WASHINGTON: Apart from sheer speed and flexibility, another critical factor that led Apple to manufacture in China was that it provided engineers at a scale that the United States could not match.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
What if Raffles hadn't founded S'pore?
Hundreds of ships crossed the Malacca Straits from the 17th century to January 1819. So why did historians decide that when Sir Stamford Raffles did so on Jan 29, 1819, it was a historic event?
This date has passed us by again without much ado. Should we, as a nation, consider once more the role of Raffles in the founding of Singapore?
Japan: Next to face a debt crisis?
A FIERY debate has broken out over an issue that many thought had long been settled: Japan's economy is sliding towards irrelevance.
The freshest evidence, reported last week, is the first annual trade deficit in 31 years. It means, at the very least, that the huge pool of domestic savings that the country uses to finance its staggering national debt might instead start going towards supporting a trade deficit - an ominous sign.
The freshest evidence, reported last week, is the first annual trade deficit in 31 years. It means, at the very least, that the huge pool of domestic savings that the country uses to finance its staggering national debt might instead start going towards supporting a trade deficit - an ominous sign.
Legend of Hang Tuah: fact or fiction?
SOME Malaysian roads have been named after him. Even a popular brand of coffee has his name. A medal for bravery was once created in his honour.
But legendary Malay warrior Hang Tuah never existed. He is just a myth. As were his four friends and Chinese princess Hang Li Po, who married the Sultan of Malacca in the 15th century.
But legendary Malay warrior Hang Tuah never existed. He is just a myth. As were his four friends and Chinese princess Hang Li Po, who married the Sultan of Malacca in the 15th century.
How the US lost out on iPhone work
WASHINGTON: When Mr Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley's top luminaries for dinner in February last year, each guest was asked to come with a question for the President.
But as Mr Steve Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
But as Mr Steve Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Sunday, January 29, 2012
True or not?
Suppose you hear a suggestion that a company is going bankrupt. How many times do you need to hear it before you believe it is true?
Apple products once made in US, now made in China
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured in other countries.
Why can't that work come home, President Obama asked Apple's Steve Jobs at a dinner in California last February.
'Those jobs aren't coming back,' Mr Jobs reportedly said.
Why can't that work come home, President Obama asked Apple's Steve Jobs at a dinner in California last February.
'Those jobs aren't coming back,' Mr Jobs reportedly said.
The creative power of one
Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Restoring hope and public trust
CAPITALISM has gone through crises of legitimacy before but this one is unprecedented. The underlying causes are complex, yet the net effect is plain - inequality is great and rising. Sixty-one million individuals have the same wealth as 3.5 billion people.
What will Internet users and industry take on next?
SAN FRANCISCO: The unlikely coalition of companies and consumer groups that helped quash anti-piracy legislation last week on Capitol Hill is weighing the future of what might be called lobbying 2.0.
Can the Internet industry, along with legions of newly politicised Web users, be a new force in Washington? And if so, what else can they all agree upon?
Can the Internet industry, along with legions of newly politicised Web users, be a new force in Washington? And if so, what else can they all agree upon?
5 myths about China's power
AS CHINA gains on the world's most advanced economies, the country excites fascination as well as fear, particularly in the United States, where many worry that China will supplant America as the 21st century's superpower. Many ask how China has grown so much so fast, whether the Communist Party can stay in power and what Beijing's expanding global influence means for the rest of us. To understand China's new role on the world stage, it helps to rethink misconceptions that dominate Western thinking.
WWII bomb shelter opens for tours
WHAT is possibly the last wartime civilian air-raid shelter here will welcome groups of visitors on guided tours next month.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Chinese clans plan centre for new citizens
Aim is to better integrate them into Singapore. A NEW Chinese cultural centre to integrate newcomers to Singapore and showcase the local Chinese identity will be set up by the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA).
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Why Singapore Has the Cleanest Government Money Can Buy: View - Bloomberg
Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, isn’t often taken publicly to task. But when you make S$3.1 million ($2.4 million) annually to run a country, people tend to expect results. When they don’t get them, the aggrieved masses turn to that lowest-of-common-denominator gripes: Hey, how much are we paying this guy?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Google plays both sides in piracy fight
THE Internet's watershed political moment in the United States arrived last week. You can Google it. The role of Google itself, however, in the so-called Web blackout is more interesting than a quick Google search would indicate.
By Susan Crawford
First, some background. On Jan 18, to protest against a pair of anti-piracy Bills in Congress, Wikipedia posted a blackout page on its English-language site that was seen by more than 162 million people. Google, meanwhile, gathered seven million signatures against the Bills.
These tactics worked, at least temporarily: At the beginning of the great day of Internet wrath, there were 80 members of Congress who supported the legislation and 31 opponents. Afterwards, those numbers were 63 and 122.
Google's statesman-like chairman Eric Schmidt has led the rhetorical charge against the two Bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the House and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) in the Senate. In November last year, he called the Bills 'draconian' and said that requiring Internet service providers to remove the URLs of suspected pirates from the Web amounted to 'censorship'.
On Jan 18, however, Google didn't disappear. Students with term papers to write may have had a tough time without Wikipedia, but all of us could get a blizzard of results from the familiar search giant. If actions speak louder than words, then what was the meaning of Google's inaction?
Janus-like, Google has two faces: It is both a technology company - providing a way to navigate to the glories and confusion of the Web - and a media company - producing content and making choices about what consumers will find useful. Those choices are based on extensive experience with consumers' use of search results.
Google-as-search-engine relies on user-generated content to thrive. As an intermediary, Google doesn't want to be conscripted as an automatic enforcer of other people's copyrights. Thus Google's objections to the piracy Bills, which give broad immunity from liability to service providers that block other sites 'dedicated to infringement'. This legislation would encourage them to remove links on the mere suspicion of illegal activity. As Mr Schmidt's remarks indicate, search censorship sets a dangerous precedent at a time when repressive regimes around the world target search engines to limit what their citizens can know. Google- as-search-engine has plenty of good reasons to oppose Sopa and Pipa.
But Google-as-speaker has enormous power to shape the boundaries of knowledge. This month, Google visibly flexed these muscles when it introduced 'Search, Plus Your World', which presents search results to users of Google+ that include materials coming from people within the users' 'circles'. Twitter results weren't included, and Twitter's general counsel, Mr Alex Macgillivray, himself a former Google employee, said that the introduction of this product marked a 'bad day for the Internet' because Google's search engine had been 'warped'. If Google had turned black on Jan 18, its power would have become obvious to millions more people. Left without Google, and if ignorant about alternatives, consumers would have been up in arms. Result: backlash.
Here's a thought experiment: A few decades ago, how would Americans have felt if one of the three major broadcast networks devoted an entire day of programming to a particular political advocacy campaign? Given the dominance of the few media outlets of the time, the initial shock of seeing a broadcaster display a political point of view would probably have been followed by anger - and a push for greater regulation of all of the networks.
Google obviously didn't want to trigger that kind of fear and knee-jerk political response. Nor did Google, as a public company, want to lose revenue by closing down. (Wikipedia, by contrast, is a volunteer enterprise.) So it stayed on safer ground, tinkering with its logo - it was blacked out for the day, as if redacted from a classified document - rather than 'disappearing' its search results.
Google-as-publisher, after all, has content concerns of its own. What Google did was more akin to a network running a public service announcement to present its views without pre-empting anyone's favourite soap opera.
Last week, we met a new Google: Google-as-political-influencer. How you feel about Google's role will depend on your categorisation of the company. To irascible mogul and novice tweeter Rupert Murdoch, Google is a pirate: 'Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.' As a media company, Google would say it was adhering to its principles by putting users first and being transparent: It didn't make it difficult for users to get work done, and the company made clear where the Google 'editorial' began and ended.
Making an editorial comment openly is arguably an upgrade from the way media companies have historically sought to influence politics. An old-media company might have played backroom politics by threatening to run programming critical of a candidate.
Google isn't perfect. But we should root for its attempt to balance its search engine job with its media role, and encourage every company - on the tech side, the content side, or in between - to make clear what it's up to when it engages in politics.
BLOOMBERG
The writer is a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of GoverBarack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. nment and Harvard Law School. In 2009, she was a special assistant to President
By Susan Crawford
First, some background. On Jan 18, to protest against a pair of anti-piracy Bills in Congress, Wikipedia posted a blackout page on its English-language site that was seen by more than 162 million people. Google, meanwhile, gathered seven million signatures against the Bills.
These tactics worked, at least temporarily: At the beginning of the great day of Internet wrath, there were 80 members of Congress who supported the legislation and 31 opponents. Afterwards, those numbers were 63 and 122.
Google's statesman-like chairman Eric Schmidt has led the rhetorical charge against the two Bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the House and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) in the Senate. In November last year, he called the Bills 'draconian' and said that requiring Internet service providers to remove the URLs of suspected pirates from the Web amounted to 'censorship'.
On Jan 18, however, Google didn't disappear. Students with term papers to write may have had a tough time without Wikipedia, but all of us could get a blizzard of results from the familiar search giant. If actions speak louder than words, then what was the meaning of Google's inaction?
Janus-like, Google has two faces: It is both a technology company - providing a way to navigate to the glories and confusion of the Web - and a media company - producing content and making choices about what consumers will find useful. Those choices are based on extensive experience with consumers' use of search results.
Google-as-search-engine relies on user-generated content to thrive. As an intermediary, Google doesn't want to be conscripted as an automatic enforcer of other people's copyrights. Thus Google's objections to the piracy Bills, which give broad immunity from liability to service providers that block other sites 'dedicated to infringement'. This legislation would encourage them to remove links on the mere suspicion of illegal activity. As Mr Schmidt's remarks indicate, search censorship sets a dangerous precedent at a time when repressive regimes around the world target search engines to limit what their citizens can know. Google- as-search-engine has plenty of good reasons to oppose Sopa and Pipa.
But Google-as-speaker has enormous power to shape the boundaries of knowledge. This month, Google visibly flexed these muscles when it introduced 'Search, Plus Your World', which presents search results to users of Google+ that include materials coming from people within the users' 'circles'. Twitter results weren't included, and Twitter's general counsel, Mr Alex Macgillivray, himself a former Google employee, said that the introduction of this product marked a 'bad day for the Internet' because Google's search engine had been 'warped'. If Google had turned black on Jan 18, its power would have become obvious to millions more people. Left without Google, and if ignorant about alternatives, consumers would have been up in arms. Result: backlash.
Here's a thought experiment: A few decades ago, how would Americans have felt if one of the three major broadcast networks devoted an entire day of programming to a particular political advocacy campaign? Given the dominance of the few media outlets of the time, the initial shock of seeing a broadcaster display a political point of view would probably have been followed by anger - and a push for greater regulation of all of the networks.
Google obviously didn't want to trigger that kind of fear and knee-jerk political response. Nor did Google, as a public company, want to lose revenue by closing down. (Wikipedia, by contrast, is a volunteer enterprise.) So it stayed on safer ground, tinkering with its logo - it was blacked out for the day, as if redacted from a classified document - rather than 'disappearing' its search results.
Google-as-publisher, after all, has content concerns of its own. What Google did was more akin to a network running a public service announcement to present its views without pre-empting anyone's favourite soap opera.
Last week, we met a new Google: Google-as-political-influencer. How you feel about Google's role will depend on your categorisation of the company. To irascible mogul and novice tweeter Rupert Murdoch, Google is a pirate: 'Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.' As a media company, Google would say it was adhering to its principles by putting users first and being transparent: It didn't make it difficult for users to get work done, and the company made clear where the Google 'editorial' began and ended.
Making an editorial comment openly is arguably an upgrade from the way media companies have historically sought to influence politics. An old-media company might have played backroom politics by threatening to run programming critical of a candidate.
Google isn't perfect. But we should root for its attempt to balance its search engine job with its media role, and encourage every company - on the tech side, the content side, or in between - to make clear what it's up to when it engages in politics.
BLOOMBERG
The writer is a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of GoverBarack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. nment and Harvard Law School. In 2009, she was a special assistant to President
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Moving up in life
SOCIAL mobility is the bugbear that will not go away. With the gap between the rich and poor widening, Singapore has been grappling with the issue of whether children from poor families can move up. And until a week ago, there has been no comprehensive study across generations on whether the rich tend to stay rich, and the poor remain poor.
New year dilemma for China's only-child generation
BEIJING: For one particular group of Chinese - young urban married couples who grew up as only children - the yearly ritual of going home for Chinese New Year can also mean tough decisions and sometimes-painful arguments.
AGC: Robust reviews before discretion is exercised
THE Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) yesterday sought to reassure the public that its decisions to charge offenders involved in the same crime differently are done only after thorough reviews by many levels of officers.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Model of governance: Big govt or big people?
SMALL government, the opposite of big government, is aimed at reducing the role of the state in the economy. In taking a laissez-faire approach towards regulating the private sector, it is argued that small government lowers costs and promotes efficiency by allowing the market to determine prices and economic outcomes. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was a champion of small government.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
US teachers cutting out empty praise for students - my humanities class
WASHINGTON: For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, award ceremonies and attendance certificates - but few, if any, academic gains.
Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call 'empty praise'. A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities.
As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, the new buzzwords are 'persistence', 'risk-taking' and 'resilience' - each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.
'We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,' Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. 'That has backfired.'
Her studies have found that praising children for intelligence - 'You're so clever!' - also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.
Instead, those praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.
Education experts have long warned about the dark side of praise.
Mr Alfie Kohn, author of the book Punished By Rewards, has said that most praise, even for effort, encourages children to be 'praise junkies' dependent on outside feedback instead of cultivating their own judgment and motivation to learn.
Ms Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, DC schools chancellor, often recounts a story about how her daughters' many soccer trophies are warping their sense of their athletic abilities.
Her daughters 'suck at soccer', she said in a radio interview in January last year.
'We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things,' she added.
Underlying the praise backlash is a hard seed of anxiety - a sense that American students are not working hard enough to compete with students from overseas for future jobs.
In an oft-cited 2006 study by the Brown Centre on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, American eighth-graders had only a middling performance in an international mathematics exam but registered high levels of confidence. They were more likely than higher-performing students from other countries, such as Singapore and South Korea, to report that they 'usually do well in mathematics'.
Praise should be relevant to objective standards, said Mr Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank. Whether it is given to make children feel good or because 'at least they tried', it is not helpful if students are still '50 yards from proficient', he said.
Professor Dweck said it is important to be clear with children about what proficient or gold-medal performance looks like so they know what to strive for. But she stresses the importance of using praise to encourage risk-taking and learning from failure in the classroom, experiences that make way for invention, creativity and resilience.
'Does the teacher say: 'Who's having a fantastic struggle? Show me your struggle.' That is something that should be rewarded,' she said.
'Does the teacher make it clear that the fastest answer isn't always the best answer? (That) a mistake-free paper isn't always the best paper?' she added.
WASHINGTON POST
Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call 'empty praise'. A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities.
As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, the new buzzwords are 'persistence', 'risk-taking' and 'resilience' - each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.
'We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,' Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. 'That has backfired.'
Her studies have found that praising children for intelligence - 'You're so clever!' - also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.
Instead, those praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.
Education experts have long warned about the dark side of praise.
Mr Alfie Kohn, author of the book Punished By Rewards, has said that most praise, even for effort, encourages children to be 'praise junkies' dependent on outside feedback instead of cultivating their own judgment and motivation to learn.
Ms Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, DC schools chancellor, often recounts a story about how her daughters' many soccer trophies are warping their sense of their athletic abilities.
Her daughters 'suck at soccer', she said in a radio interview in January last year.
'We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things,' she added.
Underlying the praise backlash is a hard seed of anxiety - a sense that American students are not working hard enough to compete with students from overseas for future jobs.
In an oft-cited 2006 study by the Brown Centre on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, American eighth-graders had only a middling performance in an international mathematics exam but registered high levels of confidence. They were more likely than higher-performing students from other countries, such as Singapore and South Korea, to report that they 'usually do well in mathematics'.
Praise should be relevant to objective standards, said Mr Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank. Whether it is given to make children feel good or because 'at least they tried', it is not helpful if students are still '50 yards from proficient', he said.
Professor Dweck said it is important to be clear with children about what proficient or gold-medal performance looks like so they know what to strive for. But she stresses the importance of using praise to encourage risk-taking and learning from failure in the classroom, experiences that make way for invention, creativity and resilience.
'Does the teacher say: 'Who's having a fantastic struggle? Show me your struggle.' That is something that should be rewarded,' she said.
'Does the teacher make it clear that the fastest answer isn't always the best answer? (That) a mistake-free paper isn't always the best paper?' she added.
WASHINGTON POST
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Building booms, economic busts: Watch China and India
Barclays Capital yesterday warned of an 'unhealthy' link between towering edifices and financial woes, in its latest annual Skyscraper Index survey.
It noted that China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, while booming India is constructing the second largest tower in the world.
'Often the world's tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction,' it said.
According to the Skyscraper Index, construction of the world's tallest buildings has been linked to impending financial crises over the last 140 years.
For example, the Great Depression hit as the finishing touches were being put on the Empire State Building in New York in 1931, while the Asian financial crisis hit as Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers were finished in 1997.
Dubai's Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, is now the world's tallest building at 828m. As it was being built, Dubai nearly went bust and the world slid into the Great Recession.
'Building booms are a sign of excess credit,' said Mr Andrew Lawrence, director of property research and lead author of the report.
Historically, he noted, skyscraper construction has been characterised by bursts of sporadic but intense activity that coincide with easy credit, rising land prices and excessive optimism. But often, by the time the skyscrapers are finished, the economy would have slipped into recession.
The Barclays Capital report described China as the world's 'biggest bubble builder'. More than half - 53 per cent - of the 124 skyscrapers being built globally are in the Asian giant, which is primed to increase its stock of skyscrapers by a 'staggering' 87 per cent.
Said the report: 'China's skyscrapers are not only increasing in number - it now has 75 completed skyscrapers above 240m in height - but the average height of the skyscrapers that it is building is also increasing as past liquidity fuels the construction boom.'
Mr Lawrence noted that China's property market is already wobbling, with residential property sales dropping in Beijing and Shanghai.
India, too, is 'playing catch-up', the report added.
'Today India has only two of the world's 276 skyscrapers over 240m in height, yet over the next five years it intends to complete 14 new skyscrapers, in what will prove to be its largest skyscraper building boom.
'Worryingly as well, India is also constructing the second tallest building in the world, the Tower of India, which should (be completed) by 2016.'
Meanwhile, the country's non-performing loans - a substantial number of them to real estate ventures - grew by nearly a third in the first half of this fiscal year, far more than it has been growing in the past five years.
'If history proves to be right, this building boom in India and China could simply be a reflection of a misallocation of capital, which may result in an economic correction... in the next five years,' the report said.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Clean wage versus pay with perks
THERE is no doubt that the issue of ministerial pay is an emotional one, but in the midst of heated debate, it is still useful to reason with cool heads.
By Calvin Cheng
First, not enough attention has been paid to the principle of 'clean wage'. This principle is not only at the heart of the report by the committee to review political salaries, but it is also the premise on which the entire system of ministerial wages is based - from the beginning, when Mr Lee Kuan Yew implemented it, right up till now.
The wage that office-holders in Singapore get is the totality of the remuneration they receive - there are no hidden perks like hospitalisation benefits, housing benefits and tax exemptions. With the exception of the president, the prime minister and the speaker of Parliament, no office-holder or MP is given a car for personal use. And even then, the use of the car is a taxable benefit rather than a perk. This is exceptional compared with in most countries, especially at the ministerial level.
This point cannot be emphasised enough. Much has been said online, in the local press and in the international press about our leaders being the best-paid. The benchmark for this is the salary, specifically the cash component of an office-holder's income. This is not a fair comparison. The most quoted example one sees repeated ad nauseam is the United States president's salary of US$400,000 (S$520,000). But this does not take into account all his other benefits, which include free accommodation in the White House, use of its army of servants and staff, official transport and a whole range of other perks and non-cash benefits.
It is also interesting to note that the reported salary of the president of China is US$11,000. Without being facetious, one wonders how such a salary could possibly allow him respectable accommodation of any sort, even if he were just to rent a home in Beijing. It was also the 'benefits' part of remuneration that led to the scandal involving expense claims, specifically housing claims, of British MPs.
The strength of our clean-wage system is also its weakness. The transparency of this system allows us to know exactly how much our political office-holders get. But the difficulty is that we alone implement this system. When nobody else in the world has a clean-wage system, and all comparisons are made purely on cash income, then our leaders will always look like the highest-paid.
The crucial question then is whether it is foolhardy for the Singapore Government to stand alone in a world where nobody else offers a clean-wage system. As an emotive issue, and with continual unfair comparisons being made purely on cash income, a good system has become a public-relations disaster. No amount of explanation will defuse the issue when the stark contrast keeps getting emphasised in salary league tables. The Singaporean voter could, in the end, be no different from and no less human than any voter or citizen anywhere else in the world, and a remuneration system with perks and benefits could prove more politically palatable than a clean-wage system.
Second, to poll the man in the street about what he thinks of a million-dollar salary is pointless. The problem is one of perspective, and the perspective of top income earners anywhere in the world is something no man in the street can empathise with - whatever method one uses to arrive at the pay is irrelevant once that number is large enough.
To the average man, a pay cut of a third from $1.5 million to $1 million still leaves an unfathomable sum. But the $500,000 difference could lead to a real impact on one's standard of living as it could mean the difference of meeting that mortgage payment on one's house.
We cannot possibly expect our office- holders to sell their houses and downgrade to take up their appointments. By the time some of these potential office- holders reach their 40s, they would have settled into a certain lifestyle that requires a certain income to upkeep. To expect these people to sell their houses, their cars, or forgo their children's education overseas is just an idealism that bears no relation to reality.
In the end, we will end up only like other countries, where only people who are financially independent and secure will enter politics seriously.
Third, while we appreciate and value the ethos of public service, it is unwise to overplay it. The generation of Mr Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee were born in a time of chaos, revolution and change in a post-colonial world. Even then, it was pure luck that we got these people rather than the rapacious leaders who impoverished many countries that became independent at the same time as Singapore.
We could thus pay low wages and hope that some able, altruistic men and women would step forward, or create a system that increases the chances that we will still get able leaders, altruistic or not.
At the end of the day, we are looking not only for servants but also leaders with specific skill sets to govern our country, manage our economy and make policies that would affect our country's future. Beyond a calling, there is thus also a job to be done, and to get people with the right technocratic skills to get this job done well, there is no shame in paying for it. We must not confuse political governance with charity work.
Finally, in the heated and emotional debate over ministerial salary, it is disappointing to see the often rude and offensive criticism of Senior Minister of State Grace Fu on the Internet in response to her honest reaction to the ministerial wage cuts.
Respect may have to be earned, but surely civility does not.
The writer is a former Nominated MP.
By Calvin Cheng
First, not enough attention has been paid to the principle of 'clean wage'. This principle is not only at the heart of the report by the committee to review political salaries, but it is also the premise on which the entire system of ministerial wages is based - from the beginning, when Mr Lee Kuan Yew implemented it, right up till now.
The wage that office-holders in Singapore get is the totality of the remuneration they receive - there are no hidden perks like hospitalisation benefits, housing benefits and tax exemptions. With the exception of the president, the prime minister and the speaker of Parliament, no office-holder or MP is given a car for personal use. And even then, the use of the car is a taxable benefit rather than a perk. This is exceptional compared with in most countries, especially at the ministerial level.
This point cannot be emphasised enough. Much has been said online, in the local press and in the international press about our leaders being the best-paid. The benchmark for this is the salary, specifically the cash component of an office-holder's income. This is not a fair comparison. The most quoted example one sees repeated ad nauseam is the United States president's salary of US$400,000 (S$520,000). But this does not take into account all his other benefits, which include free accommodation in the White House, use of its army of servants and staff, official transport and a whole range of other perks and non-cash benefits.
It is also interesting to note that the reported salary of the president of China is US$11,000. Without being facetious, one wonders how such a salary could possibly allow him respectable accommodation of any sort, even if he were just to rent a home in Beijing. It was also the 'benefits' part of remuneration that led to the scandal involving expense claims, specifically housing claims, of British MPs.
The strength of our clean-wage system is also its weakness. The transparency of this system allows us to know exactly how much our political office-holders get. But the difficulty is that we alone implement this system. When nobody else in the world has a clean-wage system, and all comparisons are made purely on cash income, then our leaders will always look like the highest-paid.
The crucial question then is whether it is foolhardy for the Singapore Government to stand alone in a world where nobody else offers a clean-wage system. As an emotive issue, and with continual unfair comparisons being made purely on cash income, a good system has become a public-relations disaster. No amount of explanation will defuse the issue when the stark contrast keeps getting emphasised in salary league tables. The Singaporean voter could, in the end, be no different from and no less human than any voter or citizen anywhere else in the world, and a remuneration system with perks and benefits could prove more politically palatable than a clean-wage system.
Second, to poll the man in the street about what he thinks of a million-dollar salary is pointless. The problem is one of perspective, and the perspective of top income earners anywhere in the world is something no man in the street can empathise with - whatever method one uses to arrive at the pay is irrelevant once that number is large enough.
To the average man, a pay cut of a third from $1.5 million to $1 million still leaves an unfathomable sum. But the $500,000 difference could lead to a real impact on one's standard of living as it could mean the difference of meeting that mortgage payment on one's house.
We cannot possibly expect our office- holders to sell their houses and downgrade to take up their appointments. By the time some of these potential office- holders reach their 40s, they would have settled into a certain lifestyle that requires a certain income to upkeep. To expect these people to sell their houses, their cars, or forgo their children's education overseas is just an idealism that bears no relation to reality.
In the end, we will end up only like other countries, where only people who are financially independent and secure will enter politics seriously.
Third, while we appreciate and value the ethos of public service, it is unwise to overplay it. The generation of Mr Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee were born in a time of chaos, revolution and change in a post-colonial world. Even then, it was pure luck that we got these people rather than the rapacious leaders who impoverished many countries that became independent at the same time as Singapore.
We could thus pay low wages and hope that some able, altruistic men and women would step forward, or create a system that increases the chances that we will still get able leaders, altruistic or not.
At the end of the day, we are looking not only for servants but also leaders with specific skill sets to govern our country, manage our economy and make policies that would affect our country's future. Beyond a calling, there is thus also a job to be done, and to get people with the right technocratic skills to get this job done well, there is no shame in paying for it. We must not confuse political governance with charity work.
Finally, in the heated and emotional debate over ministerial salary, it is disappointing to see the often rude and offensive criticism of Senior Minister of State Grace Fu on the Internet in response to her honest reaction to the ministerial wage cuts.
Respect may have to be earned, but surely civility does not.
The writer is a former Nominated MP.
Monday, January 09, 2012
Incredible how dirty India is!
ITALIAN Elsa Boccalene is drawn to India's monuments, palaces and wildlife reserves, but there is something she misses dearly - a clean toilet.
By Nirmala Ganapathy, India Correspondent
'India is incredible - chaotic, beautiful and spiritual,' said the 30-year-old software engineer as she bought postcards in a Delhi shop to send to friends and family back home. 'But it is also dirty. Toilets are a problem.'
Her sister Maria, 35, an architect, agreed. She said: 'India is an incredible country but you need to prepare yourself (for the lack of cleanliness).'
BACKGROUND STORY
BEAUTIFUL BUT DIRTY
'India is incredible - chaotic, beautiful and spiritual. But it is also dirty. Toilets are a problem.'
Italian Elsa Boccalene
Such complaints from foreign tourists like Elsa and Maria have moved India's Tourism Ministry - which is behind the successful 'Incredible India' publicity campaign - to launch a new campaign, Clean India.
Tourism has been growing in the country. The number of foreign visitors rose 24 per cent and domestic tourism grew 11 per cent in 2010 over the previous year.
In 2010, 5.6 million foreigners visited, a modest figure compared with 56 million in China. In 2009, 5.2 million tourists came to the land of the Taj Mahal.
But the ministry wants to boost these numbers to at least six to 10 million every year - and believes that improved hygiene can help.
'A lack of... environmental cleanliness has a pull-down impact on India's image. The worst-hit is tourism,' said Tourism Minister Subodh Kant Sahay at a recent workshop.
His ministry hopes to turn things around in the next five years at tourist sites, railway platforms, beaches and other areas frequented by tourists, with the help of the state governments, Railway Ministry and private sector.
Plans to be rolled out over that period include an awareness campaign headed by celebrities like southern star Chiranjeevi, advertisements and tie-ups with private partners to clean and maintain attractions. The tourism ministry aims to get large corporate houses to look after heritage sites, building up basic amenities such as public toilets.
By April 1, the ministry, which is still working out the finances for the campaign, will start to mop up the dirty spots in and around top tourist spots.
'This is the first time the ministry has taken such an initiative,' said Indian Association of Tour Operators president Subhash Goyal, who is involved in the campaign.
'There are a lot of ideas but the unique thing is that it is a public-private partnership.'
Mr Robinder Sachdev, founder of the Imagindia Institute, a non-governmental organisation, has been organising cleaning drives, in which people simply take brooms and clean up chosen spots.
'This is something the country totally needs,' he said.
But not everyone is convinced that the tourism ministry can pull off such an ambitious campaign, which basically banks on changing mindsets. For instance, fines for littering in India are as little as 100 rupees (S$2.50) but are rarely enforced.
'It's a great country with a lot of potential but you get off the plane in Mumbai and you see Dharavi, the biggest slum in the country. You go to Agra and you see filth on the road when approaching the Taj Mahal. In many places, there are no washrooms. These are constraints that have to be addressed if you want five to 10 million tourists coming into the country,' said Mr Rajinder Rai, an advisory board member of the Travel Agents Association of India.
He added: 'I essentially think that cleanliness is the single most important issue for India, not just for tourism but economically as well. The idea is good but I don't see how it can actually get enacted or how they will enforce it.'
Roads with potholes, garbage piled up on roadsides and litter on railway tracks are not uncommon sights in India, a country where infrastructure is bursting at the seams to accommodate 1.2 billion people.
Varanasi, called the city of temples, is among the top five tourist destinations in India on any list. But the breathtaking and holy city is equally known for its poor hygiene and sanitation.
Garbage piles up at street corners, roads leading in and out of temples and shops are full of muck, and plastic wrappers and bottles float along the sides of the ghats (platforms for bathing) next to the Ganges River, which flows through the city also known as Benares.
Ms Sunali, a Canadian citizen of Indian descent who is in education training, was warned many times by friends about the lack of cleanliness in Varanasi. So she was prepared for the worst.
'It was bad even outside the main temple,' the 40-year-old said. 'There could be better management. I don't expect this in a city like this.'
But she admitted that she still found the city breathtaking.
A 2009 survey in five tourist areas, including the hill cities of Kullu and Manali, world heritage site Kaziranga park and Pattadakal, the site of ancient temples and monuments, found that tourists, particularly foreign ones, rated cleanliness as a top priority.
Some 634 foreign tourists and 1,953 Indian tourists were surveyed. They ranked hygiene, sanitation and solid waste management around the monuments as ranking low in satisfaction in all five sites. Disappointment over a lack of signs and the quality of wayside amenities followed. Indian tourists also ranked traffic and crowd management among top concerns.
Mr Bobby Rekhi, 62, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur of Indian descent, comes to India every year but is still disturbed that things are not as clean as in the United States. During the last four to five times that he visited, he actually picked up a broom and joined a cleanup operation by Imagindia.
'People keep their houses clean but don't care much about the outside areas,' he said. 'Cleanliness is one thing which bothers you when you land in Delhi. It takes very little maintenance. I wanted to create more awareness.'
Even then, India remains a country of contrasts. In Delhi, the metro rises above buildings before plunging into the depths of the city. Every day, millions travel to their destinations, but the metro has also come to be known for its cleanliness. At the Connaught Place station, the heart of operations, floors are litter-free, platforms are sparkling clean and walls are pristine and white.
But 20 minutes from the metro station, the New Delhi railway station is a shocking contrast. Plastic and paper litter the platforms and railway tracks.
'If you go to the metro stations, it is very clean, but then you go to the railway station and it is very dirty. We have to make railways on a par with the metro,' said Mr Tsering Wange, 42, the president of Arunachal Mountaineering and Adventure Sports Association. His wife Anshu Jamsenpa, 32, the only woman to scale Mount Everest twice in 10 days, is set to be one of the faces of the cleanup campaign.
'I think it is long overdue for the tourism ministry to take this initiative,' he added.
gnirmala@sph.com.sg
By Nirmala Ganapathy, India Correspondent
'India is incredible - chaotic, beautiful and spiritual,' said the 30-year-old software engineer as she bought postcards in a Delhi shop to send to friends and family back home. 'But it is also dirty. Toilets are a problem.'
Her sister Maria, 35, an architect, agreed. She said: 'India is an incredible country but you need to prepare yourself (for the lack of cleanliness).'
BACKGROUND STORY
BEAUTIFUL BUT DIRTY
'India is incredible - chaotic, beautiful and spiritual. But it is also dirty. Toilets are a problem.'
Italian Elsa Boccalene
Such complaints from foreign tourists like Elsa and Maria have moved India's Tourism Ministry - which is behind the successful 'Incredible India' publicity campaign - to launch a new campaign, Clean India.
Tourism has been growing in the country. The number of foreign visitors rose 24 per cent and domestic tourism grew 11 per cent in 2010 over the previous year.
In 2010, 5.6 million foreigners visited, a modest figure compared with 56 million in China. In 2009, 5.2 million tourists came to the land of the Taj Mahal.
But the ministry wants to boost these numbers to at least six to 10 million every year - and believes that improved hygiene can help.
'A lack of... environmental cleanliness has a pull-down impact on India's image. The worst-hit is tourism,' said Tourism Minister Subodh Kant Sahay at a recent workshop.
His ministry hopes to turn things around in the next five years at tourist sites, railway platforms, beaches and other areas frequented by tourists, with the help of the state governments, Railway Ministry and private sector.
Plans to be rolled out over that period include an awareness campaign headed by celebrities like southern star Chiranjeevi, advertisements and tie-ups with private partners to clean and maintain attractions. The tourism ministry aims to get large corporate houses to look after heritage sites, building up basic amenities such as public toilets.
By April 1, the ministry, which is still working out the finances for the campaign, will start to mop up the dirty spots in and around top tourist spots.
'This is the first time the ministry has taken such an initiative,' said Indian Association of Tour Operators president Subhash Goyal, who is involved in the campaign.
'There are a lot of ideas but the unique thing is that it is a public-private partnership.'
Mr Robinder Sachdev, founder of the Imagindia Institute, a non-governmental organisation, has been organising cleaning drives, in which people simply take brooms and clean up chosen spots.
'This is something the country totally needs,' he said.
But not everyone is convinced that the tourism ministry can pull off such an ambitious campaign, which basically banks on changing mindsets. For instance, fines for littering in India are as little as 100 rupees (S$2.50) but are rarely enforced.
'It's a great country with a lot of potential but you get off the plane in Mumbai and you see Dharavi, the biggest slum in the country. You go to Agra and you see filth on the road when approaching the Taj Mahal. In many places, there are no washrooms. These are constraints that have to be addressed if you want five to 10 million tourists coming into the country,' said Mr Rajinder Rai, an advisory board member of the Travel Agents Association of India.
He added: 'I essentially think that cleanliness is the single most important issue for India, not just for tourism but economically as well. The idea is good but I don't see how it can actually get enacted or how they will enforce it.'
Roads with potholes, garbage piled up on roadsides and litter on railway tracks are not uncommon sights in India, a country where infrastructure is bursting at the seams to accommodate 1.2 billion people.
Varanasi, called the city of temples, is among the top five tourist destinations in India on any list. But the breathtaking and holy city is equally known for its poor hygiene and sanitation.
Garbage piles up at street corners, roads leading in and out of temples and shops are full of muck, and plastic wrappers and bottles float along the sides of the ghats (platforms for bathing) next to the Ganges River, which flows through the city also known as Benares.
Ms Sunali, a Canadian citizen of Indian descent who is in education training, was warned many times by friends about the lack of cleanliness in Varanasi. So she was prepared for the worst.
'It was bad even outside the main temple,' the 40-year-old said. 'There could be better management. I don't expect this in a city like this.'
But she admitted that she still found the city breathtaking.
A 2009 survey in five tourist areas, including the hill cities of Kullu and Manali, world heritage site Kaziranga park and Pattadakal, the site of ancient temples and monuments, found that tourists, particularly foreign ones, rated cleanliness as a top priority.
Some 634 foreign tourists and 1,953 Indian tourists were surveyed. They ranked hygiene, sanitation and solid waste management around the monuments as ranking low in satisfaction in all five sites. Disappointment over a lack of signs and the quality of wayside amenities followed. Indian tourists also ranked traffic and crowd management among top concerns.
Mr Bobby Rekhi, 62, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur of Indian descent, comes to India every year but is still disturbed that things are not as clean as in the United States. During the last four to five times that he visited, he actually picked up a broom and joined a cleanup operation by Imagindia.
'People keep their houses clean but don't care much about the outside areas,' he said. 'Cleanliness is one thing which bothers you when you land in Delhi. It takes very little maintenance. I wanted to create more awareness.'
Even then, India remains a country of contrasts. In Delhi, the metro rises above buildings before plunging into the depths of the city. Every day, millions travel to their destinations, but the metro has also come to be known for its cleanliness. At the Connaught Place station, the heart of operations, floors are litter-free, platforms are sparkling clean and walls are pristine and white.
But 20 minutes from the metro station, the New Delhi railway station is a shocking contrast. Plastic and paper litter the platforms and railway tracks.
'If you go to the metro stations, it is very clean, but then you go to the railway station and it is very dirty. We have to make railways on a par with the metro,' said Mr Tsering Wange, 42, the president of Arunachal Mountaineering and Adventure Sports Association. His wife Anshu Jamsenpa, 32, the only woman to scale Mount Everest twice in 10 days, is set to be one of the faces of the cleanup campaign.
'I think it is long overdue for the tourism ministry to take this initiative,' he added.
gnirmala@sph.com.sg
Peril or promise in Pyongyang?
TWO days after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died in a train in his country, the South Korean authorities still knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, American officials seemed at a loss, with the State Department at first merely acknowledging that press reports had mentioned his death.
By Javier Solana
The inability of the South Korean and US intelligence services to pick up any sign of what had happened not only attests to the North Korean regime's opaque character, but also to their own deficiencies. Little is known of the country, because all vital information is restricted to a small group of leaders obsessed with secrecy.
The leadership change is occurring at the worst possible time. It is known that Chinese leaders had hoped that Mr Kim Jong Il would survive long enough to consolidate support among the country's various factions for the succession of his son Jong Un.
All of the symbolic attributes of power have been transferred to Mr Kim Jong Un - reflected in his official position in the funeral ceremonies, his presidency of the Military Commission, and his assumption of the ruling party's highest rank - with remarkable speed. But such trappings will not make the transition process any easier for a young man of less than 30 years of age in a society where veteran military chiefs retain so much power.
The economic situation, which is still very precarious with many people living close to starvation, constitutes another key challenge. Two examples suffice to illustrate the impact: the price of rice has tripled while consumption of electricity is down by two-thirds from two decades ago.
My personal memories of North Korea, now almost 10 years old, are of a poor and depressed country. Pyongyang, the capital, was dark and deserted, illuminated by the cavalcade taking us from the official housing to the opera house, only to return to darkness behind us. Mr Kim Jong Il was greeted with the same fervour on his entrance to the opera house that today marks public mourning of his death.
My trip took place in April 2002, a somewhat optimistic time. The European Union had joined an agreement initiated by the two Koreas and the United States within the Korean Energy Development Organisation programme, the objective being to persuade North Korea to freeze and later dismantle its nuclear programme. In exchange, two light-water nuclear reactors would be built to generate electric energy, and 500,000 tonnes of oil would be supplied annually until the first reactor began operating. In turn, the EU initiated an extensive humanitarian aid project. The talks with Mr Kim Jong Il and his collaborators seemed promising.
Unfortunately, the agreement did not last long. In 2003, North Korea abandoned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. From that moment, all optimism was lost, until contacts were subsequently reinitiated in a complex six-party format (China, Russia, the US, Japan and the two Koreas) that continued, with ups and downs, until the end of 2007. Since the maritime incidents of 2009 and 2010, in which North Korean forces attacked South Korean assets, there has been virtually no contact at all between the two sides.
Given North Korea's behaviour over the last decade, the sudden change of leadership increases the threat of unexpected incidents. In order to limit the risk, it is essential to keep relations with China as transparent as possible. It is China that has the most direct contact with North Korea, and that could best catalyse resumption of the six-party talks.
Beijing recognises that North Korea cannot continue in its present form, and would like to see its leaders transform the economy without undertaking substantial political change. For China, problems are judged according to the country's own history and from the standpoint of domestic policy - all the more so the closer the problem is to its borders. For the West, especially America, every problem should have a solution within a finite period of time. While the US breaks down problems and tries to find solutions for each part, China considers political problems unhurriedly, as an extended process that might have no resolution.
Beyond the six-party talks, it is necessary to create a framework from which a cooperative dialogue between the US and China might emerge. In the case of Korea - as Mr Christopher Hill, one of the most effective US negotiators on these matters, remembers - the US should make it clear that no possible solution for the divided peninsula would mean a strategic loss for China. After the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, the 38th parallel was established as the limit for US forces' presence; the importance of that war for China should not be forgotten.
This approach could be one way to stabilise the region during this period of heightened uncertainty. There might be others. The ongoing opening in Myanmar shows that potentially significant political change does not need to be accompanied by regional instability. In the case of North Korea, where nuclear arms are in play, it cannot afford to be.
The writer, a distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, is president of ESADEgeo. Previously, he served as the European Union's High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, and as Secretary-General of Nato.
PROJECT SYNDICATE
By Javier Solana
The inability of the South Korean and US intelligence services to pick up any sign of what had happened not only attests to the North Korean regime's opaque character, but also to their own deficiencies. Little is known of the country, because all vital information is restricted to a small group of leaders obsessed with secrecy.
The leadership change is occurring at the worst possible time. It is known that Chinese leaders had hoped that Mr Kim Jong Il would survive long enough to consolidate support among the country's various factions for the succession of his son Jong Un.
All of the symbolic attributes of power have been transferred to Mr Kim Jong Un - reflected in his official position in the funeral ceremonies, his presidency of the Military Commission, and his assumption of the ruling party's highest rank - with remarkable speed. But such trappings will not make the transition process any easier for a young man of less than 30 years of age in a society where veteran military chiefs retain so much power.
The economic situation, which is still very precarious with many people living close to starvation, constitutes another key challenge. Two examples suffice to illustrate the impact: the price of rice has tripled while consumption of electricity is down by two-thirds from two decades ago.
My personal memories of North Korea, now almost 10 years old, are of a poor and depressed country. Pyongyang, the capital, was dark and deserted, illuminated by the cavalcade taking us from the official housing to the opera house, only to return to darkness behind us. Mr Kim Jong Il was greeted with the same fervour on his entrance to the opera house that today marks public mourning of his death.
My trip took place in April 2002, a somewhat optimistic time. The European Union had joined an agreement initiated by the two Koreas and the United States within the Korean Energy Development Organisation programme, the objective being to persuade North Korea to freeze and later dismantle its nuclear programme. In exchange, two light-water nuclear reactors would be built to generate electric energy, and 500,000 tonnes of oil would be supplied annually until the first reactor began operating. In turn, the EU initiated an extensive humanitarian aid project. The talks with Mr Kim Jong Il and his collaborators seemed promising.
Unfortunately, the agreement did not last long. In 2003, North Korea abandoned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. From that moment, all optimism was lost, until contacts were subsequently reinitiated in a complex six-party format (China, Russia, the US, Japan and the two Koreas) that continued, with ups and downs, until the end of 2007. Since the maritime incidents of 2009 and 2010, in which North Korean forces attacked South Korean assets, there has been virtually no contact at all between the two sides.
Given North Korea's behaviour over the last decade, the sudden change of leadership increases the threat of unexpected incidents. In order to limit the risk, it is essential to keep relations with China as transparent as possible. It is China that has the most direct contact with North Korea, and that could best catalyse resumption of the six-party talks.
Beijing recognises that North Korea cannot continue in its present form, and would like to see its leaders transform the economy without undertaking substantial political change. For China, problems are judged according to the country's own history and from the standpoint of domestic policy - all the more so the closer the problem is to its borders. For the West, especially America, every problem should have a solution within a finite period of time. While the US breaks down problems and tries to find solutions for each part, China considers political problems unhurriedly, as an extended process that might have no resolution.
Beyond the six-party talks, it is necessary to create a framework from which a cooperative dialogue between the US and China might emerge. In the case of Korea - as Mr Christopher Hill, one of the most effective US negotiators on these matters, remembers - the US should make it clear that no possible solution for the divided peninsula would mean a strategic loss for China. After the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, the 38th parallel was established as the limit for US forces' presence; the importance of that war for China should not be forgotten.
This approach could be one way to stabilise the region during this period of heightened uncertainty. There might be others. The ongoing opening in Myanmar shows that potentially significant political change does not need to be accompanied by regional instability. In the case of North Korea, where nuclear arms are in play, it cannot afford to be.
The writer, a distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, is president of ESADEgeo. Previously, he served as the European Union's High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, and as Secretary-General of Nato.
PROJECT SYNDICATE
Anxiety lingers despite outward calm in Wukan
WUKAN (Guangdong): Thick bamboo poles straining against their shoulders, 12 men hoisted a pale, rough-hewn wooden coffin as villagers watched the funeral procession snake through the village with heavy hearts.
It was the second death in recent weeks in the protest-hit fishing village of Wukan.
Even as the family of village leader Xue Jinbo, who died in police custody on Dec 11, is locked in long, angry negotiations to get his body back, relatives of Mr Lin Zheng laid him to rest last Wednesday.
Tragedy sometimes comes with victory, as Wukan villagers know well.
They triumphed temporarily after the Guangdong provincial government promised late last month to release four villagers arrested earlier, to hold new elections to replace corrupt village officials, and to investigate the allegedly illegal land grabs that had sparked months of marches and protests.
But a gnawing anxiety lingered as villagers counted another death.
Mr Lin, 69, killed himself on Dec 28.
A few villagers declined to talk about whether his suicide was a result of the recent tension.
But his wife, Madam Chen Bizhen, 64, told The Straits Times he had become very stressed and anxious after getting repeated phone calls from the local authorities, telling him to turn himself in for taking part in protests which involved most of the village's 6,000 residents.
'He became very scared when the phone calls kept coming. And there was talk about the authorities coming into the village to arrest more people. He just became very scared,' she said, on the last night of the wake.
On Dec 28, he had left their home in the morning. When she herself returned home later, she found him lying face-down on the floor. He was dead.
'He got a haircut before drinking the pesticide he bought,' she said.
He had not even taken part in the marches or protests, she added, though she herself had joined the villager-run patrol squads to keep a lookout for police.
But every household in the village had been getting phone calls from the authorities, said Mr Lin's nephew Li Junzhou, 28.
'Sometimes they call six or seven times a day, asking us if we had been involved in the protests and telling us to surrender if we had. I tell them if they hadn't been corrupt in the first place, we wouldn't have needed to protest. Others shout some swear words at them and hang up.
'But my uncle was just a very honest man. He didn't know what to do when they kept pressing him.'
Madam Chen said her husband did not have any mental problems. The couple lived in the village while their five children are migrant workers elsewhere.
She said: 'He phoned the children to tell them not to come home for a while because it was chaotic and dangerous here.'
The protests in Wukan, on China's south-east coast, were among tens of thousands of 'mass incidents' in China last year. But the village hit international headlines last month after villagers held a series of well-organised marches, chased out Communist Party officials, fought back the police, and barricaded roads leading into their village.
Their grievances initially centred on land sales which stretch back some 20 years and which they say are illegal. That led them to petition the government more than 10 times in recent years, to no avail.
Then, the death of Mr Xue - one of the 13 representatives the villagers had elected on their own - while he was in police custody galvanised the village. It held 10 days of mass protests until the government announced its conciliatory moves, with Guangdong party chief Wang Yang's endorsement.
The official Xinhua news agency, which had not reported the protests previously, then said Wukan residents had 'legitimate complaints against officials over wrongdoing concerning land use and financial management', citing a provincial investigation team.
Last week, Mr Wang - a rising star who is said to be slated for higher political office - said Guangdong would use the 'Wukan approach' as a template to reform the governance of villages and townships at the grassroots level, a statement observers read as a positive sign.
But on the ground in the village, matters appear far from settled.
'We are still anxious, there is still a lot to work out, and some of it very difficult,' said villager representative Lin Zuluan, 65.
Discussions over the village's land problems have been mired in basics like the total land area at stake and boundaries. Villagers await promised elections to put in place new leaders.
Some of the young men who led the protests have not dared to leave the village for three months now for fear of arrest by local police.
Most pressing of all, Mr Xue's body still has not been released by the authorities, who said he had died of a heart attack while in police custody.
His family members say he was covered with bruises when they were shown his body by the police, who prevented them from taking pictures or holding on to their mobile phones.
His family and village representatives have been asking for his body to be released back to them. Negotiations have proven intractable so far.
Sources close to the negotiations said the authorities had proposed sending the body straight to a cemetery, without releasing it to the family.
As Chinese New Year draws closer, the authorities' calculation might be that the Xue family would get anxious about burying their dead before then, and cave in to their suggestion.
But a family member told The Straits Times: 'What is most important is justice.'
chiyin.sim@gmail.com
It was the second death in recent weeks in the protest-hit fishing village of Wukan.
Even as the family of village leader Xue Jinbo, who died in police custody on Dec 11, is locked in long, angry negotiations to get his body back, relatives of Mr Lin Zheng laid him to rest last Wednesday.
Tragedy sometimes comes with victory, as Wukan villagers know well.
They triumphed temporarily after the Guangdong provincial government promised late last month to release four villagers arrested earlier, to hold new elections to replace corrupt village officials, and to investigate the allegedly illegal land grabs that had sparked months of marches and protests.
But a gnawing anxiety lingered as villagers counted another death.
Mr Lin, 69, killed himself on Dec 28.
A few villagers declined to talk about whether his suicide was a result of the recent tension.
But his wife, Madam Chen Bizhen, 64, told The Straits Times he had become very stressed and anxious after getting repeated phone calls from the local authorities, telling him to turn himself in for taking part in protests which involved most of the village's 6,000 residents.
'He became very scared when the phone calls kept coming. And there was talk about the authorities coming into the village to arrest more people. He just became very scared,' she said, on the last night of the wake.
On Dec 28, he had left their home in the morning. When she herself returned home later, she found him lying face-down on the floor. He was dead.
'He got a haircut before drinking the pesticide he bought,' she said.
He had not even taken part in the marches or protests, she added, though she herself had joined the villager-run patrol squads to keep a lookout for police.
But every household in the village had been getting phone calls from the authorities, said Mr Lin's nephew Li Junzhou, 28.
'Sometimes they call six or seven times a day, asking us if we had been involved in the protests and telling us to surrender if we had. I tell them if they hadn't been corrupt in the first place, we wouldn't have needed to protest. Others shout some swear words at them and hang up.
'But my uncle was just a very honest man. He didn't know what to do when they kept pressing him.'
Madam Chen said her husband did not have any mental problems. The couple lived in the village while their five children are migrant workers elsewhere.
She said: 'He phoned the children to tell them not to come home for a while because it was chaotic and dangerous here.'
The protests in Wukan, on China's south-east coast, were among tens of thousands of 'mass incidents' in China last year. But the village hit international headlines last month after villagers held a series of well-organised marches, chased out Communist Party officials, fought back the police, and barricaded roads leading into their village.
Their grievances initially centred on land sales which stretch back some 20 years and which they say are illegal. That led them to petition the government more than 10 times in recent years, to no avail.
Then, the death of Mr Xue - one of the 13 representatives the villagers had elected on their own - while he was in police custody galvanised the village. It held 10 days of mass protests until the government announced its conciliatory moves, with Guangdong party chief Wang Yang's endorsement.
The official Xinhua news agency, which had not reported the protests previously, then said Wukan residents had 'legitimate complaints against officials over wrongdoing concerning land use and financial management', citing a provincial investigation team.
Last week, Mr Wang - a rising star who is said to be slated for higher political office - said Guangdong would use the 'Wukan approach' as a template to reform the governance of villages and townships at the grassroots level, a statement observers read as a positive sign.
But on the ground in the village, matters appear far from settled.
'We are still anxious, there is still a lot to work out, and some of it very difficult,' said villager representative Lin Zuluan, 65.
Discussions over the village's land problems have been mired in basics like the total land area at stake and boundaries. Villagers await promised elections to put in place new leaders.
Some of the young men who led the protests have not dared to leave the village for three months now for fear of arrest by local police.
Most pressing of all, Mr Xue's body still has not been released by the authorities, who said he had died of a heart attack while in police custody.
His family members say he was covered with bruises when they were shown his body by the police, who prevented them from taking pictures or holding on to their mobile phones.
His family and village representatives have been asking for his body to be released back to them. Negotiations have proven intractable so far.
Sources close to the negotiations said the authorities had proposed sending the body straight to a cemetery, without releasing it to the family.
As Chinese New Year draws closer, the authorities' calculation might be that the Xue family would get anxious about burying their dead before then, and cave in to their suggestion.
But a family member told The Straits Times: 'What is most important is justice.'
chiyin.sim@gmail.com
Saturday, January 07, 2012
The key lesson: Learn how to learn
THERE'S nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits.
By Virginia Postrel
In a recent column for Real Clear Markets, Bill Frezza of the Competitive Enterprise Institute lauded the Chinese government's policy of cutting financing for any educational programme for which 60 per cent of graduates can't find work within two years.
His assumption is that, because of government education subsidies, the United States is full of liberal-arts programmes that couldn't meet that test.
'Too many aspiring young museum curators can't find jobs?' he writes. 'The pragmatic Chinese solution is to cut public subsidies used to train museum curators. The free market solution is that only the rich would be indulgent enough to buy their kids an education that left them economically dependent on Mommy and Daddy after graduation.'
But, alas, the US has no such correction mechanism, so 'unemployable college graduates pile up as fast as unsold electric cars'.
Bill Gross, the founder of the world's largest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co, has put forth a less free market (and less coherently argued) version of the same viewpoint. 'Philosophy, sociology and liberal arts agendas will no longer suffice,' he declared. 'Skill-based education is a must, as is science and maths.'
There are many problems with this simplistic prescription, but the most basic is that it ignores what American college students actually study.
Take Frezza's punching bag, the effete would-be museum curator. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that no such student exists.
According to the National Centre for Education Statistics, humanities majors account for about 12 per cent of recent graduates, and art history majors are so rare they're lost in the noise. They account for less than 0.2 per cent of working adults with college degrees, a number that is probably about right for recent graduates, too. Yet somehow art history has become the go-to example for people bemoaning the state of higher education.
A long-time acquaintance perfectly captured the dominant Internet memes in an e-mail he sent me after my last column, which was on rising tuitions. 'Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,' he wrote. 'Many of these people would be much better off becoming plumbers - including financially. (No shame in that, who're you gonna call when your pipes freeze in the middle of the night? An M.A. in Italian art?)'
While government subsidies may indeed distort the choice to go to college in the first place, it's simply not the case that students are blissfully ignoring the job market in choosing majors. Contrary to what critics imagine, most Americans in fact go to college for what they believe to be 'skill-based education'.
A quarter of them study business, by far the most popular field, and 16 per cent major in one of the so-called Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) fields. Throw in economics, and you have nearly half of all graduates studying the only subjects such contemptuous pundits recognise as respectable.
The rest, however, aren't sitting around discussing Aristotle and Foucault.
Most are studying things that sound like job preparation, including all sorts of subjects related to health and education. Even the degree with the highest rate of unemployment - architecture, whose 13.9 per cent jobless rate reflects the current construction bust - is a pre-professional major.
The students who come out of school without jobs aren't, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people who thought a degree in business, graphic design or nursing was a practical, job-oriented credential.
The higher education system does have real problems, including rising tuition fees that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won't be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.
That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.
Those who tout Stem fields as a cure-all confuse correlation with causality. It's true that people who major in those subjects generally make more than, say, psychology majors. But they're also people who have the aptitudes, attitudes, values and interests that draw them to those fields (which themselves vary greatly in content and current job prospects). The psychology and social work majors currently enjoying relatively low rates of unemployment - 7.7 per cent and 6.6 per cent respectively - probably wouldn't be very good at computer science, which offers higher salaries but, at least at the moment, slightly lower chances of a job.
(These and many of the other figures in this article come from two studies by the Georgetown University Centre on Education and the Workplace analysing data from the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey: 'Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings' released this week, and 'What's It Worth: The Economic Value of College Majors' released last May.)
Whether they're pushing plumbing or programming, the would-be vocational planners rarely consider whether any additional warm body with the right credentials would really enhance national productivity. Nor do they think much about what would happen to wages in a given field if the supply of workers increased dramatically. If everyone suddenly flooded into 'practical' fields, we'd be overwhelmed with mediocre accountants and incompetent engineers, making lower and lower salaries as they swamped the demand for these services. Something like that seems to have already happened with lawyers.
Not everyone is the same. One virtue of a developed economy is that it provides niches for people with many different personalities and talents, making it more likely that any given individual can find a job that offers satisfaction.
As any good economist will remind you, income is just a means to utility, not a goal in itself. Some jobs pay well not only because few people have the right qualifications but also because few people want to do them in the first place. In a culture where many people hate oil companies, petroleum engineers probably enjoy such a premium. Plumbers - the touchstone example for critics who think too many people go to college - certainly do.
The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labour market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning - the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the 'soft' professions that complement them.
I was lucky to graduate from high school in the late 1970s, when the best research said that going to college was an economically losing proposition. You would be better off just getting a job out of high school - or so it appeared at the time. Such studies are always backward-looking.
I thus entered college to pursue learning for its own sake. As an English major determined not to be a lawyer, I also made sure I graduated with not one but two practical trades -neither learnt in the college classroom. At the depths of the previous worst recession since the Great Depression, I had no problem getting a job as a rookie journalist and, as an emergency backup, I knew I could always fall back on my excellent typing skills. Three decades later, nobody needs typists, and journalists are almost as obsolete.
The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyse texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn't that I didn't learn Fortran, but that I didn't study Dante.
The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently - how to figure out what you don't know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smartphone app.
When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors 'stressed that they weren't there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system ... but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I've often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.'
Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.
The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or 'green' industries. It's just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labour markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.
Pundits are entitled to their hypotheses, of course, and if they're footing the bill they can experiment on their children. But they shouldn't try to use the rest of the population as lab mice.
The writer is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of The Future And Its Enemies and The Substance Of Style.
BLOOMBERG
By Virginia Postrel
In a recent column for Real Clear Markets, Bill Frezza of the Competitive Enterprise Institute lauded the Chinese government's policy of cutting financing for any educational programme for which 60 per cent of graduates can't find work within two years.
His assumption is that, because of government education subsidies, the United States is full of liberal-arts programmes that couldn't meet that test.
'Too many aspiring young museum curators can't find jobs?' he writes. 'The pragmatic Chinese solution is to cut public subsidies used to train museum curators. The free market solution is that only the rich would be indulgent enough to buy their kids an education that left them economically dependent on Mommy and Daddy after graduation.'
But, alas, the US has no such correction mechanism, so 'unemployable college graduates pile up as fast as unsold electric cars'.
Bill Gross, the founder of the world's largest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co, has put forth a less free market (and less coherently argued) version of the same viewpoint. 'Philosophy, sociology and liberal arts agendas will no longer suffice,' he declared. 'Skill-based education is a must, as is science and maths.'
There are many problems with this simplistic prescription, but the most basic is that it ignores what American college students actually study.
Take Frezza's punching bag, the effete would-be museum curator. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that no such student exists.
According to the National Centre for Education Statistics, humanities majors account for about 12 per cent of recent graduates, and art history majors are so rare they're lost in the noise. They account for less than 0.2 per cent of working adults with college degrees, a number that is probably about right for recent graduates, too. Yet somehow art history has become the go-to example for people bemoaning the state of higher education.
A long-time acquaintance perfectly captured the dominant Internet memes in an e-mail he sent me after my last column, which was on rising tuitions. 'Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,' he wrote. 'Many of these people would be much better off becoming plumbers - including financially. (No shame in that, who're you gonna call when your pipes freeze in the middle of the night? An M.A. in Italian art?)'
While government subsidies may indeed distort the choice to go to college in the first place, it's simply not the case that students are blissfully ignoring the job market in choosing majors. Contrary to what critics imagine, most Americans in fact go to college for what they believe to be 'skill-based education'.
A quarter of them study business, by far the most popular field, and 16 per cent major in one of the so-called Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) fields. Throw in economics, and you have nearly half of all graduates studying the only subjects such contemptuous pundits recognise as respectable.
The rest, however, aren't sitting around discussing Aristotle and Foucault.
Most are studying things that sound like job preparation, including all sorts of subjects related to health and education. Even the degree with the highest rate of unemployment - architecture, whose 13.9 per cent jobless rate reflects the current construction bust - is a pre-professional major.
The students who come out of school without jobs aren't, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people who thought a degree in business, graphic design or nursing was a practical, job-oriented credential.
The higher education system does have real problems, including rising tuition fees that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won't be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.
That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.
Those who tout Stem fields as a cure-all confuse correlation with causality. It's true that people who major in those subjects generally make more than, say, psychology majors. But they're also people who have the aptitudes, attitudes, values and interests that draw them to those fields (which themselves vary greatly in content and current job prospects). The psychology and social work majors currently enjoying relatively low rates of unemployment - 7.7 per cent and 6.6 per cent respectively - probably wouldn't be very good at computer science, which offers higher salaries but, at least at the moment, slightly lower chances of a job.
(These and many of the other figures in this article come from two studies by the Georgetown University Centre on Education and the Workplace analysing data from the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey: 'Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings' released this week, and 'What's It Worth: The Economic Value of College Majors' released last May.)
Whether they're pushing plumbing or programming, the would-be vocational planners rarely consider whether any additional warm body with the right credentials would really enhance national productivity. Nor do they think much about what would happen to wages in a given field if the supply of workers increased dramatically. If everyone suddenly flooded into 'practical' fields, we'd be overwhelmed with mediocre accountants and incompetent engineers, making lower and lower salaries as they swamped the demand for these services. Something like that seems to have already happened with lawyers.
Not everyone is the same. One virtue of a developed economy is that it provides niches for people with many different personalities and talents, making it more likely that any given individual can find a job that offers satisfaction.
As any good economist will remind you, income is just a means to utility, not a goal in itself. Some jobs pay well not only because few people have the right qualifications but also because few people want to do them in the first place. In a culture where many people hate oil companies, petroleum engineers probably enjoy such a premium. Plumbers - the touchstone example for critics who think too many people go to college - certainly do.
The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labour market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning - the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the 'soft' professions that complement them.
I was lucky to graduate from high school in the late 1970s, when the best research said that going to college was an economically losing proposition. You would be better off just getting a job out of high school - or so it appeared at the time. Such studies are always backward-looking.
I thus entered college to pursue learning for its own sake. As an English major determined not to be a lawyer, I also made sure I graduated with not one but two practical trades -neither learnt in the college classroom. At the depths of the previous worst recession since the Great Depression, I had no problem getting a job as a rookie journalist and, as an emergency backup, I knew I could always fall back on my excellent typing skills. Three decades later, nobody needs typists, and journalists are almost as obsolete.
The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyse texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn't that I didn't learn Fortran, but that I didn't study Dante.
The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently - how to figure out what you don't know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smartphone app.
When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors 'stressed that they weren't there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system ... but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I've often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.'
Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.
The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or 'green' industries. It's just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labour markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.
Pundits are entitled to their hypotheses, of course, and if they're footing the bill they can experiment on their children. But they shouldn't try to use the rest of the population as lab mice.
The writer is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of The Future And Its Enemies and The Substance Of Style.
BLOOMBERG
Friday, January 06, 2012
Time for leaders to find the 'fire' again?
ON WEDNESDAY, a committee commissioned by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to review ministerial pay issued a report recommending a raft of changes to how salaries should be calculated.
By Andrea Ong
This is the second major report since the White Paper in 1994 that brought about the system of pegging ministers' pay to the private sector.
What has changed since 1994 and 1970, when ministers got their first raise? Insight looks at four burning questions over the years.
Does high pay = the best ministers?
ONE key principle behind paying ministers wages that are competitive with the private sector is the need to get the very best of Singaporeans to form the Government.
This principle has not budged over the years. Singapore's three prime ministers have emphasised repeatedly that good government - the nation's most precious asset - did not come about by chance.
It came about by getting capable and committed people to become ministers, a job more challenging and complex than being a CEO or doctor.
The Government believes that the opportunity cost for such talent to enter politics should not be too high. Besides sacrificing privacy and family life, they should not have to suffer financially too.
And as ministers need time to grow in their jobs, they must cross over to politics in their prime.
The review committee headed by Mr Gerard Ee emphasises this point in its report. 'While money should never be the motivation for anyone becoming a politician, the financial sacrifice should not be so large that it discourages outstanding and committed Singaporeans from devoting the best part of their lives to political office,' says the report.
However, detractors over the years have argued that the pay was just too high. Writer Catherine Lim argued in 2007 that the high pay contributed to the 'affective divide' between the People's Action Party (PAP) government and the people.
Others have warned that the idea of paying for the best to join politics may encourage people to join for the 'wrong' reasons, as PAP backbencher Denise Phua argued passionately in 2007.
'The lure of personal prestige and monetary gain can produce a dangerously intelligent and self-interested class of political elites who will readily compromise the national interest to satisfy their own needs,' said Associate Professor Kenneth Paul Tan from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in a 2008 article.
However, then-Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong made it clear in 1989 that men who are in it for the money are unfit to be ministers. 'If you think that the salary is so attractive that you want to be a minister because of the salaries, you are unlikely to pass our screening test.'
Government leaders have also argued for 'a sense of proportion' by comparing ministers' pay to the size of the national economy that they are in charge of.
Does high pay prevent corruption?
ANOTHER reason for competitive ministerial pay is to prevent corruption and maintain transparency.
The committee's report highlights the need to pay ministers a 'clean wage' with no hidden perks.
While other countries may pay their ministers less, the ministers may in fact get much more under the table in benefits.
This argument has been used by government leaders to counter those who compare Singaporean ministers' salaries with those of their foreign counterparts.
A commonly cited example is the US President, who earns less than PM Lee on paper but whose expenses, including housing and his own plane, are borne by taxpayers.
In 2000, then Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that only 'constant vigilance' had allowed Singapore to escape the corruption, collusion and nepotism problems which have plagued the region.
'Our market-based pay and allowances will give no excuse for any slippage,' he said of Singapore's good track record.
However, in a 2010 book on Singapore's public administration, political scientist Jon Quah points out that the PAP government had put in place stringent anti-corruption laws even before it began raising pay for ministers.
Former Potong Pasir MP Chiam See Tong argued on several occasions that high pay would not satisfy a minister bent on being corrupt. It would 'make him only more greedy for more money', said the opposition MP in 1994, citing the late minister Teh Cheang Wan who committed suicide in 1986 after being investigated for accepting bribes.
Should ministers' pay be benchmarked to private sector?
THE decision in 1994 to peg ministerial pay to the top income earners in Singapore has been one of the most controversial aspects of the debate over the years.
MPs have argued that the benchmark is unfair as the top earners in the private sector change every year, while ministers stay put in their jobs for years. The formula could also be skewed upwards as many of the top earners are extreme outliers.
Opposition parties have suggested pegging ministers' pay to the income of the poorest 20 per cent instead.
Other MPs, however, accept that pegging ministers' pay to the private sector is part of the 'market reality'.
The committee's report goes some way in addressing these concerns. It has widened the sample size of top income earners from 48 to 1,000.
Another point of disagreement is how much variable pay ministers should get.
A high variable component means larger swings in salary from year to year.
In line with private sector practice, the variable component of a minister's annual package increased from 30 per cent in 2000 to 47 per cent in 2007.
However, the committee has recommended cutting it.
A 'GDP bonus' introduced in 2000 was seen as an inducement to ministers to focus on economic growth at all costs. The committee now wants to replace the GDP bonus with a National Bonus which includes additional indicators like real income growth of the poorest 20 per cent.
What do we look for in our ministers?
THE debate over ministerial pay boils down, ultimately, to what Mr Lee Hsien Loong asked in 1993: 'What sort of men do you want to hold this job?'
On one side are those in favour of the spirit of public service and moral authority - two commonly used terms. Serving the people should not be about dollars and cents but about being honourable and sacrificing for the nation.
In the other camp are the more pragmatic PAP leaders, who question if it is realistic to expect to get a dream team of ministers without paying them more competitive rates.
The three prime ministers have all dwelt on the changing aspirations and nature of Singaporeans since the 1950s.
In those 'tumultuous times', Mr Lee Kuan Yew once said: 'Asia was in ferment: the shape of our lives was being altered irrevocably. In that revolutionary ferment, any man with any courage, any fire in him, would respond to the challenge.'
Times and the people have changed since. As PM Lee reiterated in 2007, the Government cannot expect everyone to be like that.
Still, the benchmark for ministers' pay has always included a discount from the private sector to signify the personal sacrifice involved in public service. The committee has now recommended increasing the discount from a third to 40 per cent.
Under the terms of reference given by PM Lee, ministers' pay has been reviewed and cut independently of that of the elite Administrative Service for the first time - a signal that elected political leaders should have a calling of their own.
The titles of the 1994 White Paper and the new report are also telling. Where the former emphasised 'competitive, competent and honest' government, the latter speaks of a 'capable and committed' one.
Perhaps it is time for Singapore's political leaders to find that 'fire' in them to shape Singaporeans' lives once more, as the Old Guard ministers did.
Additional reporting by Janice Heng
By Andrea Ong
This is the second major report since the White Paper in 1994 that brought about the system of pegging ministers' pay to the private sector.
What has changed since 1994 and 1970, when ministers got their first raise? Insight looks at four burning questions over the years.
Does high pay = the best ministers?
ONE key principle behind paying ministers wages that are competitive with the private sector is the need to get the very best of Singaporeans to form the Government.
This principle has not budged over the years. Singapore's three prime ministers have emphasised repeatedly that good government - the nation's most precious asset - did not come about by chance.
It came about by getting capable and committed people to become ministers, a job more challenging and complex than being a CEO or doctor.
The Government believes that the opportunity cost for such talent to enter politics should not be too high. Besides sacrificing privacy and family life, they should not have to suffer financially too.
And as ministers need time to grow in their jobs, they must cross over to politics in their prime.
The review committee headed by Mr Gerard Ee emphasises this point in its report. 'While money should never be the motivation for anyone becoming a politician, the financial sacrifice should not be so large that it discourages outstanding and committed Singaporeans from devoting the best part of their lives to political office,' says the report.
However, detractors over the years have argued that the pay was just too high. Writer Catherine Lim argued in 2007 that the high pay contributed to the 'affective divide' between the People's Action Party (PAP) government and the people.
Others have warned that the idea of paying for the best to join politics may encourage people to join for the 'wrong' reasons, as PAP backbencher Denise Phua argued passionately in 2007.
'The lure of personal prestige and monetary gain can produce a dangerously intelligent and self-interested class of political elites who will readily compromise the national interest to satisfy their own needs,' said Associate Professor Kenneth Paul Tan from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in a 2008 article.
However, then-Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong made it clear in 1989 that men who are in it for the money are unfit to be ministers. 'If you think that the salary is so attractive that you want to be a minister because of the salaries, you are unlikely to pass our screening test.'
Government leaders have also argued for 'a sense of proportion' by comparing ministers' pay to the size of the national economy that they are in charge of.
Does high pay prevent corruption?
ANOTHER reason for competitive ministerial pay is to prevent corruption and maintain transparency.
The committee's report highlights the need to pay ministers a 'clean wage' with no hidden perks.
While other countries may pay their ministers less, the ministers may in fact get much more under the table in benefits.
This argument has been used by government leaders to counter those who compare Singaporean ministers' salaries with those of their foreign counterparts.
A commonly cited example is the US President, who earns less than PM Lee on paper but whose expenses, including housing and his own plane, are borne by taxpayers.
In 2000, then Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that only 'constant vigilance' had allowed Singapore to escape the corruption, collusion and nepotism problems which have plagued the region.
'Our market-based pay and allowances will give no excuse for any slippage,' he said of Singapore's good track record.
However, in a 2010 book on Singapore's public administration, political scientist Jon Quah points out that the PAP government had put in place stringent anti-corruption laws even before it began raising pay for ministers.
Former Potong Pasir MP Chiam See Tong argued on several occasions that high pay would not satisfy a minister bent on being corrupt. It would 'make him only more greedy for more money', said the opposition MP in 1994, citing the late minister Teh Cheang Wan who committed suicide in 1986 after being investigated for accepting bribes.
Should ministers' pay be benchmarked to private sector?
THE decision in 1994 to peg ministerial pay to the top income earners in Singapore has been one of the most controversial aspects of the debate over the years.
MPs have argued that the benchmark is unfair as the top earners in the private sector change every year, while ministers stay put in their jobs for years. The formula could also be skewed upwards as many of the top earners are extreme outliers.
Opposition parties have suggested pegging ministers' pay to the income of the poorest 20 per cent instead.
Other MPs, however, accept that pegging ministers' pay to the private sector is part of the 'market reality'.
The committee's report goes some way in addressing these concerns. It has widened the sample size of top income earners from 48 to 1,000.
Another point of disagreement is how much variable pay ministers should get.
A high variable component means larger swings in salary from year to year.
In line with private sector practice, the variable component of a minister's annual package increased from 30 per cent in 2000 to 47 per cent in 2007.
However, the committee has recommended cutting it.
A 'GDP bonus' introduced in 2000 was seen as an inducement to ministers to focus on economic growth at all costs. The committee now wants to replace the GDP bonus with a National Bonus which includes additional indicators like real income growth of the poorest 20 per cent.
What do we look for in our ministers?
THE debate over ministerial pay boils down, ultimately, to what Mr Lee Hsien Loong asked in 1993: 'What sort of men do you want to hold this job?'
On one side are those in favour of the spirit of public service and moral authority - two commonly used terms. Serving the people should not be about dollars and cents but about being honourable and sacrificing for the nation.
In the other camp are the more pragmatic PAP leaders, who question if it is realistic to expect to get a dream team of ministers without paying them more competitive rates.
The three prime ministers have all dwelt on the changing aspirations and nature of Singaporeans since the 1950s.
In those 'tumultuous times', Mr Lee Kuan Yew once said: 'Asia was in ferment: the shape of our lives was being altered irrevocably. In that revolutionary ferment, any man with any courage, any fire in him, would respond to the challenge.'
Times and the people have changed since. As PM Lee reiterated in 2007, the Government cannot expect everyone to be like that.
Still, the benchmark for ministers' pay has always included a discount from the private sector to signify the personal sacrifice involved in public service. The committee has now recommended increasing the discount from a third to 40 per cent.
Under the terms of reference given by PM Lee, ministers' pay has been reviewed and cut independently of that of the elite Administrative Service for the first time - a signal that elected political leaders should have a calling of their own.
The titles of the 1994 White Paper and the new report are also telling. Where the former emphasised 'competitive, competent and honest' government, the latter speaks of a 'capable and committed' one.
Perhaps it is time for Singapore's political leaders to find that 'fire' in them to shape Singaporeans' lives once more, as the Old Guard ministers did.
Additional reporting by Janice Heng
Monday, January 02, 2012
China's lockdown on truth
WITH China stumping assertively on the world stage, one might think Beijing would be open, even gracious, about the country's past. To the contrary, history remains an exceedingly sensitive subject here, drawing relentless attention from the authorities anxious to keep all skeletons safely in closets.
By Sergey Radchenko
As a university professor in China, I face the consequences of this official apprehension every day. My young, bright students know little about their country's recent past. What they do know tends to agree with government-sponsored discourse on the pride and glory of China's rise after a century of humiliation by Western powers.
Library and bookstore shelves tell, with enviable conviction, this same story of national grandeur. And it is hard to get around that government-approved tale. Some of us at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo recently attempted to order a standard Western work on China's history, Jonathan Spence's The Search For Modern China.
Our efforts ran aground when Customs officials refused to allow the book shipment into the country. The agent courteously proposed to manually cut out the censored sections - including photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre and Spence's account of the Cultural Revolution - to get the Customs clearance. These are things the Chinese people are not supposed to know.
Historians of China face secrecy and restrictions everywhere as the key archives remain largely inaccessible, even though the Chinese archives law provides for the opening of official documents to the public after 30 years. Some progress has been made with declassification, notably at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to appease international scholars.
Academics can now read, though not print, digitised memos and telegrams from 1949 through 1965. Still, even these documents have been pre-selected to avoid potential embarrassment for the government. The party archives, which host the records of the Communist Party's holy of holies - the Politburo - are closed. Anyone in China interested in studying the origins of the Korean War, which took place more than 60 years ago, will not get very far. The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? Same story. Uncomfortable episodes of China's recent history have become a subject of official amnesia and a victim of the government's monopoly on truth.
Consider the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Chinese Civil War, and later Mao Zedong's comrade in arms during the Cultural Revolution, who died in 1971. Lin Biao, who is well remembered for his appearances atop Tiananmen Square, the Little Red Book in his hand, supposedly conspired to kill the Chinese leader, even though he was Mao's anointed successor. When the plot was discovered, he fled to the Soviet Union, then China's archenemy, but he never made it: His plane crashed in Mongolia after allegedly running out of fuel.
This is the official story; this is as much as the Chinese government is willing to say 40 years on. We do not know whether Lin Biao really planned to kill Mao. Their fallout could have been a personal feud or, as the chairman later claimed, a policy disagreement (Lin Biao is said to have opposed the Sino-American opening).
In 2003, the crash report, including grisly photos of burned victims, was leaked from Mongolian intelligence archives.
Contrary to the official Chinese explanation, the report (which was made available to me) showed that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed. No attempt had been made to land the plane, and weather conditions were fine. Mongolian investigators concluded that the pilot made an error. But they had no access to the plane's black box; the Soviet military took it, along with one of the plane engines. The Soviets later came back and took the heads of the two victims with golden teeth, which, it turned out, belonged to Lin Biao and his wife.
These heads are said to remain at the archives of Russia's Federal Security Service. Moscow has not released its findings about the crash, and China has remained silent. Although we know precious little about Lin Biao's death, we know enough to conclude that at least part of Beijing's explanation is a fabrication.
In the absence of archival openness and amid repression of free historical inquiry, these kinds of myths and fabrications underpin the official discourse on history in China - hence, the need to repulse the infiltration of foreign books. Despite the best efforts of committed Chinese historians who defy government restrictions (and risk jail terms) to learn more, the government still has an iron grip on the past.
The time has come for strong and proud China to cast aside this fear of the past, which is utterly incompatible with Beijing's search for international prestige and acclaim. True, China's history is full of blood and tragedy, often directly caused by leaders' misrule. It is also full of remarkable feats and formidable breakthroughs on the path towards modernity.
Both facets of its history, like the proverbial halves of yin and yang, make China what it is today. World events suggest that government efforts to control how history is read and taught are doomed to failure. The question is when today's China will realise it should not resort to methods of information control handed down from a tyranny.
The writer is a lecturer in the history of American-Asian relations at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, and the author of Two Suns In The Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle For Supremacy, 1962-1967.
LOS ANGELES TIMES-WASHINGTON POST
By Sergey Radchenko
As a university professor in China, I face the consequences of this official apprehension every day. My young, bright students know little about their country's recent past. What they do know tends to agree with government-sponsored discourse on the pride and glory of China's rise after a century of humiliation by Western powers.
Library and bookstore shelves tell, with enviable conviction, this same story of national grandeur. And it is hard to get around that government-approved tale. Some of us at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo recently attempted to order a standard Western work on China's history, Jonathan Spence's The Search For Modern China.
Our efforts ran aground when Customs officials refused to allow the book shipment into the country. The agent courteously proposed to manually cut out the censored sections - including photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre and Spence's account of the Cultural Revolution - to get the Customs clearance. These are things the Chinese people are not supposed to know.
Historians of China face secrecy and restrictions everywhere as the key archives remain largely inaccessible, even though the Chinese archives law provides for the opening of official documents to the public after 30 years. Some progress has been made with declassification, notably at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to appease international scholars.
Academics can now read, though not print, digitised memos and telegrams from 1949 through 1965. Still, even these documents have been pre-selected to avoid potential embarrassment for the government. The party archives, which host the records of the Communist Party's holy of holies - the Politburo - are closed. Anyone in China interested in studying the origins of the Korean War, which took place more than 60 years ago, will not get very far. The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? Same story. Uncomfortable episodes of China's recent history have become a subject of official amnesia and a victim of the government's monopoly on truth.
Consider the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Chinese Civil War, and later Mao Zedong's comrade in arms during the Cultural Revolution, who died in 1971. Lin Biao, who is well remembered for his appearances atop Tiananmen Square, the Little Red Book in his hand, supposedly conspired to kill the Chinese leader, even though he was Mao's anointed successor. When the plot was discovered, he fled to the Soviet Union, then China's archenemy, but he never made it: His plane crashed in Mongolia after allegedly running out of fuel.
This is the official story; this is as much as the Chinese government is willing to say 40 years on. We do not know whether Lin Biao really planned to kill Mao. Their fallout could have been a personal feud or, as the chairman later claimed, a policy disagreement (Lin Biao is said to have opposed the Sino-American opening).
In 2003, the crash report, including grisly photos of burned victims, was leaked from Mongolian intelligence archives.
Contrary to the official Chinese explanation, the report (which was made available to me) showed that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed. No attempt had been made to land the plane, and weather conditions were fine. Mongolian investigators concluded that the pilot made an error. But they had no access to the plane's black box; the Soviet military took it, along with one of the plane engines. The Soviets later came back and took the heads of the two victims with golden teeth, which, it turned out, belonged to Lin Biao and his wife.
These heads are said to remain at the archives of Russia's Federal Security Service. Moscow has not released its findings about the crash, and China has remained silent. Although we know precious little about Lin Biao's death, we know enough to conclude that at least part of Beijing's explanation is a fabrication.
In the absence of archival openness and amid repression of free historical inquiry, these kinds of myths and fabrications underpin the official discourse on history in China - hence, the need to repulse the infiltration of foreign books. Despite the best efforts of committed Chinese historians who defy government restrictions (and risk jail terms) to learn more, the government still has an iron grip on the past.
The time has come for strong and proud China to cast aside this fear of the past, which is utterly incompatible with Beijing's search for international prestige and acclaim. True, China's history is full of blood and tragedy, often directly caused by leaders' misrule. It is also full of remarkable feats and formidable breakthroughs on the path towards modernity.
Both facets of its history, like the proverbial halves of yin and yang, make China what it is today. World events suggest that government efforts to control how history is read and taught are doomed to failure. The question is when today's China will realise it should not resort to methods of information control handed down from a tyranny.
The writer is a lecturer in the history of American-Asian relations at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, and the author of Two Suns In The Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle For Supremacy, 1962-1967.
LOS ANGELES TIMES-WASHINGTON POST
China's lockdown on truth
WITH China stumping assertively on the world stage, one might think Beijing would be open, even gracious, about the country's past. To the contrary, history remains an exceedingly sensitive subject here, drawing relentless attention from the authorities anxious to keep all skeletons safely in closets.
As a university professor in China, I face the consequences of this official apprehension every day. My young, bright students know little about their country's recent past. What they do know tends to agree with government-sponsored discourse on the pride and glory of China's rise after a century of humiliation by Western powers.
Library and bookstore shelves tell, with enviable conviction, this same story of national grandeur. And it is hard to get around that government-approved tale. Some of us at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo recently attempted to order a standard Western work on China's history, Jonathan Spence's The Search For Modern China.
Our efforts ran aground when Customs officials refused to allow the book shipment into the country. The agent courteously proposed to manually cut out the censored sections - including photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre and Spence's account of the Cultural Revolution - to get the Customs clearance. These are things the Chinese people are not supposed to know.
Historians of China face secrecy and restrictions everywhere as the key archives remain largely inaccessible, even though the Chinese archives law provides for the opening of official documents to the public after 30 years. Some progress has been made with declassification, notably at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to appease international scholars.
Academics can now read, though not print, digitised memos and telegrams from 1949 through 1965. Still, even these documents have been pre-selected to avoid potential embarrassment for the government. The party archives, which host the records of the Communist Party's holy of holies - the Politburo - are closed. Anyone in China interested in studying the origins of the Korean War, which took place more than 60 years ago, will not get very far. The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? Same story. Uncomfortable episodes of China's recent history have become a subject of official amnesia and a victim of the government's monopoly on truth.
Consider the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Chinese Civil War, and later Mao Zedong's comrade in arms during the Cultural Revolution, who died in 1971. Lin Biao, who is well remembered for his appearances atop Tiananmen Square, the Little Red Book in his hand, supposedly conspired to kill the Chinese leader, even though he was Mao's anointed successor. When the plot was discovered, he fled to the Soviet Union, then China's archenemy, but he never made it: His plane crashed in Mongolia after allegedly running out of fuel.
This is the official story; this is as much as the Chinese government is willing to say 40 years on. We do not know whether Lin Biao really planned to kill Mao. Their fallout could have been a personal feud or, as the chairman later claimed, a policy disagreement (Lin Biao is said to have opposed the Sino-American opening).
In 2003, the crash report, including grisly photos of burned victims, was leaked from Mongolian intelligence archives.
Contrary to the official Chinese explanation, the report (which was made available to me) showed that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed. No attempt had been made to land the plane, and weather conditions were fine. Mongolian investigators concluded that the pilot made an error. But they had no access to the plane's black box; the Soviet military took it, along with one of the plane engines. The Soviets later came back and took the heads of the two victims with golden teeth, which, it turned out, belonged to Lin Biao and his wife.
These heads are said to remain at the archives of Russia's Federal Security Service. Moscow has not released its findings about the crash, and China has remained silent. Although we know precious little about Lin Biao's death, we know enough to conclude that at least part of Beijing's explanation is a fabrication.
In the absence of archival openness and amid repression of free historical inquiry, these kinds of myths and fabrications underpin the official discourse on history in China - hence, the need to repulse the infiltration of foreign books. Despite the best efforts of committed Chinese historians who defy government restrictions (and risk jail terms) to learn more, the government still has an iron grip on the past.
The time has come for strong and proud China to cast aside this fear of the past, which is utterly incompatible with Beijing's search for international prestige and acclaim. True, China's history is full of blood and tragedy, often directly caused by leaders' misrule. It is also full of remarkable feats and formidable breakthroughs on the path towards modernity.
Both facets of its history, like the proverbial halves of yin and yang, make China what it is today. World events suggest that government efforts to control how history is read and taught are doomed to failure. The question is when today's China will realise it should not resort to methods of information control handed down from a tyranny.
The writer is a lecturer in the history of American-Asian relations at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, and the author of Two Suns In The Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle For Supremacy, 1962-1967.
LOS ANGELES TIMES-WASHINGTON POST
As a university professor in China, I face the consequences of this official apprehension every day. My young, bright students know little about their country's recent past. What they do know tends to agree with government-sponsored discourse on the pride and glory of China's rise after a century of humiliation by Western powers.
Library and bookstore shelves tell, with enviable conviction, this same story of national grandeur. And it is hard to get around that government-approved tale. Some of us at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo recently attempted to order a standard Western work on China's history, Jonathan Spence's The Search For Modern China.
Our efforts ran aground when Customs officials refused to allow the book shipment into the country. The agent courteously proposed to manually cut out the censored sections - including photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre and Spence's account of the Cultural Revolution - to get the Customs clearance. These are things the Chinese people are not supposed to know.
Historians of China face secrecy and restrictions everywhere as the key archives remain largely inaccessible, even though the Chinese archives law provides for the opening of official documents to the public after 30 years. Some progress has been made with declassification, notably at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to appease international scholars.
Academics can now read, though not print, digitised memos and telegrams from 1949 through 1965. Still, even these documents have been pre-selected to avoid potential embarrassment for the government. The party archives, which host the records of the Communist Party's holy of holies - the Politburo - are closed. Anyone in China interested in studying the origins of the Korean War, which took place more than 60 years ago, will not get very far. The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? Same story. Uncomfortable episodes of China's recent history have become a subject of official amnesia and a victim of the government's monopoly on truth.
Consider the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Chinese Civil War, and later Mao Zedong's comrade in arms during the Cultural Revolution, who died in 1971. Lin Biao, who is well remembered for his appearances atop Tiananmen Square, the Little Red Book in his hand, supposedly conspired to kill the Chinese leader, even though he was Mao's anointed successor. When the plot was discovered, he fled to the Soviet Union, then China's archenemy, but he never made it: His plane crashed in Mongolia after allegedly running out of fuel.
This is the official story; this is as much as the Chinese government is willing to say 40 years on. We do not know whether Lin Biao really planned to kill Mao. Their fallout could have been a personal feud or, as the chairman later claimed, a policy disagreement (Lin Biao is said to have opposed the Sino-American opening).
In 2003, the crash report, including grisly photos of burned victims, was leaked from Mongolian intelligence archives.
Contrary to the official Chinese explanation, the report (which was made available to me) showed that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed. No attempt had been made to land the plane, and weather conditions were fine. Mongolian investigators concluded that the pilot made an error. But they had no access to the plane's black box; the Soviet military took it, along with one of the plane engines. The Soviets later came back and took the heads of the two victims with golden teeth, which, it turned out, belonged to Lin Biao and his wife.
These heads are said to remain at the archives of Russia's Federal Security Service. Moscow has not released its findings about the crash, and China has remained silent. Although we know precious little about Lin Biao's death, we know enough to conclude that at least part of Beijing's explanation is a fabrication.
In the absence of archival openness and amid repression of free historical inquiry, these kinds of myths and fabrications underpin the official discourse on history in China - hence, the need to repulse the infiltration of foreign books. Despite the best efforts of committed Chinese historians who defy government restrictions (and risk jail terms) to learn more, the government still has an iron grip on the past.
The time has come for strong and proud China to cast aside this fear of the past, which is utterly incompatible with Beijing's search for international prestige and acclaim. True, China's history is full of blood and tragedy, often directly caused by leaders' misrule. It is also full of remarkable feats and formidable breakthroughs on the path towards modernity.
Both facets of its history, like the proverbial halves of yin and yang, make China what it is today. World events suggest that government efforts to control how history is read and taught are doomed to failure. The question is when today's China will realise it should not resort to methods of information control handed down from a tyranny.
The writer is a lecturer in the history of American-Asian relations at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, and the author of Two Suns In The Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle For Supremacy, 1962-1967.
LOS ANGELES TIMES-WASHINGTON POST
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