Government

Chinese publishers have declined to distribute Hillary Clinton’s new book, which includes anecdotes that are critical of Asian superpower

Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, which focuses on her tenure as U.S. secretary of state, will not be sold in mainland China, according to her publisher in an interview with BuzzFeed.

Simon & Schuster said they were not able to secure translation rights with Chinese publishers and that one of the nation’s leading import agencies, Shanghai Book Traders, has refused to distribute the English-language version.

Jonathan Karp, president of Simon & Schuster, said that China’s reaction to the book is an “effective ban.”

Clinton’s memoir is seen as critical of the People’s Republic. She wrote how the country is “full of contradictions” and the “epicenter of the antidemocratic movement in Asia.”

Ironically, she also wrote of her address to the U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing, where she “felt the heavy hand of Chinese censorship when the government blocked the broadcast of my speech.”

[BuzzFeed]

I work in a profession devoted to compromise and incremental change — and we diplomats have acquired an unfortunate reputation for dishonesty

“An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

—Sir Henry Wotton, 1604

“Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.”

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

There are few more odious figures in popular culture than the diplomat. Ben Kingsley’s ambassador to Yemen in the movie Rules of Engagement is first a coward, hiding under his desk from an angry mob, waiting to be rescued by U.S. Marines, and then later a snake, lying smoothly under oath to help convict the very Marine officer who saved him from the mob. In Costa-Gavras’ classic Missing, the American diplomats are alternately dissembling and disinterested. And it would be hard to top The Omen, in which an American diplomat, played by Gregory Peck, lies to his wife, played by Lee Remick, and tricks her into raising the Antichrist. That, needless to say, does not work out well.

Spies and soldiers can draw on the goodwill generated by thousands of popular books and movies that, on balance, present a broadly positive image. Tom Clancy’s CIA officers, for instance, are good-looking, hardworking, honorable patriots. The general public has every reason to feel that it understands what soldiers and spies do for a living and how they contribute to American security. Diplomats, on the other hand, are something else. Only a relatively small number of people have a good grasp of what it is that diplomats actually do. We are part of the national-security establishment. We collect information, formulate policy and seek to influence foreign governments in support of that policy. And as instruments of state power, we are considerably cheaper than spy satellites or cruise missiles.

To the extent the public thinks about it at all, however, there is something vaguely slippery about diplomacy as a profession. Part of the reason is that, at its core, diplomacy is fundamentally about compromise. It is the art of the possible. Victories are rarely clear-cut, and they are typically more of the incremental variety than of the transformational. Even more important, however, is the reputation diplomacy has acquired for dishonesty. Diplomats, it is widely assumed, are professional liars with expense accounts and nice suits. If not immoral, they are at best amoral.

The reality is that diplomacy — good diplomacy, at least — places a premium on honesty, defined here as credibility and trustworthiness. Do you mean what you say? Do you deliver on what you promise? If not, why would anyone give you the time of day?

I have devoted more than 20 years to the diplomatic service of the U.S., and I have never once been asked to lie for my country. I have said things — often with complete confidence and utter conviction — that later turned out to be wrong. And I have engaged in my fair share of lies of a social nature — “We’re friends, aren’t we?” “Of course we are” — but I have never, to the best of my recollection, deliberately lied to a contact.

I have said things I do not believe — lots of things. But that’s a very different issue. When I speak professionally on behalf of the U.S., whether in public or private, I represent U.S. policy and U.S. views to the best of my abilities. Like royalty, diplomats do a great deal of talking in the first-person plural (“We believe . . .”) or the third-person inanimate (“My government feels . . .”). My contacts — interlocutors, in diplomatese — don’t care what I think. Or at least they shouldn’t. They care a great deal, however, about what the U.S. thinks. So my job is to persuade others to see things our way but not necessarily my way.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought the board game Diplomacy for my 12-year-old son, drawing on my fond memories of late-night sessions in junior high school. The other day, I brought the game to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, where I am currently assigned. What could be more fun than playing Diplomacy with a bunch of diplomats?

We were terrible at it.

On one level, of course, Diplomacy the board game bears as much resemblance to diplomacy the profession as the board game Operation does to surgery. Diplomacy is the exercise of national power in its multidimensional complexity. The game version involves pushing little cardboard pieces across a map of long-defunct European empires. It also involves lying — lots of lying. You make promises to other players about how you are going to support them in achieving their ambitions, and then you don’t follow through. You deceive and cheat your way to Continental domination.

There was a demonstrable reluctance on the part of the diplomats playing Diplomacy to promise X and do Y, even in a game. In real diplomacy, if it ever becomes apparent that your word is no good, you are, for all intents and purposes, finished. A diplomat who can’t be trusted is little short of worthless.

This doesn’t mean that being a diplomat is being an open book. Far from it. We cherry-pick our facts, omit the inconvenient from our narratives and manipulate language without mercy to make our point. All of this is fair game. But just don’t lie. It’s not only unethical, it’s bad business.

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State.

Matthew Palmer is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, currently serving as political counselor at the American embassy in Belgrade. While on the Secretary of State’s policy-planning staff, Palmer helped design and implement the Kimberley Process for certifying African diamonds as “conflict free.” His experience in Africa serves as the foundation for his debut novel, THE AMERICAN MISSION, out June 26.

Nearly one in ten respondents said they had zero confidence in the legislature.

Just when you thought Congress’s approval ratings couldn’t get any lower—they sunk to another historic low.

A record-low seven percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday. That’s down from 10 percent in 2013 and 42 percent in 1973, the first year of the poll. As recently as the mid-2000s, that figure stood around 30%.

Today, just 4 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal” of confidence and 3 percent have “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, whose budget deadlock last fall resulted in a federal government shutdown. A third of Americans said they had “some” confidence in the legislature and another 7 percent said they had “none.”

If that doesn’t sound grim enough, Gallup says the responses represent the poorest confidence levels in any U.S. institution since it began taking measure. The poll also has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, meaning the actual approval rating could be as high as 11 percent — or as low as three percent.

The world's largest trading nation's economic growth remains heavily dependent on property, meaning a sharp downturn in that sector would be felt across Asia and beyond

“Will the government save the market if housing prices fall?” That was the question being asked in China this week — not by stressed-out mortgage holders, but by the country’s most famous (and wealthy) property mogul, Pan Shiyi.

Pan, the chairman of giant real estate developer SOHO China, has made a series of pronouncements in recent weeks that reflect an increasingly bearish long-term outlook for China’s property sector.

At an industry forum in late May, Pan compared the nation’s real estate prospects to the Titanic. “It [the real estate industry] will soon hit the iceberg in front of it,” he declared.

Pan’s outlook may be bleak, but is borne out by statistics. According to Standard & Poor’s, residential housing prices in China will drop by 5% this year — a dramatic reversal from last year’s rise of 11.5%.

That’s bad news for China’s property holders, but potentially also a worrying sign for global investors. With Chinese economic growth heavily dependent on the real estate sector, which accounts for 20% of GDP by some estimates, a sharp slowdown in the property market would be felt far beyond China’s borders. (China is, after all, the world’s largest trading nation.)

After more than a decade of sizzling double-digit growth, the government is targeting 7% growth this year. But the potential for a real estate correction means that the actual number could be much lower.

There are already some signs that imports are being affected as consumer confidence weakens. The General Administration of Customs announced Sunday that imports in May declined 1.6% year on year — a drop that surprised industry analysts. That compared to an increase of 0.9% year on year in April.

With prices trending sharply downward, the president of the country’s largest residential real estate developer, Vanke, has declared that the “golden age” for property is over. “The period when everyone made money from property is gone,” Yu Liang was quoted as saying recently.

A conflagration of factors is driving the decrease in prices, not least repressive market policies that restrict the number of properties city dwellers can own. Markets in larger cities are also being flooded with knockdown properties being dumped by overextended investors or government officials looking to rid themselves of any undeclared assets in light of a recent and severe government crackdown on corruption.

Chinese media reported Monday that one coal-mining magnate was attempting to offload 100 apartments in a coveted location along Beijing’s Second Ring Road.

Little wonder, then, that the property mogul Pan is on the lookout for the visible hand of the government. But, for now at least, state intervention seems unlikely. In a report late last month, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development declared that it would stay on the sidelines and “respect the adjustment role of the laws of the market in the real estate sector.”

There’s a lot to hate about changes proposed by the FDA, which could push prices higher not only for beer, but for milk and meat as well. The new regulations are being bashed as wasteful and anti-recycling to boot.

For centuries, beer manufacturers and farmers have enjoyed a mutually beneficial arrangement, in which the barley and other spent grain that’s left over in the brewing process is sold or given to farmers to use as cheap feed for animals.

“I get free waste removal and he gets free feed — it doesn’t get any better than that,” Kyle Williams, owner and brewer at North Carolina’s Brevard Brewing Co., who works with the nearby Busybee Farm, explained in a recent (Hendersonville) Times-News story. “It’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship.”

This relationship is in jeopardy, however, due to changes proposed by the FDA that are part of the broader Food Safety Modernization Act. Brewers fear that if the proposal is approved, they would be required to dry and package spent grain before it’s shipped off to farmers as feed. The equipment needed and administrative hassles required to handle that extra step in the waste removal process would cost a bundle—as much as $13 million per brewing facility, Scott Mennen, vice president of brewery operations at Widmer Brothers Brewery in North Portland, Ore., told the Oregonian. “That would be cost prohibitive,” Mennen said. “Most brewers would have to put this material in a landfill.”

(MORE: That Craft Beer You’re Drinking Isn’t Craft Beer. Do You Care?)

The proposals, as well as the Food Safety Modernization Act in general, are obviously designed to protect consumers and make food safer. But no one has made much of a case indicating that using spent grain as feed is unsafe for animals or humans—an FDA spokesperson cited in the Oregonian piece couldn’t a single example in which the age-old practice has caused problems.

The Brewers Association declared the FDA proposal an “unwarranted burden for all brewers,” arguing that if the regulations would approved, costs would rise for brewers—and, inevitably, for drinkers who buy products made by those brewers—and that the changes would also be bad for the environment:

Brewers of all sizes must either adhere to new processes, testing requirements, recordkeeping and other regulatory requirements or send their spent grain to landfills, wasting a reliable food source for farm animals and triggering a significant economic and environmental cost.

Right behind brewers in the protest over the new regulations are farmers, who are potentially losing an inexpensive stream of feed for animals. The system of recycling a nearby brewer’s spent grain “saves me so much money in feed costs it’s incredible,” one small farmer in North Carolina, who uses the grain to feed cattle, pigs, and chickens, said to the Times-News. “If I couldn’t get the grain, it wouldn’t be justifiable for me to be in the hog business, because it keeps the cost down to where it’s affordable for me to feed them — that would be one more industry I would be out of.”

To recap, the new FDA proposal would raise the costs and complications in the of production process for beer brewers, and would also make it more expensive for farmers to feed animals, perhaps even to the point of putting some out of business. The proposal wasn’t created to address some specific safety problem, nor out of concern for the environment—in fact, approval of the new regulations could result in more waste at landfills, which is less than ideal for the environment.

(MORE: The Resurgence of Cheap Old-School Mass-Market Beer)

And horror of all horrors, your beer could wind up costing more down the line. Same thing for meat, dairy, and a wide range of products that originate at farms, as the rise in feed prices is a prime reason why there’s been such as steep rise in beef prices lately.

The FDA is currently reviewing the proposed rule changes, and it is including the overwhelmingly negative feedback it has received from brewers and farmers in this process. A revised proposal is expected sometime this summer.

UPDATE: The Beer Institute, the national trade organization for the American beer industry, understandably opposes the FDA proposals. A representative of the group reached out to TIME and released a statement explaining the Beer Institute “began a year ago with FDA and other industry groups to make sure the amended rule we expect this summer allows us to continue this practice of marketing spent grains in the safe, sanitary and swift manner that the industry has exhibited.” Chris Thorne, vice president of communications for the Beer Institute, also said, “The FDA has asked the Beer Institute to please make sure that brewers understand there is no requirement that spent grains be dried and pre-packaged.”

The announcement comes shortly after India's Supreme Court recognized a "third gender" option for trans people

Just a few days after India’s Supreme Court recognized a “third gender” option, a transgender woman in India is vying for a seat in parliament.

Bharathi Kannamma, 53, is considered the first transgender person to be accepted as a candidate in a general election, AFP reports. She’s running as an independent candidate in the city of Madurai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“Even when people come to see me talk, they have certain set notions,” Kannamma told AFP. “It is only when they hear what I have to say and see me in person that they can get past the fact that I am a transgender.”

Kannamma came out in 2004 as transgender and soon began devoting her time to social activism, fighting for the rights of transgender people — known in India as “hijras.” But her current campaign — which she is running on a very tight budget — focuses on other issues too. For example, she hopes to develop the city’s infrastructure and rid its systems of corruption.

“I have nothing to fear,” Kannamma said, “and I have no vested interest in being corrupt and the people see that.”

(h/t Jezebel)