Blood & Treasure

'we can do something also'

Right, we have an Uighur counter-narrative for the Kunming atrocity provided by anonymous sources to RFA.

 “They cannot go back to Hotan, but they cannot do any business in Kunming either because they don’t have any ID cards with them and have arrest warrants issued against them by the regional police department,” the source said.

With no immediate hope in sight, they may have decided to go on a killing spree to avenge the death of their compatriots back home in Xinjiang, according to the source.

“They were likely reacting to the extrajudicial killings that have occurred about a dozen times last year in Xinjiang," the Uyghur said. "Their message to the government was, ‘We can do something also.' "

 The initial flashpoint was by this account clashes between Chinese security forces and Uighur protestors in Hanerik, a town in Hotan/Heitian prefecture in Xinjiang last year. That's confirmed by this much more strongly sourced RFA feature from last year, which states that the clashes started after the authorities shut down a local mosque (an informal one?) and took the imam into custody for unexplained reasons. This piece also has allegations of knife attacks against Han civilians.

The overall timeline and wider story here is plausible. What strikes me as improbable is the idea that an inability to get hold of ID cards would cause you to dress in black, arm yourselves with knives and stab more than 160 people.

he who cannot be named is named

A semi-independent outlet finally comes out with it...after a bit of  teasing.

Zhou Yuanxing, who died aged 69 of cancer, was the second of three brothers. Media reports on March 3 say his younger brother, Zhou Yuanqing, and brother's wife, Zhou Lingying, were taken away in early December by investigators from Beijing.

His nephew, Zhou Bin, is the son of his older brother and is also embroiled in a corruption inquiry. Zhou Bin is the former chairman of Beijing Zhongxu Yangguang Petroleum and Natural Gas Technology Ltd. He is involved in the country's hydropower and oil businesses

and the older brother is...

The Zhou family has been influential in Wuxi. The eldest brother, whose original name was Zhou Yuangen, left home at an early age to go to Beijing for school and work. He later changed his name to Zhou Yongkang.

In a story about the Zhou who stayed on the farm, and prospered under big brother's umbrella to become a kind of bucolic micro-oligarch: the local Wuliangye franchise, the Audi dealership, the gold bars, the crates of fancy liquor - the small change of  influence. It's a nice sidebar but it wouldn't have made the papers if it didn't offer a chance to name Zhou discreetly and to  drop the fascinating fact that the entire family seems to have vansihed into detention.

Elsewhere, it was noted yesterday that Zhou Yongkang became searchable term within the Sinosphere. The chorus is being allowed to tune up.

chewbacca diplomacy

There's been some quite bizarre speculation about China in relation to the Ukraine, some of it speculating that in time, and representing a kind of karmic justice, an unstoppable flow of Chinese peasants will occupy Eastern Siberia followed by the PLA, so what do you think of that Mr Putin, huh?  Now, hot off the presses, China's position on Ukraine:

“China has always upheld the principles of diplomacy and the fundamental norms of international relations,” he said.

“At the same time we also take into consideration the history and the current complexities of the Ukrainian issue. It could be said that China’s position is to both maintain principles while also seeking to be realistic.”

uuuh, yeah. OK. China always opposes intervention, domestic turmoil etc. China also always welcomes whatever governments arise out of intervention, domestic turmoil etc. As yet, there are two sets of semi-facts on the ground, in Kiev and Crimea, so Beijing is kind of stuck.  It reminds me a bit of Beijing's actual position on Iraq: don't even think about doing this, but for Christ's sake do it properly. What complicates things more here is that the message is directed both at Russia and Ukraine and its various backers.

March to September

After March 1 came September 12:

The Internet is another battlefield to fight against terrorists. A few people, including some opinion leaders in the cyber world, have criticized the government and the system for being the reasons behind violent terror. Such voices, undermining the united opinion front against terror, have to be cleaned up.

 Well that sounds familiar. Various international media outlets and the US government are also under public attack – thus far from the public, not so much the Chinese government - for failing to condemn the Kunming atrocity either as terrorism or in sufficiently strident terms (the US Embassy released a statement condemning 'meaningless killings', which seems a bit ill chosen). WE saw a version of this over sloppy reporting of the Tibet uprising in 2008, but this seems somewhat more intense. More grassroots Chinese responses here and here.

Interestingly, Beijing seems to be playing down the Islamic terrorism angle – at least in English language reports (all of which are 'Xinhua only') despite the fact that it's usually keen to nail any kind of Uighur violence to ETIM. Instead it's reverted to connecting Uighur terrorism to separatism generally, which in Beijing's purview includes any attemot at all to speak up for any kind of Uighur identity outside the fold of the 'great Chinese family' . ETIM crops up, if at all, downpage. This is may be an acknowledgement that cozying up to the War on Islamic Terror line has served its purpose and acknowledge that this is an element in an anti-colonial war. At any rate, it's bad news for Ilham Toti.

 If so, it may be a little late, since the latest attack had indications that the group were advocates of some kind of Islamist ideology. There were black banners left at the scene, suitably inscribed, and the Daily Telegraph reported that that attackers spared one man because they identified him as a Hui Muslim. The Hui are normally just as much as a target for Uighur rage as the Han. This time the man was apparently spared because he was a co-religionist. As James noted in what seems to have become the essential introductory essay to Han-Uighur relations, an element of Uighur rage is to become whatever you hate about me. This may be a case of the face growing to fit the mask.

 Given that states often define or refrain to define violent acts as terrorism for self-serving reasons, especially when they happen to others, it's surprising that the US didn't just give the Chinese public the benefit of the T word, which seems to me to cost them nothing in terms of policy. By contrast, not doing so seems to have rapidly undermined the considerable progress the US has made over the past few years in salvaging its reputation in China from the debacle of the Bush years. Minds on other things, perhaps.

We’ve got the money too

Some musings on the current world crisis by Chris W

I’ve spent the last four years professionally immersed in C20th European history, helping to write a course on 1914-1989 which is getting more relevant by the hour. Does this make the current crisis easier to understand? Why, yes. Does it make me feel better than I otherwise would? Why, no.

There are worrying parallels with 1937. Putin’s no Hitler: there is no evidence that he’s got an expansionist goal which involves killing everyone in undesirable racial groups who are in the way. And the Russian Federation’s treatment of minority groups is not stellar, but there are no Nuremburg Laws. Putin’s no Stalin, either: at home he’s a fundamental reactionary, raised in an era when political failure meant being sidelined, not shot in the head. He has no ideological motivation to take his state to a new level of industrialisation via a raft of corpses.

But he’s clearly playing the role of a revisionist power, and thus his strategic playbook looks like Hitler’s.

1)      At home, the politics of self-pity. This one writes itself, and to be honest, it doesn’t really differentiate Russia from England, Serbia, China, Pakistan, India, etc ‘We are hard done by and should recover what is ours’. On the other hand, like German borders in 1919, Russian borders in 1989 got a lot closer to the capital: there’s a major constituency for revision, and revision is a fine way to deflect political opposition.

2)      Getting and taking the political initiative. When you want change, you can pick your moment to strike.  Your opponents are by definition a coalition whose attachment to the status quo is not all at the same level, so when they are conferring about where exactly they want to draw the line in the sand, you have time to drive a tank over it.

3)      Smokescreening with bullshit. The English-language news in 1938 wasn’t about great power politics: it was about the daily-mangled rights of the poor Sudeten Germans, manfully chafing under Czech oppression. Like Hitler, Putin wants to re-state his case in his opponents’ language: hence RT’s gleeful proclamation of a largely fictitious (for now) pogrom threatening Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Insert ‘told you so, Decents’ snark here.

But it’s not all the same. One of the defining features in Europe of the 1930s was economic autarchy, which contrasts with the historically high degree of globalisation we now enjoy. Russia is rich enough to go a-reiving now because they’ve been selling us stuff, mainly gas. Some of the cash has been used to build weapons, much of the rest has been salted away by rich Russians.

Which brings me on to another set of depressing historical parallels. How much damage was done in the UK by the billions of oil-dollars which poured into London in the 1970s? There was inflation of land values, suborning of politicians (Aitken, take a bow) and a dangerous complacency about the political implications of the Saudis’ commitment to Wahabbism. Melanie Philips isn’t wrong about _everything_: the political economy of militant’n’murderous Islam did rather well out of 90s London. We got to enjoy the consequences (exacerbated by some remarkably stupid reactions) later.

Noughties London got its money from elsewhere. Clearly it’s not all Russian, but that’s the origin of a substantial chunk of the cash which is making my beloved city increasingly resemble, and be about as much fun as, a bank vault. Ben Judah is good on this here.

It’s there because London is a safe investment. The UK’s relatively non-corrupt legal and criminal justice systems, and our high degree of public order and (in London) infrastructure spending – also our strange desire to burn out the shops of the poor, not the mansions of the rich, when we riot – keep it safe. Loadsa guard labour in London, provided by us: I note that the billionaires are largely paying the minimum wage, while the expensive clever stuff is picked up by us taxpayers.  

What can we do? Well, the Treasury has form in moving quite fast to chase up enemy assets when it wants to: there may even be some people still in the game who remember 1982, and the Europe-wide effort to freeze (the?) Argentine assets.

There’s the matter of the gas: the UK doesn’t get a great deal of our gas from Russia, but most key European players do.  Emergency technical assistance for Italy, more gas storage facilities and more windmills already would help to mitigate the energy crisis. Clearly the Germans might need to reconsider their shift away from nukes, but perhaps they might see reason.

So – there are steps the UK can take to defend the rights of (most of) the Ukranian people which involve neither instant sunshine nor sending the Staffordshires to the Vistula. These steps involve clamping down on the financial services industry, threatening the capital’s capital, and returning to the energy generation model of the 1930s-1980s. Will the UK govt take them? I wouldn’t bet on it.

'the unenviable halo of a bloodthirsty ruffian'

While making no claims to contemporary relevance, it seems remiss now that Ukraine is in the news not to blog a thrilling account of the life and exploits of Nestor Makhno:

Makhno was particularly bitter when writing about the Ukraine, his homeland, whose liberator he had hoped to become. Her inclusion in the Soviet Union was in his opinion comparable to her occupation by the German and Austrian armies during the World War -- only camouflaged by "Bolshevik hot air." He considered as sheer hypocrisy that clause of the Soviet Constitution of 1923 which granted self-determination to each of the constituent republics, including the right of withdrawal from the Union. For anyone caught in the "act" of advocating such a withdrawal would never get another chance of advocating anything at all. Unwittingly he gave vent to the nationalist longings of most of his countrymen. For in the remote recesses of their hearts even the Ukrainian Communists dream of the well-being their country might enjoy if it did not have to share its enormous wealth with the rest of the Soviet Union. 

The former heard of the Revolutioinary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine - who clearly wasn't mithered by the colonial 'the' - apparently worked as a stagehand at the Paris Opera while in exile. His relevance to contemporary conflict probably has most to do with his invention of the Technical, at least according to Isaac Babel.

baby hatches

China has 25 facilities for the safe, anonymous transfer of unwanted babies, which in many cases are babies which parents want but are unable to keep:

 99%of babies left at hatches have illnesses or disabilities.
--Ji Gang, a staff member of China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption 

Most of the parents left brief notes or cash along with the infants indicating that they had no choice but to abandon their children.

Their parents are afraid of becoming impoverished as they cannot afford the expensive medical bills and fees for special education. 

 The Shijiazhuang social welfare institution received 105 infants in 2009 and 83 in 2010. Since the baby hatch was set up in June 2011, it has received 181 abandoned children.

 Only one-third of abandoned babies in Shijiazhuang survived before, but now the death rate has fallen sharply with the help of the baby hatch.

On life chances for the disabled in China, see James' essay. But this is an example of why things just carry on in China. Despite massive dysfunction, Chinese governance is capable of doing the best thing in the circumstances. (update see here for a better explanation of what i mean)

a dirty little business full of dirty little men

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

It seems to be impolite to point out that if you find a lot of amateur porn when you spy on people who "are not intelligence targets", that's probably because amateur porn was what you were looking for.

the unnameable

Zhou Yongkang:  he who must not be named, like Yahweh or Yog Sothoth:

Like mafia foot soldiers afraid to testify against their boss until they know for sure he's been disgraced, none of the wide Chinese coverage of the arrests mention Zhou's name. "The four [fallen officials] all worked at different times as secretaries for a high-ranking official who has since left office," reported the Oriental Morning Daily, a Shanghai newspaper; Hexun, a Chinese financial portal, used the same language. The popular web portal Sina evenposted a chart of the hierarchy of those four officials -- without putting Zhou at the top.

In fairness, everybody knows what no one is precisely saying. And maybe there are no words, especially since all the superlatives were used up over the comparative small fry Bo Xilai. I was secptical of initial reports that Zhou was being targeted partly because his final role as security czar meant he was arguably the most hated man in China and it sounded like wishful thinking, and partly because he's such an immense target. You can see this is you break down his career.

Let's  do this with imaginary headlines: former Sichuan Party secretary under investigation. Sichuan is China's most populous province. It's a fiefdom with more than a hundred million people. So that alone is a huge scandal. But we're just getting started here. Then there's the man who ran half of China's state oil industry targeted in corruption investigation. Again, massive. Now let's try one of China's nine most powerful men in crosshairs. Even more immense.  And then there's net closes on  China's former internal security czar and man responsible for security policy in Tibet and Xinjiang for the chop. At one time or other Zhou was all of these things, and associates from each stage of his career have been swept up in the dragnet. The mind just boggles. Isaac Stone Fish goes on:

Imagine a giant wall on a secluded floor in a Beijing office tower housing the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the powerful organization tasked with investigating malfeasance and corruption within the Communist Party. Now, imagine Zhou's name in the center of a web of hundreds of intersecting lines -- a much larger version of the type seen in police stations in U.S. mafia movies. In China, the term guanxi wang -- "network of connections" -- refers to a person's social circle. The web on this wall is Zhou's network, and the threads connect to those with whom Zhou intersected throughout his career: as an oil industry executive in the 1980s and 1990s, as party secretary of China's largest southwestern province of Sichuan from 1999 to 2002, and then as minister of public security until 2007, when he took on his most powerful role.

As a wrinkle on that, imagine a whiteboard at CDIC which contains every category of person on Boss Xi's hitlist: rogue cadre, corrupt corporates, mafiosi, empire builders and - let's say - pesky reformist types. Take down Zhou and you take down all of them. Here and here for instance, we can see a connection being established between Zhou's son Zhou Bin and the family of reformist icon Hu Yaobang through investigating the case of the violent entrepreneur Liu Han. And that's only a tiny part of the story. Perhaps the best way to consider Zhou is as a kind of one man autonomous region with a dependent population that enjoyed a guarantee of complete impunity - until now. So its not so much a corruption investigation here as a kind of reconquista.

popcorn time in Zhongnanhai

Adam Minter notes that China's been giving extensive coverage to events in Ukraine. Elsewhere, Offbeat China has a sample of public responses:

A popular comment shared by many Chinese netizens sarcastically summed up the situation: “When Ukraine declared independence in 1991, the Ukrainians won a victory of democracy. When Leonid Kuchma won the 1994 presidential election, the Ukrainians won a victory of democracy…for the second time. When Yushchenko won the 2005 presidential election, the Ukrainians won a victory of democracy…for a third time. In 2010 when Yanukovych was elected president, the Ukrainians won yet another victory of democracy. Now in 2014, Ukraine is without a president, the Ukrainians are still winning a victory of democracy.”

China's official line on these and other events is that each country must take its own development path (or occasionally that each must seek democracy in its own way).  That gives lots of scope for pointing out in the course of any specific incident, that, gosh, things seem to be terribly violent in that corner of laowai land, and it must be having a terrible effect on the economy and look at the Americans meddling away and perhaps conflicts are too endemic over there to allow too much freedom and its best to be cautious on general principles and ...so on and so on.

It's not so much that China is laying down the propaganda law on these events; more that its letting them play out  publicly against a background of constant nagging, sighing and wheedling. Structure things that way  and you can count on the inner Simon Jenkins emerging in your audience.  And in fairness, though this might amount to a tendentious and  self-serving narrative, it's also a viable one given the way events have unfolded over the past few years. It doesn't require flat out lying.