Michigan's Racist Candidate

In case you've missed all of the hoopla, this ad for Pete Hoekstra ran in Michigan during the Super Bowl last week. As you'll see it's beyond obnoxious and worth of all of the vitriol that its caused:

My jaw dropped when I saw this and could not believe that a candidate for national office in the US would think that running something like this was actually a good idea. I'm not from Michigan but I just couldn't hold my tongue in the face of such idiocy. Here's what I blasted off to the erstwhile candidate:

Mr. Hoekstra,

I wanted to add my voice to the many who must be contacting you in regards to the ad that you played during the Super Bowl. It was shameful not only for its borderline (at best)  racism, but also for its criminal oversimplification of America's economic problems.

Even if I were somebody who could overlook the blatant race-baiting, I would still think you a fool because of you assertion that borrowing money from China and "sending" our jobs overseas is somehow the root cause of our current economic crisis. I live in China and I see the reasons why America is in decline every day. It's a shame that America is saddled with politicians like you who campaign on fear and symptoms instead of positivity and real solutions.

Shame on you.

Sincerely,

Mike Shaw
Beijing, China

Of course he'll never read this note, but maybe one of his staffers will and maybe it'll at least provoke a thought in his/her head about what the real reasons for America's problems are. But it probably won't.

And that's an even bigger problem. What we face in America today is a political culture that is focused on tactics and message instead of actually presenting arguments to voters. This ad comes straight out of Modern Campaigning 101: Push the people's fear buttons (Yellow people!" "China!" "Debt!" "Unemployment!") then associate the other candidate's name to it. No explanation of the issues is required. No laying out the reasons why the incumbent's policies feed the problems and no presentation of solutions.

It's all so simple. And tragic.

Mr. Hoekstra should come to China and take a ride on one of the new high speed rail lines and then try to envision us building something like that in the US. (Spoiler: We can't.) Then dwell on that for a while. THEN maybe he'll reconsider what the real problems facing America are.

Of course he'll never do that.

The Sky is Falling! Fo' Realz!

Chinese New Year in Beijing is hard to encapsulate in a blog post. Really hard. Thankfully a friend of mine went through the trouble of trying to document last week's arrival of the Year of the Dragon on video for the New York Times:



It's an awesome job by Jonah and his merry band of videographers. The only complaint that I have about it is that he was not able to successfully bend the laws of space and time and actually transport viewers to where we who were lucky enough to be in Beijing were that night.

As I have for the past 3 years I organized a gathering for the local Couchsurfing community and visitors from out of town. The result was a raucous, rollicking bash that climaxed with us joining tens of thousands of people gathered around (and on) frozen Houhai Lake around midnight for a pyrotechnic display like none other. It seemed like everybody in this city if 20 million people was shooting off fireworks at once. The sky above my head was alive with light and the horizon in every direction was sparkling with glittering explosions. The noise was deafening.

I took some video myself on Chinese New Year's Eve 3 years ago. It's nowhere near as good as Jonah's stuff, but I was on a hutong rooftop and you can get an idea of the overwhelming sight of fireworks exploding in every direction all at once:

I would HIGHLY recommend everybody putting "Be in Beijing During Chinese New Year" on their Bucket List. This really puts the 4th of July to shame and, frankly, I wonder why we tolerate such comparatively miniscule displays on our national day. Then again, we in the US have only been around for 230-odd years. The Chinese have been at this for a few thousand. Maybe we'll get the hang of it after another millennium.

China in 10 Minutes or Less

Here's a great video that came out last fall. It's a wonderful overview of what's going on in China, its history and interesting highlights about its culture. I love it.

China's Lack of Cultural Relevance in the West

An interesting column ran in yesterday's New York Times, noting China's "charm offensive" of recent years and their attempts to build up "soft power" that can counterbalance the US in much the same way as their economic, political and military strength. Unfortunately for them it's not working.

"[President] Hu was saying that China was under assault by Western soft power — the ability to produce outcomes through persuasion and attraction rather than coercion or payment — and needed to fight back."

"But for all its efforts, China has had a limited return on its investment… A poll taken in Asia after the Beijing Olympics found that China’s charm offensive had been ineffective."

This piece is very good at explaining the Chinese problem and noting how they've been trying to address it, but it doesn’t get into WHY Chinese cultural influence hasn’t been growing outside of China.

And that's, basically, because a lot of what is produced in China isn’t produced for the West. At all.

Building Confucius Institutes around the world and opening a 24-hour news channel is all well and good, but if cultural production is only being done for internal consumption then nobody outside of your market is going to buy into it.

Take films, for example. There is a prodigious movie industry in China, but other than the occasional crossover hit, such as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", there really isn’t much that is coming out of China that appeals to Western audiences.

The same runs true for video games, music and TV. While the Chinese are busy gobbling up all of the World of Warcraft, western club dance hits and Prison Break that they can cram into their brains, there's precious little flowing in the other direction. The closest thing to a hit Chinese TV show that we've seen in the west has been Firefly. (And even that only lasted 13 episodes – stupid Fox network.)

And this is a shame, because Chinese culture is quite beautiful and rich. Unfortunately, the creative juices of a majority of the artists in Mainland China are being squashed by the government's need to censor content. The result is a tragic dearth of Chinese cultural products being consumed in the west.

But there are exceptions and proof that art and culture from China can be successful outside of the Middle Kingdom.

The Flowers of War, a recent film starring Christian bale, is a good example of how movies can be made with both a western and Chinese perspective. The film is about 40% in English and showcases a main character (and actor) who doesn’t speak Chinese. The filmmaking is first class and the result is a gorgeous, haunting film that is accessible by both Chinese and western audiences.

I've got some friends who would be really upset if I didn’t mention the Chinese music scene. There are a handful of bands and artists who are doing their best to mix elements of Chinese culture with western musical influences. And they are awesome. Among my favorites are Hanggai from Mongolia, who mix traditional throat singing with hard rock, and my good friend Miss Melody, whose songs combine classical Chinese poetry-inspired lyrics with western electronic beats.

Here's a sample of Hanggai:

And here's the lovely Miss Melody looking all sultry on the streets of Beijing:

I don’t know what the secret formula to getting more Chinese flavor to sprinkle into western culture might be, but with the government here not very permissive when it comes to pushing boundaries, it will be a while before you see any breakout stars from the Mainland start hitting it big in the west. And that's a damn shame.

Ignoring The Facebook in The Room

A great post popped up on Fareed Zakaria's GPS blog today. In it, Anne-Marie Slaughter opined about how Public/Private Partnerships are playing a larger and larger role in foreign relations and how their new importantce seems to be transcending domestic US politics.

"The political argument for PPPs is that they stretch scarce government resources and ensure that they leverage other contributions of money, expertise and other in-kind resources. The initial emphasis on PPPs came from the Reinventing Government initiative under the Clinton administration, but the George W. Bush administration was also enthusiastic."

A really nice piece (Zakaria's blog is always fantastic place to find intersting takes on what's going on in the world), but I think that it completely ignored the biggest reason why this evolution is occuring: Social Media.

I think that public-private partnerships are going to continue to grow in importantce when it comes to the "heavy lifting" of foreign policy (i.e. nuclear proliferation, etc.), but this is coming out of a reality that has existed for several years but has only recently snuck up on the career politicans and the diplomatic corps: Governments already matter less when it comes to foreign relations.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to maintain relationships regardless of geographical or political borders. Other sites, such as Couchsurfing, encourage and facilitate real-world interaction and relationships, which Facebook and Twitter then help to maintain/deepen. The role of government in defining or shaping a person's iteraction with a country (or its people/culture/economy) is shrinking. Fast.

For instance, China's relationship with the US has little real effect on me here in Beijing. I don't interact with the government nearly as much I interact with people. Whether or not Obama moves troops to Australia or if Vietnam invites US naval vesels into their sections of the South China Sea has very little influence over mine and my friends' relationships. Whether Putin and Medvedev actually hold fair elections in the coming months doesn't effect my relationship with my girlfriend or our good friends in Moscow.

Sure, there are measures that countries can take to cut off peoples' access to one another or to social media and money, but these are extreme cases and outliers (North Korea, Iran). Travel has never been more accessible and the flow of information and capital has never been so proliferate.

In the near future you'll see governments sliding towards placing a greater emphasis on two items in their foreign policy stances: 1) The tracking of interactions between their citizens and another country's (not necessarily in a nefarious way, but in a similar way that they currently track financial transactions - see this fabulous map for an example of how this could work) and 2) a focus on interacting with another country's people directly. Even today the US is having more of an influence in Iran and Syria than it has had in decades by dealing with the PEOPLE there instead of the strongmen.

In the near future foreign policy will be directed more by people's interactions than the policies of governments.

Another Brick in the Pay Wall

The journey from free news to pay sites is well underway. The latest media giant to make the switch is my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, and I'm dreading it.

Boston.com has been my go-to site for news from home ever since I moved overseas. It's not my homepage (hello, Google!), but it's always the first site that I hit every day after checking my e-mails. The new pay system will essentially sequester all of the newspaper content behind a paywall leaving Boston.com with AP wire stories, bloggers and the Sports section, which will remain free and fully accessible. In addition, Boston.com will be able to feature up to 5 stories from the newspaper each day on the free site, but that's all.

This is frustrating for me because I've been a regular Globe reader since the 4th grade and I was even among the last generation of paperboys for them I the late 80s. Today it remains one of my last links to my hometown and what's going on there. Maybe I should have cut the cord years ago, but I've never been able to walk away from it completely. This may do the trick, though.

I'm a bit of an unusual case since I live overseas (I doubt that the folks at Boston.com have a very large expat demographic that they're worried about), but I'm not even sure if I could justify the cost of paying for the "paper" version if I was still living in Boston. Frankly, it doesn’t pass the smell test for me: Access will cost $3.99 per week, but you can subscribe to the Sunday paper for $3.50 per week and get in that way; it's a pretty obvious ploy to increase Sunday circulation.

Everybody knows that newspapers need to make more money somehow, but this paywall doesn’t feel like the right way. It's basically a retrenchment to the physical paper; it's a step backwards when I think that they should be expanding into different forms of media. They should re-open their Washington bureau and align with outfits like GlobalPost. They should produce more video. They could start broadcasting. They could buy into NECN and produce content with them. They could put some of that behind a paywall. Make the stuff that lives back there premium somehow. Don't make me pay for the same-old, same-old.

Boston's Paper of Record is (insultingly) a subsidiary of the New York Times (which also owns the Worcester Telegram-Gazette), which instituted its own paywall several months ago and, to my own surprise, I have actually come to like it. I even posted on Facebook that I would probably end up visiting the site much less as a result of it, but I'm eating crow now, as I read it just as much as I ever have. It allows for easy circumvention so leeches like me can get onto it for free, but is just annoying enough to get some folks to pay for it, and it has the benefit of helping their circulation, too.

Last month Wired's Felix Salmon wrote a great piece on the success of the Times' rather porous paywall. He posited that letting people get limited, but not exclusive, access to their content makes the Times a more attractive destination than, say, the Wall Street Journal.

If you hit the paywall on a regular basis and barge past it, eventually you start feeling a bit guilty and pay up. By contrast, if you hit the FT or WSJ paywall and can’t get past it, you simply go away and feel disappointed in your experience.

He even noted that given the "gentle" quest from a valued institution to pay a little or make a donation, people tend to actually do it:

Here’s the thing about freeloaders: if they value what they’re getting, a lot of them will end up paying anyway. What happened when the Indianapolis Museum of Art moved to a free-admission policy? Its paid membership increased by 3%. When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did the same thing, paid membership increased by 33%.

Given their modest success, I wondered why the Globe didn’t just follow its daddy's model, but then I realized that the Times actually produces a shitload of content while the Globe, well, doesn’t.

The division between the website and the "paper" started last week and you can already see the difference. Boston.com has looked mighty thin of late and seems to have basically turned into an AP wire site (which I can get in a million different places in a much better-organized, cleaner format) with lots of trash (i.e. fashion, parties photos and celebrity garbage) that newshounds like myself couldn't care less about. They also seem to be putting their bloggers more front-and-center instead of burying them at the bottom of the site like they used to, turning them into low rent columnists, while the real ones are now hidden behind the paywall. (I wonder how they like the idea of going from a site with 7 million unique hits per month to a subscription-only audience of under 250,000 people.) I'm quickly finding that I have less and less reason to stop there since most of the local news content has been (or will be) put behind the paywall.

Which is, I guess, the whole point of the operation. Unfortunately, while this method may help to stabilize revenues, I don’t see it as being the foundation upon which the Globe can re-build itself into the pre-eminent news organization that it used to be. And that's a damn shame.

You Can only Remember 9/11 if You're on The List

This past Sunday my country stopped to remember the tragedy of the attacks from 10 years ago. What should have been a day for all Americans and sympathetic people from around the world to reflect and support one another was, for myself and dozens of Americans in Beijing, a day when our country turned us away at the door, refusing to let us beyond their velvet rope and forcing us to walk away in dismay.

Here's what went down.

On Friday, I was alerted to a posting in City Weekend announcing a public ceremony to observe the 9/11 attacks:

…A 9/11 memorial service led by U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke will honor the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of ten years ago. The American community is invited to come to the U.S. Embassy at 7:30pm on September 11 and light floating lanterns, a Chinese custom for mourning. Those planning to attend must arrive 30 minutes prior to the event and bring photo ID.

I'd already made plans for a private get-together with some American friends (several of whom I had not seen in a while) but decided to delay it by an hour to check this out. My only worry was the "American community" part. My girlfriend, Alya, as I often still find myself amazed by, is a Russian citizen and I was concerned that she might have trouble getting in.

I called the embassy to see if people of any nationality would be allowed to enter, and while the polite woman who answered the phone did not know right away (and could not reach the "duty officer" at that moment), she asked me to call back in a bit and said that she would have an answer then. I  dialed them up again about an hour later and the woman cheerfully told me that the duty officer had told her that it "should not be a problem" getting my girlfriend in because the ceremony was not being held inside a building; it would just be on the grounds.

[An aside: My good friend Iris also called the embassy for some information but had a much worse experience. She said that the person that she spoke with was "rude" and that the call was entirely unpleasant. The embassy has a reputation in Beijing for bad service, lousy communication and general inconvenience.]

Fast forward to 7:00pm. Alya, Iris and I walk up to the security gate and get into line. There is already a sizable crowd gathered:

There were lot of families, contingents of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and lots of people that I did not know. (I don’t hang out with very many Americans here in Beijing.) Between the three of us, we only recognized one face, but I could see that lots of the folks in line were of the full-Expat-package and/or Big Business Owners crowd. A warning bell in my heard started to go off. Where were the "regular" folks: the students and "Halfpats" like us?

As we moved closer we saw that there was a table with 4 people seated behind it, each holding a list of names in front of them. When we got to the front, we were asked for our names and if we had RSVP'd. I said that we hadn't and that we'd had no idea that an RSVP was required.

The way it was explained to me, the event at the embassy was by invitation only. There was never supposed to have been an announcement made on the expat websites and the woman who was coordinating the staff at the gate didn’t even know who had given the information to them in the first place. The best that she could do, she said, would be to put our names onto a waiting list and let us in if some of the invitees who had RSVP'd did not show up.

This did not sit well with me. But then it got worse.

I saw a Girl Scout in uniform turned away, her mother calling out to another parent in the troop, "Did you guys register the whole troop? They're telling me that she's not on the list!"

"Sorry," came another parent's reply from the approved group. "You had to RSVP as a family."

Disgraceful.

Not only was there no mention of needing an invitation on the expat websites, but there was no mention of the event on the embassy's own site. There still isn’t, in fact. If you want to see what went on, you've got to check out an expat site or China's state news agency, Xinhua. (Really?!) Furthermore, neither I nor Iris were informed when we called to ask about admission that it was invite-only.

And not for nothing, but what the FUCK is the US Embassy doing holding a private 9/11 ceremony in the first place?! Of all of the days to encourage the local American community to come together, this was it! Hell, they should have welcomed all comers, no matter their nationalities!

At brunch earlier that day, an Italian guy that I know came over to me, shook my hand and said in a low voice, "Today we're all with you." People in the embassy should have been falling over themselves to get him, and other like-minded folks, to join the memorial ceremony. This was a missed opportunity to try to engender some goodwill among the international population here.

It seems like a trivial thing, not getting to enter the embassy for a little ceremony, but it was such a symbolic event, and I was in such a patriotic mood, that the experience made me feel absolutely disgusted.

On a day when our country could have reached out and tried to reclaim the spirit of togetherness that was squandered so shortly after the attacks occurred, the US Embassy in Beijing displayed incompetent planning, absent leadership and a laughable lack of vision by not doing so.

Our tax dollars at work.