Blood & Treasure

they have seen the future and it works for them

So the Health Secretary wants us to work like the Chinese. You could write a pretty long historical monologue on the idea of work as embodied in perceptions of the Chinese people, but it would probably come down to the two essential features of docility and endurance.

 My word, those Chinese can work. They're not quite as far up the value chain as the Germans, but they're basically reliable, it's possible to manufacture them in much larger quantities and they need less fuel to keep going. And of course, when they're not simply beavering away the Chinese are starting businesses without the need to erect an enterprise culture to encourage them. Chinese business just spreads naturally over the landscape, like a kind of fungus.

 It's the sort of thing that spreads a warm glow in the Tory heart and it maybe answers a question that's been puzzling a number of people, namely why is government policy towards China so openly and frankly obsequious. It may not come down to policy at all. The Tories look at China and they simply like what they see, or think they see.

 Consider: everyone knows who is in charge in China. Yet while there are strict and well regulated heirarchies, there is always room at the top – and much more room for people who were born closer to the top. There are endless appeals to tradition, much of it invented, combined with an unashamed admiration for money and those who have it. Entrepreneurs enjoy a huge amount of latitude in their treatment of the human material they endow with the chance to gain self-respect and human stature through labour. At the same time the labouring classes can enjoy seemingly endless patriotic festivities that bring together rulers and ruled in shared love of country. Education is traditional. The armed forces are valorised. Charity is encouraged, while charities themselves 'stick to their knitting' as the saying goes. There is order, or there appears to be. Yes, the British government wants some of that, and wants it for the rest of us too. Lucky us.

what football hooligan twitter may tell us about Putin in Syria

Yes, it's been a while and I've gone all 'Slate Pitch' as they say. Anyway, here goes.

I've been following football hooligan twitter for a while now, mainly because of the way that the lads sometimes venture from their comfort zone of beer, fighting and casualwear into politics. It's not that much of a surprise, of course. Football ultras have participated in every uprising since 2011, often contriving to be on the right side.

 In this instance, quite a while before Angela Merkel changed her stance from Hammer of the Greeks to Mother of the Refugees, Refugees Welcome banners were cropping up at stadiums all over Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. Not just the ususal suspects like St Pauli either but all the way down the divisions to small clubs in deepest Lower Saxony. So also across Western Europe; I counted pro-refugee manifestations in France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and England.

 It was an entirely different picture in the EU's Eastern states, where ultra groups from pretty much every country started putting up anti-refugee signage. Not just the usual suspects in places like Hungary, but in every country in the old Eastern bloc, plus the Baltic states and our pro European friends in Ukraine. Just as the Refugees Welcome banners in Germany prefigured Merkel's limited opening to Syrian forced migration, this stark difference in sentiment also shadowed the row that erupted between Western and Eastern EU countries over shared resettlment plans.

 Things haven't stopped there. In recent weeks, Eastern European ultras have shifted from apparently ad hoc but general anti-refugee manifestations to hard right Brievikisms about 'stopping the islamisation of Europe'. There have been boycotts of Europa League matches after UEFA announced that 1 Euro of the admission fee would be given to refugee charities . And here we have a bunch of Hungarian hooligans offering themselves as border guards. We're seeing somethiong ugly building at the grassroots underpinning Eastern Europe's general hostility to refugees, and linking it explicitly wqith the so-called 'anti-islamization agenda. Remember when the Slovaks, Hungarians and others came up with a Christian only regugee plan? This is the other shoe dropping.

 So what does all this have to do with Putin in Syria?

 The connection occurred to me yesterday after the Russian orthodox church declared that Putin's intervention amounted to a Holy War – because while anti-refugee attitudes in the wider context of Christian nationalism and hostility to Muslims is something that divides the Eastern and Western halves of the EU, it's also something that Eastern Europe has in common with Russia.

 Take, for instance, this demonstration in Latvia last weekend.

 In a country that is deeply divided between the ethnic Latvian ruling majority and an alienated minority of Russian speakers, shared dread at the prospect of resettling a few hundred asylum-seekers is bringing the two communities together.

 ...Last week, Nils Ušakovs, the charismatic mayor of Riga and leader of Harmony Center, put up a posting on Facebook from a comedy show depicting Germany being taken over by Muslims, complete with announcements of executions and German Chancellor Angela Merkel clad in a burka.

A third of Latvians are of Russian origin; two thirds of Latvians of whatever heritage oppose taking refugees from Syria.

 So you can see here why a little bit of Christian jihad might work out well for Putin, at least as a side bet for whatever his major objectives in Syria might be. It tends to work as a wedge issue within the EU. It won't help relations between the US and Eastern Europe either. And while it doesn't change the nature of the actual disputes between Russia and Eastern European countries it resets their context in a way that tends towards a more accomodating attitude towards Russia. I mean, taking Crimea like that was a bad thing, but how much should we isolate and sanction a country that is boldly standing between Christian Europa and the Muslim hordes – a proposition that dovetails in an ugly way with Putin's stated offer that all nations should put aside their differences to make common cause against Islamic State.

 Moreover these political tendencies are hardly absent in Western Europe – for one thing, they're pretty much a racing certainty to come second in the next French presidential election. And of course, the whole anti-Islamisation agenda is a live issue in the US, and one that is likely to get more prominenece if any Republican manages to get him or herselfelected in 2016. There's been talk in the past of Russia being a pole of attraction round which a 'reactionary international' might accumulate. Putin's Syrian intervention could provide the momentum for it to actually happen. Or as the lads from Levski Sofia put it the other day: Europe Awake.

 

some of the People, some of the time

When the Discipline Inspectors came for Yang Dongliang, head of the State Administration of Work Safety in the wake of the Tianjin explosion, People's Daily online was on the case.

When the Discipline Inspectors had former Jiangsu provincial level official Zhao Shaolin expelled from the Communist Party of China preparatory to trial and imprisonment for graft, People's Daily Online was once more on the case.

When Xu Jianyi, former boss of the massive First Auto Works was also expelled from the Communist Party of China after Discipline Inspectors uncovered his corruption, People's Daily online reported the news in timely fashion.

When the Discipline Inspectors investigated Xinjiang official Zhao Guoming for lining his pockets with poverty alleviation funds, People's Daily online gave us a concise account of the case.

When Wang Yizhe, former Party Secretary of the city of Nanjing, was found by the Discipline Inspectors to be 'accepting cash gifts' among many other things, People's Daily online did not shy away from the bare facts of the matter.

Indeed, a search for Central Commission for Discipline Inspection at the People's Daily online reveals no less than 308 results.

But when earlier today the Discipline Inspectors came for Liao Hong, chief editor of the People's Daily online, the People's Daily online was far, far away.

man on a mission

File this under really stupid things somehow worth doing.

"Several of these countries have little freedom of press and expression. Tourists are rare. Visas for photographers were hard to come by. I often had to instead go into the countries on tourist visas. Despite my efforts not to arouse suspicion I was, on several occasions, accused of being a spy and only narrowly avoided getting caught up in something rather awkward. With reluctance this added to the adventure and made each new discovery even more precious. In Abkhazia my driver accused me of being a Georgian agent and photographing sensitive material. He demanded a bribe, otherwise, it would be “straight to the militizia and a firing squad”. Needless to say, he was not convinced by my story that “I have only come to your country to see your pretty bus stops”. I was happy to escape from the journey with relatively little drama, and even happier to have captured some of the most beautifully insane bus stops I had ever encountered, safe on a memory card tucked into my underpants."

I suspect that the taxi driver knew damn well that he simply had a naive chap on his hands and acted accordingly.  Anyway, the book is out in September, and I for one will be helping the author recoup his bribe. 

separatism and discipline

I have an op-ed up at the National on the pro-independence turn in Hong Kong politics.

Elsewhere, James has an examination in Vice on the shuanggui process, the means by which boss Xi and the gang are purging the Party.

I'm not too keen on the Hong Kong indy crowd, but you can understand here what they want to separate themselves from.

mass incident watch: Linshui

How much do you want high speed rail? Enough to riot when you don't have it?

Tens of Thousands of residents of the southwestern county of Linshui gathered in the morning and marched about 3km. Photos posted by the protesters on social media also showed violent attacks by a police tactical team(SWAT)and the resistance that followed lasted all day and well into the night...

...The residents want (need) to have a proposed railway linking Dazhou to Chongqing pass through their county in the centre of Sichuan. The county currently has no railway, waterway, or airport.

Rage built up last week after residents found out that the authorities favor another plan – that the railway stretching more than 200km will instead by-pass Linshui and be routed through the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s hometown Guangan , to the west of Linshui.

And it all ended in a colossal riot, which as of a few hours ago was still going on.

Areas with 'revolutionary' ancestry use their prestige in various ways as economic leverage, much to the frustration of neighbouring communities. I'm reaching a bit here but i wonder if the Linshui demonstrations are not entirely unconnected to elements in the local power structure trying to use popular anger to improve the local government's negotiating position. If so, it still seems to have got a bit out of hand.

a letter from the hearse chasers

Just over a week ago we got a letter addressed to my stepson. This happens occasionally, though he's long since moved out. We bin the obvious junk and keep the other stuff for when he comes home on a visit.

 But this time my partner decided to invoke a mum's privilege to poke her nose into her offspring's business. The letter was from a company called Estate Research, “a firm of genealogists who specialise in tracing missing beneficiaries.” It was a form letter with his name inserted in another font at the top.

 Intriguing! Our kid was in line for a windfall. At least that was the hint. Except the thing is, none of his or mine or his mum's family has died recently. The older generation have long since gone, with the exception of my partner's dad, still golfing his brains out well into his eighties.

 At a bit of a loss and with an uneasy feeling that there was something we should know about, my partner went to our hometown newspaper website and searched under the family surname.

 That was how we found out that her ex husband and my stepson's biological father had died in early April. Not only that, we were the first of any members of the wider family to find out.

 My partner spent the rest of the evening on the phone: to our kid and to his uncle, who still lives near Stoke.

 This wasn't the first time the deaceased made the papers. He was a long-term and sporadically violent paranoid schizophrenic whose various escapades and rampages had provided occasional entertainment for readers of the Evening Sentinel over the years. He was very well known indeed to the NHS, to the police and in the court system. He had been found dead at his flat some three weeks earlier. And the family only found out because a slightly dodgy looking genealogy company got my stepson's address wrong.  Bear in mind as well that the approach this company took to telling my stepson his father had died was through hinting that he was going to be quids in.

 We didn't bother contacting the company, but my stepson got straight in touch with the coroner, who said that they couldn't find a phone with contact addresses and so they had turned to the genealogists. These turned out to be a firm of lawyers who track down relatives of the unclaimed dead by arrangement in the hope of getting chargeable probate work. Apparently they and Stoke coroners office have some sort of arrangement.

 It was true that he never had a phone. Phones tended to accentuate his paranoia. It's not true that he was some kind of lost soul, completely out of touch with family. His mother and father looked after himn while they were alive, to the extent that someone in his state could be looked after. His brother visited regularly, though a lot of the time he wouldn't open the door. His brother saw him about once every month.

 And as I say, even the most cursory search of the relevant databases would have turned up contact details. Not that it was necessary to search. His brother went to his flat next day and found a piece of paper with his own address on it within three minutes of opening the door. It seems that the cops had just routinely turned over the job of finding next of kin to the hearse-chasers.

 So why would that be? I suspect the reasons can be found in this HMIC report on Staffordshire Police and the “Funding Challenge” as the inspectorate chose to call it. Over the past five years, Staffordshire police have lost more than 20% of their cops, 17% of their PCSOs and 16% of their civilian support staff.

There's lots of upbeat, managerial jargonese stuff in that report about 'maintaining a strong presence on the frontline' and so on. But my guess is that the frontline has narrowed to the point where it doesn't include contacting next of kin of the deceased, at least if this involves any actual looking for them.

 People think about austerity as removing discrete services. Something specific used to be available that has now been withdrawn. But austerity is also about eroding services to the point where the wider, social content of the job disappears. The service provided dwindles to a series of datapoints that can be used to make a 'business case'. One would expect the police to trace and contact relatives out of basic human decency. But there's no budget heading for that, at least not in a time of “funding challenges.”

what Mr Seymour saw

150 years ago today

Benito & the prods

So, there's a book out on the tendence apocalyptique in US politics. Those folks got around:

...missionaries Ralph and Edith Norton meet with Mussolini in the early 1930s to interview him for the Sunday School Times. Like a lot of fundamentalists of that era, the missionary couple believed Mussolini was a strong candidate for the Antichrist—the dictatorial leader who would resurrect the Roman Empire. As the Nortons quizzed Mussolini about his political intentions and explained the basics of biblical prophecy, Il Duce became fascinated. “Is that really described in the Bible?” he asked. “By the time the Nortons were through with him,” Sutton writes, “Mussolini apparently believed—and maybe even hoped—that he was the long-awaited world dictator prophesied in the book of Daniel.”

There's also a cracking story about Bush raving to Chirac about Gog and Magog in order to get him to join in the Iraq war. Always worth being reminded of how crazy the atmosphere was in those days.

sundae bloody sundae

I'm easing back into blogging with a few cut and paste jobs. Like about the time that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman ran an ice cream parlour:

"But where to get enough money for the purpose?...It occurred to us that an ice-cream parlour might prove the means to our end." They put up $50 of their own, borrowed $150 from their landlord, rented a storefront, and "succeeded in turning the neglected ramshackle place into an attractive lunch-room....Within a short time we had paid back our landlord's loan and were able to invest in a soda-water fountain and some lovely coloured dishes."

This charming idyll of small-scale entrepreneurship among the anarchists ended with news of the crushing of the Homestead strike.

One day, spotting a newspaper headline over a customer's shoulder, Goldman saw news of the Homestead steel strike, which was being countered by violence from Pinkerton agents and the Pennsylvania state militia.

She paid for the man's paper with a free dish of ice cream (true story), then closed the store and plotted with Berkman to assassinate the steel company boss, Henry Clay Frick. Berkman eventually gained access to Frick's office, where he shot and stabbed the man but failed to kill him.

Berkman was sentenced to 22 years for the attempt. I have his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, in which he doesn't mention once that he plotted an attentat among the 99s.

(title thanks to John Band on twitter)

collapse of stout Party?

I've got an op-ed up about the various discussions following David Shambaugh's recent prediction of the forthcoming endgame of Communist Party rule in China. Over here:

veterans in politics

The first thing that struck me about the Afzal Amin story last night was that someone who has - apparently - been involved with population centric counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan for much of the last decade came home and allegedly decided to advance his political career by paying and patronising an extremist militia.

And today we find out that counterinsurgency was apparently exactly what Mr Amin had in mind:

Politics requires an amount of bravery and using my experience as a strategist in Afghanistan, negotiating between pro-Taliban militias and the US military, I decided to use the same tactics to improve community relations here in my own country between the EDL and Muslim communities.

unfriendly skies

'As examples of Chinese air rage go, what happened at Okinawa airport on March 9 was no big deal.'

I have something up at the National in which I consider the remarkable amount of air rage in China as an aspect of the mass incident phenomenon.

can Kim Jong-un take a joke?

So if I haven't been doing much writing recently, at least I got to do a bit of commissioning.  On Saturday the folks at NK News. Org  issued a tweet asking for suggestions for the estimable Dr Andrei Lankov's latest column. I tweeted back wondering if the regime knew that the Kim dynasty  were figures of fun and whether they exploited the fact. Dr Lankov liked the idea, and here is the column.

dietrologia* in Moscow

Re the murder of Boris Nemtsov, it's worth bearing this in mind:

Nemtsov’s allies were divided on whom to blame for the murder. Some pointed a finger at the Kremlin, since the crime took place literally just outside its walls, swarming with guards and security cameras. Others suspected the hand of rogue zealots like the Moscow-born former east Ukraine militia leader Igor Strelkov, who returned from Donetsk vowing to wage war against a “fifth column of national traitors” first identified by Putin.

But that speculation is pointless, because we’re never going to find out.

Unless we've been taking happy pills and are assuming that the investigation will be conducted competently and will go wherever the evidence takes it, then politically, the interesting thing here isn't who killed Nemtsov, but who is going to get blamed (and probably, though not necessarily, framed) for it.

It may, for instance, be the right time to rein in people like Streltsov and the ultra-nationalists who have been getting a bit over-inflamed  - a bit too prone to independent action - since the whole Ukraine thing kicked off. This would have the advantage that nationalist crazies are indeed likely suspects and so the drive to let them know who's boss would be bolstered by a more or less legitimate investigation. Of course, this raises the issue of whether Moscow can, in fact, get the crazies to wind their necks in.

Early doors, the regime has floated the idea that Muslim terrorists might be responsible, implying that  - because Nemtsov was Jewish - his murder  was an anti-semitic attack similar to that perpetrated after the Charlie Hebdo murders. This has the advantage of tying  into one Russian propaganda line - 'why the hostility, we're all facing the same threats?' - while satisfying the Russian overclass penchant for brutal mockery. When it comes to offensive humour, Charlie H has nothing on those guys.

Another early attack line was that it was a 'provocation', ie that the opposition movement murdered one of its most prominent members in order to revive its fortunes. If this line is followed, it would indicate either that the regime thinks that the opposition are more of a threat than observers tend to think, or contrariwise that authoritarianism in Russia has metastasized to the point where even basically symbolic non-sistema opposition is not tolerable. Lots of opportunities here to fling all sorts of allegations and kompromat around. Also, the National Bolsheviks could be fit into this frame quite neatly, them being actual dingbats and everything.

Lastly, there's the dead bat option: put it down to his private life. Something connected with his sex life, for instance, or maybe someone he lent money to who thought it cheaper to hire a hit squad than pay the debt back. Again, lots of potential for smearing the opposition, though the main political takeaway would be that the regime considers Nemtsov's murder to be part of an acceptable status quo. Nothing to see here but the dead guy. Draw your own conclusions.

*definition of dietrologia here. To my mind, it doesn't really do justice to the actual situation in Russia (or Italy for that matter. Or China). After all, Nemtsov almost certainly was murdered as a result of a conspiracy of some sort. In Moscow, we're all dietrologicians.

dancing and total information dominance

Happy Lunar New Year, folks. There's some debate over whether it's the year of the goat or the sheep. If you're David Icke, of course, or one of UKIP's wackier supporters, every year is the year of the sheeple.

Anyway, James has another piece out on China's quest for total spectrum information dominance through Big Data; a dilemma for Beijing since finding out everything it wants to know implies allowing greater freedom of information than it would like. The story starts in Xinjiang:

On  5 July 2009, residents of Xinjiang, China’s far western province, found the internet wasn’t working. It’s a regular frustration in remote areas, but it rapidly became apparent that this time it wasn’t coming back. The government had hit the kill switch on the entire province when a protest in the capital Ürümqi by young Uighur men (of the area’s indigenous Turkic population) turned into a riot against the Han Chinese, in which at least 197 people were killed.

The shutdown was intended to prevent similar uprisings by the Uighur, long subjected to religious and cultural repression, and to halt revenge attacks by Han. In that respect, it might have worked; officially, there was no fatal retaliation, but in retrospect the move came to be seen as an error.

Mainly because Uyghur rebels seem to have become the first 21st century dissident movement to take themselves offline. 

On that note, Beijing has also taken its campaign against Islamic radicalism in Xinjiang in a truly bizarre direction:

But there are particular reasons why the Chinese Communist Party might be interested in promoting public dancing in Xinjiang now. Beijing is nervous about what it considers signs of religious extremism among Uyghurs, and one of these telltale signs is a disinclination to dance. In speech at the National People’s Congress in March last year, a Xinjiang representative and deputy chairperson of the China Dancer’s Association Dilnar Abdulla gave a speech claiming that religious extremists in Xinjiang were ‘campaigning for the commoners not to sing and dance, even not permitting them to sing and dance at weddings.’

So, according to this logic, orchestrating a campaign to encourage people to dance is actually a way to get people to disavow publicly any sympathy for religious extremism. People are technically not coerced into dancing, despite what the Turkish headlines scream, but it would be a brave individual who would call attention to themselves as a potential extremist by refusing the invitation to ‘cut a rug’. Public and peer pressure is enough for most people to join in.

Yes, Beijing is quite literally compelling Uighurs to dance in public to demonstrate that they are moderate Muslims. 

what is good, imam?

I'm increasingly convinced that stuff like this is the wrong way of looking at it. I don't think we're looking at people led through religious ideology to barbarism; we're looking at people who fancy a bit of barbarism but need a convenient faith-based excuse.

In fact, I bet  if IS dropped all that religious nonsense and just stuck to the head choppings, immolations, and all the other what-is-good-Conan stuff they'd be absolutely inundated with international volunteers. Basements would be empty, games consoles would go unattended and cats remain untortured throughout the Western world.

Of course, Islam here does provide an interpretive framework through which people can justify their murderous proclivities to themselves and the like-minded and its arguably a necessary social framework which enables IS domination of the territory of people of a shared faith. But from the point of view of international recruitment, all the praying five times a day, malevolent parsing of obscure hadiths and wacky dietary restrictions has to be a drag on the market. It's just not the way to appeal to promising constituencies like, say, the gamergate crowd.

orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Here is the anthem of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the agency with overall responsibility for internet censorship, as sung by staff of that august body at a lunar new year talent show the other day. Naturally, it was put online, where, equally naturally, it was censored, and so I reproduce it here. Full story and translated lyrics over here.

five types of smoke

 

There were five sorts of “flames of war.” The sort that had a sharp tip and flared up straight was a beacon fire. The sort that had a diffused purplish light was the fire that burned possessions. The sort that was black in its upper part and red at the base was the fire that burned houses. The sort that gave off a white smoke like clouds and drifted about was the fire that burned grain. As for the sort with a congealed smoke and of a light green hue, that was the fire that burned corpses. I had tested this theory from the pinnacle of Snow Shadow Peak, and had never erred.

An extract from Zhang Daye's The World of A Tiny Insect, a memoir of of life as a child refugee during the Taiping war, excerpted at Frog in a Well.

sex, politics, business

So, James starts as he means to go on:

Turning down an after-dinner invite to a brothel is always a social minefield. 

And continues:

Some of this may be a thing of the past, at least for officials. Before this year, periodic crackdowns on the sex trade would close down businesses for a couple of weeks or months, before all went back to business as normal. The ongoing purge of officials and “anti-corruption campaign” under President Xi Jinping, however, has put a freeze on what was once standard business practice. The fall of many high-level leaders has been accompanied by recitations of their moral failings, especially their keeping of mistresses. While shared brothel visits were once the norm, officials, especially policemen, are now terrified to be seen at clubs, KTVs, or even expensive restaurants.

...Reaching out to contacts in Chengdu, Chongqing, Tangshan, Shijiazhuang, and Harbin I found the same story: officials were terrified of being seen at establishments where they had previously been welcome guests. A long-established business norm was now, at least for anyone with ties to the government, a dangerous hobby. But what had drawn them there in the first place?

Read it all.