James Fallows

From Gail Collins in Saturday's New York Times:

The Democratic Party seems to be gradually acclimating itself to the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. It’s a little like that frog in a beaker of water that Al Gore talks about in his global warming speech — the one who won’t notice he’s being boiled to death if you turn up the heat ever so gradually.

NO NO NO NO NO!

I'm not talking about the politics of the thing*. I'm talking about the poor frog. Ms. Collins may be off the hook in attributing the frog metaphor to Al Gore -- he used it in An Inconvenient Truth, and he keeps right on using it. But he is flat wrong -- right on Global Warming, wrong on Amphibian Warming -- and so is everybody else who tries to explain things this way.

Summary of the undisputed science on this point: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will either die or else be so badly hurt it will wish that it were dead. If you put it in a pot of tepid water and turn on the heat, the frog will climb out -- if it can -- as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.

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It turns out that there is a company that conducts wine tours of China! This is apropos of my recent announcement that I had come across two good Chinese red wines, in a context suggesting that such discoveries should be considered news.

Comes now China Wine Tours, of California, which offers an interesting-looking trip next spring to Chinese cities and vineyards -- including the renowned (as I now think of it) Grace Vineyards of Shanxi province in northern China. Grace's site, in Chinese, is here.

A China Wine Tours representative notes that it is wrong to generalize about wine from China or anyplace else. Fair enough. And while I feel safe in saying that Sichuan food is generally better in Chengdu (Sichuan province) than in, say, Nebraska -- much as wine is generally worse in China than in, say, most of Europe, North America, or Oceania -- I take the point that there are exceptions to any rule. More power to all involved, from Grace, to China Wine Tours, to the other people and companies in China trying to develop and satisfy a market for a much better product. And I will have to save up and try the top-level Grace wine.

This is why we have the internets: - 1. After my report that I had found an "actually good" red wine in Gansu province, a reader in Berkeley wrote to say that this was exactly the same wine he had practically spit out in disgust when he tried it in Gansu. Versus my "actually good," his tasting notes:

Worst wine ever. It was pinot noir, but off-brown colored and tasted like crap. Supposedly the best wine of the gansu province. I think Chinese wine has about 50 million years before it catches up with the rest of the world. It made me end up barfing (well that plus a lot of weak chinese beer).

The explanation for this difference? I think it's not just that my standards have been affected by too much exposure to Great Wall and Changyu. It may be our old friend "quality control in Chinese manufacturing" raising its head once again. What my wife and I had didn't taste like crap and was normal red-wine color rather than brown. Your experience may vary! Caveat potor.

- 2. Fareed Zakaria, oenophile among other distinctions, reports that the "best wine in China" is from Grace Vineyards, in particular the "Chairman's Reserve." I have tried Grace's 60RMB/ $8 Chardonnay, which was OK. Could it be time to spring for the 388RMB / $52 Chairman's Reserve Cabernet? On the one hand, that's only a little more than twice as much as the 188RMB "Pride of Gansu" pinot noir in question. On the other hand, for the same money I could eat street food for two weeks and have change left over for REEB. Decisions....

Perhaps I was unfair to single out CNN for its relentless insistence on the name Myanmar rather than Burma. Lamentably, the New York Times is doing the same thing (for instance, here). The Economist is bizarrely schizophrenic on the question. Its latest cover boldly says, "Burma's Saffron Revolution," but in the accompanying lead story all references are to Myanmar. Good for the Washington Post, which on its front page goes unashamedly with Burma, as does virtually all of the British media (BBC, Times, Guardian, Telegraph) except for the inexplicable Economist. I suppose CNN sticks in my craw because they were the first media outlet in which I'd noticed such ostentatiously PC-sounding Myanmar-ization, especially in their arm's-length treatment of G.W. Bush's speech about "Burma." And just now they nonchalantly introduced comments "on Myanmar" from Archibishop Desmond Tutu, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a Burmese democracy advocate, and America's own Condoleezza Rice, only to have each of them begin, "The problem in Burma is" or "The people of Burma hope..." Take a hint, CNN and NYT! One more thought experiment, on the argument that Burma is a "colonial" name: If a country changes its name in the process of becoming independent, no problem. Today's Ghana had been the Gold Coast as a British colony; when it became independent 50 years ago, it became Ghana too. New country; new name. But suppose a junta took over Mexico tomorrow and said that henceforth the world must call the country Atzlan. (Or, to choose a country with a name more obviously traceable to the colonial era, the Dominican Republican, or the Philippines.) It's not a new country; it's just a new regime, and there would be no need to oblige them, just there is no need to dignify the brutal Burmese generals

My experience with the Chinese Great Firewall over the last year-plus has been weirdly variable. Sometimes I can get to almost any site I'm interested in, even without using a proxy server or VPN. Sometimes a large number are blocked. With a proxy server, of course, almost anything works. For the last few days I've been in circumstances where I can't use my normal proxy server. And here's what I find: - Wikipedia -- all entries blocked - Blogspot -- all blogs hosted there blocked - Blogger -- ditto - My pre-existing personal site, on WordPress (jamesfallows.com) -- blocked, so I can't put any posts or updates there Yet BBC.co.uk -- often impossible to reach from within the Great Firewall, today is wide open without problems. And so is the very-frequently-blocked Technorati. My intuition is that the offs and ons of the Firewall have as much to do with inadvertence and happenstance as with some coordinated master plan. But this is tighter control, or at least more broadly obstructive control, than I've noticed in a while. Is it due to the Burma upheavals, to diminish awkward discussion of China's role? I don't really think so, because Burma-related sites not on Blogger or Blogspot come through - plus lots of news on the BBC (which forthrightly calls the country "Burma.") Run-up to the 17th Party Congress, which begins in about three weeks, and before which there's been a general attempt to damp down controversy of any kind? For now I don't know the cause, only the effect.

For discussion tomorrow: whether China can do what many outsiders hope, and be the deus ex machina in the tragedy of Burma. It's pretty to think so, and to hope that Chinese intervention might spare Burmese monks and civilians from what looks like impending crackdown or massacre from the heavily-armed thugs who rule the country. I fear it's not realistic to think that China can or will play such a role. More later.

For now, street scenes from Rangoon, four months ago:

Rangoon city hall, with its somewhat eerie combination of British-colonial and traditional Burmese design. This appears in the background of many current protest videos. Here is how it looked on a weekday midmorning this May:

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A reader in Yangon/Rangoon says this about the "Burma" v. "Myanmar" question:

In your article you miss one critical point.

Burma was the name given by the British, and is a corruption of Bamar. The Bamar people are the ethnic majority of the lowland areas of the country, referred to as divisions eg, Yangon Division, Bago Division, Mandalay Division. The other parts of the country are known as States, where other ethnic groups form the majority eg Chin State, Shan State, Karen State each named after majority ethnic group.

Therefore, to insist on calling the country Burma (Bamar) falls into the trap of Bamar nationalism, identifiable not just to Military but to the NLD as well, but always to the exclusion and the expense of the many other ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, Burmese nationalism has been a problem in the country for centuries (and made worse under the British policy of divide and rule), and unless the more inclusive Myanmar is used will continue to be so no matter who is in charge.

If you decide to use this info, please attribute it to ANON in Yangon (the historically correct name for Rangoon), and be assured I am not a stooge, but have friends here from pretty much every community !

Actually we don't disagree. As I said the first time around, within Burma there have been serious arguments for years about what the country should call itself, to reflect the relations among its component ethnic groups. If Burma wants to call itself Myanmar for internal purposes, no outsider should object.

But as for the name outsiders use, here is the plain fact: nearly 20 years ago the brutal SLORC commandos insisted on the change to Myanmar as a way of aggrandizing and legitimizing themselves and of suggesting a Year Zero, history-starts-with-us outlook on the country. There is no reason for outsiders to go along with them, especially now.

This is making me nervous. The usual run of daily-life hassles has so far .... vanished today: 1) Good soaking rain last night in Beijing, with a cold front moving through. Open the hotel windows this morning to see: bright blue skies! Thin high white clouds! Hills and mountains visible miles away in the distance! Gee, I guess the pre-Olympic air-quality campaign is kicking in even faster than planned. (Don't worry, I know this is fluke-not-trend, and a reason to have planned the Olympics for September rather than August.*) 2) Taxi to Beijing Capital Airport, leaving three hours before flight time just to be safe given the morning rush hour. Third Ring Road: at a dead stop for miles into the distance. (Remember: we can see miles into the distance today.) Taxi driver veers recklessly off the entrance ramp, movie chase-scene style, one second before we would have been trapped. Fourth Ring Road: same endless jam, same escape. Out to the Fifth Ring Road: clear sailing! At the airport an hour after we leave the downtown hotel. 3) Time to kill before our scheduled flight to Shanghai. Maybe we could talk our way onto the one leaving an hour earlier -- despite our cheapo-discount tickets, bought with "no change/no transfer" strictures? My wife, the bargainer/negotiator in the family, asks -- and receives! 4) Plane takes off on time, and lands on time. Despite the overall efficiency of Chinese domestic air travel, on-schedule operations into and out of Beijing are still nothing to take for granted. Luggage appears immediately. 5) At Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, instead of the usual teeming-masses horror of the multi-hundred-person taxi queue, hardly anyone in line! We don't even need to use the trick we'd heard from savvier friends: going back up to the Departures level and jumping in a cab that has just dropped off a passenger. (Thanks to the cartel rules that keep the taxi lines snarled, these cabs aren't supposed to pick anyone up.) We stay in the legit line, step into a cab, cruise downtown to our apartment, and are unpacking at "home" a little more than four hours after we checked out of the hotel in Beijing. Veterans will know, that's a miracle. Which is why I'm worried. Something bad must be about to happen. I think I'll stay inside the rest of the day. * The opening ceremonies are of course planned for 8:08pm next August 8, as a bow to the auspciousness of the number eight in China. (08/08/08 -- get it?) Maybe the temperature will be 108F too!

"Why aren't there better beers in Asia?"

In the IHT today Jeff Boda dares ask the question that so often runs through my mind these days. Most often, when I confront the depressing choice among local Tiger, local Carlsberg, local Suntory, local Heineken, and of-course-local Qingdao or Snow in a neighborhood restaurant. Talk about a distinction without a difference! I might as well just have a REEB.

Even the brave Boda is not daring enough to hazard an answer. (My hypothesis: hops are the one expensive ingredient in beer, so the breweries don't use any.) But his story says enough to break my heart:

There's hope brewing in Japan. Thirteen years after it legalized microbreweries, the country has produced craft brewers who can hold their own with the best that the United States and Europe have to offer. Their pale ales are as refreshingly hoppy as Sierra Nevada, the benchmark in the United States.

Where were you, Japanese microbrewers, when I lived in your country? And why aren't you in China now? Just wondering. Crying in my beer, you might say.

(Updated) My hatred for pinyin, the convention for rendering Chinese words in Western script, is undiminished. But a little while ago I used the wrong example to make the point. As readers Jake Fleming, Joshua Rosenzweig, James Roy, and others promptly pointed out, the Western spelling Urumqi, for a city's name that most Chinese pronounce approximately wu-lu-mu-chi, illustrates complications other than pinyin-ization.

Urumqi (it turns out!) is the Uighur spelling of the city's Uighur Mongolian* name, the Uighurs being a mainly-Muslim, Central Asian people whose stronghold in China is the Xinjiang "autonomous region." The spelling is a actually good approximation for how they would pronounce the name, with "qi" roughly as "chee."

The four-character Chinese name 乌鲁木齐 is the Chinese attempt to phoneticize the name into Mandarin. Given the phonetics of Mandarin, such renderings are often awkward at best. So, bad example! I apologize!

Why do I still hate pinyin? I think that 99.9% of native English speakers, seeing pinyinizations like deng, men, cai, shi, or zhou are guaranteed to mispronounce them. For instance, dung, rather than deng, might look vaguely embarrassing but would take English speakers closer to the desired result. But I bow to the power of pinyin and struggle along.

By the way, the Xinjiang Suntime Wine is still good. * Per James Millward of Georgetown University, among others! Now it seems that place names south of Xinjiang's Tian Shan mountains, which run roughly east-west and which were still snow-covered when we saw them in late summer, are indeed mainly Uighur. Those north of the mountains, including Urumqi / Wulumuqi / 乌鲁木齐, are largely Mongolian (or Chinese) in origin. I'm not touching this topic again! Instead I refer all comers to Millward's own recent Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang

Another discovery from the west of China: two Chinese-made red wines that can be called "good." One, from Xinjiang autonomous region (the far northwest frontier of China), is Suntime Red Wine. Its Chinese-language site is here. Suntime comes from what I understand to be the biggest grape-growing operation in China. (Xinjiang, like the central valley of California, is grape paradise. Islamic Uighurs, from Xinjiang, are known among other things for selling grapes and raisins in big Chinese cities.) I've seen the wine only in a store in Urumqi*, biggest city in Xinjiang, where it cost less than $10 per bottle. The other, more obscure, is Mogao Vineyards Pinot Noir, from Gansu province. I was told in Gansu that Mogao is considered "the home town of grape wine," because of discoveries of ancient winery operations nearby. This wine, below, is actually good. On sale in Gansu for about $24. By Chinese standards, very pricey -- but bottles of lamentable Great Wall wine cost as much.

I leave it to the wine experts from here on out. - * "Urumqi" is example #97,408 of Why We Hate Pinyin, the system for rendering Chinese sounds in western script. The town's name is actually pronounced in Chinese more like "Wu-lu-mu-qi," and that is what the four characters in its Chinese name, 乌鲁木齐, amount to. And "Urumqi" is the best pinyin can do? [Update: see next post; there is actually a difference between the Mongolian and Chinese versions of the name. Sorry!] Sure, we understand that the English name "Worcestershire" is not actually pronounced that way, but no one ever advertised English spelling as a way to simplify pronunciation.

I'm watching CNN in Beijing, which keeps tut-tutting President Bush for saying "Burma," rather than "Myanmar," in his just-completed UN speech, as if this were merely another of his gaffes.

I'm with Bush. For nearly twenty years, since first visiting the country during the violent protests in 1988, I've followed arguments about the twists and turns of what to call the country in Burmese. The complications mainly involve what the various names say about the relations between the Burmese people proper and other ethnic groups within the nation.

But when it comes to referring to the nation in English, there's little debate. Myanmar is the name invented 18 years ago by the benighted junta, known as SLORC* back then and the State Peace and Development Council now, when it seized power through force. When Westerners say "Myanmar," they're not being culturally respectful to the people of a beautiful but oppressed nation. (We don't call China Zhongguo or Germany Deutschland just because the locals do.) They're bowing to the whims of the generals who still imprison Aung San Suu Kyi.

There is no reason to humor them. Say Burma, as George Bush did. And CNN, grow some backbone when it comes to terminology!
-

* "State Law and Order Restoration Council."

Update: Thanks to my Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood, I learn that I am agreeing here not merely with George W. Bush but, it seems, even with John Derbyshire! Sort of....

Two months ago, the skies over Beijing resembled some kind of nuclear disaster. This was the morning view near Chaoyang Park on July 25:

Now-- much better!!

September 24, 5pm, looking north and west over Chaoyang Park:

Central Business District, earlier that afternoon:

If this doesn't look like much of an improvement, then the pictures aren't really doing their job.

Mere byproduct of the change of seasons, with Fall usually the least-polluted time of the year? Conceivably an indication of something more? As my wife and I prepare to move here, naturally we hope (as opposed to assume) that this is a pre-Olympic trend rather than just a seasonal fluke.

Village near Yellow Sheep River, Gansu province, western China, 9am today. Harvest time:

In the middle and background: stacks of hay, waiting to be collected in carts drawn by people or cattle. The people in the middle and foreground are threshing the wheat and winnowing it the old-fashioned way, by tossing shovelsful in the air and letting the wind carry off the chaff. The village's houses are built around courtyards, with families and animals living inside each compound's walls. The line running through the picture is fiber for internet connections, which bypass this village but go to a nearby small town.

To stop asking where the "natural beauty" of China is:

Central Gansu province, near Maya mountains, September 20, 2007.

What I've also learned: where the people live who are not part of coastal China's economic boom. But that's a different story.

Thanks to all who kindly sent queries or wishes about conditions during the typhoon.

At least in Shanghai, this was, as they put it in the U.S. Midwest, a big nothing. A little windier than normal, but not by much. A little rain, but not as much as yesterday or half the days of the last month.

Three days ago, this was going to be the biggest storm in ten years, the equivalent of a Cat 5 hurricane. Rationally its petering out is a blessing. And yes yes yes, I know the tragedy of Katrina etc. But no red-blooded real person can help but wonder what it would have been like.

I'm declaring the voting closed on people whose reputations are better and place-in-history improved by virtue of service under GW Bush. Overall winner: Christopher Hill, State Department careerist now in charge of North Korean negotiations. Better known than he was six years ago, and in a good way! Dark-horse category winner: Sandy Randt, Yale classmate of GW Bush who has been ambassador to China since the beginning of the Administration; lawyer and Mandarin-speaker, unknown to 300 million Americans but respected by 1.3 billion Chinese. Interesting honorable mentions in their own special categories: Robert Gates (backing down from Donald Rumsfeld); Robert Zoellick (backing down from Paul Wolfowitz); conceivably David Petraeus, depending how the next 18 months goes. Possibly Patrick Fitzgerald, with the ambiguous legacy of his prosecutions? (Bad for the Bush administration; also bad for the press.) Also depending on the next 18 months, Henry Paulson? Honorary winners (technically disqualified since they're not part of the administration but instead feed off it): Jon Stewart; Stephen Colbert; staff of The Onion.

When my wife and I went to bed last night, we expected that through the night we'd hear the ever-more-howling winds of the approaching Typhoon Wipha. Perhaps the tall, skinny building in which we live would itself sway, which we'd watch and feel from the 22nd floor?

So far (10:30am China time), things are still pretty tame. At 8:30 this morning, the pavement was still dry. Now the wind is just beginning to push on the trees, and the skies are starting to drizzle, but not much more.

If this were the U.S., where Doppler Radar is everywhere, we'd watch the storm expand, contract, veer around, go out to sea, etc, and have some idea of whether we should be relaxing or hunkering down. As best I know, no such radar exists for most of China -- and if it does, its results aren't instantly and publicly available as they are on countless web sites and weather stations in the U.S.

So we go about our business, and wait, which maybe is a metaphor for the right way to approach life in general, where you have no idea what really lies ahead.

My Shanghai comrade Adam Minter is doing a Live Typhoon Blog. In a few minutes I'm planning to walk across the town, to get an idea of how the big city looks and feels before the typhoon hits (or perhaps doesn't).

Nanjing Xi Lu and Xinchang Lu, downtown Shanghai, 9am:

Eastward across People's Square, 10am:

As mentioned yesterday, it's hard to think of people whose reputations have been burnished through service in the GW Bush Administration. Making the opposite list is easy: Eight years ago, Dick Cheney's reputation was as a level-headed foreign policy pro. Same for Donald Rumsfeld. Alberto Gonzales was a rising talent. Scooter Libby, a cosmopolitan lawyer. Paul Bremer, a successful diplomat....

Several people have written me with suggestions, almost all of them people who look better than those around them because they said, Watch out, things are going to hell! Richard Clarke; Lawrence Lindsey; Eric Shinseki; the Abu Ghraib investigator Antonio Taguba, etc. A less obvious but worthy suggestion would be Conrad Crane and Andrew Terrill, principal authors of the Army War College's prescient, and of course overlooked, pre-war handbook on how to run a successful occupation. (The study's history recounted here; subscribers only.) James Baker and Lee Hamilton of the Iraq Study Group?

A very interesting discussion is going on in the comments section of Ezra Klein's blog, here. The interesting part is the way you have to bend definitions to argue that the Administration has made certain people look "better." Eg, John Ashcroft: a better reputation as Attorney General than in his previous political career? Maybe not. A better reputation than what came after him, especially for his apparent sickbed opposition to a surveillance scheme? Maybe so.

But people who will be honored for an unambiguously positive contribution through these years? So far it's a challenging search. We have a John Yoo with his Yoo Theories on torture, but no George Marshall with his Marshall Plan. Any positive suggestions welcomed.

Additional discussion here by Brian Beutler, and some interesting possibilities from Moira Whelan.

Landfall south of Shanghai in a few hours. Shanghai is just to the right of the red dot on the map. Raining like mad today. I wonder what real winds will do in a city where there are construction cranes, stacks of metal siding, etc all over the place, not to mention a lot of vulnerable people living in exposed circumstances.

Update: Ahah! It turns out the that graphic below is from a dynamic, updated site rather than a static image. So at this moment, nearly a day after original posting, it shows a green dot near Shanghai, and eventually it will show no dots from this typhoon at all. To find Shanghai on the map, follow the 30-degree latitude line over to the coast of China. Shanghai is just north of the big inlet, which is the mouth of the Yangtze River.