Loyal to the Group of Seventeen

Martin Jacques, where are you now?

Roger is right. The US is much worse than China now. Didn’t used to be, but now it is. There is virtually no way for an American citizen to petition their government, and absolutely no hope whatsoever that the government will make any effort to enforce the laws. The US has many, many more people in prison than the Chinese, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population. And speaking of detention centers and illegal jails, the US now has a global gulag of concentration camps, slave labor camps, and detention centers that is now larger than that of Hitler and Stalin combined. So let’s focus on overthrowing the rule of the Democrats and Republicans before we waste time suggesting the Chinese overthrow their ruling party.

Sorry, but Americans are simply not in a position to criticize other nations for human rights violations or for not respecting the rule of law. The US has become the most lawless, human rights abuser on the planet.

I’d say that there is some reasonableness in your reply, Maurice, except for this:
“If the same people are in charge and benefit no matter whom you vote for, then why would the GOP try so hard to depress turnout and disenfranchise citizens? ”

Oppression operates on the margins. The KGB could easily have let the dissidents have their small little protests, distribute their samizdat -after the fall of the Soviet Union, one notices taht there was maybe 1 percent worried about the issues that roiled the Moscow intelligentsia. But you get a big return from that marginal oppression. If you can provide a reasonable standard of living, the people will be amazingly cowed by it all.

Granted, this isn’t the UK, which has an unelected leader, a House of Lords that could be called House of Bribery, and a raft of Labour passed laws that have plummeted the extent of freedoms of expression to 1870s levels. But you have merely to read the sickening story of the Treasury setting up the Maiden Lane off the books entities to grossly violate the law for plutocrats to know that this system is rotten. Iraq was sort of like a laboratory experiment in how far a small ruling elite could push the envelop – the billions of unaccounted money, the return of mercenaries, the endless lies, the impossibility to enforce any accountability. And of course, out in the American public, it seems like the desire for accountability is gone – there’s no sense that anyone at all should be held accountable for the horrendous last eight years. Which is how China does differ. The leadership cannot ignore, forever, such desires, and so they arbitrarily will pick off this or that corrupt dealer. Here, we simply put them in a think tank, where they can abide their time. The democratic spirit is definitely dying.

Typo – I meant torture of course.

Well, I’m certainly not qualified to generalize about China; I’m glad there are folks like Anderlini out there doing what they can to offer us a lever here and there, and I daresay I could do a lot more to touch base with what those Chinese are writing who are offering an insider’s view. And I’m sure there are plenty who will want to chime in to take issue with your characterization of the UK government.

But I do take issue with the idea that in the US ‘there’s no sense that anyone at all should be held accountable for the last eight years’. If you polled the self-styled political cognoscenti inside the Beltway, the political pundits and journalists of our own version of the Court at Versailles, you’d certainly get the impression that everyone in the US wants to move on from Bush. But that is a handful of dozens of people presuming to speak for 300 million, and assuming, arrogantly and wrongly, that their own values and interests are those of the people they wish would shut up and listen to them.

Numerous polls have shown substantial support for investigations into foreign and economic policy over the last eight years, and even for prosecutions of those who committed crimes. There is plenty of anger and resentment among the American public about the collapse of the market. The problem is not motive, it’s opportunity: there is such a sense of disconnect between the government and its citizens that people feel powerless to put their anger into effective channels of response and change.

What worries me is that a group like Obama and his officials and supporters, who–say what you like about their specific policy choices–clearly want to revive and restore faith in mechanisms like elections and community organizing, may not be able to do so in time to prevent a substantial number of people–and not just the poor and undereducated, by the way–from being drawn into more separatist or even violent directions (think a re-expansion of survivalist/secessionist groups like the militia movements). The GOP, for all their vaunted political acumen, are playing with matches and gasoline when they whip up faux-populist sentiments, something they really ought to have realized as recently as 1995. Their preferred model of government–the police market state–assumes a docile and passive public of consumers, not well-armed paranoiacs drinking rainwater and hoarding gold bullion and fuel oil.

My point, and I do have one, is that my fears aside, the choice between the a public that relies on elections and organizing, and one that gathers in small numbers yearly to hope they can catch the ear of a government official to ask for a redress of their grievance without being dragged off to a nearby hotel room to be re-educated with a truncheon at the hands of thugs, is a meaningful one, and not one that flatters the thugs. Many folks in the US are starting to realize that the prosperity that free and easy credit offered them is a mirage, and that a belligerent and stupid foreign policy is bankrupting them and making them less safe. To the extent that they trust elections and organizing, they will use those mechanisms to make change. It will be halting and imperfect and patchy, but it will happen. To the extent they do not, we’ll end up closer to the state, probably not of contemporary Chinese citizen-government relations, but those of contemporary Russia. And it’s just not reasonable to deny that that would be a decline.

I live in China, and anyone who thinks there’s less human rights and freedom in the US than in China is – how do we put this politely – a fucking moron who shouldn’t be allowed to use a typewriter, let alone a computer, lest they break it.

One of the chief problems with the system is that, while there’ s a fairly high level of desire on the part of the higher authorities (or some of them) to clean things up, there’s almost no political will to push through the kind of institutional changes – external watchdogs, free press – that would genuinely alter things. So you get rounds of anti-corruption sweeps every few years that merely clear out a few thousand corrupt officials or so (a small percentage of the whole), who are then replaced with other corrupt officials. For one thing, you’re unlikely to advance in local politics *unless* you have the trappings of success and being a ‘big man’ – the extra apartments, the cars, the mistress. There’s also a gigantic gulf between the laws passed at the top and the enforcement at the bottom, which the petitioning system is supposed to bridge, but, of course, doesn’t. Case in point is rural taxation, which should be minimal under Wen Jiabao’s tax reforms of a few years back, but in fact is extorted at anything from 25-50% from the farmers by local officials gathering ‘fees’ and ‘fines’ – 中国农民调查/Will the Boat Sink The Water? – was excellent on this.

It’s hard to grasp quite how ludriciously corrupt some of the police are (and most are mildly corrupt) until you’ve seen it in practice. Even a small food stand where I live pays 1000 RMB a month in protection fees, split between the police and the gangs – for comparison purposes, graduate salaries run about 2000-3000 RMB a month. Back five years ago when I was first here and doing my obligatory year of expat ESL teaching, one of the students stole the mobile phone of another (these were middle-class 18 year olds) and used it to call his girlfriend in another province. The original owner reported the case to the police (which was a dick move to begin with), and the police promptly threatened the boy’s parents with three years in jail for him (which obviously would have utterly destroyed his life) unless they paid them 30’000 RMB – which I believe was eventually reduced through negotiation to 15’000. (The phone was worth about 800 RMB).

“The GOP, for all their vaunted political acumen, are playing with matches and gasoline when they whip up faux-populist sentiments, something they really ought to have realized as recently as 1995. Their preferred model of government—the police market state—assumes a docile and passive public of consumers, not well-armed paranoiacs drinking rainwater and hoarding gold bullion and fuel oil.”

That’s because there’s jack sh*t for real populism on the right; they deal with a ridiculousness in which a professor is a member of the elites, but a billionaire is ‘jest folks’.

I did, Henry. I just wanted to suggest that JamesP made you look like Emily Post.

Brett, I know it’s probably pointless to ask, but: Have you discovered a sense of humor? Or have you taken to trolling CT comments at random?

I know, I know: the sentence ‘anyone who thinks there’s less human rights and freedom in the US than in China is – how do we put this politely – a fucking moron who shouldn’t be allowed to use a typewriter, let alone a computer, lest they break it’ is full of subtlety and nuance. But really, if you think JamesP is an apologist for contemporary Chinese government-citizen relations, you ought to read his posts through again. That story about the theft of the cellphone wasn’t for a chuckle.

#2 has got to be the most tone-deaf comment I’ve seen on CT… roger, the most brutal day-to-day police violence we see in the U.S. is electrocution by taser, usually nonlethal. Bad, yes, but not even comparable to local government agencies operating as gang-rape clubs, or black jails in which people who complain of their suffering are tortured. And those who are vocally protesting taser use in the U.S. are not being silenced or extorted or threatened or locked up in black jails by the U.S. government or its affiliates.

it is unclear whether we still have the political will to call failed public servants to account.

It’s where I think the faceless-government-bashing of the right wing has accomplished much for them. When you see the government as a unified faceless entity it’s harder to recognize individual actors within that system and call them out for abuses. They all blend into the machinery.

Salient, I disagree. Look, for instance, at the immediate self-policing my comment evokes, which is one of the aspects of the democracy deficit I’m talking about. You have Henry, who comes up with a line that seems like subdeb Rambo II, about those on the left [?] and elsewhere who… made… enormous.. sacrifices to win the freedoms that we have today! (I like the great Sylvester Stallone better: “I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had, wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it!” If you are going to try to knock down an argument by an appeal to throat lumping sentiment, there’s the way to do it).

Then the drive by zombie, who thinks I must be fucking stupid, so that I shouldn’t have a fucking computer, etc.

Meanwhile, of course, no attempt is made to deal with what is more than sentiment – my argument, right or wrong, that the democratic deficit in the U.S. and the rest of the democratic countries is driven by the enormous increase in inequality. And that one of the ways this is expressed is in the fact that the institutional processes that supposedly guarantee these freedoms (which, I remember piously, were won for me… by the sacrifices … of those on the left! I shed a tear for my comrade martyrs of the past) have now become buffers to insure that corruption of all kinds is accepted as part of the system.

So, my larger point is that the smugness of the comparison to China is stupid. The idea that we are so much better than China cause we don’t have petitioners who are imprisoned for their troubles is simply another blinding gesture on the part of those who, on the whole, have benefited from the American system, being comfortable themselves, metabolize that comfort into a morally superior position. I happen to think that’s bull. In America, we have these wonderful processes to help us forget. So we will forget the billions unaccounted for in the Iraq war, we will forget to ask questions about the State department and its good friend, Blackwater, we will forget the testimony about AIG in which, astonishingly, the Fed simply told congress to fuck off. We will gloat about the stories of shakedowns by Chinese cops of peasants – never happen in New Orleans, right? In fact, one thing for sure, you would never have a potential candidate of a major party brag about the overtly racist tactics of a majorly corrupt cop on tv … or maybe you would. On the other hand, to find out that the Fed and the Treasury decided to illegally end run around the law by setting up two off the book entities, Maiden Lane and Maiden Lane II, and very probably used them to indirectly payout billions to banks, that is too petty to even think about.

I can easily imagine a comparison going the other way. The Chinese could point out, for instance, the charming American habit of imprisoning vast swathes of the black population (for their own good – many were found in possession of drugs!) which occurred in response to the Civil Rights movement, just as the same enserfment of the black population occurred after Reconstruction, often by the same means – and the system of credit/political rights/privacy intrusion that has been built up to make the released convict’s life a petty hell.

But such a comparison would have a similar effect in china – it would be intellectual sominex. Go to sleep. We are the best. And don’t forget the enormous sacrifices of those on the left and elsewhere that brought you your healthcare, your garden patch, and your onward and upward economy.

It is disheartening that at the moment, only the worst have the passionate intensity to protest – those sad teabagging Malkin followers – and then, confusedly, on behalf of the wealthy. I’m truly sick of the amnesia by comparison which has long been the pablum of academic neo-liberalism. Look at those petitioning peasants! How far our civilization has gotten from that kind of thing. In form, there’s no difference from James Mill going on about the barbaric Hindoos. And the effect is to make us, Salient, deaf more than tone deaf.

Your point is well taken, Chris. By way of apology, I will say that I think Roger is also wrong about England and Ireland. He didn’t mention NZ, but I bet he’s wrong about them, too.

Oh dear. It is of course correct that the majority of people living in the US, UK, Ireland or Germany (or other Western democracies, please don’t feel excluded) don’t receive the same violent treatment as the poor in China do. I say “most” because in some places – for example the UK – segments of the population are clearly persecuted (just see what happened to Hicham Yezza, for example). Similar things certainly happen in the US, too.

In any event, I don’t think there’s any doubt the Western “democracies” a freer societies than China is. What is, however, in serious doubt is whether the grievances of the majority of the people in those countries are taken any more seriously than those of the Chinese petitioners.

s’okay, roger–maurice’s #27 was pretty evidently a joke.

Cut the narcissism guys, it isn’t all about you.

Well, that’s fair; all the same, roger in #2 specifically references “Americans” & many of us are responding to that. My apologies for not generalizing or considering broader applicability where it’s clearly appropriate to do so.

Salient, I disagree. Look, for instance, at the immediate self-policing my comment evokes, which is one of the aspects of the democracy deficit I’m talking about.

Yeah, but you’re able to hash out your perspective, roger, and nobody’s knocking down your door with billy clubs to take you away to black-jail detention.

And the effect is to make us, Salient, deaf more than tone deaf.

I suspect christian h., above, stated more or less what you were intending to say all along, in his last sentence. Check above and see if you agree (I know the second I say “check comment #29 above” some comment will pop out of moderation upthread and change the ordering…)

Anyhow, I think it’s probably reasonable to assess whether certain states should or should not be regarded, at any given time, as leaders or visionaries whose governments are developing or exhibiting a superior conception of justice. Clearly, while we can engage in comparative analysis, the assessment of each state is independent: the fact that we see specific problems with the conception of justice being accomplished in State X shouldn’t somehow blind us to devastating injustice being accomplished in State Y. (I’m trying, Chris!)

So, I think you severely and offensively overstated your proposition.

I believe you to have made two claims: (Claim 1) in #2, that the ability to petition the emperor makes China’s conception of justice superior to conceptions of justice accomplished by other states, such as the United States (and many other countries). Your basis for this claim is the lack of formal redress procedures in these other states. In the case of the United States, this is ludicrous on its face: if you are mistreated by a government agency, for example, we have a civil judiciary system which you can “petition” via lawsuit. Not a perfect system, but not entirely absent either, as you seem to suggest. I am not familiar enough with other states to clearly identify the grievance-redress procedures they provide, but the answer “none whatsoever” would surprise me in any EU country.

Maybe there is a case to be made that the conception of justice accomplished in China is an ideal model for the rest of the world — or is at least morally equivalent in its conception of justice to the U.S. and other countries. But maybe you shouldn’t be making the case for idealizing China in direct response to anecdotes about torture, indefinite detention, police brutality, and re-education in China. Maybe there’s a disconnect there. When I said this approach was “tone-deaf” of you, I felt I was being very charitable.

(Claim 2) [State X] Can no longer be pointed to as societies that have taken care of their rent seekers [etc]. This is a weaker claim amounting to “it’s really effing rich of citizens of these countries to be decrying China’s governance when their own states are not exactly moral leaders.”

Well, this is a standard attribution error. Citizens of State X probably didn’t have much of a hand in developing the policies of State X, and they don’t deserve to lose their right to analyze and criticize the conception of justice enacted in State Y just because the conception of justice accomplished in State X fails to adhere to reasonable baseline standards for a satisfactorily just society.

If Donald Rumsfeld starts decrying injustice in China, I will question his authority to do so (or at the least I’ll question his intentions and sincerity). But I believe Henry Farrell, Jamil Anderlini, myself, and the many others who are chilled to the bone by Jamil’s report, have every right to express our dissatisfaction, disdain, and critical assessment. I don’t recall any of us suggesting we’re satisfied with the accomplishments of justice to be found in our respective countries of citizenship.

Hnery, I put in a preface here to the silliness of the argument that, if I don’t state fully and completely my entire argument in one post, any modifications or alterations are ruled out by the invisible judges of debate. That is a child’s form of debate.

Instead, I’ll press two points. One is that the petitioning idea would be a nice thing counter to the monarchical tendencies in the “democracies.: The other will be a comment on the inertia that I think your post and comments show. It is an inertia that reminded me of the article in the NYT this sunday about economics departments.

It is very hard to argue that the power invested with the executive in the U.S….and the U.K., and Germany, and France, and Ireland … doesn’t possess quasi-monarchical powers. In foreign policy, I would say in two countries – the U.S. and the UK – the power is more than monarchical when it comes to vital things like conducting a war. Although Louis XVth might have wanted to continue the Seven Year war, the informal discontent of the bourgeoisie and the peasants made that impossible. Contrast this with the events of 2006, in which, in one democratic country, the U.S., an election was held in which a legislature was elected pretty clearly on an anti-war platform, and the legislature caved to the monarch and funded an increased commitment to the war. Then a new quasi-monarch was elected, and one of his first acts was to assure us that the commitment to the war would continue for almost three more years.

Now, I could as well be telling a tale of the U.K. There, the party that came into power and the electorate actually swallowed the idea that the prime minister would go at his choosing and would chose his successor, incidentally. And as for sentiment against the war, tough luck.

My argument, which really isn’t a straw man argument at all, is that the democratic processes in place are producing highly undemocratic outcomes. I could use, as an example, the recent business in Ireland with the golden circle of bankers and the P.M. and the resulting bailout. I have referenced the BAE scandal. Are you satisfied? Or we could go to the freedom of the press in Italy, in which the president is the head of the biggest media conglomerate in Italy and has exerted his control over the state media system. Or we could go to the scandals in France over the connection between Total and various politicians – or even the amazing synergy between various French commercial and political groups and the Rwandan genocide. Here’s a nice buried story from 2008, full of straw men:

Official French reaction to the Rwandan accusation that French leaders, diplomats, and soldiers were complicit in the epic 1994 genocide in Rwanda was muted and curt.
“Unacceptable,” said both former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, and a diplomatic spokesman here during a sleepy week when most of Paris has decamped for vacation. Yet some French nongovernmental organizations, media, and intellectuals treated accusations that France aided and abetted Hutu government forces in the 100-day killing spree, which left more than 800,000 dead, as at least a subject for further inquiry.
”
So, I abjectly apologize for using the American example. I apologize, too, for my interpretation of narcissism – obviously, I was treading the slippery slope of moral relativism, and before you know it I’d be idealizing China and putting down the freedom that the left (and Donald Duck) sacrificed so much for. But I think that, as we do have quasi-monarchical institutions, petitions are an excellent idea. I would love to see the American president, the Irish P.M., Sarkozy and Berlusconi subject to televised petitioning once a month by a random selection of citizens. Perhaps it would cause a small breech in the atmosphere of elite entitlement that dismisses all criticisms of the democratic deficit.

Second, let us go to my so stupid as to be entirely ignorable definition of narcissism, and point out that there’s some pretty interestin’ troping going on in your post, Henry. The ancient oriental despotism, the beaten peasants. In the 1840s in the UK, you could read the same kind of material. Then, of course, the problem was those poor peasants didn’t have the freedom to dope up – now, of course, fashions have changed, and we invade, pesticide spray, and engineer coups in order to keep people from doping up. But you drops in your tropes, you takes your chances. I’d expand – surely without any justication whatsoever – narcissism to include a peculiar blindness to history. But then again, since I didn’t say it in my very first post, well, that is totally out of bounds.

Although no – besides the silliness, do you actually not see how silly that argument is, Henry? Seriously, that is a procedural argument that makes no sense, and ignores the way comments sections work. One doesn’t say everything in a post. One changes an exaggeration. One works out a suggestion. Otherwise, it is hopeless.

That petitioning is more democratic doesn’t mean that china as a whole is more democratic. Instead, my posts have attacked the “more or less” distinction themselves. And, to quote mysel about the effect of these comparisons: “But such a comparison would have a similar effect in china – it would be intellectual sominex. Go to sleep. We are the best. And don’t forget the enormous sacrifices of those on the left and elsewhere that brought you your healthcare, your garden patch, and your onward and upward economy.” In fact, such things go on in China all the time. The bizarre idea that I am idealizing China by not condemning “oriental despotism” is one of the traps of the comparativist method. It is a great trap, especially as the parameters of comparison are simply assumed, instead of spelled out. Nor is there a proof process – I can look at the outcomes, I can point to the u.s., the u.k., france, italy, but it doesn’t matter. The outcomes are abstracted away, as if the system has no feedback. It does. Powerlessness in democracies is a pretty strong ambient feeling.

But this discussion is also symbolic. A generation that came of age at the end of the cold war, and went into academia during the hopes of the Clinton period (when the U.S. was the ‘indispensible” country) decided that they could build a niche in the neo-liberal order for human rights. As circumstances have changed and they have gotten older, they have increasingly adapted a vocabulary of universals in order to avoid circumstances. This is, I think, parallel to the freshwater school of economics. Your post is a very good example of this tendency, from the appeal to what we all know about “freedom” – as if freedom wasn’t context specific, but simply a description of an institutional political process, whatever the social circumstances are – to the idea that specificity is narcissism. Doubtless, you will again ignore the fact that I’ve broadened the base of examples, and ignore the pretty simple argument I am making. But I think that the rejection has less to do with my straw men than with inertia in among the political scientists who have watched humanitarian interventions and civil society groups go to hell.

Maurcie, I think you are actually agreeing with my definition of narcissism, but saying I’m the real narcissist.

Well, maybe. I do not pretend to be an expert on China. I deal with a lot of Chinese students, and I have a sense of what they think, but it is all in English. And it is not at all a representative sample.

On the other hand, I’m not quite sure why your reject the orientalist thesis except that you find it irritating. The thesis would predict, I think, the recapitulation of certain tropes in Western discourse – and surely that article was full of them.

Incidentally, reading around, the petition process has an office, and, according to Tarun Khanna’s Billions of Entrepreneurs, the state grades each local government according to the number of petitions it generates – hence, the incentive to beat the peasants by local government officials, or whoever they hire in Beijing. While I don’t think this is democratic, the idea of a petitioning system in which local governments would be graded on the citizen’s satisfaction or grievances doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.

Incidentally, I live in Beijing, used to live in Shijiazhuang, and am working on a book about Tangshan. Shameless self-advertisement time – if you liked these comments, why not try the book what I wrote!- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Goodwin-t.html.

James, interesting points. Although the wholesale dismissal of chinese students as privileged, hence not worth paying attention to, doesn’t really seem either true or relevant. I’ve students who are anything but privileged. And I work with some engineering profs who are obviously very. I do think the denunciation of Mao, followed by a Maoist like denunciation of the privileged, is interesting. What, are these capitalist roaders?

This is actually the game played by the regime – that the majority of dissidents were privileged pissants. Or pizi.

As for how any corruption could be much, much more than the U.S. – that is mindboggling. Since I would include TARP and the insider dealing that has led to the Fedtaking as collateral for loans who knows how much toxic waste to shore up a small elite, which easily runs to around a trillion dollars in a matter of merely five months, China must be something.

Henry, I can only saqy that you are being silly. It must be late.

You haven’t actually cited any textual evidence for this so-called ‘orientalist framing,’ though, and I can’t see it in the article. The comparisons with the ancient China past – maybe, but that’s a perfectly common trope of discussion *within* China when discussing aspects of the political system, which makes it hard to claim as ‘orientalist.’ (An overused though still occasionally useful term itself.) There’s some mild scene-setting at the start, but it seems bizarre to dismiss the article, which is a perfectly good (though by no means new) piece of work on a broken and damaging system which in no way substitutes for real oversight.

Minor and belated point: but roger could do with some knowledge of the UK as well. The UK does not have an unelected leader. Its leader is Gordon Brown MP, who was elected in 2005.

I believe Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) was actually a diplomat, not a journalist, though I’m not 100%. CHINESE SHADOWS is a wonderful book, so are BROKEN IMAGES and THE BURNING FOREST. He had his eyes open, unlike so many others at the time.