We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I do bits for this blog about intellectual property issues, and on Monday the guy who runs it emailed me with a link to this marvellous story from the New York Times. It seems that in China, they have produced a revised version of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, entitled My Life, with his love for all things Chinese greatly exaggerated, and his occasional complaints about Chinese human rights violations deleted.
…The fake version reveals a Clinton family obsessed with China’s strong points, with how Chinese science and technology “left us in the dust.” Readers will learn that the future president, to impress Hillary’s mother, had rhapsodized about such things as the Eight Trigrams, documented in “The Book of Changes” several thousand years ago. Another retranslation of the pirated translation last summer has Mr. Clinton explaining to Hillary that his nickname is “Big Watermelon.”
My Intellectual Property Editor would not, however, want me to regard this as a wholly amusing matter. China is being very naughty.
In the Western publishing world – in fact, in the Western business world – such purloined texts are no laughing matter. The American Chamber of Commerce recently singled out China’s lack of enforcement of laws against counterfeit goods and its failure to protect intellectual property rights as problems. American publishers estimate that they lose at least $40 million a year to Chinese forgeries.
This is true. I mean, it is true that China’s Intellectual Property misbehaviour is a big issue these days. If you google, as I often now do, “Intellectual Property”, you get lots and lots of hit, of two kinds. First, there are reports of how China is now going to really, really enforce Intellectual Property rights, hold a conference at which enforcing Intellectual Property rights will be intensively discussed, and generally jolly well do something about it, this time it will be different, etc.. And second, you get a chorus of complaints that this is all hot air and window dressing. Oh, and third, you get American law firms saying they can sort it all out for you: hire us and get rich, shun us and be ruined.
To be a bit more serious about the rewritten Clinton memoirs, I cannot feel very sorry for Clinton, but in any case there are other victims here. All those Chinese readers who genuinely want to read what Clinton has genuinely written (or signed) about China are getting swindled. And I would like to know if these (re)publishers rewrote the book in order to pander to Chinese readers, or to the Chinese Government. Either way, it shows the way what an enormous cultural impact, for good and for bad, China seems likely to make upon the world during the next few decades. (India also, of course.)
I wonder if this story will get really noticed, that is, noticed some more. I suspect that it might. Media scribblers are notoriously indifferent when it is merely industrialists or industrial designers having their ideas nicked, their profits stolen or their businesses regulated out of business. But when a writer has his sacred words stolen, and then worse, far worse, changed, well, that they can all really understand and get angry about.
Kudos to Alex Beels of Harper’s Magazine for translating this rewritten Clinton book back into English and thereby getting the story seriously started, although I can find no reference to this story here.
There have been recent reports in the media that President Chirac of France has been calling for an end to the arms embargo that the European Community (as then was) placed upon China after the Tiananmen Square massacres.
The French head of state also called for an end to the European Union’s arms embargo against China – imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on student protesters in Beijing – describing it as “a measure motivated purely and simply by hostility.”
To shed some light upon the abuses that the government in Beijing continues to perpetrate upon its subjects, we can draw upon the eugenic policies followed by that state. The birth control policy of one family, one child was instituted in 1978 under Deng, with fines and forced abortions or sterilisations for those who broke the law. This was reinforced by the eugenics law that identified inferiors as those suffering from genetic disorders or, as reported, belonging to ethnic minorities.
This has provided the legal and cultural authority for local communist cadres to effect coercive campaigns to reduce the fertility of ethnic minorities or conquered peoples. Tibet has proved one of the most resistant regions to Beijing’s determination that they “self limit” their populations. As a Home Office Bulletin quietly reported in 2002:
2.11. One of the main reasons for the continuing high birth rates has been the ethnic Tibetans’ campaigning to exert their right not to be treated like the Han. Tears of Silence, a report published by the Tibetan Women’s Association, in May 1995, outlined the abuses inflicted on Tibetan women during the 1993 campaigns.
2.12. Tibetan campaigning organisations have relayed more recent accounts that Tibetan women have been forcibly sterilised, with local Chinese authorities implementing a three-child, and in some cases even a two-child, maximum policy with forcible sterilisation in some parts of the province irrespective of assurances given to the contrary.
As the bulletin concludes,
2.14. Since the mid-1990s, the mismatch between central policy and announcements, and allegations about local implementation have shown the transmission problems in stark relief. Central PRC Government announcements promise adherence to ethnic minority commitments; but local cadres and officials feel pressure to apply pressure on a highly resistant population in remote areas, who in turn relate their experience through anti-PRC organisations. Co-operation, accountability and verification are missing from the process.
The stark suffering of these families, whose futures have been robbed from them, is hidden by the bureaucratese of the British civil service. Nevertheless, we should remember that the potential of the Chinese economy does not outweigh the wickedness of the Chinese state.
The new President of Indonesia likes to be thought of as a man of intellect. Recently he held an event where a film was shown which contrasted the view of two thinkers on the role of government.
When asked which thinker he agreed with, the now man now elected President declared that his view was “somewhere between the two”. A typical politician’s reply, so why do I think this man represents ‘progress’ in the political world?
Well the two thinkers in the film were not (say) Karl Marx and J.M. Keynes – the two thinkers shown in the film were J.M. Keynes and F.A. Hayek.
Believe me, in the context of politics, this is progress.
We don’t breed them like this over here:
FORGET eBay. If you want to buy a dysfunctional boiler house, an international airport, a tea plantation, an oil terminal, a proctology clinic, a vineyard, a telephone company, a film studio, a lost-property office or a beekeepers’ regulatory board, then call Kakha Bendukidze, Georgia’s new economy minister. His privatisation drive has made him a keen seller of all the above. And for the right price he will throw in the Tbilisi State Concert Hall and the Georgian National Mint as well.
If only he could get his hands on the BBC!
Next year�if not sooner�he will cut the rate of income tax from 20% to 12%, payroll taxes from 33% to 20%, value-added tax from 20% to 18%, and abolish 12 kinds of tax altogether. He wants to let leading foreign banks and insurers open branches freely. He wants to abolish laws on legal tender, so that investors can use whatever currency they want. He hates foreign aid�it “destroys your ability to do things for yourself,” he says�though he concedes that political realities will oblige him to accept it for at least the next three years or so.
I hear that HMG has kindly offered to take in any unwanted taxes and resettle them here in the UK.
As to where investors should put their money, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” he says, and continues: “I have shut down the department of industrial policy. I am shutting down the national investment agency. I don’t want the national innovation agency.” Oh yes, and he plans to shut down the country’s anti-monopoly agency too. “If somebody thinks his rights are being infringed he can go to the courts, not to the ministry.” He plans, as his crowning achievement, to abolish his own ministry in 2007.
Up until a few years ago, this country was run by communists.
Now where did that come from?
Japan’s economy is actually growing at more than a statistically obvious rate for the first time properly since the 1980s. The fact that a heatwave is being credited with boosting business leads to the obvious conclusion.
Global warming is Good for Capitalism. Light those brown coal fires now! Chop down those hedgerows! Hunt those whales! Bring back leaded gasoline!
The nuances of Japan’s langauge can be found even in the title of this book, as Hagakure can be rendered as ‘hidden leaves’ or ‘hidden by the leaves’. But this collection of 300 musings and anecdotes, of the 1,300 taken down from the retired samurai retainer Yamamoto Tsuenetono (1659-1719) are close enough to give the Western reader a taste of the ethical ideas, philosophy and moral ideas of the Japanese samurai class.
In 1660 the Shogun prohibited the practice of tsuifuku where a retainer committed suicide at the death of his master. So when Yamamoto’s Master died, he retired to a Buddist monastary, and younger samurai gathered to hear his views. They were transcribed, and these were collected as a book, some excerpts of which can be read here.
They are, to say the least, radically different to anything in the Western moral tradition. This is not a book of essays, many of the precepts are but a paragraph in length, and deal with the ways of the samurai. What preoccupied them was war and death, and the correct way to inflict and recieve them. It is, to our eyes, a gruesome code.
The samurai were the warriors who served their Lords, the daimyo, who were the real rulers of Japan, under the Shoguns and Emperors. Yamamoto Tsuentono devotes much of his work to the conduct and behavior of the samurai retainers. He extolls an ideal of absolute unquestioning obedience; to me it seems like voluntary slavery. And death, of course, is the ideal. The retainer should consider himself as a dead man walking, and should also be ready to die even at his own hand, should his Master require it of him.
Nakano Jin’emon constantly said, “A person who serves when treated kindly by the master is not a retainer. But a person who serves when the master is being heartless and unreasonable is a retainer. You should understand this principal well.”
But of course, the main business of the samurai was to inflict death, and this they did on a constant basis. The ‘Way of the Samurai’ is a military code, designed to discipline men into serving as soliders in a hostile, pre-technological environment. Notions of class and honour evolved into concepts which overpowered other sentiments. Yamamoto scorns women and the ‘lower classes’ when he thinks of them at all. For him, life is death, service is freedom, and killing is love.
This is an important document for the historian who turns to look at Japan. This moral code enabled the conquest of Japan and the destruction of its original inhabitants, over 2,000 years ago, and seems to have evolved until the end of the pre-technological age. As new precepts and ideas emerged in this culture, they survived by winning victory, or were killed in battle, so a form of social Darwinism dominated. For the Japanese were constantly fighting each other.
One meme that did survive was the need to be adaptable to new military ideas. So when the West impinged on the Japanese culture with a decisive technological edge in the 1850’s, the Japanese ruling class embraced the new concepts quite quickly, and within 50 years had totally discarded their old techniques for new. However, they had not changed their ideas on how wars should be fought- they felt that the old ethical considerations and ideas of valour
and honour were quite adequate for the new age.
This is why the brutal ideas of the Hagakure survived into the 20th century. In reading this book, one can see the ideas of the old samurai in full view against the might of Western industrial power. But it was decisively defeated by the US with their own ethical code, and since then, the Japanese have eschewed war for other pursuits. A reading of the Hagakure is enough to remind any reader that this is something we should all be thankful for.
Concerning martial valour, merit lies more in dying for one’s master then in striking down the enemy.
The world’s largest Muslim nation went to the polls on Monday in its first ever direct elections for President, in a difficult climate. The three main candidates were incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri (the daughter of Indonesia’s founding President), General Wiranto, the candidate of the Golkar Party, which was the political vehical of long serving President Suharto, and also General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a late entrant who had been President Sukarnoputri’s Minister for Security until he resigned earlier this year.
It is hard to tell what the actual issues in the campaign were. To grossly oversimplify, President Megawati Sukarnoputri is offering more of the same corrupt, inept and incoherent governance, while General Wiranto seemed to be campaigning on a platform of corrupt, inept and repressive governance. General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s platform of trying to have somewhat less corruption and incoherence in government has proved to be more popular, although not popular enough to get an absolute majority.
So what happens now is that General Yudhoyono and the second placed candidate will fight another run-off election on September 20.
What is really pleasing from a western point of view is that it has been an orderly and fair election, and also, Islamic fundamentalism is not a big issue in Indonesian politics. In a nation of this size, there’s always going to be the extremist fringe, but this election helps demonstrate that extremism is not a vote-winner in Indonesia. As an Australian, I personally am relieved to see this.
One of the brighter spots for the global economy in recent years has been China. A heady rate of economic growth – 9.7 percent growth in GDP last year – has encouraged some to wonder whether this nation’s decision to hitch its wagon to the star of capitalism can be translated into a more lasting adoption of liberal civil society. So far, the jury is out, but some signs are encouraging. I honestly cannot see how China can long resist reforms to its political arrangements in the long run.
More recently, though, a number of fund managers, banks and economists have voiced a few worries about whether China could be vulnerable to the sort of jarring market moves that hit Southeast Asia, starting in Thailand, back in the late 90s. China has a fixed exchange rate to the dollar, which means that at present Chinese goods are very cheap in overseas markets, but also swells the Chinese money supply. Credit expansion, guided by the state-owned banks, has been rapid, and a lot of the investment has been spent on questionable enterprises. About 40 percent or more of China’s GDP growth is dependent on bank lending. There are many signs that China could be headed for a serious hangover.
One of the biggest worries could be the state-run banks. About 40 percent of all the loans held by these banks are so-called non-performing loans — in other words, they will never be repaid. These banks are in the throes of a major overhaul, as the Chinese authorities in Beijing try to restructure the system along more commercial lines. But in the meantime, the authorities are trying to cut the pace of monetary growth, which may come at a time when the financial infrastructure is in a weak state.
Attending a conference in the City today, an economist, speaking off the record, said this: “Alan Greenspan (Fed Chairman) is a smart man, has access to all kinds of research backup, but he has made mistakes on the economy. Now the Chinese authorities, who are isolated in their Beijing centre, inexperienced in such matters, could make very big mistakes indeed.”
China offers a great deal of promise in the medium term. In the short term, anyone with a few pounds to spare on an investment should tread very carefully. China could be in for a bumpy ride.
Feeling cheerful? Have a read of this:
In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these “surplus males” will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men’s aggressive energies.
“In 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause,” says Ms. Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University.
With luck, if the two armies do go to war, it will be against each other.
Apart from that, what is the answer? Homosexuality via genetic modification, administered with magic gamma rays beamed in by satellites? Male death, ditto? An immediate plan by someone to test-tube a lot of girls, now? Polyandry? When confronting such a problem we generally find that the answers have a way of mutating into grisly restatements of the problem. How can we avoid …?
In the words of Noel Coward, there are, as always, bad times just around the corner, although that song (recently covered with what appear to be somewhat rehashed words by Robbie Williams) was originally only about places like Kettering (where I believe this Samizdatista lives), Hull and the isle of (because it rhymes with Hull) Mull.
A team from the EU Commission is hotfooting it off to North Korea in the wake of that ‘minor-train-incident-which-never-happened-and-anyway-even-if-it-did-it-was-caused-by-reactionaries‘:
Development spokesperson Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe said on Friday that a representative from the EU’s humanitarian assistance team in North Korea will visit the site late tonight (early morning local time) to assess the situation.
They may have to fly in some emergency directives. But, on to the truly pant-wettingly, hilarious, quote-of-the-week bit:
Asked whether the EU representative would be allowed to get a clear picture of the situation on the ground given the secrecy of the Pyongyang regime and the time elapsed since the accident occurred, Mr Ellermann-Kingombe pointed out that they had been invited by the authorities to visit the site.
“We have no reason to question their intentions”, he said.
And probably no motive either.
Every single incident and accident on the UK rail network in recent years has prompted a torrent of bug-eyed wailing about the ‘disastrous effects of privatisation’ and the iniqiuties of those ‘greedy’ shareholders who insist on putting their squalid demands for profit ahead of safety concerns.
The answer (say the established media, the transport unions, the sundry activists, lawyers, Uncle Tom Cobley and all) is to take the network back into public control. Only when the ‘distorting’ private profit-motive has been eliminated, they say, will it be safe to travel by rail.
As safe as this?
Up to 3,000 people have been killed or injured in a huge explosion after two fuel trains collided in North Korea, reports say.
The blast happened at Ryongchon station, 50km north of Pyongyang, South Korea’s YTN television said.
Nationalisation kills! Privatisation now! Put profits before people!
A battle is brewing in Japan between education authorities and liberal minded teachers over the place of national symbols in the Japanese school system, reports Aussie expat Cameron Weston, for Australian news website Crikey.com.au:
Most countries have no law in place that compels its citizens to stand, put their hands on their hearts or do anything else when the national symbols are displayed. Most people do it because they want to, and this is the way it should be. Patriotism is something felt, not imposed. Forcing such action impinges on the basic tenets of democracy and freedom, and democracies have laws that enshrine this principle.
But what if the symbols of your nation had a deeper historical meaning, if they spoke to a past that some were ashamed of, of policies and deeds which some considered criminal?
And what if you felt strongly enough about this that you refused to stand and sing the anthem or to gaze upon the flag of your nation? In a democracy, you would be allowed to do so.
You might still reasonably be called a patriot by some, a person of conscience by others, ignorant and a traitor by others still but it would all be a matter of opinion, and hopefully then of discussion and debate. In 1999, amid some controversy, the Japanese LDP government passed legislation making the rising sun flag (‘Hinomaru’) and the national anthem (‘Kimigayo’) official, legal symbols of this nation. In a country where voluntary adherence to tradition and fixed social rites underpin the very fabric of society and daily life, it is ironic that the government felt that these forces were insufficient to ensure the flag and anthem remained venerated national symbols – they deemed that a law needed to be passed….
However, in the last few months, as the new school year begins, the debate has been taken to a new level. Teachers across Tokyo have been issued with a directive from the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, compelling them to stand and sing the national anthem and for them to in turn compel their students to do the same. No debate, no discussion; this is a direct order.
If the teacher refuses to do so, he will be open to public censure and criticism from his superiors, further warnings and potential expulsion. So far this year, over 200 teachers have refused to stand and many have received written warnings as a result. Miwako Sato, a music teacher who received one such warning when the law was first enacted in 1999 sums up the problem for many teachers perfectly, “Many people in other Asian countries do not want to look at the flag, the symbol of Japanese occupation of their lands, even 60 years after World War II, and I believe its coercive display at school ceremonies is against our Constitution,” she said.
Ah, the Japanese constitution. What I tend to get out of Mr. Weston’s article is a feeling that although Japan has lived under that constitution for over 50 years, it has never really embraced the spirit of the document (which is a bizzare mixture of the liberal and the statist).
But the fact that the more reactionary elements in authority in Japan feel the need to legislate nationalism, and to make it compulsary, gives me heart; I doubt they would have felt the need to do it if people were embracing the nationalistic message willingly.
And the resistance of teachers and the media is a good sign too. Anyway, read the whole thing.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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