"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
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 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.
October 29, 2009
Background on Nook v. Kindle
A person who was involved in Barnes & Noble's launch of the Nook sends this info about its positioning relative to the Kindle and other potential competitors. This person naturally has a bias in favor of the Nook, but this is interesting as a view onto B&N's thinking.
"Nook advantages "- More open with ePub, Android OS, and lending "- My guess is Amazon will copy lending "- In store WiFi. Users can go in stores and access lots of content from entire books to free publications. Len Riggio, founder and CEO of B&N fought to have comfortable seating in the stores and has prevailed against naysayers thought it would waste valuable space. I think you'll see even more space allotted to this. There's lots of space devoted to music that will be replaced with nook areas. "- The color touch display really brings the ease of use to ebooks much as Apple did with iPhones. "- Much larger bookstore that includes Google books "- Holding. Easier to grip with a contoured and soft touch back. Works equally well for right and left handed."
Again, this comes from an interested party, but it's worth bearing in mind as the product hits the market.
October 28, 2009
Health-related follow up: can Asians drink? (UPDATED)
The latest installment of the Doing Business in China series talked about the ritual of drinking-to-the-point-of-drunkness in formal Chinese "business" gatherings. This doesn't always happen, but it happens enough to be a factor in professional life. In my experience, it was even more common in the provinces than in the big cities, and most likely in "getting to know you" dinners involving big delegations. Now a reader in Philadelphia writes with a question about the practice:
"I read your post on Doing Business in China, and I wondered to what extent the prevalence of alcohol in after-hours business gatherings is complicated by the alcohol flush reaction common to so many people of East Asian descent. I am an American of Chinese descent with this particular genetic variation and I find that the unpleasant side effects of alcohol consumption interfere with any desire to drink until intoxication. Given the frequency of this condition, do business people in China simply accept the situation as normal or is there a demurral from overconsumption, where someone may take one drink as a courtesy and then decline politely thereafter, so as to avoid such intoxicating effects?"
The issue here involves an enzyme called acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, or ALDH2. It is part of the metabolic chain for breaking down alcohol, and people who lack it are subject to a kind of "alcohol poisoning." Their face and/or neck turns red, they sweat, they flush and may pass out. Interestingly (and to the best of my understanding), the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse, which is supposed to make drinking so unpleasant that people are forced to swear off, works by mimicking the effect of a blocked ALDH2 enzyme.
Caucasians rarely lack this enzyme, but as many as half the people do among some East Asian and North Asian population groups -- Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians, many Native American groups in the US and Canada. (I don't know about Africans, South Asians, etc.) So at a drinking party in China, you'll typically see some faces turn bright red after a couple of sips.
How do people who have this problem cope? Obviously it depends, but I've seen two main patterns. Some people politely avoid the baijiu or similar high-proof spirits. They stick to tea or hot water or soft drinks. Others plunge right ahead, as if getting drunk is the point (to promote a shared dropping of inhibitions). It's tough work but must be done. Whenever I felt sorry for myself at these rituals, I realized that there were people who were facing even greater challenges. 干杯 - Ganbei!
UPDATE: thanks to reader M.L. a map from a paper in the Annals of Human Genetics showing with dark shade the prevalence of the genetic problem in question. Centered farther south in China than I would have guessed. Mongolia not very much affected. As for adjoining areas, M.L. reports "Central Asians - and I can back this up from direct observation, especially in former Soviet Central Asia, most certainly do not seem to be afflicted with any symptoms of alcohol allergies."
October 27, 2009
Doing Business in China: Drinks and Deals
Ah, drinking in China as part of business negotiations. Where to start... This next installment of the Doing Business in China series is a beginning. It really is true that the purpose of many "business" dinners is for everyone, Chinese and foreign, to become drunk (often on Chinese Baijiu, 白酒, vodka-ish raw spirit). In becoming drunk and lowering defenses, people prove their mutual trust, or something. In any case, it's real. Note the appearance of Chinese beer, on which I often commented during my time of residence, starting about time 0:11. Main point: this sounds like a joke or cliche but actually makes a difference.
This is heartwarming! (From Shaanxi to Carnegie Hall)
This summer I mentioned the mesmerizing experience of hearing lao qiang, "Old Songs," in a middle-of-nowhere rural theater in Shaanxi province in China. The patriarch and star of the troupe I saw was Zhang Ximin, more or less a traditional Chinese counterpart to BB King:
Today I see in the New York Times that he and Zhang Family Band were at Carnegie Hall over the weekend! That's Zhang Ximin in the red shirt in the NYT's picture, below.
This should support some new version of the "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" joke, but I can't think of one at the moment.
The pictures below are from an extremely powerful exhibition by Lu Guang (卢广), a Chinese photographer, about pollution and its effects in his home country. His photos have just won a major prize from the Asia Society. While not all of China looks like what he has depicted, I have seen things exactly like what is shown in these photos, and so has anyone else who has traveled outside the big cities or visited factories and mines. Two samples from Lu Guang's work: a power plant in Inner Mongolia, then a migrant laborer in the coal regions of Shanxi province.
These are pictures to bear in mind the next time you read a "China is an unstoppable superpower with an ability to solve all problems" story; it's worth emphasizing, as I have here and elsewhere, that there is tremendous pressure within China to change course environmentally for the survival of its own people.
Many pending messages in the queue with more info about the measurable health effects, for foreigners and Chinese citizens, of China's environmental situation. Will get to them in due course. Thanks to many people who have sent in notes about the Lu Guang photos.
October 22, 2009
Doing Business in China: A Piece of the Pie
Next in Doing Business in China: the pizza wars! Early in our stay in Shanghai, my wife and I tried to stop in to the Pizza Hut just north of People's Square -- and were turned away, by a head waiter whose face was barely visible beneath his gigantic sombrero. We didn't have reservations, on this routine weekday night -- what were we thinking in trying to get in? This is one illustration of the social and business complications of the pizza business in China, which has been good for Pizza Hut and very rough for Domino's. This segment narrated by Emily Chang, series co-host.
October 21, 2009
I love the English-language Chinese press (chap. 17,825)
An article now buzzing around the China-hand blogosphere: multi-shot photo feature on "Most beautiful Chinese female soldier" from the People's Daily today.
For later discussion: why the PLA often seems less fearsome inside China than when described in Western news reports. Bonus photo collage after the jump.
First-hand experience with Chinese air, pro and con
Following this item yesterday, about this article in the current issue on the health effects of living in China, good-news and bad-news reports from American friends with long experience in Asia.
First, the bad news.
"I check the BeijingAir Twitter every time I'm headed there for work. I thought I'd report an anecdote from a friend who has worked in China since the 1970s and lived there for many years (though moved back partly to raise children in a more healthy environment!). She had MRIs performed on her lungs some time ago and they indicated significant scarring and other damage, despite the fact that she has never been a smoker. She has never complained of any symptoms or health problems but clearly some damage was done."
FWIW, I heard similar stories from a variety of people who had been in and out of China since the 1980s, but I don't know of any systematic data. Maybe I'll have another data point two weeks from now, when my appointment with my own doctor for a welcome-home physical exam finally rolls around. Only has taken three months to get on his schedule! Good thing we don't have Canadian-style socialized medicine in this country, what with its long waiting lists and rationing-by-delay etc.
Now, the better news:
"We were back in China for a couple of weeks this past summer to visit my former students in Beijing and then to travel in Hunan for a week or so. I think the air has improved. It was mostly blue skies, even in Beijing, which I rarely saw when we lived there for 10 months in 2003-04. I think you are right to conclude that expats do get over the problems once they leave. At least we haven't had lasting health problems -- at least not yet."
As a side note, based on my experience anyone who wants to visit Beijing in particular should go in October. Even though the current BeijingAir Twitter reading is deep into the "unhealthy" zone, this seems reliably the nicest time of the year.
October 20, 2009
The air over there
In the new issue of the magazine (subscribe!) I have a short article about a topic I discussed constantly with Chinese and foreign friends over the past few years: how dangerous it is, really, just to live in China. To breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food. Won't spoil the suspense about conclusions in the article itself. But the note below is from a reader whose experience is similar to mine:
"I just returned to the US after a four-year tour in Shanghai. I major reason for returning was that I knew that living over there was terrible for my health. I always told myself that I couldn't live in that poor environment for five years. Aside from the terrible air quality, I did four stints in hospitals for food poisoning.
"But since I have been back, I have found that recovery has been easier than expected. I am now running about four to six miles four times a week. I think it may have been like living at high altitudes - you body gets used to being deprived of oxygen and becomes more efficient.
"Plus, just having the space and good weather adds to the motivation. As I am sure you know."
For perspective, here is today's real-time air pollution map for the US, emphasizing the dangerous small-particulate pollution (PM2.5) plus ozone (O3). Green "good" areas have readings below 50; the yellow "moderate" areas are 51-100; and the little spot of orange "unsafe for sensitive groups" air, near Pittsburgh, is 101-150. Maybe they're reopening the steel works? Most times when I look at this map, it's virtually all green.
Meanwhile, readings earlier today from Beijing, taken by the clandestine "Beijing Air" monitoring station I describe in the article:
The point is that the Chinese readings would be in the red "unhealthy" (151-200) or magenta "very unhealthy" (201-300) zones if they were mapped. Like anyone in Beijing, I've breathed my way through a large number of purple "hazardous" days, with readings over 300.
For the benefit of Chinese readers, let me say for the millionth time that to stress this comparison is not to put down China's successes, underestimate the difficulties of dealing with these problems, deny that a high-pollution phase is part of every move toward industrialization, etc. China's situation is tough, and a lot of forces within the country are working to improve it, as laid out at length here. Instead it's worth emphasizing that the people of China themselves are the ones with most at stake in improving its environment. And because of global effects of climate, as I've also said a million times, it's crucial for the US and China, the two biggest-emitting countries, to work together on energy and pollution issues. Indeed, this is the historically most important business for the two countries to take up.
In the meantime, it's a nice day in DC, so like my correspondent I'll plan to take another run.
Doing Business in China: From Supply Chains to Supply Networks
Next up in the Doing Business in China series: a clip that gives a brief look at one of several central, and complex, parts of the US-China business interaction. This clip has some worthwhile shots of the insides of several Chinese factories -- a relatively new one, and a ponderous old state-owned metal works.
It also introduces an aspect of the "outsourcing" wave that I discussed two years ago in "China Makes, the World Takes": that factories in China, serving US and other foreign customers, are providing a lot of jobs for Chinese laborers, but are also providing a majority of the profits, plus most of the associated design, marketing, R&D, etc jobs elsewhere, especially in the US. The furniture company featured here had never done production inside the US: it was a pure startup, with factories in China and design/marketing/management in the US, to serve a mainly US market. The ramifications of this overall division of labor, and how it might change in the future, obviously go beyond the bounds of this clip (and are considered in the series as a whole, in my book, etc). But this is an opening look.
October 15, 2009
Doing Business in China: Keeping Employees Happy
Next up in the Doing Business in China series: a look at an issue whose importance may come as a surprise to people who have not worked in the country. This is the challenge of keeping Chinese employees, once they have become skilled in factory or white-collar procedures. Among other things it mentions why "Spring Festival," aka Chinese New Year, is the moment of greatest turnover, as workers go to their home villages and then often shop around for new jobs when they return to factory centers. Plus, another cameo by Kaifu Lee!
October 13, 2009
Festival of links, part 1
Before an impending "real," as opposed to false-alarm, absence from this site for a while, because of impending "real" writing, a variety of links about things I've meant to mention. Two now, two or three later in the day.
- Everyone on the China-media beat is aware of the turmoil at Caijing, a unique and important magazine in China. The title means "Finance and Economics"; an English site is here. (Disclosure: one of my sons worked there right out of college, during the SARS epidemic, and I know many of the staff.) Caijing has become a powerhouse in both the business and the journalistic sense. It publishes thick issues and holds big, influential conferences -- but it has also been a crucial leader in real business/financial reporting and exposes of financial chicanery, corruption, pollution, and other topics usually hard for the Chinese press to cover. Evan Osnos, who wrote a New Yorker profile of the founder and sparkplug of the magazine, Hu Shuli, has an update on the turmoil here. Other info from the FT here, from the AP here, from the WSJ (subscription wall) here, from the Guardian here, from the NYT here, and from Yahoo news here. None of this is good news.
- In their respective parts of the Atlantic's site, my colleagues Corby Kummer and Megan McArdle make opposite cases about the effects of New York City's calorie-labeling law. McArdle says it hasn't done any good; Kummer argues that it has already done something and, over time, will undoubtedly do much more. Read and judge for yourself, but one part of Kummer's argument seems obviously true and worth underscoring. He stresses (as did the authors of the original study) that calorie labels -- like mileage labels on cars or electric-consumption labels on appliances -- can make a difference even if customers don't think they're paying attention to them. As the original study said:
"Calorie labeling could result in changes that do not rely primarily on alterations in consumers' food choices. Menu
labeling regulations may encourage chain restaurants to offer more
nutritious or otherwise improved menu offerings, which could be
profoundly influential. [italics Kummer's] Public health experts have
shown that creating "default" incentives to improve well-being is
essential to improving public health. By indirectly influencing
restaurants to offer more lower-calorie items, menu labeling
regulations could help encourage such default options for consumers."
As Kummer added:
"Yuppie avatar Starbucks immediately
changed its default milk from whole to 2 percent, so it wouldn't have
to admit that a Frappuccino could amount to practically as many
calories as you should eat in a whole day... Just this week, [a NYC official] told me... Burger King began a new ad campaign
telling how customers could eat a full meal for 650 calories or less.
McDonalds took .7 ounces and 70 calories out of its standard portion of
french fries. Dunkin Donuts introduced an egg-white breakfast. KFC put grilled skinless chicken on its menu--not something anyone expected to see at KFC."
Again, decide for yourself, but this corresponds to effects I've seen in other areas over the years. Labeling and disclosure in itself has an influence, in encouraging organizations to offer more of what they think will look "good" and less of what looks "bad."
Doing Business in China: What is Communism?
I love this clip, once again from the Doing Business in China series. In particular I love the initial interviews with business people, average folk, Communist Party members, etc. about what this thing called "communism" (共产主义, Gongchan zhuyi) might possibly be. You'll see what I mean. And again this rings true to my daily experience there over the years.
October 8, 2009
Doing Business in China: Kissing in Public
All I'll say about this clip, next in the Doing Business in China series, is that I did in fact frequently patronize the Haagen-Dazs stores shown in Shanghai to get presents of ice cream for my wife. The clip explains why this makes me a romantic-hearted person. The fashion show at the end also gives a little glimpse of why it can seem, well, incomplete to refer to modern China as only a grim land of sweatshops, or a culture under careful control by the central government, et cetera.
October 6, 2009
Doing Business in China: Battling Pirates
Next in the Doing Business in China series: a look at the morass of intellectual property protection, plus ways that some foreign companies have tried to cope with it. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the opening scenes, in which CDs of operating systems and similar big-ticket software items are being sold for a dollar or two, were taken in front of the same high-tech mall in Shenzhen that I wrote about in 2007.
This clip is also notable for the cameo appearances by Kaifu Lee, a very attention-getting figure in the Chinese technology business. During the early filming for this series, he was Microsoft's man in China -- working, as the clip explains, to build relationships that would keep other companies and government ministries from simply stealing Microsoft products. By later stages of the filming, he was directing Google's operations in China. Very recently, he left to form his own VC firm. This clip concentrates on what he did with Microsoft; the whole series covers other companies' answers to the piracy problem.
October 5, 2009
Press items roundup
- TNR/McCaughey watch. As mentioned here numerous times, starting 14 years ago, The New Republic made Elizabeth McCaughey a public figure in 1994 and has been trying to mitigate the damage ever since. Concluding installment, under the circle-closing headline "No Exit" [also the title of McCaughey's original article], from Michelle Cottle here.
- Unknown gigantic cities watch. In my story last year about the surprisingly intense struggles within China to improve environmental protection, I mentioned a visit to Zibo, a coal-and-ceramics center in Shandong province. Zibo is one of countless cities in China that few outsiders have heard of but that are larger than, say, Chicago or Milan. The always interesting Moving Cities site, a Beijing-based effort to document urban design in fast growing cities, recently took a trip to Zibo to show what it looks like. Description and four photo essays about Zibo can be found here. (Note: for me, the Javascript on this site always stalled with Firefox. Worked OK with IE, Chrome, and Safari.)
Downtown view, with housing from the 1980s onward -- horizontal black bar is part of the site's convention for presenting photos:
On the way into town:
Alley that I've walked down myself, with pre-1980s housing:
- Problems of the press watch. I am grateful to Jake Seliger, of The Story's Story site, for a retrospective of my 1996 book Breaking the News. He makes the discouraging but, I think, accurate point that the arguments and criticisms from back in that era are all truer now. I have thought several times about revising or updating the book but have held back for two reasons. One is the shark-like instinct that it's worth always moving ahead to new territory. The other, that the central points to make remain the same; the details would differ and be more depressing.
October 2, 2009
The big parade
As I mentioned in real time while watching the 60th anniversary festivities from Beijing on middle-of-the-night Chinese language TV, the whole event was a surprising relief. It had been shaping up ahead of time as a mammoth and imposing display of military hardware. The hardware and missiles were there -- but there was, to put it mildly, a lot of other stuff too.
As anyone watching in real time can attest, the appearance of this troupe was the first time that Hu Jintao, from the reviewing stand, broke into anything that looked like a relaxed expression:
What this picture (by Diego Azubel / European Pressphoto Agency) tragically doesn't convey is that members of scarlet-miniskirted division were actually goose-stepping.
A wonderful video summary from Dan Chung and Xiaoli Wang, of the Guardian, below, boils the many hours of the parade into four minutes -- and conveys the dramatic shift from tanks-and-missiles, to Mardi Gras/County Fair, at about time 1:55 of the clip.
Two other nice summaries: a live blog from the WSJ's China staff here; and a comparison of the parade to the movie Hangover here.
Here's one of the groups that came soon after the tanks. As I say, I'm relieved to see this chaos diversity, which reflects some of the wild range of Chinese life. Congrats to all involved.
October 1, 2009
Doing Business in China: As Good as Their Word
Next up in the Doing Business in China series, a look at the implications of the heavily freighted term guanxi -- 关系, usually rendered in English as "relationship" and often thought by Westerners to indicate the shadier senses of that term. As the interviewees in this clip indicate, the emphasis on guanxi has evolved in response to China's particular circumstances -- especially, the centuries-long absence of an effective legal system. In the video series as a whole, we talk about the ways in which it persists, and doesn't, in modern China.
September 30, 2009
I take it back
Have been watching live coverage of the 60th anniversary festivities from Beijing for the last two hours (on the local Chinese-language TV station in DC). Nice blue-sky day in town! Yes, they had the giant and threatening-seeming military displays I mentioned earlier.
But they were intermixed among mass pageantry of every imaginable campy Rose Parade-type variety. For each deployment of tanks, there has been a Farmers' Coop float. For each regiment of goosestepping female soldiers, all exactly the same height and with skirts exactly the same length, there has been a group of Clean Energy workers, accompanying a display of wind turbines and solar panels -- or a group of athletes from the Phys Ed university. Plus some pompom group whose ID on the screen I couldn't understand, and miscellaneous other celebrations. And a float from each province or region, with waving local beauties! This is becoming truer to the randomness of China as I think of it. Happy 60th birthday.
Beijing, 3am
Well, we're going to see a lot of these shots in the next 24 hours out of Beijing, as the 60th anniversary celebrations for the founding of the People's Republic take place. This is from a reader looking down Xidawang Lu, not far from our former home, at 3am local time October 1-- a few minutes ago as I write.
This item, "China's Looming PR Disaster," at the Interpreter site from the Lowy Institute in Sydney, makes the point I've made frequently (including once on a live Chinese government TV show in Beijing) since the plans for a gala military parade were announced this spring: In showcasing endless seas of Chinese soldiers and weaponry, the regime may make itself look stronger to its people -- at the cost of looking threatening to everyone else. (Versions of this argument here and here.) As Alistair Thornton says on the Interpreter site:
"I have a sinking feeling that this could turn out to be the worst PR
stunt of all time. To me, it screams, 'Hey! You in the West! How's the
recession? We just nailed 9% growth. Scared of a rising China? Check
out all of our tanks and never-seen-before missiles'. It's not really
the vibe you want to give off in the midst of unprecedented shifts in
geopolitical power."
But the other obvious point is that all politics is local, in China as well as anywhere else, and impressing the home crowd will always outweigh the hand-wringing concerns from the diplomats. So, the show begins. I will leave most further photos to the news services, but thought it was worth kicking off the observations with this pic.
September 29, 2009
Local boys make good, China version
In an article this spring about China's recovery from the world slowdown, I mentioned a visit to the BYD company in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, where a materials-science PhD named Wang Chuanfu was leading the development of advanced battery powered cars.
On that trip I also visited the nice-but-nothing-fancy dorm-style
quarters where Wang and the rest of the BYD management lived. Here's
the punchline from that article (with a shot of Wang from the press
conference in December announcing his new cars):
"The company's official goal is to be the biggest automaker in China by
2015, and the biggest in the world by 2025. Wang's unveiling of the car
in Shenzhen coincided with U.S. congressional debate about emergency
aid to GM and Chrysler. I asked Wang if he had any tips for the U.S.
companies. He is a quiet, nerdish man who seemed to blanch as he heard
the question translated. "For 100 years, nothing has changed in
Detroit," he finally said (through the interpreter). "I think they need
to reconsider their product lines."
Now, according to this report, Wang has become the richest man in China, thanks to a rise in BYD stock and a stake from Warren Buffett. That is a volatile distinction, with people's fortunes rising and falling, but impressive as an up-from-nothing manufacturing success story.
And in this article in 2007, I discussed the amazing Chinese "reality" show Win in China, which was a kind of super-capitalist version of The Apprentice. One of the finalists in the show was an earthy, non-college-grad character named Zhou Yu and generally known as the "Lone Wolf." Ole Schell, who has made a great new documentary about Win In China, has just posted an online report about the Wolf and his lingerie factory in Shandong province. Congrats all around.
The moment of truth on the show, as the Wolf dutifully claps for the just-announced winner, Song "Social Conscience" Wenming, who raises his hands in victory.
Doing Business in China: Porcelain Skin
Next installment in the Doing Business in China series: a look at the cosmetics business in China, in particular the very strong market for skin-whitening creams.
The desirability of "porcelain skin" in China -- like the analogous light-skin beauty images in Japan, the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia, much of India, and much of everyplace else -- has a variety of origins, largely in the tangled realm of basic color prejudice. In this clip we look briefly at a more straightforward source: the association in Chinese history between dark, tanned skin and a manual-labor, agricultural background -- which made untanned, light skin a marker of privilege and status. In practical terms this has significant business implications for cosmetics firms, as the clip suggests.
A nice offhand allusion in the NYT
The third paragraph of Sharon LaFraniere's story today in the NYT, about the Chinese government's obsessive over-preparation for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic, on October 1 (background on the celebrations here):
"China's government at times resembles an exasperated parent trying to
rein in a pack of rebellious children. Its edicts are persistently
flouted by censor-dodging Internet users, wayward local officials and
rioting Uighurs."
Two things strike me about this. First, it's good to see correspondents flat-out saying how things look to them, rather than having to rely on "Some observers say" or "Mr. X of YY think tank observes..." Second, this little context-setting aside is so much more realistic than the standard Western press references to a big, omniscient, all-powerful Chinese regime effortlessly working its will on the populace, whether in a good way by installing green technology or in a bad way by squashing dissent.
Over the past three years, I've emphasized maybe a million times how diverse, churning, individual-minded, and generally resistant to control much of today's China seems. If I were writing LaFraniere's sentence myself, I'd say "often resembles" rather than "at times resembles," and I'd replace the reference to the Uighur uprising (an exceptional, real emergency) with something about one billion rule-evading ordinary citizens. But this is a worthy step toward a sane perspective on China -- worth bearing in mind as we prepare to see the (deceptively) precise and orderly displays on October 1.
Photo from the NYT about the kind of precise pageantry we'll be treated to. Don't be misled.
September 27, 2009
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Besuboru dept
Update: Just after posting the item below I learned of the death of William Safire, who for three decades wrote the NYT Mag's language column, among his voluminous other works. Sorry for a querulous-seeming note under the circumstances. On the other hand, this is the kind of distinction that Safire himself reveled in. My condolences to his family. ___
There is a big risk in writing items on the lines of: "Everybody thinks X, but everybody's wrong. Actually Y is correct." The risk is that, as the corrector, you can be wrong yourself. I know! I've been there before, and no doubt will be again.
Unfortunately, I think that the estimable Jack Rosenthal of the NYT, in today's "Language" column in the magazine, is there too. Most of the column is devoted to correcting widely-practiced misuses of "phantonym" terms -- "disinterested" to mean bored (wrong) rather than impartial (right), etc. I'm with him on all of these! Then he adds this multilingual note:
"The Japanese love besuboru, reflecting the phonetic phenomenon of lallation, reversing "r" and "l." "
Not really. Rather, in keeping with my opening note of caution: to the best of my knowledge and experience, this is incorrect. Japanese fans of the Hiroshima Carp or the Nippon Ham Fighters do indeed refer to the sport as either besoboru or, more formally, 野球, yakyu. But they don't say besoboru because they are switching Ls and Rs. They say it because the Japanese language does not have the L sound. Where English speakers would use either L or R, the Japanese language has only R.*
Therefore when Japanese people speak English, they often have trouble with Ls and may even "lallate," mixing up Ls and Rs. Much as English speakers, raised in a language with no gender, often mix up le/la or der/die/das in gendered languages like French or German. But when they're speaking Japanese, they say besoboru because that's the way their language works. (And if Rosenthal meant that the change wasn't caused by lallation but simply illustrated the use of an R where there had been an L -- OK. But it's still a bad illustration, since both Ls and Rs in English will become Rs in Japanese. Saying that it illustrates lallation implies that Rs would become Ls in Japanese -- Balaku Obama, etc. That doesn't happen.)
OTOH, a very nice homage to one of my long-time Atlantic friends and colleagues in the Cox-Rathvon acrostic in the same magazine today, and a lot of unusually elegant clues. Check it out. ___ * Primer on Japanese sound system here and here. As anyone who has studied the language knows, its syllabary has the ra / ri / ru / re / ro sequence of R sounds, but nothing involving Ls.
Foreign words are often brought directly into Japanese and and converted to Japanese phonetics -- in contrast to Chinese, where the concept behind the foreign word is often re-rendered in Chinese. Thus "computer" is konpyuta (コンピュータ) in Japanese, but dian nao, "electric brain," (电脑), in Chinese. And thus in China I had a whole invented Chinese name with little relation to my original name, whereas in Japan, within the limits of Japanese sounds, my last name became ファローズ, Fuarohzu.
September 25, 2009
Weight, class, and Wal-Mart
From a friend in Boston, a note that gives an extended version of a theme in many responses I've received. Background here and here. Charts and data on this point shortly. The argument here -- that, along with smoking, obesity has become a class-bound marker and problem in America -- is hardly surprising, but the power of the connection is what many people emphasize.
"i wonder if your seeing fewer overweight people than you expected when you got back to the states might be, at least in part, a function of class. this is a point i'm somewhat uncomfortable making, but it shouldn't be ignored. people who, just as a for instance, run and listen to npr and read (not to mention write for) the atlantic are both likelier to be fit and likelier to associate with people of the same ilk. (as a nation, we've not only gotten fatter but also, as you know, much less likely to mix with people who don't share our educational or cultural background.)
"i remember walking through harvard yard back in 1986 during the university's celebration of its 350th anniversary. the place was awash in alums, and there was something noticeably different about most of these people. it wasn't that they were expensively dressed or looked like preppies, i realized. it's that almost everyone was so *trim.* none of these people would likely be found shopping in wal-mart, where waistlines look a lot different.
"as an aside: i've long thought it would be an interesting commentary on the stratification in this society to have political candidates asked during a debate if they'd ever shopped at a wal-mart. i have to think that very few could honestly answer yes--and the higher the office the fewer the yeses. to think that a democracy's leadership class should have no connection (other than owning stock--or, in hillary clinton's case, being once on its board) to the biggest corporation in the country, how strange! back when the biggest corporation was gm or exxon, even the wealthiest people likely had *some* dealings with it, even only being chauffered in a cadillac."
To answer the last question: I'm not a political candidate, but I have not only shopped in W-Ms around the US but have also been to many outlets inside China. That's a story on its own -- the one in Shanghai has whole pig carcasses suspended by hooks right inside the front door, and tanks full of live carp, which the shopper-housewives let flop around on the floor to see which ones look best for the evening's dinner. No one will ever convince me that W-M doesn't know how to globalize/localize.
But I digress. To sharpen my friend's question: a candidate should be asked when was the most recent time he or she enjoyed Every Day Low Prices.
Reactions on Chinese tires
In this item two days ago, I mentioned that most of the mainstream economics press had gone (predictably) berserk in overreacting to the shock-horror nightmare of the Obama administration's tariff on imported Chinese tires.
First point: I neglected to mention the honorable exception of Andrew Peaple, reporting in the WSJ and playing down "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" hysteria from the start. The online version of his initial story:
"WSJA(9/15) Heard On The Street: Tires, Chickens, Common Sense
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA)
By Andrew Peaple
"Fought over the likes of bras and bananas, trade wars always give off a whiff of the absurd.
"With a measure of good sense, a spat between the U.S. and China
involving tires and chickens won't devolve into a trade war as well."
Unfortunately, the version of the story that is now online has a much more alarmist headline, though the common-sense content of the article itself is still the same. Here's the new headline:
Next, from someone with on-scene experience, making a point left out of most of the reflexive, "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" original coverage
"I was a senior International Trade consultant with 2 major firms in China 2003-2007. Approximately one third of the over 100 projects I managed during that four year period involved assisting foreign companies (US, EU, some Japanese) in defending themselves against either investigations by, or anti-competitive practices perpetrated by, the Chinese Customs authorities.
"I believe that I can safely say that without fail, each project of this type that I was involved in was predicated by a distortion or willful misunderstanding of both Chinese and WTO/WCO trade law and operational norms by the Customs authorities. Nor were these actions limited to provincial backwaters (though the most egregious did take place there); many of our projects involved Shanghai or Beijing Customs entry ports. Practices such as demanding improper HTS classification of goods (HTS classification determines applicable duty rate) or arbitrary valuation of goods (the Customs declared value upon which duty and VAT are assessed) are practiced daily throughout the country and cost foreign companies substantial amounts.
"I very seldom see this issue addressed in any article concerning China trade and thought I would bring it to your attention."
Main point: this is a far more complicated issue, with a far longer and more tangled history, than 95% of the western-press reaction would indicate. I urge everyone to keep up with this "China Financial Markets site before expressing heated opinions on the subject.
Update: there's actually no material after the jump; original posting included some background notes, by mistake. But our system retains the "continue reading" link even with nothing there any more.
I will never do this systematically, so I'll keep jotting them down at random. As I repatriate, I notice:
- Not as many very fat large Americans as I was expecting. Am I looking in the wrong places? So propagandized into thinking that all of my countrymen are obese that expectations are off? Something gone wrong with my visual judgment? Something gone right with public health? I don't know. Just telling you what I have (not) seen.
- In a number of airports the past few days. I can't help noticing the moronic, utterly rote and meaningless announcements that begin, "The Department of Homeland Security has determined that the threat level is Orange. Please be alert..." The way you can tell that I'm still not fully acclimated is that I notice the announcements at all. For everyone else, they are 100% white noise. Is there a stupider aspect of national policy at the moment than these formulaic "threat level" announcements, which are always orange and which give no useful info whatsoever? Okay, I'm sure there's something stupider, but for rhetorical purposes I'll say that I can't think of one right now.
- When I am king: I will outlaw "wheelie"- style rollable bags for carry-on luggage. Wheels and a handle on a big, heavy suitcase meant to be checked? Perfectly reasonable. But if you're going to carry something onto the plane, the law should require you actually to carry the thing, all the way to your seat. Why do I care? The wheelie triples or quadruples the floor space occupied by any one person, and the people tugging them don't look behind. I get my revenge by kicking the bags as they're being dragged across my path and tripping me. Then I act like it was an "accident."
- But even before that I will outlaw: leafblowers. God in heaven, do I hate that noise. Unfortunately, the neighborhood abounds in households that love hiring crews for the all-out leafblower experience -- they stagger their days, so it happens pretty much nonstop. I realize that the Beijing approach (below) is probably not practical in the U.S. But, hey, I actually have used a rake in my time. Part of the new Clean Energy policy for America?
As is obvious, I'm auditioning for Andy Rooney's role as public crank.
If you're in Princeton this afternoon....
... go hear Zhang Yue, the environmentalist-mogul who was the subject of my story "Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town," give a talk at the university. Time and place details here.
Zhang Yue, in sunglasses, when I first visited "Broad Town," his surrealistic factory town in Changsha, Hunan province. More pictures and narrated slideshow here.
September 23, 2009
About those Chinese tires
I keep putting this off, so before it finally disappears into the mists of time, here is a bullet-point summary of what I would have said at greater length when the Chinese tire tariff first arose.
1) There is not now, and there never was, a serious possibility that this would escalate into some sweeping, self-intensifying, global-recovery-threatening "trade war." The many publications and commentators who raised their hands in "Oh no! It's Smoot Hawley again!" horror need to calm down -- and to have their tendency toward over-reaction noted for the record. Yes, I'm talking about you, Economist magazine cover-designers (last week's cover image, below), but you had tons of company.
There is too much going on, on too many other fronts, involving affairs of incomparably greater consequence between China and America, for this to have been more than a contained, specific dispute -- contained in both duration and sweep. This was clear at the time and should have buffered the shock-horror tone of the stories. Why this matters: because of the boy-who-cried-wolf principle. There are issues between China and the outside world in which a small disagreement could spiral into a very dangerous confrontation. Many of these involve Taiwan, for reasons to be spelled out another time. But tire tariffs, agree with them or not, were never going to set off a global economic confrontation.
2) Larger point about the nature of this reaction, by analogy to Al Sharpton. Not to pick on him, but why did Sharpton's reputation as a careful, precise commentator on national affairs suffer during the 1980s? Especially after the unfortunate Brawley case? I would say it was the magical combination of predictability, exaggeration, and tendentiousness. His reaction to any news event was predictable (it was always about racism); it was exaggerated (it was always really terrible racism); and it was tendentious, in being uninterested in the details of the specific case. On the other hand, he was witty! I often think of the bad, non-witty side of the Sharpton of that era when I see the mainstream reaction to any trade dispute. It's predictable (oh no! Trade war!); exaggerated (oh no! Smoot Hawley!); and tendentious, in not being interested in any contextual point other than the evils of unions and protectionism.
3) What's the context that does matter? Usefully, two people with whom I often disagree on trade questions -- the former editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, and Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post -- have both pointed out that there is a more important issue here than whether one agrees on the merits of the tire decision. They both criticize the decision -- but as the headline on Samuelson's column puts it, "Bad Policy, Right Message." (My own view would be: Maybe bad policy, certainly right message.)
The right message concerns the historic transformation of the Chinese economy that began a year ago, when demand from its biggest overseas customer, the United States, dried up all at once. This story, which I wrote from China six months ago, discussed the magnitude of the adjustments China was trying to make -- and also emphasized the parallel that Michael Pettis, an economist at Peking University, drew between China's situation in 2009 and America's 80 years earlier. The details are laid out in that article, but the main point was this: Like America in the 1920s, China in the 2000s had been the dominant "global surplus" country, manufacturing and selling to everyone else and piling up big surpluses. When customers suddenly stopped buying -- America's because of the Great Depression, China's because of this recent freezeup -- the surplus countries lost disproportionately many jobs, because they'd had more than "their share" to begin with. That happened to America in the 1930s, and it is happening to China now.
This kind of loss is painful for any country under any regime. In terms of human suffering, it's all the worse for China, since so many of the displaced workers are so hard-pressed to begin with. In the long run, everyone agrees that both the Chinese and the U.S. economies need serious adjustment: the US toward more savings and investment, China toward more domestic consumption and less reliance on export markets, so that its own, still-poor population can enjoy more of the fruits of their own labor. But in the short run, the adjustment is difficult -- for each country. And the drama that Pettis foresaw six months ago, and which provides the proper background to the tire dispute, is the Chinese government's (natural) attempt to resist the inevitable and keep its trade surplus up as long as it can.
That's the significance of stories like this, which I've mentioned (eg here and here) over the months.
This is not at all a matter of "blaming" China. Moralizing has no place in these sorts of economic adjustments -- whether we're talking about the Chinese government's currency-management to keep the RMB's value artificially low (details here), or the US imposition of tire tariffs. The real question is how the economies can manage the complementary adjustments each of them has to make, with minimal damage to their own populations and to world business as a whole. These are big, woolly, complicated, world-historical processes underway. There are a lot of useful things to say about them -- not including "Oh no! Trade war!"
Doing Business in China: The Elusive Chinese Internet
Next up in the Doing Business in China series: what to make of the positive and negative effects of China's embrace of the internet. My Atlantic article about the subject last year is here; previous entries about the series here. This clip, and the related parts of the series, go into some of the related and subsequent developments.
September 21, 2009
I love this on so many levels
It turns out that the "Chinese site" with dramatic photos of rehearsals for the 60th anniversary commemorations in Beijing on October 1, which I mentioned this morning, is a straight-ahead, flat-out, unblushing rip-off of this "The Big Picture" feature three days ago from the Boston Globe's site. I don't see any mention of the Globe on the Chinese site, either in English or what I think is the Chinese version (Boshidun Huanqiu - 波士顿 环球 ?).
I should have guessed. (Why would a Chinese site have bothered to include translated English captions? Why was there a semi-edgy photo of a lone man and a tank?) My reflexes must be going. I'll have to re-sharpen them with a visit soon. Thanks to C. Wang and others for the heads-up. Apologies to the Globe.
Book list: Repeat After Me
Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing -- a memoir of her unlikely career as a vampy soap opera star on Chinese TV in the 1990s -- is deservedly on the list of books that expats in China tell new arrivals they should read for a pop-culture feel of the place. My own reaction, when newly arrived, here.
DeWoskin's new book, Repeat After Me, is different: novel rather than memoir, set half in New York and half in Beijing rather than all on-scene in China. But the voice and nervous/sassy sensibility are similar, and similarly memorable. When I was reading it this summer, I marked a few passages that made me miss Beijing (no small achievement, just after I'd left) or that rang particularly true. The book's not at hand at the moment, so I'll just say: a book worth finding out about for yourself.
The 60th anniversary celebration is almost here!
From this Chinese site, with English translation, some appropriately amazing pictures of the preparations and practice runs for the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on October 1. (Previous mention here.) A few samples:
Nightime practice drill last month.
Tank practice parade two days ago
An unintentionally evocative picture of a lone man and a tank.
And a photo of a women's militia unit that is more in the spirit of the way I usually saw soldiers (and people in general) carrying themselves in China.
This should be interesting. Very sorry I won't be there to see it in person. (Thanks to various readers in China.)
September 19, 2009
Harmonic convergence dept: frogs, China Daily, etc
I realize this may be more interesting to me than to the public at large, but: Somehow I feel fulfilled to find my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, taking my favorite factually-erroneous cliche, the boiling frog, and putting it to excellent and unexpected use. Today's China Daily illustrates the frog problem -- but, for once, in an accurate way! As the water is getting hotter, the little froggies are jumping right out. Just like in real life, except for the tiny backpacks. (Parachutes?)
The editorial is about universities in Australia making things "hot" (get it?? ho-ho!) for international transfer students, including those from China. Great headline too: Well done all around. Let's learn from Asia! Thanks to numerous informants.
_____ Harmonic convergence part deux: Article six years ago in another of my favorite publications, Legal Affairs, that melds boiling frogs and slippery slopes in a less factually scrupulous way.
September 18, 2009
Why the China Daily will always be my favorite newspaper
I miss the joy of opening it each morning so much!
Full story here; earnest Onion-worthy comments here; thanks to Shanghaiist, here.
September 17, 2009
DVD series: The World's Factory
Next up in the Doing Business in China series (previous entries here): a look at China's factories.
What I like about this segment (not including the load of industrial goo slathered on my hair by a well-meaning Shanghai stylist just before filming, but I digress) is its emphasis on the elements other than cheap labor that have been crucial to China's manufacturing success. Yes, $10-a-day factory wages give Chinese producers a big edge. As I explained in the magazine two years ago, they also affect the way the whole production process is planned and laid out. Eg: Some functions that would always be mechanized in the US, Japan, or Europe are done by hand in China, because the cost of the machines isn't worth it. This has its disadvantages, yet it also can allow Chinese factories to switch from product to product much faster than a more "modern" facility could.
But there are a lot of places with much cheaper wage rates than China now. The Chinese advantage over such places -- Cambodia, Bangladesh, much of Africa -- is the combination of relatively cheap labor and absolutely superb production infrastructure. Ports, industrial zones, highways headed to airports, whatever else it takes. This clip mentions the issue; the whole series goes into it at some length, and gives you an idea of what these factories look like on the inside.
September 14, 2009
DVD Series: Carrots in the Washing Machine
Here's the third clip from the Doing Business in China series; previous ones here. All the clips are my favorites, but this one is a particular favorite. It's a look at one of the big unknown issues for China's commercial future: whether, how, and when its companies can rise out of the pure low-cost commodity-supplier role to have valuable brand names of their own.
The starting point is the "white goods" manufacturer Haier, which absolutely dominates the Chinese domestic market for washers, fridges, and so on and is becoming better known world wide. The segment title refers to one of its breakthrough innovations. Bonus in this clip: a cameo of Kai-Fu Lee, who once directed Microsoft's research labs in Beijing, and who until last week headed Google's offices in China, before resigning to set up his own VC firm. I first met him when I worked at Microsoft ten years ago and saw him frequently in China. More later; enjoy this clip for now.
September 12, 2009
Another traveler to Yunnan
In my story in the current issue about Xizhou, a small but historically prosperous and architecturally rich village in far southern China, I mention the cautionary example of the city of Lijiang. In the 1990s, Lijiang was also small and charming. Now, most foreign visitors instantly recognize it as a combination of Atlantic City, a discount mall, and a turnpike rest stop. The Chinese domestic tourism industry, which is developing very fast, is in the stage where it is processing huge numbers of necessarily low-end travelers. As sites become popular, many of them end up looking like Lijiang. That's the fate the friends of Xizhou are trying to avoid.
Kevin Kelly, "Senior Maverick" at Wired, has traveled widely in Asia, including to both Lijiang and Xizhou. That's his picture of "old" Lijiang, to the left. His account:
"Every regular visitor to China has their own story of headsnapping change. Mine has to do with Lijiang. I
first visited Lijiang in the mid 90s on a month-long trip with my two
daughters who were 8 and 10 at the time. Lijiang was our starting point
for an excursion into the north beyond what is now called Shangrila
(Zhongdian back then) into the Tibetan areas around Litang. I've spent
a lot of time in the Himalaya and so was quite taken by Lijiang. It
seemed to have everything a Shangrila was supposed to -- views, climate,
music, and a strong unique, even isolated, culture. One could see how
the fantasy began there. I wanted to return with my wife and son
someday.
If you thought the Olympic opening ceremony was impressive...
... just wait for the parades and public ceremonies in Beijing on October 1, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
For the past few months I've heard from university contacts in China about students being marshaled for long drill sessions before the massed exercises for the 60th anniversary celebrations. Courtesy of Glenn Mott, this slide show (text in Chinese) of soldiers, police, and others getting ready for the big day. Eg, soldiers being checked with tape measures and plumb lines to be sure they're standing straight.
More pictures in the same vein, from Sohu, here -- for instance:
I can't emphasize enough how much this is not the way most Chinese life seems most of the time. The main mental pictures I recall are people doing their own thing, in their own way, with only reluctant and enforced attention to the "rules." But, as with the Olympics, it is certainly the face that official China wants to present -- even if the effect is to make foreigners unrealistically alarmed about a big, single-minded, perfectly-organized Rising China emerging to crush all in its path. Since so many of the people working in unison on October 1 will be actual soldiers carrying weapons, the international fluster effect will be all the greater. Check out the two minute video here (sometimes slow to load) from the 50th Anniversary commemorations ten years ago, for the general idea.
If I were a US defense contractor, I'd show that video at every Congressional hearing about the "Chinese threat." But since, as always, the Chinese government cares a million times more about looking strong, successful, and in control to its own people than about whatever foreigners might think, we'll soon see endless waves of goosestepping soldiers. Then life will get back to normal.
September 11, 2009
From the magazine: Field of dreams in China
The new issue of the Atlantic is worth reading cover to cover -- and IMHO better read on paper than on line. For sometime soon: talking systematically about what kind of material is best read, scanned, absorbed, enjoyed in what kinds of media - handheld, computer screen, "real" print, Kindle-style reader, and so on.
For the moment, a mention of my own very short article in this issue: a profile of an American family that has ended up in one of the most beautiful parts of China, trying -- against considerable odds -- to put together a coalition of local residents, Communist party officials, businesses, and NGOs to preserve traditional Chinese culture against the onslaught of kitsch-style development otherwise transforming the country's look. Their adopted home town is Xizhou, in the lush, southerly Yunnan province, and this is one view of their "Linden Centre," with local kids biking by.
More on Brian and Jeanee Linden and their ambitions here, and a four-minute narrated slideshow of the town, the center, the family, and the challenge is below (or here). That is Brian Linden, who first became known in China 25 years ago when cast in a movie about a famous and tragic US-Chinese interaction, in blue jeans and white shirt in the opening shot below.
September 10, 2009
Two quick updates: flu in China, 64-bit code
Flu: Over the months, I have frequently remarked on the difference between the Chinese government's approach to H1N1/swine flu and that of many other countries. Difference in brief: the Chinese government has applied sweeping quarantine measures to try to keep the disease out of the country and then to limit its spread; many other countries have viewed the spread as more or less unavoidable and have tried to cope with the consequences.
(Photo from this previous post, about visiting Americans quarantined in Shanghai.) In all countries the emerging view seems to be: the flu has not been that dangerous so far, during this atypical, spring time emergence (in the Northern Hemisphere). But it might be a more serious problem when it comes back in new form during the regular flu season, as the weather gets cold.
A reader who has recently been in Beijing writes to make a point I have heard from a number of health professionals too:
"I'm not an immunologist or anything remotely close. But I wonder if China is actually hurting themselves by so aggressively stopping the spread of H1N1. The current incarnation of H1N1 seems to be less lethal than the variants that we normally deal with. Wouldn't it be better to let this variety of H1N1 spread so that people build up immunity to this mild version of H1N1 and then if H1N1 becomes more lethal they will already have some immunity?
"By the way, while I was at university this summer in Beijing, a student living on the sixth floor of a dorm became ill with H1N1 and the police came with buses and removed about 60 people from that floor."
The argument from the Chinese authorities is that in a big, poor country with a shaky public health network, they have no choice but to fight a new disease with everything they've got. Memories of the under-reaction to SARS in 2003 also have a Hurricane Katrina-style "let's not make that mistake again" effect. Given the inconvenience many people, Chinese and foreign, have already suffered in the name of flu control, I hope the hyper-aggressive early response to the flu doesn't backfire.
64-bit code: Last week, I declared a moratorium on discussion of "huge pages" in Apple's operating systems. (Hey, it was interesting at the time.) The reply below, for nerds only, qualifies in the spirit of fair-response. A reader writes:
"I have nothing to add to the "huge pages" discussion. I promise.
"But I would like address Mr. [Ken] Broomfield's closing statement which, I believe, is misleading:
Here is the second in the series of "Doing Business in China" clips. As I have argued many many times, most recently here, the first step toward sanity in dealing with "China" is to recognize that there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands of separate realities all lumped together under that one label. This clip eases us into that concept by talking about the first big division -- between the modern, urban China we mainly hear about in the outside world, and the very different place where most Chinese citizens actually live. Click "play" for more....
Remaining holiday-festival updates, #9 - 999, all in one place
Labor Day weekend has, sigh, reached its close, and with it the feeling of summer. To clear out the list of update topics for this weekend-long festival:
- #9Striking gold in China. I mentioned previously my skeptical response to the story of Americans showing up in China and suddenly finding great jobs. Seems that this was pretty much the response by the expat community in China too. See this and this from last month -- plus after the jump, a reply today from someone who showed up a year ago in China and has put the "Chinese streets are paved with gold" hypothesis to the test.
- #10Is China (unfortunately) starting to learn from the TSA? Secondly after the jump, an account of a new wrinkle in Chinese airport security: having passengers take off their shoes, just like in the U.S. Not sure whether this is a local aberration or the beginning of a new policy. - #999 President Obama speaks to the schoolchildren. I was all in favor of this earnest buckle-down, back-to-school pitch until I saw the way the presentation ended. Sigh. And that brings us to the end of this holiday weekend special! _____
Festival of updates #8: Chinese/US attitudes on race, flu
These are both big, complicated topics, but to catch up on recent developments in each:
- I mentioned many times last year that there seemed to be less excitement about Barack Obama's rise in China than in, say, Europe or Africa, and that this was due at least partly to racial attitudes.* Many Chinese people with experience in America appreciate the centrality of black-white relations in the story of America's development. For instance, in a profile of Gao Xiqing, who directs the Chinese government's vast investments in the U.S., I mentioned that he has a small portrait of Martin Luther King over his desk in Beijing. (Gao went to law school at Duke.) But in my experience, many ordinary people with little exposure outside China freely expressed anti-black racial attitudes. During the 2008 primary season, this turned up as a kind of puzzlement about whether a black candidate could plausibly have the skill, sophistication, knowledge, work habits, etc to stand up to veteran opponents like Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
That's the context in which to read the stories about the hard times faced by a (beautiful) young Chinese model-aspirant whose mother is a Han Chinese from Shanghai and whose father was a black American. The girl, Lou Jing, is at right, and her mother at center in this picture:
Stories from last week here, in the Straits Times in Singapore (thanks, C. Tan), and from the Shanghaiist site here. A summary (in English) of some of the harsh Chinese on-line chatter at this site, which was also the source of the picture. Discussion of parallel situations in Korea here. The ChinaSmack site, which translates a lot of blog material into English, is said to have a discussion here, but for whatever reason I can't get it to load.
UPDATE: The China Smack link did finally come up, which has a lot of trenchant material, including what is claimed to be a statement by Lou Jing herself, plus this additional and additionally charming photo:
To be clear about the context: this is not a "blame China" episode but rather one of many illustrations of the differences in day by day social realities and perceived versus ignored sources of tension in particular societies. That's all to say about it for now.
- In the same "varying realities" vein, I mentioned repeatedly through this spring how H1N1/swine flu was being taken as a huge public-health emergency in China, leading to extraordinary gestures of what most foreigners considered heavy-handed security-theater. But inside China, the prevalent perception was that the government was taking all necessary and proper steps -- while the US was being self-indulgently and irresponsibly lax, letting infected people roam free to spread disease wherever they went. I'm judging this by what I saw in the Chinese press and by the voluminous complaint messages I received from Chinese readers.
That is the context for this item by James Areddy of the WSJ last week, concerning an inflight-video on a Chinese airline flight explaining what a "shame" it is that flu virus has been spreading from America. As Areddy points out, the video refers to mei zhou -- 美洲, "the Americas" -- as the source of infection, rather than mei guo, 美国, "America." So maybe it's Mexico-US-Canada NAFTA-solidarity in blame. On the other hand, the English subtitles say "America." In any case, interesting as a reminder of difference in attitudes. This will matter more, of course, if the flu comes back in a more lethal form this fall. (Photo by Areddy from his item:)
___ * In part, it also reflected the long-standing Chinese assumption that Democrats will be tougher than Republicans on trade policy, and the preference for sticking with known figures in US politics. Hillary Clinton was much better known to the Chinese public and officialdom than Obama was, and thus she seemed the safer bet from their point of view.
September 6, 2009
Festival of updates #7: NYT hit-and-miss
Catching up on one NYT item that rang exactly (and surprisingly) true, and another with a different effect:
Sounds true to me: A "good news" item that stayed on the "most popular" list for a very long time. Its news was that years and years of running can actually protect and strengthen your knees, rather than inevitably pulverize and destroy them. I am here as a one-man long-term-longitudinal study to say: yessir!
Except for the past three years-of-smog in China -- lest we forget: Easter Day, 2009, in Beijing, shown at left -- I have been running many times a week for many decades. I shudder for various reasons to realize that I ran my first Boston Marathon 40 years ago. As the body-odometer has gotten into the tens of thousands of miles, I've logged problems with: Achilles tendon (too often -- hmmm, I wonder if there should be some term for a point of chronic weakness); hamstrings or calf muscles (periodically, including now); shin splints or ankle issues (rarely); etc. But knees, which I'd always been warned would be used up by running? No problems, at all. (As opposed to my dad -- who played college football and for the next 60 years coped with trick knees.) Now that actual medical research has confirmed that this is the expected result rather than a fluke, my knees feel even better. So can yours!
On the other hand: we have this story last month, which suggested that if young Americans couldn't find jobs at home, all they had to do was move to China and they'd shortcut into positions of responsibility. I'm here to say: Well, sort of.
Is China exciting enough that people should go there? It sure is. Can young people with no background in China or Chinese find work quickly? Probably so -- if they're willing to teach English. (And can get a visa -- whole different topic.) And if they stay and learn the language, lots of other opportunities often do turn up. Really, for Westerners in their 20s it's hard to think of a better investment of a few years than going to China, learning what it's like, becoming comfortable with Chinese ways and Chinese people, facing its discouraging realities but also sharing its sense of possibility.
But the idea that many non-trained grads will find "good" jobs -- eg, ones where the Chinese employer regularly pays them? Or that it's realistic to go from zero to "highly proficient" in Chinese language in a short time? Or that young foreigners will be insulated from the, ummm, idiosyncrasies of typical Chinese accounting and business practices? Those all seem a stretch. This kind of "land of gold!" account of today's China has a touching parallel to the "gold mountain!" accounts of prospects in America that have historically drawn Chinese migrants across the Pacific. Both are accurate in spirit, but potentially misleading on details.
September 4, 2009
Festival of updates #2: China business!
Recently I mentioned an enjoyable discussion session at the Motley Fool, which is available in this podcast. Today there was a followup analysis here,
at the Fool's site. The low-road reason I mention it is that it's very complimentary about my assessment of life and business in
China. But there's a high-road reason too, which involves an aspect of making sense of China
that, IMHO, needs to be stressed again and again, even if you've
already stressed it a lot -- as I certainly have.
This aspect,
which indeed can never be stressed strongly enough, concerns the chaos,
diversity, internal contradiction, unknowability, and general "many
different countries and cultures coexisting under one name" nature of
today's China. It's harder to keep track of such a confusing
reality than it would be to say, "We must be afraid of China" or "The
Chinese want XXXX" or "With its new power, China will do YYYY." But it
is certainly more interesting and stimulating to embrace all this
contradictory reality than to stick to a monolithic view of one big, "rising," potentially menacing power. It is also much truer to life. In any case, I am glad
to see the Motley Fool analyst underscoring this point. And I think the author of this item, Sean Sun, has added a very interesting born-in-China perspective. As he says:
"I was born in China and raised in its countryside in a small,
mountainous village. I've worn a suit and tie in tier-1 metropolises,
donned hard hats in tier-2 and 3 cities, and marveled at the rapid
growth in rural areas like my hometown. When someone wants to ask me
about China, I ask: Which one?"
Worth reading, as part of your holiday weekend fare.
September 2, 2009
My visit to the Motley Fool
A week ago, when for unrelated house-reconstruction reasons I was comatose from no sleep, I had a very enjoyable hour-long visit with the staff of the Motley Fool, at their stylish HQ in Alexandria, Va. This was part of their Motley Fool Conversation series. A podcast of the result is available here. I realize that I may have been snarkier-sounding about the future of Twitter than reasoned analysis would support. But, hey, I was only half awake! And it was at the Motley Fool. Most of the talk was about China, with side notes about Microsoft, speechwriting, the Future of the Atlantic, and so on.
Seriously, most TV and radio talk shows could take useful interviewing tips from these guys. A very enjoyable exchange, at least from my point of view.
September 1, 2009
The Real China
Starting this week and through the fall, the Atlantic's site will have a series of clips from the DVD series "Doing Business in China" in which I was involved before moving back to the United States. I'll have more to say shortly about the background of the project, and what I view as its potential importance. For now I'll just say thanks to: Bob Schapiro and Dovar Chen, who figured out how to get the original and quite startling video footage inside Chinese factories, bureaucracies, stores, etc over the past few years; Joe Nocera of the New York Times, who appears on the films in "what it all means" discussions with me after each segment; and Emily Chang, on-camera co-host. I'll also mention that when we were filming some of the narration in Shanghai, it was hot and humid beyond all belief, and we were standing in direct sun on a rooftop. More to come, and I will say that I learned a lot about China through the process of working on this project.
1) Demonstrating the mathematical theorem that TSA+Google Ads = unintended comedy, reader Andrew Hall shows what happened when he clicked on the trailer for the Hilary Swank / Amelia Earhart film:
In case you can't read it, the pop-up ad says: "Homeland Security: Become a TSA Scanner by Earning Your Degree in Homeland Security." I hope it's a joke -- I mean, including the "Degree in Homeland Security." But I fear it is not. FWIW, my pop-up ads on the same trailer were all for the WaWa grocery store chain.
2) I said that the Grace McGuire story had a happy ending. After TSA security-theater threatened to close down her reconstruction of an Amelia Earhart-type plane, the pre-approved crew from a San Diego museum had taken over the task. A reader begs to differ:
"Happy ending..." you say, at the end of today's piece.
But probably not for the "....variety of craftsmen and suppliers who happened to come up with the right part for the plane...." not to mention the likely large number of simple voluntary workers on such a project.
Case in point: My 76 year old mother, who is the non-flying secretary of her local EAA [Experimental Aircraft Association] chapter, was a volunteer member of a group which recently completed the restoration of a Viet Namese era artillery spotter plane. She, and the other 60 and 70 something year-olds who restored that Piper took great pleasure and pride in what they did, and the results - in fact, they're planning to do another plane in the not-too distant future. What a shame it will be if their ability to make some contribution, and derive a sense of satisfaction and worth from the effort, is prevented by the TSA's bureaucratic nonsense.
3) Just because it's both China-related and aviation-themed, here's a YouTube video of China's first all-electric plane, the Yuneec. (Say it out loud. Hardee-har!) Kind of odd video, but looks like fun -- it's at a California airport I know well. And, to bring things back to a TSA theme, never once in my many, many trips through Chinese airports did I have to take off my shoes. I mean, except on flights back to the U.S. Let us learn from a 5,000-year-old culture to the east. (More here. Thanks to Ted Pearlman.)
As a conservative, I did not vote for President Obama. Nonetheless, it's my hope that some of the sillier things instituted by the Bush Administration would get thrown out.
Why hasn't the Obama Administration acted to clean up the public image of TSA? Specifically, why hasn't TSA stopped making people take off their shoes? It's the silly tip of the iceberg of silly security theatre.
I'd think that the President would win himself a lot of independent votes by getting rid of this rather ridiculous measure. Have any ideas as to why it hasn't happened?
August 23, 2009
Xu Zhiyong released
Just over a month ago, a well-known Chinese legal reformer named Xu Zhiyong was taken from his house in Beijing at 5am and moved to a detention facility. Background reports here and here, which emphasize that Xu, far from being some overthrow-the-government voice of radicalism, had been dedicated to defending the rights of Chinese citizens within China's own legal system. His best-known recent case was on behalf of parents of children who died or were harmed during the tainted-milk scandal last year.
This morning comes news that he has just been released, though under the threat of follow-up prosecution. That would probably involve (trumped-up, in the view of the outside world) charges of "tax evasion," probably based on support that the Yale Law School has given to Xu's Open Constitution Initiative (Gong Meng, 公盟) project. See here and here, with details sketchy but the main fact of his release established. Later on, more about the implications of the case -- including the disappearance of Xu's assistant, as reported here in the Guardian. For now, it is better to have Xu Zhiyong out of jail than in.
August 11, 2009
"Black, and very, very lucky."
I have had my disagreements with Niall Ferguson, as chronicled several times -- here, here, here, and here. But I had thought they were simply on the merits -- how to interpret the financial and strategic tensions between China and America, whether there was any serious historical parallel to be drawn between the rising China of Hu Jintao and the rising Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm. (Ferguson said Yes; I said No.)
Everything about such discussions is conditioned by Ferguson's constant reminders that he is a professional academic historian and therefore deserves deference for whatever historical connections he sees. This morning in the Financial Times he once again shows off the insight that professional training can bring. The essay on American politics begins:
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the
best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black.
He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th
president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just
over six months in the world's biggest and toughest job.
Hu Jintao is Kaiser Wilhelm; Obama is a black cartoon cat. I look forward to Ferguson's discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.
August 7, 2009
If you're in Seattle-land
I will be on KUOW's Weekday program today, 9am-10am PDT, talking with Steve Scher about (guess!) China. I was supposed to do this one week ago, but had such a paralyzing case of laryngitis, based on having yelled over the noise of jet engines at the Oshkosh air show earlier that week, that I couldn't say a word and had to bail out.
Update: audio of show is available here. It was a lot of fun. Got to talk about my visit to the Shanghai Skin Diseases and Sexually Transmitted Diseases clinic, as a patient.
Side note: again I notice as a recent arrival on American shores the value that NPR public-affairs talk shows around the country bring. When I lived in Seattle, I often listened to Scher's show -- or to Michael Krasny's Forum on KQED when I was living in Berkeley, or Larry Mantle's AirTalk on KPCC when I was visiting my parents in southern California, or Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio when I'm in that part of the country. And of course in many cities you can hear Tom Ashbrook's On Point from WBUR in Boston and Diane Rehm on WAMU in DC. I'll stop with the list before getting into the risk of "offense by omission"; the point, again, is that at a moment of justified concern about the chaos and deterioration of the media, it's worth noting that this particular kind of program -- locally-run NPR talk shows -- is an area of increasing quality and strength.
August 6, 2009
A reminder that we've left Beijing
I open the front door this afternoon, at our recently re-occupied house inside the District of Columbia barely three miles from the White House, and I see:
And my first thought is: this is not what you'd see three miles from Zhongnanhai [seat of power] in Beijing. Actually, that was my second thought. The first one was, "where is the camera?" -- and the deer were blase enough to stick around while I got it.
Yes, yes, I know that deer are the new rats of American cities, graceful but nonetheless troublesome supersized vermin. Still, the stark difference in circumstances of daily life in the two capitals -- the background sights, the routine nuisances and pleasures that shape consciousness -- makes it remarkable that officials of the two governments can communicate about issues as well as they do. Here is what I would see when I walked out my front door in Beijing, about as far from Zhongnanhai as my DC house is from Pennsylvania Avenue:
Yes, sure, I could find something similar in a three-mile radius of the White House too. But you couldn't find anything in Beijing like a deer-filled front yard. (I have seen people in Chinese cities trapping ducks and pigeons to eat. How long would venison on the hoof last?) I put up these pictures mainly for the benefit of readers in China. It is hard to convey to people who have lived only in one of the two countries how different everything about daily life can feel in the other. I'm still in that fleeting stage where I notice. But that will pass.
August 1, 2009
More on the detained Chinese lawyer
Not being on-scene in Beijing, I don't have fresh info myself. But as a reference for anyone wanting to follow the case of Xu Zhiyong, the Chinese civil-rights lawyer who was taken from his home at 5am last week and has not been heard from since, here are some relevant sites:
- China Digital Times summary of the event and coverage; - CDT on the recent crackdown on other legal-aid groups; - Evan Osnos dispatch for the New Yorker on "Where is Xu Zhiyong?" - The Chinese Media Project story; - Xu's personal blog, in Chinese; - Blog account in Chinese of tax charges against Xu and his response; - English version of similar response; - English account by one of Xu's colleagues, Teng Biao, of his own "kidnapping" by the police.
Check those sites for updates. The minor point that comes through these accounts is the excuse for the arrest of Xu. His legal-defense center, the Open Constitution Initiative, had been receiving support and grants from Yale Law School -- one of many instances of Western legal groups working to expand the rule of law in China. The authorities have found a way to declare that this support was improperly reported for tax purposes.
The major point that comes through is that Xu and his colleagues are the farthest thing from overthrow-the-system radical subversives. On the contrary: he files suit in Chinese courts, he bases his claims for protection on the Chinese constitution, and he has even been a successful candidate in a local election. (China has elections at the local level.) He is what real radicals would dismiss as a "liberal" and "inside-the-system reformer," but now his and similar efforts are beyond the pale.
Over the 20 years since Tiananmen Square, and certainly during the three years I could observe first-hand there, rule of law and civil liberties made a steady if uneven expansion in China. This and related recent crackdowns are a setback, whose significance we can judge depending on what happens next.
Consistent with the policy that the US should view China as a partner and friend in the many areas where collaboration is necessary and fruitful, but should speak up for its own values when they differ from Chinese government practice, US officials should say that they are watching this case. Not interfering in Chinese affairs, not telling the Chinese government what to do -- but watching, to see how the government respects its own citizens' rights.
July 30, 2009
Important and negative Chinese human rights development
I am remiss in not mentioning the news from earlier today that Xu Zhiyong, a prominent citizens-defense lawyer in China, was taken from his home at 5 am in Beijing and has not been seen since. Xu has been a major figure in a group called the Open Constitution Initiative, or Gong Meng (公盟), and is well known for representing groups and individuals against corporations and the state. For instance, last year he represented families whose children had been poisoned during the Sanlu tainted-milk scandal.
The official rationale for taking Xu is that he was suspected of income-tax irregularities. This claim is not believed anywhere outside the public-prosecutor's office and probably not by many inside it. A number of similar legal-rights organizations have been closed in the last few days and other lawyers detained. As one Chinese associate of Xu's wrote me today,
Ever since the first indictments came, I have feared something like this would happen, but to know they actually detained Dr. Xu, a highly respected lawyer and a people's representative of Haidian District [the northwest university/tech district of Beijing], just as they do to any other petitioner is just shocking. This means that nobody is safe from random detainment, or free from the fear of it.
Stories about the case here, here, and here, and statement from the Chinese Human Rights Defenders organization here (in Chinese here). If this had happened two days ago, during the generally upbeat "Strategic and Economic Dialogue," US officials could not decently have avoided commenting on it directly to their Chinese counterparts. They should say something publicly now.
This whole crackdown is being presented inside China as part of the tightening necessary before the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic this fall. What a commemoration.
July 28, 2009
Smoot-Hawley redux watch
Several months ago in this Atlantic story, I explained what some economists thought was the biggest danger in the Chinese government's response to the world business collapse. Obviously the Chinese government had to do something to offset the tens of millions of layoffs happening all at once. Its predicament was in a way like America's at the start of the Great Depression: having had an abnormally large share of the world's manufacturing jobs and export earnings when times were good, it had more of them to lose when demand crashed. But China's situation was worse, because it is so much poorer than America was, and because exports represented a bigger share of its employment base.
So China had to do something. The danger, as with the US recovery measures now, came from the long-term implications of the necessary short-term damage-staunching measures. And here the main fears were: (a) that the government would try to maintain its huge trade surplus (through subsidies, Smoot-Hawleyesque trade barriers, "buy Chinese" rules, etc) even as foreigners were forced to cut back on their buying, thereby triggering understandable resentment and retaliation; (b) that its stimulus efforts would aggravate trade-imbalance problems in the future, since so much was devoted to new productive capacity which could further glut world markets; and (c) that the stimulus would lead to a big destabilizing bubble, since a lot of it was propelled by China's version of sub-prime loans. (Ie, shaky, under-collateralized, dubiously repayable loans to sweetheart or shady companies).
These are problems to keep watching, and toward that end, two worthwhile resources: The first is this essay by R. Taggart Murphy, longtime investment banker in Japan and now a finance professor there. (The link opens a Word .DOC file for download.) Murphy -- for the record, a friend from my Japan days -- compares China's nascent attempt to prop up its trade surplus to what Japan did in the 1970s. He says:
"If the parallels continue with the 1970s, what might we expect? First, hostility directed away from the United States and towards China. ... Once your economy is so large that whatever you do affects global economic architecture, the "free rider" option [of permanent trade surplus] begins to close. If you manage your economy in such a way as to maximize exports and trade surpluses at a time when global growth is sluggish or non-existent, you are willy-nilly forcing other countries to run trade deficits. What happens if they refuse to go along?"
He suggests some cautionary answers to that last question. Also, we have yet another illuminating item from Guanghua School of Management's Michael Pettis, about the pitfalls built into the stimulus package. Here. Worth reading as a complement to this week's "Strategic and Economic Dialogue."
July 25, 2009
Well, I have a new favorite newspaper
Move over, China Daily. I don't know how long The Onion can keep up its running version of how it will look after acquisition by the Yu Wan Mei fish salvage company (鱼完美, yu wan mei, "perfect fish"). Background on the sale here.
But as long as it lasts, it is a tour de force. I suspect that some veteran of the China Daily or allied Chinese "information" organs in English must have defected to the Onion and guided this exercise. It's as good an imitation of the original as are the standard Onion "area man" versions of American news.
Original (these are real China Daily headlines):
Improved version:
My general policy is: if something is already On The Internet, no need for me to mention it too, unless it is in some cranny where many people might overlook it. But the artistry here forces an exception to the policy. After the jump, an early indication of the Onion's prowess in the "learning from China" field.
UPDATE: It is worth going to the Opinion page, as illustrated below, and clicking on the "Internet allows free exchange" story.
Before disappearing offline last week, I posted a number of items from Uighur, Han, and foreign observers in XInjiang during the ethnic violence there. Alistair Thornton, a young researcher / scholar I knew in Beijing, has just returned from Urumqi (largest city in Xinjiang) and posted a number of photos of the way it has looked recently. They are on the always-interesting "The Interpreter" site of the Lowy Institute in Australia. Here's one; more, and narrative, at the site.
July 15, 2009
Let a thousand flowers bloom again, Atlantic style
Here is a genuine strength of the community assembled at the Atlantic. We all take our work and the issues we're exploring seriously -- but we don't agree always or even a lot of the time about important issues. The closest thing to an across-the-board outlook was during last year's presidential election, when only a couple of people on the staff were rooting hard for the McCain-Palin ticket. But before the Iraq war, there was a really deep split, with our then-editor and many prominent writers strongly in favor of the war, and our then-managing editor and many others strongly against. Those differences were apparent -- I think in a useful way -- to anyone reading the magazine in those days and seeing the different perspectives argued out. Right now there are real differences on economic-policy matters, various aspects of foreign policy from Afghanistan to the Middle East to China, the futures of the Republican and Democratic parties, defense issues, and a lot of other specific points.
I mention this as a strength of the organization internally and also, I think, a virtue from the reader's point of view. The real differences but also real sense of community and respect can encourage people to explain and argue-out their positions more carefully rather than just assuming agreement. It's like "not Red States or Blue States but the United States of the Atlantic Monthly"!
In that spirit of respectful disagreement with a colleague and friend, let me say that Robert Kaplan's "we" does not speak for the whole magazine's staff when he says just now about China:
For years we had perceived China as a state galloping ever forward, en
route to peer competitor status with the United States and its
military. We forgot that foreign and defense policy emanates from a
country's domestic conditions, and that if its domestic conditions are
less than harmonious, its policy toward the outside world, too, may be
less than robust. In other words, China's rise cannot be taken for
granted. To wit, China is also grinding away at its environmental base.
Its water table is diminishing, along with the nutrients in its soil.
But the regime cannot afford to slow down its economic growth for fear
of a popular eruption far broader than what we just saw in Xinjiang....Remember, nothing is destiny.
The limits on China's "galloping" rise and the "nothing is destiny" perspective on its future are points I've tried to convey so often that many readers may be going crazy from the repetition. (Eg here or here or here.) In a sense the heart of my disagreement with Niall Ferguson at the Aspen Ideas Festival was his seeming confidence that anything at all could be assumed as certain about China's future -- either the rise that seemed inevitable to some people until recently, or the breakup with the U.S. and the outside world that he says is now certain to come. That's my disagreement with Bob Kaplan's statement of previous views on China: "we" may have seen things that way, but "I" most certainly didn't.
Arguing for uncertainty, or for many possible futures that will in fact be shaped by real choices by real human beings, may seem weak and unsatisfying. On the other hand: it conforms to the facts, and, at least as important, it focuses attention on the difference that "we" can make through our choices, wise or foolish, about China policy and other matters from economic interaction to environmental protection. And by "we" I mean political leaders and the politically-interested community in the United States, and China, and around the world.
July 13, 2009
A Uighur speaks about pork
After I posted this picture from Shannon Kirwin, three days ago, of a help-wanted notice at a restaurant in Kashgar that said "Han Chinese only," one response ran through the vast majority of messages from readers in China. It is the argument I quoted here. "Uighurs are Muslim," many correspondents said. "Chinese restaurants serve pork. It would be an insult to the Uighurs to suggest that they apply."
I had my own guesses about the response, but I asked another correspondent who (to the best of my knowledge) is a Muslim Uighur who reads Chinese. I asked: would Uighurs in Kashgar view the sign as a favor to them? Here is the reply I just received, with some addenda from the same correspondent after the jump.
"Han Chinese only" simply is a discrimination. Uyghurs are desperate
to have jobs and long have been complaining about "Han Chinese only"
requirements. Uyghurs don't eat pork, but "Handling pork" doesn't mean
eating pork. That ad includes not only chef position but also
waiter/waitress and supervisor positions, which don't require to taste
the food. In fact, I've seen many Uyghur
students both in United States, Europe and Japan work as
waiters/waitresses. They don't eat pork and bacon, but happily perform
the task. They have no problem with carrying the plates, and cleaning
them.
"The job ads I've sent to you earlier [quoted after the jump here, and very much worth re-checking] was posted on Kashgar
Teacher's College web site. One of them is about "Dean of College"
position, which also has "Han Chinese Only" requirement . The other ad
is about several positions, including computer instructor and lab
assistant position. Most of them have "Han Chinese Only"
requirements, which explain that an Uyghur can not apply for the jobs even if
she/he has the similar educational background and skill set to her/his
Chinese counterpart, simply beacuse she/he is Uyghur.
"Postal service is a government institution in China. "Postal Hotel" [the one with the "Han only" sign] is Postal service owned company. The Kashgar Teacher's College is, an
institution which has has more than of half of the student population
is Uyghur, also a government owned
institution. If the job ads by government institutions are so
discriminative, the situation in private chinese companies is anybody's
guess."
Full Aspen session, Fallows v Ferguson, now posted
In several posts from Aspen (here, here, and here) I mentioned my "full and frank" discussion, as the diplomats would say, with Niall Ferguson over the future of Chinese and American interactions. Main summary of our disagreements is, again, here.
A streaming video of the whole session is available now, here. My memories of it are clear enough that I don't think I need another immersion. But if you missed it and/or are interested, it's now online.
On Uighurs, Han, and general racial attitudes in China
Three more views on racial attitudes and tensions in China, following this and previous dispatches. From a foreigner with experience in China:
Regarding the "no Uighurs" sign, that type of thing is pretty common in China. Many advertisements for foreign English teachers will include something like "Whites only" or a "Looking for Caucasian teachers" sentence somewhere in the text. Additionally, many a native speaker have flown from their country to China only to find upon arrival that regardless of the applicant's qualifications, the job could only be performed by a white person. At these times the Chinese are usually polite and a little embarrassed (most Chinese are very nice people and mean no harm), but they will remain very firm in their conviction that a person with darker skin than theirs could not possibly make a good teacher.
I have experienced this on a number of occasions. But after living in China for a while I realized that what we would consider racism in the West is simply a deeply ingrained cultural characteristic of mainland Chinese people. White skin (the Chinese like to consider themselves white) and or being a Han (the dominant ethnic group) means a person is good. Dark skin or not being Han means a person is inferior (and more likely to be a bad guy/a thief/incompetent etc.). It does not equal KKK style hatred. It does not even mean a Han Chinese wouldn't be friends with a person from India or Africa. It simply means that if a person is non-white or a member of certain Chinese minorities, they simply are to be considered less smart, less competent and less trustworthy than the average white person or Han. [Ed note: This accords with my observation, with the caveat that I have observed this all as a middle aged white guy. Early discussion of Obama in China fit this pattern -- but changed after he took office.]
On a lighter note, the Chinese are not inflexible and when exposed to nice people of color they usually will change their minds quickly. [Agree, as with Obama.] However, the tendency towards ethnic and racial chauvinism is a current running through Chinese culture that is unlikely to change in any meaningful way anytime soon. "Truths" are rarely challenged here.
From a person with a Chinese name:
Your mentioning the sign ["Han Chinese only"] in Xinjiang provides half the question. It's
pretty obvious why the Uighurs are angry, but that doesn't explain why
Han Chinese in Xinjiang are angry. I think that if you see this simply
as a majority group trying to crush a minority group, then you miss the
fact that the average Han Chinese in Xinjiang probably feels as
oppressed and repressed as the Uighurs, and since they are competing
for the same pool of jobs. Just because you are Han Chinese doesn't
mean that you are going to be in the Politburo.
As mentioned earlier (eg here), America's participation in the
impending Shanghai Expo 2010 has been in question, because of disputes
and uncertainties about who would design, build, and (especially) pay for the US
pavilion. Likely consequence was much shame and embarrassment for the U.S. and loss of face for its would-be Chinese hosts. Left: Haibao, beloved mascot of the Expo, in Wild West
Americana gear -- from this gallery of Haibao in an assortment of folkloric outfits.
On Friday a deal was struck to finance and move ahead with the pavilion. Official announcement here, from the site of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai. Update on Adam Minter's Shanghai Scrap site, which has been following the action, here. More news to come on various sponsors, supporters, and consequences. Phew!
By all reports. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton played a crucial role in making sure the Expo bid happened. Here we see the victorious team: Sec. Clinton (left); Jose H. Villarreal, the newly appointed U.S. Commissioner General to the 2010 World Exposition (right), who worked hard to put a deal together after his appointment on July 1; and Haibao (center). Another excuse to get back to Shanghai...
Atlantic interview with Eric Schmidt
As part of the series of shortish interviews of big shots by Atlantic staffers at the Aspen Ideas Festival, our they-never-sleep web team has posted this Q-and-A between me and Eric Schmidt of Google:
July 11, 2009
Weekend Xinjiang / Uighur / 愤青 update, #2
More from the mailbag:
1) A reader with a Chinese name points out another aspect of the story --
the extreme reaction inside Turkey, where the "reality" of events
appears to be as one-sided as it has been portrayed within China:
"Have you noticed the reaction in Turkey? Here's what appeared in today's two big papers.
"The nationalist Hurriyet reported
the riot "has claimed the lives of hundreds of ethnic Uighur Turks."
The other big daily reports the released breakdown of the death toll
but as background reported the retaliatory attacks by Han against
Uighurs but did not mention Uighur attacks against Han. And the Prime
Minister stepped in to declare that the riot was "almost genocide."
"I'm amazed that despite the free flow of information, open
parts of the world can still live in different universes. A reader in
London will read an article in The Times about the "butchered" Han
family while on the same day a Turkish reader will read about the
massacre of Uighurs."
The point about separate
fact-universes is one of the sobering marvels of the modern info-age.
It's true within the United States, as discussed long ago here;
and it's true between countries, as China, Turkey, and the rest of the
world all digest different versions of the Xinjiang "truth." Main
point: the internet, mobile phones, and other info technology, far from
eliminating the country-by-country differences in information and
belief, in some ways may increase them, as each little info-sphere is
able to reinforce its own view of the world.
2) From reader Yuan Song:
"To be frank, I'm astonished to see such a big post [the "Han Chinese only"] sign, explicit, yet cold. If I were a Uighur that could read Chinese, I would have felt so insulted. Last time, one of my Canadian friends told me he that when he traveled in Austria, he saw an advertisement to let room saying "no Jewish or Northern Italians" (I forgot the original German word he used that actually means people from Northern Italy.) My Canadian friend was obviously very much annoyed by that advertisement. So was I. Then I had worsening impression of Austria after that.
"Anyway, thanks a lot for giving me more insights in the situations in Xinjiang. I've never been there personally. The fact that I, being a native Chinese, rely on this source of information to understand Xinjiang, is funny, though. The Chinese media should have done better job. I don't know whether you have heard of Phoenix TV, a mandarin TV station. They have good reputation for giving objective and insight reports on different issues. [Agree]
"Are you from US? I heard in US, there is a law that guarantees the proportion of employees from different ethnic groups hired by each employer should resemble that of the whole society. Is it true?"
3) A reader with a Chinese name points out that the real news is not
the "Han Chinese only" aspect of the sign but rather the "ages 18-30 only"
part. The reader says:
"And, because the problem is bigger, discrimination against
minority (and favoritism toward minority, as adding grade points to
minority for "Gao Kao" [the nationwide university admissions exam]) is not actually that unique, or big,
a problem.
In response to three previous posts (here, here, and here), a series of reactions and updates. First, from a reader with a Chinese name*, a measured discussion of some of the reasons behind the frequently thin-skinned, defensive, 愤青 (fenqing, "angry youth") reaction from China to critical comments from abroad:
"You discussed Chinese people's "tone of response to outside criticism"
in recent posts. I agree that many Chinese people do not react well
to outside criticisms, and that's certainly something worth their
self-reflection. But around this particular event-time, it would be
helpful to put these people's emotions within the context of many
foreign media's portraits of the unrest in Xinjiang:
"1. Initial western media reports tend to gave readers/viewers the
impression that most of the dead must have been Uighur demonstrators
killed in police gunfire (this might have been most western
journalists' assumption, as Christian Science Monitor's Peter Ford
conceded). And when it was later discovered that actually most of the
dead were Han Chinese (often murdered brutally), many western media
reports only mentioned this crucial fact in passing (often buried deep
in the middle of their reports), or simply ignored it (e.g., NBC's July
10th Nightly News). The impact of such portraits on the public opinion
in the West is clear: numerous people on Twitter, perhaps the majority
of the commentators in the first couple of days, condemned the
perceived Chinese police's slaughtering or even genocide of Uighurs.
Wouldn't an ordinary Chinese person get emotional over such media
portraits and the resulted public perception?
The NYT online has a very nice graphic just now showing the parts of China with significant "minority" population. Minority, in this sense, means one of the 55 recognized groups other than Han Chinese that together make up about 8 percent of the country's population. The screen shot below is not the default version of the graphic, which shows all counties in China with at least 10 percent minority population. Instead it's the version that shows counties where at least half the people are something other than Han.
In a sense the map is misleading, in the same way "Red State / Blue State" electoral maps are misleading about real division of opinion within the United States. The big western areas marked as Tibetan or Uighur are rugged territory that is very lightly populated (think Alaska, Nevada), compared with the dense, mainly-Han areas of the east. For instance, the ethnic Tibetan areas are shown as covering not just Tibet proper but also parts of the neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu (in all of which places I have been to Tibetan villages). But the total ethnic-Tibetan proportion of China's population is something under one percent. Still, the graph gives an idea of the control issues China has with some of its minority groups.
After the jump, three responses on the 愤青 -- fenqing, "angry youth" -- tone of response to outside criticism I mentioned earlier.
A few hours ago I posted a picture from Kashgar of a Help Wanted ad that concluded, "Han Chinese only." Recently I've received a wave of messages, mainly from readers with Chinese names, similar in content to the one below. (In fairness, not all have been this huffy in tone*):
I came cross your website and read the article "No Uighurs Need Apply" written by Shannon Kirwin [ie, quoting S.K.], hinting the unfair treatment of Uighurs by Han. It showed how ignorant she and your web editors are, because you don't even know that Muslims don't touch any pork while Hans do. In addition it'd be a humiliation and insult to Muslims if you ask them to work in Han kitchens. I think it's typical that you Westerners are so unfairly to spread twisted information around the world, while smiling to your local Han friends.
Now, at the level of simple, cold logic, there are some obvious responses to this argument. If observant Uighur Muslims don't want to work with pork, then they're not going to apply for the jobsanyway. So why bother to say they can't? Or: maybe not all Uighurs are observant Muslims or even Muslim at all, and perhaps they'd like the job. Or: maybe there are other ethnic groups in the area who are not Han but would still be happy to work with pork. Why rule them out? Or: maybe some of the jobs listed, as supervisors, don't involve touching food at all. What about those? And so on.
But to me the responses are more interesting on two other, sociological levels. One is the theme that runs through much internal Chinese discussion of relations with its minority groups: that whatever is going on is obviously and overwhelmingly for the minority's own good. In the case of the Kashgar restaurant, sparing Muslims the sacrilege of dealing with pork. In the case of a Beijing exhibit on the history of Tibet I mentioned last year, bringing modern prosperity to a backward people. In this context, it doesn't make sense to ask, "Well, what if the Uighur wanted to work in the restaurant?" or "What if the Tibetans wanted to choose a different path," since the benefits to them are so plain. This attitude is obviously not confined to China: it typifies America's attitude toward its minority groups at many points in our history. But the attitude is more broadly shared and less internally-debated in China now than many other places.
(Beijing exhibit photo, showing a Tibetan woman grateful to have a modern fridge full of beer.)
The other theme this illustrates is the much-discussed readiness of the Chinese "netizen" population to take offense at foreign criticism. Being away from China even for a few weeks, I am aware of how this reaction can be mis-read in the outside world. Day by day over the past few years in China, I've been in a sea of highly varied, tremendously individualistic, and generally very good-humored and approachable people. This touchy, net-based tone did not at all characterize the daily life I observed anywhere in the country -- very much including interactions with foreigners. But it is part of the mix in China's dealings with the outside world, especially when "foreign criticism" comes up. ____ * It is possible in the case of this note that I have fallen for an elaborate hoax. The sender's email address contains the initials "LOL" repeated twice with numbers in between, and his or her listed Chinese name is 笑生, which also has a jokey connotation. So who knows. Many of the other notes seemed quite serious.
"No Uighurs Need Apply"
From Shannon Kirwin of Beijing, this photo of a "Help Wanted" sign outside the Postal Hotel (邮政宾馆) in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang region a few days ago. Click for larger.
Here's the significance of the sign: It's an advertisement for restaurant staff at the hotel, in roles from cooks to supervisors. Kashgar, of course, is a historic trading town on the extreme western frontier of China, much closer to Lahore, Kabul, and New Delhi than to Beijing. The original population there would be of Uighur or other Turkic ethnicity, rather than Han Chinese. But the last line of the advertisement says, "This offer is for Han Chinese (汉族) only, ages 18-30."
Shannon Kirwin writes,
"I completely agreed with Glenn Mott's analysis of the riots as a
variation of the same race riots we have experienced in the US. In
large part the frustration with the Chinese regime that many Uighurs
expressed to us throughout our travels in Xinjiang seemed to stem from
everyday insults and degradations such as the one pictured here. We
were also told by people in several different cities that there is an
unofficial policy of denying ethnic Uighurs passports until they reach
retirement age, particularly if they are applying to visit Mecca.
"Just to describe the scene a little more, the hotel, the 邮政宾馆, is
located on a major street corner that is a neighborhood gathering spot
for fruit peddlers, motorcycle taxi drivers, and residents. The sign
is enormous and impossible to miss."
July 9, 2009
Cornucopia of updates #7: Great Firewall
Everyone on the China beat already knows this, but for bystanders curious about how China's internet-filtering system adjusts to breaking news, see this report from China Digital Times. It's an intercepted (and, to me, legitimate-sounding) new memo from state propaganda authorities about the items that search-engine companies must block from their results. The memo is of course in Chinese, with CDT's translation. Brief samples:
以下关键词请屏蔽无结果，不设相关搜索，今日(8日)19时生效。
Please screen out the following keywords, no relevant search results. Effective starting 7 pm today [July 8, 2009].....
"冲突 汉维""维冲突 汉族" "维族冲突 汉族" "维族冲突 汉人" "维族冲突 汉族人" "维族冲突汉族同胞""维狗冲突 汉族"
"维族狗冲突 汉族" "维族狗冲突 汉人" "维族狗冲突 汉族人" "维狗冲突 汉族同胞" "维族狗冲突汉族同胞" "新疆人冲突 汉族"
"新疆人冲突 汉人" "新疆人冲突 汉族人" "新疆人冲突 汉族同胞""新疆狗冲突 汉族" "维族狗冲突汉人" "新疆狗冲突 汉族人"
"新疆狗冲突 汉族同胞"
"conflict, Han and Uighur" "Conflict, Han and Uighur people" "Conflict, Han and Xinjiang people"
"Conflict, Xinjiang dogs and Han compatriots" "Conflict, Xinjiang people and Han compatriots"
For background on the Great Firewall, try here. In some other update, it will be worth talking about the Chinese government's press strategy during this emergency, which so far is strikingly different from past practice. During the Tibet turmoil early last year, the government tried its best to keep foreign reporters and outsiders in general away from the action. This time, it is conducting press tours of Xinjiang for foreigners. Rapid-adaptation to changing circumstances has been a hallmark of Chinese economic policy but not so much of its international diplomatic stance. We'll see how big a change this is.
July 8, 2009
Cornucopia of updates #4: Xinjiang
Following this selection yesterday of pictures of Uighur students in Xinjiang.
- On why this eruption, violent as it and its suppression have been, is unlikely to shake the government's control of or support in China, my friend Russell Leigh Moses of Beijing, in this op-ed in the NYT today, makes the right points and presents a convincing argument. Gist:
"The state apparatus has become dizzy with success in dealing with
unrest. This gives little hope that further mass outbreaks will not be
violently crushed. It also demonstrates that social upheaval will not
pave the way to democracy. The party is too strong and confident to
allow change from below."
The contrast between the Chinese state's continued ineptness in appealing to international opinion and its very effective control of opinion and knowledge within China is worth remembering at all times, and especially during crises like this. From the outside, these may look like challenges to the survival of the regime. From the inside, to most people in China, they're new occasions for national fortitude and solidarity.
- On the roots of the conflict, Glenn Mott of the Hearst Corporation (also a friend), who has been in Beijing as a Fulbright lecturer at Tsinghua University, sends this report:
"What we saw this week should be familiar to us as Americans. This was a race riot, not a political insurrection. It is what a young Chinese engineer I had lunch with today called an ethnic "brawl" with Uighurs and Hans throwing rocks over the heads of police in between. We should notice there is progress at the central government level--foreign journalists are in fact being given some access to Urumqi--though social networks have been cut, and Xinhua is carefully editing for fullest grim effect on the Eastern Chinese psyche.
"But with no public space in the media to cultivate a civil society, to debate and discuss grievances, and none on the horizon, the Han and Uighur of Xinjiang are caught in a hopeless deficit for information about each other's grievances. This is the same all over China (between developers and farmers, and between local government and petitioners, for instance) lacking a public space for civil discourse, lacking rule of law, lacking release and resolution except in private conversations and ultimately, into the streets they go."
He attached a recent photo of the storied Uighur trading city of Kashgar, which is being razed so it can be rebuilt in a "safer" way.
- On fiction-list suggestions, I have mentioned many times this past year a spy-thriller novel by the British writer Charles Cumming, called Typhoon. It is about a Uighur uprising in Xinjiang -- in the novel's case, abetted by outside agents. I will have serious/non-fiction reading tips later, but this is the most relevant thriller.
- On general introduction to the Uighurs and their situation, this brief video by the Stanley Foundation has a lot of useful information, including an interview with Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur emigree blamed by the Chinese government for much of the upheaval. It also includes an interview with a very tired-looking me after a trip to Xinjiang.
- On America's stake in Xinjiang, it is a lasting error and embarrassment that after 9/11 the U.S. won Chinese government support by agreeing that Uighur separatists -- formally, the East Turkestan Liberation Organization -- should be seen as part of the world terrorist threat. After all, they are Muslims.
Uighur faces
Tomorrow, more on the substance of the racial violence in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in northwest China. For the moment, small glimpses of what some people there look like.
Three of the students below are ethnic Uighurs -- ethnically Central Asian, generally Muslim, raised speaking a Turkic language rather than Mandarin -- on the first day of class in the fall of 2007 at 新疆大学, Xinjiang University in Urumqi. They had come from remote parts of Xinjiang and, when my wife and I saw them, were buying "Mandarin as second language" textbooks in the university book store. The man on the right of the picture, a Han Chinese, was their teacher.
The Uighur father on the right below, who wore the same expression of wistful pride my wife and I did when we took our children to college, had come a long distance from the countryside to bring his daughter, on the left, for her first day at the big-city university. He is holding the math and Mandarin textbooks he has just bought for her.
The racial tension was palpable when we traveled around Xinjiang. More on the consequences soon. After the jump, several other pictures from Xinjiang U.
One more viewing tip on the 'Chimerica' tape (updated)
As a reminder: sooner or later the full video of the "Chimerica" discussion between Niall Ferguson and me, this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, will be posted at the Aspen site. (Previous mentions here and here.) If you see or read the full version, you will note that an absolutely fundamental premise in the argument (Ferguson's) for the inevitable collision of US and Chinese interests is that the Chinese leadership has recently lost all faith in the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar and is determined to move away from the dollar as an international currency.
You will note too that statements by Chinese officials, taken strictly at face value, are the main pieces of evidence for this contention. In that regard, this latest statement by a senior Chinese official deserves notice: -------- My argument, as you'll see, is that China and the United States will continue to disagree over countless issues but are too thoroughly connected to be pushed by the current world economic crisis toward what Ferguson declares a "divorce." If a real separation occurs, it would probably be over Taiwan or some other non-routine-economic issue.
Bear this statement from He Yafei (genuine influential official) in mind when you hear "academic discussions" about moves away from the dollar. And, as I've mentioned many times, if you're looking for an "academic" perspective on the Chinese economy and US-Chinese tensions that is based on its actual realities rather than sweeping generalizations, start here. ____ UPDATE: Thanks to Andy Rothman of CLSA in Shanghai for the reminder that one week ago, Zhou Xiaochuan, the People's Bank of China governor who touched off original speculation about China's move away from dollar holdings, declared that China would be making no sudden moves to change its currency holdings. Why this matters: the "impending breakup" thesis depends crucially on the idea that China is quickly and unstoppably undoing its links to the U.S. economy and U.S. holdings.
July 5, 2009
More Chimerica, Ferguson, Fallows, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc
Apparently it will still be a while until full videos of various Aspen Ideas Festival sessions go on line, as opposed to the selected clips now available (see the right side of this page). So because it may not be apparent from the short video of my discussion with Niall Ferguson, or from David Brooks' very fair-minded column about the discussion, or from my previous item on it, here is a little more about what was discussed and where I think the differences lay.
1. The main part of my "side" of the argument that was necessarily
left out of a 750-word summary of a 90-minute discussion, but that I've tried to express in all the articles I've written from China over the past three years, is that anything is possible when
it comes to developments inside China and also relations between China
and the outside world.
For instance, when one questioner asked for "scenarios" about China's political evolution, Ferguson replied that "all my Chinese graduate students at Harvard" gave him the same scenario: that there was no huge appetite for a democratic shift in China now, economics came first, etc. I said that I could imagine countless possible scenarios: internal disaster because of environmental or other emergencies; another Tiananmen-like internal crackdown that alienated the outside world but reflected the government's belief that domestic control mattered more than outside approval; a nationalistic backlash triggered by something like last year's foreign protests against the Olympic torch relay; a Taiwan-related emergency; even rising middle-class pressure for democratic openings. Whatever. These are all conceivable. What seems to me most likely, however, is what we've seen since the early Clinton years: continued US-Chinese engagement in a deeply connected but often contentious way.
This is in contrast to Ferguson's argument that the "Chimerica" bloc had been the indispensable basis of the world economy until recently, but now was headed for inevitable breakup because of economic troubles inside the US and political developments inside China.
2. The specific part of Ferguson's view I most strongly resist is his assertion of close, cautionary parallels between Germany's rise in the years leading up to World War I and China's rise now.
Historical patterns and analogies are obviously essential and instructive. But just as obviously, it's crucial to recognize the differences as well as the similarities in different stages of history. This was the central argument of the wonderful "Lessons" of the Past: Uses and Misuses of History in American Foreign Policy, by Ernest May, a favorite professor of mine in college and afterwards who sadly died this year. Another valuable work by another Harvard professor is Richard Neustadt's Thinking in Time: The Use of History by Decision-Makers. As May pointed out in his book, when LBJ and his confidants thought only of Munich, Chamberlain, and Hitler when hearing about Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh, they mis-assessed their adversaries and badly hurt themselves. We've seen the same mistake more recently in the pre-Iraq war assertions that because it was a mistake to delay a military confrontation with Hitler's Germany, the same principle applied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
A systematic examination of the similarities and differences between the Kaiser's Germany and Hu Jintao's China would be an interesting exercise. As I run through them informally, it strikes me that for every similarity (relatively rising economy, naval-force expansion) you can think of at least ten differences (scale, overall stage of economic development, geographical points of tension with existing powers, religion and ideology, recent military history, environmental and other possible constraints on growth, etc).
The real point is: The fact that Germany's rise was followed by a disastrous-for-all-parties world war is worth remembering. But to assert that this means that China and America are necessarily or even probably headed for a showdown is just assertion.
3. More than assertion, it is dangerous assertion. Even historians -- or especially historians -- recognize that world events are shaped in part by deep economic, demographic, and technical trends, but only in part. Real human beings make real decisions that have real effects. (Cf: LBJ in 1964, Bush-Cheney in 2001, JFK-Khrushchev in 1962, etc.) If we recognize that a collision with China is possible, but only one of several possibilities, then we act so as to reduce that possibility and increase the probability of better outcomes. If we think breakup is inevitable, as Ferguson is arguing, then the odds of a collision in fact occurring become higher than they would otherwise be. (Because each side interprets the other's moves in the darkest way and responds in kind.)
4. As will be seen when the tape goes up, Ferguson's opening remarks included repeated references to what "the Chinese think" and "the Chinese want" and "the Chinese will demand." My opening comment was how treacherous it was to say that "the Chinese" do or think or want anything, since in practice the place often behaves like 20 separate countries and countless regional factions and many self-interested businesses and a billion-strong individuals. This is related to the previous point, in that any analysis that starts with the idea of one big, coherent Chinese entity is both more alarming than other understandings -- and, in my view, less realistic.
5. Although I didn't address this part of Ferguson's analysis directly, he pointed out -- correctly -- that China's export machine has been profoundly affected by the collapse in surplus US demand. But Ferguson's conclusion, that this means the end of "Chimerica," seems to me far less convincing or nuanced than, say, the running analysis by Michael Pettis of Peking University. His web site is here; he was among the analysts I quoted in this article about what the economic downturn will mean for "Chimerica."
There's more, but this will do till the tape appears!
July 3, 2009
Fallows v Ferguson at Aspen (updated)
David Brooks' column in the NYT this morning describes a discussion I had with Niall Ferguson, of "Chimerica," two days ago at Aspen. In its brief space the column gives a fair sampling of the terms of argument and tone of the discussion. A video of the thing itself is here, as part of the Ideas Festival's video archive. Right at the moment, the video doesn't load for me, but I assume that's a temporary glitch.
For now, I'll say that the discussion speaks for itself -- and perhaps that it may also illustrate two different ways of approaching and assessing evidence, and two different styles of presentation and argument. My experience in graduate school in England makes me think that among other things we might be seeing here a comparison of two national styles of discourse, Oxford-style debate versus Yank-style. But probably it's just the difference between two individuals.
UPDATE: At the moment I am not at a computer that will load the video of the session. But I hear from my trusty correspondents that, rather than being the whole hour-plus discussion, it's actually a 3:41 clip. The contentious part, as described in David Brooks' column, begins at about 2:30. FWIW.
June 30, 2009
Toe back into the online pool
Travel* + time zones + away from internet + jet lag = no web activity. It's a mathematical axiom known since the time of Euclid. But before sleeping off the latest long-haul trip and rejoining the crack, round-the-clock Atlantic Monthly web team reporting on the Aspen Ideas Festival effective in a few hours, two notes from opposite ends of the world.
From China: Three months ago I mentioned that an "unofficial site" in Beijing was providing hourly Twitter readings on the air pollution element that is most threatening to health but is either not measured or not reported by the Chinese government itself. I knew then but did not say that the "unofficial" site was actually on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Beijing. I did not say it because friends at the embassy said that calling attention to it could seem provocative or thumbing-the-nose at Chinese authorities and could jeopardize the whole undertaking. A tremendous amount of "unofficial" activity goes on in China, under the hallowed principle of "one eye open, one eye shut." As long as the authorities' noses weren't rubbed in the flouting of rules, many things were possible.
For better or worse, and perhaps with different guidance from embassy officials, Time magazine's blog recently revealed that the site was on the embassy roof. And just now my favorite paper, the China Daily, has picked up the story. In the short run, I see that it has kicked Twitter followers for the service well up above previous levels. I hope the readings continue -- and, of course, that they eventually show healthier air.
From America: There are lots of things my wife and I will miss about China, and lots of things that are a relief to escape. I will chronicle them systematically at some point. Here's one brief "I miss China" item for the moment: Jeez is it a pain to return to the culture of tipping. I hated the haggling in Chinese markets and preferred to shop where there were simple price tags -- and the item was worth it to me, or it was not. So too did I hate this episode on arrival in Aspen today:
We got off an airplane and got into a van headed for the conference headquarters. We climb out at the HQ, and the driver stands in our path and announces, "Your transportation is covered by the conference, but you are perfectly free to tip." I guess he could tell we had been away.
I know and respect the little signs saying "Gratuities appreciated" on, say, the shuttle buses taking you to airport car-rental lots. I understand the ritual supplement at restaurants, and am always "generous" in that regard. Same with hotel maids, and so on. I have worked in tip-receiving jobs. But this episode just made me think: there has to be a better way.
I rummaged through my pockets that were still full of Chinese RMB and finally found a $5 bill. I gave it to him and thought: I do not believe that countries with a tipping culture end up having a fairer distribution of income than ones (like China) where tipping is unusual and can even seem insulting. They just end up delivering the money in a way that is more demeaning all around. The driver can't have enjoyed this exercise. I know I didn't. Please! Just add the money to the fare -- or the restaurant check or the hotel bill -- rather than having all of commercial life colored by the haggling / hostile-servile on one end / guilty-paternalistic on the other end institution of the tip. Ok, Ok, we can deal with the environmental crisis and health-care reform before that. But this is a place where the Chinese (and the Japanese and in many cases the Aussies and others) have it right. ___ * Explanation of travel oddities: We left Beijing two weeks ago today; spent 72 hours in the US; were out of the country again; and are back, today, for the duration.
June 24, 2009
More on Chinese lack of interest in Iran
A reader makes a point (following this post) about why the Iranian drama seems so much less compelling from inside China than it does in much of the West. There is more, well, John Bull-esque swagger to this note than I'd probably have if making the point myself. But I basically agree with this perspective. It's not all government info-control and censorship.
"I think it's good to keep in mind that Chinese folks tend to have a certain antediluvian sense of detachment when it comes to foreign affairs, sort of almost pre-war British John Bull-esque isolationist vintage. They just don't care particularly about what happens in foreign countries. They really couldn't give a whistle if a foreign country is communist or democratic or whatever. They just want to be left alone to make their wages and buy their house and cars.
"And I think that detachment is probably much more powerful than any silly, heavy-handed government innuendo and propaganda, at the end of the day. Everyone paid more attention to Europe and America, that's true, but Europe and America are important and rich and to be emulated in their wealth; toward the developing world, the feeling is sort of a disinterested bemusement from the average man-in-the-street.
"So I think the best way to view the Iran coverage in China is, frankly, to ignore it. Government press might have (really stupid) agendas to pursue in relation to this, fighting the colour revolutions and so on, but the average man couldn't care less. And it's quite exactly the same thing when that clown Hugo Chavez is feted in the Chinese press; he's viewed more as a curiosity than as some glorious David, hero of the Developing World-cum-Israelites.
"And I personally think that, for China at least, this is not an unhealthy attitude. Splendid (Sino-)Isolation ought be cause for relief for the rest of the world.
"....Another thing I forgot, and this is I think how someone used to describe the pre-war British, is that the Chinese generally find foreigners funny. Not serious, not genuinely dangerous, not heroic and considerable (as an European might for MLK, or an American for Thatcher or both for Mandala), but nice and funny in a harmless sort of way."
Again, while the writer is deliberately heading into campy-Orientalism by the end of the note, and while a billion-person country has exceptions to any generalization (I know Chinese people who quite clearly are inspired by Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or Isaac Newton, or John Dewey, or....) the basic point rings true to me. Including the "not unhealthy" part -- worth bearing in mind when you hear the next "China as master of the world" scare-lecture.
June 22, 2009
Iran in China
I have been out of China for a week and away from internet contact most of that time, including the last day-plus. So I am behind the curve on the Iranian drama in general, and the way it's playing in China in particular. But in response to a number of requests for tips on how to judge the reaction of China's officialdom, media (controlled by officialdom), and populace, here are some guidelines.
1) Never underestimate the ability of the Chinese media to steer attention toward -- or away from -- stories both domestic and foreign. Over the past six weeks, as H1N1/swine flu has been waning as a front-line concern in most countries, it has been end-of-days news inside China. And right now -- Monday evening, June 22, China time -- when Iran's fate is dominant news in much of the world, it's a second- or third-tier item in the official Chinese media. The current front page of People Daily (in Chinese, here) has Iran as a fairly minor news item. English version of People's Daily Online, here, currenty shows the same understated play.
2) It is worth remembering that the elements of the Iranian story that give it such drama and importance in much of the world are less automatically resonant in China. One part of the narrative -- a massed populace standing up against state power -- is obviously anathema to Chinese authorities. And many of the other themes are also less immediate and compelling to ordinary people in China than they would be in North America, Europe, or parts of the Islamic world. To most Westerners, everything about this story matters. It involves a people's struggle to make their voices heard; it follows other "color revolutions" in former Soviet territories and indeed popular movements for democracy and rule of law in Asia and Latin America from the 1980s onwards; it potentially marks a crucial moment in the evolution of modern Islamic society; it can have war-and-peace implications for US foreign policy and Israeli actions; and so on. Ordinary members of the Western viewing audience feel a connection to these themes. I assert that they seem more distant to ordinary people in China -- even if the themes were featured on the news. People's own problems, and their business problems, and the country's problems, are enough to worry about.
3) The Chinese publications that are explicitly aimed at foreign readers, the redoubtable China Daily and its new complement Global Times, have taken a predictable but still interesting line. Right now the China Daily is, like the People's Daily, underplaying the story altogether. The new Global Times, generally seen as taking an edgier and more adventurous approach to advancing telling China's "soft power" presentation of its official perspective worldwide, went with this as its lead item today:
The themes of "outside interference" and "victimization by Western powers" are comfortable, reflexive positions for the Chinese government's foreign policy establishment to take, so are the natural positions here.
4) I don't think anyone in the foreign media has any clear idea of what the Chinese leadership really is thinking about Iran and its implications.
5) I have lacked online time to follow up on the Chinese blog world but welcome submissions by readers, which I will share.
Political education
Several days ago I posted an account of the distorting effect of the "political" component of Chinese higher ed -- essentially, the need to parrot back parts of Marxist analysis and the dictums of past leaders. This is apart from all the other concerns about the incentives and emphases of the educational and testing system itself, as thrashed out in many postings here.
[For application of political nostrums in an amusing way, see Simon Lewis's recent violent-noir novel Bad Traffic, about a regular non-English-speaking tough-guy Chinese cop who finds himself in England trying to track down his missing daughter. In the middle of gun fights or when wincing after blows to the head, he steadies himself by reciting boilerplate from his political classes. "His ears rang from the [gun] blast and that din added to a sense that he had stepped outside time. He hauled his mind back into the present. The contradiction between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization..."]
Now, from a young Chinese person who has recently graduated from college in Beijing and is headed to grad school in the US, a startling account of another sort of political effect on higher education: the levee en masse of university students to participate in political ceremonies, notably those in October commemorating the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
ALL freshmen of our school are mandated to join the 60 Anniversary
National Day parade. They will be taken to a special training ground
set up outside of Beijing where training will continue from early July
(after final exams) till Oct. 1st. Those who are tall and fit will be
selected to march; those who are not selected will have to be trained
as volunteers. Students are threatened by their Party Advisers with not
being able to graduate if refuse to join the National Day parade.
As chronicled in the months leading up to last summer's Olympics, the air in Beijing was alarmingly dense and opaque as the Games drew near. In the end, it remained bad right through the opening ceremonies and the first full day of competition. Then, a powerful cold front blew through from the northwest, with clear, dry air behind it. And for the rest of the competition, and indeed much of the ten months since that time, the air has seemed far better than before. For day by day photos of Beijing's sky before and after the Games, see this wonderful site by Michael Zhao of the Asia Society. For sample shots of recent "Paradise Beijing" circumstances, see here.
Thus in this context of overall improvement, two recent reports are sobering. The first, by Tini Tran of the Associated Press, says that a joint US-Chinese governmental study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, has concluded that the air during the Beijing Olympics was far dirtier and unhealthier than in other recent Games. The Yahoo news version of the story is here; unfortunately, it contains no links to the scientific study itself, which I don't yet see on the Env Sci &Tech journal's site. [Update: study now on line here.] Among the study's findings, according to the AP:
Researchers found that particulate air pollution
did drop by about one-third during the two-week Olympic period. But
coarser particulate matter, PM 10, exceeded levels the WHO considers
safe about 81 percent of the time, while the smaller particulate
pollution PM 2.5, which can cause more serious health consequences,
exceeded WHO guidelines 100 percent of the time.
The second development is the ongoing failure of the Chinese government to report any readings of, and perhaps even to measure, the PM 2.5 small-particulate level in its big cities' air. This matters because the smaller particles, which go deep into the alveoli, are more damaging to the lungs than the larger ones (background and links here) -- and because, by many accounts, their level in Beijing is once again rising. Earlier this week, the readings from a non-Chinese PM 2.5 monitoring station (background here) again reached the "hazardous" level, as had happened several times previously this spring. Glenn Mott sent me this photo taken at Tsinghua University during the "hazardous" day.
Minor conclusion: perhaps one more indication that China's manufacturing economy is recovering, with factories and power plants up and running again? Major theme: if you needed more convincing that environmental and climate issues in China are a first-order challenge for the world as a whole, perhaps this will help. (Background in the magazine here.)
June 18, 2009
Sigh, out of range again
I am no longer based in China, but am not yet actually based anyplace else. So this might be the last dispatch for the next week, and it's on the fly from yet another airport wi-fi site. Sketchy for-the-record remarks:
1) After 60+ hours in America (and on the way out again): Life is so abundant! Even in a downturn -- and, yes, in Washington, not Flint. Everything looks so comfortable and lush! The air is so clean! (Today's reading in Beijing: "Hazardous.") And the cell phone coverage is so crappy! I can barely recall a moment in China when I was out of signal range. Today alone in Washington, half a dozen dropped calls. Yes, yes, I know the reasons for this. But the difference is impressive.
1A) Bad part of my character as revealed by travel (part 2,847): When approached by spare-change panhandlers I have to bite my tongue to avoid giving the "do you know what people put up with in China?" speech. Yes, yes, I know why this is wrong.
2) Positive aviation development of the week: flight of a new all-electric plane, here.
3) Negative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.
4) "There will always be a China" anecdote of the day. This comes from a Chinese friend I know and trust but, for this person's own sake, will not identify. My friend asked a CCTV producer (whose name I also know) about the mystery I mentioned last week: what on earth the weird ... thing on top of the otherwise-clean CCTV tower was. Reminder:
Here is the report from my friend, recounting a conversation with the producer:
Me [my friend]: Do you know what that huge round thing protruding on the top of the main CCTV building is? Producer: What? Me: It looks like either a misshaped radar or a helicopter landing pad... Producer: Why are you asking? Me: Just curious. Producer: Well, don't be curious. You know it's a very sensitive period here at CCTV, because of Fang Jing's "spy-gate" incident. Don't ask such sensitive questions. Me: Why is it sensitive? That huge thing is right there on the very top of your landmark. Everyone could see it, even from far away. You've never thought about what it is? Nobody asks about it? Producer: No... No one. Seriously, stop asking about it!
Words to live by. With that, I leave you to my Atlantic colleagues for a week.
June 17, 2009
If you've been wondering about BiggieSu
His Beijing quarantine saga, previously mentioned here and here, has now come to its end. May have been a nuisance for him, but highly entertaining for the reading public -- especially with this taxonomy of "The Seven People You'll Meet in Hotel Quarantine." Full chronicles here.
After two dispatches, I received no further updates from the Chinese-American person being quarantined in Shanghai (and whose mother apparently developed H1N1.) I am assuming that all is well there and the person decided that more attention would be a minus rather than a plus.
On leaving Beijing airport a day and a half ago, my wife and I found that all the government officials we encountered -- security screeners, passport stampers, general standing-around staff -- wore medical-type masks over their faces and in many cases surgical-style gloves, testament to constant vigilance against the dreaded flu. On arrival 13 hours later in the US, we saw a little sign in front of the US immigration desk, saying that if we felt feverish or fluish, it would be a good idea to avoid close contact with other people -- but that was that. I have a theory about what the resolute Chinese government response to this so-far-not-very-powerful disease says about "security theater" in the Chinese context. But that's for later.
June 15, 2009
The next time you're in Shaanxi....
Do whatever you can to hear the Lao Qiang -- 老腔, "Old Tunes" --
musical performance held in the small city at the foot of China's most
famous mountain-climbing tourist site, Hua Shan (roughly, "Mt. China" sorry, right character- 华 - wrong etymology).
Most forms of traditional Chinese singing, Beijing opera and the like, are easier for Westerners to "admire" than to "enjoy." When I learned that I'd be spending a couple of hours hearing songs from a 2000-year-old tradition, I was preparing myself for a bout of "admiration." In fact, it was tremendously enjoyable, and I was sorry only that the program (flyer to the left) had to come to an end.
The lore of Lao Qiang is that these are songs from old-time rivermen, which have been passed down through the eons by a select few families. Heirs of those families are the current stars of the performing troupe -- notably the Wang family, whose head is the older performer in the first photo below, and the Zhang family, whose Zhang Ximin is the riveting, hard-to-take-your-eyes-off lead singer and string player -- the dark haired man in the second photo. According to the program, these performers spend their days as regular farmers, and practice and perform at night. Who knows about that; but as performers they're great.
Wang Zhenzhong (王振中) above; Zhang Ximin (张喜民) below.
The troupe:
If the music has a Western equivalent, I would say it is something like "Muleskinner blues." Lusty, rhythmic, loud, fun. More on the topic here, here, and here in English, here, here, and here in Chinese. Of course the brief clips don't really do it justice. See it yourself.
Reverse angle equity, and 再见北京
Several thousand times over the past 18 months I've posted shots out the back window of our apartment in Beijing, as ways of illustrating the air quality, or lack thereof, in the big city. For instance, this one back in March:
For the record, here's how the same scene looks from the opposite direction. This is a shot back toward our apartment window, which is almost exactly in the middle of the frame, taken from a pedestrian walkway over a big road just murkily visible in the shot above. The low, reddish-colored, Mao-era building in the foreground of the second view is the same one in the bottom center of the first.
And as we leave the apartment for the last time (I'm scheduling this post for the minute we get in the taxi for the airport), a clearer-sky view out the back from this past weekend. In this view it's possible to see the overpass, and a lot more -- including the arched bridge over the canal shown two days ago. Unfortunately, today the air is back to blear.
再见北京
June 14, 2009
Updates: education, quarantine
As mentioned two days ago, Mike Su was taken off to quarantine in Beijing after someone on his flight from America turned out to be sick. Today Su has posted a richly (and fancifully) illustrated account of "Life in the Big House" at his quarantine hotel. .
And from another foreigner who has been teaching English in a rural area:
Apropos of the thread about the Chinese testing system, several of our very best students earned very high marks in the English section of the recent 'further study' battery that determines whether or not a student may continue their higher education. In spite of their excellent performance in their major subject, they are crippled in their attempt to attend any Chinese college or university for post graduate work because they were a few points deficient in the politics portion of the examination.
No matter how well one does in other parts of the test, failure to pass the politics (read 'indoctrination certification') portion disqualifies a student from any further education except under very diminished circumstances. Imagine the flowing tears and heartbreak surrounding graduation 2009. Even our Chinese colleagues are incensed.
That grinding sound you hear is enamel coming off my teeth.
I have examples of the content of these "political" courses, which are among the most visible holdovers of Marxism in today's China, but not available right now. More later.
June 13, 2009
Our wacky government, chapter 21,472 (updated!)
A friend preparing to enter the foreign service was looking through the official list of "hardship" posts and the extra pay that goes with them. Some are obvious -- Kabul! I have no idea what embassy life is like there, but 35% seems only reasonable.
Same presumably true of Iraq, no matter how much "calmer" things may be getting there.
But... China?
Yeah, yeah, I've griped about pollution and traffic in Beijing, and
maybe 10% is fair, all things considered. (Hey, Atlantic head office,
just a hint!) But half again as much "hardship" to be in Shanghai???
Paris of the Orient, and all of that? And while Shenyang has its bleak
side and Wuhan and Nanjing are two of the famous "Three Furnaces of China," it's intriguing that they should be seen as constituting nearly as much hardship as Kabul. Maybe just a reminder of the oddities
that come when you try to quantify things that really aren't similar. (Hardship in Kabul: actual risk to life and limb. Hardship in Shanghai: making do with REEB beer.) On the other hand, we
have a friend soon heading off for several years' diplomatic service in
Wuhan. As far as we're concerned, she deserves every cent.
UPDATE: Many FSOs and other public employees have written in to say that "hardship pay" is only part of the story. There is also "danger pay," which obviously is higher in a place like Kabul than one like Wuhan, and other supplements. One representative note:
I'd like to point out that the hardship differential is not designed to compensate Foreign Service Officers for dangerous duty. The hardship differential is paid for a variety of reasons: if the duty location is heavily polluted, or if it is very isolated, or if it is in a very poor area and amenities are hard to come by, and so forth. It's basically an incentive for FSOs to bid on tours in places where life will be very uncomfortable. I don't know about the air in Beijing, though I've heard it's very bad; I do know about the air in Cairo, which is so bad that it does the damage of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day. Hardship pay basically compensates FSOs in places like Cairo for sacrificing their health to serve their country.
Hardship pay is separate from danger pay, which is paid for tours where life and limb are risked. There are also COLAs for tours in countries where cost of living would be very high; this could be a tour in a very wealthy country, where everything costs an arm or a leg, or in a country where a terrible exchange rate wipes out a good chunk of every pay check, or in a country where everything has to be imported and therefore costs a fortune. There is also separation pay, which an FSO can receive for an unaccompanied tour that entails
separation from one's family. An FSO could, in theory, earn multiple compensations for going on a poor, isolated, polluted, dangerous tour.
Sorry to tell only part of the story the first time through. By the way, this is an interesting little illustration of the weaknesses and also strengths of online reportage. For the print version of the magazine, I would never have published something without calling around to several people to say: OK, let's hear more about this foreign-pay schedule. What's the rationale? What else is involved? And whether or not I'd done that that, Sue Parilla or Yvonne Rolzhausen or some other member of our crack fact-checking team would have done it too. So, this kind of chart without the extra info would not have made it into the magazine.
On the other hand, in print I would never have had the chance to hear from people around the world within minutes of pushing the "save" button -- and make a correction as soon as I saw their comments when I next got email. Different media, different roles, different vulnerabilities and strengths.
OK, one mystery solved (updated)
I mentioned last night my puzzlement about why and how the dramatic new CCTV tower, whose entire point was the stark simplicity of its design (by Rem Koolhaas), had been junked up by an inexplicable and unignorable wart on its roof line. This is in keeping with the theme of last month's Atlantic article, about the tendency of many projects here to turn out almost right.
I am grateful to readers who wrote in suggesting that it was a window-washing platform, which would move along rails around the perimeter (no, it's always in the same place); or perhaps a giant satellite dish (no, as is obvious from other views).
The dispositive comment came from Jim Gourley, who reminded me that he had pointed out last year on his Rudenoon blog that it was indeed a helipad; that something similar had been in the works for a long time; but that the original idea was for something much more contained and concealed that would do less to destroy the overall look of the structure, as has now occurred. From his Flickr picture of the earlier plans:
And Jeremy Goldkorn, of Danwei, had pointed out just before the Olympics began that "The iconic new CCTV building designed by Rem
Koolhaas has had its clean lines ruined by the addition of a helicopter
landing pad on the roof." Now I know. If only there were ever any helicopters in sight above Chinese cities.... (Separate topic.)
To round out the CCTV theme, a very nice FT story by Kathrin Hille quotes Tong Bing, a Chinese journalism professor, on what's wrong with the (state-controlled) network's mainstream news show:
"Currently, the programme has three parts: political
leaders' activities for the first ten minutes, other news for second
ten minutes, and international news for last ten minutes," said Mr
Tong. "During the first part, people tend to watch commercials. They
use the second part to go to the toilet. Only for the third part will
they come back to listen."
(Thanks to D. Lippman)
Update: via Micah Sittig, info that Tong Bing's observation is a cleaned up version of a standard joke. For rendering of the joke in Chinese, see comments #24 and #29 at this site. English version, per Sittig, "Evening News classic summary. First 10 minutes: the (national) leaders are busy; middle 10 minutes: the Chinese people are prospering; last 10 minutes: the rest of the world is living in chaos and hardship." Commenter #29 points out that he often amuses himself on foreign travels observing said chaos and hardship.
June 12, 2009
Journal of the plague year, #2
A second-day installment from the Chinese-American person now quarantined in Shanghai. First installment here. In this episode, a family member who has just been to the United States is diagnosed with... the H1N1 flu! Some additional thoughts from inside the quarantine site at the end of the dispatch.
My mom was on all the major news outlets yesterday... "Woman has been diagnosed as a confirmed case ..." She had a slight cold which she caught at [a
college graduation ceremony she just attended in the US] but was all
better by the time she got on the plane. She had no fever, no cough, no
physical symptoms of the flu. However, during one of the numerous times
they measured her temperature while she was in quarantine, she was
found to have a "fever" of 0.2C above normal.
Previously in the Paradise Beijing series: here, here, and here.
Most accurate air-quality reading today: not "dangerous for sensitive groups" or "hazardous," but "good"! Temperatures balmy, winds light, skies clear. Time for a final run along the canal.
Looking east, toward the Fourth Ring Road and beyond:
Looking west, in toward the Second Ring Road (same bridge, from different sides, in both shots):
Fishermen, bicyclers, drunks and idlers, young romantics, and school kids were out enjoying the paradise too. Carpe diem, as we say in Beijing.
For tales of another flu quarantinee
Those of you who follow Twitter feeds can sign up for reports from Mike Su, aka Biggiesu, whose site is here and who just now was taken off to quarantine in Beijing. We'll see how his experience compares with that of the other quarantined correspondent in Shanghai. (Thanks to A. Lih)
Departing questions
When I first arrived in China, I wrote an Atlantic article about various mysteries I hoped to explore. I've learned about some, still puzzled about others. Keep reading for further hypotheses!
But more mysteries arise as I near departure. One involves the famous CCTV tower, which has been going up a a few blocks from our apartment during the three years we've been in China and the past 18 months we've been in Beijing. Here's how it is supposed to look, in a MOMA pre-construction, heroically glamorous rendering as seen more or less from where we live.
Precious little seems to have happened to the building over the past 18 months (setting aside the fire that destroyed the adjoining Mandarin Oriental hotel in February). A year ago at this time, we thought there was a race to get it ready before the Olympics. Nope. Through all this time, my wife and I have constantly wondered what was going on with the very top of the building. Here's how the roof line actually looks as of today, starting with a long shot from the south:
Closer southerly view:
And, long shot from the Sanlitun area in the north:
For a long time, we thought hoped this was some kind of construction staging pad. But the rooftop cranes came and went, and this thing stayed. Helipad? Who knows. But I wonder whether this was quite what Rem Koolhaas had in mind when he drew the tower's stark, dramatic lines. It has, umm, a somewhat noticeable effect on the building's profile. Another reason to come back soon and see how it, like so many other parts of China, looks when it's "done."
June 11, 2009
Journal of the plague year (Shanghai edition)
An extraordinary statement from someone now being quarantined in Shanghai is below and after the jump. First, a bit of context:
The World Health Organization has of course now declared H1N1 a "pandemic," while emphasizing that its effects so far are mild. You can look long and hard at the WHO's main site about the disease (nerds will note that the site's URL retains its original basename "swineflu" rather than the less porcophobic current term) without seeing any recommendations for widespread quarantine programs or closing of national borders etc.
To put the disease's toll in perspective: of the 30,000 cases reported so far all around the world, about 150 people appear to have died from this variant of flu. And in many "though not all" of these cases, according to the WHO, the victims had "underlying chronic conditions." For comparison: since the time I woke up this morning, about 150 people have died of tuberculosis in China alone.* Estimates vary, but "normal" seasonal flu typically kills around 1,000 people per day worldwide.
[*TB math: According to the UN,
China's average annual death rate from tuberculosis is about 15 per
100,000 population. For a Chinese population of 1.3 billion, that would
mean about 195,000 TB deaths per year, or about 535 per day.]
Of course any new disease strain raises new concerns about potential mutations. And of course a big, poor country like China has different public health considerations than, say, Switzerland might. But bear in mind the dimensions of this current disease threat relative to other real concerns while reading this account from earlier this week, by a person currently quarantined in Shanghai. The writer is originally Chinese but now with U.S. citizenship. It is quite long, but you will not regret reading to the very end. It begins:
When I landed in Shanghai on Saturday afternoon, a team of medical
officials wearing white bio-hazard suites boarded the plane with heat
wands and measured everyone's temperature. All passengers were required
to remain in their seats while they went around to each individual to
check them for physical symptoms of H1N1. These measures had become
standard protocol in China due to fears of a H1N1 outbreak. We all
passed the inspection and were let off of the plane. I thought I was
free to enjoy my two weeks in China.
I'm aware of a ton of loose threads to be gathered up (about Air France updates, Obama's speaking style, urban design in China, design in software, boiled frogs, you name it). Soon.
But three years in China have now come down to three days; the movers arrive in nine hours; and I've happily spent my last reporting day -- at least of this stint in China -- in an uplifting fashion, at a tiny airport outside Beijing on a spectacular blue-sky day. Its managers and organizers have the dream of bringing convenient flight to remote communities across China.
I like the many dreamers and visionaries I have met in China, so I liked these people. And I liked that, in addition to their legacy aircraft (first pic), they were building their fleet with the same Cirrus airplanes I had known in the United States.
Legacy fleet:
Cirrus SR-22 (with Cirrus's man in China, Scott Jiang):
Back to packing. Loose ends soon.
June 10, 2009
This does not bode well
Front page of yesterday's China Daily, my favorite newspaper, echoing stories throughout the Chinese press (for instance, here, in the English version of the leading economics magazine Caijing). I am referring to the "Exporters get sops" story.
For the background on why this spells trouble, check out this Atlantic article from two months ago, on the risks of China's trying to defend its trade surplus when demand is collapsing around the world. After the jump, a relevant excerpt from the article. More tomorrow, in between last-minute packing and other imperatives. ______
Two ads right next to each other at Beijing's Capital Airport on Monday night, part of an ongoing "Fly more" campaign.
First, this one:
About ten feet away, this one:
How I convert this into an "are you used to China?" test: 1) You have to not wonder, "what does this mean at all???" Ie, "leaping depend on vision." 2) You have to not wonder, "how could they have noticed an English grammar problem in one but not bothered to fix it in the other?" [The one-character difference in the Chinese versions has nothing to do with the one-letter difference in the English renditions.]
I just thought, "Huh, look at that," rather than wondering why, what, or how. I guess I'm finally acclimated.
June 7, 2009
Last two about June 4
Numerous previous items (here, here, here, here, and others) have addressed the Chinese government's success in erasing June 4, 1989, from the collective memory of their country's next generation. Two more accounts, both from foreigners who have recently raised the issue with young Chinese people, and each of which shows some of the drama associated with the issue here.
First, from someone now teaching in a major manufacturing city in China. (Yes, I know, this really narrows it down.):
Today [several days ago], a few other foreigners and I were looking at an MSNBC retrospective (miraculously, not blocked) of the important day that happened recently, and just of reveling in the amazing photos and videos with lots of "wows" and stunned silences.
A 23-year old Chinese girl we know very well was sitting next to us and peered over, and said, "What's that? What's going on?" We tried to dissuade her; since in many ways it's not in her or our best interest for her to see, but she forced herself into our huddle and was looking, and noticed all the Chinese people wearing headbands, the blood, the violence, the shouting at the police, and so on. So she started asking, shocked by the fact that this had to be somewhere in her homeland, "What is this!? What's going on!? Who are these people?! Where is this?!" She was just awestruck and horrified.
So we told her the whole story from the W perspective, making diplomatic but honest allowances since most of us don't truly believe that "things" are generally that bad at all; certainly not here and now. But she just listened to us, staring at the videos and pictures, and none of us could see her face, which was bowed intently at the computer screen and veiled by her long hair. All of a sudden, she started weeping. Just weeping. She had had no idea that it had ever happened.
It can be really hard to live here, but it's something like this that makes me love this country and these people, especially here in my city of residence. Where others might see darkness, sadness and ignorance, it's often possible to see hope, beauty in the struggle, and real, unedited life.
The second account:
I am currently living in Shanghai, a recent US college graduate and
English teacher (born in '84). I have a Chinese girlfriend (born in
'89), and since we began dating some months back I have mentioned TAM
to her a few times.
I left the city this morning for a long-planned reporting trip 600 miles to the southwest, in Shaanxi province. As I implied yesterday, I was glad to have the option to leave Beijing. But updates I have received from various sources fall into these categories:
1) Several people have written to say that the going was surprisingly easy. For instance, this account from a Chinese-American man in his 20s whom I know in Beijing:
We were tourists and took many many photos, even asking the
plainclothed police who were keeping their eye on us to take one or
two. We didn't get hassled; in fact, aside from the ridiculous numbers
of cops, obvious and otherwise, there seemed to be no difference from
when I was there two weeks ago, showing friends around. Time: 8am.
Persons: myself, another Chinese-American, and two white guys. Just
wanted to add that data point to your blog, especially in light of the
note of caution you posted.
2) For fully authorized foreign TV news crews, the problem of the day was not so much frontal confrontations with security officials as -- well, you have to see the pictures to believe it. The Shanghaiist site has a roundup of photos and videos of the ever-so-suave "umbrella trick" as practiced on news crews from CNN, BBC, and AFP. This is the kind of thing that makes you hold your head and say: Rising major power in the world?
3) Speaking of the CNN/BBC blackout difference I mentioned previously, it's possible that our apartment house is getting its BBC feed through some outside-normal-systems satellite connection. I hear from other people in China that the normal, authorized (ie, subject-to-censoring) foreign satellite feed cut off CNN, BBC, as well as French TV 5 at all the predictable points.
4) My wife, lacking the excuse of travel to Shaanxi, and equipped with the multiple tools a woman can use to alter her appearance from one day to the next, went back to Tiananmen Square today looking like a different person from the one whose presence the authorities had noted the previous night. Her report on the day's activities is here and after the jump.
I went to the square at noontime, expecting to see pretty much what we
saw last night: the square off limits, people walking along the
roadside or staring at the flag and Mao's giant portrait.
I am guessing that you will see no real-time TV reports from the Tiananmen Square area today, and little or no photography. This is based on personal experience there last night, China time, which also leads to personal advice for anyone in Beijing thinking of going there today.
During my time in Beijing over the past year and a half, I've often seen the square itself totally closed off to visitors, as it is at the moment. There are always plenty of security forces around -- soldiers in green uniforms, various kinds of police in blue uniforms, and "plainclothes" forces who are pretty easy to pick out, like strapping young men in buzz cuts all wearing similar-looking "leisure" clothes. But I have not seen before anything like the situation at the moment.
There are more representatives in all categories -- soldiers, police, obvious plainclothesmen -- than I recall seeing even during the Tibet violence in early 2008 or through the Olympic games. Also many people whom you would normally classify as fruit vendors, tourists from the Chinese provinces, youngish white collar workers male and female, and skateboarder-looking characters wearing cargo shorts and with fauxhawk haircuts, were last night walking up and down the sidewalks with their eyes constantly on visitors and drifting up next to people who were holding conversations.
The way to avoid their attention is keep moving briskly along the sidewalk rather than stopping as if you think there is something particular to look at in the square today. The way to draw it is to stop and look around, to pay attention to the security forces themselves, or to have a camera in your hand. If the camera comes out, it may be pointed at one of the scenic highlights in the center of the square. A nighttime glamour shot of the Great Hall of the People, taken from across the Square with a glowing Monument to the People's Heroes in the middle ground (and no actual people in the square) is within bounds. This is how it looked last night:
A view down toward Mao's Mausoleum, again across an emptied square, is also OK.
But to point a camera in any direction not shown in these shots is to ask for immediate trouble. In particular if security forces in any of the categories above are in the field of view. I say this with first-hand certainty, based on experiences I will describe later when I am living someplace else.
Two other, related notes: As reported yesterday, CNN is still blacked out whenever words like "In China today...." or "Twenty years ago in Bei...." come across the airwaves. Whereas BBC TV is airing uncensored footage of tanks in the square twenty years ago and repeatedly using the phrase "Tiananmen massacre." And just as I type, the admirable Quentin Somerville of the BBC is talking, live from Beijing, about the "ruthlessness at the heart of the Communist government." (And just this second, in a Borges-worthy moment, Somerville said that international coverage was being blacked out across China -- so I got to see him saying that I was not able to see him. Still, the general point is true.)
Second note: Hillary Clinton's official "Message on the Twentieth Anniversary of Tiananmen Square," here, was necessary, appropriate, properly phrased, and -- even though it will have no effect inside China -- exactly the right thing to have done. More on this theme shortly.
Back to practicalities: if you in Beijing and are near the square, be careful. Seriously.
June 2, 2009
June 4 news coverage update
As many people have reported, Twitter has been blacked out in China for the past few days (also, I hear, Flickr and Hotmail), apparently for June 4-related reasons.
BBC TV, weirdly and perhaps temporarily, is being let through loud and clear with quite startling and gruesome footage of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square 20 years ago this evening, plus an interview with one family whose child was shot dead that day, plus with the photographer who took the immortal "tank man" picture.
CNN, on the other hand, goes black-screen for several-minute periods, starting a few seconds after the words "In Beijing twenty years ago..." or "At Tianan...." The censors are just fast enough, or slow enough, to reveal what they are doing -- very much like last year, during the violence in Tibet, when you'd see an opening shot of Lhasa followed by black screen.
As nearly always in Chinese government management of the media, the apparent logic of these steps is hard to figure out. (a) Why hard-line on CNN and tolerance for BBC, which is one click away via the TV remote? (b) Why bother with English-language foreign media at all, since 99% of anyone who might be watching them already knows what happened 20 years ago? Memory-control has worked remarkably well inside China with Chinese language media. I have no explanation for the censors' decisions, just reporting the situation as of early June 3 in Beijing.
If you want to compare speculation with analysis...
...a good place to start would be with these two recent entries from writers within the Washington Post family, both trying to explain what China is, is not, and might someday be doing about North Korea.
For analysis, you would turn to John Pomfret, who actually knows quite a bit about China (as shown most clearly in his book Chinese Lessons). In an entry last week on his Pomfret's China site, he explained how the nutty regime in North Korea looks from the Chinese perspective, and how much power the Chinese actually have -- and lack.
For speculation -- really, paranoid hysteria -- you would turn to his colleague Anne Applebaum, who has just asserted in Slate that China is encouraging the North Koreans to keep testing nuclear weapons and thereby create an international crisis. She says, after entertaining several explanatory hypotheses:
Personally, I favor another scenario, equally speculative: Perhaps the
North Koreans have stepped up their war rhetoric and war preparations
because China wants them to do so. I can't prove that this was the case--no one else can prove any of his
theories about North Korea, in fact--but I can look at the evidence...
The "evidence" she lists will seem crude to the point of caricature to anyone with any familiarity with China. Even such familiarity as would come reading her colleague Pomfret's work. She ends with the flat-out statement:
North Korea is a puppet state, and the Chinese are the puppeteers. They
could end this farce tomorrow. If they haven't done so yet, there must
be a reason.
Many of the reasons -- other than deliberate Chinese war-mongering -- are precisely what Pomfret explains.
I'm not generally looking for fights with people, so why bother to mention this? The minor reason is that since the topic is the same and both writers are necessarily working with imperfect information about North Korea, it's a particularly stark illustration of the difference between informed analysis, explaining its steps of logic, and simply spinning out a snappy "hey, this could be interesting!" idea with minimal effort to reality-check.
The major reason is that this is dangerous. This is the kind of cocksure, half-informed assumption of the most threatening and moralistic interpretation of world events that has led to grief in our recent history. Applebaum herself has laudably cautioned against this view when it comes to Iran. A third member of the Post family, the columnist David Ignatius (disclosure: long-time friend of mine) has published a great new novel, The Increment, which among other themes concerns the danger of talking yourself into this view of the world. It's another worthy candidate for Ms. Applebaum's reading list.
Two more about June 4
In response to previous "lost memory" dispatches -- here, here, and here -- two more notes I thought worth sharing, the first from a Chinese person I know and the second from an American teaching in China.
The Chinese person was of grade-school age in 1989. He wrote in response to this plea from another Chinese person recently put under house arrest:
First and foremost, to hear a student-aged person saying "don't give up freedom" and read Yuhua's op-ed on NYT are like reading romanticizing of that history. What i read in these, call me detached or cynical, are their own sentiments and emotions unrelated to what actually happened 20 years ago, rather than true and fair understanding of it, which is what i want to read and remember. I don't deny those people have their own faith and dreams, sometimes glorious. But celebrating their faith and dreams through memorization of that history is absurd. Feels like ripping the history of its true meaning and rewriting it for one's own sake. And this is a lot worse than forgetting or misreading history.
Second, I don't understand why the (managed or controlled) oblivion of that part of history should be such a big event. There are tons of other events in modern China history that we don't know or remember. So why single out this particular part of history? Was it because of the fact that death occurred to thousands of unarmed students? Well, if that's case, we should lament a thousand times for those died during the great famine, political movements and culture revolution, not to mention the millions killed during the civil war. I can clearly remember that we were taught during high school that in each of the great campaigns in the civil war, tens of thousands of enemies were killed. Great military successes. But we were never taught in the same book that those were also human beings, killed in that large number and then forgotten (I guess they were probably not part of "the people" Yuhua was talking about). I don't mean to be sarcastic or cold-blooded about this. What i want to say is that our history is never short of such carnage episodes and since we have forgotten or ignored so much of it, why pick this out in particular and romanticize it. Only to make it sound very very very absurd!
After the jump, the dispatch from the foreign teacher:
It appears that Alex Wang, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Beijing, must have stayed last month in the same part of the Green Lake View Hotel in Kunming that my wife and I recently occupied. Because the "look at all the solar panels!" pictures he took from the hotel window and posted recently on the NRDC Greenlaw site are amazingly similar to those I showed two days ago. If you're traveling to Kunming and want to get in on the fun, I suggest asking for room 2008 at the hotel -- also known as the "view that will impress foreigners worried about the environment" suite.
It turns out that the solar-paneled rooftops of Kunming are about as well known a feature of the city as are gabled rooftops for Paris. As one reader with a Chinese name wrote:
Your latest post of the roof with solar-thermal heating device in Kunming is a typical picture of Chinese city, especially of those second or third-tier cities. People in these cities mostly live in the apartments built in the last two decades. Solar heating device became extremely popular around 2000, for its cheapness, and governments then don't care about its impact on the outlook of the city,ie,barely any regulation.
He also pointed to this Greenpeace report on the city of Dezhou, in Shandong province, where many solar panels are manufactured -- and used. Also, this recent Danwei.org post that includes a Greenpeace video about the city. Les toits de Dezhou:
After the jump, a note from a non-Chinese person about the larger life bargain that solar-thermal water systems imply. ___
Not all young Chinese people are unaware of or indifferent to the events of twenty years ago in Beijing. Late last night I heard from one such person, roughly in the student age bracket, who had just been put under house arrest for the next week, until the "sensitive" anniversary period is over. The message I received today via mobile phone/SMS, before communication ended, was this:
Could you please blog, "Chinese people, don't give up on freedom, ever."
It is heartbreaking and, in a way, shaming for outsiders to realize how little they can do directly to affect the government's handling of cases like these. I would only hurt this person's prospects by saying more about specifics. But this is where my thoughts will be in the next week.
Lost memory of June 4, update #1
I mentioned yesterday that a system-wide silence about what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago this week has left many young Chinese completely ignorant of that stage in their country's history. I meant this not as an original observation -- the phenomenon is widely discussed here by outsiders and by Chinese people who are aware of the events, plus in the NYT op-ed by Yu Hua I cited -- but as reinforcement of a point that might not be so familiar in the rest of the world.
Of many reactions that have come in on the lost-memory theme, I will quote a representative two. The first is from a Chinese person now based at a university in the United States. After the jump, a roundup of references and links on the topic.
From the academic in America:
Chinese government is embarassed by the incident 20 years ago. It is never a glorious thing to shoot at your own citizens. So it keeps silent on the issue.
But I don't think this is the main reason to students' indifference. There are plenty of resources about this on the internet. This is a staple topic in Chinese internet discussion forums, usually with great vehemence on both pro and anti government sides. The main reason I think is there was not really any support among general population for overthrowing of communist government even back in 1989. There was not any strike. (If there had been a general strike, the communist government would probably have fallen).
The general population watched the events unfolding in Beijing before June 4th warily but also with amusement. Unlike the participants in the demonstration, for the "silent majority", the events happening in those few months are far from the defining event in their lives. It is no great surprise people in China don't attach much importance to them.
And for most of young people, they don't have a lot of grievances against the government. People have lots of personal freedom as long as they don't touch politics. As for those political-minded, the communist party is always eager to recruit them. There are ample economic opportunities to absorb their mind and energy. They don't identify with the students 20 years ago the same way young people in US don't identify themselves with protesters during the Vietnam War. ___
From an organization holding a conference I plan to attend in Beijing starting tomorrow, whose sessions have been scheduled for a government-run meeting site:
Change of Venue Due
to the concerns of the H1N1 virus, the Chinese government has banned
gatherings of groups larger than 50 people at all government
facilities. Due to this new circumstance, we are no longer able to host
the forum at the [xxxxx]. We
have now changed the venue to the [xxxx] Hotel. The schedule of the forum will
remain the same, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have
caused you.
I have no independent information about whether, when, by whom, and with what geographic extent such an order might have been issued. And of course it's hardly the first time I've heard of a last-minute change of site (or cancellation) for a long-scheduled gathering in China, for reasons having nothing to do with flu.
Whatever the back story here, to me the announcement is an interesting historical document concerning the management of public opinion in China during the current flu episode -- and the success of the government in making any measure, no matter how hazily connected to systematic public health reasoning, seem part of a resolute effort to protect the Chinese people against lax standards elsewhere, notably including the United States. No other countries are imposing quarantine rules as strict as China's? So much more to the credit of the government protecting us here!! Yes, Americans too are familiar with such "security theater" -- just not when it comes to flu. And I can't help remembering that in recent hours I passed through airports in Kunming and Beijing, "government facilities" in both cases, where tens of thousands of people were gathered. So far we all survived.
Win in China screening - Tuesday in NYC
Reminder (earlier notice here): If you're in New York this Tuesday evening, June 2, consider checking out the screening at the Asia Society of a new documentary on the Chinese reality TV show for budding entrepreneurs, Win in China. Screening details here; my 2007 article about the show here.
At the main web site for the film, here, you can see a short trailer. I was going to embed a playable link to the trailer, but the opening image on the embed is a headshot of me being interviewed about the show, and that seemed too weird. So here's a different static shot from the trailer, below. It depicts one of the PK phases of the show, for "Player Kill." See my article, and presumably the film, for explanation of PK and much else.
May 30, 2009
Lost memory of Tiananmen
As I write, at the equivalent of 11pm Saturday night in New York -- 11am Sunday morning in Beijing -- links to three of the four NYT essays about the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square are broken. (The page with links to the four essays is here: as of this moment, items #2, #3, and #4 are instead linked to essays about the recession from three months ago.)
I am sure that will be fixed soon. A quick note about the one essay that is readable at the moment, this one from Yu Hua, the author of Brothers. He says he is writing about the event for the first time ever in order to emphasize two points:
The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a
one-time release of the Chinese people's political passions, later
replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the
summer of 1989 the incident vanished from the Chinese news media. As a
result, few young Chinese know anything about it.
The first point is continually thrashed out in all articles about the current state of China's economic and political evolution. For the moment I want to underscore the accuracy of the second.
I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country's past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family's experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can't assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it's just another day.
What do you notice in this view of Kunming?
This morning, looking north out the window of the Green Lake View ( Cui Yi Hu*) hotel in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southern China:
Click above for larger, detailed view. Or, see this closeup of the building nearest the hotel:
Clue, in case you didn't spot it yourself: Every roof as far as you can see has solar-thermal panels for hot water heating. More to come shortly on China's general environmental/climate situation, but I think this vista is different from that in many US cities -- among other details you might notice, in the prevalence of the panels. __ * Originally thought we'd stayed in the Green Lake, Cui Hu. On correction from higher authority, ie my wife, I realize it was the Green Lake View, Cui Yi.
May 26, 2009
Beijing construction triptych #3: Opposite House
The Atlantic's latest issue has a brief article by me about a very unusual new hotel in Beijing called the Opposite House. For details -- get the magazine!
Here are a few amateur shots of what makes the place a noticeable exception among the other fancy Western hotels that have sprung up all over Beijing. Giant version of a traditional Chinese medicine chest, with (mainly) workable drawers, in the atrium:
Scando-Japanese minimalism in the rooms -- I mean, "studios":
Enormous woven-metal drape or sail hanging from the upper stories down through the atrium:
There are genuine, professional photos in the magazine, and this brings me to my real point. Seriously, you should read articles like this in the magazine itself, not on line.
Some written material is merely "text" and can be absorbed equally well regardless of medium. I've claimed that I like reading novels just as much on a Kindle as in printed form. All that matters is a novel is the words. But some material is designed for something other than a computer screen, and is best absorbed from printed pages, with illustrations and thought-through layout. Most of what's in a good magazine is in this category. Long, narrative articles are simply better to read on a sequence of pages, with illustrations and margins and call-out text, than as clicked-through screens.
I'm saying: subscribe to our magazine because you'll enjoy it more that way. And: subscribe because you should! Anyone who worries about the "crisis of the press" has a chance to do something about it for two bucks a month.
Herdict: now, in Arabic and Chinese!
Several months ago I mentioned a new web site from Harvard's Berkman Center called "Herdict," which allows people around the world to pool information about web sites being blocked.
For instance: late last year, I suddenly found that I couldn't reach the New York Times web site from my apartment in Beijing without using a VPN, and I heard from a friend in Shanghai that she was having trouble too. We didn't know if it was a problem on the Times's end, coincidental problems with our local connections, some other unknown issue -- or a conscious crackdown in China. As it emerged, Chinese officials had imposed a nationwide blackout on the NYT site. But it took a while to determine what was going on.
Herdict is meant to be a quick, crowdsourced way of reporting such developments -- and it has recently come out with Chinese and Arabic language versions of its site. It looks as if it's getting more traffic than the last time I checked a few months ago, but it could use more participants to produce finer-grained reports. Even now it's a quick way for people in, say, China to figure out that if they're having problems reaching YouTube, Blogger, China Digital Times, or Huffington Post, the fault lies not with them but with the Great Firewall. A useful tool.
May 24, 2009
Back to the gaokao....
... following this discussion of Chinese education, Chinese management and research styles, and whether there is a "creativity" problem for people trained in China. Main theme so far about the gaokao, or 高考 -- the standardized, nationwide, make-or-break test for university admission: no one likes it, but many Chinese people feel that it is fairer than any likely alternative.
Today, two dispatches. First, a short one from a young Irish high-tech entrepreneur now working in the United States. Then, a long one from a foreigner teaching at a mainland Chinese university.
From the young Irish technologist:
Am enjoying posts on the gaokao. As it happens, the Irish education system functions virtually identically. The "Leaving Certificate" is taken by every Irish student in their final year. It consists of three core subjects (English, math, a language), plus three tertiary subjects; your results in each subject add up to a single score (max of 600); this score is the sole determinant of undergraduate college admission. There's much hand-wringing over students' foreign-language abilities--or lack thereof--even after years of study. It's often criticized for excessive emphasis on rote learning. And it is ultimately brutally fair: students rank courses in order of preference, and a computer program fills them by allocating places to successively lower-scoring students.
Despite the similarities, I've never heard accusations of a lack of creativity in students... and having gone through school in Ireland and college in the US, I can't say I noticed much difference in creativity or critical thinking. All of which may mean that the Chinese education system (or at least its superficial attributes) are not the problem.
(As it happens, I never sat the Leaving Cert, so I don't have direct experience with it. Unlike the gaokao, you can't sit it early, so I dropped out of school and taught myself the A Levels (British equivalent) instead. Also, I guess I should qualify the US/Ireland comparison. At college, the students were certainly smarter on average, but I don't think they were relatively more creative.)
From the teacher:
I'm another foreign university English teacher in China. I'm currently
in Yantai, Shandong Province. I'm an experienced teacher from the U.S.
and I've been in China for almost three years. One of my standard
classroom practices is to pose a general question and ask for
responses. I find that after a couple of weeks, when the students have
gotten used to me, most of them are willing to risk raising their hands
and offering their opinions.
One of my regular discussion subjects is the students' experiences so
far with the Chinese educational system. More than any other, this one
is greeted with groans and rolled eyes.
First picture: Google satellite view of the I-10 / I-405 intersection on the west side of Los Angeles. This is where the Santa Monica freeway meets the San Diego freeway, an extremely busy piece of thoroughfare. The only airline flight I've ever missed in my life was because of a jam at this very intersection -- my mother was driving me to LAX for a flight back to college after my first year's Christmas break, and we sat for two hours on one of the connectors shown below. (Part #1 of the Beijing construction triptych here.)
Next picture: the Guomao intersection in Beijing, where Jianguo Lu meets the East Third Ring Road. Our apartment building is just off screen on the lower right corner of the picture; subway entrances are on the other three corners but not on ours:
From my point of view, main difference between these intersections: no sane person would try to cross I-10/I-405 on foot. But many tens of thousands of pedestrians, including me, have to cross the Guomao intersection every day.
... that this issue is still with us, three clips from web-based environment sites, all taken within a few-minute span.
1) Real time map of particulate pollution across the US. This map shows PM2.5, the smallest particulates which are most damaging to the lungs:
2) EPA explanation of what the color-coding means.
3) What today's real-time monitoring of PM2.5 in Beijing shows. (Background here.) Note that the EPA charts have no reading or category for levels above 300, like the current 311 in Beijing.
Substantive update on anti-pollution efforts in China coming shortly, following this item a week ago. For now, think I will skip the gym today.
May 22, 2009
Now I truly feel like Mr. Beijing
I know people who've lived here for decades, for their entire lives, and have not had the full immersion in Beijing-ology that I have recently been exposed to: an air journey from Nanyuan Airport!
"Thirteen kilometers south of Tian'anmen, deep in Fentgai district, likes the purgatory of Beijing air travel: Nanyuan Airport. Only travelers with frightening karmic debt end up here -- and all clients of China United Airlines, formerly a military carrier, which bases its operations at Nanyuan."
Probably I have the karmic debt, and for sure I was traveling on CUA -- but I found the experience weirdly charming. It was like a little trip back into the Beijing I first saw in the 1980s: an airport in the middle of a rural neighborhood, trees all around the runways, little hutongs and five-story Mao-era apartments just outside the airport fence. Few intrusions of modernity, like: taxicabs with meters (you bargain) or the for-sissies effect of translated signage. This is definitely not the new Beijing Capital Airport. (Below, my fellow travelers for Linyi, headed toward our CUA airplane on the tarmac at Nanyuan. Linyi, in Shandong province, is another of those Chinese cities few foreigners have heard of but is larger than nearly any city in the US.)
I'll take my nostalgia wherever I can find it. This was an unexpected dose.
Beijing construction triptych #1: Mandarin Oriental
Three and half months ago, during the climax of the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year fireworks insanity bacchanalia, the nearly-completed Mandarin Oriental Beijing hotel, designed by Rem Koolhaas, was engulfed in flames. It soon emerged that fireworks on the nearby CCTV tower, also by Koolhaas, had been the source. (Reuters photo of the fire, Feb 9)
The fire and its aftermath will make a great book topic for someone (not me), because of all the intriguing "this is modern China!" strands involved. The climax of architectural ambition / hubris in Beijing. News media intrigue about exploring the cause of the fire. Backlash against CCTV, for whom the complex (including famous odd-shaped tower) is being built. Many, many other subplots -- as suggested eg here.
What strikes me at the moment is that the building stands untouched, looking months later just as it did when the ashes cooled. Two days ago, looking east from about half a mile away, across the Third Ring Road:
Sometimes structures in big Chinese cities appear -- or disappear -- practically overnight. Other times, they sit for a very long period in limbo. I'm not sure of all the reasons why the hotel has this frozen-in-time aspect, but it's startling whenever I see it.
May 21, 2009
For you fans of Chinese reality-TV
In the spring of 2007 I wrote about a campy / idealistic Chinese reality show called Win In China, which was designed to select, train, and motivate future entrepreneurs. The film maker Ole Schell has produced a documentary about the program and its aftermath, which will be shown at the Asia Society in New York on Tuesday evening, June 2. Details here.
I haven't seen the film, though I was one of the "what it all means" interviewees, but I watched Ole Schell getting lots of background footage as the show was underway. I think this should be very interesting. Make your Gotham travel plans accordingly!
May 20, 2009
Compare and contrast: "quarantine" in the US and China
Below on the left, the image from the recent diary of a (perfectly healthy) AP correspondent who, with his wife, ended up in Chinese quarantine for a week, simply because their plane had stopped at a Mexican airport. Starting on the right, an account from a reader in the US who has an actual swine flu patient in her house. The eccentricities of each country's approach are on display here -- along with, as discussed earlier, the reasons why China's reaction might understandably differ from America's or Europe's. The reader begins:
"In striking contrast to the story of quarantine in China, I am here in
Illinois with a house guest with the swine flu, and only the vaguest
instructions about avoiding spreading the infection. The young woman
came down with the flu Monday morning, after not feeling great on
Sunday. Since her health insurance is an HMO from another part of the
country, it took several phone calls to insurance companies, doctors,
etc., to get an appointment - not that the current round of health care
reform is likely to address this ridiculous bureaucracy, but that's
another topic.
You should, of course, start by reading my description of the casino economy as it was fully opening up two years ago, here and here.
But on the remote chance that's not enough, it is surprisingly interesting to get the email updates from an operation called "Destination Macau." At first glance I thought it was just another local-booster site. But here is a representative passage from the latest newsletter:
"If a president of most companies we know were to stand up in public, after having recently posted a solid rise in quarterly earnings amid a bearish economic environment, and announce he is looking to cut nearly a quarter of his workforce, his audience might be forgiven a gasp of astonishment. Not when that president runs the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
"This week, the company's recently installed president, Mike Leven, announced in Las Vegas that he was going to cut another 3,000 to 4,000 jobs at the Macau subsidiary, taking the total workforce to around 13,000-14,000 from its current level of around 17,500, and down from a high that once scraped the 20,000 mark. This is despite the fact that the Venetian Macao posted a 10 per cent rise in first-quarter EBITDA and continues to hoover up the city's visitor market... Job cuts and the redrawing of organization charts seem to have become routine at Macau's most profitable gaming concessionaire as it struggles under the weight of a massive debt load.
"Needless to say, the Venetian Macao is not a happy camp for an expatriate to be in at the moment. Given that locals are protected by divine right to employment in an election year, every Filipino, Nepalese, Malaysian, Singaporean and, yes, American and Australian that walks the floors of LVS's Macau properties can be forgiven their long faces...
"A black joke doing the rounds yesterday was that all of these cuts could be made without having to go beneath the vice-president level."
For specialized tastes only, but engagingly done.
About corruption, meritocracy, and "fairness" in Chinese life
A recent "Red-diaper perspective" on Chinese schooling and the nationwide "gaokao" admissions tests said that distortions in Chinese education were related to the nervousness of a Chinese elite that was not sure it could pass its advantages on to its children. Here, from another Chinese reader, is a dissent. Climax of the argument below; full text after the jump.
The anonymous reader blamed that China
gaokao system is brutal. I got news for him: The reality in China is
brutal. A population of 1.4 Billion makes any resource and opportunity
extremely scarce. This is why a fair system is so important: if you
deny the poor the educational opportunity to climb the social ladder by
reserving the precious slots in elite school for those who have, the
next thing will be that the poor overthrow the elite class physically,
as it happened several times in Chinese history.
The article notes that mainland China had a large number of entries and won many
minor prizes. But it had no real successes -- and the question
was why.
The three overall grand-prize winners were all young women from
American high schools, shown here. For individual best-in-category prizes -- 18
total according to People's Daily, 19 total according to Intel -- all
but one went to American students. That one exception was from Taiwan.
What's the problem? The article discussed some obvious barriers -- language, resources -- but quoted a number of Chinese authorities saying that the real problem lay in the way Chinese schools taught people to think for themselves -- or, didn't. Too much emphasis on rote, detail, and following procedures; too little encouragement to reflect about the process of discovery. An analysis very similar to what we originally heard from a foreigner. I do not pretend to be able to follow arguments in the Chinese press with any nuance. I offer this (tipped from a contact at Intel, then labored-through by me) as evidence of a parallel, and obviously authorized, Chinese-language discussion, and as a resource for any Chinese reader who might have missed it.
May 18, 2009
Very interesting flu-quarantine diary
Will Weissert, an AP correspondent based in Havana, traveled with his wife to China for a wedding -- and ended up spending a week in quarantine. His account of the quarantine, here and with pictures beginning here, is very interesting on the nuts and bolts of how the system works. It's not a complaint, though there are some complaining details. Mainly a chronicle, with details I hadn't seen elsewhere.
Here is his wife in the quarantine-hotel room, as Chinese officials take notes on her condition.
And here is the intro to his account of how they ended up in this situation:
My wife and I are in perfect health, but after flying to China
for my college friend's wedding we're being quarantined in a remote
hotel for seven days. The reason: Our flight from our home in Havana included a layover in Cancun, and China is taking no chances with swine flu.
Never
mind that we were in Cancun for only two hours, that we didn't leave
the airport and that Mexican doctors with electronic thermometers
checked us for fever on arrival and departure. Never mind that when our
Continental Airlines flight from Newark
touched down in Shanghai, we and everyone else on board were not
allowed to leave our seats until health workers clamored aboard and
pointed a blue beam at our foreheads to take our temperatures.
The Mexican
stamps in our passports -- my wife is Chilean, I'm American -- are enough
for authorities to pull us out of line at immigration and send us to a
medical room where attendants in white lab coats take our temperature yet again and give us surgical masks...
After 3 1/2 hours, a man in uniform -- speaking by phone with a
communist official everyone calls "the leader" -- announces we will be
confined to a hotel room for seven days.
We say we'll simply fly back home. He tells us that isn't possible.
Worth reading the rest. (Thanks to Daniel Lippman.)
Cross cultural exchange
Above-the-fold picture on China Daily special weekly business supplement. Caption says:
"The official dance troupe of the Dallas Cowboys (a US National Football League team) perform with local elderly at a downtown park in Shanghai."
How it looked on the page:
In the circumstances, the "local elderly" don't look that bad! Must be the morning tai chi.
More Chinese education! Or, is it really "Chinese"?
Previously in our series, the complaint has been that the Chinese school system pushes students too hard and in too rote-memorization a way, leaving the victors undeniably tough but maybe drained of their spark and inventiveness. Along the way, many contrary views and debates about the role of the Chinese nationwide university-admission exam, the gaokao.
Now, two bits of testimony more or less on China's behalf. First, from a Westerner now teaching in Japan, who says that these problems are hardly confined to China. Then from an American (of Chinese ancestry) about an American counterpart to gaokao-style training.
First, the Westerner teaching at a university in Japan.
China, Eastern Europe, Japan, it's all the same story. No, it's not a legacy of Communism. The saying here in Japan is similar to the one mentioned by the teacher in Eastern Europe: "The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down."
I cannot get my students to voice an opinion for love nor money. They do not want to call attention to themselves; stand out from the crowd, or be different in any way. This is the Japanese way. If, by chance, they do have an opinion, they keep it to themselves.
As a result, they are totally incapable of creative/critical thinking or problem solving abilities.
US no-show at Shanghai Expo: the hows and whys (updated)
Last month Adam Minter of ShanghaiScrap, did our initial Atlantic report on the looming self-inflicted embarrassment of America's no-show status at the 2010 Shanghai Expo / World's Fair.
The strands of the story are tangled, to put it mildly, and have been hard to follow in scattered press reports. So Minter's latest detailed backgrounder is very useful in explaining how things reached this point, why it matters, and what if anything could be done. Among the points he clarifies, in a list of problems that have affected the proposed US pavilion:
A. Cost. Shanghai Expo 2010's [one of the US contenders] $61 million pavilion
budget - down from an earlier $84 million budget - is inordinately
expensive, and surely the most expensive national pavilion after the
elaborate Chinese design. "For that kind of money [$61 million]," an
experienced American businessman in Shanghai told me. "You could build
a thirty-story residential tower on that site and still have money left
over. But these people want that money for a two story pavilion." In
comparison, Germany's elaborate pavilion design is projected to cost US$40.8 million; Norway's elegant structure,
a comparatively minor US$22 million. And even those might be
overpriced. At the Beijing 2008 Olympics, major commercial pavilions
were built for around $1000 per square meter - that is, less than US$5
million. So far, Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., has failed to provide a
detailed public accounting of how it plans to spend its proposed US$61
million, leading to wild and unsubstantiated speculation among
experienced China hands in Shanghai.
[UPDATE: I hear from informed sources that there is some controversy about the importance of whole cost issue, with some other pavilions costing more than this US figure -- and the real question being whether the US can spend this much money in a sensible way with so little time to go. More details as they come in.]
One image of the proposed US structure Minter is referring to, from this site:
Full set of images of other countries' structures here. One example I like from that site: the Israeli pavilion, with components of the Whispering Garden, the Hall of Light, and the Hall of Innovations. Israel is a tiny country and this is a relatively small structure, but FWIW Israeli's entire budget for the expo, including construction, is $6 million.
And here is Italy's (no budget listed). The story is worth following.
Europe, America, China respond to the flu
From Kevin Miller, of the University of Michigan, an observation on why the differing European, American, and Chinese approaches to the current spread of flu might be explained by the respective health threats the areas face:
I have
a colleague, a native German, who went to Germany last week and
reported that the general attitude was that Americans were being
crazily hysterical about this. It makes sense to me that a) the Chinese
are really being hysterical, b) Germans are calm, and c) we're
somewhere in between.
If you look at the medical safety net in
each country, this makes perfect sense (plus the big worry that this
could combine with bird flu, which they have in China. H1N1 seems to be
easy to catch but rarely serious; bird flu is hard to catch but often
fatal; flu viruses seem good at swapping DNA within host nuclei. If the
same person had both bird flu and H1N1, this could lead to something
really bad).
Lots of fascinating testimony has piled up, on the topic previously covered here. (Gaokao = nationwide university-admission exam in China.) Will parcel it out soon. Here is one from a reader who wishes not to be named. I have omitted only a few comments about people who have written before, using their real names. He starts with his bona fides:
I have been following the discussion on your blog, on the subject of
Chinese gaokao, with interest. Now, before I go on, I feel compelled to
state the facts: I had taken the SAT, and received 2400 on it (Yes, one of the less than few hundred a year ones with this
result. It is utterly insane in my opinion.) So, I do want to make it
clear that this isn't a loser's rant against meritocracy.
If you're thinking about coming to China from the US, you should know that visa rules have recently tightened up dramatically, as they did before the Olympics last year. Here's why.
Inside China, the detected flu cases have doubled, from one person to two, and the quarantine-and-tracking efforts are stepping up. Newspaper charts have shown the infected people's progress through the country and reported the efforts to find and quarantine everyone who was, say, riding in the same railroad car. A report I saw this morning said that most of the people who had been on the same Beijing-Jinan train with Victim #2 were still "at large."
[Reader R. Skinner points out the inventive West-to-East rendering of the Toronto->Vancouver-> Beijing flight.] Meanwhile, in mail from Chinese readers and in Chinese and English news sources I've seen more and more frequent mentions of the need to crack down on the "real" source of the problem: the United States. Both of the infected people had, after all, come on flights originating in the US (flights from Mexico having been cancelled for quite a while.) Eg this lead editorial in yesterday's Global Times, the new state run voice to the outside world.
I am at a computer for about 90 seconds until late tonight, but: the reported selection of Utah's Republican governor Jon Huntsman Jr as the Obama Administration's new ambassador to China is an interesting and surprising choice -- and at face value, a shrewd one. Huntsman is reportedly fluent in Mandarin, based on his time as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan; has an adopted Chinese daughter (plus another from India, in addition to biological children); is experienced in Asia, as a boy-ambassador to Singapore (at age 32) during the first Bush administration; and -- so I gather -- is on the modern-science as opposed to the flat-earth side of the debate about the environmental + climate issues that constitute the most important impending business between the US and China. More later, but on first impression a clever choice from American-interest point of view (completely apart from what it means for internal party politics in the US). Will also give the Chinese leadership something to think about: why the new Democratic president has appointed a rising Republican politician. Sign of bipartisan US views toward China? Etc?
Subject to revision if there is something important I don't know about Huntsman and his record!
May 15, 2009
Not sure exactly which Chinese people Paul Krugman met...
... before writing his column today in the NYT, but:
While his conclusion -- that China has to be part of global efforts to control carbon emissions -- is obviously correct and important, his premise -- that no one in China admits this -- does not square with my observation over these past three years.* As it happens, I spent this very day at a conference in Beijing where the first five presentations I heard were about emissions-reductions and sustainability in one specific domestic industry. (Also, I wrote in the magazine, a year ago, about Chinese people and organizations making similar efforts in a variety of other fields.)
If blunt-instrument outside pressure like this column makes it more likely that Chinese authorities will keep making progress, then as a pure matter of power-politics I say: fine. But my guess and observation is that it is just as likely to get their back up -- and encourage the ever-present victimization mentality that makes it less rather than more likely that Chinese authorities will behave "responsibly" on the international stage.
As I've written a million times (most recently here and here and generally here), arguably the most important thing that will happen on Barack Obama's watch is reaching an agreement with China -- or not -- on environmental and climate issues. We'll see what's the best means toward that end. _____ * Krugman says:
"Each time I raised the issue during my visit, I was met with outraged
declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of
fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar
constraints during its development; while China may be the world's
largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions
are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the
global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the
past carbon emissions of today's wealthy nations. And they're right...But that unfairness doesn't change the fact that letting China
match the West's past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it."
I've heard that Chinese response too many times to count. But it's mainly a throat-clearing prelude to talking-turkey discussions about what the country will and can do, and under what circumstances.
May 14, 2009
In defense of the 高考: Chinese, foreigners rally to its support!
Yesterday, two reader-arguments (here and here) that the gaokao or 高考, the standardized, nationwide college-admissions exam for students in China, plays a central role in the parts of Chinese education that people inside and outside the country dislike. (On that larger debate, here.)
Since then, a flood of correspondence from people generally offering a "Yes, but..." defense of the gaokao. Yes, it's not connected to "real" education. Yes, it makes students' lives hell. Yes... But: it has other advantages. Or, the obvious alternatives would be even worse -- especially given widespread Chinese fear that any more "subjective" system would certainly be rigged.
Here is a sampling. Judge for yourself -- and be convinced, at least, that allocating educational opportunity in a country with the scale and extremes of China is a complicated business.
1. From a reader in China:
I just read your posts on the nationwide college-admissions exam, the
gaokao. While I agreed that this system did focus too much on
memorizing books and exam preparation, it cannot be replaced for the
current sociaty. The advantage of this universal exam system is
relative fairness.
Yes, there are much unfairness in the exam system, i.e. Beijing and Shanghai got too many quotas for the colleges entries, minority groups got extra points, and some can get in based on their privilege and wealth. However, this system is the most fair and practical one compared to all other alternative systems. The American system including essays, reference letters, community service experiences...all too subjective and easy to manipulate in China. The privileged ones will benefit even more from American system and squeeze the poor talented ones out of the best schools.
I am all for a reformed education system to promote innovation. But the first thing the education should achieve is fairness: the best students can be selected to get the best education.
2) From Ella Shengru Zhou, a Chinese student who has just finished college in Beijing and will enroll in a Harvard graduate school this fall. She has worked with me as a interpreter and assistant.
Officially done with my college study today, I feel I just have to say
something about the discussion on China's education. I don't think gao
kao is the problem in China's education.
From Joshua Davis, a foreigner teaching English in China, a further critique of the nationwide college-admissions exam, the gaokao, following this one earlier today by another foreign teacher. These are worth noting less for the novelty of the complaint (objecting to the effects of the test on Chinese education is like objecting to the effects of money on American politics) than for giving examples of how central and powerful the test's effects are. Mr. Davis writes:
Earlier this year, I decided that one of the things that stifles creativity in China more than anything else was high school. All Chinese students are required to take an all inclusive,
end-all, be-all exam at the end of their high school careers called the
Gao Kao.. If I can remember from the top of my head, this test includes
physics, biology, math, politics, Chinese, English, history, geography,
and maybe 3 or 4 others.
Because this is the only grade that actually matters in high school,
it's the sole determiner for students going on to college. There is no
college essay, interviews, etc. The only thing that matters is the gao
kao.
From Benjamin, a foreign teacher who recounts what his Chinese students don't like about their educational experience. The big focus here is the 高考, or gaokao, the nationwide college entrance exam that, as in some other Asian countries, is the make or break moment for many life prospects. Americans think their kids are stressed by the SAT. Hah!
The ripple effects of the gaokao (and its Japanese and Korean counterparts) are a familiar theme in complaints about Asian school systems. But after the jump, Benjamin gets his students to explain what a better Chinese school system would look like. He writes:
Having taught English here for the past year, mostly to recent high
school and college graduates (and a few primary and middle school
students), I have had countless opportunities to hear what Chinese
students have to say about their educational system.
They don't like it that much, and it goes beyond ideas about
critical thinking and creativity. They have said that they find it a
very stifling experience, filled with long days focused on boring books
and lectures with rote assignments to ensure that they've memorized the
essential facts (and pre-decided interpretations) and mastered the
essential skills.
Expats in China: NOT being called in for health checks (updated)
Yesterday I posted a report from a teacher in Hangzhou who, along with other foreigners on the staff, was being called in for special health checks as part of anti-flu precautions. The teacher wondered whether this was a Hangzhou localism or a wider policy.
Since then I have received no reports of special health checks for foreigners, and many comments to the effect that "all is routine here." So it appears to be a one-city or even one-school policy. Worth noting.
Update: Have heard from one teacher in Suzhou about health checks there too (not far from Hangzhou, so maybe....) and an expat in Beijing about getting temperature checked on the way into his apartment building gym. Adding: "(lucky they didn't take it one the way out. Would have been quarantined for sure. Or perhaps shipped out to a morgue)."
May 12
News and events in China today are dominated by commemorations of the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008.
In that spirit, here is a link to a video released today by Afterquake, a project by Abigail Washburn and Dave Liang, American musicians living in China, to document and assist the recovery effort.
I think most people will find the video affecting but not depressing. It certainly makes clear why this event so dominated the country's consciousness last year. The only thing the post-earthquake scenes don't convey is how vast the devastated area was. You could drive for hours, far away from the epicenter, and still see crushed buildings and shaken-down mountains like those depicted here.
Further links: Sichuan Quake Relief charity Additional site on Vimeo for English version of video Sites for Chinese version of video on Tudou and Youku SexyBeijing.TV, whose Luke Mines shot and edited the video
May 11, 2009
Here it comes: more on Chinese & non-Chinese education!
From a Chinese person teaching in America; then an American teaching somewhere else; and finally the man who kicked the whole thing off, Randy Pollock himself. (Previously here.)
First, from a Chinese reader:
I had a pretty low opinion on Chinese education when I was in China. Certain subjects such as history and Marxist philosophy are just crammed in without any critical discussion. But when I came to US and worked as TA for a top state university, I changed my mind a bit. Almost none of my students (first-year economics) are interested in understanding the materials critically. Most of them are just looking for a good grade. Also the math preparation some of my students received are so inadequate, I doubt they would be able to graduate from high school in China, not mentioning entering a top university. My classmate told me a story that one of his student could not do 7*7 by hand. From what I read in newspapers about quality of inner city schools in US, the situation may be even worse than I see. So the conspiracy theory one of your reader talked about that the poor quality of
