News That Stays News

China Watch December 23, 2010

1. A great article in the New York Review of Books about China and its unhappy relationship with its history. For me, reading it was a time to, as Emerson said in Self-Reliance, “take with shame our own opinion from another:”

Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid-off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party. The socialist slogans that the government touts are widely seen as mere panoply that covers a lawless crony capitalism in which officials themselves are primary players. This incongruity has been in place for many years and no longer fools anyone. People take it as normal, but that very normality makes cynicism the public ideology. Many people turn to materialism—whether in property or investment—in search of value, but often cannot feel secure there, either; even if they gain a bit of wealth, they do not know when it might disappear or be wrested away.One stopgap that top leaders have used has been to stoke national pride. They have staged an Olympics and a World’s Fair. They arrange to broadcast throughout China that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf” who would “split the motherland.” Such tactics have had some success. Chauvinist sentiment, especially among the upwardly mobile urban young, is easy to provoke, and is sometimes loudly expressed.

Yet in quieter settings, Chinese people continue to make decisions that reflect their lack of confidence in China’s future. Farmers from Fujian province still pay “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York. Of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study, only about 25–30 percent return to live in China (and of these, some keep foreign passports tucked away). Even leaders of the Communist Party send their children—and large amounts of their money—to places like Vancouver and Los Angeles.

In the review of Mubei (Tombstone), by Yang Jisheng, we learn the misery of the Great Leap Forward.

People learned not to kill rats immediately; it was better to tie a string to a rat’s leg, follow it to its hole, and kill it then. That way one could eat the rat as well as dig down into its hole to recover whatever grain it might have stored below.

2. In an otherwise-plain Paul Kennedy article about the prospect of American decline, we get one thought that sticks out. I get the feeling that economists would think that this simplistic, but on a rhetorical level it has a natural appeal.

The collective folly of portfolio advisers is compounded by the current congressional baying for China’s currency to get stronger and stronger and stronger. Is that what the United States really wants—to get relatively weaker? At a certain stage in the past 500-year history of currencies and power, the Dutch guilder hustled the Spanish escudo off the scene; then the pound sterling hustled the guilder (and franc and mark) off the scene; then the dollar hustled the pound off the scene. What is Washington risking as it presses for a stronger Chinese currency? My apprehension is that it risks a much stronger Chinese political influence in the world.

Credit: The Browser