Category Archives: China

The Zheng [clan of Coxinga] were defeated [in 1683], and the dream of restoring the Ming was officially over. For bringing an end to the resistance by surrendering, [Coxinga’s grandson] Keshuang was named as the Duke Who Quells the Seas. He became a minor noble in the Manchu aristocracy, and remained in north China, where he was classified as a member of the Bordered Yellow Banner. Shi Lang, the man who defeated him, received even greater honours, and some years after his own death, was officially deemed a name worthy of worship in the Temple of Eminent Statesmen….

There, the story of the Zheng clan should end, except that Chinese biographies often extend into the afterlife. Coxinga, the Zhengs’ most famous son, was no exception.

The desecrated graves of the Zheng clan were restored in 1700, as the first of several steps in which the Manchu conquerors paid their respect to the enemy who had caused them so much trouble. Coxinga remained a hero to the Chinese, and even to the Manchus, who could not help but admire his dogged refusal to betray his beloved Dynasty of Brightness [Ming]. The Manchu state, founded to a large extent on the willingness of Chinese defectors to switch sides, eventually recognised Coxinga as a Paragon of Loyalty in 1787. He was held up to successive generations as a hero to be emulated.

Coxinga’s crowning glory came in 1875, over two centuries after his death, in a China threatened by foreign powers. In recognition of the first Chinese warrior to inflict a resounding defeat upon barbarians from beyond the sea, Coxinga was elevated to divine status with the dedication of a temple to him. In fact, statues and pictures of Coxinga had long been found on altars all around Taiwan, where local people were found to be seeking his aid from beyond the grave. To the Chinese on Taiwan, he was the ‘loyal and pure’ Prince of Yanping, or the Sage King Who Opened Our Mountains.

In 1898, when Taiwan was handed over to the Japanese as a spoil of war, the new Japanese governor immediately paid his respects to Coxinga, the ‘Japanese’ conqueror who had originally wrested the island from foreign invaders. Coxinga was honoured by the island’s new masters with incorporation into the pantheon of Japan’s native Shinto religion, thereby achieving the rare distinction of becoming a god twice.

Coxinga’s sometime ally, the partisan Zhang Huang-yan once wrote that ‘for a thousand autumns, men will tell of this’. Barely a third of that number has passed since Coxinga’s death, and yet the hero remains a popular subject in plays, novels and filrns.

In the twentieth century, his memory became a rallying point for Republican Chinese determined to oust foreign aggressors. Coxinga was regarded as a saintly predecessor by Chiang Kai-shek’s government-in-exile on Taiwan, but also became a hero for the Communists – he was both the man who banished the Western imperialists, and also the conqueror who helped make Taiwan part of China. None can agree if he was a pirate or a king, a loyalist or a madman. But in parts of Taiwan, people still pray to him for rain.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 259-260

Michael Anti, the Chinese citizen whose MSN blog Microsoft deleted at the request of the Chinese government, defends Google and Microsoft, attacks Yahoo, and tells the U.S. Congress to butt out, all in a post translated on ESWN entitled The Freedom of Chinese Netizens Is Not Up to the Americans. (Anti’s Chinese version here.)

On the eve of the US Congressional Hearings directed against the four big Internet companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco) about their coloration [collaboration?] with the Chinese government, I am writing to state that I believe that this has nothing to with us whatsoever. This is a purely internal American affair. When we Chinese who love freedom attempt to promote freedom of expression, we never thought that the right for freedom of expression ought to be protected by the US Congress. Every single blog post of mine was written in Chinese, and every sentence was written for my compatriots. I have no interest to cater to the interests of foreign readers….

Companies such as Microsoft and Google have provided Chinese netizens with much freedom of information over these years. They have begun to compromise recently. This is the shame of American companies as well as the shame of the Chinese people. The solution from the American side is that these companies must adhere to their bottom lines and be more responsible. Not only do you need the Chinese market, but China also needs these American companies. Your negotiation conditions are not getting fewer, but there are more. The Chinese netizens need freedom to grow more and more.

For the US Congressional representatives who think that everything is black-and-white, the absurd proposal is that “compromise=retreat.” They even treat the freedom of the Chinese netizens as a maid that they can dress us as they wish. This proves once again: the freedom and rights of the Chinese people can only be won by the Chinese people themselves.

The only true way of solving the Internet blockage in China is this: every Chinese youth with conscience must practice and expand their freedom and oppose any blockage and suppression every day. This is the country that we love. Nobody wants her to be free more than we do. I am proud to be your compatriot.

At the end of my statement, I must state once again that I have mentioned only Microsoft and Google as the American companies, but it is definitely not Yahoo! A company such as Yahoo! which gives up information is unforgivable. It would be for the good of the Chinese netizens if such a company could be shut down or get out of China forever.

via Asiapundit. Nick Kristof also weighs in behind the New York Times elite opinion wall. (Michael Anti now works for the NYT Beijing bureau.)

Google strikes me as innocent of wrongdoing. True, Google has offered a censored version of its Chinese search engine, which will turn out the kind of results that the Communist Party would like (and thus will not be slowed down by filters and other impediments that now make it unattractive to Chinese users). But Google also kept its unexpurgated (and thus frustratingly slow) Chinese-language search engine available, so in effect its decision gave Chinese Web users more choices rather than fewer.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Sunday’s Washington Post carries a wonderfully detailed report by Philip P. Pan about how Chinese netizens are winning some battles for their own freedom.

BEIJING — The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.

Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper’s computer system attacking the Communist Party’s propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters’ pay if their stories upset party officials.

No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done.

The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li’s memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China’s most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.

The government’s Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief’s plan to muzzle his reporters.

via Instapundit

This story kicks off a series on The Great Firewall of China.

From Canton in the south to the northern coastal region near Beijing itself, the [Manchu] Emperor of Unbroken Rule ordered the evacuation of the shoreline. For a distance of thirty miles from the sea, no habitation was permitted, on pain of death. The farmers and fishermen, along with their families, were given mere days to evacuate. Manchu soldiers then arrived and destroyed everything within the designated no-man’s-land. Houses and barns were burned, crops wete razed and boats were sunk at their moorings.

People in some areas refused to take the edict seriously, convinced that it had somehow been garbled in its transmission. They stayed put, only to be surprised by the arrival of torch-bearing soldiers, who threw them out of their homes and burned down their villages. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people became refugees, in a land stripped of food. Many died of starvation, or were hunted down by unsympathetic soldiers when the evacuation period expired.

The Manchus encouraged the conquered Chinese to share in their fear and ignorance of the sea. The former nomads preferred grassy steppes, mountains and lush forests – they had no wish to see a vast expanse of ocean, particularly when it harboured Coxinga and his followers. With their coastal prohibitions, they hoped not only to cut off Coxinga from his secret suppliers, but also to remove the sea from China’s field of interest.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 182-183

The Manchu coastal prohibitions certainly made Coxinga take notice, but in the short term, they may even have helped him. His raiders raced to pick through whatever was left behind, and carried off what food and supplies they could from the abandoned villages before the Manchu demolition teams arrived.

The Manchus did not particularly care where the local population went; they merely wanted them to leave the coast. Leave they did, but many sought refuge with the Ming loyalists, who arrived to ship them across the straits to Taiwan.

Although the defeat in Nanjing might have finished Coxinga’s reputation as an adversary of the Manchus, the ranks of his followers were swelled by thousands of disaffected coastal dwellers, who preferred to head east and out to sea, instead of west to an unknown fate on land. Zheng family ships took refugees in their thousands to colonies on Taiwan, swelling the Chinese population there.

As time passed, the effect of the coastal prohibitions began to make itself felt. [Coxinga defector] Huang Wu had been right – the removal of any coastal dwellers seriously damaged Coxinga’s ability to obtain supplies from allies inland. Communication with the distant [Ming] Emperor of Eternal Experiences became more difficult, and the Zheng family clung only to a few coastal islands such as Amoy and Quemoy. However, Coxinga’s fleet and followers remained supplied from anew source. Chinese refugees established in military colonies on Taiwan were able to clear land and farm new crops for the Zheng organization. Mainland China might have been all but lost to Coxinga, but the Taiwan Strait continued to keep a Manchu counter-offensive at bay.

Protected from his enemies by the sea itself, Taiwan could be the perfect place from which Coxinga could plan his next move. It might take years to rebuild his forces to a level suitable for a repeat performance of the march on Nanjing, but Taiwan had the resources to make such a project possible. There was only one small problem.

The Dutch would have to go.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 186-187

Bloomberg News columnist Andy Mukherjee explains why China needs to get rich before it gets too old.

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — Helen Qiao, an economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Hong Kong, posed an interesting question this week: “Will China grow old before getting rich?”

Qiao’s research shows that China’s dependency ratio — the number of people too young and too old to work divided by the working-age population — will start rising at the end of this decade and approach 50 percent in 2030, from less than 40 percent at present, making China as gray as Japan was last year.

By 2050, every 10 Chinese workers in the age group of 15 to 64 will support a total of seven younger and older people — a dependency ratio of 70 percent.

An aging society may be an inevitable part of demographic transition, though “what makes China’s case unique is that the sharp rise in dependency ratio will arrive earlier in terms of per capita income level relative to other countries,” Qiao says in her report.

In 2030, China’s annual per capita income will be a little more than $11,000 measured in current prices, compared with almost $36,000 in Japan last year, according to Goldman Sachs’s estimates. South Korea’s dependency ratio will approach 50 percent in 2025, with its citizens earning $52,000 a year.

Does it matter if China gets old before it gets rich? It does, for a number of reasons. First, economic growth rates taper off with aging: It’s difficult for a developing nation to get rich after its population has already grown old.

via RealClearPolitics

Oh, great. Slate has just published an article by Ian Bremmer entitled “Is Burma the Next Iran?” And it’s not talking about an explosion of blogging by Burmese young people.

The United States and its European allies worry that if they simply accept a nuclear Iran, other states will be encouraged to pursue nuclear ambitions of their own. But that ship may already have sailed. As the world watches the twists and turns of Iran’s path toward the Security Council, the military regime in Burma may be quietly selling its energy resources to finance the acquisition of nuclear technology….

Burma’s generals, known in state-controlled media as the State Peace and Development Council, routinely harass and imprison opposition activists. Citizens have been used as slave labor. The junta’s security police have been known to strafe demonstrators with gunfire. In December, an Asian human rights group issued a 124-page report on the Burmese government’s “brutal and systematic” torture of political prisoners.

To deepen the country’s isolation, last November the generals began to move Burma’s capital from the southern coastal city of Rangoon to the mountain stronghold of Pyinmana, deep in the country’s interior. Perhaps the regime’s oft-stated fear of a U.S. invasion prompted the retreat from the coast. That would explain press reports that the junta has surrounded its new capital with land mines. Perhaps the regime is even more afraid of the ethnically diverse and impoverished students of Rangoon. We can’t look for answers to the United Nations’ envoy to Burma. He resigned in January after failing for nearly two years to gain entry into the country….

Just as Iran’s energy wealth frustrates U.S. and European efforts to sanction Tehran, foreign competition for gas contracts will obstruct international attempts to pressure Burma toward democratic reform. China has profited time and again by forging commercial deals with states that are the objects of international scorn, and other energy-dependent Asian countries (India and South Korea, in particular) don’t want China to monopolize Burma’s energy reserves. These states and others will continue to chase energy deals there, including agreements to build the infrastructure needed to pipe gas or petroleum directly to their consumers and industries. Even the United States and European Union have resisted pressure to ban all investment in the country—so energy firms Unocal and Total can join in the scramble.

The Burmese junta knows when it approves these deals that it’s giving its Asian neighbors an important stake in the regime’s survival. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, is an especially useful provider of diplomatic cover. Energy revenues also help finance the domestic repression that keeps the opposition in check and the generals in charge….

Another reason Burma matters for regional stability is that it adds to the growing list of irritants in U.S. relations with China. Burma provides China with the use of a military base on the Indian Ocean. Sino-Burmese trade grew by more than 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 to more than $1.1 billion. Late last year, China outmaneuvered India for an agreement to buy 6.5 trillion cubic feet of gas. As China’s dependence on Burma’s energy grows, we can expect Beijing to help the junta resist international pressure—just as they have done for authoritarian regimes in Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. (China has invested around $300 million in Zimbabwe in return for mining concessions and direct supply of gold, diamonds, chrome, bauxite, and possibly uranium.) That will only add to Washington’s diplomatic frustrations.

Well, this passage answers a question I have long wondered about:

Coxinga … was said to have greatly impressed the bookish Emperor of Intense Warring [the remaining Ming pretender who had retreated to Fuzhou as the Manchus invaded]. Still only a youth of twenty-one, the former Confucian scholar was made assistant controller of the Imperial Clan Court. The childless Emperor also commented that he was disappointed not to have a daughter he could offer to Coxinga in marriage, and bestowed him with a new name. Once Lucky Pine [Fukumatsu], then Big Tree [Da Mu, a nickname from Sen ‘Forest’], the boy was now given the appellation Chenggong, thereby making his new given name Zheng Chenggong translate literally as ‘Serious Achievement’. In a moment of supreme pride for his family, the boy was also conferred with the right to use the surname of the Ming ruling family itself. It amounted to a symbolic adoption, and he was often referred to as Guoxingye, the Imperial Namekeeper. Pronounced Koksenya in the staccato dialect of Fujian, and later transcribed by foreign observers, the title eventually transformed into the ‘Coxinga’ by which he is known to history.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), p. 124

UPDATE: As usual, Language Hat‘s learned commentariat sheds more light on the topic, among them Andrew West:

Early Portuguese accounts of China frequently use “x” in romanizing Chinese names (Xanadu from Xangdu from Shangdu 上都 is a well-known example). On the other hand, when does Dutch use “x” rather than “ks”?

Looking at the original Dutch translation of the letter from Coxinga to Frederick Coyett dated 1662, (images of the manuscript are available here), his name is consistently given as “Coxinja” rather than “Coxinga”. Googling also produces a lot of Dutch pages which refer to the “Zeeroover Coxinja”. Coxinja certainly gives a better representation of the final syllable of the Chinese Guoxingye.

In “An Introduction to Taiwanese Historical Materials in the Archives of the Dutch East India Company” here, Coxinga’s name is apparently spelled as “Cocxinja” in the Dutch sources, which supports the hypothesis that the “x” in his name represents the initial sound of the second syllable rather than a combination of the final sound of the first syllable and first sound of the second syllable.

So I wonder when the spelling “Coxinga” is first attested?

On last week’s Foreign Exchange, Fareed Zakaria interviewed two economists about the differences between how China and India are growing their economies. The transcript is now online. Here’s a chunk of it.

Fareed Zakaria: India and China are booming of course but investors worldwide are wondering who will boom more loudly in the coming years? And it’s not an easy question because it means going inside two complex developing economies and making projections about the future. But we’re going to do it anyway.

Joining us to talk about this are Yasheng Huang of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Sandeep Dahiya, Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown and a former Consultant with McKinsey.

So let me ask both of you; the–if we focus in on the issue of Indian companies and Chinese companies, my sense is that you’ll actually find surprisingly that Indian companies are better known certainly around the world. You’ve–you people have heard of the big outsourcing companies like Infosys; people have heard of companies like Tata, whereas there are very few Chinese companies in that category. Let me ask you Yasheng why is that? China’s economy is growing much faster than India’s. It’s been growing faster for a long time, you know probably 15 years longer it’s had a boom and yet there aren’t those many Chinese world-class brand names.

Yasheng Huang: That’s right; I think this is one of the most interesting puzzles about Chinese economy and this is something that I have done research on. One of the main reasons is that the Chinese economic miracle has been created essentially by foreign direct investment. It is not created by the entrepreneurship, local entrepreneurship, indigenous private sector growth, whereas–.

Fareed Zakaria: Explain that; so you mean that it’s been created by Volkswagen coming into China?

Yasheng Huang: That’s right.

Fareed Zakaria: Getting the government to give them a great deal, employing Chinese and making low cost Volkswagens and export them?

Yasheng Huang: Yeah; essentially the Chinese economic miracle is a result of Chinese labor being cheap and very productive rather than the result of the capital accumulated by the Chinese capitalists and–and this is one of the principal reasons why even with eight or nine percentage growth rate every year we do not see the emergence of the world-class Chinese companies coming out of that economy.

Fareed Zakaria: Now what–why is that–because most people would say if you go to China you certainly see this. There’s a very strong entrepreneurial spirit in China, that certainly–

Yasheng Huang: That’s right; yeah.

Fareed Zakaria: You know to the extent that genetics or culture matter, they seem to be fine. I mean you look at Southeast Asia it’s all Chinese entrepreneurs.

Yasheng Huang: Yeah, absolutely; the Chinese entrepreneurs do very well outside of China. China–Chinese have this animal spirit, the business acumen capabilities and let me add a substantial engineering and scientific capability. The main issue is not a lack of these capabilities or entrepreneurial drives; the main reason is the lack of a financial system supportive of these entrepreneurial initiatives and growth. So you can get Chinese company up and running to a certain level; after that they stop growing because you need outside financing; you need outside capital; they can’t get bank loans; they can’t get listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange or [Shenzhen] Stock Exchange and from that perspective Indian firms have done much better because they have access to financing; they have access to legal protection in a way that the Chinese entrepreneurs so far have lacked.

Fareed Zakaria: All right; so let’s say that’s the good news about Indian firms–that they are real you know private sector firms. They use capital and they probably use it more efficiently because they don’t get as much of it. But can–can they grow in this environment of a pretty chaotic political system, very little sustained reform taking place? If you look at the Indian Government it keeps announcing reform programs that never get implemented. It keeps announcing infrastructure, roads, buildings and bridges that don’t get built. I mean do–what is your sense? Looking at companies, do they find this a major obstacle or can they find ways around it?

Sandeep Dahiya: You bring up a very interesting point Fareed and this is very true, which is this stop and go reform process in India and the fact that the political process is–is not always geared 100-percent towards making the economy as–as open–as liberalized as some economists would argue. And the world-class firms that we are talking about; what is so peculiar about them is they’re all concentrated in the IT sector. That is one sector which literally grew under wraps. It–the government knew nothing about it and before you knew it–it was a big sector. And that’s saying something about the–the lopsided growth of Indian companies–at least in terms of international recognition.

Fareed Zakaria: Well and the other big difference is–correct me if I’m wrong–but the other big difference is the IT firms are unique in that they don’t need infrastructure since what they transport is transported over the internet. If you’re–if you’re trying to send toys, manufactured toys, you need roads, you need ports, and that’s why it seems to me the Chinese–firms are able to do that so much better because their roads are better–their ports are better. If you’re sending services over the internet you–it’s the one area where you can transport goods without infrastructure.

Sandeep Dahiya: Precisely; it’s very true. About five years ago before the telecom made the communication cost come down a lot you could send people abroad which the IT firms did in the early ‘90s and in the last few years as the–the communication services and–and the capacity to–to work remotely has become much better, but you’re absolutely right. You do not need these busy ports or–or infrastructure.

Fareed Zakaria: But right now wouldn’t it be fair to say China is growing because of the state and India is growing because of its private sector?

Yasheng Huang: Well but you–you can argue about the quality of–of that growth. China invests about 40-percent–actually last year–50-percent of its GDP; India is investing about 20-percent of the–its GDP. The Indian growth rate is inching up to about seven–seven point five; Chinese growth is about nine and–and China is–

Fareed Zakaria: So you think it’s getting a bigger bang for its buck as it were?

Read the rest, including an interview with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and a segment on a Spanish entrepreneur trying to turn fast food into healthy food. The latter interview was followed by a surprising chart:

Percentage Overweight/Obese Children:
Russia: 10%
Brazil: 14%
UK: 20%
USA: 26%
Iran: 30%
Spain: 34%
Source: Foreign Policy, World Health Organization

Yangzhou was occupied by Shi Kefa, a 44-year-old general with fanatical loyalty to the Ming dynasty. The Manchus tried to win Shi Kefa over in a number of ways, sending numerous letters in the name of Dorgon, but actually drafted by turncoats. Shi Kefa had famously berated the Emperor of Grand Radiance on military matters, using language that would have led to the reprimand or imprisonment of a less valuable soldier. [Manchu Prince] Dorgon’s messages capitalised on this, reminding Shi Kefa that, loyal to the Ming or not, he was currently serving a depraved master. While the Manchus fought the Ming loyalists, wrote Dorgon’s scribes, both sides lost out on the opportunity to unite and pursue the true enemy: the remnants of the forces of [northern warlord] Li Zicheng. Dorgon urged Shi Kefa at all costs to avoid a situation in which there were ‘two suns in the firmament’. But it was too late; already there were two people claiming to be the emperor of China–three, if one was prepared to count the fugitive Li Zicheng.

When the Manchu army finally began the assault of Yangzhou, Shi Kefa’s [Jesuit-designed] guns killed them in their thousands. The bodies piled up so high, that after a time, there was no need for siege ladders, and fresh Manchu troops climbed a mountain of corpses to reach the battlements.

The defenders of the city began fleeing the walls by jumping onto the houses immediately below, tearing off their helmets and throwing down their spears, creating an unearthly clatter as their feet smashed tiles on the rooftops. The noise brought townsfolk out of their houses in time to see the defenders running away, and soon the streets were full of refugees. But there was nowhere to run. Someone opened the south gate, and the last possible escape route was cut off by more Manchu soldiers.

In the aftermath Shi Kefa ordered his men to kill him, but his lieutenant could not bring himself to strike the death blow. With the town now in Manchu hands, Shi Kefa was brought to [Manchu Prince] Dodo. The prince advised him that his loyalty had impressed his Manchu enemies.

‘You have made a gallant defence,’ he said. ‘Now that you have done all that duty could dictate, I would be glad to give you a high post.’

Shi Kefa, however, refused to abandon his beloved Dynasty of Brightness [= Ming].

‘I ask of you no favour except death,’ he replied. Over several days, the Manchus made repeated attempts to persuade Shi Kefa to join them, but he was adamant that the only thing he wanted was to die with his dynasty. On the third day, an exasperated Prince Dodo granted Shi Kefa his wish, and beheaded him personally.

Despite his pleas to Shi Kefa, Dodo was intensely irritated at the human cost of taking Yangzhou. He told his troops to do whatever they wanted with the city for five days, and the ensuing atrocities reached such heights that it was a further five days before Dodo regained control of his men. The surviving Manchus avenged their fallen comrades on the population of the town, slaughtering the menfolk and raping the women. The clemency shown to turncoat towns further in the north was nowhere in evidence here, as Manchus and Chinese traitors looted what they could, and murdered all the witnesses they could find. Fires broke out in numerous quarters of the city, but were largely put out by heavy rain.

A survivor reported that the corpses filled the canals, gutters and ponds, their blood drowning the water itself, creating rivulets of a deep greenish-red throughout the city. Babies were killed or trampled underfoot, and the young women were chained together ready to be shipped to the far north. Many years later, travellers in Manchuria and Mongolia would still report sightings of aging, scarred female slaves with Yangzhou accents, clad in animal skins.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 116-118

The contrarian Spengler at the Asia Times weighs in on the Cartoon Offensive.

The global relationship among literacy rates, secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons. The first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become actors on the world economic stage. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, 400 million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can hope to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other locations, most recently in reporting the pope’s seminar at Castelgandolfo. Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI’s classic Introduction to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West well inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal, unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons. I do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

Okay, I have many doubts about Spengler’s broad brush. Plenty of Muslims nowadays are full of doubt, and perhaps even more full of justifiable fear–from all sides. But societies that brook no doubt and no dissent are destined for the dustbin of history.

I swim in doubt–I drown in doubt–and have done so for as long as I can remember. My closest brother, who was baptized at the same time I was in the dunking pool of the First Baptist Church in Winchester, Virginia, says we laughed on the way home from church in the rear-facing third seat of our family’s Nash Rambler station wagon. I don’t really remember. I just vaguely remember being shy about being down front and having to read our testimony before the congregation. But I remember all too well the last Sunday school class I attended several years later at my last mission meeting at Amagi Sanso before returning to the States to face college, the draft, or whatever else awaited a newly 18-year-old male citizen of the U.S. in 1967.

A new missionary, half a generation younger than our parents, was our Sunday School teacher that year. Some of us MKs were borderline delinquent, infected with both doubt and rebelliousness, and perhaps our missionary parents thought Uncle Jim’s testimony might connect with us. He had been a delinquent himself until he found the Lord, as he testified in some detail. Not entirely boring detail. Postconversion joy was far less interesting. But how do you know that God even exists, some of us asked. The experience he described was foreign to some of us. Well, it says so right here, he answered, and read the Bible to us to prove the existence of its imputed author (“as told to” quite a string of ghostwriters). But haven’t you ever doubted the scriptures, some of us asked. Never! Not since I found the Lord, he assured us. Well, that didn’t connect too well.

That night I asked my Dad if he had ever had doubts about his beliefs. He had been raised a Quaker, but joined the Baptist church in his youth (dunked in a mill pond near his country church). Of course I’ve had doubts, he said. But Uncle Jim says he had never doubted the scriptures since his conversion! Well, Dad hesitantly replied, anyone who says he’s never had any doubts about his beliefs is either a fool or a liar. What a relief it was to hear that! I can’t convey how much I appreciated his honesty that night. And still do. He doesn’t shy away from unpleasant truths. I think Uncle Jim eventually came to the same realization. His own kids later turned out no less delinquent and disoriented as teenagers than the older MKs he failed to connect with that night.

A generation later, it was my daughter’s turn to go through confirmation class at a UCC church in Honolulu–a church imbued with doubt about most elements of the Christian tradition. Even so, I rarely attended. And even though I was welcome to partake of communion there, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I didn’t feel part of the community of belief, even though my wife and daughter were regular members of that community of believers (or at least seekers).

One of the confirmation class activities was to interview your parents (or guardians, etc.) about their religious beliefs. I had to confess that I find it hard to believe in a Supreme Being. Even so, I have too many doubts to be an outright atheist. And one of the major sociological goals of the confirmation class (in fact, most of the goals seemed to be more sociological than theological) was to to prepare Christians for an age in which they constitute a minority in global society, in which (as the pastor once put it) “the church is not the chapel of the state.” That is a most worthy goal, in my estimation. One that militant evangelicals of all religions would do well to adopt.