The Man Who Loved China

Hello Jiajie and Wilf.

Here's the question:

Originally posted by Liang Jiajie:
I have accepted as fact that the central government will not abandon Tibet. I have accepted as fact that the international community cannot, and is not capable, to force the central government to grant independence to Tibet. And I have accepted as a fact that most Chinese would not support a central government willing to succumb to international pressure on such an emotional issue. I therefore work with those assumptions while contemplating the Tibet question.

I have just learned (CBC) that the central government of China has agreed to again provide free education to the impoverished kids in those 1,000,000 villages.
On the same broadcast, I"m told that perhaps 200,000,000 rural folk are at various stages of transit into the cities to find employment.

"Most Chinese" would not accept that government "succumbing" to international pressure on Tibet?

But given their situation, to look to "most Chinese" would seem so 1930s.

It would seem that all there are in great fear of the people who made Mao possible. And while that may be a "realistic" understanding of the political situation, I would have thought some advice from the "new Confucians" would have brought some control to growth. Seen to it that village schools providing free education would have been erected as well as those "blade runner" structures witnessed by Winchester.

Our own "philosopher king" the late Pierre TRudeau, made our own multi-ethnic phenom possible by disavowing nationalism. Certainly the nationalism of the great unread, which he transcended in the 40s and 50s.

You have studied CAnadian history Jiajie, the conquest of the French by the British on the Plains of Abraham. And some of the French-speaking descendants objected to a Beatle being brought to that ancient battlefield to perform at a ceremony celebrating the 400th anniversary of France's settlement there. Paul is British, after all.

And no nationalist in Quebec has been jailed lately. Not even murder of a kidnapped British trade commissioner resulted in more than a short prison term a third of a century back.

But given that "most Chinese" are apparently onside with the government's treatment of Tibetan nationalists - and we have NO IDEA of their treatment - you wonder at my being "floored'?

Pardon me but this nationalist can't accommodate that polarity of action even in the name of cultural understanding.

Moreover, while "we" could once afford not to be concerned with the goings on over there in Africa, Asia, wherever, it seems to me that we must hold true to the sense of empathy that we have developed here since the death of Wolfe and Montcalm.

We don't "buy" the excuses given by our government for intervention in Afghanistan. It's basically oil-related. Can't justify all the death. But read Rory Stewart's The PLaces in Between to understand that it's also pure ignorance on our part to be there.

There's no attempt to modify Chinese nationalism now, on Tibet, because the nationalist fervour in 1954, the year of the pact with India, one year after the Korean War peace agreement, can't be rescinded.

And Tibet could not be allowed to pass laws, like Quebec, stipulating certain conditions that would insure cultural viability, language and beliefs? It's just ce serra, serra ? (with apologies to Italian-speaking Canadians for the spelling, etc.

My wife taught English as a second language to many 7 year olds coming to Mississauga from around the world, not as a specialist, but as a Grade 2 teacher. I got to help in her final couple of years (we both had B Ed.s) And by golly, even the newest newcomers could read the new language by year's end.

Again, surely the newly rich, the newly educated and well-to-do, can enter the contest there? It's not a matter of "don't buy Chinese" as we didn't "buy South African wine" or "California grapes" etc. etc. to force China's hand.

But when Chinese foreign policy starts emulating our own in Africa and elsewhere, it is time to start being at least as critical of made-in-China policy as we are of our own misbegotten ventures.

A July 22 footnote.

Yes, indeed, my "part of the world" does indeed include many who think like you. I believe Wilf, who also asks the question, is in line with your thinking.

But, then, I believe that that is how we have arrived at our present quandry. Today's intellectual is first a professional, someone who must fit into the society they have inherited, and which increasingly needs to change direction.

The change does not come about, because that would require your professional to step out of role and perform as the intellectual of old. Look at the hold of capital on the small investor and would-be comfortably retired, professional or not. How does that person perform the historic role of thoughtful critic?

This has not been a problem in the past because growth was not challenged on a planet with apparently infinite capacity to absorb growth.

In my view, the state must again intervene and provide the cushion, the controlled and safe investment opportunity, with zero growth in mind, and an eventual diminution of population.
That will all become all too clear in time, due to the effects of environmental overload, but I am afraid we don't have much of that most precious commodity left.

(30)

[ 21 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 22 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Your return message was just what I needed to make my morning coffee satisfying, Jiajie.

As a Luddite, I have torn emotions at the news that your computer has been replaced. However, I always celebrate at news that the human factor remains a must!

Yes, the Chinese immigrant population of Canada is impressively on the side of China on the Tibet question. In fact, my friends in Mississauga were half-seriously considering returning there if the economy here "tanks". Only half-seriously, however, with one youngster now in university and the other, the really brilliant one, about to be.

I understand your position. As a retiree taken care of by insurance and pension in Canada, I can hold forth with all sorts of subversive thoughts, and be treated simply as an eccentric, even without the protection of Needham's superior intellect and accomplishments under that appellation.

But, as radically different as the polity of China is, ours is depressingly similar in the self image of its "citizens".

I no longer use "citizen" to describe the corrupted voter/taxpayer/consumer of goods, whose view of self is a product of a half-century of lifestyle and supporting propaganda by the admen and conservative intelligentsia who have had nothing to lose in the game.

I had a larger question for you, but must retreat into a second (or third) coffee first.

George

I see from your postings of April 28 on another thread, Jiajie, that "for the West to maintain its affluence, it needs Asian markets..."

That is what my friend in Mississauga also believes, as you will see, below. We have to be able to compete, as well.

But I believe that our speculations since April 28 may have inserted a mitigating factor into that materialist' assumption about the future?

Yes, Jiajie, to answer the question first, before reporting on that luch with my friends:

The improvements in the life of the majority of North American workers since the Second War - slowed since the early 1970s and now actually beginning to reverse - together with their investment opportunities, created the middle class to which most aspired.

This did not create a higher quality of political performance or expectations of higher performance from the politicians. In fact, since the California tax revolt of the late 70s, the great middle has been appealed to first by the siren song of lower taxes. Maintenance of a lifestyle unknown to any previous generation of working people has been pivotal in defining the nature of our polity, its goals.

Lifestyle corrupts, and it seems to me that a really cushy one corrupts completely (to fiddle with a verbal play on power).

Each generation is burped on the scene to learn (or not to learn) from scratch about our social and political institutions and cultural mores. And we’ve been taught by television and the admen. In the early 1970s, participating in a symposium at Trent University , I put forward the argument about the corrupting influence of advertising.

I shall never forget the advertising execs and flacks there arguing that they were not causing people to buy, only to understand the choices that advertising made clear. It was before the public confessions by the tobacco industry execs. It was a leading New Democrat and academic who brought the debate forward.

Some have been uncertain about the outcome of the “human experiment” since Rachel Carson. Our capacity to do ourselves in with our chosen lifestyle, bombs aside.

But to the “lunch” - a half dozen vegetable dishes and shrimp on rice - a Cantonese feast:

My hosts came to Canada in the middle Trudeau years, and were sure that they had found the promised land of freedoms.

By the middle years of Brian Mulroney, they were packing to return to China when Tienanmen happened. They unpacked their bags.

But now, they would again pack to return to China except for the kids - a son studying math and business, and a daughter who fully expects to enter U. of T. in a year’s time and study medicine. Her grades make that a more than likely outcome. She was the top student in Grade 2, and seems to have continued to excel through her third year in secondary school.

And dad - I cannot speak for mom - no longer believes Canada will be able to compete in a globalized world, or that its media are telling him the truth. In fact he’s sure that stories about China, reported in the media here from any western source, are biased and reports on events, beginning with Tienanmen, are exaggerated.

For me, this means that even a practicing scientist is vulnerable to nationalism’s corrupting, distorting effect and rational becomes rationalization to meet the desired object (Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia).

What is more, he cannot understand the laid-back attitude of Canadians toward the disappearance of their manufacturing base. Not just the “hollowing out” concerns about the transfer of control to other countries, but the actual loss of industry and its skills.

He is convinced that Canadian educational facilities are being degraded, comparing their product to those overseas.

And while he marveled at Canada’s capacity to absorb the greatest ethnic variety and number (relatively) of newcomers, the revelation that “that’s what Canada does” (if with somewhat narrower lenses in the past), led only to a cautionary note. Canada should beware because in the event of conflict with any of those countries of origin there would be a resident fifth column ready to do damage. And I thought that that, too, represents the position of a great many Chinese on the eve of the Olympics and with Tibet in the wings.

On Tibet and the Falun Gong…both people showing a tendency to “unnatural” practices in their customs, social structure, and treatment of people within their fold that rational people should suppress.

On the media…as much as I pointed out that from time to time the media will get it right, and I told him of Graeme Smith’s work for the Globe and Mail in Afghanistan, he would not concede, and does not try to find “the truth” out there in the aether. And since I was there on a fact-finding mission as well as to enjoy the company of friends, we will meet again.

But to me the severity of the grip of the materialist lifestyle - the reminder of the hold of Homo economicus - was again a huge downer.

But I believe the children are more complex and may break the mould. And the mother of the children, whose every action spells empathy for the other, wants to be able to again read Marx on Capital , the source of the ideas delivered by her father, the political officer in the peoples’ army. I believe that she represents exactly the human being that Marx envisioned.

She cannot yet read in the language of her adopted country, and wondered if she might find at least the introductory chapter, the one in which Marx described the lifestyle of people in the society he hoped might result from his work… published in the language of her birth. I believe she is her father’s daughter.

I said that I would inquire, but could only leave them with a copy of Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China.

v

[ 27 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Quoting Jiajie:
The popular definition of affluence among well-to-do Canadians and Chinese must change. The definition must include the quality of the natural environment, literacy and numeracy, spirituality, the dignity of labour, aesthetics.... (end quote)

I desperately needed to hear that. Now all we have to do is overcome the reactionary forces that stand in the way, eh?

And for that reason, I cannot accept this reasoning:

George: I am not an engineer or scientist, so I cannot offer original and practical thoughts on this subject. I can only repeat the projections of scientists that I have read. However, I am interested in what the natural environment can teach philosophy and how that experience can change human attitudes.
(end quote)

The scientists that I have read, Jiajie, Tim Flannery and James Lovelock, plus those on the IPCC, convey a feeling of urgency that does not come from some sort of naturalistic "communing with nature".

You earlier suggested that the native peoples might have something to contribute regarding our attitude. But I read yesterday that, for instance, a couple of native-controlled logging operations at Clayoquot Sound, B.C. are determined to cut a few thousand metres of wood in old growth forest, fought for by environmentalists since the early 90s.

I had been through there in 1969, and took my family there in '94. Trees going to the sky, some there since an Arab culture saved the last vestiges of Greek and Roman culture from the Christians.

No, we're going to have to depend on science. And on honest reportage of events.

You and Wilf (and my Mississauga friend) tar all news outlets with the same brush.

But I've just now finished congratulating a friend of my daughter's from secondary school days for his continued success in bringing "another take" on the Afghanistan situation. A young guy who impressed the hell out of everyone for his honesty, brilliance and nerve...preferred the "older" girls.

He has already won the Amnesty International media award for his uncovering the ill-treatment of detainees handed over to the gentle mercies of Afghan police by Canadian forces there.(Dec. 07)His work forced the Canadian government to end the practice.

Beginning March 22 the Globe and Mail carried his interviews with the Taliban, relating why they fought. Which turned out to be for all the natural reasons... relatives killed by bombs, reduced to starvation by destruction of poppy crops, etc. You did not read it in the New York Times...

He was co-winner of Canada's most prestigious Michner Award for the same action.(April this year).

And now from China comes news of the "silencing" of Hu Jia, Yang Chunlin and Ye Guozhu for their human rights activity.Amnesty International has comdemned the suppression of rights activists and journalists "and the use of arbitrary imprisonment."

How we would ever bring off that project (above) for the survival of the species without some awareness on the part of China's people (and the people of Canada who also trust no media)I've no idea, Jiajie.

So I guess I would make that another, early project. Win freedom for ALL to tell it like it is. It might get a bit corrupted in some IT venues, as you witness here, from time to time. But I can't go along with the appeal for infinite patience while things work themselves out.

We've got to reconstruct an industrial base in Canada that is environmentally sustainable. And we have to expect the same from all, sooner rather than later.

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
I'm not convinced "expectations" will work any better than "wishes." I hope I'm wrong. After all, the west eventually abolished slavery even before the slaves had a vote on the matter. Was that just by application of Christian ethics, philosophy and expectations? Or was it because the industrial revolution made it possible to run profitable enterprises without slaves?
(end of Wilf's quote)

The expectations would, of course, have to be supported by something more than aphorisms.

But, again, Wilf. I have asked for your take on the science of climate change, folks you have read, anything to indicate that you see it in serious light. You have not replied to the question.

i.e."
From your end, Wilf, rather than your take on China,or suggestions for my self-analysis,i.e. put Toronto in the place of Beijing, etc., I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts on the environmental question. Are you, too, just being "realistic"?
(end of quote)

Howcum?

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Realism has won the day.

So, since we do not try to pressure anyone to do anything "over there" , how about here in old Canady?

Like, what do you think of the idea of approaching Cambridge city council to request - fiollowing the lead of Toronto's planning agencies - abolishment of the Ontario Municipal Board because of its dead hand on any attempt to speed planning - for environmental reasons. No use? It's like they say, you can't fight city hall?

Think Ill try anyway. Just for fun, and at least raise some sign of life among the taxpaying/consuming citizenry.

You never know until you try.
Or, Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Had a soc. prof who had fun pointed to the contradictions like: Absence makes the heart grow fonder/ Out of sight, out of mind.

Anything for a laugh. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

Perhaps this is an unfair question. How do you think Chinese can win their freedom to tell it like it is?

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: Liang Jiajie ]

"All's fair in love and war."
Now Wilf's got me started and I can't stop.

That is definitely the place to start, Jiajie, and I have to regroup to bring forward all the hubris at my command to even think about that one.
George

Mou played God, Wilf, and in that way the peasantry needed a cult figure to fight effectively. When he began to believe his image, things went downhill.

Zhou did all the work, and was quite intelligent enough to wage war. But he didn't represent God, (or smoke cigars with a victory sign from the free hand). To me, he always represented a sane presence on the international stage.

I've just finished listening to a recorded CBC "Ideas" program from the University of Toronto in which two Canadian writers, now living in New York, debate the idea of "Canada, nation or notion".

The debate was put together by our now right-wing national news magazine, Maclean's, and one of the speakers, Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point, etc.) in explaining the (up to now) success of Canada on the international stage, put it down to our "unencumbered" status. And he used the success of Chinese business people everywhere in their adoptive countries, as an example - because they are on the "outside" of the adopted culture, they are "unencumbered".

Malcolm came out of that little town of Elmira, near here, where they produced agent orange and destroyed the aquafer while producing a poison aimed at stopping the spread of communism into former French Indo-China only a few short years ago.

We didn't know what was going on over in that sleepy little town on the edge of Mennonite country, until too late.

And your own assessment of the position of "news" out of the right-wing U.S. media, an exercise in nationalist rhetoric, compared to the reflective, broadly evaluative assessment of Canadian CBC programs, can be seen as partly due to our "unencumbered" position in the world.

A friend just e-omailed me this, as a case of an encumbered U.S.:

Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 3:06 PM
Subject: A new kind of Dollar Diplomacy

"It turns out the biggest supporter of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
bailouts has been the Chinese government. The Chinese own about half a
trillion dollars in Fannie and Freddie securities and they've put the
warning out to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson they expect to be repaid in
full. The fear among Mr. Paulson and other Treasury officials is that if
Fannie and Freddie debt isn't repaid at 100% par, the Chinese may start
dumping their hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury securities,
possibly causing a run on U.S. government debt and sharply raising Uncle
Sam's borrowing costs."

- Political Diary
Wall Street Journal
July 29 2008

I'm not sure that China would endanger a couple of $trillion in securities. That might be "cutting off the nose to spite the face" (as Wilf might put it), but regardless, it displays the different "nationalisms" of Canada and the U.S.

I offer this start as a backdoor approach to further discussiion of the need for an informed Chinese population if ANYTHING progressive is to come out of its phenomenal material progress.

Challenged (above) to explain how the individual can turn around the juggernaut in that regard (the realist's position), I offer up the thought that "anything" is superior to remaining supine before the ideas of that central CCP official, who, not many weeks back, exclaimed (in more or less these words), that to be rich is glorious.

No, in the spirit of Malcolm and Graeme, I'd say we must shout from the rooftops that the Chinese people deserve to know more. And that the increasing censorship of the Olympic Games ("China hobbling internet at Games media centre", AP, July 30, Waterloo Region Record) is a criminal act carried out against its own people.

There, I had to say that.

There does not seem to be a rush out there to discover whether or not France, Austria, Sweden and Norway are, a decade later, still providing state assistance to journals in the name of electoral enlightenment.

Anything is superior to the U.S. model, of course, as explained by Al Gore in The Assault on Reason, and by Susan Jacoby in her The Age of American Unreason.

But Canada is slipping toward the same condition. In fact, I'm taking a copy of the late Val Ross's posthumously published biography on the late Robertson Davies, author and one-time editor of his father's newspaper, The Peterborough Examiner.

When Davies' daddy died, he sold out the paper and the city to a Lord Thomson of Fleet, whose son later sold out the whole shooting match to m' Lord Black of Crossharbour (and the Florida penal system). Ken Thomson partially redeemed himself and his old man for the sellout of several hundred Canadian communities by building the Globe and Mail to an information source capable of telling us about the world as it is.

And he fended off the attempt by the neocons to replace it with their house organ, The National Post. We would look and act much more like the Americans if that had not been done.

We certainly need state support of our other newspapers. The U.S. does also as advertising and readership declines (see Jacoby).

Perhaps those ubiquitous "authorities" in China might see their way clear to an arms-length support of an "almost free" news distribution system - no ads, just four pages of news, local, national and international, every morning.

I don't think I'm painting a utopian picture. I think it's the barest minimum step forward to our collective survival as a species. To hell with the nation-state.

The morning will find me heading north with a few ounces of Forty Creek in the saddlebags, bound to bunk in with a couple of fellow retreads. We'll dissect the new biography on Davies, his washroom motto "ne illegitimus carborundum" one to which we have always subscribed, but we had always placed Davies in the position of the bastard.

[ 30 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 30 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 31 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

I agree. Gladwell's presentation does nothing to explain Canada's position in the world. And I do not think that you are being unfair in commenting on a seven-minute slice. It does not get better over time.

I feel more comfortable with your own explanation:

His example of successful overseas Chinese is not a good one. His explanation of why Chinese have been particularly successful in their adopted countries does not consider Chinatowns, created exactly because of a hostile environment and because of guanxi, which created local, private connections rather than regional connections. Within the boundaries of a Chinatown, family members lived closely together among other speakers of their dialects, and each member helped to operate the business rather than encumber themselves. Also, there was a hierarchy imposed on the immediate and extended family based on the family's lineage, so this allowed for disciplinary action or, as Gladwell says, being "mean." If his definition of hostile environment includes racism, then Chinatowns were a necessity to start businesses which were supported by mostly Chinese customers. The Chinese who emigrated to the United States and Canada were encumbered, but not by family members and the deep roots they set. So the answer to why overseas Chinese have been successful is found in China rather than in the adopted countries of overseas Chinese.

It did not come to me immediately because out of my own experience, the individual did not need a "Chinatown". There were no such enclaves in small-town Canada.

Among my teenage hunting and fishing buddies in central Ontario, Kwong , whose parents hailed from Canton and who had established a restaurant in the small town of Lakefield, had only his family to support him.

I remember him having to surreptitiously visit the girl he was to marry - they celebrated their 50th anniversary a couple of months ago - because of some ancient custom that would have denied marriage across the two families. I drove the "getaway" car.

I'm afraid I have not been able to suggest the answer to your main question a couple of postings back. What DOES China do to break through official (and unofficial) resistance to media openness?

I believe that in the furor over the Olympics' revelations of broken promises of internet freedom etc. we are perhaps going to see just the slightest advance in that direction. But whether that can be parlayed into an expanding situation out of growing need to know the opinion of others within Chinese society (let alone the world's thoughts) is to be revealed.

I still think that the European idea of state support for an absolutely necessary source of opinion could be a point of entry.

But I just wish that I could find a group of people who did not equate admission of an imperfect system of public communications with a slippery slope that can only end with one group or the other kowtowing to the "winner".

I'm going to post something on Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason to try to find my own footing again in a world apparently going paranoid.

[ 03 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

The "Books" section of the Aug. 2 Globe and Mail presents three works of recent Chinese literature aimed at the swelling interest in culture as well as Olympic sports in the West.

There's the Nobel Prize winner, Gao Xinjiang's Soul Mountain (first published in Taiwan in 1989 (English in 1999);

Ma Jian's Red Dust: A Path Through China (2001), and Xinran's The Good Women of China (2002).

The last work is the only one to appear in China, apparently. I'll see if any are contained in the public library system here.

Jiajie agrees with your position re the difficulty of moving the privileged group, R.

But I think that since it is a "learned" position, the enormity of so many of the changes demanded of society by just the very poisoning or their air, water and food, will have impact. This is unlike anything before, and I would think understandable within dialectical reasoning.

That is, they may indeed not act out of some sudden altruistic feeling - but only when their own butts are exposed.

I just hope that the synthesis to come out of this new understanding is not too bloody late in arriving and leaving us unable to act. The arrival of Charles Taylor's "spirit of Dunkirk"...

As for the power structure of the future...I hope that Rawi Hage is incorrect in saying we are all just territorial monkeys. And James Lovelock (sorry FM) has the remnants moving to the Arctic for relief from climate change.

What do they know, eh?

[ 05 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 05 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]