For those interested in how the internet operates in the PRC, its social effects and political implications, this speech by Kaiser Kuo (an interesting guy: started out a a metal band guitarist and now works for a PR firm in Beijing) is quite good. It’s long (over a hour – takes a long time to buffer) but worth the time. A description of the talk can be found here.
The Blog
Election News and Analysis
The big election news in Northern Berkshire county is this: John Barrett, who had served as North Adams mayor for 26 years, was voted out of office by a wide margin. Barrett himself viewed it as a generational change:
“All good things must come to an end,” an emotional Barrett said during his concession speech. “I had a bad feeling this afternoon, when I saw people going to the polls. I saw a different voter going to the polls — a younger voter. I used to joke at the conferences I speak at that the people I’ve brought here — with all the changes we’ve made — were going to be the ones to vote me out. That day has come. This was just one election I couldn’t grasp. We got our message out there, but they just didn’t want to listen.”
Congratulations to the new mayor, Richard Alcombright.
For analysis of other races, The Monkey Cage has a few posts. I liked this one, by Marc Hetherington:
The race in New York’s 23rd congressional district exemplifies the disconnect between polarized political elites and much of the American public, which like moderate alternatives when they are available. Movement conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh attacked the moderation of Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee, ultimately driving her from the race and causing her to endorse Bill Owens, her Democratic counterpart. This opened the door for the first Democratic victory in the district in more than 100 years. It seems very likely that, others things being equal, a candidate like Scozzafava would have been the choice over Owens in a two person race. The district choked on the type of candidate that Palin and Limbaugh favored.
The guys at FiveThirtyEight are good with the numbers.
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“Too late” on climate change?
I was enjoying my lunch in Paresky this afternoon — chicken salad on a kaiser roll while sitting on a stool facing Baxter Hall — when a strategically placed flier caught my eye. I’ll quote it at length:
Some numbers are just too much . . .
350ppm is the number that leading scientists say is the safe, stable upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
We’re past it, and rising. However, with swift action it’s not too late to reduce our collective emissions levels.
The rest of the text invites students to attend a jumping-into-a-pile-of-leaves celebration of International Day of Climate Action on Saturday the 24th, the goal being to “call on world leaders to pass climate policies grounded in the latest science and strong enough to get us back to 350.”
There is no doubt that global climate change is among the most important social issues of our day. There is also no doubt that optimism is much to be preferred over pessimism. These things being said, a dose of realism is always necessary, and realism begs the question “is it truly not too late?”
The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2007/08 is organized around the theme “Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world”. Relying on climate models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – THE “leading scientists” on the issue – the UNDP presents six possible scenarios for global temperature and CO2 levels projected to the year 2100. The most pessimistic scenario, given the catchy title ‘A1FI’, assumes “rapid economic and population growth combined with reliance on fossil fuels”. If this is our collective future, the IPCC says that by the end of the century its best estimate is a CO2 level of a whopping 1550ppm with a global average temperature change of +4.5°C (relative to the preindustrial era) and possibly as high as +6.9°C. With +2°C defined as the threshold for “dangerous climate change,” this is a pretty scary scenario.
Quite frankly, however, the IPCC doesn’t offer us any non-scary scenarios. The most optimistic, titled ‘B1’ (“some mitigation of emissions through increased resource efficiency and technology improvement” in the absence of “rapid economic and population growth”) projects CO2 stabilization at century’s end at 600ppm, with a best estimate global average temperature change of +2.3°C over preindustrial levels.
Because future greenhouse gas stocks are determined by past greenhouse gas emissions, even stabilizing emission levels this very moment will still result in a significant rise in future CO2 levels: +200ppm by 2100 even if we stabilized at year 2000 emission levels. To make a +2°C temperature change “unlikely,” the world’s CO2 ceiling is 350 ppm — the goal of the folks behind the International Day of Climate Action and, as the flier admits, a level we’ve already breached. To make a +2°C change of “medium likelihood,” the world must limit itself to 400 ppm. If our goal is even more limited — simply to stay away from a “very likely” +2°C — we still are allowed just 450ppm. At 650ppm, +2°C is virtually guaranteed.
The 2007/08 Human Development Report lays out an ambitious CO2 reduction strategy: a 500ppm peak and stabilization at 450ppm by 2100. This is some ways above the 350ppm goal mentioned above, but even this UNDP plan is extremely ambitious. To achieve the 450ppm goal, the UNDP prescribes CO2 emission cuts for the developed countries from a base year 1990 of [1] 30% by the year 2030 and [2] of 80% by 2050. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, as of 2007 the US was +20.2% from our 1990 levels. That means that using 2007 as our baseline, the US will have to cut CO2 emissions a whopping 42% by the time Williams students are my age, and this just to dwell in the “medium likelihood” territory for dangerous climate change.
The world’s only examples of greenhouse gas emission reductions of such an incredible and rapid scale involve catastrophic economic collapse, such as in Ukraine since the fall of communism where emissions fell (-55% from 1990 to 2004) alongside absolute declines in population, life expectancy and real GDP per capita. I’m assuming this is not quite what the organizers of the International Day of Climate Action have in mind. Yet a realistic 350ppm scenario which does not involve a serious and lasting global depression exists only in the pages of a Tom Friedman book.
It’s good to be optimistic, and it’s good to take up a challenge in the face of long odds. At the same time, it is very important for everyone concerned about climate change to put at least as much effort into preparing to alleviate the suffering which will result from inevitable catastrophes as into struggling heroically to prevent them.
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Political Satire
I hadn’t heard of the Yes Men until they popped up last week with a punk of the US Chamber of Commerce. Apparently, they have been around for years (I guess I need to get out more!). I just hope their movie gets to Williamstown, or Pittsfield….
I thought this one was brilliant:
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A Thought on Democracy
Getting ready for my Chinese politics class (PSCI 247), I was rereading the work for today, chapter 2 from Adam Przeworski’s Democracy and the Market (1991), and came across one of my favorite thought-provoking paragraphs (p.95)
Democracy is the realm of the indeterminate; the future is not written. Conflicts of values and of interests are inherent in all societies. Democracy is needed precisely because we cannot agree. Democracy is only a system for processing conflicts without killing one another; it is a system in which there are differences, conflicts, winners and losers. Conflicts are absent only in authoritarian systems. No country in which a party wins 60 percent of the vote twice in a row is a democracy.
Is he right? Is he wrong? How?
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Inviting Confucius to celebrate 30 years of the PRC
An op-ed in the NYT last week, by Zhang Weiwei, links China’s successes of the past 30 years to various strands of tradition, Confucianism included.
On the face of it, this is yet another example of how the PRC is redeveloping (reinventing) traditional legitimation. As Max Weber says: “Authority will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers.” Of course, tradition is not the only basis of PRC legitimacy. As Zhang Weiwei notes, a kind of “performance legitimacy” is in play – essentially a matter of delivering the economic goods. If people feel that their, and their children’s, material lives are improving, then they will accept authoritarian government. I would add that, in keeping with the Weberian analysis, legal-rational legitimation is also part of the picture. What has changed is the move away from what we might call revolutionary legitimacy (if some political action can be shown to be consistent with the general notion of “revolution,” then it is good) and the return of traditional legitimacy.
What is most notable about Zhang’s piece, however, is the absence of Mao. He is mentioned once, when Zhang notes Deng Xiaoping’s rejection of the “Maoist utopia.”
This made me think of Mikhail Gorbachev and the late Soviet Union. Then, in trying to find a way to reform the declining state socialist system, Gorbachev said the country should “return to Lenin.” This was a means of getting out from under the dead weight of Stalinism. A “return to Lenin” would allow for a critique of all that had gone wrong in the Soviet Union, conveniently blamed on Stalin, while preserving the legitimacy of the initial revolution, and thus the legitimacy of the then still extant Soviet Communist Party.
The PRC has a harder time with all of this because instead of two people – Lenin and Stalin – there is only one: Mao. Back in 1981, the CCP issued its “Resolution on CPC History,” in which it established the good Mao/bad Mao distinction. Everything up until the Great Leap Forward was basically good, while what came after was contaminated with “left errors.” This became the basis for the formula: Mao was 70% good and 30% bad.
What Zhang’s article does, in essence, is to have Confucius play the part that Lenin played for Gorbachev. The Sage, and the tradition for which he stands, is now the target of return, and in that return the “bad Mao” can be elided. Tradition is the thing that now legitimates the post-Mao era of the PRC. Mao, especially the bad Mao, in the meantime, is shunted off to a historical siding alongside comrade Stalin.
The October 1 ceremonies
thus did not really celebrate 60 years of the PRC. They celebrated 30 years. The
1949-1979 period is to be ignored and the glories of the ancient empire
resurrected to facilitate that forgetting.
The danger here is that PRC citizens might start asking: if tradition is now a fundamental basis of regime legitimacy, why did there have to be a revolution in 1949? The KMT has already made something of a come back on the mainland. Could this go further? Could Lung Ying-tai’s new book, Big River, Big Sea gain traction among PRC readers and stoke the question: was all the violence of the revolution really worth it, if the ultimate goal was a return to tradition?
But this may not be too likely an outcome. Legitimation everywhere, in any country, is a mish-mash of tradition and legal-rationality and particularism. The PRC’s odd concoction of a Mao-forgetting return to tradition is no more cognitively dissonent than the historical amnesias of Americans and others.
Cross posted on The Useless Tree.
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Iraq Elections
National Elections will be held in Iraq in January, with high expectations on the part of many American observers. But friend and fomer colleague Mark Lynch offers a cautionary note:
As the national elections approach, then, analysts and policymakers should be attentive to what might go wrong and should not assume that the elections will “solve” anything. Politics won’t end. Many analysts worry that the elections will exacerbate rather than eased the Arab-Kurdish tensions which so many put at the top of the list of current security worries (a concern given weight by the success of the al-Hadba list in provincial elections and by the trends in Iraqi political discourse thus far). Few provisions seem to have yet been made to ensure the effective participation of the still massive refugee and IDP populations. The potential for fraud seems high. The laws governing the election remain unclear. And if the SOFA referendum is packaged into the national elections, as seems increasingly likely, then all bets are off.
“Politics won’t end.” That’s worth keeping in mind because politics never end. Some American analysts seemto want to resist that reality, as Samuel Huntington pointed over forty years ago in his book Political Order in Changing Societies (which I railed against in graduate school but which now seems to have an eerie relevance for posts-neo-con America):
…The Lockean American is so fundamentally anti-government that he identifies government with restrictions on government. Confronted with the need to design a political system which will maximize power and authority, he has no ready answer. His general formula is that government should be based on free and fair elections.
In many modernizing societies this formula is irrelevant. Elections to be meaningful presuppose a certain level of political organization. The problem is not to hold elections but to create organizations… (p. 7)
Oh, and by the way, Huntington was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Hyman Minsky and political economy
Students who have taken PSCI 229 “Global Political Economy” over the years will remember Hyman Minsky and his financial instability hypothesis. This past Sunday, the Boston Globe found that lots of people are paying new attention to this oft-forgotten political economist:
He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”
Of course, it is a bit much to call Minsky — who died in 1996 — “the one person who foresaw the crisis”. Plenty of people did, but they were largely ignored or marginalized as far as the public debate prior to 2008 was concerned. One can say — as former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did — accurately that “nobody” saw the financial collapse coming, because it was precisely the “nobodies” who did.
One important “nobody” who praises Minksy in the Boston Globe article is University of Texas at Austin economist and Levy Economics Institute of Bard College senior scholar James K. Galbraith — who will be speaking at Williams on Monday, September 21 on “The Great Crisis and the Dismal Science”. Who knows — that evening Brooks-Rogers might be full of nobodies!
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Confucian Confusion
Francesco Sisci has a nice piece in The Asia Times last week on Confucianism. The title, “West confused over Confucianism,” does not do it justice, since there is confusion to be found in China as well when it comes to Confucianism. But there are some good points made.
I especially like this question Sisci poses (riffing off a book title by Benedetto Croce): “Why can’t the Chinese say they are not Confucian?” For most of the twentieth century, many Chinese, especially elite Chinese political leaders, particularly of the Marxist-Maoist variety, tried hard to contend that China could renounce its Confucian past, that the Chinese could not be Confucian. But, as evidenced by the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China, that didn’t work. Why? Sisci suggests that “Confucianism” is a symbol for tradition in general and that people are generally uncomfortable giving up on their traditions altogether. Just as Italians in Croce’s time (the subject of his book) had a hard time saying they were not Christian (however un-Christian their world had become), similarly many Chinese people have a hard time denying the continuing presence of “Confucian” ideas and practices in China today.
The confusion comes in specifying precisely what in the vast storehouse of Chinese traditions is “Confucian” and what derives from other aspects of the culture. Politically, it is common to hear that because of its Confucian past, the PRC lacks cultural resources to support democracy. It is not at all clear that the Confucianism of Mencius is necessarily antagonistic toward democratic practices. Indeed, Mencius has been held up by East Asian democrats as a precursor and inspiration. While Mencius may not himself have been a democrat in a modern sense, his thought can be consistent with modern democracy. To my mind, the anti-democratic elements of Chinese tradition are more powerfully associated with Legalism, not Confucianism. Chinese tradition includes both of these political tendencies but “tradition” cannot be reduced to “Confucianism.”
Sisci also offers us a telling quote:
“As a senior official at the Communist Party’s central school put it, “One should just not pit ‘Confucianism’ against ‘modernization’, tradition against reform. These juxtapositions are simply wrong and entail wrong results and consequences.”"
I think this is correct, at least in the sense that we should not view Confucianism as fundamentally incomparable with modernization. The latter requires a certain revision of the former, and those revisions can yield an authentic Confucianism, a set of ideas that are true to certain key principles of the past but molded in a way to shape the sensibilities of contemporary societies.
I must point out, however, a mistake in Sisci’s article. In discussing how Confucianism might be make “useful” in modern East Asian contexts, he suggests that there might be a trade-off between economic growth and democratization. This sentence is particularly problematic:
“China and Singapore have managed to maintain high growth notwithstanding their lack of democracy, and Taiwan’s gross domestic product has decreased since it became a fully-fledged democracy.”
That last phrase about Taiwan is empirically false. Even if we limit the analysis to 2000, when Chen Shui-bian assumed the presidency and executive power was peacefully transferred by electoral means (a possible measure of the consolidation of democracy), Taiwan’s GDP has not decreased. There have been some years of decrease (most importantly 2001 with the tech shake out and 2009 in the face of global economic recession), but the cumulative GDP growth from 2000-2008 is positive.
If we change the argument to say that the rate of growth of Taiwan’s GDP has declined since 2000, we must then also consider factors other than the country’s democratization. How much of the slower growth is due to democratization and how much of it is due to the naturaly slowing due to economic maturation or the rise of the PRC economy or external economic shocks. That is, even if Taiwan was not a democracy, other factors would have contributed to slower growth.
I emailed Sisci to ask him about his sources and he responded that he was reporting on the perceptions of PRC officials. And it may be true that PRC officials think that Taiwan’s GDP has declined (or they want Westerners to think that) but, in fact, Taiwan’s GDP has continued to grow since it became a full-fledged democracy.
Indeed, if we come back to the question of Confucianism, Taiwan suggests that there is no absolute obstacle in Chinese tradition – Confucian or otherwise – to democracy and modernization.
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Obama in China: what did you expect?
I’ve been reading some of the commentary about Obama’s trip to China and I am struck by the negative tone of much of what I’ve seen. This piece in the NYT pretty well sums it up:
The town hall meeting has come in for criticism from Obama supporters who feel he soft-peddled his critique of censorship. Adam Minter, over at Shanghai Scrap, was not happy:
He was especially disturbed by this line of Obama’s: “I’m a big supporter of non-censorship“ On its own that is a rather awkward formulation, suggesting that censorship is the baseline from which we work toward non-censorship. It seems ilke conditional support for freedom of information. But just before that, Obama said: “…I’ve always been a strong supporter of open Internet use.” And a bit later he said: “So I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter. The more open we are, the more we can communicate. And it also helps to draw the world together.“ These are more direct, clearer defenses of open exchange of information and ideas without censorship. I suspect the “non-censorship” line was not a calculated expression. He did not sit down with his aides ahead of time and say: “let’s use the term ‘non-censorship’ because that will be less challenging to the CCP.’ More likely, it was extemporaneous. He was just riffing on the idea he had already established when he said:
That is why the CCP limited access to the live video feed of the town hall (the trascript is available, however): they do not want to highlight this idea and the contrast that is obviously drawn here with the US.
I would not go so far as my friend David Shambaugh, who, according to Xinhua, was very positive on Obama’s visit:
He is referring to the long “U.S. – China Joint Statement” that outlined various and sundry issues, ranging from security to economics to environment. It is a careful document. It does not call unequivocally for improvement in human rights or for revaluation of the RMB or for sanctions on Iran. Rather, it lays out an assortment of large and small matters that the two countries are working on together. Neither state, it seems to me, comes away in an unambiguously superior position. Each is tied to the other in many ways. It is a description of interdependence.
And that is my main point here. Those who see Obama’s performance in China as weak – i.e not pressing the PRC on any of a number of sensitive issues – are missing the larger structural reality. The US is not so powerful that it can simply make demands of China without regard to its own vulnerabilities or weaknesses. Take the currency issue, for example. Has the US bees so responsible in managing its deficits and “imbalances” that it can easily and credibly demand that China take care of its surpluses and “imbalances”? No. The US has been flaunting its economic power for decades, avoiding painful adjustments and relying on China and other countries to finance our consumption and debt. We’re really in no position to be dictating on this front, especially since the US needs the PRC more than ever to aid in global and American economic recovery.
Chris Nelson, of the Nelson Report (a DC political email letter) has a reaction to the negative commentary similar to my own:
Obama went to China. In Shanghai he said that freedom of information is a good thing that makes a country strong, thus implying that the PRC should open up more. In Beijing, with President Hu Jintao standing by his side, he said that human rights matter. He said that the PRC should talk with the Dalai Lama. He mentioned the Taiwan Relations Act. He did not posture like a cowboy. He did not hector. He began a serious engagement with serious people about serious issues.