China.

China holds my interest. Those closest to me say I'm obsessed.

The New York Times prominently reports today And they don't mean that as a compliment on a new Brookings Institute study, "Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust."  The study gets prominent reporting because a co-author is Wang Jisi, an adviser to the Center, and thus reveals what PRC officials really think.  Although I have downloaded the study this post is based on the Times article summarized below because I am impatient as well as...interested.

1. China is more assertive in the world. 

2. That's because the Center is more confident of China's capabilities based on post-Deng economic growth.

3. The Center is not impressed with the U.S. as a model for China.

     A. The U.S. is in decline economically and in world influence.

     B. Internal U.S. politics is increasingly polarized.

4. Americans are nosey people with a bone in their brain and should not be raising human and political rights issues with China.

5. The Center has no intent to liberalize human and political rights. 

6. Sino-American economic and world influence competition is zero-sum.

7. China will win the sum and the U.S. will win the zero.

8. Sino-American competition is likely to develop into hostility, maybe into military conflict but not necessarily.

The entire outlook is of course plausible, Mr. Wang and co-author Kenneth Lieberthal are rational, informed analysts. Numbers 1 and 5 are factually true and obvious. 

Number 3 is also true as far as it goes. That is, China does not see the U.S. as a model. 3A and 3B are undoubtedly the reasons China does not see the U.S. as a model.  3A is not true in my opinion and 3B, while true, is not relevant if one believes that America is not in decline. 3B is relevant to those who are paranoid and see a one-party state as the best way forward.

I don’t find the analysis in number 3 particularly cogent. This strikes me as boilerplate. It was said America was in decline in the 1960’s and ‘70’s during and after Vietnam. Henry Kissinger believed America-as-Athens might succumb to Russia-as-Sparta. In the, what was it, the ‘80’s, there was a book by some guy—Paul Kennedy?-- that was all the rage.  The cover imagery was the thesis: it showed a platform with three steps, like in the Olympics. John Bull was stepping off the platform entirely; Uncle Sam was stepping off the “gold medal” top step, and a figure carrying a Japanese flag was ascending to the top step.  And I bought a lot of stock in a mutual fund called the “Japan Fund” and lost a lot of money.  But “past success is no guarantee of future success.”  Nothing lasts forever and China is a plausible candidate to be next up on the winner’s step. But I don’t think so.  And that’s because of number 2.

Number 2 surprises me: “confident,” the Center is confident.  I don’t see “confidence” in China’s soul.  China was dysfunctional for 3,000 years; they have been functional for 30 and Chinese are a very history-conscious people. As the People’s Republic, China was as dysfunctional, incompetent, and murderous as any regime in human history from 1949-1976.  Now they’ve had economic success for 30 years and they’re confident?  No.  Or at least not the people; the Center may be confident but not the people. Historically they have never competed. Chinese have a slavish mentality. They obey. When the Center tells the people to go do something they do it. This works particularly well in the catch-up phase of economic development, which is the phase China is in.  "See that stuff over there?  Go make stuff like that."  They will do it. Look at the Beijing Olympics. They figured out what Hollywood did and out-did Hollywood.  They're great at working off blueprints; blueprints are orders and they obey orders. Here's what pains me:  it's imitation and imitation is fake. This is why I say China today is not real.  China is not real.   Imitation is not creation.  To move to the next phase of economic development, Chinese have to create. A modern post-industrial economy must continually create: new products, new ideas to stimulate demand for new products.  Chinese have the ability to do this by virtue of being human just like Americans.  Historically they haven't done it and the slavish mentality is one key reason.  But history need not be destiny.

I see pain, so much pain, in China’s soul, so much sorrow. I look in those eyes and I see it; I hear it in their voices. The Chinese population is still half rural. All of those huge cities and half the people still live in the countryside*  The West, and I certainly, know virtually nothing about rural Chinese. For three millennia the peasants of China have survived, little more. In my oft-stated view Chinese are survivors, not achievers, not competitors. For these reasons I do not believe Number 7.  I don’t believe number 8 on this ground either and because China historically has not been nearly as imperial as many other nations, nor as aggressive. Nor even interested.  China did not explore. If the authors are correct that China and America are locked in competition and that competition may turn “antagonistic,” I am confident as China’s American competitor and antagonist. I am more confident that my antagonist is confident. 

Number 6 puzzles me. Economic competition is hardly ever zero-sum. That was at the root of Harry Truman’s desire for a “one-handed” economic advisor.  There’s almost always an “on the other hand.”  Even with the enormous trade deficit the U.S. runs currently with China, there’s some benefit to the U.S., more supply, cheaper goods (but see below). Maybe it’s because the Center fundamentally doesn’t understand economics. Wouldn’t be the first time. There is something though about this view that I’ve read somewhere, maybe in Kissinger’s book.  If survival is at your soul, do you not see more than one winner possible?

Number 4 causes schizoid thinking in Americans, from bloggers to policy makers, even in Henry Kissinger, the champion of realpolitik in Sino-American relations.  Last year (I think it was) when Hu Jintao visited Washington I wrote here that the Administration should not talk human rights with Hu, that America had made the decision to play with China and should accept the repression as something we can and should do nothing about.  Except decide not to play with them. The latter no one seriously advocates.  I wonder.

Human rights are important values to Americans.  That’s why they’re part of our foreign policy sometimes.  We really believe in them and we really don’t like to see people slaughtered or repressed, even in far-away China.  And when we “play” with another country, we feel guilty if that other country slaughters or represses its people because then we have “enabled” that slaughter and repression to some degree.  All for money (trade, “play”).

What if we think of it this way:  how much money has America made from playing with China, and is that enough to offset our guilty feelings (everything has a price; guilty feelings are a thing).  At the macro-economic level, we’ve lost money. Our trade deficit with China last year was $295 billion. So we’ve paid the Center $295 billion (last year) for them to repress their people.  I think it is factual that if the U.S. decided, “You know what, you disgust us, we’re not going to trade with you anymore,” China would be hurt economically more than the U.S. would.  Actually, it’s factual, it is undeniable.  That would throw off Lieberthal’s and Wang’s predictions. I have thought about this.  I have thought about this as seriously as an idiot blogger can. After I read Kissinger’s On China, I re-read parts of Margaret Macmillan’s Nixon and Mao. Macmillan asks the question whether Nixon, Kissinger, and America gave up too much in 1972 and thereafter.  My recollection is she didn't answer the question.  She was troubled by it.

I’m troubled by it. I have found myself turn away in disgust at times. China’s assertiveness in the last few years has annoyed me. I have found myself sometimes wistful for those pre-1972 days when China was closed. Maybe it is always thus with obsessions.

*Changed April 7, 2012 from "The Chinese population is--60%? 70%?, some astonishing figure—rural. All those huge cities and China is still largely a rural nation," based on the CIA estimate of 53% in 2010  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html, and Wikipedia's estimate of 48.7% at the end of 2011.

The Soul of China

                                                                   
China today is not real. That movie is not real.  The Beijing Olympics were not real. Their prosperity is not real.

"Chinese do not think for themselves, Ben," a Beijinger said to me in 2008. That is real. That is the reality that has produced all the modern unreality in China. Chinese do not think for themselves, they obey.  They were the reddest reds--because the maximum leader said to be that way.  That's how China, and individual Chinese would survive, he said.  Then a new maximum leader said "to be rich is glorious;"  he said for China to survive it and its people must become the opposite, capitalists, fascists.  And Chinese obeyed. 

I do not think that anything is so ingrained in China's soul nor anything explains Chinese behavior as a people so well as this felt need to survive, an impetus so primordial that it is called an "instinct." An instinct requires no thought. 

Soul as survival produces contradictory behavior: Chinese were communists to survive; they are capitalists to survive. Chinese live to survive: not a tautology; to commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution was the gravest political error. It was a betrayal of the Revolution. One had to live through the persecution, the pain, for China; for China to survive. 

Chinese die for China to survive.  Bian Zhongyun walked to her school on August 5, 1966 knowing that she would be killed. She said goodbye to her husband that morning; She washed her body the night before so that it would be found clean after death. 

Chinese killed the innocent to survive: 交换孩子使食物, “Swap child, make food.”  

The question that has haunted a generation of Chinese females is how the students of the High School for Girls attached to Beijing Normal University, the best and the brightest in China, "good girls," how did they become responsible for "the first casualty of the Cultural Revolution?"  Because they saw a threat to Mao Zedong's, and hence all of China's, survival. There were "counter-revolutionaries,"  "rightests," "capitalist roaders," those from "black" families, who were attempting to stage a coup d'etat and oust Mao, and they were everywhere. Bian was from a "black" family. She was killed, made a "sacrifice" in Weili Ye's words, so that Mao and China would survive.

And then they went back to being good girls. 

It was absurd, bizarrely absurd--and no less criminal--wasn't the whole Cultural Revolution? Liu Shaoqi, the president of the country, the author of the book, "How to be a Good Communist" was ousted by Red Guards and ultimately killed...because he was a "capitalist roader."  Aren't labels like "absurd," "contradictory," even "criminal," the product of  analysis, of thought?  "Chinese don't think for themselves, Ben."  

China today is a Potemkin village. One steps through the doorway and right into thin air. I defy any serious China watcher, any scholar, to say, "China will never go back. They have given up communism for good." China is no more capitalist today than it is Swedish and if the maximum leader, like the dictator of San Marcos in Bananas, tells the people of China that they are to speak Swedish and wear their underwear on the outside in order to survive, they'll do it.

Moon Blew? Orange Loon Red

Man. The Summit of the Buttoneers is not looking buttoned down. At all. This weekend was definitely not baked in drama. The DPRK nuclear negotiater made that statement and Trump called South Korean president Moon Jae-in Saturday night to ask WTF? According to the former Quasi's Trump is now canvassing his advisers on whether to go at all.

The Orange Loon is red with embarrassment. Korean War Over! My Nobel! My Nobel! And red with anger. He's pissed at Moon. He doesn't know if Moon misunderstood Kim, put his own optimistic gloss on Kim's willingness to give up his nuclear arsenal or misled him when Moon flew to D.C. to deliver the message to Trump personally. (That message was not in writing and was not from official DPRK.) "Was I scammed?" Trump wonders and there is nothing that makes his orange head redder than being scammed.

Trump is also red at Red China. Was this a plot hatched together by fiendish yellow brains (Revenge of the Pink Panther, 1978)? Kim went to China recently. Again. The first time he went he was obsequious to Xi Jinping. Hardly talked at all. Took notes! Sat there and took notes as Xi spoke. Now, Trump wonders if Xi didn't man-splain some things to the whippersnapper. Wouldn't be a bit surprised, as my father used to say. Today the Orange Loon tweeted that the "word" that he heard was that the Chinese-DPRK "Border," like wife's vajeen, had become "porous"and "more has been filtering in" from Red Chinese Yellow Hordes. "China must continue" to have "strong & tight" vajeen border. "I" want vajeen "porous" "but only after signing!" Vajeen Free Use nukes agreement. Me and Kim. First me and Kim sign then Red Chinese Hordes may use Kim's "porous" border to fienish yellow brain delight till it hang like wizard sleeve and China nuts ache and Kim leak with overflow filter. It was a tweet by Trump pregnant with meaning. Or innuendo. It distracted me.

Having been told by a tiny few people (including some real Chinese) that he understands a tiny few things about China, about its soul, the undersigned makes bold to share with a tiny few others his "thoughts" on this chroma study.

The soul, the animating principle, of China is survival.

Chinese fear encirclement as Donald Trump fears being scammed.

China has stuck by and propped up the DPRK dictatorship of racist dwarfs for nigh 70 years because of that soul and that fear.

China only lost 1,000,000 men fighting the U.S. in the Korean War. It was worth it to them.

Chinese, including the Communist leadership, are a highly intelligent people in a super-computing sense.Their intelligence is close and dense. They crunch. They study matters very intensely, they memorize.

Chinese knowledge is insular. Limited to China and what they must learn from "The Foreigner" for China to survive.

Chinese are short of intuition because of their insularity.

They are intelligent enough to know when they don't know.

Chinese leadership is cautious.

Chinese intelligence is neither creative nor curious. They don't invent, they copy. They don't explore, they stay home.

They are indirect, not direct.

China is ~94% ethnic Han. They are far--far, far, far--the most racially/ethnically homogenuous of the  world's major nations.

Chinese are racist.

Chimese are not happy.

You will never be Chinese. Chinese do not want you or your land. They have enough of both. They will never invade you.

Chinese are not religious.

Chinese leadership is pragmatic. They will do only what is in China's interests.

Chinese have made a close study of Donald Trump and have consulted with others about Trump because they are cautious in making judgments of foreigners. They have concluded that Trump is an interesting, dangerous moron who can be scammed. They have shared their conclusions with Kim Jong-un.

China has use for the DPRK. DPRK leadership is like their leadership. The DPRK keeps China from being encircled to the east. China does not want to see the DPRK "totally destroyed." Neither does China wish to have a Western-like, South Korea-ish DPRK. That would be giving in to encirclement.

Chinese leadership is of two minds about the U.S. presence in southeast Asia. In one part of their fiendish yellow brains they see danger of encirclement. In another part they do not see danger from the U.S. presence. They do not believe that the U.S. is trying to encircle them militarily. Mao even told Kissinger "You take it," referring to Taiwan.

In the no-danger part of their brain Chinese have use of the U.S. in its presence in Korea: it is the DPRK's raison d'etre. No U.S. in Korea, no DPRK. No DPRK~encirclement of China. In this version of wei chi it is the DPRK and the U.S. who are encircled. The former is totally dependent on China and the U.S. has troops, 30,000 of them, in South Korea pinned down from the north by the DPRK and to the west by China with their backs to the sea. In any new Korean war 30,000 U.S. men and women and millions of South Koreans would be killed. Ultimately in any such war the DPRK would be totally destroyed and the wei chi board flipped. China would then be encircled. So, China does not want a full scale war. But, they like the possibility. China will act in its interests and its alone and China loses the game if the DPRK is totally destroyed or if the DPRK becomes McDPRK with porous, infiltrated wizard sleeve border. In either case China would lose its buffer against encirclement. China went along with every recent sanction, every recent U.N. resolution against the DPRK proposed by Trump because they believed that the dangerous moron would totally destroy the DPRK. Xi Jinping convinced Kim Jong-un that Trump would totally destroy the DPRK. Kim stopped his nuclear tests and his missile flights. China did not want the DPRK to have a nuclear capability, the DPRK got one anyway, Kim began threatening the U.S. and China had to step in.

However, China is not down with the Kim-Moon hand-holding. They do not want a unified Korea because that would mean a South Korea and a McDPRK. They do not want a porous border, they do not want the DPRK to be "VERY successful" or to get rich. So, China is of two minds about the Trump-Kim summit. They want the DPRK to be denuclearized but do not want the DPRK to be rewarded by the U.S. for it. China is thus tacking back, "filtering in" food, materiel, and supplies, demonstrating Chinese support, control, easing the pressure on Kim, rewarding Kim, preempting Trump. Kim is taking notes. Both Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un want Kim Jong-un and the DPRK to survive and ahead of the summit they have gotten the moron Trump to go along: Libya and Qaddafi will not be the model. That preserves the DPRK qua DPRK. The summit will go ahead. Kim will sign a very strong denuclearization agreement, Trump will trumpet "Korean War Over!," collect a Nobel, Kim will refuse to attend or to accept, and Kim will begin cheating, violating the agreement just enough so that the U.S. restores its own sanctions but not enough to court total destruction. China will not go along with the new sanctions, will keep filtering in supplies and U.S. troops will remain in Korea and remain encircled.

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's amore." Ah, Venice.

No. It's Tianjin, China.

Zhengzhou.

Huizhou.


"There does not seem to me to be any core of "Chinese-ness" that Chinese can fall back on in their bewilderment, no "soul" that they can take comfort in, to which they can return and say, "Whatever we are not, we are this."
...
"China today seems to me like a Potemkin village, a stage set only as deep as its facade. I have walked through the door of that stage set; there is no doubt in my mind of that. I have gone deeper into China than appearances. But in going through that door I can't find my way about. It seems I have stepped into thin air." http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2010/11/there-is-great-pain-in-china.html

"China today is not real. That movie is not real. The Beijing Olympics were not real. Their prosperity is not real." http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/search?q=china+is+not+real

There is a new book, "Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China.  The author is Bianca Bosker.

Protests in Hong Kong.

So, do you think these protests are going to work? Bring real democracy to Hong Kong?...

...Anybody?
Anybody at all.

"As if," right? The PRC will never allow that to happen.

Slightly different question: Do you think the protesters think they will bring democracy to Hong Kong? Ahh...kids, young people, who knows what they think. No, I don't think they think that. They know, better than Chinese on the mainland know believe it or not, what happened in Tienanmen Square on June 4, 1989. They hold candlelight vigils every year. T'AIN'T NO CANDLELIGHT VIGILS IN TIENANMEN SQUARE.

When I first read about this I immediately thought "Another centralized protest; those things never work." Which really is not true; they worked in blessed Tahrir Square in Cairo. They worked in the maidan in Kiev, during the American Civil Rights movement; Gandhi made them work in India against the Brits. Centralized, big, telegenic, photogenic protests can work--if the guys with the tear gas and the batons and the guns let them work. There's this great scene in the movie Gandhi where Mohammad Karzai, sorry, Ben Kingsley is called in for a talk with some exasperated officials of British imperialism, you can picture them in their uniforms and mustaches and their blubbery proper English diction, and they want to know what this little half-naked man wants!, Gandhi of course says independence and one of the uniforms and mustaches says all blubbery: "You do not expect us just to walk out of India, do you?" "Yes," replies Kingsley. "In the end you will just walk out because 350,000 British cannot control 300,000,000 Indians." (Whatever the numbers were.)

Gandhi and the Indians had two things going for them: One, the Indians were not concentrated in some goddamned square in New Delhi or someplace, they were the country. Two, the Indians had going for them that their imperialist rulers were British! The Brits were not going to start slaughtering half-naked Indians until the rest of the 300,000,000 obeyed them. That just would not be cricket. So yeah, the Brits "just walked out."

Hong Kongers had British rulers too. And the Brits just walked out there too. The oppressors have to cooperate with the oppressed for protests to work. When the oppressors don't cooperate then centralized, big, telegenic, photogenic protests work against the oppressed. There is in all protests a tremendous disparity in firepower. The oppressors have the tear gas and batons and guns and shields and helmets and body armor and the oppressed have sticks and rocks and bottles, at most. The oppressed protesters all corral themselves into some goddamned square just waiting to be oppressed. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Now Hong Kongers know this, those Occupy kids and young people know this, they know they are not going to succeed, they know they're going to get arrested, injured, some may get killed. So the question then becomes, "Why are you doing this?" Protests seem to be just universal, even under these hopeless, and known hopeless conditions. "I have to do something," said one Hong Kong taxi driver. Right? We all have felt that way before! "If rape is inevitable, just lay back and enjoy it" (An American basketball couch actually said that.), HELL NO! We're going to fight until the last dog dies! I get that. I really get that. (I have a problem with authority.) Blow off a little steam. "You don't expect us to just walk out, do you? If you're not walking out, we're not walking out!"

But, notice: Then the protests are not really real. You're blowing off steam, you know you have no chance of success; the protests are symbolic.  Rather than "really real," another way of putting it is that under these circumstances protests are real in the additional sense as symbols. Put it this way: If the protesters really want democracy they wouldn't be protesting they would be rebelling. If the Hong Kong protesters really want the "mainland" Chinese "to just walk out" they need look only to China's "restive" Muslim Uyghurs for the most efficacious means.

Symbolism is a big thing with human beings, it is a bigger thing among Chinese human beings than some others. Nothing is on the surface in China; everything has got some other meaning, some other "reality." There are protests every single goddamned day somewhere in China. To some all these protests signify a societal "bubbling cauldron." Rebellion is just beneath the surface and Beijing has to keep the lid on the cauldron or take the cauldron off the fire or do whatever you do with bubbling cauldrons. I, for what this is worth, do not see bubbling cauldrons in China (except in the "restive" west.). I see symbolic blowing off of steam. I have three images in mind whenever I think about this. Two images are from the Cultural Revolution period. Some of those "struggled" walked voluntarily to their struggle sessions. Bian Zhongyun did. There was also a guy, such a vivid image from Mao's Last Revolution, whose struggle session was set for, let's say 3 pm today. At 2:30 pm the guy walks out of his house, locks the door, walks to the stadium. Tries to enter the stadium:

 "Who are you! What are you doing here!" (Red Guards).
"I'm Harris Binbin."
"Yeah, what of it Harris Binbin, what do you want?"
"Are you not having a struggle session today?" 
"Yes! What of it!" 
"I am the man you are struggling today." 

Only in China.

The third image, from just a couple of years ago, is of a poor woman who was being evicted from her apartment building which was being torn down for another apartment building probably. There are actually photographs of this. She is standing alone in a dusty field abutting her apartment building facing a bunch of People's Liberation Housing Evictors armed with batons, dressed in riot gear, helmets, etc. It is the most hopeless situation imaginable. But she won't move. And in the next photograph the PLHE charge her and send her flying like tumbleweed, the dust kicking up around her.

In all three instances there was real violence. In the CR instances it was the victims who cooperated with their victimizers. The violence of the CR was real, 3,000,000 killed, but the victimizers were not street criminals, they had not been violent before, would not be violent again in their lives, they were "good girls" in the case of Bian's victimizers, they had had no previous run-ins with the victims, there was no "history" there, the victims were "good communists" as Bian and Liu Shaoqi had been, and in this sense the violence was not real, it was symbolic; during the Cultural Revolution the victimizers acted symbolically, their violence was directed at the victims but for Mao Zedong. Beijing was too civilized, Mao said. He wanted "chaos," permanent revolution; wanted students to know revolutionary ardor, wanted them to rebel. "To rebel is justified!" "Bombard the Headquarters!" There is a sense in China, throughout its history, of violence that is both "real-real" and symbolically real. Symbols are important, especially in China.

I look at Chinese history, I look at the country today, I look at the protests in Hong Kong and the only "real" bubbling cauldron I see is in the "restive" west. But, maybe I'm wrong. Love those protesters, though. :)

Was it not real?

That article on Trump has had me spooked all day. What if he's not real?

About an hour ago I googled something like "is this real?" Just to see what popped up:

Brexit was fueled by irrational xenophobia, not real economic grievances-Vox

Yeah, that's another one.

The “struggle” is not real: From tiny houses to my own lunch, poverty chic commodifies working-class life-Salon

I don't know what poverty chic is but I don't think the American working class struggles. I mean compared to what?  India? China? Africa? Past American generations? No.

Dear Teenagers: Porn Sex Is Not ‘Real Sex’

Boy, that is a good one. And not just about teenagers! I have heard that more guys, maybe women too, I don't fucking know, have watched so much porn they expect three positions, anal, finish with a facial on a normal, like, date.

Is it real?-YouTube.
"Have you ever come across a viral video and you can't tell if it's real or fake?"

The Golden State Warriors used virtual reality to woo Kevin Durant-TechCrunch

Oh fuck them.


"Reality" TV shows are another one-back to Trump again. To state the obvious, we, me included, live increasingly in a virtual real universe. I'm sure most of you have heard of "Second Life," no? And, what I'm not so sure is obvious, some of us mistake the virtual for the real. Maybe like Trump. Like those porn star imitators. The Second Lifers. And, are not sure what is virtual and what real. The Civil War veterans who asked themselves the title question. Or, and here the first two become one, we prefer our second, virtual, life to our real life; we spend so much time in our virtual world that it becomes our real life.  Some people have lost their families over Second Life.

Is somebody really running for president of the United States who really doesn't want to be president?

Who maybe wishes it hadn't gotten this far? MEANING: who has gotten so many more real votes from real people that he has about a one-in-four chance of becoming president?

Who has never been elected dog catcher before?

Who may, MAY, be thinking of dropping out?-"Bored billionaire Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) decides to entertain himself by stealing a Monet from the Metropolitan Museum of Art."-If so, are those votes real? Like really-real. If you don't have the intent to become president-or to steal a painting-can you give the votes back or return the painting and the whole thing never really happened? (No, with regard to theft.)

What if Trump voters were in on the scheme? What if they knew, not really knew, but knew-knew, it
was all a reality show by Trump and he never intended, and didn't want, to be president, and they
went along with it and voted for him. Would they be participants in a reality TV spoof or a real
presidential election? Would their votes count then? (Yes.)

What if they were DUPED? What if, this sounds unreal, they voted for Trump really thinking he'd make a great president? When everybody else, including TRUMP, knew he was unqualified? Would their votes count if they were duped? Yes. Would Trump be guilty of some crime, knowingly and
falsely impersonating a presidential candidate say, if he got their votes AND BECAME PRESIDENT
under false pretenses? No. Sucks to be stupid.

"After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy."

Personal record for Trump, listening for 10 minutes. That's how long it took China's Xi to convince America's Jeeh! that "it's not what you think," China's power over North Korea.

This 38North is a good site for DPRK-specific news and you know how much I want to transform Public Occurrences into an "all North Korea, all the time" site. It's not so easy

The article that the link takes you to offers informed suggestion on Chinese thought and action, and that I am always interested in, for real. The knowledgeable 38North writer confirms what this idiot blogger thought, and wrote, in the previous post: that there really has been a change in Chinese tone. Now, why? Peter 38 North offers three suggestions:

1. If there were war, there goes the neighborhood: nuclear fallout, refugees, yada yada, and China lives in that 'hood.
     A. I'm going to make this a separate sub-suggestion because in my opinion it deserves it but respect Peter's enumeration: China is not down with a reunified Korean peninsula because it will be unified as an American peninsula and combined with Japan and Taiwan to become a platform for the U.S. to confront China. China would rather go halfsies with us even if that means they get the racist dwarf half. That sounds stupid but it is true and Peter thus concludes his first suggestion. Uncle Ben wishes to add that Chinese thinking here taps into an ancient Chinese anxiety: the fear of encirclement. The soul of China, the animating principle of their thought and behavior, is survival. Encirclement makes them fear for their survival. Yes, that is stupid, too, I just wanted to add that level of Chinese stupidity to Peter's. Next!

2. China is more batshit now than in previous Korean crises because they really do think the DPRK and the U.S. could rumble with nukes this time. I also thought that and wrote it in the previous post. Peter suggests however that the Chinese fear is not that those crazy DPRK-niks bird pump and set off a glow in the dark peninsula but that the Americans are going to! China really believes, really most sincerely believes, that there has been a consensus in America, not just in the current illegitimate, mutant, pseudo official America, but in Official America, and for some years, that the DPRK was NOT going to be allowed to develop ICBM-tipped nukes which could make Seattle and L.A. glow in the dark and that therefore the real danger now is in a preemptive American nuclear strike regardless of whether the DPRK does another underground nuclear test or test fires another missile. You can debate that all you want, I'm not going there again, the De Facto's redebated this last Friday, General McMaster was clear on Sunday but who knows what Trump told Xi in Florida, Pence said today "the sword is at the ready," the point is, this is what the Chinese think, suggests Peter 38 North.

3. China needs a "constructive" relationship with the U.S.

Okay, so on that last one, I don't know. That's the shortest paragraph of Peter's suggestions. Did they not want a constructive relationship with the U.S. in the past? When would that have been? Do they REALLY want a constructive relationship now? What does that mean specifically? If Xi convinced Trump in 10 minutes, 600 seconds you know, that Chinese "power" over the DPRK "is not what you think," that "it's not easy" for China to influence the DPRK, then that sounds like a pretty damn constructive relationship Xi constructed, Trump is satisfied, and the Chinese need do no more.

What it sounds like to me.

China.

Nothing else to do so I started reading Paul Krugman columns on Greece, didn't understand them, and then saw a column, a blog post I guess or the shortest column in history, on China which linked to an earlier post. The title was:

"China's Ponzi Bicycle Is Running Into a Brick Wall."-July 19, 2013.

Don't know what a Ponzi bicycle is but know what a Ponzi scheme is so that got my interest. That's vaguely what I had in mind when I wrote about China's mag-lev trains to nowhere recently. The concern of experts that I repeated is that China's 39 years of uninterrupted economic expansion, literally a first in human history, might not be, in some sense real. Let's see what Paulie wrote two years ago.

[I]n a way, China’s low-consumption high-investment economy was a kind of Ponzi scheme. Chinese businesses were investing furiously, not to build capacity to serve consumers, who weren’t buying much, but to serve buyers of investment goods — in effect, investing to take advantage of future investment, adding even more capacity. Would there ever be final buyers for what all this capacity could produce? Unclear. So, a kind of Ponzi scheme.

That is very much like what I had in mind. 

Also, my worries are that China doesn’t know how to slow down — that it’s a bicycle economy that falls over if it stops moving forward.

Ah, understand "Ponzi bicycle" now which led me to a related thought which I shall just touch on here, en passant. Knowing next to nothing about economics it has struck me nonetheless that capitalism itself is "bicycle economics." I have used the legend of the shark rather than a bicycle as metaphor: capitalist economies must continuously expand, the shark must constantly move forward, to aereate its gills, or both die. I have written this. Is there not some truth in that? Back to China. I read recently that the Center played an aggressive role in the current stock market situation. I assume without knowing for sure that it plays an aggressive role in China's economy generally. In this instance the government encouraged Chinese to buy particular stocks. Knowing something about the Chinese people--"The Chinese people have a slavish mentality."--this encouragement would have had the effect more of an exhortation, little short of a command. The Chinese people bought the stocks that the government "suggested" they buy and the stock market took a Great Leap Forward. Enter, "bubble" and shortly thereafter, bust. Then the Center decided to partially reinflate the bubble, or the bicycle tire, by suspending trading in the stocks that a few months before it was exhorting the people to buy! It started poring money into the stock market, buying itself the stock of those now partially deflated, once over-inflated companies. These strike me as particularly intrusive moves by a government into a "free" market, no? Is a market subject to such intrusion a free market? What are the real values of companies whose stock is manipulated so? Back to Paulie:

The blog post links to a Krugman column, not another blog post, from the same day, "Hitting China's Wall." Okay, let's see what Paulie-the-columnist said in 2013. 

All economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most. 

Yep. Oh lord. "Waiter! Another double scotch, please."

Add a secretive government, a controlled press, and the sheer size of the country, and it’s harder to figure out what’s really happening in China than it is in any other major economy. 

When investors get a lack transparency they get "concerns;" these concerns can slide easily into panic. "Sheer size of the country:" I have a question. Could it be, is an alternative reasonable explanation for the unique four decades of uninterrupted economic growth, that in some meaningful sense the "laws" of economics do not apply to China because of the "sheer size of the country," its remarkable homogeneity, the slavish mentality of the people, etc., etc. etc.? A China has never before in history just literally decided overnight, "Hi! We're capitalists now, we're going to play, K?" They did things practically overnight that other countries are thinking about but have never gotten beyond thinking about. "Google, you piss us off, be gone." Enter, Baidu. China can successfully take on Google, did successfully take on Google, they did what Brazil can only dream of doing, even the EU
is only now cautiously creating a degree of separation. There are 1.357 billion Chinese. The world population is 7 billion. 19% of the world's population is Chinese. They have a humongous land mass, resources out the ass, a near monopoly on some critically needed rare metals. If Chinese inhabited their own planet exclusively, without Foreigners, could they not do what they have done the last 40 years with "socialism with Chinese characteristics?" Size matters. Rules do not apply in one size fits all manner to big things and little things. Individuals and companies must balance their budgets. Governments can deficit spend. Greece could not get away with this lack of transparency and market manipulation but China is not Greece. The most eminent economists that America has, guys like Larry Summers, like Krugman, have been predicting "The Coming Chinese Collapse" for a lot of the last forty years. It has not happened. The expansion goes on and on. Is there maybe some "Chinese exceptionalism" that they haven't taken proper account of? No? Alright, then.

Yet the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

You didn't expect Krugman to write something un-dreary, did you? This was written two years ago and certainly the two years since have not visited "big trouble" on China, have they? I mean, the economy has continued to expand--I know that much.--it has expanded not as much as in some (most?) years previous but wasn't it 7% last year? If so, America would kill for 7% growth. 

Start with the data, unreliable as they may be. What immediately jumps out at you when you compare China with almost any other economy, aside from its rapid growth, is the lopsided balance between consumption and investment.

See! The empty mag-lev trains. Isn't this similar to the "fundamental" problem that finally consumed the Japanese economy? Damn Japanese saved and saved and saved, which is usually a good thing!, Japanese were held up to Americans as exemplars, money saved is invested by banks, but like everything in economics, there's always an "on the other hand." On the other hand, if all you do is save and never buy, never consume, never ride those mag-lev trains, ride your bicycle instead, the cycle of economic growth ends. The trains run rider-less and stores are stocked with wonderful toys which nobody buys. Currency is after all an abstract measure of true value; stocks of currency are only as good as what they buy, not what they could buy, what they actually buy. A people who save too much and spend too little are similar to a people who have no money to buy anything! They're a poor people.

All successful economies devote part of their current income to investment rather than consumption, so as to expand their future ability to consume.

Toldja! The cycle has to keep on cycling, it can't end with investment. Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine.

China, however, seems to invest only to expand its future ability to invest even more. America, admittedly on the high side, devotes 70 percent of its gross domestic product to consumption; for China, the number is only half that high, while almost half of G.D.P. is invested.

Alright, well, whatever, I certainly don't know if Chinese should be more like Americans. Presumably there's some "optimum" percentage between 35% and 70% that we all should be shooting for. What is that optimum percentage, Krugman? Wait...Aren't those percentages supposed to add up to 100? America: 70% to consumption; that means 30% to investment, no? China: "half that high" to consumption, so 35%, and "almost half of G.D.P.," 50%, to investment--That's only 85%, Paulie.

How is that even possible?

See, when you get a Nobel economics laureate like Krugman asking "How is that even possible?", that is worse than an idiot blogger asking the same question, that is officially, or "quasi-officially," a concern, on a slippery slope to panic.

What keeps consumption so low, and how have the Chinese been able to invest so much without (until now) running into sharply diminishing returns? The answers are the subject of intense controversy.

He then says something about too many peasants, "surplus labor," but I'm getting tired now. 

[T]he main thing holding down Chinese consumption seems to be that Chinese families never see much of the income being generated by the country’s economic growth. Some of that income flows to a politically connected elite; but much of it simply stays bottled up in businesses, many of them state-owned enterprises.

It’s all very peculiar by our standards, but it worked for several decades. Now, however, China has hit the...point... — to put it crudely, it’s running out of surplus peasants.

Too few peasants, my bad. Toldja I was getting tired.

Investment is now running into sharply diminishing returns and is going to drop drastically no matter what the government does; consumer spending must rise dramatically to take its place.

...

How big a deal is this for the rest of us?

...

Just the other day we were afraid of the Chinese. Now we’re afraid for them. But our situation has not improved.

No, of course not! The situation never improves for Krugman. That's how the column ends.

Krugman, on Greece: Could Greece mint a special $1 trillion drachma or Euro and drop it in the Eurozone tiller and pay off all its debts like you half-seriously suggested a couple of years ago Obama do in minting a $1 trillion coin to pay off our debts? Big things can do things little things can't.

The Soul of China

                                                                 
Henry Kissinger's new book, certainly his last, is On China.  There is professional support there for certain amateur assertions (based on other professionals) made here on the fundamentals to China's soul: the absence of influenceof Western-style religion; the importance of Confucianism; the lack of Western-style imperialism; the related, not identical, lack of exploration; centralism of authority. I address this last first.

In Law and Modern Society Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger contrasted the fractured power structure that developed out of feudal Europe with that in China. Key to the emergence of the rule of law in Europe was the development of Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, as a power locus. This came as the Roman Catholic Church was under assault from Protestant reformers. China never had anything like a Roman Catholic Church or the bourgeoisie as power loci.

Dr. Kissinger notes the importance of geography too. Europe was fractured geographically, which contributed mightily to the development of separate languages, ethnicities, and nation-states, and hence power centers. China was not as fractured geographically. The Gobi Desert in the northwest, the Himalayas in the southwest, the seas to the east and southeast, these were natural geographic boundaries to the Chinese empire. The sheer expanse of this land area--larger than all of Europe combined--and its variety of terrain and climate provided support, facts on the ground, to the idea that China was all that mattered, very nearly all there was, a self-contained, self-sustaining civilization that was the Middle Kingdom in the universe with an emperor who ruled with nothing less than a Mandate of Heaven. Why explore?

China today is 95% ethnic Han, a homogeneity incomprehensible to an American. It's written language, so important that the meaning of "writing" in Chinese is "when civilization began" has changed so little, Dr. Kissinger points out, that millennia-old classics, are eminently readable today. Why change?

Geography, ethnicity, language: it's hard to think of any other factors as fundamental to the creation of a distinctive people, and they did combine to produce a distinctive people in Chinese.

Geography made China hard to invade and made China wealthy. China was the wealthiest, most advanced civilization on earth prior to the Industrial Revolution in the West. That made it tempting to invade. And so the invaders came. Professor John Head relates a metaphor used by a colleague, of China as a giant with his back to the northwest, inward-looking, protective, defensive, fearful. Time and again in Chinese history the invaders came on horseback from the northwest.

Unity against the threat, real or imagined, of invasion was viewed by Chinese as key to survival and it is survival that I argue is the soul of China. The primordial survival "instinct," more pronounced (and less rational) in my view in the soul of China than in the souls of some other peoples produced the desideratum of unity which produced the incredible centralism of Chinese society throughout history and down to the present day. Kissinger argues that Confucius' Analects worked as both religion and Constitution for China. However that may be, Confucius' message to Chinese was "know your place." The individual was a cog, a "rustless screw,"  who legitimized the Emperor and the Mandate of Heaven, rather than civilization legitimizing the individual.

Unity's near opposite, chaos, is the dirtiest word in Chinese. Chinese had everything they wanted in China. There was no need to explore, no need to conquer. China was not nearly as imperial as were so many Western peoples. If it could remain unified it could survive and since chaos was the great horror China would sow chaos among her enemies. Kissinger points to the the maxim, barbarians fighting barbarians is good for China. The Chinese theory of war is indirect, defensive; the West's direct and offensive. When it failed on the battlefield, it won in the peace. China absorbed the conquerors, converting them to the use of the difficult Chinese language and putting the vast imperial bureaucracy at the new ruler's disposal. China survived.

Unity, grounded in survival, brooked no competing power loci. Confucianism was certainly not a religion in that sense and, as Unger and Head both wrote, so would have been a brokering rule of law. China is, in Kissinger's wording, a "singularity," more unified geographically, ethnically, linguistically, and in its power structure, than other civilizations, "a civilization pretending to be a nation-state," in his quoting of Professor Lucian Pye. Why compromise?

With no competing power loci and with a Mandate of Heaven, the Chinese emperor never had to compromise with internal groups, not with a Church, not with a burgeoning middle class, not with an aristocratic Second Estate, not with the rule of law. Compromise is the essence of democracy.

Image:  Zhongnanhai, "The Center."

"It was not a mistake, as some have argued, to expand NATO and the EU into Eastern Europe. It was a significant strategic advance for democracy and free market capitalism."
-Nicholas Burns, Boston Globe.

Mr. Burns puts it more directly than others have. Thomas L. Friedman wrote that "we" should get all that we can out of the genocide that was then just beginning in Egypt. "It" is the pursuit of happiness. That is the soul of America, that is Nicholas Burns' and Thomas L. Friedman's soul.

It is apodictic that democracy and free market capitalism are synergistic. The "human right" that Official America most consistently advances is democracy. Democracy is good. In promoting democracy in other countries Official America promotes the human rights of other peoples. One level deeper, American support for democracy abroad supports government by popular consent. Government of, by and for is good.

America, official and unofficial, has had chance to think about the applicability of "democracy is good." Sometimes the bird hits the air pump with democracy. Democracy produced Hitler; Democracy produced Mohammad Morsi. Democracy resulted in genocide in the first; it resulted, by one degree of separation, in genocide in the second. Democracy produced Robert Mugabe, Salvador Allende, Vladimir Putin. Democracy is not always good, not even for the human rights of the voting democrats.

In all of the instances above, maybe with the exception of Putin, America thinks "real" democracy was "high-jacked." And it was. More or less. Maybe with the exception of Putin, again. There was the form of democracy, i.e. there were elections, but then the victors hollowed the content, protection of minority rights for instance, being "inclusive." Protection of minority rights and having an inclusive government do seem to be part of the content of democracy, of government of, by and for. Those and more, are how Official America defines the content of democracy in any event, whether they are included in any "official" definition of democracy.

In all those instances, however, America does not go the one level deeper, does not go the one level deeper as it is reflected in American policy, that is. That is, however short of "real" democracy America thinks the governments are in those instances, still those governments are (or were) of, by and for the people. To take the most extreme example, Hitler was a terrible, terrible dictator, of course. However, no one can argue that he was not supported by at least a plurality of the German people. And the same with Morsi, Mugabe, Allende and Putin.

America has thought of all this and has concluded that those instances are forgettable exceptions to the rule "democracy is good," which American foreign policy most consistently pursues. In other instances, for example China, where there was never the hint of democracy under Mao Zedong, but where also there was no doubt that Mao's dictatorship was supported by the Chinese people, that's another exception, America thinks. Policy's the same: democracy is good. Official America thinks democracy is a human right but there are these exceptional humans, not that democracy is not a human right, not that democracy isn't for all humans.

As a human right, democracy is emphasized by Official America because democracy is the hand maiden to free market capitalism. And here we come back again to Nicholas Burns. Mr. Burns is exceptional in making this link explicit. Official America likes it to be implicit, we like to emphasize the human right, democracy. But, Official America really does believe, knows, that democracy and fee market capitalism are joined at the hip. (The Chinese, man, they are really exceptional.) Mr. Burns joins them at the hip. But, Official America cannot even make the argument that free market capitalism is a human right. First, because it's not, like, human, right? Capitalism is a tool, a machine, it is not a human anything, it is a tool to make money. Second because, my God, how many different economic systems have their been that the peoples of the world have tried? That they still try. Third, and we'll leave it at third, the capitalist machine is pretty inhumane sometimes, right? It has not eradicated poverty, you have these immense asymmetric distributions of wealth, America itself has had to "tweak" the machine several times to: avoid depressions, provide a social "safety net," there's "free trade" and then there's "fair trade," etc. And etc. Capitalism is like the legend of the shark: So primitive, inhuman, so perfectly predatory that it must always advance in order to aerate its gills, gobbling up more and more as the only thing it knows how to do, or it will die. In capitalism, if a company is not growing it dies. Official America does not mention the shark, it does not mention capitalism if it can avoid it; when it can't avoid it Official America shows prospective buyers Big Macs and Four Wheel Drives and big houses and toys. Official America's argument, when it includes free market capitalism at all, is a sort of capitalistic "buy one, get one free."  Buy democracy, get capitalism. A lot of people are down with all that. Nicholas Burns is down with all that.

Some people are not down with all that.

Some people are not down with democracy and free market capitalism. Hitler was not down with capitalism. The German people were not. Nor the Japanese. Both of those peoples emphasized race or ethnicity over making money. Nor, of course, were the Soviet Russians. (But they're all gone now. We won.). The Chinese are down with capitalism, they're not down with democracy. Putin's Russia is pretty much down with capitalism, is down, more or less, with democracy but puts, at least recently, more emphasis on ethnicity through language. None of them are, or were, down with inclusiveness (Or maybe Putin wants to be too inclusive.), which is one of the components of democracy. America thinks. Putin's "intellectuals" reject inclusiveness, they reject "North Atlantic liberalism," they reject America. Putin's intellectuals see America and its form of democracy and its free market capitalism, and they see a shark. They see the expansion of NATO and the EU just as Nicholas Burns does, as a "significant strategic advance." By a shark. The expansion of NATO and the EU into eastern Europe was not a mistake. That's what Nicholas Burns thinks. 

For Real?

                                                         
I would like to discuss reality.

Actually, I don't want to discuss reality but I feel compelled to discuss reality in the way I feel compelled to discuss things. A couple of centuries ago Dr. Johnson didn't want to discuss reality either and when informed by Boswell that Bishop Berkeley had written something questioning the existence of reality kicked a large rock and proclaimed "I refute it thusly!"  I have always thought Dr. Johnson's a convincing refutation of Bishop Berkeley.

The world has changed in the last couple hundred years however and those who may be termed the intellectual descendants of Bishop Berkeley have descended to make arguments which I view as similar. Has reality changed?

This dreary exercise is compelled by (1) an article today by former National Security Advisor Richard Clarke in the Wall Street Journal (2) recent articles on U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (unfortunate name) and (3) some article I read that was cited to in Arts and Letters Daily a couple of months ago. The subject matter of these disquisitions is, in reality, within the personal life experiences of the undersigned. We examine each of these in turn.

Congressman Weiner sent naked pictures of his own self and his own gentiles to women of the female persuasion via internet technology which was not in existence when Dr. Johnson kicked the rock. The transmission of these images is characterized as an extramarital "affair" as none of the recipients was Congressman Weiner's wife.

No. Upon information, belief and personal experience I hold that a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for an extramarital affair is the use of the human sense of touch. That did not occur here, these "virtual" affairs were not affairs in reality. The rock is kicked. Boom. Done. Weiner.

Richard Clarke recounts the Chinese government's history of hacking into American computers, including the U.S. electrical grid and then writes:

"What would we do if we discovered that Chinese explosives had been laid throughout our national electrical system? The public would demand a government response."


Since I am an American I am necessarily included in Mr. Clarke's "we" and so I will answer his question: I would lay explosives in Zhongnanhai (easier). And they would go off.  That was our response to Islam's use of explosives on 9/11. That would be my response to Chinese explosives.

That is my answer to the question Mr. Clarke, what is your answer?  Mr. Clarke doesn't give an answer (to his own question) because it's not a real question. It is "real" explosives--like dynamite, nitroglycerin, jet fuel--Mr. Clarke is talking about, right?  No. That's not what Mr. Clarke is talking about:

"If, however, the explosive is a digital bomb that could do even more damage, our response is apparently muted--especially from our government."


A digital bomb. Mr. Clarke deliberately segues from "real" explosives to "virtual" explosives, whatever those are. Let me answer Mr. Clarke further.  Mr. Clarke, "real" people--the public and our governmental officials--distinguish between bombs that go "boom" (real) and whatever virtual explosives and "digital bombs" do because bombs that go boom, like the flying bombs on 9/11, kill "real" people and the public, our government and, like, the law, distinguish between acts that take life and those that do not.

Mr. Clarke never defines "digital bomb," never explains how it "could do even more damage," provides no evidence that when China "probed our electrical grid" it had "laid" digital bombs. Boom. Done. Clarke.

The Arts and Letters Daily link was to an article on "virtual friendships."  Now I can't find it but here is an article that looks similar (I have just skimmed it.) http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-friendship-and-the-new-narcissism. The gist of the article I read was that the various social media provide a beguiling intimacy that is no substitute for the real thing--sort of the flip side of Congressman Weiner's situation.  I think this is a better point.  That is, Congressman Weiner would never have gone into a male strip club and disrobed, but showing his weiner via text messages or the like gave the illusion of privacy. We all know that by now.  Some of us, like Congressman Weiner, still act.

A variation on this is that people who one interacts with on the internet may seem friendly but not be.  Again, this is not breaking news.  We have all read the stories of children getting lured, sometimes to their deaths, by other putative kids who turn out to be pedophiles.  The author of the article I read went further--(s)he argued that people who don't "really" meet cannot be considered to be friends, or in love.  I think I agree with the latter; I know I do not agree with the former.  I have been, and am, involved in email exchanges with lots of people.  On the China subject I have "really" met one.  The rest aren't friends?  No. How do I determine who I think of as a "friend" and who not?  Based on the quality and quantity of the--virtual--interaction.  Zhou Jineng from Red Art?  We've been emailing off and on (more off) for four years; he sent me Red Art. Never met him and probably never will. He's a friend for life! (Even though he referred to me, in Chinese, as an "honorable foreign devil.")  Another reader who I've emailed with some, Chris, to whom I dedicated a page a couple months ago, sent me a birthday greeting.  Meant a lot to me. He followed that up with a very touching email. A terrific friend. Really.

Boom. Done.

Why Trump? Why Sanders? Why Now?

There is an angry groaning. We do not see and we hear only indistinctly, only that there is an angry groaning coming from parts of America.(1)

There is a questioning, "Does America Still Work?" It is both a statement of doubt and a question for we cannot see clearly that America does not still work, we want to know if others can see clearly, we want them to tell us if America still works, and we see vaguely, we "sense," that America does not still work.

Why would we ask ourselves that question at all? One of the New York Times columnists wrote, trying to answer "Why Trump? Why Sanders? Why Now?" that, really, things are not that bad, in fact, they're pretty darn good, especially in America as compared to the rest of the world. He's right. We have long been out of the Great Recession, thanks to President Obama and the Republican congress...What else? Our standard of living is still very high...We're kinda sorta out of wars...

We're not a kinda-sorta people. We want to win wars, not get out of them; we don't want to get out of Great Recessions, we don't want Great Recessions. We don't want sorta Peace and sorta Prosperity, we want Peace and Prosperity. We want to be "Great Again!" That makes us Proud and we want to be proud of America; that makes us Love America and we want to love America.

We don't want a "Post-American World."

The memorized 30-second speech for which the dearly departed Chris Christie successfully skewered Marco Rubio, have you ever listened to it, or read it?

"He knows exactly what he's doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world. That's why he passed Obamacare, and the stimulus, and Dodd-Frank, and the deal with Iran, it is a systematic effort to change America."

There is truth there. Obama said repeatedly, "We are the only advanced nation in the world...":

1. That didn't have some form of universal health care;
2.That doesn't have meaningful handgun restrictions.

At least those two, and the truth in Rubio's memorized speech is that Obama has changed America with Obamacare to make it more like the rest of the world, especially "those Scandinavian countries," and if he had the untempered power would, in a heartbeat and with a pen stroke, make America more like the rest of the world in handgun control. 

In my opinion Obama has made America "a more perfect union" with Obamacare and it would be more perfect still with handgun control but notice Rubio's words, he doesn't say Obama has made America better or worse, Rubio says only that Obama has changed America to make it "more like the rest of the world." Rubio's point is not that America is better or worse off, it is changed.

Americans generally, and this is not just Republican candidates and primary voters, Americans across party and ideological lines, and the vast majority of us it seems to me, do not want to be like the rest of the world!

That is a primal feeling with Americans, it is deep in our souls. Every American except Native Americans and the slaves is an American because (s)he did not want to be like the rest of the world. We came here because we lived in the rest of the world and thought it SUCKED. 

"Except Native Americans and slaves:" I have often thought that part of the reason for the intransigence of Republicans to anything Barack Obama attempted to do was because of race. My God, they decided on the strategy of intransigence at a meeting held the night of Obama's first inauguration! First time that has ever happened. Coincidence that it happened on the evening of the first Black president's inauguration? No. 

Obama is not a descendant of slaves, his father was Kenyan-born and came to America freely, and left to go back to Kenya freely, but Obama self-identifies American Black and you cannot self-identify as American Black and not self-identify with the slave history of American Black people. 

Now, how might this be significant to our topic? Obama self-identifies with one of two groups of Americans who have been persecuted and discriminated against for the entire history of America, are  still discriminated against, and with the one group that were slaves. SLAVES. That is so painful. I tell you, sometimes I think of my Black friends and am amazed that they don't want to kill me and every other White person they know. I would totally understand! I would understand if they didn't Love America as White people do, but they do and that amazes me more.

"Love America:" 

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”-Rudolph Giuliani, February 18, 2015, speaking to a group of Republicans.

The overwhelming majority of Americans, including Obama's spokesman, castigated Giuliani for saying such a "horrible" thing, so painful, so untrue. I, and I remember at least one other person, a Black man, wrote that I could understand how it would be true, and would not think less of Obama as man or president if it were true. He grew up differently, way differently, than most of us did. Not only Black African father, White mother, but a Muslim father, who Obama identified with, for whom he has a special fondness, to whom he dedicated his book, not his White, American, Kansan mother, and Obama lived from ages six to ten in another part of the world, Indonesia. First through fourth grade he attended school in Indonesia; formative years, first through fourth grade, and Obama has a special fondness for Indonesia. As I hope he would.

But, you see, having a special fondness for another country calls into question in some people's minds, including mine, whether the person has another Love and most Americans, not including me, want America to be Loved, firstly, and then to be loved exclusively, "exceptionally." Some "real" American Black people do not like to be labeled "African American;" there is nothing African about them, they are Black. Period there. Obama has feet in different worlds: America, and a unique part of America, Hawaii; Africa, Kenya; the Muslim world, and in Indonesia, 87% Muslim. And Obama does not have the feelings that almost all other Americans have, of  "The old country, good riddance!" No. He has fond memories of Indonesia, has fond feelings for his Muslim Kenyan father, seems to have a special place in his heart for Africa, where did he give his first foreign speech as
president? Egypt. All, "as I hope he would and am glad he does." But, I'm not everybody.

It is in this "multiple fondess-es," this multi-cultural sense that I think race plays a special role in Republican attitudes toward Obama, it is not that he is American Black, they liked Ben Carson for awhile, liked Alan Keyes for awhile, liked Herman Cain a little, because they were "real" American Black, did not have weird foreign names, had "real" American names! just like "Rudolph Giuliani." For instance. That is, I think, what Giuliani was getting at when he said he didn't think Obama loved America, didn't love "you," who is he talking to? White Republicans. It is, I think, what Marco Rubio is getting at in his memorized 25-second speech, that, for good or bad  Rubio doesn't say (in those 25 seconds), Obama has attempted to "change" America "to make America more like the rest of the world," a world that Obama does not not love and which Rubio, most Republicans and most Americans, do not love. 

So, "Why Trump?" Donald Trump is sui generis. Perhaps never has American politics seen a candidate like him, which is not to say that there are not some parallels. Trump's support is, and has been this entire young political season, limited to about a one-third segment of the Republican Party. He is the most unpopular Republican candidate among all registered Republicans and is viewed negatively by huge majorities of Independents and Democrats. Yet he also leads the Republican race.

Trump leads the Republican race with about one-third support for the same structural reason Adolph Hitler was able to position himself as Fuhrer of Germany with approximately the same level of support among voters: divided opposition.

Trump has approximately one-third support because of his personality, his unique political style and his policy proposals. Trump has an out-sized personality, larger than life, and has had this image in America for decades. It appeals to some because when they think of a leader they want the man to look and sound like a leader. Trump is a commanding presence who speaks in a commanding style, perfect for some for a commander-in-chief.

Trump insults fellow Republicans in the most personal terms, which accounts for his unpopularity among most Republicans, but for about one-third, is reinforcement of his commanding presence. A commander gives orders, he doesn't ask; a commander says "You're Fired!", he does not brook dissent; a commander does not ask for support, he demands it. Trump has what I have called a sixth sense for identifying and exploiting an opponent's weaknesses. I heard a Washington Post reporter this week describe the same ability as that of a "heat-seeking missile."

Trump's policy proposals are sometimes vague ("I'll get a better deal with China, Iran;" "I'll bring the businesses that left New Hampshire for Mexico back again."), sometimes outlandish (Build a wall, "Bomb the shit out of ISIS."), sometimes nuanced and specific ("Stop Muslim immigration until we figure out what is going on."), all have in common "Do," and all are consistent with his strongman persona. "If Donald Trump says he's going to do something, he's going to do it!" Forget about how, he's going to do it. Forget about the Constitution, separation of powers, getting legislation passed, forget all that stuff. One-third of Republicans want the things Trump proposes and wants them DONE NOW.

Sprinkle in some latent fascism in the American electorate, add some residual insanity from the Declaration of Independence and voila!

Why Now?:" because it's after eight years of Obama, that's why! That was David Axelrod's epiphany at least.

"Why Sanders?" Why a 74 year-old Jewish socialist? I don't think Sanders' popularity has the same deep-rootedness as does Trump's, and I don't think Trump's is as broad as many think, I think it is capped at 30%-40% of Republicans, but I think it is more deeply rooted in the American soul than Sanders'. Sanders' showing in New Hampshire will not be replicated, part of the reason for that is neighboring Vermont, but no, not all of it. Sanders is appealing to young people, lefties have since the '60's, but young people have never gone to a socialist in these numbers. Is it Clinton or Hillary fatigue?

I think a large part is Hillary (Clinton) fatigue. Look, she was doing well in the public's eye as Secretary of State, was stepping out of Bill's dark shadow, was getting props as a good soldier who buckled down and did the best job she could and then...Benghazi. Her judgment pre- and post- was dead wrong. Then she left office and...email-gate. For me, that was it; it was same-old, same-old, she hadn't changed from "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary. Still paranoid after all these years.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of a Democratic voter, not a teenager, but someone in his or her 30's and older, someone who remembers Benghazi and "vast right-wing conspiracy" and for whom email-gate resonated like a cracked bell. If you are bothered by those things what is your only option when you step into the voting booth? The Democrats' problem is the opposite of the Republicans' crisis. The anti-Trump vote is split four ways. The Democratic ABC (Anybody But Clinton) vote has one channel out, a 74 year old Jewish socialist.

I think all of the above is a lot of it, most of it, but let us also give Democratic voters a little more credit. Young people, more so older voters, but some of all voters are asking themselves the question in the opening sentence of this post, "Does America Still Work?" It would be completely understandable if Sanders supporters have the same vague uneasiness gnawing at them, that things just don't feel as right as the Times columnist pointed out they were, they don't understand why the Great Recession happened, are not much more impressed than others that Obama got us out of it, the young people probably don't have as great a sense as others that a Great Recession isn't supposed to happen to a Great America, but are not that impressed that we're out of it, know that whatever the causes of the Great Recession, "They," some ill-defined but more keenly felt They, were responsible, and for getting us out of it too, the same people, the Bushs, the Obamas, Wall Street, Bernie Madoff, Icelanders and their volcanoes, all those guys; Democratics are feeling fragile, America feels a bit fragile to them, their futures seems fragile, their safety seems fragile, like their iPhones, broken easily, repaired not so easily, and damned expensive. Bernie Sanders was not one of them, those They's, even though he was, Hillary Clinton definitely was a They and these voters also, like the Trumpets, don't want more Theys!  It's a theory.

1. "...if one could not see the revolution one could hear it in the evenings, carried across the Peking sky. The sound was...angry...shrill...often accompanied by the beating of drums...You could not escape from the roar...it was like the moaning of a gigantic animal crouching over the city...I was utterly bewildered." Unnamed British Communist translator quoted in Mao's Last Revolution, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, (2006) on the beginnings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Wednesday I jotted some notes for a post to be titled "Games:" the games professional athletes play, cops use of games in interrogating subjects, the "game" car salesmen play, the games of spycraft, rhetoric, what was real and what was a game, when games are real...It was going to be a long fucking post and I didn't write it. Now it has expanded. Keeping it short:

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me."

"Words matter."

"Hate speech."

"Sea of fire." North Korean threats to Guam

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Fire and fury, signifying nothing?

"Locked and loaded." This morning.

"if North Korea launches missiles that threaten US soil first and the US retaliates, China will stay neutral. If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so."

What happens if you are playing a game, something that is virtually real, but the other side is not? In trying to recruit a foreign national to become an agent that can result in both of you getting whacked. China did that to a dozen of its nationals recruited by the CIA.

I was not playing the "game" when I went in with a check for $14,500 to buy a car. The "bad cop" manager of the sales duo thought I was. After three hours I left without a car and he without a check. After I walked out the manager said to my son, "Good game."

“North Korea best not make any more threats..."

Threats, not hits.

"...to the United States..."

Guam is the United States? South Korea and Japan are not. So the DPRK has to threaten the U.S. They can go ahead and threaten anybody else.

"They will be met with fire and fury..."

"if North Korea launches missiles that threaten..."


"Threaten," not "hit."

"US soil..."

Guam is U.S. soil. Can we agree that Guam is U.S. soil? South Korea and Japan are not.

"...first and the US retaliates..."

By launching missiles that threaten but do not hit DPRK soil? What if we drop bombs, no missiles.

"... China will stay neutral."

If the DPRK starts it by launching missiles that threaten U.S. soil and the U.S. retaliates by same.


"If the US and South Korea..."

What if we act alone? What if South Korea acts alone?

 "...carry out strikes..."

Is to "carry out strikes" different than "launching missiles"? What if we drop bombs?

"...and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula..."

So you know what's coming, right? I'm going to go full lawyer on you: All of those things in the conjunctive have to happen: the U.S. and South Korea acting together, to "try" to overthrow un and "try"' to change the political situation on the Peninsula, as pre-conditions for:

"...China will prevent them from doing so."

Words do matter, not just to lawyers. A threat and the apparent ability to carry it out is a crime. North Korea has made threats and can carry them out, at least as regards Guam. Words matter to the Chinese, who are verily alarmed by the rhetoric of the fire twins. That is why the Chinese parsed Japan and South Korea out of the neutrality sentence: They will stay neutral only if the DPRK "threatens" U.S. soil. Why would China use different words when they are trying to "make clear" where they stand? Are the Chinese playing games? What does "prevent" mean to the Chinese?

Taking off my lawyer's hat I think Chief WaPo's construction on things is more accurate, more reasonable, but I do not know, and we, lawyers and non-lawyers, should know, when the Chinese say they are making their position clear. 

Seeking the Soul of China: XYZ

I will generalize that Chinese have a reputation for being reserved and tactful.  And to know XYZ, my co-auditor below, is to know reserve and tact.  However, some situations call for direct, forceful communication.

Fang Lijun's  paintings are enormously powerful--to me. I asked XYZ what she thought of them. There is no misunderstanding her here. 

This is not about taste in art.  As XYZ explains, it is about politics in art.  She refers to Fang Lijun's "whole generation's political frustration."  There are generational politics in China just as there are in America: the Baby Boom generation's conflict with Generations X and Y for example.  This is the Tianamen generation (Fang) vs Generation XYZ.  

Tianamen killed the soul of Fang Lijun and his generation. That is what my friend is referring to here.  Fang's paintings do indeed show the "abandonment" of life, the "hopeless fate" of Chinese society that he sees.  Indeed, there is a madness on the faces of some of the people Fang paints that reminds me of the same look of madness that the Gao brothers paint. 

The Tianamen generation is not admired by young people in China.  They are not considered martyrs. Chai Ling is controversial even in America. They are considered to have been trouble-makers who should have compromised with the government to avoid the massacre.  Generation XYZ did not have its soul killed by Tianamen and they will not have it killed by Fang Lijun.  As XYZ says, she and her generation are not going to give up their belief in a better China, nor in their own ability to "build and create" it.  

March 3, 2010

Benjamin,

I dislike Fang's paintings. Though it is true that he has expressed a feeling of vanity as most critics says, I do believe his paintings just show his abandonment of his own life, due to the whole generation's political frustration. He is mocking himself rather than laughing at the seriousness in political affairs. First, he lost his beliefs, then he makes a claim that other people's life styles are also funny, meaningless, and the society seems to be set by such a hopeless fate that there will be neither improvement in public areas nor in private lives, just opposite to my view of contempary China.

In my opinion, human beings do have the ability to build and create. The prevalent paintings in Chinese contempary art use a mask that has disabled common people for sticking to their true faces and has humiliated those people who persist fighting for something, either more righteous society or internal integrity and loneliness. No more such paintings.

Note: XYZ’ writing, previously scattered over several posts, is presented together here in one. Future writing by her will appear in this single post also.

For the first three decades of the People’s Republic, Chinese lived under an orthodox communist command economy. Obedience is a marker to a part of China’s soul and goes back to the teachings of Confucius. So the commands of the communist economic planners were obeyed. Then Deng Xiaoping abruptly changed the economy to fascio-capitalism and individual Chinese found themselves on their own.

The plight of “The Ants Tribe” that XYZ writes about is a familiar one to those used to living under capitalism but it is new to Chinese. XYZ is referring here not only to the current generation of educated, unemployed or underemployed young people but also to the book “Ants Tribe,” by Lian Si a Beijing professor in business and economics, that was published in September 2009 and describes for Chinese this new, unsettling phenomenon.

In her January 10 email XYZ expressed skepticism that job creation by the government alone was the solution to the plight of the Ants Tribe. “But does it,” she wrote, “ease the spiritual situation of young people?” I asked her to expand on that and this was her response,

“…young people no longer believe what they do is worth their lifetime. From the surface, they are fixed up in the society, just as screws in the machine.”

The reference is to the legend of Lei Feng and individual inconsequence to the larger cause of the common good. In the same paragraph XYZ goes on to describe an estrangement between the Ants Tribe generation and the Chinese government. More importantly, that estrangement is over the founding ideal of the People's Republic. The "common good" is not providing meaningful lives for the Ants Tribe generation as it did for the revolutionary generation.

January 25:

Hi, Benjamin,

Students in China are on their winter vacation now. Last week we finished all the works in the painting studio before leaving Beijing. Then I went to my hometown to take some photos of desolate factories built after 1949 and before 1979, which can be recognized from the exposed structures that show architecture of the period. They carried the memories of the old generation and represented the change of life style. Just think that once in China it was the world of blue work clothes, and the factory are holy place.

I found I touched a complex issue in my email, Benjamin, and I am surprised you can understand as a foreigner and you are always interested in China’s occurrences, while the old residents in the old country neglect or cannot seize the essence. To begin, I try to explain the ambiguous places in the article.

First, for the case of WWW, she grew up in a poor, single-parent family in country, and enrolled in a university located in city. Two reasons accounted for her suicide. The direct one was the university authority ruthlessly refused to help accommodate her mother according to their regulation, which led to her desperation, as she cannot let her mother sleep on the streets. All the money the daughter and mother earned by part-time jobs was not enough to rent a room in the city. And the deep reason lied in her inability to find a job. As a child, she dreamed to be a lawyer and believed in justice, but she could do nothing but suicide when she was thirty years old.

Second, the Ant Tribe emerges in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, but it is composed of students from all over China. They leave their hometowns as migrant workers do. The difference is, migrant workers are from undeveloped villages, while these students from ordinary families in towns and counties.

Third, for your question “what is this spiritual situation”, I think the spiritual situation can be described as a dilemma. That is, the young people no longer believe what they do is worth their lifetime. From the surface, they are fixed up in the society, just as screws in the machine. But unlike their father and grandfather, they generally consider the collectivism as political rhetoric. Deep in their mind is to realize their individual value. However, they must surrender to the pretended dominate ideology if they intend to find a job supplied by the government (good jobs are monopolized by government). Ironically, that job failed to supply them a meaning.

Finally, I translate the “Dignitary Capitalism” directly from Chinese. It refers to a form of combination of political power and capital.Different from the bribery and corruption, the owner of capital and governor of political power now share the same interests or they even belong to one family. It is not strange that public policy always take sides with certain powerful interest group, such as state-owned companies in various areas.

So in comparison with the experience of revolutionary generation, they thought they served their country and their ideal, which disillusioned them, the young generation does not have the illusion. One of my friends tells me his parents, who usually complained their lives because they underwent political movements during the Cultural Revolution, now admit that the road of their son is tough too.

January 11: Benjamin Harris to XYZ.

This is very important what you have written. You have a keen eye for social issues and that is what I observed in the short time we conversed in Beijing. I remember our conversation in the cafe vividly and wrote about it in "Beijing Diary" as one of the most memorable conversations I had in China. Your writing is very good. This in no way beyond your English ability.

I will summarize my understanding of what you have written:

The majority view is that more jobs and more paths to more jobs are what are needed. And you see that too: bored and restless post-graduates with no jobs or unrewarding jobs, and most tragically, suicide among young people. But even with the evidence of what material success in the new economy can bring--residence in one of the exclusive downtown Beijing high-rises, etc.--you see a "spiritual" problem: the powerful and the modest no longer walk the same streets (or "rub shoulders" in the English saying), economic power means political power and vice versa. And, there is what you mentioned in your earlier email: "I am chilled by the real capitalism that my father and grandfather fought in their daydreams."

How would you explain the spiritual situation that you refer to, and how does the experience of the revolutionary generation--your father and grandfather--effect the spirit?

January 10, 2010:

I asked XYZ to expand on her Christmas email (December 29 post). Her response, slightly edited, is reprinted below.

Benjamin,

I feel happy to exchange my ideas with you and tell the main concern of mine. Maybe you are interested in some facts.

Do you still remember I was proud of my country when we talked in the cafe? You wanted to know why. I explained, then, unlike in India, the poor and the rich in China were not separated distinctly. As in Beijing, the residential districts of high class adjoin the old apartments in bad conditions. Therefore, imagining that people might meet every morning on the same road, it helps creat a sense of mutual life. And the crucial is the possibility for ordinary people to become rich or improve their livings. The ladder, such as education and good jobs in the traditional way, seems always there. That means a lot. Owing to this social mechanism, my boyfriend makes his way to fulfil himself.

But things now are different. An increasing public begins to question the deeply believed wisdom going that knowledge changes fortune, because they have witnessed so many college graduates and post-graduates failed in the job seeking. The significance can be tesitified in two aspects. First, when I went to the countrysides to teach, I found the school dropouts due to lack of belief in education prevalent over the villages and towns where poverty has been beated. Secondly, as was frequently reported, another suicide committed by a post-graduate student shocked me extremely. In this year, the students with high education and low revenue are formally named as the Ants Tribe, denoting that they are smart, gregarious and powerless, just as ants.

I always focus on the young people in China. I follow them from campuses to workplaces, and wonder how their energies die out in society after a short brilliance in their twenties. Then I detect that they are more depressed than ever. The majority view attributes it to the depreciation of diploma, as a result of expanding enrollment of colleges and universities, and to solve the problem, the only thing needed is to supply more jobs. Undoubtedly, Chinese government is competent in producing jobs from the internal, for example, village officials, a solution to unemployment supported by public finances. But does it ease the spiritial situation of young people? There is something beyond the obvious.

We all know that Chinese government has put a 4 thousand billion plan to stimulate the economy, mainly concentrating on investments in infrastructures. Consequently, the state-owned companies and local governments benefit from projects and budgets, while the overflowed money makes the price of real estate rocket. Some scholars observed the tendency toward combination of political power and capital in economical realm. Wu Jinglian, a well-known economist, called on the public to caution against the Dignitary Capitalism. Given the context that the whole country lays full emphasis on nationalized businesses, every small enterprise and every single person know they could never profit if they were not relying on the government.

To most graduates, civil service examination has been indispensable, because if one intends to pursue a comfortable life, secure himself/herself in financial crisis or afford to an apartment in big cities, there are only three desirable choices, the public servants, the state-owned huge companies, and famous foreign companies.

The question is, how can we expect independent thoughts if we all live a dependent life in one form or another at the mercy of power and system much more overwhelming us? How does the society support the individual values and dreams? That is why I say our young generation is materially spoiled, socially fixed and spiritually desolate. Fortunately, we are able to contemplate our confusion.

ps: If you are interested in some cases, the bad things I mentioned, maybe I can find some next time.

December 29, 2009:

"Thank you Benjamin, and Happy New Year to you and Carmen and your family. :)

I really wish a happy new year to the world, you know, the frustrated Copenhagen, and I am chilled by the real capitalism that my father and grandfather fought in their daydreams. Too many sad things in China this year, bad signs.

So I wish bright happinesses to those fragile families and hope those exhausted bodies awake and feel peace. Sorry I say too much...It's really good to share the festival with you."

-XYZ