(1) Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten. Die Pressefreiheit und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung durch Rundfunk und Film werden gewährleistet. Eine Zensur findet nicht statt.

(2) Diese Rechte finden ihre Schranken in den Vorschriften der allgemeinen Gesetze, den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen zum Schutze der Jugend und in dem Recht der persönlichen Ehre.

(3) Kunst und Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre sind frei. Die Freiheit der Lehre entbindet nicht von der Treue zur Verfassung.

“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that  computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?”

Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009

“Wo kämen wir hin, wenn alle sagten, wo kämen wir hin, und keiner ginge, um einmal zu schauen, wohin man käme, wenn man ginge.”

Kurt Marti

“For 2nd year students，take one course each semester that requires you to write a paper. It might be that you write a good paper. However, it is more probable that you write a bad paper. But don’t get nervous about it, because before people write good papers they usually write bad papers.”

“Don’t clutter up your life; just write. You might think there are still a lot of things that you don’t understand, but that doesn’t matter, there are a lot of things that I don’t understand. Contrary to taking classes, TAing or going to seminar, research is a very painful thing because there is no instantaneous payoff. You may waste a whole afternoon without any results, but that is what research is about. There are two ways you can deal with this: 1) dedicate a big part of your time for research or 2) prepare for Thanksgiving early.”

“A good paper almost always has 1) a viewpoint 2) a lever 3) a result.”

“If you find yourself thinking ‘But that’s how the game is played,’ slap yourself. If that doesn’t work, take up sheep farming.”

“Congratulations to you graduates. You made it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s extremely hot and I am going to spend the next fifteen minutes telling you about economics. Let me start, though, by reminding you that we always have a faculty member get up and talk about ideas at our commencements. We have always done it that way. Some people say that it’s because we are a place of ideas and we want the parents to see that you have been a serious person these past several years. Others say we have a hard time getting more famous people to speak. I don’t know why. Perhaps we are afraid that, starting this afternoon, everywhere you go they will assume you know something because you are a Chicago graduate, so we try to stuff in one last thing before you leave. Personally, I think it’s something completely different. I think these commencement speeches are for the faculty. We may get only twelve minutes to talk, but it’s the only time in our Chicago careers we get to stand up and say whatever we want and you aren’t allowed to challenge it. I mean, what are you going to do? Get up and leave?

So today I thought I would talk about why people hate economists and why we don’t care. Nobody likes an economist. In fact, some students who are here today from the Divinity School are thinking that if they have learned anything in school it’s that an economist like me should not be talking from a pulpit like this.

It’s almost like the cartoon where the guy is at a party talking to someone and says, “You’re a terrorist? Thank God. I thought you said you were an economist.” My granddad used to say that 80 percent of the world doesn’t care about your problems and the other 20 percent is glad. In our case, economists know that 20 percent is way too low. People hate economists, and they hate economists from Chicago most of all. But we don’t mind. So in the next twelve minutes, I will give you the lowdown of how the field of economics has changed in the last twenty-five years and of how economists think about the world. I think it will be pretty clear why we aren’t popular.

First, let’s begin with some misconceptions you might have about “the Chicago School of Economics.” If you aren’t one of the students from the Graduate School of Business who are here in the front pews, you probably think that’s just some right-wing thing. You may have visions of a five-foot-tall bald man—Milton Friedman—and something about monetarism. Well, that is so 1950s, dad.

In the last twenty-five years, much of the action of economics has come from major parts of the field turning away from big macro topics like inflation and unemployment, as well as away from the political stuff, toward microeconomic topics like why there has been a rise of income inequality since the 1970s, what leads to technology adoption in developing countries, or how much people value new products like cereal or minivans.

From our turn toward microeconomics, it wasn’t long before we started getting our noses into just about everything—how to stop crime, how to improve our schools, what medical treatments work, how TV affects kids—we could get data on and apply the basic principles of economics. Now you know how people hate that. “What does an economist know about crime?” “You have no business talking about medicine, you don’t even go to the doctor.” You get the idea.

But I would say that although economists are irritating, the new ideas we have brought to these subjects are important. And often they are things the fields themselves would not have come up with on their own. Economists love markets. It’s true. Even when they think about something gruesome like organ donation, they start asking market questions, like whether people being allowed to sell one of their kidneys would eliminate the grim wait lists for transplants. Although there is no public sentiment for an explicit market in organs, it did lead another economist to think about the issue. He figured out that people objecting to the idea of trading organs for money wouldn’t automatically prevent a beneficial market. He showed that if there was one person who had a brother, say, who was willing to donate a kidney but was not a proper match, we could create a donor bank where they could make a “trade” with a mother in some other location who was willing to donate a kidney to her own child but was not a match. Instead each one donates to the bank, which gives their relative a credit at the bank. Such a bank can save the lives of thousands by encouraging more people to be kidney donors and by making it so that your survival doesn’t depend on you finding a match among close relatives. And it’s an idea that comes straight from the principles of economics.

The “new” Chicago School of Economics is not really about politics at all. It’s not right wing or left wing. It’s about a way of thinking about the world. It starts from the basic theory that, for the most part, people try to do better for themselves. If this is true, they will respond to incentives so that, in most cases, competition will drive them to be more efficient. That theory then says: Let’s get the data and think hard about causality, because we don’t have much in the way of controlled experiments. And let’s see how far that will take us. But that simplicity of purpose is quite a large part of why people hate us. We really don’t deal with the loftiest ideals of humanity. We deal with humans at their most mundane. We aren’t about narratives and inspiration or how people would behave in their finest hours. We are about how people behave in the everyday marketplace. I think we are especially hated because of the nagging fear on the part of idealists that we might be right about people. Our world view begins with a few of the following points:

First, economists typically ignore what people say and only look at what they do. We pay no attention to what you say in surveys about how much you love the environment, about how you intend to buy a Prius and start taking public transportation to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Instead we know you are lying because we can see that people continue to buy a lot of gas even when the price goes up. What people say they are going to do and what they do are barely correlated. People say they don’t care about taxes but make sure to buy books from sellers out of state so  they don’t have to pay sales tax. Even in their dating, what they say they want in a partner and the kind of person they actually date are often far apart. Economists have derived ways to use the information about choices you make to infer what your internal “utility function” must be. People hate having their statements ignored and their choices examined.

Another thing they don’t like is having to make choices between imperfect alternatives. Economists are perfectly comfortable in a world of choosing between the lesser of evils. In our world, everything is an evil. Nothing is perfect. As long as we can see the alternatives and compare them, economics is in its element. Nor are we upset about sunk costs—crying over spilled milk. You’ll never see the economists crying over spilled milk. We’re the people getting up and walking out of the crappy movie because we have better things to do with the next two hours of our time. The $10 you paid for a ticket is a sunk cost. You can’t get it back, so it’s irrelevant. Sunk costs shouldn’t affect your decisions.

Next, economists don’t take anecdotes for answers. And that irritates people. Out of one hundred smokers, fewer than six will get lung cancer and less than 25 percent will die of something related to smoking. That means that there will always be millions of people who smoke all their lives with no health problems and die at age ninety in a car accident or something. But if you conclude from your uncle’s long life that smoking doesn’t harm people, you are no economist. People hate us because we really don’t care about their uncle. We just want the data on everybody.

And that plays into the last thing: We spend lots of time thinking about causality and indirect effects. Economists documented the big increase in income inequality throughout the 1980s. But we didn’t just wring our hands saying, “Look, inequality is up.” We spent the next two decades pushing hard on the data trying to figure out the root causes of rising inequality. We showed that the inequality was highly tied to an increase in the premium for skills—the earnings of college graduates skyrocketed compared to the earnings of high school graduates, for example. We then tried to figure out whether immigration was pushing low-skill wages down, whether the rise of computers at work was driving high-skill wages up, or whether the shift of consumer spending away from actual manufactured things to services could account for the hit to low-skill workers (since manufacturing industries tended to pay good wages to lower-skill employees).

We also look at indirect effects, which are, ironically, often quite easy to predict. I recently saw an exposé on TV about fat in our diets. They noted that education about fat in milk has led to a huge drop in the level of fat we get from milk. But the kicker from the report was that at the same time we have started drinking less high-fat milk, there has been an almost identical increase in the amount of fat we are eating in our cheese! I guess no one talked to an economist for this report. But they should have. Think about it: Cow’s milk has the same amount of fat no matter what. If people stop buying the high-fat milk, the farmers are going to put it somewhere. Did  you think they were just going to throw it away? Unless it’s going into dog food or something, cutting fat out of your milk is going to mean lower prices for cheese and more people buying cheese. The prices of cheese may change, but the farmers are always going to sell what they have in one
form or another.

But that’s the problem with economics. It’s always taking the fun out of everything. As I like to say, economics is frequently hated but seldom wrong. It’s like the guy in the movie My Cousin Vinny. Ralph Macchio (the Karate Kid) and his buddy are on their way to college when they mistakenly get arrested for murder in Alabama. They bring in Macchio’s cousin Vinny as their lawyer, but Vinny has only just passed law school and is really an auto mechanic. Macchio’s friend wants to dump Vinny as the lawyer, but Macchio tells him he shouldn’t. He says something like, “You know the birthday party magician Alakazam? Alakazam was at a party doing tricks. Every trick he did, Vinny was like, ‘No, no, wait a second. He’s palming it and the rings are breakable and the card is up his sleeve.’ It was Alakazam’s worst nightmare. But he wasn’t being a jerk. He was just being the quintessential Gambini.” But Macchio wasn’t thinking big enough. Actually Vinny was really just being the quintessential Chicago economist. It’s who we are. We live to argue. How does the world work? Where should we eat lunch? Anything.

We know that everyone hates us. The reason we don’t care is that we are too busy arguing with each other to pay attention. In our world, it doesn’t matter where you got a degree or how old you are or where you are from. It just matters what your ideas are. And that’s how it should be. Ironically, somehow the place that puts no status on being the grand old scholar of the field—the place where the junior faculty are chewing out the Nobel laureates for getting it wrong—is the very place that seems to extend the intellectual lives of its grand old scholars far beyond other universities. Come to a seminar any week of the year in economics, and you will find scholars in the thick of a debate that would long since have been considered “checked out” anywhere else. It’s actually quite thrilling.

After I gave my first talk at Chicago, I went to dinner at the restaurant in the Windermere—Piccolo Mondo—and they had paper tablecloths. Some guys in the audience continued to debate me out of the
seminar room and then in the car over there and then in the restaurant. We were writing all over the tablecloths and not ordering. After about twenty minutes, the waiter walked up and said loudly, “Ahem . . . may I get you anything?” The most senior person there looked up and said, “Well yes, we really need some more tablecloths.”

It’s not just Chicago economists, though, and you know it. It’s what Chicago is like. I had the pleasure (and pain) of serving on the search committee that selected our illustrious new President, who is presiding over his first convocation here today. There were faculty from all the divisions on the committee. I really knew only economists before that. Over the course of the search, I came to see that we all have that intensity. It’s just who we are. We are the only place in the world where you go into the classrooms, and not only are the boards full of writing but people have written off the edges and there are chalk marks on the walls. It’s why when you come back here in ten years or fifty years or whenever, you will still find us asking for more tablecloths at Piccolo Mondo and the classroom walls still will have chalk marks on them. As long as there is a seminar room, you will still find the economists in there arguing with each other about how the world works. There are people who think that a place like this cannot succeed—no $50-billion endowment, no cache of the social elite, no whatever it is. But as long as we have students and alumni with the spirit that you have and a culture with the intensity that Chicago has, and as long as there is a seminar room that the faculty can meet in . . . I have to tell you—I like those odds. “

E-Lab Funnel: How Holtzbrinck does it

“Wenn Sie daran glauben, dass es eine Sache gibt, die die Menschheit am meisten bedroht, und jemand kommt herein und kritisiert die Farbe ihres Hemdes, was fällt Ihnen dazu ein?”

Shai Agassi

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Von Tibet war an diesem denkwürdigen Nachmittag an der Peking-Universität nicht die Rede. Aber die in den letzten Wochen dramatisch verschärften Empfindlichkeiten zwischen China und dem Westen schwangen in jeder einzelnen Formulierung mit, als sich deutsche und chinesische Philosophen darüber austauschten, was „Aufklärung“ für sie bedeutet. Es traten die Wahrnehmungsdifferenzen hervor, die den politischen Streit zusätzlich komplizieren - wobei die Konfliktlinien bisweilen alle Erwartung unterliefen: Die Deutschen kamen mit Kant, die Chinesen konterten mit Thomas Mann.

Forschungsministerin Annette Schavan, deren Besuch der Anlass der Zusammenkunft war, erläuterte, weshalb das Thema für sie an diesem Ort wichtig ist: Im Gefolge der Aufklärung habe der Wechsel von der absolutistischen zur demokratischen Herrschaft den Menschen als Zweck an sich in den Mittelpunkt gestellt. Als symbolische Geste schenkte sie der Peking-Universität ein Kant-Porträt von Horst Janssen. Dass im Moment der Übergabe ein verpoppter Schuhplattler vom Band ertönte, brauchte nicht als Perfidie interpretiert zu werden; es war in einer Gesellschaft, in der die gegenseitige Abgrenzung der Stile noch nicht ganz so präzise ist, wohl einfach als Zeichen des Wohlwollens gemeint.

Die über sich selbst unaufgeklärte Aufklärung

Einen solchen Zustand, in dem die „Unterschiede zwischen den Dingen unscharf und die Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten vieldeutig sind“, stellte der Pekinger Kant-Forscher Han Shuifa dann in den Mittelpunkt seiner Ausführungen, in denen er eine Parabel des antiken chinesischen Philosophen Zhuangzi auslegte. Die mythische Figur Ungestalt trifft da auf zwei schon wesentlich ausdifferenziertere Freunde, die ihm einen Gefallen tun wollen und sich sagen: „Alle Leute haben sieben Löcher zum Sehen, Hören, Essen und Atmen. Ungestalt hat keins. Wir wollen ihm ein paar Löcher bohren.“ Also bohren sie ihm jeden Tag ein Loch, und am siebten Tag, so endet die Parabel, „starb Ungestalt“. Für Han Shuifa ist dieser Hilfsversuch Sinnbild eines über sich selbst nicht aufgeklärten Aufklärungsbegriffs, der eine für alle in gleicher Weise gültige Vernunft annimmt und keine Unterschiede duldet. Der Mensch werde dabei zum bloßen Objekt der Vernunft und deren Manipulationen.

Han ließ keinen Zweifel daran, dass er dabei an China dachte, dem die „glorreiche Aufklärung aus dem Westen schon unvergleichliches Leid zugefügt“ habe. Mit Foucault empfahl er, dass sich die Aufklärung statt dessen zu Kritik und Selbstkritik weiterentwickle.

Kein europäischer Exklusivanspruch

Die Vorträge nahmen nicht direkt aufeinander Bezug, aber das Thema „Differenz“ war in die Argumentation der Deutschen schon eingebaut. Der universelle Anspruch der Vernunft vertrage sich durchaus mit der Verschiedenheit der Menschen, sagte der Kölner Romanist Andreas Kablitz mit Aristoteles; die „Freiheit“ des Toleranzgebots wollte er gerade als Verzicht auf Determinationen verstanden wissen. Der Tübinger Philosoph Otfried Höffe, der in seinem Buch „Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung“ die Idee einer „föderalen, subsidiären Weltrepublik“ entwickelt hatte, sah die Allgemeingültigkeit der aufklärerischen Forderung, sich seines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen, auch darin zum Ausdruck gebracht, dass Europa keinen Exklusivanspruch auf sie erheben dürfe.

Während die Deutschen also eine Universalisierbarkeit des Verschiedenen voraussetzten, beharrten die Chinesen auf einer Verschiedenheit der Universalien. Wie Han Shuifa sprach auch der Germanist Huang Liaoyu von einer spezifisch chinesischen Aufklärung. Als Kronzeugen rief er Dr. Ting-fu auf, einen ständig kichernden Chinesen, der eine winzige Nebenrolle in Thomas Manns „Zauberberg“ spielt. Bei einer okkultistischen Sitzung fasste er als Einziger „den gesunden Gedanken, das Deckenlicht einzuschalten, so dass alsbald das Zimmer in Klarheit lag“. Für Huang ist in diesem deutschen Chinesenbild tatsächlich etwas Typisches ausgesprochen: die Diesseitigkeit des konfuzianischen Chinesen. Auf der einen Seite verbinde ihn diese mit dem Humanisten Settembrini im Roman und der westlichen Aufklärung im Allgemeinen, auf der anderen Seite werde er um ihretwillen auch beargwöhnt, weil er unfähig zu transzendenten Gedanken und zur Abstraktion schlechthin sei.

Wille vor Intellekt

Die Entkonfuzianisierungsbewegungen des letzten Jahrhunderts hätten dieser konfuzianischen Aufgeklärtheit dann noch neue Akzente hinzugefügt. Huang nannte unter anderem zwei, die er der „institutionalisierten marxistischen Aufklärung“ zuschrieb: eine Betrachtung der Geschichte „ohne Sentimentalität und moralische Aufgeregtheit“ und einen Sinn für den Primat des Willens, dem gegenüber der Intellekt nur als Dienstmädchen in Betracht komme. Mit diesem geistigen Rüstzeug seien die kapitalistisch gewordenen Chinesen davon überzeugt, dass der Überbau von der Basis abhänge „und dass mit der rasanten Wirtschaftsentwicklung auch zivilisatorische, politische und moralische Fortschritte gemacht werden können“.

So mündete Huangs in subtilem Deutsch vorgetragene Betrachtung ins Resümee: „Der konfuzianische Chinese der Gegenwart ist zufrieden mit der Welt und mit sich selbst, wie er es lange nicht mehr war. Aber die Welt ist unzufrieden mit ihm. Darunter leidet er schon ein bisschen.“ Verstehen könne er es indessen nicht: Sofern er schon ins „kapitalistische Weltsystem“ integriert sei, wirke er mit seiner Diesseitigkeit doch entscheidend am „Werk der europäischen Aufklärung“ mit und schade niemandem.

Kulturrelativismus und Universalismus

Bei aller Ironie äußerte sich da eine unter Chinesen heute tatsächlich weitverbreitete Ratlosigkeit, was „der Westen“ überhaupt von ihnen wolle; die Kritik an der Verletzung von Menschenrechten wird dabei oft gar nicht erst zum Nennwert genommen, sondern für eine bloß ideologische Verschleierung anderer Interessen gehalten. So stieß auch an diesem Nachmittag der Wille, alle Einzelnen, wo auch immer sie leben, zum Gebrauch der Vernunft zu befreien, auf die Erklärung, dass die Selbstbestimmung des Einzelnen mit der Anerkennung der Verschiedenheit seines kulturellen Eingebundenseins beginne. Die politisch-kulturelle Bedingtheit der eigenen Sprecherrolle mag in der Tat ein blinder Fleck des westlichen Universalismus sein; die Immunisierung gegen Kritik durch „Kultur“ ist es auf der anderen Seite allerdings nicht minder. Der gegenseitigen Aufklärung bleibt noch einiges zu tun.

“Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie! Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor; Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar, Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr Herauf, herab und quer und krumm Meine Schüler an der Nase herum - Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können! Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen. Zwar bin ich gescheiter als alle die Laffen, Doktoren, Magister, Schreiber und Pfaffen; Mich plagen keine Skrupel noch Zweifel, Fürchte mich weder vor Hölle noch Teufel - Dafür ist mir auch alle Freud entrissen, Bilde mir nicht ein, was Rechts zu wissen, Bilde mir nicht ein, ich könnte was lehren, Die Menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren. Auch hab ich weder Gut noch Geld, Noch Ehr und Herrlichkeit der Welt; Es möchte kein Hund so länger leben! Drum hab ich mich der Magie ergeben, Ob mir durch Geistes Kraft und Mund Nicht manch Geheimnis würde kund; Daß ich nicht mehr, mit sauerm Schweiß, Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß; Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält, Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen, Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen.”

SHANGHAI: Each night this week the television news has opened with images from the biggest event on China’s political calendar, the once-every-five-years congress of the Communist Party.

In a country where political cartoonists are unheard of, and a sense of humor, never mind satire, about politics doesn’t get much of an airing, it was fitting that the camera shots were mostly solemn: long slow pans over audiences seated in a giant hall draped in red, bent over their desks, taking careful notes or studiously reading the interminable texts.

It is not hard to feel sympathy for the 2,213 congress delegates.

China’s political discourse remains some of the most stultifying you’ll find anywhere, a fact made all the more strange for the startling dynamism on display almost everywhere else one looks in this country.

Much of the dutiful study this week has been of the opening speech by the country’s leader, Hu Jintao, a man with the inscrutability of a sphinx and a penchant - this may be by now a requirement for the job - for stuffy slogans that are difficult to parse.

Building a “harmonious society” through something called “scientific development” is Hu’s trademark idea, and in a long, omnibus speech he touched on so many familiar problems and goals that retaining any one
thought as the centerpiece or overriding priority became a task worthy of hard study.

There is something else about congresses like these that makes the exercise seem unsettling and almost incongruous. Talk of the real work at hand - choosing the country’s next generation of leaders - is scrupulously managed, to the point of suppressing the topic altogether. Chinese party congresses live up to the maxim that important things are decided in small meetings, and trivial things decided in large ones.

Accordingly, who will follow Hu in five years is being hashed out in the smokiest of political back rooms, reducing the delegates who pore over the reports before the cameras, and who will eventually vote to ratify
the new leadership lineup, to the role of movie set extras. Just to make sure that none of the rank and file get the wrong idea, and begin thinking they are actually meant to have a say, it has been reported that the delegates have been warned to follow instructions and to vote as told when the big moment comes.

This week, the Chinese magazine Caijing summed up this reality by citing comments by Deng Xiaoping, the leader in the 1980s, who said that “economic reform will not work if political reform is not keeping pace.” The magazine then boldly asserted what many citizens, particularly in the booming cities of the east, may think as they watch political theater that owes more to the Stalinist past than it does to the mores of a self-confident and resurgent country: “At the center of political reform is democratization. Just as economic reform cannot divert from the road toward market reform, political reform cannot divert from democratization.”

Indeed, China’s leaders find themselves at an interesting moment, perhaps even a fulcrum point; their staid governing style, their reluctance to accept more openness and stronger checks on their powers and privileges, and most of all, their unwillingness to treat the public in mature rather than old-fashioned, deeply patronizing ways risks placing them increasingly out of synch with the fast evolving world of the big, rich cities.

No one is expecting an upheaval, certainly not now. What may be in store, however, is a steady erosion of legitimacy, which does not augur well for the medium and longer term.

This is what can happen, though, to authoritarian systems that constantly invoke the need for reform and never muster the courage to actually undertake it, and likewise to those who constantly promise to tackle corruption, while never actually moving beyond fingering scapegoats.

The signs of this slow fade in credibility could be heard in the voices of many Shanghai residents who were asked in sidewalk interviews this week what they make of the ongoing political show and how they see the
future.

There was lots of grumbling about the high cost of food and housing, which was to be expected, but skepticism and outright disaffection loomed large, too. A 50-year-old engineer who gave his name as David Yuan said he had paid “zero” attention to the congress, because he felt politics were beyond people’s control. “Our lives are like bits of leaves blowing in the wind,” he said. “We can only hope to land in a good place.”

Many others focused on growing inequality, a theme addressed in many official speeches, but one which few here see getting better. “Even their policies are made preferentially for rich people,” said Xu Gengsheng, the owner of a small shop in central Shanghai. “What I see is people who have become rich through illegal means seeking ways to make their property legal. How? Through policies and laws.”

Perhaps more than anywhere in China, corruption is on people’s minds in Shanghai, where immense fortunes have been made through murky real estate deals, and where the former Communist Party secretary Chen
Liangyu was arrested in a purge and recently stripped of his membership for dipping into the city’s social security funds.

The handling of Chen’s takedown was as opaque as any of the backstage meetings in Beijing this week, however, and impressed many more as a high-level political vendetta than as part of a systematic war on
corruption. “The last party congress talked about corruption, too,” said an employee at a state company who gave his name as Wang. “It’s hard to solve this problem because the system in China doesn’t have any supervision outside of the party. Freedom of expression is the  most important. “If you could criticize the Communist Party in the newspaper, I’m sure they’d show some restraint, but I’m sure we won’t see that in the next five years.”

International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=7960791

57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 Americans (North and South), 8 Africans
52 female, 48 male
70 Non-white, 30 white
70 Non-Christians, 30 Christians
89 straight, 11 queer

6 persons would hold 59 percent of global wealth and all 6 would come from the USA

80 would not have sufficient shelter
70 would be illiterate
50 would be malnourished
1 would die
2 would be born
1 would have a PC
1 would have an academic degree

If you woke up this morning, healthy and not sick, then you’re better off than 1 Million people, who will not survive the next week.

If you never experienced war, never went through slavery or the agony of torture, or never experienced extreme hunger, then you’re better off than 500 million people world-wide.

If you can go to a church, without having to fear that somebody will incarcerate you or will kill you for doing so, then you’re better off that 3 billion humans on earth.

If you do have sufficient nutrition, clothing and shelter, and your own bed,  then you’re richer than 75 percent of humanity.

If you have a deposit at a bank, maybe with some money on it and some cash in you pocket then you belong to the richest 10 percent in this world.

最烦的是早晚两次“挤”地铁。执意要用“挤”这个字，原因是传统的“坐”已经无法表达出地铁如罐头的感觉。在中国生活了二十二年，头一次体会到了一点四亿人民的力量。第一次坐地铁，用“惊呆”这个词一点也不为过。不管是手里拿着早饭豆浆的叔叔阿姨，还是手提电脑包，画着浓妆的陆家嘴白领，在地铁到站的那一刻已经没有的形象和尊严，也没有了身份和自我。脑袋里只有一个字“上”！ 好久以前就一直想用照相机或者是摄像机拍下地铁站插队的众生相。仔细观察，的确有意思。好好的两行队伍，有迂回前进型的，就是站在队伍头部的旁边，乘上下车混乱之际挺身而上；也有装无辜型的，就是直接站在你的前面，好似无视你的存在；有逆流行舟型的，就是站在两行队伍的中间，逆着下车的人群硬往上挤；更有蛮不讲理型的，直接插队，还嚷嚷着“人家都是这样的”“哪里有队伍？！”人云亦云，人为我为。这时候倒是不见了要有自己风格的时尚，有的只是物质主义和一己之私。曾在车厢里听到大大咧咧的上海话“就是要挤，不挤就上不来，不挤就没劲道！”以“挤”作为人生乐趣，是不是也太乐观了？！

听着人肉罐头里的吵架声，看着早上七点已经人满为患的站台，不仅要问: 为什么出站的时候大家都要用跑，为什么坐车从来没有队伍，为什么先上后下这么一个简简单单的道理这么多人不懂，或者是不要懂;为什么每个人都有天下为我独尊的“气势”。真的只有这样才叫做生活节奏快吗，我看不见得。突然发觉我问了好多个为什么。以前很反感外国朋友经常问为什么，有什么好问的，中国特色，自然而然。现在自己却问个不断，真的是有些惭愧。

其实有时候还真是感叹上海夜晚的霓虹闪烁，让人想听沙发乐，想买醉…一直听说上海的酒吧和饭馆是只赚不亏。去了酒吧才知道，到不是因为这儿老外聚集，而是更多土生土长的中国人灯红酒绿、纸醉金迷。也许这是所谓的新型生活方式，也许是积累了多时的压力、郁闷在黑暗的软靠椅里得以挥发，也许是蠢蠢欲动的心得以低靡，颓废….

物质下的空虚，这应该是我对所有一切的，至少到现在为止的最好的概括。 其实自己也不知道是缺少了竞争意识，是不习惯了“与人争”的生活状态，还是贪图西方缓慢的生活节奏带来的安逸。或许什么也不是。

“The average … economist is white, middle-class, male, swamped withliterature to absorb or referee, intimidated by his superiors and colleagues,goaded along by two creeds - ‘publish or perish’ and ‘conform or perish’ - and unhappy with the state of current economics. In addition, the typical graduate student - also male, middle class, white - believes success [within the profession] means techniques and not an understanding of the economy or even the literature, even though, as contrary as it may be to common sense, he knows that publications are what will lead to recognition within the discipline.”

Deborah Redman: Economics and the Philosophy of Science

Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform, and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach. Foreign academics must cooperate with academics in China to collect data and co-author research. Surveys are conducted in a manner that is acceptable to the Party, and their content is limited to politically acceptable questions. For academics in China, such choices come naturally. The Western side plays along. China researchers are equally constrained in their solo research. Some Western China scholars have relatives in China. Others own apartments there. Those China scholars whose mother tongue is not Chinese have studied the language for years and have built their careers on this large and nontransferable investment. We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections. Everybody is happy, Western readers for the up-to-date view from academia, we ourselves for prospering in our jobs, and the Party for getting us to do its advertising. China is fairly unique in that the incentives for academics all go one way: One does not upset the Party.

What happens when we don’t play along is all too obvious. We can’t attract Chinese collaborators. When we poke around in China to do research we run into trouble. Li Shaomin, associate professor in the marketing department of City University in Hong Kong and a U.S. citizen, spent five months in a Chinese jail on charges of “endangering state security.” In his own words, his crimes were his critical views of China’s political system, his visits to Taiwan, his use of Taiwanese funds to conduct research on politically sensitive issues, and his collecting research data in China. City University offered no support, and once he was released he went to teach at Old Dominion University in Virginia. One may wonder what five months in the hands of Chinese secret police does to one’s psyche, and what means the Party used to silence Mr. Li. To academics in Hong Kong, the signal was not lost.

China researchers across different disciplines may not all be equally affected. Economists and political scientists are likely to come up against the Party constraint frequently, and perhaps severely. But even sociologists or ethnographers can reach the forbidden zone when doing network studies or examining ethnic minority cultures.

Our self-censorship takes many forms. We ask Western instead of China-relevant questions. We try to explain the profitability of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by basic economic factors, when it may make more sense to explain it by the quality of enterprise management (hand-picked by the Party’s “Organization Department”), or by the political constraints an enterprise faces, or by the political and bureaucratic channels through which an enterprise interacts with its owners, employees, suppliers and buyers. But how to collect systematic information about the influence of the Party on the operation of a state-owned or state-controlled enterprise, when these are typically matters that nobody in the enterprise will speak about?

We talk about economic institutions and their development over time as if they were institutions in the West. “Price administration” regulations, central and local, abound, giving officials far-reaching powers to interfere in the price-setting process. Yet we accept official statistics that show 90% of all prices, by trading value, to be market-determined. We do not question the meaning of the Chinese word shichang, translated as “market,” but presume it to be the same as in the West.

Similarly, we take at face value China’s Company Law, which makes no mention of the Party, even though the Party is likely to still call the shots in the companies organized under the Company Law. Only if one digs deeper will one find unambiguous evidence: The Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and the Shaanxi government in a joint circular of 2006 explicitly require the Party cell in state-owned enterprises (including “companies”) to participate in all major enterprise decisions; the circular also requests that in all provincial state-owned enterprises the chairman of the board of directors and the Party secretary, in principle, are one and the same person. At the national level, the leadership of the 50 largest central state-owned enterprises—enterprises that invest around the world—is directly appointed by the Politburo. Economists do not ask what it means if the Party center increasingly runs enterprises in the U.S. and Europe.

The governor and Party secretary of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, writes extensively in Chinese about “comprehensively accelerating central bank work” based on the “three represents” (the Party represents the “advanced productive forces, the advanced Chinese culture and the basic interests of the Chinese people”). He describes the three represents as “guiding macroeconomic policy” in ways that defy any Western concept of logic. And yet we take this person as seriously as if we were dealing with the governor of a Western central bank, as if China’s central bank were truly setting monetary policy, and as if the channels through which monetary policy operates in China and the impact monetary policy has on the economy are the same as in the West.

Are we naïve? Or are we justified in ignoring the central bank governor’s second—or rather, first—life as Party secretary? Are we subconsciously shutting out something that we do not comprehend, or something we do not want to see because it doesn’t fit into our neat, Western economic concepts?
Article after article pores over the potential economic reasons for the increase in income inequality in China. We ignore the fact that of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2, 932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors—finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities—85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.

With the introduction of each new element of reform and transition, cadres enrich themselves: the dual track price system, the nonperforming loans, the asset-stripping of SOEs, the misuse of funds in investment companies and in private pension accounts. The overwhelmingly irregular transformation of rural into urban land may well qualify as “systematic looting” by local “leaders.” Local cadres are heavily invested in the small, unsafe coal mines they are supposed to close, and nobody knows how they obtained their stakes in these operations.

A general dearth of economic information shapes our research. Statistics on specific current issues are collected by the National Bureau of Statistics on special request of the Party Central Committee and the State Council. None of this information is likely to be available to the public. The quality of the statistics that are published comes with a large question mark. Outside the realm of official statistics, government departments at all levels collect and control internal information. What is published tends to be propaganda—pieces of information released with an ulterior objective in mind. One solution for China economists then is to resign themselves to conducting sterilized surveys and to building abstract models on the basis of convenient assumptions—of perfect competition, profit maximization given a production technology, household utility maximization with respect to consumption and subject to financial constraints, etc. How much this can tell us about China is unclear.

Other China economists openly accept favors from the Party. We can use our connections to link up with government cadres. We may be hosted in field research by local governments and local Party committees. A local Party committee, at one point, helped me out by providing a car, a Party cadre and a local government official. They directed me to enterprise managers who, presumably, gave all the right answers. The hosts were invariably highly supportive, but I ended up working in exactly the box in which they were thinking and operating. (This seems to be the only research project that I never completed.) Furthermore, those who go to the field and interview cadres may not only unwillingly become a tool of the Party, but also a tool in departmental infighting.

Our use of language to conform to the image the Party wishes to project is pervasive. Would the description “a secret society characterized by an attitude of popular hostility to law and government” not properly describe the secrecy of the Party’s operations, its supremacy above the law and its total control of government? In Webster’s New World College Dictionary, this is the definition of “mafia.”

We speak of the Chinese “government” without further qualification when more than 95% of the “leadership cadres” are Party members, key decisions are reached by leadership cadres in their function as members of Party work committees, the staff of the government Personnel Ministry is virtually identical to the staff of the Party Organization Department, the staff of the Supervision Ministry is virtually identical to the staff of the Party Disciplinary Commission, and the staff of the PRC Central Military Commission is usually 100% identical to the staff of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Does China’s government actually govern China, or is it merely an organ that implements Party decisions? By using the word “government,” is it correct to grant the Chinese “government” this association with other, in particular Western, governments, or would it not be more accurate to call it the “government with Chinese characteristics” or the “mafia’s front man”? Who questions the legitimacy of the Party leadership to rule China, and to rule it the way it does?

The Party’s—or, the mafia’s—terminology pervades our writing and teaching. We do not ask if the Chinese Communist Party is communist, the People’s Congresses are congresses of the people, the People’s Liberation Army is liberating or suppressing the people, or if the judges are not all appointed by the Party and answer to the Party. We say “Tiananmen incident,” in conformance with Party terminology, but called it “Tiananmen massacre” right after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, when “incident” would have made us look too submissive to the Party.

Which Western textbook on China’s political system elaborates on the Party’s selection and de facto appointment of government officials and parliamentary delegates, and, furthermore, points out these procedures as different from how we view political parties, government and parliament in the West? By following the Party’s lead in giving the names of Western institutions to fake Chinese imitations, we sanctify the Party’s pretenses. We are not even willing to call China what its own constitution calls it: a dictatorship (a “people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants, which is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat”).

Who lays out the systematic sale of leadership positions across Chinese governments and Party committees? The Heilongjiang scandal provides the going price list from the province down to the county level, a list not to be found in any textbook. The publicly known scope of the sale of positions does not leave much room for interpretation. For these salesmen and saleswomen of government positions to have nothing to fear, the rule of the mafia and its code of silence must be powerful beyond imagination.

What is not normal is accepted as normal for China. Hackers were collecting the incoming emails of a faculty member of the University of Hong Kong from the university’s server until they were found out in June 2005, when they accidentally deleted emails. The hackers came from three mainland Internet provider addresses, and all three IP addresses are state telecommunications firms. Within China, the staff of the foreign students’ dormitories includes public security officials who keep tabs on foreign students and compile each student’s file. In a Shanghai institution of tertiary education, typing “Jiang Zemin” into a search engine from a computer located on campus, three times in a row, leads to the automatic shutdown of access to that search engine for the whole campus. The Party is rumored to employ tens of thousands of Internet “police.” Phone calls are listened to, if not systematically recorded. Emails are filtered and sometimes not delivered. Who will not learn to instinctively avoid what the Party does not want them to think or do?

Party propaganda has found its way deeply into our thinking. The importance of “social stability” and nowadays a “harmonious society” are accepted unconditionally as important for China. But is a country with more than 200 incidents of social unrest every day really socially stable, and its society harmonious? Or does “socially stable” mean no more than acceptance of the rule of the mafia? “Local government bad, central government good” is another propaganda truism that is accepted unquestioningly in the foreign research community, informing and shaping research questions. Yet, viewing the Party as a mafia, there is no room for such niceties, and reporting outside academia indeed suggests that the center hides a rather hideous second face, and inevitably does so for a purpose.

We see the “ends”—successful reform—and don’t question the “means.” The Party’s growth mantra is faithfully accepted as the overarching objective for the country and the one measure of successful reform. Nobody lingers on the political mechanisms through which growth is achieved. The mafia runs China rather efficiently, so why worry about how it is done, and what the “side effects” are? We obviously know of the labor camps into which people disappear without judiciary review, of torture inflicted by the personnel of state “security” organs, and of the treatment of Falun Gong, but choose to move on with our sterilized research and teaching. We ignore that China’s political system is responsible for 30 million dead from starvation in the Great Leap Forward, and 750,000 to 1.5 million murders during the Cultural Revolution. What can make Western academics stop and think twice about who they have bedded down with?

If academics don’t, who will? The World Bank and other international organizations won’t because they profit from dealing with China. Their banking relationship depends on amicable cooperation with the Party, and a de facto requirement of their research collaboration is that the final report and the public statements are acceptable to Party censors. The research departments of Western investment banks won’t because the banks’ other arms likely depend on business with China.

Does this all matter? Does it matter if China researchers ignore the political context in which they operate and the political constraints that shape their work? Does it matter if we present China to the West the way the Party leadership must like us to present China, providing narrow answers to our self-censored research questions and offering a sanitized picture of China’s political system?
The size of China’s economy will exceed that of the U.S., in purchasing power terms, by 2008 or 2009. China is a country with which Western economies are increasingly intertwined: A quarter of Chinese industry is foreign-owned and we depend on Chinese industry for cheap consumer goods. Ultimately, our pensions, invested in multinationals that increasingly produce in China, depend on the continued economic rise of China. But does the West understand that country and its rulers? At what point, and through what channels, will the Party leadership with its different views of human rights and the citizens’ rights affect our choices of political organization and political freedoms in the West (as it has affected academic research and teaching)? And to what extent are China researchers guilty of putting their own rice bowl before honest thinking and teaching?

Mr. Holz is an economist and professor in the social science division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Source: Far Eastern Economic Review

Niemand weiß, ob Liu Xingzhi hätte gerettet werden können. Der Dreijährige hatte im Dezember in der Provinz Sichuan gespielt, als ein Mercedes ihn anfuhr. Der Fahrer, ein Mitarbeiter einer Aluminium-Firma, rief weder Krankenwagen noch Polizei. Stattdessen stieg er aus, wie Augenzeugen sagten, schaute sich den Jungen an, und rollte dann erneut mit den Reifen über den Körper. Als Polizei und Ärzte eintrafen, war das Kind tot.

“Malu Zhuihun Shou” werden sie in China genannt - frei übersetzt: Seelenjäger der Straße”. Um Entschädigungszahlungen und teure Behandlungen zu vermeiden, fahren Autofahrer in China Medienberichten zufolge die Opfer von Verkehrsunfällen absichtlich tot. “Fälle wie diese passieren häufig”, meldet die Tianfu Morgenzeitung aus Chengdu. Nur selten weisen die Behörden den Tätern eine vorsätzliche Straftat nach.Ein Menschenleben ist in China nicht viel wert, vor allem auf der Straße. Fast 100 000 Chinesen sterben jedes Jahr bei Verkehrsunfällen. Viele der Unfälle passieren auf dem Land, wo die Menschen keine Verkehrsregeln kennen und oft ohne Autoverkehr groß wurden. Laut Gesetz muss ein Unfallverursacher den Hinterbliebenen eine einmalige Entschädigung zahlen. Dabei kostet ein Bauernleben nur ein Drittel von dem eines Städters. In der Provinz Anhui bekam die Familie eines Bauern, der im Verkehr getötet wurde, nur rund 5000 Euro. Wenn das Opfer den Unfall überlebt, sind die Kosten oft deutlich höher. Der Autofahrer muss für die Behandlung im Krankenhaus, den Verdienstausfall und für Schmerzensgeld aufkommen.

Im Fall von Liu Xingzhi konnten oder wollten die Behörden dem Fahrer keine Absicht nachweisen. Der Untersuchungsbericht der Polizei kommt zu dem Schluss, dass der Junge bei einem Unfall getötet wurde. Medienberichten zufolge soll die Firma des Fahrers der Familie 30 000 Yuan als Entschädigung angeboten haben - 3000 Euro. Viele Chinesen sind empört. “Die Handlung des Mercedes-Fahrers ist Mord. Er sollte die Todesstrafe bekommen”, schrieb jemand im Internetforum Sina.com. Andere forderten eine Änderung der Gesetze: “Die Ursache ist ein Defizit in unserem Strafrecht. Wenn ein Fahrer nach einem Unfall flüchtet, bekommt er nur eine leichte Strafe.”

Pekings Regierung hat angekündigt, die Entschädigung neu zu regeln. Die aktuellen Gesetze stimmten nicht mit dem Gleichheitsgrundsatz der Verfassung überein, sagte der Präsident des Obersten Gerichtshofes, Xiao Yang, am Rande des Volkskongresses im März. Wann ein neues Entschädigungsgesetz kommt, ist unklar.

Für manche ist das brutale Vorgehen der Autofahrer ein Ausdruck der Klassengesellschaft, die sich in der Volksrepublik herausgebildet hat. Oft sind es die Besitzer von Luxusautos, die Fahrerflucht begehen oder ihre Opfer absichtlich überrollen. Vor drei Jahren geriet eine BMW-Fahrerin im nordchinesischen Harbin mit einer Zwiebelverkäuferin in Streit, die mit ihrem Karren einen Kratzer an das Auto gefahren hatte. Nach einem Wortgefecht stieg die Fahrerin in ihren Geländewagen und fuhr die Bäuerin tot. Aus Versehen, behauptete sie später.

Frankfurter Rundschau
http://fr-aktuell.de/in_und_ausland/politik/aktuell/?em_cnt=1105911

其实本想将题目取成 “伊斯坦布尔之旅”, ‘旅”当然取其意为 “旅行”.突然想起此行土耳其名为旅行并不怎么恰当,不是指其字面意思,而是据中国文俗习惯对 “旅行”的理解.

外国人总是对中国旅行社所筹办的欧洲七日游,或者九日游嗤之以鼻,认为在仅仅七到九天之内游完欧洲这么多的国家简直是天方夜谭,充其量也只能是在每个国家的首都合影留念,以作为今后在亲戚好友面前的骄傲谈资.

不过的确也是,不管是境内游,还是境外游,凡是旅游,中国人的传统概念即在最短的时间内看最多的风景名胜,这也应了经济效益的最大化理论.所以大凡旅行,总是走马观花,结果是虽然看尽大好河山,却换得个人也疲了,马也疲了,结论是:还是在家里待着舒坦.

此行在一个城市待了六天,当然不符合旅行的效率和速度.

作为一个中国人想伊斯坦布尔,就像一个普通的德国人想北京,充满了无限的神秘色彩.古典的白裙舞,绚丽的地毯,路边老人的水烟筒,还有民族特色的音乐…..

结果在从伊机场去宾馆的路上,竟然惊谔地发现伊的住宅楼和城市交通建设居然和中国有着如此之多的相似之处.不免有些失望.到了老市区见到清真寺弧型屋顶和四周环绕的塔尖,才感受到了这个城市的特别之处.逗留期间,偶尔在宾馆里看看书,听听雨声;或是在市区中央大道上漫步,在路边的咖啡室点上一杯土耳其苹果茶或是土耳其咖啡,享受阳光;偶尔兴致勃勃地参观不同风格的清真寺,感受里面肃穆虔诚的伊斯兰氛围.真的很难想象,也很难描述这样的圆顶建筑里蕴藏的静谧虔诚的宗教气氛,那么的神圣,那么的执着….当古兰经在这个城市的每个角落想起;当无数一袭黑衣包裹只剩眼睛露在外面的土耳其妇女在你身边匆匆路过,眼睑低垂;当虔诚的宗教信仰者清洗手脚,在庄严的清真寺内面向麦加叩跪,你真的很难不被这种文化,这种和宗教融为一体的文化所吸引,所震撼.

很可惜,因为此行之前走得匆忙,没有对土耳其的历史,以及伊斯兰教的形成,发展有所了解,所以未免对某些习俗和宗教发展有许多的疑问.不过,也许正因为如此,为伊以及它的文化蒙上了一层神秘的色彩.记得的是,在落日晚霞里的弧型清真寺还有映衬着他的蓝色的海真的很美很美.

Mittags um 12 Uhr bin ich pünktlich im Kuhviertel aufgetaucht..(Ich wundere mich immer über die deutschen Straßenname, wie „Kuhviertel“, „Untermühllagstraße“, weiss nicht, ob man sie wirklich im Sinne des Wortes interpretieren darf.). Christoph und Irene waren mit einem großen Tüter schon da. Während wir laut „Hella“ schrieen, haben wir sowie die anderen Erwachsene auch fleißig gegen die Kinder nebenbei gekämpt, um Bonbons, Popcorns zu erhalten. Es hat ziemlich Spass gemacht (Eine geschenkte gelbe Rose hat mich am besten gefallen.), obwohl die Bonbons uns nicht wirklich schmecken. Womit ich mich nicht gerechnt habe, ist die aufrende Stimmung. Alle waren nicht weniger angeheitert als damals die Leute in Freiburg. In China wird man bei solchen Umzug schon längst komisch angestarrt und für Idioten gehalten, wenn man inzwischen bisschen schreit oder mit der Musik Körper bewegt..

Aber man muss auch zugeben, dass die gute aufregende Atmosphäre teilweise von Alkohol verursacht wird. Nach dem Umzug waren auf dem Domplatz voller betrunkener Leute (vor allem junge Leute). Die tanzetn, sangen, schrieen und drängten die anderen Leute, erbrochen sich auf der Straße,  warfen die Bierflaschen rücksichtslos auf den Boden oder ließen die auf den Boden rollen, verhielten sich so wie Verrückte. Als wir durch das Menschenmeer gingen, empfang ich zwar noch sehr stark ferierliche Stimmung, aber ich sah auch unglaublich viele zerbrochene Gläser, Zigaretten auf den Straßen, ich sah die beschäftigte Krankenwägen und ich sah Chaos und Rücksichtslosigkeit. Auch in China sehen große Feierm nicht so aus, obwohl die Chinesen laut Deutschen allgemein weniger Alkohol ertragen können. Ich habe schon seit langem die Bierkultur und –tradtion kennengelernt. Und ich verstehe auch, dass mengengemäße Alkoholika zur richtigen Stimmung führt. Aber muss man unbedingt betrunken sein, um zu feiern, um zu zeigen, wie froh und cool man ist? Ich frage nur, seit wann ist unendlicher Alkohol die einzige Weise zur Unterhaltung und Feier?

Nein, diese Fragen haben überhaupt nichts mit politischer Ausrichtung oder mit Weltanschauung zu tun, sondern allein mit der Qualität von Argumenten. Fürs politische Geschäft scheint die weniger relevant zu sein. Am Ende gewinnt Sinn. Gysi fährt nach der Sendung wieder ins politische Berlin und kämpft weiter für den Mindestlohn, Sinn zurück nach München in den Elfenbeinturm. Er darf froh sein, wenn er mal einen Anruf aus Berlin bekommt - um sein Konzept Kombilohn vorzustellen.

留德已数月,每天为了学习忙忙碌碌,突然发现已经很久没有用中文写一些什么.有时候不得不感叹技术对人影响的潜移默化,像我一个总将中国文字之美,之博大精深挂在嘴边的人,当偶然兴致而起想要用文字记录一些什么的时候,不是真正意义上的 写 ,也只是习惯性地毫无感觉地敲打着键盘,不知道是该为自己的与时俱进感到高兴,还是应该觉得可悲.当然这也只是题外话.一个星期以前收到从中国寄来的筷子,要提一句,走得匆忙,竟然将每个中国人都引以为荣的吃饭工具忘了.为此,也一直成为这儿几个留学同胞的笑柄.其实用刀叉除了让人联想到血腥以外.我到是也没有觉得任何不妥.只是几天以前第一次用筷子吃东西的时候,突然发现我已经不再习惯于筷子的细嚼慢咽,而是更倾向于用叉大块吃肉.不禁深刻感受到全球同化的危机感,还有在全球化和国际化的同时用本国文字写一些东西的必要性.听上去似乎有些抽象,事实上也是.不过,一人身处异国.所见所闻所想之丰富,文化差异之巨令人诧异.如果不及时将这些记录下来未免是一种遗憾.十年,二十年以后,回头看看,如果天唐的世界还存在,也许会窃笑年轻的单纯,也许会感悟这段经历的珍贵,也许也会为年轻时候追求梦想所做的努力有一丝丝的感动.所谓开篇,仅此而已!

“Nous ne désirons pas les choses parce qu’elles sont bonnes, mais nous les déclarons bonnes parce que nous les désirons.”

Spinoza

July 5 issue - Flat on my back, my eyes shrouded with LED goggles and my ears encased in headphones, I was trundled into the maw of an fMRI machine in a basement lab at the California Institute of Technology. The business end of an fMRI is a giant cylindrical magnet, similar to the MRI machines doctors use to diagnose tumors, but with the added ability to show changes in brain activity as they happen—hence the “f,” which stands for “functional.” In the magnet’s powerful field, blood sloshing back and forth inside my head reveals its presence with minute electromagnetic signals. In the control room next door are Steven Quartz, a Caltech neuroscientist, and Colin Camerer, an economist, who are looking inside my brain to help understand some of the most vexing problems in postmodern society—irrational market bubbles, intractable Third World poverty and loser brothers-in-law who want to borrow $5,000 to open a franchised back-rub parlor. My brain was helping science explain why, despite centuries of progress in economic theory since Adam Smith, actual human beings so often refuse to behave as equations say they should.

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. Of course, economists know that the world doesn’t actually work this way; if it did, you wouldn’t need Jane Bryant Quinn to remind people once a month to save for retirement. But until recently the anomalies were chalked up to the pernicious influence of emotions, emanations from the primitive regions of the brain, a kind of mental noise interfering with the pure, rational expression of economic self-interest. The new paradigm sweeping the field, under the rubric of “behavioral economics,” holds that studying what people actually do is at least as valuable as deriving equations for what they should do. And when you look at human behavior, you discover, as Camerer and his collaborator George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon have written, that “the Platonic metaphor of the mind as a charioteer driving twin horses of reason and emotion is on the right track—except that cognition is a smart pony, and emotion a big elephant.” The fMRI machine enables researchers in the emerging field of neuroeconomics to investigate the interplay of fear, anger, greed and altruism that are activated each time we touch that most intimate of our possessions, our wallets.

Economists have many ways of demonstrating the irrationality of their favorite experimental animal, Homo sapiens. One is the “ultimatum game,” which involves two subjects—researchers generally recruit undergraduates, but if you’re doing this at home, feel free to use your own kids. Subject A gets 10 dollar bills. He can choose to give any number of them to subject B, who can accept or reject the offer. If she accepts, they split the money as A proposed; if she rejects A’s offer, both get nothing. As predicted by the theories of mathematician John Nash (subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”), A makes the most money by offering one dollar to B, keeping nine for himself, and B should accept it, because one dollar is better than none.

But if you ignore the equations and focus on how people actually behave, you see something different, says Jonathan D. Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton. People playing B who receive only one or two dollars overwhelmingly reject the offer. Economists have no better explanation than simple spite over feeling shortchanged. This becomes clear when people play the same game against a computer. They tend to accept whatever they’re offered, because why feel insulted by a machine? By the same token, most normal people playing A offer something close to an even split, averaging about $4. The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible amount, are those who don’t take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics.

The fMRI machine shows how all this works inside the brain. A low offer stimulates activity in the brain’s insular cortex, a relatively primitive region associated with negative emotions including anger and disgust. This appears to compete with the more highly evolved prefrontal cortex, the locus of the rational impulse to take the dollar and go buy a soda with it. The more activity in the insular cortex, the more likely subjects were to reject the offer. This is a big step toward being able to see on a screen what people actually want, rather than what they say in focus groups or interviews. Would brain-scan-assisted matchmaking or employee headhunting be more efficient than the way these have been carried out until now? Or would the fMRI merely ratify the judgments of intuition? Psychologists can hardly wait to find out.

And for their part, economists can hardly contain their glee at the research horizons this opens up. “Imagine if you could go on the floor of the stock exchange and see what was going on in traders’ brains,” says Camerer. “We kept hearing during the bubble that people were behaving as if they were in a delusional state. Well, were they or weren’t they?” People don’t save enough for their retirements because of a phenomenon known as forward discounting: they value money more in the here and now than 20 years down the road. If we could understand how this process works in the brain, says Paul Glimcher, a leading neuroscientist at New York University, we would have a head start on figuring out how to overcome it. Much of Glimcher’s work is with monkeys, which can be implanted (safely and painlessly, he stresses) with electrodes that can detect in real time the firing of a single neuron. By contrast, the fMRI only indirectly tracks brain function by measuring blood flow. This is an im-precise indicator both spatially—it deals with regions of hundreds of thousands of neurons—and temporally, since it lags several seconds behind the neural activity it reflects. Monkeys, obviously, don’t save for their retirements, and you couldn’t expect them to grasp the rules of the ultimatum game. But they do have a rudimentary concept of economic choice, and researchers have discovered a medium of exchange—Berry Berry fruit drink—that can usefully stand in for money in a monkey’s mental life. To illustrate how monkeys make economic decisions, Glimcher’s former colleague Michael Platt, now at Duke, has investigated how they value status within their troop. Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member. It isn’t known exactly why monkeys do this, but the finding might help explain the behavior of human beings who pay $1,000 just to sit in a hotel ballroom with the president. You can draw whatever conclusion you choose from Platt’s finding that there is no quantity of juice sufficient to get a male monkey to look away from the hindquarters of a female in estrus.

Glimcher is trying to piece together the building blocks of economic choice in the brain, starting at the most basic level of a single neuron. In weighing options—a gamble on a roulette wheel, say, or the purchase of a bond—economists invoke the concept of “expected value.” It is the potential payoff of a given course of action, multiplied by the chance of collecting it. Hence the expected value of tossing a coin to win $1 is 50 cents. A more sophisticated mathematical function called “expected utility” takes into account most people’s inborn aversion to risk, and appears to more accurately reflect how people actually make these choices. Tossing a coin for $10 million or getting a guaranteed $5 million both have the same expected value, but a different expected utility—and most people who aren’t already millionaires would take the sure thing. (Or so economists believe. No one has come up with the funding to test the hypothesis.) In his monkey research Glimcher has isolated individual neurons that fire in response to the expectation of getting a drink of juice. By manipulating the odds of getting the drink and the size of the drink, he has shown that the rate at which these neurons fire is proportionate to the expected utility of the juice payoff. The implication is electrifying, especially to economists: an abstract, mathematically derived formula appears to be literally hard-wired into the primate brain.

And that, in turn, is a step toward the holy grail of marketing: being able to figure out how people will make choices that haven’t been offered yet. The same tools that can answer deep questions about primate behavior can also be used to get people to sign up for more cell-phone minutes than there actually are in a month. A handful of researchers in the United States and Europe are already using fMRIs to test how product brands are represented in the brain. The goal of every consumer marketer is to have people “identify” with a brand, to develop the kind of loyalty that goes far beyond a utilitarian preference for, say, one kind of pickup truck over another. Emory University psychologist Clint Kilts scanned subjects as they looked at a variety of products, from cars to soft drinks, and found that this sense of brand identification elicited a strong response in the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the brain area associated with what psychologists call the “sense of self,” one’s self-constructed identity. His insights are now being offered to the corporations of the world through the BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group in Atlanta, a pioneer in the emerging field of neuromarketing. “There’s a pretty big gap in our understanding of consumers, which neuroscience can help close,” says Justine Meaux, a researcher at BrightHouse. But—well aware of the Orwellian implications of this work—she hastens to add that “there’s no ‘buy button’ out there to be found. We’re not going to subvert free will. This isn’t about screwing the consumer.”

Glimcher has thought about these questions, too. Based on his research into choice and preference, he says, “If a corporation came here and said, ‘We want to be able to tell the lowest salary a candidate will accept for a job,’ I wouldn’t do it. But given six months or a year, I think it would be possible.” Of course, he admits, you couldn’t scan people’s brains, practically or ethically, without their knowing it. So they would have to voluntarily submit to an fMRI scan. Would they? Well, Glimcher says, “how badly do you want the job?”

Inside the scanner at Caltech, I played a version of what economists call the “investment game.” Quartz, in the next room, watched images of my brain while I manipulated a thumb switch and studied choices on fiber-optic goggles. At the same time his collaborator Read Montague was overseeing a subject inside a similar machine in his laboratory at Baylor University. The game is played thusly: at the start of each of 10 rounds, I am given an imaginary stake of $10. I can keep it all, or “invest” some or all of it with my opposite number at Baylor. Anything I invest gets tripled, and the other player then has the option of returning any portion of that amount back to me. If I keep $5 and invest $5, the other player has $15 to divide between us. He can keep it all and send me nothing if he chooses, but since in this version of the game we play for 10 rounds—there are also one-round variations—he obviously has an incentive to keep my trust. This game investigates one of the hottest topics in behavioral economics: interpersonal trust. Observing that some societies are consistently richer than others, social scientists have invoked such ingenious explanations as “the Protestant ethic” (of working and saving for the future) or “the resource curse” (when an elite controls a valuable natural resource, such as oil, and has no incentive to encourage political and economic modernization). One of the newest explanations is “trust,” which varies widely between societies and is strongly correlated with economic growth, says Paul Zak, an economist at Claremont Graduate University. Trust encourages savings and investment, and reduces the “transaction cost” of investigating the people you do business with. But, compared with well-studied behaviors such as aggression, relatively little is known about the biological basis for trust. (Zak’s own research is not on brain function directly, but on oxytocin, a hormone that seems to promote trust. It is usually studied in relation not to the stock market but to lovemaking and breast-feeding.)

“If we knew what creates trust and could intervene to encourage it, we could do a lot of good for the world,” says Camerer. Hence the investment game. Because the participants have no outside force to keep them honest, it represents an unusually pure test of interpersonal trust in a laboratory setting. And I was determined to ace it! I didn’t get a seat on the subway to work for 39 consecutive days last year by trusting the other passengers to leave one for me.

My approach, it turns out, is consistent with some of the findings coming out of Quartz and Montague’s research. The cingulate cortex, which processes both emotions and abstract thinking, becomes especially active after one player betrays the other by cutting back on how much he shares—as if the brain, or at least this crucial part of it, is “hypertuned” to detect betrayal. Quartz has also seen intriguing differences between men and women in the scanner. Men’s brains tend to shut down after they’ve made their decision, awaiting a reply from the other subject. But women don’t relax so easily; they show continued activity in at least three areas—the ventral striatum (the brain’s center for anticipating rewards), the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (which is involved with planning and organizing) and the caudate nucleus (a checking and monitoring region, sometimes associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder). Women, says Quartz, seem to obsess more over whether they did the right thing—and how the other subject will react to them.

There’s one other intriguing discovery coming out of this work, which has even the scientists baffled: with approximately 85 percent accuracy, the subjects, separated by the distance from Los Angeles to Texas, can guess whether they’re playing against a man or a woman. They appear to be picking up on subtle clues in the interactions that the scientists themselves haven’t identified.

So here was my strategy. In total defiance of the social norms that should incline me toward cooperation and trust, I pursued the single-minded goal of amassing as many points as possible. Recognizing that the more I invested the more money there would be for both of us to split, on each round I sent all 10 dollars to my counterpart, who routinely returned $16 (of $30) to me—just enough over half to keep me going.

That is, until the ninth round, when, I calculated, the other subject could come out ahead by keeping the whole $30. So I got there first: I “invested” zero. I did the same on the last round and cleared a hypothetical $148 ($16 times eight rounds, plus $10 times two rounds) to her (or his) $112 ($14 times eight rounds). And I pulled off one more coup: I figured out, correctly as it happened, that I was playing against a woman. I reasoned that a man would have been just as competitive as I am, and guessed that I was going to betray him on the ninth round—so he would have kept all $30 to himself on the eighth round. At least, most of the ones I know would have, although maybe a sample consisting mostly of journalists isn’t entirely representative. Out of such tiny insights, scientists are constructing a model for some of the most intricate and sophisticated decisions a fully evolved human being can face in the modern world. And maybe, in some small way, if Camerer and his colleagues are right, making the world a more trusting and cooperative—and peaceful—place.

With Mary Carmichael
Source: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5304846/site/newsweek/

Like a dove flying a gauntlet, my article flew out of my hands at 6 p.m. and landed in the next day’s paper a flightless, ugly thing. It sailed the jet streams of copy editors, senior editors, and night editors, both foreign and Chinese, losing a feather here, a quote there, a harsh edge, a word, a thought, an idea, and, eventually, its point. What I read the next morning was still, in its discussion of political theory, riskier than the state-owned China Daily’s usual fare, and that consoled me a little. But it had no bite.

Soon after I arrived as an intern at China Daily, I was asked to profile Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He teaches political philosophy, a touchy subject in China. After a few emails and our first encounter, it dawned on me that I would need to tread controversial territory. First, there was only one reason his academics focused on China: He fell in love with a Chinese woman in the tense, pre-tragedy moments of May 1989. Second, though a communitarian and a critic of both U.S. policy and American values, he has less than glowing praise for the Party and continues to encounter various forms of censorship.

Bell had written about his teaching experiences in Beijing for Dissent magazine, a leftist American academic journal, and the article was later translated into Chinese. This prompted a storm of online commentary. A Chinese-language newspaper — the weekly Freezing Point supplement of China Youth Daily, whose editors a few months ago got “clearing-housed” for political reasons — had profiled him already. When I was done my first draft, one editor began to point out tidbits from that article mine did not include. She repeatedly asked me to insert them. Among such crucial detail was him lecturing at the Central Party School in Beijing and being called handsome by some girls in the audience. She also asked me to find out if he had Chinese furniture in his apartment.

Mentioning that Bell had experienced some censorship in China was itself censored, and bizarrely at that. The word “censorship” was removed and replaced with “restrictions” by one editor. Even that euphemism was obliterated in the copy that made it to print. The editor who axed the censorship sections of my article, while listening to me list the mistakes that had been edited into my draft, turned to me and said, “I thought the most interesting part of your article was that he owned a restaurant.” The word “revolution,” used in a quote, underwent the strangest transformation. Bell told me that May 1989 was a heady, passionate time — that on one hand he was in love and on the other “… she was cancelling dates for the revolution.” This was juicy and I included it.

However, after the sentence had made it through several editorial levels, it became “`cancelling dates’ for the goings-on at the time.” I’m not kidding. One editor tried to edit that ending into the direct quote. Eventually, even the reference to the month of May was removed, and it simply became 1989 — not passionate or particularly heady of the night editor, an Indian expatriate formerly of Singapore’s pseudo state-owned The Straits Times. He was not the one, however, who aborted the entire section on Singapore’s authoritarian oppression; it was removed far earlier than that, though the editor made a point of noting I had not, in discussing Singapore, violated “the cardinal rules” of China Daily. I replaced the section with a less detailed, more softly worded critique, which made it through.

Hong Kong was, obviously, changed to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and China (in the same sentence) to “the mainland.” This was, as an editor offhandedly remarked, not a politicized change but a matter of style. I promptly consulted the China Daily style guide. Oops. On other points of “style,” the guide instructs its followers to use quotation marks around the title of any government official from Taiwan. And also, that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.”

By this time of course, the whole thing was turning into a farce. My enthusiasm at Trojan-horsing a meaningful article at this non-meaningful paper was waning. It was only such edited-in gems as “… U.S.-style democracy, as a social model to be imitated, is not so widely embraced in Asia,” that kept me going. I read that phrase and burst into tearful laughter.

“Some people in Asia embrace it,” an editor later told me without looking at me.
I knew I was asking for trouble with most of the article. This is China Daily, after all. But what could I do? They asked me to profile someone inspired to come to China by a horrible massacre and who writes about human rights. These are slightly more than trifling, removable details. An English copy editor called me over to clarify some details; he then separated vast swathes of my article, turned to me, and said, “This is China Daily. We just don’t, you know, say this.” It seemed that some foreigners were almost more anxious to axe controversy than our Chinese colleagues.

I was in my apartment the evening before the article’s publication when I received a call from the night editor. A solid guy, that night editor. He made some good comments about cultural inaccuracies. He then made no changes to my cultural inaccuracies, but tore my copy to shreds and replaced an uncontroversial sentence with a Strunk and White-soul-destroying diamond: “It was 1989 and among the Chinese students he was hanging out with was someone he met and fell in love with: Song Bing …”

The next morning I read the awkward headline grinning at me like a naughty child: “Communitarianism, Confucianism: He’s got all that figured out.” I am, perhaps, not alone in thinking this reeks of an entertainment magazine for children heralding a new boy band, and not of a national newspaper. Near the end I included the professor’s suggestion for Confucian-styled democratic reform: a bicameral legislature with two houses, the highest being elected by competitive exams. Sexy, huh? Strangely, this was left untouched. The editors probably assumed anyone among China Daily’s readership who made it that far either would not understand it, would not care, or would have grown up under a democratic system. They probably had nothing to worry about, I suppose: No one gets to the end of articles anyway.

Iain Marlow is a Canadian journalism student working at China Daily.

Reicher Mann und armer Mann
Standen da und sahn sich an.
Und der Arme sagte bleich:
Wär ich nicht arm, wärst du nicht reich.

In China ist möglicherweise erstmals ein Mensch an der Vogelgrippe gestorben. Experten schlossen nicht aus, dass das zwölfjährige Mädchen aus der Provinz Hunan mit dem Erreger infiziert war. Sein Bruder und ein Lehrer erholten sich von der Krankheit.

China bat die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) um Unterstützung. Ursprünglich hatten chinesische Behörden erklärt, das Mädchen und sein Bruder seien negativ auf den Erreger der Vogelgrippe getestet worden. Nach Angaben der amtlichen Nachrichtenagentur Xinhua waren sie und der Lehrer im Oktober an einer Lungenentzündung erkrankt. Alle lebten in dem Dorf Wantang oder in der Umgebung und hatten mit Hühnern Kontakt. In Wantang starben nach Behördenangaben im Oktober 545 Hühner an der Vogelgrippe. In der Provinz Liaoning setzten die Behörden die Tötung tausender Vögeln im Dorf Badaohao fort, wie Xinhua berichtete. In der Region an der Grenze zu Nordkorea wurden bereits 8940 Hühner und fast 370 000 weitere Vögel getötet. Das Gebiet liegt nach dem Bericht auf der Route von Zugvögeln.

Indonesien bestätigte zwei weitere Fälle von Vogelgrippe beim Menschen. Eine 19- Jährige aus der Stadt Tangerang bei Jakarta erlag der Krankheit, wie das Gesundheitsministerium erklärte. Ein achtjähriger Verwandter der Frau wurde im Krankenhaus behandelt. In Indonesien haben sich damit neun Menschen mit dem Erreger H5N1 infiziert, fünf von ihnen sind tot.

Mit einem Aktionsplan gegen Vogelgrippe will die Weltgemeinschaft ihren Kampf gegen die Tierkrankheit verschärfen. Der Plan soll bei einer dreitägigen internationalen Konferenz vom heutigen Montag an in Genf unter Leitung der WHO debattiert werden. Fast 700 Vertreter von Regierungen und Organisationen nehmen teil. ap/dpa

Frankfurter Rundschau online 2005
http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/aus_aller_welt/?cnt=752571

Die Wirtschaft wächst mit atemberaubendem Tempo und ohne Rücksicht auf die Natur. Pan Yue, Vize-Umweltminister des Landes, schlägt Alarm. Ein ZEIT-Gespräch

DIE ZEIT: Herr Vizeminister, alle Welt schaut neidisch auf das chinesische Wirtschaftswunder. Sind auch Sie begeistert?

Pan Yue: Unser Wirtschaftswunder besteht aus vielen Superlativen, positiven wie negativen. Die chinesische Industrie wächst rasant. Bei den ausländischen Direktinvestitionen liegen wir auf Platz zwei. Und China ist mittlerweile die drittgrößte Handelsnation der Erde. Aber gleichzeitig verschmutzen wir eben unser Wasser wie kein zweites Land der Erde. Beim Energieverbrauch liegt China auf Platz zwei. Und in punkto saurer Regen auf Platz drei.

ZEIT: Und, wie ist Ihre Bilanz unterm Strich?
Pan: Früher habe ich voller Stolz gesagt: China ist die Werkbank der Welt. Heute treibt mich die Sorge um, China nicht zur Müllhalde der Welt verkommen zu lassen.

ZEIT: Welche Umweltprobleme beunruhigen Sie am meisten?

Pan: Ich habe viele Sorgen. Ein Drittel der chinesischen Städte leidet unter starker Luftverschmutzung, auf einem Drittel der chinesischen Landesfläche wachsen die Wüsten, und ein Drittel der ländlichen Flüsse ist stark verschmutzt. Obendrein sind sogar 90 Prozent aller Flüsse, die Städte durchqueren, verdreckt.

ZEIT: Die Wassernot nehmen laut einer Umfrage Ihrer Behörde die Chinesen als größtes Umweltproblem wahr.

Pan: Ja. Wasser ist in China nicht nur schmutzig, sondern auch knapp. Womöglich entscheidet die Wasserproblematik sogar über die Zukunft unseres Landes – obwohl unsere traditionelle Kultur aufs Engste mit dem Wasser verbunden ist. Eine alte chinesische Weisheit lautet: Wer sich gegen das Wasser stellt, der stellt sich gegen das Leben.

ZEIT: Es mangelt Ihrem Land an allen möglichen natürlichen Ressourcen, nicht nur am Wasser.

Pan: Das ist wirklich ein großes Problem. China besitzt nur neun Prozent der weltweiten landwirtschaftlich nutzbaren Fläche, nur sechs Prozent der Wasserressourcen und gar nur vier Prozent des Waldes. Damit ernähren wir gegenwärtig 22 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung – und sind stolz auf diese Leistung. Wenn es uns aber nicht gelingt, in Zukunft mit unseren knappen Ressourcen sparsamer zu wirtschaften, bekommen nicht nur wir ein Problem, sondern auch der Rest der Welt.

ZEIT: Welche volkswirtschaftlichen Kosten verursachen Raubbau und Umweltverschmutzung?

Pan: Wir ermitteln das gerade. Wir wollen bei uns in China das Sozialprodukt in Zukunft so berechnen, dass auch der Umweltverzehr, die ökologischen Schäden, darin Eingang finden. In zehn Provinzen probieren wir das schon aus.

ZEIT: Wie bitte? Das machen nicht einmal die Deutschen, die vermeintlichen Öko-Weltmeister.

Pan: China muss es tun, denn bei uns haben die Umweltprobleme eine ganz andere Dimension. Die staatliche Umweltbehörde SEPA und das Chinesische Statistikbüro sind gerade dabei, die Kosten der Umweltverluste zu berechnen. Nach der schon vorliegenden Berechnung der Weltbank und der Chinesischen Akademie der Wissenschaften beläuft sich der jährliche Umweltschaden auf 8 bis 13 Prozent des Sozialprodukts. Langfristig gesehen werden die Umweltschäden und die Ressourcenverluste sämtliche Ergebnisse der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung aufheben.

ZEIT: Richtig gerechnet wächst die chinesische Wirtschaft also gar nicht?

Pan: Das rasante Wirtschaftswachstum hat uns zwar materiellen Reichtum gebracht. Aber die Kosten sind so hoch, dass wir uns diese Art des Wachstums mit hohem Energieverbrauch und großer Verschmutzung nicht mehr leisten können. Wir stoßen an Grenzen – es sei denn, wir kümmern uns schleunigst nicht nur um die Quantität, sondern auch um die Qualität des Wachstums.

ZEIT: Sie plädieren für qualitatives Wachstum, obwohl China noch ein Entwicklungsland ist?

Pan: Erst reich werden und dann für Sauberkeit sorgen – ich weiß, dass dies die gängige Formel der Industrieländer ist. China mit seinen 1,3 Milliarden Menschen kann sich das aber nicht leisten. China beherbergt zu viele Menschen, hat zu wenig Ressourcen und ist obendrein nur mit einer äußerst fragilen Umwelt ausgestattet. Höchstwahrscheinlich werden die Umweltschäden die Grundlagen des Wirtschaftens zerstört haben, bevor wir reich werden konnten.

ZEIT: Wie konnte es zu der Umweltkrise kommen?

Pan: China ist seit Tausenden von Jahren ein Agrarland. Der Kernpunkt unserer traditionellen Kultur ist die Harmonie mit der Natur; dass wir eine so lange Tradition haben, kommt schließlich nicht von ungefähr. Allerdings sind wir in den vergangenen 150 Jahren unserer Geschichte oft vom Westen gedemütigt worden – und es ist uns dadurch vor Augen geführt worden, dass wir dem Westen unterlegen waren. Das ließ uns glauben, diese Unterlegenheit hänge mit unserer traditionellen Kultur zusammen.

Um diesen Fehler zu korrigieren, hat China den Lebensstil und die Produktionsmuster des Westens übernommen – inklusive des hohen Energieverbrauchs, der hohen Umweltverschmutzung und des hohen Konsums. Wir befinden uns momentan noch in dieser Phase, während der Westen sich längst vom ressourcenintensiven Wirtschaften verabschiedet. Wenn wir jetzt die Wende hin zu einer grünen Entwicklung nicht schaffen, stößt unsere Wirtschaftsweise an Grenzen. Wir hätten dann sowohl unsere Tradition verspielt als auch die Chance, Anschluss an die moderne Welt zu finden.

ZEIT: Aber Millionen Chinesen wollen erst noch reich werden und beispielsweise ein Auto besitzen.
Pan: Sicher. Aber jeder weiß doch, dass das gesamte Erdöl der Welt nicht ausreichen würde, wenn jeder zweite Chinese – so wie jeder zweite Deutsche – Auto fahren würde. Deshalb sind alle Chinesen aufgerufen, bescheiden zu leben. Wer sich ein Luxusauto zulegt, wer feudale Bankette schmeißt oder überall Golf spielen will, der trägt dazu bei, dass Chinas Entwicklung fatal endet.

ZEIT: Trotzdem wollen, wie gesagt, viele Chinesen ein Auto.

Pan: Überrascht Sie das? Wenn arme Leute die Wahl haben, entweder ein Auto zu besitzen oder in einer intakten Umwelt zu leben, entscheiden sie sich natürlich für das Auto. Umweltbewusstsein ist auch eine Frage der Bildung, deshalb ist Erziehung auch eine ökologische Waffe. Gesetze und Verordnungen allein reichen nicht.

ZEIT: Was unternimmt die Pekinger Regierung konkret, um den Umweltfrevel zu bekämpfen?

Pan: Wir haben zum Beispiel die Umweltverträglichkeitsprüfung als Gesetz eingeführt – und damit eine Handhabe, umweltschädliche Vorhaben zu verhindern.

ZEIT: Auch Projekte wie den umstrittenen Drei-Schluchten-Staudamm?
Pan: Auf jeden Fall hätte dieses Projekt wie auch viele andere Wasserkraftprojekte viel stärker auf seine ökologischen Konsequenzen hin bewertet werden müssen, wenn seinerzeit die neuen Vorschriften schon gegolten hätten. Wir fördern erneuerbare Energien und wollen bis Ende des Jahres ein Gesetz haben, um das Recycling zu forcieren. Dieses Gesetz wird sich übrigens stark an dem deutschen Kreislaufwirtschaftsgesetz orientieren; die Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit berät uns hier. Wir haben außerdem unser Wasser- und unser Abfallgesetz verschärft – und unsere Sanktionsmöglichkeiten gegenüber Umweltsündern erweitert. Früher konnten wir nur Geldbußen verhängen, jetzt können wir auch Fabriken schließen…

ZEIT: …die bald darauf wieder eröffnet werden.

Pan: Das geschieht leider manchmal, weil die staatliche Umweltbehörde SEPA keine Managementbefugnis gegenüber den Umweltbeamten auf kommunaler Ebene hat. Dort herrscht noch zu oft der Glaube vor, allein Wachstum könne sämtliche Probleme lösen – die politischen ebenso wie die sozialen. Ich hoffe aber, dass wir diesen Widerstand bald brechen können. Die Zentralregierung will uns jetzt eine Art Umweltpolizei zur Seite stellen.

ZEIT: Klingt so, als hätten es chinesische Umweltpolitiker nicht gerade leicht.

Pan: Das kann man wohl sagen. Der Umweltminister hat den schwersten Posten in einem Land, das sich noch in der Industrialisierungsphase befindet. Trotzdem, China muss grüner werden. Sonst handeln wir uns sogar Sicherheitsprobleme ein.

Das Gespräch führte Fritz Vorholz
http://zeus.zeit.de/text/2005/43/Pan_Yue-Interview

Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City. That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.

China’s real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country’s nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion. For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990’s, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.

“There’s no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we’ve never seen before,” said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. “But more importantly, it’s the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years.” In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden. Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West.

“I’m working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area,” said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. “Scale like that doesn’t happen in the U.S.” It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways. For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant. A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts. Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.

Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills. Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China. The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage . China’s heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world’s second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world’s 10 most-polluted cities. The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists.

Indeed, as the world’s most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered. China’s housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990’s that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940’s allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing. As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.

This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region. “China’s demand for housing is just getting going,” says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai. The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3. “Everyone wants to build a Manhattan,” said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. “In China, I say ’smaller, smaller’ and the clients say ‘wider, wider.’ ”

Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country’s new real estate tycoons - people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur. It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries. The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People’s Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district. Guohua’s real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.

Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers - buildings 18 stories or higher - far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany. Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world’s biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world’s tallest buildings - the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.

There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will. And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation’s economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector. Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world’s largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.

In his report, “China Eats the World,” Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, “the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry.” Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle. “You know for a half-century, nothing was built in China,” Mr. Jun of Gensler said. “Now there’s a lot of excitement and demand for new houses, and excitement about a new way to live.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/business/worldbusiness/18bubble.html?hp&ex=1129694400&en=1c492a3534f486d8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Wer in der modernen Finanzwelt etwas auf sich hält, kauft derzeit in China ein. Nach VW und Google stürmen nun auch internationale Großbanken das Reich der Mitte und hoffen spätestens im Olympia-Jahr 2008 auf reiche Rendite. So auch die Deutsche Bank, die einen Ausgleich für das mangelnde Wachstum im Heimatland suchen muss.Sie könnte auf dem umworbenen chinesischen Bankenmarkt bald erstmals zum Zuge kommen. Die mittelgroße Huaxia Bank hat sich dem hiesigen Branchenprimus offenbar für eine Liaison angeboten. Für einen Anteil von weniger als fünf Prozent verlangen die Chinesen umgerechnet 90 Millionen Euro.

Die Konkurrenz in China ist aber mittlerweile groß. Die Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Schweizer Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch oder Bank of America sind schon da oder kaufen gerade ein. Die Geldhäuser wollen von dem beispiellosen wirtschaftlichen Aufschwung in Chinas profitieren. In den Metropolen an der Ostküste herrscht Goldgräberstimmung, und ein kaufkräftiger Mittelstand von vielleicht 100 Millionen potenziellen Kunden lockt. Ein Konzern wie Volkswagen verkauft dort mittlerweile mehr Golf-Modelle als in Deutschland. Im Welthandel ist China seinerseits bereits die Nummer drei - vor Japan. Der Konferenz der Vereinten Nationen für Handel und Entwicklung (Unctad) entsteht in der Weltwirtschaft zurzeit eine “neue Geografie”.

Deshalb drängt es jetzt auch die Banken nach Osten. Bislang gehört die rote Kreditwirtschaft zwar noch weitgehend dem Staat und ausländische Beteiligungen sind nur bis 25 Prozent möglich. Doch 2007 will die Regierung den chinesischen Markt vollständig öffnen. Neben Banken und Versicherungen stehen dann auch etwa 1.300 Unternehmen zum Börsengang an. Ein großes Potenzial für Finanzinstitute, die mit dem Management eines Börsengangs gutes Geld verdienen.

“Go east” geht jedoch nicht ohne Risiko. Chinas Kreditwirtschaft schleppt faule Darlehen der überalterten Staatsindustrie mit sich rum, und niemand weiß, was passiert, wenn die spekulative Koppelung des unterbewerteten chinesischen Yuan an den amerikanischen Dollar eines Tages platzen sollte.

Die Gefahren scheinen die Banker aber nicht zu schocken, wie das Beispiel der britisch-asiatische Großbank HSBC zeigt. Sie gilt als westlicher Platzhirsch in China. Die nach der US-amerikanischen Citigroup die zweitgrößte Bank und macht einen etwa dreimal so hohen Gewinn wie die Deutsche Bank, die einst Europas Finanzszene dominiert hatte.

Die Geschichte der HSBC ist britische Kolonialgeschichte. 1865 gründete der Schotte Thomas Sutherland die “Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation”, kurz HSBC, um den britischen Handel mit Indien und China zu beflügeln. Schon um 1900 war HSBC die Nummer eins in Asien. Heute liegt der Hauptsitz in London, aber gleichzeitig bilden die Aktien von HSBC das Schwergewicht an der Börse in Hongkong. “Back to the roots”, zurück zu den Wurzeln, heißt seit einem Jahr die Devise der HSBC.

Damals durfte sich der Londoner Finanzgigant als einer der Ersten an einer Bank im realkapitalistischen China beteiligen. HSBC kaufte Anteile an dem fünftgrößtem Geldinstitut des Landes, der Bank of Communications, sowie an der zweitgrößten Lebensversicherung, Ping An, und investierte zunächst 2,8 Milliarden Dollar als Türöffner.

Schon jetzt profitiert HSBC von seiner Expansion in China und der umliegenden Region: 34 Prozent des Gewinns stammt mittlerweile aus Asien, während der Europaanteil auf 27 abgesunken ist.

HERMANNUS PFEIFFER

taz Nr. 7753 vom 27.8.2005, Seite 8, 122 Zeilen (TAZ-Bericht), HERMANNUS
PFEIFFER, http://www.taz.de/pt/2005/08/27/a0146.nf/text

Die Sommerpause hat sich EU-Handelskommissar Peter Mandelson wohl anders vorgestellt. Während seine Amtskollegen im sitzungsfreien August an ihren Urlaubsdomizilen zwischen dem Nordkap und Neapel Kraft für den aufreibenden Herbst tanken, muss sich Mandelson mit dem milliardenschweren Streit um den Import chinesischer Textilien und Bekleidung nach Europa herumschlagen.

Jüngste Episode einer Geschichte um Quoten, Büstenhalter und politische Einflussnahme: Der deutsche Einzelhandelsverband BAG will die Europäische Union auf Schadenersatz klagen. “Unsere Unternehmen haben auf den freien Handel vertraut, sich ihre Waren aus China beschafft und zum größten Teil auch schon bezahlt”, sagte BAG-Chef Rolf Pangels zur Nachrichtenagentur Reuters. Deshalb fordert die BAG eine sofortige Freigabe der Importquoten. Zudem müsse die EU künftig gänzlich auf Schutzzölle verzichten. Unterlässt dies die EU (konkret: der fachlich zuständige Handelskommissar Mandelson), wolle der Verband klagen.Seit Wochen gehen die Lagerhallen europäischer Seehäfen durch chinesische Textillieferungen über. Der Grund: Seit Jahresbeginn gilt das jahrzehntealte Quotensystem im globalen Textilhandel nicht mehr. Unterhosen, Socken, Vorhangstoffe und ähnliches mehr können seit 1. Jänner ohne Mengenbeschränkungen gehandelt werden - allerdings nur theoretisch.

Denn in der Praxis dürfen Staaten, deren nationale Industrien durch die Marktöffnung überwältigt werden, die Mengenquoten wieder einführen. Rund 2,5 Millionen Europäer arbeiten derzeit noch in der Textilbranche - vor allem in Südeuropa. Und so war es kaum überraschend, dass schon wenige Wochen nach Ende des Quotensystems die Handelsminister Frankreichs, Spaniens und Italiens auf Mandelsons Fußmatte standen und auf neue Quoten drängten. Der grundsätzlich freihandelsfreundliche Brite musste sich dem Druck beugen: Bis Ende 2008 sind Textil- und Bekleidungsimporte aus China wieder beschränkt.

Ende gut, alles gut? Mitnichten. Denn nun schreien - siehe obige Klage - die Einzelhändler auf, allen voran H&M mit Sitz in Schweden und die niederländische C&A. H&M etwa bezieht sechs von zehn Kleidungsstücken, die in Europa verkauft werden, aus Asien - und einen Gutteil daran aus China. Kein Wunder also, dass mehrere skandinavische Handelsminister einen geharnischten Brief an Mandelson sandten, in welchem sie zur sofortigen Beendigung der Quoten aufforderten.

“Die EU sollte auf schnellstem Weg zurück zum Freihandel - deshalb sind wir ja in der WTO”, sagt der Welthandelsexperte Dean Spinanger vom Kieler Institut für Weltwirtschaft zur “Presse”. Er hat untersucht, welche Folgen die Abschaffung der Quoten für Europas Konsumenten hat. Sein Fazit: Eine vierköpfige Familie muss jährlich rund 300 Euro mehr für Gewand bezahlen, solange der Import weiterhin beschränkt wird.

Spinanger warnt zudem vor einer Selbstbeschädigung der EU bei den ohnehin schon ins Stocken gekommenen Verhandlungen in der Welthandelsorganisation WTO. “Es geht nicht, bei jeder Zunahme von Importen nach Quoten zu rufen. Wir können keine Ausnahmen machen und gleichzeitig darüber klagen, dass uns die Entwicklungsländer keinen Zugang zu ihren Märkten gewähren wollen.”

Seit zehn Jahren sei der Beitritt Chinas zur WTO bekannt gewesen - und noch immer berufe sich die Kommission auf “abnormale” Wettbewerbsbedingungen im Welthandel, die einer Öffnung des europäischen Marktes entgegenstünden: “Seit dem Jahr 1972 verwendet man fast wortgleich diese Begründung”, kritisiert der Ökonom.

Gegner des Freihandels bringen vor, dass die Abschaffung der Quoten armen Textilländern schade. Unter dem Quotenregime erzeugte China nämlich große Mengen beinahe fertiger Kleidungsstücke, die in Ländern wie Bangladesch oder Kambodscha fertigt genäht wurden und somit nicht in die chinesische Quote fielen. Diese Jobs würden wegfallen, wenn China schrankenlos produzieren dürfe.

Das stimme nicht, meint Spinanger und verweist auf aktuelle Zahlen. Seit Jahresbeginn verloren etwa Kambodscha und Bangladesch zwar in einzelnen Produktgruppen Marktanteile: “Im Schnitt haben aber beide Länder bei den Exporten zugelegt.”

http://www.diepresse.com/Artikel.aspx?channel=e&ressort=eo&id=502628

Wenn die Augen eines Amerikaners und eines Chinesen auf ein und dasselbe Bild fallen, sehen die beiden etwas ganz Unterschiedliches: Der Amerikaner konzentriert sich stärker auf die Objekte im Vordergrund, der Chinese ordnet sie stärker in den Hintergrund ein. Und wenn man Kindern drei Fotos zeigt - von einem Huhn, einer Kuh und einer Wiese -, und sie fragt, welche beiden zusammengehören, antworten sie je nach Herkunft ganz unterschiedlich: “Kuh und Huhn gehören zusammen, beide sind Tiere”, antworten kleine Amerikaner - “Kuh und Gras gehören zusammen, die Kuh frisst das Gras”, ordnen hingegen kleine Chinesen. Bietet man endlich Amerikanern und Koreanern Kugelschreiber in einer breiten Farbpalette an, wählt der Amerikaner einen mit der seltensten Farbe - er zeichnet sich selbst als etwas ganz Besonderes aus -, der Koreaner einen mit der häufigsten.

Psychologen und Philosophen mögen darauf beharren, dass alle Menschen in
gleicher Weise wahrnehmen und denken, im Test-Labor des chinesisch-amerikanischen Teams Hannah-Faye Chua und Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) werden sie zusehends eines Besseren belehrt, dort wird in vielen Experimenten die Differenz zwischen der Wahrnehmung in Ost und West bis in ihre Details verfolgt. Sie hat Tradition, Chua/Nisbett sehen sie schon in den Grundlagen der jeweiligen Kulturen angelegt: Die griechische Philosophie hat das Individuum betont und auch die Gegenstände der Wahrnehmung als individuelle Objekte betrachtet, die sich erkennen lassen und mit denen sich hantieren lässt.

Der chinesische Blick war holistisch, er bettete Objekte in Zusammenhänge und richtet die Aufmerksamkeit auf Übergänge, Zwischentöne, auch in der Logik, Aristoteles hat eine entwickelt, in China gab es keine. Die Differenz zeigte sich auch später in der Blickweise der Kunst: Ostasiatische Landschaftsmaler wählen gerne die Vogelperspektive, westliche bleiben auf Augenhöhe.

Hohe Kulturen waren beide, aber sie waren anders strukturiert: China war eine Agrargesellschaft mit Großfamilien und zentralen Bewässerungssystemen - mit entsprechenden Hierarchien -, in der jeder Einzelne in viele Zusammenhänge eingebettet war, im Stadtstaat Athen hingegen blühte die Individualität. Und wenn ein Kind heute in China auf die Welt kommt - auf dem Land, der soziale Wandel ist rasch und wird auch die Sicht verwestlichen -, schläft es in einem Raum mit vielen anderen, im Westen hat es früh ein eigenes Zimmer. Ist es aufgewacht und spielt es mit seiner Mutter, lernt es sich richtig ein: “Schau, das ist ein Auto, es hat schöne Räder”, sagt die amerikanische Mutter, - “wenn du das Auto an die Wand wirfst, tut es der weh”, lenkt die japanische Mutter.

Was lenkt sie? Die Art und Weise, wie das Gehirn eine Sinneswahrnehmung verarbeitet? Oder schon das Auge selbst, meldet es dem Gehirn in Ost und West etwas anderes? Chua/Nisbett haben Probanden Fotos gezeigt - mit je einem Objekt vor einem reich strukturierten Hintergrund, etwa einem Tiger vor dem Dschungel - und die Bewegung der Pupillen gemessen: “Schon die Augenbewegung ist unterschiedlich, sie liegt vermutlich dem Urteil des Gehirns zugrunde” (Pnas, 21. 8.). Amerikanische Augen stürzen sich rasch auf den Gegenstand, chinesische schweifen weit über den Hintergrund.

http://www.diepresse.com/Artikel.aspx?channel=h&ressort=ws&id=501961