So it's been 5 months since my last entry, the longest gap ever in between my entries. I sort of lost interest in blogging, partly due to laziness and partly due to being busy.
As the winter sets in, flashbacks of Oz has been on my mind constantly. Although the job is going ok and things are going well with the gf, but the daily routine alongside the depressing winter has really started to distract me.
I think about the beach, warm weather/ocean, and skin cancer daily. The travelbug is coming on strong and watching Departures doesn't help either.
I am happy most of the time, but this entry is really just venting out the desire to travel more. There must be more in life than just working.
Australia, I took you for granted. You are still on my mind.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tiananmen Square 20 years later
Tiananmen: two men, two countries, one tragedy
A Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks, calling for an end to the violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
‘The emotional impact is still there and is still devastating'
Sonia Verma and Mark MacKinnon
Toronto, Beijing — From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2009 09:29PM EDT
When dawn breaks on this June 4 day, a diminutive, middle-aged teacher named Professor Chen will quietly leave his new home in Beijing for a routine day at work.
In Toronto, a scruffy, slightly younger man named Leon Tuo will rise to an equally unremarkable day, at the Chinese-language daily where he works, hoping to go unnoticed.
The two men live half a world apart and will not speak, but each will hold the other close to his heart, their lives forever linked by the quiet but crucial roles they played in the dramatic events that unfolded in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago Thursday.
It's a bond that extended into self-imposed exile, spent largely in Canada, where they struggled to move on with their lives while coming to terms with their past.
From a distance, China marched on, but for them – and a handful of other witnesses who came to Canada – the clock stopped on June 4, 1989.
Back then, Mr. Chen was a professor of political science at Beijing University, locally known as Beida.
Mr. Tuo was his third-year student, a “typical teenager,” who spent his spare time listening to Hong Kong pop and dreamed of one day graduating into a government job to serve his country.
Leon Tom (his Christian name) poses for photos in Toronto, May 30, 2009. Twenty years ago he was a student at Beijing University and had a man die in his arms. Tom agreed to have his photo taken, on the condition that his identity is somewhat obscured. He is worried about a backlash from the pro-China community here, as well as consequences for his parents, who still live in Beijing.
On campus, the mood was already roiling. Students frequently took to the streets to vent frustration with the slow pace of China's political reform.
Escalating protests in 1987 triggered the fall of Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief, accused by other Politburo members of empathizing with the students calling for change.
At the time, Prof. Chen and Mr. Tuo kept their distance rather than risk their careers.
That changed when Mr. Hu died of a heart attack two years later and students poured into the streets to mourn.
Mr. Tuo, then 20, was one of the first to lay a white paper wreath at the foot of the Monument to the People's Heroes. Prof. Chen, then 35, visited the square between classes to advise his students as tensions grew.
At one point, he intervened to pull three of his students off their knees after they went to deliver a petition to Premier Li Peng and were rebuffed.
“That was the moment for me that it became something bigger,” recalled Mr. Tuo, dressed in jeans and a khaki jacket and blinking back tears in an east end Toronto coffee shop last week.
“We had been taught that students are the key to the country. Why were we being ignored?” he asked.
The Beida faculty's decision to remain uninvolved changed on April 26, when the state-run People's Daily newspaper ran an editorial that denounced the protesters as part of “a planned conspiracy” to sow disorder.
Angered, Prof. Chen and many of his colleagues joined the students in the square the next day for what would be one of the most triumphant moments of that spectacular spring – hundreds of thousands of protesters jamming the city's main boulevards in a peaceful show of defiance.
“Maybe there has been no demonstration of this kind in the history of the world,” Prof. Chen said, speaking Wednesday at a café near Renmin University in Beijing.
He and his fellow professors marched at the front, linking arms as if to protect the students behind them, including Mr. Tuo.
The students never returned to class. Prof. Chen joined the Tiananmen protests full-time, sleeping on the concrete ground for days on end.
“ I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened”
When his students announced they would go on a hunger strike, he bought them their last lunch. Mr. Tuo starved himself for 100 hours before he collapsed. Martial law was declared on May 19 and he returned to the square with the crowd.
On the morning of June 3, Prof. Chen left Tiananmen Square for the first time in more than 10 days. He wanted to go to see his parents – dyed-in-the-wool Communist Party members – to reassure them of his health and try to explain the protesters' actions.
When he arrived, he received news that a military vehicle had hit and killed three people near the square. Knowing how volatile the situation was, Prof. Chen headed back. On his way, the soft-spoken professor was kicked to the ground by a police officer when he tried to intervene in the arrest of a student.
Terrifying reports began pouring in from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “Some students came shouting, ‘They're killing They're using machine guns'“ he recalled.
“One of them showed me a wound on his hand, but I still didn't believe them because there was no reason for the army to shoot.”
Prof. Chen saw a line of soldiers kneeling and firing their rifles at random. He watched a young man nearby fall dead to the ground.
Mr. Tuo was standing on the sidelines. Four young men rushed toward him carrying another man, a teenager, limp and covered in blood.
“They gave this young man to me and I managed to stop a taxi and I took him in my arms to the hospital.”
“You just followed the blood to find the ER,” he said. “I was trying to find a bed for that young man. I could not even find a place on the floor. People were lying on the floor. I was not quite sure if they were dead or alive but you could hear the people crying, screaming for help and out of pain.”
The man in Mr. Tuo's arms was already dead. “It was my first time to be so close to a dead person and I was 20. I dare not touch him. I just hold his hand. … You could really feel a life just perish. I could feel his hands getting hard, getting cold. It's so real, it's so real. Even then, the blood still drip down. He died, and the blood still drip down. I do remember his face, even now.”
Mr. Tuo spent the night in the hospital, hoping to find the dead man's family. They never came. He returned to the square, where Prof. Chen had returned with thousands of others in a final show of defiance.
Shortly after midnight, loudspeakers around the city began blaring warnings for citizens to stay indoors or suffer the consequences. At 4 a.m., floodlights on the square suddenly switched on and soldiers came pouring out of the adjacent buildings.
“We weren't heroes, we were scared of death. But I had to be there because my students were there,” Prof. Chen said.
Eventually, the students agreed to withdraw peacefully from the square. But as they marched home in defeat along Changan Avenue, Prof. Chen saw seven people crushed to death under a tank.
“I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened,” he said.
Life returned to normal, at least on the surface. Mr. Tuo returned to The Beijing Children's Hospital every day for a week. A picture of the dead man's face was posted on the wall with a dozen anonymous others.
His body was never claimed, and was later collected by the city for disposal. “I assume his family will never know how he died or where he is,” Mr. Tuo says.
Prof. Chen was called in for interrogation a month later. University officials offered him a deal: Sign a statement that he regretted opposing the Communist Party and he could resume his teaching post.
Nearly all of his colleagues signed the bogus confessions to save their careers. Prof. Chen refused. When Mr. Tuo returned to class that October, Prof. Chen had already been purged.
The students were ordered to write essays denouncing the protesters, stating that the crackdown never happened.
Mr. Tuo complied, graduated, and took a marketing job with Sony. He never spoke of Tiananmen Square, but decided to quit China for Canada a few years later: “I could never feel at home after what happened,” he said.
A few years ago, in the lobby of a downtown Toronto hotel, he ran into his former teacher. More than 15 years had passed. He looked exactly the same.
Prof. Chen was a nightshift housekeeper. Mr. Tuo wept: “He was someone who had shared the most important days of my life.”
After he left China, Prof. Chen had earned a PhD in political science and a Master's degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. He couldn't find work, so when his student visa expired – he refused to seek refugee status in the United States – he decided to try his luck in Canada, settling with his wife in North York, juggling temporary jobs to make ends meet.
He had two children, and his entire family held Canadian citizenship, but the struggle to settle in Canada took its toll.
“The biggest difficulty in Canada is that it is hard for people to find jobs in their profession, not just for me, but for all immigrants,” he said.
Mr. Tuo also struggled, but in different ways. He found work as a journalist at the Toronto bureau of Sing Tao, a Chinese newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong.
For 20 years, he hid his involvement in the Tiananmen protests, fearing the powerful pro-China community in Canada would disown him, or that his family in Beijing would be targeted.
Prof. Chen also was silent. The only way he was able to escape the memories of June 4 was, in some ways, by returning to China.
His prime motivation for moving back was for his children to be educated in a more competitive environment.
“I don't think they can compete with Chinese children who study 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Prof. Chen said, laughing.
Teaching again, this time at a private school, he marvels at how much has changed – at least on the surface.
“Twenty years ago, we couldn't sit here and drink coffee in a café like this,” he said, sitting at an Italian-style café in the same neighbourhood as Beijing University.
The professor is, at heart, still the dissident who stood shoulder to shoulder with his students 20 years ago. He rails against how students today lack the ideals of a generation ago, and challenges the government's assertion that the Tiananmen crackdown, messy as it was, has somehow paved the way for two decades of runaway economic growth.
“You cannot draw the conclusion that from the crackdown, we got faster economic growth. Maybe with more political reforms we would have an even better situation. The ends cannot justify the means,” he says.
However, his days of trying to change China are over. He may live in Beijing at the moment, but he gave up his Chinese passport years ago and considers himself a Canadian now.
Meanwhile in Toronto, his former student, Mr. Tuo, remains a haunted man. His feelings are more acute and complex than friends and relatives who remained in China, he says, as if frozen in time.
“I cannot enjoy the summer until June 4. I am amazed to find out that the emotional impact is still there and is still devastating,” he said.
The collective amnesia of China – and the West
Forget about June 4, 1989, the Chinese were told, and you will prosper. We took the deal, too
Charles Foran
From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009 12:20AM EDT
In the spring of 1989, my wife and I were teaching at a college in east Beijing. On April 15, a reform-minded Communist Party leader passed away unexpectedly. His death brought students from various schools to Tiananmen Square, the traditional venue for mourning high officials. When the students decided to stay on the square, a protest was born. By early May, with classes suspended, we were riding bikes into the city to observe the demonstrations.
Early on, the mood of the democracy movement, as it came to be called, was serious but festive. Initiated mostly by undergraduates whose demands ranged from ending state corruption to better cafeteria food, it was soon broadened by the involvement of groups from all walks of Chinese life. Activists knew the moment was special and knew the world was watching.
They sensed this wider interest, in part, because they were now allowed to be interested in the world again. In the 1980s, elements inside China wanted to open up the country. To do this, they needed exposure to fresh ideas that could be adapted. As such, they encouraged their “intellectuals” to think a little outside the party box.
Older intellectuals brought Cultural Revolution memories to their embrace of the era's modest reform agenda. Younger ones tended to be more innocent. When a film-teacher friend biked past me during the first days of the protest, I jokingly asked what he was rebelling against. “Whaddya got?” he answered, channelling Marlon Brando in The Wild One .
Four weeks later, with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and hunger strikes, the million-person marches and Goddess of Democracy statue all serving to enrage the government beyond any point of safe return, martial law was declared. One evening, a student announced that she had spent her day outside the leadership compound, shouting to the soldiers guarding the entrance: “The People's Army doesn't shoot the people” To us, she added a nagging doubt: “Do they?”
They did. Starting on the night of June 3 and into the morning of June 4, soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square and the streets around it. Several hundred Beijingers, and a handful of students, died, with many more arrested and imprisoned. Conservative party factions rid themselves of the main reformer in their midst: general secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged and placed under house arrest. “Your enthusiasm for democracy and the rule of law,” Mr. Zhao had assured protesters, “for the struggle against corruption and for furthering reform is very valuable.”
That's what happened on June 4 in Beijing.
Except it didn't happen that way. On June 9, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping issued the official version. “A handful of people first staged turmoil, which later developed into a counter-revolutionary rebellion. Their aim was to overthrow the Communist Party, topple the socialist system, and establish a bourgeois republic.”
My wife and I had been asked to leave the college four days after the Tiananmen Square massacre. We returned to our teaching positions the following January to discover just how successful Mr. Deng had been at distorting public history: There had been no killings in the square. There had been only a scattering of necessary violence around the city. The People's Liberation Army had saved China from Black Hand agents serving foreign interests.
In subsequent years, efforts were made at encoding this revision in the collective DNA. The party offered the population a deal: denial of a murky past in exchange for a bright future. Forget June 4, and you may prosper. No surprise, most Chinese, accustomed to wild reality swings and guessing the consequences of refusing the deal, went along.
In short, China suppressed the events of spring 1989 for its own reasons. Never mind the crushing of spirits of a generation of its brightest young people. Never mind the discrediting of artistic and intellectual inquiry birthed in the 1980s, forays into a culture's deepest conscious and unconscious impulses.
Never mind, either, how differently the country might have emerged as a global power had a freer media and more confident, questioning populace been present to balance other forces. Contrary to Mr. Deng's assertions, a ragged reform movement, most of its agitators barely old enough to shave, had posed no real threat to stability. China's emergence from Maoism would have proceeded apace.
Instead, totalitarian governance asserted itself in the usual fashion: a cautionary boot to the face, followed by the erasure of any inconvenient complexities. “An internal Chinese matter,” as officials like to say when brushing off international criticism.
No less distressing has been the decision by the West to validate this dismal treatment of reality. After a little post-Tiananmen Square wrist-slapping, it was decided that China's potential, China's labour force and, more recently, China's markets and cash reserves made it prudent that we, too, see the democracy movement as having been a mistake, even an aberration.
To help us with our view, we have adopted notions of “incrementalism,” of the nation's slow, steady progress in treating its citizens decently. We've decided to be pragmatic. “Get over it,” was one recent summary of the correct attitude. Anyways, we can't change China, can we? No more than those foolish, if brave, students could way back in 1989.
One problem persists in this mutual denial. As I've discovered during visits to mainland China over the years, many individuals have looked to the West to validate and support their own struggles for rights and reforms and basic rule of law. They assumed we'd be on their side. After all, most of us enjoy these privileges. We even make noises about demanding reluctant nations live up to universal standards, or else. But not with China. China, we have concluded, is different. Different human rights for, apparently, different humans.
Our moral relativism has done more than hurt reformers' feelings. The deeper legacy of June 4 has been the enshrinement in the West of a policy of small-scale - specific to specific people - betrayals of Chinese citizens in pursuit of a generalized, at-a-later-date support of their humanity.
Round up perceived dissidents on the eve of the Olympics, and we'll focus on the glittering opening ceremonies. Arrest signatories of a human-rights document and we may express mild disappointment. Or how about this very recent outrage: the harassing and detaining of the grieving parents of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake?
Each time the Chinese government makes plain its scorn for its own people, a scorn that shows no signs of being moderated or even chastened by the “soft” pressure we believe we are applying, June 4 lives as a reminder of the various betrayals that have left so many Chinese so vulnerable, and without much sense that the rest of the world cares.
A year ago, publishers hustled to release a novel to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Ma Jian's Beijing Coma used an audacious metaphor to explore the fate of the individual in China. A student protester, shot in the head by a soldier on June 4, has lain in a coma ever since. He is able to hear, smell and remember, but not to see, speak or respond.
Globe editorials
Economic leap, political freeze
20 years after the pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square, the 'People's Republic,' like all authoritarian governments, remains afraid of the people
From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009 12:06AM EDT
China closed the gates to Twitter and other Internet services yesterday so that its people could not reflect on Tiananmen Square, 20 years after the country's democratic moment and the subsequent military crackdown. Officially, China forgets that the people stirred. And it tries to enforce forgetfulness by shutting Twitter down on the anniversary. The “People's Republic,” like all authoritarian governments, remains afraid of the people.
This is the paradox of modern China. As a rapidly advancing economy it relies on information flow, on education, creativity, innovation. But then people ask questions, demand accountability and independent courts, insist on learning the truth about their history. What China needs economically it will not tolerate politically.
“ If even a seemingly impregnable regime remains frightened, 20 years after pro-democracy protests, it must believe that the people bestirred are a powerful force”
China has made enormous progress on nearly every front since June 4, 1989, except those related to political freedom. The country held last summer's Olympic Games, a testament to its global heft. Its economy is six times the size it was then (adjusted for inflation). Its young population is becoming well educated and cosmopolitan. Vast, ultramodern cities have sprung up. While inequities have grown, the standard of living in the cities has leaped ahead.
But China is still a one-party state opposed to political reform. The regime still uses torture and chokes off religious freedom. It still represses sovereign Tibet, jails lawyers and dissidents, and stifles dissent. In some ways the country allows more space for personal expression and diversity. It feels like a bigger, more comfortable cage, as one dissident puts it. But still a cage.
The Communist authorities in China made a fateful choice after the events at Tiananmen Square, in which more than a million peaceful pro-democracy protesters gathered in Beijing's centre, for weeks on end, until the army rolled in, killing hundreds, or perhaps thousands. They chose to unleash the market forces that would make the economy boom, believing that people would ignore the suffocating political climate in return for a higher standard of living. Since then, the Soviet empire, and the Soviet Union itself, have fallen; but the Chinese bargain has held. And young urbanites – the people who like to Tweet – know little about Tiananmen.
Forgetting is easier said than done in the Internet age, especially for a country that is as much a part of the global community as China. Blocking Twitter is an admission that the authorities feel vulnerable. Far from forgetting, they have a long memory. If even a seemingly impregnable regime remains frightened, 20 years after pro-democracy protests, it must believe that the people bestirred are a powerful force.
For nearly 600 pages, the reader shares the insides of his cranium. He relives his state-swaddled childhood and soul-crushing adolescence. He also delivers a passionate rendering of what the democracy movement had represented to its participants: an intimation of the challenges, and risks, of not only demanding certain liberties but of asserting the individual will, self-directed and free to make choices, wise or ill-advised.
The price the coma victim pays for his assertion is high. He wastes away in a Beijing apartment, harassed by officials for his counter-revolutionary crimes but otherwise forgotten. People stop visiting and, having accepted the “deal,” eventually stop remembering why he's even in such a woeful state. By the end, they are cannibalizing him for body parts.
The apartment building is torn down in order to build a bigger, better structure, with the coma victim still within, a ghost in the machine of history-free progress. Only the afflicted, Ma Jian suggests, can “see” how China replays patterns of oppression and amnesia; everyone else, healthy and alert, can't see much at all.
Beijing Coma appeared in the West, where Mr. Ma lives in exile in London, but not in China. State censorship ensures the Chinese can't read the novel that explains to them what occurred to their society and, perhaps, to their own souls, both on June 4, 1989, and in the two decades since. Westerners, of course, can read the book; they can also decide to remember what happened in Beijing 20 years ago and not be told, or tolerate, otherwise.
Charles Foran is the author of Sketches in Winter, an account of life in Beijing in 1989 and 1990. His latest book is the essay collection Join the Revolution, Comrade.
A Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks, calling for an end to the violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
‘The emotional impact is still there and is still devastating'
Sonia Verma and Mark MacKinnon
Toronto, Beijing — From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2009 09:29PM EDT
When dawn breaks on this June 4 day, a diminutive, middle-aged teacher named Professor Chen will quietly leave his new home in Beijing for a routine day at work.
In Toronto, a scruffy, slightly younger man named Leon Tuo will rise to an equally unremarkable day, at the Chinese-language daily where he works, hoping to go unnoticed.
The two men live half a world apart and will not speak, but each will hold the other close to his heart, their lives forever linked by the quiet but crucial roles they played in the dramatic events that unfolded in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago Thursday.
It's a bond that extended into self-imposed exile, spent largely in Canada, where they struggled to move on with their lives while coming to terms with their past.
From a distance, China marched on, but for them – and a handful of other witnesses who came to Canada – the clock stopped on June 4, 1989.
Back then, Mr. Chen was a professor of political science at Beijing University, locally known as Beida.
Mr. Tuo was his third-year student, a “typical teenager,” who spent his spare time listening to Hong Kong pop and dreamed of one day graduating into a government job to serve his country.
Leon Tom (his Christian name) poses for photos in Toronto, May 30, 2009. Twenty years ago he was a student at Beijing University and had a man die in his arms. Tom agreed to have his photo taken, on the condition that his identity is somewhat obscured. He is worried about a backlash from the pro-China community here, as well as consequences for his parents, who still live in Beijing.
On campus, the mood was already roiling. Students frequently took to the streets to vent frustration with the slow pace of China's political reform.
Escalating protests in 1987 triggered the fall of Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief, accused by other Politburo members of empathizing with the students calling for change.
At the time, Prof. Chen and Mr. Tuo kept their distance rather than risk their careers.
That changed when Mr. Hu died of a heart attack two years later and students poured into the streets to mourn.
Mr. Tuo, then 20, was one of the first to lay a white paper wreath at the foot of the Monument to the People's Heroes. Prof. Chen, then 35, visited the square between classes to advise his students as tensions grew.
At one point, he intervened to pull three of his students off their knees after they went to deliver a petition to Premier Li Peng and were rebuffed.
“That was the moment for me that it became something bigger,” recalled Mr. Tuo, dressed in jeans and a khaki jacket and blinking back tears in an east end Toronto coffee shop last week.
“We had been taught that students are the key to the country. Why were we being ignored?” he asked.
The Beida faculty's decision to remain uninvolved changed on April 26, when the state-run People's Daily newspaper ran an editorial that denounced the protesters as part of “a planned conspiracy” to sow disorder.
Angered, Prof. Chen and many of his colleagues joined the students in the square the next day for what would be one of the most triumphant moments of that spectacular spring – hundreds of thousands of protesters jamming the city's main boulevards in a peaceful show of defiance.
“Maybe there has been no demonstration of this kind in the history of the world,” Prof. Chen said, speaking Wednesday at a café near Renmin University in Beijing.
He and his fellow professors marched at the front, linking arms as if to protect the students behind them, including Mr. Tuo.
The students never returned to class. Prof. Chen joined the Tiananmen protests full-time, sleeping on the concrete ground for days on end.
“ I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened”
When his students announced they would go on a hunger strike, he bought them their last lunch. Mr. Tuo starved himself for 100 hours before he collapsed. Martial law was declared on May 19 and he returned to the square with the crowd.
On the morning of June 3, Prof. Chen left Tiananmen Square for the first time in more than 10 days. He wanted to go to see his parents – dyed-in-the-wool Communist Party members – to reassure them of his health and try to explain the protesters' actions.
When he arrived, he received news that a military vehicle had hit and killed three people near the square. Knowing how volatile the situation was, Prof. Chen headed back. On his way, the soft-spoken professor was kicked to the ground by a police officer when he tried to intervene in the arrest of a student.
Terrifying reports began pouring in from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “Some students came shouting, ‘They're killing They're using machine guns'“ he recalled.
“One of them showed me a wound on his hand, but I still didn't believe them because there was no reason for the army to shoot.”
Prof. Chen saw a line of soldiers kneeling and firing their rifles at random. He watched a young man nearby fall dead to the ground.
Mr. Tuo was standing on the sidelines. Four young men rushed toward him carrying another man, a teenager, limp and covered in blood.
“They gave this young man to me and I managed to stop a taxi and I took him in my arms to the hospital.”
“You just followed the blood to find the ER,” he said. “I was trying to find a bed for that young man. I could not even find a place on the floor. People were lying on the floor. I was not quite sure if they were dead or alive but you could hear the people crying, screaming for help and out of pain.”
The man in Mr. Tuo's arms was already dead. “It was my first time to be so close to a dead person and I was 20. I dare not touch him. I just hold his hand. … You could really feel a life just perish. I could feel his hands getting hard, getting cold. It's so real, it's so real. Even then, the blood still drip down. He died, and the blood still drip down. I do remember his face, even now.”
Mr. Tuo spent the night in the hospital, hoping to find the dead man's family. They never came. He returned to the square, where Prof. Chen had returned with thousands of others in a final show of defiance.
Shortly after midnight, loudspeakers around the city began blaring warnings for citizens to stay indoors or suffer the consequences. At 4 a.m., floodlights on the square suddenly switched on and soldiers came pouring out of the adjacent buildings.
“We weren't heroes, we were scared of death. But I had to be there because my students were there,” Prof. Chen said.
Eventually, the students agreed to withdraw peacefully from the square. But as they marched home in defeat along Changan Avenue, Prof. Chen saw seven people crushed to death under a tank.
“I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened,” he said.
Life returned to normal, at least on the surface. Mr. Tuo returned to The Beijing Children's Hospital every day for a week. A picture of the dead man's face was posted on the wall with a dozen anonymous others.
His body was never claimed, and was later collected by the city for disposal. “I assume his family will never know how he died or where he is,” Mr. Tuo says.
Prof. Chen was called in for interrogation a month later. University officials offered him a deal: Sign a statement that he regretted opposing the Communist Party and he could resume his teaching post.
Nearly all of his colleagues signed the bogus confessions to save their careers. Prof. Chen refused. When Mr. Tuo returned to class that October, Prof. Chen had already been purged.
The students were ordered to write essays denouncing the protesters, stating that the crackdown never happened.
Mr. Tuo complied, graduated, and took a marketing job with Sony. He never spoke of Tiananmen Square, but decided to quit China for Canada a few years later: “I could never feel at home after what happened,” he said.
A few years ago, in the lobby of a downtown Toronto hotel, he ran into his former teacher. More than 15 years had passed. He looked exactly the same.
Prof. Chen was a nightshift housekeeper. Mr. Tuo wept: “He was someone who had shared the most important days of my life.”
After he left China, Prof. Chen had earned a PhD in political science and a Master's degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. He couldn't find work, so when his student visa expired – he refused to seek refugee status in the United States – he decided to try his luck in Canada, settling with his wife in North York, juggling temporary jobs to make ends meet.
He had two children, and his entire family held Canadian citizenship, but the struggle to settle in Canada took its toll.
“The biggest difficulty in Canada is that it is hard for people to find jobs in their profession, not just for me, but for all immigrants,” he said.
Mr. Tuo also struggled, but in different ways. He found work as a journalist at the Toronto bureau of Sing Tao, a Chinese newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong.
For 20 years, he hid his involvement in the Tiananmen protests, fearing the powerful pro-China community in Canada would disown him, or that his family in Beijing would be targeted.
Prof. Chen also was silent. The only way he was able to escape the memories of June 4 was, in some ways, by returning to China.
His prime motivation for moving back was for his children to be educated in a more competitive environment.
“I don't think they can compete with Chinese children who study 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Prof. Chen said, laughing.
Teaching again, this time at a private school, he marvels at how much has changed – at least on the surface.
“Twenty years ago, we couldn't sit here and drink coffee in a café like this,” he said, sitting at an Italian-style café in the same neighbourhood as Beijing University.
The professor is, at heart, still the dissident who stood shoulder to shoulder with his students 20 years ago. He rails against how students today lack the ideals of a generation ago, and challenges the government's assertion that the Tiananmen crackdown, messy as it was, has somehow paved the way for two decades of runaway economic growth.
“You cannot draw the conclusion that from the crackdown, we got faster economic growth. Maybe with more political reforms we would have an even better situation. The ends cannot justify the means,” he says.
However, his days of trying to change China are over. He may live in Beijing at the moment, but he gave up his Chinese passport years ago and considers himself a Canadian now.
Meanwhile in Toronto, his former student, Mr. Tuo, remains a haunted man. His feelings are more acute and complex than friends and relatives who remained in China, he says, as if frozen in time.
“I cannot enjoy the summer until June 4. I am amazed to find out that the emotional impact is still there and is still devastating,” he said.
The collective amnesia of China – and the West
Forget about June 4, 1989, the Chinese were told, and you will prosper. We took the deal, too
Charles Foran
From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009 12:20AM EDT
In the spring of 1989, my wife and I were teaching at a college in east Beijing. On April 15, a reform-minded Communist Party leader passed away unexpectedly. His death brought students from various schools to Tiananmen Square, the traditional venue for mourning high officials. When the students decided to stay on the square, a protest was born. By early May, with classes suspended, we were riding bikes into the city to observe the demonstrations.
Early on, the mood of the democracy movement, as it came to be called, was serious but festive. Initiated mostly by undergraduates whose demands ranged from ending state corruption to better cafeteria food, it was soon broadened by the involvement of groups from all walks of Chinese life. Activists knew the moment was special and knew the world was watching.
They sensed this wider interest, in part, because they were now allowed to be interested in the world again. In the 1980s, elements inside China wanted to open up the country. To do this, they needed exposure to fresh ideas that could be adapted. As such, they encouraged their “intellectuals” to think a little outside the party box.
Older intellectuals brought Cultural Revolution memories to their embrace of the era's modest reform agenda. Younger ones tended to be more innocent. When a film-teacher friend biked past me during the first days of the protest, I jokingly asked what he was rebelling against. “Whaddya got?” he answered, channelling Marlon Brando in The Wild One .
Four weeks later, with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and hunger strikes, the million-person marches and Goddess of Democracy statue all serving to enrage the government beyond any point of safe return, martial law was declared. One evening, a student announced that she had spent her day outside the leadership compound, shouting to the soldiers guarding the entrance: “The People's Army doesn't shoot the people” To us, she added a nagging doubt: “Do they?”
They did. Starting on the night of June 3 and into the morning of June 4, soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square and the streets around it. Several hundred Beijingers, and a handful of students, died, with many more arrested and imprisoned. Conservative party factions rid themselves of the main reformer in their midst: general secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged and placed under house arrest. “Your enthusiasm for democracy and the rule of law,” Mr. Zhao had assured protesters, “for the struggle against corruption and for furthering reform is very valuable.”
That's what happened on June 4 in Beijing.
Except it didn't happen that way. On June 9, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping issued the official version. “A handful of people first staged turmoil, which later developed into a counter-revolutionary rebellion. Their aim was to overthrow the Communist Party, topple the socialist system, and establish a bourgeois republic.”
My wife and I had been asked to leave the college four days after the Tiananmen Square massacre. We returned to our teaching positions the following January to discover just how successful Mr. Deng had been at distorting public history: There had been no killings in the square. There had been only a scattering of necessary violence around the city. The People's Liberation Army had saved China from Black Hand agents serving foreign interests.
In subsequent years, efforts were made at encoding this revision in the collective DNA. The party offered the population a deal: denial of a murky past in exchange for a bright future. Forget June 4, and you may prosper. No surprise, most Chinese, accustomed to wild reality swings and guessing the consequences of refusing the deal, went along.
In short, China suppressed the events of spring 1989 for its own reasons. Never mind the crushing of spirits of a generation of its brightest young people. Never mind the discrediting of artistic and intellectual inquiry birthed in the 1980s, forays into a culture's deepest conscious and unconscious impulses.
Never mind, either, how differently the country might have emerged as a global power had a freer media and more confident, questioning populace been present to balance other forces. Contrary to Mr. Deng's assertions, a ragged reform movement, most of its agitators barely old enough to shave, had posed no real threat to stability. China's emergence from Maoism would have proceeded apace.
Instead, totalitarian governance asserted itself in the usual fashion: a cautionary boot to the face, followed by the erasure of any inconvenient complexities. “An internal Chinese matter,” as officials like to say when brushing off international criticism.
No less distressing has been the decision by the West to validate this dismal treatment of reality. After a little post-Tiananmen Square wrist-slapping, it was decided that China's potential, China's labour force and, more recently, China's markets and cash reserves made it prudent that we, too, see the democracy movement as having been a mistake, even an aberration.
To help us with our view, we have adopted notions of “incrementalism,” of the nation's slow, steady progress in treating its citizens decently. We've decided to be pragmatic. “Get over it,” was one recent summary of the correct attitude. Anyways, we can't change China, can we? No more than those foolish, if brave, students could way back in 1989.
One problem persists in this mutual denial. As I've discovered during visits to mainland China over the years, many individuals have looked to the West to validate and support their own struggles for rights and reforms and basic rule of law. They assumed we'd be on their side. After all, most of us enjoy these privileges. We even make noises about demanding reluctant nations live up to universal standards, or else. But not with China. China, we have concluded, is different. Different human rights for, apparently, different humans.
Our moral relativism has done more than hurt reformers' feelings. The deeper legacy of June 4 has been the enshrinement in the West of a policy of small-scale - specific to specific people - betrayals of Chinese citizens in pursuit of a generalized, at-a-later-date support of their humanity.
Round up perceived dissidents on the eve of the Olympics, and we'll focus on the glittering opening ceremonies. Arrest signatories of a human-rights document and we may express mild disappointment. Or how about this very recent outrage: the harassing and detaining of the grieving parents of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake?
Each time the Chinese government makes plain its scorn for its own people, a scorn that shows no signs of being moderated or even chastened by the “soft” pressure we believe we are applying, June 4 lives as a reminder of the various betrayals that have left so many Chinese so vulnerable, and without much sense that the rest of the world cares.
A year ago, publishers hustled to release a novel to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Ma Jian's Beijing Coma used an audacious metaphor to explore the fate of the individual in China. A student protester, shot in the head by a soldier on June 4, has lain in a coma ever since. He is able to hear, smell and remember, but not to see, speak or respond.
Globe editorials
Economic leap, political freeze
20 years after the pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square, the 'People's Republic,' like all authoritarian governments, remains afraid of the people
From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009 12:06AM EDT
China closed the gates to Twitter and other Internet services yesterday so that its people could not reflect on Tiananmen Square, 20 years after the country's democratic moment and the subsequent military crackdown. Officially, China forgets that the people stirred. And it tries to enforce forgetfulness by shutting Twitter down on the anniversary. The “People's Republic,” like all authoritarian governments, remains afraid of the people.
This is the paradox of modern China. As a rapidly advancing economy it relies on information flow, on education, creativity, innovation. But then people ask questions, demand accountability and independent courts, insist on learning the truth about their history. What China needs economically it will not tolerate politically.
“ If even a seemingly impregnable regime remains frightened, 20 years after pro-democracy protests, it must believe that the people bestirred are a powerful force”
China has made enormous progress on nearly every front since June 4, 1989, except those related to political freedom. The country held last summer's Olympic Games, a testament to its global heft. Its economy is six times the size it was then (adjusted for inflation). Its young population is becoming well educated and cosmopolitan. Vast, ultramodern cities have sprung up. While inequities have grown, the standard of living in the cities has leaped ahead.
But China is still a one-party state opposed to political reform. The regime still uses torture and chokes off religious freedom. It still represses sovereign Tibet, jails lawyers and dissidents, and stifles dissent. In some ways the country allows more space for personal expression and diversity. It feels like a bigger, more comfortable cage, as one dissident puts it. But still a cage.
The Communist authorities in China made a fateful choice after the events at Tiananmen Square, in which more than a million peaceful pro-democracy protesters gathered in Beijing's centre, for weeks on end, until the army rolled in, killing hundreds, or perhaps thousands. They chose to unleash the market forces that would make the economy boom, believing that people would ignore the suffocating political climate in return for a higher standard of living. Since then, the Soviet empire, and the Soviet Union itself, have fallen; but the Chinese bargain has held. And young urbanites – the people who like to Tweet – know little about Tiananmen.
Forgetting is easier said than done in the Internet age, especially for a country that is as much a part of the global community as China. Blocking Twitter is an admission that the authorities feel vulnerable. Far from forgetting, they have a long memory. If even a seemingly impregnable regime remains frightened, 20 years after pro-democracy protests, it must believe that the people bestirred are a powerful force.
For nearly 600 pages, the reader shares the insides of his cranium. He relives his state-swaddled childhood and soul-crushing adolescence. He also delivers a passionate rendering of what the democracy movement had represented to its participants: an intimation of the challenges, and risks, of not only demanding certain liberties but of asserting the individual will, self-directed and free to make choices, wise or ill-advised.
The price the coma victim pays for his assertion is high. He wastes away in a Beijing apartment, harassed by officials for his counter-revolutionary crimes but otherwise forgotten. People stop visiting and, having accepted the “deal,” eventually stop remembering why he's even in such a woeful state. By the end, they are cannibalizing him for body parts.
The apartment building is torn down in order to build a bigger, better structure, with the coma victim still within, a ghost in the machine of history-free progress. Only the afflicted, Ma Jian suggests, can “see” how China replays patterns of oppression and amnesia; everyone else, healthy and alert, can't see much at all.
Beijing Coma appeared in the West, where Mr. Ma lives in exile in London, but not in China. State censorship ensures the Chinese can't read the novel that explains to them what occurred to their society and, perhaps, to their own souls, both on June 4, 1989, and in the two decades since. Westerners, of course, can read the book; they can also decide to remember what happened in Beijing 20 years ago and not be told, or tolerate, otherwise.
Charles Foran is the author of Sketches in Winter, an account of life in Beijing in 1989 and 1990. His latest book is the essay collection Join the Revolution, Comrade.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
W W Jackie Chan D?
As far as I am concerned, JC, you are what Mel Gibson is to the female cop in 2007. Dummy!
Jackie, use violence, not your mouth or your brain.
Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Pandering
Mark MacKinnon, today at 8:05 AM EDT
Mark MacKinnon, today at 8:05 AM EDT
Beijing – Jackie Chan, yes he of Rush Hour and Kung Fu Panda fame, has waded into the great debate over the political future of 1.3 billion people, telling a conference in south China that “we Chinese need to be controlled.”
Speaking Saturday to business leaders on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, Chan ranged well off the conference topic – “Tapping into Asia's Creative Industry Potential” – and opined that without control (ostensibly the sort currently provided by the Communist Party of China) the country would descend into chaos.“I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not,” he said in response to an audience question about censorship in the film industry. “If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”
Then came the kung fu master's coup de grace: “I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want.”Music to the ears of the government of Beijing, which has long been peddling the “we're the only thing holding this place together line,” and laughable nonsense to democrats in Hong Kong and Taipei, who seem to like their chaos just fine thank you. And all in time to mark 60 years since the Communists seized power in China and the Kuomintang in Taiwan went their own way.
It's worth noting that Chan, who was born in colonial-era Hong Kong and has made millions of dollars as a Hollywood film star, has never lived in the sort of repressive regime that he's advocating for his countrymen. As he proved by his comments this weekend, he obviously feels quite free to say whatever he wants.I wonder if our action star-cum-political scientist took the time to notice the reaction his comments garnered in this part of the world. While they were widely reported on and debated by the media in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there was no mention of them in the state-controlled mainland Chinese press.
Apparently, the government in Beijing thinks that even Jackie Chan shouldn't be free to just do what he wants.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Where's the love for Canada? - globe and mail
Where's the love for Canada?
Mark MacKinnon, March 19, 2009 at 6:44 PM EDT
The man in the bathtub is Lai Changxing. He's reading a newspaper that says “Canada Real Estate News” and “Job Service Centre.” This is how China's Southern Weekly newspaper – and many ordinary Chinese – envision life in Canada for China's most wanted man, someone accused by Beijing of heading a $10-billion smuggling empire before fleeing to Canada in 1999.
With press like this, it's hard to believe sometimes, but there was a time – barely a decade ago – when this country's leaders referred to Canada as China's “best friend in the world.”
That statement, made by then-Premier Zhu Rongji during one of those ballyhooed “Team Canada” business promotion trips of the Jean Chrétien era, was perhaps an overstatement made by a very polite host, but there was a bit of substance to it at the time. Canadian-Chinese friendship dates back to the fabled Norman Bethune's battlefield medical work during the Sino-Japanese war and has accelerated since 1970 when Canada recognized the People's Republic, two years before Richard Nixon dared travel to China. The Globe and Mail even played a role, opening the first Western newspaper office here in 1959, back when it was still called Peking. Most importantly, there are 1.4 million Canadians of Chinese descent.
The Chrétien era was arguably the warmest stretch to date, in part because Canada's 20th prime minister was personal friends with former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. In 2005, someone named Paul Martin took it a step further by signing a “strategic partnership” agreement with visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao and promising to double trade within 10 years.
It took less than four years for all that warmth to almost completely disappear. The Stephen Harper era has been catastrophic in terms of Ottawa-Beijing ties, to the point that Canada has become almost irrelevant here. (Charles Burton, who once served as a Canadian diplomat in China, wrote a devastating critique of what's wrong that's well worth a read. Or check out Colin Freeze's report that appeared in The Globe and Mail.
In a sentence that summarized much of what Mr. Burton laid out over 25 pages, the Canada-China Business council recently warned that “Canada, despite its historic ties to China, is not seizing all of the opportunities China affords to investors and businesses.”
The two biggest irritants were Canada's decision to award honourary citizenship to the Dalai Lama (which was a good idea) and Mr. Harper's decision to skip last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing (which wasn't).
When asked why he takes stands that fly in the face of Canada's business interests in the world's largest market, Mr. Harper claimed that he doesn't want to sacrifice “important Canadian values” to the “almighty dollar.” Fine. And if Mr. Harper was going around the world defending human rights anywhere they were in danger, his hard-line China policy might make sense. But given his government's unquestioning support of Israel during its recent assault on the Gaza Strip (to pick one example that I have some familiarity with), it's clear that he's not going to win a Nobel Peace Prize any time soon.
The problem Mr. Harper and his coterie have is they see the world as divided up into “good” countries (like the United States, Taiwan and Israel) and “bad ones” including China and much of the Muslim world. We take tough stands about Tiananmen Square and Tibet, but don't bat an eyelash at Guantanamo Bay or Gaza. If we had a consistent, moral foreign policy based on “Canadian principles,” the tough stand vis-à-vis Beijing would make sense. But we don't, and it doesn't.
The fact is that only the pro-Israel lobby spends more time and money on lobbying Canadian parliamentarians than pro-Taiwan groups. (Taiwan was the top destination for freebie trips by MPs in 2007, and second to Israel last year), and so here we are. And Canada's relationship with the world's next superpower is in tatters.
The truth is that we're in serious danger becoming a “bad” country in China's eyes as well. Our Prime Minister boycotted their coming-out party last summer, when even George W. Bush and Nicholas Sarkozy found ways to attend either the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics. We grant refuge to their most wanted man (albeit because the aforementioned Mr. Zhu repeatedly declared that Mr. Lai deserved to be executed, which is pretty much a death sentence in a country where courts usually do as their told). And we harangue them about domestic issues from across the ocean, rather than in quiet face-to-face talks where Mr. Harper speaking his mind might actually have some impact.
The good news is that there are some inside the Canadian government that get it. We're in the process of opening six new trade missions in China, which should finally give us a diplomatic and commercial presence here worthy of the world's third-biggest – and fastest-growing – economy. And, for better or for worse, Trade Minister Stockwell Day is planning a visit here next month.
That's all well and good. But the word I'm getting from various sources is that the “face” -conscious Chinese leadership is going to hold a grudge until Mr. Harper repents and makes a full-on official visit to Beijing. Mr. Harper has suggested that such a trip is on the horizon.
I hate to agree with the Toronto Star, but for the sake of Canada's interests, and reputation, in China, the sooner he gets here, the better.
Mark MacKinnon, March 19, 2009 at 6:44 PM EDT
The man in the bathtub is Lai Changxing. He's reading a newspaper that says “Canada Real Estate News” and “Job Service Centre.” This is how China's Southern Weekly newspaper – and many ordinary Chinese – envision life in Canada for China's most wanted man, someone accused by Beijing of heading a $10-billion smuggling empire before fleeing to Canada in 1999.
With press like this, it's hard to believe sometimes, but there was a time – barely a decade ago – when this country's leaders referred to Canada as China's “best friend in the world.”
That statement, made by then-Premier Zhu Rongji during one of those ballyhooed “Team Canada” business promotion trips of the Jean Chrétien era, was perhaps an overstatement made by a very polite host, but there was a bit of substance to it at the time. Canadian-Chinese friendship dates back to the fabled Norman Bethune's battlefield medical work during the Sino-Japanese war and has accelerated since 1970 when Canada recognized the People's Republic, two years before Richard Nixon dared travel to China. The Globe and Mail even played a role, opening the first Western newspaper office here in 1959, back when it was still called Peking. Most importantly, there are 1.4 million Canadians of Chinese descent.
The Chrétien era was arguably the warmest stretch to date, in part because Canada's 20th prime minister was personal friends with former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. In 2005, someone named Paul Martin took it a step further by signing a “strategic partnership” agreement with visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao and promising to double trade within 10 years.
It took less than four years for all that warmth to almost completely disappear. The Stephen Harper era has been catastrophic in terms of Ottawa-Beijing ties, to the point that Canada has become almost irrelevant here. (Charles Burton, who once served as a Canadian diplomat in China, wrote a devastating critique of what's wrong that's well worth a read. Or check out Colin Freeze's report that appeared in The Globe and Mail.
In a sentence that summarized much of what Mr. Burton laid out over 25 pages, the Canada-China Business council recently warned that “Canada, despite its historic ties to China, is not seizing all of the opportunities China affords to investors and businesses.”
The two biggest irritants were Canada's decision to award honourary citizenship to the Dalai Lama (which was a good idea) and Mr. Harper's decision to skip last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing (which wasn't).
When asked why he takes stands that fly in the face of Canada's business interests in the world's largest market, Mr. Harper claimed that he doesn't want to sacrifice “important Canadian values” to the “almighty dollar.” Fine. And if Mr. Harper was going around the world defending human rights anywhere they were in danger, his hard-line China policy might make sense. But given his government's unquestioning support of Israel during its recent assault on the Gaza Strip (to pick one example that I have some familiarity with), it's clear that he's not going to win a Nobel Peace Prize any time soon.
The problem Mr. Harper and his coterie have is they see the world as divided up into “good” countries (like the United States, Taiwan and Israel) and “bad ones” including China and much of the Muslim world. We take tough stands about Tiananmen Square and Tibet, but don't bat an eyelash at Guantanamo Bay or Gaza. If we had a consistent, moral foreign policy based on “Canadian principles,” the tough stand vis-à-vis Beijing would make sense. But we don't, and it doesn't.
The fact is that only the pro-Israel lobby spends more time and money on lobbying Canadian parliamentarians than pro-Taiwan groups. (Taiwan was the top destination for freebie trips by MPs in 2007, and second to Israel last year), and so here we are. And Canada's relationship with the world's next superpower is in tatters.
The truth is that we're in serious danger becoming a “bad” country in China's eyes as well. Our Prime Minister boycotted their coming-out party last summer, when even George W. Bush and Nicholas Sarkozy found ways to attend either the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics. We grant refuge to their most wanted man (albeit because the aforementioned Mr. Zhu repeatedly declared that Mr. Lai deserved to be executed, which is pretty much a death sentence in a country where courts usually do as their told). And we harangue them about domestic issues from across the ocean, rather than in quiet face-to-face talks where Mr. Harper speaking his mind might actually have some impact.
The good news is that there are some inside the Canadian government that get it. We're in the process of opening six new trade missions in China, which should finally give us a diplomatic and commercial presence here worthy of the world's third-biggest – and fastest-growing – economy. And, for better or for worse, Trade Minister Stockwell Day is planning a visit here next month.
That's all well and good. But the word I'm getting from various sources is that the “face” -conscious Chinese leadership is going to hold a grudge until Mr. Harper repents and makes a full-on official visit to Beijing. Mr. Harper has suggested that such a trip is on the horizon.
I hate to agree with the Toronto Star, but for the sake of Canada's interests, and reputation, in China, the sooner he gets here, the better.
Freedom for both Chinese and Tibetans
Are Tibetans happy? There's no way of knowing
IAN BURUMA
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
April 11, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT
CHENGDU, CHINA — Last month saw the 50th anniversary of what Tibetan activists like to call Tibetan National Uprising Day, the day in 1959 when Tibetans in Lhasa revolted against Chinese Communist Party rule. The rebellion was crushed, the Dalai Lama fled to India and, for at least a decade, things became a lot worse: Many Tibetans - possibly more than a million - starved to death during Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, temples and monasteries were smashed during the Cultural Revolution, and a large number of people died in the violence.
Chinese officials are noticeably jumpy in this year of anniversaries (20 years after Tiananmen). Last month, I was in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, where many Tibetans live. Even foreign tourists who had no clue about the anniversary were stopped in the streets by policemen looking for signs of rebellion. The colourful Tibetan district was cordoned off; not only was it forbidden to take pictures, one couldn't even walk through.
The Chinese press, however, marked the anniversary with effusive articles describing Tibetan joy at being liberated from centuries of feudalism and slavery. If the China Daily is to be believed, "pre-Liberation" Tibet was a living hell, and Tibetans are now grateful to be citizens of the People's Republic of China.
Some probably are. Many are not. But if Chinese propaganda paints too dark a picture of the Tibetan past, Westerners who sympathize with the Tibetan cause are often too sentimental.
The personal charm of the Dalai Lama, combined with the Himalayan air of superior spiritual wisdom, has promoted a caricature of a mystical, wise and peace-loving people being crushed by a brutal empire. It was not for nothing, however, that quite a few educated Tibetans actually welcomed the Chinese Communists in 1950. The Buddhist clergy was seen, not without reason, as hidebound and oppressive. Chinese communism promised modernization.
And that is what China's government delivered in the past few decades. Lhasa, a sleepy, rather grubby backwater only 30 years ago, is now a city of huge public squares, shopping centres and high-rise buildings, connected to the rest of China with a high-speed railway line.
It is true that Tibetans, sparsely represented in local government, may not have benefited as much as the Han Chinese, whose presence in cities such as Lhasa as soldiers, traders and prostitutes is so overwhelming that people worry about the extinction of Tibetan culture, except as an official tourist attraction.
Still, there is no question that Tibetan towns are now more modern - in terms of electrification, education, hospitals and other public facilities - than they were before. This is one of the arguments used by the Chinese to justify Tibet's absorption into greater China.
This argument has a long history. Western (and Japanese) imperialists used it in the early 20th century to justify their "missions" to "civilize" or "modernize" the natives. Taiwan, under Japanese rule, was, in fact, more modern than other parts of China. And the British brought modern administration, as well as railways, universities and hospitals, to India.
But most Europeans and Japanese are no longer so convinced that modernization is sufficient validation of imperial rule. Modernization should be carried out by self-governing people, not imposed by foreign force. Tibetans, in other words, should be allowed to modernize themselves.
But the Chinese have another argument up their sleeve. They are justly proud of their country's ethnic diversity. Why should nationality be defined by language or ethnicity? If Tibetans should be allowed to break away from China, why not the Welsh from Britain, the Basques from Spain, the Kurds from Turkey, or the Kashmiris from India?
In some cases, the answer might be: Well, perhaps they should. But ethnicity as the main marker of nationality is a vague and dangerous concept, not least because it leaves all minorities out in the cold.
So are people wrong to support the Tibetan cause? Should we dismiss it as sentimental nonsense? Not necessarily. The issue is not so much Tibetan culture or spirituality or even national independence, but political consent.
In this respect, the Tibetans are no worse off than other citizens of China. Historic monuments are being bulldozed everywhere in China in the name of development. Culture is being sterilized and homogenized in all Chinese cities, not just in Tibet. No Chinese citizen can vote the ruling party out of power.
The problem, then, is politics. The Chinese government says Tibetans are happy. But without a free press and the right to vote, there is no way of knowing this. Sporadic acts of collective violence, followed by equally violent oppression, suggest that many are not.
Without democratic reform, there will be no end to this cycle, for violence is the typical expression of people without free speech. This is true not only for Tibet but also for the rest of China. Tibetans will be free only when all Chinese are free. In that sense, all citizens of China hang together.
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. His latest book is The China Lover.
IAN BURUMA
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
April 11, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT
CHENGDU, CHINA — Last month saw the 50th anniversary of what Tibetan activists like to call Tibetan National Uprising Day, the day in 1959 when Tibetans in Lhasa revolted against Chinese Communist Party rule. The rebellion was crushed, the Dalai Lama fled to India and, for at least a decade, things became a lot worse: Many Tibetans - possibly more than a million - starved to death during Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, temples and monasteries were smashed during the Cultural Revolution, and a large number of people died in the violence.
Chinese officials are noticeably jumpy in this year of anniversaries (20 years after Tiananmen). Last month, I was in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, where many Tibetans live. Even foreign tourists who had no clue about the anniversary were stopped in the streets by policemen looking for signs of rebellion. The colourful Tibetan district was cordoned off; not only was it forbidden to take pictures, one couldn't even walk through.
The Chinese press, however, marked the anniversary with effusive articles describing Tibetan joy at being liberated from centuries of feudalism and slavery. If the China Daily is to be believed, "pre-Liberation" Tibet was a living hell, and Tibetans are now grateful to be citizens of the People's Republic of China.
Some probably are. Many are not. But if Chinese propaganda paints too dark a picture of the Tibetan past, Westerners who sympathize with the Tibetan cause are often too sentimental.
The personal charm of the Dalai Lama, combined with the Himalayan air of superior spiritual wisdom, has promoted a caricature of a mystical, wise and peace-loving people being crushed by a brutal empire. It was not for nothing, however, that quite a few educated Tibetans actually welcomed the Chinese Communists in 1950. The Buddhist clergy was seen, not without reason, as hidebound and oppressive. Chinese communism promised modernization.
And that is what China's government delivered in the past few decades. Lhasa, a sleepy, rather grubby backwater only 30 years ago, is now a city of huge public squares, shopping centres and high-rise buildings, connected to the rest of China with a high-speed railway line.
It is true that Tibetans, sparsely represented in local government, may not have benefited as much as the Han Chinese, whose presence in cities such as Lhasa as soldiers, traders and prostitutes is so overwhelming that people worry about the extinction of Tibetan culture, except as an official tourist attraction.
Still, there is no question that Tibetan towns are now more modern - in terms of electrification, education, hospitals and other public facilities - than they were before. This is one of the arguments used by the Chinese to justify Tibet's absorption into greater China.
This argument has a long history. Western (and Japanese) imperialists used it in the early 20th century to justify their "missions" to "civilize" or "modernize" the natives. Taiwan, under Japanese rule, was, in fact, more modern than other parts of China. And the British brought modern administration, as well as railways, universities and hospitals, to India.
But most Europeans and Japanese are no longer so convinced that modernization is sufficient validation of imperial rule. Modernization should be carried out by self-governing people, not imposed by foreign force. Tibetans, in other words, should be allowed to modernize themselves.
But the Chinese have another argument up their sleeve. They are justly proud of their country's ethnic diversity. Why should nationality be defined by language or ethnicity? If Tibetans should be allowed to break away from China, why not the Welsh from Britain, the Basques from Spain, the Kurds from Turkey, or the Kashmiris from India?
In some cases, the answer might be: Well, perhaps they should. But ethnicity as the main marker of nationality is a vague and dangerous concept, not least because it leaves all minorities out in the cold.
So are people wrong to support the Tibetan cause? Should we dismiss it as sentimental nonsense? Not necessarily. The issue is not so much Tibetan culture or spirituality or even national independence, but political consent.
In this respect, the Tibetans are no worse off than other citizens of China. Historic monuments are being bulldozed everywhere in China in the name of development. Culture is being sterilized and homogenized in all Chinese cities, not just in Tibet. No Chinese citizen can vote the ruling party out of power.
The problem, then, is politics. The Chinese government says Tibetans are happy. But without a free press and the right to vote, there is no way of knowing this. Sporadic acts of collective violence, followed by equally violent oppression, suggest that many are not.
Without democratic reform, there will be no end to this cycle, for violence is the typical expression of people without free speech. This is true not only for Tibet but also for the rest of China. Tibetans will be free only when all Chinese are free. In that sense, all citizens of China hang together.
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. His latest book is The China Lover.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
The movement - grassroots style
The Islamic movement that just won't die
PATRICK MARTIN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
January 3, 2009 at 12:19 AM EST
HEBRON, WEST BANK — On Monday, as Israeli bombs rained down on Gaza, a group of 10 Egyptian surgeons made their way across the frontier into the embattled Palestinian strip. They came through the infamous tunnels that have served as a supply route to Gaza from Egypt, even as Israel began shelling the passageways.
“We came to help our brothers in Gaza,” said Abu Abdullah, a doctor from Cairo who declined to give his full, proper name. The 10, followers of the Muslim Brotherhood that dominates Egypt's medical and other professions, say their political views are not what's important. “We came as professionals,” Abu Abdullah said, “to assist people who are part of the larger Arab nation.”
“Since we came,” he said, “we have not stopped working. It's non-stop surgery.”
The commitment of people such as these is just one of the reasons why the bloody and battered Hamas movement will live to fight another day.
After one week and more than 500 Israeli Air Force sorties against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed, 2,000 injured, and nearly every instrument of the Hamas administration obliterated. But, as Israel's own leadership acknowledges, even with a powerful ground invasion that could come at any time, the movement that was born of the resistance to Israeli occupation and rose to infamy through suicide bombings and other terrorist tactics, just won't die.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas is an acronym from the Arabic) was founded in late 1987, at the start of the first modern Palestinian uprising, or intifada. The group grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood that took root when Egypt dominated the area. Even Israel supported the Brotherhood in the 1970s and 80s, viewing the social movement as a benign alternative to the violent Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. In the intifada, Hamas's dedicated young activists attracted many followers and it began to rival the PLO for political influence.
For 21 years, Hamas has endured imprisonment, assassinations, expulsion, boycott and siege, and it has grown in strength through it all. It has practised rock-throwing, drive-by shooting, kidnapping, suicide bombing and, most recently, rocket attacks. It won the only multiparty election in Palestinian history in 2006 and, when it failed to work out a power-sharing arrangement with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, it defeated Mr. Abbas's forces in a brutal campaign for control of the Gaza Strip.
While Hamas began in the Gaza Strip, it also flourished, to a lesser degree, in the West Bank, particularly in the more religious, southern city of Hebron.
At the Al-Haras mosque in Hebron, a dozen men sat around an electric heater just before midafternoon prayers on Thursday. They were keen to talk about the heroics and the future of the Hamas movement they support.
Five years ago, in one of the most gruesome attacks in the 2000-2005 intifada, the imam of the mosque, Raed Abdul-Hamid Misq, blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 Israelis, including seven children, as they returned from praying at the Western Wall in the Old City. The father of two young children, Mr. Misq was reported to be a close friend of a leader of another movement, Islamic Jihad, who had been killed by Israeli forces a few days before.
“It's not important how many people are killed,” said Arif Dweik, 51. “The people of Gaza are strong believers in God, and you can't erase their belief with tanks or planes.”
Mr. Dweik is a cousin of Aziz Dweik, also a member of this mosque and the political leader of Hamas in the West Bank. He was elected Speaker of the Palestinian legislature following the 2006 election, but was jailed by Israel for being a member of a subversive movement.
“Hamas will survive this battle,” Mr. Dweik said.
As the men spoke, news emerged that Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas leader had been killed by a bomb in Gaza. Could the movement survive the loss of all its leaders?
“It doesn't matter who dies,” said Adnan al-Qawasmeh, 29, the nephew of the late leader of Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, who was killed by Israeli forces four years ago. “There will be others to take their places, just as others took the place of Prophet Mohammed when he died, and Islam became even stronger.”
“This is the strength of Hamas,” said Mohammed Asa'd Ewaiwi, speaking in a nearby coffee house. “What distinguishes it from other movements is that it has leadership across the generations.”
“Compare that to Fatah,” said Mr. Ewaiwi, a political science professor at Al-Quds Open University. “Look what happened when Arafat died. There was chaos, and very weak leadership.”
The other great strength of Hamas, say Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, two Israeli academics who authored the book The Palestinian Hamas, is that it is more than just a militant or terrorist movement. “Contrary to this description, it is essentially a social movement,” they write. “As such, Hamas has directed its energies and resources primarily toward providing services to the community, especially responding to its immediate hardships and concerns.”
“The common people constitute its main stronghold,” they say.
Indeed, Islamic movements in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood have proliferated across the Middle East in recent years, largely answering the call from people who are unrepresented in less than democratic situations.
In Egypt, where the movement was founded 80 years ago, the Brotherhood is the main opposition to the Mubarak administration, despite being banned from running for office. It governs many of the country's labour and professional syndicates and runs many health services. In Algeria, only a military coup kept the Islamic Salvation Front from winning parliamentary election, and in Turkey a moderate Islamic movement now forms the government. Islamic movements have been part of government in both Lebanon and Jordan, and are represented in Israel's Knesset.
Only in Syria has the Muslim Brotherhood been stamped out, literally. In 1982, when the Brotherhood began to challenge the regime of Hafez Assad, Syrian troops were ordered to shell the group's stronghold in the city of Hama. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed and buried when a large portion of the city was bulldozed and flattened.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to brutal actions such as this as “playing by Hama rules.”
Israel's bombardment of Gaza has been extraordinarily harsh, but it's still nothing like Hama rules.
Israel can't play by such rules, says Mark Heller, principal research associate of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University – which is why it's so difficult to deal with a non-state actor such as Hamas.
And that is why Israeli leaders have concluded they can't wipe out Hamas even if they wanted to.
“We just want them to change their behaviour,” said a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Can they change?
“Yes,” Prof. Ewaiwi says. “Hamas is the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, and one of the reasons for its great endurance is its realistic, pragmatic approach.”
“Hamas will adapt to circumstances,” he said.
They have in the past. About 2005-06, for example, it dawned on Hamas leaders that the group's suicide bombing campaign was not winning them international support and they largely dropped it as a tactic, replacing it with other tactics, such as rocket attacks.
Interestingly, when Israel launched its overpowering assault on Hamas last Saturday, many thought the group would revert to its old tactic. As of this writing it hasn't, and Abduljaber Fuqahaa, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, thinks it won't.
“They don't want to do this because they want the world to help Hamas and the Palestinian people. And they know that if they send suicide bombers, the world would turn against them.”
Prof. Ewaiwi thinks Hamas will be willing to agree to a new ceasefire with Israel in the short term and, more than that, would be willing to agree to a very long-term truce.
“If Israel pulls back to the 1967 borders and addresses the refugee issue, yes, I believe Hamas would agree to such a truce.”
Indeed, that's what Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said in an interview in Gaza three weeks ago, with one caveat.
“Hamas accepts having the '67 borders for a [Palestinian] state, but without recognition of Israel,” Dr. Zahar said. “We can reach with them a state of quiet, but we will never recognize Israel – never.”
To recognize Israel, he explained, would be to “accept the Israeli crimes, its aggression and occupation.”
At the Al-Haras mosque in Hebron, Mr. al-Qawasmeh fingered his amber prayer beads and noted that “since 1924, when the [Islamic] caliphate was ended, the West has enjoyed the comfort” of the absence of Islam's influence.
“Only in the last few years has Islam posed a threat to the West and others,” he said, “and only now have they begun to realize they will have to learn to live with us again.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090103.wgaza03/BNStory/International/home
PATRICK MARTIN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
January 3, 2009 at 12:19 AM EST
HEBRON, WEST BANK — On Monday, as Israeli bombs rained down on Gaza, a group of 10 Egyptian surgeons made their way across the frontier into the embattled Palestinian strip. They came through the infamous tunnels that have served as a supply route to Gaza from Egypt, even as Israel began shelling the passageways.
“We came to help our brothers in Gaza,” said Abu Abdullah, a doctor from Cairo who declined to give his full, proper name. The 10, followers of the Muslim Brotherhood that dominates Egypt's medical and other professions, say their political views are not what's important. “We came as professionals,” Abu Abdullah said, “to assist people who are part of the larger Arab nation.”
“Since we came,” he said, “we have not stopped working. It's non-stop surgery.”
The commitment of people such as these is just one of the reasons why the bloody and battered Hamas movement will live to fight another day.
After one week and more than 500 Israeli Air Force sorties against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed, 2,000 injured, and nearly every instrument of the Hamas administration obliterated. But, as Israel's own leadership acknowledges, even with a powerful ground invasion that could come at any time, the movement that was born of the resistance to Israeli occupation and rose to infamy through suicide bombings and other terrorist tactics, just won't die.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas is an acronym from the Arabic) was founded in late 1987, at the start of the first modern Palestinian uprising, or intifada. The group grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood that took root when Egypt dominated the area. Even Israel supported the Brotherhood in the 1970s and 80s, viewing the social movement as a benign alternative to the violent Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. In the intifada, Hamas's dedicated young activists attracted many followers and it began to rival the PLO for political influence.
For 21 years, Hamas has endured imprisonment, assassinations, expulsion, boycott and siege, and it has grown in strength through it all. It has practised rock-throwing, drive-by shooting, kidnapping, suicide bombing and, most recently, rocket attacks. It won the only multiparty election in Palestinian history in 2006 and, when it failed to work out a power-sharing arrangement with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, it defeated Mr. Abbas's forces in a brutal campaign for control of the Gaza Strip.
While Hamas began in the Gaza Strip, it also flourished, to a lesser degree, in the West Bank, particularly in the more religious, southern city of Hebron.
At the Al-Haras mosque in Hebron, a dozen men sat around an electric heater just before midafternoon prayers on Thursday. They were keen to talk about the heroics and the future of the Hamas movement they support.
Five years ago, in one of the most gruesome attacks in the 2000-2005 intifada, the imam of the mosque, Raed Abdul-Hamid Misq, blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 Israelis, including seven children, as they returned from praying at the Western Wall in the Old City. The father of two young children, Mr. Misq was reported to be a close friend of a leader of another movement, Islamic Jihad, who had been killed by Israeli forces a few days before.
“It's not important how many people are killed,” said Arif Dweik, 51. “The people of Gaza are strong believers in God, and you can't erase their belief with tanks or planes.”
Mr. Dweik is a cousin of Aziz Dweik, also a member of this mosque and the political leader of Hamas in the West Bank. He was elected Speaker of the Palestinian legislature following the 2006 election, but was jailed by Israel for being a member of a subversive movement.
“Hamas will survive this battle,” Mr. Dweik said.
As the men spoke, news emerged that Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas leader had been killed by a bomb in Gaza. Could the movement survive the loss of all its leaders?
“It doesn't matter who dies,” said Adnan al-Qawasmeh, 29, the nephew of the late leader of Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, who was killed by Israeli forces four years ago. “There will be others to take their places, just as others took the place of Prophet Mohammed when he died, and Islam became even stronger.”
“This is the strength of Hamas,” said Mohammed Asa'd Ewaiwi, speaking in a nearby coffee house. “What distinguishes it from other movements is that it has leadership across the generations.”
“Compare that to Fatah,” said Mr. Ewaiwi, a political science professor at Al-Quds Open University. “Look what happened when Arafat died. There was chaos, and very weak leadership.”
The other great strength of Hamas, say Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, two Israeli academics who authored the book The Palestinian Hamas, is that it is more than just a militant or terrorist movement. “Contrary to this description, it is essentially a social movement,” they write. “As such, Hamas has directed its energies and resources primarily toward providing services to the community, especially responding to its immediate hardships and concerns.”
“The common people constitute its main stronghold,” they say.
Indeed, Islamic movements in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood have proliferated across the Middle East in recent years, largely answering the call from people who are unrepresented in less than democratic situations.
In Egypt, where the movement was founded 80 years ago, the Brotherhood is the main opposition to the Mubarak administration, despite being banned from running for office. It governs many of the country's labour and professional syndicates and runs many health services. In Algeria, only a military coup kept the Islamic Salvation Front from winning parliamentary election, and in Turkey a moderate Islamic movement now forms the government. Islamic movements have been part of government in both Lebanon and Jordan, and are represented in Israel's Knesset.
Only in Syria has the Muslim Brotherhood been stamped out, literally. In 1982, when the Brotherhood began to challenge the regime of Hafez Assad, Syrian troops were ordered to shell the group's stronghold in the city of Hama. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed and buried when a large portion of the city was bulldozed and flattened.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to brutal actions such as this as “playing by Hama rules.”
Israel's bombardment of Gaza has been extraordinarily harsh, but it's still nothing like Hama rules.
Israel can't play by such rules, says Mark Heller, principal research associate of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University – which is why it's so difficult to deal with a non-state actor such as Hamas.
And that is why Israeli leaders have concluded they can't wipe out Hamas even if they wanted to.
“We just want them to change their behaviour,” said a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Can they change?
“Yes,” Prof. Ewaiwi says. “Hamas is the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, and one of the reasons for its great endurance is its realistic, pragmatic approach.”
“Hamas will adapt to circumstances,” he said.
They have in the past. About 2005-06, for example, it dawned on Hamas leaders that the group's suicide bombing campaign was not winning them international support and they largely dropped it as a tactic, replacing it with other tactics, such as rocket attacks.
Interestingly, when Israel launched its overpowering assault on Hamas last Saturday, many thought the group would revert to its old tactic. As of this writing it hasn't, and Abduljaber Fuqahaa, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, thinks it won't.
“They don't want to do this because they want the world to help Hamas and the Palestinian people. And they know that if they send suicide bombers, the world would turn against them.”
Prof. Ewaiwi thinks Hamas will be willing to agree to a new ceasefire with Israel in the short term and, more than that, would be willing to agree to a very long-term truce.
“If Israel pulls back to the 1967 borders and addresses the refugee issue, yes, I believe Hamas would agree to such a truce.”
Indeed, that's what Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said in an interview in Gaza three weeks ago, with one caveat.
“Hamas accepts having the '67 borders for a [Palestinian] state, but without recognition of Israel,” Dr. Zahar said. “We can reach with them a state of quiet, but we will never recognize Israel – never.”
To recognize Israel, he explained, would be to “accept the Israeli crimes, its aggression and occupation.”
At the Al-Haras mosque in Hebron, Mr. al-Qawasmeh fingered his amber prayer beads and noted that “since 1924, when the [Islamic] caliphate was ended, the West has enjoyed the comfort” of the absence of Islam's influence.
“Only in the last few years has Islam posed a threat to the West and others,” he said, “and only now have they begun to realize they will have to learn to live with us again.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090103.wgaza03/BNStory/International/home
PNG - China's newest corporation
Papua New Guinea and China's New Empire
As he completes nearly seven years as The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief, Geoffrey York says the most striking change is the boom in Chinese trade, aid and influence around the world, especially in places the West has neglected or rejected. For an in-depth look, he visits a $1.4-billion nickel and cobalt mine that a Chinese company has made spring from the wilderness in the Pacific – but not without serious conflicts
GEOFFREY YORK
Globe and Mail
January 2, 2009 at 9:21 PM EST
MADANG, Papua New Guinea — When Chinese engineers landed in Papua New Guinea in 2006 to inspect their latest mineral acquisition, they faced an arduous journey through the tropical wilderness. They drove over crumbling roads to the Ramu River, then found natives with dugout canoes to paddle them upstream. Next, they hired another team of locals with machetes to slash a rough trail for eight hours through the steamy jungle, dodging poisonous snakes and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
"It was terrible," recalls Wang Chun, the chief engineer. "You couldn't breathe."
Today, less than three years later, a series of small Chinatowns has emerged in the jungle — complete with Chinese food, Chinese satellite television channels and crews of Chinese migrant labourers living in cheap dormitory huts. Where once was wilderness, you find the workers of China Metallurgical Group Corp., toiling seven days a week and chattering about their families back home in Beijing and Sichuan.
It hasn't been easy. The state-owned mining company has dealt with violent clashes with local landowners, striking workers, attacks from the media and unfriendly police who arrested more than 200 Chinese technicians on charges of illegally entering the country. But today it is transforming the economy of Papua New Guinea. Its $1.4-billion nickel and cobalt mine (all figures U.S.), the biggest construction project in the country, will employ 4,000 people at its peak, adding at least 10 per cent to the national economy every year.
Already, its workers have built the country's longest bridge, eliminating the need for those canoes. They have built the country's biggest wharf. They have carved out a 25-kilometre access road in the mountains. And now they are working on a 135-kilometre pipeline to the company's new refinery on the coast.
This remote Pacific country is the latest outpost in the New Chinese Empire — a far-flung network of trade and investment that also generates political power.
In less than a decade, China has spun a web of strategic investments that stretches from Latin America to the former Soviet Union, from the remotest islands of the South Pacific to the huge oil fields of Angola and Sudan. In a range of resource-rich countries, China is diligently cultivating its interests.
It is winning political connections, gaining new markets and capturing vital resources. On some continents, China has matched — or even surpassed — the trading muscle of the traditional empire-builders of Europe and the United States.
China has become a presence in almost every country that has fallen off the mental maps of American and British geopolitical planners. This is how a superpower is born — one sphere of influence at a time.
'Walking out'
It would be naive to see this as normal capitalism. State-controlled Chinese companies obey a policy of "walking out" into the world and acquiring properties for the national interest — nickel and copper projects to feed China's voracious manufacturing sector, oil fields to fuel its cars and industry, logging projects to supply its furniture factories and coal and natural-gas projects to satisfy its energy needs.
It all has carefully calculated benefits to the Chinese state, which doesn't require short-term profits from these projects. And it is scarcely affected by the Western financial meltdown. Recessions and stock-market crashes are minor speed bumps on China's expressway to global power.
In my nearly seven years as The Globe and Mail's Beijing correspondent, this is the most striking phenomenon that I have witnessed. I have seen China's footprint in the oddest places around the world — a Russian border city that is now dominated by Chinese construction companies and market traders; entertainment palaces in Myanmar and Pyongyang built exclusively for the pleasure of Chinese visitors; a huge banner in the middle of Addis Ababa that proclaims: "Learn Chinese Now."
Western fears have focused on Africa, where Beijing has swiftly become a key player in the oil industry, snagging valuable energy deals and strategic mining concessions. China's trade with Africa has soared from a mere $2-billion in 1999 to an astonishing $74-billion in 2007, rivalling the United States for trade leadership in the continent. Chinese leaders have made dozens of trips there and have sent construction teams to build hospitals, clinics, highways, railways, universities, mines, hydro dams, housing compounds and presidential palaces.
Western diplomats in Ethiopia told me about the frustration of travelling to remote corners of the country, only to discover that a delegation from Beijing has just left a local official's office. "The Chinese are everywhere," one diplomat said.
The President of Senegal put it bluntly: "The Chinese are more competitive, less bureaucratic and more adept at business in Africa than their critics," Abdoulaye Wade wrote. "China's approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronizing post-colonial approach of European investors."
By 2010, China forecasts that its Africa trade will reach $100-billion, making it the continent's most important trading partner. China is already the biggest trading partner of oil-rich but authoritarian countries such as Sudan and Angola.
Within the past few days, a Chinese conglomerate announced one of the biggest investments China has ever made in Africa, a $2.6-billion stake in Liberia's main iron-ore mine.
China also has signed mining and energy deals reportedly worth $1.6-billion with Zimbabwe, undercutting the international sanctions against Robert Mugabe's regime. China helps keep his government afloat by investing heavily in Zimbabwean farming, in coal, diamond and gold mines and in tobacco factories.
"We look again to the East, where the sun rises, and no longer to the West, where it sets," Mr. Mugabe said recently.
In addition, China is competing openly with traditional Western donors by offering infrastructure and social services. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, China announced a $9-billion plan to build thousands of kilometres of railways and roads, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres, two hydro dams and two airports — all in exchange for access to lucrative copper and cobalt resources.
China has forgiven the debts of 32 African countries, and in 2006, it brought more than 40 African heads of state to a red-carpet summit in Beijing, the biggest such summit ever held outside Africa. Thousands of local motorists were ordered to stay home to keep the roads clear for the leaders. At the summit, China announced $5-billion in loans and credits for Africa, along with pledges to train 15,000 African professionals, to build dozens of hospitals and schools and to double development assistance by 2009.
"This 21st century is the century for China to lead the world," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has said. "And when you are leading the world, we want to be close behind you. When you are going to the moon, we don't want to be left behind."
Support from African countries has paved the way for China to win key votes at the United Nations and other international bodies, which helped it to gain the hosting rights for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and to neutralize the powers of the UN Human Rights Council, among other victories.
Meanwhile, Chinese investors also have grabbed control of some of the most highly visible Western brands, including the Thinkpad personal-computer business of IBM, the MG Rover motor company in Britain (maker of iconic MG sports cars) and the French parent company of the RCA television brand. Chinese concerns have made audacious bids for the huge Unocal oil and Maytag appliance companies and Canada's Noranda mining group.
As the global financial crisis deepens, Chinese state companies are increasingly seen as "white knights" — ready to step in to acquire companies that might otherwise fall into distress. When the Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley struggled this fall, China's wealthy CITIC group reportedly was considering a takeover bid.
Less than five years after creating the concept, China now supports 249 Confucius Institutes in 78 countries around the world — the equivalent of the British Council or Germany's Goethe Institute, to promote China's language and culture — advancing the cause of the country's "soft power" abroad. In the same time period, it has helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally: An estimated 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a second language around the world.
(China has been adept at using the education system to bolster its own political interests. During the wave of Tibetan protests in the country last spring, tens of thousands of Chinese students held demonstrations in support of the government in cities across Canada, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. Many were given transportation and logistical support from Chinese embassies.) China's military, too, is following the soft-power strategy: After decades of isolation from UN peacekeeping operations, China is now a highly active participant, having sent more than 10,000 peacekeepers to 18 missions in recent years. This week, Beijing dispatched three naval ships to the coast of Somalia on an unprecedented mission to fight piracy, and confirmed for the first time that it is "seriously considering" building an aircraft carrier for its navy — a dramatic increase in its ability to project power on the world stage.
But it is China's giant, state-owned multinational corporations that have been the most active in carving out new zones of influence.
In Latin America, Chinese trade has expanded from $13-billion in 2000 to more than $100-billion in 2007, and by a further 52 per cent in the first nine months of 2008. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made five recent visits to China to negotiate oil and weapons deals.
In the Middle East, a Chinese state-owned company was the beneficiary of the Iraqi government's first major oil-development deal since the fall of Saddam Hussein, which is worth $3.5-billion.
And China is discreetly expanding its presence in less-prominent regions, such as the Pacific nations, where its trade has been growing by an annual average of 27 per cent for the past five years. In Australia, for example, Aluminum Corp. of China (Chalco) has bought a minority stake in Rio Tinto, one of the world's biggest mining companies, and is planning a $2.4-billion bauxite mine — even bigger than the Ramu mine in Papua New Guinea.
When a superpower lands
PNG is a typical outpost of the new Chinese empire in that it is neglected by the traditional powers in Washington and Europe. With its vast reserves of minerals and virgin timber as well as substantial oil and natural gas, it is an obvious target — if the Chinese can navigate the hazards of a country with few roads, little electricity, few telephones, complex clan loyalties, more than 800 languages and an often-chaotic democratic system.
The country's forests are among the richest and most biodiverse in the world, but they are rapidly disappearing. Twelve years ago, China received only 0.5 per cent of its log exports. Today, more than 80 per cent of those logs — almost two million cubic metres annually — are shipped to China. Independent studies have concluded that most of this logging is illegal according to the country's own rules.
Israel Bewang, a forestry activist, sketches a cargo ship on a piece of paper to explain one of the tactics used to smuggle logs to China, according to his inside sources. "They seal the logs into the bottom of the ship and weld it shut," Mr. Bewang says. "The customs inspectors think it is just part of the ship. When it gets to China, they open it up and take out the logs."
Until recently, Papua New Guinea's mining sector was dominated by Australian, British and Canadian companies. But since the 1990s, China has been assiduously cultivating the PNG government, inviting its leaders on red-carpet trips to Beijing. When the Ramu nickel property came up for sale by its Australian owners in 2003, the government was happy to see China leap into the negotiations. And it rewarded the buyers with an unprecedented 10-year tax holiday.
In sleepy, seaside Madang, normally the haunt of German missionaries and Australian scuba divers, there is plenty of evidence that a superpower has arrived in town. A red Chinese banner flies on top of the tallest new building, its construction nearly completed. This is the headquarters of Ramu NiCo, the joint venture headed by China Metallurgical Group Corp., the majority owners of the nickel mine.
With a planned investment of $1.4-billion and an expected lifespan of 20 to 40 years, Ramu is one of the biggest mining projects China has ever attempted overseas. And China Metallurgical is determined to do it right.
"The significance of this project for Chinese companies is very huge," says Mr. Wang, the mine engineer, who is also its technical director. "This project will be the bible for Chinese mining companies going overseas. If we can develop a mine here, we can do it anywhere."
It got off to a clumsy start. PNG's Labour Minister, David Tibu, flew to the Ramu mine site for a surprise inspection in early 2007, just months before a national election. His findings were front-page news: He declared that the local workers were being treated as slaves. They were paid less than $3 a day and given tins of fish as compensation for overtime work. Their canteen was "not fit for pigs" and their toilets were shockingly bad.
"The Chinese developer does not seem to have any standards, and I will not allow my countrymen and women to be used as slaves," the minister said.
For the Chinese, it was a rough introduction to the intense scrutiny they would face in a democratic country, and they responded with the same savvy public-relations tactics that Western mining companies use: Ramu NiCo created a large community affairs department, staffed by Chinese officials and veteran local experts, and began spreading cash around liberally to local villages and landowners.
Invoking the Chinese concept of harmony (and the Beijing Olympics slogan), the company's official motto is: "One Ramu NiCo, One Community." In that spirit, it has given a 2.5-per-cent ownership stake in the mining venture to four landowner groups around the mine and refinery sites and has pledged millions of dollars to an astonishingly wide range of causes — health clinics, schools, churches, rugby and basketball teams, rice farmers, water pumps, new roads, job-training programs, local festivals and even a cocoa factory.
It has sent its locally hired engineers to language-and-culture training courses in China. It has handed out contracts to landowner groups. It is recruiting rice experts from China to help local farmers. It even has appointed a "Spiritual Awareness Officer" to talk to the churches.
"The Chinese are in a steep learning curve, and they've got quite a long way to go," says Paul Barker, head of a research institute in Port Moresby, the national capital. "They've had to answer questions here. They've learned that they can't just do it the way they did it in Africa or elsewhere."
'Kung-fu kicks'
But many villagers are still unhappy, and tensions have sometimes erupted into violence. In August, a Chinese security officer was badly injured in a struggle with protesting villagers near the nickel refinery site, about two hours by boat from Madang. Guards still roam around the site, protecting the workers from further attack by the landowners.
"The Chinese cut down our coconut trees and didn't give us much compensation," says Reuben Andonga, a village teacher and landowner who carries a slingshot to hunt birds in the surrounding jungle. "They removed our mountains and didn't pay us.
"They were supposed to help us develop, but we are still living in a primitive way. We still live in houses of grass and coconut leaves. We still get our light from hurricane lamps. They haven't given us any electricity or permanent houses."
Smoking a homemade tobacco cheroot, Mr. Andonga chuckles as he remembers the battle in August with a Chinese security official who was taking photos of the protesting landowners: "We forced him to come out of the gate, and then the boys rushed him and beat him a little. He tried to fight us with kung-fu kicks, but then he fell down and the people rushed him."
Police arrested 15 people and the villagers agreed to apologize to the Chinese company, handing over three chickens and a pile of vegetables in a tribal gesture of compensation.
The villagers admit that the refinery will actually provide some benefits, including the wharf and an improved access road, which will lower the cost of selling their dried coconut meat to city buyers. Yet they still distrust the Chinese.
"They are greedy, selfish people," says Yambel Uddy, a village magistrate near the refinery. "They are very tricky people. We don't need them."
The Ramu project has been plagued by a series of strikes by hundreds of local workers who say they are paid less than $75 a month, even though they are expected to work seven days a week.
"They don't let us go to church on Sunday," says Tom Imai, a welder at the refinery site. "So we just decided to go to church anyway. They got angry and deducted it from our pay."
Similar complaints are voiced by villagers near the newly constructed bridge over the Ramu River, who say they are denied the benefits that they were promised. "We go on strike, but they seem to hide away when we try to talk to them," says Gabriel Aragaina, a former worker at the mining site. "They tell us to go and talk to the Prime Minister."
Part of the problem is a language gap, since only a few of the Chinese miners can speak English or Pidgin, the two main languages here. But there is also a culture clash between two ways of life that seem alien to each other.
"The Chinese don't understand the value of the land to the people," says Ben Kedoga, a radio journalist in Madang.
"For us, the land is mother land, our life. We have a very close connection to the land. The Chinese have a system where everything is owned by the government, and the government tells you what to do. Their deal for the Ramu mine was done on a government-to-government basis.
"But, for us, 85 per cent of the country's land is owned by traditional landowners. When you tell a simple villager to talk to the Prime Minister — this is impossible."
24-hour clock
Surprisingly, the Chinese agree that they need a better understanding of the local way of life. "We're trying to educate our Chinese about the culture," says Mr. Wang, the engineer. "It's a lesson we have to learn. Everyone has to understand the importance of the land to the people here. Our first two years here were very difficult, and we had many cultural misunderstandings. But I feel that the past year has been better."
The disputes contributed to delays in Ramu's construction, putting it a year behind schedule, which indicates another sharp contrast between Chinese and Pacific culture. "The Chinese always finish their projects very quickly," Mr. Wang says. "We have a 12-hour shift in the daytime and a 12-hour shift at night. But we understand that that model won't work here."
Australian companies, he notes, owned the Ramu property for more than 40 years without any success in developing it. The Chinese have managed to build most of the mine in just three years, with completion scheduled for the end of next year — despite the abysmal state of the infrastructure, which has forced the Chinese to do many of the jobs that the government normally would handle.
"Compared to other mines in this country, it's been very fast," Mr. Wang says. "We don't take many holidays. We work night and day. The Chinese are fast learners, and eventually we are easy to get along with. But the people here are not familiar with China. We need time to establish trust and communications with the landowners. It takes time to harmonize our relations with the people."
Mr. Wang, 40, is the son of a geologist who volunteered to work in China's harsh northwestern desert region of Xinjiang at the height of the Maoist fervour. Now, like his father, he sees himself as a pioneer for China. "We are the young generation and we understand the international rules. If we don't follow the best world standards, China could suffer from the failure of this project. It would shut down opportunities for China in other parts of the world."
He knows that China has a poor reputation for industrial accidents and pollution. One of his biggest challenges is to convince the local population that the Ramu mine will not contaminate the environment. There is widespread concern over the company's plans for underwater disposal of the mine tailings in Astrolabe Bay, a gorgeous tropical sea with leaping dolphins and world-famous coral reefs.
The tailings will be dumped from a pipeline 150 metres below the surface of the sea, which the company says is deep enough to avoid damage to marine life. Many independent experts, such as the Australian non-governmental Mineral Policy Institute, are more skeptical, noting that this method of underwater disposal is essentially banned in Canada and the United States.
Another controversy is the Chinese company's failure to obtain legal work permits for many of its technicians and engineers.
In November, police arrested 213 Chinese employees of the Ramu mine for entering the country on improper permits. The company was hit with a $720,000 fine for breaching labour laws and blasted in the national media, which accused it of importing Chinese workers for jobs that locals could do.
Mr. Wang admits the violations, but he says the company had no choice — the skills it needs simply don't exist in Papua New Guinea, he says, and waiting for permits from the country's legendarily slow bureaucracy would have killed the mine's progress.
"To get a work permit can take six months to a year. We can't wait. We've borrowed a lot of money from the bank and we're paying interest on it every day. We need a fast track. If they don't improve the efficiency of the visas, we'll suffer again."
This controversy was part of a wider reaction to a Chinese influx. According to one report, about 300 Chinese people are entering PNG every week without proper immigration checks. "There's been a lot of illegal or semi-legal Chinese immigration," says Mr. Barker from the Port Moresby research group. "There seems to be a back door."
In cities such as Madang and Port Moresby, 20 to 50 per cent of the shops and fast-food outlets are owned by Chinese migrants. Behind the counter of Zhou Enterprises, a variety story in Madang, the owner is a migrant from China's Fujian province who has been in the country for five years. He says he doesn't like it here much, but he already owns five shops in the town, mostly selling cheap goods from China.
Another migrant from Fujian, 38-year-old David Lin, came to PNG five years ago. Now, he owns four fast-food restaurants and a supermarket in towns such as Mount Hagen and Kutubu in the Highlands region. "In China, you need a lot of money to start a business like a supermarket," he says. "Here, it's cheaper."
Maggie Wilson, a hotelier who is a veteran of more than 30 years in business in Mount Hagen, says the Chinese migrants are more entrepreneurial and pragmatic than their rivals. "They came to the Highlands when nobody else wanted to come," she says. "They're bringing in cheap affordable items and they employ people. We don't have the skills, or we're too lazy, so they do it."
She admits, however, that there is widespread resentment of the migrants because they are seen as taking away business opportunities from the locals.
A similar backlash has erupted in countries such as Zambia and South Africa, where unions and opposition leaders have accused Chinese investors of exploiting workers and forcing local producers out of business.
In the Pacific nations of Tonga and the Solomon Islands, such resentments have sparked violent riots, leaving many Chinese-owned shops looted or destroyed.
'Non-interference' policy
The rise of an unfamiliar new power always triggers volatile reactions. But that is not enough to stop it. The growth of Chinese investment continues, and now China is even moving into the provision of government-style services, a way of filling the vacuum in countries with weak states.
As it has done in Africa, China has begun providing development aid in PNG. It is sending medical teams to hospitals, giving students scholarships, building school dormitories, renovating a military hospital, inviting military officers on exchanges and, according to a Chinese report, providing "technical advice on the rehabilitation of prisoners" — an odd form of expertise for a police state to offer.
China insists that its foreign policy is based on "non-interference" — yet this policy has a strong political impact of its own. By providing aid and investment to authoritarian regimes, it has made it much easier for them to resist sanctions and stay in power.
In the Pacific, its money bolstered Fiji's junta after other governments pulled out in protest against the military coup. In Africa, its trade and investment has helped to ensure the survival of authoritarian governments, and Chinese state media have even criticized African democracies — blaming democracy for the tribal bloodshed in Kenya earlier this year, for instance.
But the experience in PNG shows that China can build up political capital with democratic governments too, even if their citizens are sometimes unhappy about it.
Back in the jungle along the Ramu River, village landowners are plotting their next move against the mining company. They admit that the Chinese-built bridge is a boon to their economy, connecting them to the rest of the country for the first time. Yet they insist they are not getting their promised compensation for the loss of trees and land.
"They never talk to us. They only bring in their bulldozers," says Peter Momeya, who says he lost valuable betel-nut trees to make room for the nickel mine.
Next month, the landowners are planning a new tactic: They will weld bars across the bridge to block it until their compensation demands are satisfied.
For the Chinese investors, the learning curve is about to take another steep jump.
Geoffrey York has been The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief since May, 2002. In 2009, he will begin reporting from Africa.
As he completes nearly seven years as The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief, Geoffrey York says the most striking change is the boom in Chinese trade, aid and influence around the world, especially in places the West has neglected or rejected. For an in-depth look, he visits a $1.4-billion nickel and cobalt mine that a Chinese company has made spring from the wilderness in the Pacific – but not without serious conflicts
GEOFFREY YORK
Globe and Mail
January 2, 2009 at 9:21 PM EST
MADANG, Papua New Guinea — When Chinese engineers landed in Papua New Guinea in 2006 to inspect their latest mineral acquisition, they faced an arduous journey through the tropical wilderness. They drove over crumbling roads to the Ramu River, then found natives with dugout canoes to paddle them upstream. Next, they hired another team of locals with machetes to slash a rough trail for eight hours through the steamy jungle, dodging poisonous snakes and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
"It was terrible," recalls Wang Chun, the chief engineer. "You couldn't breathe."
Today, less than three years later, a series of small Chinatowns has emerged in the jungle — complete with Chinese food, Chinese satellite television channels and crews of Chinese migrant labourers living in cheap dormitory huts. Where once was wilderness, you find the workers of China Metallurgical Group Corp., toiling seven days a week and chattering about their families back home in Beijing and Sichuan.
It hasn't been easy. The state-owned mining company has dealt with violent clashes with local landowners, striking workers, attacks from the media and unfriendly police who arrested more than 200 Chinese technicians on charges of illegally entering the country. But today it is transforming the economy of Papua New Guinea. Its $1.4-billion nickel and cobalt mine (all figures U.S.), the biggest construction project in the country, will employ 4,000 people at its peak, adding at least 10 per cent to the national economy every year.
Already, its workers have built the country's longest bridge, eliminating the need for those canoes. They have built the country's biggest wharf. They have carved out a 25-kilometre access road in the mountains. And now they are working on a 135-kilometre pipeline to the company's new refinery on the coast.
This remote Pacific country is the latest outpost in the New Chinese Empire — a far-flung network of trade and investment that also generates political power.
In less than a decade, China has spun a web of strategic investments that stretches from Latin America to the former Soviet Union, from the remotest islands of the South Pacific to the huge oil fields of Angola and Sudan. In a range of resource-rich countries, China is diligently cultivating its interests.
It is winning political connections, gaining new markets and capturing vital resources. On some continents, China has matched — or even surpassed — the trading muscle of the traditional empire-builders of Europe and the United States.
China has become a presence in almost every country that has fallen off the mental maps of American and British geopolitical planners. This is how a superpower is born — one sphere of influence at a time.
'Walking out'
It would be naive to see this as normal capitalism. State-controlled Chinese companies obey a policy of "walking out" into the world and acquiring properties for the national interest — nickel and copper projects to feed China's voracious manufacturing sector, oil fields to fuel its cars and industry, logging projects to supply its furniture factories and coal and natural-gas projects to satisfy its energy needs.
It all has carefully calculated benefits to the Chinese state, which doesn't require short-term profits from these projects. And it is scarcely affected by the Western financial meltdown. Recessions and stock-market crashes are minor speed bumps on China's expressway to global power.
In my nearly seven years as The Globe and Mail's Beijing correspondent, this is the most striking phenomenon that I have witnessed. I have seen China's footprint in the oddest places around the world — a Russian border city that is now dominated by Chinese construction companies and market traders; entertainment palaces in Myanmar and Pyongyang built exclusively for the pleasure of Chinese visitors; a huge banner in the middle of Addis Ababa that proclaims: "Learn Chinese Now."
Western fears have focused on Africa, where Beijing has swiftly become a key player in the oil industry, snagging valuable energy deals and strategic mining concessions. China's trade with Africa has soared from a mere $2-billion in 1999 to an astonishing $74-billion in 2007, rivalling the United States for trade leadership in the continent. Chinese leaders have made dozens of trips there and have sent construction teams to build hospitals, clinics, highways, railways, universities, mines, hydro dams, housing compounds and presidential palaces.
Western diplomats in Ethiopia told me about the frustration of travelling to remote corners of the country, only to discover that a delegation from Beijing has just left a local official's office. "The Chinese are everywhere," one diplomat said.
The President of Senegal put it bluntly: "The Chinese are more competitive, less bureaucratic and more adept at business in Africa than their critics," Abdoulaye Wade wrote. "China's approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronizing post-colonial approach of European investors."
By 2010, China forecasts that its Africa trade will reach $100-billion, making it the continent's most important trading partner. China is already the biggest trading partner of oil-rich but authoritarian countries such as Sudan and Angola.
Within the past few days, a Chinese conglomerate announced one of the biggest investments China has ever made in Africa, a $2.6-billion stake in Liberia's main iron-ore mine.
China also has signed mining and energy deals reportedly worth $1.6-billion with Zimbabwe, undercutting the international sanctions against Robert Mugabe's regime. China helps keep his government afloat by investing heavily in Zimbabwean farming, in coal, diamond and gold mines and in tobacco factories.
"We look again to the East, where the sun rises, and no longer to the West, where it sets," Mr. Mugabe said recently.
In addition, China is competing openly with traditional Western donors by offering infrastructure and social services. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, China announced a $9-billion plan to build thousands of kilometres of railways and roads, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres, two hydro dams and two airports — all in exchange for access to lucrative copper and cobalt resources.
China has forgiven the debts of 32 African countries, and in 2006, it brought more than 40 African heads of state to a red-carpet summit in Beijing, the biggest such summit ever held outside Africa. Thousands of local motorists were ordered to stay home to keep the roads clear for the leaders. At the summit, China announced $5-billion in loans and credits for Africa, along with pledges to train 15,000 African professionals, to build dozens of hospitals and schools and to double development assistance by 2009.
"This 21st century is the century for China to lead the world," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has said. "And when you are leading the world, we want to be close behind you. When you are going to the moon, we don't want to be left behind."
Support from African countries has paved the way for China to win key votes at the United Nations and other international bodies, which helped it to gain the hosting rights for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and to neutralize the powers of the UN Human Rights Council, among other victories.
Meanwhile, Chinese investors also have grabbed control of some of the most highly visible Western brands, including the Thinkpad personal-computer business of IBM, the MG Rover motor company in Britain (maker of iconic MG sports cars) and the French parent company of the RCA television brand. Chinese concerns have made audacious bids for the huge Unocal oil and Maytag appliance companies and Canada's Noranda mining group.
As the global financial crisis deepens, Chinese state companies are increasingly seen as "white knights" — ready to step in to acquire companies that might otherwise fall into distress. When the Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley struggled this fall, China's wealthy CITIC group reportedly was considering a takeover bid.
Less than five years after creating the concept, China now supports 249 Confucius Institutes in 78 countries around the world — the equivalent of the British Council or Germany's Goethe Institute, to promote China's language and culture — advancing the cause of the country's "soft power" abroad. In the same time period, it has helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally: An estimated 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a second language around the world.
(China has been adept at using the education system to bolster its own political interests. During the wave of Tibetan protests in the country last spring, tens of thousands of Chinese students held demonstrations in support of the government in cities across Canada, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. Many were given transportation and logistical support from Chinese embassies.) China's military, too, is following the soft-power strategy: After decades of isolation from UN peacekeeping operations, China is now a highly active participant, having sent more than 10,000 peacekeepers to 18 missions in recent years. This week, Beijing dispatched three naval ships to the coast of Somalia on an unprecedented mission to fight piracy, and confirmed for the first time that it is "seriously considering" building an aircraft carrier for its navy — a dramatic increase in its ability to project power on the world stage.
But it is China's giant, state-owned multinational corporations that have been the most active in carving out new zones of influence.
In Latin America, Chinese trade has expanded from $13-billion in 2000 to more than $100-billion in 2007, and by a further 52 per cent in the first nine months of 2008. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made five recent visits to China to negotiate oil and weapons deals.
In the Middle East, a Chinese state-owned company was the beneficiary of the Iraqi government's first major oil-development deal since the fall of Saddam Hussein, which is worth $3.5-billion.
And China is discreetly expanding its presence in less-prominent regions, such as the Pacific nations, where its trade has been growing by an annual average of 27 per cent for the past five years. In Australia, for example, Aluminum Corp. of China (Chalco) has bought a minority stake in Rio Tinto, one of the world's biggest mining companies, and is planning a $2.4-billion bauxite mine — even bigger than the Ramu mine in Papua New Guinea.
When a superpower lands
PNG is a typical outpost of the new Chinese empire in that it is neglected by the traditional powers in Washington and Europe. With its vast reserves of minerals and virgin timber as well as substantial oil and natural gas, it is an obvious target — if the Chinese can navigate the hazards of a country with few roads, little electricity, few telephones, complex clan loyalties, more than 800 languages and an often-chaotic democratic system.
The country's forests are among the richest and most biodiverse in the world, but they are rapidly disappearing. Twelve years ago, China received only 0.5 per cent of its log exports. Today, more than 80 per cent of those logs — almost two million cubic metres annually — are shipped to China. Independent studies have concluded that most of this logging is illegal according to the country's own rules.
Israel Bewang, a forestry activist, sketches a cargo ship on a piece of paper to explain one of the tactics used to smuggle logs to China, according to his inside sources. "They seal the logs into the bottom of the ship and weld it shut," Mr. Bewang says. "The customs inspectors think it is just part of the ship. When it gets to China, they open it up and take out the logs."
Until recently, Papua New Guinea's mining sector was dominated by Australian, British and Canadian companies. But since the 1990s, China has been assiduously cultivating the PNG government, inviting its leaders on red-carpet trips to Beijing. When the Ramu nickel property came up for sale by its Australian owners in 2003, the government was happy to see China leap into the negotiations. And it rewarded the buyers with an unprecedented 10-year tax holiday.
In sleepy, seaside Madang, normally the haunt of German missionaries and Australian scuba divers, there is plenty of evidence that a superpower has arrived in town. A red Chinese banner flies on top of the tallest new building, its construction nearly completed. This is the headquarters of Ramu NiCo, the joint venture headed by China Metallurgical Group Corp., the majority owners of the nickel mine.
With a planned investment of $1.4-billion and an expected lifespan of 20 to 40 years, Ramu is one of the biggest mining projects China has ever attempted overseas. And China Metallurgical is determined to do it right.
"The significance of this project for Chinese companies is very huge," says Mr. Wang, the mine engineer, who is also its technical director. "This project will be the bible for Chinese mining companies going overseas. If we can develop a mine here, we can do it anywhere."
It got off to a clumsy start. PNG's Labour Minister, David Tibu, flew to the Ramu mine site for a surprise inspection in early 2007, just months before a national election. His findings were front-page news: He declared that the local workers were being treated as slaves. They were paid less than $3 a day and given tins of fish as compensation for overtime work. Their canteen was "not fit for pigs" and their toilets were shockingly bad.
"The Chinese developer does not seem to have any standards, and I will not allow my countrymen and women to be used as slaves," the minister said.
For the Chinese, it was a rough introduction to the intense scrutiny they would face in a democratic country, and they responded with the same savvy public-relations tactics that Western mining companies use: Ramu NiCo created a large community affairs department, staffed by Chinese officials and veteran local experts, and began spreading cash around liberally to local villages and landowners.
Invoking the Chinese concept of harmony (and the Beijing Olympics slogan), the company's official motto is: "One Ramu NiCo, One Community." In that spirit, it has given a 2.5-per-cent ownership stake in the mining venture to four landowner groups around the mine and refinery sites and has pledged millions of dollars to an astonishingly wide range of causes — health clinics, schools, churches, rugby and basketball teams, rice farmers, water pumps, new roads, job-training programs, local festivals and even a cocoa factory.
It has sent its locally hired engineers to language-and-culture training courses in China. It has handed out contracts to landowner groups. It is recruiting rice experts from China to help local farmers. It even has appointed a "Spiritual Awareness Officer" to talk to the churches.
"The Chinese are in a steep learning curve, and they've got quite a long way to go," says Paul Barker, head of a research institute in Port Moresby, the national capital. "They've had to answer questions here. They've learned that they can't just do it the way they did it in Africa or elsewhere."
'Kung-fu kicks'
But many villagers are still unhappy, and tensions have sometimes erupted into violence. In August, a Chinese security officer was badly injured in a struggle with protesting villagers near the nickel refinery site, about two hours by boat from Madang. Guards still roam around the site, protecting the workers from further attack by the landowners.
"The Chinese cut down our coconut trees and didn't give us much compensation," says Reuben Andonga, a village teacher and landowner who carries a slingshot to hunt birds in the surrounding jungle. "They removed our mountains and didn't pay us.
"They were supposed to help us develop, but we are still living in a primitive way. We still live in houses of grass and coconut leaves. We still get our light from hurricane lamps. They haven't given us any electricity or permanent houses."
Smoking a homemade tobacco cheroot, Mr. Andonga chuckles as he remembers the battle in August with a Chinese security official who was taking photos of the protesting landowners: "We forced him to come out of the gate, and then the boys rushed him and beat him a little. He tried to fight us with kung-fu kicks, but then he fell down and the people rushed him."
Police arrested 15 people and the villagers agreed to apologize to the Chinese company, handing over three chickens and a pile of vegetables in a tribal gesture of compensation.
The villagers admit that the refinery will actually provide some benefits, including the wharf and an improved access road, which will lower the cost of selling their dried coconut meat to city buyers. Yet they still distrust the Chinese.
"They are greedy, selfish people," says Yambel Uddy, a village magistrate near the refinery. "They are very tricky people. We don't need them."
The Ramu project has been plagued by a series of strikes by hundreds of local workers who say they are paid less than $75 a month, even though they are expected to work seven days a week.
"They don't let us go to church on Sunday," says Tom Imai, a welder at the refinery site. "So we just decided to go to church anyway. They got angry and deducted it from our pay."
Similar complaints are voiced by villagers near the newly constructed bridge over the Ramu River, who say they are denied the benefits that they were promised. "We go on strike, but they seem to hide away when we try to talk to them," says Gabriel Aragaina, a former worker at the mining site. "They tell us to go and talk to the Prime Minister."
Part of the problem is a language gap, since only a few of the Chinese miners can speak English or Pidgin, the two main languages here. But there is also a culture clash between two ways of life that seem alien to each other.
"The Chinese don't understand the value of the land to the people," says Ben Kedoga, a radio journalist in Madang.
"For us, the land is mother land, our life. We have a very close connection to the land. The Chinese have a system where everything is owned by the government, and the government tells you what to do. Their deal for the Ramu mine was done on a government-to-government basis.
"But, for us, 85 per cent of the country's land is owned by traditional landowners. When you tell a simple villager to talk to the Prime Minister — this is impossible."
24-hour clock
Surprisingly, the Chinese agree that they need a better understanding of the local way of life. "We're trying to educate our Chinese about the culture," says Mr. Wang, the engineer. "It's a lesson we have to learn. Everyone has to understand the importance of the land to the people here. Our first two years here were very difficult, and we had many cultural misunderstandings. But I feel that the past year has been better."
The disputes contributed to delays in Ramu's construction, putting it a year behind schedule, which indicates another sharp contrast between Chinese and Pacific culture. "The Chinese always finish their projects very quickly," Mr. Wang says. "We have a 12-hour shift in the daytime and a 12-hour shift at night. But we understand that that model won't work here."
Australian companies, he notes, owned the Ramu property for more than 40 years without any success in developing it. The Chinese have managed to build most of the mine in just three years, with completion scheduled for the end of next year — despite the abysmal state of the infrastructure, which has forced the Chinese to do many of the jobs that the government normally would handle.
"Compared to other mines in this country, it's been very fast," Mr. Wang says. "We don't take many holidays. We work night and day. The Chinese are fast learners, and eventually we are easy to get along with. But the people here are not familiar with China. We need time to establish trust and communications with the landowners. It takes time to harmonize our relations with the people."
Mr. Wang, 40, is the son of a geologist who volunteered to work in China's harsh northwestern desert region of Xinjiang at the height of the Maoist fervour. Now, like his father, he sees himself as a pioneer for China. "We are the young generation and we understand the international rules. If we don't follow the best world standards, China could suffer from the failure of this project. It would shut down opportunities for China in other parts of the world."
He knows that China has a poor reputation for industrial accidents and pollution. One of his biggest challenges is to convince the local population that the Ramu mine will not contaminate the environment. There is widespread concern over the company's plans for underwater disposal of the mine tailings in Astrolabe Bay, a gorgeous tropical sea with leaping dolphins and world-famous coral reefs.
The tailings will be dumped from a pipeline 150 metres below the surface of the sea, which the company says is deep enough to avoid damage to marine life. Many independent experts, such as the Australian non-governmental Mineral Policy Institute, are more skeptical, noting that this method of underwater disposal is essentially banned in Canada and the United States.
Another controversy is the Chinese company's failure to obtain legal work permits for many of its technicians and engineers.
In November, police arrested 213 Chinese employees of the Ramu mine for entering the country on improper permits. The company was hit with a $720,000 fine for breaching labour laws and blasted in the national media, which accused it of importing Chinese workers for jobs that locals could do.
Mr. Wang admits the violations, but he says the company had no choice — the skills it needs simply don't exist in Papua New Guinea, he says, and waiting for permits from the country's legendarily slow bureaucracy would have killed the mine's progress.
"To get a work permit can take six months to a year. We can't wait. We've borrowed a lot of money from the bank and we're paying interest on it every day. We need a fast track. If they don't improve the efficiency of the visas, we'll suffer again."
This controversy was part of a wider reaction to a Chinese influx. According to one report, about 300 Chinese people are entering PNG every week without proper immigration checks. "There's been a lot of illegal or semi-legal Chinese immigration," says Mr. Barker from the Port Moresby research group. "There seems to be a back door."
In cities such as Madang and Port Moresby, 20 to 50 per cent of the shops and fast-food outlets are owned by Chinese migrants. Behind the counter of Zhou Enterprises, a variety story in Madang, the owner is a migrant from China's Fujian province who has been in the country for five years. He says he doesn't like it here much, but he already owns five shops in the town, mostly selling cheap goods from China.
Another migrant from Fujian, 38-year-old David Lin, came to PNG five years ago. Now, he owns four fast-food restaurants and a supermarket in towns such as Mount Hagen and Kutubu in the Highlands region. "In China, you need a lot of money to start a business like a supermarket," he says. "Here, it's cheaper."
Maggie Wilson, a hotelier who is a veteran of more than 30 years in business in Mount Hagen, says the Chinese migrants are more entrepreneurial and pragmatic than their rivals. "They came to the Highlands when nobody else wanted to come," she says. "They're bringing in cheap affordable items and they employ people. We don't have the skills, or we're too lazy, so they do it."
She admits, however, that there is widespread resentment of the migrants because they are seen as taking away business opportunities from the locals.
A similar backlash has erupted in countries such as Zambia and South Africa, where unions and opposition leaders have accused Chinese investors of exploiting workers and forcing local producers out of business.
In the Pacific nations of Tonga and the Solomon Islands, such resentments have sparked violent riots, leaving many Chinese-owned shops looted or destroyed.
'Non-interference' policy
The rise of an unfamiliar new power always triggers volatile reactions. But that is not enough to stop it. The growth of Chinese investment continues, and now China is even moving into the provision of government-style services, a way of filling the vacuum in countries with weak states.
As it has done in Africa, China has begun providing development aid in PNG. It is sending medical teams to hospitals, giving students scholarships, building school dormitories, renovating a military hospital, inviting military officers on exchanges and, according to a Chinese report, providing "technical advice on the rehabilitation of prisoners" — an odd form of expertise for a police state to offer.
China insists that its foreign policy is based on "non-interference" — yet this policy has a strong political impact of its own. By providing aid and investment to authoritarian regimes, it has made it much easier for them to resist sanctions and stay in power.
In the Pacific, its money bolstered Fiji's junta after other governments pulled out in protest against the military coup. In Africa, its trade and investment has helped to ensure the survival of authoritarian governments, and Chinese state media have even criticized African democracies — blaming democracy for the tribal bloodshed in Kenya earlier this year, for instance.
But the experience in PNG shows that China can build up political capital with democratic governments too, even if their citizens are sometimes unhappy about it.
Back in the jungle along the Ramu River, village landowners are plotting their next move against the mining company. They admit that the Chinese-built bridge is a boon to their economy, connecting them to the rest of the country for the first time. Yet they insist they are not getting their promised compensation for the loss of trees and land.
"They never talk to us. They only bring in their bulldozers," says Peter Momeya, who says he lost valuable betel-nut trees to make room for the nickel mine.
Next month, the landowners are planning a new tactic: They will weld bars across the bridge to block it until their compensation demands are satisfied.
For the Chinese investors, the learning curve is about to take another steep jump.
Geoffrey York has been The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief since May, 2002. In 2009, he will begin reporting from Africa.
Doubt - the movie
I watched the movie, Doubt, last weekend with an old friend when he was back in town from Cali. It was either gonna be Ben Button or this one, I thought this might be a better choice just because of the topic covered.
Premise of the story: “Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play's quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality and authority.” http://www.mytelus.com/movies/mdetails.do?movieID=85059a
Instead of writing lengthy review of this film, I am gonna keep it short and simple just because I have grew even more impatient than before (that’s an understatement!)
So other than the movie’s subject, I really enjoyed the firey arguments as well as all the character development throughout the movie. I found that I could really identify myself with each and every one of them.
For example, I can see myself being as naïve as the Sister James, as investigative and righteous as Sister Aloysius, and last but not the least, as shameful and self-preserving as Father Flynn.
While without spoiling the movie for you guys, the denial and defensiveness of Father Flynn really convinced the audience his guilt.
A debatable point of the movie: Sometimes the best proofs are the doubts. After all, perception is reality in this world. It is ironic, backwards, and self-serving.
Premise of the story: “Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play's quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality and authority.” http://www.mytelus.com/movies/mdetails.do?movieID=85059a
Instead of writing lengthy review of this film, I am gonna keep it short and simple just because I have grew even more impatient than before (that’s an understatement!)
So other than the movie’s subject, I really enjoyed the firey arguments as well as all the character development throughout the movie. I found that I could really identify myself with each and every one of them.
For example, I can see myself being as naïve as the Sister James, as investigative and righteous as Sister Aloysius, and last but not the least, as shameful and self-preserving as Father Flynn.
While without spoiling the movie for you guys, the denial and defensiveness of Father Flynn really convinced the audience his guilt.
A debatable point of the movie: Sometimes the best proofs are the doubts. After all, perception is reality in this world. It is ironic, backwards, and self-serving.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Kiwi Snaps
As a result of last night’s heavy snow fall, about 90% of the staff no showed in the office today. I was about 40 minutes late getting into the office mainly because I was stuck in my own drive way for an hour. I had to shovel my way through the communal back alley shared by the other houses around mine.
Anticipating for more snow fall later in the evening, I even brought the shovel along with me to work, so I could shove my way out of things in case I got stuck again. The decision proved rewarding as I shoved out a spot on the side of the road to park my car near the office.
The Kiwi I work with in my department is a dummy. In terms of doing his job, he’s not bad at it if you are a fan of the "Used-Car Salesman Technique." I have never seen anybody lying through their teeth with a straight face like this guy does while all of us surrounding him know that he BS’s a lot.
In addition to that, he was just ripping the other coworker of ours for not making it in today because of the snow. He just went on and on about her absence. I was pretty disgusted with him for the lack of decency and also the way he shows his sympathy for his fellow team member.
Make no bones about it, I am definitely biased about this guy. Just not a fan of this sheepfucker (sorry, I meant him). Before I met him at this job, I wanted to go to New Zealand. Not so much now.
Of the whole time, he never ripped once into our direct supervisor for not making it in today. I guess he was just picking his battles and our other coworker was just an easier target. I can only imagine what he’d say about me had I not make it in today.
He continued to rip into her about being a no show after he’s learned that she lives in the hilly part of the Lower Mainland and that a heavy snow dump like this makes it real difficult to do anything other than staying at home. Meanwhile, he lives walking distance from the office and still walks home for lunch everyday. You can’t be serious, Kiwi.
I also hold a double standard against him as well because for a guy that’s traveled extensively around the world over the last 6 years (yes, he has only been back to NZ once the last six years), I was expecting him to be more empathetic and understanding. Boy, was I wrong. He doesn’t cut anybody any slack, but gives himself plenty. Rightfully so that I should hold my double standard against him! After all, it’s only appropriate and fittingly.
Now I am ripping into him for ripping our team members. What a wanker. I’m gonna snap!
Anticipating for more snow fall later in the evening, I even brought the shovel along with me to work, so I could shove my way out of things in case I got stuck again. The decision proved rewarding as I shoved out a spot on the side of the road to park my car near the office.
The Kiwi I work with in my department is a dummy. In terms of doing his job, he’s not bad at it if you are a fan of the "Used-Car Salesman Technique." I have never seen anybody lying through their teeth with a straight face like this guy does while all of us surrounding him know that he BS’s a lot.
In addition to that, he was just ripping the other coworker of ours for not making it in today because of the snow. He just went on and on about her absence. I was pretty disgusted with him for the lack of decency and also the way he shows his sympathy for his fellow team member.
Make no bones about it, I am definitely biased about this guy. Just not a fan of this sheepfucker (sorry, I meant him). Before I met him at this job, I wanted to go to New Zealand. Not so much now.
Of the whole time, he never ripped once into our direct supervisor for not making it in today. I guess he was just picking his battles and our other coworker was just an easier target. I can only imagine what he’d say about me had I not make it in today.
He continued to rip into her about being a no show after he’s learned that she lives in the hilly part of the Lower Mainland and that a heavy snow dump like this makes it real difficult to do anything other than staying at home. Meanwhile, he lives walking distance from the office and still walks home for lunch everyday. You can’t be serious, Kiwi.
I also hold a double standard against him as well because for a guy that’s traveled extensively around the world over the last 6 years (yes, he has only been back to NZ once the last six years), I was expecting him to be more empathetic and understanding. Boy, was I wrong. He doesn’t cut anybody any slack, but gives himself plenty. Rightfully so that I should hold my double standard against him! After all, it’s only appropriate and fittingly.
Now I am ripping into him for ripping our team members. What a wanker. I’m gonna snap!
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Shoe Me
I read this article and immediately thought of my boy, Bill Maher, and his comments on 9/11 less than a week after the attack.
"ABC decided not to renew Maher's contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he made a controversial on-air remark on September 17, 2001,in which he agreed with guest conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards. He then went on to say, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
The show was subsequently cancelled on June 16, 2002." - wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher You can also find this clip on youtube.
Peace on Earth, good shoes toward men
RICK SALUTIN
From Friday's Globe and Mail December 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe thrower of Baghdad, has given us all a Christmas present - like the gift of the Musli - in the form of a new way to react to rage and conflict, one that's symbolic and non-violent. It evokes respect, even from its target, rather than further rage and violence.
I don't think his act was unprofessional, as claimed by Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, or a Globe and Mail editorial - since I don't see journalism as a profession, not the way medicine or shoemaking is. It lacks a unique body of knowledge and depends on a skill everyone has language - plus the exercise of normal virtues such as common sense, skepticism, observation and integrity.
The humour, restraint and non-violence - or, at most, symbolic violence - Muntader al-Zaidi showed are a welcome antidote to the common stereotypes about some inherent Muslim impulse to violence. Violence is a human trait. It's certainly just as Christian - wars of religion, Crusades, world wars, the Holocaust - and Jewish, if you consider the historical books of the Old Testament or the 41-year occupation of Palestinian land.
Our own violent, martial era of disastrous invasions and occupations is a good time to be reminded of the merits of non-violent action. It had its triumphs, in India under Gandhi and in the civil-rights battles of America. Non-violence as a political tactic usually goes with symbols such as sit-ins or the march to the sea. There are places today, including the Mideast, where it should be tried. There is, for instance, a non-violent current in Palestinian politics that might be effective, if it got a (pardon) foothold.
Symbolic acts are therapeutic for people who feel, like many Iraqis and Palestinians, humiliated. You not only lose your homes and lives, you lose your sense of dignity. A restrained, controlled act helps restore that sense. You could see it in the creativity of people raising shoes on poles in recent demos demanding U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or pelting military convoys with shoes - rather than blowing them up with IEDs, which assault terrified young soldiers instead of the decision-makers. The latter are rarely exposed, except at press conferences, where the indignity can descend on them, if they have to dodge around like targets in a dunk tank.
Such acts can even be helpful for the targets. "This is a gift from the Iraqis ... you dog!" yelled the shoe thrower. But he gave George Bush a chance to look quick on his feet and more astute than he ever did after 9/11. Remember his doltish "analysis": It's because they hate us for our freedoms. Here he called it an "interesting way for a person to express himself" - as if it gave him something to reflect on, for once. So it was a gift.
As for journalists, the brave Irish reporter Patrick Cockburn said the toss would "gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless and almost invariably obsequious" sessions with visiting Western leaders. Journalists are citizens, too, with civic obligations. Meeting leaders isn't their "privilege," as The Globe editorial claimed; it's their duty and right. But if you merely ask tough questions, you won't get called on again, likely won't be invited next time, and may lose your job.
The shoe thrower hasn't been seen since his arrest, although he was heard from: screaming while being beaten by security afterward, then apologizing yesterday for his "big ugly act," according to a government official. He used to sign off his reports from "occupied Iraq," which sounds more sincere, as well as being both objective and impassioned. And his tosses seem a model of self-restraint and goodwill when compared to two bombings during a visit on Wednesday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: at least nine dead in Baghdad and a 13-year-old north of there. Gimme a shoe thrower any day.
"ABC decided not to renew Maher's contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he made a controversial on-air remark on September 17, 2001,in which he agreed with guest conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards. He then went on to say, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
The show was subsequently cancelled on June 16, 2002." - wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher You can also find this clip on youtube.
Peace on Earth, good shoes toward men
RICK SALUTIN
From Friday's Globe and Mail December 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe thrower of Baghdad, has given us all a Christmas present - like the gift of the Musli - in the form of a new way to react to rage and conflict, one that's symbolic and non-violent. It evokes respect, even from its target, rather than further rage and violence.
I don't think his act was unprofessional, as claimed by Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, or a Globe and Mail editorial - since I don't see journalism as a profession, not the way medicine or shoemaking is. It lacks a unique body of knowledge and depends on a skill everyone has language - plus the exercise of normal virtues such as common sense, skepticism, observation and integrity.
The humour, restraint and non-violence - or, at most, symbolic violence - Muntader al-Zaidi showed are a welcome antidote to the common stereotypes about some inherent Muslim impulse to violence. Violence is a human trait. It's certainly just as Christian - wars of religion, Crusades, world wars, the Holocaust - and Jewish, if you consider the historical books of the Old Testament or the 41-year occupation of Palestinian land.
Our own violent, martial era of disastrous invasions and occupations is a good time to be reminded of the merits of non-violent action. It had its triumphs, in India under Gandhi and in the civil-rights battles of America. Non-violence as a political tactic usually goes with symbols such as sit-ins or the march to the sea. There are places today, including the Mideast, where it should be tried. There is, for instance, a non-violent current in Palestinian politics that might be effective, if it got a (pardon) foothold.
Symbolic acts are therapeutic for people who feel, like many Iraqis and Palestinians, humiliated. You not only lose your homes and lives, you lose your sense of dignity. A restrained, controlled act helps restore that sense. You could see it in the creativity of people raising shoes on poles in recent demos demanding U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or pelting military convoys with shoes - rather than blowing them up with IEDs, which assault terrified young soldiers instead of the decision-makers. The latter are rarely exposed, except at press conferences, where the indignity can descend on them, if they have to dodge around like targets in a dunk tank.
Such acts can even be helpful for the targets. "This is a gift from the Iraqis ... you dog!" yelled the shoe thrower. But he gave George Bush a chance to look quick on his feet and more astute than he ever did after 9/11. Remember his doltish "analysis": It's because they hate us for our freedoms. Here he called it an "interesting way for a person to express himself" - as if it gave him something to reflect on, for once. So it was a gift.
As for journalists, the brave Irish reporter Patrick Cockburn said the toss would "gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless and almost invariably obsequious" sessions with visiting Western leaders. Journalists are citizens, too, with civic obligations. Meeting leaders isn't their "privilege," as The Globe editorial claimed; it's their duty and right. But if you merely ask tough questions, you won't get called on again, likely won't be invited next time, and may lose your job.
The shoe thrower hasn't been seen since his arrest, although he was heard from: screaming while being beaten by security afterward, then apologizing yesterday for his "big ugly act," according to a government official. He used to sign off his reports from "occupied Iraq," which sounds more sincere, as well as being both objective and impassioned. And his tosses seem a model of self-restraint and goodwill when compared to two bombings during a visit on Wednesday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: at least nine dead in Baghdad and a 13-year-old north of there. Gimme a shoe thrower any day.
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