The China Paradox

How should Americans understand a country that presents itself as simultaneously weak and strong?

BY CHRISTINA LARSON @ foreignpolicy.com

Until recently, the Chinese paradox that most puzzled Western audiences was how to understand a country that is both communist and hyper-capitalist. But that is hardly the only, or even the most striking, paradox of the modern Middle Kingdom. China is fast on its way to becoming a global superpower, even as it grapples with such enormous domestic challenges as supplying enough energy to keep its cities lit, absorbing millions of rural migrants into cities each year, reining in choking pollution, creating a social safety net, and attempting to lift millions out of poverty. Although China holds $1 trillion in U.S. debt, its per capita GDP is still roughly one-tenth that of the United States. Beijing is subsidizing China's fast-growing clean-tech export industry, even as the skies above the country's largest cities remain a hazy gray. Such seeming contradictions are dazzlingly confusing to outsiders -- and sometimes to China's own leaders.

Yet, this recent show of confidence is making some in Beijing nervous. Although from a distance China's Communist government may appear a decision-making monolith, in fact a variety of voices are now arguing about the country's future direction -- and what face to show foreigners -- as Council on Foreign Relations scholar Elizabeth Economy documented in her recent Foreign Policyarticle, "The End of the Peaceful Rise?" While all good mandarins take pride in their country's growing economic and geopolitical clout, some critics within China worry that inflated pride comes before a fall. Ye Hailin, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, for instance, recently pointed out what he sees as flaws in current domestic sensibilities: "Three decades of reform have led to a rapid increase of wealth in China, and this in turn has also made the Chinese people arrogant. ...The Chinese people are no longer tolerant of criticisms."

 

But refusing to accept criticism is not necessarily the same thing as thinking of oneself as a superpower. At least China's citizenry, for all their surging patriotism, aren't yet buying that line. One interesting paradox about how Chinese and American people see China was evident in two recent polls. Americans tend to exaggerate China's economic strength (and presumed threat to U.S. stature), while Chinese tend to downplay news of their rising power. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly half of Americans -- 47 percent -- named China as the world's top economic power (though, in fact, China's economy is about one-third the size of that of the United States). That's up significantly from early 2008, when 30 percent of Americans made the same claim. Meanwhile, when asked whether China was a "superpower," only 12 percent of Chinese people agreed in a recent poll by state-run Global Times newspaper. It's a good reminder that not only is China home to vast wealth and poverty, but also home to a range of views, ever-evolving.

Read more here.

 

After the unthinkable: How 9/11 changed fiction

IN THE days and weeks after 9/11 a number of writers asked what the future of fiction could be after such a rupture. The comments echoed philosopher Theodor Adorno’s comment: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
 
Ten years on it is abundantly clear that fiction does, of course, have a future. Some novelists have tackled the events of that September day head on; others have used the episode as a spur to look at the Western world shaken out of its complacency. The quality of the output, as in all areas of fiction, is highly variable.
 
Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life” was a rather crass before-and-after view of a couple forced to re-examine their relationship following the events of 9/11; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” had a number of touching moments but was ultimately too long to carry itself. Don Delillo’s “Falling Man” was a strange sort of novel which lacked the density of his other work, but it did capture some of the most chilling elements of the events: “By the time the second plane appears,” Keith comments as he and Lianne watch the endlessly cycling video of the attacks, “we're all a little older and wiser.”
 
There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story. Mr McInerney’s book is the poorer, I think, because his characters seem so paper-thin beside the burning towers and anguished souls the television footage depicted. For this reason non-fiction has often been the better medium to convey the most moving and poignant record of the day.

The second is that all fiction of every genre hinges around some kind of crisis, internal or external, that a book has to see its way through. This can take many forms. But 9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it’s a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.
 
That is probably why many authors have taken 9/11 as a jumping-off point to look at a group or type of person they had not thought to before. Martin Amis wrote a short story in the voice of one of the 9/11 hijackers. John Updike’s “Terrorist” traced the world of a would-be suicide bomber, for example. The setting for that book, like Updike’s other work, was suburban middle-America, and many of the characters were also recognisable from earlier books, but his central figure, a teenager who becomes radicalised, sits uneasily in this context—uneasy both for the character and sadly the novel too.

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Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11

by Zadie Smith @ newyorker.com

Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness,” wrote John Updike ten years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with “the false intimacy of television,” from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Over in North West London, we were certainly very small and distant, but we still felt that false intimacy. We are a mixed community, including many Muslims, from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Africa. I grew up with girls who wore the head scarf, a fact that seemed no more remarkable to me at the time than Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes or Hindu kids with bindis on their foreheads. Different world. What enabled it? It helped that so many of the class disparities between us had been partially obscured. United in the same primary schools, we were neither mesmerized by, nor especially frightened of, our differences. Later, that sense of equality became difficult to maintain. Teen-agers are preoccupied with status and justice—they notice difference. Why do some have so much while others have nothing? Natural superiority? Hard work? Historical luck? Or exploitation? For some, the basic political insights of adolescence arrived with an extra jolt: your people over here were hurting your people over there; your home was attacking your home. Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet, sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No. 1.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/09/12/110912ta_talk_smith#ixzz1XL0cLP70

Zadie Smith was only 25 when her first novel, White Teeth, was published. It seems that this is sort of the Number One Fact about Zadie Smith, as it were, especially for Writing About Zadie Smith. At the New Yorker festival this past fall, Smith was questioned about what it was like to become such a remarkable success at such an incredibly young age. Her response was classically Zadie: It wasn’t that unusual at all, she said, and then she proceeded to list a host of names who had achieved similarly early and lasting success — among them John Updike, Martin Amis, and the rest of the foundation of modern Western literature. And she’s right — for a talent of her caliber, she is just right on track.

The Worst Mistake America Made After 9/11: How focusing too much on the war on terror undermined our economy and global power.

By Anne Applebaum @ Slate.com

We reacted to 9/11 with the war on terror. Was it a huge mistake?

 

On Sept. 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era that began so euphorically on Nov. 9, 1989, abruptly ended. The long decade that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center was marked by military spending cuts, domestic political scandals, and a general sense that American foreign policy was adrift. President George H.W. Bush had talked of the "New World Order" but had no policy to fit the clever phrase. President Bill Clinton had a clutch of policies but never found a neat way to describe them.

In the wake of al-Qaida's attack on New York and Washington, an organizing principle suddenly presented itself. Like the Cold War, the new "war on terror," as it instantly became known, clearly defined America's friends, enemies, and priorities. Like the Cold War, the war on terror appealed both to American idealism and to American realism. We were fighting genuine bad guys, but the destruction of al-Qaida also lay clearly within the sphere of our national interests. The speed with which we all adopted this new paradigm was impressive, if somewhat alarming. At the time, I marveled at the neatness and cleanliness of this New New World Order and observed "how like an academic article everything suddenly appears to be."

 

In our single-minded focus on Islamic fanaticism, we missed, for example, the transformation of China from a commercial power into an ambitious political power. We failed to appreciate the significance of economic growth in China's neighborhood, too. When President George W. Bush traveled in Asia in the wake of 9/11, he spoke to his Malaysian and Indonesia interlocutors about their resident terrorist cells. His Chinese colleagues, meanwhile, talked business and trade.

We also missed, at least initially, the transformation of Russia from a weak and struggling partner into a sometimes hostile opponent. Through the lens of the war on terror, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia in 2001, looked like an ally. He, too, was fighting terrorists, in Chechnya. Though his was quite a different war against quite different terrorists (and not only against terrorists), for a brief period he nevertheless convinced his American counterparts that his struggle and their struggle were more or less the same thing.

 

Thanks to the war on terror, we missed what might have been a historic chance to make a deal on immigration with Mexico. Because all of Latin America was irrelevant to the war on terror, we lost interest in, and influence on, that region, too. The same goes for Africa, with the exception of those countries with al-Qaida cells. In the Arab world, we aligned ourselves closely with authoritarian regimes because we believed they would help us fight Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that their authoritarianism was an inspiration to fanatical Islamists. If we are now treated with suspicion in place like Egypt and Tunisia, that is part of the explanation.

Finally, we stopped investing in our own infrastructure—think what $3 trillion could have done for roads, research, education, or even private investment, if a part of that sum had just been left in taxpayers' pockets—and we missed the chance to rethink our national energy policy. After 9/11, the president could have gone to the nation, declared an emergency, explained that wars would have to be fought and would have to be paid for—perhaps, appropriately, through a gasoline tax. He would have had enormous support. It's hard to remember now, but I could just about fill the tank of my car for $20 back in 2001. At the time, I'd have been happy to make it $21 if it helped the marines in Afghanistan. Instead, the president cut taxes and increased defense spending. We are only now paying the price.

 

Continue reading here.

 

The True Cost of 9/11: Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz @ project-syndicate.org

The 9/11 attacks led to two wars and out-of-control U.S. spending

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by Al Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to Al Qaeda – as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive – orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning – as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.

Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America’s macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the US.

But then the US Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.

Continue reading here.