Blood & Treasure

meat that breathes

Someone’s done a survey on whether people who feel their life has no meaning care about that one way or the other.

Looking at a sample of 603 Germans, Schnell found that 61 percent were “meaningful,” 4 percent suffered a “crisis of meaning,” and 35 percent were “existentially indifferent,” those who “neither experience their lives as meaningful nor suffer from this lack of meaning.” So of the people who felt their lives lacked meaning, it really only bothered one in 10 of them.

I have no idea whether the nature of the sample had any effect on the result. Still, count me in. I suppose you could call this state of mind true atheism, though it would also please Buddhists.

the cheese thing

I suppose I should stop doing these now that hyperactive gagjourneyman Russell Howard is showing them – and incidentally Russell, they’re not from Korea – but for old times sake, here’s NMA on the Irish bailout. Incidentally, there’s evidence here that Father Ted has indeed reached the pacific rim, if you look closely. The cheese thing’s there too.

towards less brazenness

In 2002, as I recall, the magazine Strategy and Management (and isn’t that a great title for a publication dealing with internal Chinese politics) had its publishing license revoked for reprinting some unflattering thoughts by senior Chinese figures on their relationship with North Korea. There’s also an apocryphal story from the eighties about Deng Xiaoping giving Kim Il Sung a bollocking after Chinese aid money – and China wasn’t rich at the time – meant to go towards industrial and agricultural support somehow being diverted into the production of gigantic bronze statues of Kim Il Sung.

So we’ve known for a long time that there’s a certain level of tension between Beijing and Pyongyang, and also maybe what the MFA actually meant when he called on Washington to deal appropriately with Wikileaks. Even so, some of yesterday’s revelations on the subject need to be treated with caution. The proposal that China is ready to abandon the North to reunification comes originally from a South Korean politician talking to US diplomats. What we actually know here is what the South Koreans want the Americans to think about what China thinks about North Korea; or did at the time the cable was written.

It may represent a section of opinion in China, but that hasn’t been reflected in policy over the past year or so. Beijing’s been very closely involved at all levels in underwriting the latest Kim succession, pushing the North Eastern provinces to invest, building infrastructure and piling food into the country. The obvious implication of this is that it’s making a big effort to put Pyongyang under closer supervision in the hope of levering it open economically: fewer bronze statues and less brazenness all round. As I’ve said before, the obvious international parallel is the US and Israel. Both senior partners proceed on the grounds that if we hug them closer we can get them to do what we want.

The results appear to be similar as well. Perhaps today’s confirmation that Beijing is itself looking at reunification as an end state can be taken as a warning to the North that it has options too. It’s certainly the first time I’ve seen any Chinese officials come forward and state that they envision a Kim free future for Korea. But the same officials are also signalled something else.

"We do not have an effective way to influence them. Sometimes when we try it only makes things worse," a senior Chinese diplomat said.

Reunification is going to be a slow process. The entire North is going to have to be rebuilt from the ground up and, in practical terms, the only country with the available capital to divert to that is China. Or at any rate, it's the only country that has demonstrated a real willingness to divert it.

Thus far the China-North Korea question has always been posed in terms of how China can be got to use it’s supposed leverage to meet Western objectives. Maybe the real question is how the West and regional actors can help Beijing assert greater control over the regime. Always assuming, that is, that you give credibility to China’s promises on eventual reunification.

the sad decline of a fine madhouse

Early Xmas/late Eid present!  The Spectator and Melanie Phillips have had to pay out substantial damages to Muhammad Sawalha, head of the British Muslim Initiative, for repeatedly libeling him.  Apparently a couple of months ago they had to do the same with IslamExpo. Serves them right.

I can remember when the Spectator was entertainingly mad, instead of just a haven for poisonous little bigots like Phillips and Mark fucking Steyn.  And there was a good portion of the 1990s when it was the best train read out there, even if there were usually one or two articles it was best to ignore for the sake of one's sanity.

Plus it once had my favorite letter ever, in about 1984 (when I was six; I read it much later in a pile of old issues in my granddad's Budapest apartment, he being of the Eastern Bloc habit of never throwing anything away.)  It was at the end of a long, barmy discussion over several weeks about penis size, race, and intelligence.

"Dear Sir,

as a practicing homosexual of many years standing, I can assure you that the largest member of my acquaintance, some 10 and a half inches, belonged to an extremely cultured and intelligence civil servant." 

the ideal blogger

Information brokerage for good in the Chinese countryside. 

This dramatic figure is a young blogger, popular among local petitioners in an East China province. He is well-known for his ability to help petitioners with their legal requests. He helps them deal with land disputes, labor disputes, forced abortions and other injustices, often caused by corrupt officials.

The blogger, who barely finished his high school education, makes a good living on the commissions offered by petitioners who were able to receive compensation from the government through his help.

I was intrigued by his occupation, so I went to his studio, tucked away in a deserted residential building, to find out how he worked.

I was in awe as I identified hidden cameras and voice recorders, along with professional cameras and digital video cameras. In his laptop were carefully stored videos, recordings and photos of the cases from no fewer than a hundred petitioners. Some of the videos have already attracted tens of thousands of hits on the Internet.

Over the years, he has got hold of crucial evidence of numerous bureaucratic scandals in the different levels of government institutions from petitioners. The more he knows, the more he can use them to his own advantage, often as evidence to blackmail corrupt officials, if they refuse to compensate the petitioners he represents.

takes after his dad

An oaf abroad; an oaf responsible for trade promotion, which can be a fairly oafish business

In the cable from the US embassy to Washington in October 2008, Gfoeller wrote: "Rude language a la British … [Andrew] turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the 'idiocy' of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia."

The prince, she explained, "was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces."

Though it has to be said that the businessmen he was regaling with this were also pretty oafish. But why, other than him being an archetypal British Brute, would he think like this?

Andrew's other forays into central Asia, where he is reported to have a good relationship with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, have also proved controversial. Ambassador Richard Hoagland cabled in April 2009 his view of political life in Kazakhstan: "Corruption is endemic among Kazakhstani officialdom… Most senior officials live lifestyles that require much higher incomes. In many instances, they receive profits from businesses registered in the names of their spouses or other relatives. In other cases, they're stealing directly from the public trough."

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the president's billionaire son-in-law Timur Kulibayev paid Andrew's representatives £15m – £3m over the asking price – via offshore companies, for the prince's Surrey mansion, Sunninghill Park, which he was apparently having difficulty selling.

Ah huh. Anyway, for those interested in less trivial stuff, The Friday Lunch club is doing a good job of trawling the memos.

information twilight possibly brings forth interesting monsters

I don’t really believe that a member of the Politburo standing committee personally ordered Google to be hacked on the grounds that if something is presented as being at the personal orders of a powerful man stroking a persian cat, then it’s probably bollocks. Nor do I think that Standing Committee members have been obsessively Googling themselves. That strikes me as culturally lazy: look – they’re obsessed with our beads and shiny things!

What I think happened here, and I guess it’s probably behind a lot of other opinions leaked over the last day or so, is that someone got an order from Foggy Bottom to find out what was happening with Google in China. Not actually knowing, or having access to politburo hair or nail clippings, that person recycled what he picked up in the Western media through an unnamed “local source”, creating an information feedback loop.

But now China has banned reporting on the wikileaks revelations. That in turn provides an excellent opportunity for some local internet prankster to start spreading rumours based on what he (face it, it will be a he) decides the US is saying secretly about China, based on his own prejudices, frames of reference and partial information sources. Also, it’s an excellent way to re-ventilate existing gossip about what China’s leaders get up to, recycled through an unnamed “foreign source”, with a medium to high possibility that this gossip will break out of China to entertain the broad masses generally. Look, it has to be true about Uncle Wen, the hairless Filipina and the fifteen kilos of Ketamine - the Americans say so!

bubble bubble, toil and trouble

I'm skeptical of many of these kind of pieces because they so often seem themed around "China is working - but it goes against my personal economic ideology, so it can't really be working."  That said, a lot of the stuff mentioned is obviously true - the construction bubble, the lack of information*, bureaucracy, corruption, the lack of real income growth for many people, etc. 

So, I am not an economist, obviously**, but personally, my guess is that a crash at some point is inevitable.  James Fallows has made the claim before that the Chinese public can manage a recession because they went through so much worse in the past, but I'm highly dubious of this.  For starters, the really bad times are over 30 years gone; most Chinese, and especially most young Chinese, have no more idea of them than, say, young people in the 1970s in the UK did of the Second World War. 30 years of continuous growth, and a decade plus of super-growth, makes it hard to cope with the idea of recession.

The underlying problem is that the legitimacy of the Chinese regime rests upon two foundations nowadays; continued economic success and national unity.  The second isn't threatened in any significant way, the first is going to be a problem at some point.  Economic woes played a major parti n both the cultural revolution and  1989.  The big danger, I reckon, is that if things did turn sour here and the public turned truly angry, the government would be forced to beat the nationalist drum extremely hard - Taiwan is the biggest and most obvious issue to get nasty on to bring the people together, but there are others. 

So this means that the government is also keen to put off a recession by any means necessary, which means - like the Greenspan meaures in the US as a way to dampen the impact of the dot-com burst - creating more problems in the long run.  I suspect the stimulus package will come back to bite China in the long run - as cited in the article, I've seen huge amounts of waste as a result.  One of my friends made a long trip and came back with nothing but pictures of deserted housing blocks and Ozymandian local projects. 

*Important note: nobody in China has the right figures.  It's not like there's secret numbers the government keeps hidden - the center has very little idea what's happening in the provinces a lot of the time, though it tries hard to find out.  That's why the unofficial population estimate is 100-300 million over the official figure of 1.3 billion, for instance. 

*In my experience economists suffer the second worse case of deformation professionale I know, beaten out only by computer programmers.  Engineers have to be pretty high up there too. 

clouds of waaagh

So the emerging consensus in the Chinese IR/media community seems to be that the South Koreans deliberately provoked the North Korea attack by maneuvering/firing in the disputed waters, in order to scupper the chances of a bilateral deal between the North and the US over nukes.  This is more plausible than most such theories drifting around here because the US aren’t painted as the source of all evil as usual, so I’m inclined to give it at least a little credibility.

The theory that I just heard from a senior journalism professor that if war breaks out, the West will use China’s treatment of the Korean refugees as an excuse to forcibly separate the North-East of China, “as happened in Kosovo,” not so credible.

wikileaks open thread

Well it’s started. Nothing particularly surprising so far, though I have to say that I’m a bit taken aback at US diplomats being instructed to collect biometric details of various African warlords. The insults are a bit disappointing too. Berlusconi “parties too hard.” Get away.

Anyway, I won’t have the time to read everything as it comes in, so feel free to throw in anything you find interesting, amusing, typical etc.

And incidentally, I'm having trouble believing that all of this came from one source.