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100,000 American Students to China?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why is it that the US media focused almost exclusively and sometimes even rather "creatively" on the atmospherics surrounding President Obama’s recent trip to Asia but ignored much of the substance? Didn’t the White House reporters who accompanied the president understand that foreign affairs and substance are related? Don’t they realize that parsing the sentences of a joint communiqué or even reading the text of or listening to a Town Hall meeting (as opposed to being frustrated because they couldn’t use instant messaging to contact their editors – or Twitter their fans due to over-zealous Chinese censors) can bear not only fruit but a few surprises? And maybe even a news article at that? Or don’t they care? Or perhaps future educational opportunities for young Americans just don't rate.

One US media ignored surprise

One of those media ignored surprises was President Obama’s commitment first announced at the Town Hall meeting in Shanghai to expand the number of American students studying in China from 20,000 to 100,000. This commitment was reiterated in more detail later in a joint communiqué issued in Beijing. The number 100,000 was likely selected to match the approximate number of Chinese currently studying in the US. Regardless, it would also represent a huge jump in American students studying abroad. Furthermore, it would be an about-face from the Bush administration’s policies that emphasized one way “exchanges” – namely foreigners coming here – while specializing in sending Americans abroad on troop ships or planes.

I had decided ever since I lived in the Philippines in the early 1990s that it was as important for Americans to travel, live and work abroad as it is for the US to play host to foreigners. Unfortunately, the successive administrations all too often saw it differently. The US government related programs that did involve two way exchanges – with the exception of Fulbright and the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange – were defunded, eliminated or devalued. But in reality, several of them were by far the most cost effective. They also had the greatest chance of furthering long term people-to-people connections - which is what I thought student and youth exchanges were all about anyway.

An Agreement "in principle"

According to the US-Chinese communiqué, the two governments agreed “in principle to establish a new bilateral mechanism to facilitate these (student) exchanges.” The communiqué also states that the US “seeks to encourage more Americans to study in China by launching a new initiative to send 100,000 students to China over the coming four years.” Presumably this would occur under the rubric of the US-Chinese Cultural Agreement to be renegotiated in 2010 - although the communiqué itself does not so state.

Pleasing China, Insulting India

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The president of a republic bows to an emperor!  Not a courteous reciprocal nod in lieu of a handshake, but very very deeply!  Didn’t anyone bother to tell Barack Obama that presidents and emperors are equals as heads of state?  Even I, this mere citizen of a republic, would not curtsey to the Queen of England or bow to an emperor any further than he would bow to me.  The U.S. rejected subservience to hereditary rulers long long ago. 

Subsequently Obama’s conduct in China amounted to one kowtow after another.  Hasn’t he got protocol people who can explain the difference, verbal and otherwise, between due respect for others and servility?  Ah well, debtors can’t be choosers, I suppose.

And then!  Did your ears hear this?  Did my eyes see this?  It wasn’t just a matter of overdosing on politeness.  It was a gaffe of monumental—should I say Himalayan?—proportions.  The joint statement by the U.S. and China on Tuesday said:

The two sides are ready to strengthen communication, dialogue and cooperation on issues related to South Asia and work together to promote peace and development in that region.

The Chinese must have chortled over that one! 

But surely Obama’s advisers realize that India and China are bitter competitors who nevertheless sometimes manage to do a little mutually beneficial trading.  Trade aside, they  have an adversarial relationship along the northern border of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (see my recent post) and in Kashmir.  Mere weeks before Barack Obama set foot in Beijing, China was once again claiming territory that China had invaded in 1962.  Surely Obama’s advisors also know that Pakistan became an India-threatening nuclear power with the assistance of China.  It worked like this: India needed the bomb because China had the bomb, so China helped Pakistan to the bomb in order to retilt the balance in favor of China.  In fact, China has pursued a relentless policy of isolating and undermining India for decades, as I’ll detail below.  How, then, could  President Barack Obama have invited China to join the U.S. in “promoting peace” in South Asia?  You don’t ask a partisan to mediate.

As for asking China to “promote development” in South Asia, surely India could be expected to take that as an insult, pure and simple.  Should India trade the democratic model for one party rule?  Should India trade freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, a free press, true ethnic and minority rights for Beijing’s totally authoritarian model?   As the old saying went, Hitler and Mussolini made the trains run on time, but were they models for the good society?  Sadly, the U.S. chooses convenience over democracy again and again.  We expected better of Obama.

The Internet, Obama and the Chinese Censors

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I’ve been dubious about the efficacy of social networking for government – or commercial – communication purposes for some time.   At least, I’m skeptical of too much reliance on social networking and the Internet in lieu of all other forms of communication - especially in communicating with foreign audiences.   The web is still no panacea. Especially in countries like China.

 OK.  So call me Neanderthal.

 But it’s pretty clear that an approach that works in communicating with the citizens of one country does not necessarily have the same reverberations or impact elsewhere.

 Let’s just take President Obama’s Town Hall meeting in  Shanghai on November 16 as a case in point.  This turned out to be a tame Q and A with about 400 Chinese Communist Party selected university students.  Even so the Chinese government censors limited the media coverage to local TV and Xinhua, China’s official news agency, while blocking – among other forms of media - Facebook and YouTube.  Meanwhile Chinese bloggers the US had hoped to invite to the event were barred by the Chinese government from attending and dissidents were rounded up ahead of time.  Although the Soviets didn’t have to worry about the Internet because it had yet to be born,  the latter move was an all too typical Soviet approach to restricting citizen access to high level foreign visitors from the West.

Overkill by the censors?

 Seems to me the media restraints in Shanghai were overkill on the part of the Chinese censors.  This was far from their finest hour.  If anything, they simply drew western media attention to a still uber-paranoid and stultified government “information” bureaucracy that has not yet caught up with the new freer-wheeling international communications environment that many young Chinese would like to be a part of.    

One has to ask the question whether the US Embassy should have recommended that the President cancel the event - given the constraints placed upon it.   Or, perhaps, Embassy staff did not know ahead of time that the Town Hall would be as restricted, scripted and constricted as it was.  Or perhaps they did, and chose to go ahead regardless but decided to conclude with the lone question that Ambassador Huntsman read out as the finale, a question that had been e-mailed to the US Embassy website asking about the President’s views on Internet censorship in China.  The question and response obviously caught even the censors off-guard.

Here's the White House's answer  bottom line - they did know in advance and for sensible reasons (including the large numbers of Chinese they would be reaching in any event) decided to proceed.

The Borderline Blues

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Walls are always porous in one way or another, yet people keep building them because boundaries are frightening places where various sorts of intellectual and physical miscegenation occur.

The space between armies or warring states is traditionally a no man’s land, a place that’s safe for no one.  As one set of laws and customs meets another, a gap occurs where no writ applies, especially if that boundary coincides with mountains or jungles or pirate-ridden oceans or vast deserts, all of which have always symbolized the unbounded—the savage, the fantastic, the unowned, the undisciplined.  Walled or not, legal or not, borders are essentially arbitrary.  They break down.  They become bones of contention.  They make news.

Borders have been much in the news this week.  The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago.  That erasure of ideological boundaries was celebrated this week.  Meanwhile, India and China were at odds over the Dali Lama’s visit to Tawang because the two countries cannot agree on where their Eastern boundary runs. Here at home, the U.S. Supreme Court has to decide whether there is an inviolable line to be drawn between adulthood and adolescence when it comes to punishment for violent crime.  Many of the issues in play during the current period of economic recovery have to do with the boundaries between government and private enterprise in our economic lives. The American doctrine of the separation of church and state is also a border issue—as is the application of Sharia Law.  

Dragons and Diplomacy

So far as China is concerned, the dragon has been breathing heavily, in hopes of controlling people and events far from its physical borders.   The Frankfurt Book Fair erupted in controversy when China attempted to dictate which writers of Chinese origin could be featured during the Fair.   Because of its intense concern about its internal boundaries, China breathes heavily on countries that allow Uighur nationalists to speak more freely outside China than they may within Chinese borders; ditto for Tibetans.    As I wrote last week, China’s baleful influence even reached into the White House, preventing President Obama from meeting with the  Dali Lama.  Sanctions and financial manipulations are other ways to achieve, more or less subtly or successfully, cross border influence.

Thus, there are so many ways in which countries attempt to control events beyond their  formal boundaries.  War is one.  The threat of war is almost as effective.  Diplomacy is another way to achieve influence across borders, as is its hand-maiden public diplomacy, which characteristically attempts to distinguish itself from propaganda. The latter is no small debate.  It concerns the borders to be respected when attempting to influence.  At one end of the spectrum is rational persuasion through information and facts; at the other end is emotional manipulation—or worse.  At what point does legitimate persuasion turn into fraud, deceit, duplicity, conning?  All of the latter are usually considered to be immoral and/or illegal, however effective they may be in achieving the manipulator’s ends.  And how about this one—when does psychological pressure or physical discomfort turn into torture?  In domestic politics, a related boundary question is this: when does an inspiring speech turn into demagoguery?  Indeed, much of the debate over health care reform has crossed the border from informed debate to scare-mongering.

Failing/Passing the Dalai Lama Test

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Because the declining power that is America must kowtow to a burgeoning China on trade and financial issues, American President Barak Obama ducked the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama before he sets off for Beijing in a few weeks.  That’s the way the Times of India reports the behavior of the first U.S. president to shy away from a meeting with the exiled Buddhist leader.

The Tawang Tiff

Perhaps Barack should borrow a page or two from India’s book.  Despite very strenuous objections sometimes amounting to threats, India is allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Tawang, a territory that China claims.  The Chinese also protested when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did some electioneering in Tawang some months ago.   Singh did not change his plans.

What’s the context here?  Back in 1914, when the U.K. ruled India and Tibet acted like an independent entity, although it was still more or less under Chinese suzerainty, the McMahon Line was drawn east from Bhutan to define the northern boundary of British India.  This is now the Line of Actual Control and it was recognized by China in 1957, but deep down Beijing is not happy: this area that is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh should be Chinese South Tibet.  In 1962 the Chinese army invaded the district of Arunachal known as Tawang.  The Red army swarmed over Se La, a 14,000 foot high pass, and drove south, pulling up heart-stoppingly close to the Brahmaputra River before withdrawing to China’s side of the traditional border.  Ever since, there have been occasional rumblings from China, a far-from-dormant volcano warning that eruptions are always possible.

The Rules of the Game

Now China was mightly miffed back then.  The 14th Dalai Lama had, only a couple of years before, escaped from Chinese control (house arrest, essentially) in Lhasa.  He crossed snowy Himalayan passes that took him through Tawang and eventually down into the rice fields of Assam along the Bhramaputra River.  India gave him asylum and allowed him to set up a government in exile in Dharamshala, which is still his headquarters.  India laid down a few rules, the most important being: no mounting insurrections against China from India territory.  Just last summer, India refused to permit a group of India-based Tibetans to cross the border and disrupt the Olympics in Beijing.  But otherwise, the Dalai Lama is free to go where he wishes and to say what he pleases, as are the thousands of other Tibetans who are based in India.  It helps that Tenzin Gyatso has proved to be a very wise and discreet leader.  He recognizes the limits of India’s patience and the material weakness of his own position vis-à-vis China. 

Not that India doesn't calculate its approach to China very shrewdly. Even as India insists that the Dalai Lama is free to go to Tawang, an ancient center of Tibetan buddhism where even in our times there is a large, active and prestigious monastery, the Indian government is not issuing press permits to foreign correspondents to cover the visit.  There will be no media circus—at least not officially.  But reports say the press are filtering in, which means that the Chinese can grumble all they want.  India!  Such a disorganized country! 

Meanwhile, after a meeting two days ago between Man Mohan Singh and his Chinese counterpart Wen Jibao, China began singing a somewhat different song.  The criticism of India largely disappeared, although the Dalai Lama himself was still the target of harsh criticism.

Is Appeasement the Word?

Watching the latest act in the intriguing dance between the Asian giants, I found myself thinking of Barack Obama again.  Perhaps if he had been brave enough to act according to principle in his own country, in his own capital, in his own White House, he would find himself in a stronger, less compromised position to do business with the Chinese, who have not dealt gently with the weak in recent times.  By not meeting with the Dalai Lama for a cordial few minutes, he has announced that his commitment to the First Amendment is for sale.  Freedom of speech?  Optional.  Freedom of assembly?  Overrated.  Freedom of Religion?  Nonsense.

Now will you help us?  Pretty please!

Does anyone believe that such kowtowing will make the  Chinese more generous on issues of importance of the U.S.?  What’s more, world domination may be built on raw power, but world leadership is built on principle.  I’d thought that Barack Obama understood that.

Hillary in Pakistan: Assessing That “Charm Offensive”

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Who came up with the idea of calling Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan a “charm offensive”?  First of all, the term is sexist.  Imagine sending Richard Holbrooke on a charm offensive!  Secondly, the concept is insulting to Pakistan.  As if that proud and prickly country would take kindly to the publically-declared notion that it could be seduced into dancing for America.  Finally, and most important, anyone who is in the least aware of the complexities of the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan would know that what’s needed in this relationship is insight, persistence and constancy, not a three days’ flirtation which would be only too reminiscent of the on-and-off romance that the U.S. has been so angrily and so often accused of.  This week included.

So Washington is shocked that Hillary didn’t sweep particulars under a lovely Baloch or Kashmiri carpet?  I am going to take issue and suggest that she did exactly what was needed.  She let some fresh air into the discussion.  She got serious.  Most likely we shouldn't assume that her comments about someone surely knowing the whereabouts of al Qaeda or about trust needing to be a two-way street or about Pakistan’s needing to take responsibility for education were bloopers, blunders, or obnoxiously preachy.  I think they were carefully embedded in the innocuous stuff.   Lawyers know how to do this.

I have read every interview text on the Department of State website, particularly the questions with which Secstate Clinton was peppered by journalists, students and tribal leaders.  (Whoever was responsible for the recordings that yielded so many “inaudibles”  should be fired!).  These were good discussions, and I find it regrettable that the American press so frequently framed the story so as to deserve a headline like this: “Clinton Suffers Barbs and Returns Jabs on Pakistan Trip.”  Here is more of such misrepresentation:

She submitted [itals mine] to four round-table interviews...in which Pakistan’s leading journalists took their best shots at her, and she even counterpunched once or twice.  By the time she left...she appeared to have fought Pakistan’s fourth estate to a draw.

What’s offensive about such a description?  It’s inaccurate.  It’s inappropriate.  What was going on was more like the first phase of a negotiation.  Everything gets laid on the table.  The fears.  The resentments.  The angers.  The misunderstandings.  The disappointments.  Unless you get through that stage, you can never progress to anything like productive cooperation. 

Looks Like We’ve Given Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For decades now the US has been closing its cultural centers and trying to whip up enthusiasiam for cheap substitutes which surveys have shown to be ineffectual.  The rationale for the cost cutting jag?  That old end of history canard.  Once the Cold War was over, there’d be no need to promote the American brand.  We’d won.  The future was us—the U.S.

The Greeks were so right about the need for self-knowledge and the dangers of hubris.  Our joy and relief when the Berlin Wall came down were so extreme that we thought the U.S. would be on top for ever—well, there were some level headed sorts who considered such thinking to be absurd, but they were pooh-poohed.  We cut back on our public diplomacy programs, and within ten years our public diplomacy agency went poof!  Gone.  In all fairness, I need to add that the Brits were cutting back on British Council expenditures, the French were less generous to their Alliance Française operations and the Germans were closing Goethe Centers, too.  The West, in general, was pretty smug about winning the Cold War and was determined to reap financial dividends.

But history, as it will, moved on.  Islam exploded, Russia refused to play the role of deferential poor provincial cousin, and if the 20st century was the American century, the competition for which country will dominate the 21st century seems to be constrained only by the never properly appreciated or understood efforts of India to deny the honor to the Chinese.  However, the Chinese are looking so good that the Russians, evidently, have decided to follow the Sino one-party-capitalism model to prosperity.

Obama's War: A Must See

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I've just watched the PBS Frontline production Obama's War.  Mostly I want to say: see it now if you didn't manage to catch it on Tuesday night.    See our troops telling villagers they have to answer questions honestly---and actually expecting a heart-to-heart to happen, if not now, then in time!  Hear someone say it will take 600,000 troops to win (whatever winning means)---without speculating on how many years would be involved, but suggesting that in time the Afghans could take over most of the job, evidently assuming that the Afghans would have the same goals as the U.S.  And so it goes!  Delusion after delusion, punctuated by the grave pronouncements of the so-called expert General McCrystal Ball or Bull, whom the Republicans imagine to be capable of dictating U.S. policy in South Asia!   But see it for yourself.   

If I Were a Pakistani Reading Kerry-Lugar, I’d Flip

By Patricial Lee Sharpe

The Pakistani military is balking at some provisions in the Kerry-Lugar Bill and not every influential civilian is jumping with joy at the prospect of $1.5 billion a year from the U.S.  Meanwhile, Asif Ali Zardari’s civilian government is trying to persuade the Obama administration to take no account of such foolish tantrums.

Given the unusually spirited objections to U.S. aid,  I decided to see what might be obnoxious about the text.  I decided to try to peruse S. 962 as a proud, well educated Pakistani citizen might read it.  All 33 pages.  Every clause.

Reading in my Pakistani persona, I found myself getting more and more angry.  I was in the mood to throw all 33 pages across the room—or maybe to rip them up and stomp on them.

For a cool billion and a half a year,  the United States of America proposes to intrude into the following areas/processes/concerns of the national life of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: police; judiciary; political pluralism, equality and the rule of law; human and civil rights; media; transparency and accountability of ALL branches of government and judiciary; anti-corruption efforts at ALL levels of military and civilian administration; narcotics trade; legal and political reform of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; rural development in general; natural resources management; energy and water investments and management, employment generation; roads, irrigation and other physical infrastructure; worker rights including the right to form labor unions [this from the union-busting U.S. culture!]; primary and secondary education and vocational training and higher education; food security and agriculture; public health; vocational training; micro-finance and income generation for women.

“Is nothing to be free of American meddling and dictation?” I find my Pakistani self raging. “It was fine, it was innocuous, back when the yahoos wanted to do a little project here, a little project there, a seminar, a conference, but scaled up like this!  They want to take over our whole life, beginning tomorrow!”

All projects will, of course, have to be approved by U.S. authorities, and before any money flows into these many channels of national life,  the U.S. government will require a description of the role to be played by Pakistani national, regional, and local officials and members of Pakistani civil society and local private sector, civic, religious and tribal leaders, all of whom may help to identify and implement programs and projects.

 “How sweet!” my Pakistani persona thinks.  “Local input.”

Meeting Gods and Godesses in Kolkata

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For nearly two weeks, day and night, Bengalis have been paying homage to Durga their favorite goddess.  But now her effigies have been carried, carted or trucked from their places of honor to be tossed or toppled into the Houghly River.  Sic transit gloria.  All is transient.  Calcutta/Kolkata will return to hyper-crowded, high-energy normality, until the next puja, in honor of Kali or Manasa or Kartik or Saraswati or Ganesh or—the roster of honorees is practically countless.  Calcutta is almost always preparing for or recovering from one puja or another, as I discovered on Day One, for me, in the vibrant city that turned from Calcutta to Kolkata while I was living there.

Kartik

En route from the airport, I found myself being driven down a street along which everyone in sight seemed to have something to do with making effigies.  In open-front shop after shop, artisans were engaged in what turned out to be a four-part process.  (1) Make a humanoid armature of  bamboo strips.  (2) Flesh it out with straw.  (3) Cover it with papier mache.  (4) Paint it flamboyantly.

Kartik puja was days away, it seemed, and I had a decision to make.  Kartik, like the more widely known Ganesha, is a son of the Hindu god Shiva and his wife Parvati.  One of his modern duties is to serve as the god (eg patron saint) of mechanics and engineers.  I, as in-coming supervisor of team that included drivers, mechanics, audio-visual specialists and computer systems operators, had to say yea or nay to the business  of setting up an image of Kartik in our garage.  “Is it customary?” I asked.  The answer was  “Yes.”  So Kartik was duly installed, with a garland of marigolds around his neck.  Who wanted accidents or computer crashes over the next 12 months?  What’s more, if we could have Kartik in the garage, we could have a Christmas tree in the lobby when December rolled around.  Eid treats, in turn, would also be enjoyed by all, Muslim or not. Hurrah for festivals!

Durga

But Kartik puja had nothing, festival-wise, on Durga puja, when every intersection in the city was likely to offer a resplendent image of Durga off to the side, if not plumb in the center, traffic be damned.  In rich neighborhoods Durga images could soar to an awesome 20 feet.  Neighborhood associations collecting funds in less affluent areas would have to be content with a Durga closer to the measurements of an ordinary woman.  Always, however, she’d be lacquered in bright colors and dressed in gaudy glittery raiment.  That much was traditional.  Then came the strings of lights draped above and all around each and every one of her, and the huge loudspeakers with their gaping bells broadcasting Bollywood favorites and static incessantly.