Shanghai in the Twenties.

Posted on December 21, 2020 by jsh54

Shanghai was a place to conjure both dreams and nightmares. The city still incarnated Western power over the rest of the world at the start of the Twentieth Century. British and French negotiations with the Chinese government in the 1840s had produced the International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai. These tracts were legally privileged and self-governing areas for European residents. Residents within the Shanghai settlements were exempt from most Chinese taxation. They were tried by Western courts, rather than by Chinese courts. Disputes between Chinese and Westerners were tried in a Mixed Court dominated by foreigners in fact if not in name. The municipal authorities within the Shanghai settlements had legal jurisdiction over all the residents, including the Chinese. But the settlements also exuded a certain ambiguity and vulnerability that could not escape the Westerners. They only amounted to a little over twelve square miles. The exact limits of the Shanghai settlements remained ambiguous since Chinese owned land within the settlements and the foreigners kept trying to extend their authority over additional territory by building roads, water mains, and power lines outside the territory. Moreover, Chinese made up the vast majority of inhabitants of the settlements.[i]

Shanghai meant opportunity. Businessmen came to reap the benefits of abundant cheap labor and raw materials, low taxes, a great port on the South China Sea, and a river into the heart of the much-imagined “China Market.” Civil engineers came to build bridges, dams, and railroads. Ship engineers and sea captains came to run the riverboats and steamers carrying the trade. Bankers, lawyers, doctors, and insurance men—for when the bankers, lawyers, and doctors failed–came to provide their services. Nor were the opportunities solely material. Missionaries and teachers came to provide “oil for the lamps of China.”[ii] The Westerners maintained troops and warships in the Far East to guard their possessions, so there were soldiers and sailors. People with money need entertainment, so the city drew actors and singers, gamblers and bartenders, whores and pimps.

Shanghai also meant danger and always had. In the nineteenth century to be drugged in a waterfront tavern and kidnapped aboard some square-rigged hell-ship bound for the seal fisheries of the Bering Sea was to be “shanghaied.” Now, a revolution that had been roiling China since 1911 created turmoil. Shanghai drew adventurers of all sorts, from criminals on the run to “soldiers of fortune” hoping to hire on with a warlord to young men desperate to escape the humdrum life at home. The police force in the French Concession was in league with the Chinese “Green Gang” to deal in opium in return for the protection of the French territory. For those with fears of a coming race war between Yellow and White, Shanghai appeared to be a flash-point. In 1925 the settlements contained about 37,000 foreigners and 1.1 million Chinese. The total population of Shanghai itself stood at 2.5 million, so the settlements amounted to a great Chinese city under western imperial government.[iii] The psychological effects could be disturbing. One Russian refugee remarked that “China is not only an immense territory, it is a human anthill. Everywhere, in Shanghai, Tientsin, Fuchow, a European feels himself submerged into an enormous swarm of human beings in the midst of which one feels himself defenseless and strange as if he were a creature from another world.”[iv]

In Shanghai East and West thus rubbed up against each other uncomfortably. There seems to have been less friction between the Chinese and the residents of the French Concession than between the Chinese and the Anglo-Saxon residents of the International Settlement. The French assumed that this arose from their own lack of overt racism; the British and the Americans assumed it was because the French were slimy and willing to retreat from any principle in pursuit of gain. In any event, many rich Chinese maintained a house in the French Concession, either because the services were good and the area quiet, or because they wanted a bolt hole in case of trouble in the Chinese city. In the French Concession Chinese dressed in Western clothing were allowed to enter the public park, but anyone not dressed as a Westerner was banned. Conversely, the professors at the Jesuit-run Aurora University on the Avenue Dubail, wore long beards, presumably to associate themselves with the wisdom of the ancients in the minds of their Chinese pupils.[v]

[i] Albert Feuerwerker, The Foreign Establishment in China in the Early Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1976), pp. 3, 5. The International Settlement occupied 8.35 square miles; French concession, 3.9 square miles.

[ii] The phrase comes from the title of one of the books about Westerners in China by Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882-1967). Married to a Standard Oil company executive working in China during the 1920s, Hobart drew on her own experiences in a series of novels and non-fiction works: Pioneering Where the World is Old (1917); By the City of the Long Sand (1926); Within the Walls of Nanking (1928); Pidgin Cargo (1929); and Oil for the Lamps of China (1933). The latter became a best-seller in 1934 and was made into a popular movie.

[iii] Nicholas R. Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Middlebury College Press, 1991), p. 40. There were 29,848 foreigners and 810,378 Chinese in the International Settlement; there were 7,790 foreigners and 289,210 Chinese in the French Concession.

[iv] George C. Guins, “Interview,” University of California Oral History Archive, 1966, p. 273.

[v] Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire, pp. 26-27, 58, 64.

By the Waters of Babylon 2.

Posted on December 19, 2020 by jsh54

In 2019, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) estimated that 51.5 million Americans suffered from some sort of mental illness ranging from minor to severe. Of these, NIMH estimated that 13.1 million suffered from a Serious Mental Illness.[1] About two-thirds received some kind of treatment. Women were much more likely than men to suffer from SMI, but also much more likely to receive treatment. Young people (18-25) were much less likely to receive treatment than were older people.

A couple of recent high-profile cases have brought attention to the interaction of the mentally ill with law enforcement.[2] Entangled as they are with other social issues, the mental illness issue has faded into the background. What gets missed is the sheer complexity of the problems and the wide ranges of people who are affected.

During 2019, the second chapter in a small tragedy concluded. In January 2015, Thomas Gilbert, Jr. shot and killed his father, Thomas Gilbert, Sr.[3] From January 2015 to May 2019, Tom Jr. languished in jail as the court tried to figure out if he was competent to stand trial. Eventually, the presiding judge found him competent.

It seems obvious that he was mentally ill. His mother recounted a promising life gone to ruin from his late teens on. He “didn’t like to be controlled,” so he defied his father by quitting high school soccer. He became obsessed about “contamination” by things and then by other people. His washed his hands obsessively, discarded clothing, furniture, and even college roommates, and stayed away from places like Kennedy airport from fear of contamination. He did a lot of drugs. He left Princeton mid-way through his freshman year to surf in South Carolina, but ended up in a hospital in Charleston after going three days without sleeping.[4] The young man resisted every effort by his parents to get him professional help or even to stay in touch with him.[5] After he eventually graduated from Princeton, he couldn’t get or keep work.

However, none of this is enough to establish mental incompetence or to support an insanity defense. What makes someone “competent” to stand trial? A “defendant is incompetent [only] if he or she is incapable of rationally communicating with his or her attorney or rationally comprehending the nature of the proceedings against him or her…..The threshold for establishing competency is often identified as notoriously low.”[6] Moreover, in New York, the burden of proof is on the accused. The prosecutor here argued that Tom Jr. had long intended to kill his father: he had driven to Ohio to buy the murder weapon seven months before the killing; he had sent his mother out of the apartment on a ruse just before he shot his father. He killed his father because his father has cut off financial aid.

Prosecutors also commonly argue that the accused is shamming. If Tom Jr. was shamming, then he was doing a pretty good job of it in the early stages of his trial. He repeatedly interrupted his own lawyer and objected to his mother’s testimony about his unraveling sanity.

The trial dragged on into late June, when the jury found Thomas Gilbert, Jr., guilty of murder. In September, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole until he had served 30 years.[7]

At least in prison he can be denied access to firearms and be forced to take his medications. His parents had no such power.

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml#:~:text=Mental%20illnesses%20are%20common%20in%20the%20United%20States.,severity%2C%20ranging%20from%20mild%20to%20moderate%20to%20severe. Serious Mental Illness (SMI) defined as “a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.”

[2] Walter Wallace, Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Walter_Wallace; Daniel Prude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Daniel_Prude

[3] See: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2015/01/19/by-the-waters-of-babylon/

[4] So, maybe he was surfing at Folly Beach. See: https://www.islasurfschool-charleston.com/journal/2018/6/11/5-things-to-know-about-surfing-in-charleston

[5] For what it’s worth, see the article on the co-occurrence of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with bipolar disorder (manic-depressive). https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/bipolar-plus-ocd-which-treat-first That seems to my un-tutored eye to be what was happening to Thomas Gilbert, Jr.

[6] See the very useful discussion at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/insanity_defense

[7] You can follow the story in the articles by Edgar Sandoval and others in the New York Times. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/nyregion/thomas-gilbert-jr-is-fit-for-trial-in-wealthy-fathers-death-psychologist-says.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/nyregion/murder-trial-thomas-gilbert.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/nyregion/murder-trial-thomas-gilbert.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/nyregion/murder-trial-thomas-gilbert.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/nyregion/murder-trial-thomas-gilbert-verdict.html?auth=linked-facebook&searchResultPosition=1; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/nyregion/thomas-gilbert-murder-sentence.html;

The Crisis of Democracy 1.

Posted on December 18, 2020 by jsh54

The American Constitution is the product of compromises. If all states were represented equally, the few big, populous states feared being outvoted by many smaller, less populous states; if states were represented on the basis of population, the many small states feared being outvoted by the big, more populous states. Some states depended on slave-based agriculture, while many people in the free states disliked either slavery or the slave-owning elite. As the instrument of the people’s will, many people feared a tyrannical government located far from voters; many others feared “mob rule” (pure democracy). Most recognized that the Articles of Confederation were too weak to defend national interests or even hold the country together in a world full of wolves. The Founders sought to reconcile these tensions by enhancing the powers of the national government in certain specific ways, while reserving other powers to the state government; by dividing power between three co-equal branches of government; and by shoring up individual liberties with a Bill of Rights.

This system of government served well enough to deal with the crises of the 19^th Century: territorial expansion, civil war, and rapid industrialization. What it lacked in efficiency, it generally made up for by fending-off tyranny.

The 20^th Century dropped more challenging problems on the door-step of government. The two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War each required a massive government mobilization. That mobilization enhanced the prestige of the federal government as a problem-solver. That mobilization increased the size, powers, and responsibilities of the executive branch. The tripod created by the Constitution tilted as the Executive branch grew in power while the Legislative and—for a time—the Judicial branches ceded their powers.[1]

These changes were justified in various ways. Obviously, national emergencies demanded a rapid and effective national response. Then the greater ability of the national government, based on its ability to recruit able servants from business, academia, and the civil service, could be offered. Finally, it began to be argued that the President alone was elected by all the people to lead the country. Members of Congress represented only their districts or states, and judges were appointed. Thus, the president enjoyed a unique mandate to govern. The other branches should defer to his (and one day her) leadership in whatever grave hour was at hand.

In recent decades even a modified version of the original Constitution seems ill-matched to the needs of the hour. The country is deeply divided over some issues, so the Congress is polarized to the point of incapacity. The intervention of the courts in issues of national importance sparked an arms race between the parties over which one could pack the courts with sympathetic judges. A number of times, presidents have won a majority in the Electoral College, while winning a minority of the popular vote. Increasingly, presidents have relied upon rule-writing, executive orders, and executive agreements in place of legislation passed by Congress and judged constitutional by the courts. Presidential inaction and action alike arouse bitter commentary in the media. More seriously, perhaps, voter frustration with a government that cannot act fueled “populism.” Now a “crisis of democracy” has become a buzz-term.[2]

[1] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (1973).

[2] I don’t know. Maybe none of this is true. “I just know what I read in the newspapers.”—Will Rogers.

Climate of Fear XXII.

Posted on December 12, 2020 by jsh54

The Paris Climate Accords, which the Obama administration helped negotiate in 2016, contained flaws as well as virtues.[1] The virtues have been sufficiently broadcast, so it is worth looking at two flaws.

First, the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions promised by other countries were purely voluntary. No one except Morocco and Gambia has met their commitments. This lack of enthusiasm about compliance with even voluntary targets provides ammunition to critics of the Accords. If the threat is real, it could be argued, then counties would drive ahead regardless of American participation. If the threat isn’t real, then is the climate crisis being over-hyped? Is the United States being beset by a warming planet or by a combination of ivory tower zealots with rival foreign economies seeking a competitive advantage?[2]

Second, it is not a treaty. It is an executive agreement. Never ratified by the Senate, it never became legally binding on the United States. Furthermore, it could be—and was—abandoned by the United States as soon as a president hostile to the agreement waved good-bye to the moving van that deposited his stuff in the White House. In this sense, the Paris Accords resemble the Versailles Treaty ending the First World War with Germany. Even if the Accords could be converted to a real treaty, it is unlikely that it could get the two-thirds vote needed for ratification. In short, the Democrats need to win more than a simple majority in the Senate to get a legally-binding treaty in place. Even passing the legislation to implement a revived executive agreement could be tricky. This will leave the Biden administration with the same slog through executive orders and rule-writing in which the Obama administration engaged so much energy.

One possible lever on the economy for the Biden administration would be to define climate change as not just an “environmental threat” or as a “national security threat,” but also as a “financial stability threat.” Both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank offer means to impose government policies without new legislation. Both possess robust regulatory powers that can lever corporate policies and investor behavior in new directions.

The Obama-Trump-Biden pattern of rule writing followed by re-writing followed by re-re-writing is dangerous. It turns what should be a predictable framework for decision-making into a quadrennial football. On the one hand, the financial services industry is a vital part of America’s domestic economy and of its international trade. Is it a good idea to build-in systemic uncertainty?

On the other hand, the whole enterprise of governing through rule-writing and executive orders is deeply undemocratic. It further exalts the executive branch; it further diminishes the legislative branch; and it further politicizes the judicial branch.

No matter how much they are loved by their beneficiaries, rapid globalization and the growth of the “administrative state” have not received a unanimous warm welcome. “Brexit” is best understood as a revolt against the European Union. Donald Trump’s election is best understood as a revolt against the dominant policy strand of recent decades. There is no guarantee that the revolt will end if Biden goes back to the same old policies.

[1] Walter Russell Mead, “Climate Finance May Foul the Economy,” WSJ, 8 December 2020.

[2] That’s not what I believe (although both things could be true). It may well make sense in coal country or the oil patch or the “Rust Belt.”

The First Draft of History.

Posted on December 6, 2020 by jsh54

Journalism is said to be the “first draft of history. It’s only the first draft because journalists commonly do what most historians would not. Historians try to give a full picture of what happened and why. Their approach is let the evidence talk to them, then build an argument based on as much evidence as possible. They’re not supposed to leave out important facts that get in the way of an argument they want to make. Even the best journalists can do this.[1]

In 2006, House Minority-Leader Nancy Pelosi saw the opportunity to win control of the House of Representatives by steering toward the center. She lined up a bunch of centrist candidates and defined an agenda focused on material concerns weighing on ordinary Americans. The result? The Democrats added 31 seats in the election and Pelosi became Speaker of the House.[2]

When Barak Obama won election as President in 2008 he carried additional Democrats on his coat-tails. Pelosi joined the Senate Democrats and President Obama in passing the Affordable Care Act, legislation on climate-change, and other costly measures desired by the Democratic left.[3]

In the 2010 mid-term elections Democrat suffered heavy losses to Republicans. Pelosi was relegated to House Minority Leader once again.[4]

After grinding her teeth in frustration at not banging the gavel for eight years, Pelosi steered her caucus back toward the center. She recruited moderate candidates like Colin Lamb and Abigail Spanberger, and she talked down the demands for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Result? Democrats regained a clear majority in the House of Representatives and Pelosi got her old job back.[5]

From 2018 through 2020, the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives indulged in a frenzy of Trump-hunting and leftist legislation that could never pass the Senate or be signed by the White House.[6] It only passed President Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).[7] This was one big thing done in cooperation with the Republican-dominated Senate. Other than that, it’s difficult to think of any significant legislation passed by the Congress in two years.

Strassel concludes that “America remains a center-right country, and there is great political upside for politicians who govern in a center-right fashion.” Was this her starting point?

[1] See Kimberley Strassel, “2020’s Biggest Election Loser’s,” WSJ, 6 November 2020. NB: I have enormous respect for Strassel based on reading her tenacious “I smell a rat” commentary on the Russia investigation.

[2] This was an off-year election, when the party in power normally loses seats in the House.

[3] What this ignores is that Obama had run and won on the issue of universal health-care. This wasn’t Pelosi’s issue. Among the costly bills passed were the not-big-enough stimulus bill to pull the country out of the recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, and the bail-out of the auto industry.

[4] What this ignores is the flight from Keynesian economics on the part of both the Republicans and the Democrats after the financial crisis. While this spawned the “Tea Party” faction within the Republican Party, it also caused President Obama to do much less on economic recovery that he might have tried to do. The recovery from the recession dragged on, antagonizing all sorts of people.

[5] What this ignores is that the Great Recession spawned a Democratic “Tea Party” in the form of Bernie Sanders and “The Squad.” Pelosi found herself under the same harassment as had John Boehner, her Republican predecessor.

[6] Endorsing the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, while making a foredoomed effort to impeach the president.

[7] What this leaves out is that the House and Senate also passed the CARES Act on Covid-related economic stimulus.

The Asian Century 13.

Posted on December 3, 2020 by jsh54

From the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603, r. 1558-1603), England had a special intelligence service dedicated to thwarting the schemes of foreign enemies.[1] Other countries took longer to reach this institutional goal. Many countries assigned this task to intelligence departments of the military, with military attaches in foreign countries operating as case officers for spies.[2] Impressed by the achievements of the British in the Second World War, the United States soon created the Central Intelligence Agency.[3] On the other hand, revolutionary movements caught up in the struggle for power have to improvise. The Bolsheviks created the “Cheka” in 1917.[4] Later it became the OGPU, then the KGB, and now the FSB.[5]

The intelligence service of Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) followed a recognizable track in its own development. It began as a branch of the Peoples’ Liberation Army in the era of the struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government. It continued as such during the wars with Japan, with Kuomintang again, and then with the Americans in Korea from 1937 to 1953.[6] The Ministry of Public Security handled the repression of domestic resistance.

Military domination of intelligence-gathering matched poorly with Deng Xiaoping’s decision to dramatically reorient China after the death of Mao. An opening to the West would involve allowing Westerners relatively unrestricted access to China. This would pose a grave security threat. However, an opening to the West would also permit greatly expanded espionage directed not only against foreign military power, but also against economic and technological targets.[7] In 1983 Deng created the Ministry of State Security (MSS).

In comparison to the Soviet Union, the PRC began at a disadvantage. Many of the Westerners who spied for the Soviets were recruited during the “Devil’s Decades” of the 1920s and 1930s. Social, political, and economic crises created large numbers of foreigners who were true believers in Communism.[8] That intellectual commitment had died long before the MSS began its work. Instead, it has relied upon a combination of lots of money to human agents and lots of technology to invade foreign computer systems.

Has it worked? Yes: spy scandals are becoming ever more common. How much difference has it made? It’s hard to tell because China’s astonishing ascent as a military and economic power has so many roots. Still, in the judgement of experts, “China is today the greatest intelligence threat to U.S. interests.”

[1] Now called MI-6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Domestic counter-intelligence is the province of MI-5, the Security Service. See: Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (1985).

[2] See, for example, Peter Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy-Making, 1933-1939 (2000).

[3] Unfortunately, one of the British advisors to the early CIA turned out to be the Soviet “mole” Kim Philby.

[4] The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

[5] See Christopher Andrew, KGB (1990).

[6] Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil, Chinese Communist Espionage (2020), reviewed by Michael Auslin in WSJ, 2 March 2020. .

[7] Despite President Obama’s huffing and puffing, this was hardly a new approach to hurrying industrialization on the cheap. See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (2004).

[8] See, for examples, the Rosenberg spy ring in the United States, the “Cambridge Five” in Britain, and the “Red orchestra” in Germany and elsewhere.

The Asian Century 12.

Posted on November 30, 2020 by jsh54

China has a huge stake in continuing economic growth. For decades, Communism delivered little to the Chinese people but poverty and suffering. Only a brutal police state kept the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power. After the death of Mao, the CCP re-founded Chinese Communism. Prosperity gained through rapid industrialization and entry into the global market would legitimize CCP rule. Having made this bargain, the Party would have to keep the economy growing faster than either population or the expectations of the Chinese people. A crash or even a serious slowdown would strain the Party’s claim to both omniscience and power.

China has an unbalanced economy.[1] China laid the foundations for its post-Mao economic ascent with investment in heavy industry and mass production of consumer goods for export. The Chinese have a high savings rate that limits the domestic demand for consumer goods, while also limiting the impact of foreign lenders.[2] The government pursued a policy of easy money with interest rates held down regardless of market conditions.

China’s excess of enthusiasm led to over-investment in productive capacity. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, political considerations forestalled a clean-out, so mills and mines proliferated beyond actual demand. The same forces prevented raising interest rates.

China responded to the global recession triggered by the American financial crisis of 2008 with a gigantic stimulus program. After 2008, government-owned heavy industry splurged on adding more productive capacity in basic industries. All of this happened because the central government provided easy credit. Local governments did the same with their own locally-controlled businesses. Private industry—notably property developers and construction companies—built whole “ghost towns” on credit.

China ended up with a more distorted economy as a result of that stimulus program. “Zombie” businesses walked the land like a Chinese opera version of “Twilight.” This led many Western observers to predict a financial collapse that would shake Chinese politics and society. Why didn’t that happen?

China has robust means to resolve its economic problems. It’s not a Western capitalist country or a democracy. Real power rests with the Chinese Communist Party. Zi Jinping has been consolidating control of the Party and of the government in his hands for some time now.

China operates a powerful set of controls on capital flows out of the country, so the savings of the Chinese are readily available to the government. The same controls help shore up the international exchange value of the currency.

Ownership of so much industry and control of the banks allowed Zi to begin shoring-up the financial system from early 2016 onward. China did what Japan had balked at doing years before. It forced mergers and write-downs on loans, sometimes expanding the state’s ownership stake in businesses through taking equity positions. The government pulled back on lending, both by banks and outside the banking system.

Will these reforms suffice to hold off disaster? Probably not. Political concerns limited the clean-out needed for real stability. Meanwhile, real estate and consumer debt have ballooned. There’s always someone who says “This time it’s different.” It never is different.

[1] Thomas Orlik, China: The Bubble That Never Pops (2020), reviewed by Edward Chancellor, WSJ, 27 July 2020.

[2] Foreign lenders, operating with a more capitalistic mind-set, might well have tried to drag on the reins.

The Asian Century 11.

Posted on November 20, 2020 by jsh54

After the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1989, other countries that believed in centrally-planned economies had a Road to Damascus experience.[1] The scales fell from their eyes: adaptation to capitalism and the global market offered the only path to political survival for the elite. China and India embarked on this path with energy and determination.

Along with forced-draft industrialization came an amazing amount of pollution. For example, both steel and cement, two mainstays of China’s economic progress, burn huge amounts of carbon.[2] Local governments have encouraged industrialization though their sponsorship of Town and Village Enterprises (TVEs). The TVEs have long enjoyed a high level of freedom from any meaningful regulation. The coal mines and smelters they operated spewed pollutants[3] into rivers, waste land, and the air. The concentration of China’s population in the great river valleys and along the coastal plain concentrates pollution in those areas as well.

The auditor could add to the price of progress the price of the fruits of progress. China had 5.5 million privately-owned automobiles in 1995; now it has 194.5 million. Mountains—literally–of garbage pile up in unofficial garbage dumps around cities.

For a long time, the Chinese government shrugged it off as the price of progress. Then the public health effects aroused protest and criticism. Myriad statistics suggest that the Chinese are being poisoned by their own success. The infertility rate for couples has risen from 3 percent in 1995 to 15 percent in 2018. Lung cancer deaths rose by 465 percent from 1973 to 2013. Life expectancy in the more industrialized areas is 3.1 years less than in less industrialized areas.

Eventually, the Chinese Communist Party and the government that fronts for it began to take the problem seriously. By this point, however, immense damage had been done and much of China’s economic success was founded on polluting activities. Both changing course for the future and cleaning up the legacy of the past will load heavy burdens on China.

For one thing, there are the economic costs. Shifting from burning coal and oil will require developing “fracking” for natural gas as a reasonable alternative until renewable energy becomes a reality. Shifting from heavy industry to technological and service industries will require development of an appropriate labor force, while leaving large numbers of discontented coal miners and steel workers in its wake.

For another, there are the political problems. Local governments are going to have to manage the reality of angry workers and angry industrialists. But local governments seek to evade the dictates of the central government. Officials in one province responded to an order from Beijing to limit their steel production by continuing to produce at a high level, then trying to hide the extra 50 million tons of steel.[4]

Then there is the possibility that China will seek internal unity through a nationalist foreign policy.[5] With any luck, the latter is alarmism and pessimism. With any luck.

[1] Yanzhong Huang, Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State (2020), reviewed by Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 11 November 2020..

[2] For example, half of China’s blast furnaces produce one-fourth of the world’s steel.

[3] These include lead, cadmium, mercury.

[4] That’s more steel than all of Germany—a one-time world leader—makes in a year.

[5] Volker R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (1973).

The Asian Century 10.

Posted on November 19, 2020 by jsh54

“China is the most significant international threat that America—and the global West generally—now faces. And that will be true for the rest of the Century.”[1] Certainly that seems to be the intention of Xi Jinping. He has been deploying China’s enormous economic power to claim the leading role in Asia for China. First in his sights is Hong Kong, regardless of the terms of the “hand-over agreement” with “Little England.” Next is Taiwan, itself an economic powerhouse. Xi’s Belt and Road initiative is also shouldering China into a role in many other corners of the globe.

For its part, what John Bolton calls “the global West” seems to be knocked back on its heels. The phrase “crisis of democracy” is frequently used.[2] The financial crisis and the drawn-out “Great Recession,” “globalization,” and mass immigration (much of it unregulated and unwelcome) all cast into doubt the effectiveness of the democratic state as a model for progress. The same forces intensified nationalist forces, which sometimes take an authoritarian form. Both Brexit and Donald Trump’s version of “America First” show how far beyond the fringe this mood has spread. All these developments may have sharpened China’s appetite.

Much remains unknown. Is the “global West” really suffering a crisis of democracy? Or is it just having a fit of the sulks after victory in the long struggle with aggressive tyrannies?

How strong is China really? Deng Xiaoping had set the country on the capitalist road with sweeping political and economic reforms intended to create a market economy. Chinese industriousness and thrift would do the rest. By and large, this vision has come true. Undoubtedly, Japan and the United States provided a lot of help through investments and voluntary transfer of intellectual property, but China’s own efforts explain the lion’s share of its success. Now China has the second largest economy in the world.

Now some observers see strains on the foundations of China’s power. Xi Jinping has reversed course on many reforms. He is moving the Party and the State more and more tightly under his control. He is moving China’s economy back toward Party and State control. If a market economy and global integration raised China up, then the new course might lay it low.

In times of crisis, China does things that reveal the true nature of its government: brutal and secretive. The suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, the repression of what Americans call “diversity” (Tibet, Uighurs), and its hiding of the truth about Covid-19 in 2019-2020 provide examples of a robust dictatorship responding to its own fears. Is China’s foreign policy another example of a state acting from fear, rather than from strength? Taiwan’s rival model of economic organization effects can’t be ignored by people on the mainland. One might see the fixation on Taiwan as driven by concern for present problems as much as by historical memory of the Qing dynasty.

There are real dangers here. Both Lenin and Hitler refused to wait on History. They tried to hurry it forward to the destination they had appointed for it.

[1] John Bolton (Yes, that John Bolton), “Beijing Never Got the Memo,” WSJ, 16 November 2020, review of Dan Blumenthal, The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State (2020).

[2] Not without reason. See: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2020/11/04/crisis-of-democracy/

Hidden History.

Posted on November 16, 2020 by jsh54

Robert Harris is the author of a series of historical-fiction thrillers.

Munich (2017). The 1938 conference between German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, French prime minister Edouard Daladier, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain marked the high point of Appeasement. While both Hitler and Chamberlain believed in what they were doing, other people on both sides had their doubts. Some of these people, British anti-appeasers and German anti-Nazis, tried to undermine their own leaders. Could knowledge of German plots to topple Hitler be communicated to the British? Could British anti-appeasers use this knowledge to shift Chamberlain toward a harder line? Would a harder line by the British provide an excuse to overthrow Hitler before he could set fire to the whole world?

Enigma (1995). One secret of the Second World War was British victory in breaking the code system, called “Enigma,” used by the German military for all radio communications. This allowed the British to read all enemy radio traffic, but with occasional, nerve-racking interruptions. A second, less well-preserved, secret of the Second World War was the Russian massacre in 1940 of thousands of captured Polish army officers. The mass graves were discovered by the German invaders in 1943.[1] Harris supposes that an Anglo-Polish cryptographer discovers the truth. Revealing it could wreck the Russo-British alliance.

V2 (2020). As the Second World War turned decisively against Germany, Hitler unleashed “vengeance weapons” created by advanced science. First, the V-1 “flying bombs,” then the V-2 ballistic missiles began to rain down on allied cities. Is there any way—technological or human—to halt the attacks? The question racks both an Allied intelligence officer and a German scientist tormented by his own deal with the Devil.

Fatherland (1992). Long after Nazi victory in the “last European war,” a German homicide detective discovers the Holocaust. Here Harris is thinking-through the implications of a German victory: a “united” Europe is dominated by Germany; the Soviet Union has been thrust back away from Europe; American “appeasers” (Joseph P. Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh) now head the government of the United States; and the Holocaust has been kept so completely secret that thought about the Jews never enter anyone’s noggin. Now, on the eve of a Hitler-Kennedy summit meeting, the truth starts to leak.

Harris is fascinated by the hidden parts of historical events. Knowledge of the German resistance to Hitler only came out after the war and then in dribbles; the Nazis meant for the Holocaust to remain hidden from history and all but one copy of the minutes from the Wannsee Conference were destroyed; at Nuremberg, the Katyn Wood massacre was blamed on the Germans; and the Enigma story remained secret until 1974.[2] In dramatizing these events, Harris restates a basic lesson of history. It didn’t have to be this way. People create History by the decisions they make and the actions they take.

He also leaves the reader wondering “What else is still hidden?”

[1] For another fictional take on the Katyn Wood discovery, see Philip Kerr, A Man without Breath (2013).

[2] See Peter Hoffmann, The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945 (1977); F.W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (1974); Allen Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Polish Massacre (1991)..