Category Archives: Current Affairs

This evening, while watching the Olympics opening ceremonies, Jeff Jarvis unleashed a string a Twitter comments railing against China and NBC’s non-coverage of their human rights violations and oppression in general:

We are watching perhaps the most dangerous and amoral substantiation of capitalism in its history. Matt: Why wouldya go away? Huh? Why?

China poisons its people’s air and minds, poisons our people and pets, and allows no freedom. NBC’s caveats on its hype are unconvincing.

It seems every day another Western intellectual denounces China in terms too simple and broad. Sometimes these denouncements are couched in national security or U.S. competitiveness, but actually, in my view, take root in the quicksand of xenophobia. Other times the criticisms rely upon the human rights issues and censorship that Jeff mentions — these are substantive and serious and worth discussing / fighting for.

But it’s also worth putting China’s lack of certain freedoms in context. In many ways, China’s recent economic progress — fueled by that "dangerous and amoral capitalism" that Jeff detests — has provided new, tangible freedoms to hundreds of millions of Chinese. This ought to be celebrated. As Kishore Mahbubani describes in The New Asian Hemisphere, it’s hard for us Westerners, as we enjoy our flush toilets and clean water and edible food, to appreciate how a material increase in living can result in freedoms (and, as Benjamin Friedman argues, other positive moral consequences) far more important than our favorite d-word, Democracy, or even luxuries such as a free press:

Many in the West do not understand the realities of China. A profound revival of China’s civilization is occurring. Many in the West cannot even conceive of this because in their mind an "unfree" society like China cannot possibly be progressing. The Western mind has a rigid, one-dimensional, and ideological understanding of the term "freedom."

In the eyes of the West, freedom (a word often written with a capital F) is seen as an absolute virtue. It has to be complete for it to be effective; to speak of any people being "half free" is as ludicrous as saying someone is "half pregnant." The idea that freedom can be relative and can indeed take many forms is alien. But for the Chinese, in real terms — if they compare their lives today with their lives a few decades ago — they have achieved much greater freedom.

The notion of "human freedom" can have many layers. The fundamental layer of human freedom is freedom from want. A human being who cannot feed himself or his family cannot possibly be free. Famine is more damaging to human freedom than a politically closed society. To tell people who are struggling to stay alive that they are "Free" because a distant despotic ruler has been removed will appear meaningless to them. In terms of their daily lives, "freedom" will come with liberation from the fight for survival. In this sense, the Chinese people have never enjoyed greater human freedom….As a result of China’s rapid growth over the last three decades, the number of people living in absolute poverty has fallen from 600 million people to slightly more than 200 million people.

Then follows freedom of security. The only way to enjoy freedom is to stay alive. This is why many people of Iraq find it hard to believe that they are now enjoying greater freedom than they did under Saddam. Now they can’t feel safe walking the streets of Baghdad; under Saddam’s oppressive regime, they still felt safe. By contrast, citizens of Beijing have never enjoyed as much personal security as they do now. Beijing people don’t want to go to Baghdad. Where is there greater human freedom?

Then freedom to choose employment. Millions have migrated to cities in China and found new, higher paying work. Yet Western media portrays these new workers as terrible conditions. Nike factories, for example, were vilified as paying extremely low wages to produce their shoes. Yet for these young girls the "miserly low wages" were higher than what they earned in villages, and working in air-conditioned rooms was more comfortable than tilling soil in the sun.

This doesn’t mean that the we shouldn’t push China to open up even more. But it does mean that their recent progress and current situation is more complicated than many make it out to be. Freedom does not have a capital "f". Freedom is not bimodal. Capitalism, even in its strange, quasi-authoritarian version, has helped more than hurt the Chinese people.

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James Fallows notes that George Bush gave…a good speech! In Bangkok. On China. Appropriate nuance. Worth reading Fallows’ excerpts.

Anne-Marie Slaughter via Nicholas Kristof’s blog makes this novel observation about how to tell if a country is truly developed (new stuff and old stuff) versus superficially developed (just new shiny stuff):

…in China there is only one layer of infrastructure — a shiny new layer. In the U.S., by contrast, you see multiple layers — old streetlights next to newer ones, different kinds of asphalt dating from different periods of road-building, old cars and new cars on the road, old and new factories, old and new shopping centers, and old and new houses on the side of the road. The larger point, which was deeply counter-intuitive at least to me, is that the sign of a developed country is the presence of old things, whereas at least in China’s major cities (this does not hold for the countryside), old things have been destroyed to the point of invisibility, with the exception of the major national symbols like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, in favor of the newest architecture, technology, and fashions. The counter-intuitive part is that we think of developed countries as new and advanced, while the old model of developing countries had crumbling buildings and creaky infrastructure….

A country of only new things has no depth, no fall-backs, no layers of experience and expertise. It is fragile; if the new highway is flooded out or scored by earthquakes, there are no decent secondary roads to handle the traffic. If the power system for the new street lights fails, there is no older but more dependable technology to rely on.

Two people I read regularly and respect offered today totally opposite perspectives on Larry Summer’s FT column on the U.S. economy.

Paul Kedrosky said:

Larry Summers’ FT column on building a U.S. financial recovery is must reading. It is lucid, crisply argued and practically-minded in its attempt to come up with a plan to get U.S. policy ahead of the curve with respect to the unfolding multiple crises in the U.S. economy.

Felix Salmon said:

Larry Summers has a long and pompous article in the FT today on building a financial recovery. If you can slog your way through the awkward constructions ("consideration should be given to whether the government should establish a mechanism for purchasing assets from stressed banks in return for warrants or other consideration"), you’re likely to end up thinking that his diagnosis is pretty accurate, but that his proposed cure is far too vague to be useful.

Just goes to show that two smart, informed people can come down very differently on the same words, and that anyone seeking "expert" perspectives should engage more than one expert.

The other day global warming came up in conversation and my friend laid out the reasons why he was skeptical, why we’re probably witnessing just a normal temperature cycle, how Al Gore exaggerates, etc etc. Afterwards I told him, “Dude, don’t you see? The global warming skeptic used to be the fashionable position of smart people. The wheels have spun and the anti-skeptic is back on top.”

He smiled solemnly, ever aware of the need to stay one step ahead of the vicious hype cycle, agreed global warming skepticism has jumped the shark, and resolved to join the fight to save our planet.

Hardly a day goes by without a stark reminder of the the newspaper industry’s malaise. Today, to pick just one example, the Los Angeles Times announced it will no longer print a separate book review section on Sundays.

Predictably, the journalistic community responded with dismay. We’ve seen this movie before. Several past LAT book editors wrote a letter of protest in which they claimed this decision is a "blunder" which will lead to more readers canceling their subscriptions and that eliminating a stand-alone book review section is an "insult" to "cultural ambitions of the city."

Don’t these people get it? Newspapers are dying. Content is being unbundled. Cultural ambitions of cities are no longer channeled by the local newspaper. The world is changing. Yet, a considerable number of executives in this industry (and newspaper readers over age 60 in general) believe that newspapers in their current form must be saved — including a book review section alongside city crime alongside reporting from Iraq alongside Lakers and Dodgers news. Not so.

No one questions the societal need for high quality journalism. But — and this is key — there is no inextricable link between high quality journalism and a print newspaper covering a million topics.

My popular belief on all this is that the most promising category is "hyperlocal" news / analysis / coverage. My unpopular belief is that print still has a future in a big way, just not for metro daily newspapers.

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is the most intelligent blogger on reinventing journalism. I read him daily.

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