Blood & Treasure

OK, so Google have finally done it: They’ve stopped censoring and sent viewers of their .cn site down to a mirror in Hong Kong. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that people are actually getting there. The difference now is that the censorship is coming from agencies of the Chinese government, not from Google itself.

Hello America! Germany says, Welcome to 1883! The UK says, Welcome to 1911! France says, Welcome to 1930! 

 Via. It all looks nightmarishly complicated, but there seems to be quite a bit of “modern thinking” here as well in that a lot of what has been mandated is the compulsory purchase of insurance by individuals from private providers, who in turn have to accept cases they would previously have turned down, at least in theory. Maybe it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that such compromises might have produced a bill so hideously deformed that it will end up discrediting the case for actual comprehensive public healthcare in the US. At any rate, you’re not going to have real public healthcare until the rent seeking middlemen are either reduced to entirely marginal status or so bound with detailed legislation that they’re made into outright government subcontractors. Still, Obama finally pulled something out.

I’m actually inclined to believe Stephen Byers when he says that he exaggerated what he would be able to do for the corporate clients he’s now hustling for, if only on the grounds that it’s difficult to see what an ex-transport minister could do for anyone that would be worth £5000 per day (or would enable whoever hired him to plausibly claim that the cost was worth it). And it’s not as if he’s fresh goods either. His last ministerial post ended in 2002, which means that a lot of the contacts he made at the time, both government and corporate, will have moved on. I’m not particularly impressed that he helped Tesco out either. “Doing things for Tesco” is as near as this government has to an expression of principle. 

As Justin points out, influence peddling was always part of the New Labour project. It follows rationally enough. The whole thing was supposed to be post ideological, which means in practice that you spend your time managing, choosing between and sometimes working for projects proposed by competing interest groups. At first, the public pays you in your capacity as minister. Then the taxi meter starts, as Byers pointed out. 

I liked the bit about being able to get access to Tony Blair. It’s as if the whole network had simply transferred itself out of parliament and reconstituted itself as a kind of shadow government. But would Tony return Stephen’s phone calls? Maybe. Blair seems to have set himself up as a kind of global influence brokerage running through various foundations which enable people who might like to work together in various ways to meet and see whether they get along. So it depends on whether the people Stephen can scrape up are worth Tony’s time, and that of his valuable friends. So maybe a headline charge of £5000 makes sense. He’s got to pull in some heavy hitters to make the other heavy hitters take any notice of him. I don’t suppose he’ll be getting them now.

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love', 'duty', 'humanity' and 'virtue' - words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like "I surrender" in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life. 

Paul Linebarger was a psychological warfare consultant to the US army in Korea and elsewhere. But he’s probably better known as Cordwainer Smith, at least to science fiction fans, or people who were, way back when. Via comments here.

It’s one of those North Manchester days of cosy, soggy boredom, with everything on the Salford side of Cheetham Hill Road washed out by the drizzle and the sky a solid field of gray, an endless battleship cruising right overhead. That concludes today’s news. Now here’s Mark E Smith with the football results.

A Thai execution, back in the good old days. 

Now the second executioner came out, dressed in red with a red band bound round his forehead, and carrying a sword. He advanced until the condemned man could see him out of the corner of his eye, and there, some twenty yards away on the man's right hand, he sat upon his heels, and appeared to wait the moment when he should strike. Thereafter, the condemned man kept his head turned towards him, looking over his right shoulder. Meanwhile, the first executioner had swiftly run back and donned the red dress. He now entered the wide ring of spectators almost directly behind the condemned man, but during his stealthy advance, he kept always on his left hand. Wai-ing once to the Governor, and then raising his joined hands to heaven, he took his sword - a long slightly curved blade broadening towards the point, with thick heavy back and edge keen as a razor. Then he danced out with half-a-dozen prancing steps in tiptoe, and then stopped with one foot in the air. His sword was held above his head, one hand grasping the handle and the other fingering the point. 

So, in a series of little rushes, varied by extraordinary posturing and twirling of his sword, he crept nearer and nearer to his unsuspecting victim, amidst a silence that was painful. At the end his movements were so rapid that we could scarcely follow them. He was well out of striking distance when there came a quick rush, a circle of light in the air, and a sudden jet of crimson. He had not paused for the fraction of a second to take aim, but the head was severed with that single blow. 

That was in 1906. I interviewed Thailand’s most prolific executioner back in 2007. Things had moved on a little in the meantime.

I picked up this story a little late: a company called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium offers VPN’s and kindred software to get around China’s net nanny. Then they collect data on their users and sell it for personalized advertising.

Now the obvious risk of this is that the data will find its way to the Chinese government, through a front agency for them or simply by being sold on. In this case, that’s unlikely, since the GIFC is actually a front organization for the Fal*n G*ng cult (see here), who are obviously no friends of Beijing. The wheelies are not exactly all that popular in China or with Chinese people across the diaspora either, including with a lot of the people who might like to use these services, so a nice, friendly, secular sounding front would seem to make sense. 

In addition to selling data on users, they’re also apparently after US government democracy promotion funding. Gongers believe that their well being is promoted by an invisible swastika revolving in their stomach (hence wheelies). Apparently the invisible revolving swastika also helps those who help themselves, in this case by gathering together a large centralised store of information on people in whom Beijing’s security organs would be interested in knowing more about.

There’s a good piece by Fred Pearce over here which develops yesterdays post about the Hunan smelter incident and central/local rivalries in the Chinese power structure. 

 In the days before online news, that would probably have been the end of the matter. But reporters from the state Xinhua Online news service spotted the local item and a week later they showed up to investigate. Emboldened, the parents resumed their protest. They surrounded the smelter, tore down the wall, ransacked the offices, and destroyed machinery. 

Now Xinhua had a story. Its splash on Aug. 18 was accompanied by an editorial that asked: “If pollution standards were met, how is it that people are still poisoned by lead?” Within days, the factory was closed, and the Dongling case had set off a chain reaction across the country, as more and more citizens protested against metal smelters and mines, and Chinese journalists became bolder in reporting the protests. 

If this were happening in the West, it would hardly be extraordinary that a major news story had developed out of events such as those in Chongqing. But in China, this was something new, points out Qian Gang, a leading Chinese journalist who studied how the story grew for the China Media Project, a research group at the University of Hong Kong. The major Communist Party news media, such as Xinhua, are starting to report environmental stories, he says. “High-level party media have taken the lead.” Of all the Chinese media, they are proving to be “the fiercest, both in revealing the facts and in offering shrill criticism.” 

State media – and the Ministry of Environmental Protection – seem to be gaining more latitude for themselves by acting as a means of enforcing central government control over local authorities. And notice the way that MGIs slot neatly into the whole scenario.

Charli Carpenter at LGM has excerpted a report from the Monitoring Group on Somalia with some fascinating details on the piracy business model. As she says, it’s getting a little top heavy, with A and B shares, various investors and service providers and payoffs to local tribal bigwigs for anchoring rights. I can just see some Somali kid telling his mates that dad wants him to get a trade and join the family business, but he doesn’t want to become just another corporate suit. 

 Still, Francis Drake had to kick up half of what he took to Good Queen Bess even before he started handing the goodies out to his crew and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near that level of rent seeking.

So North Korea may or may not have executed its Finance Minister – “at a firing range in Pyongyang” - as the fall guy for the currency reform fiasco. If so, the regime can count on at least some support. According to this ICG report, meanwhile, the revaluation is only one of a series of cascading crises which might finally lead to collapse. The report notes the effect of sanctions in severely restricting Pyongyang’s ability to get the hard currency it needs, which makes me wonder whether anyone has a plan beyond immediate emergency aid in the event of regime collapse, and, if not, whether they should. Beijing's actions seem predicated on a slow integration of the North Korean economy with the regime kept intact during the process.

...and maybe kick that traitor out of the White House. Intense Marine Corps love.

Elsewhere, this may be relevant. 

 

"We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other," Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan tells Haaretz as she explains why she chose to dress up her baby daughter as the most evil historical figures of the 20th century. 

 "Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist. The possibility is still there. You never know." 

 In the controversial photo-series "Potency," Kleivan's daughter Faustina, then a few months old, depicts such infamous personalities as Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Chairman Mao, Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Adolf Hitler. The aim is to illustrate just one thing: We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil. 

 Well I think it’s disgraceful. And my dog, Lavrenty, agrees. 

The Mussolini one’s best, in a sort of united fascists of Benetton way. Milosevic is just crap – the kiddie’s just dressed in an all purpose baby gangster suit. Come to think of it, she looks remarkably like Churchill. It’s like some effigy maker in rural Pakistan trying to busk a model of the Danish Prime Minister for burning by an angry mob at immediate notice.

It’s curious how the renewed pressure on China to let the yuan rise and make its exports less competitive comes at just the time when the workers in those enterprises are starting to make something like real money. Obviously, the Chinese working class isn’t Obama’s electorate, though pushing for a raise in the price of imported basic manufactured goods (at least till the companies making them migrate to cheaper climes) doesn’t strike me as a great policy for the American working class either. But it’s odd how, for whatever reason, a half decent working class wage always ends up framed in the context of a problem to be solved, not identified as an outcome to be desired or maintained.

But on the subject of shitty jobs, let's spare a thought for these Chinese graduates.

Both Granite Studio and the China Health Care blog have got issues with Jonathan Watts’ story in the Guardian a couple of days back about fifty residents of a Hunan village detained while on their way to test for lead poisoning from a local smelter. It’s not the story that they have a problem with, but the headline: “China defends detention of lead poisoning victims who sought medical help.” Says Jeremiah: 

As I said, this case is tragic and the response by local and provincial officials has been shocking in its cruelty, but CHINA didn’t defend the detention, it was two local party hacks with a third quote from the regional propaganda office. Of course these hardhearted pleather-toting ernai-loving dimwits are defending their actions, it’s what local officials do. 

Sadly, reprehensibly, ’twas ever thus. 

But suggesting that the country — or the national government — stands firmly behind these goons is getting ahead of the story. Maybe the central government has issued orders to squelch any political blowback from this horrible case — they’ve done it before — but the article doesn’t make that claim and the headline should reflect the content. It’s hard to convince people overseas that China is not a monolith, this kind of carelessness makes that effort more difficult and hinders understanding of the complexities of China’s political landscape. 

It’s the familiar “fragmented tyranny” issue. The abuses in Hunan probably weren’t done at the order of the government; they’re much more likely to be a product of the administrative decentralization that accompanied the economic reform process, the creation of lots of petty local dictators from the body of one monolithic dictatorship (I’m overstating things here since there always was a surprising amount of local administrative autonomy in Communist China, something which helped the reform process along in the first place. But I haven’t time to get into that, or the knowledge to do it more than sketchily).

Attendant on that you have the constant struggle for power and influence between central government ministries and the attempts of every administrative layer from central government downwards to maximize its own power and get more control over people further down the chain. 

What we actually have here is a classic modern China story. An impoverished county desperate for investment of any sort invites a colossal polluter in and gives it carte blanche. Polluter duly proceeds to poison most of the population, on whom the local authority then falls like a ton of bricks in order to keep the scandal hushed up and to prevent an MGI. In this context, the actions of the local authority were likely to be taken partly in order to stop central government hearing about the problem and shutting the smelter down – which is what eventually happened.

Maybe a subeditor can’t be expected to know all this, but it is essential to understand that one party rule doesn’t translate into monolithic dictatorship in China, because without that it’s difficult to understand a lot of the things that are actually happening. It’s why, for instance, the actual experience of dictatorship with Chinese characteristics often creates an apparently paradoxical yearning for strong, centralized government, even to the extent of people taking to the streets and burning down the local communist party headquarters in order to try and get it – and why this yearning has nothing to do with the kind of culturalist bollocks spouted by Martin Jacques, et al. It’s also why I think that eventual political change, should it happen, will come through democratic experimentation at local level, rather than a complete change of system led from the top, and that this process will be driven by Mass Group Incidents. Sometime the penny will drop somewhere in the overall system that liberty is the mother of order.

OK. So a young lady called Feng Yangyan, who is no better than she ought to be, hires a handsome fellow with whom to lose her virginity and posts a video of the event on the Chinese internet. The story duly gets picked up by local media. Roland Soong provides some context: 

Forty years ago ... the publisher, the reporter and the principal might have been sentenced to be executed for counter-revolutionary behavior. 

Thirty years ago ... the publisher, the reporter and the principal might have been sentenced to long periods of labor reform in the countryside for decadent bourgeois behavior. 

Twenty years ago ... the publisher and the reporter might have lost their jobs and be banned from working in journalism forever, and the principal might have been subjected to a short prison term for educational correction. 

Ten years ago ... the publisher and the reporter might have lost their jobs but will surface elsewhere in journalism, and the principal might have been given 10 days of administrative detention for disseminating pornography. 

Yesterday ... the publisher gets job recognition for gathering eyeballs, the reporter gets applauded for exclusive journalistic realism and the principal becomes an Internet celebrity. Meanwhile, the netiziens yawn with a small number exclaiming perfunctorily, "Oh, aren't those post-90's people awesome?"

Oh lordy: say it ain’t so... 

Over the past few years, one of China’s up-and-coming leaders has made a name for himself by calling for “ideological emancipation”–including through reading of the works of Thomas Friedman, the ubiquitous author of homilies to global capitalism. 

It’s Wang Yang, the party secretary of Guangdong Province. 

Over the past few years, Wang has been trying to cultivate another image: the heir to ideologically liberal reformers who tolerated free thinking. He’s called for sixiang jiefang (ideological or thought liberation) and said that this should be part of a big, new third wave of reform in China. (The previous two were the launch of reforms in 1978 and Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 tour of southern China’s centers of reforms, which supposedly kicked off the country’s current boom.) 

Now this is “thought liberation” as conceived of by a forward looking Provincial party secretary. So lots of izzy-wizzy-let’s-get-busy technocratic snack homilies fit right in, not requiring much of either thought or liberation. Come to think of it, chaps like Yang are probably exactly who Friedman has in mind when he writes his books, whether in Guangzhou or Bangalore. They seem to be produced for cunning men bursting with bullshit, ambition and self-interest for whom English isn’t a first language.

We print ‘em:

“Overnight, Parachute some bears into areas [bin Laden] might be,” the innovator wrote. “Attempt to train bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.” 

The bears-in-the-air idea, and scores of others, came from people who clicked on the “contact us” button on the Defense Department’s Web site, which allows the general public to ask questions or make suggestions. 

Not that the Pentagon needs any particular help in the idea department. Not long ago, for example, the agency spent $2 million to find out whether honey bees could be relied upon to sniff out roadside bombs.

 Now bees, that’s perfectly logical. Bears is just crazy. Also:

 One writer let the Defense Department know of a dream something was about to happen. Likely on a Friday. “I have no idea what this might be, do you?” the person asked. 

No, me neither. But DARPA are probably working on it.

Ah, those wacky red shirts. I can’t wait for when they start protesting against the laws governing sexual behaviour, or the state of the sewers. via

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the three-star general in charge of revamping all aspects initial training, said his overall goal is to drop outmoded drills and focus on what soldiers need today and in the future. 

Bayonet drills had continued for decades, even though soldiers no longer carry the blades on their automatic rifles. 

Hertling ordered the drills dropped. “We have to make the training relevant to the conditions on the modern battlefield,” Hertling said during a visit to Fort Jackson in January. 

Apparently, the British army still finds bayonets relevant in Afghanistan, at least as recently as 2007. And didn’t John Paul Vann say something about the bayonet being the basic weapon of the counter-insurgent? After all, there’s no question of collateral damage. You only kill the man you stab.

Philip Knightley has an interesting piece on the history of the honey trap in FP, following on from this piece of advice from MI5: 

In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled "The Threat from Chinese Espionage," the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate "long-term relationships" and have been known to "exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships ... to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them." 

I’ve almost certainly told this tale before, but within half an hour of arriving at a Beijing hotel in 1999 and handing over my passport at the desk I got a call in my room: “Hello! Hello!” said a chirpy female voice. “You want SEX?” 

I didn’t, as it happened, but when I told the tale to others I was told the following in return: 

Prostitution is controlled by or through the local cops, in conjunction with the management at certain hotels, with the women working from the danwei ( they don’t call it a work unit for nothing) and being supplied with room numbers as foreigners come in. 

Most of the time it’s just what it says on the tin; some of the time it’s a shakedown: half a dozen cops burst through the door while woman and punter are in flagrante. Then the negotiations begin. There isn’t really a good outcome to them. On the threat of going to jail the punter is fleeced and then deported with a sex offender stamp in his passport – which means, amongst other things, he can’t get back in to China. Or, possibly, anywhere else worth going, since Interpol will have that information presently. 

British passport holders are considered a particularly good business proposition. It certainly didn’t take long to get around to me. 

I was in no position to check how accurate all this was: certainly, the whole prostitution thing seemed both brazen and orderly, a combination that speaks of official involvement or protection at some level.

So maybe in the light of that MI5’s advisory could have been phrased like this: 

OK, so the cops have burst through the door and they’re pointing and laughing at the condom sagging off the end of your rapidly shriveling winkle and the woman has just vanished somewhere - that's why she wanted the money upfront, you suddenly realise -  and you’re seeing the end of everything: your career, your marriage, the corner office and the suburban McMansion, the golden handshakes and the golden handcuffs, the lot. So maybe the thing to do is to tell them that you’re a very important person in a very important company and could tell the right people some very useful things, if only this mess could just be made to go away. And if anything does come out, well, it was because you were entrapped by some heartless kung fu minx from the Chinese secret services. Well forget it slob, ‘cause we’re fucking well on to you. Just keep it zipped, ok?