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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When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine ‘One nation, two systems’.
Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style ‘harmonizing’ of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.
…the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the “Article 23” measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong’s laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of “state secrets” in line with China’s.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong’s people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.
The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests
(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)
So the ‘heroic’ human shields found Iraq not worth laying down their lives for? I previously asked why they weren’t in Kuwait City when Iraq invaded. David Carr suggested jokingly next year North Korea, but I doubt if they would be welcome. The place that needs defending right now from the threat of massive chemical and possibly nuclear destruction is South Korea.
If the human shields were anything more than stooges for Communist evil, they would be in Seoul, Pusan, or forming a chain across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ). If it is of any help to the peacenik who may be reading, try this link for info on places to visit along the border.
I’m not holding my breath.
This has been my 100th posting on Samizdata. Thanks to Brian, Adriana and especially Perry for their patient explanations of this medium, and to all the readers and commentators, who make it all worthwhile. Well sort of 
China is a country that appears to be attracting increasing interest from the blogosphere and elsewhere and not without good reason. We all sense the potential lurking in this Asian giant. Depending upon one’s point of view this is either worrying or exciting or, possibly, both.
Only yesterday I took delivery of a new dining table and set of chairs and couldn’t help the raised eyebrow upon noticing the legend ‘Made in China’ stamped on the box. Jolly smart it is too.
I admit to being lured into the ranks of the China-watchers, so I tend to regard throwaway news items like this to be noteworthy:
“China has allowed its citizens to buy gold bullion for the first time since the Communist Party took power in 1949.
Shoppers queued on Thursday to look at gold bars on sale in department stores in Beijing and the southern city of Nanjing
Other moves to develop the gold market include plans for Chinas big four commercial banks to offer gold-related investment products to individual investors next year.”
How ironic that, despite the unarguable ghastliness of their ruling regime, the Chinese are constantly embracing new ideas of enterprise and weath-creation whilst the ruling elites of the West are searching for ever-more elaborate ways of suffocating both.
For us fans of capitalism, watching China is a bit like watching a child develop, from the first utterance of ‘Mamma’ to taking the stabilisers off of their bikes.
Just wait until those hormones begin to kick in!
Brian asked if Japan was only pretending to do badly. He seemed to think that there were some grounds for doubting the news of Japanese economic stagnation.
Looking at the World Economic Freedom report I discovered the following interesting figures.
- Income Tax top rates as percentages:
(1st figure 1990), (2nd 1995), 3rd 2000.
Japan 65, 65, 50
USA 33, 42, 42
UK 40, 40, 40
Ireland 58, 48, 42
Sweden 72, 58, 51
OECD average 53, 50, 47
- Corporate Taxes (including regiuonal, state, local etc),
also top rates as percentages: 1990, 1995, 2000
Japan 42, 42, 42
USA 40, 40, 40
UK 30, 30, 30
Ireland 24, 20, 16
Sweden 28, 28, 28
OECD average 34, 33, 31
Note that Japan is consistently higher than the OECD average. Note also that Sweden’s business taxation always was low. The US corporate taxes may be close to Japan’s, but the US economy hasn’t needed tax cuts for the past ten years to stimulate growth.
My conclusion is that Japanese “stimulus packages” are clearly not addressing incentives to produce.
Finally, the overall ranking between 1990 and 2000 is highly revealing:
USA 3rd in 2000, 4th in 1990
UK 4th (2000), 6th (1990)
Ireland 7th (2000), 20th (1990)
Sweden 19th (2000), 26th (1990)
JAPAN 24th (2000), 7th (1990)
Before David Carr wonders how the heck a Labour government pushed the UK up 2 places: 1) independent Bank of England, 2) you should have seen what other governments were like…
A case example of (relative) economic freedom being a precondition for (relative) economic prosperity.
Good news! Samizdata.net is still accessible in China, at least as of this morning! A few months back we did get a couple e-mails from Chinese readers, so it is good to know that the Great (Internet) Wall of China has some holes in it, no thanks to collaborators Cisco and Oracle (may the great EMP from the sky strike them down).
- Communist China: GDP per capita (2001) $4,300 per year
- Capitalist Taiwan: GDP per capita (2001) $17,200 per year
- You are four times better off under capitalism
So here are a few things you are not supposed to see in China. Now stop messing around on the Internet and go out and conspire with someone to overthrow the state, willya!
All change in China this week, as the ‘old guard’ of the ruling Communist Party step down in favour of younger, more vigourous leaders.
So change only in terms of personel, not policies. The new boys would not have been allowed within light years of the reins of power were they not commited to continued rule by the Party.
But that doesn’t mean that it is going to be easier for them to do so. For the last 20 years or so China has been moving from command to market economy and now over 50% of the GDP is generated by the private sector. The changes have been formally recognised by the decision to allow ‘capitalists’ to join the Party so that their interests can be represented as well. Yes, that is absurd but how else are the ruling elite going to cope with changes and stay in power?
Capitalism in China now appears to be irreversible so the big question is how long the present political architecture stand erect against the hurricanes of economic change on the ground.
183 people at least are dead, probably more as 220 Australians and 20 or so British remain unaccounted for. All the victims were civilians, mostly young backpackers on holiday or the Indonesian staff serving them. Yet judging by what I seen written by John Pilger or Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky since September 11th of last year, I thought the reason terrorists are attacking ‘us’ was something to do with injustice in Palestine? Is Bali part of Palestine? How many Palestinians have the Australian Army killed?
I recall hearing that the WTC was attacked because it was a symbol and centre of exploitive capitalism and the US military industrial complex. And what exactly was the Sari Club in Bali a symbol of? Will the people on WarbloggerWatch or at New Stateman tell us how the forces of US imperialism have been thwarted by the death of so many young Aussies and others in a holiday resort?
What was that you said? It is all about oil? Ah, silly me.
Evil-white-male and immodest un-Islamic
Australian woman flee Bali attack last night
The Jemaah Islamiyah organisation, which is part of the Al Qaeda network, has killed around 180 people, mostly Australian, American and British tourists in the Indonesian holiday resort of Bali. I have been to Bali myself and it is a glorious place. Although Indonesia is the worlds most populous Muslim nation, Bali has a majority Hindu population.
People are already asking what can be done about the ‘root causes’ of this horror. Well sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is a justified struggle against injustice. To deal with the ‘root cause’, one should therefore work to remove the injustice. But sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is the unjustified defence of a collective order against those who would reject it. In such cases the way to ‘mitigate’ that violence is by putting a 7.62mm hole in the head of those who would perpetrate or enable such acts.
Find the people who planned this, the people who carried it out and the people who support them. Find them and you find the only ’cause’ that matters. Rip their ‘root cause’ out by the roots and apply a blow torch. Kill them. I don’t give a damn what their grievances are. Just kill them.
The only rational response
Blogger Alan K. Henderson has a rather flattering idea for protests at the Beijing Olympics.
After reading about Yahoo’s complicity with the Chicoms, I started thinking about the Beijing Olympics. Maybe everyday American spectators could sneak in a little protest here and there. The only idea I have right off the bat is strategically chosen wardrobe. Shirts emblazoned with the Taiwanese flag or that famous photo of the guy standing in front of the Tianenmen tanks might not get past customs (American inspectors might seize them, for all we know – don’t want to upset our partners in peace ). But Samizdata T-shirts are another matter; inspectors won’t think twice about them, and even though Chinese locals won’t know what the eye-in-the-pyramid logo means, they’ll probably ask…
Alan K. Henderson
[Editor: of course if they look at the back of the T-shirts and see the slogan ‘When the state watches you, dare to stare back’ they might have a teeny inkling that these shirts might not be indicative of enthusiasm for the collectivist world view]
Absolutely, Perry, I couldn’t agree more though moral (un)ambiguity of collaborating (via commerce or otherwise) with a repressive regime was not in question at all. My point was either you condemn Yahoo! for doing business with China in the first place or boycott them all, not just Yahoo! as other global companies are guilty of the association with or assistance to the Chinese government.
The argument that Yahoo!’s measures are “analogous to Coca Cola agreeing to embed a recording device in each bottle so that the state can hear what each person is talking about whilst they sip their drink” does not fairly capture the moral charge of the comparison. Yahoo!’s business is communication, mediation and information and these are not intrinsic to Coca Cola’s business. That is, Yahoo! by the very nature of its business has to comply with the Chinese government requirements or not do any business at all. If Coca Cola company installed listening devices into its bottles, it would amount to a step beyond the one Yahoo has taken in agreeing to allow monitoring of its services de jure, so to speak, (which the Chinese officials can carry out de facto anyway).
As with Coca Cola, it is communism’s hapless victim for the most part who are able to surf the internet even in its truncated form. And they know very well (or should) what their government is capable of and will not (or should not) be using it in a way that will expose them or get them into trouble. For example, in the Cold War days dissidents knew that phones were not reliable and tried to use them ‘safely’, i.e. in a way difficult for authorities to decypher.
Again, I agree that it was wrong for Yahoo! to take that step and do prefer Microsoft’s hard headed approach (there is a first for everything!). So, boycott Yahoo! alongside those companies who in dealing with China help its officials to repress their victims instead of treating Yahoo! as the only big business without a back-bone.
It’s easy to be shocked this side of firewall. I do not like Yahoo!’s complicity with the Chinese communists either but if we are to boycott them for it, let’s not leave out Cisco, for example. It was Cisco who provided the infrastructure that made Yahoo!’s self-censorship a gesture of compliance necessary for continuing their business in China at all:
In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers. In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive websites, now and forever.
The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a website outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites. The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: “Operation timed out.” Great, but China’s leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world. To force compliance with government objectives–to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome–they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale. According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government’s telecom monopoly. At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom “bought many thousands” and IBM arranged for the “high-end” financing. Michael confirms: “Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere.”
True, freedom and opposition to a brutal regime should be more important than profits and voicing our disgust with global companies’ perverse priorities is necessary to alter them. By the way, Perry, did anyone call for a boycott of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies during the Cold War? I remember the drinks in their distinctive bottles that put some fizz into my rather gloomy childhood under communism. Hmmm. 
The issue is more complicated than a simple call for boycott of the global companies that have more than the Western face and are operating in repressed political regimes. In the article by Ethan Gutmann, “Who Lost China’s Internet?” (quoted above), a Yahoo! representative puts forward a kind of ‘moral appeasement’ case given the two options – either you please the Chinese state ‘big mama’ watching the Internet or the Chinese people have no internet at all.
It is interesting, to say the least, that it was Microsoft who did not give in to the Chinese authorities and demonstrated that what is “normal” in China can be altered under duress.
When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software’s underlying source codes–the keys to encryption–as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands. Theoretically, China’s desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage. Instead, the leverage all seems to have remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor. AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency.
So, boycott them all or ask ourselves whether “there is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and make them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking”.
Ace blogger John Weidner of Random Jottings has written about a truly shocking decision by Yahoo to help the Chinese government censor the Internet for the 1 billion people living in China (and of course that open air prison camp called Tibet).
There is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and that is to made them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking: Boycott Yahoo!
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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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