Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [199]
13. Ibid. By the same token, the failure to acquire the 2000 Olympic games was an economic disaster for the Beijing region that would have profited economically, and a blow to China’s global image; but for officials worrying about insidious outside influences, it may have represented an inadvertent victory.
14. Dave Lindorff, “China’s Economic Miracle Runs Out,” The Nation, May 30, 1994, pp. 742–744.
15. Kristof, “China Sees ‘Market-Leninism’ a Way to Future,” The New York Times, September 6, 1991, p. 1.
16. Sheryl WuDunn, “Clan Feuds,” The New York Times, January 17, 1993, p. A 10.
17. It has responded to both provocations with a heavy-handed and brutal use of force—over sixty thousand are estimated to have been killed, including Sri Lanka’s president, who was assassinated by a terrorist on May Day 1993; in 1987, India was dragged into the Tamil conflict, sending over fifty thousand troops into northern Sri Lanka to enforce its own solution. The troops went home empty-handed, and for his trouble, Indian ex—Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Tamil terrorists in 1991. In 1993 some progress was made toward resolving the dual Jihad of Tamils and extremist Sinhalese (see Edward A. Gargan, “Sri Lanka Is Choking Off Long Ethnic Revolt,” The New York Times, March 20, 1993, p. 1). Yet most observers believe Sri Lanka’s multiculturalism may yet destroy it; see William McGowan, Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993).
18. Indonesia is 85 percent Muslim, but 10 percent of the population are Christian, the rest falling into small Hindu, Buddhist, and animist minorities. Military intervention has been episodic and Suharto would like to convince his trading partners that his is a disciplinarian regime no worse, say, than Singapore’s or Taiwan’s. But repression is unceasing: most recently, three very influential magazines, including its best known newsmagazine Tempo (founded in 1971), were closed down without warning.
19. James Fallows, Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Fallows is unpersuaded that the economic slump of 1994 is anything other than a small bump in Japan’s road, and contests those like Bill Emmott Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese, New York: Times Books, 1994) who think Japan is a country like any other (which in my terms would make it a better candidate for McWorld).
20. Karl Taro Greenfeld, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). There are, Greenfeld reminds us, 25 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty. They are “the children of the industrialists, executives and laborers who built Japan Inc.” and they are “as accustomed to hamburgers as to rice balls and are often more adept at folding a bundle of cocaine or heroin than creasing an origami crane.”
21. Neil Strauss, “In Performance,” The New York Times, July 23, 1994, Section 1, p. 12.
22. The most innocuous changes can signal the deepest challenges: for example, in 1994 economic pressures mounted to introduce Western-style self-service gas pumping at Japan’s sixty thousand gas stations. In the ensuing controversy focusing on safety and jobs, culture was hardly mentioned. Yet while self-service may be economically efficient, it problematizes the cultural ideal of full employment (see Part III) and the traditional Japanese concern for courtesy and service. The campaign to maintain full-service pumps is hardly likely to inspire a cultural Jihad, but perhaps it ought to. For a discussion, see Andrew Pollack, “Japan’s Radical Plan: Self-Service Gas,” The New York Times, July 14, 1994, p. D I.
23. The quote is from Kina’s American producer Ry Cooder, cited by Neil Strauss in a fascinating account of the career of Shoukichi Kina, who played New York in the summer of 1994 and has made the new Okinawan hybrid a popular international sound. Cooder, who is