had seen before. And beyond that was to be explicit and direct in the
private meetings about the importance of our values and the effect on our
relations. And then we put in references in the press conference statement to
Tibet and the Dalai Lama, and the importance of rule of law, freedom of expression,
protection of the rights of minorities, which was an obvious reference to the
Uighurs and Tibetans. We went straight to Tibet in the statement, saying that
we consider it part of China and urge direct negotiations with the Dalai
Lama."
One more on scholars, career paths, and Wall Street
While waiting for one last installment on the Obama-in-Asia front, here is one last installment on the "does it matter that bright young things go to Wall Street" front. This is from a reader I know, American by background but living overseas for many years, on postings in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He went from a high-prestige academic track to the financial world, for reasons explained below and after the jump.
Heart of his argument: the problem is not so much the financial rewards of Wall Street, which had not begun their stratospheric ascent when he made the switch 20-plus years ago. Rather it was the scarcity of other work for people trained and interested in international work -- and, as he puts it, the distinctive role of business-based experts in American public life.
"Please allow me to give a view on the "Rhodes Scholars take the path to
Wall Street" topic -- as I think my own experience sheds light on a
fundamental fact which might be missing in the author's dismay that
young US students in Oxford might lower their moral standards by
pursuing a get-rich career in Wall Street: we need to understand the
heavy weight of business pervading many segments of American political
life and society, and to appreciate the lack of alternatives available
to young American professionals if they wish to create a respectful
career with an international background in non-business areas
(diplomacy, journalism and/or academic). That in a nutshell is how I
wound up in a Wall Street job coming out of a traditional university
environment.
Yesterday I mentioned Elliott Gerson's op-ed in the Washington Post, which said that a shift in career choices for Rhodes scholars -- before, mainly politics/academics/writing; now, increasingly Wall Street -- was one more illustration of how outlandish pay in the financial world was distorting American incentives. For a Chinese perspective on this same point, see the thoughts of Gao Xiqing in my article last year, here.
A current Rhodes scholar at Oxford writes in defense of today's students:
"Although I'm [from a country other than the US] and so outside of Mr
Gerson's jurisdiction, I'm friends with many American Rhodies and I
think it's worth noting one or two things about his article. It was an
interesting and thought-provoking piece, but...
"First, it should not
be assumed that Rhodes Scholars are leaving Oxford for business in
overwhelming numbers. The most convincing evidence Mr Gerson cites is
that 6 (presumably 6 out of 32 American Scholars) went into business
"recently". While 6/32 is a lot more than the 3/320 in the 1970s, it
hardly signals that there has been a fundamental change in the nature
of the organisation or the Scholars involved. The road from Oxford High
Street to Wall Street is far less well travelled than the road from
Oxford to law school in New Haven or med school in Cambridge, MA.
I won't go on in this vein forever (previously #1, #2, #3, #4), but the topic is important enough to bear a little more elaboration, IMHO. Part of the importance: there is no country with whom America's interactions are more consequential, or perpetually more complicated, than China. Another part of the importance: how the American public understands these interactions makes a big difference, in recognizing the points of disagreement and the areas of possible cooperation. Tomorrow, one more installment from the US government official who participated in important meetings and whom I have quoted twice before. For now:
This morning on the Chris Matthews show I mentioned earlier, a White House reporter for the Washington Post said that the Shanghai town meeting was another item on the disappointment/failure docket for America. Her argument was essentially: the Chinese outsmarted the Obama team and kept their countrymen from seeing it. I don't remember whether she said it was not broadcast at all or only on one "local" network; as mentioned yesterday, that one network reaches 100 million households.
So to a member of the traveling press pool, viewing the session mainly as a campaign stop whose advance work went either well or poorly, this looked like a bust. Here is how it looked to a foreigner who has just written me -- a person who has lived in China for two decades, still does business there, and speaks Mandarin:
"In your series, you touched on the
Shanghai town hall, quoting from President Obama's opening and his
response to the Twitter/Great Firewall question, and gave voice to a
White House insider as to the power of his words and their likely reach
inside China. There's been some buzz among western journalists about
how the town hall "reached no one".
"I've been monitoring the China
internet in the wake of the town hall and, based on my observations of
these things over the years I'm very much leaning toward the White
House insider's view -- that the reach was vast and deep, in the many
millions or tens of millions, though not necessarily entirely positive.
But the comment from President Obama that I think will have the most
impact inside the firewall was not the one about US principles that you
quoted in your followups. It was this one:
'Now, I should tell you, I should be honest, as President of the United States, there
are times where I wish information didn't flow so freely because then I
wouldn't have to listen to people criticizing me all the time. I think people naturally are -- when they're in positions of power sometimes thinks, oh, how could that person say that about me, or that's irresponsible, or -- but the truth is that because in the United States information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear. It
forces me to examine what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis to see, am I
really doing the very best that I could be doing for the people of the
United States.'
"Wow! As a
resident of China for two decades and a Mandarin-speaking China-watcher
for three decades, I can say without any doubt that those words will
resonate far more deeply -- and potentially more "subversively" or
"destabilizingly" -- than any overt thumb-in-the-eye hectoring that any
foreigner or foreign leader might muster, in public or private.
Those words are ***precisely*** the kind that Zhongnanhai [Chinese term equivalent to "the Kremlin"] fears the
most, and rightly so."
After the jump, two other reader responses, one with an additional Chinese perspective and one with a historical comparison. ______
Things are warming up on this front. Previously here, with backward links. Today's points:
1) Many people have forwarded me a posting from my friend and former colleague Chuck Todd, saying that people who criticize the press's horse-race, instant-analysis coverage of Obama's trip are guilty of the same horse-race, instant-analysis thinking themselves. Ie, Hypocrite lecteur - mon semblable -- mon frere!
With all good will toward Chuck, let me point out the distinction: What (we) reporters say or write about an event can in fact be judged as soon as we say or write it, because it's all out there to be seen. What happens in a meeting between the leaders of China and the US often can't be judged for months or years after it occurs -- which is the complaint about instant analysis of what Obama "got" or didn't from this trip. For instance: no sane person imagined that an agreement about the value of the RMB would be announced just after this session. That is not the way the Chinese government has ever behaved in response to foreign "pressure." We will know whether US intervention on this issue had any effect over the next few months. It reveals zero familiarity with the issue to expect anything else -- or imply that the absence of an announcement is a "failure."
2) Many people have sent clips of today's talk show by my friend and former colleague Chris Matthews, which went in super-heavy for the "Obama humiliated in Asia" line. With all good will to Chris, I fear that this show today, notably the comments by the Washington Post's reporter from the Asia trip, will be the new symbol of exactly the kind of instant-analysis that, in my view, fundamentally misrepresents what happened on the trip. (Distillation of my complaint in an On the Media segment here; also, it was one theme of my All Things Considered discussion with Guy Raz yesterday.)
2A) As a bonus, here is what the Post's page showed yesterday for discussion of Obama's trip: was it a success or "an embarrassment"?
3) Below and after the jump, more comments from a US government official who was on the trip and knows first-hand about many of the meetings with foreign dignitaries. Earlier from this person here. About the "humiliating" bow to the Emperor of Japan:
"Obama's
attitude was, this is an elderly gentleman in a country where this kind
of greeting is customary. It does not seem extraordinary to show this
kind of gesture to him. The Fox news poll said that 67% of
Americans thought it was a good thing for him to have done. When the
president heard that some people had complained, I'd characterize his
reaction as: The notion that the United States is somehow humbling or
humiliating itself by showing respect for a local custom, when it is
transparently the most powerful country in the world, leaves me
speechless."
Manufactured failure #3: insider's view of the Obama trip
Late yesterday -- after I had recorded my On The Media complaints about mainstream coverage of Barack Obama's trip to Asia, but before I had seen Howard French's and Tish Durkin's similar complaints -- I got a call from a government official who had been on the trip. This person -- for convenience, I'll say "she" rather than "he or she" from here on -- wasn't aware that I'd already weighed in about the coverage, and was calling to say that I, as person who'd recently been living in China, might be interested in how different the events seemed to her from what she'd seen in the U.S. press.
She agreed to have her views conveyed "on background," which I'll do here and in a few more installments over the next two or three days. Obviously these are the views of an interested party, who was involved in planning the trip and believes it should be seen as a success. But compare them with what you read and heard about the trip last week -- including about the "failure" of the Town Meeting in Shanghai. About coverage of the trip in general:
"I don't care if someone criticizes us, I just would like it to be accurate and in context. I fear I am learning that is not the skill of some in the White House Press corps. They are experts on horse races, and so that is the way everything is cast."
About what the Administration hoped for from the trip:
"In thinking about the trip, the things we were trying to accomplish were all basically long term things. We were not looking for 'deliverables' or one-day stories. You've now got eight or nine countries among the G20 that are Asia-Pacific countries. The historic shift of power and influence from West to East is reflected in that number.
"Obama is very focused on global issues, things like climate change, financial imbalances, non proliferation, energy issues. We saw all the countries on this trip as players on those global issues. Of course China is important in particular, but also Korea and Japan and the ASEAN countries. So we saw this as a way of developing relationships that would be helpful to us as we tackled these issues coming down the road.
"We've got Copenhagen [climate talk] coming up in mid-December. We have Iran heading increasingly likely toward Plan B rather than Plan A, pressure rather than inducements. North Korea. And the Copenhagen session is very far from a done deal. The countries we dealt with are all key players here. And on the economic side, you've got the whole issue of rebalancing the global agenda. None of those is something where you come out of a meeting and say Eureka. They're all part of a long process and a long game.
"The other thing we had in mind, which has to do with the whole "rising China" phenomenon: we wanted to solidify the relationship with China. To show them that we're not going to have a fluctuating policy. That we know what we're doing, and understand that we are dealing from a position of strength. And at the same time, to all our traditional allies [Japan, Korea, etc], we wanted to reinforce their sense of comfort that our relationship with China won't be at their expense."
About the Town Hall meeting in Shanghai: Why was it "censored" rather than streamed to anyone who wanted to see it in China?
Signs of the apocalypse from an unexpected angle, #13,287
In case you haven't seen it, check out Elliott Gerson's op-ed in the Washington Post today, offering an unexpected measure of what has gone wrong with America's economic and social structure. Gerson is the American secretary of the Rhodes scholarship trust, and his data track follows... what Rhodes Scholars do with their lives once they come home from England.
Precis: in the olden days, they wanted to be big shots, a la Bill Clinton. Politicians, professors, writers, people paid in part or full in currency other than plain cash. Now, they want to be rich. And Gerson has a theory about what that change shows.
There is a reverse-backflip aspect to this shift that Gerson is certainly aware of but doesn't have the space to mention: Over the past 20 years or so, the selection process for Rhodes scholars has shifted to place less emphasis on Clinton-style BMOC traits and more on expressed or proven commitment to "service." So a group that starts out being more interested in social service ends up being more likely to go to Wall Street. Read and reflect.
Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia
It's not just me. Two colleagues with different perspectives -- from each other's, and sometimes from my own -- marvel at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama's just-ended tour of Asia.
First, Howard French -- long of the NYT, now of the Columbia Journalism School, friend of mine in both Tokyo and Shanghai. He has a new online Q-and-A with the Columbia Journalism Review, here, in which he says that the traveling press covered Obama's meetings with Asian officials as if this were a bunch of stops in a presidential campaign tour, and as a result missed or misrepresented what was going on. Read the whole thing, but here are two samples:
From the set-up to the interview, by Alexandra Fenwick:
"In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic."
Howard French goes on to say that these assumptions were flat wrong. He offers many explanations, including this:
"I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They're at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can't be an expert on every question, and so you're part of the Washington press corps and if you're really good and really diligent, you're going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China."
If you have seen Howard French's coverage over the years, including the five years he was based in Shanghai, you will know that no sane reader has ever put him in the category of "soft" on the Chinese leadership or China's faults. Yet his wonderment and exasperation at what he reads is palpable.
Tish Durkin, who has written for the Atlantic from Iraq and elsewhere, arrived in China recently. The subhead on her new column for The Week gets across the point:
"Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese
people managed a clearer view of Obama's visit than the US media did."
While I'm at it, here's one more: a story quoting the new US Ambassador to China, former Republican governor of Utah Jon Huntsman (a Mandarin speaker), to exactly the same effect.
"Washington's ambassador to Beijing hit out on Friday at negative US media coverage of President Barack Obama's visit to China, saying it failed to take into account important progress on many issues...
"The trip was the top news story in China, drawing strong interest from the mainland public who, surveys suggest, are largely positive in their view of the American president.
"However, much of the US media coverage was strongly negative, accusing Obama of failing to gain concessions on key issues such as Iran's nuclear programme and climate change, as well as being weak on human rights."
"I attended all those meetings that President Obama had with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao," Huntsman said, referring to the Chinese president and premier. "I've got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren't talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings," he said.
I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at the way our colleagues had missed the main point of what just happened in America's relations with a very important part of the world. We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race." As you can tell, this really bothers me.
November 20, 2009
Manufactured failure: press coverage of Obama in Asia
I have what I think is some interesting new info coming on this front over the weekend; stay tuned, starting Saturday afternoon. For the moment, two more installments in my argument, previously here and here, that Barack Obama's recent swing through Asia was a relative success, and certainly nothing like the disaster that most U.S. coverage implied.
Installment one: me talking with Bob Garfield of NPR's On The Media just now, about why American fantasies of an omnipotent, rising China may have distorted American press reaction to what Obama said and did.
Installment two: the before-and-after analyses from a private client newsletter by Damien Ma, Divya Reddy, and Nicholas Consonery of the Eurasia Group, reinforcing the idea that what actually happened on the trip was almost exactly what informed observers expected to happen, and not some humiliating disappointment.
November 11, just before the trip:
"President Barack Obama's first visit to China on 16 November will produce positive rhetoric, but achieve little on a range of issues from North Korea to economic rebalancing. Washington and Beijing will continue to highlight areas of mutual cooperation and interests, but domestic political agendas will pose serious constraints on the extent of near-term progress....
"Little to be expected on economic rebalancing and trade... Obama will likely raise the currency issue as part of a broader economic rebalancing framework. But the Chinese will continue to reject greater emphasis on the rebalancing issue, because Beijing interprets it as Washington shifting more of the blame on China for the global recession....
"No bilateral agreement will be reached on emissions reduction targets that might precipitate an ambitious global climate change treaty next month in Copenhagen. Obama's more modest task is to prevent China from aligning too closely with the G77 developing country bloc in global negotiations, although he has limited bargaining chips to encourage cooperation from China." [emphasis mine]
November 20 (today), post-action assessment, which boils down to, it went just as expected, and maybe a little better:
"President Barack Obama's first visit to China met the modest expectations set by the White House, making some progress on creating a more expansive relationship and on clean energy and climate change cooperation...Obama appears to have effectively reassured Beijing that the US does not intend to contain China's rise, creating a framework for mutual assurance that could augur a more mature relationship in the longer term.
"The US-China presidential summit involved a genuine attempt by both sides to push toward closer cooperation -- producing a robust joint statement that highlighted a range of common interests. In particular, Obama's first visit to China saw deliverables on clean energy and climate change cooperation, as expected. By dampening Copenhagen expectations in Singapore, Obama avoided a potential collision with China at next month's meeting... But Chinese domestic politics prevented Beijing from publicly discussing contentious issues such as currency and economic rebalancing during the trip...
"While policy disagreements and trade frictions will continue in the near term, Obama took an important step with a very public reassurance for Beijing that the US does not seek to contain China's rise. Beijing's receptiveness to this appeal indicates the intent of both countries to reduce the mutual distrust that has colored aspects of the relationship -- from currency, military engagement, and Taiwan to human rights and climate change. The Obama administration's more public approach, if successful, can promote longer term stability by engaging China on a broad range of issues within the context of a more mature and pragmatic relationship -- and in preventing specific, contentious issues from defining the relationship."
Why bring this up? Because it's bad all around when American press coverage makes people feel that perfectly predictable results constitute a shameful failure for the country and its leadership. More on this theme tomorrow.
RIP, D-N-I.net (updated)
After an outstanding ten-and-a-half year run, the website "Defense and the National Interest," better known as d-n-i.net, will close down next Monday, November 23. Chet Richards, who with his wife Ginger has run the site through that time, says that for various logistical and practical reasons he is ready to move on to day-job concerns.
Chet (shown here), a retired Air Force colonel and math PhD, has been one of the most committed and effective proponents of the ideas of combat developed in the 1970s and 1980s by another retired Air Force colonel, the late John Boyd -- background here and here. Chet is an original thinker and strategist himself and has written about theories of conflict as they apply to modern business, technological innovation, "soft power," and so on.
There's an immediate reason for mentioning the site's pending close, apart from an appreciation of Chet and Ginger Richards, William Lind, Chuck Spinney, and others who have contributed to d-n-i's success. This is the main online repository for a lot of Boyd's briefings and papers, so if you think you might ever be interested in them, set aside a little downloading time over the weekend. Handy shortcut to some downloads here. Thanks to all involved.
Update: more on d-n-i, Richards, Boyd, and maintaining the archives here and here.
Having complained about Google Checkout...
... because of its opaqueness in certain circumstances (and more to say when next I am at a computer), let me mention a different Google project notable for its transparency. That is the "Chromium OS" -- a new operating system optimized for "netbooks," which was announced yesterday as an open-source development project. Google has made the source code available free, along with some design documents and results of early user testing. First video below is the hour-plus announcement session. At the bottom is a three-minute product intro.
Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart
your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code.
If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with
a reboot."
How well will this actually work? Obviously we'll have to watch as it unfolds -- the watching process being much easier because it will be open-source. Here's an early Network World look at strengths and apparent weaknesses. Google's related Chrome browser has had both pluses and minuses, about which more later. A beta version of Chrome (Windows only; Mac promised) has just been announced with bookmark-sync and further progress toward support of "extensions," which is one of the areas where Firefox is most obviously superior to Chrome. Will check it out, with reactions later on. (Routine disclosure: I have many friends who work at Google -- but, to my knowledge, none of them directly involved in this project.)
November 18, 2009
About my frozen Google account
Well, at least I know what the problem was. It was China's fault! When I was living in Beijing early this year, I tried to reserve a domain name and pay for it using the Google Checkout system. Google's fraud-detection system flagged the transaction as likely fraudulent. It then canceled the deal and put a hold on my account.
This happened to me all the time in China. Maybe once a week my wife or I would find that our Visa or Master Card account had been frozen, because any online purchase we tried to make from a China-based Internet connection would trigger all the fraud detectors. Then we would spend 30 minutes on the phone, via Skype, getting the cards re-upped. We should have remembered always, always, to fire up the VPN before trying to buy something online -- so that the credit card company would think we were logging in from San Francisco or suburban Washington -- but sometimes we forgot. I hadn't tried to pay for anything else by Google's system until this week, so I didn't know until now that my account had been put on the watch list.
A product manager for Google's Checkout utility sent me the following explanation, and said I was free to quote it:
"I am the product manager responsible for fraud prevention on Google Checkout, and I want to follow up with you about the recent issues with your account.
"The issue with your Checkout account actually begun shortly after you placed the first order on January 28, 2009 for domain [XXX] which was cancelled because the IP address that was used for the order had a high rate of attempted fraud. [The IP address was our apartment building in Beijing.]
"Google's algorithms automatically review IP addresses when orders are placed on Checkout to catch attempted fraud with stolen credit cards. Fraud is a pressing issue in the electronic payment industry, and merchants bear the financial risk associated with these transactions so Google (and most online merchants) collect additional signals to determine the risk of online orders. Where our algorithms see suspicious transactions, we will often ask for additional proof of identity.
"While Google employs an advanced fraud detection system, it does occasionally catch legitimate user orders, which was what happened in your case. An error can occasionally arise when people share the same IP addresss on WiFi or VPN networks. For more info about Checkout fraud detection, take a look at the Checkout Security Center and our recent blog post."
Tomorrow some time, an elaboration on the security/usability trade-off in online commerce, which has surprising similarities to the comparable trade-off in air travel. The same Google official who sent the note above re-instated my account long enough for me to enter new credit card info and re-up my bona fides. Responding one-by-one to people who complain in public is obviously not a solution that "scales." But if I hadn't complained in public, I would simply never have used Google Checkout again: I am not about to send a scan of my passport or driver's license to some random email address, which is the only option offered for "verification." More on what this means anon.
Those tin-eared Americans
I noted here recently, as I have since time immemorial, that Chinese government spokesmen can often seem deaf to the concerns and mindset of their potential audience overseas. A reader from France says that maybe my own ears need to be inspected for metallic content:
"Put simply, I reacted myself mostly to the following phrase of Obama [in his Shanghai town hall presentation]: "We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation,"
"Read again slowly: 'We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation.'
"My take: the disconnect is as old as the CIA, Mossadegh or Cuba... I would have not reacted strongly when told the same by Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton. But now it is different. And my epidermic intolerance is now quite wide ranging, not only relating this affirmation as concerns Iraq, but extending to the sermons about sclerotic European Market, Global warming [etc].
"I understand that Obama's task is among others to sell the American Brand, and marketing people have a tenuous obligation to stick to the product. Or if we want to be kind, they want to mold the public perception of a brand new product they are bringing to the market. Nonetheless: I suspect you didn't even react yourself to this sentence. Could you comment on the state of the American eardrums, as you did for the Chinese ones?
"My background: French with (European) multi-countries experience...and close relatives living in the US. As I consequence, I lost my patriotic Innocence, and often smile at the overblown universal moralistic discourse of my Presidents or Intellectuals. You?"
On the state of American eardrums, I've often explicitly compared the inward-looking nature of Chinese officials and much of the Chinese population to their counterparts in the U.S. These are both big, continental nations that are finally more interested in themselves than in how those teeming, confusing, often-touchy outsiders might feel, think, or act. This can lead to blunders and offense-giving, innocent and otherwise. Part of Obama's appeal in the outside world has been the sense that by background and mindset he should be more attuned to outside sentiments. And of course this very sense is what some Americans don't like about Obama -- that he seems "foreign," or "cosmopolitan," very much as John Kerry seemed "French."
When I read the "do not seek to impose" line again, slowly, of course I understand the "hey, wait a minute" retorts that might spring up from half a dozen sites around the world. I suppose the reason it didn't strike me the first time is that I was also assuming the background that many Americans would: that Obama marked a change from the "seek to impose" policies of recent years, that he could say that line without taking responsibility for complications of the past and some in the present. But I see, and take, the reader's point.
On Obama's Asian diplomacy -- #3
Last week some of Barack Obama's critics were upset that he ducked a question in Japan about whether he approved of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I cannot begin to say how short-sighted that criticism is.
When I lived in Japan for several years in the 1980s, I learned about the various realms of the things you could say in public (建前, tatemae) and things you actually believed (本音, honne). Although not strictly a matter of tatemae/honne, the atomic bomb decision is a particularly thorny and awkward one for Americans to discuss with Japanese. The normal way to consider the topic in Japan involves the country's status as the only object of an atomic attack in history, the suffering its people underwent, and the status it therefore possesses to talk about the importance of avoiding any such event again -- all of which is understandable. There is a lot of history the prevailing Japanese account leaves out, but that is a point better raised in internal Japanese debate than by American officials. Americans may believe that Harry Truman saved both Japanese and Allied lives by this decision. But there really is no mileage in a U.S. official saying that to people in Japan. Probably the worst thing I did in my time there was to propose that argument to a man who had been a doctor in Hiroshima in 1945. The conversation came to an abrupt and hostile end. And I was just a reporter, not the American president who has the power to order nuclear weapons used again.
Here's the best analogy I can think of: suppose you were a sheriff who had gunned down a group of terrorists who were threatening to blow up a town. In the crossfire, some innocent children were killed. If you run into their parents long afterwards, do you say: "Tough luck, it was in a good cause! And I'd do just the same thing again!" Or do you recognize their great sorrow and loss and do everything possible to avoid rubbing it in?
In avoiding a direct answer to the question from a Japanese reporter about whether the bombing was justified, Obama did what any American president or diplomat should do when this topic is raised in Japan. There is no answer that would have worked out better for him than his not answering at all.
He has just done a followup on his own site, about some preceding Chinese and Western exercises in the same spirit. Very much worth reading, here, along with this post on a related theme.
Update: To be clear about it, any suggestion from the discussions above that Patrick Chovanec's map was in some way "unoriginal" is entirely unwarranted, from my point of view. The concept that big, monolithic "China" is better understood as a variety of diverse sub-units is a well-established, even obvious one. The plus of Chovanec's presentation is the execution, which makes the point interesting and accessible for people in a new way. And as he points out on his own site, in his initial (very long!) submission to the Atlantic, he catalogued a variety of previous efforts in this same direction. That history would have fit well into a long, print version of his analysis, but not so well into the kind of interactive online feature we have presented. So, congratulations to him for making an important concept interesting and vivid for readers.
"Relating to comments on the Shanghai town hall, enough of the parsing of what he said on issues and how he said them, I think the most significant sentence was "That's why I'm pleased to announce that the United States will dramatically expand the number of our students who study in China to 100,000." Even without details (per year (I hope) or over what period, college and/or high school students, how funded, etc), I am surprised you have not remarked on it (and that the NY Times did not even report it). It is of major significance."
Good point. I did noticed this while listening to the speech, but have not yet tracked back to see exactly how, when, and through what institutions this will occur. It's worth following up -- as I will, soon. But in the meantime, it's welcome news.
On Obama's Asian diplomacy -- #1
First of several updates on the fly:
On reflection, I still stick with my initial reaction to the Shanghai Town Meeting appearance, rather than being won over by the on-scene complaints of my Shanghai friend Adam Minter as described here. If you combine Obama's opening statement (White House version here), with his answers to the questions about the Great Firewall, it seems to me that he said just about as much on censorship and liberties as a visiting dignitary could say, in the circumstances.
I mean, seriously -- consider what he said in the opening statement. He talked about America's founding documents and the long struggle to match American reality to their promises. Then he said:
"Those documents put forward a simple vision of human affairs, and they
enshrine several core principles -- that all men and women are created
equal, and possess certain fundamental rights; that government should
reflect the will of the people and respond to their wishes; that
commerce should be open, information freely accessible; and that laws,
and not simply men, should guarantee the administration of justice....
"And that is why America will always speak out for these core principles
around the world. We do not seek to impose any system of government
on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that
we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression
and worship -- of access to information and political participation --
we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all
people, including ethnic and religious minorities -- whether they are
in the United States, China, or any nation. Indeed, it is that respect
for universal rights that guides America's openness to other countries;
our respect for different cultures; our commitment to international
law; and our faith in the future.
The Chinese students in the audience were smart. They understood what he was saying. In the circumstances, how much more obvious did he need to be? Those circumstances included: Obama's being in China for his first official visit; his knowing (as he must have, from his briefings) that the big Chinese bugaboo is "outside interference" from foreigners telling them what to do; and his knowing that he had business on many fronts ahead of him in Beijing. Even in those circumstances he clearly said: America believes that openness and liberties are not quaint American practices but are in fact universal and should be available to everyone, including in China. In domestic American politics, Obama has been known for doing his work with the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer. How much less deft would we like him to be on a foreign visit?
Similarly with his answer about censorship and the Great Firewall:
"I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness
when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely
information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then
citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments
accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates
new ideas. It encourages creativity.
"And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use.
I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition
of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that
different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in
the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or
unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength, and I think
should be encouraged."
"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship" is ungainly. But what's wrong with the statement as a whole?
Foreign leaders do not typically go to other countries and frontally criticize the way those places they're run -- at least not if they're smart, or serious. For instance, when Hugo Chavez made his famous "I smell the devil!" crack after following G.W. Bush to the podium at the U.N., this was not a sign of his wanting to do business with America. Yes, you got Chavez's point, in all its gross clownishness. Who could miss Obama's point in Shanghai? Would we welcome a French or German prime minister coming to a US town meeting in the Bush years, shortly before a negotiating session at the White House, and saying, "Of course we condemn waterboarding, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib"? I condemn those things too, but is that the shrewdest thing for a foreign president to say while here?
More later, but I thought the words stand up well and got across the intended message.
What "green collaboration" might mean in practice
As I never tire of mentioning, the big opportunity -- and challenge -- of the Obama Administration's interaction with China is finding ways for the countries to work together on climate, energy, and pollution issues. The countries are two of the main sources of the problem, as the two leading emitters in the world. And they're two of the main sources of solutions, China with its manufacturing ability and the U.S. with (we hope!) its R&D.
I am not equipped to judge how the slew of clean-energy initiatives prepared for approval at the Hu-Obama meeting will turn out in practice -- which ones are serious, which ones are for show. That's what I'll be asking my expert friends in the next while. But if you were wondering what US-China "cooperation" might mean in practice, here's a list of seven joint initiatives, announced today in Beijing. Convenient summary highlight below, with links that open up fact-sheet PDFs:
I'll be asking my experts which of these is most plausible. Let's hope the answers begin, "Well, quite a few of them are... "
In case you were really curious about my views on different topics...
For the record: - Last night's panel discussion with Jim Lehrer on the News Hour about China, Obama, et cetera, here;
- Also last night on BBC America with Matt Frei, also about Obama and China, here;
- This morning on CSPAN Washington Journal, with Bill Scanlan, also about Obama and China, not on line at the moment but I will find it at some point (here);
- Interview last week on The Kindle Chronicles, with Len Edgerly, about e-reading devices, here;
- Radio interview two weeks ago, when I was in Australia, with Margaret Throsby of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- closest U.S. counterpart would be Terry Gross -- here. Her interviews are Fresh Air-like in combining policy and personal info. Also discussing my upcoming collaboration with the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney on future-of-media issues, a topic for another day.
- Just to round this out, plan to be on KQED "Forum" with Michael Krasny at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST today. (Audio here.)
- Charlie Rose this evening, with Elizabeth Economy and Nicholas Burns.
November 16, 2009
Good UI by Google; bad UI by Google
First, the unsurprising part: yet another convenient, beneficial feature from Google for practically no money. Indeed, the only surprise about this one is that it is not literally free. Since the debut of Gmail five years ago, Google has offered ever-increasing amounts of free storage for each account. It started out at one gigabyte and is now over 7 GB. (Background from the Official Gmail Blog here.) Since you can create multiple accounts, in theory you can have as much storage as you'd ever want, all without cost.
I have a bunch of accounts for various purposes -- different mailing lists etc. But it's convenient to have one main account, so you can search for old messages or attachments without skipping around. My main personal Gmail account is so clogged with pictures, PDFs, article drafts, etc that it is closing in on the 7GB ceiling. Since Gmail does not let you search or sort past messages by size, there is not a quick and easy way to get rid of the lunkers with the 10MB attachments. So I was glad to see the good-news announcement last week: a lot more Gmail storage, for a ridiculously low price.
The first 20GB of additional storage is $5 per year, and onward at proportional rates up to 16TB ( > 16,000 GB) of storage. Pricing details here; Google account sign-in required.
Great! What a deal! So I decided to sink a full $5 per year into tripling my online storage. I hit the purchase button -- and that is when the bad part of the interaction began.
Further on local reaction to Obama's Shanghai town hall (updated)
After my real-time late-night note a few hours ago saying that I thought things had gone OK for Obama in Shanghai, I wake up to see this report from my friend Adam Minter, on the scene in Shanghai, about ways in which Obama's answers seemed disappointing from the local perspective:
"Obama's performance this afternoon reminded me of nothing so much as an
overly coached American businessman on his first trip to China, so
concerned about what he should or should not say that he forgets what
he wanted to say in the first place."
I dunno. I understand the pattern Minter is talking about, and I'll watch the session again with that in mind. His account is worth reading for his assessment and for many amusing logistics details about the event. Adam Minter also did our dispatch on "Obama mania in China" over the weekend. UPDATE: Chris Good has more of the full transcript of Obama's talk, which shows that especially in the opening remarks he made about as explicit an argument in favor of liberties and freedom of expression as one can expect in the circumstances.
Related China/US rhetoric point: in two recent items, here and here, I tried to explain what a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman could have been thinking when comparing Chairman Mao to Abraham Lincoln, the Tibetan serfs whom Mao "freed" from the lamas as being similar to the black slaves whom Lincoln freed, etc. A reader's reponse:
"I agree with you on Chinese officials' lack of skills in
communication and persuasion (part of this is due to political inward-looking,
as you said, but the other part is cultural---Confucius said "a gentleman should
be modest in speech but quick in action", and so eloquence in public speech,
oration, etc, is never highly valued in Chinese tradition.)
"With regards to Qin Gang's [the foreign ministry spokesman] comment on Obama,
Tibet, and slavery, however, I think he (as well as many other Chinese
people) is genuinely thinking that the Chinese and American cases
are comparable, or genuinely believe there are some valid points in Chinese
views on Tibet that westerners tend to ignore, and they want to bring these
points to the fore. I know you are a big Obama fan and obviously not a
fan of Mao or Hu Jintao, but I think no one is really making personal
comparisons. Now, Qin Gang's view (and the Chinese view) might be
wrong---by the way you didn't explain why it's wrong on your blog---but it does
not mean he cannot express his view. Why shouldn't Qin or any other Chinese
official express their genuine opinion (be it right or wrong), but pander
to Western thinking or adapt their expressions to suit Western ears?
"To me Qin's comment does not reflect a Chinese
communication problem, but rather the vast difference between Chinese
thinking and Western thinking on Tibet (after all, most westerners want to
believe Seven Years in Tibet while most Chinese do not). Not that China does not
have communication problems---the problems abound---but this is not a good
example."
This is a useful opportunity for clarification. I agree with the writer that most Chinese officials (and, in my experience, most Chinese people) sincerely believe the Mao=Lincoln point. That's exactly what I said in the original post. The "communications problem" would be the failure to recognize that people outside the country generally don't think that way and will view the argument as bizarre at best. So Qin's holding the view does not illustrate the tin-ear problem I'm talking about; the question is why he said it that way to outsiders. Someone whose job is to address a foreign audience needs to know something about foreign assumptions, reactions, and so on. American politicians routinely say to home audiences, "This is God's country" and similar thoughts amounting to "We are better than the foreigners." But a State Department person who said those things to visiting reporters would be foolish or tin-eared. It's what Qin said, not what he thought, that's illustrates the problem.
Obama's town hall in Shanghai just now
I got up to watch the live stream on the White House site, out of nostalgia for my Shanghai days.
No very shocking questions from the students, though some had swathed edges to them: What about harmonious relations and arms sales with Taiwan? Obama doesn't answer about arms sales but does, carefully, about the harmonious relations. What about the Great Firewall and free access to info? Obama explains why free exchange of info makes leaders do a better job, even if he doesn't like the criticism some times. What about the risk that an intentionally- and historically-diverse nation like the US will misunderstand the situation of countries with different histories and makeups? Obama gives a defense and celebration of diversity, in his country and in his family. And says that he doesn't use Twitter.
Tomorrow's chore is a omnibus wrap-up on several recent Obama pronouncements, from the Ft. Hood eulogy to the Japan and China speeches. Main impression here is that he did well -- charming the students in the room itself, though almost any president can do that through the sheer magnetism of the office, but also talking in ways that will play well to Chinese sensibilities without saying a word that would go over wrong back home. Listening to him, I am not 100% sure that Obama has spent a lot of time conversing with non-native speakers of English. There is a different way you learn to talk: not condescending or stripped down, but more direct and less allusive. (For example, you wouldn't say "allusive." And I wouldn't say "swathed" in the paragraph above, to indicate questions that had a kind of protective wrapping to blunt their edge. I'd say something like, "The questions from the students were polite, but some had a slight edge.") People without experience doing this either talk in needlessly complex ways or talk in an insultingly clumsy oogah-boogah style. Sometimes Obama sounded as if he knew this approach; sometimes, as if he thought he was talking to a domestic audience.
It was also heartening for me to see these students, who resembled those I'd dealt with over the years -- and the truest moment of all came with the final question, where a student asked him frankly what was the right educational background that could lead to a Nobel prize. Now back to bed and more tomorrow.
November 15, 2009
Were you possibly wondering...
... about that picture on the front page of today's NYT, showing a little shop in Beijing with Obama-related memorabilia in honor of the president's visit? There's a prominent hand-lettered Chinese sign in the upper left-hand part of the picture. Wonder if it says, "Welcome President Obama"? Or, "Resolutely support the development of mutually-respectful relations between China and America"? Or, "Strongly resist splittism"? Or some other topical greeting?
Actually, no. It says "Help wanted -- shopgirl." [ 招店員(女) ] Nice to see the practical-mindedness of the Chinese business class shining through. And a welcome indication that retail sector hiring is underway!
"Nine Nations of China"
Even if President Obama weren't getting to China just now, it would be worth checking out the illustrated feature "Nine Nations of China," by Patrick Chovanec, which has just gone up on our site. Given the visit, it's all the more timely.
I've mentioned time and again over the years how the big, unified- and imposing-seeming "China" of American imagination should really be thought of as a billion-plus individuals, tens of thousands of contending companies and small businesses, dozens of provincial or regional-loyalty groups, and lots of other subdivisions. In some circumstances, this agglomeration can act as one big, momentarily-unified "country" - especially when the national dignity is thought to be under attack from overseas. In most other cases, the big country of "China" is really a fluid congeries of interests and ambitions.
Patrick Chovanec -- who teaches in Beijing, and whom I knew there -- has provided another way to think about how China is organized and divided. You can see it here. Congrats to him and to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz and Anup Kaphle of the Atlantic's web site for putting it together.
I hate to keep picking on the WaPo...
... so I'll start with the positive. Very good combo Outlook/Book Review section today, including a nice number, by Neil Irwin, on the fat target of Super Freakonomics. Sports section always excellent. Tom Toles remains the best editorial cartoonist I'm aware of. Keith Richburg does a good exploration of racial attitudes in China, in the wake of the Lou Jing controversy (the charming fashion model from Shanghai with a Chinese mother and a black American father, who has run into lots of prejudice in China; previously here, also here). And much more! Glad that I subscribe.
But I do have to keep wondering, as before and here, about such basics as copy editing. Consider this cover line for the (also good) story about the writer Edward P. Jones in today's Washington Post magazine.
The detail worth noticing:
C'mon!!! The intention behind this line is clear. But it is literally nonsensical unless it has a word like "other" or "before" in there some place. ("...has rendered the soul of black Washington in a way no other writer ever has"; "in a way no writer ever has before"; etc.) Or, making the second "has" into "had" ("in a way no writer ever had.") This is the kind of thing they put on the basic command-of-English portion of the SAT. In a blog post or a late-breaking story, OK. I make hasty errors like this all the time in email messages and drafts of stories. But on the cover of a magazine? How many people had to have seen this before it was published?
Back to the positive: lots of good stories! I'll leave it on that note.
More on Mao, Lincoln, the lamas, etc
I mentioned yesterday the oddity of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman welcoming Barack Obama to China with a triple-backflip metaphor linking Chairman Mao to Abraham Lincoln, since both Lincoln and Mao fought against secessionist rebels. From a reader with experience in China and America this response:
"Thank you for pointing
out the strange logic of the foreign ministry spokesman in this bizarre
lecture to President Obama. I have been living in the U.S. for twenty
years and as a citizen for the last ten, but i often can't help feel
ashamed often by remarks like these.
"I know I shouldn't, but I lived my
first 26 years in this great country [China] after all. What a shame it is
represented by such cynical officials. I say cynical because I think
they often know better than what they say. They say it that way because
it is not only safe but potentially profitable politically. They don't
really care about the effect of their remarks globally. Their audience
is inside the ministry and the government. I once had lunch with [a very prominent government official], while he was [in an important position] in the Washington embassy. He
said when he wrote reports to the ministry, he needed to know what the
ministry's opinion was so he would not be too out of line.
"Maybe this
is true for all bureaucracies, but it is practiced to such a degree for
so long in China that it is one of its most deep-rooted diseases. Reading the histories of Qing and Republic of China, once sees many
examples of how officials often opted for the politically safe path at
the expense of national interests. Today, one also sees the same
practice in dealing with tough political issues such as ethnic tension. Because harsh measures and blaming the "splittists" is always safe and
potentially rewarding for their careers, they become the only chosen
policy options, even when that create more problems for the county in
the future and draw international scolding."
Let me say that this rings 100% true to my observation of the situation. Individuals are often very sophisticated about outside realities; the system keeps their attention directed inward.
My discussion of this and related Obama/China questions this afternoon on All Things Considered, with Guy Raz, here.
November 14, 2009
James Lilley
I was sorry to hear that James Lilley has died in Washington, at age 81.
Lilley, who was born in Qingdao and mainly lived in China until age 12, was a very important figure in the modern US-China rapprochement. He was a career CIA agent who served as CIA station chief in Beijing during George H. W. Bush's time as chief of mission there (before the US and China established formal relations). He is the only person to have been ambassador both to the Republic of China on Taiwan and to the People's Republic, in Beijing, which is a convenient shorthand for his maintaining a long-term balance between the positive and the negative aspects of relations between the US and China. He kept working to expand the positive and cooperative potential between the countries, without forgetting or suppressing the areas in which they disagree. This was most notable after the Tiananmen crackdowns 20 years ago, when he was on duty as ambassador in Beijing and forcefully criticized the repression (and offered protection to the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi).
Frontline interview with Lilley from 2004, about the Wen Ho Lee case and related US-Chinese nuclear and military tensions here. Very recent interview with the China Daily (which goes easy on his intelligence backgrond) here. Statement yesterday on his death by Hillary Clinton here. I did not know him well but met or interviewed him half a dozen times over the past twenty years in Korea (where he was also ambassador) and in Washington. He was personally gracious and a skillful public servant.
Here's why the China trip matters
Nearly thirty years after he left office, the most important achievement of Jimmy Carter's time as president was his cementing the relationship with China that had begun under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (Second-most important: Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. Third: showing that it was possible, at least for a while, to increase the energy efficiency of cars, buildings, power generation, and industry within the US.)
Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in 2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad environmental improvement. If they can't....
Today the Asia Society's "China Green" project ran a full-page ad in the New York Times -- good to see support for the print media! -- and launched another online display dramatizing why such cooperation matters. This one is called On Thinner Ice and documents the accelerating disappearance of the glaciers on the Tibetan plateau that feed nearly all the major rivers of Asia. (Previous Asia Society displays on this topic here.) Sample clip from the display:
For an earlier project by Michael Zhao of "China Green," documenting air quality in Beijing in the year leading up to the Olympics, see this discussion and the Olympic-air site, here. A week ago, according to the BejingAir Twitter feed (background here and here) the city's air quality was in the almost-unbelievable "hazardous" range. My friends in Beijing say that the skies are fresh and blue today, hours before Obama's arrival. Good! Every non-polluted day is a victory. But let's hope the two sides concentrate on cleaning up for the long run.
November 13, 2009
Those silver-tongued spokesmen in Beijing
I have marveled many times (eg a year ago in the magazine here) at the lack of savvy Chinese government spokesmen often display when presenting their country's case and face to the world. Locus classicus #1 is the description of the Dalai Lama as a "jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes," as a government official once called him. Number Two was the handling of "authorized" protests at the Beijing Olympics last year. Anyone could apply to protest any domestic or international issue -- but the authorities rejected all such requests and locked up some Chinese people who applied.*
Now we may have candidate #3, in the form of the welcome offered yesterday by Qin Gang, the official spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, to President Obama on the eve of his visit to China. Qin observed that Obama should be especially appreciative of China's need to quash "splittist" factions in Tibet and elsewhere. Why? Because Obama's race should give him a particularly acute sympathy to the plight of enslaved peoples. From the Reuters story (additional press comment from the FT here and China's Global Times here):
"He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln's major significance for that movement," said Qin.
"Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States."...China's stance [in opposing Tibetan "splittists" was like Lincoln's, Qin said.] "Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China's stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity," said Qin.
What is Qin talking about? This whole concept makes little sense from an outside perspective unless you recognize two taken-for-granted parts of the argument, from the Chinese point of view:
Black slaves in the South, before the arrival of the Union armies = Tibetan peasants under the lamas' rule, before the arrival of Mao's forces;
Lincoln with his steadfast insistence that the Union not be sundered = Mao and his successors with their steadfast insistence that the PRC not be "split."
The truth of the first equation is assumed by people at all levels of Han Chinese society, and is reinforced by exhibits like the one I mentioned here.
The truth of the second is a top-level tenet of Chinese government strategy. Maintain internal order; prevent "splittism" (whether in Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, or elsewhere); and develop the economy -- with those three propositions, you can predict quite a bit of what the government will do.
If you were going to argue a case to an audience inside China, you would do well to be aware of those assumptions in the listeners' minds. But if -- as with the Foreign Ministry spokesmen -- you were making a case to the world at large, you would do well to realize that Americans won't automatically think "Oh, yes, Abraham Lincoln was just like Hu Jintao" or "Oh, those Tibetan lamas were just like Simon Legree." The main point again is the tin-ear touch, the failure to recognize how these arguments will come across outside the People's Republic.
Here's hoping that we've seen an atypically awkward beginning to what will be a successful trip. FWIW, yesterday on Tom Ashbrook's On Point program, from WBUR in Boston, I discussed Obama's Asian trip along with Susan Shirk of UCSD and Shen Dingli of Fudan in Shanghai. The program is here. ___ * For Chinese readers, a reminder: the point of my article is that the
reality of modern China is much more varied, open, and flexible than
the spokesmen manage to convey. So we have an official PR apparatus
that generally succeeds in making the country look less appealing than it really is.
The right kind of "security theater"
It is not surprising that we'd find good sense about security in the words of Bruce Schneier, but this recent essay does the best job I've seen of explaining the balance between "real" and "symbolic" steps against terrorism; why some purely symbolic steps can be worthwhile; but why much of today's "security theater" is so misguided.
Read the whole thing, but crucial concepts are these. First, what we mean when we talk about "security theater":
"Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more
secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An
example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings.
No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID
provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a
uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards." [My emphasis]
On why the steady accretion of "fighting the last war" security measures, especially involving air travel, are beyond the point. E.g., because there was once a shoe-bomb plot, we all now take off our shoes; because there was once a plot involving liquids, women have perfume and gels seized from their purses, etc. There's always a demand to do "something," and...
"Often, this 'something' is directly related to the details of a recent
event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on
aeroplanes. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that
are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective
if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.... Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it
shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor
change in their tactics or targets..."
On what the right kind of security theater would mean: I think this is the most important and, to most politicians and readers, novel part of Scheneir's argument. He says that the best way to reduce the damage terrorism can do is to act as if we're not scared of it.
"The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around
them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders
-- need to react with indomitability.
"By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by
not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society,
in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between
indomitability and arrogant 'bring 'em on' rhetoric. There's a
difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free
and open society, and hyping the threats...
"Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a
transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a
country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can
do that kind of damage."
I am predisposed to welcome this argument, having made my version of a similar case three years ago (with guidance then from Schneier and others). But this is an unusually strong formulation from an unusually well positioned authority. Please do read what he says.
November 12, 2009
More on the undercover TSA officers
Two days ago I mentioned the delightful story about the TSA's plan to place "behavior detection officers," or BDOs, in airports and to disguise them in ... TSA uniforms. Herewith several relevant responses.
1) About the plan's underlying genius:
"There are so many security officers at the airport that one no longer notices them. It's like policemen at the US capitol building, or people wearing orange clothes at a Clemson football game. Clothing that would be conspicuous in normal situations becomes the best way to blend in at the airport."
2) About how it may be working in Seattle:
"I witnessed this in action at SeaTac airport on this past Sunday morning. But I have to say the quote: "They do not focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman, Sari Koshetz, does not ring true.
"As I (a nicely dressed white middle aged woman) sat there a young woman of Asian heritage was approached and asked for her boarding pass. She complied and I didn't think anything of it but realized it was a newly established check point. Then a few minutes later another TSA agent approached the same woman and asked again. Hmmm, was she so nervous looking? Not to me, she looked like the rest of us bored and waiting to go folks. She did have a nice long conversation on her cell phone in a language I could not understand but there are thousands of people who do this. Another young white woman who was sitting to my right was shocked and said "but they just asked her". Yep. So they don't focus on nationality, race or ethnicity? I am not at all convinced and will be observing to see how this plays out." [JF note: Like all law enforcement work, this is tricky. Eg, in any sensible risk-based system people in their 20s would deserve more attention than people in their 70s or 80s. The trick of course is drawing the line between that sort of common-sense triage and blanket categorization. Let's hope TSA is working on it.]
3) An account from inside the system:
"I [have a relative] who is in fact one of the Behavior Detection Officers your item today mentions. She is a very nice, petite Asian woman, and she finds it pretty entertaining that she is now a BDO and gets to flag people for extra security, question them, etc.
"Some of her comments to us about her job raise some questions (for me at least, I don't think she thinks this critically about her job) about how these officers are regulated, and their approach to screening.
Our back yard, 2pm yesterday afternoon, three miles from the White House in northwest Washington DC. I think this is one of the fawns from the summer, grown out of its dappled phase. It sat there thinking and observing for an hour or two, about 50 feet from our house, until a drizzle turned into a downpour and it went somewhere else. For Chinese friends, that is indeed a bamboo stand in the background. We lack pandas so make do this way.
Doing Business in China: Legalese (updated)
Nearing the end of our Doing Business in China clips, here's the story of a Western businessman who went to the Chinese courts for relief -- and got it. Larger point involves the uneven way that "rule of law" applies in China. Some place, yes; many places, no; but the number of "yes" zones is increasing.
UPDATE: In introducing the previous clip, I said that there was one sentence in it I completely disagreed with, while all the rest rang true. In case you were wondering, it was the sentence saying that in Shanghai and Beijing, "it is hard to find someone who doesn't speak English." If you define "Shanghai and Beijing" as meaning, "inside a five-star international hotel in Shanghai or Beijing, among the staff trained to deal with foreign guests, when the first team is on duty," that statement is exactly right! Otherwise....The statement appears around time 1:20, so you can put it in context and see the source.
November 11, 2009
Placeholder on presidential rhetoric
I agree with my Atlantic colleagues Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan that Barack Obama's speech yesterday at Ft. Hood was another exceptional match of message and moment. It also highlights the forced nature of an analysis I meant to mention earlier: this past weekend's NYT "Week in Review" assertion that Obama's rhetoric has grown stale. Saying more about this topic is next on the internal to-do list, after turning in an article later today. But I didn't want the whole of Veteran's Day to pass without a mention of this performance.
November 10, 2009
Great books to give as presents: kicking off the series
Whatever your occasion for giving presents, books are the present to give. (I try like crazy to avoid the generic term "holiday," so I'll say: Christmas presents for me, Hanukkah presents for you, Kwanzaa for somebody else, and general midwinter cheer for another person. Whatever they are, I'm going to call them "presents," and we can all get along.)
One worth considering: The Fourth Part of the World, by Toby Lester. It's a great, absorbing, richly illustrated, makes-you-feel-smarter-and-better-for-having-read-it chronicle of the race to map what became the Americas five centuries ago. Toby Lester explains the idea behind the book in this clip:
There's also a nice Flash-based interactive version of the influential 1507 map at the center of his story, here. Toby Lester is a friend and one-time Atlantic colleague -- but part of the reason we're friends is the sensibility and intelligence he exhibits in this book. Worth checking out.
Going undercover, TSA-style!
I do love this story. There's good news from a report about the TSA in yesterday's Washington Post! In addition to relying purely on the screening techniques we all know so well from airport security lines, the TSA has people roaming the airports checking out travelers who give off a suspicious vibe:
"To identify potentially dangerous individuals, the Transportation
Security Administration has stationed specially trained
behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports. The officers may be
positioned anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, trying to
spot passengers who show an unusual level of nervousness or stress.
"They do not focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz.
"We're not looking for a type of person, but at behaviors," she said."
Good idea! The whole complaint about rule-based, one-size-fits-all screening systems is that they're not sufficiently flexible, discriminating, or directed toward more serious threats.
On the other hand, this charming detail from the story:
"It's not easy to spot detection officers. Working in teams of two and
clad in TSA uniforms, they blend in with those performing screening
chores at the security checkpoint."
Yes, there is no chance the bad guys will spot them! Like plainclothes cops, cleverly hidden from drug dealers etc when they are disguised as regular policemen.
Of course, maybe this article itself is part of an elaborate cover operation, lulling plotters into thinking that the only people they have to watch for have TSA suits on. Yes, that must be it. [Thanks to D Lippman]
Doing Business in China: Lost in Translation
Ah, the mysteries of language. This little clip, next in the Doing Business in China series, actually does a nice job of introducing some of the tangles and intricacies of the "what language are people speaking, when they say they're speaking English?" question. There is exactly one sentence in this clip, from an interviewee, that I completely disagree with. Will let you guess which one it is. The rest all rings true, even when people contradict one another and themselves.
Two language updates
There's lot in the queue about language, all-in-one devices, slippery slopes, and other lost topics. Deferred while doing "work." To start back, two language items:
On Presidents and verbs: Last month I mentioned that in Japanese the term "to Obama" -- Obamu, オバむ -- had been accepted as a verb signifying hopefulness despite obstacles, "yes we can," etc. A reader with experience in Japan reminds me that there is a precedent:
"I was living in Japan 97-98 at the height of the Lewinsky brouhaha. At
that time, Clinton's name became a joke of sort in the Japanese press.
They were referring to him as Bill "Furinton". You see, in Japanese,
"furin" [不倫] is the verb "to commit adultery". So they were calling him
"Furinton Daitoryo" or essentially "President Adultery."
On la vie Francophone: Background here, with my assertion that Japan = France when it comes to dealing with outsiders who try to handle their language, whereas China = the United States. A reader writes:
"I just wanted to share my experiences of living, though briefly, in Francophone cultures. A year ago, I spent a couple of months living and working in Belgium. Where I lived, Brussels, is decidely Francophone. With that said, most of my attempts to use French within the city were politely but quickly rebuffed as the person I would be speaking to would switch to mostly flawless English.
"Although I was staying in Brussels, my work was at an office twenty miles north in Mechelen, which is decidely Flemish. Most of my coworkers there were Flemish, spoke three languages (Dutch, French, English) fluently and often a fourth one (German) fluently as well. As I got to know them I would try speaking French with them as well, since I did not know any Dutch. They would compliment me on how well I spoke French; which I interpreted as an exaggerated compliment reflective of the expectation that few Americans can speak anything other than twangy English. They would humor me for a couple of minutes then state "I don't like to speak French" which would usually be followed by an unloading, in perfect English, of their resentment of the Francophone population (Walloons") within Belgium....
Seven years ago I wrote in the magazine about the genesis of the F-35 fighter plane, known back then as the Joint Strike Fighter or JSF. ("Uncle Sam Builds an Airplane," June, 2002.) At the time, the JSF was supposed to be the solution to one of the modern military's worst problems: relentless and "unexpected" cost growth. Year after year, ships, missiles, tanks, etc go up "surprisingly" much in unit cost, so year after year the numbers in the inventory go down. The JSF was explicitly designed to break the cycle. In three complementary models, it was supposed to suit the differing aviation needs of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. Like a car or computer meant for a broad global market, it was intended from the start to fit the needs of a large number of allied militaries.
As part of the story said:
"The JSF matters because of both its scale and its conceptual
ambition. The planners at the Pentagon and at Lockheed Martin imagine
that as many as 6,000 of these airplanes may be bought, at a total cost
of as much as $200 billion, over the next twenty-five years. If all
goes according to plan, about 3,000 of the JSFs will go to the original
"investors" in the program--the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps,
plus the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy in Britain. All have shared the
cost of developing the plane. The other 3,000 are supposed to go to
customers in the rest of the world."
That was then.
In this new column at Military.com, Winslow Wheeler -- part of the group of defense thinkers I mentioned yesterday -- talks about what has happened to the JSF as it has evolved into the F-35. Main plot line: cost has gone up, reliability has gone down, capabilities have fallen short of promises -- all of these "unexpected" changes forcing the planned number of purchases down, which in turn has pushed unit cost up further still. Check out the full account at Wheeler's column. And consider this part of the original article in light of what has happened seven years into the project:
"The ambitious idea behind the JSF is to address several chronic
problems of U.S. military acquisition policy simultaneously. If it
succeeds, it will put military procurement on a more affordable, more
effective track. If it fails, it will underscore how deep those
problems are."
The other shoe drops at Caijing
According to Ian Johnson in the WSJ just now, Hu Shuli, the founder and editor of Caijing magazine in China, has finally resigned, along with her deputy Wang Shuo. This is Hu, at the magazine's big annual conference last year in Beijing. (I didn't take this picture but was at the event. Update: WSJ story now has co-byline with Sky Canaves.)
At Johnson explains in his story, tension at Caijing had been rising for some time. Also see previous links, including to Evan Osnos's profile of Hu in the New Yorker, here. The reason this news matters is that Caijing, a business/finance magazine that had in its 11 years become the main vehicle for independent reporting and criticism of all sorts, has been the very important exception to the rule about the strictures and limits on the Chinese domestic press. "Yes, the press is subject to tight controls, but at Caijing..." For instance, during the SARS outbreak in 2003, Caijing played an important role in questioning the government's story that everything was under control. (Disclosure: one of my sons was an intern at the magazine then.)
The potential silver lining, in character for the irrepressible Hu Shuli, is that she is apparently already planning to launch a new magazine. More to come on this topic, but news of the change itself is worth noting.
Mad magazine takes on the birthers
I don't know whether the birthers are petering out on their own. If they're still around, here's an additional challenge for them that springs from the glory days of Mad magazine.
A friend has recalled a classic Mad riff from its "Strangely Believe It! Strangely True" series, produced by comedian Ernie Kovacs in the late Fifties as a knock-off of Ripley's Believe It or Not. It concerned -- well, see for yourself, in this detail of a scan of the original page, courtesy of Scott Gosar at TheMadStore. [Thanks to reader JS for title catch.]
The punch line -- hardee har! -- is that news of the baby girl's birth had to be telegrammed to her mother, who had missed the plane on which the surprise birth occurred.
What's the connection to the birthers? If Barack Obama had actually been born in Kenya, then his mother would have to have been in Kenya too! I don't think anyone has dreamed of suggesting that his mother was other than the one he has always claimed, Stanley Ann Dunham. Presumably somewhere in the passport records of the United States or Kenya is information about whether his mother (a) left the United States, or (b) entered Kenya in 1961 when her son was born. If she didn't leave the United States, including the fully-fledged state of Hawaii, in the summer of 1961, then by definition her child has to have been a natural-born U.S. citizen.
I recognize that if this were a matter of -- how do we say? -- "reality" or "facts," it would have been settled long ago, as it has been for everyone except the birther stalwarts. But this is an interesting additional angle worth considering; plus, it's great to see these detailed old Mad drawings. FYI, you can see a zoomable full-page version of the "Strangely Believe It!" illustration, by Wallace Wood, if you click on the smaller image below.
November 8, 2009
Press deadline detail (updated)
The House passed the health-care reform bill last night at 11:15pm. I was watching (I mean, on CSPAN)! This morning, the Sunday New York Times that was waiting outside at our house in northwest DC had a headline about the passage and a wrapup of who had voted which way, and why.
The Washington Post that was sitting alongside it had a story about the likely result in the vote, and a little box saying that the vote had happened too late to be covered in the paper.
No major point here: just interesting that the newspaper of politics, the newspaper of Washington, apparently has an earlier deadline for events in the capital than the out of town paper does. May just have been a fluke and signifying nothing, but mildly a surprise.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader J.M., I see that the Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, has recently commented on the effect of earlier deadlines at the Post. Unfortunate effect that he highlights: gap between the quality and polish of articles on the web site and those that make it into the paper. Alexander said:
"[A reader] put his finger on a primary cause [of grammar errors]: tighter deadlines. It's the same problem I wrote about
last week in explaining why up to 185,000 Post readers were no longer
getting late game coverage of the World Series, the Redskins' Monday
night game or the Wizards' exciting season opening victory in Dallas.
"The need to cut costs forced The Post to close its College Park
printing facility some months ago and consolidate operations at its
other printing plant in Springfield. That, coupled with the need to
deliver papers to subscribers who now begin their commutes earlier due
to worsening traffic congestion, has resulted in deadlines being moved
forward."
West Point, Phillips Collection: two very different YouTube clips
West Point: Over the decades I have sung the praises of defense thinkers broadly associated with or inspired by the late Air Force colonel John Boyd. More on this general outlook to national strategy here. One prominent figure in this group is Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and prolific author. Recently he was invited to West Point, his alma mater, to address cadets on the realities of military life and military thinking. His full address, broken into a series of YouTube clips, starts here.
Mostly for specialists, but for those interested in the effort to shape
a sustainable U.S. military strategy, this is worthwhile. Macgregor's
latest book is here.
Phillips Collection: This very elegant small museum/gallery near DuPont Circle in Washington now has has a display by the sculptor and artist Barbara Liotta (a close friend of my wife's). This brief clip she shows how she installed her piece "Icarus" at the Phillips. This is interesting to me in showing the combination of elementary manual skills -- like tying knots around the small stones she is suspending -- with an original vision of how strings and stones can create a powerful 3-D structure. She has another gallery show in Washington here. Detail of suspended stone below; then, the YouTube clip.
Meta point: the value of YouTube in showing two committed people from completely different realms of endeavor intensely at their work.
November 7, 2009
November 7
This seems like ancient history and it seems like only yesterday, but it was one year ago that my father, James A. Fallows MD, died at his home in California. I can't help mentioning him, and my late mother Jean, today.
I saw this picture, thanks to my siblings, only after his death. I think this is from his late 40s or early 50s. Thanks to many people who wrote a year ago, after I mentioned what he and my mother had meant to their small community and their children. For reasons of distraction, volume, and general life chaos I never responded to most messages, but I appreciated them.
In defense of the TSA
On the "man bites dog" front, and in the spirit of fairness, here are two items on behalf of the TSA. Or at least in opposition to some lines of criticism (like this recent one from me).
First: I can't believe that I've learned only now that the TSA has its own chatty blog, which takes up various criticisms, especially from web sites, and gives the TSA's answer. For instance, if you want to know their response to this famed cartoon from XKCD.com, check here.
The wonderful headline on another item
at the blog: "Response to 'TSA Agents Took My Son.'" I won't say that I
am tremendously convinced by their rebuttals, but I do (seriously)
admire the effort, and the flair. (I learned about the blog via Bob Collins of Minnesota.)
Next, below and after the jump, a reader's message in response to the recent GAO critique of TSA, mentioned here.
"While agreeing with the spirt of your attack on TSA, I'm not sure the jab is well centered.
"The GAO report is about TSA funding new technology. Clearly that is a botched job -- the withdrawal of the "puffer" machines is a demonstration that TSA is not good at funding R&D. But it has nothing to do with TSA screening tactics -- which I agree are not "risk based". And on the larger level, I'm not sure a blanket risk analysis is an effective tool for deciding where to put R&D dollars.
A man in Florida sends what may be the ideal example of reader mail, combining as it does aerodynamic theory, politics, economics, and presidential rhetoric. If only there were a China- or beer-related angle... Seriously, his critique of how the Obama team has explained the continuing collapse of the U.S. employment base is insightful. Although it is obviously too late to adjust the rhetoric with which the Administration launched its economic recovery plans, arguments like this reader's could help shape the ongoing discussion.
"I'm really confused by how the Obama administration has handled the narrative and voter expectations for this recession. I clearly understand that they had to carefully balance early 2009 dire warnings against economic pessimism, while making a case for the stimulus package, etc. But once the stimulus was passed, I believe that they should have boldly stated how bad things really were, how their economic policies were the correct choices (even acknowledging Krugman's critiques of "too little"), and emphasizing that even the best possible management of the 2008 economic trainwreck would see significantly increasing unemployment as a lagging indicator.
"One analogy I've thought of often, aligned with your interests, is an economic analogy of an aerodynamic stall. When commerical credit froze and consumers reduced spending, the prevailing economic "lift" was gone. Stall! Conservative knee-jerk reactions for tax cuts were the equivalent of "pulling up" on the stick- intuitive but deadly. Obama's expert advice was to gain speed by spending (diving), even at the cost of altitude (deficit/debt). High unemployment was destined from the moment the stall occurred. Only when sufficient airspeed/angle of attack (spending) had been reached could the economy begin to pull up, and the unemployment would be analogous to the altitude lost even after the decision to finaly "pull up" had been made. Passenger relief (consumer confidence) would follow long after the immediate recovery (i.e., GDP), and no one would be "satisfied" until the plane came in for a (economic) "soft landing."
"There are probably numerous logical errors with this analogy [JF note: seems pretty good to me], but the simple point is this: If "Joe six-pack" clearly understands that Obama saved his economic life, while Conservatives would have driven the plane into the ground, he's more likely to appreciate and reward the unpalatable choices that Obama made. His appreciation would be enhanced if he understood all along that the pilot had no choice but to lose altitude, and the pilot explained that altitude (jobs) would take a long time to regain. This administration sorely needs a narrative that citizens can grasp and accept, otherwise the cynical partisan naysayers will continue to fill the void....
"I came across this, published online by Irwin M. Stelzer on 12/19/2008 in the Weekly Standard (hardly a liberal apologist):
'Bush knows that Obama is inheriting a very difficult economic situation indeed. So does the president-elect. Economists with whom I have spoken--and these are the people listened to at the highest levels in both parties and at Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve Board--believe that the unemployment rate, now at 6.7 percent, will hit double digits sometime in 2009, and stay there well into 2010. They expect house prices to drop another 15 percent and share prices at least another 10 percent before finding a bottom.Worse still, they are predicting an extraordinarily sluggish recovery. Since unemployment is what economists call a lagging indicator--job creation doesn't start until a recovery is well under way--the unemployment rate might remain high well into 2011.'
"None of this is news to you. But if the Weekly Standard could articulate this in late 2008, why hasn't the Obama administration made sure that average Americans understand the "pre-destination" involved with unemployment?"
As an answer to the final question, my guess is that a combined message of uplift and caution is among the most difficult for leaders to convey. Obama and his economic team had to keep sounding optimistic, since so much of a recovery is affected by "animal spirits." But they also needed to acknowledge that for a long time ahead more people would be losing than gaining jobs. The dual message is not impossible, but it's tricky, and as the reader suggests the proper balance has not yet come across.
November 6, 2009
Lavar Arrington: the new Will Shortz
One of many media discoveries about the USA of late 2009 is Lavar Arrington on the radio. (This is a good media discovery. A bad one: the McLaughlin Group is still on the air!!!! Jeesh.) When we left town in 2006, Arrington was a big talent just ending a troubled run with the Redskins. Now, he turns out to be a surprisingly charming and erudite sports-talk host. I find it easier to listen to him when running, in the gym, and otherwise sweating than to absorb the latest news from Afghanistan. (Lavar, left; Will, right.)
Just now, on his show (with co-host Chad Dukes), Arrington was talking about Gregg Williams of the Saints, who was the former defensive guru for the Redskins. He said that even though Williams was gone from DC, his influence remained because he had left behind "his prodigy, Greg Blache," now the defensive coordinator.
That didn't sound right, and I realized after a second that the word he was looking for was "protege." But if Blache was good enough, "prodigy" could also make sense, which leads to the Will Shortz-like question Arrington could have been setting up: I can't at the moment think of another situation in which three words with different meanings that sound very much alike -- prodigy, protege, and (even) progeny - could all sort-of work in the same sentence.
Yes, it's cheating that they sound alike, since they all come from the same pro- root. And yes, progeny is a little different -- but you can imagine it working figuratively. Still it's interesting to me -- and is the kind of thing that occurs when trying to avoid thinking about the team itself, or the next lap on the track. Watch out, Will Shortz!
Ongoing TSA / Security Theater watch
The monthly "Airport Policy News" reports by Robert Poole, of the Reason Foundation, are a steady source of nuggets about economic, technological, and political developments in the aviation world. I would send a link to the latest report I'm about to cite, except that what's online, here, is routinely a few weeks behind what's come out in the newsletters.
I am not a full adherent to the Reason Magazine/Ayn Rand view of the world (I loved her books when I was 14, though!), including some specifics about aviation. But we are as one in dismay about the combination of authoritarianism, empty symbolism, and undiscriminating clumsiness that makes up much of our current TSA policy. See my Atlantic colleague Jeff Goldberg on this point too.
Poole's latest nugget is a GAO report on how the TSA is doing. Links to the full 75-page report and summary highlights are here. The cover page gets across the essential point, which is that years and years into its existence, the TSA is still not basing its screening plans, its strategy, or its technology on assessment of relative risk. That is, if you wonder why the two-year old in a stroller is getting the full pat-down and why so many TSA procedures fail the basic-logic test, it turns out that the GAO wonders those things too.
From its summary:
"TSA completed a strategic plan to guide research, development, and deployment of passenger checkpoint screening technologies; however, the plan is not risk-based. [My emphasis.]...
"Since TSA's creation, 10 passenger screening technologies have been in various phases of research, development, test and evaluation, procurement, and deployment, but TSA has not deployed any of these technologies to airports nationwide.... In the case of the ETP [ a new scanner], although TSA tested earlier models, the models ultimately chosen were not operationally tested before they were deployed to ensure they demonstrated effective performance in an operational environment. Without operationally testing technologies prior to deployment, TSA does not have reasonable assurance that technologies will perform as intended."
Much more from the full GAO report, here in PDF form. I realize that there are bigger emergencies in America right now. But the ongoing impossibility of applying logic to this situation really is discouraging -- or, more positively, is an opportunity for someone in government to address.
"I was sorry to hear about her passing. Four years ago, after reading her book, I wrote to her and she invited me over to her apartment near the Washington Cathedral. I was just finishing up Chinese language training in DC and was about to be posted to Shanghai. I was surprised by how lively and sharp she was. She was 90 but appeared to be 70. She was very well informed about life in Shanghai even though she had been gone for decades. When I asked her if she would ever return she said she had been invited by the Chinese government but she would never return to be used for propaganda purposes. Besides, she said, it would be too painful. She loved Washington.
"After living in Shanghai a couple of years I wrote to her and shared with her my view that Shanghai was a relentlessly materialistic city. She replied that she had been told by her friends that it had become a city without a soul. I offered to send her photos of the places she described in her book but she asked me not to. She didn't want to look back."
From another reader, in response to my comment that over the years I had recognized Nien Cheng several times on the street in northwest DC but had never felt as I should interrupt her to say hello and say that I had been moved by her book:
"I did have the pleasure of meeting Nien Cheng and having a pleasant chat with her in her apartment in Washington. She sent several Christmas cards to me over the years. And yes, she was an elegant lady. You've got that right. It will have to be one of those things you always regret (and we all have them) because I can assure you, she would have appreciated your comment about how much you liked her book. She would not have minded at all. She would have been deeply touched by you telling her so. She exhibited surprise that anyone still remembered her book after so many years when I told her that very thing. But being a person of faith, myself, I would like to tell you that I sincerely believe she is in a place where she knows how you feel. She was a Christian of strong faith. So hold your memories of seeing her dear to your heart. I only got to see her once."
November 5, 2009
The meaninglessness of shootings
One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.
In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.
We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.
RIP.
Nien Cheng
My wife just alerted me to something I had missed in the paper today: news that Nien Cheng had died in Washington this week, at 94.
Life and Death in Shanghai, her memoir of her life in China in the pre-Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her own imprisonment and torture by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was one of the first notable accounts of those years and remains a powerful work of modern non-fiction. Although it has been two decades since I read it, many of the scenes are still vivid. Soon after it was published in 1987, my wife and I were in Shanghai and traced the neighborhoods she had described.
Nien Cheng never returned to mainland China after she got out in 1980, and over the past twenty years she lived mainly in Washington DC. Several times while walking my wife or I had the amazing-each-time experience of passing on the sidewalk a tiny, increasingly frail, but elegant Chinese woman whom we knew to be her. I never dared to say hello or thank her for writing the book, which I now regret all the more. None of her family is left, but her book will endure.
You can probably guess the answer to the question above, explored in this next clip from the Doing Business in China series. But I do love the way this clip gets to the answer, via both its pre-Communist era documentary and movie footage and also its exploration of special role of the "Shanghai woman." I think you will see what I mean.
November 4, 2009
The Prius of the sky
A contest for fuel-efficient small airplanes has a winner: a modified VariEze that gets 45 mpg at over 200 MPH with two people aboard, and nearly 100 mpg at a lower "maximum range" speed.
Details from Wired here, Tree Hugger here, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association last year here. Just as I've always said: to get America moving again, including on the fuel-efficiency front, we've got to get more people up in the air. (Thanks to Michael Ham.)
Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute
Because Alexander Hamilton has always been my favorite Founding Father; because I am in the "actually writing" mode and otherwise away from the internet; because no one else on the Atlantic's team has yet called attention to this; and because it is a very diverting four-minute interlude, here is Lin-Manuel Miranda's tribute to Hamilton from the "White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word" this past May. In case you have missed it.
For more, you can't go wrong with Ron Chernow's great 2004 biography. Now back to, ahem, work.
November 3, 2009
Doing Business in China: An Eastern Perspective
This clip is about numbers, and the varying ways to make sense of them in China. At one extreme the power of numbers is of obvious and unignorable importance. The opening scene of the clip, on a winter day in Shanghai, give a glimpse of the sea-of-people effect of many Chinese cities. On the other hand, neither Shanghai nor Beijing nor any other city in the mainland seems as densely packed as either Tokyo or Hong Kong. The difference with mainland China is that there are so many multi-million person cities across so huge a landmass, plus plenty of well-populated rural areas too.
At the same time, just about any number concerning China is an approximation, from economic growth rates to literacy or environmental readings, or anything else. This clip mainly talks about the implications of that rough-and-ready statistical approach for businesses, but it has international and political implications too.
November 2, 2009
A very good question
A friend who has worked in and written about politics for nearly 40 years writes with this question about assessments of Obama's "disappointing" first year:
"How can the MSM (what's left of it) not "get" that disappointment in Obama over "lack of change" is precisely the object of the GOP in blocking change? Does no one remember Newt Gingrich and the GOP strategy from 1992 to 1994, which actually worked? How can the GOP steal second and third in one play AGAIN and not get nailed this time? I want to scream. In any sensible society, instead of disappointment in Obama there would be intense anger at the GOP, and they'd be forced to knock it off."
The talk about "any sensible society" of course leads us into the realm of what is fancily known as counterfactual theorizing....
All-in-one, nearing the finale
Three more views -- previously here, here, and here. Again the question is: are we going to keep carrying around a grab-bag of devices, each optimized for its own purpose? Or will convenience, technical improvement, etc mean more and more functions in fewer and fewer gizmos.
From a tech-industry reader:
"I think you're wrong; the vast majority of the device market in these kinds of segments will eventually go to all-in-one, "good enough" devices. Sure, people will still buy digital cameras, portable reading devices, etc., but the specialty devices will be for the 10% of uses or 10% of consumers who want special higher quality or particular features--for most people, the simple functionality in a lowest-common-denominator single device will be sufficient.
"An anecdote: circa 1998, I was working on cryptography for mobile devices (my career also includes Apple, and I'm currently an engineer at [famous internet company]. I had a meeting with a number of very senior engineers at Motorola, and this convergence question came up. One engineer pooh-poohed the idea of convergence, and when I asked him explicitly, he asserted that yes, people would carry a cell phone, a pager, and a PDA to solve those specific problems (I envisioned Batman's utility belt).
"You can't even buy a PDA anymore, as far as I know--it's a feature integrated into phones. Pagers are rare and for particular on-call specialties. I now know a number of people who carry a Blackberry for email and a cell phone for calls, but I'm certain that bifurcation is also doomed. I regularly now check my email from my phone, rather than bother to open my laptop, even if it's in the same room."
Another reader in New York writes:
"I agree with you (mostly, as I think that some convergence is inevitable) that no device can be everything to everybody. But here is another counterexample I'm not sure you mentioned - phones and GPS devices: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/technology/companies/29gps.html
"I'm not a big GPS user (I don't even have a car here in NYC), and I am a big Google maps fan, but here I do have to wonder. If the Google Maps for Mobile is going to depend on a good data connection, then I don't really see how it can match a dedicated GPS device which only needs "sightlines" to satellites (assuming of course that there is no brownout... hey, convergence of two of your tech threads!). When we were camping in Acadia National Park this summer, my wife's Google phone had no phone signal, never mind 3G....
"I think Maps for Mobiles is great in densely populated areas, but if I were planning a long trip with lots of detours in rural areas, I don't see how this could be a dedicated GPS with the maps data downloaded previously to the device."
_______ After the jump, one more very long but detailed and interesting pro-convergent case.
A reader sends in a link to this recent post by law professor Orin Kerr, on a ruling about how 4th Amendment protections against "unreasonable search and seizure" apply to email. The central question is whether the government needs to inform individual email users when their messages are seized and read -- or whether it is sufficient to notify their internet service provider or mail service, like Google or Yahoo. According to the logic of the ruling, by the sheer act of sending email, a user has transferred custody of the messages to a third party. Thus notifying the third party -- Google, Yahoo, et al -- is enough, with the sender left in the dark.
As that post describes, the legal comparison-drawing goes in many directions. Is "giving" an email to Yahoo like putting a package in a public storage locker? Is it like putting an envelope in a regular mailbox? Does it matter if the message is encrypted? Etc. But the reader's point is less about the ins and outs of this ruling than about the broader legal/privacy implications of storing information "in the cloud." When you're working in Google Docs, as opposed to using a spreadsheet or document that lives on your computer, have you essentially surrendered custody and control of that information? What if you rely on online "cloud" systems -- Carbonite, SugarSync -- to back up or sync your files? Have you given up custody of those files too? The reader writes:
"Based, in part, on your fondness ["your" referring to me, JF] for storing your documents in "the cloud" via third-party services like Sugarsync, Google Docs, etc., I thought you would this link interesting. [It concerns an opinion] concluding that email messages - even if they are entitled to 4th Amendment protection - can be retrieved by federal law enforcement authorities WITHOUT NOTICE TO THE SUBSCRIBER. The court's rationale - that the ISP is a "third party" rather than a file cabinet inside the target's "home" - would seem to apply perfectly well to documents stored in the cloud.
"My concern about such matters is one big reason I do not rely much on "cloud" services of which you are so fond. It's not that I have much about myself that is all that interesting to third parties. It's that, as a lawyer, I have an ethical obligation to protect client confidences. And - if [this] reasoning prevails nationwide - this becomes impossible to do if I were to receive no "notice" from the ISP that they had received a search (or already complied with) a warrant for my clients' personal stuff.
"To be clear, my clients are mostly indigent disabled people rather than individuals accused of criminal conduct, but - still - these sort of "big picture" issues are what a lawyer thinks about when he or she is deciding whether to make a wholesale migration to Sugarsync or Google Docs. And, for what it's worth, it is why I think Google and Sugarsync would be well served in joining together to lobby FOR a federal statute imposing strict privacy protection on documents stored in the cloud.
"There is no way I'm putting my business docs permanently online until this issue is clearly settled in favor of privacy. It would, in fact, be unethical for me to do so.... While having copies of all your stuff stored in the cloud may be vastly more convenient than having it in your home-office file cabinet - it is a vastly less safe "place" from a privacy standpoint."
I am not equipped to say more about the legal aspects here. But as a matter of politics and policy, I think the reader's recommendation is exactly right. All parties with a stake in developing cloud-based computing -- Google and Microsoft, IBM and Apple, Yahoo and anyone else you can name -- should push for clearer policy statements about keeping things private even in the cloud. People simply are going to store and share more information this way. That shouldn't mean a further, big, automatic, unintended surrender of privacy, and it would be better to set up rules to that effect before there's a big scandal or problem.
Language politics: Germany, Japan, Cote d'Ivoire
Following this item about how China and America had one attitude toward foreigners trying to speak their language, while Japan, France, and (arguably) the Ivory Coast had a different view, some assent, dissent, and elaboration. These are long but if you're interested in language, then the detail is interesting.
About German speakers:
"Vigorous agreement on the American attitude towards foreigners speaking English, as contrasted with (in this case) German-speakers. My mother, an Austrian, always used to watch as my dad, an American, inevitably got mocked in her homeland for his imperfect German accent, and, indeed, imperfect German (which was still pretty good). She notes this would never happen in America -- it is rare for Americans to actively mock a foreigner's accent. When they do, it's usually in a way that somehow includes the foreign speaker. (We have a young family friend who sometimes says a word or two in "Churman" to make fun of her -- but he doesn't know any language but English -- he isn't lording any linguistic superiority over her -- knowing 2-3 languages to him is like ESP, a genuinely remarkable capacity.) Mom always says that the most common American reaction to her accent is a genuinely curious and open, "You have such a nice accent -- where are you from?"
"Those German-speakers aren't being malicious -- something about the relative difficulty of the language instills this attitude in them. It's just hard for a foreigner to avoid mistakes that every educated German-speaker learns to avoid at the age of five. Also, note that in German there is a sharp distinction between "Hochdeutsch" and the vernacular German that the unlettered masses speak, meaning that a fairly substantial percentage of the population isn't even really trying to speak German correctly. English doesn't really recognize any such division -- we're all speaking English, one way or another. (Also, it fascinates me that the dictionary in German is known as the "Fremdwörterbuch" -- the book of foreign words -- you know, those hard Latinate words that you sometimes need to look up -- everyone knows the core German words. Mongrel English treats all words the same, regardless of origin.)
"My mother, whose English in the meantime is excellent (but with an accent), observes that the thing about English is that the first stages of learning the language are easy -- anyone can learn it. And then comes the huge chasm to true fluency. English's vast vocabulary creates endless nuance in expression, which is just damnably difficult to master. But the first stages are easy, a linguistic open-door policy."
About Japanese:
"I agree with your comments about the Japanese language. I am a 2-year
resident of Tokyo with fairly strong Japanese skills. [After some university study in Hiroshima and London] I mastered the
language not by learning it from textbooks, but doing it on my own
will-power. So, by speaking to people in Japanese almost non-stop, by
reading books and newspapers in Japanese, watching Japanese television
programs and listening to Japanese music and the radio, and by making
requests by emails and fax for work in Japanese. Dating a Japanese girl
for 3 years who only spoke Japanese, helped too. (we're no longer
together, but I am grateful to her for the hours we spend talking
together) I'm still learning day-by-day, but I am approaching the
upper-intermediate level."
Chet (shown here), a retired Air Force colonel and math PhD, has been one of the most committed and effective proponents of the ideas of combat developed in the 1970s and 1980s by another retired Air Force colonel, the late John Boyd -- background 
Lilley, who was born in Qingdao and mainly lived in China until age 12, was a very important figure in the modern US-China rapprochement. He was a career CIA agent who served as CIA station chief in Beijing during George H. W. Bush's time as chief of mission there (before the US and China established formal relations). He is the only person to have been ambassador both to the Republic of China on Taiwan and to the People's Republic, in Beijing, which is a convenient shorthand for his maintaining a long-term balance between the positive and the negative aspects of relations between the US and China. He kept working to expand the positive and cooperative potential between the countries, without forgetting or suppressing the areas in which they disagree. This was most notable after the Tiananmen crackdowns 20 years ago, when he was on duty as ambassador in Beijing and forcefully criticized the repression (and offered protection to the dissident physicist 
