[LINK] Northeast Asia's Future

China and Japan are getting along badly. China and South Korea are getting along just fine. Best not to speak about Japan and South Korea.

A Sino-Korean alliance sounds rather more plausible now than a Sino-Japanese alliance.

[BRIEF NOTE] Ceca in 2005

I don't normally read GQ, but in the May 2005 issue, the one with Hayden Christiansen on the cover, there is a remarkable article about Ceca, a Serbian turbo-folk singer best known for her marriage to the late Arkan. Born Zeljko Raznatovic into a military family, after being a gangster in western Europe and an assassin for the SFRY's secret police in the 1970s and 1980s, in the 1990s Arkan went on to command the famous "Arkan's Tigers", a brutal paramilitary organization which committed numerous crimes against humanity elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. His murder in a Belgrade hotel lobby in 2000 came as no real surprise, but inasmuch as Ceca's career was intimately tied up with the nationalist gangsterism that dominated Serbia in the 1990s she took a hit. After being arrested in July 2003 following allegations of her involvement in the assassination of Serbian prime ministre Zoran Djindjic, her career took a nosedive. In between talking about how she's persecuted and her love for her ex-husband, she mentions that she's trying to make a comeback, though thankfully The Glory of Carniola's conclusion that her career is dead seems more likely. The GQ article--"The Most Dangerous Pop Star in the World"--is a fascinating read, if a voyeuristic one.

[LINK] The State of the Mandarin Language

Yesterday, the Taipei Times carried a brief AFP report on China's language situation.

A recent survey has revealed that nearly half of China's population cannot speak the official language, Mandarin, despite decades of efforts by the communist government, state media said yesterday.

The National Language Commission's survey also found that many of the 53 percent of China's 1.3 billion people who can speak Mandarin are not frequent Mandarin users, preferring their local dialect, the Xinhua news agency said.

Mandarin -- known as putonghua in China -- is just one of the hundreds of dialects in the Chinese language. Cantonese and Shanghainese are other major Chinese dialects.

In addition to Chinese, people living in China also speak other languages such as Tibetan, Uighur, Fujianese and even Korean.

The article goes on to note that the need for fluency in Mandarin is a product of the recent integration of China's diverse provinces. Mandarin is widespread mainly in eastern China and in major cities. It will be worthwhile to watch how quickly the Mandarin language spreads within the People's Republic, and the way in which it spreads. Judging by the Taiwanese experience, if the Mandarin language is seen as threatening the Chinese regiolects and other minority languages there is a decided potential for a backlash. The political and other consequences of this can be easily imagined.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Failed Promise of Caspian Oil

The business section of today's The Globe and Mail prominently features Mark MacKinnon's article about the oil of the Caspian Sea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many oil firms eagerly looked to the Caspian Sea area as a promising untapped area. The region of Baku in Azerbaijan was the historical centre of the Russian and Soviet oil industries, after all. If (as many argued) the littoral region hosted almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. the potential for diversifying the developed world's sources of oil was vast. This idea excited many, even becoming the central feature of the script of a James Bond movie, the 1999 The World Is Not Enough.

ROBINSON: [. . .] Largest landlocked body of water on Earth. Oil-rich. Hitler wanted it. Stalin beat him to it.

M: And now it's up for grabs, a goldrush. Far more oil than anyone thought.

ROBINSON: Latest estimates, six trillion dollars. It'll make the Gulf look like a puddle, see us right through the new century. The problem is getting the oil out of there.

The film was mildly controversial among fans for certain plot reasons. As it turns out, the movie was flawed for the much more fundamental reason that there isn't enough oil in the Caspian Sea to "see us through the next century."

But just as the crude is finally starting to creep westward, it's becoming clear that there's much, much less oil than had been originally trumpeted. Instead of the 200 billion barrels predicted in 1995, most estimates now place the figure at somewhere between 17 and 32 billion, most of it on the other side of the Caspian from Azerbaijan, in the waters off Kazakhstan(B6).

It doesn't help matters any that the division of the Caspian Sea among the littoral states is hotly debated, or that Azerbaijan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world as ranked by Transparency International (read this report (PDF format) on corruption in the Azerbaijan oil industry for more), or that the pipeline running from Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan via Georgia has been criticized as uneconomical, or that much of the fuss seems to have been encouraged as much by the Clinton administration's desire to pull the South Caucasus out of the Russian orbit via investment as anything else. So much for all that.

[LINK] Drezner on American and European Arabs

My thanks to mollpeartree for linking to Daniel Drezner's post "Arabs at home and abroad". It's an interesting discussion about the differences between Arab immigrants in the United States and Arab immigrants in the European Union that, miraculously, doesn't descend into an overheated flamewar.

[LINK] Market Research

london_calling is looking for volunteers who would be willing to answer a questionnaire, to help chart out the potential markets for a feminist e-zine or magazine. To help, just go right here.

[LINK] When Politics Makes Prime-time

Patrick Belton at Oxblog isn't the first person to post this. I certainly won't be the last to laugh at it, I think.

This Time on Jeremy Springer: Catfighting Political Theorists

Crowd: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!

Jerry: Today's guests are here because they can't agree on fundamental principles of epistemology and ontology. I'd like to welcome Todd to the show.

Todd enters from backstage.

Jerry: Hello, Todd.

Todd: Hi, Jerry.

Jerry: (reading from card) So, Todd, you're here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?

Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it's been nothing but fighting ever since.

Jerry: Why is that?

Todd: You see, Jerry, I'm a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the "I" or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.

Crowd: Ooooohhhh!

Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?

Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?

Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we're through. I just can't go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn't believe I exist.

Jerry: Well, you're going to get your chance. Here's Ursula!

Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.

Ursula: Patriarchal colonizer!

She slaps him viciously. Todd leaps up, but the security guys pull them apart before things can go any further.

Ursula: Don't listen to him! Logic is a male hysteria! Rationality equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!