A news brief from WisBusiness.com, "Wisconsin's Business News Source":
Gov. Jim Doyle announced a trade agreement between the Wisconsin Ginseng Board and a Chinese company today he said will result in $12 million for state producers over the next five years... The Badger State produces some 95 percent of all ginseng produced in the U.S.
Somewhere, the spirits of a couple of 18th century Jesuit missionaries are nodding their heads sagely. This news would not surprise them. Nor would Daniel Boone or John Jacob Astor raise his eyebrows. Ginseng exports have a long history in North America -- in fact, one could argue that ginseng, as possibly the first trade item ever exported to Asia from the Americas, was a key factor in embedding the colonies in what passed for globalization in the 18th century.
The historical record is remarkably clear. In the early 1700s, Father Pierre Jartoux, a Jesuit missionary stationed in Beijing, was ordered by the Kang-Hsi emperor to compile an atlas of China. While surveying the Korean border, he was introduced to the miraculous powers of the ginseng root, which flourished in the dark forests of the northeast. Jartoux wrote a report on the plant intended to be distributed to Jesuit missions throughout the world and eventually translated into English and published in 1714 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, under the title "The Description of a Tartarian Plant, Call'd Gin-Seng; with an Account of Its Virtues. In a Letter from Father Jartoux, to the Procurator General of the Missions of India and China."
Jartoux's account was an unqualified rave, making the tuber, long prized in China, sound like a a cross between a wonder-drug antidepressant and crystal meth. As he noted:
"But four days after, finding myself so fatigued and weary that I could scarce get on horse back, a Mandarin who was in company with us perceiving it, gave me one of these roots: I took half of it immediately, and an hour after I was not the least sensible of any weariness. I have often made use of it since, and always the same success."
Amazingly, Jartoux also surmised that wild ginseng's propensity for growing in shady, cool forests in northern latitudes suggested the likelihood that the plant might also be at home in the forests of Canada, a country he had never visited.
Enter Father Francois Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary working with the Iroquois in Canada. In 1715, Lafitau read Jartoux's letter in a Jesuit periodical, and decided to follow up. Within a year he had located the plant in the forests stretching between Montreal and Ottawa. Lafitau soon organized the Iroquois, who were apparently unfamiliar with the medicinal properties of the root, as gatherers of the wild plant. He sent his samples back to China for positive identification. Although North American ginseng was not identical to Asian ginseng, it was nevertheless immediately embraced by the Chinese. By 1720, a French trading firm, the Company of the Indies, was exporting ginseng to China.
(Let us pause for one second here to ponder the linkages now exposed between Qing Dynasty emperors, Jesuit missionaries, Iroquois Indians, colonial exploitation, global trade, and natural medicine. We think the world has been made smaller (or flatter) by the Internet and other communication technologies, but even 300 years ago, the forests of southern Canada were not as distant as we might imagine from the Forbidden City.)
In "Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America's Most Valuable Plant," author Kristin Johannsen tells us that Americans of all stripes became fervent ginseng hunters. Daniel Boone was just one of thousands of Appalachian ginseng seekers, and the plutocrat John Jacob Astor "got his start in business in 1786 by buying every scrap of ginseng root he could find and chartering a chip to take it to China. From this venture he he received $55,000 in silver coin -- equivalent to $1,140,000 in our day, and the stake that founded a trading empire that stretched from New York to Oregon." In 1841, writes Johannsen, clipper ships carried over 640,000 pounds of dry ginseng to Asia, and the United States exported a total of 60 million pounds between 1783 and 1900.
Ginseng fever was so great that the United States quickly accomplished what had previously taken many centuries to achieve in China; the near eradication of the wild plant over most of the continental land-mass. Wild ginseng is now considered an endangered species in much of its former North American habitat. As the wild variety became scarcer, the commercial pressure to successfully engage in domestic cultivation rose.
And here is where the story moves to Wisconsin, specifically the German and Polish farmers who settled in the hills of Marathon County.
Today, 90 percent of Wisconsin's ginseng is grown in Marathon County. It is renowned worldwide and prized in China for its high quality -- which in scientific terms means its relatively high percentage of gensenocides, the compound believed to give ginseng whatever special properties is may have. But as recounted by Johannsen, it was all something of an accident. The pioneers of ginseng domestication, the four Fromm brothers of Hamburg, Wisconsin, were "just trying to raise the cash to start a fox farm." Specifically a "silver fox" farm, aimed at producing rare silver fox pelts that could command a huge premium in the fur market. The whole point of farming ginseng, for the Fromm brothers, was to raise enough cash to buy a breeding pair of silver foxes.
Ginseng cultivation is extraordinarily finicky, and it took the Fromm brothers years to perfect it. They also had to endure the crash of the Great Depression, which, combined with the Japanese invasion of China and then World War II, annihilated ginseng export markets. But the brothers persevered, and in the decades after World War II, prospered. In the 1970s and '80s ginseng cultivation in Wisconsin exploded.
But today the news that a new deal for Wisconsin ginseng has been signed could hardly come at a better time. Canada's entry into the export market, along with Chinese efforts at domestic cultivation, caused a global price crash for ginseng in the 1990s, sending hundreds of Wisconsin farmers out of the business -- including the legendary Fromm brothers. Although Wisconsin still dominates U.S. production, the total acreage under cultivation has fallen dramatically. Between 1997 and 2002 alone, it dropped by more than half.
And yet the root causes for ginseng's popularity as an export item in the early 18th century have hardly changed -- if anything, the potential is greater than ever. As one investigation of the current status of the Wisconsin ginseng industry concluded:
Although WI ginseng industry is experiencing a gloom period now, there are chances to revive it. China, the biggest market for American ginseng, has seen a growing population with more and more affluent consumers. Besides, domestic ginseng market is expanded by value-added products such as capsules, teas, tonics, soup base, beer, boxes of candy, and even cranberry-flavored "ginseng chew." The most important is that, Wisconsin ginseng is unique from other ginseng and famous for a higher quality and a minimum amount of chemical residue though at a cost of low production.
What, one wonders, would the Kang-Hsi emperor have thought of cranberry-flavored ginseng chew? Perhaps he would have immediately dismissed it as yet another barbarian innovation of no interest to the ageless Middle Kingdom. I'm guessing, however, that a modern Father Jartoux would taste it with curiosity, and, who knows, perhaps write a blog post about the yummy restorative treat that changed the course of history and global trade patterns.
Chinese director Jia Zhangke is among that rare breed of filmmaker capable of combining stunning artifice with documentary truth. After making a few low-budget underground films about provincial slackers, and at a time when most of the so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers had resigned themselves to collaborating with the powers-that-be, Jia took up the slack. He began to tackle larger social issues with a much more refined aesthetic in such films as "The World" (2004) and "Still Life" (2006). In the latter, one of the most provocative movies of the past decade, he exposes the folly of the Three Gorges Dam, a project conceived under Mao and executed by contemporary technocrats. During its construction, the government destroyed the city of Fengjie, displacing 1.2 million residents.
Two characters who never meet arrive there to tie up loose ends. A woman (played by the director's muse, Zhao Tao) seeks her husband to finalize their divorce; a man looks for the daughter he had abandoned years before. Jia is careful not to diminish the value of his protagonists' lives against the huge, impressive backdrop of gorgeous mountains haloed in fog, the wide Yangtze River, the strangely attractive remnants of centuries-old towns, even the bland new replacement cities in the distance. His palette and the narrative itself are distinctly Chinese: Jia has said he wanted to create a cinematic version of ancient scroll paintings. Winner of the best-film prize at Venice in 2006, "Still Life" testifies to the inner strength of the powerless residents and boldly challenges the decision-makers who care more about technological "progress" than quality of life.
Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.
A common explanation for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is Washington's interest in Central Asian fuel sources -- natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political right in the U.S. actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.
If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.
So the U.S. is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.
On Tuesday, radical guerrillas deployed a bomb to kill eight persons and wound 40 in an upscale area of Kabul where foreigners, including Indian aid workers, live -- in another sign of the deterioration of security in Afghanistan's capital. It is obvious how long a gas pipeline would last under these circumstances.
I'm not sure very many politicians in Washington were ever really so interested in the gas pipeline. For someone like then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, making Afghanistan a U.S. base may have aimed at surrounding and weakening Russia and keeping it from reemerging as a peer (a la the attempted push of NATO into places like Georgia).
Some U.S. leaders, however, were pushing for it. In recent years a Turkmenistan pipeline was seen as a way of forestalling India from breaking the embargo on Iran. And I remember that in fall 2001, when congressmen asked Colin Powell how the Afghanistan war would be paid for, he replied that the region is rich in resources. Since Afghanistan is not, he must have been speaking of places like Turkmenistan.
In any case, the Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like hell, and it all falls into your lap.
As if we needed any further proof that, from the vantage point of American pop culture, China has solidified its position as evil empire of the 21st century: Due in theaters next fall, a remake of the '80s classic "Red Dawn" -- but this time with Chinese invaders replacing the original Russkies. (Found via a tweet from Kaiser Kuo.)
I suppose some movie aficionados might quibble with the "classic" sobriquet. But they would be foolish to do so. The original "Red Dawn" provided a key early showcase for the talents of both Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen and perfectly captured the cartoon elements of Reagan-era Cold War posturing. And while some moviegoers at the time might have judged unrealistic the prospect of a handful of plucky Michigan teenagers -- the Wolverines! -- fighting the mighty Red Army to a standstill, there's no getting around the historical reality that within five years of "Red Dawn's" premiere, the Soviet Union had effectively collapsed. As many a rowdy bar patron would discover in the future, you just don't mess around with Patrick Swayze. He will take you and your totalitarian communist army down.
The new "Red Dawn 2010" stars Josh Peck as one the latter-day teens determined to resist the forces of collectivism. Peck is best known as the shlubby half of the Nickelodeon teen duo that starred in "The Adventures of Drake and Josh." Here's hoping that Josh has been working out lately, because as last seen on Nick, he was no Patrick Swayze. But maybe that's just part of Hollywood's fiendish plan to lull the Chinese into a sense of complacency before our cultural commissars destroy the People's Republic just as they did the USSR.
The best parts of "Red Dawn 2010" -- judging from the various trailers and YouTube videos leaking across the Net, are the socialist realist Chinese propaganda posters adorning the crumbling walls of Detroit slums. Judging by the poster slogans, -- "Repairing Your Economy," "Helping You Back On Your Feet," "Defeating Your Enemy" (complete with a sledgehammer busting up the Capitol building) the Chinese have chosen to invade while the U.S. is in the middle of deep economic trouble. And by depicting Washington as the problem, the Chinese are deftly attempting to rally both the populist TeaParty Right and the disenchanted progressive left to their cause. Real socialists to save us from the faux socialists!
Given that the the invasion is supposed to occur in 2010, the chances that the U.S. will remain mired in the economic doldrums, with the masses yearning for for delivery from our woes via foreign hands, could be high. So here's a little more pressure for the Obama administration. Fix our economic problems now, or the Chinese will arrive to fix them for us.
UPDATE: Grey Munford, Director of Corporate Publicity, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., responds:
Saw your post and just wanted to correct one thing about your synopsis. The 2010 version of Red Dawn begins when the Chinese and Russians attack a small northwestern town and a group of teenagers take the fight to the intruders in an attempt to disrupt the invasion and save their home.
Chinese and Russians! The plot thickens.
In a few weeks, the second decade of the 21st century will be upon us. (Note to purists who insist that it will begin on Jan. 1, 2011: Get a life.) The first decade of this century is likely to be remembered as the Decade From Hell. It began with a stock market crash and the 9/11 attacks. It ended with the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression and deepening U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A decade's worth of stock market gains were swiftly erased and for 10 years there has been no new net job creation outside the areas of healthcare, education and government.
The oughts can't end a moment too soon.
What does the decade of 2010-20 hold in store? There is already a consensus among America's commentariat. We are told that the near future will see the decline of the United States and the rise of China in global power politics and, as an added attraction, the decline of the nation-state.
Yeah, sure. I'll believe it when I see it.
I've heard it before. Born in 1962, I have followed the public discussion in this country for nearly half a century. And as I think back on the five decades of my life to date, what impresses me is the repetition of two themes in public discourse: the dramatic rise and fall of the U.S. and other great powers, and claims of radical changes in the very nature of world politics. When I hear these same sensational themes recycled, my response is a yawn.
Take the rise and fall of the great powers, a subject that has engaged me since I took Paul Kennedy's course on the subject at Yale in the 1980s. I have lived through enough cycles of exaggeration to be skeptical about claims that radical changes in the global distribution of power and wealth will end American primacy in the near future. In the 1970s, the Soviets were supposed in some quarters to be on the verge of surpassing the U.S. not only in military strength but also in economic power. Then the Soviet empire fell apart, and it turned out that CIA analysts and other alleged experts had grossly exaggerated the size of the Soviet economy and the efficiency of the Soviet armed forces.
But the theme of the imminent downfall of the U.S. was too good to be abandoned. So a substitute was found for the Soviet leviathan in the Japanese juggernaut. In the 1980s, there were predictions that Japan might actually surpass the U.S. in gross domestic product by 2000. Tom Clancy wrote a novel in which Japanese militarists blow up the U.S. Capitol and slaughter America's top leaders. Business school gurus recommended Japanese management techniques like singing company songs. And then the bottom fell out of the Japanese real estate and stock markets and Japan went into a prolonged slump from which it has yet to recover.
In the 1990s, American pundits lurched to the other extreme. Following the implosions of the Soviet Union and Japan, America's best and brightest declared almost unanimously that the U.S. was not a declining empire after all. No, America was an unstoppable super-duper-hyper-megapower! U.S. victories in a couple of wars in which a military designed to defeat the Warsaw Pact was deployed to crush bankrupt, backward countries like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan were interpreted as proof that the world -- and not just bankrupt, backward countries -- trembled before the might of Washington's legions. Otherwise sensible people, swept up in the conventional wisdom, wrote things like, "Not since Rome has a single state been as powerful as the United States of America."
This neo-imperial triumphalism shaped U.S. policy during the Bush years, when Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department, in the silliest government seminars of all time, invited historians to speculate on lessons for the Pax Americana from ancient empires. Let's combine Byzantine diplomacy with Hittite battlefield tactics ...
Then it turned out that a handful of terrorists hijacking airplanes could temporarily crater the U.S. economy and make Americans afraid of their own shadows, while small numbers of insurgents with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could make American occupations of other countries too costly for the American people to stomach. So much for the greatest empire since Rome. The imaginary Pax Americana was as short-lived as the imaginary Pax Nipponica and the imaginary Pax Sovietica that preceded it.
The lesson I take from all of this is that the distribution of power and wealth in the world is far more stable than you would think if you listened to our manic-depressive public discourse, where America is always either on the brink of catastrophic decline or unchallengeable global supremacy. The U.S. share of global GDP -- a good proxy for power -- has fluctuated around a quarter or a fifth since the early 1900s, with the exception of a temporary spike after World War II before the other industrial great powers recovered from it. The Soviet Union never came anywhere near challenging American primacy, and neither did Japan.
But now we are told that China will catch up with the U.S. in a couple of decades and dominate the world in the "Asian century." Maybe, and then again, maybe not. Those projections depend on straight-line extrapolations of the incredibly high Chinese growth rates of the last decade. But there are a lot of problems with those projections that you seldom hear in awed discussions of the rise of China.
For one thing, as developing countries become developed countries, their initial high rates of growth slow down. Taking this into account pushes China's parity with the U.S. further into the future. And this assumes that China's high growth rates have been real. More and more experts are wondering whether those official growth rates can be trusted. It would not be the first time that a corrupt, authoritarian regime cooked the books. If China's growth figures have been inflated for a decade or two, then the Chinese economy may be smaller than many believe and the distance it has to travel to catch up with the U.S. is much greater.
And even optimistic projections only have China catching up with the U.S. in overall GDP, mainly because it will have a larger, but much poorer, population. Nobody expects China, even under the most favorable circumstances, to catch up with the U.S. and other developed countries in per capita income until the 22nd century, if then. And each of the rest of the "BRICs" (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is dwarfed by the U.S. in GDP.
But don't expect to read any of this in the newsmagazines or the Op-Ed columns. "Sleeping Dragon Wakes, World Trembles" or "South Asian Elephant Shakes World Order" make better headlines than "Even With High Growth, China and India Will Be Poor for Generations."
Hyperbolic assertions about America's meteoric rise or meteoric decline are not the only kind of hype that pollutes public discourse. Academics and journalistic pundits alike are fond of drawing attention to themselves by declaring that we are on the verge of a radical transformation of the system of sovereign states that has existed in Europe since the Thirty Years' War and in the world since post-World War II decolonization. Once again, we see the fallacy of the straight-line extrapolation from a temporary trend to a cosmic transformation.
In the 1990s, some misinterpreted the disintegration along ethnonational lines of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Instead of understanding these phenomena as what they were -- the long-delayed dissolution of remnants of the Romanov and Hapsburg empires -- these local breakups were said by some to augur the crackup of states everywhere.
During the Balkan wars in the mid-1990s, on a trip to war-ravaged Croatia, I sat on a plane next to an American businessmen who was reading a pop futurist book. "This book says that by the year 2000, there will be 3,000 nations in the U.N.," the businessman told me. When I expressed my skepticism, he evidently concluded that I didn't know what I was talking about and said little for the rest of the flight. As of 2009, mostly as a result of the Soviet and Yugoslav crackups, a couple of dozen new states have joined the international community since the end of the Cold War, but not a couple of thousand.
Others in the 1990s predicted not the exponential multiplication of states but the end of the state as such as the dominant actor in world politics. Robert Kaplan predicted "the coming anarchy" and many prophesied a neo-feudal world order in which stateless entities were more powerful than conventional states.
9/11 gave a brief boost to those who claimed that international terrorist organizations now rivaled states in their power, but in retrospect it was a fluke, not a trend. Since 9/11 the U.S. and other states, having heightened their security, have thwarted mass-casualty attacks, and jihadists have been limited to crude, smaller-scale violence like machine-gunning crowds and blowing up buses and trains. Contrary to popular belief, with the exception of jihadism and a few local wars of partition, political violence worldwide dramatically diminished after the Cold War and remains low compared to the Cold War years (in part because the U.S. and the Soviets stirred the pot of many local conflicts that mercifully fizzled out without external intervention).
And the international corporations that were supposed to be more powerful than countries? The poorest countries have to bargain with transnational enterprises and banks -- but that is nothing new. Not only giant but also medium-size countries still overmatch even the largest corporations and banks. And "global" firms turned out to be not so global. When the present economic crisis struck in 2008, allegedly transnational enterprises like banks and car companies went running for aid to their respective national governments. These global firms, from Deutsche Bank to General Motors, have always been deeply rooted in particular nation-states, notwithstanding their overseas subsidiaries and partners. True global capitalism is a myth spread by the likes of Thomas Friedman. In reality, we live in the era of multinational capitalism, not global capitalism.
While we are strolling down memory lane, remember all the chatter a few years back about how irresistible immigration flows were leading to a world with open borders for labor as well as goods and capital? One of the fads in universities in the 1990s was the claim that "diasporic consciousness" was leading to the replacement of national identity by post-national global multiculturalism.
Not hardly. The backlash against the economic and cultural problems associated with mass immigration has forced parties of the left as well as the right in Europe to crack down on illegal immigration and asylum seeking. In the last decade in the U.S., many Democratic politicians who face reelection, including President Obama, have switched from denouncing critics of illegal immigration as racists to boasting of the success of their efforts to control the borders and promising to exclude illegal immigrants from public healthcare plans. And from India and Saudi Arabia to America's Southwestern border, fences are going up, to keep out both terrorist infiltrators and the unwanted foreign poor.
Remember how national identity was supposed to wither away? Obama campaigned and now governs against a backdrop of multiple American flags, as though he were the head of the John Birch Society. In Britain, the Labour Party that touted the wonders of globalization and financial deregulation in the 1990s is now proposing citizenship tests for immigrants, assimilation and American-style civic patriotism or liberal nationalism. The nation-state is not withering away. Post-national globalism is withering away. To be more accurate, post-national globalism never really existed, except in the imaginations of pundits and professors and plutocrats who concluded that the nation-state was dead because they invested in China, bought their suits in London and watched French art films.
In the decade about to begin, it would be naive to expect an end to breathless hype about world politics. That sort of thing wins readers for journals and newspapers and makes the careers of pundits who aspire to bloviate at Davos before an audience of the trendy rich. Nevertheless, the appropriate response to claims that America is about to collapse or conquer the world, and to assertions that the nation-state system is about to give way to something entirely different -- global mafias, city-states, a new Caliphate, tribal empires, a cybernetic Singularity, whatever -- is a bored yawn.
When John Woo left Hong Kong in the early 1990s, a few years before the then-British territory was to be handed over to the People's Republic of China, it clearly marked the end of an era. Although he was hardly the only important Hong Kong filmmaker, Woo symbolized the sudden global emergence of the territory's highly choreographed action cinema. With pictures like "Bullet in the Head," "The Killer," and the "Better Tomorrow" series, he had personally elevated the violent police thriller to implausible levels of symbolism and visual poetry.
Woo's move to Hollywood suggested that Chinese authorities might have trouble convincing the best talents in Hong Kong's film industry to stay home, under what was presumably going to be a censorious and intrusive regime. It also suggested that however corporatized mainstream American film had become, it could still attract exciting directors from overseas. Indeed, while Hong Kong studios struggled with budgets and distribution problems over the next few years, Woo became a certified Hollywood hitmaker, directing the cult faves "Broken Arrow" and "Face/Off," along with the Tom Cruise vehicle "Mission: Impossible II," which grossed $565 million worldwide.
But you can go home again, it appears. When I caught up with Woo for a few minutes on the phone recently, the 63-year-old action legend was partway through a whirlwind American tour to promote a film he calls the biggest and most ambitious he's ever done -- a massively-scaled, visually spectacular historical epic called "Red Cliff" that was entirely conceived, financed and made in China. He was also serving as a de facto spokesman for China's burgeoning campaign to build a new global film industry that can compete on equal terms with both Hollywood and Bollywood. Yeah, if the suits in west L.A. haven't made the logical deduction yet, they might make it now: Chinawood is coming, and it's going to be a very big deal.
This isn't an entirely new phenomenon, of course. From "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to "Hero" to "Curse of the Golden Flower," productions financed or co-financed by China's film industry have occasionally combined big budgets with artistic vision and become hits on a global scale. But "Red Cliff" has definitely kicked the game up a notch, and you have to wonder whether veteran Chinese filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou are feeling disrespected. Woo spends a dozen years in L.A. living the high life with Tom Cruise and Nic Cage while they're making serious films, and then he gets to come back and become a huge national hero.
After protracted discussions with Chinese authorities, Woo got near-total carte blanche to come home and make this long-contemplated dream project, one for which Hollywood producers had displayed little enthusiasm. In the process, Woo -- a devout Christian who is widely assumed to be anti-Communist -- has clearly been tasked with driving Chinese cinema in a more commercial direction. "I have learned so much from Hollywood," Woo told me, "and I thought it was about time to bring what I have learned in Hollywood back to Asia. There are so many young and talented filmmakers in China. I think it's great for them to have the chance to work on a big-budget, Hollywood-type movie. To learn some new spirit, you might say."
Whether Chinese film really needs an injection of Hollywood's spirit is very much open to debate, but the Chinese authorities, like Woo himself, are thinking big. Woo's grandiose retelling of the 208 A.D. Battle of Red Cliffs, between Han Empire forces and the rebellious kingdoms to the west and south -- a legendary conflict as well-known to Asians as the Trojan War is to Westerners -- veers, like most of his films, from the portentous to the breathtaking (and is often both at the same time). It combines Asian action cinema and Hollywood-style CGI effects in truly dazzling fashion and on a scale never seen before. And it's become the biggest-grossing release in Chinese history (breaking the record previously held by "Titanic"), and a record-breaker in several other Asian countries as well.
Unfortunately, American moviegoers will only see a sliced-'n'-diced version of "Red Cliff," edited down from the two-part, five-hour opus that played in Asian markets to a single, 148-minute release stitched together with voiceover narration and explanatory on-screen titles. This only drives home the point that "Red Cliff" wasn't made for Americans; its release here by Magnet, a genre-oriented offshoot of Magnolia Pictures, is almost an afterthought by comparison. (Woo says the full-length Asian version will eventually be released here on DVD; you can probably find it now, if you know where to look.)
Despite the occasional clunkiness of the foreshortened "Red Cliff" and its ancient-world setting, it's unmistakably a John Woo movie. (I haven't seen the full-length version.) It's built around patterns of male friendship and enmity, a deadly feud over a beautiful woman who represents the domestic bliss Woo's violent heroes always yearn for, and three or four of the most elaborate action sequences ever filmed. (Yes, Woo devotees, there are still doves. Lots and lots of doves!)
Woo says the climactic, three-stage naval battle that lends the movie its name involved building two dozen or so full-size wooden warships, creating many more digitally, and shooting with four different filmmaking crews: a first unit to capture the principal action, a second unit, a stunt unit and a special-effects unit. "We had to shoot all kinds of live-action scenes while the ships were actually on fire," he laughed. "We CG'd the rest of the ships and the rest of the fire, but a lot of it is real. And we were shooting against bad weather. It was extremely cold and we were facing high winds. We had to get creative in every shot. This was definitely the biggest movie, and the toughest movie, I've ever tried to do."
Given that the historical battle of Red Cliffs took place 1,800 years ago, and the best-known account is a fictionalized version written in the 13th century, more than a millennium later, Woo and his writing team felt free to simplify and amplify the story as they see fit. Three of Asia's biggest male stars play the principal roles: Tony Leung plays Zhou Yu, the rebel hero who joins forces with Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a rival kingdom's military strategist, to confront the massively superior forces of Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), a nefarious schemer who has convinced the Han Emperor to go to war.
There are dozens of other characters in the mix, but none are as memorable as the ethereal Xiao Qiao (Taiwanese supermodel Chiling Lin), who is married to Zhou Yu but, of course, coveted by the evil Cao Cao, whose uncontrollable desire for her will prove to be a near-fatal failing. (No one is ever likely to accuse Woo of being a feminist filmmaker. His women come in two flavors: lovely and mysterious or tomboyish and spunky.)
Despite the wide variety of fantastical violence depicted in "Red Cliff," Woo insists he has stayed true to his code of never glorifying killing in the service of entertainment. "It's very much an entertaining film, but I think there's a human story in there too, that's important for me to tell," he said. "It's a war movie, and I like to stress that in war there are no winners. I think we have an antiwar message in there. As I'm sure you can see, I emphasize that when people get shot, there is death and tears. I think that's the way to send the right message."
Woo was able to borrow up to 1,500 soldiers from the Chinese army to serve as extras in the battle scenes and work on building sets, which gives you some idea how much national pride became officially invested in this prodigal son's homecoming. For his part, Woo describes working in his native country after all these years as "a dream come true." (He was born in Guangzhou, in southern China, and moved to Hong Kong as a child around the time the Communists came to power.)
"I've wanted to make this movie for more than 20 years," he said. "I always dreamed about making a movie like 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Spartacus' or 'Seven Samurai' -- that scale of movie. And I really love this part of history. This is the most famous battle in Chinese history. Anybody who grew up in China knows this story. The Japanese know it, the Koreans know it, all the other Asian countries know this story."
Seeing the audience reaction in China and other East Asian countries, says Woo, made him see the potential of a Hollywood-scale Chinese film industry. "The movie was so successful in China and Japan and that was very, very gratifying," he said. "The audience really felt so much excitement about the movie. Most Asian audiences are used to watching big Hollywood movies, which honestly are much higher quality, with the heroes and the big stars. But a movie like 'Red Cliff' has really changed their minds. It's a movie on the Hollywood scale that has so much of the Asian spirit. It has drawn the Asian audience back to the movie theater. We will have to see what happens, but I think the film industry in China will grow very fast, very fast. People in China really want to watch this kind of movie."
"Red Cliff" is now playing in New York, and opens Nov. 25 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Washington; Dec. 4 in Honolulu, Monterey, Calif., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Dec. 11 in Baltimore, Cleveland, Hartford, Conn., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Memphis St. Louis, San Antonio, Texas, and Santa Fe, N.M., with more cities to follow. Also available on-demand via many cable-TV systems.
President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese ... just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending.
This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cellphone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many).
Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50 percent higher this year than last. Procter & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at or near its current rate and the benefits of that growth trickle down to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, the country would become the largest shopping bazaar in the history of the world. They'll be driving over a billion cars and will be the world's biggest purchasers of household electronics, clothing, appliances and almost everything else produced on the planet.
So this will mean millions of American export jobs, right? No.
In fact China is heading in the opposite direction of "rebalancing." Its productive capacity keeps soaring, but Chinese consumers are taking home a shrinking proportion of the total economy. Last year, personal consumption in China amounted to only 35 percent of the Chinese economy; 10 years ago consumption was almost 50 percent. Capital investment, by contrast, rose to 44 percent from 35 percent over the decade.
China's capital spending is on the way to exceeding that of the U.S., but its consumer spending is barely a sixth as large. Chinese companies are plowing their rising profits back into more productive capacity -- additional factories, more equipment, new technologies. China's massive $600 billion stimulus package has been directed at further enlarging China's productive capacity rather than consumption. So where will this productive capacity go if not to Chinese consumers? Net exports to other nations, especially the U.S. and Europe.
Many explanations have been offered for the parsimony of Chinese consumers. Social safety-nets are still inadequate, so Chinese families have to cover the costs of health care, education and retirement. Young Chinese men outnumber young Chinese women by a wide margin, so households with sons have to accumulate and save enough assets to compete in the marriage market. Chinese society is aging quickly because the government has kept a tight lid on population growth for three decades, with the result that households are supporting lots of elderly dependents.
But the larger explanation for Chinese frugality is that the nation is oriented to production, not consumption. China wants to become the world's preeminent producer nation. It also wants to take the lead in the production of advanced technologies. The U.S. would like to retain the lead, but our economy is oriented to consumption rather than production.
Deep down inside the cerebral cortex of our national consciousness we assume that the basic purpose of an economy is to provide more opportunities to consume. We grudgingly support government efforts to rebuild our infrastructure. We want our companies to invest in new equipment and technologies but also want them to pay generous dividends. We approve of government investments in basic research and development, but mainly for the purpose of making the nation more secure through advanced military technologies. (We regard spillovers to the private sector as incidental.)
China's industrial and technological policy is unapologetically direct. It especially wants America's know-how, and the best way to capture know-how is to get it firsthand. So China continues to condition many sales by U.S. and foreign companies on production in China -- often in joint ventures with Chinese companies.
American firms are now helping China build a "smart" infrastructure, tackle pollution with clean technologies, develop a new generation of photovoltaics and wind turbines, find new applications for nanotechnologies, and build commercial jets and jet engines. GM recently announced it was planning to make a new subcompact in China designed and developed primarily by the Pan-Asia Technical Automotive Center, a joint venture between GM and SAIC Motor in Shanghai. General Electric is producing wind turbine components in China. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar announced it will be moving its solar panel production to China.
The Chinese government also wants to create more jobs in China, and it will continue to rely on exports. Each year, tens of millions of poor Chinese pour into large cities from the countryside in pursuit of better-paying work. If they don't find it, China risks riots and other upheaval. Massive disorder is one of the greatest risks facing China's governing elite. That elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.
To this extent, China's export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order. Despite the Obama administration's entreaties, China will continue to peg the yuan to the dollar -- when the dollar drops, selling yuan in the foreign-exchange market and adding to its pile of foreign assets in order to maintain the yuan's fixed relation to the dollar. This is costly to China, of course, but for the purposes of industrial and social policy, China figures the cost is worth it.
The dirty little secret on both sides of the Pacific is that both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment.
Both societies are threatened by the disconnect between production and consumption. In China, the threat is civil unrest. In the U.S., it's a prolonged jobs and earnings recession that, when combined with widening inequality, could create political backlash.
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