Author: old_wp_importer

One name mentioned repeatedly, and respectfully, mentioned in China Pop is that of journalist [Dai Qing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Qing) (戴晴). Dai has written on many topics, including a book on the Three Gorges dam, which got her briefly jailed in the aftermath of Tiananmen. More recently she has criticized the Beijing Olympics, and is one of the signatories of [Charter 08](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22210)

Trying to track down her work on the internet, I end up with:

• A blog apparently once here, but now seemingly only available from archive.org
• A handful of newspaper columns from the start of this decade
• A profile of Dai from the Wall Street Journal (one of many, but mostly telling the same story so I’ll stick with listing one)

Simon Reynolds. [Energy Flash](http://energyflashinfohype.blogspot.com/), a journey through rave music and dance culture. 1998.


Reynolds’ history of ‘rave music and dance culture’ attracted me primarily in an anthropological way, as a loving report from an alien subculture. It’s helpful that Reynolds’ sympathies match mine. An intellectual left-liberal, and a believer in spritual and social progress through counter-culture, he drenches raveculture in his own aspirations

‘What the London pirate stations and the free parties conjured up was the sense of rave as a vision quest. Both transformed mundane Britain, its dreary metropolitan thoroughfares and placid country lanes, into a cartography of adventure and forbidden pleasures’ [xviii]

…

‘While rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave _constructs_ an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies’ [xix]

Similarly, he shares the natural doubts. Coming into electronic music from years submerged in post-punk, he worries that ecstasy alone can’t save the world:

Is rave simply about the dissipation of utopian energies into the void or does the idealism it catalyses spill over into and transform ordinary life? Can the oceanic, ‘only connect!’ feelings experienced on the dancefloor be integrated into everyday struggles to be ‘better at being human’?

But the socio-political analysis doesn’t get out of hand: most of the book is filled with descriptions of the music; Reynolds somehow manages powerful and varied descriptions of music, without the ability to fall back to the crutch of describing the lyrics.

My only disappointment was how parochial Reynolds’ approach is. The cover doesn’t make it clear, but this is primarily an exploration of rave culture in the UK. Detroit and Chicago do get a chapter largely to themselves, but there is very little exploration of the european scene. Eurodisco, EBM and the like are more-or-less ignored.

[GRAIN](http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212) reports on what happens when a food crisis meets an economic crisis, and is given a healthy shove by government policies:

>On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land is becoming increasingly privatised and concentrated.

They’ve also been obsessively collecting [news clippings](http://farmlandgrab.blogspot.com/) to back up their case.

I don’t normally like human-interest articles, but occasionally journalists are skillful enough to win over even skeptics like me.

First, [Rebecca Skloot](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04Creatures-t.html) on ‘service animals’

>people often find it hard to believe that the United States government is considering a proposal that would force Edie and many others like her to stop using their service animals. But that’s precisely what’s happening, because a growing number of people believe the world of service animals has gotten out of control: first it was guide dogs for the blind; now it’s monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck.

Then, two from Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post. One is a [recent tear-jerker](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549_pf.html) on children killed by being left in cars:

>”Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.

>Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

Then – without much deeper meaning, just a great portrait – on children’s entertainer [The Great Zucchini](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801434.html):

>The Great Zucchini actually does magic tricks, but they are mostly dime-store novelty gags — false thumbs to hide a handkerchief, magic dust that turns water to gel — accompanied by sleight of hand so primitive your average 8-year-old would suss it out in an instant. That’s one reason he has fashioned himself a specialist in ages 2 to 6. He behaves like no adult in these preschoolers’ world, making himself the dimwitted victim of every gag. He thinks a banana is a telephone, and answers it. He can’t find the birthday boy when the birthday boy is standing right behind him. Every kid in the room is smarter than the Great Zucchini; he gives them that power over their anxieties.

This report from the British Council talks about how being a native speaker of English isn’t as big an advantage as it might seem. A review says (and my experience agrees entirely):

As English increasingly becomes the language of business, native speakers feel, quite understandably, that they are at an advantage. But discussion often goes more smoothly when the native speakers leave the room – proceedings are not muddied by idioms and intuitive, unthinking use of slang. Conversation among non-native speakers may be more direct and pragmatic – correct, probably, yet stripped down and functional. The people who see themselves as facilitators are, in reality, obstacles. This is increasingly evident to non-native speakers, and it is having an impact on the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Most people are impressively incompetent when it comes to talking with non-native speakers of their language. The exceptions are generally those who have learnt through experience how to talk simply – businesspeople, tour guides or travellers. But it’s a skill which

could

be taught – it just isn’t.

Teaching of foreign languages in Britain, for good reason, farcical: a basic knowledge of French is pretty useless, when every child in France is learning English to a far higher level. Why not let kids opt out of learning foreign languages, and instead take a course in ‘how to communicate with foreigners’? Give them prose-composition excercises with a thousand-word vocabulary. Mark them down for using slang, or irony, or meaningless pleasantries that confuse the conversation. Have comprehension exercises where children must make sense of Babelfish translations, or letters badly translated from Finnish. Get them onto skype, let them talk to the Chinese kids their age who are learning English. Teach them how to rephrase and repeat, how to pitch their language according to the audience, how to figure out when a listener hasn’t understood them. It’ll be far more use than a few words in French.

The [Worldchanging](http://www.worldchanging.com) folks often talk about [leapfrogging](http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001743.html), ‘the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps’. It’s nice to see the same concept in different clothes, in a [book on Trotsky](http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2635#_ednref14) (who naturally had the problem of explaining Communism in Russia):

>In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself. In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its ‘ideal type’, and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of going through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the ‘ideal’ for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities.

Reading [Blair Unbound](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3669345/Tony-Blair-Hat-trick-hero.html), Anthony Seldon’s political biography of Blair since 2001, I’ve been struck by how forcefully it confirms the view much of the outside world had of Number 10 in that time. Namely, that everything was driven by personalities rather than policies, with Blair rarely hearing — let alone listening to — the outside world.

[Naturally](http://ohuiginn.net/mt/the_world/iraq/) I’ve been paying particularly close attention to the treatment of the Iraq war. This was the first political event I was deeply involved in, and re-viewing it as history provides a chance to see what I interpreted correctly and falsely at the time. Generally, the lesson is I was most likely to be right when I was at my most cynical.

A good example of this is the casual way in which Blair and Bush controlled Iraqi politicians — including elected politicians, whose democratic selection was one of the last remaining justifications for their war.

So, when Nouri al-Maliki’s selection as Iraqi Prime Minster in early 2006, replacing Ibrahim Jaafari,

[most reports](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/16/iraq) treated it as a decision made by Iraqis. Relatively few journalists discussed it as a selection determined by the Americans. [I did](http://ohuiginn.net/mt/2006/04/jawad_almaliki.html), correctly cynical for once, mainly because I had been paying attention to [Helena Cobban](http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/election/2006/0405impasse.htm):

>The US and British governments…have been using the power of their countries’ military position inside Iraq to try to subvert the results of the December election by pursuing a determined campaign against the nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari as Prime Minister.

Now it is safely in the past, Seldon is free to show that the cynics had it right:

>[Blair] became convinced that al-Jaafari should, in the interests of Iraq’s future, step down. But how? Al-Jaafari did not want to relinquish office, and so the full weight of the Bush administration would be required to shift his view….Blair told Bush that he had asked Straw to go to Baghdad to ‘bang heads together’ and suggested that Rice join him….Straw and Rice were unable to dislodge al-Jaafari during their visit, but, in making clear that they spoke with the full authority of their bosses, they made their point. Sawers and the NSC’s Megan O’Sullivan remained behind to maintain the pressure. Blair kept in close contact with them, and on 20 April, al-Jaafari eventually stepped down.

Despite the column-yards given over to news from China, I often feel that the only stories I read from that country are ones about money. There are other, less business-oriented voices around — how could there not be, given the number of people constantly travelling to and from China — but you have to go and hunt them down rather than waiting for them to arrive on the front page.

So [on Cosma’s recommendation](http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/china-today.html) I bought myself a copy of [Zha Jianying](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/23/070423fa_fact_zha?currentPage=all)’s book [China Pop](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/02/books/books-of-the-times-now-china-has-its-soaps-and-celebrity-authors.html).

Written in 1995, this is a a tour of the Chinese culture industry – books, film, television, art and the press. Zha wisely avoids the temptation to cover everything. Instead she focuses mainly on her Beijing-intellectual friends, people she understands and who will be willing to talk with her. So we get telling pen-portraits of a handful of successful artists. There is the team behind TV melodrama Yearning (ke wang), a mix of highbrow writers such as Zheng Wanglong, who devoted their energies to building a chinese equivalent to Mexican soaps. Or there isChan Koon-Chung, one of the breed of ambitious Hong Kong media entrepreneurs trying to expand onto the mainland.

Many of Zha’s subjects are intellectuals who have consciously abandoned an inward-looking and elitist ‘avant-garde’ in favour of the mass market. It all sounds strikingly like Yeltsin-era Russia, where some professors become millionaire wheeler-dealers, while many of their colleagues end up bewildered and impoverished, unable to find a position for themselves inside a new world. Even as she focusses on the success stories, Zha does manage to point out the number who have lost their way.

What’s truly striking, though, is how dated the book feels. She writes of the fledgling contemporary art scene in Beijing; now, [artfacts](http://www.artfacts.net) lists 149 galleries there, and Chinese influence on the international world is growing exponentially. Equally, much of the media – the press, music, even porn – has been transformed beyond recognition by the internet. I’d love to see Zha write a similar book now, and capture what has changed in the past 15 years. Unfortunately her [latest book](http://new.artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid247_en.html) won’t help: she’s devoted it entirely to the 1980s.

There’s much to be said for Johann Hari, whatever [uncertainties](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Johann_Hari#Challenges_to_his_credibility.2C_and_Hari.27s_responses) you may have about his reliability. He’s one of the few reliably left-liberal voices in the British media, and he’s an excellent writer. His long [piece on Dubai](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html) in last week’s Independent deservedly ruffled a lot of feathers. In it, he describes the life of the labourers imported to build Dubai’s skyscrapers, kept without chance of escape in what amounts to slavery:

>Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

>Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means “City of Gold”. In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

The reaction was immense, and consisted of that odd mix of “you’re making it up” and “that’s old news” which is generally a sure sign that you’ve hit a nerve.

But in the interests of not relying on Hari alone, here’s a somewhat similar [account of Dubai](http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2635), by [Planet of Slums](http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1844671607/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239803062&sr=8-1) author Mike Davis:

>Dubai, like its neighbours, flouts ILO labour regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on ‘forced labour’. Indeed, as the Independent recently emphasized, ‘the labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.’ ‘Like their impoverished forefathers’, the London paper continued, ‘today’s Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them.’

Back to Hari for the last word:

>Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.

In Georgia, the [protests](http://ohuiginn.net/mt/2009/04/georgia_protests_friday.html) continue: [small rallies](http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11123&Itemid=133), alongside attempts to blockade the streets outside parliament and other official buildings. Day in, day out, there are still several thousand people involved in the protests, an impressive show of strength.

The problem is the leadership; as [Paul Rimple](http://tbilisiblues.blogspot.com/2009/04/salome-ii-pure-genius.html) writes:

>I’d really like to sympathize with the opposition, but these people must understand what a grave responsibility they bear when talking to thousands of tired and angry people. If you are a leader, people depend on you to guide them. If you don’t know what you are leading them towards you have no reason to be sitting in the chair.

They have genuine grievances. Problem is, they won’t allow any avenue to resolve them, short of toppling the government. They’ve rejected out of hand suggestions of directly elected mayors, and of a coalition government. They aren’t putting forward demands of their own, except for the unachievable one of complete power.

And if, somehow, they did manage to oust Saakashvili? The new president would instantly be beseiged by the same crowd of disaffected politicos, and there’s no reason to expect any better behaviour from the protest leaders than from Saakashvili. My instinct is usually to support protesters, but in this debacle I don’t see much to admire anywhere.

By the way, [here](http://kosmyryk.typepad.com/) are [some](http://caucasusreports.wordpress.com/) [blogs](http://tbilisiblues.blogspot.com/) following the protests.


ETA

: Judging by the [Global Voices roundup](http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/04/14/concerns-emerge-over-protest/), more or less every other blog has the same view. Doesn’t mean we’re right, of course.