Ryan Pyle Blog: Russians Bribe to Solve Problems

Hello.

I don't often put up blog posts about other countries unless it somehow directly relates to China, and when a topic like bribery comes up it's always a hot topic.

Now, I've never been to Russia but from what I've heard it is full of blatant bribery, so much so that many Russians actually believe they need to pay bribes to get problems solved. Research shows that Russians still need to pay bribes to get better health care, get drivers licenses, bribe police when they get traffic tickets, get children out of military service or a place at the right school.

The Chinese usually have to pay similar bribes they usually come in the form of gifts and are most often both socially acceptable and expected.

Russia is ranked 146th out of 180 nations in the Transparency International ranking for Corruption Perception. China is ranked 79th. India is ranked 84th. Food for thought. Original article is below:

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Copyright: Reuters
Title: Half of Russians believe bribery solves "problems"
Original Story LINK

MOSCOW (Reuters) - More than half of Russians think bribing officials is the best way to "solve problems," according to a new poll.

Fifty-five percent of respondents to a Levada Centre poll of 1,600 Russians said they believed that "bribes are given by everyone who comes across officials" in Russia.

President Dmitry Medvedev, halfway through his four-year term, has pledged to fight Russia's all-pervasive graft and build a law-abiding state, where everyone observes the rules rather than looking for ways around them.

But findings by the Levada Centre showed that Russians still pay bribes to obtain better medical services, prefer to "buy" their driving licences, bribe police when caught violating traffic rules, or pay to ensure that their child can dodge the draft or get a place at the right school.

Ten percent confessed they had even paid to arrange funerals for relatives or loved ones.

Only 10 percent of those polled believe that only "cheats and criminals" bribed officials and 30 percent said that those offering "cash in envelopes" are in fact "ordinary people who have no other way to solve their problems."
Watchdog Transparency International last November rated Russia, a G8 country, joint 146th out of 180 nations in

its Corruption Perception Index, along with Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and five other developing nations.
(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Paul Casciato)


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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: AP Taking Assignments

Hello,

This story broke a few weeks ago and it's taken me a bit of time to come up with a reaction to it. The Associated Press is now taking editorial assignments.

Their online advertisement can be view HERE.

"Our new Editorial Assignments Service offers the power of AP's award-winning photojournalism and global access. Hire AP's elite staff photographers, now available for your next editorial project. AP will capture your vision with depth and authenticity and offer unsurpassed vision and on-point delivery. Book your assignment today."

So the big question is why does a wire service need to start taking assignments. It's true, the AP have some very talented and dedicated image makers, and if those photographers were freelancers they would get a lot of assignments; but this just feels wrong.

Perhaps it's timing. While the career options for a "freelance photographer" are dwindling, we now have another competitor to deal with. The industry is shrinking. Everyone is offering everything and rates are dropping. The future can't really be this bleak, can it be?

I still believe the still image is the most powerful form of communication and story telling there is, but do I have to earn a negative income, spending more money than I make, to pursue my career as a photographer?

Only time will tell.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Arta Gallery Show

Hello.

I just wanted to share some details about my Gallery Exhibition (A Group Show) at the Arta Gallery in Toronto, Canada for the Contact Photo Festival. It opened on May 15th and will run until May 27th. I hope if you are in the area you can swing by. Some new work from Chinese Turkestan is on display. Sadly I will not be there. Check out the link below. Cheers,

LINK: Arta Gallery

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Ryerson Journalism School Questions

Hello.

I enjoy lecturing and earlier this year I spoke about being a freelance photographer at the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto, Canada. It was a very enjoyable and I feel that my experiences can offer people a lot of insight in to how to get your freelance career started.

Just a few weeks ago a Ryerson student wrote me asking if I could answer a few questions for them; as they wanted to profile my career for a project they were working on. Below are some of those questions and answers. I thought they may be suitable for my blog.

1) What is your impression of the state of the journalism industry today?

I think the state of the journalism industry is in decline. Saying that though, people know more about remote parts of the world, and people generally consume more information now, and in different formats, than they did twenty years ago. Journalism, especially non-professional journalism, is expanding rapidly as the internet and blogging continue to change our lives - and the way we consume media.

But, while non-professional journalism, in general, is proliferating and expanding; professional journalism and career journalism is shrinking and retreating, mainly because advertising revenue's have forced many magazines and newspapers to reduce pages and close up all together. The big question going forward, for people like me who earn a living as professional journalists, is whether the news consumers out there will pay for high quality professional journalism. There are too many bloggers and non-professional journalists out there that are spreading news and information that may not fully understand the ethics and morals of good journalism, and this hurts the industry over time. But there doesn't seem to be much interest for consumers to pay for high-quality, reliable journalism content. The next five years will be very interesting to see what happens.


2) What is it like to be a freelancer right now?

Being a freelancer is very difficult at the moment. Magazines and newspapers, my clients, are cutting back their pages and their assignments. The cutbacks are widespread and everyone is affected. The downturn in the advertising industry for traditional (print) media is the main reason for this, as more advertising spending drifts towards online venues. There are less pictures in magazines, there are less freelance stories and when you do get an assignment they are often shorter and often the pay is less. But while the jobs may be fewer and the pay may be less I still find documenting China visually incredibly rewarding and important. Even though I was able to win some awards in 2009, it is safe to say that last year was my worse income earning year of my career. I'm pleased to say that 2010 is looking better, hopefully the upward trend continues.


3) How much do you (or can you) make per photograph?

My pictures sell for a wide range of prices. In the photo industry the "price" of a picture is determined by the "usage". For example, if HSBC - a global bank - wants to use your picture from a hospital in China for an advertisement then that sale might be USD 10,000. But if the New York Times wants to buy that same picture to illustrate a story about health care in China, you may only earn USD 250. The key is in the usage.


4) What are the greatest challenges of being a freelance photographer?

The greatest challenge of being a freelance photographer is running a small business. Yes, taking lovely pictures is crucial, but if you can not earn a living and pay your bills your freelance career will end very quickly. In every course on journalism they need to have an optional class for those who want to be freelancers, and that class needs to teach people how to manage their costs and understand basic accounting. I know a lot of photographers who make beautiful images, but they don't freelance anymore because they couldn't make a living at it. Another massive challenge is managing contacts and networking but all of that doesn't matter much if you can't keep your books in order.


5) What are the greatest advantages of being a freelancer?

The greatest advantage of being a freelance photographer is that I am FREE. I can work on projects that I think are important. I can take jobs and turn down jobs as I see fit. I am my own boss, my own editor and my own accountant. That might intimidate people but I thrive on it. I enjoy having complete control over the direction of my career and control over the projects I work on. It helps me stay sharp and motivated.


6) And finally, what advice do you have for any journalism students who are looking towards the freelance career in the future.

Freelancing is tough and it will challenge you. It will test your perception of what is normal and what you are capable of. With no stable income and no benefits you have to use your wit and your ingenuity to generate income, and interest in your work. You have to create a following among editors and you need to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. All of this seems near impossible when you first start out. But remember, no one builds a profitable company over night. And you shouldn't expect to build a profitable freelance career over night. It takes time. I've lived in China since 2001. My first five years, yes - 5 years - were very difficult. It is possible, and if you have the ability to tough it out then there will be rewards down the road.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Shrinking Path

Hello,

Well, it appears that being a photographer is actually as bleak as everyone says it is. Even house wives are able to earn an income from Getty Images. Read below. Time to dust off that degree in accounting.

Please follow this LINK to the original story.
The article is also posted below.
Copywrite: New York Times
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March 29, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.

But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.

“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.

Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”

Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.

Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.

Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.

That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”

They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.

“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.

And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.

“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”

At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.

Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.

That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.

“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”

In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said. That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.

With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.

There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.

Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”

But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.

“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is. Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care. “I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Where are all the Girls?

Hello.

China, and most poor agrarian countries, have a problem with baby girls. It seems that on almost every level they are not desired. The impression is that they can’t work as hard in the fields and once they are of marrying age they’ll be gone and working for another family, so what use are they? Well, actually they are incredibly useful and China is slowly waking up to this fact.

According to the Economist, a few weeks back, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen in a country with too few baby girls. Within ten years, the CASS reported, there will be one in five young men who will be unable to find a bride. This is apparently unprecedented for a country that is not at war.
China, by 2020, will have some 30 or 40 million more men than women. This group of Chinese bachelors, known as “bare branches”, seemed to actually accelerate from 1990 to 2005, and in ways not directly related to the “One Child Policy” which was introduced in 1979. The real reasons behind this male preference are not entirely understood but poverty and ignorance do play their part, so do prenatal sex-determination technology and the general decline in fertility.

While under natural circumstances the average birth ratio is roughly 104 boys for every 100 girls born. In China, from 2000 to 2004, the number is a sky-high 124 boys for every 100 girls. And even today in 2010 the number stands at 123 boys for every 100 girls. While the numbers for China that are quoted here are “national level” statistics, provinces in China contain wild variations. For example, Tibet has what would be considered a natural birth rate of about 104 boys to every 100 girls, but some of the more rural and backwards provinces have birth statistics as high as 130 boys for every 100 girls.

So what does all this mean for China? Well, having lots of energetic young men around without much work and without a woman to keep them tame is one of the telling influences for many of the world’s social revolutions; so yes, political instability could be a potential outcome. Increased crime rates and the deterioration of traditional family values could also be possible side effects; as well as the proliferation of prostitution and brothels. Fulfilling the needs of these young “bare branches” will be an economic opportunity that surely won’t be missed by those who practice the world’s oldest profession.

The original story is posted below:
Please follow this LINK to the original online version.
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The worldwide war on baby girls
Mar 4th 2010

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

The BMJ study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China’s sexual imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth start entering the official registers on attending school or the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of 15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that sex-selective abortion, not under-registration of girls, accounts for the excess of boys.

Other countries have wildly skewed sex ratios without China’s draconian population controls (see chart 1). Taiwan’s sex ratio also rose from just above normal in 1980 to 110 in the early 1990s; it remains just below that level today. During the same period, South Korea’s sex ratio rose from just above normal to 117 in 1990—then the highest in the world—before falling back to more natural levels. Both these countries were already rich, growing quickly and becoming more highly educated even while the balance between the sexes was swinging sharply towards males.

South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences. The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were “mixed”, mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogenous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government thinks half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children are common enough to have produced a new word: “Kosians”, or Korean-Asians.

China is nominally a communist country, but elsewhere it was communism’s collapse that was associated with the growth of sexual disparities. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, there was an upsurge in the ratio of boys to girls in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Their sex ratios rose from normal levels in 1991 to 115-120 by 2000. A rise also occurred in several Balkan states after the wars of Yugoslav succession. The ratio in Serbia and Macedonia is around 108. There are even signs of distorted sex ratios in America, among various groups of Asian-Americans. In 1975, calculates Mr Eberstadt, the sex ratio for Chinese-, Japanese- and Filipino-Americans was between 100 and 106. In 2002, it was 107 to 109.

But the country with the most remarkable record is that other supergiant, India. India does not produce figures for sex ratios at birth, so its numbers are not strictly comparable with the others. But there is no doubt that the number of boys has been rising relative to girls and that, as in China, there are large regional disparities. The north-western states of Punjab and Haryana have sex ratios as high as the provinces of China’s east and south. Nationally, the ratio for children up to six years of age rose from a biologically unexceptionable 104 in 1981 to a biologically impossible 108 in 2001. In 1991, there was a single district with a sex ratio over 125; by 2001, there were 46.

Conventional wisdom about such disparities is that they are the result of “backward thinking” in old-fashioned societies or—in China—of the one-child policy. By implication, reforming the policy or modernising the society (by, for example, enhancing the status of women) should bring the sex ratio back to normal. But this is not always true and, where it is, the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.

Not all traditional societies show a marked preference for sons over daughters. But in those that do—especially those in which the family line passes through the son and in which he is supposed to look after his parents in old age—a son is worth more than a daughter. A girl is deemed to have joined her husband’s family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As a Hindu saying puts it, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”

“Son preference” is discernible—overwhelming, even—in polling evidence. In 1999 the government of India asked women what sex they wanted their next child to be. One third of those without children said a son, two-thirds had no preference and only a residual said a daughter. Polls carried out in Pakistan and Yemen show similar results. Mothers in some developing countries say they want sons, not daughters, by margins of ten to one. In China midwives charge more for delivering a son than a daughter.


Chasing puppy-dogs’ tails
The unusual thing about son preference is that it rises sharply at second and later births (see chart 2). Among Indian women with two children (of either sex), 60% said they wanted a son next time, almost twice the preference for first-borns. This reflected the desire of those with two daughters for a son. The share rose to 75% for those with three children. The difference in parental attitudes between first-borns and subsequent children is large and significant.

Until the 1980s people in poor countries could do little about this preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began to make their appearance. These technologies changed everything. Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound scans with the slogan “Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (the saving was on the cost of a daughter’s dowry). Parents who wanted a son, but balked at killing baby daughters, chose abortion in their millions.

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

The spread of fetal-imaging technology has not only skewed the sex ratio but also explains what would otherwise be something of a puzzle: sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education, which you would not expect if “backward thinking” was all that mattered. In India, some of the most prosperous states—Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat—have the worst sex ratios. In China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio. The ratio also rises with income per head.

In Punjab Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank discovered that second and third daughters of well-educated mothers were more than twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as their brothers, regardless of their birth order. The discrepancy was far lower in poorer households. Ms Das Gupta argues that women do not necessarily use improvements in education and income to help daughters. Richer, well-educated families share their poorer neighbours’ preference for sons and, because they tend to have smaller families, come under greater pressure to produce a son and heir if their first child is an unlooked-for daughter**.

So modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. When families are large, at least one male child will doubtless come along to maintain the family line. But if you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.

In China the one-child policy increases that pressure further. Unexpectedly, though, it is the relaxation of the policy, rather than the policy pure and simple, which explains the unnatural upsurge in the number of boys.

In most Chinese cities couples are usually allowed to have only one child—the policy in its pure form. But in the countryside, where 55% of China’s population lives, there are three variants of the one-child policy. In the coastal provinces some 40% of couples are permitted a second child if their first is a girl. In central and southern provinces everyone is permitted a second child either if the first is a girl or if the parents suffer “hardship”, a criterion determined by local officials. In the far west and Inner Mongolia, the provinces do not really operate a one-child policy at all. Minorities are permitted second—sometimes even third—children, whatever the sex of the first-born (see map).

The provinces in this last group are the only ones with close to normal sex ratios. They are sparsely populated and inhabited by ethnic groups that do not much like abortion and whose family systems do not disparage the value of daughters so much. The provinces with by far the highest ratios of boys to girls are in the second group, the ones with the most exceptions to the one-child policy. As the BMJ study shows, these exceptions matter because of the preference for sons in second or third births.

For an example, take Guangdong, China’s most populous province. Its overall sex ratio is 120, which is very high. But if you take first births alone, the ratio is “only” 108. That is outside the bounds of normality but not by much. If you take just second children, however, which are permitted in the province, the ratio leaps to 146 boys for every 100 girls. And for the relatively few births where parents are permitted a third child, the sex ratio is 167. Even this startling ratio is not the outer limit. In Anhui province, among third children, there are 227 boys for every 100 girls, while in Beijing municipality (which also permits exceptions in rural areas), the sex ratio reaches a hard-to-credit 275. There are almost three baby boys for each baby girl.

Ms Das Gupta found something similar in India. First-born daughters were treated the same as their brothers; younger sisters were more likely to die in infancy. The rule seems to be that parents will joyfully embrace a daughter as their first child. But they will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure subsequent children are sons.


The hazards of bare branches
Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, “must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.”

Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen (see article). Where people pay a bride price (ie, the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s), that price has risen. During the 1990s, China saw the appearance of tens of thousands of “extra-birth guerrilla troops”—couples from one-child areas who live in a legal limbo, shifting restlessly from city to city in order to shield their two or three children from the authorities’ baleful eye. And, according to the World Health Organisation, female suicide rates in China are among the highest in the world (as are South Korea’s). Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilisers, which are easy to come by. The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters.

Some of the consequences of the skewed sex ratio have been unexpected. It has probably increased China’s savings rate. This is because parents with a single son save to increase his chances of attracting a wife in China’s ultra-competitive marriage market. Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, compared savings rates for households with sons versus those with daughters. “We find not only that households with sons save more than households with daughters in all regions,” says Mr Wei, “but that households with sons tend to raise their savings rate if they also happen to live in a region with a more skewed sex ratio.” They calculate that about half the increase in China’s savings in the past 25 years can be attributed to the rise in the sex ratio. If true, this would suggest that economic-policy changes to boost consumption will be less effective than the government hopes.

Over the next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection will get worse. The social consequences will become more evident because the boys born in large numbers over the past decade will reach maturity then. Meanwhile, the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the developing world.

Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3). There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit.

South Korea was the first country to report exceptionally high sex ratios and has been the first to cut them. Between 1985 and 2003, the share of South Korean women who told national health surveyors that they felt “they must have a son” fell by almost two-thirds, from 48% to 17%. After a lag of a decade, the sex ratio began to fall in the mid-1990s and is now 110 to 100. Ms Das Gupta argues that though it takes a long time for social norms favouring sons to alter, and though the transition can be delayed by the introduction of ultrasound scans, eventually change will come. Modernisation not only makes it easier for parents to control the sex of their children, it also changes people’s values and undermines those norms which set a higher store on sons. At some point, one trend becomes more important than the other.

It is just possible that China and India may be reaching that point now. The census of 2000 and the CASS study both showed the sex ratio stable at around 120. At the very least, it seems to have stopped rising. Locally, Ms Das Gupta argues†††, the provinces which had the highest sex ratios (and have two-thirds of China’s population) have seen a deceleration in their ratios since 2000, and provinces with a quarter of the population have seen their ratios fall. In India, one study found that the cultural preference for sons has been falling, too, and that the sex ratio, as in much of China, is rising more slowly. In villages in Haryana, grandmothers sit veiled and silent while men are present. But their daughters sit and chat uncovered because, they say, they have seen unveiled women at work or on television so much that at last it seems normal to them.

Ms Das Gupta points out that, though the two giants are much poorer than South Korea, their governments are doing more than it ever did to persuade people to treat girls equally (through anti-discrimination laws and media campaigns). The unintended consequences of sex selection have been vast. They may get worse. But, at long last, she reckons, “there seems to be an incipient turnaround in the phenomenon of ‘missing girls’ in Asia.”
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Looking back on Columbia University

Hello.

Last month I was in New York City for a brief visit and I had the chance to speak at Columbia University. The talk was hosted under the Asia Pacific Studies Department and the topic was essentially how I saw political change in China coming about, and what factors may speed up the process. As a photographer who is constantly on the go I feel I have a unique vision and understanding as to some growing pains China is going through.

It's a lecture I had given before, but this time it was different.

This time my talk was a truly unique experience because longtime friend and colleague Howard W. French was present, and not only provided me with a wonderful introduction, but assisted in dealing with many of the complex issues dealt with during the questions and answers.

It was a treat to be able to converse with students and facility, and it was great to be able to agree and disagree with Howard. After Howard basically gave me my first photojournalism job about six years ago we've traveled together what seems like hundreds of times and it was the first time we've been able to discuss our points of view about China in an academic environment.

For those who don't know Howard left the New York Times for an academic position at Columbia University two years ago, he continues to be an active freelance writer and is continuing work on several book projects.

My hope is that I can continue to be active in the academic community and continue to share my perspective and ideas about China's growth and ever changing landscape. Hopefully I can make the journey to Columbia University a regular feature on my stops to New York.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Rural Population of 400 million

Hello.

I live in a mega city; the name of that city is Shanghai. I love my massive city, which is said to be currently bursting at the seams with a population of roughly 20 million people. Whiles the crowds can be intense, I somehow manage to thrive off the energy of the masses. But what will the next 30 years hold?

Whenever I complete a trip in to rural China I am always amazed at how little is there, about how few opportunities exist. While roads and bridges are constantly being build and infrastructure spending is at an all-time high, there are still round 900 million rural residents in China who do very little other than farm, manage a market stall or are involved in basic irregular business. Many of these folks often hold ambitions of moving to the big cities of China, for a chance at a better life, earning a higher wage and having their children attend better schools. So an obvious question looms, how many people can China’s cities really hold?

Can Shanghai really be a functional city with 30 or 40 million residents? Can Beijing’s ill-prepared roads and highway system really handle another one or two million cars? The numbers, once crunched are staggering; and a little scary.

A few weeks back the China Daily, of all sources, ran a story that made me physically shudder. The government of China has predicted that China’s rural population could fall to just 400 million people from its current 900 million. The last 30 years provide most of the proof for this trend of urbanization; you see some 400 million people have moved from the countryside to the cities over the last three decades. So the prediction is that by 2040 there will be another 400 or 500 million people living in China’s cities; that’s an unbelievable figure.

Right or wrong, I am a believer. I strongly believe that China’s urban population will double rapidly increase in the next two or three decades; one only has to visit rural Anhui, Hebei, Henan and Shandong to see how few options exist for those who have chosen to stay closer to home during this current economic boom. As China, over the next 3-5 years eases restrictions on migrant workers and urban registration you could see a flood of people move to the cities, crowding in for better health care and educational services. At the moment the restrictive and complicated Hukou “home registration” system links people to their place of birth, which is often different than where they currently live; and many social benefits can only be claimed in your “home registration” area. This has not restricted the most daring of China’s migrant labor class, but my guess is that once these restrictions are lifted for good, and there is talk of this happening – there will be a biblical flood of people in to urban centers to take advantage of higher living, and service, standards.

So how many of that 500 million will end up in cities like Shanghai? How much more traffic will I have to fight through on my grocery shopping trips? How much longer could the line up get at the bank? My guess is not too many. While 500 million is a large number, my estimate is that Shanghai might double its urban population and become a mega city of 40 million residents. From what I can see at the moment, the creation of suburbs and transportation infrastructure to move people in and out of the city center has hit overdrive. The government is in a real rush to put these pieces in place before Shanghai just becomes a hot and crowded mess.

The real winners in this mass migration, however, will be second tier cities like Hefei, Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming, Guiyang, Nanning, Xi’an, Dalian, Harbin and other notable provincial capitals. They will, under decent guidance, become more livable and offer better services as their population rises; at least that’s the great hope. Fingers crossed that actually happens or the resulting civil unrest could be a large destabilizing factor to the economy and general political stability. Either way, mass migrations or not, it’ll be an exciting process to watch unfold. I’m very glad I bought my ticket early; I’ve got a front row seat.
The China Daily story is posted below in its original form.

China Daily story LINK:
Copy write: China Daily
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Rural population could drop to 400m
February 25, 2010

The country's rural population may drop to 400 million from the current 900 million in the next three decades because of rising urbanization, a senior official has forecast.

The rural population currently stands at 720 million, the latest population figures have shown. But the number does not include the 180 million rural residents who have left their hometowns to live in cities for more than half a year, Han Jun, a senior official at the State Council Development Research Center, was quoted as saying by Beijing News.

In the past 30 years, the urban population has increased by 400 million to hit 600 million. Of these people, 27 percent now live in cities but are not permanent residents.

"Currently, one in four residents in the cities come from the rural population. The current movement of labor from rural to urban areas is expected to continue in the future," Han said.

The country has about 240 million migrant workers, with about half of them born after 1980 and 40 million of them born in the 1990s, the latest official statistics show.

"Young migrant workers are reluctant to go back to the countryside and are eager to be new residents in cities," Han said.

A major policy document released last month addressed the young as "a new generation of migrant workers" for the first time and made it clear that the government is "striving for substantial reform of the household registration system" to help them to register in cities where they can then receive more social benefits.

"Hundreds of millions of farmers are now working for the development of cities and contribute a great deal to tax revenues where they live. However, they cannot enjoy the public services offered in cities. It is not fair," said Zhang Hulin, a professor with the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC.

New-generation migrant workers mostly live in cities and work as security guards, waiters, construction and decoration laborers, and deliverymen.

"More and more citizens have felt the importance of migrant workers to their daily life. But low wages have also made many migrant workers unwilling to stay and work, especially in big cities," Zhang told China Daily yesterday.

So far, 13 provinces and cities such as Hebei and Liaoning have already piloted a unified household registration in rural and urban areas. But many say the reform falls short of offering benefits in education, housing and social security to the new population, Han said.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Multimedia Blog for Resolve

Hello.

Throughout the recent digital revolution in photography, I have continued to shoot film, but there is one area where I have happily adopted new lightweight digital capture -- audio. With the technology jumping leaps and bounds, audio that previously required large, complex recorders can now be captured on small digital recorders, perfect for the kind of multimedia storytelling that I've been exploring.

I’ve been intrigued with the advance of multimedia in the last few year, and especially how it can be used to enhance the art of story telling. I have a deep respect for still photographers moving into video -- like Tim Hetherington and his award-winning documentary Restrepo -- but I'm not ready to turn in my viewfinder for a video camera yet. What feels right to me right now is the multimedia slideshow.

You see, I love to write and I enjoy the process of preparing a script to accompany imagery. The multimedia slideshow allows me to go one step beyond the still image, with regards to story telling, but still aligns with my belief that still images are more powerful than moving ones.

My first dabble in multimedia I decided to create a slidewho of my black-and-white fine-art project on Chinese Turkestan in an attempt to reach a wider audience (above). In my visits to the region, several times a year for the last several years, I began recording audio with a small handheld recorder. For the slideshow's audio I used a "Call to Prayer", essentially a man who stands on the top of the mosque and calls everyone to come and pray several times per day. It is something I hear all the time while working in the region and I thought it was fitting.

My goal here was never to produce a “news” piece or include various clips of audio with fuller story telling. I wanted to create a space for the viewer to fully experience the still image. For that reason, the sequencing was incredibly important, and difficult. I payed particular attention to composition and flow, and I'm still working on it, since the project itself is not yet complete.

One of the exciting things about this first foray into multimedia is starting to think about how this slide show can support the still images in terms of publicity and marketing. For instance, I integrated the slideshow into my presentations at a few universities and galleries during a recent trip to the U.S. I was very pleased with both the impact of the slideshow and the feedback I received. Remembering that the end goal is to have my images reach the widest possible audience, I believe an audio slideshow contribute to that in many ways.

I have several more videos currently in production, including ones with a narrative as well as more audio from locations. You can follow the process on my blog.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Unwritten Rule

Hello.

For years there has been an unwritten rule or agreement between the Communist Party in China, and the subjects that they watch over. That rule has been that, the government will maintain breakneck GDP growth, to keep employment high and wages rising, and the average people will stay out of politics and political debate. In a sense, as Yang Yao says below, that the ruling body in Beijing as been tied to a performance based legitimacy, instead of a classical democratic based legitimacy.

Well, that's all fun; but the real question is how is power transfered? In a democracy we for new representatives and that takes place every 2-4 years. Power is handed over peacefully and in a way that is in line with a constitution which sets out these rules. Decisions may be close, or down to the wire, but power is always relinquished and the process moves as smoothly as it possibly could.

But what happens when Beijing's "Performance Based Legitimacy" comes to an end? What happens when China has GDP growth rates of only 2% a year, and unemployment rates of over 20% a year? What happens then? As the performance decreases the government will begin to lack a power base. What happens when the government loses the ability to generate growth? It's a scary scenario, but one that needs to be talked about today, instead of tomorrow.

When the gap between rich and poor, or city dwellers and rural peasants, becomes too great; will there be social instability? Might that lead to some kind of political upheaval? To be honest I have more questions than answers. But the thought of the Communist Party potentially losing control is frightening. While the government can be big, nasty and ineffective, at least they are fairly stable and predictable. What replaces them could be potentially much nastier.

Please give Yang Yao's piece a look below. Raises a lot of interesting questions.

Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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The End of the Beijing Consensus

Can China's Model of Authoritarian Growth Survive?

Yang Yao
YANG YAO is Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University.
Since China began undertaking economic reforms in 1978, its economy has grown at a rate of nearly ten percent a year, and its per-capita GDP is now twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. Many analysts attribute the country's economic success to its unconventional approach to economic policy -- a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. Time magazine's former foreign editor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, has even given it a name: the Beijing consensus.

But, in fact, over the last 30 years, the Chinese economy has moved unmistakably toward the market doctrines of neoclassical economics, with an emphasis on prudent fiscal policy, economic openness, privatization, market liberalization, and the protection of private property. Beijing has been extremely cautious in maintaining a balanced budget and keeping inflation down. Purely redistributive programs have been kept to a minimum, and central government transfers have been primarily limited to infrastructure spending. The overall tax burden (measured by the ratio of tax revenue to GDP) is in the range of 20 to 25 percent. The country is the world's second-largest recipient of foreign direct investment, and domestically, more than 80 percent of its state-owned enterprises have been released to private hands or transformed into publicly listed companies. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lacks legitimacy in the classic democratic sense, it has been forced to seek performance-based legitimacy instead, by continuously improving the living standards of Chinese citizens. So far, this strategy has succeeded, but there are signs that it will not last because of the growing income inequality and the internal and external imbalances it has created.

The CCP's free-market policies have, predictably, led to major income disparities in China. The overall Gini coefficient -- a measure of economic inequality in which zero equals perfect equality and one absolute inequality -- reached 0.47 in 2008, the same level as in the United States. More disturbing, Chinese city dwellers are now earning three and a half times as much as their fellow citizens in the countryside, the highest urban-rural income gap in the world.

How, then, has the Chinese government been able to adopt the principles of neoclassical economics while still claiming Marxism as its ideological anchor? The answer is that China has for three decades been ruled by a disinterested government -- a detached, unbiased regime that takes a neutral stance when conflicts of interest arise among different social and political groups. This does not mean that Beijing has been devoid of self-interest. On the contrary, the state is often predatory toward citizens, but its predation is "identity-blind" in the sense that Beijing does not generally care about the social and political status of its chosen prey -- unlike many governments elsewhere that act to protect and enrich specific social or political groups. As a consequence, the Chinese government has been more likely than other authoritarian regimes to adopt growth-enhancing policies.

For the last 30 years, the CCP has intentionally adopted policies favoring specific groups or regions to promote reform and economic growth. It has helped that the disinterested CCP government was not permanently beholden to certain groups or regions. China's integration into the world economy is a case in point. At the end of the 1970s, the United States was eager to bring China into its camp as a buffer against Soviet hegemony, and China quickly grasped the opportunity. Yet that early adoption of an "open-door" policy gave rise to domestic resistance: special economic zones, such as Shenzhen, enjoyed an abundance of preferential treatments that other parts of the country envied. Moreover, the CCP's export-led growth model required that Beijing embrace an unbalanced development strategy that encouraged rapid growth on the country's east coast while neglecting the interior; today, nearly 90 percent of China's exports still come from the nine coastal provinces.

China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 was also a calculated move. Before accession, it was widely believed that China would have to endure painful structural adjustment policies in many sectors in order to join the WTO. Even so, the central government actually accelerated negotiations with the organization's members. Despite the burdens it placed on the agriculture and retailing sectors, accession boosted China's exports, proving wrong those who worried about its effects. Between 2002 and 2007, Chinese exports grew by an annual rate of 29 percent, double the average rate during the 1990s.

China's astronomic growth has left it in a precarious situation, however. Other developing countries have suffered from the so-called middle-income trap -- a situation that often arises when a country's per-capita GDP reaches the range of $3,000 to $8,000, the economy stops growing, income inequality increases, and social conflicts erupt. China has entered this range, and the warning signs of a trap loom large.

In the last several years, government involvement in the economy has increased -- most notably with the current four-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan. Government investment helped China reach a GDP growth rate of nearly nine percent in 2009, which many applaud; but in the long run, it could suffocate the Chinese economy by reducing efficiency and crowding out more vibrant private investment.

The economy currently depends heavily on external demand, creating friction among major trading partners. Savings account for 52 percent of GDP, and consumption has dropped to a historic low. Whereas governments in most advanced democracies spend less than eight percent of government revenue on capital investment, this figure is close to 50 percent in China. And residential income as a share of national income is declining, making the average citizen feel poorer while the economy expands. As the Chinese people demand more than economic gains as their income increases, it will become increasingly difficult for the CCP to contain or discourage social discontent by administering the medicine of economic growth alone.

Despite its absolute power and recent track record of delivering economic growth, the CCP has still periodically faced resistance from citizens. The Tiananmen incident of April 5, 1976, the first spontaneous democratic movement in PRC history, the June 4 movement of 1989, and numerous subsequent protests proved that the Chinese people are quite willing to stage organized resistance when their needs are not met by the state. International monitoring of China's domestic affairs has also played an important role; now that it has emerged as a major global power, China is suddenly concerned about its legitimacy on the international stage.

The Chinese government generally tries to manage such popular discontent by providing various "pain relievers," including programs that quickly address early signs of unrest in the population, such as reemployment centers for unemployed workers, migration programs aimed at lowering regional disparities, and the recent "new countryside movement" to improve infrastructure, health care, and education in rural areas.

Those measures, however, may be too weak to discourage the emergence of powerful interest groups seeking to influence the government. Although private businesses have long recognized the importance of cultivating the government for larger profits, they are not alone. The government itself, its cronies, and state-controlled enterprises are quickly forming strong and exclusive interest groups. In a sense, local governments in China behave like corporations: unlike in advanced democracies, where one of the key mandates of the government is to redistribute income to improve the average citizen's welfare, local governments in China simply pursue economic gain.

More important, Beijing's ongoing efforts to promote GDP growth will inevitably result in infringements on people's economic and political rights. For example, arbitrary land acquisitions are still prevalent in some cities, the government closely monitors the Internet, labor unions are suppressed, and workers have to endure long hours and unsafe conditions. Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance. Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.

The reforms carried out over the last 30 years have mostly been responses to imminent crises. Popular resistance and economic imbalances are now moving China toward another major crisis. Strong and privileged interest groups and commercialized local governments are blocking equal distribution of the benefits of economic growth throughout society, thereby rendering futile the CCP's strategy of trading economic growth for people's consent to its absolute rule.

An open and inclusive political process has generally checked the power of interest groups in advanced democracies such as the United States. Indeed, this is precisely the mandate of a disinterested government -- to balance the demands of different social groups. A more open Chinese government could still remain disinterested if the right democratic institutions were put in place to keep the most powerful groups at bay. But ultimately, there is no alternative to greater democratization if the CCP wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social stability.

Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Magazine Revenue 2009

Hello.

It pains me to have to bring this kind of stuff up all the time, but I thought it was important to publish this list. The list in question is the 2009 revenue from the Magazine Publishers of America. And for people like me, who depend on publishers to spend money on images, it makes bleak reading.

A few highlights on the list:

1) The overall average for the difference in revenue between 2008 and 2009 is -18.1%. That means that on average each magazine lost 17% revenue from 2008 to 2009. No small number. Hence the massive layoffs and huge reduction in picture purchasing, especially in assignments to create original imagery.

2) US News and World Report, once a major picture buyer and huge publisher of photojournalism, was down 88% compared to 2008.

3) Portfolio Magazine, one of my clients, went bust.

4) People Magazine was up 3.8%. Maybe I should start up a celebrity photography business in China.

5) National Geographic was down 14%; and NG's other titles like Adventure (which went bust) and Traveler were down at least 30% from 2008.

6) Organic Gardening was up 16% year on year with 2008. Plant photograph anyone?

And the rest makes pretty tough reading. You'll have to follow the link below to see the actual numbers, I couldn't find a format to properly download the statistics and have them cropped in to my blog. Please see below.

LINK: Magazine Publishers of America

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The 126th Best Job

Hello.

This news came out a long while ago, but it's taken me a few weeks to reflect on it. When the list of the Best and Worst Jobs for 2010 appeared I was traveling at the time and just book marked the list and forgot about it. When I had a chance to re-read I was motivated to write down a few notes. And below are some interesting observations.

In January the Wall Street Journal published a list of Best and Worst Jobs 2010, which was compiled by a website named Careercast.com. I'm not sure on the methodology of the study, or survey, but I found it hilarious that "Photographer" was ranked at the #126th best job to have in the USA, and "Photojournalist" was the #189th best job to have.

The list ranked 200 jobs in the order of best to worst and they were based on criteria like: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. All very important factors.

Now I consider myself to be a photographer, not just a photojournalist. Many of the images I take of no journalism merit at all. So, apparently I've dedicated my life to the #126th best job in the US, or the #74 worst job. According to the study if I am starting out in my career I can expect an income of USD 17,000 per year; if I am in the middle of my career I can expect an income of USD 29,000 per year; and if I'm experienced I can expect around USD 62,000 per year.

All of this seems fine and dandy. I'm glad photographer showed up on the list at all. I know I would never steer any of my friends, relatives or children in to the career unless they had a real stomach for the up and downs of the journalism, photography and art industries. My career progression has never been easy and at times it's been downright exhausting. My brother lives in Canada and works in the finance industry and we often joke about switching jobs, he keen on travel and adventure; and I'm interested in a mildly stable income.

But all that joking aside. I'm really not interested in changing professions and I'm not surprised at the job of "Photographer" being listed at #126. Maybe back in the 1970s and 1980s when there were less photographers, more magazines, more advertising revenue and longer, juicier higher paying assignments the job of "Photographer" could have cracked the top 50. But these days, since the digital revolution, competition has intensified and as Canon likes to say in their advertisements, anyone can be a professional photographer with their new EOS digital cameras.

What interests me most about the list is what jobs appear as "better" or "more appealing" than my job. The job of "Photographer" is #126. But lets take a quick look at what jobs appear higher, or nearby, in ranking:

#2 - Software Engineer (Understandable - Stock Options!)
#9 - Accountant (Really?)
#29 - Parole Officer (Dealing with criminals?)
#46 - Librarian (Do libraries still exist?)
#58 - Receptionist (Seriously?)
#62 - Musical Instrument Repair Person (For the adventurist inside you!)
#65 - Publication Editor (Some of my editors may find that funny)
#81 - Teachers Aid (Really, a TA is better than being a photographer?)
#83 - Janitor (Unbelievable!!!!!!!!!!!)
#108 - Security Guard (Nothing is better than working nights)
#109 - Piano Tuner (Always the life of the party)
#125 - Waitress (Working on tips?)
#126 - Photographer (Poor Little Me)
#131 - A Maid (Cleaning Homes?)

Well, the waitress and the maid being that close to Photographer leaves me feeling a bit uncomfortable. But alas that is the basis of the list compiled. Wacky, wild stuff.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Venture into Multimedia

Hello.

I've made my first venture in to multimedia. A huge leap I know, but I have decided to try and organize my photography in such a way to reach a wider audience. The slide show above is from my Chinese Turkestan series and it includes some captured audio and a wonderful bit of music as well. I have a blog prepared for a little later that will go more in depth in to the multimedia process. I hope you can also enjoy that once it runs.

You can also follow this YouTube LINK.

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: PDN Photo of the Day

Hello.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to share some work with everyone. PDN Magazine has published a selection of my Chinese Turkestan project on their Photo of the Day blog. While the images are displayed the multimedia piece that I have prepared as been linked to. Please be sure to check out the links below:

Photo LINK: PDN Photo of the Day

Multimedia LINK: YouTube Audio Slide Show

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Taking Back the Golf Courses

Hello.

I wanted to direct you all to a new bit of work I've completed with writer Dan Washburn. The piece is about the government taking back land from illlegal golf courses. Interesting times in the development of China. Please take a look at Dan's article, wild stuff.

LINK: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/pagenum/2

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The Forbidden Game
China's on-again, off-again war against golf.

By Dan Washburn

Posted Tuesday, March 9, 2010, at 10:04 AM ET

JIANSHAN VILLAGE, Zhejiang, China—Last November, when the Chinese government held a press conference to announce its most recent crackdown on illegal land use, it highlighted five investigations. Three involved heavy industry: a coking plant, a plastics factory, and a rare-earth metals mine. The other two were about golf courses, and they were the ones that made the headlines. "Golf defies rules to gain ground," screamed China Daily.

While the announcement raised a few eyebrows in China's golf industry, it was easy to brush it off as another toothless threat from Beijing. Almost all of the nation's 600 or so completed golf courses are illegal in some way. In order to operate as a golf business in China, you need to have an official license. Since 2004, however, there's been a moratorium on course construction in the country, making the acquisition of such a license impossible. Nevertheless, about 400 new golf facilities have opened their gates in the past six years.

The most generous estimates put the number of golfers in China at a few million—statistically zero percent of the population. While the game is growing in popularity, in many developers' eyes golf courses exist primarily as a means to sell the million-dollar homes that get built around them. On a recent trip to China, a representative of an American course design firm compared the goings-on here to the Oklahoma land run combined with the California gold rush. China, the nation that banned golf development, had somehow emerged as the only country in the world still in the midst of a golf boom.

That was before the government started digging up fairways. The bulldozers arrived at dawn in early December. There were more than a dozen lined up outside the gate of the Anji King Valley Country Club, 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. The convoy drove past the fountain, the bronze knight, and the Tudor-style clubhouse, and arrived at the multimillion-dollar 18-hole course that had been open for little more than a year and was scheduled to play host to a Ladies European Tour event this October. For 10 days, the excavators ripped up turf and snapped irrigation pipes in the soil below.

King Valley's punishment is the harshest thus far, but some in the industry believe government inspectors (the "Beijing golf police," as they have become known on the ground) could make their way throughout the country, one province at a time. Since the beginning of the year, the golf police have been frisking finished and unfinished golf courses throughout central China's Sichuan province, a hotbed of construction activity. Several projects there have been put on hold pending further review.

It makes sense that the "rich man's game" would get special scrutiny. While the Communists lifted their ban on the sport in 1984, golf still suffers an image problem in China, where a weekend round costs $160 on average. Critics have contended that such a high-consumption pastime runs counter to several of President Hu Jintao's primary concerns—among them, rural land rights and the widening gap between rich and poor. Farm land is a precious commodity in a country that must feed 21 percent of the world's population with less than 8 percent of its arable land. China has lost more than 30,000 square miles of agricultural land since 1996, and its current total of about 470,000 square miles is getting dangerously close to the 463,323-square-mile baseline the government believes necessary to sustain its massive population. As such, while golf-related construction accounted for a tiny fraction of the reported 42,000 cases of illegal land usage in China last year, it's good PR for the Communist government to say it's tackling such an elitist activity.

Ironically, it was the Chinese government's reluctance to embrace golf—or at least come up with a set of regulations intended to standardize its inevitable growth—that allowed things to get out of control. China doesn't even know how many golf courses exist within its borders. At the press conference in November, officials at the Ministry of Land and Resources said they were using satellite imagery to get a handle on the number. Back in 2004, when the moratorium was announced, state media reported that only 10 of China's then 176 known courses had received proper approvals from Beijing. One golf developer who wished to remain anonymous—this happens often when reporting on the legally nebulous word of golf construction in China—said the market remains "in chaos," with local governments continuing to approve golf projects despite not having the right to do so.

This was the case in Anji County, where King Valley Country Club is located. Anji had always been one of the poorer parts of Zhejiang province, with bamboo forests its lone claim to fame (some were featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The area's top government official was fond of telling people he had two dreams for Anji: a university and a golf course. Ask anyone in Jianshan village, where that second dream came to fruition, and they'll tell you that King Valley was a pet project of the local government, designed to attract well-heeled patrons from nearby cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai to the impoverished countryside.

There is some evidence that this effort was successful. While Jianshan remains tied to the past—locals still refer to their "production teams," a holdover term from the pre-reform days of China's communal farming system—a walk through the village reveals many signs of growth: small factories manufacturing decorative bamboo wall-coverings, kitschy hotels and restaurants geared at tourists, and construction sites for new housing complexes. All of this followed the 2005 arrival of King Valley.

The official reason for King Valley's bulldozing is simple: The course's builders didn't have the proper approvals to develop the entirety of their 400-acre plot. (Nearly 35 acres of the tract were farmland.) Dig a little deeper, and things don't look that straightforward. A dirt path along a fence offers views of the golf course's back nine, where most fairways now look like freshly plowed fields awaiting planting season. But a closer inspection reveals peculiarities. All of the greens and tee boxes remain untouched, the cuts around them following neat lines. The greens, and what remains of the fairways, are watered and mowed daily. The cart paths are still there. So are the buildings and the landscaping. Smaller shrubs are wrapped in white plastic to protect them from the winter cold. (Click here for a companion photo essay on King Valley's bulldozing.)

"Don't worry—the course is not going to become farmland," one of several workers who remain at King Valley said reassuringly during a visit in January. He said they were repairing the irrigation system and, since the greens were not destroyed, the course could be rebuilt very quickly. How could this be possible? "The local government has certain guanxi with our company," he said.

That guanxi, or favorable relationship, would seem to be strained these days. When Beijing's focus turned to King Valley, local officials ran for the hills. Many denied knowledge that a golf course existed inside the "Anji China Ecotourism and Fitness Center," as King Valley is officially known. (To get around the 2004 moratorium on course construction, "golf" never appears in planning documents for golf facilities in China.) Their case was flimsy: King Valley played host to a stop on China's domestic pro golf tour last summer; it's the official training center of the provincial golf team; and the large sign the local government installed beside the highway included the stylized silhouette of a man swinging a golf club. "Government officials go there all the time," said a village shopkeeper. "Only a ghost would believe their claims."

Despite the workers' assertions at the course, sources familiar with the situation say the company behind the project—Hangzhou-based real estate firm Handnice Group—is in no hurry to pay for the necessary repairs. Many in Jianshan believe the course destruction was a calculated move by local officials, a grand display intended to shield them from punishment from Beijing. Without assurances that the project is fully legal, the existence of a course like King Valley will always be dependent upon the word of local bureaucrats.

The Handnice Group is no innocent bystander here. The risks associated with opening a golf course in China, though seemingly minimal in recent years, are no secret. And while official land designations in rural areas often change on the whims of those in power, it was obvious villagers were farming on a portion of the land that is now a golf course. In fact, the company paid close to $1.2 million in fines for illegal land use between 2006 and 2008. But after each fine, sources say, the local government urged them to carry on with construction. The fines were viewed as a cost of doing business.

As is often the case with major development projects in China, hundreds of villagers were relocated to make room for King Valley. This is typically presented to farmers as a choice, but more than one Jianshan resident admitted their departure from the land was "kind of enforced." Reports suggest this process got messy. The most heated disputes arose over compensation—they usually do—and the noise surrounding a few key blowups may have gotten the project on the central government's short list for investigation.

Because the state owns all land in China, the developer pays the local government, which then distributes payouts to the villagers. Much of the money gets caught in the government filter—recent data suggests more than half of local government revenues come from land sales. One elderly man in Jianshan said the $15,000 settlement he received was not enough to cover the cost of his new home, and that the $200 he receives in "rent" each year from the golf course (where a round can cost $120) is "definitely not enough." He shrugged his shoulders and added, "But what can you do?"

It's unclear what's next for King Valley. When asked for a status update, a worker at the Anji land bureau said only "that's already been dealt with" before hanging up the phone. Another source said "a conclusion has been reached" but it has yet to be made public. Meanwhile, golf course construction in China continues to chug along. One industry veteran, who says his firm has survived "crackdowns" in the past, didn't sound too worried. The number of leads and new projects he discovers during his monthly trips to China remains "astronomical."

"I've been telling people if they shut down 50 percent, even 70 percent, of the projects there are still too many of them," he said. "A hell of a lot of golf courses are still going to be built."

Alice Liu contributed to this report.

Dan Washburn is a Shanghai-based writer. For more on the development of golf in China, visit his Par for China Web site.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/

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Ryan Pyle
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Looking Back on Toronto

Hello.

I get to visit Toronto roughly once a year. And each time I visit it's an incredibly rewarding experience. Not only do I get to spend a week with friends and family, because I grew up in Toronto, I get to network and discuss my work.

This week I had a busy schedule. I participated in an artist lecture, whereby I got to speak about my work in Chinese Turkestan, to a standing room only crowd at the Arta Gallery in the Distillery District, located in Toronto's trendy lakefront area. A special thanks should go out to the Arta Gallery folks as well as my printers at Elevator Digital for helping to organize the event. After that I went knee deep in to the world of academia, with lectures at the Ryerson University School of Journalism and the University of Toronto's China Program.

The Ryerson visit was my second in as many years and I throughly enjoyed the experience. It was an opportunity for me to talk about what it is like living abroad and trying to document another society and culture. I'm always keen to share my experiences in China with an attentive audience and these journalism students were a fantastic audience and sparked some great discussion. As young students interested in journalism I think it's important that they try to understand what kind of options are available abroad.

The University of Toronto talk was equally as rewarding, talking about Change in China and what the future might hold for this awkwardly emerging super power. It's my third visit to the University of Toronto and my first since becoming an Affiliate Member of the Asian Institute, an academic body at the University of Toronto that deals with all things Asia. The reception was warm and I hope there will be much further collaboration with the University moving forward.

So a gallery talk, and a few lectures plus a Leaf's game and a Raptors' game. I had a full week and did a lot of important networking. I am a firm believer in networking and meeting people face to face. While China is my adopted home and I may never leave the Middle Kingdom, I thoroughly enjoy making trips to Europe and North America to meet with gallery owner and editors, and having a chance to promote my work.

Now I am off to New York, trying to build a network from scratch is never easy. Upwards and onwards.

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

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Ryan Pyle
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ryan@ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: China's Fat Children

Hello.

I like to blog about topics that offer a peak in to the psychological makeup of the Chinese, and this story below by Nick Mulvenney offers a unique glimpse in to the thinking behind one of China's top sports officials.

In the article below the President of Beijing's Sports University says that China's youth are essentially fat and out of shape and incapable of defending China from a future war against the Japanese. That is a unique statement for a sports administrator to make.

Now it's true that the president of the Sports University is trying to be shocking, of course he wants more funding for his school and he is more a politician than an educator. But I love the fact that instead of talking about obesity and health, or diabetes, or any of the other health concerns that can occur with child obesity he chooses to try to strike fear in to people's hearts by saying basically that Japan will attack China at some stage in the future and China must be fit enough to defend itself.

Don't you think that sports administrators and educators should stick to talking about gold medals, university athletics and the physical health of children and adults? At what point should a sports administrator make geo-political statements about potential military conflict against a major trading partner? This kind of talk dates back to the 1960s and 1970s; sadly the mentality of a lot of Chinese officials hasn't changed much since then, even though the country's youth are much more progressive.

This article, and the statements made by the President of the Beijing Sports University, offers a unique glimpse in to how many Chinese, especially the older generations, still feel about Japan; and how they feel about the importance of China have a powerful military.

Imagine for a moment if the Athletic Director at the University of North Carolina, famous for a great sports program, made comments about US obesity and the country not being able to defend itself from an attack by the UK, a formal colonial master, or China, a rising super power - he would most likely be removed from his post or pressured to resign. That kind of war mongering and backwards way of thinking doesn't help. Our world is pretty fragile and we all need to choose our words carefully. Someday, perhaps soon, Chinese officials will learn that as well.

Copywrite: Reuters
Original Story LINK
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Reuters

Title: Children exercise during a weight-losing summer camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province

By Nick Mulvenney – Thu Mar 4, 10:52 am ET

BEIJING (Reuters) – China must urgently address the physical fitness of the nation's youth or run the risk of raising a generation incapable of fighting the Japanese in a future war, the head of the country's top sports university said Thursday.

The government must immediately invest some of its new wealth in ensuring that children take regular exercise, Beijing Sports University president Yang Hua told the sports group of the largely ceremonial advisory body to China's annual parliament.

"It is time for the Chinese nation to improve the physical fitness of our next generation," said Yang. "If we miss the next three to five years a whole generation will be next to useless.

"If there was another war against Japan, would the younger Chinese be able to fight the Japanese one-on-one?

"The government has enough money for banquets and for luxurious office buildings, do they not have money for children's physical education?" he added.

Japan invaded and occupied much of China between 1931 and 1945. Rancour over Japanese wartime atrocities has subsided as a diplomatic flashpoint, but it continues to shape Chinese public attitudes toward Japan and its people.

The fitness of China's young dominated the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's sports group, a normally sedate gathering turned into a media circus this year by the presence of hurdler Liu Xiang.

The former Olympic and world champion 110 meter hurdler, unconventionally dressed in jeans with his shirt tails hanging out, was making his first appearance as one of the 22 members of the committee.

"A healthy body is the foundation of everything," he said. "I hope I can be an example to attract more attention to athletics, and encourage our children to be stronger and stronger."

The emphasis on academic education in China -- Chinese teenagers preparing for the university entrance exams often study for more than 12 hours a day -- has been blamed for the lack of exercise undertaken by young.

A year after China's elite athletes succeeded in topping the medals table with a cascade of gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, August 8 was declared "National Fitness Day."

"A survey has shown that Chinese teenagers are behind their Japanese peers in almost every indicator it measured," Jiang Xiaoyu, a senior member of the organizing committee for the Beijing Games, told the meeting.

"The physical fitness of the young is a matter of strengthening our country and our Chinese race."

(Additional reporting by Liu Zhen and Ben Blanchard, editing by Patrick Johnston)
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
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