Howard W. French: Scandals Emerging in Shanghai as Political Season Nears

In a reversal of fortunes that may say as much about Chinese power politics as it does about corruption, China's richest commercial city has come under investigation by the central government for a huge pension fraud scheme.

So far, the budding scandal, which has been written about in unusual detail in the country's news media, has ensnared the chief of the city's Labor and Social Security Bureau, or pension fund, along with the chairman of the Shanghai Electric Group, a municipal utility.

The two, along with the heads of at least two of the city's districts, including a former top aide to the city's Communist Party leader, have been taken to Nanjing, where they are being held by investigators for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the presence of more than 100 investigators from the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who have been sent here from Beijing and have taken up residence in a historic old hotel, has fed widespread speculation that the arrest or demotion of others, possibly including more senior municipal and party officials, may follow.

The Chinese government routinely bans publication of articles on subjects it deems sensitive or embarrassing, so the widespread reporting on the scandal here has led many to conclude that it is the first act in what may be a long season of political jockeying leading up to the 17th Communist Party Congress next year, in which the next generation of national leaders will be selected.

In recent years Shanghai appeared to be all but immune to high-level scandals, with the city's leaders benefiting from the patronage of Jiang Zemin, the country's former leader, who rose to national prominence as mayor of the city and cultivated it as a power base.

Indeed, three years ago a large team of investigators descended from Beijing to look into collusion between officials and real estate developers, only to be recalled abruptly to Beijing, reportedly at Mr. Jiang's insistence.

That scandal began with residents' claims that they had been forced to relocate after developers secured rights to their land through illegal payments to city officials. After the investigation was quashed, the news media were ordered not to write about corrupt land deals, and the lawyer for the displaced residents, Zheng Enchong, was jailed for contacting international human rights groups.

But with Mr. Jiang having relinquished the last of his important titles in 2004, many here say, the way has been opened for a new investigation that many see as an attack on Mr. Jiang's old power base by allies of a younger generation of leaders.

In the current scandal, according to reports in the Chinese news media, city officials arranged for $1.2 billion of municipal pension funds to be lent to an obscure private holding company for investment in a toll expressway between Shanghai and the nearby city of Hangzhou.

Chinese journalists who have reported on the case say the loan was nearly paid off when employees at the highway company informed on their superiors, bringing the arrangement to light.

Chinese news reports have said that if the investigators are allowed to pursue their work to its conclusion, the highway deal may in the end prove to be a modest piece of a much larger web of corruption linking city officials, banks and developers.

The newsweekly Caijing, for example, has carried detailed reports of how money from the city's Social Security Bureau was funneled into private real estate projects as long ago as the early 1990's.

''At the center of the issue is the bureau's dual role as both administrative regulator and investment manager of the fund, despite public demand to entrust the fund to market-oriented operators,'' the magazine wrote in a cover story on the scandal. ''The monopoly it created is at the root of the fund's current problems.''

Besides weakening the city's national political standing, the pension scandal constitutes a blow to Shanghai's ambition to emerge as China's pre-eminent financial center. As with the suppressed real estate scandal, the reported pension dealings highlight the lack of transparency in a system in which the news media and the courts are subjected to political direction.

Sep 5, 2006. pg. A.3

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Joseph Kahn: Shanghai Party Boss Held for Corruption

BEIJING, Monday, Sept. 25 — Chinese security officers have detained the powerful party boss of Shanghai for corruption, as President Hu Jintao expands a crackdown on graft that has focused on prominent political opponents.

Chen Liangyu, the Communist Party’s top official in the wealthy East Coast enclave and a member of the ruling Politburo, was formally detained on Sunday afternoon, Chinese state media confirmed Monday afternoon.

It is exceedingly rare in China for members of the ruling Politburo to face legal trouble, even when the authorities have evidence of corrupt activities by them or people close to them. Mr. Hu almost certainly would not have approved of the action unless he considered Mr. Chen an obstacle to his political control or his policy agenda.

The action seems intended mainly to reduce local resistance to edicts by Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, while also smashing the remnants of the political clique that had been tied more closely to Jiang Zemin, China’s former paramount leader, than to Mr. Hu.

Mr. Hu is seeking to reshuffle the members of the Politburo and all the leading government and provincial posts at the 17th Party Congress to be held next year. He has sought to extinguish opposition to his priorities among senior party members ahead of that event and to anoint his own successor.

Mr. Chen’s political machine has long been considered one of the strongest and most corrupt in a country where the powerful find ways to claim a big share of the country’s prosperity, despite almost constant anti-corruption campaigns within the ruling party.

As Shanghai party boss, Mr. Chen enjoyed considerable leeway to run China’s wealthiest urban region. Friends and relatives of Mr. Chen are suspected of using access to public funds, including Shanghai’s pension fund, to enrich themselves, people informed about the investigation said. They said at least half a dozen other officials and many prominent local deal makers have also been arrested in recent weeks.

Mr. Chen, 60, inherited the political base of Mr. Jiang, who rose to prominence as Shanghai party boss in the 1980’s and subsequently promoted many of his cohorts to top national party and government posts. He was once seen as having the potential to join the Politburo Standing Committee and compete for China’s top political titles.

The so-called Shanghai faction did not operate like a cohesive political clique in recent years and failed to help Mr. Jiang himself retain his final post as military chief in 2004, when Mr. Hu forced him into retirement and consolidated his own power.

But Mr. Chen resisted central government demands to reduce speculative real estate investment and tamp down economic growth to prevent waste and overheating. He offered a prominent symbol of the strength of local party machines even in the face of heavy pressure from the Beijing leadership, so his downfall seems likely to signal Mr. Hu’s rising authority.

The last time a sitting Politburo member lost his post for corruption was in 1995, when Mr. Jiang, then China’s top leader, purged Chen Xitong, the Beijing party chief Mr. Jiang considered a formidable rival.

Chen Liangyu, who is not related to Chen Xitong, was detained under “double regulations,” a form of house arrest for members of the Communist Party suspected of wrongdoing. Such detentions do not necessarily lead to legal charges, but after losing the confidence of the top leadership, Mr. Chen will almost certainly be stripped of his political posts.

His detention is a black mark for Shanghai, which China has built into a showcase market economy and financial center in an attempt to present its most sophisticated face to the outside world.

The ongoing investigation into corruption provided a glimpse into another side of the city’s stunning growth. Mr. Chen’s political machine controlled a great swathe of Shanghai’s economy, including prime portions of real estate and major infrastructure projects.

A huge investigation by the central government into corruption there focused on the misuse of pension funds to invest in building projects tied to local leaders and their business cohorts.

But Mr. Chen, his relatives and friends were also implicated in a major real estate scandal in 2003 that resulted in a short prison term for one well-connected Shanghai businessman, Zhou Zhengyi, but did not focus on Mr. Chen or officials close to him directly. Issues related to the handling of that investigation were revived during the latest crackdown, people informed about the investigation said.

Mr. Hu’s corruption crackdown began last spring and picked up pace during the summer months. It has so far resulted in the arrests of lower-level officials and well-connected businessmen in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian and other areas.

Most of the people implicated in the scandals are viewed as old loyalists of Mr. Jiang or members of the Politburo not considered among the core supporters of Mr. Hu, leading to suspicions that Mr. Hu has used the fight against corruption as a tool to eliminate opponents.

Some party officials acknowledge that it is rare for officials in China to climb the political ladder without quietly securing economic benefits for themselves or their friends and relatives. The party-run security apparatus usually does not seek to stop such behavior unless the officials in question fall from political favor, they say.

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Keith Bradsher: Bouquet of Roses May Have Note: ‘Made in China’

KUNMING, China — Americans and Europeans are used to buying mass produced shoes, toys and microwave ovens from China. So why not roses?

That is the thinking behind an elaborate Chinese government effort to export cut flowers, aimed not just at developing a new business to take on the world but at redeveloping the social and economic landscape here in southwestern China.

By placing the flower industry, along with several others, far from the coastal provinces that have enjoyed most of the nation’s prosperity, Beijing officials hope to bring jobs to tens of millions of impoverished, isolated workers in a bid to narrow the income gap between rich city dwellers and unemployed farmers.

At the giant flower farms here in Yunnan Province, workers earning as little as $25 a month clip roses from huge greenhouses, take them to vast sheds to remove any thorns by hand, and wrap them in paper and plastic for shipment. Roses without thorns are lighter and can be packed more tightly, reducing the cost of air shipment.

With the first sustained exports to the United States starting later this week, some of those flowers will end up in Los Angeles, packed with red wine bottles in gift boxes; others will be sold at auction in the Netherlands, where historical pride over locally grown tulips and other flowers has not quelled demand for inexpensive Chinese roses. Almost overnight, growers in this poor, rural province have become big suppliers to markets from Singapore to Moscow.

“Our plan is to become the biggest flower producer and exporter in Asia in 10 to 15 years,” and possibly the world’s largest after the Netherlands, said Li Gang, the deputy chief of the Flower Association, a provincial government agency.

The government has dedicated a huge effort to making all this possible. Extending its top-notch infrastructure inland, it is building 12-lane roads, sturdy bridges and international airports in this strategically critical area. Elsewhere in China’s poor inland provinces, similar investments are helping industries making everything from shoes to electronics to cars.

The cut-flower industry is so important a national priority that President Hu Jintao came to Yunnan Province two years ago to call for growth in shipments. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his predecessor, Zhu Rongji, have taken a personal interest in improving the province’s greenhouses, and the government is offering interest-free loans for greenhouse construction.

China is mainly trying to export roses, which have a high value per pound and can most easily be transported long distances with limited damage. Carnations can withstand air shipment but have a low value per pound, and tulips have a high value but must be packed very loosely, which drives up air freight costs so that China cannot easily compete. Lilies can be shipped by air and have high value but must be handled with considerable care, so China is starting to export them to closer markets like Singapore.

China sells all grades of flowers, and growers here, like growers everywhere, are trying to boost production of top-grade flowers, those that grow tall, straight and without blemishes. But the top varieties of roses — those that command a premium around the world — are scarcely grown in China because of disputes over the evasion of royalty payments by Chinese growers.

The cost of air shipping works out to about 30 cents per long-stemmed rose, a little less without thorns and leaves. By comparison, farms in Yunnan sell their flowers at wholesale for 4 cents to 16 cents apiece, a price that soars to 28 cents each just before Valentine’s Day. Depending on the time of year, these roses cost as little as half the price of roses in other developing countries, excluding air freight.

Yunnan is not only a good place to grow flowers but also a place of particular interest to Chinese leaders because of its sensitive location. Tucked against Myanmar, formerly Burma, as well as Vietnam, Laos and Tibet, Yunnan is close to India. China fought a border war there in 1962, and the area is the main route for heroin trafficking from Myanmar to China; as in Colombia, the Chinese government is trying to encourage cut flower cultivation as an alternative to the drug trade. Yunnan also has important rail and road links that increasingly connect China to southeast Asia.

China is concerned that Islamic fundamentalism might extend into its western provinces from Central Asia if the area remains undeveloped, and the flower-growing villages south of Kunming tend to have many Muslims.

The central government is spending $200 billion a year, much of it to build roads, bridges, airports and phone systems that link the inland regions to the outside world, ensuring, among other things, that the flowers have a smooth and speedy trip. Refrigerated trucks are being offered free or at deep discounts to farm groups so that fewer flowers wilt in transit, Mr. Li said.

But in the flower industry as in so many others, China’s business practices have prompted other nations to object. Western governments, including that of the Netherlands, complain that many Chinese growers do not pay royalties when they raise internationally registered varieties of flowers. The dispute could prompt countries to restrict Chinese flower imports, and it has already interfered with the transfer to China of new rose breeds that grow with practically no thorns.

All the flowers being grown commercially in Yunnan are internationally traded species that have been brought in from elsewhere. Growers in Yunnan have produced a few new varieties and registered them with Chinese authorities. But they have made few efforts to register them abroad, where they would be subject to questions about whether the new varieties are derived from ones that are already registered, in which case royalties would be owed.

Additionally, the government’s moves here may violate international trade rules, which bar the use of government subsidies to help cover the operating costs of exporters.

Then there is the issue of China’s immense productivity. Growers in many countries worry that China may ship so many flowers, especially low-quality ones, that wholesale prices could plunge.

“One of the big dangers in China is overproduction, so this is something that definitely needs to be controlled,” said Luc Driessen, the managing director for China at Van Den Bos, a Dutch flower bulb company.

Doeke Faber, chairman of the Association of Flower Auctions in the Netherlands and president of the International Association of Horticultural Producers, said that China was in a position to pose an even bigger competitive threat. “Certainly they are the sleeping giant,” he said. “They have excellent climate and very cheap labor.”

China’s push into the cut flower industry — which includes plans to quadruple exports to $200 million by 2010, or more than a billion stems — is mostly of concern to established producers like Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Malaysia and Thailand, flower traders and growers said.

The United States exports few flowers because of high labor costs, but California produces 15 percent of the flowers sold in the American market. These tend to be varieties like sunflowers that are not easily shipped long distances, however, so American flower production is not likely to be hurt much by China’s rise, said Ben Pauley, the vice president of mass markets at FTD.

The Chinese growers do face some large obstacles, including a continuing shortage of refrigerated storage areas and trucks to keep flowers from wilting and the expense of flying the flowers to distant markets. Even if world oil prices continue to fall, air freight costs will always be substantial.

As much as 90 percent of the retail price of a rose is added after the flowers arrive in the United States or Europe. Many of China’s roses are sold in supermarkets, where the markup is smaller.

China’s influence on the global flower industry may also emerge in a tactile way: the lack of thorns.

At a flower farm in Si Jie, 70 miles south of Kunming, Shi Yin, 22, takes her clippers into a greenhouse, walks down the long rows of flower beds and selects the roses that will wind up in the gift boxes in Los Angeles.

The flowers that meet her approval are taken to a dimly lit shed, where rows of women strip the thorns and leaves by hand. The task tends to be done by machine elsewhere, if it is done at all.

Qian Lan, a slim 19-year-old in brown work gloves and a soiled cream-colored apron, stood in the shed on a recent afternoon and grabbed at yard-long white and pink roses, one at a time. She clamped a pliers-like device around each stem, about a foot from the bottom, gripped tightly and pulled down, doing surprisingly little damage to the stem itself. Machines with what look like whirling plastic pipe cleaners can do the same job as Miss Qian, but injure the stem more, leaving cuts that can reduce vase life.

Yet doing it by hand is an ergonomic nightmare with a strong risk of repetitive stress injuries. “My hand goes numb if I do it for a long time,” said Miss Qian, a recent high school graduate who earns $25 a month.

Asked whether a man had ever given her roses, Miss Qian shyly murmured “yes.”

Then she blushed deeply, and turned back to her work.

September 25, 2006

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Michiko Kakutani: 'The Body Artist': A Marriage Replayed Inside a Widow's Mind

Don DeLillo has followed the big, mythic dazzle of his last novel, "Underworld" (1997), with a small, transitional work: a dark, elliptical tone poem that admits us to the troubled consciousness of a woman trying to come to terms with her husband's suicide.

"The Body Artist," which is billed as a novel but reads more like a longish short story, has less in common with Mr. DeLillo's earlier fiction than with his portentous 1987 play "The Day Room." Instead of the savage, slightly surreal inventories of American life that distinguished his earlier novels, there are vague, almost abstract meditations on the nature of time and perception. Instead of the black comedy and dead- on, loony dialogue of "Libra" and "Mao II," there are stark Pinteresque exchanges, filled with silences and omissions. And instead of the preoccupation with the white noise of contemporary history, there is a willful focus on the subconscious murmurings of a woman's mind.

In the opening section of "The Body Artist," Mr. DeLillo introduces a married couple named Rey and Lauren who barely seem to know each other. He is a filmmaker whose subject, like the author's, is "people in landscapes of estrangement"; she is a performance artist specializing in stylized impersonations. The two are living in a large, isolated house, which they have rented for six months, and over breakfast they perform a banal pas de deux of banter and recrimination and withholding.

Although portions of earlier DeLillo novels like "White Noise" also dealt with the prosaic stuff of daily life, these passages in "The Body Artist" are so generic, so divorced from an external reality that they often read like a parody of slice-of- life fiction. "He changed stations on the radio and said something she missed," Mr. DeLillo writes. "She took the kettle back to the stove because this is how you live a life even if you don't know it and then she scraped her teeth over her tongue again, for emphasis, watching the flame shoot blue from the burner."

After Rey kills himself — we retrospectively learn that he has driven to Manhattan and shot himself in the apartment of an ex-wife — Lauren returns to their rented house to mourn and grieve in solitude. Like so many DeLillo characters before her, she feels a compelling need to try to seize control of her life. "To organize time" she begins methodically cleaning the house and preparing her body, through stretching and breathing exercises, for her next performance piece. She later wonders why she shouldn't sink into her grief, "give death its sway."

"Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?" Mr. DeLillo writes. "You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take."

It's not long before Lauren encounters a strange, possibly autistic man living in one of the house's empty bedrooms — a foundling of indeterminate age, unable to use language in any conventional manner and unable to process the division of time into past and present and future. This man, whom Lauren names Mr. Tuttle and who may be no more than a figment of her imagination, demonstrates unusual gifts of mimicry and prescience, qualities uncannily reminiscent of those possessed by the character Karen in "Mao II."

Lauren discovers that Tuttle has a tape-recorder ability to play back conversations he once overheard between her and Rey, and she quickly develops an obsession with her uninvited houseguest. Her sexual encounters with Tuttle, like her efforts to get him to talk like Rey, seem like futile efforts to turn back the clock, to unravel the merciless forward- marching narrative of time: she wants to believe that she can prevent Rey's fateful trip to New York, that she takes his car keys, "hides them, hammers them, beats them, eats them, buries them in the bone soil."

Like the Lee Harvey Oswald character in "Libra," Lauren lacks a strongly centered sense of self. Ever the performance artist, she has always had a tendency to lose herself in newspaper articles, to allow the lives of people she has read about to seep into her own, and she gradually begins to transform herself into a version of Tuttle, starving her body, cutting her hair, bleaching her skin, trying to inhabit his reality out of time, out of mind.

No doubt Mr. DeLillo means to use these events to probe the themes of identity and fate, which have always figured so prominently in his fiction. The problem is that his writing seems strangely attenuated in these pages, stripped of its usual pop and fizz, its tactile sense of detail, and as a result the novel has a spindly, etiolated feel. Maybe after the monumental achievement of "Underworld" — a choral work featuring dozens of characters and five decades of American history — the author simply wanted to work in a minimalist vein, to change the wide- angle lens on his camera to an up- close and personal zoom, and in doing so experiment with a more pared-down, Beckettian kind of prose.

What remains most interesting about this modest, imperfect novel is its fascination with the emotional life of its heroine — a focus on the personal that extends the sympathetic attention to character first evinced in "Underworld," and points, in the future perhaps, to an exciting new vein in Mr. DeLillo's already remarkable body of work.

January 19, 2001

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Adam Begley: Ghostbuster

If you haven't yet woken up to the beauty of Don DeLillo's sentences, here's your chance. His new novel, ''The Body Artist,'' is a tiny, intimate affair, quiet, spare and strange -- but not so strange as to distract from the glories of the chiseled prose. If that sounds precious, or if your daily life is already too crammed with exquisite beauty, then you can afford to dismiss this pamphlet-sized book that looks and feels like an elegant, weightless gesture.

Don DeLillo weightless? Unthinkable, especially after ''Underworld,'' the magnificent 827-page postwar panorama he published four years ago, which set in stone his reputation as a vastly ambitious literary novelist unafraid of challenging his readers, of making us work. He'd done it before: in his rambling, overstuffed debut, ''Americana'' (1971); in ''Ratner's Star'' (1976), a sci-fi teaser for the mathematically inclined; in ''The Names'' (1982), with its cryptic mystery cult and long, philosophy-of-art dialogues; and most successfully in ''Libra'' (1988), his reconstruction of John F. Kennedy's assassination, a book at once historically immaculate and fiercely imaginative, a book that tests both our knowledge of the Warren Commission report and our willingness to live inside the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Underworld,'' DeLillo went out of his way to rub our noses in other smelly bits of our recent history: the Bomb and the fear it bred, and our ''waste stream,'' the ''mountained garbage'' we produce.

Maybe you've already guessed that ''The Body Artist'' is not weightless after all. A metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone and not alone in a large rented seaside house, the novel invests the simplest domestic detail with a heavy burden of significance. Breakfast in the kitchen, the virtuoso first scene, expands in space and time, each showcased moment stretching to eternity, every movement -- the shaking of the juice carton -- seismic. The dailiness is at once inconsequential and eloquent, vast and dense. In just 124 pages, DeLillo finds room to ponder large themes: how we structure time and are structured by it; how we express grief or fail to express it; how an artist makes sense, or not, of calamity; and the equivocal role language plays in all of this.

Breakfast is with Lauren Hartke, a 36-year-old ''body artist'' and her husband, Rey Robles, a 64-year-old film director. Turn the page and there's an obituary; turn the page again and the newly widowed Lauren is back in the big old house, on her own now, faced with an impossible question: ''Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?''

What little plot there is in ''The Body Artist'' begins to unfold when Lauren discovers, in an unused room on the empty third floor of her house, a man who may or may not have been there all along: ''He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.'' This anonymous man, whom Lauren nicknames Mr. Tuttle after a high school science teacher, is in all ways mysterious. His speech is oddly scrambled, mostly nonsensical -- he muddles past and future tense. Is he autistic? An alien? A ghost? ''There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinness of physical address.''

Mr. Tuttle often talks like Gertrude Stein on a bad day: ''Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where.'' Or: ''The word for moonlight is moonlight.'' His nonsense is suspiciously suggestive, but it's nothing compared to his true talent: he has the eerie ability to speak in Lauren's voice, and in Rey's, too -- words echoing from beyond the grave.

Is this a trick, a meaningless parroting, or does it promise communication with the dead? Lauren comes to think of Mr. Tuttle as exempt from chronology, outside time's narrative: ''His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present.'' It comes as no surprise when he simply disappears. Like Rey, he is here and then gone.

Lauren fashions a performance piece. We learn about it from a profile-cum-review inserted, like Rey's obituary, into the midst of the narrative. This is also how we discover what it means to be a body artist. We've seen Lauren rehearsing, doing her ''bodywork . . . her regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion,'' we've seen her scraping at her skin and chopping off her hair and we're told that she aims to become ''a body slate erased of every past resemblance'' -- but we still don't quite know what it all adds up to.

She's part actress, part mime, part flesh-and-bone artwork. With her body, Lauren channels other people, real or invented, young or old, male or female. It's like Mr. Tuttle speaking in Rey's voice -- except that Lauren creates illusions with artistic intent. What's she after? ''Maybe the idea is to think of time differently,'' she tells her interviewer. ''Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life that's living, not painted.''

You could say that this is also DeLillo's intent in the beautiful opening breakfast chapter. This still life breathes; it makes noise, it smells. Here's Rey in the middle of the kitchen with the orange juice: ''He stood shaking the container. He shook it longer than he had to because he wasn't paying attention . . . and because it was satisfying in some dumb and blameless way, for its own childlike sake, for the bounce and slosh and cardboard orange aroma.'' (And how satisfying was it, in a less dumb but equally blameless way, for DeLillo to put together those last three words, ''cardboard orange aroma''?) Lauren hears the birds at the feeder and tries to define their sound, ''a wing-whir that was all b's and r's, the letter b followed by a series of vibrato r's.'' She struggles to get a fix on the scent of the soya granules she sprinkles on her cereal, ''a faint wheaty stink with feet mixed in''; she zooms in closer: ''The smell of the soya was somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded.'' I suspect that DeLillo wanted ''pod'' to echo ''body odor'' in a sentence that leads from the hint of decay in the smell of our own bodies to the promised regeneration of a buried seed.

DeLillo slows the reader down. All the way through, ''The Body Artist'' requires close attention to each word in each artfully made sentence. He wants to do for the reader what Mr. Tuttle does for Lauren: ''This was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.'' Try ''shadow-inching'' through DeLillo's sentences and you'll find that most of them remind you of how meaning ticks along to the beat of ordered time, the steady march of moments into the graveyard of the past.

There he goes again, making us work. Or is it difficult, delightful play?

Lauren laughs when she listens to Mr. Tuttle's weird, patterned jumble of words: ''It came out of him nonstop and it wasn't schizophrenic speech or the whoop of rippling bodies shocked by God. . . . The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement.'' Empty, unstructured language, free of time's monotonous sequence, is ''the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling upward in your skull.''

Ecstasy. That's a lot to ask of words, especially of words on the page. But if you respond to the poetry of DeLillo's meticulously worked prose, this novel will make you smile; if you think your way through the thematic puzzle, the convoluted notions about the grammar of language and the laws of time, it will stretch you; if you feel your way past the edges of a massive bereavement, it will dredge you. Imagine that: a stretched, dredged, smiling you.

February 4, 2001

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Simon Elegant: The War For China's Soul

Several weeks after the attack, the witness is still trembling. "Everyone knew trouble was coming," the man says, describing the day last month that haunts him still. A fit-looking fortysomething wearing a T shirt and jeans, the man was a volunteer working on a half-completed church in a suburb of Hangzhou, a picturesque lakeside city 112 miles southwest of Shanghai. Financed by local Christians, the church was to serve a community of 5,000 parishioners. Hundreds of them gathered at the site on the afternoon of July 29, some joining the construction crew building the church. Others, many of them elderly parishioners, sat on plastic chairs surrounding the church, singing hymns.

The Christians surely knew they were testing the patience of local government officials, who insisted the building was illegal and had to be torn down. But few were prepared for what happened next. Witnesses told TIME that at about 2:30 p.m., thousands of uniformed police and plainclothes security officers appeared at the construction site. The police cleared a way through the crowds for a few drill-equipped backhoes, and the authorities then demolished the church. Witnesses say police bludgeoned people indiscriminately with nightsticks. "They were picking up women--some of them old ladies--by their hair and swinging them around like dolls, then letting them crash to the ground," says a man who watched the clash from across the street. A statement faxed to TIME by the information office of the Xiaoshan district government describes the scene differently, claiming that about 100 Christians "attacked and injured government officials" and that although the police detained a few protesters, none were injured. But the volunteer interviewed by TIME produced receipts from the local hospital attesting to his treatment for broken ribs, which he says many others suffered as well. "They treated us like dead dogs," he says. "Some of them scoffed at us as we lay there, saying, 'Where is your God now? Why can't he help you? If you want to go to heaven, we'll help you get there right now.'"

The crackdown in Hangzhou may seem unremarkable for a country where a public demonstration of any kind can still trigger a brutal government response. For openly religious Chinese, in particular, that's a constant threat. Human-rights groups regularly report cases of harassment, temporary detention and even long-term imprisonment of priests and their followers. But the Hangzhou episode is also unmistakable evidence that Christianity is transforming Chinese society.

After four failed attempts over a millennium and a half by foreign missionaries to gain a foothold in China, Christianity is finally taking root and evolving into a truly Chinese religion. Estimates vary, but some experts say Christians make up 5% of China's population, or 65 million believers. And thousands more are converting every day, the vast majority through unofficial "house" churches like the one that sparked the clash in Hangzhou. "Politically, China hasn't changed at all," says Dennis Balcombe, who has spent the past three decades evangelizing in China from his base in Hong Kong. "But as far as religion is concerned, it is much, much freer."

The flowering of Chinese Christianity reflects a wider religious awakening. Long criticized by Western governments and human-rights groups for its virulently antireligious policies, China's central government has in recent years adopted a more lenient attitude toward religious expression. Traditionally, the Communist Party allowed membership in five officially approved religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestant Christianity and Catholicism. Anything falling outside those groups was officially shunned. Even those adhering to "approved" religions have to register to worship in churches and temples approved by the state. But those rules are becoming harder to enforce. These days, Chinese flock to everything from mystical Taoist sects to huge, prosperous Buddhist temples and spiritually based exercise and meditation systems.

The growth of spirituality poses a challenge for China's ruling class, which pays little more than lip service to communist ideology but still strives to control its restive populace. Faced with a social phenomenon that would use up huge amounts of time, manpower and international goodwill to curb, Beijing's cadres have decided to tolerate the new churches so long as they keep a low profile. The more outspoken and organized such groups become, however, the greater the threat they pose to the authority of the Communist Party. For the moment, that influence is confined to local issues related to their faith, such as church building and education. But observers say the challenge could grow, as churches continue to spread out of the countryside and into the cities, where they draw from the ranks of the rapidly growing middle class. "If you look at Chinese history, all the rebellions that led to change of dynasty had some religious connotations," says Jean-Paul Wiest, an expert in the history of Christianity in China who teaches at Beijing's University of International Business and Economics. "The authorities don't like that."

There may not be much they can do about it. Across the country, Christians are worshipping with a fervor once unimaginable in a communist society. Take the service held at 10 o'clock on a recent Sunday morning in China's booming southern city of Shenzhen. Some 40 people are crowded into the living room of a small two-bedroom apartment. The regulars call the place the Home of Love, and like the majority of Chinese Christians, they worship in private because they can't--or won't--register with the government-controlled official Protestant Church, the so-called Three-Self Church (the church's name refers to its three guiding principles of self-reliance). The cries of hawkers selling vegetables and fruits in the alleyway below drift through the grimy windows, but the worshippers have eyes only for the front of the room, where a plump, middle-aged preacher in a tight gray suit stands at a small lectern. Behind him is a large wooden cross draped with a white cotton cloth. Several pictures of Jesus hang on the walls, and Chinese characters phonetically spelling out Emanuel--"Yi-man-nei-yi"--frame an archway.

Because of fears that officers from the Public Security Bureau might disrupt the proceedings, which are illegal, services in house churches are often low-key. Not at the Home of Love. The congregation starts by belting out a series of hymns to an accompanying sound track booming out of several large loudspeakers. After the singing, the preacher launches into a sermon extolling the growth of Christianity in China. Then he steps among the tightly packed worshippers, holding their heads and praying over them, chanting what would sound to most Chinese like gibberish. Soon most of the room has joined him in fervent, noisy prayer, many swaying back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, moaning, shouting, wailing. One woman repeats over and over, "Oh mashalah, oh Yesu, oh mashalah, oh Yesu, oh Yesu, oh Yesu." (Yesu is Jesus; mashalah seems to mean nothing.) The woman's face is clenched in ecstasy; tears run down her cheeks.

So far, the government hasn't done much to halt the spread of such hothouses of faith. But that may be changing, as evidenced by the assault on the Hangzhou church. The mandarins in Beijing have always reserved special venom for groups they label xie jiao, or evil cults. The most famous is the brutally suppressed Falun Gong movement, but the authorities may be tempted to extend that label to the Christian sects that are growing the fastest--those practicing fervid forms of worship that stress miracles and personal inspiration through prayer. A number of cultlike, pseudo-Christian offshoots have sprung up in the Chinese countryside in recent years, apparently inspired by this ecstatic form of worship. Often spawned by the personal ambition of their leaders, these highly secretive groups usually espouse millenarian views that make the authorities profoundly nervous. Members of a sect called the Three Grades of Servants were convicted earlier this year in Heilongjiang province on 20 murder charges, involving attacks on its main rival, Eastern Lightning, a sect that relies on kidnapping and beating to make converts. One of its central aims is the overthrow of the "Great Red Dragon," a thinly disguised reference to Beijing.

Although Christians tend not to see themselves as revolutionaries, house churches have become one of China's few bulwarks against government power. In Wenzhou, a city in coastal Zhejiang province known among Chinese Christians as "China's Jerusalem," 15% to 20% of the population is Christian, a fact that gives the church leaders much greater authority in confronting local party officials. In 2002, for example, a campaign of protests and appeals to Beijing led to the reversal of a city government decision to ban Sunday-school teaching. In Hangzhou, local officials say the clash--about which TIME was the first to hear eyewitness accounts--stemmed from the church builders' long-running defiance of government regulations. The county government's statement contends that three alternative sites had been offered to the Christian community's representatives but were refused by church leaders.

Chinese authorities insist that they are not hostile to religion as long as it is practiced according to their rules. At officially sanctioned churches like St. Paul's in Nanjing, a near puritanical attention to order is maintained. There are rows of wooden pews, a pulpit from which the sermon is preached, even a signboard on which hymn numbers are posted. The pastor of St. Paul's, Kan Renping, 38, says his congregation has grown from a few hundred when he took over in 1994 to some 5,000 regular worshippers today. Many have to watch the proceedings on remote TV from four satellite chapels in a nearby building. Despite the growth, Kan isn't a proselytizer. "Anyone is welcome to come in and have a chat with me about religion," he says. "But if people want to come in and talk politics, that we don't like. We only want to concentrate on religion here."

In the long run, though, government attempts to circumscribe how people practice their faith seem unlikely to succeed--and could well spark more unrest. It's telling that even in the face of such crackdowns, some Chinese Christians say they are confident that they will eventually win the freedom to practice their faith as they choose. Brother Chow (not his real name) is one. He is every inch the model of the modern Chinese Christian, a preacher who doubles as a businessman. Despite his pressed jeans, polo shirt and fancy mobile phone, he professes to believe in a deep, ancient faith, one that he says has carried many a Christian through persecution. "Why don't I think it will be a problem? Because as time goes on, the government will get to know the Christian spirit and realize that God exists." He smiles with the secret knowledge of a true believer. "And then," he says, "they will become Christians too."

Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006

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Frank Rich: Stuff Happens Again in Baghdad

IT'S not just about torture. Even if there had never been an Abu Ghraib, a Guantanamo or an American president determined to rewrite the Geneva Conventions, America would still be losing the war for hearts and minds in the Arab world. Our first major defeat in that war happened at the dawn of the Iraq occupation, before ''detainee abuse'' entered our language: the ''Stuff happens!'' moment at the National Museum in Baghdad.

Three and a half years later, have we learned anything? You have to wonder. As the looting of the museum was the first clear warning of disasters soon to come, so the stuff that's happening at the museum today is a grim indicator of where we're headed in Iraq: America is empowering the very Islamic radicals this war was supposed to smite. But even now we seem to be averting our eyes from reality on the ground in Baghdad.

Our blindness back in April 2003 seems ludicrous in retrospect. As the looting flared, an oblivious President Bush told the Iraqi people in a televised address that they were ''the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.'' Our actions -- or, more accurately, our inaction as the artifacts of that great civilization were carted away -- spoke louder than those pretty words. As Fred Ikle, the Reagan administration Pentagon policy chief, puts it in Thomas Ricks's ''Fiasco,'' ''America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode.''

That disaster might have been mitigated if our leaders had not dismissed the whole episode as a triviality. But Donald Rumsfeld likened the chaos to the aftermath of a soccer game and joked that television was exaggerating the story by recycling video of a single looter with a vase. Gen. Richard Myers defended our failure to intervene as ''a matter of priorities'' (we had protected the oil ministry). Lt. Gen. William Wallace, countering a wildly inflated early claim by a former museum employee that 170,000 artifacts had been destroyed, put the number of objects still unaccounted for at ''as few as 17.'' (The actual number was closer to 14,000.)

The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled ''Idiocy of the Week'' (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about ''the alleged ransacking'' of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? ''Rummy, of course. He almost always is.''

Of course, dear old Rummy's what-me-worry take on the museum was the tip-off to how he would be wrong about everything that would follow: he reacted with exactly the same disdain and indifference to the insurgency happening under his own nose and to Abu Ghraib. There would be a hasty corrective to the looting, at least: a heroic Marine Reserve colonel, Matthew Bogdanos, commanded a team that ultimately tracked down a bit more than a third of the vanished objects. (It was too late to rescue tens of thousands of additional treasures in Iraq's National Library and National Archives, both also looted and torched.) But Mr. Rumsfeld's ''Stuff happens!'' proved indelible because it so resonantly set forth an enduring theme of the occupation: that the Americans in charge of Iraq were contemptuous of the local populace to whom they were so grandly bequeathing democracy and other fruits of civilization.

The cavalier American reaction to the museum looting was mimicked in the $22 billion reconstruction effort, an orgy of corruption and waste that still hasn't brought Iraqis reliable electricity. In a new account of the civilian nation-builders in the Green Zone, ''Imperial Life in the Emerald City,'' Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post details how L. Paul Bremer III and his underlings enlisted cronies and apparatchiks rather than those who might actually know anything about the country's people or their needs. Thus we saddled Iraq with Bernie Kerik, G.O.P. fund-raisers and politically connected young ideologues chosen over more qualified job applicants who knew Arabic. They saw Iraq as a guinea pig for irrelevant (and doomed) experiments, including an antismoking campaign and an elaborate American-style stock exchange. Mr. Chandrasekaran's book, while nonfiction, is as chilling an indictment of America's tragic cultural myopia as Graham Greene's prescient 1955 novel of the American debacle in Indochina, ''The Quiet American.''

Our public diplomacy efforts were equally tone-deaf to Iraqis and their neighbors. In the early going, the State Department hired a Madison Avenue whiz who made sunny TV testimonials about America's love of Muslims. These ads won no hearts or minds, but wasted tons of money and even more valuable time. Now this job belongs to Karen Hughes, the presidential flack, whose patronizing photo-op tour of the region last year earned mostly ridicule.

Our broadcasting outreach there is supervised by a longtime Karl Rove pal, Kenneth Tomlinson, who last month was found by State Department investigators to be using his office -- literally -- to run a ''horse-racing operation.'' One of Mr. Tomlinson's thoroughbreds is named Karzai, in supposed honor of the Afghan president. If that's his idea of lifting America's image in the Muslim world, he might as well be on Al Jazeera's payroll. On Wednesday, ABC News reported the bottom line of such P.R. misfires: a confidential Pentagon survey found that 75 percent of Iraq's Sunni Muslims support the insurgency, up from 14 percent in 2003.

Speaking before the United Nations last week in what may be the run-up to our new war, Mr. Bush was still on his battle-for-civilization kick, flattering Iranians much as he has the Iraqis. ''We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization,'' he said. All Iranians have to do is look to the Baghdad museum today to see that such words are worth no more now than they were in 2003.

It's symbolic of the anarchy throughout Iraq's capital that the museum's entrances are now sealed with concrete to keep out new hordes of killers and thieves. But the violence, which seems to spiral with each declaration of a new security crackdown, is old news. More revealing is the other half of the museum's current plight: it is now in the hands of Iraq's version of the Taliban. That sad denouement is another symbol, standing for our defeat in the larger war of ideas.

The museum changed hands in August, when Donny George, its longtime administrator and the chairman of Iraq's official antiquities board, fled the country fearing for his life and for the treasures in his care, both at the museum and the country's many archaeological sites. Mr. George is a Christian and had good reason to fear. The new government minister placed in charge of the museum, a dentist, is an acolyte of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose goal is to make Iraq a fundamentalist theocracy. To Mr. Sadr and his followers, the museum's legendary pre-Islam antiquities, harking back to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, are infidels' idols to be sacked.

You might think, given Mr. Sadr's radicalism, that he is a fugitive terrorist on the lam as, say, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was. After all, Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, is a font of death squads at the heart of the sectarian warfare; he's an enthusiastic ally of Hezbollah besides. But he is instead a major player in the ''democracy'' we have installed in Iraq, controlling at least 30 of 275 seats in the Parliament and six government ministries, including the power centers of transportation and health.

Back in 2004, the Americans made plans to take down Mr. Sadr, but as Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the coalition authority in Baghdad, writes in his book ''Squandered Victory,'' those plans were shelved for ''various reasons, including political calculations in Washington.'' American forces arrested some Sadr aides last week, but such periodic skirmishes notwithstanding, his influence continues to grow. He is a crucial ally of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who would not be in office without his support. In the past few days, both Tony Snow and Condi Rice have been reaffirming that the administration has what the secretary of state called ''enormous confidence'' in Mr. Maliki, despite Washington chatter to the contrary.

One of the first Westerners to warn strongly of the dangers of someone like Mr. Sadr was Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the legendary archaeologist, explorer, author and British political officer who masterminded the unlikely cobbling together of the modern Iraq state after World War I. She warned that a Shiite theocracy in the new country would be ''the very devil.'' As it happened, it was also Bell who created the Iraqi National Museum in 1923.

The fortunes of her museum, once considered the finest in the Middle East, have been synonymous with the fate of Iraq ever since. That's because, like any such national institution, it is not merely some building that houses art but a repository of a country's heart and soul. That America has stood helplessly by as Mr. Sadr folds the museum into his orbit of power is as ominous a predictor of what lies ahead in this war as was our callous reaction to the looting of 2003. For all of America's talk of stamping out a ''murderous ideology'' and promoting civilization and democracy in Iraq, we are now handing the very devil the keys.

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Nicholas D. Kristof: Prudence's Struggle Ends

As Prudence Lemokouno lay on a hospital bed here, spitting blood, her breath coming in terrible rattles, it was obvious that what was killing her wasn't so much complications in pregnancy as the casual disregard for women like her across much of the developing world.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female, and so half a million such women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.

I began Prudence's story in my column last Sunday, and for a while I thought I would have a happy ending.

Prudence, 24, was from a small village and already had three small children. As she was in labor to deliver her fourth, an untrained midwife didn't realize she had a cervical blockage and sat on Prudence's stomach to force the baby out -- but instead her uterus ruptured and the fetus died.

Prudence's family carried her to the hospital on a motorcycle, but once she was there the doctor, Pascal Pipi, demanded $100 for a Caesarian to remove the fetus. The fetus was decomposing inside her, and an infection was raging in her abdomen -- but her family had total savings of only $20, so she lay down in the maternity ward and began to die.

I arrived the next day, interviewed Dr. Pipi about maternal mortality -- and found Prudence fading away in the next room. Dr. Pipi said she needed a blood transfusion before the operation could begin, so a Times colleague, Naka Nathaniel, and I donated blood (yes, the needles were sterile) and cash.

The transfusion helped Prudence, and she grew strong enough to reach out her hand and respond to people around her. Dr. Pipi said the operation would begin promptly, and Prudence's family was ecstatic. But as we waited in the hospital lobby, Dr. Pipi sneaked out the back door of the hospital and went home for the night.

It wasn't just the doctor who failed Prudence, but the entire system. He did operate the next morning, but by then the infection had spread further -- and the hospital had no powerful antibiotics. Prudence's breathing grew strained, as her stomach ballooned with the infection and the bag of urine from her catheter overflowed. The nurses couldn't be bothered with a poor villager like her.

That night she began vomiting and spitting blood. She slipped into a coma, and a towel beside her head grew soggy with blood and vomit. On Tuesday afternoon, she finally passed away.

Intellectually, I knew that women in Africa had a 1-in-20 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. But it was wrenching to see this young mother of three fade and die so needlessly.

There's no doubt that if men were dying at this rate, poor and rich countries alike would make the issue a priority, but the problem seems invisible, like the victims.

The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals that might have saved Prudence's life, but it doesn't operate in this region. And it's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut U.S. funding for the population fund -- even for African programs -- because of false allegations that it supports abortions in China.

That's shameful. Two women have tried to recoup American honor by starting a group, 34 Million Friends of U.N.F.P.A., to make up the shortfall with private donations (www.34millionfriends.org).

(I discuss some of the groups active in this area at nytimes.com/ontheground, and I'll also have a link to video of Prudence.)

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health. And abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries. We know exactly how to save the lives of women like Prudence, partly because a few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.

Lynn Freedman, head of the Averting Maternal Death and Disability program at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University (www.amdd.hs.columbia.edu), notes that we could provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95 percent of the world's population for an additional $9 billion per year.

Sure, that's a lot. But think of Prudence and women like her dying in childbirth at a rate of one a minute -- and after all, the world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.

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