A Second Hand Conjecture

Blogger FangKC queried the archive of the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, and discovered that 19 countries and organizations have been officially accused of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. You can anticipate some such as the Japan and United States, others are quite unexpected.

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(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

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The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

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China space mission article hits Web before launch

A news story describing a successful launch of China’s long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

The country’s official news agency Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down.

Excepts:

“After this order, signal lights all were switched on, various data show up on rows of screens, hundreds of technicians staring at the screens, without missing any slightest changes …

‘One minute to go!’this claim

‘Changjiang No.1 found the target!’…

“The firm voice of the controller broke the silence of the whole ship. Now, the target is captured 12 seconds ahead of the predicted time …

‘The air pressure in the cabin is normal!’

“Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean.”

Is anyone really surprised? Hopefully the technician who made the mistake is still healthy.

UPDATE: This story doesn’t inspire any confidence in this claim.

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Redstate
A good description of what just happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and some reasons why. This made me laugh. “If we were in China, they’d probably have “committed suicide” with bullets inexplicably entering the backs of their heads. I’d certainly want to shoot them if I were a shareholder of either GSE. There are some things the Chinese do better than we do.”

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Extremely interesting post from Seth Weinberger on the opportunity for pulling China in the pro-Georgia camp, after the SCO failed to endorse Russian actions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Seth is as mystified as I am that the Russian foreign ministry could possibly have believed it would persuade China to endorse ethnic separatism and provincial secession. If there is such a thing as an enduring Chinese ideology from ancient times, it is the idea of struggle against separatist disorder and provincial independence. A fear that is only amplified to extraordinary degrees by the prospect of other great powers assisting in the dismemberment of traditional territorial unity.

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I was searching for an image on my backup drive today and came across a cache of header graphics I’d thrown together for posts over the years. The diversity of subjects was kind of interesting as a gallery. Here’s a few rather random selections:

The HIV Epidemic:

Eurabia:

Slobodan Milosevic:

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Jeff Jacoby
Two interesting points here. One, that China is not yet ready to be a free society, and two, the political sham of the modern day Olympics.

“When thugs host the Olympics, thuggish behavior can be expected.”

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Caches of Chinese Government documents found on a Chinese search engine show Chinese Olympic Gymnist Age as 14, too young to compete in the Olympics. Will the IOC do anything? I’m not sure I’d put money on it..

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On your mark, get set, Lego!

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Chinese journalist Zhou Shuguang was abducted by the security services in China on a manifestly fatuous charge. Incredibly, he used Twitter to keep the world informed throughout the ordeal.

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Looking like the Redeem Team is exactly that so far. Greece fell 92-69 in Beijing, securing our quarterfinal berth.

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The United States pulverizes China 101-70.

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China’s Olympic security crackdown is as impressive as it is draconian. Plus, the largely pro-Western Uighurs are suffering rough treatment due to the Turkestan Islamic Party’s activities.

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Chinese architectural designer Ai Weiwei, who conceived the now famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium design for the Beijing games, will not attend the opening ceremonies in protest against Chinese dictatorship. He has some powerful words of explanation in the Guardian today:

We must bid farewell to autocracy. Whatever shape it takes, whatever justification it gives, authoritarian government always ends up trampling on equality, denying justice and stealing happiness and laughter from the people.
(Guardian)

A bold and tremendously important gesture. Read the entire piece here.

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(photo: 2 Dogs)

Modern China has a curious capacity to make otherwise very sensible capitalists instantly forget every experience they’ve ever had with government central planning. The Western businessman on a trip to Shanghai looks up and sees all those gleaming skyscrapers going up on the Yangtze, and he thinks massive state planning must be different somehow in the People’s Republic. It isn’t.

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Blue Sky Days by Derek Chatwood.

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When it comes to robotic goose-stepping goons, the PLA is hard to top.

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Francis Fukuyama chats with Robert Kagan on a number of interesting things: Flash | WMV | MP3 (via: The American Interest).

Of immediate interest is Kagan’s notion that the the emergence of global multipolarity induces an imperfect, baseline bipolarity of ideological division in diplomacy, between the West and the surging authoritarians of the “New East.”

In the opening minutes, Fukuyama argues that while the recent diplomatic concord on Zimbabwe between China and Russia might suggest this, the two reborn Eastern powers have certain fundamental divisions of world-view which impact alliance structure, due to their historical relationship to power. He argues that China has traditionally perceived itself as a kind of destination for power and politics. The mandate of heaven makes China the imperial center of the universe, of which the rest of the world can only envy in political sinocentrism.

Whereas Russia –increasingly animated today by Soviet nostalgia– may again begin to see itself as a kind of departure point for power and politics. In Russia at least there is a political tradition of the country serving as a aggressive universalist tutor for the developing world. Perhaps Moscow could even perceive itself in the way Lenin saw the role of Russia in the context of international revolution. Lenin after all, went so far as to argue that the Soviet Union could not survive absent a world revolution driven by his exportable political principles.

In essence, Fukuyama seems to be wondering whether Russia could be an internationalist while China remains a nationalist,with both representing not dissimilar models for authoritarian power, but presumably finding difficulty in unified action at the United Nations and elsewhere.

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Yu Tingyun, left, lost his daughter, Yang, in the May earthquake in southwest China, and Huang Lianfen, right, lost a nephew. Ms. Huang holds an agreement that Chinese officials want parents to sign, saying they will not hold protests about collapsed schools.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Yu’s daughter had died in a cascade of concrete and bricks, one of at least 240 students at a high school here who lost their lives in the May 12 earthquake. Mr. Yu became a leader of grieving parents demanding to know if the school, like so many others, had crumbled because of poor construction.

The contract had been thrust in Mr. Yu’s face during a long police interrogation the day before. In exchange for his silence and for affirming that the ruling Communist Party “mobilized society to help us,” he would get a cash payment and a pension.

Mr. Yu had resisted then. This time, he took the pen.

“When I saw that most of the parents had signed it, I signed it myself,” Mr. Yu said softly. A wiry 42-year-old driver, he carries a framed portrait of his daughter, Yang, in his shoulder bag.

Hmmm…..In one sense the price of silence has gone down. In Mao’s day the parents would have been sent off to a reeducation camp, or executed. Still, I suspect the terms are considered a bit more favorable in this case.

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How many of you were as excited to find out we were torturing or helping out the torture of China’s non-terrorist-but-oppressed Uighurs? That line about releasing all Uighurs despite their status as a dangerous threat is extra-rich, too: why release them if they’re “the worst of the worst,” as Rumsfeld called them? Why be afraid of sending them back to China if they’re threats? There is too much egg on too many faces here: one of Mr. Bush’s more galling legacies.

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My China correspondent, Chris Bartlett, happens to live near where the earthquake in central China struck. He sent me an account of what happened there. He also reports now that, thanks to an “earthquake warning” from the government, tens of thousands of people are camped out in sports fields and in parks. His story is below.

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The sin of omission that Hillary is committing with the re-telling of the Indiana plant moving to China (while not mentioning that it was sold to China during her husbands tenure,) is starting to gather some light. The following story was linked by the DrudgeReport today.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/election2008/story/35337.html

It’s a story Hillary Clinton loves to tell, about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

And it’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but didn’t.

If she were president, she says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support form working-class Democrats worried about jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never tells in the oft-repeated tale is the role prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company, or that the sale was approved by the administration of her husband.

I’ve been following this since the 24th when I finally got around doing some investigation of the claims she made in her ad. And even noted that Senator Bayh of Indiana is complicit in her sin of omission.

And what is their excuse for not being concerned with the purchase in 1995…

Because “there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States,”

In other words, they promised not to move production out of the US.

Update:

Instapundit linked to the same story also.

And the story made the Special Report w/ Brit Hume last night on Fox News.

The Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin, keep this wagon rollin’ Update:

More coverage,

http://nwitimes.com/articles/2008/05/01//news/top_news/doc7832950a3328e7fb8625743c0004a528.txt

Kevin Griffis, Indiana spokesman for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, said Hillary Clinton’s comments about Magnequench were part of “Washington game-playing” in which “people are willing to say anything to win an election.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24315615/ < -- includes some push back from the Clinton campaign...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4757257&page=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/abc-digs-into-clinton-tra_b_99473.html

“In 1995, when this group bought Magnequench, there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States.” But as ABC recounts, the Congressional Research Service reports that the state-owned Chinese company that Clinton allowed to purchase Magnequench “promised to keep those Anderson, Ind., jobs in the U.S. only until 2005.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/04/29/hoosier-daddy.aspx

Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They’re building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we’re basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2008/05/01/abc-corrects-clintons-indiana-tale-blaming-bush-closed-factory

Interestingly, the hometown paper did carry this on the 17th of last month. But it hasn’t received national attention until now. Hmmm, wonder if the email to the Obama campaign had anything to do with it???

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Here’s an ad some of you may not have seen. But now (wonder of wonders) since Indiana is a battleground state in the Democratic primary, it’s been getting plenty of air play during the local news programs.

Hillary Clinton:
Right here over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets.
They were good jobs, but now, they’re gone to China.
And now America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts.
George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.
As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here, and to turn this economy around.
I’m Hillary Clinton and I approve this message because American workers should build America’s defense.

Seems like a simple enough case, doesn’t it. Bush and the Republicans failing to do what she would do.

But wait till you here the kicker about this.
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Another embarrassment for China.

PARIS, April 7 (UPI) — The Olympic torch was doused Monday in Paris as demonstrators protested China’s civil rights record and involvement in Tibet, police said.

After the flame was snuffed, the torch was put on a bus, moved to another location and relit, Sky News reported. The torch was then extinguished again and put on a bus a second time, CNN reported.

At least it looks like Taiwan won’t be a problem.

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It’s not the one you might think. The most interesting observation:

“Not to be overlooked is the massive economic cost of reintegrating an antiquated North Korean economy into the modern economic world. The contrast between a backward North and a modern South recalls the challenges of reintegrating East Germany with the modernized West, a process that severely inhibited economic growth all across Europe for nearly a decade and which has lingering side effects that persist even now. South Korea and China will inevitably bear the brunt of these costs, but the second-order effects on the U.S. economy deriving from decreased demand for the U.S. treasury securities might threaten yet another hit on an already strained U.S. credit market.”

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Due to free markets, capitalism and freedom in general, the world is getting wealthier.

The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5400 in 1980 to $8500 in 2005.Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just asfast. Compared to 1980, many more countries in the world are democratic today.

The last quarter century also saw wide acceptance of free market policies in both rich and poor countries: from private ownership, to free trade, to responsible budgets, to lower taxes. Three important events mark the beginning of this period. In 1979, Deng Xiao Ping started market reforms in China, which over the quarter century lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In the same year, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in Britain, and initiated her radical reforms and a long period of growth. A year later, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, and also embraced free market policies. All three of these leaders professed inspiration from the work of Milton Friedman. It is natural, then, to refer to the last quarter century as the Age of Milton Friedman.

Oh!  The agony of it all!

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photo: Simón Pais-Thomas

Toronto police recently seized shipments of 10,320,000 counterfeit cigarettes from China (PRC authorities themselves intercepted nine billion in 2007). Chinese made counterfeits bearing fake American branding such as Marlboro, are produced “in underground operations, caves and old warehouses,” and shipped through Vancouver for sale on a vast black market that has developed to evade the high sales taxes legitimate Canadian retailers must charge.

This illustrates another deleterious economic effect of the 23% national sales tax championed by Mike Huckabee (many more were discussed this morning here). As consumers are forced into the black market to escape artificially inflated government pricing, the quality of goods declines with volume, as otherwise quality-focused consumers are introduced to the cheap sub-market products of illegal trade for the first time.

Since the black market is by definition unregulated, there is no effective deterrent for engaging in product counterfeiting to substantially enhance margins, as black marketeers compete with each other, rather than with retailers who are priced and regulated out of the real market. Thus, with high national sales taxes not only does the tax base contract as the black market expands, the real quality of life enjoyed by the populace begins to erode as the marketplace is flooded with cut-rate and even dangerous goods:

Usually priced at $10-to-$15 per 200 instead of a retail price averaging $70, Martin said some contain tobacco scooped off floors. Cut-rate workers also chop up stalks and sometimes leave in lumps due to blunt cutters.

“It’s just human nature for people to save a dollar,” the 10-year investigator said.
(London Free Press)

The belief that most Fair Taxers have that people will not resort to the underground economy to reap fantastic savings, betrays the scheme’s essentially utopian nature. When prices are artificially inflated above natural market prices by the state, someone will always be available to exploit the opportunity. While it is human nature to save a dollar, it’s also human nature to make one when you can. And with a 23% burden resting on businesses to finance the welfare state, there are many to be made.

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(photo: Sébastien Boymond-Pfahrer)

Howard W. French notices that attempts to evade and promote evasion of China’s Great Firewall –which blocks vast regions of the web from the Chinese public– are taking off inside the PRC. Li Xieheng, who coded the Firefox proxy plug-in Gladder, has recognized the fundamental weakness of censorship: it relies on the public’s specific ignorance that it is being actively controlled and manipulated.

“If you don’t know what’s on top of you, than you won’t fight back against it…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.”

“Why don’t they just take Google down? 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.”
(The New York Times via Boing Boing)

Censorship efforts in the United States have always failed, because while courts and government bodies can attempt to censor or restrict access to information on grounds of obscenity or criminal advocacy, they generally cannot conceal their efforts to do so. Once the public is aware that information is being withheld from it, it becomes very difficult to maintain an embargo. It’s an old story, but when it comes to knowledge, demand always favors the forbidden.

Thus the 1933 test case seizure of imported copies of Joyce’s Ulysses on grounds of obscenity, dramatically publicized the novel to an otherwise largely indifferent audience (which was Random House’s intention of course). While the government had the power to confiscate, it did not have the power to conceal confiscation.

The nature of the material banned becomes consequential in how broadly and quickly any new popular awareness of censorship can spread. By banning access to ASHC for criticism of communism, the PRC is unlikely to intrude into the realm of popular Chinese consciousness. But as Li suggests, striking at Flickr is another matter altogether. Perhaps the wall is starting to stretch too far, to sustain widespread popular ignorance that the Chinese public is living in coercive information seclusion from the rest of the world. One can hope.

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Hat tip: Tyler.

Chris Blattman has a conjecture, possibly high wages in Africa are holding back growth:

One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms in China and India seem to be more productive than their African counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don’t manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or informal business?

Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don’t begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It’s the relative differential that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business globally.

There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa, which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages are erroneous.

Another possibility, however, is that the largest employers of skilled workers in most African countries are international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.

Bonus, Tyler has now introduced me to Chris’ great blog, which I haven’t read before. Given my and Lee’s interest in the Dark Continent, I am putting it on the blogroll.

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Click to enlarge

I thought the map Lance posted from the other day (originally from Strange Maps), which expressed the GDP of foreign countries as US states, based on their approximate equivalent GSP, was a pretty interesting visualization. However, I got to thinking what the same exercise might produce if the big boys were projected onto US geography. If you take the top five national economies in the world minus the US (Japan, PRC, Germany, UK), they easily fit into four macro GSP regions in the contiguous United States. I threw together the quick little map above from the data.

Incredibly, once you’ve applied the big four to the map, you will find that you still have around 800 billion dollars left to play with (including Alaska and Hawaii, which are not depicted). Underneath each country I included (in parentheses) how much additional money in US dollars you would have to add to the economies of each economic superpower to make them genuinely equal the collective GSP of each US region.

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This is a stunning statistic:

…the annual expansion in China’s trade has been larger than India’s total annual trade during last several years.

Tyler Cowen hones in on this point, amongst a bounty of good points:

The most important factor that still holds back large [Indian] firms from entering these products is a set of draconian labour laws in India. Under these laws, it is virtually impossible for a firm with 100 or more employees to fire the workers even in the face of bankruptcy. It is equally difficult for the firms to reassign the workers from one task to another. These provisions impose very low worker productivity or a high real cost of labour. Large-scale capital-intensive sectors such as automobiles, where labour costs are a tiny proportion of the total costs, can profitably operate in such an environment. But the same is not true of large-scale labour-intensive sectors labour. Few foreign manufacturers are willing to enter India outside of a small subset of capital- and skilled-labour intensive sectors.

These kinds of rules damage economies around the world, but countries with the enormous poverty present in India are the least able to afford the luxury of such self inflicted wounds. Which goes to the point of the first chapter of the latest Index of Economic Freedom report.

Economic Fluidity: A Crucial Dimension of Economic Freedom

This essay argues that whether the economic infrastructure is “successful” or “perverse” and whether the “reward structure” is conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship rests on the degree of economic fluidity. Without constant mixing across boundaries, without the creation and testing of ideas, and without learning and adaptation, the specific character of the institutional structure matters little. Fluidity determines whether or not the structure will be successful in facilitating growth.

It isn’t capital, natural resources or education, it is the opportunity for all of those things to be deployed and redeployed. Entrepreneurial activity.

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A few weeks back I posted a facile little rebuke aimed at the national security implications of Green Party presidential candidate Alan Augustson’s political platform. Alan responded to this in such a way that I realized I had little idea what the Green Party’s position on security matters was, relative to its environmental policies. Indeed, rarely have I seen anyone even ask Green Party figures questions about this subject.

In continental Europe, Greens are expected to have a broad agenda on all conventional political issues from foreign policy, to funding for the humanities. However in the United States, Greens seem to have been ghettoized into answering questions solely on subjects like global warming or genetically engineered foods. This has the natural effect of marginalizing them into niche political interests within the broader Left. A Left that the media seems quite content to have dominated by the Democratic Party alone.

So, toward a better education in the broader politics of Greens, Alan was kind enough to sit down with us for a short interview on security policy.

From the outset, it should be noted that Alan is a fierce critic of current US security policy and naturally his ideas won’t find much agreement with me, or among postpolitical’s predominantly conservative audience. But I think you’ll agree with me that we managed to ask some fair questions and the interview turned out to be an interesting and instructive exploration of a radically different political perspective.

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