Sticks and Stones

2008 will see the first ever Olympic games take place in China. This will be a spectacular sight, and will be a clear beacon showing how much China has progressed and integrated with the globalised world that exists today. Just looking around my desk at the moment I see a great many items that have been made in China, and looking at the news I see just how important China is to the global economy. So surely it is only correct that now, in 2008, we celebrate China’s emergence as one of the leading countries in the world, with an Olympic games?

‘No’, would be the short answer.

The reason is quite simple, and is demonstrated in a news item from today. Though China may be a global player in the world, it is still an undemocratic dictatorship, where human rights abuses are omnipresent.

Today we learn that any British athlete who dare criticises the Chinese regime, will be sent on the next plane home, under the auspices of the British Olympic Authority. So much for freedom of speech then? See today’s Daily Telegraph for more on this story.

It is here that the inevitable parallels are drawn with Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which were designed to show off the “mightiness of the Aryan race”. And yet, inevitably, at events like these the fallacies of evil regimes are highlighted. At Berlin it was Jesse Owens’ - an African American - many gold medals. In Beijing it may well be the expulsion of Paula Radcliffe.

Speaking of Olympic games run by dictatorships, where freedom of speech is suppressed and the public have little chance to express their dissatisfaction, did you know that the Ken Livingstone Olympics are taking place in 2012?

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Many of you will have been as shocked as I was at the recent news that the World Bank has lambasted several Arabic countries for providing their children with extremely poor educations - “falling behind”. Reports the BBC:

The World Bank has said the quality of education in the Arab world is falling behind other regions and needs urgent reform if it is to tackle unemployment.

In a report, bank officials said Arab states had to make improving education their top priority, because it went hand-in-hand with economic development.

So many revelations to take in at once! Arab education needs reforming? But what’s wrong with textbooks that omit the Holocaust, maps that omit Israel, classrooms that omit girls? But not only does the World Bank deserves much praise for highlighting this sorry state of affairs, but also for the enlightening insight that education fosters economic development.

Come on. Is there anyone in the world for whom this was not blindingly obvious? Of course education encourage economic growth - we could ask first-year economics students at university the same question and get a much more edifying and learned response. I’m a Trotskyist - that shows how little I understand economics - and even I knew that. It really makes you wonder: what is the point?

What is more, how is this newsworthy? Arab countries, I thought, are renowned for their shoddy quality of education, it being on a par with their sinfully corrupt leaders and Islam-derived injustices towards women, homosexuals etc. Next they’ll be saying that these countries would be a lot better off with female emancipation and secular government - and imagine how surprised we’ll all be if they say that.

This is Senior Staff Writer Leo’s 14th post and the blog’s 63rd post. It was published on Thursday 7th February 2008, one month after Sticks and Stones was founded.

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James Fallows wrote an illuminating article about the economic interdependence of China and the US, expounding on a series of topical questions. How independent is the US economy? How strong is it? What is the likelihood of a US economic collapse? Most worrying was the question it dealt with at the end: What would happen if China sold its $1.4 trillion in US Treasury bonds?

The answers are not simple; China buys billions of US dollars daily through a complicated series of fiscal regulations forcing banks to surrender USD to the central bank which then buys US bonds with the dollars. Fallows summarises it neatly:

Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B, paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on Chinese-made goods.

The problem is that this forces interdependence onto both the US and China. While a controlled system in China ensures the US has the money to continue consuming, political tensions and distrust from both nations toward each other makes this a fragile situation. We all remember when the USS Kitty Hawk was not allowed to dock for Thanksgiving in Hong Kong. Another military incident that worries the US was when the Chinese blew up one of their own satellites, spraying debris in the path of many US orbital probes.

Whether these actions are innocent and simply procedural or menacing cannot be known because China’s government is so secretive. Was the blocking of the USS Kitty Hawk a demonstration of regional domination? Was the destruction of the satellite China flexing its technological muscle? Perhaps these situations were, as claimed, simply miscommunications either between the US and China, or within the Chinese government. We cannot know because they won’t let us know.

As China continues fuelling US consumption - which has grown to the extent that it is greater than US production: a very dangerous situation when not propped up by China - both nations will need to be ever more delicate about their political connections and demands. Human rights for the Chinese, free access for CNOOC to buy U.S.–based Unocal… demands abound on both sides.

The next president will have to face this complicated situation, and possibly a devastating fallout if someone misunderstands something (as when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, said last November, “We are worried about how to preserve the value” speaking about their US dollar foreign reserves). It is a delicate situation, and both sides need it to exist to maintain economic stability, even as both sides square off politically over a plethora of issues: Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Nigeria… the list goes on.

Read the article in this month’s Atlantic, or online at theatlantic.com

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Chanced upon an article in the Wall Street Journal, in response to yesterday’s suicide bomb attack in the southern Israeli city of Dimona - worth a read, to remind ourselves of the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism, and the measures that have and can be taken to prevent these misguided, inhuman and murderous activities;

The news about yesterday’s suicide bombing in the Israeli town of Dimona is that it’s news. In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, 451 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, including 14 suicide bombings. By contrast, yesterday’s attack, which killed one and injured 11, was the first of its kind in more than a year.

This didn’t happen by accident, or because Palestinian radicals have somehow become less hostile to Israel. Responsibility for yesterday’s attack was claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which is affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas’s ostensibly moderate Fatah party. Islamist Hamas remains even more ardently dedicated to Israel’s destruction, a point it emphasizes with its rocket barrages at southern Israeli cities close to the Gaza Strip.

Instead, the difference has come because of Israel’s increasingly successful antiterrorist efforts. Key to that success has been the construction of its ostensibly “illegal” security fence, its equally “illegal” targeted assassinations of key terrorist leaders, its “disproportional” attacks on terrorist enclaves in Jenin and elsewhere, and other actions that saved innocent lives but which much of the international community deplored.

One of the most common arguments against Israel’s actions is that it would feed a “cycle of violence.” It’s fair to say that what happened is closer to the opposite. As Israel put pressure on terrorist leaders, they were forced to spend their time running for their lives rather than planning the next attack. As Israel set up physical obstacles to terrorism, the need for large-scale military incursions declined, allowing a semblance of normal life to return for Israelis as well as Palestinians. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel proved that terrorists can be defeated — a lesson that applies equally in Iraq.

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This year is 18 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Evil Empire, the death of one manifestation of totalitarianism that the free world squared off against for half a century.

We know. By we I mean those of us born during or after 1989. By know I mean, unlike the ever-popular notion that children take the present moment and their liberties for granted, there are millions of children across the world captivated and fully aware of the significance of what happened that year, before they were born.

Films like The Lives of Others bring these decades into sharp and immediate focus but the real history is to be found through the work of Wired magazine which recently investigated the meticulous shredding undertaken by the Stasi in its last throes.

History reminds us of the most poignant and pivotal moments; the darkest of years and the most hopeful. 1989 represented a fundamental shift from stable hatred to unstable turmoil. Those of us who did not live through those times are no less prepared to speak about them, and speak about them authoritatively.

It is important that we treat our history with reverence and never forget how hard our parents and grandparents fought now-vanquished enemies for the liberties we, today, consider ‘normal’. They weren’t normal then, and it is dangerously foolish of us to neglect that.

However, it is equally dangerous to brand the new generation of citizenry unaware and apathetic. In every generation it is easy to find broad swathes of the population who seem totally incapable of thinking about things beyond what will bring them utmost pleasure in the here and now.

But in every generation, without fail, you will find hundreds of thousands of bright young men and women in whom the hope of tomorrow resides.

Yes, Mr Cohen you found the children whose accounts will add colour to your article. Heike Krupa’s students like Felix Blanke may be unaware of what communism was. He may be happy and content playing with computers, networking online and killing Orcs on World of Warcraft, but he is not the whole story. Don’t lose hope in our generation, don’t think we don’t care about the past. There are many of us who care deeply about history, who are truly passionate about learning about who did what, and when, and why, and how.

For Ricardo Westendorf ignorance may be bliss, but for many others of our generation, ignorance is extremely dangerous, and apathy even more so because it turns its blind eye to horrors. We know what 1989 meant, just as we know what 1933 meant. Rest assured that there are those of us out there who will never forget. But know that in 2019 I won’t write in the IHT portraying only the 18 year olds who don’t know what 9/11 means, because there will be those who do; and they are the ones upon whom we should focus our attention.

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