Monday, June 25, 2012
The Great Leap Forward from Myth to History
This post originally appeared at Asia Times. It can be reposted if AT is acknowledged and a link to AT is provided.
The Great Leap Forward, a calamity that killed tens of
millions, afflicted China with the misery and morals of a concentration camp,
and spawned the Cultural Revolution, was once a shunned and shameful
topic.
But convenient myths—such as the threadbare explanation of
“Three Years of Natural Disasters”, fingerpointing at the Soviet Union, and exculpatory
emphasis on quixotic but seemingly admirable revolutionary enthusiasm—are now
crumbling as a new generation feels enough distance to confront the painful
past, and at the same time races to record the memories of the citizens who
suffered through the period before they pass on.
Through the efforts of Chinese and foreign researchers, a
more complete history of the Great Leap Forward is emerging from archives and
personal accounts, as a parade of folly, viciousness, and cruelty. This history—and the current regime’s
incomplete willingness to confront it—is finding resonance in the campaign to
discredit Chongqing neo-Maoist firebrand Bo Xilai, and the effort to shape the
agenda of the new leadership cadre that is expected to assume power in 2013.
In the process, the era of the Great Leap Forward and its
aftermath is acquiring a new name: The Great Famine.
The Great Leap Forward was born of hubris: Mao Zedong’s bet
that his version of socialism could unleash unprecedented productivity from the
Chinese economy and show the supercilious commissars of the Soviet Union who
was the best and greatest Communist leader.
In 1958 and 1959, China was convulsed by massive, disruptive
labor projects, collectivization, and a mad rush to steelmaking. Agriculture was disrupted by diversion of
labor and misapplied programs of deep planting, marginal land recovery, and
over-irrigation. At the same time, local
leaders made extravagant claims of increased agricultural output attributed to
the new socialist system, figures that were further padded as they traveled up
the chain of command to Beijing and, fatally, became the basis for central
government grain requisitions.
Things turned very dark very quickly as local cadres emptied
granaries in order to meet their requisition targets and demonstrate their
ability, zeal, and loyalty to their superiors.
One county in Henan claimed production of 7 billion jin of
grain—but actually produced only 2 billion jin—of which 1.6 billion jin was
requisitioned.
By the late months of 1958, throughout China communal
kitchens—where farmers in the new collectives went to get fed—were either
handing out thin gruel or were no longer bothering to light their fires at all. People began to starve.
Despite concerted efforts by local and provincial leaders to
cover up, it was soon apparent at the center that something was seriously
amiss.
And things got worse.
Mao Zedong adopted the self-serving explanation that the
shortfall in grain was the result of a counter-revolutionary resurgence in the
Chinese countryside, with ex-landlords and rich peasants conniving to conceal
their bumper grain harvests from the state.
Ironically, his convictions were buttressed by the party
secretary of Guangdong province, who conducted a successful campaign to root
out one million tons of grain hidden by desperate peasants. His name: Zhao Ziyang.
As the situation deteriorated in the Chinese countryside,
therefore, the afflicted areas were not regarded as disaster areas needing
outside assistance; they were nests of anti-state criminals who had to be
compelled to give up their ill-gotten grain.
Then things got even worse.
As news of widespread suffering trickled up to the party leadership, sub
voce dissatisfaction with Mao’s policies was amplified at the Lushan plenum in
the summer of 1959 as open criticism of the Great Leap Forward as a whole by defense
minister Peng Dehuai and party elder Zhang Wentian.
Mao interpreted the criticism at Lushan as an attack on
himself by a cabal of candidate Khrushchevs and launched an all-out political
war, loyally abetted by Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and most other senior leaders,
against Peng, Zhang, and any cadre that presumed to criticize the Great Leap
Forward.
The full human and political dimensions of the Great
Famine—and a damning portrait of Mao as a leader who was happy to slay the
messengers, by the tens of millions, rather than endure the humiliation of
acknowledging the failure of his policies before his peers in China and the
Soviet Union, or accept diminution of his authority and political power—are
found in the book Mao’s Great Famine
by Dr. Frank Dikӧtter (New York: Walker & Co., 2010).
In the words of Dikӧtter:
Had the leadership
reversed course in the summer of 1959 at Lushan, the number of victims claimed
by famine would have been counted in the millions. Instead, as the country plunged into
catastrophe, tens of millions of lives would be extinguished through
exhaustion, illness, torture, and hunger.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Wall of Fear Rebuilt in Syria
In the summer of 2011, foreign reportage and commentary on
the Syrian uprising noted that the “wall of fear”—popular unwillingness to
speak out against the government out of fear of reprisal by the government’s
brutal security services—had crumbled, thanks to the sense of safety and
empowerment (and, most likely, anonymity) provided by burgeoning mass
demonstrations.
From July 2011:
Joshua Landis, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, says people are beginning to lose their fear of the regime."The president appears to be hesitating, torn between a bloody crackdown and hoping the protests will run themselves out and he can stay in power," he said."People can smell his fear and are making calculations that the likelihood of getting killed amongst tens of thousands of protesters is far smaller. Bashar does not want to be his father[the former president Hafez al-Assad], and your average young Syrian man will be emboldened if he thinks he might just get thrown in jail for a few days. The numbers game has changed."
Well, fear has made a comeback. Google the two words fear and Syria and you
get 106 million results.
There’s a reason for that.
The Syrian government has conducted an extensive program of
state terror in an attempt to regain the political initiative in Syria’s
restive areas.
Amnesty International recently issued a report titled “Deadly Reprisals,” describing atrocities committed by the Syrian army during its
pacification activities. It is based on
in-country reporting and contains moving first-hand testimony such as this
example, from a town called Sarmin:
According
to their family and local activists, the brothers, all construction workers,
were not fighters but were active in demonstrations. Their mother told Amnesty International:
“The army came on Thursday [22
March] and so all the youths were trapped in the town. My
boys were at home. On Friday [23
March] early morning, at about 6-6.30am, soldiers came and
banged on the door. We were all
asleep and Bilal went to open the door. They said they want to
search; they asked about the small
motorcycle in the courtyard and Bilal said it was his. He
gave his ID and one soldier took
it and put it in his shirt pocket without even looking at it.
Yousef came out of the room into
the courtyard and Talal also came out of his room, still
wiping his eyes from the sleep. He
gave his ID and a soldier also put it in his shirt pocket
without looking at it.
“They took Bilal and the motorbike
outside to the street. There was a group of them searching
everywhere and many others outside
in the street. I could not see those outside but could hear
many voices. The soldiers did not
find anything in the house. They only grabbed a pair of
military type trousers and said my
sons are with the FSA [the opposition Free Syrian Army] but
I told them everyone is wearing
those trousers and they are being sold at the market. They did
not take anything else.
“They dragged Yousef and Talal out
to the street. I tried to go after them but a soldier pushed
his rifle against me and told me
to go back. Every time I tried to go outside they stopped me.
About an hour later, after the
soldiers had moved from the street, my relatives and neighbours
called asking for water to put out
a fire. We filled buckets of water and I ran out barefoot and
my daughter who had run out ahead
of me screamed ‘my brothers are burning’.
“Yousef and Bilal were burning on
the ground with several motorbikes piled over them. Yousef
was shot in the side of the head
and Bilal in the forehead, and Talal was lying face down, shot
in head and in the back and
burning from the waist down. Their hands were folded back, from
how they had been tied. They were
about 20 metres from the door of our home but we had to
run back into the house because of
heavy shooting and we could not recover the bodies until
the
about 7pm in the evening.”
And:
“At about 2pm soldiers broke down
the door and burst into the house. There were at least 10
of them. The men of my family were
hiding because it was believed that the army was taking
and/or killing any young men they
found. They grabbed my son Uday and asked for his ID. I
told them that he does not yet
have an ID because he is just 15.
“They left and went next door and
found my brother Mohamed Sa’ad. He had shrapnel injuries
in the arms and legs which he had
sustained in the morning of 24 March, when he was in the
market and the army came into town
and many residents were injured by shooting and shelling.
He was not involved with the
resistance; he did not even go to demonstrations and was not
wanted; he had no problem passing
the army checkpoints on his way to and from Aleppo
University and home. The soldiers
brought him back to the house and we told them he was not
involved in anything; I told them
to check and if they found that he had done anything I would
hand him over myself. We showed
them his university card and they tore it up without even
looking at it…
“I was trying to protect Uday
behind my back and they pointed their rifles at me. I tried to
reason with them and we begged
them and kissed their feet but they took both Uday and
Mohamed Sa’ad away.
“I tried to follow them outside
and was screaming at them and they got angry and grabbed my
other child, who is 10 years old
and handicapped [learning disabled and mute], and threatened
to kill him. As they left they set
fire to the house. With my relatives we eventually managed to
put out the fire, but by then my
parents’ home was mostly burned down. We could not go out
for fear of being shot. Only in
the evening, after the army left the area I went out with some
relatives and found the bodies in
the street, around the corner, less than 100 metres from the
house. There were nine bodies.
Uday had been shot in the head and Mohamed Sa’ad had his
hands tied behind his back and had
been shot in the chest.”
The
report is describes numerous incidents of extra-judicial killings, and includes
dozens of photos of the victims: identity cards, candid photos, formal
portraits, smartphone snaps of boys and young and youngish men regarding the
lens with a mixture of expressions of happiness, suspicion, or blankness, but
all lacking a hint of the horrors that would soon overtake them.
People
who question the veracity and motives of anti-Assad reporting may be inclined
to offer the usual caveats concerning anti-regime propaganda orchestrated by
the Syrian opposition’s indefatigable and ethically untrammeled media operation.
However,
the Amnesty report looks like the real deal, and not just because of the
wrenching verbal and pictorial testimony.
It’s
because the report provides a complementary and explanatory picture to what’s
going on in the government’s counterattack against the insurgency.
Readers
have noted that the report describes extensive atrocities by the Syrian army,
not the mukhabarat (security services) or the shabiha (pro-government
irregulars).
Judging
from incidents of the type reproduced above, the violence is not a
carefully-planned death squad operation against selected targets. Instead, the violence is, beyond the fact
that it is directed almost exclusively at young men of military age, arbitrary
to the point of randomness.
Like
the seemingly random shelling of Syrian towns prior to military assaults.
It
is difficult to see what military or political objective, at least according to
the “hearts and minds” theory of weaning the undecided away from the insurgency
by ostentatious solicitude for the innocent--is served by lobbing a few shells
into a village or massacring some young men who might have been insurgents—but also
peaceful demonstrators, disgruntled wannabes, or innocent bystanders or even
regime supporters.
Unless
“randomness” is regarded as a feature, not a bug.
The
picture I get from the Amnesty report is of a counterinsurgency strategy that
wishes to return the Syrian population to its pre-2011 state of fear through
frequent exercises of state violence that make little serious attempt to
discriminate between (in its terms) the deserving, the undeserving, and the
terminally wronged.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Russia and China Try to Draw the Line on Saudi Hegemony in Syria
I have a long piece up in Asia Times about sectarian aspects
of the Syrian crisis. But first, updates
on some interesting elements.
In the piece, I wrote:
The narrative of
escalating Syrian government brutality is important to Assad’s enemies, as it counters
another, more embarrassing narrative: the increased flow of money and material
aid to the rebels…
A sure sign of the
increased flow of aid to the rebels was the deployment of publicly
unsubstantiated accusations by the US State Department that Russia was sending
attack helicopters to Syria. Perhaps the
State Department has unique insights into the flow of military materiel from
Russia to Syria, but the key change in Syria is not in the order of battle of
the government forces; it is the increase in military capabilities of the local
rebels thanks in significant part to foreign supply of arms.
And today, via Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com:
It turns out Russia
was telling the truth, and the US
State Department today admitted that the helicopters they were railing about
were actually already owned by Syria and that they had just been sent to
Russia for repairs.
Presumably the United States was acting on the principle, to
paraphrase Mark Twain, that a righteous lie will make it around the world to
every receptive media outlet before an inconvenient truth manages to get its
butt out of bed.
Another matter I touched on was how different things would
have been if Syria had a nuclear program, like North Korea:
Today, there is no
international consensus and a shrinking domestic commitment to sustaining
Syria—a diminished, artificially constructed rump with almost no oil and no
atomic bomb (with hindsight, Assad’s failed clandestine attempt to get Syria
into the nuclear business appears wise instead of reckless)—as a successful
multi-ethnic state.
We can apparently thank Israel for that.
Elliott Abrams, everybody’s favorite foreign policy felon,
told the Jerusalem Post that George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice decided to use
diplomacy on the Syrian nuclear reactor project at al Kabir but the Israeli
government went ahead and bombed it on their own kick.
Commenting in response to a government wrist-slap delivered
by Israel’s State Comptroller to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning
the bloody Mavi Marmara incident,
Abrams made the important point that theprocess of painstaking fact-finding
and sober, multi-faceted analysis will sometimes yield an incorrect outcome.
Incorrect, as in Elliott Abrams doesn’t like it.
Abrams, however, used the
Syrian nuclear facility issue to illustrate that what is more important than
thorough preparation and a good process is the right people making the right
decisions. He also said that some of the best White House meetings were
informal ones where no notes were taken.
He said that his preferred option in the summer of 2007, when intelligence information emerged that the Syrians were building a nuclear facility, was for Israel to take it out in order for Jerusalem to rebuild its deterrence capability following the Second Lebanon War a year earlier. He added that then-vice president Dick Cheney argued for the US to bomb the facility itself to rebuild America’s deterrence capability.
He said that his preferred option in the summer of 2007, when intelligence information emerged that the Syrians were building a nuclear facility, was for Israel to take it out in order for Jerusalem to rebuild its deterrence capability following the Second Lebanon War a year earlier. He added that then-vice president Dick Cheney argued for the US to bomb the facility itself to rebuild America’s deterrence capability.
Insert your own joke concerning right [wing] people making
right [wing] decisions here, and the interesting stretch of the definition of “deterrence”
to include “aggression.”
Final takeaway of the Asia Times piece addresses the destabilizing
role of Saudi Arabia intransigence in forestalling a resolution of the crisis
that might leave Assad a share of power—which has elicited determined Russian
and Chinese opposition to the Kingdom’s reckless neo-Clean Break strategy to
roll back Iranian power and impose some sort of Saudi hegemony on the Middle
East:
In other words, if
Saudi Arabia, the homeland of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, could pause from
beating up Bahrain long enough to look in a mirror, it might see an
overreaching, overfunded theocracy that is more the cause than the victim of
the instability it reviles.
After the break is the full text of the Asia Times
piece. It can be reposted if Asia Times
copyright is acknowledged and a link is provided to Asia Times Online.
Monday, June 11, 2012
China Battens Down the Hatches
This piece originally appeared at Asia Times on June 2, 2012
The entertaining ruckus over CCTV talk show host Yang Rui’s
anti-foreign comments obscures a rather significant trend in Chinese government
policy.
It appears that the CCP is winding down its five-year charm
offensive meant to bolster its international legitimacy and standing, and is
turning inward to focus on pressing domestic social, economic, and political
concerns.
Disturbingly, China has a limited number of effective policy
levers to deal with these issues. The
few they have are ugly in conception and application—like xenophobia.
China’s economic miracle, typified by the spectacle of the
2008 Beijing Olympics and the titanic stimulus program of 2009-2010 (which is
credited with forestalling a prolonged global recession), never elicited the
Western respect that the Chinese leadership felt was its due.
With the election of President Obama, the West rediscovered
the impeccable moral self-regard it had forfeited during the Bush II years and,
instead of acknowledging Chinese regional suzerainty, cobbled together an
alliance to “pivot” back into Asia and contain China.
International policy toward China is inseparable from
criticism of China’s human rights record, its neo-mercantilist economic
policies, and its heightened security profile in East Asia, and the hope and
expectation that China will fall on its behind before the West (excluding
Greece, probably Spain, and perhaps Italy) does.
“Soft power”, in other words, hasn’t won China much
breathing space. As the CCP turns its attention
to a fraught leadership transition complicated by smoldering inflation,
simmering public discontent, slowing economic growth thanks to the
dysfunctional Eurozone, and a spate of opportunistic bitching over uninhabited
island groups by its maritime neighbors, perhaps xenophobia is the most
effective way for the Party to seize the initiative in the public sphere.
In recent weeks, public opinion has been entertained and
inflamed by such diverse exhibition of foreign misbehavior as 1) arrogant
Russian cellist putting his feet where they didn’t belong on a Chinese train 2)
brain-melted foreign tourist trying to undress a hapless Chinese woman on a
busy Beijing street 3) North Korean “pirates” holding Chinese fishermen for
ransom.
There was a lot of palaver about what the kidnapping said
about the North Koreans and their possible unhappiness with Chinese criticism
of their weapons testing. Remarkably,
there was very little discussion of why the Chinese media chose to give this
event (which, quite possibly, was simply the most recent of many shakedowns by
North Korea’s cash-hungry/smuggling-happy coastal security forces) front-page
treatment.
The xenophobic piece
du resistance, however, was a May 16 Weibo screed by CCTV’s Yang Rui,
sneering at “foreign trash”.
One can safely assume that Yang was supporting the party
line on pesky foreigners. It also
appears that Yang put a lot of himself, too much, in fact, into his
140-character ramble, including accusations that foreigners were shacking up
with Chinese women in order to make maps and send out GPS coordinates to
overseas intelligence services (coordinates of what, Yang failed to enlighten
his readers).
What caused Yang’s anti-foreign assault to backfire,
however, was his use of the term “po fu” to describe Al Jazeera Beijing
correspondent Melissa Chan.
Chan,a well-regarded reporter who had aired pieces on black
prisons and illegal land grabs that the Chinese government certainly found
uncomfortable, was expelled (technically, her request for a visa extension was refused)
in early May.
Yang lumped her together with the foreign trash, declaring:
赶走洋泼妇，关闭半岛电视台驻京办，让妖魔化中国的闭嘴滚蛋
We kicked out the foreign po fu, closed down
Al Jazeera’s Beijing office, so those who demonize China shut their mouths and
beat it.
Global Times translated “po fu” as
“crazy”, which is pretty far from the mark.
The Wall Street Journal translated “po fu” as b*tch, which is closer to
the truth, if not quite accurate, and helped feed the expressions of quivering outrage
by expats in China who tweet.
Yang tried to explain that his
insulting characterization actually means “shrew” in English, and he does have
a point. “Po fu” started out as a
literary term coined by the Qian Long emperor.
During one of his southern tours he saw two women fighting and said
something along the lines of (adjusting for the dense meaning of individual
characters in classical Chinese), “when you’re talking about fierce,
unreasonable, and incapable of engaging in elevated moral discourse, that’s
women.”
In essence, therefore, Yang appears not be saying that Ms. Chan
was a b*tch (a bad woman), but the unfortunate but entirely predictable
manifestation of female shrewishness in her reporting prevented her from
scaling the highest peaks of respectable journalism (already occupied, perhaps,
by certain smugly condescending male CCTV presenters).
Sometimes, when you’re in a hole, it’s time to stop digging.
The furor over “po fu” also distracts attention from the more
interesting question of why Ms. Chan’s visa was not renewed.
The conclusion of Yang’s Weibo blast (so those who demonize China shut their
mouths and beat it) implies that the
Chinese government made an example of a free-wheeling reporter at a second-tier
news outlet in order to pass the message to top-line media outlets that
nettlesome reporting will have consequences for individual reporters and,
perhaps, entire news operations (in addition to not renewing Chan’s visa, the
Chinese government has so far refused to accept a replacement and the Al
Jazeera Beijing bureau is, at least for the time being, defunct).
The impression of Chinese xenophobia
was also accentuated by the announcement of a three-month drive to crack down
on foreigners residing or working in China without proper documentation.
Needless to say, it is an unpleasant
experience to be regarded as potential “foreign trash” and go through the
degrading transaction of presenting one’s papers to the local police on
demand. It is also an indication that
the security system’s relatively kid-glove treatment of foreigners is the
latest victim of China’s growing political and economic uncertainty.
Chinese policies toward improperly
documented aliens bear a remarkable resemblance to laws in Arizona and Georgia
that have integrated immigration policy into police operations largely in
response to xenophobic sentiment and political unease in a deteriorated
economic climate.
The real issue may not be the outraged
feelings of foreigners today; it may be making the scapegoating of foreign
troublemakers, journalists and otherwise, an available option against the day
when the political climate inside China worsens for the CCP.
If and when bad times come, the CCP
seems to have a decreasing number of tools available to deal with the
situation. In particular, there are
sticks available, but not a lot of carrots.
This restricted toolkit apparently
applies to dealing with domestic dissatisfaction as well as pesky foreigners.
A remarkable object lesson in the financial
and systemic hazards of contemporary Chinese authoritarianism is illustrated by
the remarkable extralegal detention of Chen Guangcheng and other dissidents.
It takes a village, apparently, to
button up a lawyer-activist in China, and the amounts expended on supervising
and harassing Chen—estimated at over 8 million RMB—are a source of wonder.
What is perhaps an even more
remarkable source of wonder is the fact that variants of this extravagant
system are applied to perhaps 1 million Chinese that no one has ever heard of.
As reported by Charles Hutzler of AP,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese activists, dissidents, miscreants, parolees,
and suspicious characters are kept under intensive surveillance similar to
Chen’s.
The operations are funded by
“stability maintenance” funds from the central government, part of the $110
billion the government spends each year on domestic security and order.
The article recounted the case of Yao
Lifa, a schoolteacher who ran afoul of the system when he tried to run as an
independent for a local political office 25 years ago. The current system of tight surveillance has
been in place for a year or so.
Yao told AP how his surveillance is
managed, including a significant outsourcing to gym teachers in the school he
used to teach at:
The sums add up in Qianjiang, a city of struggling factories and one million people set in the center of the country. Basic pay runs about 1,000 yuan, or $160, a month for an entry-level teacher and goes to three times that amount for a veteran, Yao said.
"This isn't bad for teachers," said Yao. "An English teacher probably wouldn't take it. They can earn extra money giving private tutoring. But gym teachers can't do the tutoring. Besides, their superiors have told them to do this. They can't not do it."
…
He said he heard the school and
education bureau were arguing over $48,000 for his surveillance."I have many acquaintances. Some of them work in police stations," Yao said. "They tell me 'Really we could use a Yao Lifa. If we had one, we could make more money.'"
According to Hutzler, an article in
Caijing reported on a village in south China in which a quarter of the local
government personnel were on the stability payroll.
This would appear to be more than
“stability maintenance”. It’s a form of central
government support to shore up the finances and legitimacy of the local government
i.e. the local Communist apparatus.
Call it CCP welfare, or
“workfare”. Well, maybe call it
“goonfare.”
It is, to put it mildly, not a good
thing for the CCP when the local face of the party is a crew of musclemen
hassling schoolteachers.
To add to the problem, and the
perception, for many local officials the temptation to graft off the
imperfectly supervised “stability maintenance” funds is reportedly
irresistible.
Now that this system is in place, it
is difficult to see how the central government can abolish it—unless, in
addition to howls of protest from local cadres, it is interested in dealing
with a surge of local unrest and disgruntled petitioners, and a legal system
that is not up to the task of protecting the rights and serving the aspirations
of its citizens.
The fundamental problem is that,
contrary to the party’s hopes, breakneck economic growth over the last decade
has not translated into an outpouring of gratitude or support for the Chinese
Communist Party. “Socialism with Chinese
characteristics” like another triumphant economic system we all know and love,
has inequality built into it.
In Western capitalism, the power of
the “1%” is diffused, anonymous, entrenched in every institution, and embedded
in every political party. Even after the
colossal rich man’s cock-up of the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, 99%
Americans were unable to summon up the united political will to confront Wall
Street, let alone engage in a satisfying politico-economic jacquerie against
the moneyed elite.
However, in China, the political
problem is much more severe because inequality clearly benefits party
members—and princelings within the party—disproportionately. Overall GDP growth, that scorecard of
economic success that infatuates state planners, foreign businesses, and
economists alike is, for China, a two-edged sword, since it ineluctably widens
the perceived income and social justice gap.
Therefore, there is a lot of anxiety
inside and outside the party about closing the wealth and justice gap ranging
from traditional command economy nostrums like subsidized housing to fancy
free-market panaceas like reforming the pampered, cash-rich state run
corporations through private corporate competition and public wealth sharing
through increased stock ownership.
In fact, it would be useful to
consider that China is now trying to turn away from macro-economic management
of the economy, with its implication of passively waiting for the tide to lift
all boats, to politically targeted financial and investment policy meant to
selectively grow vulnerable sectors of the economy at the expense of industries
and institutions that have emerged as political liabilities.
However, these solutions don’t go very
far in addressing the disgruntlement that suffuses Chinese society like a toxic
fog: the idea that Chinese wealth creation is primarily an exercise by which
the CCP enriches and entrenches itself.
It’s not easy—or perhaps even
feasible—to remove the dead hand of the party from economic and political life,
or from the consciousness of the Chinese citizenry under the current system.
Things are less than ideal even
after—and, to some extent because of—a decade of rampant growth.
Now, of course, China is looking at a
period of slowed growth as a matter of policy as well as necessity, one that
will presumably leverage even greater perceived economic and social injustice
onto the shoulders of the resentful Chinese citizenry.
The West’s faltering effort to free
itself of the incubus of its failed economic policies means a Eurozone crisis
and bad news for China’s export economy.
At the same time, China is still dealing with the inflation and real
estate bubble hangover from its massive 2009-10 stimulus and cannot risk
fueling inflation by dumping a lot of money into the economy.
If the CCP finds itself unable to
finesse the looming economic and political crisis through a savvy combination
of political and economic policies, the alternative—a bout of xenophobia and
domestic repression that reveal the party in its least attractive light both to
the world and its citizens—is not going to be pretty.
"Bo Fu" image from nipic.com
Thursday, June 07, 2012
Brave New Worlds: The Difference Engine and The Murder of the Century
London, Summer 1821. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), inventor and
mathematician, is poring over a set of astronomical tables calculated by
hand. Finding error after error he finally exclaims 'I wish to God
these calculations had been executed by steam'.
I recently had the good fortune to read two excellent and
complementary books in tandem.
One was The Difference
Engine, a famous piece of sci-fi alternate history by William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling. It takes place in
Victorian England—a different Victorian England, still driven by steam and
innocent of electricity, but one in which Charles Babbage’s machine for
mechanical computing has been perfected.
New but oddly familiar vistas of technology, pollution, wealth, crime,
control, and oppression confront the characters and the reader. Gibson has said that The Difference Engine remains his favorite among his books and the
only one he re-reads. Coming from the
author of Neuromancer, that’s no
small claim. Unsurprisingly, the book
has become something of a touchstone for the steampunk movement, which it
anticipated by about a decade.
The other book is Murder
of the Century, by Paul Collins. It
reads like a prequel to The Difference
Engine, with the added advantage that it is both strange and true. The murder in question was the quite mundane if
gruesome liquidation and dismemberment in 1897 New York City of a German
immigrant, William Guldensuppe by his lover, Augusta Nack, and her other lover,
Martin Thorn. What made it the murder of that century was the central role it
played in the New York tabloid wars and the rise of William Randolph Hearst.
The Guldensuppe murder made Hearst. Through a combination of luck, energy, and
money Hearst’s upstart New York Journal
rode the case to victory over the Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and mastery of the New York newspaper universe.
Hearst did not only report the case—he made the case. His “Wrecking
Crew”—a pack of reporters whizzing around the city on that new-fangled
invention, the bicycle, to scoop the competition—not only kept ahead of the World; it stayed a step ahead of New
York’s not-too-impressive police department, unearthing clues, accumulating evidence,
interviewing suspects, and keeping the prosecutorial ball rolling.
At the time, New York was a big city, but as yet deficient
in the big city mechanisms of control and consent meant to convey the unassailable
authority of the government. The
suspect, Martin Thorn, was trundled to and from the courthouse on the trolley
by his police escort; when it was time to go up the river to Sing Sing, he was
loaded on the public ferry to be ogled, consoled, insulted, or interviewed by
any passenger who had the inclination.
The whole book reads like a steampunk artifact from when the
cage of science, modern laws, and bourgeois morals had not yet been completely erected
around the human passions, but the modern hive mind fostered by capitalism,
population density, and the omnipresent media had already emerged.
Even as Hearst’s hyper-modern steam presses thundered out
multiple daily editions to overwhelm The
World, and Linotype operators in the printing plant received direct
telephone feeds of the courtroom testimony in their headsets, The Journal’s crack sketch artists
relied on Aeolus, Flyaway, and Electra—three U.S. record-holding racing pigeons
hired by Hearst—to deliver the latest pictures from the courthouse to Newspaper
Row.
Throughout the book glides the sensuous and sinister figure
of Mrs. Nack: an uneducated German immigrant who deftly navigated 19th
century New York as a single woman by deftly juggling and exploiting multiple
lovers, and through her talents as a midwife and alleged abortionist. She played the press like a fiddle, doling
out scoops, interviews, and accusations that kept her the center of sympathetic
attention. Although Mrs. Nack, according
to Collins’ reconstruction, killed Guldensuppe in the most intimate manner conceivable
with Thorn’s assistance, she blithely and easily rolled over on her accomplice
by turning state’s evidence.
Augusta Nack emerged from prison ten years later and, after
a flurry of media interest and interviews, disappeared forever.
Martin Thorne went to the electric chair at Sing Sing.
In true steampunk irony, the electric chair, still in its
infancy, only delivered a modest jolt of 1750 volts at ten amperes. After the sentence was executed—accompanied by
a smell that a witness described as resembling “an overheated flatiron on a
handkerchief” -- Thorn was pronounced dead.
Reporters dashed out to file their stories and Dr. Joseph O’Neill of the
New York School of Clinical Medicine came forward to examine the body.
Collins describes the aftermath:
O’Neill bent over and rested the stethoscope on Thorn’s skin. There was a motion underneath—a faint thrill in the carotid artery…With swift and practiced movements, the doctor examined the cremasteric reflex, which retracted or loosened the testes; it was still working. O’Neill…pulled back Thorn’s left eyelid; the pupil contracted beneath the blaze of light.“If required, I should be very reluctant to sign his death certificate,” the surgeon announced.…The prison doctor pointedly ignored O’Neill and directed two attendants to carry the body to an autopsy room. Thorn’s skull and chest were quickly opened…Aghast, Dr. O’Neill fired off a dispatch titled “Who’s the Executioner?” to the Atlantic Medical Weekly. “The law requires post-mortem mutilation…as it reveals no cause of death and teaches nothing of interest to science, it is evident that its purpose is to complete the killing.”
Relishing his victory over The World and Joseph Pulitzer in New York City, Hearst quickly
moved on to leverage his talents, ambitions, and media assets on a truly global
stage.
His chosen sensation: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. The objective: war between Spain and the
United States.
The outcome: well, the rest is history. Modern
history.
The Computer History Museum has an on-line exhibit on Babbage and his engine, which provides the quote in the header. The first full feature difference engine ever built in our world was constructed in 2002 and weighed 5 tons.
Here’s a link to purchase Murder of the Century at Amazon.
The Library of Congress has a page on the Guldensuppe case in its Chronicling America series with links to
contemporary news accounts that one may view, clip, and download to one’s heart’s
content. The picture above came from the
November 11, 1897 Salt Lake Herald.
