He goes by “Charlie” in English, which he speaks very well, having spent some five years studying here in the states. Charlie is what one might call a “junzi” — a Confucian gentleman. In terms of status, a junzi is essentially the Chinese version of a knight, but scholarly pursuits and cultural refinement are far more important than in the Western tradition. Of course, feudal China has been gone for sixty years, but just as in the West, old tradition continues to resonate throughout the modern culture.

As a man, my friend is an admirable person. He is far from what one might consider a brash “alpha male” here in the states, but he has a sensibility and self-confidence that give him a great deal of success with women in China, and I would dare say that these traits would serve him well here — if he cared for American women (he doesn’t).

This got me to thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western gender relations, and what it is about China, which is the cultural center of East Asia, that allows men to maintain a higher status relative to women than they do in Western cultures.

Before I single out China, I should note that China is not the only country in which men have a higher status than they do in the West — in fact, cultures derived from Northwest Europe are unique around the world for elevating their women while affording no special status to men. However, I know a lot more about China than I do about India, the Middle East, Persia and other non-Western civilizations, so that’s what I’ll stick to here.

The difference comes down to Confucianism, which is the philosophy that serves as the basis for Chinese civilization. Confucianism proposes that a proper hierarchical structure of human relationships in the temporal world is pleasing to God (called “Heaven” in most Chinese texts). In this structure, each individual has a proper place. Fathers are above sons, officials above the people, rulers above the officials, etc. Of course, husbands are explicitly above wives.

Confucianism specifies five primary relationships:

• Ruler to Subject
• Father to Son
• Husband to Wife
• Elder Brother to Younger Brother
• Friend to Friend

The only one that specifies the female place in relationships is that of husband to wife. Even friend to friend is about male camaraderie, such as that Confucius himself expresses from time to time in the Analects. A wife’s duty is to submit to her husband, and the husband’s duty is to treat his wife lovingly. This is a very simple arrangement, and similar to Christian ideals concerning marriage.

However, there are some big differences between Confucianism and Christianity, which is the most influential philosophical force in the West. Perhaps most importantly, Confucius does not profess to know the Word of God, but rather suggests that observing the laws of nature can give one a sense of Heaven’s intent. Therefore, there is no real concept of heresy in Confucian thought; however, impropriety takes on far greater significance than it does in Christianity. For example, failing to be virtuous and improperly following rituals can bring down the wrath of Heaven in the form of great disasters and social upheavals.

Christians may be equipped with the Word of God, but they are left to figure out hierarchy and order in the temporal world by themselves through clues in scripture and the structure of the early church. Part of the reason for this is that early Christians came from a marginalized community that had no real hope of ruling the state. To them, the order was clear: Rome rules, leaving their primary concern as the community’s relationship with God. Confucius, for his part, was speaking directly to rulers — he was explicitly trying to influence governance.

So today, when neither Christianity nor Confucius are officially canon, but both have a strong, essential influence on the civilizations they founded, we can find the most confusion in terms of hierarchy in places where the Word of God (i.e. divine authority) has the most weight in relation to concepts of temporal order (including ecclesiastical order). This is why Southern and Eastern Europe, with their respective Catholic and Orthodox sensibilities, have retained more of the traditional order than the parts of Europe and the United States most strongly influenced by the egalitariam Protestantism that democratized the Word of God, sweeping away whatever order may have existed in the barbarous marchlands of Northern Europe and settlements of Colonial America.

A further tendency to identify with the early Christians in Palestine through a common contempt for Rome tends to lend a strong iconoclastic streak to the American nature. This contempt for the conventional has been the source of much American progress – both moral and material – over the relatively brief existence of the American people, but it is also one of the sources of our present confusion in gender relations. America has repeatedly justified itself on divine authority despite a lack of consensus on how divine authority is to be interpreted, and even over what constitutes such authority. So one can see the strange phenomenon of Americans, even if they proclaim atheism, behaving as though there is some sort of irrefutable weight to their beliefs, which must be sanctioned by some force or the other (perhaps Darwin has become a spook?). Justifications through scripture have also become increasingly odd and divorced from reality, such as Governor Sanford’s attempt to use scripture to ameliorate his shameless adultery. Wouldn’t it have been better for him to simply say that he was only sating a hunger, reprehensible though his behavior may have been? No, not here; he had to make an attempt to sanctify it somehow.

It is this fragmented, febrile and often myopic interpretation of divine authority (how could it be otherwise?) that leads to an utter lack of consensus on propriety in American culture. In this bubbling cauldron of opinions and ideas, where every heresy has equal weight, there can be no lasting sense of order that sustains society. Rather, the survival of the state itself has become orthodoxy in America, and the impermanence, turnover and anarchy of society has become its corollary — or perhaps even the necessary ingredient of this orthodoxy.

We see the converse in Chinese civilization, where it is assumed that social order undergirds the state, and divine favor is granted through the preservation of that order. The state that fails to do so loses this favor, and is eventually crushed. So in China one gets the sense that the people and their customs survive and prevail despite the periodic failures of the state, whereas in America today it is taught that the state survives and prevails despite the periodic failures of the American people. This is really the essence of the term “propositional nation,” or “creedal nation.”

The current situation in America is not unprecedented — not even in China itself. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 saw social order turned on its head in China. Mao, in a bid to reestablish power following a temporary fall from grace in the early 1960s (resulting from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward), drew from his base – largely young devotees of his personality cult – and declared a state of perpetual revolution. Students as young as 12 denounced and disciplined teachers, and doctors and experts of all sorts were dragged from their professions for being counter-revolutionary and hauled before criticism committees, where they were slandered, humiliated and beaten. The inevitable result was the breakdown of China’s society, which had profound implications for millions of people whose lives were put on hold, or worse, for a decade.

Finally, in 1976 Mao’s death and the devastating Tangshan earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands, were widely seen as signs of divine disfavor, and the Chinese began to slowly return to tradition and the ancient social norms. Today, the Cultural Revolution is known as Mao’s greatest error, and seen as a great offense against the natural order of society. This, as I mentioned before, is the Chinese version of heresy.

Naturally, having been around for 2,200 years, unified China has seen many periods of dysfunctional government that eventually led to dynastic collapse, the most recent of which occurred less than a century ago. Like the current American state, Chinese governments have always done their best to survive, and in doing so have upset the natural order countless times. The fact that such a strong notion of tradition exists in China is testament to these repeated failures, which have tempered the Chinese people and civilization through periodic trials and tests.

Perhaps we Americans are on the verge of such a trial — we may even be in the midst of one today. When the state takes precedence over the people, it bends the people to suit its needs, and this is why we are observing such a radical departure from established norms. America’s national philosophy, which is still not fully formed, does not need to be done away with, but it is becoming clear at this point that adjustments must be made. Our radical individualism has taken us to a point where our country cannot hold together without the rigid system of law and regulation that stifles rather than promotes freedom. So we find that our lack of consensus and rejection of any common, unifying philosophy and spirituality has come to imprison us in a rigid institution that grants us all a cell of our own, but does not allow the uplifting and liberating experience of living in a true national community with a common purpose.

This is why we live in such contentious confusing times. It is why so many have no idea of, or appreciation for, their natural place in our world.

Only one of the captured Uyghurs is alleged to be an Al-Qaeda member, and the rest were largely unfortunate men who had fled China or were trying to resist the PRC in one way or the other. None had any real argument with the United States, and they all appear to have been largely ignorant concerning the jihad against the US. In fact, prior to their capture, most thought of the US as an ally in their struggle against the PRC. To sum it up, they were mainly hapless political dissidents rather than hardcore jihadis.

Now what I’d really like to know, given the recent unrest in Xinjiang, is exactly what kind of intelligence they provided interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Given that at least a few of them probably were sincere about resisting China in Xinjiang, and were allegedly plugged into the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (which may not actually exist), it would seem that these Uyghurs could be of great value to the US in harassing China.

The significance of Palau as a potential refuge for the Uyghurs has to do with its location, a recent defense deal, and historical operations carried out in the region. Although few people are aware that during the 1950s and 60s the US supported a guerrilla war against China through Tibetan activists, this was in fact an important CIA operation that yielded significant intelligence for the US on the then-isolated PRC. Tibetan dissidents were flown to the US for training, but the center of the operation was in Saipan, a US territory in the Pacific located relatively close to Palau.

Palau gained independence from the US in 1994, but the countries have continued to maintain a close relationship. Recently, Palau was offered $200 million as an incentive to continue to work with United States “sharing mutual burdens,” which according to William Cleary in a Pacific Daily News article, “[...] is a bargain in which the U.S. arguably will get its money’s worth by keeping the military forces of China and other rival powers out of Palau.”

Now, of course, the Chinese are stridently demanding the return of each and every Uyghur. China is using every bit of diplomatic leverage it can to have them returned, and most countries have shied away from offering them asylum. Ultimately, this may be in the interests of the US (which, I am starting to think, wants the Uyghurs working for our intelligence services) because they will be forced to stay on US territory or in satellite states such as Palau.

Evidently only one Uyghur has so far agreed to relocate to Palau, but eventually the number may rise, because 17 remain in Gitmo, and Chinese pressure guarantees that their options will be limited. I can imagine a new guerrilla operation intended to harass and pressure China through Xinjiang being run, at least partially, out of Palau. Because we now have a number of real, live ethnic Uyghur dissidents in US hands, the US has the tools to stir up trouble in China’s backyard, and I assume they will be put to use.

When living in the PRC, although very young, I had a strong feeling that there was a fundamental imbalance in the global economy. I had left the US at a time when fortunes were just starting to soar with the dotcom boom, development was ramping up and people were living at an unparalleled level of affluence. High school kids were driving giant SUVs, hip new shopping malls were sprouting in previously barren lots, and the mega stores like Costco and WalMart were beginning to establish themselves as the models for American consumption. It was an odd phenomenon to watch overfed Americans hefting pallets of goods into cavernous vehicles even before I saw how the other half of humanity lived.

So when I arrived in China and saw how little most people had, I began to wonder what exactly it was that sustained American consumption, and soon the answer became apparent. China was booming at the time, and still is. Millions of people were working on construction projects and in manufacturing, and what they were producing was very tangible. Buildings were going up all over the place, and stores were bursting with cheap manufactured products. The North Face jackets one would pay hundreds of dollars to buy in an American department store could be bought for a a mere $50 in markets like Hongqiao, which was my favorite place to buy pearls.

Because China was awash in goods, many of which were of limited value to the Chinese, who had little space in their meager apartments and still hadn’t adopted a consumer culture, practically any American with the proper resources could purchase containers and ship these products to America, selling them for a steep profit. The Chinese were certainly making money off of these manufactured goods, but it was the American middlemen who were really cleaning up. In retrospect, I can see that it was this model that came to dominate the American economy over the last fifteen years or so.

In order to sustain growth in a post-industrial United States, we had to figure out a way to make money off of other countries’ labor, and China became the most important provider of that labor. However, as the growth in consumption of goods manufactured in China began to taper off this decade, we needed to find another product of Chinese labor to sell, and so, increasingly, we began to sell their savings. The US real estate boom was financed with the cash Chinese workers were putting in their banks.

Because Chinese save so much of their money, their interest rate is very low. For the most part, Chinese operate on the basis of cash, credit being a risky proposition. However, their banks were willing to extend credit to the United States in return for federally guaranteed treasuries. So, through the Federal Reserve, our banks took this cash and pumped it into the real estate market, inflating it to ridiculous proportions. As long as the boom held up, people were happily reaping profits on both sides of the Pacific.

However, nothing lasts forever – especially not speculative bubbles – and now we are left with an incredible debt and little to no profit to pay it off. This time, there’s nothing credible to replace the real estate scam. Some have mentioned carbon credits, but there’s no way the Chinese, who are now the world’s largest producers of CO2, will ever buy into that scheme. But we do have assets…

Here’s where Goldman Sachs and friends come into the equation. Through their dominance of the Federal Reserve, they will have the money and the power to purchase valuable, but financially struggling assets, which they will turn around and sell for a cut. Who will they sell these assets to? Why, whoever can pay for them, and that happens to be the Chinese. The Chinese will demand a good deal, because we do, of course, owe them a whole lot of money, and how else can we make good on those federal guarantees?

So my prediction is that American assets will start to be sold to foreigners, Chinese in particular, and the oligarchs at Goldman Sachs will make a killing off these deals. What assets will these be? Probably a number of natural resource extraction companies, some factories, technology, aerospace, etc. I can imagine some pharmaceutical companies being sold off as well. Americans might assume the government will protect our vital economic assets, but I don’t think so. Those in government understand that their job, just like a postal worker’s, requires a paycheck. Government is expensive, and those who work in it do not want to become unemployed. Therefore, if the price they have to pay for continuing to do business is selling out the American people, they will quietly do so. And anyway, American business isn’t laying many golden eggs these days. From a Chinese perspective, it might simply be a better idea to throw the goose in a pot and cook it.

American middlemen will continue to grow fat off of international deals, but this time it won’t be Chinese trinkets in WalMart that provide the basis of their profits, but rather what remains of America’s national assets.

I just found an article written for the All-China Women’s Federation which attempts to do just that, and in bringing American Born Chinese (this what Chinese call Chinese Americans) girls’ experiences in China to light, it shows just how strong American cultural (and dietary, evidently) influence can be.

Stephanie Lin and Emerald Chien are fairly typical Chinese American girls. They are healthy, well-educated, and, ermmm, well-fed; especially by Chinese standards. Stephanie and Emerald are students at UCLA, and consider themselves fairly normal at home. In fact, Stephanie wears a size “small” in the US, but in China she was dismayed to find that the labels on the clothes that fit her in China indicated “large.”

Emerald, for her part, was shocked when her Chinese tutor looked her up and down and plainly stated: “you’re fat.” She explained that it was not as mean to call someone fat in China as it is in the US, but actually, she’s not entirely correct — Chinese women dread being fat.

Other Chinese Americans studying in Beijing were “appalled” by the skin whitening products in supermarkets. One Chinese American woman likened their use to racial betrayal, “because skin tone is so much a part of who you are racially.”

Chinese women appear to be blissfully unaware of the concerns of these American students in their midst, celebrating their own idea of beauty, which is epitomized by Miss China World 2007 Zhang Zilin. Ms. Zhang is beautiful by any standard, but the article suggests that her beauty is a typically Chinese kind that Chinese American girls can relate to due to racial affiliation.

However, I think the writer gets it all wrong. The Chinese American girls could not relate to the thin, fair women of their ancestral home. In Chinese society, feminine traits such as delicacy and fair complexion (relative, of course, considering one’s ancestry) are emphasized, whereas American women have rejected both. China still has a strong sense of gender differentiation, even at the level of popular culture. In America, women strive to be darker, don’t mind being large, and are brash, aggressive and loud.

The Chinese American woman who said she felt racially betrayed actually felt betrayed because her American ideals were rejected. It is really no wonder that many American men find East Asia something of a paradise compared to what they left behind.

The Chinese American girls are the ethnic controls who prove that there is something about American culture that causes women to take on masculine traits. The people of China also prove that there was never anything unnatural about standards of beauty, but rather that they are universal.

The Uighurs, a Turkic people, are quite different from Han Chinese. Unlike the Hui, they look distinct from Han, having a roughly Eurasian countenance. Some of them would not stand out from the locals in Southeastern Europe, while others have a notably Turkic look, which is hard to describe to Americans who are unfamiliar with the ethnicity, but is nonetheless significantly different from Han Chinese. The Uighur language, which is a form of Turkish closely related to Uzbek, sounds vaguely similar to Korean and Japanese.

Despite the fact that Uighurs are a fairly mixed, cosmopolitan people, I browsed some images to look for the most typical Uighur I could find, based on my memories of the Uighurs I knew in Beijing, and came up with the following pleasant image of a Uighur woman in traditional dress:

So, as one might expect, there are some racial elements to the conflict in Xinjiang. These have fairly deep roots, and during the early days of the Chinese Republic, following the collapse of the Qing dynasty but prior to the victory of the Communists, there was a widely held view in nationalist circles that Uighurs did not belong in the Chinese state. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek’s brutal treatment of Uighurs and other Northwestern minorities following their move toward independence in the 1930s led to their alignment with Communist forces during the later years of the Chinese Revolution.

Following the 1949 establishment of the PRC, Xinjiang was mainly left to itself as China struggled to build a Communist society. The rural areas were largely untouched by the struggles of the Cultural Revolution, and life continued as it had for hundreds of years. The eastern core of Han culture had its own problems, and China was mired in medieval poverty, so there wasn’t much impetus for the kind of economic development that later began to bring millions of Chinese to Xinjiang.

When China’s economic ascendancy began around 1980, this started to change. Xinjiang, although lagging far behind coastal China, started to attract development — a trend that was encouraged by the central government in Beijing. Furthermore, increasing effort was put into assimilating the minority peoples of China, and students from Xinjiang were encouraged, through advantageous quotas, to attend universities in the east. The policy was the same age-old sinicization that has characterized the expansion of the Han ethnicity since the dawn of history, but with a decidedly modern implementation.

However, as I have written before in regards to Tibetan people, assimilation into the Chinese cultural sphere doesn’t usually work very well for people who are already civilized, and the Uighurs have been both settled and civilized for about a thousand years. Exacerbating the inherent tension between Chinese and peripheral civilizations is the policy of encouraging nationalism in response to the failure of Communist ideology. Inevitably, Chinese nationalism has taken on some Han supremacist overtones, and this is profoundly alienating to a people without any real connection or sense of belonging in the context of Chinese civilization.

Combined with economic discrepancies, it is natural that race and culture would play a part in fomenting conflict in the “New Territories” (direct translation of Xinjiang). As China goes through more growing pains and joins the rest of the world, it will increasingly face the difficult task of humanely managing these tensions within its own borders. Outbursts such as the bloodshed in Urumqi can only serve as serious setbacks to China’s goals, so a reappraisal of policies is in order. Despite the talk of the inevitability of China’s eventual ascendance to global power, these incidents serve as a reminder that there is a long path ahead; one that is fraught with pitfalls and potentially insurmountable obstacles.

The story of the Soong sisters has captivated China for generations, and the different path each sister took represents the struggles of China as it strove to find its place in the modern world. Eldest sister Ai Ling, who married China’s finance minister, is said to have loved money, while the next sister, Ching-ling, who married Sun Yat-sen, is characterized as having a great love for her country. May-ling, who eventually married Chiang Kai-shek, loved power.

The fall of the Kuomintang is well-known in the US, as it resulted in the creation of Taiwan and years of antipathy between the United States and the victorious Communist regime in Beijing. However, little is known of the massive corruption, ineffective government and abuse of power in Nationalist China, which greatly aided Mao Zedong and his peasant army by turning popular opinion against the Kuomintang. Ordinary Chinese had been through decades of misery and war, yet the majority of powerful officials in the Kuomintang were more concerned about themselves than their suffering countrymen.

To many Chinese, Soong May-ling epitomized these negative traits of the Kuomintang, and recent discoveries appear to confirm their sentiments.

After losing to President Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie set out to travel the world in service to the US. While in Chungking (modern Chongqing), he met Soong May-ling, and the two evidently took an interest in each other. After excusing themselves from a government reception, they stayed out all night, Willkie returning at 4 AM as “cocky as a young college student,” according to publishing magnate Gardner “Mike” Cowles. Cowles was staying with Willkie, and reports that Chiang Kai-shek himself came to their room in a frantic attempt to find his absent wife.

As Mdme. Soong’s affair with Willkie deepened, Willkie thought it might be a good idea to bring her back to Washington, upon which Cowles had to scuttle this plan. When Cowles broke the news to Mdme. Soong, telling her that she wasn’t going anywhere, she attacked him, severely scratching his face. As Cowles put it: “Before I knew what was happening she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.”

Nevertheless, she wasn’t deterred for long, making it to the US the next year, where she met with Eleanor Roosevelt and many major officials. As stated in Cowles’ memoirs, she had been fantasizing about global domination with Willkie at her side, and while in her suite at the Waldorf said to Cowles: “You know, Mike, if Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world.”

Of course, none of this came to pass. Willkie died within a year, and the Kuomintang, led by Mdme. Soong’s husband Chiang Kai-shek, was in terminal decline. Soon, the triumphant People’s Liberation Army marched on Beijing, and on October 1, 1949, Mao declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square (video). Mdme. Soong and her husband grabbed all the loot they could get their hands on and fled the mainland for Taiwan, and the rest is history.

It has been popular for some time for liberal minded Americans to say they don’t care what politicians do in private, as long as they do a good job in office. However, this story, as well as many, many others, shows that the personal integrity of people in power has a great effect on how they wield that power, and ultimately the people often pay for choices made by those with degraded morals. It is, actually, little different from the well-known fact that children usually pay the heaviest price for their parents’ indiscretions.

Confucius, who would certainly have condemned the Kuomintang (not to mention the PRC), had a good take on this matter:

“If you really want good to flourish, your people will turn towards the good. The virtue of a noble ruler is like the wind; the virtue of his subjects is like grass. If the wind sweeps across the grass, the grass will bend.”

–Confucius

Of course, the other side of the coin is true as well: a wicked ruler will only encourage wickedness in the people.

As for the story, I have no idea who wrote it, but it is nice, short piece that gives one an image upon which to reflect. And despite the fact that I cannot fully accept the author’s position, he certainly gives me some questions to ponder.

Enjoy:

The Fable of Lao Wang

Not long ago, Iran arrested Roxana Saberi, an American “journalist” of Iranian and Japanese descent for spying. Saberi had been working as a freelancer, occasionally contributing pieces to NPR, and can be seen in photographs with a number of powerful Iranian politicians, who appeared quite pleased to have the company of the attractive former pageant winner. I really have no idea whether Saberi was spying or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me — she was caught red-handed with classified documents, after all.

However, what is really interesting is how the Iranians orchestrated a media circus over Saberi’s imprisonment. There were pious proclamations from Ahmadinejad about the need to respect her rights even as American news organizations across the spectrum wailed and gnashed their teeth over Saberi’s confinement. Hillary Clinton stepped into the limelight to demand Saberi’s release as the case generated a steadily rising level of anxiety. The Iranians really played this one beautifully.

Now let’s be honest about Saberi and how important she really was as a journalist. She had a few skills and some inside information that were of value in covering Iran, but she was not by any means a major media player. Her true value lay in the fact that she was a beautiful American woman. All she had to do was go through the motions and she’d go places. Perhaps some American CIA manager, working on his native assumption that she would have the same immunity and freedom to do as she pleased in Iran as America, actually did recruit her. We may never know, but the debacle proved to be a boon to Iran, which played her for concessions even as its government managed to look merciful throughout the ordeal. Who knows what Iran managed to squeeze out of the Obama administration, which would have looked weak and un-chivalrous if it had allowed a poor, innocent young American beauty to languish in the dungeon of some monstrous Islamic stronghold, guarded by nasty, bearded, wife-beating fanatics?

If Saberi had been some poor American guy who got caught unintentionally taking photos of an anti-aircraft battery and subsequently thrown in jail, I suspect we wouldn’t have heard much. In fact, I doubt Hillary Clinton would even be bothered enough to take up the matter in a meeting; she probably would have simply handed responsibility over to some powerless underling. I am sure the Iranians have figured this out, so they went for the big fish: an American woman. America so values its women and is so blasé about kicking its men to the curb that any regime with any sense should know which pieces are worth taking.

Recent news suggests that North Korea has figured this out as well. North Korea has actually been taking female prisoners for quite some time — in fact, Kim Jong Il has been at it since the 1970s when his father ran the country. However, until recently, most of the captured women were from various Asian nations. Quite a few Japanese women and a few Chinese women have been captured, but neither the Japanese nor Chinese governments were too concerned about the abductions, as women in East Asia are valued about as much as men in America.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, both from San Francisco, were seized by North Korea after an illegal entry while filming a documentary for Al Gore’s “Current TV” media company on March 17. According to reports, they were caught near the Tumen river, which serves as the the border between the northeastern part of North Korea and China. Evidently, the Tumen was still frozen at the time and the two young women thought it might be a good idea to mosey across. Reuters reports that they did not actually touch land on the North Korean side, but rather had set up their cameras and equipment on the frozen river. However, if this clip is any indication of Ms. Ling’s reporting style (notice how she ignores the police cordon to get a shot of the bullet-ridden bodies and has to be shooed away by police), I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that she walked right over to the North Korean side without a second thought.

The circumstances of this arrest do not suggest espionage, but rather monumental stupidity. And arrogance. What American man, if not drunk or insane, would think he could get away with illegally crossing into North Korea? Perhaps the two women thought it would be like swimming the Rio Grande from Mexico — a mere afternoon excursion that, at worst, might result in a bus ride back across the border. Unfortunately for the two young ladies, North Korea doesn’t mess around, and they’ve just been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor (ouch!).

Once again, Hillary Clinton has jumped into the fray, and, using the exact same term she did when Saberi was thrown in the slammer in Iran, has dismissed the North Korean charges as “baseless.” How creative… She is also said to be hard at work selecting a special envoy to help get the girls out of the country before they have to start work in uranium mines, or wherever NK plans to send them. Al Gore allegedly plans to travel there to work on the girls’ release as well; we can only hope that an exchange is arranged whereby Al Gore will stay in North Korea and perform the hard labor in their place.

If Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee have done anything, they’ve significantly damaged American security interests in the region. In fact, their capture may have given North Korea just enough leverage to detonate an atomic bomb a few weeks ago and begin carrying out missile tests. Just for that, I’d suggest that even if the North Koreans hadn’t caught them, they’d still deserve some jail time over here for such a thoughtless escapade.

However, one can never underestimate the depth of pity for American girls, no matter what they do. The lesson learned here is that America’s cultural tendency to empower young women without holding them responsible for anything can be problematic in both the domestic and international arena. Additionally, the huge amount of value that America places on its spoiled daughters has already begun to incur enormous costs, and threatens to seriously damage our international standing.

As Beijing has transformed itself over the last few decades, the city has set about purging the “old” and replacing it with the “new.” Part of this process has resulted in the destruction of countless hutongs, torn down brick by brick to make way for office buildings, apartment blocks and shopping centers. Although Americans and Europeans may find it difficult to understand what they view as the wanton destruction of cultural heritage, it is important to keep in mind that the old China, full of hunger, war, poverty and bitterness, is still remembered by many Chinese. Spending cold nights in a little brick house, hovering around a sooty coal stove, eating old fried cabbage and rushing to and from a communal toilet is not as romantic as it may appear from the outside.

By the time I lived in Beijing, native Beijingers had already been fleeing hutongs for years. Most of the time I spent in the common hutongs (as opposed to the classier ones inhabited by the privileged) was for the purpose of buying pirated VCDs and such from the rural migrants who scrape by in Beijing through whatever means they can. Hutongs, confusing and impenetrable as they are, were great for black market dealing. After I would meet the dealer’s associate – usually a young farm boy with a dirty face and thin, shabby clothes – he would guide me through the crumbling brick neighborhood, and along the way I would be exposed to frame after frame of unadorned humanity, cooking over a coal stove here, reclining on a blanket on the floor there, washing clothes, talking, all the while living entirely out of view of the rest of the city.

Given the state of the hutongs I saw, many of which were ancient neighborhoods in a state of disrepair and largely inhabited by squatters, it is little wonder that they are being torn down to make way for highrises and apartment buildings. The problems with the olds hutong go beyond mere delapidation; they pose a sanitation problem as well. Until fairly recently, much of Beijing’s human waste was not flushed through sewers, but rather scraped out of a trench in public lavatories and hauled off in carts to nearby farms as a fertilizer. Understandably, Chinese no longer wish to live this way, so for many old neighborhoods lacking the necessary infrastructure there is no practical alternative to razing them.

Despite the relief many Beijingers must feel as they climb toward modern urban standards, there will come a time when they begin to reflect on what they have lost in the process. As the memories of coal smoke, stinking toilets and rotten cabbage fade, the pleasant, quaint aspects of life in the hutongs of old Beijing will introduce a hint of nostalgia into the public consciousness. Fresh snow on the courtyards in the morning, late night mah-jong under a gas light, watching the children play in the alleyways — all these things will ensure the survival of the hutong in the collective memory of Beijing.

Eventually, these fonder memories of hutongs will guarantee their physical survival as well, albeit in a different form. In time, Beijing will likely build new hutongs with indoor plumbing, insulation and clean heating. The hutong may be endangered for the time being, but China has not been around for thousands of years because the Chinese throw away all that defines them as a people. Despite the triumphant monumentalism that marks China’s return to its ancient, proper place in the world and characterizes the Beijing we all see today, the very soul of Beijing dwells in a little brick house on a narrow alley, and neither China nor the rest of the world wants to see it shut up in an office building.

Although petty traders and small-scale commercial ventures operated relatively freely and thrived for many centuries in China, big business has traditionally been under strict supervision. International trade was also tightly regulated, leading inevitably to clashes with Western powers in the 19th century. Westerners were not the only ones who chafed over such commercial inflexibility; many Chinese merchants sought ways to circumvent the system. They did this in a number of ways, some of which are familiar to the many different peoples of the world who have come into contact with Chinese. The coastal south developed a commercial culture based on trade beyond the shores of China, sailing in their junks throughout the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, establishing Chinese trading colonies in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indochina, Indonesia and Malaysia. Farther north and inland, smugglers set up salt trading routes to break the government monopoly, cutting into state revenue while enriching themselves.

China’s ruling philosophy, Confucianism, relegates business and trade to a lesser status than farming the land, but there are aspects of Confucianism that encourage the kind of trust and bonding – particularly in patriarchal clans – that confers great advantages in business and trade. Being a natural human activity, trade was necessarily carried on in and between clans. Loans, inside connections and special knowledge became immensely valuable assets to members of powerful merchant clans, especially in the south. The ideals of compassion, mutual responsibility and filial piety were the glue that held these extended families together. Thus, Chinese success in trade is based on in-group moral principles that, applied over many generations, reinforced loyalty and encouraged benevolence on the part of clan leaders.

Because Confucian principles chastise trade even as they create conditions for the successful practice thereof, China itself has long had an ambivalent, often suspicious attitude toward business, even before Communism became the ruling ideology. So in order to maintain a dominant role over trade, the state, which in China has always placed more value on the sanctity of the human hierarchy than the rule of law, practices patronage over traders and businessmen. It is permissible to get rich and to do business, but the dues must always be paid to officials, who pay their dues to higher officials, and so on up to the top. When everyone is reasonable this can work out fairly well, but human nature being what it is, abuses have always been common. There is always a motive to cheat, and retaliation takes on personal overtones. Abuse of state power is another common problem, and it can result in the suppression of profitable trade as venal officials collect profits for their own personal enrichment. So although China is blessed with rich land and plenty of human capital, its cultural and administrative structure, which are deeply intertwined, retards the development of business and trade.

When freed from the restrictions of the Chinese administrative system, however, Chinese cultural strengths can shine brilliantly. This can be seen in the spectacular success of peripheral and overseas Chinese colonies and states, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, freed from central control and influenced by Western governments. The unique characteristics of Chinese culture confer a great advantage in economically permissive environments while the Anglo-Saxon concept of law places a strong check on the runaway patronage that could easily ruin such shining outposts of Capitalism.

Many Westerners marvel at the economic miracles wrought in Chinese communities throughout Asia and the world, but they often fail to understand that two contradictory philosophies have intersected to create the conditions for economic success. This is far from unprecedented, but it is a precarious situation, and exists only in exceptional rather than typical circumstances. This must be kept in mind when considering China’s economic future. In time, one philosophy will have to give way to the other, and I am skeptical as to whether China could adopt Western ideals in lieu of its 2,000 year-old governing culture. Even if it did, then China’s unique advantages in business would eventually disappear as collective bonds give way to individualism.