IHT Quick Read: Dec. 26

NEWS The Tea Party might not be over, but it's increasingly clear that the U.S. election last month significantly weakened the movement, which had nearly captured control of the Republican Party through a potent combination of populism and fury. Trip Gabriel reports.

As Russia's middle class becomes a force in commerce, G.M., Ford, Volkswagen and other automakers have been expanding, or plan to expand, in the country with new factories. Andrew E. Kramer reports.

Whether he stays in Damascus or tries to flee, President Bashar al-Assad has no easy options as Syria plunges deeper into chaos. Anne Barnard and Hwaida Said report from Beirut.

How did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that Pakistani teenage girls - whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children - are gunned down in the streets? Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports.

ARTS As officials plan to expand the Buddenbrookhaus, a museum devoted to Thomas Mann, the challenge is how to make an author of weighty tomes approachable to coming generations weaned on Twitter messages and status updates. Nicholas Kulish reports from Lübeck, Germany.

On stages large and sm all, via new plays but also (very much so) the classics, the theater in London proved time and again in 2012 that it matters. Matt Wolf writes.

SPORTS Syd Fischer, an 85-year-old ocean-racing legend in Australia, is taking yet another shot at winning the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race outright, with his hand on the helm. Christopher Clarey reports.

Buy, Sell, Adopt: Child Trafficking in China

HONG KONG - In announcing the rescue of 89 abducted Chinese children on Christmas Eve, a senior police official said baby boys could now be purchased in China's interior for less than $5,000 - and then resold for three times that amount in the wealthier coastal provinces.

The latest sting operation, which covered nine provinces, led to the arrests of 355 people for child trafficking. In the past two and a half years, according to government statistics, some 54,000 children have been rescued from traffickers.

These splashy announcements about the “busting” of child-trafficking “rings” seem to come with a distressing regularity now in China. In the summer of 2011, a similar bust was proclaimed - also featuring exactly 89 children - with the deputy director of the Public Security Min istry assailing what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

In 2009, my colleague Andrew Jacobs reported some of the horrifying details from a series of child snatchings. A 9-month-old baby boy was grabbed by someone in a moving vehicle. A 3-year-old was enticed away by the offer of a slice of mango and a toy car. A shopkeeper's son disappeared when his father turned away for a moment to help a customer.

Almost always, the abducted children are boys.

“Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam,” Andy reported, “most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir.”

Su Qingcai, a tea farmer in Fujian Province, admitted buying a 5-year-old boy for the equivalent of $3,500, even though Mr. Su already had a teenage daughter.

“A girl is just not as good as a son,” Mr. Su, then 38, told Andy. “It doesn't matter how much money you have. If you don't have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”

In his story in The Times on the latest round of arrests, Andy wrote that “the Chinese government says that 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but some experts suggest the number may be as high as 70,000.”

The nationwide scourge of child abductions and baby selling in China first came prominently to light 10 years ago, when the police in Guangxi Province discovered 28 baby girls in the back of a long-distance bus.

The babies, all younger than 3 months, had been drugged to keep them quiet. News reports said they had been stuffed into tote bags. A story in the state-run newspaper China Daily was chilling in its matter-of-fact accounting of the incident in May 2002:

One baby died of suffocation. Others were blu e from lack of air. Twenty passengers on the bus were arrested for trafficking. The babies were on their way to Anhui Province after being purchased from a hospital in Guangxi for $12 to $24 each. After they were rescued the children were sent to an orphanage.

The following year, China carried out its first executions of child traffickers.

Child-welfare advocates working in China say some kidnappings are the result of the increasing prices paid for adoptions by foreigners. Abducted kids often end up in orphanages, even though they aren't orphans at all. Paperwork is forged. Identities are erased. The orphanage gets a cut.

It was revealed in 2005 that government officials and orphanage employees in Hunan Province “had sold at least 100 children to other orphanages, which provided them to foreign adoptive parents,” as John Leland reported in The Times.

“For some, it raised a nightmarish question: What if my child had been taken forcibly from her parents?”

Scott Tong, a reporter for the radio program Marketplace, investigated baby buying and selling at Chinese orphanages in 2010. One trafficker, Chen Zhijing, said that during the 1990s she would get a few dollars from an orphanage for bringing in a child.

But then the orphanage began asking for more babies. “It started paying $120 each,” she said. “Then $250. Then $500 by 2005.”

Her son, Duan Yueneng, got involved in the trade, which expanded, and they began buying infants from a supplier hundreds of miles away in southern China.

“We sold babies to orphanages. Others did, too,” he said. “They bought them because foreigners wanted them, and then made big profits when the babies were adopted.”

Mr. T ong said Mr. Duan “reckons he trafficked 1,000 or more. Duan says the orphanages falsified foreign adoption papers for each of the trafficked babies.”

“Sometimes the orphanages listed my sister as the finder, or they just put down a fake name,” Mr. Duan said. “For Americans who adopted babies, let me put it this way: When were the kids really born? Who really found them?”

Local family planning officials in Hunan Province also were known to have forcibly taken babies from their parents for a variety of offenses, as my colleague Sharon LaFraniere has reported. Where those children ended up is unclear.

One man Sharon interviewed, Yuan Xinquan, said his 2-month-old daughter was taken from him when he couldn't pay a fine for having been too young â€" 19 â€" to have married and had a child. Six men jumped from a government van, confronted Mr. Yuan at a bus stop, then took his child.

“He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula,” Sharon wrote.

“Adoptions from China currently account for more than one-third of all international adoptions to the United States,” said a statement on the Web site of the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, a workload that makes it “one of the largest adoption units in the world.”

Over the years, the consulate said, it has issued more than 70,000 visas to Chinese orphans adopted by Americans.

A total of 2,587 Chinese children went to American homes last year, most of them girls, most between the ages of 1 and 2.

But U.S. adoptions from China are declining, and last year's total was the lowest since 1999. The high point came in 2005, when nearly 8,000 children were adopted by Americans.

In Asia, the U.S. government has no adoption programs with Cambodia and Vietnam, both of which are strengthening their protocols, although Cambodia has indicated that it will resume American adoptions beginning Jan. 1.

Also, India said this month it is refusing new applications from the United States due to a backlog of existing cases.

Americans also go to other Asian countries seeking adoptions, but not nearly the number who apply in China.

According to U.S. government figures, Americans adopted 736 South Korean children last year, about two-thirds of them boys, followed by the Philippines (229, mostly children between 5 and 12); India (226); Thailand (44); Japan (27); and Indonesia (two boys and a girl).

Safety Agency Blasts Grinches Who Use \'Safety\' to Spoil Christmas Fun

LONDON - Britain's health and safety watchdog has come out with a timely indictment of petty officialdom for using the excuse of supposedly protecting the public in order to spoil everyone's Christmas fun.

The seasonal Grinches include the town officials who banned Santa from riding in a local yuletide parade because his reindeer sled was not fitted with a seatbelt.

Other killjoys have tried to outlaw the tradition of putting coins in Christmas puddings, and insurance companies have reportedly issued stringent safety guidelines for carol singers.

Each year there are reports of children being banned from throwing snowballs because it is not safe, or office workers being told they cannot put up Christmas decorations for the same reason.

The Health and Safety Execu tive, the official agency in charge of ensuring sensible safety rules are followed in the workplace, frequently gets the blame for being behind even the most ludicrous bans.

This year, it has struck back by busting such health and safety myths.

“If we had one wish,” the agency said, “it would be to stamp out the health and safety Scrooges who try to dampen the Christmas spirit.”

It set up a panel to look into complaints that the likes of insurance companies, safety consultants and employers were going too far in their health and safety fervor, often for their own benefit rather than the public's.

“We want to make clear that ‘health and safety' is about managing real risks properly, not being risk averse and stopping people getting on with their lives,” the agency said.

It sometimes feels like Britons live in a straitjacket of health and safety rules, monitored by petty of ficials, shop clerks and bureaucrats whose standard response to many everyday activities is “you can't do that â€" health and safety!”

This wouldn't matter in a country like France or Italy, where rules are made to be broken. In Britain, however, there is a natural tendency to follow the rules â€" and inevitable frustration when they don't make sense.

Many of the health and safety myths are propagated by a Euroskeptic press that tends to see the hidden hand of the European Union behind restrictions that seem designed to make life difficult. The HSE spends much of its effort on just putting the record straight.

“Christmas is a special time of year,” the agency said this week. But that didn't stop people wrongly citing health and safety to prevent harmless activities from going ahead.

“Not only does this needlessly ruin the festive spirit but it also trivializes the true purpose o f health and safety: protecting people from real risks at, or connected with, work.”

Have a safe and happy Christmas!

Pass the Hat, Save the Arts?

PARIS - In the early rush to turn crowd-funding online into a new source of public revenue to buy everything from medieval ivory statues in France to a gallery for dinosaur bones in Canada there's a cautionary tale: It doesn't always work.

The Louvre is nearing the end of what appears to be its third successful online fundraising campaign to raise "800,000, or $1.06 million, toward the "2.6 million purchase of two delicate 13th-century statues that complete a carved set of “The Descent From the Cross” that were believed to be lost or destroyed. Already the museum has raised more than 60 percent, or almost "500,000, and has set a deadline of Jan. 31 in its call to save a national treasure from being sold outside France.

Professional auctioneers often use that appeal for much less pricey treasures, entreating bidders to raise their bids to guard the national heritage. But if there is no such pressure, it's much more difficult to persuade people to give a high volume of little donations, such as the "50 contribution that the Louvre collected in its first online campaign in 2010. The prize from that campaign: “The Three Graces,” painted on wood in 1531 by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

In Germany last spring, Tobias Wolff found out the hard way when his organization, the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, tried to raise "15,000 online to finance a free concert last May. Mr. Wolff, the managing director, pitched the idea directly to potential users in a video where he walked through a cavernous, former engine station where the concert was scheduled to take place.

The festival also offered enticements: a vou cher for a bratwurst and soda for a "25 donation or a custom-designed bottle of wine signed by an artist for "50. But the festival organizers only managed to raise a small fraction of their goal - "540 - with the crowd-funding platform startnext.de.

The result: The money was refunded and the International Handel Festival turned to traditional local foundations to finance the free concert.

The lesson we learned from this little exercise: “You do need an element of pressure to make people donate,” Mr. Wolff said. “We announced that our open-door event would take place in any case, so obviously people didn't have a sufficiently strong feeling that they would have to support us.”

Hark! The Herald of Christmas Past

One hundred years ago, in celebration of the holiday season, The New York Herald Tribune European edition (a forerunner of today's IHT) published its annual Christmas supplement. The richly illustrated pages contained original artwork and articles on a variety of topics.

Women and winter sports featured prominently (“With no one are winter sports more popular than with the fair sex,” read part of the text), and there was a long essay by Thomas Nelson Page titled “Christmases of the Nation” that expounded upon the history of Christmas in the United States. “In no part of the world is Christmas celebrated with more warmth and cheer than in America,” the essay began enthusiastically.

There were pages in French (the European edition was, and still is, headquartered in Paris) about various topics including dolls, the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s, and film. There were plenty of luxurious ads for travel companies. The supplement also had several full-pag e color illustrations such as this one, titled “The Christmas Cotillion of Our Cities” by Arthur I. Keller (probably this man).

As a gift to our modern-day readers, we present to you here an abridged text of the last article of the supplement, titled “The Parisian Christmas,” no author credited, complete with contemporary spellings and language.

Happy holidays, and stayed tuned for more from our archives, as the IHT celebrates 125 years.
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THE PARISIAN CHRISTMAS
The New York Herald, Paris, Sunday, December 22, 1912.-Christmas Supplement

Some people there are who have said that there is “no real Christmas” in France. They were, needless to say, foreigners, or rather strangers, who saw perhaps the “Réveillon” of Christmas and the New Year in a café or night restaurant, and welcomed in whichever of th e two days it was to the strains of a tzigane orchestra. Are not these festivities a distinct feature of the celebrations in Paris? Yes, certainly, but they are far from being all that there is to a French Christmas.

That there is an essential difference between the viewpoint of Anglo-Saxon and Gaul is certain. To define the difference, however, is less easy than to state that it exists. It has been said that in France, Christmas was a religious fêTe, while in England and America it was a family holiday. Though some may quarrel with the definition on the ground that it is over sweeping, it is yet not so far from the truth.

To the French family, Christmas begins with the visits to the churches, where tapers are lighted before the little groups representing the Nativity, more or less elaborate according to the wealth or poverty of the quarter. There are, of course, many who come out of pure curiosity, but to the great majority these little visits are very near and very true. Every year, prince and pauper, youth and old age, symbolize the Wonderful Legend. For the time being, they are shepherds or kings, and the little flame-crowned candles are as symbols of the gifts brought by these first adorers.

What man who has attended a midnight mass on Christmas Eve at a great basilica or cathedral can forget it? Here, too, the curious come in their hundreds, but even the most brazen “sightseer” among them cannot but realize the deep religious feeling which moves this human stream….

But it must not be imagined that Christmas is not also a family fête. In France, le Bonhomme Noël drives his team of reindeer-or is it an automobile nowadays-even as does Santa Claus in lands where he is called by that name….

No Christmas tree in France? Have you then never strolled along that part of the quays where noble firs and baby first, fat ones and thin ones, stand in the shadow of the Conciergerie until Father comes with his hat chet-only it is a louis to-day-to take home The Tree for his dearest ones….

For the base of this ever-green abbey, for the underbrush of this forest of dreams, you have the deep-green masses of holly, jewelled with red, which men and women bring there to sell so that their Little Ones may have a happy Christmas….

Here we have mistletoe, and Jeanne watches her mother with a half-smile as she buys a great ball of dainty gray-green leaves and wax-like berries. Yes, Monsieur l'Anglais, the same custom exists here, and we pretend not to see, and hope, and then scream, in just the same way as Bess and Joan.

It is nightfall now, and over there by the bridge a little cluster of people, returning from work, has gathered round three street-singers, a woman and two men. From this distance, you cannot hear the words. In all probability, it is some very modern romance they are singing, but if you make-believe, you will almost think it is one of those naive carols of olden times.

Then from Christmas, when Hope was born, to the New Year, when we marshal our armies to fight the battle of life again. Let us laugh and make merry, for we are on the eve of a new era…. Laughter, songs and music to hail 1913, which must bring better things!….

New Year's Day brings gifts and flowers…. France calls on its relatives and friends, the postal authorities celebrate the occasion by delivering cards six weeks late, and families gather to make good resolutions, to chat about those dear ones who are too far away to join in the happy circle….

After all, it is much the same the world over. Outwardly, it may vary a little, but the spirit and heart are the same. Logician, pessimist, unbeliever, by whatever name you choose to call yourself, we must write you down an ass. But even though you are but a dismal fool, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!