Blood & Treasure

the sharp end

There is much mockery across the sinosphere at the finding that a CDIC anti-corruption official found dead with eleven stab wounds killed himself. Personally I find the official version credible. If you read the autopsy report in the ChinaSMACK link, what you see are classic hesitation wounds, which are actual positive evidence of suicide. You think of murder if you don’t find them. By contrast, there is nothing at all hesitant about multiple stab wounds from one or more assailants. I think it’s most likely the poor fellow sat there and smoked eight cigarettes while tentatively cutting himself and getting up the courage for the decisive blow.

As ever, what the whole furore demonstrates are the numerous self inflicted wounds inflicted on Beijing’s credibility by its general attitude to public information. But still, what we may actually have here is an interesting mystery. Why would a CDIC official decide to kill himself in the middle of an investigation into the local deputy Party secretary? What did they have on him?

the great army protects our happiness with guns

Fairly slick North Korean propaganda video, with less emphasis on bloodcurdling threats than usual and no shouting. Go on, treat yourselves. It's only four minutes.

atrocityfest tellypitch

Right, we've already had 9/11: the conspiracy files and we're apparently going to be treated to Children of 9/11. Why don't we go the whole fucking hog and have children's conspiracy theories about 9/11?  It might actually be quite interesting.

fuchsing up nuclear power

A video's leaked online of a general accusing Kang Rixin, former head of the China National Nuclear Corporation till he was arrested for corruption, of espionage.  Ms Blood speculates that this is part of the attempt by China Guangdong Nuclear Power to gain ascendancy over the CNNC. CGNP is keener on domestic development of nuclear tech (though it also imported French and US reactors), while CNNC is more dependent on imports; linking Kang to spying for foreigners bolsters the case for domestic development.

the Conservative Party is abortion central

Well, OK. So we’re now all probably going to be paying for crazy Jesus ladies to show unfortunate women badly faked pictures of mashed foetuses. I suppose the extent to what this “issue” is put forward as misdirection will eventually be revealed to us as general government NHS legislation begins to work its magic.

That aside, has anyone noted how government policy is a mass driver of abortion? I mean, from the general to the particular: from general economic policy failure to deliberately engendered unemployment, to ongoing insecurity for those in employment, to changes in housing benefit rules. That’s a rough sketch. Throw in anything you like.

All of these force more people to make hard choices in the actual, rather than political, sense of the phrase. And the point about actual hard choices is that they tend to make people hard. For instance, If Grant Shapps gets his way, the unemployed will have to pay full council tax. That, along with everything else, will produce an actually quantifiable increase in the number of abortions, because it will lead to an additional number of loving and competent mothers and/or fathers to conclude that parenthood is not a viable option, perhaps because it’s not time to start a family, perhaps because having another child would stretch their resources to breaking point. Either way, the Tories are shaping up as champion foetus killers.

guided emancipation engenders total loyalty

From back in 2004, an account of time spent with Gaddafi’s all-female bodyguard. Part of what we have here is standard authoritarian practice: use rural shitkickers to police the metropolis. But there’s an interesting deployment of pseudo-feminism here: I, the dear leader have raised you up from oppression, feudalism and religiously mandated inferior status, and what’s more taught you to kill with your bare hands. You, the dear led, will in turn offer me your total loyalty.

It reminds me of one of the interviewees in Sun Shuyun’s The Long March, a sprightly, cheerful old lady who had been adopted by the CPC on the line of march, given a name (she’d been known as pigshit before on account of being made to sleep in a sty), fed properly, taught to read and write and generally been made to feel wanted. Naturally, she was effusive in her praise of the Party. It turned out that the purpose in life she’d been given was to be an enthusiastic assassin and purge leader in the party’s endless round of internal struggles and mass line campaigns. Sun’s other interviewees were still frightened of/angry with her sixty years on.

Of course, what’s operating here is a basic principle of tyranny: sponsor the oppressed and use them against your enemies. But, historically, when tyrants are eventually toppled the people they are believed to have favoured also suffer. Half baked and self-serving as it was, Gaddafi’s pseudo feminism formally identified women as beneficiaries of the regime. One metric of the new regime will be whether that is replaced by actual feminism or simply provide an opportunity to get women back under full control, or what actual combination of those things goes on.

chicken at thirty thousand feet

Oh, wow:

The country’s General Administration of Civil Aviation on Monday announced its punishment for privately held Juneyao Airlines Co. after an incident earlier this month in the skies above Shanghai in which a Juneyao flight crew refused to give way to a Qatar Airways jet that had issued a “mayday” call and requested immediate permission to land as it ran low on fuel...

...The Qatar Airways flight, a Boeing 777 en route from Doha, had been circling above Shanghai Pudong International Airport due to bad weather, Xinhua reported. Authorities decided to divert it to the city’s smaller Hongqiao International Airport as it ran low on fuel. The Juneyao pilot refused six orders from the control tower to yield and allow the Qatari jet to land first. Both flights eventually landed safely, but the Civil Aviation Administration said the Qatar jet had only about 18 minutes worth of fuel left when it finally landed at Hongqiao.

It's the kind of thing you read about in places like Manila or Nairobi, with minbus drivers fighting each other over customers or drag racing to get to bus stops first, except in the air. But there you go: a competitive transport environment.

 

 

numeracy hour

Andrew Lankov's been reading North Korean primary school maths textbooks:

``During the Fatherland Liberation War (North Korea’s official name for the Korean War) the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American imperialist bastards in the first battle. In the second battle they killed 70 more bastards than they had in the first battle. How many bastards did they kill in the second battle? How many American imperialist bastards did they kill all together?’

Circa 2003.  Bet it was whole class teaching, with everybody facing the teacher.

he fell off a tower

Just read Rudolph (son of Werner) Herzog's book on jokes in the Third Reich, DEAD FUNNY, which isn't bad. Skilfully translated, too, though there's probably no way to make light comic rhymes sound anything other than trite in another language, so the inclusion of long passages of satirical verse falls flat.  Properly scathing about attempts to promote gentle jibes as serious dissent after the war, if a bit heavy-handed at points.  I think, at this stage, it can be safely assumed we all know the Nazis were total cunts.

One point the book misses is that the majority of jokes told by Jews about their persecution were recycled versions of jokes originally told about Tsarist Russia.  (For instance, the one recounted in the FT review.)  Anything that's non-specific to Nazi regulations or the camps was almost certainly set in Russia originally; I've got US compilations of Jewish jokes from the 1920s and 30s including most of them.

There's a good section on the BBC's German service's use of satire; somebody should really probe the archives and put together a compilation of this stuff.  Herzog handles the bullying sneer of Nazi humor (not unreminiscent of the worst parts of the Chinese media) well, typified by Roland Freisler, who achieved the remarkable feat of being particularly revolting for a Nazi.  (Freisler has a small part in Conspiracy, which is, I think, the best movie about the Nazi mentality and bureaucracy ever made.)

Nazi actions are, at times, the funniest things in the book. For instance, when a circus performer taught his apes to give the Hitler salute, a law was passed forbidding apes from doing so on pain of death. The compilation of caricatures of Hitler from around the world, with hysterically explanatory notes as to how wrong the cartoonists are, is also good. 

my weakness is that I work *too* hard

I get asked to edit a lot of applications for grants, scholarships, etc, and one thing puzzles me. In the personal statement, Chinese always write something like "I am hard-working, personable, independent, responsible, and confident."   If there was more variety, it might at least tell you something about the person's self-image, but as it is they basically pick from a list of about eight standard virtues.

It's standard in Chinese applications, too.  It's supposed to be listing your "personal qualities" but it's become effectively depersonalized, presumably because people don't want to risk actually sounding too much like a person. So it's a phatic statement - all it says is "I know how applications should be written." Plenty of information on Western CVs acts the same way, just at greater length. 

But I feel that this offers a welcome opportunity to reinstitute traditional culture, where self-deprecation was valued. How much more entertaining applications would be if they opened with "I am lazy, inattentive, and unfilial, but the good fortune of my family and teachers has enabled me to pursue a PhD despite my many failings."