Blood & Treasure

mass incident watch: Beijing

Slap in the heart of the big dumpling; or at least on the South Third Ring Road. Here’s some video of a large demonstration today outside Jingwen mall in south Beijing, after the body of a woman named Yuan Liya was found dead outside the building. The cops say she jumped. The protestors say that Ms Yuan, who was an employee at the mall, was gang raped by security guards and then thrown off the roof. Ms Yuan was from Anhui and according to reports I’ve seen most of the protestors are from her home town. Here are some photos of the protest.

Here’s a brief account of the protest at Global Times, which clearly lowballs the numbers involved and which omits the above details, along with the fact that there was a huge police/PAP presence, apparently to forestall the protestors stated aim of marching on Tiananmen.

There’s a longer account of the story at the Beijing Cream blog, based in China, but attempts to link to it just return a 404. The name Yuan Liya and the term suicide are now sensitive words on the Sinosphere.

It’s now 1 am in Beijing, so presumably the crowds have dispersed, at least for today.

I’ll update this post as I have more. The nearest parallel in mass incident terms I can think of is the Weng’an incident in Guizhou in 2008.

local deity steps down

"People keep rushing out of their houses, hands on their heads in disbelief asking me if I've heard the news" 

Alex Ferguson’s time in Manchester roughly co-incides with my own. He was leading what was then a group of ill-assorted notorious piss artists to defeat at Oxford United at around the same time I was settling into a council squat in Hulme.

In those days he was, at some level, a bit of a joke: a grim Presbyterian appointed to knock a bunch of playboys into shape. There was a sense that they’d see the back of him before too long. Instead he got rid of them, and proceeded to build an Empire over the border in Trafford.

In non-footballing terms he became institutionalised as a kind of tutelary guardian of the city as a whole, red-faced like something out of a Buddhist hell, with a localised ability to make time stretch and a capacity for permanent anger that, you felt, could ward off the evil eye. Outsiders feared his wrath. In mythological terms, he was the troll who guarded the gate to the city from those with hostile intent. When he finally dies, he’ll be buried in the Scythian manner, in a kurgan, with his favourite racehorses and, perhaps, Eric Cantona.

All nonsense of course. But I do feel curiously and vaguely unprotected since I heard he was actually going.

more on poisonings and protests

Last Friday, I mentioned the case of Zhu Ling, the young Tsinghua university student crippled by Thallium poisoning in 1995. The affair went completely berserk on the Sinosphere over the weekend, with some interesting results:

For a Chinese government determined to corral public opinion in its favor, the failed attempt to shut down the Zhu debate is nothing short of a spectacular public-relations failure. On Friday, an enterprising netizen turned to the U.S. government and posted a petition to the White House website. It asks that the U.S. government “investigate and deport” Sun and pointedly takes note of her “family’s powerful political connections.” As of Monday afternoon in China, the petition exceeded the 100,000 signatures necessary for an official response from the White House. In all likelihood, that response will be diplomatic and noncommittal.

The upside here for Beijing is that a lot of people in China apparently still believe in petitions; just to a different Emperor.

Elsewhere, China Digital Times has a great rundown of contrasting events in Chengdu and Kunming this weekend. The Kunming cops decided to let the protest go ahead, accurately figuring that 2000 people letting off steam in a city of 7 million was no big deal, and, I have to say, policing the whole affair a lot more sensitively than we’ve been seeing from the Met of late. In Chengdu, by contrast, the cops went to some truly bizarre lengths to make sure the whole thing didn’t happen. I imagine both sets of cops will think they handled events correctly, as they say. 

without fear of hell or hope of paradise

A couple of excellent obituaries of the late Giulio Andreotti. It falls to us to pay tribute by noting that he died in the same week as the anniversary of Machiavelli’s birth and wondering what exactly he meant by that.

one policy, two interpretations

Here are a couple of contrasting articles on China’s one child policy: Ma Jian gives it the full totalitarian nightmare treatment. By contrast Leslie Chang draws a picture of a law slowly dying a natural death through the willingness of ever larger numbers of people to ignore it.

I think the problem with the Chang piece is a sort of dippy-libertarian sense that if enough people ignore the state it will just sort of wither away. Nonetheless the picture of contentious politics it presents strikes me as more accurate. One of the ways in which you can place people in China is in understanding the latitude they have to disobey particular laws, and why. OTOH, without getting into nitpicking, some of the details presented by Ma  in his full-totalitarian thesis seem to be pushing the envelope a bit:

When a black plastic bag floated past, my fellow passengers would point at it and mutter under their breath: "Another dead baby."

What, every black plastic bag? Most of them?

Returning to the two articles, which of these paras is right? Leslie Chang:

Before getting pregnant with her second child, Lu Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit. Officials in her husband’s Hunan village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She may eventually be fined $1,600—about what she makes in two months in her purchasing job at a Guangdong paint factory. “Everyone told me to hide so the family-planning people wouldn’t find me, but I went around everywhere,” she told me. “In the past, that place had very strict family planning, but now the policy has loosened. The cadres worry that there are too many only children here.” I asked her if government policy had factored into her decision to have a second child. “It was never a consideration,” she said.

Ma Jian:

In a small village in remote Guangdong, a contact took me to her local family planning centre, and told the director that I was a state reporter from Beijing. He took me to his office and we talked for hours. Backlit by a dusty window, he leaned over his desk and showed me the record book that meticulously charted the menstrual cycles and pelvic examination results of every woman of childbearing age in the village. He said 98% of the 280 women were fitted with IUDs. Every three months, he broadcasts an announcement through the village summoning every woman for a mandatory ultrasound to check that her IUD is still in place.

I think Ma may be pushing the envelope here as well a bit. How many villages still broadcast propaganda announcements over the tannoy, Totalitarian Butlins style? And why does the official have a record book rather than a computer? When was this information obtained, and what has changed since?

Still, the answer is probably that both of these extracts are true. Hunan is a labour exporting province; local officials need to keep the remittances up and keep at least a modicum of economic life in the villages. Guangdong receives a huge number of incomers, making localized population pressure – at the level where it’s measured – all the more acute. Or maybe the latitude local officials have allows site-specific misogyny full rein.

To reiterate, I think the Leslie Chang piece is probably closer to the overall picture than Ma Jian’s. In which case it's worth repeating this from her article:

A friend of mine in Shanghai had two abortions in the years following the birth of her daughter. “A lot of entrepreneurs, including some of my friends, have two children,” she told me. “But we both work for government units, so we can’t.”

release the batmobile

Syrian rebels, apparently filmed yesterday in Dier Ezzor:

load bearers

Interesting piece on the background to the recent fight between megastar mountaineers and Sherpas on Everest. Proximate cause:

Professionals like the Swiss Ueli Steck and the Italian Simone Moro, whose use of the word "motherfucker" in Nepali started the spat,...

Well, yes. Inter alia, try calling a Gurkha a motherfucker and see what happens. Or indeed interrupting the labour of any culturally coherent group - miners, footballers, strippers - with similar insults. These are  professionals we're talking about here, which in turn seems to be the non-proximate cause.

Sherpas originally starteed out as basic coolie labour. Then a collection of romantic lunatics arrived in the Himalayas with the aim of getting up Everest, an idea which eventually caught on among the semi-sedentary. What the Sherpas seem to have realised is that the money is in carrying the people up the mountains, not their kit, and there is naturally irritation that the romantic lunatics are still wandering around interfering with efforts to put the whole business on a proper quasi-Fordist footing.

Good for them. But there's still a lot of the colonial sensibility in the Everest trade - lots of notions of conquest and leadership. So what happens to the market when it becomes clear that the help are taking over the business? Still:

Even before setting out for Everest in 1953, Tenzing – as sirdar, or leader, of the Sherpas who would carry loads for the sahibs to supply them on the mountain – had been agitating for better working conditions. When his team were told to sleep on the floor of the British embassy's garage in Kathmandu, Tenzing, who was offered a bed inside, was outraged. Next morning, lacking access to any facilities, the Sherpas relieved themselves in the street in front of the embassy, prompting fury from embassy staff, but offering an eloquent reminder that the Sherpas weren't servants who could be arrogantly dismissed.

Them times ain't no more.

94 years later

It’s the ninety-fourth anniversary of the May 4 movement today. Probably not coincidentally, plans to protest against a chemical plant in Chengdu appear to have been smothered by pre-emptive action from the authorities: Cops everywhere on the pretext of earthquake drills, menacing text messages to activists, targeted online censorship, schools and colleges kept open at the weekend, informal house arrests. And this:

In Chengdu's Wenjiang district, activist Jiang Yuqiong said she and her husband had been taken away "on holiday" by officials to Black Dragon Lake near Meishan city.

"[We will be back on] Sunday," Jiang said.

The Chengdu-based rights website Tianwang said that Zhou Wenming, an activist from Sichuan's Shuangliu county, had been taken "on holiday" along with fellow activists Zhao Xianqiong and Yang Fang.

I’d heard of this before but it just struck me. First, black jails. Now, black holidays. They didn't have those back in 1919

It has to be said; this is a successful operation by the Chengdu cops, not in suppressing a demonstration so much as forestalling it. Thus reform, in the era of Xi Jinping.

In Kunming, however, it was a slightly different story...

from a brief history of Korean anarchism

Over here.

One day, Shin happened to go to the public bath-house with a colleague from school. While they were taking off their clothes, this man noticed that Shin seemed to be wearing a pair of bright red women's bloomers. Queried about them, Shin replied nonchalantly: "Oh, as I was walking along the street yesterday I passed a shop selling these beautiful coloured knickers, so I popped in and bought a pair!" This colleague, Lee Kwang-sop, later recalled in his memoirs the absurd image of Shin Chae-ho the eminent historian, with his bald, pointed head and several days' growth of whiskers because he couldn't be bothered to shave, standing there in a pair of bright red knickers looking totally unconcerned.

educational poisoning roundup

As you can see, there’s a lot of it about. Not just primary schools either. Huang Yang, a PHD student at Shanghai’s Fudan University was recently fatally poisoned, apparently by a jealous fellow student. People are now harking back to the mysterious thallium poisoning of Zhu Ling, at Tsinghua University 19 years ago, a case in which the prime suspect was allegedly let slide because of powerful connections.

Some put it down to a hypercompetitive environment:

His generation, or China’s early post-80s generation, learns the meaning of competition from a very early age. The childhood nightmare of many post-80s generation is when their parents say: “You are bad. Look at XXX from XXX’s family. S/he is good and you should learn from her/him.” They compete with their peers for almost everything in life from school admissions to jobs, sometimes very fiercely.

What’s more unfortunate, China’s 30 years of at-all-cost development and deteriorating corruption and social inequality have led to a population more pragmatic than ever – If I can use a trick to win, why not? If I can use a shortcut to outrun, why not? If I can use guangxi or bribes to get through, why not? The ultimate goal is to win, and win for now.