Blood & Treasure

my name is Mr Cronenberg and i am your obstetrician

As we await the birth of young Herod or Urgulanilla or Hermaphroditica here's something suited to the current retarded state of the national mood:

Such stories were commonly reported in print: Cressy’s essay on Agnes Bowker refers to many of them, and there is a further chapter on monstrous births in his book.* He suggests that contemporaries explained them in a range of possible ways: freaks of nature or manifestations of divine power; judgements or punishments against individuals or communities; portents of coming catastrophes, or even of the end of the world. Or they could simply be treated as freak-show entertainment.

Very often, the cases are associated with the widespread belief that what the experiences of a pregnant mother – beautiful or shocking, but most often the latter – could physically imprint themselves on her unborn child...

...Herman Roodenburg’s detailed study of the phenomenon of the ‘maternal imagination’ in Holland** notes that pregnant women were warned to be particularly careful with animals (strange and frightening or maimed animals seem to have been particularly dangerous); other cases were associated with the sight of human ‘freaks’ at fairs, or mutilated beggars, or black people, or lunatics, with paintings or statutes of grotesque subjects. (Conversely, pregnant women were advised to hang beautiful paintings on their walls in order to have beautiful babies.)

So Kate lets loose a final bellow and they emerge: one by one at first, then in puling squadrons, a flood of shiny pink homunculi each clutching tiny little microphones: after first conjoining in a seething mass they separate and begin to conduct interviews with each other. The sound is of cats sliding apologetically down tin walls. A tiny Kay Burley bites into the juciy wizened head of a miniscule Nicholas Witchell, who mewls pitifully. At length, their heads turn as one and they begin to crawl, with terrible purpose, up the flaccid thighs of their former host. A deathly scream reverberates. Indifferent, the simpletons dance in the streets.

and we mean 'adult' literacy

I'd seen these (NSFW)* floating around before but never realised they were part of a genuine Soviet adult literacy campaign, circa 1931, and by an artist who went on to create a lot of monumental masonry for Stalin. I wonder how well it worked.

*unless maybe you happen to work in adult education.

petitioner at the terminal

This is the moment that Ji Zhongxing detonated a homemade bomb at the international arrivals hall of Terminal 3 of Beijing airport at 6:24 pm today, China time.

Ji, who is believed to be 33 years old, is wheelchair bound after allegedly receiving a serious beating at the hands of cops in Guangdong Province either for carrying a passenger on the back of his motorbike or in some dispute involving his job driving a rickdshaw (presumably for tourists). He started a blog detailing his long, frustrating attempts to obtain justice through grappling with the petitioning system, now of course deleted.

Ji was seen attempting to hand out leaflets to travellers at the airport, but was prevented from doing so by staff. There are other pictures of him in his wheelchair waving around a package now believed to be the bomb before he detonated it.

The bomb is believed to have been constructed from fireworks. At any rate, it wasn’t powerful enough to kill him and no-one else was hurt in the explosion. Ji is currently in hospital.

Public suicide by frustrated petitioners and others similarly aggrieved is not unknown in China, though no-one up till now has attempted it at a major point of ingress for foreign visitors. Suicide bombing is a more recent trend: in 2011 farmer Qian Mingqi killed three people including himself when he bombed government buildings in Jiangxi Province.  Just over a month ago, 47 people died in Xiamen when Chen Shuizong decided to bring an end to a long running dispute between himself and the authorities over a clerical error by setting himself alight on a crowded bus, which exploded.

It’s suggestive that Ji decided to set off his device in a place where he couldn’t help but be noticed by travellers, though the device itself doesn’t appear to have really been designed to cause a mass casualty event. Maybe it would be fair to say that all he really wanted was for someone to pay attention to what he had to say. Of course, others with more seriously lethal intent may also decide to make a similar statement in a place where the presence of foreigners makes it harder to hush matters up.

Picture credit: just about everybody in the Sinosphere. If Ji wanted publicity, he got it.

people who count

As a means of encouraging Myanmar’s transition to democracy, Britain is helping fund the country’s next census. What could possibly go wrong?

Because Thein Sein's government is forcing the Rohingya people to register as "Bengali", a continuation of a decades-old policy of stripping the Rohingya of both their citizenship and ethnic identity, Britain's financial support for this process is troubling. The coming census will no doubt be used to reinforce this racist policy and practice of forcibly registering the self-referenced Rohingya and erasing the fact that the Rohingya as an ethnic nationality group ever existed in Myanmar.

As I understand things, right now Rohingya forced into camps after various pogroms across the country are being held until they agree to redefine themselves as ‘Bengali’. The presumption here seems to be that the census will make this process automatic. And the fact that Thein Sein felt able to say that there are no such persons as Rohingya during his speech at Chatham House indicates that the UK government is not acting out of ignorance. 

mass incident watch: Linwu

We have a classic of the genre here. Firstly, the inoffensive street vendor beaten to death by chengguan, and secondly the body used as a locus for protest:

The story doesn’t just stop there. The real war started when local authorities decided that they wanted the body. That evening, many of Deng’s fellow villagers and several hundreds of local residents volunteered to protect the dead body. About 200 anti-riot police were sent to disperse the crowd. Inevitably, clashes happened.

Pictures from the ground show bloody faces of people beaten by police. Several people who were sharing information live on Weibo said they heard police say “Make way or die!”

According to this WSJ report, the family eventually agreed to let the body be taken by the authorities provided they could witness the post mortem, a very Chinese kind of compromise. As of right now, actual physical protest seems to have died down, though the case is all over the Sinosphere, where people continue to have difficulty with the idea that people responsible for enforcing bylaws about standing on pavemnents and suchlike should be responsible for so many fatalities.

idea factory

Daniel Drezner on why the US is still the world’s leading manufacturer of thought:

The reason that the United States still dominates the ‘ideaplex’ is that the American system confers greater economic, political and cultural rewards on thought leaders than any other country in the world. Economically, the rise in economic inequality has created a class of plutocrats that demand ideational and ideological sustenance as well as material comfort. This has made the rewards for supplying accessible ideas considerable. Politically, both the left and the right have appreciated the need for creating an infrastructure that can promote ideologically friendly ideas. Culturally, the combined effect is to create a ‘superstar’ class of public intellectuals.

It is no coincidence that the surge in intellectual opportunities has coincided with the growth of the super-affluent. As the One Percent has become richer and richer, they can afford to do anything they want – and it turns out a surprising number of them want to go back to school. While some donate their funds to their alma mater, others set up their very own intellectual salons. There has been an explosion of Davos-like ‘Big Idea’ events – TED conferences, the Aspen Ideas Festival, anything sponsored by The Atlantic – that tap ‘provocative’ thinkers to sate the curiosity of attendees.

The idea that the growth in inequality has produced a vibrant infrastructure of left wing intellectualization funded by the beneficiaries of this growth is kind of...sweet. But then I suppose it’s rude to remind everyone that the fundable space for political and social thought is limited to what some random collection of billionaires finds congenial.

But here as well you see China’s thought problem: if you want oligarchy to reproduce itself in an intellectually plausible manner, you have to allow it to do so.

a cultured thief

Other villagers told the paper that they suspect Wang used the museum to launder money.  

I can't figure out precisely what's going on here. Antiquities are used as bribes in China: maybe it's something to do with that, with the museum being a front for 'donations'. Still, I think the golden rule applies: nightclubs are for laundering money, museums are for laundering empires.

song for the self-immolators

The song “Patriotic Martyrs” is clearly about the self-immolations in Tibet with many references to fire and flames in the lyrics. The line “The courage of Thupten Ngodup” refers to the first Tibetan self-immolator. Thupten Ngodup self-immolated on April 27, 1998 in New Delhi, India, and died two days later. Interestingly, Thupten Ngodup was the only self-immolator to be mentioned by name in the last message of Lama Soepawho self-immolated on January 8, 2012: “To all the six million Tibetans – including those living in exile – I am grateful to Pawo Thupten Ngodup and all other Tibetan heroes who have sacrificed their lives for Tibet and for the reunification of the Tibetan people.”

The word “Pawo” means hero and is a title given to honour Tibetans who have sacrificed their lives. In this context, the title also connotes a martyr. In the song, Jampel specifically mentions both pawo (the male form) and pamo (the female form) but, for the sake of brevity, in our translation we have only used one English word “martyr” to include both the men and the women.

Whole thing over here.

wanderer in the heartland

Yu's imprisonment -- after he threw eggs with red paint on a portrait of Mao Zedong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 -- drew international attention as human rights groups pressed for his freedom. But he was released a different man, battered by abuse, with diminished mental and verbal abilities.

Yu, 46, was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 2009. He and his sister emigrated to Indianapolis that year, and he has spent much of his time at the spa.

He has a habit of wandering off, apparently. On this occasion he was found by a nice lady who gave him a drink and something to eat. He nested on her patio until she eventually called the cops.

The desperately sad thing is that Yu and two friends who also defaced Mao's portrait were caught and handed over to the Beijing police by demonstrating students, who wanted to show that they were orderly and patriotic and would have nothing to do with 'hooliganism'. Much good it did them.

Kudos to the yanks for taking him in, by the way. I dread to think how he'd have been received had he tried to come to the UK.

one execution, many explanations

I blogged about Zeng Chengjie execution over the weekend. The responsible authorities’ constant changes of explanation over why his family was not notified have since become a source of grim comedy, to wit:

 We didn’t notify his daughter because we don’t have to under the law. You mean we do have to? Oh, right. Actually, what we meant to say was that he didn’t want them to be notified. No, cancel that: we notified his ex wife and family. No you can’t speak to them – they’re in prison too. OK, well we did try and notify his daughter, but we couldn’t find her. You mean she was protesting outside the courthouse all this time? How about that! Oh, and one last thing. You know we said we executed him by lethal injection? We meant to say that we shot him. No, don’t worry about the funeral. Already taken care of!

Adds Offbeat China:

Many businessmen, who usually keep their mouth shut about politics, break their silent this time. Like 王冉, CEO of China eCapital, commented: “I share [Zeng Shan’s post] because this is the reality of China’s judicial system that every one of us needs to face every day.” 王石, another Chinese real estate tycoon, called for more transparency: “Please stop secret execution!.”

The case as a whole sounds like a classic provincial corruption clusterfuck: the impact of social media on Chinese politics is generally overstated but it does mean that you just can’t bury people like you used to, at least not people in whom the Sinosphere’s various blogging business types and their many followers take an interest . Still, from the central government’s point of view, having a bunch of very scared real estate tycoons out there is probably not something they're especially displeased about right now.

not quite the spirit of '45

Says Anna:

Ken Loach's feature-length documentary, The Spirit of '45, is one recent example. A documentary about the creation of the welfare state and its legacy, it presents us with Loach's vision of the British working class, united in the struggle for a better Britain. And though it covers the period from the 1930s up to the Thatcher era, everyone featured in the film is white – it's as if people like me have been bred out of the working-class gene pool.

I can think of another reason why Ken Loach might not have referred to the Chinese in particular:

But as soon as the war was over, during a series of police swoops on the Liverpool dock area, deportation orders were served on the Chinese sailors.

"He just went out to the shop, and my mum was waiting for him to come home, and he never came," Linda Davis said of her father.

The operations were carried out by the Liverpool Constabulary under the watchful eyes of the Special Branch.

The initiative came from the UK Home Office, as proven by official paperwork that has recently been discovered.

Within 48 hours the Chinese sailors were on their way back to China.

So yeah: awkward. Perhaps the basic problem is that it’s difficult to present a sentimentalised version of the past, even of one of its more hopeful moments, without ‘whitening’ it, if only because a lot of the makers of the new dawn were, in conformity with the times, pretty racist and acted on that when they had the chance.

A few years back a Deputy Mayor of Wuhan told an old colleague that he’d heard that Labour were always the ‘anti-Chinese’ party. I’m not sure if this was a long term consequence of those deportations that somehow made it down through the years. It was certainly true that the Hong Kong Chinese press always used to portray Labour as a party keen to block Chinese migration in order to featherbed lazy British workers. Maybe that view, which sounds like it may be based on the Liverpool deportation story, filtered up to central China.

More on the Liverpool deportations here.  Ugly stuff: your basic razzia, in fact.

way of the camera

Well, the latest emerging scandal in China - actually, it's been on the point of emerging for ages but seems to be finally doing so now - involves the Shaolin Temple: the birthplace of kungfu now appears to be involved in a three cornered battle for control between the monks, the local government, and a Hong Kong-based tourism company. Things took an interesting turn when surveillance cameras were discovered in the Abbott's chamber, one pointed at his bed:

In 2011, it was said that Abbot Shi Yongxin had a mistress who was a student at Peking University and that he had US$3 billion deposited overseas. The mistress and an illegitimate son were said to be living in Germany.

A temple spokesman said later the rumor was not worth responding to.

If that's a rumour not worth responding to, I'd love to see one that is.

another shooting

It’s not all bad news from Florida: here’s a shooting incident from last year in which no-one was hurt and someone went to jail:

A Florida woman who fired warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville had said the state's "Stand Your Ground" law should apply to her because she was defending herself against her allegedly abusive husband when she fired warning shots inside her home in August 2010. She told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she had already taken out a protective order.

Another account here. Ms Alexander was jailed under the State’s Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Laws, having rejected a plea bargain which would have got her three years. Instead she went the ‘Stand Your Ground’ route.

As I understand it from the Zimmerman/Martin case, this is supposed to require the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had no cause to discharge a firearm at him. Trayvon Martin had difficulty in assisting the prosecution in this task on account of him being dead. Ms Alexander’s husband, by contrast, was very much alive and willing to talk.

You wouldn’t have to be particularly cynical to assume that ‘Stand Your Ground’ is designed to assist people who discharge firearms  in the character of upstanding, non African-American property owners rather than in the character of frightened and/or angry wives. But I suppose given that the law is perverse enough to make acquittal easier if lethal force is used, you could also argue that Ms Alexander’s mistake was not to use it.

tycoons, and their downfall

For today, a couple of epic tales of life and death in the iron triangle of Chinese business, politics and crime:

Zeng Chengjie, a self-made businessman who pull himself up by the bootstraps from abject poverty to become a powerful real estate developer, was showered with accolades and superfluous praises for most of his life. In 2006, the local state-owned media in Hunan, his home province, wrote a glowing of the “diligent, wise and conscientious man,” concluding that “the future, for Zeng, is starting new ventures, new glories and new legends!”

But the future had other plans. Zeng was executed on July 12, 2013 by lethal injection.

The authorities were in such a hurry to get rid of Mr Zeng that they thoughtfully failed to notify his family, no doubt to spare them anxiety. The final resolution in the case was allegedly made when the Party Secretary for Hunan, where Zeng operated, ended up on China’s supreme court.

Elsewhere, here’s the story  of how Li Zeyuan bought a and allegedly looted a functioning airline company using contacts he’d made while enjoying a career as a serial fraudster with various PLA units, including Second Artillery, the nuclear force. He seems to be able to have done this by convincing various people that his military background meant he could get away with more or less anything. You can understand how they felt that way, though retribution does seem to have caught up with him in the end.

singer finds audience

“What those covering this story have missed is that J.Lo and her management have misled her fans and the public,” said HRF president Thor Halvorssen. “J.Lo has repeatedly mingled with and entertained some of the world’s worst thugs and their cronies. The ‘Jenny-from-the-block-who-doesn't-Google’ clarification may be credible in one instance, but it beggars belief in light of a pattern of repeated behavior. This is not about ignorance, it’s about greed.”

Well of course she does. I appreciate your concern, earnest folks, but wasn’t the end inherent in the beginning here? Is there any way that J Lo’s career trajectory would not involve performing before a bunch of platinum plated thugs from the ‘Stans, if only on the downside? Are you trying to deprive this hardworking woman of her pension? If you strip popular music from any kind of context not associated with success and the shiny things it buys then here you have a singer and her audience.

And this is surely the career high implied by the very existence of The Voice and other such abominations. Humble young women from troubled backgrounds turn into princesses and go on to sing before men of power, who strew their paths with rose petals and yachts and pet ocelots on tinkling silver chains. Late capitalism, meet primitive accumulation: and get paid.

I suppose the proper resolution for this would be for J Lo to marry Ramzan Kadyrov. But then she would be a bird in a gilded cage *sigh*.

not just oppression; also dysfunction

It’s Friday night so let’s do something wild and take a dive inside Chinese local government: specifically the case of a deputy township head who chucked in his job because it offered too much stability:

I wasn’t specially tasked with stability preservation. The areas I was responsible for were safety, law-based administration, land issues — there was a lot of complicated stuff to do. But stability preservation took a big chunk of my time. Based on my experience, about four months out of every year is taken up with stability preservation. About two months are taken up with dealing with materials for inspections [by superiors], and another two months for meetings, study sessions, etcetera. So that leaves only about four months to do real work.

In other words, he spent four months out of every year chasing petitioners around; also he was once disciplined, presumably either for failing to catch them or not dealing severely enough with them when he did. In total, two thirds of his year was devoted to ass-covering; his own and his superiors. This seems a lot but it is partly based on an ass-covering stability management budget larger than the PLAs.

Also, an interesting career trajectory: his first government job, in his twenties, was as a judge, though this was presumabkly not in a context where he had to be too judicious.

return to greeneland

If you’re writing a story whose basic message is ‘yes, we did horrible things to these people but its OK because we put them back together afterwards’ then you need to kick off with an engaging detail that makes the whole thing seem kinda quirky. Hence Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, vacuum cleaner designer. The piece adds:

In Graham Greene's spy thriller "Our Man in Havana," a vacuum salesman in Cuba agrees to work for MI6, the British spy service. He dupes the British into believing his vacuum designs are military installations. The AP was unable to determine whether Mohammed ever read the famous novel.

I bet the person who actually read the book is not unconnected with the person who told the story to the journalist, which is itself a very Graham Greenish touch. In fact, if you enjoy black humour, the whole article has a wonderfully self-defeating quality:

The prison had a debriefing room, where Mohammed, who saw himself as something of a professor, held "office hours," as he told CIA officers. While chained to the floor, Mohammed would lecture the CIA officers on his path to jihad, his childhood and family. Tea and cookies were served.

All very jolly.

'for immediate recirculation'

Here’s a nice roundup of the work of Xiao Qiang, whose team at Berkeley have put together an archive of 2600 censorship directives used day to day by the Chinese authorities in managing the Sinosphere. As we’ve noted before, it’s not a straight binary between publish/spike, but a complex positioning exercise whose main focus seems to be to avoid or damp down brushfires of popular anger and/or mobilisation. This bit stuck out:

Because political power and commercial interests are commonly intertwined in China, censorship often merges with something that resembles commercial “reputation management” in the West. In 2006, when a scandal broke over melamine found in the baby formula of the Sanlu milk company, government censors sent out dozens of directives trying to play down the matter. To protect Sanlu? To tamp down general “incitement”? Both? In any case, it is easy to find examples of censorship that protects both political and commercial interests at all levels.

This is partly a function of that fact that trying to manage an immensely protean entity like the Chinese internet requires much shorter reporting lines: the tendency is for power to devolve not from the government to the people but from central to local government. It thus becomes a fiefdom building tool for ambitious provincial officials. Perhaps we’ve already seen the political consequences of this in the way Bo Xilai’s ‘Chongqing model’ was promoted.  Paradoxically, this gives central government a limited objective interest in grassroots freedom of expression as a means to prevent more Bo-style demagoguery, especially since the old internal reporting system run by Xinhua seems to have withered.

a mere trinket

Sick liberal judges today jailed a British hero for defending himself against the voices in his head.

Ex SAS sniper Danny Nightingale explained that he couldn’t quite recall how he actually got hold of the Glock pistol that investigators found at his home.

At first Mr Nightingale said that the powerful handgun was a gift from “friendly Iraqis” whose names were Abdul or something. Mr Nightingale then said the gun wasn’t his after all.

Later he explained convincingly that ‘they’ must have put it there.

‘They’ also left the 300 rounds of ammunition discovered at the property, said Mr Nightingale. Or perhaps they put the ammo in his pockets while he was training snipers and he accidentally brought it home and hid it. Or something.

‘They’re everywhere’ said Mr Nightingale as his wife clung supportively to both his arms and wrestled him back on to the sofa.

‘Danny served his country as a trained elite killer in war zones for years, suffered catastrophic trauma and memory loss and how does his country reward him? By taking his unauthorised lethal weapon away' she said.

‘And now they want to jail him. It’s enough to make you go on the rampage’ she added.

Supporters of Mr Nightingale have waged a long and vociferous campaign on his behalf, saying that a soldier should have the right to keep mementoes of wartime service.

‘My grandfather had an extensive collection of SS cap badges that he used to show me’ said one internet commentator. ‘He really enjoyed his years in the SS.’

Asked to justify jailing Mr Nightingale, an MoD spokesman said that ‘rules were rules’ but conceded that a prison term might well ‘screw him up good and proper’.

‘But at least he doesn’t have a gun anymore’ the spokesman added.

arboreally incorrect

Here's a how-to for making a Nazi branded forest:

But there was a crucial difference: all the others were pine trees. The larches, unlike the pines, changed color in the fall, first to yellow, then brown. And when they were seen from a certain height, it wasn't difficult to recognize the pattern they formed. It was quite striking, in fact.

As he was dutifully accomplishing the task he had been given, the intern suddenly stopped and stared, dumbfounded, at the picture in his hand. It was an aerial view of Kutzerower Heath at Zernikow -- photo number 106/88. He showed it to Reschke: "Do you see what this is?" But the 60-by-60 meter (200-by-200 foot) design that stood out sharply from the forest was obvious to all: a swastika.

I rather hoped that this was some kind of Nazi plant genetic programme designed to produce racially conscious uber-larches which would organise themselves naturally into swastikas and wheel to the East. But no: just the usual sinister kitsch. 

Given Hampshire's political leanings it would be most amusing if someone used the same techniques to create a giant hammer and sickle in the New Forest, though it would be a bit difficult to do the knobbly bit at the end of the sickle.

In related knews I can set your mind at rest that the 1000 year old Buddha with a swastika carved on its chest that an SS expedition allegedly brought back from Tibet in the 1930's is a Nazi fake. Judging fropm the picture, making it look like Jesus was the giveaway.