Blood & Treasure

they also serve who dig the trenches

Ensuring we Remember is a campaign by various Chinese groups in the UK to erect a permanent memorial to the 96,000 Chinese volunteers who served in the Chinese Labour Corps during world war one - digging trenches, repairing tanks, erecting barbed wire, bearing stretchers and generally making themselves useful while in harm's way. Some 2-3000 died in the process.  Here's the petition. Here's some more background. And here's the campaign video.

the diplomacy of poor but sexy in Kurdistan

This chap is committing the secular sin of having a go at the Kurds, or at east their suitability as recipients of military aid and support. It seems a bit churlish in the circumstances.

 The Kurds have to do a lot of ducking and diving in their self-presentation, seeming to be a number of contradictory things at once. Kurds are rugged and self-reliant. At the same time, they are vulnerable and in constant need of help. Kurdish Peshmerga must be seen as basically invincible. Yet if they perform too well, no one will feel the need to supply them with arms. They are very much their own men – and women, too! At the same time, they are representatives of Western values in a hostile part of the world – we may be war weary, but they are on 'our' front line, despite being dedicated anti-imperialists. Or perhaps becauseof that. Their claim to nationhood is based on cultural and historical values and identities. At the same time, it is faultlessly modern and secular in outlook. The Kurds are simultaneously on the verge of statehood, at the edge of oblivion, and the least dysfunctional part of a multi-confessional Iraqi state. They are both the forerunners of a truly modern Middle East and What We Can Salvage from this Horrible Mess.

 You have to sympathise. They need us to meet their objectives and we demand so many different and often incompatible things from the Kurds that we're effectively forcing them to live permanently inside a Tony Blair speech. Still, it seems to be working. A bit.

 Note: title robbed and recontextualised from here.

methamphetamine producers in balance of power gambit

More worrying, on Oct. 30 last year, the local intelligence office in the Burmese garrison town of Tang-yan sent a message to the regional command headquarters in Lashio saying that the UWSA was constructing a “radar and missile base” in its area — built in partnership with a Chinese company called Liao Lian, with equipment brought from China, Taiwan and Pakistan, the report asserts. The type of missile being considered is unclear, but given the fact that radars will be installed at the base, it is plausible to assume that it would be something more powerful than what the UWSA has in its current arsenal. The Burmese-language report uses the term taweipyetonggyi, or “long-distance missile.”

Congratulations to the Wa here: the first narco state to get, perhaps, its own ballistic missiles. They'll be so jealous in Mexico.

republic of thieves

Here's some epic reporting on Ukranian corruption under Yanukovych. Here's an even more epic long form report on the same subject. The main point is that widespread corruption under post independence governments metastasized under Yanukovych into something far more centralised and systematic. The Ukranian state changed from being a means of facilitating corruption to become a system of theft in itself, and in so doing eventually created an unstoppable opposing coalition. This reminds me a bit of the Italian theory of virtuous minorities: to a certain extent the corrupt need the honest to keep the machinery ticking over and preventing the corruption moving from transactions in which paying parties actually get what they pay for to the kind of situation where people have to pay simply to function. Inter-alia, this is what Xi is trying to prevent in China.

 My guess is that things will revert back to steal-more-quietly mode, assuming Putin's engineering of a brother's war doesn't have revolutionary consequences. One advantage here is that a pro-Western orientation changes the framing. Our enemies are kleptocrats. Our friends are embarking on a difficult reform process. They need our encouragement.

the excellent wingback Svejk

A bit of Friday night trivia, but if, like me, you follow football and are fond of the Czechoslovak Legion , you will be pleased to learn that they had their own team, here seen playing in Japan after fighting their way through Siberia and paying their passage home with eight wagonloads of the Czar's gold. 

trenchocracy

If Putin's basic plan is to put the Ukranian state under more pressure than it can bear, then it may just be working:

"I see little evidence that he wants to change the corrupt system, just that he wants to lead it," says Sobelev. "I think there will be a new Maidan led by the people who come back from the front lines in the east, who have seen the effect that corruption and mismanagement has first hand. And I'd be surprised if all our current political leaders make it through that Maidan with their lives intact."

Or as a Great War veteran put it:

I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;
And with my trusty bombers turned and went 
To clear those Junkers out of Parliament. 

 

fighting and sleeping

The great thing about renaissance art was the way in whch it dignified a lot of sleazy goings on; hence the magic of this Caravaggio-fication of a punchup in the Ukranian parliament.

What really makes that work is the quality of the light and the sheer bulk of the individuals involved.  By contrast, these folk scrapping in the Taiwanese legislative yuan look too much like kids in the playground. The fake wood panelling doesn't help much either.

What I'd like to see is the Ukranian ruck combined in a diptych with these fellows snoring their way through a plenary session of China's NPA. You could call the whole thing 'discord and unity'.

inspectorate goes global

Following up the CDIC post; whatever they are, they're going global, says Richard McGregor: —

This campaign is moving offshore in a big way. This is interesting on a number of levels. Remember, the party’s anti-graft body has no legal status. It enforces party discipline which extends beyond mere laws. But with this current enquiry, what is effectively an extralegal body is exerting extraterritorial powers. Caixin has already reported how PetroChina’s Canadian investments have been caught up in the Zhou investigation. The CDIC is also dispatching its investigators to other nations in search of the assets of “naked officials,” the term given to officials who have children and spouses living on their families’ ill-gotten gains abroad. Some countries are likely to quietly welcome the CDIC’s help. Just remember how China’s effort to extradite Lai Changxing, the fugitive from the billion-dollar Xiamen smuggling scandal, from Canada was caught up that country’s courts for years after he fled China in 1999. The case severely damaged Sino-Canadian relations for a decade. Countries such as Australia and New Zealand, favorite destinations for “naked officials,” do not want to have bi-lateral relations held hostage to domestic Chinese politics surrounding corruption. Hence, they have an incentive to quietly co-operate with the CDIC. Other counties may do so as well.

You'd have to bet on the UK being among them, given Cameron's China turn.

Elsewhere, and relatedly, the investigation into CCTV continues apace. You'll recall the basic format from previous posts on the Rui Chenggang affair: senior journalists and execs at the station form PR companies which make a simple offering to other companies: pay for good publicity, or pay to avoid bad publicity. Rui appears to have taken this one step further by forming a company which was then taken over by Edelman. Now Edelman's China head has vanished, apparently into police custody. Shortly before that happened, a senior Chinese PR practitioner wrote this:

What happened to Edelman could have happened to any of dozens of local and international PR firms. Rui had made himself a target, and Edelman is the largest PR firm in the world. But the rest of us have now been given a shot across our bows. Either we bite the bullet now, change course and adopt ethical tactics and practices, or we leave our firms, our people, and our livelihoods at the mercy of government caprice. If we don’t, this will happen again, and when it does we will all find that it will not be a single firm in the spotlight – it will be every PR practitioner in China.

Now that would be fun – to watch, at least. But summing up here, we have CDIC poised to run rampant and China business scandals going global in the oil, pharma (through GSK) and public relations sectors. Remember when I used to bang on about China exporting its internal chaos? This is what it looks like.

supreme military bobblehead

I have no idea of how official the source is, but do check out this excellent animated Xi Jinping propaganda video, which ends with an extravagant demonstration of the love shared by Xi and the PLA: 

your words are just unadorned

So on Friday night, China time, a group calling itself the Anti-Communist Party hackers somehow broke into the main state TV channel in Wenzhou and said rude things about the CPC; things that couldn't be erased until viewers re-inserted their smart cards. Things like this:

"Why is Liu Xiaobo of Charter 8 in prison, Communist bandits your words are just unadorned farts, you know the people know that everything you say are just farts."

Technically adroit. Great stunt. But something lacking at the content end, I think. I mean I'm not asking people to commit the collected speeches of Martin Luther King to memory but it does seem like a bit of a wasted opportunity. But that seems to be the hacking thing; the point is to demonstrate technical virtuosity, the message doesn't mean so much.

the men who put ZYK's head on a stick

One thing that opinion polls of what people think of various countries miss is the matter of salience. It's easy to get into a row about the United States because people care one way or another about what it does. People who know that I'm intererested in China think of it as a hobby. I'm that bloke who's interested in China, as opposed to stamp collecting or comics or whatever it may be. When Bo Xilai got busted and it made the news in the UK I was asked in a casual way what all that was about, then. I mentioned CDIC, which I said was a kind of police force that just investigated politicians and officials.  A bit like the British Transport Police, only with politicians, not transport. Everyone thought that was a really good idea - China, eh? They know what they're doing, that lot -  and then we had another drink and talked about something else. 

Anyway, that bit of rambling aside and more for the record than anything else, Caixin has a nice rundown of the structure and personnel of China's discipline inspectors.  As we can see, they're not really like the British Transport Police. I would guess that ultimately their historical origins lie in the attempts of various Tsarist era Russian revolutionary organisations to evolve structures that would enable them to resist penetration by the Okhrana, formalised in post revolutionary Bolshevik practice, and, perhaps, transmitted to China through Mao's security chief Kang Sheng, who had a ringside seat at the Yezovzshchina. 

That's guesswork. Worth noting at the link is the fact that a lot of the current CDIC structures were put into place under Hu Jintao, which tends to the conclusion that the impetus for Xi's purge has been building for a while and represents a genuine movement within the Party. I've read elsewhere that one of the first things that Wang Qishan did when he became head of the discipline inspectorate was to change its funding structure so that CDICs local organs were paid by central rather than provincial governments. Thus, the cossacks were able to work for the Tsar.

Comrade Zhou is ready for his close up

The investigation into Zhou Yongkang has officially begun. Which is to say that the investigation into Zhou Yongkang has actually concluded. What has begun is the choreography around his appearance before people imitating judges, his conviction and his sentence. And what we'll be looking for from all this is some clue as to what the next stage will be. There's an emerging consensus that this clears the decks for major economic reforms in a market-friendly direction. We'll see, but the problem here is that this framing presents a temptation for people to start speculating along the lines of 'at last, Beijing is free to do what I want it to do!' and fill in the details accordingly. While Zhou's takedown clearly contributes to the overall authority of the Xi dispensation in many areas, it's always worth remembering at this point that Zhou, while responsible for overall regime security, seems to have been running a large organised crime family within the higher reaches of the Party, and that this is worth dealing with for it's own sake.

Watching the saga unroll this afternoon I was impressed by how well China's resurrection of the classic Leninist show trial fits in with the multi and social media age. It seems to be a matter of structure, of the unrolling of infographic friendly nuggets of information which slot easily into continuous news cycles while providing endless opportunities for specialist punditry. I've profited modestly from this myself. We all know the media beast needs to be fed. Orthodox Leninist investigative practice can be a very effective way of feeding it, precisely because of the basic predictability of the way in which events are made to unfurl.

 Conventionally, the trial should provide a staisfying climax - the event that defines the process -  and here Xi and his fellow Leninists let us down. Bukharin wasn't tried, Slansky wasn't tried, Bo Xilai wasn't tried, and Zhou Yongkang isn't going to be tried either. He's going to be disposed of, like the rest of them. Everybody knows this, but I bet every hack in China will be trying to get to whichever third tier city the authorities use to bring down the curtain. While there, they will complain that the proceedings make a mockery of that whole rule of law thing. Well, sure: so why go? Why bother? The whole thing will be the very definition of the caravan moving on, so why bark like the dogs?

 A modest suggestion for the relevant organs. Since everybody knows that this is not an investigation and it will not end in a trial, why not structure it as something more engaging, like, say, the last scene in Sunset Boulevard? Have Zhou emerge at the top of the staircase...I'm ready for my close up, Comrade Xi...It's not me, it's the Communist Party that got small...

 Or something like that.

the hipsters will be pleased

the vessels, required conditions, and varied recipes work together to

bring it to complete maturity over a good length of time

bringing out the pure essence of the pure essence.

These are its perfect causes and conditions.

 

So contemporary craft brewery propaganda is in fact remarkably similar to medieval Tibetan beer poetry.

purge as the new normal

So being part of the senior management at a gigantic Chinese state oil company has become opertionally akin to being a member of some forlorn partisan band arranging a rendezvous in a distant forest

CNPC sources said that high-level managers are so worried about these investigations that they have drawn up a contingency plan for filling any position left vacant after a CDIC inspection. As part of the plan, all mid- to upper-level company managers must contact department heads daily. Anyone who does not report is considered gone, and replaced the next day by a pre-approved successor.

.It's fairly safe to say at this point that the stability question in Chinese politics has changed from 'how safe is the Party from external challenge' to 'is the Party beginning to put itself under destabilizing internal strain'. There must be at least several hundred thousand people in important or significant jobs in China now wondering if this is going to happen to them. So how well do these jobs get done?

There are not many curently metrics available by which we can judge this - fluctuations in London property prices might be one - though it might be worthwhile examining this in the light of China's ongoing attempts to extinguish the last remnants of anything conceivably definable as dissident activity. If the Party feels the need to subject itself to internal pressure it won't tolerate even the most rudimentary external challenge. 

fall of the gang of one

The saga of Gove’s downfall is fascinating because it’s a real-life parable about politics, media, education and the general public. If you had been consuming the media in the past few years, you could be excused for thinking that Michael Gove was tremendously popular because the overwhelming majority of commentators in the press presented him as the saviour of our schools. Possibly this slavish devotion made Gove and the government think that while there may be a few grumbles, everything was going along swimmingly.

This was the same mistake the Gang of Four made in the succession battle around Mao's death. They thought they were safe because they controlled the propaganda organs and came to believe their own story as it was reflected back at them.  There's a similar tale in the way Gove politicised Ofsted beyond repair, much as the Gang thought the institutions they controlled were simply instruments of their will.  And in the way that both the Gang and Gove surrounded themselves with sycophants, while writing off the professionals as enemies of the revolution.

In both cases, everybody hated them. The Gang of Four woke up to this after the demonstrations at Zhou Enlai's funeral, but by then it was too late. There's no sign Gove woke up to it at all, though even Sky were mumbling over whether the whole Free schools thing had got a bit out of control around the time of the so-called "Trojan Horse" scandal.

his latest role

North Korea is apparently complaining about this sprightly little mashup starring Kim Jong-un, currently doing the rounds in China. Great supporting role for Obama. Enjoy:

bloke stuff

A day onwards, I still think Mark Galeotti has the best explanation for what happened to flight MH 17.

More generally, the whole situation in Eastern Ukriane reminds me of stuff like this (selected at random) that we see from time to time:

He told the Mail: "We have let down boys over the years. The school system does not value enough of the traditional male things like competition. Boys are finding it increasingly difficult to cope where things are uncertain for them, specifically around competition or the use of physical strength.

"They have found the skills have been feminised. What seems to have been beaten out of them is any enthusiasm for anything. Some boys are resorting to gangs, which present a world where basic male instincts hold sway."

Mr Sewell recommends more outdoor adventure. But anyway, if you want to see the consequences of a properly masculinized culture at work, head over to the Donetsk People's Republic, where young men have the opportunity to be competitive in masculine company under masculine leadership, pursue outdoor adventures, and demonstrate their physical strength and mastery of various forms of technology, including those pertaining to shooting down airliners. I mean, it's Sporadically Lethal Top Gear over there. Yet despite the grip of firm masculine virtues on local society, they still seem to like forming gangs.

alcohol-tinged company

It transpires that the theorist of the Proptestant work ethic was a right laugh when he was pissed:

It transpires that as a young professor Weber ‘suffered from obsessional thoughts and, especially after nights of drinking, sometimes imagined for the whole day that he was Jumbo the elephant and lived in a zoo’.[1] This was fairly often because ‘alcohol-tinged male company, even without deeper friendships, seems to have been what excited him par excellence’.[2]  According to those who knew him best, there was ‘a quite elemental kind of sociability in Weber: he was a buddy with all his soul, a buddy for the moment thought capable of creating happiness; a drinking pal, a song mate, an accomplice in furious story-telling and boasting’.

I suppose you could argue that there's a Protestant Drink Ethic going on here. At any rate, he really seems to have worked at getting drunk and then playing the big-I-am with all the 'furious story telling and boasting'. And none of it seems to have had much to do with pleasure.

a traditional source of instruction

So how does Chinese e-commerce communicate with the Chinese peasantry? Basically, it does the old time rural Communist Party thing, ie it gets a pot of paint and heads to the nearest village wall. In some cases, what it does is adapt the old CPC technique of designating 'model villages'

As of 2013, there are officially 20 “Taobao villages” in China. To be on the list, at least 10% of the village’s households need to be operating online stores, and the total annual village e-commerce revenue must exceed $1.6 million.

Wall slogans used to say things like 'abort when you should or we will take your house and cow' and 'those who are poor should be ashamed' and suchlike pithy expressions of the government's will. So 'To get rich, build roads first. To shop, search on Baidu first' is a decided improvement.

tigers, flies, celebrity hacks - UPDATED

China's controlled media culture hasn't stopped it developing a phenomena familiar in Western media, namely the celebrity anchor:

 At just 31 years old, Rui Chenggang has emerged as the media face of Chinese capitalism: young, smart and, to the dismay of some, deeply nationalistic.

His nightly financial news program attracts 13 million viewers on China Central Television, the nation’s biggest state-run network, where Mr. Rui puts tough questions to Wall Street chiefs and Chinese economists while also delivering a dose of optimism about China’s outlook.

That was from 2009. Here's Rui profiled by the BBC in 2012:

At 35, he's already a veteran of the annual Global Economic Forum in Davos.

He's been going every year since he was 22. His book is filled with photos of him with people such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. His private conversations contain references to them, too: "Rupert (Murdoch) told me... Henry (Kissinger) said..."

If he comes across in all of this as being a bit of a dick, that's also his reputation in China. But anyway, Rupert and Henry can't help him now:

Quoting an unnamed insider, Caixin.com said on its website that prosecutors took Rui away directly from the workplace without notifying the news program. Caixin said Rui had been scheduled to appear on the nightly newscast Friday, and his absence was conspicuous, as a second microphone remained on the set. The show is usually anchored by two people.

This is connected to the Guo Zhenxi affair, which I blogged about here, in which the director of CCTV's business coverage stands accused of using it to fuel a huge extortion racket. Presumably the Discipline Inspectors suspect Rui of having some role in the caper.

His last book, by the way, was called Something for Nothing.

UPDATE:  The NYT quotes a local journalism professor to the effect that Rui was arrested for economic crimes committed in a professional capacity, ie by the ordinary police, not by the Discipline Inspectors, though the case still seemns to be connected to Guo.

More importantly, it seemsto revolve around a PR company Rui founded in 2002, which was later bought out by the Edelman Group: The co-founder of the company went on to head Edelman's China operations and to work closely with CCTV. I've seen other reports that if you wanted to get onto CCTV then you hired Mr Rui's PR company, and, perhaps, Edelman. It may also have been a good way to protect yourself from negative publicity by the channel, but we'll see.  That being the case, it'll be interesting to see how many foreigners and foreign businesses took part in the caper. Also, this:

Pegasus found a studio for CCTV 2 that was 200 yards away from the main venue during the winter 2009 session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and that was apparently praised by Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, for being “the most cozy and comfortable studio in all of Davos,” the report said.

That's got to be the ultimate Blair quote.