How China sees a multicultural world

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world?

More than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world’s other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

Why is this? The BBC answers

Ethnic minorities in China

Ethnic Uyghur grandfather holds child

Of the 55 recognised ethnic minority groups, the 10 largest are:

  • Zhuang (16.9 million)
  • Hui (10.59 million)
  • Manchu (10.39 million)
  • Uyghur (10.07 million)
  • Miao (9.43 million)
  • Yi (8.7 million)
  • Tujia (8.35 million)
  • Tibetan (6.28 million)
  • Mongol (5.98 million)
  • Buyei (2.87 million)

Source: 2010 China census

Reforming the north-east – Rustbelt revival


A decade after an explosion of unrest in China’s north-east, a remarkable recovery is under way

The outgoing party chief, Jiang Zemin, was trying to promote a new catchphrase for the party called the “three represents”, including the notion that the party represented “the fundamental interests of the majority”. The workers who took to the streets in the spring of 2002, in the cities of Daqing, Fushun and Liaoyang were in effect saying that the party did not represent them and had indeed failed them.

Within a year of taking over from Mr Jiang, Hu Jintao launched a campaign to “revive the north-east”. It was an ambitious project for a region that had few of the advantages of the fast-growing Yangzi and Pearl River deltas, with their better-developed private sectors and ready access to investment and know-how from abroad, especially Hong Kong and Taiwan. Of the north-east’s GDP, two-thirds was being produced by state-owned firms
Much work remains to be done, from the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to boosting social-security provisions. But a decade on, as Mr Hu and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, prepare to step down, the party is likely to tout the north-east’s revival as one of its successes.

Problems for migrants “Don’t complain about things that you can’t change”

After a generation of migration, barriers to social mobility remain…

THE greatest wave of voluntary migration in human history transformed China’s cities, and the global economy, in a single generation. It has also created a huge task for those cities, by raising the expectations of the next generation of migrants from the countryside, and of second-generation migrant children. They have grown up in cities in which neither the jobs nor the education offered them have improved much.

This matters because the next generation of migrants has already arrived in staggering numbers. Shanghai’s migrant population almost trebled between 2000 and 2010, to 9m of the municipality’s 23m people. Nearly 60% of Shanghai’s 7.5m or so 20-to-34-year-olds are migrants.

44% of young migrants worked in manufacturing and another 10% in construction.

Nearly half worried about the monotony of their work and despaired of their career prospects. Only 8.6% reported being “comfortable” at work. One worker told researchers: “We have become robots, and I don’t want to be a robot who only works with machines.”

One obstacle to a better job is their parents. In China’s system of household registration (known as hukou)…They are fated to grow up on a separate path from children of Shanghainese parents. Migrant children are eligible to attend local primary and middle schools, but barred from Shanghai’s high schools. For years reformers have called for changes in the hukou system.

'Master' Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” there’s compelling evidence to indicate that he indeed meant all men, not just white guys.

But by the 1780s, Jefferson’s views on slavery in America had mysteriously shifted. He formulated racial theories asserting, for instance, that African women had mated with apes; Jefferson financed the construction of Monticello by using the slaves he owned — some 600 during his lifetime — as collateral for a loan he took out from a Dutch banking house; and when he engineered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson pushed for slavery in that territory. By 1810, Jefferson had his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line, disparaging a relative’s plan to sell his slaves by saying, “It [would] never do to destroy the goose.”

Faced with these conflicting visions of Jefferson, scholars usually fall back on words like “paradox” and “irony”; but historian Henry Wiencek says words like that allow “a comforting state of moral suspended animation.” His tough new book, Master of the Mountain, judges Jefferson’s racial views by the standards of his own time and finds him wanting. Unlike, say, George Washington, who freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson, Wiencek says, increasingly “rationalized an abomination.”

7 minute book review of “Master”

The March Days of 1848: Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and his "Dear Berliners

This document, based on a chapter from the author’s Germans and the Revolution of 1848-1849, which appears in the New German-American Studies series published by Peter Lang, is presented in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the March Days in Berlin that followed the deposition of King Louis-Philippe in France and the fall of the Austrian minister Clemens Metternich in Vienna, events that triggered a wave of revolutions all across the continent of Europe.

This account should be of special interest to descendants of Forty-Eighters who fled to the United States after conclusion of the revolutionary debates and hostilities.

A good chapter

Scottish independence: Cameron and Salmond strike referendum deal

The agreement, struck in Edinburgh, has paved the way for a vote in autumn 2014, with a single Yes/No question on Scotland leaving the UK.

It will also allow 16 and 17-year-olds to take part in the ballot.
The SNP secured a mandate to hold the referendum after its landslide Scottish election win last year.

The UK government, which has responsibility over constitutional issues, will grant limited powers to the Scottish Parliament to hold a legal referendum, under a mechanism called Section 30.

David Cameron says the agreement includes “one simple, straightforward question”

Read more about the deal at BBC

The American Revolution: The Game

When Assassin’s Creed III was in development, the game’s Canadian developers regularly quizzed Americans about their knowledge of the Revolutionary War. Who were the leading lights of the era? What did Boston look like? Just how deep would Ubisoft Montreal’s writers, artists, and cultural consultants have to dig to tell a story that felt fresh and surprising to Americans?
Not all that deep, it turns out. Alex Hutchinson, the game’s creative director, says Americans were as likely to identify Christopher Columbus and Billy the Kid as Colonial-era figures as they were to cite George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. In addition, some assumed that cities like Boston were little more than frontier campgrounds, with tiny communities huddling for warmth in tents.

You might argue that these sorts of answers reveal how ignorant Americans are about their own history, and you might be right. But they’re also a consequence of the dearth of popular depictions of this period. When Assassin’s Creed III comes out on Tuesday, millions of gamers will be exposed to the American Revolution for the first time. (Perhaps tens of millions—Assassin’s Creed II sold more than 9 million copies.) What they’ll find is the most accessible reconstruction of the Revolutionary War era that’s ever been made.

Read on at Slate

Video – Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one

maximum peril.

On the 50th anniversary of the crisis, the BBC has had exclusive access to new information that paints an even more dangerous picture of how the crisis unfolded.

Papers to be published next week reveal that far from the crisis ending neatly with the deal struck by President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev at the end of October, there was a second secret stage to the crisis with staggering implications for the world.

Joe Matthews spoke to Dr Svetlana Savranskay, Director of Russia Programmes, National Security Archive in Washington DC, about her research and has this report.

Secor on Ahmadinejad at the UN

And yet much has changed in Iran since Ahmadinejad took office, in 2005. He came to power as the establishment’s candidate; he inherited an economy that was sick but not wasted, and a polity that was disillusioned but not completely cynical. Today, the President is an isolated figure. His relationship with the Supreme Leader has soured. Last spring, Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian President to be summoned to parliament for hostile questioning, his close allies were barred from running for office, and one of his top aides was sentenced to prison. The Leader has even toyed with the idea of abolishing the Presidency.

Ahmadinejad’s economic policies stoked inflation well before the latest round of sanctions, but the current situation is far more severe. In the past year, the Iranian rial has depreciated by two hundred and fifty per cent against the dollar; official statistics put inflation at about twenty-four per cent, which means that it’s probably higher; and the price of chicken has increased threefold, leading to a riot in the city of Neyshabur, and an outpouring of “chicken crisis” jokes on the Web. Under the circumstances, New York must have been a welcome respite for Ahmadinejad, and not only because of the ready availability of an affordable chicken dinner. Here he’s a big man; in Tehran, he’s approaching irrelevance.

Lyndon Johnson: That day that changed everything

The weeks after the assassination may have been the “finest moment” in Johnson’s life, argues Robert Caro in this fourth—but not final—volume of his defining series on one of America’s most complex and compelling politicians.

By blending the outpouring of goodwill from the tragedy with his own legislative mastery, Johnson had got Kennedy’s stalled programme of legislation moving again in less than two months. That included the landmark civil-rights bill, which would forever bar discrimination in hotels and other public venues.

Johnson, Mr Caro writes, refused to campaign actively until it was too late because, much as he desired the presidency, deep down he feared the humiliation of losing—and not trying meant not losing. And so, indeed, he lost out to Kennedy, a man he described at the time as a “little scrawny fellow with rickets”.

Indeed, writes Mr Caro, in 1960 he told his staff to look up how many presidents had died in office. The answer was seven out of 33—and several more vice-presidents got elected in their own right after their predecessor left office.

Johnson took the odds, but the nearly three years he spent under Kennedy were sheer misery. He gave up enormous power as Senate majority leader to assume the sideline role of vice-president.

But the Kennedys shut him out. He became mocked around Washington as “Uncle Cornpone” and was left off the invitation lists for Camelot’s decadent parties (thrown by the “Harvards”, as Johnson called the Kennedy set).

Johnson in the vice-presidency is described as a “bull castrated very late in life” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), a “great horse in a very small corral” (Bill Moyers), and a “cut dog” (Johnson himself).

By November 1963 things looked especially dire for Johnson. A former aide was under investigation for bribery, and journalists had begun looking into Johnson’s own business dealings. Washington chatter held that Kennedy might drop him from the 1964 ticket.

But when the president was shot, Johnson took over with preternatural calm.

He made a huge effort to retain Kennedy’s advisers, even those who had previously spurned him. And he gave new hope to black leaders, who emerged from his office amazed (and heartened) that a Texan would be so committed to desegregation. The odds against passing civil-rights legislation had been high because of the chokehold Southern senators had on Congress, yet Johnson schemed and cajoled and threatened, and in the end got it done—something Kennedy, for all his eloquence, had not managed.
From book review of The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

China’s princelings: Grappling in the dark

ON HIS visit to America this week China’s vice-president, Xi Jinping, serenely played the role his aides had scripted for him as the country’s leader-in-waiting, charming his hosts but revealing little. At home, however, the the Communist Party’s plans for a sweeping shuffle of its hierarchy later this year were beginning to appear less orderly...

There remains little doubt that Mr Xi will take over from Hu Jintao as party chief at a five-yearly congress to be held sometime in the autumn. But the prospects of another aspirant to top office, Bo Xilai (pictured above), have been overshadowed.

The Most Damning Evidence of a U.S. Coverup of Soviet War Crimes

On Monday, the U.S. National Archives released 1,000 declassified documents pertaining to the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Poles by the Soviet Union. The Cliffs Notes version? America’s coverup of the infamous Katyn Massacre was more extensive than previously thought.

For years, Poles and Polish-Americans have alleged that the U.S. government suppressed information about the Soviet Union’s guilt in the World War II-era murders, which were aimed at killing off Poland’s military and intellectual elite. As recently as 1992, the State Department said it “lacked irrefutable evidence” in the early 1950s to substantiate claims that the USSR, not Nazi Germany, carried out the crimes. But today’s documents show the concrete proof U.S. officials had in their hands in the 1940s regarding the Soviet Union’s guilt.

You can see all of the newly-released documents and maps at the National Archives site here.

10 Minute documentary on the Katyn massacre

NPR Interview: Mickey Edwards On Democracy's 'Cancer'

In his 16 years in Congress, Republican Mickey Edwards came to a strong conclusion: Political parties are the “cancer at the heart of our democracy,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.

In his new book, The Parties Versus the People, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma details how party leaders have too much control over who runs for office, what bills make it to the floor and how lawmakers vote.

How To Buy a Daughter

The conventional wisdom has always been this: Given a choice, couples would prefer sons. That has certainly been the case in places like China and India, where couples have used pregnancy screening to abort female fetuses. But in the United States, a different kind of sex selection is taking place: Mothers like Simpson are using expensive reproductive procedures so they can select girls.

Boko Haram Coverage

Who are Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists?

Boko Haram kills 67 in northeast Nigeria

Abubakar Shekau is the leader of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has carried out a series of deadly attacks across northern Nigeria. Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar from the BBC Hausa service looks at Nigeria’s most wanted man, who has been designated a terrorist by the US government.

Nigeria’s military has killed a top commander of militant Islamist group Boko Haram in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, an army spokesman has said Nigerian troops have opened fire and burned buildings in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, reportedly killing 30 civilians.