I watched the New Orleans - Atlanta game last night. Like a majority of viewers, I couldn't help rooting for the Saints, whether because of Reggie Bush or Drew Brees (who I have long considered a very underrated, undersized quarterback) or the triumphant return to the Superdome. I also couldn't help being majorly irritated by all the nonsense about football helping to rebuild New Orleans. Ok, fine, there are football players (notably Warrick Dunn of the Falcons, another of my favorite undersized players) who have raised money, given time, etc to the rebuilding efforts. But I really don't buy into all this crap about the football team (or the NO Hornets for that matter) rebuilding the city. I thought the best summation was when Spike Lee said the game at least gave the people of New Orleans "a few hours away from their FEMA trailers."
So this morning, as I went for my run, I was thinking about class relations (this is not a total non sequitor, just wait, you'll see the connection). I was thinking about how there are some people to whom you actually talk, in whose lives you develop active interest, and then there are some people who act more as tools or barriers. In no place was this more apparent to me than in China (big surprise) where the language barrier was even worse with common laborers than it was with shopkeepers, and where the true upper class often spoke English. But it was not just a language barrier. I generally had no interest in talking to the construction workers, and they likewise avoided me; shopkeepers were an obstacle to get past in order to make a purchase; but the upper class actively went out of their way to talk to me, and I to them. Why? We had more in common to discuss, both interests (economics, politics) and experiences (travel) and a common language in which to speak (English, or at least proper Mandarin). This is not so different in America. When is the last time you had a real conversation with a construction worker or the guy at the deli counter? And I bet you're more likely (as I am) to strike up a conversation with stranger on the train if he's wearing a collared shirt than if he's in coveralls. But I'll talk to anyone about sports.
This, to me, is the greatest redeeming feature of professional sports. More than anything else (except maybe the weather, with pop culture coming in third), it is easy to talk to just about anyone, from just about any walk of life, about sports. So does that make sports the great unifier, the one segment of society where everyone can relate? I'm not so sure about that.
See, sports plays a fundamentally different role in different communities. To most of us, sports is primarily entertainment. But to certain communities, espcially poor ones and especially black ones, sports is the only real hope for the future. And the reason that sports is able to cut across class barriers is that it exists in a comfort zone. For the upper and middle classes, sports truly is a diversion, something to do after school or watch after work or play on the weekends to break up a busy and sucessful career as a lawyer or doctor or businesman. If you're from a rich, white suburb and you're good enough to make the NFL or the NBA or the Olympics, great! If not, you're still looking forward to a sucessful career and the propect of raising your own kids in the rich, white suburbs to have the same choices you had. We are not threatened by the poor and minorities in sports (or music, or film) because this is a diversion for us. For many poor black kids (and many poor white kids as well), a football scholarship is their great hope to get out of the ghetto or the coal town or off the farm. It's not entertainment, it's a job; it's not a diversion, it's life.
Professional sports represent the greatest success of the modern segregation paradigm. In Friday Night Lights (a true story), the (effectively) white high school in the rich part of Odessa is finally willing to submit to desegregation when it realizes that it can manipulate this to get most of the black running backs and dominate their cross-town rivals. Booby Miles is the "next great black hope" until he blows out his ACL, at which point he returns to being "just another nigger." While we liberal coastals are above such language, we are equally dismissive of athletes from poor backgrounds who fail to perform. And we are scared enough of what this means about us that we took most of the elements of class and racial conflict out of the movie version. Sports give us a safe ground to praise sucessful poor and/or minority atheletes and ignore all the failures.
In the meantime, sports (and popular culture) are reeking havoc on black communities. Yes, failing schools are a problem. Yes, drugs are a problem. And absent parents, and poverty and so on. But studies show that poor blacks in poor black schools perform even worse than poor blacks in poor white schools and much worse than poor blacks in rich white schools. This means that the failure is at least partially one that can be attributed to the community, not just to socio-economic and racial factors. Many black pundits, including Bill Cosby, think that drugs, sports and pop culture (i.e. rap music) are to blame.
Whites, even poor whites, grow up with multiple white role models (on TV if nowhere else), including plenty of presidents, doctors and such as well as musicians and athletes. On the other hand, the primary role models of poor blacks in poor black communities are almost exclusively basketball and football players, rap musicians and drug dealers. The meteoric rise of professional sports and the black athlete has coopted many of the most upwardly mobile individuals in the black community. Before the rise of the black athelete, the main role models were, by default, church leaders, businessmen and other financially sucessful individuals. The collapse of the blue-collar industries that had fed a black renaissance was simultaneous with the ascent of cocaine, rap and professional sports. One brand role model was taken away and replaced with another one.
And what do athletes, drug dealers and musicians have in common? Plenty, actually. All three career paths are typified by a massive reward for a very small percentage of participants. Most drug dealers are poor (see Freakanomics), but a very few are very rich. Likewise, most high school athletes don't get recruited by colleges, and most college athletes don't get drafted, but the few who do get rich, and the few who become superstars get very, very rich. And musicians will make next to nothing without a record contract, or even with a record contract, but a few will go plantinum, get on MTV, buy big houses and get on MTV Cribs. For businesmen or lawyers, there are similarly a very few who get very rich. But unlike musicians or athletes, most lawyers make plenty of money, even if they're not millionaires. However, in the absence of lawyer role models and any percieved likelyhood of attending law schools, most poor blacks make the obvious choice, the high stakes crap shoot, the trade in drugs or beats or running backs.
The other thing that musicians, athletes and drug dealers have in common is that they tend to give very little back to the community (or even take away from the community). By simply setting up business in their home community, professionals will help to boost the community as a whole. Even if they don't, they are more likely to live in or near the community where they grew up, and so their consumption dollars are more likely to end up in community pockets and their charity dollars in local churches and community centers. On the other hand, drug dealers depress entire communities by scaring away legitimate businesses and attracting and creating addicts. Athletes, for their part, divert money that might be spent on teachers or books to buy pads and charter busses. They're just a different kind of parasite.
So this is the great paradox of sport in America. It is something that we can all talk about. But that very fact makes in the only thing we really have to talk about. Maybe it would be better if we talked about the real problems of race and class with the people who are across those divides. And if athletes made a little less money and teachers a little more, maybe that would change career choices in a way that benifited poor communities and not just a few poor individuals.
Wednesday, September 27
Thursday, September 21
Corny spinach and E. coli
So you're a vegitarian, maybe even a vegan. If it's important for the general population to eat enough leafy greens, it's even more so for you because you don't have as many dietary sources of iron and calcium. You head to the store, take a look at the kale and chard but ultimately decide that you feel like spinach this week. You even do the environmentally responsible thing and buy organic. After heading home, you make a spinach salad with walnuts and some of those pears that are just coming into season. Soon after, toxins flood your digestive tract and your kidneys fail. The culprit, E. coli.
Now here's the crazy thing: this particularly toxic strain of E. coli occurs almost exclusively in the diatary tracts of cows. You may have even given up meat to avoid exposure to this type of bacteria, in addition to the other health benifits of a meatless diet. It gets worse. Although the government is not exactly forthcoming with these specifics, this particular strain of E. coli, O157: H7, occurs almost exclusively in the gut of grain-fed cattle.
Now I'm not usually a big fan of vegitarians who proseletise, and I feel that I, as an on-and-off flexiblitarian, have even less high ground from which to criticize. Do I wish that people ate less meat? Sure, but as long as it is a choice that primarily affects their own health, I don't have a big issue with the choice to eat meat. The concerns that have made me an occasional vegitarian have always been health and environmental ones. And what this latest E. coli outbreak makes clear to me is that people can be hurt by second-hand meat as much as they can by second-hand smoke. The problem in this case was not one of contaminated meat or dairy, it was one of contaminated vegitables. This is apparently not that uncommon. It looks as if the spinach-growers and -packers are not particularly at fault for their handling practices; the culprit is a strain of bacteria that is expecially resistant to washing, acidic environments and antibiotics.
See, O157: H7 is a strain of E. coli that has mutated in the particular conditions of grain-fed livestock. Cattle in particular are not built to eat grain on a regular basis, they are built to eat grass. In grass-fed cattle, the levels of O157: H7 drop to almost nothing. So the spinach industry fell victim to being downstream from heards of living petrie dishes perfectly designed to grow resistant, toxogenic bacteria. But that's not even the end. Why are cattle being fed grain in the first place? Doesn't it seem like it should be cheaper and easier to feed them on grass and hay (as is the predominant practice in every other country in the world)? It would be, if it were not for subsudies for grain, especially corn farmers.
These subsudies make corn the cheapest way to do just about everything. Processed foods are often cheaper than real food because of cheap corn oil and corn syrup, and this is making us fat. Cattle are fed grain, which they are not built to handle in large quantities. It raises the acidity of their stomaches, giving them ulcers, which in turn nessisitates the use of massive quantities of antibiotics (I read somewhere that 70% of antibiotics used in the US go to agriculture). This, in turn, creates the perfect environment to grow military-grade biological weapons. Now corn is the top priority in ethanol-fuel development, despite the fact that you loose energy in making it (as opposed to switchgrass and sugar-cane based fuel which gain energy).
The point is, factory farming has gone beyond the point where I can simply let it be someone else's business. Cattle ranches and dairy farms are massive polluters of groundwater and in some places are even leading emitters of ozone-destroying gasses (I recall reading this about New Zealand, but I can't find a source...clearly in America there are much bigger air polluters, but cattle are still a major source of groundwater pollution). They are the biggest culprits in overuse of diminishing water supplies (espcially in the American West and many places in the developing world). Subsudies to the big grain growers have been making us fat and are making us sick. The spinach outbreak is the perfect case in point: even people who don't eat meat, avoid processed goods and otherwise supporting the big farm-factories can get sick from eating organic spinach.
Of course, people on the East Coast should be eating local spinach anyway. New Jersey spinach has not been connected with the outbreak, as Senator Menendez mentioned even while campaigning for reelections. Farm subsidies don't work the way they are supposed to. Labling of agricultural goods for point of origin would help consumers even more amidst this sort of scare. Appologies for the rant, but this is important stuff.
Now here's the crazy thing: this particularly toxic strain of E. coli occurs almost exclusively in the diatary tracts of cows. You may have even given up meat to avoid exposure to this type of bacteria, in addition to the other health benifits of a meatless diet. It gets worse. Although the government is not exactly forthcoming with these specifics, this particular strain of E. coli, O157: H7, occurs almost exclusively in the gut of grain-fed cattle.
Now I'm not usually a big fan of vegitarians who proseletise, and I feel that I, as an on-and-off flexiblitarian, have even less high ground from which to criticize. Do I wish that people ate less meat? Sure, but as long as it is a choice that primarily affects their own health, I don't have a big issue with the choice to eat meat. The concerns that have made me an occasional vegitarian have always been health and environmental ones. And what this latest E. coli outbreak makes clear to me is that people can be hurt by second-hand meat as much as they can by second-hand smoke. The problem in this case was not one of contaminated meat or dairy, it was one of contaminated vegitables. This is apparently not that uncommon. It looks as if the spinach-growers and -packers are not particularly at fault for their handling practices; the culprit is a strain of bacteria that is expecially resistant to washing, acidic environments and antibiotics.
See, O157: H7 is a strain of E. coli that has mutated in the particular conditions of grain-fed livestock. Cattle in particular are not built to eat grain on a regular basis, they are built to eat grass. In grass-fed cattle, the levels of O157: H7 drop to almost nothing. So the spinach industry fell victim to being downstream from heards of living petrie dishes perfectly designed to grow resistant, toxogenic bacteria. But that's not even the end. Why are cattle being fed grain in the first place? Doesn't it seem like it should be cheaper and easier to feed them on grass and hay (as is the predominant practice in every other country in the world)? It would be, if it were not for subsudies for grain, especially corn farmers.
These subsudies make corn the cheapest way to do just about everything. Processed foods are often cheaper than real food because of cheap corn oil and corn syrup, and this is making us fat. Cattle are fed grain, which they are not built to handle in large quantities. It raises the acidity of their stomaches, giving them ulcers, which in turn nessisitates the use of massive quantities of antibiotics (I read somewhere that 70% of antibiotics used in the US go to agriculture). This, in turn, creates the perfect environment to grow military-grade biological weapons. Now corn is the top priority in ethanol-fuel development, despite the fact that you loose energy in making it (as opposed to switchgrass and sugar-cane based fuel which gain energy).
The point is, factory farming has gone beyond the point where I can simply let it be someone else's business. Cattle ranches and dairy farms are massive polluters of groundwater and in some places are even leading emitters of ozone-destroying gasses (I recall reading this about New Zealand, but I can't find a source...clearly in America there are much bigger air polluters, but cattle are still a major source of groundwater pollution). They are the biggest culprits in overuse of diminishing water supplies (espcially in the American West and many places in the developing world). Subsudies to the big grain growers have been making us fat and are making us sick. The spinach outbreak is the perfect case in point: even people who don't eat meat, avoid processed goods and otherwise supporting the big farm-factories can get sick from eating organic spinach.
Of course, people on the East Coast should be eating local spinach anyway. New Jersey spinach has not been connected with the outbreak, as Senator Menendez mentioned even while campaigning for reelections. Farm subsidies don't work the way they are supposed to. Labling of agricultural goods for point of origin would help consumers even more amidst this sort of scare. Appologies for the rant, but this is important stuff.
Wednesday, September 20
Body hair
First of all, an article about Baidu that relates to last week's post about censorship. It appears that Baidu is doing really well, which certainly couldn't please the Chinese government more. This is perhaps the latest type of censorship in China, but it's certainly not the first. Emperors from the beginning of time burned books and killed writers with whom they disagreed. Mao liked to bait traps, like in the Hundred Flowers Campaign when he asked for suggestions and got rid of anyone who made one. And of course, there was the Cultural Revolution.
This week I'm supposed to be writing about Mao. Some other sites have had retrospectives over the past two weeks. Interestingly enough, there has not been a major retrospective from out of China. Perhaps this is related to the initiative to take Mao out of the history books! In fact, in the years after his death, the high cadres decided that Mao had been "70% right and 30% wrong" and considered the book closed. More specifics were left out: most Chinese under fourty continue to revere Mao without knowing much of anything about him.
It is difficult to assess Mao's legacy. As a revolutionary, he was a great, a genius, and generally improved the plight of everyday Chinese. In Communist areas before the full takeover in 1949 and for some time thereafter, the Party redistributed land, largely ended child slavery and opium abuse, instituted more equal rights for women, schools and basic healthcare. As a leader, Mao presided over massive crackdowns like the Hundred Flowers and the Cultural Revolution, as well as the greatest famine in human history (and one that probably could have been avoided). And if you look at China today, it bears little resemblance to the socialist paradise that Mao aimed at creating.
You might say (as many have before you) that Mao was Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. The question this raises is how Lenin would have ruled had he lived. There are indications that Lenin would have been more of an internationalist, more of a moderate and less of a tyrant. There are also indications that Lenin would have been every bit as ruthless as Stalin. Different times call for different leaders. And you know what they say about power.
While it is true that Mao was a theorist and a true revolutionary in his youth and a vicious tyrant at the end, and probably made some poor judgements in between, this comparison suppreses another aspect of Mao's legacy we should look at. Mao was a nationalist every bit as much as he was a socialist (please note the lower case, I do not mean that Mao was a Nationalist as much as he was a Communist in terms of party affiliation [i.e. guomindang a.k.a. KMT] although he, like all early Communists, was a Nationalist early on). There is a big division between the international communists and the national communists. No major internationalist socialist has ever lead a Communist country. True, the USSR (sucessfully) sponsored Communists in Korea, Eastern Europe, China (sortof), Southeast Asia and Cuba (who in turn sponsored unsucessful Communists elsewhere in Latin America and Africa) and unsucessfully elswhere. But this was largely out of nessessity and a very national rivalry with the US. Real internationalists like Trotsky never came fully to power and probably never could have.
In fact, revolutionaries in many of those countries were oppsed simultaneously to a leadership supported by foreign capital or even foreign occupation, putting class and national interests in the same camp. This was certainly the case in China (Japan and to a lesser extent the US-supported KMT), Vietnam (France, Japan and the US) and Cuba (the US). Ho Chi Minh discribed himself as a Vietnamese nationalist first and a Communist second; arguably this was the case for Mao as well. During the war with Japan, the Communists were willing to form common ground with the Nationalists to force out the foreign threat. Following the take-over, Mao insisted on rapid industrialization based on heavy industry largely for reasons of national pride and security; allowing light industry to develop first would likely have resulted in smoother progress.
In this respect, the China of today is a real legacy of Mao. He lead the effort to drive out foreigners and develop China as a powerful and independant country. He would certainly be proud that China is a major force on the global scene and has begun to export technical expertise with development loans and has been asserting itself in the UN. He certainly would have liked the Three Gorges Dam. And in terms of the culture, China shows Mao's legacy in it's very language: Mao, like several emperors before him modernized the writing system and required everyone to learn Mandarin. This is a legacy that I can certainly appreciate.
This week I'm supposed to be writing about Mao. Some other sites have had retrospectives over the past two weeks. Interestingly enough, there has not been a major retrospective from out of China. Perhaps this is related to the initiative to take Mao out of the history books! In fact, in the years after his death, the high cadres decided that Mao had been "70% right and 30% wrong" and considered the book closed. More specifics were left out: most Chinese under fourty continue to revere Mao without knowing much of anything about him.
It is difficult to assess Mao's legacy. As a revolutionary, he was a great, a genius, and generally improved the plight of everyday Chinese. In Communist areas before the full takeover in 1949 and for some time thereafter, the Party redistributed land, largely ended child slavery and opium abuse, instituted more equal rights for women, schools and basic healthcare. As a leader, Mao presided over massive crackdowns like the Hundred Flowers and the Cultural Revolution, as well as the greatest famine in human history (and one that probably could have been avoided). And if you look at China today, it bears little resemblance to the socialist paradise that Mao aimed at creating.
You might say (as many have before you) that Mao was Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. The question this raises is how Lenin would have ruled had he lived. There are indications that Lenin would have been more of an internationalist, more of a moderate and less of a tyrant. There are also indications that Lenin would have been every bit as ruthless as Stalin. Different times call for different leaders. And you know what they say about power.
While it is true that Mao was a theorist and a true revolutionary in his youth and a vicious tyrant at the end, and probably made some poor judgements in between, this comparison suppreses another aspect of Mao's legacy we should look at. Mao was a nationalist every bit as much as he was a socialist (please note the lower case, I do not mean that Mao was a Nationalist as much as he was a Communist in terms of party affiliation [i.e. guomindang a.k.a. KMT] although he, like all early Communists, was a Nationalist early on). There is a big division between the international communists and the national communists. No major internationalist socialist has ever lead a Communist country. True, the USSR (sucessfully) sponsored Communists in Korea, Eastern Europe, China (sortof), Southeast Asia and Cuba (who in turn sponsored unsucessful Communists elsewhere in Latin America and Africa) and unsucessfully elswhere. But this was largely out of nessessity and a very national rivalry with the US. Real internationalists like Trotsky never came fully to power and probably never could have.
In fact, revolutionaries in many of those countries were oppsed simultaneously to a leadership supported by foreign capital or even foreign occupation, putting class and national interests in the same camp. This was certainly the case in China (Japan and to a lesser extent the US-supported KMT), Vietnam (France, Japan and the US) and Cuba (the US). Ho Chi Minh discribed himself as a Vietnamese nationalist first and a Communist second; arguably this was the case for Mao as well. During the war with Japan, the Communists were willing to form common ground with the Nationalists to force out the foreign threat. Following the take-over, Mao insisted on rapid industrialization based on heavy industry largely for reasons of national pride and security; allowing light industry to develop first would likely have resulted in smoother progress.
In this respect, the China of today is a real legacy of Mao. He lead the effort to drive out foreigners and develop China as a powerful and independant country. He would certainly be proud that China is a major force on the global scene and has begun to export technical expertise with development loans and has been asserting itself in the UN. He certainly would have liked the Three Gorges Dam. And in terms of the culture, China shows Mao's legacy in it's very language: Mao, like several emperors before him modernized the writing system and required everyone to learn Mandarin. This is a legacy that I can certainly appreciate.
Tuesday, September 12
Censorship
A brief summary of my Summer: I got off scott free from the diploma riots only to get mild sunstroke in Yangshuo, overcharged for ice cream on Putuoshan and some sort of nasty stomach-purging condition in Beijing while vacationing with my dad. I decided to move to Enlgand for the football, but then realized I would miss the American kind (also: happy with the way the Eagles defensive line looks, Stalworth may finally be the right number one for McNabb although I'm not ready to jummp on that bandwagon just yet and Westbrook is the real deal). I went on a trip West with Alex (McDonald), got some altitude sickness camping above 12000 feet and flew home from Denver with a more informed impression of the corn states (Nebraska, by the way, beats the snot out of Iowa). I have a great evening job at the ABC house in Swarthmore and plan on spending a lot of time playing Taiko at the college, but I'm still in the market for a day job.
And before the real post, some notes. It has been quite some time since I published with any regularity, however, I now find myself with a great deal of time on my hands and not a whole hell of a lot to do. On the advice of several people, I have decided to try to force myself to publish on some sort of shedule as opposed to when I have time and something to write about and my computer is not acting up or being censored by the Chinese government and I'm not feeling terribly lazy and/or some crisis or particularly newsworthy event provokes me into writing something. In any case, my current plan is to try to post every Tuesday in the hopes that I can develop something like a real readership, which will in turn give me more impetus to write something every Tuesday. So, those few of you reading this, I am calling on you to respond to my posts and to bug me if you wake up on Wednesday morning and find nothing new posted on the site.
Given the anniversary of 9/11, I felt a particular need to post something yesterday, and I will continue to post things like this when the fancy strikes me. However, I intend to hold myself responsable for these posts in addition to my (hopefully) regular Tuesday rants. Of course, so much is happening all the time that it may be harder than I anticipate to address everything I want to. For instance, in writing about 9/11 and today about censorship (which has been in the news), I managed to overlook another big anniversary: the death of Chairman Mao thirty years ago last Saturday (September 9, 1976). Some news organs have been writing about the cultural revolution in addition to terror. Mao and terror are both of great interest to me, so I'm gonna have to figure out a way to do them both justice considering that their milestones occured twenty five years and two days appart. Hopefully I'll have a system down by the time the Towers' 25th year of decease occurs two days after the Chairman's 50th. I'll write about Mao next week, which will give me time to read up. This week: censorship.
As you may have read, the CCP's official news organ, Xinhua, has instituted new restrictions on the ability of foreign new organs to distibute in China. Here are some reports in the People's Daily (Xinhua's English language paper) as well as reacation reported by BBC and the Financial Times and the full text of the regulations. Most pundits are convinced that these new restrictions are more a bid for the unprofitable Xinhua to take market share away from the big reporting companies like Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg, especially in the financial reporting sector. Basically, the restrictions require foreign news to be distributed by companies approved by Xinhua; currently the only approved distributer is a subsidiary of Xinhua itself. It is not clear the degree to which the new restrictions will hurt reporting of general news topics, but they will almost certainly damage the availability of financial information to buisinesses, banks and financial services. This seems espeically counterproductive given that China is considering a new financial watchdog to better regulate a corrupt and comparatively ineffective sector.
A continuing criticism of Chinese media censorship, which goes so far as to put limits on foreign cartoons is that it not only leaves clear ground for governmental and civil rights abuses but also hurts the longterm capabilities of the Chinese economy. For China to develop a high-tech information economy, companies need free access not only to financial information but to any news that might affect financial markets, which is to say, any news. It is clear that Xinhua reporting alone, or for that matter, any single news agency, is not up to that task.
This is not the first time that new restrictions on speech have had the dual purpose of supporting Chinese companies over foreign ones. Government regulation and censorship of the internet, especially through search engines and portals, has been seen as a way to improve the market share of domestic corporations while simultaneously improving control over the flow of information. The government makes use of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" to punitively block certain sites as well as search engines which return those sites. To avoid their entire network of pages being blocked, search engines like Baidu and portals like SINA proactively censor anything they think might turn up the government list. This sort of complicit censorship is also carried to bbs and chat sites by university students and other volunteers. Even Google has censored it's Chinese search, although it has compromised by keeping two running, a chinese version of its main site which may return blocked results and itself be punatively blocked from time to time, and google.cn, which self-censors and will not return blocked sites. Google caught some heat for this, but they felt it was the most reasonable way to maintain their Chinese market share. This solution still provides an uncensored search which has the added benifit of enabling searchers in China to determine which sites are blocked by the combined use of both tools. Despite Google's solution, the punative blocking of sites that don't self-censor has made it much easier for the Chinese portals to grow, partially at the expense of foreign rivals like MSN and Yahoo.
This type of censorship is ingenious, it helps companies that censor obtain a higher market share, which means that a greater share of the population is using censored searches. The companies have incentive to do the work of censoring themselves or face the possibility of being blocked by the firewall; companies that censor better are blocked less which makes them more desirable to consumers. Outsourcing the censorship of print media can potentially work the same way. Giving Xinhua the ability to control their rivals' distribution will help grow Xinhua's market share. And of course Xinhua is censored, so that means a greater share of the print market will be reading reliably censored news. Who needs to burn books when you can give a leg up to a censored printer and let the market do the work for you?
The idea of occasional punitive censorship is based on the same principle of terror or secret police. There were far fewer Gestapo in Nazi Germany than is generally assumed. The threat of seemingly random arrests or crackdowns made the reach of the secret police seem greater. The threat of the Gestapo was that you might be arrested for anything at any time, so you would proactively avoid anything that might get you in trouble, even if it wasn't explicitly forbidden. This in turn created a network of informants quick to avoid being associated in any way with anything that might be construed a crime.
I saw this mentality come face-to-face with American individualism during the diploma crisis at Shengda. The Chinese teachers, without exception, avoided the issue as much as possible or stood with the administration. Many students were complicit and even active in informing the powers-that-were of any potential infractions of any kind (including when I ripped down a poster of the founder to make a tremendously juvenile statement of no real function). Administrators and teachers regularly would give us "advice" to stay home, which the troublemakers among us regularly ignored. Finally a meeting occured between the administration and the foreign teachers in which nothing useful was accomplished. The Chinese could not understand our inability to take a hint and self-limit our behavior out of fear of potential reprisals. We Americans (and Canadians, and Brits...) could not understand their inability to give us clear-cut guidelines on what we could and could not do. The administrator kept saying "this is a Chinese affair" while the foreign teachers sought some guidance on how to recognise a "Chinese affair." Basically, a "Chinese affair" is anything that might potentially be declared a "Chinese affair" by anyone who could possibly have the authority to make this sort of declaration. Earlier, in my writing class, I had been told by a student that they were not allowed to talk about "politics," which of course does not include things like Bush's mismanagement of Hurricane Katarina or the EU's limits on Chinese "textile dumping" or anything else that makes other people look bad, but does include anything that might make China look bad.
In fact, the very wording of the new regulations basically prohibit any news that makes China look bad, prohibiting anything that might (among other things):
"(3) endanger China's national security, reputation and interests;
....
(5) incite hatred and discrimination among ethnic groups, undermine their unity, infringe upon their customs and habits, or hurt their feelings;
...
(9) undermine social ethics or the fine cultural traditions of the Chinese nation;"
as well as the catch-all: "Xinhua News Agency has the right to select the news and information released by foreign news agencies in China "
This is getting rambling, but a last thought. I can't help but wonder if this crackdown on outside reporting is due in part to emberassment on reporting of a few major crises in the past year, including the diploma crisis and the violent crackdown in Guagdong.
And before the real post, some notes. It has been quite some time since I published with any regularity, however, I now find myself with a great deal of time on my hands and not a whole hell of a lot to do. On the advice of several people, I have decided to try to force myself to publish on some sort of shedule as opposed to when I have time and something to write about and my computer is not acting up or being censored by the Chinese government and I'm not feeling terribly lazy and/or some crisis or particularly newsworthy event provokes me into writing something. In any case, my current plan is to try to post every Tuesday in the hopes that I can develop something like a real readership, which will in turn give me more impetus to write something every Tuesday. So, those few of you reading this, I am calling on you to respond to my posts and to bug me if you wake up on Wednesday morning and find nothing new posted on the site.
Given the anniversary of 9/11, I felt a particular need to post something yesterday, and I will continue to post things like this when the fancy strikes me. However, I intend to hold myself responsable for these posts in addition to my (hopefully) regular Tuesday rants. Of course, so much is happening all the time that it may be harder than I anticipate to address everything I want to. For instance, in writing about 9/11 and today about censorship (which has been in the news), I managed to overlook another big anniversary: the death of Chairman Mao thirty years ago last Saturday (September 9, 1976). Some news organs have been writing about the cultural revolution in addition to terror. Mao and terror are both of great interest to me, so I'm gonna have to figure out a way to do them both justice considering that their milestones occured twenty five years and two days appart. Hopefully I'll have a system down by the time the Towers' 25th year of decease occurs two days after the Chairman's 50th. I'll write about Mao next week, which will give me time to read up. This week: censorship.
As you may have read, the CCP's official news organ, Xinhua, has instituted new restrictions on the ability of foreign new organs to distibute in China. Here are some reports in the People's Daily (Xinhua's English language paper) as well as reacation reported by BBC and the Financial Times and the full text of the regulations. Most pundits are convinced that these new restrictions are more a bid for the unprofitable Xinhua to take market share away from the big reporting companies like Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg, especially in the financial reporting sector. Basically, the restrictions require foreign news to be distributed by companies approved by Xinhua; currently the only approved distributer is a subsidiary of Xinhua itself. It is not clear the degree to which the new restrictions will hurt reporting of general news topics, but they will almost certainly damage the availability of financial information to buisinesses, banks and financial services. This seems espeically counterproductive given that China is considering a new financial watchdog to better regulate a corrupt and comparatively ineffective sector.
A continuing criticism of Chinese media censorship, which goes so far as to put limits on foreign cartoons is that it not only leaves clear ground for governmental and civil rights abuses but also hurts the longterm capabilities of the Chinese economy. For China to develop a high-tech information economy, companies need free access not only to financial information but to any news that might affect financial markets, which is to say, any news. It is clear that Xinhua reporting alone, or for that matter, any single news agency, is not up to that task.
This is not the first time that new restrictions on speech have had the dual purpose of supporting Chinese companies over foreign ones. Government regulation and censorship of the internet, especially through search engines and portals, has been seen as a way to improve the market share of domestic corporations while simultaneously improving control over the flow of information. The government makes use of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" to punitively block certain sites as well as search engines which return those sites. To avoid their entire network of pages being blocked, search engines like Baidu and portals like SINA proactively censor anything they think might turn up the government list. This sort of complicit censorship is also carried to bbs and chat sites by university students and other volunteers. Even Google has censored it's Chinese search, although it has compromised by keeping two running, a chinese version of its main site which may return blocked results and itself be punatively blocked from time to time, and google.cn, which self-censors and will not return blocked sites. Google caught some heat for this, but they felt it was the most reasonable way to maintain their Chinese market share. This solution still provides an uncensored search which has the added benifit of enabling searchers in China to determine which sites are blocked by the combined use of both tools. Despite Google's solution, the punative blocking of sites that don't self-censor has made it much easier for the Chinese portals to grow, partially at the expense of foreign rivals like MSN and Yahoo.
This type of censorship is ingenious, it helps companies that censor obtain a higher market share, which means that a greater share of the population is using censored searches. The companies have incentive to do the work of censoring themselves or face the possibility of being blocked by the firewall; companies that censor better are blocked less which makes them more desirable to consumers. Outsourcing the censorship of print media can potentially work the same way. Giving Xinhua the ability to control their rivals' distribution will help grow Xinhua's market share. And of course Xinhua is censored, so that means a greater share of the print market will be reading reliably censored news. Who needs to burn books when you can give a leg up to a censored printer and let the market do the work for you?
The idea of occasional punitive censorship is based on the same principle of terror or secret police. There were far fewer Gestapo in Nazi Germany than is generally assumed. The threat of seemingly random arrests or crackdowns made the reach of the secret police seem greater. The threat of the Gestapo was that you might be arrested for anything at any time, so you would proactively avoid anything that might get you in trouble, even if it wasn't explicitly forbidden. This in turn created a network of informants quick to avoid being associated in any way with anything that might be construed a crime.
I saw this mentality come face-to-face with American individualism during the diploma crisis at Shengda. The Chinese teachers, without exception, avoided the issue as much as possible or stood with the administration. Many students were complicit and even active in informing the powers-that-were of any potential infractions of any kind (including when I ripped down a poster of the founder to make a tremendously juvenile statement of no real function). Administrators and teachers regularly would give us "advice" to stay home, which the troublemakers among us regularly ignored. Finally a meeting occured between the administration and the foreign teachers in which nothing useful was accomplished. The Chinese could not understand our inability to take a hint and self-limit our behavior out of fear of potential reprisals. We Americans (and Canadians, and Brits...) could not understand their inability to give us clear-cut guidelines on what we could and could not do. The administrator kept saying "this is a Chinese affair" while the foreign teachers sought some guidance on how to recognise a "Chinese affair." Basically, a "Chinese affair" is anything that might potentially be declared a "Chinese affair" by anyone who could possibly have the authority to make this sort of declaration. Earlier, in my writing class, I had been told by a student that they were not allowed to talk about "politics," which of course does not include things like Bush's mismanagement of Hurricane Katarina or the EU's limits on Chinese "textile dumping" or anything else that makes other people look bad, but does include anything that might make China look bad.
In fact, the very wording of the new regulations basically prohibit any news that makes China look bad, prohibiting anything that might (among other things):
"(3) endanger China's national security, reputation and interests;
....
(5) incite hatred and discrimination among ethnic groups, undermine their unity, infringe upon their customs and habits, or hurt their feelings;
...
(9) undermine social ethics or the fine cultural traditions of the Chinese nation;"
as well as the catch-all: "Xinhua News Agency has the right to select the news and information released by foreign news agencies in China "
This is getting rambling, but a last thought. I can't help but wonder if this crackdown on outside reporting is due in part to emberassment on reporting of a few major crises in the past year, including the diploma crisis and the violent crackdown in Guagdong.
Monday, September 11
Five Years Later
Coming off a long hiatus, I figure there's no better way to get back on the horse than to jump on the 9/11 anniversary bandwagon. Plenty of columnists have taken this opportunity to present their opinions on the responses to terror over the past five years. The general consensus, at least among my favored sources of news which, I'm sure, share my liberal bias, is that the US response to terrorism has made more terrorists, although not nessisarily more al Qaeda terrorists, and it may have also made the moderate Muslim community more vocal as well; that special interests and political parties have responded with more infighting rather than more consensus; that nothing really phases the British and that we need to be prepared to make more sacrifices. I agree.
The typical liberal perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the war on drugs and the like: it's not really a war and we don't really understand it. The solution is, like all liberal solutions, a call for more understanding and cooperation. The conservative perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the Vietnam war: liberals are pussies and are sapping our strength, and apparently our willingness to arrest all funny-looking brown people. I tend to think that both sides are right, or both sides are wrong, depending primarily on how ornery I'm feeling. Put another way, it is stupid to treat issues like they are coins; there are more than two sides to most conflicts and often the best solution is one that combines the better elements of heads, tails and the rim around the edge. Ok, that simile kinda got away from me....
But I'd like to use another simile to help visualize my perspective on terror. I think terror is a lot like weeds. The Bush approach to the War on Terror has been something like this: "dern weeds killed my prize rosebush," then he found the part of the garden with the most weeds and burned it. The problem with this approach is multifold. Burning kills weeds, but it also kills flowers and veggies and good stuff like that. Furthermore, it left portions of the garden unweeded. Furthermore, burning plants helps fix nitrogen in the soil and makes it easier for the next generation of plants to grow. Part of what makes weeds so weedy is that they are really good at growing where you don't want them to. Guess which plants are gonna spread most easily back into the burned section of the garden. Probably not the rosebush.
The liberal approach might be characterized, at its extreme, as somewhat like my grandma's take on gardening: "oh, well Queen Ann's Lace is beautiful too, and I don't like to call it a weed..." The thing is, Queen Ann's Lace does have some nice flowers, but it also tends to grow where you don't want it to, and to make it hard to grow other things. Goutweed, milkweed, all these plants can be pretty attractive in their own rights, but if they're growing in your neighbor's garden, your garden had better be filled with some pretty resliliant plants or they'll take over yours as well. Think of this in economic and social terms: if your economy is full of strong companies with good growth and your civil society is well developed, then you are pretty resiliant and dissent and division are not a major problems; if your "plants" are weak, it's easy for weeds to take over.
Neo cons, for their part, seem to be thinking: "we've got these great herbicides (profiling, wiretaps) so why won't these hippy vegan organic types let us use them?" Like the liberal gardener, the neo con has an approach that seems sensible in many situations. The problem is that they trade long-term health for short-term conveniance. Sure, herbicides will help keep your garden weed-free, pesticides will help kill the bugs and synthetic fertilizer will grow great looking gardinias, but at the same time, you are poisining the soil, and your tomatos will never taste quite as good as the organic ones.
So where does this garden metaphor bring us? The most sucessful garden always requires a real investment of time and energy, especially when it is first planted. You've gotta go in, weed by hand, compost, water and repeat. But a few years later, the garden gets to the point where it can do pretty well on it's own. Taking this back into the real world, I find it amazing how people love to consider the "problem" Islam - terrorists and fundamental regimes like Iran - in terms of Communists and Fascists, but have failed to learn the lessons of two hot wars and a cold one. Communists gained in power when the economies struggled, Fascists gained in power when governments struggled with Communists. Two World Wars did not end the "Communist threat," and if anything made it worse AND created fertile ground for American-style Fascism (or as close as we got, McCarthyism). Our ultimate sucess against Communism was through economic development, both in America and supporting it in Europe, Japan and Korea through the Marshal Plan and such. Communist countries that we tried to fight directly: North Korea, China (kinda), Vietnam, Cuba. All are still at least nominaly Communist. Communist countries that we fought indirectly, economically and such: The Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc. None are Communist anymore. Hrm.
The lesson is clear: we don't win this kinda war with guns, bombs and secret police, we win it simply by being there.
The typical liberal perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the war on drugs and the like: it's not really a war and we don't really understand it. The solution is, like all liberal solutions, a call for more understanding and cooperation. The conservative perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the Vietnam war: liberals are pussies and are sapping our strength, and apparently our willingness to arrest all funny-looking brown people. I tend to think that both sides are right, or both sides are wrong, depending primarily on how ornery I'm feeling. Put another way, it is stupid to treat issues like they are coins; there are more than two sides to most conflicts and often the best solution is one that combines the better elements of heads, tails and the rim around the edge. Ok, that simile kinda got away from me....
But I'd like to use another simile to help visualize my perspective on terror. I think terror is a lot like weeds. The Bush approach to the War on Terror has been something like this: "dern weeds killed my prize rosebush," then he found the part of the garden with the most weeds and burned it. The problem with this approach is multifold. Burning kills weeds, but it also kills flowers and veggies and good stuff like that. Furthermore, it left portions of the garden unweeded. Furthermore, burning plants helps fix nitrogen in the soil and makes it easier for the next generation of plants to grow. Part of what makes weeds so weedy is that they are really good at growing where you don't want them to. Guess which plants are gonna spread most easily back into the burned section of the garden. Probably not the rosebush.
The liberal approach might be characterized, at its extreme, as somewhat like my grandma's take on gardening: "oh, well Queen Ann's Lace is beautiful too, and I don't like to call it a weed..." The thing is, Queen Ann's Lace does have some nice flowers, but it also tends to grow where you don't want it to, and to make it hard to grow other things. Goutweed, milkweed, all these plants can be pretty attractive in their own rights, but if they're growing in your neighbor's garden, your garden had better be filled with some pretty resliliant plants or they'll take over yours as well. Think of this in economic and social terms: if your economy is full of strong companies with good growth and your civil society is well developed, then you are pretty resiliant and dissent and division are not a major problems; if your "plants" are weak, it's easy for weeds to take over.
Neo cons, for their part, seem to be thinking: "we've got these great herbicides (profiling, wiretaps) so why won't these hippy vegan organic types let us use them?" Like the liberal gardener, the neo con has an approach that seems sensible in many situations. The problem is that they trade long-term health for short-term conveniance. Sure, herbicides will help keep your garden weed-free, pesticides will help kill the bugs and synthetic fertilizer will grow great looking gardinias, but at the same time, you are poisining the soil, and your tomatos will never taste quite as good as the organic ones.
So where does this garden metaphor bring us? The most sucessful garden always requires a real investment of time and energy, especially when it is first planted. You've gotta go in, weed by hand, compost, water and repeat. But a few years later, the garden gets to the point where it can do pretty well on it's own. Taking this back into the real world, I find it amazing how people love to consider the "problem" Islam - terrorists and fundamental regimes like Iran - in terms of Communists and Fascists, but have failed to learn the lessons of two hot wars and a cold one. Communists gained in power when the economies struggled, Fascists gained in power when governments struggled with Communists. Two World Wars did not end the "Communist threat," and if anything made it worse AND created fertile ground for American-style Fascism (or as close as we got, McCarthyism). Our ultimate sucess against Communism was through economic development, both in America and supporting it in Europe, Japan and Korea through the Marshal Plan and such. Communist countries that we tried to fight directly: North Korea, China (kinda), Vietnam, Cuba. All are still at least nominaly Communist. Communist countries that we fought indirectly, economically and such: The Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc. None are Communist anymore. Hrm.
The lesson is clear: we don't win this kinda war with guns, bombs and secret police, we win it simply by being there.
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