外国人が驚く中国の真実：大紀元引用
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中国の炭鉱事故：大紀元引用
| 【大紀元日本7月12日】新華社の報道によると、中国北西部の新疆ウィグル自治区ブーカン地区の神竜炭鉱で11日午前2時30分ごろ、ガス爆発があった。事故当時、87人の従業員が坑内で作業していた。同日の午後2時までに65人の死亡が確認され、18人が行方不明となった。事故直後に救出された5人は生還したという。 今回の事故は、7月以来2回目の深刻な炭鉱爆発事故。7月2日午後2時30分ごろ、山西省寧武県の賈家堡炭鉱で、同様のガス爆発事故が発生した。この事故では、官報が発表した死亡者数19人に対して、外電は30人以上と発表。 中国の炭鉱産業は世界で最も危険だといわれている。中国国家安全生産監督管理局の発表によると、去年の石炭産量が世界の35％を占めているのに対し、炭鉱所での事故死亡率は世界の79％を占め、百万トン生産量平均死亡者数は3人。同局の統計によると、去年の炭鉱事故の死者数は6000人を超え、毎日平均15人が亡くなっている。官報の統計に対して、外電の発表は2万人を上回るという。また、同局の統計により、去年のデータと比べて今年の事故数と死亡者数が大幅に増えていることが分かった。 |
中国臓器移植の実態：大紀元ＨＰ引用
| ■大紀元 --- 日本 | http://www.epochtimes.jp/jp/2006/01/html/d18173.html | |
中国、死刑囚の臓器、移植・販売
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中国経済の現状：大紀元ＨＰから引用
―――総理が一番よく知っている
作者：欧陽湘
| 【大紀元日本5月18日】以前は朱鎔基が涙に暮れ、後には温家宝がマクロ調整を実施した。口には出さないが、こうした総理の行動は、中共国家の経済状況を洗いざらいさらけ出している。 中共の大小の官僚が数億元を国家から盗み出して持ち逃げし、賭博に狂い、数人の愛人を養っているが、こうした行為には、つまるところ“双規（党による自己告発）”のリスクが存在する。しかし、金銭を小金庫（帳簿に載らない資金）や自分の金庫に移したり、集団で金銭を浪費したり、集団で罪を犯してもこうしたリスクはない。「小金庫」の出現は、中共が、個人ベースでこっそりと汚職をしていた段階から、集団で汚職をする段階に達したことを示しており、これは中共という邪党の死の到来を加速化している。 現在、どの経済ニュースも中共がすでに死地にあることを示している。中共の経済上の源泉は３つある。１つが外資からの輸血、２つ目が原材料の加工、３つ目が国産品の輸出である。この３つの全てにおいて信頼、信用が求められるが、これこそまさに中共がその誕生時から欠落していたものである。 私の祖父は資本家であり、共産党による建国以前、北京一等地の店の半分は私の家が所有していた。祖父は、かつて私の父にこう述べた：“大資本家になりたければ、必ず信用を守りなさい。そうすることによってはじめて絶えることなく商売ができる。” 中共に欠けているのはまさにこの一点である。強奪、ひいては殺人など灰色の手口で身を立てた中共は、西方の民主国家との交流がここ数年でますます困難になっている。 一部の外資は、共産党の約束した大きなメリットの誘惑に乗り、先を争って中国に投資して工場を建設した。彼らは安い労働力を用いて巨額の利潤を稼ぐことを期待したが、中国が独裁国家であり、進出してきた外資でさえも意のままに踏みつけてくることに気づいていなかった。法律手段を利用することに慣れている外資は、中共国家に法がないことを知らず、訴訟を起こして初めて相手には絶対に勝てないことを知る。外資は泥沼にはまり込んだ虎と同じであり、各々の企業が耐え難い災難に遭遇していく。そして、時間の経過とともに、多くの大企業が、長期の痛みよりも短期の痛みの方がましだと考えて撤退していくのである。 ○日本第二位の製紙会社が撤退 日本第二の製紙会社である日本製紙グループは、２００３年の１２月になって総額 １００億円の資金で製紙工場を建設すると発表し、２００４年６月に工場建設に着手した。しかし、今年４月２６日、中国承徳帝賢針紡公司との合資で製紙工場を建設する計画を中止した。その理由は、資金の回転が早すぎ、これに持ちこたえられなくなったことである。 ○オーストラリア第二位のビール会社が２億ドルの損失を出して撤退 １６０年余りの歴史を持つオーストラリア第二のビール会社であるライオンビールは、世界に一流のビール生産会社を約２０保有し、総資産額は２１億ドル、製品は世界８０余りの国や地域で販売されており、年間の販売額は１２億ドルとなっている。 しかし、不思議なことに、ライオン（獅王）は何処へ行っても王を称することができたが、中共国家においてのみうまくいかず、進出するとすぐに障害者となってしまった。 北京現代商報が２００４年９月１５日に報道したところによると、ライオンビールグループは、１９９５年に中国に進出した後、前後して無錫、蘇州、常州に３つのビール工場を建設した。しかし、この９年間における中国での営業損失は２億オーストラリアドルとなった。昨年９月、ライオンビールは中国側と資産譲渡の協議に正式にサインし、落とし穴だらけの中共国家の市場に別れを告げた。 ○ドイツ最大の建材流通大手が撤退 企業規模はドイツ第１位、世界第４位で、世界に３万人近くの従業者を擁するドイツの家具建材流通会社OBIは、４月２７日、中国市場から撤退し、海外販売の重点をヨーロッパの国々、とりわけロシア、ポーランド、チェコ、イタリア及びスイスといった潜在的な新興市場に移すことを発表した。 ２００２年、OBIは中国の無錫に一番目の家具建材マーケットを開設した。中共は多くの優遇措置を与え、この甘いナツメでOBIを騙し、中国の家具建材市場に巨額の資本を投下させることに成功した。OBIの中文サイトには、中国市場の発展戦略がこう記されている：“２０１０年の予測として、OBIの中国における経営規模は１００店舗となり、事業規模はトップとなっている：中国製品の輸出を強力に推進し、より多くの中国サプライヤをリードして国際市場に打って出る：従業員は３００００人となる：中国で最も卓越した流行家具の小売企業になる。” しかしOBIは、５年を経ずして、１３店舗を開業し、他に５つの店舗を施工していたところで突然中国市場を放棄することを発表した。上海に設置した中国本社さえも事情の分かっていないイギリスのKingfisherに譲渡された。しかし、OBIは中国における経営情況については明かさなかった。１００店舗に向けてスパートをかけていたOBIは何が原因で撤退したのだろうか？ドイツ政府が最近紡績品問題で中共に制裁をしようとしている点を考えると、重大な政治的、経済的考慮なくしてOBIはこのような行動をとらなかったであろう。 ○ドイツ・シーメンスの携帯部門は４四半期連続の赤字で撤退を考慮 ドイツ商報の報道によると、ドイツ・シーメンスの携帯部門は、コストを有効に節約しているものの、中国における取次販売事業者である波導公司との提携に予想したほどの成果が上がらず、アナリストの推計によると、第一四半期の損失は１億６３００万ドルで、４四半期連続の赤字となる。もしこの悪い状況が改善されなければ、シーメンスの携帯部門は撤退を考えるという。 しかし、経済的な損失は外国の豪商が一点の外傷を負うだけにすぎない。こうした外資の撤退は、毎日輸血しなければ生きていけない中共からすれば、もちろん興味深い話である！ ○中共の打撃によって米国のボーイングはカナダ航空とインド航空から１３０億ドルを受注 経済的な利益のために中共に追随したフランスのシラク大統領は、道義と良心を失い、中共のヨーロッパにおける代弁者となってしまった。中共は、米国をも屈服させるため、飛行機の発注をフランスのエアバスにエサとして与えたのである。しかし、ボーイングはエアバスよりも質が良く、価格も安い。 最近、ボーイングはエアバスを破ってカナダ航空から６０億ドルの受注をした。また、４月２８日、ボーイングはまた国営インド航空から７０億ドルの受注をした。アメリカの飛行機製造大手のボーイングは、一週間で１３０億ドルにもなる２つの大受注を勝ち取ったのである。 エアバス副総裁のハウドはこう述べている：“私たちは失望とともに衝撃を受けた。私たちは公正・公平な扱いを受けなかった。” 正義と良知のない国家がお金儲けをしようとしても、そんなにうまい話はない。あるアナリストによると、インド航空の決定に政治的な圧力があったというが、私から見れば特に政治力が介入したわけでもなく、神の力が介入したといえる。フランスがまた悪人を助けて悪事を働くならば、更なる失望と衝撃が後に控えているであろう！ こうしたニュースは、フランスに深刻な打撃を与えるとともに、なす術のない中共に終末の到来を感じさせるものである。 |
パレスチナ苦境回避策を求めて：economist記事引用
Seeking a bypass, as the money runs out
From The Economist print edition
The Quartet moots a way of mitigating Palestinian hardship. But nobody knows how, or whether, it is going to work
EVER since March, when foreign donors first began cutting aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the wake of Hamas's election victory, their refrain has been that they did not intend to punish the Palestinians personally. This week they acknowledged that the punishment was happening anyway. The so-called Quartet (America, the European Union, Russia and the UN) has proposed a “temporary international mechanism” to avert a humanitarian disaster by sending aid directly to the Palestinian people. The unspoken assumption is that this scheme will restore at least some of the money for PA salaries, while bypassing Hamas, which the donors do not want to deal with until it meets the Quartet's conditions of recognising Israel and renouncing violence.
Some 29% of the Palestinian population depend on PA salaries, and they have gone largely unpaid for two months. The effects are clearly visible. In Gaza City, the rush-hour traffic jams are a shadow of what they used to be. Shopkeepers and stallholders on the usually bustling Omar Mukhtar street stand idle, except for the jewellers who field steady trickles of people wanting to sell wedding rings and family silver. Vegetables and fruit are starting to rot as customers hoard their cash.
There are shortages of fuel—which will only increase now that the Israeli provider to the PA has suspended supplies because it had not been paid—and also of dairy products and medicines, largely because, since the start of the year, Israel has kept the Karni goods crossing-point between it and Gaza closed almost as often as it is open. The crossing has been targeted by terrorists, and the PA, under Israel's instructions, has been digging for alleged tunnels there. So far it has found nothing.
The world's blockade of the PA has hit harder and quicker than anyone expected. In March, the World Bank predicted cuts in aid, trade and the number of work permits for Palestinians in Israel, and forecast that Palestinians' average incomes—already low in the wake of the intifada—would fall by another 30% this year alone. In fact the cuts have been much deeper than foreseen, and banks are caving in to American pressure not to send the PA money from other sources. In a report this week the bank says that even its original gloomy forecast now looks “too rosy”.
Locals say they are still a few weeks away from running out of money altogether. But PA institutions are showing the first signs of shutting down. Some departments have told staff they need not turn up or can work from home. Gaza's state-run university has closed its doors for a week. Grant Leaity, the field co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, worries that “nurses will be among the first people to look elsewhere for jobs”.
That would cripple the Health Ministry, the main provider of health services, which was already running out of some medical supplies because a big funding programme from the World Bank expired last year. This week four kidney patients in Gaza were reported to have died for lack of dialysis. Another immediate risk is that rival clans and political factions with influence over the various bits of the PA's security services will stoke the unrest already felt by unpaid and disgruntled members.
If the PA stops functioning, says the World Bank, the result will undo years of institution-building. The bank gives warning that the crisis “could lead the public to look for basic services, such as education, from informal and less secular providers.” It adds that “institutional paralysis could also increase calls by the Palestinian public for wrapping up the PA and handing administrative responsibility back to Israel.”
Israel definitely does not want that. It welcomed this week's Quartet proposal. But the mechanism for providing aid is still a pretty vague notion. One idea is to channel the wage money through the office of the president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is not from Hamas. But most people agree that his office simply lacks the capacity to handle it. Another is to set up a trust fund with an independent payments agent, as was done in the mid-1990s when the PA began. But that could take precious time. A third is to beef up the World Bank's existing Emergency Services Support Programme, which provided the Health Ministry money that ran out last year.
Equally unclear is how much money, and for what, the donors actually want to give. If the total sum is not enough to cover the whole of the PA's bloated payroll, who—other than the PA itself—can decide which salaries really need paying? And will it cover anything besides wages? More than half the Health Ministry's budget, for instance, goes on expenses like fuel, medicine and equipment. Without them, paying the nurses will do little good.
In any case, the bank says, there is not much point in a bypass mechanism unless Hamas itself agrees, and so far its reaction has been hostile. It is almost equally important that Israel, too, gives way, by releasing the $55m-60m a month in tax and customs revenue that it collects on the PA's behalf but has been holding in escrow since February. On May 10th Israel said it was willing to release 50m shekels ($11m) through a Quartet mechanism for humanitarian uses, but not towards the $95m monthly wage bill.
As the Palestinians wait for help, Israel continues to pound the northern Gaza Strip with up to 300 artillery shells a day, in response to rocket fire from Palestinian militants. While the militants' crude rockets have done virtually no damage in Israel, the shells, though usually aimed away from populated areas, do damage houses, and injure and occasionally kill people with their shrapnel. The continuous thud of shelling, audible several miles away in Gaza City, puts everyone even more on edge than they were already.
ロシアのナショナリズムとプーチン：economist記事引用
Playing a dangerous game
From The Economist print edition
Alarmist rhetoric from President Vladimir Putin; skinhead violence on Russian streets. Is there a connection?
A FEW days before Vladimir Putin's state-of-the nation address on May 10th, a strange, seemingly unrelated apparition presented itself in a Moscow park: some 50 Africans, plus the odd Afghan and Iraqi, carrying rakes. They came to perform a subbotnik—an old Soviet tradition of voluntary civic work. They headed for a wooded glade favoured by barbecuing Muscovites, and began clearing leaves and rubbish. “Good on them,” said an elderly Russian park cleaner. “Friendship between the nations is very important.”
Unfortunately, the idea of international friendship, like the near-defunct tradition of the subbotnik, is less popular in Russia than it was. At the annual Victory Day parade in Red Square on March 9th, Mr Putin attacked “those who...try to sow racial hatred, extremism, and xenophobia.” Well he might: his country is experiencing a plague of racist murder and violence, often committed by neo-Nazi gangs. “The drunks just beat you,” says Romeo, from Cameroon. “The skinheads kill you.” He and his fellow leaf-rakers wanted to underline their contribution to city life. Most have stories of beatings; all avoid the Moscow metro, even in daytime.
Scant consolation though it might be, there are other victims—including Russia's ancient scapegoat, the Jews. Nine were stabbed in January in an attack on a Moscow synagogue. People from the Caucasus and immigrants from Central Asia are also frequent targets, in what is now a nationwide phenomenon. The latest foreign fatality in Voronezh, a university town in central Russia, was a Peruvian (foreign students are drawn to Russia by cheap university fees, but are increasingly taking fright). Two people were killed when an armed gang attacked a Roma camp in the Volgograd region last month.
Beautiful St Petersburg, where Mr Putin will host world leaders at the G8 summit in July, rivals Moscow as the capital of race hatred. A Senegalese student was shot there last month—“the clean-up of the city continues,” crowed an extremist website. Anti-racist campaigners and homosexuals have also been attacked. A Russian Orthodox priest recently blessed agitators outside a Moscow gay club.
Some see the viciousness as the reincarnation of old Russian neuroses that a combination of internationalist rhetoric and strong security services had managed to suppress during Soviet times. Oscar, from Burundi, studied in Moscow in the Brezhnev era and says discipline was the difference. “If I hate you, and nobody is protecting you,” he says, “I can attack you.” But others see the street violence as an extreme manifestation of a newer, broader trend—one evident, in a different way, in Mr Putin's state address.
Victory Day was not the first time that Mr Putin has publicly denounced racism and xenophobia. Yet, as a recent report by Amnesty International catalogued, police, prosecutors and courts remain too slow to recognise racist crimes and too lenient in their punishment. Typically, the killers of a nine-year-old Tajik girl in St Petersburg were recently adjudged to have been motivated by “hooliganism” rather than racism (another nine-year-old, the daughter of a Malian, was stabbed in the throat in St Petersburg, but lived). A racist attack on an official from Russia's north Caucasus in Moscow last month was also classified as hooliganism, until officials were shamed into thinking again.
One plausible explanation for this reticence is an old-fashioned reluctance to admit problems, especially, in a country that justly regards itself as Nazism's vanquisher, the growth of fascism. Dmitry Dubrovsky, of the European University of St Petersburg, says that some officials in his city detect a conspiracy by outsiders to shame St Petersburg. But another theory, endorsed by Vladimir Lukin, Russia's human-rights ombudsman, is that many in the security services secretly sympathise with the skinheads (Mr Dubrovsky agrees that this is true in St Petersburg of many ordinary officers). The police themselves harass ethnic minorities, often to extort money: ten Africans were said to have been detained at a metro station on their way to the Moscow subbotnik.
Attitudes in the security services are not unusual. At the last count, 52% of those polled by the Levada centre supported the idea of “Russia for the [ethnic] Russians”; large numbers confess to hostile feelings to Chechens, Roma and others. “Go into the metro,” says Ma from Guinea-Bissau, “and even the children call you nigger.” Russian children, she says, will not play with hers. A nationalist tendency is evident in attitudes to the rest of the world, too: friendliness towards America and western Europe is declining. It is an odd moment for Russia to assume the ministerial presidency of the Council of Europe—which is, moreover, about to publish a critical report on the country.
A new hostility to the West is not surprising, given the Kremlin's foreign-policy tone. Meddling foreign powers and spying human-rights workers have been reviled. Relations with several neighbours—Georgia and Ukraine, but also Poland—were poisonous, and those with America strained, even before Dick Cheney's critical speech in Vilnius last week (greeted by the Moscow media as a harbinger of a new cold war, but also as evidence that Mr Putin's policies were working). “We see what's happening in the world,” Mr Putin said cryptically on May 10th, in a speech otherwise focused heavily on the declining birthrate. “As the saying goes, comrade wolf knows who to eat and he eats without listening to others.” Less cryptically, he said the arms race was still on.
The relationship between this rhetoric, the Kremlin's bid to revive national pride using tsarist and Soviet symbols, and the hate on Russia's streets, is murky. Alexander Verkhovsky of the SOVA Centre, a Moscow think-tank, sees all of them as different manifestations of feelings of imperial nostalgia. Others think Mr Putin is deliberately tolerating, even cultivating, radical nationalism as a political tactic. Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent member of parliament, says that Mr Putin may see himself as an emperor, but not as a Führer. Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal politician, argues that the Kremlin is trying to appeal to nationalist instincts but also to portray itself as the country's only defence against them. The security services seem more concerned by leftist groups than rightist ones (some of which profess loyalty to the Kremlin). Meanwhile, liberal politicians are often labelled “fascists.”
From the pogroms of the 19th century to the intermittent racism of the Soviet Union, Russian rulers have tried to manipulate nationalism for their own ends. If that is the Kremlin's game, it is a risky one, and not just for the beleaguered immigrants—as the Kremlin may already have discovered. The Motherland party is widely thought to have been created by the Kremlin in order to drain votes away from the Communists in the parliamentary election of 2003. It was banned from participating in December's local election in Moscow after it ran an anti-immigrant advertisement with the slogan, “Let's rid our city of rubbish.” But Motherland's real crime, many thought, was not being too offensive—but becoming too popular
ベビーブームと経済破綻：economist記事引用
Baby boom and bust
From The Economist print edition
Will share prices crash as baby-boomers sell their assets to pay for retirement?
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MICHAEL MILKEN will celebrate his 60th birthday on July 4th. The former “junk-bond king” is still going strong, having seen off prostate cancer, and remains as controversial as ever. The debate over whether Mr Milken deserved his jail term for manipulating the high-yield bond market he largely created rumbles on nearly 20 years later, most recently during the Enron trial, where Mr Milken's genius was championed by none other than Kenneth Lay (as the saying goes, with friends like that...).
Jeremy Siegel turned 60 last November. The Wharton business school economist, whose book “Stocks for the Long Run” was the bulls' bible during the last bubble, is going strong too, trim and fit, with his mind as lively as ever—despite being called “demented” at last weekend's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting by one of the firm's bosses, Charlie Munger. (“He's a very nice guy,” retorted the other boss, Warren Buffett.)
Mr Siegel and Mr Milken are among the first members of the post-war “baby boom” generation to enter the decade of life in which most people retire. (Mr Siegel puts the dates of America's baby-boomers at 1946-64, which he says technically makes him a pre-boomer.) Lately, both men have been giving considerable thought to what impact the impending retirement of the baby-boomers will have on the prices of financial assets. They have reached sharply different conclusions, which they aired in a conference last month at the Milken Institute.
Having built his career on arguing that buying shares and holding them is the best long-term investment strategy in almost any circumstances, Mr Siegel is now surprisingly worried about the impact on asset prices of the demographic time-bomb in the rich world represented by the baby-boomers' mass retirement. Many boomers have bought assets such as bonds and shares to fund their old age. Arguably, these purchases have helped to drive up prices over the past couple of decades. Now, he says, all else being equal, the sale of these assets will lead to a sharp fall in prices, because there are too few people in the smaller generations that followed the boomers to buy all of those assets at today's prices. For instance, in the developed world share prices could fall by as much as 40-50% over the coming decades because of boomer selling, calculates Mr Siegel. Unless they retire later, baby-boomers could see their standard of living in retirement halved, relative to their final year of work.
Mr Siegel's one great hope is that the shortfall of buyers of assets in the rich world will be made up for by a surge in demand from the developing world, as it gets richer fast thanks to the information revolution and globalisation. The demographic time-bomb of a lot of rich-country boomers having to be supported in their retirement by a smaller group of younger workers disappears when the huge, far younger population of the developing world is added to the mix. Indeed, Mr Siegel calculates that shares will continue to perform as well as they have in the past—generating real returns of above six percentage points a year since 1802, according to the research that made his name—provided that the developing world continues to grow strongly, and that buyers there are able to snap up all the shares they want.
That would need to be a lot of shares, says Mr Siegel, who is writing a new book on the subject, “The Global Solution”. By the middle of this century, he reckons, most multinational companies would need to be owned by investors outside today's developed countries, he says, especially investors in Asia. The challenge is to integrate global capital markets so that selling assets from the old in the rich world to the young in developing countries is no harder, nor more unusual, than today's sales of assets by elderly folk in Florida to younger people in other American states. From this perspective, America's external deficits, particularly with some developing countries, may be both long-lasting and nothing to worry about.
The biggest danger is that growing protectionism in the rich world will both slow the rate of growth in the developing world and prevent its demand for shares being met. Mr Siegel views the recent opposition to purchases of American firms by companies from China and Dubai as decidedly ominous.
Mr Milken, by contrast, is hugely optimistic, mainly because he thinks that many boomers will live far longer than is expected today, thanks to existing medical practice and spectacular advances, such as a cure for cancer, that he expects in the near future. He thinks that average life expectancy could eventually reach 120 years. With good health at a far greater age, people will want to keep working, not retire, he says—just as he and Mr Siegel do. (This prediction, Mr Siegel notes, goes against the trend for rising average life expectancy to coincide with falling retirement ages in the rich world.)
Undaunted, Mr Milken insists that working for longer will become easier thanks to technological innovation, such as using the internet from home. That will increase wealth, fuelling demand for assets. Hence the real issue for the world over the coming decades, predicts Mr Milken, will be not whether there are enough people to buy the assets of the baby-boomers, but whether there are enough assets to buy, given all the extra demand in the world.
Most economists will tend to agree with Mr Siegel that Mr Milken's forecast is “more hope than reality”. But Mr Milken's greatest achievements, from creating the high-yield debt market to beating cancer, have been the result of his refusal to accept conventional wisdom. Perhaps he will be proved right again. And if not, there may be an ounce of good news among the bad. If politicians realise that foreign buyers are needed to prop up the value of America's retirement savings, they may be less inclined to flirt with protectionism.
弱者の枢軸：economist記事引用
Axis of feeble
From The Economist print edition
A world-bestriding partnership is drawing to a close
THEY have been improbable soul-mates, the silver-tongued British barrister and the drawling Republican from Texas. But the partnership between Tony Blair and George Bush has shaped world events in the nearly five years since the attacks of September 11th. Over the past year, however, the debacle in Iraq and problems at home have turned both leaders from soaring hawks into the lamest of ducks.
This week Mr Bush's popularity drooped to 31% in the polls; his party faces a beating and the possible loss of one or both houses of Congress in November's mid-term elections (see article ). In Britain meanwhile, much of the Labour Party, which Mr Blair reinvented and led through three consecutive election victories, wants to bundle its saviour into retirement and replace him with Gordon Brown (see article and article ).
Neither man is going right away. Mr Blair may hang on for another year. Unpopular lame duck though he may be, Mr Bush will stay in office until January 2009. And the path may not be all downhill: the dysfunctionality of the Democrats may yet let the Republicans limp home in the mid-terms. But an era is plainly drawing to an end. No matter how long they remain in office, the self-confident and often self-righteous political partnership that shaped the West's military response to al-Qaeda and led the march into Afghanistan and Iraq is now faltering. What does this mean for the wider world?
Remember first that this is no pairing of equals. Britain's contribution to the war on terror has been smaller in substance than in symbolism. After September 11th Mr Bush did not need Mr Blair in order to mobilise the domestic support and military power he required for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But in Mr Blair the president found a supreme political salesman and a dependable ally with a respected voice inside both the UN Security Council and the European Union. Better still, Mr Blair was a true believer, exuding conviction. He attached himself to Mr Bush out of principle, not some British instinct to hold the coat-tails of the superpower. From the start, he believed in a forceful response to terrorism and the need to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. As a “progressive” politician from the centre-left, who had got on just as well with Bill Clinton, Mr Blair reached audiences in parts of the world, and of America, that Mr Bush could not reach.
Because Britain is so much the junior partner, neither Mr Blair's new weakness nor his possible ejection from Downing Street will have an immediate impact on America's behaviour in the world. Mr Brown has so far given few clues about his beliefs in foreign policy beyond the fact that he is a Eurosceptic well-disposed to America. Under him Britain will continue to value its transatlantic alliance, not least because the European Union has been at sixes and sevens since the voters' rejection of its new constitution and no longer exerts much of a tug in the opposite direction. The timetable for extracting Britain's small force from southern Iraq, Britain's commitment to peacekeeping in Afghanistan and its opposition to Iran's nuclear programme will almost certainly not change.
Even so, as Mr Blair loses authority at home—and even more when he eventually leaves office—Mr Bush is bound to feel the loss not just of a strong ally but also of a kindred spirit. Growing friendlessness at home will be compounded by increasing loneliness abroad. Lately the president has found a new European friend in Angela Merkel. Germany's chancellor is much closer to Mr Bush's way of thinking than was her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. She is commendably outspoken, for example, on Iran's nuclear programme and its threats against Israel (though also somewhat feeble in her attitude towards Vladimir Putin's increasingly pushy Russia). But many of Mr Bush's other foreign allies, such as Spain's José María Aznar and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, have lost their jobs. And none of these allies formed a bond as strong as the one with Mr Blair. When the time comes for Mr Bush to soldier on without his one foreign soul-mate and confidant, it may not be Britain's troops, intelligence advice or Security Council votes he will miss most but the psychological pattern of mutual encouragement: each man's reinforcement of the other's belief in the rightness of his gut convictions.
The fact that the prime minister and president hail from opposite ends of politics has made this pattern all the stronger. What they shared was the same instinctive responses to the attack on the twin towers and all that followed. Both have a strong Christian morality. Both see jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation as dangers akin to those posed by Hitler in the 1930s. Both consider it their calling to rise Churchill-like to the challenge. Mr Blair may not have gone so far as Mr Bush in defining his as a wartime administration. But part of the Blairite worldview is that desperate times require desperate measures. Even before September 11th, Mr Blair was citing Rwanda and Kosovo as justifications for a doctrine of liberal interventionism under which great powers had a duty to use force for virtuous ends even without the say-so of the United Nations. On September 12th the prime minister sent the president a five-page memo promising to help with the invasion of Afghanistan. This prime minister is as close as any British Labour leader can come to being an American neo-conservative.
With Mr Blair weakened and his own political capital trickling away, Mr Bush will find it harder to trust his own instincts, let alone rise Churchill-like to the challenges in the remaining two and a half years of his presidency. Critics of the improbable partnership—those who think Mr Bush and Mr Blair overreacted to September 11th, lied their way into Iraq, trampled over law and liberties and inflamed the very clash of religions that Osama bin Laden was so keen to ignite—will rejoice. In a world of one superpower, some say, people are safer when its president is too weak for foreign adventures.
They are wrong. That Mr Bush has made big mistakes in foreign policy is not in doubt. He oversold the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, bungled the aftermath, betrayed America's own principles in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, ignored Mr Blair's pleas to restart peace diplomacy in Palestine. But America cannot fix any of these mistakes by folding its tents and slinking home to a grumpy isolation. On the contrary. In his belief that America needed to respond resolutely to the dangers of terrorism, tyranny and proliferation, Mr Bush was mainly right. His chief failures stem from incompetent execution.
What is required when Mr Bush's term ends is a president no less committed to the exercise of American power when it is necessary, and no less willing to rise to external threats. Perhaps that will be a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton. But in the meantime, the world won't wait. However weak he is at home, Mr Bush still has duties abroad. He must ensure that America is not bundled out of Iraq before its elected government has a chance to stand on its own feet. He must hold the line against a nuclear Iran. He needs to push harder for an independent Palestine, continue the fight against al-Qaeda, resist Russia's bullying of its neighbours and help America come to terms with a rising China. If he is wise, he will work harder than before to enlist allies for these aims, even if America must sometimes still act alone. But it will be harder and lonelier without a confident Tony Blair at his side.
越境陀羅尼:日刊ゲンダイ引用
「今だけを引き連れていく――それが現代の青春です」
- 佐藤 トモヒサ
- 越境陀羅尼
――７０年代の日本の若者のインド・ムーブメントやドラッグ文化、学生運動におけるイデオロギー闘争や内ゲバと称された身内殺しの権力闘争を、現代に置き換えたような物語だ。さらに宗教やセックス、少数民族問題の意識が濃密に絡み、凄まじいパワーと理想に対する狂気の情熱も発散させている。なぜ今、こういう物語を？
「確かにテーマは６０年代、７０年代のヒッピー文化や、イデオロギー闘争といったものを意識しています。ただ９０年代、２０００年代に青春を送る僕らの世代には、昔のような厳然とした政治的幻想はないし、オウム事件を経て宗教に対してもそれほどの期待は持ち得ない。そういう僕らのアイデンティティーのありかを自問すると、相当あいまいなままで、そこで外側から強烈な枠にはめて、自分自身の感性がどう反応するかをこの物語で試みてみたかったんです」
――アジア・ツアーの楽屋裏、ドラッグやアジア雑貨の日本国内流通、それを担う日本の若者たちの生態も詳細に描かれるが、この物語で最も書きたかったことは？
「すごく極端な言葉になりますが、ここに描かれた若者たちは、何かに絶望しているわけでも、最終的には何かを希望しているわけではないんです。ただ彼らは生きています。最後に主人公にひとこと言わせていますが“今だけを引き連れていく”。それって意外とすばらしいことなんじゃないか、幸せなんじゃないか、そこを描きたかった」
――最終的には友情や愛とは何かがとことん突き詰められていくが、主人公サンタはアイヌ系。なぜそういう設定に？
「自分が日本人であることを絶えず懐疑的に見る、見られる存在として登場してもらいました。個人的にはアイヌ民族をリスペクト（尊敬）していますし。この物語を手にすることで、やはり読み手の方には、自分がどういう場所で生まれ育ち、どこに拠って立っているのかを考えるきっかけにしていただければ、と思っています」
【作品概要】
アイヌ民族の自立・解放闘争を経て、パレスチナ解放闘争に殉じた故浅田基行。その遺志を受け継ぐ日本の若い世代が、タイ北部の広大な地域に自治解放王国の建設を目指すニルバーナ旅団を組織する。
指導者は〈在〉と呼ばれる入植地造成組を率いる彰、資金調達を担う流民系を率いるシゲ。だがシゲが行方不明となり、組織はいつしか〈在〉独裁の野望により分裂を始める。シゲの代わりに流民系を率いるサンタは、バンコクの淫猥な雑踏の中で殺人込みの権力闘争に巻き込まれていく。
▼さとう・ともひさ １９７２年、茨城県日立市生まれ。多摩美術大学大学院美術研究科絵画（油画）専攻修了。その後、アルバイトをしながら東南アジア・インド・中東・欧州・アフリカ諸国などを旅する。初の書き下ろしの本作品で作家デビューする。
第１回日本ラブストーリー大賞：日刊ゲンダイ引用
- 原田 マハ
- カフーを待ちわびて
| 【NEW WAVE】 2006年4月8日 掲載
第１回日本ラブストーリー大賞受賞 原田マハ氏に聞く「大人が楽しめるラブストーリーを書きたかった」 原田マハ氏の最新刊「カフーを待ちわびて」（宝島社 １４００円）は、新設された第１回日本ラブストーリー大賞受賞作。マハ氏は作家・原田宗典氏の実妹で、いわば満を持しての作家デビューだ。絵馬に書かれた“嫁に来ないか”という言葉が、沖縄の離島にてんやわんやの大騒ぎを引き起こす。 ――手に軽い障害をもち何かと引っ込み思案、それまで決断という言葉とは無縁だった三十男、明青（あきお）の恋物語。そこに嫁志望の幸が押しかけ、島のリゾート開発問題で信じていた仲間との間に亀裂が入り、すべてに解決を迫られる。ラブストーリーの枠に収まりきらないテーマも抱えているが、今なぜ恋物語を？ 「これまでキュレーター（美術展・博覧会などの企画者）や、環境問題をテーマにライターの仕事をしてきた私のキャリアから生まれてきた物語、といえると思います。それと、若い人の書く流行のラブストーリーではなく、私もそんなに若くないし（笑い）、大人じゃないと描けないラブストーリーを書いてみたかったこともありますね」 ――読んでいるうちに、どうもこの島は実在しているのではないか、こういう島んちゅたちが今日も泡盛で宴会をやっているのではないか、という気にさせられるが？ 「そうですね、舞台になった島にはモデルがありますし、作中、海中に潜ってハリセンボンをくわえてくる黒犬カフーのモデルも実在します。カフーが島言葉で“幸せ”を意味することを教わったときには、もうこれは後は書くしかないなと。目標は激情や官能はちょっぴりでも、人の純愛の原点、でした。男性にとっても女性にとってもファンタジーであり得る恋、ですね」 ――先輩作家としての原田宗典氏に影響を受けたりしたことは？ 「それはもうまったくないですね。ただ、いざ自分が書いてみるとプロの兄とちがって、これがなかなか完結しない（笑い）。意外に身近なところに幸せはある、ということも隠れテーマのひとつなんですが、最後は本当に（いい作品になるよう）カフーよ来てくれ、この作品を手にするすべての人に来てくれ、と祈りを込めて仕上げました」 【作品概要】 沖縄の離島・与那喜島で細々と雑貨店を営む３５歳の明青。彼は仲間内で北陸に旅したとき、遊び心で神社の絵馬に“嫁に来ないか”と書く。そしてある日、幸という女性から“もし絵馬の言葉が本当なら、私をあなたのお嫁さんにしてください”という手紙が届き、実際に幸が島に現れ大騒ぎに。 島はリゾート開発問題に揺れ、明青はユタ婆の不思議な予言、失踪した母の思い出、そして愛犬カフーと海辺で戯れる幸の存在に振り回される。成就すべき愛はどこにあるのか！？ ▼はらだ・まは １９６２年生まれ、東京都出身。関西学院大学文学部日本文学科卒、早稲田大学第二文学部美術史科卒。大手商社や大手都市開発企業の美術館開設室、地方都市の美術館開設準備、ニューヨーク近代美術館（ＭｏＭＡ）などのキュレーターを務め、０２年独立、フリーに。本作品で第１回日本ラブストーリー大賞を受賞、作家デビューする。 |