Blood & Treasure

a vision and a philosophy

Sir Frank Lowe, who helped coin Tesco’s slogan “Every little helps”, understood the necessary political alchemy to win this common ground when he said that Labour must communicate with the voters “in a way that shows them a vision and a philosophy that they themselves already wish to embrace”. 

Read the whole thing. I suspect that it's basically a transcribed speech, but the best thing you can say for Cruddas here is that he had some kind of cerebral event while producing this gibberish.

I actually like Ed M on a personal basis.  He's smart, and he's ruthless and while his hate may not be pure he's a bit of a killer when he wants to be, unlike that dopey brother of his. All that goes well with the dweeb facade. I'm also fairly sure that the people who are saying he doesn't look prime-ministerial now will be saying he should have won by a majority of 80 rather than 60 in a few years. But as things stand he can do it without me.

baby on plate

Steven Poole writes:

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word "baby" in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a "baby" lamb or the "baby" queen scallop can be "resting" (in the scallop's case, resting itself on another baby, this time a "baby gem", since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these "baby" organisms into our mouths doesn't register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Babies are young, tender, helpless and succulent. The last thing we want to eat are old people, even though consumption of their beating hearts may transfer their courage and survivor smarts to ouselves. Babies also start appearing on menus at the upper end of the scale. They can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of successful predation. The poor eat chips. The rich eat babies. The weak are meat. The strong are hungry.

ordinary decent communists

It's always worth remembering that opposition to the CPC doesn't pit you against a regime or an ideology but against conventional wisdom, the power of the way things are, ordinarily ambitous people with workaday parochial goals in life and, indeed, the notion of aspiration itself. Whatever your politics, it makes you a kind of existential extremist. What, you don't think people should get on in life? Are you some kind of communist or something? Notice that the chap who takes the whole ideology thing seriously is on the verge of losing his job.

This probably an indication that I should go away and lie down for a while but I sometimes try and transpose CPC membership on to life in the UK. Would everyone in parliament be a CPC member or go off and do something else: no brainer. What is David Cameron if not leader of a Princeling faction? Sir Alan Sugar? Not only a CPC member but a proud ornament of the National People's Congress. The contestants on Dragon's Den? Party members one and all. James Delingpole? Party member. Polly Toynbee? Party member. 

Doing what I do, I wouldn't have to join the CPC if I was doing it in China, which is lucky because it seems to contain 83 million people who I would have hated at school. Doing what she does, Mrs Treasure would, I think. I told her this and she just muttered something about more bullshit bingo.

early planned alcoholism

Or, The London Pissed:

The story of the Gin Craze properly begins with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William III of Orange to the British throne. He brought with him a hatred of all things French -- he immediately banned the import of Gallic spirits, such as brandy -- and a warring political agenda that required funding. Meanwhile, William’s wealthy landowner friends in Parliament had surplus grain, not to mention an eye for the profit it could make them....

This led to a series of political machinations that would set the stage for gin’s stranglehold on the underprivileged. First, the Distilling Act of 1690 dissolved the production monopoly that had been held by the Worshipful Company of Distillers, thus allowing anyone to set up a still simply by posting a public notice and produce spirits without a license.

Then, in 1694, beer -- the “national beverage” -- was subjected to a heavy tax, making gin cheaper to drink. In 1720, one of Parliament’s annual Mutiny Acts stated that those who distilled spirits in their homes didn’t have to house soldiers, since soldiers and alcohol often did not create the best of situations. Soon, “distillers” of the home-grown sort abounded. Over time, the government would come to rely heavily on excises on distilled spirits for revenue.

The author puts this down to the simultaneous growth of an early 'consumer society'. More likely it was a down to the fact that people paid a bare subsistence to work until they collapsed substituted gin for food, to the point where this was perceived as a threat to economic productivity and national cohesion, at which juncture the forces of religion, law and morality intervened to deprive people of their gin without raising their wages. Hogarth was on to this with Beer Street. 

Incidentally, I seem to recall that the cheapo pseudo brand "My Mum's" which was widespread in the north of England not so many years ago actually produced a "My Mum's Gin", though I may have been on tha vodka at the time so I can't swear to it.

chewing over Bo

The data dump technique over Bo doesn't seem to have worked: a search for Bo Xilai on Sina Weibo right now gets you 7 milliion results, and some interesting theorising:

“From Dalian to Liaoning, from Liaoning to the Ministry of Commerce, from the Ministry of Commerce to Chongqing, Bo Xilai brought disease wherever he went. What does this approximately 20-year career track show? [If] Bo Xilai was poor at managing people, [does that not mean] that every level of government was also imprudent in managing Bo? Does this type of phenomenon not require reflection? Shouldn’t we seek out who’s responsible?”

An significant component of regime stability is the perception that while lower level cadres may be corrupt, higher level ones - certainly at the Politburo level - are honest: the old 'mountains high, emperor far away' thing. It's by no means a universal perception and seems to have been fading in recent years, but it's still there: it informs the classic structure of mass incidents, where rioters appeal to justice to those on high from their local oppressors. This was one of the reasons why I thought Bo would just vanish into house arrest. The Party seems to have decided that it wants Bo nailed publicly so much that it's prepared to blow this useful perception sky high. He's technically no higher up than Chen Liangyu in Shanghai but his princeling background and general prominence makes him much more of a central figure, especially since he's from the same family-party milieu as Xi Jinping. At any rate, it seems like no-one was arguing for him unless this took the form of an argument as to why Politburo members don't kill each other these days. Also:

Translating this again, this release–which has been vetted over and over again–is trying to emphasize two levels of meaning: The first is that Bo [Xilai] took bribes himself, the second is that Bo [Xilai] and his wife [Gu Kailai] conspired together for their son’s benefit. How did they conspire? What were they conspiring to get?

Dunno. Degree at Oxford? But then Guagua spent a lot of time here up till a couple of years ago, and was quite the man about town. So who knows what we're going to hear.

farewell, sausage

Loukanikos, the Greek Riot Dog, is now living in retirement in Athens and no doubt boring all the other local canines with tall soixante-huitard type tales. One imagines there's a similar network of ex-riot dog owners in Greece as there is of ex-racing greyhound adopters elsewhere.

toast of Chongqing is toast

So at 7 o'clock on Friday night before the start of the week long National Day holiday the Party unloads on its errant son. And boy does it ever unload: abuses of power, taking huge bribes through himself and his family and 'inappropriate sexual relations with multiple women'. The allegations go back from his time in Chongqing, through his role as Commerce Minister and back to his days as Mayor of Dalian. Evidence of other unspecified crimes has also been uncovered, allegedly.

Bo's been expelled from the Party, which paves the way for him to face criminal charges. So I was pretty badly off point when I predicted that he'd be permanently sequestered in the manner of Zhao Ziyang. The trends seemed to point towards leniency early on, but the fact that charges against him got back at least as far as the early nineties shows that the CDIC people decided to go over his career pretty thoroughly. They clearly didn't like what they found. And though we don't know what specific charges he's going to face it's also clear that the Party want him buried enough to allow some incredibly embarrassing stuff to bubble up in a court.

Incidentally, the point about Bo taking bribes through his family flags up another British connection. How did the family get hold of the tuition fees to send young Guagua to Harrow and then Oxford? We may be about to find out.

In other news, the date of the 18th Party Congress has now been set for November 8, in line with the 17th Party Congress statement that it would take place in the last half of this year, but later than the various floral displays and block hotel bookings in Beijing would indicate. Perhaps there was a last minute decision to get Bo finally out of the way before striding boldly on into the glorious future.

the spark that goes out without lighting anything

An interesting piece here on why some political self-immolations work and others don't, with particular reference to the Tibetan situation: 51 Tibetans have now self-immolated since 2009, to very little response. The extent of China's security presence has clearly been enough to smother anything other than sporadic protests following these incidents. It's not just the fact that PAP troopers go around carrying fire extinguishers but that their whole presence is a fire-blanket.

But still the immolations go on. I'm beginning to wonder if they are actually political in the sense of despair weaponized to promote resistance or whether it's just actual despair we're seeing, an indicator of a wider collapse into a Tristes Tropiques state of mind among Tibetans, especially in historic Cham and Amdo, which hasn't just seen political repression but a wider dislocation of traditional ways of life. 

The Dalai Lama meanwhile is apparently hopeful that Xi JInping's arrival will see a softer line on Tibetan affairs, though on closer examination this comes down to the Dalai once being friendly enough with Xi's father to give him a watch and maybe also because Xi is supposed to be a bit of a closet Buddhist. It's not a convincing line of argument.

publisher in unfortunate choice of words

Makinson added that a prerequisite to any e-book market is a digital copyright regime which protects the interests of authors. The General Administration of Press and Publication, China's publishing regulator, has said that under China's 12th Five-Year Plan it will roll out policies aimed at strengthening the digital publishing market. That includes research and development efforts targeting digital copyright protection technology.

"This is something which, three years ago, I was very concerned about in China, where there wasn't really a copyright regime in place. And I really want to pay tribute to the GAPP and the enormous progress that has been made over the last couple of years in putting in place a framework for digital copyright," said Makinson at the forum.

I know he was referring specifically to digital copyright, but in general I don't think the man in charge of Penguin books should be 'paying tribute' to the agency which is also responsible for censoring Chinese writers on behalf of the state.

counter-containment

South Koreans seem to be quite supportive of China’s anti-Japanese demonstrations. But then experience of Japanese colonialism is something that China and Korea have in common. That’s also true for Malaysia and Indonesia; not to mention the Philippines and Vietnam, where a couple of million people died of starvation under Japanese rule. Mongolia and Taiwan have highly conflicted histories with Japan. The current Taiwanese government represents the KMT version of the Chinese anti-Japanese tendency: in Mongolia, you have the fact that the Bloody White Baron was historically a major agent of Japanese influence.

What I’m wondering here is if a revival of a pan-Asian, anti-Japanese sensibility may actually be part of the wider plan here, something to counter the containing alliance/offshore balancing configuration the US wants to set up against China, and something which mitigates all the other maritime disputes going on right now. So if China’s response to Japan’s nationalization of the disputed territories leads to a more aggressive Japanese stance on territorial issues, past victims of Japanese aggression respond by leaning towards China. At any rate, it’s worth remembering that anti-Japanese sentiment has real historical causes and isn’t confined to Chinese fenqing.