Blood & Treasure

reversal of verdicts

Via Anna, China bans the use of evidence obtained through torture. It has before, but this particular measure may stick because it follows the case of Zhao Zuohai, who was beaten into a confession of murder against someone who was, in fact, still alive, and then spent 11 years in prison before this was discovered, which became something of a cause celebre. 

However, the state’s interference didn’t end with Mr Zhao’s release and compensation: he was then “touristed”. 

It brings to mind a comment by a Chinese vice-minister reproduced in Richard McGregor’s The Party: 

The central government’s control does not extend beyond the walls of Zhongnanhai. The people below just don’t listen. 

What the hell: a billion steps forward, nine hundred and ninety nine million steps back. But still, forward.

Pyongyang on the levant

The first thought that occurred to me today was “hey, say what you like, at least the Cheonan was an actual warship.” 

On the other hand, the Mavi Marmara wasn’t actually sunk. 

Is it extreme to raise parallels between Israel and North Korea? I don’t think so. Both countries are highly militarized and intensely nationalistic, quite a lot of the time to the point of messianism . Both regard themselves as lights unto the nations, as the saying goes. Neither consider themselves bound by treaty arrangements, and are indeed generally suspicious of them. Both believe themselves to be under existential threat and neither acknowledges that their own behaviour may have anything to do with whatever hostility they face. Both pursue a strategy of active deterrence, based on a philosophy of applying disproportionate force. Both countries enjoy active, committed support from within a diaspora population. Both have nuclear weapons and neither subscribe to the anti-proliferation regime. Both economies depend heavily on arms sales abroad. While both countries consider themselves to be friendless, and use this perception to mobilise support among their respective populations, each enjoys close relations with a major sponsor. In both cases, said sponsor is showing signs of exasperation but in neither case has this led anywhere. Most governments would probably be more or less happy to let the status quo continue if both nations did not act so irrationally. In one case, there is a general acknowledgment that the policies of the nation concerned are the source of many of the region’s problems and that this in turn has its roots in the country’s dominant ideology. But as yet, this line of thinking has not been applied to Israel.

...that is forever Yorkshire

Yglesias: 

We had a tour guide today at the forbidden city who spoke English very well but had a very strange accent. Initially I thought that he must have been taught English by an Australian or perhaps studied abroad there. But it turned that he’d learned English from a native Chinese speaker who himself had learned from a native Chinese speaker who in turn had learned from a guy from Leeds in the UK. So I was listening, essentially, to a very capable individual doing a copy of a copy of a northern English accent.

Boss, Boss! there's Mass Group Incident at't Mill!

Or maybe not.  The original tutor may have taken the Chinese degree at Leeds University - the Leeds crowd were always more "pick up your backpack and get cracking" than Chinese language graduates from other universities - but he could have gone there from anywhere. On the other hand, I like the idea of someone teaching the language of Scargill, Boycott and Alan Bennett deep in the heart of the Middle Kingdom.

shall we start Classical Industrial Action watch?

The wave of suicides at Foxconn in Shenzhen – the company has now reportedly approved a 20% wage rise for staff – has hogged a lot of the news because of the ipad connection. Less widely reported is the ongoing strike at Honda’s factories across Guangzhou and in Wuhan. 

The takeout here is that workers in several widely separated factories – Wuhan, in Hubei is several hundred kilometers and three provinces away from Guangzhou – seem to have successfully organized a company wide strike. Says the FT: 

The Honda workers’ ability to organise themselves independently – and the impact they have had on a major multinational’s overall China operations – distinguishes their action from myriad other industrial disputes that routinely flare up across the country. 

Honda workers said they earn Rmb900-1,500 ($130-220) per month depending on experience and overtime. They are asking that monthly salaries be raised to Rmb2,000-2,500. 

There are apparently worker representatives currently in negotiation with management independent of the official ACFTU, who seem to have been relegated to an unspecified mediating role. The other implication of this is that the strikers have the infrastructure to put a deal to the vote amongst widely scattered clusters of supporters. And above all, you have what seems like an independent union at least in formation whose delegates are prepared to emerge publicly with their demands: an alternative power centre which the Communist Party seems to be tolerating – for now.

imagine Age Concern stamping on a human face forever

I never bothered reading Gita Saghal’s latest complaint about Amnesty until now. A shame, because it contains this gem. 

Their programmes of social control such as promotion of the hijab are supported quite uncritically. The actions of human rights advocates mirror those of governments from Chechnya to the UK. Recruit former insurgents or fundamentalists and subcontract them to provide surveillance and control over the mass of the population. Defeat one form of fundamentalism by supporting another. 

I must admit that I hadn’t bothered much about Amnesty International’s comprehensive surveillance network of former fundamentalists; perhaps because I was distracted by Oxfam’s fleet of flying killer robots. Via.

unnecessary efforts

The story of David Laws has an uncomfortable echo: the downfall of BP's former chief executive John Browne. Both men – for reasons their friends still don't understand – tangled themselves in entirely unnecessary efforts to hide their sexuality. Browne fell. Laws may survive – he deserves to – but this looks bad. 

This is the case for the defence but I really don’t get it at all. How did staying in the closet oblige him to use the expenses system in any way at all? Surely the last thing you need in these circumstances is a paper trail, let alone a money trail. After all, it was the expenses that gave the media justification to expose his sexual orientation. By continuing to claim expenses he paid for the rent of a room in his partner’s house after the rules changed to forbid that, he made that exposure all the more likely.

I believe he’s paying £40,000 back. Why, that’s 160 Child Trust Fund payments!

many uniforms, none his own

A fascinating (and distinctly pan-green) account of the life of Chao-Jung Hsu, a Taiwanese conscripted into thbe Japanese army in 1937, then into the Kuomintang forces defeated by the Communists before ending up in jail during the White Terror period on the island. 

This is meant to be understood as a colonial tale, that of an ethnic/cultural Taiwanese swept up in wars between various colonizers – China versus Japan – and between factions within the colonizers – Kuomintang versus communist. Some of Mr Hsu’s (his name appears to follow the western word order) fellow Taiwanese ended up captured by the PLA and conscripted into the Korean war, to fight against Korean and UN forces, including, possibly, the British army, before the survivors were scattered across China. 

These young Taiwanese soldiers who were drafted into the Japanese army in September 1937…(were in the battlefield) until the end of the Korean War in 1953. Within 16 years, they had worn the uniforms of the Japanese army, the ROC army, and then the PLA. 

Mr Hsu founded a Taiwanese veterans association and worked to found a park to the memory of Taiwanese veterans in Kiaohsiung. The city government later co-opted the project and renamed it to commemorate the bombardment of Qemoy by the PLA in 1958. This was an exact reversal of what Mr Hsu intended: instead of a memorial to Taiwanese victims of power struggles between their colonizers, it became a memorial to an incidence in the power struggle between “the two Chinas.” 

In a protest against the Kaohsiung City Council's decision on 20 of May 2008, Hsu burned himself to death. 

 But read the whole, sad thing.

America at its best

Truly impressive. Over here.

grudging conditional support offered

This is interesting. A piece against abuse of the word Islamist by a prominent Muslim Tory. It’s explicitly an attack on the Douglas Murray/Policy Exchange tendency in the Conservatives: and a well argued one at that. Certainly better than anything produced by Ed Husain during the previous dispensation. 

This stuff’s useful for lefties because we really don’t understand the internal dynamics of the actually existing Tories: we’ve never been close enough to them to be able to do that. I suppose we should make an attempt to understand the internal dynamics of the Lib Dems too, but frankly I can’t be arsed: some of them will accept their historic mission to provide the Tories with a human face and some of them won’t, and that’s all there is to it. 

But Mr Amin and the other folk brought into the fold by Baroness Warsi now stand in the front line against the crazies. Given that we have the government we have, a government of Patrick Mercer and Michael Gove, they deserve some conditional support. Or at least some degree of interest in how they get on.

Prague autumn

So the Czechs are voting today and tomorrow. The FT tells us that investors are edgy. But that’s its job, I suppose. BusinessWeek expresses its concerns that the new government may lack the strength to cut spending. Reuters confides its worries that what it calls necessary reforms may be further delayed. You can guess what kinds of reforms are being talked of. The BBC concedes that the Czech economy is actually doing pretty well, but talks to someone who insists sternly that its pension system is unsustainable. 

A week or so ago, Edward Hugh told us over at AFOE that: 

I am already starting to see articles from investor circles asking whether or not democracy is compatible with fiscal rectitude. 

This attitude seems to be close to breaking out from the trade press into the media at large. Maybe the Czech result will see this happen. The Czech Republic still has a fairly popular, reformed but not entirely reconstructed Communist Party. Should they go into coalition with the Social Democrats, who are currently leading in the polls, that would provide an excellent opportunity for overt calls to remove the irresponsible public from undue influence over financial affairs through the medium of politics. Moreover, it provides a ready made “anti-totalitarian” pretext for the suspension of democracy. Wonder which way Uncle Vaclav will jump.