Blood & Treasure

left foot forward

This is as much Splinty’s turf as mine, especially these days, but here’s some news of the progress of Catholicism in China. We have, it seems, a reconciliation of sorts. 

But even before the papal letter, things had been quietly changing for China's Catholics. A reconciliation of sorts has been going on unnoticed, as the vast majority of Beijing's patriotic bishops have secretly contacted the Vatican and received Rome's approval. 

Beijing, after the manner of Henry VIII and his followers, insists on appointing its own Bishops. But it’s the usual story. The Chinese market is just too big to let little things like that get in the way. The main problem right now is the fact that the Vatican recognizes Taiwan, but I suppose that one’s up for negotiation too. 

Disclosure. I was once bought an incredibly long lunch by the head of the Taiwan Representative Office in Brussels, on the occasion of his appointment as Ambassador to the Vatican. We didn’t do anything so vulgar as talk about religion. I wonder what happened to Benjy Lu. I’ve never seen a man with such a vast expense account at his command who so few people were willing to meet. It was like witnessing a violation of a basic law of nature, or at least of politics. 

Relatedly, here’s a good piece on Chinese Hui Muslims: 

China has an estimated 21 million Muslims, who have developed their own set of Islamic practices with Chinese characteristics. The biggest difference is the development of independent women's mosques with female imams, something scholars who have researched the issue say is unique to China.

dial a wail

Danwei translates a feature from the Beijing News on professional mourners, without which no funeral in Sichuan is apparently complete: 

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. 

At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably. 

Income from tips and gratuities comes to the equivalent of about £80.00 per month. Not a great living, even in the Chinese interior. Business comes through “wreath shops”, which seem to be evolving into western style funeral directors. 

Norman Lewis once wrote up a variant on the trade in Italy, The Uncles from Rome. These were elderly people hired to arrive in a car and look grave and vaguely prosperous at working class Neapolitan funerals, with the implication that the deceased and his or her family amounted to something materially.

Russia’s got talent

Tank ballet! It gets lively about halfway through, when the tanks start courting what looks like an amphibious vehicle. More here.

blind faceless mother were loaded silicone fake face new

Put another way, News in Motion goes to Red State America:

scenes from a bad marriage

There’s been an obvious pushback gong on from the US against China since the Copenhagen summit last year. This was to be expected after the free ride the PRC got during the Bush era, though right now it doesn’t seem to consist of anything more than perception management, the specific perception being that Chinese policies everyone was more or less OK with before are now to be viewed as threats, it’s points of difference with the US and others to be regarded as pig headedness and its carrying out of stated policy as aggression. The thing that these pieces tend to have in common is that they’re all incredibly lame: 

China rankled the Europeans over its climate change diplomacy at Copenhagen. For all of Beijing's bluster, it failed to alter U.S. policies on Tibet and Taiwan. It backed down on the Google controversy. It overestimated the power that comes with holding U.S. debt. It alienated South Korea and Japan over its handling of the Cheonan incident, leading to joint naval exercises with the United States -- exactly what China didn't want. It's growing more isolated within the G-20. And, increasingly, no one trusts its economic data. 

In order: Europeans aren’t fond of US climate change diplomacy either; China hasn’t tried to alter US policies on Taiwan and Tibet; Google is now operating its local search engine out of Hong Kong; the naval exercises are about what North Korea did, not about China’s response to that (and they don’t involve Japan anyway); isolated from who, exactly; and no-one trusts its data any more or less than they always did. In other words, what’s actually being described here is the usual truck and barter of diplomacy and the ususal messy execution of policy. 

FP seems to specialize in this kind of crap polemic. Here’s another even lamer example. Expect forthcoming attractions to include “China spotted throwing chips at people in bus shelter”, “China ties snoozing OAPs shoelaces together” “who’s that sniffing glue in the park – it’s China!” 

I can sort of see the point of this. According to this poll, China’s increasing heft in the world isn’t popular with many people in Europe and Asia, apparently on the grounds that since we’re doing badly, them doing well constitutes some kind of threat. Even so, China is more popular than not in Britain and the USA, so perhaps the aim is to change these numbers. But Jesus, talk about bricks without straw. Drezner says: 

 Developing.... in a very interesting way. 

No Dan. It’s deeply boring. It’s the sound of a bad marriage playing out from behind thin walls, with the US playing the clichéd female role. “You said you’d change.” “Why do we always do the same things.” And China sighs and slopes off to the garden shed, a copy of Razzle firmly tucked under its arm.

people like us like people like us

Paul Campos at LGM has a nicely forensic account of the career of Obama’s supreme court pick, Elena Kagan. It’s an elegant bit of detective work, finding the traces of someone who apparently rose without trace. 

The bottom line is that a close look at Kagan’s formal credentials to serve on the Court reveals there is nothing extraordinary about her, other than the extraordinary combination of social privilege and the ability to exploit it that has put her in her current position. This makes it all the more imperative that the public process leading up to Kagan’s confirmation should have produced a satisfactory answer to the almost wholly unresolved question of what Kagan’s fundamental legal and political views actually are. This it has completely failed to do.

don’t fence me in

Men of the desert: the origins of the US-Saudi romance: 

Steineke responded to the call put out by Aramco’s public-relations-and-marketing apparatus in the early ’30s, when the company began modeling Saudi Arabia after a John Ford set, a place where boyhood fantasies could be indulged and fortunes made. The groundwork for this romancing of Americans had been laid by Harry St. John Philby, the British explorer, Arabist, and confidante of Ibn Saud. Long before Aramco became a hundred-billion-barrel giant, it was a figment of Philby’s fertile imagination. He convinced the king that Arabia was “a man sleeping atop buried treasure” and that extracting it required the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (which later begat Aramco). “Arabia is a mirror image of the Old West,” Philby wrote, “a wide, unfenced land where nature is unsubdued, religion is simple and fundamental, and the law of the gun prevails—the desert of Arabia is America’s last frontier.”

 St John Philby, the author of this redneck-bedouin alliance, being the father of Kim.

minority reports

For those interested in dissenting Chinese political tendencies, here’s an interview with journalist, uber-blogger and liberal exponent Zhang Wen and here’s an in depth assessment of the Chinese New Left.

Deputy Prime Minister fails to be interesting

"I'm happy to account for everything we are doing in this coalition government, which has brought together two parties, working in the national interest to sort out the mess that you left behind," Clegg said.

 "Perhaps one day you could account for your role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq." 

Interesting that the Guardian describe this description of the Iraq invasion as a “gaffe”, in the article as well as the headline. I know there’s a value of gaffe which is supposed to mean “inadvertent outburst of truth”, but I never knew there was one meaning “coming forward with uncontroversial view broadly accepted by the public.” The Groan also describes Clegg as “under pressure” over the remark, but I don’t see any evidence that anyone on the opposition front bench seems inclined to take him up on it. 

This too is an uncontroversial view broadly accepted by the public. Some are questioning why more isn’t being made of it right now. But I remember when the link between Iraq and radicalization only had to be mentioned for a whole gang of people to run round with their fingers in their ears yelling “la la I can’t hear you” at the tops of their voices. So personally I’m inclined to savour the silence.

theme song for the Age of Cameron

The last lines are a little dated, shall we say, but... take it away, Noel:

not with a bang but a whimper

Interesting. According to this CIF piece by Robert Fox, if the MOD wants a Trident replacement it’s going to have to bear the entire cost itself. The current system was apparently paid for directly by central government. 

I suspect it’s too much for a basically Tory government to actually kill the project. Instead, I can see it being proclaimed as a central plank of Britain’s defence right up until the point when it’s completely forgotten about. So much for the inchoate Chinese menace.

looming reconciliation

Brilliant example of op-ed speak fail: 

Tangible signs of a looming reconciliation between Israel and Turkey aside, there are also indications that tensions will continue to degenerate. 

 ...which is a shame, because it’s quite an interesting piece that proposes Israel and Turkey acting out regional power rivalries against a background of declining American power, exacerbated by the potential opportunities for both in Iraqi Kurdistan. That’s how you do op-ed speak.

moving off to the grassland

A bit more on Korean cultural impact in Asia. This time: sex tourism 

To avoid the crackdown, prostitution has spread to horseback-riding schools, massage parlours and others. An official at a Mongolian horseback-riding school, which is only identified by the letter “G” and is located an hour’s drive from the city center, said, “When (men who are here as sex tourists) arrive at the airport, they are escorted here. Local women arrive here in a different van. When they move off to the grassland, (the women) are accompanied by the men.” 

I assume that “moving off to the grassland” is done on horseback. That sounds quite romantic, except, obviously, that it isn’t.

all Scythians now

Registan brings news of the discovery of a Scythian burial mound, complete with gold plated inhabitant. No news of whether the remains of any impaled mounted servants were discovered, but ain’t that the way of it: who knows who actually built the Pyramids? 

There seems to be an element of rivalry here. The latest discovery was found outside Astana, the political capital of Khazakstan. Now it has a sun lord to rival the one found forty one years ago outside Almaty, the commercial capital. 

Michael Hancock deals at some length with Griffinology and speculates entertainingly on the potential for pan-Scythianness to bring unity to the conflicted folk of the ‘Stans, mentioning that certain Uzbeks too consider themselves children of Scythes. That golden statue of himself revolving to face the sun which Karimov put up in Turkmenistan was also suggestive along those lines. 

Finally, a link to Book 4 of Herodotus.

call and response

Cameron and Obama on the al-Megrahi release. 

He added: "Releasing the Lockerbie bomber, a mass murderer, was completely wrong.He showed his victims no compassion. They were not allowed to die in their beds at home." 

But he added: "That was not a decision taken by BP; it was a decision taken by the Scottish Government."

 Mr Obama said he would welcome new information on why the Scottish government had freed Megrahi. 

A regular double act. Alex Salmond already fingered Blair prior to this meeting. Now that he’s got a response, it’s his turn to tell us all a little more. Cameron’s statements have insulated his administration on the matter. If the Scots have anything to point to the involvement of the then British government, it’s not his British government and I’m sure he’ll be shocked, shocked that anything so untoward could have happened and doesn’t it show that Labour is forever unfit to take office, etc etc. 

Anyway, come on, Salmond: give. Tell the nice Senators what you know. I’ve still got a couple of years to run on my bet. The scenario is a little patchy but I think the timing might just be right.

some figures

...from Kellner et al:

Over the past four weeks, the coalition’s approval rating has slipped slowly but remorselessly. Our latest figures report a net rating of plus four (approve 41%, disapprove 37%). In just over two months, the coalition’s rating has declined to levels that were not reached for almost three years under Tony Blair.

 Peter Kellner puts this down to the impact of news about spending cuts finally hitting home. I’m not sure. The government’s early narrative was of the absolute necessity of cuts, and they got quite a bit of buy in on that one. The last four weeks have been all about the government’s actual initiatives: free schools, Nick Clegg’s miserable little compromise, “GP contracting”, and now renewed efforts to discover what a “big society” actually is: so far it’s about funding voluntary groups from dormant bank accounts rather than mainstream budgets. 

A lot of people went along with the doctor’s mandate stuff, at least while there was a prospect that it was only other people getting the medicine. What they haven’t liked are the things that the government has plainly chosen to do. But then it’s a weird fit anyway. X has to go while Y must be introduced is a hard sell when Y happens to be a pet project of the theatre critic of the Spectator. The cupboard is bare for you my friend, but there’s always something in the pot for our chums and a little put by to play out our own cranky notions. I think we have our schwerpunkt here.

the business of America is...

...spying on itself and everybody else. 

Here’s the motherlode.

the hellbound train has left the station

Julian Glover thinks it’s morning again in Parliament: 

After every winter of depression, there's an automatic rebound. It's true of the economy and of the Commons, post-expenses, for all the misery among MPs about the way the rules are applied. New MPs, a new government and a new way of doing government have added a superficial glamour. You sense it in the chamber, where business is more topical and quicker. The late sittings engineered by Labour, and even the recent embarrassed drunks on the terrace, are signs of something stirring. There is a buzz, a sense that the place is starting to matter again, that maybe voters are noticing. 

Julian Glover hasn’t been reading his own newspaper.

MPs will this afternoon get their first chance to debate a bill that allows every school in England to become an academy – with schools rated outstanding by Ofsted being fast-tracked, so that hundreds could convert by the start of the new school year. To enable this to happen, the government has compressed the committee stage in which bills are usually studied in detail by a panel of MPs. Instead, this stage will take place in two days on the floor of the House of Commons. 

... He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Rushed laws can be bad laws. But it is also the case that if you've had extensive debate during the course of an election campaign, if you have, as we have, hundreds of schools who are anxious to take advantage of these proposals, then it is understandable that you want to honour the manifesto commitment." 

Because, you know, who needs a parliament when you’ve had a plebiscite? A couple of other things occur. Needless to say I don’t like most of what the government is doing. But they’re surely getting on and doing it, and doing it without, technically speaking, a majority. 

Compare that to the comparative timidity of the Blair government in 1997 while it was sitting on the largest majority in modern times. Remember that “post euphoria, pre delivery” guff that Blair came out with when people began wondering what was supposed to happen next? None of that here. The hellbound train has left the station. But then the 1997 government seemed absolutely petrified of being forced by the momentum of its majority into doing something leftwing. 

I suppose one reason to frontload everything and ram it through parliament is the government’s unwillingness to put the coalition through an extended series of stress tests. On the other hand coalitions are supposed to prevent hot legislative action of a radical and precipitate kind. So it’s another datapoint to the notion that the Lib Dems no longer really exist as an autonomous force.

old school laughing academies

Tonight’s top ten: abandoned asylums, with suitably sombre photography. I chose this pictire because it's of a place called Hellingly. Via.

 

deals in deserts

On the face of it, William Hague’s statement today continues the former government’s line that the release of al-Megrahi to Libya was entirely a matter for the Scottish government. That’s certainly a line helpful to BP. 

But put another way, he’s simply saying that it was nothing to do with the British government. That interpretation leaves open some of the questions explored here: 

Alex Salmond has heaped pressure on Tony Blair over his alleged role in the controversial release of the Lockerbie bomber by claiming that the former prime minister should be forced to testify before a US Senate committee investigating the affair. 

Amid growing concerns over the potential impact of the forthcoming foreign relations committee hearings, the Scottish First Minister advised senators to question Mr Blair over the infamous "deal in the desert" in 2007, when Mr Blair and the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi agreed plans to open the country up to foreign trade. 

The call came as the Daily Mail claimed Mr Blair was flown to Libya for secret talks with Col Gaddafi last month, days after denying he was an adviser to the dictator. So Hague says “talk to the Scots.” And Salmond says “talk to Tony Blair.” 

Salmond’s accusations put Blair in the frame in January 2007. That’s roughly halfway between Blair’s agreeing to step down and his eventual departure. Now it could be argued that some kind of side deal meant to help Blair establish his post retirement mega consultancy had “nothing to do with the government” – ie, with government business. Using government for the furtherance of a retirement plan, perhaps with the aid of other members of the government, is another matter. It’s certainly well known that Blair was working on his post parliamentary career for a fair amount of time before he stepped down. 

 Still, for such a deal to go through the co-operation of the Scottish government would be essential. So the question then becomes: what was offered to the SNP, and by who, that would make it worth their while taking such an unpopular decision?