Blood & Treasure

1931 option

Paul Mason did a standout article on the Chancellor’s statement today, pointing out, among other things, that the government was engineering the collapse of the British economy even before the Euro crisis struck. It’s as though we were governed by lemmings with the gift of prophecy: let us simply run and the chasm will open up before us.

Anyway, among many standout bits, this bit stood out for me:

And don't kid yourself that Britain is somehow immune, either, from the "government by technocrat" virus sweeping Europe. We saw last night the Lib Dems forced to effectively write their manifesto on the set of Newsnight; Labour too will now be wrenched from the leisurely world of blue-skies thinking, by boxfresh young frontbenchers in as yet unwrinkled suits. It will see its core electoral base - the public sector workforce and low-income families - subjected to four more years of demands for givebacks, job losses, service cuts, tax-credit cuts. But it cannot publicly support their protest actions. Those of us who've reported from the streets of Athens, and know what a leaderless mass of angry people looks like, know how disorienting a fiscal crisis can be for social democrats.

The hint here seems to be that Labour will be so hemmed in by lack of economic options that it may throw in behind some kind of government of national unity. I don’t know about Labour as a whole, but there seem to be quite a number of continuity Blairites in and around Labour who broadly support the government agenda, who are currently doing their best to cripple coherent opposition to it, and who would be quite prepared to do a Ramsay. This chap, for instance. On the other side of the question, the Tory vote has started slipping to UKIP, there’s no sign of them pushing beyond the 36% of the vote that they got last time, and so a neoliberal alliance may well seem very tempting for 2015.

In some respects, I think having all the neolibs stuck in the same party would be a good thing: ‘the enemy plain’, and all that. On the other hand, I remember reading that when the last National government took Britain off the gold standard, Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor in the preceding government, expressed bafflement that anyone could do that: Snowden had been obsessed with preserving the economic orthodoxy of the time as a means of demonstrating the ‘fitness’ of Labour to rule. But any future National government would be full of Snowdens.

UPDATE 1/12. I see I made a bit of a mess of my chancellors. Snowden took us off the Gold Standard as part of the national government, after keeping us on it as part of a Labour admin. It was Baron passfield who said that no-one told Labour they could do that. I still think it true that any potential 'national' government would be full of Snowden markone's, so to speak.

secret nukes kept in secret tunnels (updated)

It's the latest in China Threatology.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.

Which may well be the intention, since the study was led by an old Nukeman who used to work for Kissinger. 

 UPDATE: See M Taylor Fravel's assesemrnt of China's nuclear policy.

her execution drew near

At 6:11 a.m., He Xiuling was trying her new outfit. Her execution drew near. She disliked the white top, as it made her look fat. The head of the detention center then got a black top for her.

Extraordinary photospread from Ministry of Tofu of the last twelve hours of several women condemned to death in Wuhan, Hubei Province, for drug offences. The photos are from 2003, and the photographer appears to have been allowed access to mark the International Day against Drug Trafficking.

ChinaSmack dealt with the same subject in characteristically brutal style back in August. 

 

bogeyman contest

US Govt: We are stopping CHINESE DOMINATION of our Christmas Tree Industry! Wingnuts: You are enabling CREEPING SHARIA!  CREEPING SHARIA wins this particular stupidity contest.

Shandong picaresque

Speaking of the LRB, this from the latest issue (no link) is kind of fascinating. It’s another East Asian wanderer:

 In late 1936, two workers from the Renault car factory in the Paris suburb of Billacnourt, Tchang Jaui Sai and Liou Kin Tien, travelled to Albacete to join the International Brigades. Already in their mid-forties, they were rejected for active battlefield service and sent instead to act as stretcher bearers. Their 14 hour days of back-breaking, often emotionally wrenching work earned them the praise of their comrades as heroes of the civil war. They had originally been brought to France from rural China during the GreatWar to serve as trench-diggers or to fill in at factories whose regular workforce was at the front…

…Tchang was born in Shandong Province, the son of a peasant. He joined the Chinese army after the Republican revolution of 1911 and served for several years. In the Spring of 1917 he saw an advertisement at the Yentai harbour in Shandong and signed up as a wartime contract worker. Having passed the stringent medical examinations administered by the Chinese and French authorities, he travelled to Hong Kong and then in several stages crossed to Europe. He was put to work in France, where for nineteen months he laboured ten hour days…

When the war was over…despite the five year terms of their contracts, the Chinese workers were made redundant and expected to go home. Unlike many of his compatriots, Tchang decided to stay on. He lived hand to mouth for several years before finding a job at the Renault factory. There he met Liou, who had also arrived in France from China in 1917. they became friends, took part in the drive to unionise the factory and like many of their unionised brethren joined the Communist Party, and, in 1936, went to Spain. Tchang left, probably in 1939, and reappeared in Yan’an, Mao Zedong’s base region, where he was written up as a ‘labour hero’ in Liberation Daily in 1944.

I don't know how Mr Zhang (as I think his name would translate into pinyin) fared after the Sino-Soviet split, following which his CV would seem rather less romantic to some of his colleagues.

That story is cited in a review of Xu Guoqi’s Strangers on the Western Front, the first book-lengfth account that I know of to deal with the experiences of the Chinese Civilian Labour Corps from a Chinese perspective. The reviewer finds it disappointing, since professor Xu apparently chooses to frame the experience as an abortive prototype of China’s current international expansion, which certainly sounds odd.

I wonder if anyone's produced an account of the role of France in the radicalisation of East Asian politics, with a heavy assist from Woodrow Wilson. Deng Xiaoping and Ho Chi Min were there at roughly the same time. And a few years later, the boat from Cambodia offloaded an idealistic young chap called Saloth Sar, come to study radio engineering.

 

an insistent, demanding presence in cultural life

So farewell then, Ken Russell, who always raised the tone. YouTube doesn’t have the bit out of the Devils where Louis XIII takes pot shots at Huguenots forced to dress as birds and run around squawking. Instead, this, which is not safe for work.

Reading between the lines

From the annual accounts for LRB Limited for the year ended 31 March 2010 (as pulled from Companies House just now). D^2 fans will be interested to know they've got a month to get their 2011 accounts in.

 

 

upper class dwarf throwing

Via Charlie Whitaker’s twitter feed: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles recently held a fundraising dinner at which attendees were entertained in the following manner:

So, I spent an hour today at the Abromovic [sic] audition at MOCA. The deal is that the artists/dancers she will hire will spend 3(!) hours under the dining tables of the donor gala with their heads protruding from the tables. They will be sitting on lazy susans under the table and slowly rotating and making eye contact with the donors/diners. Of course we were warned that we will not be able to leave to pee, etc. That the diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc but will be warned not to. Whatever happens, we are to remain in performance mode and unaffected. What the fuck?!

Says the LA Times:

By the time the guests — a wild mix that included Museum of Contemporary Art trustees Maria Bell and Eli Broad; celebrities Gwen Stefani, Tilda Swinton and Pamela Anderson; and Gov. Jerry Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — entered the main dinner tent, dozens of performers were in place kneeling on Lazy Susans beneath rectangular dinner tables, heads poking through those holes so that they could turn quietly and make eye contact with the guests. (A few other performers lay on circular tables, nude, breathing life into the skeletons resting on top of them.)

And of course, many of those who took part were proud of the exciting opportunity to become temporary table objects:

"The worst thing that I heard about," said one of the heads, yoga instructor/actress Jesse Aran Holcomb, was someone lining up a little salt near a performer's face "so it looked like he was snorting a line." She found the accusations of exploitation perplexing. "It’s not so bad to sit on the floor -- as a yogi I do that all the time," Holcomb said. "You feel sorry for us because we’re being stared at? But we’re staring at you. Marina gave us all permission to create our own performance space around us — it was a gift."

Well there you go: art appropriate for contemporary power relations.

but he can't take it

I assume Niall Ferguson's threats of legal action against Pankaj Mishra for a bad review are just bluster, since one would have to stretch to an absurd degree to find anything defamatory in the original piece.  But what an enormous child he comes across as.  With this and that interview where he bitched about the UK not appreciating his genius, petulance seems to be his main calling nowadays.

police priorities

From a conversation with a Chinese graffiti artist yesterday -

"The police aren't a big worry here. If a policeman catches you, it depends on the kind of day he's been having. If he's in a good mood, he'll just let you go, tell you not to do it again. If he's had a bad day, or the neighbors have complained, maybe he'll take your name, threaten a fine, that kind of thing.

But we have to be very careful to steer clear of anything political.  Once a group in Shanghai was spraying anti-government slogans. The police analyzed the paint they used and found it came from cans that, at that time, were only carried by my shop in Beijing. So the PSB came to my shop to talk to me, and to get my help in investigating the case"