James Fallows

Bandage came off today; nose looks fine! Or more precisely, no worse than it ever has. So my first encounter with an outsourced, “China price” medical procedure is a success.

Actually, the moral is the same one I discuss in my Shenzhen article in the current issue. As explained by Liam Casey, the article’s “Mr. China” and a man whose daily work is connecting North American or European companies with suppliers in China: "People think China is cheap, but really, it's fast."  Being told by the surgeon “you can go” five minutes after I walk in the clinic door would certainly qualify as fast. But I guess a total price, with all administrative fees, of $32 qualifies on the “cheap” front too.

The title of my latest article in the Atlantic is “China Makes, the World Takes.” The title wasn’t my idea– I believe it came from Corby Kummer, who edited this article as he has nearly everything I’ve written for the magazine in the last 25 years. But the instant I heard it I thought: yes, that’s right. It exactly suits the argument of the article. And as a bonus, it has great family and emotional resonance for me.

The title of course is a play on the famous slogan spelled out in neon lights over the Delaware River bridge in Trenton, New Jersey: “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.”

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This is what I am denied, or spared, by being trapped in Chinese factories or hospitals and getting only intermittent glimpses of real-time Campaign 2008 rhetoric:

Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the first substantive question of the debate. Knowing everything we know now, good idea or bad idea to have invaded Iraq?

Absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.

Huh????

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It started two weeks ago: drinks on a beautiful Shanghai evening with a visiting American couple at Barbarossa, a surreal Arabic-themed indoor/outdoor restaurant right in People’s Square. The husband was a doctor, here for a consultation on product-safety issues. “I’m a dermatologist, and so….” I stop listening to the sentence at that point but corner him as we’re leaving. “Funny you should mention you’re a dermatologist. Would you mind taking a look at….?” People ask me this kind of favor all the time, and I usually say yes. (Will I read Cousin Sally’s book manuscript? Can I suggest a publisher for a collection of poems?) In the cycle of karma, it was my turn to ask advice.

That very morning I had noticed a tiny rough patch of skin on the bridge of my nose. Just the normal collapse and decay, or something more specific to worry about?

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According to a Shanghainese friend (whose name I’m omitting because, really, how much good can it do a Chinese citizen to be seeing discussing anything fighter-plane related with a foreign journalist?), the planes I saw zooming overhead recently were probably just on a training mission from a local air field.

Sure enough, a quick check with Google Earth shows an obviously- military airfield just north of town, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze.

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The Bancroft family, which controls the Wall Street Journal, has now decided to listen to Rupert Murdoch’s pitch to buy the newspaper. OK, listen. But please, God, don’t sell.

The tragedy of late 20th century American journalism, in a nutshell, is its conversion from a special kind of business to just another business.

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Last fall, in an Atlantic cover story called “Declaring Victory,” I discussed the one big advantage the United States held over most European countries when it came to dealing with Islamic terrorists: the loyalty and assimilation of America’s Muslim and Arabic-origin populations. The two categories are not identical — many U.S. Muslims are from Pakistan, India, Iran, or other non-Arab countries; many Arab-Americans are non-Islamic, especially Lebanese Christians — but they are similar in overall success in America and resistance to extremist views. For instance (from that article):

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

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I’ve read Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital only now, three years after it came out. My main question is why people hadn’t been telling me about it before. OK, the operational explanation may well be that it got dismissive “not quite up to snuff” handling in the all-powerful NYT. For instance, right near the top of Michiko Kakutani’s “we are not amused” review was: “The novel never lives up to its Dreiseresque ambitions…And those larger aims sometimes clash with the author’s more commercial impulses to write a made-for-the-movies thriller.” Etc.

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There is counter-intuitive, and then there is really counterintuitive: advancing an argument so hard to believe that, well, it’s hard for people to believe you. Congratulations to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic for pulling off an exercise in the latter category: making the case that Hillary Clinton’s original health care plan, far from being a serious mistake that must be explained away (like, say, an enthusiastic vote in favor of the Iraq war), in fact reflects well on her prescience and judgment.

As Cohn notes, I made a similar case in this magazine twelve years ago. Journalistic insider-style complications abound here, in Anthony Powellish rococo fashion, so let me mention them:

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I've spent most of my life in places with lots of airborne activity to notice and watch. I grew up near a major Air Force base. We heard sonic booms every day on the school playground and learned how far to "lead" the sound's origin when looking at the sky, so as to spot the jet traveling much faster than its sound. The base was also a center for B-52 operations. During the Vietnam War years, I'd see news footage of the unmistakable "Stratofortress" silhouette over a jungle and think, Yes, that's just how it looked over our house.

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Time zones! At least China does. Many countries in the neighborhood, including Burma, India, Afghanistan, and Iran, have time zones on the half-hour (as does Australia). Nepal has one on the three-quarter hour -- when it's midnight UTC in London, it's 5:45 am in Kathmandu. But China has one great big desert-to-sea time zone covering a country about as big as the United States. As Joshua Rosenzweig points out by email, in response to this post about the curse of sunrise-at-4:30am in Shanghai:

Before you could implement daylight time for China, you'd probably have to implement time zones first. Remember, "Beijing time" stretches from the forests of Manchuria all the way to the bazaars of Kashgar and from the steppes of Mongolia to the tropical Hainan Island.  In fact, if you want daylight savings time you should head out west to Xinjiang, where daylight already lasts well past 9pm all summer long.  Of course, some accommodations are made to adjust to local conditions in places so far west of Beijing, but this is not really the same thing as actual time zones.  But I think to ask Beijing to implement anything that promotes the concept of regionalism is a tall order.

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Why we love them:

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