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.
Sphere: Related ContentFriday, July 07, 2006
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Ignoring Japan
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
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.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Rethinking internet optimism in China
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
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.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Majorities shouldn't decide on privacy
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.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Pacing the Rule of Law
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.
Sphere: Related Content
Monday, November 28, 2005
Mass Action in China
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
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.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
New Chinese Words
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.
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