Threat to the West or Model for the Rest?

Posted December 7, 2007 

Threat to the West or Model for the Rest?

by Randall Peerenboom
Oxford University Press, 432 pages, $35

December 2007

Is China proving that developing countries are better off under an authoritarian regime that focuses on developing the economy, rather than under a democratic regime that gives emphasis to political participation? And if the enjoyment of human rights improves with economic prosperity, isn't it wiser to restrict them in the short term and allow them only once income levels take off?

According to Randall Peerenboom, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of China programs for the Oxford Foundation of Law, Justice and Society, the answer is a resounding "yes" on both counts. World Bank and United Nations Development Program data, he says, show that China is doing better on health, education, women's rights, and law and order compared to most countries at comparable income level, and in particular compared to countries that have democratized at a lower level of wealth, such as India, Indonesia or the Philippines. Economic disparities may have shot up, but this is normal and they will eventually come down (although this might take "several generations").

Civil and political rights might be curtailed, but this actually helps economic development and in any case these rights would not "magically solve" China's developmental and human-rights problems. Further proof that political authoritarianism works best is to be found in the experience of other East Asian countries such as Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, whose course, says Mr. Peerenboom, China has largely been following so far, and may lead in the future to democratization also of the "elitist nonliberal type."

If China still enjoys a poor reputation for human rights despite these achievements, Mr. Peerenboom tells us, it is mainly because of a "bias" by Western countries against one-party states; a traditional emphasis on political and civil rights overlooks other indicators of human-rights development (and in particular the benefits of law and order for personal rights); the playing up of exceptional "heart wrenching" cases by human-rights organizations (whose work relies mostly on accounts of "disgruntled parties"); and sensationalist media editors who prefer to "sink one's teeth in reports of dissidents being arrested, newspaper editors being sacked, prisoners being tortured as opposed to dry statistics about Gini coefficients."

In other words, China is held to a "double standard" on human rights. This is particularly hypocritical, Mr. Peerenboom asserts, since democracies themselves don't have an immaculate human rights record (think of Guantanamo Bay) and "liberalism tends to benefit the more talented, smarter, or already well-off individuals in a society at the expense of the vast majority." Asians, who according to him have more of a "communitarian" ethos, favor stability more than individual freedoms. This is reflected in Chinese opinion polls showing high levels of satisfaction with the present government.

None of these arguments are particularly novel. In fact, they are largely the ones that the Chinese government makes itself, and are echoed by many in business and diplomatic circles. Mr. Peerenboom seems aware of this, and to avoid "the bogeyman of being accused of being an apologist for a repressive regime," he reassures the reader that he is nothing but a dispassionate, disinterested analyst: "As a white male with the resources and good fortune to attend decent schools I stand more to gain personally from liberalism and the belief that we deserve all we can get." This noble stand is belied by the mention on the dust jacket that he is also "Of Counsel at one of China's leading foreign investment firms." But this is a small detail compared to the fact that this 400-page, heavily footnoted book does actually little to convincingly demonstrate the arguments he advances.

Instead, the author's approach seem to be to take whatever arguments come his way and throw them into the pot, without regards for consistency or relevance. Those that fit his prejudice are deemed pertinent and significant, and those that don't are dismissed as uninformed, biased or, at best, inconclusive. There is no mention of the asymmetry of information between China and the countries it is compared to. The work of human rights organizations is used to support his denunciation of the shortcomings of countries with democratic institutions, but discounted when it brings to light uncomfortable facts about China.

Not that Mr. Peerenboom has actually taken the effort to read the work he takes offense with: Only one report by Human Rights Watch is cited, although it has been publishing reports on China for over two decades; Amnesty International's comprehensive reports are left aside in favor of press communiques and yearly summaries for 2004 and 1993; there is no mention of publications from the Duihua Foundation, even though they are based on Chinese archives and reflect that most cases of political imprisonment never surface; only two reports by United Nation's special rapporteurs are cited–to support the argument that their recommendations were impractical.

In fact, the book systematically avoids tackling what really stands in the way of the author's argument, in favor of anecdotal or caricatured positions. The fairly uncontroversial observation that China has been actively trying to weaken human-rights mechanisms at the United Nations, for example, is reported as signifying that "we are, in short, heading for a 'clash of civilization.'" Elsewhere, Mr. Peerenboom offers that given the accounts made by human-rights organizations and the media, "first time visitors to China are often bewildered when they don't see machine-gun toting soldiers in military fatigues on every corner or find ominous-looking public-security agents in black trench coats lurking suspiciously in alleyways and Internet cafes." When the author acknowledges that, indeed, there are serious human-rights violations, this is only to rationalize them away or say that public-opinion polls reflect public support for the government. (That opinion polls in a one-party state without a free press might be questionable doesn't seem to be worth a mention.)

While the author continues to cherry pick his way to demonstrate how enlightened and unjustly maligned the Chinese government is, the reader cannot but feel increasingly frustrated at the numerous repetitions, contradictions and digressions of a book that, despite a long publishing time-lag–the preface is dated July 2005– seems to have been hastily arranged from previous publications. (The author acknowledges as much in the preface when he thanks half a dozen journals and publishers for allowing him "to reprint passages from these works.")

A glaring contradiction in the author's argument is his central claim that critics are subjecting China to a double standard on human rights, while in fact it is Mr. Peerenboom himself who argues that China should be held to a different standard on account of its stage of development and distinct culture. The need to acknowledge from time to time that there are indeed serious human-rights violations in China while trying at the same time to rationalize them away also leads to bizarre statements like "China outperforms the average country in its income class on most major indicators of human rights and well-being, with the notable exception of civil and political rights"–a proposition not dissimilar to a doctor saying that a patient is in perfect health, except for his heart not beating.

The thought that at least some Chinese people might disagree with the condescending views of the author is not given any consideration (in fact, the book doesn't cite Chinese language material). Instead we are told that the Chinese government meets some ill-defined test of legitimacy and that China has a better international image than the U.S. or Japan. Leaving aside the issue of how one justifies political persecution, whether China's record on economic, social and cultural rights is as rosy as Mr. Peerenboom advances is also debatable. The prohibition on independent organizing maintains the wages of millions of workers at artificially low levels, the previously free provision of education and health care has disappeared in favor of a user-paying system increasingly beyond the reach of the poorest, and China's architectural heritage faces ever more rapid destruction.

More critically for a book that purports to analyze the relation between rights and development and the chances of China democratizing or not in the future, none of the ample scholarly literature on these subjects is deemed by the author worth engaging with. The work of the Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen, for instance, is never mentioned. (Development as Freedom, his most famous book, seems to have been added in the bibliography as an afterthought.)

Mr. Sen's theory, simply put, is that development has a lot to do with removing what he calls "un-freedoms"–barriers to natural human agency and economic transactions between individuals and communities. In fact, China's recent history largely supports this idea. Once the Communist Party of China decided to lift the artificial restrictions it had imposed under the centrally planned economy, and started to free its citizens from the minute social control of the work-unit and to gradually allow the rural surplus workforce to move to urban areas, the economy took off, and China started to regain the rank it had occupied for many centuries as one of the largest economies in the world.

What comes next is hard to fathom, but here is what another authority that Mr. Peerenboom conveniently ignores, Max Weber, tells us: As a bourgeoisie develops (and by all accounts, that is what China's "middle class" really is in comparison to the rest of the population), it will start to ask for a number of things, including a legal system that guarantees economic transaction, the effective protection of property rights and participation in the conduct of public affairs.

Another author, Jurgen Habermas (also ignored by Mr. Peerenboom if only for a derisive–and actually mistaken–remark) tells us how this is likely to happen: first citizens will develop a private sphere shielded from arbitrary intervention by the state; and then they will form a public sphere in which they discuss public matters. Expectation of rationality and legality of state actions will grow, political and administrative arbitrariness will become harder to justify by the state, ultimately giving way to a system where its power is legally constrained, often by a constitutional order.

So far, China is ticking all the checkmarks: Citizens are increasingly valuing privacy, private property is now guaranteed by law, traditional and digital media are relentlessly pushing the limits of discussion of public affairs, the middle class is becoming more assertive in defending its rights by the day and the Communist Party has promoted the legal system as "the main instrument to govern the country." Unfortunately, history tells us, there is nothing automatic about when and how authoritarian regimes embark on the political soft-landing phase. Numerous examples around the world demonstrate the dire consequences of authoritarian regimes keeping themselves in power at the expense of social expectations, and failed transitions to democracy also cripple economic development and possibilities for greater social justice.

Mr. Peerenboom's advice on how human rights can be improved in essence for Chinese citizens to wait until the Party decides on its own volition to do so, and for the international community to appease, rather than criticize the government: "Government leaders might be more willing to revisit sensitive issues regarding free speech, religious freedoms and the rights of minorities if they felt their concerns [about national security] were taken more seriously," we are told. Maybe. But staying silent on human-rights abuses in China would mean considering Chinese people as somehow less worthy of the rights and freedoms that other nationals are entitled to enjoy. And that would be applying double standards.

Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War

The road that leads from the center of the northwestern Japanese port city of Niigata toward the docks is called Botonamu Street. Most locals are unaware of the origin of that foreign-sounding name, some people think it even may be Russian. But botonamu is the Japanized version of the Korean word boedeunamu, or "willow tree," because it is lined with willows. These were planted in the late 1950s to celebrate the start of the repatriation of ethnic Koreans in Japan–to North Korea. The "return to their homeland" of 93,340 people–86,603 ethnic Koreans together with 6,731 Japanese and six Chinese spouses or dependents–between 1959 and 1984 is one of the least known events in Japan's relations with its neighbors since the end of World War II.

But it is also one of the most controversial. Many of the repatriates went back, full of enthusiasm as they thought they were going back to help build their new socialist fatherland–but, before long, became, at best, only disillusioned, while many others perished in the north's notorious labor camps. And, today, some critics argue that it was an early case of ethnic cleansing. The Japanese authorities wanted to get rid of as many as they could of an unwanted ethnic minority. In the racist view of Takajiro Inoue, then director of the foreign affairs department of the Japan Red Cross Society, the Koreans should be repatriated because of "their very violent character, and the fact that they are divided into several parties, which may turn into an unfortunate accident at any moment."

But why to North Korea and not the south? Relations between Japan and South Korea were strained at that moment, and the south wanted Japan to be responsible for its ethnic Korean minority. Besides, even if very few of the ethnic Koreans in Japan actually came from the north–as many as 97% came from the south, especially Cheju island off the southern coast–they perceived the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as their political and spiritual homeland. The south, they thought, was a puppet state of the United States run by Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese during the 1910-45 colonial era.

In the mid-1950s, Japanese authorities estimated that about 90% of the then 650,000-strong ethnic Korean community were behind the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, abbreviated Chongryun in Korean and Chosensoren in Japanese. The smaller, pro-Seoul Mindan, had a much weaker profile, and was itself divided between supporters and opponents of the South Korean regime. Most Koreans had been brought to Japan as cheap labor after the peninsula became a Japanese colony, but were always treated as second-class citizens. For them, repatriation seemed a way to freedom from poverty and discrimination.

So an unholy alliance was formed between the Japanese establishment and the Chongryun as they both encouraged repatriation, albeit for entirely different reasons. Chongryun wanted to assist the "fatherland" in getting labor to help rebuild from the ashes of the devastating 1950-53 Korean War, and therefore, it seems, didn't mind the racist policies of some Japanese authorities.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a British-born professor of Japanese history at the Australian National University in Canberra, has done the first detailed study in English of this now shameful chapter in Japan's modern history. She also examines the rather controversial role of the International Committee of the Red Cross in this sordid saga. In some ways, it was deceived into assisting the less-than neutral Japan Red Cross in the repatriation of the Koreans. But getting the ICRC involved was a way for Tokyo to distance itself from fierce criticism from South Korea, and perhaps also other countries, which found it appalling that tens of thousands of people, many of whom were actually second-generation Koreans and thus born in Japan, were being sent to the communist north. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, however, seemed to share the Japanese view, and at some stages in the process the Soviets actively assisted the repatriation efforts.

Ms. Morris-Suzuki has interviewed Koreans who were "repatriated" but later managed to escape and return to Japan, and she has, as perhaps the first international researcher, gone through the archives at the ICRC's Geneva headquarters. The outcome is a fascinating, and often disturbing, account of how callous authorities caused immense hardships to an already suffering ethnic minority–and of the deceptiveness of the Chongryun, which benefited from financial support for the scheme from the governments in Pyongyang as well as Tokyo.

The horrors many of the immigrants had to endure are described in by Kang Chol-hwan in his book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, a gripping account of how he, at the age of nine, was sent to Yodok, one of the north's most notorious labor camps, together with his sister, father, uncle and grandmother. Mr. Kang's grandfather, Kang Tae-gyu, had been the local leader of the Chongryun in Tokyo, and he and some of his closest family members were among the first Koreans who decided to migrate to North Korea, only to end up being arrested on trumped-up charges. The immigrants, Ms. Morris-Suzuki writes, ended up being "disproportionately represented among the victims of North Korean political purges, but they were, of course, neither the only nor the most numerous victims."

Mr. Kang writes that, as the first ship full of repatriates was ready to leave Niigata, the pier was packed with well-wishers shouting "'Long Live!' After a blast of the horn, the ship sailed away, bound for North Korea, and with those onboard singing patriotic songs." And when the ship approached the North Korean coast after a 15-hour journey from Niigata, Kim Yong-gil, a famous Korean opera singer from Japan, got up on the bridge. He turned to the promised land and launched into an impromptu but powerful rendition of O Sole Mio, "causing emotions to swell among his fellow passengers."

But, as they came closer to the shore, the mood changed. Another ethnic Korean, quoted in Ms. Morris-Suzuki's book, says: "I think everyone felt what they saw the scene in front of us–oh no! There was a row of grim-looking warehouses. The wind was blowing hard and it was still cold. The people waiting on the dock for us were all wearing shabby, padded cotton jackets." The ethnic Koreans onboard the ship thought, "This isn't right. This isn't how it's supposed to be" And worse was to come. When Kim Yong-gil first arrived, the North Korean regime welcomed him with open arms, and he was even received by "the Great Leader" Kim Il Sung himself. A few years later, as Mr. Kang writes, "he wound up being condemned as a spy and sent to die in the Senghori hard-labor camp–reputedly one of North Korea's harshest."

Mr. Kang's book about his years in a labor camp, before escaping to China and then South Korea, is written in very straightforward and down-to-earth prose; Ms. Morris-Suzuki, by contrast, mixes her narrative with "local color" which doesn't always work. It is hard to see the relevance of whether a tall Westerner she sees in a Pyongyang hotel, "gazing intently at the landscape below through a pair of high-powered binoculars," is a journalist or not, or what the scene has to do with the story anyway. Time and again we read how many of the issues she encountered during the course of her research at first "didn't make sense," but later did. Isn't that the case in most research into any unfamiliar subject?

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding study of how a downtrodden and vulnerable ethnic group of people were caught in grander political schemes, of which they knew little–and how they ended up being victimized once again. Those who remain in North Korea may be forgotten by the outside world, but the row of willows in Niigata stands as a reminder of what happened there.

If you take Gao Wenqian's word for it, this book should be one of the publishing events of the year. Once the official biographer of the late Premier Zhou Enlai, he twice calls it an act of "betrayal." The betrayal purports to be the unmasking of Zhou, who "had assisted in the creation of the very totalitarian system of which he became the victim." Mr. Gao's purpose is to show that "Zhou Enlai was neither the god current Chinese officials have put on a pedestal, nor the unequivocally evil person whom anti-CCP types have portrayed."

But is this really such a revelation? These days few put Zhou on a pedestal. Instead of being a scholarly scoop, the book demonstrates the Sinocentrism of the author, who like many Chinese cannot imagine that foreigners know what they know about China.

Zhou Enlai, who died in 1976, was, with Mao Zedong, one of the two main figures in the Chinese revolution. But after the tragedies and disasters of that revolution, beginning with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, were exposed, Western scholars began understanding Mao as a fascinating monster. Zhou, on the other hand, was hailed for years inside China and admired by foreigners, not least by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who in 1972 had succumbed in Beijing to the then premier's suave charm. "The greatest statesman of our era," said Nixon. Zhou was praised for attempting to blunt Mao's excesses and for protecting some of the Chairman's potential victims–although it is well known that Mao generally approved such protection.

In 1959, Mr. Gao's father was banished to Tibet, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) his mother spent seven years in prison, partly, Mr. Gao says, for her "intemperate remarks" about Jiang Qing, Mao's wife. Mr. Gao himself, child of "counterrevolutionaries," was banished to the countryside.

After Mao's death in 1976, Mr. Gao's mother was released from prison and eventually he was assigned to the Central Research Office for Documentation, "a ministerial level center," he says, "for the study of CCP history with prime responsibility to edit and publish the collected works of Party leaders." As the "official biographer of Zhou Enlai," Mr. Gao was now, he writes, "working in the very inhumane system that had doomed my parents [and] remained the same crushing, totalitarian apparatus that Mao Zedong had created."

Columbia University Professor Andrew Nathan, a leading expert on China, observes in his introduction that Mr. Gao spent most of his 14 years in the Central Research Office accumulating more knowledge of Zhou Enlai than almost anyone else. Mr. Nathan also points out that the Office is super-secret, squirreling away records back to the earliest days of the Party–telegrams, reports, decisions, meeting minutes, photographs, tape recordings, and interview transcripts–to be selectively approved for publication. Mr. Gao's wife is an American citizen, and because of her he managed to leave China in 1992 and make his way to Harvard. Over time his friends smuggled out the documentation for his Chinese-language Zhou Enlai's Later Years. That book, 615 pages long, equals about 1200 English pages, or about three times the length of the English version. The bulk of the original is devoted to Zhou's last nine years.

"Party officials," Mr. Gao writes, "tried every trick at their disposal to prevent publication. The government even offered to pay me a high price to acquire the rights," and threatened the safety of his mother. As he observes, "the government continues to promote national amnesia by imposing taboos on many subjects, particularly the life and times of Zhou Enlai." In 2003 his book was banned in China.

So is this revised English-language version of Mr. Gao's earlier book, a bombshell? Mr. Nathan thinks so.

Until now, he says, "Zhou remained immaculate.... The facts about Zhou's strange personality and its tragic consequences for China have now come out thanks to the personal odyssey of Gao Wenqian." Mao imposed a nightmare on China, Mr. Nathan rightly concludes," and "sadly, Zhou must go down in history as the man who let it happen."

But is it really only now, because of Mr. Gao's book, that we know the terrible truth about Zhou?

I'm afraid not. While the book relates many incidents in his career that seem new, they are difficult or impossible to verify because most of the bibliography consists of Mr. Gao's secret materials. The exception, in this the English-language version, is the first chapter about President Nixon's trip to see Mao in 1972 (in the Chinese version the account is much longer), the event that made Zhou's reputation as an adroit international statesman and caused Mao, who felt upstaged, to hate him. Most of that chapter is drawn from well-known Western sources, such as Nixon and Henry Kissinger; unusually, Mr. Gao cites these fully.

As for Zhou's ruthlessness, here, too, the evidence has already been published. Mr. Gao notes that in 1931 a Party member, arrested by Chiang Kai-shek's police, informed on his comrades. Zhou ordered the execution of the man's entire family. This was related, for example, in Philip Short's 1999 biography of Mao. Mr. Gao mentions in a somewhat unclear fashion a horrific organ called the Central Case Examination Group, devoted to the interrogation and torture of high-level Party members. Its chairman, who knew everything the Group did, and reported the results to Mao, was Zhou Enlai. This instrument of Party cruelty has been exhaustively described, first by Lund University's Michael Schoenhals in 1996 and later by Mr. Schoenhals and Harvard's Roderick MacFarquhar, who say in their 2006 Mao's Last Revolution (cited by Mr. Gao) that the CCEG "dealt exclusively in violence." Mr. Schoenhals contends that when the archives are opened "the number of people Zhou protected will pale by comparison with the number of those he did nothing to help."

Mr. Gao supplies details on how Zhou turned on his old comrades in order to ensure Mao's favor. But this has already been made clear by Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui. In his 1994 memoir The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Dr. Li showed how Zhou–sometimes literally–prostrated himself before Mao. "Mao demanded Zhou's absolute loyalty," the doctor writes, "and had he not received it, Zhou would no doubt have been overthrown. But because Zhou was so subservient and loyal, Mao held the premier in contempt."

The translators make a surprising statement: When they "used their license to shape the current version of Mr. Gao's book," they "eliminated material that is of interest primarily to scholars of 20th-century China and Chinese readers well-versed in the details of Chinese political issues." What they cut appears to be two-thirds of the original. They say they have supplied "source identification in a List of Sources"–which are unavailable and thus inaccessible to any reader. In the original, too, the footnotes are to secret sources that cannot be checked. It is therefore impossible, in either book, to evaluate Mr. Gao's information. Since it is precisely scholars of 20th-century China's history and politics who need this information, the book will be relatively useless to the most interested readers. The translation itself is peppered with casual Americanisms, such as Zhou was fearful of "the political Dumpster of Chinese politics."

Although no expose, Mr. Gao's biography does supply some new information about how Mao's closest lieutenants, notably Zhou Enlai, usually obeyed him, at first because they shared his ruthlessness, and later, understandably if contemptibly, to save themselves.

The vermin-filled pit in which the Emir of Bukhara held Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly before beheading them is today clean, sunny and empty–the main attraction of a museum in present-day Uzbekistan. Stoddart and Conolly met their maker in 1842 in the midst of the "Great Game" between the Russian and British Empires. As Imperial Russia expanded into Central Asia, the British worried that a Russian invasion of India was next. Intelligence officers like Stoddart and Conolly were sent to map the terrain and discover as much as they could about the adversary's intentions.

More than 150 years later, the scramble for oil contracts and pipelines, recounted in Steve LeVine's The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune, is redolent of the Russo-British rivalry. Like stories about the Great Game, Mr. LeVine's tales of oil fields, pipelines and back-room deals are permeated with treachery and treasure. But what makes his account a compelling read is that today's competition for oil is actually quite different from the Great Game. Instead of two empires competing for hegemony, today's story involves a multitude of individual players vying for resources in a contest where victory is often fleeting.

The oil companies that descended on Central Asia in the waning years of the Soviet Union were driven by the promise of new sources of energy wealth. In the late 1980s, it was becoming increasingly expensive to extract oil from older fields. Demand for energy was growing, yet there was a reluctance to depend exclusively on the unstable Middle East. With rumors flying that the Caspian Sea could be the next Persian Gulf, and Mikhail Gorbachev opening up the country, companies like British Petroleum and Chevron jockeyed to get the first contracts. Victory was decided by negotiation skills, connections and resolve. Bribery often helped, too.

The Oil and the Glory's most fascinating chapters describe how ambiguous such victory could be. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, BP's John Browne signed a protocol with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leader of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, to negotiate development of the Tengiz oil field. Tengiz was located in the Kazakh republic's northwest and had oil reserves of 14 billion barrels. Meanwhile, the American company Chevron cozied up to Mr. Gorbachev. When he realized that awarding Tengiz to Chevron would improve U.S.-Soviet relations, the BP deal was scrapped. Chevron's negotiations with Soviet officials were successful in 1990 until Mr. Nazarbayev declared the agreement null and void. The Kazakh president decided that he "could not accept a deal that had been done by the Soviet Union." As the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, Chevron was back at square one.

Episodes such as these were common because the pursuit of oil and gas in the Caspian region was not a two-sided contest, but a playground for dealmakers, oil company bosses, Caspian autocrats, Russians and Americans alike. Mr. LeVine introduces the reader to an especially shady dealmaker, James Giffen. While the Soviet Union was on its last legs, Mr. Giffen led an organization of U.S. companies doing business in the U.S.S.R., of which Chevron was a client. A few years after Kazakhstan gained independence, the dealmaker became Mr. Nazarbayev's personal oil adviser. By facilitating deals between the Kazakh government and the oil companies, Mr. Giffen made millions.

In 2003, Mr. Giffen's joyride ended when he was arrested for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by paying out more than $78 million to Kazakh officials. The dealmaker was also charged him with 33 counts of money laundering, fraud, and tax evasion. "Kazakhgate," as the case is referred to, is still pending, and the World Bank is administering the millions in frozen funds to help poor children in Kazakhstan.

Infighting among U.S. government officials closely following the events in the Caspian region suggested that it was difficult to define national interests. Rosemarie Forsythe, the Director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council from 1993-95, organized a meeting between Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev and U.S. President Bill Clinton to hasten the signing of a deal between several oil companies and Azerbaijan. When it came time to figure out how the oil would be transported from the region, she and her successor Sheila Heslin butted heads with Strobe Talbott, Clinton's deputy secretary of state. Mr. Talbott advocated treading lightly with the Russians by opposing the construction of a pipeline that would avoid Russian territory. Ms. Forsythe and Ms. Heslin, however, firmly believed that U.S. influence in the region would be strengthened with a pipeline that emptied into the Black Sea, and eventually another that ended at the Mediterranean's shores. While the women were eventually successful, it took much persuading to get the oil companies, including American businesses, onto their side. Incidentally, Ms. Forsythe went to work for Exxon Mobil after leaving government.

Having just as much a stake as any other player, the leaders of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan did not passively stand by and watch as others made their fortunes. Aliyev had the courage to support the construction of a pipeline heading west instead of north through Russia, while Mr. Nazarbayev sometimes demanded cash up front. The ability of Aliyev and Mr. Nazarbayev to maneuver so deftly increased their capacity to stay in power. When Aliyev died in 2003, he successfully arranged for the succession to power of his son, Ilham. As the standard of living rose in Kazakhstan as a result of the oil boom, Mr. Nazarbayev did not face significant opposition when he made himself president for life in 2007.

Government officials and oil companies could not blindly sign agreements without considering their constituencies and consumers. When Unocal Corp.'s John Imle wanted to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, he and U.S. officials "watched approvingly as the Taliban widened their hold on the country," writes Mr. LeVine. Mr. Imle openly courted Taliban officials with President Clinton's implicit support until the Islamists captured Kabul in 1996 and killed former President Najibullah, dragging his corpse through the city. The Taliban's treatment of women outraged the activist Feminist Majority Foundation, and al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 forced Unocal to abandon its cooperation with the extremists.

The Central Asian energy saga hardly ends with the book's conclusion. In December 2006, Turkmenistan's despotic President Saparmurat Niyazov died unexpectedly, and his successor indicated a greater willingness to engage the international community. Just last month, representatives from an unprecedented 150 companies and 21 countries converged on the capital city of Ashgabat for Turkmenistan's annual oil and gas conference. Underscoring the significance of the event was the attendance of U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, the first high-level U.S. official to visit Turkmenistan in several years. Secretary Bodman's remarks emphasized energy security, defining it as "having options a diversified set of partners and new infrastructure."

It is the quest for energy security that will define this new sort of "Great Game" for some time to come. Russia is hoping that Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan will cooperate in building a gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea north to Russian territory, while the U.S. and others are pushing for the construction of a trans-Caspian pipeline under the sea bed connecting Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, bypassing Russia.

Yet the rivalry is not just about dominance in the Caspian region. The European Union is supporting a new project called the Nabucco pipeline that will transport Caspian gas from Turkey to the Balkans. Russian energy giant Gazprom, meanwhile, signed an agreement with Italy's Eni to build the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, avoiding Turkey. With more and more players involved, it is unlikely that a clear winner will emerge anytime soon.

In the 60th year of Indian and Pakistani independence, two book projects have already fed and grown to plump fruition on the fertile material of the subcontinental Partition. Alex von Tunzelmann, in Indian Summer, argues that Lord Louis Mountbatten, India's last viceroy, had no option but to divide India when he did, and that partition at any time, whether in August 1947 or later, would have resulted in violence and bloodshed. Meanwhile, in The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan pitches the opposite idea–that British withdrawal was too hasty and unplanned, and that a more considered exit could have mitigated the violence to some extent.

If 60 years of hindsight can still provide us with such contrasting opinions, it is safe to presume that Mountbatten and his administration faced no little confusion and soul-searching themselves. Pamela Mountbatten's potted memories of her father's months as viceroy, seems to adhere, by and large, to Ms. von Tunzelmann's thesis. By the time Mountbatten, his wife Edwina and his daughter arrived in India in March 1947, events had acquired their own momentum. Mountbatten was not so much captain of the ship as helmsman, negotiating the intemperate seas as best as he could.

When Ms. Mountbatten reached India she was 17, barely out of school. India at the best of times is an overwhelming experience, but it must have been particularly so for a British schoolgirl in 1947. India Remembered is constituted from Ms. Mountbatten's sketchy diary entries of those days, as well as correspondence and photographs from the Mountbatten estate. "I have left many of the passages in that girl's voice, even though time and experience have since afforded me the gift of greater objectivity," Ms. Mountbatten writes in her introduction. It explains a decision that sometimes makes for a refreshing, very novel viewpoint on the events of the time, but it also stokes an appetite for more information and perspective from someone so close to the center of the whirligig.

Many of the decisions about India's near future were already out of Mountbatten's hands by the time he moved into the Viceroy's House. His brief was to effect as smooth a transfer of power as possible, and to this end, he unleashed what Ms. Mountbatten calls his "charm offensive" on India's top leaders. It worked on Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; it did not work, Ms. Mountbatten notes, on Mohammad Ali Jinnah. "My father could talk of nothing else because he could not crack Jinnah and this had never happened to him before. He later admitted that he didn't realize how impossible his task was going to be until he met Jinnah." The Congress, Ms. Mountbatten writes, courted Mountbatten's help. "Jinnah was the opposite and rejected my father's involvement whenever he could."

India Remembered is at its best when it concerns itself with the personal and the anecdotal. Ms. Mountbatten beams illuminating little shafts of light onto her parents and onto the Indian leaders, capturing detail without feeling compelled to attempt biographical character sketches. She was evidently fond of Nehru, and her book was all over the Indian news this past summer, even before its publication, because of its promise of spilling the beans about the Edwina-Nehru affair.

But Ms. Mountbatten takes the sting out early, in her introduction, by confirming that her mother's relationship with Nehru was not physical. "The relationship remained platonic, but it was a deep love." Her father, it appears, had long been aware of Edwina's lovers, and in this case, his own affection for Nehru as well as her potentially useful influence over him kept Mountbatten tolerant. "She and Jawarhalal [sic] are so sweet together," he wrote to his other daughter, Patricia. "They really dote on each other in the nicest way."

Mountbatten wrote that letter in June 1948, when the transfer of power was so close that he had a countdown calendar distributed to his various offices. India Remembered becomes a curious book around this period. The transfer of power and the horrific spasms of violence are so clearly the raison d'etre for its publication, and yet, even as they happen, they vacate the text almost completely. Ms. Mountbatten mentions, en passant, Edwina's trips to riot-hit areas and refugee camps, but she dwells more upon her own preoccupations. She plays with her mongoose, she holidays with the family in the hill station of Simla and she watches films; she seems to hear about the violence only in a detached, second-hand manner. She meets Nehru and her father often, but we never learn their state of mind during those wretched times. Only later, when Gandhi is assassinated in January 1948, does a sense of the India outside the Mountbatten household begin to creep into the book again.

Perhaps the detachment is appropriately symbolic of Mountbatten's own unenviable position in India–his helplessness in the face of tumultuous historical events, the various demands of his office, the delicate balancing acts to be played between London and Delhi, and between India and Pakistan, and even between Edwina and Nehru. Not to mention the numerous intricacies in a land like India, where, as Ms. Mountbatten mentions, a Hindu ruler reigned in the mainly Muslim kingdom of Kashmir and a Muslim ruler reigned in the mainly Hindu kingdom of Hyderabad. This is why India Remembered reads so sympathetically to Ms. von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer and its assertion that, under the circumstances, this was simply the best that the United Kingdom and Mountbatten could do.

Mountbatten faced some acrimony when he returned to London–Winston Churchill, famously, never forgave him for "giving away the empire"–but he and his family left the Indian people in a glow of mutual affection. India Remembered is laced heavily with that affection, but it is sparser in its substance. Ms. Mountbatten recollects that her father encouraged her repeatedly to keep her diaries exhaustive and up to date. That advice serves the reader well.

Two acts of violence bracket Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier. The first was a relatively harmless carjacking that put a halt to the cash-for-work programs in the villages of Babaji and Bolan in Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province. Chemonics International, the aid-contracting organization tasked with plugging the inevitable drain on the region's economy that would come with poppy eradication, pulled its funding from the villages until the local police could give solid assurances that they were pursuing the case.

Gradually, though, the threshold for acceptable risk rose, and Chemonics decided to reconsider its suspension in Babaji. The pressure to meet promised development targets was one reason the organization eased its security requirements. After repeated visits from two village elders, whose teary entreaties to bring back their village's program had earned them the nicknames Priam and Odysseus from the Chemonics staff, the organization slackened its demand for concrete cooperation on security. At a shura, or council, Lashkargah's mayor gave this backhanded attempt at reassurance:

"For a moment, it sounded like we were going to get a guarantee from Abdul Munaf, the portly mayor of Lashkargah; then he finished his sentence. 'We promise you that this time if you come to work with us,' the sharwal declared, 'you should bring guards.'"

After years of Western military presence in Afghanistan, the country remains stuck in a cycle of drug cultivation and violence. Mullah Omar temporarily stopped the cycle, but only by applying thuggish Taliban tactics that are by now familiar to most readers.

Opium Season is not a book that offers grand solutions to the drug trade in Afghanistan; after working on band-aid development projects to alleviate the economic consequences wreaked by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's poppy eradication, first-time writer Joel Hafvenstein is understandably wary of policy prescriptions. His conclusions about the role of Pakistan in the neo-Taliban insurgency are not new. His call for a strong police first, development later, seems like common sense in the light of the Iraq and Taliban insurgencies.

Mr. Hafvenstein works in the genre of personal, almost religious confession. Avoiding the common trap of exoticism, he reveals much that is wrong with the American approach in southern Afghanistan. As his writing hits high elegiac lilt, he details the tragic tale of the south spiraling downward under American dithering and a resurging Taliban. Like Sarah Chayes' The Punishment of Virtue, the book provides a snapshot of a region teetering on the edge of disaster, and then meticulously documents the emotions of watching it go right over.

What sets Mr. Hafvenstein apart from Ms. Chayes is his keen sense of irony and his self-criticism. He spares his readers any self-righteousness and does not hide the fact that he arrived in Afghanistan with almost no qualifications for running a jobs program. Smirking at his own ignorance, he assumes there's someone who knows better; then, almost by accident, he sits in on a United States military interrogation and realizes with horror that they are blind to the world outside their security perimeter. When he visits the Amu River with coworkers, they fantasize about irrigating arid northern Afghanistan into another California. Mr. Hafvenstein shows that Afghanistan is, and has been throughout much of the 20th century, a blank page on which outside powers have sketched their dream worlds.

Violent assassination has tended to put an end to these idle dreams. Three weeks after Mr. Hafvenstein's visit to the north in 2004, insurgents in a neighboring region targeted and killed five workers with Doctors Without Borders. The killings drove out an organization that had worked in Afghanistan through the invasion by the Soviet Union and the turmoil of the 1990s. While they did not say so directly, Doctors Without Borders clearly implied that because the NATO force in Afghanistan had dabbled in reconstruction, they had blurred the line between military force and aid work.

That attack cast a long shadow over the security posture of the Chemonics team in Helmand. On the one hand, Mr. Hafvenstein writes, they felt discomfort over the professional advice they received to arm themselves with gun-mounted lorries. The fear was that a prominent display of gunpower would too closely associate them with the more controversial American military presence in the province. Against their instincts, they took cover under U.S. Protection and Investigations, LLC, a Blackwater-style American security contractor, and they went on their payroll runs with "police" provided by the local strongmen, carrying thousands of dollars through the most dangerous patches of the country.

Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand, was one such strongman, alternately begging for a wider geographic distribution of aid monies to his province, and skimping on the security details for Chemonics' traveling teams of workers. As Mr. Hafvenstein notes, Sher Muhammad was later the target of a drug bust that found him in possession of a ton of heroin in June 2006; then Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed him to the upper house of the Afghan parliament. In recent months Sher Muhammad has been vying for the governorship of Helmand once again.

The outlook in Helmand is awful. In 2006 the British Army replaced the Americans based in Lashkargah and fought a bloody campaign against the insurgency that effectively ended in a draw. With NATO forces largely confined to their bases, military operations rely more heavily on air power. This past year has been marked by increasingly disturbing reports of air strikes resulting in civilian deaths, further straining the credibility of the West among locals. In late November, the Senlis Council think tank issued a report that estimated 54% of Afghanistan's territory hosts a "permanent" Taliban presence, and called for a doubling of nato troops. Despite poppy eradication efforts and the earlier work of organizations like Chemonics, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported in November that in 2007, more than half of the entire opium crop of Afghanistan came from Helmand alone; opium production there has quadrupled since 2005.

A devastatingly lethal Taliban attack on Chemonics' staff in Babaji brought their project in Helmand to an abrupt end. Despite the failure and the tragedy, the author has returned to Afghanistan to run a similar program, this time in the northern (and relatively Taliban-free) province of Badakhshan. Although the Lashkargah experiment ended in tragedy, Mr. Hafvenstein has hope for the future of Afghanistan as a whole.

China: friend or foe? To find the answer to this critical question, the editors of this volume William W. Keller, the director of the Matthew B. Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies and Thomas G Rawski, a professor of economics and history, both of Pittsburgh University, along with 8 other contributors, analyze many aspects of China's rise.

Using a multidisciplinary approach, they explore the nature of China's rapid economic growth spurt over the past 25 years, along with accompanying political changes, military developments and its changing relationships with other Asian countries.

An animating concern for all the writers is apparent U.S. disengagement in Asia. Echoing the observations of many in this region, editors Messrs. Keller and Rawski note that American foreign policy has been overwhelmed by the twin issues of terrorism and the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, China is consolidating strong relationships with its neighbors and heading inch-by-inch towards superpower status. Worryingly, neither the Clinton nor the Bush administration have re-evaluated Asia policy in proportion to the size and scope of China's rise. Instead American policy appears piecemeal and distracted. As Messrs. Rawski and Keller write, "Washington relies on a tired mix of recycled policies a shifting series of compromises between cooperation and containment." China should be a top priority for the next administration in Washington.

Messrs. Rawski and Keller point out that China has transformed from near autarky in the 1970s to a global economy that exerts enormous influence over world markets. Its expanding trade and investment links with other Asian countries threaten to weaken U.S. influence. At the same time, China's arsenal is growing. Since 1999, China's military budget has exceeded those of major European powers and, since 2001, has even surpassed that of Japan, reaching $56 billion in 2003. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission announced in its 2005 and 2006 reports to congress that "trends in the U.S.-China relationship have negative implications for the long-term economic and security interests of the United States."

The question is then, is China biding its time? Is it waiting until its economy gains enough critical mass to allow it to exert political and military dominance as an enemy superpower of the U.S.? Is China's policy of economic engagement and commercial diplomacy merely tactical, a "charm offensive"?

On the whole, the authors say most likely "no", with a strongly issued caveat that it is vital for the U.S. to remain engaged with the region. They also say, short of a war, the U.S. cannot stop China's rise. Mr. Rawski and contributors Loren Brandt and Xiaodong Zhu in the second chapter entitled: "International Dimensions of China's Long Boom" argue that economic growth–essential for maintaining the legitimacy of China's present government–in this era of globalization depends on overseas markets beyond China's military control. China's military is unable to secure access to Brazil's iron ore, Canada's tar sands, Iran's crude oil, Africa's mineral wealth or the consumer markets of North America and Western Europe. This puts pressure on Beijing to emphasize compromise and diplomacy. Optimistically, they even argue that there could be overlaps between U.S. and Chinese interests, for example both powers could have a joint interest in working together to promote stability in the Middle East and other resource-rich countries.

Ellen L. Frost in a chapter entitled "China's Commercial Diplomacy in Asia: Promise or Threat" argues that China is a skilled practitioner of commercial diplomacy with Asian countries, but, again, Washington has nothing to fear if it remains engaged in the region. Asian countries first discovered that China was interested in forging good relations when Beijing gave generous loans to several Southeast Asian nations during the currency crisis in 1997 and 1998. At the same time, she writes, the U.S. unwisely turned its back on Thailand when its currency collapsed and triggered the crisis, even though Washington had extended help to Mexico when the peso crashed in 1994.

China has since made numerous diplomatic and commercial overtures. Chinese plans for intra-Asian Free Trade Agreements are assuming a role tantamount to security alliances. However, Ms. Frost says, the Association of South-East Asian Nations along with Japan and South Korea do not want to turn away from strong ties with Washington and view its role as a balancer against China, but some have the impression that Washington is indifferent. Adam Segal, in another chapter, "Chinese Economic Statecraft and the Political Economy of Asian Security" also points out that the smaller states of Southeast Asia are not defecting from the U.S. to China but are instead working to mitigate China's threat by meshing it in a web of commercial relations while simultaneously stepping up defense ties with Washington.

This volume deserves both praise and criticism. Approaching China's rise from a multidisciplinary approach is sorely needed–particularly in the ways some contributors, such as Robert S. Ross, weigh up China's commercial power against its military power. All too frequently, security and economics studies are treated as mutually exclusive disciplines. It's not uncommon for economists based in Taiwan to voice immense frustration at the government there for failing to institute direct links and completely open up economically to the mainland, as if China's 900-plus ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan simply did not exist.

My criticism is that the authors oversimplify Asian governments and policies and do not award the same sophisticated perspective that is given to the U.S. government. Messrs. Rawski and Keller complain that three basic world-views are competing for ascendancy in Washington. One would have the U.S. as the world's only hyperpower, which needs to shape the 21st century to its advantage and sees China as its only plausible competitor. (This view was prominent in the first administration of George W. Bush and is seen as underpinning the invasion and occupation of Iraq.) One envisions a coming second Cold War, but this time the rival superpower is China. And the third perspective–that the authors say they tend to support provided the U.S. remains engaged in Asia–emphasizes the mutual benefits of economic interdependence. That is, the U.S. government is not presented in this volume as a coherent and single actor, but a policy-making "black box" where competing ideas have caused some inconsistent policy outcomes that give a poor impression to some Asian countries.

However, Asian countries are not given the same treatment as the U.S. We are not given an inside view of their policy-making processes. This leads Robert S. Ross in his chapter "Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation and Balancing in East Asia" to conclude, to my surprise, that growing economic ties with the mainland are causing Taiwan to adjust its defense and foreign policies. As evidence he cites the opposition-dominated legislature's six-year failure to pass a massive special budget for a purchase of diesel submarines, pac-3 antimissile systems and antisubmarine reconnaissance aircraft that were first offered to Taiwan by the Bush administration in 2001. He depicts this as a decision made by Taiwan as a whole.

But the U.S. is not the only country with competing factions that cause it to send the contradictory signals to the outside world. Most observers in Taiwan view the opposition legislators who block this budget as motivated by petty and partisan concerns. Accommodation to Chinese power and an impression that Taiwan possibly cannot match China in defense spending, as Mr. Ross argues, is a factor for some lawmakers. However, others simply wish to sabotage President Chen Shui-bian and his pro-independence government.

In the middle of this year, the opposition consented to move a tiny fraction of this budget and purchase some of this weaponry, a sign, analysts said, that Nationalist leader Ma Ying-jeou wanted to ditch the partisan image and improve relations with Washington ahead of presidential elections next year. And one of Mr. Ma's close policy advisers has said that if he is elected, the Nationalists will approach the newly elected American administration with a fresh shopping list for weaponry. The Nationalists still view Washington as important.

In any case, they do not represent the dominant ideology in Taiwan. Instead the nation is divided. President Chen Shui-bian, who represents pro-independence voters, was elected president in 2000 and again in 2004 with a slim majority of the votes. Mr. Ross's statement that Mr. Chen's win was not a vote for independence and instead reflected sympathy votes after a botched assassination attempt does not make complete sense. Even if sympathy votes did allow Mr. Chen to win, and there's no proof this was the case, who could possibly feel any sympathy for a politician they didn't like, identify with or agree with? A win is a win.

And, despite Joseph Fewsmith's fascinating chapter "The Politics of Liberalization: Are There Limits?" in which he describes how the Chinese government has reformed its Leninist roots to accommodate its economic rise and relations with Chinese society at large, a look inside China's policy-making "black box" is still not offered. It would have been very helpful to understand the different factions in China's governments and what key leaders with decision-making power really think of the West.