Are Chinese Tech Companies a Victim of Washington or of Beijing?

Bipartisanship in Washington is such a rare bird that when it takes flight, one begins to suspect that something is terribly amiss. Not surprisingly, when Congressmen join hands across the aisle and call for the US to get “tough on China,” skepticism is warranted.

Over the last decade, American politicians have raked Cisco over the coals for helping to build the “Great Firewall,” accused Beijing of currency manipulation, and even attacked China for “counterfeit” Apple stores. But no issue seems to animate as much hysteria in US politics as claims that Chinese electronics have “built-in back doors” that could be exploited by Beijing for purposes of espionage or warfare.

Lenovo, which is now the number one PC maker in the world, was one of the first Chinese companies to get hit with back door allegations, with Congress citing potential back doors as a reason to block the State Department’s acquisition of 16,000 Lenovo computers in 2006. The sale went through, though the State Department only used the computers for non-sensitive tasks.

More recently, in May of this year, computer chips manufactured by the Chinese firm Microsemi were discovered by researchers at Cambridge to have an unexplained hardware back door, which, depending on who one speaks to, is either a completely routine diagnostic measure or a malicious platform for cyberwarfare.

It is into this hostile milieu – intensified by the theatrics of an American general election year – that Huawei and ZTE made their doomed bid to help build the next generation of U.S. communication networks. Back doors were once again a major issue.

Before we continue, one must concede that back doors very well could exist in Chinese-built hardware. In our iPhones, for example, or in our new Dell netbooks. “But those aren’t Chinese companies!” one might protest. True, but China’s key position in the global supply chain means that any hardware vendors doing business in China could potentially be infiltrated. If the threat exists, it’s likely already on our desks or in our pockets.

For its part, the Obama administration reportedly downplayed the threat of espionage, telling Congress that there is no evidence of Huawei or ZTE spying on America. Since the White House can call upon more resources than Congress to verify the possibility of espionage, many observers will see the House Select Committee on Intelligence’s findings – as well as Chairman Rogers’ subsequent calls to blacklist Huawei and ZTE – as blatant protectionism. That said, if the allegations of spying against Huawei and ZTE are protectionism disguised as paranoia, does that make them innocent victims?

Victims, yes. Innocent, not so much.

Stan Abrams has detailed on his blog, China Hearsay, the Chinese firms were unable to reach the standard of transparency demanded by the US Congress, and gave evasive answers when pressed by investigators. Huawei refused to answer questions about the possibility of Chinese government ownership through Huawei stock and the nature of its interactions with Chinese regulators. Given their stonewalling tactics, Abrams rightly wondered whether Huawei and ZTE had actually followed the advice of their American lawyers.

Another point to consider is that a national communications network is a sensitive piece of infrastructure, and it’s neither nationalist nor protectionist to ask foreign vendors to be completely aboveboard about their business practices and ownership structure. Therein lies the rub, however, since even if Huawei and ZTE had wanted to be forthcoming, the Chinese government may not have allowed it.

Make no mistake, Huawei and ZTE are great companies fielding excellent products. As the biggest communications company in the world, Huawei has earned praise from Western media for its mobiles and 3G modems, while its market follower ZTE remains less flashy and consumer-oriented at the high end, yet omnipresent in Chinese homes and workplaces. Thanks to a combination of joint ventures with Western companies like 3com, a generous industrial policy from Beijing, and a fair degree of market savvy, both firms have developed into world-class telecommunications companies in a remarkably short time.

Getting to the top has required Huawei and ZTE to play by Beijing’s rules, which have sometimes included disincentives towards transparency, malleable contracts, and creative notions of IP protection. (In fairness, these rules are changing, but Huawei and ZTE, like Youku and Baidu, are still judged by the rules they followed while “growing up.”)  Although Beijing’s rules have enabled Huawei and ZTE to emerge as powerful brands within China, it has also slowed their expansion into Western markets, where the rules of the game are fundamentally different. Furthermore, given the Chinese government’s penchant for labeling information “state secrets,” chances are that neither Huawei nor ZTE will be able to fully comply with foreign regulators, especially those as tough-minded as Congressman Rogers.

Although Huawei and ZTE have stalled out in their bid to enter the American market in a big way, they previously made inroads into Canada, the UK, and other Western countries. Things changed this year. Australia took steps to effectively blacklist Huawei in spring, Canada suggested it might block Huawei from contributing to its National Broadband Network in October, and there’s a real danger that other Western countries may follow suit. If a “global blacklist” leaves Huawei and ZTE as vendors for developing countries only, China’s dream of becoming a high-tech exporter is in peril.

One thing is certain: Beijing will follow up on Washington’s moves against Huawei and ZTE with punitive measures against American businesses. Rather than conclude the first summit between China’s new President Xi Jinping and President Obama (or Romney) with the announcement of “diplomatic hongbao” in the form of big ticket contracts for American companies, Xi’s American counterpart is likely to return home empty-handed. Ironically, this stands to hurt many of the American firms who support the crackdown on Huawei and ZTE in the US.

Karma, as you know, has its own back doors.

The Secret Orientalism of Martin Jacques

Writing for the BBC, Marxist journalist Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, joins the most important discussion foreign policy elites will have in the next ten years — how will China behave as a superpower?  Sadly, Jacques begins well, talking about the weight of China’s population upon the country’s massive economy, but then immediately falls into the same trap as Pankaj Mishra, namely, recycling the Chinese government’s own narratives about Chinese history rather than doing critical research.

The milk of Jacques’ argument begins to turn sour around this point in the article:

In fact we should not expect China to behave in the manner of the US. It will be very different. And nor should we assume that it will necessarily be worse.

Why will it be different? Because its history is so different. Articles about China’s growing involvement with Africa – in terms of trade and investment – often talk of the “new colonialism”.

If we hold China to the same standards that America and Britain have been held to by the left, then its cultivation of client states in Africa and Southeast Asia is precisely that —  a neo-colonial power.  If, on the other hand, we discard dependency theory as warmed-over Marxism and look at China through a traditional realist lens, Chinese behavior in Africa is balancing behavior, not neo-colonialism.

And while I’m sympathetic to this argument, I can’t imagine that Jacques or other admirers of China in the new left would excuse Western behavior the same way Jacques is prepared to make excuses for China.  This is, as we shall see, the key flaw in Jacques’ argument.

We continue:

Beware historical ignorance. China has never colonised any overseas territories. Overseas empires were a European speciality, with Japan getting in on the act for a short while too.

China could have colonised South East Asia, for example, in the early 15th century. It had the resources, it had enormous ships, many times bigger than anything Europe possessed at the time. But it didn’t.

These passages are bizarrely, totally, wrong.

For starters, China, like Russia, India, and the United States, is a continental empire-state.  All of these countries grew out of a strong core nation that, after acquiring sufficient resources, proceeded to conquer and subjugate surrounding nations until obtaining a large contiguous landmass with fairly stable natural borders (e.g. mountains, rivers, seas).  Colonialism doesn’t enter into the picture like it did for, say, Belgium, because an empire-state has enough resources within its own borders that it doesn’t necessarily need colonies.

Understand that colonies qua colonialism are largely a function of distance.  If a country can control the territory of its neighbors first with puppet governments and increasing military presence, outright incorporation usually follows.  How, for instance, is China’s final incorporation of Tibet — which was an independent country for most of its history — different than what Japan attempted to do in China proper?  In fairness, Jacques goes on to acknowledge the massive growth of Chinese empire during the Qing Dynasty, yet this doesn’t trouble him because China didn’t have any colonies.  Except it did.

Let’s look at just one example.  As any good historian of Vietnam will tell you, the Ming Dynasty spent the early 15th century subjugating Vietnam, which led to a guerrilla war against Chinese occupation — a Vietnamese specialty — and the withdrawal of Chinese forces after their defeat by Vietnamese hero Le Loi.  In summary, the Chinese invaded Vietnam in 1406 and administered the country as a colony for two decades.  Perhaps this doesn’t count to Jacques because the Chinese didn’t move to crush Le’s forces with the totality of their might, but the British don’t get any credit for letting India slip away, so why should China?

Jacques gives himself a little leeway to address the Vietnam case, but never does so directly.  He continues:

That is not to say China ignored its neighbours. On the contrary. For many, many centuries it dominated them – as a result of its sheer size and far more advanced level of development. China’s relationship with them was based not on colonialism but what we now know as the tributary system. It neither ruled them nor occupied them. Rather, in return for access to the Chinese market and various forms of protection, the rulers of tribute states were required to give gifts – literally tribute – to the Emperor as a symbolic acknowledgement of China’s superiority.

The tributary system comprised what we know today as East Asia, home to one-third of the world’s population. It stretched from Japan and Korea to the Malay Peninsula and parts of Indonesia.

It proved remarkably stable, lasting for at least 2,000 years and only coming to an end around 1900.

What we see here is that Jacques, the Marxist, begins to paper over classical power relations where China is concerned, and Jacques, the Orientalist, begins to raise his ugly head.  Focus on the Chinese tributary system as a kind of benign empire that doesn’t carry the taint of colonialism was also a thrust of Mishra’s piece, so allow me to quote Dan Trombly’s excellent response to Mishra:

[C]onsidering that during the Qing period the British would pay tribute to China after its subjugation of Burma, at a period when the British had already begun their humiliation of China, treating the tribute system as a supplication to a frequently tenuous and weak Chinese hegemonic capacity is incredibly dubious. Indeed, the increasing direction in studies of Chinese international relations is to challenge the idea of the tribute system as a dominant analytic model explaining vast periods of Chinese history, rather than a relationship with incredible amounts of variance in both outcome and motives for participation. Since the term ‘tribute system’ is a western invention devised no later than the nineteenth century,” it makes more sense to “talk about tributary relations without feeling simultaneously obliged to stick to the tribute system.”

We should also remember that many of modern China’s territorial claims, including settled questions like Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as Chinese nationalist fantasies of seizing the Korean peninsula and Okinawa, are based on these lands once participating in the tributary system under their former feudal rulers.  A troubling paradigm within official Chinese scholarship treats Chinese vassal states as the equivalent of Chinese territory, and China’s neighbors understand that when China engages in political archaeology such as the Northeast History Project, the goal is the Sinification of the past to achieve the Sinification of the future.

Returning to the article, Jacques outlines the staggering reach of 19th and 20th century Western colonialism and contrasts it to humble Ming Dynasty China, which, as we have already seen, was not as benevolent as Jacques would have his readers believe.  (An aside here for my materialist friends:  how much of the power wielded by Western imperialists, compared to the Chinese 300 years earlier, was actually a function of technology rather than ideology?)  Consciously or not, Jacques reiterates Chinese national propaganda about Zheng He, the “can-do eunuch”:

The seven great voyages of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 around the East and South China Seas and across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa left no permanent mark – they were about demonstrating the glory of the Middle Kingdom rather than a desire to conquer. Those who left China to settle in South East Asia were seen as leaving civilisation and deserving of no support or protection by the Emperor.

This account of Zheng He, which closely follows the official Chinese history, would have us believe two things:  that Zheng He’s expeditions didn’t have a military function, and that the Ming saw the Chinese diaspora as pariahs.  As for the first point, history records that Zheng He was as much an enforcer of Chinese hegemony — a MacArthur figure, if you will — as he was an explorer.   His fleets pursued pirates throughout Asia, and in Sri Lanka he led the Ming forces in a two-year war against the kingdom of Kotte, installing a puppet ruler who was deposed by the Sri Lankans in 1414.  Rather than piracy, it seems the Chinese fixation on Kotte — they had invaded under the Yuan Dynasty as well — had to do with acquiring the Tooth of Buddha and taking it to China.  (Attempting to steal another country’s artifacts is downright … European.)

As for the second point, Zheng He interacted freely with the Chinese diaspora and they were vital parts of the Ming’s trading network.  If there was any schism between the diaspora and the emperor, it may have been because many of them moved abroad during earlier dynasties.  Zheng He himself referred to these overseas Chinese as “Tang Dynasty men.”  Yet they, along with local peoples in Southeast Asia, venerated Zheng He, which undermines Jacques’ characterization of overseas Chinese, and also calls into question the next passage:

Compare that with the way in which Britain and France celebrated the heroes of their colonial expansion. Our cities are littered with statues and street names in their memory.

Zheng He, while not being a hero of colonial expansion per se, is certainly a hero of hegemonic power.  His are not the only statues of a maritime hero one finds in China, however.  Monuments to Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, have been erected throughout coastal China as well as in Taiwan.  A Ming loyalist and pirate, Koxinga operated from southern China during the early Qing Dynasty before invading Taiwan in 1661 and overthrowing its Dutch rulers.  With the Europeans out of the picture, Koxinga was left with the task of brutally subjugating the aboriginal Taiwanese — a fact deemed so inconvenient to the official Chinese narrative that the Koxinga scholar Tonio Andrade was told to censor his recent book on the subject or risk being unable to publish a translation in China.

At this point in the article, Jacques makes the correct argument that Chinese rulers remain more internally focused than Western leaders; that, when Xi Jinping becomes president, his agenda “will be overwhelmingly filled with domestic rather than foreign issues.” Jacques also argues, correctly, that Westerners are fixated on exporting their values to the rest of the world.  But he falters when he suggests China is uninterested in spreading its values.  The doctrine of “non-interference,” which Beijing regularly upholds with its UN Security Council veto, is itself a universal value.  The friends Beijing makes through the non-inteference doctrine leads to the contradiction of Chinese becoming more cosmopolitan as the country becomes richer, then looking at their country’s list of allies with shame. And when one of those allies abruptly changes course and becomes freer than China, the envy can be palpable.

Next, Jacques reduces Western influence over the world to a byproduct of Western (read: American) military power and argues,

That kind of overweening military power has never really been a Chinese characteristic.

Instead the quintessential forms of Chinese power will be economic and cultural. Over time, China’s economic strength – given the size of its population – will be gigantic, far greater than that of the US at its zenith. Already, even at its present low level of development, China is the main trading partner of a multitude of countries around the world. And with economic power will come commensurate political power and influence. China will, if it wishes, be able to bend many other countries to its will.

Cultural power will also be important to the Chinese. Theirs is a remarkable civilisation – having enjoyed a place in the sun not once but several times. During the Tang dynasty, for instance, from the 7th to the 10th Century, and most remarkably during the Song dynasty from the 10th to the 13th Century, with major advances in a host of fields from biology and hydraulic engineering to architecture, medicine, mathematics and cartography.

The economic power of the ascendant China will unquestionably great, and as Beijing’s shameless monkeywrenching of ASEAN shows, China has already begun to “bend … countries to its will,” but cultural power remains a giant question mark.  Chinese cultural malaise has paradoxically increased even as China grows economically stronger, which suggests that either the patterns of cultural development have changed considerably and thus economy and culture are no longer fungible, or else the current Chinese government, despite its merits, lacks the openness and vision of the Tang and Song Dynasties.  The Chinese critique, from the Heshang documentary series in 1988, to Wolf Totem twenty years later, to Han Han’s writing today, is that, for various reasons, Chinese culture is backwards and lacks vitality.  Perhaps this self-doubt will change “when China rules the world.” Perhaps not.

Martin Jacques has no room for Han Han and the fierce urgency of now, though.  By the end of the piece, Jacques the Orientalist is fully in charge, telling us that Chinese have a different way of looking at history:

The Chinese have a completely different conception of time to Westerners. Whereas Americans think very short, the Chinese think very long.

For them a century is nothing.

For Chinese peasants and their feudal lords, a century was nothing.  But can we say the same for Han Han’s generation?

Romney Beats Romney, Obama Wins

I tuned into the debate at the halfway mark, just as Romney was giving an effective, soft-spoken critique of Obama’s broken promises. It was the only hit Romney would score on Obama for the next 45 minutes. By the time my C-Span stream cut out during Obama’s closing remarks, it was clear the president emerged the victor in the second presidential debate of 2012.

Obama wasn’t an excellent debater, but he was good. He was engaged, energized, and aggressive — the total opposite of the Obama of the first debate. He was helped by having a center-left New York audience, and also by Biden’s performance in the vice presidential debate. He managed a couple of good quips at Romney’s expense, especially when Romney whined about the investments in the president’s pension. And this time, he was aware that he would be seen on the split-screen (and by the audience), so he adjusted his body language accordingly. There was no looking down.

But Obama wasn’t beyond mistakes or stupid arguments, such as saying automatic (not semi-automatic) weapons need to be taken out of the hands of criminals (for those unaware of American law, this is not an actual problem), calling manufacturing jobs high-skilled jobs (they aren’t or else they couldn’t be outsourced to China) or bragging about the growth in American exports (which is more attributable to the historically weak USD than anything else). And on the economy, which will be the most important issue in most voters’ minds, Obama failed to convince people he would be better than Romney — which is pretty remarkable.

Romney’s defeat was not as devastating as Obama’s was in the first debate, but at a time when both campaigns are focusing on the margins, Romney lost valuable ground. I missed both “binders full of women” — the most quotable Romney line/gaffe of the evening — as well as Romney criticizing the Bush administration, which, if Twitter commentary was any indication, was borderline bitter. What I was there for, however, was Romney’s weird stream-of-consciousness answers once Obama knocked him off script.

What will frustrate Republicans the most is how many missed opportunities Romney had. Every time he had a good question or opening, he would mangle his lines or go off on rambling tangents. He was given a chance to criticize the president on Libya, and responded in such a hamfisted way that I can’t imagine him being able to bring it up effectively in the final foreign policy debate next week. He was given a question on immigration that Republicans need to answer, but he focused largely on illegal immigration instead of a comprehensive policy that would talk about enforcement on the one hand and more paths to citizenship on the other. Gun control led to an sloppy invocation of the Fast and the Furious scandal, then a discussion of two-parent families, and Romney’s basic correctness was overshadowed by the awkwardness of the transition.

Finally, Romney’s Lou Dobbs-esque pledge to start a trade war with China was his most annoying position. I can’t believe Romney even believes it, since he defended his personal investments in Chinese companies. Governor Romney would’ve had the sense to call for a balanced relationship with China, as would have businessman Romney, but candidate Romney’s China policy exists in Schumer-Dobbsian anti-China talking point netherworld where constantly repeating “I will label China a currency manipulator on day one!” is a demonstration of strength. Xinhua will not be amused.

On China’s Cultural Malaise

A few months ago I talked with my students about the culture vs. practicality difference between foreign language students in American who study Japanese and those who study Chinese. For better or worse, Japanese classes are filled with otaku and similar cultural aficionados of Japan, while Chinese classes are dominated by business Chinese students and others who want to learn Mandarin as a marketable skill yet care less about Chinese culture.

Students find this trend extremely upsetting whenever I point it out, and even before the whole Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands mess you could get a hate-Japan session going by suggesting that Japanese culture is more popular than Chinese culture abroad. It is, and the Confucius Institutes aren’t going to change that anytime soon. If you think about it, most Chinese language students in the US are actually being pretty “Chinese” about their studies — cutting out the artsy “fat” and focusing on those “meaty” parts of the language needed in their careers. For example, when I taught Chinese English majors I was depressed by how many cared little about English poetry and literature outside of general knowledges needed to graduate from college.

Getting back to my recent students, I made them even more angry by asking which version of the Monkey King is most famous with Westerners. “Stephen Chow’s?” they asked. “Nope, Dragonball Z.” Some gritted their teeth. I pointed out that Japanese culture is a “child culture” which works within a synthesis between China as a “parent culture” and the West as a “neighbor culture.” There’s a similar theory among Chinese Japanophiles that Japanese culture has flourished because it “borrowed” Tang Dynasty culture, and thus the Japanese have actually preserved former Chinese greatness in their own culture.

The Marxist position taken by one of my students in response was that it’s a matter of development, that Chinese culture will grow popular once China is as developed as Japan. But this theory ignores the fact that Japan’s cultural heavy hitters first started appearing in the postwar period, when Japan was far less developed than China today. By now, China ought to have its own Osamu Tezuka, its own Kurosawa. It doesn’t. And, as the New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos notes, it doesn’t even have its own PSY.  For some Chinese, that’s cause for shame.

In 2010, the Chinese writer Han Han, reflecting on Chinese soft power or the the lack thereof, argued that if all of your cultural products are based on things written down 2,000 years ago, then your culture is basically dead. It’s true that a lot of Chinese cultural malaise and the constant focus on ancient culture is the result of political self-censorship and direct censorship in mainland Chinese media, which Osnos explores at length with nice anecdotes from Chinese director Lu Chuan, but that can’t explain everything, because Hong Kong and Taiwan — which are as developed as Japan — also lack significant cultural soft power around the world, although they have vast reserves of it to spend in the mainland itself.

The bigger problem is that Chinese culture remains both insular — with taboos about mocking cultural images — and, more damningly, lazy. Hong Kong and Taiwan media magnates rely on “templates” for managing stars’ careers and plotting movies. For instance, a model will appear on TV, release a CD, and then start acting in movies, regardless of her actual talents in these fields. This happens so often that stars have become interchangeable, predictable, and boring. Movies are much the same, especially now that Chinese directors have adorned their films with CGI the way a “new rich” Chinese covers himself in golden baubles.

As for Osnos’ piece, PSY is not a highly representative cultural product of South Korea, so the Chinese Osnos says are soul-searching are doing so based on a false premise. South Korea has, by and large, followed the exact same pattern of “manufacturing” entertainers as China, and Korean films and dramas are filled with an army of cookiecutter stars with lookalike plastic surgery-enhanced faces.  PSY, on the other hand, is sui generis in Korea — polished in a way that looks unpolished, amusingly critical of Korean society, and with a face that sets no Japanese housewives’ hearts-a-flutter. He is, emphatically, not the typical K-Pop artist. And based on news coverage, Koreans themselves are at a loss to explain why PSY has conquered the globe when the Wonder Girls, Jun Ji-hyun, Super Junior, and Rain could not.

Alas, there is no parsimonious explanation of why China has no “Gangnam Style” or why no Chinese director could make Kung-Fu Panda. I admit that economics and “face” is part of it. Once Americans start thinking of China as a rich country they’ll respect China more and come to appreciate Chinese culture. Politics is part of it, too. As I quipped during the anti-Japan riots, protestors calling for a boycott of Japanese cultural products should be protesting SARFT for not allowing Chinese artists to be as experimental as their Japanese (or Korean or American) counterparts.

Ultimately, though, Chinese artists have also succumbed to the laziness that follows economic success. Hong Kong and Taiwanese directors and producers were at their most innovative in the 1970s and 1980s when budgets were tight. Once money flowed freely, they lost the incentive to be creative. Instead, they flooded the market with forgettable, mass-produced, lower quality cultural products.  Why would the mainland be any different from the rest of China?

Greening Chinese attitudes? Yes and no.

Gallup has some data that point to a “greening” of the Chinese public:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Fifty-seven percent of Chinese adults surveyed in 2011 — before the country’s economic slowdown grabbed headlines — prioritized protecting the environment, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. About one in five believed economic growth is more important. Chinese attitudes are typical of those in other emerging-market economies, where residents sided with the environment over the economy in earlier surveys.

Although I believe that green issues are the area where the Chinese Party-state deserves the most criticism and will receive the most opposition politically in the future (after all, “clean water” is much more tangible to the masses than “free speech” and other tenets of liberalism), I’m disinclined to read much into these results. Why not? Well, somewhere between the 57% of Chinese that say protecting the environment is more important than growing the economy and the 77% who are generally satisfied with the Chinese government’s record of environmental protection lies the shadow of social desirability bias.

These two percentages (57% and 77%) seem to contradict each other unless a strong majority of Chinese already believe the government is putting the environment first, which not even the government seems to believe.  Instead, what we’re likely seeing is Chinese giving two “politically correct” answers and obfuscating the real data underneath.  As an educator I see this from students all the time, since they are conditioned to tell authority figures (and their peers) what they want to hear rather than offer genuine opinions and risk losing face.

Incidentally, the cohort that interests me is that small subset in the poll that believed in putting the environment first and were dissatisfied with China’s environmental record.  Who are these guys, and what are they doing?

It’s Not Their English, It’s Their Mandarin

In two back-to-back classes on Friday I encountered the sort of problem that most ESL teachers will ignore, either because they make sweeping assumptions about Chinese pronunciation, because they’ve never bothered to learn Mandarin, or because their training never prepared them for regional variation in the English pronunciation of their students.

In the first class, a girl named Ann from Guangdong was totally unable to pronounce the word “shine” in the brand name Shineway.  Instead, she said shuài (handsome) repeatedly, which made her classmate laugh, since Shineway is a sausage company.  I asked Ann if she could pronounce “shoe” and “shoot.”  No problem, and even “shit” came out okay.  However, “shall” came out “share” and “shy” also came out shuài.  Setting aside the l/r issue, I created a list of s/sh minimal pairs on the board (e.g. “sheep”-”seep”) and used it to drill Ann and her classmate, a girl from Beijing.  Ann had trouble, as you might expect, but the Beijing girl breezed through it despite having lower overall fluency than the girl from Guangdong.  Why?

Well, as anyone who has “listened for” a Chinese person’s hometown in their way of speaking can tell you, Beijingers and people around Beijing, including Tianjiners, Hebei residents, and Hebei/Beijing transplants to Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, generally have an easier time with English pronunciation than people located to the south.  (In this case, the “south” means the bottom 2/3rds of China!)  While “Beijing Mandarin” is still very different from English, its native speakers are generally able to handle more English blends such as sh as well as distinguish between the dreaded l’s and r’s, though they still have trouble with consonant sounds that don’t neatly fit into the pinyin system of initials and finals.  For instance, my wife cannot pronounce “zero” to save her life, since there’s no equivalent to z + e in Mandarin.  Getting back to “southerners” (again, I’ll use this term broadly), the trouble they have with pronunciation tends to manifest in their Mandarin first and then appear later in their English.

Consider the second class, which featured a new student unable to say s sounds clearly.  Every s-word she said, such as “sorry” or “so,”  began with an sh sound.  I asked her if she was from the south and she said no, that her hometown was Shanxi and Shanxi was in the north.  So I pointed out that that’s still in the “south” compared to Tianjin-Beijing.  I asked her if she had trouble with s and z sounds in Mandarin, which she found odd, and she said she wasn’t sure.  So I asked what she called the special food Chinese people eat during Dragon Boat Festival and she said zhòngzi.  (It should be zòngzi in standard Mandarin.)  I asked her to say the word “zoo” and she kept saying zhū (pig) instead.  She said her English pronunciation was bad but I suggested to her that her troubles really began with her Mandarin pronunciation, and that she is not alone.

To understand what’s going on here, we can run a quasi-experiment to show how a student’s Mandarin-speaking environment will influence their English.  Let’s look at Chinese Koreans from Dongbei vs. Chinese Koreans born in Tianjin.  Dongbei Koreans typically grow up in a Korean-speaking environment, and when they speak Mandarin they overuse the second tone, much like Mandarin learners from South Korea.  (Everything sounds like a question!)  Furthermore, when Dongbei Koreans speak English it has a real “Korean flavor,” especially in l’s and r’s, with, for example, “sorry” becoming “solly” and “hungry” becoming “hungly.”  Tianjin-area Koreans, on the other hand, may speak Korean at home but their school and work environment is Mandarin-heavy and they lack telltale Korean accents when speaking Chinese.  When they speak English they face the same issues as most Tianjiners, which is to say that they don’t have a series of fossilized pronunciation errors inherited from Korean language.

A host of issues converge here.  Consider that Mandarin is the first “foreign” language many Chinese learn at school, since their mother tongue is often a local dialect or another language (e.g. Cantonese or Korean), and that their Mandarin learning often suffers from the same problems that plague their English learning:  they can read and write reasonably well, do alright in listening, but are essentially “mute” except for stilted, prememorized recitation exercises.  Failure to fully grasp spoken Mandarin leads, in turn, to difficulty in speaking English, since Chinese English teachers usually stop drilling English pronunciation once a student progresses past the ABC level, and so, later on, many challenging sounds and blends that native Mandarin speakers can approximate become intimidating to these students.  Of course, there are exceptions to my generalizations, and anyone living in China is likely to have southern friends with brilliant English abilities.  Yet most of them will also demonstrate outstanding Mandarin skills!  The two languages go together, at least in China.

The overall point of these anecdotes is that ESL teachers in China need to orient themselves to the fact that a student’s English abilities reflect not only their intelligence and their commitment to learning English but also the way they speak Mandarin.  If you as a teacher haven’t taken it upon yourself to learn a little spoken Mandarin and the basic rules of Mandarin pronunciation, your teaching is actually missing a practical and helpful component.*   If you do learn Chinese, however, you’ll be surprised at how many of your students’ English pronunciation mistakes actually began as mistakes in their Mandarin.

* Setting aside the entire pronunciation issue above, a basic-to-intermediate grasp of Mandarin is useful when the ESL teacher is faced with the task of deprogramming Chinglish mistakes among their students.

Adventures in Democracy

Our blog emerges from long dormancy with a tale set long ago in an English classroom far, far away.  (Or Friday here in China for those of you who remain sticklers for facts.)

In recent weeks I’ve been talking about American politics as part of my school’s American culture series of lectures.  Talking about politics in a Chinese classroom requires, in part, a certain academic distance from one’s true political leanings as well as a comparative approach that finds as many similarities as possible between the Chinese and Western polities while explaining the key differences between each system.

We teachers self-censor, to be sure, but anyone who has observed Chinese politics closely is aware of the internal Communist party dynamics that resemble the coalitioning at work within the elite leadership of most American political parties.  Ultimately, the American people are enfranchised and the Chinese people are not, yet the forces at work that produce our available choices as American voters are similar to those forces which propel China’s next generation of leaders to the top of the politburo.

While talking about this to students I also take care to explain the variety of balances at work within American politics — between branches of government, between interest groups, between large states and small states, and between the majority and the minority — and highlight how China is very different from America in this respect, often to the detriment of Chinese citizens.

Of course, this high-minded talk may obscure the fact that I am no longer a university teacher but instead work at an almost-anything-goes English training center.  Our core goal is a fun, productive English learning environment. And so, with a nod towards the goal of promoting fun, I spent a handful of minutes designing a classroom election activity for Friday afternoon.

What follows is a documentary account of how said activity unfolded.

The class began with a review of a few of the political terms I had previously introduced to the students.  Specifically, we discussed:

• political parties
• political beliefs (“ideology” was too complex a term for a mixed-level student group)
• party platforms
• issues
• candidates
• elections

English classes, particularly hour-long classes like this one, shouldn’t overwhelm the students with vocabulary.  And with these few terms in hand we had enough to move on to the next step.

I again highlighted the concept of issues and elicited from the students a list of eight “hot issues” in China at the moment.  The “two meetings” of the NPC and CPPCC, which were held in Beijing at the start of March, pushed most of these issues to the forefront, with the government talking about talking about solving various problems, while possibly but not really implementing solutions.  (You see, China really is like America!)

The list of issues the students produced was as follows:

• controlling housing prices
• cleaning up pollution
• improving health care
• reforming education
• whipping inflation*
• fighting corruption
• maintaining full employment
• reducing inequality

* Okay, they didn’t actually say “whipping,” but all the talk about inflation got me to thinking of this:

Moving on, I divided the class into three roughly equal-sized groups and told them that they were all now political parties and that they were about to hold a political convention.  Their first item of business?  To choose an animal that represents their political party.

The first group of students was divided.  Panzer II, the school’s resident Hitlerphile and small government libertarian, suggested that the party call itself the “Virus Party,” because they could infect and kill the other political parties.  Another student wisely suggested the “Eagle Party” as an alternative.  I had their group put it to a vote.  ”Eagle” defeated “Virus” by a vote of 8-2 with 5 abstentions.  There’s no telling what animals the abstainees would’ve preferred.

The rest of the students were unanimous in their choice of party names.  The second group called itself the “Wolf Party,” while the last and smallest group of students called itself the “Panda Party,” which immediately provoked a “Why didn’t we think of that?” reaction from the other groups.  Personally, I was thinking of pandas on unicorns:

Next, I gave them the task of devising a party platform that addressed each of the eight issues we brainstormed earlier.  Panzer II immediately suggested that “Ein Volk … ein Führer” as the Eagle Party platform.  God (in this case, me) responded in the negative.  Most of the groups went about their party platform work more seriously, however, and in the middle of the “convention” I asked them to nominate their candidates for president and vice-president.

Time management is essential in activities like this one, so I rushed the process along and had students announce their party platform and candidates and then had the six candidates — three presidents and three-vice presidents, three men and three women — all come to the front of the class.

It was time for a debate.  The Eagle Party’s whole plan of action was built around taxing apartments larger than 90 square meters to pay for everything. (You see, they started out as Nazis and turned into tax-and-spend Democrats.)  The Wolf Party, on the other hand, was pretty ineffectual, building their platform around core ideas in Jiang Zemin’s now-abandoned western China development strategy, and prone to being caught in “gotcha” moments by their opposition when they failed to answer questions posed by Sam Donaldson (also me).

As for the Pandas, well, in the words of their presidential candidate who himself paraphrased Hu Jintao, the panda is a “harmonious” creature and, by learning from the panda, the Panda Party would promote a more “harmonious society.” (This line was delivered in perfect deadpan earnestness and provoked a wave of laughter from the students.)  The debate ended with a closing statement from each party, and it looked for sure like the Eagle Party, which kept focusing like a laser beam on housing prices, was the clear favorite.

With a few minutes left in class we turned to voting. I handed out slips of paper and told the students that they were now voters and could vote for the party that they liked best, and that they didn’t have to vote for their own party. Alas, Palm Beach County (me yet again) failed to devise a sound balloting procedure.  Inspecting the final tally I noticed there were more votes than there were voters, but we were out of time.

The result?  The Pandas harmoniously stole the election.

Avatar’s Political Messages: the Overt and the Hidden

Stuart Staniford has written a compelling post where he compares the politics of James Cameron’s Avatar to the philosophy of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.  A key — and disturbing — passage:

We put [the Unabomber] in jail because he started killing technologists, stating as his reason that he hated industrial society and wanted to return to a more natural and free state of humanity. He was less successful in the execution than Jake/Trudy/Grace and the Na’vi – who actually succeed in ejecting Parker and Co. from Pandora – but it seems to me that the moral logic is exactly the same.  Nature good, technology bad, violent opposition justified.

So, you might want to stop a minute and ask yourself: how exactly does Cameron get mainstream American audiences to root for the Unabomber side in this conflict?

It’s a good question, but in fact, Avatar is not the first time Cameron has asked viewers to root for terrorists.  Though it predates the Unabomber as a public figure by four years, Cameron’s Terminator 2 is heavily infused with a violent ludditism not unlike Kaczynski’s manifesto.  We come to accept Sarah Connor’s extremism because, in the universe of the film, there really is a future where technology threatens mankind.  But that doesn’t change the fact that her rhetoric and the Unabomber’s rhetoric are cut from the same cloth, in particular when she rants and starts comparing the creators of Skynet to the creators of the atom bomb.

(As an aside, before Cameron was a hypocrite for using cutting-edge technology to make a film attacking technology with Avatar, he was a hypocrite for doing the same thing in Terminator 2.)

Returning to Staniford’s question, how does Cameron get audiences to side with terrorist luddites (or if you want to use an Iraq metaphor, “insurgents”)?  Part of it is because, like Terminator 2, the technological baubles he throws at us are so appealing that most audiences barely think about the plot.  Still another reason is that, for liberal and moderate audiences, the movie is a triumphalist appeal to white guilt.  Triumphalist, because rather than lecturing the protagonist about his racism, it gives him the opportunity to transcend his own racial limitations.  As Annalee Newitz put it in her essay on race in the films Avatar and the much-superior District 9,

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

There’s another side to this which explains incentives for Sully (and the audience).  More than just “peoples of color” or even “noble savages,” the Na’vi are highly idealized and eroticized, presented to us as, in the words of one friend on Twitter, “ten foot blue supermodels.”  Unlike the aliens in District 9, whose appearance and behaviors tend to repulse rather than evoke sympathy, Cameron banks on sexual imagery both to lure in the teenage demographic and to make his messiah tale more palatable.  (This choice was so blatant that Cameron opened himself up to all kinds of parody.)  What if, however, Cameron had made the aliens in Avatar something truly alien, like the jellyfish-like Flouwen in Robert Forward’s Rocheworld, or simply made Eywa herself the only sentient life on the planet?  He could have sidestepped many of the film’s shortcomings, though the end result would’ve been closer to 2001 than any of Cameron’s prior work.*

Despite the film’s politics, Cameron manages to sell us on Avatar with a ton of technology, a feel-good fable, a significant amount of sex, and a dumbed-down New Age religion.  And yet there’s a less-discussed moral aspect of the film that appeals to audiences:  the defense of property rights.  This is perhaps an accidental reading of the movie; Cameron certainly wasn’t out to defend one of the foundations of capitalism when he wrote the script, but the movie invites such comparisons.  Here’s libertarian David Boaz, making the case that Avatar is about eminent domain:

Conservatives rallied to the defense of Susette Kelo when the Pfizer Corp. and the city of New London, Conn., tried to take her land. She was unreasonable too, like the Na’vi. She wasn’t holding out for a better price; she just didn’t want to sell her house. As Jake tells his bosses, “They’re not going to give up their home.”

“Avatar” is like a space opera of the Kelo case, which went to the Supreme Court in 2005. Peaceful people defend their property against outsiders who want it and who have vastly more power. Jake rallies the Na’vi with the stirring cry “And we will show the Sky People that they cannot take whatever they want! And that this is our land!”

I’m sure that some in America will roll their eyes at Boaz.  But here in China, the Avatar-as-defense-of-property rights meme is the dominant view of the film.  Chinese have little interest in Avatar‘s cotton candy pantheism and no white guilt to make them sympathize with native peoples (in fact, had Cameron linked the Na’vi to Tibetans or other minorities, Chinese would have hated the movie), so the sheer spectacle of the film is what drew in Chinese audiences and the economic aspects are what they took away from their viewing.  How else to explain the apparent victim of an illegal demolition who hoists a banner above his half-smashed home, telling people that the lesson of Avatar is “to defend your home to your death!”

* Save perhaps for The Abyss, which presents us with “aliens” that are fantastically different from us, though at times sickeningly cute.

Send China to Burma

Dr. Steven Taylor noted earlier in the week that the SLORC junta in Burma (sorry, no Myanmar here) has agreed to receive aid but not aid workers.  Dr. T notes that this is par for the course in dictatorships:

One of the tried and true (and tragic) behaviors of hardline dictatorships is to reaction to internal disasters as if either they didn’t happen (something that is increasingly difficult to do these days) or to downplay the need for help from the outside (if not to reject it outright). It has to do with control (of information as well as what the population might learn) as well, I suspect, with embarrassment over the state of the country. No doubt there is a healthy dose of xenophobia thrown in for good measure.

The shroud being drawn across the disaster relief effort by the junta naturally creates a problem for donor countries, as there are zero guarantees that humanitarian aid will (a) go to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, (b) not be used politically by the government, and (c) can actually be delivered in a prompt and effective manner.

To an extent, the junta’s policy is understandable from the perspective of a hyper-paranoid autocratic elite which has almost no international friends and sees the crisis situation as a potential opening for outsiders intent on toppling the regime.  The human cost of this need for total control is difficult to estimate — surely it will add thousands to the final death toll from the storm — but SLORC likely looks to examples such as the North Korean famine as assurance that a hardline regime can remain in power despite massive loss of life.

So, what should the UN and the West do to make sure that relief aid can actually get to devastated Burmese communities?  They might want to call on China.

While an international pariah, SLORC, like the regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and North Korea, has a significant ally in Beijing.  Westerners have thus far unsuccessfully tried to pressure China to change its friendly policies towards the Burmese government.  They ought to learn by now that China will always refuse to implement policies that might run contrary to the interests of one of its client states.  That said, while nothing will sever the Sino-Burmese relationship, the international community might be able to persuade China to put boots on the ground in Burma as part of the relief effort.  SLORC trusts China, after all, and is not likely to see Chinese relief workers as a security threat.

China might not agree to be the West’s proxy, but the country’s relatively recent history in providing relief operations suggests an openness to the idea.  Bringing Beijing on board would require illustrating the following benefits to Hu Jintao and his foreign policy hands:

• Leading a significant relief effort will provide good PR for the Chinese government in advance of the Olympics and in the wake of the Tibet riots.
• China, by distributing aid, could help stabilize Burma (and help SLORC stay in power).
• Western countries could provide the bulk of the material cost, and even some of the air- and sealift, leaving China with the cost of manpower, which is significantly less than Western manpower costs.

Many in the West will be left scratching their heads and wondering where the good side is in this proposal.  China, a sometimes-adversary, comes out ahead, while the SLORC emerge unscathed and Western countries foot most of the bill.  Yet, as we watch the news from Burma, we cannot underestimate the scale of the tragedy nor the urgency of the situation:  between 20,000 and 100,000 already dead, millions displaced, and tens of thousands more threatened by malnourishment, disease, and floodwaters.  This is a rare circumstance where the lesser of two evils is easy to determine.

The question is, will any leaders in the West or the UN step forward and ask China to go to Burma?

Thought for the Day

Among international couples I’ve known here in China, two observations hold as the relationships develop:

• Either the Chinese partner becomes progressively better in his/her partner’s language (usually English), or
• The foreign partner becomes progressively better in Chinese.

Rarely do both partners improve their foreign language skills during the relationship.  Why?

Stereotypes with Chinese Characteristics

One classroom lecture that I’ve repeatedly used and refined during my time in China has been an exploration of student understandings of stereotypes and the propagation of stereotypes among the Chinese urban middle class. What stands out during the lesson is the degree to which some kinds of imagery — the Arab terrorist, the black athlete — have become so globalized that many Chinese sound exactly like their American counterparts when discussing people from different backgrounds.

I generally begin this lesson by defining the word stereotype and inviting students to offer stereotypes, positive and negative, of men and women. This makes things lively at the start, especially in classes with a strong mix of male and female students. From there we move on to stereotypes of people from different parts of China.

I asked the students to complete sentences such as the following:

• Dongbei people are …
• Beijing people are …
• Hong Kong people are …
• Xinjiang people are …

Not surprisingly, Dongbei people — in Tianjin at least — were painted in colorful but positive terms, but people in the capital were ripped on heavily, while those from Xinjiang came in for the most negative stereotypes (“monstrous,” “dangerous,” “terrorists”). This impression of Uighur people is worrying to me since, of all of China’s minority groups today, they have the greatest chance to face discrimination in society, and when stories like this one go flickering into the public consciousness, the stereotyping verges on becoming a permanent fixture in Chinese thought.

Returning to the lecture, one thing I added tonight was a group quasi-experiment in which the students were shown a series of photos and asked for their impressions. Since our reactions to the appearance of strangers can be influenced by the stereotypes we subscribe to, this was another way to gauge the prevalence of certain stereotypes among my students. That said, this wasn’t a truly scientific survey,* and I “rigged” things a bit when choosing the nine images shown in the collage below by making sure some photos were out-of-character for the person depicted:

These images are all famous people save one (the Sikh in the center left), and except perhaps for young Michael Jackson (top center), none of them are recognizable to most Chinese. What reactions did the students have?

• Ted Bundy (top left): “intelligent,” “businessman,” “lawyer”
• Michael Jackson (top center): “poor,” “good at sports”
• Gov. Bobby Jindal and family (top right): “happy,” “Middle Eastern,” “not American”
• Sikh man (center left): “Bin Laden,” “Arab,” “oil merchant,” “terrorist”
• Kristen Kreuk (center): “model,” “actress,” “mixed”
• Kim Jong-nam (center right): “rich,” “countryside person,” “taxi driver”
• Augusto Pinochet (bottom left): “Nazi,” “strong man,” “Japanese”
• Cindy McCain (bottom center): “businesswoman,” “serious,” “kind”
• Bobby Bowden (bottom right): “government official,” “intelligent,” “European”

To analyze the responses a bit, I created this segment of the lecture expecting the Sikh to catch most of the negative comments, since Westerners also mistake Sikhs for Muslim fundamentalist Arabs and thereby transfer negative stereotypes from Arabs to Sikhs. Furthermore, I deliberately included a friendly-looking Ted Bundy, so as to further underscore the point of the dangers of stereotyping, and the students fell for my “trap.” The other results are across the board, and the reactions to Bobby Bowden and Kim Jong-nam made me laugh. Lastly, while liberals may be heartened by my students’ reaction to Pinochet, China throws a wrinkle into the mix because being Nazi-like is not always negative here.

But that’s a subject for another post.

* A scientific survey would probably involve individual testing and ask respondents to simply note whether they had good feelings or bad feelings about the person they were looking at.

The Hegemon’s Prerogative

Chris Waugh makes the following observation about global defense spending figures compiled by SIPRI:

America wins with a whopping 47.77%, UK comes a very, very, very distant second with 4.83%, France third with 4.61%, then 4.2% followed by China on 4.1%. Of course, these figures are not presented in numerical order, and there could be other countries that should be inserted in the gaps, but still: Do you see why I don’t take any American complaints about China’s defence spending even remotely seriously? Do you see why such complaints send my hypocrisy detector way off the scale and into rehab?

Chris, with all due respect, is both right and wrong in this analysis.

Firstly, America does spend too much money on national defense, roughly $420 billion in FY 2007, a number sure to rise in 2008, especially when taking into account defense supplemental spending, extra funds approved by Congress during the course of the year. The budget features a lot of bloat, especially in contracting and operations, and for years American Congressmen have made Pentagon spending a piggybank for pet projects.

What are Americans buying with their $400+ billion? While it’s fashionable to think that all of the Pentagon budget goes towards weapon systems, operations and maintenance is the biggest single chunk of the US defense budget, and when combined with combat pay expenses and procurement expenses to replace used equipment, it easily approached $200 billion — roughly half — of the 2007 defense budget. The War on Terror plus the Iraq and Afghan conflicts are responsible for most of the operations budget, and as most other nations have declined to deploy as many forces as the US, their operations budgets are noticeably smaller, which in turn makes the US defense budget loom that much bigger over the rest of the world.

To be fair, we cannot really compare the Chinese peacetime defense budget to the US wartime budget. But if we took most of operations and maintenance off the table, America is still spending over $220 billion a year, about five times more than the 2007 SIPRI estimate for China’s defense budget, $41 billion, and roughly four times China’s $60 billion budget for 2008. This still seems like a massive disparity, but let’s consider how many military theaters China and the US are active in, respectively. China’s primary theater of operations is Asia, with a sprinkling of deployments to protect Chinese interests in Africa. The US, conversely, has forces deployed globally, with major operations in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. If we did some ugly math and divided the US’ spending by 5 to account for each theater of operations, then the US would be spending roughly the same amount per theater as the Chinese are spending in a single theater.* And for reasons I will explain, the strategic scope of a country’s operations matter when evaluating their defense budgets.

Why do American policymakers get uppity about a 19 percent hike in China’s disclosed defense budget?** Because US policy, post-WWII, has always been to be the militarily dominant power in as many theaters as possible. NATO was used to bolster the US presence in Europe and overpower the Soviets, while the US mostly went it alone — with some British help — in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, while relying on Japan and South Korea for assistance and strategic positioning in East Asia (a role that may ironically be filled by Vietnam in the future). In more recent years, the Pentagon has downgraded its strategic plans from the ability to fight two major theater wars to fighting one major theater war plus a small conflict — i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan — but there’s always been a demand for enough materiel and troops to respond to any crisis, anywhere. From the perspective of the political scientist, this is the way the US performs the role of “offshore balancer” — the foreign power strong enough to prevent the outbreak of regional wars or to limit their spread. Others will see the US behaving as an imperial power, and there is merit to this argument as well, though in function the US is less a “dictatress to the world” than a global magistrate.

Returning to the main point, China is quickly achieving parity with the US in Asia, and if China continues to grow its defense budget at the current rate, then the US runs the risk of being outmaneuvered and outgunned in this corner of the world. If you are American, or a conservative-minded Japanese, South Korean, or even a nationalist Vietnamese, the prospect of China ascendant in Asia may prove troubling. If you are Russian, then you’re happy to see America’s designs thwarted in the short term but might worry about the security of the Russian Far East in the long run. If you are a center-left European, you are happy to see America begin to step down from the hegemonic stage, though you fear what would happen if America similarly disengaged from NATO. But if you’re like most people around the world, you probably think the US shouldn’t be a hegemon in the first place, so you’re likely to accuse the US of hypocrisy for demanding that China justify its defense spending increases.

Not surprisingly, I find myself in the first category of thinkers, though I have hope that economic links and America’s technological edge will enable a peaceful rise of China. I understand where critics like Chris are coming from, but it’s the hegemon’s prerogative to be jealous of its power. The US has a lot invested in the status quo, and she will not gently accede to a regional challenger unless China proves that it is less interested in upsetting the balance than in preserving the system for mutual benefit.

* Few would assert that the Chinese have designs on a global military empire, but all signs point to a Chinese desire to be the regional hegemon of Asia.

** Always bear in mind that this is the budget we know about and probably not the entire budget.

Old Europe, Then and Now

A bit of weekend back-blogging: recently-released Nixon presidential papers reveal, among other things, interesting details from early Sino-US negotiations. An amusing conversation between Mao and Henry Kissinger has been making the rounds on the blogs, but the Telegraph‘s Richard Spencer turned to another aspect of the talks — mutual Euro-bashing:

… I came across this record of exchanges between Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao yesterday, in which Kissinger’s contempt for old Europe shines through – remember his comment, when I want to speak to Europe, who do I call?

Here Kissinger decides Europe is pretty much irrelevant, and that the person he most liked dealing with was Mao, with whom he could be perfectly frank about his realpolitick. Ho-hum.

[...]

We won’t get into the whole Kissinger subject now, obviously. But can we just agree that if only there hadn’t been such contempt for Europe, we might now have Spanish and Italian cafes on every street corner, rather than Starbucks, and how much better modern China would be for it, at least in this one, small, trivial way?

Setting aside the non-sequitir that increased Sino-European political ties would’ve created commercial alternatives to Starbucks, there’s something very important missing from Spencer’s characterization of Kissinger’s (and, seemingly, Mao’s) attitude towards Europe: context. The primary rationale for détente wasn’t economic cooperation but mutual security. And in early 1970s, not only was the Soviet Union at perhaps the peak of its power, threatening both the US and China, but Europe was also in the beginnings of Eurosclerosis, politically splintered and threatened by radicalism (remember the Red Brigades?), and, save for Great Britain, militarily weak. Calling Europe irrelevant then would be harsh but close to the truth.

Regardless of whether Dr. Kissinger has made animus towards Europe a known part of his philosophy, reciting his biases isn’t enough to prove him wrong. In terms of international security, the Europe of the 1970s had little to offer the US and nothing to offer China, so there’s no wonder the Chinese chose to forge a bilateral relationship. Today, of course, China recognizes the power of the EU and will gladly play the Europeans and Americans off each other. This is the nature of a Chinese foreign policy that is ever-changing but always realpolitik.

Update:  The Time China Blog notes that the jokes between Mao and Kissinger are actually old news.

It’s Fuwa Festival Now

One of my old Spring Festival rituals has been to travel to Tianjin’s Ancient Culture Street and look at the art unveiled there. Usually, the place is decorated with three-dimensional wire-and-cloth installations representing Spring Festival themes and the Chinese zodiac animal of the given year. While there were indeed giant mice to greet visitors this year, most of the traditional art took a back seat to Olympics propaganda imagery, with the many, many Fuwa and previous mascots popping up everywhere. It was a little bit like going to the mall in Christmastime and seeing Santa shoved aside by SuperBowl merchandise.

Are the Fuwa cute? Arguably, yes, but more so than any Olympic mascots in recent history, the Fuwa seem designed to appeal to children, and, by extension of that appeal, sell toys. (Those who would compare the Fuwa to the Care Bears phenomenon of the 1980s aren’t far from the truth. As such, I eagerly await parodies like this one.) Now the capitalist in me ought to embrace the marketing genius of actually using an Olympic mascot to sell things rather than just stand around looking embarrassingly ugly, but given the disconnect between the cutesy kiddie Fuwa and the “spirit” of the Olympic games, I wonder why we bother having Olympic mascots at all.

One could argue that the mascots are symbols of the country and emblematic of the pride that country feels at hosting the Olympics. To a lesser extent they reflect the Olympics themselves, which the Fuwa do through their colors and through our friend Huanhuan to the left, who allegedly personifies the Olympic flame. Fair enough, but aside from Jingjing the Giant Panda, which of the Fuwa can be visually connected to China by most people?* How is the pride of a great nation adequately represented by dolls?

This is an old debate, of course, and the Fuwa, in their multi-colored plush glory, are here to stay. But the Fuwa do underline two negative trends in Olympic mascots — first, making them so abstract that they have only a thin connection to the host country, and second, opting for multiple mascots** rather than a single one, which needlessly clutters up the imagery. On the latter score we can be thankful that the five Fuwa aren’t nearly as ugly as the three mascots of the Sydney games:

Lastly, lest I be accused of needless Fuwa-bashing, I promise this is all a prelude to bashing the mascot of the 2012 London Olympics, which, if the logo for the games is any indication, promises to be spectacularly bad.

* Chinese may understand the symbolism of, say, Beibei the Fish, but foreigners won’t, and that defies the point of the Olympics as a global event.

** Arguably, this was to avoid the cliché of making the sole mascot a panda or a dragon.

In the Shadow of the Mouse

2008 is the Chinese Year of the Rat, though this year’s animal symbol is less rat and more mouse — Mickey Mouse to be precise. Walt Disney’s signature creation is all over Tianjin (and I suspect, all over the rest of the country), begging the question, is this one of the biggest copyright frauds in Chinese history, or is Disney raking in the dough from licensing fees?

(Also worth mentioning: the hundreds of almost-Mickeys that would be actionable copyright violations in a Western court.)