Category Archives: China

Fareed Zakaria, whose Foreign Exchange program is now on my regular weekly viewing list, compares educational approaches in his latest column in Newsweek‘s international edition.

Traveling around Asia for most of the past month, I have been struck by the relentless focus on education. It makes sense. Many of these countries have no natural resources, other than their people; making them smarter is the only path for development. China, as always, appears to be moving fastest. When officials there talk about their plans for future growth, they point out that they have increased spending on colleges and universities almost tenfold in the past 10 years. Yale’s president, Richard Levin, notes that Peking University’s two state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lines—each employing a different technology—outshine anything in the United States. East Asian countries top virtually every global ranking of students in science and mathematics.

But one thing puzzles me about these oft-made comparisons. I talked to Tharman Shanmugaratnam to understand it better. He’s the minister of Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the fact that even though Singapore’s students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids, by contrast, test much worse in the fourth and eighth grades but seem to do better later in life and in the real world. Why?

“We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.” …

Singapore is now emphasizing factors other than raw testing skills when selecting its top students. But cultures are hard to change. A Singaporean friend recently brought his children back from America and put them in his country’s much-heralded schools. He described the difference. “In the American school, when my son would speak up, he was applauded and encouraged. In Singapore, he’s seen as pushy and weird. The culture of making learning something to love and engage in with gusto is totally absent. Here it is a chore. Work hard, memorize and test well.” He took his child out of the Singapore state school and put him into a private, Western-style one.

Meanwhile, elite prep schools in the U.S. are increasingly emulating the Singapore model, and so are many top universities (like Levin’s) who recruit buy their students products.

It was the Manchus and the Dutch who called Coxinga a pirate, the English and the Spanish who called him a king. His Chinese countrymen called him both, depending on their mood. But he saw himself as neither; instead, he wanted to be known as a scholar and a patriot, unexpectedly plucked from a privileged upbringing and thrust into the forefront of a terrible war. A child prodigy from a wealthy trading family in seventeenth-century China, Coxinga became a nobleman at twenty-one, a resistance leader at twenty-two, and was a prince at thirty. The last loyal defender of the defeated Ming dynasty, he was the invincible sea lord who raided the coasts for ten years, before leading a massive army to strike at the heart of China itself. Still plotting to restore a pretender he had never seen, he was dead at thirty-nine, only to be canonised by his former enemies as a paragon of loyalty.

In a China that shunned contact with the outside world, Coxinga was a surprisingly cosmopolitan individual. His mother was Japanese, his bodyguards African and Indian, his chief envoy an Italian missionary. Among his ‘Chinese’ loyalist troops were German and French defectors. His enemies were similarly international, including Chinese relatives and rivals, the Dutch against whom he nursed a lifelong hatred, and the Manchus who invaded his country. Betrayed and deserted by many of his own friends and family, Coxinga’s stubborn character was most similar to that of his most famous foe–the Swedish commander whom he defeated in his last battle.

Famous for his pathological insistence on justice and correctness, Coxinga was ever troubled by his shadowy origins. His father was an admiral and the richest man in China, but also a crook who had cheated, murdered and bribed his way to the top of south China’s largest criminal organisation. Though Coxinga grew up in a palace, his family had clawed their way to their fortune, and had made many enemies in the process.

This, then, is the man that was known to European writers as that ‘heathen idolater and devil-worshipper’, the mutilator of his enemies and a heartless brute who could execute a Dutch priest and ravish the man’s bereaved daughter on the same day. But Coxinga is also the loyalist lauded by the Chinese as the last son of a departed dynasty, who steadfastly refused to surrender to foreign invaders when millions of his countrymen submitted willingly. He was demonised in Europe, deified in China, and remains a contentious figure to this day.

This is his story. It is also the story of his father, Nicholas Iquan, and of his deals and double-crosses with the Europeans he despised. To the superstitious, it is also the story of the goddess of the sea, and how she granted fortune on the waters to one family for forty long years. Though it ends with saints and gods, it begins with smugglers and pirates.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 5-6

On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan in 1944, former Peace Corps Volunteer P.F. Kluge spoke to a group of veterans and residents on the island. The text of his speech appears in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (Project Muse subscription required). Here are a couple of excerpts.

Saipan in the 1960s

In launching a large Micronesia program, the Peace Corps had advertised, only half ironically, that it was going to paradise. The result was an ambitious, overextended, and controversial program involving hundreds of volunteers. We joked that if the same ratio of volunteers to locals prevailed in, say, India, there would be no young people left in the United States.

The Saipan we came to was no paradise, that was clear. Almost a quarter century had passed since the shooting had stopped, and yet the place was still shaped, defined, by the battle that had been fought here. Long after the combat stopped, long after the naval administration walked away from its camps and Quonsets and airfields, the island was … well … haunted. It was like a theater that had been abandoned by actors and by audience, a place still littered with costumes and props, ticket stubs and programs in the aisles. Have you ever, driving around America, gone past an old outdoor drive-in theater, the big screen still standing, weeds in the parking lot, long semicircular rows of those little parking-meter-like poles evenly spaced, and the ruins of a rickety, graffiti-marked projection booth in the middle of it all? That was what Saipan felt like.

It had a kind of sullen magic. Scarred, handsome, and in its way, beautiful. It invited exploring. It made you think. And it was all about the past; it was about some of you who gather here now. It was about you, this sighting out from the invasion beach at landing craft and tanks impaled on the reef. It was about you, when I went swimming off the rusting breakwaters and half-sunken barges at Charley Dock. It was about you, traveling in and off the islands, waiting at little Kobler Field for a DC-3. You were there, your spirit lingered at Isley Field, with overgrown bunkers and revetments, all the giant footsteps of another time. Saipan then was one of those rare, dear places where you could confront history without a ticket, a tape-recorded spiel, a forced march through a museum, and a sign warning you about all the things you weren’t supposed to do. In the villages–­Garapan, Susupe, Chalan Kanoa–­it was about you, in the remnants and ruins of destroyed Japanese buildings, bullet-pocked walls and cisterns, overgrown gardens; about you as well in the scrap metal and lumber taken from the emptied internment camps, hammered into houses, and collected and rehammered after typhoons, when people came back from bunkers and old Japanese buildings where they had taken shelter during the storms. You were on the roads, in surplus jeeps the Saipanese had purchased at $1 each. You were in the roads themselves, those roads that, more than anything else, made Saipan special: it was the only Trust Territory island west of Majuro where you could spend more than a minute in third gear….

Saipan Today

Now, in an island vastly transformed since becoming part of America, there remains cause for celebration and concern. What I love, maybe more now than before, is the wild-card vitality, the buzz and hurly-burly, the characters who land­in some cases, wash up­here, searchers, dreamers, tax-dodgers, flimflam men, the hits just keep coming. What characters, what schemes, especially in the early years: an X-rated Doonesbury cartoon. This was let’s-make-a-deal time, the coming of disco, duty-free karaoke, poker machines, etc, etc. A time in which opportunity shaded into opportunism. The world discovered Saipan; Saipan discovered the world. Things got complicated and still are. The Saipan tourist industry is at the mercy of ups and downs in Japan, the wanderlust of mainland Chinese, the health of airlines, the outbreak of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], the risk of terrorism. The garment industry thrives in the shadow of regulations, soon to go into effect, that will permit Chinese garments made in China into the US market. Will Chinese need to come to Saipan to sew? In its moment of greatest strength, Saipan is singularly vulnerable to outside forces beyond its control. All this is another way of saying it has ceased in an important way to be an island at all. Forget your images of island life: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Fantasy Island, Napoleon on St. Helena. Forget the familiar island adjectives: remote, isolated, lonely, insular, self-sufficient. They don’t apply. Saipan’s not an island anymore. It’s all connected.

The island’s main export may be irony. I saw the first Japanese tourists in the late sixties: decorous, dark-suited, camera-toting groups, middle-aged and older. I attended the opening of the first hotel, the Royal Taga. First and last, I thought. Was I wrong! Who could have guessed that a World War II battleground would turn into a Japanese Florida? Or that its transformation would mimic the 1944 campaign, first taking the invasion beaches, then heading north toward Marpi, duty-free shopping, souvenir and convenience stores and gaming emporia shooting galleries following along behind? And, among these nearly 500,000 visitors per year, there are fewer and fewer who come for the reasons that unite us today. They walk past pillboxes and monuments on their way to the beach. Was there a battle here? Well, that was then and this is now. A famous victory? Never mind: sunburn lotion is their armor. Against this tide of indifference and forgetting, the memories we share and renew may amount to more than history. They may offer guidance in times ahead.

Talk about garment industries, talk about hotels and realize that they have one thing in common: a reliance on outside capital and outside labor. The Saipanese are agents, middlemen­not bosses, and rarely employees. Where are the Saipanese? The most enthusiastic celebrants of the US Commonwealth–­and there is much to celebrate: hospitals, businesses, a likeable junior college–­turn quiet when I inquire. The Saipanese are outnumbered, nearly two-to-one, on their own island, that’s for sure, outnumbered by those waves of foreign workers, garment makers, security guards, barbers and beauticians, hostesses and maids, farmers and hard-hats who have come to do the island’s heavy lifting. There were around 11,000 people in the Northern Marianas in 1967, mostly local, and now there are 75,000, mostly alien. Be careful what you wish for. Saipanese are a minority on their own islands­–an elite minority, to be sure, and determined to stay that way, but a minority nonetheless. What, then, are they up to? What is their work, job, occupation, trade, calling? Their purpose or their passion? This is something that they may still be discovering. It’s taking time. For the moment, most island citizens who work are employed by local and commonwealth government. That is cause for wonder. It will take a few trips to know whether the situation I’ve described can last: an entrenched government contending with outside money, transient workers. I will not predict the worst: the island has a way of dodging bullets, pulling through. It has some magic. But if I predicted happy endings, we’d have to define terms.

No island is an island anymore.

Today’s Tacoma News Tribune carries an earlier Washington Post report on the outbreak of violence in coastal Guangdong northeast of Hong Kong.

DONGZHOU, China – Paramilitary police and anti-riot units have opened fire with pistols and automatic rifles for the past two nights on rioting farmers and fishermen who have attacked them with gas bombs and explosive charges, according to residents of this small coastal village.

The sustained volleys of gunfire, unprecedented in a wave of peasant uprisings over the past two years in China, have killed between 10 and 20 villagers and injured more, residents said…. As far as is known, previous riots have all been put down with heavy use of truncheons and tear gas, but without firearms.

This time, according to a villager who heard and saw what happened, police responded to the launching of explosives by repeatedly firing “very rapid bursts of gunfire” over a period of several hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Some villagers reported seeing People’s Armed Police carrying AK-47 assault rifles, one of the Chinese military’s standard-issue weapons. There were no reports of violence Thursday night.

The villagers who rose up against land confiscations in Dongzhou, a community of 10,000 residents 14 miles southeast of Shanwei city, in Guangdong province near Hong Kong, also opened a new chapter – the use of the homemade bottle bombs and explosive charges that local fishermen normally use to stun fish.

Belmont Club has compiled a range of background information about economic projects in Shanwei City, as well as an intriguing story in the People’s Daily on 29 January 2000 of the arrest and execution there of 13 pirates, including an Indonesian national.

The executions of Weng Siliang, Indonesian citizen Soni Wee and the other 11 who committed the crimes on China’s territorial waters in the South China Sea were enforced in Shanwei City of Guangdong.

The gang started planning the robbery in August of 1998 with illegal purchase of guns and buying ships. On November 16, they intercepted the Cheung Son cargo ship from Hong Kong by masquerading as Chinese police.

They robbed the ship and killed all of the 23 seamen. Later they sold the contraband for 300,000 US dollars. They also stole a total of 970,00[0] yuan in cash.

Wen and Soni Wee also were involved in the pirating of two foreign ships, and Wee was found with 156 grams of narcotics when arrested, according to court hearings.

UPDATE, 18 December – Yesterday’s Washington Post has a fascinating story about how Chinese bloggers are evading censors by discussing this event in the guise of a similar event in 1926.

HONG KONG, Dec. 16 — At first glance, it looked like a spirited online discussion about an essay written nearly 80 years ago by modern China’s greatest author. But then again, the exchange on a popular Chinese bulletin board site seemed a bit emotional, given the subject.

“In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week?

A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

via Crooked Timber

The UN’s climate change secretariat has compiled some very revealing statistics about greenhouse gas emissions in the wake of the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. As reported by the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada and New Zealand, which have not only signed the Protocol but chided their respective neighbors for not signing it, are doing no better at reining in their greenhouse gasses than Australia, which refused to sign the treaty. (Canada’s emissions were up 24.2%, Australia’s up 23.3%, New Zealand’s up 22.5%.) Furthermore, the U.S., which refused to sign, is neck and neck with Japan, where the final version of the Protocol was hashed out. (U.S. emissions have risen 13.3%, Japan’s 12.8%.)

The report shows that a huge, one-time greenhouse gas reduction occurred after the economic collapse of the former Communist countries. The former East Bloc’s emissions fell from 5.7 billion tonnes in 1990 to 3.4 billion tonnes in 2003, a stunning drop equivalent to eliminating three times Canada’s total annual contribution to warming the planet.

But since the early 1990s, most countries in the East and West have muddled along, making little headway in weaning themselves from their fossil-fuel dependency.

Excluding the former East Bloc, emissions among industrialized countries actually rose 9.2 per cent between 1990 and 2003.

How the hell did Spain, Monaco, and Portugal manage to increase their emissions by 36.7% to 41.7%? And Britain’s growing economy to reduce its emissions by 13%? Why did the UN include no statistics on China and India?

I guess the moral of this story is that actions speak louder than sanctimonious emissions.