This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
A centrally planned economy.
Shiver. It's a bogeyman of the hardly-ever-Right that liberals and environmentalists want to foist a centrally planned economy on the US. They point to the Soviets, the Chinese, the human misery caused by perpetual shortages based on miscalculations of demand, the failure of price signals, the inflexibility of industrial response.
Those systems were inefficient, it's true. Consider:
The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1959-1965, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period. ... The central idea behind the Great Leap was that rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. ... To achieve this, Mao advocated that a further round of collectivisation modelled on the USSR's "Third Period" was necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives would be merged into huge People's communes. ... At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Astonishingly for such a dramatic social change, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5,000 households.
... On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers.
... With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where as a result of massively inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao's reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.
... Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a "dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public.
... In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to 1978.)" ...
Even authoritarian China had to reject the disastrous local effects of collectivized mass agriculture. Even a figure such as Mao was brought low by failures that led to the deaths of millions. But now look where they're at today, and also consider this:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true.
Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into.
In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment.
Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves.
Paradise Burned
Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911
For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease.
The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark:
The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon.
The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirredChinesenationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.
Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?
The Social Concerns Committee of Lake City (Michigan) United Methodist Church, led by Richard Renner, is spearheading an effort to boycott the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Chinese Games are regularly referred to as the "Genocide Games," due to China's record of human rights atrocities at home, and their unyielding support of the brutal regimes in Burma and Sudan.
According to Renner, "We absolutely support our American athletes, and it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will completely boycott the Beijing Olympics. However, we urge our Representatives in Congress to support resolutions condemning China's human rights record. Further, we would like our President, George W. Bush, to reconsider his decision to attend the opening ceremonies. As leader of the free world, it would send a strong message of disapproval to the Chinese Communists if he were to decline their invitation to be an honored guest."
Since 1950, when the army of the People's Republic of China illegally invaded and occupied Tibet, the Chinese authorities have conducted a systematic campaign of genocide upon the Tibetan nation. Reliable estimates claim that as many as 1.2 million innocent Tibetans have been murdered. This crime of genocide has been condemned by the International Commission of Jurists, and is currently being investigated by Spain's High Court.
China is the number one diplomatic, economic and military ally of the brutal regime in Sudan. Armed with Chinese weapons, the Sudanese government has conducted a systematic campaign of genocide in the Darfur region. Since the conflict began in 2003, over 400,000 Darfuri civilians have been murdered, 2.8 million refugees have been driven from their homes, and 90 percent of ethnic Darfuri villages have been destroyed. On the U.N. Security Council, China has repeatedly threatened to use its veto to block resolutions imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Sudan.
"It is unfortunate that the Beijing Olympics have become so politicized," said Renner. "However, it is the Chinese government that began the process, by continually using the games as a propaganda tool to promote their political and economic agenda. China wants to be recognized as a global power, perhaps even a superpower, and they are using the Olympics to achieve that recognition."
So far, people of conscience from all across Michigan have joined our campaign to boycott the "Genocide Games." However, we need your help, too. For more information contact Richard Renner at 231/229-2505, or rrenner@core.com.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."
- Pastor Martin Niemoller, decorated World War I U-boat Commander. Imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau Death Camps from 1938 to 1945 for his anti-Nazi activities.
Amnesty International reported yesterday that China is the world's top executioner. From ITN News in the UK:
But as with everything else in life, there are unseen ties that link China's use of the death penalty with the United States' use of torture in conducting the "war on terror".
Ok, this is really weird. Today, Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was on Fox talking about whether Bush would boycott the Olympics' opening ceremony, and talked about the issue of "Tibet." Later the same morning he went on ABC and discussed the same issue, but he consistently talked about "Nepal."
(As Think Progress and CrooksandLiars point out, these are 2 distinct places.) Very curious -- is Hadley just a moron? Or is there some diplomacy-speak reason that someone would tell him to actively switch from "Tibet" to "Nepal" between shows?
Nancy Pelosi catches a lot of flak. Some of it is justified, but IMHO, most of it is undeserved, because she is operating in a difficult situation with immediate underlings who are not loyal to her, and a caucus that is still conditioned by 12 long years out of power.
This week, we have another example of her using her position to speak out in a manner strikingly different from other high leaders. It deserves our attention, not just for her message, but for how she delivers it.
On the San Francisco Olympic Torch Relay April 8th, 2008 by Speaker Pelosi
The Olympic Charter states that the goal of the Olympic games should be to promote 'a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.' The Chinese government has failed to live up to the commitments it made before being awarded the Olympic games to improve its human rights situation. In fact, there is disturbing new evidence that it is conducting a broader crackdown on human rights in China and Tibet because of the Olympics.
For the next four months, the International Olympic Committee and Chinese officials will parade the Olympic torch through dozens of countries and even through Tibet. The torch will be met by politicians and heads-of-state from all over the world along a 'journey of harmony.' It is the Chinese government that is making the Olympic torch relay a political event.
Freedom-loving people around the world are vigorously protesting because of the crackdown in Tibet and Beijing's support for the regime in Sudan and the military junta in Burma. The people are making a significant statement that the Olympic ideals of peace and harmony should apply to all people, including those in Tibet and Darfur.
San Francisco is blessed by a large and vibrant Chinese American community. As San Franciscans, we embrace the diversity of our community and we value the contributions made in every corner of our great city. We also value free expression, and this week, many will exercise this right by demonstrating against the Olympic torch. I urge all those who protest to do so peacefully and respectfully. I commend those who speak out for their commitment to shining a light on the causes that challenge the conscience of the world.
California's Democratic Party just passed some very progressive resolutions, btw, and Pelosi's daughter is the CDP chair. So, take notice, people. Please.
"We want to say to China, 'We thought that the Olympic Games would help you improve your human rights record," Tutu said. "We still hope... But what we are saying to the heads of state, to President George Bush, is, 'For goodness sake, don't go to the Beijing games... for the sake of our children, for the beautiful people of Tibet. Don't go!'"
First things first: there are no suicide bombers in Tibet. But unless the Chinese government makes some drastic changes to policies with Tibet, there will be, potentially very, very soon.
At the risk of being a finger-wagger, I can't help but be somewhat appalled at the lack of commentary on the violent protests that have taken place in the Tibet Autonomous Region and surrounding provinces this past week. When the election cycle takes 3 years, we should make a concerted effort to start thinking about some of the things the next president is actually going to have to deal with. Like a violent guerrilla movement against one of our more problematic and violence-prone allies.
