Blood & Treasure

same as it ever was

Following Alex’s lead, here’s a bit of Sunday Wanktankery from non other than Charles Grant and the Centre from European Reform:

But over the past year China's behaviour has changed. Relatively hard-line and nationalist elements in the leadership appear to have sidelined those with liberal and internationalist instincts. This shift is spurring the EU's governments and institutions to reappraise their China strategies.

But Charles! A nationalist coup in the highest levels of the Communist Party. Tell us more. This is a huge story. Dramatize, man: Name names, because all the names I can see in the politbureau and State Council look exactly the same to me as they always did.

Mr Grant then goes on to name a number of Chinese policies that have not changed for many years and lists a number of behaviours which are exactly what you’d expect from the CPC because they typify the way it’s always behaved.

Then the former proponent of helping China become a major global player, tells us why it should now be treated as a major global worry. I dunno. Maybe that’s where the money is these days, think tank wise. It certainly seems to be where the action is.

visualising neo-Maoism

Danwei explains. Also, see Xujun Eberlein’s account of a recent unofficial Neo Maoist congress in Sichuan.

arms deal for three players

Blake Hounshell is worried about Sino-US relations in the light of arms sales to Taiwan:

Now, China is expressing furious anger over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan -- threatening unprecedented actions in response, including sanctions on U.S. companies, and hinting darkly of a broader unwillingness to cooperate with American diplomatic priorities (read: North Korea and Iran). Military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and China now seems to be off the table, and deputies-level talks will be suspended.

Truth be told, China hadn't been and probably wouldn't be super helpful on Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs, but the direction the relationship is taking is worrying.

There’s an interesting backstory to this. Throughout its time in power the pro-independence DPP refused to buy arms from the US. There were complaints from the Taiwanese that the Americans were palming junk on them (plausible in that the US wouldn’t want the PLA inheriting any really top line stuff anyway should the worst happen). But what that was really about was an attempt to get a commitment from the US to protect Taiwan with its own assets, so drawing it away from China and into the American orbit.

That option was rejected by the US, which was part of the reason why the working relationship between China and the US during the Bush years was generally a pretty good one, after that little misunderstanding about the spy plane over Hainan - it was when, for instance, the military contacts now being suspended by the Chinese were first initiated.

The apparent paradox here is that the reason the latest tranche of arms sales went through is because the Taiwanese elected the comparatively pro-China Kuomintang, which has since been busy resurrecting economic and cultural ties with the mainland. The Taiwanese public overwhelmingly favours the current status quo in Taiwan-China relations. From the KMT’s point of view, buying a load of American weapons helps it resists domestic suspicions that it is drawing too close to China. That in turn enables it to go on establishing closer commercial and diplomatic links with the mainland. Additionally, a stronger defence posture allows Taipei to have more say over the speed and depth of the links between the two.

And that, after all, is the plan as far as Taiwan is concerned: absorbtion, rather than invasion, with an eventual bit of political tidying up to seal the deal. It wouldn’t be too cynical to regard the occasional subvention from the Taiwanese taxpayer to the US defence industries as America’s price for acquiescence in the process. I don’t think the Chinese countermeasures are especially harsh, given that their formal position is that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and that selling it weapons is the equivalent of selling them to Guangdong or Sichuan. Beijing’s response to that would involve more than mumbling about sanctions on defence companies that don’t sell into the Chinese market anyway. I do think Airbus will have a good year, for what it’s worth.

insufficient pendulosity

From boingboing, so you’ve probably already seen it.  But here goes anyway.

 "Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women.

Wowserism seems to be alive and well in its ancestral homeland. Anyway, Willendorf Venus, your time has come.

sinosphere Friday

China welcomes its first high level political delegation including a gay partnership. Said partner undertook a "programme typical for a foreign dignitary's spouse". Also on Shanghaiist, i-pad clone maker sues Apple for cloning its clone with i-pad.

Comparing the Sichuan and Haitian earthquakes. More on China’s involvement in Haiti. Haiti, incidentally, is one of the few places that still recognizes Taiwan diplomatically. Not for long, maybe.

As China moves towards its first animal cruelty law, interested economic stakeholders weigh in:

When the news of possible ban on eating cats and dogs came out, the community heavily discussed the news in particular, Pei County, Xuzhou, famous for their industry of breeding Meaty Dogs. Pei County has a very prosperous dog meat industry; their products are exported to Russia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and other countries. Meaty Dog industry employs approximately 100,000 people, with annual sales of nearly 1 billion yuan. If “Anti-Animal Cruelty Law (experts suggested draft)” really is implemented, it will undoubtedly have enormous impact to the local economy.

Pei County Meaty Dogs Breeding Association President, Dog Meat Processing Association vice president Fan Xiantao told the reporter, “Pei County dog meat” is Pei County’s famous dish, which uses high quality dog meat, coupled with clove, Chinese prickly ash, Amomum tsao-ko, Ginger, Amomum villosum, large fennel, small fennel and Chinese cinnamon etc spices, after simmering in a stew and finished with the draining of the soup and coloring.

More background on commercial dog farming in northern Jiangsu here. And if it does get banned, there’s always Cane Toads.

Meet Dongguan double cleaver underwear man.

Internal documents from the Domestic Security Department, China’s counter subversion organ, have been leaked and released online: go here, here and here. I found this snippet from the third part interesting:

Through early detection and punishment as well as through the functioning of mechanisms to work with the masses, 107 mass incidents were dissolved or stopped.

I don’t know the timeframe, but that’s from one city in Zhejiang Province.

from Bagdhad to Nyapyidaw

Interesting piece on upcoming Burmese elections in FP, under which, it seems, Myanmar will become one of the growing number of states turning to electoral mechanisms to uphold and support an authoritarian state structure. Welcome to the Russia/Iran/any number of ‘stans club. Now the interesting thing is that this is also Iraq’s trajectory - elections meant to uphold the powers that be, with the wrong people conveniently barred from standing. So after seven years of invasion, occupation and multi-faceted civil war, Iraqis can soon look forward to being as free as the Burmese.

who wants flowers?

Yeah, I read it too. By way of an epitaph:

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

I don’t have the book any longer. I remembered the quote vaguely and got it from here. In a way, it would be kind of cool if they did just dump him in the river and then notified the assembled media multitudes – “ he’s long gone: probably floated out into the Atlantic by now. No flowers.” I won’t read him again, but I like Salinger’s career. He wasn’t a hermit, but because he wouldn’t submit to explanation he had to be mystified instead. Really he just did what he damn well wanted.

refusal to clarify

Following the General Medical Council’s verdict on Andrew Wakefield’s research methods, I bet some frenzied blogging type will got to the ridiculous lengths of actually trying to blame Tony Blair for the whole autism/MMR scandal. Damn right, too.

But the biggest public health disaster of all – which everyone misses – was a sweet little baby called Leo. In December 2001 the Blairs were asked if their infant son had been given the MMR vaccine, and refused to answer, on the grounds that this would invade their child’s right to privacy. This stance was not entirely unreasonable, but its validity was somewhat undermined by Cherie Blair when she chose to reveal Leo’s vaccination history, in the process of promoting her autobiography, and also described the specific act of sexual intercourse which conceived him.

And while most other politicians were happy to clarify whether their children had had the vaccine, you could see how people might believe the Blairs were the kind of family not to have their children immunised: essentially, they had surrounded themselves with health cranks. There was Cherie Blair’s closest friend and aide, Carole Caplin, a new age guru and “life coach”. Cherie was reported to visit Carole’s mum, Sylvia Caplin, a spiritual guru who was viciously anti-MMR (“for a tiny child, the MMR is a ridiculous thing to do. It has definitely caused autism,” she told the Mail). They were also prominently associated with a new age healer called Jack Temple, who offered crystal dowsing, homeopathy, neolithic-circle healing in his suburban back garden, and some special breastfeeding technique which he reckoned made vaccines unnecessary.

Whatever you believe about the Blairs’ relationships, this is what the nation was thinking about when they refused to clarify whether they had given their child the MMR vaccine.

The MMR scare has created a small cottage industry of media analysis. In 2003 the Economic and Social Research Council published a paper on the media’s role in the public understanding of science, which sampled all the major science media stories from January to September 2002, the peak of the scare. It found 32% of all the stories written in that period about MMR mentioned Leo Blair, and Wakefield was only mentioned in 25%: Leo Blair was a bigger figure in this story than Wakefield.

The best you can say is that those fruitloops were less dangerous than the types Tony started consorting with after 9/11.

and Jesus thinks Juche's pretty cool, too

Probably not the best T shirt to wear in downtown Pyongyang. On the other hand, the Billy Graham Organisation has developed surprisingly close relationship with the North Korean government over the years. Building trust, they say. Looking for an exclusive local soul franchise, I reckon.

random detention

Back in the days of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, it used to be pointed out that the vast majority of people detained under it were never charged, never formally arrested, or found not guilty. But back in those days, terrorism was at least the pretext on which action was taken, however flimsy. These days, "detained under anti-terrorism laws" is rapidly becoming a synonym for detained for no reason at all.