Beijing University (aka Peking University) and Qinghua University (Tsinghua) top Science magazine’s list of top undergraduate schools for students obtaining U.S. Ph.D.s.

A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea’s Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Via China’s Scientific & Academic Integrity Watch. The text of the article, without a pay wall, is at MITBBS.

Without saying definitively he would not attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing one month from today, U.S. Senator Barack Obama said as president he would skip the ceremony without hearing from the Dalai Lama that there had been progress on the Tibet issue.

“In the absence of some sense of progress, in the absence of some sense from the Dalai Lama that there was progress, I would not have gone,” Obama said at a news conference, according to the Associated Press.

From a Chinese perspective, the statement that Obama would take cues from the Dalai Lama is quite bold and constitutes a public articulation of which side the candidate has chosen in the Dalai Lama–P.R.C. disputes. While few would be surprised to hear a Democratic candidate support human rights in Tibet, it’s diplomatically significant if enunciated.

The AP article notes that Obama had encouraged President George W. Bush to skip the ceremony, as had Senator John McCain in April.

McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, also issued a hypothetical ultimatum, similarly saying that he would only attend the ceremony if he saw improvements on human rights issues. McCain’s April statement was in some ways stronger than Obama’s most recent one, though he did not allude to taking cues from the exiled Tibetan leader.

“If Chinese policies and practices do not change, I would not attend the opening ceremonies,” said the Arizona senator, who has clinched the GOP nomination for president. “It does no service to the Chinese government, and certainly no service to the people of China, for the United States and other democracies to pretend that the suppression of rights in China does not concern us. It does, will and must concern us.”

These statements, which apparently promise to show symbolic support in exchange for concessions on human rights issues, recall the early Bill Clinton administration principle of conditional engagement: The United States would work with China on trade in exchange for rights improvements. What the candidates haven’t mentioned is that when Clinton tried this tactic, it either failed or was abandoned in favor of, say, less-conditional engagement.

Could the candidates be reacting to George W. Bush’s friendly behavior toward China in the way that Clinton reacted to George H. W. Bush’s? The current president, for one, comes near toeing the Chinese line in his most recent statement, promising to attend the ceremony. Skipping the event would be “an affront to the Chinese people,” he said.

In The New Republic, Jed Perl exercises no economy of words in lambasting art from China and its growing global following. Based on a reading of “Chinese art” that does not apparently leave the island of Manhattan, Perl makes several questionable statements, often abetted by lack of knowledge, and Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well has already taken some of them to task.

I find some solace in Perl’s admission that: “This is not to say that there is nothing of value going on in China today: I do not know all there is to know about art in China. What I do know is that the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious.” Fine, but this comes only after hundreds of words of under-informed negativity and no apparent experience with Chinese art that hasn’t arrived in New York or Venice.

Missing from Perl’s account is the pervasive sense of unease among many in Beijing’s art scene, both Chinese and foreign, as they have watched the transformation of spaces such as the 798 Art District into pedestrian mall commercial centers, and as they have watched some of the artists Perl criticizes grow their bank accounts with manufactured art.

That’s one of the things Angie Baecker and I tried to capture with our article in the current issue (No. 59) of Art Asia Pacific. We examined the plans and sentiments of some major art spaces and figures in Beijing leading up to the Olympics. And we found a mixture of excitement and trepidation, sometimes with both sentiments coming from the same person.

Totally unexamined by Perl, for instance, are the artists whose work rarely if ever engages political and nationalist issues. And others who openly criticize the government and the country’s history, even if with a certain care to avoid publicity that could threaten their livelihood. Then there’s Ai Weiwei, both involved with and vocally opposed to the Olympics. In the classic media formulation, his contributions to the design of the Olympic stadium are tempered by his criticism of the government. (”The Olympics are an opportunity to redefine the country, but the message is always wrong,” Ai says in our article.)

I would not discount the possibility that some of Ai’s repeated statements have been motivated by a desire for publicity. But for those who make their commentaries in private and whose art-with-message works face government scrutiny, the spotlight is neither welcomed nor sought.

Criticizing a country’s art without engaging even well-reported examples that don’t support one’s criticism is an art world example of the basic structure of [insert country]-bashing: Find some well-accepted tropes about the target country that are well-reported but unconfirmed by the critic, and then use them as the basis of an argument that makes no effort to engage the actual thoughts or facts of life of those involved.

Could it be that a critic writing in a derivative way in the milieu of China-bashing is just as guilty as artists who profit from market-friendly, easily digestible political messages?

The United States is importing less oil from Venezuela, and China is buying more. Is Venezuela putting its resources where Hugo Chávez’s mouth is and using the country’s major export as a geopolitical lever? Or are U.S. imports just catching up with a 10-year decline in Venezuelan production?

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released April data on Monday, revealing that imports of crude and petroleum from Venezuela in the first four months of 2008 fell 10.7 percent from the same period last year—from about 1.3 million barrels/day to about 1.16 million b/d.

If we take a longer-term view of U.S. imports of Venezuelan crude and petroleum, the drop is even more significant: Venezuela sold about 1.6 million b/d to the United States in January–April of 2005, as it had since the mid-1990s (except in the oil strike years of 2000 and 2003). This means that Venezuelan sales to the United States have declined 30 percent over the past three years. Why?

AP’s Rachel Jones reports that the drop is likely due to three factors: (1) falling demand in the United States, (2) falling production in Venezuela, and (3) Venezuela’s decision to sell more oil to China. Does this make sense? Let’s take a closer look at the numbers:

1. Total U.S. oil imports in January–April 2008 dropped 2.5 percent compared with the same period last year (you can download the raw data here, or check out the Transpacifica digest below (after the jump). This, then, might explain one-fourth of the decline in imports from Venezuela.
2. There are no reliable numbers on Venezuelan oil production, but those that exist (for example, the monthly OPEC report) indicate at most a 2 percent drop in production from last year—which, like the change in U.S. demand, would explain only part of the 10.7 percent drop in sales. Over the past 10 years, however, Venezuelan production has declined about 25 percent—about the same as the change in U.S. imports over the past three years (according to EIA data here).
3. The AP report states that Venezuela now sends 250,000 b/d to China, up from next to nothing a few years ago. The story does not source this figure, and PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, recently stated that China buys 398,000 b/d, as a result of increased CNPC operations. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said that the country plans to sell China 1 million b/d by 2012.

Is China buying 250,000 b/d or more of Venezuelan oil? If so, does that purchase explain declining sales to the United States? Or would sales have declined anyway, as a result of falling production in Venezuela? What is the role of Chávez’s oil donations to countries throughout the region? Perhaps there are other explanations. If the United States wants control over how much oil it buys from Venezuela, the answer is critical. (more…)

Anyone living in China and communicating with the Western Hemisphere or Europe knows that even when government controls aren’t slowing down the internet, any disruption of undersea fiber optics in the Pacific can bring traffic to a crawl.

From MIT’s Technology Review, via Japan Probe and Foreign Policy, comes a map of global fiber projects slated and in progress. This is a screenshot of the Pacific, taken from TR’s global interactive map.

According to the article accompanying the map, global international transmissions are about 11.0 terabits per second. As I wrote at Sinobyte, one cable is supported by Google, Japan’s KDDI, and others. Another, the Trans-Pacific Express, recently won approval early this year from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The things I miss living outside the United States. New last week from ABC, I Survived a Japanese Game Show, has gone to work reinforcing the “odd Japanese” trope with laughter directed at the unsuspecting nation. David Marx writes at Néojaponisme:

ABC producers went all the way to Japan to make their own TV program, vaguely based on silly segments from Japanese variety shows. And after completely rewiring the original program formula to fit their own needs, the producers had the gall to blame the final product on the Japanese. “I survived a Japanese game show“? This is like placing the onus of Guantanamo Bay on the Cubans. American rented the space, borrowed the know-how, and made it all happen, but in the end, the Americans maintain: hey, we were just “following orders” to this crazy Japanese aesthetic.

The national propaganda effort fortunately backs up their premise. According to the New York Times, “The Japanese originals [on which the show is based] are known as batsu games, or punishment and humiliation games.” There is either fundamental confusion or willful truth-bending here: Japanese “game shows” tend to punish talento (celebrities or aspiring celebrities), and for the most part, extremely-unfunny comedians. While game shows in the past have sadistically meted out punishment to normal contestants, this has become relatively rare in recent days. Yes, even the Japanese race thinks it’s kind of sad and depressing to see everyday people humiliated on television.

I share Marxy’s distaste. He’s issued a well-argued rant. Read it.

Mark Selden, coordinator of Japan Focus, asks:

[M]ore than six decades since Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, by what right does an American critically address issues of the Nanjing Massacre and Japan’s wartime atrocities? Stated differently, in the course of those six decades US military forces have repeatedly violated international law and humanitarian ethics, notably in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the course of those decades, Japan has never fought a war, although it has steadfastly backed the US in each of its wars

In “Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation,” Selden attempts to lay out a comparative framework to examine Japanese and U.S. atrocities and trace their significance to today. As implied in the quote above, condemnation hasn’t necessarily been going around in proportion to atrocity. The article begins by taking up the Nanjing Massacre.

Selden outlines quickly what happened, and emphasizes that not only do the events at Nanjing constitute an atrocity, but those events were a beginning of a longer string of atrocities that would last until the end of the war. He writes, “In short, the anarchy first seen at Nanjing paved the way for more systematic policies of slaughter carried out by the Japanese military throughout the countryside. … Nanjing then is less a typical atrocity than a key event that shaped the everyday structure of Japanese atrocities over eight years of war.”

He goes on to address U.S. actions, noting the U.S. “has never been required to change the fundamental character of the wars it wages, to engage in self-criticism at the level of state or people, or to pay reparations to other nations or to individual victims of war atrocities.”

The article takes on the bombing of cities, culminating in the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombings. He questions the U.S. and Japanese number for casualties in the Tokyo bombings:

An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude and speed produced by the bombs, casualties could have been several times higher than these estimates. The figure of 100,000 deaths in Tokyo may be compared with total US casualties in the four years of the Pacific War—103,000—and Japanese war casualties of more than three million.

Selden also alludes to wars in Korea, Indochina, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq, focusing not on the big name atrocities but on “foundational practices that systematically violate international law provisions.” He lists what apologies or acknowledgements he can find from the United States, but doesn’t find many.

I think an important if not entirely new point in the essay is that the Tokyo Tribunal was a starting point for a sort of two-tiered system, in which Germans would make amends, Japanese would give concessions to their U.S. occupiers, and the United States would begin what is now more than 60 years of life outside international law. I won’t say that international law is widely followed, but this is something to think about:

Only by engaging the issues raised by such a reexamination [of the bombing of Japanese cities]—from which Americans were explicitly shielded by judges during the Tokyo Tribunals—is it possible to begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal, which holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standard with respect to crimes against humanity, or the yardstick of the 1949 Geneva Accord, which mandates the protection of all civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality proclaimed at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US ever since.

It’s been a while; to any loyal readers, my apologies. Since Monday evening I’ve been in Japan traveling, the first time I’ve left China after moving there last July. Writing now on the train between a visit in southern Kyushu on my way to Hiroshima, I’ll save you my personal reflections. I did see something of interest, however, in today’s Japan Times. The paper carried a Kyodo story on a U.S. professor’s advice to Japan.

In brief, the story reports that Kent Calder, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., urges that Japan be more “proactive” in its post-Bush relations with the United States. He also said that an Obama presidency may be more conducive to changes in Japan policy from the U.S. side than a Hillary Clinton or McCain administration.

The article leads with Calder’s comments on a concept called “Japan passing,” meaning essentially U.S. policy discussions going on without much discussion of this country. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, for example, China and Iraq are among the most talked-about countries in Clinton’s foreign policy, whereas Japan plays a small role. (Perhaps I will have time to compare that work with Obama and McCain.) The story may be using Calder’s statements to imply a general apathy in U.S. policy circles toward Japan, which I think isn’t true. Without knowing more about Calder’s work and statements, I can’t say what he thinks, but I do believe that economic and East Asian security concerns would prevent any U.S. government from ignoring Japan.

Calder said energy efficiency and environmental technology are strengths for Japan and might serve as a good way to increase its international influence. “Japan is the only major nation of the major energy producers whose consumption in the last three years or so has gone down,” Calder said.

Anecdotally, I see positive and negative forces at work in Japan on energy efficiency over the last few days. Mass transit is of course a strength here, and over two days in an area of Kyushu with fewer train options, I was glad to see light-engine automobiles either at parity with or outnumbering larger engines. Meanwhile the lack of good insulation in many regular Japanese residential and public buildings represents a huge opportunity for retrofitting to prevent energy waste as heating or cooling is lost through under-insulated walls. (As I write this, I am passing the most industrial and pollution-spewing vista I have encountered in Japan, off the shinkansen tracks near Tokuyama Station.)

I have taken an unanticipated break on this site because of an uptick in my paid workload: Sinobyte, my blog on Chinese technology and society for the CNET Blog Network, is now in its third month. I have also had work to do on some new consulting before what, barring any unforeseen changes, will be my return to the United States this fall for more academic work on East Asia. I am sure I will have more to say after my stay in Hiroshima, and most likely more to come after my return late this month to Beijing.

For a while now, G. John Ikenberry’s article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs has been on the reading lists of those who watch Chinese–U.S. relations. Its title does not lack for gravity—”The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?”—but its argument is perhaps a bit less uncertain. “The United States’ ‘unipolar moment’ will inevitably end,” he writes. “If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.”

After this pithy formulation, the possibility of the “West” not surviving is not given much space. Ikenberry argues that the international institutions in the era of U.S. dominance are fundamentally different from other orders that have been challenged by rising powers. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the security pacts that enlace the earth, are portrayed as too open to be overthrown. He writes: “[I]f a country wants to be a world power, it has no choice but to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). The road to global power, in effect, runs through the Western order and its multilateral economic institutions.”

And that’s what Ikenberry thinks China is trying to do. For the full argument, give the article a quick read.

There is one interesting passage worth highlighting. As Ikenberry argues that 20th century international institutions were designed to be open, he notes a difference of opinion between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the composition of the U.N. Security Council…

In fact, it was Roosevelt who urged—over the opposition of Winston Churchill—that China be included as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The then Australian ambassador to the United States wrote in his diary after his first meeting with Roosevelt during the war, “He said that he had numerous discussions with Winston about China and that he felt that Winston was 40 years behind the times on China and he continually referred to the Chinese as ‘Chinks’ and ‘Chinamen’ and he felt that this was very dangerous. He wanted to keep China as a friend because in 40 or 50 years’ time China might easily become a very powerful military nation.”

This issue of Foreign Affairs has other China articles worth checking out too. While it’s the current issue, those pieces are here.

It’s Iowa caucus day in the U.S. election, so time for a bit of China-election news. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a candidate for the Republican nomination, promises to “level the playing field” with China in a new ad (below). And Sen. Barack Obama, a Democratic candidate, said he would ban all toy imports from China—and then took it back.

Romney’s ad is more recent than Obama’s toy trouble. Bill Powell at Time’s China Blog, noting that the ad appeared on the eve of today’s Iowa caucuses, cranked up the sarcasm for this one:

Never mind that former Governor Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly say how he’ll “level the playing field” with an economy that’s growing “three times faster than ours” (presumably not by getting Americans to work in factories for a dollar an hour). At least the guy devotes 30 seconds of television time to the second most important foreign policy subject out there. Maybe some crack American political reporter will actually ask him about it.

Or, more likely, not…

As for Obama, I was on the road for two weeks in December and failed to comment on this story. Luckily China Law Blog had some coverage of Obama’s pre-Christmas statement that he “would stop the import of all toys from China.” CLB collected blogger reaction, including from China Venture News, which wrote, “The bottom line though is this: China trade is not a simple “us and them” issue. The companies making toys in Shanghai and Shenzhen for export to America send their profits to New York and are parts of joint ventures that have stockholders in the suburbs of Chicago, Boston, and Topeka.”

The Obama campaign later said that the statement had not been rendered by the press with appropriate context. From Reuters via NYT:

“Now, don’t get me wrong: As president, I’ll work with China to keep harmful toys off our shelves,” he said in Greenfield, Iowa, according to a statement from his campaign for the November 2008 election, . [sic]

On Wednesday, Obama had told voters in New Hampshire: “I would stop the import of all toys from China,” which supplies about 80 percent of U.S. toys.

A spokesman for Obama, Josh Earnest, said the candidate had been referring in New Hampshire to banning “toys that contain more than a trace level of lead, coming from China or anywhere else.”