Horrifying

From write-up on Talking Points Memo:

“What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here?” Williams asked. “The mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”

“I think Americans understand justice,” Perry replied.

Gaddafi accused of cluster bombing Misrata

Gaddafi has been accused by HRW of cluster bombing Misrata. Really nasty stuff.

And---not to shift the blame at a moment like this---but the obvious cruelty of the way the bombs are being used right now is a good reminder that the U.S. should sign and ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions (as should Israel, China, Russia and other holdouts).

When cluster bombs have been used elsewhere, such as by Israel in Lebanon and by the U.S. in Aghanistan, the results have been devastating for civilians. No battlefield advantage justifies this.

Contrasts

One thing that's irked me a bit of late is the unselfconsciously positive coverage of the rebels.

The same images that are taken to be "negative" in other contexts (I'm thinking especially of Palestine), such as young men shouldering missile launchers and even younger boys playing on wrecked tanks and flashing victory signs---are suddenly "good" in Libya. On NPR a few nights ago, they interviewed someone whose brother had driven a truck of propane tanks through the gate to a Libyan army base, killing himself but blasting an opening for others to use to attack. The brother was treated as an unqualified hero.

I want to be clear. My problem isn't so much that the rebels are treated as heroes---I find them heroic myself, on the whole. Or that Palestinian violence is treated with skepticism. Violence should always be treated with skepticism. Rather, I find it disturbing that the news media's sympathies, it's circle of what it treats as heroic and what it treats as deserving of suspicion or, worse, as pathological, is so determined by prevailing foreign policy opinion in the U.S.

Libya

I'm conflicted about the prospect of a no fly zone over Libya. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of the U.S. pursuing such a policy while it tacitly supports Saudi Arabia's suppression of protesters in Bahrain---which is irrelevant as far as Libyans are concerned---what does it mean to take sides in a Civil War? A "no fly zone," after all, requires at least the destruction of air bases and anti-aircraft installations before it can commence. It's war.

But.. that said, it is immensely gratifying to see that this U.S. administration takes it for granted that any decision to enforce a no fly zone must be preceded by Chapter VII resolution from the UN Security Council and that key regional players, importantly the Arab League, not NATO, need to be on board first. This is an important step toward getting basic norms of multilateralism and obedience of international law back into the bloodstream of U.S. foreign policy.

Great Photos from Shaanxi

I just came across Julen Potron's photos on Flickr via China Digital Times. They're great images of my favorite part of China: the northwestern loess plateau. Shaanxi, not my preferred Shanxi, but still great.

Stupid response to Wikileaks

China needed a good excuse on censorship. The United States provided that excuse when it went after Wikileaks, showing that liberal democracies, if powerful enough, will also not hesitate to shut down internet gadflies. Of course, hypocrisy by the U.S. does not undo China's obligations. But it makes the argument of rights activists that much harder.

Wikileaks is now banned from the Library of Congress computers. The site's temporary host, Amazon.com, has been pressured (successfully) to drop it. Funding for Wikileaks via Paypal and even Swiss banks has been cut off.

Beijing must be sighing a big sigh of relief.

Back again

I haven't posted things here in quite some time. So, this is partially just a test of whether anyone reads the blog anymore!

In the past month, I've started school again and am hoping I can use Old Tales Retold to force myself to keep better track of goings on in China amid all the other stuff cluttering my head.

So... random comments on two bits of China news:

One, while I more or less supported Obama's tire tariffs a while back (or at least I think I did... check the old posts), I really can't justify the United Steelworkers' demand of action against China for subsidizing green technology.

The USW are incredibly forward-thinking in general when it comes to international solidarity. During the Vale Inco strike in Sudbury, Canada, steelworkers reached out to union brothers and sisters in places as far-flung as Brazil, Mozambique and Indonesia. Earlier this year, the USW signed an innovative deal with a group of Chinese wind energy companies "to create long-term, good-paying, green American jobs."

But the new trade complaint, as a friend pointed out to me, essentially makes the argument that governments should not invest in green energy, at least not "too" much. Instead of attacking China for not meeting WTO rules, the USW should be forcing the U.S. government to invest more. No need to carry water for neo-liberalism.

And... (unrelated) comment number two: what's with this new anti-Japan stuff?

Sure, I get that the detention of the Chinese boat captain pisses people off. That sort of thing pisses people off anywhere in the world, rightly or wrongly.

However, leaving aside the overall debate about whether China is pushed around by or is itself pushing domestic nationalism, I think, as Han Han has argued, this case in particular seems more about Beijing looking for a distraction than anything else. Just a gut response.

A few points on Thailand, China and stuff

Now that the Thai uprising has been acknowledged by even the mainstream, Western media as a class war (see this article from The Guardian and a blog post from the Wall Street Journal comparing the uprising to the situation in China)---and a pro-democracy one at that---it seems to me like the only moral response a person can have to the unrest is to support the Red Shirts.

Wishy-washy liberals won't back the Reds Shirts. They would unconditionally, of course, if the protesters were all middle class Chinese students marching for free speech or monks facing down the Burmese junta---both of which are worthy causes, but not legitimate litmus tests for what constitutes a worthy cause.

However, left-leaners and principled liberals should support the Thai protesters because the protesters are on the side of the basic tenants of electoral democracy (the Red Shirts' middle class opponents, the Yellow Shorts, want to reduce the voting power of rural areas because they don't like the leaders that rural people have helped elect, simple as that); because the alternative is an endless series of democratic votes overruled by courts or by military coups because, again, the wealthy and the monarchy don't like the outcomes of the votes, with resulting chaos again and again and again; and because the Red Shirts are poorer than their opponents.

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In China, the nexus of property speculation / local government budgets / giving middle and upper class people somewhere to invest their money when banks give next-to-zero interest is a mess.... The worst example of the mess is what is going on in Hainan. See this NY Times article.

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There's a lot of argument over whether privatizing China's land makes sense. I tend to think that it does not make sense, at least not without a court system that can support farmers' claims against the more powerful interests of developers and local governments. But the gall of the liberal intellectual cited in an an article I just read (and am trying to find so I can link to it) who took a longtime farmer-activist's manifesto and changed it so it didn't demand expropriated land to be returned to the public but instead demanded that the land be given to individual farmers as private property... is astounding. The activist ended up in jail for a belief he (apparently) didn't hold. The intellectual scored a point for his rigid free market view of freedom.

Mine tragedies, again

Two mine accidents occurred last week, both in predictable places: Shanxi, China and West Virginia, U.S.A. One of the tragedies, the one in the People's Republic, ended in something of a "miracle," with 115 miners rescued---but still dozens dead. Some good articles on both include an interview in the Global Times with Dave Feickert, the New Zealander who was recently given a friendship award by the Chinese government for his work to reduce mining accidents; a piece in Daily Kos about Massey Energy's wanton disregard for safety; and a comparison between the U.S. and Chinese experiences in In These Times.

Damn! Another wonderful part of Beijing destroyed!

I thought Beijing had slowed down its destruction of hutongs. Then, the city government went and decided to wreck one of my favorite spots in the city, the Drum and Bell Tower hutong, to build an underground mall, so it could make a little more money and so some developer that's all buddy-buddy with some local official can make a killing. Before you rush to say this is an inevitable part of modernizing, consider the following:

1) The cities in the world that people like to visit (rather than visit for purely business reasons) have old parts, and not just a few stand-alone old buildings with museums in them, but tons and tons, blocks and blocks of beautiful old buildings with real character. This is true of Rome, New York, Paris, Valparaiso, and Varanasi alike. Who will want to visit---let alone settle down in---a Beijing that, with the exception of a few tourist sites, looks like a giant shopping center? Not me.

2) The people who make Beijing what it is, the workers and old people and professors and small shopkeepers, are leaving the city center as each hutong is torn down. In their place, yuppies from across the country and world are moving in. Is a crude class transfer like this (mirrored in Manhattan and elsewhere) really something progressives should cheer for? Really?

3) There's a wonderful little bar in the Drum and Bell Tower hutong called Drum and Bell. You can sit on the roof on warm summer weekends and branches from trees tickle your ears and you can hear noises from the hutong below and read a book and eat peanuts. Sucks for that bar.

If you don't want this destruction to continue, consider writing a polite letter to the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning here.

Breaking the blockade

I'm glad China is managing to break the Gaza blockade with everyday necessities, though this article is a little strange.

Is it an ad for the quality of "Made in China" goods? A critique of the blockade?

Maybe if China would speak up about the human catastrophe that Israel has imposed on Gaza, rather than focusing their Security Council activism on blocking pressure on Iran...

Google

What struck me most about the whole Google-China thing was the surprise some people expressed that the e-mail addresses of human rights activists were being hacked at all. I mean, how many of the activists thought for a minute that their accounts were safe? No one who does that kind of work trusts their phones, their computers, anything (see, for example, Marquand's story about journalists' experiences with hacking in China).

Google should get a lot of credit, but not for saying enough is enough to a particularly egregious problem that the company alone had been suffering in silence. They should get credit for finally stating something blindingly obvious, for finally acting as if something everyone else had put up with for ages was not, actually, normal.

The sharpness of China's reaction---Google's decision was on the cover of the Chinese-language, paper edition of the nationalist Global Times the next day; the English-language China Daily followed with a deceptive "point-counterpoint"-style piece on Google the next day, if I recall correctly---was surprising for me. But maybe it shouldn't have been. Stating the obvious is sometimes a big deal.

China's inequality

After carping about China's Gini coefficient for ages, it's interesting to see that it is finally leveling off, if the OECD can be believed. According to the organization's recent survey, China even fell slightly from 41 to 40.8 between 2005 and 2007. I don't like the Kuznets Curve on ideological grounds and because, while it only seems to have held true in some cases, it has been used as almost a prescription for developing countries: become more equal, let a few get rich first, and things will settle out later. But it might be true for China.

Obama at one

Reading over the contributions in The Nation's special issue on "Obama at One," a few things stuck out. One was that exaggerated expressions of love for Obama and exaggerated disappointment in Obama similarly miss the point: it's not about one person. But the left's fall-back lesson, namely that you need outside movements to pressure even a good president to do good, is also incomplete.

Yes, the activism needs to go on. However, to put a twist on Malcolm X's most famous statement, I would argue: "By any means necessary---even boring, institutional ones." Progressives need to achieve a better marriage of protests and community activism, on the one hand, and of an effective governance strategy and savvy spin-meistering, on the other. The right gets it. We don't, at least not entirely.

We shouldn't be afraid of dirtying ourselves with a sustained commitment to effective inside politics, just as we've always embraced the limits of civil and uncivil disobedience. But ours---like the rights---must be an inside politics aimed at achieving concrete goals, not just treading water like the Clintons. And achieving those goals not under the noses of the American people but with their full knowledge and support.

Liu Xiaobo

Regardless of what you think of the process Liu Xiaobo is going through right now, the Christian Science Monitor's recent piece on the story has to stand out as some of the worst reporting on it thus far---at least in terms of the headline chosen, "Will West's Criticism of China for Jailing Top Dissident Backfire?"

The title refers to a long-running debate in human rights circles, both within China and abroad, as to the best way to support individual P.R.C. prisoners of conscience. NYU's Professor Jerome Cohen provided a thoughtful take on the topic a while back in the South China Morning Post (available via CFR here).

I don't blame the Monitor for trying to add to the debate. The problem is that they added zero. Evidence for the "backfire" thesis? One single quote from Tom Doctoroff, "the Shanghai-based Greater China CEO of US advertising agency JWT," who says you get the best results on human rights (his specialty I'm sure) through behind-the-doors conversations. Oh yeah, a real reliable, independent source with NO business interests whatsoever in China of all places...

Then, the reporter gets some good responses from Teng Biao, Josh Rosenzweig over at Dui Hua, etc. Except none of them deal with the issue of backlash and publicity / versus quiet.

Again, may just be bad work on the part of editor. But a serious question like this deserves better.

More on the G-20

On the other hand, here's an interesting take on the G-20 protests from Pittsburgh labor historian Charles McCollester. He recalls earlier protests in the city that descended into violence. And he describes the varied reactions of residents to today's demonstrators.

McCollester also argues that the Pittsburgh leadership doesn't want green manufacturing because it doesn't want manufacturing, period. It wants to continue to be "green" more through an absence--of industry and a troublesome working class--than through starting anything new.

G-20 protests

I've had fantasies elsewhere on this blog of teabaggers getting their comeuppance from rowdies of our own with fists and I've just barely held myself back from rooting for anti-racist rioters in Lund, Sweden.

I'm also disappointed by the media's unwillingness to take anarchists seriously. If students and professors in my international affairs classes were comfortable with the idea of states weakening and CEOs replacing or at least joining elected governments as the big players on the world state, what's so outlandish about horizontal, non-state structures that serve local, long-term needs, not short-term profits? Such a system existed in the Middle Ages, after all, when guilds controlled cities and princes had to ask permission to enter.

But the self-centered-ness of some of the G20 protesters is hard to escape. In their videos, posted at G-finity and elsewhere, the police are dehumanized from the get-go and are fought in an almost ritualistic manner, despite officers' working class roots. Local residents sympathetic to the anarchists are interviewed, but mostly as a sort of loyal workers' chorus. Sort of like, "See? They like us!"

I know that this grassroots support for anarchists can be genuine. At an anti-death penalty rally in Columbus, Ohio many years ago, the family of the condemned man in question spoke movingly afterward, away from the main event, about the support they had felt from those "masked bandits" (or some phrase to that effect). Leftists---not just anarchists, but the ISO and Socialist Alternative activists known from campus campaigns---often put down real, productive roots in urban communities. This dynamic was hinted at in a superficial way during the Reverend Wright controversy last year.

Nonetheless, there's a forced feeling to the thing in Pittsburgh, at least the marches with black banners and trash cans. As if it's time to search for a new mode of resistance.

Palin in Hong Kong!

Sarah Palin stunned Hong Kong with her BRILLIANT analysis of the global financial crisis and Sino-US relations the other day.

Not only that, she brought COMPLEX issues down to earth, down to "Main Street, USA," as she repeatedly put it, before a crowd of businesspeople carefully screened for pesky journalists (but not carefully enough--the AP slipped through). I mean, only a "Main Street" person would care about such a PRESSING, ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING issue as intellectual property rights, right? Or eliminating capital gains taxes and estate taxes for the wealthy?

And Palin showed a knack for Daoist mental puzzles with her claim that only the unbridled market could fix problems in the long run and that government meddling caused the financial crisis. Deepening the puzzle into a sort of puzzle within a puzzle, she singled out one kind of meddling for particular rebuke, namely the sort of government action that, well, left the market unbridled. As Palin said, because the government intervened to not intervene in housing markets in particular, "Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks." Damn socialism! Death panels!

Amid all this heady discussion, though, some of which, I must admit, went over my head, as it did over the heads of some attendees, who, heads exploding with new ideas, walked out, Palin touched on one issue that left me genuinely puzzled. This was the issue of, as she put it so eloquently, "the protest of... Chinese workers throughout the country," which, she said, along with the protests of Tibetans and Uighurs, "rightfully makes a lot of people nervous."

Her focus on workers was, of course, no surprise. She highlighted Joe the Plumber during the campaign, remember (OK, maybe he qualifies more as "petit bourgeoisie" or "would-be-petit-bourgeoisie-if-he-can-ever-buy-that-business"). Republicans, moreover, have a proud tradition of staunch support for the rights of working people---in other countries.

But Chinese workers, as Palin must know, are protesting against market policies that have shut down their plants. In some cases, they are quite explicitly calling for more government intervention in their workplaces, in the form of wage and hour law enforcement, of all things, or the investigation of occupational illnesses.

Surely, by Palin's logic, China's workers are clearly in the wrong.

More on tires

I'd like to add to my previous post. Some, like Adam Bobrow, have responded to Obama's tire tariffs with considerably more nuance than the critics I mentioned earlier. They have done so from a perspective of a "comprehensive" approach to trade liberalization, one that tries to make the loss of certain industries in the U.S. and elsewhere more palatable through job retraining programs, improved social safety nets, etc. Basically, Jagdish Bhagwati's line (a loyal Democrat, by the way).

But these people miss a crucial point: old-fashioned, nuts and bolts industry is good to have in ANY country, not just the "developing world." Every state will, naturally, find a different mix of sectors most suitable to its conditions. However, manufacturing, through its bringing together of large groups of people in one place, through its job stability, and through the satisfaction and pride it brings by creating something concrete, builds communities in a way that no "service" employer---whether a fast food restaurant, a call center or a hair salon, a white collar consulting this or that, a do-good NGO or whatever---ever will.

Obama's action against an "import surge" (not "dumping," as I wrongly implied in the previous post) may be procedurally just---the P.R.C. agreed to the U.S. retaining its Section 421 provisions when it joined the WTO. And it may also be substantively unjust to Chinese workers. But is also only fair to American tire employees and to hopes for a healthy nation on this side of the Pacific.

It's bridging these two fairnesses, of course, that is the biggest obstacle to solidarity between U.S. and Chinese workers.

Tire tariffs

America's recent decision to impose tariffs on Chinese tire imports isn't as clean-cut of an issue as either its supporters or detractors make it out to be.

First of all, there is nothing inherently "good" or "bad" about tariffs, protectionism, free trade or any other buzzwords of the moment. As Korean economist Ha Joon Chang has amply demonstrated, on their ascent to power, every major industrial state (yes, including Britain) protected key markets and opened them, tightly guarded intellectual property rights and wantonly violated them, and welcomed FDI and restricted it.

The winners and losers in each trade dispute vary, but it would take a market fundamentalists of a utopian variety to argue with a straight face that under absolute free trade "everyone is a winner." A little like some peppy grade school teacher saying that in sports everyone wins because it makes everyone healthy and fills everyone with team spirit. Really? Even the guy who hates to play sports? Or the one who broke his leg? Maybe a bad analogy...

Back to the dispute at hand... some criticize the Obama administration's penalties as "political." As those who make such criticisms tend to make an ostentatious show of noting that few (if any) tire companies supported the tariffs, it is clear that the heart of their argument is this: captains of industry are legitimate actors in trade decisions and not by any means "political," but unions, specifically the United Steel Workers, are not. Unions---and voters more generally---are just interest groups, goes the logic, the sort of folks who are "pandered" to by venal politicians.

On the Chinese side, there's a fair case, too, though. Many in the P.R.C. were rightly angered by the concessions that former Premier Zhu Rongji made to get China into the WTO in the 1990s, concessions that came from a Clinton administration that bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia around the same time. It is precisely these special conditions that allow the Obama administration to hit China on tires (and steel pipes and other stuff)... but not hit similar "dumping" by other countries.

Young Chinese nationalists do their countrymen a better service by fighting imbalanced treaties---as their forebears during the May Fourth Movement did 90 years ago---than they do by whining about media coverage or defending Chinese colonial policies toward ethnic minorities.

So, where do I fall? Fair to protect your workers (on both sides). Nothing right or wrong inherently about protecting this or not protecting that industry. But unequal treaties are lame.