piggyishly's Xanga

Tech, Censorship, and Human Rights

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:14:32 GMT

I found this a very interesting conversation piece from the NYTimes today. After visiting the Cisco HQ (my dad used to work for Cisco back in the States) in Beijing in Oriental Plaza, you could tell they were doing very well. An indication of good cooperation with the government? (There's a fair amount of present giving to government entities and partners but that's expected of any organization/business working in China).

Also go to Rebecca McKinnon's blog which is mentioned in the piece and who I've started reading regularly.

Thoughts anyone?

January 18, 2007, 1:46 pm

Tech Companies Get Serious About Global Rights Issues. But Where’s Cisco?

By Tom Zeller Jr.

Tags: business, china, human rights, technology

From left, Mark Chandler of Cisco, Elliot Schrage of Google, Jack Krumholtz of Microsoft and Michael Callahan of Yahoo at a House hearing last year on the companies’ dealings in China (Photo: Tom Zeller Jr./The New York Times)

It looks like after years of hollering, civil rights groups have nudged some technology companies into a dialogue over how to avoid stomping on human rights, freedom of speech, privacy and other concepts that aren’t considered quite so precious in some countries where the Western companies are aggressively doing business.

An announcement today from Business for Social Responsibility, which steers corporate clients toward “socially responsible business solutions,” lays out the details:

A diverse group of companies, academics, investors, technology leaders and human rights organizations announced today its intention to seek solutions to the free expression and privacy challenges faced by technology and communications companies doing business internationally.
The process, which aims to produce a set of principles guiding company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights, marks a new phase in efforts that these groups began in 2006.

This apparently weds parallel efforts begun by the B.S.R. and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. That group’s executive director, said in the release today:

“Technology companies have played a vital role building the economy and providing tools important for democratic reform in developing countries. But some governments have found ways to turn technology against their citizens — monitoring legitimate online activities and censoring democratic material,” she said. “It is vital that we identify solutions that preserve the enormous democratic value provided by technological development, while at the same time protecting the human rights and civil liberties of those who stand to benefit from that expansion.”

Readers might remember that it was just about this time last year that executives from four major technology companies — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco — were summoned before Congress to account for their activities in China and elsewhere, after mounting press reports about how the software and hardware that the companies sold overseas was being used, altered and tweaked by repressive governments — or tailor-made by the companies for them.

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message. A Chinese division of Yahoo was decried by many human rights advocates for playing a role in the arrest.

The defense from the companies has always been that they were following local laws, but advocates have long found that explanation wanting — and this might well be the tech sectors’ best stab at avoiding onerous legislation.

This was the suggestion of John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and American Life at Harvard Law Schook, which has been one of the participating institutions in the discussions:

I am firmly of the view that this problem — of multinational corporations being required, as a matter of law or otherwise, to carry out censorship and surveillance at the behest of states — would best be solved by concerted action of the sort announced today, rather than through legislation as a first pass.

(An example of such a bill is the Global Online Freedom Act, introduced last year by New Jersey Republican Christopher Smith.)

Still, what exactly the companies will be expected to do when they find themselves between a rock and a hard place — say, with a demand to turn over the names of users of their e-mail service or to shut the accounts of bloggers that a particular government dislikes (not altogether unlikely, as some readers will remember), is a bit unclear.

The statement today simply says that in addition to developing the “principles” — whatever those will be, that the participants — will seek “to advance their effectiveness by establishing a framework to implement the principles, hold signatories accountable and provide for ongoing learning.”

Oh yes, and the participants. It’s a wide mix of digital rights groups from the Berkman Center and the C.D.T., to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco; traditional human rights and advocacy organizations like Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and others; and of course, technology companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

(A complete list can be found along with the release.)

Conspicuously missing, however, is Cisco, China’s largest U.S. supplier of networking hardware, the company whose equipment forms the backbone of China’s Internet (arguably the most efficiently monitored and censored networking matrix on the planet) and the company that sat shoulder-to-shoulder with executives from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft before Congress last year.

(Rebecca McKinnon, an assistant professor of journalism at University of Hong Kong, coyly notes Cicso’s absence on her blog today.)

When we asked Mr. Palfrey of Harvard’s Berkman Center why Cisco was missing from the list, he simply replied: “Ask Cisco.”

We’ll do that, and keep you posted…

Happy Holidays!

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:24:01 GMT

Dear Friends:

So I'm a little late but Happy Holidays everyone!

My parents are here visiting me and relatives. Not much has been going on, as evidenced by the lack of posts. But I'm going to Japan next week with the parents so hopefully that will generating posting material.

For Christmas, I went to the Great Wall with my friend Julia and her boyfriend Tom because when in China ...

Last time I went to the Great Wall I was 12 and we took a cable car up and down Badaling (the super touristy part of the Wall) so I only climbed a whopping 100 meters to earn my tshirt, which I have since lost.

What we hiked - a part of the wall in Huairou, 2 hours north of Beijing

On the wall

I'm working on the jumping pictures...slowly

This is a wilder part of the wall than most tourists see. Look at this precarious brick with no mortar on it...not a good ledge to hold onto

Inner peace on the wall...would be awesome to do yoga here

One highlight of the trip was the truck ride from the post-hike area to the bus back. Note to self: when I grow up, must buy a truck to take kids around

post-hike ramen eating. We tried going to this yummy vegetarian restaurant but they were having a big blow-out Christmas Eve buffet. Apparently Christmas is a big going out holiday in China.

After a long hike, I went to Christmas Mass at St. Joseph's on Wangfujing. The scene getting into the church was complete madness. The street was packed with party-goers and window-shoppers. The church was all lit up and flashbulbs were going off constantly so it felt like paparazzi outside some movie premiere. We had to squeeze and push our way through the crowd just to get inside the church. Thankfully we had tickets, thanks to some friend's guanxi. Inside, I was the only person that didn't take pictures. Most people were wearing their outer coats it was so cold, and the security/ushers wore stadium jackets with a big Jesus on the crucifix image emblazoned on the back. The whole ceremony was kind of formal and wacky at the same time. We were treated to songs by the worst harmonized and rehearsed (if dedicated) group of choir singers ever. The priest walked in under a canopy and these kids dressed up as angels threw petals on him. When communion was offered, a cute old man next to me asked me if I was Communist to which I replied, "No". Then he told me I could go take communion (since Commmunists can't take communion). When I explained I wasn't Catholic, he entreated my (Catholic) friend to convert me for "life should have meaning". By the end of the night, my knees were buckling from standing and I was ready to pass out. We went to McDonald's after to celebrate. All-American Christmas right? All in all, it was an interesting experience and it was fun singing the English versions to all the Christmas songs.

Happy New Year everyone!

PS: how do I get flickr to get rid of the awful blue borders on the pictures?

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:44:11 GMT

2 hours, lots of hand wringing, and 6 00 kuai later ... my camera is now fixed! Yay! so expect pictures ... at some point.

speaking of multimedia...I pretty much only listen to music from Grey's Anatomy now.
voila Mat Kearney:

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 02:33:31 GMT

It's been awhile ... and the news is not good.

The Chinese River Dolphin or 白鱀豚 has been declared functionally extinct
Probable causes (according to Wikipedia*).
- the building of the Three Gorges Dam
- extreme environmental pollution, ie. filth being dumped into the Yangtze
- hunting by people
- ship collisions and intrusion of ship propellers which throw the sonar
*Note how the site is linked off a proxy server thanks to Chinese censors blocking Wikipedia, sometimes gchat, and often google image search.

August Pfluger, a Swiss conservationist on the dolphin: "It's nobody's fault," he said. "You can't point to somebody and blame him. In the middle of the most flourishing economy in the world, a little dolphin, nobody cares." This is so sad. Dolphins are one of the most intelligent creatures in the world. It looks so cute too with it's long, sharp snout and little eyes. Good job humans! Aya!

RIP

millions of year BC - 2006

The Repair(wo)man

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:44:40 GMT

As promised, a snapshot:

Over the course of a week traveling through underdeveloped Guizhou Province I had a glance at the hard-working lives of minority women in impoverished areas in China. One portrait that stands out to me is a long bus ride from a small Miao village back to Kaili. We had spent three days walking between villages in Northwestern Guizhou and watched as women worked in the fields, tended to livestock, and cared for children while their husbands and sons were nowhere to be found. We saw women carry heavy loads to markets where they haggled prices and sold their wares while their husbands rested at home. We saw women cook and serve tirelessly while their husbands raised glass after glass of baijiu (Chinese liquor) toasts to entertain guests. The driver and ticket collector were both male but most of the bus consisted of women in colorful dress holding children bumping along on their laps as the bus navigated precarious inclines along rough mountainside roads. Thirty minutes before reaching our destination, the bus abruptly stopped owing to a flat tire. As my traveling companions and I rose out of our bus for a stretch, we saw the following:

While the men at the car repair shop smoked, chatted, and casually stared at my foreign friends and I, a woman of small build and my motherâ€™s age wrestled the rear tire off our truck, tested it for tears, and deftly patched up a small hole. The Miao women in Guizhou wear their hair up in a bun and traditionally place a wooden comb at the top. This woman had substituted a plastic comb in place of the traditional wooden comb all the while quickly fixing our car tire as the men watched on. Pretty kick-ass. The only profession you don't see as many women in in the countryside is driving trucks and cars, that and positions of power.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 10:40:46 GMT

These are my favorite kinds of articles: snapshots of places through the everyday people that live there. My favorite subjects are taxicab drivers, street vendors, people I meet on trains (specifically trains and not the sketchy Asian businessmen you meet on planes). I'll try to put up a couple of mine in the next few days.

Here's one of a street vendor in Cairo from the NYTimes, October 3, 2006 edition

Cairo Journal

A Hand on the Ladle, and an Eye Out for the Law

Dana Smillie/Polaris, for The International Herald Tribune

Farouk Salem tended to his cart in a southern Cairo neighborhood recently as his customers ate their breakfast of ful, a fava bean stew that is an Egyptian staple. He has operated the unlicensed stand for 18 years.

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: October 3, 2006

CAIRO, Oct. 2 — With his cart tucked beneath a highway overpass, just beside the railroad tracks and behind a parked taxi, Farouk Salem darted his eyes back and forth nervously as he awaited customers.

Dana Smillie/Polaris, for The International Herald Tribune

Muhammad Salem garnishes a bowl of ful at his brother's cart.

On most days, except during Ramadan, the sun has barely risen and worshipers are shuffling out of the nearby mosque after morning prayers as the first customers make their way to Mr. Salem. A few quick flicks of a ladle, the shaking of a bottle or two, and breakfast is ready.

Mr. Salem sells ful, the fava bean stew that is a staple of Egyptian cuisine, as a cheap, hearty breakfast for just 20 cents. But he is an unlicensed street vendor, one of the many hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who make their living in what economists here describe as Egypt’s informal work force: selling, delivering, cooking, cleaning, serving, ferrying, shoeshining, anything that will provide income.

Dr. Rashad Abdou, a professor of economics at Cairo University, estimated that the informal sector might account for as much as 60 percent of Egypt’s economy.

“As long as I keep a low profile, they don’t bother me,” Mr. Salem said on a recent day, as his brother worked behind the parked metal cart, dishing out bowls of ful. The police have forced him to move many times and have even confiscated his cart. But it is hard to keep a really low profile when the food is good and the prices are cheap.

As the sun began to heat up the morning air, customers showed up in a steady stream, some still in their pajamas.

“It’s good,” said Muhammad Abbadi. “It’s clean. And the most important thing is it’s cheap. We are poor. You see how poor we are in Egypt.”

Mr. Salem’s story is the story of millions of Egyptians who left rural villages to find a life here in the capital. There are an estimated 15 million people crowded into the many neighborhoods of Cairo, forcing the city to expand into the desert. Mr. Salem is 39 years old. He came to Cairo when he was 15, a newly minted graduate of a technical high school.

He had left a place called Al Wadi al Jadid, a vast expanse of desert in southwestern Egypt. It is a huge quarter, among the least populated areas of the country. It is known for its dates, which sweeten in the hot desert sun.

“There were no job opportunities there,” Mr. Salem said, puffing on a harsh Egyptian cigarette.

So he came to Cairo, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, and found he could make money providing a good, cheap meal to poor people like himself. As a teenager he went to work on ful carts owned by others.

The carts are all over Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods. They resemble the kind of cart pushed around Western cities, but have a hole in the center for a kedrat, a bowl with a long narrow neck and a potbellied bottom used to stew the beans. A long-handled ladle is used to fish them out.

“I realized I can do this on my own,” Mr. Salem said.

Eighteen years later, he is still at it. His cart is a bit battered, a metal hulk he hauls to and from home every day behind an equally battered yellow pickup truck. He has five children, and employs his younger brother Muhammad, who ladles out the steaming ful. And he says they all survive on about $2.50 a day, at best.

“Life is getting more expensive in Egypt,” he said. “The only prices that remain stable are the subsidized bread. Everything else has gone up. The oils, the beans, the spices.”

About a year ago, Mr. Salem said, he was forced to raise his own prices to about 20 cents from about 13 cents per meal.

That does not seem to have frightened away customers. Egypt, like other developing nations, has not been immune to the forces of globalization, including gastronomic homogenization. In many neighborhoods, cafes offering low-fat lattes and chocolate-sprinkled cappuccinos have replaced coffee houses serving up sweet tea in short glasses. McDonald’s offers the McFalafel.

But such changes have not reached into the lives of Mr. Salem’s clientele.

“There is still a great deal of popular demand for the ful cart — especially in agricultural, working-class and lower-income districts,” said Dr. Malak Rouchdy, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo. “Anybody can visit the ful cart in the morning wearing their pajamas and get their breakfast at an economical price.”

And indeed they were lining up, as they moved slowly, their eyes still sleepy, toward Mr. Salem’s cart. Some came with their own bowls. Muhammad’s hands flew around as his brother watched.

Two ladles of pasty beans. A few splashes of a vinegar spice mixture called daqa. A splash of oil. A dollop of tahini, a sesame paste. A touch of salt, a sprinkle of red pepper, finished off with a bit of lemon juice. Ful is not eaten with a spoon, not outside the fancy five-star restaurants that have tried to glamorize the meal and inflate the price. It is eaten with flat, round pieces of bread, like pita, known in colloquial Egyptian as “aish,” which also means life.

Ful is by definition a peasant food, though most everyone in Egypt eats it. The word ful has become synonymous with being poor, as people will often describe their poverty by saying they eat ful for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But ful is also loved, as though it is part of Egyptian identity.

“Nobody doesn’t like ful,” said Muhammad, though he acknowledged one can eat only so much. “I make it every day. But I don’t necessarily eat it every day.”

The older Mr. Salem said his life was his battered cart beneath the soiled makeshift umbrella. During the month of Ramadan, now under way, he goes out at night, since Muslims are required to fast during the day. But the rest of the year, he gets to his spot around 6 a.m. He and his brother serve customers until 11 a.m. and then he heads home to get ready for the next day.

He slow-cooks his beans overnight, so they are ready to be served the next morning. He wakes up early and chops up lettuce, tomatoes and onions. He wants them to be fresh.

And then he heads out, across the city to his not-so-secret spot. He sets up a wooden table, also battered, like everything else, including the metal bowls he serves the ful in, even the communal metal water cup. And then he paces, worried that the authorities will once again confiscate his cart and, with that, his livelihood.

He has been in this spot for six years, and it seems he has not made it through one day without that worry.

“If the authorities want to chase me away, they will do it,” he says, his face tight and nervous. “If they want to put me in prison, they can. If they want to take my cart away, they can.”

He walked over to get some more bread as Muhammad kept ladling.

Jano Charbel contributed reporting.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 17:16:21 GMT

So I managed to wear my shirt inside-out for at least half the day, unbeknownst to me. This is reminiscent of the time I wore my dress inside-out to the high school sophomore cruise around Boston Harbor. Someone pointed it out to me, so of course, first thing I do when I get on the boat is run mortified to the bathroom to fix it. I also lost a toothbrush (a darned nice one!) and a towel to the toilet a few days ago so there's a week in the life of someone absent-minded.

On a positive note, I bought a bike! (yay). It broke twice within 24 hours (boo). But I fixed it for 1 kuai (yay). Hopefully it'll stay rideable and in my possession for as long as possible. Riding my bike through Tsinghua campus at night definitely made my week.

So now is October Holiday which means millions upon millions of people flood into Beijing resulting in:

this is an underpass beneath Tiananmen Square

October 1st is National Day - the equivalent of July 4th in China. On Oct 1, 1949, Mao Zedong marched through Beijing declaring the founding of the People's Republic of China. On its 57th anniversary, there were no parades but plenty of people. In the square there was a picture of Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of modern China (and later associated with the republican movement and the KMT which moved to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists on the Mainland). The banner celebrates the founding of the Communist state and lauds it for technological progress.

There was no parade however this year, only big 5 or 10 year anniversaries I hear.

There was also a miniature version of the Potala Palace of Lhasa, probably because of the Qinghai-Tibetan train that was completed this year, the highest train in the world, now skirting thousands of people from Beijing straight to Lhasa everyday.

This little kid wanted a picture with Huanhuan, one of the 5 Friendlies (the official 5 Olympics mascots aka. lame advertising strategy). Mr. police officer had to tell him to move quickly

recycling man has a Mao pocket watch if you zoom in enough

In front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace,oblivious of the fire breathing lion above me

Fenced off from the tourists, this is the only semi-empty space in the square

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:13:52 GMT

Before my readership plummets to zero, I wanted to keep you all in the know so here are some pictures of our new apartment.

The entry area.

Here's our kitchen which so far has been good for attracting cockroaches and making french press coffee in. All I need is condensed milk and then I can recreate Lao coffee!

View of our living room from the porch-like area where we air our dirty laundry like any good Chinese. The sad news about the TV today is that we no longer get jacked satellite HBO. I watched 2 whole episodes of Entourage last night! *sniff

Here's our infamous bathroom. Can you guess everything that's wrong with it?

1) The drain is 3 feet away from the shower area which means the shower floods the ENTIRE bathroom
2) You have to uncover and recover the drain for every shower or else all the "aromatic" odors from bathrooms below will waft up.
3) You can't adjust the temperature of the water in the shower. The knob is in the kitchen with the water heater. Makes sense I know.
4) The washing machine plug doesn't fit the outlet. It also has to be raised off the ground away from the flooding.
5) (Well I guess this is my fault) our shower curtain is a little too short --> more flooding!
Our apartment is fine except for the illogical bathroom. But because it's in Wudaokou, it's overpriced albeit convenient to transportation and the student scene. I pretty much work all day so only the transportation applies to me.

The long-awaited picture - my bedroom! So the furniture doesn't match, there's no color theme, and it's much less organized than my roommate's room but who's counting? After I changed the overhead light bulbs, it's become quite a pleasant place to be.

So settling into Beijing has been lots of work. Haven't had time to explore Beijing yet, but let's just say that this year will be very different from the last in good and bad ways.

A picture of people (and excellent melt-in-your-mouth duck) for good measure:
Isabella and I with some Fulbrighters: Hai-Ching & Hayes

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 04:43:11 GMT

Wow! Sounds like a good thing. Hopefully, this will lessen the admissions craze and give students some more leeway to think and play senior year. I didn't get in early and it wasn't so bad. I definitely didn't like binding early admission programs to begin with so maybe it'll start a trend in reverse where you don't spend all of high school only thinking about getting into college. It makes sense to lessen the gap for disadvantaged students who don't have as much access to SAT prep, and college admissions prep, and every other kind of prep service to help students through the crapshoot that is college admissions now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/education/12harvard.html?hp&ex=1158120000&en=6e2c0bf3989c157f&ei=5094&partner=homepage
September 12, 2006
Harvard Ends Early Admission, Citing Barrier to Disadvantaged
By ALAN FINDER and KAREN W. ARENSON

Harvard University, breaking with a major trend in college admissions, says it will eliminate its early admissions program next year, with university officials arguing that such programs put low-income and minority applicants at a distinct disadvantage in the competition to get into selective universities.

Harvard will be the first of the nationâ€™s prestigious universities to do away completely with early admissions, in which high school seniors try to bolster their chances at competitive schools by applying in the fall and learning whether they have been admitted in December, months before other students.

Some universities now admit as much as half of their freshman class this way, and many, though not Harvard, require an ironclad commitment from students that they will attend in return for the early acceptance.

Harvardâ€™s decision â€” to be announced today â€” is likely to put pressure on other colleges, which acknowledge the same concerns but have been reluctant to take any step that could put them at a disadvantage in the heated competition for the top students.

â€œWe think this will produce a fairer process, because the existing process has been shown to advantage those who are already advantaged,â€™â€™ Derek Bok, the interim president of Harvard, said yesterday in an interview.

Mr. Bok said students who were more affluent and sophisticated were the ones most likely to apply for early admission. More than a third of Harvardâ€™s students are accepted through early admission. In addition, he said many early admissions programs require students to lock in without being able to compare financial aid offerings from various colleges.

Mr. Bok also spoke about reducing the frenzy surrounding admissions. â€œI think it will improve the climate in high schools,â€ he said, â€œso that students donâ€™t start getting preoccupied in their junior year about which college to go to.â€™â€™

Many admissions deans and high school guidance counselors greeted Harvardâ€™s decision â€” which is to go into effect for applicants in the fall of 2007 â€” with astonishment and delight.

â€œWow, itâ€™s incredible,â€™â€™ said Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a nonbinding early admissions program.

Ms. Jones has spoken widely about reducing the pressure and stress of admissions. â€œIt has the capacity to change a lot of things in this business,â€™â€™ she said. â€œItâ€™s bold enough for other schools to really reconsider what theyâ€™re doing. I wish them so much luck in this.â€™â€™

Lloyd Thacker, the executive director of the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit group created to lobby for an overhaul in admissions procedures, said his eyes had teared up when he heard the news. â€œIâ€™m so glad,â€ Mr.Thacker said. â€œI canâ€™t believe it.â€™â€™

â€œThe most powerful institution in the country is saying, singularly, yes, something is wrong with this and weâ€™re going to try to act in the public interest,â€™â€™ he added.

The University of Delaware announced a similar move last May.

For three decades Harvard has offered a particular form of early admissions, in which students who are accepted early still have the freedom to go elsewhere. Various forms of early admissions are offered by hundreds of colleges and universities, with many requiring applicants to commit upfront to attending the university if offered early admission.

The popularity of the procedure grew significantly in the 1990â€™s, as colleges tried to increase their competitive advantage by locking in strong candidates early. It also gave an edge to students willing to commit early to an institution. In some cases admissions rates are two or three times higher for students who apply early.

But at Harvard and many other universities officials have grown concerned that early admissions present a major obstacle to low-income and working-class students. Such students have also been hurt by steep tuition increases and competition with students from wealthy families who pour thousands of dollars into college consultants and tutoring.

â€œI think there are lots of very talented students out there from poor and moderate-income backgrounds who have been discouraged by this whole hocus-pocus of early admissions by many of the nationâ€™s top colleges,â€™â€™ said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard Collegeâ€™s dean of admissions and financial aid.

Mr. Thacker and other critics said that under binding early admission programs, students have to commit to a college long before they know how much aid they will be offered. Students who apply for admission in the regular cycle are able to compare financial-aid offerings from various colleges before making up their minds in April.

Under Harvardâ€™s early admissions program, which is known as early action, students do not have to decide until May 1 whether to accept an admission offer. Even so, many potential applicants did not understand the distinction between Harvardâ€™s program and those that require an upfront commitment and were discouraged from applying, Mr. Bok said.

â€œWe think the more schools abandon this process, the healthier the admissions process will be,â€™â€™ he said.

Of the 2,124 students admitted by Harvard last year, 813 were granted early admission, or 38 percent, Mr. Fitzsimmons said.

Under Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard president who left office in June, the university took a number of steps to make itself more accessible to poor and working-class students. Among other things, families with incomes below $60,000 a year are no longer required to pay for a studentsâ€™ education.

The idea of abandoning early admission was developed after Mr. Bok became interim president in July, said John Longbrake, a Harvard spokesman. Early admission will remain in effect in the current academic year, which is already under way.

Several educators said only a university with Harvardâ€™s reputation could take the risk involved with eliminating early admission because it will continue to be the first choice for so many top students.

â€œThe one thing that always seemed commonly agreed was that no college could give up its early application program if the others didnâ€™t, too,â€ said Christopher Avery, a Harvard professor and a co-author of â€œThe Early Admissions Game: Joining the Eliteâ€ (Harvard University Press, 2003). â€œThis seems to move to do just that.â€™â€™

Bruce Hunter, director of college counseling at the Rowland Hall-St. Markâ€™s School, a private school in Salt Lake City, said he hoped other universities would follow Harvardâ€™s lead, but he was not confident they would.

â€œI think that Harvard has calculated that they will not suffer any competitive disadvantage in the process,â€™â€™ Mr. Hunter said. â€œIâ€™m not sure that there are more than a handful of other places that could make the same claim.â€™â€™

Janet Lavin Rapelye, dean of admission at Princeton University, applauded Harvardâ€™s decision, but said she could not predict how Princeton might respond. Princeton has binding early admission, and Ms. Rapelye said there had been questions about whether early admissions limited diversity.

â€œAll of us who sit in these seats have always worried about that,â€™â€™ she said. â€œYet we have worked very hard to broaden and deepen our applicant pool at every step in the process.â€™â€™

To Changes

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:52:08 GMT

Wow! Below is an article from today's NYTimes on changes to the history curriculum. It's starting in Shanghai, the model of westernization and "development" in China...hasn't quite reached Changsha yet =P.

I'm also reading Peter Hessler's (of River Town fame) new book Oracle Bones - about working as a free lance journalist and writer in Beijing at the turn of the millenium. It's got me thinking alot about China's history as a conservative culture between the ancestor worship, Confucianism, and its late and reluctant opening to Western ideas. That makes this curriculum change all the more significant. But while the new textbook changes reflect less Communist ideology and indoctrination, it advances current political goals towards economic development, making money, innovation, and pretty much just that. It worries me that Chinese students are not encourage to learn history and when they do, it's a very narrow scope of Chinese history, most of it by rote memorization of dates, people, and events. My coworkers in Changsha who taught history have told me they expect to take a backseat to other subjects such as math, physics, and English. Having taught Chinese high school students last year, I was disappointed, sometimes appalled to learn how little Chinese history my students knew or how inaccurately they were taught it. Teaching also made me realize how influential textbooks and teachers can be in a student's life. It makes me worried that the next generation of Chinese student shave an unfettered desire towards economic progress and making money, but less and less of a grasp of their own history or place in the world. It also makes me really grateful for the luxury of a liberal arts education in America. I look at the classes I took in college and even high school and realize most of them I could not have taken in China. From Cosmic Connections (it was about the birth of the Universe...really) to the Political Theory of Schools and Prisons, to most of Social Studies - thank you Harvard for impractical but invaluably thought-provoking and mind expanding coursework!

On that note, here's the article:

NYTimes: Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books

By JOSEPH KAHN

Published: September 1, 2006

BEIJING, Aug. 31 ¡ª When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once ¡ª in a chapter on etiquette.

Nearly overnight the country¡¯s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950¡¯s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today¡¯s economic and political goals.

Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another.

They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it. The one-party state, having largely abandoned its official ideology, prefers people to think more about the future than the past.

The new text focuses on ideas and buzzwords that dominate the state-run media and official discourse: economic growth, innovation, foreign trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social harmony.

J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan¡¯s bullet train are all highlighted. There is a lesson on how neckties became fashionable.

The French and Bolshevik Revolutions, once seen as turning points in world history, now get far less attention. Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.

¡°Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity,¡± said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. ¡°The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.¡±

The changes are at least initially limited to Shanghai. That elite urban region has leeway to alter its curriculum and textbooks, and in the past it has introduced advances that the central government has instructed the rest of the country to follow.

But the textbooks have provoked a lively debate among historians ahead of their full-scale introduction in Shanghai in the fall term. Several Shanghai schools began using the texts experimentally in the last school year.

Many scholars said they did not regret leaving behind the Marxist perspective in history courses. It is still taught in required classes on politics. But some criticized what they saw as an effort to minimize history altogether. Chinese and world history in junior high have been compressed into two years from three, while the single year in senior high devoted to history now focuses on cultures, ideas and civilizations.

¡°The junior high textbook castrates history, while the senior high school textbook eliminates it entirely,¡± one Shanghai history teacher wrote in an online discussion. The teacher asked to remain anonymous because he was criticizing the education authorities.

Zhou Chunsheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and one of the lead authors of the new textbook series, said his purpose was to rescue history from its traditional emphasis on leaders and wars and to make people and societies the central theme.

¡°History does not belong to emperors or generals,¡± Mr. Zhou said in an interview. ¡°It belongs to the people. It may take some time for others to accept this, naturally, but a similar process has long been under way in Europe and the United States.¡±

Mr. Zhou said the new textbooks followed the ideas of the French historian Fernand Braudel. Mr. Braudel advocated including culture, religion, social customs, economics and ideology into a new ¡°total history.¡± That approach has been popular in many Western countries for more than half a century.

Mr. Braudel elevated history above the ideology of any nation. China has steadily moved away from its ruling ideology of Communism, but the Shanghai textbooks are the first to try examining it as a phenomenon rather than preaching it as the truth.

Socialism is still referred to as having a ¡°glorious future.¡± But the concept is reduced to one of 52 chapters in the senior high school text. Revolutionary socialism gets less emphasis than the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution.

Students now study Mao ¡ª still officially revered as the founding father of modern China but no longer regularly promoted as an influence on policy ¡ª only in junior high. In the senior high school text, he is mentioned fleetingly as part of a lesson on the custom of lowering flags to half-staff at state funerals, like Mao¡¯s in 1976.

Deng Xiaoping, who began China¡¯s market-oriented reforms, appears in the junior and senior high school versions, with emphasis on his economic vision.

Gerald A. Postiglione, an associate professor of education at the University of Hong Kong, said mainland Chinese education authorities had searched for ways to make the school curriculum more relevant.

¡°The emphasis is on producing innovative thinking and preparing students for a global discourse,¡± he said. ¡°It is natural that they would ask whether a history textbook that talks so much about Chinese suffering during the colonial era is really creating the kind of sophisticated talent they want for today¡¯s Shanghai.¡±

That does not mean history and politics have been disentangled. Early this year a prominent Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, wrote an essay that criticized Chinese textbooks for whitewashing the savagery of the Boxer Rebellion, the violent movement against foreigners in China at the beginning of the 20th century. He called for a more balanced analysis of what provoked foreign interventions at the time.

In response, the popular newspaper supplement Freezing Point, which carried his essay, was temporarily shut down and its editors were fired. When it reopened, Freezing Point ran an essay that rebuked Mr. Yuan, a warning that many historical topics remained too delicate to discuss in the popular media.

The Shanghai textbook revisions do not address many domestic and foreign concerns about the biased way Chinese schools teach recent history. Like the old textbooks, for example, the new ones play down historic errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989.

The junior high school textbook still uses boilerplate idioms to condemn Japan¡¯s invasion of China in the 1930¡¯s and includes little about Tokyo¡¯s peaceful, democratic postwar development. It will do little to assuage Japanese concerns that Chinese imbibe hatred of Japan from a young age.

Yet over all, the reduction in time spent studying history and the inclusion of new topics, like culture and technology, mean that the content of the core Chinese history course has contracted sharply.

The new textbook leaves out some milestones of ancient history. Shanghai students will no longer learn that Qin Shihuang, who unified the country and became China¡¯s first emperor, ordered a campaign to burn books and kill scholars, to wipe out intellectual resistance to his rule. The text bypasses well-known rebellions and coups that shook or toppled the Zhou, Sui, Tang and Ming dynasties.

It does not mention the resistance by Han Chinese, the country¡¯s dominant ethnic group, to Kublai Khan¡¯s invasion and the founding of the Mongol-controlled Yuan dynasty. Wen Tianxiang, a Han Chinese prime minister who became the country¡¯s most transcendent symbol of loyalty and patriotism when he refused to serve the Mongol invaders, is also left out.

Some of those historic facts and personalities have been replaced with references to old customs and fashions, prompting some critics to say that history teaching has lost focus.

¡°Would you rather students remember the design of ancient robes, or that the Qin dynasty unified China in 221 B.C.?¡± one high school teacher quipped in an online forum for history experts.

Others speculated that the Shanghai textbooks reflected the political viewpoints of China¡¯s top leaders, including Jiang Zemin, the former president and Communist Party chief, and his successor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Jiang¡¯s ¡°Three Represents¡± slogan aimed to broaden the Communist Party¡¯s mandate and dilute its traditional emphasis on class struggle. Mr. Hu coined the phrase ¡°harmonious society,¡± which analysts say aims to persuade people to build a stable, prosperous, unified China under one-party rule.

The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change, peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war, some critics say, because the leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a great deal. Officials prefer to create the impression that Chinese through the ages cared more about innovation, technology and trade relationships with the outside world.

Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does present a more harmonious image of China¡¯s past. But he says the alterations ¡°do not come from someone¡¯s political slogan,¡± but rather reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know.

¡°The government has a big role in approving textbooks,¡± he said. ¡°But the goal of our work is not politics. It is to make the study of history more mainstream and prepare our students for a new era.¡±