Blood & Treasure

on China not being scared

Axis of evil alert:

Who are the members of this group? Today, it includes China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.

Why does it exist? Fundamentally, this new axis signals growing anxiety on the part of its members that they are “behind the curve” of history. Simply put, these states are on the wrong side of history, politics and economics – and they know it.

Leaving aside all the rest of the bullshit there, let’s have a look at the idea that China in particular is driven by fear, which is a popular one. Google reveals that China is currently scared of, among other things:

Rural Unrest, North Korea, Indian Ballistic Missiles, Ai Weiwei, Nancy Pelosi, US monetary policy, the Arab Spring, the Jasmine Revolution, It’s Own People, the internet, Liu Xiaobo, higher commodity prices, lower commodity prices, corruption, tainted food scandals.

I don’t suppose there’s any point in criticizing the variant of the pathetic fallacy here, since it seems to be accepted shorthand that governments and other organisations are collectively assigned emotions that they cannot in fact ‘feel’. The interesting questions is why so many of the emotions ascribed to Beijing concern fear and anxiety. I mean, how many actual communist party officials are ‘scared’ at any given point in time (other than by their superiors) rather than, say, angry, petulant, self-satisfied, vengeful, relaxed, or preoccupied by the day to day demands of their job, their ambitions and so on?

The obvious argument here is that dictatorship in itself implies an existential state of fear because it relies on surveillance and the ability to deploy physical force. In this reading, the whole structure of stability management, the PAP, internet ‘self-discipline and so on are manifestations of fear. But a CP member could reasonably turn round and say that they don’t intend to share power, so they are simply taking the necessary measures. Saying that spending on security stems from a fear of democracy is like saying that going shopping stems from a fear of anti-consumerism. In both cases, people spend the money because they like what it buys them. Or alternatively, the reason I’m not giving you any of my beer is not because I’m scared of sharing, it’s because I want to get drunk.

The use of fear here also seems to be a compensation mechanism. Dissident stories in China follow a pretty simple pattern, namely: dissident identified; dissident crushed. It makes the thing a whole lot less bleak if you can say that the dissident concerned started Hu Jintao quaking in his pajamas. You can see the compensatory mechanism work on a wider level as well. A bit scared by the way the West runs out of gas while China keeps banging on? Well they’re scared, because, um, ...they’re on the wrong side of history? Yes, that must be it. Of course the reason China grew so fast in the first case was also because it was scared, as if the whole process was just a matter of frantically baking cakes and throwing them at an otherwise uncontrollable mob.

I think fear might operate somewhere within the system as a function of the sheer structural lunacy of trying to run the most populous country on earth through an imported Leninist power vertical the size of Germany. Choose to do that and you might wake up in a sweat from time to time when it strikes you that there are one and a half billion people out there and you don’t know what they’re doing.  But the reflex that ascribes pretty much everything Beijing does as from fear and its whole internal world as a nightmare haunted place probably says more about us than them. Beijing isn’t frightened most of the time, and maybe that’s a bit scary.

arty paintings on the walls

Here's the 1970 version of outing. Jack Anderson on Randy Agnew, son of Spiro and cohabitee of Buddy. via Jesse walker on twitter.

xi incorporated

Bloomberg has a terrific rundown of the business interests of the family of Xi Jinping, China’s soon to be President and Communist Party boss, a portfolio including telecoms, rare earths, real estate and clean energy. It’s blocked in China, but we can give it a look over.

None of these interests are held by Xi, his wife Peng Liyuan, or their daughter. They fan out from the business activities of his sisters, through in-laws, nephews and nieces. Alex pointed out on twitter that the Xi’s telco business (currently owned by the family of his younger brother’s wife) came from nowhere to get a huge number of contracts when China rolled out its 3G network, in an arrangement that confused onlookers but proved immensely profitable for the company.

The obvious inference is that Xi was getting his family contracts as he moved up the hierarchy. It reads to me more like a powerful clan concentrating its business activities in state led sectors with lots of opportunities to apply regulatory arbitrage or exploit inside knowledge. Another example would be the way the family’s property arm built luxury villas in Beijing designed for the chief executives of state-owned companies, which, in fact would buy the villas for their managers. Very cute.

The thing is, being the sister or brother in law of Xi Jinping wouldn’t have meant that much through a lot of his career. What counts is the connection they all had to the family patriarch, revolutionary elder Xi Zhongxun. XZX – and isn’t it just great typing that abbreviation – is probably best known these days for talking Deng Xiaoping into setting up the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone back in the early eighties.

Xi Junior could have used that connection to establish himself in Guangdong, but didn’t, which was smart thinking. Thousands of southern cadres owe their advancement to the Xi family, and Xi junior allowed them to advance without muscling in himself.

Instead, after launching his career in the PLA’s political apparat, Xi has risen through Fujian and the Yangtze delta provinces, with a particular emphasis on Fujian, but holding posts in Zhejiang, Shanghai and Jiangsu. If we regard Guangdong as a rear area established by his father, then Xi’s career bears an odd resemblance to the progress of the 19^th route army, sweeping all before it as it heads north. At a guess, the inflection point was his position as governor in Fujian between 1999 and 2002, while the fallout from the Lai Changxing scandal was still going strong. He was also briefly CPC secretary in Shanghai after Chen Liangyu was deposed and jailed for corruption in 2006.

 Xi’s career is outlined here at China Vitae. There are probably thousands of young cadres poring over it as we speak. It’s quite the howto.

 

prospective end of 'newspaper of record'

This could be fun:

News Corp. still isn't unloading any newspapers, but Thursday's decision to split into two separate companies -- media/entertainment and publishing -- has raised concerns about the fate of Murdoch's beloved newspapers like the Journal, Post, Sun, and Times (of London) when no longer sheltered by more lucrative film and TV businesses, such as Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Broadcasting, Fox Sports, Fox News, FX and BSkyB.

"Instead of being part of this big diverse, cash-rich aircraft carrier of a company, we're going to be part of a car ferry," said one Journal staffer not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

Another staffer suggested to The Huffington Post that the Journal would be more equipped without a safety net, but was concerned about being bundled with money-losing papers like the Post and Times. (Some other entities in the new publishing company, like HarperCollins, the Sun and some Australian papers, are profitable). 

...the existance of the Wall Street Journal will soon be partially but directly dependant on the profits of The Sun, which means that the Times will have heavy duty competition for the Sun's profit stream, just at the time when the Leveson process has reduced it to a kind of eunuch version of its former self. If I was Aaro or Ollie Kamm I would be polishing my CV right now and praying for the sudden appearance of one of Putin's wealthy orphans.

about that mustache

A great article in Global Times on the CPC's internal book clubs brings depressing news. But firstly, this is how the system works:

According to People's Daily, the choice of books read by officials does not stem only from their personal preferences, given the power they wield. This is all the more crucial as the country is undergoing a period of transition as its reform and opening-up policy is strengthened and social changes arise more frequently.

In keeping with this, several top CPC bodies have recommended six batches of books for officials since February 2010. These bodies, responsible for ideology and political thought within the Party ranks, have forwarded these recommendations to the more than 80 million Party members.

A publishing house told Oriental Outlook, a weekly magazine, that organizations such as the CPC's publicity department sometimes ask for books to be brought to their attention, which they will buy en masse should they approve the recommendations. These bodies are reported to also always keep a close eye on the latest published books.

Which gives you massive influence over the publishing market and so to a certain extent obviates censorship. And now the depressing bit:

Wang Yang, the Party secretary of Guangdong Province, is well-known for his progressive political ideas and policies. In 2007, when he held positions in Chongqing Municipality, Wang recommended the World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. This author became widely known in Chongqing because of Wang.

OK. He's a wrong 'un.

disease of excellence

'World class’ vision is key to Manchester future says town hall chief

World classness is a bit of a disease here in Manchester. I don’t exactly know when the order came down to describe absolutely everything associated with the city  as world class, but it seemed to become endemic after the IRA detonated its world class fertiliser bomb outside Marks & Spencer back in ’96.

So we have a world class vision, and I for one am glad that our vision is not merely very good. But A quick google tells me that Manchester also has world class research, sustainable development, media, chamber orchestras, athletes (regular and paralympic), restaurants, communications, concierge services, services generally, facilities of various kinds (educational, sporting, leisure, etc), businesses, teaching, procurement, design, designer living, museums, hotels, shopping, cocktails, BMX tracks, expertise (undefined), venues (miscellaneous), professionals (all trades), Irish Heritage Centres, artists, festivals and cultural strategies. In all these areas we are on a par with Valparaiso, Penang and Ulan Bataar. Makes you proud.

China tries to understand US QED disorder

Given what’s happening to the NHS right now, Brits are in no position to be patronising about the US bringing universal health coverage up to the level of, say, Wilhelmine Germany . But this piece in which a presenter on Chinese TV tries to explain to his audience the issues around the US healthcare debate does show how weird that debate is:

He did so using a short Chinese cartoon, animated with “South Park”-style characters and titled “Obama’s Health-Care Reform War.” It begins with an image of a castle under a blue sky, and a narrator’s voice:

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful country. Legend had it that these people lived in peace and contentment, never worrying much about their livelihood. But that bright and shiny exterior concealed a surprising reality: “We don’t have universal health care!” One sixth of the country, fifty million people, have no insurance, spending their days anxious that some sudden illness will wrest away the good life.

Over the early reform period, China went rapidly from a system of universal but massively under-resourced state healthcare provision straight to a pay as you go setup, without the complementary insurance market: you went to see the doctor, and you put your money down. You still do, a lot of the time, despite recent expansion in state medical insurance. Given that experience under a dictatorship, people find it hard to understand not only the debate in the US but why there is one at all: everyone gets a vote. Therefore your country has universal health coverage. What ‘s the problem here?

on the BXL disposal problem: place your bets

OK, I think the Party will get the succession sorted before they deal with Bo Xilai publicly, but I get the sense that the basic decision has already been taken. So it’s time we started a book on what happens to Bo. Here are the options as I see them.

Revolutionary justice. Shoot him. Just shoot him. Just shoot the fucker. He’s made us look like utter dickheads in front of the whole world. They’re laughing at us out there, when they’re not wagging their pointy little laowei fingers. I bet there is a strain of opinion along these lines, but as James pointed out earlier, breaking the truce at the top would be an actual declaration of factional warfare, as in shooting warfare. And the way the case has been handled so far has been at least partly directed towards preserving party unity. This will be a factor in his disposal. However, I bet there’s a certain amount of resentment at the fact that he made many comrades feel that way. So they may shoot his wife, instead. And I don't fancy Wang Lijun's chances much.

The Gang of Four option: ie, life imprisonment on pseudo-criminal but actually political charges. Difficult, I think, because there’s now a much wider separation between actual criminal law and internal party discipline measures: revolutionary crimes got dropped from the statutes back in the nineties. There’s also the fact that Bo is more popular than the Gang of Four were. As with option one, this kind of treatment implies a thorough political purge of the type the party doesn’t do anymore.

The Chen Liangyu option: ie, hanging criminal charges round his neck, along with a chunky tariff, and packing him off to the court to do the necessary. This ties in with the ‘rule of law’ theme the Party has been promoting with his detention. However, there’s been no criminal investigation of Bo so far: all that stuff has been dumped on Madam Gu. I think the Party want to keep this one in-house, but it could be an option if the Party wants to push reform credentials. Bo can always be sedated in court, if he hasn't been trained into suitable humility under Shuanggui.

The Zhao Ziyang: Bo disappears into lifelong house arrest, with, perhaps, the odd spot of golf parole. Has the advantage of making the problem go away without generating waves of suspicion and hard feeling among people who matter. Has the disadvantage that it appears like the Party is looking after its own. But everyone knows it does that anyway.

Wildcard: Utterly remorseful at his betrayal of Party, nation and people, Bo commits suicide on the eve of the final disposal of his case. Could even be technically genuine if they work on him hard enough. But no-one will believe it.

I’m leaning towards option four, basically since it’s the least disruptive. Any thoughts?

service denied

From an interesting q & a with Chen Guangcheng, conducted by Ian Denis Johnson:

...the problem is that many ordinary Chinese can’t get online. Right now, the percentage of Chinese with cell phones is high but in the countryside Internet access is relatively low. So I think a lot of these foreign broadcasters are wrong to stop broadcasting in shortwave to China. In the past, we listened regularly to Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada International, and of course Voice of America. But countries are planning to scale back or even cut these services. This shows that these people don’t understand the situation in the countryside in China.

The World Service shut down its Mandarin service last year, another victim of the managerial/geek 'let's put everything on the internet and save costs and anyway nobody listens to the radio any more' axis. Chen's normally characterised as an activist, but he's also a kind of deep China classic: the self-taught village intellectual, tuning into shortwave every night, consulted by his neighbours over baffling official documents, or to intercede with officials, or because he might have some idea of what's going on in the world. Such are the nobodies who listen to the radio.

MGI watch - Zuotan, Shaxi,

After last night’s post, here’s hot news of a couple of classic MGIs from none other than Happy Guangdong. First up, Zuotan, which is part of Foshan municipality:

On June 26 before dawn, hundreds of riot police clashed with the villagers in Zuotan, part of the city of Foshan in Guangdong Province. Police cars were smashed and flipped over. Many villagers were hospitalized for injuries, including an 81-year-old veteran of the Korean War who was beaten unconscious. Demanding to speak with the village secretary in person about the cheap sale of land [the villagers currently live on and cultivate], thousands of residents surrounded the village Party headquarters, gathering in the afternoon and staying through the early hours of the next morning. At 2 a.m., several hundred riot police arrived and began beating unarmed villagers in an attempt to escort the village secretary away. Residents defended themselves with bricks. The riot police eventually pulled out

It’s not clear from the report which side currently has possession of the Party Secretary. You’ll note that both the cause of the riot here, and the methodology of the rioters, is identical to the Wukan incident, whose successful handling is – or was - Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yang’s ticket to the Politburo Standing Committee. It may be that this decision has already been taken. If not, this incident will not do him any favours at all.

Nor will events elsewhere in Guangdong, where we have what seems like an absolute monster of an MGI, a full-blown state of siege in Shaxi, involving thousands of angry migrant workers from Sichuan descending on the town following a fight between a Sichuanese and a local man:

On Tuesday, thousands of migrant workers swarmed into Shaxi from Guangzhou, Foshan, Jiangmen and other neighboring cities, overwhelming the local police force. Rioters are wrecking every motor vehicle they see, stopping moving cars in order to batter them. Police cars, privately owned cars and bus stops have all been destroyed. A number of shops have been broken into as well. The Zhongshan Fuhua Station was set on fire and burned for close to 24 hours. The Shaxi town hall has also been ruined. At first the rioters allowed ambulances in to bring food and water to armed police and others. After 5 p.m. no cars were allowed in and protesters began overturning cars. At least five ambulances have been torn apart. It is reported that several protesters have died and over 100 have been injured, mostly workers. More than 100 people have been arrested.

That’s originally from a dissident website. Wire service reports say the incident was smaller. Splitting the difference and you still have a hell of a fight.