Social Science

The New York Times
June 29, 2005
Live Free and Soar
By PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK

Boulder, Colo.

A week ago, at the conference of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) meeting at the Morongo Casino Resort, the evening banquet opened with a ceremony that begins most formal Indian gatherings. Several Indian men, often military veterans, march in with flags and place them on the stage. The American flag leads the procession. Last week, the Ute Mountain Ute Indian leader Ernest House carried in the Star-Spangled Banner, and then stood and faced it, as if reunited with a treasured comrade. After the others had left the stage, he gave the flag an intense salute and parted from its company.

Non-Indians familiar with the history of the invasion and conquest of North America might be puzzled or even troubled by this ceremony. No residents of this country have better reasons for anger at the imperial powers of this nation than do Indian people; no American citizens have a better-grounded historical reason to put the American flag at the end of the procession, or to refuse to carry it.

And yet, most native people are loyal and committed patriots. The American flag appears at ceremonies and rituals; stars and stripes are woven into beadwork and incorporated into powwow clothing.

Indian people, in other words, are complicated human beings, despite centuries of efforts to reduce them to narrow and simple stereotypes.

Patriotism is one element of that complexity. As a younger, more skeptical person, I might have mustered a patronizing sense that Indians serving in the military were a co-opted and exploited group. Now, guided by respect and consideration for their choices and privileged to watch veterans salute their flag, I have put aside the skepticism.

I take my bearings from the reality that these are people with an extraordinary knowledge of both the promise and the tragedy of this nation. "When I was about 30 years old," A. David Lester, director of CERT and a Muscogee Creek Indian, remembers, "the Blackfeet Indian leader Earl Old Person told me, 'One of our responsibilities is to teach our neighbors what it means to be American.' "

No one in these circles would advocate historical amnesia; making a peace with the injuries of the past is quite a different matter from forgetting those injuries. It is, in fact, a national misfortune that the Indian wars have faded from the memory of most citizens. We have surrendered the chance to learn lessons from the wars that might well guide our military and diplomatic policy today.

Much of what we have taken to calling "the lessons of Vietnam" - perhaps especially the difficulty of sequestering noncombatants from violence, as well as the complex moral choices raised by confronting guerrilla war - could just as easily have been learned as "the lessons of the Indian wars." If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever hints at even the slightest interest in exploring the historical meanings of the Indian wars, I will be on the next plane to D.C.

In the meantime, my mind lingers on the fact that many Indian tribes held mourning or honoring ceremonies on behalf of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. I think of a group of Lummi Indian artists, led by Jewell James, who carved totem poles to place in recognition of the 9/11 victims at the sites of the attacks.

And I hold on to the memory of the remarks made by the Yakama Indian thinker and speaker Ted Strong as he introduced the entrance of the color guard at the CERT banquet last week. "In true tribal custom," he said, "we will post the colors of our nations. The American flag represents our allegiance and commitment to the well-being of our land, our neighbors and our country. ... Our families and friends have fought and sacrificed their lives to secure human rights for us and our future generations."

Next in the procession, after the American flag, came a staff bearing eagle feathers and "representing all tribes," Mr. Strong said. "The eagle," he explained, "is symbolic of the human effort to live free and soar above the weaknesses on earth."

Paralysis enforced by bitterness and resentment is an understandable response to historical injury. But spending time in the company of Indian people in 2005 offers a spirit-raising chance to know what it means when human beings "soar above weakness" and choose life over defeat and despair.

Maureen Dowd is on book leave.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado and the author of "The Legacy of Conquest" and "Something in the Soil," is a guest columnist for two weeks.

E-mail: limerick@nytimes.com

Severe pollution blights China's Pearl River Delta Wed Jun 22, 7:58 AM ET

BEIJING (AFP) - China's Pearl River estuary is so badly polluted the fish that once thrived in its waters have virtually vanished.

"We found 95 percent of the 2,500-square-metre (26,900 square feet) sea area we examined was excessively contaminated," said Xia Zhen, head of a study team for the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey organization.

Xia and his team have been testing seawater areas of the estuary in China's south since 2003, China Daily reported Wednesday.

The contamination includes heavy metals, oil, nitrogen, ammonia and other chemical matter with levels of pollutants far higher than standards set by the State Environmental Protection Administration.

In 2004, nearly 2.5 million tons of pollutants produced by agriculture and industry flowed into the mouth of the Pearl River.

The survey revealed that over 200 kinds of fish previously spawned and lived in the area, but few remain.

"More and more fish have moved away from the polluted sea or have died from the toxic water," said Xia. "Few fish can survive there now."

Besides fishermen's livelihoods, the ecosystem of the area is also under threat. Xia said mangrove swamps were disappearing.

The group concluded that sea reclamation projects and over exploitation of sea sand were two of the main reasons for the changes, weakening the power of the sea's current to help clean the area.

Chen Guangrong, director of the Guangdong Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau, was cited as saying that as well as industrial pollutants over two billion tons of sewage drained into the estuary last year.

The estuary covers the coastlines of many economically developed cities and regions, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Hong Kong.

Serious pollution blights large parts of China as a consequence of its rapid economic development.

On Sunday Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, warned China faced an ecological disaster unless it did more to curb pollution.

Great leap forward
Chinese literature is overlooked in the west but a new English edition of a classic novel could change that, writes Julia Lovell

Saturday June 11, 2005
The Guardian

Why does modern Japanese fiction have an audience in Britain while its Chinese counterpart plays to an empty house? How come substantial numbers of British readers of literary fiction can conjure with a few names from recent Japanese literature - Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami - while the Chinese Shen Congwen, Qian Zhongshu and Mo Yan languish in near-total obscurity?

The cold war has a lot to do with it. In the 1950s, as part of the broader US project of reinventing Japan as an unthreatening regional ally against communist China, the American publisher Knopf set about marketing a picture of Japan - through carefully selected and translated works of its modern fiction - as a non-bellicose land of exotic aestheticism; the very opposite of Japan's aggressive, jingoistic pre-war image. These were the years in which authors such as Mishima and Kawabata became the representative, languishingly melancholic voices who later slipped comfortably into canon-forming collections in Britain: Penguin Modern Classics, the Everyman's Library. Although the themes and styles of those contemporary Japanese novelists now best known in the west - Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto - are a far cry from the taciturn, elusive qualities of Mishima and others, both owe large swathes of their western audiences to the trails blazed by their predecessors.

At almost exactly the same historical moment as the cold war gave Japanese fiction an entrée into big-business publishing, Mao's bamboo curtain clattered down around China, shutting off western access to many of its most interesting, free-thinking writers and tainting its modern literature - in the eyes of the western public - with the stigma of communism. At about this time, the earliest courses in modern Chinese literature began in British universities, many of which adopted as teaching materials politically correct works advertised as modern masterpieces by the Chinese state. To an Anglophone reading community that is, at best, timidly selective about reading translations, these two publishing and teaching trends helped promote a timesaving shorthand for stereotyping both literatures in audiences' minds: Chinese as dully propagandistic; Japanese as aesthetically humanist. In a major British review journal four years ago, a work of Japanese fiction was praised as "a hymn to the resilience of the human spirit", while the reviewer of a Chinese author, a couple of column inches higher up, dismissed all mainland Chinese fiction as "socialist realism".

But something momentous has just happened: Penguin Modern Classics has for the first time allowed a work of 20th-century Chinese fiction on to its list. After skulking for decades in small, academic or, more disastrously, communist Chinese presses (the threadbare Panda Books), translated fiction from China has, 50 years after a similar gesture transformed Japanese fiction's profile in the west, been beckoned into Penguin's modern canon. Modern Chinese fiction, long regarded at best as an educational source of information on China, or at worst, providing none at all looks to have made a great leap towards the bookshelves of British readers.

The novel itself, Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The last hurrah of modern Chinese literature's pre-communist cosmopolitan age, this 1947 satire of an intellectual dilettante enduring love, disappointment and hypocrisy in 1930s Shanghai enjoyed two years of best-selling success immediately after publication. When, in 1949, the People's Liberation Army marched into the city, transforming one of China's most vibrant metropolises into the grey headquarters of communist orthodoxy, Qian - an outstanding product of early 20th-century China's internationalist cultural revolution, fluent in both Chinese and European literatures - was erased from the state literary canon. But after Mao's death in 1976, liberated Chinese critics and readers gleefully rediscovered Qian's novel, enthusiastically enshrining it as a modern classic.

Ribald, sardonic, set against the tragic turmoil of wartime China without ever collapsing into patriotic bluster, its pages populated by young westernised Chinese harried by their traditional families, Fortress Besieged has, it would seem, something for everyone. It certainly ought to stand a better chance of reaching into the hearts of Anglophone readers than many other works of modern Chinese fiction.

What is disappointing, is that - despite expending a good deal of trouble on producing a beautiful-looking book, fronted by an original Chinese print - Penguin has used an old (1979) and uninspired translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K Mao. It is, for the most part, competent, but hardly reproduces the dazzling, spiked wit for which the original is renowned. Dialogue, in particular, is wooden and unidiomatic - "I've heard about you for a long time"; "This is certainly neglect of filial duties to the extreme!" - and littered with empty filler adverbs ("really", "simply") and literally translated Chinese proverbs with explanatory footnotes bolted on. Descriptive prose, while more serviceable, also contains the occasional puzzler, such as "sleep ... like a club suddenly knocked him into its dark bottom".

This is the kind of carelessness characteristic of most mainstream presses in Britain when they - very unusually - venture to produce translations of modern (late 19th-century to 1976) or contemporary (1976-) Chinese literature. It is as if they are already so convinced of its fundamental aesthetic poverty that when they do finally stir themselves to publish, they seem barely to bother with the quality of the translation. If they do, they certainly don't apply the kind of rigorous critical standards to be expected in the editing of other books on their lists. This is strikingly true in this instance, but the same criticism could also be levelled at both Faber and HarperCollins; Rebecca Carter's painstaking work at Chatto & Windus - Red Dust, The Noodle Maker, Village of Stone - is a wonderful exception.

A kind of vicious circle results, in which large publishers are chary of producing modern Chinese literature because it is little known, generally viewed as being of poor literary value and therefore unlikely to attract audiences. When they do publish it, slack editing often allows unsatisfactory translations to slip into print. All in all, it merely confirms general readers and other editors in their instinct that China's recent literature can be safely ignored.
There are, of course, reasons other than translation and editing that help explain why modern Chinese fiction has not taken off among Anglophone readers. One is logistical: China's cultural remoteness from the west makes it inevitable that audiences from very different reading traditions will have difficulty fathoming its literature. The Chinese language is an especially intimidating barrier: it is no coincidence that post-Mao film-makers (particularly Zhang Yimou) have scored the kind of global success - international prizes, Hollywood distribution deals - of which their literary counterparts can only dream. Cinema trades in the direct, universal currency of images; it doesn't have to worry about losing value across the uncertain exchange rates of translation. Although Fortress Besieged contains plenty of comic character types and situational slapstick that entertainingly convert into English without too much confusion - the chubbily pompous author of "Adulterous Smorgasbord", a pseudo-cosmopolitan sonnet littered with meaningless foreign words; the innkeeper who insists that maggots stirring drowsily from their "greasy slumber" on a slab of ham are no more than harmless "meat sprouts" - other parts of the book are studded with puns and allusions that would challenge the most inventive translator.

Another reason is historical, affecting the quality of individual works. In the early 20th century, China embarked on a quest for a modern version of itself that dragged its writers through decades of political upheaval and guilty anxiety that they should, somehow, help rescue the country from national crisis. Especially after the communist revolution in 1949, ideological pressures and the ever-shrinking remit of Revolutionary Realism and Romanticism (Mao's extra-rose-tinted version of socialist realism) severely squeezed creativity; between 1949 and 1966, the production of novels dwindled to an embarrassingly low average of eight per year.
When these proscriptions eased after Mao's death, contemporary Chinese literature was left to contemplate its lost years. Thanks to Mao's fondness for sending intellectuals for "re-education through labour", authors who normally would have been reaching their mature middle decades in the 70s and 80s, had been cleaning toilets, planting rice or mucking out pigs - certainly not thinking hard about the bourgeois question of how to write a good book - during their early career, when a novelist steadily refines his or her craft. Qian Zhongshu is a case in point. Fortress Besieged was his only novel, written two years before the 38-year-old gave up fiction when the communists swept to victory. For much of the next 30 years, he was occupied by the state translating Chairman Mao's Collected Works into English, except for labouring in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

Although in Fortress Besieged Qian emerges as a refreshingly sceptical chronicler of 1930s China, with a sharp ear for the comic hypocrisy of his fellow intellectuals, the book has the unmistakeable failures of discipline and control of a first novel: the flow of the prose trips a little too frequently on Qian's pointed analogies and asides, as if he can't quite suppress his admiration at his own cynical cleverness. Qian himself rapidly became dissatisfied with his work and it's impossible to resist wistfully imagining what he might have achieved if Mao had never come to power.

But there are Chinese novelists who managed, at times, to sidestep the 20th century's circumstantial exigencies, and whose work can compare with European or American writing of which educated British readers could be expected to have some knowledge. For example, Qian Zhongshu could be termed a scurrilously Chinese Evelyn Waugh; Shen Congwen a Hunanese Turgenev, awash with ambivalent nostalgia for his war-wracked southern homeland; Zhang Ailing a bleakly claustrophobic Katherine Mansfield, for her intricately oppressive stories of Shanghai domesticity. And the most accomplished translators of Chinese fiction at work today are certainly capable of producing versions of the best works elegant enough to tempt the insular appetites of British readers - if major publishers are prepared to believe that these works can provide not just worthy pseudo-documentary information on Chinese history, but also more universal literary satisfactions: delicate psychological portraits, powerful evocations of time and place, philosophical insights into the human condition.

And this is what is required to give Anglophone audiences access to the reading pleasures of recent Chinese literature. Although translations of post-Mao fiction into English have been coming steadily over the past 20-odd years, it is hard to think of more than one or two robustly selling succès d'estime. One reason is that contemporary Chinese fiction in English translation emerges into a vacuum, artificially wrested from its modern antecedents. While British readers lack points of reference from earlier, formative decades in modern Chinese literary history, their capacity for understanding and appreciating more recent writing is always going to be shaky.
I am not claiming that British audiences have any kind of obligation to read Chinese fiction in translation. Arguments about China having the longest continuous literary civilisation, or being the most populous nation in the world might help spark a utilitarian kind of interest in its literature, but in a publishing free market, its fiction has to stand on its own merits. Yet that is so often precisely what it is not allowed to do by publishers; at least not relative to its competitors - fiction in English or translated from other languages. Most major publishers do not even give modern Chinese fiction a platform on which to rest beside their glossily marketed rivals.
What 20th-century Chinese literature badly needs, in order to convince foreign readers that it is worth the investment of time and concentration necessary to make some sense of it, is a gesture comparable to that made towards modern Japanese literature in the 1950s.

Cosmetically, Penguin has started on this very worthwhile endeavour. But if it wants any kind of meaningful return - in terms of satisfied readers eager for more - on its initial outlay, it will have to make a commitment not just to the dust jacket and paper quality of works of 20th-century Chinese literature in translation, but also to the words that make them modern classics.

A modern Chinese library

Cao Xueqin The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes (Penguin Classics, 1973-). Written around 1760, this classic family saga of the late imperial period is probably China's best-known novel.

Lu Ling Children of the Rich. An epic and untranslated account of the decline of a wealthy family during the Japanese invasion of the 1930s.

Lu Xun's bleak stories of rural China and reworked versions of classical stories, collected in Lu Xun Selected Works, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Foreign Languages Press, 1985).

Ma Jian, Red Dust, translated by Flora Drew (Chatto & Windus, 2001). Semi-fictionalised travelogue of an escape around the margins in the early 1980s; an acute portrait of a society in flux.

Qian Zhongshu's 1947 satire of wartime Shanghai, Fortress Besieged, and barbed stories of human and superhuman vanity collected in Men, Beasts, Ghosts.

Shen Congwen's bittersweet nostalgic tales of his war-ravaged south China homeland in the early 20th century, some of which are translated by Jeffrey Kinkley and others in Imperfect Paradise (University of Hawaii Press, 1995).

Han Shaogong's relaxed biography of a village in southern China, A Dictionary of Maqiao, told as the author's semi-fictionalised memoir of labouring there and learning the local dialect during the Cultural Revolution; translated by Julia Lovell, (Columbia University Press, 2003).

Xiao Hong, The Field of Life and Death, translated by Howard Goldblatt (Indiana University Press, 1979). A moving portrait of stoical, suffering women in the northeast during the 1930s.
Yang Jiang, Six Chapters From My Life "Down under", translated by Howard Goldblatt (University of Washington Press, 1984). Written by Qian Zhongshu's wife, a wryly sensitive account of two years labouring in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

Zhang Ailing's claustrophobic novellas of domestic scheming and psychological disintegration in pre-1949 Shanghai. One of the best "The Golden Cangue", is in Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949 translated by CT Hsia et al (Columbia University Press, 1981).

• Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged is published by Penguin for £18.99
• Julia Lovell's translation of the novellas of Zhu Wen will be published next year by Columbia University Press

How To Kill a Dead Zone
My quest for perfect cell-phone reception.
By Sam Schechner
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005, at 2:04 PM PT

My cell phone and my apartment never got along. I missed calls. When calls did come through, it sounded like I was talking to a drowning robot. I wasn't about to pay one of those gigantic contract termination fees, so I did the only logical thing—I got a new apartment.

I found out recently that there's another solution, a reception-boosting device called a cellular repeater. The name explains the simple concept: A large outdoor antenna tunes into the strongest cellular signal available and repeats it on a smaller antenna wired inside. Voila, you've got five bars.

Cellular repeaters are mostly used by businesses that want to boost signal strength inside big office buildings. But now some of these devices are being targeted specifically to the home market. They're not cheap. Spotwave Wireless, which works with business customers for several carriers, sells home units starting at $995. A smaller outfit called JDTECK, which just became an approved T-Mobile vendor, sells its most pared-down device for $365. (Cellular service providers usually have no problem with the devices, so long as they don't interfere with their cellular networks, which a Cingular spokesman told me almost never happens. The spokesman did say you should only use a repeater that's approved by your carrier.)

Do these devices really help? Can a layperson wire them? And what about the risks of installing a miniature cell tower in your apartment?

My first testing ground is a notorious dead zone in a friend's Brooklyn apartment. A T-Mobile phone by the sink never registers more than one or two bars. (Kitchens and bathrooms frequently have poor reception because they're close to building cores and shielded by layers of walls and appliances. In general, steel is the most difficult building material for cellular signals to penetrate, followed by concrete and the insulation-coated glass of office buildings. Wood and drywall pose little problem in moderation.)

Repeaters are carrier- and location-specific. A repeater tuned to, say, an 850 MHz Cingular signal is useless in boosting the reception of T-Mobile's 1900 MHz signal. Both Spotwave and JDTECK sent me repeaters calibrated for the T-Mobile spectrum in New York City, and some simple instructions. JDTECK's repeater has two components. For inside, there's a device the size of a light switch with a tiny swivel antenna. For outside, there's a simple-looking square plate of an antenna. Spotwave's kit has larger, more sophisticated-looking versions of the same equipment. The outdoor antenna looks like an alien pizza box, and the indoor one looks like its little sibling.

The most important part of the installation is to mount the outdoor antenna in a place with good reception, ideally in the line of sight of a cell tower. Unfortunately, like most New York apartments, this one has no roof access. I manage to secure JDTECK's outdoor antenna to a window frame, but reception in the sink area improves only slightly. The window frame isn't good enough for the picky Spotwave antenna. The signal is so weak that the unit shuts itself down.

With my first experiment a failure, I set out to find an apartment with roof access and crappy reception. I find a friend's place in the West Village with a roof and so-so T-Mobile reception, at least when I lie on my side with my head nestled in the corner near the front door.

When I activate the Spotwave repeater, the reception immediately shoots up from none or one bar to between three and four bars. A five-minute conversation isn't crystal clear, but there are far fewer missing words and garbled robot noises. The JDTECK repeater works even better. I'm getting four or five bars, and the reception is clear enough for a business call—something like a 7.5 out of 10 on the clarity scale.

In short, these things actually work. But to get the full benefits, you must live somewhere with great outdoor reception and little indoor reception. If you live in an obstruction-filled city like New York, you'd best make sure you can find perfect reception on the roof before plunking down a lot of cash for a repeater.

Why does the much cheaper device do a better job? Perhaps because the more expensive one tries harder to eliminate feedback. As the costly Spotwave repeater fires up, it continually lowers the intensity of its indoor signal until its "isolation"—how much of the indoor signal is reaching the outdoor antenna—is below a certain threshold, a precaution that Spotwave says protects your cellular provider's larger network from damage. JDTECK's repeater, by contrast, only shuts down in extreme feedback situations, after which you can manually lower its power. When I tested the JDTECK device, it worked at full power and offered better coverage indoors.

And what about the health consequences of putting a signal repeater in your bedroom? Several recent studies have shown no link between brain tumors and cell-phone use. But if you're really paranoid, you might be inclined to believe another recent study that found longtime cell-phone users in rural areas were more than three times more likely to get brain tumors than urban cell-phone toters. The researchers hypothesized that this higher cancer rate results from the extra juice that rural cell phones must transmit to reach distant cell towers.

The more power your phone uses, the farther it can transmit a signal. Your cell phone continually boosts and reduces its antenna power based on signal quality. When the phone has only one bar, it will use as much as 600 milliwatts of power to amplify its weak signal. When you've got five bars, power consumption may drop to as little as 200 milliwatts. (When your phone gets a good-quality signal, its battery will exhaust much more slowly.)

Both the Spotwave and the JDTECK outdoor antennas emit large amounts of electromagnetic radiation to allow your signal to reach the closest cell tower. (Spotwave even warns users not to install the outdoor antenna where people will regularly walk in front of it.) That outdoor radiation means you'll have to use less power indoors. Since using a repeater will give your phone a stronger signal, it's likely that it will emit less energy near your head. So, if there does turn out to be a link between brain cancer and cell phones, having a miniature cell tower in your home could help reduce your exposure. But maybe you'd just be better off finding another apartment.

Conflict is not an option
Henry A. Kissinger International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2005 NEW YORK
The relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations with China and a commitment to a one-China policy.

Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly re-emerged. Various U.S. officials, members of Congress and the news media are attacking China's policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying that China is on some sort of probation.

Before continuing on this subject, I must point out that the consulting company I chair advises clients with business interests around the world, including China. Also, in early May, I spent a week in China, much of it as a guest of the government.

The rise of China - and Asia - will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The center of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

China's emerging role is often compared to that of imperial Germany at the beginning of the last century, the implication being that a strategic confrontation is inevitable and the United States had best prepare for it. That assumption is as dangerous as it is wrong. Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances.

It is also unwise to apply to China the policy of military containment of the cold war. The Soviet Union was the heir of an imperialist tradition. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years.

is often invoked as a potential trigger. This could happen if either side abandons the restraint that has characterized U.S.-Chinese relations on the subject for more than a generation. But it is far from inevitable. All major countries have recognized China's claim that Taiwan is part of China. So have seven American presidents of both parties, none more emphatically than President George W. Bush.

With respect to the overall balance, China's large and educated population, its vast markets, its growing role in the world economy and global financial system foreshadow an increasing capacity to pose an array of incentives and risks, the currency of international influence.

Short of seeking to destroy China as a functioning entity, however, this capacity is inherent in the global economic and financial processes that America has been pre-eminent in fostering.

The test of China's intentions will be whether its growing capacity will be used to seek to exclude America from Asia or whether it will be part of a cooperative effort.

Paradoxically, the best strategy for achieving antihegemonic objectives is to maintain close relations with all the major countries of Asia, including China. In that sense, the rise of Asia will be a test of America's competitiveness in the world now emerging, especially in the countries of Asia.

The vast majority of Asian nations view their relations with the United States in terms of their perception of their own interests. In a U.S. confrontation with China, they would seek to avoid choosing sides; at the same time, they would generally have greater incentives for participating in a multilateral system with America than adopting an exclusionary Asian nationalism.

They will not want to be seen as pieces of an American design. India, for example, finds no inconsistency between its improving relations with the United States and proclaiming a strategic partnership with China.

China, in its own interest, is seeking cooperation with the United States for many reasons, including the need to close the gap between its own developed and developing regions; the imperative of adjusting its political institutions to the accelerating economic and technological revolutions; the potentially catastrophic impact of a cold war with America on the continued raising of the standard of living, on which the legitimacy of the government depends.

But from this it does not follow that any damage to China caused by a cold war would benefit America. The United States would have few followers anywhere in Asia. Asian countries would continue trading with China. Whatever happens, China will not disappear. The American interest in cooperative relations with China is for the pursuit of world peace.

Attitudes are psychologically important. China needs to be careful about policies that seem to exclude America from Asia and about U.S. sensitivities regarding human rights, which will influence the flexibility and scope of America's stance toward China.

America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government.

As a new century begins, the relations between China and the United States may well determine whether our children will live in turmoil even worse than the 20th century or whether they will witness a new world order compatible with universal aspirations for peace and progress.

(Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger and Associates. Distributed by Tribune Media Services International.)

NEW YORK The relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations with China and a commitment to a one-China policy.

Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly re-emerged. Various U.S. officials, members of Congress and the news media are attacking China's policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying that China is on some sort of probation.

Before continuing on this subject, I must point out that the consulting company I chair advises clients with business interests around the world, including China. Also, in early May, I spent a week in China, much of it as a guest of the government.

The rise of China - and Asia - will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The center of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

China's emerging role is often compared to that of imperial Germany at the beginning of the last century, the implication being that a strategic confrontation is inevitable and the United States had best prepare for it. That assumption is as dangerous as it is wrong. Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances.

It is also unwise to apply to China the policy of military containment of the cold war. The Soviet Union was the heir of an imperialist tradition. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years.

is often invoked as a potential trigger. This could happen if either side abandons the restraint that has characterized U.S.-Chinese relations on the subject for more than a generation. But it is far from inevitable. All major countries have recognized China's claim that Taiwan is part of China. So have seven American presidents of both parties, none more emphatically than President George W. Bush.

With respect to the overall balance, China's large and educated population, its vast markets, its growing role in the world economy and global financial system foreshadow an increasing capacity to pose an array of incentives and risks, the currency of international influence.

Short of seeking to destroy China as a functioning entity, however, this capacity is inherent in the global economic and financial processes that America has been pre-eminent in fostering.

The test of China's intentions will be whether its growing capacity will be used to seek to exclude America from Asia or whether it will be part of a cooperative effort.

Paradoxically, the best strategy for achieving antihegemonic objectives is to maintain close relations with all the major countries of Asia, including China. In that sense, the rise of Asia will be a test of America's competitiveness in the world now emerging, especially in the countries of Asia.

The vast majority of Asian nations view their relations with the United States in terms of their perception of their own interests. In a U.S. confrontation with China, they would seek to avoid choosing sides; at the same time, they would generally have greater incentives for participating in a multilateral system with America than adopting an exclusionary Asian nationalism.

They will not want to be seen as pieces of an American design. India, for example, finds no inconsistency between its improving relations with the United States and proclaiming a strategic partnership with China.

China, in its own interest, is seeking cooperation with the United States for many reasons, including the need to close the gap between its own developed and developing regions; the imperative of adjusting its political institutions to the accelerating economic and technological revolutions; the potentially catastrophic impact of a cold war with America on the continued raising of the standard of living, on which the legitimacy of the government depends.

But from this it does not follow that any damage to China caused by a cold war would benefit America. The United States would have few followers anywhere in Asia. Asian countries would continue trading with China. Whatever happens, China will not disappear. The American interest in cooperative relations with China is for the pursuit of world peace.

Attitudes are psychologically important. China needs to be careful about policies that seem to exclude America from Asia and about U.S. sensitivities regarding human rights, which will influence the flexibility and scope of America's stance toward China.

America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government.

As a new century begins, the relations between China and the United States may well determine whether our children will live in turmoil even worse than the 20th century or whether they will witness a new world order compatible with universal aspirations for peace and progress.

(Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger and Associates. Distributed by Tribune Media Services Internationa.)