Blood & Treasure

offence goes downmarket

Salman Rushdie's memoirs look like they might be fun if only for his apparently inexhaustible capacity for grudge-jeeping keeping, but I cannot associate myself with this thesis:

Whether the battle over The Satanic Verses has ended “in victory or defeat” is, Rushdie writes, “hard to say.” Rushdie survived the fatwa,The Satanic Verses continues to be published. And yet, “a climate of fear” has developed that makes it “harder for books like his to be published, or even, perhaps, to be written.” There has developed over the past two decades a much stronger sense that it is morally unacceptable to give offence to other cultures or faiths. The campaigners against The Satanic Verses lost the battle but they have won the war. The fatwa has, in the West, effectively become internalized.

Leaving aside the obvious rhetorical warning signs here - starting the argument in the passive voice to make an assertion seem like an actual atate of affairs and ending it with an unfalsifiable claim - this is nonsense on the facts. When Rushdie was threatened with murder the response was incredibly grudging. You had Cabinet ministers like Geoffrey Howe and Norman Tebbit going to the media to distance themselves from the disagreeable necessity of protecting a British citizen – a respected author at that -  who had no idea at all that his book would produce threats to kill him. These days, any bottom feeder can produce ‘speech’ with no other aim in mind than baiting Muslims, succeed in so doing with the help of sundry angry beards pleased with the opportunity to break stuff and derail US foreign policy, and have his right to do so publicly guaranteed by the President and the Secretary of State. This would indicate that the right to give offence is alive and thriving.

Or maybe not. But that’s nothing to do with any fatwas,'internalised' or not, or Rushdie for that matter. Starmer’s legal power grab here is based precisely on the fact that there’s more potentially offensive speech around these days.

 

not one of us

Three days later, I met one of the men who had been torturing the young man. He had a sorry look on his face.

The 'young man' just wanted to fit in. The Syrian revolution culls the socially inadequate. This is roughly like it was in school for the people who said the wrong things at the wrong times, only with fatal consequences.

scheduled event happens on time

Tania Branigan maybe drops a hint to some of her fellow hacks:

China watchers now know vastly more about the lives of ordinary people than ever before. Yet the country's version of Kremlinology – Zhongnanhaiology, after the vermilion-walled compound where its leaders live and work – has in some ways advanced little since the mid-70s, when a (now declassified) CIA guide asked: "Does logic help?"

She goes on to note that the best guess we have to the exact timing of the 18^th Party Congress, at which Xi and co are due to assume the purple, is the information gleaned via hotel receptionists in Beijing that the local marathon was being postponed because of block bookings by party officials. It follows from this that there are thousands of people who know when the next Party Congress is. Some of them will obviously be the people responsible: but most of them will be receptionists, cleaners, security guards, guys who deliver stuff in vans low level clerical staff in Beijing state organs and so on. Throw in their families, the women they chat up at karaoke bars, the men these women are trying to fend off with bits of gossip, the waiters and bar staff in their favourite restaurants and all their friends and families and you have quite a badly kept secret.

Moreover, it’s not a very secret secret. The 17^th party congress stated that it would have a reunion and see the old gang again sometime in the last half of this year. And the actual likely date seems to be on the exact anniversary of the last Congress. See you next week lads? Same place? Yeah, nice one.

Lastly, now that huge floral signs are being put up all over Beijing welcoming delegates, it’s not any kind of secret at all: or wouldn’t be if the press corps hadn’t spent the last six months investing the process with such a sense of mystery that they now appear to be unable to stop.

First, the Congress was going to be delayed so the consequences of the Bo affair could be dealt with. Then it was going to be brought forward, to give more time to deal with the consequences of the Bo affair, in each case sourced to anonymous but apparently highly placed contacts. As Ms Branigan points out, we had a similar process going on with Xi Jinping’s disappearance: in the absence of official comment, everything was true. There’s also a persistent ‘highly sourced’ rumour that the PB standing committee will be reduced from nine members to seven.

The two posts due for the chop are supposedly those dealing with propaganda and internal security. This may be true – it certainly has a lot of traction -  but it’s also an indicator that the rumour is being promoted by the reform camp within the apparat. Other rumours may also be true, but as Ms Branigan also points out, they are also prime spinning opportunities for interested parties, some of whom may be mainly interested in impressing their colleagues by the fact that they can get stories into the big Western newspapers, though maybe this is more of a factor in relation to the named Chinese academic typically quoted for his interpretation of what the anonymous insider asserts.

All this is a lot of fun, and certainly more informative than, say, the lunch-based stenography typical of British political reporting.  But what I think I know at the end of the process is that everything in China is going to carry on in pretty much the way it has always done, until it can’t. 

country ways

It's not all rioting, nationalism and high-level intrigue: welcome to China's 7th National Peasant Games. Clumping great irony alert:

Beijing welcomed the world to the Olympic Games of 2008 after a capitalwide makeover that included the demolishing of whole city blocks of homes. Nanyang made way for a 35,000-seat arena and other facilities by knocking down the homes of over 50,000 people in Wancheng district, mostly peasants according to the local government website.

The thing seems to have started as a symbolic means of reassurance to the peasantry that they were not forgotten in the hurly-burly of reform and then to have mutated into an opportunity for fourth tier cities to host 'prestige' projects. Happiness economics is apparently in the mix, too. And to a Brit of my age, the ghostly presence of It's a Knock Out is also detectable.

Anyway. Events include rice planting and tyre-rolling, though the militiamen's triathlon, featuring hand-grenade throwing, seems to be absent this year. No sign of 'black jail dodging' or 'chasing the party secretary out of town' either.

Here's some footage of the 2008 games.

'the victim's co-workers sought revenge'

The Mike Daisey fabrications have tended to conceal the fact that there is obviously something seriously wrong with Foxconn. Maybe it's that the scale and nature of operations tend to concentrate various of the causes of social discontent in China into their facilities:

“A large number of workers were moved to Taiyuan to make iPhone 5 in a rush. The security personnel at the factory had a fight with a worker from Shandong Province, dragged him to a van and beat him up. The victim’s co-workers from Shandong sought revenge, and workers from Henan Province became involved too, and the situation devolved into chaos where workers chased down security guards and beat them up.”

Ten dead, according to some sources. So here you have clannishness among migrant workers from different places, abuses of power by security forces, the general callousness inherent in the conscription and disposal of labour forces, etc. Note here the trend from individual suicides to incoherent mass action: perhaps the latest installment of 'the iphone and the making of the Chinese working classes'.

Here's an earlier installment:

According to Chinese media reports, college classes have been suspended and students have been involuntarily sent to the local Foxconn plant as extra workforce for the production of iPhone 5’s. 

where are you all coming from

A dictatorship reforms:

Bahrain is aiming to reignite its tourism sector after months of civil unrest by building a US$5m theme park based on The Smurfs, the popular Belgian children’s cartoon centred around a group of small blue fictional creatures, it was reported at the weekend.

...The development will include 30 Smurf houses measuring around 50 sqm and which can accommodate up to 20 children each.

In addition, the report said there will also be a 250 sqm Papa Smurf house and a 220 sqm castle, which will home to the Smurf’s nemesis Gargamel. Plans will also include a café, aquarium, stables and a souvenir shop.

This sounds like the kind of weird, flaky econ.dev. project a regime under pressure goes in for. When it fails due to further unrest, the facilities are used as a detention centre and at night noises can be heard coming from Papa Smurf's house. Eventually, the place features in Amnesty reports and first person testimonials by broken men and women. This is put to the people responsible for the Smurf brand, who smile thinly and shift about in their chairs.

intellectual life

Most of Ian Johnson's feature on Yu Hua is paywalled, but how's this for a writers and artists colony:

We stayed in a villa in a secluded development built on part of a wetlands park. The string of houses, bridges, and canals was surrounded by high walls and walkie-talkie-wielding guards. Yu’s neighbors were film producers, directors, artists, writers, and government officials—all beneficiaries of a city-run company that owned the properties and lent them out to anyone it figured might lend luster to Hangzhou, do something artistic, or simply had the pull to live in a luxury development. Yu is one of China’s most famous writers and even though his relationship to the city is tenuous—he was born in Hangzhou but left as an infant for a small town and now lives in Beijing—officials hoped he’d give their city some cachet.

Over the next few days, the villa was the setting for a series of meals, one raunchier than the next. The high point was a boozy lunch where the head of the local writer’s association ogled the legs of the deputy head of propaganda, while a paunchy singer for the People’s Liberation Army showed off a “talented young lady” he had taken under his wing. Later, a Party secretary arrived with a suitcase full of French wine and an enormous celadon vase from the onetime imperial kilns of Jingdezhen—the sort of trophy that governments in China fob off on famous visitors and hotel lobbies.

He then proceeds to wind them up about the Party while they all chuckle and go 'oh, you cheeky monkey'. You can read more on Yu Hua over here.

Interesting how Huangzhou seems to have cracked the 'attratcing cultural capital' issue without any pop psychology, conferences or strategy papers. Just throw up a luxury compound and switch the booze tap on.

a close escape

I certainly wasn’t expecting to be woken up in the morning by a member of the group telling me that I should leave that very moment, because the group was threatening physical violence against me.

This was the point where I began to wonder if there wasn’t another story underneath the public one, the one about ‘gategate’ and the cultlike behaviour of a group of activists under the purview of a bumptious and irascible politician.

I was thinking of the sort of story that Barbara Vine would do, or Ian McEwen back in his early days before he discovered that he had Things to Tell Us, or maybe Paul Bowles and his cool outlines of complex and painful expatriate fates. The sort of story where a jaunt to teach Rwandan teachers English is merely the early bonding stage in a more serious venture, one which binds its participants together forever through mutual guilty knowledge. One that sees more people go out on a journey than come back. One that sees the survivors look distracted while talking vaguely about what Africa had ‘taught’ them and what they ‘learned’ while they were there. One where this learning consists of the knowledge that while they would deliberately not look at their former tripmates should they see them on the street, they could phone each other up at three in the morning with urgent requests.

Things clearly did not take that turn here and there is nothing to really indicate that they could have, apart from my overactive imagination and the knowledge of how difficult it is to generate cohesion in party politics in a post-ideological age. I’m not sure it is a post-ideological age. But political parties insist that it is and so it is reasonable to assume that they act according to this belief and have found other ways to bind their members together. Does everybody come back when they all go off on trips together? Or is someone missing on return, someone a bit awkward, perhaps, who just didn’t ‘get it’. ‘He was fine one minute and then…’ ‘we warned her about the riptide…’ ‘the truck just came careering round the bend’… ‘it’s the custom to bury people immediately over there…’

unusual life form spotted

This appears to be an actual, real life, specifically pro-American revolt. That's incredibly rare.

wild helmsman

Unlike Oiwan Lam I don’t think all the people waving Mao placards out on last weeks demos were Maoists. In fact I bet that nearly all of them weren’t and that the wider attitude of many people carrying his picture was more like the chap quoted here:

“If old Mao were alive,” he said, “then these corrupt officials would be hanged to death.”

It’s certainly true that a banner of Mao is a politically safe thing to wave; but it also contains an implicit threat to the Party. After all, Mao is responsible for the deaths of more CPC members than Chiang Kai-shek ever managed, or the Japanese: He was one of the world’s great killers of Communists. So the idea that his image was being handed out of the back door for people to run amok with never struck me as likely. Rather, he was something like a talisman that could be waved about patriotically to ward off the authorities while people took possession of the streets.  

What we should consider here is the proposition that rather than being part of a mass orchestration, the Mao we saw last weekend has bust out of the mausoleum and run wild and that significant sections of the Chinese public are making of him something genuine to them. In principle, this is a good thing: the public has seized possession of a state icon, however misinformed they might be about him. There’s a power shift of sorts going on here.

Well OK, this version of Mao turns out to be an Angry War God. But if there’s a market in Maos out there, there’s no reason why you couldn’t pitch a better one, like that fellow who by a bold stroke of diplomacy ended decades of animosity between the US and China. That guy would be useful to have around right now.

Incidentally, if only Nixon could go to China, could only Mao go to Japan, at least on a peace errand? Maybe something for Comrade Xi to think about.