SLOW Movement

FT: Human beings or human resources?

Human beings or human resources?

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11

Recently, my partner Ching Ling got an iPhone. It is an amazing piece of engineering, so sleek and clever and attractive to handle that you could hardly fail to fall for it. A poet friend who, a while ago, penned a magnificent invective against mobile phones, comparing them to sex aids, would have to revise his lines. This thing is more like a cat: you stroke it and it purrs. Not always a well-behaved cat; plugged in for recharging, it woke us up in the middle of the night bleeping loudly. I have no idea what it wanted.

Essentially, though, it is a toy. Once you acquire an iPhone, you can’t stop playing with it. But the phone is also playing with you. It is making money out of you, cajoling you into signing up for all sorts of unnecessary applications. Watching me playing with it, Ching Ling observed that I had reverted to the age of five; shortly after she revised that to three.

The iPhone represents the power and attraction of the new – of technological innovation, promising social benefits but driven by commercial interests that do not uphold the principle St Paul enunciated in his first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child ... I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. I really don’t know whether an iPhone will help me to live better; I rather suspect not. I have no idea whether mobile phones in general have added to the sum of human well-being. We seemed to get on quite well without them; I have a feeling they have made it harder for people to be on their own.

For a long time now the power of the new has trumped the power of the old. But almost a year ago, when President Barack Obama gave his inaugural address, I noted a sea-change. In the most stirring piece of political oratory delivered for decades, Obama made a distinction between new challenges and instruments and old values, including “tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”. Later in the speech he harked back to one of the battles that gave birth to the US. It seemed the old was making a comeback, and in the UK that coincided with a sense of hollowness and decrepitude in the political project that has dominated the late 1990s and the 2000s, New Labour.

One old thing Obama did not so much talk about as represent was the power of the word. The word is probably the ultimate old thing that went out of fashion: words became “mere rhetoric”, windy nothingnesses set against the hard truths told by numbers. But Obama did not offer rhetoric so much as oratory, and many commented on the debt his speeches owed to classical models. Something rather strange and fascinating was going on: a youthful president, of African-American ancestry, was speaking not in bullet points but in the style of Cicero.

My gripe with Obama’s old things is that they are not old enough. He may speak in the style of Cicero but his values are drawn from the Enlightenment. Of course that makes sense, because America is a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment values Obama praises, such as tolerance and curiosity, are both admirable and essential – especially so in the context of insurgent bigotry. But they are not sufficient.

Sixty-five years ago, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had a nightmare. The Enlightenment, instead of liberating mankind, had bound it in chains. “The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with calamity ... What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to enslave both it and human beings.”

You don’t have to go quite as far as the two dour Frankfurt philosophers to see that the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen both in the state of nature, reduced and damaged possibly beyond repair, and of human beings, retooled as “human resources” – that is, means to be exploited rather than ends in themselves.

I think we need to go back beyond the time of the Enlightenment and the birth of the US to rediscover the values that give god-like dignity (what Plato called the “divine something”) to human beings and restore the non-instrumental beauty of the natural world. One place to start would be the beautifully redesigned Medieval and Renaissance galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. And within those galleries you might pause in front of the Symmachi panel, an exquisite late Roman ivory carving showing a young woman performing a pagan rite at an outdoor altar. Under the shade of a spreading oak an offering is being made, and thanks are being given. We don’t know exactly of what, for what, but we can imagine it has something to do with sky and earth, and the sustaining of life.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

November 29, 2009

Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

By MARTIN FACKLER

YEONGGWANG, South Korea — Just a few years ago, the number of pregnant women in this city had declined so much that the sparsely equipped two-room maternity ward at Yeonggwang General Hospital was close to shutting down. But these days it is busy again.

More surprising than the fact of this miniature baby-boom is its composition: children of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the offspring of Korean fathers and mothers from China, Vietnam and other parts of Asia. These families have suddenly become so numerous that the nurses say they have had to learn how to say “push” in four languages.

It is a similar story across South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas like this one in the nation’s southwest.

Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them.

South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.

“We bring these children into the world, but sometimes I worry,” said Kwak Ock-ja, 48, head maternity nurse at Yeonggwang General, where a third of the 132 births so far this year have been of children of mixed background, up from almost none a decade ago. “Prejudice against these families is something society must resolve.”

The surge in births of mixed children is the product of the similarly explosive growth here in marriages to foreigners, as a surplus of bachelors and the movement of eligible women to big cities like Seoul have increasingly driven Korean men in rural areas to seek brides in poorer parts of Asia. In addition, a preference for male babies has helped skew the population so there are fewer native-born women to marry. The Ministry of Public Security says the total number of children from what are called multicultural families in South Korea rose to 107,689 in May of this year from 58,007 last December, though the ministry said it might have slightly undercounted last year.

That is only about 1 percent of the approximately 12 million children in South Korea under the age of 19. But if marriages to foreigners continue to increase at their current rate — they accounted for 11 percent of all marriages here last year — more than one in nine children could be of mixed background by 2020, demographic researchers say.

The trend is even more pronounced in rural areas, where most of these marriages take place. Among farming households, 49 percent of all children will be multicultural by 2020, according to the Agricultural Ministry.

This increase is coming as South Korea’s overall birthrate has fallen to about 1.22 children per woman of child-bearing age, one of the world’s lowest rates. While many Koreans say they hope that the rising number of mixed children will help rejuvenate their rapidly graying society, they also say they fear that a failure to assimilate them could create the sort of poor, alienated underclass of ethnic minorities they see in the United States and Europe.

The increase has also begun to prompt a national soul-searching here about what it means to be Korean. While most of these children have Korean fathers and Korean citizenship, their dual ethnicity still gives them an uncertain status in a society where membership was long seen as being based on blood.

“The hard reality of our low birthrate is forcing us to realize that we can’t be homogeneous anymore,” said Park Hwa-seo, a professor of migration studies at Myongji University in Seoul. “It isn’t easy, but there is no turning back but to embrace these more diverse families.”

The increase of mixed-background children is so recent that relatively few have even reached elementary-school age. Still, signs of strain are already appearing.

According to the Education Ministry, the dropout rate of mixed-background children from elementary school is 15.4 percent, 22 times the national average. Part of the problem, social experts say, is the mothers’ lack of Korean-language skills, which prevents them from filling the expected social role of guiding children through the nation’s high-pressure education system.

Compounding the risk is the fact that most of the foreign women marry older farmers or manual laborers. Some 53 percent of mixed families live on earnings at or below the national minimum hourly wage of 4,000 won, or less than $3.50, according to the Welfare Ministry.

However, social experts say the biggest threat to the mixed children is that they will be ostracized in a society that began grappling with ethnic diversity only when labor shortages forced South Korea to accept foreign workers in the 1990s. The risk has been underscored by recent studies showing that the children of mixed marriages are more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse or bullying in school.

“I’m afraid we are already too late in responding,” said Suh Hae-jung, a researcher on gender equality at the government-financed Gyeonggido Family and Women’s Research Institute in Suwon. “On top of getting slighted for their color, their learning is also falling behind.”

Such concerns are quietly felt by Vicky Merano, 29, who came here from the Philippines six years ago to marry a Korean rice farmer 18 years her elder. Their 5-year-old daughter, Kim Da-som, does well in a local kindergarten, and on a recent evening she proudly showed off her ability to read the Korean language’s script and several Chinese characters.

Her father, Kim Hee-jong, beamed with pride and said that his relatives accepted the girl, including his parents, who share their 80-year-old tile-roofed farmhouse. Ms. Merano agreed but said she worried about what might happen as Da-som advanced beyond elementary school.

“Maybe if they don’t see me, they’ll just think my daughter is Korean,” Ms. Merano said.

The South Korean government says it has tried to respond quickly, opening 119 multicultural family support centers across the country in the past three years to offer help in education and vocational training.

The one in Yeonggwang, a small provincial city of 57,000 residents, opened in January. On a recent afternoon, its four small rooms were filled with Chinese, Thai and Filipino women learning to use computers and sewing machines while staff members watched their young children. Teachers also offered Korean-language classes to the mothers and children.

One woman, Edna Dela Cruz, said she preferred raising a family here because South Korea had better schools and a higher standard of living than the Philippines, where she was born. But she also worries about her 6-year-old son, who wants her to speak to him only in Korean so his classmates will not treat him as a pariah.

“Koreans tell me my child will be insulted because of me,” said Ms. Dela Cruz, 33, who married a local farmer.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China

Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009

Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China

By bill powell / shanghai

On the evening of Nov. 15, President Barack Obama, the youthful leader of one of the world's youngest countries, begins his first visit to China, among the world's most ancient societies. Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, have much to discuss. Nukes in Iran and North Korea. China's surging military spending. Trade imbalances. Climate change.

But the visit comes at an awkward moment for the U.S. China, despite its 5,000-year burden of history, has emerged as a dynamo of optimism, experimentation and growth. It has defied the global economic slump, and the sense that it's the world's ascendant power has never been stronger. The U.S., by contrast, seems suddenly older and frailer. America's national mood is still in a funk, its economy foundering, its red-vs.-blue politics as rancorous as ever. The U.S. may be one of the world's oldest capitalist countries and China one of the youngest, but you couldn't blame Obama if he leaned over to Hu at some point and asked, "What are you guys doing right?" (See pictures of people around the world watching Obama's Inauguration.)

Could the world's lone but weary superpower actually learn something from China? It's a politically incorrect question, of course. China is an authoritarian nation; its ruling Communist Party deals ruthlessly with any challenge to its hegemony. It remains, relatively speaking, a poor, developing country with huge problems to confront, massive corruption and environmental degradation being Nos. 1 and 1a. Still, this is a moment of humility for the U.S., and China is doing some important things right. If the U.S. were to ask the Chinese what it could learn from their example, it might gain some insight into what it's doing right and wrong. Here are five lessons from China's success story:

1. Be Ambitious
One day this summer, Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel, was bouncing from one appointment to another in northeastern China, speeding along in a van traversing newly built highways. He gazed out at one of the world's biggest construction projects: a network of high-speed train lines — covering 10,000 miles (16,000 km) nationwide — that China is building. As far as the eye could see, there sat vast concrete support struts, one after another, exactly 246 ft. (75 m) apart. Each was full of steel cables and weighed about 800 tons. "We used to build stuff too," Maloney mused, unprompted. "But now it's NIMBY [not in my backyard] every time you try to do something. Here," he joked, "it's more like IMBY. There's stuff happening here, everywhere and always." (See pictures of the largest military parade in China's history.)

It's not just NIMBYism that constrains the U.S. these days, of course. America is close to tapped out financially, with budget deficits this year and next exceeding $1 trillion and forecast to remain above $500 billion through 2019. But sometimes the country seems tapped out in terms of vision and investment for the future.

Some economists believe that given its stage of development, China spends too much on expensive items like high-speed rail lines. But step back from the individual infrastructure projects and the debates about whether a given investment is necessary, and what's palpable in China is the sense of forward motion, of energy. No foreigner — at least not one I've met in five years of living here — even bothers denying it. And the Chinese take it for granted. When a brand-new six-lane highway opened in suburban Shanghai in October, Zhong Li Ping, who shuttles migrant workers to the city and back to their hometowns, said, "I don't know what took them so long." In truth, it took about two years — roughly the time it would take to get the environmental and other regulatory permits for a new highway in the U.S. If, that is, you could get them at all. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Making of Modern China.")

There's no direct translation into Chinese of the phrase can-do spirit. But yong wang zhi qian probably suffices. Literally, it means "march forward courageously." China has — and has had for years now — a can-do spirit that's unmistakable. Americans know the phrase well. They invented it. It used to define them.

Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do — or else." And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.) But you don't have to be a card-carrying communist to wonder how effectively the U.S. develops and executes ambitious projects. Ask James McGregor. He's a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now a business consultant who divides his time between the two countries. "One key thing we can learn from China is setting goals, making plans and focusing on moving the country ahead as a nation," he says. "These guys have taken the old five-year plans and stood them on their head. Instead of deciding which factory gets which raw materials, which products are made, how they are priced and where they are sold, their planning now consists of 'How do we build a world-class silicon-chip industry in five years? How do we become a global player in car-manufacturing?'"

See 10 things to do in Shanghai.

See 10 things to do in Beijing.

Some of this is the natural arc of a huge, fast-growing country in the process of modernization. The U.S. in the late 19th century was nothing if not what Intel's Maloney would call an IMBY country. America was ambitious. There's no secret formula to help the nation get back its zeal for what it used to enthusiastically and sincerely call progress. But even though the U.S. is a mature, developed country, many economists believe it has shortchanged infrastructure investment for decades. It possibly did so again in this year's stimulus package. Just $144 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed earlier this year went to direct infrastructure spending. According to IHS Global Insight, an economic-consulting firm, U.S. spending on transportation infrastructure will actually decline overall in 2009 when state budgets are factored in — this at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers contends that the U.S. should invest $1.6 trillion to upgrade its aging infrastructure over the next five years.

When the economic crisis hit China late last year, by contrast, almost half of the emergency spending Beijing approved — $585 billion spread over two years — was directed at projects that accelerated China's massive infrastructure build-out. "That money went into the real economy very quickly," says economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But it's not just emergency spending on bridges, roads and high-speed rail networks that's helping growth in China. Patrick Tam, general partner at Tsing Capital, a venture-capital firm in Beijing, says the government is aggressively helping seed the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China's biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years. "China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles," Tam says, "in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal to make that happen." Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, says he does deals in Beijing rather than Silicon Valley these days "because I believe this is where these new industries will really take shape. China's got the energy, the drive and the market to do it." Isn't that the sort of thing venture capitalists used to say about the U.S.? (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

2. Education Matters
On a recent Saturday afternoon, at a nice restaurant in central Shanghai, Liu Zhi-he sat fidgeting at the table, knowing that it was about time for him to leave. All around him sat relatives from an extended family that had gathered for a momentous occasion: the 90th birthday of Liu's great-grandmother Ling Shu Zhen, the still spry and elegant matriarch of a sprawling clan. But Liu had to leave because it was time for him to go to school. This Saturday, as he does every Saturday, Liu was attending two special classes. He takes a math tutorial, and he studies English.

Liu is 7 years old.

A lot of foreigners — and, indeed, a fair number of Chinese — believe that the obsession (and that's the right word) with education in China is overdone. The system stresses rote memorization. It drives kids crazy — aren't 7-year-olds supposed to have fun on Saturday afternoons? — and doesn't necessarily prepare them, economically speaking, for the job market or, emotionally speaking, for adulthood. Add to that the fact that the system, while incredibly competitive, has become corrupt.

All true — and all, for the most part, beside the point. After decades of investment in an educational system that reaches the remotest peasant villages, the literacy rate in China is now over 90%. (The U.S.'s is 86%.) And in urban China, in particular, students don't just learn to read. They learn math. They learn science. As William McCahill, a former deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, says, "Fundamentally, they are getting the basics right, particularly in math and science. We need to do the same. Their kids are often ahead of ours." (See pictures of China on the wild side.)

What the Chinese can teach are verities, home truths that have started to make a comeback in the U.S. but that could still use a push. The Chinese understand that there is no substitute for putting in the hours and doing the work. And more than anything else, the kids in China do lots of work. In the U.S., according to a 2007 survey by the Department of Education, 37% of 10th-graders in 2002 spent more than 10 hours on homework each week. That's not bad; in fact, it's much better than it used to be (in 1980 a mere 7% of kids did that much work at home each week). But Chinese students, according to a 2006 report by the Asia Society, spend twice as many hours doing homework as do their U.S. peers.

Part of the reason is family involvement. Consider Liu, the 7-year-old who had to leave the birthday party to go to Saturday school. Both his parents work, so when he goes home each day, his grandparents are there to greet him and put him through his after-school paces. His mother says simply, "This is normal. All his classmates work like this after school."

See pictures of Beijing.

Read "Can China Save the World?"

Yes, big corporate employers in China will tell you the best students coming out of U.S. universities are just as bright as and, generally speaking, far more creative than their counterparts from China's élite universities. But the big hump in the bell curve — the majority of the school-age population — matters a lot for the economic health of countries. Simply put, the more smart, well-educated people there are — of the sort that hard work creates — the more economies (and companies) benefit. Remember what venture capitalist Tam said about China and the electric-vehicle industry. A single, relatively new company working on developing an electric-car battery — BYD Co. — employs an astounding 10,000 engineers.

China, critics will point out, doesn't produce (at least not yet) many Nobel Prize winners. But don't think the basic educational competence of the workforce isn't a key factor in its having become the manufacturing workshop of the world. It isn't just about cheap labor; it's about smart labor. "Whether it's line workers or engineers, we're finding the candlepower of our employees here as good as or better than anywhere in the world," says Nick Reilly, a top executive at General Motors in Shanghai. "It all starts with the emphasis families put on the importance of education. That puts pressure on the government to deliver a decent system." (See pictures of the best-selling cars in China.)

And the Chinese government responds to that pressure in some intriguing ways. It insists that primary-school teachers in math and science have degrees in those subjects. (Less than half of eighth-grade math teachers in the U.S. majored in math.) There is a "master teacher" program nationwide that provides mentoring for younger teachers. Zhang Dianzhou, a professor emeritus of mathematics at East China Normal University in Shanghai who co-chaired a committee charged with redesigning high school mathematics programs across the country, says recent changes have begun to reflect more of a "real-world emphasis." Computer-science courses, for example, have been integrated into the math curriculum for high school students. And China is placing even more importance on teaching young students English and other foreign languages. If you think China's willingness to constantly fine-tune its educational system is not going to have much of an impact 20 years from now, there's a 7-year-old boy in Shanghai who'd be happy to discuss the issue with you. In English.

3. Look After the Elderly
it's hard to imagine two societies that deal with their elderly as differently as the U.S. and China. And I can vouch for that firsthand. My wife Junling is a Shanghai native, and last month for the first time we visited my father at a nursing home in the U.S. She was shaken by the experience and later told me, "You know, in China, it's a great shame to put a parent into a nursing home." In China the social contract has been straightforward for centuries: parents raise children; then the children care for the parents as they reach their dotage. When, for example, real estate developer Jiang Xiao Li and his wife recently bought a new, larger apartment in Shanghai, they did so in part because they know that in a few years, his parents will move in with them. Jiang's parents will help take care of Jiang's daughter, and as they age, Jiang and his wife will help take care of them. As China slowly develops a better-funded and more reliable social-security system for retirees — which it has begun — the economic necessity of generations living together will diminish a bit. But no one believes that as China gets richer, the cultural norm will shift too significantly. (See 10 health care–reform ads.)

To a degree, of course, three generations living under one roof has long happened in the U.S., but in the 20th century, America became a particularly mobile and rootless society. It is hard to care for one's parents when they live three time zones away.

Home care for the elderly will most likely make a comeback in the U.S. out of sheer economic necessity, however. The number of elderly Americans will soar from 38.6 million in 2007 to 71.5 million in 2030. But, says Arnold Eppel, who recently retired as head of the department of aging in Baltimore County, Maryland, "There won't be enough spots for them" in the country's overwhelmed nursing-home system. Appreciating the magnitude of the coming crisis, the U.S. government has begun to respond. Two new initiatives — Nursing Home Diversion and Money Follows the Person — expand subsidies for home elder care, and the Veterans Health Administration has just put in effect its own similar initiative. "The whole trend will be into home care, because nursing homes are too expensive," Eppel says, noting that nursing-home care in the U.S. costs about $85,000 annually per resident.

In China, senior-care costs are, for the most part, borne by families. For millions of poor Chinese, that's a burden as well as a responsibility, and it unquestionably skews both spending and saving patterns in ways that China needs to change (see Save More, below). For middle-class and rich Chinese, those costs are a more manageable responsibility but one that nonetheless ripples through their economic decision-making. Still, there are benefits that balance the financial hardship: grandparents tutor young children while Mom and Dad work; they acculturate the youngest generation to the values of family and nation; they provide a sense of cultural continuity that helps bind a society. China needs to make obvious changes to its elder-care system as it becomes a wealthier society, but as millions of U.S. families make the brutal decision about whether to send aging parents into nursing homes, a bigger dose of the Chinese ethos may well be returning to America.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

See pictures of Shanghai.

4. Save More
You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to spend more; they need to consume more; they need — believe it or not — to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy.

And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U.S. needs to save more. For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. Now that it's pouring, in other words, American households have decided to save for a rainy day. The savings rate is currently about 4% and has gone as high as 6% this year. (See TIME's photo-essay "A New Look at Old Shanghai.")

In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. It is partly for straightforward policy reasons. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but also their aging parents. And there is, to date, only the flimsiest of publicly funded health care and pension systems, which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China, like many other East Asian countries, is a society that has esteemed personal financial prudence for centuries. There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending.

Why does the U.S. need to learn a little frugality? Because healthy savings rates, including government and business savings, are one of the surest indicators of a country's long-term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn of a good economic harvest.

The U.S. government thus needs to get in on the act as well. By running perennial deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U.S. budget deficits unsustainable — this year's is $1.4 trillion — and he's right. To date, the U.S. has seemed unable to have what Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has called an "adult conversation" about the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. And though Hu Jintao and the rest of the Chinese leadership aren't inclined to lecture visiting Presidents, he might gently hint that Beijing is getting a little nervous about the value of the dollar — which has fallen 15% since March, in large part because of increasing fears that America's debt load is becoming unmanageable. (See TIME's special report "Obama After a Year: What's Changed, and What Hasn't.")

That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor: you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic havoc if they were ever leaked. (Every time any official in Beijing muses publicly about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans became a bit more like the Chinese — if they saved more and spent less, consistently over time — they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

5. Look over the Horizon
The energy that so many outsiders feel when they are in China and that President Obama may see when he is there comes not just from the frenetic activity that is visible everywhere. It comes also from a sense that it's harnessed to something bigger. The government isn't frantically building all this infrastructure just to create make-work jobs. And kids aren't studying themselves sleepless because it's a lot of fun. A few years ago, I interviewed Zhang Xin, a young man from a deeply poor agricultural province in central China. His parents were wheat farmers and lived in a tiny one-room house next to the fields. He had graduated from Tsinghua University — China's MIT — and gotten a job as a software engineer at Huawei, the Cisco of China. His success, Zhang told me one day, had changed his family forever. None of his descendants would "ever work in the wheat fields again. Not my children. Not their children. That life is over." (And neither would his parents. They moved to prosperous Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, soon after he started his new job.)

Multiply that young man's story by millions, and you get a sense of what a forward-looking country this once very backward society has become. A smart American who lived in China for years and who wants to avoid being identified publicly (perhaps because he'd be labeled a "panda hugger," the timeworn epithet tossed at anyone who has anything good to say about China) puts it this way: "China is striving to become what it has not yet become. It is upwardly mobile, consciously, avowedly and — as its track record continues to strengthen — proudly so."

Proudly so, because as Zhang understood, hard work today means a much better life decades from now for those who will inherit what he helped create. And if that sounds familiar to Americans — marooned, for the moment, in the deepest recession in 26 years — it should.

===

China's schools are adding more creative and practical topics to their notoriously rigid curriculum.

China is experimenting with eco-friendly technologies, from electric cars to urban wind turbines like this one in southeastern Shanghai.

Masons at work in front of the China Pavilion at the future site of Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Most Chinese seniors live with and are cared for by their relatives.

See pictures of China's electronic waste village.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671,00.html

FT: Britian's first female diplomats

For 26 years – from their entry into the Foreign Office until the marriage bar was lifted – the UK’s women diplomats had to choose between a husband and public service.

===

Britain’s first female diplomats

By Alex Barker

Published: November 6 2009 14:25 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:25

Lady Cicely Mayhew, first woman to join the British diplomatic service, this year

Cicely Mayhew, the first woman to join the British diplomatic service, lives in a handsome cottage near Blenheim Palace, on a street that once served as a set for “Miss Marple”. Now well into her eighties, her memory is not what it was. But she still recites long passages of Shakespeare, chants marching songs from Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoys a pot of vanilla ice-cream most days to make up for wartime rationing.

She is remarkably matter-of-fact about having blazed a trail for women by becoming the King’s first female emissary in 1947. “My attitude was, about time too!” she says. Mayhew had already come up against the barriers that ambitious working women faced – during her wartime service at Bletchley Park, where the codes that protected German communications were cracked, she received lower pay and ranked beneath men who could not boast a first from Oxford. By comparison with that, the diplomatic service was a step forward, albeit a touch patronising. “Our new lamb, that’s what they called me,” Mayhew recalls. “They were all very kind, very courteous.”

The Foreign Office had fought for decades to keep Mayhew’s kind out, often going to great lengths to prove women unworthy. In response to one 1930s committee investigation, it called on every head of mission to consider the question of women in the service, the results of which FCO historians recently reprinted in a striking paper. Even by the standards of their era, the views are extraordinary.

One ambassador said it was “unthinkable” for a diplomat to “produce babies”. Our man in Berne feared that “the clever woman would not be liked and the attractive woman would not be taken seriously”. Then there was this from Bucharest: “The hard-bitten Englishwoman nurtured in the London School of Economics, with a Marx and Engels outlook; the product of Girton or Somerville, interested chiefly in ancient Greek theatre, but wielding from time to time a forceful hockey stick; the shires girl who breakfasts off an ether cocktail and who will abandon the Chancery entirely for the polo field – none of these would be suitable representatives.”

When women, led by Mayhew, finally breached the Foreign Office ramparts, little was changed to accommodate them. Old habits endured. New applicants were still taken to a grand country house, plied with stiff Martinis and tested after dinner, without warning, on administering a fictitious island. There was no special guidance for female entrants and, in age-old Foreign Office tradition, no training either. “You were just flung into a department head-first and told to get on with it,” said Rosamund Huebener, who joined the year after Mayhew. “I had no idea what I was doing and nobody knew what to do with me. It was tremendous fun.”

Some continents, however, remained out of bounds: the Middle East and, more surprisingly, South America. “They thought any young woman would suffer what was euphemistically called a fate worse than death at the hands of some Latin lover,” says Dame Margaret Anstee, who went on to a glittering career with the UN in Bolivia among other places.

Lady Cicely Mayhew in Yugoslavia in 1948

For her first posting, in the late 1940s, Mayhew asked to “have a look behind the Iron Curtain” and embarked on an adventure to Belgrade with her shaggy dog, Hamlet, at her side. Her next assignment was Geneva. It didn’t last long. A dashing foreign office minister – dubbed “the Socialists’ most eligible bachelor” – arrived on an official visit in 1949. At dinner Mayhew commended a speech the minister had delivered earlier that day. “Then he said something about how he had another speech to make – and proposed,” Mayhew recalls. “I was so surprised I said yes.”

And that was the end of Cicely Mayhew’s career as a diplomat. More than anything else, her future had depended on one thing: staying single. Along with all female diplomats, Mayhew’s letter of service stated that she would be “required to resign on marriage”. Other Whitehall departments had dropped the so-called “marriage bar” after the war. The one exception was the diplomatic service.

Very little official explanation was offered, save that diplomats could be sent anywhere in the world at short notice, a condition deemed incompatible with married life. (What on earth would their husband do?) Diplomatic Service Regulation No 5 was just “the order of things”. Those women who left to marry were stripped of their pensions and given a dowry, amounting to a month’s salary for every year they had served. The marriage bar remained in place, rigorously enforced, until 1973.

For 26 years, from the moment women were admitted to the diplomatic service to the point the marriage bar was lifted, Britain’s pioneering female diplomats faced the starkest choice possible between their careers and their private lives, between public service and a husband. There was no middle way.

. . .

The Foreign Office’s decision to do away with the marriage bar was inevitable. Debate was already under way in Britain about the need to guarantee basic equality in the workplace and elsewhere, and in 1975, Harold Wilson’s Labour government passed the Sex Discrimination Act. If the Foreign Office had not removed the bar voluntarily, it would not have been long before it was forced to do so. The mandarins knew they would eventually have to bend with the times.

But – bizarre anachronism though it now appears – the existence of the marriage bar for female diplomats as recently as 36 years ago underlines both how much has changed in the relationship between people and their jobs, and how little. Society still agonises over trade-offs made by working mothers and the halting progress women are making towards equal representation, particularly in senior executive and professional positions. The solution has been to seek – and to legislate for – the “work-life balance”, a state of being we are all enjoined to achieve.

The pioneering female diplomats who served in the Foreign Office between 1947 and 1973 had that balance struck for them. Their superiors concluded that no accommodation between career and family was possible – at least not one involving a husband or children. It was a bar that at some point applied to professions ranging from teaching to the law (see panel below). The tide of equality legislation swept it away, implying to the generations who followed that no job is inherently incompatible with a family life.

But, as any female diplomat will attest, some jobs lend themselves less well to family responsibilities. The barriers may have gone, but the personal trade-offs remain. Moving across continents every three or four years takes a toll on any family or relationship. Women remain significantly underrepresented. To this day the Foreign Office struggles to design a system that is flexible, meets equality legislation, is fair to both sexes, is kind to families and effective. It may be a puzzle with no solution.

. . .

Faced with the stark choice between professional ambition and desire for domesticity, most of Cicely Mayhew’s contemporaries also chose a husband over a career. Mayhew, in common with others, admits it was not a straightforward decision to leave the job she loved. “It is silly to pretend I didn’t have doubts, then or later,” she said. “Did I do the right thing? Should I have stayed? Now of course I have my family, two boys, two girls. How could I possibly wish them away?”

Departures such as hers touched off something of a brouhaha among the male superiors left behind. “The Foreign Office is perturbed,” declared one newspaper article (which described Mayhew as a “glamour girl”). “Its women diplomats are so attractive that it is losing them too fast. All their training and experience is being lost.” In the face of this exodus, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin apparently snapped: “We’ve turned the Foreign Office into a matrimonial bureau!”

Dame Anne Warburton, our first female ambassador

Of course, it was not the marriage bar that was blamed so much as the fact that women had been allowed into the service at all. Grace Gardner, who joined in 1947, came up against similar bunkum. When she announced she was leaving, a “rather crusty” senior colleague blurted out: “The trouble with you women is that you will go and get married.”

“You’ve had 11 of the best years of my life,” Gardner replied. “What are you grumbling about?”

Yet it is wrong to assume that the pioneering female diplomats saw the marriage bar as unjust at the time. The gravity of the choice it forced upon them certainly added an extra edge to marriage proposals (one Foreign Office veteran admitted that it took her six years to decide). But many took the marriage bar for granted or never thought of mixing a family and a career, regardless of the rules. There was no push to remove it.

Some of those who persevered came to rationalise the direction their careers had taken as the result of never having met the right person. One put it this way: “If you are very much in love, it is pretty clear what you do.” Some pioneers are candid about the emotional price of a career in diplomacy, of options narrowed, of paths chosen “in spite of yourself”. But none admits to having forgone pure love for a job.

“It didn’t bother me very much. If I wanted to marry, I would have been ready to leave the service,” Anne Warburton told me as we sat drinking coffee, looking out at her Suffolk garden. “There were times when I enjoyed that side of life, but not to the point of wanting to leave the service. I was enjoying life as I was.”

Warburton became Britain’s first female ambassador, presenting her credentials to the Danish court in 1976. Others followed, but there were no more than a dozen senior women through the 1970s and 1980s, and until 1987, when Veronica Sutherland took up her post in the Ivory Coast, every British female ambassador was unmarried and childless.

Warburton is still regarded inside the diplomatic service with some awe. But she is unassuming and modest to a fault. If there were barriers in her way because of her sex, she bears no grudges. She recalls the odd case of discrimination. (Our ambassador in Helsinki once turned down a woman for a posting, claiming “policy is so often made in the sauna”.) But Warburton was never seriously put out. “If you arrive as the herald of other people, maybe you feel that that’s good, that’s progress and you don’t start complaining.”

Some pioneers acknowledge that later generations may find it odd that they did not protest more. “If the Service has changed its attitudes, so too have the women who belong to it,” explained Juliet Campbell, the former ambassador to Luxembourg and probably the first to lead a majority-female mission overseas. “In retrospect, I am struck by how those of us among my contemporaries who thought of ourselves as feminists felt we had to prove ourselves, without concessions. To have suggested that any special allowance be made was a tacit admission of inferiority.”

Juliet Campbell, former ambassador to Luxembourg

Campbell married in her mid-forties, long after the marriage bar had gone. Had she come close to leaving? “I did have moments. But, to be honest, I used to ask myself why I didn’t get married, and I think maybe belonging to the Foreign Office was part of it,” she said. “You had this life, you moved on every two or three years or whatever, and you didn’t form quite the same forms of relationship.”

It is a common gripe. Diplomacy is a peripatetic business that leaves little time for blossoming romances or ageing parents. Every diplomat’s contract includes a mobility clause, meaning they can be sent anywhere at any time. “There was an assumption that you couldn’t expect to spend all your time in green pastures,” said Campbell. “I remember being told that it was time to go and get my knees brown. You couldn’t expect because you had children or, as I later discovered, elderly parents, to think that this was a reason you could stay in easy touch, because you would be told, rather briskly, ‘we all do at this stage of life’.”

A stint as a single woman in Bangkok was particularly hard. “Society moved in certain sorts of groups and circles and as a relatively senior woman you were neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring,” she said. “There were the wives, there were what were then known as dolly-birds, the pretty secretaries, and there were lots of gorgeous Thai girls all over the place. I somehow felt I didn’t belong. That’s probably the biggest price, at times: you can gather I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m not fussing, but I would say I had periods of being acutely lonely.”

. . .

There was no party to say goodbye to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones when she left the Foreign Office. It was Christmas 1995 and she was a 32-year veteran, the most senior woman diplomat of her time and arguably the most influential the service has ever had. But there was no card, no carriage clock, no leaving do. “You must be joking,” she told me as we sat in her small Chelsea house. “I just left. It was not very nice. Everybody had a sense it was a failure, which it was, in a way.”

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, whose glittering Foreign Office career ended in regret

Too much time has passed to unpick properly the rights and wrongs of why she resigned. One fact stands out: she is the only political director in living memory not to move on to a top ambassadorial post. She wanted Paris, the plum appointment, and asked not to return to Bonn, where she had just served. In the event, a man six years her junior was given Paris, while she was only offered a ticket to Germany. She walked.

Neville-Jones admits playing her hand badly. But she is still smarting at the sniping that followed her exit. Anonymous diplomats were quoted saying her mind was not up to scratch, that she was “strong-willed and abrasive”, not “sufficiently emollient for the niceties of diplomatic life”, a touch heartless. “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?” she said, jumping forward in her chair. “That is not something that you would ever hear about a man.”

Who did she confide in during this difficult period? “Well that’s one of the hard things about not being married, because you’ve nobody else to talk to. I talk a bit with my brother, my brother’s very supportive,” she said. “My mother couldn’t begin to understand what was happening. Though, interestingly enough, she said to me afterwards, ‘I sensed you were unhappy in that job.’ So it must have shown.”

She pressed on in business, and recently joined the Conservatives as David Cameron’s national security adviser. But almost 15 years on, her premature departure still splits opinion. The controversy survives, in part, because the women’s diplomatic revolution is unfinished. Not long after Neville-Jones, another senior woman fell at the Paris hurdle. And a woman has yet to hold one of the seven top Foreign Office jobs.

I wondered if Neville-Jones sacrificed anything to the marriage bar. “Well, I’m not married,” she said, after a moment’s pause. Over the years she rejected a few suitors, but only came close to accepting one proposal, and even then never really “agonised about it”. She admits the marriage bar played a part. “Do I regret it?” she went on, anticipating my question. “It would be nice to be married. But do I look back and say, this is a fearful regret? No, I don’t. The one thing I do think about my life is – for God’s sake – don’t complain. You choose to do something, you take what goes with the territory.”

. . .

Yet there is little doubt that, from a woman’s perspective, what goes with the territory is changing. The marriage bar is long gone. Our man in Havana is now our woman. The number of women in senior management remains woefully low – 21 per cent of the total and just four out of the top 29 jobs – but compared even with a decade ago, when the proportion was 6 per cent, it is a small triumph.

The new watchword is flexibility. Sir Peter Ricketts, the well-regarded head of the Foreign Office, has introduced schemes to help balance family and career. A “mobility clause” still appears in every contract, but it is far less strictly enforced. Job shares are more common: a husband and wife team now head the mission to Zambia. So is remote working. So the schemes are in place – the real battle is to change the culture. A Foreign Office survey found that more than 40 per cent of staff still feel issues of work-life balance and flexible working cannot be openly discussed.

Anne Pringle, ‘rock chick’ and Britain’s first female ambassador to Moscow

One symbol of the new female-friendly service is Anne Pringle, the first female ambassador to Moscow since diplomatic links were established 450 years ago. A self-described “rock chick”, she joined the service four years after the marriage bar was lifted and benefited from the new regime. Early on, she still sensed that “people didn’t hear the message till a bloke had said it”. But once she started being noticed, she was supported.

As a man who has just married a diplomat, I’m understandably concerned about the peripatetic lifestyle. Moving countries every four years – kids and careers in tow – sounds like the opposite of settling down. Pringle spoke to me with some trepidation – knowing my wedding was just a few weeks away. “I hope I don’t put you off,” she said.

She didn’t. But her lifestyle would not suit everyone. Since they married 20 years ago, her Moscow posting is the first time she has worked in the same country as her husband. “I don’t think anyone would pretend it’s easy. I’d say my husband and I are past masters at shuttle diplomacy,” she told me. For a while it was Paris and Brussels, then Singapore and London. “It is quite a long haul. But it’s worked for us. We have barely missed a beat and certainly barely ever missed a weekend,” she said.

At this point, she must have noticed the wobble in my voice. “Most people find it slightly bizarre that we are still very, very together. But you have just got to find what works for you. The joy of nowadays is that you are not in a straitjacket. Spouses 30 years ago were in quite a straitjacket in terms of not having many choices for what to do. Now things are a bit more flexible and that helps both sides.” I do hope she is right.

Alex Barker is an FT political correspondent

...............................................................

A brief history of the marriage bar

Airline stewardesses
c. 1930-1968

Boeing Air Transport’s hire of eight young nurses as flight attendants in 1930 set the precedent for employing only attractive, unattached women, writes Sonia Van Gilder Cooke. In the 1960s, stewardesses challenged the industry’s tacit marriage bar and in 1968, airlines dropped the policy along with forced retirement at the age of 32.

Postal workers
1875-1946

In the early 1870s, the Post Office opened the doors of its Returned Letter Office and Savings Bank to women workers. In 1875, however, the Office introduced a marriage bar that stayed in place for seven decades, until 1946.

Bank workers: Barclays
c.1915-1961

Women first joined Barclays during the first world war, yet had to wait until 1961 to retain their positions after marriage. The Bank of England and Lloyds Bank had abolished their marriage bars by 1952, but Barclays continued the policy, with its chairman suggesting as late as 1964 that “family commitments” rather than career should be the priority of young female employees.

Broadcasters: BBC
1932-1944

Despite the eminence of many married female employees in its early years, the BBC adopted a marriage bar in 1932. The bar was jettisoned in 1944, the same year the BBC reporter Audrey Russell became the nation’s first accredited female war correspondent. Gender discrimination persisted, however: women could not become general trainees or newsreaders until 1960.

Teachers
1923-1935

In 1923, London County Council banned the hiring of married women teachers; it was followed by educational authorities nationwide. The National Union of Women Teachers argued that marriage brought “human understanding” to the classroom and won the right to continue working after marriage in 1935.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Economist: Singapore's sand shortage - The hourglass effect

Singapore's sand shortage

The hourglass effect

Oct 8th 2009 | SINGAPORE
From The Economist print edition

Seven maids with seven mops might fail, but Singapore gets close

“LOOKING for sea-sand for reclamation project in Singapore. Prompt reply is greatly appreciated.” Many such pleas can be found on Alibaba.com, a popular Chinese trading-website. Malaysia banned sand exports as long ago as 1997. Indonesia followed suit in 2007 on environmental and, some say, political grounds. Ever since, it has become harder for Singapore to secure supplies for its booming construction industry and sea-fill plans.

AFP

The good old days, when Indonesia’s loss was Singapore’s gain

The ban by Indonesia, its biggest supplier, led to a surge in the price of sand, used in both concrete and land-reclamation. The government averted a short-term crisis by releasing sand from its stockpile and helping contractors find new sources. However, Indonesia’s embargo, followed swiftly by a Chinese ban on sales of sand to Taiwan, set in train a domino effect.

Environmentalists argue that large-scale sand-dredging can deplete fish stocks and cause erosion, risking landslides and flooding. So Singaporean contractors turned to Cambodia, where prices are low and environmental standards almost non-existent. But this May Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, outlawed exports of sand. Again, environmental pressures were cited, but there may also have been a political motive.

After the Cambodian ban Vietnam’s sand exports surged, achieving volumes seven times as big as last year, with Singapore the main customer. Then last month Vietnam’s construction ministry called for a temporary halt to the trade, to assess its impact on the environment and the local building industry. NGOs in Thailand and Bangladesh have also pressed their governments to reject recent requests to allow sales of sand to Singapore.

Sand prices, which peaked at over S$60 ($43) a tonne in 2007, have fallen during the slowdown. Simon Lee, of the Singapore Contractors’ Association, believes a new regulation requiring sand importers to have alternative back-up supplies will help insulate his members from further turbulence. A spokesman for Singapore’s national-development ministry adds that construction companies have been importing sand from “various” regional countries and claims that “recent restrictions on sand exports have not affected the supply of construction sand to Singapore.” But global demand for dwindling supplies of sand and other materials is mounting. Critics say that Singapore needs to shift faster from building cheap but resource-intensive concrete structures towards more expensive construction techniques that use, say, more steel and glass.

Relying as it does on low-wage, low-skilled migrant workers from South Asia, Singapore’s construction industry is not yet ready for such a high-tech transformation. And in the short term there are still plenty of willing suppliers. Tim Sintop, an American whose trading company wants to export sand from Myanmar and has already secured several contracts in Singapore, is upbeat: “The more bans there are elsewhere, the better for us.”

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Adopted Chinese daughters seek their roots

Adopted Chinese daughters seek their roots

By Patti Waldmeir

Published: September 25 2009 21:33 | Last updated: September 25 2009 21:33

Patti Waldmeir with her daughter, Grace

We have all seen them: adorable Chinese girls holding the hands of their (usually elderly, often overweight, but definitely doting) Caucasian parents, strolling the streets from New York to New South Wales, growing up in a white, white world, far away from the land and culture where they were born.

In some ways, they are a permanent blot on the image of China: surplus daughters the country couldn’t care for, unintended consequences of the 30-year-old “one-child” policy that led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands if not millions of female infants at birth. But now, as the balance of global economic and political power shifts subtly in favour of China, Beijing is reaching out to all these lost daughters – and welcoming them back home.

China has invited thousands of foundlings back to their birthplaces for government-sponsored “homeland tours” which, like last year’s Beijing Olympics or next year’s Shanghai World Expo, give the country a chance to show off to the world. On one level, what the Chinese adoption authorities call “root seeking tours” – filled with extravagant expressions of love and kinship and lavish gifts for the returning orphans – are a transparent public relations exercise aimed at raising money for Chinese orphanages, justifying the decision to export surplus children and countering decades of unfair international criticism that Chinese people “hate girls”.

But for the children involved – one of whom is my nine-year-old daughter, Grace Shu Min, who attended a 20-year reunion at her orphanage in March, along with two of her closest orphanage friends – their hometown trip was more like therapy. China put its best foot forward for the returning children (all girls), treating them like celebrities, showering them with presents, laying on magicians and puppet shows, kindness and warmth. It was the kind of mythical homecoming we all hope for – but few can ever achieve.

For the girls who attended the Yangzhou reunion, aged from eight to 18, it could prove a priceless boost to their self-esteem, a chance to view the dark facts of their short lives – abandonment at birth by a mother they will never know, institutionalisation and exile from their homeland – through rose-tinted spectacles handed to them by the Chinese government.

Some 36 families – from the US and the Netherlands, Sweden and ­Canada – made the trip last March to their girls’ hometown of Yangzhou, an elegant and increasingly prosperous city of 4.5 million in eastern China. Yangzhou greeted them with a whirlwind of banquets and traditional celebrations. Local families opened their hearts and homes to the visitors, and the orphanage greeted them with the sound of giant kettle drums and gifts of life-sized teddy bears, plus a wall plastered with their baby photos and a shower of hugs and tears from many of the same nannies who looked after them as infants. To the maudlin strains of “There’s no Place like Home”, the deputy mayor of the city told the children at a welcome banquet: “You are not guests, you are family.” The evening became more surreal and saccharine with each advancing hour, ending with a lady in a pink frock singing “Auld Lang Syne” from behind a cloud of Lawrence Welk-style bubbles.

Grace (pictured centre) with her friends Lily (left) and Natalie: the girls spent the first eight months of their lives together at the Yangzhou orphanage and “on some level are clearly sisters”

Many of us had been to Yangzhou before – including the Mueller, Petro and Waldmeir families, who adopted Yang Yu Yao, Yang Yi Lin and Yang Shu Min in one weepy ceremony on August 1 2000, and renamed them Lily Mueller, Natalie Petro and Grace Waldmeir.

The Yangzhou girls, now nearly 10, were born in the same fortnight and raised together for the first eight months of their lives, cuddling up two or three to a crib in the then-meagrely staffed and provisioned Yangzhou orphanage. Now they live in America. Nearly once a year, they have ­gathered together to celebrate a joint birthday or an adoption day – together with Maya O’Brien, the former Yang Xue, who could not join them on the homeland tour. (A fifth friend, Emma Raff, formerly Yang Yu Nong, lives in Paris but keeps in frequent touch by e-mail).

They are forever friends. From the moment Grace, Lily and Natalie saw each other on our return trip to Yangzhou, they were inseparable: the three girls held hands, giggled, whispered and squeezed into two seats on our massive tour bus, always together. They may not be biologically related, but on some level they are clearly sisters.

. . .

Grace and Lily (in a green top) at Yangzhou Zoo

We visited the orphanage together as families when we adopted them in August 2000, but when we returned together in March 2009, we were astounded at what a difference a decade makes. The road to the orphanage had been paved; there were many more toys, and many more nannies (all clad in pink uniforms so new they still showed the creases), not to mention a brand new, nearly complete five-story baby wing that looks more like a luxury resort than an orphanage.

But those signs of prosperity are hardly a shock, given China’s explosive growth in the past decade. Much more surprising was what we did not see at the orphanage: where are all the babies? And especially, what has happened to all the healthy infant girls that made China such a Mecca of international adoption?

According to Yangzhou orphanage officials, adoptions from the orphanage have plummeted from 150 a year when our girls were born to 10 or 20 a year. There are so few healthy infants that the orphanage has even been able to find homes for nearly all its older children, many of whom are mildly disabled. There are a handful of as-yet unadopted toddlers with special needs, but the majority of Yangzhou’s 80-odd infants have special needs, roughly half boys and half girls. Most have only minor problems, like cleft lips or palates, or congenital heart disease. Many will be adopted, either domestically or by foreigners, after their disabilities are repaired.

What the orphanage does not have is a surfeit of healthy infant girls – a situation mirrored by many other orphanages throughout China. The shortage of healthy babies has led to a dramatic decline in overseas ­adoptions from China: in America, the biggest international home for ­Chinese adoptees, annual adoptions have halved since 2005, from nearly 8,000 then to less than 3,000 last year.

The stark reality of the falling numbers has great personal significance for our family: it means that, if I wanted to adopt Yang Shu Min now, I could not become her mother; nor could I be mother to her eight-year-old sister Lucy, the former Fu Xinke, from Chuzhou in Anhui Province (China has stopped single parents like me adopting, in an attempt to reduce demand for scarce orphans).

But the figures also tell a remarkable tale about a society in transition: a China where attitudes to fertility, abandonment and the value of girls have shifted dramatically in ways that could profoundly influence its future – not to mention the self-image of Natalie and Lily, Maya, Emma and Grace, as they enter the penumbra of their puberty.

Already in their short lives, our daughters have heard too often that Chinese people “hate girls”: hardly an irrational conclusion to be drawn from the fact that almost all of the 110,000 children adopted internationally from China in the past two decades are girls – but still wrong. China is never that simple. In 1999, when Yang Shu Min was born, abandoning a girl may have been the only rational thing her birthmother could do. Most of us would have done the same. In a country with only a rudimentary or non-existent system of old-age support, especially in the countryside, boys are rural China’s pension system. As in many Asian societies, girls owe fealty to their husband’s parents once they marry; parents without a son are left with no one to support them in their dotage. What rational person would not prefer a boy?

Grace at the spot where she was found as an infant

My daughter’s birthmother almost certainly did: so she swaddled her six-day-old infant against the cold of a November dawn, and placed her in a spot dangerously close to the local police station. She risked her freedom to place my child in a spot where she would quickly be discovered – and that act of courage still makes me weep. If she had been caught at it, she could have been severely punished, since abandoning a child in China is a crime, and a violation of a population policy aimed at preventing excess births in an overpopulated country of 1.3 billion. Grace laughs when I grow tearful at the thought: but she is slowly beginning to understand the risk her birthmother ran to protect her. It is a lot for a nine-year-old to take in. But as our Chinese daughters grow to womanhood, these are the hard facts of their past that they cannot ignore.

One of those tough facts is the orphanage itself: every parent who takes their adopted child back for an orphanage visit in China fears a reality overdose. We Yangzhou parents need not have worried: our return to the orphanage was larded with so much fantasy, so much singing and ­dumpling-making and present-giving and heartfelt speeches that reality hardly made an appearance. The kids complained that the day was ­unseasonably hot, and some of the speeches were boring. But remarkably few showed any negative reaction to the place they called home as infants: even the teenagers among them – surely the most likely to find an orphanage hard to integrate into their blossoming self-image. Most said they liked seeing “their” nannies cuddling the babies, and appreciated such a splendid homecoming.

Several children told me afterwards that it might have been fun growing up around so many other kids – a reaction that surprised me, and made me grateful to those whose artifice had produced such a positive experience for so many of our children.

. . .

There were tears – but not for the reasons one might imagine. I cried a lot (to the constant admonishment of Yang Shu Min); many other parents teared up from time to time; and there were inevitable meltdowns among children who had missed naps, were too hot or hungry, overexcited or simply exhausted by the gruelling timetable of our tour. Viewing our children’s orphanage files caused pain for some and joy for others: most files bear scant information about where the child was found, what police station she was taken to, whether she was born with one ­eyelid or two. There is no record of a birthmother’s anguish at a child carried nine months and then relinquished, no genetic information that could be useful for medical care in later life, no evidence with which to weave a life’s story.

Our daughters have birthmothers and birthfathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers – and almost certainly siblings whom they may never know. The lucky among us found an anonymous note from a birthparent in their child’s orphanage file, stating the date and time of birth. Others hoped to obtain the original of such a “finding note”, but were left with only a copy provided at the time of adoption. Most found nothing, an empty file. A void where other children have DNA, family trees and intimate portraits in the hospital delivery room. For some of the girls, finding that void was a difficult moment (especially if an adopted sister had a finding note, and they did not), but most moved on quickly to the next game with their Yangzhou “sisters”.

Grace on the tour bus A sign typifying the expressions of love and kinship which now greet returning adoptees

And one American mother who visited the orphanage squat toilet with her nine-year-old Yangzhou girl reports that the child gripped her hand as she perched precariously above the evacuation hole, and proclaimed that she was glad she had not been left there forever. Those of us who live in China (as my family does) know that squat toilets are a trial for any westerner. They are a wake-up call that, to those used to western toileting ways, China is still a foreign country.

Still, everyone seemed to enjoy the visit to the babies who live at Yangzhou now. The orphanage authorities, understandably eager to put their best foot forward to the world, had spruced the place up almost beyond recognition – but not quite. It was easy to spot the room where our Yangzhou girls spent their first few months of life – the dark and dingy rooms that we photographed surreptitiously when we adopted our girls, to the manifest displeasure of orphanage authorities who back then did not want international publicity. As a journalist, I was so terrified of their disapproval that I took no photos – and burst into tears after passing the final immigration check on departure at Shanghai airport, so afraid that my daughter would be seized from me, because the visibility of my profession made me an undesirable parent.

Now the same rooms are open for international viewing: filled with colourful quilts and pastel, hand-knitted outfits for the infants, the result of an inflow of government and foreign money and an outpouring of philanthropy from a local population that, after a decade of prosperity, has started giving its time and money to the local foundlings. Our children were transfixed with the babies they found there: the infant girl with blue-tinged skin, whose nanny said she had a heart problem but would soon be adopted; the children with parts of their palate protruding through their lips; and many more infants recuperating from recent operations.

My Yang Shu Min loves babies, and she had visited the orphanage once before since we moved to China in June 2008, so she seemed to take the visit in her stride. But later that night, in our hotel room, she asked me about Ling Ling, an 18-year-old orphan, blind in one eye, who had never been adopted and has since acted as unofficial “mother” to many of the younger orphanage occupants. And with that began the tale of how China has changed since she was born: especially in its attitude to girls.

. . .

The handprints of the girls adopted from the Yangzhou orphanage, which will be made into a wall: government cash has now transformed the orphanage, but the number of healthy girls available for adoption has dropped dramatically

Exact figures are impossible to come by, but most adoption ­professionals both within and outside the Chinese government agree that the number of healthy abandoned girls in China has declined dramatically. When I adopted Grace, the waiting took only nine months; now overseas parents seeking a healthy infant girl wait three to five years – so long that many have given up. Orphanages in Guangzhou province, temporary home to a large number of migrant workers, report a large number of healthy infants of both sexes. But in the rest of the country, the number of normal infant girls has declined significantly.

That does not necessarily mean that every female foetus is greeted with joy: China’s sex ratio at birth remains skewed strongly toward males, with 120 boys born for every 100 girls. Ironically, modern technology has made it easier to choose a boy: sex-selective abortion means parents who want a boy can choose one before birth. But nowadays, girls who are born in China are often raised by their parents or other “child-hungry” families, and only seldom abandoned, says Shang Xiaoyuan, of the University of New South Wales and Beijing Normal University, one of the few Chinese academics who has published research recently on Chinese orphanages.

Parents of disabled children still have little option but to put them in orphanage care (though the Chinese government is trying to increase incentives to raise them at home). But normal girls are much more likely to grow up in a home – theirs or that of another Chinese family.

Ji Gang, director of the China Centre for Adoption Affairs, a Chinese government body, says many more people can afford to raise children than in the past – and their mentality has changed from the traditional “more children, more lucky” to “less children, better life”. In Chinese cities, many urban people prefer daughters, arguing that they are more caring in old age and less expensive: bearing a son means buying him an expensive flat when he marries. Girls are definitely cheaper – and if they can migrate to factory jobs in export industries, their economic value is even higher.

The Chinese government is doing all it can to encourage more equal gender practices. It recognises that the so-called one-child policy – which was never a monolith, since parents in rural and minority areas were ­permitted more than one daughter, and the policy was selectively enforced – led to a dangerous imbalance among the sexes, and a shortage of wives for a whole generation. China’s “care for girls” policy varies by province, but parents of only girls may get as much as Rmb900 (£80) per month in old-age pension, or preferential access to land or a house. Only daughters in Hebei province will now be granted extra points on their university entrance examination – the make-or-break exam for Chinese prosperity. Beijing is doing all it can in the short term to encourage rural Chinese to bear daughters; solving the old-age support problem longer term will take time.

But for our Yangzhou girls, what matters most is that the atmospherics have changed: Chinese people have started adopting children themselves, and they have largely stopped abandoning girls: what a difference a decade makes; what a difference to our children’s self-image.

Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent. With additional reporting by Shirley Chen.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Singapore looks to F1 to rev up growth of economy

I am not a fan of F1 nor have a penchant for fast cars. However, the Singapore's night race was definitely one experience not to be missed.

I was one of the lucky ones invited to the luxury entertainment suites by my business associates and chose to attend the practice and final race. I figured out that I would rather not spend my entire weekend watching the F1 :P

Guests were required to wear the ticket and wristband of the corresponding day.

25 Sep 2009 - Red (Practice)
26 Sep 2009 - Silver (Qualifying)
27 Sep 2009 - Gold (Race)

===

Singapore looks to F1 to rev up growth of economy

By John Burton in Singapore

Published: September 27 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 27 2008 03:00

When Lee Hsien Loong, the Singapore prime minister, said several years ago that he wanted the buttoned-down island state to become "a global city with buzz", he cited the examples of New York and London. But Singapore instead appears to be adopting the model of another tiny country: Monaco.

The staging tomorrow of Singapore's first Formula One race, which is also the inaugural night-time event on the global grand prix circuit, is part of the city-state's makeover. The brightly lit Monaco-styled street track will snake around the central Marina Bay area, which has other Monaco-like attributes. It is the home to a new financial district for its growing private banking industry and where Singapore's first casino will begin operating next year.

The southern edge of the island is being transformed in other ways. The new Singapore Flyer, a bigger version of the London Eye Ferris wheel, looms over the area. The nearby resort island of Sentosa has become an exclusive area for multi-million-dollar homes and also the site of a Universal theme park and another casino that will open in 2010.

"This is my first grand prix and I wanted to be here because it's a special event with the night racing," said Tim Gray, a businessman who had flown from the UK.

Lavish parties are being held during the weekend to tout the advantages of Singapore as a financial haven to the global rich. The city's super-yacht berths are fully booked and air-conditioned luxury entertainment suites above the grand prix grandstands are charging S$7,500 ($5,300, €3,600, £2,850) a person for entry.

But the festivities will not be able to dispel the economic gloom that is descending. Economic growth is expected to fall below 4 per cent this year against 7.7 per cent in 2007 and Singapore is on the verge of slipping into a technical recession, with two consecutive quarters of contraction.

While the affluent are partying on Singapore's Gold Coast in the south, increasing numbers are seeking food aid in the towering public housing projects that dominate the landscape in the northern half of the island.

Ngiam Tong Dow, an influential former senior civil servant, has criticised the government for helping finance the F1 event. The government will assume 60 per cent of the S$150m annual cost to host the race for the the next five years and he says the money would be better spent helping the poor.

S. Iswaran, the junior trade and industry minister who is spearheading the government's involvement in the project, says F1 is needed to boost Singapore's tourist industry, which accounts for 3 to 4 per cent of gross domestic product, when its market share of the Asian tourism industry is declining.

The government predicts that F1 will increase tourism spending by $100m a year, with half of the 100,000 people attending the event coming from abroad. A report released this week by ING and Formula Money, an industry publication, claimed that nations that held F1 events had a return of 553 per cent on their costs because of higher retail and tourist revenues.

Singapore is hoping to draw more visitors in the future by building a new sports stadium and hosting other sporting events, including the inaugural Youth Olympics in 2010 and the Volvo Ocean Race.

Economists agree that Singapore must promote tourism and other services to counter a decline in some manufacturing industries, particularly the mainstay electronics sector. Tourism is seen as a favourable in employing large numbers of low-skilled workers who have lost industrial jobs.

But some analysts remain cautious about the outlook. "My fear is that expectations have risen so high in relation to F1 and the integrated [casino] resorts that people are likely to be disappointed with the actual results," said Kit Wei Zheng, a Citigroup economist in Singapore.

There are already signs of this happening. Only three of the 11 trackside hotels are fully booked in spite of predictions that demand would be strong. The vacancies have been blamed on higher room rates caused by a 30 per cent government levy to offset the state's investment in the F1 event.

Most visitors also are limiting their stay to the three-day event instead of staying longer, dashing estimates by the Singapore tourist board of a prolonged spending spree. Hopes are being pinned on the Singapore F1 attracting more than the average 150m televised viewers that each race normally draws, which could increase visitors next year. The closeness of the title race will help boost interest.

An added attraction are the brutal challenges of the Singapore race, from a counter-clockwise circuit to the vision problems caused by possibe rain. While the race drivers could face slippery conditions, Singapore is praying that its F1 future will not encounter the same results.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

September 23, 2009

Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

By JULIA MOSKIN

GREAT NECK, N.Y.

BEYOND THE KOREAN BBQ Kim Yoon-ok, the first lady of South Korea, flips a savory pancake stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers during a demonstration in Great Neck, N.Y.

TALKING about food is built into the job for first ladies: cookie recipes, menus for state dinners and, now, organic farming are all in their sphere of influence. But Kim Yoon-ok, the wife of the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, seemed to go beyond the call of duty on Sept. 21 when she picked up a spatula to cook pajeon — savory pancakes stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers — for a group of American veterans of the Korean War.

To the consternation of her bodyguards, and in a moment that seemed more inspired by Rachael Ray than by Michelle Obama, the first lady plunged into the rows of guests to hand-feed bites of her pajeon to some silver-haired veterans and their wives.

“I wanted to give them a new taste of Korea as something positive and delicious,” she said in an interview afterward, her first with a member of the Western news media since her husband took office last year. (She spoke through an interpreter.) “From the war, they do not have many pleasant food memories.”

Mrs. Kim, along with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef; Moon Bloodgood, a Korean-American actress; and Salvatore Scarlato, a local war veteran with a flamboyant cooking style, were all taking part in the South Korean government’s mission in the United States this week. While Mr. Lee met in closed sessions at the United Nations, his wife, 62, embarked on a new career in the field of culinary diplomacy.

The government’s Korean Cuisine to the World campaign began in April, with official goals that include quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants abroad and lifting Korean food into the “top five rank of world cuisines” by 2017. Putting aside that such a ranking system does not exist, the campaign shows how seriously food is now taken by many governments, especially in Asia.

As sushi has served as a kind of cultural crowbar, opening doors for Japanese tourism, culture and exports, the South Korean Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has high hopes for bibimbap and bulgogi.

Bang Moon-kyu, a ministry official who is leading the campaign, said that it has about $10 million to spend in 2009, including grants and scholarships for South Koreans to travel and attend culinary school. The campaign has already established a research and development lab devoted to the popular street-food dish called tteokbokki, a garlicky, richly spiced dish of rice cakes bathed in red chili paste. Tteokbokki (pronounced duck-bo-key) got its own festival in March, spinning off from the larger annual Seoul festival of rice cakes, or tteok. “And tteokbokki is only the beginning,” he said.

“First was Chinese food in the U.S., then Japanese and Thai,” said Min Mon-hong, director of tourism for Korea. “Korean is the next big boom.”

At least seven arms of government, including the military, were represented at the Sept. 21 event, which took place at Leonard’s in Great Neck, a local venue for proms, weddings and bar mitzvahs. The catering, by the New York restaurant KumGangSan, was vastly more flavorful than the usual kosher fare.

As the cameras of the Korean news media clicked, Jean-Georges Vongerichten showed off his one-handed pajeon-flipping abilities. “I’ve been teaching him some sauces and marinades,” said Mr. Vongerichten’s wife, Marja, who is Korean-American. “I think he would do great things with gochujang,” she said, referring to the spicy, fermented paste of ripe red chili peppers that is one of the basic seasonings of the Korean kitchen.

New York City is viewed by the campaign’s officials as a vast field of opportunity for shaping world opinion about Korean food. Although the city lacks a truly ambitious, transporting Korean restaurant, the flavors have made major inroads here. At the Momofuku restaurants, David Chang made his name by layering the intense flavors of Korea into Japanese and American dishes; at Ssam Bar, his version of tteokbokki is crossbred with Italian gnocchi in a light, fiery, herb-spiked pork sauce. New York Hotdog in Greenwich Village serves hot dogs topped with bulgogi (redundant, but tasty) and burgers with kimchi.

For many years, authentic Korean food was perceived, even among Koreans, as too spicy, too garlicky and too sour for the world stage. (The strong smell of kimchi was a running joke among the American veterans on Monday). In South Korea, exotica like pizza and hamburgers became fashionable once the country began to recover from the devastation of the war years.

But high-end restaurants in Seoul are now turning away from Western food and toward Korean tradition, drawing on both everyday snacks like pajeon and painstaking arts like the making of tteok, sticky rice pounded into a dizzying array of shapes, colors and flavors.

Making tteok, like almost all cooking in Korea, was traditionally done by women; hundreds of female slaves and workers were employed by the kitchens of the royal court during the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910. “The court cuisine has become trendy in the last few years,” said Michael Pettid, the author of “Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History.” “More people can afford to eat things once reserved for the elite, like tteok.”

Last week on 32nd Street in Manhattan, where Korean restaurants are clustered, Eun-joo Song, a Korean-American student at Parsons the New School for Design, expressed doubt about the need for any official campaign. “I think the restaurants here can speak for themselves,” she said, gesturing at storefronts advertising barbecued beef, organic tofu and handmade dumplings. “Governments can’t tell people what to like.”

Although Mrs. Kim’s official role was to promote Korean food, she did use her platform to raise a tender political topic. “You all look very healthy to me,” she said, gazing out at the veterans in their blue dress uniforms. “You might live to see the reunification of the two Koreas.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Singapore to rein in immigration

Singapore to rein in immigration

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: September 16 2009 16:35 | Last updated: September 16 2009 16:35

Singapore is to impose curbs on immigration amid fears of social friction between citizens and hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who have poured into the country over the past decade.

Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister, said Singapore had taken in more than 100,000 foreign workers a year for several years as high economic growth burnished the lure of south-east Asia’s richest country.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Singapore may tap reserves amid recession - Jan-19

Death of Singaporean maverick - Sep-30

Singapore set to sue paper - Sep-13

Lawyers accuse Singapore on human rights - Jul-09

Lawsuit threatens Singapore opposition party - May-27

Singapore apologises for terror suspect escape - Feb-29

“We will not continue to admit people at this pace,” Mr Lee said. “We know we cannot take in unlimited numbers of foreign workers.”

The announcement follows moves to restrict immigration in several other countries, including the US, Australia and the UK, which have sought to target migrants with in- demand skills.

However, the prime minister’s comments, made to a group of students on Tuesday night, appeared designed to soothe public concern at the surge in migrants rather than signal a clampdown.

Mr Lee gave no details of how immigration would be reduced, which groups of potential migrants might be targeted, or how big the cut in numbers might be. Officials said there were no plans beyond an intention to “moderate” the flow.

The prime minister said the government understood public concerns about the level of immigration, and promised to shore up the attractions of citizenship in response to claims it confers few useful benefits that are not available to permanent residents.

However, Mr Lee also said that a “sustained, calibrated inflow” of immigrants was the only way for Singapore to maintain its international competitiveness, adding “Singapore will need new immigrants for the indefinite future”.

Trading Places: Migration in the Crisis

The economic downturn has inevitably hit migrant workers hard. Here, reporters from the FT’s foreign bureaux investigate the plight of migrants from Poland and the US to Brazil and China, to see which groups are returning home and which are finding innovative ways to survive the downturn abroad.

About 3.2m of Singapore’s 4.8m people are citizens, according to the government statistical service’s 2008 estimates, with a further 478,000 living in the island state as permanent residents. About 1.2m foreign workers without permanent residency make up 25 per cent of the population.

This compares with just 312,000 foreign workers without permanent status in 1990, who then accounted for 10 per cent of a total population of just over 3m.

Permanent residents cannot vote, are not eligible for some benefits and tax concessions available to citizens, and cannot purchase subsidised government-built housing. However, they are not required to do two years’ national service, although their male children are.

Concern about the influx of foreigners – many of whom are relatively unskilled migrants from Indonesia and mainland China – has mounted as the economy has slowed in the face of the global financial crisis. The government is forecasting that the economy will contract by 4 to 6 per cent this year.

Contributors to one popular blogging site listed a range of complaints on Wednesday, including claims that foreigners had pushed up residential property prices. However, some also defended immigration as a means of accessing essential skills.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

ST: Past in posters

Past in posters

Excerpt: The show, Coping With Vulnerability: The First 50 Years. Posters From Our Past, will be a merry trip down memory lane for many, but in its own graphic way charts five decades of self-governance and the changes in society along the way. COPING WITH VULNERABILITY: THE FIRST 50 YEARS. POSTERS FROM OUR PAST Where: Basement 1, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street When: Till Oct 15, 10am to 9pm daily (closed on public holidays) Info: www.mysingapore.sg === Sep 12, 2009

The nation's growth through 50 years of public education posters is on show at the National Library

By deepika shetty

Singapore's story has been told in books, films, photographs and maps. Get set for a new way of framing its history: through posters. If you Stopped At Two, or actually did cut your long hair, or still think of a camel when you save water, it is due to the influence of public education posters over the years. Now, these posters with their quaint pictures and earnest messages are, for the first time, the subject of a free exhibition that opened last week at the National Library Building. The show, Coping With Vulnerability: The First 50 Years. Posters From Our Past, will be a merry trip down memory lane for many, but in its own graphic way charts five decades of self-governance and the changes in society along the way. About 300 posters produced by the Government and its agencies make up the show, organised by the National Resilience Division of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts and the National Archives of Singapore. A 'poster boy' for the impact the posters had on society is musician Jatt Ali, 53. The Long Hair poster with the tag line: Males With Long Hair Will Be Attended To Last, has some hair-raising memories for him. The authorities at that time associated people with long hair with hippies and drug addicts. Jatt tells Life!: 'This is from the 1970s. I had long hair and each time I went to the post office, I was served last. People took these posters seriously. 'Once I was even picked up during a police ambush in the Peninsula Plaza area and ended up missing the show I was meant to perform at. Together with 20 other long-haired boys my age, I was locked up for 12 hours. My parents made a lot of noise after that and kept asking me to cut my hair, but I never did it.' Arts impresario Robert Liew, 60, too, recalls the poster. He says: 'We equated long hair with individualism. The Government equated it with undesirable Western influence, primarily drug consumption. 'There was a fair amount of consternation, but before things came to head, no pun intended, it was all over, the drug threat abated and the length of one's hair returned to the domain of fashion.' Sociologist Paulin Tay Straughan, 46, points out that beyond the obvious and in-your-face messages, these posters tell an important story. 'My mother was a nurse in the Family Planning Department and I pretty much grew up with the Stop At Two message. Things were so much simpler then. The fact that we have to use fancy effects, new media and phrase our messages cleverly now shows how far we have advanced as a nation.' History lesson She adds: 'I know some of these posters seem like a real blast from the past and are extremely amusing. But they also show how Singaporeans did not question as much in the early days. Having survived the war, all people wanted was stability. They had full faith in their lawmakers and there was no cynicism.' The trials and tribulations of the early days Dr Straughan refers to is something the exhibition organisers want viewers to reflect on. Supplementing the posters are news clippings, archival photographs and illustrations. The exhibition is divided into four sections with an introduction showcasing how different countries and governments employ posters as a simple and effective means of communication. From there, its three sections touch on issues of Water, Public Health and Internal/ External Threats. Collectively, these posters explore the many challenges Singapore has faced over the years, from communism to communalism, the lack of water resources, exposure to infectious diseases and transnational terrorism post 9/11. Dr K. Unnikrishna Menon, 59, director of the ministry's National Resilience Division, calls the exhibition a 'logical progression'. Two years ago, the ministry organised an exhibition on Infectious Diseases, Past, Present And Future to educate Singaporeans on the threat of pandemics such as Sars and avian flu. Before that was another exhibition, The Changing Faces Of Terrorism. Dr Menon says of the latest show: 'The idea is to get people to pause and reflect and ponder on the eventful journey of 50 years, and the amazing advances we have made. So many Singaporeans take these for granted. 'The posters serve as visual records of our culture and evolution.' Artist and curator Alan Oei, 33, who is working on a project based on posters in the 1970s, says the show reflects a significant part of Singapore's history. He says: 'Sometimes you wonder why Singaporeans expect the Government to do everything for them, and here you have the answer - because we have always been told what to do and what values to aspire to. 'I grew up with lots of posters, which were more campaigns than simple messages. There are still plenty of campaigns, but the messages have become a lot more sophisticated and subtle. The in-your-face kind of approach is gone.' deepikas@sph.com.sg

=== 1970S CONCERNS MALES WITH LONG HAIR WILL BE ATTENDED TO LAST Iconic. It bluntly spells out the official stand on long hair. Men with long hair would be served last. You can laugh about it now, but things were dead serious then. Apart from being served last, male artists with long hair were not allowed to appear on television. TWO IS ENOUGH In 1966, the National Family Planning Campaign was launched and the Government embarked on a Stop-At-Two policy with the slogan: Girl Or Boy - Two Is Enough. The Government feared that unchecked population growth could strain the country's limited resources. At the same time, Singaporeans preferred boys. This Two-Girl poster, as it was called, was meant to highlight that two children, of either sex, were enough. WATER ISSUES SAVE WATER (undated) A camel grins and bears the message of water conservation. It is simple, it is sweet and it drives the point home. CHILD IN A PAIL POSTER (1980s) Things become a little more subtle. A child in a pail raises issues about water conservation. SECURITY ISSUES PROTECTING SINGAPORE DAY AND NIGHT (1983) OUR ARMED FORCES. BECAUSE A GENERATION'S EFFORTS CAN BE WIPED OUT IN DAYS (1983) Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. These posters produced by the Singapore Armed Forces and the Ministry of Home Affairs drive home the point. WHAT WILL YOU DEFEND? (2009) Slick look and a clever question. Produced by NEXUS (Mindef) as part of the Total Defence Campaign, this latest in the line shows how posters and their underlying messages have evolved over the last 50 years. PUBLIC HEALTH STOP THE HORROR WITH SOAP AND WATER (2009) Produced by the Health Promotion Board, there were complaints when these hard-hitting posters were put up at some bus shelters near primary schools. The board removed the posters and explained that its research had shown that people did not cite handwashing as a way to protect themselves from flu. This poster aimed to show how germs can be present on hands and that handwashing with soap and water would reduce their number - and the likelihood of serious infections.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

ST: The making of Men In White (People's Action Party)

Aug 29, 2009

The making of Men In White

A new book on the People's Action Party took three senior journalists more than five years to complete. Backed by four researchers, they conducted 300 interviews and pored over 60 years of press and government records for the 692-page book. Insight finds out about the challenges they faced, what they did to overcome them, and how they put Men In White together.

By Zakir Hussain

The book, which has a print run of 30,000, will be available at leading bookstores after the launch on Sept 8 at $39.90 a copy before GST. THE man was a key player in the formative years of the People's Action Party (PAP). He had been with the party almost from the start and was privy to many of its goings-on. So it was natural that Straits Times writers Sonny Yap, Richard Lim and Leong Weng Kam identified him as a key player they must interview when they started work on a book on the PAP. Unfortunately, the retired politician was known for being reticent and guarded, and for keeping his views to himself since he left politics in the 1980s. The team's initial overtures were rebuffed. It took more than six months of effort before he agreed to speak, Mr Yap, 59, tells Insight. Every now and then, the writers would call up a contact who knew him personally, and the reply would be that he was still pondering over it. Then one day, they had a lucky break. He asked for their list of questions. But it was followed by months of silence. 'In the meantime, whenever we interviewed or met anyone who knew the subject, we would ask them to intercede on our behalf, to convince him that we had no hidden agenda, that the book was not another exercise in PAP propaganda, that we would be fair, objective and balanced,' says Mr Yap. Finally, one night, a contact called to say the subject would like to meet Mr Yap for lunch. That was the breakthrough. 'It was a getting-to-know-you session in which I tried my best to win his confidence,' recalls Mr Yap. 'After that, the first interview was arranged, and we went on for three more interviews and several lunch discussions where he warmly opened up on his role in the PAP. Thanks to his inputs, Men In White is so much more complete, balanced and richer,' he says. Persuaded by Goh Chok Tong IT WAS not just that key player - plus many others who played a part in the PAP's colourful past - who needed to be cajoled, convinced and won over. Mr Yap himself had to be persuaded - by then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong - to work on the book. He had said no when asked by then-Straits Times editor Leslie Fong. 'I didn't want to wind up my journalistic career by doing a PAP propaganda book,' says Mr Yap, who has more than 30 years of experience in journalism. He was with New Nation, the defunct afternoon tabloid, from 1971 to 1982, before moving to The Straits Times. Over tea at the Istana, Mr Goh assured him the book would be a Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) publication, and was meant to fill a void in Singapore's history for the younger generation. 'He assured me I would have editorial autonomy over the project, and the PAP would be involved only in rendering research assistance,' recounts Mr Yap. He said yes. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew also repeatedly stressed to the writers throughout the book project, when they interviewed him, that the book was their version of the PAP story, and not the party's. 'Indeed, confidence-building and convincing people that the book was not PAP propaganda were the prerequisites to clinching many of the interviews,' Mr Yap tells Insight. 'Whether they were former PAP or non-PAP players, we knew we had to overcome their initial reactions of scepticism, if not cynicism, doubt, suspicion, belligerence and, occasionally, outright hostility.' Several former PAP politicians, who were still embittered over how they were unceremoniously dropped, said it was pointless to talk about the past and that they wanted to move on. One former PAP stalwart, who helped to rebuild the party during the big split of 1961, slammed down the phone on the writers, saying he had nothing more to do with the party. In 1961, leftist elements broke away from the party and formed Barisan Sosialis. They included 35 out of 51 branches, and 19 out of 23 branch secretaries. There were also former party members who gave scraps of information on the phone, and said they would give a fuller account when they met the writers. But they never responded again to them. Some agreed to an interview but did not turn up at the arranged time and place. Others were extremely cautious, and insisted that every quote used in the book had to be checked back with them. Getting former leftists to agree to interviews was even more challenging, says Mr Yap. 'They assumed that we were engaged in yet another exercise to deify the PAP and demonise the opposition.' Some asked the writers: 'Do you know we had been detained by the PAP Government for many years? Why should we help you do a book on the PAP?' Others asked if the writers were intelligence agents trying to pry more information out of them to use against them. Some demanded to know whether the team would print what they said. 'Some questioned our questions, some questioned the premises underpinning our questions,' recalls Mr Yap. 'How do you define a communist?' and 'Why do you describe so-and-so as a leftist?' were but two questions they encountered. Yet others took issue with the writers' knowledge and ability to do the book. Mr Yap remembers being ushered into the home of a former Barisan Sosialis official, who gestured to a long table with books on Marx, Engels and Lenin, rows of Hansard volumes which carried the verbatim proceedings of legislative assembly sessions in the 1960s, and stacks of speeches and documents. Seeking out former leftists 'HE SAID rather sternly, 'You can't possibly be qualified to write the PAP story until you have read all these. If you don't read them, how can you grasp the context of my replies to your questions?'' Mr Yap recounts the conversation. Another former prominent leftist and political detainee grilled him for 45 minutes before beginning the interview. It turns out he wanted to check Mr Yap's knowledge of Singapore politics and discern his leanings and biases. The interviewee said he had dumped every book on the PAP into the dustbin because whenever he gave interviews to the authors, he found the information given was used to vilify him and the leftist movement. Mr Leong, 55, was also able to draw out former Mandarin-speaking leftists in Singapore and abroad, with his command of the Chinese language. A big help was a series of articles on former politicians from the early years, he says. Called Life After Politics, the series was done shortly before he started on the book. For the series, Mr Leong spoke to a number of former leftists and won their trust and confidence with his balanced portrayals of their life experiences. Many of them put in a good word for him and helped him locate several left-wing leaders of the PAP who had either quietly retired here or had fled Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s. 'Often, one interview would lead to another,' he recalls. Slowly, insights unfolded on key developments in the party's history, like the plots by leftists to seize control. Former Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan gave the team the names of people who were deported and are now living in Hong Kong. Mr Leong also spent a week tracking down and interviewing former leftists and members of the Malayan Communist Party in the peace villages in southern Thailand. He travelled with Straits Times executive photographer Wong Kwai Chow, 56. The interviews were an eye-opener, he says. The experience of a key leftist in exile there, Mr Chan Sun Wing, a former top aide to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, forms the prologue of the book. Mr Leong also met former teenage Chinese schoolgirls in pigtails, who were part of the leftist movement here. 'After more than 50 years, those I met in 2003 were frail (some could hardly walk), and in their 60s and 70s. 'One of them told me she was the daughter of a rich businessman in Singapore, living in a big mansion with servants at home and ate very good food every day. But she gave up all that to join the leftist movement, and went underground when security officers were after her,' he recounts. She, with many others, escaped to Indonesia and later joined her compatriots as armed guerillas in jungles along the Malaysian-Thai border. Says Mr Leong: 'They were young and innocent and idealistic, and for that they paid a very high price. 'To this day, they do not think it was wrong,' he adds. Mr Cheong Yip Seng, former editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division, who oversaw much of the work on the book, says he was very pleased that many of the left-wing leaders agreed, some after much persuasion, to be interviewed. 'Nobody has told a non-partisan story of the PAP. It was long overdue,' he says. 'Here was a chance to get a version of the history from the defeated faction of the PAP, the radical left who came so close to winning. If we did not reach out to them, their voices would have been suppressed forever,' he adds. 'By any yardstick, it was a gripping tale. I had lived through part of that history as a journalist and know it had all the ingredients of a thriller,' he says. Mr Cheong also sees the book as a way to reach out to younger Singaporeans. 'My sense is that they have only a vague idea of how Singapore got here,' he adds. The book began life in two parts. Mr Yap and Mr Leong worked on telling the story of the party's early years, while Mr Lim explained how the party consolidated its hold on Singapore. As the book neared completion, they decided to add a third part to examine the party's longevity. 'I was sad we were not able to reach a few, including Mr Lim Chin Siong. He had died before we started,' says Mr Cheong. Mr Fang Chuang Pi, who led the communist underground in Singapore at the time, died in Hat Yai, Thailand, in 2004 before the team could reach him. Ong Eng Guan stays mum THERE were also a handful of party stalwarts who resolutely declined to be interviewed. Among them was the first mayor of Singapore, Mr Ong Eng Guan. Mr Leong visited his office to speak to him, and managed only to put in a word with his wife who said she would get him to call back. He never did. Many key players, however, shared their stories willingly, and extended their help and assistance in recommending and persuading former comrades to speak. They helped the writers to get in touch with past players lost in the mist of time, and gave them access to their memorabilia. 'At their age, they knew that if they didn't give their side of the story, it would pass into eternal oblivion,' notes Mr Yap. But one major challenge was that many of the subjects interviewed were in their 70s, 80s and even 90s. Their memories were fading, if not failing. As a result, the writers had to fill in the blanks and counter-check what the subjects said against other accounts and research. 'Often, we had to jolt their memories. Some asked for newspaper clippings to help them refresh their memories,' recalls Mr Yap. 'We were often confronted with conflicting and contradictory accounts, and trying to reconcile them posed a tremendous challenge for the team.' They had to cross-check recollections and details with other interviews, news reports and records. But notes of their early eventful meetings could not be located with any of the founding members or with the party headquarters. The notes could have been destroyed to avoid them falling into the hands of the Special Branch, misplaced when the party headquarters moved, or taken away by defectors when the party split. The lack of records left the writers, in some cases, with no way of ascertaining whose version was right, such as how the founders came up with the party logo. So, they opted to reflect the various individuals' views on the matter and left it at that. Still, the authors say the book would have been harder to write if it were done, say, 10 years earlier. In this case, the distance of time helped. 'Former leftists may not have opened up earlier,' says Mr Leong. Even as the writers were busy arranging interviews, the team of researchers led by former Straits Times journalist Leong Ching, 40, was hard at work. They trawled the National Archives and the archives of unions and universities, tracked down people the writers wanted to interview, and hunted down odd pieces of information for close to four years. They also combed through Malay- and Chinese-language newspapers which reported on the PAP's internal struggles. Others on the research team were Ms Goh Sue Lin and Ms Tan Mui Ling, both 29, graduates from the National University of Singapore who also helped to provide translations of Chinese reports. Veteran journalist Sia Boon So, who is fluent in English, Chinese and Malay, was also on the team and translated many Malay newspaper reports. Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu journalists also helped in explaining Malay and Tamil materials. Ms Leong notes that there were some disappointments - such as when the families of key players declined to give the team access to their taped interviews deposited with the National Archives. As a younger Singaporean, she felt that the climate of political awakening in the 1950s and 1960s made the process of research exciting. 'I spent hours in the dark halls of the oral history department, listening to the voices and reading the transcripts of men long dead, describing their dreams and passions, and their version of what happened,' she says. 'Politics in those days was literally a matter of life and death - and many lost their lives in the struggle,' she says. Ms Leong, a PhD candidate at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adds: 'It has been said that history is written by the victors. Actually, in the course of doing the research for this book, I realise that history is written by those who take the trouble and have the resources and the will to strive for a more perfect understanding. 'Working towards providing a complete version of history is not possible, but I believe the resources SPH put into this book make this as close as possible to any historically accurate version now or in future,' she says. Ms Leong notes that while the early years of the party were rich in stories, its later years were nearer what people would treasure and remember. 'What makes a good story doesn't always make good public policy,' she quips. Changes after 1984 election MR LIM, 60, admits he had an easier task persuading people to talk, as many PAP leaders and MPs were forthcoming. PAP ministers, in particular MM Lee, Senior Minister Goh and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gave a considerable amount of their time in several interviews with the writers. Mr Lim worked on the chapters which looked at the years when the party was firmly in control. At times, politicians shared bits of information that had never been made public. The challenge, he notes, was trying to make the narrative nearly as exciting as the chapters on the party's early years. It helped that the party gave him access to its confidential post-mortem report of the 1984 General Election, which marked a turning point in the PAP's post-independence history. 'It was a no-holds-barred report,' says Mr Lim, who saw in it a blueprint for the PAP's subsequent direction towards a more consultative style. At that election, the PAP saw a steep plunge in support: It garnered 64.8 per cent of the vote, a plunge of 12.8 per cent from the 1980 election. Two opposition candidates - Mr J.B. Jeyaretnam in Anson and Mr Chiam See Tong in Potong Pasir - were victorious and the PAP lost the political dominance it had enjoyed since 1968. 'We tempted fate,' the party said in the report, which was made public for the first time for the book. 'Had it not been for the tremendous depth of support which PAP enjoyed, we would have been voted out of office,' it said. The Government had rolled out one controversial policy after another in that election year - from steps to favour graduate mothers to a report that proposed raising the retirement age from 55 to 60, then 65 and consequently pushing back the age when people could withdraw their Central Provident Fund savings. The post-mortem was put together by a team set up by then-assistant secretary-general Goh Chok Tong, and chaired by Mr Ong Teng Cheong who went on to become second deputy prime minister and elected president. The report was written up by Mr Lee Hsien Loong, who was a first-time candidate. It made recommendations on what the party should do to rebuild the support it had enjoyed, and these proposals were reflected in many of the changes to the PAP's style in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The party had to revamp its image, engage people emotionally, and stop harping on the quality of its candidates as this reinforced the perception that its super-achievers were too removed from the ground. But it also had to accept that 'the opposition is here to stay' - and the party should try to maintain a large and stable majority rather than eliminate the opposition altogether. 'Instant rapport' with white outfits AS THE interviews progressed, Straits Times verbatim reporters Gavin Chua, Simon Tan and Serene Ng rendered the taped voices, accents and intonations into ready-to-use transcripts. Over several years, they produced hundreds of transcripts. The writers decided to use their reportorial techniques and go for a 'voices approach'. They would speak to as many people as possible who were involved in the PAP and reflect their views and versions of events. Mr Yap and Mr Leong worked on telling the story of the party's early years, while Mr Lim would narrate the later years and explain how the party consolidated its position. By August 2006, drafts for these two parts of the book were completed and ready to go, but Mr Cheong decided to bring the story up to date by including recent developments, including the general election that year. A decision was made to do a second book on PAP governance - to trace the origins, evolution and implementation of the key principles underpinning the party's rule of Singapore. But this idea was scrapped, and replaced by a third part on PAP governance and survival. At the same time, updates and revisions were made to the earlier parts, and the writers had to do their own research. They also settled on Men In White as the title. Mr Yap recounts how at the PAP's inauguration at Victoria Memorial Hall on Nov 21, 1954, many members of the audience were taken aback by the sight of the party's founding members and convenors striding onstage in white open-necked shirts and cotton trousers. They had expected to see them in ties and suits. 'That struck an instant rapport with the people, as one interviewee told me,' he says, adding that the party whites have since been a defining element of the PAP till today. The drafts were completed late last year, and the final okay was given for each and every page in June before the book went to press this month. Mr Cheong, who guided the team, was glad the writers produced many gripping inside stories. 'The PAP was also generous with its time, and their leaders spent many hours with the team,' he adds. Says the book's editor, Ms Lee Mei Lin of publishing company Marshall Cavendish which was involved in the production and design of the book: 'Editing the book was worth every minute because there was new information to read about and much to discover all over again.' Says Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang: 'It wasn't difficult supervising this project. 'The material was compelling and the writers were very seasoned. My job was to move the project along, make sure there were no large gaps in the story and act as a sounding board for the writers to bounce off their ideas.' Adds Mr Han: 'We usually think of the PAP in organisational terms, how effective it is as a party and what its ideology was. 'But if you read the book, you'll find that it's mainly about people who believed in what they were fighting for - both for and against the PAP leadership - and were not afraid to step forward because they wanted a better future for Singapore.' The writers captured this spirit, and the process of chronicling it is best reflected in their acknowledgements in the book. They said: 'It was indeed the ride of a lifetime.' zakirh@sph.com.sg

===

A TALE FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE 'Nobody has told a non-partisan story of the PAP. It was long overdue. Here was a chance to get a version of the history from the defeated faction of the PAP, the radical left who came so close to winning. If we did not reach out to them, their voices would have been suppressed forever. By any yardstick, it was a gripping tale. I had lived through part of that history as a journalist and know it had all the ingredients of a thriller.' Mr Cheong Yip Seng (above), former editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

ST: Singapore water story awash with success

Quote In spite of their astounding achievements as well as the international exposure many Singaporeans have, its people are not at all arrogant. People of all races live in harmony. There is peace and order in the city... A lot has to do with its Government that is as transparent as the Singapore River is clear. === Aug 29, 2009

S'pore water story awash with success

By Lu Yuanbing

IT HAS been some time since I returned to China from Singapore where I had gone for studies. But I continue to cherish sweet memories of the island's clean and clear Singapore River. Indeed, that river seems to have left an indelible mark in my mind, ever reminding me of the country's gentle people, its clean Government and the successes the Republic has achieved. During my sojourn in Singapore, some of the stories that could be heard most often were about water. Water can be formless yet it can also be powerful. Water droplets may well have no force but a torrent can wash away many things in its path. In fact, nothing can stop a rapidly shifting deluge. Likewise, Singapore's water story is a reflection of the character of its people. Given its tiny land area, the importance of water to Singapore is very obvious. Its water supply comes from the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor under two water agreements signed before Independence. It has not been unknown for Malaysia to resort to using its water as a bargaining chip in cross-border talks with Singapore over a number of issues. This vulnerability once posed a nasty headache for Singapore. Now, however, the Republic not only has a sufficient supply of water but it is even planning to turn this Garden City into a Water City. This achievement is a tribute to the diligence and collective wisdom of its people. During the mid-1980s, the Government began regarding water as a strategic issue and thus gave it top priority. It spared no expenses in bringing in world-class talent to build new technologies that would make the desalination of sea water economically feasible. Within a few years, the country had put in place an islandwide system of rainwater collection and Newater plants to recycle water. It has also succeeded in extracting fresh water from sea water. Thus, the country now produces 40 per cent of its own fresh water supply. This means that, even as the world was grappling with water shortages, Singapore has succeeded in resolving its water problem by developing what is called membrane technology. This has turned it around from being a country held hostage by another over its water supply to one that the world now knows as a global water hub. Singapore now even provides water solutions centred on membrane technology to countries the world over. It has given birth to an industrial sector based on environmental technologies with clever branding and smart financing. When you think about it, this story is a veritable miracle. But then again, this island has wrought many a miracle in electronics, education and medicine. Appropriately, the people of Singapore I came to know also have the gentleness of water. The Singapore River meanders its way through the city, carrying boats filled with tourists on a river cruise. Strolling along the banks of that river are Singaporeans as well as people from many countries and regions. While basking in the sunshine and relishing in its clear skies and fresh air, they also experience the harmony that thrives in this multicultural metropolis. I came to the realisation that, in spite of their astounding achievements as well as the international exposure many Singaporeans have, its people are not at all arrogant. People of all races live in harmony. There is peace and order in the city. The city exudes a certain calm and humility, even poise. A lot has to do with its Government that is as transparent as the Singapore River is clear. However, it was only after a visit to one of its museums showcasing local history that I came to know how, during British colonial rule, the river was utterly filthy and polluted. Then dotted with boats where labourers toiled, the river emitted such a foul stench that people had to hold their noses from quite a distance away. After independence, the Government began to clean up the river assiduously. Today, the river is clear and clean while the Government is just and transparent. Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's former prime minister and currently its Minister Mentor, believes that the Reublic's survival hinges on its political stability as well as incorruptible and efficient government officials. To me, Singaporeans are fortunate. In 1996, MM Lee was accused of corruption. He had allegedly received discounts when purchasing property. MM Lee insisted that the Government investigate the matter and openly explained the facts in Parliament. It was established that the property developer had indeed given such discounts to all 'early bird' buyers. MM Lee once pronounced that the fact he was asked to explain his case in Parliament gave him hope for Singapore's future. Granted there may still be some instances of corruption in Singapore today. However, guilty parties will certainly pay a hefty price for it. Though I have left Singapore for some time now, the imagery of its clean and clear river flowing quietly through this blessed city - and what that symbolises - remains vivid in my mind. This is a translation of a column that first appeared in China's People's Daily on Monday.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Washington Post: For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots

For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots

By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Intellipedia, the intelligence community's version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results.

Similarly, a page established in November immediately after the terrorist attack in Mumbai provided intelligence analysts with a better understandinsg of the scope of the incident, as well as a forum to speculate on possible perpetrators.

"There were a number of things posted that were ahead of what was being reported in the press," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped establish the site.

Intellipedia is a collaborative online intelligence repository, and it runs counter to traditional reluctance in the intelligence community to the sharing of classified information. Indeed, it still meets with formidable resistance from many quarters of the 16 agencies that have access to the system.

But the site, which is available only to users with proper government clearance, has grown markedly since its formal launch in 2006 and now averages more than 15,000 edits per day. It's home to 900,000 pages and 100,000 user accounts.

"About everything that happens of significance, there's an Intellipedia page on," Dennehy said.

Intellipedia sprung from a 2004 paper by CIA employee Calvin Andrus titled "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community."

Dennehy listened to a presentation by Andrus and recalled the skepticism among colleagues about adapting Wikipedia to the intelligence community. He shared their skepticism. "But something he said interested me enough to look into it further," Dennehy said.

Context was also a factor. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence agencies had come under intense criticism for failing to pull together disparate strands of information pointing to the possibility of a major incident.

"We were all doing it in stovepipes," Dennehy said.

Dennehy described 9/11 not so much as a catalyst but as a selling point to explain how Intellipedia could help collate information. "Cal used 9/11 as a backdrop," said Dennehy. "It was really more about what was happening on the Web."

In 2005, Dennehy was given the job of leading the effort and persuading the intelligence community to use it, a task likened to "promoting vegetarianism in Texas" by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group devoted to improving the federal government.

Cultural resistance to Intellipedia includes concerns that foreign intelligence agents could hack into the system. Many intelligence officers, particularly of the older generation, simply do not trust it.

"There isn't any one agency that is more or less prone to use it. It's really a product of individuals," said Don Burke, a fellow CIA officer who helps promote the Intellipedia initiative.

Burke said Intellipedia remains largely the province of early adopters. While some pages are robust and balanced, he added, "there are other pages that leave a lot to be desired, to put it bluntly."

A CIA officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of his work, said Intellipedia "makes it very real-time. You can move down the road fast and focus on catching bad guys. We can really bring our expertise right to the war without leaving our desks."

Intellipedia, which uses the same software as Wikipedia, operates on three levels: an unclassified version, a secret version and a top-secret version. Beyond that, there are "bread crumbs" that could lead a user with proper clearance to additional information offline, Burke said.

Burke said that beyond major incidents such as the Mumbai attack, the biggest advantage is in connecting users seeking information on small, obscure subjects, something he described as "a thousand small wins a day."

Burke and Dennehy have been chosen as finalists for the 2009 Service to America Medals, sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service. The recipients of the medals, which are awarded in eight areas of public service, will be announced next month.

Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, described Intellipedia as an important post-Sept. 11 reform, but one that did not involve a major bureaucratic shake-up, as with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"It's the kind of work we need to see more out of government," Stier said. "They're connecting the dots without rearranging the deck chairs."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

Foreign Policy: Think Again - Twitter

Think Again: Twitter

The groundbreaking microblogging service is great for sharing links and communicating with friends. It's not so good at spreading democracy and overthrowing dictatorships.

BY EVGENY MOROZOV | AUGUST 6, 2009

"Authoritarian regimes should fear Twitter"

Not at all. You can't fear what doesn't exist -- and Twitter barely exists, if it exists at all, in most authoritarian countries. Generally, either they have their own microblogging services or Internet access is too slow and expensive for Twitter to be broadly useful. Furthermore, anyone who does use Twitter probably speaks English, has international contacts, and travels more than the rest of the population -- in other words, they are already lost causes, as far as the regime is concerned.

Combined with other tools - e-mail, social networking, and blogs -- Twitter can certainly be helpful in spreading news about upcoming flashmobs and protests. The demonstrations following Moldova's disputed election earlier this year were a perfect example, where a dozen local Twitter maniacs used the service to spread news about their flashmob. Eventually, their campaign (which went beyond Twitter and included Facebook and LiveJournal as well) attracted thousands of people and spilled into loud protests. While the Moldovan "Twitterati" had very little impact on the events on the ground, they did a great job using Twitter's global, viral reach to keep the protests in the international news.

However, Twitter use in authoritarian countries comes with major drawbacks. Twitter creates an extensive online paper trail that can be easily used against dissidents. In fact, as Twitter use becomes more common, authoritarian governments are likely to exploit Twitter to gather open-source intelligence on the opposition -- not a difficult task for anyone with an Internet hook-up. So Twitter could help authorities identify dissent at very early stages, tracking not just individual activists, but entire activist networks. An online friend list could enable a serious crack-down.

"Twitter was the best source of news about the post-election protests in Iran."

It depends. Twitter was a great resource during the protests -- for people who knew how to use it. If you had spent the previous six months carefully studying the Iranian Twitterverse, you would already know who to trust and who to ignore. Unfortunately, 99.9 percent of the readers around the world who turned to Twitter during the uprising had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

Most of them relied on particular "keywords" (like #iranelection) to read everything that was being posted about the events in Tehran. After a few days, the #iranelection and #moussavi channels contained so much noise that they became attractive destinations for spammers and marketers. (Many of these spammers are clearly run on some sort of auto-pilot, because #iranelection is still one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter, though very few users seem to still be talking about the election.)

To make things worse, supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began spreading misinformation.  Some of them were quickly ferreted out on sites like Twitspam.org, but the damage was done.

Of course, not everyone was going into the Iranian Twitterworld blind. The best way to read the Iranian tweeters was probably second-hand on the sites of established bloggers like The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, both of whom did admirable work curating the valuable posts and vetting out the junk. Still, the Iranian protests pointed out some of the dangers of relying on Twitter for breaking news from abroad.

"Twitter is a great organizing tool."

Perhaps. If your objective is to get 500 people to do the Thriller dance in Grand Central Station, Twitter, with its penchant for all things viral, is your best friend. The NYPD (which also Twitters, by the way) might even decide to let you get away with it.  But if you're trying to overthrow a tyrannical government somewhere in the Middle East, you may want to think twice. Members of the local Mukhabarat (secret police) may trail behind the NYPD in their tech-enthusiasm, but chances are they are also reading your feed. You'd be much better off organizing your revolution with more secure tools -- like encrypted e-mail or even instant messaging -- and turning to Twitter only to publicize the protests that are already underway. 

The events in Moldova fell somewhere in between: a flashmob that, rather unexpectedly, grew into a mini-revolution. The events in Iran were part of an organized campaign by the Moussavi camp and, as such, were probably carefully planned offline by a handful of Moussavi's top aides who spread the word using tools they learned as young revolutionaries in 1979. Leaflets, posters, and even fax machines can still be very effective organizing tools, precisely because they are not dependent on the Internet -- which, as Iranians found out during the protests, can suffer from unbearable slowness or equally unbearable censorship. Twitter was instrumental as a publicity tool, but played little role in instigating or coordinating the protests.

"Twitter is replacing blogging."

Not quite. Twitter is surely taking over many of the niches previously reserved for blogging: simple link-sharing, for one. It also seems much better positioned to allow discussions of breaking news -- checking multiple blogs takes an eternity compared with Twitter's instant flow of information. But blogs still have a good chance of survival.  One-hundred-forty characters is not very much; blogs could become a space for longer, more analytical writing, an ironic fate for a medium once mocked for its own brevity and shallowness.

The mainstream news media also continues to be suspicious of Twitter. It took about five years to convince most newspapers and magazines that blogging was an acceptable medium for reporting news, and many are still catching up. Twitter may take less time to sink in, but don't expect it to happen overnight.

The situation in the developing world is different, particularly in countries where blogging hasn't yet fully taken off or where zany platforms predominate that define what "blogging" is and how it's done. Russians love LiveJournal, Brazilians love Orkut, and the Chinese love QQ; for them, these sites offer a platform not only for blogging, but also for social networking, instant messaging, and other online distractions. Thus, even if they do find Twitter very appealing, their primary digital life happens on other platforms. 

On the other hand, the proliferation of the mobile Internet in Africa might cause millions of new Web users to skip the blogging stage altogether and jump straight to Twitter: After all, it's hard to write an 800-word essay on a cellphone keypad.

"Twitter doesn't have a business model and might go under soon."

Don't worry. First, Twitter is very addictive -- and people are usually eager to pay to keep their addictions going. Second, it's a great intelligence-gathering tool for news organizations, marketers, and even the CIA. As with very good network, its value will rise as more members join. There's still a need for better tools to make sense of all the data generated on Twitter -- but this is not an insurmountable task. Someone will eventually figure out how to unlock Twitter's data reservoirs for the wider public (that is, the wider paying public).

Third, it still makes a very appealing acquisition target for Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The problem is that none of them know how to keep its entrepreneurial spirit alive. (Google already has a dismal record of killing similar companies by buying them. Just look at Twitter's early, ill-fated competitor, Jaiku -- or, actually, don't look.) But this problem isn't impossible to solve either.

Finally, the more we talk about "Twitter revolutions," the more American diplomats and policymakers fall in love with the tool. "Twitter diplomacy" might soon replace the expensive efforts of the struggling Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). So what that they would only get 140 characters to express the American position on a given subject? Stripping these messages of the legalese would only add to their appeal, while helping to tap into the otherwise ADD-ed minds of the "digital natives" who might never have heard the radio broadcast of BBG's Voice of America because they don't know what radio is. And given how much U.S. government money has spent to bolster the BBG, even buying Twitter outright would look like a rounding mistake.

"Twitter is brimming with spammers, impostors, and just plain crazy people."

Sure.  But that's also true of the Internet as a whole, and it doesn't stop us from using it. Compared to e-mail, Twitter spam doesn't really look that menacing, and its administrators are beginning to crack down on those who abuse the system to push sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll on unsuspecting tweeters.

Impostors are indeed in vast supply. For instance, I suspect that the funny "Slavoj Zizek" that I am following on Twitter is not really the radical Slovenian philosopher. But this endless guesswork only makes it more fun. Twitter is a very curious universe in which even impostors add value, as long as they share cool and interesting links. (Would the real Zizek have turned me on to the marvelous site "White People Who Study Hegel?") The proliferation of impostors might even present Twitter with an actual business model, something it lacks at the moment: charging celebrities for authenticating their accounts and displaying a proud "I've been authenticated" badge. Successful companies have been built on less.

"Twitter conversations are shallow and serious people should avoid it."

Who cares? Obviously, Twitter is not the letters section of the New York Review of Books. Those looking for deep, long, insightful conversations shouldn't bother. But what attracts so many smart people to Twitter is a chance to follow what other smart people are reading and browsing -- and to do so in real time. What "Twitter virgins" do not understand is that Twitter actually facilitates the discovery of all those long and uber-insightful conversations that are happening elsewhere. As a discovery tool that works for everyone, it beats everything else out there, from syndication services like Delicious and RSS to aggregator blogs like Kottke and BoingBoing.

In the Twitter universe, you are what you follow -- so if you find Twitter boring, you're probably following the wrong people. Figuring out how to sift through all the noise and actually get hold of signal can be a challenging task, of course, requiring time and a fair amount of tinkering. But ultimately it pays off. A carefully maintained Twitter feed can deliver you information that is far more diverse and interesting than it was in the pre-Twitter days. One-hundred-forty characters are more than enough to describe a link or express one idea. 

So far, Twitter's influence on global politics is still very marginal; while it helps to draw public attention to otherwise overlooked problems and places, this will stop as soon as the media discovers yet another digital darling. But despite what you may hear from the overly conservative naysayers, Twitter's cultural impact is far greater. We may currently be at the very dawn of the era of Twitter Renaissance. Avoid it at your own peril.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

All contents ©2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC. All rights reserved.

Economist: Corazon Aquino

Excerpt:

Mrs Aquino may come to be seen as just another example of Asia’s political-widow syndrome, in which the doughty wife of a slain statesman rises to replace him. It has happened in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. No one, however, has done it with such modesty, pluck and charm as Cory Aquino.

===

Corazon Aquino

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Corazon Aquino, president of the Philippines, died on August 1st, aged 76

Reuters

IF GREATNESS was thrust upon Corazon Aquino, and for a while it was, she did her best to parry it. The decisive moment came after eight hours of prayer at St Joseph’s Convent of Perpetual Adoration in Quezon City, the former capital of the Philippines. There the self-proclaimed “plain housewife” resolved that she would, after all, accede to the request of 1m petitioners and run for president in the election that the wicked President Ferdinand Marcos had just called. Days of humming, hawing and after-youing were at an end, and the people had a champion. She was the lady in the yellow dress, simple, bespectacled, plain not just in her housewifery but also in her demeanour, a contrast in every way to the stylish Imelda, who was still stuffing the boudoirs of the presidential palace with frocks and furs and shoes, shoes, shoes. The power, however, was with the people, and the people were with Cory.

It was a tumultuous time for the Philippines, a country that has never been easy to take seriously. Its Spanish-American colonial experience, invigorated by Malay, Chinese and indigenous influences, has produced an Asian variant of the rum-and-Coca-Cola culture. In the 1980s this meant visitors could be forgiven for thinking they had arrived on the set of a wacky sitcom, perhaps made for the Central American market, in which the actors, all speaking American with a Latin twang, were masquerading as the nation’s public figures.

Strangely, though, they had nicknames that evoked either the Broadway characters of Damon Runyon or, more bizarrely, the upper classes of Wodehousian England: Bongbong, Teddyboy, Ting Ting and Ballsy, for example. But the aristocrats, pallid though they were by Philippine standards, were less Edwardian buffers than mestizos of Spanish-indigenous or Spanish-Chinese blood, whose landholdings and feudal attitudes were reminiscent of nowhere so much as time-warped Pakistan. Adding to the exotic admixture were such minor curiosities as Cardinal Sin, whose inspired name suggested someone in the Vatican must have had a sense of humour, and the ouija tables introduced to the Malacañang Palace during the Marcos presidency, which yanked the mind back towards the Chinese occult.

Against such a backdrop, Mrs Aquino—devout, shy and apparently devoid of ambition—was on the face of it an improbable tribune of the Filipinos. But circumstances propelled her. In August 1983 her husband Benigno, better known as Ninoy, a leading opponent of the president, had returned home from three years’ exile in the United States. He was at once shot dead. Over 2m people attended his funeral, which turned out to be, in effect, the first of a series of mass demonstrations against the regime, many of them prominently attended by the woman in the yellow dress. These culminated, after Marcos had tried to steal the election and some soldiers had mutinied, in an outpouring of protesters onto Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, known as EDSA, the huge arterial highway that loops round the capital, Manila. Three days later, on February 25th 1986, Marcos was on his way to Hawaii and Mrs Aquino was president (see article).

The guts but not the nous

Cory had not been passive. She had seen off the charges of crypto-communism, faced down the efforts at intimidation and rejected the ill-judged attempt by Ronald Reagan’s envoy to make her share power with Marcos. But her greatness was already at an end. As president, she introduced a democratic constitution and set the judiciary free. Her land reform, however, failed to break the grip of the aristocrats, and her promises to end the long communist insurrection were soon set aside. Worse, she failed to control the army. Her greatest achievement was to survive seven attempted coups and hand over peacefully at the end of her six-year term.

At bottom, she was quite conservative. She spoke for the people but her family was rich, landed and firmly set in the political establishment. In 1948, after studying in Philadelphia and New York, she had worked as a volunteer in the campaign of Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate. Nothing she was to suffer later would either shake her faith or turn her red. The “revolutionary” government she proclaimed owed nothing to Marx or Mao. Decency and honesty she had in plenty, and on occasion a hint of steel. But these were overwhelmed by indecision, naivety and a lack of political instinct.

Today Mrs Aquino’s reputation rests mainly on her role as the leader of a people-power revolution of the kind that seemed to be sweeping the world a few years ago. Her yellow dress and the yellow ribbons it inspired are even seen as the forerunners of the roses, tulips and other coloured emblems of these uprisings. Unfortunately, in the Philippines, as elsewhere, people power has sometimes turned into mob rule rather than direct democracy: in 2001 President Joseph Estrada, though legitimately elected, was deposed in another EDSA revolution.

As the yellow fades, Mrs Aquino may come to be seen as just another example of Asia’s political-widow syndrome, in which the doughty wife of a slain statesman rises to replace him. It has happened in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. No one, however, has done it with such modesty, pluck and charm as Cory Aquino.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

WSJ: What's Chinese for .limitedgovernment?

OPINION: INFORMATION AGE
JULY 26, 2009, 7:51 P.M. ET

What’s Chinese for .limitedgovernment?

Authoritarian governments make a bid to control the Internet.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

One of the marvels of the Internet is that it is self-governing, with private groups of engineers and technology companies doing their best to keep it up and running without political interference. Many countries around the world censor how their citizens access the Web, but governance of the Internet itself has been left to technologists and their largely libertarian instincts.

This happy state of affairs could be close to an end. There are now more Internet users in China than in any other country, and the fastest growing group of new users online is from non-English- speaking developing countries. This has led to a well-meaning plan to reorient the Web toward these users. But it could result in authoritarian governments insisting on more influence.

At issue is a key shift in the approach of Icann, the California-based nonprofit that maintains the directory of Internet addresses. Icann, which stands for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, ultimately reports to the U.S. Commerce Department, though it has numerous advisory groups from other countries and from free-speech and other advocacy groups. It plans to open the door to many new Web addresses and to give better access to non-English-language users.

Next spring, Icann is set to expand Web addresses beyond the familiar .com, .org and .edu to domains that would include the names of industries, companies and political movements. Under its proposed rules, anyone who could afford the almost $200,000 registration fee should be able to start a domain. Icann would also permit top-level domains in non-Latin alphabets. This means Internet addresses in languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Farsi.

This will make the Web more accessible to non-English-speakers but also will lead to tricky issues, such as whether dissidents in China or Iran will be permitted to have their own dot-addresses. How would Beijing respond to a Chinese-language domain that translates into .democracy or .limitedgovernment, perhaps hosted by computers in Taipei or Vancouver?

This prospect could explain why Beijing recently had a top bureaucrat engage with Icann for the first time since 2001. Governments tend to be less concerned when only their better-educated, more English-fluent citizens have access to information. When I ran the English-language Far Eastern Economic Review magazine in the 1990s, it was rarely blacklisted in China for its reporting, but issues were routinely banned when they included political cartoons featuring Chinese government officials.

The combination of more domains in more languages could put unprecedented pressures on a system under which Web addresses are interoperable only because all governments agree that Icann controls the directory.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a Web researcher writing a book about lessons from China on Internet freedom, praises Icann for being influenced by nongovernmental groups, not just governments. “The U.N. model of Internet governance is highly unsatisfactory from a human-rights and free-expression point of view for obvious reasons,” she told me. “The Chinese and the Iranians and various other authoritarian countries will insist on standards and rules that make dissent more difficult, destroy the possibility of anonymity, and facilitate surveillance.”

Up to now, governments have been largely hands-off. An amusing example is the dispute over the domain www.newzealand.com. The queen of England, “in right of her Government in New Zealand, as Trustee for the Citizens, Organizations and State of New Zealand,” brought an action in 2002 against a Seattle-based company called Virtual Countries Inc. that had registered the Web address. The queen argued that her antipodean country should have control over its own .com name. This may sound reasonable, but she lost. New Zealand had to buy the .com address for $500,000.

Will governments like China’s be as philosophical about Internet domain decisions they don’t like?

Countries such as China, Russia and Iran have long argued that it’s wrong for Icann to report to the U.S. government. Any alternative to the light control exerted by the U.S. government could put the Web on a slippery course toward more control. This is one reason efforts by these countries to politicize Icann have failed in the past.

“I think the question here is not about which governments have the moral right to lead Internet governance over others,” Ms. MacKinnon argues, “but about whether it’s appropriate that Internet governance should be the sole province of governments, many of which do not arguably represent the interests of Internet users in their countries because they were not democratically elected.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Internet idealists, but the Web has been a powerful force for individual expression, especially in parts of the world where free speech had been limited to those who could afford it. Groups like Icann will have their hands full trying to keep controlling governments from restricting freedom of the Internet.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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NY Times: Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

Excerpt:

Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

===

July 19, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Newsweek: The Secret of His Success

The Secret Of His Success

What Obama has been able to accomplish in his first 100 days is enough to make any president envious.

Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

No other American president in modern memory has faced a learning curve as steep as the one Barack Obama has encountered. When he began his quest for the Democratic nomination three years ago, the Dow Jones industrial average was 14,000, and the world was in the midst of a great economic boom. By the time he took office, America's financial industry was in chaos, credit markets were frozen, housing values were plummeting and the economy was in its worst contraction since the Great Depression. Add to that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and you get an extraordinary set of challenges.

And yet, by most measures, President Obama's first 100 days have been successful. The economy remains weak, of course, but he has put forward a series of initiatives to stabilize the capital and housing markets, proposed longer-term programs to create sustained growth, adjusted America's military priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and begun a process of reaching out to the world and changing America's image. These are only overtures, and naturally much will depend on how things turn out—in the economy, in Pakistan, in Iraq. But so far, any president would be envious of Obama's accomplishments.

The real question is, why has Obama been so successful? Many commentators have focused on his calm leadership style, his deliberative methods and his tight teamwork. That's all true, but there is a larger explanation for the success so far. Obama has read the country and the political moment correctly. He understands that America in 2009 is in a very different place now. Polls say the country is more liberal than it was two decades ago.

Conservative commentators have made much of a recent Pew survey showing that public reaction to Obama has been more polarized than to any previous president: Democrats really like him, and Republicans really dislike him. But the poll's most striking statistic was how few Americans now self-identify as Republicans. For the past year it has hovered around 24 percent, the lowest in three decades. It's not so much that the Republican base has shrunk, as Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out in a recent essay: the Democratic base has expanded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the Democratic base was 30 percent of the electorate; swing voters were 43 percent and Republicans 27 percent. Last year Democrats made up 41 percent; swing voters dropped to 32 percent and Republicans stayed put at 27 percent. Because party loyalties tend not to shift quickly, an 11-point rise for the Democrats is astonishing. Abramowitz argues that since these changes are largely rooted in demography—particularly the growing nonwhite population—they are likely to persist for a while.

It's not only that Obama has inherited a more liberal country. He has figured out how to utilize the moment. Rahm Emmanuel's aphorism "Never let a crisis go to waste" has in fact proved a brilliant political strategy. By combining short-term stimulus spending with long-term progressive projects, Obama has confounded the opposition. Sen. Judd Gregg was on CNBC last week trying to explain that while he fully supported government spending for 2009 and 2010 to jump-start the economy, his concerns were about 2011 and 2012. That's a pretty complicated case to make to the electorate.

Just as important, Obama has not overinterpreted the moment. He has steered a careful middle course on the bank bailouts. The most spirited critiques of his policies have come not from the right but from the left—in the clamor for nationalization. He may or may not have the policy right, but he certainly has the politics right. The country remains generally suspicious of big government and comfortable with free markets and private enterprise. And the old Democratic hostility to big business doesn't resonate so strongly anymore, since the new Democratic majority has fewer working-class whites and more college graduates. Obama has handled the public's anger well, giving voice to outrage but not enacting populist policies. He quietly announced last week that he will not reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement to impose new labor and environmental standards.

On the torture memos, Obama has made clear (after some hesitation) that he does not want to criminalize a policy disagreement. On Iraq, he has hewed to a centrist course, but still one that draws down America's military presence there. On Cuba, Iran and Syria, his overtures have been modest and preliminary. In almost every arena, he has pushed the envelope to change policy, not worrying about the inevitable opposition from the right, yet always in a sober and calculating manner.

Globalization, immigration, more working women and college graduates—all these have changed America over the past two decades. In a detailed study for the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin point out that 67 percent of Americans now think favorably of the term "progressive," a 25 point increase in five years. This doesn't make us a European country—67 percent also think favorably of the term "conservative"—but it does suggest that things are changing. And Barack Obama's success derives from his understanding of this shift—and his readiness to act on it.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/195079

© 2009

NY Times: Life in Iran, Where Freedom Is Deferred

April 14, 2009

Books of The Times

Life in Iran, Where Freedom Is Deferred

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

HONEYMOON IN TEHRAN

Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

By Azadeh Moaveni

340 pages. Random House. $26.

In her compelling 2005 book, “Lipstick Jihad,” the journalist Azadeh Moaveni chronicled the underground youth culture in Tehran at the turn of the millennium, writing about teenagers who embraced an “as if lifestyle,” acting as if their country were not under the control of hard-line mullahs, as if they were allowed to hold hands on the street, blast rock ’n’ roll at parties, read censored books, speak their minds, challenge authority, wear too much lipstick. Ms. Moaveni argued that grass-roots changes in Iran — from the spread of illegal satellite dishes and illegal video dealers to the popularity of blogging — would eventually alter the trajectory of that country’s history, while the demographic ascendance of a younger generation would transform the nation from below.

Ms. Moaveni’s new book, “Honeymoon in Tehran,” which describes the fallout that the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have on Iran, paints a far less optimistic portrait of the country. It depicts the author’s own struggles to make a home for herself in Tehran — where she fell in love, married an Iranian and gave birth to a boy — and her realization that she could no longer pursue a career as a journalist and raise a family there. It is a book that uses the author’s own experiences as a prism by which to view political developments in Tehran, a book that leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the author’s family and a highly personal picture of Iran’s social and political evolution.

Ms. Moaveni, who grew up in California, the daughter of Iranian émigrés, and who has covered the country for Time magazine, left Tehran in 2002, in the wake of President Bush’s depiction of Iran in his State of the Union address as part of the “axis of evil.” When she returned to Tehran in 2005 to cover the presidential election, she was initially encouraged by changes she saw in the city and thought “Iranians had reached a tacit accommodation with the government over which taboos might be reconsidered.”

Novels by women, full of romance and sex, dominated the best-seller lists; students had started underground rock bands; and Iranians, “accustomed to a bland, mullah-controlled existence lacking in entertainment and retail” prospects, could now choose among a variety of household products, American-style foods and designer goods. (A billboard for Dolce & Gabbana, she notes, weirdly loomed over a site where demonstrators gathered to chant “Death to America.”)

The election of the little-known Mr. Ahmadinejad — a hardliner, who had campaigned not on a platform of strict Islamic values but on populist promises of economic opportunity — came as a surprise to much of the country and the world. It was a result, Ms. Moaveni argues, not only of possible vote tampering, but also of moderates’ failure to unify around one persuasive candidate, and apathy on the part of voters who’d grown disillusioned with years of stalled reform.

The election would have serious consequences — for Iran and for the world. President Ahmadinejad has pursued a confrontational approach toward the United States and used Western opposition to Iran’s nuclear program to try to generate national unity; in addition, his government has clamped down on the limited freedoms afforded journalists and women.

One day in spring 2007, Ms. Moaveni reports: “The authorities launched the most ferocious crackdown on ‘un-Islamic’ dress in over a decade. Overnight, they revised the tacit rules governing women’s dress. The closets of millions of women across the country contained nothing but short, tailored coats; ankle-length pants; and bright headscarves. Suddenly, these styles were grounds for arrest. In the days that followed, the police detained 150,000 women for failing to abide by the official dress code.”

“I suppose to people living in free countries where women wear what they please, the difference between a relaxed dress code and a stern one sounds inconsequential,” she writes. “In fact, it mattered desperately. In the years when women could wear colors, could show off the lines of their figures, what in effect became acceptable was the expression of individuality. Between the year 2000 until that April of 2007, I wore a headscarf and manteau in Tehran, but I still looked, from head to toe, like Azadeh. I did not resemble the thousands of other women on the street, but only myself. As I presume was the case for most women, this helped me to perceive the oppressive weight of the regime as lighter than it perhaps actually was.”

In these pages Ms. Moaveni does an affecting job of conveying how the Islamic government’s edicts permeated every aspect of people’s private lives. Couples wishing to hold a “mixed wedding,” where men and women commingle, are advised to hire expensive security details to guard against police raids. Baby names have to be chosen with care so as to avoid forbidden names, including European names, Kurdish names and the names of pre-Islamic Persian heroes.

Attention must be paid to neighbors, who are liable to report people who pursue an “alternative lifestyle” — sometimes “out of genuine pious indignation, sometimes as revenge for neighborly quarrels.” And parents must worry that bringing up their children with liberal values can have troubling consequences for them down the road: “for espousing their real beliefs openly, they might one day be punished by a teacher, expelled from school, arrested by the police, fired from a job.”

After a government minder tells Ms. Moaveni that “it is no longer appropriate for you to work,” that she is “guilty of propaganda against the regime,” and that judiciary proceedings are being started against her, she and her husband — who worked for his father’s textile business and who, like Ms. Moaveni, came from a family split between Iran and exile in the West — decide to move to England with their young son. It is a difficult decision, for it means abandoning the extended family that has enveloped them in Tehran, and for Ms. Moaveni, it means acknowledging that “Iran wasn’t livable enough” for them, that all the talk there about “mending and changing and improving was a charade,” that “Iran is all heavy and rotten at the core.”

Why has the reform movement stalled in Iran? Why hasn’t there been more protest against the government’s repressive policies or a broader movement for political change? As Ms. Moaveni sees it, young Iranians care “far more about finding jobs and raising their living standards than about whether Islam would become compatible with Western-style democracy during their lifetime.”

That young people “were willing to shout down a police officer or flirt during a public Islamic ritual meant mostly that they were concerned with freedom in their immediate 10-foot radius,” she caustically concludes. “Beyond that, the risks involved in rebellion swiftly outgrew the rewards. Busy investing in the logistics of emigration — the English proficiency tests, visa applications and language courses — many young people envisioned their futures abroad, and were unwilling to compromise those hopes for the sake of somehow changing Iran, a notion they considered chimerical, costly and best left to a future generation.”

TIME: Pictures of the Week - G20 Summit

Pictures of the Week: Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009

Stefan Rousseau / AP

Say Cheese!
At center, President Obama, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev mug for the camera during a group photo shoot at the G20 summit in London.