1. 9名石油工人被杀

2. 中国欲树立大国形象

3. 2008北京奥运的抵制问题。

详情请见原文。

China’s Healing Power

Thursday, Aug. 02, 2007 By RICHARD DOWDEN

TOO FEW: Sudan’s 7,000 African Union troops are overstretched

The dragon’s wing has twitched. A tiny shift in China’s Africa policy might just lead to peace in Darfur. China is Sudan’s largest trading partner, buying 65% of its oil. Until now Beijing has protected Khartoum from the`Western world, which was crying genocide and demanding intervention and sanctions. Now China has helped persuade Sudan to accept a new United Nations-led peacekeeping force of 26,000 military personnel and police, subsuming the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers who have failed to have any significant impact on the conflict.

In the past, China has taken the position that it doesn’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. (To do so would invite interference in its own internal affairs, including its insistence that Taiwan is a renegade province of China.) And its foreign aid has been unconditional. (In contrast to the “Imperialists,” China wants a relationship of equality with other developing countries.) But lately, China has displayed a new willingness to twist arms in Sudan, and its officials have been talking in different terms about the crisis there. Listen, for example, to Liu Guijin, China’s Special Envoy on Darfur, speaking in June at a conference on Africa: “China supports African countries in their efforts to improve democracy and the rule of law, and to practice good governance … Closer cooperation between China and Africa is helpful to African countries in maintaining stability and enhancing governing capacity.”

These phrases could have been copied straight out of a Western textbook on African development. That’s a mark of how much changed in recent months as the Chinese grew increasingly frustrated by Sudan’s stubborn refusal to cooperate with the U.N. At a closed conference in Beijing in late July, one Chinese adviser on Africa said pointedly: “The Sudanese government should be more cooperative with the international community and make more efforts to find a solution to the Darfur crisis.”

Why has China’s stance changed? One reason is that it suffered a recent setback in Africa. The murder by separatist rebels of nine Chinese oil workers in Ethiopia in April shocked Beijing, which sees itself as a benign — and welcome — force in Africa. China now has huge investments across the continent, yet realizes that it cannot rely on African governments to protect its interests. Whatever the public expressions of eternal friendship, we should expect to see the Chinese bypassing government contacts to engage more at a local level wherever they have operations in Africa. A second explanation is that China, now restored to the world’s top table, wants to play by the rules and do what the other big boys do — but in a way that does not besmirch its virtue as a noncolonial power. Expect China to continue pretending to be Sudan’s benevolent senior partner, only interested in helping its less fortunate sibling to develop.

The third reason for the shift is that China desperately wants the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing to go smoothly. That means everyone must come and the hosts must be in control. Threats of boycotts or demonstrations worry China enough to risk a little interference in Sudan. It is all discreetly handled, of course, but China does appear to have played a significant part in getting the Sudanese to accept the U.N.-led force.

It would be wrong to take this to mean that China has fallen into line and adopted Western positions on Africa. China would like to position itself as the mediator between an aggressive, imperialist West and a recalcitrant but misunderstood Sudan government. In the U.N. Security Council, Beijing secured the removal of phrases from the British-drafted resolution on Darfur, including the threat of sanctions if Sudan obstructed the U.N. deployment, and the condemnation of Khartoum for past violence against its own people.

In return for these concessions, the peacekeeping mission is authorized to defend itself with force, to protect civilians and ensure safe passage of aid workers and aid. Though it is hoped that most of the troops will come from Africa, the logistics and technical support — which the ineffective African Union force lacked — will come from outside the continent.

The new resolution means humanitarian aid workers will be safer, and so will the 1.8 million displaced people living in camps in Sudan. But to impose peace on all of Darfur would require a force several times larger, and with a mandate to attack militias and confiscate guns. The war has mutated. It began as a rebellion by two local movements; the government responded by arming Arab-speaking militias who attacked civilian communities of the same ethnicity as the rebels. Today the rebel movements and the militias have splintered, and more than 20 gangs range across the harsh terrain seeking loot and land. Now, thanks in no small part to the intervention of China, there are glimmers of hope, but what is still needed is mediation to establish some peace for the peacekeepers to keep.

Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society, which promotes cooperation between Britain and African nations

Original Link:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1649133,00.html

评论2:

2.2007.09.01.7:59.pm. 山之岚: 没有别的意思，我将它放在english reading里面，是自己看《Time》杂志上有关于中国的一些比较精彩的文章，就会把它放上来。看看国外是怎么看中国的。

1.2007.09.01.6:36.pm. ddkk3000: 这篇文章意图所在是？

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China’s Me Generation

By Simon Elegant / Beijing

THIS YEAR’S MODEL: Young Chinese like Liu Yun, 23, an actress pictured in a Beijing dance studio, belong to a generation for whom prosperity and personal freedom haven’t required democracy Photograph for TIME by Ian Teh

Six friends out on a friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang — big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup — starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese there so you don’t have to worry about language. Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding (“I must have fallen a hundred times”) to the relative merits of various iPods (“Shuffle is no good”) and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China. Silence Chen, an account executive with advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing, tells the group he recently received six different cards in the mail. “Each one has a credit limit of 10,000,” he says, laughing. “So suddenly I’m 60,000 yuan richer!” The talk turns to China’s online shopping business, before that is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.

The one subject that doesn’t come up — and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together — is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China’s past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression. The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today’s twentysomethings are tuning all that out. “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” says Chen. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”

There are roughly 300 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that it is becoming. Young Chinese are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country’s current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20- to 29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest of any age group. And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party — so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”

The rise of China’s Me generation has implications for the foreign policies of other nations. Sinologists in the West have long predicted that economic growth would eventually bring democracy to China. As James Mann points out in his new book, The China Fantasy, the idea that China will evolve into a democracy as its middle class grows continues to underlie the U.S.’s China policy, providing the central rationale for maintaining close ties with what is, after all, an unapologetically authoritarian regime. But China’s Me generation could shatter such long-held assumptions. As the chief beneficiaries of China’s economic success, young professionals have more and more tied up in preserving the status quo. The last thing they want is a populist politician winning over the country’s hundreds of millions of have-nots on a rural-reform, stick-it-to-the-cities agenda.

All of which means democracy isn’t likely to come to China anytime soon. And that poses challenges for Western policymakers as they try to engage China without condoning the Communist Party’s record of political repression and its failures to improve the lives of the country’s rural poor. China watchers say the Me generation’s reluctance to agitate for reform is driven in part by a reluctance to tarnish China’s moment in the sun. “They are proud of what China has accomplished, and very positive about the government,” says P.T. Black, who conducts extensive marketing research for a Shanghai-based company called Jigsaw International. The political passivity of China’s new élite makes sense while the good times roll. The question is what will happen to the Me generation — and to China — when they end.

For anyone who visited the workers’ paradise when it was still the land of Mao suits and communes, trying to reconcile that China to the one that young élites live in today is disorienting. When I first visited China in 1981, I went to the People’s Park in Shanghai with two traveling companions. Our obligatory Foreign Ministry “guide” ushered us through a special gate reserved for “foreign friends.” A knot of young Chinese had gathered outside. As we passed, a few made loud comments about the unfairness of having parts of the People’s Park reserved only for foreigners. One of my companions, a Mandarin speaker, agreed volubly in Chinese. Immediately a group of young Chinese men and women surrounded us and peppered us with questions that mixed naiveté and aspiration: Are there still slaves in America? Where did you learn to speak Chinese? Do all American families really have three cars? Can you help me go to America?

That discussion took place 25 years ago, the span usually allotted to a single generation. The naive, wary Chinese I met that day could be the parents of the group gathered for the seafood feast in Beijing. But there is almost nothing about the appearance, attitudes, life experience, education or dreams for the future that those young people in the Shanghai People’s Park share with the likes of Vicky and her friends.

The most obvious change is demographic. Because of China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1978, this is the first generation in the world’s history in which a majority are single children, a group whose solipsistic tendencies have been further encouraged by a growing obsession with consumerism, the Internet and video games. At the same time, today’s young Chinese are better educated and more worldly than their predecessors. Whereas the so-called Lost Generation that grew up in the Cultural Revolution often struggled to finish high school, today around a quarter of Chinese in their 20s have attended college. The country’s opening to the West has allowed many more of its citizens to satisfy their curiosity about the world: some 37 million will travel overseas in 2007. In the next decade, there will be more Chinese tourists traveling the globe than the combined total of those originating in the U.S. and Europe. Rather than fueling restlessness among the Me generation, however, the ease of travel seems to provide more evidence that the benefits of globalization can be had without radical change.

There’s another reason for the lack of political ferment: it’s exhausting. Like anyone else, members of the Me generation are shaped by their experiences and those of their families. When their parents talk about the Great Leap Forward (a disastrous Mao campaign in the late 1950s that left 20 million to 30 million dead of starvation) and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they mostly tell horror stories that would put anyone off politics forever. That chapter in Chinese history, which officially ended with Mao’s death in 1976, is ancient history to today’s young élites. They have known little but peace and an ever increasing economic boom. “We have so much bigger a desire for everything than [our parents],” says Maria Zhang, 27. “And the more we eat, the more we taste and see, the more we want.”

One event that the Me generation does remember is the crackdown on student activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But to young Chinese like Maria and Vicky, the Tiananmen protests are less a source of inspiration than an admonishment. Were popular uprisings like Tiananmen allowed to continue, Vicky believes, they would have provoked a counterreaction by conservative forces and led to a return to fortress China: no more iPods, overseas shopping trips or snowboarding weekends. “I think that the students meant well,” says Vicky, who was 11 at the time and has only vague memories of what happened. But the crackdown that ended the demonstrations “certainly was needed.”

Vicky embodies the shift in the priorities of young Chinese. She’s a purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who rarely smiles but loves nothing better than a party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt.

Encouraged by her new boyfriend Wang Ning, a keen snowboarder, Vicky decided earlier this year to take up the sport as well. To prime for it, she went to a mall in south Beijing that specializes in pricey, imported skiing gear. She chose a gleaming new snowboard made by the Colorado company Never Summer, emblazoned with colorful, psychedelic paintings of butterflies. Along with gloves, goggles and other paraphernalia, the new gear set her back about $700. When asked about the wisdom of spending a small fortune on equipment for a sport she may never take to, she says, “I believe you have to be fully prepared and equipped before you decide to start a new hobby.” Besides, she adds, “even if I don’t like skiing, think how nice [the gear] will look in the hallway of my apartment. Guests won’t know that I don’t use it.” Vicky smiles to signal she’s joking. But she’s dead serious when she explains, over coffee at Starbucks, her lack of interest in politics. “It’s because our life is pretty good. I care about my rights when it comes to the quality of a waitress in a restaurant or a product I buy. When it comes to democracy and all that, well …” She shrugs expressively and takes a sip of her latte. “That doesn’t play a role in my life.”

People like Vicky and her friends represent the leading edge, the trailblazers for a huge mass of young, eagerly aspirant consumers. All over China, young professionals like these banter about blogging, travel and work-life balance. (“Work hard, play harder,” says Vicky several times, repeating it in case she isn’t heard.) If they can’t afford to blow $700 on skiing gear, they want to be able to soon.

And so for China’s leaders, placating the Me generation is seen as critical to ensuring the Communist Party’s survival. By 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 is expected to swell 61%, to 500 million, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital’s sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million. (By comparison, there are about 2 million vehicles registered in all of New York City.) But despite a grim pollution problem (Beijing air quality is among the world’s worst) that could embarrass China during next summer’s Olympic Games, the central government has made no move to curb vehicle purchases through regulation or taxes. And that, in turn, has made it harder for governments in the developed world to make progress in getting Beijing to do more to fight climate change.

That’s just one example of the long-term impact of the government’s focus on the Me generation. In an article in the official mouthpiece People’s Daily published in February, Premier Wen Jiabao stressed that economic growth should take precedence over democratic reforms for the foreseeable future, a period that he appeared to indicate could stretch to 100 years. And yet for all its machinery of control, the party is vulnerable. Senior cadres from Wen on down have acknowledged in public that growing unrest in the provinces, as farmers clash with police over expropriated land or official corruption, could threaten the party’s grip on power.

As a result, China’s rulers face a dilemma: the very policies that cater to the urban middle class come at the expense of the rural poor. So far the government is erring on the side of the rich. In March the government pledged to address problems plaguing the country’s peasants, such as access to medical treatment and schooling, health insurance and the disparity between urban and rural incomes. And yet a relatively small portion of the budget was set aside to address the concerns of the peasantry, with the bulk of spending still concentrated on stoking the booming economy.

Even more telling was the passage of what was widely viewed as one of the most important pieces of legislation to be put forward in several decades of reform: the revised law on property ownership. Pushed through despite objections from old-line conservatives, the law for the first time gave equal weight to both state- and private-ownership rights. But a look at the fine print shows that the law only protects things dear to the rising middle class: real estate, cars, stock-market assets. Farmers, on the other hand, will still be unable to purchase their land and instead will be forced to lease plots from the government.

If left unchanged, such policies could exacerbate China’s rich-poor divide and create conditions for tumultuous social upheaval. The test for China — as the Me generation grows bigger, richer and more powerful — will be whether it begins to push for the social and political reforms that are necessary to ensure China’s long-term prosperity and stability. How likely is that? Though they’re not exactly clamoring for free elections, members of the new middle class have shown a willingness to stand up to authority when their interests are threatened. Last October police in Beijing attempted to enforce rules limiting each household to a single, registered animal no taller than 14 in. (35 cm). The drive sparked a rare public demonstration by hundreds of well-heeled Chinese, mostly young dog owners. Within a month, according to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, President Hu Jintao had intervened, ordering the Beijing authorities to back off. It was the first time most Beijingers could remember a public protest drawing a direct intervention by China’s top leader.

It was hardly Tiananmen, but a small triumph for free expression nonetheless. And if the West hopes to see China become democratic as well as prosperous, it will have to find ways to encourage modest breakthroughs like these, rather than expect sweeping change. At the Gang Ji Restaurant, where the dishes have been cleared and fresh fruit and more tea brought in, the mood is reflective. “We are lucky compared to our parents,” says Maria Zhang, who works as a membership manager in one of the capital’s most exclusive clubs. “My parents had nothing themselves. They lived for me.” Wang Ning, the snowboarder who runs his own successful advertising company, agrees. “We are more self-centered. We live for ourselves, and that’s good. We need to have the strength to contribute to the economy. That’s our power. The power to contribute. That’s how our generation is going to help the country.” China’s future will be defined by whether they realize that democracy can help China, too.

Find this article at:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647228,00.html

[tags]time magazine, me generation[/tags]

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Copyright © 2010 | Think Again | 原文链接

Commentary: Surface Calm

By Bryan Walsh

China is usually the first nation to protest—loudly—any perceived backsliding by Japan on its acceptance of guilt for World War II abuses. Yet, last month, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied Japan’s wartime army had forced tens of thousands of Asian women into sexual slavery, igniting an international furor, Beijing stayed conspicuously quiet. China’s diplomatic silence was the latest sign of an unexpected thaw in the two nations’ often icy relationship.

The change began with Abe’s own surprise trip to Beijing last October, which established lines of communication that had been all but ruined by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s repeated trips to the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead viewed by many nations as an irredeemable symbol of Japanese imperialism. For Abe, who had a nationalist reputation as a legislator, the move assuaged worries that ties with China would further degrade under his administration. For the leaders in Beijing, Abe’s visit was an opportunity to show that China could be forward thinking, and not just a prisoner of history. Since then the two nations have toned down the hostile rhetoric and found patches of common ground—like stopping North Korea’s nuclear program. The good vibes culminated with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s trip to Japan on April 11 to 13, the first high-level Chinese visit in nearly seven years. But while it was all smiles and bows in Tokyo this week, China and Japan remain wary rivals at best. “The two sides realized they hadn’t talked with each other for years, and that simply wasn’t sustainable,” says Malcolm Cook, director of the Asia Pacific Program at Sydney’s Lowy Institute for International Policy. “There isn’t much more than that right now.”

That the superficial rapprochement between China and Japan seems so momentous is a measure of just how far apart the neighbors have drifted. They still face a host of problems, from disputed borders to deep-seated animosity over the memory of World War II. Take security. Abe has upgraded Japan’s Defense Agency to a Cabinet-level ministry, sped deployment of American ballistic missile-defense systems on Japanese soil, and is pushing for a revision of the country’s pacifist constitution. Last month, after Japan signed a defense agreement with Australia, Abe spoke of the two democracies’ “shared destiny.” And given Japan’s flirtations with another powerful Asian democracy (India), you can see why Beijing might think it’s on the wrong side of a Japanese containment policy.

Tokyo, for its part, points to China’s rapidly increasing military spending, which rose nearly 18% to reach $45 billion officially this year—even as Japan’s own defense budget, for all of Abe’s posturing, has remained virtually flat. The point is that while both nations want what one Tokyo official calls a “future-oriented relationship,” the future will likely find them on opposite strategic sides. That doesn’t mean they can’t be good neighbors—good fences and all that—but we can expect friction.

Such a confrontation occurred in 2005 when the two governments faced off over potentially rich underwater natural-gas and oil fields in the East China Sea. The deposits lie inside maritime territory claimed by both countries, and the dispute has so far prevented either from tapping the oil and gas. Joint development is the only realistic solution, but with the two competing over everything from natural resources to global influence, neither can afford to back down. “Both sides have face at stake,” says Ryosei Kokubun, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Tokyo’s Keio University.

Beijing and Tokyo should focus on confidence-building measures in areas where both can win—like the environment. China’s rapid industrialization and inefficient energy use have created a horrific pollution problem. Japan has coped with similar problems in the past to become one of the world’s most efficient energy users; its expertise in this field could be of great benefit to China. Expanding the two nations’ already robust economic ties—bilateral trade passed $200 billion last year—will bind them further. “Japanese officials realize that China is Japan’s economic future,” says Jeff Kingston, a professor of history at Temple University in Tokyo. “The mutual interest is real.”

Mutual interest may not be enough. Though China has downplayed Abe’s recent attempts to rewrite Japan’s wartime history, Yasukuni remains a redline for Beijing. Eventually Abe will come under pressure from his conservative base to stand up to China, as Koizumi did, and visit Yasukuni. At the same time the Chinese government could face anger at home should it be seen as playing too nice with Tokyo. The past is never really past in Asia, but Japan and China have enough genuine challenges in front of them without being weighed down by what’s behind.[tags]time magazine[/tags]

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Dads’ Dilemma

Asian fathers are in a bind, tugged in opposite directions by responsibilities at work and at home. Is there a way out?

BY LIAM FITZPATRICK

It’s a Saturday morning in Singapore, and around 20 men have turned up at the Chongfu Primary School to hear Wong Suen Kwong give a talk about fathering. Wong, who heads an NGO called the Centre for Fathering, begins his presentation with a PowerPoint slide declaring his organization’s purpose: “Inspiring fathers to be involved with their children’s lives.” A little way into the meeting, one of the men explains his way of rising to this challenge. He has rigged up his home with over $2,000 worth of remotely operated camera equipment, so that when he’s at work he can log onto the Internet and see what his kids are doing. A ripple of laughter spreads through the room, but there’s a touch of ruefulness about it because many of today’s fathers find it equally hard to be fully involved with their children.

“You have plans for your careers,” Wong continues. “You have savings plans. You have vacation plans. But how many of you have a parenting plan?” Not a hand goes up and the room falls silent save for the soft drone of an air conditioner. It’s embarrassing for these upstanding burghers of Singapore—so methodical and conscientious in their professional lives—to dwell upon the possibility that they might be falling short at home, but Wong lets them fidget and cough for a few more moments before resuming. “Watching your children over the Internet is one thing,” he says, “but the goal of parenting is to get them to do the right thing when you’re not looking.” And there are plenty of hours in the day when Asian fathers are not looking.

Take a day in the life of Wong Kam-hung, a 38-year-old Hong Kong buyer of plastic goods. He’s at the office by 8 a.m., leaves between 12 and 13 hours later, and gets back to his high-rise suburban apartment at around 10 p.m. His four kids—one is 11, one is 5 and there are 2-year-old twins—are in bed by 11 at the latest, leaving him one hour to spend with them if he’s lucky. At the same time as seeing to them, an exhausted Wong also tries to relax and have his evening meal. This is on one of his better parenting days. Half the time, he isn’t at home at all, because his job constantly takes him to China. “I’m gone half the year,” he says. “I feel like I don’t give the children enough care.”

Fathers all over Asia share that sense of guilt over their inability to balance work and parenthood. Dr. Sanjay Chugh, a New Delhi psychiatrist, says these harried, overburdened men stream through his consulting rooms: “Indian fathers have less and less time to spend with their children. When stress goes up for a father, it affects not only the quantity of time he spends with his children but the quality.” Some, like a 35-year-old human-resources manager in Tokyo, who asked not to be named, blame unsympathetic employers. “At my old workplace, most of the people in my department didn’t have children,” he says. “I don’t think they understood the importance. I was unable to take any holidays after the birth of my son.” Others point to the old Asian culture of networking, in which deals are done over endless cups of sake and soju. “I really thought I’d be the kind of father who spends a lot of time with his kids,” sighs Ahn Chan, an office worker in Seoul. But, come evening, he feels obliged to drink with colleagues and clients, and hardly sees his 4-year-old. “Sometimes when we run into each other, she looks very sad and starts demanding that I stay at home,” he says.

Every day, pleading overwork, millions of men cancel millions of promises made to millions of children. Dads cannot read bedtime stories or go to the park. Dads are in their offices, or on the road, or on conference calls. The effects of this physical or emotional absenteeism are actually quantifiable: numerous academic studies have shown that children with distant fathers score lower on tests of empathy, reasoning and brain development than those whose fathers are more involved. The former behave more aggressively, don’t get on as well with siblings, tend to be less popular in school and are more reluctant to take responsibility for their misbehavior. In 2002, the U.S. National Center for Policy Analysis concluded that kids with physically absent fathers were up to three times more likely to use drugs and engage in criminal behavior. Last month, an Israeli study reported that children with absent fathers were more likely to have trouble forming new relationships, whether the absences were permanent or shorter term. When children reach school age, Australian psychologist Paul Amato found, fathers are even more important to self-esteem than mothers.

Not surprisingly, the more involved the father, the smarter and better adjusted kids tend to turn out. A 1993 Harvard study showed that the amount of time a father spends with his children can actually affect their ability at math, and that children whose fathers encourage them in sports are more successful in their adult careers. Other researchers have found that children who were fathered well are more tolerant and socially responsible as adults. Precisely the same behavior is shown in the animal world: as part of his PowerPoint presentation, Wong Suen Kwong tells the story of how orphaned young male elephants in a South African game reserve began killing rhinos and threatening vehicles. When older bulls were introduced to the park, he says, the killings and delinquency stopped.

Fifty years ago, parenting was so much simpler for Asian men. As the sole breadwinner, a dad’s responsibilities typically ceased the moment he crossed the threshold of his home and flopped into his favorite chair, while mom dealt with the dinner and the children. “The father in the previous generation was more aloof, removed from the family and emotionally more detached,” says Daniel Wong, a University of Hong Kong professor of social welfare and author of a 2003 study on the stresses faced by dads. Says Benjamin Naden, a client manager at Microsoft in Singapore who sometimes snatches an hour or two from work to watch his kids in sports events: “We understood that our father was the breadwinner and had to work, but kids today have different expectations. They require more of your time.”

Yet many fathers find there’s less of it to give. Asian men are becoming fathers later in life, when they tend to have less time for their children. “Career responsibilities increase with age,” says Raphael Chan, a director of a fast-food chain in Singapore who became a first-time father at age 41. “But this was the point at which I had a child, and it was hard.” Multitasking and an accelerated workflow present other challenges for the single-task-oriented male brain. And technological advances—from vibrating Blackberries to the addictive allure of high-speed Internet access at home—have made it all the harder to detach from work. Finally, when you consider the retrenchments and economic wipeouts that have set the temper of their working lives over the past decade—the financial crisis of 1997, the dotcom implosion of 2000, the downturn in the wake of SARS in 2003—it’s easy to see why Asian men have prioritized work. “Since 1997, it’s not been possible to get a bonus,” says Wong, the Hong Kong buyer and father of four. Spurred by the fear that their incomes will dry up or their jobs will be cut, many men work longer hours in a bid to prove their indispensability.

But unlike their fathers, Asian men today face an epoch-shifting change: the entry of women into the workforce. Having two incomes has brought economic benefits to countless families, and given women rich opportunities for fulfillment, but it has left men scrambling to become the fully fledged co-parents their wives now need them to be. In fact, many men are experiencing, for the first time, the conflicting pulls of career and home that have long bedeviled working women. These overstretched fathers are still getting used to the idea that they’re no longer excused from taking on a wider family role. Increasingly, they are “sharing more housework with their spouses, such as buying groceries, picking up the kids from school, changing diapers and feeding the babies,” says Zhang Liang, a researcher on fatherhood at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Chan, the fast-food executive, is one of the legion of fathers who has had to adapt accordingly. “My wife picks our son up from playschool and brings him to her workplace, and cooks him something to eat in the pantry there,” he says. “I come and pick them up a couple of hours later and bring them home at around 9 p.m.”

And it isn’t just chauffeuring that’s required. Fathers need to stimulate their children intellectually and emotionally just as much as mothers do, whether that means helping with homework or listening to a child’s problems. In cultural terms, this is a seismic shift. Bear in mind that half a century ago, as men moved from villages to cities—or overseas—to find work, they had very little contact with their sons. Those sons, with educations paid for by their fathers’ remittances, were able to advance up the socioeconomic ladder. But the jobs they took—many of them white-collar jobs at the heart of the Asian economic boom—robbed them of a family life, too. Today, their sons—the third generation and the present crop of fathers—are the product of two previous generations of absent dads. “The pattern of fatherlessness can be passed down,” says Wong Suen Kwong, who says he started the Centre for Fathering because he was having trouble relating to his teenage daughters.

Recognizing that fathers need encouragement if they are to change, society bombards them with helpful (or guilt-inducing) messages every time they pick up a remote control. Viewers of China Central TV wake up each day to the sight of pop star and actor Lin Yilun hosting a cooking show produced by the government in the hope that men will learn to effortlessly relieve their wives at the wok. In 2006, Japanese men were invited to benchmark themselves against the central character of Love Mum More Than Anyone—a TV drama series about an exemplary stay-at-home dad. Japan’s print media has also decided that men need to be educated in a style of fathering hitherto unknown. Not long ago, the idea of a Japanese magazine about fathering might have been dismissed with a derisory snort. But last year saw the launch of two upscale glossies now duking it out for market share—Oceans and FQ. “The most frequent comment fathers make is, ‘I’ve been waiting for a magazine like this,’” says FQ’s advertising manager, Masashi Nakatomi. “Wives will say, ‘My husband has become more aware after reading it.’” Both magazines feature celebrity fathers. FQ has even had Johnny Depp on its cover—all part of an unlikely effort to equate dads with cool.

Media images like this may be contrived, but behind them lies the truth that’s the salvation of many overworked fathers: namely, men who play a fuller role at home often find it energizing and cheering rather than an additional cause of exhaustion. For his children’s sake, Masato Yamada took a year off from his job at Japan’s Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and was so delighted with the experience that he wrote a book: METI Assistant Manager Yamada is Currently on Paternity Leave. “Many people take their jobs very seriously—to the degree that they think Japan will collapse without them—and work 24/7,” says Yamada. “But from a long-term perspective, getting involved in parenting is a plus.”

Raku Yoshida, a 33-year-old father of two, works in an airline’s reservations office in Tokyo. So that he can spend as much time as possible with his children, he gets up at 5 a.m. to answer e-mails and tackle household chores. His reward is being able to wake up his children for breakfast and an hour of play before he heads to the office. The working day normally ends by 7 p.m. because Yoshida took the radical step, in 2005, of asking his employer for a less demanding job. (Prior to that, he notched up 14-hour stints.) This means he can have another hour with his kids in the evening. He tucks them into bed at around 8.30 p.m. and falls asleep not long after. “There are very few men around me who spend as much time with their children as I do,” he says. “In fact, many people are putting in more overtime [than before].” He’s not wrong: the 2005 financial year was Japan’s worst ever when it came to karoshi, or death from overwork, with 330 cases of people dying from work-induced heart attacks, strokes or other ailments.

Of course, most fathers feel less at liberty than Yoshida to walk out of the office at a sane hour. “The number of men who want to balance work and home is increasing,” says Emiko Takeishi, a human-resources expert at Tokyo’s Hosei University, “but when you take a look at figures on long working hours, or the take-up of paid leave, they’re worse than before.” A recent survey by Japan’s Cabinet Office found that while 70% of fathers wanted to balance home and career, 23% had little or no time to spend with their children on weekdays. Some are even reluctant to take time off for the birth of their kids. In South Korea, civil servants are permitted three days’ paternity leave, but the figures suggest that men either don’t want it or feel pressured not to take it. In 2005, just 208 fathers in the civil service used their entitlement, compared with 10,492 women who took maternity leave.

If there’s one person who can convince men to spend more time with their families, it’s not necessarily a child or a wife. It’s a boss who leads by example. Studies show that when CEOs and department heads try to balance their own lives, instead of merely urging subordinates to do so, then everyone benefits. “In our research we have found that any change in attitude works best when the tone at the top stipulates what the corporate culture will be,” says Karen Sumberg of the Center for Work-Life Policy in the U.S. “If taking time to go see your child play soccer is O.K., and you see that the man or woman at the top does the same thing, then the culture will start to shift in that direction.”

This may explain the varying degrees of success Asian companies have had with programs aimed at fathers. In Japan, cosmetics firm Shiseido introduced an enlightened scheme in April 2005 whereby employees with children under 3 are offered a one-time benefit of an additional two weeks of paid leave. Since the scheme’s adoption, says spokesman Tatsuyoshi Endo, only 28 men have taken advantage of the offer. (At Shiseido’s Tokyo head office 1,780 of the 3,300 employees are men, but the firm doesn’t keep a tally of how many are fathers). Other companies are offering similarly progressive programs that would once have been unthinkable in Asia. At IBM in Singapore, 70% of the 3,000 mostly male employees regularly participate in the firm’s “mobility program,” which lets them work from home as long as they can be contacted via e-mail or phone. In addition, fathers are allowed to work 22 half-days in every six months if they use that extra time for family purposes. “With the wife working, there is an expectation that fathers should share more responsibilities in the home,” says IBM’s human-resources manager for Singapore, Tho Lye Sam. One benefit of this increased involvement, she adds, is that “fathers are now much closer to their children.”

But even where there’s no official support, men can improvise ways of boosting the time they spend with their kids. While living in Singapore several years ago, Prasenjit Basu found that his ferocious working hours as Credit Suisse First Boston’s chief economist in Asia were causing him to miss out on seeing his two young children. “What I began to do was come home for lunch at the time they came home from school,” he says. As his children grew older, their school days lengthened. “I’d be eating my lunch at 3 p.m. or 3:45 p.m.,” Basu laughs, but he has no regrets. In Seoul, Yang Sunmook, the 48-year-old chairman of the Democratic Party, says he took the unusual step of taking his two sons to some of the social functions that cram a politician’s diary “so I could be with them.” If successful economists and politicians can make these efforts, so can other men. Masahiro Endo, a 33-year-old father of two and a gas-station owner in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, runs two websites for fathers, publishing articles with titles like “Let’s Master the Three Categories of Housework.” But not so long ago, he says, he was a living anachronism—the kind of father who “couldn’t cook or do any kind of housework.” He decided to change when he realized that he no longer wanted to depend on his wife’s ministrations. So, Endo began to teach himself how to become a modern male, juggling the demands of his home and his business. Endo’s discovery: “You can handle it as long as you’re ingenious about the time you do have.”

Cheerfully dealing with myriad commitments, being smart about your time, and accepting that being a parent means being responsible for both the material and emotional welfare of your children: this is the new way of Asian fatherhood. Gentlemen, does it remind you of anyone? But of course. “Women are doing it,” says Endo. “So why can’t we?”

with reporting by Neel Chowdhury/Singapore, Ling Woo Liu/Hong Hong, Yuki Oda and Michiko Toyama/Tokyo, Benjamin Siegel/New Delhi, Natalie Tso/Taipei, Jennifer Veale/Seoul and Jodi Xu/Beijing

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By Simon Elegant / Zhangjiachang, Friday, Mar. 02, 2007

A coal miner carries a sack of coal back home after his shift at a small mine in China’s Shanxi Province on November 29, 2006.

Old Zhao, his fellow miners called him — a weary-looking man, 54, wearing a yellow safety helmet and a miner’s lamp strung around his neck, black coal dust embedded in the lines on his forehead and lightly powdering the insides of his ears. Last May Zhao and a team of other veterans were assigned to search for the bodies of 57 miners killed in Zuoyun County, deep in China’s Shanxi province. The dead men had accidentally tunneled into a flooded mine shaft next to their own. “Many of them are very young–just boys,” Zhao says, pausing to light a cigarette. “I keep seeing their faces in my dreams, and they remind me of my son. He’s 27 and works at a mine in the next county.”

For 25 years, Zhao has worked as a miner in China’s northeast, where much of the coal that drives the country’s booming economy is mined. That longevity makes him a lucky man. Being a coal miner in China is one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Officially, about 5,000 of his fellow workers died in mining accidents last year. Unofficially, nobody knows how many were killed. In the space of a single week late last year, gas explosions and accidents in four mines left nearly 100 miners dead. Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety Supervision, described the carnage as “unprecedented” and blamed the deaths on collusion between local officials and greedy mine owners. Indeed, throughout China, the coal magnates of Shanxi are notorious for their extravagance. Chinese newspapers regularly tally the number of Hummers, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces in the otherwise impoverished province.

Coal powers China. The original fossil fuel is the source of explosive economic growth in China, just as it was in Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and in the U.S. later. China is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, its factories and homes using nearly a third of total world production. Much of that coal is dug in tens of thousands of mines scattered across the windblasted ocher hills northeast of Beijing. It is here–more than in the textile factories of the south where Western activists complain of sweatshop conditions–that Chinese pay in blood for their country’s economic success. The official death toll fell some 20% last year, but as with many government statistics in China, the figures aren’t sparking celebrations, even among safety officials. In fact, many industry observers believe that accidents are heavily underreported. Robin Munro, a human-rights activist at the Hong Kong–based China Labor Bulletin, working from an unofficial estimate given by a senior work-safety bureaucrat, thinks as many as 20,000 miners die in accidents each year. And that count doesn’t include tens of thousands more of the country’s estimated 5 million miners who die of lung afflictions and other work-related diseases every year.

The toll highlights more than the awful conditions in an industry that the China Labor Bulletin calls “blood coal.” It also exposes one of the most critical issues faced by Beijing: the inability of the central government to get local authorities to follow orders. The official Chinese media repeatedly feature stories on how local administrators ignore orders from Beijing on everything from controlling public spending and cracking down on corruption to protecting the environment. “Mining is the perfect case study of central-government relations with local government in China,” says Arthur Kroeber, editor of the China Economic Quarterly. “The clash is between the central government’s desires and the local government’s pressing economic needs, and in 99 cases out of 100, local government wins out.”

That is a frightening prospect in a country whose future depends on how the current boom is handled. If China’s economy continues on its hell-for-leather path, the country’s air and water will become even more filthy than they are now, and its workers–many of whom labor in appalling conditions–will never enjoy the fruits of its economic growth. Yet no matter how enlightened Beijing technocrats may be or how thoughtfully new regulations may read, if local governments can do whatever they want, all is lost. Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), regularly warns of looming environmental catastrophe. And yet there is no sign of any slowdown in the tide of pollution engulfing the country. Despite Beijing’s condemnation of a huge chemical spill that left 4 million residents of the city of Harbin with no running water in November 2005, Pan recently revealed that over the next year, there were no fewer than 130 chemical spills around the country–a rate of one every three days.

SEPA, admittedly, is not a full-fledged ministry. The drive to improve safety in coal mines, by contrast, has had backing from the very top for years. In 2003 Premier Wen Jiabao celebrated the Chinese New Year by eating dumplings with miners 2,300 feet underground. When he visited their homes and families, Wen called for improvements in mine safety. Wen has stayed involved in the issue, regularly expressing concern for miners and their families and once tearfully instructing officials to learn “lessons drawn in blood.” Indeed, within days of the Zuoyun accident, the Premier met with rescuers and called for a thorough investigation, noting that there was evidence of collusion between local officials and mine owners to cover up the tragedy. Officials at the company running the Zuoyun mine could not be reached for comment.

In a country famously assumed to be authoritarian, like China, you might think such repeated investment of personal authority by a top leader would produce rapid results. Not so. In fact, central- government efforts to rein in local authorities have been not only ignored but also actively blocked. Last October Beijing announced that it was delaying until 2010 a plan that would have forced the closure of thousands of small mines, which account for the majority of accidents. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the plan foundered because of opposition from local governments, which see mines as their “major capital sources.” That, said Xinhua, led “many local authorities to protect unsafe mines for financial gain.”

According to accounts in the state-controlled media, such small mines, which account for a third of China’s total coal output, are commonly subcontracted by local governments to individuals. With some 17,000 of these small mines now operating (as well as thousands of illegal mines), supervision by government authorities is virtually nonexistent. To maximize profits, mine owners ramp up production far above sanctioned levels, exceed the regulated number of miners and neglect safety equipment and procedures. Mine owners often bribe local officials into turning a blind eye to their practices and have been known to ship corpses to other provinces to escape regulations requiring them to report any accident in which more than three miners die.

A glimpse of the hellish conditions in which millions of Chinese miners work can be seen in the documentary Yuan Shan (Distant Mountain), by filmmaker Hu Jie. Although the film was made more than 10 years ago, industry observers say conditions have changed little in China’s private mines. Shot in Qinghai province, near Tibet, the film shows miners working in tunnels so low that they crouch at the coal face, dressed in little more than loincloths. After they fill their quota, the miners have to turn and crawl hundreds of yards, pulling a basketful of coal twice their body weight. The only illumination comes from candles in small lamps attached to the miners’ heads–but Chinese mines are particularly prone to gas explosions, says Munro, making naked flames extremely dangerous.

The accident at Zuoyun, where Old Zhao recovered the bodies of dead miners, sums up everything that is wrong with China’s mining sector. Media reports in the wake of the disaster put production from the mine, licensed to produce only 90,000 tons a year, at roughly four times that amount. And according to accounts in China’s state-owned media, which gave the accident widespread coverage–another sign of Beijing’s concern–the mine operators broke numerous other safety regulations, including the number of miners allowed in the mine and the depth at which they worked. But the principal operator of the mine, according to the press reports, felt protected by the fact that his brother was the senior Communist Party official in the area, responsible for supervision of mining. When news of the collapse emerged, the media have alleged, the contractors tried to cover up the seriousness of the accident by reporting that only five men were trapped, a delay the authorities say impaired rescue operations. On Feb. 26, a provincial court in Shanxi sentenced Li Fanyuan, who it said was owner of the Zuoyun mine when the accident happened last May, to 16 years in prison on charges relating to his responsibility for the deaths.

Such practices leave central-government officials fuming helplessly. After the string of accidents that left more than 100 miners dead in November, Li, Beijing’s top official in charge of work safety, alleged that in one case, in which 32 died, local officials had ignored an order to close a shaft. “With local governments as backstage supporters, unscrupulous mine owners just keep operating illegally,” Li was quoted as saying in the state-run English-language China Daily. “This is a direct challenge to the authority of state laws and regulations.”

It is a challenge that the state does not yet know how to meet. So long as China’s economy continues its giddy growth, the country’s thirst for coal will continue to grow. China derives about 70% of its energy needs from coal, and production has nearly tripled in the past five years to meet soaring demand. High oil prices have added to coal’s attraction. Beijing has plans to open 35 to 40 coal-powered electricity-generating plants annually in the next few years and to build two plants to convert coal to liquid fuel.

All that spells more Hummers and luxury condominiums in Beijing and Shanghai for Shanxi’s coal barons. The cash to buy their cars and toys will come from the sweat–and perhaps blood–of men like Xie Daibing. Xie, originally from the remote and dirt-poor province of Gansu, on the border with Tibet, works in a mine less than a mile from the shaft in Zuoyun County where the 57 miners drowned. “No, I’m not scared,” he says, although he looks it, a frown creasing his forehead and his fingers restlessly juggling his cigarette pack and lighter. Xie says he’s confident that the central government is doing its best to protect miners. “I hear the government regulations say that production at illegal mines will be stopped and the mines blown up. I’m sure the State Council in Beijing will order that.” It may. The question is whether anyone in Zuoyun County will listen.

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Copyright © 2010 | Think Again | 原文链接

Enjoy it. Proud of our country!

Thursday, Feb. 08, 2007

Welcome to China’s China

By Michael Schuman

Wang Li may live deep in China’s interior, in a city you may never have heard of–the provincial capital of Chengdu–but that doesn’t stop her from shopping like the big spenders of Tokyo, Hong Kong or Shanghai. One Friday evening, Wang, 28, trolls down Chunxi Street, a jam-packed thoroughfare of flashing neon signs, McDonald’s restaurants and boutiques, looking for the latest fashions she’s admired in Cosmopolitan magazine.

First stop is a store selling oddly streaked jeans, next a shop with frilly jackets and flowery coats. After two hours of hunting, she finally plunks down $24 on a pair of brown shoes at a funky outlet selling studded boots and fluffy handbags that’s playing earsplitting Gwen Stefani tunes. Wang spends nearly every yuan she earns as a real estate agent on shopping excursions, dinners and drinking sessions with friends. That’s no small chunk of change. Since her first job in a coffee shop eight years ago, Wang’s annual income has vaulted more than 1,500%, to $7,500. “Five years ago, I’d be happy if I had a little money to buy a small snack on the street. I was yearning for KFC, and my dream was to get pizza,” Wang recalls. “Now I can do it.”

Can do is the new M.O. of Chengdu. Although 1,000 miles from the glamour of Shanghai, Chengdu has a surprising number of choices for Wang and her fellow aspirants. As China’s fourth largest city, it is catching up to the world’s richest at a blistering pace. It has a booming economy, escalating incomes and 10.8 million people–more than New York City. Wooing the newly wealthy of Chengdu is a top priority for consumer companies from Coca-Cola to General Motors to Christian Dior. Chengdu is only one of several mammoth metropolises–like Chongqing, Wuhan and Xi’an–experiencing similar booms of investment, wages and jobs.

Welcome to China’s China, a land of gargantuan urban centers beyond Shanghai and Beijing where the growth potential is giving consumer-products makers palpitations. “If you want to be No. 1 in China, you have to be successful in every city in China,” says Ian Chapman-Banks, chief of marketing for North Asia at Motorola.

On Chengdu’s main square, near the outstretched arm of a statue of Mao, sits a shopping center with Cartier, Zegna and Hugo Boss outlets. One night at the new Seibu department store, which opened last April, Italy’s Missoni held a fashion show with Chinese models strutting to thumping reggae music. “Everybody who comes to Chengdu has a surprise,” says an ebullient Antonino Laspina, the Italian trade commissioner in China, on the sidelines of the show. Living in Chengdu “is becoming like living in New York, Paris or Milan.”

Not quite. Yet only a few years ago, the boundless interior was a daunting and unprofitable place for many companies. Giant cities like Chengdu languished, starved of investment and government attention that went to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Chengdu was known mainly as China’s largest panda-preservation center. Some companies like Korea’s Samsung that tried to make an early move were disappointed and left, or limited their expansion.

The gaping disparity between East and West was also becoming a big headache for China’s policymakers. Fearing disgruntled Westerners would grow unruly, Beijing stepped in seven years ago with an aggressive program to bring balance to the national economy. The government poured money into infrastructure like new airports and expressways throughout western China, with good result. “We follow the tarmac,” notes Andy Coslett, CEO of Intercontinental Hotels, which is building like mad in Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi’an and other cities.

Residents of Chengdu, glued to the Internet and TV shows like Friends, are striving to connect with the outside world more than ever before, in fashion trends, food and lifestyles. Starbucks is importing its coffee-education strategy to persuade customers to splurge on a cappuccino. (A grande latte in Chengdu costs about $3.30, a huge sum in a city where locals typically earn less than $7 a day.) Starbucks has seven outlets in Chengdu (more than Peoria, Ill.) and is on its way to 10 to 15.

Foreign investors are lured west by the interior’s lower costs–salaries for highly skilled college graduates in Chengdu are about 30% lower than in Shanghai–as well as tax breaks and other juicy incentives. After Motorola opened a software R&D center in Chengdu in 2001, the city government built the company a special building, complete with a rooftop patio.

Today industrial parks outside the city center house research labs from Nokia and Ericsson. U.S. bearings producer Timken is investing $15 million in a factory that will start production this year. Intel has poured $525 million into two chip-assembly and -packaging plants, one of which opened in 2005, while the second will start production this year. These facilities ship from Chengdu’s airport to customers around the globe. Overall, foreign direct investment in Chengdu totaled $1.9 billion from 2001 to 2005. The results have been spectacular. GDP growth in Chengdu averaged 13.3% between 2001 and 2005, outpacing Shanghai’s 11.9%. In 2005, per capita GDP reached $2,700, still only a third of Shanghai’s but 70% greater than in 2000. Wages have surged more than 90%, to more than $2,400 a year on average during that same period, rapidly approaching Shanghai’s $3,300.

Consumers in Chengdu are taking a page from the American book on spending, since they appear less interested in saving and more willing to take on debt to indulge themselves. Despite having lower incomes, Chengdu ranks among China’s three largest cities in the number of privately owned cars clogging the roads. GM’s sales in Chengdu grew about 40% in 2006, twice that of Beijing. Zhao Jinhui, vice president of Chengdu-based Eastern Kingo Auto Group, a large Chevy dealer in China, says that 22% of his customers finance their purchases, compared with only 5% nationally. “In Beijing, when they get rich, they buy cars; in Shanghai, apartments. In Chengdu, they buy both,” Zhao says.

Chengdu’s car-crazy locals chalk up their carefree spending habits to the city’s more laid-back atmosphere. It’s China’s L.A.; the stressed-out Type A lifestyle is, like, so Shanghai. But also at work is their desire to catch up to China’s wealthier metropolises. Like many nouveau riche, people in Chengdu have got into a keeping-up-with-the-Wangs mentality. Jin Jin, 27, a staff member at a local university, says he spends 10 times more each month than he did two years ago, especially on branded sportswear from Nike, Adidas and Reebok. “The reason I do this is because I cannot make my girlfriend think that I am poor,” he says.

Still, capitalizing on all this new spending isn’t automatic or even easy in a country of 1.3 billion. “I don’t think that it has ever been more difficult to go national than in China,” says William Ghitis, president of global apparel at Invista, the maker of Lycra. One hurdle is the logistical nightmare created by China’s sheer size. Motorola has tripled the number of its sales outlets, to 30,000, in just the past 18 months to penetrate deeper into interior markets. Chapman-Banks says it often takes weeks to get new phones to these outposts. Then there’s the challenge of organizing marketing efforts and training salespeople in such far-flung locales. “This is the most complex market I’ve ever worked in,” he says.

Another problem is staffing. Cities like Chengdu don’t have enough managers with global experience. HSBC, a company with a vast history in China, opened a branch in Chengdu in 2005 to service corporate customers. It would like to begin retail-banking operations in the city, but a dearth of local talent is one factor holding it back. “It is not easy to find staff who are familiar with foreign operations but also have a good understanding of the local market and customs,” says Henry Han, manager of the Chengdu branch.

Many foreign consumer companies are undaunted by such problems, and competition between them is heating up. Helena Tan, general manager of a Buick dealership in Chengdu, says that when she first started managing the business eight years ago, she had three competitors. Now Tan is fighting it out with 15, from Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen to local players like Chery. Tan provides all kinds of extras to keep Chengdu drivers in Buicks, such as handing out hair dryers, rice cookers and other gifts to car buyers and computer games to entertain those waiting for auto repairs. “A few years ago, customers would come in with bags of cash begging you to sell them a car,” Tan says. Those days are over.

The secret to success in cities like Chengdu is going local. French hypermarketer Carrefour, which opened its fifth outlet in Chengdu in January, overhauled its prepared-food department to cook up the chili-laden specialties favored by natives, including marinated rabbit heads and roasted duck jaws. Samsung reopened its operation here in 2004, but it is going native. Shoppers in China’s west, says Ko You Chan, Samsung’s managing director for the western districts, usually expect a small gift when they make a major purchase. So Samsung liberally doles out free DVDs and other goodies. Result: sales of Samsung consumer electronics were up 50% in the region in 2006. The lesson, says Ko, is that “it’s not easy to control everything from Beijing.”

In all likelihood, Chengdu and China’s other interior cities will look more and more like Shanghai every year. The optimistic citizens of Chengdu, such as Liu Xindi, couldn’t imagine anything else. Liu, 33, has seen his income skyrocket 20-fold since he began working 15 years ago. Now Liu, who sells ads for the local Yellow Pages, can splurge whenever he wants on his soccer shoes, badminton racquets and biking gear. But he still thinks the good times are just starting to roll. “Of course, I think my life will be better in the future,” Liu says confidently. “The economy of the city is growing, and it’s not going to stop. There’s no question about it.”

With reporting by Jodi Xu/Beijing

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THE CHINESE CENTURY－second cover story of TIME magazin in 2007

  前阵子订阅了２００７年的TIME时代杂志，上周收到了今年第二期，一看封面故事，“中国世纪”，主要讲述了中国的快速增长对世界，特别是美国的影响。可 能是身在国外的缘故吧，对国外的主流媒体是对中国的报道，特别敏感。一口气看完文章，颇有感触，该文章还是主要在外交方面上讲述中国影响的篇幅比较多。文 章也比较中肯，比如在引用伦敦数据说到中国的军事投入在过去的10年内增长了300%，从1995年GDP的1.08%到2005年的1.55%的时候， 作为对比，提供了美国的数据，GDP的3.8%，且提到美国经济大概是中国的5倍以上。还有一句特别有意思，those westerners who criticize china for its behavior in africa might remember their own history on the continent, 翻译成中文，意思就是：那些批评中国在非洲行为的西方国家应该都会记得他们自己在非洲大陆的历史。这段话是阐述中国在非洲的影响时补充的。言下之意就是 说，那些西方国家不要老是批评现在中国在非洲的所为，要记着自己以前在非洲上所犯过的事情。
付英文原文如下，有兴趣的朋友可以看看。

附英文原文

THE CHINESE CENTURY

                                                BY MICHAEL ELLIOTT

Already a commercial giant, China is aiming to be the world’s next great power. Will that lead to a confrontation with the U.S.?

The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn’t seen a train in years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink façade crumbling away; the local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialists founded long ago is a distant memory, victim of a civil war that lasted for 27 years. Dondo’s fortunes, however, may be looking up. This month, work is scheduled to start on the local section of the line that links the town to the deep harbor at Luanda, Angola’s capital. The work will be done by Chinese construction firms, and as two of their workers survey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his feelings. “Thank you, God,” he says, “for the Chinese.”

That sentiment, or something like it, can be heard a lot these days in Africa, where Chinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textile factories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil, where Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming export trade. And you hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand, where locals used to subsist on whatever they could make from farming and smuggling–until Chinese engineers began blasting the rapids and reefs on the upper Mekong so that large boats could take Chinese-manufactured goods to markets in Southeast Asia. “Before the Chinese came here, you couldn’t find any work,” says Ba, a Burmese immigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from his task hauling sacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for Bangkok. “Now I can send money back home to my family.”

You may know all about the world coming to China–about the hordes of foreign businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showrooms in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less about how China is going out into the world. Through its foreign investments and appetite for raw materials, the world’s most populous country has already transformed economies from Angola to Australia. Now China is turning that commercial might into real political muscle, striding onto the global stage and acting like a nation that very much intends to become the world’s next great power. In the past year, China has established itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations with North Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape the future of central Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe and Latin America and contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. With the U.S. preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terrorism and struggling to extricate itself from a failing war in Iraq, China seems ready to challenge–possibly even undermine–some of Washington’s other foreign policy goals, from halting the genocide in Darfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China’s international role has won the attention of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Tom Lantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and a critic of Beijing’s human-rights record, told TIME that he intends to hold early hearings on China, on everything from its censorship of the Internet to its policies toward Tibet. “China is thinking in much more active terms about its strategy,” says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University of Michigan, who was senior director at the National Security Council Asia desk under President Bill Clinton, “not only regionally, but globally, than it has done in the past. We have seen a sea change in China’s fundamental level of confidence.”

Blink for a moment and you can imagine that–as many Chinese would tell the tale–after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civil war, revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a date with destiny. “The Chinese wouldn’t put it this way themselves,” says Lieberthal. “But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China’s century.”

That’s quite something to believe. Is it true? Or rather–since the century is yet young–will it be true? If so, when, and how would it happen? How comfortable would such a development be for the West? Can China’s rise be managed peaceably by the international system? Or will China so threaten the interests of established powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th century and Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going to be nagging at us for some time–but a peaceful, prosperous future for both China and the West depends on trying to answer them now.

WHAT CHINA WANTS–AND FEARS

If you ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear about China–20% of the world’s population, gazillions of brainy engineers, serried ranks of soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack of doom–remember this: China is still a poor country (GDP per head in 2005 was $1,700, compared with $42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders face so many problems that it is reasonable to wonder how they ever sleep. The country’s urban labor market recently exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension system is nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia, its cities’ air foul beyond imagination and its clean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and growing. Protests and riots by rural workers are measured in the tens of thousands each year. The most immediate priority for China’s leadership is less how to project itself internationally than how to maintain stability in a society that is going through the sort of social and economic change that, in the past, has led to chaos and violence.

And yet for all their internal challenges, the Chinese seem to want their nation to be a bigger player in the world. In a 2006 poll conducted jointly by the the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society, 87% of Chinese respondents thought their country should take a greater role in world affairs. Most Chinese, the survey found, believed China’s global influence would match that of the U.S. within a decade. The most striking aspect of President Hu Jintao’s leadership has been China’s remarkable success in advancing its interests abroad despite turmoil at home.

Surprisingly for those who thought they knew his type, Hu has placed himself at the forefront of China’s new assertiveness. Hu, 64, has never studied outside China and is steeped in the ways of the Communist Party. He became a party member as a university student in the early 1960s and headed the Communist Youth League in the poor western province of Gansu before becoming provincial party chief in Guizhou and later Tibet. Despite a public stiffness in front of foreigners, Hu has been a vigorous ambassador for China: the pattern was set in 2004, when Hu spent two weeks in South America–more time than George W. Bush had spent on the continent in four years–and pledged billions of dollars in investments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba. While Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, was visiting 15 countries last year, Hu spent time in the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. In a three-week period toward the end of 2006, he played host to leaders from 48 African countries in Beijing, went to Vietnam for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, slipped over to Laos for a day and then popped off for a six-day tour of India and Pakistan. For someone whose comfort zone is supposed to be domestic affairs, that’s quite a schedule. “Look at Africa, look at Central America, look at parts of Asia,” says Eberhard Sandschneider, a China scholar who is head of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “They are playing a global game now.”

As it follows Hu’s lead and steps out in the world, what will be China’s priorities? What does it want and what does it fear? The first item on the agenda is straightforward: it is to be left alone. China brooks no interference in its internal affairs, and its definition of what is internal is not in doubt. The status of Tibet, for example, is an internal matter; the Dalai Lama is not a spiritual leader but a “splittist” whose real aim is to break up China. As for Taiwan, China is prepared to tolerate all sorts of temporary uncertainties as to how its status might one day be resolved–but not the central point that there is only one China. Cross that line, and you will hear about it.

This defense of its right to be free of interference has a corollary. China has traditionally detested the intervention by the great powers in other nations’ affairs. An aide to French President Jacques Chirac traces a new Chinese assertiveness to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying, “They felt they can’t allow that sort of meddling in what they see as a nation’s internal affairs.” But the same horror of anything that might smell of foreign intervention was evident long before Iraq. I visited Beijing during the Kosovo war in 1999, and it wasn’t just the notorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that year that outraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO’s rearranging what was left of Yugoslavia. Wasn’t the cause a good one? That didn’t matter.

China’s commitment to nonintervention means that it doesn’t inquire closely into the internal arrangements of others. When all those African leaders met in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by 2009, train 15,000 professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000 students, and help Africa’s health-care and farming sectors. But as a 2005 report by the Council on Foreign Relations notes, “China’s aid and investments are attractive to Africans precisely because they come with no conditionality related to governance, fiscal probity or other concerns of Western donors.” In 2004, when an International Monetary Fund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected corruption, China ponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and money to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused of massive human-rights violations.

Most notoriously, China has consistently used its place as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the Sudanese government to stop the ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinese state-owned company owns 40% of the oil concession in the south of Sudan, and there are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops there protecting Beijing’s oil interests. (By contrast, despite the noise that China made when one of its soldiers was killed by an Israeli air strike on a U.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there are only 1,400 Chinese troops serving in all U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide.) “Is China playing a positive role in developing democracy [in Africa]?” asks Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs. “Largely not.” Human Rights Watch goes further: China’s policies in Africa, it claimed during the Beijing summit, have “propped up some of the continents’ worst human-rights abusers.”

China doesn’t support unsavory regimes for the sake of it. Instead China’s key objective is to ensure a steady supply of natural resources, so that its economy can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lid on unrest at home. That is why China has reached out to resource-rich democracies like Australia and Brazil as much as it has to such international pariahs as Sudan and Burma, both of which have underdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There’s nothing particularly surprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave when domestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustain their economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behavior in Africa might remember their own history on the continent.) But China has never needed such resources in such quantities before, so its politicians have never had to learn the skills of getting them without looking like a dictator’s friend. Now they have to.

WORKING WITH CHINA

Assuming a bigger global presence has forced Beijing to learn the art of international diplomacy. Until recently, China’s foreign policy consisted of little more than bloodcurdling condemnations of hegemonic imperialism. “This is a country that 30 years ago pretty much saw things in zero-sum terms,” says former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. “What was good for the U.S. or the West was bad for China, and vice versa.” Those days are gone. Wang Jisi of Beijing University, one of China’s top foreign policy scholars, says one of the most important developments of 2006 was that the communiqué issued after a key conference on foreign affairs for top officials had no reference to the tired old terms that have been standard in China’s diplomatic vocabulary.

Washington would like Beijing to go further. In a speech in 2005, Zoellick invited China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. China’s national interest, Zoellick argued, should not be narrowly defined, but would be “much better served by working with us to shape the future international system,” on everything from intellectual-property rights to nuclear nonproliferation. Says Zoellick: “I’m not sure anyone had ever put it quite in those terms, and it clearly had a bracing effect.”

That would imply that China’s behavior has changed of late. Has it? A U.S. policymaker cautions, “It’s important to see the ‘responsible stakeholder’ notion as a future vision of China.” In practice, this official says, “They’ve been more helpful in some areas than others.” When the stars align–when China’s perception of its own national interest matches what the U.S. and other international powers seek–that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S. As North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.–which would have implied doing little to rein in Pyongyang–or stiffing its former protégé.

Hu’s personal preferences seem to have helped shape the choice. He is known to have been stingingly critical of Kim in meetings with U.S. officials. Michael Green, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council until December 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups of Americans his skepticism about Kim’s intentions. When the North finally tested a nuke last fall, China joined the U.S. and other regional powers in condemning Kim and supported a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Pyongyang. Says a senior U.S. official: “If you asked experts several years ago, Could you imagine China taking these actions toward a longtime ally in cooperation with us and Japan? Most people would have said no.”

But nobody in Washington is getting carried away. Beijing has been helpful on North Korea because it’s more important to China that Pyongyang not provoke a regional nuclear arms race than it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support. Contrast such helpfulness with China’s behavior on the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In December, China signed a $16 billion contract with Iran to buy natural gas and help develop some oil fields, and it has consistently joined Russia in refusing to back the tough sanctions against Tehran sought by the U.S. and Europe. “It’s hard to say China’s been helpful on Iran,” says a senior U.S. official, and there is little sense that such an assessment will change any time soon.

Within its own neighborhood, there are signs that China’s behavior is changing in more constructive ways. China fought a war with India in 1962 and another with Vietnam in 1979. For years, it supported communist movements dedicated to undermining governments in nations such as Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Yet today China’s relations with its neighbors are nothing but sweetness and light, often at the expense of the U.S. Absorbed by the arc of crisis spreading from the Middle East, the U.S. is simply less visible in Southeast Asia than it once was, and China is stepping into the vacuum.

While American exports to Southeast Asia have been virtually stagnant for the past five years, Chinese trade with the region is soaring. In the northern reaches of Thailand and Laos, you can find whole towns where Mandarin has become the common language and the yuan the local currency. In Chiang Saen, signs in Chinese read CALL CHINA FOR ONLY 12 BAHT A MINUTE. A sign outside the Glory Lotus hotel advertises CLEAN, CHEAP ROOMs in Chinese. It is not aid from the U.S. but trade with China–carried on new highways being built from Kunming in Yunnan province to Hanoi, Mandalay and Bangkok, or along a Mekong River whose channels are full of Chinese goods–that is transforming much of Southeast Asia.

Nor is China’s smiling face visible only to its south. In a cordial state visit last year, Hu reached out to India–an old rival with which it still has some disputed borders. The two countries pledged to double trade by 2010 and agreed to bid jointly for global oil projects on which they had previously been competing. Hu has also sought to mend ties with Japan, another longtime rival, with whom China’s relations have deteriorated in recent years. Last October, Hu met the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in Beijing just days after Abe took office, a visit Hu called a “turning point” in frosty relations between the two countries and which Premier Wen described as a “window of hope.”

WHOSE CENTURY?

So, a China whose influence is growing but that is trying to ease old antagonisms–what’s not to like?

In one view, nothing at all, as long as China’s rise remains peaceful, with China neither provoking others to rein in its power nor slipping into outward aggression. And yet as remote as a confrontation seems today, there are some China watchers who fear a conflict with the West could still materialize in coming years. They point to two factors: the modernization of China’s defense forces and the risk of war over Taiwan. The authoritative Military Balance, published annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, estimates that China’s military spending has increased nearly 300% in the past decade and from 1.08% of its GDP in 1995 to 1.55% in 2005. (By contrast, the U.S. spends 3.9% of its GDP on defense, and the U.S. economy is more than five times as big as China’s.) China’s most recent defense white paper, published last month, showed a 15% rise in military spending in the past year. Place such an increase in the context of Taiwan policy and you can start to feel queasy. The island has been governed independently since the defeated forces of Chiang Kai-shek retreated there in 1949. Beijing wants to see the island reunited with the mainland one day. The U.S., although it has a one-China policy and has no formal diplomatic mission in Taiwan, is committed to defend Taiwan from an unprovoked attack by China.

In all likelihood, war over Taiwan is unlikely. After a miserable 200 years, China’s prospects now are as bright as ever, the opportunities of its people improving each year. It would take a particularly stupid or evil group of leaders to put that glittering prize at risk in a war. Those in Taiwan who favor independence–including its President Chen Shui-bian–have singularly failed to win the support of the Bush Administration. “China,” says Huang Jing of the Brookings Institution in Washington, “is now basically on the same page as the U.S. when it comes to Taiwan. Neither wants independence for Taiwan. Both want peace and stability.” China’s military buildup is best seen as a corollary of changes in Chinese society. Where Chinese military doctrine was once based on human-wave attacks, it now stresses the killing power of technology. There’s nothing new, or particularly frightening, about such a transformation; it’s what nations do all the time. If the Sioux hadn’t learned how to handle horses and shoot Winchesters, they wouldn’t have wiped out Custer’s forces at the Little Bighorn.

But other aspects of China’s rise are real and troubling. China is a one-party state, not a democracy. Some U.S. policymakers and business leaders like to say there is something inevitable about political change in China–that as China gets richer, its population will press for more democratic freedoms and its ruling élite, mindful of the need for change, will grant them. Could be. But China is becoming richer now, and if there is any sign of substantial political reform–or any sign that the absence of such reform is hurting China’s economic growth–it is, to put it mildly, hard to find.

Does China’s lack of democracy necessarily threaten U.S. interests? One answer to that question involves looking back to the cold war. The Soviet Union was not a democracy, and although the U.S. contested its power in all sorts of ways, American policymakers were content to live with the reality of Soviet strength in the hope (correct, as it turned out) that communism’s appeal outside its borders would wither and Russia’s political system would become more open. Is that how the U.S. should treat a nondemocratic China? In the forthcoming book The China Fantasy, James Mann, an experienced China watcher now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, warns that living with a more powerful, nondemocratic Beijing would not be easy for the U.S. In crucial ways, the U.S. has less leverage over China than it ever had over the Soviet Union. China holds billions of dollars of U.S. government assets. American consumers have come to rely on cheap labor in China to provide goods at Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was an economic basket case: it had minimal foreign-exchange reserves and was desperate for U.S. and European high technology.

This lack of leverage over Chinese behavior may make for an uncomfortable future. Mann sees a time when a powerful China not only remains undemocratic but also sustains unpleasant regimes in power, as it does today in such nations as Zimbabwe and Burma. Such behavior could make the world a colder place for freedom. Green, the former National Security Council staff member, agrees that China “wants to build speed bumps on the road to political globalization and liberalization” and is “particularly against any attempt to spread democracy.” Sandschneider, the German China expert, says the Chinese “talk about peace and cooperation and development, which sounds great to European ears–but underneath is a question of brutal competition for energy, for resources and for markets.”

How can that competition be managed? And how can the U.S. and its allies convince the Chinese not to support rogue regimes? The key may be to identify more areas in which China’s national interests align with the West’s and where cooperation brings mutual benefits. China competes aggressively for natural resources. But as David Zweig and Bi Jianhai of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology argued in Foreign Affairs in 2005, it would make just as much sense for the U.S. and China–both gas guzzlers–to pool forces and figure out how to tap renewable sources of energy and conserve existing supplies. For a start, the U.S. could work to get China admitted into the International Energy Agency and the G-8, where such topics are debated.

The U.S. can also encourage China’s leaders to recognize that irresponsible policies will diminish China’s long-term influence. As China expands its global reach, it will find itself exposed to all sorts of pressures–of the sort it has never had to face before–to behave itself. Already, there are voices in Africa warning China that it is acting just like the white imperialists of old. In the Zambian city of Kabwe, where the Chinese own a manganese smelter, the local shops are stocked with Chinese-made clothes rather than local ones. In the oil-rich delta region of Nigeria, where Chinese rigs have a reputation for poor safety and employment practices, a militia group recently warned the Chinese they would be targeted for attack unless they changed their ways.

There are some glimmers that such criticism is having an impact in Beijing. The Chinese, says Joshua Kurlantzick of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “are beginning to understand that some of their policies in Africa are turning people off” and have quietly turned to the U.S. and Britain for help in devising foreign-aid policies. A former senior U.S. official says Chinese officials have been closely monitoring the growing international distaste over its support for the Sudanese government. Congressman Lantos says younger Chinese diplomats “are embarrassed that the Chinese government is prepared to do any business with Sudan for oil despite what is happening in Darfur.” Slowly, slowly, engagement with China, debate with its leaders–and the hope that as they see more of the world, they will understand why so many want to shun dictatorships–may all act to shade Chinese behavior.

Such engagement will always be controversial. Like it or not, it involves cozying up to a nation that is not a democracy–and does not look as if it will become one soon. But China is now so significant a player in the global economy that the alternative–waiting until China changes its ways–won’t fly. There is still time to hope that China’s way into the world will be a smooth one. Perhaps above anything else, the sheer scale of China’s domestic agenda is likely to act as a brake on its doing anything dramatically destabilizing abroad.

On the optimistic view, then, China’s rise to global prominence can be managed. It doesn’t have to lead to the sort of horror that accompanied the emerging power of Germany or Japan. Raise a glass to that, but don’t get too comfortable. There need be no wars between China and the U.S., no catastrophes, no economic competition that gets out of hand. But in this century the relative power of the U.S. is going to decline, and that of China is going to rise. That cake was baked long ago. [This article contains charts and graphs. Please see hardcopy or pdf.]

With reporting by Hannah Beech / Bangkok, Simon Elegant, Susan Jakes / Beijing, James Graff / Paris, Megan Lindow / Dondo, Alex Perry / Johannesburg, Bill Powell / Shanghai, Andrew Purvis / Berlin, Simon Robinson / Kabwe, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson / Washington

Chinese construction workers work on a structure that will be used during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

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