The Great Firewall of China

After the American Century

The Chinese government has ordered all computer makers to pre-install a censorship program on new computers. (See New York Times for details) This is to begin in less than two weeks, on July 1. Will the big computer firms stand up to the Chinese on this? Hewlett Packard and Dell have asked the government to reconsider, and clearly the world's computer makers are not comfortable with the plan. But will their belief in democratic principles of free speech be strong enough to withstand the fear of profit losses?

China already has a bad track record on censorship, and makes great efforts to prevent the flow of information or dissent on certain issues. James Fallows has written a penetrating article on this, based on his experiences of (trying to) use the Internet inside China during the Olympics last summer. But evidently the Chinese government feels that blocking many sites and trying to control the flow of information through monitoring is not enough. It wants to have direct control over every single PC in the country. It wants an impenetrable Great Firewall.

The importance of the Internet in promoting freedom of speech is obvious in the present crisis in Iran. There, too, the central government is trying hard to block all communications with the outside world. The Iranian government already controls and censors the newspapers, radio, and television. If it had a Chinese style program installed on every PC in the country, then control might be absolute.

At moments like this, one can only hope that programmers who believe in free speech will develop ways to disconnect or disable the censorship software. Fortunately, there are quite a few computer people who want cyberspace to be free of censorship, notably those who set up the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The naked Chinese challenge to the computer industry should worry anyone who believes in freedom of speech and democracy. It is more than dismal to contemplate a major nuclear power that crushes Tibet and thwarts all criticism. The twenty-first century may well turn out to be "the Asian century." Will that mean a century of greater censorship, more dictatorship, and trumped up xenophobia? Iran may provide part of the answer in the coming weeks, but so too will China, if it succeeds in stifling the Internet.

In the next two weeks, will any governments speak out against the Chinese plan? Or are markets more important than principles? Centuries ago China spent vast resources building a Great Wall to keep out the barbarians. It ultimately failed to do this, and one can hope the same will be true of the Great Firewall.

If you want to find out if any site is censored out of existence in China, check out greatfirewallofchina.org

Who Should Be Paid for Danish Research?

After the American Century

The Danish universities are moving to what labor historians would call a "piece rate system." That is, money for research will be paid not on the basis of weeks or months devoted to research, but rather on the basis of how many items are produced.

A new form of exploitation may emerge in this system. Exploitation is a strong word, so let me be clear what I mean by it. Workers are exploited if another person or institution is paid for their work. If I build a wall, and someone else, not me, gets paid for my work, that is exploitation.

Is something akin to this happening in Danish universities? Quite possibly. Every university has a number of recent PhDs who have completed their studies and who teach part time. (In many cases they are paid only as teaching assistants, which I think should not be allowed. Once you have a PhD, the proper title and pay scale should be that of external lecturer.) My concern is that these recent PhDs do not have research appointments. They only are paid, and rather badly, for their teaching. Nevertheless, they do their best to publish articles and books, for that is the surest path to full-time employment.

Who gets financial credit for a recent PhD's publications? I have asked around, and it seems that these new PhDs are encouraged to register their work, i.e. put it into each university's database. The system's acronym is, ironically enough, PURE. But there is nothing "pure" about hiring people only for their teaching and then including their research in the university's productivity. Why should the university be paid for publications by people whom it does not employ to do research? How would you feel if, outside your regular job, you painted a picture or renovated a car, and then suddenly your employer was able to send a bill to the government for that work, while you got nothing?

Is this happening? I fear it is. I know for certain that when university departments undergo accreditation reviews, the publications of recent PhDs at times are included in the statistics. Admittedly, this is a gray area, because typically these publications are portions of a PhD thesis, rewritten into articles. And the PhD thesis was written while on a research appointment. Nevertheless, it does not feel entirely right or fair. And for how many years can a university claim the publications of its recent PhDs?

Note too that retired faculty also may continue to publish. Can or should the Danish universities be paid for this work, which again they do not support financially?

There is a simple solution to this problem. Pay the writer for a publication directly unless he or she has a university research contract. This would mean that if a person does not have university employment, they could still be rewarded. Why should the government pay the university for the completion of research it did not support? Why should a scholarly publication by a private individual be worth nothing, if a publication produced by a university employee automatically releases funding?

To see the absurdity, translate this into agricultural terms. Imagine that there are university farmers who are paid for the crops they grow. Imagine that there are private farmers who are paid nothing for their crops. And imagine that university farmers find ways to claim the production of the private farmers, in order to get a completely unearned additional subsidy. Who would think that a fair policy?

The Danish universities do not seem to have quite reached this form of exploitation, but they appear to be headed that way. No one consciously planned this situation, which rather seems to be an unintended outcome. But it has dire consequences. If such a system is allowed to flourish, then universities will profit if they can produce many PhDs, keep them around as poorly paid part-time teachers, and claim credit for the research they do on their own. This is presumably not what the government wanted to do by introducing a piece-rate system.

[For critique of the new bibliometric system itself, see March 21, 2009
The Bureaucratic Dream of Quantifying Research Results

Iran Delegitimizes Its Election

After the American Century

Elections are the central events in democracies, giving voters the chance to reject some candidates and embrace others. A fair and free election strengthens the rule of the people, as both winners and losers learn to accept the will of the voters. But the farcical election in Iran does none of these things. No one can seriously believe that only two hours after the polls closed that the 46 million votes had been counted. No one thinks that all the opinion polls taken before the election were wrong. They showed a close race, with no one likely to get a majority. Yet shortly after the polls closed the government could announce that what had appeared to be a close contest actually was a lop-sided landslide, in which the incumbent received almost two-thirds of the vote.

Democratic elections also include extensive public discussion about what happened and reconciliation between the winning and losing candidates. But in Iran the government has used tear gas to break up rallies, shut down internet sites, intimidated opposition politicians, and cut off the use of text messaging. In doing so, the Iranian government throws further doubt on the legality of the election, enrages the opposition, and disqualifies itself. It is an insult to world opinion to pretend that this has been a free or fair process.

Once again, the educated, middle-class Iranians have been robbed of the opportunity to build a modern state that is part of an international world of states. Instead, critics who claim that Islam and democracy are fundamentally incompatible have another dismaying example for their arguments. But I remain hopeful that one day Iran will peacefully join the larger world as a democratic state. I say this because of the passion for justice, fairness, and democracy demonstrated in the election campaign. Sadly, however, it appears Iran will inflict much suffering on itself before reaching that goal.

Democracy in Iran?

After the American Century

I have followed Iranian politics, casually to be sure, for almost half a century. This is for the simple reason that I had an aunt who married an Iranian lawyer and remained in the country after originally going there to teach. She had a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Michigan, a somewhat unusual achievement for a woman in c. 1940. There were few university jobs available then (i.e. probably none), and so she took a series of interesting positions working for the US government in agencies that were precursors for the Peace Corps. First she taught in Bolivia and Peru. where she perfected her Spanish. Later she taught English in India briefly, before ending up in Tehran.

My Aunt Gertrude was a powerful personality. Think of the strong women in American cinema from the same era, like Kathrine Hepburn. She was adventurous, eloquent, forceful, and a wonderful role model for a kid growing up. Th exotic aunt who not only had a professional job, but a series of positions in many parts of the world.

She gave most of her professional life to improving the teaching of English in Iran, putting in more than 25 years before the Shah's government fell. By then she was over sixty years old, and because she was perceived to be an old woman, she was left alone by the Revolution. This is not the place for more about her, but she remained in the country for several more years, until it became clear that she would never be allowed to teach or take an active part in the cultural life of the nation again. Then she returned to the US, with her Iranian daughter, who still lives there today. Aunt Gertrude herself lived to be over 90.

Now let me read this little story as a minature version of what has happened to Iran. Until 1979 the nation was modernizing rapidly, using its oil money to develop a middle-class. This middle class embraced foreigners like my Aunt, who had married one of their own, who spoke the language, and who had only the country's betterment at heart. But the growth of this middle-class also brought discontent with a monarchical form of government. The urban middle class wanted a democracy and more western form of government. But the rural people and the poor disliked the Shah for quite a different reason, because he was secularizing the society. Religious fundamentalism swept through the country, and the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini became the idealized leader who would return Iran to its religious roots.

The problem in late 1970s was that not enough people like my Aunt Gertrude had been there, nor had they been there long enough, to nurture the transition to a secular, democratic state. The forces against the Shaw were strong enough to topple him, but there was no unity amongst the university students, peasants, and religious leaders who together brought him down. In the ensuing power struggle, obviously won by the fundamentalists, many of the talented young (like my cousin, Aunt Gertrude's daughter) left the country for ever.

In the election yesterday, the struggle appears once again to be between city and country, between middle class and rural peasants, and between modern Muslims and fundamentalists. The basic inconsistency, the core problem that came to light in the late 1970s, has not yet been resolved. But the terms of struggle have changed someone. For no truly secular figure had a chance in this election. Rather, the two leading candidates were each to the right of where their counterparts might have been thirty years ago. The current President Ahmadinejad is a right-wing demagogue who revels in confrontation with the West. His strongest opponent , Mir Hossein Mousavi, is a former prime minister of the country, and generally defined as a "right-wing reformer." This I translate to mean that his policies are at least informed by economic theory and pragmatic evaluations of consequences. A liberal he is not.

Both men have claimed victory. The government began playing games with the telephone system during the election, controls the media which all too-quickly announced a decisive victory for the incumbent, and has already used police to break up peaceful demonstrations in favor of Mousavi. Ideally this crisis will end well, with a run-off election between the two main candidates, as prescribed by law if no one receives more than half the votes. But it may be too soon for such a disciplined and secular outcome, and Iran could be falling into an intractable crisis.

If the Media is National, Can the EU be International?

After the American Century

I have been looking at coverage of the EU elections on a wide variety of stations, but the story is much the same everywhere, or rather it is entirely different everywhere. On German television, the election is about German political parties and their relative strengths. Nothing is said about the rest of Europe. On Spanish TV the results for their 50 delegates are revealed at precisely 10 PM, when the polls have closed all over Europe. Nothing is said about results elsewhere, however. On CNN they say that the election is taking place, mention that the German Social Democrats have had a bad election (but no details), and focus more on Gordon Brown's weaknesses, as revealed by Labor's poor showing.

In short, the media is national, the languages are national, and the focus is parochial. Not a word about whether the new European Parliament will favor environmental reform, cuts in the massive agricultural subsidies, or greater investments in research and development. These topics are not even mentioned in passing. It is all about the local, the particular, the parochial, and close to being idiotic.

Imagine that you lived in Nebraska during the time of an American general election, when all members of Congress and one third of the Senate were being selected. Imagine that you turn on the TV to hear the results, and can only find out about how the election went in Nebraska. You also get a station from Kansas, so you hear those results as well. But no one talks about the election as a whole, about what the balance of power will be in Washington. Not a single sentence on this subject. The entire focus is on Nebraska and its political parties. To make the comparison complete, you would have to imagine a European party system, i.e. Nebraska would have at least five parties, five leaders to interview, five news conferences, and so forth.

How can Europe ever become conscious of itself in this situation? As long as the media remain fixated on the parochial level of individual states, no one will know what is going on in Brussels, and no one will care. There is no European public opinion, there are only various national opinions, splintered into small parties.

Does the EU Know that It Exists?

After the American Century Today ends the election of representatives to the EU's equivalent of parliament or Congress. It has been a sad spectacle in Denmark. I heard many candidates during the past few weeks, but I did not hear anything wise or even very intelligent about the European Union. To judge by the tenor of the discussions, Danes have no idea what the EU does, or what they are electing people to do. Worse, they seem to send two kinds of candidates, those who are nearing retirement or people who are rather young and wet behind the ears. From this, I can only conclude that Danes do not really understand that the EU exists. It is more like a hypothesis or an idea that is being tried mostly elsewhere. There are still politicians getting a serious hearing in this country who want to withdraw from the union. Much the same seems to be the case in many other countries. Voter turnout is low, apathy about issues common, and confusion about the point of the exercise rampant. The situation is much as it was in the United States in about 1830. Loyalty then remained to the state where one lived, at least as much as to the united stat4es, or nation. What will the EU do if it faces a real military or foreign policy crisis? If people scarcely know it exists, they are not going to fight and die for it.

Obama in Egypt

After the American Century

Later today President Obama will make a major address to the Arab and Muslim worlds. I will not try to second-guess the content of this speech, which has been long in preparation, and which has benefited from the advice of Arab American business leaders, foreign policy experts, and his own staff. But the importance of the gesture and the symbolism should not be lost in thinking about the content. The gesture is a clear declaration that the United States wants a new relationship with the Middle East, and that he regards Egypt as the central player in bringing about change. Only if Egypt can help broker a peace, is it likely to have staying power. Of almost equal importance are the Saudis, whom Obama visited first. The gesture also includes the fact that the address will be given at arguably the most important university in the region and in the largest city of the region, Cairo. Obama thus appeals directly to intellectuals and to young people, both of whom are important, even crucial, to making the United States more popular (or at least less unpopular).

This gesture might have had little possibility of success were the speaker to be George Bush or John McCain. But because the speaker is a generation younger, because his father's family is Muslim, and because he has committed his administration to closing the illegal jails in Cuba and ending the war in Iraq, there is a chance that the speech will mark a turning point. Only a chance, but a real one. That depends on what he says later today, and also on proximate events, mostly beyond his control.

One good sign: extremists have attacked the visit beforehand, including Israelis determined to stay on the West Bank, and Al Queda. He must be doing something right.

Sonia Sotomayor: Superbly Qualified

After the American Century

President Obama has named Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the Supreme Court. It is a good choice. Many are saying it is a good choice because she is a woman, because she is Hispanic, because she is in favor of affirmative action, and because she has risen from humble origins, making her personally aware of the hardships faced by the poor in American society.

This is all well and good, but I applaud her nomination for a different reason: because she has the right credentials. Sonia Sotomayor is very bright. She went to Princeton on a scholarship and graduated summa cum laude. For those less familiar with the American education system, this means that she was at the absolute top of her class, receiving high grades in a wide range of subjects as part of a liberal arts education. Then she went to Yale law school, where she again excelled, becoming an editor of the law journal. Even to make law review at all would have been a great accomplishment, but to be selected as an editor means that she was judged to have the capacity to grasp a wide range of legal issues and to prod some large egos to work together. All of that bodes very well for a future Supreme Court justice.

In short, I am tired of hearing that someone will be good at a job because they are of a particular gender or social background. Relevant? Absolutely. The decisive factor? No. Want proof? Consider Clarence Thomas, an African American who rose from humble origins to become a mediocre justice (at best), appointed by George Bush, Senior. Or that pathetic female nominee, Harriet Miers, the evangelical Christian tort lawyer that George Bush Jr nominated but had to withdraw because even his own party could not stomach her. We need smart, hard-working justices, not party hacks who provide the illusion of diversity. Most of the issues that confront the Supreme Court are not about abortion or race, but about extremely complex legal problems, that have to be understood in terms of the continuing interpretation of the Constitution during the last 220 years. I want to see people who have exception talent and also worked exceptionally hard, and so graduated summa cum laude on the Court. Sonia Sotomayor is one of those rare people.

Just as importantly, Sonia Sotomayor has years of practical experience. She has worked in a district attorney's office, prosecuting cases of theft, murder, robbery, rape, and child pornography. She also has worked as a lawyer in private practice, and she knows a good deal about intellectual property law, which is a burgeoning area where many cases are likely, because digital technologies demand new interpretations of the legal tradition. Most importantly, she has been a Federal Judge, nominated first by that notorious radical George Bush Senior, and later promoted to her present position in at the United States Court of Appeals by Bill Clinton.

The Senate approved her elevation to this new position by a more than 2 to 1 majority, which in 1998 included many Republicans, notably Orrin Hatch, hardly a lefty or a liberal. Conceivably the Republicans will try to mount a challenge to this appointment, but Sonia Sotomayor probably is more intelligent than any of the people who will be questioning her at the confirmation hearings. If the Republicans want to get something out of this, they probably ought to celebrate the fact that Sonia Sotomayor entered the judiciary because a Republican president appointed her. The recent Republican project of self-destruction (by appealing to the rabid base and alienating moderates) may not be quite over yet, however.

However, it also seems likely that, unless some fantastic revelation comes out in the hearings, Sonia Sotomayor will soon be on the Supreme Court. She deserves to be there because of her excellent education and experience, and not merely because she is a woman or a member of a racial minority. And since she is 54, one could hope to see her on the bench for two decades.

Majority Leader Hoyer and Denmark

After the American Century

Yesterday I attended a reception for "Steny" Hoyer who is the Majority Leader in the United States House of Representatives. To look at the distinguished silver-haired gentlement, you might think he was the perfect example of someone connected to old patrician money. He wore a blue blazer with gold buttons, gray pants, and a light blue shirt. He spoke well, stood straight and looked right in your eyes when shaking hands, and managed to do that with everyone in the room. As he represents a district in Maryland, it might seem that he is from an old planter family, that arrived in the seventeenth century.

In fact, Steny Hoyer is the son of a Danish immigrant, and his father's name was Steen Høyer. He was visiting Denmark in part to have dinner with twelve cousins who live here. He is also to meet with various members of the Danish government and no doubt pass by the American Embassy. As he noted in a short talk he gave at the reception, the visit is prompted in part by the coming summit meeting on the world's climate, that will take place at the end of this year in Copenhagen.

Those of us meeting Steny Hoyer yesterday, however, were guests of American Democrats Abroad, an international organization that sends delegates to the national conventions of the Democratic Party every four years, and whose members, of course, vote in elections. Representative Hoyer does not really need our votes, as he generally gets more than 70% of the vote in his district and is the longest serving member of the House in the history of Maryland. But he came by and gave us almost two hours of his time, because, as he noted, the Americans who live abroad are the face of the US - not abstractions, not policies, but people who better than any passing diplomat, and whether they like it or not, are the daily representatives of the United States. I have known this for years, but it was nice to hear it from one of the highest elected officials. Americans abroad also try to tell people in the United States how the country could learn from other nations. Hoyer knew that too, and spoke about what might be learned from the Danish health care system.

So all in all, I have disturbingly little to criticize and much to happy about as I reflect on Hoyer's immigrant background, his ties to Denmark, and his deportment yesterday. He should come more often.