the greycat blog

An excellent puncturing of the great empty bubble of awe with which the West surrounds China these days: John Pomfret’s ‘A long wait at the gate to greatness’ at the Washington Post. Pomfret is a former Peking bureau chief for the Post and knows what he is talking about.

So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China’s becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China’s missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

Too many constraints are built into the country’s social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons — dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn’t travel well — China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

It’s a balanced, realistic, well-informed view, the kind of thing you almost never get from the Western media when it comes to China. Highly recommended. If I may pick up my own trumpet and send forth a few muted notes for a moment, some of my own thoughts about China can be found here: ‘China’s future is not Europe’s past’.

By the way, I see that the Washington Post has underlined certain words and phrases in its online stories: these, of course, are links, but of a particular kind. The idea is that you, poor feeble-minded reader who needs to be led by the hand through everything, can click upon them and be taken to a page giving a list of resources (on washingtonpost.com, of course) related to the word or phrase in question - oh, and you’ll get a nice pop-up ad too, unless you’re careful. Thus, Pacific Ocean is linked in this way, in case you don’t know what that is. This is presumably the web’s wonderful version of the obsolete mind-broadening exercises once known as thinking for yourself and doing your own research. Take warning from any page scattered with those inviting underlinings: guided in everything you do by the notions of pedantic twats, you will ultimately become one of them.

I found Pomfret’s article thanks to a link from a post at Alan Sullivan’s fine Fresh Bilge blog. My thanks to him.

If this report is correct, Brown’s Britain is about to achieve a new low.

The government is expected to offer a last-minute compensation deal to help push the 42-day detention plan through. Under this, any suspect held for more than 28 days and later not charged could receive £3,000 for each extra day in custody, the BBC has learned.

We have now reached a point where the British Government is happy to put civil liberties up for sale.

… but not by the international press, for whom this 360km² strip of land seems to hold more fascination than the rest of the Middle East put together. Everything that happens there is much worse than comparable things happening elsewhere: hunger, illness, poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, even darkness is much darker there. The BBC, naturally, has been in the forefront of keeping the world up to date with just how unspeakably ghastly everything is, serializing an aid worker’s Gaza diary (’Poverty is deepening here, as is stress and despair, especially among the most vulnerable, women and children’), reporting on power cuts (’At least 800,000 people are now in darkness’), and making it clear where the blame lies (’Israel closed Gaza’s borders last Thursday’).

However, it turns out that the place has a border with Egypt too, and the BBC has been forced to adjust its usual choice of Gaza map - which didn’t mention Egypt at all - to one which accords more closely with reality. This isn’t a problem, though, for in the looking-glass world of the BBC, Egypt sealing its border with Gaza forms part of Israel’s blockade:

At the time of Israel’s “disengagement” or withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, an international agreement launched new policing of the Rafah border.

Essentially, a combination of CCTV cameras providing live pictures to the Israeli authorities and a team of EU monitors at crossing points was intended to ensure proper control, and protection against the smuggling of guns and explosives which could be used to launch attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Those arrangements broke down progressively, partly after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza of January 2006, and totally after the final seizure of all power in Gaza by Hamas in 2007.

The EU teams withdrew. The border closed.

It has become part of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is a necessary response to rocket attacks from Gaza which kill and injure Israeli citizens.

Meanwhile the stage-managing of Gaza’s blackouts, the careful planning of the ’spontaneous’ breaching of the border, Hamas’s fabrication of Gazan ‘food shortages’, and the fact that Israel at no time has left Gaza deprived of electricity, are among the aspects of the situation disregarded by the BBC in favour of propaganda like this:

The border was destroyed by Hamas militants after an Israeli blockade of Gaza led to a shortage of food, fuel and other vital supplies.

Israel said the blockade was aimed at preventing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on its settlements near the border.

So it’s all down to the Israeli ‘blockade’. Surely never in history has a state withdrawn from a territory that its critics had spent years demanding it withdraw from, only to find that it is still, by those very same critics, held to be responsible for everything that goes on there. Israel is expected to provide food, fuel and power to the very people who are dedicated to its destruction, and is savaged by the international community when it reduces (never cuts off, only reduces) that support.

Meanwhile, whatever Gaza’s hardships, the local manufacture of rockets never seems to be interrupted, and those deadly missiles continue to rain down upon the towns (not ’settlements’ as the BBC would have it) of Israel. Presumably they are putting them together by candlelight.

For more on the media’s delusions of Gaza, Cinnamon Stillwell’s ‘Pallywood’s latest attractions’ is strongly recommended. Read Cinnamon’s post, and follow her links.

UPDATE 30 January 2008: Der Spiegel has published a grimly fascinating article on the Gaza rocket industry, ‘A visit to a Gaza rocket factory’, in which engaging Gazan rocket-builder ‘Abdul’ (a geography student by day) shows off his propellant-making skills to reporter Ulrike Putz. Some highlights of Abdul’s cheery chatter: ‘Fertilizer for the rocket fuel … we get it in Israel’; ‘The Israeli blockade doesn’t affect us; it’s just intended to plunge the people into misery’; ‘If we kill soldiers, then we are more than happy. If it hits a child, then naturally we are not happy’. Naturally. (Information about this article came via Solomonia’s post ‘Why should Israelis continue to support this?’ - why indeed? Acknowledgements and thanks.)

Orientalism: the East systematically misrepresented and exploited to suit the ideology and purposes of the West. Here’s a prime example, from the BBC: ‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’, by BBC Middle East correspondent Kate Clark. It comes from a long-established BBC Radio Four programme called ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ which sits somewhat outside the constraints of regular reporting. The programme, writes one distinguished BBC journalist, offers BBC reporters the chance to ’say things you cannot say anywhere else. You are freer to be yourself … to react, draw broad conclusions and even step over that barrier so many BBC correspondents set up and say what you really feel about what you are doing’.

‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’ begins with an account of Clark’s conversation with a taxi driver in Kurdish Iraq. He told her his woes: ‘”Rent,” he said, “had gone up five-fold and petrol prices 20-fold since 2003″‘. No mention of what else might have changed for him as a Kurd in Iraq since 2003, but taxi drivers aren’t known for accentuating the positive. Anyway, moved by what he told her, Clark apparently ‘paid him a bit extra’. His reaction? ‘He called me back to argue over the money because he thought I had paid him too much’. This, we are led to conclude, is a noble soul. Mired in economic hardship that is the West’s fault (everything is much worse ’since 2003′, don’t forget) he nonetheless refuses to take more than his fair share of Ms Clark’s UK-taxpayer-funded expenses account. And, the report makes clear, this is not unusual: the Middle East is full of this kind of selfless generosity.

‘Why do you go to such dangerous places?’ people often ask me. They mean dangerous, Muslim countries. I usually report from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.

‘Do you have to wear a headscarf?’ I’m asked.

‘Do you ever feel threatened as a woman?’

It is difficult to explain that the sort of generosity and open-heartedness shown by the Kurdish taxi driver is very compelling and very normal across the Islamic world. It is generally a good place to be a guest.

Ms Clark does indeed appear wearing a headscarf in a picture illustrating the article, and later admits to feeling nervous ‘just walking down the street in Kabul’. But that isn’t allowed to distract from her central point: the people of the Middle East (the people of the Muslim Middle East) are generous, hospitable, welcoming, noble, and if they aren’t, it’s our fault.

But it has become more complicated.

Bin Laden’s war and the US-UK military response, and the polarisation between the Western and Islamic worlds mean such ordinary human encounters have become more difficult.

Western journalists are now targets for some Muslims in some Muslim countries. And it does not matter what we actually do or believe, we may be considered enemies.

Before 2001 in Afghanistan ’there was very little anti-Western sentiment, not even from the Taleban’ whereas now ‘many Afghans, including some friends, speak darkly of Western conspiracies to oppress the Umma, the global Muslim community’. You see, it’s not just extremists who express anti-Western sentiment. Even friends of BBC journalists feel that way. But only since 2001, when we suddenly started being horrible to them.

Afghanistan, says Clark, is ‘a place where strangers offer you tea and a bed for the night, where proverbially, people say that, when faced with guests, what is important is not how big your house is, but how big your heart is’. The Taleban weren’t very hospitable: they threw Clark out in March 2001 because her reporting ‘was not based in reality and conflicted with the Taliban way of thinking’. In a report on her expulsion published in The Daily Mirror on 20 March 2001 Clark described a Taliban hitting her in the shoulder with the butt of his Kalashnikov:

‘He assumed that I was an Afghan woman who shouldn’t be where I was with my face uncovered. I yelled back at him, “How dare you? I’m from the BBC.” As soon as he realised who I was he was very apologetic - he kept smiling and saying sorry’.

Had she been an Afghan woman he would not have stopped at one blow, and smiles and apologies would, one imagines, have been in short supply. That particular Afghan’s heart was clearly not big enough to accommodate hospitable feelings for the women of his own country, only for foreign women working for news organizations.

Clark then moves on to her experiences in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during ‘the first Palestinian intifada’ which, she helpfully reminds us with the impartiality for with the BBC is famous, was ‘the uprising against Israeli military occupation’. She recounts an occasion when, in a Gaza refugee camp, ‘an adult carefully explain[ed] to a small child who had picked up a stone to throw at me, that this would be shameful - I was a guest’. If she’d been an Israeli - man, woman or child, soldier or civilian - stoning would have been fine and honourable. But no - Kate Clark was a guest, and a guest of a particularly useful kind, so to stone her would have been ’shameful’. Just as in Afghanistan, those hospitable hearts are not quite big enough.

Yet the Palestinians were wonderful, apparently: not a gun or a rocket, not a bomb or a riot to be seen. They bought her cans of cola, even though they couldn’t afford to. They were hospitable, generous, and, Clark tells us with a flourish of self-hating post-imperial guilt worthy of Robert Fisk himself, they graciously forgave her for being British and therefore, along with every other Westerner, responsible for their current plight:

Palestinians were generous despite their bleak, constrained lives. Lives which, they were usually too polite to point out, my country was historically, partly responsible for.

Yes, once again, it’s all our fault. Their ‘bleak and constrained lives’ are our fault - not their fault, for consistently rejecting peace and resorting to violence and terror, not the fault of their fellow Arabs, for doing nothing to ease their plight and exploiting them for their own political ends, not the fault of their corrupt, incompetent and thuggish leaders. Our fault. Politely, they refrain from blaming us, however, and we should be grateful to them for their civilized restraint.

‘You want to find out what is going on’, as a journalist, says Clark.’ And you particularly want to hear from the marginalised and powerless’. It’s strange that the marginalised and powerless so often occupy the centre of the stage for the Western media and dictate the script from which its representatives read.

Clark ends by telling us that visiting Iraqi Kurdistan was a ‘treat’. ‘It is Iraq and it is safe’, she declares. And that is thanks to who exactly? She doesn’t say. She then returns to her taxi driver:

When I eventually managed to pay the Kurdish taxi driver his extra fare, I thought, ‘this wouldn’t happen in London’.

But actually it does sometimes.

If the driver is Afghan or Pakistani or Iraqi and we chat about his home country, I do quite often end up trying to drive the fare up, while he endeavours to drive it down.

This glibly patronizing little tale is very hard to believe. For a start taxi fares in London are rigidly regulated - there’s no scope for haggling. And what if they’ve chatted about the driver’s home country and disagreed? If he’s a secularist Afghan, or a Pakistani Christian, for example (to name two truly ‘marginalised and powerless’ groups)? Does the same apply? But that wouldn’t happen, because we’re not dealing here with real people with diverse views: we are dealing with an orientalist stereotype, devised to flatter the self-lacerating sensibilities of a guilt-ridden, self-hating West.

Edward Said could never have predicted the intellectual back-flip that ‘orientalism’ has performed. Conceptualized by him as an ideology through which the West oppresses the East, it has become a means through which the West can oppress itself. Yet it still draws upon the same roots of caricature and stereotype: not least, a sentimentalized and romanticized view of the Middle East as a place inhabited by modern versions of the noble savage, who shame the decadent West with their generosity of spirit and their innate sense of hospitality. Meet the new orientalism, even more misleading and dangerous than the old sort.

The first ‘most-read’ of the new year, and the new favourite essay at greycat.org is ‘Burke and revolution: reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke’. Many of the visitors who have been interested in this essay have been from the United States - appropriately enough, for Burke was a friend of American independence.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works.

Read ’Burke and revolution’ by clicking here. Other essays on eighteenth-century topics can be found here.

Picture: Edmund Burke, engraving after Joshua Reynolds. [Source]

The most popular essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘.

Hobbes’s assertion that ‘Feare and Liberty are consistent’ (II: xxi, 262) has caused a certain amount of puzzlement and confusion: how freely can a person robbed at gunpoint really be said to be acting when he hands over his wallet? Yet it is consistent with Hobbes’s view that liberty can only be restricted by an external agent. If the robber knocks his victim to the ground and restrains him physically while extracting his wallet from his pocket, then the victim’s freedom has been restricted; but if the victim reaches into his own pocket and hands the robber his wallet out of fear that he will be shot if he does not, he has chosen that course of action freely, while others, no matter how unpalatable, remain open to him; and he has removed his wallet and surrendered it with his own hands and of his own volition. This is an important point for understanding the nature of the covenant which gives rise to Hobbes’s Commonwealth, for its ultimate motivation is fear (‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death’ (I: xiii, 188)), and yet it is freely arrived at by all concerned.

Hobbes’s Leviathan is commonly seen as an argument for absolute despotism on the part of the sovereign and absolute submission on the part of the subject; yet Hobbes asserts that individual liberty is inalienable. How can these positions be reconciled? This is the question explored in ’Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘. Click here to read the essay, in full and for free.

Picture: Frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651 (detail). [Source]

In the current (3 December 2007) edition of In These Times, Slavoj Zizek of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, has an interesting article about the People’s Republic of China: ‘China’s valley of tears’. He argues that western expectations that democracy will follow in the wake of capitalism in China are profoundly mistaken, pointing out that economic development in China has occurred because of authoritarian rule, not in spite of it.

Zizek is surely right in seeing no essential contradiction between capitalism and authoritarianism in the Chinese case. Where he goes badly astray is in the parallel he draws between the development of capitalism in the People’s Republic of China today and its historical development in Europe. In short, he argues that the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe was accompanied by precisely the kind of state authoritarianism that we see in contemporary China:

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill might well have approved of this facile Marxism, but it really won’t do as history. ‘Democracy’ in early modern Europe meant something quite different to what it means today, in so far as it had (or has) a settled meaning in any case; as for ‘brutal state dictatorship’, no early modern state had the means to impose such a thing, even had it wished to do so. Capitalism in Europe was not imposed from above, it arose from below, from investment, invention and entrepreneurship. It arose first and most successfully in those countries which had political stability, surplus capital, availability of labour and natural resources, and in which governments enabled its development. An enabling government is a very different thing from an enforcing government. No Dutch merchant was forced by the state to trade with the East Indies; no English landowner was compelled at bayonet-point to dig for coal on his estate; no Scottish businessman was threatened with beheading if he did not open a bank. Even for the workers who provided the muscle which powered the development of capital, the economic imperatives of the market were far more significant in determining whether and where they worked than the coercive power of the state, which was minimal by modern standards.

Zizek’s characterization of the development of European capitalism is profoundly mistaken, and the parallel with contemporary China simply isn’t there. European capitalism arose organically from below, and the state developed to accommodate it. In China, capitalism is imposed from above by state decree (and what one decree gives, another can take away). European capitalism was driven by invention; no-one in China has invented anything for centuries, being content to copy. The development of western capitalism was bound up with philosophical and political notions of individual liberty and free will; in China these notions are absent, and have indeed long been officially despised and rejected.

Not only is the supposed parallel absent for the past, it is equally false for the future. The growth of the capitalist economies of Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was built on deep economic, financial and philosophical roots; it was real, it endured, and it changed the world. China’s recent growth is built on sand: it is illusory, it is short-term, and it will only change the world if the world is foolish enough to go on accepting China at its own valuation.

Where Zizek argues that there is a parallel between the contemporary Chinese situation and the conditions under which capitalism developed in early modern Europe, he is mistaken. He is correct, however, to argue that, far from authoritarian rule undermining contemporary Chinese economic development, it is the foundation of it, and to assert that (contrary to the claims of China’s cheerleaders in the west) there is no natural progression from capitalist economic liberalization to democratic political liberalization. That argument needs to be taken a stage further: given the artificial, state-imposed nature of contemporary Chinese capitalism, its continuing expansion - indeed, its continuing presence - cannot be relied upon.

Zizek sees modern China as a natural and consistent expression of Marxist economic and political philosophy. He is right, and the lesson is clear. The Marxist house of cards collapsed long ago; how long before the fragile edifice that is the People’s Republic falls down flat as well?

UPDATE 10 Dec 07: This article has been republished by History News Network in their ‘Roundup’ section - see ‘Ralph Harrington: China’s Future’ (number two in their ‘top ten’ today).

Remember Paul Gray? He’s the former head of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, who resigned last month over the ‘discs lost in the post’ scandal (still very much unresolved, of course). Well, he’s back in a Government post, but his situation is a mysterious one. The mystery is this: why is he now working for nothing?

Channel 4 News have reported that he is ‘working for his old treasury boss, Sir Gus O’Donnell at the cabinet office - on projects to “develop Civil servants skills”‘ (that should probably be ‘civil servants’ skills’, but never mind). Apparently he is not being paid for this work - indeed, Government has boasted of the fact. BBC News this evening quotes a Cabinet Office spokesman:

A government spokesman said Mr Gray’s period of notice meant he would continue to be paid until 31 December whether he was working or not. ‘In the meantime he has agreed to a request from Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to undertake a short piece of work on cross-government matters until Christmas,’ the Cabinet Office spokesman said. He added the period of notice meant ‘he could receive payment for no work or receive payment for doing some work. It was thought to be better in the public interest that he did some work. There is no additional cost to the public purse. He will leave the payroll on December 31.’

Paul Gray’s period of notice would be laid down in his contract, entitling him to be paid for a set period after leaving his post (depending on the circumstances). That isn’t ‘payment for no work’, that’s payment he’s entitled to for the work he was doing in his previous post. If neither the Cabinet Office nor HMRC understands that simple fact, no wonder we’ve got problems.

If Mr Gray is indeed now doing a short-term piece of work, he ought to be paid for it - and that pay has nothing to do with the provisions of the contract governing the job he has now left. It sounds as if the Government are depriving an employee of his rights in order to get what they hope will be the good publicity of saying that he isn’t costing taxpayers anything. And if Paul Gray has agreed to that, he’s surely ill-advised. Government is not a charity, and no-one should work for it for nothing.

It may not seem to matter very much in the case of a senior and well-paid official like Mr Gray, but the principle that if you work you should get paid for it applies to everyone and it’s very dangerous to chip away at that principle.

Yet another example of how clueless and confused the British Government is these days.

It seems Gillian Gibbons, the Sudan Teddy Bear Teacher, is to be freed. This something about which we should be very glad, but it is not something for which we should be grateful.

Apparently she has been ‘pardoned’ by the Sudanese president. That can hardly be the case; only someone who was guilty would need a pardon.

The interactivity of the web is all very well, but having comments facilities on news reports is a very dubious notion: just look at what happens over at CBS News. The BBC, so committed to fawning over user-generated content that one wonders why they need all those very expensive newsrooms and journalists at all, is, of course, in love with the idea. Those bulging ‘Have Your Say’ pages hang like monstrously distended parasitic growths from many BBC news stories, and the fact that the comments are moderated only makes the prevalent ignorance, offensiveness, smug stupidity (and illiteracy) of the contents all the more disturbing.

The Have Your Sayers have been Having Their Say about Gillian Gibbons and the Khartoum teddy bear crisis (see my earlier post), and the results are truly revolting. For the full grisly picture see ‘The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate’ at The Monkey Tennis Centre, but make sure you take a sick-bag.

(Some choice comments have been added since the Monkey Tennis Centre’s post. Steve from Derry declares that ‘She went to another country, broke the law, and insulted an entire religion’, that ‘calls for her to be executed are welcomed’ and he hopes that ‘even if she just gets the poor sentence of 15 days, there will be a strong revolt outside the prison upon her release’. What a nice chap. ‘I think we should take a step back and be thankfull that we are all luncky enough to live in a multi cultural society that welcomes any person of any race or religion’, says optimistic James Taggart of London. Glad you feel luncky, James. From sunny Southend, Ken reminds us all (twice, in identical posts - what’s that moderator doing?) that ‘You can’t look at this with western values, this is a different culture and it has to be respected’. Personally I find it hard to respect that kind of respect.)

Today hundreds of demonstrators have flooded Khartoum’s streets protesting about the leniency of Mrs Gibbons’s sentence and demanding that she go before a firing squad.

Above: Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916), victor of Omdurman. He’d know what to do.

The quotation in the title of this post, ‘Astonishing backwardness, oh people!’, is from a posting, in Arabic, at The Sudanese Thinker, as quoted by the BBC in their review of blog responses to the Teddy Bear Crisis.