Island People: The Caribbean and the World, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro -- A book review

This is a great book on many levels. Although it was published already in 2017, it hardly matters given the historical context and the fact that the Caribbean nations have not changed dramatically since then.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro knows the Caribbean intimately and is extremely well-read in the region and its culture, from history and literature to music. He covers the places he visits or stays in for longer periods from the time of Columbus’ journeys, the colonial period when the islands were used for sugar plantations relying on slave labor, to contemporary cultural trends. This is how a travelogue should be: personal but anchored in the larger historical-geographic-political context, erudite but entertaining.

Yet, it took me some time to wade through the 430+ pages. Not because I wasn’t interested but because some of the chapters (each dealing with a specific island) were rather heavy going. Some sections on the larger islands — Jamaica and Cuba each get three chapters — are lively, mixing culture and societal commentary with the author’s personal experiences.
In the case of Jamaica, rasta culture and reggae, naturally, play an important part. It’s not only about Bob Marley, but also Toots Hibbert, Peter Tosh and many others get their share. Jelly-Schapiro spends time with Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records that brought reggae to a wider audience, now living in the villa where Ian Fleming dreamed up James Bond. Jelly-Schapiro places these cultural and musical factors firmly into the socio-political setting.
Similarly, the highly personal section on Cuba brings together history, politics, economy, music and culture. He explores the notion of cubanidad, which “first crystallized as an important, if still vague, idea when the cause of Cuban independence” was promoted by José Martí in the 1880s and 1890s (p. 120). He equally explores the roots of the specifically Cuban music that we love in the mélange of African and European traditions. He highlights the role of Israel “Cachao” Lopez, the legendary musician and composer broght to broader fame in his later years through Buenavista Social Club. The last of the three chapters concerns Cuba in the twilight of Fidel Catro’s reign.
The chapter on Puerto Rico emphasizes the island’s relationhip with the United States and the diaspora in the Bronx. The chapter also traces the history of Puerto Rican nationalism and its hero, Pedro Albizu Campos.
The three chapters dedicated to Hispaniola are weighed down by history, perhaps inevitably given how important it is in explaining the current state of affairs. The two countries that share the island — Dominican Republic and Haiti — are often contrasted, with the first one coming on top as a developmental success story and the second as a hopeless basket case. Jelly-Schapiro brings much nuance to this interpretation highlighting the violent and dictatorial history of the Dominican Republic, while bringing out the humanity in Haiti. He sheds light on the curious racial relations on the island, stemming from the two sides’ histories as Spanish vs. French colonies, and how these continue to cause tensions between the two.
The four chapters covering eight smaller islands in the Lesser Antilles are shorter, perhaps because there’s not that much to report (and perhaps because the author seems to have spent less time on each of them, which is perfectly understandable). His reporting from these islands tends to poke holes to the image of them as paradise. Yet, Jelly-Schapiro’s understanding still brings forth many distinctive features between, say, Barbados and Barbuda, both with a history as British colonies and sugar plantations.
Grenada has a distinct political history and a charismatic leader, Maurice Bishop, executed by his political rivals in 1983. Ronald Reagan found the island’s socialist experiment so threatening that he sent in the marines to subdue the tiny island nation, on the pretext of the presence of Cuban workers helping to expand the airport.
Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory where Sir George Martin, the legendary producer built a house and studio, rose to international attention in 1995 when the long-dormant Soufrière volcano erupted destroying Plymouth, the capital, and forced two-thirds of the island’s population to flee. Jelly-Schapiro explores the volcanic zones with an American geography professor, Lydia Pulsipher, and her husband. They note how, following the disaster, the British governmental aid agency DFID, relocated people into new houses in a non-affected area: “they’re well bjuilt, but they’ve got nothing to do with how Montserratians live; with the old social structure here, and with homes they built to fit it” (p. 319). Unfortunately, this is a picture that often emerges when well-meaning outsiders try to assist countries to rebuild after a disaster (for example in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami).
Martinique, which still today is a French territory and the westernmost extension of EU, deserves a lengthy chapter, largely due to the writers and political thinkers it has produced, such as Aimé Césaire and Patrick Chamoiseau. Jelly-Schapiro writes (p. 358):
“Few large countries, let alone little ones, boast the literary riches allowing one to trace the whole modern arc of their culture, and the contours of that culture’s conflicts, through those of its books.”
Accordingly focusing on these writers and their poetry and their legacy at the expense of the author’s own experiences, these 32 pages took me more effort than most other parts of the book.
Throughout, the book discusses numerous authors from the islands, many of whom have achieved fame outside of the Caribbean: C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), George Lamming (Barbados), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Franz Fanon (Martinique), Jean Rhys (Dominica), and the already-mentioned Aimé Césaire and Patric Chamoiseau
Luckily, he saved the best for the last. The 40-page final chapter on Trinidad is superbly crafted. Its culture and social and political issues are presented in a very animated way. Jelly-Schapiro has spent ample time on the island, including as a visiting scholar at the university. The carnival, the calypso and steel bands form a sort of a backbone to the chapter. Jelly-Schapiro tells the dramatic story of Michael Abdul Hakim (a.k.a. Michael X), a Black activist, and the people around him.His best informant is Jay Telfer, an octogenarian figure whom he befriended. Telfer who in the 1960s played a central role in bringing West Indian culture, including the Notting Hill Carnival, to London, is a font of information and a delightful character. Before that, in the 1950s, Jay Telfer studied at NYU and worked at the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village where he met many jazz legends, and where Thelonius Monk told Telfer he was the only man able to dance to Monk’s music. Although involved in politics throughout his career, Jelly-Schapiro says of Telfer: “Personal ethics, like personal style, were for him much more important than politics” (p. 411).
Jelly-Schapiro has written a highly interesting and valuable book, although it is somewhat uneven. He generally writes well alternating between the casual when describing his own personal experiences and the academic. There are places where his style can get a bit out of hand. Take, for example, this sentence about Chamoiseau (p. 334):
“And his ideas’ shadows have been palpably present, too, over polemics surrounding the French Antilles’ great human export of now; those other public artists — soccer players — whose goals in World Cup stadia, firing France to victory in a Coupe de Monde contested in Paris in 1998, prompted scenes of joy on the Champs-Elysées more massive than any since the Liberation, and forced a country still unaccustomed to seeing itself reflected in the brown and black faces of its colonies to ask pointed questions about what, two centuries after Robespierre’s fall, a Frenchman is.”
Apart from these squabbles, it is a book worthy of its author, a fellow geographer, with a PhD from UC Berkeley. Finally, Jelly-Schapiro confesses to having adopted C.L.R. James as “a kind of intellectual hero and style icon alike” (p. 401):
“Here was a scholar activist who wrote with equal verve and brilliance about the Haitian Revolution and the game of cricket, Hegelian philosophy and Hollywood movies, Herman Melville and calypso music — and whose synthetic aptitude for doing so, moreover, found him placing all those subjects within the larger telos not only of modern capitalism but also of humanity’s struggle for democracy reaching back to the Greeks.”
If this cultural-historical-political-social mixture was what Joshua Jelly-Schapiro aimed for in this book, I think he pretty much succeeded.

The Eurasian Century, by Hal Brands

 

This is a fact-filled book written in a highly readable and lively style. I found it very satisfying on several fronts, although I can sympathize with some of the reviewers who disagree with Hal Brands’ point of view. He makes no effort to hide where he is coming from, seeing the democratic West as something worth defending, and the USA as the necessary guarantor to the free world.

 Brands draws upon the geopolitical theories and traditions of Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Nicholas Spykman, and others. This is one of the attractions of the book. As a trained geographer myself, I’ve always thought that geopolitics was unfairly criticized for decades. Sure, it was originally associated with the Swede Rudolf Kjellén and the German Friedich Ratzel both of whom were something of social Darwinists and whose ideas were embraced by the Nazis. Brand’s view is nuanced and his application of the perspective is intelligent. He sums it up: “Geopolitics tempered by democracy was stark but rarely evil. Geopolitics with an autocratic bent was poison, pure and simple” (p. 31). Bad application of an approach should not be a reason to ban the entire discipline (for example, genetics has been misused for bad purposes but it nevertheless is a vital science).

 The first two-thirds of the book is dedicated to a backward look at the 20^th century: the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the quarter century of peace and prosperity following the fall of the Soviet Union. The final part looks at the “second Eurasian century” which we are currently living and draws lessons from the past.

 It is easy to see why readers of a certain persuasion would object to Brand’s interpretation. He readily acknowledges the American mistakes and overreactions in building and defending a safe and free world. Often, in defending democracy, America ended up crushing it and supporting oppressive regimes that it saw to be on its side. Scores of people died in wars from Vietnam to Iraq and many smaller skirmishes. However, Brand is unabashedly of the view that the US-dominated world after World War II has been, in the balance, hugely positive to everyone, and that US involvement in the world—especially the central Eurasian continent and the surrounding seas—is a necessity for the world and its people to prosper.

 He does see the threat posed by rising isolationism. Although the book was published in 2025, the manuscript must have been completed prior to the November 2024 elections. Brand writes: “If America makes a habit of electing aspiring strongmen, it may not remain a democratic superpower. And don’t think for a second that troubled autocracies can’t bring a world of woe” (p. 219). Unfortunately, it seems this is where we stand for the moment.

 Although a multipolar world would seem desirable at the face of it, the contenders to fill the other pole posts—notably China and Russia—do not provide an attractive alternative. In fact, these revisionist powers represent illiberal authoritarian regimes that would limit free speech and civil liberties in their spheres of influence. Western Europe without the US will not be able to resist. Brand makes a strong case for a broad coalition of democracies to cooperate, in terms of politics and policy, innovation and technology, and military. Citing Harry Truman in 1948: “America must pay the price for peace.” Brand’s final warning: “There is no law of nature that expansion must fail and tyranny must be vanguished. There is no guarantee that history takes the path of progress” (p. 245).  As the book shows, the 20^th century history is full of examples where things could have gone badly wrong.

Adriatic by Robert D. Kaplan

Two-thirds through the book, Robert Kaplan worries that this book fits in no category: "It is not military strategy, political  science, original archival history, conventional long-form journalism, traditional travel writing, memoir, or literary criticism" (p.237). He's right about that, although it has elements of all or most of the above. Kaplan, a renowned geopolitical analyst, has written 20 books of which I have read about half a dozen before this one. It is thus clear that I like his writing and his perspective on contemporary affairs. His work is always anchored in history and geography, which gives it more depth than most others. (It has to be said that many academic geographers are highly critical of Kaplan's analysis, judging him to be something of a geographical determinist and of a somewhat conservative bent; I do not subscribe to this view and, on the contrary, appreciate Kaplan's traditional approach to political geography.)

This book was, however, a harder read than any of the others that I have read. Kaplan has a fascination with history that takes him way back in time to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is also deeply interested in architecture and culture, including religion. Consequently, the early parts of the book, focusing on Trieste and Venice in Italy, are rather heavy, with much emphasis on the above aspects. Throughout the book, he expends much effort to pondering the relationship between the past powers (the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Venice...) and the influences of Catholism, Eastern Orthodoxism and Islam. There is also an extraordinary amount of introspection. 

At least to me, the book gets more interesting as the author travels down the eastern Adriatic coast, from Slovenia through Croatia, Montenegro and Albania ending up on the island of Corfu. In these parts, he talks more to people--historians and other academics, politicians, journalists and others--which adds much needed color and points of view bringing the analysis to recent history and the present. Kaplan, in my view, is in his own element when discussing the geopolitics of the region. I personally learned a lot about the history of the Adriatic and especially the Balkans.

In the final part, Kaplan ponders the future of Europe, not in the long term but what comes next and which way it will develop. He also discusses the state of nation states and the tensions between multiculturalism (as today experienced in cities), identity, and the nationalist and populist instincts that currently prevail. These are thoughtful passages.

The Asian 21st Century, by Kishore Mahbubani

 

This new book by Kishore Mahbubani, a senior Singaporean diplomat and academic, deals with the same issues as his earlier book Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Supremacy. The new one is a collection of essays that have been published elsewhere in a variety of sources, with a few interviews with the author thrown in. This results in an inevitable repetitiveness throughout. This is not only the case for substance, but Mahbubani has the tendency of using same phrases and metaphors and to cite same research multiple times. Having said that, one must largely agree with Mahbubani’s analysis and viewpoints or at least take them seriously.

The first part of the book is called ‘The End of the Era of Western Domination’ in which he makes the case that the West is in denial and must learn to act strategically in a world where it is no longer Number One. He likes to quote a prescient speech by Bill Clinton at Yale University. The then-President said that at the time when the US will become No. 2 in the world, it will benefit from clear international rules. This is an excellent observation but there are many Americans who won’t accept the inevitable that the US would not always remain No. 1 and it would be almost certain political suicide for any American politician to suggest otherwise. (The propaganda about American exceptionalism starts early in US schools and society, but is not unique to America: similar indoctrination is prevalent also in other large nations, not least in China and Russia.)

Much of Mahbubani’s writing focuses on the United States and here he is at his sharpest. His main point is that the US is no longer a democracy, but has turned into a plutocracy in which a rich minority dictates national policy. As he likes to say, it is now government of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. He cites research by prominent authorities, such as the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, who have also observed this undeniable truth.  Evidence includes that the United States is the only developed country where the economic status of the lower 50% of the population has actually declined in the past three decades. He also refers several times to the “sea of despair” (a phrase coined by Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case) of American working classes, which led them to elect Donald Trump as president, mistaking his crude rhetoric for concern for the working poor, not realizing that Trump himself is a prime representative of the plutocracy. Again, despite all evidence to the contrary, most Americans are in denial that their country would no longer be a democracy.

At the root of the current situation is the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the 1980s. It was—and remains—popular when Reagan made his speech, stating that government is not the solution to your problems; government is the problem. Mahbubani is obviously absolutely correct that this dogma of unfettered markets fixing all problems has led to many, if not most, of the problems the American society (and many others) now are beset with. Mahbubani quotes another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen as saying that societies are best when they combine the invisible hand of markets with the visible hand of good government.

Mahbubani identifies three strategic mistakes that were made that led to the troubles that we are now experiencing. First was the failure of the elites to protect the working classes from the inevitable disruptions caused by globalization. This was partly due to the illusion of the “end of history”, as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama, that the Western capitalist democracies had won the global competition and would thus not have to adjust to new realities. Mistake number two was the trust placed in markets and the intentional weakening of government institutions in the US. The third and final mistake was caused by the antipathy of the American business elites to paying attention to the larger social concerns, which then led to the creation of the plutocracy. Logically, they are all fixable, but it is impossible to fix a problem if you deny its existence.

The title of the book refers to the 21^st century belonging to Asia, the focus of the second part: ‘The Asian Renaissance’. It makes a historically accurate points that the past 200 or so years have been an anomaly in world history. Before that China and India’s were the two largest economies in the world. The standards of living were higher in Asia than in Europe for much of preceding history. It was Western colonialism and imperialism, enforced by military might, that changed this. Now, China and other Asian countries are just returning to their rightful place in the world as powerful countries in their own right. It is a dangerous moment as the current hegemon, USA, is in decline (at least in relative terms) but wants to ensure its continued primacy. Mahbubani cites ample statistical data to back up this contention.

He makes the great point that if American policymakers truly believed that state-led economic policy is detrimental and that markets steer capital to the most optimal allocations, why would the US harp about the Chinese government interfering in the country’s economy? Why not just let China waste its resources through planning and state-led policy? The undisputed truth is that all current developed countries have used state-led economic policy and protection of infant industries as tools during the phase when they were rising. Now they want to deny this right from other countries threatening the interests of their multinational companies and their primacy.

Mahbubani also cites the Asian response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The mortality rates paint a picture that suggests that most Asian countries have done much better than those in the West (both North America and Europe). Perhaps, however, countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam or Singapore (as well as New Zealand and Australia) are better examples than China where the Zero-Covid policy has led to draconian lockdowns and major societal disruptions.

The third part of the book is entitled ‘The Peaceful Rise of China’. Mahbubani has strong faith in China, which may at times seem misplaced. He admits that China is not perfect but that the mistakes that have been made are excusable. He claims that China is not expansionist and does not seek to export its model of governance beyond its own borders. As evidence, he cites that China over its thousands of years of history has not sought colonies. Yet, its actions towards Taiwan (which it considers an inalienable part of One China) and around the South China Sea cast doubt on this claim. (Of course, it would be unthinkable that China would conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols in the international waters of the Caribbean, like the US and its allies do in the South China Sea.) It may be that China prefers to concur the world through economic means, like its Belt and Road Initiative would suggest. President Xi Jinping has, however, gone on record suggesting that China’s example provides an alternative development model to current developing countries (as it obviously does; again, after the fall of communism in Europe, there was a naïve belief that, given the opportunity to vote, all people in the world would naturally choose liberal democracy; a belief that was proven dramatically wrong in Egypt and in countries that US and NATO would “liberate”, in Iraq and elsewhere.)

Mahbubani also casts an understanding eye on China’s crackdown of democracy protests in Hong Kong, writing that no society tolerates violent protest and the Chinese did well in quelling such protests in Hong Kong with no lives lost (in contrast to several protest events in the US where people were killed). He also reminds us that, in general, state should have the monopoly on violence; a very valid point which, however, may not sit well with Second Amendment enthusiasts in the United States.

Overall, Mahbubani argues that, as opposed to the American plutocracy, China is a true meritocracy. This is then reflected in the highly competent government in the country an the fact that China has the highest government approval ratings anywhere in the world. He points out (several times) that the past four decades have been the best for the Chinese people in the country’s 5000-year history. The approval ratings are verifiable and may be in response to good governance (the Chinese people have made a bargain with their leaders: as long as the economy continues to grow, political rights are secondary), although one also suspects that they reflect the significantly increased patriotism among especially young Chinese caused by indoctrination and censorship (see, e.g., Tracy Wen Liu’s article in the spring 2022 issue of Foreign Policy). The fact remains that the West (and especially the US) loses many of the brightest graduates to the private sector due to the salary differential and the anti-government sentiment. Singapore, where Mahbubani is from, is arguably the most meritocratic and best run country where the best graduates go to government jobs, which are well paid and powerful (perhaps out of modesty, Mahbubani does not emphasize this).

The final part focuses on ‘Globalization, Multilateralism and Cooperation’. Mahbubani is a strong proponent of multilateral action, both at the global (the United Nations) and regional (EU, ASEAN) levels. He rightly underscores that many of the problems that the world faces—the pandemic, climate change, migration, the global economy—are beyond the ability of nation states to manage. He berates the United States and the West more generally for intentionally weaking multilateral institutions, such as the WHO which would be needed more now than ever. He recognizes that powerful countries think that multilateralism constrains them, but points out the fallacy in this argument. One of his metaphors repeated a couple of times is that today’s world is like a cruise ship with nation states as cabins. It doesn’t make sense only to keep the individual cabins clean without taking care of the entire ship.

Mahbubani is a strong believer in globalization, free trade, and competition. He laments the isolationist tendencies that populist leaders around the world favor. The US withdrawal during President Trump’s tenure from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is one of his targets. He also believes that economics will trump military strength and, therefore, in terms of four-letter abbreviations, the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that brings together 15 nations in the Asia-Pacific region)  will be more powerful than QUAD (the quadrilateral security dialogue between the USA, Australia, India and Japan).

He also emphasizes the importance of economic growth and frequently cites GDP growth figures as evidence of Asia’s (notably China and India) success. In this sense, his economic views are quite traditional. Although he mentions the problem of climate change several times, he doesn’t seem to make the connection to the growth in extraction of natural resources, production, and consumption as the drivers of climate change and wider environmental destruction. The problem with GDP is that it measures only economic output based on monetary transactions. It does not discriminate between positive and negative outputs, it doesn’t measure unpaid work (like, care of children or the elderly), and it is not negatively affected by reduced natural capital or environmental degradation.

Mahbubani clearly considers himself a practitioner of Realpolitik. His idols whom he frequently evokes include the legendary American diplomat George Kennan, the founder and long-term leader of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, and Henry Kissinger. The latter sounds odd, even callous, given how much blood, especially Asian blood (think, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh…), the man has on his hands.

Kishore Mahbubani is a significant thinker on the global policy arena. Reading him is stimulating. He is not afraid of slaying sacred cows. This is not a book to the liking of those who think that the US is the greatest country on earth and that Western style democracy will always win, but it is them who would most benefit from reading it.

Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of Natural Abundance by Donald Worster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Are there limits to growth – of economy, population, natural resource use, wealth – or will human ingenuity always concur the obstacles through capital and technology? Donald Worster, an environmental historian, tracks the ebb and flow of these contrasting ideas in North America and Europe since the discovery of the Americas half a millennium ago – the Second Earth, as he calls it. Worster’s history is an authoritative one, thoroughly researched, at times poetic, always insightful and thought-provoking. Worster builds a theory upon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. The mysterious green light that Jay Gatsby saw in the mist across the Long Island Sound enticed him but in reality was nothing more magical than a light bulb at the end of Daisy’s boat dock. The green light becomes a metaphor for the perceived natural abundance that Europeans discovered as they entered the Western Hemisphere – but would this green light also turn out to be a chimera, as the nature is conquered and overexploited, and the Earth shrinks?

Worster takes as his starting point the “discovery” of the Americas (along with Australia, Oceania and southern Africa), which he marks as the beginning of the modern period of human ecology that was global in scope and triggered profound changes in almost every society on earth (p. 7).

The book is divided into three parts, roughly according to three historic periods: the expansionist age after the discovery of the Second Earth, the sobering era in the late-19th and early-20th centuries when pollution and destruction of nature became apparent, and the latter part of the 1900s when the debate on the limits to growth fully emerged. Each of these parts ends with a record of a field trip that demonstrates the previous discussion in concrete terms.

The first part of the book, ‘Second Earth,’ describes the excitement that followed the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans and how Mercator’s map with its second sphere next to the old world map (literally the second earth) spurred the imagination of men in Europe. The old continent at that time was becoming crowded, its farmland and natural resources already stretched. When the new frontier opened, it became to be seen as a source of endless wealth in terms of land, forests, water, fish and wildlife. Imaginings of gold and other treasures added to the fables as Europeans started to flock to the new continent, which was also considered empty and free for anyone to come to. Worster also discusses the more theoretical thinking about abundance in the era’s intellectual climate. He notes that economics “still carried a residue of prediscovery attitudes – and awareness of natural limits that must eventually restrain the accumulation of wealth” (p. 42). Adam Smith, known for establishing the foundations free market economy in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776), as well as John Stuart Mill both recognized that nature’s limits must ultimately lead to a stable state. This, however, was not the dominant view.

The first field trip takes us to Nantucket off the New England coast. A group of British immigrants settled on the island in 1659, soon realizing that the place was not well-suited for agriculture. Instead, they turned to hunting and fishing. Nantucket became a center of whaling, but the Atlantic whale stocks were depleted in just over a century and the Nantucket whalers ended up taking longer and longer trips with less and less catch. Using historical records, statistics and literature (notably Melville’s Moby Dick). Worster paints a lively story of the whaling industry’s rise and fall, concluding: “The new fuels (that replaced blubber) did help remove pressure from the remaining populations of whales; they did not “save” the whales. Nor did capitalism or the supposedly benign and rational play of markets save them. Whales were saved only by the passage of laws and the exercise of moral constraint” (p. 69). This reflects a common theme in the book. Markets do not self-regulate when it comes to exploiting a common resource.

The second part of the book is entitled ‘After the Frontier.’ The first chapter in it is dedicated to George Perkins Marsh, perhaps the first influential environmental thinker in America. As Worster notes, “Marsh’s book (Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, 1864) represents an important intellectual moment in the transition from an age of plenty to an age of limits” (p. 81). Marsh saw warning signs from the European history where overuse had taken a toll on the land. Again, Marsh’s warnings fell mostly on deaf ears. This was the time when expansion of coal mining and the creation of steel mills it enabled brought prosperity to America – or at least to the owners of these facilities, such as Andrew Carnegie – while wreaking havoc on the environment and creating severe pollution in industrial towns and regions.

President Theodore Roosevelt and his advisors, Gifford Pinchot and WJ McGee get deservedly a full chapter. Teddy Roosevelt was an outdoors man and a big game hunter. He came to be known as a great conservationist, establishing the US system of national parks. “No president, before or after, did more than Roosevelt to protect and preserve land in the United States. No one did more to conserve wild nature for its own sake” ... “Roosevelt, however, never believed that conservation should merely mean preserving the natural environment. He also sought to exploit nature in new ways and places” (p. 111). The thinking of Roosevelt and his advisors led to a technocratic approach that emphasized re-engineering nature for the purpose of expanding productivity and wealth. The period’s most prominent environmentalist, John Muir, disagreed with his friend the President on this philosophy.

The field trip tells the story of California’s Imperial Valley, an arid desert near the Mexican border, which was started to be developed into agricultural land at the turn of the 20th century. The project would require enormous amounts of money and labor, but most importantly it meant dealing with the mighty Colorado river, controlling and re-channeling its waters to support agricultural production. While Imperial Valley survives as an agricultural area till today, its future remains uncertain as competition over water resources grows and demands from the cities of coastal California increases, while climate change bring further droughts.

The third and final part, ‘Planet of Limits,’ focuses on the time after World War II to the present. The initial postwar decades were marked by optimism and a belief in the America Dream. There would be no bounds to growth and prosperity. Man’s inventiveness would overcome all limitations that the natural world would try to pose. The American economy was booming and consumerism was ripe. Cars, houses, consumer goods were produced in massive quantities. At the same time, human population growth peaked: almost 200,000 babies were added to the world population every day. The world population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 3.7 billion in 1970 (today there are 7.6 billion of us on the planet and, contrary to common beliefs, population growth continues at a rapid rate; projections expect our numbers to reach 9.8 billion by mid-century). Oil provided fuel for the massive expansion of economy but it didn’t add new resources to humankind. “Did cheap oil in the postwar era reopen a wholly new world of abundance to replace the one discovered by Christopher Columbus? Was it a Third Earth” asks Worster and answers: “Not all … But for a while its abundance could and did work a miraculous change” (p. 143).

Worster tracks the arguments between the believers in eternal growth and those in the emerging environmental movement. When President Harry Truman started worrying about impending resource scarcity, he appointed a Material Policy Commission. The commission recognized that it would in the future be harder to satisfy the demand for materials, but it still concluded that “the principle of Growth” through “free enterprise” was worth preserving (p. 146). This was a clear win of ideology over logic. While the economists, business people and politicians cheered on ever expanding capitalism, there was a new environmentalism rising with authors and thinkers such as Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb).

A chapter is dedicated to The Limits to Growth. Its main authors, Dennis and Donella Meadows, young American scientists whose eyes had been opened during a post-graduation trip to India, teamed up with the Italian visionary industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish science advisor to OECD Alexander King. The latter two established the Club of Rome, a think-tank to address what they called “world problematique.” This collaboration also involved an MIT statistician Jay Forrester and led to the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, a highly influential book (which also greatly influenced me in my youth). At that time, the team was mostly concerned with the depletion of nonrenewable resources. They questioned the idea that growth – in population, agricultural production, industrial output – could continue infinitely on a finite planet. Their position was not dogmatic and they did not prescribe solutions; still they were attacked viciously by most economists. Donella expressed her surprise at the “intensity of the reaction” to the book that simply cautioned that exponential growth was not possibly forever (p. 169). Limits to Growth suggested that limiting the number of children and consumption was necessary. This was unacceptable to the critics who would not accept any limits to individual freedom. At the same time, there was criticism from the left on the grounds that growth was needed to eliminate poverty in the world. These tensions are of course very much present in society today.

For a while it appeared that those advocating for unlimited growth – spurred on by human ingenuity that would always find substitutes when materials ran short – was winning. And it certainly took hold of politicians and economists many of whom till this day tend to think in these terms. Yet, ideas regarding ecological limits have constantly gained momentum and attention paid to environmental destruction caused by industrial and agricultural production has increased. The science community organized itself around global initiatives, such as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and others in the 1990s and as the concern over climate change became prevalent bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have gathered irrefutable scientific evidence of the environmental havoc our economic system is causing (the IPCC released its latest report in the autumn of 2018 with a dire warning for us to mend our ways or to face peril). Systematic analysis of ‘planetary boundaries’ by the Stockholm Resilience Centre led by Johan Rockström has shown that we have already breached safe operating space for humanity in terms of species extinction, climate change and nitrogen pollution.

The final field trip is to Athabasca River in western Canada, one of the remaining wildernesses in North America – the final place where the green light beckons. The area is now threatened by massive extraction of shale oil from its bituminous sands, leaving the natural beauty of the forested watersheds badly tarnished. The excavation of the tar sands is egged on by reduced availability of oil from more conventional sources and the thawing of the northern areas due to climate change.

Donald Worster has written a majestic account of the rise and fall of natural abundance in North America and the world. His prose is beautifully crafted and engaging. The historical and scientific sources are supplemented by frequent and well-chosen references to literature. Still, Worster’s account is factual and he never preaches, leaving the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. In the epilogue, ‘Life on a Pale Blue Dot,’ Worster places Earth in a cosmic perspective and concludes that irrespective of scientific and technological advances, this planet is the only home we have or will have in any foreseeable future. At the end he ponders about the future of liberal and democracy in the face of natural limits. “Is individualism sustainable when the material horizons begin to shrink and ecological systems to unravel,” he asks. On an optimistic note, “our descendants … might choose to redefine democracy in less fragmented, individualistic terms – not as a political culture devoted to freeing the individual from all restraint, but instead as a culture that embraces restraint for all” (p. 224).



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China's Asian Dream: Empire Building along the New Silk Road by Tom Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tom Miller, a former journalist and senior analyst at Gavekal Research, is a China expert who has spent years in the country and Asia more broadly, and can speak and read Chinese. This is his second book; the first one, China’s Urban Billion was published by Zed in 2012. He is in an excellent position for having written China’s Asian Dream, that focuses on China’s strategic vision and actions to reclaim what it sees as its rightful place as the undisputed leader in Asia. The book gives a systematic and lively treatise of China’s aspirations on the continent and in the world. It paints a picture that poses significant challenges not only to the neighboring countries in the region, but to the West and the United States in particular.

The first part of the book provides a broad historical and geopolitical context, including a brief overview of China’s long history and its humiliation by Britain and the British East Asia Company in the 1939 Opium War and the 1942 Treaty of Nanking that forced China to open its ports to foreign trade. Then in 1895 followed the defeat in the Sino-Japanese war, no less by a country that China regarded a little brother. Then in 1931 Japan invaded China’s northeast setting up Manchukuo, a puppet state. In 1937, a full-out war broke with Japanese domination for years to come. These were humiliations that China has never forgotten (although Mao later thanked Japan for the invasion, as it eventually enabled the successful Communist takeover in 1949).

Chapter 1 after this introduction tells about the ongoing effort by China to establish a ‘New Silk Road,’ what it calls ‘One Belt, One Road,’ connecting China to its neighbors through both a terrestrial and maritime route eventually leading to Europe. The initiative is tied to financing by the Silk Road Fund and the newly established Asian Infrastructure Development Bank. The aim is to tie Asian countries more tightly to China’s sphere of interest through extensive investment in infrastructure. This more proactive strategy, as Miller points out, is a clear departure from China’s earlier foreign policy established by Deng Xiaoping that “diplomacy must serve the greater goal of domestic development” (p. 26). The current President Xi Jingping has taken a much more aggressive stance in promoting Chinese interests abroad.

The rest of the book is divided into sections based on geography. Here Miller reports first-hand accounts from his travels often to remote local areas in the countries. The first such section focuses on Central Asia, including China’s western Islamic dominated province of Xinjiang (literally, ‘New territory’). The Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan used to belong to the Soviet Union and, while becoming independent after the breakup of the empire, have maintained close ties to Russia. Recently, however, China has made a concerted effort to muscle itself into Central Asia and its expansive oil fields. “Economically, China – not Russia – is now top dog in Central Asia,” writes Miller (p. 75). However, business for the Chinese traders is not always easy, given the need to routinely bribe border guards and the occasional troubles that break out. Tens of thousands of Chinese have settled into Central Asia, but most of them see them as temporary visitors making some money for a few years before returning home. While the Chinese investment is welcomed by the governments, local people fear they are being overtaken by the Chinese – a theme that is quite common throughout the book. Russia at the same time is concerned about losing its grip on Central Asia. Local people in the Stans are worried about Russia’s intentions, especially after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia remains militarily dominant in the region and its cultural ties to Central Asia are definitely closer than those of China.

The next part deals with Laos and Cambodia, two of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries downstream in the Mekong basin from China’s Yunnan Province. Yunnan shares a 4,000 km long border with Southeast Asia and the Chinese planners have made it a priority to connect these two parts with extensive road and railway connections, as well as air links. China has designated Yunnan as ‘bridgehead’ for Southeast Asia’s development. As Miller notes, ‘bridgehead’ is a military term, which may have unfortunate connotations (p. 98). Laos is also one of the few remaining communist countries ruled by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. It is traditionally closely allied with Vietnam and was heavily bombed by the American air force during the Vietnam War, although Laos was not officially a party in the war. When I worked there a decade ago, the Vietnamese presence was still prevalent and Thailand also had a strong influence. In the northern parts of the country, however, you could see an increasing Chinese influence. Today the capital city, Vientiane, has been transformed by Chinese capital. Miller reports from Udomxai, the biggest town in northern Laos where the Chinese make up some 15% of the inhabitants. Even Chinese farmers are moving to Laos to take advantage of the country’s cheap and fertile land. Moving to the infamous opium growing Golden Triangle where Laos meets Thailand and Myanmar, Miller finds industrial scale agricultural plantations operated by the Chinese. Chinese-owned casinos have sprouted up there to cater to Chinese and Thai gamblers; and even the working girls are imported from China (p. 111). Further south, in Cambodia, the Chinese money and influence are equally important and eagerly received by the thuggish Hun Sen regime, which ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. As a consequence, Cambodia has often been out of line with its fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), regularly supporting China in its controversial and expansionist policies pertaining to Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and, importantly, the South China Sea. While the elites in these countries are all too happy to receive China and its investments, the relationships between the regular people and the Chinese immigrants who are not known for their respect for other people’s cultures is not always equally friendly. Furthermore, as Miller points out, there is a fine balance to be achieved in foreign relations: for instance, China’s increasing influence in Cambodia is resented in Vietnam (p. 124).

Myanmar provides a cautionary tale as to the perils of associating with undemocratic and corrupt regimes. In the following chapter Miller reports on how China “lost” Myanmar, where it was the closest (in fact only) international ally to the notorious military regime. When the junta dissolved in 2012, anti-Chinese protests ensued, in particular against Chinese state-owned firms operating a giant dam, a copper mine, and oil and gas mines. The Chinese were accused of taking land with poor compensation from locals, as well as destroying the environment and ransacking natural resources (p. 127). Myanmar’s democratic transition coincided by the American government’s ‘pivot to Asia,’ which worried China. Anti-Chinese feelings are widespread in Myanmar and the democratization and consequent freedom of expression led quickly to popular protests against China. Public pressure even caused the new president to suspend work on the $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam that was a Chinese flagship project. The leaders in China were shocked about how popular opinion could lead to such a disastrous outcome – obviously, they were not used to the fact that people’s views mattered – and Chinese analysts started talking about the ‘loss’ or Myanmar (p. 128). Miller claims that in the recent years the Chinese firms have started to understand that they need to improve their relations with local populations (p. 134). The Chinese state has also taken unprecedented steps as a mediator between the government of Myanmar and the Kachin rebels up north. Despite the tensions China should not be counted out in Myanmar. Trade between China and Myanmar stands for a high share of Myanmar’s GDP – and this is not counting the highly significant illegal trade in timber, opium, meta-amphetamines and jade. The environmental watchdog Global Witness estimates that the jade trade in alone 2014 was worth a whopping $31 billion and a significant driver of the armed conflict with the Kachin (p. 141). In the late 1990s, when traveling in the border region of Yunnan and Myanmar, I could witness an incredibly buoyant trade in jade that was by no means under ground. Miller travels to Lashio, the largest town in northeastern Myanmar to seek evidence of a reported ‘Chinese invasion,’ but finds little by way of new arrivals. He concludes that Myanmar doesn’t need to worry about being overrun by Chinese people, but rather by Chinese money: “Myanmar’s problem is less one of outsiders arriving and taking over than one of outsiders taking what they want and then leaving” (p. 148).

One of the reasons why Myanmar is so important is because of China’s desire to gain access to the Bay of Bengal. Such a western seaboard for China would notably improve its energy supplies and reduce the risks of importing most of its oil through the narrow Straits of Malacca that could be blocked by US or other war ships during a time of conflict. Some years ago the Chinese national petroleum company constructed oil and gas pipelines from the Myanmar coast to Yunnan. These pipelines, which were subject to protests during their construction, started pumping natural gas from the Myanmar’s Shwe gas field in 2013 and two years later the first oil was pumped, bringing billions of dollars to the government of Myanmar as well as benefiting China. A Chinese port on the Bay of Bengal is also seen as important for facilitating exports to Bangladesh, India and beyond. Importantly, the economic corridor from Yunnan to the Bay of Bengal allows Beijing to extend its sphere of influence to the Indian Ocean (p. 150). Miller concludes that much depends on how Myanmar’s new government, in effect led by Aung San Suu Kyi, receives China’s approaches and whether Chinese companies there behave responsibly.

In a chapter entitled “A String of Pearls” Miller turns his attention to the Indian Ocean where China has become increasingly active. Indian analysts believe that the Chinese are systematically building naval bases around Indian ocean establishing what they have called ‘a string of pearls’ in order to enhance their dominance of what India considers their backyard. India and China have a half century long history of mutual distrust. Latest this summer, the two countries’ armies were at loggerheads across their land border in the Himalayas. Indian concerns about the ‘string of pearls’ has further intensified since Xi Jinping announce the plan to build a Maritime Silk Road in 2013 (p. 167). Indian analysts that Miller has talked to see China’s advancement as a conscious step by Beijing to expand its dominance in the region. While India could benefit from cooperating with China on initiatives, such as the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor, there are significant security-related concerns. In Miller’s judgment, these are exaggerated: “Beijing is far more interested in securing alternative routes for its energy imports and in protecting commercial sea lanes than it is in building a new empire” (p. 171). This despite the fact that Miller recognizes that China’s schemes have geostrategic as well as commercial motives. India is concerned about Sri Lank sliding into China’s sphere. However, a particular sore point is the long-standing friendship between China and Pakistan, an expression of which is the Chinese port development in Gwadar on the coast of Baluchistan and the associated plan to develop a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor running from Gwadar to the Chinese border and Kashgar in Xinjiang. Apart from opening up an alternative route for energy imports, according to Miller, China also wants to use this massive economic cooperation to persuade Pakistan’s government to rule in Islamic extremists whose tentacles reach across the border to Xinjiang (p. 176). Importantly, the Gwadar port provides a valuable permanent maritime base for China on Indian Ocean, near the shipping lanes from the Middle East and Africa.

China had a close relationship with the government of Mahenda Rajapaksa, former dictatorial and thuggish president of Sri Lanka, supplying the bulk of arms he used in the prolonged civil war against the Tamil population in the north of the island country. During that period, Chinese banks financed major projects in Sri Lanka constructed by Chinese firms. The banks loaned money at high interest rates so that these could be used to provide kickbacks to Rajapaksa and his cronies. After the civil war ended and Rajapaksa died, these high interest rate loans have been a major bone of contention between the new government and China. As Miller states: “For China, Sri Lanka offers a test case of how nimbly its leaders and enterprises can react to the vicissitudes of foreign politics” (p. 195). He quotes a Sri Lankan intellectual saying: “The Chinese do not quite understand how to deal with countries that are democracies, where you have political transitions as we have seen here .. They would rather deal with a corrupt dictatorship and not worry about it.”

The final chapter of the book deals with the fiery waters of South China Sea, an area where tensions have risen in recent years as China has aggressively pursued an expansionist policy (see also Hayton, 2014; Kaplan, 2015). China has claimed sovereignty over most of South China Sea causing conflict with many of its neighbors. It claims the Paracel Islands southeast of Hainan. These are also claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam, but China has controlled them since it wrested them from South Vietnam in a maritime battle in 1974. Much further away from the Chinese mainland and its exclusive economic zone as recognized by international law lie the Spratly Islands, which are also subject to disputes between China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan. Using its military power, China has in the past several years focused on creating ‘facts on the ground’ by carrying out massive reclamation works to create artificial islands and building garrisons on them. The Chinese government has, somewhat disingenuously, used both claims based on international law and, when they have been unsuccessful, historical claims to the ownership of the islands. Already in 1975, Deng Xiaoping told his Vietnamese counterpart that the islands of South China Sea had “belonged to China since ancient times” (p. 202). As demonstrated by Bill Hayton in his excellent book The South China Sea and summarized here by Miller, these historical claims are at best dubious. For most part of its 2000 years of history, the South China Sea was a trading area for the various peoples belonging to shifting kingdoms that occupied the littoral. The Chinese empire was not even active in maritime affairs for most of that period. The claims to the South China Sea started appearing in Chinese maps for the first time in 1914 and these were used as a basis for claims by the Nationalist government and the Communists after that. In 2009, China for the first time submitted a map to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in which appeared a nine-dash line (also known as the ‘cow’s lick’) and exerting “indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and adjacent waters” (p. 206). The Southeast Asian nations were understandably furious. Since then, Chinese actions in the South China Sea have resulted in numerous conflicts with the neighbors. China has blocked oil exploration in the territorial waters of Vietnam, which it claims to itself. There have been naval standoffs and actual shooting incidents between Chinese and Vietnamese and Philippines forces. And China has harassed fishing vessels from other countries that have ventured into disputed waters.

One of the reasons for China claiming virtually all of South China Sea, including the EEZs of the adjacent Southeast Asian nations pertains to the hydrocarbons to be found in the seabed. However, Miller does not believe this to be a major motivation: it is believed that the region contains relatively little oil and gas, and what is there is hard to exploit due to difficult geology and powerful typhoons. The real reason he says is to gain strategic control of the shipping lanes (p. 210). Miller appears to have some sympathy for China’s position, although he recognizes that its position is weakened by its selective adherence to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of which it is part, and its refusal to accept a ruling in 2016 by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in favor of the Philippines regarding the Scarborough Shoal, a triangular group of reefs and rocks off the coast of the Philippines. The events have also led to tensions with other countries, including Japan, Australia and the US. In fact, the American navy destroyer U.S.S. John McCain, which collided with a tanker off Singapore on August 21st, 2017, was returning from a ‘freedom of navigation’ mission in South China Sea sailing through international waters that China claims. This has led Beijing to believe that there is a US-led anti-Chinese coalition being built involving its Southeast Asian neighbors, as well as Japan, Australia and India.

Tom Miller ends his excellent book with a brief but powerful 10-page conclusion that both acknowledges China’s rightful concerns and its need to “start acting like a great power” (p. 239) given the size of its population and economy, as well as recognizes the challenges that the country itself and the region as a whole face. President Xi’s “proactive” foreign policy in Asia, he writes, “offers a straightforward deal: China will deliver trade, investment and other economic goodies to all partners that accommodate – or, at the very least, do not challenge – its core interests” (p. 240). China’s persuasive power comes from the economic incentives it can provide. It faces questions of trust with its Asian neighbors and partners, especially those that have disputes or historical reasons to distrust China. Also in newly democratic countries, like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where China is associated with support to previous suppressive regimes, there will be challenges.

However, as Miller, states, “the reality is that China will become a much more visible presence in Asia in the coming decades” (p. 242). And as Chinese nationals and firms spread across the region and the world, President Xi has sworn to protect nationals abroad, using military force if necessary (p. 243). These factors risk blowing up in the future. Still, despite a certain militarization, China has thus far emphasized trade, commercial interests and economic growth, rather than political or geographical expansion (notwithstanding its occupation of Tibet and claims to Taiwan as a rogue province). In President Xi’s words: “We Chinese love peace … No matter how much stronger it may become, China will never seek hegemony or expansion” (p. 245). Miller sees China’s determination to gain control of the region as quite rational and something that the US and regional powers must accept. He finishes the book with the following passage (p. 248):

“It is hardly my place to prescribe how the US and China should avoid war. I do believe, however, that the US and its regional allies must accept China’s determination to carve out its own sphere of influence across Asia. And having accepted the inevitability of China’s rise, the safest course of action is to accommodate it within a remodeled regional security structure. Whether China would accept such an accommodation is another question, and much will depend on the relative strengths of both sides in the decades to come. But as China pursues its vision of national rejuvenation, something has to give. If it does not, the “Chinese dream” might tragically morph into an Asian nightmare.”

Tom Miller has written a very fine book on a topic that is one of the most important developments in the world today. His writing is smooth and entertaining, while he combines historical and political analysis with reporting from the frontlines. Everyone interested in security and development in Asia and the world would benefit from reading this book.

References:

Hayton, Bill (2014). The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Kaplan, Robert D. (2015). Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. New York: Random House.

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Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me a long time to get through this one. It's not because it's boring or badly written, but because it's a big book. I mean literally big: 635 pages and mine is the heavy hard cover version. I travel a lot and I could not make myself bring the book with me, as it would have doubled the weight of my carry-on, although it would have been good reading on long flights (like the ones I took on a Japan trip during this reading). The fact that I had to take several breaks from the book made it harder, as the story is really quite complicated. Or stories, I should say, as there are several going on in parallel.

At the heart of it is a kidnap-murder case that took place 14 years earlier and where the trail has gone cold. This story is quite interesting and complex in itself, with a surprising twist at the end. A parallel story to this is that the protagonist Mikami's daughter has vanished and this is naturally putting a huge strain on Mikami and his wife Minako.

Here's another thing that makes it a bit hard to keep track of the characters. To name a few, so the protagonist is Mikami and his spouse is Minako who has a friend Mizuki; while in the office Mikami's assistant is Mikumo and the assistant chief is Mikura. Now, I know that in Japanese these are entirely different names but reading in English we don't have the benefit of the kanji characters that would keep them separate. And in the end, it turns out that the phonetic similarities have a meaning to the story.

Back to the story, the main complication to the plot is that it mostly focuses on the internal strife within the prefectural police department where Mikami is press director. Here again there are parallel plots. There's been a cover-up related to police missteps during the cold case kidnap-murder, which the different sides use as a weapon against each other, the sides being the Criminal Investigations and the Administrative Affairs divisions. Mikami, a former detective and still one at heart, has been sidelined to Administrative Affairs and thus lands in the middle of the infighting, with conflicted loyalties. There's a threat of the police commissioner from the National Police Agency in Tokyo to come down and take over the Criminal Investigations division, which would be an enormous catastrophe to the pride and minds of the local police.

At the same time, there is unexpected tumult in the press relations, which Mikami (and Mikumo and the two others in the team) has to manage. The press representatives are depicted as rather vulgar savages out for blood and the press briefings, some lasting the entire night, turning into shouting matches where the press assaults the officers hauling insults and sometimes getting physical (it's interesting because the author used to be an investigative reporter). This takes a toll on Mikami who at the same time has to conduct his own investigations, try to prevent damage from the commissioners visit, partake in the departmental intrigue, try to manage his career and marriage etc. You get the point: he's one stressed out dude.

For a Western reader, the fights within the police department and with the press may seem like a storm in a tea cup. The cover-up is a bigger deal, but the rest of it is about things that could be seen as rather trivial. Yet, Mikami (and the author Yokoyama) makes a huge deal of it -- in fact, this is the main reason to the book's length. A huge amount of space is dedicated to these plots and to the mixed ponderings inside Mikami's conflicted mind (see, this is a psychological thriller). What they do reveal, though, are the machismo and pride and the fear of losing face that define Japanese salaried men. And the fact that you are entirely defined by your work and loyalty to your office is seen as paramount. Even generations of former Criminal Investigations directors are drawn into the plot and their years of retirement have not lessened their partiality or investment in departmental intrigue. In other countries, Mikami would have already called it quits, but he might as well kill himself if he had to leave the police force (although his thinking evolves during the book and he starts to see life priorities in a slightly clearer light). This is not exaggerated, I'm sure, and it's all very interesting. But these sections are just too long, there is a lot of repetition, and a huge number of characters who are hard to keep straight in one's mind -- and they distract from the fascinating investigations.

It's not that the book is boring. It's actually well written and has a certain amount of suspense. The translator, Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, has done an admirable job and the language flows naturally. Maybe I would give it another star had I just read it in one go spending a weekend on the sofa with a pot of coffee and, perhaps, pen and paper to remind me of who each of the characters was and what they stood for.


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The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A very well researched account of what the author calls the madness industry. Written in a highly entertaining style, the book provides a thoughtful critique of how psychology and psychiatry are practiced, and how pharmaceutical companies push for more and more severe diagnoses to peddle their products. In the book we meet an interesting cast of characters -- sane and truly insane, psychopaths and not so, incarcerated and sitting in boardrooms. Looking at these serious phenomena through the concrete and varied cases provides a most vivid and absorbing approach. Along the way, Jon Ronson also examines his own sanity and role as a journalist.



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The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia by Bill Hayton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bill Hayton has written an important book about a world hotspot that receives far too little attention in the United States and Europe now obsessed with Islamic terrorism, the refugee crisis and the mess in the Middle East. In the meantime, the South China Sea region continues to grow importance as a global economic powerhouse, while tensions mount between the increasingly aggressive China and its neighbors. The importance of South China Sea goes far beyond the region. For example, US$5.3 trillion of trade passes through the South China Sea, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (Armed Clash in the South China Sea). Of this, U.S. trade accounts for US1.2 trillion. According to security expert Robert D. Kaplan, almost 60% of Japan’s and Taiwan’s and 80% of China’s crude oil imports are also transported through the relatively narrow sea lanes in the region. As China flexes its political and military muscles in order to secure the mineral and other resources in the South China Sea to itself, it is imperative for the rest of the world to ensure that the international waters in the area remain open for navigation. Hence the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.

South China Sea directly borders a large number countries, including China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, and the Republic of China (Taiwan). In addition, countries like Japan have an important stake in the sea. As a semi-enclosed sea, there is considerable scope for overlapping claims for territorial waters in the area. China has unilaterally established a “nine-dashed line” – known as the “cow’s tongue” – that usurps most of South China Sea to the big brother in the region. In 2009, the Chinese government attached a map of this “U-shaped line” to its submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. At stake are island groups, such as the Paracels (claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam) and the Spratly Islands (disputed by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam), and their presumed resources, from oil and minerals to fishing. In 2013, the Philippines brought the case under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to the International Court of Justice, which in June 2016 ruled in the Philippines’ favor on seven of the aspects in the case (stating that in other seven submissions it was not able to provide a ruling). Needless to say, China has not accepted the ruling. Hayton in his book gives extensive background to the disputes and China’s attempts to use both the notion of territorial waters under UNCLOS as well as historical arguments to justify its claims to most of the sea area.

In the first lengthy chapter, ‘Wrecks and Wrongs: Prehistory to 1500’, Hayton provides a comprehensive historical overview of the waxing and waning empires – including the Champa, Angkor and Srivijaya – in the South China Sea area and the importance of the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network (using the term coined by the archeologist Wilhem Solheim). This analysis convincingly refutes the notion of any single nation having unique historical claims to the sea. In the following chapter, ‘Maps and Lines: 1500 to 1948’, the book moves on to the era when the European colonial powers played a significant role in the region, until the times in the 1930s when the Chinese government turned to map-making in trying to exert its control over the region. Hayton demonstrates how new Chinese names were invented for many of the islands and reefs, sometimes just translating the names that the French and the British had given to them (like in the case of North Danger Reef in Spratly Islands, which was simply translated into Bei xian), to give legitimacy to the historical claims. The French geographer, François-Xavier Bonnet has also shown how China has planted archaeological evidence on the islands in the South China Sea to bolster its territorial claims (Archeology and Patriotism: Long Term Chinese Strategies in the South China Sea, 2015). Following Mao’s revolution, the Communists adopted the policies and maps of the predecessor government.

China, however, has not been the only regional actor trying to ensure access to South China Sea and its resources. Others, not least Vietnam and the Philippines, have been active, too, sometimes using inventive tactics to expand their control. For example, both countries established garrisons on deserted islands in the North Spratly Islands trying to outmaneuver each other. Despite earlier conflicts, these garrisons are now on speaking terms and have even organized football and basketball matches between themselves. One of the core strategies of all the actors has been to try to establish a permanent foothold on uninhabited (and often uninhabitable) islands or mere rocks, so as to be able to claim territorial waters around them. Hayton gives detailed and interesting accounts of these efforts. Placing permanent structures and settlements for military personnel unfortunate enough to be posted in these hostile environments is hard when a rock is unable to support food production or is part of the year submerged under water. These claims can’t be accepted under international law, but it hasn’t stopped China and others from establishing bases on them. This strategy may be dissolved in water when rising sea levels due to global warming fully submerge the geological formations.

Among the key actors in the fray have, naturally, been many energy companies hoping for a bonanza on the hydrocarbons supposedly lying under the South China Sea. The extent of these, as well as the technical and economic feasibility of extracting them, is still somewhat unknown. Still multinationals, such as BP and ExxonMobil (and many of their subsidiaries, some established just for this purpose), as well as national energy companies like the Sinopec (China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation) have entered the geopolitical game as active players. Surely the Secretary of State nominee, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, will be able to advice the incoming President Trump on the intricacies of the situation.

In the sixth chapter, ‘Drums and Symbols: Nationalism’, Hayton discusses how the countries in the region have used sovereignty issues around South China Sea to boost nationalistic sentiments, often to divert attention from domestic problems. Equally obviously, all countries in the basin, as well as outside, such as the United States, use political carrots and sticks to convince others, including those in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), to support their position. China’s diplomacy, which alternates between economic incentives and military threats, is especially powerful in this regard. Towards the end of the book, chapter 8 focuses on ‘Shaping the Battlefield: Military Matters’, outlining the military buildup in the region, as well as the role of the United States armed forces providing security guarantees to its allies, notably Taiwan, but also others.

Last but not at all least, the South China Sea is significant in terms of its environment. Apart from fisheries, Hayton does not spend much time discussing environmental issues. The fishing issue is big enough in itself, given that the 500 million or so, largely poor, people living on the shores of South China Sea depend on fish for their protein. In the last chapter 9, ‘Cooperation and Its Opposites: Resolving the Disputes’, Hayton discusses the declining yields caused by overfishing and development in the sea. There has been a steady increase in the number of fishing operators (from 584,000 in 1980 to 1.8 million in 2002) and the fishing fleets’ power, size and ability to operate far offshore has equally increased. Over the same period, the average catch of a small inshore fisherman has fallen from 20 kg to 2 kg, which barely allows for subsistence. Again, China is the biggest culprit and as its fishing boats have ventured further away, this has led to clashes with other nations’ coast guards. Recognizing the problem, China has attempted to establish periodic fishing bans to allow for the fish stocks to recuperate, but this is not enough. A better solution would be to establish permanent marine protected areas, but this obviously requires agreement and cooperation by all countries in the region.

Apart from the fisheries, the South China Sea basin is a repository of globally significant ecosystems and biodiversity in mangroves, seagrass beds and the like. These are threatened by coastal development, extensive aquaculture, land-based sources of pollution and many other human-induced stresses. The project, ‘Reversing Environmental Degradation Trends in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand’, funded by the organization that I work for, Global Environment Facility, and implemented by the UN Environment Programme, is a major effort to fight these trends – and it was the first regional program of its kind in which China agreed to participate. I was delighted to see the program getting mention in Hayton’s book.

The South China Sea by Bill Hayton is a good complement to Robert D. Kaplan’s fine 2014 book Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. In fact, where Kaplan focuses on military and security issues (while giving geography and politics fair coverage), Hayton’s approach is broader. Especially the historical chapters are amongst the best in the book, bringing new information in a consolidated form and putting the current issues in perspective.

South China Sea is an area with high risk for conflict, even if a shooting war between China and the U.S. would be unlikely. Just earlier this month, a Chinese navy ship intercepted and confiscated a U.S. submarine drone in international waters causing tensions between the two countries. Lynn Kuok, in an opinion piece published by the Brookings Institution this month, advises the incoming administration about the importance of the region for US and global strategic interests (“America first” cannot mean “America alone”: Engaging Southeast Asia). If the US withdraws from the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), ignores ASEAN, and waffles on its interests and commitments in the region, this will only benefit China as the hegemon of the region. Others, like Susan Shirk, head of the China policy center at the University of California San Diego, have argued that the US interests in the South China Sea are limited (see China’s Great Leap Backward by James Fallows in The Atlantic). Then again, as Kuok wrote in June 2016, “The South China Sea dispute is about much more than mere ‘rocks.’ It concerns maritime rights and the preservation of the system of international law. More broadly, how the United States and China interact in the South China Sea has important implications of their relationship elsewhere and on other issues” (The U.S. FON Program in the South China Sea).

In my opinion, the South China Sea issues are so important for regional stability, freedom of navigation, food security, and the global environment, that they deserve the full attention of the world at large.


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Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alex Kerr is angry. He’s angry at the Japanese bureaucrats, construction industry, media and, not least, education system that have all destroyed not only the natural beauty of the unique archipelago, but also the culture and psyche of the ancient country. The book is very well researched and Kerr knows his subject, the country where he has lived for decades. All in all, the book is an important antidote to the Japanophiles who look at the country through rose-tinted glasses—and as Kerr points out, there are many of those (and to a point I have to confess being one myself). At the same time, this is a rather tedious read because of its gloom and hopelessness. Furthermore, at 432 pages, it’s somewhat overlong and somewhat repetitious. Still, it’s an important book, which I hope many Japanese would read. However, there’s probably not much risk of that, for the very reasons that Kerr outlines in the book.

Kerr takes us through virtually all sectors of Japanese society, pointing out systematically what is wrong. He takes the title of the book from an old Chinese story where an emperor asked a painter: “What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?” The artist replied, “Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy” (pp. 145-146). The metaphor here is that focusing on small everyday things is difficult, but constructing new, big and expensive things is easy. Japan in the past half century has focused only on the latter and in the process destroyed the former.

It all comes down to an all-powerful and completely unaccountable bureaucracy that is unimaginative, undemocratic and tone deaf to alternative voices. It has been empowered by an education system that discourages free thinking and emphasizes rote learning and military style obeisance. Of course, no such system could stay in place for long unless there were powerful groups that benefited. Kerr shows the collusion between the bureaucrats, politicians and industry that by any Western standard could only be condemned as corrupt. The long-standing principle of ‘poor people, strong state’ was born after the American occupation when Japan was determined to catch up with the West at any cost. Which it did, but at an enormous cost to the environment, nature and, yes, the poor people.

Probably the strongest part of the book focuses on the power of the construction industry and the Ministry of Construction, which have systematically destroyed the natural beauty and ecological balance of this unique archipelago. By the mid-1990s, Japan used about 30 times more concrete per square kilometre than the United States, channelling virtually every river and stream, constructing ‘erosion control’ measures on the most remote uninhabited mountainsides, building roads into the forest to allow for logging, destroying most of its shoreline with ‘coastal protection’ works, and paving over virtually anything that can be paved. This construction frenzy has been a huge boon to the industry and to the bureaucrats who benefit from it, not least in the form of amakudari—cushy post-retirement jobs in the industry. It’s been enabled by many factors. Importantly, the huge government subsidies flowing to rural areas, but only if they accept construction works determined in Tokyo. These are in many smaller towns and villages the main sources of employment and income (although Kerr shows how many a town has also ended up in unsustainable debt because of the demons that have been brought upon them).

The government propaganda has been effective in making many Japanese genuinely believe that theirs is a small (semai) country with not enough of space for the population (in reality, Japan is by far larger than any country in Europe, barring Russia; it’s a third larger than France or Spain and has a lower population density than Holland or Germany). Another aspect that the propaganda has been successful in is instilling the fear of danger into the population: everything is abunai (dangerous) and anyone doing manual labour (including, e.g., ambulance drivers) wear helmets. Although the Japanese culture traditionally admires nature, it has also been seen as something to be controlled.

The education system has been consciously devised to create an obedient, unquestioning and hard-working labour force for Japan’s industry. Inquisitive minds are discouraged from the beginning and authority is to be respected. My wife remembers from her Japanese childhood being punished when she asked questions from the teachers at school. Education is centred on discipline and group think—starting with the school uniforms: strictly militaristic for boys, sailor outfits for girls. One story from the time I lived in Tokyo in the 1990s has stuck in my mind as typical. It was about a boy who was expelled from school on the grounds that he had dyed his hair. The parents got a doctor’s certificate that the poor boy actually had been born with brown hair. The school authorities reluctantly reversed the decision, on the condition that the boy dyed his hair black. School bullying is rampant in Japan and the victims often are kids who are somehow different. All this has resulted in a complacent public. For instance, environmental NGOs are few and far between, their members considered radical outliers.

If school is tough, university is not. On the contrary, once you’ve secured a place in a prestigious university, the four years spent in higher education are commonly the only time in a person’s life when you can slack off freely. Employers hire graduates on the basis of which university they went to, not their grades or field of study. That’s because the next stage of socialization is at work: the employer wants to re-educate the new staff member and mould him to fit the company culture. Only those intent on becoming academics go to graduate school. Unfortunately, graduate schools are equally hierarchical, as young scholars get affiliated with one senior professor who has complete authority over their research and lives. Peer review is basically unheard of in Japanese academia; it would be a logical impossibility, as it would involve a critique of a researcher who is affiliated with an unassailable senior professor. In the West, peer review is the foundation that guarantees academic quality. A Japanese friend of mine who did his doctorate in the States, but got hired by one of the better private universities in Tokyo, told me that his publications in the best international journals have no bearing for his career or status; the university only requires him to write two pieces per year, in Japanese, to its own non-peer reviewed journal. Another acquaintance, an American professor in a recognized university in the Kansai region strongly discouraged me to join the faculty, as I remember him telling me, “these are the stupidest professors in the world.”

Of course, Japan is well-known for its technological progress and the situation in hard sciences and engineering is much better than in social sciences or even medicine. Japan is essentially a handicraft culture and, as such, it is extremely detail-oriented and aiming for perfection. It’s not that the Japanese invented the camera, the computer or the car; they just perfected them. Kerr elaborates on this: “Total dedication drives Japan’s self-sacrificing workers, and underlies the quality control that is the hallmark of Japanese production. But the tendency to take things to extremes means that people and organizations can easily get carried away and set out to ‘improve’ things that don’t need improving” (p. 45). I believe he is right when he sees a connection between this tendency and the constant desire to ‘improve’ on the rivers, mountainsides, ancient cities, and the like—if you think of it, even the famed Japanese gardens and bonsai trees are attempts to improve on what the nature has created. Kerr extrapolates further, stating that “there is an unstoppable extremism at work that is reminiscent of Japan’s military buildup before World War II” (p. 45). There is something to this, which can explain the continued destruction of Japan by a single-minded bureaucratic mass not governed by any democratically accountable political leadership.

The wanton way in which the environment has been destroyed in the name of progress is sad. After the war, in the effort to rebuild Japan and to catch up with the West, everything was sacrificed to the altar of industrial development. Minamata, a fishing village with considerable natural beauty on the island of Kyushu, became synonymous to industrial pollution in the 1950s and 1960s. The stunning thing about Minamata—and several other similar, if less publicized cases—was that, for decades, it was the victims who were shunned and ostracized for hampering industrial progress. One might say that Minamata took place half a century ago, but the case has barely been closed now. Perhaps more importantly, similar disregard for human health and life—not to mention ecosystem health or aesthetic values—continues to be demonstrated today, when Japan is rich and there is absolutely no justification for it (if there ever was). It was only in 1997 when the government started half-hearted regulation of dioxins after the publication of extremely high concentration levels of this poison around incinerators. The meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the tsunami of 11 March 2011 revealed stupendous breaches in security at the plant, with the government watchdog clearly in collusion with the industry to bypass even the weak regulations.

Taking Kyoto as a prime example, Kerr—understandably and correctly—lambasts the destruction of old neighbourhoods and the cultural patrimony in ancient urban centres. Again, at work are the bureaucrats and construction industry on autopilot and a complacent public with a misguided understanding of progress and modernity.

Had Kerr left it to examining environment, construction and education the book might have read better. But he decided to cover many more areas, including the bubble economy, manga, ikebana, the poor state of Japan’s museums, the movie industry, just to name a few True, he does tie the miserable state of Japanese cinema and other arts to the same root causes, stating how “Japan’s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children” (p. 312). Similarly, the critique of ‘internationalization’ of Japan is right on the money. Japan is likely the least international of any industrialized nation. Since the Edo period, foreigners have been isolated in their own ghettos, like the historical Dutch and Chinese merchants off Nagasaki. Today, foreigners (gaijin) have been largely relegated to the position of low-level workers in companies or language teachers with no chance of career advancement. As for unskilled workers, authorities have encouraged primarily ethnically Japanese people from places like Brazil and Peru to take up work in the country. Just a few years ago, I was having dinner in Tokyo with a senior government official. When I mentioned that, given the aging population and dearth of manual workers, Japan would be forced to ease up immigration laws, his answer was (seriously): “No, not at all; that’s why we’re investing so much in the development of robots.” Xenophobia is alive and well in Japan.

Kerr also talks about creative Japanese people who choose to leave the country. Japan has never appreciated the maverick, even if the person was a genius.  He mentions leading scientists (like Shuji Nakamura, inventor of important breakthroughs in blue lasers; Dr. Ken Kakere, a cancer specialist long with NIH in the USA), business people (Nobuya Okabe who makes SciFi effects for movies and TV) and musicians (Seiji Ozawa, Ryuichi Sakamoto) who all have decided to go abroad. “In Japan’s medical world, young people, women, the outspoken, and the inventive stand no chance of recognition” (p. 339). The same could be said of many other fields. At the same time, many young people decide to leave for studies abroad where they can “enjoy” life and study, rather than just “endure” like in Japan (p. 357).

This book was published more than a decade ago, in 2001, and its examples come largely from the 1990s. One could therefore expect it to be outdated. Many things have changed since the publication and, perhaps, things are no longer equally bleak. In fact, Kerr himself sees some hopeful signs for change, although he does have his doubts: “Change will get harder, not easier, as the population ages. At the very moment when Japan needs adventurous people to drastically revise its way of doing things, the population has already become the world’s oldest, with school registrations on a strong downward curve … Meanwhile, youths, whom one would ordinarily expect to be full of energy and initiative, have been taught in school to be obedient and never to question the way things are” (p. 367). Kerr points out that Japan has demonstrated an ability to abruptly change course, twice, but both times there was an external impetus: first in the late-Edo period when Commodore Perry forced Japan open to outsiders; the second time after World War II with an American instigated new constitution. This time Japan is on its own: “Nobody outside Japan is concerned about the fate of its mountains and rivers; nobody will arrive in a warship to demand that Japan produce better movies, rescue bankrupt pension funds, educate its children to be creative, or house its families in livable houses. The revolution will have to come from within” (p. 360).

But many things have indeed happened. The recession has shaken up the lifelong career structure and unemployment has risen. More young people have been forced into self-employment or have even dropped out. At the time when Kerr wrote his book a dozen years ago, Japan’s economy was still larger than the combined economy of the rest of East Asia, including China. Since then, China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. Then there was the tsunami and the nuclear disaster, which surely must have shattered any remaining trust people may have had in the bureaucracy and big business.

Then again, East Village is still full of Japanese kids who did not fit in and Ryuichi Sakamoto still lives in New York. Japanese speaking henna gaijin are still paraded on TV variety shows as curious freaks. Construction is continuing unabated with government subsidies. And LDP—neither liberal nor democratic—is again in power. One can only hope for the best.

If this review—like the book itself—comes across overly negative, it is because Kerr focused on the critical aspects. Japan, of course, has so many good aspects to it. That’s why Kerr, I and many a Japanophile cares. At the end, this is a work of love. As Kerr points out, the overwhelming majority of books written about Japan by gaijin focus on the lovely aspects—the aesthetics, the traditional culture, the food, the politeness of people, the efficiency, the beauty that remains in nature and in culture—therefore, a critical look that doesn’t overlook the troubling side is useful. Taking an analogy from what is missing in new ikebana, Kerr concludes Japan has strayed too far from jitsu, or reality, and there is a need to getting back in touch with this reality. He concludes: “The result of Japan’s war with jitsu has been to tear apart and ravage most of what Japan holds most dear in its own culture, and this lies at the root of the nation’s modern cultural malaise: people are sick at heart because Japan has strayed so far from its true self … The challenge of this century will be how to find a way home” (p. 385).


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