cycling newsies

Tom Vanderbilt muses about paper boys in the current issue of Time. I've enjoyed his writings, beginning with Traffic a couple of years ago. You don't have to be a transportation wonk to learn from and enjoy that book. That's true also of his articles in Slate and other press outlets, his tweets, and his blog posts. He writes about Americans' intense, but frequently absurd love affair with the car[1] but just as much about the silliness of traffic engineers and politicians who pander to us car lovers. And he writes about those of us, too, who, whether we're car lovers or not, yearn for more livable urban and sub-urb spaces for walking, jogging, and cycling.

The Time piece is The Rise and Fall of the American Paperboy. In it he says those of us who were carriers tend to have intense memories of that time. I agree. At 14 I was barely old enough for the required work permit and had never shouldered responsibility anywhere near that heavy. I'm pretty sure I signed up because my much-admired-but-never-successfully-emulated older sister had pointed the way. By that time she'd been earning what seemed big sums as a babysitter for a few years. I wrote once before about the paper route and my propensity to earn and save. The post is Secondat: Margaret Atwood and me.

My job was to deliver the Citizen Register weekday afternoons, in good weather and bad. My mom had cause to remember the bad because there were times when the route was either too wet or too icy to be bikable and I begged her to drive me (she did not like this task and I think I tried not to call on her too often). I can't recall how the job opportunity came my way, but I do have a vivid memory of the training session I received from the outgoing carrier, a one-time shadowing which left me on my own to work out a passably efficient means for receiving, counting, bagging my 60 or so papers and getting them into their roadside tubes over the ups and downs of the route's 3.6 miles. I carried Dogbone treats in a vain attempt to stay a couple of aggressive dogs in the first few houses I served. After the dogs my main challenge was a handful of steep climbs. I couldn't handle them in an American one-speed, like my old Columbia (which was less luxurious than this 1955 Schwinn Black Phantom[2]). You couldn't get an affordable 10-speed "racer" at that time[3], but fortunately my big cousin Carl was done with his English three-speed which looked like this.[4] I've a vivid memory of a guy in a truck yelling out "put it in low" one afternoon as I struggled up one of the steepest inclines. (Though struggling, I did have it in third already.)

Toward the end of my career in that work I was photographed and interviewed for the Register's annual carrier-of-the-year fluff piece. Needless to say I'd no prior experience of this kind of thing and I'm sure I failed to give the poor journalist a single interesting quote. It mystified me that the photog wanted a shot of my stringing my laminated, recurved yew-wood bow,[5] but I'm pretty sure a prop was needed to make me look even a little bit relaxed.

Here are some map images that show the route. I began my afternoon's ride at the circle on the right, rode west, then south and west until I reached the last customer. At that point I reversed myself and wheeled back to the beginning and onward to my parents' home nearby. Because examining these maps brings forth some memories, I've indulged in a brief nostalgic reverie somewhat further down the page.

Click these images if you wish to view them full size. The first is a USGS topo map from the later 1930s. If you're good at reading gradients, you'll notice that I start off in a little valley and don't encounter much climbing until the longish south-west straight (which you'll find when you scroll down is called Aspinwall Road). At that point I go up to the route's high point, then down and up again to a very steep but short little "Y" at the end.

{This is a detail from a map published in 1943 from survey data collected in 1936. It's the Ossining, NY Quadrangle, USGS 7.5 Minute Series, Latitude 41.1875 Longitude 286.1875, and I got it from Historic USGS Maps of New England & New York}

This topo map represents how the same area looked in 1964.

{This is a detail from a USGS topo map in the same series. It was published in 1979 from data collected in 1964. NYSGIS Clearinghouse}

This up-to-date contour map shows the ups and downs pretty clearly.

{source: Google}

This hybrid satellite image adds little to the other maps other than indicating how woodsy is this part of the world.

{source: Yahoo}

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Here's the nostalgic reverie.

I was born the year before the first map was published. Population density was then quite low. There'd been less than a thousand residents when the village was incorporated in 1910. By 1940 the total has risen to near 1,500. At the time I had the paper route it was somewhere around 3,000 and the 2000 Census found it to be close to 8,000. As a paperboy and in my other local jobs (service station gas jockey, summer clerk in the high school, drug store stock boy, house painter, and doer of odd jobs) I got the sense that I knew maybe half of the 700 households, including their cars and their dogs.[6]

Many of the village's breadwinners spent their workdays 30 miles south in Manhattan, but many others worked locally. Some were wealthy, but others quite middling and less. This admirable diversity did not extend to racial or ethnic composition. We were predominantly white Protestants and Catholics with family roots in continental Europe and the British Isles.

The excellence of the school system was a major draw for many who moved there, including my parents. Following a couple of part-time stints in local nursery schools, I spent my K-12 years in one building. Sometimes on bike, but mostly on foot, I'd work my way the mile and a half to and from school, municipal pool, playing fields, and tennis courts, or (if cold enough) the iced duck pond that adjoined. You walked by the side of the road and cut through friendly back yards to paths that snaked through the woods. If there were no golfers about, you could cut the trip down by crossing the fairways either to the village stores (for candy mostly) or the school. This detail shows the long route in green and the two shorter ones in burgundy and blue.

This little piece of map shows a lot of my young universe, from the village park, school, and pond, to the village stores, golf course, and, on the opposite ridge, steeply wooded hillside leading up to the Lodge (which had become Edgewood Park, a college for upper-class girls when I was growing up and, after some years' vacancy, King's College, an evangelical Christian school). One of my earliest memories is a kindergarten "class trip" to the little-used single-track Putnam Line that shows on the right of the map. We saw the semaphore, the bags of mail, and inhaled the special train smell of the station; then watched a steam engine pull a couple of cars on a south-bound route.

Until I got involved in high school sports and took on some part-time jobs, I'd lots of free time to spend with friends. We did sports together — shot hoops in each others' driveways, found some favorite fields for tag football games, and played ice hockey on the iced over swimming pool. Lots of neighboring kids would get together for glorious softball games on the golf course fairway and a one or two of us would bring a few old clubs so as to play a few holes when we thought we could get away with it. We'd fish in the Lodge Pool and create Huck Finn rafts to navigate it. We'd climb tree vines and run helter-skelter down the wooded slopes. There was a big open field down the street that was a constant attraction for romps.

I'd one friend with whom I'd like to set out on random adventures. We'd climb the golf course hill and pick a distant landmark then try to walk there in a straight line, going into people's yards and over their fences. Mostly we'd find ourselves in woods but never to such an extent that we lost our way. Sometimes we'd end up where there were boulders and tall trees to climb. Once we found ourselves at an old quarry whose face we proceeded to climb as far as we could (it was a bit icy then and I'm happy now to have survived that feat). Once we kept walking until we got to Millwood some two towns distant. We wore sneaks and had no water or snacks and the trek back was, that time, a sore trial.

I didn't know then what a privilege it was to grow up in that place and that time.

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Fair use claim: To the best of my knowledge my reproduction of images on this page complies with fair use provisions of US copyright law. I'll remove any for which fair use does not apply on being shown that I've infringed.

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Some sources:

Paperboy, in wikipedia

Village of Briarcliff Manor, the village web site

10510 Zip Code Detailed Profile, i.e., Briarcliff Manor, on eachtown.com

Briarcliff Manor in wikipedia


WESTCHESTER COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF PLANNING (pdf), for census data

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Notes:

[1] "Car" is used for so many different conveyances that it's use as synonym for automobile always demands some context to be properly understood. As well as motor vehicles, cars are what locomotives pull down the track, what's strung under a hot-air balloon, what carries people up and down skyscrapers within elevator shafts, and what carries tourists and skiers to the top of the mountain (and, some of them, back down again). Formerly, it was a favorite conveyance for poetic beings — as in the fiery carr of Phoebus, the weary Sun's fiery car, or the Carr of Jove's Imperial Queen, or, as might be, a special type of horse-drawn cart or carriage (jaunting car), car as hansom cab, a kind of drag used in making road repairs, or yet even seven stars in Ursa Major (as in "Pleiads, Hyads, and the Northern Car"). -- OED.

Americans distinguish cars from trucks, but a high proportion of these cars are officially (by the government) called light trucks.

[2] Which I found on nostalgic.net, as seen here:


[3] I got this image of a Fuji Deray from OldTenSpeedGallery.com.


[4] My image comes from flickr. So's you don't have to leave the page, here it is.


[5] I still have the bow. It looks like this.

{source: leatherwall.bowsite.com}

[6] This shows the village's growth in population. The yellow bars show the information we're interested in. The blue and burgundy show numbers of people in each of the two townships in which the village is located.

{source: the village web site, briarcliffmanor.org/}

her study

I've done some blog posts on the documentary photographs of Berenice Abbott showing New York City in the 1930s.[1] She was one of many Depression-era photographers who received government paychecks to document the times, but while most of them worked for the Farm Security Administration recording conditions in rural America,[2] she managed to convince managers of the Federal Art Project to fund a documentary record of New York City.[3] In undertaking this project she paid homage to the influence of the French photographer, Eugène Atget, who had captured Paris in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His motives were entirely pragmatic: to earn a living by selling photos to the artists of Montparnasse, but his output was far from utilitarian, rivaling in different medium the paintings of his customers.

There's no direct connection between Atget-Abbott and Fan Ho, but he, like them, is known for images that celebrate a city, in his case, Hong Kong in book entitled Hong Kong Yesterday.[4]

This image is my favorite of Fan Ho's photographs. It's in a style very similar to Atget's.

{Her Study, 1963; source: (OvO) on tumblr, via Nothing New}

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These are all by Eugène Atget

{Rue des Ursins, 1923; source: masters-of-photography.com}

{Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, 1924 source: evansklar.blogspot.com}

{cour 7 rue de Valencia, 1922, Eugene Atget; source: singularimages.wordpress.com}

{Quai d'Anjou, 6 a.m., 1924; source: masters-of-photography.com}

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Some sources:

Berenice Abbott's Changing New York, 1935-1939, Museum of the City of New York

Abbott, Berenice, an overview of her work shown through 10 photographs at Get The Picture

Berenice Abbott by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) Photojournalism, Portraiture

Berenice Abbott 1898-1991, short biography

Berenice Abbott, photographer: an independent vision by George Sullivan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006)

Changing New York: Photographs by Berenice Abbott, 1935-1938, NYPL

the city of paris, a collection of Atget's photographs on the blog, Miss Parlour

Atget, Eugene, French, 1857-1927 a collection on photography-now.net

Eugene Atget (1856-1927), an exhibition at Temple University

The Atget Rephotographic Project

Hong Kong yesterday by Fan Ho, John A. Bennette, Mark Pinsukanjana, and Bryan Yedinak (Modernbook Editions, 2006)

Fan Ho, biography and many photographs

fan ho 100 photographs

FAN HO 50 Year Retrospective 1954 - 2004, a gallery show

Fan Ho The Living Theatre by Modernbook Gallery

Hong Kong Yesterday, some images

Fan Ho: Hong Kong Yesterday, more photos

Stillness in Motion: The Photographs of Fan Ho

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Notes:

[1] They are

• Monroe & Hamilton
• a re-creation of the living world
• more Berenice Abbott
• New York in the '30s

[2] Click the FSA label on my blog to see the 40 posts I've put together on the images made by these photographers.

[3] Abbott's life was an interesting one. See "Some sources," above, for links to information about her.

[4] "Born in Shanghai in 1932, Fan Ho later moved with his family to Hong Kong where he began to take photographs using a Rolleiflex given to him by his father. Initially, Fan Ho considered photography an engaging pastime. But as he roamed the streets and alleyways of Hong Kong, he was drawn to the city and its inhabitants." -- From Hong Kong yesterday. The Rollei takes square images, 6 cm. by 6 cm. Atget and Abbott used much larger view cameras. Hers was an 8 in. by 10 in. Century Universal and his was almost the same (it's described here as "a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lens. The images were exposed and developed as 18x24cm glass dry plates").

Guizhou Weng'an riots

EastSouthWestNorth, a China newsblog by a Hong Kong resident named Roland Soong (wikipedia) has continued to update its compilation of stories and photos on the Weng'an Mass Incident. Currently, the article at the bottom of the page is a long summary of events from a Chinese newsmagazine called Southern Weekend, a weekly newspaper from Guangzhou, China (wikipedia). The article illustrates something that's interested me about coverage of the event: The official news agency, Xinhua, at first tried to whitewash the event, but was never able to establish its spin and suffered servere criticism on blogs and both foreign and domestic news coverage for its inept attempts: its bland weasel-worded accounts of the incident, its quotes from officials speaking bureaucrateeze and quotes from locals who were obviously, and painfully, trying to say what they thought officials wanted to hear. So, as things turned out, the Chinese press coverage was pretty thorough and pretty well balanced; raising questions and pointing out contradictions in different accounts. Other things about coverage are also interesting: (1) how much cell-phone photography there was, how quickly photos and videos showed up on blogs, how inventive people were in getting around internet censorship in China; (2) how the riot managed to limit itself to destruction of property with no loss of life and very little injury to participants or police; (3) how the frame enlarged from the tragic death of a 15-year-old to include the ineptitude of local officials and police and the legitimate grievances of residents; and (4) how much the current Chinese version of totalitarianism lacks totality -- police so unprepared to deal with crowd violence that the police station itself could be trashed, the family of the dead girl able to claim her body and display it (for payment of contributions) in a refrigerated coffin on the banks of the river where she died, the friends who were with her at time of death first sequestered by authorities but then released to be interviewed and, being interviewed, not mouthing official pieties, and the release, finally, of information that balanced against rumors of rape and murder (some plausible motiviations for the girl to be distraught because of actions by her family). I don't expect there will ever be a single "truth" that emerges from the story, but that's normal for emotion-charged events outside Communist societies as well as within them.

more on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

Here's a short update to my post just below (a death in Guiyang). (I seem to be the only person refering to the event by the city where the riot took place, Guiyang. I've put the more common reference points in the subject of this post.)

There's still plenty of coverage in the news media, although it's not front page stuff. As Kenneth Tan says on shanghaiist, the best coverage of this story continues to come from the blog eastsouthwestnorth.

The ESWN bloggers are saying that Chinese web portals are deleting posts related to the event as quickly as they show up. On one forum it was estimated that Weng'an-related posts had an avererage lifespan of only 15 seconds. Because of this most discussion of the event appears as comments on the official Xinhua news reports.

Xinhua, the Communist Party news agency, is reporting that a high ranking official is investigating the death of the teenage girl. The report says the "incident was a simple affair that a small number of people with ulterior motives managed to manipulate and leverage, with the direct participation of organized crime forces, to provoke and challenge the Party and the government publicly." The blog comments on the Xinhua article: "The above Xinhua article is just about unreadable because it is just another stream of homilies without content. Is this how people really think and talk?"

ESWN also points out the confusion caused by government efforts to take control of coverage, to put their own spin on it, and give it the frame they wish it to have:

The second phenomenon was the amount of noisy chaff released. On one hand, there is the legendary "50-cent gang." These are supposed to be professional Internet writers who get paid 0.50 RMB for every post favorable to the government position. When yet another version of the Weng'an mass incident gets published as being the ultimate truth, the author is accused of being a member of the "50-cent gang" who is trying to confuse the public. Indeed, if you read through enough versions, you will probably throw up your hands and decide that you don't know what the truth is anymore. Instead, you change your investigation to questioning the motives of the people who are producing these versions.

On the other hand, there is the legendary "Internet special agent (??)." These are supposed to be professional spies who are paid by anti-China hostile forces to publish unfavorable information about China. For example, some of the posts mentioned that the People's Liberation Army has been dispatched to Weng'an with tanks and artillery, with the hint of a Tiananmen-like massacre to follow. Immediately, the other netizens reacted by pointing that these posts are coming from "Internet special agents." The netizens want to draw a very clear line: they may be protesting against what is happening in Weng'an but they will not serve the purpose of the anti-China hostile forces. This is very clear.

ESWN also provides a link to another blog site which gives a quote from a local Communist Party newspaper that is unaffiliated with Xinhua. In an editorial comment, the paper criticizes the response by government leaders and the national press, saying that there wouldn't have been a riot with great property damage and the rest if leaders had addressed the core element in the story. The editorial writer says:

But the actual fuse that led to this incident, the details on the actual case involving the death hasn’t been explained or described. The short description that “some people are dissatisfied with the determination of ’cause of death’” isn’t enough of a conclusion. This is no different than wrapping gunpowder with paper (ed: similar to the English idiom walking on land-mines), and will lead to guesses and assumptions, and the people’s dissatisfaction is completely understandable.

A comment on the posts in this other blog site says that Xinhua has now published a report by editor Yan Liang giving many more facts and indicating for the first time why local residents were so upset. The article says:

But the police account proved difficult to accept for the girl's family and their supporters. Li's classmates and her landlord said she was a good student and couldn't have killed herself.

"She was a quiet and nice child. She seldom hung out or played around. I don't think she killed herself," said landlord Liu Jinxue, who helped pull her body from the river. Li's hometown was a rural township and she lived in a rented apartment in the county.

Liu told Xinhua that the girl's uncle, Li Xiuzhong, had several serious confrontations with the police, and was beaten by unidentified men in the street.

The uncle was in a county hospital last week, but had since been transferred elsewhere, Xinhua learnt.

Li's grandmother Lu Xiuzhen said the girl's father had departed for provincial capital, Guiyang, to petition the government and could not be reached. The mother had "gone mad" since the incident, she said.

"I demand the government thoroughly investigate the incident and give us a justifiable explanation," she said.

What's interesting -- according to other commenters on the blog -- is that Xinhua put this up on the English-language part of its web site. The version of the Chinese-language side of the site is apparently much more bland:

The English one was written by writers working for Xinhua, and contains a fairly reasonable report of the incident with quotes from various parties. The Chinese article, however, comes from local Guizhou news report (????-????), and is, frustratingly, of the typical style of official non-sense and white wash everyone hated so much. That article basically reported that the party boss of Guizhou held meetings with local officials to discuss the incident, already casting it as mostly caused by misguided people incited by a few and laid only light blame on officials who “didn’t do a good enough job” locally.

Here's the blog post in shanghaiist:

More on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens more questions than it answers, paving the way for all sorts of unsubstantiated rumours to dominate public opinion.

An AP story has some photos by Andy Wong.

Chinese paramilitary police officers patrol in Weng'an county of Guizhou province, China, Monday, June. 30, 2008. Authorities detained hundreds of people suspected of setting fire to police and government buildings in southwest China in protests over a teenage student's death, a human rights organization said Monday.

a death in Guiyang

I saw a link to a BBC news story with the headline Chinese riots over girl's death. There's so much Chinese news these days, what with the upcoming Olymic Games, the ongoing tragedy following from the massive earthquake in Sichuan Province, the Tibetan conflict in which the Dalai Lama figures, the slowing of China's unbelievably fast-growing economy, Chinese massive energy requirements, Chinese environmental problems, and social problems stemming from the fast growth of China's middle class. The BBC article piqued my interest partly because I'd seen a recent headline on the Chinese power structure which pointed out that Communist Party leaders in local areas were practically autonomous. That article tallied with conclusions I'd drawn from reading Qiu Xiaolong's gritty detective stories set in southeast China.

News accounts of the riots are interesting partly because they don't all say the same thing. In the west, it seems to me, when there's broad coverage of an event, all the reporters have pretty much the same sources and their accounts differ very little from one another. It's more difficult to cover a closed society like China and -- sources being more difficult to find -- the accounts differ somewhat more.

In this case the western stories tend to build on one another as the set of facts enlarges. They differ in that, but also in the emphasis they place on the story's main elements. The current lead paragraphs in the AFP account gives some of the basics up front:

Rioters in southwestern China torched government buildings and cars after anger over a probe into a schoolgirl's death exploded into violent protests, locals and state press said Sunday.

The riots occurred Saturday in Guizhou province when protesters ransacked three government and police buildings after the girl's uncle died from an alleged beating by police trying to stop him from protesting against the handling of the case, locals and Internet postings said.

The BBC gives the map I put above and adds a crucial point:

Local residents were angered after a police inquiry concluded that the girl, found dead in a river earlier in June, had committed suicide. Her family accused the son of a local official of raping and killing her.

Reuters makes the cause of local anger more plain:

"Local residents were very angry about the injustice exercised by local authorities," the resident, who is an official at a local government office, told Reuters by telephone.

It's not surprising that the account in the politically-controlled Chinese news agency contrasts dramatically with the reports in free-press media. The Chinese story tells that there's been a riot, but the reporter tells us that a bunch of misguided people went overboard and attacked the local police station and government buildings because they were "dissatisfied with the medicolegal expertise on the death of a local girl student." The emphasis is on destruction of public property and efforts to restore order. The action of the mob is described as torching government office buildings and assaulting local officials. The scene is characterized by the word chaos.

You'd think that all reports coming out of China would be similarly slanted, so I was surprised to find an account on a Shanghai web site that I find better than many of the news stories that originate outside China. The site gives succinct coverage and a number of useful links:

Riot in Weng'an County, Guizhou Province

Several thousand rioters have gathered in Guizhou's Weng'an County, torched a police station, ransacked government buildings and overturned police cars, after allegations of a cover-up over a 15 year old girl's death blew up. Ming Pao reports the son of the county's vice-deputy mayor had raped and murdered the girl along with another youth and tossed her body into the Ximen River. Police only detained the suspects for five hours and released them without charge. EastSouthWestNorth says unconfirmed, conflicting reports are now swirling around the Internet but has several telling pictures which indicate a large proportion of the population was out on the streets. [Xinhua] [Reuters] [AP] [AFP] [Youtube videos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

By Kenneth Tan in News | Link

You can learn more about the shanghaiist site from their about page. It seems they actually publish from Shanghai in China. The wikipedia article on the city makes it sound like a very interesting place.

Here are photos from a site called eastsouthwestnorth. Notice that they all come from myspace.cn, the Chinese myspace site that went live about a year ago.

This is the young woman:


This shows the size of the crowd:




The city apparently has a large central square surrounded by government buildings:


One of the accounts says that locals hate their police:


One account says how much smoke there was:


Here you can see, in the aftermath, that young people participated:

whither China?

Newspapers are reporting that China's currency has appreciated against the US dollar to the highest point since 1994. This pleases US policy makers who maintain that the Yuan has been artificially low.

As the Yuan rises in value, Chinese exports become more costly to Americans. Americans who spend a lot of time in Wal-Mart and Target have benefited from the cheap Yuan. They'll regret the appreciation of the currency. American producers consider the cheap Yuan to be unfair competition. American politicians dislike the unequal trade balance that has resulted, as exports from America to China represent only a tiny offset to the enormous volume of American imports from China.*

Things are much more complicated than that.

China has been constrained from letting the Yuan rise in value because its factories provide employment to millions of its citizens. The nation set a fixed ratio of the Yuan to the dollar at least partly in order to stimulate exports and thus provide jobs to those who were barely surviving on subsistence agriculture. Chinese factories produced cheap clothing and other low-wage goods, Americans bought this output, and the Chinese economy grew at a rapid rate.

China sees that there are limits to this policy and has more recently begun to diversify its manufacturing. It has been purchasing high-tech production equipment and improving educational opportunities so that it can develop a better-trained workforce and produce more sophisticated goods and services.

It has been induced to make this change partly because its currency manipulation has stimulated inflation and partly because middle class Chinese people need better investment opportunities: it does not make sense for them to continue to invest in low-end manufacturing.

Chinese policy makers also realize that as Chinese people gain wealth (or at least reasonable incomes) from exports, their desire to consume high-end goods and services increases. The Chinese government would prefer to meet this need from within China rather than by way of imports.

Inflation is a world-wide concern. The price of oil continues to rise and now rises in the price of food are causing great concern. China has to worry about the rising price of rice as much as do its Asian neighbors. There's great risk that people who can't afford food will rebel against their governments.

Echoing many financial experts, a blogger says China should be more aggressive in revaluing its currency:

China's PMI Numbers Are Too Strong, by Michael Pettis.

Extracts:

China should have begun the appreciation of [its currency] much earlier than it did and it should have appreciated more aggressively. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the excess global liquidity of the past few years and especially of the past few months, China is now caught in a monetary trap in which the high trade surplus forces the central bank to buy large amounts of foreign exchange, which of course causes very rapid domestic money expansion. This money expansion feeds directly into excessively high levels of investment, which force up industrial production and so causes the trade surplus to rise or remain high. It will be extremely difficult for China to get out of this trap.

As China’s labor force, especially in the wealthy south and southeast, move out of low value-added assembly and into higher quality manufacturing and service jobs, companies that rely on cheap, unsophisticated labor will necessarily find conditions more difficult and may even go out of business.

Policies aimed at creating a higher quality manufacturing and service base in places like Guangdong are succeeding. As long as overall exports continue to grow it is hard to see how the rising RMB** has caused trouble for Chinese exporters in general.

In China, appreciation will not reduce inflationary pressures through the price impact on imported goods. It can only really reduce inflation if it reduces the amount of foreign exchange the central bank has to buy every month, and so reduce the growth of the domestic money supply. As long as China’s money supply keeps expanding at such a fast pace, it will be impossible to bring inflation down, and as long as the central bank is forced to purchase very high levels of foreign exchange every month, China’s money supply will keep growing too quickly. The recent appreciation has done nothing to slow the trade surplus but it may have increased speculative inflows, so it actually causes an even further increase in the money supply.

Chinese policy makers say this analysis overstates their ability to revalue the Yuan. There is a limit to how quickly the country can replace low-level manufacturing with manufacturing that requires a more educated workforce. Moving too fast could cause economic chaos world-wide.

The US and other western governments don't substantially disagree, but see it as in their interest to keep the pressure on China.

Coincidentally, the global concern with inflation and the rising price of food comes as China is attempting to show the best side of itself with the coming Olympic games. Its difficulty in answering critics of its civil rights policies in general and in particular of its policies toward Tibet is only one of many concerns connected with this aim to look good.

China thus has lots of reasons to allow its currency to continue to appreciate.

One final complication, however, is the expected recession in the US and (to a lesser extent) around the globe. That event will cause American imports to decline and the decline in imports from China will provide counter-pressure against appreciation of the Yuan. The logic is thus: appreciation increases the price of exports and reduces the expansion of the Chinese money supply through purchase of dollars. US recession reduces the volume of exports and this makes it less necessary to purchase dollars. The result is less need to purchase dollars and consequently less inflationary pressure on the economy.

If China succeeds in controlling the rise in prices of oil and food imports, the recession in the US and slowed growth throughout the world may give Chinese policy makers greater flexibility in transforming the country's industrial infrastructure from low-end toward high-end manufacturing. If they do get this flexibility and use it wisely, expected benefits should flow over from China to the global marketplace. That is to say, all of us stand to benefit from Chinese modernization. However, these benefits will not be evenly distributed (whenever are benefits evenly distributed?) and, in the long run, while the US may be able to increase exports to China, it will not be easy for Americans to make a transition from prosperity based on expanding consumption (driven by low interest rates and manifested substantially in an abundance of cheap imports from China) to one in which interest rates are more rational (i.e., higher) and prosperity is achieved by growth in production as much as by growth in consumption. Along the way, as I've said, there's a good chance that the US will lose its status as preeminent financial power.

One last quote. Here is the head of the IMF on the Chinese economic situation. Note that he mentions social inequality, energy efficiency, and social services as areas that the Chinese government should address in addition to more purely economic and financial ones. He doesn't say so outright, but it's implicit that carbon emissions and other forms of pollution are and should be a major concern. It's not his place to add that China needs to address the corruption of its political regime. Although China has immensely talented and well-educated bureaucrats and policy makers, Party hacks block needed economic, social, and political reforms, and -- to some extent -- permeate the government from top to bottom. And the Chinese judicial system is unable to insure due process either for the Chinese people or those who do business with them.

Statement by IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Conclusion of his Visit to China.

Extract

The Chinese government is confronting several macroeconomic policy challenges, including preventing inflation—largely the result of food price increases in recent months—from becoming entrenched, and rebalancing growth away from heavy reliance on exports and investment toward consumption. Addressing social inequalities and improving energy efficiency are also priorities.

We agreed that continued tight monetary policy will be important in containing investment growth and inflationary pressures. The government's emphasis on reorienting the budget toward improving social services—including health and education programs—can also help both to reduce disparities and rebalance growth. In addition, we also see the government's focus on financial sector reforms as key for achieving these goals. On exchange rate policy, we welcome the authorities' objective of allowing greater flexibility over time. However, we encourage a faster pace of appreciation that would be helpful for addressing China's key economic challenges and would also contribute to preserving global economic stability.

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* The BEA reports that the Chinese trade surplus with the US was $20 billion in January and a little less in February. $20 billion is more than a quarter of the total January deficit in US import/export of goods.
**RMB: The renminbi (literally "people's currency") is the currency of the mainland of the People's Republic of China whose principal unit is the yuan. (Wikipedia)