Bobo is in Beijing, and considers Chinese culture, God help us. He says the Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods. Mr. Krugman, in a piece titled “Mandates and Mudslinging,” says Barack Obama’s reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Here’s Bobo:
During the 20th century, hell descended on many nations, and each one seems to recover in its own way. This is the story of one man’s recovery, and a glimpse into the rise of modern China:
Edward Tian was 3 years old when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution. His parents, ecologists who had been educated in the Soviet Union, were deported to rural backwaters. A mob invaded his home and burned his family’s books. He was separated from his sister and was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the industrial city of Shenyang.
His grandmother was a terrifying yet fiercely devoted woman, whose child-rearing philosophy was summed up by her motto: “Do not smile until the children are in bed.”
Tian remembers being furious with his parents during their 11 years of separation: “I was very angry. Why didn’t they take care of me? I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents again until my own children were born.” Meanwhile, he was studying Marxism at school and dreaming of becoming a soldier for the revolution.
His grandmother persuaded him not to go into the military, but to continue his studies. In 1981, he enrolled in Liaoning University, and after graduation he sent out letters to American universities in hopes of getting a scholarship somewhere.
Texas Tech offered him one, and Tian, under the impression that Lubbock, Tex., was near New York, accepted. “The first plane ride of my life was the flight from Beijing to San Francisco, then I flew to Dallas where the airport was huge. I was so scared.”
He felt obliged to continue in his parents’ footsteps and study ecology, so the boy from Shenyang ended up getting a Ph.D. in Texas ranch management. He spent five years driving around local ranches. His dissertation was a statistical model of the spread of bromegrass weeds, which was read, after years of work, by 10 people.
But at Texas Tech he did have access to a Macintosh computer. “During breaks I had no family and no friends around, so I’d play with it. It planted a seed in my heart.”
By the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were beginning to transform China, the Internet was beginning to transform the world and Tian seized the historical moment. He and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AsiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year.
In 1999, the Chinese government created a new company, China Netcom Group, to compete with China Telecom in bringing broadband to China. Tian was asked to become chief executive, and he accepted. The ranch researcher from Lubbock ended up with 230,000 people working for him.
But the Cultural Revolution still lurks in the mental shadows. “Insecurity is a very important thought in my head,” he says. He now works with business luminaries like Henry Kravis, and observes: “Henry Kravis doesn’t need to prove himself. Because I’m Chinese, I need to prove I can do that. I can travel faster and learn more.”
Recently, he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Malaysia and arrived late and hungry to a buffet dinner. He went to the buffet table, piled his plate with rice and began furiously shoveling it into his mouth. A friend said he was embarrassing his fellow Chinese by behaving like a peasant. “I had to think about why I was behaving like that.”
Meanwhile, the prodding from home continues. On a trip to Japan, he called his grandmother, who is now 92, and told her that despite what she had suffered during the Japanese occupation, he was now standing in a beautiful Japanese park. She responded: “Why are you sightseeing? You should be hard at work.”
Tired of the bureaucracy, Tian resigned from Netcom and has founded China Broadband Capital. It funds firms that are using cellphones as the next information technology platform, and it owns part of MySpace China. He sits alone in a beautiful office in the middle of the park where the Qing Dynasty emperors came to worship the sun. His office was the emperor’s dressing room.
With his lingering insecurity, with his fierce determination to prove and reprove himself, he is in some ways typical of the Cultural Revolution generation elite. But he is also a cultured man, and in that he is atypical. The Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. It was followed by the wave of commercialism and materialism. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods.
The spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution has yet to be filled. Some set of values — good or bad — will eventually fill it, and at that point, the final aftershock of the hell will be finally felt.
It’s nice to know Bobo is also an authority on China. Here’s Mr. Krugman:
From the beginning, advocates of universal health care were troubled by the incompleteness of Barack Obama’s plan, which unlike those of his Democratic rivals wouldn’t cover everyone. But they were willing to cut Mr. Obama slack on the issue, assuming that in the end he would do the right thing.
Now, however, Mr. Obama is claiming that his plan’s weakness is actually a strength. What’s more, he’s doing the same thing in the health care debate he did when claiming that Social Security faces a “crisis” — attacking his rivals by echoing right-wing talking points.
The central question is whether there should be a health insurance “mandate” — a requirement that everyone sign up for health insurance, even if they don’t think they need it. The Edwards and Clinton plans have mandates; the Obama plan has one for children, but not for adults.
Why have a mandate? The whole point of a universal health insurance system is that everyone pays in, even if they’re currently healthy, and in return everyone has insurance coverage if and when they need it.
And it’s not just a matter of principle. As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don’t feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else.
Here’s why: under the Obama plan, as it now stands, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance — then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. Insurance companies couldn’t turn them away, because Mr. Obama’s plan, like those of his rivals, requires that insurers offer the same policy to everyone.
As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.
In other words, when Mr. Obama declares that “the reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it, it’s because they can’t afford it,” he’s saying something that is mostly true now — but wouldn’t be true under his plan.
The fundamental weakness of the Obama plan was apparent from the beginning. Still, as I said, advocates of health care reform were willing to cut Mr. Obama some slack.
But now Mr. Obama, who just two weeks ago was telling audiences that his plan was essentially identical to the Edwards and Clinton plans, is attacking his rivals and claiming that his plan is superior. It isn’t — and his attacks amount to cheap shots.
First, Mr. Obama claims that his plan does much more to control costs than his rivals’ plans. In fact, all three plans include impressive cost control measures.
Second, Mr. Obama claims that mandates won’t work, pointing out that many people don’t have car insurance despite state requirements that all drivers be insured. Um, is he saying that states shouldn’t require that drivers have insurance? If not, what’s his point?
Look, law enforcement is sometimes imperfect. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws.
Third, and most troubling, Mr. Obama accuses his rivals of not explaining how they would enforce mandates, and suggests that the mandate would require some kind of nasty, punitive enforcement: “Their essential argument,” he says, “is the only way to get everybody covered is if the government forces you to buy health insurance. If you don’t buy it, then you’ll be penalized in some way.”
Well, John Edwards has just called Mr. Obama’s bluff, by proposing that individuals be required to show proof of insurance when filing income taxes or receiving health care. If they don’t have insurance, they won’t be penalized — they’ll be automatically enrolled in an insurance plan.
That’s actually a terrific idea — not only would it prevent people from gaming the system, it would have the side benefit of enrolling people who qualify for S-chip and other government programs, but don’t know it.
Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.
I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.
What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.
Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.
