In my experience — and I do have some experience with this phenomenon — when a journalistic outlet responds to criticism by saying “We stand by our story,” that always means that (a) they know they have been caught red-handed in either dishonesty or incompetence, (b) they cannot stage a proper defense of their work, but (c) they are unwilling to confess their shortcomings.
Tag: China (page 1 of 1)
This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in translations of the Daodejing points to something that has been worrying me. I want to go father with my investigations into Daoism — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but I keep running into differences in the various translations that are this extreme or even more so. I’m starting to think that I’m either going to have to abandon my Daoist inquiries … or learn Chinese. The latter being a very daunting thought, especially at my age. (If I’m going to pursue any language with an alphabet other than my own, it probably should be Greek — which I know a bit of — or Hebrew — which I don’t really know at all.)
China wants to change, or break, a world order set by others | The Economist:
Nor does Mr Xi accept that the second world war created a mandate to draw up a liberal order. A China/EU summit in April was clarifying. The European Council president, Charles Michel, explained why Europe’s dark past, notably the Holocaust, obliged its leaders to call out rights abuses, from China to Ukraine. According to a readout shared with EU governments, Mr Xi retorted that the Chinese have even stronger memories of suffering at the hands of colonial powers. He cited treaties forcing China to open markets and cede territory in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and racist bylaws banning Chinese people and dogs from parks in European-run enclaves. Mr Xi recalled the massacre of civilians at Nanjing by Japanese invaders in 1937. Such aggression left the Chinese with strong feelings about human rights, he said, and about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.
Hard to deny that they have a point. Hard also to deny that they’re trying to make way for permanent tyranny.
Many developing countries see nothing magic about the year 1945, and have limited nostalgia for a time when the West dominated rulemaking. China is ready to offer them alternatives. Seven decades ago, at founding meetings of the un, Soviet-bloc delegates sought an order that deferred to states and promoted collective rather than individual rights, opposing everything from free speech to the concept of seeking political asylum. In the late 1940s communist countries were outvoted. China now seeks to reopen those old arguments about how to balance sovereignty with individual freedoms. This time, the liberal order is on the defensive.
The Economist is doing great work on China these days. Their podcast series about Xi Jinping, The Prince, was outstanding — a kind of survey of recent Chinese history through the story of one man. And their new newsletter on China, Drum Tower, which is accompanied by a podcast, promises to be excellent also.
The world has no real plan to stop the genocide underway in China. Some Uyghurs are at the point where they wish the world would just cop to that harsh fact, rather than paying lip service and raising their hopes over and over.
“We had an illusion that the world would do its best to stop China from this genocide,” said Tahir Imin, a US-based Uyghur academic who believes many of his relatives are in the camps. “But the world has no plan to stop this genocide. It’s not happening. The governments should clearly say that. Either stop the genocide — or admit you will not.”
Have been trying got the past couple of years to avoid buying anything made in China, because much of it is made by slave labor — but it seems that everything I might want to buy is made there. So I just have to redouble my efforts.
I keep thinking about what the late great Paul Farmer said: “I love WL’s [White Liberals], love ’em to death. They’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.”
What the West Got Wrong About China – Habi Zhang:
The reason why China would brazenly “disregard the international law” that many other nations voluntarily abide by is that the rule of law is not, and has never been, a moral principle in Chinese society. […]
It was the rule of morality, not the rule of law, that defined Chinese politics.
In The Classics of Filial Piety — primarily a moral code of conduct — Confucius teaches that “of all the actions of man there is none greater than filial piety. In filial piety, there is nothing greater than the reverential awe of one’s father. In the reverential awe shown to one’s father, there is nothing greater than the making him the correlate of Heaven.” We can therefore conclude that the Durkheimian sense of the sacred object — the source of moral authority — is the father in both the literal and metaphorical sense. With this understanding, Confucianism can be viewed as a religion as manifested in the ritual of ancestor worship.
What the individual sovereignty is to liberalism, ancestor worship is to Confucianism.
Fascinating. James Dominic Rooney offers a partial dissent here — though it’s not to my mind especially convincing. David K. Schneider weighs in on the debate and comes down more on Zhang’s side: “liberal government is antithetical to the Confucian ideal of benevolent government. In Mencius, the happiness of the people is the measure of good government. But the people are not sovereign. Only a king is sovereign and conformity with Heaven’s ritual order is the responsibility of an educated political and economic elite, which is charged with the duty of acting as parents to the people, who in turn are obliged to submit.”
This argument sheds an interesting light on my recent essay on “Recovering Piety.”
The Coddling of American Children Is a Boon to Beijing – WSJ:
My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions. Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.
This is not a philosophy shared by American schools. On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it. How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers?
Two quite different issues are being conflated here, and the difference can be put in the form of two questions: Do American schools do enough to challenge and educate our children? Do students learn more when they get a lot of homework?
Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial features no one cares about. And yet the people most alarmed about Facebook’s negative influence are those who complain the most about how bad a product Facebook is. The question is: Why do disinformation workers think they are the only ones who have noticed that Facebook stinks? Why should we suppose the rest of the world has been hypnotized by it? Why have we been so eager to accept Silicon Valley’s story about how easy we are to manipulate?
Within the knowledge-making professions there are some sympathetic structural explanations. Social scientists get funding for research projects that might show up in the news. Think tanks want to study quantifiable policy problems. Journalists strive to expose powerful hypocrites and create “impact.” Indeed, the tech platforms are so inept and so easily caught violating their own rules about verboten information that a generation of ambitious reporters has found an inexhaustible vein of hypocrisy through stories about disinformation leading to moderation. As a matter of policy, it’s much easier to focus on an adjustable algorithm than entrenched social conditions.
I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.
The internet companies in San Francisco and Beijing are highly skilled at business model innovation and leveraging network effects, not necessarily R&D and the creation of new IP. (That’s why, I think, that the companies in Beijing work so hard. Since no one has any real, defensible IP, the only path to success is to brutally outwork the competition.) I wish we would drop the notion that China is leading in technology because it has a vibrant consumer internet. A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader.
This juxtaposition offers much to reflect on, but one brief comment: The idea that Silicon Valley is meaningfully innovative and the idea that Silicon Valley shapes our social order are the products of the same PR machine, and so perhaps should be subjected to what Con Law calls “strict scrutiny.” As Wang often points out in his fascinating analytical work, one of the biggest differences between China and the USA is that China thinks technologies made of Atoms are more important, and more worthy of major investment, than technologies made of Bits. As Dan Wang says elsewhere — oh crap, I’m ruining my #twoquotes post with a third quote, oh well — anyway, this is a good point:
The internet is important, and we’re likely still underrating its effects. But I don’t think that we should let innovation be confined entirely to the digital world, because there’s still too much left to build. The world isn’t yet developed enough that everyone has access to shelter, food, water, and energy at a low share of income. Hundreds of millions still live in extreme poverty, which means that manufacturing and logistics haven’t overcome the obstacles of delivering cheap material comfort to all.
I am not in any way rescinding, or even questioning, my long-held view that Facebook is evil and should be destroyed. But if Bernstein is right, then Facebook is more of a symptom than a cause of our social afflictions, and we are even more screwed than I have thought we are. And if Wang is right, then smart people who have some influence need to turn their attention to technologies of Atoms.
All this is of course related to my recent posts on climate change and geoengineering.
I obviously write about a good many things, but over the last decade my work has been largely devoted to a single overarching theme: what we attend to and what we fail to attend to. This started with the work on my old Text Patterns blog that fed into my 2011 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and since then I have pursued the various connected issues and problems down several paths. My set of Theses for Disputation, “Attending to Technology,” is my most explicit articulation of these concerns, but even when I didn’t seem to be thinking about these things I really was. Even my biography of the Book of Common Prayer was an attempt to understand the prayer book as an instrument for the focusing of the attention of wayward Christians on that to which they should primarily attend. As the BCP almost says, “We have attended to those things we should not have attended to, and we have not attended to those things which we should have attended to, and there is no health in us.” The relevance of these questions to How to Think will be obvious to anyone who has read it, but I could say the same about the two books that I published since then, The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread with the Dead. In each case I am concerned with the forces in our culture that inhibit enriching attentiveness, that enforce enervating distraction, that direct our minds always towards the frivolous or the malicious. (This is of course why I despise Twitter so intensely.)
The Invitation and Repair project might be understood as circling within this orbit of thought, but it’s also an attempt to go beyond my earlier, more purely diagnostic, thinking and to begin to understand how to embed concrete practices of life in concrete institutional structures. My most recent essay in The New Atlantis is likewise an attempt to forge a new and more constructive direction for thinking about and addressing our culture-wide attentional dysfunction. I have been interested in Chinese thought — looking into each of the Three Ways but especially Taoism — because the Chinese intellectual/spiritual traditions have always striven to identify and defeat the enemies of proper attention. Even something like the I Ching, which is commonly thought of as a straightforward manual of divination, is always said by its most eloquent and insightful proponents to be — as I have said the Book of Common Prayer is — a device for directing the attention. The I Ching doesn’t tell you what to do so much as tell you what you should be thinking about as you try to decide what to do – what your primary coordinates for judgment should be.
I’ve been intrigued by Chinese thought about these matters not because I think the Christian tradition, which I hold as my own, is deficient, though in fact I do believe that the Western church hasn’t been, well, sufficiently attentive to attention. Rather, I’m just trying to surprise myself. China Achebe used to say that he could write well about the traditional ways of the Igbo people because, while he observed them closely, they weren’t his ways, not when he was growing up. His Christian-convert father forbade him to consort with pagans, which just made pagans more interesting to him. He watched them more closely, and learned a lot from them, precisely because they were a step or two away from his ordinary beliefs and practices.
And that’s the goal, right? — not to think about attention, which is like thinking about your flashlight instead of using it to find your way in the dark, but rather to see more clearly — and, ultimately, direct your mind and heart and spirit towards what can nourish you. Indeed that is the goal; gut sometimes you might be forced to notice that your flashlight is running out of batteries, or isn’t very strong even at its best, so maybe you should try a different one, or see if you have any fresh batteries?
Such meta-reflection is dangerous, though. I find myself recalling Carlyle’s famous comment about talking with Coleridge: “He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out.” People who talk and write about “productivity” and even “attention” are like that, in a more mundane way. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to achieve ever-more-precise diagnoses of our attentional disorders; I don’t want to continue looking at the light, I want to look along it to see what it illuminates.
Epistemic confidence level: very low. I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, though I’m trying to know more.
In an essay published a few months ago, I looked for a way beyond what I call the Standard Critique of Technology, and suggested that one such way could be found in certain Daoist ideas about the human-built world. And I speculated that, as China grows in power and influence, and insofar as the Chinese technosphere draws upon elements of ancient intellectual traditions, there is at least the possibility that some of those ideas could make their way to the U.S.
In light of all that, I read with great interest this essay in the LRB by Peter C. Perdue. The essay is essentially an overview of the work of a Chinese historian Ge Zhaoguang, with a particular emphasis on this new book. Ge is a passionate advocate for the Confucian intellectual tradition, and sees it not just as valuable in itself but also a kind of binding agent for Chinese culture, a project towards which Perdue is extremely skeptical. He thinks such a return to the past is necessarily Han-centric and therefore manifestly inadequate to the multicultural society that China has become.
Yet Perdue sees the need for some kind of project of cultural and moral renewal — that is, he fully understands why Ge writes as he does. He notes that
In 1895, China suffered a crushing military defeat at the hands of the Japanese and then came under assault from its own intellectuals, who were heavily influenced by the Western thought that had arrived with the conquerors. The result was an almost complete rejection of the Confucian tradition over the next ninety years. Ge ends his Intellectual History of China in 1895, the year in which Yan Fu, the famous translator of Darwinist thought, wrote of the extreme ‘nervous anxiety’ afflicting intellectuals of his time. Ge does not follow the story into the next two decades, when genuine faith in the classical tradition almost completely collapsed. As he writes, by 1895, the loss of territory, cultural confidence, unity and common historical identity had ‘undermined the integrity of the classical tradition’. The abolition of the examination system in 1905 and the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 sealed its fate. But China had faced foreign invasion and cultural challenges before without the collapse of the Confucian tradition.
Other forces have rushed in to fill the gap created by the collapse of the Confucian system, Maoist Marxism above all — but not only that: “After Mao, Chinese endorsed cowboy capitalism of the most corrupt, environmentally destructive kind. Like all of us, they struggle to restrain capitalist greed with moral or legal norms; many of them, amazingly enough, have turned to Christianity for answers, but others search for guidance in Buddhism, Daoism, popular cults, and even Confucius.”
Perdue himself is appalled by “cowboy capitalism,” appalled by the rise of Christianity in China, appalled by Ge’s desire for a return to Classical Chinese thought. Indeed, he seems appalled by every option except China coming to embody the worldview of — well, of the LRB and its readers, I guess. “Is an alternative intellectual history of China possible? If so, it would not seek to define the unity of Chinese civilisation, but to celebrate its multiplicity. It would look to centrifugal forces, marginal figures and frontier contacts as sources of innovation, not threats to order. It would include women, non-Han peoples and non-elite traditions without trying to co-opt them into an orthodoxy.” (I’m not saying that these would be bad things, but it’s noteworthy that, while lamenting the influence in China of Western models of political economy, Perdue can only imagine a good future for China that’s based on a Western leftist cultural frame. As though the possibilities for China’s future involve choosing items from a buffet laid out by the West.)
In my essay for The New Atlantis I invoked the fascinating work of Tongdong Bai — especially his Against Political Equality — and speculated that there might be some interest within the CCP in renewing Confucianism or other elements of the classical tradition. Perdue thinks this is happening, at least on the level of public declaration: “The Chinese state now invokes the once despised Confucius as the bedrock of native values.” But Tongdong Bai isn’t so sure, as he explained in an email to me that he has graciously given me permission to quote from:
I don’t think CCP is that friendly to Confucianism…. My interest in Confucian political philosophy is not directly related to the mainland Chinese government and policies. Although my dear friend Daniel Bell sometimes links his proposal to the present Chinese regime, I am fundamentally different from him in this regard. What I am proposing is normative, and I don’t think the contemporary Chinese regime offers any real-world exemplification of my proposals.
So what do I — again, a novice, if a fascinated one — make of all this? A few things:
- There is a kind of crisis of confidence among China’s intellectual elite, a sense that the power of their state is growing faster than the moral order of their culture;
- For many, capitalism (whether of the cowboy variety or any other) is inadequate to providing the necessary moral order;
- For those many, certain religious traditions — whether the embodied-in-religious-practice forms of the Three Ways (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) or Christianity — offer themselves as alternatives;
- None of these alternatives is yet strong enough to displace or even really to affect the juggernaut of CCP capitalism;
- The hopes I articulate in my essay for a renewal of Daoism seem unlikely, in part because, as both Ge and Perdue explain, Daoism has been largely incorporated into Confucianism, or redefined by Confucianism;
- Christianity might therefore be a better hope for providing a moral order for Chinese culture;
- But Christianity, though I believe it to be true, has never developed the kind of coherent critique of technocracy that Daoism has long embodied;
- So if that new moral center emerges, it’s unlikely to offer significant resistance to the increasingly technocratic character of the Chinese regime and therefore the Chinese nation.
On the one hand, it’s good to stretch yourself intellectually; on the other hand, when you do so you might pull a muscle. In my recent essay on Cosmotechnics, I got in over my head — delightfully so, for me, but it led to at least one embarrassing error.
In my first footnote I talk about Yuk Hui’s use of the word qi and I get it wrong. I received a very kind email from a Sinologist named Nils Wieland explaining my mistake:
qi 氣 is the Qi non-Chinese speakers have heard of as some sort of energy or spirit, which Yuk Hui romanizes as Ch’i.
qi 器 doesn’t have the same popularity, it’s a standard Chinese word meaning container, vessel or instrument, and it’s the Qi from Yuk Hui’s Dao-Qi-duality.
(Both qi’s sound exactly the same, so I guess differentiating them by romanization is a good approach; what’s odd is that he chose the nowadays standard Pinyin spelling for the less famous qi – throwing people off 😉 )
Dammit! I knew something like this had to be the case; you wouldn’t believe how long and fruitlessly I googled the question. Again, this is what happens when your reach exceeds your grasp — and (trying to be meaningfully self-reflective here) I think on some level I was afraid that if I contacted a Sinologist I’d get the information but would also be told that my whole essay was nonsense. And I really wanted to write that essay.
I also have received a very kind message from Tongdong Bai, whom I quote in my essay, pointing to other work of his on the political implications (or lack thereof) of Daoism. Nils Wieland suggested some further reading too. So while I am embarrassed at my rookie error I have some interesting next steps to take in this project.
Watching all these big sports clubs scrambling to appease the Chinese regime, and punish the coaches and players who don’t bow and scrape — Arsenal being the most recent of these — I find myself singing, “If Adolf Hitler flew in today / They’d send a limousine anyway.”
The meaning is so obvious: “The black clothes represent Hong Kong, the mask represents Hong Kong, the Molotov cocktail represents Hong Kong, what else here doesn’t represent Hong Kong???”
But the artist who drew this, Rafael Grampá, is Brazilian, and Brazil has had its recent moments of social unrest: Why couldn’t it be about Brazil? The comics company, D.C., is American: Why couldn’t it be about the various protest movements that have succeeded Occupy Wall Street? (Batwoman = black bloc.) Of course, the Hong Kong protesters have learned from those movements. They’re not the only ones, though.
Why couldn’t the image be about … Batwoman?
We don’t even know when the image was drawn, or the story it illustrates written. Since the appearance of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943, I have received several emails from people noting, either approvingly or critically, its obvious subtextual commentary on Christian participation in the political events of 2016. The only problem with this assumption: I signed the original contract for that book in 2013, and had largely finished it before the last Presidential election. People don’t think about matters like the time-frame for the publication of books when they discern correspondences with whatever is at or near the forefront of their minds.
Years and years ago a student told me that his high-school English teacher had explained to her classes that Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” is about Santa Claus — Santa indulging in a contemplative moment before resuming his duties. For he has promises to keep, and miles to go before he sleeps. It all fits.
And it does fit. Sort of. Close enough for a reader to be pleased when she discerns the correspondence. Such a reader will be sufficiently pleased to stop asking questions, and will not wonder whether other interpretations might match the text equally well — or even better.
This is the curious doubled character of the human impulse towards interpretation. We delight in interpreting, but we delight even more in bringing interpretation to a satisfying end. We want to do it, and we want to be done with it.
I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese authorities were playing a long game, biding their time and building their power, and I do not think they were relishing an immediate confrontation with Western capitalism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Beijing clearly perceives these protests as an existential threat, and have decided that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the center of the table … and the capitalists immediately folded like a Chinese-made lawn chair.
NBA officials are bowing and scraping to Beijing and begging forgiveness while trying to tell Americans that they’re not really apologizing. (Adam Silver says he’s not apologizing for Daryl Morey’s exercise of free speech, but then what is he apologizing for?) ESPN/Disney is muzzling its employees. Apple is banning apps that Beijing wants banned, for whatever reason.
This has all gone better for Beijing than CCP officials probably dared hope, but in fact they held the strongest hand. Tim Cook, who got his job as Apple CEO after spending years proving that he was a wizard of the supply chain, knows better than anyone that China has a stranglehold on Apple’s supply chain, and it would take years or even decades to loosen that hold. I don’t know how much revenue the NBA gets from China, but even if it’s far less than they get in this country, that Chinese revenue can be cut off altogether in an instant; by contrast, not one American NBA fan in ten thousand will care enough about what happens in China to stop buying jerseys and tickets and League Pass.
If nothing else, this whole shameful display should put an end, once and for all, to the ridiculous idea that there is some natural and intrinsic connection between democracy and capitalism. There very obviously ain’t. When shareholders and the bottom line are not benefitted by democracy, then democracy gets flushed down the toilet. American big business has firmly decided for a totalitarian regime and against people who want democratic freedoms. The business of America really is business after all.
But here’s an interesting question: How woke will our woke capitalists remain if an emboldened Chinese regime starts to rail against moral perversion in the form of homosexuals and trans people?
UPDATE: This:
“Believe me, the China situation bothers me. . . . But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my owners to make money,” then–NBA commissioner David Stern said in a 2006 interview. He may not have known then where his allegiance to the bottom line would lead the league and the game he helped to grow.
To hear him tell it then, Stern was intent on turning the NBA into an exporter of American values. Under his leadership, the league began its “Basketball Without Borders” program, which initially sent NBA players to run basketball camps in geopolitically tense parts of the world. “NBACares” television spots dominated game breaks. “We’re going to keep right on showing them,” Stern told Sports Illustrated when asked about public annoyance with the frequency of the ads. “Because social responsibility is extremely important to us.”
You know it was an article of faith for Stern that “make money” and “social responsibility” could never come into irreconcilable conflict with each other. No doubt Adam Silver and Tim Cook have been similarly catechized. But their religion is in vain, so what will they do? They’ll keep making money and tell themselves that they are also socially responsible, no matter what happens on the ground. For faith is the evidence of things not seen.
UPDATE 2: Paul Farmer, in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, on WLs (White Liberals): “I love WLs to death, they’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves.” (More about Farmer, on related themes, here.)
Adam Silver is standing by NBA employees’ free speech rights, though he doesn’t sound happy about it. “Daryl Morey, as general manager of the Houston Rockets, enjoys that right [to speak his political views] as one of our employees. What I also tried to suggest is that I understand there are consequences from his freedom of speech and we will have to live with those consequences.” He also made sure to emphasize how deeply he “sympathizes” with Chinese companies that angry.
Let’s be clear about what Silver sympathizes with. A Chinese broadcasting company replied to Silver’s statement thus: “We’re strongly dissatisfied and oppose Adam Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right to freedom of expression. We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.” That is, people who are citizens of countries other than China, who speak while in their own countries, should be governed not by the laws of those countries but by the preferences of China. That is the view that Adam Silver sympathizes with.
UPDATE: Ben Thompson makes a rather obvious point, though one I had neglected: The statement by Daryl Morey that so profoundly offended Chinese officials was made on Twitter — which is banned in China. Thompson continues by demonstrating how Chinese censorship works on TikTok, and near the end of the post writes,
The government response is also critical: I already argued that CFIUS should revisit TikTok’s acquisition of Music.ly; the current skepticism around all Chinese investment in the United States should be continued if not increased. Attempts by China to leverage market access into self-censorship by U.S. companies should also be treated as trade violations that are subject to retaliation. Make no mistake, what happened to the NBA this weekend is nothing new: similar pressure has befallen multiple U.S. companies, often about content that is outside of China’s borders (Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example, being listed in drop-down menus for hotels or airlines).
First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called for ‘Big Vs’, people with well-followed verified accounts, analogous to Twitter’s blue tick. At the conference, the newly formed Cyberspace Administration of China reminded the assembled big shots about their ‘social responsibility’ to the ‘interests of the state’ and ‘core socialist values’. Two weeks later, on 23 August 2013, the prominent investor and Weibo activist Charles Xue was arrested. He turned up shortly afterwards in a Chinese Central Television interview from his prison cell, weeping and apologising for his irresponsibility and vanity.
Such TV interviews have become a staple feature of the CCP’s internet crackdown, helped by a new law, passed in September 2013, which threatens three years in prison to anyone who shares a rumour that ‘upsets social order’ and is shared five hundred times or clicked on five thousand times. For people with Weibo followings well into the millions, the law effectively banned the posting of anything even potentially controversial. ‘Ever since, Weibo has been dead as a politically relevant medium,’ Griffiths writes. ‘Once, debate had raged there: sometimes wild, often polemical, clever if you were lucky – but always lively. Today, it’s as silent as the grave.’ Weibo continues to grow, mind you; it’s just that it’s now the usual entertainment news and celebrity bollocks.
And:
Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and ‘China’ had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.
To which Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA:
Actual quote: “We are dealing with a complex set of issues. And I will just add that the fact that we have apologized to fans in China is not inconsistent with supporting someone’s right to have a point of view.” A point of view — your opinion, man — the opinion that the people of Hong Kong have the right to demand democracy and that the Chinese communist government is determined at all costs to deny it to them — which Silver is quite explicitly disavowing by apologizing to the fans in China. The NBA loves it when their people are politically vocal, until being politically vocal costs the NBA money. Then they claim, as the owner of the Houston Rockets has, not to be political.
It’s interesting how little coverage of this issue there is on ESPN, and no editorializing — in text, anyway: maybe the on-air personalities are being more assertive. But my guess is that ESPN and the NBA are joined at the hip here, and are trying to figure out which way to jump. My second guess is that they’ll back the totalitarian Chinese regime.
And my third guess is this: The time will come when no major American media will tell the truth about what the Chinese government does, and my over/under on the moment when perfect silence has been achieved is five years.
UPDATE: Here’s what the NBA posted on Weibo: “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable.” Remember that “inappropriate speech,” in full, was: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”
UPDATE 2: Since I posted this earlier today I have been browsing through the Twitter feeds of the major NBA reporters. Crickets. Not an opinion in sight, and these people have opinions about everything. There are two factors at work here, I think. The first is simple greed: NBA exhibition games are coming up in China, ESPN is sending crews there, there’s money to be had both in the near and in the far term. But the other factor is something I wrote about a lot in How to Think: Scott Alexander’s extremely useful categories of the Ingroup, the Outgroup, and the Fargroup. To people who run the NBA, how North Carolina portions out its public restrooms is A Matter of Vital Importance, because those Jesusland weirdos are the Outgroup. But the Chinese government persecuting and killing Uighurs? Whatever, man. Who am I to judge?
UPDATE 3: Brian Phillips:
There’s nothing edifying about any of this, except to the extent that it’s a useful reminder of where we are. We’re in a world where global capital feels perfectly comfortable teaming up with communist autocrats against democracy activists, as long as it keeps the cash registers dinging. Generally speaking, the hypocrisy of sports owners feels more depressing than the hypocrisy of other tycoon varietals, because sports owners represent a product that you’d like to believe has a meaning surpassing commerce. This is especially true about the NBA, because the NBA is so proud of its social conscience, or at least it was before its social conscience started threatening to cost it money.
For the most part, though, you’ll never be surprised if you assume that the devotion of sports owners to their own self-interest, and of sports leagues to their owners’ self-interest, is absolute. The NBA wants you to see it as politically progressive to the precise extent that your seeing it as progressive helps the bottom line and no further. Tilman Fertitta, the Rockets’ owner, occasionally goes on CNBC to praise Donald Trump, from whom he bought an Atlantic City casino in 2011, and to say things like “Obamacare does not work.” He has no problem then turning around and declaring that the Rockets are a “non-political organization” to make nice with China, because what he means by “non-political organization” is that he thinks hundred-dollar bills are nice, and also fuck you.
How the Beijing elite sees the world:
The Chinese have developed a state system run by a technocratic elite of highly educated bureaucrats under party control. This is China’s age-old imperial system in modern form. The attraction that western-style democracy and free-market capitalism may have exercised on this elite has now withered. They stressed the failure of western states to invest in their physical or human assets, the poor quality of many of their elected leaders and the instability of their economies. One participant added that “90 per cent of democracies created after the fall of the Soviet Union have now failed”. This risk is not to be run.
All this has increased confidence in China’s unique model. Yet this does not mean a return to a controlled economy. On the contrary, as a participant remarked: “We believe in the fundamental role of the market in allocating resources. But government needs to play a decisive role. It creates the framework for the market. The government should promote entrepreneurship and protect the private economy.” One participant even insisted that the new idea of a “core leader” could lead to strong government and economic freedom.
This is by no means an irrational take on the global state of affairs. I wish it were.
On his blog this morning, Rod Dreher publishes a fascinating letter from a reader in China, who suggests that the work of Xún Zǐ might be a good entryway into Chinese culture.
As it happens, I wrote about Xún Zǐ in my book on original sin. I introduce him after briefly describing the thought of Confucius’s disciple Mencius, who believed that human beings are intrinsically good. Here’s the relevant passage:
But some generations later there came along another great sage, one who also considered himself a faithful disciple of Confucius, who believed that Mencius had gotten it all wrong. His name was Xún Zǐ (310-237 BCE), and it is probably not coincidental that he lived in what has long been called the Warring States Period, when the unifying power of the Zhou dynasty was weakening and the social order crumbling. “The nature of man is evil,” Xún Zǐ wrote; “man’s inborn nature is to seek for gain. If this tendency is followed, strife and rapacity result and deference and compliance disappear. By inborn nature one is envious and hates others. If these tendencies are followed, injury and destruction result and loyalty and faithfulness disappear.” If we feel a pang of compassion or anxiety for a child falling into a well, that is because the life or death of that child does not affect our interests — we do not gain by it. If we knew that we would gain by that child’s death, then not only would we feel no anxiety, we’d give the kid a good push.
But then, someone might say, people often, or at least sometimes, do virtuous deeds. If our nature is evil, where does goodness come from? Xún Zǐ has a ready reply: “I answer that all propriety and righteousness are results of the activity” — this word carries connotations of creativity and artifice — “of sages and not originally produced from man’s nature…. The sages gathered together their ideas and thoughts and became familiar with activity, facts, and principles, and thus produced propriety and righteousness and instituted laws and systems.”
So it would seem that the news from Xún Zǐ is not so bad after all, and not so different from the model of Mencius. Yes, we have an innately evil nature, and come into this world predisposed to greed and strife; however, these tendencies are correctable by the judicious enforcement of well-made laws. The one thing needful is that the sages, who have “gathered together their ideas and thoughts and became familiar with activity, facts, and principles,” are the ones given charge of “laws and systems.” Philosophers rule — or should.
So for Xún Zǐ inborn evil is not so much a curse as an annoyance. Thanks to basic human intelligence, which allows us to see when things aren’t working properly and then take the necessary steps to address the problems, we can find sages (“sage-kings,” he later says) to establish laws and social structures that mitigate evil and build up good. And, not incidentally, Xún Zǐ believes that “Every man in the street possesses the faculty to know [humanity, righteousness, laws, and correct principles] and the capacity to practice them.” Therefore, almost anyone can become a sage; there is no reason why there should ever be a shortage of them.
It’s Xún Zǐ’s matter-of-factness that’s noteworthy here, and really rather attractive. What his philosophy indicates is that one can have a very low view of human nature without being what William James, in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) calls a “sick soul”: a person tormented by consciousness of sin and helpless in the face of temptation. James spoke of such people as “these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth,” and it was almost axiomatic to him that their personality is antithetical to the confidence and assurance and warmth of what he calls “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” But Xún Zǐ, for all his insistence on the depths of our innate sinfulness, seems the very embodiment of healthy-mindedness. How is this possible? It turns out that what matters more than your view of “human nature” is your view of the relative importance of nature and nurture. For Xún Zǐ human nature is evil, but nature is also easily controllable and eminently improvable. All you have to do is put the philosophers in charge.
