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

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.

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Western observers helped to create Thai crisis

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.

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Preah Vihear conflict is unlikely to conclude with elections

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.

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

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.

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A human swarm

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.

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Illiteracy in China

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.

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Funny North Korea story

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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