Looking for Mao? Try a Trinket Site, Not the Yangtze - New York Times

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Looking for Mao? Try a Trinket Site, Not the Yangtze - New York Times

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

Published: May 25, 2006

THERE are few things I don't like about overseas travel other than realizing, as the plane lifts off for a 13-hour flight, that the best movie they're showing in economy is "Big Momma's House 2."

Leslie Lammle

During a trip to China earlier this month, I didn't mind the jet lag, the 15-hour time difference or even the time I went out and forgot the Beijing street map in the hotel room.

But there's one thing I really hate, and that is when my husband turns out to know more about shopping than I do.

It happened at the huge Panjiayuan buyer-beware flea market in Beijing, which collectors haunt at sunrise and where tourists troll for trinkets all day long. As far as we could see were aisles of brass Buddhas, piles of glass beads, old typewriters, bolts of silk, dusty framed photographs, strands of pearls and yellowed posters from the Cultural Revolution.

My husband homed in on a shelf of kitschy porcelain statues.

"I love this," he said, pointing to a foot-tall statue of two peasants riding a shiny silver rocket. One peasant held a scroll inscribed with a proclamation that translated, roughly, as, "China will exceed the United States and the United Kingdom."

Too me it looked tacky. "You can't be serious," I said, eyeing the statue's garish colors.

"And this one," he said, pointing to a statue of Mao Zedong waving to a crowd from a sedan.

The seller wanted 300 yuan (about $37) for the Mao statue and 200 yuan (about $24) for the rocket.

"Just get one," I pleaded.

"You'll regret it," my husband said, buying Mao.

"I will not regret it," I said.

Two days later, I regretted it. It's funny how something that looks common amid the clutter of a giant flea market can be transformed into something that looks striking in a different context like, say, sitting on a coffee table in northern California.

Now I loved that statue and wished I had another one, too. And I had a lot of questions. What was the history of these unusual pieces that evoked the Cultural Revolution? And where could I get my hands on that rocket?

I turned to the Internet for answers. And that's where I learned, almost faster than I could type the keyword query "porcelain Mao in car," that my husband has a better eye for a story than I do.

These days, I learned, all kinds of memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution have become highly collectible; in addition to porcelain statues, the category includes vintage posters and ticking Mao mantel clocks. And you don't have to travel to the Panjiayuan flea market to shop.

At Culturegems.com, I saw Mao's face painted on a porcelain disk ($160). Artelino.com, an online auction site, sells Chinese propaganda posters. At www.Easterncurio.com, I even saw the same statue of Mao in a car, described as Item No. D1S0041. "Write to Eastern Curio Shanghai Ltd. or call 0086-13621990301 for further enquire," the site instructed.

I sent an e-mail message. "Can you tell me how old it is and how much it costs?" I wrote. The response was quick, but a little vague: 1968 and $195, plus unspecified shipping costs to the United States.

Then I stumbled across the site of a dealer named Victoria Edison, 1930shanghai.com; her large selection of memorabilia included Mao on a dinner plate ($25). As I browsed through pictures — Mao on an ashtray ($20) and Mao on a jewelry box ($25) — I came across an item that made me wince.

I clicked for a bigger image and saw another porcelain statue of peasants on a rocket that looked just like the one we could have bought for $24 in Beijing.

The price was $209.

Cursing, I phoned Mrs. Edison, whose store is in Berkeley, Calif., near my house.

"It's a very well-known piece," said Mrs. Edison, who with her husband, James, wrote the book "Cultural Revolution Posters & Memorabilia" (Schiffer, 2005). "When we were approached to do the book, at that time we were selling primarily to Europe, but now the trend has made its way to the U.S."

Mrs. Edison, whose parents and grandparents lived through the Cultural Revolution, said she grew curious about memorabilia from that era during a trip to China in the early 1990's.

"I was interested because my folks went through it, my grandfather was in jail during that period for merely having a brother who went to Taiwan," she said. "I was in China and browsing in the same flea market you did, where I saw posters. I thought, 'Wow.' "

I asked, "Why don't people think there's something unseemly about collecting relics from an era that brought so many people so much pain?"

Mrs. Edison said: "I don't think people collect Mao because he's cool, because everyone who went through that period thinks he was crazy and power hungry. But the pieces represent the people, too, and what they went through and what they were like. My grandfather finds this fascinating. By talking about it, we won't forget history."

In the 1960's, millions of porcelain pieces were made for export in provincial ceramic factories.

The intended market was countries friendly to China and people who had left the mainland, Mrs. Edison said. "There were two industries that were able to flourish when other businesses were shut down. Ceramics factories and printing companies flourished because they made propaganda materials."

I told her my husband bought Mao in a car at the flea market.

"The car piece is considered one of the best pieces of that period," she said. "But there are a lot of reproductions, and it's almost impossible to tell, because they're using the same molds to make them. My assumption, when I shop in China, is that it's a reproduction unless I know for sure that it was one of the pieces sitting in a warehouse that wasn't distributed during the Cultural Revolution.

He paid about $37, I said.

"Probably fake, but even so, that's pretty good," she said. "He must know how to bargain."

"He has a good eye," I said.

Then I made an appointment to go to her shop to look at the rocket. It may be expensive, but he deserves it.

E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com

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Mice Deaths Are Setback in Gene Test - New York Times

Mice Deaths Are Setback in Gene Test - New York Times

May 25, 2006

By ANDREW POLLACK

A large number of mice died unexpectedly in a test of a new technique for inactivating genes that has been widely proclaimed a breakthrough, scientists are reporting today.

The finding could give rise to new caution about the technique, called RNA interference, which is already widely used in laboratory experiments and is starting to be tested in people as a means of treating diseases by silencing the genes that cause them.

But Dr. Mark A. Kay and colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine report today in the journal Nature that the technique, also called RNAi for short, caused liver poisoning and death in mice.

"It's a very striking result — all of the fatalities observed and the toxicity, which was unexpected," said Timothy W. Nilsen, director of the center for RNA molecular biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "It's really a note of concern for rapid therapeutic development of RNAi."

But Phillip Zamore, an RNAi expert at the University of Massachusetts, said the Stanford scientists had used a variation of the technique that was "no longer state of the art" and required a very high dose. The tests already conducted in people involve a different technique and lower doses, said Dr. Zamore, who is a co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a company in Cambridge, Mass., that is developing drugs using RNAi.

Dr. Kay himself said he thought the findings were "not a showstopper by any means" for the field. "It's like any drug," he said. "The toxicity depends on the dose."

RNA is the chemical cousin of DNA, which encodes hereditary instructions in genes. RNA was once thought to be a mere messenger in the cell. But in a rush of discoveries over the last few years, scientists have found that RNA plays a more active role in controlling gene activity.

They have found that cells make tiny snippets of RNA, called microRNA, that silence particular genes. And they have learned how to harness that natural mechanism to turn off any gene of their choosing by inserting the proper piece of RNA into cells.

But Dr. Kay said his experiment showed that if too much interfering RNA was put into a cell, it could overtax the cell's ability to process its own microRNA.

"The good news about RNAi is that it uses the cell's machinery to do its work, and that is why it's so effective," Dr. Kay said. "The bad news about RNAi is that it uses the cell's machinery to do its work. If you overload the system, you hijack the machinery from performing its normal duties."

Dr. Kay and his team, led by a postdoctoral researcher, Dirk Grimm, wanted to cure mice of hepatitis B, not to kill them. They induced RNA interference in the mice's liver cells, intending to silence one of the hepatitis virus's major genes.

In some cases this worked, and the virus was suppressed without side effects. In other cases the mice got liver poisoning, and some of them died.

The researchers tried the same thing in mice without hepatitis and then they tried using RNA interference to turn off different mouse genes.

Of 49 different RNA snippets meant to shut down six different genes, 36 caused liver injury and 23 led to death within two months. The RNA at the highest concentration was most toxic.

But some scientists said the problem appeared to be related to the technique used by Dr. Kay, which is a type of gene therapy. The Stanford team put DNA, not RNA, into the mouse liver cells. The DNA became part of the mice's genetic makeup and the mouse cells then produced the gene-silencing RNA, which was carried out of the nuclei into the body of the cells.

The scientists hypothesized that a protein that transports RNA out of the nucleus became overloaded.

The other technique is to put the interfering RNA itself into cells. That RNA does not need to be transported out of the cell nuclei, so that transporter protein would not be overloaded, some scientists said.

"These data really represent the fundamental limitations of gene therapy, not of RNAi," John Maraganore, chief executive of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, said of the report in Nature. The company has already reported that it safely tested a nasal-spray RNA drug intended to treat a respiratory infection, on 65 healthy volunteers.

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My Pain, My Brain - New York Times

My Pain, My Brain - New York Times

May 14, 2006

My Pain, My Brain

By MELANIE THERNSTROM

Who hasn't wished she could watch her brain at work and make changes to it, the way a painter steps back from a painting, studies it and decides to make the sky a different hue? If only we could spell-check our brain like a text, or reprogram it like a computer to eliminate glitches like pain, depression and learning disabilities. Would we one day become completely transparent to ourselves, and — fully conscious of consciousness — consciously create ourselves as we like?

The glitch I'd like to program out of my brain is chronic pain. For the past 10 years, I have been suffering from an arthritic condition that causes chronic pain in my neck that radiates into the right side of my face and right shoulder and arm. Sometimes I picture the pain — soggy, moldy, dark or perhaps ashy, like those alarming pictures of smokers' lungs. Wherever the pain is located, it must look awful by now, after a decade of dominating my brain. I'd like to replace my forehead with a Plexiglas window, set up a camera and film my brain and (since this is my brain, I'm the director) redirect it. Cut. Those areas that are generating pain — cool it. Those areas that are supposed to be alleviating pain — hello? I need you! Down-regulate pain-perception circuitry, as scientists say. Up-regulate pain-modulation circuitry. Now.

Recently, I had a glimpse of what that reprogramming would look like. I was lying on my back in a large white plastic f.M.R.I. machine that uses ingenious new software, peering up through 3-D goggles at a small screen. I was experiencing a clinical demonstration of a new technology — real-time functional neuroimaging — used in a Stanford University study, now in its second phase, that allows subjects to see their own brain activity while feeling pain and to try to change that brain activity to control their pain.

Over six sessions, volunteers are being asked to try to increase and decrease their pain while watching the activation of a part of their brain involved in pain perception and modulation. This real-time imaging lets them assess how well they are succeeding. Dr. Sean Mackey, the study's senior investigator and the director of the Neuroimaging and Pain Lab at Stanford, explained that the results of the study's first phase, which were recently published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that while looking at the brain, subjects can learn to control its activation in a way that regulates their pain. While this may be likened to biofeedback, traditional biofeedback provides indirect measures of brain activity through information about heart rate, skin temperature and other autonomic functions, or even EEG waves. Mackey's approach allows subjects to interact with the brain itself.

"It is the mind-body problem — right there on the screen," one of Mackey's collaborators, Christopher deCharms, a neurophysiologist and a principal investigator of the study, told me later. "We are doing something that people have wanted to do for thousands of years. Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Now we're watching that process as it unfolds."

Suddenly, the machine made a deep rattling sound, and an image flickered before me: my brain. I am looking at my own brain, as it thinks my own thoughts, including these thoughts.

How does it work? I want to ask. Just as people were once puzzled by Freud's talking cure (how does describing problems solve them?), the Stanford study makes us wonder: How can one part of our brain control another by looking at it? Who is the "me" controlling my brain, then? It seems to deepen the mind-body problem, widening the old Cartesian divide by splitting the self into subject and agent.

But most of all I want to know: Will I be able to learn it?

or most of history, the idea of watching the mind at work was as fantastical as documenting a ghost. You could break into the haunted house — slice the brain open — but all you would find would be the house itself, the brain's architecture, not its invisible occupant. Photographing it with X-rays resulted only in pictures of the shell of the house, the skull. The invention of the CT scan and magnetic resonance imaging (M.R.I.) were great advances because they reveal tissue as well as bones — the wallpaper as well as the walls — but the ghost still didn't show up. Consciousness remained elusive.

A newer form of M.R.I., functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.), used with increasingly sophisticated software, is accomplishing this, taking "movies" of brain activity. Researchers are able to watch the brain work, as the films show parts of the brain becoming active under various stimuli by detecting areas of increased blood flow connected with the faster firing of nerve cells. These films are difficult to read; researchers puzzle over the new images like Columbus staring at the gray shoreline, thinking, India? Most of the brain is uncharted, the nature of the terrain unclear. But the voyage has been made; the technology exists. Pain — a complex perception occupying the elusive space spanning sensation, emotion and cognition — is a particularly promising area of imaging research because, researchers say, it has the potential to make great progress in a short time.

Perhaps more than any other aspect of human existence, persistent pain is experienced as something we cannot control but desperately wish we could. Acute pain serves the evolutionary function of warning us of tissue damage, but chronic pain does nothing except undo us. Pain is the primary complaint that sends people to the doctor. Of the 50-odd million sufferers in the United States, half cannot get adequate relief from their chronic pain. Many do not even have a diagnosis.

Unlike acute pain, chronic pain is now thought to be a disease of the central nervous system that may or may not correlate with any tissue damage but involves an errant reprogramming in the brain and spinal cord. The brain can generate terrible pain in a wound that is long healed, in a body that is numb and paralyzed or — in the case of phantom-limb pain — in a limb that no longer even exists.

Although there have been many theories about how pain works in the brain, it is only through neuroimaging that the process has actually been observed. It is now clear that there is no single pain center in the brain. Rather, pain is a complex, adaptive network involving 5 to 10 areas of the brain transmitting information back and forth.

This network has two pain systems: pain perception and pain modulation, which involve both overlapping and distinct brain structures. The pain-modulatory system constantly interacts with the pain-perception system, inhibiting its activity. Much chronic pain is thought to involve either an overactive pain-perception circuit or an underactive pain-modulation circuit.

Like everyone who suffers from chronic pain, I find it hard to believe that I have a pain-modulation circuit. The aspect of my pain I feel most certain about is that it is not voluntary: I cannot modulate it. And this belief is reinforced every single day that I suffer from pain, which is every day. Yet I know that pain is not a fact, like a broken bone; it's a perception, like hunger, about a physical state ("an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage," as the International Association for the Study of Pain defines it). And it's a mercurial perception; under certain circumstances the pain-modulatory system works like a spell and the brain completely blocks out pain.

Soldiers, athletes, martyrs and pilgrims engage in battles, athletic feats or acts of devotion without being distracted by the pain of injuries. When the teenage surfer Bethany Hamilton's arm was bitten off by a shark, she felt pressure, but "I didn't feel any pain — I'm really lucky, because if I felt pain, things might not have gone as well," she said (articulating one reason the modulatory system evolved: if she had thrashed about in pain, she would have bled until she drowned).

In addition to being activated by stress, the pain-modulatory system is triggered by belief. The brain will shut down pain if it believes it has been given pain relief, even when it hasn't (the placebo effect), and it will augment pain if it believes you are being hurt, even if you aren't (the nocebo effect). The brain's modulatory system relies on endogenous endorphins, its own opiatelike substances. The nature of a placebo has long been a source of speculation and debate, but neuroimaging studies have shown the way a placebo actually helps to activate the pain-modulatory system.

In a recently published study led by Dr. Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan Medical School, the brains of 14 men were imaged after a stinging saltwater solution was injected into their jaws. They were then each given a placebo and told that it would positively relieve their pain. The men immediately felt better — and the screen showed how. Parts of the brain that release endogenous opiates lighted up. In other words, fake opiates caused the brain to dispense real ones. Like some New Age dictum, philosophy becomes chemistry; believing becomes reality; the mind unites with the body.

Other studies have shown that opiates and other medications rely on a placebo to achieve part of their effect. When subjects are covertly given strong opiates like morphine, they don't work nearly as well as they do if the subjects are told they are being given a powerful pain reliever. Even real medications require some of the brain's own bounty.

Conversely, thinking about pain creates pain. In studies at Oxford University, Irene Tracey has shown that asking subjects to think about their chronic pain, for example, increases activation in their pain-perception circuits. Distraction, on the other hand, is a great analgesic; when Tracey's volunteers were asked to engage in a complicated counting task while being subjected to a painful heat stimulus, she could watch the pain-perception matrix decrease while cognitive parts of the brain involved in counting lighted up. At McGill University, Catherine Bushnell has shown that simply listening to tones while being subjected to a heat stimulus decreased activity in the pain-perception circuit. +++

"There is an interesting irony to pain," comments Christopher deCharms, who worked with Mackey designing and carrying out the Stanford study. We were talking in his office at Omneuron, a Menlo Park medical-technology company he founded three years ago to develop clinical applications of neuroimaging. "Everyone is born with a system designed to turn off pain. There isn't an obvious mechanism to turn off other diseases like Parkinson's. With pain, the system is there, but we don't have control over the dial."

The goal of the Stanford technique is to teach people to control their dials — to activate their modulatory systems without requiring the extreme stress of fleeing from a shark or the deception of a placebo. The hope of neuroimaging therapy (as deCharms calls the Stanford technique) is that repeated practice will strengthen and eventually change the ineffective modulatory system to eliminate chronic pain, the way long-term physical therapy can change muscular weakness. The scan would thus be more than a research tool: the scan itself would be the treatment, and the subject his or her own researcher.

Only once do I recall having a glimmer of my own pain-modulatory system at work: a hidden power that emerged, dispensed with pain and then returned to some forgotten fold in my brain, where I have never been able to locate it again. The event did not take place on a battlefield or a marathon course or in a temple; it was in a basement of the Stanford University medical center three years ago. At the time, Mackey had designed an earlier study that did not use imaging technology but focused on how suggestion alters pain perception. Although I was not formally enrolled in the study, I asked if I could undergo a clinical demonstration. My experience illustrated the power of suggestion in an unexpected fashion.

A metal probe attached to the underbelly of my arm heated up and cooled down at set intervals. I was told that although the heat probe would feel uncomfortable, my skin would not be burned. During one exposure, I was instructed to think of the pain as positively as possible, during another to think of it as negatively. After each sequence, I was asked to rate my pain on a 0-to-10 scale, with 10 being the worst pain I could imagine.

Although I discovered that I could make the pain fluctuate depending on whether I was imagining that I was sunbathing or was the victim of an inquisition, I still rated all the pain as low — ranging from a 1 to a 3. If 10 was being slowly burned alive, I felt I should at least be begging for mercy to justify a rating of 5. So I insisted that Mackey turn up the dial so I could get a real response. But even during the moments when I was actively trying to imagine the pain as negatively as possible, it remained in a mental box of "not even burned," which kept it from really hurting: hurting, that is, the way a burn would.

As it turned out, I got a second-degree burn that later darkened into a square mark. Mackey was more than a little dismayed as we watched the reddening skin pucker, but I was thrilled. Naturally the protocol had been carefully designed not to injure anyone, yet in my case that protection had failed because of the very phenomenon it was designed to study: expectation — the effect of the mind on pain or placebo.

I had recently spent several weeks observing Mackey in the university's pain clinic, where he is associate director. I was so convinced that Mackey — then a tall sandy-haired 39-year-old with a deep interest in technology (he got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering before he went to medical school) and an air of radiant integrity — would not burn me that my brain had not perceived the stimulus as a threat and generated pain. I admired him, I trusted him, I was positive that he wouldn't hurt me. And, ipso facto, he hadn't.

Mackey's genius as a practitioner, I thought, lay partly in his ability to similarly inspire patients. "When I started working with pain patients, I realized how much of the treatment involved trying to reverse learned helplessness," he said — to rally them out of the despair ingrained from years of unremitting pain and cajole their minds to chip in its own analgesic to their therapies. "The purpose of this study is to show patients their mind matters," Mackey said.

The mark of the burn is barely visible now, but for a couple of years afterward, at times when my chronic pain was making me miserable, the sight of it would both encourage and reproach me. Here is the ultimate proof that my mind can control pain, I would think, yet I didn't know how to make it wake up and do so. I could take the edge off the pain by conjuring positive images, but the effects didn't last, and I never again had the remarkable placebo response that masked a second-degree burn. In fact, a mild burn from spilling tea on my hand one day brought tears to my eyes.

When the real-time neuroimaging study began, I couldn't wait to try it.

The area of the brain that the scanner focuses on is the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). The rACC (a quarter-size patch in the middle-front of the brain, the cingular cortex) plays a critical role in the awareness of the nastiness of pain: the feeling of dislike for it, a loathing so intense that you are immediately compelled to try to make it stop. Indeed, the pain of pain, you might say, its defining element, is the way in which the sensation is suffused with a particular unpleasantness researchers refer to as dysphoria. Since pain is a perception, it's not pain if you don't experience it as hurting. You can feel hot or cold or pressure, and note them simply as stimuli, but when they exceed a certain intensity, the rACC kicks in, and suddenly they become painful, riveting your attention and causing you to recoil.

Many pain-reducing techniques aim to manipulate the conscious awareness of pain. Distraction, placebo, meditation, imagining pleasant scenes and hypnosis all result in a reduction of rACC activation when they work. Patients who have undergone a radical surgical treatment occasionally used for pain (as well as for mental illness) called a cingulotomy, in which the rACC is partly destroyed, report that they are still aware of pain but that they don't "mind" it anymore. Their emotional response has receded.

The image I saw while lying in the f.M.R.I. machine at the time of the recent Stanford study was not literally my rACC but a visual analogue of it that is easier to see: a 3-D image of a fire. The flames represent the degree of activation in your rACC: when it is low, the flames are low; when rACC activation is high, the flames flare. The study involves five 13-minute scanning runs, each consisting of five cycles of a 30-second rest followed by a 1-minute interval in which you try to increase rACC activation and then a 1-minute interval in which you try to decrease rACC activation.

Before my scan began, I was prepped in different mental strategies for increasing and modulating my pain. Everyone's brain works a bit differently, though, so subjects have to experiment in the scanner to see what is most effective for them. For some, trying to distract themselves from their pain works best; for others, focusing on their pain — like embracing a Zen koan — seems to be what triggers their pain-modulatory system. When deCharms used neuroimaging therapy on himself to try to alleviate his chronic neck pain, he concentrated on the pain itself and felt it "suddenly melt away." He said that a patient described the feeling as being "like a runner's high" (a state that has been shown to involve the release of endogenous endorphins).

Increase Your Pain, the screen commanded, as the first run began. I tried to recall the mental strategies in which I had been prepped for increasing pain: Dwell on how hopeless, depressed or lonely you felt when your pain was most severe. Sense that the pain is causing long-term damage.

Dwelling on the hopeless loneliness of my pain certainly made the flames of my rACC spark. The mental image that I found increased my pain the most, however, was the one that matched the visual analogue of the rACC: Picture a hot flame on your painful area. Try to make the flame grow in the painful area, and imagine it actually burning your flesh.

Having recently read Ariel Glucklich's extraordinary "Sacred Pain," I had plenty of details of the burning of heretics and witches available to me. I had only to imagine the smell of sizzling hair to make the flames of my rACC explode.

Decrease Pain, the screen commanded.

The suggested pain-reduction strategies, however, did little to quell the flames on the screen. I pictured suffocating the pain with banal positive imagery: flowing water or honey, something soft and gentle, but my mind kept slipping back to the progress of the auto-da-fé, and the rACC fire flared.

Feel that sensation, but tell yourself that it is just a completely harmless, short-term tactile sensation.

Pilgrims and devotees all around the world choose to inflict pain upon themselves during sacred rites — from being nailed to crosses to dangling from hooks. For them, pain is an occasion for euphoria, not dysphoria. There are many historical records of the equanimity saints and martyrs often possessed during torture. The second-century Jewish martyr Rabbi Akiva, for example, continued to recite a prayer with a smile on his lips while the flesh was being combed from his bones. "All my life," he explained to the puzzled Roman general orchestrating his execution, "when I said the words 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might,' I was saddened, for I thought, When shall I be able to fulfill this command? Now that I am giving my life and my resolution remains firm, should I not smile?"

As Glucklich writes, the conviction that pain is a spiritual opportunity seems paradoxically anesthetizing — or, as a scientist would say, religious states of conviction can robustly activate the pain-modulatory system.

During my next Decrease Pain interval, instead of trying to picture a vacation, I imagined myself as a martyr, lucidly reciting Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death while being burned at the stake. My rACC activation — I noted — respectfully quieted. Then I remembered that the 23rd Psalm seems to have Christian associations, and since I was presumably being tortured for being half-Jewish, a Jewish prayer might be more appropriate. Unless, that is, I was being accused of witchcraft, in which case, I might be generally disillusioned with Judeo-Christian prayer. As I tried to settle on a fantasy, I noticed that my rACC stayed low: Irene Tracey's theory of the modulating effects of distraction. By the last run, I had the strategies down — heretic-martyr: rACC down; heretic-victim: rACC up.

The results of the scan, Mackey showed me, revealed significant brain control. A week later, I was scanned again, this time in the offices of Omneuron. I could feel that it was easier to control my rACC with less reliance on elaborate fantasy; I was interacting more directly with my brain.

his learning effect was clearly seen in the recent Stanford study (which was financed in part by the National Institutes of Health). The first phase of the study looked at 12 subjects with chronic pain and 36 healthy subjects. (The healthy participants were subjected to a painful heat stimulus in the scanner and tried to modulate their responses. The chronic-pain patients, however, simply worked to reduce their own pain.) The chronic-pain patients who underwent neuroimaging training reported an average decrease of 64 percent in pain rating by the end of the study. (Healthy subjects also reported a significant increase in their ability to control the pain.)

"One big concern we had," Mackey says, "is, Were we creating the world's most expensive placebo?" To ensure against that, Mackey trained a control group in pain-reduction techniques without using the scanner (as in his previous study) to see if that was as effective as employing a $2 million machine. Mackey also tried scanning subjects without showing them their brain images or tricking subjects by feeding them images of irrelevant parts of the brain or feeding them someone else's brain images. "None of these worked," Mackey says, "or worked nearly as well." Traditional biofeedback also compared unfavorably; changes in pain ratings of subjects in the experimental group were three times as large as in the biofeedback control group.

The second phase of the study, which is now under way, is designed to assess whether neuroimaging therapy offers long-term practical benefits to a larger group of chronic-pain patients. After the six sessions designed to teach them to regulate their pain, they will be observed for at least six months. The idea is to see whether they can fundamentally change their modulation system so that it can reduce pain all the time without constantly and consciously thinking about it. If so, the technique would not simply provide shelter from the storm of pain; it would bring about climate change.

"I believe the technique may make lasting changes because the brain is a machine designed to learn," deCharms says. The brain is soft-wired (plastic) rather than hard-wired: whenever you learn something new, new neural connections are believed to form and old, unused ones to wither away. (Researchers refer to this as activity-dependent neuroplasticity.) In other words, if you actively engage a certain brain region, you can alter it.

Many diseases of the central nervous system involve inappropriate levels of activation in particular brain regions that change the way they operate (negative neuroplasticity). Some regions experience atrophy, while other regions become hyperactive. (For example, epilepsy involves hyperactivity of cells; stroke, Parkinson's and other diseases involve the atrophy of nerve cells.) With chronic pain, it is believed that additional nerve cells, recruited for transmitting pain, create more pain pathways in the nervous system, while nerve cells that normally inhibit or slow the signaling, decrease or change function.

In addition, chronic pain results in a significant loss of other kinds of brain cells. A. Vania Apkarian at Northwestern University found that while the brain of a healthy person shrinks 2.5 percent a year, in a person with chronic back pain, it shrinks an additional 1.3 percent annually in the areas that involve rational thinking. I know chronic pain interferes with my concentration at times, but I never imagined that it could be truly impairing it! The Stanford technique may mitigate this harm by teaching people how to increase the efficacy of the healthy cells.

Moreover, the technique may offer a particular advantage over drug therapy. It is very difficult to design drugs to fix a problem in a specific region of the brain because the receptors that drugs target, like the opiate receptors, generally appear in multiple systems throughout the brain (which is partly why drugs almost always have side-effects). Neuroimaging therapy, on the other hand, is designed to teach control of a localized brain region.

"The technique gives people a tool they didn't know they had," Mackey says, "cognitive control over neuroplasticity. We don't fully understand how this feedback mechanism is working, but it provides tangible evidence that people can change something in their own brains, which can be very empowering. It takes Buddhist monks 30 years of sitting on a mountain learning to control their brains through meditation — we're trying to jump-start that process." As to how exactly it works — how the decision-making parts of the brain (the prefrontal regions of the cortex) cause the change in the rACC — "Heck if I know!" he says. "How do we get the brain to do anything? We can map out the anatomical circuits involved and the general functions of those circuits, but we can't tell you the mechanism by which any cognitive decision is translated into action."

If neuroimaging therapy could treat pain, could it rewire the brain to fix other diseases, like depression, stroke and learning disabilities, or exercise the brain in ways that would make it cleverer and more adept at certain skills? Neuroimaging has shown, for example, that the part of the brains of London cabdrivers that regulates spatial relations is larger than usual and that learning to juggle creates visible changes in parts of the brain involved with motor coordination during three months of training. I'm constantly getting lost and dropping things. Could I exercise and strengthen those areas more quickly by, say, thinking about maps in the scanner than by driving around London?

"What is the limit to neuroimaging therapy?" deCharms muses. "Could you learn to target the reward or serotonin system and up-regulate happiness? Could you augment psychotherapy by allowing the patient and the therapist to watch the brain?" — an idea Omneuron is already exploring, by bringing therapists and patients to the scanner and imaging patients' brains as they undergo the sessions. "After all, talk therapy is about learning to understand thought processes — to understand neural substrates and change them," he says.

How deep can the insights that functional imaging might offer really go?

What I'd like to do most is not fix problems or improve skills but use imaging as a vehicle for self-transparency. Instead of puzzling about my motivations, I'd like to be able to read my mind completely, like a book: for imaging to be the Plexiglas window through which I could finally see the ghost.

"Hmm," Dr. Scott Fishman, chief of the pain-medicine division at the University of California, Davis, said dubiously when I brought up this notion. "I'm not sure that functional imaging is actually looking at the mind. The mind is like a virtual organ — it doesn't have a physical address that we know about. Functional imaging provides a two-dimensional snapshot of a three-dimensional or a four-dimensional event of this entity of the mind. Right now, imaging is just looking at the brain; we have to be honest about that." Imaging shows the level of activation of different parts of the brain, from which we can extrapolate something about the mind, he points out, "but what we really need to see is how the parts talk to each other — and the complex nuances of their language."

The brain has more than a hundred billion neurons. All functional imaging can tell us now is that a few hundred million of them in various areas become more active at certain times. It's as if you were trying to conduct a symphony by watching a silent film of the concert. You would see the players in the bass section active at one moment, vigorously gesturing, and then the rest of the orchestra would join in, but you couldn't hear the notes or how they form strands of melody and harmony and meld together to create the ethereal experience.

"Consciousness is not neurons firing — consciousness is a transcendent emergent phenomenon that depends on the firing of neurons," says Dr. Daniel Carr, an eminent pain researcher who is now the C.E.O. of Javelin Pharmaceuticals. "The gears of a watch rotate and keep time, but the turning of the gears is not time. The question is, Is neuroimaging a picture of the experience of consciousness or is it a picture of a mechanism associated with that experience? Can there actually be a picture of an experience? Does a picture of a funeral or a wedding show you experiences? Or is there an unbridgeable gap there because you need to already understand the experience in order to interpret the photos? If a higher being told us how consciousness works, could we understand the explanation?"

Melanie Thernstrom is a contributing writer for the magazine. She is working on a book about pain.

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What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

May 21, 2006

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." [Read A. O. Scott's essay. See a list of the judges.] Following are the results.

THE WINNER:

Beloved

Toni Morrison
(1987)

• Review

THE RUNNERS-UP:

Underworld

Don DeLillo

(1997)

• Review

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

(1985)

• Review

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels

John Updike

(1995)

• Review: 'Rabbit at Rest'

(1990)

• Review: 'Rabbit Is Rich'

(1981)

• Review: 'Rabbit Redux'

(1971)

• Review: 'Rabbit, Run'

(1960)

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

(1997)

• Review

THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

(1980)

• Review

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

(1980)

(This book was not reviewed by The Times.)

Winter's Tale

Mark Helprin

(1983)

• Review

White Noise

Don DeLillo

(1985)

• Review

The Counterlife

Philip Roth

(1986)

• Review

Libra

Don DeLillo

(1988)

• Review

Where I'm Calling From

Raymond Carver

(1988)

• Review

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

(1990)

• Review

Mating

Norman Rush

(1991)

• Review

Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson

(1992)

• Review

Operation Shylock

Philip Roth

(1993)

• Review

Independence Day

Richard Ford

(1995)

• Review

Sabbath's Theater

Philip Roth

(1995)

• Review

Border Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy

(1999)

• Review: 'Cities of the Plain'

(1998)

• Review: 'The Crossing'

(1994)

• Review: 'All the Pretty Horses'

(1992)

The Human Stain

Philip Roth

(2000)

• Review

The Known World

Edward P. Jones

(2003)

• Review

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth

(2004)

• Review

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Teaching Political Theory in Beijing

Teaching Political Theory in Beijing

By Daniel A. Bell

Spring 2006

Few Western academics would aspire to teach political theory in an authoritarian setting. Surely the free, uninhibited flow of discussion is crucial to our enterprise. When I tell my Western friends that I gave up a tenured, high-paying job in relatively free Hong Kong for a contractual post at Tsinghua University in Beijing, they think I’ve gone off my rocker. I explain that it’s a unique opportunity for me: it’s the first time Tsinghua has hired a foreigner in the humanities since the revolution; Tsinghua trains much of China’s political elite, and I might be able to make a difference by teaching that elite; the students are talented, curious, hardworking, and it’s a pleasure to engage with them; the political future of China is wide open, and I’ll be well placed to observe the changes when they happen. Still, I do not deny that teaching political theory in China has been challenging. This has to do partly with political constraints. But it’s not all about politics. Even if China became a Western-style liberal democracy overnight, there would still be cultural obstacles to deal with. In this essay, I will discuss some of these political and cultural challenges.

Political Constraints

The willingness to put up with political constraints depends partly upon one’s history. In my case, I had taught at the National University of Singapore in the early 1990s. There, the head of the department was a member of the ruling People’s Action Party. He was soon replaced by another head, who asked to see my reading lists and informed me that I should teach more communitarianism (the subject of my doctoral thesis) and less John Stuart Mill. Naturally, this made me want to do the opposite. Strange people would show up in my classroom when I spoke about “politically sensitive” topics, such as Karl Marx’s thought. Students would clam up when I used examples from local politics to illustrate arguments. It came as no surprise when my contract was not renewed.

In comparison, China is a paradise of academic freedom. Among colleagues, anything goes (in Singapore, most local colleagues were very guarded when dealing with foreigners). Academic publications are surprisingly free: there aren’t any personal attacks on leaders or open calls for multiparty rule, but particular policies, such as the household registry system, which limits internal mobility, are subject to severe criticism. In 2004, state television, for the first time in history, broadcast the U.S. presidential elections live, without any obvious political slant. (I suspect that the turmoil surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential elections, along with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, discredited U.S.-style democracy among many Chinese, and the government has less to fear from the model.) More surprisingly, perhaps, I was not given any explicit (or implicit, as far as I could tell) guidance regarding what I could teach at Tsinghua. My course proposals have been approved as submitted.

Forms of Censorship

Last spring, I offered one graduate course titled “Topics in Contemporary Political Philosophy.” It was a small seminar, and students freely drew upon “sensitive” cases such as Tibet to illustrate theories about self-determination and multiculturalism. My experiences of political constraints came outside the classroom. One was self-imposed. A student asked me to address a “salon” at Tsinghua on the topic of democracy. I consulted some trusted friends, who suggested that I stay away from it. I found out later that the salon was just a discussion group among graduate students in philosophy, not a trap, and that my fears were likely ungrounded.

I did have one experience with censorship imposed from outside. I gave an interview to a Chinese newspaper that is widely read in intellectual circles. The interview dealt with China’s role in international affairs, and I made some critical comments about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that were published. However, I also made some comments about the ancient thinker Mencius—I argued that he justified “punitive expeditions” that were functionally similar to modern-day humanitarian interventions—that were not published. The Chinese government does not support any infringements on state sovereignty, and the newspaper probably worried that readers would draw implications for contemporary debates. To my surprise, the editor of the newspaper phoned me to apologize, explaining that the article was “reviewed” by a party cadre and that he had no hand in the matter. He also offered to publish the interview in full in an academic publication that would not be subject to the same sorts of constraints. In Singapore, by contrast, it is hard to imagine that the editor of the pro-government Straits Times would apologize to contributors whose views were censored: public humiliation is a more common tactic for dealing with those who do not toe the party line.

I presented the same argument about Mencius and just war in extended form at an informal seminar at the headquarters of one of China’s main computer companies. An interesting feature of China’s academic scene is that some prominent reformist intellectuals obtain material support from sympathetic capitalists to organize seminars outside the formal university structure. These seminars are meant to be relatively free-flowing and less subject to political constraints. However, I was advised to delete the part of my paper that drew implications for the mainland’s relations with Taiwan. (I argue that Mencius would justify armed intervention against Taiwan only if its government systematically deprived people of the right to subsistence.) I agreed to do so, thinking that the benefits of exchanging ideas on the topic of just war with a group of influential Chinese intellectuals outweighed the cost of censorship. Besides, the full, uncensored version of my article will appear in my forthcoming book. It seems that the Chinese authorities rarely care about English-language material, which allows more scope for intellectual freedom.

This past fall I taught two courses. I was invited to co-teach a course on contemporary Western political philosophy at Beijing University, China’s other prominent university (located next to Tsinghua). Beijing University has a history of political turmoil, and one might expect political constraints to be more severe: after the student-led political uprising in spring 1989, the government forced Beijing University students to undergo one year of compulsory military training.^[1]

The pre-university compulsory military training at Beijing University has since been reduced to one month, in line with other Chinese universities. It is worth noting that mainland China does not have an extended period of compulsory military service (unlike Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore), but periods of military training are widespread in schools: my own son, who attends grade five at the primary school attached to Tsinghua University, underwent a military training period of one week prior to the start of the school year.

Once again, however, I could teach anything—with one exception: Marxist thought. I was told that this area is still too sensitive; the government won’t welcome foreigners putting forward alternative interpretations of Marxism. I was also told that students won’t welcome Marxist teachings under any guise: they’ve been subject to enough, and they want to learn something else. (A former student at Beijing University told me how she used to reserve her seats in the library by putting her Marxist philosophy lessons on her chair, secure in the knowledge that no one would bother to steal her books; two decades later, I’m told, the practice has not changed.)

Politics in the Classroom

After the first class, a student stayed behind to ask, in fluent English, if he could audit the course. He introduced himself as a graduate student at the Chinese Communist Party university known as the Central Party School. I asked (half-jokingly) if I could give lectures there, and he said that foreigners weren’t allowed. Then I said he’d be welcome to audit my course if he was interested in the material. He did seem genuinely curious, though I wondered why he would tell me his party affiliation. The next class dealt with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, and I found myself scanning for his facial reaction when I mentioned Bentham’s disillusionment with benevolent despotism (he could not find monarchs to adopt his Panopticon proposal) and subsequent “conversion” to democracy. After the lecture, I asked an academic friend if the party would send spies to my classroom. He laughed and told me that it was normal for students from the party university to audit classes at Beijing University, that I’m regarded as an academic and nothing else. He also told me not to be so paranoid and reminded me that China’s totalitarian days are long gone.

At Tsinghua, I teach a graduate seminar on “Just and Unjust War.” The “realist paradigm”—the idea that states are motivated by nothing other than self-interest in international affairs and that morality is not and should not be used to judge the international behavior of states—seems to be dominant in China. I think there’s a need to consider theories that allow for moral evaluation of wars, especially as China becomes a more dominant power in the international arena. After the first class, the same student from the party school stayed behind to ask if he could audit that class too. I agreed.

THE SECOND SESSION dealt with humanitarian intervention. It is hard for many Chinese to believe that any sort of intervention might be justified on moral grounds. I asked how they would feel if a massacre occurred in their neighbor’s home—say, a father killing his children—and they had the power to make a difference. Most agreed they would intervene. I drew a comparison with massacres in other states, asking if it would make a moral difference if it were a neighboring state. Most agreed there could be a moral case for intervention, even for a non-neighboring state. Then I discussed the case of the Rwanda genocide, noting that Bill Clinton says his greatest regret is that he did not intervene to stop the genocide. So far, so good.

Next, we moved on to a discussion of Kosovo. Not a single student seemed to believe that NATO’s intervention was justified. “Only” a few thousand had died before the intervention, it wasn’t anything like a Rwanda-style genocide. I tried to explain the context, that Europeans had been watching the Serbs carrying out ethnic cleansing for several years, and most thought they were prepared to do it again. But I doubt that anybody was persuaded. Then the student from the party school raised questions about sovereignty. He noted the Chinese view that human rights should not have priority over sovereignty. I replied that human rights—or at least, the functional equivalent of human rights, whatever we want to call it—is what gives the point to sovereignty. Sovereignty only has moral value because it serves (usually) to protect the fundamental human rights of people in the state, and it loses its value once the state infringes upon, or fails to protect, those rights. I asked the student whether I, as a leader of a sovereign state, could kill millions of my people, then be justified in telling you not to intervene because you’d be trampling on my sovereignty. He agreed that I could not do so. I then asked him what moral value sovereignty could have if not its contribution to securing the fundamental rights of people in the state. He seemed genuinely puzzled, and then repeated out loud, to the whole class, “Mmm, what you’re saying is very different from what we’ve learned.”

The student noted that my view on justified intervention is also espoused by defenders of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. I had been discussing Michael Walzer’s theory of just war, and I noted that Walzer’s theory would bar intervention in this case, because there was another alternative to war (the UN inspectors), and war should not be launched unless other alternatives are seriously pursued. I reminded him of the other conditions of just war, and I noted that in most cases today measures such as economic sanctions might be more appropriate to deal with injustices in foreign lands.

He then asked me if I thought economic sanctions should have been used in China after June 4, 1989. I was shocked. It was the first time any student had mentioned that fateful day in a classroom setting (as opposed to private discussion). I couldn’t ignore the question, neither could I answer it directly. I mumbled a bit, until finally I thought of the “right” answer: that our seminar deals with the morally justified use of violence, and that nobody argues that foreign powers should have intervened militarily after June 4, because the costs of intervening against a nuclear power would likely outweigh the benefits. It’s the same reason no sane person calls for military intervention against Russia to protect the people of Chechnya. Another student intervened and noted people weren’t killed on June 4 for ethnic or racial reasons, so the case doesn’t compare to most cases of humanitarian intervention. I wanted to respond that the moral case for foreign intervention turns more on the number of people killed than on the reason they were killed,^[2]

To be more precise, huge numbers (tens if not hundreds of thousands) would have to be killed (or under imminent threat of being killed) before the moral case for foreign military intervention would begin to seem plausible. (That’s another reason nobody called for foreign military intervention after June 4; the number of people killed was small in comparison to Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia.) State sovereignty does serve, on the whole, to secure people’s vital interests in life and security, and the barriers to foreign military intervention should be high. But I don’t see any moral difference if, say, huge numbers are being killed because they belong to a certain class (as in Stalin’s liquidation of Kulaks) rather than an ethnic group.

but I held my tongue. The seminar ended, and on the way out, I thanked the visiting student for his contributions to making the discussion more interesting. He said, “You’re the one we should thank, we hope for more debate and we want to hear more of your own views.”

The next day, I sent an e-mail to the whole class that included the following paragraph:

Next Monday, we will pursue the discussion of Walzer’s views on the conditions for just war. For discussion, we will debate the following hypothetical issue. Assume you’re advising the leader of a state. In your neighboring state, one million people (members of a vulnerable minority group) are at serious risk of being massacred. Your country probably has the power to intervene to protect the minority group and prevent the genocide. However, the UN would not support intervention. What do you do? We can split the debate into two halves, and the students will switch positions at the halfway point. This way, you will be able to look at both sides of the question. Remember, this is an academic seminar, the aim is to learn and critically evaluate arguments, not to defend particular political positions.

In the debate, the students raised an interesting argument not covered in the reading: namely, that most soldiers sign up to defend national interests, and it would be hard to justify putting their lives at risk in another country if the intervention does not benefit their own country in any way (in other words, the convergence of national and humanitarian interests makes the moral case for humanitarian intervention stronger, not weaker). Of course, I was also curious about the performance of the student from the party school. He did well representing both sides of the debate, including a defense of the view that human rights abuses can justify infringements of sovereignty. He also steered clear of provocative comments.

In subsequent classes, I learned to relax with the students and to go over the material without worrying about sensitive political implications. We discussed Christian, Realist, Confucian, and Islamic perspectives on just and unjust war, with the students doing presentations and debating more issues among themselves. The student from the party school did an excellent presentation on the Maoist perspective. In debate, he made thoughtful and constructive comments, as one might expect of a talented student. To the extent he had a political motivation, it seemed to be the desire to learn theories that may be useful for China’s future reform.

Let me sum up these reflections on the challenges of political constraints. Constraints on writing are easier to tolerate if censorship is carried out in an open and apologetic manner and if there are alternative opportunities for publication within one’s country and outside. Constraints on teaching are easier to tolerate if one has the experience of more severe constraints, but it is difficult to prevent students from steering discussion into precisely those sensitive areas that may lead to trouble. The constraints on political talk may also lead to unjustified paranoia, particularly for new arrivals uncertain of the boundaries of political correctness. Perhaps I should be more positive. The very fact of operating in a restrictive political environment does have some psychological benefits. If political authorities care about what I do, then I do not have to worry about the practical utility of my work. It is commonly remarked that Russian intellectuals felt somewhat demoralized after the Soviet Union collapsed, because people seemed to have lost interest in their work. If their dreams had been realized, then they should not have felt demoralized. But there usually remains a large gap between one’s ideals and the reality, even after the revolution, and it is something to worry about if political freedom means that critical intellectuals begin to feel irrelevant.

Teaching in a Foreign Language Environment

It’s not all about politics. With or without political constraints, there will be cultural particularities in different settings to which the foreign teacher needs to adjust. I will set aside such philosophical issues as the commensurability of terms to focus on the personal issues. I’ve had to adjust to the Chinese language as well as to different methods of teaching and ways of dealing with colleagues and students. These challenges require strategies that are not necessarily specific to teachers of political theory.

The first question I’m usually asked is, “What language do you teach in?” I wish I could say that I lecture in Chinese, but I use mainly English. The proportion of Chinese is increasing as my academic oral Chinese improves, and I set aside time for discussion in Chinese. I also take questions in Chinese (usually answering in English) because I can understand most of them. The key word is “most.” If the questioner has a heavy regional accent or gives a long speech on a topic only distantly related to the teaching material, then I may not be able to catch everything. What do I do in such cases?

Sometimes, I ask the questioner to repeat the question. Occasionally, however, even that doesn’t work. Then I answer the part of the question that I understood. Or I make inferences and answer what seems like a pertinent question. At Beijing University, I co-teach the course with a Chinese professor, and I may let him take the question. Of course, there’s a risk of missing interesting details,^[3]

There is no such risk in written communication. Some students write papers and send e-mails in Chinese (I usually comment and respond in English), and if I’m missing something I can consult the dictionary.

but relying on a translator would be too disruptive of the ebb and flow of discussion. The challenge of lecturing in a foreign language environment also affects my syllabus.^[4]

It’s worth noting that the idea of a “syllabus,” with the particular week’s reading and discussion decided long before term-time, is less common in Chinese universities. Most teachers assign a general reading list of a few topics and related books and articles, without trying to fit X amount of material in a particular week.

In my first term, the course was an exercise in comparative political philosophy. I took certain themes—such as utilitarianism, liberalism, and communitarianism—and discussed both Western and Chinese thinkers who shed light on those themes. But my lectures on the Chinese thinkers did not go well. I could tell that many students felt they weren’t learning much. Some of the students had memorized the classics, most were familiar with the history of interpretations, and they probably felt that a Western political philosopher should be teaching Western thinking.^[5]

This expectation may be partly due to the fact that my first book on (Western) communitarianism has been translated into Chinese, and some students know me as a (Western) communitarian. But after my interest in Chinese philosophy becomes more apparent, there is more willingness to discuss Chinese material. And there is no such prejudice among Chinese academics when I discuss Chinese and comparative philosophy.

So I’ve changed my approach. At Beijing University, I use the excellent Chinese translation of Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy as the main text.^[6]

With the exception of Kymlicka’s chapter on Marxism: the normally curious and critical students did not object to (or even mention) this discrepancy.

And to fill in some of the required background, I lecture on Western historical thinkers before discussing Kymlicka’s themes (for example, I lecture on Mill and Bentham before looking at Kymlicka’s chapter on utilitarianism). I draw some comparisons with Chinese thinkers along the way (for example, comparing Mozi’s ideas with utilitarianism), but less than last term. For my seminar on just war at Tsinghua, I do not spend time introducing the thoughts of well-known Chinese thinkers. I dive right into comparison and critical evaluation, on the assumption that most students are familiar with the basics.

Status of Teachers

One of the benefits of being a teacher in China—and even more so, a professor at a well-known university—is the relatively high social status that one enjoys. The Cultural Revolution’s antipathy to intellectual elites seems to be long forgotten. Tsinghua, once the bastion of ultra-left politics, now has a statue of Confucius on campus. The state officially recognizes the social importance of teachers by means of such policies as travel discounts for teachers.

The high social esteem translates into understandings of the teaching profession that have challenged my prior ways of doing things. In the past, I’ve tried not to let my own views color my presentation of the material (though a certain bias always shows through). I’ve tried to present the ideas of various thinkers in their best possible light, then let students debate and make up their own minds. In China, however, such an approach invariably disappoints students. I’ve been told over and over again to state my own views. Students want their teachers to present and defend their own outlooks, perhaps because they are supposed to serve as exemplars to follow (or reject) in the traditional Confucian mode. In my class on Mill’s utilitarianism, for example, a student asked me whether the government should promote higher or lower pleasures or both. Normally, I would have asked him for his own views, but that would have made him unhappy. So I said any decent government should try to enact measures that provide means of subsistence for the poor as well as policies that allow for a flourishing intellectual life. I didn’t elaborate, and I avoided hard questions about limited resources and trade-offs between values.

The high social status of professors also translates into distinctive ways of dealing with students outside class. For one thing, the professor is supposed to be both an intellectual authority and an ethical person who cares about the student’s emotional development. Thus, my one-on-one encounters with students typically begin with questions about the student’s well-being and that of family members. At the end of term, I invite the students to my home, and they pepper my family members with questions. The students, for their part, sometimes bring gifts from home after long vacations. It would be the height of rudeness to refuse a gift. In early September, the whole country celebrates “Teachers’ Day,” and students often present their teachers with flowers. On that day, the side streets of the Beijing University campus are lined with flower sellers.

THE BOUNDARIES between private and public are challenged in other ways. Graduate students do much more than help with research. They also help with personal tasks: in my case, the department appointed a graduate student to help me with my visa and settling-in procedures. On the other hand, the boundary between economic and academic spheres is more rigidly enforced. I’ve asked graduate students to help me with classical Chinese. We do regular tutorials, going through the classical texts slowly and carefully. No matter how much I try, they refuse to be compensated. So I’ve had to exchange their work for work of my own, such as help with their English studies. The truth is that what I do for them rarely matches what they do for me. They claim that they’re also learning during the tutorials, but they’re probably just being polite. I’d almost prefer a market relationship that would be fair for both sides, but perhaps the idea of the teacher paying the student to teach the teacher is just too far removed from ordinary conceptions of proper roles.

This is not to deny that graduate students need money. They are paid a stipend of US$50 or so per month by the university. Not surprisingly, they don’t buy English-language books. I was shocked at first by the unabashed flouting of intellectual copyright laws: students openly sell or distribute photocopied versions of whole books. But it’s unrealistic to expect them to pay for English-language books (Chinese-language books, in contrast, are much cheaper, typically around US$2 or $3 per book). For what it’s worth, fellow authors, I lend my own books to students so that they can be photocopied.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I would like to emphasize that norms of respect and cordiality and the concern for affective well-being do not necessarily mean sacrificing intellectual rigor. True, aggressive debate in seminars is usually frowned upon. I was invited to present a lecture on communitarianism last year, and the host professor proceeded to comment on my views, noting that Western-style communitarianism should be seen as an extension of Western-style liberalism. He hit a sore spot. I’ve made a (not very successful) career of trying to distinguish communitarianism from liberalism, and I jumped in, arguing that he was “wrong.” I felt bad after. The professor is a kind and polite elderly scholar. I was not invited again.

I’ve since learned to observe norms of cordiality during the course of debate. In my political theory class at Beijing University, my co-teacher might claim that he needs to “supplement” some of what I’ve just said. He goes on to criticize my views and defend his own preferred alternatives. I then reply that I need to “supplement” some of what he has just said. This way, we can argue without, Oxford-style, tearing each other to shreds. And I refer to my fellow teacher as “Teacher,”^[7]

There is a literal translation for “professor,” but I once introduced myself as a professor and my (Chinese) wife said it sounded arrogant, I should say that I’m a “teacher.” I’ve since learned that most professors refer to each other as “teacher,” the same term that is used to refer to teachers of all levels. The term is also used to refer to departmental administrators (for example, students would call our departmental administrator “Teacher Bai”). Such linguistic practices may stem from a mixture of Confucian humility and Maoist egalitarianism.

never using his full name in class.

The students also raise questions in class. They are no slouches: it’s probably harder to be admitted, statistically speaking, into Tsinghua and Beijing University than into leading American universities. My students are supposed to be leaders of society: I’m told that the Communist Party student members at Tsinghua prepare the educational curriculum for all the young Communists in China. They are intellectually confident and often well versed in the Chinese and Anglo-American (if not French and German) philosophical traditions. Nonetheless, they often communicate their most critical comments via e-mail, not in the classroom. Of course, the e-mails are cordial, but the substance is often harshly critical of what I’ve said in class.

There are other out-of-classroom settings for debate. To promote affective ties between students and professors, my department at Tsinghua organizes weekend excursions. This term, thirty-five graduate students and four “young” (under fifty) professors took a three-hour bus ride to the foot of the Great Wall. We climbed the “wild” part of the Wall and settled down for an excellent dinner of local produce. The dinner involved lots of drinking, with the professors going from table to table to toast the students.^[8]

There is also an order to the seating arrangement. The senior professor should sit at the part of the round table that gives him (or, more rarely, “her”), a view of the whole dining room.

To my surprise, the group then proceeded to debate the merits of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberal modernity. Two graduate students had prepared papers, which they read before the discussion. Another group of tourists was engaged in Dionysian revelries just outside our dining/seminar room, and some students could not help glancing over, but it was an otherwise orderly debate. I was grilled with questions about communitarianism, even though I had consumed my share of spirits. The next morning, I told our team leader that I was surprised that such a serious debate had taken place after so much drinking. He responded, “It’s because of the drinking that we could have this kind of debate.”

LET ME SUM UP these reflections on the challenges of cultural difference. Teaching in a foreign language environment is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Ideally, the foreign teacher would converse in the local language that best lends itself to critical exchanges, but this may require years of immersion. In the short-to-medium term, there may be less-than-ideal compromises, such as the “passive bilingualism approach” (each speaks in the preferred language) that also characterizes some European Community meetings. In China, the long tradition of high esteem for learning is an obvious blessing for the teacher, though it means that teachers (and students) have nonacademic obligations that go beyond the usual Western ideas of teacher-student relationships. But these obligations can also be a source of emotional gratification. And intellectual activity doesn’t stop at the classroom door: fueled by the right sorts of rituals, critical debate with teachers and students can take place in various settings with no loss of face by anyone.

Postscript: A Talk at the Party School

A few weeks into term, the student from the party school phoned to ask if I’d give a talk there. “I thought you said foreigners can’t go there,” I responded. He said that they were trying to change that policy and he thought that students from the school should be exposed to the ideas of foreign professors. He then asked if I could do it the next day. I said, “I’d love to, but what should I talk about?” He suggested I give a lecture on how to improve one’s English. I laughed and said, “I know nothing about the topic, I learned English as a kid, that’s not a very useful lesson for Chinese students.” He responded, “Come on, you’re a professor, you’ll think of something. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 5 p.m.”

The next day, we took a taxi from Tsinghua, and he told me it was the first time that the students had invited a Westerner to give a talk at the Central Party School.^[9]

A few weeks after I gave my talk, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a talk to mid-career Communist Party officials preparing for senior leadership positions at the Central Party School (the school has two parts—one for graduate students and one for mid-level cadres—but both groups meet on Friday mornings for a joint lecture). The Pentagon specifically requested this setting for Rumsfeld’s talk. Rumsfeld criticized China’s military expansion saying that it prompted “questions [about] whether China will make the right choices—choices that will serve the world’s real interests in regional peace and stability,” though one wonders if he was so self-deluded as to think members of the crowd would look to his administration for guidance regarding “the world’s interests in regional peace and stability.” The only defense of the invasion of Iraq I’ve heard in China came from a party official who was pleased that the U.S. forces were stretched in Iraq, thus reducing the likelihood that the United States would lend military support to pro-independence forces in Taiwan.

It took much effort to get me invited. He had to get approval from the vice president of the school. We’d have to proceed slowly, by beginning with a less controversial topic than political philosophy. I asked about his family, and he said that he was from Qufu, Confucius’s home town. I said I’d been there, and he nodded: “Yes, I know, we checked on the Internet and we saw pictures of you addressing the Confucian university.” He also told me that one of his professors had read my book East Meets West (the last chapter puts forward a constitutional proposal for post-communist China). When I showed my surprise, he told me that their classes are very open at the party school; they can talk about anything without restrictions, even more so than at Tsinghua University.^[10]

The main reason for the relative freedom of speech at the Central Party School may be that students and professors can be trusted as committed nationalists and communists. They are not likely to rock the boat no matter what kind of critical information they are exposed to.

When we arrived at the school, he took me on a tour. He told me that the university is directly administered by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It is Beijing’s most beautiful university campus, with an unnamed lake in the middle.^[11]

The lake at nearby Beijing University is called “Unnamed Lake,” but this lake really doesn’t seem to have a name.

One of the buildings once housed the Japanese military’s headquarters during the occupation (now it houses a party periodical). We encountered a group of Tibetan-speaking young women, and my student noted, “Those are the future rulers of Tibet.” As I waited in line at the student cafeteria, I received the sort of looks—half-bemused, half-curious—that I had encountered only in the most remote parts of the Chinese countryside.

HE UNIVERSITY has about six hundred graduate students (no undergraduates), and several have experience serving in government. My student, for example, worked in the economic affairs bureau of a local government and has traveled abroad extensively. About a hundred students came to my talk. As I walked in to the hall, the largely female audience giggled, and my student informed them that I was married to a woman from China. The student—now I call him my friend—introduced me as a political philosopher and said I’d talk about learning English. My presentation consisted of tips I’d learned during the ongoing process of learning Chinese, and I just substituted “English” for “Chinese” in my mind. I explained the need for a Middlebury College-style language school in China, where students would be forced to speak English during a period of at least two months.^[12]

Middlebury College in Vermont is famous for its intensive summer language programs: students live on campus and must sign a language pledge that bars them from speaking English the whole summer.

I said that if I were a capitalist—“which I’m not”—I would invest money to build that kind of school in Beijing. I also said that it helps to have an English-speaking boyfriend or girlfriend. I noted that advanced students should not simply learn about economics and politics, but also literature, poetry, and philosophy, in order to develop appreciation for the culture that is expressed in the language.

The discussion period began with some questions about learning English. One student asked whether she should listen to the British Broadcasting Channel or the Voice of America. I replied that because VOA is American government propaganda, she would enjoy the learning process more by listening to the BBC. Another student asked which social science book she should read to improve her English. I replied that she should read what she enjoys, and improving her language skills would be a by-product. I asked what her major is, and she said “party-building,” to some laughter in the crowd. I suggested that she could read some of Marx’s works in English. (Only a fraction of Marx’s works have been translated into Chinese.) A female student then asked for more practical tips on learning English. Having run out of ideas, I repeated my point about finding an English-speaking boyfriend. My host interjected that the young man (in military garb) sitting next to the questioner was her boyfriend.

To my relief, the questions then shifted to political philosophy. I was asked about communitarianism, Marxism, and Confucianism, and I did my best to provide academic responses, steering clear of overt political content. The discussion took place in a mixture of English and Chinese, and it was a genuine pleasure to discuss ideas with such curious students. After the lecture, a couple of female students stayed behind for further discussion. One student criticized Westerners who read Sunzi’s The Art of War to get ideas for defeating China in war. I agreed that of course that was not a good reason to read the Chinese classics. Then she asked the other student if she would leave the country and find an English-speaking man and not return to China. I interjected with the thought that she might find a man and return to China with him, as in my case.

My student/friend (along with two other students) accompanied me by taxi back to the Tsinghua University campus. We had the usual argument about whether the Beijing haze was fog or pollution. They dropped me off, and I asked how they would be getting back to their campus. They said they’d be taking public transport. I felt guilty, saying there had been no need to accompany me all the way back to Tsinghua. But deep down, I was grateful that my hosts had been so gracious.

Daniel A. Bell’s most recent book is Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2006). He can be reached at daniel.a.bell@gmail.com.

Footnotes:

1.) The pre-university compulsory military training at Beijing University has since been reduced to one month, in line with other Chinese universities. It is worth noting that mainland China does not have an extended period of compulsory military service (unlike Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore), but periods of military training are widespread in schools: my own son, who attends grade five at the primary school attached to Tsinghua University, underwent a military training period of one week prior to the start of the school year.

2.) To be more precise, huge numbers (tens if not hundreds of thousands) would have to be killed (or under imminent threat of being killed) before the moral case for foreign military intervention would begin to seem plausible. (That’s another reason nobody called for foreign military intervention after June 4; the number of people killed was small in comparison to Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia.) State sovereignty does serve, on the whole, to secure people’s vital interests in life and security, and the barriers to foreign military intervention should be high. But I don’t see any moral difference if, say, huge numbers are being killed because they belong to a certain class (as in Stalin’s liquidation of Kulaks) rather than an ethnic group.

3.) There is no such risk in written communication. Some students write papers and send e-mails in Chinese (I usually comment and respond in English), and if I’m missing something I can consult the dictionary.

4.) It’s worth noting that the idea of a “syllabus,” with the particular week’s reading and discussion decided long before term-time, is less common in Chinese universities. Most teachers assign a general reading list of a few topics and related books and articles, without trying to fit X amount of material in a particular week.

5.) This expectation may be partly due to the fact that my first book on (Western) communitarianism has been translated into Chinese, and some students know me as a (Western) communitarian. But after my interest in Chinese philosophy becomes more apparent, there is more willingness to discuss Chinese material. And there is no such prejudice among Chinese academics when I discuss Chinese and comparative philosophy.

6.) With the exception of Kymlicka’s chapter on Marxism: the normally curious and critical students did not object to (or even mention) this discrepancy.

7.) There is a literal translation for “professor,” but I once introduced myself as a professor and my (Chinese) wife said it sounded arrogant, I should say that I’m a “teacher.” I’ve since learned that most professors refer to each other as “teacher,” the same term that is used to refer to teachers of all levels. The term is also used to refer to departmental administrators (for example, students would call our departmental administrator “Teacher Bai”). Such linguistic practices may stem from a mixture of Confucian humility and Maoist egalitarianism.

8.) There is also an order to the seating arrangement. The senior professor should sit at the part of the round table that gives him (or, more rarely, “her”), a view of the whole dining room.

9.) A few weeks after I gave my talk, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a talk to mid-career Communist Party officials preparing for senior leadership positions at the Central Party School (the school has two parts—one for graduate students and one for mid-level cadres—but both groups meet on Friday mornings for a joint lecture). The Pentagon specifically requested this setting for Rumsfeld’s talk. Rumsfeld criticized China’s military expansion saying that it prompted “questions [about] whether China will make the right choices—choices that will serve the world’s real interests in regional peace and stability,” though one wonders if he was so self-deluded as to think members of the crowd would look to his administration for guidance regarding “the world’s interests in regional peace and stability.” The only defense of the invasion of Iraq I’ve heard in China came from a party official who was pleased that the U.S. forces were stretched in Iraq, thus reducing the likelihood that the United States would lend military support to pro-independence forces in Taiwan.

10.) The main reason for the relative freedom of speech at the Central Party School may be that students and professors can be trusted as committed nationalists and communists. They are not likely to rock the boat no matter what kind of critical information they are exposed to.

11.) The lake at nearby Beijing University is called “Unnamed Lake,” but this lake really doesn’t seem to have a name.

12.) Middlebury College in Vermont is famous for its intensive summer language programs: students live on campus and must sign a language pledge that bars them from speaking English the whole summer.

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