Blood & Treasure

high level suicides and private armies

It’s National Day tomorrow, the 61st anniversary of the day that that Mao climbed the rostrum at Tiananmen and said “the Chinese people have stood up – but they won’t be standing when I’ve finished with them”. Or something like that. So we’ll have a Sinosphere tomorrow. But in the meantime, a couple of snippets. 

Nine senior Chinese officials have killed themselves this year: not all that many, given the numbers, but still significant. The key element seems to be the Discipline Inspection Commission, the CPC’s private cops. The threat of them showing up seems to act like the local version of the whisky and revolver of yore. CDIC know this. When they come to town and take over a local hotel for interrogation purposes, they take care to sequester the people they want on the lower stories. You’re supposed to drink the malt and pull the trigger after you get the double discipline notice, but before the investigators actually show up. 

 

 Elsewhere, more on the Anyuanding, the “stabilization contractors” I posted about yesterday: 

They were equipped with police truncheons, attack dogs, private jails and special armored vehicles. The whole escort organization, for so it was called, was staffed much like a military outfit: one political commissar, one battalion chief, three captains, a central battalion made up of two to three companies, and seven or eight men to a company. They were outfitted just like riot police, with the same uniforms and helmets. On their left and right shoulders were dark patches emblazoned with white characters: “Special Service.” 

And this entire apparatus of violence was operated as a private enterprise. Put another way, this was the private militia of legend. And the fact that this private militia could operate for so many years is something that leaves us all staring speechlessly. 

Indeed. Because part of the general contract of Chinese autocracy is that private armies are not supposed to exist. The fact that the Qing required the Hunan Braves and the EVA to put down the Taiping was widely understood to mean that the dynasty was in trouble and needed urgent reform. Such formations were the ancestors of the warlord armies which plagued China during the early decades of the 20th century, an era which the Communist victory in 1949 was supposed to have brought to an end. 

I don’t think we’re anywhere near that stage, but this one really does bear watching. 

On the other hand, I suppose it could just be China adapting itself to general modern thinking about the role of private security contractors. A joint venture opportunity for Xe, perhaps?

a double handful of brains

Maybe it’s a bit early in the day for this, but what the hell. Proceed at your own risk. A group of graphic artists are in the process of creating a collaborative illustrated version of Blood Meridian. But then graphic was always the word for that particular tale of American foundations. Via.

what was your name again?

So, farewell then Tony Curtis. I suppose it would have been more realistic if everyone had stood up and said: “You’re not fucking crucifying me - he’s Spartacus.”

home of cheap Brazilians

I was scouting through some Asian football blogs the other night when I discovered that Henan Construction – itself one of the last of the great Eastern Bloc football team names – have a Brazilian forward called Netto.

These days, if Stoke bought a Brazilian, we could probably afford Waitrosio.

sense of an ending

Ed Miliband finally gets level with the British public: 

He told the conference on Tuesday: "I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions and I honour our troops who fought and died there, but I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war." 

Defence Secretary Liam Fox wants to maintain defence spending, but is in difficulty because he does not know what the British armed forces are supposed to be for: 

"I am concerned that we do not have a narrative that we can communicate clearly." 

Elsewhere, an old favourite: whither NATO.

Yesterday's gathering of scholars and policymakers, most of them Atlanticists from way back, were mostly at a loss for how to reignite NATO in the wake of Afghanistan. Indeed, it was as pessimistic a gathering as I've seen on the subject. 

 But this bears watching: 

The closest we got was Josef Janning's observation that "relevance is not absolute." But even he conceded that "jobs" was the thing most voters care about these days and that defense spending was likely to have to be sold on that basis.

deference is death

I think Edward Pearce has the best definition of the man Labour just failed to elect as its leader. 

He has been cherished, favoured, advanced and made grateful. He is a professional protégé, the candidate of a leader and of the leader’s faction. Gratitude would have paralysed him in the future as it did when he voted for the Iraq war, recited its sad rationalisations and, at the FO, followed the Bush line as Blair followed it. He is a man in a conga, a good trooper, not the man to challenge the unrelenting coalition mantra that Labour and Brown are the chief begetters of the deficit, as they are not. Blair deferred to City assumptions. David Miliband deferred to Blair. Since in politics deference is death, one applauds the victory of Not-David. 

More pertinently, he was the candidate of an ex leader’s faction. “Not-David”’s good as well, since early signs are that aggressive blandness is the strategy.

contracting for stability

As is fairly well known, people in China with a grievance against their local governments which they cannot otherwise resolve have to travel to Beijing to petition. Chinese central government uses the number of petitioners it gets as a metric for the performance of local governments. They, in turn, do their best to intercept, detain and return petitioners to their place of origin. Hence the black jail phenomenon. 

Not surprisingly, abuse of the petitioning system – and increasingly, the system itself – is something of a public scandal. Last year, Beijing passed a law limiting the presence of provincial representative offices in the capital. This was seen as an attempt to prevent the interception of petitioners by their local authorities. Enter the private sector, in the form of Stability Maintenance Contractors. In particular, meet the An Yuan Ding. 

And you know what? The private sector works! The number of petitions in China has been falling year on year for the past five years, at least according to China’s latest White Paper on Human Rights. However, the internal impact of this good news is limited somewhat by the fact that the search term “human rights” is blocked on the Chinese internet. Still, as the GVO piece shows, people seem to be fully aware of stability maintenance and its implications.

exit Ellison

I read a lot of Harlan Ellison as a teenager, a fact that I’m not as embarrassed about as I used to be. These days I don’t think so much about the prose; more about hopping on a train for London (which you could do dirt cheap in those days) and spending the afternoon hanging about goggle eyed in Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in St Anne’s Court off Wardour Street. Good times, man. 

 I think I’ve still got a copy of his TV criticism lying around somewhere. That aside, I think he may be remembered for taking the practice of writing pretentious story titles and making it into something resembling an art form. But still…

 "The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. "I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West -- I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it.'" 

... "This is gonna be the biggest fucking science-fiction convention ever," Ellison says, "because no con has ever had a guest of honor drop dead while performing for the goddamn audience. The only comparison is the death of Patrick Troughton, at a Doctor Who convention. And I don't think he was even onstage." 

 He always had a lot of fight in him. That was the other thing I liked. Via.

you're capable and i'm satisfied

Bradley Martin, author of the indispensable Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly leader, gives us the lowdown on the man who must now be known as General Wanker:  

As son of the late Choe Hyon, North Korea's then-vice president, Choe Ryong-hae grew up in the same elite Pyongyang neighborhood where Kim Jong-il lived as the eldest son of the country's founding leader, Kim Il-sung. 

 Seven years younger than Kim Jong-il, Choe earned his crude nickname one day at Kim's house when he was hanging out with Kim and a group of Kim's college chums, including girlfriends, according to another member of that Pyongyang elite group who told the story on condition of anonymity after defecting to South Korea. (Talking about Kim's private life has gotten defectors hunted down and killed, so this source's precaution is understandable.) 

 At that gathering, Kim noted that Choe didn't seem to have much interest in girls and suggested he was impotent. Demanding that Choe drop his pants, then pointing out his lack of an erection despite the presence of the females, Kim had one of them massage the boy. Choe duly became aroused and Kim observed, "Oh, you're capable. I'm satisfied." 

 Ever since, Choe has been known by the pals of his youth not as Ryong Hae but as Ryong Du, "the head is moving toward the sky", a slang term for masturbation. 

This incident started Choe in a career as a lifelong sycophant to KJI, which once saved him from execution and has now seen him appointed four star general with a watching brief over Jong Un. The whole thing’s vulgar enough to be positively Shakespearean.

retweeting rape

Three potential problems with this: 

1. Doing it live.

 2. Doing it on twitter. 

3. Doing it if you are a crass and insensitive idiot. 

 An ugly story.