Islands in the Stream

“What’s in a name?” Juliet asks in the play, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” What’s in a name? Ah, Juliet, if it was only about flowers? What’s in a name? Why, war, possibly, especially if the name is Senkaku or Diaoyu. Take your pick and you take your sides, the first with Japan, the second with China, the Montagues and the Capulets of the East China Sea.

I wrote about the dispute over these uninhabited islands last November (Alas, Poor Moles). Since then the cold war has risen in temperature by several degrees. “We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too”, so went the old British music hall challenge. My, oh my, what a world we live in, with jingoism now making a novel appearance on Chinese state media. “Japan”, says the China Daily, “is the real danger and threat to the world.” A military clash, the Global Times, echoes, is now more likely. “We need to prepare for the worst”, its editorial said.

Alarming exaggerations, you might think, but the position is actually quite serious, getting ever more serious since the Japanese government nationalised the islands - previously in private hands - last September. In December Japanese fighters were scrambled after a Chinese patrol plane buzzed the islands. Last month aircraft from both nations played a game of tag over the islands’ air space. According to newspaper reports, Japan is considering firing warning shots in any subsequent aerial dance. A Chinese general has said that this will count as the start of “actual combat.”

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be concerning ourselves because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...especially in a spat over a group of rocks. Horrible, fantastic and incredible it may very well be, but if you are American you should be concerned. For one thing, Japan is presently governed by Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party. While he is no General Tojo, he is a right-wing nationalist, one who believes that Japan needs to take a ‘tougher line’ with China. For another thing, America is treaty-bound to come to Japan’s aid if the country is attacked. Iraq and Afghanistan were bad enough but a new war in the Pacific – the horror! the horror!

The Chinese, incidentally, are well aware of the wider implications of the dispute. This is a country that, having left communism well behind, has embraced the most militant forms of nationalism. Suppressed and bullied for so many decades, China now wants to assert itself in a new form of manifest destiny. Japan, says the Global Daily, has become the “vanguard of American strategy to contain China.” The implication, the Economist reports, is clear enough – China should be ready to take on the United States.

Returning to my jingo theme, I think there is a game being played out here. The stakes are high and the wrong bid could be potentially catastrophic. China clearly wants to assert itself; for power politics has become the opium of the masses. Asserting itself is one thing; risking a region-wide war quite another. Japan is not only the country’s second biggest trading partner but it’s also one of its biggest investors. War or anything approaching war would potentially cripple the Chinese economy.

Nationalism is a dangerous and unpredictable beast. It’s anything but a paper tiger. A wrong move could lead to the communist oligarchy being devoured, a fact that surely cannot have escaped Beijing. It would be best for all parties to stand back and leave these islands, no matter what they are called, to the moles, their principal inhabitants. No venture, no gain, no loss, no prestige, no pride, no power; nothing. Let’s pray to God, for the sake of the little gentlemen in black, that oil is never discovered in these treacherous waters.

Nuclear Facejobs

So, North Korea has announced plans for further rocket launches and a nuclear test as ‘New phase of the anti-US struggle.’ The official communiqué could not make it any clearer;

We do not hide the fact that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets will be launched by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea one after another, and a nuclear test of a higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action will target against the US, the sworn enemy of the Korean people. Settling accounts with the US needs to be done with force, not with words. The world will clearly see how the army and people of the DPKK punishes all kinds of hostile forces and emerge as the final victor while following the just road of defending its sovereignty.

I know, I know; the prose is not very elegant, but surely it creates a mood of dread? The hermit state really does seem intent on settling accounts with America but, contrary to assertion, not with missiles but with a lethal barrage of...words. Yes, let’s bore the hostile forces to death with intercontinental verbal incontinence. Quick; take to the shelters; here comes a dirty bomb of nouns and verbs!

Do not be too concerned by the latest petulance from Pyongyang. As far as real intercontinental capability is concerned, it’s almost certain that the country lacks the capacity. Of course it can still do a lot of damage with short range weapons aimed at South Korea and Japan. Still, look at the facts. Regimes that plan aggressive actions do not generally announce their intentions in advance. Look out, America; here we come: the Imperial Japanese fleet is on its way to Pearl Harbor.

It’s getting just a bit boring, this pseudo-nation behaving like a petulant child. We’ve been here before, in 2006 and again in 2009, nuclear tests that provoked international outrage. But there was no advance publicity with these past travesties, no bluster, no suggestion that the regime was set to punish ‘all kinds of hostile forces.’

The truth is Kim Jong Un, the Fat Leader, and his military chiefs are a bit like a collection of mafia dons, making an offer you can’t refuse. No test, no missile, and no words, just as long as the price is right. After all, this is a country that can build weapons but can’t feed its own people.

The biggest threat North Korea presents is not its weapons arsenal but itself, and the greatest threat is not to the US but to China, its ostensible ally. The Chinese, infinitely patient, are beginning to lose patience. They have had enough of their blustering and adolescent neighbour. But there is only so far they can go in expressing disapproval, least the baby starts howling and throwing his toys out of his pram.

Beijing said naughty, naughty after the last nuclear test, punishing baby with a series of sanctions that were not sanctions. The latest hot air is a cause of renewed embarrassment. But China can’t go too far in reigning in the Fat Leader. His ultimate threat is not the explosion of his nuclear arsenal but the implosion of his own benighted nation, causing millions to flee over the border, the stuff of Chinese nightmares.

Meanwhile the reports that the Fat Leader has been having plastic surgery to look more like the Great Leader, his dead grandfather, are entirely wrong. This falsehood is a hideous criminal act that the party, state, army and people can never tolerate;

Those hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the nation should not expect any mercy or leniency. Time will clearly show what dear price the human scum and media in the service of traitors of South Korea, slaves of capital, will have to pay.

Would it, I wonder be as high as the price for a nose job? Oh, well; I can’t say I haven’t been warned. Even as I write a severe incontinent reprimand is winging its way in my general direction.

China’s Ancien Régime

Last August, in China’s Hunan province, a woman by the name of Tang Hui was sent to a labour camp, sentenced to eighteen months‘ re-education’ for “seriously disturbing the social order and exerting a negative impact on society.”  Why, you may wonder, what was her crime?  Simply that she had repeatedly petitioned officials, saying that the sentences passed against the men who had kidnapped, raped and forced her eleven-year-old daughter into prostitution should have been more severe. 

Times have changed, even in China.  In times past Tang Hui would simply have vanished into night and fog.  In times present thousands went online to protest on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which really is turning into the true voice of the people, protesting against the corruption and complacency of the country’s communist oligarchy.  She was released but the protests against the obvious injustice of the legal system have not gone away.

It was Mao Zedong, one of history’s most revolting tyrants, who set up China’s ‘reform through labour’ system, known as laojiao, in 1957.  It was a way of dealing with people who had offended the communist authorities, all the better since it did not involve the inconvenience of any form of due process. 

People can be locked up for four years simply on the whim of some petty official or other; in the past because they were supposedly ‘counter-revolutionaries’, in the present because they are perceived to be a nuisance.  At a conservative estimate some 160,000 are said to be languishing in laojiao labour camps. 

The paradox of Chinese communism is that it reproduces, in its own unique way, the abuses of the Ancien Régime.  Yes, indeed.  Those of you have read Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities may recall the fate of Dr. Manette, imprisoned in the Bastille by means of a lettre de cachet.  These documents, often issued blank, with a name to be added later, were used by the powerful to imprison people without trial or an opportunity for defence.  Laojiao is possible the closest thing the modern world has to lettre de cachet.  But the various Bastilles it supports are far fuller than they ever were in the good old bad old days in France. 

Things move slowly in China when they move at all; politically they move with all the urgency of a glacier.  Earlier this month a senior legal journalist claimed in a microblog that the government was getting ready to abandon the whole system.  Soon after laojiao consigned his tweets to silence.  Instead Xinhau, the official news agency, said that the government would “advance reforms” this year.  Yes, well, I think we all know exactly what that means. 

Soon after the release of Tang Hui a poll of some 20,000 internet users recorded a 98% verdict in favour of abolition.  I can’t be certain, of course, but I imagine the 2% who voted in favour are placemen and stooges of one kind or another.  No matter; for the poll was deleted, causing some to remark that it too had been sent to a labour camp. 

Tang Hui was lucky; her case attracted public attention, too many people to be sent comfortably off for ‘re-education through labour.’  But there are many thousands still languishing in camps, fellow petitioners, House-church Christians and others who have attracted the eye of disapproval.  It’s simply a way of silencing any form of dissent by those who don’t really qualify for the big Dissident label.  No, these are the petty people, the little people who can be incarcerated often just to settle a local vendetta. 

Just imagine a legal system where you can be picked up by the police because the local sheriff does not like your face.  Just imagine being used as slave labour by camp officials for their own personal profit.  Just imagine injustice.  Just imagine China.   

Alas, Poor Moles

Have you heard of the Senkaku islands?  No?  What about the Diaoyu islands, have you heard of those?  Again no?  If you look on a map you might find the one but you are almost certain not to find the other.  It might be better to say that every map tells its own story, Chinese and Japanese maps more so here than others.  In short, it’s the same place, Diaoyu for the Chinese, Senkaku for the Japanese.  Here, for those respective nations, we can safely say an island by any other name would not smell as sweet.

The smell from the East China Sea, where ‘the islands’ are located, is fairly rank at the present.  Both nations claim territorial right to these barren rocks, where only the Diaoyu mole or the Senkaku mole makes a home.  Writing it that way round might even occasion another dispute!  No, I shouldn’t make fun, for the political and diplomatic implications are serious enough, with an Oahu-like potential, a point I’ll make clearer a little later.

Possession, the saying goes, is nine points of the law, and here the Japanese have all nine points.  Or, rather, what the Japanese government has is $30million worth of points, having recently bought the three islands in the chain from their private – Japanese – owners.  There may as well have been an earthquake in the archipelago, for a tsunami of nationalist anger swept across much of China in the aftermath. 

Japan relies on more than purchase; it relies on the diplomatic records to prove sovereignty, saying that this goes back to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5.  I’m no expert on international law but this would seem somewhat dubious grounds upon which to make a stand, in that the Japanese could lay claim to Taiwan by the same aggressive right.  The Chinese can go a several steps deeper; their claim is based on travel records that can be traced right back to the Ming Dynasty. 

Chinese sabres are rattling.  I mentioned Oahu, not just because of Pearl Harbor, not just because that is another island where a war started, but because the United States is an unwilling participant in the whole fuss.  America is obliged by treaty to defend Japanese territorial integrity, and the integrity at this moment includes ‘those islands.’ 

We are not talking World War Two here but we may very well be touching on a regional conflict as intense as that over the Falklands, with a lot less clearer outcome.  Geographically and strategically, given the position of ‘the islands’ close to the mainland, the Chinese are in a strong position. 

So, why the fuss over the kingdom of the mole?  Is it all down to national one-upmanship?  No, follow the money.  Rather, given that they are islands surrounded by sea, the thing you should be following is not greenbacks but black gold – oil, to be exact, something else the conflict shares with the Falklands. 

However, the extent of unresolved national anger in China over past Japanese aggression should not be underestimated.  It is no accident that protests in China took place on 19 September, the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.  On the streets reference was made to the later Rape of Nanking, in which thousands of Chinese civilians were systematically massacred by the Japanese Army.  In the Chinese consciousness this infamous episode comes close to occupying the same place as the Holocaust and, as with the Holocaust, there are deniers, here on the Japanese nationalist fringe. 

China was in Japan’s shadow for decades before the Second World War (actually their war was far longer than the usually accepted dates for this conflict); it was in the shadows for many decades after, a weak giant.  Not any longer.  Chinese economic power has waxed just as Japanese power waned.  With economic prosperity comes political ambition, the Chinese now seeing themselves, and rightly so, as a major regional power. 

The whole question is also complicated by domestic politics in both nations, with the Chinese communist oligarchy playing the nationalist card to deflect attention from internal problems, just as the Japanese government, still under the shadow of the Fukushima disaster, holds a similar card.  In the ensuing international poker it raised the Chinese $30million.  Who holds the winning hand is still to be seen.

I think those unfortunate moles should start looking for another home, though, preferably where there is no trace of oil, of history or of hate.  The Wild Wood might be best.  

Past Present

If I were to chose the point where modern Chinese history began it would not be the overthrow of the Imperial Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic in 1911; no, it would be even more precise than that – it would be 4 May, 1919. 

It was on that day that students demonstrated on the streets of Beijing, protesting against the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the transfer of the German concessions in Shandong Province to Japan, contrary to past promises.  Protest spread across the country, the first spontaneous and populist movement in the country’s history, an upswing of Chinese nationalism far more significant than the events of 1911.

Anger over past grievances, particularly over grievances at the hands of Japan, continues to be an important measure of Chinese national feeling.  The Japanese are also good at remembering past sorrows…at least when it comes to their own.  It's not long since the annual commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, attended this year by the grandson of President Harry Truman, the man who ordered the attack. 

I’m sure there’s lots of genuine feeling here, a desire that history should be remembered and never be repeated.  I might feel more sympathy but for the fact that I see Hiroshima and Nagasaki used, abused, if you like, as alibis, conveniently wiping out inconvenient memories.  Where is the sorry and wringing of hands, the Chinese might very well, ask, over the Rape of Nanking in 1937, one of the worst atrocities in Japanese imperial history?  That single incident left more dead than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. 

Japanese school texts make fulsome mention of the atomic bombs.  They are a bit more reticent when it comes to other aspects of the the country’s history between 1931 and 1945.  Virtually no mention at all is made of the war, as John Dower highlights in his recently published Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan and the Modern World.  Japanese conservatives are a little less reticent, passing off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.

That’s not how the Chinese see it.  They have their own memories of Western colonialism, but Japanese colonialism is much more immediate in the national mind.  The spirit of 4 May 1919 has never really gone away.  It was revived again recently, when thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest against Japan.  The 19 August Movement, if I can call it that, was triggered by a long-standing dispute between China and Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. 

Like the May 4 Movement, the demonstrations appear to have been quite spontaneous in nature, sparked off by micro-blogging sites.  There clearly had to be some kind of official sanction – the Communist Party is not averse to occasional expressions of the vox populi – but the authorities are concerned least matters get out of control.  Nationalism in China is a dangerous tiger, ridden at some peril. 

Now directed against Japan, the anger could just as easily turn inwards as the economy begins to show serious signs of slowing down.  It’s particularly sensitive as the Communist Party heads towards its eighteenth national Congress in October, when a major change in the present leadership is expected. 

For China and Japan the past is not a foreign country; it’s part of a naturalised present.  They do things much the same as they have always done.  

China’s Well of Loneliness

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young, and a Chinese woman, was very heaven.  It’s not so hot, though, if you are male.  The girls in China are in a sellers market, with plenty of boys only too anxious to buy…if they can afford the price of entry.  The sad truth is that there are boys being born today in China who will never marry, who will never find the right girl, because there are simply not enough girls to go around.

For over twenty years the Chinese authorities have operated a one child policy as a way of controlling a burgeoning population.  When this is combined with a traditional preference for male children, thus ensuring the preservation of the family name, a preference that has seen the widespread abortion of female foetuses, a major demographic imbalance has resulted.  The sad irony is that family names will die out anyway in the absence of wives for only sons.

The shortage of women is bad enough.  What makes it worse is the ‘reverse dowry’ system that operates across much of rural China.  Bachelors are generally expected to have a minimum of 80 thousand Yuan (about $12000) to allow them to set up a home with their prospective wives.  In peasant communities few men can ever hope to command such personal wealth.  Inevitably this will draw more and more people towards the cities, there creating even greater social problems.

On the latest projections demographers estimate that there will be a surplus of 50 million men by the end of the present decade alone.  This will mean millions of lives unshared.  In the absence of the forms of social stability brought about by marriage crime and disorder are likely to increase to unprecedented levels. 

Commenting on this Li Jianmin, the head of the Institute of Population and Development Research at Nankai University, said that “The gender imbalance trend started showing in the early 1980s, and now we have just walked over the threshold.  In five to ten years, the high risk period will come.”  Andrea Den Bores, a demographer, also warned of the long-term implications of China’s new population crisis in her book Bare Bones:

It is difficult to be optimistic because while the China knows that this problem exists, it does not appear to have any plan.  There is a strong potential building for future violence and unrest and so far the Chinese authorities have not developed a response to these issues other than violent ones. 

Thomas Malthus, the gloomy prophet of population Armageddon, continues to be relevant, though not in ways that he had anticipated.  In his classic An Essay on the Principle of Population he talks of the unhappy people who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.  Many Chinese men are looking into a future that is no more than a deep well of loneliness.    Nature is finely balanced.  We interfere with its mechanisms at huge peril. 

The Eye of the People

Last week the Chinese National Bureau of Corruption Prevention issued a statement saying that 72.7 per cent of the population was satisfied with progress the government was making on tackling corruption, an endemic problem in the country. It caused a virtual tsunami. People went on line in their thousands, creative in their derision of a figure that doubtless sprung fully armed from the head of some bureaucrat or other. One individual said “Public opinion poll? Did they conduct it inside the Politburo? Poor old public opinion – raped once again.”

I say ‘said’ but the comment was actually tweeted, except it wasn’t tweeted because Twitter isn’t allowed in China! No, but people do have access to a microblogging service called Weibo.com (weibo simply means microblog). It’s hosted by Sina, a state-controlled internet service provider which regularly censors content, but Chinese bloggers are amazingly versatile, getting around restrictions in all sorts of imaginative ways.

In a country where the people have rarely had a voice at all Sina Weibo is a remarkable development. Let a hundred flowers bloom, it might be said, to drag up one ghost from the Chinese past, except that’s a huge underestimate. In all there are some 300million microbloggers in China, people who greet official statements - traditionally received in silence or reverence or else - with cynical derision. When the Beijing Daily recently demanded that Gary Locke, the US ambassador, declare his personal assets, the bloggers responded by saying that the real scrutiny should be on the assets of the country’s own elites.

Chinese officialdom has never been subject to such detailed and critical attention. Traditionally information is power and the flow of information has been tightly controlled. Not any longer. Quoted in the London Times, Zhan Jiang, professor of journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies Service, said of Weibo that it “Has given a voice to 300 million Chinese and that has never happened before. It has taken on the role of spreading information when news is breaking and that is a big challenge to the government and media.”

It certainly is, when one considers that the most popular bloggers have followings far in excess of even mass circulation newspapers. Attempted cover-ups have been blown wide open by a rapid flow of information. The most recent example of this was a fatal train crash in Wenzhou, news of which officials attempted to bury. Exposure on Weibo forced a change of tactics.

Superficially Weibo is like Twitter. The latter has a 140-letter limit, just as the former has a 140-character limit. Ah, but you see, that makes all the difference in the microblogging world! For in Chinese, as the Times reported, every character is a word. Also in the absence of prepositions users can say much more in a single post than on Twitter. Yu Jianrong, an academic noted for his exposure of child trafficking, has in excess of 1.3million followers. This is one recent communication of his;

On May 16, 1966, the Chinese Communist Party started the Cultural Revolution which caused 10 years’ turmoil. I suggest that we mark the day as a “Day of Reflection”. My reflection is that blind belief in an organisation or leader cannot bring real democracy or the rule of law. Without democracy that people can take part in, everyone may turn violent.

Now, who would ever have believed the expression of such sentiment possible in a land where the repellent Mao Zedong still stares balefully down on Tiananmen Square?

The whole phenomena, this virtual democracy wall, might very well be pulled down, though some believe that things have gone too far for that. Uncomfortable as it is for the communist authorities, it actually provides greater intelligence on the mood around the country than they ever had in the past.

There are forms of censorship, certainly, and clear dangers in modes of expression that become too free. After all, the service only allows real name users, so there is no hiding. But, notwithstanding the risks, the authorities are still subject to forms of scrutiny and ridicule previously unknown.

The Weibo users are also highly creative in getting around official gags. When particular words are blocked by the censors, euphemisms appear within moments. No sooner was an interdict placed on naming premier Wen Jiabao that he reappeared in the far less dignified form as ‘Tellytubbie.’

I do not think that democracy will come to China any time soon. But the old days of silence, deference and intimidation are being overwhelmed by politically meaningful chatter.

Time and History

I originally only planned to publish my recent article on the decline of American power contrasted with the rise of China’s (How Are the Mighty Fallen, 30 January) on BrooWaha. I published it here because the editorial process there was log jammed for several days. Now it has appeared there it elicited an interesting response from a fellow contributor, one who lives in India. I think my own detailed reply, slightly modified, deserves to stand here on its own.

Greatness and power have nothing at all to do with freedom and human rights. The Roman state survived for centuries as a slave power and rapacious conqueror. China has never enjoyed a full democratic existence in the sense that you and I would understand the concept. Even before the Communist takeover it was ruled, when it was ruled at all, by dictators, warlords and freebooters of one kind or another in the period after the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the last imperial dynasty.

I’m sorry, I complete disagree with you; the present government of China shows little in the way of communist orthodoxy; it shows not the least interest in exporting its brand of high holiday politics, unlike its economic imperialism. Mao would simply not recognise the China that has emerged after his death. The Chinese government is simply an oligarchy, interested in the perpetuation of its power, a power over which Marxism is draped like a fig leaf. Their brand of realpolitik owes far more to Machiavelli than Marx, more to The Prince than to The Communist Manifesto.

A nation survives by conserving its power, not wasting it. Yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure the security of the land. But America under George W Bush did not contain a threat; it simply made it worse. Where was the logic in invading Iraq, a country with a secular government, a country with no connection to terrorism, a country actively opposed to Al-Qaeda? Where was the logic in invading a country that had effectively been neutralised after the First Gulf War, and neutralised to the advantage of the West?

There are so many things I could say about this disaster, things I have said previously. Not only was the Al-Qaeda genie let out of the bottle, not only was the power of Iran immeasurably increased, but the aftermath of a war, which Bush described as a ‘crusade’, led to the tragic destruction of the age-old Iraqi Christian community, rather ironic in the circumstances. Has the invasion of Afghanistan made America safer? I rather think not. Anyone with even the lightest grasp of history would have kept clear of this ‘graveyard of empires.’

America has spent trillions beyond its means; America is now in hock to China, a further proof of my argument that one power has waned while the other has waxed. If the country has, as you put it, protected its interests, its gone about it in a wholly cack-handed fashion. Would you, as an Indian, someone surely with a better understanding of regional politics and history, ever have envisaged your country invading a hopeless place like Afghanistan, even with the co-operation of Pakistan? Was the British example not enough; was the Russian example not enough? The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy the Taliban, merely submerged it for a time. The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy Al-Qaeda, merely allowed it to relocate in the tribal highlands of Pakistan. Muscles were not flexed; muscles were lost.

I am no wiser or prescient in these matters than any other. I cannot see into the future, only project on the basis of present trends. These trends allow me to predict that this will be the Chinese century, but on this question only time and history will sit as the final arbiters.

How Are the Mighty Fallen

I admire China; I admire the present Chinese government. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that I admire communism; I don’t; I loath it, but it’s doubtful that the Chinese system has anything to do with communism in any meaningful ideological sense. No, as an idea it was effectively abandoned at the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia and China then took the high road to capitalism, chaotic for the former, controlled for the latter.

What I admire is the technique of realpolitik, the wholly Machiavellian outlook of the Chinese. This is likely to be their century not simply because of their economic power but because they play the game carefully, looking always to their own interests.

What a sense of humour Clio, the goddess of history, has, what an acute love of irony. There was America at the end of the Cold War, the only great power left in the world. There was Francis Fukuyama saying that history itself had come to an end, a humourless plagiarism of Sellar and Yeatman’s contention in 1066 and All That, published in the 1930s, that America was clearly Top Nation and history came to a .

But it didn’t, did it? America, the paramount power in 1991, has frittered it all away in one fruitless crusade after another, war after war, intervention hard upon intervention, the gift of the neo cons who have nothing at all to do with genuine conservatism or any kind of political realism. All they achieved was more and more spending with fewer and fewer results. Now the country has reached the lowest point in its history, the nadir, headed by the hopeless and incompetent Barack Obama, not a neo con just a con, a Marxist in Marxist clothing.

Now look at China, the communist capitalist super power. This is a country with the good sense to stand and stare, to consolidate its power, not waste it all away. This is the new empire, extending its influence over much of the developing world, particularly Africa, large parts of which are effectively a Chinese economic colony. I simply could not imagine the Chinese getting bogged down in a hopeless place like Afghanistan for a hopeless cause. I simply can’t imagine any country headed by an intelligent leader doing so, a leader with even the lightest grasp of history.

But America did, here, there and everywhere, taking the wolf by the ears, unable thereafter to let it go. Good sense and good politics would have kept America out of Iraq, a country which, no matter how repellent its dictator, kept a check on the regional ambitions of Iran. But good sense and good politics was not at a premium in the Bush Whitehouse; it has not been at a premium ever since. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle.

A Tale of Two Cities

True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged…the worst houses in the worst quarters of the town…The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these…quarters may readily be imagined.

Where is this do you think? Is it some third world city, perhaps? I’ll tell you in just a moment, but first let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of another city, in another place, in another time. The narrative goes like this;

The woman…crouches in the acrid fumes…tending the stock in her shop; the mangled remains of a wooden kitchen unit, broken microwave ovens, lengths of fire house and a meat slicer without a blade. To her right is one of…the largest dumps, spilling from its gates in a cascade of plastic bags. It stinks and is swarming with flies. To her left, written in huge letters, is the market’s slogan: a motto supposedly designed to give meaning to a life lived off rubbish…”If you don’t work hard today, tomorrow you will be working harder to find a new job!” It is unclear how she and her husband could work any harder. His day is spent trawling the city for the detritus of urban life. Hers is spent putting it into a state that might earn a few pennies…The woman, too nervous to give her name, describes life as “very difficult and without any feeling of security.” What little she and her family have could be bulldozed at any moment.

Yes, it’s two worlds, two times, two systems. It’s a tale of two cities; the first is London, described by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England. It’s a description of a city during the high noon of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s the bleak age of the bourgeoisie, as someone once described it, the time of Ebenezer Scrooge before the haunting. It’s a past time.

The second is the present time, not in the heart of a heartless capitalist state. No, it’s the condition of the working class in a worker’s state; it’s the condition of the working class in a communist state. This city is not London or Manchester; it’s Beijing.

The London of the 1840s had its chroniclers, not just political radicals like Friedrich Engels but moral radicals like Charles Dickens, who appealed to the conscience of his middle-class readers in such works as Oliver Twist, Hard Times and A Christmas Carol. Those who attempt a chronicle of Beijing in the second decade of the twenty-first century face dangers that past reformers never did. A Chinese Dickens, or a Chinese Engels, for that matter, would almost certainly end up in one of Beijing’s ‘black jails’, the secret prisons where critics of the system can be held for indefinite periods without trial or legal representation of any kind.

It was in one of these places that Ai Weiwei, the brilliantly unconventional artist who has become the conscience of the nation, ended up earlier this year, held for some eighty days, his family not even being told of his whereabouts. Nothing chastened, he has since written a kind of Tale of Two Cities, or a tale of two Beijings, the city of the obscenely rich and the city of the wretchedly poor, in a country where several hundred households are worth more than $100million, while 100 million have to manage on $100 a year.

Like Dickens he has drawn attention to the underbelly of the capital, the other city, a city choked by filth and pollution, a constant nightmare, as he put it, of violence, numbing abusiveness and fear. This is the city of the migrants, people little better than slaves, people without any kind of civic rights, people who can be removed on a whim, constantly at risk from the arbitrary violence of the authorities.

China, in its present state of social, political and economic development, is one of history’s oddest paradoxes. Not only does it have an economy based upon forms of rapacious capitalism that might even have shocked Engels and Dickens, but the abuses are also held in place by Communist oligarchy that allows no room for dissent, for any form of social conscience or reforming impulse, an oligarchy that exists for no other purpose than to perpetuate its own monopoly of power. Thus is the reality of modern China in this anniversary year, the anniversary of the revolution of 1911, which saw the fall of the last imperial dynasty.

There is anger in the country over various social abuses, anger which finds some outlet in social media sites, anger which deepens the paranoia of the authorities, ever fearful that individual fires may turn into a general conflagration, fearful that the Arab disease might be contagious.

But setting to one side the complaints given air on micro-blogging sites like Sina Weibo, most Chinese would seem to be largely indifferent to the plight of the migrant subclass. Given the appalling misery inflicted on the country in the time of Mao Zedong, people are content with new forms of relative prosperity, prosperity and a quiet life. Put it another way, there is no audience for Engels, for Dickens or for Al Weiwei. Reform, if it comes at all, is a long way in the future, or lost in the past.

Tyranny Remains

The more things change in China the more they stay the same. In social and economic terms no greater contrast could be imagined between the country at the time of the death of Mao in 1976 and the high-tech nation of today. But the political technique, the technique of oppression, the techniques favoured by Mao Zedong both before and after the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, are still very much in place.

There always have to be enemies, always outsiders, counter-revolutionaries then, disruptive elements now. China, in a sense, is in a state of permanent revolution. The enemies may have changed, the definition of what constitutes an enemy certainly has, but the fallback position remains the same – they have to be eliminated in one manner or another. It’s the technique inherited from Mao, the default position as Jonathan Minsky argued recently in an article in the political journal Standpoint.

Here it’s as well to remember that that it was Deng Xiaoping, the man normally associated in the West with modernisation and reform, who oversaw the so-called ‘anti-Rightist’ campaign of 1957, which saw the purge of thousands, and who also presided over the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as well as the ensuing reign of terror.

Now, in the midst of prosperity, when even the word ‘jasmine’ is banned, as if it carried a kind of plague bacillus, it has been estimated that the number of extra-judicial executions range between 5000 and 10000 per annum, more than the rest of the world combined.

Thousands of people, often the poorest and least powerful, are being held in secret ‘black jails’, free enterprise institutions run by thugs to contain ‘troublemakers’, often no more than petitioners anxious to redress some abuse – a right granted to them by precedent and by law -, people who are an embarrassment to the authorities. There they can be held indefinitely without charge, beaten, starved and abused, out of official sight and out of official mind.

Corruption, mismanagement, official neglect and sheer incompetence get worst by the day. Officially the casualty toll from the recent high-speed rail crash near the city of Wenzhou stands at 40 dead and 191 injured, though according to the buzz among the country’s micro-bloggers the true figures are much higher. What is certain is that the government cleaned up the site with indecent haste, burying one of the carriages and restoring rail services even before rescue operations had been completed.

True or not, the rumours are based on past perceptions, on other scandals that have created a mood of widespread cynicism and scorn, a reluctance to believe anything the authorities say. Here the case of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when so many children died as a result of shoddy school construction, comes to mind. It was the determination to establish the true facts over this scandal that lead to the first serious clash between the complacent and negligent authorities and Ai Weiwei, the brilliantly unconventional artist, recently convicted on a charge of ‘tax evasion.’

In Mao’s Invisible Hand, a collection of papers edited by Sebastian Hellman and Elizabeth J. Perry, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, the point is made that the policy style that emerged from Maoism was “fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic and merciless. Unchecked by institutions of accountability, guerrilla leaders pursue their objectives with little concern for the interests of those who stand in their way.” Rightist opportunists, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, seditionists, disruptive people, inharmonious elements - the terminology may change, the tyranny remains the same.

China’s Creeping Catastrophe

It’s over thirty years since China adopted its one-child only policy, a draconian measure designed to cope with the perceived problem of overpopulation. But the agrarian China of 1979, not long emerged from the nightmare of Mao, is a very different place from the high-tech China of today.

High fertility rates are most often a consequence of poverty, not wealth. Economic modernisation and the growth in personal wealth have the effect of reducing the number of children people have anyway, without the need for state intervention, which almost invariably has the effect of making things worse, or creating new and unintended problems.

China is facing a demographic crisis alright, but not the kind originally anticipated. It’s not that it has too many people: it now has too few of the right kind of people; there are too few young people to carry the future burden that has been placed on their shoulders. China, in other words, is growing old.

But the crisis, or the potential crisis, goes still deeper. Despite over sixty years of Communist rule, China is a nation wedded deeply to tradition, to a tradition that places a far greater importance on male over female children. No male child means that a long chain with the past is broken, that the family name disappears, that one’s ancestors have been consigned to a deeper oblivion.

When preference, and politics, meets with technology, when tradition meets the ultrasound, the outcome is depressingly predictable: female foetuses are aborted until nature gets it ‘right.’ In the more heavily populated eastern provinces of the country, places where the one-child policy is imposed with all the rigour at the disposal of officialdom (forced abortions, even at a late stage of gestation, and the confiscation of ‘illegal’ children were routinely deployed at one time) the ratio of male to female children is now shockingly out of balance.

This femicide is bad enough in itself but it means that there are thousands of males born in China today who will never find a partner. And as problems tend to be built on problems there is evidence that girls are being kidnapped for forced marriages.

There is also the issue of corruption, a huge problem in a country with a political system fearful of any kind of popular scrutiny. According to Caixin, the Beijing-based news agency, surplus children were routinely taken into orphanages, there to be sold on to foreign parents at a price up to $5000 a head, with kickbacks to the bureaucrats involved.

Reporting on this whole issue recently, a leader in the Economist made the point that demography is like a super tanker; it takes decades to turn around. If change is to come it has to come soon. But with the Chinese gerontocracy tied to the one-child policy as an act of political faith it’s difficult to see how the country can escape a creeping catastrophe.

Let a Million Bloggers Bloom

Let a hundred flowers bloom, Mao Zedong once said, only immediately to start rooting up the garden. Now, in a wholly modern development the frustrated promise of free speech has found a new outlet on the internet, where a million bloggers have been talking. They have been, loudly and persistently on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like micro-blogging service. The hot topic recently has been the fate of the people in the People’s Republic, the fate of those bold enough to stand as independents in elections.

I had always assumed that voting in China was a kind of dance routine choreographed by the Communist Party, a dull, meaningless and wholly predictable quadrille. But at the lowest level of the electoral pyramid citizens can actually vote for other citizens, people who are not part of the official apparatus; or at least they can try to.

Even in local elections the Party has long attempted to micro-manage affairs, assuring that only approved candidates get through. But, emboldened by the forms of communication and solidarity offered through the internet, an increasing number of real independents are putting themselves forward. According Li Fan of the World and China Institute in Beijing more than a hundred people have declared their candidacy for the elections to the various people’s congresses that will be held across the country in the coming months.

The Party is nervous, the Party is always nervous, never more so than now with the Arabs showing the world a networking revolution. Silence is no longer an option, especially as Li Chengpeng, an author, critic and micro-blogger, has announced to his three million followers on Sina Weibo that he is prepared to stand.

The Economist reported that the emergence of such candidates has been accompanied by a series of local disturbances across the country. Although the details are hazy it appears that thousands of police officers were required to suppress a riot in the town of Zengcheng in Guangdong province, brought on by an altercation between security guards and a street vendor. Before this there had been serious disturbances in Lichuan in Hubei after the death of a local legislator and anti-corruption campaigner in police custody. Such incidents, according to Xu Chunliu, a Beijing blogger, are only encouraging others into politics, himself included, as he announced to his twelve thousand followers.

Meanwhile a government official in an interview with a state-run news agency said that independent candidates had no ‘legal basis’ and that campaigning in ‘non-approved settings’ – meaning Sina Weibo – would not be tolerated. “Soliciting votes through the internet”, the Global Times, a Beijing newspaper, declared, “could destroy the operating rules of Chinese society.”

In other words democracy is a threat to civilization as we know it, meaning a threat to oligarchy as the Chinese have experienced it. Bloggers of all countries unite! Bloggers of China keep on writing on the new Democracy Wall.

Inharmonious fist

Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is an admirable man, a martyr to free thought in the way that Socrates was a martyr to free thought. But it’s wrong to assume that he somehow represents a huddled Chinese mass yearning to breath free. He is, in many ways, deeply untypical of the mood of his nation, deeply untypical of its history.

When it comes to history the Chinese have a particularly long memory; and one of the most abiding memories is that of national humiliation at the hands of foreigners. It’s a memory particularly strong among a section of the national community known as the fenqing – angry youth –, who have no interest at all in the values upheld by the Nobel Prize Committee, supporting, rather, a robust version of Chinese nationalism. Without too much exaggeration it’s tempting to see them as the modern Boxers, after the movement involved in the anti-foreign uprising of 1900.

This phenomenon is not entirely new. Unlike the Nationalists, who saw the Boxers as ‘bandits’, the Communists have always taken a more positive view. During the Cultural Revolution Mao’s Red Guards occasionally referred to themselves as the ‘new Boxers.’ Though the Boxer-style violence of the Red Guard has been eschewed by the ruling Communist Party, the original movement is increasingly promoted as an example of anti-imperialist patriotism. In 2009 The People’s Daily published an article praising the Boxers for the panic they had caused among the foreigners trying to carve up China.

It’s all very well, of course, to try to harness into a patriotic tradition but there are dangers here for a regime not always that certain of its continuing hold on power. I can understand that, in a mood of national pride, the Chinese may wish to reinterpret parts of their history. But Boxer violence was not exclusively directed against foreigners. Indeed, far more native Chinese died in their excesses than outsiders. The government of the day, headed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, originally gave encouragement to the movement before they realised the dangers of the dragon. The Communist Party might choose to think that patriotism begins and ends with itself. It does not, as it might eventually discover to its cost.

Mao denounces Mao

A petition carrying some ten thousand signatures was handed in to a police station in Beijing recently. It calls for the arrest of Mao. No, no, it’s not that Mao; he’s beyond arrest, just resting in hell. The Mao these people want arrested is Mao Yushi, the eighty-two year old economist who heads the Unirule Institute of Economics. He is accused of slandering the other Mao and attempting to overthrow the Communist party itself.

It does not stop with the petition. The Maoist websites are all incandescent, with comments like “The whole nation is waiting for the dawn, the dawn of the day when Mao Yu-shit (sic) and other anti-Mao reactionaries who vilify Mao are annihilated.” He’s also received abusive telephone calls from people threatening to beat him up.

So, what’s brought on this flood of hate? Simply that Mr Mao published an article in late April on a blog hosted by Caixin, a Beijing-based media group. The article is called Restore Mao Zedong as a Man. The report I read in the Economist says that it was subsequently removed from the Caixin site, as well as from several others that reposted it. But it must have been restored, because I was able to find it earlier today simply by Googling the title. Don’t wait too long. A second purge may be in the offing!

There it is, the original Chinese followed by an English translation. It’s a computer generated translation, so the sense, structure and syntax is abysmal, but it’s still possible to garner the basic meaning. Actually, the author, who is calling for the end of the deification of Mao, urging that he be judged in the light of his actions, goes that one step further. He does not just restore Mao as a man; he shows him as he really was – a beast, one of the worst criminals in human history, who brought nothing but misery to China and the Chinese people.

For those who have any knowledge of Chinese history there is really nothing new here, but for a Chinese audience, brought up in a tradition of political amnesia, it’s really quite devastating. The takeover by the Communists in 1949 did not bring happiness to China: “On the contrary it plunged the Chinese into the abyss of misery for thirty years.” Mao is responsible for the death of millions: “…for which he felt not the slightest remorse.” It is a matter of regret that the portrait of this “backstage boss who wrecked the country and ruined the people” still hangs in Tiananmen Square.

The catalogue of crimes goes on, personal as well as political. This was a man who, in the style of one of the more degenerate Roman emperors, forced people to commit suicide, one who raped numerous women. The man’s “cold-blooded nature is unsurpassed”, his “dark psychology” his lack of “basic humanity.”

There is the abuse and destruction of people. But the article also touches on the abuse and destruction of China’s ancient civilization. Chinese people are want to recall the abuse they suffered from foreigners in the nineteenth century, a period which saw the Old Summer Palace of the Emperors, the Yuan Ming Yuan, a great cultural treasure, destroyed in an act of gratuitous vandalism by British and French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War. But that was nothing compared with the vandalism of Mao, worse than any hairy foreign devil. It all went during the so-called Cultural Revolution; ancient monuments, artefacts, antiques, sculptures, paintings, “several thousand years of accumulated culture…were all negative.”

Mr Mao is certainly to be commended on his honesty and his courage. So far he has suffered no repercussions, at least from the authorities, who presumably want no airing of the past in any public trial. The late Chairman is their legacy and their liability. Bringing too close a light on him is likely to undermine the whole ethos of Communist rule. Better if he remains in heaven, a god to whom lip service is paid, one whose scripture is ignored by all those who are not politically or clinically insane.

Still, nothing is certain. The Party is in a nervous mood as it approaches the ninetieth anniversary of its foundation. If you want to really put the wind up a Chinese apparatchik just shout ‘Jasmine!’ Yes, they are terrified that the Arab spring may sweep its way east. Apparently the word ‘jasmine’ has effectively been banned, as has the inoffensive little plant, disappearing from all the markets, something of a problem in a country that consumes so much jasmine tea!

The simple truth is that everyone in China, from the highest official to the humblest peasant, everyone beyond the Maoist fringe, is aware that the people suffered more dreadfully as a result of the appalling Chairman’s ‘mistakes’ than the Arabs ever did at the hands of their own dictators, most of whom are relatively benign in contrast. Perhaps the time really has come to let a hundred – jasmine – flowers bloom.

Confucius the Dissident

Close to the end of last month I wrote an article on the arrest and disappearance of Ai Weiwei, a leading Chinese artist and dissident (China in Night and Fog). I now have to report on the recent disappearance of Confucius, yes, Confucius, the ancient sage whose concepts of social harmony had such appeal for the Communist authorities, always afraid of inharmonious times and inharmonious people. But the wind has changed yet again and harmony, at least in the Confucian form, is no longer quite so fashionable.

Poor Confucius, there he is, forever in and out of Chinese history, approved of at one moment, despised at the next. He was certainly the political fashion as recently as January, when a 9.5 metre statue of the old boy was installed outside the National Museum on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square looking on to the Forbidden City. He was there, stared at by Mao, making the mad Chairman leap in hell.

Confucius, you see, represented everything that Mao hated, the traditional values and the feudalism of the old China. Mao came to China, particularly in the Cultural Revolution, a little like Qui Shi Huang, the first emperor, who tried to wipe out all memory of the past by destroying books and by burning scholars alive. Confucius was the past and the past was Confucius, swept into a form of oblivion.

The recovery of memory began soon after Mao’s death in 1976. Bit by bit the sage returned, tolerated to begin with and then celebrated by a nation and a government looking for roots in the past. Just as the Germans tried to spread their cultural message across the world with Goethe Institutes, the Chinese set up their own Confucius Institutes. Abroad it was a new way of selling China, a more acceptable face than that of the malign Mao, while at home Confucian notions of harmony were a corrective to the upheaval of rapid and socially unsettling economic progress.

Not any longer. At the end of April the statue was removed under cover of dark without any explanation. The thing is Confucius is a rather awkward avatar. Oh yes, there is all that stuff about obedience and duty, of deference to the system, but that’s not the sum total of his thought. In the Confucian scheme of things governments have to be accountable to the people and, what is worse from the apparatchik’s point of view, they only have the right to rule through the exercise of ethical conduct.

Ethical conduct is now the last thing that the Communist Party wishes to be reminded of, ever fearful that it might just lose the mandate of heaven, every fearful that it’s own abysmal lack of any ethical code will become increasingly apparent, ever fearful of its own people. I see from a report in the Economist that neo-Maoist websites are crowing over the sudden removal of the “witch doctor.” But the ‘witch doctor’ has proved to be remarkably resilient. The night and the fog may have descended on him but he will re-emerge, a symbol, seemingly, not just of harmony but dissidence.

China in Night and Fog

In December 1941 Hitler issued one of his most sinister directives. Even the name still carries frightful overtones: Nacht und Nebel – Night and Fog. This allowed for the complete disappearance of anyone in Nazi-occupied territory judged to be a danger to the regime. Relatives would be given no information at all, not even if the people they were inquiring about were alive or not. There was no official record whatsoever, no trial and no appeal. It was as if some malevolent god had suddenly plucked random individuals out of existence, gone for ever into the night and the fog.

Night and fog has come to China. Earlier this month Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist and political dissident, was detained at Beijing airport. Nothing has been heard of him since. His family don’t even know if he is receiving the drugs he needs for a heart condition.

“According to the relevant law, the search results will not be shown”, is the message displayed to users of China’s micro-blogging sites, trying to learn something of his fate. Attempting to get over this Chinese Wall of Silence, bloggers started to use an invented name, Ai Weilai, as a forum for discussion. In retaliation all foreign websites petitioning for Ai’s release have been knocked out. So, if you are Chinese and living in China the chances are you will never read this.

The night and the fog have not just embraced Ai. The latest crackdown has seen others ‘disappeared’, so far more than a hundred bloggers, lawyers and activists for villagers’ rights. On Easter Sunday Christians in Beijing, people who refuse to recognise the officially-sanctioned state church, were rounded up and bussed off after they gathered to attend their own service, this in the face of a constitutional right to freedom of worship. Public places have been occupied by police and thugs in plain clothes, ready to descend on people ‘strolling’ as a veiled form of protest. Yes, one can be beaten up for taking a group walk, yet another face of modern China.

Through history Chinese governments have been notorious for their inscrutability, but the Communists have perfected the practice. Relative liberalisation at one moment can quickly be replaced by repression at the next, with no obvious explanation for the change of direction. The suggestion is that the so-called Jasmine Revolution in the Arab world, brought on in part by internet networking, has resulted in heightened sensitivity, a reasonable conjecture, though impossible to prove with any certainty. The authorities were never that liberal when it came to communication on the internet, a form of free expression they would really rather do without.

Information is power, so to be without information is to be powerlessness. Ignorance is Strength, is the Orwellian motto that governs official thinking in Beijing. Almost anything can trigger a new wave of repression, not just calls for greater freedom. If Japan’s tsunami had hit China instead I can guarantee that only a fraction of the news would have been reported, and almost certainly nothing about stricken nuclear plants. Ai’s first big run-in with the state, after all, came not over his brilliantly unconventional art, or his politics, but his attempt to account for all of the schoolchildren killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. There are uncomfortable questions here, you see, over the exact relationship between the authorities and companies who erected buildings not fit for purpose let alone natural disasters.

Night and fog is a measure of the political paranoia which grips China, the fear that besets the government, the fear of the state of its own people. The Communist Party here is no more than an organised conspiracy against the population. Secure in their forbidden cities, and their hidden villas, the apparatchiks look across the nation in a mood of fearfulness, seeing conspiracy around every corner, dissension in every tweet, a threat in every artist.

Happiness and the Pursuit of…Salt

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are the three words that form the most recognisable cornerstone to the American Declaration of Independence, the very essence of Jeffersonian principle. I’ve always wondered how one manages to ‘pursue’ happiness, and what one does with it once the elusive little beastie is caught; but this is not the time raise quibbles, especially as the Chinese have now set out on the hunt.

Yes, indeed; last month the National People’s Congress added happiness as one of the commodities to be over-fulfilled in the next five year plan. But it has a special importance in the great scheme of things, more important, officials insist, than increasing GDP. The new plan has been greeted as a blueprint for a “happy China”, though Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, forgot to put on his happy face when he made the announcement, at least according to the report I read recently in The Economist.

Forget about the Liberty element of the equation – Harmony in the old Confucian style and Happiness in the new Communist style are the motors behind a fresh Great Leap Forward, to a world of happy grins and make-believe. Earlier this year officials in Guangdong province announced that it would become “Happy Guangdong”, responding to a cue from Beijing to the effect that the Glorious and Happy Chinese Communist Party wanted citizens to have “glorious and happy lives.” Seriously, I’m not making any of these phrases up!

I have no idea if Thomas Jefferson had an exact definition of happiness beyond the opportunity to lead a useful and fulfilling life, but you can be sure that the Chinese leadership does, a definition that does not include any unwelcome notions of freedom, or even free access to the internet, where the Great Firewall gets higher and Higher by the day, just in case people realise that they are not quite as happy as they should be, that happiness maximisation is falling far short of the quotas.

I can provide you with one small illustration of the problem – salt. Yes, salt. No sooner had Wen made his monumental announcement than the Chinese people were unhappy enough to begin a rush on salt stocks, a wave of panic-buying triggered by a rumour that the iodine in salt was an effective antidote to the potential radioactive fallout from Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Official denials were issued. “It’s nonsense”, declared the government, with the result that the salt panic spread still further! People were observed leaving supermarkets, their baskets over-fulfilled with salt. When supplies ran out they turned to soy sauce and fermented bean curd for their saltiness.

So, I now know what happiness is in China and how one pursues it – just trot along to the local supermarket, hoping that salt has not been pursued out of existence. I imagine future statistics will reflect this sudden upsurge in the GHI – the Gross Happiness Index. Be happy, be Chinese, buy salt.

Breaching the wall of silence

There was a story on the main evening news broadcast here last week abut Lele, a six-year old Chinese boy kidnapped three years ago and now reunited with his family. I was moved to tears by the warmth of the reunion of the little boy with his parents and community, and by the sad tragedy that for every child found hundreds are still missing, many never to be recovered.

There is a combination of things at work here, things that have turned child kidnapping into an epidemic in China. As part of a scheme aimed at controlling a booming population the Chinese Communist government introduced a one child policy a number of years ago. This is all very well if the child is a boy; for by long-standing Confucian tradition there is a preference for male children, to carry on the family name, amongst other things.

So, in a country where children are at a premium, especially boys, a vicious black market has grown up, specialising in kidnapping. I read in the Sunday press that an estimated 70,000 children are sold by gangs every year, some fetching as much as £10,000.

It’s a terrible scandal; it would be a terrible scandal in any country but China. Why? Because it embarrasses the communist authorities, unwilling to lose face, unwilling to admit the scale of the problem. Parents of missing children often get only the most perfunctory assistance from the police. Worse than that: if they become too persistent in their quest they start to face official harassment. Peng Gaofeng, the father of Lele, was told to give up his campaign because it was disrupting ‘social harmony.’

In the end it wasn’t the police, the government or the party that found Lele; it was the ordinary people in a marvellous display of simple human solidarity. Twitter is banned in China but there are other microblogging sites, places that give the people a voice, empowering them in the way that they were never empowered before. With the help of Deng Fei, a journalist, Lele’s picture was tweeted to people all over the country. He was eventually spotted in Jiangsu province, some 2000 kilometres from his home.

Commenting on the power of the microblog (they are used by an estimated 100million people in the country) Deng said;

With this tool, everyone can express themselves immediately. Things can no longer be kept secret. Microblogs break the monopoly on information. They mean it can flow freely. A lot of things in China are caused by the lack of transparency here. So a lot of things will change now.

It truly is the breach of the Great Wall of Silence, a way around official complacency and unofficial corruption. Unfortunately this true voice of the people, so long gagged, exists only by the indulgence of the state. Like Twitter the microblogs could be closed at any time if they are perceived to threaten the monopoly of the party, or if they are found to disrupt a fictitious ‘social harmony’. I wish I could share Deng Fei’s optimism but the sound of silence is always to be feared.

Daring to question

Earlier this month I wrote about Liu Xiabo, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (Freedom is an obscenity). I wanted to offer this brave man a tiny drop of support for his moral courage, his determination to stand for a simple principle of freedom. Beyond the fact that he is a leading Chinese dissident I did not know terribly much about him. However, my friend Yun Yi has been busy adding translations from The Mist of Metaphysics , a major philosophical work, to one of her own blogs (Human without God). With her permission I’m adding a selection of these here, a tribute to a clever, subtle thinker in the best Socratic tradition. That a man like this should languish in prison for daring to pose questions is a tragedy for us all. It's as if Socrates had never quite finished his cup of hemlock


From Human without God by Yun Yi

Liu Xiaobo is the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2010 who is currently in jail in mainland China. I don't know much about him but just discovered one of his books "Mist of metaphysics" and it appears very thoughtful to me, also a bit pessimistic.
Below are some quotes from the book (my own English translation):

About metaphysics:
"Metaphysics is a compound of ways of our thinking and existence, an entirety of our behavior and motive."

"All knowledge of mankind is process of questions and answers. The history of thought is the history of questions."

"Whereas everything that man creates is for transcending his own limitation, the limitation of existence itself decides that he could never break the boundary."p6

"Discovery is creativity, common sense is imitation."

Space and Time:
"...the importance of time and space lies in the fact that they are the measurement of our life, the reference for the meaning of life - which work as a leverage for our survive will."

The value of thinkers:
"The value of a thinker is not about what problems he solves, but what kind of problems/questions he presents, because a new question means a new start and new development. Even if he does solve problems, the solutions must be open and provocative, must conceive new problems/questions"

About human wisdom, the separation of human and nature:
"If we ask: why under God's supervise Adam and Eve still stole the forbidden fruit, choosing the misery of knowing instead of the happiness of unknown? Was it really because of the temptation of Snake? I think, this temptation of snake was not the true cause of this action, the true cause was our human nature. And the reason that we created such a story to put the responsibility to others (snake) was because we have fear - we fear we have such kind of instinct. Indeed, giving a outside cause to our human tragedy can more or less alleviate the cruelty of this destiny." p14

About Time - the value also the limitation of life:
"The Buddhist concept of reincarnation is an avoidance of time, a murder of the sense of time. This avoidance of time creates a psychological satisfaction, a triumph over death, but the price is all our current life. Being apathetic to time is being apathetic to life. If all our hardship was caused by our previous life, we should not fight, be completely obedient to whatever come to us. Those whoever lack vitality, would also lack the sense about time. The sense of time is the sense of life... " p22