Blood & Treasure

die on your feet or fight on your knees

On  November 1, some professors from Yangtze University in Jingzhou, Hubei Province, got down on their knees and begged the local government to shut down an illegal factory that was choking them and their students out of their campus, to a considerable Sinosphere rumpus. Now check out this backgrounder on the politics of kneeling: 

It is the third type of kneel Li Nuoyen described, a begging kneel, that was clearly on the minds of Jingzhou’s professors when they appeared at city hall on Nov 1. They had solid precedent: Last April, in the northern Chinese county of Zhuanghe, more than a thousand poor villagers met in front of their city hall in protest, hoping the mayor would dismiss allegedly corrupt local leaders. The mayor refused. But then, images of the protest circulated online and in the mainstream media, casting the mayor as an unsympathetic, unresponsive leader. It was an embarrassment to a Communist Party that still fancies itself a populist organization. Not long after, the mayor of Zhuanghe was fired.

So if you pursue moderate change within the bounds of the law you get treated like Chen Guangcheng. If you band together and fight, MGI style, you may get a partial result. So also, maybe, if you get down on your knees. 

oh, the hippy and the redneck should be friends

Jens Lundand R. Serge Denisoff walked “through the parking lot of the 1968 Berryville, Virginia, Bluegrass Festival, and lost count of the numberof cars bearing either McCarthy or Wallace stickers, but nothing inbetween. The amount of fraternization between ‘freaks’ and ‘rednecks’at these events is truly remarkable” 

Extensive and quite compelling analysis of the relationship between politics and country music in the US. In the UK, as it happens, I associate it very stromgly with voting Labour. via Jesse Walker's twitter feed. And here's the author's blog.

 

public enemies

It's fairly rare that PLA corruption and fuck-ups get reported in China, which is, no doubt, one reason why this is being rapidly taken off the news.  I assume their plan was to hit a bank or two and then cross the border into Russia, which is moderately porous.

On a related note, I've been reading up on the Sino-Vietnamese campaign, which really was a botch of enormous proportions. The PLA went back to using human wave tactics after abandoning them in Korea, for political reasons (those who pushed for the change, like Peng Dehuai*, having been purged). Most of the troops hadn't had any training for years; some of them didn't know how to load their guns properly. Whole companies went into battle without using support weaponry (mortars, machine-guns, etc).

*Peng Dehuai is one of the genuine CCP heroes, and should be on all the banknotes.  Spent his youth as a beggar and coal miner, strategic genius of the Giap kind, one of the few to have the balls to confront Mao over the Great Leap Forward.  

some day a cleansing rain will come...

Has there been any occasion in the recorded history of British protest when students and black cab drivers co-ordinated their efforts, however loosely? I realise that the cabbies who blockaded Trafalgar Square today were there to pursue their own grievance, and that they belong to a group affiliated to the RMT union, which probably makes them more radical than their iron-arsed brethren. Even so, these are two groups of people where the assumption is that there's a profound cultural hostility operating. The frustrated racist gobshites are over here and the overprivileged shiftless campus monkeys are over there, and by and large both parties would be happy with the separation between them. That's just the way it is in Britain, or was. The idea that they might act as force multipliers for each other is something new. I wonder if it will lead anywhere.

Zhili MGI update

Here's a great report in Caixin magazine about the Zhili tax uprising I wrote about last Sunday. It seems I read the situation more or less accurately in that the core issue is the city's dependance on and exploitation of migrant labour: 200,000  - two thirds - of the city's residents are internal migrants, mainly from Anqing city in Anhui province over on the northern side of the Yangtse. Locals and incomers have together made Zhili China's (and therefiore probably the world's) largest centre for the manufacture of children's clothing.

One thing I missed:

By approximately 6 p.m. on Oct. 26, another 500 to 600 people had assembled, and including the surrounding onlookers, the entire crowd is estimated to have numbered over 1,000. During that time, one driver in an Audi ran into and injured nine people as he fled the scene. Officials said the victims were sent to the hospital and their injuries were not life-threatening, but many Anhui migrants insisted that some were killed in the accident.

So what's the significance of the make of car? Well, B&T regulars will already be familiar with the marque preferred by cadres. By using the word 'Audi' you can convey the information that a local government official ran his car into the crowd of demonstrators without actually writing that and drawing unwanted attention from the rest of the Audi-driving classes. 

occupying the SuGaytenland

He wrote: "Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK's victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.

"Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it's only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated."

I know its easy to read too much into these things, but I notice that he's not suffering imaginary oppression by the CIGay, the GayGB, the Homintern, al Gayda or even the Gayluminati. It's got to be the ice cold blondes in the leather coats.

security theatre state

The fascinating thing about the UK border control story is that it tells you with some precision what's gone horribly wrong in this country. To recap, it seems that the Home Secretary told the relevant organs not to treat visitors as potential terrorist or criminal suspects. Not because this was wrong for moral or practical reasons, you understand, but because it was causing delays. Nonetheless, this is considered to be such a shameful decision that it has to be kept secret - or at the very least that its later revelation is considered a ministerially job threatening scandal.

Of course, any sympathy you might have for Theresa May ends with the fact that when the story does come out she doesn't simply justify her actions on any of the numerous practical or moral grounds available. Instead she tries to stick the 'blame' on to the civil servants under her. And the opposition, meanwhile, is making an utter disgrace of itself hopping from foot to foot and claming that not running passport checks on the dependent children of visitors represents a 'failure to control our borders'.

It seems to be politically impossible to point out the obvious conclusion here, namely that the whole thing proves that you can't simultaneously excercise the levels of border control politicians and assorted xenophobes howl for while living in an open political and economic system. And the idea that there might be a moral issue involved in treating everyone like a potential terrorist on the grounds that they want to come to your country is just off the radar completely.

i have no words

So what's on the telly in China then? This:

funeral games

Oh wow, this is good:

In 2005, when London was awarded the games, the question of why they were desirable wasn't really a publicly legitimate one to ask. The Olympics were a perfect embodiment of every dominant business and political value of the time: they maximised competitiveness, of individuals, neighbourhoods, London and the UK; they were family-friendly and healthy; they were 'delivered' by a well-oiled machinery of public-private collaboration; they would show-case managerial efficiency and budgetary honesty, with 'the world watching'. The core purpose of the Olympics, in a pre-2008 universe, was to synthesise every value of that economic era. Collaboration and teamwork were celebrated - but only to the extent that they further competitiveness (collaboration and teamwork which are not in the service of competitiveness constitute cheating and/or socialism).

But like the man goes on to say, them times ain't no more. I suppose the government could try and re-run the 1948 austerity Olympics and make it a matter of making-do, spam fritters and a jolly good time had by all. That, after all, was roughly the line taken after Beijing's Triumph of the Sporting Will extravaganza in 2008. These were going to be 'democratic Olympics', as you may recall.

But the context of the 1948 games, was among other things, the creation of the NHS. Next year's fiasco will take place, among other things, partway through the dissolution of the NHS: a whole different set of optics. And the point of the whole spectacle these days is corporate hospitality. Those boys are going to want opulence for their money, something which the roganisers may or may not be able to afford to give them. I see the Millenium Dome here; on steroids, appropriately enough

the lost pollster

So. Philip Gould goes off to join the silent majority in the classical meaning of the phrase. Ed M says:

"He taught those fortunate enough to know him much about how to live, and in the years of his illness, much about how to die."

Now that must have been one hell of a focus group. Maybe this is what happens when you become too dependent on pollsters.

The obituary here shows how much his rise owed to chance and contingency. He was running a firm of "Associates" out of his back bedroom with no clients, when Peter Mandelson hired him to wow a disconsolate Labour Party with jargon and flipcharts. This fails to work in 1992 and Gould is out in the cold until John Smith dies and he's rehired to promote the idea that Only Tony could win an election that Labour were never going to lose anyway.

We've had twenty five odd thirty years of Gould and Gouldism, of politicians talking to real people and hearing their very real concerns and being on the side of ordinary hard working families and of reaching outside the tribe, and yesterday we have Ed telling the Observer's readers that people feel politicians are "in touch with the richest one percent" and "wondering if politicians can make any difference". So how did that happen?

history as parody

Over here:

Ahead of so-called “Bachelor Day” on November 11, 11 men were seen on a Shanghai subway train, wrapped in duvets with their contact numbers written on placards in a desperate effort to seek wives.

November 11, a day represented by four 1 digits, has been dubbed “Bachelor Day” by young single Chinese.

Although it is not an official holiday, it has become a voguish day to celebrate among young, single white-collar workers.

lots of cakes

OK, so we have the first of what no doubt will be a long series of chin-scratchers on 'whither the CPC' in advance of HJT’s retirement next year. And at a guess we’re going to get a lot more along the lines of en emerging split over policy between “socialist” Chongqing and “free market” Guangdong and the styles and opinions of their respective leaders Bo Xilai and Wang Yang. So:

Qiu of the Unirule Institute of Economics believes that the existence of the Chongqing model and the Guangdong model, with their different constituencies, has sharpened the debate.

"These two models have made people conscious of the factions. They will seriously consider which model they support," Qiu says. "An even bolder prediction is that maybe the Communist Party could split along those lines, and become two parties: one for the middle class, let's call it a Liberal Party; the other for the lower class, the Democratic Party."

Well it’s an interesting question, and it certainly beats “will (bloke in suit with dyed hair) be China’s Gorbachev. But I think it overlooks a few things.

Now the other week there was an MGI I missed at the time in northern Zhejiang, at a town called Zhili. A tax riot, no less:

Over ten thousand migrant workers reportedly surrounded the government office of Zhili, a township under the city of Huzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province on Wednesday following a confrontation between tax collectors and local shop owners. The confrontation arose after authorities in Zhili doubled the business tax it imposed on local children's garments workers from 300 yuan (US$47) last year to 600 yuan (US$94).

The key phrase here is migrant workers. A number of years ago some friends of mine did some economic research in various townships in Northern Zhejiang, and found a system whereby pretty much all the enterprises were owned ‘collectively’ (ie by the local government), managed by local people and staffed by migrant workers from other parts of China. The profits went to pay for city government, local security forces and a welfare/healthcare/education system only for local huku holders. What seems to have happened since then is that migrants have been allowed to form enterprises. But it’s clear that the township government, or elements therein, still sees migrant labour simply as a source of revenue, whether in the form of profits or taxes.

The Yangtse delta towns have certain things in common: they’re traditionally better off areas, they have established industries (variations on textile), they’re very handy for export markets and they ‘reformed’ their economic structures fairly early on when there were stricter limits on what you could do. The result seems to be an odd form of ‘socialism in one township’ stretching across the fish and rice towns in the Delta.

The most obvious contrast to this is Wenzhou, the ‘city of millionaires’ currently undergoing something of a crisis as China’s unofficial debt market implodes. Wenzhou has no natural advantages or established industries; it was originally dirt poor, hardscrabble farming country with lousy communications links. It reformed comparatively late when the rules on what you could do were more relaxed, and chose a low tax, completely unregulated, red in tooth and claw approach to economic development.

The point here is that both of these radically different strategies are being pursued within the same province, and I’d bet you could point to many more examples of things like this happening across China as a whole. This makes discussion of China’s policy in binary terms – ‘red’ Chongqing versus ‘capitalist’ Guangzhou – a bit beside the point, because it implies a centralization of administrative power to an extent that is highly unlikely to happen.

As I’ve said before, I think the thing to look for here is differences in styles of governance. Wang Yang’s MO is as a consensus building, money in the bank kind of guy who leaves the places he once was as richer and more peaceful. Bo Xilai might be reclaiming the whole Mao scheme of thing in kitsch form, but he always had the reputation as the kind of man who ‘took no nonsense’ and ‘got things done’. Wang is an advanced example of China’s evolution from tyranny to oligarchy. Bo harkens back to when everyone looked to the big boss for a lead. For that reason alone, my money’s on Wang to advance to the standing committe next year and for Bo to get a slapdown.

they also enjoy comfy chairs and big tvs

This New York Times story on air purifiers and China's "privileged elite" strikes me as a considerable stretch. For starters, air purifiers are hardly the territory of the super-rich; a lot of upper-middle class houses have one. And claming to be used by the top leaders was one of the earliest marketing tricks here.

Plus, I think this is another instance of Weibo (China's super-Twitter) making journalists kind of lazy.  Weibo's a great thing, but it's really easy to just pluck a comment off it and make it seem representative.  Imagine scouring Comment is Free or Daily Mail comments to find UK opinion. 

Fun Zhongnanhai fact: the heating bill for one leaders' apartment in 1976 was more expensive than the heating bill for the 1000+ student school nearby.

dashing through the reich

At the port and policy nights of the Oxford University Conservative Association:

One officer claimed that members regularly sang a song which includes the words: “Dashing through the Reich…killing lots of kike (Jews).”

The Telegraph describes this as a ‘nazi themed song.’ Well, it’s not the first time:

In 2000, four members of OUCA were kicked out of a meeting of Oxford University Student Union for what the student press described as "a deliberate disruption of proceedings, involving Nazi-style salutes, cries of 'Viva Pinochet' and alleged drunken behaviour". In 2004 OUCA's ex-treasurer was found guilty of bringing the organisation into disrepute after writing an article claiming that "the problem with India is its culture [which is] stained by two main features which hold the country down continually with little sign of change: democracy and Hinduism". In late 2007 OUCA members were exposed in the student press for singing drinking songs that went "Dashing through the Reich/In a black Mercedes Benz/Killing lots of kikes/Ra ta ta ta".

It is, in fact, a Nazi themed song which appears to have been handed down over the years to successive members of the Oxford University Conservative Association. The Pinochet comment is interesting, since there was always a tendresse for the old monster and the Chilean army always looked to Germany as a model, down to the use of SS marching songs like ‘Erika’.

reform proves successful

A couple of interesting and disturbing things in this Dui Hua report. First, there are still more than sixty people in jail in China on charges of counterrevolution that were removed from Chinese law in 1997. Second, the conviction rate on state security charges has gone up since China replaced its laws against counterrevolution with more legalistically formulated statutes.

I didn't know about the hijacking either.

from Wedgwood's little known 'ten years of chaos' series

As you all know, I’m from the Potteries, and I think maybe you have to be from there to appreciate the full extent of the sheer evil weirdness of this. I mean, my great aunt Phyllis used to paint for Doulton; dotting the little eyes on the ‘much loved characters from Dickens’ series and enlivening the nymphs and shepherds sets with tasteful pastel washes. Christ knows what the poor old dear would have made of a figurine of a counterrevolutionary cow demon forced to his knees by eager red guards; why, if you look closely you can see one arm being forced back into the notorious aeroplane position! And look at those glasses! Don’t they just scream ‘stinking ninth category’?

 Anyway, this from a Cultural Revolution mantlepiece set, apparently distributed as rewards for deserving cadres. Many more at the link.

 And thanks to Leo for the tip.

 

taoist hells are even better than buddhist hells

In traditional Chinese thought, the afterlife is full of government bureaucracy, run by a paperwork- and red tape-stalled management. At Beijing’s Dongyue Temple (东岳庙), representations of 76 of these offices are on display. Sometimes reminiscent of my Chinese government offices, sometimes reminiscent of a Troma film, they’re almost all insanely cool. Fish-headed monsters, managed by fire-breathing goblin judges, sit in the room beyond decapitated na’er-do-wells and scowling horses.

 

the thing about tourists is that they go home

Every year, thousands of wealthy Chinese familes fly to the US so the woman of the family can give birth on American soil. This is how US media reports the issue:

A curious global industry has emerged that caters to wealthy foreign women willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to give birth in the United States and get instant U.S. citizenship for their babies. The hefty price is worth it, according to these women, because it paves the way for easy access to American public schools, universities and jobs as the children get older and green cards for the whole family once the child turns 21.

And this is how it is:

Under the [one child] policy's complicated rules, there are exceptions that allow many couples -- including those belonging to ethnic minorities and those coming from one-child families themselves -- to have second children. The government provides local officials with great leeway to enforce the policy -- a factor that results in sometimes brutal punishment for couples who defy the rules. As a result, Chinese couples seeking siblings for their children, or boys as heirs, can risk the wrath of local governments, or go abroad to give birth.

Hong Kong has been a popular destination for expecting Mainlanders, as it is officially exempted from China's population control policies and children born there are ensured Hong Kong residency. In 2010, however, the city’s medical facilities were severley tested when 40,648 Mainland mothers gave birth to children in Hong Kong. Earlier this year, Hong Kong's food and health secretary capped the number of non-residents allowed to give birth there to 34,000 for 2012.

The United States is a more costly destination for couples wishing to evade the one-child policy. If Chinese couples give birth in the U.S. but raise their new child in China, the parents would be required to pay for educational and other social benefit expenses that an American citizen –- such as Wang’s new child -– is not entitled to receive.

In other words, having a kid in the US isn't a matter of laying a marker down; it's a colossal, and colossally expensive, pain in the backside.

let them eat laptops, a reprise...

This is so 1990's:

Nicholas Negroponte plans to airdrop OLPC tablets to remote villages to teach the children within them to read, he told the audience at the Open Mobile Summit on Wednesday.

The tablets won't be accompanied by any adults or teaching resources; Negroponte said that he was convinced that they were designed for children, and that he wanted to see if the tablets could be used to teach them to read without additional instruction.

"We will literally take tablets and drop them out of helicopters," and return a year later to see if the effort was a success, Negroponte said. A new tablet design can withstand a 30-foot drop, and even be left out in the rain.

What a child needs is to be sequestered from human contact with the latest technology. A third world educational initiative should be conducted in the manner of an eperiment in developing the cognitive power of chimpanzees. Feel the techno-idiocy: it burns.

I remember this idea getting serious momentum years ago until it was pointed out to some of the philanthropists that the places they were planning to distribuite computing to didn't have electricity. Now they've figured out how to put solar panels in the things, so its let them eat laptops: the sequel.

This kind of thing was depressingly popular in new Labour circles as well. There was a fairly well advanced scheme in Manchester a few years back to give every child a laptop. What I was told by people dealing with evangelists for the idea comprised a sort of retail version of general government IT procurement policy.

Why do you want to do this? Because it's a laptop. It will promote learning! How? Because its information technology with information in it. The child just switches on the laptop and gets the information out of it. Then it will be educated.They'll just use it to play games. No they won't, because it will be a special computer which won't be able to play games. How are you going to make that work? because its new technology and new technology is flexible. Anyway, How can you deny a child a shiny new laptop, with a software package kindly provided to us by the manufacturers at only a third more than the normal retail price. What kind of progressive are you, anyway?

It didn't take off in the end, which is maybe a shame because In can think of three or four pubs where I should have been able to pick one up for fifty quid...

 

they'll just stop when it hits 88

While I agree with much of this article* on Chinese healthcare, the stat it leads with, life expectancy, is fundamentally flawed. Why?  Because it relies on the Chinese official data from 1949-1980, a period where, even more than today, Chinese official data was often wholescale lies or at the least massively internally manipulated to meet targets and please superiors. Meanwhile, international observers were limited to Potemkinised observations and often strikingly naive.  (Take the swallowing of China's claims to be able to "predict" earthquakes through "people's science" following Haicheng - a quake which was predicted because the ground was shaking in the day beforehand.) The way to get accurate observations would be to look at a whole bunch of individual commune records, which are much more (though not entirely) accurate.   

This is, as it happens, especially apparent with life expectancy, which, for instance, show life expectancy jumping by 12 years during the Cultural Revolution, during which time a huge number of Chinese hospitals were closed down, the economy again neared collapse, doctors were regularly persecuted, and mass violence was common.

 I'm hugely sceptical of the claim in the article that the purge at the Ministry of Health meant that "With less bureaucratic obstruction, policy became better coordinated" - that certainly wasn't the case with most sectors, since the rampant paranoia, "helicoptering" of incompetent-but-politically-acceptable staff from below, and bureaucratic infighting often paralyzed operations entirely.  (There's a bizarrely rose-tinted take on the Cultural Revolution throughout the piece, though the claims about barefoot doctors are fair enough.)  

What you did get too was a big influx of politically dubious medical personnel into the countryside, which probably did cause improvement of healthcare there. That happened with other purges too; I have a friend whose parents were highly-respected doctors in an Anhui village, having been purged in the Anti-Rightist Campaign in '56.  But it also crippled the country's medical research efforts: to take one example, I know of one doctor who came back from the West to work on solving childbirth mortality issues and was imprisoned in a village mortuary for several years.   

So what you may have is a situation in which average life expectancy actually increased by quite a bit more between 1980 and today than the 5 years claimed by the article, simply because the "68 years" of claimed life expectancy in 1980 was probably quite a few years higher than the reality. That doesn't take away from the current rural healthcare crisis, which the rest of the article is very good on, but it makes the record more comparable to other developing Asian countries.  

(Going purely by casual observation of various age groups, *height,* which is a decent roundabout measure of infant health, has increased quite considerably in the last 30 years.  Again, though, big urban/rural distinction, but still, the migrant workers of today are 3-4 inches taller than their parents.)

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