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This document summarizes China's severe environmental pollution problems and their consequences. It states that China is the world's worst polluter, home to 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities. Pollution is threatening China's public health and economic growth. It is also threatening global health by spreading pollution beyond China's borders through air, water, and ocean pollution. The document outlines specific examples of severe air, water, and ocean pollution from industries, vehicles, and agriculture in China. It concludes that China's pursuit of economic growth at all costs is compromising its environment and public health in an unsustainable way.
This document summarizes China's severe environmental pollution problems and their consequences. It states that China is the world's worst polluter, home to 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities. Pollution is threatening China's public health and economic growth. It is also threatening global health by spreading pollution beyond China's borders through air, water, and ocean pollution. The document outlines specific examples of severe air, water, and ocean pollution from industries, vehicles, and agriculture in China. It concludes that China's pursuit of economic growth at all costs is compromising its environment and public health in an unsustainable way.
This document summarizes China's severe environmental pollution problems and their consequences. It states that China is the world's worst polluter, home to 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities. Pollution is threatening China's public health and economic growth. It is also threatening global health by spreading pollution beyond China's borders through air, water, and ocean pollution. The document outlines specific examples of severe air, water, and ocean pollution from industries, vehicles, and agriculture in China. It concludes that China's pursuit of economic growth at all costs is compromising its environment and public health in an unsustainable way.
In their single-minded pursuit of economic growth, China's leaders have long overlooked public health -- which, by some measures, is now worse than under Mao. Despite recent reforms, China's citizens keep getting sicker, threatening the country's health-care system, the economy at large, and even the stability of the regime. melamine-laced powdered milk that sickened thousands of children, China's food record hasn't improved. Companies have been caught making ham laced with pesticides, counterfeit alcoholic drinks, fake baby formula, adulterated pickled vegetables, and carcinogenic chili sauce. And Beijing's responses are having little impact. China is the worlds worst polluter -- home to 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Recent headlines have been shocking: 16,000 decaying pig carcasses in Shanghais Whampoa River, dire air quality reports in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands of people dying prematurely because of environmental degradation. Most recently, the country has been shaken by a mysterious virus, H7N9, which has already killed six people and has spurred health authorities to order the slaughter of thousands of pigeons, chickens, and ducks thought to carry it. In the United States, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has begun work on an H7N9 vaccine. The dangers of Chinas environmental degradation go well beyond the countrys borders, as pollution threatens global health more than ever. Chinese leaders have argued that their country has the right to pollute, claiming that, as a developing nation, it cannot sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the environment. In reality, however, China is holding the rest of the world hostage -- and undermining its own prosperity. According to the World Bank, only one percent of Chinas 560 million urban residents breathe air considered safe by EU standards. Beijings levels of PM2.5s -- particles that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can penetrate the gas exchange regions of the lungs -- are the worst in the world. Beijings 2012 March average reading was 469 micrograms of such particles per cubic meter, which compares abysmally with Los Angeles highest 2012 reading of 43 micrograms per cubic meter. Such air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study. The unrelenting pace of construction of coal-fired power plants is only making matters worse. In his recent monograph, Climate Change: The China Problem, environmental scholar Michael Vandenbergh writes, On average, a new coal-powered electric plant large enough to serve a city the size of Dallas opens in China every seven to ten days. The lack of widespread coal-washing infrastructure and scrubbers at Chinese industrial facilities exacerbates the problem. Carbon dioxide emissions from cars in China are also growing exponentially, replacing coal-fired power plants as the major source of pollution in major Chinese cities. Deutsche Bank estimates that the number of passenger cars in China will reach 400 million by 2030, up from todays 90 million. And the sulfur levels produced by diesel trucks in China are at least 23 times worse than those in the United States. Acid rain, caused by these emissions, has damaged a third of Chinas limited cropland, in addition to forests and watersheds on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan. This pollution reaches the United States as well, sometimes at levels prohibited by the U.S. Clean Water Act. In 2006, researchers at the University of CaliforniaDavis discovered that almost all of the harmful particulates over Lake Tahoe originated in China. The environmental experts Juli Kim and Jennifer Turner note in their essay Chinas Filthiest Export that by the time it reaches the U.S., mercury transforms into a reactive gaseous material that dissolves easily in the wet climates of the Pacific Northwest. At least 20 percent of the mercury entering the Willamette River in Oregon most likely comes from China. Black carbon soot from China also threatens to block sunlight, lower crop yields, heat the atmosphere, and destabilize weather throughout the Pacific Rim. Chinas use of fresh water resources also threatens those beyond its borders. As Mark Twain reportedly said, in reference to California in the late nineteenth century, Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over. The sentiment holds true in modern-day Asia as well. Asias per capita fresh water availability is less than half the global average. China and India, for example, are home to 40 percent of the worlds population but make do with ten percent of the worlds fresh water. China is guzzling and polluting this limited resource at an alarming rate. The country has dammed every major river on the Tibetan plateau, including the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Indus, the Sutlej, the Shweli, and the Karnali, and there are large-scale plans to dam others. Of the 50,000 largest dams in the world, more than half are in China. As a result, China now controls the river water supply to 13 nearby countries but so far has refused to sign any treaties or cooperate with other countries on water issues. Beijing also voted against the UN attempt to regulate water sharing in the region. Chinas former minister of water resources, Wang Shucheng, described Chinas water policy as fight for every drop of water or die. This philosophy, combined with Chinas unabated pursuit of economic development, will have profoundly destabilizing consequences for the region, both politically and environmentally. Unfortunately for China, compromising the environment and health in pursuit of economic growth is not a sustainable strategy. The threat of water scarcity and the adverse domestic health effects of pollution darken Chinas future. Pollution-related illnesses are soaring. A recent social media campaign led by locals and international activities shed light on the growing phenomena of cancer villages -- areas where water pollution is so bad that it has led to a sharp rise in diseases like stomach cancer. Chinas own Ministry of Environmental Protection has concluded that 70 percent of the countrys major waterways are heavily polluted. According to Scott Moore of the Sustainability Science Program at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, pollutants have even seeped into the countrys subsurfaces, with more than half of monitored wells deemed unsafe to use for drinking water. The China Geological Survey now estimates that 90 percent of Chinas cities depend on polluted groundwater supplies. Water that has been purified at treatment plants is often recontaminated en route to homes. China has plundered its groundwater reserves, drilling massive underground tunnels that have even caused some cities to literally sink. China has also completely botched its waste-removal efforts. Eighty percent of the East China Sea, one of the worlds largest fisheries, is now unsuitable for fishing, according to Elizabeth C. Economy, a China and environmental expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Most Chinese coastal cities pump at least half of their waste directly into the ocean, which causes red tides and coastal fish die-offs. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the country is now the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean. The economic costs of pollution have been the focus of various government-backed studies in China. A recent study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning found that environmental damage to forests, wetlands, and grasslands shaved 3.5 percent off Chinas 2012 GDP. The World Bank puts the total cost of Chinas environmental degradation in the late 1990s at between 3.5 and 8 percent of GDP. Chinas pollution problem is holding back its economy -- and poisoning its own people and the rest of the world in the process. The international community should push China to realize that if it continues to ravage the environment, it will be unable to secure its future health and prosperity -- or avoid a global disaster.
The Swiss Miracle? Beyond Chocolate, Cheese, and Banking The eurozone's troubles -- including the possibility of Greece's exit from the union -- no longer qualify as a crisis. What looks like significant instability is really just the slow-motion settling of the continent's new economic order. From Ireland to Cyprus, the whole of Europe seems to be locked in economic and political crisis. But there is a small area of calm at the continents core: Switzerland. Switzerlands secret is that it is part of Europe -- and it isnt. On the one hand, it is a signatory to the Schengen treaty, and thus delegates the protection of its borders to the European Union. It has had a free trade agreement with EU nations since 1972. Accordingly, it sends 60 percent of its exports to the EU and gets 80 percent of its imports from the EU. The country is a member of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), which integrates the European financial industry, and its currency has been bound stably to the euro since 2011. At the same time, though, Switzerland is not part of the continent: it belongs neither to the European Union nor to the eurozone, so it makes its own fiscal policy and remains economically and politically independent. Switzerlands middle path is likely the reason why the country is doing so well. Between 2007 and the first quarter of 2012, its economy grew at a steady two to three percent per year, with a modest contraction of 1.9 percent at the peak of the financial crisis in 2009. GDP also shrank slightly in the second quarter of 2012, but is predicted to increase again by over one percent in 2013. In addition, the government is incredibly stable. The basic balance of parties in the executive branch has remained constant for the last 50 years. Switzerlands success stands in contrast to the struggles of many of its neighbors, which are still deep in recession, face deep social splits, and have governments that are fighting to hold on to power. That fact alone should make the Swiss case an object of international study. But, to date, it has not. The world only occasionally talks about this landlocked island of the blessed in the middle of Europe. And even then, the tales are mostly of morally problematic banking secrets or the imposition of the worlds strictest legal regulations for companies quoted on the stock exchange. But there is more to Switzerland than that. Underneath the countrys relative success is a unique political system, some elements of which Europe might do well to adopt. At their root, Europes economic and political problems result from a crisis of legitimacy. In Europe, the common economic zone and currency were created without an accompanying federal government. And the union itself controls less than two percent of the combined national GDPs of the 27 EU member states and is thus largely inoperative. National governments have retained their legitimacy but are bound to a hapless and unpopular union. As the recent Italian elections showed, Europeans feel stymied by both an overly complex bureaucracy and a power vacuum. That, in turn, has led to a loss of confidence in the traditional parties and in institutional politics. None of this is true in Switzerland, though, which has a brand of direct democracy that keeps politics, the capital, and the public in constant discourse. In a nutshell, the executive branch of Switzerlands government consists not of a president and prime minister but of something called the Federal Council, which is elected by the Swiss parliament. The council is composed of seven members and all five major parties, and the German and French languages must be represented. The distinction between the governing party and the opposition is thus blurred, since everyone participates in the executive branch of government. Another difference is that Switzerlands barely eight million citizens are called to the polls as many as four times a year for national elections alone. The frequency of voting relates to two facts: constitutional amendments can be brought to government through popular initiative (100,000 signatures in 18 months) and all constitutional changes are subject to mandatory public referendums. In addition, Swiss citizens can initiate a referendum on any piece of legislation by gathering 50,000 signatures within 100 days. In the last few years, Swiss citizens have voted on constitutional changes relating to protection from gun violence, the introduction of managed care, protection from secondhand smoke, the requirement to put treaties with other countries to a public vote, and a rule that no one in a company can earn less in a year than the highest-ranking manager earns in a month. Continuous political deliberation has created a rare balance between citizens and government. Government commissions are driven to develop legislation that will pass the immediate scrutiny of parliament and the people. And the government spends a considerable amount of time communicating its policy decisions to the public. Not surprisingly, policymakers information efforts are repeatedly scrutinized: a vocal segment of the public has demanded that government representatives abstain from campaigning and let the people decide on certain issues without any influence from the government. Similarly, campaign spending, particularly by trade associations, has come under scrutiny, and media sponsored by public foundations and the broader public have raised awareness for the increasing spending inequalities. In addition, Swiss laws ban political advertising on television and radio. Of course, that still does not mean that public is perfectly informed: the introduction of free newspapers, the pressures on print media, and the turn toward news as entertainment on television have all threatened the quality and diversity of information. As a result of the Swiss political system, the constitution is subject to constant amendment by its citizen- authors. Admittedly, the emphasis on the Swiss publics right to revise the constitution according to its beliefs of the moment occasionally leads to inconsistencies in the highest law and, sometimes, tension with international human rights laws. Popular initiatives from the right, for example, led to a ban on minarets in Switzerland (which goes against the Swiss constitutions guarantee of freedom of religion) and to new rules for the deportation of foreigners who have been convicted of crimes (which are thought to counter international human rights treaties). The constitutional court, tasked with adjudicating such discrepancies, shows considerable restraint in ruling against direct democracy and for human rights. In 1990, it overruled male citizens in one canton (state) who repeatedly voted down womens suffrage. Since then, it has rarely stepped in, famously avoiding interfering in the 2009 Mosque minarets decision. On the other side, the public-is-king mentality has, at times, led to a weakening sense of the rule of law. Still, the tension between direct democracy and the constitutional state aside, Switzerlands brand of government has brought with it a strong sense of identification with the political system. Unlike in other countries, polls are rarely used as a protest against Bern. So should the rest of Europe adopt the Swiss model? For government to work, it needs legitimacy. This is attained through the including as many voices as possible, and political efficacy, which is achieved when that public opinion actually informs legislation. Switzerland gets a good rating on the efficacy scale. It also does fairly well on the legitimacy scale. The recent transformation of the media landscape with the introduction of free political newspapers for commuters (a large segment of the population) and other populist media has certainly taken its toll, but the country suffers far less from lack of legitimacy than do other European countries. Some elements of the Swiss model could not translate to the rest of Europe. Switzerland is comparably small and consists of an ethnically and culturally homogenous population. (In fact, it has been growing more homogenous over the past 150 years, as various confessions and French, German, and Italian Swiss cultures have merged.) The country further profits from its highly profitable niches in the world economy, such as the pharmaceutical industry, metals, watches, and agricultural products. Thanks to these industries, the countrys welfare state and education system are well funded. The European Union enjoys none of these benefits. But Switzerland does have four official languages and an urban-rural divide on many political issues, especially those relating to immigration, integration, and cultural diversity. The Swiss system offers four lessons for the European project. First, small is beautiful. Switzerlands emphasis on small-scale administration autonomy for the different cantons could serve as a model for a Europe of regions. The way Switzerland handles its four languages and their respective ethnicities is an example of the unity in diversity that Europe seeks. Second, direct and frequent appeals to the public make government more palatable. Europe has to dramatically improve government-people relationships if it wants to avoid further loss of the publics confidence. Third, not only do direct appeals make government more palatable but they also make citizens feel more responsible for government business and more likely to participate in it. Fourth, success in an interconnected world depends on blending integration with autonomy. Switzerland is successful because it has integrated with Europe but has preserved its autonomy. Europe-wide, this would mean giving up on full integration and being more lenient about half-measures, as Switzerland is -- if not as a definitive solution, then certainly as a viable pathway in times of crisis and transition. In other words, Switzerland could be a model for a potential United States of Europe, which several commentators, such as the political theorists Jrgen Habermas and Umberto Eco and the politicians Franois Hollande, Mario Monti, and Angela Merkel, believe is needed to overcome the European crisis. At the super-national level, the Swiss model would create a political union without a homogenization of cultures, identities, and laws. The EU could be headed by a council like Switzerlands, with no single leader. Instead of governing from above -- light years away from European citizens -- governments could bring as many issues as possible to a joint vote of all European citizens of all 27 member states. Such polling would foster feelings of community, shared destiny, and common identity. It would also help create a more concrete joint historical memory. If Switzerlands stability, peace, and prosperity is the goal, it is time for Europe to take the countrys model to heart.
How Thatcher Saved Britain -- And Lost Europe The Iron Lady's Foreign Policy Margaret Thatcher's memoir, The Downing Street Years, offers little nuanced portraiture, self-revelation or introspection. But it is a work of real force and shrewdness that recounts the political battles of a dogged, self-assured champion of conservatives. In tone and tilt, thus, it is unalloyed Iron Lady. The United Kingdom has had its share of remarkable twentieth-century prime ministers. David Lloyd George was in many respects the architect of victory over Germany in the First World War. Winston Churchill led the country to victory in the second. Clement Attlee spearheaded the transformation of British society after 1945 with the creation of the welfare state. None of them, however, lent their names to an ism; there would have been something almost un-British about it. All that changed in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher. The outlines of Thatcherism on the socio-economic front are well known: rolling back the frontiers of the state, emphasizing individual responsibility, and championing entrepreneurial creativity. Today, the legacy of Thatcherism is ambivalent. On the one hand, Thatcher pulled the country out of the economic tailspin of the 1970s; on the other hand, her war on regulation facilitated the banking extravaganzas that eventually resulted in the ongoing financial crisis. What is less well grasped, however, is Thatchers legacy in foreign policy, which is at least as important and equally complex. After all, the sobriquet Iron Lady was bestowed on Thatcher not by British miners or Thatchers many other domestic opponents, but by the Soviet press in the mid-1980s. It reflected her reputation for toughness on the military and diplomatic fronts, particularly in the joint effort with U.S. President Ronald Reagan to strengthen the Wests nuclear defenses during the Cold War. Thatchers uncompromising struggle against Irish republican terrorism earned her the undying hatred of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which made its first targeted assassination attempt against a British prime minister in the notorious Brighton hotel bombing of 1984. Her most complete victory came in the 1982 Falklands War, when she dispatched a British task force -- at considerable risk -- to expel an Argentinian junta from the Falklands Islands. (The conflict ended in a decisive British victory.) Thatchers relations with her partners in the European Economic Community were more pacific, but the leaders of continental Europe nevertheless feared the vigor with which she represented British interests in Brussels. After decades of drift and decline, Thatcher re-established the United Kingdom as a major force on the international scene. Three interlocking -- but not always mutually reinforcing -- impulses drove Thatchers foreign policy. First, the Iron Lady hated dictators and bullies of any kind. She refused to be intimidated by IRA violence, and she despised the culture of fear that the Irish republican movement fostered to keep its community in line. Her toughness on the Falklands reflected a determination not to hand islands inhabitants over to the military regime in Buenos Aires, whose abysmal human rights record was well known. And her opposition to the Soviet bloc was informed by a deep sympathy for the dissident movements in such places as Czechoslovakia and Poland. Later, Thatcher was one of the few members of the British political establishment to speak out strongly against Serb ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The sobriquet Iron Lady was bestowed on Thatcher not by British miners or Thatchers many other domestic opponents, but by the Soviet press in the mid-1980s. Underpinning this hatred of dictators was the second impulse that drove Thatchers foreign policy: her passionate commitment to democracy. She was outraged that the National Union of Mineworkers refused to allow its members to vote on whether to strike, a decision that was ultimately made for the miners by an authoritarian, Soviet-leaning leadership. Her unyielding line against IRA terror was rooted in the knowledge that the majority of those in Northern Ireland wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. Thatchers close relationship with Reagan was based, above all, on their shared belief in economic liberalization at home and democracy promotion abroad, at least in the Communist world. To be sure, her conception of democracy could be a little narrow. She was slow to understand, for example, that a first- past-the-post electoral scheme was not suitable for a divided society such as Northern Ireland, and that a system that guaranteed more power-sharing among different groups would work better. Despite her reputation for inflexibility, Thatcher often showed remarkable imagination. She was the first Western leader to recognize the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she defined as a man we can do business with even before his elevation to the Soviet leadership. In this respect, she played a key role in ending the Cold War. Likewise, Thatcher pushed through the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, in the face of furious opposition from Unionists, thus paving the way for a constructive role for the Dublin government in the peace process. In both cases, however, Thatcher knew she needed to negotiate from a position of strength -- be it a favorable balance of nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union or a robust counterterrorist strategy that reduced the IRA threat to what was dubbed an acceptable level of violence. Subsequently, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 incorporated the democratic consent principle so long resisted by armed republicanism. Where Thatcher ultimately came unstuck was in her third principle, which was a preoccupation with German power -- and a related profound ambivalence about European integration. She was a strong supporter of the European common market, partly because of her belief in free trade and partly because she thought that a reinvigorated and economically robust Europe would help contain the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, Thatcher belonged to a generation that had gone through World War II and naturally feared German power and German unification. By the late 1980s, she began to view the growing influence of the European Commission in Brussels not only as an encroachment on the democratic rights of the British people, but also as a vehicle for the reassertion of German power on the continent. This divided her not only from the French, for whom Europe was a device to contain its historical enemy, but also from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose genuine commitment to a united Europe she mistakenly saw as a fig leaf for the reassertion of German power. In 198990, Thatchers commitment to democracy and her fear of Germany were in direct contradiction. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc cleared the way for the German people to express their democratic desire for reunification. Thatcher now expressed concern that a united republic would once again, dominate the whole of Europe. For a time, it seemed as if she would team up with Gorbachev and French President Francois Mitterand to prevent it. It was only with difficulty that the United States and her own advisers persuaded her to accept the inevitable. Nearly 25 years later, as Europe struggles with its sovereign debt crisis and the ever-widening gulf between Berlin and continents periphery, Thatchers concerns seem less far-fetched -- not because of any malevolence on the part of Germany, but because of the flawed structure of the common currency and the sheer size of the Federal Republic. Her failure of imagination in the 1980s was to insist on the renationalization of the powers drifting toward Brussels, rather than allowing for the different European countries to buy in to the project of integration democratically, through the creation of a single electoral and political space. Of course, the resulting loss of British sovereignty would have been unacceptable for Thatcher and indeed for the British people. But such a program would at least have given London a positive agenda toward Europe, instead of its half-in, half-out approach of the past three decades. Social Diplomacy Or How Diplomats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tweet impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. In fact, social media's real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere -- which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months. The rapid rise in popularity of social media outlets such as Twitter have led many to argue that people around the world are connecting in unprecedented ways. Parsing the data, however, reveals that isn't true. Rather than creating new relationships, Twitter largely reinforces those that already exist. Soon after protests erupted outside the U.S. embassy in the Egyptian capital last September, inspired by the posting on the Internet of an American-made anti-Islamic video, the embassy posted a statement saying, We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others. The statement appeared in two forms: a three-paragraph press release, e- mailed to various government officials and journalists, and a 123-character tweet. The tweet made waves first. The conservative Twitter-watching website Twitchy posted it under the headline US Embassy in Cairo chooses Sep. 11 to apologize for hurt Muslim feelings. Republicans quickly called the embassys actions an example of the Obama administrations appeasement of U.S. enemies, and the Romney campaign denounced it as disgraceful. The White House soon disavowed the statement, saying it was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government. @USEmbassyCairo deleted the tweet within hours, and, according to media reports, within weeks the senior public affairs officer on duty in Cairo that night was recalled to Washington. The Cairo incident wasnt the first time that a diplomats tweets have sparked a firestorm. Sometimes even apparently benign or accidental use of social media can lead to diplomatic discord. In February 2012, for example, the Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulroney, posted a tweet with a photo of his official car on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Chinese citizens expressed shock at the discovery that a prominent Western ambassador would drive a plain old Toyota Camry; the tweet threw the ubiquitous use of luxury cars by even mid-range Chinese officials into sharp relief and led to a storm of posts on Chinese bureaucratic excesses. Washington's Secret Weapon Against Chinese Hackers Applying the Lessons of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation in Cyberspace The United States faces unprecedented threats in cyberspace. But in its efforts to mitigate them, Washington is neglecting one of its best tools: economic sanctions. Without delay, the Obama administration should start using sanctions to deter both foreign governments and nonstate actors from hacking into American computer systems. ZACHARY K. GOLDMAN is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. governments can do about intellectual property theft. It is time to start considering what the private sector can do. After years of pressure, most multinational corporations agreed to build fair labor practices, worker safety, and environmental measures into their supply chains. They should now do the same with intellectual property protections. Chinese cyberattacks are stealing priceless intellectual property and crucial military secrets from companies and governments around the globe. Negotiations with Beijing are unlikely to help, since China has little interest in cracking down on hacking. So Washington must focus on defenses, not diplomacy. The tide of war is receding, U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed in October 2011, announcing the impending conclusion of the war in Iraq. In the year and a half since, however, the tide of a new type of conflict has been rising -- one that takes place not on land, in the air, or at sea but in cyberspace. Indeed, in the past several months, the Obama administration has called a great deal of attention to the threat posed by cyberattacks and cybertheft, the most ominous source of which appears to be China. Early last month, the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said that the cybertheft of confidential information and technology from American businesses has been emanating from China on an unprecedented scale, and General Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, has previously called such theft the greatest transfer of wealth in history. If recent announcements are any indication, the Obama administration has heightened its focus on cybersecurity threats. In February, the White House published an executive order directed at improving the cybersecurity of the countrys critical infrastructure. That same month, it also unveiled a new strategy for preventing the theft of U.S. trade secrets. One potentially crucial tool, however, has been largely absent from the discussion of how the United States should address cyberthreats: targeted financial sanctions. Given the success of targeted financial sanctions in other contexts -- namely, counterterrorism and efforts to stem nuclear proliferation -- the Obama administration should establish a process for imposing them on individuals and entities that engage in pernicious cyberactivity. For a number of reasons, targeted sanctions are particularly well suited to address the threats posed by cyberattacks and cybertheft, and they could form an important part of a larger strategy to mitigate the problem. First, for attacks undertaken by states or their proxies, sanctions could serve as a deterrent against future illicit behavior. This is because states, concerned for their reputations, have an interest in preventing their unlawful activity from being exposed publicly. Late last year, for example, both Beijing and the Chinese company Huawei Technologies strongly objected to a report published by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that accused Huawei and another Chinese company of posing a significant cyberthreat to U.S. national security interests. Huawei went so far as to label the report "an exercise in China-bashing. Targeted financial sanctions are also well suited to address illicit cyberactivities perpetrated by nonstate actors. For such actors, public sanctions would not only serve as a deterrent; they would limit their access to the U.S. financial system. The Obama administration has imposed targeted financial sanctions against similar nonstate criminal groups in the past -- such as the Yakuza in Japan, Los Zetas in Mexico, and the Camorra in Italy -- as part of its strategy to combat transnational organized crime. Targeted financial sanctions have also played a major role in weakening al Qaeda over the last several years. A second reason that targeted financial sanctions would work well in the cyber context is that, unlike reciprocal attacks in cyberspace or the use of military force, they are proportionate in scale to cyberinfiltrations, such as the discreet theft of intellectual property from U.S. businesses, and can be carefully calibrated to produce their desired effect. Sanctions could therefore act as a brake on escalation and add leverage to diplomatic negotiations on cyber issues, which the United States and China both appear to welcome. Finally, if Washington imposed targeted financial sanctions on cybercriminals, the effect of the sanctions would likely reverberate beyond U.S. borders, because financial institutions around the world often refuse to do business with sanctioned entities. THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF BITS AND BYTES When the U.S. government uses targeted financial sanctions, it identifies actors engaged in illicit activity, freezes their U.S. assets, and prohibits American people and entities from doing business with them. The governments power to do this is rooted in statutes such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which permits the president to declare a national emergency with respect to threats that originate in whole or substantial part outside the United States and to impose certain economic restrictions on the source of those threats. Unlike older types of sanctions programs like the embargo against Cuba, targeted financial sanctions are directed only at people and entities that the U.S. government knows are involved in illicit activity. Washington can impose such sanctions on individuals or corporations, including front and shell companies, whether or not they are linked to a state. The United States has not hesitated to use sanctions against Chinese entities in the past. In July 2012, for example, the U.S. government sanctioned Chinas Kunlun Bank for providing financial services to Iranian banks with connections to the countrys WMD programs and sponsorship of international terrorism. Sanctions in the cyber context would, of course, extend beyond Chinese entities, embracing the full range of state and nonstate actors that U.S. intelligence officials have publicly described as posing a cyberthreat to the United States. To develop a cybersanctions program, the president would issue an executive order and declare a national emergency with respect to certain cyberthreats, and specify the persons or entities engaged in the proscribed conduct. Banks would then take that list of individuals or organizations, freeze their assets, and block their intended transactions. The Obama administration would also establish a legal process to ensure that the intended targets of the sanctions had in fact engaged in prohibited conduct. As with other sanctions programs, designated individuals could challenge the legal basis for the sanctions imposed on them before a judge. As with all targeted sanctions programs, the government needs accurate information about who exactly has engaged in illicit conduct. This challenge is particularly salient in the realm of cybersecurity, since the government must surmount the additional hurdle of attribution -- the process of determining the true perpetrator of a cyber operation. This process is made more difficult by the fact that cyberattacks and cybertheft often make use of intermediate computer systems, many of which do not realize they are being hijacked in the course of an illicit cyber operation. Although the problem of attribution poses a significant obstacle to identifying and sanctioning cybercrime, the U.S. government and the private sector have recently made progress in refining their ability to classify and identify the sources of threats. Last October, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared, Potential aggressors should be aware that the United States has the capacity to locate them and to hold them accountable for their actions that may try to harm America. Improved analytical methodologies are enabling public and private sector cybersecurity professionals to synthesize many small pieces of information collected over time to develop comprehensive pictures of cyberattackers. The more data the authorities and victims have about computer intrusions, the more they can compare the characteristics of individual attacks and accurately pinpoint their origins. In a prominent example of this dynamic, the computer security firm Mandiant recently published a report in which it demonstrated that one specific Chinese military unit was responsible for a number of cyberattacks on U.S. entities. It based its assessment on an investigation of hundreds of incidents, employing data-driven analytical techniques. To be sure, the problem of attribution has not been fully resolved, but the progress that has been made on this front would enable targeted financial measures to achieve a number of important objectives. For starters, the establishment of a sanctions process would publicly identify those individuals and entities involved in illicit cyberactivities. Each time the government imposes sanctions on a person or an organization, it must publish a public statement that details the offenders identity and describes the illicit activities. This information has traditionally served two purposes: it permits the financial institutions that are freezing assets and blocking transactions to ensure that they are penalizing the correct target, and it fulfills due process requirements designed to ensure that the entity has sufficient information about the reasons it is being sanctioned. In the cybersecurity context, such public statements would serve another important purpose. By disclosing as much information as possible (consistent with the protection of intelligence sources and methods), the government would reveal a great deal about the ways in which cybercriminals conduct their operations. The government could even go so far as to include digital appendices with its public statements that include threat signatures -- the exact type of malicious computer code used to perpetrate cyberattacks and cybertheft. Companies in vulnerable industries could utilize such public information to improve their own defenses. What is more, the establishment of a sanctions process for cyberattacks and cybertheft could help catalyze a global coalition to take action against the perpetrators of such activity. This is because banks all over the world, many of which are not legally obligated to enforce U.S. sanctions, often do so anyway because they are afraid of the reputational risks involved in conducting business with U.S.-sanctioned entities. The worldwide reach and power of the U.S. financial system mean that entities sanctioned under such a program could be effectively shut out of global finance. Finally, the most important effects of a process for sanctioning cybertheft may not come directly from the sanctions imposed on illicit actors but, rather, from the incentives that such a program would establish for foreign governments that do not want to be known for tolerating cybercrime within their borders. By employing targeted sanctions to address certain kinds of illicit cyberactivities, the United States and other countries could begin the painstaking work of building international consensus around clear rules and expectations for appropriate behavior in cyberspace. Sanctioning nonstate actors from countries that take insufficient action against cybercriminals would call negative attention to their governments and, over time, identify their behavior as lying outside an international norm. Sanctions could play a major role in setting guidelines for what constitutes acceptable behavior in cyberspace. Establishing a sanctions program to combat illicit cyberactivities would be a direct and proportionate way to address the growing threats that emanate from cyberspace. Although cybersanctions would need to be combined with diplomacy and other measures to be most effective, they should be implemented without delay. It is high time for illicit cyber actors to face serious consequences for their actions. The Long Arm of International Law Giving Victims of Human Rights Abuses Their Day in Court In late 1945, the Allied victors of World War II established a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, which convicted Nazi leaders for their wartime atrocities. The animating principle of the trials was that conduct of extreme inhumanity violated the part of international law that protects fundamental human rights, which applies everywhere, even though the conduct was authorized by German law under the Third Reich. Since then, the world has accepted that the worst human rights abuses -- including genocide, slavery, torture, and war crimes -- are crimes prohibited by international law, even if they are expressly permitted by the laws of the state in which they occur. Yet over 65 years after Nuremberg, although the world remains awash in these atrocities, the prohibitions of international law are largely toothless, especially when the abusive governments remain in power. The international community has established criminal tribunals to try abusers, but those who remain in power are ordinarily shielded from prosecution by their government and its protectors. Victims seeking recognition of the wrongs done to them and compensation for their suffering cannot get relief in their home countries, and they have practically no courts available to them elsewhere. Since 1980, they have been able to turn to the United States. That year, a U.S. appeals court, invoking a previously obscure law known as the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), allowed U.S. federal courts to hear civil suits brought by foreign citizens against foreign defendants for crimes committed on foreign soil, provided that the defendant brought himself within the territorial reach of the court. The ATS offers victims of abuse a rare tool in their fight for justice; the United States remains the only country in the world to entertain such lawsuits. Now, however, the U.S. Supreme Court may slam shut the door on such plaintiffs, relying in part on the argument that other countries do not offer such relief. During proceedings held last year, the Court hinted that it may altogether ban ATS cases based on foreign abuses. At the very least, keeping courts open to civil suits about human rights can bring solace and compensation to victims. More important, these suits draw global attention to atrocities, and in so doing perhaps deter would-be abusers. And they give substance to a body of law that is crucial to a civilized world yet so underenforced that it amounts to little more than a pious sham. The Supreme Court should continue to interpret the ATS as opening the doors of U.S. federal courts to victims of foreign atrocities who cannot get justice elsewhere, and other countries should adopt laws that open the doors of their courts as well. THE ENFORCEMENT GAP Respect for fundamental human rights in the world today is dismal -- better, no doubt, than it was 200 years ago, but dismal nonetheless. As in the past, despotic regimes murder, mutilate, and rape civilian populations and arbitrarily imprison and torture political opponents. Human traffickers, almost invariably operating with the protection of corrupt local officials and police, enslave children and young women in the sex trade. So long as the regimes that sponsor and protect these criminals remain in power, their crimes go unrecognized. To deal with the effective immunity of abusers whose regimes remain in power, international law has developed the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that trials for certain offenses may be heard in courts throughout the world if the defendant cannot be brought to justice in the country where he committed them. And following the example of Nuremberg, the international community has created international criminal courts, generally at The Hague, in the Netherlands, which hear trials of offenses committed anywhere. Despite this framework, however, prohibitions against atrocities are rarely enforced. Criminal prosecutions in international tribunals are infrequent, slow, and inefficient. During its ten years of existence, the most prominent and permanent of those courts, the International Criminal Court, has brought only ten cases into the trial process and has convicted only one person (the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga). Fault for that paltry record lies with the court's limited jurisdiction and the intricacies of international politics: the ICC may prosecute only if the country of the defendant or the country where the crime was committed has ratified the treaty that created the court, the Rome Statute, or if the UN Security Council recommends prosecution. Not surprisingly, many of the countries that regularly flout human rights have not signed the treaty. Nonsignatories can also avoid punishment by relying on their friends among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of which can use its veto to block a recommendation. Furthermore, the ICC prosecutes only those who appear in person before the court, and offending officials of a government that remains in power are not easily arrested. As a practical matter, then, it is only when a regime has lost power that its offenders will be vulnerable to prosecution. Victims of atrocities have few avenues to seek justice on their own. With rare exceptions, they cannot bring suits against governments, which are protected under the concept of sovereign immunity, nor can they bring civil suits against individual offenders before international criminal tribunals, which are not authorized to hear civil suits. Although the ICC does have the power to award compensation once it has secured a conviction, it never has done so. The court may be reluctant to get into the messy business of granting compensation; the number and identity of many of the victims of such crimes are likely unknown, and such a pursuit would divert the court, with its limited resources, from its principal mission of trying and punishing abusers. So letting victims file civil suits in foreign courts would fill an important gap. JUSTIFYING JUSTICE In most countries, courts act only with statutory authorization and, under existing legal codes, have no power to entertain suits between foreign parties alleging foreign violations of international law. For the most part, then, such suits can be heard only if a legislature grants its country's courts the specific authority to hear them. No country other than the United States has. But the lack of these statutes today does not necessarily mean other governments have made a policy decision against hearing foreign human rights suits; in all likelihood, their legislatures have simply never considered granting their courts such authority. If human rights advocates were to lobby governments to accept these suits, opponents would no doubt line up with arguments against doing so. Some of these arguments would have merit, at least in certain circumstances. But none would justify categorically excluding all such cases. Among the strongest arguments likely to be made is that allowing victims to bring suits accusing foreign officials of human rights abuses could interfere with the foreign policy of the government where the suit was brought. This objection is certainly not frivolous, and any foreign ministry, unless it was reassured on this score, would likely fight against allowing these lawsuits. But there is no reason to bar all such lawsuits: some cases have the potential to disrupt foreign policy, whereas others do not. When its courts are faced with a suit that does, a government could advise them that entertaining the suit would harm the national interest. Human rights advocates may object to handing governments what would amount to veto power, but making that compromise is far preferable to the likely alternative of totally excluding the cases. Some countries worry about reciprocity, too -- that if their courts hear suits claiming violations of international law in other countries, those countries will retaliate by entertaining suits against them. The fear is not trivial, and a court's judgments could well be fueled more by enmity or bias than objective facts. But that sort of risk is always inherent in establishing laws and mechanisms to enforce them. Another argument is that the proliferation of countries hearing cases of foreign atrocities would allow plaintiffs to "forum shop" for a court that was prejudiced against the defendant's country, producing a system of injustice that would neither command nor deserve respect. There is some merit to this argument. The remedy, however, is not to prevent the expansion of the practice but rather to establish standards governing the circumstances in which a foreign defendant may be sued. Perhaps jurisdiction should be limited to cases that present a reasonable basis for imposing it on the particular defendant -- such as the defendant's having brought himself within the court's customary territorial reach, as with ATS suits in the United States. The biggest obstacle to any country's adopting such an authorization is the perception that atrocities committed by foreigners against foreigners in a foreign land are not that country's problem. This view is wrong for a number of reasons. For starters, it overlooks the fact that courts already adjudicate wholly foreign disputes, such as cases involving transnational trade when the parties have contracted to bring their disputes before the courts of a selected country and maritime cases. More problematic, this view is at odds with the idea that legal protections of the most fundamental human rights derive from the consensus of nations. Most countries have already crossed this bridge. By underwriting the international criminal courts charged with enforcing the law of nations, they have repeatedly accepted that violations of these fundamental rules are in fact their business. Accepting universal jurisdiction for human rights violations would not represent a drastic extension of most governments' existing laws. Many countries have long authorized courts to entertain suits against absent foreigners alleging wrongs committed elsewhere if one of two conditions is met: the plaintiff is a national of the state where the suit is filed or that state's interests are in some way involved. All it would take for countries to start allowing civil suits concerning foreign human rights abuses would be to recognize that all atrocities in violation of international law, regardless of where they are committed, affect the interests of every law-respecting country -- thus satisfying the second condition. Human rights advocates should try to allay predictable objections to countries' opening their courts. They should start by drafting proposed legislation with modest and realistic goals, building in limitations that may disappoint the most ardent activists but hugely increase the chances of success. For example, a proposed bill for a country should require the approval of the foreign ministry before each suit can proceed to trial and specify that a suit will be allowed only if the plaintiff has no access to just relief in the country of the defendant or in the country where the abuse occurred. The bill should also require a court to dismiss a suit when the defendant can show that the plaintiff has forum-shopped and has access to justice in a country far better suited to hear the dispute, on the condition that the defendant agrees to face trial in that other country's courts. And it should require an initial showing of probable cause to stave off frivolous, politically motivated suits. Limitations such as these would do much to disarm or convert opponents. A PRACTICE IN PERIL The prospects that legislatures will pass bills allowing foreign human rights suits would get much dimmer if the country at the vanguard of the practice stopped hearing them. In the past few decades, U.S. federal courts have heard suits brought by foreigners involving human rights abuses in Ethiopia, Myanmar (also called Burma), Paraguay, the Philippines, Serbia, Sudan, and other countries. But it was only by historical accident that the United States started welcoming these plaintiffs into its courts. In 1789, Congress passed the ATS, allowing foreigners to sue in the federal courts for a wrong that was "in violation of the law of nations." Back then, however, the law of nations expressed no concern for human rights, much less for a sovereign government's treatment of its own citizens. It focused on matters of state-to-state relations, such as national boundaries, aggression, safe passage of ambassadors, and piracy. Only in the mid-twentieth century, at Nuremberg, did international law begin to deal with human rights abuses committed by governments. And only since 1980 have U.S. federal courts interpreted the ATS as authorizing suits based on violations of human rights. But the Supreme Court may soon stop letting foreign plaintiffs use the ATS to sue the perpetrators of foreign atrocities. In February 2012, the Court heard oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case filed by inhabitants of the Ogoni region of Nigeria against an oil conglomerate that allegedly aided the Nigerian military in carrying out torture and executions in the early 1990s. Although no party had raised the issue of whether the ATS has extraterritorial reach, the line of questioning by the justices suggested that some of them were considering ruling that atrocities in foreign countries lie outside the jurisdiction granted by the statute. The Court then took the exceptional step of directing the parties to prepare briefs on that issue. It is expected to decide the matter in the coming months. The arguments that the defendants submitted in favor of limiting the ATS in this way are distortions of both U.S. and international law. First, the defendants claim that U.S. statutes apply only to acts committed in the United States. That is true for U.S. statutes that prescribe norms of conduct, which are clearly intended to govern conduct within U.S. borders (perhaps of Americans outside U.S. borders, too), but not all conduct throughout the world. But the argument does not apply to the ATS, because a court hearing a case under the ATS is not imposing norms prescribed by the United States for the rest of the world. It is merely giving effect to norms that were prescribed by the international community with the intent that they would apply throughout the world. (What is more, the ATS was most likely originally intended to apply to acts committed outside the United States; in the eighteenth century, the law of nations was understood to apply to piracy on the high seas.) The defendants also claim that foreign courts, by declining to exercise comparable jurisdiction, have either implied or ruled that doing so would violate international law. Indeed, courts declining to hear foreign human rights suits have pointed out that most other countries' courts also do not hear such cases. That observation can undoubtedly give comfort to any country deciding that it, like so many others, will not assume the unwelcome burden of hearing foreigners' claims of foreign atrocities. It does not, however, imply that any country's court would violate international law by carrying out international law. Global human rights law prescribes global norms of conduct. It leaves the question of how to enforce those norms to the countries themselves. That other countries have not yet empowered their courts to hear foreign human rights lawsuits is no reason for the United States to withdraw the jurisdiction its courts have exercised for over 30 years. If the Supreme Court barred federal courts from hearing suits about foreign atrocities under the ATS, it would be making a sad mistake. For one thing, the ruling would not necessarily terminate such litigation in the United States; it might merely move the cases from federal courts to state courts, where the Supreme Court would exercise less control. (Unlike federal courts, state courts do not need explicit statutory authorization to hear cases.) More troubling, the Supreme Court, through such a ruling, would embrace the retrograde proposition that distant genocides are not the business of the United States -- and deal a devastating blow to hopes of expanding global recognition of human rights. India Needs More Democracy, Not Less The Case for More Bureaucrats, Institutions, and Voting The Hindu-nationalist leader Narendra Modi's recent election sparked a good deal of controversy. It also sparked an open and substantive debate about economics, liberalism, and social welfare in Gujarat and across all of India -- a rarity in developing democracies and a positive thing as India gears up for nationwide elections in 2014. More than ever, Indians believe that their government is not keeping pace with their expectations. In the last two years, India has seen two groundswells of popular protest in which crowds largely composed of middle-class urbanites have taken to the streets to demand a more accountable and responsive government. Beginning in the summer of 2011, tens of thousands of citizens joined in anticorruption demonstrations led by Anna Hazare, the social activist who agitated for reform after a series of high- profile scandals implicated ruling politicians and their cronies in taking billions of dollars of graft. More recently, thousands assembled to mourn a 23-year-old woman who died after being brutally gang-raped and to demand greater government protection of citizens safety. The moral outrage is entirely justified, and the factors linked to Indias governance woes are well known - - a rise in corruption, cronyism, and criminalism among the ranks of elected officials, and a crushing government bureaucracy. However, the root causes mostly go unexplored. For starters, the apparent increase in corruption and criminalism in India is, in part, the product of two positive developments: increased transparency and rapid economic growth. In addition, the proliferation of elected politicians with criminal records, although deplorable, is a direct response to rational voter choices -- voters select the politicians who they believe can work Indias ineffectual state to their advantage. In turn, the remedies to these problems are somewhat counterintuitive. Although India is often accused of having too much democracy (a billion and a quarter clamoring voices makes policymaking difficult), it could actually use more: a more engaged citizenry, more institution building, and a better-staffed bureaucracy. THE BEST DISINFECTANT In part, Indians feel corruption now more than ever because of improved transparency: dirt is more visible where there is sunlight. Recently, agencies designed to increase government accountability, namely the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), have started to assert their independence. The CAG has eagerly brought to light scandals ranging from sweetheart deals for 2G telecommunications spectrum licenses to the murky distribution of coal mining licenses (leading to the scandal known as Coalgate). These institutions, and the vibrant and growing news media, have made it very difficult for the government to conduct its business as usual. But it is also true that the scope for corruption is on the rise. As the political scientist Samuel Huntington recognized more than four decades ago, corruption is an inevitable byproduct of economic modernization. In India, increased economic productivity triggered by liberalization provided elites with new opportunities to self-deal. Sustained rapid growth, for instance, created a huge demand for energy. Increased demand, coupled with rising commodity prices, made rent seeking in the natural resource sector all the more lucrative. And unlike other industries, which have been reformed over the years, the public sector in India retains control over the commanding heights, or the critical sectors that dominate economic activity, such as power, mining, and petrochemicals. Government agents have thus been able to easily collude with extractive industries and reap windfall gains. And federalism, in turn, has multiplied the number of actors with their hands in the till. In the words of one senior government adviser, Indians have not become more corrupt, it is just that the opportunities for corruption have increased due to higher growth. All this means that, for now, corruption will continue to rise as India continues to grow. This is especially true in the poor Indian states that are just now rapidly expanding, such as Bihar. Today, Bihar, which registers among the highest growth rates of any Indian state, is helmed by Nitish Kumar, a reformist chief minister. Kumar has earnestly attempted to turn the state around following 15 years of misrule under Lalu Prasad Yadav, his predecessor. The most notorious corruption scandal during Yadavs Jungle Raj, as it was known, was the fodder scam, in which the chief minister and his cronies allegedly fabricated vast herds of fictitious livestock in order to embezzle funds from the states animal husbandry department. Paradoxically, while Bihar today may have a less corrupt executive in Kumar, the state is likely to encounter more rent seeking as the economy enters the industrial era and invests in big-ticket infrastructure, energy, and road-building projects. RATIONAL CHOICE In the short term, the combined effect of corruption and increased scrutiny will lead to uncertainty and policy paralysis. Think of the bureaucrat who is asked to issue a permit for a big infrastructure project just months after seeing his predecessor put in the dock for O.K.-ing a similarly dubious deal. This bureaucrats initial -- and rational -- instinct will be to demur. In the long term, frustration with policy paralysis will likely produce a fundamental rethinking of governance. But first, the government must cleanse itself of considerable rot within. Some have suggested that, in the interim, India needs a more orderly democracy with fewer and less fractious voices. Otherwise, the argument goes, real reform will be nearly impossible to enact. For instance, former White House official Steven Rattner recently suggested that Indias democracy might hurt its development prospects vis--vis China, writing that success for developing countries is about more than free elections. As odd as it sounds, though, India could use more, not less, political mobilization. In fact, Indias middle class, which has traditionally been politically reticent, is well placed to push for better and more responsive governance. The good news is that the middle class might be mobilizing for just that purpose. Last December, the citizens who took to the streets to protest violence against women were largely middle-class. For the most part, their outrage was directed not against ordinary criminals but against the political class, which, they believed, had failed to provide basic security and protections for human rights. To quell the protests, the government appointed a committee to propose measures for addressing gender violence in India. Once they had that win in hand, protestors made the jump from chanting antigovernment slogans to engaging in pragmatic politics. This spring, the public, especially the middle class, has engaged in a vigorous and well-informed debate about womens rights, which led to the passage of new legislation in March. All this suggests that the middle class is capable of embracing politics and promoting reform. Of course, for change to be lasting, the middle class must also turn out to vote come election time (something poor Indians are more inclined to do than the well-off), and middle-class citizens must stand for elected office themselves. And, unfortunately, it is precisely electoral politics that Indians find most tainted. It is common knowledge that one in three members of Indias parliament is under criminal investigation and that one in four state legislators boasts such a dubious distinction. Those disturbing facts have led to the widespread demonization of politicians and party politics but not to an honest discussion of why constituents vote for such tainted candidates in the first place. As a growing body of research suggests, voters in India often support politicians with criminal connections because of -- not in spite of -- their criminality. From the perspective of voters frustrated by an unresponsive state, criminality is often viewed as a signal of a politicians ability to get things done, especially for his or her parochial community. In other words, transparency only gets you so far. Voters incentives must also change. FAST TRACK TO LONG-TERM PROBLEMS To start on the gargantuan task of changing voter preferences, it will be up to reformers to pressure the state to address the institutional failures that make criminal politicians attractive in the first place: namely, Indias inability to impartially deliver services, dole out benefits, or adjudicate disputes. Fixing institutional shortcomings will be a decades-long challenge, and it will be easy to grasp at short-term fixes in the interim. Exhibit A is the rise of fast track courts designed to short-circuit Indias dysfunctional justice system. In the aftermath of the Delhi rape protests, Altamas Kabir, the chief justice of India, ordered all state high courts to set up dedicated courts to expedite the prosecution of existing criminal cases involving rape. The move was a not-so-subtle admission that Indias judicial system is incapable of resolving criminal cases in a timely manner. Within three weeks, six fast-track courts set up in the capital city alone were given 500 pending rape cases to adjudicate. Leaving aside concerns about the quality of justice that these courts deliver, there is some evidence that fast-track courts are themselves becoming overburdened. According to one independent analysis, Bihar has the highest number of fast-track courts (nearly 180), yet it has the second-highest number of pending cases and one of the worst clearance rates in the country. Quick fixes like fast-track courts may provide instant gratification -- and they might seem to give Indians faith that they dont need to elect corrupt officials. But a better response, in this case, would have been to start addressing the root problem of Indias judicial system: endemic shortfalls in manpower. In the United States, there are 108 judges per one million citizens; in India, there are 12. Thus, it comes as no surprise that there are 32 million cases pending in various courts in India, with courts regularly taking on more cases with each passing year than they can dream of disposing of. According to data collected in 2008, local magistrates in New Delhi had nearly half a million check-bouncing cases alone to wade through. More than anything, India should plug the manpower gap by doing everything from revisiting the outmoded collegium system, in which a small number of elite judges handpick each new justice, to reforming procedures that allow litigants to indefinitely delay proceedings according to their whim. When it comes to addressing institutional dysfunction, the enormity of the task ahead should not distract from the fact that there have already been some real successes. For example, Indias Supreme Court -- responding to grassroots movements -- has intervened to defend and codify numerous rights for average Indians, such as guaranteeing an individuals right to food or a childs right to education. In addition, a fiercely independent Election Commission has been steadfast in asserting its constitutional authority to tackle electoral malpractice. In 2005, the Indian parliament passed the landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act, modeled after the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, to open up governments inner workings to public scrutiny. Under the acts provisions, government bureaucrats are required to respond to citizen requests for information about government initiatives -- or risk personally incurring financial penalties. Several states have passed similar laws to prod government agencies to deliver a core set of basic services in a timely manner. More of that kind of reform is needed to convince Indians that their government can and will serve them -- even without kickbacks. The road to making Indias government more accountable goes uphill, and the problem will seem to get worse before it is better. Even so, Indias governance challenges come against a background of dramatic economic and political transformation. There is nothing inevitable about continued transformation, though, or about India improving the quality of its governance. To do both, Indians will have to start making better diagnoses of their problems and prescribing the correct remedies.