A brief comment on the Wukan protests + pointless video post: ‘OCP’ by Gama Bomb

A village in China’s Guangdong Province, Wukan 廣東烏坎, is now in open revolt against the local government; see ChinaGeeks and The Telegraph for the full story as it develops. The Party has been laying on the censorship rather thick for this one, methinks; one may count on them to do precisely the wrong thing (censoring any news about Wukan and doing nothing to help the villagers) in a situation such as this. For some of the political background, may I humbly offer this assessment from a couple of weeks back:

In the meanwhile, in China, Bo Xilai and Wang Yang have been using local models in China in an attempt to shore up support for the more interventionist, public-good provisionist, actively anti-corruption Chongqing model and the more developmentalist, neoliberal, laissez-faire Guangdong model, respectively. Although both appear to be equally divergent from China’s current authoritarian-capitalist status quo (Mr Bo in the direction of greater economic democracy and a social safety net, Mr Wang in the direction of more authoritarian-capitalist ‘reforms’), in actuality Mr Bo is the more open to the guidance of democratic principles (willingly taking the advice of social democrats such as Dr Cui Zhiyuan, for example) and true exposure of the inner workings of the Chinese government to the public eye, whilst Mr Wang appears to be merely another rehash of Jiang Zemin: gleefully adopting the advice of market ‘reformers’ and technocrats and gutting public goods provision, and shielding those very same technocrats from any real sort of public scrutiny.

And, naturally, the same principle applies to public protests. The Chinese government under Jiang Zemin sounded a hasty retreat from Tian’anmen only for the 1989 protests to disappear quickly and quietly down the Memory Hole; the same sort of dynamic appears to be holding true for the Wukan protests under Wang Yang. (How long before that Google search is blocked?)

Apparently I am not alone in the opinion that this development does not look particularly good for Mr Wang, though naturally I tend to take a far more… some might say ‘cynical’, but I prefer the term ‘realistic’, view of Chinese liberalism. As long as its primary theorists continue to follow the sorry, intellectually-bankrupt roads trodden by the likes of the Austrian school (Liu Junning) and the neoconservatives (Liu Xiaobo) rather than the more humane liberalism of, say, EF Schumacher, authoritarianism will continue to be a mark of Chinese politics (especially among those who make the biggest show of being against it) for a long time to come.

And speaking of ‘realistic’ views on liberalism, particularly in its more extremist forms, a great comment by John from Economics is for Donkeys on my last post (I really appreciated this one, gave me an excuse to post another thrash metal video):

I am glad the interview with the libertarian quotes Hans Herman-Hoppe. Hoppe is often praised by Christian monarchists because he has argued that monarchy is the ultimate private government. Apparently, Hoppe's concept of monarchy would be OCP from the RoboCop movies, but with a crown.

Dick Jones! Dick Jones!



Ah, Gama Bomb. We respect you, too! Best of luck to the villagers of Wukan. Stand strong, and thrash on, my gentle readers! \m/