Blood & Treasure

if only he was a milford man

Adam Minter has an excellent short story up in a Minnesotan paper about a US connection to the ongoing Li Tianyi scandal. Li, the son of crooning "Major-General*" Li Shuangjiang, became a figure of public rage through the traditional rich-brat method of road rage.  He got either a year or a month in juvenile detention (presumably cushy) for that, then got out and allegedly gang-raped a girl.  (Cynically, I would be amazed if the girl was not also the child of somebody with pull, because the chances of people like this being prosecuted for rape are miniscule otherwise, given the situation with rape prosecutions in China is exactly as dire as one would expect.)

Anyway, Li's father is famous for patriotic ballads, so the whole "ship the kid off to the US" thing is extra-embarassing for him. Li Jr comes across as rather pathetic in the account. When it comes to considering China's future, remember that unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, a time of harsh meritocracy, a big part of the Chinese power class in the next 20 years is going to be made up of people like this.

*I really wish Western papers would start pointing out to their readership that half the figures quoted as "generals" are nothing of the sort, but recepients of the PLA system of courtesy ranks for entertainers and military academics.  

castle in the sky

The re-election of Obama has produced a rich harvest of the crazy and the paranoid, but my favorite example is this (map below), an attempt to build a walled fortress in the mountains of Idaho where gun ownership will be compulsory, "Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles," and the inhabitants will be prepared for the apocalypse, as long as the hordes haven't discovered, say, cannon.

On a different end of the right-fantasy scale is this attempt to create Singapore near Detroit.  "Twenty nine years prior (2013), Belle Isle was sold by the city of Detroit for $1 billion dollars to a group of investors who believed in individual freedom, liberty and free markets.  They formed their own city-state, with innovative systems of government, taxation, labor and money.  People soon came from all over the world to be part of this culture of unlimited opportunity.  Belle Isle became the “Midwest Tiger,” rivaling Singapore as an economic miracle.  Although numbering only 35,000 citizens, it generated billions of dollars in desperately needed economic growth and became a social laboratory for the western world."  The island location keeps up libertarian fantasy's long association with the sea.

My guess is that "Belle Isle" is a genuine fantasy, whereas "the Citadel" is a con job. Note they're taking "Application Fees" of $208 and that you can only lease your property in the redoubt, not buy (like China!).They repeatedly stress that they are NOT RACISTS. If I had the money to burn, I would lease half the spots and donate them to Black Panther groups.

 

they will also all have tiny penises

Chinabollocks normally runs predictable courses, based off ignorance, projection, or fantasy. But sometimes a rare gem is thrown up among the sludge, an idea so bizarre, so completely out of touch with reality, that one cannot criticize, but just gasp in awe.  In that spirit, I give you genetic scientist Geoffrey Miller's answer to the Edge question, "What should we be worried about?" - China breeding a super-intelligent generation

 

 

holiday costs

At lunch today, one of my friends was complaining about the obligations of Spring Festival.  I thought at first she just meant cooking, making sure that the wrong relatives don't sit next to each other, sending cards, that kind of thing, but she soon clarified things.

"My friend is a construction magnate in [SECOND-TIER CHINESE MINING CITY], and he has to fly seven city management officials to Paris, because they got him a permit to build a seafood mall last year."

"Huh.  Business class?"

"Yes."  

"So that's about ... $30,000."

"Oh, he has to fly their families too. And they have to stay in five-star hotels."

"Wow.  So I guess about ... say 3.5 people a family ... $150,000 or more ..."

"He's paying for all their shopping."

She also mentioned that her brother, a supermarket buyer, had to hand over his entire salary for the year to his boss every Spring Festival to be allowed to keep his job; he lives (fairly well) off the kickbacks from the companies he purchases from.  And that a few years ago, when she'd set up her own steel trading business, her husband and her had had to fork out so much in "presents" at Spring Festival that they lived off instant noodles for a year.

no one who speaks german could be an evil man

Klaus Kinski accused of long-term sexual abuse by eldest daughter.  Maybe Herzog should have given those Indians the green light after all.  

Kinski's better known daughter, Nastassja, began her relationship with the 43-year-old Roman Polanski when she was 15, just after Polanski had fled the US to avoid being sentenced for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.  This casts that relationship in an even more unpleasant light.

new labour

Rather lost in the Southern Weekly kerfuffle - which looks to be drawing to a sort-of-happy-ending, about which I'm pleasantly surprised, though I fear petty vengeance against the people involved later* - has been a pretty important piece of news; reform, possibly abolition, of the reeducation-through-labor system, which allowed the police to hand out up to four year sentences without trial or, for the most part, legal recourse.

GT and the Guardian both have decent coverage.  This doesn't mean an end to labor camps, since the regular judicial system also hands down labor sentences. But it's a significant blow to arbitrary power, and might mean reform of the treatment of petitioners - a common target of "reeducation" sentences.

The obvious fear, however, is that the system will stay in place, but with a new legal veneer - like the "secret detention" laws passed last year.  Reform would still make it more difficult for the local governments to use, and would allow some kind of legal challenges, as limited and dangerous as those are. Local governments want to hang onto the system not only to control petitioners and "troublemakers" but also because there's a powerful financial motivation - plenty of official collusion in just what that labor's used for.

*I've also been cheered by the solidarity shown, whenever possible, by other papers, with a certain glaring exception.  

rageface

The people in this picture are nationalist-Maoist protestors demonstrating against Southern Weekend.  The older guy in the foreground is a fantastic embodiment of the older Chinese "leftist" - set jaw, angry eyes, perpetual scrunch of resentment. I've had occasional encounters with them, and while some of the younger men - and they're almost all men - are either idealistic or misguided, the older ones give off an air of frustration and rage which is quite frightening.  They'd be pitiable if they weren't so nasty, but having seen them yell at, abuse, and threaten young female reporters on several occasions, I have no sympathy.  

Anyway, if this chap was in the West, he'd spend his time writing furious letters to the local paper about immigrants. Which suggests an cross-cultural reality show. Zhang, 56, from Zhengzhou, believes Chairman Mao was history's greatest hero and that China's problems are all caused by foreign agents. Andrew, 43, from Maryland, thinks the UN wants to take away our guns and that Democrats are traitors. Paul, 32, from Kent, believes that England is being "flooded" by immigrants and that Muslims are all terrorists. Mikhail, 53, from Vladivostok, believes in Russia for the Russians, kicking out the "blacks," and that Gorbachev was a CIA agent.  Terry, 26, from Queensland, thinks that AFL is for Melbourne pansies and that boat people are taking his money. Adil, 45, from Sindh, holds that unveiled woman are sluts and that apostates should be killed. John, 39, from Kampala, wants homosexuals to be executed under Old Testament law and thinks that women need a good raping sometimes. And Pierre, 56, from Brittany, believes that Dreyfus was guilty and that Freemasons and Algerians run Paris.

Sparks - and romance - fly in Dickhead Mansion.

 

informal dress

I have an American friend who does business in Hunan, which normally involves black-out drinking sessions with provincial-level officials.  Not kidding about the black-out; last time he only brought one guy to back him up to a lunch banquet and doesn't remember anything between 1 pm and 6:30 pm, when he found himself in a hotel room with the Hunanese minister of health and hangers-on, who were laughing uproariously as his colleague vomited into the toilet.  

Anyway, he got a call from his chief official point-of-contact a few weeks ago, telling him that at a meeting they were going to be attending not to wear jacket or tie, because none of the officials would be. The reason was Xi's recent visit to Hunan, where he criticized the extravagent style of officialdom and called upon them to serve the people, etc.  Their reaction to this, naturally, wasn't to actually start doing real work, ditch their mistresses, etc, but to give up wearing ties, jackets, and gold watches at photo ops.

That's pretty much my expectation of Xi's push for cleaner officialdom in general; do nothing to actually change the incentives for official corruption, but put on a nicer surface so the proles don't get upset.

weekend cancelled

It's going around that Southern Weekend just got shut down for the indefinite future. If true, this isn't a surprise; the prospects were never good as soon as Party authority got directly challenged. No word yet on fallout for the rest of the Southern group, and there's the possbility of a scab version of the paper being put out in the future to try and cover the embarassing gap on the newsstands.  Top-down embargo on the rest of the Chinese media covering this, naturally.  (And this is fairly accurate, BTW.) (link fixed - JK)

This would be a tragedy for the already-battered state of Chinese journalism, though it means quite a talent pool drifting around. It also strikes an early blow to Xi Jinping-will-save-us-all fantasies.  

UPDATE: Hopefully false, though "as of this time" strikes an ominous note.

new iron rice bowl

I did a bunch of work for this Radio 4 program with Rana Mitter on China's new welfare state, or lack thereof.  Enjoy!