Horrific story about conditions for women in post-invasion Iraq:

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq’s women are living with a fear that is increasing in line with the numbers dying violently every month. They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq’s criminal gangs.

Iraq’s women live in terror of speaking their opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They live in fear of their husbands, too, as women’s rights have been undermined by the country’s postwar constitution that has taken power from the family courts and given it to clerics.

What a horrible, sickening situation, all because of the grandiose ambitions of Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Close to 3,000 American soldiers dead, tens of thousands seriously wounded and mentally traumatized, and so many Iraqi lives lost and shattered that we can’t even begin to provide a proper accounting of them.

We are covered in the blood of the dead, and it will be a very long time before this damned spot will fade and our hands will ever be clean.

UPDATE Digby reports that some 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion.

“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand.”

A disturbing story is emerging about the shooting deaths of Tibetan refugees by Chinese soldiers in a Himalayan pass. First reported on a climber’s website, the story has been picked up by the British press, amidst allegations that “Chinese diplomats in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu are tracking down and trying to silence hundreds of Western climbers and Sherpas who witnessed the killing.”

The invaluable China Digital Times has a summary and links.

Dave shoots a few holes in the latest trendy theory that purports to explain everything and fits on a napkin…

One more post before I go to Macau for a visa stamp and cheese.

From the Telegraph:

A new catchphrase is buzzing its way around the political salons of Washington and New York. Move over, “tipping point”.

The “J curve” is an explanation for the way the world works that is so simple that you can draw it on the back of a paper napkin. Indeed, its inventor, a boyish American political scientist called Ian Bremmer, spent years doing just that.

“God knows how many napkins I got through,” he says. “And my friends kept telling me, ‘Wow, write a book.’ So here it is.”

Bremmer, 36, is chairman and founder of the Eurasia Group, the world’s largest political risk consultancy.

When governments and businessmen want to know whether they should invest in a country with a dodgy government, or whether they should run a mile from it because the capital city is about to go up in flames, they come to him.

What’s the J-Curve? Here’s an excerpt from the J Curve website:

What is the J curve? Imagine a graph on which the vertical axis measures stability and the horizontal axis measures political and economic openness to the outside world. Each nation whose level of stability and openness we want to measure appears as a data point on the graph. These data points, representing a cross-section of countries, produce a ‘J’ shape. Nations to the left of the dip in the J are less open; nations to the right are more open. Nations higher on the graph are more stable; those that are lower are less stable.

I’m in the wrong business. How does this apply to China? Here’s Bremmer himself in Institutional Investory breaking it down for us.

Openness is a measure of the extent to which a state allows people, ideas, information, goods, and services to flow freely across its borders in both directions. How much foreign direct investment is there in the country? How much local money is invested in other countries? How many books written in another language are translated into the local language? How much direct contact do locals have with foreigners? How free are citizens to travel outside the country? What percentage of a nation’s citizens has access to foreign media? By these measures, China is far more open than it used to be, though a recent crackdown on both domestic and foreign reporting on sensitive political issues signals the state’s determination to monopolize the distribution of certain types of information.

But openness also refers to the movement of people, resources, information, and ideas within the country. Are citizens able to communicate freely with one another? Do they have access to accurate information about events in other parts of the country? Are they free to travel within the country without restriction? Are freedoms of speech and assembly legally enforced? How transparent are the processes of local and national government? Do citizens have access to and influence with their leaders? Here, China is not open by any measure.

He concludes:

Can the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on political power survive the country’s economic opening to the outside world? Can China’s current system survive the eventual passage through the dip in the J curve? Perhaps double-digit growth and the middle class freedoms it has created will indefinitely keep a lid on public anger with the country’s authoritarian political system.

But maybe it won’t. The dangers of a sudden economic downturn (driven by a spike in global energy prices or the severe restrictions on travel into, out of, and around the country following confirmation of human-to-human transmission of bird flu, for example) could be unprecedented for China. The last time Chinese citizens experienced a sharp and sustained economic slowdown, they did not yet have the communications tools that might allow them to focus their anger at their government and to coordinate resistance should the state fail to meet their demands for change.

If the Chinese economy were to hit a wall, we might discover that the country is already closer to dangerous instability than we realize. The J curve suggests that this might well be the case.

Whatever this guy charges, it’s way too much. There is no stunning news here. There’s not even news. And some reviewers say it doesn’t really work well:

Bremmer’s struggle over where to place China on the J curve reflects the limitations of his one-dimensional model. By conflating the economic and political into a single measure of “openness,” Bremmer’s J curve masks the fact that there are really three types of state in transition: those that are neither politically nor economically open, those that are politically but not economically open, and vice versa. Bremmer argues that China, an example of the latter, is trying, futilely, to “beat the J curve.” But the same could be said about India, which is trying to pursue economic reform in a democratic state without triggering a paralyzing backlash from those with a stake in the old system.

I was looking at Bremmer’s openness criteria and wondered how accurate some of these indicators are. For example, he says one question on openness is “How many books written in another language are translated into local languages?â€? and I wondered what those numbers are for China and the U.S.

In 2004, Bowker, publishers of the Global Books in Print database, reported:

The English-speaking countries remain relatively inhospitable to translations into English from other languages. In all, there were only 14,440 new translations in 2004, accounting for a little more than 3% of all books available for sale. The 4,982 translations available for sale in the U.S. was the most in the English-speaking world, but was less than half the 12,197 translations reported by Italy in 2002, and less than 400 more than the 4,602 reported by the Czech Republic in 2003. Almost three quarters of all books translated into English from other languages last year were non-fiction.

Does somebody wanna weigh in here on the stability of Italy? Like a rock or linguini? Meanwhile, the Hindu reports this from the Beijing International Book Fair:

With the Chinese economy surging, all publications benefit from a market that is growing by more than $ 300 million a year. Industry sources say 400 new titles are launched every day, though only six per cent are translations.

Deputy head of the Government’s press and publications administration, Yu Yongzhan said China’s 573 publishing houses produced 6.4 billion books, including 1,28,578 new titles, in 2005.

6% of 400 is 24, multiplied by 365 is 8760 titles a year. And while Chinese statistics are always sketchy (and no more so than this), anecdotal evidence at my local used bookstore yesterday includes translations of Empire: A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal and the Battle for An American Icon, I Am The Central Park Jogger, Stephen King’s “The Standâ€? and “Salem’s Lotâ€?, two books in the eschatological Christian pulp series “Left Behindâ€?, and The Book of Mormon (ok, probably not printed by a Chinese publishing house, but smuggled in). That and the copy of Animal Farm on my shelf. China is not wanting for translations. For godsakes, isn’t Jack Welch’s book required reading at the party school these days?

Beyond this, I do wonder if Bremmer is overconfident that he has discovered some immutable law. As Dorothy Parker said, you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think. Even when people have access to information, it doesn’t mean they will necessarily find it, want it or accept it. Witness the one third of the United States that believes Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda. More to the point, is it really the number of translated books Americans read that makes their country more stable? Or is simply that they’re richer and therefore have more to lose?

Something a little different from Dave

Not China related, but this kickass video is making the rounds. I did biology for a couple of years in undergrad before switching to history, and this is what I always enjoyed: visualizing cellular processes.

The Inner Life of The Cell

More on the “clash of civilizations from Dave

I thought I’d address a few tangents I’ve been commenting on in this thread. I apologize for the length.

Social darwinism made its first entry in Chinese society in 1895-6, when Yan Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics. (Actually, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was translated some 20 years prior, but it didn’t make the same splash) Ironically, Huxley was a debunker of social darwinim, but that’s not how he was interpreted. According to Limin Bai’s paper Children and the Survival of China: Liang Qichao on Education Before 1898 Reform (sorry, only available on academic networks)

According to Liang’s own account, he read the draft of Yan’s translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in 1896,11 and he immediately applied this new theory in his criticism and analysis of traditional Chinese education by arguing that the defense of China should start with the defense of the Chinese race, and the education of children is the key to improving the race.

Early Qing reformers were grappling with the tremendous blow to Chinese self-confidence following the Opium Wars and the Sino-Japanese War. China was severely screwed up, went the story, and something had to be done. Hence it was framed as racial inferiority:

they deliberately interpreted his theory of evolution to serve their reform programs. This Chinese version of social Darwinism inevitably complied with traditional Chinese ideas in which education was highly valued for teaching people and transforming society. What interested them more was not the original or real meanings of Darwin’s theory of evolution but how it might help explain China’s weakness and awaken the Chinese people to the grim reality.

MORE AFTER THE FOLD

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From the AP:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, on a trip to China, opened a first-of-its-kind city tourism office in Beijing on Monday that he hopes will encourage travel to his hometown and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into its economy.

“Los Angeles is putting down a permanent welcome mat for the tens of millions of Chinese tourists who will visit our great city in the coming years,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “More tourism means more jobs and a healthier economy.”…

…The tourism office, run by the convention and visitors bureau, will target Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. It will market Los Angeles as an attractive business and leisure destination, and travel agents will help provide resources for international travel.

The office expects to vie for a good share of an anticipated 100 million Chinese travelers who are expected to visit the United States annually by 2020…

Any suggestion on sights, fellow Angelenos?

For all of China’s recent and much touted diplomatic successes in Africa and elsewhere, any friendships forged won’t last long if this kind of thing keeps up:

Deep in the tunnel of the Collum mine, coal dust swirls thickly, and it’s stifling for workers such as Chengo Nguni. He describes his $2-a-day job with a sigh: His supervisor yells incomprehensibly in Chinese. His rubber boots leak. The buttons to control the flow of ore out of the mine often deliver an electric shock.

But the worst thing about life in the Chinese-owned mine in southern Zambia is that there is no such thing as a day off. Ever.

The unhappiness with the Chinese goes far beyond a few disgruntled workers and up to the highest levels of government:

The growing resentment sparked an acrimonious debate in Zambia’s recent presidential elections, with Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong making comments suggesting that Beijing might sever ties and investors might pull out if leading opposition candidate Michael Sata won the Sept. 28 vote.

Sata, who at one point threatened to expel Chinese traders if he became president, lost the election, and he alleged massive vote fraud. In the heat of the campaign, his Patriotic Front claimed that the use of Chinese computers to tally the count could skew results in the government’s favor, an accusation strongly denied by Chinese Embassy officials.

Sata argued that most Chinese investors in Zambia were exploiters who brought the country no benefit. He accused Li of interfering in the election.

“I find the reaction by the Chinese government very childish and dictatorial,” Sata said, accusing China of campaigning for the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy, which has been in power 15 years.

It’s one thing to make deals with other governments without any regard for ideology or character of said governments. It’s quite another to exploit foreign workforces. Nationalism and resentment of outsiders are traits you’ll find in just about every country in the world, perhaps submerged but ready to rise to the surface if conditions are right.

Dave weighs in on a Clash of Civilizations…

Uber-blogger and professor emeritus at Miskatonic University Brad DeLong has published part of David Landes’ article Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?, in which Landes takes a stab at the old Joseph Needham question about why China got beat by Europe in the tech race. This often reminds me of the game “not it” – usually the one declared the loser is the one who didn’t even know there was a contest in the first place.

This question puts the entire focus on history being a race to the finish between civilizations. Take that logic to the ultimate extreme and you’ll find the racial nationalism of many a BBS that appears to based solely on repeated viewings of the movie Highlander: There can be only one! So let’s all keep in mind that the question itself is loaded and ready for some of the more infamous PKD commenters. Landes’ particular stab at the problem seems to be: “First, China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights. The Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise — to take over certain activities, to prohibit and inhibit others, to manipulate prices, to exact bribes… The Europeans knew much less of these interferences. Instead, they entered during these centuries into an exciting world of innovation and emulation that challenged and tempted vested interests and kept the forces of conservatism scrambling. Changes were cumulative, news of novelty spread fast and a new sense of progress and achievement replaced an older, effete reverence for authority.”

Landes appears to be borrowing the language of a stock market analyst. Europe is an “exciting” IPO that “challenged” conventional thinking, in contrast to the “scrambling” “effete” conservatives. The Reformation as Google. The Church and monarchs as brick and mortar dinosaurs. Who was pets.com? Manicheism?

Landes’ argument seems to deal in huge generalities, blurring different European culture s, Chinese dynasties and several centuries. And he makes some very unclear distinctions. The Chinese state would “prohibit and inhibit” activities – in other words, pass laws and enforce them? Elizabethan England had plenty of price controls, and the East/West India Companies was always closely tied to the Crown and Parliament. In England, as in China, they often didn’t work.

Meanwhile in Europe, the heresies “made newness a virtue and a source of delight”. Correct me if I wrong, but apparently in Chinese history oppression is a sign of oppression, while in European history the heresies (for which people were opressed and executed) were a sign of “newness” and “delight”. I guess Torquemada was, in fact, the Greenspan of his day, keeping the markets going?

The Chinese “exacted bribes”, while the Canterbury Tales complained about the Pardoner doing… exactly the same, plus condemning you to eternal hellfire. I have never, never had a Chinese official tell me I will burn in Hades for not bribing him. A stupid egg, maybe, but not damned. Not even the most liberal translation of “Mei you” gets you there.

If the response from Landes is “Yes, but see, Chaucer is an example of the European creative genius responding to this injustice with innovation!”, then I would challenge Landes to show me the classical Chinese novel, opera or story that doesn’t deal with corruption. Water Margin/Outlaws of the Marsh, anyone?

As for the question of China not having an Industrial Revolution, I say check out the work of Ken Pomerantz and Bin Wong over at Columbia (links below). Geography and not being a bunch of warring nation states seem like better explanations for China’s different path than some free market revisionism, but more it’s even more important to consider that this is as a good a case as any eurocentrism. To say China failed at “two chances” to match “European achievement” is about as clear an example as I can imagine. When history becomes about meeting one civilization’s standard, it becomes myopic, if not hopelessly biased.

Bonus question: when China enter its “Modern Era”? According to Mao, it was 1840 – the first Opium War. Landes perhaps would say the same. Is that accurate? What about the heady boom of the Song Dynasty? Zheng He’s voyages in the Ming? There’s alot of aspects of “European Modern” scattered across China’s history.

China and Europe 1500-2000 and Beyond: What is Modern?

China, Technology and Change by Lynda Shaffer

Does Modernity Begin With the Song Dynasty?
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I’m not religious, and I don’t think religious beliefs are necessary to act in a decent, moral way. That said, we could learn a lot from these people:

Dozens of Amish neighbors came out Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage.

Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, was buried in his wife’s family plot behind a small Methodist church, a few miles from the one-room schoolhouse he stormed Monday.

His wife, Marie, and their three small children looked on as Roberts was buried beside the pink, heart-shaped grave of the infant daughter whose death nine years ago apparently haunted him, said Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Colorado who attended the service.

About half of perhaps 75 mourners on hand were Amish.

“It’s the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed,” said Porter, who had come to Pennsylvania to offer what help he could. He said Marie Roberts was also touched.

“She was absolutely deeply moved, by just the love shown,” Porter said.

another post from Dave, who is making my job really easy…

It seems that former South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon is going to be the next Secretary General. China, among others, pushed hard for an Asian Secretary General this time around and word has it they took a shine to Mr. Ban during the Six Party Talks in which he played a key role.

But coming right on the heels of the SecGen process will be the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, and Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer is tipped to be in the top three contenders, with a 15 to 1 shot according to Australian bookies. The other two nominees, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, are running at 2.75 to 1 and 3 to 1 respectively.

Nobel insider Stein Toennesson, head of the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO), says of Rebiya: “She’s the ideal candidate: she’s a woman, she’s Muslim and she’s Chinese”. Interesting way to phrase it, since the first two criteria have to do with approval, the last criteria is one of condemnation. And the Chinese wouldn’t see it as recognition of one of their own: they claim Rebiya is a terrorist.

CONT. BELOW THE FOLD

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