Blood & Treasure

as though there were any debate to be had

I was very annoyed the other night to find the BBC having a ‘debate’ on Iraq ten years after the invasion as though there were any debate to be had about an enterprise of mass violence whose aftermath demonstrated, about as much as anything could, that there were worse things in the world than the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein if only on the grounds that if you know which way death is coming from, then you have a better chance of getting out of the way.

But anyway. Here’s a good article about the situation now that the foreign armies have gone and the fratricide has burned down to the embers, in circumstances of what might be called distributed authoritarianism under someone who on the whole prefers to rule by cunning than by force.

The new regime seems to have slipped in to the shoes of the former. Officials squat in the opulent residences of their predecessors, whose era they claimed they were ending. Almost no infrastructure has been built in Baghdad over the past 10 years, except the local government headquarters, the road to the airport and a few flyovers. Traffic police shelters at crossroads are stamped “gift from the town hall”, recalling the “donations” (makarim) of Saddam: a personalised substitute for what should be provided anonymously by the state. Public service salaries remain insufficient, driving employees to find supplementary sources of income, legal or not. High-level corruption is tolerated, documented and used as leverage when necessary. Pervasive social climbing, nepotism and incompetence are poisoning institutions.

The Republican Palace in the heart of Baghdad became the “green zone” when the US made it the nerve centre of the occupation, and it embodies the worst of the new order just as it did the old. This huge, fairly well secured area is an exclusive political arena, a place of privilege, and a world that does its best to keep everyone else out. A whole deck of access cards defines a new elite, and a position within its hierarchy. The closure of the Karrada-Mansour main road, which cuts through the green zone, forces ordinary people to make ridiculously long detours. It would be feasible to reopen it, but that is not the issue: the green zone seems to have become the inalienable privilege of a caste that values not having to answer to anyone.

The piece is good on the resilience of the Iraqi people, which I seem to recall is a feature in books and articles I’ve read about Iraq over the years. People kept their heads down under Saddam, made do and mended under the sanctions regime and are now ducking and diving their way through the new order. Of course, there was that descent into hell thing after 2003. That’s the bit the BBC is debating.

be thankful you're not an immigrant

Hey, read James over at Time Out Beijing holding forth on the expat condition.

66 2/28

In words, today is the sixty sixth anniversary of the 2/28 Incident, Taiwan's Tiananmen. I'll note in passing that the political party which committed it also constitutes the current, freely elected government of the island and that it commemorates the incident as follows:

Every February 28, the president of the ROC gathers with other officials to ring a commemorative bell in memory of the victims. The president bows to family members of 2/28 victims and gives each one a certificate officially exonerating the victims, who were previously blacklisted  as enemies of the state. Monuments and memorial parks to the victims of 2/28 have been erected in a number of Taiwanese cities.

high seas gambler

Another great China crime story features a potent mix of Big Crime, Big Business and Big Politics. And a genuine, honest-to-God bond villain.

Born Feb. 16, 1968, Lian, a Hong Kong businessman and former gang member, made his first fortune working at casinos and smuggling. Later, he began operating the Neptune Cruises casino in his family's name. He controls Neptunus, a Hong Kong-listed bio-tech company, and is known as "the king of gambling on the high seas" due in part to his extensive connections with senior government officials as well as underworld organizations.

Anyway: here’s the nexus between illegal gambling junkets from the mainland, underground banking and money laundering.

"Zheng (Shaodong) is a senior official in the mainland's public security system, leading crackdowns on gambling and illegal private banks. I bribed him in exchange for protection," said Lian in his confession. He said that most of the gamblers who go to his casinos in Hong Kong and Macao are from the Chinese mainland, and since their gambling winnings could be ruled illegal, he is forced to deal with mainland police.

I would be quite surprised if Sheldon Adelman’s local casino interests were not making use of similar services. If this were the case, Beijing might have had an interesting relationship with President Romney. 

Anyway, this concerns the case of Huang Guangyu, whose white goods empire once made him China’s richest man but who went down for 14 years inn 2010 for money laundering. nNot that it’s cramped his style. Last I heard, a venture capital vehicle controlled by him was trying to buy the Ark Royal, to turn into a floating casino. via.

"an idiot and a degenerate"

Today's bit of recovered history:

Alarmed by the passage of the new law against sodomy, Whyte wrote to Stalin directly, offering a case for why homosexuality should not be outlawed in a Communist society. In the letter, Whyte relies on a combination of Marxist-Leninist theory and scientific theories of “constitutional homosexuality”; he uses himself as an example of a homosexual who is also a good Communist. Stalin read Whyte’s letter, marked it with the words “an idiot and a degenerate,” and had it archived. When it was finally published by a Russian journal in 1993, it was with the sub-heading “Humor from the Secret Archives.”

You can read the whole letter over here. In a postcript, Mr Whyte notes that his membership of the All-Union Communist Party was on hold until its latest purge had been completed and that he had sent a copy of the letter to the comrades at OGPU. Nothing more seems to be known of him.

learning lessons

So, a Chinese politcal scientist teaching at a Singaporean university reads Discipline and Punish, Foucault's history of how state power reproduces itself through adaptation of the criminal justice system. And takes it as an operator's manual.

lhakarism

There's something in this account of the Tibetan cultural revival movement that doesn't seem to quite fit:

That includes the lhakar movement, which emphasizes individual acts of protest through personal actions such as wearing traditional clothes, eating Tibetan food, listening to Tibetan music and teaching the native language to their children.

Tamding Tsetan, a well-known artist who writes and performs folk songs, is one of the leading exponents of Tibetan heavy metal.

Well, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. Anyway: the lhakar, a kind of Tibetan Gaeltacht thing:

Developed inside Tibet after the uprising of 2008 and more recently exported to the Tibetan Diaspora, Tseten says it challenges Chinese rule while simultaneously allowing Tibetans to assert their culture and identity within the letter of Chinese law.
 
“So, Tibetans have started buying vegetables from Tibetan [grocers], going to Tibetan restaurants, not Chinese," Tseten says. "We are speaking as much Tibetan as possible, not Chinese. But Lakhar is not just about eating Tibetan food and wearing Tibetan dress, it is about getting back your identity. 

Pressures towards Sinicization certainly exist, but I'm pretty sure the Politburo are quite cool with people buying stuff from Tibetan grocers: there's probably a quota for Tibetan grocer creation as part of Provincial economic development metrics. Overall, China's aim is more to co-opt 'Tibetanness' as an inferior part of a Greater Chinese identity than to supress it absolutely.

This actually reads more like a way of disengaging with direct confrontation than anything else: a retreat into culture. If the alternative is serial self-immolation maybe that's not too surprising. 

ongoing negotiated technological surrender

Having already embraced power tools, the Amish are now settling into the use of machines that make words, though not those which talk to each other. This reminds me a bit of recently encountered Amazonian tribes trying to get to grips with the tide of stuff that flows in from the exterior, short of the mass die off from disease, despair and predation. Alternatively, this could be the beginnings of an attempt to make steampunk an actual viable future.

the era of worthwhile initiatives

China Media Project has a scoop:

In an open letter circulating on Chinese social media today, a group of more than 100 prominent individuals — including academics, journalists, lawyers, economists and former Party officials — call on China’s government to immediately ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or ICCPR. The treaty, one of three main components of the UN’s International Bill of Rights, commits ratifying parties to a series of core individual civil and political rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and due process.

Addressed directly to the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the open letter poses a strong challenge to China’s incoming leadership ahead of the annual “two meetings” of the NPC and CPPCC,which are scheduled to convene on March 5.

The significance here isn't really the demand, which isn't going to be met, but a) the mobilisation, b) the direct attempt to make demands of the government, c) the fact that the persons involved felt it was safe to do so and d) the prospect of various government critics drawing together into an extra-party lobby (if so, it's probably best not to refer to them as a 'movement' until such time they decide to do so themselves). 

The petition was set to appear on Thursday in a 'major newspaper' but had to be released early, online, after the authorities got wind of the plan. I take it that this means Southern Group is still in the hands of the censors, despite recent protests.

I suspect coverage of this will be a bit overblown, as with the Wukan affair. My take is that if we regard activism in China as a kind of dancing on the lip of the volcano, then maybe the lip has got large enough to make room for large-ish scale co-ordinated dancing. Which is something.

'they use the graves of people's ancestors to decorate their hats'

On the eve of Lunar New Year and first day of the New Year, local residents began to rebuild their ancestors’ graves. However, local governments keep warning the villagers over loudspeakers that they must dig up the graves again or else they will be slapped with a fine of 500-1000 yuan and the government will forcibly dig up the grave.

Involving as it does grave robbing, unaccountable power, justified cynicism, and, sadly, a gangnam style parody video involving people dressed as zombies, I should have covered the Henan province grave reclamation protests before. However, it was rumbling on for a while and I never quite got round to disinterring it from the to-blog list.

I’m pleased to say that Global Voices has now done the necessary.

Local irony: Our neighbourhood graveyard here in north Manchester was dug up four years ago and replaced by our local Tesco, to no more than a murmur of opposition. There’s a little plaque in the corner of the car park and a couple of benches where the staff eat their lunches and smoke.