Dialogues: April 2018

Monday, April 30, 2018

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Premium Times Nigeria

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Great Nation, Timi Dakolo

I have not heard Timi Dakolo's song but I imagine that it could help to mobilize into meaningful action

various segments of the population including policy makers and politicians.

I hope that it is inspirational - and an antidote to nihilism and self-

destructive behavior and philosophies- while challenging exclusivity and elitism, exploitation and marginalization.

Patriotic songs can fuel meaningful change when skillfully crafted.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
www.africahistory.net

www.gloriaemeagwali.com

www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html

Chief Editor- "Africa Update"

www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2018 7:36 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Great Nation, Timi Dakolo

Nice posting

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 30 April 2018 at 04:15
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Great Nation, Timi Dakolo

Beautiful song! Timi Dakolo remains a wonderful singer. But then, how do we read this song of patriotism, or any such song in Nigeria? At one level, how do the singers understand loaded concepts like "freedom," "tribes," "nation," "people," etc that add to the song's sonorous quality? Who are the "we" Dakolo refers to? Does that "we" bring together the elites/politicians/wealthy with the masses/poor/citizens?

By reason of his status as a successful singer, Timi Dakolo gives credence to the hypothesis that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Only the elite (politicians and the middle-upper class) are patriotic in the sense of a false sentimental attachment to a nation that is grounded on a status quo of injustice and inequality. However, Todd Gitlin, in "Varieties of Patriotic Experience," alludes to another sense of patriotism that makes one patriotic even if one rejects the sociopolitical practices and the way of life that define one's nation. I can be a patriot but not to my country. For instance, those that the Nigerian state has consigned to what Agamben calls "the zone of indistinction," a zone where the homo sacer are banned and abandoned, and opened to the vagaries of the state's irresponsibility, can band together in patriotic bond. This subnational patriotism derives from an epistemic standpoint of negative thinking, according to Marcuse. It comes from a thinking tat negates what is immediately before us, to quote Hegel.

This is an exciting twist to patriotism that enables us to interrogate the relationship between unfreedom and freedom. What result will we get if we apply Agamben, Marcuse, Hegel to the unraveling of informality and patriotism in Nigeria?

Timi Dakolo' "Great Nation" is a great song, but it will largely fall on the deaf ears of those who have been abandoned by the Nigerian state.

Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan

+23480-3928-8429

On Sunday, April 29, 2018, 10:34:15 PM GMT+1, Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oladipupo Adamolekun <dipo7k@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 9:59 PM
Subject: Great Nation, Timi Dakolo
To: OLADIPUPO ADAMOLEKUN <dipo7k@yahoo.com>

Sharing. I listened to Timi Dakolo sing this song a fortnight ago. Under-50s in the audience - the majority - sang along standing and with passion. Listen to the youtube, if you can.

Video: https://m.youtube.com/ watch?v=Y2OhlyXx3kE

Viewing lyrics for Great Nation by Timi Dakolo.

Here we stand as a people
With one song, with one voice
We're a nation, undivided and poised
We will take our stand, and build our land
With faith to defend what is ours

Here we are as a people
With one heart, for one cause
We're determined to rebuild and restore
Where freedom reigns, and truth prevails
A land where there's hope for us all
A land where there's hope for us all

We're all we have, we'll defend our land
We believe in this nation, and we know we'll get there
We're all we have, we'll defend our land
We believe in Nigeria and the promise she holds
And that one day we'll shine like the sun
We're a great nation

Though we are many people
Different tribes, different tongues
We're united in our strength and resolve
To uphold the honour of our land
And for generations to come
And for generations to come

Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria
Nigeria Nigeria

We're all we have, we'll defend our land
We believe
We're all we have, we'll defend our land
We believe

We're a great nation

Sent from a mobile device.

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's Quote

So, it is an achievement in Nigeria if the President meets another country's President and did not say something embarrassing?

CAO.

USA Africa Dialogue Series - From CNN: How beautiful design is keeping libraries relevant

How beautiful design is keeping libraries relevant

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/modern-libraries/index.html

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teaching While Black

The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America

I've received hundreds of racist emails, phone messages, and letters. This is what it's like to be hated.

This may interest some

Biko

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pushing the Technology Envelop [Rich Essay on Technological Transformation of Reality ]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: JUNIOUS STANTON jrswriter@comcast.net [ChatAfriK] <ChatAfriK@yahoogroups.com>
Date: 30 April 2018 at 16:00
Subject: [ChatAfriK] Pushing the Technology Envelop

From the Ramparts

Junious Ricardo Stanton

Pushing the Technology Envelop

"With augmented-reality gear barely on the market, rigorous studies of its effects on vision and mobility have yet to be done. But in reviewing the existing research on the way people perceive and interact with the world around them, we found a number of reasons to be concerned. Augmented reality can cause you to misjudge the speed of oncoming cars, underestimate your reaction time, and unintentionally ignore the hazards of navigating in the real world. And the worst thing about it: Until something bad happens, you won't know you're at greater risk of harm." https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/the-reallife-dangers-of-augmented-reality

More and more people are buying what are called augmented reality gizmos and gadgets such as: Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap Lightwear, Google Glass Enterprise Edition, Vuzix Blade AR and numerous others soon coming to market. What is augmented reality you ask? Augmented Reality or AR is explained as: "Augmented reality is the integration of digital information with the user's environment in real time. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it…Augmented reality apps are written in special 3D programs that allow the developer to tie animation or contextual digital information in the computer program to an augmented reality 'marker' in the real world. When a computing device's AR app or browser plug-in receives digital information from a known marker, it begins to execute the marker's code

and layer the correct image or images"

https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/augmented-reality-AR

AR is different from virtual reality in that AR is your real time environment with visuals and graphics superimposed while virtual realities is simulated three dimensional images, computer generated environments, fantasy or make believe. Now it has been discovered that Facebook is working on technologies that can/will scan your brain and use AR technology to share one's thoughts and images with the world.

An article on the Waking Times Website http://www.wakingtimes.com/2018/04/23/facebook-teams-up-with-shady-darpa-exec-to-scan-your-brain-and-augment-your-reality/ claims Facebook is teaming up with the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) to create new technologies that integrate AR with what we are thinking or doing and share that with the world (or allow Big Brother to know exactly what you are thinking and doing in real time). The article quotes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he describes the planned technology. "In the future, you'll be able to snap your fingers and pull out a photo and make it as big as you want and with your AR glasses you'll be able to show it to people and they'll be able to see it. As a matter of fact, when you get to this world, a lot of things that we think we think about as physical objects today, like a TV for displaying an image, will actually just be $1 apps in an AR app store. So it's going to take a long time to make this work. But this is the vision, and this is what we're trying to get to over the next ten years" ibid.

The article raises cogent questions about the impact of this technology on personal privacy, "Facebook users need to ask themselves whether or not they want to live in this world of augmented reality. It's uncertain at this point just how many of our current abilities and freedoms we could lose if this kind of technology took over our lives. Would it be possible to have a private moment? With Facebook technology becoming ever-more invasive into our lives and their protection of privacy becoming increasingly moot, it's possible that at some point in time we may not even remember what life was like before Facebook took control over our perceptions and intimate data." Ibid

Keep in mind this is already on the drawing boards at places like DARPA, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others. This is all part of the New World Order/Big Brother surveillance society. AR and "virtual reality" are the next steps as the one pecent push the technology envelop. But we don't have to be willing participants in our own debasement and slavery. As I have been saying for several years, Facebook is not a benign or pristine technology; it is a monopoly, a Trojan horse we are being duped and socially engineered to install and use on our devices so corporations and the government can keep tabs on us, sell us stuff, manipulate our choices and behavior. In addition to the privacy issues there is also the issue of the unintended consequences of our digital addiction and concomitant distraction. See The Real Life Dangers of Augmented Reality at https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/the-reallife-dangers-of-augmented-reality to glean some of the real life adverse affects of AR.

If you want to be a part of social networks that do not unduly expose you to unwanted surveillance and analytical data mining algorithms do the research to locate the spaces that respect your privacy that do not scrutinize or sell your information to third parties or share it with the government. Here is one site to get you started https://www.1and1.com/digitalguide/online-marketing/social-media/the-best-facebook-alternatives/

-30-

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Posted by: JUNIOUS STANTON <jrswriter@comcast.net>

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Authoritarian Capitalism Works in China—for Now

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2018-04-16/autocracy-chinese-characteristics?cid=nlc-fa_fatoday-20180425

Autocracy With Chinese Characteristics

Beijing's Behind-the-Scenes Reforms

Sooner or later this economy will slow," the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared of China in 1998. He continued: "That's when China will need a government that is legitimate. . . . When China's 900 million villagers get phones, and start calling each other, this will inevitably become a more open country." At the time, just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Friedman's certainty was broadly shared. China's economic ascent under authoritarian rule could not last; eventually, and inescapably, further economic development would bring about democratization.

Twenty years after Friedman's prophecy, China has morphed into the world's second-largest economy. Growth has slowed, but only because it leveled off when China reached middle-income status (not, as Friedman worried, because of a lack of "real regulatory systems"). Communications technology rapidly spread—today, 600 million Chinese citizens own smartphones and 750 million use the Internet—but the much-anticipated tsunami of political liberalization has not arrived. If anything, under the current regime of President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government appears more authoritarian, not less.

Most Western observers have long believed that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, that economic liberalization both requires and propels political liberalization. China's apparent defiance of this logic has led to two opposite conclusions. One camp insists that China represents a temporary aberration and that liberalization will come soon. But this is mostly speculation; these analysts have been incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. The other camp sees China's success as proof that autocracies are just as good as democracies at promoting growth—if not better. As Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad put it in 1992, "authoritarian stability" has enabled prosperity, whereas democracy has brought "chaos and increased misery." But not all autocracies deliver economic success. In fact, some are utterly disastrous, including China under Mao.

Both of these explanations overlook a crucial reality: since opening its markets in 1978, China has in fact pursued significant political reforms—just not in the manner that Western observers expected. Instead of instituting multiparty elections, establishing formal protections for individual rights, or allowing free expression, the CCP has made changes below the surface, reforming its vast bureaucracy to realize many of the benefits of democratization—in particular, accountability, competition, and partial limits on power—without giving up single-party control. Although these changes may appear dry and apolitical, in fact, they have created a unique hybrid: autocracy with democratic characteristics. In practice, tweaks to rules and incentives within China's public administration have quietly transformed an ossified communist bureaucracy into a highly adaptive capitalist machine. But bureaucratic reforms cannot substitute for political reforms forever. As prosperity continues to increase and demands on the bureaucracy grow, the limits of this approach are beginning to loom large.

Tweaks to rules and incentives within China's public administration have quietly transformed an ossified communist bureaucracy into a highly adaptive capitalist machine.

CHINESE BUREAUCRACY 101

In the United States, politics are exciting and bureaucracy is boring. In China, the opposite is true. As a senior official once explained to me, "The bureaucracy is political, and politics are bureaucratized." In the Chinese communist regime, there is no separation between political power and public administration. Understanding Chinese politics, therefore, requires first and foremost an appreciation of China's bureaucracy. That bureaucracy is composed of two vertical hierarchies—the party and the state—replicated across the five levels of government: central, provincial, county, city, and township. These crisscrossing lines of authority produce what the China scholar Kenneth Lieberthal has termed a "matrix" structure. In formal organizational charts, the party and the state are separate entities, with Xi leading the party and Premier Li Keqiang heading up the administration and its ministries. In practice, however, the two are intertwined. The premier is also a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the party's top body, which currently has seven members. And at the local level, officials often simultaneously hold positions in both hierarchies. For example, a mayor, who heads the administration of a municipality, is usually also the municipality's deputy chief of party. Moreover, officials frequently move between the party and the state. For instance, mayors may become party secretaries and vice versa.

The Chinese public administration is massive. The state and party organs alone (excluding the military and state-owned enterprises) consist of over 50 million people, roughly the size of South Korea's entire population. Among these, 20 percent are civil servants who perform management roles. The rest are street-level public employees who interact with citizens directly, such as inspectors, police officers, and health-care workers.

The top one percent of the bureaucracy—roughly 500,000 people—make up China's political elite. These individuals are directly appointed by the party, and they rotate through offices across the country. Notably, CCP membership is not a prerequisite for public employment, although elites tend to be CCP members.

Within each level of government, the bureaucracy is similarly disaggregated into the leading one percent and the remaining 99 percent. In the first category is the leadership, which comprises the party secretary (first in command), the chief of state (second in command), and members of an elite party committee, who simultaneously head key party or state offices that perform strategic functions such as appointing personnel and maintaining public security. In the second category are civil servants and frontline workers who are permanently stationed in one location.

Managing a public administration the size of a midsize country is a gargantuan task. It is also a critical one, since the Chinese leadership relies on the bureaucracy to govern the country and run the economy. Not only do bureaucrats implement policies and laws; they also formulate them by tailoring central mandates for local implementation and by experimenting with local initiatives.

REFORM AT THE TOP

When Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, unleashed reforms, he maintained the CCP's monopoly on power. Instead of introducing Western-style democracy, he focused on transforming the Chinese bureaucracy into a driver of economic growth. To achieve this, he injected democratic characteristics into the bureaucracy, namely, accountability, competition, and partial limits on power.

Perhaps the most significant of Deng's reforms was a shift in the bureaucracy away from one-man rule toward collective leadership and the introduction of term limits and a mandatory retirement age for elite officials. These changes constrained the accumulation of personal power and rejuvenated the party-state with younger officials. Lower down, the reformist leadership changed the incentives of local leaders by updating the cadre evaluation system, which assesses local leaders according to performance targets. Since Chinese officials are appointed rather than popularly elected, these report cards serve an accountability function similar to elections in democracies. Changing the targets for evaluating cadres redefined the bureaucracy's goals, making clear to millions of officials what they were expected to deliver, as well as the accompanying rewards and penalties.

Breaking from Mao's fixation on class background and ideological fervor, Deng, ever the pragmatist, used this system to turn local leaders into more productive economic agents. From the 1980s onward, officials were assigned a narrow list of quantifiable deliverables, focused primarily on the economy and revenue generation. Tasks unrelated to the economy, such as environmental protection and poverty relief, were either relegated to a lower priority or not mentioned at all. Meanwhile, the goal of economic growth was always paired with an indispensable requisite: maintaining political stability. Failing this requirement (for instance, allowing a mass protest to break out) could cause leaders to flunk their entire test in a given year.

In short, during the early decades of reform, the new performance criteria instructed local leaders to achieve rapid economic growth without causing political instability. Reformers reinforced this stark redefinition of bureaucratic success with incentives. High scores improved the prospects of promotion, or at least the chances of being laterally transferred to a favorable office. Local leaders were also entitled to performance-based bonuses, with the highest performers sometimes receiving many times more than the lower performers. The government also began publicly ranking localities. Officials from the winning ones earned prestige and honorary titles; officials from those at the bottom lost face in their community. In this culture of hypercompetition, nobody wanted to be left behind.

Newly incentivized, local leaders dove headlong into promoting industrialization and growth. Along the way, they devised strategies and solutions that even party bosses in Beijing had not conceived. A famous example from the 1980s and 1990s are township and village enterprises, companies that circumvented restrictions on private ownership by operating as collectively owned enterprises. Another, more recent example is the creation of "land quota markets" in Chengdu and Chongqing, which allow developers to buy quotas of land from villages for urban use.

Through these reforms, the CCP achieved some measure of accountability and competition within single-party rule. Although no ballots were cast, lower-level officials were held responsible for the economic development of their jurisdictions. To be sure, Deng's reforms emphasized brute capital accumulation rather than holistic development, which led to environmental degradation, inequality, and other social problems. Still, they undoubtedly kicked China's growth machine into gear by making the bureaucracy results-oriented, fiercely competitive, and responsive to business needs, qualities that are normally associated with democracies.

Jason Lee / Reuters The closing session of the party conference, Beijing, March 2018

STREET-LEVEL REFORMS

Bureaucratic reforms among local leaders were critical but not sufficient. Below them are the street-level bureaucrats who run the daily machinery of governance. And in the Chinese bureaucracy, these inspectors, officers, and even teachers are not merely providers of public services but also potential agents of economic change. For example, they might use personal connections to recruit investors to their locales or use their departments to provide commercial services as state-affiliated agencies.

Career incentives do not apply to rank-and-file public employees, as there is little chance of being promoted to the elite level; most civil servants do not dream of becoming mayors. Instead, the government has relied on financial incentives, through an uncodified system of internal profit sharing that links the bureaucracy's financial performance to individual remuneration. Although profit sharing is usually associated with capitalist corporations, it is not new to China's bureaucracy or, indeed, to any premodern state administration. As the sociologist Max Weber noted, before the onset of modernization, instead of receiving sufficient, stable salaries from state budgets, most public agents financed themselves through the prerogatives of office—for example, skimming off a share of fees and taxes for themselves. Modern observers may frown on such practices, considering them corrupt, but they do have some benefits.

Before Deng's reforms, the Chinese bureaucracy was far from modern or technocratic; it was a mishmash of traditional practices and personal relationships, inserted into a Leninist structure of top-down commands. So when Chinese markets opened up, bureaucratic agents naturally revived many traditional practices, but with a twentieth-century capitalist twist. Within the vast Chinese bureaucracy, formal salaries for officials and public employees were standardized at abysmally low rates. For instance, President Hu Jintao's official salary in 2012 was the equivalent of only about $1,000 a month. An entry-level civil servant received far less, about $150 a month. But in practice, these low salaries were supplemented by an array of additional perks, such as allowances, bonuses, gifts, and free vacations and meals.

And unlike in other developing countries, supplemental compensation in China's bureaucracy was pegged to financial performance: the central government granted local authorities partial autonomy to spend the funds they earned. The more tax revenue a local government generated and the more nontax revenue (such as fees and profits) that party and state offices earned, the more compensation they could provide to their staff members.

What emerged was essentially a variant of profit sharing: public employees took a cut of the revenue produced by their organizations. These changes fueled a results-oriented culture in the bureaucracy, although results in the Chinese context were measured purely in economic terms. These strong incentives propelled the bureaucracy to help transition the economy toward capitalism.

A profit-oriented public bureaucracy has drawbacks, of course, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese complained endlessly about arbitrary payments and profiteering. In response, from the late 1990s on, reformers rolled out a suite of measures aimed at combating petty corruption and the theft of public funds. Central authorities abolished cash payments of fees and fines and allowed citizens to make payments directly through banks. These technical reforms were not flashy, yet their impact was significant. Police officers, for example, are now far less likely to extort citizens and privately pocket fines. Over time, these reforms have made the Chinese people less vulnerable to petty abuses of power. In 2011, Transparency International found that only nine percent of Chinese citizens reported having paid a bribe in the past year, compared with 54 percent in India, 64 percent in Nigeria, and 84 percent in Cambodia. To be sure, China has a serious corruption problem, but the most significant issue is collusion among political and business elites, not petty predation.

Although none of these bureaucratic reforms fits the bill of traditional political reforms, their effects are political. They have changed the priorities of government, introduced competition, and altered how citizens encounter the state. Above all, they have incentivized economic performance, allowing the CCP to enjoy the benefits of continued growth while evading the pressures of political liberalization.

Pool / Reuters Xi in Shanghai, May 2014

THE LIMITS OF BUREAUCRATIC REFORM

Substituting bureaucratic reform for political reform has bought the CCP time. For the first few decades of China's market transition, the party's reliance on the bureaucracy to act as the agent of change paid off. But can this approach forestall pressure for individual rights and democratic freedoms forever? Today, there are increasing signs that the bureaucracy has come close to exhausting its entrepreneurial and adaptive functions. Since Xi took office in 2012, the limits of bureaucratic reform have become increasingly clear.

Substituting bureaucratic reform for political reform has bought the CCP time.

The Xi era marks a new stage in the country's development. China is now a middle-income economy with an increasingly educated, connected, and demanding citizenry. And the political pressures that have come with prosperity are, in fact, beginning to undermine the reforms that propelled China's rapid growth.

The cadre evaluation system has come under particular stress. Over time, the targets assigned to local leaders have steadily crept upward. In the 1980s and 1990s, officials were evaluated like CEOs, on their economic performance alone. But today, in addition to economic growth, leaders must also maintain social harmony, protect the environment, supply public services, enforce party discipline, and even promote happiness. These changes have paralyzed local leaders. Whereas officials used to be empowered to do whatever it took to achieve rapid growth, they are now constrained by multiple constituents and competing demands, not unlike democratically elected politicians.

Xi's sweeping anticorruption campaign, which has led to the arrest of an unprecedented number of officials, has only made this worse. In past decades, assertive leadership and corruption were often two sides of the same coin. Consider the disgraced party secretary Bo Xilai, who was as ruthless and corrupt as he was bold in transforming the western backwater of Chongqing into a thriving industrial hub. Corrupt dealings aside, all innovative policies and unpopular decisions entail political risk. If Xi intends to impose strict discipline—in his eyes, necessary to contain the political threats to CCP rule—then he cannot expect the bureaucracy to innovate or accomplish as much as it has in the past.

Moreover, sustaining growth in a high-income economy requires more than merely constructing industrial parks and building roads. It demands fresh ideas, technology, services, and cutting-edge innovations. Government officials everywhere tend to have no idea how to drive such developments. To achieve this kind of growth, the government must release and channel the immense creative potential of civil society, which would necessitate greater freedom of expression, more public participation, and less state intervention.

Yet just as political freedoms have become imperative for continued economic growth, the Xi administration is backpedaling. Most worrying is the party leadership's decision to remove term limits among the top brass, a change that will allow Xi to stay in office for the rest of his life. So long as the CCP remains the only party in power, China will always be susceptible to what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has called "the bad emperor problem"—that is, extreme sensitivity to leadership idiosyncrasies. This means that under a leader like Deng, pragmatic and committed to reform, China will prosper and rise. But a more absolutist and narcissistic leader could create a nationwide catastrophe.

Xi has been variously described as an aspiring reformer and an absolute dictator. But regardless of his predilections, Xi cannot force the genie of economic and social transformation back into the bottle. China today is no longer the impoverished, cloistered society of the 1970s. Further liberalization is both inevitable and necessary for China's continued prosperity and its desire to partake in global leadership. But contrary to Friedman's prediction, this need not take the form of multiparty elections. China still has tremendous untapped room for political liberalization on the margins. If the party loosens its grip on society and directs, rather than commands, bottom-up improvisation, this could be enough to drive innovation and growth for at least another generation.

CHINA AND DEMOCRACY

What broader lessons on democracy can be drawn from China? One is the need to move beyond the narrow conception of democratization as the introduction of multiparty elections. As China has shown, some of the benefits of democratization can be achieved under single-party rule. Allowing bureaucratic reforms to unfold can work better than trying to impose political change from the outside, since over time, the economic improvements that the bureaucratic reforms generate should create internal pressure for meaningful political reform. This is not to say that states must delay democracy in order to experience economic growth. Rather, China's experience shows that democracy is best introduced by grafting reforms onto existing traditions and institutions—in China's case, a Leninist bureaucracy. Put simply, it is better to promote political change by building on what is already there than by trying to import something wholly foreign.

A second lesson is that the presumed dichotomy between the state and society is a false one. American observers, in particular, tend to assume that the state is a potential oppressor and so society must be empowered to combat it. This worldview arises from the United States' distinct political philosophy, but it is not shared in many other parts of the world.

In nondemocratic societies such as China, there has always been an intermediate layer of actors between the state and society. In ancient China, the educated, landholding elite filled this role. They had direct access to those in power but were still rooted in their communities. China's civil service occupies a similar position today. The country's bureaucratic reforms were successful because they freed up space for these intermediate actors to try new initiatives.

Sent from my iPhone

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kenya Bans Film About 2 Girls in Love Because It’s ‘Too Hopeful’ - The New York Times

That's a pity, Ken.

I believe, though that, in the long run, the film will show up in other avenues such as "you tube." I agree that would mean a loss of income for her but the point against censorship would have been made.

let us see how the courts deal with this, meanwhile.

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2018 10:19 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kenya Bans Film About 2 Girls in Love Because It's 'Too Hopeful' - The New York Times

It won't be available for a while, Gloria. I asked wanuri, and they are enmeshed in the legal battle to get it available in Kenya, and aren't yet—or probably near—being reading to do a distribution. If she can't distribute it at home, in Kenya, that is going to hurt her financially quite a bit. I asked if we should try to campaign on her behalf, and the answer for now is no. another friend said it might actually hurt the situation… unfortunately.

They are approaching the courts on the ground of legal rights to distribute, not on the grounds related to the contents.

ken

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday 29 April 2018 at 19:34
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kenya Bans Film About 2 Girls in Love Because It's 'Too Hopeful' - The New York Times

If it is as great as "Pumzi" then it is certainly worth seeing. I shall have a look. Thanks for the information.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

Professor of History
History Department

Central Connecticut State University

1615 Stanley Street
New Britain. CT 06050
www.africahistory.net

www.gloriaemeagwali.com

www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html

Chief Editor- "Africa Update"

www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos

Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on

Africa and the African Diaspora

8608322815 Phone

8608322804 Fax

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2018 9:24 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kenya Bans Film About 2 Girls in Love Because It's 'Too Hopeful' - The New York Times

Dialogues

Monday, April 30, 2018

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Premium Times Nigeria

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Great Nation, Timi Dakolo

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's Quote

USA Africa Dialogue Series - From CNN: How beautiful design is keeping libraries relevant

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teaching While Black

The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pushing the Technology Envelop [Rich Essay on Technological Transformation of Reality ]

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Authoritarian Capitalism Works in China—for Now

Autocracy With Chinese Characteristics

Beijing's Behind-the-Scenes Reforms

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kenya Bans Film About 2 Girls in Love Because It’s ‘Too Hopeful’ - The New York Times

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