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.
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 14, 2009
About the internet, the Atlantic, and Iran
In coverage of Iran over the past week and especially in these last few days, Andrew Sullivan has on his site illustrated the way the internet and related technologies have permanently changed journalism for the better. So have a number of other people at other sites, which have made themselves clearinghouses for information coming out of Iran in emails, blog posts, camera-phone and ad hoc video transmissions, and other forms including, yes, Twitter feeds. Collectively they've let the outside world know more about what is happening in a would-be sealed-off country, and given people inside that country a place to share and compare news as they could not possibly have done even a few years ago.
This fact is worth noting its own right, as a moment when we see that something truly new and positive has occurred. It's also worth observing in light of the many seemingly-permanent changes for the worse in journalism that have coincided with the internet era, whether or not they've been caused by it.
If I'm not mentioning anything about Iran at the moment, it's not because I think the news unimportant but rather because I have no contacts in the country and nothing to add to the discussion. As we follow developments there it's worth recognizing the different era in communications that has begun.
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.
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.
June 1, 2009
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. ___
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of response on the "who's killing the press?" theme. Because the theme has been so very heavily worked over in recent months, I'm not reposting much of this. But here is a note that reflects a theme in a number of messages: that the newspapers are only the first casualties in what will be a more sweeping elimination of ad revenue in general. It is a response from a reader named Hal:
Among my friends, we've had this discussion before. Here's what I said then, edited to fit addressing you directly: *^*^*
The real problem is, advertising is dying. It's just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.
This is why I was warning anyone who would listen that traditional media's schadenfreude when the internet bubble popped in 2001 was probably misplaced. Because the reason it popped was one finally had the metrics to show Advertising Doesn't Work. Google has forestalled the inevitable by doing the Net equivalent of the "tiny little ads" schtick of a decade or two back, but I think they see the writing on the wall, which is why they keep trying so desperately to find something, anything, other than search that'll make money....
Thanks for numerous responses to yesterday's message from my Google friend about how newspapers could, and presumably still might, take advantage of the shift to web-based advertising. Short version: the need to have the business (as opposed to purely journalistic) swagger of predecessors like William Randolph Hearst:
Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
This is a very thoroughly discussed issue, so only a few reactions -- then back to queued-up reactions on Chinese education!
First, from a reader in Australia, about what brought on the crash and a hoped-for solution:
My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet. The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%. (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames. On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.
I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste. I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism. However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.
After the jump, another reader's suggestion of a potential opportunity. It begins:
It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could
fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking
more creatively.
More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers
A few hours ago I mentioned that a friend from Google had tipped me to a new Pew study showing how big a hole Craigslist (and similar services) had blown in the classified-ad portion of newspaper revenue. I signed off by saying that the distinction -- Google's not killing the news business, Craigslist is! -- was "worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting."
My friend, who was up in the middle of the night in California, immediately wrote back to say that I'd misunderstood the point. With his stipulation that he is speaking for himself and not the company, and with my clarification that he is not one of the household names at Google who by definition are always speaking for the company, here is his note:
It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for
treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified
revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely
self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then
they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news
aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt
Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new
visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously
infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick
faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will
hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers.
Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar
compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not
been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though
doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but
publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than
racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you
can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you
get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis
is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are
all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again.
Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the
future of shopping.
These are the issues for papers to agonize about;
to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve.
Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented
and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot
his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
Extra thought on my end: if this is what someone not in the writing biz can crank out at 4:40am his time, while up with eye problems and a splitting headache, maybe the publishing industry has even more to worry about from web-based competition than we thought!
Who exactly is killing the press
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting. ___ * Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
PR updates: NPR, Stanford Review, WNYC, plus NYT Mag
- On the Media interview with Bob Garfield, here, about the media-politics of health care reform. Back in 1995, I wrote this Atlantic article about the way the Clinton health-care proposal fell apart -- including the damaging role played by a hugely misleading article by Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. Interview covers whether it could happen again.
- Online Q-and-A with the Stanford Review's Bellum project, here.
- Interview last week about China with Brian Lehrer of WNYC, here. These all for the record.
Also for the record, let me join others congratulating the Atlantic's Megan McArdle for what she has reportedabout Edmund Andrews' gripping account of his descent into deadbeat hell.
Having had some experience with writing confessional, "here's a mistake I made, and what I learned from it" articles, I understand the fundamental premise of the tell-all bargain. You're asking for the reader's trust and, if not forgiveness or respect, at least forbearance because of your brave candor in facing unflattering truths. But in those tell-all circumstances, you really do have to tell it all. There would ordinarily be no reason whatsoever for Andrews to embarrass his wife by talking about her past financial problems (two declarations of bankruptcy) -- unless he undertook to write a warts-and-all book about how his household got into financial trouble. This is also connected to the first item, above, about the health care debate. For all the mixed effects of the internet on mainstream journalism, there is a fast-feedback loop now that can correct errors that would otherwise have stood.
May 19, 2009
In case you've been wondering about Macau
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.
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 9, 2009
Nonfiction writing class: how it should be done
Suppose you were writing about the financial-policy mistakes that helped bring on the Great Depression. And you wanted to dramatize the damage done by adherence to the gold standard, which meant that the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, etc could issue only as much money as they happened to have gold in their vaults.
As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way -- or you could write this:
"Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy -- a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton -- that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to 'earmarking' the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abernon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, 'This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.' "
This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the "small rubber tires" detail and mot juste "trundling" term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.
May 5, 2009
One more on China, India, and the Western media
In two previous posts, here and here, overseas Chinese readers have presented very different views on whether Western press outlets were ganging up against China, and whether India was by comparison getting a free ride.
As a worthy complement to these arguments, an email from reader Shreeharsh Kelkar, giving an overseas Indian perspective:
I was pleasantly surprised to read the email you published from an
overseas Chinese citizen who thinks the western media treats China
unfairly and that he would like to see China being treated the way
India gets treated. As an Indian who lives in the US, I have many many
Indian friends who complain that the media here only talks about the
poverty in India, that they emphasize only what's wrong with the
country and not what's going right with it, that they talk only of the
poor and not of the middle class. Etc, etc.
I think both these complaints -- the Chinese and the Indian -- are, in some sense, two sides of the same coin.
Where did the swine H1N1 flu virus come from? I certainly don't know, and I gather that epidemiologists are not yet entirely sure. Maybe the US? Maybe Mexico? Maybe someplace else? But for the official health ministry in China to treat the question as a matter of national dignity.... Sigh. It is a reminder of the point raised here, and of the ways in which the government is still learning the basics of expressing itself to the outside world.
(The Chinese-language version of the story, here courtesy of Danwei, seems to have a similar tone -- as best I can make out. This is the Chinese version of the stalwart concluding quote: "对此, 我们坚决反对.")
After the handling of SARS in 2003 and of the "blue ear" pig virus two years ago, who could possibly doubt assurances coming from the Ministry of Health?
Here's free PR advice from an actual foreign media person: All nations get defensive and try to make things look good for themselves -- as the Mexican governor could well have been doing. But go easy on terms like "driven by ulterior motives" and "ruin China's image" when you're dealing with a scientific matter. Especially if you're representing the Ministry of Health! Just stick to facts and say you're eager to help fellow scientists in other countries get to the bottom of this case. (And the Chinese government is giving $5 million to Mexico to help in anti-flu efforts, which is commendable.) But, please do keep saying "resolutely opposed" ("坚决反对"). Something will go out of the world when that kind of starchiness is lost.
April 5, 2009
Mea culpa
Here's the difference between writing on a web site and writing for a monthly magazine, as I usually do, or in books: on a web site the crucial "hmmm, did I really mean to say that?" delay cycle has less chance of guarding you against something you didn't really mean to say. (Yes, I know, in the hands of genuine bloggers this is part of the medium's spontaneous charm.)
On reflection, I really did mean to say that Barack Obama's top-of-his-head answer to the "Do you believe in American exceptionalism?" question was extraordinary in its combination of comprehensiveness and concision. As argued here and here. But I've been convinced by the person who posed the question (plus the Yank journalist who recommended that he ask it) that there was no lost-Empire hauteur intended in it. So I didn't really mean to make that cheap joke, and I'm sorry that I did -- and apologize to the man in question, Edward Luce.
Think how many more of these excesses our magazine would contain if it were published every hour rather than every month!
That tricky old language barrier (China, Tibet, and France)
As I so often say, my favorite newspaper is the (state-controlled) China Daily. It's possible that the French ambassador in Beijing, Herve Ladsous, now has a different view.
Ladsous was the star of yesterday's newspaper, thanks to his observation in a China Daily interview that Tibet had been a "slave society" before the arrival of Mao's liberators 60 years ago. Below, the lead story on the front page, and the lead paragraphs in that story:
The front page:
The story:
The man himself, as shown in the China Daily:
Such observations would be heartily welcomed by officials and many citizens in China. That Tibetans lived as slaves under the lamas is one of the Three Unappreciated Truths about Tibet, as propounded by the Chinese government and endorsed by most of the public. The other two: that Tibet has since ancient times been an acknowledged and inseparable part of China; and that the Dalai Lama, despite having gulled naive foreigners into thinking him a "spiritual" figure, is actually a cunning "splittist" bent on breaking up the Chinese state.
Was this simply...what is the mot juste? Oh, yes, kow-towing by the government of France, in awareness of how many fences it has to mend in China? The complaints on the Chinese side are numerous but mainly seem to involve Tibet (eg, protests in Paris against the Olympic torch relay, mainly about Tibet; Sarkozy's initial claim that he would boycott the Olympics, and his recent meeting with the "splittist" leader). Carrefour, Airbus, and other big French names have felt the heat of Chinese popular ill will.
So perhaps the French representative had gotten the signal to truckle make nice? I wondered when I saw the story -- and also saw no related item at the sites of Le Monde or Figaro, nor at Agence France-Presse. But it appears -- zut! -- that it was all a misunderstanding, accidental or otherwise. Just now, France-Info has posted an item in which the Ambassador says that the story "did not reflect the tone of the interview" and that "this was not the first time that China Daily" has misrepresented a discussion. I will try to deal with the disillusionment.
More on Obama, exceptionalism, and impromptu speaking
The transcript of the NATO press conference I mentioned a few hours ago is now available here, via CQ Politics. For some reason, I don't see the transcript at the official WhiteHouse.Gov site, though a blog item about the conference is here. Ie, if the transcript is there, at the site run by this famously tech-hip White House staff, it is not in an immediately obvious location, like via a link from the aforementioned blog entry, nor does it come up on a "NATO press conference" search of the site.
After the jump, the text of what Obama actually said when asked about "American exceptionalism." To my relief, it more or less resembles the way I characterized it from memory! On re-reading, I'm more impressed by how terse it is -- and, as mentioned earlier, how hard it would be to improve on it in the same space, especially in real time.
Also after the jump, two other excerpts, prompted by this comment from reader Edward Goldstick:
I think two other moments were even more 'remarkable' than the one that caught your attention (though it is, too):
1) In response to the provocative Major [Garrett] of Fox News who asked about Afghan laws that supposedly endorsed spousal rape and other dubious practices, I found that Obama walked confidently between the moral imperatives that the questioner presented so blithely and the primacy of the post 9/11 mission and the complex and uncomfortable realities in which the United States and NATO are currently operating.
2) Perhaps it was a setup, but I thought the question to the audience about US journalists getting questions from the other heads of state was a sly move... though I won't hide my lack of surprise (nor my glee) when he used Sarko as a target.
On #2, the context of which will be apparent in the excerpt, what I noticed was his light use of the term "Sarkozy" -- not "President Sarkozy" -- which had the same cheeky effect as the reference to "the Brits." Details below. ___
Just catching up with the April 1 story in the English-language Taipei Times, about the shocking revelation that Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, the two pandas mainland China had sent to Taiwan as a good-will gesture, were actually fakes. Clip from story below.
The Onion-worthy part of the story, IMHO, is the setup for discovering the fraud. Unlike real pandas, this pair was extremely randy ("children screamed and parents became irate"). When zookeepers tried to maintain order ("whenever the moaning from the panda enclosure gets too loud we gotta go in there and hose 'em down with cold water") the painted-on panda markings wore off, revealing the truth. Many similar nice touches. See for yourself: online version here, full page PDF here, followup here and here. Thanks to Daniel Lippman.
Obama on exceptionalism
It's after midnight in China, but I wanted to mention in real time an oratorical performance that deserves a second look. It's from Barack Obama's NATO press conference that just wrapped up, and the part worth studying is the two or three minutes that followed a question by Edward Luce of the Financial Times.
I have nothing against Luce, who wrote a very good recent book about India, but here he asked in what can only be called plummy tones whether Obama still clung to the idea of "American exceptionalism." The general phrasing of the question held that idea out at arm's length as a kind of yahoo colonial oddity.
"I believe in American exceptionalism," Obama said after one beat for thought. "Just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism..." I don't have a transcript here, but what was impressive was how rapidly he seemed to have figured out the full shape of his answer; how effortlessly the term "the Brits" (and the instant pairing with "the Greeks") offset the seeming Oxbridge hauteur* of the question; and how he went on to give so balanced a response that no one, Yank or otherwise, could fail to be satisfied.
Of course he was proud of his country, Obama said. But it was also objectively exceptional in several ways: it still had the world's largest economy; its military power was unmatched; and -- with emphasis here -- its Constitutional principles enshrined values and ideals that truly were exceptional. Therefore it should be proud of its role in the world, and embrace its responsibilities.
Then came the pivot, introduced as usual with the word "Now..." Of course America's strength didn't mean it could do things wholly on its own. And of course Obama's pride in his country didn't blind him to the fact that it sometimes could be wrong, nor to the idea that other people from other countries had good ideas that had to be heeded. Indeed, the very fact of American leadership made it all the more important to show respect and listen attentively. He wrapped it all up by saying he saw "no contradiction" between the idea that America was exceptionally strong and had an exceptional leadership role, and the reality that it needed to work with others as part of a team.
When a transcript or YouTube clip comes out, give it a look. The thoughts may seem banal, but I challenge anyone to come up with a clearer explanation of American exceptionalism to an international audience in the same number of words -- not to mention doing so on live TV with maybe five seconds to figure out what your answer will be. In a world where evidence mattered, these few minutes would put an end to the "can't talk without a teleprompter" madness. More important, they're a way of explaining to Americans the potential and limits of our international role.
And, yes, Obama did end the press conference by ducking a question about Kosovo. But knowing what not to answer is a part of rhetorical effectiveness too. Update: He also appeared to refer to the language of Austria as "Austrian," thus: "I don't know how you say it in Austrian, but we call it wheeling-dealing." If this had been GW Bush, it would have been taken as an obvious gaffe, as in his calling the residents of Greece "Grecians." Here you can't be sure whether it's a plain error or a knowing casualism, as in saying that Australians speak "Australian" -- eg, in the ad that says, "Foster's: Australian for 'beer.' " * UPDATE #2: The questioner has convinced me that he didn't really mean it that way. See this mea culpa.
4) Boy, if some of the questions from reporters were examined as mercilessly for their logic, factual basis, clarity, coherence, emotional tone, etc as Obama's answers were.... I know, they're not the most powerful people on earth with the might of the presidency behind them. But unlike him, the reporters are not reacting on the fly but instead have hours and hours to think of exactly the way they want to make their point. Just an observation.
Three-sentence instant reaction to Obama press conference
1) After seeing a session like this, it is hard to understand how right-wingers can keep up their "Obama can't talk without his teleprompter" theory -- although it's hard to know, given his campaign-debate performance etc, how anyone could have advanced this view in the first place.
2) All successful politicians know how to turn a question to the answer they want to give ("The real point is..."), but Obama showed several times exactly how that should be done -- eg, when asked about changing tax rules for charitable deduction, he brushed that aside and said "what does affect charitable giving is the economy, and..."
3) Explicitly, in his closing comments about being in it for the long haul "even though" he had not brought peace to the Middle East or solved the economic problem in his first 60 days, and implicitly in his manner, he conveyed the same, steady, 'let's keep plugging along and we'll make it' message that had run through his presentations through the campaign.
OK, those are very long and ungainly sentences, but there are only three of them.
March 18, 2009
Correction: Chinese coal mine deaths
In my story about the Chinese economy in the latest Atlantic, I say, "You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me..." The never-know problem is a real challenge here, and a reason to view any number concerning China with skepticism.
Part of the problem arises from what we might call a "transparency" issue. The government has committed itself to a growth rate of at least 8 per cent this year. Whatever else happens, it is safe to assume that at year's end the reported growth rate will be about 8 per cent. Part of the problem is the sheer impossibility of really knowing what is going on in so vast a country containing such geographic, economic, and social extremes. Is China's population closer to 1.3 billion -- or 1.4 billion? It's a difference of 100 million, and I don't think anyone knows for sure.
And for foreigners there's a particular problem of having your usual standards of judgment mismatched to China's scale. I have been in cities that looked middling-size. Based on the street grid and downtown area, I would have estimated the population at maybe 100,000 -- then I'm told that two million people live there. (True? I don't know.) Every reporter in China knows about the government statistics reporting 60,000 to 70,000 mass disturbances throughout the country each year. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred a day? It doesn't seem plausible, but I see the figure quoted all the time.
Very late in the process of writing my latest article, I saw a release from the government-controlled Xinhua news agency, saying that coal mining fatalities had declined to a total of over 90,000 in 2008. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred and fifty people per day? So I double-checked with Xinhua, and so did our fact-checker, and that was the number the government was officially putting out. As a result, one passage in my story said:
So if China's rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years--pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents--might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy?... My guess is No. [And on to the main argument of the article.]
Twelve days later, Xinhua put out this correction.
In the corrected version, ninety thousand people had died in accidents of all sorts in China last year, not just in coal mines. The coal mine fatality rate was more like nine per day, not 250. I was out of China when this correction was posted, and I didn't see it until just now. (You don't routinely go back to sources you've already checked, to see if they've happened to change their figures.) If I'd seen it immediately we could have made a change just before our issue went to the printer, but I probably wouldn't have seen it even if I were sitting in Beijing.
I regret the error, though I am glad for the differential 240 coal miners per day, and wanted to take the initiative in putting the revised number on the record. The larger points about workplace safety -- and the resilience of the Chinese economy, and the shakiness of statistics -- remain.
March 17, 2009
Interviewing tips from a novelist
Apropos of nothing, I was struck by this passage from Lisa See's The Interior: A Red Princess Mystery, which I was reading this morning on Beijing's subway Line 1. See's novels, like the "Inspector Chen" series by Qiu Xiaolong, are meant to convey the texture of modern China via crime procedurals. From my perspective, great excuse to do "research" while enjoying noir fiction.
In this passage, See's protagonist, inspector Liu Hulan, has gone back to the rural village where she spent the Cultural Revolution years to investigate a suspicious death. In civvies and without identifying herself as a cop, she interrogates a village couple. The young man had been the fiancee of Miaoshan, the woman who has recently died; he is accompanied by his new love interest, a hot number named Siang. The investigator taunts Siang about her cozying up so quickly to the young man:
"I'm sure that Miaoshan's mother will be comforted to hear of your grief and that you have come to offer solace to her daughter's fiance."
Siang's cheeks reddened, but she said nothing.
Hulan [the cop] let the silence stretch out. She was in no hurry, and the longer she kept quiet, the sooner these two would wish to fill the void. Siang noiselessly etched a groove in the dirt with the edge of her tennis shoe, while Tsai Bing [the man] looked around nervously. Finally he said, 'I didn't see Miaoshan so much anymore...'"
The "let the silence stretch out" approach, which is not discussed as often as it should be, can be a surprisingly valuable interviewing technique. The truth is that most people who are being interviewed would like to think that they are providing you with "interesting" information, which reflects well on their knowledge, insight, sense of humor, general bonhomie, etc. People want to be liked and to feel as if they're holding up their end of the conversation. Obviously this doesn't apply in a 60 Minutes-style hostile interrogation, but in most non-adversarial interviews, the subject wants to feel that he is holding the interest of the questioner.
Thus informal body-language signs that you're getting bored or disappointed usually prompt an interviewee to try harder and say more. The strategic use of silence can send such a signal, since people become uncomfortable and think that the silence is their fault. You can't do it very often, but every now and then it works great.
In only one circumstance have I found the "I'm getting bored" approach to be ineffective. That is when interviewing Japanese corporate or political officials. If I act as if they're telling me what I've heard a million times before, generally they've seemed more satisfied than uncomfortable. If someone's goal is to stay On Message no matter how it makes him look -- think, Scott McClellan handling questions about Scooter Libby in the late Bush years -- these psycho-warfare tricks will be futile. But for you aspiring young interviewers: remember to give strategic-silence a try.
March 14, 2009
This actually is suprising (Cramer/Stewart followup)
If you had been through the treatment that Jon Stewart administered to Jim Cramer last night, try to imagine what your next day's program would be like. I will confess to being surprised by the approach Cramer actually took -- not necessarily the initial "joke" but what follows it, in the second half of this short clip. Wow.
One theory is that Cramer looked uncomfortable on Stewart's show because he knew he had something to answer for. This clip suggests that we need some other theory, since it's hard to find anything resembling the contrite. (Thanks to Terry M.)
March 13, 2009
It's true: Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow (updated)
Through karmic guidance, I sprang awake at the exact moment Jon Stewart was beginning his merciless demolition of interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money."
Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC. If you want to feel sorry for me, CNBC = 25% of the English-language TV news offerings available in China, the others being CNN, BBC, and the Chinese government's own CCTV-9.
But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible. (Updated update: Previously had links here, but they kept going bad. I assume anyone who wants it can find it by now.)
Although, improbably, I share a journalistic background with Cramer*, I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.
Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did. Seeing this interview justified the three-day trip in itself. ___ * At different times each of us was editor of the same college paper.
March 12, 2009
In fairness...
... After learning something about the now-resigned Chas Freeman, I came to disagree with, and think tendentious, Jon Chait's opening salvo against Freeman in the Washington Post. And I have received enough pro-Freeman letters from his working associates in the last two days to make we wonder: is there anyone who actually dealt with the man who considered him a crackpot, an anti-Semite, a menace -- terms thrown around by his critics? Obviously Dennis Blair -- Naval Academy graduate, Rhodes scholar, former CINCPAC, Asia/China expert, no one's idea of a nut -- thought Freeman's irreverent perspective so valuable that he sought it out. Personal knowledge isn't everything, but it is dramatic to me that people who have known Freeman seem so solid in support for him, in contrast to those who don't. It's all moot now.
Still, in fairness: Chait's take-down of the absurd Amity Shlaes interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal is both important in its own right and a model of the systematic demolition of a flawed though alluring argument. Among the admirable aspects of this essay is that it it painlessly conveys some of the Ec 101 principles that somehow have been assumed out of existence in day by day political discussion.* This is very well done; worth reading; and worth learning from. I look forward to more from Chait in this area. ___ * Eg that critics of a stimulus bill can denounce it because it means "more spending" suggests that they don't understand anything that has been written about economics in the last 70+ years. The point of a stimulus bill is to spend extra money and therefore bring total economic output to a higher level than it would otherwise attain. Even having to mention this point is like having to explain the connection between caloric intake and body weight, or the role of gravity. But Chait nicely and non-condescendingly lays it out in his article:
Prior to Keynes, the economy was held to be self-correcting. The only cure for a recession was to let wages and prices fall to their natural level. The prevailing attitude, as Paul Krugman writes in his recently re-issued book The Return of Depression Economics, was "a sort of moralistic fatalism." Keynes upended the orthodoxy in a way that was every bit as dramatic as Galileo challenging geocentrism. He insisted that recessions are not a natural process, or the invisible hand's righteous judgment against our sins, but a simple failure of consumer demand.
When people worry about losing their jobs, they sensibly cut back on their spending. But that decision, in turn, reduces demand for goods and services, which results in reduced income or lost jobs for other workers. Keynes called this phenomenon "the paradox of thrift": what makes sense for individuals turns into a disaster for society as a whole. The recession was therefore a failure of collective action that required government action. Government needed to encourage spending by reducing interest rates or, failing that, to inject spending into the economy directly by deliberately running temporary budget deficits.
March 10, 2009
The end for Freeman
As I mentioned originally, I had no intention of getting into the Chas Freeman matter. It has ended in an ugly way -- Freeman's departure statement is intemperate, but even calmer people might sound testy if they had been accused of "hostility toward Jews generally" without, to my knowledge, any evidence for that claim.
I want to think carefully before saying much more about this episode. For the moment my sentiments are closest to those expressed by David Rothkopf, friend and stalwart supporter of Freeman, in this post at the Foreign Policy blog:
The genesis of that crisis is that we have lost perspective on
what the criteria for selecting and approving government officials ought to be.
Financial trivia, minutiae from people's personal lives and political litmus
tests have grown in importance while character, experience, intelligence,
creativity and wisdom have fallen by the wayside. Ridiculous threshold
obstacles stand alongside obscene ones and when taken with the relentless
personal attacks associated with high level jobs in Washington -- the low pay,
and the extreme difficulty of getting anything done -- we are seeing even those
selected for senior jobs turn away in droves. We are at a moment of not one but
an extraordinary array of great crises and challenges for America and we are
effectively keeping the people we need most out of the positions we most need
filled.
Emphasis mine. The friend I quoted when I first raised this topic said that, in his view, the controversy over Freeman's appointment amounted to the "self-lobotomization" of the US policy-making apparatus. He was talking just about Freeman, but the problem is clearly broader, as Rothkopf points out. Thought experiment: Steven Chu, our new Secretary of Energy, was previously director of the UC-run Lawrence-Berkeley Lab. The Lab receives a tremendous amount of funding from the US government, largely through the DOE. Chu himself is recused from being involved in such deals for a ceratin period. Suppose instead that this background had been considered a "conflict" that would bar him from office. You could imagine people making the argument, if Chu's reputation were less bullet-proof or if he had offended some interest group.
One other point. Rothkopf ends his post this way:
The
result [of problems described above] is not a government of people without conflicts of interest or troubling
ties, rather it is a government full of people whose conflicts and ties are
with groups powerful enough to protect them. This among other reasons is why I, as
a Jew with a memory, was so opposed to the attacks on Freeman. But for the
record, the most compelling reason I found for believing Chas Freeman would
have been a superb Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was one that
seldom came up in all the articles I read. I actually know him.
As I initially pointed out, I do not know Freeman and had never paid attention to him before this controversy. But it turns out that nearly twenty people I know well enough to respect and trust have themselves known and worked with Freeman. Every one of them supported his nomination. And -- as it is unfortunately relevant to point out in these circumstances -- most of them are Jewish.
We'll all think about this episode for a while.
Two brief media notes about Tibet
Like most other people, I don't know for sure what is going on in Tibet, and in ethnic-Tibetan regions in nearby provinces (Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, etc) right now. It does look ominous. For the moment, here are two semi-surprising media notes, as of Wednesday morning, March 11, Beijing time:
1) CNN and BBC are just now running extensive reports on crackdowns and extra Chinese troops being set to Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas. Plus, historical footage of Chinese soldiers "liberating" Tibet 50 years ago. The surprising aspect: the transmissions are not being blocked or cut off, as happened routinely last year with far less sensitive material. Even footage of an old interview with the Dalai Lama is coming right across the airwaves. Oversight? New strategy? Just too busy? Don't care what people hear in English? Impossible to say.
2) The official Chinese media usually take the sledgehammer approach when explaining China's Tibet policy to the outside world. "Jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes" as an epithet for the Dalai Lama, etc. But yesterday's editorial in my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, instead tried... the light touch! The editorial, in the form of an open letter to the D.L, was mock reverent (rather than blusteringly condemnatory), consistently addressing him as "Your Holiness" and asking him if he would be so kind as to explain various mysteries and problems. It began this way:
Full text, again, here. A new approach? An aberration? Something that will be shelved now that the D.L. has taken a much harsher, "hell on earth" tone? I don't know. We all will watch.
March 6, 2009
Own worst enemy, Tomorrow Square edition
I've mentioned once or twice, or maybe fifty times, my wonderment at the contrast between the sophistication with which Chinese officialdom can address domestic audiences and sensitivities, and the comic-if-it-weren't tragic cluelessness of many official efforts to explain China's views and "feelings" to the outside, non-Chinese-speaking world.
I don't have time for a full presentation-and-gloss at the moment, but see if this recent item, which I found while leafing through back copies of my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, rings any bells. It was about the nomination of Gary Locke, former governor of Washington, as US Commerce Secretary, and it featured "inside" analysis from an experienced Chinese diplomat:
Story as it looked on the page, showing the local Chinese angle:
Near the end, the experts step in, displaying their perfect ear for the nuances of the way race is lived and discussed in Obama-era USA. Analytical conclusion of the story, from someone with that indispensable on-the-ground knowledge of America:
Ah, the talents with the yellow skin. In a similar development, the new issue of the local That's Shanghai magazine has a rundown of events for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, including a talk I'm giving at 3pm today. Most of the items list the writer and the name of his or her most recent book. In my case, that proved to be awkward -- since the title, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, includes the now-sensitive word "Square," which officials feel might stir up emotions about unpleasant events that happened twenty years ago this June in another Square. I am not kidding (and I'm also not just guessing about this). A friend has suggested that perhaps the Tomorrow Square building, 明天广场, in central Shanghai -- right on People's Square, as it happens -- will have to have its nameplate removed during the sensitive period ahead. It is sometimes unbelievable but never dull here.
The building formerly known as Tomorrow Square. Maybe everyone will agree not to notice it:
March 4, 2009
Better news out of the midwest: Mischke back in business
Previous bad newsentries reported the dethronement of St. Paul's own Tommy Mischke as a radio talk-show host. My profile of Mischke from eight years ago in the Atlantic is here; it included this photo of the artist at work:
As reported in MinnPost.com and Czerniec.com, Mischke is back in business -- as of today. Details of the first webcast, which will be weekdays from 2pm to 4pm Central time starting March 4, are in the two previous links plus at CityPages.com, which will host the show. Enjoy.
February 24, 2009
美国欢迎您!
Or, more simply, "America welcomes you!" The China Daily, beloved staple of my life in China these last few years, has just opened its US edition! Huzzah!
Where, in today's downcast news environment, are we going to find headlines like this except in the China Daily?
To understand why I love this paper so much, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and passim. Or put down that copy of The Onion and see for yourself. Welcome!
February 23, 2009
Chinese viewers' guide to the Oscars! (updated)
In my earlier report, I should have noted that it's for the benefit of the billion-strong local viewership that the Chinese broadcast of the Academy Awards is being tape-delayed some 12 hours, until airtime 10:30 tonight on CCTV-6. Bigger home audience than if it were shown live during the working day! And, of course, it takes a little while to add the Chinese subtitles and... how do we put this ... to harmonize* the program for domestic tastes.
It would be unfair and surprise-spoiling to use my crystal ball (aka The Internets) to predict the Best Actor-etc winners. But I confidently make this prediction about harmonization:
In the version of the Oscars shown in the US a few hours ago, Steven Spielberg got a lot of face time announcing the nominees and winners in the Best Picture category. This is the same Spielberg who one year ago very publicly backed out of planning the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, in protest of China's policies in Darfur. ("I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual.") The eventual opening ceremony, under China's own Zhang Yimou, hardly lacked in spectacle -- but people here remember! My prediction: whatever CGI magic can be applied to make a presenter disappear from a presentation ceremony will be employed on Mr. Spielberg. This gives me an excuse to stay up tonight and find out if I am right.
(From Reuters: the face they won't see) _____ * "Harmonization" = in local lingo, closing down or censoring web sites, publications, or broadcasts to avoid the spread of unwelcome views. Especially important for Oscar ceremonies, because who knows what these crazy Hollywood people will say.
Update: I'll never know. Wasn't at a place that had CCTV-6 during the show. Update #2: According to Nathan Jackson of Shanghai,
My wife and I watched the Oscars on CCTV6 last night and Spielberg indeed had his entire appearance cut. You can hear his voice for about 1 second, but the whole introduction of nominees is very crudely cut out of the show. Sean Penn also had a few cuts to his speech
1) It turns out that the Senate Finance Committee has put out a set of FAQs addressing some of the problems E. McCaughey "discovered" in the fine print of the deal. It specifically knocks down the central Big Brother claim McCaughey makes -- namely, that federal health bureaucrats will use new electronic records to monitor your doctor's decisions about your care, and then penalize any doctors who deviate from federally-defined standard practice. The FAQ says:
Q: Will the health IT director have any influence on the decisions doctors and patients can make together about tests and treatment? A: Absolutely not. This position's function is to make sure that doctors and other health care providers use good, secure technologies as they change their record-keeping systems from paper to computers.
And
Actually, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is not even new. President George W. Bush created the office by Executive Order a number of years ago. The bill simply codifies the office and gives it a specific job.
There are a bunch more, all in "absolutely not" or "actually" spirit. In fairness to McCaughey, she couldn't have seen this FAQ before she wrote. It came out on Tuesday of this week, after her column on Monday. But it makes you wonder: Did she bother to call anyone to check out her claims and inferences? Did she consult anything apart from her own imagination?
2) As numerous readers have written in to remind me, there is an in-house Atlantic angle to all of this. My current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic in 1994, when the original McCaughey story came out. I like Andrew very much personally; I am very glad he's on the Atlantic team; I agree with him on most issues and disagree on some, including whether this article should ever have been published. Notwithstanding all or any of that, my beef here is with McCaughey, not with him.
I understand enough about both the editor's and the writer's role to understand that at a certain point, an editor has to trust the writer's basic honesty and operational competence. Good magazines have good fact-checking departments -- and our magazine has a great one. But you can't "check" a reporter's basic honesty. There is a difference between re-confirming facts to be sure the writer didn't miss something and having to treat a reporter like a defendant, whose every motive, claim, and observation is subject to doubt. When a publication -- or any organization -- gets into that position, as the New Republic eventually did with Stephen Glass, the normal precautions do no good. To put it differently, the 10% of an article you can check rests on faith that the other 90% you can't check, starting with the author's claim to be reading evidence honestly, is also true. If that faith is misplaced, you can easily get burned.
So: this is explicitly not an invitation to revisit the merits of publishing the original article 15 years ago. My complaint is with people who would believe or repeat similar claims from the same source (McCaughey) now.
Also: I see now that Rick Ungar, of Culture11.com, put out a line-by-line demolition of McCaughey's claims immediately after her column ran, here.
Thanks also to Neil Mackenzie for a lead. (And, for the final awkwardly-timed installment of my family-duties saga of recent weeks, I am about to leave internet range for another four days. At least this final duty is a pleasant one; next posting here likely to be in the wedding-announcement category.)
Let's stop this before it goes any further
The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002. Of course, this is a career-achievement award, not limited to this one event.)
My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.
In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.
After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush.
Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:
One new bureaucracy, the
National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties. "Meaningful user" isn't
defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who
will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of
meaningful use over time" (511, 518, 540-541)
For what is wrong with her "analysis" this time, check out this
in The Washington Monthly, which also has a chronology of how
the (right wing) press -- led by Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge -- is again
picking up flatly disprovable lies. (Eg, the "new" bureaucracy she
warns about already exists, and was established under GW Bush.)
Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from
this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it
turn out last time?" test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new
claim before it gets real traction. ___
As mentioned earlier, the devastating fire in Beijing two days ago was indeed caused by fireworks and firecrackers on the final night of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year celebrations. For positional reference, the building that burned down is behind, and mostly obscured by, the distinctive asymmetrical CCTV tower in the two shots below:
On a nice day last fall (edge of hotel barely visible behind left leg of CCTV tower): On the second day of the Olympics (hotel just visible behind and to the left of CCTV tower; this was before the air cleared up on the following day, thanks to a powerful cold front that moved through from Mongolia):
Night of the fire, photo from UK Telegraph (this view from east; others from the south):
People in and interested in China already know this, but for those who don't: Danwei.org has one-stop shopping for links and explanations about the cause of the fire, and coverage inside China, here. Similarly with the current set of links and headlines on EastSouthWestNorth, here.
Apart from the disaster/tragedy itself, the interesting aspects are: that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke (it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have); that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country's leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city's most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now. (Update: interesting LA Times story, which I see before me in paper version here in the LAX airport, here.)
February 6, 2009
Update on Chinese coverage of dam/earthquake connection
Last night I mentioned the NYT story suggesting that a dam recently built near a major fault line in China could possibly have triggered the devastating Sichuan earthquake last May. I said I would like to see how -- if at all -- the story was being covered and interpreted inside China. (I'm still away.)
One fascinating early answer comes from the Mutant Palm site in this post. The headline of the Chinese press report it quotes (and translates) gives the general idea:
Foreign Media Stir Up Trouble, Speculate "Sichuan Earthquake was Man-Made"
Original version of that headline:
Full Chinese report (in Chinese) here. Even from afar it will be interesting to watch this develop.
January 24, 2009
Un-$%&%ing-believable! (China's censoring of Obama's speech, cont.)
I mentioned yesterday that even though the censors at China's CCTV apparently panicked in real time, and cut off coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address when he started talking about "dissent" and "communism," the editors of People's Daily, with more time and calm to reflect, had provided a full, translated version of the speech -- including this touchy passage:
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not
just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and
enduring convictions.
(Reminder: China is still officially ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, even though much of its economy runs on wide-open market principles.)
I just got a note from Donald Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University in DC, acting on a tip from David Kelly, of the China Research Center at University of Technology Sydney, asking whether I was certain about the link I had provided, here. Because he had checked the People's Daily version -- and he didn't see any mention of the struggle against communism.
So I went back and checked -- and he's right! The same link to the same page with the same official translation of Obama's speech is virtually the same as the original, except that someone carefully removed the word "communism." ("Dissent" is still in there.) Here's the play by play:
1) Sentence in Obama's speech:
"Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not
just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and
enduring convictions."
2) Version in People's Daily yesterday, which (as best I can judge) is a pretty faithful rendering of Obama's statement. I should note that I directly cut-and-pasted this from the PD site, as an indication that it actually was there at some point:
回想起先辈们从容地面对法西斯主义和共产主义的时候，并不仅靠导弹和坦克，还靠强健的联盟和持久的信念
3) Same sentence from the same translation at the same site today, with no notice of any change:
回想起先辈们从容地面对法西斯主义的时候，并不仅靠导弹和坦克，还靠强健的联盟和持久的信念。
And what's the difference? The disappearance of these five characters, 和共产主义, meaning "and communism." So now Obama talks only about the victory over fascism and about no other foe.
Which in turn means: in calm deliberation, after initially deciding the Chinese readership could stand to hear an American president talk about struggles over fascism and communism, the editors went back a day later, altered the translation, and gave no indication that they were doing so. (Update. Alternative hypothesis suggested to me: someone at PD "accidentally did the right thing" by translating the whole speech; then this "error" was corrected as soon as people in charge realized what had happened.)
If I had the time right now to call up the internet way-back machine and get the version of People's Daily from yesterday, I could prove that 24 hours ago it included the now-missing five characters. But, again, the indirect proof is that the part I quoted yesterday was cut-and-pasted directly from what the People's Daily was showing at the time.
To repeat: un-$#$#()&$-believable -- in the insecurity, the hamhandedness, and the immaturity this reveals.
January 22, 2009
A little more on the Chinese censorship of Obama's speech
Maybe it's the jet lag. Maybe it's the culture shock of being back in DC for the first time in a year. Maybe it's my inborn crabbiness. Whatever the source, I find myself more more incredulous with each passing hour that Chinese media authorities could have thought it as necessary or smart to censor live coverage of an event being watched intently in every other corner of the world: the inaugural address of America's first black president and current champion orator.
I have been trying to think: in what other country might this occur? Burma, perhaps. North Korea, no doubt. Perhaps other tinhorn states. But a real, important, powerful, rich country that in many ways (eg, finance) is America's most important partner? It is almost literally incredible.
It's all the more surprising because of something that might not be obvious to the average US viewer. I have met a lot of Chinese people in the last few years, in lots of stations of life. Big shots, farmers, dissidents, factory workers, party bosses. And I cannot think of a single one of them who would have been put off his or her feed by hearing a new American president talk about the virtues of dissent or America's struggle against Communism. Even if they don't agree with those sentiments themselves (and many would agree), all of them know that this is the way Americans talk and think. How on earth could it seem threatening to hear an American president talk about basic American beliefs?
Here is the "there must be an explanation" explanation. As I tried to explain in this recent article in the Atlantic, the people in charge of China's propaganda apparatus are among the least worldly and most rigid-minded people in the entire country, with absolutely the least feel for how people in other countries might react or think. So apparently some of these ignoramuses considered it a good and prudent idea to cut off Obama -- even if the vast majority of their fellow citizens would consider such paranoia to be extreme and bizarre. Also, within a part of the government where orthodoxy is everything, an official takes no risks by being too hard-line, but could get in trouble by being too permissive. Still; it is an incident whose importance may grow as time goes on. They couldn't even stand to hear Barack Obama speak!
After the jump, in the same spirit as the previous post, a couple of interesting reactions on this theme from people in and around China. Maybe this will all make sense to me when I catch up on my sleep. ____
Not from the Atlantic, but worth reading all the same!
1) A very interesting collection of very short essays from the Washington Monthly, in which 19 writers and academics answer the question: what book do you really hope our new reader-president will take time to read? Disclosures: I am a proud alumnus of the Washington Monthly, and I have a brief item on the list. But I was surprised and impressed by the recommendations in general and in turn recommend that you read it.
2) An extensive "Oral History of the Bush White House," by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This is a timeline recreation of the last eight years -- not all the big moments and turning points, but a lot of them -- in the words of original participants. I read this two days ago on the flight from Beijing to Washington (don't worry, it only took 20 or 30 minutes of the 13 hours of reading time, with plenty left over to watch the Chinese pirate video of Pineapple Express) and was both riveted and newly shocked about our recent history. Several of my Atlantic Voices colleagues have already reported similar reactions.
If I had been shown this project with no names attached, I would have guessed immediately that Cullen Murphy was involved. During his twenty years as the Atlantic's managing editor, I worked with Cullen on dozens of articles. He had many inspired, favorite approaches, of which one of the most favorite was the careful recreation of "familiar" events, which usually led to surprising results. Two of my Iraq-policy articles -- Blind Into Baghdad, and Bush's Lost Year -- grew out of exactly this approach. This latest package shows the power of this simple idea.
I've written several times, in this article and and this book and various posts like this and this, about the strange difficulty Chinese institutions face when dealing with the outside world. Individual Chinese people get along very well overseas, at least in my experience. But companies and public institutions often act as if they have no clue about how foreigners think, reason, or react. The twin symbols of this difficulty are signs and brochures rendered into an "English" no foreigner can make sense of, and the official agitprop statements, from "jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes" to "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" that undermine rather than advance their intended cause.
My job is not to help Chinese organizations advance their intended causes. But it doesn't help anybody, as I argue in the book and article, if China's clumsy public diplomacy makes the country seem more menacing, opaque, hyper-controlled, and overall bad than it really is. For another time: how different the experience of living and traveling here is from what you'd expect by just reading about the place, and generally how much better.
Thus my fascination with the much examined news this week that the Chinese authorities plan to spend 45 billion RMB, or well over $6 billion, on a new effort to explain China to the world. The original stories were in the (non-government-controlled) South China Morning Post, of Hong Kong. They're for subscribers only, so I won't link to them. (By the way, for about $1 per week, a SCMP subscription is a bargain for people interested in China.) An account in the ZhongnanhaiBlog site has many details. It also has a bracing critique of the whole idea that money is the main cause of the government's difficulties in explaining itself. Cam MacMurchy of the ZhongnanhaiBlog says:
The problem isn't lack of TV channels or media outlets that present
China's case to foreigners, it's the lack of any media outlets that
present China's case well. If Xinhua's new TV endeavor is
run in the same manner CCTV is, with the same group of life-long
communist party members in bad suits calling the shots, it will be
doomed to failure. In fact, I'd go one step further: any mainland Chinese run media outlet will be taken less seriously as long as general media controls are in place.
The post also contains (rare) good news for English-speaking journalists: these Chinese media outlets are going on a hiring spree! At least someone is sure to benefit from this plan.
December 22, 2008
Oh, never mind (NYT.com blackout dept)
NYTimes.com is working fine for me once more, and I hear from friends in varied corners of China that it's up and running across the country, after three or four days of (apparent) nationwide blackout. Background here and here, with links to other stories. Who can explain. As I mentioned earlier, it's the miracle and mystery of Christmas.
December 21, 2008
Atlantic readers: once again ahead of the news!
Thomas Friedman tells us in his column today about the art village of Dafen, and how it has been affected by the housing collapse in the US:
I had no idea that many of those oil paintings
that hang in hotel rooms and starter homes across America are actually produced
by just one Chinese village, Dafen, north of Hong Kong. And I had no idea that
Dafen's artist colony -- the world's leading center for mass-produced artwork
and knockoffs of masterpieces -- had been devastated by the bursting of the U.S.
housing bubble. I should have, though.
True to the Atlantic's motto -- "this year's news, last year!" -- our own readers knew all about Dafen exactly 12 months ago, for example here, here, and here, plus a very good Feb, 2007 Chicago Tribune story by Evan Osnos here. The "village," by the way, would be considered a real city any place but China. Here is one of my favorite artists there, responsible for much of the varied work around him (many more pics at the links above):
No larger point here, just glad to see Dafen make the big time. It's also an interesting counterpoint to Adam Minter's recent observations about the changing ecology of the news.
Last words on NYT.com block in China
With apologies in advance for the self-referential quality* of what I'm about to say, I recommend this recent entry by fellow Atlantic Monthly contributor Adam Minter on his ShanghaiScrap blog. He makes a point that is obvious once you think about it, but which I hadn't seen laid out quite this clearly anywhere else:
The point is that a nationwide firewall-block on the NYTimes.com site, if that is indeed what's happening, is not simply questionable as a PR strategy for the Chinese government. It also emphasizes how much the information ecology has changed.
The NYT is, in my view, indispensable as a source of reported news around the world. One of the big and really alarming trends of 2008 is the hugely-accelerating economic pressure on organizations like the NYT that support reporting rather than pure opinionizing. But as Minter details, blocking this flagship site means a lot less than it used to -- and a lot less than the censoring authorities may assume -- no matter how good a job the NYT's team is doing, because of the rise of reported blogs:
What's curious to me - in fact, what's astounding to me - is that the
Chinese authorities either haven't picked up on this phenomenon, or
they don't care. Instead, they are doing what Chinese officials always
do: focusing their attention on the entity with the most prestige.
Quite honestly, I think most Chinese officials would have a hard time
believing that the rather rag-tag unwashed mass of (for the most part)
young, male, poorly compensated bloggers could actually drive news
coverage.
* The self-referential part is that Adam Minter originally sent this as an email to me, which I encouraged him to spread more generally. I hope you agree that it's worth reading.
December 20, 2008
NYTimes.com in China: Sunday morning update
1) For me, back in Beijing, the main NYT site is fully blocked, if I'm using the plain Chinese internet without a VPN or other burnishment.
2) Anyone who really wants to can find what's on that site -- with a VPN, by going through the International Herald Tribune site, by trying mobile.nytimes.com from a hand-held device, or with one of the tech workarounds mentioned here yesterday.
3) Without the relatively fast, informal-but-informative polling made possible by the internet, it would have been harder to establish that this was happening all over the vast country all at once. So thanks for writing in.
INTELLECTUAL RIGOR BONUS POINT 3A) As a matter of logic, one cannot be absolutely certain that this is a purposeful, country-wide blackout. Conceivably there is some other technological or accidental explanation. I consider this extremely unlikely, given: that the same computer that won't load the pages while using a normal connection loads them instantly when a VPN is turned on; that the pattern is reported in every corner of the country, from Urumqi to Dalian to Zhuhai and points in between; and that it involves a site about which the government has complained before and that has recently carried some sensitive items. But logically, we cannot exclude the possibility that it's all an accident.
4) While the porous nature of the current NYT block is consistent with past Great Firewall practice, the motivation for this episode remains unclear at the tactical level and puzzling at the strategic. I won't review the tactical possibilities, some of which were mentioned earlier. The real question concerns the strategy.
As i argued last month in the Atlantic, China's official PR machinery often succeeds mainly in making the country seem far more closed-off, impenetrable, defensive, and difficult to deal with than it actually is most places most of the time. By that logic, what exactly will China gain through this episode? The vast majority of Chinese net users would never look at NYTimes.com anyway -- it's in the wrong language. Those who really want to see what's on there can find a way to do so, despite the block. And how confident, open-minded, rules-abiding, modern and so on will the episode make the Chinese government look in other countries' eyes? Governments everywhere are annoyed by the press, but a mark of being in the big leagues is viewing press criticism as a necessary annoyance. This just is strange.
December 19, 2008
Tech followups on NYTimes.com blockage in China (updated)
On December 19, the NYTimes.com site was apparently blocked all across China. For the sake of completeness, these followups.
1) Could the problem be related to a recent physical break in three of the four main internet cables connecting Asia to North America? (As reported here and elsewhere.) Maybe -- but at face value that wouldn't seem to explain why the NYTimes.com site loads at normal speeds when you're using a VPN but times-out when you try it through the plain, old, Great Firewall-screened Chinese internet. It also wouldn't explain why most other international sites seem to behave normally.
When the main undersea cable off Taiwan was cut in an earthquake nearly two years ago, you knew it immediately. Internet traffic in most parts of Asia was either interrupted altogether or brought to 300-baud dialup modem speeds. But maybe this recent break somehow contributes to the NYT problem?
2) After the jump, tech details on an important point I didn't mention: Consistent with hit-or-miss, far-from-airtight nature of Great Firewall censorship, even when the site www.nytimes.com is blocked, http://nytimes.com is not. Go figure. Also, various mobile web devices seem to be able to reach any site they want.
3) I mentioned yesterday that exactly one person, from Guangdong province, had written to say that he could reach the NYT site with no problem. I heard from him again just now. Today his connection is blocked. The change in my situation is the reverse. I started having NYT problems last night -- but at the moment, it's working fine, even with the VPN turned off. It's the mystery and miracle of Christmas. Tech details below.
UPDATE: From a friend who knows the nuances of high-level Communist Party maneuvering far better than I do, this hypothesis about what's going on:
I suspect that while the reason behind this blocking is not yet clear, the process--and thereby the motivation--might be a bit less obscure. That is, given that consensus drives policy decisions here, it is very likely that different parts of the bureaucracy weighed in and officials each had a gripe with the NYT coverage of some or another issue. Collectively, they were able to push through a directive to block it.
The people here overseeing foreign journalists also know that there will soon be a new contingent manning the desks of the NYT bureau here. Those officials want to send a clear signal that they expect more positive ("objective") coverage of China.
I suppose all will be revealed in due time. Or maybe never. _______
Poll among readers in China: is NYTimes.com now blocked?
Even without using my VPN, I've had no trouble reaching NYTimes.com or similar Western news sites in recent days from Shenzhen or Beijing. And that's from my same old apartment-house ISP in Beijing that is subject to all the standard Great Firewall strictures. (For chapter and verse on how the Great Firewall works, go here.)
But today I heard from one reader in Chengdu, another in a different part of Beijing, and another in Guangzhou that they were suddenly not able to reach the NYT site. Very few things in China happen in a consistent, everywhere-at-once way. But I am curious about whether something larger is underway.
If you're within Chinese territory could you try NYTimes.com without using a proxy or VPN and see whether you can get through? If you send me a note, via the "email me" feature on this site, and tell me what city you're in and whether you got through, I'll post the accumulated results when there are enough to show some pattern. All I'm looking for is: "Xian, YES" if you CAN get through, or "Shenyang, NO" if you can't. I won't reply to those messages but will tally them up and report later. Thanks!
UPDATE: I have already heard from several people that the main page of the NYT comes up but the links are disabled. (This is consistent with one of the patterns of GFW blocking I mentioned in an article on the topic.) So could you click a link, too, to see if it works? I have gotten a lot more "NO" replies, indicating problems, than YESes so far.
December 18, 2008
Coda (for now) to the Mischke saga
David Brauer, of MinnPost.com, has posted a two-part Q-and-A with Tommy Mischke, the recently-deposed radio humorist-genius of KSTP in St. Paul. (Previously on this subject here, here, and -- eight years ago in an Atlantic article - here.) (Mischke, as "shown" in our magazine story in 2000:)
The really surprising part of the interview is Mischke's description of exactly why he was fired "for cause" and with no warning, severance, benefits, phase-out period, etc. That's in Part 1 of the interview. In Part 2, he talks about the economic future of radio, the choices available to people like him who don't fit the standard AM political-talk mold, and various other challenges that will sound uncomfortably familiar to people in print journalism. Worth reading for culture-of-media purposes even if you've never heard of Mischke and don't care about life in "good old St. Paul, big-time Minneapolis" as Mischke always refers to "The Cities" on his show.
Actually, one other point. I hadn't looked at my article on Mischke for lo these past eight years, but I did so just now. After the jump is one passage that tries to convey the on-air effect. And, for another long interview with Mischke from three years ago, go to the MischkeMadness site here. ________
Many people in the blog-o-world, including several of my Atlantic colleagues, have noted the, umm, similarity between Barack Obama's most famous poster and the recent "SarkObama" campaign by Nicolas Sarkozy in France.
Loyal Atlantic reader Edward Goldstick sent me a note suggesting that I read what the posters actually say. As soon as you do so, it becomes evident that they're not pro-Sarkozy posters at all! They're an elegant little bit of jiujitsu to both mock and pressure Sarkozy by appearing to commit him to positions more progressive/leftist than he in fact holds.
"Produce clean and sustainable energy for Europe," the one on the upper left says. "Yes we can!" "Make polluters pay," says the next one down. "Yes we can!"
Others are in the same vein. And, as it turns out from a story in Le Monde (in French, here) published five days ago, this is part of a guerrilla campaign by Greenpeace to push its climate-change programs during EU talks on the summit in Poznan, Poland, this month.
Ah, the subtle French. But at least we know that Sarkozy is not as derivative as he seemed -- and that it takes much longer for material to make its way from the mainstream French press into English than the other way around.
December 4, 2008
Harping on the RMB
I truly love the (state controlled, voice to the outside world) China Daily. There is a wonderful purity to the worldview it conveys. It never disappoints -- as with this front page story yesterday setting the stage for the latest meetings in the US-China "Strategic Economic Dialogue" series.
Those urging the U.S. to stop harping on currency values turn out to be two Chinese analysts, one at a government agency. Who needs to hear from financiers, business people, economists, or, ahem, experts from any other country!
As it happens, I too have been continually urging American politicians to stop harping on beating their gums about the "rigged" Chinese currency, notably here and here -- mainly because, until quite recently, it was already rising in value. Moreover, the obsession with the RMB seemed mainly to show a failure of imagination on the US side: it was the only thing Americans could think of to "do" about China's trade surpluses.
Yes, the Chinese government was obviously "managing" the currency's rise and keeping it unnaturally low to help exporters (as explained blow-by-blow here). But U.S. discussion seemed based on the assumption that this was the secret of China's export boom. As I heard constantly from the foreign and Chinese business people I visited in factories and export shops and quoted in those stories, it was at best a secondary factor.
Now things are different. China's exporters, like businesses in every part of this recession-slowed world, are losing orders and laying off workers. This is tough for them -- as the counterpart is tough everywhere else. In response, governments elsewhere in the world are taking steps that, at a minimum, should not worsen conditions for other economies. That is, they mainly are mounting stimulus programs to keep people buying, whether from domestic suppliers or foreign sources. China too has of course announced a huge stimulus program.
Yet there are increasing rumbles of China's desire/intent to do something that would in fact aggravate problems elsewhere: trying to help its exporters by pushing the RMB's value down again, after two-plus years of letting it rise. In essence, this would be a game of exporting unemployment -- yes, yes, with all caveats about Chinese people being on average so much poorer than Americans or Europeans and suffering so much more when laid off.
Some very interesting economic discussions in and around China concern exactly this issue. Will the government try to devalue the RMB again? Should it try? Could it succeed? And if it tries, how will other countries respond? Could this be the step that turns a "contained" international economic crisis into something worse?
This subject is so complex, deep, and fast-changing that there are countless angles to explore. For now, as a first installment, after the jump are excerpts from my friend Andy Rothman's "Sinology" newsletter for CLSA, arguing that on balance the Chinese authorities won't take this step. (Proprietary newsletter, so no web link.) More on this theme to come. ______
Reading the NYT on line just now, I see a review of a "historical documentary" movie of something I can remember vividly but that apparently happened forty years ago this week: the Harvard-Yale football game in which Harvard scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds to "win," 29-29. (Touchdown with 2-point conversion; onside kick with recovery; another touchdown as the clock ran out and 2-point conversion.) Tick-tock footage of the game, from a Harvard athletic department perspective, here:
I mention this dawn-of-time occurrence for two reasons: I was excited during the game itself because one of the big stars for Harvard was tight end Bruce Freeman, who caught two crucial touchdown passes. We had grown up and gone to school together in the Western hinterland, where our fathers were doctors in the same small clinic. Also, I was about to take over as the editor of the Crimson and so was part of the squadron responsible for our post-game special edition.
I have never been 100% sure of exactly who in the small group was first to say that the special-edition headline needed to be: HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29-29. It wasn't me; and I think it was my classmate Bill Kutik. But everyone instantly recognized a stroke of genius, and so it was set in hot lead, on Linotype machines, and was on the streets in a matter of minutes:
Maybe if the movie makes its way to Beijing's pirate video stores I'll find out what really happened.
(I have seen the image above on several sites. Somewhere in the attic of my real house in the US, I have the special edition itself, which I suppose I should scan or preserve in amber someday, given its status as a treasured antiquity.)
UPDATE: I have heard from Bill Kutik, who was indeed centrally involved, and even more so was the person I thought to name, but didn't: Tim Carlson. Further background (complete with Rashomon-like conflicting memories and accounts) here.
November 19, 2008
Who says there are no good jobs left in journalism?
Here is exciting news. The (state-run) China Daily may be opening a US edition!! Clues here, with thanks to Michele Travierso. If you're an experienced but job-threatened native speaker of English who can see the wry possibilities in writing headlines like the front-pager below, your time may have come. I might look into it myself.
A few other keeper headlines shown here, here, here, and here; and an exploration of the thinking behind this form of journalism here. (Update: via Charlie McElwee of Shanghai, more info from the China Daily-USA web site.)
How it should be done: Terry Gross with Bill Ayers
It's conventional chattering-class wisdom to say that Terry Gross of Fresh Air is a "great interviewer." In the early days I think that wisdom originated to some significant extent in male-listener fascination with the sound of her voice. But a broadcast I just heard was not only a reminder that she is, in fact, truly a great interviewer but also a demonstration of what that means in practice.
The broadcast in question was her 43-minute session yesterday with Ayers, the person presented by GOP campaigners as Barack Obama's closest and most influential friend. Ayers himself came across, inevitably, as a more complex character than the campaign caricature: more sympathetic in some ways, not necessarily in others. But much of what Ayers "reveals" comes out precisely because of the way Gross posed and sequenced the questions. If he had just been parked in front of the microphone by someone who said, "Well, how can you hold your head up?" or "So, tell us about Barack Obama," the results would have been much duller.
At the most obvious level, Terry Gross succeeds in this interview simply by avoiding the two most common, and laziest, styles of today's broadcast interviewers: surplus aggressiveness, long ago made familiar by Mike Wallace and now lampooned by Stephen Colbert; and lapdogism, most recently on display in Greta Van Susteren's sessions with Sarah Palin and the default mode of Larry King Live. Both of these extremes reflect the confusion of toughness of manner -- do you interrupt, are you scowling, are you borderline impolite -- with toughness of inquiry, which is something altogether different and can happen under the most polite and civil auspices.
She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.
What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.
If you have this standard in mind -- is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? -- you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.
November 18, 2008
A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
Back to business, and back to China: Why we love the English-language Chinese press (cont.)
A mere 22 hours after we started driving toward LAX at 4:15am through what seemed to be snowfall but in fact was ashfall from Yorba Linda version of the recent SoCal fires*, my wife and I are back in our apartment in Beijing. And reassuringly, we have the joys of the English-language Chinese press to welcome us home. Front page of today's (state controlled) China Daily:
Apart from the picture of the baby-holding Premier Wen Jiabao in his now-iconic role as Beloved Grandpa of the Nation, I invite attention to the headline in the top right corner of the front page:
On line and in print, I have oftenmarveled at why Chinese organizations make so many careless and unintended errors when rendering material into English for foreigners to read. (Locus classicus, discussed here: the huge signs outside an art museum in Shanghai last year. They announced a big exhibit of photos from the Three Gorges dam area and read: THE THREE GEORGES.)
With the China Daily and sister publications, it's a different matter. Judging from the result, it's obvious that native English speakers have a final pass at the stories, headlines, and captions there. They have very few unintended, "Three Georges"-type errors. But it also seems obvious that the British, Canadian, American, Australian, Indian, South African, Singaporean, etc subeditors hired for this role can have a slyly subversive bent. Often little touches show up in the publication that will seem Onion-like to any native speaker but that even very capable English-speaking Chinese supervisors would likely miss. At least that's what I hope is going on here -- intentional wry precision rather than unaware imprecision. I'm applying an Intelligent Design model in my newspaper reading. ______ * For those who know the LA Freeway system: this was along Highway 91 west of I-605, which we were detoured onto because signs said that I-105 was closed, apparently for fire reasons. The fires were of course aggravated by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds. On the weather report we heard while passing through the ashfall, the reported atmospheric humidity was six percent.
November 2, 2008
Proof that John McCain has reached the "acceptance" stage
His appearance in the opening skit of SNL last night. (Clip from official NBC site here, with intro ad.)
The premise and execution of the skit were very funny. Much funnier, except for the physical-humor thrill of seeing Tina Fey and "the real" Sarah Palin on screen on the same show, than Palin's appearance a few weeks ago. This time, McCain and Fey, in the roles of McCain and Palin, were QVC hosts shilling for fine election-related collectibles, like Joe the Plumber action figures. The setup, which poor McCain himself had to lay out, was that airtime just before Election Day was essential -- but while Obama could pay for a wall-to-wall half-hour special, McCain and Palin couldn't afford anything more than a spot on QVC.
I just watched it again right now, and it's even better than I remember. The only thing we'll miss when this campaign is finished is seeing Fey in her Palin role. "OK, now I'm goin' rogue..." McCain himself was also a charming performer. Not a bit of the crabbed, offended, uncontrollably angry man we saw during the debates. Instead, a little reprise of the "I know this is all bullshit, and I can laugh at myself" McCain as he consistently presented himself in the 1980s and 1990s.
But no candidate who thought he had a prayer of winning would have appeared on this show.
For a candidate coming from behind, every second of the final week of the campaign is like a second in cardiac-surgery operating theater, with absolutely no room for fooling around or wasting time, money, or effort that could be used to sway that last crucial vote. (Think: the last days of Gore-Bush in 2000.)
For a candidate who thinks he's ahead, and might actually become president, inevitably there's a tone of new seriousness right at the end: What we've been working for years is within our grasp, let's not screw this up, and let's be sobered by how different the world is going to look in a few days.
So if McCain really thought he had a chance of catching up, he wouldn't have wasted time on an audience that might repair his reputation among liberals and journalists but does him no good with the crucial swing votes. And if he thought he were secretly ahead, he wouldn't comport himself this way. He would be more like the stiff character we saw in the debates.
Great TV! But also an unmistakable message.
October 30, 2008
An essay by someone who has never worked in a political campaign (updated)
There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics
about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign
trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American
politics.
What??? A general-election presidential campaign consists, roughly speaking, of appearing before one crowd after another all day long. I know this from having worked in one, but all you have to do is watch TV to get the idea.
I know, it is hardly shocking that the WSJ would publish a piece suggesting that Barack Obama is the wrong man for the times. (This one by Fouad Ajami.) Nor that it would reach, Pravda-like, to find the latest argument against him. Haven't looked, but I bet that when Sarah Palin was drawing big crowds the Journal's editorialists noted this with approval.
But doesn't a certain self-protective "wait a minute, can we really say that?" instinct kick in at some point? Are there no copy editors any more?
Update: Actually, there are no copy editors any more! Marge duMond, head of the crack copy editing team at our own Atlantic Monthly, reminds me of this dispatch soon after the Murdoch takeover of the WSJ, which disclosed that the WSJ was laying off large numbers of its editors. The Journal's new managing editor said:
The reformed structure means that it is essential for reporters and bureau chiefs to ensure that copy filed to the news desk is clean...
Yes, that's a foolproof plan.
October 19, 2008
Three colleagues
Often I make some explanatory or background comment about my own article in each new issue of the Atlantic. But I don't like to say much about other articles, because on the merits I'd end up saying: Hey, read them all, they're all great! Usually, and especially in this issue, they are.
For special reasons I want to mention three current items by my colleagues.
1) Jeffrey Goldberg's hilarious-but-serious takedown of the TSA. The wasteful spectacle of "security theater" has been on my mind for a long time, as the folly of this system was evident from pretty near the start. Very soon after 9/11, the only two airline-security measures that really matter -- fortified cockpit doors, and the vigilance of a flying public that now knows what a hijacking can mean -- were in place. Since then we've erected an edifice that imposes a huge indirect cost on the traveling public while (as Jeff points out in the article) doing very little to discourage serious terrorist threats. Two years ago in the Atlantic, I quoted John Mueller, author of Overblown, to similar effect:
The widely held view among security experts is that this airport
spending is largely for show. Strengthened cockpit doors and a flying
public that knows what happened on 9/11 mean that commercial airliners
are highly unlikely to be used again as targeted flying bombs. "The
inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe
about flying," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State
and the author of a forthcoming book about the security-industrial
complex.
But there seems to be a ratchet effect in "security theater" projects. Once a "safeguard" is adopted, no one dares propose taking it down. Here in Beijing, X-ray screening for all handbags, briefcases, and other parcels taken onto the subway was introduced as a special Olympic-security measure last July. The games are gone, but the screeners (and the long lines of people waiting in front of them) are still there. If logic and evidence had any power to change a system, Jeff Goldberg's article would have some effect.
2) Barbara Wallraff, in the latest entry in her new Atlantic blog, asks for a word to describe people whose street etiquette takes a certain form. My nominee is "the people of Beijing and Shanghai." I was actually planning to write something about the mysterious difference between Chinese and Japanese walking-styles on the street. (Pedestrians in Tokyo, in general, act as if they're aware that ten million other people need to fit onto the same streets, and make themselves small. Pedestrians in Shanghai or Beijing, in the same overgeneralization, act as if they're the only ones walking and make themselves big.) Details, theory, evidence, and photos for another time.
3) Andrew Sullivan, in this item, has very nice and accurate things to say about the Atlantic's elegant redesign, and about the virtues of actually subscribing to the magazine. He is right on all counts -- and also has a very polished and non-bloggish essay about blogs in this issue. As for subscribing, in the short term the physical magazine really is an important complement to the (ever more important) web site, in that it can combine photos, art, and text in a way not matched on screen. I feel this difference very keenly overseas, where I get print issues five or six weeks late. It's simply different to read a magazine like this on a designed page. And in the long run, this is part of how businesses like ours survive.
October 16, 2008
Jackal with a human face (updated)
The new issue of the Atlantic, just up on line (and available with great photos and new design for subscribers) has among many other offerings my article about the ways in which Chinese officialdom so often makes the country look so much worse than it really is. It also includes an explanation of the "jackal" headline here.*
I just know this will be taken by all concerned in the spirit of constructive criticism! That's what I'm saying to friends here in Beijing.
UPDATE: Interesting to see, in this BBC dispatch, that China's former ambassador to France is making a similar on-the-record constructive criticism of his own government. (Thanks to reader T.H.):
[Former ambassador] Wu Jianmin says China's image problem is caused at least in part by
its own officials because they do not know how to communicate with the
outside world.
He says they waste time using political cliches, talking nonsense, and making empty or outrageous claims.
_____
*Hint: when trying to discredit a Nobel Peace Prize winner also seen as a religious leader in much of the world and by some important sub-groups within China, what subtle imagery would some Chinese leaders choose?
October 13, 2008
Last word on my "ignore the DJIA" crusade
In the last few days I've made a quixotic complaint -- that we spend too much time thinking about stock-market prices -- and proposed a wildly quixotic solution. It is that we devise real time credit-congestion maps, showing where companies are about to be financially starved out of viability for lack of working capital, modeled on real time traffic-congestion maps now popular around the world. For visual amusement, here is the traffic situation in greater Melbourne, Australia just now:
Obviously my proposal is in the "thought experiment" category, rather than something that is actually going to occur. (Thus it is in the same category as another longstanding crusade I'll rev up again soon: to get rid of what is commonly but erroneously referred to as the "Nobel prize" in economics. More on that another time. Interim reading here.) One problem with the real-time credit map is that the underlying data points -- the countless daily business decisions based on available credit, among other factors -- can't quickly or easily be tracked down, and are held by people who often have a strong interest in keeping them private.
After the jump, a reader's note that spells out some of the further complexities of amassing and publicizing such data. But the reader also underscores my main point: the need to find some way to dramatize the reality that today's financial crisis involves things more serious than collapsing share prices. _______
I have argued for decades that the press pays too much attention to daily stock market movement. Their immediate fluctuations are of interest mainly to day traders (ah, remember when that was a popular pastime). Their longer term connection to real national wealth, welfare, and happiness is imprecise, to put it mildly. This is especially so in the volatile and panicky mood of the moment.
Obviously my effort to get the daily market reports pushed to the inside pages is a doomed crusade. But in the short run, I wish that, instead of the DJIA / S&P 500 / NASDAQ etc, we had some comparably precise seeming, attention-getting, publicized* measure of credit availability. From all evidence, that is the real emergency driving real destruction of real companies creating real products and about to eliminate real jobs.
While waiting to see what President Bush (ah, remember him!) might have to say on the topic, anecdotage that is getting my attention:
Three weeks ago, I mentioned that DayJet, the pioneering air-taxi company, was shutting down not (it claimed) because of overt business problems but because of the impossibility of getting short-term finance. At the time, the credit squeeze might have seemed an excuse for the inevitable diceyness of the air travel business.
But just in the last few days, I've heard separately from three friends who run objectively "viable" businesses that they are on the verge of closing permanently, or laying off much of their staff, because they can't get short-term working capital. One said he was on the verge of having to close a manufacturing facility in the Midwest that, as he put it, "realistically will never open again." And this is from a group of friends that is heavy on writers, political people, academics, etc rather than a lot of business owners. I have never heard stories like this before. When I was living in northern California during the tech crash early this decade, the story was about the relatively slow deflation of (mostly) unrealistic plans rather than the widespread destruction of enterprises with a future.
My minor point: mainly because they're so precise and fast-moving, financial-market measures crowd out attention from what we really need to worry about, the imminent destruction of businesses and jobs that "should" survive.
My major point: the United States is near a moment of fundamental political choice. To have the discussion distracted by -- well, it would be nice to be even-handed about this, but the truth is that the distraction has been 99% from the McCain side, with the ongoing crap about the Weathermen in the 1960s -- is suicidal. A few weeks ago Senator McCain "suspended" his campaign because of what now seems a mild early phase of the financial crisis. Maybe he and Barack Obama could agree over the weekend to suspend discussion of any topic other than avoiding real economic devastation for the time being, at a minimum until their debate next week on economics.
Now waiting to hear Bush. ___ * The LIBOR, the London Interbank Offer Rate, is one well known proxy; my point is that the DJIA gets 100 times the attention but is not 100 times as important right now.
October 9, 2008
A day of conciliation
Before these items get too far out of date, let me say:
1) I generally am on the opposite side from David Frum on questions of politics and public policy. But I have to admire the sobriety and fairmindedness with which he makes this case about the future of the Republicans.
2) As Thomas Friedman knows, I am more impressed by the many ways in which the world is not at all "flat" than those in which it is. (When I asked him about this on TV two years ago, he quite charmingly explained that "In the columnist game, you don't sell things 51 - 49.") But having complained about the broad brush he used in that case, let me do homage to the very great precision of his column yesterday on patriotism a la Sarah Palin. It is an achievement to bring into exact focus something that other people have been generally talking-around for a while. He did so in that column.
The 28th Amendment to the Constitution (draft form)
"No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held."
Three weeks to get it enacted.
October 5, 2008
A comment that dumbfounds me
I know the Washington Post's David Broder slightly, and I've always respected and liked him and enjoyed dealing with him. But what can he have been thinking when writing this, about the VP debate, in his column today?
Those of us who know and admire Joe Biden were happy that a big
national audience got to see him at his best -- a sentimental, smart,
decent and generous guy.
But he was no better than Palin. She appeared cool as a cucumber,
comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was
thrown at her.
I've added the emphasis, my way of conveying a reaction of WHAT???????????!!!!!?????? Such an assessment can be true only if you have decided to assess debate performance on one factor alone, perky self-assurance, and to assign no weight whatsoever to such items as logic, responsiveness to questions, clarity in explaining views, factual knowledge, sentence by sentence coherence, and so on.
As everyone else including me has observed, Palin managed to pass her own particular test in this debate -- which was to improve on her alarmingly ill-informed and paralyzed appearances with Katie Couric. Biden's test was to "do well" in the normal, not the making-special-allowances, sense of that term. Each passed the respective test, but that doesn't mean there was no difference in how they performed.
In his famous 1960s book Paper Lion, George Plimpton described the thrill of running a few plays as quarterback during a Detroit Lions scrimmage. He rightly considered himself a success simply because he didn't get pulverized. That he avoided being killed by the opposing linemen was indeed impressive, but it didn't mean that they were "no better" at what they did.
The title of one of Plimpton's other books, about what happened when he got to pitch to several major league batters, gets across the idea of the different standards being applied to his appearances in pro sports lineups -- and to Palin's performance in the debate. It was called Out of My League.
October 2, 2008
The main thing I will say about the Veep debate in real time
The loser 38 minutes in is Gwen Ifill, who is doing nothing at all to keep the discussion on track or having the candidates engage.
The circumstances don't allow her to do anything close to what Katie Couric achieved, but she seems not even to be listening to the answers when moving to her next question.
UPDATE: Forty minutes in, Ifill completely missed the followup on the gay marriage / civil rights question. Where is Katie C?
September 29, 2008
Something you don't see every day (Chinese leadership dept)
It's not posted at the CNN archives site yet, but in a day or two look for and watch Fareed Zakaria's TV interview today with China's premier, or #2 leader, Wen Jiabao. (In the meantime, printed transcript is here. Update: video clips are now available.) Interview appearances by Wen or president Hu Jintao are so rare, let alone with the foreign media, that this session is noteworthy simply for its existence.
It's interesting beyond that for Wen's relative openness and non-defensiveness on a variety of issues, including the Dalai Lama and China's role in Darfur. (I am grading on the curve.) I have an article coming out pretty soon in the Atlantic about how very closed and defensive official Chinese spokesmen usually are when dealing with the outside world. This is an intriguing exception.
Given China's new role as America's banker, U.S. citizens should also pay attention to passages like this:
ZAKARIA: There is another sense in which we are interdependent. China
is the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bills. By some accounts, you
hold almost $1 trillion of it. It makes Americans - some Americans -
uneasy. Can you reassure them that China would never use this status as
a weapon in some form?
WEN (voice of interpreter): As I said,
we believe that the U.S. real economy is still solidly based,
particularly in the high-tech industries and the basic industries.
Now, something has gone wrong in the virtual economy. But if this
problem is properly addressed, then it is still possible to stabilize
the economy in this country....
Of course, we are concerned about the safety and security of Chinese
money here. But we believe that the United States is a credible
country, and particularly at such difficult times, China has reached
out to the United States.
I am not sure I buy the claim that Wen has read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 100 times. Still, that he can talk about it at all is impressive. Also, the small-d democrat in me wishes that Zakaria had not wrapped up the interview by addressing Wen as "Your Excellency." (I didn't hear the way the interpreter rendered that to Wen in Chinese.) That's my only cavil with a very impressive and useful interview.
September 24, 2008
Worst self-inflicted campaign move ever?
Candidates have made a lot of unforced errors over the years. Richard Nixon promising to campaign in all 50 states when running against John Kennedy in 1960 -- and getting sick, tired, and cadaver-looking as a result. Nixon again thinking he had to get those crucial Democratic National Committee records from the Watergate building in 1972. (He obviously made it through the election, but then....) Dukakis getting into the tank in 1988.
But compared with John McCain "suspending" his campaign and trying to postpone the debates? Puh-leeze. None of the reasons below is original, but it's worth adding them up to see how risky McCain's proposal is, in giving people impressions he doesn't want to convey.
The senator with (understandably) one of the lowest actual-attendance rates at the Capitol in the last two years, and who has played little role in crafting legislation recently, suddenly needs to be nowhere but Washington -- exactly now?
The candidate whose strongest claim to office is his experience, mastery, and understanding of foreign policy, cannot handle a debate on that topic, against a rookie, when he has other things on his mind?
The candidate who wants to quash any suspicion that he is not quick enough, not vigorous enough, or not multi-tasking enough to handle a job that poses a new challenge every minute, is essentially asking for everyone to take things a little slower so he can concentrate?
The candidate whose first response to the financial crisis was to propose firing the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and whose second response was to run ads linking his opponent (hazily) to former Fannie Mae officials (before news came out that his own campaign manager was still on the Freddie Mac payroll), now wants us to believe that statesmanship and love of country govern his every move on this issue?
The most famously stoic candidate of recent times is willing to have it look as if he's running away from a confrontation while he's behind.
Now, maybe I am misjudging my fellow citizens. Maybe most people will say: Yes, it's perfectly understandable that John McCain, having traveled constantly for years on the campaign trail, suddenly can't make it down to Mississippi on Friday. We respect him all the more! But I don't think this is some mass-vs-elite type question. This involves basic "dog ate my homework" appearances that anyone can understand.
To my taste, the strongest moment in John McCain's long debating history happened more than eight years ago, when he took on George W. Bush in South Carolina. McCain was furious at Bush for the underhanded campaign ads the Bush-Rove campaign had run against him in the South. He excoriated Bush (description of the whole scene after the jump) and, with acid in his voice, said "You should be ashamed."
If that John McCain were still around, I can guess what he would think about the man now campaigning under his previously-good name. ______________
I mentioned yesterday my general sympathy for whatever hapless underling in the McCain camp had cranked out the now-notorious article for Contingencies: The Official Journal of the American Academy of Actuaries.
But in expressing comradely support for a beleaguered staff member, I did not mean to suggest that the article was a mis-representation of McCain's views, or that it was unfair for the Democrats to pounce on it as part of their economic argument against putting McCain in charge or extending Republican rule:
On the contrary! The episode was a "gaffe" only in the sense classically defined by my friend Mike Kinsley: the ill-timed utterance of what you really think. This was the political equivalent of saying, "You know, what I really hate about Fred is..." even as your friends frantically try to signal that Fred has just walked up behind you.
It's completely fair for McCain to be judged on the article -- which reflects his views, just not views he would have chosen to emphasize in the middle of a banking panic -- and for reporters and Democrats to force him to explain where, exactly, he thinks regulation is still needed for the health-care industry or in finance. (It would be fun, but in some sporting sense unfair, to get Gov. Palin to answer the same question.) Still, I sympathize with the staffer who "wrote" the article assuming it would vanish into neverland and now is inevitably taking the heat.
September 10, 2008
A controlled experiment: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin
Twice in the last six months we've had the spectacle of a candidate clinging to a provably false personal narrative. Each tale was meant to show something admirable and significant about the candidate's character. But in each case the press had the goods to show that the tale was too tall to be believed.
One, of course, was Hillary Clinton's "hail of bullets" account of her arrival at the airport in Bosnia.
The other is Sarah Palin's "thanks but no thanks" claim to have opposed funding for the "bridge to nowhere."
In Senator Clinton's case, the more often she repeated the story, the more relentlessly the press said the story was not true. All parts of the press did this: right, left, middle. They didn't say that there was a "controversy" about her story. They said it was false. And eventually she bowed to the inevitable and stopped telling the story any more.
In Governor Palin's case, the more often she has repeated the story, the more abashed the press has seemed about pointing out its falsity. The accurate version would be more like: "I said 'Yes, please!' until the Congress said 'Sorry, no.'" As best I can tell (from my distance in China), the right-wing press has played no part in this truth-squadding. The mainstream press has seemed to treat it as a "controversy" rather than a falsehood. And there is no evidence of Palin hesitating to use the story again and again.
There can't be any difference in gender or race bias in treatment of these two cases: they both both involve successful, married white female politicians. There is no essential difference in the falseness of their claims, though there was a greater comic potential in the film footage of Sen. Clinton's "harrowing" arrival. The major remaining difference is that one case involves a Democrat (though the more conservative of the primary-campaign finalists) and one a Republican.
So here are the controlled-experiment questions:
1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?
2) If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?
3) At any point will Palin herself -- or, far more significant, McCain -- acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?
I pose it as a set of questions rather than an assumed conclusion. For now.
August 19, 2008
Too much Olympics? Try 'Ace in the Hole'
No more heart to watch the Olympics now that Michael Phelps and Liu Xiang have left the stage? To say nothing of the departed archery teams, lightweight weightlifters, rowers, etc?
Fill the empty hours, and get into the right mood for the upcoming conventions and general election campaign, with a fabulously bleak and cynical old movie from Netflix: Ace in the Hole.
Start-off benefit: Kirk Douglas's shirtless scenes an easy transition from watching toned bodies in the Water Cube.
Douglas plays a newspaper reporter who looks the way many male reporters may fantasize that they might look, and acts the way many non-reporters think the press actually behaves. Directed, with an acid touch, by Billy Wilder. When it came out in 1951, the film flopped at the box office, apparently because its depiction of media ethics and public appetites was considered too dark. Right now -- judge for yourself. Many details in the movie are surprisingly dated, but others could have come from yesterday's cable TV news Also, Kirk Douglas, who was 35 when the film was made and is now nearing 92, deserves to get some more buzz for this performance while he's around.
PS: Although I missed this item when it came out, I see that Jack Shafer had a much more detailed dark hymn-of-praise to the movie here, a year ago on Slate. Plus clips from the film! (Heard about the film instead from my friend Bob Schapiro.) Shafer is much harder to please than I am, so that's really a sign that the film is worth checking out.
August 18, 2008
Saying something nice about CCTV
As I've harped on before, in posts too numerous to link to, China's state-run network CCTV has been unashamedly nationalistic in choosing which Olympic events to show. OK: most people watching are Chinese.
But the play by play expert commentators seem surprisingly non-home-team in what they say. Sports broadcasting is its own stripped down dialect in any language, and the CCTV team seems about as willing to apply the standard Chinese versions of "beautiful" or "well done" or "not bad at all" terms to a nice dive, three-point shot, good serve by a rival as to one of their own. And they usually say "China" rather than "we" for the home team.
Of course, my sample could be skewed, since I haven't seen any Japan-v-China events.
In a crew race where the Chinese women's team came from behind for a dramatic upset victory, the announcer screamed himself hoarse and raised his voice two octaves as the boat crossed the finish line. But that was straight out of America's own "Do you believe in miracles?!?!?" Olympic play book.
August 15, 2008
More on Chauvinism. medals, and Olympic TV
This follows up the recent item saying that people who are in a huff about America-centrism in NBC's coverage should put things in perspective. (I've heard from many people about beach volleyball-centrism in NBC's coverage too. Agnostic on that.)
1) A Slate item, by June Shih, whose headline makes the point: "You think NBC is bad? You haven't seen CCTV." CCTV is of course China Central TV.
If you're going to rely on CCTV to bring you your Olympics, you've got to care about the Chinese teams. ...
Instead of [NBC's] soft-focus profiles, what you get
from CCTV is raw, one-sided footage. Predictably, the cameras were
trained exclusively on the Chinese gymnasts. During the early
rotations, when the Chinese unexpectedly found themselves in fifth
place, CCTV broadcast little or no footage of the teams in first,
second, third, and fourth. ....
It was a
reminder that, at the end of the day, [CCTV] is still a large cog in a giant
propaganda machine. NBC is patriotic because patriotism sells; CCTV is
patriotic because patriotism is the law.
Shih, like me, is positive about these Olympics, many of the Chinese athletes, One World One Dream, the Fuwa, and all the rest. But she's describing the same thing I see.
2) From "Traveling Lavalles," by an American family now in Shanghai, a completely true point about varying national conceptions of "success" at the games:
Medals:
Only gold count! Contrary to internal propaganda regarding the country
not being in a quest for gold, that is all that is being counted.... They want the most gold medals - nothing else matters. Locals are frustrated that Yahoo! ranks country performance based on total medals [instead of gold medals]...That would make Michael Phelps something like number 4 as a country as of right now.
It's interesting to look at the official Beijing Olympics medal-count site, which like all other media I've seen in China ranks countries' performance according to how many gold medals they have won. Right at this moment, it shows China as #1 with 22 golds, vs 14 for the runner up, the United States. Then look at the main US Olympic Committee/NBC medal-count site, which as of right now shows the US as #1 with 43 total medals, vs 36 for #2 China. We're all above average!
This is kind of an electoral college/popular vote issue. I don't know how it will shake out when all the events are done, but right now the gold supremacy is another cause for good national feelings in China.
A friend recently sent on quite an amazing blog post. It is a systematic, but funny!, examination of the "science" behind NYT column I was objecting to recently: David Brooks' claim that economic competition between China and America should really be understood as a clash between collectivist and individualist models of life and thought.
The premise of the NYT column was: We don't like to admit it, but brain experts and experimental
psychologists know what we're going to do before we know ourselves. For instance, by knowing whether we come from a collectivist or individualist system, they can predict what we'll see when we look at a tank of fish.
I was complaining about the application of this theory to the real world of modern China. And I didn't make a point I should have: The problem is not just sweeping generalizations about the billion-plus highly diverse people who live in China. The further point is that if you were to generalize, you'd find that many outsiders who've lived in China consider it more individualist-minded than many other Asian countries, notably Japan. (For instance, southern China is full of tiny mom-and-pop factories, since people love being their own boss and aren't that keen on taking orders from others.) It's commonplace to hear Americans and Chinese say that they feel their cultures share many personality traits, despite the obvious huge differences. More another time.
But that is small potatoes compared with the argument presented by Mark Liberman, of the linguistics and computer science department at U Penn. It turns out that the theory itself is .... well, see for yourself in Liberman's devastating analysis at the Language Log blog.
One little sample:
Brooks' column: "If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will
usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If
you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will
usually describe the context in which the fish swim."
Liberman: "First of all, it wasn't a representative sample of Americans, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at the University of Michigan; and second, it wasn't Chinese, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at Kyoto University in Japan; and third, it wasn't a fish tank, it was 10 20-second animated vignettes of underwater scenes; and fourth, the Americans didn't mention the "focal fish" more often than the Japanese, they mentioned them less often."
In my twilight years, I am not looking to pick a fight with anyone, and explicitly am not looking to do so with the amiable David Brooks. But I didn't like the argument or craftsmanship of this column, and I do hope he recognizes the danger of applying this kind of theorizing to big, important parts of the world. Or any parts!
Update: A good roundup of online reaction to Brooks's column here.
August 12, 2008
Wednesday morning Olympics
A little less cheery this time. (By comparison with this from yesterday.)
1. Weather The air today looks the way it looks most days. That is, bad. Well, we enjoyed yesterday while it was here.
2. Media Control Dept Here is a big feature story from yesterday's (state-run, official-voice) China Daily about the adorable little girl who "sang" the patriotic anthem at the opening ceremony.
Today's paper has not a word about the story that is all over the international press: that she was lip-syncing for a recording from another girl, judged not "cute enough" to represent the country at the ceremony. Fortunately the Chinese blogosphere is all over the story, largely in defense of the off-camera girl. For what it's worth, I also have not seen any followup on the photo-shopped nature of the dramatic "footprints" firework display during the opening ceremony. (If it's been publicized within China, I've missed it.*) This is how it is. Some kinds of news "exist" and are publicly discussed. Others don't and aren't. *Update/correction: of course the faked-firework story was originally broken by a Chinese publication, Beijing Times, which has received credit from nearly all foreign sources for its scoop. I knew this and regret any slight to BJT. I guess what I meant was follow-up discussion on CCTV, which I haven't been aware of. Thanks to Albert Sun for reminder.)
3. More Media Control There are a bunch of illustrations I don't have the time or heart for now. For the moment, here's today's official view of how the outside world judges the games in general.
4. On the brighter side, I've become a big fan of low-weight-class weightlifting, which is mainly what's shown in the evenings here. These short, square pocket-Hercules types from Colombia, Korea, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and of course usually-triumphant China are inspiring to watch. Jia you!
5. Update Bonus Item: On the larger-scale question of what's at stake for China-- culturally, politically, and psychologically -- in the Olympics, I highly recommend this new piece in the New York Review of Books, by my friend Orville Schell. It puts the questions of "humiliation" and "face" in a clearer and deeper perspective than I've seen elsewhere. After you've read it, take another look at today's David Brooks column, in wonderment.
If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will
usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If
you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will
usually describe the context in which the fish swim.
These sorts
of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results
reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals;
Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
This is the kind of thing you can say only if you have not the slightest inkling of how completely different a billion-plus people can be from one another. Beijingers from Shanghainese, Guangdong entrepreneurs
from farmers in Sichuan, Tibetans from Taiwanese, people who remember the Cultural Revolution from those who don't, people who remember the famines of the Great Leap Forward from people who've always had enough. The guy across the street from his
brother. His daughter from his wife. People hanging on in big state enterprises from those starting small firms. People who stayed in the villages from those who came to the city for jobs. Christians from Buddhists. Hu Jintao from Jiang
Zemin, Olympic weightlifters from Olympic tennis players, Yao Ming from Liu Xiang, Wen Jiabao from Edison Chen -- and while we're at it,
Filipinos from Koreans, Japanese from Chinese, Malaysian Chinese from Malaysian Malays. Lee Kuan Yew from Kim Jong Il. People from Jakarta from people in Seoul. Hey, they're all
"Asians".
(Following items 1 - 3 here.) 4. The mysteries of the Great Firewall Immediately before the Olympics, there of course was a flurry about whether or not the Chinese government would allow foreign visitors and reporters un-firewalled access to the internet. (As I reported in the Atlantic early this year, the original idea was to quietly un-block all IP addresses in hotels or Olympic areas where foreigners were likely to be, so that they'd say: What's this we hear about the firewall? Works fine for me!)
The Chinese government ultimately agreed to open unblock access for the Olympic visitors. For a while, it looked as if that meant blanket unblocking through much of Beijing. My own apartment access has always been firewalled, which I've worked around quite easily with my VPN. But for a day or two, I seemed not to need it. Now the blocking is back again -- and I'm reminded of what a nuisance that is, since on one of my computers, for odd reasons, the VPN is now no-go.
The real point, of course (as emphasized in my story), is that the very uncertainty of the Firewall's operation tremendously magnifies its effect. You don't know day by day what you can easily see, what you can't, or whether any problems you're having come from your own computer or always-shaky ISP setup.
5. The mysteries of Olympic food. After the jump, an account from a reader trying to buy food at Olympic venues, whose experience exactly mirrored my wife's and mine at the rowing site on Sunday.
That site is really distant from downtown Beijing, and is a big open-air meadow, but on the way in we went through a very, very thorough security search. After I passed through the metal detector with no beeps, a young man poked my right rear pocket several times and said shenme?, "What's that?" I pulled it out and said, "We call this a 'wallet'. " My wife had brought some peanuts and other little snack-packs, but she had to surrender all edibles at the gate.
After we went through, we found concession stands where prices were very low -- but there was not much to buy! Ah, keeps us fit. Reader's account, and one more point, after the jump. ______
Non-Olympics, non-China: check out Josh Green's memo haul
In case you have not seen any of the (deserved) zillion other references to this at various Atlantic sites, it is very much worth reading my colleague Joshua Green's new story about what went wrong with Hillary Clinton's campaign, and the trove of memos he collected while reporting the story.
Josh has done an outstanding job on this beat for a long time, starting with his definitive article nearly two years ago about how Hillary Clinton's success in the Senate had prepared her, and perhaps mis-positioned her, for a run for the presidency. Also, as everyone in media-land knows, a year ago GQ commissioned him for a big piece on the Clinton campaign -- which the magazine then killed, by all accounts as part of a deal to get better access to Bill Clinton for a different story. Josh then published this excellent account instead in the Atlantic.
The magnum opus among the memos, based on what I've seen, is this one from Mark Penn, which is sure to be parsed and reflected-upon for months and years.
Related thought that comes to my mind while reading through these documents: I make my living writing things down, but even I have reached the point where I am not willing to put any sentiment whatsoever into reproducible form -- in an email that could be forwarded, in a document that could be cut-and-pasted -- without thinking about how it would look if it got into unintended hands.
That is, the perfection of the technology for spreading and sharing written material has made writing weirdly less useful for conveying private thought. It's risky as a way to share thoughts about running a political campaign; it's reckless as a way to say anything about any other person you might not want him or her to hear. The evolution of technology may return us to the era when the no-tech face-to-face meeting, or the hard-to-copy handwritten note, is the most secure means of communication. And when written statements, even in the "privacy" of email, are necessarily blanded-down by pre-knowledge that they could turn up somewhere unexpected months or years or decades later.
August 10, 2008
"Chauvinism" and Olympic TV
Every four years some people moan and hand-wring about American TV's excessive focus on American athletes and the Olympic events where Americans are likely to win medals.
These people need to get out more.
Or at least they need to spend a little time watching CCTV in China. Today's early morning and evening Olympic coverage -- was gone in the interim, at a real Olympic venue about which more later -- focused heavily on events like Women's Air Pistol (Gold medal: China), Men's Air Pistol (Gold medal: China), Women's 48kg Weightlifting (Gold medal: China), Men's 56kg Weightlifting (Gold medal: China), and... you get the idea.
This applied even to coverage of the Sunday morning's swimming finals, Saturday night in the US. This is not a strong category for China, but after each race the replays and interview were with whatever Chinese swimmer had made it into the finals. When that swimmer did well, as with the silver medalist in the 400m men's freestyle, there was a happy-seeming interview. In the other cases, including when swimmers dragged in dead last, there would be a stiff-upper-lip interview with the athlete and melancholy -- I will say mawkish -- shots of the coach or parents getting teary-eyed in the stands.
This is normal! I switched just now to Korean TV, where I saw the Korean team playing soccer. Then NHK, the Japanese network, with a badminton doubles match involving a Japanese team.
The Olympic Games are for "the youth of the world," but they're organized and scored by countries. It's no surprise that countries treat them as vehicles of national pride, and assume that their people will be most interested in their own athletes. So anybody who was saving up to write an angry letter, blog post, or op-ed about NBC's chauvinistic coverage: don't bother! They're actually more above-the-fray than most. Also, their coverage is not shown anywhere except America -- I know, it's because I can't get it that I'm watching Women's Air Pistol -- so can't ruffle feathers elsewhere.
Now, I have to get back to listening to CCTV announcers yell piaoliang! -- "beautiful!" -- whenever Yao Ming sinks a three-pointed in the US-China basketball game now turning into a runaway. (And in fairness, they've said piaoliang! after some shots by LeBron and Kobe too.)
August 4, 2008
Unfortunate NYT lapse in Beijing
Adam Minter, of the ShanghaiScrap blog (and an Atlantic author), has noticed a heartbreaking and consequential bit of sloppiness in a NYT report today out of Beijing. The Times quoted a Beijing resident on what is, given the attack on police in the largely-Islamic Xinjiang region of China, perhaps the most sensitive topic of the moment: the Chinese government's efforts to quash what it considers mounting terrorist potential from its Muslim Uighur minority. The Times understandably grants its source anonymity on this topic, given the potential risks to him if he were identified -- and then carelessly identifies him! Minter quotes the crucial passage from this Times story today:
The owner of the Xinjiang Kashgar Restaurant near the main Olympic
venue said he shut down Tuesday [of last week] after repeated visits from officials
who cited health concerns. He said several other Muslim restaurants
nearby had received similar visits. The owner, a Uighur, spoke on the
condition of anonymity for fear that he would be further harassed by
the authorities.
The passage is still in the story at the NYT's site as of two minutes ago -- although once the info has been published at all, I guess whether it stays up is moot.
I know that very restaurant and went past it today on my trip out to the Olympic venue. Poor guy. This can't have been intentional, but the results are the same as if it were. And no one within the NYT system looked at these two sentences and said, Wait a minute... ?
July 23, 2008
Our American media landscape
For reasons too odd to contemplate, a quick, business-related, out-and-back trip from Beijing airport to.... Newark! With stay at an airport hotel designed to make me newly grateful for the environmental pleasures of Beijing. Surrounded on three sides by freeways. On the fourth, by check-cashing storefronts, pawn shops, liquor stores, tattoo parlors, car-auction sites. Kind of disappointed not to see some gun shops in there too.
All the other occupants of the hotel that I have seen are flight crews on Newark layovers. At least it's my aspirational peer group! Get to sit with the grizzled pilots in the bar and talk about "there I was...."-type flying tales and which airline will fold next.
On the first night in the hotel, dragging in late from the PEK-EWR flight, I see... a single copy of the New York Times in the hotel gift shop! I snap it up. Second day, leave in a rush before dawn, back late in the afternoon and see there is still one copy of the NYT left. Snap that up too. Just now, day three (nearing the end of the adventure), on my way in to breakfast I see that again I've had the luck to get the last copy of the paper.
I remark on my good fortune to the woman at the news stand. She says, "Oh, sir, we only get the one."
July 21, 2008
I turn on the TV in America, and in the first ten minutes I see...
Barack Obama in Iraq, meeting with the troops and sinking his long basketball shot. My Lord. Politicians have to be tough, and driven, and indefatigable. They also have to be lucky.
We can think of unlucky examples. Gerald Ford, who out of college was offered pro football contracts, tripping on his way down the steps to Air Force One. The first George Bush, all-American* college baseball player, bouncing a ceremonial First Pitch before tens of thousands in the Astrodome (as immortalized in Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes). Jimmy Carter, lifelong outdoorsman, being caught in a surreal photo that made it look as if he were being attacked by a crazed rabbit.Let's not get into Al Gore's luck in 2000.
I don't know how many times out of ten Obama would make that shot -- but with the (military) cameras running, he made it this time. And it becomes much harder to portray him as an anti-military outsider weirdo after the pictures of the troops clamoring to shake his hand. Politics is only partly rational. The late Mike Deaver, who didn't care how much TV reporters criticized Ronald Reagan as long as they kept broadcasting handsome-looking shots of him, would have appreciated the importance of this footage. If Obama wins, we'll see film of this trip three or four years from now and be amazed that the the worn, haggard looking man in the White House ever looked so carefree and fit. But that's how he does look now, and anyone who has seen campaigns knows how powerful these images are. (And I'm not even talking about the whole godsend for Obama of P.M. Maliki's comments.)
T Boone Pickens bewailing America's dependence on imported oil. I have spent no time on Pickens' plan and don't know whether it makes any sense. For purposes of argument, let's assume it doesn't. The mere fact of a grizzled tough guy saying, "This is an emergency," was startling to see -- and welcome. Much like grizzled tough guy Ross Perot talking about budget-balancing in the 1992 campaign. His own plan had its problems, but he changed the debate.
Health Care Now with its wonderful "Magic Eight Ball" ad mocking the health insurance companies. History would be different if some comparable campaign had been launched in 1993 when Bill and Hillary Clinton were pushing their health care plan.
TV seems more interesting than I remembered, at least in this first blast. I hope it's as interesting in my next three days here.
UPDATE: Kumar, of Harold and Kumar fame, is now on House? WTF??? This is not right.
* Sorry, hyperbole. Thanks to Garrett Epps.
July 18, 2008
More on Malaysia, Tibet
Malaysia: It doesn't happen often, so I might as well hail the moment when it arrives: something I agree with has appeared on the WSJ's editorial page. Last known occurrence, nearly a year ago, here.
This latest instance is from the Asian WSJ, which is more interested in reality than is the US mother ship and whose ongoing rhetorical target is less the dreaded "liberal fascists" of the United States than the actual fascists and other repressive forces of East Asia. Its editorial today about the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia is strong, clear, and right. It begins as follows and continues in similar vein:
The last time Malaysian democrat Anwar Ibrahim was prosecuted on a trumped-up sodomy charge, we wrote
that the government's "crude measures will exact a heavy price in terms
of lost credibility." Ten years later, Malaysia's current political
leaders should take note.
______ Tibet: Recently I recommended Melvyn Goldstein's short book about the hotly-contested history of China's relations with Tibet.
I decline to be drawn into the
exhausting and irreconcilable historiographical controversies on this topic and will post no further retorts or
elaborations on it. (Previous illustration of irreconcilability here.) But in the spirit of the open marketplace of ideas, I offer this link to a denunciation of Goldstein and other "Running-Dog Propagandists" by the exiled Tibetan activist Jamyang Norbu. The article's principal argument against Goldstein is that his scholarship and knowledge of Tibet are so impressive that his policy conclusion, that the outside world should not insist on Tibetan independence, is all the more damaging to the free-Tibet cause. Read and judge for yourself.
July 15, 2008
Probably no one will notice this outside the Blue State liberal elite...
Box on the front page of the (state-controlled and Beijing-based) China Daily, July 15 2008:
To be fair, it was below the fold, and underneath a giant picture of the Miss Universe pageant winner:
Click for larger, and to see some other interesting stories.
June 23, 2008
Getting this off my chest about the Olympics
This is very long, but for-the-record:
First, a reminder: I think that it will be best for China, the world, the athletes, the spectators, and the Olympic Movement itself if the Beijing games come off as a big success. No one will benefit if China feels disappointed or under-appreciated about how these years of work ultimately pay off.
Also: as I can’t say often enough, I am a Friend of the Chinese People!
And: I’ll be here in August. I want to have a good time when the Games begin.
But I am getting a bad feeling about the buildup to these events. It’s not just the air— I do still believe that last-minute measures will make it acceptable by Games time. (Reasoning and quotes in this article. Also, I'm out of Beijing till the start of July -- giving it a chance!) And it’s not about a lot of the transportation infrastructure, although crucial subway lines that are supposed to be running before visitors arrive still have mounds of fresh construction dirt around some entryways. I am confident that they will handling passengers by the time they're needed for the Games.
Rather I’m puzzled by a series of deliberate and inadvertent decisions that, if you didn’t know better, you might think were designed to turn the whole spectacle into a source of friction rather than pride for China. None of these steps is news on its own. Collectively the pattern is discouraging, and puzzling too.
It is of course precisely the vitality and at-the-center-ness of Tim Russert that makes his sudden death so shocking. I am very sorry for his family.
Like many other people in political journalism, I have had differences with him over the years about his particular concept of "tough" questioning and the effect it had, because of his great influence, on politicians and the DC journalistic culture. Such issues are for another day.
What I liked and admired most about him as a journalist and human being was his sense of permanent child-like wonder, which is in fact the essence of this business. Reporters never quite think of themselves as grownups, because they're always so excited about the next thing they get to see or the next puzzle they get to figure out. Rather, if people don't feel this way, they find some other line of work.
Even he ascended past the level where he would routinely be called a "reporter," Tim Russert always retained that sense of openness and curiosity about what he'd learn in the next interview or see at the next event. In turn this made him seem un-stuffy to people who knew him only from TV, and approachable when you dealt with him in person. I am sorry that his weekly CNBC/MSNBC interview show was not as well-known as Meet the Press, because it showed more of his open, omni-interested nature than some of the Sunday morning inquisitions did. Still, the overwhelming reaction to his death shows that his essential character came through. This is sad news.
June 11, 2008
Jim Webb as "Confederate"
I am on record as liking and admiring Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, and also hoping that he stays in the Senate rather than joins the Obama ticket as VP.
But I am underwhelmed by the latest "revelation" about him: that he has expressed sympathy and respect for Confederate soldiers, including many of his forbears. (FWIW: Such of my relatives as were then in America lived in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and fought on the Union side. Many were killed.)
First, this is hardly a secret or news. The dignity of ordinary Confederate troops and their battlefield leaders, as opposed to the evil of the southern slaveholding system, was a major theme in Webb's widely-noted and generally-praised book Born Fighting, published four years ago.
In addition to that book, the main documentary proof of Webb's "problem" is a speech at the Confederate war memorial in 1990. That memorial, by the way, is in Arlington National Cemetery -- not in Richmond, Charleston, Natchez, etc. His speech contained a passage addressed to white descendants of the Confederate army that is hard to imagine coming from, say, David Duke:
The last twenty five years in this country have shown again and again that, despite the regrettable and well-publicized turmoil of the Civil Rights years, those Americans of African ancestry are the people with whom our [Southern whites'] history in this country most closely intertwines, whose struggles in an odd but compelling way most resemble our own, and whose rights as full citizens we above all should celebrate and insist upon....
Worst moment of TV commentary (that I can think of at the moment)
Gloria Borger just now on CNN, reading credulously from a Hillary-supporter email saying that this "needed to be her night" and thus it was OK for her to perform the way she did.
Best moment: Jeffrey Toobin's instant, unscripted, "What are you TALKING ABOUT???" response, saying that except for the "deranged narcissism of the Clintons" the point would be that she had lost and Obama had won and it was time for her to step aside. That was "hard" on her, but elections are hard. It was no picnic for Bob Dole or George HW Bush or Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown when Bill Clinton beat them, either, but that is life and they didn't try to stay on stage. This last part is me talking, but it's what Toobin implied.
Of course, CNN is the only source of real-time U.S. commentary available here, so my pool of possible worst-remark candidates is restricted.
June 2, 2008
Praising a neocon! (updated)
I am limited, to put it mildly, in my admiration for neocons and the blessings they have brought to America and the world.
But to give credit where it is due: just now on BBC's HARDtalk program, Robert Kagan -- he of the "Mars vs. Venus" description of virile America versus weakling Europe -- did an admirable job of handling the interviewer Stephen Sackur. Sackur's specialty has become the haughty-sounding "Surely it's preposterous to suggest.." school of bullying interrogation. Often this involves hopping around from theme to theme, the continuity provided mainly by the superior tone.
Kagan, who is now a McCain advisor, dealt with this act as well as I've seen done, calling Sackur out on each of the logical jumps. Bonus point to him for admitting (in roughly these words) that the war in Iraq had "hurt America's image, largely deservedly." The BBC's internet video of the show, here, gave me an error message saying it's not available in China. (I saw it on actual TV.) If it works where you are and you'd like to see someone stand his ground, check it out.
UPDATE: Word from the US is that this clip is available only in the UK. Sorry! But surely it's preposterous to suggest that the BBC can indefinitely bottle up its shows. Will pass on any word I get about other sources.
BETTER UPDATE: Gavin Sheridan points out that while the BBC's own iPlayer is UK-only, a number of shows, including the one I'm talking about, are available on its normal web site. So here it is, Mars, Venus, HARDtalk, and all.
May 29, 2008
Who could ever have seen this coming? (Macau dept)
In an article last week that is now behind the WSJ's subscriber wall, two reporters whom I mercifully won't name say that US-based "gaming" companies like Las Vegas Sands and Wynn are starting to have problems in Macau. Heart of the story:
Even as the U.S. operators pour billions into the market, they are struggling to overcome an unforeseen obstacle: the growing power of local middlemen in determined where big-spending, so-called VIP players spend their money
"Unforeseen"? The few prescient geniuses who happened to anticipate this problem included, let's see.... every single person I interviewed about the Macau situation in the spring and summer of last year, for this article in the Atlantic. There is even an authoritative academic study of the phenomenon, here. "Stanley Ho’s four-decade monopoly on all casino business might seem the strangest part of Macau’s economic structure," my story said, referring to the local Mr. Big. "It was not: That distinction has belonged to the related system of VIP rooms, which has also been the foundation of Macau’s gambling economy—and which poses the greatest challenge to Macau’s ability to come into sync with international norms."
If the big U.S. companies really have been blindsided by the VIP phenomenon, maybe customers have a better chance in Vegas casinos than they thought. Maybe "the house" is not really that sharp.
May 25, 2008
Credit to the pioneers (updated twice)
All journalism involves simplification and compression. Otherwise a story could never end and would always be longer than the event it describes, to take all perspectives into account. Even our chronicles in the Atlantic involve serious last-minute cutting -- believe it or not!
Thus Fareed Zakaria's latest column in Newsweek, which as usual I agree with, has to leave out certain details to get to the main point. The main point: that there is such a thing as exaggerated fear of terrorism, and that U.S. politics shows ample and self-destructive illustrations of it.
Certain details necessarily left out of this column but that should remain on the record: the pioneering role of scholars like John Mueller (of Ohio State), Benjamin H. Friedman (of MIT -- not the economist Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard), Ian Lustick (of Penn), Veronique de Rugy (now of George Mason U's Mercatus Center), and others in arguing from the start that the United States needed to be careful about doing too much, too cumbersomely, in its attempt to "protect" itself against every risk. My chronicle of their activities and arguments was in a 2006 Atlantic cover story, "Declaring Victory."
This was not so safe or comfortable an argument to make back, say, in 2004 when Benjamin Friedman began doing so. Such efforts are worth remembering.
Update: The security expert Bruce Schneier also deserves a place on the list of "sane when everyone else was going berserk" honorees. For instance, the issue of his "Crypto-Gram" newsletter that came out immediately after the 9/11 attacks said this:
Airline security measures are primarily designed to give the appearance of good security rather than the actuality. This makes sense, once you realize that the airlines' goal isn't so much to make the planes hard to hijack, as to make the passengers willing to fly. Of course airlines would prefer it if all their flights were perfectly safe, but actual hijackings and bombings are rare events and they know it.
This is not to say that all airport security is useless, and that we'd be better off doing nothing. All security measures have benefits, and all have costs: money, inconvenience, etc. I would like to see some rational analysis of the costs and benefits, so we can get the most security for the resources we have.
Some of Schneier's more recent thoughts here. Thanks to Jay Ackroyd for this reminder.
Update #2: Fareed Zakaria himself was also writing some "let's get a grip here" articles fairly early on, for instance this in 2004. (This previous post concerns a similar earlier battle.) And, this front page story in Monday's New York Times illustrates how far in the brainless auto-pilot direction Homeland "Security" policy has gone. It's much as foreseen in pop fiction.
May 19, 2008
Earthquake update #2: Media
Three days ago I mentioned this report from the Pew representative in Beijing (Deborah Fallows, who is also my wife) about Chinese media play on the earthquake.
Here is her followup report on Pew's site, about Chinese TV and internet coverage through the three-minute national period of mourning today.
May 18, 2008
What was John McCain thinking?
An advantage of being in the US again for a few days: seeing shows in real time, specifically SNL just now. What on earth was John McCain thinking, in agreeing to do a SNL spot 35 minutes into the show? The run-into-the-ground "joke" line was, "I am older than anyone can possibly believe. Hardee-har! I am so incredibly old!" Jeesh. He came across as a good sport, but, well, old. Everyone has seen SNL items that could be used as campaign ads. This is the only one I can think of where a candidate intentionally produced something that could be used as an attack ad on himself.
My immediate reaction while watching it is: if the Democrats ever move past their current intra-party bloodletting,the election might not turn out to be that close.
May 16, 2008
Pew blog on Chinese media coverage of earthquake
I am out of China for a few more days. While away I have seen this report on the Pew Research Center site, from the head of the Pew Research Internet Project's China operation, on what she is seeing about the earthquake on Chinese TV and reading on the internet.
(Disclosure: the author is my wife.)
May 12, 2008
Earthquake coverage on Chinese TV
Most of the channels on the (state controlled) CCTV are running the normal game shows, Olympic warmups (especially torch-relay updates), teen music shows, etc. But the CCTV-1 news channel is having all-out coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province. Brief cultural notes:
- The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster.
- News channels from Taiwan, which we are watching in alternation with the mainland coverage on CCTV, have extensive video footage from Chengdu, estimates of casualties, etc. So far no on-scene video footage that I've seen on CCTV-1, and no casualty figures. (The state news agency, Xinhua, is saying that 7600 people, or more, may have died.) Channel-surfing, we see that the German, Japanese, and Korean networks are also running Chengdu footage. It could have been on CCTV when I wasn't watching, but it's certainly not featured. CCTV is mainly running telephone interviews with correspondents in Sichuan and talking-head analyses in the studio. Possible background: controlling coverage within China until being sure exactly how the story should be presented. (Update: just saw a 20-second video clip from Chengdu on CCTV.)
- To help place this disaster: it is in almost exactly the same area I described in this article about the Wolong Panda Reserve, northwest of Chengdu, and this slide show about the reserve. A long, twisty road from Chengdu to Wolong, which had been undergoing years of reconstruction, passes right through the earthquake area. I assume it could be a long time before it is restored to even its perilous previous condition.
Good luck to all in Sichuan, including Dr. Tang Chunxiang and his colleagues in Wolong.
May 11, 2008
Evil in Burma
I have not said anything about the disaster in Burma, because I haven't had anything to say beyond "It's a disaster." And, that people should call the country Burma -- as the Bush Administration, Senators Clinton, McCain*, and Obama, and the Washington Post do -- rather than Myanmar, the term chosen by its junta and now accepted by CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.
My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.
A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in "lucky" denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.
Unfortunately, saying that the regime is evil doesn't automatically indicate how to help its unfortunate people. Invasions -- even for humanitarian purposes -- should be a very last resort. And without spelling out the whole reasoning, the U.S. is not in a great position now to be organizing an international invasion force, no matter how noble the cause. As the international frustrations of the last week have suggested, the main option is the unsatisfying one of putting together as much pressure from as many sources as possible, including China**, to force the regime away from its outrageous refusal to allow aid workers in.
(*About McCain: if it really is true that he has given a major convention role to a lobbyist who represented the Burmese junta, McCain needs to dump that person forthwith -- or be pilloried for not doing so every day between now and the election. Update: I see that the lobbyist, Doug Goodyear, has just quit the convention job. Next, maybe giving back the $300,000+ the generals paid him, to a human rights group? **About China: the latest outrage by the Burmese generals should not become the latest reason to threaten China with an Olympic boycott or disruption. The Chinese government has some influence over the Burmese regime -- but just some. It is better to make China part of the solution to this problem, by pointing out that a regime's refusal to save its own people is the strongest possible reason for an exception in China's "non-interference with other sovereign states" doctrine.)
A year ago, during the time of riots and crackdowns, I posted several pictures of what Rangoon looked like just before the fighting began. Here and after the jump, a few other pictures from that time.
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1: Village on the Irrawaddy delta, south of Rangoon, showing why a storm surge would do such damage. (Click for larger version that shows pagoda):
The bright side #4: Why I've missed the (English-language) Chinese press
May 1 edition, China Daily, state-controlled voice to the outside world:
Headline, in case you can't read it: "Happiness abounds as country cheers." (Click on photo for larger version.) Lead paragraph: "Across the country, people yesterday celebrated the 100-day countdown to the Olympics." Picture is of Tibetan university students in Lhasa rejoicing.
There are serious aspects to the enormous gap between Chinese and international coverage of the Olympics, Tibet, etc -- but for another time. For now it's great to see these publications in top form.
April 28, 2008
Most important item in Sunday's NYT
This Sunday's New York Times -- fat, varied, making me wonder how I got anything done on the weekends in America when I routinely had all this to read -- had lots of interesting stuff in it. But the most important item was the op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards called "Bowling 1, Health Care 0."
It's one of the rare expressions in print of a sentiment anyone who has covered politics has heard expressed privately countless times. Or at least that I've heard repeatedly when interviewing politicians about how they do their work. This is the politician's frustration with the behavior of the campaign press -- but not for the obvious reason.
The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work.
The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.
Active politicians rarely dare say this in public, since they know the same reporters and commentators will be there to talk about them tomorrow and the next day and from then on. For reasons personal (health) and political (husband out of the race), Elizabeth Edwards no longer has to hold anything back. After the jump, a sample of what she said:
Issues have come and gone over this last month, and they'll have to enter history without my imprimatur. But I will try in the next while to work back through a few of them, using the "if you can't say something nice..." standard*. I intend to mention a few technological, political, and other developments that deserve more attention or praise than they seem to have received.
As a start: the two speeches early this week by the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, about what he thinks is wrong with the culture of the professional military.
Gates starts out miles ahead simply by not being the man he replaced at the Pentagon, the odious Donald Rumsfeld. And even though Gates has implemented essentially the same Administration policy and administered the same gigantic budget that Rumsfeld left him, he has defended and explained his policies in ways suggesting that he has noticed, thought about, and attempted to address opposing views. This is in contrast to the haughty sneering-away of opposition so familiar from the Rumsfeld days.
In back-to-back speeches this Monday to the Air Force leadership at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and then to the Army leadership at West Point, Gates revived what had always been the best part of Rumsfeld's approach in the Pentagon. This was a willingness to challenge the cautious, yes-man aspects of today's professional military culture. Rumsfeld gave all such questioning a bad name by his contemptuous disregard for professional military judgment in the runup to the Iraq war. But Gates still had a point -- and he made it in a surprising way.
As mentioned earlier, family concerns (my father) have trumped other concerns for quite a while. Among various consequences, and in the cosmic sense a trivial one, is the list of items building up that I am looking for a chance to weigh in on -- should that chance coincide with my being near an internet connection.
Future items range from U.S. policy toward the Beijing Olympics, to Windows Vista and Mac and Google news, to frog-related and air taxi-related developments, to other themes. Concerning a potential US boycott of part or all of the Olympics, I'm looking for the chance to explain why Jimmy Carter, GW Bush, and WJ Clinton are right on this issue, and John McCain, Barack Obama, and HR Clinton are wrong. Off-hand I can't think of any other controversial issue in which you can place Bush and Carter on the same side.
And some day I will at least look at the couple thousand emails now backed up in the system. Sorry if one of them is yours.
I want to use this moment at the computer to address the unspeakable ABC bear-baiting debate last night. I haven't read what anyone has said about this -- except for Tom Shales of the Washington Post. He said that what Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos did last night was "shoddy and despicable." I completely agree and add only these grace notes:
--- From the often-harrumphing Gibson, this is no big surprise. But from Stephanopoulos??? Who earlier in his career was a message/press/legislative man for Dick Gephardt and of course played a more visible version of that role during Bill Clinton's rise - what the hell is this????
I like and respect Stephanopoulos, and part of what I respect about him is the way he usually conducts his TV interviews. But I also remember dealing with him back in the early Clinton days, he in his role as campaign guy and me in my role as reporter. He understands thoroughly and in his bones what is wrong with the kind of mindless, substance-free gotcha questioning he and Gibson wasted their time on last night. I know he understands it because I've heard him shame journalists who were applying the same tactics to Bill Clinton back in the day. What was he thinking? What kind of pressure had been applied to him?
--- After the jump, a passage from my 1996 Atlantic article "Why Americans Hate the Media," itself excerpted from my book Breaking the News, which bears on exactly this kind of mindless "what about the flag pin?" haranguing. To summarize what this passage says: Political reporters think they are being "tough" when they take a borderline-impolite (or worse) tone and try to trap people in some provable if ultimately-meaningless contradiction. But while members of the electorate often find these gaffes diverting in a pro-wrestling sense, whenever they have their own chance to ask "tough" questions they ask the candidates about things that will affect the voters' lives. These are generally questions of war, peace, economics, etc. Again, George S. lived through the phenomenon the excerpt below describes, though he was on the other side. That he would now be in gotcha mode is depressing, to put it mildly.
--- Whatever else happens the next time we choose a president, there has got to be a better way to see candidates operate under pressure than the grotesque system that has metastasized during this electoral cycle. It makes candidates into mere props for bullying anchormen-narcissists. It does no one except the anchormen any good. I mentioned earlier the oddity of Jimmy Carter and GW Bush finding common cause about China policy. Maybe the RNC and the DNC can join hands in freeing political debate from the destructive grip of the networks. And if they can't do that, maybe we should just go all the way and have the candidates compete eating pails full of maggots on Fear Factor. That's the logical extension of where we're headed.
Article except after the jump. Then, again off line for a while.
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I mentioned recently that the Chinese propaganda apparatus was surprisingly old fashioned, compared with most other aspects of life in contemporary China.
Well, the headline language is becoming more up to date. Front page of Thursday's China Daily (have to say it every time: official voice to the outside world).
The "hype" involved is the idea that the government is encouraging Han Chinese to flood into Tibet, to take economic opportunities from Tibetans and dilute the Tibet-ness of the place.
Hype aside, my impression is that it is hard for people outside China to appreciate how strong and unified is the view on "the Chinese street" about the rights and wrongs of the Tibetan tragedy. From this internal perspective, Tibet has always, obviously, and indisputably been an integral part of China. And just as obviously and indisputably, through 50-plus years the people of Han China have sacrificed time, treasure, and manpower to bring Tibetans out of the feudal age and into modernity. And the thanks they get is.... this destructive outburst?
Americans might consider this blasphemous, but I think the prevailing Chinese view is about as dominant here as was the view on "the American street" about the rights and wrongs of 9/11. In all this is the potential for trouble between China and the outside world, not to mention the trouble for Tibet.
Update: This story by Howard French in today's NYT very well describes the gulf between Chinese and outside perspectives on Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and "splittism."
Joe Conason, "Crossing the Line"
I mentioned several days ago that I was surprised to see -- ok, "disgusted" was the term -- that Hillary Clinton's campaign spokesman had emailed reporters an article from the American Spectator accusing one of Barack Obama's advisors of being an anti-Semite.
This was surprising because the Spectator had, during Bill Clinton's term of office, relentlessly accused him and his wife of crimes starting with the death of Vince Foster and moving downward from there.
It also struck me as simple malice, a try-anything attempt to injure someone near Obama with the false but always damaging claim that he was bigoted.
I see now that Joe Conason, in Salon, has had a similar strongly negative reaction to the same episode. This strikes me as a very significant reaction; if I were in the Clinton organization I would take his article very seriously indeed.
Conason is a formidable reporter in general. But in particular, anyone familiar with what The American Spectator's name implied in the 1990s remembers how redoubtable and relentless Joe Conason was in rebutting its spurious attacks on both Clintons. He and my long-time friend Gene Lyons even wrote a book, The Hunting of the President, about the Spectator-Starr-Scaife crusade to do whatever it took to bring the Clintons down. If this Joe Conason now thinks that the Hillary Clinton campaign is the one doing the disreputable attacking, that means something. His article's final words:
This incident offers Hillary Clinton an opportunity to consider how she wants this campaign to end. If she beats the odds and wins, this kind of behavior will taint her victory. And if she loses, as seems more likely now, is this how she wants her historic campaign to be remembered?
March 28, 2008
Recent items about Chinese info-control (#1 in a series)
Intensely in the midst of "real" work at the moment, so just a quick mention of one of a thicket of recent illustrations of a larger point. The larger point, as often argued in the magazine, is that daily life in most of China is less controlled and more freewheeling and chaotic than Westerners would usually guess. But there are clear, controlled, no-nonsense exceptions, among which the general field of information (media, internet, schooling) ranks high.
Today's illustration: maps. I contend that overall "map-mindedness" in China differs from the typical Western approach, but that's for another time. Finding useful maps here, in Chinese or English, can be tricky because roads, buildings, and landmarks are changing so fast. But there's also the official outlook that geographic information isn't something you want to fall into just anybody's hands. Thus this announcement yesterday that unauthorized online mapping services would be shut down:
China cracks down on illegal online map services to protect state security
"...Some websites publish sensitive or confidential geographical information, which might leak state secrets and threaten national security," [a Central Government official] said.
He said those websites would be closed down.
In a way I can understand what they're worried about. For instance, Google Earth makes something absolutely plain and obvious that I don't see on normal maps of Beijing: that there is gigantic airfield on the west side of the city, just outside the 4th Ring Road.* And I'm reading a novel whose plot turns on the discovery, via satellite photos, of unauthorized activity in Tibet. My point at the moment is simply the frequent reminders of the tension between China's opening in many ways and its attempt to bottle up some kinds of information.
--
* This site, originally pointed out to me by Joe Reckford, is "Beijing Western Suburb airport," 北京西郊机场, apparently used for travel by top officials and as a military base. Here is a Xinhua photo of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and eventual president of China Li Xiannian at the airfield 45 years ago.
March 27, 2008
'Declaring Victory'
Mark Danner's new article assessing the Bush-era "War on Terror" is very much worth reading. (A sample after the jump.) It is one of a rapidly-increasing number of good essays, speeches, and policy proposals looking at how the U.S. went wrong after 9/11 -- and not just in Iraq -- and how the next administration can start correcting the long string of previous mistakes.
This discussion needs to become more widespread, intense, and practical. John McCain is a vastly more admirable person than George W. Bush, but his strategy for Iraq and national security in general is an extension of Bush-Cheney. If and when the Democratic party moves past its current fratricide, it needs to make a big push here, not just for election purposes but so it can do something in 2009 if given the chance.
As the discussion continues, I immodestly offer this link to "Declaring Victory," the Atlantic story I wrote a year and a half ago on ways out of the War on Terror trap. As we near the end of the intellectual paralysis and policy rigidity of the Bush-Cheney years, some of the ideas people described to me back then seem, at least to me, all the more relevant.
Another writer starts another piece with another use of the fatuous (and incorrect) boiled-frogcliche -- and then takes a surprising turn! John Mbaria, a writer for The East African in Nairobi, shows the way amphibious homilies should be used --and with empathy for the poor amphibian too. From an article he wrote in today's Daily Nation, in Kenya:
THE STORY IS TOLD OF HOW an adventurous young frog struggled hard to climb into a pot of water. After a few false starts, he finally managed and had a nice time, enjoying the swim.
But the pot's owner came, proceeded to light a fire, and placed the pot on it. When the water started warming, the frog found the conditions even better.
But soon, conditions inside the pot became unbearable and the frog decided to jump out. But upon seeing the fire below, he stopped dead on his tracks. He was trapped in a dilemma of his own making. The water was killing him slowly, but the fire would kill him instantly.
As we seek answers on how the dispute over the 2007 presidential results could have triggered such wanton killings, we might ask ourselves how we got trapped in a dilemma of our own making....
Political writers, politicians: let John Mbaria be an example unto one and all.
(Thanks to Nicholas Wadhams of Nairobi for this tip.)
March 26, 2008
This is disgusting (Clintons, McPeak, American Spectator)
Watching from 12 time zones away, I've tried to stay out of campaign blow-by-blow.
But if, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder's report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from the American Spectator, this is simply disgusting. (Marc has just confirmed to me that indeed the article came in an on-the-record email from Phil Singer, the Clinton campaign spokesman.)
That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.
That they would bless this attempt to paint Merrill McPeak as an anti-Semite is grotesque.
I doubt that the author of the hit job ever bothered to speak with or interview McPeak. I have done so many times, during and after his days as Air Force chief of staff (which he was during the first Gulf War). People can agree or disagree with McPeak's foreign policy or his record at the Pentagon -- but that's not what we're talking about here. Any attempt to fish out a quote that will banish him as a bigot is exactly as fair and accurate as depicting Bill Clinton as being personally a racist based on his "fairy tale" and "Jesse Jackson" comments around the time of the South Carolina primary. I say this having heard McPeak lay out his views, starting while the Gulf War was underway 17 years ago, about how to maintain general stability, US interests, and Israeli security in the Middle East.
McPeak may have gone too far in saying that Bill Clinton's earlier comments (that it would be "a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country" -- namely, Hillary Clinton and John McCain) amounted to "McCarthyism." But that's a pretty fair description of this latest round. I don't like attempts to stifle argument when they occur in China, and I don't like this in the United States.
I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article. That the Clinton team would circulate it I'm still trying to deal with.
March 25, 2008
I keep being re-surprised...
... at how tin-eared and antique the Chinese propaganda apparatus is, compared with the way most other things seem and feel in the country.
Today's illustration: front page of China Daily, official voice to the outside world. Story at top left, about lighting of Olympic flame, contains not one word about protesters who disrupted the ceremony in Greece. (Local Chinese TV coverage also cut away at that instant.) Story at top right, today's update on the Tibet saga, is about the unified outrage of China's web population over Western news distortions. Eg,
"A video clip titled 'Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China' became an instant hit after it was posted on YouTube on March 15. [Hmmm. As I remembered it, the Great Firewall was blocking YouTube around that time.]... The 7-minute clip then lists indisputable historical facts to prove that Tibet has long been an inalienable part of China."
As an indication of what the majority of Chinese people have been taught about the Tibet issue, the story is indeed useful. What is weird is its attempt to sell the "if we don't mention it, it didn't happen" version of reality to outside, English-language readers who have other sources of information on the topic.
Meanwhile, a microscopic story at the very bottom of the front page (picture after jump), right next to the Hooters-Beijing ad, notes that shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange fell by 4.49% yesterday. To be fair, it is linked to a longer story inside.
And you thought the Clinton-Obama race was exciting....
The incumbent team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has come out on top in the voting at the National People's Congress, winning a second five-year term! Today's front page:
Essay question: In what basic way did these NPC elections resemble the Democrats' presidential primary in Michigan two months ago, and what does this suggest about the way globalization is bringing us all together?
March 16, 2008
The Atlantic's motto (cont.): Today's news three years ago
Just one last reminder, this one prompted by the Bear Stearns news and the collapse of Asian stock markets around me as I type, of the Atlantic's "Countdown to a Meltdown" cover story, by me, from the summer of 2005.
The point of steering readers toward the article once more is its attempt to explain, while it was going on, the origins of the credit bubble whose collapse is now causing problems.
Some "predictions" in this fictional history are looking pretty shaky now -- for instance, the assumption that the first black American with a serious chance at the presidency would be a four-star Army general running as a Republican. (Our 45th president in this scenario, the "Desert Eagle," becomes a hero by leading the raid that captures Osama bin Laden just before the 2012 elections.) But some of the other predictions, about the spread of panic from the real estate markets to the international financial system.....
A very good documentary series
(Updated below.)
This month BBC World TV is running a series of short documentaries on China. My wife and I have seen only two of them so far -- one about a little place called White Horse Village that is being demolished to make room for a modern development, another about a year in the life of several public school students, some cramming hard for university entrance exams and others just trying to get by while their parents are a thousand miles away in factory jobs.
If they're aired where you are, they are worth seeing. (Series schedule here. I gather that several of the films have been broadcast before.) They capture some amazing moments -- a bright young high school senior from the boondocks as she learns the scores on the entrance exam that will change her life, a beleaguered rural mother nearly suffering a breakdown when her callous mother-in-law won't help her, a nouveau-riche land developer cavorting with his family while the people he's evicting despair. Most of all, they show what China outside Beijing or Shanghai looks like, in a way TV news rarely does.
Why these are being broadcast with no interference I can't say. In a similar development, unlike yesterday, today both CNN and the BBC, along with the French, German, and Japanese news stations, are broadcasting Lhasa footage without being censored. On the other hand, my experience confirms Danwei's report that YouTube is now blacked out.
Real time update: Whoops! I wrote this yesterday morning, and one minute before it was scheduled to appear -- that is, right now -- I heard in the background a third documentary in the series. In it correspondent Juliana Liu reported on a visit to her hometown of Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and her talk with a colorful local millionaire: the air-conditioning magnate, aviator, and environmentalist Zhang Yue. Who would have guessed -- his campus includes a gilded pyramid and a replica of the palace of Versailles!
Small world. This picture of Versailles-in-Changsha is not from the film but from our story on Mr. Zhang early last year. Maybe this film was shot long before that (though its credit screen said 2008). Further demonstration of our motto. The Atlantic Monthly: today's news one year ago.
March 15, 2008
Tibet info-flow update
As of Saturday night, March 15, China time, in Beijing:
- The screen goes black on CNN one second after any report about the situation in Lhasa begins;
- Similar coverage on BBC World TV has, oddly, come through unmolested -- though BBC has often been blacked out in the past. This evening I saw footage on BBC of riots in Lhasa, cars being burned, accusations of attacks on monks, and so on;
- CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV) has included at least one brief mention we saw, similar to those in the papers previously discussed here, saying that small groups of hooligans have attacked soldiers in Lhasa but that things are under control.
- Just about every blog, web site, or online news source I've tried for info about Tibet has been blocked by the Great Firewall, using one of the techniques I discussed in this article. The URLs for those sites -- say, NYTimes.com -- aren't permanently black-listed or blocked. But when the GFW's filtering system sees troublesome words in the actual content of the page you're reading -- and let's assume the words Tibet, Lhasa, and Dalai Lama now all qualify -- it breaks the connection and interrupts all attempts to go back to the site for certain period of time. So far, my VPN has gotten me around this barrier. But, as discussed in the article, avoiding the Great Firewall is enough of a chore and an expense that most Chinese citizens don't bother. I imagine some people in Tibet are bothering now.
Front page of today's China Daily, the government's English-language presentation to the world. This is on Saturday, March 15, when news outlets elsewhere are leading with the Tibet news:
You can click on the photo for a larger version, but you're still likely to miss the Tibet news, which is in the very bottom left corner of the paper under the headline "Dalai Lama Behind Sabotage." In its entirety it reads as follows:
In case you're wondering how this is playing in China...
.... here is the current front page of the People's Daily website, in Chinese. The English-language site, here, has different stories with different emphases.
Both the Chinese and the English pages may have changed by the time you see them, but as I look on Saturday morning, March 15, China time, the Chinese page is playing the Tibet story as secondary news, just at the bottom of the opening screen. You can find it with these characters for Tibetan Autonomous Region -- 西藏自治区 -- and the story itself is here. The gist, according to me, is that responsible authorities say that a small number of hooligans and saboteurs are creating disruptions in Lhasa.
The English-language story is played higher on the opening page and with the headline, "Tibet Regional Government: Sabotage in Lhasa masterminded by Dalai clique."
As mentioned earlier, no one outside the region can really know yet what is going on or where it will lead.
March 7, 2008
My new homeland security hero: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (MT)
Listen to this item from Friday evening's All Things Considered and realize, in amazement, how long it has been since we have heard a public figure talk plain common sense about the "theater of security" and 'fraidy-cat authoritarianism of TSA-era America.
The speaker is Brian Schweitzer, elected governor of Montana in 2004. (A Democrat.) Good for him.
Point for later discussion: Right now I'd say that the biggest single difference between life as an American in China in the 2000s, versus my family's life as Americans in Japan and Malaysia for four years in the 1980s, is internet streaming audio. It's still a big nuisance to see U.S. television broadcasts in anything like real time -- or at all, given that the slowness of the Chinese internet makes streaming video difficult. But to listen to the NPR morning and evening shows live, with time zones reversed -- Morning Edition live at our dinner time, All Things Considered in the morning -- that is an enormous difference in connected-ness. We had email even back in those old days! Not Skype, of course, which rivals streaming audio in importance (and obviously is a variant of the same technology.) For now, glad that this phenomenon brought me the Schweitzer interview.
March 5, 2008
Shorter version of "right wing bloggers and China" point
The same people -- same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites - that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.
These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.
More on Clinton, Obama, and the OODA loop
Updated, below:
About two weeks ago I mentioned Chuck Spinney's analysis of the Clinton-Obama race, from the perspective of "Fourth Generation Warfare" and the famous John Boyd "OODA Loop." (Details on those concepts in the original post.)
The payoff of his argument, made shortly after Obama's Maryland-Virginia-DC sweep, was that Hillary Clinton could still win -- but that she could no longer win "well." That is, the terms of any possible victory over Obama had narrowed in a way that would compromise her ability to win the general election if nominated or to govern if sworn in. This was to Obama's credit, in showing how he had maneuvered her into that position. But it was a problem for the party, if Clinton finally did win on these Pyrrhic terms.
In making his point Spinney quoted a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson on "Hillary's Unappealing Path," written just after the Potomac primaries. It said:
"Though it is increasingly unlikely, Clinton may still have a path to the nomination -- and what a path it is. She merely has to puncture the balloon of Democratic idealism; sully the character of a good man; feed racial tensions within her party; then eke out a win with the support of unelected superdelegates and appeals, thwarting the hopes of millions of new voters who would see an inspiring young man defeated by backroom arm-twisting and arcane party rules."
Gerson is obviously not rooting for the Democrats, but his analysis, like Spinney's, has stood up.
Jeez louise department (China and right-wing bloggers)
Late last night China time, joining in via Skype on an institution I had not been aware of before: a "Bloggers Roundtable" phone call from the Pentagon, discussing the newly released report on Chinese military power. I don't know who else is on the phone call, except for two officials who were supposed to be identified as "a Defense official." OK.
About the report, nothing to say until I have looked at it more closely. About other questions from other people, not my place to characterize them -- tempting as it is to give verbatim the tendentious line of argument / "questioning" from one right wing blogger in particular. But since this same guy (whose boss I have repeatedlymocked) has made it his business to mischaracterize what I said, let me take the unwise step of trying to set a blog record straight.
The "plagiarism" flap over Barack Obama is bogus and overstated. It makes me think worse about whoever is pushing this complaint, rather than about Obama himself.
The Times's newest columnist, being brutally frank about the unwillingness to draw careful distinctions, and the lack of exposure to bracing market forces, among the leftist commentariat:
And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.
We all delude ourselves about ourselves. But I wonder if Bill Kristol can imagine how this line -- criticizing scholars for a descent into hackdom, and for being comfortably ensconced in sinecures -- will strike many of his readers.
February 14, 2008
We criticize because we love
First boiled frogs, now basic math. I hate to keep wondering whether the NYT Op-Ed page employs fact checkers, but it's impossible not to wonder after passages like this. From this morning's Gail Collins column:
Most people have never been to a caucus, even if their state happens to have them. In Washington, the caucuses last Saturday drew a little more than 1 percent of the registered voters.
Those wacky caucuses! But wait a minute....
As a former Seattle resident I recall that Washington state has six or seven million people. After investing 0.75 seconds in internet research time I see that a little over half of them, let's say 3.75 million, are registered to vote.
One percent of 3.75 million is 37,500 people. Now, let's think back to reports of those caucuses. All the stories talked about "record breaking turnout" and "unexpected crowds." Some 20,000 people had crammed in to a pre-caucus Obama rally in Seattle -- with thousands more outside, and presumably thousands of others in the rest of the state also supporting Obama, or Clinton, or McCain, or Huckabee. And among all of them, only 37,500 show up?
And... It turns out that four years ago, the Democrats alone had 100,000 people for their much less dramatic and consequential caucuses. By all reports, highly publicized on caucus day, at least twice as many turned out for the Democrats this year. But somehow, according to the Times, only one-sixth that many people showed up for both parties???
And... I hear from friends and local news reports that the Democratic caucuses in just one Seattle-area legislative district attracted 18,000 people. (This detail from a story with the typical headline, "Turnout Shatters Record.") So, that district accounted for half the total for both parties across the entire state????
Obviously something went wrong here. Let's say the Democrats had maybe 200,000 at their caucuses, and the Republicans mabe half that many. That would be 300,000 total. Not enough to legitimize what is in fact a wacky caucus system. Not enough to prove that people of every class and background were involved. But different by nearly an order of magnitude from what our paper of record reports, in a factoid that will no doubt be picked up and considered "true".
What's the explanation? (And, by the way, I wish that some other NYT columnist had committed this howler, since I am a fan of Gail Collins' columns.) Maybe the "too good to check" instinct when coming across a tantalizing statistic? I don't know. But if we're looking for job-creation opportunities in America, how about for common-sense checkers?
___ Update: Mystery may be solved! The number of precinct delegates chosen at the caucuses, who in turn vote for the state delegates to the national party convention, was in fact close to the magic 1% figure. An understandable mixup, perhaps -- unless you apply the "can this figure possibly be true??" common sense test.
February 11, 2008
Dispatch from the WA state caucuses: it wasn't about the ground game
A reader who lives in Washington state and strongly supports Obama sends this report about the caucus activity two days ago, which of course led to a landslide Obama win.
As Clinton loses caucus states, she keeps saying they favor Obama, and so does the press. The press in particular says that the caucuses reward greater organization. Whether or not that is so, and whether or not Obama is better organized than Clinton, the fact is that NEITHER candidate was that well organized for the WA caucuses (see my note below), and I suspect Obama was not for Maine.
The dispatch goes on to say that the point is not at all to belittle Obama's organizers. Rather, it's this: that at least in Washington, the contest appeared to have moved beyond the strict get-out-the-vote, nuts-and-bolts marshaling of resources, attrition-style warfare and onto some different level. (I have removed a few personally identifying details from the note):
Correct link for "Better than Free" essay by Kevin Kelly
The previous item, about how organizations might be able to sell the same information they are giving away via the internet, had the wrong link to Kevin Kelly's valuable "Better than Free" essay. Here is the right link -- also now fixed in original item.
February 2, 2008
A very good essay about the economics of "free" info on the internet
(Updated to fix bad link.)
The Atlantic -- which was early to the idea of making its content available free on the internet, then went to a subscriber-only model, and now has come back -- is one of many publications wrestling with the question of how, exactly, you sell something you are simultaneously giving away.
One of the best accounts I've seen of why our current approach might make sense -- and more generally, of why individuals and organizations may still be able to do well selling information they're also offering free -- is this one, from Kevin Kelly, on his "The Technium" blog. His analysis does ring true to me, and it clarifies some possibilities I've heard discussed mainly in hazy terms.
Everyone knows that the world demand for sophisticated, rapid, reliable information and analysis can only keep rising -- and everyone also knows that the traditional models of paying for such information are in trouble, with newspapers being the most obvious case. Ten years from now, or twenty, or some time, a new way of paying for the information will have evolved. I found this essay useful in pointing toward some potential paths of evolution.
(Thanks to Paul Holbrook, of the Zoot users' forum on Yahoo, for this tip.)
January 31, 2008
Fun with datelines from the NYT (updated)
(Update below) Traveling during the Barack-Hillary debate, so no thoughts on that until I see a replay. But this passage from today's NYT, perused during an endless session on US Air, certainly caught my eye:
REDLANDS, Calif. — The most trenchant symbol of the California presidential primary can be found on an isolated stretch of Interstate 15, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. There, affixed to an old trailer, is possibly the largest candidate billboard in the entire state, and it is for the Republican fringe candidate, Ron Paul.
Why did I notice?
1) Redlands is where I grew up and where my dad still lives, and it doesn't get that much national ink. So, great!
2) Redlands is not "smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert." To put this in terms that might resonate with the NYT copy desk, this would be like saying: White Plains is smack in the middle of the Adirondacks. More or less in the same part of the country? Yes. In the middle of? Not hardly.
3) Interstate 10 passes through Redlands. Interstate 15? Unt-uh -- at its closest point 15 or 20 miles away.
Maybe the writer was talking about some other place? Fine. But (not that I want to look a hometown gifthorse in the mouth), why this dateline?
On to weighter matters another time.
Update: Fellow son-of-Redlands Brian Beutler observed the same phenomenon on his blog.
Seriously, wasn't sloppiness about datelines one of the complaints about the NYT during the wild and woolly days of Howell Raines? I'm sure what happened in this case was the following: the Ron Paul sign in question was probably someplace on I-15 en route to Barstow, which is in the middle of the Mojave Desert and which is the heartland of Paul-type libertarian/survivalist sentiment. And for the Times's purposes, it was no doubt all close enough to fit under a 40-miles-away dateline. On the other hand: Bill Keller, the NYT's editor, went to college right in this same area and presumably would have known better if he had seen the story. That's all on this subject.
January 21, 2008
Mitch Kapor on spreadsheets, Magellan, etc
Yesterday, a NYT tech column suggested that Mitch Kapor of Lotus was responsible for the fundamental innovation of the spreadsheet.
Today I said, quoting Dottie Hall, that actually Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented the spreadsheet, with VisiCalc for the Apple II -- but Kapor had brought it to the PC world with Lotus 1-2-3.
Kapor writes to say that's wrong too!
As long as we're beating a dead frog, let me add my two Linden dollars*: Bill Gross was responsible for Lotus Magellan, not me. I had nothing to do with it.
Also, "and while he (me, that is) can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC," is not true either. Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.
As for Bill Gross: I've written a whole string of articles lauding him for the programs he has created. The only one of these articles I can find online right now is this. from my own days as a NYT tech columnist.** Gross was also the force behind a program I have praised so often I should be on its payroll, X1. (To spell it out: I'm not, and I paid for my copy of X1.) I had assumed that as Kapor was institutionally responsible for Lotus Magellan, but he should know.
And as for spreadsheet genealogy, I have already received so many accounts of how this happened that I have decided to quote only Kapor's for the moment, since the rest have so many variations on points large and small.
____
* For those embarrassed to ask: Linden dollars are the currency of Second Life.
** Back in my day as NYT tech columnist, the paper ran a correction when I made a mistake. I'm just saying.....
For the record, two (interesting!) boiled-frog updates
Both referring to yesterday's shock-horror revelation that the NYT, Oxford Univ, and a skilled tech writer had combined to repeat a cruel bit of misinformation.
1) My friend Dottie Hall, a veteran of Microsoft, Symantec, Eclipse Aviation, and other ventures, points out in her blog that the boiled frog story was not the only canard in the NYT article. The column, by G. Paschal Zachary, also said this:
Businesses crave a sweet spot: where the line is drawn in favor of the innovator. The late Akio Morita, founder of Sony, talked about satisfying appetites that people didn’t even know they had. He achieved such a feat with the Sony Walkman, the music player introduced in 1979. While at the Lotus Development Corporation, [Mitch] Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.
Mitch Kapor is a wonderful guy, creator of such truly innovative programs as Agenda and Magellan during his years at Lotus and in recent years hard at work on the innovative Chandler project. And while he can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC, namely Lotus 1-2-3, that was less a break through than the real innovation of creating the spreadsheet itself. All honor for this latter achievement lies (as Dottie Hall points out) with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented VisiCalc for the Apple II.
2) Reader Gregory Sokoloff points out a version of the boiled-frog story that, if we called it boiled-salaryman, might actually be true. He lived in Japan when I did, in the late 1980s, and reports:
You may remember that the most common form of bath in homes was of a design not found in the West. The bath would first be filled with cold water, then a natural gas heater would be lit and the water would slowly circulate from the bath into the heater and then back into the bath, much like a heated swimming pool. The recirculation was achieved simply through convection without any pump, and thus the device was very, very quiet. Apparently, people commonly would get into their baths when the water was tepid, fall asleep, and then wake up with serious burns requiring treatment in a hospital. I don't know if there were deaths. Of course, only one who has lived in Japan can fully appreciate how sleepy and inebriated many Japanese are by the time they take a bath after rounds in the local bars (the best named one where I lived was the "Salaryman Daigaku" ["Salaryman University"]).
I may be repeating an urban myth here, but a good friend of mine their swore she witnessed the aftermath of such an incident.
So, consistent with my emphasis on the scientific approach to tall tales, I hereby request that henceforth people begin the cliched story thus: "Throw a salaryman into a boiling hot bath, and he'll scramble right out. But put a salaryman in a nice comfy tub, and....."
You really do learn something by reading the paper
And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.
Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.
It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:
The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.
There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.
But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.
(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)
In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.
January 16, 2008
Nagl, Russert, and crises of institutional culture
Two very important articles:
1) Tom Ricks's story in the Washington Post revealing that Lt.Col John Nagl is leaving the Army to join a new DC think tank.
I am partial to Nagl, whom I know somewhat and like very much, and whom I interviewed, along with Lewis Sorley and Conrad Crane, two years ago on the Charlie Rose show. Indeed many reporters know and like him, and he has been a kind of media darling: subject of a (very good) cover-story profile by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine four years ago; author of a well-received book about the timeliest of military topics, counter-insurgency strategy; and one of the driving forces behind the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," the same document whose existence is so often cited as one of general David Petraeus's great accomplishments. (Petraeus and Marine Corps general James Mattis sponsored the overall effort.) Nagl had been a Rhodes scholar and, like Petraeus (Princeton PhD) before him, has been a very prominent example of the media-savvy scholar-warrior.
1) From a distance, it is no surprise that Hillary Clinton apparently got a big boost from women voters. It's more surprising (if this is what the results end up showing) that she didn't have a larger margin among women who made up their minds in the last few days. She really was ganged-up on after Iowa, in a way that should have brought out the chivalry --rather, the decency -- in at least some men and the solidarity in many women. Also, if "the media" largely doing the ganging-up had been one of the candidates on the ballot, I suspect its popularity would have been below Tom Tancredo's.
2) As Andrew Sullivan immediately noted, John Edwards really did give the very same post-vote speech this week that he did last week in Iowa. Weird. Same real-world anecdotes he had delivered in a thousand living rooms in Iowa and New Hampshire and that he used on TV five days ago. Same apparent lack of recognition that this was one of his scarce opportunities to reach tens of millions of people live and unfiltered. Main difference: the (inaccurate) claim that last week he had congratulated Barack Obama on his win and this week he was congratulating Hillary Clinton. He quite notably did not mention Obama last week.
Suppose you had just received one of the most important opportunities in opinion journalism: a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. Suppose it was all the more important because it gave you a base in what would normally be considered enemy territory, right there alongside Paul Krugman and Frank Rich and the NYT's own editorials. Suppose your debut column came at a moment of peak political excitement, with the surprise of the Iowa caucuses just behind us and the New Hampshire primaries one day away.
In those circumstances, would this be the best you could come up with for the very first paragraphs of your very first column? It is what the new NYT columnist William Kristol has offered to introduce himself:
Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.
But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.
I'm saying nothing about the content here. Indeed the subject -- how the GOP should run against Barack Obama -- is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican's views.
I am talking instead about the breathtaking banality of expression.
The battle over media "cross-ownership" rules -- allowing local newspapers to own local TV and radio stations, and vice versa -- appeared to have been fought, and resolved, four years ago. I described the battle back then, and the stakes, in an Atlantic cover story called "The Age of Murdoch." At the time, the three Republicans on the FCC, led by chairman Michael Powell (Colin's son) voted in favor of the liberalization. The two Democrats, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, voted against. The liberalization went through, but it was so unpopular and so sloppy in its reasoning that the Congress and courts effectively countermanded it.
The FCC chairman now, Kevin Martin, was the newest White House appointee to the commission back then. I know, from reporting that story, that Michael Powell was badmouthed in leaks from the Administration for handling the whole issue so messily -- and ultimately to so little effect. (Side note; what other father-son team has as much to regret about its service in a single administration as Colin and Michael Powell do about their service under GW Bush?) Now Martin is the force behind the new effort to loosen cross-ownership rules. Nothing against him, but I hope his experience turns out to be the same as Powell's. Adelstein and Copps are still there, and to their credit once again voted No.
Changing the ownership rules was a bad idea four years ago, and it's a bad idea now. Full case in the article. Summary point is: no matter what you think is wrong with the media, corporate concentration won't make things better. Further discussion from the Media Access Project here.
December 8, 2007
Generally I look down on headlines with puns
because generally they're such a lazy way out. One example of a million: recently I saw a story about the sub-prime loan mess with the headline, "Can this mortgage be saved?" This was a "witty" turn on the old advice column "Can this marriage be saved?" Hardee-har! And I'm looking at one from a restaurant guide, about a Japanese place: "The seaweed is always greener." Please.
But these two, from recent issues of the Wall Street Journal (Asia edition -- don't know if they were used in the U.S.) seemed to reflect some actual effort. Cleverness, even! Especially the one at the bottom.
A few days later, a Chinese blogger named Ruan Yifeng mentioned my report on his own blog, and went on to discuss other ways Chinese users could deal with the internet filters collectively known as the Great FireWall (GFW). The original Chinese version of his post is here; a translation by the indispensable Roland Soong** of Hong Kong, on his ZonaEuropa/ESWN blog, is here; just for the hell of it, an auto-translated version via Google's online translation tools is here. It's very interesting to compare this with Soong's native-speaker, hand-crafted version.
Two days ago, Ruan Yifeng said that he had been reported to the authorities for putting such subversive information on the internet. (Original Chinese version here; Roland Soong's translation here; Google auto-translate version here.) From the ESWN version:
I just found out today that someone had just reported my "Methods of bypassing the Great Firewall of China" to the China Internet Illegal and Harmful Information Reporting Center.
I cannot help but say: Fuck, what a stupid jerk! No wonder someone said: When there is a shameless, disgusting government, there will necessarily be shameless, disgusting people.
(The auto-translate version of the second sentence is: "I really could not contain himself: damn, really such a SB!")
Ruan Yifeng says that Baidu (China's leading search engine, with a huge lead here over Google) has already filtered out his site, and "it is a matter of time when government filtering occurs." His whole saga is very much worth reading at Soong's site, for what it says about control on expression in China -- and the spirit of those trying to work their way around it. For instance, Ruan Yifeng directs his real fury not at the censors who implement the GFW but at the Chinese fellow citizen who informed on him:
"It is the existence of people like you that makes people despair about this country."
Thankfulness is great, but what is the NYT thinking?
The Thanksgiving-day lead editorial from the New York Times, mindful of the difficulties many of its readers may have had in traveling to join their loved ones, praised President Bush for his wise and timely efforts to provide "Congestion Relief":
President Bush’s announcement this week of measures to reduce air traffic congestion was welcome news, especially his decision to open military air lanes along the Eastern Seaboard to commercial planes from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after. The administration deserves credit for not ignoring the mess...
Not to violate the spirit of Thanksgiving, but: are you kidding me???
First, military airspace is at best a minor factor in holiday air-traffic congestion. The worst air traffic congestion is around New York City. As mentioned earlier, there's not much military airspace there to begin with. Chapter-and-verse details after the jump. Anyone who has ever looked at an aviation chart knows this. (I know about it from flying small airplanes on the East Coast over the past ten years.)
Second, controllers already can open up the military airspace during peak holiday travel periods. See this blog by former controller Don Brown for more. To be clear about this: the new order gives controllers a power they already have and have used for years.
Third, the decision did nothing at all about the real problem: too many flights scheduled to take off or land at the same time from a limited number of runways.
So this decision has made, and will make, no difference in holiday travel congestion. Zero. This weekend's traffic will flow well, or poorly, depending on weather, and unanticipated screw-ups, and many other factors. But it will have nothing to do with this plan.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful not to have to wonder what kind of research went into a lead editorial like this.
Good: bonding with other expat Yanks over our shared secret national ritual. Foreigners know about the 4th of July but are always a little hazy about the point of Thanksgiving and when exactly it is. Bad: just another Thursday for everyone else. No NFL on TV.
Last year: a very nice turkey dinner with others of our tribe in our apartment in Shanghai. This year: our apartment building in Beijing is thoughtfully having an evening turkey dinner, advertised this way: "See you in your scariest costume & display your creativity in the Pumpkin Carving Competition." Hmmmm.
But to start the list of things to be thankful for: the English-language state-controlled Chinese media! Life would be duller without it. For instance, today's front-page story about the problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam.
Perhaps the predictions they have in mind are those in the Book of Revelations, about the End of Days? It's a possibility.
About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel
Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....
What's wrong with this plan?
1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!
It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.
1) From the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the paper "Dereliction of Duty Redux?" by Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine officer and long-time military scholar, whom I know.
The paper's title refers, of course, to Col. H.R. McMaster's book from the 1990s Dereliction of Duty, which argued that the uniformed military leadership in the Vietnam era finally betrayed the military and the country by not more forcefully opposing policies in Vietnam it knew to be doomed. The book was extremely influential within today's officer corps -- and since McMaster himself, a youngish West Point grad when he wrote it, has been centrally involved in combat operations in Iraq (and now is part of Gen. David Petraeus's team), it has become a cliched joke that soon there will be "McMaster's McMaster" -- that is, some young officer who describes how even the person who saw what happened to the military in Vietnam was caught by a repetition of many of the same patterns.
Frank Hoffmann's essay goes into the similarities and differences in the military leadership's performance in Vietnam and Iraq -- and in particular the warring "narratives" inside the military about who will take the blame for what has gone wrong this time:
The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging “stab in the back” thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry it out. Our collective failure to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security.
The essay is not not long and very much worth reading in its entirety.
2) A paper last week from the Pew Research Center* giving data to back up the general impression that Americans are thinking and talking less about the Iraq war than they did even a few months ago, and that the American media are paying less attention to the war. There's evidence in the paper for both sides of the chicken-and-egg question: less coverage because people don't care, or people don't care because of less coverage. Either way, here is the result:
Are foreigners dissing China by noticing the smog?
After the jump are parts of an intriguing note from Shelly Kraicer of Beijing. He is a Canadian writer and film-festival programmer, based in China for the last four years, who runs a web site on Chinese film, ChineseCinema.org I don't know him personally.
His note is in response to my repeated ."sky is falling" screeds about the disaster of air quality in Beijing nine months before the Olympics. (Note: today, November 16, was a pretty nice day.)
His note raises a question I can't do more than acknowledge at the moment: whether the Western focus on environmental catastrophe in China is, in some way, part of a long process of belittling the Chinese. He recounts the comments of a Chinese media friend:
...who pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they're thinking of China (if at all). ... Now the big idea, Olympics branch, is Pollution Disaster! She pointed out that Athens' big Olympic story was Preparation DIsaster! But since, here, things seem to be generally on schedule, that story is unavailable. So the foul air story is its replacement. I think that what she's describing has an all too predictable undercurrent of looking down from lofty developed Western heights to squalid undeveloped Third World depths ("tut tut, of course they just can't get it right, the way we know we could").
At a strictly logical level, I know that these things are true:
* I personally hope the Olympics turn out to be a big success for China. I'm convinced that the general public here sees them, or has been led to see them, as an occasion of pride for China as a whole, not just "the regime." It would be better for everyone if China ends up feeling happy and successful in its efforts than if it feels embarrassed or, worse, disrespected.
* I genuinely view environmental carnage as Problem Number One for China itself, and as the biggest problem posed by China for the rest of the world. Fewer Chinese people feel as strongly about this because, I think, fewer of them have seen how it is elsewhere.
* And I think that to raise alarms about the air and water in China is fundamentally supportive of the people of China rather than in any way dismissive of them. After all, they are the ones who breathe this air their whole lives.
But I know that more than strict logic is involved in these questions. The note, below, is worth thinking about.
