Blood & Treasure

scenes from a propaganda war

Syrian rebels busted faking footage of a plane shootdown using a rather dinky model aeroplane kit. Over on the other side of the hill, Homs is rockin' tonite.

You know what Bashar's people are getting at here. Everything's normal, we're all having fun and there'll be no pool parties if the angry beardies take over. But it comes across more Berlin Bunker than Club Tropicana. Why, is that Herr Fegelein being dragged from the room by men in leather coats?

he's not smiling now

Here's a rather awesome example of the continued potency of the human flesh search engine. Note the division of labour here in the deployment of the weibo subculture devoted to the analysis of cadres watches. Funny to think that the whole human flesh search engine thing started by tracking down a woman making kitten crushing videos.

old codger wows partisans

I kind of hope Clint was trying to bootleg a bit of bipartisan criticism into his speech at Romneyfest (on Afghanistan and Guantanamo), rather than just being an 82 year old man addressing an empty chair while making throat slitting gestures. Still, I see promise in the format and look forward to the Democrats featuring Barbara Streisand shouting at a bus stop or Oprah cackling to herself while poisoning next door's kittens or or Michael Martin Sheen not being quite sure why he's standing in the front garden after having definitively forgotten to put his trousers on, or Oliver Stone wandering the streets trying to identify the one person not responsible for assassinating Kennedy.

I believe it was Charlton Heston who pioneered this encroaching senility approach to celebrity endorsement. Was it really the case that he once addressed an audience of gun owners as 'my fellow Armenians' while fondling a Dushki? Sadly no: I just made that up.

the question needs no answer

If you want to while away a little time with some contemporary craziness, here’s the latest bulletin from the Committee Against Government Apologies to Korea, the government concerned being that of Japan.

My favourite bit records how the Japanese occupation saved Korea from a joint Methodist-Baptist-Comintern plot (p75). China was not so lucky:

Just as the Christians had hoped, China embraced Communism. But did Communism bring happiness to the Chinese people? The question needs no answer.

Via the Marmot’s Hole.

Elsewhere, a man apparently likely to be Japan’s next Prime Minister concurs with the claim, also repeated in the linked document, that the comfort women were an entirely voluntary phenomenon.

may contain nuts

Oh, dear:

Whatever the translation, the Israelis construe Cleese’s utterance as the generals’ official approval of a military strike. Delighted, they give one another victorious high five signs and triumphantly exit to launch their attack.

This is a bit overwrought: I don't think John Cleese is aiding a subliminal campaign to noramalise the prospect of launching a war against Iran through the medium of a TV advert for a fattening choclate-based snacks (also noted: when Israel won wars, it didn't allow its human materiel to be corrupted by TV ads for fattening chocolate-based snacks). It's more of a death march of commerce thing, with a cute Silly Walk angle. 

But poor old John Cleese, blundering around the world at his age, picking up the advertunities. I look forward to seeing him in a flat turban, promoting the excellence of the Iranian Pistachio Marketing Board, maybe throwing in some hardened shell jokes.

benign neglect anticipated

The Dalai Lama has high-ish hopes for Comrade Xi and his forthcoming administration. I think the gravamen here is the fact that Hu Jintao was first talent spotted by Deng Xiaoping putting down an uprising in Tibet in 1989, while serving as Party Secretary and wearing a becoming tin hat. Leaving aside other aspects of Chinese policy, Hu's success seems to have embeded the notion among ambitious cadres, at least among his own CYL-populist faction, that kicking around the Tibetans and other disgruntled minorities is a good way to get ahead. 

By contrast, Xi isn't a CYL man. And he's spent his entire career at the opposite end of China. So perhaps the anticipation here is that conspicuous displays of stability management in Tibet will cease to be a career builder for those who hope to rise with his administration. 

naughty but nice

We've posted about author, race driver and uberblogger Han Han here from time to time. There will shortly be a compliation of his work coming out in English. Evan Osnos sets the scene:

Han Han's rise may be most interesting for what it says about his biggest fans: China's post-1989 generation. The people to whom Han Han most appeals in China -- and maybe one day in other countries -- were typically born after or near the end of the Cold War era. They find it easier to conceptualize a writer who can sharply criticize the government in one post and then, in another, oppose revolution by arguing that revolutionary struggles may cause more sorrow than they're worth. Young Chinese don't seem bothered that Han Han can be as passionate about racing as he is about writing, can blog with equal verve about environmental protests and the frustrations of schoolwork, and seems to revel in tweaking Internet censors by using word play and jokes to hide some of his most trenchant criticisms of the establishment. And they may be intrigued by someone who often seeks the limelight, yet claims he passed up an invitation to meet with Barack Obama when the president came to Shanghai (a claim that has not been verified).

There are unproven but persistent claims that Han is the face of a collectve endeavour; a writing and marketing team run by his father designed to establish him as a 'voice of a generation' project. If anything, this would make Brand Han Han more interesting as a phenomenon: naughty but nice; alienated but successful; individualistic but representative; a disenchanted but not oppositional critic of a regime that is uncool but not intolerable.  Such is the space opened up in China's journey from tyranny to oligarchy.

Reagan co-prosperity sphere proposed

From a nice analysis of Romney’s China policies:

In an oblique nod to the concerns of his backers, Romney has floated plans for a titanic Pacific economic engine to take away the downside of a trade war with China, at least in theory: a confrontational free-trade zone that will boost trade internally while sticking it to countries - like the PRC - that fail to display sufficient allegiance to open-market and free-trade principals. 

This initiative appears to be nothing more than a clone of President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership. Romney's alternative has, to his mind, one unanswerable advantage: it is called "The Reagan Economic Zone" (REZ), bringing the irresistible posthumous charisma of the Republican Party's Great Communicator to bear on our overawed Asian trading partners. 

Yes, the Reagan Economic Zone is a thing: the susceptible little yellow people will finally come round when we pay them in Ronnies.

The policy as a whole looks like a doubling down on the ‘Asia Pivot’, just as it threatens to unravel. In principle, competition for the support of the countries around China’s littoral could be no bad thing for those countries: Afghanistan was a lot better off when Daoud was "lighting American cigarettes with Russian matches". But in practice it seems to have suffered from being based on false premises, namely that all the relevant countries are intimidated by China’s claims and that all will therefore form a containing alliance against Beijing under US guidance.

Yet none have ever shown any indication that they are actually intimidated by China, rather than simply opposing it when they think it challenges their interests . Vigorous exchanges of views between representative fisherfolk and various coastguard vessels over disputed bits of sea and symbolic flag bearing raids and settlements on different atolls have been part of the regional choreography for years. Moreover, many of the nations involved also have claims against each other. The overall outcome has been an increasing cycle of claim and counter-claim; and one upshot of that is that Japan, the US’s major pacific ally, is now actively involved in four separate jurisdictional disputes, two of which are with fellow US allies. We’ve also discovered that there’s quite a bit of overt pro-China sentiment in ASEAN, in the form of Cambodia, Malaysia and maybe Indonesia, to which China has just agreed to sell ballistic missile technology.

I’m not by any means saying that China’s claims are justified. But it does seem to me that the region was managing its difficulties at an acceptable level of friction, until the US intervened. That’s when everything started to escalate. And Mitt promises more of the same, with added self-delusion. If Beijing was smart here, it could build a containing alliance by promoting the idea that US involvement brings nothing to the region but the heightened prospect of war. But that would probably mean giving up some of its own claims, so it’s not likely to happen.

sociological observation

They must be pretty posh down in Clacton if they see a large grey plastic bag flapping about in a field and conclude that it must be a lion. Up here we have entire ecosystems of non-organically based charismatic megafauna randomly floating about, and by and large recognise them for the receptacles they are.

Yes, I know that if you scrunch your eyes up enough you can see what looks like a couple of perky ears and a big black nose. Obviously, Binbag Giant Cat Jesus has returned to Essex.

MGI suppression watch: Jiaozuo

Here's a chance to read about successful stability management operations, or at least that’s what this article broadly claims, originally published by People’s Daily and then passed on via m4, a pro-government overseas Chinese website. I haven’t seen any other English language coverage of this incident so can’t link to anything for comparison.

The cause of the affair was a fatal road accident, details of which the demonstration organisers say were hushed up. According to the account, they didn’t get many takers for their demonstration outside the city government despite energetic recourse to gongs and funerary rites and so the incident was easy to suppress.

Maybe this is best looked at as a case study of an incident which either failed to take off or which was successfully suppressed, perhaps either because the original reason didn’t really catch on or because the organisers apparently chose to mobilize through an open bulletin board.

Worth noting here are the facts that the authorities chose to stress the apparent lenience with which they treated the organisers and that it offered a detailed rebuttal, rather than just blaming “some people spreading rumours” or “foreign influences”. This perhaps provides the groundwork for eventually generating a plausible narrative about “incident chasing”, for want of a better phrase.