雜記●草稿

【海洋資源】
2014


2015



光伏效率最新研究




Are Americans Working Less Than the Rest of the World?

Location	Avg Hours Worked Ann	Hours Rank	Labor-Force Participation	Participation-Rate Rank	2013 GDP Change	GDP Rank
Mexico	2,237	1	60.50%	19	1.40%	21
Korea	2,163	2	61.50%	16	2.90%	7
Greece	2,060	3	52.00%	36	-3.90%	38
Chile	2,015	4	59.60%	23	4.20%	2
Russia	1,980	5	68.50%	4	1.30%	22
Latvia	1,928	6	59.40%	24	4.20%	1
Poland	1,918	7	55.90%	34	1.70%	14
Hungary	1,880	8	57.00%	32	1.50%	18
Israel	1,867	9	63.70%	12	3.40%	5
Estonia	1,866	10	68.30%	6	1.60%	16
Portugal	1,852	11	59.30%	27	-1.60%	36
Iceland	1,846	12	81.40%	1	3.60%	4
Lithuania	1,839	13	58.00%	30	3.30%	6
Turkey	1,832	14	50.80%	37	4.20%	3
Ireland	1,815	15	60.50%	18	0.20%	28
United States	1,788	16	63.20%	13	2.20%	9
Slovak Republic	1,772	17	59.30%	28	1.40%	19
Average of OEDC Members	1,770	18	60.10%	21	1.40%	20
Czech Republic	1,763	19	59.30%	29	-0.50%	32
New Zealand	1,752	20	68.20%	7	2.20%	8
Japan	1,734	21	59.30%	26	1.60%	17
Italy	1,733	22	49.30%	38	-1.70%	37
Canada	1,708	23	66.50%	8	2.00%	11
Spain	1,699	24	60.00%	22	-1.20%	34
United Kingdom	1,669	25	63.10%	14	1.70%	15
Australia	1,663	26	64.90%	11	2.10%	10
Luxembourg	1,649	27	59.40%	25	2.00%	12
Finland	1,643	28	65.50%	9	-1.30%	35
Austria	1,629	29	60.90%	17	0.20%	27
Sweden	1,607	30	71.50%	2	1.30%	23
Switzerland	1,576	31	68.30%	5	1.90%	13
Belgium	1,576	32	53.60%	35	0.30%	26
Slovenia	1,550	33	57.20%	31	-1.00%	33
France	1,489	34	56.50%	33	0.70%	25
Denmark	1,438	35	62.40%	15	-0.50%	30
Netherlands	1,421	36	65.20%	10	-0.50%	31
Norway	1,408	37	71.20%	3	0.70%	24
Germany	1,363	38	60.30%	20	0.10%	29

 

【《緬甸】
外媒熱議昂山素季率團訪華（雜）
姚穎、張偉玉：《甸街頭巷尾，人們怎麽看昂山素季訪華
【英國獨立報》（此報道被中文媒體瞎轉）Burma election: China tries to woo opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of poll
《路透社》Irritated with Myanmar, China to woo opposition leader Suu Kyi
【觀察網】一張圖看懂中國在緬甸的利益



《國際網》2013.06.17
方筠嫻：緬甸對華外交政策受地緣政治考量的影響有多大？
（作者為英國切特豪斯中學（Charterhouse School）高三學生）
李晨陽:政治轉型以來的中緬(探索不同規模國家關係模式)
《時代尖兵的博客》2011
“友邦”緬甸為何突然猛抽中國耳光？
中緬關係，我們該如何扭轉危局？

《金融時報中文網》2013.06.19
分析：中緬關係日漸疏遠
一名緬甸部長的顧問說：“我們對中國人的幫助表示‘非常感謝’，然後請他們離開。”


【疲敝的冷戰】
《紐約時報》美國擬在東歐部署重武器，威懾俄羅斯（英文）
路透社轉載
圖片
《Pew》
Key findings from our poll on the Russia-Ukraine conflict




《CNN》Obama: Europe will continue sanctions on Russia
《RT》'US drawing Europe into crusade against Russia, against our interests' – ex-French PM




《一財》
中國成全球綜藝模式競技場 本土原創在哪兒?
《鈦媒體》
外國版權都被買光了，未來中國綜藝模式怎麽走？

《一財》
高通人事連環變動：王翔投奔小米 孟樸回歸
《鈦媒體》
高通中國掌門人王翔加盟小米：小米補“芯”又勝一籌


高通案蝴蝶效應：小米距離專利圍剿有多遠
高通案背後的中美知識產權博弈
高通反壟斷整改變數多 企業哭訴“
國產手機將打專利內戰？誰將會被圍剿



參見。



辛一山，載於《草根網》
淺論道家“虛無”與佛教“空”觀的區別

無神論文化語境下，由於理想缺失，眾多民眾開始新的追求，道家文化和佛教思想無疑成為了被追逐的對象。

由於開始的無神論，無立場使得很多中國人對於佛教和道家思想都感興趣，都有學習的意願。在學習中，民眾對於道家的“虛無”和佛家的“空”難以精準認識。以至於有些人說虛和空是一樣的，有一致性，有些人則說有區別，但具體有什麽區別則說不清。所以本文的主旨是解釋說清虛無與空的區別，以使得這兩個關鍵的概念明晰，讓民眾清楚道家與佛教的基本區別。

首先，在世界觀的宏觀層麵上看道家與佛家有一致性。道家認為，宇宙世界的本原是太極是虛無，佛家認為宇宙世界的本原是空，一切皆空。表麵上兩者的世界觀論述是一致的。但由於佛道兩家不同的出發點和目的性導致了“虛無”與“空”在觀念上出現了很大的不同。

佛教是婆羅門教衍生出來的，其本原是婆羅門教。婆羅門教認為世界的本質是梵，梵我為一，梵是一切的終極。而且世界的一切都是依照本原梵進行輪回的。婆羅門教“梵”的輪回流轉理論中，出現了同一“梵”在不同人身上呈現出來的不同性矛盾。釋迦牟尼覺悟到世界的本質是空，無論是大的宇宙或者是人，還是細小的物體其本質都是空。現代物理學知識也讓我們知道，即使到了院子層麵上，空的定義是正確的。因為分子、原子等百分之90幾是空的。釋迦牟尼指出人要覺悟擺脫輪回的苦痛隻有通過“空”這一途徑。因此“空”成為佛家弟子修煉覺悟的方法。由於有對世界本原這樣的認識，佛家認為“諸行無常、諸法無我”。釋迦牟尼覺悟到跳出輪回苦海的方法就是無我。因此無欲無求、無我的修煉方法成為佛家的根本修煉法。在這其中釋迦牟尼將婆羅門教定義世界本原“梵”發展完善為“空”。佛教的“空”觀，空性、無我等從目的性來講是為了完成覺悟的個人修煉方法，是從本體個性化來體悟世界的本質。

道家的“虛無”則是出自於對世界的認識。道家認為世界的本原是太極，是虛無。太極學說源於易的陰陽文化，我國傳統的陰陽文化將世界上所有的事物都分為陰陽，陰陽相互轉變、相互影響。陰陽是由太極衍生出來的，這隻是一個理論上的說法，無礙於實際運用，因此曆史上很少有人專項考證“太極”。道家的方法論是思想重視實用，因此陰陽平衡被運用於各式事物之中。“虛無”雖是太極定義導引出來的，但這個方法也是道家個人強身壯體的實用方法。道家認為人的壽命有限，打破有限生命極限的方法是學習天地長久的方法。天地長久的方法就是不依賴外界的條件而生存。因此道家認為采用“虛空”納氣的方法可以擺脫依賴食物維持生命這樣的方式，有利於長生不老。鬼穀子說：“命之機在於氣，氣之機在於心”延續生命在於氣，鍛煉意識的自我控製能力就是養生。“虛無”就是練氣的基本方法。入靜是導致虛無的方法，這有點類似於物理上追求達致-273k這樣的狀態，當到達絕對零度當然一切都靜止歸於根本。就是所謂的”致虛極、守靜篤“。道家的”虛無觀是實用性的，他源於實際上求解問題的需要，也源於對規律性的不懈求解。所以從方法論本原來看，道家的“虛無”觀來源與長期對客觀世界觀察的歸納，而佛家的“空”觀則來源與本體的“自悟”和經驗的傳授。

道家和佛家的思想其根本是無神論，而現在很多的佛教和道教心中都將其迷信化、神秘化。事物本無所謂對錯，觀念的不同隻是觀察角度和出發點的不同，還有目的性的不同也會導致出現類似的觀念演化出很不同的結果，佛教的“空”和道家的“虛無”就是一例。言猶未盡之處請方家見諒。




《The European Financial Review》
A Different Global Power? Understanding China’s Role in the Developing World
June 19, 2014 • China & The World Series, Editor's choice, Emerging & Frontier Markets, Global Focus, WORLD
By Xiangming Chen & Ivan Su

China is now the largest trading nation in the world, with strong ties to Africa, Latin and America and the Middle East. This once impoverished and isolated nation has lifted several hundred millions of its own people out of poverty and is now reshaping the developing world. This article looks at China’s involvement in four developing regions to assess China’s influence as a rising global power.

The China where the first author grew up through college in the early 1980s was the largest and one of the poorest developing countries. The China where the second author left to attend high school in the United States was about to pass Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, in 2010. Over the past three decades, China has lifted over 500 million of its people out of poverty. Globally, China has just surpassed the United States to become the largest trading nation in the world and is expected to soon overtake the latter as the world’s largest economy (in terms of purchasing power parity or PPP). More importantly regarding the focus of this essay, China is now the largest trader and investor in Africa, with its footprints spreading and seeping into all corners of the developing world.

How did the once impoverished and isolated “Third World” country become a powerful force in shaping a new developing world in the 21st century? What are the positive vs. negative consequences of China’s inroads into developing countries by exporting its urbanism to Africa, for example? These questions highlight China’s global impact that matters a great deal to the everyday life of millions of poor people in developing countries. In this essay, following China’s global footprints in four developing regions, we offer a broad comparison of both the different and consistent economic impacts of China within and across these regions.1 Figure 1 shows China’s investment in energy and infrastructure in the four regions, while Figure 2 breaks China’s investment into four specific sectors of one major country in each of the four regions. Guided by these comparative data and focusing on four developing regions, we present a broad picture of China’s widespread but mixed role in developing countries, thus offering a preliminary assessment of whether China’s influence as a rising global power may differ from the traditional or established Western powers in how they approach the developing world.

Over the past three decades, China has lifted over 500 million of its people out of poverty.

China in Asia: Exerting Neighbouring Influences

Back in the last decades of the 20th century, the drivers and role models for development in Asia and beyond were the “Four Tigers”: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. The onset of the 21st century began to position China toward the epicentre of the Asian economy, with its influence spreading across the continent through more trade, outward investment, and other outgoing initiatives such as cross-border infrastructure development.

In Southeast Asia, China has been trying to integrate with the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which consists of China’s Yunnan Province, Guangxi Autonomous Region, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. “China’s trade with each of the GMS countries has grown since 1990, most rapidly since 2000.”2 In addition to increasing trade, China exerts strong influence on the GMS through various development projects. In Myanmar, China has reached a $20 billion agreement to construct an 800-kilometre rail link between Myanmar’s Chinese border and its western coast.3 In addition to investing in infrastructure, China is also helping its neighbors to generate energy. Since 2005, China has invested over $87 billion in the energy sector across Asia, and about one quarter of these investments went to Malaysia. In 2010, an $11 billion energy deal signed between China’s State Grid Corporation and Malaysia Development Company included four hydroelectric mega-dams that are capable of generating up to 28,000 megawatts of power, an aluminium-smelting plant, exploitation of coal mines containing 1.5 billion metric tons of coal, and a 40 billion-cubic-feet natural gas development project. “With Malaysia reeling from an exodus of capital over the past two years, the projects have strong support at the state and federal levels. Officials hope the plan will attract foreign investment to the region.”4 

China’s investment in Asia is not limited to Southeast Asia, as countries in South and Central Asia have also been affected by China’s direct investment. In 2013, China established a strong foothold in South Asia when it took over the upgrading and operation of Pakistan’s Gwadar Port from Singapore. The Gwadar project serves China’s “Go West” policy while allowing Pakistan to “look east.” China is building a road from Gwadar all the way north to Kashgar, the westernmost large city in Xinjiang. At the same time, Pakistan and China have also planned to connect the port via the Indus Highway, which will provide China with a land-based supply of oil from Central Asia. Given Gwadar’s geographical location, Gwadar cuts China’s distance from the Persian Gulf, from which China gets 60% of its oil, by thousands of kilometres.5

Since 2005, China has invested over $87 billion in the energy sector across Asia, and about one quarter of these investments went to Malaysia.

Compared to the other energy projects sponsored by China, the Central Asian vector of China’s energy policy has become more important due to the region’s abundance of oil and natural gas. While China sees Kazakhstan’s energy supply a key to its “Go West” program, Kazakhstan has used Sino-Kazakh cooperation to balance against Russia’s influence in its energy sector. China is also constructing a 1,800-kilometre natural gas pipeline from one of the world’s largest natural gas exporter, Turkmenistan, which benefits from doubling its energy supply to China and circumventing its biggest competitor – Russia. Beijing wins by securing new gas supplies and thus enlarging its already hefty investment in energy projects in Asia (see Figure 1).



China in Africa: Reaching Maximum Impact

Through increasing trade and investment, China’s growing presence has reshaped the landscape in Africa. While negligible two decades ago, China-Africa trade reached $200 billion in 2013, which makes China Africa’s largest trading partner today. With only limited investment in Africa before the 2000s, China’s cumulative investment in Africa exceeded $150 billion by the beginning of 2014. Of these investments, close to $100 billion has gone into energy and infrastructure projects.6

China’s unprecedented economic growth requires an increasing amount of oil to sustain it. In 2012, close to one-third of China’s total oil imports came from Africa, and China is looking to expand its energy presence in Africa. Nigeria has received the most Chinese direct investment over the past decade. While many Western energy firms are reluctant, China reached a $10 billion hydrocarbon deal with Nigeria at the beginning of 2014 (see Photo 1). In addition to exploiting crude oil and natural gas, China has been involved in constructing an additional refinery in Baro, Nigeria.7 Although critics have attributed China’s heavy footprint in Africa’s energy sector to its energy and resource demand back home, evidence suggests otherwise. China Africa Sunlight Energy Ltd. recently invested $2.1 billion in developing a 2,100-megawatt plant to help ease electricity shortages in Zimbabwe, which is only capable of generating 1,320 megawatts against a demand of 2,200 megawatts of electricity. “China Africa Sunlight Energy is looking at the possibility of pumping gas to the port city of Beira in neighbouring Mozambique, using an idle pipeline that the National Oil Co. of Zimbabwe once used to bring fuel into the country.”8 This power plant is expected to produce 300 megawatts by mid-2015, and the number is looking to double by the end of the year. While much of the media attention has focused on China’s investment in Africa’s energy sector, China is reshaping Africa’s landscape through large-scale infrastructure development.

Since 2005, China has invested more in Africa’s infrastructure than in any other part of the developing world. More than $44 billion has been spent to build roads, airports, and housing that are essential to the continent’s economic development. In Angola, China is helping the country’s reconstruction effort after the devastating civil war. One of China’s major investments in Angola is the rebuilding of the Benguela Railway, “an 840-mile transcontinental railway that links the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola with rail networks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. The project is expected to cost $300 million, and it will provide a much-needed cheap outlet for Congolese and Zambia copper, tin and coltan.”9 In Nigeria, China is helping to build Africa’s largest free trade zone in its commercial capital, Lagos. “A total of 16,500 hectares of land bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Lagos and Lekki lagoons has been earmarked for the whole free zone, which will include a deep-water sea port and a new international airport in close proximity.”10 The Lekki Free Trade Zone is aiming to cut down the country’s reliance on imports, and it will cost $5 billion to complete the first phrase of the project, which will cover 3,000 hectares of land. The construction will also include roads, power plants, and water plants. This evidence reinforces China’s substantial investment in building Africa’s infrastructure relative to the energy sector in comparison with the other developing regions (see Figure 2).



However, concerns arise on whether Africa is too dependent on China as results of “high commodity prices and investment inflows.”11 With China-Africa trade looking to hit $280 billion by 2015, some worry that African economies depend too much on China. Some urge African countries to diversify their economies and decrease their dependence on China. There are also calls for China to focus more on human rights and community engagement. As such a dominant investor in some African countries including those with an authoritarian government like Zimbabwe, China struggles to balance between the return on its huge investment, helping local development and living up to international norms of engagement.

With only limited investment in Africa before the 2000s, China’s cumulative investment in Africa exceeded $150 billion by the beginning of 2014.

China in Latin America: Extending the Reach

Ever since the 1960s, China has been providing limited development assistance to a small number of Latin American countries such as Chile. Fast-forward to the 21st century, China has considerably expanded its economic ties with Latin America through greater trade and more diverse investment. 

“Trade between China and Latin American countries has grown exponentially over the past decade. Although Sino-Latin American trade continues to remain a relatively small share of their respective global trade, growth has exceeded many expectations. From 2000 to 2009, annual trade between China and Latin American countries grew more than 1,200%, from $10 billion to $130 billion, according to the United Nations statistics.”12 In 2012, Latin America accounted for 13% of China’s total outbound investment – about $11.4 billion, a significant increase from the $120 million of 2004.

In 2012, Latin America accounted for 13% of China’s total outbound investment – about $11.4 billion, a significant increase from the $120 million of 2004.

Like in Asia and Africa, China has favoured the energy sector in Latin America (see Figure 1), targeting Venezuela for its oil and Brazil for its hydropower. Of China’s $100 billion investment in Latin America since 2005, more than half has been energy and infrastructure related. In 2010, China’s State Grid announced a $1 billion buyout of seven Brazilian power transmission companies. Two years later, in 2012, China’s State Grid was chosen by the Brazilian government to build a $440 million power-transmission project. And at the end of 2013, China’s State Grid led a group to win the rights building a $21 billion hydropower plant in Brazil. Set to become the world’s third-largest hydropower plant and take around 46 months to complete, it will also create a 2,092 km hydropower transmission line and two energy converter stations that will be able to take energy from the State of Pará, along the Xingu River in the Amazon Basin, to Brazil’s Southeast region, with a planned capacity of 11,233 megawatts. Brazil’s economic acceleration in the past decade led to a surge in the country’s energy demand. Given Brazil’s geographical endowment, as much as 80% of its total energy comes from hydropower generation.13 With power generation operating close to the limit, Brazil is urgently constructing more power plants using the Amazon’s abundant hydro resources and transmitting it to its Southeast region, especially Rio de Janeiro where much more energy is needed in light of the upcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics in 2016. To do so, Brazil has turned to China for its expertise and experience in building long-distance power transmission towers or the so-called electricity pylons (see Photo 2).

Besides its growing economic presence in Latin America, China has made some cultural inroads as well. Since 2012, China has opened 32 new Confucius Institutes all over Latin America, a Chinese foreign ministry deputy announced. Hotels in the region have begun to prepare for the increasing number of Chinese tourists by making the menus available in Mandarin.14 This confirms the larger trend of more Chinese tourists going to developing countries beyond Asia and advanced economies in North America and Western Europe, making China the world’s number one tourist-sending nation in 2013 with approximately 100 million overseas trips.

In 2012, Latin America accounted for 13% of China’s total outbound investment – about $11.4 billion, a significant increase from the $120 million of 2004.

China in the Middle East: Reviving the Silk Road

Tracing what China is doing in the conventionally defined developing world has taken us to Asia, Africa and Latin America. Yet given China’s huge demand for external energy, we are not surprised at all to see China’s growing presence in the Middle East, whose energy sector ranks second behind Asia in absorbing Chinese investment (see Figure 1).

Despite China’s massive efforts to secure energy from Asia and Africa, as well as from Venezuela in Latin America, its dependency on Middle Eastern oil has risen over time. The Middle East is currently the largest exporter of crude oil to China. The share of oil imported by China from the Middle East was 48% in 1990, 49% in 2005, and 51% in 2011. It is expected that China’s crude oil imports from the Middle East will reach 70% by 2020 and continue to grow until 2035, according to the International Energy Agency. Saudi Arabia is China’s largest energy supplier with about one million barrels per day, accounting for 20% of China’s crude oil imports. Iran, another big oil supplier, contributes about 10% to China’s overall oil imports as well (see Figure 2). China has maintained a friendly relationship with both Saudi Arabia and Iran. A number of top Chinese leaders including Hu Jintao and the current president Xi Jinping have visited Saudi Arabia. And China has been dragging its feet on the UN sanctions against Iran.15 These diplomatic postures toward the Middle East conform to China’s pragmatic economic policies and interests in other energy- and commodity-rich regions such as Africa and Latin America.

But China’s interest in the Middle East does not stop with oil. “As with other regions, China has rapidly expanded its economic ties with the Middle East through trade. From 2005 to 2009, China’s total trade volume with the Middle East rose 87%, to $100 billion and reached approximately $222 billion in 2012, according to China’s official statistics. This surge pushed China to surpass the United States as the top destination for the Middle East’s exports in 2010. China’s exports to the Middle East are primarily low-cost household goods that benefit the average Middle East consumer. An example is growing numbers of Egyptians being able to afford inexpensive Chinese cars. Also, residents in the Gaza Strip suffering from the Israeli blockade depend on cheap Chinese goods in their daily lives.”16

While ambitious and already far-reaching and powerful, China’s role in reshaping the developing world will only grow and remain uncertain over time.

As many African countries have done, some Middle Eastern governments have brought Chinese contractors in to work on major infrastructure projects. Egypt has also partnered with China to develop its Suez special economic zone, a development strategy that China had used itself and promoted in Africa and the least developed parts of Southeast Asia like Laos. While China has diversified its investment in the Middle East, it is much more concentrated in the energy sector than in infrastructure (Figure 1). This further establishes China’s significant dependency on the Middle East for energy resources, namely oil. However, once we factor in the non-oil related Chinese economic activities, China’s footprint in the Middle East becomes somewhat similar to the large scope of China’s economic influence in the other three developing regions, especially in several major countries where China has moved beyond energy into infrastructure and commodities (see Figures 1 and 2). In this sense, the Middle East still marks the old destination for China’s new effort to revive the ancient Silk Road through Central Asia.

The Middle East still marks the old destination for China’s new effort to revive the ancient Silk Road through Central Asia.

China’s Ambitious and Uncertain Role

Judging by a sampling of evidence across the four developing regions, we characterize China’s role as very ambitious and yet uncertain. The ambitious aspect is increasingly fueled by China’s abundant surplus capital in both private and public hands that may have a stronger effect on the urban landscape and transport infrastructure of developing countries than on its quest for the latter’s energy and commodities.

On the bank of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh, the $700 million Diamond Island Riviera, a joint venture mixed-used development project involving a Chinese company, includes three 33-story condominium towers, a shopping mall, a hospital, an international school and two pedestrian shopping streets with signs in Mandarin. Before its scheduled completion in 2017, Chinese buyers, especially Shanghainese, are already buying the condos in cash as investment properties.17

It is again in Africa where the transport infrastructure is the poorest in the developing world that China is scaling up its investment most aggressively. On his recent four-country tour of Africa, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang committed to set aside $2 billion for an African Development Fund and promised his support for a high-speed rail network connecting African capitals. As a start, China Railway Construction Corporation made a $13.1 billion deal to build an 860-mile high-speed railway in Nigeria that would employ more than 4,000 workers during construction, and 5,000 more afterward.18 Claiming no-strings-attached, China’s ambitious effort can deviate from the precedent of Western colonial powers who had built highly limited transport infrastructure for shipping out their craved commodities from Africa. Yes it is uncertain that the Chinese will succeed where the earlier powers largely failed.

As further evidence on its ambition to build the developing world’s urban and transport infrastructure, China is funding and building Nicaragua’s lifelong dream in having its own canal since the 19th century, when it rivaled Panama for control of the waterway. In August 2013, President Daniel Ortega announced that a $40 billion contract had been signed with a Hong Kong-based Chinese company that would design a route and start construction in December 2014 and manage the canal for 50 years. Estimated to cost as much as $60 billion, an infrastructure project of this massive scale is very uncertain in terms of returning investment to China. Yet China might not be looking for a quick return on investment, but to control a trade route independent from U.S.-managed Panama.19

The uncertain aspect of China’s strong role has also run into trouble in the Middle East. Despite China’s political advantage in taking a somewhat neutral position regarding Iran under West-imposed sanctions in order to continue buying its oil, Iran’s Ministry of Oil has recently removed China from the project to develop the South Azadegan oilfield because of long delays. This puts China’s non-political or no-strings-attached approach to dealing with developing countries, especially those with an authoritarian domestic system and a precarious international status, to test or at risk.

While ambitious and already far-reaching and powerful, China’s role in reshaping the developing world will only grow and remain uncertain over time. It highlights the ongoing debate about whether China merely exploits commodity and energy resources in developing countries as the old West or truly promotes national and local development through its overseas infrastructure construction and other positive means as a new global power. This debate will not be settled for a long time as we continue to scrutinize China’s powerful role in shaping the developing world during the 21st century.





June 9, 2015
Helicopter or hands-off: today’s parents can’t seem to win
【可憐天下父母心】
Whether you are over-protective or more laissez-faire, the chances are that someone, somewhere will be criticising your parenting style.
Jennie Bristow


瞧，媽媽來了！

Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University in California, has criticised “highly educated parents and academic schools” for producing, in the words of a Sunday Times headline, a “generation of no-copers” who achieve perfect grades in school but “cannot cope with the real world”.

“The idea that children have to have a string of A grades is a terrible thing”, Dweck told The Sunday Times, putting the blame for all these A grades on “parental influence”. “In the past few generations we have seen the emergence of highly educated mothers … They schedule all these activities and advocate for the child.”

Dweck is alluding to the phenomenon of “intensive mothering” – where the rearing of children has come to be seen as a highly skilled, expensive, and challenging pursuit that demands that parents (and particularly mothers) put increasing amounts of time and intellectual energies into ensuring their children’s optimal development. Indeed, the argument that the malaise of today’s youth is down to a generation of parents who are too ambitious and overprotective to allow their children grow up is becoming an increasingly common one.

There is even a label – the “helicopter parent” – which hails from the US but, like many such cultural tropes, has been gleefully adopted over here. The helicopter parent is, allegedly, a product of the Baby-Boomer generation of parents who, indulged and self-indulgent themselves, are now importing their spoiled individualism into their own little “Mini-Me"s.

It is hardly surprising that the Baby Boomers are coming under fire for their alleged parenting styles. My research into the media and policy discussion about the Boomer generation indicates that, in recent years, it has found itself blamed for a bewildering range of social problems: from the global financial crisis to the disintegration of the welfare state. Given that parents in general seem to be blamed for an awful lot these days, Baby Boomer mums and dads make convenient scapegoats for wider anxieties about child rearing.

But when it comes to the demands of today’s parenting culture, they really can’t do right for doing wrong. The complaint about “helicopter parenting” simplifies a difficult cultural problem – widespread societal anxiety about allowing children to grow up – and presents it as a question of individual parents’ attitudes and behaviours.
Concerted cultivation

It is, of course, a problem that the younger generation is infantilised by a culture of overprotection. Children are ferried from pillar to post rather than being allowed to play outside with each other. Young adults turn up to university interviews with mum and/or dad in tow. Increasingly, young people seem unwilling or unable to handle ideas or speech that they find offensive, let alone to deal with the harder knocks of life.


Parenting comes naturally to some

In education, it is a problem that the pursuit of top grades is increasingly seen as not only the main goal of education, but a task to be undertaken by parents themselves. The relentless pursuit of what the US sociologist Annette Lareau has termed “concerted cultivation” speaks to a one-sided approach to growing up, where instrumentalist, individualised concerns about academic and career success often seem to take the place of a wider focus on the good society, or the life well lived.

But can this all be the fault of pushy, highly-educated, helicopter parents? The deeper problem is the “double bind” of parenting culture in which parents are exhorted to protect their children from an expanding range of physical harms, emotional challenges, and perceived slights. When parents are continually told that their paramount concern should be the safety and success of their children, no wonder kids are scared to venture out alone and parents end up doing their homework for them.
Double bind

The helicopter parent trope presents the parent trying her hardest to meet the impossible demands of child-centred parenting – often involving a significant financial, emotional, and time cost – as a selfish “tiger mother” who is setting her child on the path to anxiety and self-harm.


Stop whining Jemima, you are going to ballet class and that’s all there is to it.

Meanwhile, parents who lack the economic, cultural or personal resources to engage in helicopter parenting are also frowned upon, for not being involved enough in their children’s education, or concerned enough about their health, safety, or emotional well-being. Just look at the official opprobrium directed at parents who allow their children to get a bit fat, miss a bit of school, fail their exams, or break a limb in an unsupervised playground.

Our culture may sneer at helicopter parents – but it is even less accepting of parents who can’t, won’t, or simply don’t want to hover over their children every minute of the day. Indeed, reading US sociologist Robert Putnam’s new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, you would be forgiven for thinking that the only thing standing between a child’s half-decent future and the slough of poverty and despondence is their parents’ ability to invest in an Ivy League education and improving extracurricular activities around the clock, while also finding the time to sit down to a “family meal” every day of the week.

We know, deep down, that such “paranoid parenting” is unnecessary, unappealing, unattainable – and probably unkind. But so great is the fear of what might happen if they don’t do it that many parents find themselves pushed in this direction.

The existence of the double bind of parenting culture indicates that what is at stake here is not simply the alleged failure of some parents to live up to an ideal parenting standard. Rather, the idea that parents can do right by their children – whatever they do – is held in question.

Media and policy circles are filled with people issuing their own contradictory warnings and prescriptions about what children should eat, how they should play and what parents should do – while nobody seems to want to listen to the parents themselves.

《金融時報》
Ukraine set to become top corn exporter to China in first half
Beijing looks to diversify grain purchases

Call it corn diplomacy. Ukraine is set to become China’s top supplier of corn in the first half of 2015 as both countries reap the benefits of closer trade relations and Beijing looks to diversify its grain and oilseed purchases.

The latest customs data for May shows China imported 403,881 tonnes of corn — mainly used as livestock feed — of which almost 95 per cent came from Ukraine. This takes the total imports from Ukraine — the bread basket of eastern Europe — to 1.55m tonnes for the first five months of the year, or nearly 90 per cent of China’s overseas corn purchases.
Chinese corn imports

Ukraine has established itself as China’s top corn exporter at a surprising pace since its first ever corn shipment to the country in 2012 after Kiev and Beijing signed a $3bn loan-for-corn deal. Ukrainian agricultural groups have sought investment and export deals with Chinese companies such as Cofco, the state-owned grains trader.



The eastern European country’s ascent has come at the expense of the US, which until last year was the top corn exporter to China. For the first five months of this year, China imported a total of 45,000 tonnes from the US, down 95 per cent from the same time last year.

Ukraine’s deepening relationship with China will support the country’s struggling agricultural sector amid continuing tensions with neighbouring Russia. Meanwhile, imports from Ukraine help satisfy China’s growing demand for grains and meat.

But Ukraine is not the only eastern European exporter to make a mark in China this year. Corn from Bulgaria totalled 99,000 tonnes in the first five months, up by 23 times.

Some economists suggest that the rising imports from eastern Europe fit in with China’s new “Silk Road” plan, which aims to upgrade road and rail links between Europe and Asia while also revitalising maritime routes across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

“Ukraine is on the new trade route to Europe that China wants to develop. It also meshes with China promoting investment and infrastructure in parts of the world that are neglected,” said Fred Gale, senior economist at the US Department of Agriculture.

Compared to soyabeans, where China consumed almost two-thirds of the world’s exports last year, the country is not a large importer of corn. In 2014 it bought 2.6m tonnes from overseas producers, less than 2 per cent of total world trade.

Since 2013, bumper domestic crops have meant that state warehouses are bulging with inventory. Moreover, both international and Chinese agricultural authorities have underestimated the level of corn inventories, leading to a reduction in import forecasts.

Nevertheless, as meat consumption continues to rise and agricultural output growth hits a wall due to the lack of water, land and labour, China is expected to turn to imports.

Reducing its reliance on food commodities from one country, namely the US, is another likely reason behind the Ukraine strategy. This will be deeply worrying for US corn exporters.

In soyabeans, for example, Brazil overtook the US as the top exporter to China in 2013, and last year accounted for 46.5 per cent of the country’s overseas purchases by value compared to the US, which accounted for 40 per cent, according data from the International Trade Centre in Switzerland.



《World Affiars - LatinAmerican Post》
What Does the TPP Mean for LatAm?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed trade deal among twelve Pacific Rim countries, including the United States, is largely discussed in the context of President Barack Obama’s administration’s “pivot to Asia.” However, three Latin American countries, Mexico, Peru, and Chile are also involved in negotiations. The TPP will not transform these economies, says CFR's Shannon  K. O’Neil, but it will "allow them them to enter the world stage with similar rules that are applied to the United States and other [wealthy countries]." She says that for these countries to reap the benefits of the TPP they will have to produce more value-added goods in a competitive way.

How significant is the TPP for the Latin American countries involved?

It’s an important trade agreement. Mexico, Peru, and Chile will be part of this larger group, which makes up almost 40 percent of world GDP. These countries have decided that their path forward is to embrace globalization and free trade agreements. They’ve signed trade agreements with many different nations, and this would be a quite-large regional bloc.

However, these countries already have free trade agreements, and [in the case of Peru and Chile, produce] commodities, whose tariffs aren’t high to begin with. I don’t see the TPP as transformative for these countries, but it does allow them to enter the world stage with similar rules that are applied to the United States and other [wealthy countries], and will potentially give exporters access to more markets.

The TPP can provide opportunities if the Latin American nations that are involved can climb the value-added chain, invent, say, the next Apple computer, and produce these products in competitive ways. The challenge is that other participants, for instance Vietnam [another member of the TPP] are also trying to upgrade their exports. Being part of the TPP is like joining a club. You have to perform when you get there.

Colombia is the only member of the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc that spans Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, that is not part of TPP negotiations. Why hasn’t Colombia been included?

While APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] membership is not required, all countries involved in TPP are members; Colombia, though it has applied for APEC membership, has not yet been admitted. The countries that began the process of forming the TPP are wary of expanding to new nations in this initial negotiation. Colombia has expressed its interest in joining, but the thought is that they wouldn’t be included in this round because adding another country to the bloc means adding yet another set of demands to already difficult negotiations.

Through NAFTA and bilateral trade agreements, the United States already does nearly $500 billion in annual trade with Mexico, and $15.8 billion and $28.3 billion with Peru and Chile, respectively. Will this boost trade between these countries?

It won’t boost trade directly between the United States and these countries because we already have free trade agreements. The TPP is coming on the back of the Pacific Alliance, which has already spurred some integration. Still, it could—particularly in the case of Mexico—deepen existing regional supply chains that create products such as autos, electronics, aerospace[craft],  by opening up new markets, reducing tariffs, and getting into the Japanese and these other Pacific markets. It provides a larger market for companies that have already taken advantage of NAFTA.

How strong is domestic support for the TPP in Mexico, Peru, and Chile?

Support for the TPP and trade in general in these countries is higher than it is in the United States. There is a sense in these countries that openness is the way to go. Of course, there are some people who disagree, but the political debates aren’t as divided as they are in the United States. Public opinion polls show that many of the citizens of these countries believe in free trade.

What are some of the sticking points for Latin American countries in trade talks?

Intellectual property rights is an issue—the challenge of whether prices on particular drugs will go up and make them unaffordable to segments of the population. The concern is that protection of intellectual property rights could make it difficult for countries to produce, say, generic AIDS drugs or other types of [life-saving] drugs.

In Mexico, there are worries about changing current rules of origin— or where parts are made—percentages for autos, and opening up the North American industry to heavy Japanese competition. So one important issue is domestic-content levels and for Japenese cars vis-a-vis North American–created cars. Here, Mexico and the United States want a higher percentage of the production to be in North America; Japan wants the opposite. Every country comes with a list of things that are important to them, and Latin American countries are no exception. Overall, I think they’re a lot closer to the United States than some other nations in terms of what they want.

Could the TPP negatively affect neighboring countries—such as Brazil, Argentina, or Venezuela—that are not  party to the agreement?

The TPP will likely further separate the economic paths these countries have chosen. Embracing the TPP means that you’re betting your economic growth will come from exports,  imports, and exposure to the rest of the world in ways that some of these other countries—which have chosen more protected, state-led industrial policies—have not at least yet decided to do. The question is, once the TPP is in effect, would those countries down the road want to join? They could later if their populations and governments felt it would be beneficial.

Mexico’s economy has a strong manufacturing base, while Peru and Chile’s economies are more reliant on commodity exports. How does that affect what each country stands to gain or lose in a potential agreement?

There’s a real question of how important the TPP will be in the short-to-medium term. Mexico can probably take advantage the quickest because of its diversified manufacturing base. Within the Pacific Alliance agreement, Mexico will probably benefit the most because it has a different economic base than the other countries. Mexico complements rather than competes with what Chile, Colombia, and Peru produce.

TPP can deepen and strengthen Mexico’s integration with the United States and protect already linked sectors and industries  from losing ground. If Mexico was not part of the TPP, it might be hard to continue manufacturing cars and airplanes across borders, as different rules could break up current U.S.-Mexico supply chains. Unlike the South American nations, Mexico has the geographic benefit of being close to the United States and Canada.

Is labor cheap enough in these countries—particulalry in Chile, which the World Bank designates as high income—to make these countries competitive vis-a-vis the deal’s Asian parties?

It’s increasingly a question of productivity of labor. Particularly in advanced manufacturing, where more and more is done by robotics wherever you do it—whether in China or South Carolina, you have the same plant and the same robotics. What you need is a skilled workforce that can use that equipment. Then, a country such as Chile, if it has the needed skilled workforce, might be as attractive. But Chile would have  transportation and logistics costs that Mexico doesn’t.

China has dramatically increased trade and investment in Latin America. Would the TPP, which some say is a counterweight to Chinese influence, affect that?

The TPP doesn’t necessarily affect these coutries’ relationships with China. It could complement China. President Obama has said China could join someday. Being part of the TPP would not preclude Latin Amercian nations from trading with China. Most of what China buys from Latin American countries are commodities. They don’t buy cars or many value-added goods. They prefer to send value-added goods. [The TPP] shouldn’t change the flow of copper, iron ore, soy, and the other myriad commodities. It could potentially open other markets for those products in a way that will allow them to diversify their economic base.

Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewee: Shannon K. O'Neil, Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Program
Interviewer: Danielle Renwick


《Brookings》
TPP? TTIP? Key trade deal terms explained


《Peterson Institute》
What Economic Models Tell Us about the TPP
Understanding the Estimated Gains from Trade Pacts
 

Table 1 Estimated income and export gains from implementation of TPP, 2025
	TPP-12	Baseline GDP 2025 (billions 2007 dollars)	Income gains			Baseline exports 2025 (billions 2007 dollars)	Export increases
			Billions 2007 dollars	% change from baseline			Billions 2007 dollars	% change from baseline
	Australia	1,433	7	0.5		332	11.1	3.4
	Brunei	20	0	0.9		9	0.2	2.6
	Canada	1,978	9	0.4		597	13.8	2.3
	Chile	292	3	0.9		151	3.7	2.4
	Japan	5,338	105	2.0		1,252	139.7	11.2
	Malaysia	431	24	5.6		336	40.0	11.9
	Mexico	2,004	10	0.5		507	19.1	3.8
	New Zealand	201	4	2.0		60	4.1	6.8
	Peru	320	4	1.2		95	6.0	6.3
	Singapore	415	8	1.9		263	11.3	4.3
	Vietnam	340	36	10.5		239	67.9	28.5
	United States	20,273	77	0.4		2,813	123.5	4.4

Simon Johnson
What Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Really All About?
TPP is a very important potential trade agreement, primarily because it will establish the rules that can be included in this kind of deal going forward, including with other countries such as China.  But in this kind of arrangement, it is essential to examine and understand the details in order to comprehend the full nature of the commitments (as well as the gains or losses).










 

環球做了個分析，有意思。

對高鐵和汽車業，分析的對。說汽車業失敗，是因為絕大部分核心技術掌握在外國企業手裏，中國汽車廠家除了低價，沒什麽招數。低價，最後地方政府得補貼，實際上政府百姓虧錢，虧大了。

隻是這分析片麵、膚淺，不是治國良策。當然環球如此說，不是怪事。


高鐵崛起和汽車業失敗，為什麽？


《環球網》2015.06.21
中國高鐵崛起背後：始終保持對國內市場統一領導

6月18日，中鐵二院與俄羅斯企業組成的聯合體，就中標的莫斯科－喀山高鐵項目的勘察設計部分與俄羅斯鐵路公司正式簽約，項目合同金額約24億人民幣，這是中國高鐵走出國門“第一單”。該段鐵路設計時速最高將達到400公裏，是名副其實的地麵鐵路“第一速度”。

實際上，俄方一開始的合作夥伴並非中國，而是德國。兩國合作成立聯合體，工作三年之後，依然解決不了該項目的多種技術難題。在此情況下，俄方轉而選擇了 中國。根據合同，中方不但要承擔該項目的勘察設計，而且要負責投融資、施工建設和運營管理。這意味著，中國高鐵走出國門“第一單”是一個檢驗和體現中國高 鐵綜合實力的整體項目。

德國電視一台網站的一篇文章說，現在大家一說到手表，就會想到瑞士製造;一說到機器，就會想到德國製造;一說到電子產品，就會想起日本製造; 一說到名牌奢侈品，就會想到法國、意大利製造;如今若說起高速列車，人們自然會想到中國製造。

的確，中國高鐵在技術體係、製造與施工能力、成本與金融支持等方麵，已在國際競爭中處於整體優勢地位。

2007年以前，中國還沒有一條真正意義上的高速鐵路，而今天中國高鐵運營裏程已達一萬六千多公裏，占世界高鐵總裏程的一半以上，且在多國承攬高鐵工程。在短短的幾年裏，中國高鐵能取得如此顯赫甚而令人驚異的成績，是後來居上、彎道超車、跨越發展的結果。

那麽，為什麽我國很多行業無法實現後來居上、彎道超車，而偏偏高鐵能夠做到呢？這裏麵的因素很多，但筆者以為，很重要的一條經驗就是我國鐵路部門始終保 持著對國內市場的統一領導。這種統一性形成了對外的唯一性，能夠有效避免內部的各自為政、相互損害，從而集中力量以龐大的國內市場為籌碼，迫使西方跨國公 司不得不以轉讓核心技術作為進入中國市場的前提條件。

在中國高鐵崛起之前，世界上掌握高鐵技術的跨國公司有德國西門子集團、法國阿爾 斯通集團、加拿大龐巴迪集團和日本的日立與川崎重工。實際上，這些掌握高鐵先進技術的跨國公司極不情願向中國轉讓技術;但是令其垂涎的中國市場因鐵道部的 把守而不得隨意進入，故不得不以技術作為門票。就這樣，鐵道部先後把加拿大的軌道技術、法國的電控係統、日本的牽引係統和德國的行車控製係統陸續引進了中 國，並在此基礎上消化、吸收、集成、再創新，逐步構成了比其中任何一個國家都完整的升級版的先進技術體係。一位鐵路係統的領導同誌談及這個問題，坦誠而自 信地說：“我們承認中國高鐵的技術來自德法日等國，是引進學習的結果;但我們也可以自豪地對他們講，我們吸收、集成、再創新，現在中國高鐵的技術比他們全 麵，比他們先進，比他們更有競爭力，是一個整體的優勢。”

相比之下，我國汽車業完全是另一種情況。本來，中國汽車業擁有和中國鐵路一 樣的優越條件：市場龐大，擁護眾多，發展潛力巨大，如果體質機製對頭，完全可以將世界汽車強國的最先進技術全部引進中國，然後加以集成創新，進而使中國成 為世界汽車最強國。然而，由於缺乏全國性的行業統籌，各地汽車企業在地方政府支持下，各自為政，相互殺價，把外企進入中國市場的門檻降得很低，導致德、 日、美、法、韓汽車廠商在不轉讓技術的情況下，輕易實現了對中國市場的占領與壟斷。最後的結果是，市場讓光了，道路堵塞了，空氣汙染了，利潤流失了，而技 術沒換來。這種情況，不但給中國造成巨大損失，甚至影響了中國的產業升級。

類似的情況還有鋼鐵業和稀土業。按說，中國是鐵礦石的最大 買家，在國際市場上應該有定價權，但實際上沒有。因為，各個鋼鐵企業各自為政，相互抬價，把鐵礦石價格越抬越高，結果全中國的鋼鐵業把利潤拱手送給了澳 洲、巴西的鐵礦老板。稀土，中國是世界上最大的賣家，按理更應該有定價權，但實際上也沒有。因為，各個稀土企業各自為政，相互殺價，把珍貴的稀土殺成了白 菜價，把利潤拱手送給了美日歐。這兩個行業的慘狀，究其根源，就是在行業體製上，缺乏統一領導和行業統籌，這和鐵路部門的情況形成鮮明反差。

經驗教訓證明，大企業如果主要麵對國內競爭，應加以分拆，以利於充分競爭，讓廣大消費者受益;反之，如果主要麵向國際競爭，則應實行企業整合和行業統 籌，以形成統一的、強大的國際競爭力。分拆，還是整合，應視具體情況而定。總之，幾十年來新自由主義把中國害慘了，不能再聽他們忽悠了。




《紐約客》
Journey to Jihad
Why are teen-agers joining ISIS?
By Ben Taub


Jejoen Bontinck at his home in Antwerp, in December, 2014. The Belgian authorities who interrogated him emerged with a portrait of the radical Islamist recruitment process

In 2009, a fourteen-year-old Belgian named Jejoen Bontinck slipped a sparkly white glove onto his left hand, squeezed into a sequinned black cardigan, and appeared on the reality-television contest “Move Like Michael Jackson.” He had travelled to Ghent from his home, in Antwerp, with his father, Dimitri, who wore a pin-striped suit jacket and oversized sunglasses, and who told the audience that he was Jejoen’s manager, mental coach, and personal assistant. Standing before the judges, Jejoen (pronounced “yeh-yoon”) professed his faith in the American Dream. “Dance yourself dizzy,” a judge said, and Jejoen moonwalked through the preliminary round. “That is performance!” Dimitri told the show’s host, a former Miss Belgium named Véronique de Kock. “You’re gonna hear from him, sweetie.”

Jejoen was soon eliminated, but four years later, when he least wanted the attention, he became the focus of hundreds of articles in the Belgian press. He had participated in a jihadi radicalization program, operated out of a rented room in Antwerp, that inspired dozens of Belgian youths to migrate to Syria and take up arms against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Most of the group’s members ultimately became part of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, joining more than twenty thousand foreign fighters engaged in the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS controls large parts of both countries. With revenue of more than a million dollars a day, mostly from extortion and taxation, the group continues to expand its reach; in mid-May, its forces captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and, last week, they took control of Palmyra, in Syria.

About four thousand European jihadis have gone to Syria since the outbreak of war, in 2011, more than four hundred from Belgium. (It is estimated that at least a hundred Americans have joined the fight.) The migration of youths from seemingly stable and prosperous communities to fight with radical Islamists has bewildered not only their families but governments and security forces throughout Europe.

Tens of thousands of Muslim civilians and moderate rebels, mostly Sunnis, died in the early stages of the war in Syria, and many people have argued that the European jihadis were motivated by humanitarian concerns. But thousands of pages of Belgian federal-police documents—including wiretaps and interrogations of jihadis who fought abroad and later returned—show that, even before ISIS announced its presence in Syria, the primary objective for many Europeans, including those in Jejoen’s group, was to establish an Islamic caliphate through violence. “We were already talking about terrorism in 2012,” a Belgian security official told me. “But, at that time, no one wanted to talk about terrorism,” because Assad insisted that the opposition was composed of extremists. The Belgian security official said, “It was very difficult to say, ‘Well, yes, he is right, because our Belgians are terrorists.’ ”

After eight months in Syria, Jejoen returned to Belgium, where he was promptly arrested. Jejoen’s lawyer says that the authorities interrogated him for more than two hundred hours. They emerged with a portrait of the radical Islamist recruitment process, as well as an account of the workings of ISIS. “We are sure that he probably didn’t tell us everything,” the Belgian security official said. But he added, of what Jejoen did divulge, “We haven’t found one element that is not correct.”

I met Jejoen several times last winter, usually at his mother’s home, in Antwerp, where he was awaiting sentencing in Belgium’s largest terrorism trial. He mostly avoided discussing his experience in Syria, preferring to play Counter-Strike on a laptop. But transcripts of the police interrogations show that he was, as his father calls him, “the golden witness.”

In 1994, Dimitri Bontinck, then a twenty-year-old night-club bouncer, travelled to West Africa on holiday, where he met and married Rose, a Nigerian woman with strict Catholic beliefs. Their son, Jejoen, was born in southern Nigeria the following year; the family moved to Belgium shortly afterward. Dimitri told me that he served in the military, and then in a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Bosnia, before taking an administrative position in the Antwerp court system. When Jejoen was eight, the Bontincks had a daughter, Iris. Family life was “always in harmony,” Dimitri said this winter, in his one-room apartment in Antwerp. Now forty-one, Dimitri has a buzz cut and an athletic build that belies his reliance on whiskey and Marlboros.

Jejoen was brought up Catholic, and enrolled in a prestigious Jesuit academy called Our Lady College. “I think that was the best period of his life,” Dimitri said, praising the school’s structure. But when Jejoen was fifteen he started doing poorly in math, and had to transfer to a remedial high school. Then his girlfriend dumped him. At that point, Dimitri told me, Jejoen “fell down in a black hole.”

Jejoen described this period to the police as one of “searching” and “looking for an alternative to the pain.” When he was sixteen, he started dating a Moroccan girl at his new school, who introduced him to Islam, and told him that if he wanted to keep seeing her he had to learn about the religion. Jejoen searched “What is Islam?” online, and, on August 1, 2011, the first day of Ramadan, he converted at De Koepel Mosque.

De Koepel, which means “The Dome,” was founded in Antwerp, in 2005, by Belgian converts. At the time, no mosque in Belgium conducted Friday prayers in Dutch, so Muslims who didn’t speak Arabic or Turkish had difficulty following sermons. De Koepel became a home not only for converts but for hundreds of second- and third-generation Moroccans and Turks.

On Fridays, the ground floor of the mosque is lined with four rows of men and boys at prayer. Women pray upstairs, and watch the imam deliver his sermon by live video. At De Koepel, Jejoen prayed five times a day and closely followed the sermons of Sulayman Van Ael, the imam at the time, who took a relatively moderate tone, emphasizing charity work and the five pillars of Islam.

Dimitri found the conversion frustrating. “A family is supposed to eat together at the table,” he told me, but, when Jejoen adopted halal dietary restrictions, family dinners grew less frequent. Still, Dimitri saw Jejoen’s new habits as a kind of teen-age rebellion. “What can you do?” he said.

In November, 2011, three months after Jejoen’s conversion, a neighbor named Azeddine invited him to visit the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium, at 117 Dambruggestraat. The mission of Sharia4Belgium, established the previous year, was to transform Belgium into a state governed as the cities of Raqqa, in Syria, and Mosul, in Iraq, are today: replace the parliament with a shura council and the Prime Minister with a caliph; stone adulterers and execute homosexuals; and convert or banish all non-Muslims, or force them to pay jizya, a tax levied on those who don’t adhere to the faith.

The leader of Sharia4Belgium was Fouad Belkacem, a thirty-three-year-old militant preacher. A slight, bespectacled, balding man with a full dark beard, who usually wears a long djellabah, Belkacem was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents. In his twenties, he wore jeans and was clean-shaven. He was arrested for burglary and forgery, for which he spent time in jail. After he got out, he worked as a used-car salesman and volunteered at a youth center, where, according to a social worker named Peter Calluy, he propagated homophobia and anti-democratic ideas.

Anjem Choudary, a British radical Islamist, told me that in March, 2010, Belkacem visited him in London to ask his advice about how “to start something in Belgium.” Choudary, who is forty-eight, and has a long, graying beard, has acted as a spokesman for various radical groups, such as al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, that have since been banned under U.K. terrorism laws. He has been arrested on several occasions for organizing illegal protests, and several of his associates have committed acts of terrorism, including, in 2013, the killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, on the streets of London. But Choudary, who is closely monitored by security services, has never been convicted of any terrorism-related charges.

“I went through the history of al-Muhajiroun, how we set it up,” Choudary told me one afternoon last winter, in a London café. “You can’t do what the prophets of old did, which was to stand on the hills and the mountains and address people,” he said. “The hills and mountains today are Sky News, CNN, Fox News, the BBC.” We were meeting just a few hours after the murders of twelve people at the office of Charlie Hebdo, and Choudary proudly showed me his statement on Twitter: “Freedom of expression does not extend to insulting the Prophets of Allah, whatever your views on the events in Paris today! #ParisShooting.” He was delighted by the reaction. “That’s not bad, actually—two hundred and eighty-six retweets?” he said. A few minutes later, Choudary’s phone rang. “Fox News, tonight,” he said, smiling. Sean Hannity wanted Choudary to represent the Muslim view.

Choudary described Belkacem as an “incredibly receptive younger brother.” Belkacem returned to Belgium and started Sharia4Belgium that March. By the time Jejoen arrived, in November, 2011, the group had publicly burned an American flag to commemorate the attacks on the World Trade Center and, in a Facebook post, applauded the news that a young politician, who belonged to an extreme-right political party that denounced Muslims and immigrants, was dying of cancer. Later, on YouTube, Belkacem declared Sharia4Belgium’s intention to destroy city monuments, and members travelled to the Netherlands to disrupt a lecture delivered by two openly gay Muslims. Every weekend, the group held demonstrations in public squares in Antwerp and Brussels, as well as in the small towns along the train line between them. Sharia4Belgium enjoyed the protection of the same free-expression laws that the group sought to dismantle. “It was a little bit irritating,” the Belgian security official told me, but “it’s very clear that you’re not going to demolish democracy in Belgium by giving flyers to people.”

Belkacem also established contact with jihadis in other countries. “He had connections with people in Denmark and other parts of Europe,” Choudary told me. One prominent jihadi ideologue in the Middle East, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, advised Belkacem to focus on recruitment. The goal was to establish Sharia law not just in Belgium but everywhere.

When Jejoen first visited the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium, Belkacem asked him if he was prepared to learn the Koran “without any distortion or editing or interpretation.” He then sent Jejoen back to De Koepel with a set of questions for Van Ael, the imam, including one about the validity of hatred in the name of Allah. “Van Ael literally told me that this was the ideology of Sharia4Belgium,” Jejoen said, “and that I should turn away from it.” But Belkacem had quoted verses from the Koran and the hadith to convince Jejoen of his interpretation of Islam. Van Ael’s response only affirmed Jejoen’s belief in Belkacem’s message.

“Typical recruitment patterns in Europe and the West tell us that it helps if that person doesn’t have a religious background,” Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist recruiter who now runs a counter-extremism think tank in London called Quilliam, told me. Converts and the newly devout, “dislocated from the traditional hierarchies” of Islam, are less likely to challenge a purported authority on religious matters.

Jejoen adopted a Muslim name, Sayfullah Ahlu Sunna. He also took a kunya, a kind of nickname that in the Arab world reflects familial relations and endearment but in jihadi circles is also used to obscure identity. Jejoen’s kunya was Abu Assya; Belkacem’s was Abu Imran. In Sharia4Belgium, most members, who were known as brothers, addressed one another by their kunyas.

Belkacem ran an intensive twenty-four-week program of ideological training. He began by declaring that the world was divided into two groups: Muslims and non-Muslims. In mainstream mosques, nuance and interpretive religious scholarship are encouraged. Notes collected in police raids show that Belkacem’s lessons reduced the world to flowcharts and categories: Muslims versus infidels; Sharia versus democracy. Belkacem taught the brothers that most imams ignore discussions of jihad and martyrdom because they want to keep state funding. Bart Buytaert, the chairman of De Koepel, told me, “Belkacem and Sharia4Belgium accused us of being non-Muslims.”

Jejoen began spending most of his free time at the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium. One of the brothers regularly led martial-arts classes there, which some members supplemented with kickboxing training at a nearby gym. Choudary, who is identified in police files as a financial supporter of Sharia4Belgium, lectured remotely, through a video-chat Web site called Paltalk. Choudary’s mentor, Omar Bakri Muhammad, a radical preacher who became known in London as the Tottenham Ayatollah, did the same from Lebanon, where he lived after being exiled from the U.K. Choudary also fostered an exchange program, through which Belkacem’s followers came to England to study with him, and some of his followers visited the Sharia4Belgium headquarters. On one occasion, Choudary and a group of his followers travelled to the Netherlands, to deliver a lecture for the brothers of Sharia4Belgium and its partner organization Sharia4Holland “about the methodology to overthrow the regimes.” The visit was captured by a documentary crew from the Belgian channel RTBF. “I come from England in order to radicalize the youth in this country,” Choudary said. One Sharia4Belgium member remarked to a British counterpart, “Sometimes you need laptop, sometimes you need Kalashnikov.”

Members were discouraged from sharing information about the group with their parents. Choudary told me, “There’s no need for them to be informed.” When Jejoen’s parents asked where he was spending so much time, he said that he was playing video games with friends. Jejoen routinely came home late and struggled to get up in the mornings. “Step by step, he started to neglect his responsibilities,” Dimitri said. Some of the brothers dropped out of school. Many lost interest in friends who weren’t affiliated with Sharia4Belgium. Choudary said that it was “natural” that members would “distance ourselves from our previous life, and our previous friends and behavior.”

Dimitri found out about his son’s membership in Sharia4Belgium in late 2011, shortly after Jejoen joined the group. Then a brother named Michael Delefortrie—who had named his two sons for founding members of Al Qaeda—was arrested for trying to sell a Kalashnikov online. Belkacem held a press conference that was covered by an evening-news show. Dimitri was watching television at home that evening when he spotted Jejoen next to Belkacem on the screen. Dimitri told the police that Jejoen was a minor, and asked them to extract him from the group, but he says that a judge told him that there was nothing they could do.

Then, one evening in February, 2012, the principal of Jejoen’s high school warned the police that Jejoen had threatened to “purge” the school. A juvenile court ordered Jejoen to see a counsellor, but, according to Dimitri, she didn’t know anything about Islam. “How you can solve a problem if the other parts don’t even know where is Mecca?” he said. Dimitri started visiting the Sharia4Belgium headquarters, hoping to find evidence of illegal activity. “I always had a feeling that something is going wrong inside that clubhouse,” he told me. Dimitri and Rose invited Belkacem to their house, but he was adept at deflecting their inquiries, and Dimitri never saw any extremist materials inside the headquarters. Though police raids later discovered fundamentalist literature—including a pamphlet with instructions on how to beat women “with a corrective and educational intent”—it was kept in members’ homes, not at the Sharia4Belgium headquarters.

As part of the indoctrination program, the brothers often watched archived lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen a little more than a month before Jejoen’s first visit to Sharia4Belgium. They also watched footage of battles in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other jihadi conflict zones, and came to think of the mujahideen in the videos as selfless heroes defending Islam against corrupt crusaders. One day, they watched a video of a beheading. Members discussed where they’d like to fight in the future, from Libya to Somalia to the Seychelles. “You sit for months in a group in which jihad is considered quite normal,” Jejoen said.

Jejoen continued to text girls, which was forbidden by Belkacem; one day, he ordered a brother to destroy Jejoen’s SIM card. Months later, Jejoen got in worse trouble for proselytizing on his own. Other Sharia4Belgium members said that Jejoen was using the activity as an excuse to meet girls. Belkacem accused him of practicing “exorcism.” He was temporarily suspended from the group.

Belkacem dedicated the last four weeks of the course to teaching the importance of loyalty toward Muslims, and disavowal of non-Muslims. The prospect of excommunication kept most members obedient; one brother, who was in his late teens, was required to undergo circumcision. The program’s final task was a written exam. The questions were rudimentary, including “What does Islam mean?” and “Should I vote?” (Members were discouraged from voting, on the ground that it acknowledged the legitimacy of the democratic process.) One student, whose exam was found in the police raid, scored eighty-four per cent. Today, he is believed to be a member of the religious police in Raqqa.

By February, 2012, Belgian police were wiretapping phone calls within the group. But many of the trainees were petty criminals familiar with police tactics, and a former Belgian counterterrorism investigator told me, “They know the way. They buy a cheap cell phone, and they throw it away.”

Belkacem never explicitly instructed his followers to fight in Syria. But he taught them that martyrdom on the battlefield, which he called “pure Islam,” yielded the greatest reward in paradise. “The battle is not only an invitation, but an individual obligation,” Walid Lakdim, a Sharia4Belgium member, said in a police interrogation after returning from Syria.

At the time, the Syrian revolution was not known for its foreign jihadi element. The face of the rebel side was the Free Syrian Army, a loose affiliation of groups, some of which were led by officers who had defected from Assad’s government forces after refusing to shoot unarmed protesters. The rebels spoke of the eventual triumph of democracy over Assad’s brutal regime.

In 2011, a Sharia4Belgium member named Nabil Kasmi travelled to Lebanon, where he visited Choudary’s mentor, Omar Bakri Muhammad, who was living under house arrest in Tripoli, a coastal city in the north. Kasmi returned to Belgium a few months later, but, in March, 2012, he came back to Lebanon. At the same time, other Sharia4Belgium members travelled to Yemen, where they were detained and subsequently deported, under suspicion of trying to join Al Qaeda. Then, in May, Kasmi crossed into Syria. Jejoen told police that Kasmi called Sharia4Belgium headquarters, declaring that “he was in Syria to fight.” According to a Lebanese military court, Bakri Muhammad and Kasmi helped a few European jihadis establish themselves in Al Qaeda-affiliated groups across the Syrian border. “Once they were ready to go to Syria,” the Belgian security official said, “they had a whole operational network,” owing to Sharia4Belgium’s ties to Bakri Muhammad and Choudary. (Choudary denied sending people to Syria, and said, “If I were to send someone somewhere, I would go there first.”)

The following month, Belkacem was arrested and imprisoned for instigating hate. One of his wives, Stephanie Djato, had refused to comply with a Belgian law that bans full-face coverings in public. (Though polygamy is illegal in Belgium, Belkacem has married at least two women in religious ceremonies.) When a female police officer tried to remove her niqab, Djato head-butted her, breaking the officer’s nose. Belkacem and Choudary both posted statements online, threatening retribution against the police for removing Djato’s niqab. Riots ensued in Brussels, and two police officers were stabbed by a man carrying Sharia4-Belgium literature.

With Belkacem in jail, Sharia4Belgium was rudderless. The members continued their video sessions with Choudary, who invited them to protest the Olympics, which were held in London that July. Kasmi returned to Belgium for a short period. Then, on August 20, 2012, he left for Syria again; the next day, five other members followed. In September, Jejoen and several other Sharia4Belgium members participated in demonstrations against “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that depicted the prophet Muhammad as a homosexual and a child-molester and which sparked deadly protests across the Middle East and North Africa. By October, the group had dissolved, and in the next eighteen months about fifty Belgians directly affiliated with Sharia4Belgium made their way to Syria. Those who arrived first joined groups that were later absorbed into Al Qaeda and ISIS; the others mostly joined ISIS directly. Only Belkacem stayed behind. In a long open letter, written from jail, Belkacem insisted that he was only a provocateur, comparing himself to Pussy Riot and Femen.

In February, 2013, shortly after Jejoen’s eighteenth birthday, he woke up from a dream in which Azeddine, the friend who had introduced him to Sharia4Belgium, was praying for help. They hadn’t seen each other in five months. A few days later, Jejoen’s phone rang, and a number appeared beginning with 963, the Syrian country code. It was Azeddine. Jejoen asked him who else was in Syria. “Everyone,” he replied.

On the pretext of going to Amsterdam with friends, Jejoen borrowed his father’s suitcase and packed it with a sleeping bag, warm clothes, a flashlight, and—on Azeddine’s request—night-vision goggles. Another Sharia4Belgium member, already in Syria, told Jejoen how to get to the border between Turkey and Syria. Jejoen left home on February 21, 2013, without knowing the name of the group that he would join. He expected that he “would fall martyr within a short time and would go to paradise,” he said. He believed, as he had been told, that “good deeds erase bad deeds, and jihad is the best deed” of all.

At Schiphol Airport, in Amsterdam, Jejoen dawdled so long at a Burger King that he missed his flight to Istanbul. He had forgotten his passport, too, but his Belgian identity card sufficed. He had been instructed to meet two other aspiring jihadis in Istanbul, but he ended up at the wrong airport. So he continued alone, flying to Adana, in southern Turkey, where they all finally met in a café. Together, they took a bus to Antakya, a city near the Syrian border.

A smuggler met them there and drove them to a village in the mountains, where they waited with other jihadis for the signal to cross. Once in Syria, Jejoen and his companions texted other Sharia4Belgium members and asked to be picked up. By nightfall on February 22nd, Jejoen was in a car, reunited with his friends from Belgium. “I found it strange to see them with weapons,” he told police. “I hesitated and then asked if this was what I had come for.” Soon, the car pulled up to a walled villa in Kafr Hamra, a small town on the outskirts of Aleppo. Around seventy pairs of shoes, belonging to Belgian, Dutch, and French jihadis, were arrayed on racks outside the front door. Inside, Jejoen met Amr al-Absi, the Syrian emir in charge of the Mujahideen Shura Council, a group of international jihadis whose goal was to transform the northern part of the country into an Islamic state. Absi had been severely injured in battle, and had several broken ribs and a large open wound on his left leg.


Dimitri Bontinck found a YouTube video showing several Belgian jihadis in a field with yellow flowers. One of them looked like Jejoen

Absi’s family is from Aleppo, but he was born in Saudi Arabia, probably in 1979. His older brother, a dentist named Firas, trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Amr and Firas are thought to have joined Al Qaeda in Iraq, which became the Islamic State of Iraq; the group’s aim was to establish an Islamic caliphate that would spread throughout the Middle East and beyond. In 2007, Amr al-Absi was arrested in Syria, and held in the Al Qaeda wing of Sednaya prison, with hundreds of other extremists. Four years later, in June, 2011, Assad released them. It was a turning point in the Syrian war. Assad had stated that the opposition was full of terrorists, a claim that the mysterious amnesty then fulfilled. It seemed like a calculated move to poison the nascent Syrian revolution.

Absi took up the leadership of a jihadi brigade near the Syrian city of Homs. His brother Firas had recently founded a group called the Shura Council of the Islamic State, which gained notoriety after raising the Al Qaeda flag at the border gates near Bab al-Hawa, a major crossing point between Turkey and Syria, in July, 2012. It was the first mention of an Islamic state in the Syrian civil war. The following week, the group kidnapped two European journalists, Jeroen Oerlemans and John Cantlie. Moderate Syrian rebels rescued and released the journalists a week later. Firas’s extremism was a liability to the revolution, and in September, 2012, he was kidnapped and murdered by moderate rebels. Amr al-Absi inherited his brother’s role as emir, and the group changed its name to the Mujahideen Shura Council.

In Kafr Hamra, Absi divided his fighters according to origin. Most of the Europeans, including the Sharia4Belgium members, lived in a walled villa, with an indoor swimming pool and a fountain. The Arabs, and some luckier Europeans, lived in a nearby complex, known as “the palace,” which was said to have been captured from an official in the Assad regime. It had a fuelling station, an orchard the size of a football field, and a rooftop pool.

Absi designated Houssien Elouassaki, a twenty-one-year-old Sharia4Belgium member, as the leader of the European group. When Absi wasn’t present, Elouassaki decided matters ranging from who washed the dishes to which Europeans would be allowed to join them in Syria. “It is something incredible,” his brother Abdel, who remained in Belgium, told a friend over the phone. “He is the youngest emir in the world.”

Absi’s fighters didn’t know his real name. They called him Sheikh, or Emir, or by his kunya, Abu Asir. Jejoen told police that the Belgians mostly knew him as “the big financier of everything.” Absi bought the weapons, the fuel, and the food, and when fighters were injured in battle he covered their medical expenses.

In early December, 2012, the Mujahideen Shura Council assisted Jabhat al-Nusra, the jihadi group that five months later became Al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate, in an attack on an Army outpost called Base 111, near the village of Sheikh Suleiman. It was Assad’s last major base west of Aleppo, and soon the Al Qaeda flag flew overhead. Absi’s group took prisoners, and initially, a jihadi said in a wiretapped call, they planned to use them for ransom or prisoner exchanges. Instead, “Everyone cut someone’s throat,” Houssien Elouassaki told his brother Abdel over the phone. Afterward, the Army base, which stretched over five hundred acres, became a jihadi training camp. Jabhat al-Nusra controlled the checkpoint to the camp, but Absi’s group trained on its own.

Training lasted twenty days. Each morning began with a ninety-minute run led by a former Egyptian special-forces officer, followed by two hours of tactical lessons with unloaded weapons and simulated attacks, a short break for lunch and prayers, and lectures by Islamist scholars. Lessons were given in Arabic and translated by bilingual jihadis into Dutch. In the evenings, the Europeans took turns on sentry duty.

By late December, the Europeans of the Mujahideen Shura Council were setting up roadblocks on the main road through Kafr Hamra and stopping buses. They rifled through passengers’ belongings, hoping to identify Shia, Christian, Alawite, and Kurdish civilians by small signs: a necklace with a cross, a garment that signified a particular tradition, a picture of Iran’s ayatollah stored on a mobile phone.

Hakim Elouassaki, one of Houssien’s older brothers, joined him in Syria. He explained the routine in phone calls to his girlfriend in Belgium, captured by a wiretap. “We take every unbeliever . . . and we take his money and everything from him,” he said. “I can take money, as much as I want . . . but it must be in the path of Allah.” Only the Sunnis were spared. Hakim stole a gold ring from a Kurd and a laptop from a Christian. His girlfriend later recounted to a friend that, when she offered to send Hakim an iPhone from Belgium, he told her not to bother, because he was “waiting to steal it from an infidel.”

At the roadblocks, the Belgians held Syrian civilians for ransom. “Normally it is seventy thousand” euros, Hakim told his girlfriend. “If they do not pay, then we kill them.” But prices varied according to the victim’s sect. Hakim released an Armenian Christian after his family paid thirty thousand euros, but, when the brother of a captured Shiite civilian delivered the same amount of money, Hakim killed him. That evening, Hakim called his girlfriend. “As I shot him, he put up his hand,” he said, “so the bullet went through his hand and his head.” Yet Hakim felt unfulfilled. “I wish the filming worked when I killed him,” he said. “I placed the camera badly, and it filmed nothing.” (Hakim has since denied killing anyone in Syria.) The Europeans filmed other murders, though, including the beheading of an old man. In the video, one jihadi saws at his neck with a knife, while another hacks at the same wound with a rusty machete, to the excitement of the others.

Jejoen told Belgian police that as soon as he arrived in Syria he wished he could leave. He said that he was sickened by the violence, and that he tried to get out of the mandatory training. One day, he went to a hospital for a sinus infection, and asked the doctor to write an extra prescription for antidepressants.

On his third day at the training camp, Jejoen received a black headband with “Mujahideen Shura Council” printed in white Arabic letters. It was the first time he learned the name of his affiliation. Beyond these headbands, the group had no uniform. Shortly after dawn prayers one day, Jejoen asked one of the camp leaders if he could return to Belgium. He cited a medical issue. The jihadi expressed surprise, but said that he would not stand in the way. Houssien Elouassaki, the Belgian emir and Absi’s deputy, was less sympathetic. He demanded Jejoen’s mobile phone and identity card. Jejoen handed over his card, but claimed that he didn’t have his phone on him.

After dawn prayers on Tuesday, March 5th, Jejoen’s eleventh day in Syria, he ate breakfast with his friend Azeddine and Houssien Elouassaki. When the meal was over, they seized him, bound his hands, and marched him up a steep trail to a bunker, which had been converted into a prison. Jejoen was chained in the cell without being told what he had done. About two weeks later, Elouassaki came in and interrogated him. He referred to a text message on Jejoen’s phone, but wouldn’t explain what it said. After another couple of weeks, more members of Sharia4Belgium came into the bunker and told Jejoen that Dimitri had shown up at their villa. They asked how he knew of the location.

After Jejoen left for Syria, Dimitri began trawling the Internet for clues to his whereabouts. He had learned that other Sharia4Belgium members were in Syria, and thought that Jejoen must be among them. “I was sending more than a thousand messages,” Dimitri told me. “Never reply on his phone.” One day, Dimitri found a YouTube video showing several Belgian jihadis in a field with yellow flowers. One of them looked like Jejoen. “When I saw that, I couldn’t continue my life here,” Dimitri told me. He decided to go to Syria to find his son.

Dimitri announced his intention in the Belgian press, and two journalists, Joanie de Rijke and Narciso Contreras, offered to help him, in exchange for the story. Both had covered the region, and had connections in rebel-held parts of Syria. Dimitri met them in Turkey, and they crossed into Syria in early April, staying with pro-revolution activists in Aleppo.

On a moonless night a week later, they drove to Absi’s villa. Dimitri was exhausted and sunburned, and his clothes reeked of sweat. Armed jihadis told the journalists to stay in the car but allowed Dimitri to come inside, along with two Syrian activists. Dimitri removed his shoes by the entrance to the villa. Inside, dozens of Jejoen’s comrades and captors, most of them wearing balaclavas and scarves, sat on couches and on the floor of the living room. Some were holding AK-47s, though the room was supposed to be reserved for surfing the Internet or playing video games on a flat-screen television that was mounted on the wall.

Absi, a skeletal man in his early thirties, was not wearing a balaclava, and he had long, thick black hair and an even thicker beard. Sitting on a couch, his wounded leg propped up, he beckoned Dimitri over and said, in English, that there were no Belgians in his ranks. But, when Dimitri stood to leave, Absi snapped his fingers and several jihadis yanked a black hood over his head, cuffed his hands, stripped him naked, beat him, and stuck the barrel of a Kalashnikov in his mouth. Who gave Dimitri the location? they asked. Did Jejoen leak secrets about the training camp to his father? The jihadis interrogated Dimitri in English, and took his passport and his phone, saying that they would kill him if they found any mention of the police. Then they forced him to mimic the sounds and movements of chickens, horses, and goats. A bright light shone through the black hood, and Dimitri assumed that the militants were filming the interrogation. He had seen hostage videos before, and feared that he’d be blackmailed or killed.

Finally, the militants removed the hood, gave him some tea, and, after further questioning, returned his passport and told him to leave. Dimitri climbed into the car. In his absence, the Syrian driver and one of the journalists had been beaten and threatened with execution. Shaken, after a few days they returned to Kilis, a Turkish town on the Syrian border. Weeks later, Dimitri went back to Aleppo, but again failed to find Jejoen.

Dimitri soon left for Belgium, where he began a campaign to bring attention to his son’s case in the media. Eventually, he released a video in which he fired guns and exchanged calls of “Allahu akbar” with Syrian rebels. He told me that his outlandish behavior was designed to court publicity for Jejoen, in the hope of bringing him home, but his antics suggested someone out of his depth. With a ghostwriter, he produced a book called “Jihadi Against His Will,” which featured a photograph of a shirtless Jejoen on the cover. Dimitri acquired a reputation for eccentricity and lurid exaggeration; later, he fabricated a story that Jejoen’s girlfriend had given birth to triplets, in Belgium, and even invented names for the imaginary children.

Dimitri’s visit convinced the Belgian jihadis that Jejoen was a spy. A week later, Amr al-Absi, still on crutches, hobbled up the rocky hill to Jejoen’s cell to ask if he had sought help from Israel. “I told him that this was one big mistake,” Jejoen said. His father had sent a text message mentioning Israeli contacts, and Elouassaki had found it while looking through Jejoen’s phone.

A few days later, Jejoen was released, on the condition that he complete his training and fully commit to the group. When another Belgian jihadi told Jejoen that he was homesick, and asked for his help in escaping, Jejoen agreed, and said that he’d go with him. But it was a setup. As they were sneaking out of the camp, a BMW with Belgian plates pulled up. Jejoen was taken at gunpoint and driven to another building on the compound, where Absi stood, loading a pistol. Jejoen was forced to kneel at his feet. Then Absi aimed at his head and pulled the trigger. “I closed my eyes and heard a bang,” Jejoen told police.

Absi had loaded the gun with blanks. He laughed, and asked Jejoen if he had died. “I said nothing,” Jejoen told police. “He felt my neck and told me that I had soft skin.” Then someone reached for a machete on the wall. “I thought I was going to be beheaded, because that is the judgment of the spies,” Jejoen said. Instead, the jihadis tortured him for four days, gagging him and then whipping him with electrical cables until he could no longer walk.

In 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a militant jihadist from Samarra and a former prisoner of the U.S., was named the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq. In the next few years, the I.S.I. captured large portions of northern and western Iraq, near the Syrian border. According to the journalist Rania Abouzeid, writing in Politico, Baghdadi sent emissaries to Syria in 2011 to capitalize on the chaos of the revolution and prepare to establish an Islamic state there.

Baghdadi was supposed to take orders from Al Qaeda’s leadership. But, on April 8, 2013, he announced that the I.S.I. had added Syria to its mandate, creating ISIS, and that Syria’s jihadis were obliged to consolidate under his leadership. This set up a power struggle. Jabhat al-Nusra insisted on remaining loyal to Al Qaeda. Absi, whose membership in the I.S.I. had caused his imprisonment in Sednaya, guided the Mujahideen Shura Council directly into Baghdadi’s control. (Only a few defectors joined al-Nusra. One was the Belgian emir, Houssien Elouassaki. Within weeks, he was murdered by his former allies.)

An anonymous Twitter account called Wikibaghdady, with apparent inside knowledge of ISIS’s leadership, has asserted that Absi’s group was “the first branch for Baghdadi in Syria.” Absi and Baghdadi discussed ways to depict other rebel groups as puppets of intelligence agencies, Wikibaghdady wrote. Soon, fighters in other jihadi brigades began to defect to ISIS in large numbers. Richard Barrett, a former director of Global Counter Terrorism Operations for the British Secret Intelligence Service and a senior vice-president of the Soufan Group, a security company that tracks Islamic extremism, told me, “My impression is that, were it not for the Absis, you wouldn’t have got that sudden flow of foreigners away from al-Nusra into the Islamic State.” Absi’s loyalty proved to many that “it wasn’t Al Qaeda’s show; it was Baghdadi’s show.” In return, Baghdadi made Absi the Wali of Aleppo, overseeing all Islamic State operations within the province. From then on, abduction on the road to Aleppo became a greater risk for Western journalists and aid workers than living under bombardment in the embattled city.

Isolated in his cell, Jejoen didn’t know that ISIS existed until at least seven weeks after the rest of the world did, even though he was now its prisoner. In August, he was transported to an ISIS prison in the basement of Aleppo’s children’s hospital, where some captives were chained to radiators. Many were tortured, and sometimes Jejoen heard gunshots. He told police that the Mujahideen Shura Council usually beheaded prisoners, but the Islamic State used bullets. After a few days, Jejoen’s captors moved him to a cell with three emaciated Western prisoners. Two of them, the journalists James Foley and John Cantlie, had been captured nearly a year before. (Cantlie was reportedly abducted while working on a film about his first kidnapping.) The third was a German hostage named Toni Neukirch.

Foley and Cantlie had been kidnapped together, in November, 2012, after leaving an Internet café near Aleppo to drive back to Turkey. They told Jejoen that their captors belonged to Jabhat al-Nusra, but they were moved to different locations, and eventually fell into Absi’s hands.

For three weeks, Jejoen, Foley, and Cantlie played word-association games like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral to pass the time. Foley and Cantlie had undergone torture, including waterboarding, and Cantlie’s ankles were scarred from the chains. Foley and Cantlie had converted to Islam while in captivity, so the group prayed together, and discussed their faith.

One day in mid-September, the emir of the prison, a Dutch jihadi, said that Jejoen could leave if he returned to a training camp or performed lookout duty near the Sheikh Najjar industrial complex, in Aleppo, a site of intense fighting. He chose the latter. The jihadi told Jejoen that Foley and Cantlie would soon be sent to a training camp.

Jejoen had been in prison more than six months. The captors who had tortured him over the Israel text message had moved on to other locations, and nobody seemed to care how he passed his time. He spent the next several days testing the limits of his freedom, leaving his post for hours at a time. Sometimes, he said, he went to Internet cafés to see how long it would take for anyone to notice. He also briefly fought in a battle north of Aleppo; the European fighters called the front line there the “gates of heaven.” Jejoen’s lawyer admitted that he fired a grenade, but said that he did it out of boredom.

On October 7th, Jejoen sent a message to his father: “Maybe I will leave now.”

“To where?” Dimitri wrote back.

“Turkey.”

Having been a captive for most of his time in Syria, Jejoen knew nothing of the country’s geography, so Dimitri helped plan his route. “I have studied all topographic maps,” Dimitri wrote Jejoen. “I know it by heart!” Because of fighting between moderate rebels and ISIS forces near the closest border crossing into Turkey, Jejoen’s best way out was a longer route, through ISIS territory west of Aleppo. They decided that Jejoen should take a bus to a Syrian hospital near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, where his father had established contacts. Dimitri travelled to Reyhanli, a dusty town on the Turkish side of the crossing, and gave his contacts three hundred dollars and Jejoen’s passport. The next day, they smuggled Jejoen across the border, dropping him at Dimitri’s hotel.

Dimitri and Jejoen took a bus to Antakya, where Dimitri bought his son a silver ring with an onyx stone, which he wears every day. They flew to Amsterdam, and Dimitri rented a bungalow at a Dutch campsite, where they enjoyed a brief vacation. Jejoen told his father that he had hoped to ride horses in Syria, so Dimitri arranged for them to ride together in the countryside. After a few days, they returned to Antwerp.

In early 2014, ISIS transported Foley, Cantlie, and its other Western hostages to Raqqa, abandoning prisons that were filled with Syrian captives. When another faction of rebels opened the prisons, they encountered only corpses. Wikibaghdady wrote that Amr al-Absi had issued an order “to leave no one alive in the prisons.”

Last fall, Absi was inducted into the Islamic State Shura Council, a group of advisers who answer directly to Baghdadi. Richard Barrett, the former spy chief, told me that Absi’s role on the council was to oversee ISIS’s media strategy. In August, Foley was executed by ISIS. The video showing his beheading was broadcast throughout the world. Cantlie is now the only publicly acknowledged Western hostage still held by the Islamic State. Since the fall, he has appeared in Islamic State propaganda, recently serving as a narrator of videos from cities under Islamic State control. While filming an episode in Mosul, Cantlie spotted a drone overhead. “Trying to rescue me again?” he shouted at the sky. “Do something!” (Absi, according to a U.S. official, was killed in an air strike last November.)

Desperate to bring Jejoen back to Belgium, Dimitri had assured him that he wouldn’t go to prison, but on October 18, 2013, hours after they arrived in Antwerp, Belgian police arrested Jejoen at his mother’s apartment. (While he was in Syria, Dimitri and Rose had divorced.) The forensic medical examiner at Antwerp University Hospital noted dozens of scars on his back, abdomen, wrists, and the tops of his feet. After initial questioning, Jejoen was interrogated by officials from the security forces of several countries, including the U.S. and the U.K. His descriptions of Foley’s tattoos and Cantlie’s family history were the first indications since the hostages had disappeared that they were still alive.

Jejoen’s testimony to the police contributed to the prosecutor’s case against forty-six members of Sharia4Belgium, including himself. The group was collectively prosecuted as a terrorist organization; members were individually charged with numerous other crimes, ranging from threatening to kill Belgian politicians to abducting and torturing Jejoen. Jejoen was charged with being a member of ISIS for the number of days that he had not spent as its prisoner, and for being a member of Sharia4Belgium before that. Only eight of the forty-six Sharia4Belgium members appeared in court. The rest are in Syria—most still fighting, and some already dead.

The trial began last September, almost a year after Jejoen’s return, in Antwerp’s Palace of Justice, a glass-and-steel complex. Armed security forces lined the perimeter of the courtroom, monitoring the visitors’ gallery. On December 10th, the last day of hearings, two police officers brought Belkacem—dressed in an olive jumpsuit, handcuffed, and restrained with a thick belt—into the courtroom.

Twenty minutes into the proceedings, the magistrate invited Belkacem to make his plea. He spoke so quietly that people in the courtroom stood up and leaned toward him, straining to hear. “I am a Muslim, not a terrorist,” he said.

“Liar!” Ozana Rodrigues, the mother of Brian De Mulder, who is now fighting in Raqqa, shouted. Belkacem calmly asked whether it was “a crime to promote your faith.”

The verdict and the sentencing for Belkacem, Jejoen, and the others were set for January 14, 2015. I visited Antwerp for six weeks this winter, while the judges were deliberating. “My life is totally destroyed,” Dimitri told me. He hasn’t held a job in two years. When we arranged our first meeting, he asked me to bring either red wine or whiskey. As his ex-wife remarked, “He doesn’t drink water anymore.”

In 2014, against the advice of his lawyers and the Belgian government, Dimitri started taking other parents of jihadis to Syria, for a small fee, to search for their children. Last summer, when I met him in Kilis, he was guiding two Belgian fathers into Islamic State territory. One of them, Pol Van Hessche, later told me that he had taken a car into northern Syria and stopped at the front gate of a jihadi villa near Manbij. It was a holding place for young fighters waiting to go to an Islamic State training camp. His son, Lucas, came out of the building, and Pol pleaded with him to come home. Lucas refused.

Other parents of jihadis told me that Dimitri offered the only hope that one day they might reunite with their children. One evening, in Antwerp, Dimitri assured Ozana Rodrigues that he could guide her into Raqqa to find her son, who had recently fathered a child with a Dutch jihadi bride. But later, drinking whiskey in his apartment, he insisted that he was finished with Syria. “I cannot continue my life like this,” he said. Then the phone rang, and after he hung up he announced that he had a new mission: “You think I’m going to say no when a mother is crying in my face?” He continued, “I wake up with Syria, and I go to sleep with Syria.”

Dimitri’s efforts to gain publicity for his son, and for parents facing a similar situation to his own, have been perhaps too successful. He has taken to speaking in sound bites, calling himself Mother Teresa, for his attempts to help parents of other jihadis, and describing Jejoen as being “just like Edward Snowden,” for leaking jihadi secrets. Outside the courtroom, Dimitri shouted at TV cameras, in English, “Bin Laden is laughing from hell, Belkacem is laughing from the cell.” This month, Dimitri received an eight-month prison sentence for a 2013 incident in which he hit a former girlfriend, the daughter of a judge, and held her hostage in a hotel room. (He has since appealed.) After the judgment, he compared his plight to that of Nelson Mandela.

On New Year’s Eve, two weeks before the sentencing, Jejoen and I ate at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Antwerp. He had grown out his hair and his beard since returning to Belgium. As we shared a large bony fish, Jejoen told me that he still believes in the caliphate, and sees it as “something which you can’t stop or hold back.” It irks him that his father believes he is “no longer radical,” though he attributes this, in part, to his own minor deceptions. When Dimitri is around, Jejoen wears trousers, but “when he doesn’t see it” he wears a qamis, a traditional Muslim garment.

I asked Jejoen about the execution of James Foley, and he said that it was a question “for scholars” of Islam, adding, “I can’t say anything about it, because I’m not at that level.” He told me that there is “no difference” between his views and those of his “spiritual leader,” Belkacem. With the prospect of prison looming, Jejoen seemed to have recast in his mind his experience in Syria. He declared that his only regret about his time there was that he returned to Belgium. Living in Raqqa, he said, “might be cool.” He had been home for more than a year, and was frequently recognized and harassed on the streets of Antwerp. In recent months, Jejoen had sat in court next to other Sharia4Belgium defendants, some of whom had repeatedly lied to the authorities; his coöperation seemed to have carried no benefit. He hadn’t been offered a plea deal or witness protection, because, the Belgian security official said, “that’s just the system in Belgium.”

Although he had divulged jihadi secrets in his police interrogations, Jejoen believed that he could return to Syria unscathed. “People think I can’t go there, because I’ll get killed,” he told me. But he compared his coöperation with the authorities—which other Sharia4Belgium members liken to treason—to committing a minor sin, such as drinking alcohol while in Belgium. “You cannot be punished for that” in the caliphate, he said, “because it didn’t take place there.”

We left the restaurant, and Jejoen headed back to his mother’s apartment. A few nights later, he called me from an unfamiliar phone number and asked for “urgent” help. “I would like to go to Turkey,” he said. He told me that it would be just for a holiday in a seaside resort in Antalya—where the temperature was barely above freezing. He faced no restrictions on his travel, and said he would return to Antwerp for the sentencing. He planned to travel with his girlfriend, a Belgian of Algerian descent, whom his father described as “extremist.” He asked to use my credit card, and promised to give me eight hundred euros immediately. The flight left in nine hours. I said no.

Later that night, Dimitri stood in the freezing alley outside his front door, smoking a cigarette. “One of my Syrian connections said that my son called to them, three weeks ago,” he told me. Jejoen later denied it, telling his father, “If I want to go back in, I know how to go.” Dimitri believed that if Jejoen went to Syria the Islamic State would kill him. “You will see him in a video,” he said. Nonetheless, Dimitri gave his son the money for the trip to Antalya.

Before sunrise the next day, Jejoen was arrested at Brussels Airport. His journey violated a restraining order filed by his girlfriend, after a fight nearly two months before. (They had since resolved their issues and she had asked for the order to be cancelled.) He remained in prison until the sentencing, which was delayed a month, after the Charlie Hebdo murders.

On February 11th, the court concluded that Sharia4Belgium was a terrorist organization. Jejoen was given a forty-month suspended sentence.

Belkacem received twelve years in prison. (He has since appealed his sentence.) “Do you know how much potential there is in prison?” Belkacem once joked with his followers at the Sharia4-Belgium headquarters. “Everyone in prison is against the system,” he said. “Infidels and Muslims alike. There is work to be done. It will be awesome.”




Battle Lines
Want to understand the jihadis? Read their poetry
By Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel   


Jihadi poetry circulates online and makes self-conscious use of the genres, metres, and language of classical Arabic verse

On October 11, 2014, according to Islamic State-affiliated Twitter accounts a woman going by the name Ahlam al-Nasr was married in the courthouse of Raqqa, Syria, to Abu Usama al-Gharib, a Vienna-born jihadi close to the movement’s leadership. ISIS social media rarely make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi power couple. Al-Gharib is a veteran propagandist, initially for Al Qaeda and now for ISIS. His bride is a burgeoning literary celebrity, better known as “the Poetess of the Islamic State.” Her first book of verse, “The Blaze of Truth,” was published online last summer and quickly circulated among militant networks. Sung recitations of her work, performed a cappella, in accordance with ISIS’s prohibition on instrumental music, are easy to find on YouTube. “The Blaze of Truth” consists of a hundred and seven poems in Arabic—elegies to mujahideen, laments for prisoners, victory odes, and short poems that were originally tweets. Almost all the poems are written in monorhyme—one rhyme for what is sometimes many dozens of lines of verse—and classical Arabic metres.

Little is known about Ahlam al-Nasr, but it seems that she comes from Damascus and is now in her early twenties. Her mother, a former law professor, has written that al-Nasr “was born with a dictionary in her mouth.” She began writing poems in her teens, often in support of Palestine. When, in the spring of 2011, protests in Syria broke out against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, al-Nasr took the side of the demonstrators. Several poems suggest that she witnessed the regime’s crackdown at first hand and may have been radicalized by what she saw:

    Their bullets shattered our brains like an
    earthquake,
    even strong bones cracked then broke.

    They drilled our throats and scattered
    our limbs—
    it was like an anatomy lesson!

    They hosed the streets as blood still
    ran
    like streams crashing down from the
    clouds.

Al-Nasr fled to one of the Gulf states but returned to Syria last year, arriving in Raqqa, the de-facto capital of ISIS, in early fall. She soon became a kind of court poet, and an official propagandist for the Islamic State. She has written poems in praise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled Caliph of ISIS, and, in February, she wrote a thirty-page essay defending the leadership’s decision to burn the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh alive. In a written account of her emigration, al-Nasr describes the caliphate as an Islamist paradise, a state whose rulers are uncorrupted and whose subjects behave according to pious norms. “In the caliphate, I saw women wearing the veil, everyone treating each other with virtue, and people closing up their shops at prayer times,” she writes. The movement’s victories in Mosul and western Iraq were fresh in the militants’ memory. In the city streets, “children played with sticks, pretending these were weapons they would use to fight heretics and unbelievers.” Al-Nasr celebrated ISIS’s military triumphs as a new dawn for Iraq:

    Ask Mosul, city of Islam, about the
    lions—
    how their fierce struggle brought
    liberation.

    The land of glory has shed its humiliation
    and defeat
    and put on the raiment of splendor.

ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other Islamist movements produce a huge amount of verse. The vast majority of it circulates online, in a clandestine network of social-media accounts, mirror sites, and proxies, which appear and disappear with bewildering speed, thanks to surveillance and hacking. On militant Web sites, poetry-discussion forums feature couplets on current events, competitions among duelling poets, who try to outdo one another in virtuosic feats, and downloadable collections with scholarly accoutrements. (“The Blaze of Truth” includes footnotes that explain tricky syntax and unusual rhyme schemes.)

Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.

“Al-shi‘r diwan al-‘arab,” runs an ancient maxim: “Poetry is the record of the Arabs”—an archive of historical experience and the epitome of their literature. The authority of verse has no rival in Arabic culture. The earliest poems were composed by desert nomads in the centuries before the revelation of the Koran. The poems are in monorhyme and one of sixteen canonical metres, making them easy to memorize. The poets were tribal spokesmen, celebrating the virtues of their kin, cursing their enemies, recalling lost loves, and lamenting the dead, especially those killed in battle. The Koran has harsh words for these pre-Islamic troubadours. “Only those who have strayed follow the poets,” the Surah of the Poets reads. “Do you not see that they wander lost in every valley, and say what they do not do?” But the poets could not be written off so easily, and Muhammad often found it useful to co-opt them. A number of tribal poets converted and became his companions, praising him in life and elegizing him after his death.

Arabic culture of the classical period—roughly, the eighth to the thirteenth century—was centered in the caliphal courts of Damascus, Baghdad, and Córdoba. Although most poets now lived far from the pasture grounds of the tribal bards, and written texts had replaced oral compositions, the basic features of the art lived on. Poetic metres were essentially unchanged. The key genres—poems of praise and blame and elegies for the dead—were maintained, and new modes grew out of the old material. In the urbane atmospheres of the courts, the wine song, which had been a minor element in the old poetry, became a full-fledged genre.

Contemporary poets writing in Arabic both read and translate a wide range of verse from abroad, and for many of them free verse and prose poetry are the norm. But, though the old models have lost some of their force, there is still a remarkable continuity of poetic expression. For educated Arabic speakers, the language of the classical period is relatively easy to enjoy. The humblest bookseller in Cairo or Damascus will stock editions of medieval verse, and pre-Islamic poems are assigned to high-school students.

Furthermore, the old poetry is alive and well in the popular sphere. Among the most successful television programs in the Middle East is “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” (“Millionaire Poet,” but also “Poet of the People”), which is modelled on “American Idol.” Every season, amateurs from across the Arab world recite their own verse in front of a large and appreciative studio audience in Abu Dhabi. Winners of the competition receive up to 1.3 million dollars—more than the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the show’s boosters are fond of pointing out. Last year, the program had seventy million viewers worldwide. The poems recited on “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” are highly conventional in form and content. They evoke the beauties of the beloved and of the homeland, praise the generosity of local leaders, or lament social ills. According to the rules of the show, they must be metered and rhymed, and the judges’ comments often zero in on contestants’ technique. The show has produced a number of literary celebrities. In 2010, a Saudi woman named Hissa Hilal became an audience favorite after reciting a poem criticizing hard-line Saudi clerics. During the Arab Spring, an Egyptian man, Hisham Algakh, appeared on a spinoff show reciting several poems in support of the demonstrators at Tahrir. He became a media star, and soon his poems were being recited in the square itself.

The views expressed in jihadi poetry are, of course, more bloodthirsty than anything on “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon”: Shiites, Jews, Western powers, and rival factions are relentlessly vilified and threatened with destruction. Yet it is recognizably a subset of this popular art form. It is sentimental—even, at times, a little kitsch—and it is communal rather than solitary. Videos of groups of jihadis reciting poems or tossing back and forth the refrain of a song are as easy to find as videos of them blowing up enemy tanks. Poetry is understood as a social art rather than as a specialized profession, and practitioners take pleasure in showing off their technique.

It may seem curious that some of the most wanted men in the world should take the time to fashion poems in classical metres and monorhyme—far easier to do in Arabic than in English, but something that still requires practice. And these are only the most obvious signs of the jihadis’ dedication to form. The poems are full of allusions, recherché terms, and baroque devices. Acrostics, in which the first letters of successive lines spell out names or phrases, are especially popular. One of al-Nasr’s poems, a declaration of her commitment to ISIS, is based on the group’s acronym, Daesh. (“Daesh” is generally a derogatory label, and al-Nasr’s embrace of it is a gesture of defiance.) The militants’ evident delight in their virtuosity turns their poems into performances. The poets are making sure that we know they are poets—laying claim to the special authority that comes with poetry’s status in Arabic culture. Yet behind the swagger there are powerful anxieties: all jihadis have elected to set themselves apart from the wider society, including their families and their religious communities. This is often a difficult choice, with lasting consequences. By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging.

The raid, in May, 2011, on the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was killed also uncovered a trove of correspondence. In one letter, written on August 6, 2010, bin Laden asks a key lieutenant to recommend someone to lead “a big operation inside America.” In the very next sentence, he requests that “if there are any brothers with you who know about poetic metres, please inform me, and if you have any books on the science of classical prosody, please send them to me.”

Of all jihadi poets, bin Laden was the most celebrated, and he prided himself on his knowledge of the art. The name of his first camp in Afghanistan, al-Ma’sada (“The Lion’s Lair”), was inspired by a line of Ka‘b bin Malik, one of the pagan tribal poets who converted and became a companion of the Prophet. A large part of bin Laden’s charisma as a leader was his mastery of classical eloquence.

One of bin Laden’s most emblematic poems was written in the late nineties, sometime after his return to Afghanistan, in 1996. It is a two-part poem, forty-four lines long: the first half is in the voice of bin Laden’s young son Hamza; the second half is the father’s reply. Many jihadi poems use the conceit of a child speaker; it provides them with a figure of innocence and truthfulness. Hamza begins by asking his father why their life is full of hardship and why they can never stay in one place. The rhetoric and the mood of this opening section are borrowed from a pre-Islamic genre called the rahil, in which the poet evokes the difficulty of his journey, complains of solitude and danger, and compares his lot to that of a series of desert animals:

    Father, I have travelled a long time among
    deserts and cities.

    It has been a long journey, Father,
    among valleys and mountains,

    So long that I have forgotten my tribe, my
    cousins, even humankind.

Hamza goes on to recall the odyssey of bin Laden and his family: their exile from Saudi Arabia, their stay in Sudan and their subsequent expulsion, and, finally, their arrival in Afghanistan, “where men are the bravest of the brave.” Even here, though, the militants find no peace, for America “sends a storm of missiles like rain” (a reference to the cruise-missile strikes of Operation Infinite Reach, in 1998). Hamza ends with a request for fatherly wisdom.

Bin Laden’s response uses the same metre and rhyme as the lines given to his son, lending the poem not only an air of formality but also one of intimacy. Bin Laden tells Hamza not to expect their life to get any easier: “I’m sorry, my son, I see nothing ahead but a hard, steep path, / Years of migration and travel.” He reminds Hamza that they live in a world where the suffering of innocents, particularly Muslim innocents, is ignored and “children are slaughtered like cattle.” Yet Muslims themselves seem inured to their humiliation, “a people struck by stupor.” The harshest lines are directed at the impotence of Arab regimes. “Zionists kill our brothers and the Arabs hold a conference,” bin Laden jeers. “Why do they send no troops to protect the little ones from harm?”

Bin Laden is acknowledging Hamza’s complaint, but also explaining to him that hardship and exile are necessary. This is not only because injustice is everywhere but, more significant, because adversity is the sign of election. A core belief of most jihadi movements is that they form the last nucleus of authentic Muslims, a vanguard referred to in the tradition as al-ghuraba’—“the strangers.” This is also the name of an ISIS media outlet and the title of a popular jihadi anthem. The trope has its source in a Hadith that is especially important for militants: “Islam began as a stranger, and it shall return as it began, as a stranger. Blessed are the strangers.” Islam began as a stranger in the sense that Muhammad’s first followers in Mecca were persecuted by the town’s unbelievers, a period of hardship that led, eventually, to the flight to Medina. For jihadis, their exile in foreign lands is evidence that they are the strangers of prophecy. In fact, jihadis consider themselves to be in exile even when living in nominally Muslim states, and their exclusion from mainstream believers serves only to vindicate their sense of righteousness.

The structure of bin Laden’s poem makes the work into a drama of inheritance. Bin Laden is bequeathing a political duty and an ethical disposition. The handing down of cultural precepts across the generations is a constant anxiety for jihadis. The militants are surrounded by enemies—Arab states, rival Islamists, remote Western powers—and are on the run. Hamza asks, “Where can we escape to, Father, and when will we stay in one place?” The fact that so much of jihadi culture is online, rather than embodied in material things, adds to the difficulty of maintaining the continuity of tradition. As a result, jihadis, like many other diasporic communities, are obsessed with recording their achievements for posterity. The infrastructure of their online archives—such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s “Minbar al-Tawheed wal-Jihad,” a repository of religious opinions, manifestos, and poetry—is remarkably sophisticated. It is no accident that the elegy is the most common genre in the poetry of jihad: poems for fallen warriors (including suicide bombers) are a way of both memorializing significant events and giving the militants a common calendar. For the jihadis, acts of martyrdom are the building blocks of communal history. Bin Laden himself recited an elegy for the nineteen hijackers of 9/11: “Embracing death, the knights of glory found their rest. / They gripped the towers with hands of rage and ripped through them like a torrent.”

At the center of jihadist politics is a rejection of the nation-state. The map of much of the modern Middle East, established by Britain and France at the end of the First World War, is an enduring source of bitterness. One of ISIS’s most striking videos shows jihadis destroying the border crossing between Iraq and Syria, a line established by the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, in 1916. Other videos feature the burning of passports and national I.D.s. The “holy warriors” find a home only in failed states such as Afghanistan—or, now, eastern Syria—so the poetry of jihad promulgates a new political geography. This geography rejects the boundaries set by foreign powers and is, instead, organized around sites of militancy and Muslim suffering. A poem of Ahlam al-Nasr draws this map in a way that combines the politics of jihad with a visionary cosmopolitanism:

    My homeland is the land of truth,
    the sons of Islam are my brothers. . . .

    I do not love the Arab of the South
    any more than the Arab of the North.

    My brother in India, you are my brother,
    as are you, my brothers in the Balkans,

    In Ahwaz and Aqsa,
    in Arabia and Chechnya.

    If Palestine cries out,
    or if Afghanistan calls out,

    If Kosovo is wronged,
    or Assam or Pattani is wronged,

    My heart stretches out to them,
    longing to help those in need.

    There is no difference among them,
    this is the teaching of Islam.

    We are all one body,
    this is our happy creed. . . .

    We differ by language and color,
    but we share the very same vein.

Ahwaz is the Arabic name for a province in southern Iran where Sunni Arabs have long complained of persecution. Pattani is a Muslim-majority province in Thailand, where a Malay insurgency dating back to the nineteen-sixties has become increasingly Islamist. Al-Nasr’s empathy for Muslims in far-flung places is a central feature of her literary persona. Among the dozens of elegies in “The Blaze of Truth,” one is for a prominent Chechen jihadist and another for a Kuwaiti philanthropist. These moments of internationalist ecstasy are common in jihadi verse. The poets delight in crossing in their imaginations borders that are impassable in reality.

The Caliphate of ISIS, as yet recognized by no other country, is a fantasy world of fluctuating borders where anything can happen, including the recapture of past glories. In March, 2014, the kingdom of Bahrain declared that all subjects fighting in Syria had two weeks to return home or be stripped of their citizenship. Turki al-Bin‘ali, a prominent ISIS ideologue and a former Bahraini subject, responded with “A Denunciation of Nationality,” a short poem that thumbs its nose at the royals and ridicules the very idea of the nation-state. “Tell them we put their nationality under our heel, just like their royal decrees,” he writes. For the jihadis, new frontiers beckon: “Do you really think we would return, when we are here in Syria, land of epic battles and the outposts of war?”

The “outposts” of al-Bin‘ali’s verse (ribat, in Arabic) were garrisons on the frontier between medieval Islamic states and their neighbors—Catholic Spain or Orthodox Byzantium. There are no actual ribat anymore, however. The term is an archaic flourish—like using monorhyme and classical metres. Jihadi culture is premised on such anachronisms. Propaganda videos show the militants on horseback with their swords in the air, flying banners, inscribed with calligraphy, modelled on those of the earliest Muslim conquerors. Jihadi poetry indulges in similar fantasies. Muhammad al-Zuhayri, a Jordanian engineer whose Web alias is “the Poet of Al Qaeda,” captures this martial mood in a poem dedicated to Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, the first head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The lines are addressed to an unnamed woman:

    Wake us to the song of swords,
    and when the cavalcade sets off, say
    farewell.

    The horses’ neighing fills the desert,
    arousing our souls and spurring them
    onward.

    The knights’ pride stirs at the sound,
    while humiliation lashes our foes.

The culture of jihad is a culture of romance. It promises adventure and asserts that the codes of medieval heroism and chivalry are still relevant. Having renounced their nationalities, the militants must invent an identity of their own. They are eager to convince themselves that this identity is not really new but extremely old. The knights of jihad style themselves as the only true Muslims, and, while they may be tilting at windmills, the romance seems to be working. ISIS recruits do not imagine they are emigrating to a dusty borderland between two disintegrating states but to a caliphate with more than a millennium of history.

Anyone who reads much jihadi poetry soon sees that it contains a great deal of theology. Religious doctrine is the essential glue of the culture, and many jihadi theologians have written poems. Just as the poets think of themselves as resurrecting an authentic poetic heritage, so the theologians believe that they are uncovering and resuscitating the true tenets of their faith. As theologians, jihadis are largely self-taught. They read the canonical texts (all of which are easy to find online) and are reluctant to accept the interpretations of mainstream clerics, whom they accuse of hiding the truth out of deference to political despots. The jihadis are literalists, and they promise to sweep away centuries of scholasticism and put believers in touch with the actual teachings of their religion. The elements of this scenario closely resemble those of the Protestant Reformation: mass literacy, the democratization of clerical authority, and methodological literalism. Under these circumstances, anyone might nail his theses to a mosque door.

Among the principles that militants are trying to reclaim from the clerics is the principle of jihad itself. Armed struggle has long been recognized by the Islamic tradition, but it was rarely put at the core of what it means to be a Muslim: by the twentieth century, many jurists considered it little more than a relic. For the jihadis, this attitude is treasonous and has led to the Islamic world’s decline. They believe that waging jihad is central to Muslim identity—an ethical obligation and a political necessity. Some of the most compelling expressions of this view are poems.

One of these is ‘Isa Sa‘d Al ‘Awshan’s “Epistle to the Scolders.” The poem was published in 2004, in “The Anthology of Glory,” a collection of poems by Saudi militants who were attempting to bring international jihad to the Kingdom, attacking local Western targets and oil compounds. The regime eventually snuffed out this offensive. (Surviving members of the group fled to Yemen, where they resurfaced as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.) ‘Awshan, a jihadi propagandist and magazine editor, appeared on a list of the Kingdom’s most wanted men and was killed during a shoot-out in Riyadh.
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‘Awshan prefaces his “Epistle” with a note claiming that, after the publication of the most-wanted list, “some of my brothers and friends scolded me, wishing that I had not gone down this road—the road of jihad and struggle against unbelievers—since it is full of difficulties.” The scolder is another figure from the old poetry. In pre-Islamic lyrics, while the speaker typically styles himself as a lover, a fighter, and a host of reckless generosity, the scolder is a voice of the communal superego, reminding the poet of his tribal duties. As the scholar András Hámori has written, “His job was to try to prevent the protagonist from making the heroic gesture.” In ‘Awshan’s poem, the scolders are pious Muslims who are not convinced of the legitimacy of jihad and worry that the militants are putting their communities in danger. ‘Awshan explains that he wrote his epistle “to clarify the path I have chosen and the reason for pursuing it.” The poem that follows is an apologia for jihad. It begins:

    Let me make clear every obscure truth,
    and remove the confusion of him who
    questions.

    Let me say to the world and what is
    beyond it, “Listen:
    I speak the truth and do not stutter.

    The age of submission to the unbeliever is
    over,
    he who gives us bitter cups to drink.

    In this time of untruthfulness, let me say:
    I do not desire money, nor a life of
    ease,

    But rather the forgiveness of God and His
    grace.
    For it is God I fear, not a gang of
    criminals.

    You ask me about the course
    I have pursued with zeal and
    swiftness,

    You ask, afraid for my sake, ‘Is this
    the rightly-guided path, the good
    road?

    Is this the way of the Prophet?’ ”

Jihadi poetry often features scolders, who counsel caution and implicitly give their blessing to the status quo. They speak the language of quiescent clerics and of parental authority. In another poem, a martyr addresses his mother from beyond the grave, telling her not to cry for him and not to question his judgment. “I’ve left my blood behind me, Mother,” he writes, “a trail that leads to paradise.” The scolders serve several purposes. They allow the poet to display his knowledge of literary tradition and to create the desired archaic mood. They also function as a choric background against which the poet can strike his lonely, heroic poses. And, by questioning the advisability of jihad, the scolders permit the speaker to make its virtues clear.

Publicly stating one’s creed like this is central to jihadi ethics. When the rest of the world is against you, and your co-religionists are too timid to speak the truth, coming out as a jihadi—swearing allegiance to the Emir of Al Qaeda, say, or to the Caliph of ISIS—is a test of courage. The “Epistle” is full of verbs of exposure and declaration. After condemning the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, ‘Awshan writes:

    I announced there would be no more rest
    until our arrows smote the enemy.

    I strapped on my machine gun with a
    mujahid’s resolve
    and pursued my course with a
    passionate heart.

    I want one of two good things:
    martyrdom,
    or deliverance from despotic power.

For the jihadist, poetry is a mode of manifesto, or of bearing witness. There are no prizes for subtlety. The poet’s task is to make an open and lucid defense of his faith against all doubters, at home and abroad. He must dare to name the truths that his parents and his elders try to hide. Another poem in “The Anthology of Glory” begins with a classical-sounding admonition: “Silence! Words are for heroes / and the words of heroes are deeds.” Surrounded by skeptics, the jihadi poet fashions himself as a knight of the word, which is to say, a martyr in the making.

After Ahlam al-Nasr arrived in Raqqa last year, she was given a celebrity tour by ISIS. She wrote a long prose account of what she saw, addressed to her “sisters” and disseminated through ISIS media outlets. Walking through the streets of Raqqa, al-Nasr notes that the stalls are full of fresh vegetables and that men encourage one another to follow the example of the Prophet and to stop smoking. She is allowed to cook for the militants, which gives her great joy: “Everything had to be clean and wonderful. I kept repeating to myself: ‘This food will be eaten by mujahideen, these plates will be used by mujahideen.’ ” She is also brought to a gun shop, where she learns how to assemble and disassemble Russian- and American-made rifles. “All this happened in Syria, sisters, and in front of my eyes!” she writes.

Al-Nasr sees the caliphate as an Islamist utopia, not only because it is a place where Muslims behave as Muslims should but because it is a place of new beginnings. To most observers, Raqqa, under ISIS, is a rigidly totalitarian society, but for al-Nasr and other recruits it is a frontier where everything is in flux and negotiable—not only political boundaries but personal identities as well. Al-Nasr’s role is an unusually public one for a woman to play in jihadist movements, but ISIS has made a point of putting women on the front lines of the propaganda war. It has also created a female morality police, a shadowy group called the al-Khansa’ Brigades, who insure proper deportment in ISIS-held towns. Although media accounts of ISIS’s female recruits typically cast them as naïfs signing up for sexual slavery, it is a fact that no other Islamist militant group has been as successful in attracting women. In the most recent issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, a female writer encourages women to emigrate to “the lands of the Islamic State” even if it means travelling without a male companion, a shocking breach of traditional Islamic law. This may be a cynical ploy—a lure for runaways. But it is in keeping with the jihadists’ attack on parental authority and its emphasis on individual empowerment, including the power of female believers to renounce families they do not view as authentically Muslim.

The radical newness of ISIS society forms a strange counterpoint to the self-conscious archaism of the culture—the obsession with purity, with the buried truths of religion, and with classical literary forms. The al-Khansa’ Brigades are a notable example. Al-Khansa’ was a female poet of the pre-Islamic era who converted to Islam and became a companion of the Prophet, and her elegies for her male relations are keystones of the genre. The name therefore suggests an institution with deep roots in the past, and yet there has never been anything like the Brigades in Islamic history, nor do they have an equivalent anywhere else in the Arab world. The militants, of course, see no contradiction. They view their caliphate as a pure resurrection of the past. In her Raqqa diary, Ahlam al-Nasr describes the ISIS capital as a place of everyday miracles, a city where believers can go to be born again into the old, authentic faith. In the caliphate, she writes, “there are many things we’ve never experienced except in our history books.”




中國麵對氣候狀況的決心：41萬億



《新浪轉載路透社報道提要》中國月底將宣布41萬億元規模溫室氣體減排計劃

China puts $6 trillion price tag on its climate plan
WASHINGTON, June 23 | By Valerie Volcovici and David Brunnstrom

It will cost China over $6.6 trillion (41 trillion yuan) to meet the greenhouse gas reduction goals it will lay out later this month in its strategy for United Nations climate negotiations, the country's lead negotiator for the talks said Tuesday.

Xie Zhenhua, special representative for climate change affairs at China's National Development and Reform Commission, said the objectives China will outline by the end of June will be "quite ambitious".

Xie was participating in a three-day Strategic and Economic Dialogue forum in Washington where he met with counterparts in the Obama administration, including U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

To meet its objectives, China, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, must reconfigure its coal-dependent energy mix and develop new energy sources, Xie said.

"We will need to carry out international cooperation and research and development to reduce the costs of relevant technologies and to innovate so that we can reach our objectives," he told reporters at a State Department briefing.

The United States and China announced on Monday they will partner on two new carbon-capture, utilization and storage projects to help commercialize the technology.

While key details of China's plan are not yet known, it is expected to include targets announced in November, when it reached a key climate change deal with Washington to cap its emissions by 2030 and fill 20 percent of its energy needs from zero-carbon sources.

Earlier this month, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang reaffirmed the government's commitment to hit a carbon emissions peak by "around 2030". The country's coal consumption decreased for the first time in years in 2014, however, leading some to speculate that its emissions could reach their peak sooner.

Stern, the U.S. climate change envoy, told reporters the plans China has already announced with Washington were "a quite strong contribution".

But he said he hopes a final agreement of all countries at this December's key UN climate change conference in Paris contains "a strong set of...contributions, which are updated periodically" to ensure more ambitious targets.

Stern said China does not expect public finance to support its climate goals and that it is likely to attract investment as it adopts new technologies.

Earlier on Tuesday, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang told a panel moderated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that 750,000 electric vehicles were sold in China last year, three times more than the year before, "giving great opportunities and profit to companies like Tesla and BYD (Auto) ".

"To tackle climate change is both a challenge and an opportunity," Wang said.

Ahead of the UN's climate change conference in Paris, countries are required to submit national plans, which will serve as the building blocks of a final agreement.

So far, 11 countries, including the United States and Mexico, as well as the European Union have submitted theirs.




Fabric of a Trade Deal: U.S. Asks Vietnam to Cut Out Chinese Textiles
Fashion businesses say move to protect American jobs would be disruptive

By Tom Wright And Mark Magnier
Updated June 24, 2015

HANOI—The U.S., aiming to bolster American exporters, is stipulating that countries joining its new Pacific trade zone cut back on imports from China—a proposal that is meeting resistance from businesses and officials who say it will disrupt global supply chains.

The Senate is expected to pass on Wednesday legislation to expand President Barack Obama’s trade-negotiating powers after a bruising battle that has put pressure on proponents to show that the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership will create jobs in the U.S.

To that end, American trade negotiators are demanding that Vietnam, a major garments exporter, reduce its reliance on textiles made in China, which isn’t part of the trade pact, to get preferential market access to the U.S.

The goal is to create new markets in Vietnam for the U.S. textile industry, which employs a quarter of a million Americans and exported $20 billion last year.

“The U.S. and Mexico are especially large textile producers,” said Eliza Levy, a spokeswoman for the National Council of Textile Organizations. “Vietnam would simply have to shift its sourcing of yarns and fabrics from China to the U.S. and Mexico.”



U.S. fashion brands oppose this approach, which they say ignores the complexities of global supply chains. Vietnam is the second-largest exporter of apparel and footwear to the U.S., behind China, with $13.1 billion in sales last year. But the country only produces enough fabric to meet a fifth of its needs and buys about $4.7 billion worth from China, or about half its total annual imports.

Clothing brands want duty-free entry to the U.S. for all goods made in the new free-trade zone, no matter where the fabric is produced. The trade negotiations could slash U.S. duties on many of Vietnam’s exports of garments and shoes to zero from between 7% and 32%.

Julia Hughes, president of the U.S. Fashion Industry Association, a trade group representing American brands, said U.S. textile exporters won’t be able to feed Vietnam’s appetite in sufficient quantities, forcing garment producers there to continue to rely on Chinese fabrics. “Vietnam isn’t going to get much duty-free access” to the U.S. under current rules, Ms. Hughes said.

The U.S. garment industry argues that free trade will help the sector, which employs three million people, including designers and retail workers. In Congress, though, the debate over whether free trade imperils manufacturing employment has made the Pacific trade pact a contentious issue.

U.S. negotiators defend their position. Trevor Kincaid, a deputy assistant U.S. trade representative, said the deal “will deliver new opportunities for American-based businesses, including opportunities related to textiles and apparel in Vietnam.” The administration, he said, has “a single-minded focus on getting [the] best possible deal for American workers and exports.”

Vietnam has its own ideas. The country is working quickly to develop a homegrown textile industry, which would help get around the restrictions. “Vietnam is seeking to reduce its reliance on imports from China for its garment industry to better benefit from TPP,” said Phan Chi Dung, a senior official with Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade. However, he sees little chance of U.S. producers filling the void.

Companies from Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan recently have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into textile factories in Vietnam, hoping to later obtain tariff-free entry to the U.S. market.

TAL Apparel Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company which says it makes one in six dress shirts sold in the U.S., is building a $240 million textile plant in Vietnam, which it hopes to complete by 2017, to feed its two garment factories there.

Roger Lee, chief executive of TAL Apparel, thinks it will take five years for Vietnam’s textile industry to be self-sufficient. U.S. textile suppliers, he said, are too costly and far away from Asia to be competitive.

Chinese companies, too, are moving factories to Vietnam as wages rise at home and in anticipation of the Pacific trade zone.

Youngor Group, a Chinese apparel maker that runs a factory in Vietnam’s northern Nam Dinh province, is looking to source more textiles from Vietnam, rather than from its own factories in China, with an eye on exporting duty-free to the U.S. “Our major competitor moved to Vietnam. Many companies are moving,” said Yu Jian, deputy general manager of Youngor’s Vietnam operations.

Ou Kui, manager of Yanian Garment Co., a Chinese apparel company based in Hanoi, is looking at producing zippers, buttons and other accessories to help investors from China meet local-content requirements.

A recent congressional report noted that Vietnam’s textile industry, if it expands rapidly enough, could even compete with U.S. textile exports to Mexico, which is also part of the Pacific trade discussions.

Under pressure from U.S. brands, the trade agreement would allow Vietnam to continue to source from any country textiles and yarns on a “short-supply list”—inputs that aren’t produced in sufficient quantities inside the proposed trade zone.

Ms. Hughes, of the fashion industry association, said the list is too restrictive, and can’t be changed in the future, which will hamper U.S. brands’ operations.




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Global Health & Healthcare
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《紐約時報》2015.07.03
Health Insurance Companies Seek Big Rate Increases for 2016

WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.

Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.”

President Obama, on a trip to Tennessee this week, said that consumers should put pressure on state insurance regulators to scrutinize the proposed rate increases. If commissioners do their job and actively review rates, he said, “my expectation is that they’ll come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

The rate requests, from some of the more popular health plans, suggest that insurance markets are still adjusting to shock waves set off by the Affordable Care Act.

It is far from certain how many of the rate increases will hold up on review, or how much they might change. But already the proposals, buttressed with reams of actuarial data, are fueling fierce debate about the effectiveness of the health law.

A study of 11 cities in different states by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that consumers would see relatively modest increases in premiums if they were willing to switch plans. But if they switch plans, consumers would have no guarantee that they can keep their doctors. And to get low premiums, they sometimes need to accept a more limited choice of doctors and hospitals.

Some say the marketplaces have not attracted enough healthy young people. “As a result, millions of people will face Obamacare sticker shock,” said Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming.

By contrast, Marinan R. Williams, chief executive of the Scott & White Health Plan in Texas, which is seeking a 32 percent rate increase, said the requests showed that “there was a real need for the Affordable Care Act.”

“People are getting services they needed for a very long time,” Ms. Williams said. “There was a pent-up demand. Over the next three years, I hope, rates will start to stabilize.”

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said that federal subsidies would soften the impact of any rate increases. Of the 10.2 million people who obtained coverage through federal and state marketplaces this year, 85 percent receive subsidies in the form of tax credits to help pay premiums.

In an interview, Ms. Burwell said consumers could also try to find less expensive plans in the open enrollment period that begins in November. “You have a marketplace where there is competition,” she said, “and people can shop for the plan that best meets their needs in terms of quality and price.”

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico has requested rate increases averaging 51 percent for its 33,000 members. The proposal elicited tart online comments from consumers.

“This rate increase is ridiculous,” one subscriber wrote on the website of the New Mexico insurance superintendent.

In their submissions to federal and state regulators, insurers cite several reasons for big rate increases. These include the needs of consumers, some of whom were previously uninsured; the high cost of specialty drugs; and a policy adopted by the Obama administration in late 2013 that allowed some people to keep insurance that did not meet new federal standards.

“Healthier people chose to keep their plans,” said Amy L. Bowen, a spokeswoman for the Geisinger Health Plan in Pennsylvania, and people buying insurance on the exchange were therefore sicker than expected. Geisinger, often praised as a national model of coordinated care, has requested an increase of 40 percent in rates for its health maintenance organization.

Insurers with decades of experience and brand-new plans underestimated claims costs.

“Our enrollees generated 24 percent more claims than we thought they would when we set our 2014 rates,” said Nathan T. Johns, the chief financial officer of Arches Health Plan, which covers about one-fourth of the people who bought insurance through the federal exchange in Utah. As a result, the company said, it collected premiums of $39.7 million and had claims of $56.3 million in 2014. It has requested rate increases averaging 45 percent for 2016.

The rate requests are the first to reflect a full year of experience with the new insurance exchanges and federal standards that require insurers to accept all applicants, without charging higher prices because of a person’s illness or disability. The 2010 health law established the rate review process, requiring insurance companies to disclose and justify large proposed increases. Under federal rules, increases of 10 percent or more are subject to review.

Federal officials have often highlighted a provision of the Affordable Care Act that caps insurers’ profits and requires them to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care and related activities. “Because of the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Obama told supporters in 2013, “insurance companies have to spend at least 80 percent of every dollar that you pay in premiums on your health care — not on overhead, not on profits, but on you.”

In financial statements filed with the government in the last two months, some insurers said that their claims payments totaled not just 80 percent, but more than 100 percent of premiums. And that, they said, is unsustainable.

At Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, for example, the ratio of claims paid to premium revenues was more than 115 percent, and the company said it lost more than $135 million on its individual insurance business in 2014. “Based on first-quarter results,” it said, “the year-end deficit for 2015 individual business is expected to be significantly higher.”

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, the largest insurer in the state’s individual market, said its proposed increase of 36 percent could affect more than 209,000 consumers.

“There’s not a lot of mystery to it,” said Roy Vaughn, a vice president of the Tennessee Blue Cross plan. “We lost a significant amount of money in the marketplace, $141 million, because we were not very accurate in predicting the utilization of health care.”

Julie Mix McPeak, the Tennessee insurance commissioner, said she would ask “hard questions of the companies we regulate, to protect consumers.”

After public hearings and a rigorous review, Ms. Cali, the Oregon insurance commissioner, found that the cost of providing coverage to individuals and families in 2014 was $830 million, while premiums were only $703 million. She directed some carriers to raise rates in 2016 even more than they had proposed.

Health Net, for example, requested rate increases averaging 9 percent in Oregon. The state approved increases averaging 34.8 percent. Oregon’s Health Co-op requested a 5.3 percent increase. The state called for a 19.9 percent increase.

“We share the concerns expressed through public comment about the affordability of health insurance in Oregon,” said Ms. Cali, an actuary. But, she added, “inadequate rates could result in companies going out of business in the middle of the plan year, or being unable to pay claims.”

Coventry Health Care, now owned by Aetna, is seeking rate increases that average 22 percent for 70,000 consumers in Missouri. “The claims experience for these plans has been worse than anticipated,” Coventry reported.

In its proposal to increase rates by an average of 25 percent for more than 397,000 consumers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina cited “inpatient costs, particularly in treatment of cancer and heart conditions, emergency room utilization, and cost for specialty drug medications” to treat hepatitis C, breast cancer and cystic fibrosis.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas sought increases averaging 37 percent for 2016 and said the increase could affect 28,600 consumers.

“Kansans who purchased these individual plans since 2014 were older, in general, than expected and required more medical services than anticipated,” the company told federal health officials.