Youth (Spring)

 

The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object."

Marx, On the Thefts of Wood, in Rheinische Zeitung (1842)

This movie is not an easy watch but a necessary one if you wish to understand the perils of unbalanced economic growth.  

Youth (Spring) is a 220-minute mammoth documentary filmed between 2014 and 2019. Separate substories show various workshops in Zhili City, China, the center of the textile industry. You see immigrant youth coming from nearby rural areas searching for jobs in these workshops under poor and unhygienic conditions. The dorms where these laborers work are dingy, rather dark, and depressingly dilapidated. The location is ironically named Happiness Street.

In the first story, we see a couple of lovers (19-20 years of age) having fun and joking about the speed of sewing the clothes and showboating their skill sets in an innocent childish way. Immediately after the intro, you're thrown into the real business which takes place downstairs (some similar structure in all the workshops: the boss's office is downstairs). The mother of the girl is negotiating time off for the abortion of her unwanted grandchild (the child of the jubilant girl upstairs). The boss's objection is business-oriented. Money-oriented. Religious values, Pro-life, and other philosophical/ideological concerns are distant and irrelevant in this material-oriented discourse. This is the heart of the textile industry in the aphotic heart of the Marxist world. They want the order to be prepared ASAP and they cannot offer the luxury of a day off.

The other story depicts a verbal argument between two young men (around 18 years old), The angry boy tries to attack with a scissor only to be stopped by the interference of ladies particularly a mother figure in the workshop, cutting his hand during the process.   

In one story, we have a protest from a group of workers as they express their discontent over their salary to the "bosses" downstairs. Here a couple in their 50s are in charge. The gentleman undermines the protestors and threatens the workers to be fired and replaced easily. Considering the mechanical nature of the job, one can hardly argue on that point. This is another sequence that implies how much violence is hidden behind the rudimentaries of Happiness Street!

Even rare off hours in the movie do not change the gloomy mood. In one of the scenes, we see young siblings in a dark internet cafe discussing and you see the exhausted girl fall asleep in the cafe.

Each story segues into another without a link except for identical environments across workshops. There is no sustained narrative as the director probably intended to provide collages of various substories. 

Youth is about a world reduced to paper bills, soulless transactions, and undignified souls walking their way through trash-strewn alleys (as a side note, you see abundant use of plastic in the environment!).  This is a real picture of an industry with a revenue of 330 billion dollars per year. However, in Happiness Street, the youth are slavishly subordinated to objects and to nondescript bosses who ruthlessly upbraid them. Marx did predict this but not for a Communist-ruled terrain! 

Youth (Spring) is directed by Wang Bing.

Pedram, 4/22/24

The Fault Line of Democracy

China may have invented the first printing press in 593 and published the first woodblock-printed newspaper, Kaiyuan Za Bao, in Beijing in 713. But in 2010 it wants to curb the newest information innovation led by Google.
To avoid censorship, Google has moved its search engine to Hong Kong and may leave China altogether after hackers, hidden for deniability somewhere deep within the Communist bureaucracy, breached Google’s proprietary systems and pieced together the e-mail exchanges of Chinese dissidents in order to trace their social networks.
Clearly a clash is shaping up that pits the raucous free-for-all of the Internet against China’s long-standing Confucian proclivity for order, respect for authority and a conformist notion of social harmony.
As they try to rebalance a relationship in which China still largely depends on American consumption of its exports and the United States largely relies on China’s purchase of U.S. Treasury debt, these tightly tethered partners in prosperity will only intensify their interaction in the coming decade. Inevitably, as the geo-civilizational plates push up against one another and produce tremors, might the cultural equivalent of subduction take place? Might, for example, more appreciation for freedom of expression shift Eastward and a greater appreciation of governing in the common interest and long-term perspective shift Westward?
To be sure, there is much cultural history under the bridge of today’s interdependence that contributes to the tectonic pace of convergence. China’s ancient “Warring States” period ended with a commitment to unified territorial integrity and stability that led to a modern focus on political control and social harmony. The path to peace after the West’s religious wars led to the opposite ideals: tolerance and diversity. In the Confucian tradition, China has relied on ethics, including obligations of the ruler to the ruled, and education to keep its institutions responsive, fair and honest. The West has relied on the check of democracy.
Nonetheless, as the political philosopher Daniel A. Bell proposes, some common ground can be envisaged along the fault lines.
Counterintuitive as it may sound to the Western ear, China may be more open to fundamental political reform than the United States. Since the rule of law in America is based upon the notion that the state itself is constrained by a body of pre-existing law that is sovereign, any thought of rewriting the Constitution is anathema.
In China, however, some intellectuals point out that Communist Party theory posits that the current system is the “primary stage of socialism,” meaning that it is a transitional phase to a higher and more superior form of socialism. The economic foundation will change with broader prosperity, and thus the legal and political superstructure must also change.
That has led some contemporary Confucian scholars to argue that new institutions for the higher stage of development should be designed based on indigenous sources of legitimacy from within the Chinese experience — meritocratic knowledge of the governing class, the people and tradition.
Mr. Bell, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has taken these ideas a bit further. He envisions a meritocratic upper house whose members are chosen not by election, but examination; an elected national democratic legislature that advises the upper house on “preferences;” direct elections up to the provincial level, and freedom of the press. The “symbolic leader of the state” would be chosen from among the most august members of the meritocratic house.
Such a formulation and others similar to it — about which there is a rich debate across China today — sticks to the Confucian idea of meritocratic government mitigated by popular accountability, but not completely ruled by it. This seems precisely the kind of non-Western political modernization we will see as China adopts its own form of democracy.
China desperately needs such a system of accountability to stem the arbitrariness, corruption and cronyism that have accompanied the primary stage of socialism. Yet such an approach as put forth by Mr. Bell seems likely to also maintain stability in a way that parliamentary democracy of the West might not, and thus would be an acceptable course of change in China.
Paradoxically, while Chinese intellectuals seek to expand democratic accountability as the poor become more educated and prosperous, the U.S. has the opposite problem: Too much short-term focus by the citizens of the prosperous consumer democracies is undermining long-term sustainability.
Thus, while institutional innovation in China might focus on a truly empowered — yet checked — elected house, the U.S. would benefit from the type of long-term deliberation offered by bodies such as a meritocratic upper house and some entity with the responsibility for continuity of governance that stands as a unifying symbol in an ever more diverse society.
During the first round of globalization at the turn of the 20th Century, Sun Yat Sen tried to blend the institutions of Western democracy with Confucian meritocracy. Perhaps today, as the “rise of the rest” challenges Western dominance, the political imagination may again be open to new ideas. This time, it won’t be just Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.


by : Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels

Kundun 5/10

I didn't like the movie...actually it was mainly focused on political matters.

Cables Disclosed

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.
The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.”
The White House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables, if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”
The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:

A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.

 

Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

 

Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)

 

A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.








 intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.

Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.

Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.
They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.
Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.”
The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”
The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy prison term.
In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq reports.



Fodder for Historians



Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States,” has reached only 1972.
While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they could not guess.
In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.
In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.
The cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation; “visas viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.
But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.
Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar.
They describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field.
But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington: “Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr. Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’ reports, believe to be false.
A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both sides.
Mr. Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the cable said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.



Not All Business



Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places.
In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.
“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”
“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.’ ”

North Never Plays Nice

While it is cowardly and foolish not to resist an act of aggression, the best way to deal with a provocation is to ignore it — or so we are taught. By refusing to be provoked, one frustrates and therefore “beats” the provoker; generations of bullied children have been consoled with this logic. And so it is that the South Korean and American governments usually refer to North Korea’s acts of aggression as “provocations.”

The North’s artillery attack on a populated South Korean island is now getting the same treatment, with the South’s president, Lee Myung-bak, vowing that Pyongyang will be “held responsible” and that “additional provocative acts” will be punished “several times over.”
There is no reason that North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-il, should take those words seriously. Mr. Lee made similar noises in March, when the North was accused of killing 46 South Korean sailors by torpedoing a naval vessel, the Cheonan, and what was the result? A pacifist South Korean electorate punished Mr. Lee’s party in regional elections, and the attack faded from the headlines.
The North’s attack on Yeonpyeong Island has been more shocking to South Koreans, but not much more. At my local train station the morning after the attack, a grinning crowd watched coverage of the Asian Games in China on a giant TV screen. The same ethno-nationalism that makes South Koreans such avid followers of international sports also dilutes their indignation at their Northern brethren. South Korea’s left-wing press, which tends to shape young opinion, is describing the shelling of the island as the inevitable product of “misunderstandings” resulting from a lack of dialogue.
Sadly, South Korea’s subdued response to such incidents makes them more likely to happen again. This poses a serious problem for the United States; we have already been drawn into one war on the peninsula because our ally seemed unlikely to defend itself.
Unfortunately, Washington shares to a certain degree the South Korean tendency to play down North Korean “provocations.” In our usage, the word reflects the America-centric perception that everything Kim Jong-il does is aimed at eliciting a reaction from Washington. His actions are trivialized accordingly, to the extent that our top policymakers have publicly compared him to a squalling, attention-hungry child.
Not surprisingly, then, the artillery attack on Yeonpyeong is seen by many Americans as an effort to force us to make concessions, to reopen negotiations, and so on. Thus we can pretend that simply by leaving sanctions in place, we are really hanging tough, even pursuing a “hard-line” policy.
The provocation view of North Korea’s actions also prevents us from seeing them in context. Since a first naval skirmish in the Yellow Sea near Yeonpyeong in 1999, there has been a steady escalation in North Korea’s efforts to destabilize the peninsula. In 2002, another naval skirmish killed at least four South Korean sailors; in 2006 the North conducted an underground nuclear test; in 2009 it launched missiles over the Sea of Japan, had another nuclear test and declared the Korean War armistice invalid; and in March the Cheonan was sunk.
This behavior is fully in keeping with the ultramilitaristic ideology of a regime that remains publicly committed to uniting the peninsula by force: “Reunification is at the ends of our bayonets,” as the omnipresent slogan in the North goes.
North Korea cannot hope to win an all-out war, but it may well believe that by incrementally escalating its aggression it can bully the South into giving up — or at least sharing power in a confederation.
The provocation view of North Korean behavior also distorts our understanding of the domestic situation. Analysts tend to focus too much on the succession issue; they interpret the attack on the island as an effort to bolster the reputation of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s son and anointed successor. Their conclusion is that North Korea will play nice once the young man is firmly in power.
In fact, as both its adversaries and supporters should realize, the North can never play nice. Just as our own economy-first governments must ensure growth to stay in power, a military-first regime must deliver a steady stream of victories or lose all reason to exist.
There is no easy solution to the North Korea problem, but to begin to solve it, we must realize that its behavior is aggressive, not provocative, and that its aggression is ideologically built in. Pyongyang is thus virtually predestined to push Seoul and Washington too far, thereby bringing about its own ruin.
The Chinese should take note of this, since their rationalization for continuing to support North Korea derives from the vain hope that they can prop it up indefinitely. The military-first state is going to collapse at some stage; let’s do what we can to make that happen sooner rather than later.



by : B.R.Myers
B. R. Myers, the director of the international studies department at Dongseo University, is the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters.”

Street Life,Street Death

Here's an interesting Economist article about HIV/AIDS management in critical areas.It reveals how a derogatory attitude  hampers the fight to curb the spread of AIDS.

Pedram

At a glance, the calf-length cape that a good-looking young model swirled around on stage appeared to be made of shaggy sheepskin, wildly inappropriate for the tropical climate of Pattaya, a seaside resort in Thailand. In fact its composition was more apt, if no less uncomfortable: hundreds of dangling prophylactics. Pattaya has one of Thailand’s highest concentrations of go-go bars, massage parlours and other shop windows for the sex trade. Parts of it call to mind Sodom-on-Sea. But this “Condom Fashion Show” was not part of the sleaze. It was staged at a recent United Nations-led “consultation”. The theme—sex workers and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS—was deadly serious, and the effort to turn it into burlesque rather heroic.

The consultation differed in more fundamental ways from the usual run of international conferences. Several dozen sex workers from eight countries (Cambodia, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Thailand) attended as full-fledged participants, not just models in the fashion show. Sex workers are on the front line in the struggle against an epidemic that in Asia still claims 350,000 new infections each year. A 2008 report prepared for the United Nations by an independent commission confirmed that “men who buy sex are the single-most powerful driving force in Asia’s HIV epidemics.” It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.

A simple and effective way to cut HIV transmission is to ensure that sex workers have access to condoms, know how to use them and always do so. Yet the UN estimates that only a third of Asia’s sex workers are reached by HIV-prevention programmes. And in some countries possession of condoms is taken as evidence of involvement in prostitution, and hence a cause for harassment, extortion or detention.

Yet sex workers themselves are normally excluded—or exclude themselves—from the air-conditioned conference halls where officials and NGOs discuss their plight. One reason is a poor grasp of English, a language, one male Thai sex worker complained, that “we learned only from our clients”. More importantly, sex workers often suffer from official disdain or condescension and are seen as the problem, not the solution.

Of course, the sex industry has not been ignored in the battle against AIDS. Thailand’s early successes are perhaps best-known. It was the first country in Asia to launch a “100% condom-use programme” in the early 1990s, and it managed to cut HIV prevalence sharply. The danger now is of complacency.

The best prevention schemes involve sex workers themselves. As a Chinese delegate put it, given the chance they do a far better job of educating and helping peers than do the UN or government. Myanmar, not normally cited as an outpost of progressive policy, has an HIV-prevention scheme seen as a model. Population Services International, an international NGO, has set up a “peer-to-peer” network with 18 drop-in centres around the country. There, 350 staff, mostly former or present sex workers themselves, dispense advice, discounted condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. HIV prevalence among sex workers dropped from over 30% in 2000-06 to 18% in 2008.

Still, a Burmese sex worker made a passionate intervention at the conference lamenting the stigma her profession carries. In Myanmar as elsewhere, sex workers suffer at the hands of the authorities. And the worst perpetrators are often the police and other official protectors. Take Cambodia, recognised for bringing down HIV prevalence, partly through a condom-use programme. In 2008 a law on “the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” led to the closure of brothels and a shift of the sex trade to bars and other places, complicating measures to prevent HIV. Worse, Human Rights Watch says, it has helped the police to beat, rob and rape sex workers “with impunity”.

A group of Cambodians wrote: “Our lives and our industry have been ruined by the anti-trafficking industry. We used to work in a brothel where we have safety and solidarity… Now we are scattered on the street where it is more dangerous.”

This is an extreme example of two problems besetting efforts to help sex workers. One is that, in most places, sex work is illegal, and almost everywhere frowned upon. Indonesian delegates complained that a new “Puritanism” accompanying a slow Islamisation of public life is forcing the sex trade underground and so making it more dangerous. As our debate showed, arguments for and against decriminalising prostitution are fierce and complex. But as long as it remains a criminal act, sex workers will be vulnerable to arbitrary abuse.

Second, the debate about sex work has become drowned in a campaign against human trafficking. That campaign, however justified its goals, fosters an assumption that all sex workers ply their trade against their will. Yet most migrant sex workers have left home for good reasons of their own—among them a desire to work away from their families, and to earn more money.

Parts of the debate, such as terminology, are as old as the oldest profession. One side regards “sex worker” as a dangerously obfuscatory euphemism. The other sees “prostitute” as degrading and derogatory. One sees those who sell sex inevitably as the victims of exploitation. But those seeking to be heard in Pattaya wanted recognition as independent actors who have made their own choices. They demand to be treated with basic human dignity just as they are.

Gao Xing Jiang Ink Paintings

Penumbra>>>>Gao Xing Jiang---Chinese ink on paper 2007