Left Flank

Juan Cole, reporting on the Palistan People's Party's decision to run Makhdum Amin Fahim for prime minister on January 8th, takes a good swipe ridiculing the party of feudalism the PPP is determined to remain.

The PPP during the past two decades has been internally split between a rising middle class urban leadership and the old landowning families. An alternative to Fahim would have been the smart Punjabi lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, who was jailed for protesting the dismissal of the justices, and is admired by a lot of the urban activists. Despite Benazir's own education abroad, her instincts (and now those of her widower) was always to "run the feudals," and to depend on the landlords' ability to get out the vote among their own (largely illiterate and repressed) peasants.

The PPP leadership had a chance to become the party of the future and to galvanize the new middle class, which has spearheaded the challenge to Musharraf over his gutting of the judiciary. It has instead run the feudals again. Fahim seems to me unlikely to generate the sort of excitement that Aitzaz Ahsan would have. But then, the PPP will probably get a big sympathy vote. Once in power, however, unless it pursues policies that benefit urban classes, it will find itself eclipsed.

So, Pakistan=Fief, People=Lord, Party=Clan?

The coming-out party for the son of Pakistan's slain former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and Asif Ali Zardari, now christened for his new role as titular leader of the Pakistan people's Party (PPP), Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, demonstrates the fragility of republican institutions in Asian states. Zardari is 19 years old. Furthermore, he's not even a college graduate, or even, as he admits, knowledgeable about his own country. Zardari's father and a committee will actually run the PPP.

Matthew Yglesias points out the dynastic streak in South Asian politics. Pakistan is also prone to military coups. But, within the context of the continent - setting South Asian dynasties apart - where Japan's prime minister is the second in generations, ROK's conservative party includes the daughter of an assassinated dictator, and DPRK's regime is unabashedly communist and dynastic, perhaps it's fitting to call Asian states elective aristocracies.

The younger Zardari's rise echoes the chilling, emotionally resonant path of his mother, who was thrust into public life after her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 by order of the military ruler, General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq.

Shortly before the official announcement of his ascension at a crowded news conference came a ceremonious rearrangement of the dais. His newly constructed name was pinned to the back of a high-backed red chair, which was then adorned with a cushion and placed at the center of a long table. He entered, dressed in a black salwar kameez, the traditional long tunic and pants, and Armani glasses, biting his lips and carrying a portrait of his mother. He promised to carry on his mother's legacy as "a symbol of the federation."

Rehman Malik, a senior party official, said Bhutto had asked him to coach her son in the basic workings of politics and government, from teaching him how to assess others to taking him to the halls of Parliament.

"She has groomed up her husband," he said. "She was grooming her son also. She was telling me many times he will grow up and take over the party."

For his part, the younger Zardari said he had discussed with his mother the prospects of entering politics, but avoided getting into details about who would take over after her. "We always tried not to have this specific conversation because we hoped this day would come, if not never, then far, far in the future," he said.

The more pertinent question is whether this will make Pakistan more stable. Suicide bombers again detonated themselves, and Pakistan has snubbed American calls for an international commission to investigate Ms. Bhutto's assassination.

The growing questions about Bhutto's assassination have led to calls for an international, independent investigation. While the government dismissed that idea, U.S. officials said Pakistan was quietly consulting with other countries about the conduct of the probe, suggesting the country wants to ensure its findings are seen as credible.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema defended the government's ability to carry out its investigation. He said an independent judicial probe should be completed within seven days of the appointment of its presiding judge.

"This is not an ordinary criminal matter in which we require assistance of the international community. I think we are capable of handling it," he said.

Would a less aristocratic Pakistan be any moe likely to face this issue? Even if Pakistan were stable in the way India is, would bureaucrats want to disclose their secrets any more readily?

(11:31) Upgrade is complete. Due to a slow connection and some server problems, it took awhile and some TLC!

I will start the upgrading process for WP 2.3.2 in a few minutes. Please excuse the inconvenience.

Beijing will delay democratic elections in Hong Kong until 2017, when the current leadership in Beijing will pass behind the gray curtain. "Preserving stability" seems an awfully lame excuse by which to delay the full democratizaion of Hong Kong, as demanded by the Basic Law.

Mr. Tsang and a senior congress official, Qiao Xiaoyang, justified the decision to wait another decade before introducing universal suffrage on the grounds of preserving stability of a community still divided over how and when to achieve full democracy.

Hong Kong still faces a long process of hard negotiation over how the new electoral system will work, and the proposed timetable could be derailed.

The democratic and pro-Beijing forces are deeply divided over many practical issues, including the rules governing a nominating committee that will select candidates for chief executive and how many of them will be able to run.

Beijing's dread of fragmentation was also uttered through Tsang mouth.

Chief Executive Donald Tsang welcomed the ruling, urging Hong Kongers to shelve their differences and work together to hammer out the details.

"We must treasure this hard-earned opportunity," Tsang told reporters. "I sincerely urge everybody to lay down all disagreements and start moving toward conciliation and consensus."

The same fixation on stability that will see Pakistan through, and probably steer relations with Tokyo into calm waters, will delay democracy in Hong Kong.

Joshua Foust recommends two geostrategic essays on Pakistan, and I'll second that. Both are a healthy departure from William Kern's alarmism. Not that the prospect of a nuclear-armed state unravelling is not worrisome, but how often do the interests of Saudi Arabia, India, PRC, and the US line up? The second post reminds the US, as Elizabeth Bumiller reminds us "How Bhutto Won Washington", that "how little the United States fathomed the feudal politics of South Asia, and its own ability to control events in the cauldron of Pakistan."

Ironically, the Bhutto assassination might have more impact on the US primary elections (at least for Senator Joe Biden's chances for third place in Iowa) than on Pakistan.

It's not a game yet, but the US should watch.

On Saturday, Mr. Fûkûdá played catch with Mr. Wen...The symbolism of this should not be underestimated. Playing catch, after all, is one of the oft-cited bonds that united President Bush and former Prime Minister Koizumi. (They played catch at Mr. Bush's ranch when first meeting in June 2001.) What a pointed but understated way for Mr. Fûkûdá to signal to Washington that Japan's priorities are changing, an argument Mr. Fûkûdá made explicitly when he visited Washington in November.

For the moment, concrete progress on disputed issues is beside the point. This is mood-setting, with its significance depending on Mr. Fûkûdá's staying around long enough to convert preliminary overtures into a lasting shift in Japanese foreign policy that will bind his successors. But the mood-setting is necessary. Japan is not in a position to choose between Beijing and Washington. It needs frank but cordial relations with both, although the two relationships are obviously different thanks to Japan's security relationship with the US. I remain unconvinced that grandiose rhetoric, which hints at a desire to prioritize the Sino-Japanese relationship to the detriment of the US-Japan relationship, is the way to change the mood in the Sino-Japanese relationship; by going to Beijing more quietly but no less determined to revive the relationship, Mr. Fûkûdá has, I think, embarrassed Mr. Ozawa yet again.

Now if he could only get certain US presidential candidates to realize that just as Japan has no choice between its largest trading partner and its most significant security partner, so the US has no choice but to maintain healthy relationships with both its long-time ally and trading partner and the emerging power.

Let's wait until April, 2008 to see if Tokyo is not playing catch-up!

Recently, I wrote about Chinese peasants in three provinces demanding land ownership rights. Those provinces were identified as Heilongjiang, Shaanxi, Jiangsu (as well as the city of Tianjin). Now, it seems part of the context in both the Financial Times and Commentary articles I quoted was missing: pollution on Lake Tai.

Joseph Kahn's report on October 13 of this year featured the heroic efforts of Wu Lihong, a 40-year old former factory salesman, to publicize the environmental destruction of Lake Tai, on the border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. That campaign cost him his job, but gained him Communist Party contacts and a certain fame, as well as bad luck.

Hang Yaobin, a truck driver and sundry shop owner in Zhoutie who has also pressed for better environmental controls, said Zhang told Wu that they could improve the environment together. But Wu should expose problems in other jurisdictions and should stop damaging Yixing's reputation.

"Zhang Aiguo told him, 'Don't make me stink, or I'll lose my job. Then we'll accomplish nothing,'" Hang said.

In a telephone interview, Zhang declined to discuss his dealings with Wu in detail. But he acknowledged that the two talked regularly before he was assigned to another position in the Yixing government.

In 2003, Zhang offered Wu a business opportunity. A steel plant in Zhoutie had been ordered by environmental authorities to buy new dust-control equipment. Wu could find a vendor for the equipment and earn a handsome commission, several people told about the arrangement said.

Zhang confirmed that he told Wu of the opportunity.

Wu debated whether to accept. Hang said he advised his friend against it. "If you're engaged in a confrontation with officials you can't gamble, or visit prostitutes, or have any other vice," Han said. "They are always looking for ways to get you."

But this contract involved an environmental cleanup. And with both Wu and his wife out of work, they needed money. Wu agreed to contact a vendor recommended by Zhang.

It was not a rewarding endeavor. He brokered a contract. But the dust-control company gave him only a token advance on his promised commission. The steel plant boss, who had befriended Wu, eventually withheld part of what he owed the dust-control company to compensate Wu, according to Xu, his wife.

That was one of several muddled interactions with local officials and businessmen that did not satisfy either side. Wu remained cash-strapped. He did not stop contacting Nanjing and Beijing about pollution problems.

Wu's experience is part of the broader problem surrounding land ownership rights. Without title to their own property, peasants are forced to protest, rather than sue with title in hand.

The announcement last week that the Ministry of Commerce would join the weak State Environmental Protection Administration in enforcing environmental regulations is good news. But between the concerns of local residents and those of massive manufacturing operations, the government is clear where it stands. The locals have little hope of restraining businesses' excesses.

"Only the collective villages, or the village groups, are the legal owners of the land. That gives the farmers a significant disadvantage if their land suffers pollution in some way," added Mr Zhu.

In the US, developments like that around Tai Lake would lead to a local backlash, campaigns and media attention. Property owners could band together and pursue class-action lawsuits against the companies polluting their land and water sources. It's hard to do that, however, when you don't have paper contracts or certificates to prove you own the properties being polluted.

In August, the State Council approved a plan to issue land-rights documentation to 90 per cent of farm households by the end of the year. But that's an extraordinarily ambitious goal, and without proof of ownership, farmers have little recourse. Beijing has been slow to acknowledge the extent of the pollution around Tai Lake, but lately it has begun using the internet to encourage local and grass-roots responses to the most egregious cases. Contamination has grown so pervasive that the government needs eyes and ears on the ground.

But for years, Beijing and businesses have worked hand in hand to build manufacturing facilities and there are endless numbers of foreign companies trying to reap the benefits. The government remains, at best, capricious in its enforcement efforts.

it's the political difference between a distant bureaucracy contemplating reform and citizens with the power and right to demand redress peacefully.

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up «Guns, Germs, and Steel» and seeing that it had been framed around what was called «Yali's question.»

Yali was a political leader and a member of a «cargo cult» that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, «Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?»

Thus began Dr. Diamond's tale about the combination of geographical factors that led to Europeans' colonizing Papua New Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans' colonizing Europe.

«We think he gets Yali's question wrong,» Dr. Gewertz said. «Yali was not asking about nifty Western stuff.»

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, the islanders would have been able to trade with them as equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the world through others' eyes.

George Johnson recounts how he encountered "a clash of world views", and one foreign to his own: anthropologists in Arizona. His bhTV interlocutor, John Horgan, is dead on, too: the anthropologists' criticisms of Diamonds' two books ARE contradictory. They are not interested in Johnson's simple universal patterns, but in "exceptions". Talk about a weird world!

The first salvo of my response to the anthropologists is on the bhTV forum.