The People's Democratic Dictatorship, Pt 2: Commuwhat?

One of my biggest pet peeves here is hearing people say, “that’s just communism.” I can see where they get the impression. There’s a Stalinist power-structure in place that calls itself the Chinese Communist Party that certainly has Marxist roots, but it has about as much a connection to communism today as the Republican Party has to the ideals of the old Roman Republic. Tenuous, at best. Not even very superficial really. One thing I’ll give credit to The Party for is not pretending to be something it’s not. Doublespeak is not a fixture in Chinese politics. Typically, the leadership says what they mean and means what they say and they say the revolution's dead, folks. They sent the memo in ’78, didn’t you get it?

Mao did create a communist society for a short while. During the Great Leap Forward in ’58 the villages were all leveled and rebuilt as communes. This might have actually worked except that alongside this came the remarkable idea that China was going to match England’s steel production in eight years. Wait, no, 4! Wait! Two years! We can do it in two! Someone said two months? Let’s do it guys! Just melt your shovels, hoes, rakes, plows, and jewelry in backyard steel mills! And then, you know, watch your crops die with thirty million dead peasants following. That's a tenth of the the current US population, by the way.

That didn’t work out so hot and his power slipped a bit. Plan B. Anarchy with communist characteristics. Ten years of it during the Cultural Revolution. Class struggle as defined by neighbors “struggling” against that bastard whose father was a rich peasant or whose brother served in Kuomintang along with your generic book burning, banning anything but revolutionary music, and sending anyone with an education to work as a farmer in the countryside. The general consensus is that it was Mao making a last ditch effort regain power and solidify his historical role as not just The Great Helmsman, but God Amongst Chinamen. Mao died. Happens to everyone, right?

Things changed very, very quickly after that. Deng Xiaoping, probably the most pragmatic political leader I’ve ever read about, came back from his small engine repair shop where he was exiled during the Cultural Revolution. He had a few ideas. The first, and most important today, was that “poverty is not communism.” Maybe sending educated people to the countryside for a few years can have a positive effect after all.

Well… turns out maybe poverty is communism when there’s not a lot of wealth to be shared. What’s a pragmatist to do? Rename communism, that’s what! But what to call it, what to call it… teacher! Pick me, pick me! If you said “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” you won! What does it mean? Well, whatever the hell it needs to mean. That’s its beauty. Did you notice how well the word “socialism” kept the relevance of the “communist” party. Didja also note that “Chinese characteristics” could mean anything? It’s kinda like saying Trey-style Chinese Cooking.

For Deng, it meant two things. Take notes, this well be on the test. First was that “to get rich is glorious.” Hmmm, interesting. That’s a bit of a change from the class-struggling fervor of Mao’s Little Red Book, the only literature allowed only five years earlier. The second was the pragmatic counter-weight, that “some must get rich before others.”

Right there communism died in China and the Chinese Communist Party was given a second chance to prove itself useful to the Chinese people before things got nasty. Nothing but pain came from the previous two decades of rule. While Mao started off on the right foot, The Party and its army was on its best red behavior while running from and fighting off the worse than useless KMT in China’s heartland, he left psychic and physical scars on this nation that will never be healed. Try to find a temple older than your grandfather in this ancient land.

So if China isn’t communist... what is it? That's for Part III: Survivalism.

Some Photos and Captions

Too much text lately, ey? Let's have some photos.

From top to bottom, left to right:

The view from my office. According to my boss, the red buildings on the left side were execution grounds about a century ago. The red keeps the bad spirits away. Behind that building is a massive park centered around Deng Xiaoping on top of a mountain.

We were walking back from Overseas Chinese Town [OCT] after a CouchSurfing meetup. We just got done telling our visitors that Shenzhen, essentially, is a safe city despite its stereotype of lawlessness and crime. Swinging her purse in circles at 2am, however, Cody had it snatched. I got kicked out of the interogation room after snapping this. She spent two hours answering questions like "what was your first pets name?"


A sea turtle. Being "protected" in a Haikou seafood restaurant. Yeah....

We've all heard of the One-Child Policy, right? Well, Pizza Hut in China has a One Trip To The Salad Bar Policy too. 1.3b people. One salad bar. Law and order, peoples, law and order! This is the result.

A group of Vietnamese/Chinese-American businessmen asked me if I wanted to go shopping with them. They took me furniture shopping. Something like $50,000 for this desk. "Wouldn't 1000 year old wood be better in a 1000 year old tree," I asked.

He was in the Chinese Army for years. He was also hit in the head with a pipe. The words "help me" are written on the dent in his bald and dented head. He jams, man. He runs loops through his keyboard by the crosswalk. Easily my favorite beggar.

People's Democratic Dictatorship, Pt. 1: My Bias and Observations

This might be taking it too far, but here goes. I'm reading a lot on the subject and really want to express my thoughts. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it here and after talking with a friend in the Party I think I know where the lines are. Here's hoping I still have a visa next week.

Democracy. China. There... cat's out of the bag. Let's chat. For a censor reading this, please note this is an attempt to explain a situation to the Western reader and not some foreigners idea of how to change China.

I'll start with my own bias and ground observations. Liberty, fairness, and responsiveness are more important to me than the tools of democracy like elections. I'm inclined to think that elections are the most efficient ways of delivering those values to the people, but it's not a universal. Hong Kong is a good example of a place that never really had elections through most of it's modern history and today only grants the right to vote to a few millionaires and academics. Hong Kong citizens experience a great deal of liberty, fairness in law, and have an extremely responsive government.

Compare that to a place like Manila where elections are common but so are troops to harass socialist leaning parties wanting to represent the squatters and poor. Corruption is even more rampant in the Philippines than in China. Lonely Planet, in fact, advices backpackers to not report crimes to the police. You'll somehow loose important belongings before you leave their offices. Elections do not cure everything.

Liberty does exist in China in a limited form. People aren't terrified of talking politics and dissing old leaders like Mao in private. I've heard people in very high positions tell me they're not a member of The Party because they "don't believe communism will be actualized." Where it stops is the right to go into the street with a big sign that says that. Or march on Tiananmen Square. Or try to convince people of your ideas in public forums. There are no North Korea-style microphone systems hidden in people's homes that send the Gestapo in to throw you into re-education camps for bringing up your ideas inside your home or even office.

Fairness and responsiveness are two things the government in Beijing openly discuss and the leaders frequently cite as major policy goals. They know theres a fire brewing in the countryside and they know that it poses the greatest threat to the future of The Party. The cities are content if not happy as a whole. There's education, health care, jobs, and smart people can potentially make a much better life for themselves. None of that can be said of the countryside. Instead they deal with rampant corruption and stagnant incomes while the coastal cities boom.

Corruption isn't just about having to pay off the local cop to get out of a traffic ticket. It's about having your small plot of land appraised at a certain value. The developer gives the local government the appraised amount to buy the land from the farmer. The farmer maybe gets ten percent of that appraised amount, then the land is resold for tens or even hundreds of times more than the appraised amount [of which the farmer only got the sliver of]. This happens all day, every day. Add to this steep taxes on produce that are only now being revoked and you have a land of very edgy farmers that have been known to tear apart government offices.

Officials reported 74,000 demonstrations, or "mass incidents," in China in 2004, up from 10,000 in 1994, with the number of participants rising to 3.8 million from 730,000. - UPI

What's happening now is Beijing knows this problem needs to be addressed but there's no clear solution to it. The corruption isn't necessarily happening because of bad people in administration. It's happening in large part because bureaucracies are both bloated and underfunded. The previous president tried subsidizing rural administration payrolls and quickly learned it would bankrupt the national government. Cutting back on the bloating has serious political consequences within the party, as it creates more work and removes layers of separation between cadres and the unruly peasants.

Limited democracy had been one of their approaches. Contrary to popular belief, there are some relatively free elections in China to small assemblies for townships. Even non-Party members can run and often win. In effect it's giving a blow-off valve to the most disaffected without seriously disrupting power structure. It gives voice without much authority. And

Weekly Observations

Observation #1: Social Harmony

The universe demands it. Extroverts get along great with introverts and vice versa. People play certain roles around certain people. Around introverts I become an exceptionally boisterous, fun-loving, girl-gawking, funny kinda guy. Around overly extroverted people I become a serious, bookish, fact-touting weirdo. Coincidentally, almost every long-term girlfriend I've had is an quietish introvert. I'm most socially awkward around unpredictable or moody people because I don't know whether I'm the yin or the yang that day.

Observation #2: A Football Riot

Bus drivers and their attendants have a choice of what media to play on their bus. About half of all buses have TV's and all have radios. I've been on bus that played techno for my half-hour ride and now I've been on a bus that plays strange cartoons everyday. Whilst watching the cartoon, which had South Park-esque craftsmanship, a riot broke out. It was clearly a football [come on guys, no one else calls it "soccer"] riot] as witnessed by their signs with... footballs. Then the riot police came. And beat the crap out of everyone. The punchline of the cartoon involved two anthropomorphic pigs, with the female one accidentally being assaulted and abused constantly and thus very angry at the male pig. And the final scene the male pig tries to talk a cop out of swinging a billy club at him and instead only infuriates the cop. The cop swings, male pig ducks, and little Mrs. Piggy goes flying through the sky like a reverse meteorite.

"I think there's a lot of collective social experiences we missed out on,'' Grant says. So what, exactly, was that collective social experience being conjured up when those billy clubs came out? Wait, I don't wanna know...

Observation #3: Chinese Time

I've spent most of my first month as Head Teacher assigning order to madness. I started by taping three 8.5x11 printed calendars on our office walls. This has now evolved into a massive effort to enter all relevant data (visa expirations, class times, vacation requests, recruiting info) into Google Calendar and Google Documents (which I can't recommend enough for people needing to share up-to-date information). I've also spent a significant amount of time trying to explain why everything happens last minute. Why one can't easily find calendars in office supply stores.

The biggest reason, in my mind, is the hierarchal structure of decision making in China. Things are strictly top down 'round these parts of the world. Boss Man tells you that you need to be somewhere in 45 minutes, you need to be there. NOW! QUICKLY! And you don't ask later why he couldn't have given you a bit more heads up. Nor do you make the friendly suggestion that he shares information with you. Information is privileged and subject to change. Even in schools, perhaps the most structured environments outside of prisons, have no idea when breaks come or when semesters begin and end. It comes from Boss Man's boss too. It goes all the way to the government. You're typically informed of a decision when it happens. When do you know when your business visa is done processing? When they tell you pick it up. That's when. Bitch.

Best Friends Forever

I don't know if it's the language or the culture, but the concept of friends is much different here than in America. I present to you, the reader, three examples. The first was last week when I was riding the bus to class. I was tired. I was grumpy. I wanted my nap to be a little longer. I'm still not used to having 8am classes. In the midst of my radiating grumpiness the lady behind me wanted to strike up conversation. I was browsing through a Chinese language book and she wanted to confirm that that's what I was studying. I agreed and went back to reading. Fifteen questions later her stop was coming up and she wanted to exchange numbers. This is very, very common. She asked, "You and me - Friends?" I reluctantly agreed and had to spent the next day ignoring her phone calls. I take Brian's line. If the only reason they're interested in you is because you're white, they're not worth much time.

Case two. I found an alternate Muslim noodle shop the other day. I love Muslim food but my local shop is relatively expensive, so I've been on the lookout for cheaper places. I found it. When I finally ate there, I spend the next twenty minutes being baraged with half-English/half-Chinese questions while I ate. My more-than-subtle body language of turning to face the wall didn't work. My new friend, who would be mistaken for a coke feign anywhere else on the planet that actually had drugs for poor people, still kept asking questions and doing weird things - like putting his hot sauce on my table despite the fact that I already had [and was using] the exact same sauce. I had the pleasure of being chased down and screamed to in a crowded alley when he saw me pass by tonight. He had his own little street-food stand selling bakery goods and I tried to buy a small cake, but had to force money into his friends hand. He really was trying to be friendly, but man... come on.

Case three. Eating a table with a stranger is common here. If a restaurant is full, you find a table with a roughly equal number of empty seats as people in your party. Thus, you and a friend can sit at another table with two strangers. I can sit at a table with another loner, like I did tonight. it began well. We shared our dishes and conversed a bit in Chinese. We even split a beer at the end of the meal. He wanted my number. It's normal, so I gave it to him. This is an aspect of Chinese culture I just don't get. We have very, very obvious communication difficulties. We barely made it out of whether we had girlfriends or wives, which part of town we liked, where we were from, and what our respective jobs were. What in the hell could we possibly talk about on the phone? I gave it anyway. I spent the rest of the night answering texts with him ascribing us to be brothers. I replied that no, we were new friends. Not brothers. I received only silence. Somewhere in the Middle Kingdom a heart broke.

* * *

I do have Chinese friends here that aren't part of the company. It took a long awhile to acquire them. We hang out the same way I hang out with friends back home. I go over for a few beers, maybe watch TV and complain about work or women or the weather. The fact that I'm a foreigner means little to them anymore, at least compared to almost everyone else. I might not call them every night [largely because the words "I really need to get home" mean nothing before 11:30 at night to them] but we enjoy each others company because our personalities mesh. They get to practice English, which they like, and I get to practice my Chinese. It's nice. They've even flipped my own sense of humor around on me. They were there for me when Hera needed to go to the hospital and I'm there for them to provide American music other than John Bolton and Michael Jackson. After all, what are friends for?

Book Review: The Rum Diary

I’m glad I finished it because I almost didn’t. It didn’t demand my attention the way other Hunter S. Thompson books have done, but on the other hand the subject matter was a bit richer than I gave it credit for while reading it. The storyline, without much deviation and outlined in the first ten pages, follows a fictional Thompson to Puerto Rico to work for a dysfunctional newspaper with a horrible crew. It’s not meant to be a humorous setup and it’s not about workplace antics or cartooned bad employees. It describes, in one way or another, almost every workplace I’ve been in. It talks about being just a suckerfish in society, “trying to find the shark with the biggest stomach and smallest mouth” and never really being anything but that. It talks about “The Fear”, the fear that back home there’s just nothing for you. The same Fear that catapults clueless Puerto Ricans to New York City and drunkard writers to San Juan.

The story is mellow and plot twists expected. You can see why it took almost 40 years to be published. But I liked it. In the end, I couldn’t help but making two comparisons. First, who was I in that story of trying to find luck in a foreign land? Though I didn’t strongly identify with any one character, I think I fit the editor/manager archetype - the only one who takes the gig seriously, one of the few actually concerned about the future of the company and willing to put the time, heart, and money into making it something bigger and better despite the odds. What I wasn’t, in any case, were the free-willing shiftless drunks personified and maybe a little glorified by Thompson and the other main characters - running from The Fear further and further, paycheck to paycheck, one mediocre workplace to another, and drink to drink. In the end, the only thing that separated Thompson from the rest of the pack was his razor-sharp wit matched with a rock star charisma and attitude that sold a lot of Rolling Stones back in the day.

The second comparison, or question, I kept running through my head was why Thompson wasn’t part of the Beat Generation – that clique of pre-hippy bohemian artsy types that dominated the counter-culture scene of the 50’s, when Thompson was in his 20’s and getting his start as a writer. The simple answer, I think, is that by that time Thompson wasn’t part of any counter-culture. He wasn’t trying to create an alternate definition of morals or aesthetics. Though disgruntled, he was mostly dealt with those sentiments alone and not part of some bigger picture of collective discontent. He was just an intelligent drunk. He was still trying to fit into American society. He was still trying to sucker up to the man, in his own words, and get his fair share. He was still trying to find his place and despite his pessimism hadn’t fully given up hope that there was room for people like him in the big picture.

Perhaps that’s why I like Thompson a bit more than the Beatnik-types. He finally managed to force his own style into the system and actually made a lasting contribution to journalism. He worked inside the system as much as he could – preferring to submit “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” to mainstream magazines and later writing for Rolling Stone – instead of writing in the ‘zines of the day, like Northern Lights out of San Francisco. In the end, he won, and I like that.

Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut

One of my fondest memories of being a first year teacher last year was when one of my seniors in study hall told he found a book on another teachers shelf called Breakfast of Champions. He read it in a few days and then told me he didn't understand it. Being just a little familiar with the works of Vonnegut I wanted to read it too. Two days later I was done with it to. We spent the next two weeks talking about it and what it meant to each of us. I've spent the past year searching Asian bookstores for more Vonnegut, after giving Cat's Cradle to a Chinese English teacher. I still base a good chunk of my theology on what I remember an old roommate sharing with me after reading a Vonnegut book. That was after I encouraged him to read Slaughterhouse Five and he began reading other books on his own.

And now the good old man is dead. I'll leave it, again, to MetaFilter to someone else to sum up my own thoughts:

Kurt Vonnegut *was* an idiot.

You'd have to be to tell the truth. Sometimes there exists a person who is unafraid to look life if in the eye and accept it for what it is. Has this world ever rewarded these people with anything but sadness and a sense of isolation?

It's the sweet little lies about this world and our lives in it that make living bearable for so many of us, you'd have to be an idiot to give up that comfort, even if you never spoke about it to another soul. You'd have to be an even bigger idiot to open your mouth and speak the truth, or in his case sing it out for all to hear, when everything history has ever taught us is that people will only despise you for it.

He wasn't a particularly happy man, his vision didn't seem to bring him comfort, he struggled with suicide his whole life, and perhaps he could have dulled that pain with some comforting illusions. But he was an idiot, and chose the harder path, and made the world an indelibly better place because he lived here, and chose to live in his manner.

... and from his own imagination, the Book of Bokonon:

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

*

Global Climate Change

I had a rocket scientist once correct my Colonization of Space class in college. "It's not global warming," he said, "it's global climate change."

I believe something is happening. I believe humans are linked to it. Despite the data, I don't think we have any idea what's really fueling it or what's going to happen. In that vein, I wrote this [way too long] comment on Metafilter in a thread tying sunspot cycles and Global Warming:

I remember growing up in the 80's seeing TV commercials telling my childhood super-ego that the oceans would be dead seven years ago. Granted, they're in horrible shape, but they're not dead and I still had shrimp I didn't ask for in my fried rice for dinner tonight. I also remember a great deal of the available data saying something serious would happen in January 1, 2000. Nothing happened besides fireworks and a few DUI's. I also remember hearing about a veritable army of Cat 5 hurricanes that were supposed to bear down on my beloved Florida last summer. They never came.

Correlation is not causation and I know we have a mountain of relatively reliable data saying one thing, but it's kinda hard to turn the Gut-O-Meter off when I hear anyone say that when there were no sunspots, things cooled down. When there were a whole lot of sunspots, things started heating up. And wait... doesn't the sun have something to do with temperature? I've heard of this for years and it's stuck on a deep level.

I want to believe in Global Warming©. I really, really do. And I really think we should be cutting down on emissions no matter what... but, that said, it's really hard to turn my Gut-O-Meter off and buy into the new and improved secularized version Judgment Day.

I think inside of everyone is this eschatological voice screaming that everything will, and should, come to a screeching halt in the very near future because of our sins against each other and our planet. It's inside all of us. It fuels most religious faith. I think there's a very real chance this thanatos seeps into interpreting results. Add in group-think bias and extremely strong pressure to arrive at certain conclusions and I think we're building ourselves up for a widespread loss of faith in the scientific community at the time when we need it most.

I don't want to be a part of the same group that also chooses the simpler, and wrong, claim there's also no massive stockpile of aged and long-sense useless chemical and bio munitions buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert. It sounds easier to say there never were WMD and that's that, just like it's easier to say emissions cause GW and that's that.

In fact, I don't want to be a part of any prediction that's anything but mediocre. We're dealing with desertification, water shortages, and beach erosion now... they're all very serious, but it's not the end of the world. In fact most peoples lots in life keep getting better. There's no reason not to assume that even quite a bit worse isn't manageable.

Book Review: The New Emperors

Pete Salisbury's The New Emperors is one of the best history books I've ever read. In reads like a Bill Bryson take down of one of the most complicated subjects in contemporary history: the rise and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the lives of it's two paramount leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It tracks the Party's rise against the odds - even the Soviets were backing the Kuomintang - to eventually take over and completely remold Chinese society. The remolding might be one of the most brutal yet intriguing social science experiments of all time: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This is where the books shines.

Instead of just telling you that the peasants were melting their farm tools in backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward while the crops rotted, it describes through firsthand account and interviews how these things happened, what Mao was thinking, and how his lieutenants fueled it. It shows the beginnings, starting with Peng Dehuai, of the purging that would define the Cultural Revolution. Like a soap opera it sets up the characters just to watch them fall. Perhaps venturing a bit too far into speculation, but supported with Mao's own words, Salisbury claims what was really going through Mao's head were literal pipe dreams. The opiate-laced sleeping medication that the old warhorses were dependent on fueled the imaginative perceptions of what flipping an entire society on its head would bring.

The book changes direction to chronicle the less interesting but more relevant story that brought Deng Xiaoping out of small tractor repair shop where he was sent during the Cultural Revolution and into Beijing to topple the Gang of Four. Like Mao, the book starts soft on the imminently flexible and results-oriented leader and ends with the rigidity and tragedy of his latter days, culminating in the Tiananmen tragedy where the author was an observer.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s China. Though I didn’t think so at the time, it was worth the Beat Reader I traded it for at Friendly’s Guest House in Manila. Get it.

New Directions

I've been promising for awhile that Treyopia was going to be taking a new direction. Here it is. I'm really just not that inspired to write about daily life here. I think I've covered almost everything already. Furthermore, as an officer now in the company and not just a teacher anymore [that promotion came through], I don't feel inclined to write much about my actual work. Too many people who I work with and whom I want to recruit read this for me to be brutally honest.

Besides, I'm a politics junkie and this is stuff I love. I'm using Hong Kong as a supply base to get new books so that when I write I know what I'm talking about. Chinese politics is something I currently know little about and it's a subject that I'm sure many people want information on. As I learn, I'll share. Here's my chance to act as an on-the-ground observer immersing myself in the literature that's out there. Besides, this might help decide if this is something I want to get serious about studying.

With that said, I invite regular readers to make a decision about whether they want to stay with me or not. I'll post up older-style materials when I can, but I think from now on it's going to look more like the past week than anything else. In any case, thanks for reading. It means a lot.

Protect Thy Mote

"I heard that there's going to be a 14 percent increase in the Chinese defense budget. That's a lot... China should undertake to be transparent about what that means." - Condoleezza Rice

What it means is this: imagine the globe for a moment. Take all the oceans. Up to 12 miles from all the coastlines of the world paint the seas a light blue. In the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean allot no such space. This is where our Navy can go with impunity. Nobody can stop us. Running about 300-400 miles inland is the combat radius of the jet fighters aboard the 12 American US carriers, six of which are always at sea and all of which have about 80 combat-capable aircraft. That's the force projection capability of the United States.

With the help of regional allies, we've assigned ourselves responsible for the security of all the lighter shade of blue. We're also responsible for the security of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, most of Western Europe, the Caribbean basin, and now we're adding a lot of Eastern Europe to the mix to. Don't forget Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. We're everywhere because no one else is. We want [our] oil and commerce to move unhindered, so we've assigned ourselves police it.

In case you hadn't notice, and I'm sure you did, that darker blue abuts a lot of other peoples stuff. It causes incidents sometimes, such as when an EP-3 Orion electronic eavesdropper flying 70 miles off the coast of China had it's wing clipped accidentally by intercepting Chinese fighters.

China's economy is growing at over 10% per year, almost 70% of which is based on exports. Like every modern economy, it's extremely dependent on foreign hydrocarbons for economic expansion. Should it be a surprise then that

"By 2010, China's submarine force will be nearly double the size of the U.S. submarine feet. The entire Chinese naval fleet is projected to surpass the size of the U.S. fleet by 2015." - American Shipbuilders Association

Mix this with the idea of "offensive realism," one of the most compelling foreign policy theories I've ever read, and the future looks a little scary. As one power rises and another weakens, historically they almost always come to blows as the rising power encroaches on the weaker ones old turf. America has a lot of old turf. John Mearsheimer makes the case in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Great powers need to prove their respective strengths and the only way to do it is to actually fire shots. Furthermore, he argues, that states must constantly expand or face perennial insecurity.

In an insightful piece written by Paul Kennedy from Harvard, he waxes on Europe deconstructing it's military while every powerful nation in Asia is rapidly expanding theirs. He concludes with a question about Europe's pacifism and Asia's militarism that I think can equally be applied to the feigned ignorance fueling Condoleeza Rice's quote at the top.

This leads to an obvious, final question: What do naval strategic planners in the one continent assume about the future of the world that the planners in the second continent do not? Why is Chinese public television showing programs about the rise of Elizabeth I's navy at the same time that the British Ministry of Defense is mothballing or scrapping warships with names that go back over 400 years?

So what is it American strategic planners assume about the future of the world that they want the Chinese to admit in spite of their promise of a "peaceful rise"? Perhaps she's looking for a confession that, as the Heritage Foundation assumes, that the "peacetime expansion of China's military capabilities betrays a clear intent to challenge the United States in the Western Pacific and establish itself as the region's predominant military power."

Honestly, maybe that's not a bad thing. If indeed that is the case, and it likely is to a degree, open communication about mutual desires and fears of the future can only be a good thing.

One Chief

The always accurate Mr. Cheney today, in referencing Democratic congressmen acting on the will of the people to pull out of Iraq, that, "the United States military answers to one commander in chief in the White House, not 535 commanders in chief on Capitol Hill." Technically, he's right. But then his logic follows that the Congress must fall in line behind Presidential policy and thus they "expect the House and Senate to meet the needs of our military on time, in full and with no strings attached."

The President answers to the 535 men and women on Capital Hill. The President is the Executive, he makes sure the law and policy is carried out. And like any CEO, he answers to a Board of Directors. A freshly elected Board of Directors still covered in the raw stench of campaigning and opinion polls. Who's powers include [Article II, Section 8 of the US Constitution]:

To declare war, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

So yes, there is but on Commander-In-Chief "when called into the actual service of the United States." Guess who calls them into service? Three guesses:

A) Captain James T. Kirk
B) The US Congress
C) Lake Michigan

Mr. Cheney, the military answers to one Commander-in-Chief who executes the foreign policy of the United States as prescribed by the US Congress, who in turn answers to the people. I expect that you will fulfill their wishes with no strings attached.

The American Dream

Things made a bit more since today after having a class with a group of teachers and later with a group of principals with the same topic of conversation. What are the differences between American schools and Chinese schools? I begin by having them participate telling me what they imagine American classrooms looking like. Universally, they sounded like this:

• In American classes, students lounge around on the floor during classes.
• At most, there are 20 students per class.
• American students are more talkative in class, but that's to ask deep and penetrating questions.
• American students and teachers are always great pals.
• American classrooms are "more open," meaning few if any rules.
• American classes are extremely fun, involving lots of games.

More importantly, they all - every one of them - unhesitantly believed American education was better. An example was a principal who told me that 20 years ago educational scholars from China visited America and American scholars visited China. Both teams came to the conclusion that they well disciplined Chinese classrooms were better and the undisciplined American classrooms were worse. In those 20 years, however, no Chinese citizen has won a Nobel prize while Americans have won many.

With that, what we're doing out here makes since. I've often complained about feeling like the foreign teachers are expected to be English-speaking clowns. Come in, play games, make the kids have fun and love English and like magic the language will sink in. Disciplining children is not allowed. What we're doing, it seems, is recreating the Chinese image of the American classroom setting. They want us to come here and do to their students what they think was done to us. They want that magic spark that we were given to rub off on the next generation of Chinese.

Unfortunately, this image of the American classroom is incorrect. While Montessori schools and small private schools do exist, they are rare and most American students endure something very similar to the Chinese classroom.

While most American teachers would love the conditions that Chinese people are describing, the apathy and attitudes of American students prevents it from being a reality. I often corrected their notion of a rules-free zone by outlining each behavior associated with Childhood - horse playing, running, touching - that American teachers spend an extraordinary amount of time preventing for liabilities sake. Thus American teachers daydream of complicit and obedient [and imaginary] Asian classrooms where students want to learn and beg for three hours of homework a night.

In coming days and weeks I want to look at this issue more deeply. I want to more clearly identify, by the numbers, where the strengths of the Chinese classroom are and where the strengths of American education are. I'd also like to explore the idea of why, despite the huge number of science graduates in China, there have been no Nobel Prizes.

China: Economy 101

If you want to break things down into impossibly simple models, there are two competing views of where China's economy is going. The first, and one I give a bit of credit to, is presented in Ted Fishman's book China, Inc. In it he lays out how and why China is providing the proverbial Perot suction cup noise of industry fleeing not just America, but everywhere, to find a new home in China. A seemingly endless supply of docile unskilled laborers, infrastructure to move the goods, a government that's only talking of putting the breaks on uncontrolled growth at any environmental cost, a knack for copying coupled with laughable copyright enforcement, and a legal transfer of technology on a scale never before seen all conspire to give China an edge over any other country on the planet.

The first issue is the biggest. The sheer population of China is mind boggling. Fishman points out that the discrepancy between the official population of China [1.3b] and the unofficial estimates [1.5b] constitutes 2/3's the population of America. With that you have the largest migration in human history of people leaving the countryside in the interior to work in the coastal boomtowns, often trailed by a trail of savings from the villages to start small businesses. Labor is cheap and plentiful. College graduates work for less than $250 a month. Chinese companies don't need expensive machines to make cheap products more efficiently... it's easier to the labor. Fisher sites an example of an automobile company in Shanghai building luxory Jeep knockoff's for $8000 - with hand tools.

Eating lunch the other day my friends and I watched for half an hour as barrows of thrown out electronics dished out of the trash were brought to small workshop where the wires, casings, and other components were neatly shredded off and dropped into massive piles. Without a single any sort of Think Green-style motivation, China is probably the largest recycler on the planet. No task is too small or menial because no wage is too small.

Fisher sends out the warning over and over again that no business is safe from China's growing economy, especially as they move into more and more advanced technology like wide-body airplanes and their first indigenous jet fighter.

And then there's the other fear...

Economically, "too much of a good thing" really means something. Too much low interest money typically leads to inflation. Rising living standards in China mean rising costs of living, which means higher wages, which again adds inflationary pressures.

That's clearly dawning on Chinese leaders. `China's investment growth is too high, lending growth too fast, liquidity excessive and trade and international payments very imbalanced,'' Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on March 16 at a Beijing press conference. He added that energy efficiency and environmental-protection issues haven't been properly resolved.

When even China's No. 2 official uses words like `unstable,' `imbalanced,' `uncoordinated' and `unsustainable' to describe the economy, you have to wonder why investors aren't paying more attention to the risks and are still buying ever more Chinese stocks.
-William Pesek

In the same article Pesek goes on to address longer term deflationary fears with business costs rising because of environmental degregation, volatility, and rising labor costs. Even the Asian Development Bank is saying that, "Should investment continue to run at more than 20 percent a year, what has been a source of growth for many years could turn out to be a curse."

My own thoughts side more with Fisher. I've been to Manila, I've lived in America during a recession, and I know what a growing economy feels like. I see the cranes on every street building new high rises, thousands of kids at my school getting a solid Western-style education. Though there are plenty of BMW's running around, most of the growth is building a budding middle class. It's no bubble that people hoping to get wages commensurate with their skills and beginning to get suckered into the consumerist game one cell phone, one DVD player, and one computer at a time. It looks and feels like almost everyone is getting a piece of the pie, even if only relatively more from starting point of worse squalor. On a street level, what else would you look for to check for a healthy economy?

Economists and market-types always like to talk about "market corrections." Well, folks, this is the biggie here. 1.3 billion consumers. 1.3 billion producers. All moving from the idle slack of horrific misrule dating from Qing Dynasty on through the wonderfully inventive ideas of Mao Zedong [it was only fifty years ago Chinese were melting their farm tools in useless backyard steel furnaces]. Here they are, arriving by the train load to work, buy, and join modernity.