What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
The National University of Singapore is 34th and Nanyang Technological University 174th in the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings powered by Thomson Reuters, released today.
American universities swept the board. Here’s the list of the world’s top 100 universities.
Seventy-five-year-old British freelance journalist Alan Shadrake did not expect to be arrested in Singapore over his book, Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, about death sentences in the city state.
Shadrake, who wrote articles for London’s Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, told AFP after the book’s Singapore launch on Saturday that he had expected trouble, but felt that the authorities were not going to take action, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.
“If they do anything, it’ll just draw more attention to it all, and they have no defence,” he said.
The New York Times apologized today to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong for an article which said: "Singapore's Lee Hsien Loong is Lee Kuan Yew's son."
That nine-word sentence was the only reference to the Lees and Singapore (there was none to Goh) in the nearly 800-word article, which was also published by the Khaleej Times on February 17. It was stating a fact, not passing any judgment. Yet the New York Times issued an apology considerably longer than the offending sentence. Why? Not because of what was said in that sentence but because of the thrust of the article.
Philip Bowring, an old Asia hand who had run-ins with the Singapore government in the past, was criticizing what he called "dynastic politics" in Asia.
He named several Asian leaders, including Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, who are related by birth or marriage to previous leaders. He did not say they are incompetent or undemocratic. "With the exception of North Korea, Asian dynasties are a phenomenon of countries that are more or less democratic," he wrote.
They can be a stabilizing or unifying force, he said.
Asian banks have a "once in a lifetime" opportunity of taking a bigger share of the global banking market and perhaps even overtake some of the big Western banks, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) deputy chairman Tony Tan tells the Financial Times at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (The Financial Times wrongly calls him chairman: that position is held by Singapore Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.)
You can see him being interviewed by Gillian Tett of the Financial Times here.
Here are some excerpts from the interview (here in full):
“For the GIC, we see no lack of opportunities in the developing world,” he said.
“I think Asian countries will now look again at whether we want to be (following the US),” he said, pointing out that even in the US there was a rethink of laisser faire economics. “State capitalism, interference by the state, has served (some countries) well,” he said.
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea show the lowest unemployment rates among the Asian and Middle Eastern economies tracked by the International Labour Organization over the past year.
The figures in these charts are all taken from Country Data, December 2009, which you can download as a PDF from the ILO website. The IMF report presents data up to mid-December from each country's national force surveys. The data here is shown in graphic charts because there are too many columns to fit in a normal table.
President Barack Obama reaffirmed US commitment to Asia in a rousing speech in Tokyo. You can see the audience applauding the president in this videoclip taken from Japanese television.
Obama was eloquent. He said:
The United States of America may have started as a series of ports and cities along the Atlantic, but for generations we also have been a nation of the Pacific. Asia and the United States are not separated by this great ocean; we are bound by it.
Speaking about US commitment to Asia, he recalled his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii and how those years on the Pacific Rim shaped his view of the world. He spoke about:
He also had good news for Singapore.
He announced America will be engaging with the Trans Pacific Partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional trade agreement. Singapore is a member of the partnership and has been pushing for such an agreement.
Obama promised to say more about how he expects the US relationship with East Asia to grow when he addresses the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) in Singapore.
The full text of the speech follows.
First, as it was reported by NHK, which telecast his speech:
US President Barack Obama has emphasized US engagement in Asia and cooperation with Japan for prosperity and security in the Asia Pacific region.
President Obama delivered his address on Saturday morning at Suntory Hall in central Tokyo before an audience of 1,500 people in political and other circles.
Obama indicated his intention to beef up US engagement in Asia. He said Asia and the United States are not separated by the Pacific Ocean but are bound by it.
The New Asian Hemisphere by Kishore Mahbubani
There is a difference between Western and Asian notions of the rule of law, according to Kishore Mahbubani, who served as Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations and is now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He writes in The New Asian Hemisphere, published last year:
The Western notion of the rule of law, in which all human beings are to be treated equally under the law and all citizens subject to the same laws, goes against the grain in Asian minds. Most Asians throughout the ages have assumed that the ruling classes, especially members of royal families and the aristocracy, stand above the law. Indeed, in the minds of the ruling classes, the only function of the law was to enable them to discipline their subjects.
In traditional Chinese legal thought, the law was only a tool through which the government ruled the governed.
But China has started implementing Western-style rule of law since the 1982 Constitution, writes Mahbubani.
Book full of praise for China
Asia is becoming more like the West in its “March to Modernity”, he adds, but instead of welcoming this growing similarity, the West is trying to continue to dominate the world. But it can’t, says Mahbubani. The subtitle of his book is The Irresistible Shift Of Global Power To The East.
Ostensibly a book about the rise of Asia – there is quite a bit favourable to India – it is a long litany of complaints against America and a eulogy to China. While America is criticized on various issues from the Iraq war to the torture of prisoners, there is just one reference to Taiwan and none to Tibet; I checked the index.
Money=Merit
One can understand Mahbubani’s admiration for China, which is growing in both wealth and power.
For he seems to equate money with merit.
The Singapore civil service is the most meritocratic in the world, he says. But he mentions none of its achievements, only that its head can earn much more than the American president. Mahbubani writes:
The Economist sells nearly four times as many copies in North America as it does in the UK. But it continues to be leery of what it calls “Americanisms”. Much as I like reading the Economist, isn’t it somewhat old-fashioned to insist:
“Avoid affirmative action, rookies, end runs, stand-offs, point men, ball games and almost all other American sporting terms”?
The Economist style guide is a stickler for British English and so it says:
“Put adverbs where you would put them in normal speech, which is usually after the verb (not before it, which usually is where Americans put them). Choose tenses according to British usage, too. In particular, do not fight shy—as Americans often do—of the perfect tense, especially where no date or time is given. Thus Mr Bush has woken up to the danger is preferable to Mr Bush woke up to the danger, unless you can add last week or when he heard the explosion.”
But how about this?
“Try not to verb nouns or to adjective them. So do not access files, haemorrhage red ink (haemorrhage is a noun), let one event impact another, author books (still less co-author them), critique style sheets, host parties, pressure colleagues (press will do), progress reports, trial programmes or loan money. Gunned down means shot. And though it is sometimes necessary to use nouns as adjectives, there is no need to call an attempted coup a coup attempt or the Californian legislature the California legislature.”
The Economist's circulation
The graphic here is from the Economist media kit, which shows the magazine sold nearly 1.4 million copies a week between June and December last year. More than half the sales were in North America (nearly 787,000 copies a week), and just over 13 percent in the UK (about 187,000). Even Continental Europe bought more copies (nearly 240,000). About 134,000 copies were sold every week in Asia Pacific, with five-figure sales in:
Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was quoted in the Straits Times as saying about the global economic crisis: “We can't go back to where we were before, which is, Asians lend money to Americans… Americans borrow money to spend.”
But why were the Asians lending money to the Americans? Because everybody gained from the arrangement.
The American sub-prime crisis is blamed for the global crunch. But the problem would not have spread without globalization. There might not have even been a sub-prime crisis if the Americans didn't have easy credit with money pouring in from Asia and the Middle East.
Asians have to share the blame for the crisis, says an article in Prospect magazine. They bought dollars to prevent their currencies from rising against the greenback and keep their exports competitive in the US market.
But what were they going to do with the dollars? They exported more than they imported from the US. So the dollars went into US investments. And they had so much money to spare they bought not only US treasuries but sub-prime mortgages, leading to the sub-prime crisis. Prospect says:
As Asian central banks recycled their dollars back to the US, they created an enormous demand for dollar-denominated bonds. This resulted in lower interest rates on longer-dated bonds and propelled the real estate market even after the Fed had started raising short-term rates.
As there weren't enough US treasury bonds to meet demand, foreign central banks bought mortgage-backed securities. Wall Street met this demand by creating investment-grade bonds from subprime mortgages. "Asian central banks," writes Richard Duncan (author of The Dollar Crisis), "bear a meaningful part of the responsibility for the global imbalances which are now coming disastrously unwound. They played the part of enabler to America's destructive consumption."
Ghost Train To The Eastern Star by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux has written an immensely readable sequel to The Great Railway Bazaar, repeating that railway journey from Europe to Asia and back which earned him fame and fortune more than 30 years ago. It is bursting with people and places, rich in indelible portraits. I can’t forget the Korean monk Theroux meets in Myanmar who carries all his possessions in a little cloth bag and the English-speaking urchins in Amritsar, India, who can’t read or write.
There is drama too. A government agent sneaks into a talk by Theroux at the US embassy in Turkmenistan and photographs a dissident before an American official seizes the film and turns the agent out of the building. But the agent files a report and Theroux has to leave the country in a hurry as a suspected troublemaker.
Not everyone will be pleased with Theroux’s accounts of the countries he revisits. He describes Bangalore, India’s IT capital, as a high-tech sweatshop. Singapore, in his account, is rigid with rules and taboos, a virtual one-party state with licensed brothels. Myanmar is ruled by fear, Sri Lanka drained by insurgency, Cambodia yet to recover from the Khmer Rouge nightmare, China dispatched in a couple of paragraphs as ugly beyond words, the Central Asian republics — formerly part of the Soviet Union – are primitive, polar opposites of Western democracies.
Only Vietnam gets a glowing treatment. Even its prostitutes are more colourful –- biker chicks in Hanoi screech to a halt in the writer’s path and ask: “You want boom boom?” And there is Japan –- kinky, high-tech, like no other country in the world but rich, peaceful, stable –- where, Theroux claims, the police actually prefer organised crime to the unorganised variety because it is organised. Japan certainly seems like paradise compared with Siberia, where Theroux travels next, taking the dirty, unkempt Trans-Siberian Express with Russians who spend days and nights making the long journey in a drunken haze.
A writer’s journey
But Ghost Train is not just a travelogue. It’s also a writer’s journey –- Theroux is revisiting old places to connect with his past and see how he himself has changed.
“Memory is a ghost train too”, he writes and explains why he made the journey:
“Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes –- but no, they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and retracing my footsteps… would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.”
He reflects on the price of his literary success. The Great Railway Bazaar brought him success -– at the expense of his first marriage. He returned to London at the end of that long journey in the 1970s to find his wife was having an affair. He recalls his emotional torment as he wrote that book.
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.
