Today, we learned the sad news. Chalmers Johnson is dead at the age of 79. Over the last 15 years, he was an indefatigable opponent of US imperialism, after having been a Cold War liberal who celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union and supported the Vietnam War. In Blowback, he identified the pathological aspect of US foreign policy:

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept blowback does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes - as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 - the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia - the area of my academic training - than on the Middle East.

In this summarization, provided by him in a subsequent book, Nemesis, Johnson points out an often forgotten fact about Blowback, the fact that he developed his analysis from his study of US involvement in Asia, and not the more highly publicized US involvement in the Middle East. It is a sobering thing to remember, as it suggests that we remain vulnerable to retaliation, whether violent or economic, from people in other regions of the world, unless there is a radical, almost impossible imagine, transformation in US policy.

In recent years, I think that there was a tendency to see Johnson as a leftist. He wasn't. The willingness of some to perceive him as such points towards something that I have observed in other contexts, a tendency to confuse anti-imperialism with leftism. For example, he never repudiated his Cold War hostility towards the USSR. Rather, he was an American exceptionalist of a particular kind. Like Pat Buchanan, he believed that the USSR posed an existential threat to the US, and, like Buchanan, saw no purpose to interventionism upon the dissipation of that threat. Much like Buchanan (and Gore Vidal as well, and, even, arguably, Kurt Vonnegut), he believed that the US was exceptional because of the example it set for other countries and peoples around the world through its domestic policies and values, even if the three of them would argue vigorously over what they should be. In short, an exceptionalism that was isolationist.

Unlike Buchanan (and possibly, even Vidal), Johnson was equally concerned about the consequences of US interventionism for the people subjected to it. His mid-1990s visit to Okinawa radicalized him as he was dismayed by the US imperial arrogance associated its military presence on the island:

I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction -- I’ve not made a secret of it -- that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.

These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one.

Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation.

Not surprisingly, Johnson's experience is a central feature of Blowback, and he was a tireless advocate for the departure of US troops from Okinawa until his death. As an area studies scholar with an emphasis upon East Asia, he respected the cultures of the countries that he studied, and highlighted how they had been economically successfully since the end of World War II by ignoring the emerging neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the IMF. Given that most people don't recognize that Blowback is focused primarily on Asia, it is not surprising that this aspect of the book is even less well known. He acknowledged that China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had relied upon significant state intervention to economically modernize, and that the US was actively seeking to prevent others from following the same path. Indeed, he considered these policies to be as perilous as the ones associated with covert operations, expressing alarm at nationalistic hostility to the US in East and South Asia in response to the currency devaluations and foreign asset sales facilitated by the IMF to address the 1998 currency crisis.

In other words, Johnson was no orientalist with an Asian emphasis. If anything, he could be said to be an indigenous modernist, meaning that he considered it impossible for anyone to escape the modernization process, but that countries and peoples should be permitted, as much as possible, to go through it autonomously. Such a perspective was consistent with his belief that the massive economic and military infrastructure created by the US during the Cold War was an anomaly and should have been dismantled. Johnson may have been no leftist, but his analytical rigor and personal integrity demanded respect. In the introduction to Blowback, he describes how he disdained the protests against the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley because he discovered, after a trip to the library, that none of the books about Vietnam had been checked out by anyone to read. In classic academic elitist style, he concluded that there was no reason to pay attention to such know nothings. But, from the vantage point of thirty years later, he admitted that they had been right, and he had been wrong. From such a mea culpa, he commenced to write his own book of revelations about the imperial hubris of the US, which has only gotten more extreme with the passage of time.

Labels: American Empire, China, Japan, Korea, Neoliberalism, Obituaries

The imposition of austerity measures in Greece has resulted in an economic catastrophe:

(snip)

The government's draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country's budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country's economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country's gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.

(snip)

Prime Minister George Papandreou's austerity package has seriously shaken the Greek economy. The package included reducing civil servants' salaries by up to 20 percent and slashing retirement benefits, while raising numerous taxes. The result is that Greeks have less and less money to spend and sales figures everywhere are dropping, spelling catastrophe for a country where 70 percent of economic output is based on private consumption.

A short jaunt through Athens' shopping streets reveals the scale of the decline. Fully a quarter of the store windows on Stadiou Street bear red signs reading Enoikiazetai -- for rent. The National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce (ESEE) calculates that 17 percent of all shops in Athens have had to file for bankruptcy.

Things aren't any better in the smaller towns. Chalkidona was, until just a few years ago, a hub for trucking traffic in the area around Thessaloniki. Two main streets, lined with fast food restaurants and stores catering to truckers, intersect in the small, dismal town. Maria Lialiambidou's house sits directly on the main trucking route. Rent from a pastry shop on the ground floor of the building used to provide her with €350 per month, an amount that helped considerably in supplementing her widow's pension of €320.

These days, though, Kostas, the man who ran the pastry shop, who people used to call a penny-pincher, can no longer afford the rent. Here too, a huge Enoikiazetai banner stretches across the shopfront. No one wants to rent the store. Neither are there any takers for an empty butcher's shop a few meters further on.

A sign on the other side of the street advertises Sakis' Restaurant. The owner, Sakis, is still hanging on, with customers filling one or two of the restaurant's tables now and then. There's really no work for me here anymore, says one Albanian employee, who goes by the name Eleni in Greece. Many others have already gone back to Albania, where it's not any worse than here. We'll see when I have to go too.

As the author of the article, Corinna Jessen, concludes: The entire country is in the grip of a depression. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate has increased significantly:

According to Aris Violatzis of the NGO Klimaka, the number of suicides have doubled if not tripled over the past year. Violatzis said the rate had increased to more than two suicides per day this year, as compared to one per day in 2009. And these are just the suicides that are recorded, Violatzis said, adding that the real number was likely to be higher as the stigma attached to suicide means they are often not reported.

Klimaka, which operates the 1018 telephone helpline, said it was receiving around 25 calls a day, compared to an average of 10 per day last year. Asked whether the spike in suicides was linked to the financial crisis, Violatzis said he believed it was a contributing factor. Suicide is a multifaceted phenomenon – we cannot link it exclusively to the crisis, he said, noting however that the environment influences our actions. As for the profile of most victims, Klimaka said they are chiefly productive people with responsibilities, financial obligations, families, loans. According to Violatzis, many of the victims are men who are no longer earning enough money to provide for their families and feel they no longer have a role to play – people who are going through an identity crisis. There are also many who take their lives due to deep-seated psychological problems or depression, he added.

For an example of this gruesome phenomenon, consider:

The tragic news was published in a local newspaper of the city of Volos (original article in Greek here) on July 23d, a few days before the strike. According to the article the 67-year old, who had been working as a truck driver for four decades, had tried to sell his truck recently without luck. Early on the morning of July 22nd he hanged himself off a bridge crossing over a motorway, where he was later found by passers-by.

Perhaps, you aren't that concerned about what is happening in Greece. It is a small, faraway place that rarely intrudes into our consciousness. But, then again, maybe you should be. Because there is no certainty that the plague has been contained within Greece. Despite the efforts of our Prince Prospero, President Obama, to protect ourselves from it, the global economy remains sickly:

From the previous quarter, Japan grew 0.1 percent, the slowest expansion among the six biggest economies. The U.S. grew 0.6 percent, the U.K. 1.1 percent, Germany 2.2 percent and France 0.6 percent. While China doesn’t release quarter-on- quarter GDP figures, it expanded 10.3 percent from a year ago.

None of the world's largest economies, with the exception of China, are generating sufficient growth to reduce unemployment. Of course, China, as a developing country, should have a substantially higher growth rate, and even it may now have a growth rate lower than the 10% to 14% range that has characterized peak performance in recent years. While subject to debate, there has been a general consensus that China requires growth rates higher than the more mature economies that have been accepted as members in the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, somewhere north of 6%. Finally, observe that the previous quarter, the spring quarter, was a more favorable period for economic growth than this one and upcoming ones.

Labels: China, France, Germany, Greece, IMF, Japan, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

From the Associated Press:

Japan's new liberal prime minister shunned a visit to a shrine that has outraged Asian neighbors for honoring war criminals, breaking from past governments' tradition and instead apologizing Sunday for the suffering World War II caused.

Members of the now-opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan nearly continuously since the end of the war, made a point by carrying out their own trip to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Shinto shrine — a spectacular building with sweeping roofs and a museum in its grounds that glorifies kamikaze pilots — has set off controversy by honoring the 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including Class A war criminals such as Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister who was executed in 1948.

Among those who visited Yasukuni was LDP leader Sadakazu Tanigaki and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. About 40 legislators went to the shrine, but none from Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Cabinet, according to Japanese media reports.

Kan leads the Democratic Party, which took power last year after winning elections on promises of greater transparency and grass-roots democracy. It is the first time since the end of World War II that the entire Japanese Cabinet has avoided visiting Yasukuni on Aug. 15, the day Japan surrendered in the war.

We caused great damage and suffering to many nations during the war, especially to the people of Asia, Kan told a crowd of about 6,000 at an annual memorial service for the war dead at Budokan hall in Tokyo.

We feel a deep regret, and we offer our sincere feelings of condolence to those who suffered and their families, he said. We renew our promise to never wage war, and we promise to do our utmost to achieve eternal world peace and to never repeat again the mistake of war.

This is more than a symbolic act. It runs contrary to a 60 year effort by the LDP and the US to remilitarize Japan. Kan's apology will prove impossible to reverse, and presents the prospect of closer cooperation between Japan, China, North Korea and South Korea. Hence, the ability of the US to manipulate tensions between them will be accordingly reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced. Kan may well be remembered for closing a lengthy chapter in the US/Japan relationship that was formally acknowledged on June 19, 1960. Future historians may also associate Kan's act with the fraying of the economic bonds between the two countries.

Labels: American Empire, China, Japan, Korea

Yes, every now and then, I do actually read something that appears on a New York Times list of notable books, although, invariably, a year or two after the fact. For me, I consider the discovery of any interesting book to be a contemporary event, regardless of when it was published, because, somewhat egotistically, I consider myself the referent, not the book. I don't segregate books that were published in the past into a cultural ghetto, and I don't dismiss movies released in the past merely because of the technological limitations of their production and distribution.

So, in this instance, I kept running into Ma Jian's Beijing Coma in bookstores for the last couple of years, but couldn't bring myself to purchase it because I had a long list of other books to read. I was also wary of American praise as American critics have a tendency to evaluate literature about China primarily in terms of individual resistance to the government. As a consequence, they are blind to a subject about which the Chinese have long been well aware, namely, the voluntary participation of Chinese people in the worst excesses of the regime. Consider, for example, this review by Jess Rowe in the New York Times, or this excellent one by Christine Smallwood in the Los Angeles Times. Both implicitly separate the individual from the repressive society in which they live, a separation that is never quite so evident in real life.

But, finally, I succumbed when I came across a discounted copy and purchased it. I remembered that Ma Jian first emerged on the international literary scene with his remarkable account of his underground travel across China in the mid-1980s, Red Dust, and hoped that there was much more to the novel than related by critics. There is. As the novel begins, the protagonist, Dai Wei, lies in a coma, as he has done for over 10 years after being shot in the head during the military suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989. Unbenownst to those around him, including his mother, who cares for him, he can perceive the world around him, even though he cannot move and cannot speak.

The narrative proceeds in a contrapuntal movement, with the experiences and expectations of Dai Wei's youth contrasted with those while immobilized. It is a masterful way of bringing out the contradictions of a person's life within the context of the world around them. By doing so, Jian tells a story of redemption, a story whereby Dai Wei comes to know the people of China and bond with them. But, to recognize this, the reader must be attuned to one of the more subtle themes of the sections regarding his youth, his self-hatred for being Chinese. Dai Wei comes from a family of classically trained musicians, and expresses sentiments about many things, but this one is too sensitive, and he never addresses it directly. Instead, it emerges, as it does with many of his university friends, through their fascination with American culture, as synthesized and imported into the country from Hong Kong and Taiwan, his recollections of his father's imprisonment as a rightist and, most specifically, through his encounter with someone investigating the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi Province.

While on vacation from school, Dai Wei finds Dr. Song, a doctor that treated his father while incarcerated in a reeducation camp there. Song explains how he discovered numerous episodes of brutality after being selected to investigate the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, including one where villagers ate the flesh of bad elements to demonstrate their revolutionary ardor. The thread that runs through all of Song's stories is not the extremism of those who ignited the Cultural Revolution, but, rather, the intensification of it by people determined to purify society by any means necessary. Curiously, given that Jian has a deserved reputation for morbid parody, critics have assumed that the cannibalism episode has a factual basis of some kind, even if only as a composite, ignoring the possibility that it may serve as a gothic fable of the revolution literally eating its own. In any event, many of Dai Wei's friends in college, especially the ones that he makes during his undergraduate education in south China, are driven by an emotional dialectic centered around the difficulty of reconciling their Chinese identity with the ostracism that they have experienced as the children of parents and relatives considered class enemies.

Such an interpretation of the novel leads the reader to perceive some of the more important aspects of the 1989 student movement in a new light. For example, Bai Ling's insistence upon adopting the tactic of the hunger strike, its embrace by thousands of students in Tiananmen Square and the simultaneous decision of some students to take advantage of opportunities to go to the US reveal the desperation of the students as they sought escape from the seemingly irreconciliable dilemma of being Chinese through death or departure. Jian, as a person who returned from Hong Kong to participate in the protests, is critical of the decision to launch the hunger strike, rightly characterizing it as one that permanently foreclosed any prospect for a mediated resolution of the crisis, but there is arguably something more much serious here, an understanding by Jian that the hunger strike exposed the movement as one fueled by schizophrenia as well as concrete political aspirations. Dai Wei was caught in the middle, a ubiquitous presence around the square in his role as organizer of security, yet someone who, by conscious decision, refused to participate in the process, such as it was, by which decisions were made.

Through the alternation of chapters relating Dai Wei's life as a student, and ones describing his subsequent experience while paralyzed, Jian brings to mind the Biblical injunction: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Prior to being shot by an undercover cop, Dai Wei was a precocious child, but, as he suffered through his immobility, and the humiliations that came with it, he becomes a man, emotionally bonding with the people that he involuntarily encounters. He overcomes his resentment towards his mother, despite her inconsistency in properly caring for him, as he observes her isolation and humiliation despite having been a loyal Party member throughout her life. As he sits in his bed day after day, he comes into contact with those he and his student friends presumed to liberate, nurses, migrants, construction workers and elderly pensioners living off the pittance provided by the government.

In other words, Dai Wei learns about the day to day lives of all those people that the student movement failed to effectively reach during the spring of 1989, and becomes one of them. He, along with his mother, struggle with them to survive Deng's reforms throughout the 1990s, as the choices of the emerging market economy merely serve to make their lives more insecure and difficult. The cost of his medical care pushes his mother to the point of insolvency, while a public/private partnership of politicians and real estate developers destroy one of the last remaining vestiges of the iron rice bowl, their home. One is tempted to describe this as a descent into lumpen proletarianism, but it is more accurately described as the life of someone forced to live in a social world that has been informalized.

Hence, through Dai Wei, Jian suggests that the spring of 1989 was a missed opportunity for China to move in a more compassionate, socially inclusive direction. But the students in the square were too immersed in romantic entanglements and sectarian conflict to connect with the populace beyond it. The longer they stayed there, the more arrogantly they conducted themselves towards those who came to support them, and the more they splintered into various committees that squabbled amongst one another for control. In this respect, the students, many of whom had parents victimized during the anti-rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution, subconsciously mimicked the political behaviour passed down to them. They were so removed from the reality of the daily lives of most Chinese that they could not communicate with them, as given allegorical expression by Jian when a passionate man from a provincial region, perhaps Sichuan or Shanxi, insists that he be allowed to speak to the assembled students in the square.

After a discussion, the students in command of the radio station allow him to speak after he offers 10,000 yuan for the privilege. Money flowed freely in the square, coming from all over China and Hong Kong, but no one could keep track of it, much less direct its expenditure, perhaps another parable by Jian, this time about the capitalization of protest. In this instance, the students took the money and allowed the man to speak for about 5 minutes, but finally turned off the microphone because his dialect was incomprehensible. It never occurred to them that the problem was not that he couldn't speak to them in a way that was understandable, but that they were incapable of hearing what he had to say. Students, like Dai Wei and his girlfriend, Tian Yi, could thoughtfully address these sorts of problems when speaking together within the boundaries of their personal relationships, but seemingly lost the ability to do so within larger groups.

Herein lies the tragedy of 1989 and the subsequent neoliberalization of China. Many, including Dai Wei's mother, found solace in Falun Gong. This is an aspect of the novel that doesn't seem to draw much critical attention. Surprisingly, Jian presents the allure of it for people like Dai Wei's mother sympathetically, through characters suffused with a warmth and humility that is, with a few exceptions, lacking in the participants in the student movement. Or, more accurately, lacking until the movement is violently suppressed, and they are expelled from the utopian life of protest, where all things are seemingly possible, into one in which they must make painful choices, if they are lucky enough to have choices at all. Jian is more empathetic to those caught up in the crackdown on Falun Gong, like Dai Wei's mother and her mentor, than he is to the victims of Tiananmen, primarily, it seems, because the adherents of Falun Gong were only seizing upon an erzatz spirituality to alleviate the insecurity of their daily lives.

Falun Gong and the student movement are therefore opposite sides of the same coin of liberation. As elaborated by Jian, the practitioners of Falon Gong acted compassionately towards one another in the service of a religion that falsely attributed all sorts of powers to those who scrupulously followed its precepts, while the students conducted themselves in an elitist fashion towards those they purportedly represented, even though they did have, as Marxists used to say, the right line, or, at least, a lot closer to it than Falun Gong. The novel concludes as Dai Wei is about to awake as a new man, and leaves us with the question, is he now someone capable of bridging this gap, or merely someone who, like many others before him, will find a way to enrich himself and separate himself from the misery around him.

Labels: Activism, Book Reviews, China, Neoliberalism, Poverty

Through recently executed agreements with Colombia, the US has grand ambitions for the military bases it intends to construct there:

With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI [Stockholm International Peace Research Institute], which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique "in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled". ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries. These were repeated by the Colombian military to the Colombian congress on 29 July. That USAF proposal was hastily reissued this month after the signature of the agreement – but without the reference to "anti-US governments". This has led to suggestions of either US government incompetence, or of a battle between a gung-ho USAF and a State Department conscious of the damage done to US relations with Latin America by its leaders' strong objections to the proposal.

Even as the US expands its military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Pentagon is already contemplating future conflicts in South America and Africa. Apparently, the Pentagon assumes that the US will not be able to obtain resources from these regions through commerce, recourse to the old imperialist methods of violence will be required. By contrast, China is taking a different, investment and trade oriented approach in regard to both continents, as indicated here and here. One can only hope that both South America and Africa find a way to evade the militarism of the US and the mercantilism of China and forge their own path to economic development.

Labels: Africa, American Empire, China, Colombia, South America, US Military

Prior to 1979, China pursued economic and social policies consistent with the creation of an industrialized proletariat, often associated with the production of armaments, within a planned economy. Peasants subsidized it through the supply of agricultural commodities at state controlled prices while subject to restrictions upon their movement that made it extremely difficult for them to leave their villages. With the increasing emphasis upon market liberalization by Deng Xiaoping and his successors, state owned industry entered a period of inexorable decline, resulting in plant closures and commercial redevelopment.

Several years ago, Wang Bing profiled this phenomenon in his epic, West of the Tracks, a nine hour documentary set in the massive Tie Xie industrial district in Shenyang, Manchuria. With an astonishing visual and narrative sensibility, one marked by neorealistic characterization and striking industrial compositions, Bing patiently presented the last months before the closure of the few remaining factories in the district, the attachment that the workers had for them and the breaking of the iron rice bowl, as housing for the workers was being torn down to make way for commercial development. A communal, collective way of life was destroyed as part of the price for admission into a neoliberal, globalized economy. Bing gently presented the workers to us with an intimacy absent sentimentality or voyeurism.

In the US and Europe, indeed, perhaps, most of the rest of the world, the Cultural Revolution is accepted as the most turbulent period of recent Chinese history, but Bing suggests that market liberalization has been equally traumatic. Jia Zhangke appears to have come to a similar conclusion in his most recent film, 24 City, or, perhaps, more accurately, he has determined that the entire period of Chinese Communist Party rule has been one characterized by the harsh ebbs and flows of modernization. He imputes great significance to his protagonists, the workers within Factory 420: The story of these characters represent the last fifty years of Chinese history.

As you might expect, Jia is being hyperbolic. The peasant experience is pretty much absent in 24 City. Even so, the experiences of the workers of Factory 420 opens a window towards understanding the social transformation resulting from the embrace of market liberalization, as he interviewed over 130 people who worked there. The film itself is an innovative blend of documentary and fiction, with Jia presenting the stories of four people connected to the factory through five of the interviewees themselves and four subsequent ones through actors and actresses. He made the decision to adopt this technique because of his belief that history is a mixture of fact and imagination. As a consequence of the incorporation of fiction within a documentary narrative structure, the film is more straightforward than Jia's previous ones which are noteworthy for their elliptical storytelling methods, although engagement with the content of what the interviewees, both real and fictional, say presents the challenges common to his other films. His mastery of color, along with his feel for architecture and interior design, are everywhere in evidence as expressed through his compelling compositions, with the most startling departure being his interweaving of more realistic scenes, such as an interview of an elderly former 420 employee traveling across Chengdu on a bus, seemingly recorded with a hand held digital camera in one long take.

By way of background, Factory 420 was opened in Chengdu in southwestern China in 1958 for the purpose of manufacturing parts for military aircraft. Prior to that time, facilities for the manufacture of military weapons were located in Manchuria, but, after such facilities were subjected to American bombing during the Korean War, the Chinese Communist Party adopted Mao's strategy of moving such production outside the reach of both American and Soviet airstrikes. One suspects that he was influenced by the Soviet experience in World War II, wherein much of the country's industrial platform was successfully transported away from the Ukraine to Siberia. During the 1980s, the workers shifted from producing military aircraft parts to appliances for the consumer market. Within the last few years, as has happened many times across China, investors brought forth a proposal for destroying the aging factory, relocating it somewhere else on the periphery of the city with modern manufacturing technology, and undoubtedly fewer workers, so as to free the land for residential and commercial development. The site was quite appealing, because of its centrality within the city, and the developers christened the project, 24 City, a name purportedly taken from a classical Chinese poem about Chengdu.

During an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Jia said that he first thought about making 24 City after he finished Platform in 2000:

This makes sense as the narratives of Platform and 24 City traverse similar terrain within their own unique social contexts. While Platform deals with the coming of age of a young music and theatrical troup forced to adapt to the rapid transformation from Maoism to the market in the 1980s, the industrial protagonists of 24 City live through a similar experience over a longer time frame. Both groups experience the turbulence of migration, market liberalization and the abandonment of collective ideals for individual ones. At the conclusion of each, a sympathetic young character, in Platform, a male one, in 24 City a female one, finds themselves esconsced in a new world of consumption and commodification, where, ironically, their new found individuality, and the individuality of those around them, have been fused into a mass of conformity. Baudrillard recognized such an outcome forty years ago when he observed that the young woman who selects a hair style popularized by a famous model or actress sees herself as engaging in act of personal expression even as thousands, if not tens of thousands, select the same one.

Prior to the production of the film, Jia also said that his purpose was to tell a story about three women in the 50s, the 70s, and the present day, as society makes the transition from collectivism to individualism. By doing so within a larger narrative that also interweaves male experience as well, he grounds gender within a complex mosaic of social transformation. First, there is the paradox that within the collectivism of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, people retained a surprisingly high degree of individuality within their personal lives. Or, rather, people carved out more and more individual space for themselves over the course of this collectivist period, so much so that, upon the introduction of market liberalization by Deng, it disintegrated. By the beginning of the 21st Century, with the collectivism of the past a fading memory, the workers of Factory 420 discovered that they were now at the mercy of a new social system that considered them and their experiences as superfluous.

Consistent with this, Jia has also observed that it is important to record memories that are disappearing all over contemporary China. So, much so that he has abandoned previous notions of films as entertainment. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not limited to China. One of Fassbinder's greatest, most idiosyncratic films, In a Year of 13 Moons, confronts precisely this subject, the extent to which the lived experiences of marginalized people are erased with the passage of time, with the assistance of finance capital. In this film, even the wealthy Jewish commercial real estate developer, the man who had participated in the postwar destruction of many of Frankfurt's old residential neighborhoods and the expulsion of the people who lived in them, finds himself facing obsolescence and irrelevance. In the world according to Fassbinder, everyone faces the prospect of becoming marginalized as a result of the acceleration of social change generated by finance capital, an acceleration too seductive to reject. There are echoes of this in the conclusion of 24 City, as Jia's last, fictionalized interviewee, a young woman raised by 420 workers, looks out from the roof of a highrise office tower across an urbanized, commercialized Chengdu that spreads in all directions as far as the eye can see. No one, not even the investors and developers of 24 City itself, can resist the reductionist power of capitalism in its current form.

Second, upon hearing the interviewees, one is tempted to ascribe a male cast to the collectivism of the past and a female one to the individualism of the present. To a certain extent, this is true, as the female characters reveal the attainment of more and more independence with the passage of time. Accordingly, it is hard to resist associating such independence with the adoption of the market liberalization measures associated with neoliberalism. And, there is some truth to this, although the use of the word independence to describe it may not be entirely accurate. Instead, it is evident that women have obtained greater autonomy within their families and their societies during this neoliberal era, even as they, in most instances, become more and more financially insecure, and the interviewees give concrete expression to this over the course of the film: an elderly woman relates how difficult it was for her to find a job in the early 1990s are being laid off at Factory 420; a middle aged one describes how she left Shanghai to work in Factory 420 and refused all suitors for marriage, living, she says, as many of her divorced female friends who got married and divorced do; a young, twenty or thirtysomething one expresses her shock at seeing her mother, also laid off at Factory 420, working elsewhere under brutal conditions at a telephone pole manufacturing plant even as she now travels to Hong Kong as a fashion buyer for wealthy Chengdu women.

Conversely, men, who, during the collectivist period, were exhalted as the embodiment of a privileged, industrial proletariat, exhalted, in effect, for their physical labor, are now defined by other achievements. The first interviewee, one of the people who actually worked in Factory 420, relates the pride that he and his coworkers took in their work ethic, their skill and their commitment to one another. He recalls a beloved supervisor who told them that must not casually dispose of an old tool because they should remember all the hands through which the tool had passed. Upon being prodded by the off camera interviewer, he theerafter notes the Cultural Revolution, but says little about it, so it remains the story that remains untold, at least in a Chinese social context outside the literature generated by its educated victims, the source of memories that even Jia cannot record. The interviewee does, however, imply that his supervisor was removed from his position during the Cultural Revolution, and that it initiated an irreversible process whereby working class support for collectivization and the planned economy unraveled.

Fast forward to the last, fictional, male interviewee, and one hears something very different. Like the last, fictional female interviewee, he is a child of Factory 420 parents. He recalls being sent to Manchuria when he was 16 years old to apprentice in a factory there. He briefly enjoyed performing his assigned task, a repetitive one that involved smoothing a metal component of some kind. But, after about an hour, he decided that he wanted to go back to Chengdu, and, against the wishes of his father, he did so. Here, Jia takes aim at the fact that, unlike the generation of the first interviewee, subsequent generations of people connected to Factory 420 found work industrial manufacturing work increasingly tedious, and seized almost any opportunity to do something else. After returning home, the last interviewee succeeded in becoming an anchor of a popular Chengdu television program. Just as with the young woman who goes to Shanghai to select and buy clothes for wealthy Chengdu women, he is considered emblematic of a generation that now defines success by one's ability to escape the factory and obtain a well paying position within some form of the culture industry. In their shadow are millions upon millions of Chinese who continue to work in a contemporary manufacturing sector under conditions that Isabel Hinton has described as evocative of those of 1840s Manchester.

Labels: China, Film Notes, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Columbia University Press has published some excellent translations of Asian novels in recent years. I have been fortunate enough to read two of them, Floating Clouds by Hayashi Fumiko and the subject of this review, The Sing Song Girls of Shanghai by Han Bangqing. Eileen Chang translated it before her death and Eva Hung revised and edited it upon the subsequent discovery of the manuscript. Some of you may be indirectly familiar with it if you have seen the film adaption, The Flowers of Shanghai, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsein. Apparently, neither the translated novel nor the film have been well received, although cinephiles, more familiar with Hou's work, recognized substantive and aesthetic qualities in the film that were lost on most American critics.

Perhaps, the problem is that both are centered around a brief period of courtesan life in Shanghai just before the industrialization of the city near the very end of the 19th Century. Our present day liberal universe is one that, quite rightly, emphasizes the importance of gender equality, so the prospect of reading an over 500 page novel about the social life of the so-called pleasure quarters, no matter how dispassionately portrayed, is probably not a very appetizing prospect. Additional hurdles include, as appears to be typical of classical Chinese fiction, an enormous number of characters drawn from all levels of society within the brothels, as well as a modernist sensibility in the execution of the narrative.

In fact, it is this sensibility that makes Sing Song Girls a mesmerizing novel, one of the most highly regarded works of Chinese fiction, even as, in the words of David Der-wei Wang in the Introdution, it remains one that has never been popular with general readers. He gives a plausible reason for it, Bangqing's avoidance of the extremes that apparently characterize the courtesan novel genre, sentimental narcissism or, alternatively, what he delicately describes as the sensationalization of the sordid dealings of the prostitutes and their clients. Indeed, the novel is so lacking in explicit sexual content that it could have been used in a literature course before I departed high school, and, I suspect, could still be today.

Bangqing had higher ambitions, but taxes the reader before revealing his intentions. For the first 200 pages or so, we are subjected to a seemingly endless merry-go-round of parties, where the wealthy patrons of the courtesans eat, drink, smoke opium and sometimes gamble at their establishments. Keeping all the characters straight is a challenge, even as Bangqing seeks, through an accumulation of outwardly mundane detail, to distinguish them from one another in important ways that will become obvious in the final quarter of the novel. His discipline in this regard is admirable, as he effectively creates a modernist form of storytelling that would subsequently be commonplace throughout much of the world in the next century.

An essential key towards understanding what transpires in the novel is the concept of mystification as developed by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, mystification was a process whereby most ideologies have succeeded at certain times in making men accept certain illusions, certain appearances and introducing these appearances into real life and making them effective there. Lefebvre provided a Marxist variation of something that has always been a prominent feature of Chinese culture, especially within literature, the notion of the real as opposed to the illusory, and the fact that each frequently masquerades as the other, to the great detriment of those mislead by the deceit. It is an oversimplification, but a fair one as a form of shorthand, to say that Bangqing lays out the mystification of the pleasure quarters in the first half of the novel, so as to dispel it in the second half.

Ultimately, one must have several things to successfully navigate the brothels, whether one is male or female, money, obviously, but something more as well, common sense, for lack of a better word, as well as education, or perhaps, more accurately, a habitus, a set of durable dispositions normally shared within particular classes and groups and the cultural capital that often goes along with it. Interestingly, while Pierre Bourdieu invoked the concepts of habitus and cultural capital to explain social influence somewhat independent of financial capital, in Sing Song Girls, there is much less of such an oppositional tendency, as in late 19th Century China, it would have been difficult to develop them without some wealth.

Of course, it goes without saying that the men, with some exceptions, possess much greater wealth than the courtesans, but, as Bangqing demonstrates, they are not powerless, with the interaction between the habitus of the male elite and the habitus of the courtesans providing much of the novel's narrative drive. Without doubt, an evaluation of Sing Song Girls in relation to the work of Bourdieu and his theories of social reproduction could prove to be a very creative research project, if it hasn't already been done. For now, at the risk of upsetting potential readers of the novel, I will briefly make reference to several important stories within the novel in order to highlight this interaction.

Modesty Zhu, the shy younger brother of businessman Amity Zhu, is initiated into the life of the pleasure quarters, where he takes a fancy to Twin Jade, a new courtesan in the Zhou House, a first class establishment. After observing the affection between Modesty and Jade, Script Li, a wealthy, high ranking official, proposes that they marry. Modesty and Jade become inseparable, but his family thereafter intercedes, with the assistance of none other than Script Li, to arrange a marriage for him with someone else. Upon finally learning of the marriage, Jade realizes that she has mistaken the unreal for the real, and proceeds to pressure the Zhu family to provide sufficient funds to enable her to buy her release from Zhou House.

One is tempted to construe this story as one of bitter betrayal, but Bangqing tells it in such a way as to suggest other, more disquieting possibilities. Upon reflection, Script Li comes across as less an insensitive cad, and more like someone playacting within the artificial world of the brothels as he would do without the slightest hesitation because of his wealth and social status. Jade, upon learning of Modesty's marriage, draws upon her experience of life in the pleasure quarters and successfully obtains the money she needs to leave Zhou House, revealing in the process that the prospect of leaving was more prominent in her mind and heart than her love for Modesty. If anyone could be said to be a victim, it was Modesty, lacking in the understanding of the habitus of both his social class and the pleasure quarters, thus finding himself pushed into a marriage imposed upon him by others.

Accordingly, the interaction between brothel patrons and courtesans is necessarily a personal, emotional and economic form of unequal exchange, one in which the courtesans accept the transformation of their attractiveness, their musical and theatrical skills, their refinement and, of course, their sexuality into a form of mercantile commerce so as to have an opportunity to assert their personal independence. Green Phoenix, a leading courtesan at another first class house, Huang House, is an excellent illustration of this aspect of the novel. Her favorite client is Vigor Quan, a client with whom she has developed a high level of trust to accompany their enduring sexual attraction.

Upon encountering another prospective client, Prosperity Luo, a magistrate, at a party, Phoenix immediately recognizes that he is enamoured of her, and seizes the opportunity to accept him as another client on her own terms. Luo is enraptured by her intelligence, her practicality and her independence, and she eventually manipulates him into paying a substantial amount for her release from Huang House. She then sets up her own house, where she will be able to continue to see both Luo and Quan as clients. Bangqing relates her story with little romantic flourish, instead highlighting her financial and legal knowledge as well as her entrepreunerial sense, essential qualities for any good courtesan.

Such qualities are invariably rare in a world where entertainment, sex and commerce are intermingled, and Bangqing acknowledges it as part of his process of demystification. Twin Jade and Green Phoenix are exceptions, not the rule, as revealed by the tragedies that befall Little Rouge and Second Treasure. Little Rouge and Lotuson Wang really do love one another, but because their desire is incapable of bridging the gap created by the habitus of class and the habitus of the brothels, she ends up alone and impoverished. Second Treasure, unwilling to acknowledge that her departed lover has reneged on his promise of marriage, continues to spend money for the anticipated wedding, and, eventually, upon discovering that she has been abandoned, stumbles blindly into a most terrible fate. For their male patrons, life goes on, in seemingly circular fashion, but for the courtesans, the slightest misstep can result in disaster, and often does.

Labels: Book Reviews, China

From The German Revolution: 1917-1923, a rich, profound, tragic history written by Pierre Broue:

It seems that from November 1921, the magnates of German industry decided that the general situation must deteriorate before it could improve; runaway inflation to wipe out Germany's debt, bring the state to its knees before them, exhaust the working people, and leave the great capitalists alone as masters of the situation. The mark fell steadily throughout 1922, and its fall became precipitous when the Ruhr was occupied.

From an article in the Financial Times by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."

"I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal.

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia's "Confucian" culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

The reporter's reference to Confucian culture as a reason for Chnese objections is quite humorous. I'm not aware of people from any culture that appreciates having the value of its assets diminished through deliberate government policy.

With that said, I'm still a deflationist, for the reasons presented by Mike Whitney yesterday:

The economy is in the grip of deflation. Commercial banks are stockpiling excess reserves (more than $850 billion in less than a year) to prepare for future downgrades, write-offs, defaults and foreclosures. That's deflation. Consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending; driving, eating out, shopping, vacations, hotels, air travel. More deflation. Businesses are laying off employees, slashing inventory, abandoning plans for expansion or reinvestment. More deflation. Banks are trimming credit lines, calling in loans and raising standards for mortgages, credit cards and commercial real estate. Still more deflation. Bernanke has opened the liquidity valves to full-blast, but consumers are backing off; they're too mired in debt to borrow, so the money sits idle in bank vaults while the economy continues to slump.

It is important to note that the Chinese concerns and Whitney's deflationary perspective are not contradictory. It is possible for economies around the world to continue to contract, even as the US deliberately orchestrates a decline in the value of the dollar. In this, Americans would experience the worst of all possible worlds, domestic deflation and continued job losses even as the cost of imported goods increased dramatically.

In such a situation, American capitalists could achieve many of the goals described by Broue in the context of German capital in 1923. Whereas the German capitalists hoped to inflate their way out of reparations, the American ones would likewise seek to inflate their way out of its foreign debt through currency devaluation. Whereas German capitalists wanted to destroy the autonomy of the working class, American ones want to eliminate what little remains of the social protections of the Great Society and the New Deal. In each instance, they have decided that the general situation must deteriorate before it could improve.

Could it get as bad here as Germany as 1923? Doubtful. But when finance capital plays these sorts of games, the door is opened to all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Indeed, the phrase the law of unintended consequences now hints at ominous, heretofore inconceivable possibilities.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, China, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

From the Financial Times:

Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.

The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.

Significant, not just because China and Brazil are among the largest emerging market economies, but also because Brazil is the largest economy in South America, formerly a US economic preserve. US preoccupations with the Middle East and Central Asia, combined with the severity of the global recession, continue to drive a decline in US military and economic influence there.

From the Brazilian and Chinese perspectives, it may be a reflection of the urgency that each places upon reducing their dependence upon US markets. As you may recall, James Petras is forecasting a collapse in the South American manufacturing sector over the next few years, while there have already been numerous reports of plant closures in China. Hence, the need to create new links of global economic interdependence to replace the old ones.

Labels: American Empire, China, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, South America

Joel Andreas, a sociology professor at John Hopkins University, has just published a compelling work of scholarship, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class. Perhaps, I will find the time to review it soon, but, meanwhile, the following passage provides one of the most concise descriptions of the interrelationship of international capital within China ever written. Capital that is not just financial but cultural and political as well:

In the mid-1980s, in line with the central government's orientation toward market reform and global integration, Tsinghua opened a School of Law and a School of Economics and Managment (SEM). The latter was founded by Zhu Rongji, the Tsinghua alumnus who later--as China's premier--would direct the privatization of much of China's economy. The SEM, the first of its kind in China, became the largest and most popular school of the university. It was modeled after the leading business schools in the United States and it embraced economic doctrines and business and management theories popular in those schools. Today, it offers MBA degrees and high priced executive-training programs in collaboration with Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management. In 2000, leading government officials, academics and business executives from both China and abroad were invited to join a newly created advisory board. The foreign dignitaries on SEM's advisory board include top executives from Intel, Goldman Sachs, Nissan, GM, NASDAQ, McKinsey, BP, Temasek Holdings, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Nokia, Citigroup, the Carlyle Group and Blackstone. Zhu Rongji serves as the honorary chairman of the board and the chairman is H. Lee Scott, the president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores, which in 2004 donated US$1,000,000 to SEM to help open the Tsinghua University China Retail Research Center.

Indeed, capitalism is increasingly a global, and not a nationalistic phenomenon. Without a recognition of the interweaving of these economic, cultural and political features, one cannot properly understand it, much less resist it with plausible alternatives.

Labels: American Empire, China, Neoliberalism, New Left Review

In late March, I outlined the emerging contours of conflict between the US and China in relation to the global recession and its ultimate outcome. Consistent with my expressed intention to recommend posts of importance on the subject of the recession and the transformation of the global economy, please consider this one by Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns. He explains how East Asia is seeking to decouple itself from US financial policies through the creation of an Asian Development Bank, after having been dissuaded from doing so by the US in the late 1990s. East Asia, asserts Harrison, has learned its lesson, and will no longer permit the US to dictate policies related to trade, finance and development through the International Monetary Fund to the advantage of the US any longer. Essential reading.

Labels: American Empire, China, Global Recession, IMF, Japan, Neoliberalism

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, China, Europe, Global Recession, Japan, Latin America, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The handwriting is on the wall in regard to decline of American economic power:

China’s central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund.

In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies”.

Analysts said the proposal was an indication of Beijing’s fears that actions being taken to save the domestic US economy would have a negative impact on China.

“This is a clear sign that China, as the largest holder of US dollar financial assets, is concerned about the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money,” said Qu Hongbin, chief China economist for HSBC.

Hongbin is deliberately understating the situation. The problem is not the fact that the US Federal Reserve is printing money, but, rather, that the Fed is printing money in an attempt to preserve the global preeminance of US financial institutions that would otherwise be moribund, with the risk assumed by foreign holders of dollar denominated assets. If the Fed was printing money in support of a policy that would revive the US consumption of Chinese exports, the People's Bank of China would not be nearly as alarmed.

But the Fed is doing the opposite, as US banks cut back on the extension of credit and Americans pay down their debt and increase their rate of savings. As a consequence, the US is slowly, but surely, moving towards reduced consumption, if measured by expectations before the recession, and increased domestic manufacture of products at the expense of foreign countries dependent upon the US market. Hence, the lack of concern by the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve about the inevitable decline in the dollar that will result from the bailout and the stimulus plan. The policy is also alluring from a geopolitical standpoint, as a decline in China's manufacturing base would be perceived quite positively by the military-industrial complex, a way of perpetuating US global hegemony.

Accordingly, if accepted on its own terms, the internal logic of such a policy is quite compelling. There are, however, good reasons to speculate as to whether Americans will accept the sacrifice involved in such a painful transition, as noted here last fall. In effect, the US would be atttempting to preserve its financial and military dominance through a conscious policy of import substitution, a policy that would initially require a form of shock therapy that prices many imports out of the reach of most Americans. Generations of people accustomed to possessing the most advanced Japanese, Chinese and European products will be stunned to discover that they only the wealthy will still be able to purchase them. Increased social unrest is very likely as the effects of the policy become evident, although the prospect that such unrest, predominately populist in nature, will result in more equitable social policies appears slight.

Furthermore, the policy also assumes that China does nothing in response, clearly, a misguided belief, as this article demonstrates. China has substantial reserves, and can direct them towards the creation of domestic market to replace foreign ones like the US. One suspects that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party anticipated this threat before the recession because Hu Jintao has been emphasizing the need for a more equitable distribution of income within China for several years. It has been common to dismiss these concerns as a mere rhetorical effort to address growing unrest, but, perhaps, there was something much more serious beneath the surface, a recognition that China had to become more economically independent of the US in order to avoid a preemptive US financial strike against it through devaluation of the dollar.

Projecting the future is a dangerous business, but the advantage here would appear to lie with China. Debtor nations rarely, if ever, succeed in reestablishing the dominance they possessed in their manufacturing and export heydeys. Of course, I shouldn't ignore the possibility that it will all end badly for all concerned. Even so, East and South Asia seems more favorably positioned to weather the storm. And, then, there are the workers themselves. How will they react to these tumultuous changes, changes that, in all instances, will result in even more rapacious forms of primitive accumulation within the societies in which they live? Or, to put it more simply, how will they react to more extreme expropriations of their wealth, expropriations required to facilitate future capitalist development? So far, with the exception of continental Europe, there are few, if any signs, of an emerging collective consciousness required to resist it.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, China, Credit Crunch, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

A mysterious historical figure, given that he attained the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party. A paradoxical man, selected by Mao to succeed him in 1976, he subsequently authorized the military arrest of the Gang of Four, including Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, shortly after Mao's death, yet continued to advocate in support of the cultural revolution. By 1978, Deng Xiaoping had pushed him into the dustbin of history. Deng later used him to establish the principle of peaceful transfers of power within the party by allowing him to remain on the Central Committee even after he lost his last leadership position in 1981. Apparently, he failed to recognize the political necessity of distancing himself from Mao's touch.

Labels: China, Communism, Obituaries

Corpses are not part of our closeted world, and certainly not several at once. Most of those I'd seen before becoming a reporter were treated with powder and rouge, dressed in their finest, displayed as much to provide "closure" to survivors as to respect the memories of the deceased.

Looking at this unvarnished business, you can't help wondering what these people must have felt at the end, their worries and passions. The woman with the beautiful long black hair, now by the fifth day starting to fall out. How she combed it, admiring herself in the mirror, careful to choose the flowered dress she wore on the last day of her life hoping a husband or lover might notice. An elderly person unidentifiable beneath a blood-soaked mattress who had hobbled as far as the front door before falling head first, blocking the stairs, cane jammed against the wall.

Most victims appeared to have died quickly, but I'm haunted by the body of one large man. By the looks of it, he had lived long enough for some good Samaritans to place him on a bed frame and fashion makeshift stretcher handles before abandoning him to save their own skin. Nearby, a store mannequin, split in half, mocked human grief with its painted smile.

Heading out of Beichuan on the steep incline up to the road, a resident back for one last look gave a wave at the wreckage. "Goodbye, my lovely hometown," he said. "My house is gone, the relatives have fled, I'll probably never see you again."

Labels: China, Earthquake

The most recent news reports place the death toll at over 71,000.

Labels: China, Earthquake

Explanatory Note: the obsessively controlling attitude of the International Olympic Committee described in the linked London Times article is an endemic aspect of the movement, and, thus, predates the award of the summer Olympics to China by several decades.

Labels: Activism, China, Olympics, Tibet

The photo caption reads as follows: A man carrying a Tibetan flag is attacked by pro-China supporters awaiting the start of the Olympic torch relay in San Francisco. (Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty)

Off to a great start already, and the relay doesn't start for another two hours. No doubt narcissistic torch relay runners like Helen Zia and Jill Slavery will find some way to rationalize it. After all, the man got what he deserved by violating the rule that the Olympics, and all the events surrounding it, are not supposed to be politicized, or rather, they are only to be politicized by the host country seeking to burnish an atrocious human rights and labor rights record.

And, when the torch relay goes through Tibet?

In China, government officials warned against attempts to disrupt the torch as it travels through Tibet on the most controversial leg of the tour.

"If someone dares to sabotage the torch relay in Tibet and its scaling of Mount Everest, we will seriously punish him and will not be soft-handed," said Qiangba Puncog, governor of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, at a press conference in Beijing.

It appears that China has completely wrested control of the 2008 Olympics away from the International Olympic Committee. One can only hope that it continues to conduct itself in such a ham handed way so as to permanently destroy the credibility of the event.

Labels: Activism, China, Neoliberalism, Olympics, Political Violence, Tibet

The Olympic Torch Relay has been dogged by protest since it left Athens. Many of the protests have condemned Chinese brutality in Tibet, but they have become broader in scope as the relay has continued along its planned itinarary.

As the New York Times reported yesterday:

In Paris, at the Trocadéro, opposite the Eiffel Tower, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and press freedom groups like Reporters Without Borders protested side by side with representatives of a banned underground Chinese democracy party, Taiwan nationalists and proponents of independence for the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China.

“We all have the same problem,” Can Asgar, a leader of the Uighur diaspora in Munich, yelled into a microphone at the Trocadéro. "Freedom for Uighurs. Freedom for Tibet. We must fight together.”

But what precisely is the problem? Yes, at one level, the problem is precisely as they understand it, a centralized, authoritarian Chinese government that increasingly relies upon xenophobic appeals to nationalism to justify the suppression of different peoples, cultures and proponents of a more tolerant, diverse society. Certainly, a change in government in Beijing, or even merely a relaxation in the political orientation of the CCP, would improve the conditions under which Uighurs, Tibetans, peasants and manufacturing workers live.

Indeed, it is this internal dynamic, the growing social unrest within China, as discussed here and here and here, that interweaves Tibet and Xinjiang into a larger pattern of discontent. China has abandoned state socialism and remorselessly implemented neoliberal economic policies since the early 1980s, creating an exploitative system that Peter Kwong, quoting a colleague, describes as high tech feudalism. As a consequence, it appears increasingly evident that the government believes that such a system cannot be preserved, even if reformed, without enforcing imperial control over peripheral regions with large numbers of non-ethnic Chinese.

Hong Kong, and possibly even Taiwan, as providers of capital for the Chinese industrial machine, can be provided with a certain measure of autonomy, because they accept the socioeconomic principles upon which the society is built. But Tibet and Xinjiang are problematic, as they emphasize ethnic and religious values that are incompatible with them. Moreover, the peoples of these regions, if granted control over their lives and resources, could set a troubling example for the laboring classes within China.

Such a perspective remains, however, too narrow. Increasingly, the global neoliberal economy is a creation of the US, Europe, Japan and China. Commodities and capital move between these economic zones, and then out to the lesser developed countries of the world, in search of the most profitable opportunities, opportunities dependent upon environmental degradation and a docile workforce that will accept the most demeaning treatment.

At the center of this economy is the relationship between the US and China. US corporations have offshored production to China, commonly through subcontractors, and the manufactured commodities return to the US, where they are purchased by consumers, often through extensive access to generous credit. Of course, the credit aspect of this equation is under stress, as discussed here, putting the future prospects of this model in question, but that does not invalidate my description of the situation.

Accordingly, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games constitutes a coronation of this global structure, with the torch relay being the procession in advance of it. A visit to the relay's official website reveals the predictable corporate sponsors, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Lenovo. Similarly, the Games has an even wider range of corporate sponsors in addition to the relay ones, including VISA, Panasonic, Kodak, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Adidas and Volkswagon. Paralleling the control that China imposes upon its workforce, the participating athletes are not permitted to wear political badges, and innocuous ones worn by torch bearers in Paris may subject them to sanction.

The Olympic Torch has therefore become the symbol of the dominant neoliberal economic order, necessitating repressive measures similar to those required to maintain stability in production facilites around the lesser developed world. It is no accident that the police presence required to escort the torch through the cities of Europe and the US evokes memories of past anti-globalization protests.

But the angry, bleeding protesters have not cast a broad enough net of condemnation. The problem is not just China, but its incorporation into a global economically coercive system of social control. The protesters should therefore aspire not just to put out the torch because of China's atrocious human rights record, but to seize it and destroy it in a provocative public exhibition of contempt for what it perversely represents.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, China, Neoliberalism, Olympics, Political Violence, Tibet

From the most current issue of the New Left Review, an article by Richard Walker and Daniel Buck:

Modern China is undergoing a relentless process of transformation, from the forests of construction cranes in its coastal cities to the gargantuan infrastructure projects in its interior. Its economic trajectory has been equally dramatic: China is now ranked 4th in the world by GDP, rising from 11th in 1990. A range of developments testify to its rapid progress along the path to a capitalist economy: the commodification of land and labour, emergence of private firms, formation of finance capital, among many others. Yet China scholars have been curiously reluctant to apply the classic Marxist idea of a transition to capitalism—and its corollary, primitive accumulation—to the Chinese case. Instead, they quite loosely use terms such as globalization, marketization, post-socialism, reform era and market socialism, seemingly unaware of how closely the transformations under way in China compare with the development of capitalism in Europe and North America—not to mention many other ‘late developers’ in Asia and Latin America.

Comparison with historical experience of the rise of capitalism in the West can act as a useful counterbalance to three shortcomings of contemporary China studies. The first common error is to exaggerate China’s uniqueness vis-à-vis the general process of capitalist transition. This does not mean adopting the flat-earth neoliberalism of Thomas Friedman or a unilinear Marxism in which the rest of the world must recapitulate the economic history of Britain or the United States. While capitalism has universal elements, the road to capitalism follows many routes, depending on history, geographic circumstance and politics. Like a virus, capitalism cannot survive without living hosts, whose dna it alters in order to reproduce. Therefore, one can certainly refer to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’.

A second pitfall for China watchers is an obsession with the socialist past. Certainly, the Maoist era shaped the country’s present course to an important degree, and China shares characteristics with other ex-socialist countries. But it differs profoundly from most post-Soviet and East European countries in that it did not undergo a sudden implosion of state, party and economy. Instead, an autocratic state has maintained a close hold on economic policy and the Communist Party continues to monopolize political life. Nonetheless, China in the twenty-first century can no longer sensibly be called ‘late’ or ‘market’ socialist.

A better comparison, in our view, is with the experience of capitalism in the West. But here lies a third danger, of drawing parallels only with contemporary developments around the world, from Internet search engines to mega-malls. Less well understood are the striking parallels with the past in Europe and North America, such as mass rural-to-urban migration and the gradual creation of a banking system. Such processes unfold over decades, and much of China is still pre-capitalist by any measure. Nevertheless, a generation after the prc was set on the road to capitalism by Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in 1978, the Communist leadership can no longer return the genie to its bottle. ‘Market imperatives quickly proved uncontrollable’, as Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett have put it; the ‘Chinese economy now operates largely according to capitalist logic.’ Or, as Robert Weil wryly notes, instead of the reformers ‘using capitalism to build socialism’, they ‘used socialism to build capitalism’.

Central to Marx’s presentation of primitive accumulation are the expropriation of the producers to create a working class, the emergence of a capitalist class with a stock of original capital, and the development of the home market. To these must be added the commodification of land, the rise of cities and extension of the spatial division of labour, and the transformation to a modern bourgeois state. We shall consider each of these in turn.

The discussion here focuses on cities, where the transition to capitalism is especially intense, but this is not to say that agrarian transformation has not been essential to the whole process. Indeed, the era of ‘reform’ was launched in the countryside with the break-up of the communes and introduction of the household responsibility system after 1978, followed by the explosion of town and village enterprises (TVES). Over the last twenty years, however, industrialization, proletarianization, accumulation, property development and consumerism have accelerated in the cities—though these are still deeply linked with the commodification of land, labour and consumption in rural areas and the extraction of surplus from the peasantry and rural industry.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this scholarly article is the assertion that China's capitalist transformation is being primarily generated by domestic factors instead of foreign direct investment:

Chinese firms depend most on the domestic market, where household consumption constitutes over 50 per cent of GDP. To view exports as the sole engine of development in modern China is therefore to repeat the classic mistake of liberals who see trade, rather than production, as the heartbeat of economic growth.

The authors also possess a nuanced perspective about recently publicized efforts to alleviate poverty, mentioned here last year (click on the China label below):

In 2000, state investment was reoriented to focus on the poor inland areas of central and western China, and the new government of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao has declared its intent to alleviate rural poverty. A common interpretation is that these measures are designed to head off growing social unrest due to glaring inequality.It is true that state spending creates jobs and income in the short term, but measures such as rural electrification and road building are ultimately designed to incorporate poor areas still ‘off the grid’ more fully into the circuits of capital, thus increasing the size of the home market and the effective demand for China’s domestic industries.

Well worth reading in its entirety.

Labels: China, Neoliberalism, New Left Review