China and India and Us Archives
|
 |
Last week, in the debate over Microsoft's involvement in China and its decision to work with the Chinese government to censor some aspects of the web logs put up by customers, Robert Scoble made one of the more techy-boneheaded comments I've ever seen.
Scoble, who runs Microsoft's "official" blog and has visited China where, he said, he was assured by a group of Chinese that they have no need for the Western concept of "freedom of speech."
In the words of former CNN's former Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon: Horseshit.
Today's New York Times brings us even more evidence of the accuracy of MacKinnon's insight. A story about a teacher who allegedly raped 26 of his female pupils contains this chilling paragraph:
It is the sort of horrific case that in many countries would be a national scandal but in China has disappeared into the muffled silence of state censorship. That silence matches the silence at the heart of the case: the fact that students considered a teacher so powerful that they did not dare speak out.
That's freedom of speech, Chinese-style: Don't ask, don't tell.
Tue 10:23 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Today's eWeek column is about Microsoft and the bad PR it's getting since Reporters Without Borders fingered it for co-operating with the Chinese government's censorship efforts.
This is the latest chapter in a larger story that's not likely to go away. Remember Nike and all those shoe factories in Indonesia that were alleged to employee children working for pennies a day? That campaign didn't start overnight but it took the shoe company years to get past the allegations. A similar fate may well befall some well-meaning tech company.
Advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch have been critical of how tech companies conduct themselves in China. Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Sun are the ones mentioned most frequently. And you can't really envy the Hobson's choice they have to make here. But you do wonder where oh where the U.S. government is on these and other issues having to do with how this country deals with the Chinese. The lack of leadership – or even a decision or two – on this issue in Washington is appalling for a host of reasons.
Continue reading "The Great Wall of Chinese Excuses"Thu 09:59 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
For much of the last week, my local newspaper – sigh – the San Francisco Chronicle, has been dominated by headlines about the arrests of some local men accused of – but not charged with -- having ties to terrorist organizations.
Not charged, just "said to have." That's the important part. And it makes your heart sink just reading the stories and watching the coverage particularly in this community where it's virtually impossible to go for more than a day without meeting someone who was not born in this country. More than almost any other part of America, Northern California is filled with immigrants at all social and economic levels who – in this day of jet travel and internet-based instant communication – no longer forsake their native lands when they come here. For better or worse, and if you're a Muslim it probably seems like worse, these immigrants integrate their two worlds.
And that, it seems, is at the root of the charges lodged against Mohammad Adil Khan, his son, Muhammad Hassan Adil and Shabbir Ahmed, all Pakistani immigrants. Two other men, Hamid Hayatt and his father, Umer, both U.S. citizens have also been arrested. The men are all residents of Lodi, a rural farming town in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area where the landscape is very much like that of Northern India: flat, with rolling tracts of farmland. It's famous for being part of a John Fogerty lyric and, back when it was home to Italian immigrants, it was where the Mondavi family wine empire began.
Continue reading "Skepticism, Please"Sun 03:41 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Businessmen can make good politicians. But they make crummy diplomats. And not all diplomacy is international.
Let's start with Microsoft. The software giant has been cowed by its local evangelical church into remaining "neutral" on a piece of state legislation that would ban discrimination against gays. They haven't even been subtle about it. After a visit from the local preacher, Microsoft decided to sit on its hands.
Now, Microsoft employees, happy to joke – well, not really – about working for the "Borg" or the "Dark Side" have enjoyed knowing that they work for a company that shares their social values, tolerance being at the forefront, as it is in most high-tech companies where intellectual and personal quirkiness go hand-in-hand. So "neutrality" when it comes to gay rights comes as a shock to some.
"It's bouncing all over the gay wires," says a correspondent who forwarded a plaintive note about the company's bone-headed behavior. "My Microsoft friends (gay and straight) on the inside are freaked out, sending it all over the place from their Microsoft corporate account, as if the anti-Christ just took over their board."
Here's the note making the rounds:
After two years of sponsorship, Microsoft recently withdrew support for a Washington state bill that would have barred discrimination based on sexual orientation. This clearly contributed to the bill's defeat last Thursday BY ONE VOTE. We're not talking about backing off support for a controversial marriage bill; we're talking about backing away from a plain and simple anti-discrimination bill. Reportedly Microsoft caved after meeting twice with a local evangelical minister. What's almost worse is Microsoft's lame attempts to disguise the motivation behind their policy flip-flop. If Microsoft gets away with this, it opens a Pandora's box and will likely lead to an evangelical campaign to get many more companies to drop their support for equal civil rights in the LGBT community…..Continue reading "Both Sides Now"
Mon 10:43 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Seems I'm not the only person less than enthused about Tom Friedman's new book. Kevin Drum, who actually read the damn thing, poor guy, says – unbelievably – the Times scribe is less critical in "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century" than he was in his previous book, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree,". Friedman having drunk Silicon Valley's Kool-Aid for his first cheery look at globalization, came back for more and liked it even better this time.
My pal, Matthew Holt, a U.S. citizen living in Northern California who sounds very much like the Englishman he is, had a response similar to mine when one of his HealthCareBlog readers started gushing about Friedman: Welcome to the party, Tom.
Their correspondence – which includes a few tart insights on book deals and their relationship to the book publishing business – follows. Names have been redacted.
Fri 09:44 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
There's a Tom Friedman-palooza going on out there and as much as Friedman annoys me with his Panglossian take on the effects of globalization, the campaign he's launched to sell his new book "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century" is important.
It's important because Friedman – who has a decided gift for wrapping up difficult ideas and putting them into pop-speak – is a columnist for the New York Times and he has come to a few basic realizations about the networked society and the global economy. He's spouting them everywhere, from his home paper's Sunday magazine to Tuesday's Jon Stewart show. For these reasons – the publicity roll-out and his Times column – Friedman's got a best-seller on his hands. It'll be an important book, too.
This is going to have a couple of immediate consequences. First, there is no bigger fan of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture that Friedman. Appearing on Charlie Rose's show Tuesday (he was studio-hopping; same suit, same too-short haircut as on Stewart) Friedman carried forth the valley's party line with a fervor I haven't seen from an East Coaster since, oh, since 1999. The valley's way of looking at the world – connected, fast, competitive – has become Friedman's. He's even gone as far as to endorse the tech community's stance on stock options – he's for it. Why? Because in China they don't expense stock options. And, he says, solemnly, this networked stuff is just getting started; the dot.com bust was the end of the beginning.
Sigh.
Continue reading "Tommy's Tune"Thu 03:25 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
John Markoff has a simply amazing story on the front page of today's NYTimes business section.
It's about computer scientist Steve – not his real name, you can bet on that – Chen and his recent decision to commute between his new office in China and his home in San Jose California. That's right, he commutes. The Chinese offered to help him build his dream supercomputer. So, well, he followed his bliss, so to speak.
For the West Coast, that's only a 9 hour plane ride, like going to Paris from New York. But, culturally, Chen and his compatriots in bi-cultural living are breaking all kinds of new ground. This is one of the odder features of the 21st Century, one we still haven't really grappled with. When you leave your native country, even if you do so as a young man as Chen did, you do not need to forsake it, even if it was once hostile to the very ideas of the land you have called home for years. That's a new development and for U.S. politics toward Asia -- China in particular – and it's hugely important.
Continue reading "The Great Cray Of China"Mon 02:36 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
This not-so-cockamamie idea – it’s gotten endorsed by Assemblyman Leland Yee -- San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez has to allow non-citizens to vote in the city’s school board elections might have some interesting ramifications.
One of which could be the ejection of the Green Party from city politics.
Continue reading "Do It. It'll Backfire"Wed 01:03 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
It’s a rare event but Business 2.0 has managed to produce a timely and well-done cover story on India and that country’s changing demographics that steers away from the out-sourcing panic button and speaks sense. Om Malik’s story of how very much his native land has changed – and the charming little bit recounted by editor Josh Quittner about Malik’s father mistaking his son’s middle-of-the-night appearance for a dream – sums up just the right combination of the fantastic and modern that is India today.
Continue reading "A Tale of Two Out Sources"Sun 02:04 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Time, once again, for a look at how some of what’s said here is showing up out there in Big Media.
Salon weighs in with what – if the editors I’m talking to are able to shepherd their stories into print – will be the first of a series of reappraisals of Calfornia Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger as a politician. Over at the SF Weekly, Matt Smith turns in a thorough critique of Schwarzengger’s tax policies, taking a refreshing and much-needed look at what’s happening in the rest of the state.
Sun 02:08 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
In the fall of 2000, I won an all-expense paid trip to India courtesy of Tina Brown, then editor of “start-up” magazine, Talk. And, along the way, I ran into India’s new prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Okay, so "ran into” is kind of an exaggeration. Let’s just say I was traveling with someone Singh thought it important to meet. Who? Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, the software that made, well, made the Internet café possible.
Continue reading "The Times of India"Wed 10:57 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
It could be election fatigue. Or it could be that with an immigrant in the governor’s mansion – a Republican immigrant in the governor’s mansion – the Southern California knee-jerk fear of the great Mexican menace isn’t quite as strong these days.
The Sacramento Bee reports that an attempt to revive Prop. 187 – the ballot initiative calling for California to restrict benefits for illegal immigrants -- has hit a snag. Organizers can’t get enough signatures to get the thing on the ballot. Some of this is, no doubt due, to turn out in the last election. You need more names on the petitions. But some could be due to the acceptance – by Republicans in particular – of politicians with not-so-waspy last names.
Or maybe it’s just that the state’s more recent immigrants, the ones who got here within oh, the past 30 years – just like Gov. Terminator! – are close to really seizing political power in the state. A business reporter covering the workers’ compensation negotiations in Sacramento said he was struck by Schwarzenegger’s tactics. As soon as he figured out that Latinos carried the freight on this issue – and that’s a deliberate pun – he behaved accordingly and got the votes he needed.
Tue 11:19 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
A few weeks ago, The San Francisco Chronicle tried to write about a Chinatown feud and did its usual lousy job explaining the politics of the city’s Asian population. The word “byzantine” was used. Couldn’t see that cliché coming, could you?
Tue 09:00 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Whoever’s running Blame India Watch got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and, boy, is it worth the read. The guy or gal writing that site is snarkier than I ever was and well, I do so enjoy saying that.
BIW takes aim at all the Tech Bubble magazine, specifically Fast Company, and lands some smart criticisms about the way CEOs were portrayed then and the way job loss is being written about now. See what a difference a stock market crash makes?
Continue reading "Economic Indicators, Leading and Otherwise"Wed 04:09 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
So much for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s supporting a ballot measure calling for San Francisco School to end its desegregation plans. Her official spokesman couldn’t wait to get on the record and say no! no! no! we had nothing to do with the idea being floated by SFSOS, never saw it, don’t know about it, don’t want anything to do with it.
Mon 12:14 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Just when it was looking like San Francisco politics were getting kinda boring -- what with a mayor we could all (almost) support and his most electable opponent going off in a poorly timed snit of self-pity that pulled the rug out from under the city’s “progressives,” – along comes SFSOS.
SFSOS, a civic organization run by long-time Democratic operative Wade Randlett with backing from wealthy business guys like Gap founder Don Fisher and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has focused on San Francisco city schools. The group is proposing a ballot initiative – an advisory one – that would conceivably, maybe, someday after the lawyers are done, do away with the city's desegregation program and end the cross-town journeys some kids make to go to school every day. The reasons? Schools are so good throughout the city, says Randlett, the balancing that was once needed in schools isn’t necessary any more.
Continue reading "Save Our Schools"Fri 09:19 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
It’s a shorter story without the breadth and depth of the first “Out of India” story she did but, once again Salon’s Katherine Mieszkowski does a fine job reporting on what’s going on with outsourcing in India.
This second story one that focuses on that formerly all-American phenomena, the self-employed entrepreneur. In this case, however, it’s not some nerdy IIT (India Institute of Technology) grad but a lovely young woman named Rachna Asirvatham whose company Smart Webby designs web stuff for other small companies. Asirvatham is in Bangalore, the Palo Alto of India, and most of her clients – it’s not hard – are American.
Continue reading "Grrrrl Power"Tue 11:34 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
One of Salon’s more talented writers, Katherine Mieszkowski (Miss-cow-ski) has filed the first of her Out-of-India outsourcing stories for the beleaguered website.
Salon, home of Democratic Party Pit Bull Sidney Blumenthal, doesn’t always hit the right notes when it goes after political hot-buttons like outsourcing. Too often it toes the party line and rants liars and lying which is boring.
Continue reading "No Fool, She"Thu 12:50 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Sunday, it seems, was outsourcing day at The New York Times.
The front page of the Times bidness section carried a long and very interesting interview with Wipro Chairman Ajit Premji.
Continue reading "Let's Call it Hot-Sourcing"Mon 12:25 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
So outsourcing – the one-stop phrase for “sending” jobs overseas – is the political hot-button for this election. Who’d have thunk?
It’s a confluence of events, as it almost always is in politics, the not-so-comfortable meeting between a less than stellar economic recovery, growing doubts about the Bush Administration’s leadership coupled with pressure from Democratic union strongholds. Old-line Democrats the kind who like unions may think they have a winner here. But they may not. A strong stance against out-sourcing could cost them the support of some of the very people they need the most: That crowd I call Progressive Libertarians, relatively new to politics, younger than most long-time supporters and easily frustrated by failure to change as they see fit.
Continue reading "Outsourced Outta Here"Tue 02:32 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Aggrieved, SFWeekly reporter Peter Byrne writes in and goes, well, he goes crazy about my criticism of his long and not very good piece on 12th Congressional District Candidate Ro Khanna. And, like Phil Bronstein before him, he takes the usual cheap shot at my colorful past. You know, if you want me to take you guys seriously, you’re going to have to do better than more than four-year-old discredited allegations that no one but me seems to remember very accurately. It’s sad.
Here’s Byrne’s letter, without edits:
Continue reading "Sticks! Stones!"Mon 03:04 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
As a rule, I like Peter Byrne’s reporting but in this week’s SFWeekly, he’s really screwed up.
In what Congressional candidate Ro Khanna correctly and bravely labels a story with “racist overtones,” Byrne takes a stab at analyzing the Khanna’s first-time effort to win the 12th District Democratic primary against Rep. Tom Lantos. But he bit off more than he could chew. And the every-which-way-but-loose story that appears in this week paper is a mess. The leaps that Byrne makes between Khanna’s first generation Indian backers – men who make their money years before dot.com was a glimmer in anyone’s eye -- and the candidate himself aren’t pretty. They are racist.
Fri 12:39 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
The race for to be the Democratic nominee for the 12th Congressional District – San Francisco’s Outer Sunset, northern San Mateo County – may some kind of California classic in the making.
Ro Khanna, a Yale-educated lawyer is challenging incumbent Democrat Tom Lantos in the March 2 primary. Khanna is clearly a young, ambitious politician and there’s no better way to make name for yourself than beating an older, entrenched competitor. And after 24 years in Congress, Rep. Tom Lantos virtually embodies “entrenched” and he may be getting ready to retire, so Khanna is smartly stumping for a future race. He wins even if he doesn’t. To make sure you remember his name – his first name is pronounced “row” and in “your boat" – Khanna is making a big stink about how Lantos is avoiding any kind of debate. It’s meaningless but it’s a good way to get attention.
Given their respective ages, it’s not a bad idea to look at this race as something else: An immigrant match-up, no different in some respects to Total Recall which put Cruz Bustamante, the son of Mexian immigrants, up against Arnold Schwarzenegger, who well, we know what happened there. Khanna’s father is, like many Bay Area Indians, an engineer trained at an Indian Institute of Technology. His son is the first generation to be born in this country (giving him only slightly better odds of becoming president than the governor).
Khanna is shrewd about how he’s running this race in another way, however. He’s staking out territory with the Digital people, among them Prof. Larry Lessig, perhaps the most articulate spokesman for a host of issues of concern to the wired nation. Lessig’s all but endorsing Khanna citing, among other things, his approach to that horrid Patriot Act as well as other privacy issues that are of concerns to folks like Lessig (and me, for that matter). “This gap between who we are and how we are represented has led me to help Congressman Lantos’ opponent — Ro Khanna. Ro’s a bright, young, committed Democrat, committed to representing the views of his district,” Lessig said in a recent post.
Wed 10:44 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
Didja see the front page of the NYTimes in which the Bush Administration talks about an amnesty program for those who have entered the country illegally?
This isn’t news for those of you who are regular readers. More immodesty, I know. But I like it when I scoop the Times.
This is one hell of a smart political move, one that will undoubtedly catch the Democrats flat-footed. It’s aimed at California, of course but also, more broadly, at Western and Southern states where Republicans are expected to do well in November. Those red states.
The local politics of this are going to be very interesting. Although we don’t have details about who and how people will qualify for this non-amnesty amnesty (today’s sub-themes), these newly legal residents are going to have a tremendous impact, fiscally and politically. And don’t forget, we’re not just talking about Latin and South America; this includes Asian immigrants, too. And that, for San Francisco and Silicon Valley is very important.
One more thing: It’s a pretty safe bet that the nation’s most visible and popular immigrant success story – The Terminator himself – will be front and center on this thing. The politics there are going to be downright fascinating. The Republicans would love love love to “take back” California. And Arnold on immigration is a good way to start. Not to mention all the favors and chits he can collect from The White House – chits and favors that might come in handy, oh, say around budget deal time.
Wed 11:08 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
|
|
As a rule, local TV news is useless. Unless you want to hear the weather forecast. But last night, before the weather, KGO ran a piece on a Mexican immigrant who, after more than 15 years in this country, was facing deportation. Like many people living and working in this state, she hadn’t managed to become a U.S. citizen. Sad but a sadly typical California story.
Buried in all the pathos was a statement from a off-camera voice bearing what sounded like real news. Real national news. Calls and appeals to Washington on this woman’s behalf had turned up indications that the Bush White House is considering an amnesty program “like President Reagan’s.”
That mass amnesty program created millions of citizens. Overnight. Normally, I’d dismiss such predictions out of hand – just like the KGO reporter who included this sound bite but didn’t follow up on what could be a very interesting turn of events in California as well as the national political scene.
But today’s Bee has this story about the Bush Administration taking a new look at immigration. “For hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of them in California, this could mean the best chance in years at attaining legal U.S. status,’’ the Bee says. From what the paper's saying, the bill appears to be concentrated on farm-workers who have jobs but that’s not an official pronouncement. It’s easy to see where this goes: one job's as good as another, isn’t it? If the White House wants to be extra nice -- and really smart -- it'll extend protection to all those expired H1B visas, wouldn't it?
Heading into the official Presidential Primary season, the political implications of this are very hard to overlook. Hispanic voters are the fastest growing segment of the electorate and they tend to vote Democratic. Asian voters are more conservative -- depnding on where they're from. But voters can be moved; look at Florida and Texas. Neither Bush brother would be in office without Spanish-speaking voters.
It's a great run-around, too. Most Democrats think some sort of amnesty program is a good idea even union guy Democratic Presidential hopeful Rep. Dick Gephart has endorsed some sort of amnesty.Too many people living illegally in this country, carrying their share – more than their share -- economically but denied basic benefits.
The administration is clearly setting up a relationship between people who already have jobs and legal residency. It’s a clever idea that neatly cuts the ground out from anyone who wants to argue that illegal aliens steal jobs – they’re already working – or come to this country to loaf around.
Thu 10:43 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
