January 30, 2005
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At Forum, Leaders Confront Annual Enigma of China
By MARK LANDLER
AVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 29 - In almost every panel discussion at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here, there comes a moment when somebody mentions China.
A hush typically ensues, as panelists draw their breath, gather their thoughts and struggle to put the bewildering vastness of the topic into a few words.
"China is going to be the change agent for the next 20 years," said Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, when asked about the country's future by the television interview host Charlie Rose.
China's staggering potential, coupled with the steep language barrier and cultural discomfort of many Chinese who come to this conference, has made it Davos's annual enigma.
After three days of outsiders' dissecting its motives and prospects, China finally took the stage on Saturday, with a speech by its executive vice prime minister, Huang Ju.
"China's development will by no means pose a threat to other countries," Mr. Huang declared cheerfully, as if to soothe people here who spent the week fretting about China's lengthening shadow.
Mr. Huang, however, said little on the two issues of overriding importance to the investors and business people here: whether China would allow its currency to rise against the dollar, and whether the Chinese would crack down on the rampant theft of intellectual property.
"We have to maintain the exchange rate at a reasonable level," said Mr. Huang, who directs China's finance policy and was billed by the organizers as Beijing's chief operating officer.
Some here interpreted that comment as a signal that China would not allow its currency, the yuan, to rise against the dollar this year, as some Europeans and Americans have demanded. But Michael S. Dell, the chairman of Dell Inc., who had breakfast with Mr. Huang, said he did not draw any conclusions.
Mr. Huang also did little to ease investors' concerns about China's regard for intellectual property rights, saying only that through new laws and tougher enforcement, China was trying to achieve in a dozen years what it had taken the Western world a century to do.
At a dinner with the theme of investing in China, several foreign executives said they discerned little progress on the issue. The only way to avoid having their proprietary technology pilfered by Chinese competitors, they said, was to keep most research and development activities at home, and to use China for simple manufacturing.
For the Chinese who trek to this Alpine ski resort, the problem is less one of legal tradition than cultural disconnect. Except for a handful of fluent English speakers with long experience with foreigners, most keep to themselves - shying away from the high-octane networking that is the fuel of Davos.
"Davos's history is as a European and American conference," said Chen Feng, the chairman of Hainan Airlines Company. "People come here to relax and ski. China's culture is not about skiing."
Mr. Chen, an irrepressible entrepreneur who worked the hallways like a Davos regular, is one of only four chief executives of major Chinese companies at this year's conference. He said more of his peers had come to previous meetings, but had found the experience uncomfortable.
Zhao Jianfei, an editor at The Observer, a Shanghai-based magazine, said, "In China, the basic idea is to watch Davos, not take part in it." People have other theories for why the Chinese do not turn out in droves. "China is not exactly soliciting investment," said Stephan F. Newhouse, the president of Morgan Stanley. "They're turning it away."
Mr. Huang dramatized China's potential with forecasts. Its economic output will grow to $4 trillion by 2020, from $1.6 trillion today, he said, and its output per capita - a more accurate measure of wealth - will triple to $3,000 per person.
For its part, the World Economic Forum says the Chinese turnout this year has been noteworthy, mostly because of the attendance of Mr. Huang, a member of the Politburo's powerful standing committee. The deputy governor of the People's Bank of China also came.
The conference organizers have gone to considerable lengths to make this a congenial place for China. There are no sessions on Taiwan - a topic sure to drive away Chinese officials. Mr. Huang did not take questions from the audience.
"It's understood that some things about China don't come up in polite conversation at Davos," said Orville Schell, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
Politesse did break down occasionally. At a lunch held by Mr. Schell, several non-Chinese participants confronted the handful of Chinese guests about how Beijing could justify not allowing the Taiwanese people to vote on whether they wanted to be an independent nation.
After an awkward silence, a few Chinese spoke about the passionate feelings in China regarding Taiwan's status. Yuan Ming, the director of the Institute of American Studies at Beijing University, alluded to the frustration that outsiders might have in seeking to understand China.
"The world needs China to play some roles," Ms. Yuan said in a polite yet weary tone. "But it's too early to rank ourselves among world nations. We do need some time to develop ourselves."
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One More 'Moral Value': Fighting Poverty
By JOHN LELAND
uring the inaugural festivities in Washington this month, three evangelical Christian groups sponsored a black-tie "Values Victory Dinner," where they celebrated the electoral strength of "moral values" as a factor in the campaign. In the shorthand of postelection polls and analysis, that meant opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.
But many religious leaders, including some evangelicals, think the current focus on moral values has created a platform to talk about other issues, especially poverty, as both political and moral concerns. "The good news about the bad news was that the spin doctors, whether they got it right or wrong, have said that values are so important to our political system," said Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, an association of liberal denominations that represents more than 100,000 congregations. "They've given an opportunity for us to say, 'We're people of faith, too, and we're going to talk about what the Bible says about poverty.' When nine million children are living in poverty, that's a moral value."
Mr. Edgar and other religious leaders across the theological spectrum are trying to shift the debate. Last week, Mr. Edgar announced an ecumenical summit meeting, sponsored or supported by more than 30 religious groups, to promote world peace and the elimination of global poverty.
Evangelical organizations, whose views were often stereotyped after the election, are also seeking a broader definition of moral values. "We've let not evangelicals, but the right wing determine what moral values are," said David J. Frenchak, president of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education, a nondenominational group that helps develop urban ministry programs at 12 seminaries or divinity schools around the country.
In Chicago last weekend, Dr. Frenchak joined a gathering of 20 Christians, mostly evangelicals, to produce a book defining moral values to include a focus on poverty. At the meeting, one man held up a Bible from which he had cut every verse that addressed poverty. "There was hardly anything left," Dr. Frenchak said. "He said, 'I challenge anyone in the room to take their Bible and cut out every verse about abortion or gay marriage, and we'll compare Bibles.' "
Dr. Frenchak said he had been involved in more conversations about moral values in the past two months than ever before. "We meet to discuss how poverty got left out of the discussion of moral values. The question is, 'How do we talk about what we do as a moral value, rather than as an assumed good?' I don't think a day goes by that I don't get some communication about rethinking an understanding of moral values."
In postelection analyses, "values voters" were often equated with evangelical Christians, just as "values" were equated with opposition to abortion and gay marriage. But evangelical churches and seminaries have become increasingly mobilized around poverty both in the United States and abroad.
"This is the great secret story," said Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical who runs Sojourners magazine and Call to Renewal, a network of religious groups committed to combating poverty.
"The perception of evangelicals is that all they care about is abortion and gay marriage, but it isn't true," he said. "It hasn't been for years."
Mr. Wallis has long tried to assemble a coalition of progressive or moderate evangelicals and Roman Catholics with mainline Protestant organizations on moral issues like poverty. Though his voice has sometimes been a lonely one, his new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," enters the New York Times best-seller list this week at No. 11. Mr. Wallis, Dr. Edgar and other religious leaders, including Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, met with Democratic members of Congress to advise them on how Democrats could inject their faith and moral values into discussions of their policies, including those intended to help the poor.
"There's serious new common ground to explore on poverty, across theological and political lines," Mr. Wallis said. "Poverty is front and center, and not just among mainline Protestants, but at Fuller and Wheaton," he added, naming two of the nation's largest evangelical schools.
Glen E. Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said his students, who were largely conservative, agreed that poverty should be part of the moral values discussion.
"A lot of Christians who are worried about abortion see poverty as a pro-life issue, because if you undermine the safety net for poor mothers, you'll increase the abortion rate and infant mortality rate," Dr. Stassen said. "We've seen that happen since welfare reform, just as the Catholic bishops predicted."
Dr. Stassen, who describes himself as "pro-life," added that many evangelicals, including his students, want to change the current moral values rhetoric because they think it drives people from, rather than to, the church. "They're both offended and worried that it will persuade people concerned about justice that they should not be Christians," he said.
At Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a liberal school, students this year developed a nine-day course called the Poverty Immersion Experience to provide a practical grounding for the moral values discussion.
"How do you preach on poverty?" said Amy Gopp, one of the students who developed the course. "People rely on theological apathy - 'The poor will always be with us' - things that don't demand that we do anything."
On a blustery January morning, Ms. Gopp and 10 classmates piled into a rented van to meet with a group of formerly homeless people in northeast Philadelphia who had organized to protest their condition.
The intent of the course is to get students to think "beyond the soup kitchen" or charity work and consider how religious institutions can address the underlying structure of poverty, said Willie Baptist, who is a scholar-in-residence at the seminary. A community activist and organizer, Mr. Baptist had been homeless in this Philadelphia neighborhood. "We're not just crying crocodile tears about poverty or singing 'Kumbaya,' " he said. "We're making contact with an organized section of the poor that's doing something about poverty."
The students visited neighborhoods where drugs are sold on street corners. They met a woman who described her experiences living in a tent city, including bathing her children in water from a hydrant. The woman is now on the staff at the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an organization started by poor people in the neighborhood to call attention to their plight.
For some of the students, it was their first close look at urban poverty. "I've done academic work on poverty, but here is a chance to meet poor people firsthand," said Paul Gremier, 23, who said he might use his education to become a minister, a social worker or a professor.
On the ride back to New York, Ted Pardoe, a former Wall Street executive, said the trip had given him ideas about ways to work with the poor through not-for-profit agencies. "Yesterday I was skeptical about reality tours," Mr. Pardoe said. "Now I'm not skeptical at all. Each person we met was more impressive than the one before."
There was little discussion of God or church on the trip, but lots of talk about values and responsibility. Andrea Metcalfe, who is studying to become a Lutheran minister, said she was frustrated that the issue of poverty had received so little attention in all the recent talk about values and voting. Ms. Metcalfe blamed a reticence among liberals to connect their faith publicly with their actions.
"There's this tendency for liberals to say, 'We don't want anything to do with mixing church and politics,' " Ms. Metcalfe said. As a result, she said, liberal Christians and their concerns have not entered the values debate.
Elizabeth Theoharis, a doctoral student and community activist who was leading the class with Mr. Baptist, challenged the students: "How do we move from the idea of poor people being sinners to poverty being a sin?"
That, she said, was a moral value, and the students agreed.
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January 30, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Torture Chicks Gone Wild
By MAUREEN DOWD
ASHINGTON
By the time House Republicans were finished with him, Bill Clinton must have thought of a thong as a torture device.
For the Bush administration, it actually is.
A former American Army sergeant who worked as an Arabic interpreter at Gitmo has written a book pulling back the veil on the astounding ways female interrogators used a toxic combination of sex and religion to try to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. It's not merely disgusting. It's beyond belief.
The Bush administration never worries about anything. But these missionaries and zealous protectors of values should be worried about the American soul. The president never mentions Osama, but he continues to use 9/11 as an excuse for American policies that bend the rules and play to our worst instincts.
"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the former sergeant, Erik R. Saar, 29, told The Associated Press. The A.P. got a manuscript of his book, deemed classified pending a Pentagon review.
What good is it for President Bush to speak respectfully of Islam and claim Iraq is not a religious war if the Pentagon denigrates Islamic law - allowing its female interrogators to try to make Muslim men talk in late-night sessions featuring sexual touching, displays of fake menstrual blood, and parading in miniskirt, tight T-shirt, bra and thong underwear?
It's like a bad porn movie, "The Geneva Monologues." All S and no M.
The A.P. noted that "some Guantánamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by 'prostitutes.' "
Mr. Saar writes about what he calls "disturbing" practices during his time in Gitmo from December 2002 to June 2003, including this anecdote related by Paisley Dodds, an A.P. reporter:
A female military interrogator who wanted to turn up the heat on a 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before 9/11 removed her uniform top to expose a snug T-shirt. She began belittling the prisoner - who was praying with his eyes closed - as she touched her breasts, rubbed them against the Saudi's back and commented on his apparent erection.
After the prisoner spat in her face, she left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist suggested she tell the prisoner that she was menstruating, touch him, and then shut off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.
"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," Mr. Saar recounted, adding: "She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee. As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred. She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward," breaking out of an ankle shackle.
"He began to cry like a baby," the author wrote, adding that the interrogator's parting shot was: "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."
A female civilian contractor kept her "uniform" - a thong and miniskirt - on the back of the door of an interrogation room, the author says.
Who are these women? Who allows this to happen? Why don't the officers who allow it get into trouble? Why do Rummy and Paul Wolfowitz still have their jobs?
The military did not deny the specifics, but said the prisoners were treated "humanely" and in a way consistent "with legal obligations prohibiting torture." However the Bush White House is redefining torture these days, the point is this: Such behavior degrades the women who are doing it, the men they are doing it to, and the country they are doing it for.
There's nothing wrong with trying to squeeze information out of detainees. But isn't it simply more effective to throw them in isolation and try to build some sort of relationship?
I doubt that the thong tease works as well on inmates at Gitmo as it did on Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
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