tdaxp

Enterra has at least three great bloggers on their payroll: Barnett, Deichman, and of course CEO Stephen DeAngelis, writing at Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. ERMB's latest post, on China in Africa, contains this paragraph:

African countries will not experience sustainable economic growth by relying on the export of natural resources. One of the reasons that Tom Barnett and I came up with the idea for Development-in-a-Box™ was to break this cycle of reliance and help countries develop the diverse economic base and create the jobs they need to prosper. Until China understands which of their programs are helpful and which are harmful, their ventures in Africa will continue to bear the rogue label.

The reason that things are labeled in political discourse is, of course, political. China is a pro-business capitalist state, and it is no surprise that she draws attacks from anti-business and anti-capitalist groups. It's chic at best and harmless at worst to have a quirky ideology that ruins your productivity and kills millions of your citizens. But become productive and compete? That makes you rogue.



That said, if we wish to criticize Beijing for not doing enough, we surely can. Perhaps the greatest technologies in the history of man are the police and ecological homogenization. The benefits of police are clear: a drastic reduction in violence and associated reputation-/pride-/face-/honor- related killings. Ecological homogenization, the reduction in diversity in a climate region, reduces the pathogenic load on a population, increasing average intelligence as the body has to spend less effort resisting diseases during development

If we really wanted China to help in Africa, we would encourage Chinese police to patrol African cities and Chinese industry to engage in continental climate change.

Of course, that would be labeled "rogue," too.

Just a few days after a picnic where the balinghou (those Chinese born after 1980, who thus grew up under both economic growth and the One Child policy), Time riffs the same tune with the article, "China's Me Generation."

Tom Barnett has quipped that China's ideological mix is "30 percent Marxist-Leninist, 70 percent The Sopranos." It's probaboy more accurate to say 70% Tony Sopranos, 30% Edmund Burke.

This book by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schnoenhals a history of the insane Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I saw "insane" purposefully. Such actions as the Holocaust and even Cambodia's "Year Zero" in a way make sense, as they were purposeful applications of an ideology designed to achieve a defined end. Mao's war against the Communist Party, however, Hitler was more-or-less in charge of the destruction of the Jews, as Pol Pot more-or-less oversaw the destruction of the Cambodians. Mao opted for a less conventional approach. Rival "Red Guard" organizations tested dirty bombs in a series of escalations and even attacked arms shipments intended for the Vietnam War. Mao's Last Revolution is the story of this madness.

The Cultural Revolution took place in the context of Soviet "revisionism," where first Khrushchev and then Brezhnev reformed the soviet system away from a cult of personality to the nondescript party oligarchy it eventually became. Mao feared a similar transformation of the People's Republic, and identified "Khrushchevs" around him. Immediate threats were the pragmatic Secretary-General of the Communist Party Deng Xiaoping and Mao's designated successor, Liu Shaoqi. Mao recognized the broader threat as the Chinese Communist Party itself, however, and proceeded to destroy it.



Mao first purged the Mayor of Beijing and the Chief of Staff of the People's Liberation Army to severe the Party's links to supporting organizations. Then he proceeded to destroy it. Red Guards were incited to tear down the Party organization, and the Army was then unleashed to tear down the Red Guards. (The self-described Red Terror is told in enough detail that one positively roots for the Army as it mows down "student demonstrators." The context of Tiananmen has never been more clear.)



Throughout the book specific incidents and anecdotes are elaborated on. The cities of Beijing (radicalized by the presence of Peking and Tsinghua Universities, not to mention the sometimes presence of Mao himself), Shanghai (where the Red Guards were subsumed by the organization of factoryworker-cum-intellectual Wang Hongwen, later one of the Gang of Four), and Wuhan (where Mao might have been deposed). Wuhan is especially notable as the beginning of the misfortunes of Wang Li, a high-ranking but not especially powerful member of the Central Cultural Revolutionary Group. Wang is attacked and tortured by enraged followers of a PLA General that Wang completed peace talks with, later is imprisoned by his fellow Culturally Revolutions, and only released by the Deng government in 1982.



Mao, whose Lou Gherig's disease worsens as the history continues on, is a master politician who is able to place one group against the other. His Red Guards destroy the Party, the People's Liberation Army (headed by toady Lin Biao) destroys the Red Guards, and the purging of Lin and other top generals in the PLA returns the government to "civilian" rule. Mao's 5GW is in a brilliant position on his death, with his wife and the rest of the Gang of Four in power behind a hapless toady, Hua Guofeng. Only a rump and discredited band of "survivors," those kept alive and with nominal party membership by Mao Zedong, remain.

Happily for the fate of the world, Madame Mao is an idiot many times over and provokes a defensive coup by Hua Guofeng which results in Deng Xiaoping's final, and successful, rise to power. In an epilogue, the authors note that Mao is the last of the "traditional" Chinese rulers (anti-market) and Deng the first of the radicals (pro-market). Deng has now been succeeded by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, who now "re-envision" Mao's legacy in what must be a nightmare to the Chairman's Ghost.

Mao's Last Revolution is one of the best histories I have ever read, and easily the most readable. Strongly recommended.

Perlez, J. (2007). Militant students capture masseuses to make a point." New York Times. June 24, 2007.

If there's anything that illustrates how screwy Pakistan, and for that matter the rest of the Islamic Gap, is, it's this:

“There were about 25 Chinese women, dressed only in underpants and bras,” recalled Ms. Okasha, 24, a muscular high-school badminton champion who had shed her black garb for soft mauves, her face uncovered, during an interview inside the women-only confines of the school. “They scattered, but we managed to grab five.”

Though a concluded paragraph isn't bad, either:

Ms. Hassan, her face absent of makeup but her fingernails and toenails varnished with red, said she was proud of her raiders.

“I said to the students before they went off, ‘The Chinese are masters at karate; you don’t know how to make one kick.’ But they were able to manage.”

And for completeness sake:

His college-age students asked “many times,” he said, about the legitimacy of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing was justifiable against American soldiers. “It depends on the circumstances,” he said. “In a supermarket I will say no. Suicide bombing against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, I will say yes, yes. It’s not suicide. It’s a mission, then it’s allowed.”

Two take-aways from this article:



First, it's interesting that the New York Times describes what are obviously prostitutes as "masseuses." The reason is clear: opposition to prostitution should be an intellectual, liberal exercise, and not a goonish one. The Times is clearly embarrassed to be intellectually on the same side as madrassa-studying reactionaries, though this isn't surprising. Both the New York Times and the Islamists prefer prostitution to remain in the informal, depriving many women of a natural capitalization vehicle. Both the the Pakistani extremists and the old liberals of the New York Times share the disdain for market exchange, Hernando de Soto-style capitalization of private wealth, and liberty. Both share a sentimental opposition and a thuggish adoration of enforced virtue.



Secondly, the story highlights the transition of China from the Gap to the Core. China is in the unusual condition that while she is becoming a global leader, she has a large reservoir of very low paid citizens. This means that while the United States, Europe, and Japan find their capital flowing oversees in a process of creative destruction, China finds her people innovatively moving abroad for profits. This creates friction, and while the the typical American "downside" is lost capital, the increasingly typical Chinese "downside" is lost lives.



China and the West share a common interest, not only in energy resources, but in a better administration of the Gap.

Lexington Green, of Chicago Boyz, kindly linked to a book review on of Kurlantzick's "soft power" book by in the open thread.

My thoughts (the quoted section is from the original article):

The "flat world" of globalization, so stridently advocated by Clinton and the current presidency of George W Bush, simply did not create the improved quality of life it promised for many Third World countries."

How long has the "developing world" been "developing"? How long as the Third World waited as the global Third Estate preparing to take over?

The reason that life in the Afro-Islamic Gap sucks is that the Afro-Islamic Gap is culturally bankrupt. Europe's experiments with totalitarian fascism were stupidly imported by the Muslim world after World War II, whle sub-saharan Africa's colonial development was canceled because it cost Europeans too much money.



The continued horror of life in the gap is not because of the Washington Consensus, or Bill Clinton, or even the Iraq War: the continued horror of life in the gap is a reflection of life during most of human history: nasty, brutish, solitary, and short. The Gap, that prison of billions of persons, is the true whore of the world: capable of taknig cash, incapable of love.

After America crushed the final attempts of Europe to give a damn about life in the Gap, Gap elites have profited by taking cahs from this or that foreign power in exchange for some fleeting commodity. During the Cold War, the customers were Washington and Moscow and the good was whether or not to put the meaningless word "People's " before the meaningless word "Republic" in their country's name. Now the situation has chnaged to selling raw physical materials: coal, tin, etc. Not an improvement.

China has moved into the US's and USSR's roles of paying with few questions asked. That's a sign of Chinese power (compared to Deng's first international act, say, which was to purchase feed-grade wheat to feed starving Chinese), but also a sign of China's weakness (playing for nickles and dimes). America's larger goal is to end history on her terms.

The United States is arrogantly accustomed to peace, having driven her early neighbors (Britain, France, Spain) from her neighbors and long ago establishing military hegemony over Canada and Mexico. Now the US extends the reach of capitalist peace under American protection from western Europe and Japan (end of World War II) to self-sustaining capitalist peace for all of Europe and all of the Pacific Rime (now). The material benefits to nearly everyone are obvious. America's profit is that she manages to stop the rise and fall of states, unlike Britain in the 19th century, France in the 18th, Turkey in the 17th, Spain in the 16th, or the Empire in the 15th. No more wars or rumors of wars, for the first time since the Pax Romana.

Now that's soft power.

Slashdot links the Guardian's summary of what the UK Ministery of Defense fears the world may look like in 30 years. Some thoughts below:

Actually, this would be a revolutionary petite bourgeious...

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

And this:

Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes "will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces", the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.

... is perhaps optimistic. Of greater concern to Europe are European Islamic No-Go Zones.

Nice bit about China though:

Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China "whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam".

The world would be very different in 9/11 had been directed against Shanghai and Beijing. Perhaps, as China connects with more and more New Core powers and threatens Islamic ruleset absolutism, that day may still come.

DeAngelis, Stephen F. (2006). Globalization's Up & Down Sides. Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. December 18, 2006. Available online: http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2006/12/globalizations_.html.

DeAngelis, Stephen F. (2006). Globalization's Up & Down Sides, Part 2:. Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. December 19, 2006. Available online: http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2006/12/globalizations__1.html.

Lady of tdaxp has been on assignment in Shenzhen ("Deep Drains"), China, as part of her training in industrial engineering, so it is neat to here about that growing city near Hong Kong in the news for its responsive government:

"In newly rich Shenzhen, as in much of China, social change is being driven by economic transformation and, more than anything else, property ownership. Red-hot real estate markets have given birth to a new class of people, known as mortgage slaves, because the financial burden of buying into the middle-class dream of home ownership has suddenly become so great. The new property owners have poured their energy into everything from establishing co-op boards to spar with landlords, to organizing real estate market boycotts to force down prices. Others, meanwhile, have begun running for office in district-level elections, where they hope to make the city government more responsive to their needs, though, like governments at every level in China, the ultimate power here rests with Communist Party officials. Shenzhen has also spawned a local research group known as Interhoo, an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues. ... Academics and others who study the city’s development say it is no surprise that Shenzhen is emerging as the cradle of movements like this. From the start, its proximity to Hong Kong has made it unusually open to outside influences. The city is also new, founded in 1980, and populated by migrants who contribute to a culture of greater individualism and risk-taking than anywhere else in China."

However, all is not right in the new, gleeming city:

"While grueling labor conditions exist in many parts of China, Shenzhen’s gigantic plants, employing as many as 200,000 workers each, have established a particular reputation for harshness among workers and labor advocates. Monthly turnover rates of 10 percent or more are not uncommon, labor groups say. The tough working conditions, in turn, have helped spawn one of the most important labor developments in China in recent years: large-scale wildcat strikes and smaller job actions for better hours and wages. The Guangdong Union Association, a government-affiliated group, said there were more than 10,000 strikes in the province last year. Among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen’s recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor. “This path is now a dead end,” said Zhao Xiao, an economist and former adviser to the Chinese State Council, or cabinet. After cataloging the city’s problems, he said, “Governments can’t count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness.” As the limits of the Shenzhen model have grown more and more apparent, other cities in China’s relatively developed east are increasingly trying to differentiate themselves, emphasizing better working and living conditions for factory workers or paying more attention to the environment."

Globalization has created the wealth & prosperity which spawned the Shenzhenese middle class, and it will continue to create the wealth & propserity that will lift the entire city out of poverty. It is tempting to say that because the poor in the countryside are out of sight, and the poor in cities are visible, that it's better to keep the whole of China agrarian and poor than build up an economy. However, the increasing visibility of poverty in China is a sign of globalization working: because now the problem is visible.

Likewise, the increasing visibility of wealth in China is a sign that globalization is working: because now there is wealth in China.

Two recent events, within twenty-four hours of each other, give hope to us all. First, India and the United States signed a nuclear accord which will allow that Republic to develop technology to deter deter an unseemly neighbor (Pakistan) and a neighbor that should be deterred from war as much as possible (China). Meanwhile, North Korea continues to show obstinance in her nuclear talks, which encourage Japan's nuclearization. This encourages Tokyo to develop technology to deter an unseemly neighbor (North Korea) and a neighbor that should be deterd from war as much as possible (China).

Sometimes, proliferation is grand.

"Bitterness in Beijing over North Korea's betrayal may mean war," by Rowan Callick, The Australian, 18 December 2006, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20943831-2703,00.html

Very hopeful, if true:

The dynamics have shifted dramatically since the last talks. When Pyongyang tested its first nuclear bomb two months ago, defying pleas from Beijing, it alienated itself from its only ally.

The extent of that alienation has been revealed in essays by China's leading strategic thinkers. The bitter sense of betrayal felt in China about its communist neighbour, on whose behalf 360,000 soldiers, mainly volunteers, died during the Korean war 53 years ago, sets the tone for the extraordinarily frank essays in China Security.

...

He sees the biggest winner, after the North Korean regime, as Japan - unless China acts firmly against Pyongyang. "If China continues its ambiguous policies on the North Korean nuclear issue, the US will encourage Japan to become nuclearised."

...

Zhu Feng, director of the international security program at Beijing University, says a recent opinion poll shows 44per cent of Chinese people dislike North Korea more than any other nation. "The Chinese leadership now understands it may have deluded itself about the Kim Jong-il Government pursuing a good-neighbourly policy that Pyongyang would gradually be won over by China's kindness," he says.

Mr Zhu says that while Beijing's support of UN resolutions against Pyongyang's nuclear testing is seen in North Korea as "an act of treachery by its socialist big brother", when the test happened, "in Beijing, ire turned into fury. It was no less than a slap in China's face".

The important meeting of the central committee of the Communist Party three months ago proclaimed that a nuclear North Korea was a formidable challenge to China's "core interests" - a phrase previously used only about Taiwan independence.

Chinese help would be need to kill Kim.

"Wikipedia Is a Hit in China As Ban Is Lifted," Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2006, http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116355788891123450-tqM_m9_qDsL5EWEFgW4o6zHBSIQ_20061214.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top (from Slashdot).

The Chinese version of wikipedia is exploding in popularity, after the Communist party legalized it

Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.

...

The unblocking of Chinese-language Wikipedia makes the site's user-generated content accessible to a much larger share of China's Internet population, which now numbers more than 120 million.

While stumbling my way through the hanzi, I came across this historical poster arguing for the continuity of the Republic of China from the founding to Chiang Kaishek's reign:



It is a reminder that Mao is not the only Chinese leader to supress the Sun Disk. The first flag of the Chinese Republic, as well as the flags of the (illegitimate) Manchu State and the (illegimiate) Empire of China also were Sun-Disk-less.



More historical Chinese flags are available at China Since 1912.