Spin Asia

Help Wanted: Second Superpower Needed in Middle East

2009-11-30T03:10:00.001-05:00

Iran's announcement that it plans a massive expansion of its nuclear program couldn't come at a worse time for the Obama administration. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows it.

Right on the heels of a pointed rebuke by the UN's nuclear watchdog agency over its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad announced that the country would build ten more reactors.

Obama is in trouble on all side with Iran. Conservatives are sure to say that Obama's efforts at rapprochement, were interpreted as weakness by Tehran. Meanwhile, the President has just ordered thousands of more troops into neighboring Afghanistan. And with Obama declaring that the war will continue until 2017, Iran knows that there is no chance of a credible military ultimatum from the administration.

Meanwhile another debt fueled holiday season puts the U.S. further in debt to China. Mounting American debt to China in this economic mess takes away American ability leverage China, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said recently. And without China even weak sanctions are impossible.

And Iran for its part has every reason to push for confrontation. With the regime still recovering from the shock of this summer's street uprising, Ahmadinejad is eager for anyway to redirect youthful anger on a shoving match with the West.

Obama has a very difficult line to walk on Iran. Making threats that he can't deliver on will make Iran's leaders even more eager to test new red lines, while giving the regime a greater mandate to crack down on dissent. But the further along that Iran gets on the potential of building a bomb, the harder it will be for anyone to reign them in.

The only real hope is that China can be convinced to assert its new role as a global superpower. In some ways China has the most to lose if the Middle East were to explode. If Israel were to launch strikes against Iran's reactors there would be a real possibility of regional war that would drive oil prices through the ceiling. A huge 1970's-style oil hike would throw the breaks on China's march to development.

China is in a unique position to offer Iran a stake in its future growth through trade agreements. China also can offer Iran a boost through helping to rebuild the country's crumbling infrastructure - power generators, refineries, major highway systems.

Iran's stalled economy is one of the causes of the regime's instability and therefore a big part of the reason it needs to pick fights with America. The U.S. is in no position to do massive development projects in Iran, and neither nation's populations would like it much, anyway. But China could take this role, gaining stability in a critical region while building relations and leverage over a country with resources it needs.

Obama's best move in Iran might be to convince China it needs a piece of the action.

Hillary: America Has Lost Its Flex

2009-11-10T22:39:00.011-05:00

In a moment of striking candor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the financial crisis has left America's power blunted.

The United States, unfortunately, has lost leverage in the world because of the global economic crisis and because of the steps that this administration had to take to try to prevent, frankly, a worldwide depression, which means increasing our debt, going into the biggest deficits we've seen since World War II. That undermines some of the capacity we need to have to influence events...

It might be a historic first - a sitting secretary of state predicting the decline of American power.

The comments, made on the Charlie Rose Show last night, were made more surprising when Clinton clarified that even after the crisis ends, America will not get back its flex -- we are going to owe too much cash to the countries we want to influence.

But the fact is when we do have that recovery and we can all look at it, touch it and feel it and feel better about ourselves and the world, we're going to be hugely in debt, and we're going to have deficits that will impinge upon our ability to make decisions and will also affect our capacity to deal with other countries because we are in debt to them.

The admission or pronouncement, on the Charlie Rose Show last night, was made in the context of Clinton saying that America will reach out to parts of the world that were neglected during the Bush administration.

"We are back," she said.

And "back" on the big issues that the administration cares about - climate change, Sudan, energy issues.

But why cast the the renewed engagement in the light of lower expectations? Sure being in debt to China is going to make it harder to get them to do what we want - but why say so?

Perhaps with the United States embroiled in two wars that we don't know if we can win, and heaps of other problems like climate change, or say Darfur, that cannot even hope to be addressed by one nation, Clinton may be doing for the U.S. what many CEOs or many big corporations have been doing in the last six months: Adjusting expectations downward.

Why Can't Net Attacks Bring Down Iran Big Brother Site?

2009-06-29T00:56:00.009-04:00

Despite calls for denial-0f-service attacks, where users try to bring down a site by flooding it with traffic, all over the blogosphere and "twitterverse", Gerdab.ir is still up. The Iranian government site has photos of protesters and requests the publics assistance in identifying these "monarchists" and "counter-revolutionaries".

I am a bit suprised that all these have proven ineffective. The strongest of the attacks are not coming from users just reloading their browsers but from botnets. Users load a program onto their computer, or someone else's computer with or without their knowledge, and then it continually loads address. If you can get enough of these zombie computers together you can bring down very large sites.

In the past criminals have done these attacks against online casinos, shutting down the sites and then extorting big cash in exchange for letting the online dice roll again, according to Ethan Zuckerman, social media guru at Harvard's Berkman Center.

But the political uses, which we have seen on both sides of the Gaza War are not often effective says Zuckerman. “All you are doing is knocking the site off the web for a short time systems until the admin finds a way to block your bots. And then they go back up again think it’s a stupid tactic and ineffectve. I am not a fan of censorship of any kind this is a way that silences speech and just makes administator's life miserable. I think there is a much stronger statement going on right now."

But is it censorship to try to knockdown a site used to hunt protesters? And if it's possible to attack casino's why hasn't anyone been able to nail this site? Thoughts?

Homicide reporting: Some Scenes I Have Seen.

2009-06-20T15:26:00.017-04:00

The most memorable reporting I did at the NY Daily News was on murders. In some ways I feel that crime reporting is journalism at its most elemental and crucial.

Local tragedy and violence doesn't make front pages but it has tremendous importance for people in the communities affected - more so perhaps than foreign wars and national politics.

As a reporter just starting out, knocking on doors and talking to family members and neighbors of victims, showed me how important it is for people to feel that their sorrow is not disconnected from the world around them. That it has meaning and shape beyond their house or block.

Those family members were usually so eager to tell me what their child meant to the those in his or her life and how this will affect them. People always wanted to make sure I knew - and that the pubic knew - that their loved ones were separate from the violence that ended their lives. That dying by the sword didn't mean they lived by it.

I have long thought the NY Times is poor at covering the city. It's not just that Metro coverage is given secondary billing - but the level of coverage given to city news is less than what you would expect to see from a good paper in Akron.

The Times often does not cover murders in its city - which offers a hint at how they view the importance of local coverage.

But now the Times offers an interactive map that charts murders throughout the city. Readers can look at patterns in homicides across time and place and make recommendations for trend stories. This seems like a great chance for communities to become more involved in helping to direct important stories. I hope this, along with The Local project partnered with CUNY, is sign that the Times plans to take its job in the city a bit more seriously.

As I was going through the map I found many of the victims I reported on, and I wanted to see if I could use the google maps tool also - but for a more personal purpose. The Times map shows a birdeye view. But I wanted to give an interactive street view of some of my memories.

New Bronx school copes with tragedy of student murders

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Man killed, 2nd hurt at Bronx party

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Man slain in Brooklyn on grandma's doorstep

View Larger Map

Iran has not yet flipped the switch

2009-06-17T18:18:00.013-04:00

There has been much talk of Internet shutdowns in Iran, but according to one expert as of June 14th, Internet in Iran has been running at near its regular levels. James Cowie, CTO for Renesys, a web-analytics company, whatever shortages that happened were very shortlived.

While the government's crackdown certainly appears to be blocking individual sites, the government of Iran appears not to have made any move towards taking down the Internet as a whole – a step taken by the Burma regime in protests in September of 2007. And it would be easy for them to do, according to Cowier, who I interviewed for my story, Iran's Twitter Revolution.

The country has only one major internet service provider, Data Communications Iran (DCI) which is run by the government, and subcontracts to smaller ISPs. “The interesting thing is that they can turn the Internet on-and-off like a light switch. but they have chosen not to do it,” Cowier says.

Cowier has analyzed Internet activity from DCI and concluded that there have not been any major outages. “Iran remains well-connected to the Internet from a routing perspective,” he notes in a blog entry.

While the government has not yet pulled the plug they are definitely restricting the web in other ways.

Here is a video from ITNNEWS on internet problems faced by protesters:

Charter 08: Chinese Activists Question Effectiveness of Popular Democracy Petition

2009-02-25T16:08:00.004-05:00

published in Huffington Post

Jiang Qisheng was among the first to sign the pro-democracy manifesto -- which calls for a radical departure from China's current one party system. In doing so, the 60-year-old Beijing writer put his freedom, his livelihood, even his life at grave risk.

But he had lived through the massacres of Tiananmen Square, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and had great hope in the power of this document to provoke change.

"I think the charter has addressed very well what our people have tried to accomplish for over 100 years: to change the system from tyranny to democracy," said Jiang in a telephone conversation through a translator.

But not all China human rights activists and scholars share his sense of optimism about the petition, known as Charter 08. While most agree that a petition signed by so many ordinary people inside China is a historic first, there is no consensus on its importance or that the new movement will succeed.

Under-Secretary of the UN Talks to I-House LIVE BLOGGING

2009-02-08T20:28:00.007-05:00

Lynn Pascoe Under-Secretary of the United Nations for Political Affairs, spoke at the International House's Sunday Supper on challenges and limitations of UN peace keeping efforts.

8:23 - Pascoe said that "there have not been conflicts between major states and seemed to cite this as an accomplishment of UN diplomacy. This is partially true but it seems that the advent of nuclear bomb also played a role in this. Also lack of conflict between major states has little relation to overall levels of violence. Fighting between big countries and small ones can be plenty bad too.

8:29 "Countries come to the UN when they can't solve problem and then when we can't solve them they ask why we can't solve them." This is well put. The expectation that the UN address ills that individual states can't solve is a heavy one. It is fair to to fault the UN when it fails but these failures need to be framed around he enormous size of the goals.

8:33 The UN SG was very involved in the Gaza ceasefire, Pascoe said. Now that the firing is done its the division between the Palestinians that the UN will help to iron out. After that a reconstruction of Gaza "for the third time" Pascoe said wearily. Its seems a bit early to be jumping to those stages though - with rockets landing in Israel and a far right-wing party posed to gain significant power in the Knesset the could start again and soon.

8:35 Pascoe wondered aloud why noone seems to be very eager to get involved in Somalia. Somalia is one of those high risk low yield areas of the world. Both politically - no national leaders gain many points for throwing their hat into that stage - and in terms of the good that can be done. At best it seems like Somalia might be able to move up from an anarchic Mad Max style failed state to a loose coalition
of war lords who will maintain their bonds for as long as donor money flows their way and not one moment longer.

8:38 Pascoe explained why the UN is often not able to get involved. Other states have leverage but the UN diplomats "only have their smiles." In the case of Zimbabwe southern African leaders don't want to the UN to get involved in their sphere of influence. I don't buy this argument of not having leverage. The UN has plenty of traction and leverage in southern Africa, where it runs dozens of programs worth billions plus maintains the closest thing it has to a standing army (in the Congo).

8:41 Russia wouldn't allow the UN to get involved so it didn't, Pascoe said. I don't like this limitation because it seems to say that aggressor states get to decide whether or not the UN can take action in preventing agression. In fact this might often be the case but it is dangerous to state this as a matter of principle.

8:43 People often don't see the negotiations that the UN is involved in because it doesn't make news when people don't get killed, Pascoe said. I like this point. The UN is involved around the world in thousands of positive ways large and small and it is difficult to recognize these successes because any violence going to be more prominent then a lack of violence.

I asked Pascoe about what the UN is doing to stop fighting from breaking out again in Gaza:

"What we are trying to do is extend the ceasefire. We are going to need to get those border crossing open - the Egyptians are working on this with us."

For medium term "there needs to be Palestinian unity and then you need to restart the peace process. Annapolis was fine but it was short terms and Olmert flaming out in the middle didn't help things.

Why its great to be a single man in Bangkok (and New York City)

2008-12-13T19:49:00.015-05:00

In both of those cities there are many many more women - and therefore more single women - than men. The supply and demand of this means that men are able to be either more selective or much more poorly groomed and do quite well for themselves. It means that we can be slack and indulgent in a land of plenty while the other team gets vicious on a barren gaming field.

In both cities the reason might have to do with migration patterns. American women who are better educated these day then their male counterparts, flock to cities for jobs and husbands. They want guys of comparable education and earning potential, say Richard Florida, author of the Creative Class. According to Florida's singles map there are 210 thousand more single girls than guys in the New York-Northern Jersey area.

When their are fewer options those options start looking a lot better.

In Bangkok this situation is even more wonderful (from a guy's perspective). There are 547,000 more women than men in the marriage year between 20 and 44 - that's a huge number when the group we are talking about has less than 3 million.

This enormous gap (500,000!) is due to a massive in-migration of women into the city and a flight out of BKK by the men according to a report from the Economic Institute at Kobe University. Bangkok is a service economy of finance, hotels, and restaurants - all areas where women are thought to better employees in Thai eyes.

Bangkok's men (who like American men are less educated than their female peers) often leave the city to work in heavy industry and manufacturing.

This leaves the city incredibly gender lopsided - walking around Bangkok ourists often wonder - where did all the men go? The images of the protests were so female dominated that it felt like you were looking at a women's liberation movement instead of an anti-goverment rally.

But that's just Bangkok.

And its for that reason that you hear the same complaint from women there that you do here in big NYC - all the good ones are taken and the rest aren't too good.

Western observers helped to create Thai crisis

2008-08-26T18:22:00.019-04:00

The news in Thailand is bad and getting worse and those in the international community who voiced support for the movement against Thaksin carry some of the blame. In 2006 it seemed that the Bangkok elite and the student protesters were working for liberal values - fighting for human rights and against authoritarianism.

When Thaksin fell and the military took over in the 2006 bloodless coup - the army was in the streets of Bangkok. But so was a sense of optimism, as tourists posed in photos next to tanks, and food vendors brought sweet tea and sticky rice to soldiers wearing yellow scarves.

It felt that there had been a catharsis in Thai society. In the days after the coup, many thought the rift between the country Thais, who elected Thaksin by a giant margin, and a Bangkok elite fed-up with demagoguery and cronyism, could be healed. After a brief period of military rule, this reasoning went, Thai governance would be renewed, under a new improved constitution and the whole sequence of events would be thought of later as growing pains in the process of creating a stronger Thai democracy.

More than two years later with Thaksin going into long-term exile, the opposition's ostensive goal, the PAD has seized the Government House, invaded a state television station and is trying to push Thailand into war with Cambodia over Preah Vihear. PAD is claiming the right to use all means to overthrow any leadership with whom it disagrees and is pushing for a violent response from the government justifying renewed military rule under the royal banner.

Most disturbing is that international observers seems to have set the stage for what could well evolve into a deadly crisis. By delegitimizing Thaksin's party and sympathizing with the royalist elite, whose education and culture were mistaken for liberal bearing, the international community signaled that it was ready and willing to be taken in by the most authoritarian of forces, provided they use the language of human rights and democracy to justify their seizure of power.

Now, far to late, Thai and Western media and human rights groups are backing away from the PAD. But it seems that this time, the years of international discomfort with Thailand's democratically elected government might have already helped to take the situation past a point of no return.

Preah Vihear conflict is unlikely to conclude with elections

2008-07-25T03:44:00.006-04:00

The consensus among the Phnom Penh expatriate community seems to be that this recent iteration of the ongoing Preah Vihear conflict, now in its second week, will quickly fizzle out after the Cambodian national elections this weekend. This notion is shared by Thai Prime Minister Samak who said earlier in the week "I think the dispute will ease and can be resolved more easily through negotiations after the election." Given his role as one of the central provocateurs of the recent drama, this is heartening. But its possible that those thinking the conflict will end without bloodshed are underestimating the stakes for both sides.

The Thai government, which has been teetering from the same forces that toppled its predecessor, is under intense pressure for having allowed Cambodia to win its petition to list Preah Vihear as World Heritage Site by UNESCO. A misstep here - any sign of backing down on what the opposition has seized upon as an important symbol of Thai sovereignty, will surely be used as a final tipping point for the already bloodied PPP.

In order to further entangle the Thai government and limit its options, the opposition has deployed protesters, or "pilgrims" as they are calling themselves, to the temple site in order to "take back Thai territory".

Given the position of the Thai government Cambodia is in a better position to give a little, especially after the election are held. But "a little" might not be what is called for. The recent conflict started over a listing by a cultural organization - no real territorial watershed. The question is what is the minimum that the Thai opposition would accept given that they only gain from the conflict continuing? Delisting of the site? A permanent stationing of troops on the Cambodian side of the border?

The Cambodian opposition, which has also siezed on the Preah Vihear issue, are not yet able to muster street demos that could cause Hun Sen to blink. But it should be remembered that in 2003 the alleged suggestion that Ankhor Wat should be under Thai territory by a television star sparked riots and an attack of the Thai embassy. Hun Sen knows, that election or no election, a sign of weakness on this issue could quickly be used by the opposition to get people into the street. And he has also seen what has happened in Thailand and would not want even the beginnings of it here.

It is dangerous for Hun Sen to stand on this issue but he might see it as more dangerous to yield too much. On the other hand, with the Thai opposition already having the upper hand, the Thai government cannot afford any compromise if they want to stay in power. This dynamic on both sides seems unlikely to allow for an easy settlement and provides the possibility for a real shooting war.

An unlikely time to say goodbye to the 'ASEAN way'

2007-11-19T01:08:00.000-05:00

With the planned signing of an ASEAN charter this week, some observers believe that now is the time to drop the regional body's adherence to the "ASEAN way" -- the policy of noninterference in the internal politics of member states. The new charter calls for a regional human rights body, a stronger secretariat and most importantly the power to suspend member states who break the rules. All of this would seem to be stepping away from the old consensus-based ASEAN that has, since its inception, been too sickeningly polite to give the Burmese junta the dressing down that it so desperately deserves.

In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today Khairy Jamaluddi writes "As useful as the 'Asean way' was in managing regional ties during past eras of autocratic leadership...it is time for Asean to slaughter its most sacred cow....The Charter aims to recast Asean as a rules-based organization with enough teeth to enforce its rules on member states."

The problem with all this ASEAN optimism is that the neighborhood still lacks a country that will really be able to stand-up for these values. The unfortunate logic of ASEAN non-interference has always been the wisdom of not throwing stones when your house is made of glass. And in the areas of democracy and human rights the region's homes seem to be built of only that one thing.

What state amongst ASEAN will really push for democratic reconciliation without feeling that its own political process will then be open to scrutiny? Thailand with its own clique of ruling generals? Singapore, which although having strong-rule-of-law, has had the same party in power since day 1 and still carries out the charming practice of imprisoning political protesters? Will Malaysia be the voice of human rights at ASEAN meetings, with its race-based economic and political system which unabashedly aims to maintain the preeminence of the majority ethnic group?

The new ASEAN charter will undoubtedly be a boon for regional human rights groups that will now have a codification for complaints created by leaders from their own states. But beyond perennial finger-wagging aimed at those who cause the grouping real embarrassment, as in the case of Burma, it is hard to imagine a ASEAN states ever carrying out a process aimed at punishing member states with suspension or even formalized censure when every nation amongst them knows that the same could happen to them.

A human swarm

2007-11-13T01:55:00.000-05:00

Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock...The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm - New York Times, Carl Zimmer, Novmber 13, 2007

I often wonder what degree of individualism is desirable if Western society- or indeed human society - is to thrive in the coming century. The Geography of Thought - How Westerners and Asians Think Differently - one of the most interesting of recent salvos in the nature nurture war - posits fundamental differences in decision making processes in Asian and Western societies. Westerners tend to make decisions based on isolated facts and set logical rules whereas Asians put much greater importance in looking at facts within a larger social context. When looking at a picture an Asian will take in the entire scene whereas a Western eye will search out and remember the most prominent objects within the frame.

In a century where world culture will become profoundly more urban and spiraling consumption threatens us with all manner of global catastrophe, will East Asia, with its emphasis on social harmony and context-based decision making, introduce a global value system as vital and controversial to the 21 st century as market capitalism was to the 20th? It could well be that Western economics and technology has built the cities that East Asia will someday show the world how to live in.

But I am not so sure.

What stands out to visitors of East Asian cities is a the lack overall order and planning. Some of this is what makes many of these cities charming - the walkways swarming with street food vendors, the outdoor markets that seem to cropup in even the smallest civic crevices - but the convoluted clogged roadways literally overflowing onto the sidewalks with two-stroke engined motorcycles belching blue smoke into the air; the massive fetid dwellings that seem to be placed in a fashion too indiscriminately to have been built by any conscious human mind - all of this seems not to jive well with the Asian society as a beacon for consensus based solutions to a growing world's ills.

While the family and the village are units that an individual can conceptualize - understanding his place within and seeking to maintain social harmony by assessing context rather then abstract logical constructs - a city is too complex for any individual to ever truly grasp his place or how his limited actions can effect the larger organism. It is when society becomes large and dense enough for the social context to be unknowable that abstract principles and laws become important. And for now the West has the edge on just this type of thinking.

Illiteracy in China

2007-06-13T00:20:00.000-04:00

I have often suspected the official literacy rates in China to be greatly inflated. I first became aware of the great difficulty of learning to write Chinese from my students in Mian Yang, who would wake up at 4 or 5 am to copy characters on layer upon layer upon layer of thin tracing paper. Whatever else I might be teaching them that day, during any moment of respite they would go back to copying the same eight or nine characters that had been assigned for the day by whoever taught them Chinese. And all with caligraphy pens -- it was shocking to see them write English as i have never seen "Jack went into the car" enscribed with such ornateness and inticacity. Every phrase that the students put on the board was a wedding invitation, a diploma.

Given the demands and complexity of this system, I suspect that the Washington Post's assertion that illiteracy rates are increasing in China is incorrect. It is very likely that under past leaderships, rural beuaracrats were under greater pressure to exaggerate rural literacy rates then they are today. And their is certainly more openness, allowing for academics such as the one in this article to draw attention to the shortcomings of the rural education system.

It is surprising that Maureen Fan would correctly critisize current literacy statistics gathering methods and yet hold up the older data as proof of lowered reading levels. If anything one would suspect that todays statistics are far more accurate then the ones gathered ten years before.

Funny North Korea story

2006-07-07T06:05:00.000-04:00

When I was working in the UN I knew a very polite Swedish man - we'll call him Janus - who worked on a project in North Korea. A few weeks after he first arrived he was speaking to another Swede on the phone. Suddenly a voice came on the line asking him if he could please speak in English -- noone listening in could understand Swedish.

Ignoring Japan

2006-06-22T17:19:00.000-04:00

In advocating a move that would raise the spectre of a regional war, Carter and Perry (If Necessary, Strike and Destroy, Washington Post June 22, 20006) breezily dismiss a wider conflict on the Korean peninsula, but seem to entirely overlook the much more likely (and obvious) way in which the conflict could escalate. The first response from North Korea would almost certainly be an attack against Japan. This would not come as a surprise to many (other than these two writers) as North Korea has promised just such a retaliation for the past fifty years. The sophistication or the logistics of the strike would be unimportant -- what matters to North Korea is that opinion in the South would immediately turn against the US. South Koreans, already extremely divided on the US presence, will not be on the same side of Japan in a conflict against other Koreans.

The residual post-war anger felt by the Chinese public would force the CCP to enter the conflict. In Chinese eyes, any military reaction taken by Japan would be seen as a return to militarism. It only took a few Japanese textbooks to get millions of Chinese into the street in violent demonstration. A Japanese naval buildup, or even just aggressive words, could easily cause an explosive public outcry in China and force its leaders to support North Korea in the conflict.

From that point there are many ways that the conflict could go and none of them would be good.

I'm not sure what the appropriate response is to North Korean long range missiles. Perhaps destroying them is the way to go, but I'm very worried by writers like these who are big on bold, violent ideas but short on basic background knowledge. We Americans have made some pretty bad mistakes with this type of thinking

Campbell Soup

2006-06-22T16:51:00.000-04:00

On the train ride into Toronto I had a conversation that was oddly appropriate for an America exit run. Much of the 17 hours from DC to Ontario was spent chatting with the man sitting next to me about his wife -- a food scientist who specializes in engineering new types of Campbell soup. It turns out that creating the next line of the quintessential American consumer product can be dissatisfying in many of the same ways as running for political office. Living in New York Ted and Vicky – a Kentucky native – grew to love Italian Lobster Bisque. Wouldn’t it be great to turn this into a Campbell line? Before going to market a soup has to be tested in focus groups in each region across the U.S. Because of the company’s behemoth production requirements, the new soup needs to get at least a passing mark in every region or it (doesn’t) get/s canned.

In the case of the Italian Lobster Bisque, Vicky held the Southeast focus group in her home state of Kentucky, only to find that her palate had apparently grown too sophisticated during her time in the big city. The Kentuckians wanted a heartier soup, something with beef and and potatoes. “Your state's a bunch of bumpkins,” said Ted after his wife told him about the trial. The soup got good ratings in the Northeast the Northwest and even the Midwest but with a good intended for sale in every grocery in the union, one region gets veto power over all.

A similar line of thinking also goes for the amount of salt added.

When Vicky is conducting focus groups on how much salt gets put into a new soup, those with the greatest sodium craving usually get their say. Someone who is use to more salt will not accept a product that doesn’t have enough whereas a person who doesn't usually like as much salt will often still enjoy a soup with a bit too much -- and after he becomes use to more salt this amount becomes his expectation.

And so you can see why we have a single can of soup fulfilling 80% of our daily sodium needs.

Herein lies the potency of American products abroad. If a brand (or style, or film) is able to fit across the entire spectrum of the American palette it is likely to be something that people will consume (but not necessarily love) around the world.

There has been a great deal of talk of a Global McDonalaldization. A kind of unending march of monstrous Ronalds consuming whole the indigenous cultures of developing nations. Everywhere I have gone I've found something very different.

For people in Bangkok, the trip to McDonald's or KFC is a rare cosmopolitan indulgence in life that is otherwise rich in local culinary diversity. Look at TV anywhere in China and you might see a Hollywood movie but more often you will see a Ming dynasty costume soap opera.

The horror of what has become of the American roadtrip -- a Twillight Zone affair of eternal visual reruns -- makes it clear that it is not the developing world that is most threatened with omniculture. Our next generation will grow up without even the memory of a neighborhood store. A nation without local commercial identities will be a human first and it is frightening to think of the consequences. Nations undergoing identity crisis often vie for relevance through external belligerence. Perhaps this crisis has started.

Rethinking internet optimism in China

2006-06-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

In an earlier post ( New Chinese Words) I supported the opinion of internet optimism in China. This view holds that CCP's censorship efforts are crude plugs in a breaking dam that is about burst with a flow of ideas and discourse that not even the Three Gorges project could hope to contain.

I am no longer so sure. Google's entry into the scene changes things.

This one company has changed the entire culture of the internet, and perhaps the world, by organizing billions of discrete ideas, groups, and individuals into an online nation with an indexed map that anyone can use. The individual of the internet in the mid nineties was a lost particle, a jane003490, in a vast sea of irrelevance. The user of today finds that no matter how unique his desires, his ideology, he will find a community that he is seemlessly made a part of. Google has not just allowed people to search masses of webpages, it has allowed individuals to zoom in on themselves from up above and know just where they fit into this new world of created identities and endless choices.

But if Google is already transferring these capabilties to government censors -- capabilities that allow observation of the movement and development of thought on a individual and collective scale -- it might be that the personal computer in China, and its integration into social life, will represent an era of greater repression and thought control.

Ahmadinejad's Charm Offensive

2006-06-09T20:29:00.000-04:00

Since his election Ahmadinejad has attempted to push Iran back to the days of its revolutionary prominence . His charming speeches, in which he called the Holocaust a myth and suggested that Israel's Jews be relocated to Alaska, as well as the push for nuclear capabilities seemed to be geared at reinvigorating Iran's leadership role in the world of Islamic radicalism. Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini at the helm, was the unquestioned center point of a what seemed a new fundamentalist-based Islamic revival.

Ten years of war with Iraq, with fighting that in its futility and savagery greatly resembled World War I trench battle, and the success of Sunni mujahadeen in driving the Soviets from Afghanistan, pulled this leadership role of radical Islamic revivalism from the hands of Iran's Mullahs. The now deceased Zarqawi's explicitly anti-Shiite jihadism went beyond overshadowing Iran's role in the movement by actually placing Shiites -- and thus the people of Iran -- as corrupters of Islam in the same cateogry as Zionists and Crusuaders. The words and actions of Ahmadinejad are part or strategy to reclaim leadership -- a Shiite leadership -- over Islamic fundamentalism, a movement that he believes is the future for the muslim world.

The interview in Der Spiegel, Germany's most popular magazine, is part of a strategy of gaining help from some sections of the West. Ahmadinejad is attempting to enlist the support of both the German right-wing nationalists and the European far-left in neutralizing European involvement in the Middle East and further isolating Israel.

To appeal to the left, increasingly opposed to Israel's policies since the start of the Second Intifada, he couched his words in anti-colonialism. On the existence of Israel he said "We argue that neither you nor we should claim to speak for the Palestian people. The Palestinians themselves should say what they want. In Europe it is customary to call a referendum on any issue. We should also give the Palestinians the opportunity to express their opinion....The Palestinians were there, in Palestine. Now 5 million of them have become refugees. Don't they have a right to live?."

To address German new-nationalists on the right Ahmanidejad invoked the unfairness of German collective guilt "Why should [Germans] have feelings of guilt toward Zionists? Why should the costs of the Zionists be paid out of their pockets? If people committed crimes in the past, then they would have to have been tried 60 years ago. End of story! Why must the German people be humiliated today because a group of people committed crimes in the name of the Germans during the course of history?" Interestingly, Ahmanidejad even tapped into the anti-immigrant feeling (a sentiment that is largely aimed at Muslims) that is gaining force in many of Germany's cities and suburbs. In justifying his calls to destroy the Jewish state he questions the origins of its Jews. "Where are Israelis from?" The obvious next question being why can't they go back there? Much of the German right-wing is asking just such questions of Moroccan emigres.

Could there be an allliance or at least a cooperation of interests between Iran and either the German right or the European anti-Zionist left? Growing friction between many Europeans and Muslim immigrants might suggest otherwise, but it is possible that these very tensions, exasperated by the continuing conflicts in the Middle East, will create pressure for European politicians to turn away from support for Israel and weaken its reapproachment of Iran on the nuclear question. And this is just what Ahmadinejad is pushing for.

Majorities shouldn't decide on privacy

2006-05-12T10:07:00.000-04:00

Poll: Most Americans Support NSA's Effort
The assumption implied in this piece -- that violations of privacy by government surveillance are somewhat legitamized by majority approval -- is a very dangerous one for a liberal democracy. Much like freedom of speech, the right to privacy is a way of protecting minority practices or opinions not just from the government, but also from majorities such as the one shown in this poll. If the balance between security and privacy is to be decided by opinions of greater numbers, then there is no telling how far we will slide away from privacy as those with the most common of views and behaviors are not the ones in need of strong protections.

Pacing the Rule of Law

2005-12-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

NYT: Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him
BEIJING, Dec. 12 - One November morning, the Beijing Judicial Bureau convened a hearing on its decree that one of China's best-known law firms must shut down for a year because it failed to file a change of address form when it moved offices. read on...
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The existence of this article is a telegraph of sorts from the party. This Mr. Gao, a kind of uber-troublemaker who specifically roams the countryside in order to find legal cases that are most antagonistic to party officials -- the ones involving detention of Falun Gong members and deep party corruption -- and then writes and circulates open letters calling communists party members "mostly a bunch of mafia bosses" has lost his license to practice law. The surpising thing is that he is not in prison, like many who tried to jolt the system ahead through legal challenges. He is now under 24-hour surveillance, his apartment courtyard a "plainclothes policeman's club". And yet he was able to do an extensive interview with a foreign journalist, which shows a sort of implicit collusion on the part of those watching him. Gao is sending the world a message about Beijing and at the same time Beijing is trying to send a message about itself : "We need people like Gao but we need them to work at our pace. " Is this message an accurate one or is the Gao case a PR effort to cover deeper intransience? It is undoubtedly both; the fact that Gao is neither imprisoned nor able to continue practicing law is an expression of a lack of consensus within the party on the pace to go forward.

Mass Action in China

2005-11-28T19:57:00.000-05:00

Asia Times: Playing with protests
By Tanaka Sakai
The rising number of protests in China - 74,000 "mass actions" last year - is a sign of economic struggles rather than political strife. Unrest can very quickly become a political issue, though, so the central government is playing up the danger posed by the protests ahead of a crackdown on local official corruption. more...
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Sakai makes the case that the Chinese government itself is providing these rising mass action statistics, something it hasn't done in the past, in order to generate political will ahead of an imminent anti-corruption crackdown. This is very different from what we hear in the western media. The opposite actually. American journalists have written that the protests are a symptom of political instability and even an impeding party crisis. Sakai implies that the numbers might even be inflated by the party itself in order to provide a pretext for a crackdown.

Either way the question remains whether mass actions are the sign of health, a growing pain as the economy develops and allows greater openness, or a sign that the economic growth is increasingly unequal and at the expense of the society's most vunerable.

Mian Yang and the New Private Sphere

2005-11-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

Dispute Leaves U.S. Executive in Chinese Legal Netherworld
by Joseph Kahn (NY Times)

A Chinese-American business executive, David Ji is being kept hostage in China over a commercial dispute between Sichuan-based Changhong Corporation and his own Apex Digital that based in Los Angeles. more...
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During my time teaching in China in the Summer of 2002 I lived about a quarter mile from the Changhong plant in the city of Mian Yang. Often called the Silicon Valley of China, because of its creation of both consumer electronics and military hardware, Mian Yang is a kind of gleaming futuristic vision of a Chinese metropolis. With most of impressive skyline created in the last ten years the sole "science and technology city" of China has a feeling of cleaness and design -- of wellbeing-- that you don't often get in most of the country. There isn't that sense of mindless sprawl that is so present in most of China's newer cities. The streets are uncluttered by garbage and there are these very inviting parks with with pleasantly lit footpaths and gigantic monitors showing a rotating streams of commercials.

Something in this narrative of the Chinese future fits well with the image of David Ji held prisoner at the request of an electronics corporation -- with him being told "Your only way out is to do what Changhong tells you to do". Creating a high-tech city that is both conducive to innovation and still serving the interests of the state means creating fluidity between private and public. Common wisdom in the West asserts that private enterprise will inevitably reduce the power of the state, but it is quite possible that China will develop an entirely different model where state power and private power augment and complement each other.

New Chinese Words

2005-06-21T20:35:00.000-04:00

According to "Democracy a Bad Word", an article on cnn.com, Chinese users of MSN's Spaces blogging section who type words such as "Democracy" "freedom" or "human rights" have the uniquely Orwellian experience of a warning message that pops up on their screens reading "Prohibited language in text, please delete".

The plain creepiness of this is enough to overshadow the much more important element of this story: Chinese are now able to have blogs. The China of the cultural revolution is now experiencing another revolution that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

After reading the CNN article I opened my MSN window and saw that a Chinese girl who I had taught outside of Beijing was online. I asked her to test out the censorship filter. She got back to me in five minutes confirming that indeed she was given a warning message for some words including the "Falun Gong", and "Jiang Zemin". For awhile we discussed censorship issues before it dawned on us how strange it was that we were able to be having these discussions at all. A rural born Chinese girl and a New York Jew busy talking about politics and human rights across borders and across timezones. In the face of this, MSN's feeble word filtering (which as it turns out is only of subject lines -- not content itself) seems like a sort of death throes of a dying form of restriction.

China's entry to the world market has given large numbers of its citizens a level of individual expression that is unprecendented in world history. Millions of Chinese who can now create messages that are instantly readable (and can be commented on) by a global audience. This is simply not a genie that can be put back in its bottle.