20 Years On

While the US media today is focusing on President Obama's historic speech in Cairo, I find myself flashing back to what I saw twenty years ago on a tiny television while sweating out summer school on the top floor of a musky fraternity house.

I recall vividly that the issue du jour for the fledgling 24-hour media in June of 1989 was the fall of House Speaker Jim Wright. Viewed through the lens of history, Newt Gingrich's debut on the national scene as the leader of this effort is ironic if not comical. It is much harder for me to reconcile the horrors I saw in Beijing with my own experiences in China.

I think this week's editorial from The Economist's new Banyan column offers a good perspective on the impact the June 4 Incident. Here is a great insight:

What nearly no one predicted has transpired. Today, the party (CCP) is as strong at home as at any time since it seized power in 1949. Though still authoritarian, it rules largely by consent, preferring persuasion to violence and intimidation—though these remain handy, as during the crushing of Tibetan riots last year.

Abroad, its prestige is as high: some believe China’s economy is about to save the world. Mr Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, has been welcomed at the top table of world leaders. On her first trip to Beijing as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was as blunt as her husband had been a decade earlier, but with a different message: the United States would not let China’s human-rights abuses obstruct the history being made between these two great states.

The Sushi Chef Sells Out

Driving home last night I listened to a news report about Kim Jong-il's anointing of his youngest son Kim Jong-un as his designated successor.

What struck me about the report was the insight that most of what is known about the personal life of Kim Jong-il and his family comes from the book Kim Jong Il's Chef. This is a 2003 tell all written, as the name implies, by the Dear Leader's former Japanese chef.

I was not able to find an English edition of the book, but you can read some excerpts in the February 2004 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Here is a highlight:

Kim Jong Il is an avid equestrian, and has even appeared in a TV movie atop a snow-white horse. (All horses belonging to the Kim family are white.) I often accompanied him on long rides. A group of guides would lead the pack, followed by Kim Jong Il, his wife Ko Young Hee, the children, and me.

One day in 1992, as I was riding behind Kim Jong Il at a right-turning path, I noticed that his horse was standing by itself. Kim had fallen off the horse. It had apparently slipped on a bed of pebbles laid over some asphalt being repaired. Kim Jong Il had hit his head and shoulder quite hard and had fallen unconscious. A doctor was called immediately.

From that day, every evening at 10:00 P.M. for the next month, five or six of his administrative staff members and I would be injected with the same painkiller that Kim Jong Il was taking. He was afraid he would become addicted to it, and didn't want to be the only one.

Geithner in China

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s visit to China is top fold in most of the newspapers today. You can read the entirety of his remarks in a generally conciliatory address to Peking University, but a key passage was highlighted in this morning’s Wal-Street Journal:

The purchases of U.S. consumers cannot be as dominant a driver of growth as they have been in the past," he said. By contrast, Mr. Geithner argued, China needs to look for ways to unlock the spending power of its own consumers. "Strengthening domestic demand will strengthen China's ability to weather future fluctuations in global supply and demand," he said.