The Iranian film “A Separation,” now playing in North American theaters, will most likely win this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and has already won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film as well as best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. “A Separation” is writer and director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth film, and it’s the one that will establish him as one of the world’s most brilliant storytellers.
The title ostensibly refers to an urban middle class couple who have separated from each other; English teacher Simin has gotten a visa to emigrate to the West, but her husband Nader, who works in a bank, refuses to leave his father who has Alzheimer’s. They have an 11-year-old daughter Termeh (played by the director’s daughter) who doesn’t want her parents to leave each other, and so chooses to stay with her father, knowing that Simin won’t leave Iran without her.
But the title also refers to the rural-urban, traditional-modern, moral-utilitarian divides that coalesce to form the main conflict in this movie. After Simin leaves to live with her parents, Nader hires a villager named Razieh to look after his father. Looking after a male patient with dementia is too much for the pregnant Razieh, who must commute three hours to work. When Nader’s father soils his pants, the profoundly pious Razieh has a crisis of faith, and seeks religious counsel to see if God will permit her to change the poor man’s pants. She’s underpaid and exhausted, but ultimately she’s bound to the family’s misfortunes by her own: her husband has lost his job as a cobbler, has to take medication for the consequent depression, and is in and out of debtors’ prison. One day, Nader returns home to find Razieh absent and his father tied to the bed, and he becomes so distraught and angry that he fires Razieh by pushing her out the door. Then Nader and Simin find themselves in a hospital where they learn that Razieh has had a miscarriage. The two families entangle themselves in a legal fight to determine who was culpable for Razieh’s miscarriage, and in the process dig themselves deeper and deeper into a moral conundrum.
Farhadi manages several neat tricks with this movie. “A Separation” is morally complex without being morally confusing, is dramatically tense and emotionally powerful without being melodramatic and emotionally overwhelming, and is sympathetic to all characters and viewpoints while affirming the power of truth and love.
Farhadi accomplishes this by building strong contrasts and comparisons between the three sets of characters. There’s the two wives Simin and Razieh, while standing with their husbands and across from each other, nevertheless are devout to the “truth” (Simin to a modern and metaphysical “truth,” Razieh to the Koran), and thus stood together throughout the film.
Then there’s the two families’ daughters who live in different worlds. One scene in a court of law outside the judge’s chambers captures how irreconcilable this chasm really is: While waiting for their parents, Termeh is pre-occupied studying for her final exams with the help of her grandmother, while Razieh’s 6-year-old daughter looks on with sad bright eyes, having never been inside a classroom and knowing she’ll never get into one. But despite their differences they’re both united by a child-like attachment to what is right, what is fair, and what is true – an innocence that makes them equally suffer as the film sinks into its moral murkiness.
What ultimately drives the plot of the film is the conflict between the two husbands, who are tragically alike. Razieh’s husband Hodjat is consumed with anger at his poverty and powerlessness, and he becomes more volatile and violent as he seeks justice for his wife and his unborn child, but feels helpless against a modern middle class urban society that seems to have united against his family. Simin’s husband Nader is consumed by pride, which ironically makes this secular man a fanatic, as he seeks to prove his innocence, even if he has to lie, conspire, and abandon his wife to do so.
Besides using vivid characterization, Farhadi also manages to balance the complexity, contradictions, and conflicts by filming minimally in interiors. Every scene is either shot inside an apartment or a hospital or a court or a school or a car. He doesn’t use wide angles to allow the audience to breathe a bit, nor does he attempt to control mood with music, color, and lighting. But the film’s claustrophobia works to the story’s advantage, magnifying and reflecting the tension and the anxiety in the characters themselves.
What ultimately makes this movie work so well then are the individual performances of all the actors. In his book The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan argues that Westerners have a misconception of Iranians as cold and aloof Muslims, while in reality they’re poetic and passionate Persians – which is perhaps why they often make such gifted actors.
Towards the climax of the movie, Simin has negotiated a truce with Hodjat to pay “blood money” for the miscarriage so that the feuding can stop its downward spiral. Simin and Termeh, who is now living with her mother, go tell the good news to Nader in his apartment. Arguing that by paying he would profess his guilt, he refuses, and Simin walks out angrily. She attempts to take Termeh with her, but Termeh refuses. The 11 year-old fears his father’s lies and equivocations, but above all she fears losing him, and so she tries to convince his father to take the deal. Then Nader says to her in that cold calculating manner only he’s capable of: “If you think I’m guilty go get your mother, and I’ll do what she wants.”
Termeh’s facial response powerfully captures so many hues and shades: It’s at the same time loud and numb, stunned and aware, hurt and empowered. That one-second facial expression, caught between crying and laughing, reveals that if no one else has changed, she at least has. And she now knows that no matter how much she loves her father he’s lost to her and to himself.
“A Separation” is a bold masterpiece of Iranian film-making. Go see it at a theater, and be overwhelmed by its artistic and moral genius.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
China's Mega-City Problem (The Diplomat)
In their article “How the rise of the megacity is changing the way we live,” the Guardian correspondents Paul Webster and Jason Burke profile Chengdu, a once lush and lethargic city of 500,000 back in 1950 that today is now a bustling and bursting metropolis of 14 million. Chengdu is just one of many cities found throughout the developing word that are acquiring “mega-city” status.
The Guardian reporters mention the building of two monuments aimed at shining the global spotlight on Chengdu, a city most famous for its teahouses where the young and the old laugh the day away playing cards:
“The New Century Global Centre is a leisure complex that will house two 1,000-room five-star hotels, an ice rink, a luxury Imax cinema, vast shopping malls and a 20,000-capacity indoor swimming pool with 400 meters of “coastline” and a fake beach the size of 10 football pitches complete with its own seaside village. Alongside will be another massive and futuristic structure, a contemporary arts centerdesigned by the award-winning Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid.”
By definition, mega-cities are overwhelming – their problems more so than their potential. The center of Johannesburg, a recently minted mega-city, brims with slums of frustration and desperation, while its margins grow fat with financial centers and gated communities. The by-products of Beijing’s overcrowding are air pollution and traffic congestion, and its insatiable appetite for water and fuel deplete the surrounding provinces of their own potential. What makes mega-cities particularly daunting is their unmanageability, only worsened by the constant influx of migrants, who with their cheap labor and political disenfranchisement permit the middle class to achieve a high standard of living, but whose need for healthcare and housing the middle class refuse to pay for.
The Guardian article quotes Chengdu’s mayor, Ge Honglin, who understands the inherent instability in planning a “mega-city” in Sichuan, one of China’s poorest provinces and a steady supplier of migrants to China’s booming coastal cities:
“Chengdu's mayor, Ge Honglin, claims that the city has avoided some of the problems associated with migration into the cities by encouraging families to stay in the countryside. ‘The first thing I did was to improve the conditions – schools, shops, garbage collection, the sewage system. We had to cut the gap between rural and urban areas. If people could have a brighter future in the countryside, they'd stay there. So we’re not seeing people swarm into the city…Instead there are people in the city considering moving to the country.’”
If Ge can grow Chengdu on his timetable and schedule without unleashing vast environmental destruction and opening the gates to a flood of poor peasants, then he would be a finer technocrat than both Albert Speer and Robert Moses combined.
The main problem with Chengdu’s growth, as well as that of all of China’s urban centers, is the mentality of growth for growth’s sake, which emphasizes buildings and statistics over people and ideas. What China’s city planners need to understand is that a city exists to unite and inspire its people to engage in creative endeavors that would better themselves and their city.
Both Robert Moses’ arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs and the urban theorist Richard Florida believe that cities can and ought to be organic and dynamic, open and diverse communities that inspire their citizens. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class (a book heavily inspired by Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Florida argues that cities, if they are to thrive and prosper, must attract creative people, and “provide the integrated eco-system or habitat where all forms of creativity – artistic and cultural, technological and economic – can take root and flourish”:
“Creative people are not moving to [cities] for traditional reasons. The physical attractions that most cities focus on building – sports stadiums, freeways, urban malls and tourism-and-entertainment districts that resemble theme parks – are irrelevant, insufficient or actually unattractive to many Creative Class people. What they look for in communities are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds, and above all else the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people.”
The irony of all this is that Chengdu, with its beautiful rural hills, its distinctive culture, its traditional openness and tolerance, and its artistic communities, could have become China’s top creative center if it built on its strengths.
By choosing rapid and vapid urbanization, Chengdu is losing its identity and character, and becoming a lesser version of Beijing – a tense conflict between buildings and people, a conflict which has alienated everyone from each other and himself.
Or much, much worse, it’ll become like Chongqing.
The Guardian reporters mention the building of two monuments aimed at shining the global spotlight on Chengdu, a city most famous for its teahouses where the young and the old laugh the day away playing cards:
“The New Century Global Centre is a leisure complex that will house two 1,000-room five-star hotels, an ice rink, a luxury Imax cinema, vast shopping malls and a 20,000-capacity indoor swimming pool with 400 meters of “coastline” and a fake beach the size of 10 football pitches complete with its own seaside village. Alongside will be another massive and futuristic structure, a contemporary arts centerdesigned by the award-winning Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid.”
By definition, mega-cities are overwhelming – their problems more so than their potential. The center of Johannesburg, a recently minted mega-city, brims with slums of frustration and desperation, while its margins grow fat with financial centers and gated communities. The by-products of Beijing’s overcrowding are air pollution and traffic congestion, and its insatiable appetite for water and fuel deplete the surrounding provinces of their own potential. What makes mega-cities particularly daunting is their unmanageability, only worsened by the constant influx of migrants, who with their cheap labor and political disenfranchisement permit the middle class to achieve a high standard of living, but whose need for healthcare and housing the middle class refuse to pay for.
The Guardian article quotes Chengdu’s mayor, Ge Honglin, who understands the inherent instability in planning a “mega-city” in Sichuan, one of China’s poorest provinces and a steady supplier of migrants to China’s booming coastal cities:
“Chengdu's mayor, Ge Honglin, claims that the city has avoided some of the problems associated with migration into the cities by encouraging families to stay in the countryside. ‘The first thing I did was to improve the conditions – schools, shops, garbage collection, the sewage system. We had to cut the gap between rural and urban areas. If people could have a brighter future in the countryside, they'd stay there. So we’re not seeing people swarm into the city…Instead there are people in the city considering moving to the country.’”
If Ge can grow Chengdu on his timetable and schedule without unleashing vast environmental destruction and opening the gates to a flood of poor peasants, then he would be a finer technocrat than both Albert Speer and Robert Moses combined.
The main problem with Chengdu’s growth, as well as that of all of China’s urban centers, is the mentality of growth for growth’s sake, which emphasizes buildings and statistics over people and ideas. What China’s city planners need to understand is that a city exists to unite and inspire its people to engage in creative endeavors that would better themselves and their city.
Both Robert Moses’ arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs and the urban theorist Richard Florida believe that cities can and ought to be organic and dynamic, open and diverse communities that inspire their citizens. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class (a book heavily inspired by Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Florida argues that cities, if they are to thrive and prosper, must attract creative people, and “provide the integrated eco-system or habitat where all forms of creativity – artistic and cultural, technological and economic – can take root and flourish”:
“Creative people are not moving to [cities] for traditional reasons. The physical attractions that most cities focus on building – sports stadiums, freeways, urban malls and tourism-and-entertainment districts that resemble theme parks – are irrelevant, insufficient or actually unattractive to many Creative Class people. What they look for in communities are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds, and above all else the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people.”
The irony of all this is that Chengdu, with its beautiful rural hills, its distinctive culture, its traditional openness and tolerance, and its artistic communities, could have become China’s top creative center if it built on its strengths.
By choosing rapid and vapid urbanization, Chengdu is losing its identity and character, and becoming a lesser version of Beijing – a tense conflict between buildings and people, a conflict which has alienated everyone from each other and himself.
Or much, much worse, it’ll become like Chongqing.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
China's Land Grab Alchemy (The Diplomat)
The most contentious issue today in China, as has been true for the past decade, is land appropriation. What we just witnessed in Wukan, with peasants organizing to defend their land and livelihood, has occurred frequently over the past decade, and will continue unabated, but with little effect, in the next.
Wukan was powerful because it provided a neat “Good Earth” narrative to understand the otherwise messy reality of China’s land grab. Already, we are using Wukan as a frame of reference to understand struggles over land: Here’s the Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between Wukan and a new struggle:
“Guangdong party chief Wang Yang may have won praise for his light-handed approach in dealing with Wukan, but has he actually opened the floodgates for a wave of land grab protests? Yesterday, 1,000 villagers rallied at the Guangzhou city government headquarters as the provincial people's congress met elsewhere in the city for the closing ceremony of its annual session.”
Is there actually a connection between Wukan and this new protest? Will Wukan spark a wildfire of land grab protests around China? What was the real lesson of Wukan?
In 2001, I spent several months traveling around China – Shenyang, Jilin, Changchun, Chongqing, and Zhengzhou – interviewing villagers, and their main complaint was losing their land without fair and adequate compensation. But their complaints were also individual and local, and different individuals employed different strategies – suing the government in local courts, petitioning for the intervention of higher authorities (shangfang), petitioning even higher authorities (Falun Gong and underground Christianity), but generally just drinking a lot and cursing corrupt officials.
And because these complaints were individual and local, the foreign media was unaware of how commonplace these complaints were throughout the aughties, and local officials dealt with them on an ad hoc basis. In those rare instances when leaders and organizers arose among the villagers, the local officials divided and conquered by using carrots and sticks. They would try bribing one of the leaders to sow internal dissent and confusion, and if that didn’t work then what did was arresting all the leaders, and paying off the villagers; again, land complaints were individual and local in China.
When I was a young and impetuous reporter I attributed China’s land grab to the greed and corruption in the Communist Party. But now that I actually work in the periphery of the Communist empire as a Beijing public school administrator I can see that greed and corruption aren’t quite as commonplace as I once imagined.
Believe it or not, Chinese officials are human too, and they are driven by the same goals and concerns as bureaucrats and managers operating in any society. They want to protect their position, and rise within the hierarchy by pleasing their superiors. Above all, they’re risk adverse.
But, if so, then why do they appropriate land, an activity fraught with costs and risks? Consider the costs of land appropriation, if you were a local official: You have to devote a large staff to negotiate with villagers, and if negotiations don’t work then you have to deploy policemen to remove villagers off the land, and pay spies to ensure they do not organize. Consider Wukan, and how expensive it was to deploy all those riot police and equipment to lay siege to the village.
The main issue, though, is of risk. If the issue draws media attention, as it did in Wukan, higher authorities might investigate, and even in the unlikely situation you are clean there’s a great risk that you will be passed over for promotion, and you’d stuck be in a place like Wukan for the rest of your life. Also, what if peasants decide to take justice into their own hands?
And the mandarins in Beijing have enough spies (official media reporters) around the country to know how explosive the land grab issue is in China, and they’ve read enough history to know that it’s this spark that has ignited many an internal rebellion.
So, if grabbing land is costly, risky, and threatens the regime, why is it so commonplace? Because neither the Communist Party honchos in Beijing, nor their local minions in Wukan and Kanwu, have a choice in the matter.
The Party’s authority and legitimacy are predicated on guaranteeing at least 8 percent GDP growth a year, and economic growth is the mandate of all Party officials. If you’re Ningbo or Yantai or any large Chinese urban center with an entrepreneurial population and large resources then that’s not a problem. But if you’re a rural township of subsistence farmers then your best shot at producing the numbers you need to win praise and promotion is to grab that worthless land and put a factory or a condo on it. The magic of economic statistics is that, even if the factory or condo is empty, the value of land shoots up, and so does your career prospects.
Land grabbing is the Chinese equivalent of alchemy, and this quick immediate economic fix is just too addictive for local officials to say no to. This is a problem not just commonplace in the villages, but everywhere in China.
Consider the Chinese public school system, which focuses on test scores and college enrollment statistics. The system destroys students’ creativity and curiosity, independence and imagination, but as long as you get eighty percent of your students into tier one colleges you’re promoted and rewarded as a brilliant educator – just like magic!
No official was arrested because of the Wukan uprising. That’s because, as everyone knows in China, those officials were just doing their job.
Wukan was powerful because it provided a neat “Good Earth” narrative to understand the otherwise messy reality of China’s land grab. Already, we are using Wukan as a frame of reference to understand struggles over land: Here’s the Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between Wukan and a new struggle:
“Guangdong party chief Wang Yang may have won praise for his light-handed approach in dealing with Wukan, but has he actually opened the floodgates for a wave of land grab protests? Yesterday, 1,000 villagers rallied at the Guangzhou city government headquarters as the provincial people's congress met elsewhere in the city for the closing ceremony of its annual session.”
Is there actually a connection between Wukan and this new protest? Will Wukan spark a wildfire of land grab protests around China? What was the real lesson of Wukan?
In 2001, I spent several months traveling around China – Shenyang, Jilin, Changchun, Chongqing, and Zhengzhou – interviewing villagers, and their main complaint was losing their land without fair and adequate compensation. But their complaints were also individual and local, and different individuals employed different strategies – suing the government in local courts, petitioning for the intervention of higher authorities (shangfang), petitioning even higher authorities (Falun Gong and underground Christianity), but generally just drinking a lot and cursing corrupt officials.
And because these complaints were individual and local, the foreign media was unaware of how commonplace these complaints were throughout the aughties, and local officials dealt with them on an ad hoc basis. In those rare instances when leaders and organizers arose among the villagers, the local officials divided and conquered by using carrots and sticks. They would try bribing one of the leaders to sow internal dissent and confusion, and if that didn’t work then what did was arresting all the leaders, and paying off the villagers; again, land complaints were individual and local in China.
When I was a young and impetuous reporter I attributed China’s land grab to the greed and corruption in the Communist Party. But now that I actually work in the periphery of the Communist empire as a Beijing public school administrator I can see that greed and corruption aren’t quite as commonplace as I once imagined.
Believe it or not, Chinese officials are human too, and they are driven by the same goals and concerns as bureaucrats and managers operating in any society. They want to protect their position, and rise within the hierarchy by pleasing their superiors. Above all, they’re risk adverse.
But, if so, then why do they appropriate land, an activity fraught with costs and risks? Consider the costs of land appropriation, if you were a local official: You have to devote a large staff to negotiate with villagers, and if negotiations don’t work then you have to deploy policemen to remove villagers off the land, and pay spies to ensure they do not organize. Consider Wukan, and how expensive it was to deploy all those riot police and equipment to lay siege to the village.
The main issue, though, is of risk. If the issue draws media attention, as it did in Wukan, higher authorities might investigate, and even in the unlikely situation you are clean there’s a great risk that you will be passed over for promotion, and you’d stuck be in a place like Wukan for the rest of your life. Also, what if peasants decide to take justice into their own hands?
And the mandarins in Beijing have enough spies (official media reporters) around the country to know how explosive the land grab issue is in China, and they’ve read enough history to know that it’s this spark that has ignited many an internal rebellion.
So, if grabbing land is costly, risky, and threatens the regime, why is it so commonplace? Because neither the Communist Party honchos in Beijing, nor their local minions in Wukan and Kanwu, have a choice in the matter.
The Party’s authority and legitimacy are predicated on guaranteeing at least 8 percent GDP growth a year, and economic growth is the mandate of all Party officials. If you’re Ningbo or Yantai or any large Chinese urban center with an entrepreneurial population and large resources then that’s not a problem. But if you’re a rural township of subsistence farmers then your best shot at producing the numbers you need to win praise and promotion is to grab that worthless land and put a factory or a condo on it. The magic of economic statistics is that, even if the factory or condo is empty, the value of land shoots up, and so does your career prospects.
Land grabbing is the Chinese equivalent of alchemy, and this quick immediate economic fix is just too addictive for local officials to say no to. This is a problem not just commonplace in the villages, but everywhere in China.
Consider the Chinese public school system, which focuses on test scores and college enrollment statistics. The system destroys students’ creativity and curiosity, independence and imagination, but as long as you get eighty percent of your students into tier one colleges you’re promoted and rewarded as a brilliant educator – just like magic!
No official was arrested because of the Wukan uprising. That’s because, as everyone knows in China, those officials were just doing their job.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Hu Jintao's Legacy (The Diplomat)
Last week, fellow China Power blogger David Cohen discussed Chinese President Hu Jintao’s essay remarking that China and the West are locked in a cultural war. The language and rhetoric used in the essay – “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration” – alarmed Western observers, and brought to mind images of Red Book-waving Red Guards.
Throughout his tenure, Hu has presented himself as the most disciplined and faceless of technocrats, so this is one of those rare moments when he’s actually said something worth commenting on. I’d like to offer some thoughts on Hu’s essay, and what it means for China in 2012.
First, I agree with David Cohen that Hu’s essay, like everything uttered by any Chinese leader, is meant for internal Communist Party consumption. In the lead-up to the October 2012 transfer of power, Hu has two immediate concerns: creating his legacy, while mapping out the Communist Party’s future strategy.
Second, what’s most interesting about Hu’s essay is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say: namely, that he chooses to focus on a problem that few in China think is actually a problem, while leaving out the still unresolved issues that he inherited ten years earlier from Jiang Zemin – the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, internal Party corruption, and China’s moral bankruptcy.
Throughout his tenure, Hu emphasized these three issues in dour empty speeches, most recently in his speech commemorating the 90th anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party in July 2011. Meanwhile, these problems have only worsened.
It’s always politically clever to use xenophobic fear-mongering to distract from real pressing issues, and this “last resort of scoundrels” hints at how desperate the Party has become.
Third, Hu’s essay implies that China’s moral decay – as symbolized by last year’s Guo Meimei and Wang Yue cases – represents a failure of China’s cultural producers to influence the hearts and minds of Chinese, and not a by-product of China’s economic growth model.
Yes, the People’s Liberation Army with song and dance did inspire peasants to join the Communist Revolution, but China today is no longer fighting against oppressive landlords and foreign devils, but rather itself; specifically, the much vaunted Beijing Consensus, a political arrangement in which the Party promises “prosperity and stability” if China’s middle class shuts its political mouth.
The Beijing Consensus has given the Party short-term political legitimacy at the long-term cost of China’s economic development and social fabric.
To understand how, consider Enron and Wall Street, both of which seemed to take pride in appealing to their employees’ greed. For a while their profits reached dizzying heights, but eventually Enron went bankrupt under the weight of its own lies and scams, while Wall Street would have gone under as well if Washington hadn’t intervened. And China’s economy, with its insolvent banks and staggering local government debt, may be the biggest house of cards yet.
Daniel Pink in his book Drive argues that appealing to people’s utilitarian instincts leads to people being unhappy, uncreative, and unethical short-term thinkers addicted to making as much money as possible. This is evident in many of China’s middle class today, and the Chinese middle class obsession with accumulating Louis Vuitton bags is neither good for China’s economy, nor for its soul.
Fourth and finally, in rhetoric, tone and spirit, Hu’s essay is a remarkable contrast to Premier Wen Jiabao’s speeches calling for China to develop “democracy” and “creativity.”
Such calls represent an understanding that, in the new reality of the Internet, globalization, and the free market, unleashing the citizenry’s creativity and letting them open their political mouths are one and the same. If governments refuse to do so, not only will that hamper economic growth, but they could also lose political legitimacy and authority – as is increasingly the case with the Communist Party today.
Unfortunately, China’s Communist Party is so because it lacks political imagination and because its obsession with maintaining power makes it blind to new realities. So expect more scary rhetoric and censorship, especially in China’s social media, in 2012.
Throughout his tenure, Hu has presented himself as the most disciplined and faceless of technocrats, so this is one of those rare moments when he’s actually said something worth commenting on. I’d like to offer some thoughts on Hu’s essay, and what it means for China in 2012.
First, I agree with David Cohen that Hu’s essay, like everything uttered by any Chinese leader, is meant for internal Communist Party consumption. In the lead-up to the October 2012 transfer of power, Hu has two immediate concerns: creating his legacy, while mapping out the Communist Party’s future strategy.
Second, what’s most interesting about Hu’s essay is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say: namely, that he chooses to focus on a problem that few in China think is actually a problem, while leaving out the still unresolved issues that he inherited ten years earlier from Jiang Zemin – the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, internal Party corruption, and China’s moral bankruptcy.
Throughout his tenure, Hu emphasized these three issues in dour empty speeches, most recently in his speech commemorating the 90th anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party in July 2011. Meanwhile, these problems have only worsened.
It’s always politically clever to use xenophobic fear-mongering to distract from real pressing issues, and this “last resort of scoundrels” hints at how desperate the Party has become.
Third, Hu’s essay implies that China’s moral decay – as symbolized by last year’s Guo Meimei and Wang Yue cases – represents a failure of China’s cultural producers to influence the hearts and minds of Chinese, and not a by-product of China’s economic growth model.
Yes, the People’s Liberation Army with song and dance did inspire peasants to join the Communist Revolution, but China today is no longer fighting against oppressive landlords and foreign devils, but rather itself; specifically, the much vaunted Beijing Consensus, a political arrangement in which the Party promises “prosperity and stability” if China’s middle class shuts its political mouth.
The Beijing Consensus has given the Party short-term political legitimacy at the long-term cost of China’s economic development and social fabric.
To understand how, consider Enron and Wall Street, both of which seemed to take pride in appealing to their employees’ greed. For a while their profits reached dizzying heights, but eventually Enron went bankrupt under the weight of its own lies and scams, while Wall Street would have gone under as well if Washington hadn’t intervened. And China’s economy, with its insolvent banks and staggering local government debt, may be the biggest house of cards yet.
Daniel Pink in his book Drive argues that appealing to people’s utilitarian instincts leads to people being unhappy, uncreative, and unethical short-term thinkers addicted to making as much money as possible. This is evident in many of China’s middle class today, and the Chinese middle class obsession with accumulating Louis Vuitton bags is neither good for China’s economy, nor for its soul.
Fourth and finally, in rhetoric, tone and spirit, Hu’s essay is a remarkable contrast to Premier Wen Jiabao’s speeches calling for China to develop “democracy” and “creativity.”
Such calls represent an understanding that, in the new reality of the Internet, globalization, and the free market, unleashing the citizenry’s creativity and letting them open their political mouths are one and the same. If governments refuse to do so, not only will that hamper economic growth, but they could also lose political legitimacy and authority – as is increasingly the case with the Communist Party today.
Unfortunately, China’s Communist Party is so because it lacks political imagination and because its obsession with maintaining power makes it blind to new realities. So expect more scary rhetoric and censorship, especially in China’s social media, in 2012.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
What Finland Shows China, U.S. (The Diplomat)
In his new book Class Warfare, Steven Brill profiles the American public education reform movement, which is promoting charter schools, standardized testing, and performance-based pay. This reform movement includes: Yale-educated Dan Levin, co-founder of Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, which specializes in getting poor minority children to do well on tests to get into college; Cornell-educated Michelle Rhee, who as Washington DC education czar, is alleged to have tried to “bribe” teachers to quit the union and to have offered them cash to try to encourage them to boost their students’ test scores; Harvard-educated Barack Obama who is forcing state governments to emphasize standardized testing if they are to obtain federal education dollars.
Because the education reform movement combines the determination of Ivy League-educated educators, the power of Ivy League-educated politicians, and the money of Ivy League-educated financiers, “accountability” in the form of standardized testing will increasingly become the raison d’etre for U.S. public education.
Just as the United States is learning from China, the reverse is true as well. Recently, the non-profit Washington-based Institute for International Education (IIE) reported that there are now 158,000 Chinese students on the American college campus, and a popular trend is for Chinese students to attend American private high schools. Middle class Chinese parents are increasingly aware of the gaokao’s limitations, creating a market for elite private schools based on the U.S. model.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the education landscapes of the United States and China will likely converge: standardized testing for the majority of students, elite private schools for the wealthy. This education trend is merely a reflection and a reinforcement of the vast socio-economic inequality in these two societies, and the unwillingness or inability of both governments to address this problem.
But instead of emulating the worst tendencies in each other, the U.S. and China would benefit from studying Finland’s education system. Writing in the Atlantic, New York-based Finnish journalist Anu Partanen argues that Finland’s education achievements derive from its focus on compassion and equality, not on competition and excellence. She criticizes America’s system of private schools, its use of standardized testing to sort students, and the trend towards “accountability,” and thus the Ivy League values of competition, testing, and elitism.
The reformers believe that standardized testing will bring rationality, accountability, and meritocracy to public education – to use short-term rewards to motivate students to learn better, and teachers to teach better. Many Ivy Leaguers became so because they’re motivated by short-term rewards, and so they naturally believe that everyone is motivated to perform their best if offered short-term rewards.
But the existing evidence argues against this. In their book Sway, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman tell the story of Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a public school that was Finnish in its mission and values. The school had high standards and few rules; most students thrived intellectually and creatively, while a minority skipped class. To induce those slackers to stop being so, the school instituted a pilot program in which teachers would be paid bonuses if their students completed the course. At the end of the school year, the course completion percentage jumped, and the teachers were paid their bonuses. Yet another success story of Ivy League thinking, right?
Not quite. Upon closer inspection, administrators discovered that the low-performing students, despite completing their courses, continued to skip classes, and their grades had declined dramatically.
Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman explain how Community High’s dedicated teachers became less so:
“Once the pilot study was introduced, in order to secure their bonuses the teachers began concentrating their efforts on enticing students to show up who would otherwise have cut class…All of a sudden the teachers had a bonus carrot dangling in front of them. Instead of focusing on teaching their students, they began chasing after their reward. To keep the students coming back to class they ‘included activities such as more field trips and in-class parties’ – probably not what they had in mind when they entered the profession.”
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink, citing copious scientific research, lists the seven consequences of using carrots and sticks to motivate:
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
The Finnish model works not because Finnish teachers are rewarded and punished depending on performance, but because they are trusted and respected. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that for an individual to excel in his work he needs mastery, autonomy, and purpose. And it’s because Finnish teachers are experienced, have control over their classroom, and aim to develop the uniqueness of each of their students that Finnish education is considered the best in the world, and helps contribute to Finland being to one of the best places to live in the world.
That’s yet another life lesson that the Ivy League just can’t teach.
Because the education reform movement combines the determination of Ivy League-educated educators, the power of Ivy League-educated politicians, and the money of Ivy League-educated financiers, “accountability” in the form of standardized testing will increasingly become the raison d’etre for U.S. public education.
Just as the United States is learning from China, the reverse is true as well. Recently, the non-profit Washington-based Institute for International Education (IIE) reported that there are now 158,000 Chinese students on the American college campus, and a popular trend is for Chinese students to attend American private high schools. Middle class Chinese parents are increasingly aware of the gaokao’s limitations, creating a market for elite private schools based on the U.S. model.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the education landscapes of the United States and China will likely converge: standardized testing for the majority of students, elite private schools for the wealthy. This education trend is merely a reflection and a reinforcement of the vast socio-economic inequality in these two societies, and the unwillingness or inability of both governments to address this problem.
But instead of emulating the worst tendencies in each other, the U.S. and China would benefit from studying Finland’s education system. Writing in the Atlantic, New York-based Finnish journalist Anu Partanen argues that Finland’s education achievements derive from its focus on compassion and equality, not on competition and excellence. She criticizes America’s system of private schools, its use of standardized testing to sort students, and the trend towards “accountability,” and thus the Ivy League values of competition, testing, and elitism.
The reformers believe that standardized testing will bring rationality, accountability, and meritocracy to public education – to use short-term rewards to motivate students to learn better, and teachers to teach better. Many Ivy Leaguers became so because they’re motivated by short-term rewards, and so they naturally believe that everyone is motivated to perform their best if offered short-term rewards.
But the existing evidence argues against this. In their book Sway, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman tell the story of Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a public school that was Finnish in its mission and values. The school had high standards and few rules; most students thrived intellectually and creatively, while a minority skipped class. To induce those slackers to stop being so, the school instituted a pilot program in which teachers would be paid bonuses if their students completed the course. At the end of the school year, the course completion percentage jumped, and the teachers were paid their bonuses. Yet another success story of Ivy League thinking, right?
Not quite. Upon closer inspection, administrators discovered that the low-performing students, despite completing their courses, continued to skip classes, and their grades had declined dramatically.
Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman explain how Community High’s dedicated teachers became less so:
“Once the pilot study was introduced, in order to secure their bonuses the teachers began concentrating their efforts on enticing students to show up who would otherwise have cut class…All of a sudden the teachers had a bonus carrot dangling in front of them. Instead of focusing on teaching their students, they began chasing after their reward. To keep the students coming back to class they ‘included activities such as more field trips and in-class parties’ – probably not what they had in mind when they entered the profession.”
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink, citing copious scientific research, lists the seven consequences of using carrots and sticks to motivate:
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
The Finnish model works not because Finnish teachers are rewarded and punished depending on performance, but because they are trusted and respected. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that for an individual to excel in his work he needs mastery, autonomy, and purpose. And it’s because Finnish teachers are experienced, have control over their classroom, and aim to develop the uniqueness of each of their students that Finnish education is considered the best in the world, and helps contribute to Finland being to one of the best places to live in the world.
That’s yet another life lesson that the Ivy League just can’t teach.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)