One of the better and more penetrating articles I have read on the recent protests in China has been, oddly enough, in Comment is Free, by professor at the London School of Economics Dr Lin Chun. Her thesis is that the protests, though their explicit purpose was to reclaim the Diaoyus from Japan (and therefore to boycott Japanese goods), was actually motivated and fed by a number of other highly disparate concerns and anxieties, not all of them to do with nationalism. Class-based anxieties, for example, and mistrust of government officials played key roles; a number of people at these protests used the opportunity to critique local policies or even the government itself (these were quickly rooted out, however). Government in various levels has allowed protest in only one direction: as far away from itself as possible, preferably in a Japan-ward vein; though some observers have reverted to paranoid fantasies about the government sponsoring the protests, I prefer the more simple explanation that the CCP just wants, like any party of government, to cover its own arse, and is selectively policing against protests which could harm its interests. (It is worth noting that the day after 18 September I managed to see only one red flag the entire day in Baotou - though quite a few police vans on the streets.) However, given that a number of the protesters in the larger cities were, in fact, migrant workers (generally themselves people who live in a constant state of economic stress and insecurity), Dr Lin’s analysis strikes me as hitting fairly close to home.
Her analysis is further bolstered by the analysis from Tea Leaf Nation, which shows a rather disheartening picture, even in the online community, of comments which condone class warfare (with some going so far as to dehumanise and blame poor people), and of comments speak more to regional bigotries than to any kind of real patriotism. Though it is sad and angering to see classism and nativism rearing their ugly heads in the aftermath of the protests, it does indeed speak to the view that there is far more going on under the surface of these protests than mere nationalism. As in Japan, the issue of control of the Diaoyus serves both as a lightning-rod for, and a distraction from, other equally important issues which do not get the full airing they deserve. It is an important issue, as I have said before - but it would be a mistake to place undue emphasis on the nationalist angle of it, as has happened in both Chinese and Western media.
23 September 2012
Chinese-language blogging at 《月氏騎士》
It has been awhile, but I hope that my visits back here may be more frequent in the future! I am currently in Inner Mongolia, and have been thrown face-first into my new job (teaching from the first day on the ground, which I have been grateful for - it was good to get some refresher-experience before my full day of teaching on Saturday). In addition to this Blogger blog, I now also have a Sina blog, The Tocharian Rider (月氏騎士) after the ‘frontier poem’ I wrote last year. The posts on that blog will be entirely in Chinese, but I will attempt to cross-post translations here (or vice-versa, depending on which version I write first). The content should be fairly similar to what is normally posted here. Please follow, my gentle readers, if you should so choose!
14 September 2012
More far-right douchebaggery
Hiranuma Takeo (b, l), Räbiya Qadyr (b, r)
This is not news, really, but I still can’t believe I found out about it only today.
As readers of David Lindsay’s excellent blog may be aware, one of the dangers of continuing to regard India as a steady ally is the rise of the Hindutva ideology in that nation, an ideology combining elements of Hindu fundamentalism and racial and caste supremacism. The proponents of this far right-wing ideology have been steadily waging campaigns of intimidation and political violence against the Abrahamic faiths (particularly Islam and Christianity) within India, and also against the Dalits (traditionally the Untouchables within the Hindu caste system; many of whom are for obvious reasons either Buddhist or Christian). In 2008 there was a tremendous surge of anti-Christian pogroms in Orissa, instigated by the far right-wing Vishva Hindu Parishad (along with its paramilitary youth wing, the Bajrang Dal) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and aided and abetted (or at the very least ignored) by the local Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-leaning Hindu party in Indian politics). The Vishva Hindu Parishad has also been responsible for the destruction of the historical Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which to this day remains a sore spot in Hindu-Muslim relations in India. This much is fairly common knowledge. A number of websites and blogs, such as this one, this one and this one, are dedicated to examining and critiquing Hindutva and proponents such as VHP, and other groups like Human Rights Watch have kept a careful eye on the rise of Hindu extremism.
What is not so well-known, is that one of the founding members of this far-right organisation was... guess who. Yes, the present Dalai Lama was in part responsible for founding one of the most violent and fascistic political movements in modern times. As a result, despite the strenuous claims of his supporters of his enlightened neutrality in Indian politics (which conveniently elide the Dalai Lama’s membership in the organisation), it should come as no surprise to critical observers that the VHP and the Tibetan secessionists have been fairly consistent close allies. And the fact that Tibetan extremists are likewise looking to purge Muslims from what they perceive as their own territory, and the fact that the worst spate of attacks on Hui Muslims in Tibet preceded by only a month the communal violence against Christians in Orissa ought likewise to give us pause.
The Tibetans deserve advocacy on the world stage for their economic and cultural rights, but let’s face it: the Dalai Lama simply isn’t the advocate they deserve. As I mentioned before, he is closely connected with Uyghur billionaire separatist Räbiya Qadyr, and through her to Tachiagare Nippon たちあがれ日本 (the respectable, political face of the uyoku dantai in Japan). Add to this his far-right connexions in India, and one soon discovers that even though he is no longer in any position to bring about any positive change in China, by virtue of the moral capital invested in him by Western activists who don’t bother to read up on the objects of their support, he is poised to do a great deal more damage in the rest of the world than he ought.
13 September 2012
The Ministry has spoken
Shorter concerned Very Serious Liberal
This isn’t about the unions, and these aren’t garment workers striking against corporate bosses, this is about the children! And if you really care about the children, you will focus on firing their teachers based on their standardised test score-based teaching evaluations; that’ll straighten them all out.Oh, yes, of course. And we all know how much you care about those garment workers and their basic labour rights, don’t we, Madam Undersecretary? Thankfully, we have Corey Robin and Erik Loomis setting the Establishment Liberal line to rights on this topic, as well as Diane Ravitch (H/T to Corey Robin for the links).
EDIT: A more thorough take-down of the standardised test-happy Nick Kristof piece here at AlterNet, by Sarah Jaffe.
12 September 2012
Off to Inner Mongolia - ‘勇敢的心’ by 顛覆M
I shall be preparing to leave shortly to take up residence and a teaching position in Inner Mongolia. With any luck, this will be only a brief au revoir rather than a permanent farewell; to my knowledge, Blogger is regrettably still blocked behind the Great Firewall, but of course there are ways over, under and around. For a send-off, here is ‘Braveheart’ [‘勇敢的心’] by Mongolian metalcore masters Ego Fall [顛覆M]!
Eleven years on
Eleven years ago, a heinous act of political violence brought to an end the lives of 2,996 people, injured more than 5,000 others and brought down the World Trade Centre. In the wake of that tragedy, much was made of the attempt of America and of the world to make sense of it, as is only natural. I was in New York City yesterday morning, standing inside the Chinese Embassy at 8:46 AM that Tuesday, on a cool, clear morning. I had spent the earlier hours that morning watching television at the Burger King opposite Port Authority on 42nd Street. There were remembrances of the victims and there were a couple of short news features, on the new tower that is being built nearby to replace the WTC in the skyline and on the museum and the reactions from survivors, family members and first responders. In our physical memory, too, we seek to make sense of human evil, to learn something and to draw strength from the wreckage.
The morning after that, I learned that the American embassies in Egypt and Libya had been brutally attacked by angry mobs, resulting in the tragic and needless deaths of four people including the Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Another heinous waste of life at the hands of violent radicals.
Unfortunately, it seems all too many people on both sides of the political divide seem bent on drawing the wrong conclusions, particularly when those conclusions are politically convenient.
Apparently, the ‘trigger’ for the attacks was a sickeningly Islamophobic YouTube video produced by an Israeli-American property developer who describes Islam as ‘a cancer’. One of the most inappropriate responses to the terrorist attacks of 11 September has been to lash out and vilify an entire religious tradition, much of which abhors political violence, war and terrorism. Reactions like this fail to distinguish the fault-lines within Islam between those who see Islam as a violent, immanently-messianic political movement, and the vast majority who refuse to capitulate to such a flat interpretation (especially the philosophically-inclined, Scholastic and Christian-leaning tendencies noted especially amongst the more thoughtful followers of Ali). Insofar as Islam as such does present a danger to the Western world, it is only because (and only to the extent that) the Western world has abdicated its own Christian, Scholastic philosophical fountainhead, and allowed Islam to articulate another version of the communitarian values we ourselves used to cherish.
More importantly, though, such reactions are puerile, and they stem from the same trolling impulse that leads people to mock and defame the symbols of the Christian Church. If agents provocateur like Sam Bacile, Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and Terry Jones really want to make a point by riling to violence those individuals who are already radical enough to be prone to it, I see no reason they should expect any sympathy from the rest of us when they succeed. Our sympathy belongs with the victims; and our condemnation with the actual perpetrators. Cartoonists, YouTube trolls, Koran-burners and opportunistic politicians who seek to instigate and capitalise on such attacks deserve nothing but our scorn, our disdain and our studied indifference.
Another wrong response to attacks like these is to automatically assume a dualistic, black-and-white view that the world is divided into ‘good guys’ and ‘evildoers’. Well, we obviously didn’t think Osama bin Laden was an ‘evildoer’ when we were supporting and arming him and his followers against the Soviets in Afghanistan, did we? Likewise, in Libya and Egypt. In Libya, we provided armed support to Islamists who had no problem with again subjecting women to polygamy and wife-beating, or with massacring blacks on the suspicion (assiduously encouraged by NATO operatives) that they might be Gadhafi supporters. (Is it any surprise that such people might be upset with a video denigrating Islam? Given that Gadhafi was emphatically not an Islamist but an Arab nationalist, do the new regime and its supporters really expect us to believe that Gadhafi loyalists were behind the attack? Do they take us for idiots? … On second thought, maybe that last question is best left unanswered.)
I believe the appropriate lesson, one which we failed to learn then and are now again suffering from the consequences, is that we need to choose our allies with extreme care. We should craft a foreign policy which enshrines non-interventionist strategies as the norm, and which favours political stability over incidental economic benefit and especially over ideological agreement. As Daniel Larison put it, ‘military interventions don’t necessarily produce gratitude from the people that benefit from them’. Sadly, one of the public faces of our current dysfunctional foreign policy in the Arab world has now had to suffer the highest cost of that ingratitude. Requiescat in pace, Mr Stevens. My condolences and prayers go out to your family, just as they did to the victims of 11 September.
The morning after that, I learned that the American embassies in Egypt and Libya had been brutally attacked by angry mobs, resulting in the tragic and needless deaths of four people including the Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Another heinous waste of life at the hands of violent radicals.
Unfortunately, it seems all too many people on both sides of the political divide seem bent on drawing the wrong conclusions, particularly when those conclusions are politically convenient.
Apparently, the ‘trigger’ for the attacks was a sickeningly Islamophobic YouTube video produced by an Israeli-American property developer who describes Islam as ‘a cancer’. One of the most inappropriate responses to the terrorist attacks of 11 September has been to lash out and vilify an entire religious tradition, much of which abhors political violence, war and terrorism. Reactions like this fail to distinguish the fault-lines within Islam between those who see Islam as a violent, immanently-messianic political movement, and the vast majority who refuse to capitulate to such a flat interpretation (especially the philosophically-inclined, Scholastic and Christian-leaning tendencies noted especially amongst the more thoughtful followers of Ali). Insofar as Islam as such does present a danger to the Western world, it is only because (and only to the extent that) the Western world has abdicated its own Christian, Scholastic philosophical fountainhead, and allowed Islam to articulate another version of the communitarian values we ourselves used to cherish.
More importantly, though, such reactions are puerile, and they stem from the same trolling impulse that leads people to mock and defame the symbols of the Christian Church. If agents provocateur like Sam Bacile, Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and Terry Jones really want to make a point by riling to violence those individuals who are already radical enough to be prone to it, I see no reason they should expect any sympathy from the rest of us when they succeed. Our sympathy belongs with the victims; and our condemnation with the actual perpetrators. Cartoonists, YouTube trolls, Koran-burners and opportunistic politicians who seek to instigate and capitalise on such attacks deserve nothing but our scorn, our disdain and our studied indifference.
Another wrong response to attacks like these is to automatically assume a dualistic, black-and-white view that the world is divided into ‘good guys’ and ‘evildoers’. Well, we obviously didn’t think Osama bin Laden was an ‘evildoer’ when we were supporting and arming him and his followers against the Soviets in Afghanistan, did we? Likewise, in Libya and Egypt. In Libya, we provided armed support to Islamists who had no problem with again subjecting women to polygamy and wife-beating, or with massacring blacks on the suspicion (assiduously encouraged by NATO operatives) that they might be Gadhafi supporters. (Is it any surprise that such people might be upset with a video denigrating Islam? Given that Gadhafi was emphatically not an Islamist but an Arab nationalist, do the new regime and its supporters really expect us to believe that Gadhafi loyalists were behind the attack? Do they take us for idiots? … On second thought, maybe that last question is best left unanswered.)
I believe the appropriate lesson, one which we failed to learn then and are now again suffering from the consequences, is that we need to choose our allies with extreme care. We should craft a foreign policy which enshrines non-interventionist strategies as the norm, and which favours political stability over incidental economic benefit and especially over ideological agreement. As Daniel Larison put it, ‘military interventions don’t necessarily produce gratitude from the people that benefit from them’. Sadly, one of the public faces of our current dysfunctional foreign policy in the Arab world has now had to suffer the highest cost of that ingratitude. Requiescat in pace, Mr Stevens. My condolences and prayers go out to your family, just as they did to the victims of 11 September.
10 September 2012
A small thought-experiment
Imagine, if you will (though God forbid it should ever actually happen), that there had been an outbreak of vandalism and arson against synagogues and Jewish community centres throughout some central European country (it doesn’t really matter which). It might be the case that these vandals and arsonists would take to spray-painting crude and violent messages and epithets like ‘Moses is a monkey’ and ‘Death to the Jews’ on the walls of synagogues, leaving next to no doubt that their motivations were anti-Semitic. Now imagine that the people suspected of perpetrating this crime were in favour of redlining and covenants that would segregate Jews into separate neighbourhoods and ghettoes, and were committing these hate crimes because they were upset that such policies were not being supported. Pretty ugly picture, right?
Now, suppose that the police, the government and the civil society of this central European country were turning, perhaps not a blind eye but a highly complacent one toward all of these acts. It may, for example, be the case that in the large cities of this country, Jews are often spit on in public. Suppose that in the parliament of this country, one of the legislators called for the Torah, the rabbinical literature and other Jewish writings to be burnt, and that another symbolically threw Jewish symbols into a rubbish bin and proclaimed that those following the Jewish faith should be relegated to the ‘trash can of history’. Suppose that yet another legislator called for activists who are aiding Jews (and other minorities) to be rounded up and sent to detention camps. Now suppose that although these legislators may have gotten some symbolic wrist-slaps from their colleagues in private, they were faced with no other substantive punishment or public censure for their hateful actions.
We would very rightly issue condemnations of such a government. Human rights groups would, of course, be livid. Perhaps we would apply diplomatic and economic pressure against them until their treatment of their own Jewish population improved.
But given that it is Israeli vandals, Israeli arsonists, Israeli civilians and Israeli legislators doing all of these things to the Christians and Muslims who happen to call home what is now the State of Israel, and the Israeli government which seems to be shuffling their feet on the issue, I suppose a different standard must apply. Of course, much to their credit, not all people seem to think so. A Vatican representative is attempting to give these recent issues a proper airing. Many American Jewish groups (like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Anti-Defamation League) have called for apologies and action where they are needed.
The question is, will our government follow suit?
Now, suppose that the police, the government and the civil society of this central European country were turning, perhaps not a blind eye but a highly complacent one toward all of these acts. It may, for example, be the case that in the large cities of this country, Jews are often spit on in public. Suppose that in the parliament of this country, one of the legislators called for the Torah, the rabbinical literature and other Jewish writings to be burnt, and that another symbolically threw Jewish symbols into a rubbish bin and proclaimed that those following the Jewish faith should be relegated to the ‘trash can of history’. Suppose that yet another legislator called for activists who are aiding Jews (and other minorities) to be rounded up and sent to detention camps. Now suppose that although these legislators may have gotten some symbolic wrist-slaps from their colleagues in private, they were faced with no other substantive punishment or public censure for their hateful actions.
We would very rightly issue condemnations of such a government. Human rights groups would, of course, be livid. Perhaps we would apply diplomatic and economic pressure against them until their treatment of their own Jewish population improved.
But given that it is Israeli vandals, Israeli arsonists, Israeli civilians and Israeli legislators doing all of these things to the Christians and Muslims who happen to call home what is now the State of Israel, and the Israeli government which seems to be shuffling their feet on the issue, I suppose a different standard must apply. Of course, much to their credit, not all people seem to think so. A Vatican representative is attempting to give these recent issues a proper airing. Many American Jewish groups (like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Anti-Defamation League) have called for apologies and action where they are needed.
The question is, will our government follow suit?
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