July 29 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese stocks plunged the most in eight months, dragging emerging markets lower, on speculation the government will curb investment to prevent a bubble. Oil led a drop in commodities.
The Shanghai Composite Index fell 5 percent, its biggest decline since Nov. 18, snapping a five-day, 7 percent advance. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index sank 1.6 percent to 823.04 at 3:12 p.m. in London, the biggest decline since July 6. Oil and copper fell the most in three weeks. The dollar rose as investors shunned higher-yielding currencies.
“Speculation the central bank may take steps to rein in liquidity worried the market,” said Gabriel Gondard, deputy chief investment officer at Fortune SGAM Fund Management Co., which oversees about $7.2 billion in assets. “A lot of people were looking to take profits” in China, he said.
Stimulus doesn't work. It creates bubbles. The CBoC (Central Bank of China) now realizes what it has created and that it must stop expanding the money supply or risk the complete destruction of the yuan.
I thought I'd go ahead and do a post about basic Chinese table-manners. There are a lot of other customs and manners of general behavior that feed into what is considered proper table etiquette, but they are far too numerous to go into in detail for a brief essay. This basic accounting of proper behavior and what to expect should get the Western visitor to China through dinner without embarrassing himself too badly.
Place Setting
When you take your seat at the table, you will most likely be met with a small rice bowl that is slightly larger than a teacup, a pair of chopsticks, and, optionally, a plate. In the center of the table, sometimes on a large Lazy-Susan style spinning platform will be arranged a wide array of dishes, all approximately the same size. The table will almost invariably be round, especially if there is to be a large number of people.
Somewhere there will be a communal pot of rice, though often this is not on the table. The number of dishes in the center of the table should be about the same as the number of guests, and will always be about the same size wherever you encounter them. With scant few exceptions, Chinese do not increase proportionally the size of a recipe to feed more guests. They cook more separate dishes.
You will likely not get a drink, and sometimes not a napkin. With the exception of alcohol, Chinese do not drink during a meal. You will usually be served tea after the meal, and often there will be a soup during the meal. This is for "drinking." Be forewarned: a lot of Chinese food is exceptionally hot. Be careful about what you chomp down on, for this reason and for others, and plan ahead if you do not normally eat a lot of spicy food.
Chopsticks
Chopsticks are not that hard to operate, though it does take some practice. If you know you will be eating formally in the near future, better practice a little ahead of time. You may use a fork if you like without offending anybody, but the reality is that Chinese food was designed to be eaten with chopsticks. I find it easier to learn to use the chopsticks than to try to insist on using a fork in a system that was not designed for it. But suit yourself. Nobody will hold it against you if you do choose to opt for the fork.
The basics of using chopsticks are pretty simple. Hold your hand in as if writing with a pencil, then turn your hand 90 degrees so that your thumbnail is facing up. Place one "stick" in a fixed position through the crook of your thumb and resting on your middle finger, and hold the other with the tip of your thumb and your index finger so that you can manipulate it, kind of like a pencil. You will likely be tempted to "choke up" on the chopsticks by holding them close to the tips that you will be eating from in an attempt to gain more control. Don't do this; hold them about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way up the shaft, with only a couple of inches hanging over the back side of your hand. If you "choke up" too much, you won't get enough range of motion from the chopsticks to make them usable.
Practice a good bit. It takes a while to get it just right. Always hold your hand with the "thumb-side" up. Turning your hand over, for example, to reach something far away, can make it considerably easier to pick up certain items, but is considered impolite. Avoid doing so if possible.
You may be served "buns," dumplings, or other unwieldy objects that are difficult to pick up. This can often be overcome by stabbing the food with your chopsticks (both of them) and eating it like a corndog. This seems like it would be horribly impolite to a Westerner, but Chinese think nothing of it. You will likely see them doing it as well. So, go right ahead, unless you can think of something better.
Some food will not lend itself to stabbing. I don't know what to tell you in this predicament, except to either avoid these kinds of foods or just do the best you can, but never, ever touch your food with your hands! More on this later.
Serving Your Food
You will be served rice, enough to fill about two-thirds of your bowl. Don't worry if you think this isn't enough for you; you'll be offered plenty more. You will be taking portions from the communal dishes at the center of the table, which will generally get rotated around to serve all the guests.
Always take only a few bites from any one plate, and always place the food into the bowl!Never put food directly onto your plate! This isn't a Western style buffet. You are not filling up your plate and coming back for seconds. Place a few bites into your rice-bowl, eat them, then get a few more. Repeat this until the end of the meal. Unlike Western rice, Chinese cook their rice to come out sticky. This is so that it will stick to the food better and is easier to pick up with chopsticks. Use this to your advantage. Roll around bites of food in the rice to pick some up and then eat it.
Chinese Food
At this point, you are probably wondering what the plate is for if you aren't going to put any food on it. Basically, the plate is for spitting.
You probably think you know what Chinese food is like because you have eaten many times at Chinese restaurants. You are wrong. This food is nothing like actual Chinese food. The guys who own the restaurants are out to make a buck, so they make food Americans want to eat. They add lots of sugar, deep fry pretty much everything, cut out most of the spices, and follow most of our conventions, especially when it comes to cutting meat and processing spices.
These two final points are critical. Westerners typically cut meat roughly in accordance with anatomy, so that bones are kept whole whenever possible. Chinese consider it a mark of culinary excellence be able to cut clear through bones in regular geometric shapes, all anatomical considerations thrown to the wind. So a drumstick comes out in about eight slices that look like meat donuts with a bone core. Ribs are cut down to three-quarter inch bits.
There are little bits of bone in everything. There are also bits of unprocessed spices, such as whole peppercorns. If you simply chomp down into your food, you will often find yourself experiencing some very unpleasant textures, bone chips, and periodic "flavor explosions" far beyond what was intended. You must be very careful of the little bits of bone and hard spices scattered throughout the food.
Chinese basically sort through the food in their mouths and spit out all the inedible bits onto the plate. We Westerners don't generally have the oral dexterity for this and wind up picking through our food with our chopsticks. Be careful what dishes you take from. Having an "ally" at the table who knows the dishes and can recommend what to avoid helps. I generally avoid meat altogether.
Oh, and if you don't get a plate, which is fairly common, all this inedible stuff goes directly on the table.
Hygiene
Chinese have some very strict rules of "behavioral hygiene." They are far more strict than Western rules. Basically, some things are considered clean, other things are not clean. Nothing which is clean is allowed to touch anything which is not clean. If it does, it becomes unclean, too. Pretty simple, and common sense, right? Kind of like not eating off the floor. That's pretty much it. Reasonable enough.
Most of it is pretty simple, really. Your chopsticks, the food, the bowls, and your mouth are all clean. The table, the floor, and the rest of your anatomy including your hands are not. Do not let your chopsticks touch the table. If food drops to the table, or elsewhere, do not touch it again. Do not try to clean it up. Just leave it alone. Never touch your food with your hands, unless you see others doing it and only that particular dish.Never, ever put your hands or fingers in your mouth for any reason. This is a very strict taboo. You will be considered dirty and barbaric if you break it badly. Do not place food you are going to eat on the spitting plate, either, because it is dirty.
On the other hand, since that's really all there is to it, some of the logical consequences become bizarre to Westerners, particularly the fact that there is no distinction between your chopsticks, your bowl, and your mouth and everybody else's. For example there are rarely serving spoons with the dishes you are helping yourself from. You just use your own chopsticks, as does everyone else. Also, eating is a far more communal exercise in China than in the West, as you could probably guess from the description so far. Your neighbors at the table, often complete strangers, will likely take it upon themselves to "help you" by depositing things in your bowl. Not at your request, whether you like it or not, and using their own chopsticks which they have been eating with and occasionally spitting into on the way to the spitting plate.
This is in violation of many Western taboos, not to mention the germ theory of disease, but it is perfectly normal to Chinese. It's best not to fight this behavior. Just accept it and get used to it.
Needless to say, many Western dishes are often held to be somewhat disgusting because they are eaten with the hands, such as hamburgers, pizza, and the like. Also, our instinct if we see something dirty is to clean it up. Not in China. Cleaning dirty things involves touching dirty things, rendering you dirty. You don't do this unless you have to. Public places in China are generally much dirtier than here, but people consider themselves clean because they have habits that they think allow them to avoid contact with it. American's generally keep things cleaner but break these conventions. Two different approaches to the same problem.
Formalisms
Actually, the surprising thing about formalisms is how few there actually are. Western eating habits are littered with formalisms in comparison with Chinese. So luckily, there is very little to learn in this regard, but the lack of formalism can be difficult to deal with, too.
For example, nobody will ever say "pass the salt" or request anything else, either. People just take what they want. This is not as chaotic and disruptive as it might sound. For one thing, the food is considered to already be salted; no more is necessary. For another, the food and any "condiments" are usually on the spinning platform, so you can almost always get what you want just by spinning it.
Don't worry about sitting up straight or not leaning your arms against the table. Belching, slurping, chewing with one's mouth open and speaking with one's mouth full, snorting, and clearing phlegm from one's throat (ahem) are all perfectly acceptable and are generally done enthusiastically and loudly in my experience. It is not considered impolite not to do these things, although your hosts may remark that you are unusually quiet. No change in behavior is therefore necessary on your part, but in general you will have to learn to ignore these behaviors in others. It sounds like it should be trivial, but I've found that most Westerners who have eaten with me at a Chinese table have had difficulty controlling themselves. I've seen even something as simple as chewing very loudly set them off. You don't understand if you haven't experienced it yourself.
In general, expect many violations of Western formalisms, some you don't even know about consciously. But on the bright side, there won't be many expected of you.
I have been told that this was not always the case. In ancient China, there were very elaborate systems of manners. But that seems to have all fallen by the wayside with the coming of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. This is one thing that I find China and America have very much in common: the celebration of equalitarianism and the rejection of class by Chinese Communism and American Democracy winds up leading to a sort of celebration of the vulgar and the crass. China has given up on its elaborate formalized systems of manners, and America has Paris Hilton & Company setting its cultural agenda.
If you engage in Western formalisms, such as placing your unused hand in your lap, it may be noticed by your hosts, and they may ask you about it. In this particular case, you may want to just hold your rice bowl with your other hand, as this is perfectly acceptable by both standards and can even make eating a little easier. In other cases, you'll just have to use your own judgment.
Interacting with Others
Eating is a lot more social among Chinese than among Westerners. I have already pointed out the serving of food to guests by one's neighbors. Another is the raising of "cheers," which is quite rare among us Westerners, but pretty common among Chinese. (Yes, I know I just said you probably won't get a drink at the beginning. Drinking is more of a social function than part of the meal. Just go with it.)
Despite the popular stereotype that "Asians can't drink" because of a genetic difference that causes them to turn very red, Chinese drink far more than most Americans I have ever encountered. Yes, they turn red. They keep drinking anyway.
I've seen six and eight year-olds order beer at public restaurants. Nobody thinks anything of it. Nobody cares. In all probability, you will be coaxed into drinking far more than is good for you if you are a man, and you may even be coaxed into it if you are a woman.
The Chinese for "cheers" is gam bei, which means "empty cup." Somebody calls for it, maybe gives a little speech with his glass raised, and everybody says "gam bei" at the end and touches glasses together and drinks. Be sure to get everybody in the glass touching, especially if you are the guest. Expect to be doing this ten to fifteen times per meal if alcohol is served. Which is a lot of the time.
Compliments, and especially their rejection, are a big part of Chinese polite conversation. You will receive lots of compliments if you go to China. The polite thing to do is reject them, and offer a compliment of your own to the other party. This goes on back and forth for an extraordinary length of time, with ever more strenuous rejection and insistence by each party. Basically, compliments turn into endless streams of arguments. This may sound rather normal, but you have no idea until you've actually encountered it. After awhile, it will drive you crazy.
I didn't really understand this the first time I went to China, thanks to my wife not preparing me in the slightest beforehand, so I just said "thank you," and moved on with the conversation. My hosts all thought this was incredibly funny for reasons I did not understand. Eventually, people made a game out of seeing who could give the most outrageous compliment to see if I would accept it. You would not believe the things I was told. They were just having fun with me, but it was all very confusing to someone who did not understand what was going on.
Probably the most frustrating thing you will encounter in this regard is the excessive offerings of your hosts. You will constantly be offered things, some of which are not appropriate to take. Your neighbors at the table will keep your bowl perpetually full. This may sound like not such a big deal; after all, your hosts are just trying to be generous. But there is likely something about yourself that you do not realize yet. You will feel obligated to take them because they were offered. You will try to eat everything in your bowl, and it will bother you a great deal that you cannot finish and they keep piling on. You will probably be sick from overeating a lot of the time, and will very much dread mealtimes after the first few.
Basically, the best thing to do is just eat as much as you can, and leave you what you can't eat. Don't kill yourself trying to eat it all. They will insist that you "eat more." You just have to argue back that you are quite full, kind of like the way you argue about the compliments. You will feel the whole thing is quite wasteful, but you just have to accept it.
If you are a man, you will almost certainly be offered liquor and cigarettes. If you do not drink or smoke, and you insist on not doing so while you are visiting, realize that you will offend your host very badly. They will not accept that a man does not drink or smoke, as this is an alien concept to them. It may be worth it to you, or it may not, but that is what is going to happen. Just be mindful of it.
Your hosts are out to look very generous towards their guests. Even if you find some things to be wasteful or in bad taste, it is best to just let them slide and try to get along. They are just doing their best to be good hosts. We Westerners have lost a lot of this in our culture, and in some respects we are probably the poorer for it.
Conclusion
Chinese manners and customs are quite a bit different from Western customs, and if you haven't yet experienced eating real Chinese food among native Chinese, you are probably in for a shock or two. Luckily, the culture is very forgiving of transgression, quite welcoming, friendly, and accepting of foreigners. Hopefully, with this little bit of guidance, you will find navigating the dining experience to be a bit less stressful and more fun.
It's so much fun to read Fred Reed when he's making fun of other people. But it is particularly fun when he is picking on you:
Middle-class albinobaptists have been…a catastrophe. Boring. Horribly boring. They remain so.
...
They were scrupulously honest, worked hard, and made good neighbors. They prized civic responsibility, good manners, and good grammar, because the lower class didn’t.
But they didn’t dance, never read anything wilder than Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, didn’t care for music, and generally made Mormon missionaries look like party animals.
Ha! Nobody makes fun of people in a more insightful way than Fred Reed. Delightful article! He's the best.
But you know, it occurs to me that I know a certain albinobaptist who quit a perfectly decent pencilpushing job here in the states, ran away to Mexico, got hitched, wound up broke, and came back with a whole passel of stories to tell. He also plays a mean electric guitar that could give Mark Knopfler or Jimmy Page a run for his money. Scandinavian descent, even. And yes, he knew all about those Democrat ladies. As I recall he used to hang around these parts.
So maybe there is a little hope for boring old whitey-baptists like us.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
I for one know that I am incredibly guilty of this unforgivable literary sin, and I hereby pledge to cut down on my abuse of the English language. It really is quite pretentious and unnecessary to write this way. Back in school, I always got compliments for my writing abilities, mostly because I was pretty good at writing that kind of garbage. It impresses people for some reason, much more so than actually articulating anything insightful, it seems.
But Orwell is right, and I'm glad Fran provided the link.
Who knows? Maybe if I put in a little more effort it will make my ramblings more readable. People might actually start reading this blog...
There is more to this essay than writing style. I recommend you read the rest of it, even if you have no intention of ever being a writer. He goes on to discuss the way this habit of using pre-assembled verbage becomes an influence on the actual message of the writing and even the mind of the writer. The structure of words begin to dictate the structures of thought. Mind control through language ... scary! And it seems to me that it is true. Orwell was the master at seeing these kinds of things. Maybe I should start reading a bit of Orwell, too.
Gary North brings up this topic quite a bit as well, with the same general opinion: simpler is better. But in this essay, Orwell proves to me just how critical the issue actually is. Gary had his points, but now I am finally fully persuaded.
It is time to make the change for good.
Just a year ago I was doing some random surfing when I came across a blog comment "Who is John Galt?". I wasn't the only one not to get the inside joke as several comments followed trying to describe who was John Galt. I was then introduced to the book Atlas Shrugged. A website cited a poll listing it as the second most influential book in peoples lives, behind the Bible. So I thought I should add this to my list of things to do before I die. Luckily I didn't do what I typically do with items on that list; I usually forget them. I acquired the book read it over several weeks (I must be a slow reader as it is only 1200 pages of light reading). I found it a good read, and I might say even influential and slightly life changing. As the Fall election fever ramped up I started to have déjà vu. It seemed the political ramblings and foreboding of Obama's potential election were scenarios right out of Atlas Shrugged. Then Obama won. The prescient political ramblings were coming to pass. However, it wasn't the modern media that appeared prophetic, but a book written over fifty years ago. While you may not be an Ayn Rand Objectivist, please tell me if this doesn't send a shiver up your back:
Panel member Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said his concern goes further...
"Every day I guess I get a little more concerned about what the administration is doing in regard to the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies. It seems to me that literally the administration is declaring war on capitalism," Smith said.
Smith said a friend of his in Florida owned three thriving dealerships and was told to close the Chrysler dealership, a $2 million dollar investment, with a three-week notice. "Then the dealership was transferred to his competitor across town, and no one can figure out why one person was being rewarded and another punished," Smith said.
So I need to pick up the book again, but gosh this sounds a lot like the "Equalization of Opportunity Bill" or the "Anti-dog-eat-dog" rule. Either example demonstrates what happens when control of business is passed to the government. Favors are passed to the players.
Prodigiously Prophetic! But who will be our John Galt?
PS I am good friends with the former Chrysler dealership owner in my small town. After 75 years of profitable service he was shut down. Now it is a 250 mile trip north or 200 mile trip south to get warranty work completed. The new service locations are so nice that if the car breaks down in this previously serviced city, they will come tow it to their distant service center (Meaning they pay someone to drive 400-500 miles roundtrip in a tow truck to pickup your car). The bad thing is you have to find transportation to the service center to pick up your repaired car. The former dealership in town is willing to do warranty work, but is not allowed. Tell me how this will save anybody money. 10 bonus marks for the parallel narrative in Atlas Shrugged to my personal story.
You may remember Dmitry Orlov from a post I put up when I first started this blog. Here's a great interview with him on the impending collapse of the US.
---Update!---
I also put a link to his blog in the list of blogs in the right-hand panel.
I would imagine that the surging stock market and my silence concerning it has a lot of people wondering if I'm pouting that I've been spectacularly wrong, or perhaps even contemplating coming to my senses, giving up on my Mad Max predictions of American apocalypse, and joining the economic mainstream.
The short answer is: neither. I'm sticking to my guns. The economy is still toast.
So why the stock market rally? What of these "green shoots?"
In case you've been living under a rock in the furthest corner of the deepest cave on planet earth for the past six months, the US government has been spending extraordinary volumes of money, running up tremendous levels of debt, and printing fantastic quantities of brand new dollars in an asset buying spree that would make a Zimbabwean central banker blush. This is all a Keynesian effort to spur "aggregate demand." Which is to say, it is an attempt to get businesses to keep doing exactly what they've been doing to make money throughout the bubble years, even though it is now known that the bubbles were bubbles, they weren't actually operating in a profitable fashion through quite a lot of it, and the stupidity of their behaviors has been revealed by the recent crash.
But in the absence of knowing what to do, it appears that our leaders prefer that we do something as opposed to doing nothing, despite the fact that it is doing nothing that would reveal to us just what constructive activity we really ought to do next. I suppose they figure that doing the old something is preferable to the attractive new something of burning things down in anger over the mismanagement of our monetary system.
Ahh, the irresistable logic of the fascist "cult of action."
So, by pumping the system artificially full of money and supplying loads of artificial demand, the government has put the pedal to the metal. Problem is, the transmission is in neutral.
So, we feel like things are moving and shaking, stuff is happening, and we're getting somewhere. There's a bit of optimism in that. But the reality is, we're wasting gas and tearing up our engine in the process. The new money is heating up old markets as the government fights the sweeping asset-price drop. Thanks to flying-trapeze FED policy, the new money is primarily staying in banks and financial markets, where it can paper over real losses to spruce up the appearance of financial assets and prop up confidence in the system without much effect on consumer prices.
So far Ben Bernanke has managed to keep the game going. He's a sly one.
The truth is, whatever economic school one belongs to, with all the sleight of hand going on and with the market making 40% swings over the course of months, anybody can lose money over a given period of time, even when they're completely right. Peter Schiff is one of the few mainstream Austrian economists with an actual investment company, Euro Pacific Capital. He predicted years ahead of time that we would see a crash, he was completely right, yet even he lost his investors an awful lot of money with the collapse in commodity prices which he apparently failed to predict. He, of course, thought that the mass inflation presently underway would flow towards commodities more than it has. And he is probably right, in the long term.
But he didn't see the short term lock-up coming. And for all his prescience, it didn't prevent him from taking a big hit in the short term.
Honestly, I'm not really sure when things will hit the fan once again. The fact is, the Emperor has no clothes. But that doesn't change the fact that the Emperor is immensely powerful, with far reaching influence and very, very deep pockets. If the Emperor desires to project an illusion and maintain an artificial reality, he has immense resources at his disposal to do so. You may be completely right in calling him naked today, but that doesn't mean you won't be run out of town and ruined long before the truth is revealed.
So, we places our bets and we takes our chances. Where is your faith: in the truth, or the Empire?
The truth is, the previous economy was a sham. It was unsustainable. It was an illusion. The government is "goosing the accelerator" in an attempt to restore what was. It is undeniable that the government has awesome clout at its disposal to shuffle us all about and create artifical economic currents that look and feel like recovery, just as it created the currents of the last few decades by opening up a gargantuan tab with an acommodating Asia that looked and felt like indefinite prosperity. The massive cash vacuum set up a flowing cash current, and quite a few dipped their tills into these flowing waters to turn a pretty looking profit. This flowing credit line kept the goods moving and the factories hopping and people busy for quite some time.
But these are created currents. They are artificial, and won't sustain themselves. The fact that it lasted so long the first time around is a testament to the power of the vast cash vacuum which has become America's aggregated debt, but it appears to have reached its limits with its Asian creditors. So Uncle Sam has turned to the domestic variety, over which he wields coercive power, and the sucking has begun yet again. Cash is moving, a little. But the old, hopped up economy is not going to come back in a sustainable fashion. The new bubble won't be as big as the one that has just passed. It, too, will eventually come to an end.
When will the illusion finally end, and the Emperor Uncle Sam revealed in all his naked un-glory? I don't really know. I will have to wait patiently, just like everybody else.
I think this will be my last post on the Xinjiang affair, as it is rapidly falling from the public conscience, and I find it frustrating finding worthwhile information on the background of the incident. I do not feel I can really do any justice to a proper analysis of the whole thing. But I do know a few things about the whole situation that most do not, and which aren't covered nearly enough by mainstream reporters but in my opinion shed a lot of light on the situation.
The Economist had yet another typical report the other day:
IT BEGAN as a protest about a brawl at the other end of the country; it became China’s bloodiest incident of civil unrest since the massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago. The ethnic Uighurs in the far western city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, accused Han Chinese factory workers in the southern province of Guangdong of racial violence against Uighur co-workers. By the time Urumqi’s Uighurs had finished venting their anger, more than 150 people were dead and hundreds more injured.
There is some background, lots of statistics, but it is the typical type of analysis: what political leaders are saying, this and that political interest, how many people died, the stated reasons for the riots, blah, blah. Garbage. As the longtime reader will know well, I do not subscribe to these kinds of facts as all that important in understanding events. They say very little of what drives masses of people to behave so violently, knowing full well the probable repercussions at the hands of the Chinese government. What are the values of the people involved? How do they see the world? Using basic facts to try and put yourself in the shoes of those involved in the story will not tell you much because you are probably not very much like those involved in the first place.
There was, however, another article which actually did actually address popularly felt grievances, albeit in a rather nonspecific manner:
The fighting was nasty enough in itself, but its underlying causes should worry Beijing even more. Many Uighurs believe their land, traditions and religion are being swamped by decades of Han immigration, which has seen the proportion of Uighurs in Xinjiang shrink from about 75% in 1949 to 45% now. They are less likely to advance in the civil service, and many feel that Han Chinese do better in business too. They are fed up with their lot as despised, second-class citizens. Like Tibetans, Uighurs feel colonised, as Xinjiang’s natural resources—it is rich in oil and gas—benefit the rich coastal regions. Meanwhile, for some Han Chinese, the Uighurs seem ungrateful and backward, pampered by the state with preferential policies, such as being allowed to have more children.
(emphasis mine)
The second fact is probably something you didn't know about China. China has a vast "affirmative action" system, which favors certain groups over others, breeding resentment between legally favored and disfavored groups:
There is another paradox to China’s treatment of minorities. There are some 50 within China, not just Uighurs and Tibetans. On paper, they have been granted considerable rights and privileges; semi-autonomous provinces, economic subsidies, religion guarantees, schooling in native languages, etc.; all sorts of affirmative action that go beyond anything done in the old Soviet Union or in today’s United States.
These policies are not just limited to ethnic groups. From what my wife tells me, whole provinces face quotas with regard to admission to public universities in China. Local officials meddle with who is allowed to take up residency in their cities. (One is not allowed to move freely in China, at least with respect to residency. Visiting is okay, moving requires permission.)
The whole idea of "affirmative action" ought to particularly strike the reader in light of my previous post on the subject. Affirmative action is actually quite prevalent all over the world, and Americans know full well how this issue can turn into a hot potato and a source of resentment amongst differentially treated groups.
But we are only imagining affirmative action in light of our own circumstances and point of view. Americans are a relatively laid-back lot with respect to jealousy towards "opportunity." Imagine affirmative action in light of the hypercompetitive Han-Chinese view of the world. I have seen it expressed that the whole idea of the Han seeing the Uighur as ungrateful for the opportunities provided as a result of Han labors and at the expense of Han opportunity is something of a joke. I would beg to differ. Strongly. The Han have been forced to put on offer to the Uigher that which they clearly covet most. If preferential policies merely rankle Americans, they must assuredly incense Chinese.
I would also beg to differ that the cause of Uighur impoverishment and "lack of opportunity" is Chinese racism. I have little doubt that there is an element of Chinese racism. I have found that Chinese are generally far more candid with their opinions concerning the propensities of other groups than most Americans, as are many other nationalities I have encountered. This isn't necessarily a negative characterization. Will they act on them in an untoward manner? Maybe. In a large group, I'm sure you can find some fraction that would.
However, this doesn't change the fact that the Uighur live in the same universe as the rest of us. If they truly desire to succeed, whether individually or collectively, I am confident that they are perfectly capable of doing so on their own, irrespective of racism. In fact, many Uighur have done so, leaving their homeland and integrating themselves into mainstream Han culture, which to my experience is perfectly happy to make a good deal with anyone who has a good deal on offer. My wife tells me that quite a few make a decent living selling their own distinctive type of barbecue, which is seen as something of an exotic dish, and reportedly finds good demand throughout the country. Most people like an exotic taste treat, after all. But if you have nothing to offer, well... obviously, that is going to be another story. And whose fault will it be?
The more one looks at this situation, the more it begins to look like any of a number of relationships in which a cultural underclass finds itself being overrun by a more vibrant and economically successful majority, which then begins treating the underclass with paternalistic, coddling policies that wind up doing little to foster real success and much to breed resentment and hostility. The relationship between several of America's minority groups and, lets be honest, a consortia of whites, Asians, Jews, and other statically higher economically performing demographics which end up getting lumped together under the label "the establishment" comes to mind.
The two effectively wind up living in the same nation under two different sets of laws. Or even multiple sets, one for each different group. Most people, regardless of culture, instinctively understand this to be an abomination and rebel against such treatment. Most people recognize that this is wrong. It is a violation of very ancient, universally understood principles and the most fundamental aspects of justice. The law is to be "no respecter of persons." In case you don't recognize that wording, it is the Old Testament expression of "equality before the law."
Which is to say, its a pretty old idea.
And in one of those juicy ironies of the universe, the pragmatic effort to keep the peace and ensure "harmony" in the short term with such abrogations of justice winds up breeding hostilities that result in even greater violence and instability in the long term. Pragmatism once again turns out to be decidedly un-pragmatic.
So, to close the subject out, in my opinion both sides are clearly and nearly equally at fault here. The Han have a lot to be angry about. So do the Uighur. The Uighur can justifiably claim that they are being colonized and disrespected by the Han. There is simply no excuse for many of China's policies, not even pragmatism. There is no excuse for differential treatment by the law, which appears to have angered both sides all around and pretty much always has throughout recorded history. At the same time, one can hardly blame the Han for choosing to employ fellow Han over their Uighur counterparts. Nothing succeeds like success, and if the Han persist in racism against a group of outperformers, they will face negative economic consequences as a result. And they will have deserved it.
If the Uighurs have a culture which fosters economic success, they probably will be successful and can hardly be angry if they are being economically displaced by another culture with a general attitude of initiative, thrift, and industry. From what I've heard, those Uighur who take the initiative to find success and contentment generally find that they can achieve it, as would be expected. Likewise, if the Uighurs have a culture that fosters brooding ethnic resentment and hatred, well, they will reap a fitting reward as well.
The Han should not lord over the Uighur the fact that they have provided such opportunity to their countrymen only to be rejected so ungratefully. The Uighur, quite simply, did not ask for it, and, quite clearly, do not wish to live under the system the Han have brought with them, regardless of its effect on material prosperity. At the same time, the economic "leg-up" on offer should not be lightly discounted, either. In this part of the world, material well being is not the difference between country club and rotary club. It can very well be the difference between a merely meager existence and grinding poverty. It is not that the "gift" on offer is no good, it is that it is being "offered" in a highly inappropriate manner, which is just as bad.
The policy of colonization should be ended if it possibly can be, as should such abrogations of justice as differentail legal treatment and affirmative action. There appear to be quite a number of different groups in the area, of which I was until recently quite unaware, as well as an enormous influx of Han into the province as a direct result of government subsidy, yet another destructive and insidious policy to be sure. Again, readers will recognize another of my pet peeves, and its negative consequence. So it is unclear if such an arrangement is even possible at this point, which was probably the entire point of the subsidy to begin with.
Finally, we should always remember that we are talking about individuals here, not just groups. It is equally a mistake to lump everyone equally into some category as it is to pretend that there are no generalized observable differences between groups which have chosen different outlooks on life. Every actor ought to be making his choices and choosing his attitudes and beliefs carefully, cognizant of the differences in outcome that are likely to befall him as a result, and of the ethical ramifications.
It appears that there hasn't been quite enough of that going on in the recent past. I think we could all do with some more of it.
A developing story in a market I don't normally take very seriously:
Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. is making a major jump into renewable energy with a $600 million investment in algae-based biofuels.
Exxon is joining a biotech company, Synthetic Genomics Inc., to research and develop next-generation biofuels produced from sunlight, water and waste carbon dioxide by photosynthetic pond scum.
Biofuels don't generally interest me, particularly those that focus on synthetic oils like biodiesel. I don't think these types of approaches will ever be economical without heavy subsidy, which is to say, they are a dubious approach.
However, the mention of Synthetic Genomics grabbed my attention, as the name rang a bell. Sure enough, it was the company I was thinking about:
"We're not claiming to know all the answers," said Craig Venter, founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomics, which has so far done early work on algae strains. "There are different approaches to what is truly economically scalable, so we're testing things and giving a new reality to the timelines and expectations of what it takes to have a global impact on fuel supply."
(emphasis mine)
When Craig Venter is working on something, Pay Attention! This guy is serious. He's no ordinary scientist. Not only is he brilliant, he has a keen eye for economics. He doesn't fool around with things that aren't likely to work.
He came up with the "shotgun sequencing" approach that finished the Human Genome Project literally years ahead of schedule and way under budget, pretty much embarrassing everyone else involved. Everyone else was sequencing linearly from the ends of chromosomes, which is analogous to slurping up a single strand of spaghetti of insane length an inch at a time. The solution he used: make several copies of the thing, sample the whole thing randomly and sequence everything at once, assembling the sequence later. Analogy: take ten identical, super-long spaghetti strands, throw them into a blender set to puree, and guzzle the spaghetti-shake in two seconds.
The genius of the approach is not so much in the actual techniques he developed, but in the recognition that the other approach was wasteful in its application of labor and time, both of which are far more valuable than most scientists tend to realize, especially in relation to physical capital. Venter saw what the problem needed: less time and labor, more capital! That was the real genius.
I have little doubt he will one day win the Nobel Prize.
Nowadays, he works on making "synthetic life." Why? Not because it is cool, though it is. It is because he has made another realization: the reason that the biosciences have fallen flat on their faces so far, despite their awesome potential, is because they are so inefficient and economically uncompetitive in the real world. Actually, a good number of people realize this; they just don't know what to do about it.
Venter thinks he has the answer. He doesn't just want to make just any life form, he wants to make the minimal life form. A life form that will require the very least to sustain its existence. A life form that he can modify to produce whatever material he likes. Like oil. If he can succeed, he may open the floodgates of a global biotech revolution, depending on just how cheap it is to grow and sustain this little synthetic beastie in comparison to traditional plant design and engineering.
Will it work? I don't know. But when Venter is involved in something, I'm keeping an eye on it.
I don't particularly like the whole topic of culture, as simply bringing up the topic almost immediately results in being sucked into the vortex of multiculturalism, identity politics, and cultural relativism, none of which do I subscribe to. Bringing it up will necessarily get me into a sticky situation, especially with respect to vocabulary and articulating thoughts in a way that is both honest and respectful, and at which I often fail.
I am far more of an absolutist than most who enthusiastically partake of these discussions will accept, or often even respect, and I will not back away from the notion one culture may be objectively "superior" to another, with the caveat that such an evaluation is necessarily extremely complex, and quite possibly beyond the capacity of mere mortals with any degree of exactitude. Generally speaking, I prefer to deal in the more "concrete" abstract, the world of economic theory, than the far more personal world of the here and now, where emotions and agendas can often cloud our way of thinking.
But the stark differences between what we see in one place versus another, as well as similarities we might not have expected, can often be quite revealing, and it really is true that having participated intimately in another culture will open your eyes in a way you can't imagine until you have done it. It is like turning up the contrast dial on your brain. It brings all sorts of details and insights into focus that you never would have noticed otherwise, and I must say that it is now a major, major, influence in the way I understand economic and historical cause-and-effect.
We like to think of ourselves as super-rational robots, able to objectively see whatever passes before our eyes and able to understand anything if we apply ourselves and it is explained well enough. But this is simply not true. We are limited creatures. Even if we could understand it all, and were not limited by intelligence, we would still be limited by time, memory and the sheer vastness of what there is to know.
We cannot and will not understand everything, and on top of this, we are inescapably evil. Our minds will refuse to understand many important lessons. This is why the "Man as God" complex is so incredibly wrong and dangerous. We desperately need our religions, cultures and rules to keep us out of trouble, accepting on faith the wisdom of those who have come before us to know things that would take a lifetime for us to discover on our own.
We also cannot grasp many things on the basis of simple explanation. Sometimes we just have to see and experience to believe. Experience is as good or better a learning tool as any other, so one would be remiss to pass over such a powerful opportunity to on the simple basis of discomfort. And I refuse to abandon such a rich source of insight or deny what it may offer to others for the sheer difficulty of articulation.
It is therefore highly worthwhile in my opinion, to attempt the following discussion, despite the risks. So, to proceed...
Some Observations
China is difficult to describe to someone who has never been. Of course, it works both ways. My wife found many situations here in the US to be unbelievably strange when she encounters them, and she finds it quite difficult to explain them to her folks back home.
One of the biggest shockers to Westerners as they first exit the airport and enter Chinese streets is the traffic situation. Normally, I am pretty much limited to prose in conveying my ideas, but in this case videos abound and convey the experience quite well, so I will readily relinquish the keyboard and allow a few to speak for themselves:
Another:
Lest you think this is all fun and games, it can have deadly consequences:
A not very funny statistic:
With some 2% of the world’s cars, China has 15% of the world’s road fatalities.
Employing my pathetic math skills, that sounds to me like "Chinese-style driving" is roughly 7.5 times as likely to get you killed as the global average. Which is a staggering thing when one considers that they are competing with the Indians:
Most people expect overcrowding, but few expect this, and having been to Mexico as well, I can report that things are much the same there, though possibly a little less chaotic. I don't recall seeing cars cruising down sidewalks to avoid traffic there or using the left hand side of the road almost interchangeably with the right, at least. But suffice it to say, for an American, simply walking down the street in these places can be a challenge. One absolutely has to be alert and focused at all times or he will wind up roadkill.
I do not mean to make a big deal out of what is, really, a trivial observation that occurs to anybody who has been to these places, only to point it out in light of other observations. Without drawing any conclusions from what we see here, but keeping it in mind, consider some of the more "perplexing" observations my wife encountered here in the US.
The first "bizarre" thing she encountered was our tendency to leave pens lying around, sometimes attached to chains or strings but sometimes not, in places like banks and at church where people might commonly need to do some writing. This is to say nothing of the hymnals and Bibles in pew racks, and the deposit slips and envelopes at the bank, for anyone to use. Such an observation flabbergasted her, but seems mundane to us.
But to her, this seemed like an incredibly stupid and naive way to do things. What she could not comprehend was how in the blazes those things managed to stay put. Week after week, the same Bibles were there in the pews. You could even mark them to see that they were the same books. Simply amazing. But not to us.
Another bizarre fact about Americans: if you put out a bunch of pens or samples for people to take free of charge, for advertising or the like, people will actually only take one of them and leave the rest, even without being watched. Some people don't even take one! It was bizarre to her that nobody simply walked up and took all of them at once. After all, one could. (This did actually happen a few times in graduate school, as I remember. Nobody could figure out what was going on at the time, though now it is obvious to me.)
Return policies at department stores, and even grocery stores for consumable goods, credit cards that let you purchase and pay later, and a host of other American practices were all strange and, in her initial estimation, incredibly stupid.
In fact, if you go to China, you will generally not see smallish items lying around in public places. Restrooms are devoid of toilet paper and soap, and are generally quite dirty. Many tourists erroneously take this to mean that, generally, cleanliness is not a high priority in this culture.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The dwellings I visited were all quite clean, some to the point of being immaculately so, and I would have to confess that pretty much every home I visited was cleaner than my own here in the US. Further, it did not take long to discover that they actually considered that I was dirty! Why? They have an elaborate system of cleanliness habits, which I was violating on a regular basis. (It occurs to me that sometime I should write a post on Chinese table manners. It could actually prove quite useful for visitors to the country. Perhaps for another day.)
Again, concerning these observations, file them away for later...
I could go on and on with similar observations, but I think that will suffice. I will now proceed to "cultural analysis." First, I will state the conclusion outright, then give a sketch at how I believe the Chinese worldview arrived at this point, as it illuminates a lot of the behaviors described above.
Again, all of this is simply my opinion.
Voluntary Restraint
Eventually, through many discussions of our various observations of the divergences we had observed, my wife and I arrived at the main conclusion: Americans tend to allow rules and codes of conduct to constrain their behavior much more so than the Chinese. I think in the specific case we were discussing, my wife concluded that America was wealthier than China not because it was free, for in a great many ways it very much is not, but because Americans obey rules to a far greater degree. Chinese behavior tends to be more governed by aversion to public reprimand and punishment than concern with breaking rules, at least in my observation.
Sadly, a post-doc friend of mine in a lab I had once worked for had tried to articulate exactly this idea to me long before, but I was not able to understand him. He was expressing frustration that Chinese society as a whole was unable to regulate ethical conduct, as evidenced by the frequency of such events as the adultering of baby formula with melamine.
Americans could ban such acts, and erect regulatory agencies to see that they don't happen with a fair level of success. But somehow, effective dissuasion of such behavior evades Chinese society. He tried to explain to me what caused the differences between us, but I could not understand him. Eventually, I just had to figure it out for myself.
See what I mean about sometimes you just have to experience things?
The difference he had been trying to articulate was a very large difference in voluntary restraint, the ability and willingness to act in an ethical manner when doing so results in personal harm or the foregoing of personal gain. Voluntary restraint critical to the well-being of a society, as there is simply no way that even a small fraction of all behavior of all people may be governed all the time through force. Even uber-libertarians like Vox Day are well aware of just how important it is to obey rules on one's own volition, even the small ones. In fact, I suspect he would even argue that the personal codes and voluntary restraint were far more important than adhering to written law period.
So in some respects, it seems that voluntary restraint leaves even rule of law in the dust!
The lesser the degree of voluntary restraint, the greater time and resources a society will devote to ensuring individual safety in person and property, and the less effort and fewer risks will be devoted to improving one's personal situation, as whatever is gained will be subject to a higher risk of loss.
Note that this conclusion should ABSOLUTELY NOT be construed to mean that Chinese culture or all Chinese individuals are somehow deliberately, knowingly, and willfully degenerate. I am quite certain that both our populations span the entire gamut of scumbag to saint. The point is that, on the whole, this very different approach to the regulation of personal conduct has a profound impact on social outcomes, as it skews behavior regardless of one's personal ethical beliefs and commitment to ethical behavior.
A discussion of how the Chinese worldview differs from the West and leads to this outcome is highly illuminating, particularly in that regard.
Despair
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend watching the movie To Live. If you are an American, you probably won't like it; see it anyway. The story basically covers the sorrows and travails of a family living through WWII, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural revolution. The main thing to take away from seeing it is the light it tries to portray the family in. Pathetic, helpless, and hopeless, the family simply does its best to survive. Not once does any character take any initiative for the righting of wrongs or the betterment of his situation, particularly the father, who is a compulsive gambler and a drunk, at least at the beginning of the movie.
You might think that the despairing mood is just a result of the subject matter of this particular movie. But watch any Chinese movie and you will see virtually the same message of general hopelessness being driven home. I have yet to see a single Chinese movie with anything approaching the standard conflict resolution and happy ending so typical of the American genre. Most of the time, the evil strong man kills all his rivals and everybody dies. At best, there is an element of a character being able to find some tiny nook or cranny of a dark and evil world to escape the worst of it and find some tiny shred of peace. But never do the good-guys win and ride away into the sunset. That evil powers will eventually rule the day is taken to be inevitable.
When I have had occasion to discuss this particular movie with native Chinese, they usually talk about how "true" and "honest" the movie is. Usually, reviews are good. But my reaction, and my reaction to virtually every Chinese movie I have ever seen, is one of disappointment and anger. I very much despise this barrage of hopelessness and despair, the message about life that it beats into the viewer's head, mainly because I know that these messages are untrue and I understand the consequences of accepting them, as we shall see.
But the fact is that I think it speaks very accurately to the pervasive despair, hopelessness, and pessimism of the Chinese cultural mindset, which sets the stage for all that follows.
Survival
Because of the deep pessimism I have just described, there is something of an overriding preoccupation with "survival." One might argue that this is entirely warranted considering the recent history of that country. It is certainly understandable. However, in my experience it has been blown completely out of proportion to the point of becoming a pathological obsession.
There is an overwhelming perception of life as a zero-sum game, which it is not, and a world of very scant resources, particularly opportunity. Also not true, but that is the perception. Play the game of mah jong, Chinese rules, and you will what I think is an illustration of this in action. Payouts to the winner depend on where the winning piece comes from. Everyone is trying to guess the winning piece and either avoid playing it himself or trick someone else into playing it.
Near the end of the game, players are destroying their own hands and therefore their own chances of winning in a passive-aggressive type strategy to avoid the payout. But unlike poker, there is no exit to the game through folding! I have never experienced a Western card game with similar rules. The funny thing is, when I have played this game with other Westerners, they rarely seem to grasp the necessity of this strategy, though I admit that could be because they don't usually play long enough for it to become apparent. I myself understand it, but find myself unable to think in such a way as to be very competitive. I still want to play to win too badly and wind up making large payouts that wipe me out. Certainly nobody I know would be competitive with the players I have seen in China.
It is a fun game, but it makes you wonder about the mentality of someone who would come up with such rules and how they understand the world to operate.
The net result is that, scarce as opportunity is taken to be, and evil as the world is, each and every choice is perceived to be a matter of survival. As one might guess, the frequent invoking of "survival" tends to serve far too often as a justification of lowest common denominator behavior.
Competition
The perception of very limited opportunity, of belonging to an unfair, inescapable system that is evil to the core, and having so many others competing against you leads to the inescapable conclusion that in order to achieve anything approaching a decent life, one must be an absolutely ardent competitor in life's rat race. And, undoubtedly, it leads to more despair and frustration.
The mindset of competition in China is unbelievably fierce. Of course, this is probably not news to most people. The sense of competitive struggle in Chinese society is legendary. But hopefully this discussion sheds some light on why it is so.
I wish that I could recall all of the stories that my wife has told me of the sinister things done in the name of competition. I have heard a story of a girl poisoning her friend over a love rivalry. I have heard multiple stories of sabotage, including a stranger sabotaging another student's application to a top school. Even my own wife conducted her job search in absolute secrecy, fearing the spread of knowledge of open positions would hurt her own opportunities, despite the fact that these were casual conversations with people not even searching for jobs.
Explain that such actions will have virtually no impact on the probability of their own acceptance or success given the sheer numbers of such applications, and you will be met with a blank stare. They know. It doesn't matter. Every little bit counts.Opportunity is limited.Every advantage is real. You do what you have to do.
Again, I would imagine that some of these stories were in all likelihood false. But like the movies, whether or not they are true, they speak to the mindset of those who are apt to believe and repeat them.
The sense of desperate competition also, in my opinion, helps explain another prevalent aspect of Chinese culture: obsession with perfection, or at least the absence of flaw, particularly with respect to one's person, abilities and behavior. There is a strong tendency for those with something to offer to demand nothing less than absolute perfection from applicants, and for competitors and compatriots alike to turn on one another at the first hint of deficiency. Like a school of piranhas, a single drop of blood in the water results in a feeding frenzy, as the fiercely competitive school devours one of its own.
This, I think, is the source the fabled "Asian pride" and the practice of "saving face." I do not think it is really so much of an issue of pride as one of fear, particularly of this type of behavior. In such fiercely competitive society, there is a long line of applicants for every position, a long line of takers vying for every offer. The mark of a flaw is a mark of death. One is either perfect, or one is worthless. There is no room nor mercy shown for mistakes.
At least, that is the perception.
Calculated Oblivionism
Thus the average Chinese finds himself trapped in a "moral vise" which he cannot escape. He understands and feels committed to his ethical codes, yet at the same time understands the world to be so highly competitive, so intolerant of the slightest fault, and so powerfully evil that he is forever a hair's breadth from undeserved ruin. At any moment, he may be destroyed by forces far outside of his control, let alone by the discovery of fault in him. The necessity of ethical breach is overwhelming, yet his conscience nags. The dual jaws of the moral vise threaten to break him.
The result is the adoption of an outlook that I would call "calculated oblivionism." There is a deliberate effort to focus on one's own self and one's own needs and to ignore any externalities until the point that they physically intervene, much like the speeding automobiles in the videos at the beginning of this essay. It is not a question of how one would like to behave; hewing to rules and codes is simply unthinkable, a childish way of thinking about the world that most people learn to repress when they "grow up."
Indeed, I have heard such documents as the Declaration of Independence criticized as childish. America is a young nation; mature civilizations recognize how naive such an outlook is. It doesn't matter whether or not such arguments are true. They are dismissed as immature and unworkable, as they obviously are.
In my opinion, the way those folks are driving in the videos is exactly they way appear to be driving: oblivious to others and to codes of conduct on the road. Signal lights and driving conventions are simply shut out of mind, as are the movements of others unless they directly impinge upon your own movement. On top of that, it is perfectly fair game to use your own positioning to force others to allow you to get where you need to go. Unless the laws of physics or an officer of the law intervenes, (and who has time for that?) that is the end of the story.
Likewise the other scenarios. To take simple-minded ethics more seriously than a theoretical, dreamy debate of utopianism is suicide.
Remember: we are talking about survival here! This is the source of exculpation that calculated oblivionism provides. It is not that anyone desires to violate ethical principles, it is that doing so is predetermined. It is necessary for existence. It therefore is a ubiquitous and inescapable fact of life.
This is why I said that one should not conclude that Chinese culture was willfully degenerate, despite the awful stories we hear. There is no perception of choice in the matter. It is perceived as an involuntary state of existence.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Unfortunately, it is not hard to imagine that such a mentality is a self-reinforcing system. Opportunity really is limited when resources are squandered in a corrupt and theft-ridden system. Perfection really is necessary when everyone accepts that it is, and cheating really is necessary to have a shot at a decent life when everyone else is doing it. Life itself is transformed from the potential for flowing abundance to a pit of despair.
In my opinion, the greatest difference between China and the West is Christianity. Christianity provides the hope that is the "way out" of the despair-survival-competition-oblivion vortex. It provides the forward thinking and eternal reward of virtue that allows people to accept hardship in the here-and-now for the sake of ethics and future reward. Even those Westerners who have given up our ancient religion still share a lot of these outlooks, though to some extent I think they are operating on cultural inertia. I do believe that a complete death of Christianity would cause a severe collapse of our way of life, as its slow erosion over the 20th century demonstrated with its series of deadly wars, and the abandonment of our ancient ethics is now wreaking havoc on our financial systems.
The reality is, we in the West are the strange ones. I did not discuss it much, but there are many commonalities between Chinese culture and others. In graduate school, I was surrounded by Indians, Chinese, Africans, etc. Invariably, they could relate to one another far better than they could relate to Americans. Our point of view makes us different, and it leads to the vastly different outcomes in our civilizations.
I can completely understand the Chinese point of view, as well as the views of others, and completely understand how it appears utterly coherent and inescapable. And if anyone has ever been close to any number of Chinese, he will know how, despite this outlook and any present hardships, he will always find a warm and genuine smile of hapiness on the face of his friend. Of everything I know of Chinese culture, I find this the most redeeming characteristic.
But how much sadder does it make the situation that the point of view is wrong! It is clearly refuted by the existence of societies of relative abundance. It is clearly refuted by the success of a different outlook on life. Success and happiness can be had in all the more abundance with a change of outlook.
It is just too bad that is so hard to get across.
Mr Medvedev, who has been seeking ways to displace the dollar as the world's dominant reserve currency, produced a sample coin of what he described as a 'united future world currency'...
...The possibility of a supranational currency “concerns everyone now, even the mints,” Mr Medvedev [president of Russia] said. The test coin “means they’re getting ready. I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdependent we are.”
Russia, alongside China and India, have all questioned the dollar's future as a global reserve currency - a status it has enjoyed since inheriting it from sterling last century.
Speaks for itself. Will it happen? We'll just have to wait and see...
I am working on a post about China and the Xinjiang situation. In the meantime, here is a brief video on the NRA, the National Recovery Administration (and not the gun rights group), that the Roosevelt administration used during the 30's to help "fix" the ailing economy:
Thanks very much to zeno at Vox Popoli for digging this up.
Several things to note about the video:
the similarity of the parade to Nazi rallies of the era
the similarity of the Blue Eagle to the Nazi eagle emblem
the outright socialist mindset of the program and its supporters
the discrimination against blacks (and the Republican opposition to the program)
What struck me most in relation to my previous post, being a capitalism freak, was the remark about the program destroying small business and strengthening large, established corporate interests.
It is my opinion that virtually all large corporations would cease to exist in a more capitalist system. Corporatism itself is a bit of an anathema to the individualist mentality of capitalism. The ability to legally escape market risk through collective ownership and limited liability is one of a vast number of ways in which anti-capitalist, interventionist legal structures favor large corporations over smaller interests. Corporatism is almost always linked to big government, as the prevalence and persistence of gigantic state-owned and state favored firms in more heavily statist societies will attest.
I do not think that a large, hulking corporation, with its bureaucratic inertia and inefficiency, would be able to compete with more nimble smaller fry that were more in touch with local tastes and practices. I do not think that economies of scale, which are the usual advantage cited by those trying to account for corporate dominance in modern markets, actually outweigh the advantages of a small business with a smaller, more flexible capital base, especially in an environment where business conditions weren't so heavily "stabilized" by state interventionism.
In short, I think the enormous power of corporations in America and elsewhere is largely the result of government intervention to "help businesses" and the economy, and probably not the result of capitalism per se. I think America would be vastly more differentiated and interests far more local and parochial without the homogenizing effect of state interventionism. If you look around and see the actions of corporations and it makes you angry, you probably ought to think twice before you attack capitalism as the culprit. Those corporate leaders may be far less "capitalistic" than you think, and more in the camp of the socialists and politicians than you realize.
Who is in the pocket of whom? It is often hard to tell.
----Update!----
And just in case you think that kind of thing could never happen again, don't be so sure!
As America teeters over the edge of the precipice, staring into the deep Abyss about to swallow her up, pundits across the nation have taken up the subject of just how it was that we have arrived at this juncture, a bit like the proverbial "life flashing before their eyes."
I've documented a lot of my thoughts on these pages related to this topic, but I thought I'd do my best to summarize them here.
Man As God
More than any other statement, I think these three words summarize just where things went wrong. For whatever reason, sometime near the beginning of the 20th century, a fever swept across the West that had long been suppressed. Rule of Law (capital L) had been the rule of most Western governments more so than at any time in history, but no more. Man elevated himself to his own throne and made himself his own God. Seeing himself as his own supreme being, he wrote his own law, and and elevated the State as Man as God's agent on earth. This he called Democracy. Man as God, Democracy, and the State became the new Trinity of America.
The new Trinity destroyed America.
Capitalism is Dead
Capitalism is not dying. It is dead. It has been for quite some time. Man as God destroyed it. He slowly strangled it. With it died the soul of the nation.
To understand just how this happened, we must not lose sight of one of the most fundamental fact of economics: that people enter into markets with goods to trade in order to satisfy their own needs. Money has not yet entered into the equation at this level. Once it does, it becomes tempting to lose sight of this crucial fact, which is precisely what Man as God has done, and as a result has enslaved himself to the social system that Man as God creates: fascism. But more on that later.
When men enter into the marketplace with goods to exchange, they do it with the expectation of receiving goods of higher value to themselves than their own goods are valued by themselves. This is true whether their goods consist of actual physical goods, or as labor. In either case, exchange is desired. But to do this, their goods must be of value to other economic actors as consumers, just as they are looking for goods of value to themselves as consumers. Economic actors benefit through trade by serving other consumers well. If they produce goods which other consumers do not desire, they will return home from the marketplace with the same goods they had when they arrived, not having their needs met. This is consumer sovereignty, and it is a crucial concept.
When the consumer is sovereign, each of us as individual economic actors gets to "vote" in a very individualized manner which products and services are desired in the marketplace. That is, the economy as a whole functions to serve the needs of consumers.
Enter money. Money is used as a universal medium of exchange. That is, any economic actor may exchange his product for money, and money for the product of others. This facilitates trade and economic calculation dramatically. For the purposes here, it is important to understand a few things: money serves to facilitate exchange, it serves as a "measurement unit," and, as such, it serves as a "means of account."
The Power of Money
Money is a powerful thing indeed, and power over money is an awesome thing. For quite a long time, gold was money, and as the supply of gold does not fall under the power of any one person or organization, power over money was limited. It functioned in a relatively honest and unbiased manner. One dollar in 1814 would buy virtually the same amount of basic goods as one dollar in 1914.
Unfortunately, near the beginning of the 20th century, America entrusted far greater power over money to the State, in the form of the Federal Reserve Banking System, America's central bank. All of that changed.
In addition, America entered into several wars, including two World Wars, and began a tremendous expansion of government. This greatly increased the State's expenditure as a consumer of goods in the marketplace. It also greatly increased the State's ability to interfere in the marketplace.
Both effects, and others, have destroyed consumer sovereignty. The State arbitrarily transfers purchasing power from one actor to another through welfarism, both corporate and individual. The State controls what products individual Americans may have access to. The State influences purchasing decisions through subsidy and tax. The State itself consumes a vast swath of what the market produces.
The connection between production and consumption has been severed. The State has created the rift and jumped into the breach. The economy no longer exists to serve consumers as consumers. It exists to serve the State, which has usurped the consumer. As the Primary Consumer, the Regulator of the Market, and the Allocator of What May Be Had, State has become the sovereign of the marketplace. State sovereignty has replaced consumer sovereignty. By controlling consumption, the State has assumed control of the means of production.
This is fascism. All this has been done through Democracy, at the behest of Man as God.
Thus, producers labor to serve fascist government if they desire to receive a portion of the goods of the marketplace, and voters vote with ballot boxes instead of their wallets to determine what producers will produce. Most consumers have no desire to own aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, or smart bombs. Yet a very large fraction of our economy is devoted to producing weapons of war. The same could be said for a swath of other "products." Our efforts no longer go to serving our fellow man. They serve the State.
It should not surprise anyone that America has grown to become a perverse caricature and an outright mockery of its former ideals. Americans are no longer sovereign. The State is.
Total Loss
We lament much of what we have lost in the process. But we fail to ask the question: who needs them?
Who needs family when you have the State? Your children will be taken care of until adulthood by the State. Mommy can go to work, to serve her new God, just like Daddy. The family doesn't need her. It does not need him, either. Why not divorce? The State is there to help.
Parents do not need their children in old age; they have Social Security. And children do not need their aged parents, for their inheritance goes to pay the State.
Who needs the Church when you have the State? Values are law, just as Man as God has written; we no longer need moral direction or discipline. Charity comes from State now. Meaning comes from State now. Our Truths are as True as we would like them to be, and if they are not, Democracy can change them. Scientific experts, trained by the state, tell us all we need to know. The mysteries of the world have been revealed, haven't they? After all, We are Gods. We Know.
Who needs God for that matter? We have the State, and we have Ourselves. Who needs God when you have America?
Capitalism did not destroy American culture. Mostly-capitalist America had strong families, strong churches, and strong communities. Mostly-uncapitalist America does not.
Judgement is Coming
We left our discussion of money far behind. It is time to return. When the State has control of money, it destroys the economy, and it destroys money itself. I have discussed this many times before, but I will sketch again briefly how this works.
The State is perpetually biased towards monetary expansion, which is to say, the creation of more money, or inflation. Most people think that this results in generalized increases in prices across all markets. This is wrong. This is not a difficult concept to understand, but it is not obvious if you have not been told.
I said before that money serves as a unit of measurement and of account, and makes possible rational economic calculation. Changing the supply of money undermines these properties of money.
It is much like an engineer drafting a complex piece of machinery with a ruler over a long period of time, with the difference that every night after he goes home, someone comes and switches out his ruler with one that has ever-so-slightly smaller units. He never notices, and continues drafting his design piece by piece. But at the end, he will not have a working piece of machinery; it will have been distorted all out of proportion.
Likewise our economy, more complex than any piece of machinery ever designed, develops all out of proportion as the unit of account is altered.
Our accounts also fail to balance, as the banking community has recently discovered. It is as if we are balancing our checkbooks without knowing basic math, then demanding a refund of the bank when our accounts don't match theirs.
The refund isn't there. The economy is a shambles. At one time, fairly honest money, gold money, kept these kinds of things from getting too far out of hand. Dishonest money, fiat money, was designed specifically to let these things happen.
Man as God may make a mockery of his money and of his accounting, but the real God will not be mocked. His accounts always balance.
Conclusion
It should not surprise anyone to look out the window and see an America that is not to one's liking. Your opinion, frankly, no longer matters, and neither does anyone else's. The State, and only the State, matters at this juncture.
But Man as God's plans will eventually come to ruin, because his plans are not God's plans. Capitalism did not kill America. Capitalism was slain along with America, Church, and family by the same beast, the State, which displaces and devours all when not kept in check. Pagan cults of state are common. They always collapse in dramatic form, and generally take human lives with them. This has happened many times throughout history, and it will surely happen again.
This collapse is a global collapse of a global fiat money system. Cities will burn. Nations will shatter. The process has already started. It is going to be a bumpy ride.
But perhaps there is hope in the rebuilding.
