Columbia Political Review: May 2009

Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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may 09

cpr staff

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Editor-in-Chief Karen Leung

Art Editor Stacy Chu

Publisher Sajaa Ahmed

Design Editor Sarah Cohler

Managing Editors Sara Doskow Sara Vogel

Ideas Editors Kabita Parajuli David Zhou

Managing Editors of Special Projects Nicolas Alvear Eric Lukas

Outreach Editors Devon Galloway Maisha Rashid Tiffany Tang

Senior Editors Ayla Bonfiglio Catherine Chong Ian Crone Jamie Kessler Ben Small

Head Copy Editor Annie Ma Deputy Copy Editor Shayna Sehayik

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Campus Editors Erin Conway Kati Fossett Sophia Merkin Business Managers Alex Frouman Max Mogensen Fact-checking Team Arun Gollakata Adam Kuerbitz Caitlyn Malcynsky

THE CONTENTS

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MAKING A SCENE

by BENNY SHAFFER

The politics of documentary spectacle at a film festival in southwest China

A RUSSIAN RESET BUTTON? The dilemma facing the foreign policy of a sovereign democracy by ERIC LUKAS

COVER ART by STACY CHU

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S NOT FIT TO PRINT Financial media’s very own crisis by CATHERINE CHONG

Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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EDITOR’S NOTE

THE ABOMINATIONS ISSUE MAY 2009

How to cope with the outrages of life today? One answer— inadequate, but not useless—is that we should write about them. Not to express narcotizing apathy or reverence, but to be earnest about our specific, contingent, historical times, and to take them (and ourselves) seriously. We’ve tried to do that in the ABOMINATIONS issue: Catherine Chong examines recent financial news for its omissions, asking how journalists could have misread—and misreported—the conditions that led to the financial crisis (p. 5). Eric Lukas’s conversation with Professor Stephen Sestanovich begins by discussing Russia’s alarming invasion of Georgia last year, but does not end there (p. 20). In the cover article, Benny Shaffer thinks about contemporary Chinese documentary filmmakers and their provocations (p. 10)— maybe they’re calculated outrages, and also symptoms of our abominable times.

Karen Leung

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[+] read us at cpreview.org [+] e-mail [email protected] to join our mailing list [+] visit cubpub.org, the blog of the Columbia Political Union

Stacy Chu

All the news that’s not fit to print Financial media’s very own crisis

by Catherine Chong

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i, I’m Sammy Antar, and I’m a crook. Had I not gotten caught, I’d still be a criminal today,” announced a slightly balding, bespectacled man to a room filled with journalists attending a recent conference about tracking financial crime at John Jay College. It was startling to witness such frankness from a man who looked uncannily similar to my high school Latin teacher. Sammy Antar worked for what the New York Post called “one of the most scandalous names in retail history.” He was

the CFO of Crazy Eddie’s, an electronics chain that earned more than $300 million in sales and had 43 stores in four states at its peak. Over the span of roughly a decade, Antar falsified inventories, ran a money laundering operation by transferring money in offshore banks, and inflated sales figures. He continued, “Let’s talk about trust. Capitalism is based on trust. Reagan said, ‘Trust and then verify.’ We love your trust. Your code of ethics, your laws. The idea that criminals are innocent until proven guilty protects us criminals, not you.” Then, as if slapping me with my copy of Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, he said, “What you learn in college about doing the right thing: we love that, too, because we criminals consider your humanity to be a weakness to be exploited in the execution of our crimes.” Though Antar represents financial crime from a different era, his values are still relevant today for fraudulent mortgage brokers and Ponzi schemers like Bernie Madoff—people who have forced investors and laypeople alike to reexamine the experts they have trusted for years. The verdict is still out on whether the financial crisis was fueled mostly by deceit, or overconfidence that enabled frauds to occur. But the painfully obvious fact is that the American economy is in its worst recession since the Great Depression of the early 1930s, and fraudulent behavior—whether illegal or nominally legal—played a substantial role in creating it. Our discovery of the many incarnations of Sammy Antar during this financial crisis has prompted the unnerved public to ask, “Who has broken our trust?” The answer includes hundreds of names and institutions—and included among them are the financial media.

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ome say the public trusted the financial media to do its rightful job, but in some cases, they deliberately misled the public. On Comedy Central’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart accused Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money on CNBC, of making overly optimistic predictions about the fate of several companies. As Stewart repeated over the course of roughly a week, Cramer and his CNBC colleagues communicated information that corpora-

Even Alan Greenspan admitted that he did not fully understand some of the more complex financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations. 6

tions were giving them without examining it. Stewart even went as far as to say that Cramer knowingly lied and encouraged viewers to make the wrong investments, making a mockery of his show’s slogan: In Cramer We Trust. “What it feels like to us—and I’m talking purely as a layman—it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hardearned money,” exclaimed Stewart when Cramer appeared on the Daily Show. “And that it is a game that you know... is going on. But you go on television as a financial network and pretend it isn’t happening.” Cramer, however, represents the worst of a small minority of reporters who knowingly misinformed the public in the leadup to the financial crisis. Cramer’s deceit was only the most egregious and sensationalized episode of the financial media’s failure to foresee and communicate signs of the economic collapse. There were more subtle reasons why the crisis seemed to catch so many journalists by surprise. Stephen Handelman, Director of the Media, Crime, and Justice Center at John Jay College and organizer of the abovementioned confer-

With a smaller and busier staff, investigative journalism has taken a backseat to the sensational stories that attract more readers.

ence, pointed to more systemic problems in the media world. In recent times, he explained, journalists have trusted experts to a fault. “Just a few years ago, there was straight propaganda barrage from the Bush administration about the existence of WMDs. But the press trusted what they heard because it came from seeming experts like Colin Powell and President Bush,” Handelman said. “People have been talking about the same misinformation [with the

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financial crisis], but you’re talking about the private sector. Journalists ought to be more skeptical and [the public] ought to be more skeptical about the stories about the private sector.” Journalists and readers alike have relied on experts too heavily, straightforwardly accepting information without critically examining its sources. At the same time, reporters may not have the skills and knowledge necessary to challenge the financial elite, let alone the ability to comprehend the many intricacies of financial instruments and processes. Not even the heads of corporations, governmental officials, and economists could untangle the webs stringing the economy together. Even Alan Greenspan, on the CBS documentary “House of Cards,” admitted to reporter David Faber that he did not fully understand some of the more complex financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations. Handelman organized the conference in an attempt to mend the knowledge gap between journalists and the financially savvy. “Your Wall Street Journal and your writers in financial magazines are experts. Many of them have MBAs. But your ordinary beat reporter, who is covering city hall or education, doesn’t know much about finance,” he said. Those who do not comprehend the workings of the financial world—of which there are many—cannot be called upon to challenge it. In today’s media climate, Handelman said, many general assignment writers are being assigned to cover local bank collapses or smaller fraud cases. The decline of print journalism, which began well before the financial crisis, has contributed to the lack of funding and resources for journalists to report in the most thorough and accurate ways. “Smaller newspapers don’t have the time and resources for their reporters to spend more than a day or even a few hours to cover a lead time story,” he noted. With a smaller and busier staff, investigative journalism has taken a backseat to the sensational stories that attract more readers. Writers also used to communicate and share stories with each other, creating a robust journalistic community that is largely missing now. “In the old days if there was a racketeering or corruption scandal, city hall reporters could get together and start sharing notes,” Handelman said. He lamented the lack of depth in newsrooms to cover stories that real-

● The Wall Street Journal has aggressively and critically reported on government-based lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for nearly a decade. “Fannie Mae Enron,” a 2004 piece, compared Fannie Mae to Enron and WorldCom.

● As early as 1994, Fortune magazine’s Carol Loomis predicted that derivatives could be “a villain, or even the villain, in some financial crisis that sweeps the world.” The complex instruments she refers to in “The Risk That Won’t Go Away” are similar to those we’ve seen unravel this year.

Unheeded warnings in the financial press ● Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times headlined a 2007 article with “Mortgages May Be Messier Than You Think.” She wrote, “As is often the case, only after fiery markets burn out do we see the risks that buyers ignore and sellers play down.” Over the past five years, fellow Times writers Diana Henriques and Floyd Norris have exposed shady lending to military personnel and shaky accounting practices, respectively.

ly delved into “root causes” and the interconnectedness of issues, especially in such a globalized economy.

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o be clear, the financial press did not entirely fail the American public. The Wall Street Journal had published several alarm bells, including an article on October 4, 2004, which pointed out the questionable accounting practices of Fannie Mae and compared Fannie to whitecollar crime ghosts Enron and WorldCom. “They got lost in all the noise,” Handelman said, referring to such journalistic endeavors. Chris Roush recently wrote in the American Journalism Review, “The problem isn’t that the business media were dazzled by soaring real-estate prices and Wall Street profits and failed to see rot beneath the surface. Rather, it was that government regulators and the general public weren’t paying attention.” John Schoen, senior business producer at MSNBC.com, agreed, “Most people, by and large, don’t read the financial press.

● In “Credit Markets’ Weight Puts Economy on Shaky Ground,” an August 2007 Washington Post column, Steven Pearlstein wrote, “This financial engineering has encouraged debt to be piled on debt, making the system more susceptible to a meltdown if credit suddenly becomes more expensive or unavailable.”

It’s a subsection like sports and our readers are also like the people who follow sports. Some watch throughout the season and others just watch when it’s March Madness or the World Series.” Those who follow the financial press remain a small segment of general news consumers. They are a self-selected audience—one that is well-versed in, or at least interested, in the financial sector. Only since the crisis has financial news become consistent front-page material. For that reason, many people are unaware of the vast, in-depth coverage of Wall Street, he said. Contributing to the trends that have made the Business Section somewhat of a niche publication, Schoen also pointed out that—more than ever—information is available for those who are curious. “Until about a decade ago, the Fed was very secret. It didn’t even announce interest rates. If you go on its website now, there’s a wealth of data on things they’re doing,” he commented. “I doubt that, other than economists and academics, it gets a lot of traffic.” For the economically savvy, the charts and data sets may have signaled

Cassie Spodak

an alarm, but for the rest, the data sets on FRED—Federal Reserve Economic Data— were incomprehensible. As the financial sector grew increasingly complex and information became increasingly available—albeit in unintelligible forms—notions about whose responsibility it was to pore over financial data to make ethical decisions shifted from financial services to average citizens and only slightly more financially literate journalists. “We’re all investors now,” MSNBC’s Schoen said. “We’re now able to shop for multiple different mortgage products. In my father’s generation, a lot of these choices weren’t there.” The claim that we are all investors is, perhaps, exaggerated, given that much of the working class did not play the speculation game. But there is a sense that now, more than ever, people are expected to invest independently. The options are overwhelming, and the responsibility is on ordinary people to know what decisions to make. People’s choices about where to get a self-education in financial decision-making have also expanded. With the in-

“Most people, by and large, don’t read the financial press. It’s a subsection like sports... Some watch throughout the season and others just watch when it’s March Madness or the World Series,” said John Schoen, senior MSNBC.com business producer. Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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creased popularity of online content, media consumers have the choice of reading thousands of blogs and watching hundreds of YouTube videos. Many of these stories can probe more extensively into financial problems and issues. Schoen said, “The nice thing about the internet is that we can publish a 3000-word story without taking away from any other content that a print newspaper might have to give up space for or a cable network might have to spare air time for.” Consequently, the nature of web media has created space for far more articles than ever could be imagined with print. Readers and viewers have increasingly relied on themselves to shape their own media consumption. Even on major news sites such as MSNBC.com, Schoen says, “a growing amount of traffic is coming from search. So the old model—where the front page dictated what people were steered toward—is still very important, but with search, people are able to pretty much create their own front pages.” As a result, internet traffic has reflected people’s lack of comprehension or people’s political or economic disagreements about the stories the financial press is printing. What they do not want to read or hear, they do not click on.

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s Jerry Muller wrote in the American, leaders of financial institutions were debilitated by a “fog created by opacity and pseudo-objectivity.” In other words, they had no idea what they were doing and, by extension, laypeople and journalists had no idea either. This narrative, however, seems too simplistic.

There is an alarming sense that financiers took advantage of this fog of opacity to practice fraudulent behavior—to mask their illegal and pseudo-legal activities behind a cloud of confusion. Wily Sammy Antars, who contributed to today’s finan-

tion at face value. Ideally, we should be able to comprehend and examine the intricate business information we hear and make prudent decisions. But, that is practically not an option for those who have only an elementary education, for those

“Your Wall Street Journal and your writers in financial magazines are experts. Many of them have MBAs. But your ordinary beat reporter, who is covering city hall or education, doesn’t know much about finance.” - Stephen Handelman, Director of the Media, Crime, and Justice Center at John Jay College

cial crisis, were able to gain the trust of the American public because the other option would have been tackling the highly technical and perplexing world of finance on its own. When the public turned to the media for a second opinion, they faced a new crop of interpretive problems and a lack of comprehension on the part of journalists. At the same time, non-experts were culpable for not trying to understand complicated financial instruments more rigorously. We, as laypeople, trusted experts when they had malicious intentions or were simply confused themselves, but we honestly had no other choice. While eventually very costly, it saved us precious time and resources to accept informa-

with three children and a career, and for those—like me—who need to write that paper on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

CATHERINE CHONG [email protected] History CC ‘11 Catherine’s last CPR article was “‘Violence Against Our Intellect’: Why the 2007 hunger strike still matters,” the cover story for the October 2008 issue. She has been considering new career options in view of today’s meager job offerings. As of May 2009, she hopes to be a professional cupcake taster and unicyclist.

Political Cartoon

Rebekah Kim 8

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by HY Kim

Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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The politics of documentary spectacle at a film festival in southwest China

MAKING A SCENE BY BENNY SHAFFER

Stacy Chu

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Columbia Political Review | cpreview.org

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O “Oh man, this is one of those really boring, hexie [harmonious], shehuizhuyi [socialist] numbers. I’m going out for a cigarette,” a friend at my side whispers as we sit in the auditorium of the Yunnan Provincial Library. It’s the closing ceremony of Yunfest, an independent documentary film festival in Kunming, China, and the head of the operation, Yi Sicheng—a hipster intellectual with a thing for cardigans, skinny ties, and wingtip shoes— has taken the stage to announce the next performance. After a string of ethnic minority song and dance pieces, the next act will be a local dance troupe. A group of serious-faced women in long black skirts rises to the stage and begins a choreographed dance to a Maoist-era tune. As the ladies of Kunming gracefully flutter fuchsia fans and cluster into geometric formations, my mind drifts and I wonder which film will win the top prize in the documentary competition. Suddenly, shouts slice through the auditorium. I turn my head to see the notorious documentary filmmaker, Hu Xinyu, running towards the front. His large DV camera in hand, Hu screams out into the crowd: “AHHHHH! This is really something! Check out those dancers! They’re so beautiful!” He starts spinning pirouettes and mounts the stage. Pointing his camera at the bewildered performers, Hu then addresses them individually, taking low-angle shots of each dancer and gazing up their skirts with his lens. To top off the absurd spectacle, he hurls his camera into the air. It crashes to the stage floor and smashes into pieces. We are stunned into silence. Later, as I tried to make sense of what

I witnessed in the auditorium that night, I wondered if there was a political dimension to Hu Xinyu’s actions. Hu has had a kind of rebel status in the Chinese documentary community since the screening of his highly controversial, overtly misogynistic film, The Man, which won a prize at Yunfest in 2005. An overreader could interpret his behavior as something subversive, a comment on history, maybe a critique of the Maoist epoch and its didactic cultural productions. Or, we could look at Hu’s politics as oriented in the present: I see him as a boisterous provocateur who loves to create disturbances. While he’s an extreme case, even on a documentary scene with a slew of transgressive directors, Hu embodies a form of resistance that has been tied to independent cinema in China since its rise in the early 90s. It’s often hard to separate the outlandish character of these documentary filmmakers from their bold and provocative works. In this article, I think about the fate of this peculiar, intriguing scene, and explore how

JIA ZHANGKE’S EARLY “AMATEUR” STATUS WAS A POLEMICAL POSITION, LINKED TO A POLITICIZED PUSH FOR A MORE EGALITARIAN SET OF FILMMAKING CONDITIONS.

COVER STORY

the individuals behind the DV cameras lay claim to their positions of power.

FORMS OF OPPOSITION Foreign audiences first fell in love with Chinese films in the 1980s. Beginning with Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, creators of what scholar Zhang Zhen calls epic tales of “cultural allegory” and “glossy exoticism,” these directors quickly became international figures, with films circulating from small art-house theaters to the world’s most renowned festivals. They’ve since become boring and sold-out, such that many film people, including myself, have instead become drawn to China’s “independent” cinema, which began to bloom in the early 1990s. As the independent scene gathered momentum—largely from the post-economic reform conditions in China that led to the gradual loosening of government restrictions and the growing accessibility of DV technology, which is postsocialist Chinese documentary’s medium of choice—filmmakers in China were first able to work outside of the dominant, commercial film industry. Jia Zhangke is the clearest example of this independent turn. Though trained at the Beijing Film Academy, he, like several other filmmakers in the 90s, consciously took the stance of the “amateur” as a form of resistance to the commercial film establishment. While he and his generation of filmmakers were hesitant to deploy the term “realism” in their self-descriptions, there was the suggestion of a “documentary” impulse in their methods—street scenes, non-professional actors, long takes. Jia’s early “amateur” status was a polemical position, linked to a politicized push for a more egalitarian set of filmmaking conditions. He wanted to work outside of institutional film production, shooting “unofficial” projects in his native Shanxi province without the approval of the Chinese government. His first Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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COVER STORY major film, Xiao Wu (1997), about a pickpocket character in his hometown, was produced on a budget of about $50,000, but still made it to international festivals for screening. This success allowed him to shoot his first state-sanctioned film, The World (2000), set in Beijing’s bizarre and disorienting World Park, where one encounters scaled-down (yet still quite large) models of cultural landmarks including the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian Pyramids. Though Jia Zhangke and his generation of filmmakers have since become wildly popular abroad—perhaps even more so than in China, where many of their films are banned for their social and political content—the filmmakers at Yunfest have not received the same exposure and probably never will. China’s independent fiction films have drawn the spotlight at numerous festivals abroad, but the dismissal of China’s independent documentaries by international critics and festival juries as formally amateurish will likely keep them on the margins. In the Chinese context, however, this marginality can also be a source of power. In short, being “independent” in China now

world. This year, the turnout for the festival was considerable—the competition films screened during the nightly primetime slot each drew crowds of a hundred or more. The eclectic audience absorbed faculty from major Chinese universities, Kunming locals, and wandering backpackers from Europe and the US, as well as filmmakers and festival types from Southeast Asia. Given its peripheral position, far from the Chinese megalapolises on the East coast, Kunming is usually off the state censorship radar. Yet even Yunfest has encountered censorship in recent years: the event was temporarily shut down in 2007 for nearly screening a film about a professor murdered by her students during the Cultural Revolution. This led the festival organizers and filmmakers to pick up the operation and move it to the town of Dali, tucked away in the mountains of Yunnan, where it was executed on a much smaller scale. The festival did not meet the same obstacles this year, despite the considerable controversy surrounding several films. It is also important to point out that the festival does not revolve sole-

it the works of young directors from different parts of China. For me, Yunfest is not just about the films themselves. The directors—especially characters like Hu Xinyu, the spinning disturbance at the closing ceremony—are what I find most interesting about the Chinese documentary scene right now. With little chance to develop the kind of international appeal and financial rewards drawn in by figures like Jia Zhangke, the scene is always precarious. Yet the marginality of independent documentary filmmakers is precisely what gives their work its vitality and dynamism. So, I think the scene still stands a chance: as an infrastructure for the exhibition for their films gradually expands, the current generation of documentary filmmakers carve out radically new substantive and formal terrain.

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’d like to draw attention to several directors whose highly provocative and challenging films created a great deal of buzz at the festival. The films of Gu Tao and Xu Tong are both unsettling and entrancing for the subject matter

THE DIRECTOR’S CRUEL REFUSAL TO TURN OFF THE CAMERA GIVES HIS FOOTAGE A POWERFUL CLAIM TO A VIOLENT, UNSTABLE SCENE—THE APPEARANCE OF AN UNSTAGED REALISM. means something quite different than it did a decade ago.

A YOUNG FESTIVAL I skipped a week of class in March to hang around Kunming for the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest), which began in 2003 as a small documentary forum put together by a group of graduates from Yunnan University’s East Asia Institute of Visual Anthropology—hence the “Multi Culture” kick in the festival’s name. Over the past few years, Yunfest has expanded to become a major stop on the relatively small Chinese documentary festival circuit, drawing larger numbers of filmmakers from all over China, as well as scholars and critics from around the 12

ly around its documentary film competition. Yunfest also sponsors projects in rural Yunnan to provide villagers, many of them ethnic minorities, with DV cameras to document daily life and address local concerns about environmental and cultural preservation. Quietly (or not so quietly), many of these rural community films gesture to how China’s modernization projects have rapidly expanded into the countryside, and, for some people, significantly disrupted the order of things. This disturbance ironically created the conditions for its own documentation when it carried DV cameras into the rural regions. In another outreach project, the festival works to cultivate a new generation of documentary filmmakers through its Youth Forum screenings, which exhib-

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they document (one follows a disenfranchised reindeer-herding family; the other, a distraught Beijing sex worker) as well as their own representational practices, which enact cruelty as they rigorously record with the unflinching gazes of their DV cameras. With Gu Tao’s Aoluguya, Aoluguya and Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, I find great value in how the filmmakers expose the social alienation and malaise that dominate the experiences of their subjects. Yet, like many in the festival audience, I find the violence and cruelty in their films tremendously hard to swallow. But this double move—of inspiring recognition and revulsion at once—may be exactly the point: it proves the value of the raw “realism” projected by documentar-

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST: Wu Haohao’s People’s Artist Jia Jinshu scrutinizes the novelist of the title.

ians who work beyond the conventional filmmaking establishment. Realism is a heavily loaded and highly contested term in contemporary theory, but what interests me here is how a director’s presence in an unfolding scene frames the constructedness of film itself, thus conferring power and authority on the filmmaker. Even as the filmmakers embrace the subjectivity of their own gazes, their footage works to isolate fragments of an ostensibly objective, authentic, reality. The pursuit of this particular breed of realism immediately complicates characters’ subject-positions, raising questions about the politics of representation and the filmmakers’ potentially exploitative use of marginalized social actors. Both the personal and the documentary impulses are tempered.

A COWBOY ETHNOGRAPHER At the Halfway House Bar in Kunming, the director Gu Tao emerges from his contemplative façade, transforming into a cowboy-esque life-of-the-party figure,

belting out folk songs from the grassland, and telling jokey tales of Mongolian women on horseback. Gu’s performance ends a string of spectacles: it’s been a long day of film screenings. On the surface he appears to be a kind of maverick, a rugged frontiersman—yet he’s also a thoughtful, deeply serious ethnographer, much like his father, who conducted fieldwork on the Ewenki minority several decades ago. Although he was educated in oil painting at an arts school in his native Inner Mongolia, Gu decided to pick up a DV camera in 2003. He spent the next three years living among the Ewenki in the thick forests of northeast China. His most recent documentary, Aoluguya, Aoluguya, closely documents a family of Ewenki people, a reindeer-herding ethnic minority dwindling in numbers who came to China’s northeast from Siberia a few centuries ago. Recently assigned to government land settlements, with their reindeer hunting practices outlawed by the state, the Ewenki are suffering. Following one family, Gu explores

their dispossession. At least for many Western viewers, the film will evoke the history of European encroachment and colonialism in the Americas. It documents with fierce, raw representation how circumstances have left the Ewenki in a vortex of alcoholic self-destruction. The film is not entirely bleak; at times, Gu highlights fleeting moments of enjoyment in the subjects’ lives. But these moments only intensify the more common depictions of suffering and alienation experienced by the Ewenki family at the center of the film. As the director gestures toward their decline with a series of episodes of drunken domestic violence, the viewer questions the apparent cruelty of the camera’s gaze, as well as the anthropological editorial voice. In one nearly unbearable scene, Gu captures a violent altercation between two family members: Liuxia, an “old widow who seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle,” and her younger brother, Vijia, “an alcoholic artist who is increasingly disoriented about life,” as the diColumbia Political Review | May 2009

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COVER STORY rector describes them. Leading up to the scene, Gu surveys the government-subsidized Ewenki land settlement where the family has relocated. Liuxia notes the number on the door of their new home— its mark of serialized, compartmentalized modernity—and enters the space; Gu follows her, and his camera watches the siblings about a meter off the ground as they sit on the bed with bottles in hand. During an indeterminate passing of time, they drink into drunkenness, and a dispute erupts. Liuxia shouts and grabs a small stool standing next to the bed. Lifting it above her head, she sends it crashing down onto Vijia’s forehead. The unmoving camera gazes upon the scene in one of the longest takes in the entire film. Vijia screams and blood flows from his head wound. Gu and his camera witness everything. When such a scene is exhibited on the festival screen, the audience feels powerless at the director’s expense. As the director takes a position of non-intervention—he’s just documenting, not trying

to change this miniature course of history—the cruelty of his refusal to turn off the camera gives his footage a powerful claim to a violent, unstable scene: the appearance of an unstaged realism, if you like. An episode of real violence is served up for consumption, and audience members are forced to swallow what they might rather have avoided. Seen within the context of an emergent global culture of violent spectacle, this scene is not exactly novel—the consumption of real violence has become a perverse trend on internet communities like YouTube, where individuals post footage of staged fights between homeless people and violent brawls between gang members. Considering the fraught ethnographic impulse in Gu’s work—as well as the complicated dynamic of display involved in exhibiting his film for a predominantly Han Chinese and foreign audience—we are forced to confront the elements of cultural exhibitionism and exploitation at play in Gu’s film, but also elsewhere. In talking about his documentary proj-

ects, Gu Tao describes his process of identification: “When I begin to film, I feel like I am spying, but after a while it starts to feel like my own life.” The element of spying, which points to one of the fundamental problems of ethnographic filmmaking—the gaze of an ethnographer on a “primitive” other—leads me to question his position as a transcendent-yetpresent participant-observer. In the postscreening discussion of Gu’s film, many wondered whether the subjects of the documentary—who have spent their lives in remote forests in northeast China and in the compartmentalized dwellings of the state reservation—could grasp the nature of Gu’s project, or fully understand what it would mean for the film to be exhibited before a festival audience. While discussing Aoluguya, Aoluguya with an American film scholar, the question came up: “Could a white filmmaker in the US make a film like this on a Native American reservation?” I really don’t think so, mostly because the subject matter is so freighted with the violent legacy of colonialism and exploitation, as well as the objectification of indige-

“To document with a DV is a cruel act since it can bring no benefit, but only damage to the subjects.” - Zhu Chuanming, director of Extras

“Despite its inability to change reality, a documentary can still convey something; it can bring someone else’s experience to the audience. It is human nature that leads to different fates.” 14

– Xu Tong, director of Wheat Harvest Columbia Political Review | cpreview.org

nous subjects in early anthropology. Any representation of Native Americans by a white filmmaker would be forced to acknowledge the problematic power relation of such an ethnographic project. I wonder, then, how a Han Chinese filmmaker’s documentary about a disenfranchised ethnic minority is different from a film on a similar topic in the Americas. Perhaps the taboos associated with such films seem to originate from different sources of restraint: social mores in the US and state censorship codes in China. And maybe Yunfest tests many thresholds: putting pressure on political correctness for a Western audience, while pushing the boundaries of Chinese state censorship and exhibition practices by screening a film that skewers the Chinese government’s complicity in the Ewenki’s marginalization and self-destruction. Gu’s film becomes a testament to the cruel and alienating conditions condoned by China’s state policy toward the Ewenki minority. I wonder if the apparent cruelty of the director’s representational practices—Gu’s presence in an othered space, his exhibition of their lives—becomes permissible based on the product. His raw, violent film, intent on capturing a harsh reality, complicates the apparent cruelty of his documentation. Western scholarship on documentary continually discusses the possibility of a universal code of documentary ethics. I have trouble determining whether such a concept should be applied in China’s case, and what exactly is at stake when we consider the presence of this “extreme realism” in genres of documentary on a global scale. Similar questions about the ethics of documentary representation come up when thinking about Xu Tong’s film, Wheat Harvest.

A NOVELIST WITH A CAMERA In what many consider the first Chinese documentary to openly address prostitution in China, Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest focuses on the dual lives of Niu Hongmiao, a 20-year-old woman who returns from her life as a sex worker in Beijing to work on her family farm in rural Hebei Province when her father falls se-

riously ill. The director/novelist Xu Tong is a quiet, pensive man behind thickframed glasses who began writing a novel shortly after meeting Hongmiao. The interplay between text and film is a crucial element of Xu’s production, since his novel’s protagonist developed out of Hongmiao’s life as a prostitute in Beijing,

near the hospital, where Hongmiao stays while her father undergoes medical examinations. Hongmiao chain-smokes by the window and talks directly to Xu’s camera, revealing her distress and uncertainty. When Hongmiao leaves the windowsill, the director completes his long take with a shot of her overflowing ash-

IN A WAY, WU HAOHAO’S COMMUNIST KICK RESEMBLES STUDENTS’ OBSESSION WITH MAOIST CHINA IN GODARD’S LA CHINOISE, SET DURING THE MOVEMENTS OF MAY 1968 IN PARIS. and Xu did not pick up his camera until several months after he first met his subject. The film centers around two locations: a brothel in Beijing and the home of Hongmiao’s father in Hebei. Xu documents Hongmiao and her co-workers in the intimate space of the Beijing brothel, capturing daily conversations about clients and filming mundane occasions like the madam’s birthday celebration, which takes place in an austere, dimly lit apartment. His documentation is generally passive and observational, and he seldom addresses the subjects, except in a few extended interviews with Hongmiao to which he periodically returns. For most of the film, Xu’s close documentation of Hongmiao creates a bleak portrait of her living situation. After she returns home to tend to her father’s increasingly unstable medical condition, the director’s camera witnesses the subject’s most traumatic experiences. When her father’s test results come back, the doctor reveals films from a CAT scan, showing the decrease in blood to her father’s brain and making it clear that his vital systems could shut down at any moment. Hongmiao is incredibly shaken by the doctor’s words, and Xu’s camera documents her reaction to the doctor’s prognosis in a long take, zooming in on the tears streaming down her face. The next scene takes place in a hotel room

tray. But the documentary also highlights elements of Hongmiao’s life that are not so bleak, exploring complex layers of feeling and meaning. One of the most poignant scenes in the film takes place in a karaoke joint in Beijing. Hongmiao and her fellow sex workers occasionally take the night off and call a few Beijing gigolos to sing songs with them and take them home. The gigolos, euphemistically called yazi (ducks), are unaware that Hongmiao and her friends are of the same trade, and the film plays with the irony of this unawareness subtly, tenderly. Hongmiao sings alongside her favorite man in the bunch, a scrawny character nicknamed Jelly, and the night reveals to the audience that her life is not entirely without moments of leisure. While certain instances in the film seem to reflect the director’s intrusion into the space of the sex workers, the karaoke scene complicates the apparent cruelty of his camera’s gaze. In revealing moments of fleeting enjoyment in Hongmiao’s life, however, it also seems to accentuate the pain that is her everyday reality.

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s with Gu Tao’s film, many spectators raised concerns after the screening about the exhibition of a personal narrative that might pose legal prob-

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COVER STORY lems for the subject if the film reached the authorities. The director chose not to address the problematic ethical position of his film, sidestepping such concerns with statements about how the subject was a close friend. Violating an apparent code of documentary ethics in pursuing rigorous documentation of a tragic, unfolding reality, perhaps the film itself, as a document, allows him to elide the

as in Gu’s documentation of the Ewenki. Does Hongmiao have to approve of the film and its exhibition? Is her story the property of the director or the subject? The matter of consent in documentary seems to provoke more questions than answers, and the festival itself does not have a neatly defined code of ethics to govern its selection of films. When I think about the elements of

ted to the festival this year were selected for screening: People’s Artist Jia Jinshu for the film competition, and Kun1 Action and Forbid Silence for the Youth Forum segment. I first met Wu Haohao at a bar in Kunming, not at the festival. His initial words to me, even before introducing himself, were: “I’m sick of all these little bourgeois kids from our generation in bars

WU’S NOT EVEN MUCH OF A MARXIST—MORE OF A PERVERSE RED GUARDIST WITH VIOLENTLY SELF-SERVING AMBITIONS AND CONTRADICTORY POLITICAL IDEALS. questions of exploitation and violence embedded in his representational practices. In this way, the ends would seem to justify the means.

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u Tong’s still-unfinished novel, which is unlikely to reach publishing houses in China due to its controversial political content, is crucial to think about in relation to the film. He identifies primarily as a novelist, and Wheat Harvest is his first documentary endeavor. I wonder if the more fictional nature of the novel, with its stronger sense of narrative control, can absolve Xu of a number of ethical issues surrounding his representation and exhibition of a female sex worker’s life. The film was remarkably well-received by the festival jury and the audience, likely due to its provocative representation of a relatively unexplored social reality. It won the Audience Award through fan voting, though I learned from a film scholar after the festival finished that the film was nearly pulled from the competition due to concerns that arose during the post-screening discussion—answering one audience question, the director had suggested that the subject had not yet been given a chance to see the film and was unaware that it had been selected for Yunfest. This situation raises questions about the issue of consent, much

cruelty that surface in these representations of marginalized social actors—be they ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia or sex workers in Beijing—the concern over the struggles of little people in little environments points to alienation and disillusionment in China today. The documentaries of Gu Tao and Xu Tong leave the audience with harsh portraits of social realities in contemporary China, while at the same time reflecting on how audiences identify with—and participate in— economies of pleasure and pain as documentary spectators. For these reasons, I’d like to emphasize the value of these films as cultural documents that illuminate something substantial about the positions of marginalized social actors in contemporary Chinese society.

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A NEWCOMER’S BOLD PERVERSIONS What I instantly noticed about Wu Haohao was his mullet. Though it’s not the kind of mullet you might see at 3 a.m. in a Waffle House in Tennessee, it has its own peculiar character—straight and black with two long tails that come to rest between his shoulder blades. He’s only 23 years old—the youngest director in the documentary competition at this year’s festival—and he comes from Shanxi Province in China’s northeast, the former stomping grounds of one of his biggest ideological opponents, Jia Zhangke. Enjoying unprecedented success at Yunfest, three of the four films he submit-

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like this one. They’ve lost sight of the struggle and the beauty of China’s revolutionary past.” His statement caught me off-guard. For one, his presence in the bar made his words ironic, though he was mostly there because he had a romantic interest in a young Chinese artist friend of mine. And his seeming identification with revolutionary ideology conjures the kind of passé commodification of revolution epitomized by a Che t-shirt in the window of an Urban Outfitters. His revolutionary zeal is a kind of nostalgic imagining at best. Wu doesn’t care much for the Communist Party, but clings to a romantic fantasy about the revolutionary movements of his parents’ generation. He’s not even much of a Marxist—more of a perverse Red Guardist with violently self-serving ambitions and contradictory political ideals. For all his talk about class struggle, he mostly wants his films to bring him fame. In a way, his communist kick resembles students’ obsession with Maoist China in Godard’s La Chinoise, set during the movements of May 1968 in Paris. (Fittingly enough, the festival organizers started to call him “Little Godard.”) At Yunfest, Wu Haohao left festival-goers polarized. Many found his attitude and behavior arrogant and obnoxious—he frequently acted the irreverent provocateur in post-screening discussions, openly criticizing other director’s films. But some of the festival organizers found his

POSITION OF THE SCENE: Directors Gu Tao (left) and Xu Tong.

blunt commentary and overflowing selfconfidence intriguing. He may be a kind of strange genius who, if his influence grows, has the potential to ride a tidal wave onto the Chinese documentary scene—that is, if people can handle his films. His work is even bolder than his personality.

on how the film carves out provocative new terrain in Chinese documentary. Wu frames his film around an extended conversation with a young self-published novelist, Jia Jinshu. Self-reflexively disregarding conventional interview practice in documentary, Wu inserts himself into

“I’m over Jia Zhangke and his obsession with little people in big environments. It’s boring and I don’t care for stuff like that,” said Wu. As the ending of People’s Artist Jia Jinshu reveals, he is more into little people in little environments.

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u’s film, People’s Artist Jia Jinshu, stood out in the competition film selection at Yunfest. In talking about this documentary, I prefer to set aside what some would call the “amateur” quality of his documentation and editing style. Instead, I’ll dwell

the film, sitting shirtless on the floor of a small dorm-like apartment. As he flips through Jia’s novel, sometimes stopping to read passages aloud, he attacks the author’s text. Wu’s critique goes beyond his subject’s novel, though, extending to a series of statements about his distaste for the now commercially successful “independent” filmmakers like Jia Zhangke. Wu remarks, “I’m over Jia Zhangke and

his obsession with little people in big environments. It’s boring and I don’t care for stuff like that.” Wu is more into little people in little environments, as the closing sequence in People’s Artist Jia Jinshu reveals. The film ends with an intense dose of reality. With a series of intertitles that follow the hour-long conversation between the two men, we learn that Jia, while selling his books in Kunming one day, was brutally beaten by a group of policemen. The screen displays letters of protest written by Jia to the local government, who deem him a criminal and the independent distribution of his novel a flagrant crime. The film’s lively conversation between two young artists flows into a direct confrontation with the hard facts of the Chinese government’s calculated control of artistic production and dissemination. While Jia Jinshu is left with the wounds of police brutality, Wu Haohao’s work, like that of Gu Tao and Xu Tong, is prominently exhibited on the film festival screen. I wonder how the screening of such a film points to the status of art in China’s political system. Or perhaps a political reading goes too far. The political dimension may be displaced and Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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COVER STORY emptied out by Wu’s own ego. While the film’s violent ending may provoke the audience’s sympathetic identification with Jia Jinshu, the work is ultimately about Wu Haohao and his desire to assert himself in opposition to filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

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nother Wu Haohao creation, Kun1 Action, is more boldly experimental and chaotic. The film is a disjointed portrait of his everyday experiences at the Chongqing Film Academy, and also what he calls a “quasi-religious tribute” to his former lover, Liang Kun. The frequent appearance of his directorial signatures— appearing shirtless or completely naked on screen, reflexively and confrontationally addressing the camera, giving philosophical and poetic musings through voiceover narration—foregrounds Wu’s individuality within the film’s jarring collage of college footage. Many viewers at the festival questioned its rampant misogyny, which is wildly offensive, to be sure: as different women enter the frame,

that Wu Haohao attracted at the festival, it seems that many consider his filmic transgressions to be products of genius. For a 23-year-old who wanders around the Chongqing Film Academy with a DV camera, being called “Little Godard” is a huge compliment. And it has certainly gone to his head. In one of our first conversations, he said outright: “Wait a few years and I’ll be really famous.” Except for the potential for documentary festivals to bring him fame (though only among a small sphere of peers and spectators), Wu Haohao cares little about the film community and the other directors involved—he even failed to show up for the post-screening discussion of his own People’s Artist Jia Jinshu. The equally rogue, though older and more familiar face, Hu Xinyu, took to the discussion stage in Wu’s place, ironically fielding audience questions as though he were the filmmaker himself. In a testament to his general attitude toward the festival, Wu told me in a conversation after his screenings that he had decided to flee Kunming for the idyllic mountain town of Dali to “make love to some girl while gazing at the scenery.”

“CHINESE DOCUMENTARY CAN ONLY BE THIS INTERESTING FOR SO LONG,” FILM SCHOLAR ABÉ MARK NORNES SAID TO ME AT YUNFEST. Wu narrates, “I like to film girls because I like to have sex with them.” And, in one of the most graphic scenes I have ever observed in documentary film—in any context—Wu appears onscreen receiving a blowjob next to a brick wall. I can’t decide whether he’s a crazy misogynist who violently exploits his subjects or a brilliantly bold documentary auteur. Wu is often so performative and brash that the term “realism” fails to apply as it does in the works of Gu Tao and Xu Tong. Considering the tremendous attention 18

Wu Haohao’s experimentation with the documentary form, and his bold challenges to the appetites of his audience, could change the way critics see the future of Chinese documentary. While most documentary filmmakers in China take a somewhat passive, observational approach, Wu’s confrontational tactics and highly narcissistic reflexivity reveal the potential for greater stylistic variation in the field, which could inject new vitality into the scene. However, such endeavors may bear troubling fruits, as his films

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push the boundaries of violence and pornography in ways that appall most viewers. Recently, a documentary festival in Beijing took an interest in Wu Haohao, and his films will be screened at the larger, higher-profile festival in the coming months. Given his films’ content and radical approaches, it’s amazing to me that he’s able to continue exhibiting films in China.

POSITIONS OF THE SCENE A number of critics feel that independent Chinese documentary is doomed. At Yunfest, film scholar Abé Mark Nornes said to me: “Chinese documentary can only be this interesting for so long.” From his perspective as a Japanese film scholar, he boldly claims that the state of Chinese documentary has reached its peak— that it is headed for inevitable decline. Nornes feels that the scene has become saturated with amateurish, poorly edited, excessively long, and generic documentaries with no chance of being screened at international festivals. I think he wants a Chinese filmmaker to produce something canonical like a Fred Wiseman documentary, and since that hasn’t happened yet, he associates Chinese documentary with immaturity and belatedness. But perhaps Nornes places too much emphasis on form and too little on content. And even if these documentaries don’t make it abroad—and some inevitably do, like the films screened at the Reel China Documentary Biennial sponsored in part by Columbia and NYU last fall—China has a developing festival infrastructure in a number of major cities, and regional audiences who eagerly consume the works of this generation’s documentarians. Chinese independent film scholar and critic Zhang Yaxuan answers these naysayers with a more optimistic view. Drawing on the now-two decades-long tradition of independent documentary in China, Zhang writes, “Nowhere in Asia has documentary film showed such vitality... Mainland China has become the center of documentary film production in Asia. When comparing it to the experience in Europe and America, we can see that Chinese film is in the process of de-

SPECTACLE AFTER SPECTACLE: The opening ceremony of Yunfest.

veloping its own perceptivity and style, one that is rooted in local realities and traditions.” This returns us to questions regarding the specificity and universality of the filmic medium itself, as well as the applicability of concepts like documentary ethics in different contexts. Whether the scene continues to thrive or gradually crumbles, the films circulating right now at festivals such as Yunfest are concrete records of China’s social transformations. In thinking about the cruelty that surfaces in many of these filmmakers’ documentary practices, the intensity with which these films point to larger structural problems in Chinese society give them tremendous value. The films derive their power from an obsession with rigorously documenting violence and suffering—realities that are supremely hard to swallow. Like Wu Haohao’s interest in little people in little environments, the documentation of marginal subjects in marginal environments with a raw, violent realism has real cur-

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recently stumbled on the amusingly narcissistic blog of the bold newcomer: “Wu Haohao’s Blog–I am a genius!” During an interview at the festival, Chinese filmmaker and critic Zhang Xianmin asked Wu about his outlandish behavior and radical politics. He responded, “I love to make a scene. Being over-the-top (kuazhang) can be a political tactic—a way for me to get famous. All of us with our cameras, we’re just using the same over-the-top methods.” Kuazhang, meaning “exaggerated” or “over-the-top,” is one of my favorite words. Something about the kuazhang behavior of Hu Xinyu, the camera-smashing incident at the closing ceremony, and young provocateur Wu Haohao transcends the academic discourse that can mire the scene in boredom. Argue over agency and power all you want—I just hope Wu Haohao keeps his mullet.

BENNY SHAFFER [email protected] East Asian Languages and Cultures CC ‘09 Benny curates an archive of bootleg Chinese films out of his dorm room. Returning to China this fall on a Fulbright grant, he will continue his documentary-related research at Yunnan University in Kunming. As a side project, he will wander from province to province in search of the next Wu Haohao.

Images provided courtesy of the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival.

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PROFESSOR INTERVIEW

“THAT’S WHAT MAKES SOVEREIGN DEMOCRACY SOVEREIGN—YOU GET TO IGNORE UNIVERSALS AND DO IT YOUR OWN WAY INSTEAD.”

A RUSSIAN RESET BUTTON? A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN SESTANOVICH Interview conducted by Eric Lukas

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n August 2008, Russia stunned observers in the United States and Europe by invading the neighboring state of Georgia, concentrating military actions on the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Many Russia scholars have pointed to the invasion as the culmination of attempts by the Kremlin to pursue a foreign policy that was simultaneously more independent of Western international relations norms and more advantageous to Russian interests. Buoyed by oil and natural gas exports and high energy prices, the Russian economy had been growing at a fast pace over the last eight years. With this increase in economic power came a greater confidence among Russian leaders, eager to reassert a greater Russian role on the world stage since a precipitous decline after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Since last summer, however, energy prices have fallen dramatically, dealing a serious blow to the Russian economy. It remains to be seen how this downturn may affect Russia’s foreign policy and its relations with the United States and the West. I posed questions on these developments to Stephen Sestanovich, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Affairs at Columbia and an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Professor Sestanovich served during the Clinton administration as ambassador-at-large and special advisor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. He also served the Reagan administration on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department and as senior director for policy development at the National Security Council.

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Stacy Chu

ERIC LUKAS: It’s been eight months since the invasion of Georgia by Russian forces. At the time, many Russia experts believed that this intervention confirmed Russia’s intention to pursue an independent and unilateral foreign policy outside of existing international institutions. How has Russia fared since then? STEPHEN SESTANOVICH: If you focus simply on the Georgia War, it’s obvious that Russia has escaped fundamental damage to its international standing. Many of the measures that the US and its European allies took in the immediate aftermath of the war have been slowly rolled back since then. NATO and Russia have resumed business more or less as usual, and in early April President Obama held a meeting with President Medvedev at which Georgia was referred to as one of the disagreements that the two sides don’t ignore but also don’t treat as obstacles to improved relations. A full balance sheet for Moscow since last summer would have to include more issues than Georgia, however. The international economic crisis had had an enormous negative impact on Russia—perhaps more severe than on any other large economy. The drop in energy prices has been especially painful. Russia’s leaders have made matters worse for themselves by exceptionally belligerent handling of their gas-pricing dispute with Ukraine at the beginning of the year. The long-term impact of this episode may well prove more significant than the Georgia war. Charles King wrote alongside you in Foreign Affairs last December that Russia has a historical pattern of hopeful cooperation followed by disenchanted withdrawal in its foreign relations with the West. Has the increasingly confrontational Russian foreign policy, culminating in the Georgia invasion, been an expression of such a mindset? I’d put it a little differently. Russia’s sharp-elbowed policies of the last several years can’t really be described as “with-

drawal” from relations with the West. After all, Russian trade with Europe and the US continued to increase; Russia continued to participate in the international forums to which it belongs; and the signature foreign policy initiative of Dmitri Medvedev, [former Russian president] Putin’s successor, involved proposals for a new European “security architecture.” What we were seeing here was not withdrawal, but an attempt to redefine relations with the West on more advantageous terms—reflecting what Russian policymakers regarded as their stronger international position. Russian officials and commentators were not shy about saying that the combination of a stronger economy, political stability at home, and increased resources for the conduct of foreign policy meant Russia would have [to] be accorded a larger role in the world. The tough question they face now, of course, is whether they need to rethink the strategy, and how much.

NATO and the European Union—have actively sought to build close and cooperative relations with Russia. Still, it’s worth asking why it isn’t a member of those organizations and why the relationships built up between them and Russia have not been fuller and more meaningful. Some people would say it’s because Russia is too big to be easily accommodated within them, but I believe that answer is incomplete. The fundamental problem is that Russia has not resolved its conflicted feelings about NATO and the EU. It doesn’t really want to join them. On a good day, you might say that Russia believes that it would have to sacrifice too much of its identity in order to fit comfortably within either of them. On a bad day, its attitude would have to be described as more openly hostile. It’s no surprise that, with Russia feeling this kind of ambivalence, neither NATO nor the EU has considered it desirable to find a way to bring it on as a member.

“RUSSIA’S SHARP-ELBOWED POLICIES OF THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS CAN’T REALLY BE DESCRIBED AS ‘WITHDRAWAL’ FROM RELATIONS WITH THE WEST.” Nearly two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, why has it been so difficult to accommodate Russia into international institutions and persuade it to accept international norms of sovereignty? Let me challenge your premise—Russia had a place in many international institutions as the principal successor state to the USSR, and it has been welcomed into a number of others, most notably the G-8. Its accession to others, like the WTO and OECD, is in process, and no one has raised a principled objection to Russia’s membership. Moreover, the two most important institutions to which it does not belong—

It appeared in the years leading up to the Georgia invasion that Russia disagreed with the drift of such former Soviet constituent republics as Georgia and Ukraine towards the West. What effect did the actions or policies of these countries in Russia’s “Near Abroad” have on the direction of Moscow’s foreign policy? I think that the critical event in Russia’s reassessment of its foreign policy and of relations with the West was the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine at the end of 2004. But was this a big shock primarily because Ukraine’s new leaders were oriented toward the West? In part, perhaps, but

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PROFESSOR INTERVIEW it’s important to remember that Ukraine was pursuing [a] very close partnership with NATO and the United States long before the Orange Revolution. Who, after all, sent Ukrainian troops to fight with the US in Iraq? [Former Ukrainian president] Leonid Kuchma. Who pulled them out? [Current Ukrainian president] Viktor Yushchenko.

You mentioned in your Foreign Affairs article that since 2002 Putin and other Russian leaders had concluded that “Russia’s relations with the United States (and the West in general) were inherently unequal and conflictual and that Russia would better serve its interests if it followed its own course.” Does Russia still perceive the West in this light?

What was shocking for Moscow about the Orange Revolution was something more basic: it was the demonstration that the corrupt manipulations used by a post-Soviet regime to keep itself in power despite a defeat at the polls could be exposed—with the strong support of the rest of Europe and the US—and actually bring the regime down. For some reason, that we don’t fully understand, Putin and his colleagues regarded this development as a much more significant threat to their own power than most Western analysts did.

I don’t believe that this view was the dominant one in Russia in 2002. In the article you mention, in fact, I point out that the early years of Putin’s presidency were characterized by increasingly close relations with the US—arguably the closest of all time. I think of this as the “post-9/11”

The invasion of Georgia caused a crisis of confidence in Russia among international investors, and the Russian economy has been further hampered by a sharp decline in oil and natural gas prices since the summer of 2008. For much of this decade, Russia’s economic growth has relied heavily on natural gas exports. Will this change in Russian economic prospects lead to any movement away from a unilateral foreign policy strategy and a path towards greater integration and engagement with international institutions? There’s no Russian consensus on this question. You certainly hear some Russians saying that integration and engagement are the right conclusion to draw, and some of them are actually rather highranking officials. I have in mind, for example, the claim that energy prices will not return to their 2008 peak for many years to come—and that for this reason Russia must strengthen the rule of law and its overall attractiveness to foreign capital. This is not, however, the only position taken in the debate. There are plenty of people who feel they will benefit more by keeping things as they have been in the last several years. 22

Russia into a more integrated role in global governance? The Bush administration’s handling of Russia involved many missteps. The Iraq War shook the post-9/11 relationship, and the Orange Revolution shook it even more, as I’ve already suggested. It’s often true that the US underestimates how bold and destabilizing its policies can seem to other countries—and that was certainly true here. There are many areas where the Obama administration has a good chance of recreating a relationship that both sides see as serving common interests. Nuclear arms

“THE IRAQ WAR SHOOK THE POST9/11 RELATIONSHIP [BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE UNITED STATES], AND THE ORANGE REVOLUTION SHOOK IT EVEN MORE.” phase of relations, and it was marked by rather high-flying rhetoric about how the two sides were becoming quasi-allies.

control—that tired old tradition of the late Cold War—is probably the most promising place to start.

In trying to explain the deterioration that followed, some analysts trace it to events like the Bush administration’s abrogation of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty at the end of 2001. But this won’t wash. Relations between Washington and Moscow continued to get better after that. Not because of it, of course, but despite it. Both sides were prepared to treat disagreement over the ABM treaty as a secondary problem at the time.

The model of “sovereign democracy” that Russia adopted during the Putin years was once touted as an alternative and increasingly attractive mode of governance, especially for other countries that had grown frustrated by the West, such as Venezuela. How attractive is that model now? Is there any chance to incorporate Russia successfully into the international order?

The Obama administration has sought to repair relations with Moscow since it came to office in January, even going so far as to give Hillary Clinton an actual “reset” button to present to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March. Where did the Bush administration go wrong in its handling of Russia, and what areas must the Obama administration focus on in order to bring

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The core principle of sovereign democracy is simple: don’t let outsiders challenge your deviations from democracy. That’s what makes it sovereign—you get to ignore universals and do it your own way instead. In fact, you try to stoke up an edgy kind of nationalism as a substitute for democracy. Now, this model is always going to be attractive to politicians—and not just in Russia—who think it will help keep them

Becca Barrett

in power. There are clearly many people in the Russian elite who believe that right now, with the economy worsening, it would be especially dangerous to experiment with any loosening-up of the political system. That’s not a surprise. What’s interesting is that there are also people who disagree—and are expressing their disagreement publicly. They say [that] the public is going to tolerate economic hardship only if they feel that greater pluralism is being allowed. Some also say that the only way to find the right path out of the crisis is through more open debate. This case—in favor of a new “social contract,” as they put it—has been made by Russian political figures and commentators who are close to Medvedev. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to prevail. To be honest, it doesn’t even mean they’re in favor of democracy as we might measure it. This debate could simply be the public manifestation of a struggle between people who are close to Medvedev and those who are close to Putin. A struggle within the elite over the distribution

of power between them, not over a real change in the system. There’s another version of this “sovereign democracy” question that we ought to keep our eye on. Is there a chance that Russia might begin to put less emphasis on going its own way, [and] might stop seeing other countries as incorrigibly opposed to Russian greatness, identity, and independence? To me, this is the most important long-term question of Russian-American relations. Yes, we can try to improve relations with Russia based on identifying mutually acceptable approaches to dealing with a variety of problems. Strategic arms limitation is one example; countering nuclear proliferation is another, and so is countering Islamist jihadism. But relations with Russia aren’t going to achieve their real potential until Russia begins seeing its interests in less zero-sum terms. Over the long haul, that’s what we need to be watching—and working—for.

MORE ON STEPHEN SESTANOVICH A longtime fixture in Washington foreign policy circles, Professor Sestanovich has been the vice president for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has written numerous articles and books on Soviet and Russian studies, including Rethinking Russia’s National Interests, and edited Creating the Post-Communist Order.

ERIC LUKAS [email protected] History, Political Science CC ‘09 Eric is a student of international politics and global power balances, recently taking an interest in the effects of oil and natural gas on national power. Next year, he will read for a master’s degree in international relations from a highly regarded British university. In the future he hopes to parlay this knowledge into a career in public policy or political risk analysis. Columbia Political Review | May 2009

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