The Great Leap

By Christopher Hayes

This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.

December 22, 2009

AVENGING ANGELS

In the heart of downtown Chongqing, a sprawling city-state in Western China on the banks of the Yangtze River, a six-story tower commemorates those who died in what the Chinese call "the anti-Japanese war." After Japan invaded in 1937, the government moved the capital of China upriver from Nanjing to Chongqing. That decision brought with it Japanese bombs, and the city was destroyed during the war. A year after Mao Zedong founded the New China in 1949, he commemorated the fallen with the People's Liberation Memorial Tower. I was told by a guide at the city's exhibition center that just twenty years ago the memorial was the tallest building in the city. Today, the tower sits in the shadow of at least three mountainous skyscrapers in the central business district. Situated at the intersection of a pedestrian shopping mall, the tower looms about as large on the Chongqing skyline as a hotdog stand on Manhattan's.

My first trip to China--sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation--came just over a month after the People's Republic celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Those six decades can be cleaved in half: the first act, 1949-78, were the years of Mao, famine and the cultural revolution; the second, the three decades since then, the years of Deng, "reforms" and the "opening up," as the Chinese call it. And yet as far as China has come in terms of wealth (and the concentration thereof), it remains a very poor country: it ranks 100 among the world's nations in terms of per capita GDP, according to the IMF. "Our biggest challenge is not from without but from within," Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told us, citing (obliquely, as the Chinese we talked to were wont to do) the potential for instability as China continues on its trajectory. "It has become the consensus of the elites that China should stay on the right track: the past thirty years have resulted in remarkable achievements in all aspects of China. We hope that in the same vein, but in different emphasis, China could have another thirty years."

But is another thirty years like the past thirty even possible? The third act of New China begins as a world financial crisis reveals the deep flaws of global neoliberal capitalism and as a diminishing fossil fuel supply and rising global temperatures escalate the competition for resources. Meanwhile, China is in the midst of the largest project of industrialization and urbanization in human history, one that requires massive amounts of capital and fossil fuel. It's like watching a jeep race up a mountain road as an avalanche begins to cascade downward from above.

At a tour of a car factory in Chongqing, the guide from Chang'an Motors pointed to the boxy gray minivans rolling off the assembly line and, beaming, said, "There are 800 million Chinese peasants who need these cars!"

He's right, of course. China "should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom," as Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, told us. But 800 million new cars--think about that for a moment.

What's happening in China is at once awe-inspiring and monstrous. Its mixture of planning and markets, autocracy and federalism, competence and corruption both supports and refutes every argument one could make about models of political economy. There is a risk, after two weeks in a country of 1.3 billion people, of falling prey to false certainties: like a traveler airlifted onto the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro who returns home to tell everyone that Africa is covered in snow.

This danger was compounded by the fact that the trip was sponsored by an independent, Hong Kong-based nonprofit whose founder, Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chinese chief executive of Hong Kong, is very close to the Chinese leadership; and our hosts on the mainland side, who chaperoned us from interview to interview, were Communist Party members and former government officials. We had a few painfully staged interactions with "ordinary people" (including an elderly tangerine farmer who couldn't remember the year of a specific agricultural reform but knew that it was during the "5th plenary of the 16th Central Committee").

We did, however, have an opportunity to speak with dozens of members of the Chinese elite: officials, academics and businessmen. And China happens to be a country where the elites hold tremendous power. Indeed, they seem to have seamlessly melded Leninist vanguardism with American-style best-and-brightest meritocracy: "Let me put it simply," said former Shanghai mayor and current president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xu Kuangdi. "Most successful businessmen or scholars or engineers--they have become party members of the CPC."

China's New Deal

There is no formal social contract that regulates the relationship between members of this ruling class and the people they rule, but there does seem to be an implicit one. It is roughly this: we (the government) provide you (the citizens) with 8 to10 percent annual GDP growth, 24 million new jobs a year and the chance to win the capitalist lottery of sending your son or daughter off to a prestigious school with the promise of a life of industrialized luxury. In exchange: you don't question the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is not the easiest contract for the government to uphold, and it has already shown some signs of fraying. As recently as 2007, there were 80,000 protests a year in China, and the Internet has given a platform to increasingly rambunctious critics of government policies. The most potent issue is corruption, which captured wide public attention in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when many blamed corruption for the fact that school buildings that collapsed had dodged building codes. Several Chinese officials told us corruption was the biggest threat the party faces, the "threat from within," as one put it. Despite high-profile "crackdowns" (such as a trial currently under way in Chongqing involving 9,000 suspects), a recent China News Agency poll shows that corruption remains the number-one issue on the minds of Chinese citizens.

Corruption aside, there are also the raw economic challenges of maintaining hypergrowth, particularly at a moment of global contraction. Exports make up 35 percent of Chinese GDP; in the past year they fell by 25 percent. There are 6 million recent college graduates who need to find jobs. One Chinese hedge fund manager showed us an article for a newspaper about new graduates flooding a job fair, where the ratio of attendees to jobs was 7.5 to 1. What would happen, I asked one local party official in Yichang, a city near the infamous Three Gorges Dam, if unemployment in China went to 10 percent? Before he answered by saying that such a situation would be impossible under the current system, one of our chaperones, a very savvy diplomat who had served in the foreign ministry, leaned over to me and said, sotto voce, "The government would collapse." He chuckled after he said it, but I think he was only half joking.

When you talk to Chinese officials, they seem competent, focused and obsessed with stability (if also, sometimes, arrogant and pedantic). But occasionally you can glimpse the dangers and threats to the established order that lurk just outside the frame. "Chinese government officials face a lot of pressures," Wen Tianping, the spokesman for Chongqing's municipal government, told us. "We work under extreme pressures and we have a lot of difficulties."

The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.

The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.

"They can be migrant workers forever," said Paul Mak, a Chinese-American businessman in Shanghai who has worked for the American company Mary Kay in Shanghai for twelve years. "A migrant worker cannot become a resident of Shanghai. Now if you have a college degree you can come but not without education. You have a class of people in this limbo."

This marginal population freaks out the Chinese authorities because they desperately wish to avoid the experience of so many other developing countries, from Brazil to India, which have seen the growth of massive, ungovernable miserable slums in their largest cities. "We have learned many lessons from other countries, including the so-called Latin American trap during the urbanization process," said Wen. "The governments didn't think thoroughly about urbanization. Huge numbers of villagers came to the cities and they couldn't find a job. That's why there are so many slums." In a concession to its inability to control the migrant flow, the government in Shanghai recently announced reforms that allow migrant workers to send their children to public school in the city where they are working. As important as it is to keep unauthorized migrants at bay, creating a vast migrant underclass of uneducated children is an outcome the government decided to avoid.

Atop the urban-rural divide is a stark class divide as well. Peasants are the original Chinese revolutionary class, hundreds of millions of whom remain chained to a life of crushing preindustrial penury while oligarchs in Shanghai and Beijing live lives that would make even a Goldman Sachs banker blush. One night in Shanghai we dined at a glass-enclosed restaurant on the roof of an art museum where entrees went for upward of $40. In 2007 per capita net income for China's approximately 800 million farmers was just $50 a month. Managing the flow and settlement of people from country to town is also a means of managing the potentially most explosive source of social tensions.

Making No Small Plans

This is where Chongqing comes in. "Chongqing is a miniature of the whole of China," said municipal spokesman Wen. Roughly the size of Maine, it contains 31 million people, one major city (Chongqing, population 5 million) and a number of satellite cities. In 1997 it was elevated to provincial status so that the municipal government could focus on the internal migration from rural to urban areas, all within its municipal boundaries. "The central government hopes to have an experiment here to explore ways to address the problems we are facing: where should the 20 million people go on such a large scale?"

The key, in the eyes of the government that runs Chongqing, is planning. "We have plans, timetables and goals in our minds whenever we do anything," said Qian Lee, who works in the local government's foreign economic outreach bureau.

"We as a government give guidance and sort of categorize those who want to come to the cities," Wen said. "There are several tiers.... The first group of villagers will go to the downtown center. The second group will go to six regional centers we are building. And the third group will go to the urban places that are closest to their home villages, such as the country towns and townships.... We have thirty-one district centers and 103 towns." For each of these three tiers--downtown Chongqing, the six satellites and the thirty-one district centers--the government has annual targeted population levels for the next three years.

Chongqing is so proud of this planned vision it has constructed a $50 million exhibition hall on the banks of the Yangtze that showcases its past, present and future. Its centerpiece is an 892-square-meter scale model of the city. The tour guide flips a switch, and a comic-book night descends on the model; the rivers glow indigo. She flips another switch and lights up several dozen clusters of buildings, future projections of structures that will be completed in the next five years, then the next ten. Finally she puts all the lights on to reveal the future of Chongqing in all its miniature glory.

The tour ends in a room with a 360-degree, full-screen projection of a computer-rendered flyover of the future metropolis. Unlike the real smogbound and dreary Chongqing, it is bathed in piercing sunlight, and because of software limitations or of an oversight by the creators, not one of the humans who populate this new world--its expensive waterside condos, outdoor stadium and grand office building lobbies--is Chinese.

The ethos that animates this exhibition hall, a High Modernist faith in progress brought about by "scientific" planning, is so distant from the demoralized America of 2009 that my time in the city felt like a visit to Chicago in 1890 on the eve of the World's Fair. (Shanghai will be hosting the World Expo next year.) There's no larger representation of this animating faith than the Three Gorges Dam, which we toured one afternoon. The project took fifteen years and cost $30 billion. It will eventually provide up to 4 percent of China's electricity (the equivalent of about 500 coal-fired power plants). In order to build it, 1.25 million people were forced out of their homes on the banks of the Yangzte, and 1,500 archaeological sites, including ancient temples, were drowned.

To the Chinese elites we talked with, though, the future is everything. Although Chinese civilization (and administrative bureaucracy) is 5,000 years old, no one seemed interested in talking about anything that occurred before 1978. Such intense futurism is easy to lampoon, but it also seems the only worldview one could hold on to in the face of the challenges Chinese planners must overcome. Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain. It is no small thing to design a sewer system for a city growing at that pace. Just ask the 10 million residents of Mumbai's slums, whose lives are literally mired in shit because there is no access to a sewage system. So if the dark side of Chongqing is the triumph of Robert Moses's vision over that of Jane Jacobs, the silver lining is that--at a technical level, at least--this vision is pursued and executed with what seemed like an impressive degree of mastery.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

The Chinese affection for urban planning is closely connected to their belief in the virtues of economic planning. The fable we are told about China, particularly by neoliberals, who hold it up as a model of how capitalism has delivered millions from poverty, is that the market reforms have produced growth and prosperity by throwing off the shackles of state intervention. It's a deeply incomplete story: the commanding heights of the economy (telecom, energy, transportation and, most important, finance) remain in state control. There are four major state-owned banks in China, which together have an 80 percent market share.

Planning of the sort undertaken by the central government is viewed in the United States as a disastrous and discredited anachronism, as if the Chinese national weather service were relying on astrology. But whatever inefficiencies the heavy state footprint introduces, the largely government-run financial sector has protected China not only from the ravages of the financial crisis but also the kind of massive misallocation of capital that the global financial system has produced in the West over the past ten years. In fact, Qian Lee, who works for the municipal government in Chongqing, couldn't help but gloat about the benefits of the Chinese approach: "This has been discussed by Internet users in China who say when Obama comes to China that he can discuss with Hu Jintao about the importance of plans. This is something I think we can present to our American friend."

In dealing with the effects of the downturn, the state has devoted itself with impressive vigor to making sure growth is maintained and unemployment doesn't spike: the central government passed a 4 trillion RMB stimulus program (70 percent of its annual budget), the state-owned banks flooded the economy with investment capital and state-owned enterprises were directed not to lay anyone off. The result is that most, if not nearly all of the growth China experienced this year almost certainly came from state-led investment. Weighed down by the collapse of American consumption and the worst global recession since China began its reforms, the state was able to drag the economy over the 8 percent finish line, holding up its part of the unwritten social contract. This is no small accomplishment, but it is an open question whether it can replicate this feat next year, should global demand continue to be depressed.

Like the Death Star, the corporatist behemoth that is the Chinese economy is intimidating to behold, but it is not without its vulnerabilities. The abominable lack of a social safety net helps produce the high savings rate that most economists say stands as the single biggest obstacle to making the necessary transition to an economy driven more by domestic consumption (not to mention basic justice and security for hundreds of millions of people). This is connected to the much deeper problem of distribution, which presents economic and political challenges, although those two categories bear a strange, sometimes mysterious relationship to each other. "We do worry about equality," says Shanghai Institutes for International Studies president Yang Jiemian. "We do need to focus on distribution, allocation of rights, taxes, hospitals, healthcare."

When you raise the issue of distribution with other Chinese officials, they acknowledge the problem (they are nothing if not vigilant about emerging threats to their managerial order) but caution that achieving a more equal society will take time. Xu Kuangdi, former Shanghai mayor and party bigwig, was just one of several men we spoke with who cited Deng Xiaoping's exhortation to members of the party when he launched his reforms: "Let some people get rich first."

The question is, Just how many is "some," how rich is "rich," and how long does "first" last?

China has undoubtedly made some progress on this front: improving rural healthcare, ending taxes on farmers and even passing a labor law with a minimum wage, overtime and other protections (over the objections, I hasten to point out, of the US Chamber of Commerce). But while everything in China on the business side seems to move as fast as Shanghai's Maglev train, which goes 430 kilometers an hour, the project of equality, justice and social welfare proceeds much more slowly.

Xu argued that this is all part of the plan: "Let's look at our neighboring Asian countries," he said. "South Korea: its peak developing speed was reached using military rule.... Indonesia was successful during the reign of Suharto but recently it faces stalemate and difficulties." The reason that democracy is an obstacle to economic progress, Xu said, is that "the poor people want to divide the property of the rich people.... If we Chinese copied the directly elected situation today, people will say, 'I want everyone to have a good job.' Someone will say, 'I will divide the property of the rich people to poor people,' and he will be elected. It is useless: parity will not solve the problem of economic development. That is why we are taking a gradual and step-by-step approach in reform. As Mr. Deng said, we will cross the river by touching the stones. We will not get ourselves drowned, and we will cross the river."

While Xu, as a party leader, had the latitude to speak in explicit terms, almost no one else discussed politics so frankly. In China, economics stands in for politics as the substance of public debate and conversation. You cannot call for elections or for a free Tibet, but you can publish heated polemics about the government's decisions to continue to purchase US treasury bonds.

Where and When East Meets West

But Wang Hui, the lone dissident we spoke with during our time in China, says the state's attempts to maintain a strong and stark dividing line between legitimate critiques of its economic policy-making and illegitimate critiques of its very foundation doesn't always work. China's nominally socialist orientation, Wang argued, has provided many of its citizens with a vocabulary with which to criticize the state. "The paradoxical situation is that many ordinary people can use [Marxism] to defend their own interest because there is a real contradiction between the theoretical claim and what happens in reality."

A participant in the Tiananmen uprising, Wang spent time in re-education camps before going on to edit an independent journal that criticized the government from, for lack of a better word, the left. We met for lunch in a restaurant on the campus of Beijing's Tsinghua University, and as Wang spoke about politics in China, our two chaperones grew more and more uncomfortable, staring down at their plates in silence as if Wang were sharing graphic details of his sex life. It was a reminder that explicitly political debates are taboo. But Wang's point is that there is a public sphere in China, cramped though it may be, and it's beginning to have an effect: if an issue seizes the public's attention, the government now finds itself forced to respond. "It's really up to whether or not you have the capacity to break through that certain kind of barrier and create some kind of space" for public debate, he said.

A few days earlier, over dinner in Chongqing, Zhang Haiqing, a local municipal official, complained to me at length about the uncivil and vicious attacks that local bloggers were incessantly launching toward the government over this or that proposal. He almost sounded like an American politician.

We tend to view China as posing an alternative and threatening model for the future, one that's by turns seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after a while I wondered if we aren't in some way converging with our supposed rival. China has managed the transition from a repressive, authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oligarchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace.

On one of my last mornings in Beijing, I stumbled upon the "Better English" section of China Daily, which offers readers chances to learn new English phrases. One of them was, "Maybe I'm going out on a limb, but I think we still have to invest in it."

I may be going out on a limb, but I don't think either country is going to be able to make this system work.

About Christopher Hayes

Christopher Hayes is The Nation's Washington, DC Editor. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation,The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. He is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation. His wife works in the White House Counsel's office.

U.S. aid workers find few trained Afghan partners

Image by DVIDSHUB via Flickr

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A07

NAWA, AFGHANISTAN -- Alongside the thousands of additional U.S. troops, civilian aid workers are surging into Afghanistan to help refurbish schools, open rural health clinics, build irrigation systems, vaccinate livestock and provide fertilizer to farmers.

But like their military counterparts, the civilian technicians are finding the lack of trained Afghan partners their most difficult challenge. The problem is particularly acute in the remote rural areas, where the Afghan government's presence is virtually nonexistent.

"We're trying to create a centralized government where there's no history of it," said Lindy Cameron, the British head of the multinational provincial reconstruction team in Helmand. "The biggest challenge is the capacity of the Afghan government."

The point was illustrated during a recent day trip to Helmand by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was in Afghanistan to see how USDA expertise and technical assistance could help farmers boost production in the country's leading agricultural province.

Image by isafmedia via Flickr

Vilsack learned how U.S. aid and agricultural officials had vaccinated more than a million animals, provided seed and fertilizer to 10,000 farmers and distributed thousands of tons of feed for livestock.

But when he traveled to Nawa, bringing along Helmand's governor and the agriculture minister from Kabul, he also came face to face with the Afghan government's limitations. Only two Agriculture Ministry officials were working here, and neither lived in the district. They had no office, no equipment, no cellphone -- not even a bicycle.

The many obstacles

"The government of Afghanistan is not in a position to deliver services at the local level, especially at the district level," said Mohammad Asif Rahimi, the agriculture minister. "There, we don't have a presence still -- or an effective presence."

In Helmand, as in much of the south, part of the reason is the lack of security. With the continuing Taliban attacks, provincial officials prefer to stay in the capital, Lashkar Gah, and they rarely venture to the outlying districts. And finding central government officials willing to relocate to violent areas is virtually impossible.

As one aid worker put it, "No one wants to move to Helmand and get blown up."

But Rahimi said the situation is much the same all over the country, even in northern areas, such as Mazar-e Sharif, which has been relatively peaceful since the Taliban was ousted from power in late 2001.

"Even if they go to the villages, they don't even have a cellphone to call back to the capital," Rahimi said. "That is the same for the Ministry of Education . . . the Ministry of Health . . . the Ministry of Rural Development."

Illiteracy is a huge obstacle. Aid workers in Lashkar Gah described how a senior provincial-level Agriculture Ministry position has remained vacant for months because no one could pass the required civil service exam.

Other aid officials said the centralization of the Afghan government presents problems as well, with all appointments made by Kabul.

There are also logistical challenges. Ministers and provincial governors largely rely on U.S. aircraft to ferry them all over the rural areas. Rahimi and Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal traveled to Nawa with Vilsack aboard a Marine tilt-rotor Osprey.

Aid workers with experience both here and in Iraq said Afghanistan is more complex. In Iraq, they said, there was an educated population and the remnants of a centralized state. In Afghanistan, they are starting from scratch, trying to build a civil service corps at the local level where none existed before.

Afghans want more say

Rahimi and other Afghans blame the problem on the international community, which, they say, has spent billions of dollars in reconstruction aid here since 2001 but funneled most of the money to foreign and nongovernmental aid agencies as well as Western companies -- with little going to build up the capacity of the Afghan government.

The international community has invested about $60 billion in Afghanistan since 2002, including $40 billion from the United States, according to the Office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

"They never developed the government of Afghanistan with their billions of dollars," Rahimi said. "For eight years, almost all the money went to the foreign companies -- the contractors -- with their high security costs."

Some U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, did not dispute the assertion. But they said that course was necessary because the Afghan ministries lacked the capacity to deal with such a massive infusion of funds.

Nawa, a small, dusty outpost, has been largely secured by U.S. Marines. The Marines say they are treading a difficult line, wanting to do as much as possible to help develop this remote area, while recognizing that it is up to the Afghan government to sustain the work for the future.

Next to their base, the Marines are refurbishing an old building that will serve as a district government office, so when provincial officials do come here to visit, they can have a place to meet and even stay overnight.

"It's all about letting the Afghan government take control of what we rehabilitate," said Maj. Rudy Quiles, who is with the Washington-based 4th Civil Affairs Group. "I can build the best health clinics, but it's up to them for staffing it, maintaining it." The problem of scarce skilled personnel in dangerous or faraway areas could be solved by offering qualified Afghans increased pay to serve there -- an idea championed by U.S. officials.

"In this country, there has to be sufficient remuneration to justify the risk," Vilsack said.

He said the U.S. Agriculture Department is committing $20 million "to build that capacity, to ultimately help them get people down in the countryside."

From Haiti's ruins, a chance to rebuild a nation

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A01

Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti, policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.

Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade, leaving Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes averaging a dollar a day. But the leveled capital, Port-au-Prince, must be rebuilt, promising one of the largest economic development efforts ever undertaken in the hemisphere -- an effort "measured in months and even years," President Obama said Saturday in an appeal for donations alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And those who will help oversee it are thinking hard about how to use that money and attention to change the country forever.

"It's terrible to look at it this way, but out of crisis often comes real change," said C. Ross Anthony, the Rand Corp.'s global health director. "The people and the institutions take on the crisis and bring forth things they weren't able to do in the past."

The early thinking encompasses a broad swath of issues. Policymakers in Washington are considering whether to expand controversial trade provisions for Haiti and how to help fund the reconstruction for years into the future. The rule of law needs to be strengthened, particularly with regard to matters of immediate concern, such as property rights, inheritance issues and guardianship in hard-hit neighborhoods.

And somehow, development officials agree, the recovery effort must build up, not supplant, the Haitian government and civil society, starting with putting Haitian authorities at the center of a single, clearly defined plan to rebuild Port-au-Prince and its environs in a far sturdier form.

"National disasters, as awful as they are, you want to seize those moments, use that awful, awful opportunity, to strengthen the ability of national and local authorities to act for the benefit of their citizens," said Jordan Ryan, the assistant administrator of the U.N. Development Program. There is, to an extent, a development framework in place from efforts underway before the earthquake involving the Obama administration, the United Nations, a huge network of international aid groups and a Haitian government that, despite corruption, was viewed as more reliable than any in years. The United States budgeted $292 million in assistance to Haiti this year, including food aid, infrastructure funds and money to fight drug trafficking. And the Haitian economy grew by 2.5 percent in 2009, despite the global recession.

"We were really making progress," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday, before visiting the capital Saturday. "We had a good plan that was a Haitian plan. The Haitian government created the plan. It was realistic. It was focused. We worked with them. . . . And it was certainly on track to be, in my view, a very positive effort."

But some development veterans say a full rethinking is now in order. Gerald Zarr, who was the U.S. Agency for International Development's director in Haiti from 1986 to 1990, said even more must be done to involve the Haitian government. Too often, he said, understandable distrust of local authorities has led the United States and the United Nations to work mostly through the many aid groups in Haiti.

"Haiti's going to have to change. And if they do, we ought to make a commitment to stick with the government of the day to keep the institutional development going," Zarr said. "Unless we are committed to institutional development, I fear Haiti's never going to get off this terrible treadmill it's been on."

Others aren't so sure. Putting more faith in Haitian authorities can be done only if there is a crackdown on corruption, said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who has witnessed the tension between local empowerment and wasted aid money as special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The United States has spent $800 million in Haiti in five years, he said, with little to show for it.

"Certainly, at this stage, the delivery of aid should be direct and not through the government," he said. "And that process should be maintained for a while, until there is a sense of stability . . . to make sure that the government delivers the aid well."

Because nongovernmental organizations will play a central role for years to come, development veterans say, it will be up to the United Nations to ensure that their efforts are coordinated, as was done after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

William Loris, director general of the International Development Law Institute in Rome, points to another lesson from the tsunami: the role of the rule of law. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, this meant coming up with a formal, regional legal system to replace the informal customs in villages that were all but swept away. The new laws also empowered women to own property.

"You've got to figure out what is the state of the rule of law in Haiti and what are the strategies for improving on it," Loris said. "It's really critical that this not get lost. You're working on a mountain of injustices unless there's justice at the bottom of the heap."

The international community is already wrestling with one major factor hanging over Haiti's economic future, its crushing foreign debt, which has required the nation to pay more than $50 million a year in debt service. On this front, too, some progress had been made, with the International Monetary Fund announcing in July that the country's reforms had qualified it for $1.2 billion in debt relief out of the more than $1.9 billion it owed. On Friday, France contacted the Paris Club, the informal group of financial officials representing the world's wealthiest nations, to discuss speeding up relief.

Meanwhile, Peter Yeo, vice president for public policy at the United Nations Foundation, said the Obama administration needs to develop its strategy for appealing to Congress for additional aid for Haiti, beyond the $100 million in emergency aid Obama announced last week.

"It's important to get Congress on board," said Yeo, a former congressional aide. "Right now, in the heat of the emergency, everyone's on board, but they [the administration] shouldn't take that for granted. They need to keep Congress fully informed of what they're doing."

But creating a new economy will rest on more than sacks of food and aid dollars, which is why others say the United States should revisit trade policies with Haiti. Over the protest of American textile manufacturers, the United States granted tariff exemptions in 2006 to Haitian-made apparel and, after seeing middling results, in 2008 eased restrictions on using fabrics from certain low-cost countries. By 2009, more than two dozen Haitian companies employed 24,000 people making T-shirts, men's suits and more.

James Roberts, a former Foreign Service officer in Haiti now at the Heritage Foundation, argues for liberalizing the fabric rules further, to lower Haitians' costs. He also called for revisiting the "really destructive" U.S. tariffs on sugar to encourage growers in Haiti. Others say the United States should make it easier for Haiti to export its mangoes, which are prized by many American consumers but have faced hurdles because of U.S. food safety rules.

Some experts say that the answer is a rice revival. Until the 1980s, Haiti grew almost all the rice that it ate. But in 1986, under pressure from foreign governments, including the United States, Haiti removed its tariff on imported rice. By 2007, 75 percent of the rice eaten in Haiti came from the United States, according to Robert Maguire, a professor at Trinity Washington University. Haitians took to calling the product "Miami Rice."

The switch to importing rice was driven by U.S. subsidies for its own growers, said Fritz Gutwein, co-director of the social justice organization Quixote Center and coordinator of its Haiti Reborn project. The result in Haiti was a neglect of domestic agriculture that left many of the country's farmers, still the majority of its population, unable to support themselves, fueling waves of urban migration and environmental degradation.

"America needs to look at how its own agricultural policies affect Haiti," Gutwein said.

No one is expecting controversial trade policies to be taken up overnight. But the broader rebuilding effort needs to begin as soon as the initial rescue is over, said Mark Schneider, a former USAID official now with the International Crisis Group. "You can't hope to create any kind of sustainable development if this process doesn't start quickly," he said. "If you don't start it now, something will take the world's attention away from Haiti."

Staff writers Binyamin Appelbaum and Renae Merle contributed to this report.

Letter From China - Going Green in China, Case by Case - NYTimes.com

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By MICHAEL FORSYTHE

ORDOS REGION, CHINA — This region of Inner Mongolia, home to one of the biggest deserts in China, is being transformed into the site of a pine forest that will stretch across its low hills as far as the eye can see.

The local government’s tree-planting program is part of a plan to “assume our green responsibilities and build a civilized way of life,” Du Zi, the local Communist Party secretary, told energy executives at a conference last month in Beijing.

Also on tap: the world’s biggest plant to convert sunlight to electricity, built by First Solar of Tempe, Arizona, part of a 12-gigawatt wind, solar and biomass power-generating zone. And General Electric is helping the land of Genghis Khan cut wastewater emissions into the Yellow River, which borders the region.

“This shows what local leadership can do in China these days,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, head of the Brookings Institution’s China Center in Washington, which played host to Mr. Du and other provincial officials at the Oct. 21-23 conference. “They’ve gone flat-out.”

Regions are vying to outdo one another in a race to develop alternative-energy sources and reduce pollution. Gansu Province in western China is building a wind farm equivalent to about 20 nuclear power facilities. In the east, Zhejiang Province is installing solar panels on roofs. Beijing bans motorcycles from the city center in favor of electric bikes.

Their efforts demonstrate that China, the world’s largest producer of the emissions blamed for global warming, will continue to accelerate development of energy from renewable sources, even as it resists binding targets for reducing carbon emissions ahead of a U.N. summit meeting in Copenhagen next month aimed at forging a new treaty to curb greenhouse gases.

Some regional officials now see environmental projects as a way to bolster their economies after decades when companies were allowed to poison the air and water without penalties while expanding output.

And First Solar surged $12.94, or 11 percent, to close at $134.41 on Nasdaq on Sept. 8, the day Wu Bangguo, China’s highest-ranking leader after President Hu Jintao, visited the company’s Tempe headquarters. The next day the company made the Ordos agreement public.

Mr. Du, 54, cites a list of achievements in Ordos: increasing the portion covered by vegetation to 81 percent last year from 20 percent in 2000, closing 1,200 polluting factories and installing 100 megawatts of wind capacity.

The 20-gigawatt, 120 billion yuan, or $17.6 billion, Gansu project, set for completion in 2020, would be the biggest wind farm in the world. The Roscoe Wind Complex in Texas, currently the largest, generates less than one gigawatt — a billion watts — of electricity.

China is under pressure from the international community to accelerate its push toward alternative energy. It has refused to accept binding restrictions on carbon pollution, saying controls will crimp economic growth. Instead, China has pledged to cut emissions voluntarily in proportion to gross domestic product, without committing to include the policy in a global agreement.

Mr. Hu called climate change “a grave challenge to mankind” and pledged to work for “positive outcomes” in Copenhagen during a speech Sunday at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore.

Collaboration between the United States and China on alternative energy was on the agenda for the talks this week in Beijing between Mr. Hu and President Barack Obama. Such projects are already under way in Ordos, Mr. Du says.

General Electric, based in Connecticut, is working with Elion Chemical Industry of Ordos City to cut its wastewater discharge into the Yellow River. The project is slated to be completed next year, said G.E., the biggest maker of power-plant equipment in the world.

First Solar, the largest U.S. producer of solar modules, is looking for more business following the planned groundbreaking next year for the new photovoltaic facility.

“We hope this will be the first of many projects in China,” said Brandon Mitchener, a company spokesman based in Brussels. “China has the potential to become one of, if not the, largest solar market in the world.”

The Bloomberg World Energy-Alternate Sources Index has risen 21 percent in the last year as of Nov. 16, compared with a 27 percent rise in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index.

Ordos, among the nation’s wealthiest areas, has the means to push big, government-backed projects. It claims one-sixth of China’s proven coal reserves and one-third of its natural gas, giving the region of 1.6 million people a per capita income of 102,128 yuan, the third highest of any Chinese municipality.

Mr. Hu is signaling that he is serious about changing China’s energy mix. The goal is to produce 15 percent from renewable sources by 2020, according to a 2006 energy law.

China will see an even greater push by provinces and cities if the Communist Party begins to reward and promote officials on the basis of their ability to promote alternative energy, says John Thornton, a former co-president of Goldman Sachs who is now chairman of Brookings and was co-host of the October conference in Beijing.

“China is really quite an impressive, well-oiled machine in its ability to do large-scale things decisively,” Mr. Thornton said.

Michael Forsythe is a columnist with Bloomberg News.

Tracking Development and Governance in the Pacific 2009

The second annual Tracking development and governance in the Pacific report has found that the Pacific region is seriously off track to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.

The report monitors progress towards the MDGs in the region and assesses the performance of Pacific island countries and development partners. The report focuses on the Pacific island countries of Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, PNG, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. It includes Timor-Leste—in this case as a reference country—because it shares many characteristics of Pacific countries.

While some countries in the Pacific have made good progress against, and even achieved some MDG targets, the same cannot be said of the entire region.

Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have more than halved their rates of malaria infection between 2003 and 2008 showing that quick development gains are possible with strong commitments from government and development partners.

However, around 400,000 children across the region are still not making it into a primary school. Around 64 out of every 1,000 children in the region are still dying before the age of five. This is despite significant investments by development partners.

The report concludes that a new development framework is required to ensure the Pacific keeps pace with better international development practice. Transparent and accountable use of all development resources is necessary to increase progress towards the MDGs. Clear and measurable commitments are required to improve coordination and accelerate progress towards mutually agreed development outcomes.

The Pacific Partnerships for Development commit Australia and Pacific island countries to work together to address these challenges.

More information:

Report: Tracking Development and Governance in the Pacific 2009

Speech: The Role of Foreign Aid in Responding to the Economic Crisis in the Pacific Islands Region

Media Release: Tracking Development and Governance in the Pacific