Blood & Treasure

burglar stabbing contest

Tories: Under the Conservatives, the law will be changed to enable householders to stab burglars.

Labour: Under common law, householders can stab burglars anyway and always have been able to stab burglars. Burglars were stabbed under Labour, you know.

Tories: We want to make it clear that burglars can be stabbed by householders. We want it right down there in black and white in Statute Law: The Go Ahead Granny and Stab that Burglar Just Like You Always Could Anyway Act, 2011.

Burglars: Not if I stab the householder first. Thanks for the heads up.

hard man remembered

So, Mike Doyle joins the silent majority. His family are stoical in the manner of those close to alcoholics. He gave us a year at Stoke when he left Man City and had an entirely beneficial effect – basically filling Denis Smith’s role while the team was reorganized after his retirement.

Denis was a guileless inspirational lunatic who got misattributed as an intelligent hard man. This, I think, is why he failed in management. Mickey Doyle was the real thing. I saw him once with a handful of Sam Allardyce’s shirt, having a quick word while the referee was looking elsewhere. Big Sam’s jowls were visibly wobbling, his fat lips were forming “no, no” sounds, his hands were spread far from his body and his general body language was acquiescent. On that occasion - 81-82 season I think it was - we beat Sunderland two-nil. Job’s a good ‘un.

walking out of mysterious backrooms

Often darn good caterers to the long war:

The availability of Chinese takeout — which is often darn good — has become a hallmark of modern war zones.

Baghdad’s Chinese restaurant at the al-Mansour Hotel kept the stove on during the worst of days, feeding the Chinese diplomats who operated out of the oft-attacked establishment.

Another Chinese restaurant, in the Iraqi capital’s Green Zone, became part of Baghdad lore, with a stream of burly contractors timidly walking out of its mysterious backrooms.

In Kabul, Golden Key Seafood Restaurant is a favorite Chinese joint among expats in landlocked Afghanistan, and one of the establishments that meets the security requirements that make them accessible to employees of certain non-governmental organizations.

While many expat-run businesses board up when war breaks out, Chinese entrepreneurs have come to see them as lands of opportunity.

So what would Brecht have made of it?

ugly pretexts

This makes nicking Ai Weiwei on tax charges look positively benign:

Yang Libing and Zhou Yinghe, two leading petitioners from a child-trafficking case in Hunan Province, were arrested on June 22 for prostitution, witnesses said.

The two will be under police custody for 15 days as part of the standard penalty for prostitution, according to local authorities.

At the time of their arrest, Yang and Zhou were with a group of parents that were also seeking to petition a child-trafficking case in Shaoyang, Hunan Province.

Yang' younger brother told Caixin that his brother was being framed. "Shaoyang police have not been prosecuting prostitution cases recently. How could my brother be arrested for that reason? Someone wants to restrict his activities," he said.

An investigative report by Caixin in May detailed a child-trafficking system run by local family planning officials. Yang's daughter was abducted by authorities in 2005 after they were unable to pay a 6,000 yuan fine, based on fabricated regulations by local family planning authorities.

We blogged about the story back in May. The children were sold to orphanages and then on to foreign adopters. Read the Caixin investigation here. One way of finding out how many other children adopted from China were kidnapped by local authorities before selling on would be some disclosure from the Western end into where adoption agencies got the children from. It can’t be that much of a secret. I’ve seen TV documentaries about adoption from China.

borrow all your babies and pass them off as yours

The point about the Hari thing isn’t “plagiarism” in general – he’s not passing up other people’s stuff as his own but as stuff said to him. We therefore go away thinking what a marvellous interviewer he is, able to draw out the best and most articulate thoughts from the people he speaks to. So, more importantly, do his editors and the people who commission him to do more of the same. But as he says himself, the best and most articulate thoughts of his interviewees often come from other sources. As doing interviews is a major part of his trade, this particular practice is not "intellectual portraiture" - cheeky bastard -  but something more like fraudulent conversion.

It’s also incredibly stupid because the stuff he’s converting doesn’t come from obscure academic sources but actually published books. He was bound to get busted sooner or later.

 

posse of mean-spirited dandies

This is old, but was just sent to me by a friend in a discussion of Chinese middle-class taste, and made me laugh out loud at least three times, so I'm sharing. 

Things you get in a lot of aspirational homes here; plastic grandfather clocks, ducks on the wall, images of famous landmarks with digital clocks in the middle, occasionally racist figurines. Think second-rate Indian restaurant, basically.

 

combat consultancy possibly called in

Yesterday:

Armed Islamic militants have infiltrated Syria's legitimate pro-democracy movement, a government spokesman has told Sky News.

... Sky's Middle East Correspondent Dominic Waghorn said he was surprised we had not seen more footage on Syrian state TV of military funerals, if the number of dead was truly this high.

What is clear is that the authorities here are putting out a robust narrative that the violence is being caused by armed gangs of "terrorists" roving the country intent on exploiting and inflaming the peaceful protests of those who are campaigning for political change.

And today:

Syrian opposition members met Monday in Damascus, in the first such gathering sanctioned by the government, but activists abroad rejected the move, signaling that President Bashar al-Assad's offer of a national dialogue could widen divisions within the opposition.

Assad was calling protestors germs a week ago. Now the regime’s putting up comely and personable young women to empathise with ‘legitimate’ protestors and organizing astroturf dissident conferences. Wonder who got the consultancy job.

war is cool

Fun fact:

The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

That's more than NASA's budget. It's more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.

 

 

 

things that are good

According to the statement, the bank held an art and literature exhibition on Monday entitled “Permanently Walking with the Party” intended to highlight the Party’s control over the bank – and, by extension, its control over Chinese monetary policy.

At the event, central bank employees sang songs proclaiming that “the Communist Party is good, socialism is good, reform and opening up are good, and the great ancestral motherland is good...

You kind of wish there was a sequel which said "on the other hand, air quality is kind of shitty and I'm not too sure about the food in the canteen."

...Maintaining a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, loudly praising socialism and communism while living and working in a modern economy with many capitalistic features has become a way of life for many a high-profile person in China. The central bank, it appears, is no exception.

It's only cognitive dissonance for people singing from a different list of things that are good. It's just a day at the office at the People's Bank of China. See also.

the labour interest

Han Dongfang has a column in CIF calling for international unions to work with the ACFTU now that it has a kinda-sorta mandate for collective bargaining. You can read about his background here. He is, among other things, the original MGI guy.

Then we began to cover demonstrations and strikes, not after the fact, but as current news stories. I would produce a report including interviews with workers, government officials, trade unions, management and so on. For example, in 1998 there were a number of disputes over back pay, and the treatment of retired and off-post workers. There were protests in the street, and I would receive a call from a public phone in front of a government building, telling me there were five hundred people there. So I would phone back, and interview people at the other end of the line, asking them about their problems and their lives. It was extraordinary—like having a reporter on the scene, recording the news live. Then I would call local government officials, and ask what they were going to do, and why the situation was getting worse and worse. And I would ask the trade union officials what they were doing for the workers—and they would reply that they were trying to calm them down and send them home, because workers didn’t understand the difficulties that management and government faced, and so on.

Were the calls you were getting coming from any regions in particular—for example, were they mainly concentrated along the coast?

No, they came from everywhere—even Tibet and Xinjiang. The distribution of the calls has depended more on the period than on the region, in particular on the timing of the reforms of state enterprises in any given part of the country. Around 1998–99 there were a lot of off-post protests in Heilongjiang, Gansu and Guizhou, for example, and stoppages of trains in the coalmine areas of Sichuan.

This was during the huge wave of layoffs in the state sector in the late nineties when Han’s Labour Express show was pretty much the only outlet reporting consistently on the subject. Inasmuch as these were reported at all by Western media they were regarded as a good thing, and proof that China was reforming. This is why I’m generally sceptical about reports of MGIs as a threat to government control now. These perceptions tend to be as much of a product of what the current story about China happens to be as an assessment of the actual situation.

As to the issue at hand, I doubt the AFCTU would ever become independent of the Party this side of a wider successful political uprising. But there is a possibility that labout influence could become a factor in policymaking and the chance of establishing better treatment of labour as a norm in Chinese industry. And against the day when wider political change might come, it’s important to establish the labour interest as a factor that needs to be accommodated because there's no guarantee that it will be otherwise. I note that trade unions are still illegal in Iraq under Saddam-era labour laws, for instance, though I'm sure Labour Friends of Iraq are working on that.