Weblog of a Syrian Diplomat in China

On English

While I profoundly do not identify with America and consider myself intensely ‘un-American’, I am deeply interested in the American scene (cultural and political) for reasons I will attempt to explain here.

I had grown up speaking both Arabic and English. For decades, English history, literature and culture were the most salient influences on my intellectual formation. However, in the eighties, French became my prevalent passion. I found then, and I still believe now, that French culture is superior to the Anglo-Saxon culture, albeit with two exceptions: history and political theory. In those days, the entirety of my reading was in French; starting with the classics, going through Proust, and including Le Nouvel Observateur. However, my “French phase” was not destined to last long because, first, I headed to England to pursue my doctoral studies, and, second, years later, I was appointed an ambassador to the United States. These two facts meant that English resumed its previous status of being the principal language of my intellectual life: reading, thinking and writing.

Upon being posted in America, I spent an incredible amount of time reading voraciously and learning everything I could lay my eyes on in the fields of American culture, politics and history.

Additionally, I wholly immersed myself in the present-day political life of the United States to a degree that I almost empathized with their politics - though never sympathized.

The more I read the major works of political scholars and theorists, the more I realized the richness, depth and sophisticated scope of these outstanding writings. I was equally impressed by the erudite debates on all issues politic in America.

However, my experience with actual politics and policies as practiced by the political establishment of the United States was completely different. It practically led me to a grand disenchantment with their political system. Shallowness, ignorance, grandstanding, sanctimonious holiest-than-thou attitudes, hubristic and ready-made platitudes, as well as their trite and repetitious talk of American values cannot be further detached from the previously described rich intellectual life of their political thinkers and scholars. They simply coexist in two parallel worlds - rarely intersecting or reflecting on each other.

Many years of personal experience led me to realize the total disconnect between these two worlds. This dichotomy between political thought and action led me to a phase were I almost gave-up on the benefits of studying, learning and exploring political ideas when they completely had no effect whatsoever on the conduct of politics by various governments of the Western hemisphere. I completely desisted from reading politics, and found refuge in the safe haven of philosophy and art.

Furthermore, this intense familiarity with the Anglo-American world – culturally, historically, politically and even geographically led me to a state of repetitive familiarity. There was nothing new for me. The excitements of serendipity and the frisson of a new realization became distant memories. I was bored. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt and long proximity leads to irritation, apathy and alienation. This was gradually happening to me. I desperately needed a breath of fresh air.

Then an unexpected thing happened. I was transferred to China. A totally brave new world opened its gates and I submerged myself in it. Chinese, this most inscrutable and artistic language became my new calling.

Now, hardly a day passes without learning new Mandarin characters, words and phrases. The thrill of the new has reinvigorated me both physically and intellectually. I am eagerly looking forward to the day when the mysteries of the Chinese language will be unraveled and I will be able to read my first book in Chinese from cover to cover.

A most surprising result of immersing myself in the culture and language of China was a sudden rekindling of my English flame. In the most discreet way, my love for the English language and culture was revived. I am back to those days when I used to read English with passion and alacrity. Whether it is a recently published book, the New York Review of Books, or my favorite website ‘3 Quarks Daily’, I am back to my old love affairs with a resuscitated vigor.

However, everything has a limit. This morning I switched on the TV to watch CNN – the first time I do so for the past five months. And again I was back to the surrealistic parallel world they sell to their viewers. I could not endure for more than ten minutes before I reached to the remote control. I think it will take more than five months before I try watching CNN next time - much longer I presume.

Kazem Khalil 3

Some of my favorite works by distinguished Syrian artists.

Thinking The Twentieth Century

In this book, Tony Judt interweaves the trajectory of his personal life story with the grand ideas and sweeping historic cataclysms of the twentieth century. This is a book of political history and social theory par excellence written by a scholar who gives equal emphasis to the history of thoughts, concepts and ideologies that influenced the twentieth century as much as to the major events themselves.

The main thesis of his book is that those who tried to think, imagine, perceive and understand the twentieth century had to do so for a world of which there was no precedent. Whether in anticipation or experience, observers of the twentieth century tried to think of its vicissitudes and catastrophes using a rational paradigm of the ninetieth century. However, the application to human behavior of a perfectly reasonable moral, utilitarian and political set of rules simply did not work for the twentieth century, hence the need to seriously think this century.

Judt does not attempt to depict the major events of the century, but to reflect on and think of the attitudes of minds, the misperceptions of the world, and how so many intelligent people adhered to ideas and doctrines with all the terrible consequences that ensued. He spares no major ideology from his perspicacious and penetrating dissection:  Fascism, Communism, Zionism and Americanism - all the bad ‘isms’ of the previous century.

The book is Tony Judt’s last book which he ‘wrote’ immediately before his death. Actually, since Judt was completely paralyzed for the last year of his tragically short life, the book is a result of a lengthy colloquy between a fellow historian, Timothy Parson, and himself. The idea of the book was conceived by Parson. It took the form of questions that will evoke memories and provoke cogent commentaries on major issues of the twentieth century.

                              
With one single, but major exception, that of Zionism, Parson’s questions and comments are thoughtful and unobtrusive. It is only when he needs to present his credentials as a Zionist sympathizer, and I may be using ‘sympathizer’ as a euphemism here, that he imposes his own beliefs and prejudices into the conversation, even to challenge what Judt had to say about Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust.

Judt considers himself a product of the British educational system in the sixties before it was pushed to decline and ruin, as he believes, by successive Labor and Tory governments. He gives credit to this system for helping him evolve from his youthful radicalism to the liberalism of his later life. “It was probably this range of traditional cultural reference, this sense of being at home in English if not exactly in England, that allowed people like me to swing comfortably back from radical youthful politics to towards the liberal mainstream.”

                                
At Cambridge, Judt learned how to become the quintessential English intellectual. This means learning to become an Oxbridgian don: never aggressive, never too political, doesn’t take moral issues seriously, abundant application of wit and irony, and, perhaps most importantly, a calibrated appearance of insouciance. However, he admits that “It would be difficult to imagine the application of such talents in, say, postwar Paris.”

Judt went to Cambridge to become a historian. He both did and didn’t.  “Richard Cobb, the leading English speaking French historian of the day and an influential figure in my field, never really regarded me as a historian. For Cobb, I was a disciplinary interloper with all the worst instincts of a French intellectual: writing politics under the guise of historical scholarship.” However, Judt admits that Cobb was not entirely wrong: “ I was on the career path of an English historian, but thought of myself as a dissenting French intellectual and acted accordingly.”

                    

Tony Judt proceeds to provide a brilliant analysis of Fascism, Communism and Zionism. On each of these major political movements he is erudite and pithy, however, being a former Zionist, his critique of Israel carries a hefty intellectual weight, and has been particularly painful to rabid Zionist crusaders. “In revealing respects, Israel today resembles the small nationalist states that emerged in Eastern Europe after the end of the Russian Empire. Had Israel – like Romania or Poland or Czechoslovakia- been established in 1918 rather than 1948, it would have closely tracked the small, vulnerable, resentful, irredentist, insecure, ethnically exclusivist states to which Word War I had given birth. But Israel did not come into being until after the Second World War. As a consequence, it stands out for its slightly paranoid national political culture and has become unhealthily dependent upon the Holocaust – its moral church and weapon of choice with which to fend off all criticism.”

I believe that the best two chapters of this book are those in its second half. The first is on historiography and the historian, where he discusses in a most enlightening way how he perceives himself as a historian and how he has evolved to whatever he has become. The other chapter has to do with his role as a ‘moraliste’ – after the French tradition of moralistes, which is quite different from the Anglo-American sensibility of moralists.

It is interesting, but not surprising that Judt advocates conventional approaches to teaching history and offers a withering attack on the trendy approaches of allowing students to reach conclusions and judgments on their own. “They sow confusion rather that insight, and confusion is the enemy of knowledge. Before anyone can engage the past, they have to know what happened, in what order and with what outcome. Instead, we have raised two generations of citizens completely bereft of common reference. As a result, they can contribute little to the governance of their society.” Judt goes on to state that the task of the historian is to provide the dimension of knowledge and narrative without which individuals cannot become a civic whole.

Judt’s distinction between memory and history is particularly worth mentioning. As an example, he believes that the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington does not record or serve history. It is merely selectively appropriated memory applied to serve a specific cause. Visitors to the Museum who are not empowered with the corresponding historical knowledge would be at a disadvantage because they are being inundated with a version of a narrative that they are in no position to assess.

          

His most profound thoughts appear in the chapter on the Age of Responsibility. “The problem is that we live today in age when the illusions, disillusions, and hatreds take front and center. So it requires a conscious effort to both identify and save the core of what was good about intellectual life in the twentieth century.

Above all, perhaps, there was the question of truth – or, rather, the two kinds of truths. Can someone who has accepted a larger political truth, or narrative truth, redeem himself as an intellectual or as a human being by staying close to smaller truths, or to truthfulness itself? That was a question put to the twentieth century by me, but perhaps also a question put to myself by me.”

He explains the difference between telling the simple naked truth, which is truthfulness, as opposed to acknowledging higher truths, which are about the national objectives, the motherland, the people’s values or the collective purpose of a nation that trumps individual interests. He believes that a historian ought to tell whatever he knows in the form in which he knows it. However, he acknowledges that historians of the twentieth century often did the exactly the opposite. They were mostly looking for what they believed was a higher truth.

Judt addresses one of the most important dilemmas facing historians. Two contradictory methodological propositions facing the historian have to do with the position of the historian vis-à-vis the history he is working on. Should the contemporary historian contextualize and separate himself from the subject matter, or should he participate in the on-going events of his own time and place? Judt believes that the historian can have it both ways. On one hand, Judt believes that he was able to methodologically separate himself in order to contextualize, which is what separates history from other ways of explaining human behavior, such as anthropology or sociology. On the other hand, he asserts that he did not retreat from his civic duties, and was not silent on major issues or ethically excused from his own circumstances.

At various points in this otherwise serious book, Judt can be hilarious. I found myself giggling loudly on reading his comment on the relationship between historical knowledge and contemporary politics, when Parson asked him if knowing history would help avoid certain mistakes; Judt’s reply was: “As it happens, I don’t think that neglecting the past is our greatest risk; the characteristic mistake of the present is to cite it in ignorance. Condoleezza Rice , who holds a PhD in political science and was the provost of Stanford University, invoked the American occupation of postwar Germany to justify the Iraq war. How much illiteracy can you identify in that one analogy?” He then proceeds to assert that actually knowing the past will make us immune from being bamboozled by the likes of Rice to justify present fallacies.

                           
The capstone of this book is his chapter on America and the American political system. It is not that he wrote something new or revealing. Almost every serious political analyst has reached, more or less, the same conclusions. It is just so well written, that it reminded me of Chopin’s famous remark on hearing Liszt playing his piano compositions "I wish I could steal his way of playing my etudes".

That is why I believe this chapter deserves a separate entry in my blog, which I intend to do very soon.

 

 

 

 

Masks from China 1

Among the phantasmagorical, surreal and burlesque.

A Day with a Chinese Family and their Friends

Since coming to China, I had few opportunities for quality time with my family. Between the heavily loaded official engagements, learning Chinese - which is a time consuming endeavor, and getting accustomed to our new life here, very little time was left for relaxation and winding down.

However, this Saturday was different. We received an invitation to spend the day with a Chinese family: Xu Jian, a painting master, his wife Wang Tin, a young Beijing Opera artist and their daughter.

This family lives in an art center-cum-home. The Gonghua Art Center in the Changping district located just outside Beijing is a classical Jiangnan-style house garden. Both the house and the garden have a large collection of paintings, calligraphy and sculpture.

Other guests in such a household included, naturally, artists from the Beijing Opera and fellow painters and calligraphers. All were gracious enough to perform, draw, and present us with some improvised artwork as a gift. This included a master calligrapher’s rendering of Saree’s name in Chinese.

I was as much impressed by the strange and mesmerizing singing of the Chinese opera artists (the wife and other guests) as with their fantastic masks. This is an enchanting world that I know very little about, albeit strongly lured by.

By the end of the day, we performed what has become a fixed ritual in our Chinese experience: exchanging presents. We gave the couple a box of Damascene sweets, and they gave us a box of Chinese green tea.

 

 

Kissinger On China

One might think that reading a book on China once I arrived to Beijing would be the most logical thing to do. Yet, it was not me who chose to do so. It was actually a Lebanese friend of mine who came to say hello and wish me well in my Chinese mission who brought me this book as a welcome gift.

Very soon, I found myself absorbed in this intelligent and well informed book. Understandably, Kissinger had a number of research assistants who compiled for him a large number of historical materials, but he managed to present it in a pithy erudite manner. Kissinger’s brilliance as a strategic thinker is rarely spoiled in this book by his doctrinal and ideological proclivities, albeit they are sprinkled throughout the book.

The book starts with an absorbing presentation of Chinese history, culture and civilization. The principal theme being that China, with a ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had always presumed a status of world centrality and superiority despite the depredations it went through in the 19^th and 20th centuries. Kissinger opines that the catastrophes of those two centuries are viewed with considerable dismay in contemporary China, as part of an infamous “Century of Humiliation” that ended by the reunification of China under Mao. He argues that the era of China’s horrible demise can also be looked at as a testimony to its remarkable ability to surmount vicissitudes that could have broken other societies.

“To weather the storm, China relied not only on technology or military power but instead on two deeply traditional resources: the analytical abilities of its diplomats, and the endurance and cultural confidence of its people.”

In this excellent book, I found his laconic and insightful comparison between China, Japan and the United States most interesting. He believes that all three countries believe in their own exceptionalism. However, this same belief led to a different ethos for each nation.

According to Kissinger, China believed in its exceptionally superior culture and civilization; the Chinese are deeply convinced that by merely being there, the rest of the world will realize, admire, learn and absorb the Chinese civilization, either through a concentrated conscious effort, or merely through osmosis. Whereas Chinese exceptionalism represented the claim of a universal empire, “Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it. The Chinese sense of uniqueness asserted that China was the one true civilization, and invited barbarians to the Middle Kingdom to come and be transformed. The Japanese attitude assumed a unique Japanese racial and cultural purity, and declined to extend its benefits or even explain itself to those born outside its sacred ancestral bonds.” All this is compared to the American exceptionalism based on the firm belief that America has the best values of the world, and that it was the manifest destiny of the American nation to spread its ideals and values across the universe, even if by force. While the Americans were zealot missionaries, the Chinese were stoic intellectuals.

One particularly interesting anecdote in Kissenge’s book was hitherto unbeknown to me. I never thought that our Middle East was, at least for one instance, the cause of some military tension between China and the U.S. This incident happened in 1958 during the Lebanese civil war, when American and British troops landed in Lebanon in support of General Fouad Shihab. On August 23, 1958, the People’s Liberation Army began another massive shelling of the offshore islands, accompanying its bombardment with a propaganda salvos calling for the liberation of Taiwan. Mao explained to his colleagues that the shelling was China’s reaction to American intervention in Lebanon: “The bombardment, frankly speaking was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time?... Americans started a fire in the Middle East, and we started another fire in the Far East. We would see what they would do with it.”

Another forte in this book is Kissinger’s analysis and evaluation of Mao’s cultural revolution and its devastating effects. He is neither apologetic nor sanctimonious, but offers us a balanced and multifaceted reading of this bleakest of all Chinese tribulations under Mao. He believes that despite its evils, it had set the stage for the future reforms of Deng Xsiao Ping through rendering the vast Chinese party and government bureaucracy an almost tabula rasa.

I also found his reflections on Nixon and Mao and their historic rapprochement very insightful. “Mao and Nixon shared one overriding trait: a willingness to follow the global logic of their reflections and instincts to ultimate conclusions. Nixon tended to be the more pragmatic. One of his frequently expressed maxims was “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely."

That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time. It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in each country. That it took place with such decisiveness and proceeded with so few detours is a tribute to the leadership that brought it about. Leaders cannot create the context in which they operate. Their distinctive contribution consists in operating at the limits of what the given operation permits. If they exceed these limits, they crash; if they fall short of what is necessary, their policies stagnate. If they build soundly, they may create a new set of relationships that sustains itself over a historical period because all parties consider it in their interest.”

His comparison between the Chinese and American negotiation style is very helpful in illuminating the quintessential differences between the two sides. The Chinese negotiators use diplomacy to wave together political, military and psychological elements into an overall strategic design. They have no emotional difficulties with deadlocks; they consider them the inevitable mechanism of diplomacy. They prize gestures of goodwill only if they serve a definable objective or tactic. And they patiently take the long view against impatient interlocutors, making time their ally.

In contrast, American diplomacy generally prefers the specific over the general, the practical over the abstract. It values flexibility, and detest deadlocks; it feels an obligation to break deadlocks with new proposals-unintentionally inviting new deadlocks to elicit new proposals.

 

Whereas Kissinger never admits it, I found that among the many Chinese leaders he had encountered, he is most sympathetic to the former Prime Minister Zhou En Lai. His portrayal of him is cordial and penetrating: “In some sixty years of public life, I have encountered no more compelling figure than Zhou Enlai. Short, elegant, with an expressive face framing luminous eyes, he dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number. When I met him, he had been Premier for nearly twenty-two years and an associate of Mao for forty. He had made himself indispensable as the crucial mediator between Mao and the people who formed the raw material for the Chairman’s vast agenda, translating Mao’s sweeping visions into concrete programs. At the same time, he had earned the gratitude of many Chinese for moderating the excesses of these visions...”

Yet, his admiration for Deng was also obvious despite the difference in character and circumstances: “Having grown accustomed to Mao’s philosophical disquisitions and indirect allusions and to Zhou’s elegant professionalism, I needed some time to adjust to Deng’s acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections, and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a room as propelled by some invisible force, ready for business. He did not envelop one with solitude as Zhou did, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal attention.” Needles to point out here that Kissinger does not fail to add some aspects of his own character to the colorful portraits he is drawing of the three leaders, with his usual self-aggrandizing remarks.

The best tribute he pays Deng, is not related to Deng’s characrer, but to his achievement: “China, as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. It is not that he designed specific programs to accomplish his ends. Rather, he fulfilled the ultimate task of a leader-of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practicing the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to undertake a course whose benefits at first reside largely in their vision.”

However, the presumed infallibility of Kissinger’s ‘brilliant strategic analysis’ suffers considerably when he moves from analyzing what is universally perceived as an indelibly successful strategic coup (the reconciliation with China), to explaining, defending and ‘strategizing’ on the U.S. position vis-à-vis what he calls the “third Vietnamese war”. Here, he obfuscates and falls into circumlocution to justify the U.S. double standards of ‘upholding human rights values in foreign policy’ as he repeatedly indicated throughout the book, while taking the strategic imperative to side with the Khmer Rouge in the Vietnamese – Cambodian – Chinese crisis. At least the Chinese did not have any false pretenses about their strategic need to ‘punish’ the Vietnamese for their invasion of Cambodia. Furthermore, Kissinger stumbles into the morass of ideologues when he astonishingly claims, without providing any arguments (convincing or otherwise) that the strategic position of the U.S. in this crisis exposed the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. He even suggests that the Soviet’s decision a decade later to enter Afghanistan was a result of the strategic gains accrued to the U.S. in the aftermath of the Chinese-Vietnamese war. Based on the precedent of this farfetched conclusion, one can claim, that the very same crisis could also be used to explain the U.S. decision to invade Afghanistan three decades later. However, if one does not have the exalted hallow of Doctor Kissinger, he will risk the ridicule of his peers for such shallow presumptions on world affairs.

The abundant brilliant strategic analysis of this the book notwithstanding, Doctor Kissinger also bores his readers with a lengthy and trivial discussion of the Fang Lizhi case, a Chinese dissident whom the United States used as a show-case for its ultra-sensitivity for human rights issues, while it was infringing, in the same time, on these rights on a large scale in other regions. Kissinger dedicates lengthy pages to the Fang affair in an otherwise sweeping and pithy presentation of China and Sino-American relations.

Finally, the capstone of this book is Kissinger’s profound take on the future of U.S.-China relations, and whether they are heading to an inevitable confrontation or a possible congruence of each other’s historic regional rule. Here, Kissinger builds on his profound knowledge of 18th and 19th century European politics and history to find cues and clues that suggest whither these two countries are heading.