River water flows east

James Palmer reminds us in Foreign Policy that deaths of CCP leaders are sometimes … inconvenient. Announcement of a death may be delayed by hours or days while CCP figures out what the death means. Deng Xiaoping’s death was not reported immediately. Jiang Zemin was not nearly so popular as Deng, but he was known as not-so-loyal opposition to Xi Jinping. His death amid virus-related protests including denunciations of Xi everywhere in China requires some … consideration.

On November 30 Shanghai blogger Qin Feng reported – pointedly, again, in the same words – jiang shui dong liu qu  the river water flows to the east. She had posted that on November 13 and her wechat was immediately blocked by CCP. She posted it again yesterday.

I have no information about any relationship of Qin Feng to the Jiang family. It is possible that she is the daughter of an acquaintance of the family from many years ago, or that someone in her family worked for Jiang at one time. It is possible that she is just making stuff up. There has been a Jiang death watch for years now. He was 96.

No matter. Since we are returning rapidly to an information-free China, when speculation and conspiracy theories are all we have to go on, I’m going with this. Qin had some inside information from about two weeks ago. Her post was odd – what could it mean? The Jiang could be a reference to Jiang Zemin. This odd post was then blocked by CCP.  When she regained her access to wechat – after Jiang’s death was announced – she posted it again.

There is the joke about eastern European political intrigue, when nations were competing frantically both publicly and surreptitiously. Deception was the order of the day. A meeting was scheduled between two fierce opponents, meant to clear the air at least a little. Hours before the meeting, the chief negotiator on one side died. Hearing of the death, the lead on the other side mused. “Died? I wonder what he means by that.”

Et tu, Jiang.

Housing Affordability … and a bit more

A recent chart on housing affordability in major cities compared with incomes –

Source: https://twitter.com/PlanMaestro/status/1472616369745281026

Hangzhou, where we have an apartment, comes out looking better than Shanghai but a lot worse than New York or London.  Great – I guess. 

One-data point comparisons are always suspect. On “city housing affordability” one has to ask, “affordability for whom?” I am always suspicious – affordable to an expat on a two-year assignment, coming with family and – most important – a nice-sized business housing allowance who wants to live in the most-like-home part of town? Ok. One can have many more issues – what incomes? median? average? what part of the city center? On the chart, “gross rental yield” is presumably an annualized per cent of purchase price, but the units are unstated. The horizontal axis is itself a ratio, price divided by income.

Still, there is some value in such a comparison, of the 50,000-foot view variety. We know prices for apartments in New York and London and Tokyo are high. If the chart above is using reasonably comparable methods for all cities, Chinese housing affordability does look outrageous. And there are plenty of news stories with data on real prices and incomes to support a chart that look something like the one above.

More than anything else, such a chart suggests that real estate prices in big cities in China are headed for a fall – as measured by the same methods used to produce the chart. Reasons – a lot fewer expats in China on expense accounts; end of the demographic dividend – the working age population is now falling by about 5 to 7 million a year, and those are people who would buy apartments; a push by owners of multiple apartments to decorate them and rent them out or sell them, now they realize that prices cannot always go up; falling birth rate (from already far-below-replacement numbers; insufficient middle class jobs for college graduates; and crackdowns on purchases of multiple apartments, convenient divorces to permit purchases, and the crackdown on corruption generally.

By most accounts there are around 65,000,000 empty (newly built in the last decade or two) apartments in China. As is typical in China, these apartments remain concrete shells with windows, utility stubs in the wall, but no “decoration” – finished floors or walls or appliances or interior doors. The concept has been to buy as a store of value. The value of that means of investment is now highly suspect. GDP growth in the next decade in  China will regularly be below 5%, perhaps in the range of 2% or 3% (my opinion). Right now and for the next couple of years the economy will have to adjust to millions of people who have lost or will lose jobs in real estate sales and after-school tutoring. With relatively slower growth in exports, decline in construction investment, and general international political antipathy, China doesn’t have – or need – more people clamoring to buy apartments.

My guess is that another round of fiscal reform is coming in a few years. The last major reform in 1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax-Sharing_Reform_of_China_in_1994  adjusted taxes paid to central and local governments and revenues distributed. The central government got a bigger share of tax revenues; cities got the burden of most social welfare expenditures and the right to most revenues from selling land. The result, along with evaluating local and provincial officials by how much GDP they “created” during their five year term, was the extreme overemphasis on physical development we have seen in the last twenty years. These policies also created severe imbalances in the shares of investment and consumption in the economy. Subsequent reforms have not addressed the excessive use of land sales by local governments to fund daily operations.

The GDP problem that could be ignored for twenty years is now salient. As China grew dramatically, all parts of the economy grew. There are now plenty of investment firms and stock exchanges and futures markets and marketing firms and media companies. But the big story was in investment. There were plenty of jobs in construction and for architects and designers and engineers and project managers. Some of those architects and designers and engineers will find work elsewhere in China or on OBOR projects. Some of the construction workers will be able to do that as well. The point is still the old story about imbalance between investment and consumption. With investment share of GDP falling, the consumption share must rise, and the economy just doesn’t need so many construction workers and at the same time it doesn’t really need more workers in retail or personal services.

Michael Pettis has been talking about this dilemma for a decade. His point, and mine, is that the income share of GDP needs to go up. That means less money for SOE investments and salaries and profits and less money for governments –  fewer expressways and ports and fancy government buildings – and more for ordinary working Chinese. Incomes and interest rates have long been repressed in China to focus on investment. If emphasis on the physical environment is lessening, money should be available for social environment purposes – education, health care, pensions, personal services. When general incomes go up, consumption can go up, along with jobs in those sectors.

Unfortunately, the trend is in the other direction. With the decline in real estate land and apartment sales, local governments are now in a severe fiscal crunch. For many big cities revenues from land sales have been 50% or more of total revenues and that is no longer going to be the case. Beijing has said it will increase transfers to local governments to help alleviate the fiscal crisis, but my suspicion is that a good portion of that money will go to pay interest and principal on bonds for infrastructure projects that cannot cover their payments now. In other words, the transfer funds will go the banks and investors, not ordinary Chinese. Bankers and investors have jobs, too, but they are not the ordinary Chinese we are talking about.

We just saw that civil servant salaries have been trimmed in Eastern China by 15% or so.  Quarterly bonuses that were always a significant part of salaries have been cancelled. That is an astounding change. The story is   here.

Civil servants have been reasonably well compensated, as have some university teachers – but by no means all. This is the middle class that has been able to go on vacations and buy some luxury products – not a lot, but some – and those bonuses will not be coming back soon. 

For a couple of decades there has been a meme in development economics that some developing countries “industrialized too fast” using foreign donations and import replacement tactics. The countries developed resource-heavy industries that created very wealthy vested interests and politics, including corruption, skewed to their own interests at the expense of factory and extraction workers. A local service sector economy was insufficiently developed.

Development economist Dani Rodrik makes the argument Growth Without Industrialization.  

After some early industrialization, the argument goes, some of these countries “deindustrialized too quickly” meaning that their resource base declined or local labor prices rose or external competition increased. Funding from donors tended to be misspent or go into physical infrastructure that did little to enhance local incomes. The countries attempted to build their service sector, but some of those functions could easily be handled by foreigners outside (law, banking, investment, even marketing and advertising). The economies did not grow in a reasonably balanced way, for both investment and consumption. The local service sectors remained underdeveloped, mostly because incomes were not distributed widely among the population.

I don’t want to push this model to represent China, but one can see the parallels. China did industrialize quickly, and government attention was on investment and not on consumption or services.  Now, labor costs in China have risen, factories in China are more efficient (more machines than before), manufacturers are leaving China, and the service sectors have blossomed in the past fifteen years.  But those service sectors remain smaller than needed for good consumption growth, because general Chinese incomes, although rising, remain low. Only with substantial transfers of wealth from SOE and governments to ordinary Chinese can this conundrum be remedied. That can be investments in education or health care or pensions, so Chinese don’t need to fund so much of those items from their own pockets. But social service spending is needed to raise incomes and GDP in China. 

One can see a lot in a single chart, one you get past the single data point conclusion. The US is not the only big country with fiscal problems at both macro and micro levels. And the US had its own housing affordability crisis about fourteen years ago. The ham-handed and biased government response was partly responsible for the politics of the last decade. Et tu, China?

 
 

A question never really asked

… in force in American politics, but is the heart of Confucian thinking about leadership – how will this policy help the people?  The Confucian leader is judged according to that standard – and don’t give me the innovation and tax-cuts-create-jobs crap.

Secular humanists and some evangelical Trumpians might agree with this characterization of the relation of heaven to the people –

Heaven gave birth to the people and set up rulers to superintend and shepherd them and see to it that they do not lose their true nature as human beings…   (Spring and Autumn Annals, one of the five Confucian classics, purportedly edited by Confucius himself.)

The passage goes on to assert – Heaven’s love for the people is very great.  Would it then allow one man to preside over them in an arrogant and willful manner, indulging his excesses and casting aside the nature Heaven and Earth allotted them?  Surely it would not.” 

God’s people in the Old Testament is comparable to Heaven’s people in the Confucian texts.  So noted Wm. T. de Bary in his Tanner lecture The Trouble with Confucianism.  (Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of California at Berkeley, May 4 and 5, 1988).

… there is much evidence of a prime concern for the people and every reason to believe that both the people’s welfare and the people’s sufferings weigh heavily on the Confucian conscience. (p18 of the book by the same name, available here.)

Confucius’ attitude is sympathetic to the common people. The ruler bears supreme responsibility for their welfare.  Leaders should be junzi, men of scholarly mien and education and wisdom.  De Bary lists seven qualities of leaders, as described in the Analects –

  1. He manifests virtues in forms that benefit the people.  (Analects 15:34 and 20:2)
  2. He commands respect because of his own respectful or reverential manner (Analects 6:30)
  3. He cultivates the social norms through rites – a disciplined observance of the social and religious forms that should govern the common life.  (Analects 1:9, 12:2, 13:4, 14:44)
  4. He has a kindly, generous, and forbearing manner in dealing with the people. (Analects 18:2, 11:24)
  5. He demonstrates a sense of confidence and trust in his relations with the people.  (Analects 12:7, 13:4, 15:25)
  6. He is reasonable in his demands on the people (Analects 19:10)
  7. He demonstrates zeal for learning and readiness to take responsibility for the education of the people. (Analects 6:20, 13:4, 13:29)

Through the Analects and other Confucian texts, the leader’s responsibility is abundantly clear – to care for the people.  Long before Confucius there was the notion of the ruler as the Son of Heaven, and the corresponding mandate of Heaven as long as the ruler demonstrates care for the people.

John Kasich demonstrated this concern in 2013 when asked about his support for medicare expansion in Ohio – “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”

As we claw our way through the virus and the next five weeks of election chaos and the economic, political, and social miasma that is baked into our future, it might serve us well to ask a fundamental question of any government policy or proposal.  Ask it in congress, in state legislatures, in city council meetings, in press conferences – how will this help the people?  And ask it over and over again. 

Wokeness – and despair for democracy

Americans seem to have woken up to disparities in our society, particularly for black people.  This is a good thing. Wokeness will go a ways toward fulfilling the promises suggested in the Declaration of Independence.

But there is a most disturbing part of wokeness that is not limited to racial matters, and that is the language fascism of the left. It is as dangerous to a free society as any fascism of the right and too close to what we can observe every day in China.

Much of the language of wokeness does not inspire faith in a more equal future. It inspires only despair at the convergence I see between authoritarian rhetoric in China and similar language in the woke left in the US. That model of wokeness is what every authoritarian government wishes for America.  It is retreat into tribes and truth in service of politics. Despair is the necessary result, for on the one hand no one can ever be sufficiently woke, and on the other, concurrent damage to civil society is not easily rebuilt.

University speech limitations have been around as long as I can remember, even in the sixties. We saw codes reappear a few years ago with the university speech codes and microaggression issues.  Per wokeness, speech is only allowed to be free if it is correct. Ignored in a person’s “right” to be called what pronoun they wish is the “right” to demur.  The most lightweight response – “I’m offended” – should not be anything more than a personal statement, but it became a call for apologies and more. The more insistent wokeness resulted in cancellation of speakers, changes in venue, and some faculty members hurt professionally or physically in trying to reply to accusations and restrain the mobs. Jordan Peterson is only cashing in on the difficult experiences of Jonathan Haidt, David Shor, and many others. 

American liberals should be as deeply disturbed by such developments in censorship and language policing as they are to lies and conspiracy theories of the alt-right.  It is inimical to civil society and to liberalism.    

The Chinese model

We know the fascism in CCP in China now – the loyalty tests, the unwritten speech codes, sanitizing of history, the scrutiny of texts and teachers for incorrect thinking, the sense of being under attack, the arrests for mocking Xi or CCP.

There is no truth apart from what CCP says.  The politically correct mimic the speech and ideas in pledges and writing. This “performative declamation” is an old fascist – and CCP – practice.  Geremie Barme at Australian National University calls it New China Newspeak.  The progressive warrior has a lot in common with a CCP cadre on speech codes. Whatever one calls it, it is straight outta 1984 and it is double-plus ungood. And it is spreading on the progressive left. See here, and here and here.

President Obama warned progressives in 2019 to avoid a circular firing squad on correctness.  And Jonathan Chait warns about wrongthink and despicable behavior among progressives in a recent New York magazine piece. Purity on wokeness appears essential, but once ensnared by wokeness, there is no escape. James Lindsey has a penetrating analysis of wokeness as cult indoctrination at New Discourses.  New China Newspeak appears to be another Chinese import to America. 

Factions don’t balance factions

One can be sanguine about the language and behavior of wokeness.  At the beginning of any cultural movement, there is a tendency to extreme behavior by some, and that motivates others. The extreme behavior is temporary and eventually the system adjusts to a new norm.

The progressive cultural movement of the last ten years does feel different because it is matched by extremists on the right (white nationalists, like Trump, and evangelicals who suggest a retreat from the world (Rod Dreher) until Trump, God’s appointee, can deliver us).  When silence is violence there can be no middle ground.  Democracy demands we be able to talk with one another. When communication fails, civil society fails, and democracy fails. 

We have threats of real physical violence enabled by the alt-right.  Michigan shut down its legislature rather than confront the armed thugs.   Threats are also from the police, as agents of the state and from our ruler.  The physical threats were there, in the Trump march to display his ignorance of the Bible and its contents.  Ezra Klein – I was watching the speech Trump gave before tear-gassing the protesters in the park in DC. What so chilled me about that speech was how much he clearly wanted this — like this was the presidency as he had always imagined it, directing men with guns and shields to put down protesters so he could walk through a park unafraid and seem tough.

Most of the violence from the left is still verbal, but it tortures language to the point of meaninglessness – there is no racism other than white racism. Silence is assault. Students need safety from language or viewpoints with which they disagree. An “incorrect” pronoun is violence. Jobs and careers are destroyed in senseless witch hunts, all due to someone using incorrect speech or even alluding to ideas with which the speaker actually disagrees.  This is Orwellian, to be sure.  It is also reminiscent of witch hunts circa 1968 in China – academics, officials, loyal party members suddenly deemed insufficiently loyal.

The factions left and right do not offset or balance each other, for a middle ground to find consensus.  The middle ground shrinks. The factions only encourage each other in democratic decay. Democracy does die in the darkness of censorship and mistrust.   It is to remember Robert Oppenheimer in a different context – I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.

Media infection

As in China, the major US media now seem controlled by a faction with a particular political agenda.  

It is not just speech codes and sanctioning of university faculty for speaking their minds. It is corruption of what we used to consider the free press.  If staff at the New York Times cannot restrain themselves in forcing resignation of the editor who okayed publication of an op-ed of which the staff (collectively) disapproved, what hope for journalism anywhere?  There are other examples. Matt Taibbi made the point in The American Press Is Destroying Itself – how can any editor operate when the price of airing opinions shared by a majority of the population might be loss of job?

Right wing media – Fox News and other – now seem justified in making a pot and kettle accusation.  What we thought was mainstream media attempting to pursue truth and openness seems just a sham.  Reporting and truth give way to virtue signaling.

Discourse matters

Our democracy can only survive as our civil society functions.  Our ability to disagree in a civil way, our ability to tolerate dissent and tolerate each other, our ability to bring kindness and understanding to social interaction are all disappearing. These traits add up to civility.  Civility is not just smiling in public.  It is how we use language, in print, in person, online. 

Lucian Pye told us what society looks like in China without our norms of civility, without civil society, without generalized trust.  The government become the arbiter of social norms, and that is dangerous. Civility, Social Capital and Civil Society: Three Powerful Concepts for Explaining AsiaTo define the state as the only legitimate community, and thus deprive citizens of individual rights, comes close to advancing a fascist ideology.  Protests are a necessary way for us to communicate with each other.  We should use them, by all means. But extremities of language only divide.  It is not the Christian way.  It is not the King way.

In 1995, novelist Umberto Eco wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books called Ur-Fascism.  Based on his youth in fascist Italy during World War II, he listed fourteen elements of fascism, regardless of political origins on the left or the right. 

We can see Xi Jinping and today’s CCP in this list.  The seven deadly sins in Document No. 9 are a warning to all Chinese.  In the list we also see the Cultural Revolution and its destruction of statues, historical buildings, books, and maiming and murder of university teachers who were not sufficiently – well, let us say, woke.  And now we can see the American progressive left – and alt-right – at every step. 

This is an abbreviated list of Eco’s fourteen points, from Chris Hedges in American Fascists way back in 2006. Blogger Jason Kottke characterized each item. Think about current news stories as you consider each of the fourteen.

  1. The cult of tradition. “As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all ….”
  2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
  3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.
  4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
  5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
  6. Appeal to social frustration. “…one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
  7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
  8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
  10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
  11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
  12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
  13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
  14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Eco quotes Franklin Roosevelt during a radio address on the “need for continuous liberal government”:

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

One can find every one of the ideas on Eco’s list – save perhaps number 12 – exemplified daily in news about the progressive left.

Chris Hedges used Eco’s list in an introduction to his book about the Christian right. Hedges – who describes himself as a socialist – shows the right wing oligarchic systems at work in Treason of the Ruling Class. To see the applicability of Eco’s list to the distinctly non-Christian left suggests the depth of my fears about democracy.  Language extremism is a democratic sickness, and it can metastasize.

Reading forward

Civil discourse requires reading.  Previously, we read Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), and Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich).  Today we are told to read How to be an Antiracist (Kendi) or White Fragility (Diangelo).  We should also be reading How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt) and America: The Farewell Tour (Hedges) and the article by Amy Chua, Divided We Fall.

When our civility fails, our civil society fails, our democracy fails.  Should that happen, we might as well be taking our marching orders from some other American autocrat in waiting, and it won’t matter if your sentiments are from the left or from the right.   Civil discourse is democratic.  It is the essence of democracy.  Without it, we are headed for a fall, Trump or no Trump. 

Has Trump has been doing God’s work?

For years, some evangelical leaders have been touting Trump as the wolf-king, anointed by God to enact the Christian right agenda.  Symbols are important in this swamp-fevered world, and Trump’s immorality is actually a positive sign of his worthiness.  Go figure.

Four years ago, Peter Montgomery noted 25 Religious Right Justifications for Supporting Donald Trump.  Christian right leaders spoke endlessly of Trump as a chosen vessel for God’s will, saying things like “God has picked him up” and that Trump is “literally splitting the kingdom of darkness right open” and that “the Lord has put His favor upon him.”

Now I wonder if the coronavirus is a symbol from God as well, a sign of displeasure.  Is God finished with Trump?  Is Trump past his heavenly use-by date?

I ask because there is a long tradition of natural disasters as portents in every culture.  They can be God’s recognition that a ruler is no longer serving the people, and it is time for a change.

American evangelicals tend to see the portents as warnings to society, rather than as warnings to leaders.  Pat Robertson told us that the  Hurricane Katrina disaster was a sign that God is displeased about American policy on abortion. Hurricane Sandy was understood in a similar way.  Jerry Falwell, himself an American natural disaster, pointed the 9-11 finger of judgment at the ACLU, among other miscreants.  Per this poll,  the coronavirus is a portent as well, but only of a general need for Americans to turn back to God.

For me, personally, I don’t like these portents.  Too vague.  The end of days is always nigh, and always attributable to gays, abortion, music, or anyone looking to actually implement teachings from the Sermon on the Mount or pay attention to the Golden Rule.  I want real, actionable portents.

The ancient Chinese Mandate of Heaven seems to work for me.  For more than 3500 years, Chinese have been using alignment of stars and planets and natural disasters of all kinds – floods, tsunami, droughts, even barbarian invasions – as a sign that the ruler may have lost his Mandate of Heaven – the right to rule.   The mandate signals heavenly disapproval of a ruler.

Heaven hears as the people hear, sees as the people see (Mencius 18.8 or Wan Zhang 1.5)

That is the Confucian warning to rulers who fail to protect and serve the people. Chinese emperors, even down to current CCP leaders, have acknowledged the threat.  Terrible Beijing floods in 2012 caused a flood of existential worry at Zhongnanhai, the top leadership encampment in Beijing.  That was the year of transition to Xi Jinping and the rebirth of hard authoritarianism in China.  The disastrous floods in 1626 and 1890 were later seen as dynastic warnings of the end of dynasty. 

The political fear in any authoritarian government is that “performance legitimacy,” the only rationale for its political existence, will be compromised.  This is as true in the US as in China. Mr. Xi has his own ways of avoiding judgment.  For us in the US, Sam Crane at Useless Tree blog notes that democracy in normal times provides a cushion for both rulers and the ruled, by permitting some officials to be replaced without jeopardizing the entire political party.  A few officials or rulers can be changed without threat to the supreme leader.

But these are not normal times, and we have two viruses – one a medical emergency, the other a social, cultural, and democratic emergency.  We are in need of an internal flush, almost a cleaning, as our dear leader promoted the drinking of disinfectant to flush the other virus.   Trump alone is not enough.  We need to flush his enablers as well.

I have written before about similarities among Trump and Xi, CCP and GOP.  The Trump-led GOP is the most despicable and authoritarian regime ever to disgrace American politics.  The portent I am banking on is the covid-19 crisis as retribution from heaven for the banality of evil attributed to the the liar-in-chief and his despicable lackeys.

Franklin Graham, the Billy Graham successor, says the virus is due to mankind turning its back on God.  One wonders whether he has both the direction of causality and the target wrong.  For Trump and GOP, sic semper tyrannis comes to mind.  Perhaps God has heard as the people hear, seen as the people see. 

China seems stuck with Mr. Xi for the duration.  For us, we can only hope that the retribution from heaven is reflected widely in the people’s choices on November 6.  Then, we can get to work on making America great again.

Killer App

Trump, Xi, CCP, GOP is the title of a series of posts I ran about a year ago, pointing out some of the ways that Trump and Xi are alike, and CCP and GOP are alike.

We know that Mr. Xi and CCP wasted about six weeks at the early stages of the crisis.  This no doubt cost lives in China, as people died at home without being tested.

We know that Trump has wasted more than six weeks, since he knew about the virus from early in January when China informed WHO.   This waste of time has cost lives in the US, and is going to cost a lot more, as doctors and nurses work without a “safety net,” preventive measures are ignored by Trump, people die from overdose on hydroxychloroquine and GOP derides the pleadings of the scientists and doctors.  The bungling will force the use of the “death panels” hypothesized by the GOP in Obamacare debates.  In overwhelmed hospitals, doctors will be forced to triage virus patients.  Public health and safety cost money, and Republicans say we can’t afford it.

So let’s help in the election.  Let’s remind all Americans in our high-tech information age that the GOP has developed a killer app for the American people.  Call it Trump.  By June or July, Americans will have realized how true that is.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

New Year’s Eve, 2020 

My wife is in the other room right now, crying. She has been reading Wuhan stories, those that get through before they are blocked.

Even now, with the panopticon state nearly complete, some individual wechat messages do get through for a while.  The stories are too long to relay here. I can only give you a sense of the despair – doctors, nurses, people of Wuhan.

It is The Plague (1).  People lined up at hospitals by the hundreds, carrying their x-rays with them, hoping against hope for someone to see them.  In most cases, people will not leave the hospital, or their place in line, so they sleep – without food, without shelter – on the floors, outside, anywhere that preserves their intention to see a doctor.  People dying on the floors untreated because there are no beds, no medicines, doctors cannot leave hospitals, people traveling – now by foot or bike, since buses are shut down – to five or six hospitals hoping someone will do the final checking that will allow them to be treated.  People who are seen by a doctor and deemed not sick enough yet are sent away.  There are certainly hundreds of those patients.  At least some deaths are not reported as virus related. Masks and hazardous treatment clothing are in short supply.  Some other provinces have sent teams of doctors to Wuhan, but it is not nearly enough. 

The government in Wuhan comes in for special hate.  The provincial governor told everyone two days ago – after the quarantine was instituted – that all is well, don’t worry.  In his annual New Year’s speech to residents, the Hubei Party leader made no mention of the coronavirus at all. As of Wednesday, the 22nd, the first mention of the virus in People’s Daily was a small item on page 4.  The first two pages of the paper were all about Xi’s trip to Yunnan.    Mr. Xi’s New Year’s Message, reported from Xinhua, made no reference to Wuhan at all.

No hospital is permitted to make announcements about contagious diseases – all such announcements have to come from the government.  The crisis leader is an 87-year old doctor who led the SARS crisis treatment (2).  Only when he announced that the virus could be transmitted from person to person did the government agree. 

All public forms of transportation are shut down to Wuhan and now ten other cities in Hubei.  No intra- or inter-city buses. No air traffic or expressway traffic.  If your license plate has a Wuhan letter indicator, you cannot cross the border on the expressway without special permission. The only way to get around inside Wuhan is to walk, bike, drive, or take a taxi.  You know how many people don’t have cars.  People are significantly weakened by fever and lungs filling up with virus.  People have to make choices between staying with a sick parent in line or on the floor at the hospital for dozens of hours and taking care of their own children at home.  Hospitals have been told to report zero infections among staff, so doctors and nurses who might be infected are not reported.

I haven’t heard this yet, but since the whole city is shut down, there will be food shortages in a day or two.  Supplies will certainly be allowed in, but not likely in sufficient supply. 

Doctors at hospitals in Wuhan said they expect the total number of infected to be more than 6000.  My own personal guess is that is a low number, based on nothing more than the severity of the foreign reporting, the paucity of Chinese government reporting, and the anguished stories on wechat. Doctors are reporting that some of those infected do not show any fever, so using temperature as a diagnostic is not completely effective, and the incubation period for the virus could be up to two weeks. Today, Friday, January 24, at the moment of writing, there were 900 officially reported cases, an unknown number of unreported cases, and reports are that the virus tripled over last weekend and has spread to 32 of 34 provinces. The Wuhan lockdown is unlikely to be effective, first of all because a lockdown of a huge area of 11,000,000 people has never been tried before, and the window for controlling spread of the virus had already closed before the lockdown was announced on Wednesday.  Not to mention the number of cases officially not reported.

Thursday, January 23, central government mouthpiece People’s Daily sent out a cheery message.  The Chinese people are united in their support for Wuhan.  This is unspeakable. 

Wuhan, hang in there! You have the support of all people across the country. The more difficult the situation is, the more united the Chinese people are. This has been constantly proven by both history and reality.

人民网评:越是艰难险阻,愈益众志成城

苏秦

2020年01月23日11:18  来源:人民网-观点频道

分享到: “1月23日10时起,全市城市公交、地铁、轮渡、长途客运暂停运营;无特殊原因,市民不要离开武汉,机场、火车站离汉通道暂时关闭。”武汉市连夜发出公告,传递明确信号:武汉正在采取更细致、更深入、更扎实的防控举措,全力遏制疫情扩散蔓延。

非常之时,非常之举。这昭示了一个基本逻辑,为了守护人民群众的生命安全:不怕兴师动众、不怕“劳民伤财”、不怕十防九空!

传染病防治有其复杂性,更有其规律性,必要时候必须采取非常之举,这于情于理于法都有坚实支撑。非常之举,必然要打破常规、影响常态。武汉市民的生活将不可避免地受到影响,我们向武汉市民的付出致敬!打赢这场防疫硬仗,每一位武汉市民都值得感佩,每一名积极参与者都值得我们呈上敬意。

非常之举,更需要政府部门遵循全心全意为人民服务的常理。积极回应民众的合理诉求,最大限度减少应急措施带来的不利因素,也是当务之急。这是对我们治理体系的测试,是对我们治理能力的检验。除了武汉,没有哪一座城市可以作壁上观。这不仅是因为疫情的联动效应,更是因为我们对人民的庄严承诺。

疫情来得迅疾,目前一些地方、一些环节面临挑战,做好药品、消毒、器械等防控物资的储备供应,显得迫在眉睫。需要看到,中国作为世界工厂,并不缺少物质生产力,补上物资缺口并非难事。一些地方出现物资短缺属于结构性的,只是“地域错配”,加上春节工厂放假因素而导致缺货。我们呼吁,口罩等物资的相关厂家能急疫情之所急,开足马力生产;全国各地也能紧急驰援、相互支持。

只要全国一盘棋,统筹安排,协调推进,相信很快就可以解决物资短缺等难题。在这个时候,我们就是要把长期培育的社会动员能力和制度优越性充分释放出来。我们的党员干部在危机面前尤其要发挥先锋模范作用,引领大家增强必胜的信心,打赢这场硬仗!

武汉加油,全国人民支持你们。越是遭遇艰难险阻,我们愈益众志成城。这是被历史和现实不断验证的中国逻辑。

相关评论

人民网评:抗击疫情,人人责无旁贷

人民网评:疫情面前要算大账

人民网评:面对疫情,任何侥幸都可能夺人性命

No one trusts the government, among other problems.  When you have a single source of authority, of power, no one can act on local knowledge to do better.  That is what Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom and James Scott said in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.   Scott calls this a failure of high modernism, and Chinese governance most certainly is an example of that in every aspect.  Engineering efficiency demands that nothing stand in the way of official action.  But official action does not respond quickly to local knowledge (3)  Combine with a hierarchical government system in which bad news does not want to flow up the chain of command, there is extreme media censorship, and you have the sort of place over which that motto might fit well – abandon all hope.

Happy New Year.

(1) from the Wall Street Journal, January 22 –

China’s cabinet-level National Health Commission said Monday it would treat the new coronavirus as a Class A infectious disease, meaning it would be handled similarly to cholera, the plague and to how it handled the SARS outbreak. Both SARS and the new virus are officially categorized in the more benign Class B.

(2) from Caixin, about January 20 –

A prominent virologist who helped identify the source of the deadly SARS coronavirus nearly two decades ago told Caixin that Wuhan’s spike in new cases “shows that the (new) virus can spread from person to person.” Guan Yi, who heads a laboratory for emerging infectious diseases at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health, said that while the virus had seemingly not initially passed between people, the rise in cases over the past several weeks meant “we should no longer be playing word games about whether or not this constitutes human-to-human transmission.”

He can afford to speak up.  He is 87 years old.

(3) from South China Morning Post, January 20 – China’s post-SARS reporting system may explain long delays in announcing new cases of Wuhan virus

“… Actually it only takes a short while to get virus results in local hospitals with the test kits. What is time-consuming is that suspected cases are required to wait for a second positive result from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention [in Beijing] before a panel of experts can go ahead with clinical diagnosis. Only after these three steps are completed can we publicly declare any confirmed case,” the official said.

Well done!  One of the early cases was dated January 3.  His viral status was not announced until the 19th.  Most people at hospitals are turned away or simply leave without seeing a doctor at all.

SFSU kills Confucius Institute Program

In May, 2019, San Francisco State University (SFSU) announced it was closing its Confucius Institute program that had been in operation since 2005.

Closure was not due to concerns about academic freedom, freedom of speech, or even any suspicion of ulterior motives on the part of the teachers sent from China.  In the SFSU case, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 denied federal funds for an intensive Chinese language programs if a university also hosted a Confucius Institute, and SFSU has an excellent DOD funded language program.

Sure, DOD can kill Confucius Institutes.  But DOD has nothing on me. I helped kill another SFSU Chinese program ten years earlier.  That was not on the basis of politics, but solely academic rigor.

In 2010, Chinese and American universities were near their peak desire for joint exchange and degree granting programs.  Many of the best US schools – HarvardYaleStanford – had programs in China, for both American and Chinese students.  Second tier American schools were eagerly establishing joint programs or 2×2 programs (two years in school in China, two years in the US, perhaps resulting in a highly valuable American degree). 

In this frenetic academic lovefest, San Francisco State University (SFSU) approached Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) about a joint undergraduate civil engineering program.  An administrative official from SFSU – I don’t remember who – came to ZUST to promote the as-yet not completely defined program. He spoke in Chinese to our students – “Two years at ZUST, two years at SFSU, possibly a joint degree, possibly a SFSU degree.  A valuable exchange program in any case.”  He made a convincing case.

The fit was pretty good on paper.  ZUST had a new undergrad civil engineering program taught all in English, for both Chinese and foreign students.  There were about 35 students in the first year, with more to come.

SFSU had a large Asian student population, so it was accustomed to dealing with foreign students.  Foreign students paid full tuition.  There were a number of Chinese civil engineering faculty, so language problems could be minimized.  The SFSU civil engineering program was internationally accredited by ABET (Accreditation Bureau for Engineering and Technology).  No Chinese undergrad program in civil engineering was internationally accredited, so a joint degree would look mighty fine for a ZUST graduate looking to work outside China.

Even in 2010, there was extensive reporting of academic problems with Chinese students in exchange programs.  Yale cancelled its ecology and evolutionary biology program with Tsinghua in Beijing, after extensive plagiarism by Chinese students.  Everyone understood that Chinese learning, even in the best schools, was dominated by repetition and attention only to the book.

SFSU wanted to make sure ZUST students could do the work.   An SFSU core requirement was – still is – a course in American history.  I was a foreigner, so I was tapped to teach.

The ZUST administrators told me I should teach the course “American style”- to me, that meant quizzes and homework and writing and, above all, no cheating. I told the civil engineering dean that was a mistake.  I knew the quality of the students from prior courses, and cheating was rampant.  The school reiterated – “yes, just like you would in America.”  Reluctantly, I said yes.

There is a saying in China about universities in China compared with those in the US – “in China, it is difficult to get into the university, but once there, everyone graduates; in the US, it is easy to get into the university, and easy to flunk out.”

No need to belabor the details.  We had a standard textbook, the Eric Foner Give Me Liberty! with quizzes and very short – five page – writing requirements.  The English listening, speaking, and writing abilities of the Chinese students were adequate.  Their cultural preparation was not.

First off, no more than one or two of the eighteen Chinese students purchased the textbook.  It was expensive by Chinese standards – about $40 – but in the US, students would be buying six or eight of those each semester.  The twenty or so Chinese students were also roommates – they probably occupied a total of four or five dorm rooms – so joint studying would be possible, although tough.  But not possible for two students to read the book at one time.  They were unaccustomed to homework, written short answer questions from the chapter covered that week.  Most tried to copy the homework in class or right before class.  We had a quiz every week on the chapter – ten or fifteen minutes, to see if they had read – anything.  Most had read something, probably just looked at the powerpoints, but the cheating in the quizzes was blatant.  I tore up some quiz papers when students were looking at their phones and writing answers.  There were a lot of low grades on quizzes.

Paper submittals were very disappointing.  I spent more than one entire class – 135 minutes – on how to write – five paragraph essay, formatting and references, APA style. References and citations were a … let us say, foreign … concept. Students had powerpoint notes, other notes from me, and examples.  I emphasized the importance of good references and avoiding plagiarism.  This was not a completely wasted effort.  But mostly.  Papers came back in two or three different color fonts, with different size fonts, with the plagiarized sections often in one of the unique colors or sizes so there was no need to do any checking.  I didn’t know whether to feel discouraged or insulted that the plagiarism was so poorly done. 

References were often simply to “Baidu” the popular online source in China.  This was like using “Google” as a reference.  To be fair, Baidu did not provide good citations for its published materials, and there were few other sources for the students to use. The library was useless as a source for materials in any language.  Students had no access whatsoever to academic journals.  All blocked.

But they needed to know how to write an acceptable five page paper, even as engineering students.  A couple of the Chinese students got the idea.  A few more of the foreign students did.  I allowed students to rewrite papers after my comments.  Some did so.  Most did not.

I point out again that these were not problems with English language. These were cultural differences, and unwillingness to make the changes necessary if they were to venture, as is said in China, outside.  

With the plagiarism, refusal to correct the plagiarism, cheating, and general mopery, we had a lot of failures in the course.  About two-thirds of the class.

I had earnest meetings with several levels of faculty and administrators and deans.  They had warnings before and during the course.  But I had given them what they wanted.

The civil engineering students learned the wisdom of the second part of the saying about universities in the US, without having to actually attend school in the US and spend thousands of dollars for nothing.  No civil engineering student applied for the 2+2 program with SFSU.   The program died a natural death before it ever went live.

I think I did good work on the SFSU program.  Curiously though, no one ever thanked me.  Sometimes, teaching is a thankless job.

Give Me Liberty! in Hangzhou

There is a saying – with guanxi, you can do anything.  Without guanxi, you can do nothing.  Sometimes, with guanxi, you can get Liberty! in China.  A story about ordering textbooks in China.

In 2009, I began teaching fulltime at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) in Hangzhou. I had a joint appointment with the business school and the engineering school.  For the business students, I was to teach micro and macro economics; for the engineers, courses in urban and environmental planning.  My students were a mix of Chinese and foreign students, mostly from Africa, a few from the middle east and Indonesia.

This was the era when Chinese schools were looking to form cooperative relationships with school in the US, England, Germany. In the fall of 2010, the president of San Francisco State University came to ZUST and delivered a promotional talk – in Chinese – to my engineering students.   The proposal that had been worked out was a 2+2 deal – two successful years of study at ZUST could lead to two, possibly three, years at SFSU and a joint bachelor’s degree in engineering.

This was an excellent opportunity for ZUST students, since a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in China was not worth much outside of China.  With the possible exception of one program at Tsinghua, no Chinese engineering bachelor’s degree programs were internationally accredited.  This meant that a graduate could not apply to take the professional engineering exam in most of the world without substantial additional study or years of practice.  There was no guarantee that the SFSU joint program would receive accreditation, but there was certainly a chance.  Basic courses in math and science would be taught in China. The more substantive courses would be in the US.  This was not unlike a junior college transfer program into a major American university.

SFSU wanted a couple of core courses taught at ZUST – an American history course and an American politics course. My background is in civil engineering, urban planning and policy, economics and organization.  But I spoke English and looked American, so I was tabbed at the instructor. As they say, what could possibly go wrong?

No other teacher at ZUST had ever taken, much less taught, American history.  It might be fair to say that this was the first time such a course had ever been taught in Zhejiang Province.  It was a historical first.

These were still heady days of openness in the second half of the Hu Jintao administration.  I was at ZUST because I had just finished six years of teaching midlevel CCP officials in a graduate program in public administration at IIT in Chicago.  I wanted to see what teaching in China would be like, so I went.  The director of the international program at ZUST was a student of mine in Chicago.  She was smart, open, and interested in making deals with foreign schools and foreign teachers.  It is fair to say that I was the face of the foreign program at ZUST at a time when such programs were much desired.

Textbook selection was going to be a challenge.  In the US, book ordering need not be more complicated than an instructor sending book details to the ordering department of the school, and a few days or weeks later the book shows up in the school bookstore.  Students buy the book, and the course is in business.

I knew that would not be the process at ZUST.  There was a book ordering department, but of course that was mostly for Chinese books.  There were a few American books used – most notably, the Greg Mankiw Fundamentals of Economics books, but those were published legally in China, so the Mankiw books had already been vetted for content.

The course was to be American history since 1865.  No other details provided to me.  There were many book from which to choose, and Eric Foner had written more than twenty of them.  His Give Me Liberty! is still the most used American history survey course text in the US.  For the instructor, the teacher’s edition provided powerpoints, which would save me dozens of hours of work (no one teaches in China without powerpoints). The book was also used at SFSU.  I chose the Foner book.

I emailed my book choice to my former IIT student, the head of the international program at ZUST, now my colleague.  If she had been drinking tea when she saw my email order, she probably would have done a spit-take.  Give Me What?

These were heady days of openness, but come on, there are limits.  Give Me History would have been ok. 

My former student was the head of the international program, but she was not the No. 1 – that was the Party leader, who was ultimately responsible for all my actions.  She could not speak much English, and could certainly not read the book, so vetting fell to my former student.

This is where the guanxi worked.  We were teacher and student in Chicago, and we had many chances to talk.  She saw me as at least reasonably trustworthy – I was not going to be running down China in the classroom.  Give Me Liberty! was the SFSU book.  The whole point of the course was to expose these Chinese students to American style courses and teaching so they had a chance to go to the US in their third year.

But still.  We had meetings.  My former student had to look up the book online, and read what she could from the W.W. Norton website. She had to convince herself that the book was ok, just an unfortunate title. I had to promise her that there were no passages suggesting that China or CCP were implicated in the bombing at Pearl Harbor or responsible for the Great Depression, and that destruction of CCP was not an integral part of American history since 1865.  She took me at my word.

There was a more serious vetting process on the ZUST side than I know.  My former student was putting herself on the line, and her Party leader, in ordering such a book.  She could not order the book herself – that had to be done by someone in the civil engineering department, and that woman was putting her reputation and that of her dean on the line as well.  I had more than half a dozen meetings with various of the parties.  I sent long emails, with text of my discussions with the WW Norton rep in the US.  I don’t know if there were provincial education bureau discussions before the book order could be placed, but I would not be surprised. Liberty was not a censored word, but it wasn’t on everyone’s lips, either. If something went south with the book or me or the course, the jobs of several people could be on the line. 

Then there was the money.  Students are supposed to pay for books. In the US, the book sold for about $46 at the time, about 300 yuan.   Three hundred yuan was the book allowance for one ZUST student for an entire semester. We could not order CD copies – those would have been illegal to ship and WW Norton would not send them anyway- as the rep told me, they didn’t have good IP protection in China.  We could not order used copies – Chinese only wanted new, and could only order from the publisher in any case. Illegal copying was still common in China, but the school did not want to engage in that itself, so ordering one copy was out.  A real world example – the Mankiw Fundamentals book was about 790 pages.  The book printed legally in China was sold for 79 yuan (about $12).  In the US, the book cost over $100.  But photocopying in China cost 0.1 yuan per page.  You do the math.   The school was going to have to buy the books, about 9000 yuan, and eat the cost.  That was a couple of months salary for some teachers.

I could have put together notes, and taught without a book.  But Chinese teachers are expected to use a book (presumably so it can be vetted, and so the school has some assurance that the teacher is at minimum reading something to the students).  For my course, a book was most certainly going to be necessary.

There were time constraints.  Shipping on a boat would take about six weeks to get to ZUST, and this was after whatever approvals and vetting were needed outside of ZUST.  WW Norton did have a relationship with one of the required Chinese book importing companies, so paper copies of the book could be sent to China. But time was getting short. We had been having the meetings and email discussions all through the spring, the school closes down in the summer, and I needed the books by about August 1.

I thought perhaps I could just order the books myself from W.W. Norton in the US – thirty or so copies, wrap them up, put them on a boat, they would arrive in six weeks or so.  But that wouldn’t work. The Chinese government still controlled book ordering.  Books could only be ordered through one of the designated import agents.  If my thirty books had just shown up at Shanghai port, they would have been seized and tossed.

I gave the school a deadline – I needed the books ordered by July 10.  My guanxi with my former student worked.  Give Me Liberty! was ordered by ZUST.  The books got delivered, and we used them – or I should say, the books were in the bookstore.  Only a few students purchased the book.

ZUST did not repeat the course.  Very few – perhaps none – of the Chinese students wanted to pay the American tuition to SFSU, and they did not respond well to an “American-style” course, with quizzes and exams and papers to write.  The students got a taste of liberty, taught American style, and judged it wanting.

I ordered other books from America for other courses.  None of those were the existential crisis of ordering Give Me Liberty! in English, for use with Chinese students, with such a provocative title.  When the course was over, the unsold books were delivered to me in my apartment.  Perhaps they are still there. Anyone interested, contact me.  I’m at liberty to make a deal.

浙江科技学院教材预订表

院、部、(盖章)   建筑工程学院                院教学主管(签名):           教研所所长(签名):        联系电话:           填表日期:  2011    6     日  

序号

课程名称

Course name

教材名称

Textbook name

主编姓名

author

出版社

Press name

版次

version

书号

ISBN

价格

price

使用对象

预订数(册)

Order volume

库存

合计

征订人

签名

使用

时间

备注

 

学生

student

教师

teacher

1

American

History Since 1865

Give Me Liberty!

Foner

WW Norton

2nd Edition Volume 2 Paper

ISBN 978-0-393-93256-0

$37.00

William D. Markle

20

2

     

2

     “

Norton Media Library

WW Norton

WW Norton

CD-Rom

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

3

      “

Instructors Manual and Test Bank

Valerie Adams

WW Norton

CD-Rom

  

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

4

       “

Studentt Study Guide

WW Norton

WW Norton

       pdf

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

注:一份送教务处教材中心,,一份系部留存.                                                           

The National Day Singing Competition

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, September, 2009


note:  this post is from 2009, a few weeks after I came to ZUST to teach full time and I was still awed by most everything.  As it turns out, there were no more singing day competitions. This one was part of the celebrations of 60 years since the founding of the PRC.  Still, an impressive event.

One of the emcees wore a black tuxedo with diamond –  I wanted to say rhinestone- studs along the collar and piping.   The other wore a white tux with black piping.  The women emcees wore serious prom type dresses, or serious I-am-a-grownup-take-me-out-dancing dresses- a slinky reflective gold long dress for one, a more demure white for the other. 

The rhinestone reference kept running through my head because the between performances music was the theme song from Ponderosa. 

This was the annual singing competition between departments at ZUST.   Each school department- economics, marketing, civil engineering- puts together a group of about 50 students, generally about half and half by gender, and practices for weeks before the big night.  So for days before tonight, it was like walking past the music building at Northwestern, and hearing beautiful voices floating out from classrooms.   Except these were 50 voices, and lots of the men sounded like men- deep voices and big and almost scary.

I am not going to keep you in suspense.  I am pleased to report that for the 5th year in a row (?), the computer science students beat every other department, including the architects (who came in second this year). 

Every department has money in their budget for clothes for the singing competition.  The standards vary a little, but generally tuxedos for the boys, fancy dresses for the girls, and all the same for each department. 

The competition started about 6:00, and ran until 8:00.  Each department did one number, generally a song built around love of country or home.   One was about the Qiantang River, in Hangzhou, as having come from very far away, and being the mother of all Chinese.  Another was about someone climbing a tree, and when I asked for clarification, I got back a finger pointing at a dictionary entry, “guerilla,” and I didn’t want any further clarification.   But it is still not clear. 

Every department sounded as if they had practiced for a long time.  The men were forceful, the women sweet and a nice  counterpart to the men.   Everyone on stage- this was on a temporary staired stage in front of the library entrance- sang, and loud.  No one looked embarrassed or too cool to sing.   It was a competition. 

There were stage lights, a lot of them, and videos, and a couple of the groups had small sparklers or fireworks as part of their song and a couple of the groups had some slight choreography, as  much as they could do  while standing on temporary stands under hot lights outside in big clothes.   The judges sat at tables in front of the stand, and hundreds of students were behind the judges, standing on small chairs and on planters at the library entrance.   The library has a six story covered entryway between two buildings, so we were shielded from the light rain and  there was plenty of room for hundreds, and the voices carried.  I could hear the groups clearly from my apartment, across the lake from the library and a good quarter mile away.   Somewhere, someone was selling or handing out t shirts inscribed with “music has no borders”  and “nations without foreigners.” 

At the end, after the awards, the winning group came back for an encore and brought in the front row another twenty or so students in ethnic costumes, mostly from the west of China, and an American student from NYC who I know, and one of the German students who is in my urban economics class.   The song was about love of country, and everybody sang.

So for Scott, and Jim, now you understand how the Chinese government IIT students have such wonderful voices, and use them, and how they can put on such performances for spring festival.  They have been doing it every year since they were small, and they practice, and they believe in the value of it.   So much for individualism and do your own thing.   One of my students in the urban economics course said she had heard some things about the development of economies, from slavery to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism.   But, she said, socialism did not have enough money to do good things for people, and capitalism helps.  But she was worried that capitalism might harm the socialism in China.   I said that was a good question, but that no country was purely capitalist or socialist.   In the US, we have a socialized safety net for health care for the elderly and poor, for people who get hurt on the job, for retirees, for housing for poor people, and for schooling.    China does not have any of those in a nationally uniform way.   But they can really sing, and when they get together to do something, it works.   I read an article yesterday expressing fears about the China future- you know, economic stimulus and corruption and too much infrastructure spending and no democracy.   One of the comments to the article provided the usual “it’s all a sham, and it will collapse any day now”  view.   Another commentator noted that in his experience, the people who claim the sham argument have invariably never been to China.   Or heard them sing, organized, for fun, in a competition just for themselves.

I wish Rachel were here.  She would have loved it.