I wouldn't waste my time with people who say things like that. You should ask him what he means by "democratize." Since he's an American, almost certainly he means to adopt the US model of representative political democracy. Then you should ask him, what's so great about that model? Many Americans I know are discontent with that model. And the US government has a long, dark history of using that model as an excuse to invade other countries, such as Iraq, and set up puppet governments
more useful for American political and economic interests.

If you say this to many Americans they will think you're brainwashed
by the Communist Party and that you're defending the Chinese system,
but it's possible to be critical of both Chinese and American systems
at the same time - and even to see them both as two different forms of
the same global capitalist system.

At the same time, such First World "democrats" try to monopolize the
word "democracy" by implying there is only one kind of democracy -
their kind. You know that in Chinese, 民主 can mean different things.
For example it can refer to someone's way of dealing with divergent
opinions when working together with a group, as in "她处事的方法很民主" (or
不民主). That kind of democracy may be more important than the formal
democracy of political representatives - who in reality always form
part of an elite class and mainly represent the interests of the
elite, not of ordinary, working-class people.

Most anarchists and (real) communists reject such formal,
representative democracy in favor of "direct democracy." Direct
democracy not only means making decisions directly and democratically
(instead of through representatives) - usually trying to come to a
consensus that will satisfy almost everyone involved, instead of
the majority imposing its will on the minority. It also means
exercising direct control over all aspects of our lives. Neither of
these conditions are met by the model of representative political
democracy advocated by people who say things like "China will never
democratize."

I'm not sure if the fundamental problem in rural China is poverty. I
think the fundamental problem today is the capitalist system. Basically,
people are poor because the state prevents them from taking things
from rich people. At the same time, the state helps rich people and
their companies to take land from poor people, to pollute their land,
and to make them work for low wages to help the companies profit.
There's more to it than that, but that's the basic problem, as I see
it. The overwhelming majority of NGOs don't aim to deal with this
basic problem, that's why I don't have much hope in them, or in
activism.

I dunno if people are following the events in California very closely, 
but in my view, the recent faculty-staff-student walkout there is a 
presage of many things to come. It offers a foretaste of what you might 
call regime change in the USA. The September 24 walkout across the 
entire University of California system follows a large number of similar 
movements in Europe, as well as the occupation of a building at the New 
School in NYC last December. At stake in the California case is the 
accelerated erosion of what used to be the most opulent welfare state in 
the country.[...]

[Mitch] Daniels [governor of Indiana] predicts a competitive downsizing of state 
governments to attract businesses fleeing comparatively high-tax states 
like California. For him it's a positive future, because like a good 
Republican corporate businessmen he has been "trimming the fat" since 
his arrival in office. What he doesn't talk about is the social 
explosion that is going to occur when the formerly "fat classes" get 
trimmed. We all know that the kinds of compensation formerly extended to 
minorities and economically disadvantaged people evaporated long ago, 
but what is at stake now are service cuts for the (aspiring) middle 
classes. The UC walkout is a harbinger of the upcoming season of protest 
and dissent in the land of the (collapsing) almighty dollar.

Actually, what the regulation school economists call a change in the 
"regime of accumulation" happened long ago, beginning in the late 
seventies. After the two oil shocks of '73 and '79, corporations 
successfully reorganized their production methods, adopting "lean and 
mean" postures, outsourcing most of their industrial labor and 
automating the rest, while at the same time opening up vast new foreign 
markets and shifting parts of their capital to the financial sphere. 
European corporations followed suit in the 1990s, stung by the sharp 
recession in the early part of that decade. In parallel to these changes 
in the production regime, the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan began 
the transformation of the "mode of regulation," or the set of 
governmental and cultural norms that stabilize and regularize the social 
conditions generated by the new pattern of capital accumulation. The 
final consequence of the neoliberal attempt at instilling a transformed 
mode of social regulation is what Europeans, and especially the French, 
have long been calling "precarization": which means the descent of large 
fractions of the former middle classes into an uncertain, "precarious" 
status, whose unpleasant realities are now rushing to the forefront of 
everyone's minds with the surging unemployment brought on by the 
financial crisis. "Stabilization," for the new corporados, apparently 
means crushing en entire sector of the population underfoot -- and 
keeping them there.

The big question is, will it hold? Will huge numbers of people accept 
the loss of their assets and their comfortable lifestyle, and teach 
their children to be the disciplined, ferociously competitive 
workaholics that the corporate employers demand for a very restricted 
number of future jobs? My guess is that the fiscal crisis of the states 
(and maybe of the Federal government too, if the dollar continues to 
decline precipitously as it has for the past seven months) will provoke 
a social and political crisis right here in America. It may not look 
exactly like the one in Greece last winter, but for the first time in a 
long long time there will be overt social conflict here too, as there 
has been off and on in Europe for the last two decades. [...]

After the huge student movements in France in 2006, as well as last year’s occupation of the Sorbonne by the staff and the professors; after the rolling and agitated “anomalous wave” of protests against the Bologna-process restructuring of higher education that swept Italy last year; after the astonishing refusal of tuition fees by Croatian students this spring and summer — to name only three arenas of an expanding transnational revolt — the global crisis of the university has finally come home to the neoliberal heartland: the State of California. [...]

[I]f somehow you have not yet done so, the first thing to read — and certainly one of the most powerful student-movement texts since the Situationist tract On the Poverty of Student Life — is this impresive and impassioned document, emanating from the “Research & Destroy” collective and prefiguring the events at UC Stanta Cruz[,] where the Graduate Student Commons is still occupied as I write [....]

[Most of what Holmes' writes about the communiqué is affirmative - here I only excerpt from his critique:]

Now exactly here, I want to ask the question: how can anyone possibly accept this idea that the function of the university is to reproduce the working class, without distorting every meaning of the words, “working class”? The working classes of the university are the janitors, the food-service people, the maintenance men and women and so forth, not the students — and not even the students who occasionally do those jobs at night or at odd hours scattered over the course of a week. The students, on the contrary, are being trained as scientists, engineers, technicians, health-care professionals, government officials, middle and upper managers, and ideologists (a category in which I would include both artists and teachers). [... I]t is false to say that the neoliberal societies do not need the human resources produced by the university. They do, crucially, to maintain their advantages in what they themselves define as the Darwinian struggle of each country and indeed, of each corporation against all the others. The present aim of the Republicans — the neoliberals — is to save money on taxes, to open up new markets for education and research while continuing to exploit the remaining (and hardly inconsequential) public budgets, and to exert further discipline over its future middle-management cadres by placing them under the full threat of joblessness and inability to pay their enormous student loans. [...]

[I thought this point was wrongheaded until I read the email message quoted above. On a pedantic level it's still wrong: in Marxian terms anyway, most uni grads indeed become wage-laborers of some kind (including half the positions Holmes' implies to be something else) and thus remain part of the working class, albeit a privileged part relative to janitors and so on. And the communique doesn't claim that "neoliberal societies do not need the human resources produced by the university" - Holmes is arguing with a strawman there. On the other hand, the email message points us to a reason at least the subjective belief that uni grads are not workers is important here: one major source of the unrest that Holmes believes will grow is the fact that the relative privilege university graduates used to enjoy is being undermined - the process Holmes' calls "precarization." Now for the second point, which I think is more substantial:]

Why then, in such a brilliant text, do we get such a tremendous mistake of class analysis? Undoubtedly (well, I don’t really know, but this is the tone of the text anyway) because from that point forth, it is very easy to lapse into an outdated concept of revolution, wherein everyone dons a black mask and engages in a massive and sweeping orgy of destruction that will send the existing system up in flames and allow the rise of a new one from its ashes. Now, does that appear likely? Has anyone studied what Homeland Security has been preparing for in this country for the last eight years? Has anyone observed the massive deployment of police, National Guard, secret service and Army personnel armed with so-called less-lethal weapons at the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, or at the RNC in St Paul last summer? Has anyone noticed how successfully agents-provocateurs have been used at all these kind of events since the anti-globalization movement brought street demonstrations back to the Western countries at the turn of the millennium?

The “Communiqué from an Absent Future” marks the return of an insurrectionalist spirit to the United States, where it has not been seen on any large scale since the 1970s, with the brief exception of an important moment in Seattle. This spirit should be put to good use by everyone. If the current movement goes anywhere, some rioting in the streets is inevitable. But no one should kid themselves that student riots are going to change the system. What students can do, from their own class position, is both to reach out to the hyper-exploited working classes toward whom they are, in effect, precariously sliding, and at the same time, to help to radicalize all those around them in what has become the central institution for the reproduction of the neoliberal hegemoney, namely the contemporary research university. A strike that can shut the university down — as has already happened for a day in the huge UC system — can also open up space for questioning what the uses of the university could be in a different society.

If the former role and glory of the public university under the welfare-warfare state is definitively over, then what can it become in the future? Wouldn’t the best way to shut down its current operations be to convince all those inside it that the way it is operating is a travesty of all its potentials, including those inscribed at the heart of every academic discipline? Why not shut it down with an excess of transformative intellectual production that would have a huge insurrectional advantage, namely that it could not be stopped by police armed with truncheons and stun guns and less-lethal weapons that they are just dying to use? In the absence of a deep, problematic delegitimation of neoliberal capitalism and the invention of new ways to run a complex society, which transparently appears as the most urgent thing for any intellectual to focus on, the real revolution will never come. Yet the way things are going, with climate change and planetary civil wars looming on the horizon, all of us are mortally threatened by the absence of that revolutionary future.

A friend just introduced me to an interesting and potentially important cluster of Chinese websites. I’m thinking of calling it the Hammer Network (at the risk of sounding like I’m talking about the 1980s American rapper with big pants). The url of the main site in this cluster is chuizi.net, which means hammer, as in the hammer & sickle. The name of the section of this site functioning as a sort of homepage is called Workers’ News, but that’s so boring & easy to confuse with other sites. Another site in the cluster, listed at the bottom of each page as the owner of chuizi.net, is honghuacao.com, which means Chinese milk vetch - a medicinal herb whose flower is much prettier than its English name. That’s apparently some kind of obscure metaphor that no one I’ve asked is familiar with.¹ In any case, I’ve decided not to call it the Chinese Milk Vetch Network for Workers’ Solidarity.

All these sites are registered in mainland China, but none of several well-connected leftists and labor activists I’ve asked have heard of this cluster, except for the one who ran across it, and she has no idea who’s behind it. Some of these sites are linked to more well-known left sites, such as Utopia & Research on Chinese Workers, but I haven’t run across any external site linked to the Hammer Network (including Utopia, which has links to over 160 sites!).

I can’t find the number of visitors to any of the websites.² Workers’ Forum lists 371 registered users, and Honghuaocao Workers’ Rights-Protection Consultation Network lists only 58. But many of the hundreds of forum threads list between 1,000 and 4,000 views, so obviously somebody is using these websites.

Where these sites differ from other Chinese left sites is that they seem more interactive and oriented toward facilitating mutual aid among workers and their supporters. The general orientation is clearly Maoist, which is pretty much the only oppositional perspective readily available to Chinese workers besides liberalism - generally (and rightly) seen as an ideology of dissident elements in the ruling class that increasingly overlaps in important ways with the CP’s present ideology (Dengism, for lack of a better word).³ I suspect these sites have some high-level connections in the CP, otherwise you’d think they would have been blocked or shut down before achieving even this low level of popularity, considering the level of interactivity and the radicalness of views expressed in the forums. On the other hand, the mutual aid promoted by these sites is mainly oriented toward enforcing China’s labor law against unscrupulous bosses - an approach the state generally accepts or even promotes at the central level.

The layout is a little confusing. The homepage of chuizi.net is also a distinct section called Workers’ News, which has several sub-sections in addition to separate sections listed alongside it, some leading to sections of chuizi.net, others to other websites. (It’s possible the strange layout is due to concerns about certain sections being more likely to be blocked or shut down.) The main sections listed on the homepage are:

Workers’ News (chuizi.net)

Workers’ Forum (chuizi.net/?action-bbs and chuizi.net/b)

Workers’ Rights-Protection (honghuacao.com)

Workers’ Photos (chuizi.net/?action-uchimage)

Workers’ Blogs (chuizi.net/?action-uchblog)

Mutual Aid Q & A (chuizi.net/m.php?name=wenda)

Workers’ Web (maopai.net - this means “Maoist” and the site is also called “Mao Portal”)

Special Section for Liu Hanhuang⁴ (chuizi.net/b/thread-3201-1-1.html)

Each of these sections or websites has sub-sections (some being links to yet other websites). To make things even more confusing, the Workers’ Forum seems to have two different homepages: chuizi.net/?action-bbs can only be accessed from Workers’ News; under that, every section returns to chuizi.net/b as its homepage.

It’s only there (chuizi.net/b) that you find an “about us” section, and the wording seems to imply that Workers’ Forum started out as a separate website. Established in 2006, the administrators have changed several times, along with the content.⁵ “Finally,” Workers’ Forum says, “we’ve settled on the present site design and operating principles.” Namely, “Workers’ Forum is a non-profit public welfare website created by a group of social youth [社会青年] and independent scholars [民间学者]. Now it is mainly maintained by a few volunteers… Our mission is to serve workers and promote the workers spirit of solidarity, mutual aid and perseverance [进取].” And that’s all it says. But it does list a few “allied sites”:

Maoist Portal (aka the Workers Web listed above; 3 mirror sites are listed here, presumably in case one gets blocked)

Honghuacao Rights-Protection Mutual Aid Network (honghuacao.com)

China Polls (tpiao.cn - also listed as a main section under chuizi.net/b - contains hundreds of polls with open commentary - the most popular presently being about Liu Hanhuang)

Nine Maps (9ditu.net & two broken mirrors - contains detailed maps of numerous cities in China & elsewhere with no commentary, but with links to chuizi.net/b as “9 Maps Community,” and links to a thread about Liu Hanhuang)

If you didn’t read my footnote 4, by now you may be wondering who Liu Hanhuang is. In case you missed it, here it is again (if you read it, skip this paragraph):

Liu Hanhuang is a 26-year-old migrant worker from rural Guizhou who killed two of his former Taiwanese bosses in June, in a row over compensation for the loss of Liu’s right hand while working in a hardware factory in Dongguan, after nearly a year of negotiation and Liu’s attempted suicide. He has become an internet hero among workers and the left in China. There is a popular campaign to reduce his sentence - as Deng Yujiao’s sentence was reduced due to popular pressure a few months ago - but at this point I’m not sure if the campaign has had any affect. There seems to be no English news on the web about the campaign (typical of both Chinese state media & liberal Western media). But there is an English petition - started by a Taiwanese human rights group - here. In over a month it has garnered only 79 signatures! I have no idea how many people in China support him or have even heard of him, but I was surprised that only 513 people had taken this anonymous poll in a Hammer thread with over 4,000 views (95.32% or 489 people voted that Liu’s sentence should be commuted). This is the only poll I can find on the web, but you can find dozens of writings expressing support for him. There are also several Chinese petitions but they are blocked.

I originally planned to briefly introduce several of the ongoing workers’ struggles reported and discussed on the Hammer Network, but it’s taking me too long to do that. It would be better to devote individual posts to each incident. Not sure how many I’ll get around to blogging about, but I’ve already started one that I hope to finish and post in the next few days.

One thing to note, in case you want to use these websites, is that the Workers’ News section is almost entirely about other countries (the Ssangyong struggle in South Korea is given prominence on the main page), and most of the reports on China don’t deal with workers’ struggles (the only one I see on the main page is about Tonghua⁶), or even workers. So the Workers’ Forum seems to be the place to go to learn about ongoing struggles. Most of the active threads there deal with workers’ grievances, and most of those involve bosses withholding wages. A few deal with workers fighting back.

Another interesting thing is that, while logging in, in order to authenticate that I was human instead of a bot, I was given a Chinese fill-in-the-blank to the effect of “The working ___ leads everything” (工人＊级领导一切). I guess, in addition to bots, they’re also trying to weed out class enemies.

____________________________________________________________________
Notes

菜園村

解殖紮根，由菜園村開始......一封由第四代給香港人的家書

週五, 2009-06-26 01:07 — 頁言

編輯朱凱迪按：石崗菜園村保留運動步入關鍵階段。政府就走線的憲報反對期將於六月廿九日結束，隨後港鐵會交出環境影響評論供公眾諮詢，立法會也會開始就六百三十億的撥款作審議。希望大家用點時間了解事件，並付諸行動，詳情可到「反對廣深港高鐵規劃行動呼籲」

給各世代的香港人﹕

德國哲學家尼采曾經提到「永劫回歸」（Eternal Recurrence）這個觀念，他認為過去某個時間點曾發生過的事情，在未來會以同等形式，人事時地物完全相同的情況下再次重現，有限的物質能量在無限 的時間河流裡，不斷循環，直到永恆。這個概念在應用於現今香港發展，實在曉有深義。尤其是在菜園村的抗爭之中，我們不難發現，整個香港現正重複地在她的歷 史軌跡上徘徊，向左走，還是右走﹖似乎只在一念之間。

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城鄉論壇　──「從菜園村看城鄉經濟的可持續發展」2009.06.27(六)

週一, 2009-06-15 20:33 — 友善的狗

日期: 

2009-06-20 - 2009-06-27

城鄉論壇　──「從菜園村看城鄉經濟的可持續發展」
 
今年五月城市大學社會科學部在各區街頭訪問了逾1000名市民，令人困惑的是當中超過一半受訪者從未聽聞有關興建廣深港高速鐵路項目。整項工程斥資超過 630億元，更重要的是計劃將「石崗菜園村」一個農業社區改建成鐵路車廠及緊急救援站，當中數以百計的村民因而被迫遷，作為生計來源的耕種生活亦要連根拔 起，直接影響新界西錦田及元朗一帶的本土可持續社區經濟，情況令人關注。到底還有多少項影響新界農地運用的工程正在進行，而未為廣大的市民所認知？城鄉的 土地規劃，可否達至友善農業的可持續發展？本論壇廣邀關注本港土地運用與規劃、生產與消費合作、有機生態等問題的人士參與。
 
主持：何渭枝先生（香港樂施會香港部總監）

主題 人與土地共生的經歷
講者 高春香女士 (菜園村關注組主席)

主題 城鄉規劃下的人與土地的關係
講者 龔立人博士 (香港基督徒學會署理總幹事 中文大學崇基神學院副教授)

主題 生態作為重要的社會資源
講者 一葉 (自然學校校長)

主題 城鄉可持續農業的實踐與代價
講者 袁易天先生 (香港永續農業關注協會代表)
 
日期：2009年 6月27日(六)
時間：下午1:30 – 5:00pm
地點：理工大學FJ303

• 行動日誌
  

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你知道廣深港高鐵嗎﹖

週六, 2009-06-13 21:34 — eg9515

編按：本文刊於第三版的《菜園村特刊》，印數50,000，請下載、廣傳，並在六月廿九日前填寫特刊底頁的反對書。另外，也請大家去看一下最新的石崗菜園村戰訊，裏面有城市大學於六月八日發表的民意調查結果，說明香港人對這條鐵路還是非常不了解的。政府不做，民間做，由我們將這個封閉的討論展開。

在六月九日公布，由城市大學專上學院進行的街頭調查，發現五成市民對這條鐵路全無認知，奇怪的是，同時有七成市民「大致贊成」興建這條鐵路。進行調 查時，這條鐵路的報價為三百九十五億元，但根據《香港經濟日報》五月二十八日的報導，最新的報價已達六百三十億元。這條將耗用每個香港人近萬元、構思經年 的鐵路，在零七年的《施政報告》中正式落實為十大基建之一。在振興經濟、創造就業的名義下，鐵路加速上馬，你我參與討論的權利都被扼殺。

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近百村民遊行　反對遷拆菜園村及要求廣深港鐵路設元朗站

週日, 2009-06-07 19:02 — 葉寶琳

石崗菜園村關注組新聞稿

廣深港高鐵香港段的興建現正進行第二次刊憲諮詢，廣深港高鐵本來可與西鐵共用車站，使元朗區市民亦能受惠，但政府提出的專用路軌方案既要花比原先多 一倍的造價，元朗區沒有車站，更要收石崗菜園村的地作起車廠用途。立法會新界西議員梁耀忠、元朗區區議員麥業成、鄺俊宇及黃偉賢連同石崗菜園村關注組發起 了「有車廠，無車站」元朗區遊行，有近一百名的元朗區市民及石崗菜園村村民參加。

遊行由元朗雞地至民政事務處，居民沿途派發特刊及反對書希望爭取更多支持，參加者於民政事務處前集會及將請願信遞交予民政事務處職員。石崗村村民亦在光華商場前設置街站，派出近二千份特刊及收回近六百份反對書，得到元朗區不少商戶支持。

在第一次刊憲諮詢後，政府只對選址作了很少修改，近日更在刊憲諮詢完結前偷步開展鑽探工作，使村民生活更不得安寧，關注組現時希望於六月二十九日反對期結束前收集更多反對書迫使政府更改現行方案。

上圖及中圖：梁耀忠議員及麥業成議員帶同近百市民遊行向元朗民政事務處．葉寶琳攝
下圖：菜園村三代居民一同參與遊行反對清拆菜園村，圖為燦叔一家合照．葉寶琳攝

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he’s just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past. Though he’s being touted as an early opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position….” He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports Israel’s continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip. [...]

What does Obama have? A lot of slogans that connect with nothing in the real world; in fact, their very emptiness may be the source of their appeal, because it allows people to project whatever they want to onto him, without getting bogged down in specifics, as Reagan liked to say. [...] And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn’t really have a movement behind him—he’s got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable? It’s not like he’ll take the phone calls of all those 27-year-olds who gave him $100 on the web as quickly as he’d answer a summons from Paul Tudor Jones. [...]

As Adolph Reed told LBO, an Obama presidency

could give us the worst of all possible of worlds: one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate critical discussion of inequality, the language of ‘disparity,’ it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. Obama already when he talks “black” (e.g., with his “Cousin Pookie” riffs, which are the exact equivalent of Shelby Steele’s rantings about underclass, shiftless “Sam”) opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite metaphor of victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural, and he has always played the Immigrant Success Story Up From Slavery Ain’t America Great and Don’t I Show It angle. And, moreover, what many of his white supporters like about him is that he doesn’t have the ‘chip on the shoulder’ that so many indigenous blacks do. Add all this to his commitment to appealing to the right and to the investor class, and the upshot is that inequality could lose whatever vestigial connotations it has as a species of injustice and be fully consolidated as the marker, on the bottom end that is, of those losers who failed to do what the market requires of them or a sign of their essential inferiority.

[full]

Speaking of the "War on Terror," it looks like some more of the Pentagon's puppets are coming loose from their strings as the body count of civilian casualties grows: "Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday that his "first and main demand" of the next U.S. administration under president-elect Barack Obama will be "to stop civilian casualties" in his country." (CNN, U.S. probes airstrikes as Afghan fury grows). And

America's top military commander in Afghanistan and Iraq has been urged to halt unauthorised air strikes against militants in Pakistan because they are stirring up anti-US sentiment and creating difficulties for the civilian government. In Islamabad, General David Petraeus, the new head of US Central Command, was told that such strikes – often using missiles fired from pilotless Predator drones – caused public "outrage".

While the US may be targeting militants in the tribal areas believed responsible for cross-border attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan, many Pakistani civilians, including women and children, have been killed. General Petraeus, accompanied by the US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Boucher, met Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari yesterday. Mr Zardari was quoted as telling the general: "Continuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counter-productive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap." In the past three months there have been around 20 such attacks, the most recent over the weekend in North and South Waziristan where up to 32 people were killed.

The warning to General Petraeus, who is likely to also meet the Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, and army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, is just the latest public rebuke for the US from Pakistan. But the country's new civilian leadership has been forced to walk a fine line. While wishing to continue to be considered an ally of Washington, the government – embroiled in wide-ranging counter-insurgency operations against militants that have cost the lives of 1,500 Pakistani troops – is in grave danger of being seen as fighting America's war. In public at least, it suits the government to criticise the US's actions. [The Independent, Pakistan urges America to halt air strikes on militants]

[...] In June we planned to rethink Midnight Notes in view of the restructuring of the
accumulation process and class relations carried out through the
neoliberal turn and Structural Adjustment. We can now define this
project more precisely: what do the current crisis and restructuring
of the financial system imply for us as we join the rest of the world
in the dog house of structural adjustment in the twilight of the
American empire?

In response to these questions, it is important, first, that we
realize that the so-called Wall Street “meltdown” is certainly the
end, but also the completion of the neoliberal program. [...] To think otherwise is to ignore the lesson taught to us by the event that opened the present capitalist era: the 1973 coup
again[st] the Chilean working class experiment with socialism, that led
to the victory of strong state backed market economy. Karl Polanyi’s
theory that the single most important cause of the rise of fascism
and Nazism in Europe was the inability to control the financial
market after the 1929 crash also resonates here. In other words, we
should not read the restructuring taking place as a turn to
socialism/Keynesianism, to the extent at least that Keynesianism was
an intervention by the state into the economy aimed at increasing the
state’s investment in social reproduction, starting with the
reproduction of the working class, in exchange for an increase in the
social productivity of labor. Despite the adoption of regulatory
mechanisms, the operation presently conducted by the US government
bears little resemblance to the Keynesian program launched with the
New Deal.

Behind the $700 billion bail-out and the many others that will follow-
-some already in the pipeline– is a massive transfer of funds from
the US working class to capital, inevitably leading to an assault on
the last remaining entitlements (like Medicare, Social Security) and
a general program of austerity the like of which we have not seen yet
in a long time. The fact that there is no organized response to this
assault makes us fear the worst. For things would never have reached
this point if over the last decade the US workers had responded to
the repeated thefts of their money and benefits, through the Enron
scandal and the many other “crises” that have followed it. That
despite the “instability” of the market, despite its usage as a means
to expropriate thousands of small/working class investors, US workers
continued to trust their livelihoods and future to it is certainly a
key factor in what we are presently witnessing and Washington/Wall
Street confidence in launching the new austerity program. It is our
argument that in the same way as September 11 served the US
government to shed the last remains of “democracy” and move to a
model of government where militarization is always around the corner
(apparently Representatives were threatened with the proclamation of
martial law if they did not pass the bailout bill), so the Wall
Street crash will serve to shed the last remaining elements of
working class “socialism” in the US political economy, starting with
Social Security, Medicare, a thorn in capital’s flesh, but so far
demonstrating a great resilience, the last shore for working class
struggle in the nation.

2. Lessons from the Debt Crisis.

There is a[n] important parallel here, not sufficiently noted, between
the present crash and bail-out and the “debt crisis” of the 1980s,
which engulfed most Third World nations (except for China) and was
the start of the globalization process. Both have been engineered in
the same fashion.[...]

With the debt crisis, international capital obtained three major
objectives.

i) It disciplined the working class in Europe and the US, by
dismantling its manufacturing structure and refusing for years to
engage in any serious investment in these regions (remember “zero
growth”?)

ii) It destroyed the attempt of the former colonial world to escape a
dependent/subordinate position, as demanded by the new generation of
Africans, Asians, etc., who, infused of the spirit of Fanon, were
keen on import substitution schemes, were pressing for REPARATIONS,
and pushing for some form of socialism ([for example] in Angola and Mozambique).

(iii). In addition to defeating revolution[s] in [the] First and Third World[s],
the “debt crisis” built the infrastructure for the new global
economy. It forged the mechanisms by which industries and offices
could be relocated, companies could run around the globe, the work
process could be computerized and streamlined and the working class
thereby could be flexibilized and re-divided.

Against this background, we must note some basic similarities between
the engineering of the debt crisis and the engineering of the Wall
Street crash and must assume these similarities will extend to the
social consequences of the crash. The housing bubble was the result
of loans made at very low though adjustable credit rates, redirecting
the influx of capital coming from abroad (China and other countries)
toward the US market.[...]

Continuing with the parallel, we have to conclude that with this 700
billion dollar “bail-out,” coming straight out of our pockets and
hides, the “structural adjustment” that since the 1980s has been
imposed on countries across the world, is going to be extended to the
US territory and the US working class. This time (after many
beginnings and many deferrals) we too are being “adjusted.” [... W]e are witnessing not only a
financial meltdown, but also a great robbery, a macro-process of
expropriation, an immense transfer of labor, this time siphoning
funds to the US banking system not only from the Third World, as in
the Debt Crisis of the 1980s, but from our households, through the
classic maneuver of increasing the national debt. What we are
witnessing is a capitalist coup, an example of capital’s historic
readiness to destroy itself in order to regain the initiative and
defeat resistance to its discipline.

3. Where does this resistance come from? How is the collapse of the
financial systems a response to it?

We cannot understand the Wall Street crisis unless we read it in
class term[s] as a means to negotiate a different class deal and
response to class struggle and resistance. However, in dealing with
these questions, I also want to distinguish this approach and the
growing tendency to view every development in capitalist planning as
a realization of working class struggle and demands, the Negrian
perspective on capital’s response to class movements.[...]

Let us look now at the crisis as a disciplinary tools and strategy.
There are at least three areas of resistance to the neoliberal
accumulation project that the Wall Street collapse has to respond to.
I will list them without an attempt to establish an order.

First, the crash and the bail-out must defeat the attempt of the US
working class to circumvent class discipline by using financial
markets, rather than struggle, sweat and labor, to increase their
wages. While strikes and struggles have died out over the last two
decades, workers have tried to increase their income in three ways:
investing in the stock market, buying on credit, now even for
everyday expenses, getting equity money through housing, and
defaulting student loans. These tactics have clearly failed and now
millions of workers are now to pay twice for them, in terms of their
individual losses and in terms of the losses that will be inflicted
on the US proletariat as a class through the bailouts. If successful,
these bail-outs will in fact be conducive to a new regime of low
wages and zero entitlements the like of which we have not seen since
the last part of the 19th century.

The new regime will not be the end of market fundamentalism. It will
be a revitalization of market investment through the injection of our
social security money, and it will be a revitalization of some parts
of American industry now presumably taking advantage of the fact that
workers are desperate enough to accept any conditions just to have a
job and a roof over their heads. A large part of capital has for a
long time been lusting to bring back America to the situation before
the New Deal, when employers had the upper hand. The “crisis” is
giving them a chance to return to that era.

That this time Social Security is at stake is due to various factors.
First, Social Security is the last pot of money available to re-
launch the US market, in a context in which workers have no savings
and monetary flows from the outside are drying out. It is also the
last `scandal” on the list of US capitalists who have relentlessly
for years now told us it must go. Most important of all, Social
Security affects primarily the old, the retired, and it is therefore
an easier target than entitlements affecting the whole working class.[...]

The second target of the attack is the global resistance to capital’s
appropriation of natural resources beginning with oil and gas
extraction. The defeat in Iraq is the peak of it. To this day,
despite an immense expenditure in war funding, the US has not been
able to put its hands on Iraqi oil. Resistance to international
capital control over global energy resources has also come from
Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Many more countries are also
refusing the neoliberal packet, especially in Latin America. These
refusals, not peak oil, are the true limits to capital’s energy
plans.

There have also been bottlenecks in the exploitation of forests,
waters, minerals, and lands which structural adjustment was to
remove. A new “rurban” peasant movement has been growing that is
fighting independently of unions, parties, “civil society” and NGOs,
using direct action tactics, to re-appropriate the lands and
resources of which it has been robbed —poaching, harvesting timber
or produce in commercial plantations, mining diamonds and
gold “illegally,” or farming in the very lands from which they have
been “legally” excluded. When they move to the cities they squat on
urban land and take over land not used, private or public to farm it
for their needs. It is a vast re-appropriation movement that is
redefining the fundamentals of social reproduction globally. It has
put globalizers and adjusters out of government, it has forced the
nationalization of local resources, and has redistributed wealth and
political power, putting the World Bank and IMF almost out of
business in Latin America. It has defeated the attempt to completely
liberalize the economies of the TW through the rule of the World
Trade organization. Though not sitting at the table, the specter of
the rural/urban peasants of the world has guided the refusal of TW
representative to comply.

Third, global migration has developed in ways that make it difficult
for governments to use it as a regulatory mechanism for the labor
market. Far from being an easy device for driving wages down,
migration is now an autonomous uncontrollable phenomenon, with a
logic of its own that is not reducible to the needs of the labor
market. It is important however to stress (against the idealization
of the migrant and of Exit, Exodus, Flight as the highest form of
struggle) that the struggle of the migrants is not superior to the
struggle of those who remain. In fact, migration can lead to the
dissolution of local organizations, it can create new divisions among
the locals, separating those benefiting from remittances and those
deprived of them, it can boost the cost of living in the area of
origin by the influx of new money and hook local economies more
strongly to the international monetary system, fostering the
expansion of monetary relations. These, of course, are not inevitable
results. Actually, migrants have been able to use the wage against
the wage, to refuse impoverishment, to create transnational networks,
to move from country to country seeking a better deal and nullifying
national boundaries and borders.

The attacks on immigrants of recent months, which have seen the most
massive factory raids and deportations ever in the US, are responses
to this autonomy. They are part of the attempt to create a population
of rightless workers, to function as a safety valve for the labor
market. Only if they have no rights can immigrants function as
regulatory mechanism for the labor market (in the same way as mass
incarceration and expansion of unpaid labor do). The redefinition of
immigrant workers as outlaws and the criminalization of the working
class–historically a key strategy to devalue labor power–will
continue to be a tool of the world order we will see emerging from
the crisis. But the crash will intensify the divisions
between “natives” and migrants, attack the organizational strength of
migrant organizations, unless there is strong opposition to this
strategy.

The Politics of the Financial Crisis and Our Response

[...] The problem for us today is that workers are only organized around
electoral politics at best. And many still place more hope in a
racist and imperialist stance than in working class solidarity. We
certainly don’t have a communist or an anarchist movement organizing
rallies of the unemployed, fight against evictions, or
organize “penny auctions” of farms as they did during the Great
Depression. Nor do we have an anti-capitalist alternative as the
Soviet Union was in the eyes of many. We also do not have the kind of
solidarity that in the Great Depression led to invention of new
commons, like the hobo movement and the creation of “jungle cities.”

Where to start then? This is what we need to work on in the coming
months and years. There is no clear path to this kind of
mobilization. But we need to start somewhere. On two things we can
get people to agree with us: First, we better find alternatives,
because, as things stand presently, we are so incestually connected
with capitalism that its demise threats our own existence. Second,
unless we organize to resist government planning, what lies ahead for
us, after a cut of more than a trillion dollars of our “entitlements,” looks much more like some variant of fascism than socialism.

Was the issue of Tibetan nationalism the overriding one, or were some of the protests focused on economic or social issues?

People talked about many things, but if you look at the slogans and banners the protesters were carrying, there was no explicit demand for independence; I think the main issue was getting China to allow the Dalai Lama to come back to Tibet, as well as human rights. It’s true that the protests in Lhasa were against the Chinese government and the Party, but also against ordinary Chinese people who have settled in Tibet—Chinese shops were burnt, ethnic Chinese were beaten. But it was really only in Lhasa that this took place. In other regions the demonstrators rushed to government offices or Communist Party headquarters, taking down the Chinese flag and hoisting the Tibetan one, ransacking official buildings; there were very few attacks on ethnic Chinese. The reason they were the target of public anger in Lhasa and not elsewhere is that the disparity between the migrants’ success and the status of the indigenous is so glaringly obvious there—the Chinese own hotels, shops, restaurants, and are therefore much more visible. In rural areas, by contrast, the economic disparity between Tibetans and Chinese is minimal, so there was little resentment based on economic grievances. There are, of course, tensions between Tibetans and outsiders: in eastern Tibet, for example, farmers supplement their income in summer by collecting mushrooms, medicinal plants and yartsa-gunbu—the caterpillar fungus, much prized in traditional Chinese medicine. Now many Han migrants are also going into the hills to harvest these things, and though the government has tried to restrict this by charging them a fee, the profits are still large enough for them to continue. Locals object to what they see as the indiscriminate way the outsiders collect the mushrooms and fungus, claiming they are doing long-term damage to the pastures. This competition over resources has become more intense in recent years.

But personally I do not think the demonstrations were principally to do with economic disparities or disadvantages suffered by Tibetans. Rather, I think these were defensive protests, concerning questions of national identity. [...] The scale of Han immigration has also been a significant factor. Throughout their history, Tibetans on the Plateau have always lived in homogeneous communities, but this is no longer the case—they feel much more acutely than ever before that this land is no longer exclusively Tibetan terrain.

How would you characterize the political spectrum of the pro-Tibet movement outside China, and its relation to Western governments’ policies?

The participants in protests in the West are quite a diverse set of people—not necessarily Buddhists or Tibetophiles. Pro-Tibetans tend to come from traditional middle-class, left-of-centre or liberal groups; in the 1970s and 80s they might have been involved in solidarity with the anc, cnd, Greenpeace and so on. The human-rights organizations have also shifted their focus: in the 1970s and 80s, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were more concerned with what was happening in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and China did not figure much in their reports. Now they have directed their attention more to China, and Tibet as an underplayed concern. But I would separate Western government policy from popular sentiment. Most Western governments are essentially very pro-China. This is mainly connected to economic questions: Beijing and the West are in broad agreement on matters such as developing market economies, privatization and the globalization of trade. Since these governments’ primary objective is to integrate China into the global economic order, the issues of human rights and Tibet are very much secondary for them.

By the same token, internet claims in the us and China that the Tibetan protests were engineered by Western ngos, funded by the us National Endowment for Democracy, are wide of the mark. There are Western-funded ngos in China—for example, the Trace Foundation, which supports health and education projects in Tibet—but the ccp obviously carries out rigorous security assessments of them. Trace is well known for distancing itself from any anti-government groups or activities, which is one of the reasons why it has been able to operate in the prc for decades. In fact it is often accused by pro-Tibetan lobbyists of being too supportive of China.

Tibetan exile groups in India do get ned funding, but that does not translate into an ability to mobilize in the prc. There is a huge social and cultural gap between Tibetans in India and those in the tar, illustrated even by their taste in music. Tibetans inside Tibet are comfortable with Chinese pop, while Tibetans in India prefer Bollywood. When Dadon, Tibet’s biggest pop star at the time, defected from Lhasa to India in 1995, she was shattered to find that there was no audience for her music. She was virtually unknown, and the exiles accused her of singing Chinese-style songs. Even when the two communities meet in the West, there is often little interaction between them. The exiles in India sometimes see themselves as the ‘true’ representatives of Tibetanness, and the Tibetans inside as merely passive, oppressed victims—a patronizing attitude that does not go down well in Tibet. The largest exile organization in India is the Tibetan Youth Congress, most of whom were born in India. They have thoroughly absorbed India’s long—and valiant—tradition of protest, and lead highly vocal demonstrations on the streets of Delhi, Paris and New York. But they have no means of projecting their words into actions inside Tibet itself. [...]

But the main outside influence on Tibetans is the Tibetan-language broadcasting on Voice of America since 1991, and Radio Free Asia since 1996. Again, it is not a question of clandestine organization; these services simply provide a source of news and ideas in a society where people are starved of alternatives. Because there is no independent news media, and people are automatically very suspicious of what they hear or read in government sources, they tend to turn to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia for their information. The two stations report on all the Dalai Lama’s trips abroad, and on the activities of the exiles in India, giving Tibetans quite international and politicized coverage; the stations are very popular in Tibet, which helps to create a certain climate of opinion there. The Chinese government tries to jam the signal, but people somehow manage to listen to them.

What is the current state of repression in the Tibet Autonomous Region?

At the moment the situation is very bad. Because of the number of people involved in the demonstrations, and because they cut across all classes, the government cannot target one particular group, such as the monasteries; it seems that they have to target everybody. The authorities are trying to exert control at every level of the community, in a way that reminds many people of the Cultural Revolution. It is not only those who have been detained that are subject to punishment—the government is holding meetings in primary and secondary schools, in colleges, government offices, where everyone has to write self-criticisms; so do Tibetan students at university in China. The Tibetan population as a whole is bearing the brunt of this campaign.

How would you characterize the recent wave of Chinese nationalist sentiment, in response to the Tibetan protests—would you say it marks a watershed in the mentality of the prc?

This is very interesting. The Chinese nationalism currently exhibited on the internet and abroad is essentially a middle-class phenomenon. It is strongly expressed by those who are the main beneficiaries of China’s economic success, and who are most conscious of the country’s global standing. They are also more exposed to what is happening outside. They feel that, for them, the reforms are going in the right direction; they are afraid of anything that will hamper China’s economic advance. But there is a great divide between coastal and inland areas in China. You do not find nationalism of this kind in the poorer provinces—in Gansu, Qinghai or other areas—where people have not benefited from the current policies. Then again, the terrible earthquake in Wenchuan on May 12 shattered the confidence in the Chinese state that many people had been expressing only weeks before. Simple questions are being raised about why school buildings collapsed but luxury hotels and private firms did not. There is much more discussion, new questions are being asked about China.

There is a debate among China scholars as to whether the upsurge of patriotic fervour that accompanied the Tibetan protests was engendered by the government, or whether it arose spontaneously from society. There are strong arguments on the side of those who claim it was engineered and manipulated by the government, since the state has evidently been involved. For example, any differing views posted in internet forums were almost immediately deleted, and people expressing them in chat rooms were shut out. Others argue that this nationalism arose not from within the prc, but from outside, among Chinese overseas students, and travelled into China from there. Certainly, many of those studying in Europe or North America are much more mindful of recent changes in the prc, and have clearly benefited from the reforms. They feel that the criticisms made are not accurate, and that Tibet has in some sense been used as a stick with which to beat China. They ask why protests in Tibet have got so much attention in the international media when similar protests happen every day in China, without being highlighted. There is some truth in this; but still, the geographical scale of the Tibetan protests is unprecedented.

I should also say that there is intense diversity within China—it is not as homogeneous as it might appear. Over three hundred intellectuals signed a petition circulated by Wang Lixiong criticizing the government’s response to the unrest in Tibet and appealing for dialogue. [1] There were similar articles appearing in a range of publications. A group of Chinese lawyers announced that they would go to defend the Tibetan detainees; these people are risking their livelihood—the government is threatening not to renew their licences. This is not what the media highlights, of course. Many of these dissenting voices were not heard amid the patriotic fervour.

If Tibetans could articulate them freely, what would their essential demands be?

One of the biggest grievances is that the Chinese authorities equate any expression of Tibetan identity with separatism. The government seems to think that if it allows any kind of cultural autonomy, it will escalate into demands for secession. This is something the government has to relax. In Tibet, everything from newspapers and magazines to music distribution is kept firmly under control, whereas all over China there are increasing numbers of independent publishing houses. The joke in Tibet is that the Dalai Lama wants ‘one country, two systems’, but what people there want is ‘one country, one system’—they want the more liberal policies that prevail in China also to apply in Tibet.

Comments on Anderlini's report on the December land privatization manifestos (Jamil Anderlini: “Losing the countryside: a restive peasantry calls on Beijing for land rights,” Financial Times, February 19 2008)

(Revised Feb 29)

These are just some knee-jerk reactions. This new linkage between disgruntled peasants and liberal intellectuals, backed by certain Chinese capitalist interests (real estate developers, for one), and Western journalists' representations of this linkage as a spontaneous emergence from "civil society" against "communism" (i.e. CCP rule), are important events. To understand them, we also need to address the Chinese party-state's own recent promotion of experimental privatization of rural land in four pilot municipalities (the topic of China Left Review's forthcoming first issue), and the place of this policy initiative within a series of Chinese debates about privatization going back at least to 1992, in which Western-trained liberal intellectuals and American think tanks like the Cato Institute have played a prominent role all along. The only reason the party-state didn't privatize land earlier is that wiser (not necessary "leftist") elements of the party leadership realized that sudden nationwide privatization of land was one the factors that threw Russia and other post-socialist countries into chaos, and that, throughout the developing world, the ability to buy and sell land has been a major factor in the growth of desperate, potentially unstabilizing sub-proletarian classes. I hope eventually to deal more systematically with reports such as Anderlini's in a bigger project addressing this web of debates and social realities as a whole.

Anderlini writes:

“separate groups of peasant farmers in four remote parts of the country published very similar statements on the internet claiming to have seized their collectively owned land from the state and unilaterally privatised it.”

Here Anderlini implies that the “peasant farmers” wrote these statements, but later he says that they were written by one intellectual, among a group of 10 urban intellectual “organizers,” backed by capitalist interests (he mentions real estate development companies in particular), who spread their propaganda among peasants in 20 provinces for 2 years. I find it interesting that they have adopted the traditionally leftist strategy of going to villages, finding active elements, and imparting them with a theoretical frame to articulate their desires and mobilize a popular movement. Only, as opposed to leftist mobilization, these liberals mobilized the “property” or “individualist” tendency in peasant society. {I’m referring to two things here: 1) Marx’s analysis of the 19th century Russian peasant commune (obschina) as containing both “property” and “collective” elements, which could lead it toward either disintegration in the face of capitalist expansion, or integration into a communist revolution (not to be confused with the state capitalist collectivization of agriculture eventually led by Stalin - see Marx’s 1881 manuscripts in Late Marx and the Russian Road, edited by Teodor Shanin); 2) Wang Xiaoyi’s analysis of “the paradox of Xiaogang village,” that is, if Xiaogang villagers were so “individualist” that they couldn’t stand the Commune system and risked their lives to decollectivize, how did they manage to cooperate and sacrifice their individual interests to organize and carry out this movement? If they were “collectivist” enough to carry out this movement, why weren’t they willing to cooperate in farming? He concluded that Chinese peasant society contains both collectivist and individualist “tendencies” (qingxiang), and the individualist tendency happened to be stronger in Xiaogang at that point, but the collectivist tendency was still there to serve as a resource for collective mobilization (“Xiaogangcun de beilun,” Sannong Zhongguo 1 (2003): 151-154).}

“The country's Communist constitution stipulates that all rural land is owned by the state, which leases it to individuals to use on a 30-year contract basis but can take it back with relative impunity.” later: “the documents [the peasants] signed violate the Chinese constitution and at least three laws stipulating that all land in China is owned by the state.”

Anderlini is wrong here (for reasons I'll get to below, I'm tempted to say he's flat-out lying). The English translation of China's constitution is online here:
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html

Article 10 reads:
Land in the cities is owned by the state. Land in the rural and
suburban areas is owned by collectives except for those portions which
belong to the state in accordance with the law; house sites and
private plots of cropland and hilly land are also owned by
collectives. {But note:} The state may in the public interest take over land for
its use in accordance with the law.

Also relevant is article 9:
Mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimed
land, beaches and other natural resources are owned by the state, that
is, by the whole people, with the exception of the forests, mountains,
grassland, unreclaimed land and beaches that are owned by collectives
in accordance with the law.

So the constitution makes clear that farmland, rural house sites, and certain other rural land is not owned by the
state but by "collectives," but it doesn't explain exactly what "collective" means. It means either administrative villages (cun) or villager team (cunmin xiaozu, consisting of several households). A sociologist I talked to says that national policy is vague about this, so in some parts of China the team is regarded as the owner, but he thinks that village ownership is more common.

Policy is clear, however, that the villager committee is the only entity with authority to make changes
in land arrangements, so in practice the villager committee (formally autonomous and democratically elected by all adult villagers, but often informally controlled by the township CCP committee) acts as the owner, so villagers
and villager teams do often lack the institutional power to act as
owners, and that's why they resort to "rightful resistance" -
extra-institutional protest on the basis of "central policy."

Another thing the constitution is vague about is this: "The state may
in the public interest take over land for its use in accordance with
the law." What is the law, and where is it written? I assume this
means the state is supposed compensate villagers for the land it
repossesses, but how is the form and amount of compensation supposed
to be determined? And is the state required to get permission from the
villager committee, or can it take it even if the committee says no
(like the "right of imminent domain" in the US)?

Another mistake is that land is leased to households, not individuals.

These are not a minor details; they're central to Anderlini's ideology. He assumes that because China is “Communist” (i.e. ruled by a party that calls itself Communist), then everything’s owned by the state, and he can only understand conflicts in such a country as conflicts between the all-powerful state and the individual, in particular as the individual's assertion of his right to own private property. Like the famous photograph of the man standing before the tank in 1989, such a grand vision has no place for a legal framework of village ownership and household use-rights periodically reallocated according to the ratio of land to villagers, and the experience of conflicts between subsistence-oriented villages and development companies working in cahoots with township officials - working according to the market logic Anderlini so champions.

This kind of journalistic sloppiness makes me have doubts about the whole report. When “the state” (usually township officials) “takes it back,” it doesn’t do so with “impunity,” exactly. At least “according to the law” (as the constitution ambiguously puts it, and as Anderlini himself mentions), the state is supposed to compensate the villagers, and I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to get permission from the villager committee as well, which is formally independent from the state and democratically elected by all adult villagers who chose to vote. {Like elections in “democratic” societies, i.e. multi-party systems, this formal independence and “grassroots democracy” are far from ideal and vary from village to village. As many political sociologists, such as He Xuefeng and Tong Zhihui point out, the main forces working against the improvement of democratic local self-government are not the institutional formalities so much as a set a of broader social problems they call “China’s rural problem” (sannong wenti). They follow Karl Polanyi and Wen Tiejun in interpreting these problems as resulting from the destruction of traditional peasant communities by the twin pressures of China’s Maoist industrialization strategy (based on collectivized peasant labor as a source for primary capital accumulation, instead of the Western strategy of colonial plunder) and the post-Mao marketization of social relations (see Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39(4) and forthcoming issue on the central China school). For one thing, as anyone who’s been to the Chinese countryside in the past few years knows, most of the talented and able-bodied villagers between the ages of 15 and 55 are off working in the cities most of the year, if they ever come back at all, and the people who stay in the villages often have difficulty organizing public affairs outside narrow social networks. But I’m getting side-tracked. All this is just to say that Anderlini is both wrong and misleading. Most rural land is formally owned by villagers, not the state, and state appropriation of villager-owned land is supposed to be negotiated with committees democratically elected by villagers and formally independent from the state and the CCP. These formalities may often be severely compromised - villager committees, for instance are often controlled by the same township officials who want to appropriate the land, so the villagers really have no say in the matter – but at least these formalities give peasants a legal basis for appealing to higher levels of the state (what O’Brien and Li call “rightful resistance”), and sometimes getting a better settlement than they would have gotten otherwise. Similar situations happen in the US in cases “imminent domain.” The main difference is that peasants appeal in the name of their village or villager team as collective owner, rather than individually. How would the legal formality of individual ownership improve peasants’ bargaining power over the present legal formality of collective ownership by several households? If anything, privatization would weaken their bargaining power: if the government takes my land but not my neighbors’, how can I get anyone to cooperate with me in appealing for compensation?}

“its calls for privatisation of all rural land were a clear rejection of the current regime.”

That’s definitely an overstatement, considering that central leaders have been debating whether to privatize land for over a decade, and the regime is now promoting experiments in de facto rural land privatization. As Anderlini himself says further down: “Land privatisation […] has high-level support from some reform-minded sections of the Communist party[.]” Again, these statements make sense only in Anderlini’s ideology, where “communism” implies state ownership, and calls for privatization are “a clear rejection” of “communism.”

“In words that could have come from the mouth of Mao Zedong, one declaration [said: ‘] Only when you protect the rights of the masses and help the masses to develop can you be called the government."”

The term “develop” is new, and is very much tied up with a different ideology in which privatization is a key step on the road of development (and “self-development”)

“They say they are acting out of a conviction that many of the problems faced by China's peasants stem from the current land ownership system.”

Do they really believe that, I wonder? If so, it’s pure formalism. As it is, groups of several households own land collectively. When officials sell it to developers, peasants appeal to higher levels on the basis of this legal formality, and sometimes they get more compensation, sometimes they don’t. How would anything be changed if the formality was changed from collective to individual ownership? If anything, peasants’ bargaining power would be weakened. Furthermore, don’t most people who advocate privatization also advocate urbanization, and want peasants to sell their land and move to the city? Privatization may help in that way, by adding a new monetary incentive (at least that’s the government’s main reason for advocating de facto privatization), but I don’t see how that will solve peasants’ problems, except that they will stop being peasants’ problems and start being proletarian (or sub-proletarian) problems.

Probably the most important passage of A's report:

“These activists have some powerful supporters, including prominent developers who have called publicly for privatisation of rural land – a move they argue would help cool soaring property prices in the cities by vastly expanding the land supply while granting rural citizens the same security urban dwellers now enjoy.”

While helping the developers make lots of easy money, incidentally, and depriving peasants of any legal justification for asking for compensation or land. If they sell it an get paid the market price (however low), then they have been treated fairly and legally, and their subsistence becomes a personal problem. And what is this “security urban dwellers now enjoy”? I don’t know enough details about this. But I thought that peasants were beginning to get better social security packages than urbanites, whose security is tied to employment and income. If you can't find secure employment, which requires cultural capital that most peasants lack, then you basically get no social security, except for 200-300 yuan a month, right? Whereas in the countryside, the state is increasing its subsidies for education and health care, at least, whereas the cost of these is rising in the cities.

“This de facto privatization [of urban housing] has led to an explosion in personal wealth and was instrumental in the creation of an urban middle class.”

What total ideological nonsense! As if privatization of public goods created anything new. The new “wealth” is just paper, and the people who get rich from buying and selling it are simply taking from the public resource pool. (Wen Tiejun discussed this in “Deconstructing Modernization.”)

“Peasant farmers are allowed to own their homes but not their land, so they are unable to use it as collateral for loans. Advocates of reform say this exacerbates the looming wealth gap between cities and the countryside, where land is virtually worthless.”

If it’s worthless, why do developers want it so bad? If peasants can use land as collateral, then it will be even more certain to be taken from them, only now it will be legally sanctioned. Since the previous passage explained that “wealth” comes from privatization, we can see how rural land privatization will create “wealth” in the countryside: a collective resource, land, will go from being “worthless” on paper to “wealth” on paper. And after peasants sell it to developers, the developers and other “middle class” investors who buy and sell whatever the developers build there will become wealthier, thus bringing more wealth to the countryside and mitigating the urban-rural wealth gap. Brilliant!

“Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms.”

“But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing” – so what? If privatization will exacerbate this problem, how does the fact that this problem already exists change anything? That’s not even an argument!

“privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms” – 1) why is privatization a precondition to larger and more efficient farms? Even in China today we could point to collectively owned larger and more efficient farms, such as the one in Nanjie; 2) “efficiency” here refers to productivity per labor hour, not productivity per acre or per unit of energy; small-scale intensive farming is both more efficient per acre and per unit of energy, and more ecologically sustainable (see, for instance, Smallholders, Householders by Robert Netting); 3) Anderlini has neglected to mention the more important part of such arguments against privatization: what will happen to all these ex-peasants, considering that the market could absorb only about 1/10 of China's current "surplus rural labor power" even in a best-case scenario of sustained growth, depending largely on global demand for exports that now seems to be falling for good (to say nothing of the ecological problems such sustained growth would exacerbate)? (He does mention this below in a quotation from Wen Tiejun, but he doesn’t respond to Wen’s argument.)

“The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land.”

This is an important problem, but how will privatization solve it?

“Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to the government agreeing to such a reform.”

I wonder if the central government also sees this as the main obstacle to privatization.

“He says privatisation in urban areas has given the middle class a bigger say in the way the country is run and points to a recent wave of peaceful demonstrations in cities such as Xiamen and Shanghai, in which citizens took to the streets over specific issues that directly affected their property prices – a proposed chemical plant in a densely populated part of Xiamen and a proposed extension of Shanghai's magnetic levitation train through the city centre – and in each case managed to convince the government to revise its plans. "If the people were given land they would have the power to speak out and it would help bring democracy to China," says the activist."

More ideological nonsense – the assumption that property and individualism goes hand in hand with “democracy.” Peasants already do the same sort of thing all the time, and I don’t see how individual ownership will make it more likely to happen or succeed. Going back to Wang Xiaoyi’s theory, it seems that privatization of land would strengthen the individualist tendency and weaken the collectivist tendency, thus weakening peasants’ ability to organize such protest movements.

Zhang Sanmin (Shaanxi “peasant farmer and activist”) says: "What I know is that it was the communal land system that killed more than 30m people in the Great Leap Forward and it is the current system that is causing so much suffering today and must be changed[.]”

It wasn’t the communal land system, but rather a number of other factors (most important in Sichuan, according to Bramall, being the speed at which major institutional changes were made (mostly within a few months), and poor planning in general (in some cases, lack of planning), including transferring too many people out of agriculture into heavy industry, and then lack of communication (in some cases caused by selfish officials, more generally due simply to the rapid institutional change) once the famine began. Once the wrinkles were smoothed out, most of institutional changes made during the GLF were kept, and, according to Bramall, contributed to improving per capita quality of life (life expectancy, etc.) about as quickly as possible under the conditions of embargo and arms race with both the US and USSR empires (see his In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931).

A few related comments on the report cited in A's report above (Mure Dickie and Jamil Anderlini: “Double challenge to Beijing orthodoxy,” Financial Times, December 26, 2007)

the authors write:

“Former Nanjing university professor Guo Quan on Wednesday claimed his “New Democracy party” enjoyed widespread backing for its goal of ending Communist “one-party dictatorship” and introducing multi-party elections. “We must join the global trend,” Mr Guo said. “China must move toward a democratic system.””

How could he say this publicly without getting arrested? Is this more evidence of the Hu—Wen administration’s apparent preference for liberalism over leftism? (I wrote a blog entry about this last summer)

Note the discursive power of “joining the global trend” (doubtless “与全球接轨”)

“Separately, farmers in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Shaanxi, Jiangsu and the city of Tianjin have announced on the internet that they have reclaimed collective land from the government and redistributed it.”

According to A's report above (among others) it was a group of 10 intellectuals, and mainly one in particular, who wrote these manifestos. One report said that the peasant whose name was presented as the other of one manifesto turned out to be illiterate. But my impression is that the peasants did agree with the manifestos, as much as they understood them. {Note that, to the extent that peasants have embraced this “mobilizing frame,” this is a break from the pattern of “rightful resistance” described by Li and O’Brien, where peasants appeal to central policy to justify their rebellion against local “corrupt officials.” Of course such a break from the state’s framework is a necessary starting point for the formation of a new political subjectivity, but in this case the break falls right into the market logic that really calls the shots in China, and which the CCP has been promoting anyway, albeit with some reservations and debate. So I think the authors are wrong to say that this movement (or this discursive move) threatens CCP rule. To what extend does CCP power depend on control of rural land (which, at least in theory and usually in practice, belongs to villagers, not the CCP)? Of course there is also the question of hegemony and spectacle, that is, of who has the right to make such discursive innovations (it should have come from CCP fiat, not dissident intellectuals or peasants or, scarier still, a coalition of intellectuals and peasants!). So, on the one hand, we have marketization as a tendency determining both state policy-making and popular movements, and, on the other hand, we have the unstable ground of CCP hegemony – the CCP’s need to represent itself as the leader, rather than a servant of the market or dissident intellectuals and peasants.}

“one of the main sources of unrest in China in recent years has been the seizure of land that is then sold to developers who often work with officials to make huge profits.”

Finally, a rational kernel

“This month’s land claims break new ground by appearing to be co-ordinated across widely separated regions of the country and by being based on presumed individual property rights.”

I think they’re right about this

“The announcement of the new party and the land claims follows the release last month by a provincial government adviser, Wang Zhaojun, of a sweeping open letter indicting the nation’s entire political system.”

Is there any connection between Guo Quan’s “party” (and how many people support this party?) and these land disputes? Sounds like none. But one connection is pretty clear: between Anderlini, the Financial Times, and a series of "news reports" putting the words of American imperialist think-tanks like the Cate Institute and the Rural Development Institute into mouths of Chinese peasants. Search Lexis-Nexis and you'll find dozens of such reports and commentaries stretching back for decades, until they shade into positive reports about "land reform" and "rural development" programs designed by such think-tanks in conjunction with the CIA to combat anti-imperialist peasant movements in Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere since at least the 1960s. Only four days after FT published this Feb 19 report by Anderlini, the South China Morning Post published "On Solid Ground: Beijing's landmark edict on land rights for the vast rural population
is a powerful signal for change" by Li Ping, "head of the Beijing Representative Office and a staff attorney with the
Seattle-based Rural Development Institute (http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork.html), which contributed to
the recent Cato Institute policy paper 'Securing Land Rights for
Chinese Farmers." So, I wonder: these mistakes that I've pointed out in Anderlini's report (about what China's constitution says about land ownership, about who actually wrote these privatization manifestos, about whether privatization will help peasants to hold onto their land in the face of state-supported capitalist expropriation, etc.) - were they honest mistakes, or was he paid to make them?

With monthly inflation at 6.5 percent, Beijing applies its first price controls in 15 years
 
The snowstorms currently sweeping China have wreaked havoc with millions of people's New Year travel plans and caused $3 billion worth of losses, including thousands of acres of winter crops.

But the harsh weather is revealing an even deeper problem for Beijing: the difficulty of trying to manage a mixed economy, which is about 30 percent state-owned and 70 percent in private hands.

"The Chinese economy is not a real market economy, nor a real command economy, so government controls are not very effective," says Xu Guangjian, an economist at People's University in Beijing.

Food and power shortages affecting tens of millions of people, and tens of thousands of enterprises, have drawn attention to just how difficult a task the Chinese government faces, even when the sun is shining.[...]

The past month has seen several indications of how easily an economy as huge and complex as China's can slip out of the central government's control.

Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, the authorities imposed price controls on a number of basic food items in a bid to stem inflation, which reached an 11 year high of 6.9 percent in November.

Last week, the government's Statistics Bureau announced that the Chinese economy had grown by 11.4 percent in 2007 – the fastest rate in 13 years and a good deal faster than planners, worried by the dangers of an overheated economy, had hoped.

On Jan. 28, as power stations ran short of fuel, the National Development and Reform Council, China's top economic policy body, ordered provincial governments to share coal supplies, as a sign that local officials were putting their own interests ahead of national needs.

Officials insist that the new food price controls are simply an effort to overcome malfunctions in the market, not a retreat to socialist economic planning diktats.

Nor is China the only Asian country taking action in the face of rising food prices: Malaysia rationed cooking oil last month, while Indonesia is subsidizing edible oil refineries to keep retail prices down. Beijing's moves include curbing exports of wheat, corn, and rice powder in an effort to boost domestic supply and dampen price increases.

But with food taking up nearly half of a poor Chinese citizen's weekly budget, and the price of pork, a local staple, rising by more than 50 percent last year, Beijing is especially worried about the danger of social unrest.

A survey released in January by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) found that inflation is the No. 1 public concern among Chinese citizens, and the government has made the fight against rising food prices its top priority.

Administrative price controls, however, are hard to implement now that almost all food production, distribution, and sales are in private hands, economists say. If farmers or shopkeepers are not allowed to raise their prices in line with their costs, they will be tempted to hold supplies back. [...]

The government's plans have not been helped by the severe weather, which is expected to push food prices higher. "The impact of the snow disaster in southern China on winter crop production is extremely serious," Chen Xiwen, deputy head of the ruling Communist party's leading financial team, told reporters on Jan. 31.

He predicted that January's inflation rate would be around 6.5 percent, roughly the same as December's figure. US inflation rose .3 percent in December, by comparison.

The power outages that have made the cold even harder to bear in much of central and southern China have also highlighted the complexities of running an economy that is partly state-owned and partly private.

Nowhere is the confusion greater than in the energy sector, which is "stranded between the plan and the market" in the words of Philip Andrews-Speed, director of the Centre for Energy Policy at Dundee University in Scotland.

Power stations are constrained by a freeze that the government has declared on electricity prices, which has made them increasingly unprofitable as coal prices have risen.

Though weather-related transport difficulties have clearly contributed much to current coal shortages, market distortions seem also to be playing a role: Some power station managers have reportedly been selling their coal stocks, rather than burning them to generate electricity, in order to make more money.

The government has plans to liberalize the energy sector, which would mean lifting the freeze on electricity and gasoline prices, but while inflation is a threat, "this is not the right time to pursue such reforms" says Mr. Wang.

"The government could raise energy prices, but it fears the reaction on the street," adds Mr. Green.

Meanwhile, China's booming gross domestic product growth worries officials whose efforts to rein it in have not succeeded. Repeated government moves to limit credit – such as higher interest rates and directives to banks to curb their lending – have not dampened the runaway growth, which many economists say is fueling the inflationary spiral.

The international economic downturn could help slow China's economic growth in the coming months, given its dependence on exports to troubled economies such as America's. But Beijing acknowledges that it has little influence over the pace of a global slowdown. "There are uncertainties in international circumstances and the economic environment, and there are new difficulties and contradictions in the domestic economy," Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told his cabinet last week, in somber comments published on Jan. 28.

"We fear that 2008 will be a most difficult year for the economy," he added.

All across China, power cables have drooped and snapped under the weight of the ice, hanging heavy like stalactites. Highways have been closed because of the snowfall, leaving drivers stranded in their cars or in service stations awaiting rescue.

More dramatically still, trains have been knocked out of service on the country's most important routes, leaving mind-boggling numbers of passengers, most of them migrant workers, without a way home for the annual Spring Festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, the figure who excels at putting a human face on Chinese politics like none other these days, took the extraordinary step of flying to the southern city of Guangzhou to address a crowd of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who were desperate for seats on trains that weren't coming. And he did it in an extraordinary way, with a rare touch of humility. [...] He actually said, "I apologize."

It would not be an exaggeration to say that China's big snowstorm has revealed an embarrassing crisis of, well, crisis management in this country. There seems to have been an utter lack of preparedness for anything like a weather emergency of these proportions, an appreciation of which was not lost on many Chinese, including the propaganda system, which has worked overtime to combat this impression.[...]

[T]he Great Snowstorm of 2008 has been a public image disaster for the Chinese government - not vis-à-vis whatever foreigners might think about the country, an area that President Hu Jintao, in a bit of unfortunate timing, recently said merits a major new propaganda drive, but rather in terms of the much more important question of how Chinese see their government and its ability to provide basic services.

To get a sense of how this works, one need only think back to the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts in the United States, and the impact that fiasco had on the standing of President George W. Bush and the image of his government.[...]

The real scandal of China's weather emergency is that it had been going on for weeks, largely uncovered and not treated as an emergency for most of that time. That is because the heavy snows that have been accumulating in central China were falling on places far out of the spotlight.

There is an inclination in autocratic political cultures to think that allowing the press to report freely would constitute subversion and destabilize the government. On the contrary, elections and the freedom to criticize are important not just because they help keep politicians honest, but because they serve as escape valves for pressures that could become dangerous otherwise.[...]

[...] We could, of course, make the comparison to the US, with its different political and economic conditions, and remember that these sorts of failures can happen in any system, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated.

But these is reason to believe that the political stakes of such problems are higher now in China than they are in the US.  And that is because of the changing nature of political legitimacy in the PRC.

In the Maoist period, or even the early reform period, when Marxism and socialism were still the foundation of state legitimacy, the Party could rally people together to "struggle against the snow."  I witnessed this back in 1984 when large snow storms hit Nanjing and people came out in force to contribute to the collective effort to clear the streets.  Perhaps more importantly, the New Year's holiday was less important to state legitimation then than it is now. [...] Since the 1990s the Party has embraced a neo-traditionalist legitimating myth: the CCP is now the heir of China's historical greatness and traditional notions of social responsibility and propriety should define personal ethics and public action.  Confucianism has made a comeback and vies with capitalistic individualism for social relevance.[...] Chinese New Year's thus takes on more political significance.  It is a time for performing and reinventing tradition.  People want to go home, back to the village, to reinvigorate family ties.  There is a deep sense of history in all of this: it is what Chinese people have done from time immemorium, or so many now believe.  If the government, therefore, screws up and makes it impossible for people to do the right thing on Spring Festival, then that is a big, big problem.  It is failing not only in terms of modern standards of public transportation and infrastructure but also in terms of traditional duty and ritual.[...]

That's why Wen Jiabao, who presents himself as a modern-day Mencian leader was faster to apologize than George W. Bush.

Chinese leaders launched an all-out publicity drive last week to demonstrate the party’s concern for the public welfare amid devastating winter storms.[...] Over the next few days and weeks, one critical issue will be whether Chinese media are permitted to ask the question: “What exactly SHOULD Wen Jiabao be sorry for?”

Yes, these storms were “natural.” But their impact on China this month and last — and the clear failure of emergency response mechanisms — ultimately speaks to the inadequacy of the political structure and the urgent need for political and social reform. [ABOVE: Screenshot of Sina.com featured editorial by Shu Shengxiang on civil society and disaster relief.]

As CMP noted last week, Caijing magazine has already addressed some political problems in the government response, particularly the over-reliance on central directives and the failure of local governments to jump into action earlier.

In today’s edition of Hebei’s Yanzhao Metropolis Daily (燕赵都市报), columnist Shu Shengxiang (舒圣祥) addresses the sensitive social and political question of civic organizations and their role in disaster relief in China.[...]

But there are nevertheless regrettable aspects of this type of disaster response. Owing to [the government’s] limited power and range of vision in dealing with the disaster, for example, only broad plans for relief were drawn up, and many people caught up in the disaster were unable to receive effective assistance. Additionally, owing to a bureaucratic mindset and formalistic attitude, many initiatives at the local and regional government levels were too late, too weak, too simplistic or simply stopped short of action.
 
We can see that basically our traditional method of dealing with disasters remains mired in a mode of “strong government, weak society” (强政府—弱社会). We have only the top-down vertical lines of government action and lack the right-left, horizontal lines of civic action. This means we cannot create an effective grid for dealing with emergency situations. As a result, the scope of effective action is limited and the “quality” of emergency response is hit-and-miss.[...]

All of this is of course easier said than done in China, where officials traditionally regard non-governmental or other mass organizations as dangerous challenges to the authority of the Communist Party. For examples, we need look no farther than the recent arrest of Chinese activist Hu Jia on charges of subverting state power, and the shutdown of the civil society-related publication Minjian.

The Yanzhao Metropolis Daily editorial is probably right that China could deal more effectively with emergency situations by permitting the growth of an active civil society. But Chinese leaders are terrified of the political implications of a society of do-gooders and people who actively care. Which is why veteran journalist Zhai Minglei asked rhetorically after the shutdown of Minjian last year: “What is the most difficult thing to do in China? The good deed.”

“The Chinese people have never lacked good-hearted individuals or the force of charitable action,” Shu Shengxiang writes. “What they do lack is institutional support (制度安排) for the effective mobilization of charitable action and giving.”[...]  

[...] Mr. Zhu’s obscure blog post and his subsequent activism is a small part of what many here regard as a watershed moment. In recent months, China’s censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls. [...]

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a historical allusion to mock his country’s censorship system.

“Many people don’t know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an invisible great wall,” he wrote. “Can blocking really work? Kangxi knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are needed to guard those thousands of miles.”

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall’s restrictions, was no less philosophical. “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. “I don’t want to be silent, even if everyone else shuts up.”

The Chinese government seems particularly wary of video-sharing sites like YouTube, and has recently tightened regulations on domestic Internet providers in ways that are aimed at controlling such services.

Others, meanwhile, have gone beyond launching Internet-based responses like these and taken more direct action. One such person is Du Dongjing, 38, an information technology engineer in Shanghai who sued a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the service provider’s unacknowledged restrictions on Web content. [...]

His lawsuit was rejected by a Shanghai court in October, but the case has been heard in appeal. “The Americans have an expression, ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’ ” Mr. Du said. “However, I believe that with the help of today’s Internet, the mood of the public, I can win this case. I can even make a contribution to improving Chinese democracy.”

Even as anticensorship activism spreads, views are divided about whether a grass-roots campaign can prevail. Some see strong continued popular resistance to the limits imposed by tens of thousands of well-financed government technicians operating powerful computers and predict a breakthrough.

Yuan Mingli, who created an anti-Great Firewall evasion group because of his love for Wikipedia, said the government was already at work on new generations of Internet technology aimed at insulating Chinese users even more from the rest of world. But he predicted its failure. “That’s impossible, fundamentally, because people’s hearts have changed,” he said, adding that the system would “eventually break down precisely because China cannot be completely disconnected to the outside world anymore.”

For some of the anticensorship activists, creating a broader awareness of censorship is itself a victory. “If you don’t know what’s on top of you, than you won’t fight back against it,” said Li Xieheng, a blogger who wrote a program he named Gladder, meaning Great Ladder, to help users of the Firefox browser overcome Great Firewall restrictions. “It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the power of media control.”

Mr. Li said he expected the Great Firewall to continue adapting to the tactics of its opponents. The movement, though, has proved the power of public opinion as an important limitation of the censor’s power, he said. “Why don’t they just take Google down?” he asked. “It’s because they don’t want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is something the system needs to weigh.”

Nevada’s seven-member supreme court overturned the district court and said General Electric / NBC does not have to honor the contract it signed with Kucinich.

Ordinary people must wait months or years to get into a state supreme court, but General Electric / NBC got a hearing in minutes.

And so the debate featured only Hillary, Obama, and Edwards.

The credit card companies brought all three of these creeps. All three voted to make it almost impossible for average Americans to get bankruptcy protection.

Kucinich is the only remaining Democratic Presidential candidate who voted against the original Iraq invasion. He consistently votes against funding for the war as well. General Electric (owner of NBC) is a war profiteer.

Another reason why General Electric / NBC eliminated Kucinich (in addition tot he fact that Kucinich called for a recount of the Diebold results in New Hampshire) is that General Electric makes many components in nuclear power plants, and wants to dump radioactive waste in Nevada, where the waste will remain deadly for tens of thousands of years.

Kucinich opposes this, as do 90% of the people of Nevada, plus Senate majority leader Harry Reid from Nevada.

Therefore General Electric vowed to destroy Kucinich.

IN OTHER NEWS Kucinich refused to sign a loyalty oath to the Texas state Democratic Party, saying it violated his First Amendment right to free speech. On Friday a federal judge ruled that this would keep Kucinich out of Texas primary scheduled for March 4. Kucinich and singer Willie Nelson appealed that ruling. The case now goes to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

So in Texas there will only be Hillary, Obama, and Edwards [... (I should note that I think the author is an idiot for calling Obama and Hillary racist and sexist names here - that sort of thing seems like the perfect way to alienate people who might otherwise sympathize!)]. All three favor the Iraq war.

For more background on the conflict of interest between GE/ (MS)NBC and Kucinich, see comments here. Of course MSNBC also pled the right to freedom of speech to justify this underhanded move, and this points to the heart of the charade that these commentators don't seem to get - such moves are completely consistent with liberal democracy, where all such forums are privately owned, and candidates must have access to billions of dollars just to have the privilege of debating in them, and even if they manage to get that far, the terms of debate and viewers' minds are already so thoroughly shaped by these very media companies, among other things, that only more or less conservative, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist positions can survive to determine the final outcome. (And of course, even when mildly reformist proposals and politicians make it into, say, Congress, they are quickly and silently neutralized, as we've seen with Bernie Sanders, various Green Party politicos, and initiatives like the Hip-Hop Caucus, to say nothing of more ambitious initiatives back when they were still possible decades ago.) Same old story, nothing new here. Over two centuries of American political history have not contradicted Thomas Jefferson's insight that institutionalization is the gravedigger of social progress, that "the tree of liberty must be continually refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots." So entrenched power cannot be confronted on its own terms, within the system of its entrenchment, but only from without, or, in Badiou's terms, from the system's void, the inconsistent space that its reproductive mechanisms cannot address, and which speaks its own language, of a different system and a different set of principles. (In China, some locate that space in places like Nanjie because they strive to realize the principle of "from each according to ability, to each according to need," rather than the hegemonic principles of increasing productivity and individual enrichment. In other countries, some locate that space in Chiapas, others in Kerala, still others in the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance movements. But is there such a space in the US today?)

Several stories the past few days about heightening of !nt3rn3+ (3ns0rs#!p, including new insights into how it works - it's news to me, for instance, that the 601d3n S#!31d project (aka the 6r34+ f!r3w411) only really started getting underway in 2005, and that both the technological ability and political will for (3ns0rs#!p and control has been growing significantly since then.

Reminds me of whenever I mention these things to people on the outside, they say things like "still? I thought China was opening up..." I always reply that this is part of the anti-communist post-cold war myth that the integration of socialist states into global capitalism has gone hand in hand with the increase in personal liberties and decrease of state control over information. Of course it has in some ways, such as for personal control over property and production (if you have a way to obtain property), but liberalization has also depended on the suppression of certain former rights, both economic (right to secure livelihood, and in some cases, some degree of workers' control over production process) and discursive (in China, for instance, where the reforms beginning in 1978 were founded on constitutionally outlawing and militarily suppressing the (u1+ur4l r3v01u+!0n discursive rights (or rites) of "big d3m0(r4(`/" - the right to assemble, to criticize leaders with big character posters, etc.).

In any case, whether it is mainly because of changes in political will or need, or b/c of technological "advances," state control over information seems to be only growing. On another personal note, I was surprised to find that one way of bypassing the 601d3n S#!31d has been compromised, but only selectively. That is, whereas I can still access certain bl0ck3d w3bs!tes according to this method, such as w!k!p3d!4, other websites, and even certain pages on these websites, can no longer be accessed according to this method, or more precisely, I access the pages, but then they get blocked after a few seconds (even through the pr0x`/). For example, although most w!k!p3d!4 can be accessed via pr0x`/, if you connect to w!k!p3d!4 pages related to !nt3rn3+ (3ns0rs#!p, or related to certain political organizations, they will be blocked even through the pr0x`/. I'm not sure what this means. I know that there is more than one agency involved in controlling the !nt3rn3+, so maybe one is using some method to bl0ck these particularly sensitive pages so they cannot even be accessed via pr0x33, whereas another is using a weaker method to bl0(k entire websites. But it's not foolproof yet - these double-bl0(ked pages can still be accessed via other methods.

In other news (and, according to my analysis, indirectly related), the "Hurun Report" has identified 106 Chinese billionaires, up from 15 last year, making China second in this ranking of global bourgeoisie's hierarchy to only the USA (and "China may have 200 billionaires, we just haven't identified them yet -- there are a lot of people out there who don't report their assets,'' said Rupert Hoogewerf, who has produced the list since 1999. ``The new wealth we haven't discovered yet is lying in the stock markets.'')

Finally, check out this week's issue of the Economist for a couple of stories with useful information, despite the ridiculousness of some of the analysis (the leading story, called "China, beware" is particularly bad, assuming, for instance, that the state's hesitance to institutionalize the de facto privatization of land is one of the factors causing peasant discontent and unrest, and that doing so will solve peasants' problems - this reporter needs to start reading up on the past decade of Chinese research, analysis, and debates about this - even China's liberals and neoliberals are not so naive). Especially see "A workers' manifesto" and "Missing the barefoot doctors." From the former:

CHINA will soon boast seven of the world's ten biggest shopping malls. Yet Chinese households are hardly the most eager shoppers. Consumer spending has fallen from 47% of GDP in the early 1990s to only 36% in 2006, the lowest proportion in any large economy (see left-hand chart). At the other extreme, American households consume 70% of GDP.

From the latter:

Mao's system of “barefoot doctors” for country districts, set up in Luochuan in 1970, may have been rudimentary, but at least it was readily accessible and practically free. Public-health care in Luochuan, as elsewhere in rural China, is now in tatters. And the extent of rural discontent is at last becoming known, as western journalists are slowly allowed to explore the backward interior.[...]