Clive Davis

CENSURED

Highly embarrassing, non? That stylish photo-blog, Un Oeil Sur la Chine (An Eye on China) notes that the regime's chief censor has been removed from his post a matter of days after the French government awarded him the Légion d’Honneur. (I suppose Jacques Chirac thinks a book-pulper needs all the encouragement he can get.) More details in the Times:

Mr Long had said last month that he planned to tighten controls on China’s growing multitude of bloggers, a statement in line with policy but at odds with government efforts to cultivate a more liberal international image before the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

NEW COLOSSUS

FT columnist Gideon Rachman makes a list of lessons learnt during a high-level visit to China. Let's begin with the good part:

China and the West: The Chinese seemed both baffled and faintly irritated to be receiving a joint European-American delegation. As one Chinese academic put it – "In 2003 we thought that there was a major split in the west over Iraq, and that this would prove lasting. But I think we were wrong."

Hooray. The bad news, though, is not far away:

Nationalism: Beijing-based journalists reckon that China has taken a nationalistic turn under Hu Jintao, who became president in 2003. The days when the Chinese would lean over backwards to help foreign investors are over. These days foreign businessmen are finding the going increasingly tough. Chinese foreign policy is also increasingly assertive and is underpinned by an assumption that the west is ultimately hostile to the rise of China. One westerner I met, who teaches at a Chinese university, said he was disturbed by how many of his pupils had been told during the course of their education, or military training, that eventual conflict between China and the United States and Japan was inevitable.

THE OTHER SIDE OF CHINA

A glimpse of China's new proletariat, courtesy of the excellent French photo-blog, Un oeil sur la Chine. Seems the authorities think the workers who have flocked to the cities from the countryside don't convey quite the right image of a thrusting, hi-tech land.

ASIA'S OTHER GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Topical, very topical. The NY Times reviews Edward Luce's book on the ever-changing face of Indian society - "an endlessly fascinating, highly pleasurable way to catch up on a very big story". Worth quoting at length, I think:

Unlike China, India has not undergone an industrial revolution. Its economy is powered not by manufacturing but by its service industries. In a vast subcontinent of poor farmers whose tiny holdings shrink by the decade, a highly competitive, if small, technology sector and a welter of service businesses have helped create a middle class, materialistic and acquisitive, along with some spectacularly rich entrepreneurs.

"If Gandhi had not been cremated,” Mr. Luce writes, “he would be turning in his grave."

... India’s economy has grown by 6 percent annually since 1991, a rate exceeded only by China’s, yet there are a mere 35 million taxpayers in a country with a population of 1.1 billion. Only 10 percent of India’s workers have jobs in the formal economy. Its excellent engineering schools turn out a million graduates each year, 10 times the number for the United States and Europe combined, yet 35 percent of the country remains illiterate.

Despite its robust democracy and honest elections, India faces the future saddled with one of the most corrupt government bureaucracies on earth. Mr. Luce encounters a woman in Sunder Nagri, a New Delhi slum, whose quest for a ration card entitling her to subsidized wheat and other staples involved bribing an official to get an application form. The form was in English, which she could not read, so she had to pay a second official to fill it out. When she turned up to claim her wheat, it was mouldy and crawling with insects. The store owner had evidently sold his good government wheat on the black market.

...Sometime in the 2020s, at current growth rates, India will overtake Japan to become the world’s third-largest economy. Greatness lies within its grasp, Mr. Luce argues, if it can figure out a way to restructure its inefficient agriculture, put millions of desperately poor people in jobs that pay more than a pittance, wake up to a potential H.I.V.-AIDS crisis and root out government corruption.

Mr. Luce takes a cautiously optimistic view. "India is not on an autopilot to greatness," he writes. “But it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane."

NOTEBOOK

Prince Sirik Matak sent a letter to the American ambassador informing him that they were not going to evacuate. It read:

"Dear Excellency and Friend,

I thank you sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have the sentiment of abandoning a country which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot, and in the country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.

Sirik Matak."

Five days later their livers were carried through the streets on sticks.

Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia.

AN EYE IN THE EAST

    

A blog I've discovered in the past couple of days is the beautifully illustrated French site, Un Oeil sur la Chine (An Eye on China). This photo comes from a post on the state of the country's rural health system. Last week 2,000 people ransacked a medical centre in the south-west of the country after claiming that staff had allowed a young boy to die because his family couldn't afford to pay for treatment. Some background from a NYT report:

Medical costs are an enormously sensitive issue for tens of millions of people in Chinese cities and hundreds of millions in the countryside who have no medical insurance and no public safety net to cover soaring health care costs.

The government, controlled by the Communist Party, once offered rudimentary medical care for nominal prices in the countryside. But hospitals were left largely to fend for themselves in the market economy of the 1990s. Many ceased providing even emergency care for people who could not pay fees in cash in advance.

In short, a side of the great leap forward that we don't hear much about. Un oeil sur la Chine is going to be one of my regular reads in future. (Take a look at the images in the piece on the one-child-per-family policy.)