We all knew they were doing this, but for some reason, reading the actual guidelines is chilling.
I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...
More precisely, the relationship between China and the USA is such that if it goes sour, both countries have a problem, because:
- trade and investment between the 2 countries is large, and if it was halted or reduced, powerful and well-connected people in both countries would suffer
- if China sold all its US securities in a rush, it wouldn't get much money from them
- if the USA reneged on its debts, or even looked likely to, it would have to pay more to borrow money in future, and the dollar might stop being the world's reserve currency (which would also hit the USA, because people would in effect stop giving it free loans)
- any serious downturn in US/China trade would also negatively affect the reast of the world, since these are 2 of the world's 3 biggest economies (they are the 1st and 2nd countries, but drop to 2nd and 3rd if you count the EU as an economy).
So there are strong arguments for both the USA and China not to let their relationship sour.
Sure, I don't have a bunch of time but I can try and reiterate some of the economists' positions that I have read (I am not a professional economist). It seems that one of the primary reasons for China's purchase of such a large share of US Treasury bonds (a little over 10%) has been to artificially lower the price of the Renminbi as compared to other currencies. This has become almost the cornerstone of the Chinese manufacturing economy -- because the Renminbi is artificially deflated compared to Western currencies, manufacturing is very cheap in China and their export status increases greatly. One of the problems with selling those bonds is that the reverse would happen: the Renminbi would shoot up, devaluing Chinese exports greatly. In contrast, the United States would experience massive devaluation of the dollar. This would produce negatives and positives, the positives being a large increase in the value of US exports. In addition, dumping U.S. assets would cause the value of their own dollar holdings to decrease, causing further problems.
Simply enough, the amount of U.S. Treasury bonds/securities that China holds at the moment is enough to bankrupt its own economy if they decide against it. In other words, China holds a good bargaining position right now, but cannot fully backup the threat without destroying their own reserves and manufacturing base.
I don't have time to find the links right now but some very interesting economists on this issue are the Brookings Institute, Paul Samuelson (MIT), and Paul Krugman (Princeton).
When people scenario-monger about economic "attacks," you mostly find that they forget to consider the other side's position.
Cutting off oil production (Iran, UAE, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia) is something you hear every so often. These are all countries where oil is most of the economy, virtually all of the exports and the state/king directly controls it.
Take Saudi Arabia. Apart from continuing to directly feed the public with grants, subsidies and giveaways, Saudi Arabia has tens (or maybe even hundreds) of thousands of royal family members, religious elites and tribal leaders relying on money from selling oil. Cutting off oil is impossible.
Sure China has the theoretical ability to hurt the US economically. But the US has an even bigger economy and just as many ways of pinching back. Besides that, there is no such thing as a pinch that doesn't hurt the pincher.
Right, but they're not threatening to sell their treasury notes, they're continuing to hoard them, which keeps Chinese exports artificially competitive, which is a problem for the US. China would have a problem if they wanted to sell, but they don't; they're content to hold our debt, collect interest payments, and use the leverage to manipulate their currency.
Partially. I was also trying to deliver the gravity of the holdings involved in this case. $1 trillion is economy-shaping money -- no country can simply "drop" $1 trillion dollars. China's economic future is now inexorably tangled with the United States'.
When you owe someone 1 trillion dollars and you and your citizens have the fruits of their labor, if you decide not to pay them they are screwed. Since China is politically unpopular it would be fairly easy to orchestrate a politically suitable reason for not paying them.
e.g. We're taking a stand for the citizens of the world and refuse to trade with China until they implement the Kyoto protocol.
e.g. Due to human rights abuses and the refusal to make progress on the issue we are suspending trade with China.
I'm sure there is some more politically suave reason but if we can't pay look for China's human rights / eco record to become an issue, ultimately culminating in our refusal to pay them.
First, debt default isn't anything like suspending trade. Russia and Argentina, just to mention recent cases, had defaults but didn't stop trading with other countries (that would have meant a much bigger disaster).
Now, even if you managed to get a crazy dictator that was willing to screw China (thereby probably getting into a war), he would have no practical way to stop paying only China. More than half of US debt is in form of liquid instruments, e.g., treasury bill, notes and bonds. To stop paying China would mean also stop paying whoever else holds them. But stopping payment for even a fraction of those bonds would be catastrophic, of course.
Why would it be catastrophic? Do you mean it would unwind the massive amounts of leverage based on fiat currency?
Please let me know how failing to pay US bonds in anyway affects the median US citizen?
Put simply if you can't afford to pay your debts it is less catastrophic to not pay them.
Crazy dictator? You mean like FDR who cancelled almost half the US debt by inflating the currency and barring ownership of gold?
Canceling the debt would do two very important things, massively lower the debt burden of the individual US household, and increase the US workforce available for free market activities almost 50% via shrinkage of the federal and state governments.
The median citizen would be unemployed. The recent credit crisis caused a surge in the unemployment rate; a US default, even if partial, would be way worse.
If you read about basic finance you'll understand why. Google for "risk-free rate" and "repo", for instance.
The role of the US dollar now is much bigger now than in FDR's time.
"Since China is politically unpopular it would be fairly easy to orchestrate a politically suitable reason for not paying them."
What happened to "a real man honours his debts?" And since you haven't noticed, the US itself is not exactly politically popular right now.
"We're taking a stand for the citizens of the world and refuse to trade with China until they implement the Kyoto protocol".
"Due to human rights abuses and the refusal to make progress on the issue we are suspending trade with China."
I have to laugh when I hear stuff like this. Since when was America concerned with human rights? The US would never risk total economic suicide by suspending trade with China over human rights. As D'Angelo Barksdale said in "The Wire": "Fair? It's not about fair. It's about money, motherfucker".
The US isn't exactly in a position to lecture others on their morals. Let's look at some of the stuff it's done over the years: supply Saddam with WMDs to gas the Iranians, arm and train Osama Bin Laden, reject Kyoto, lie it's way into a war in Iraq, the use of depleted uranium munitions in that conflict causing birth defects among the locals, having it's Vice-President and Secretary for Defense profit directly from the decision to go to war, the use of private military contractors who literally have a licence to kill without fear of prosecution, Gitmo, Abu Gharib, arming Isreal to the teeth while it bombs Lebanon and encroaches onto Palestinian territory in violation of international law, kill millions of people in the 3rd world in covert wars who are of no threat to America.... and so on ad infinium.
p.s. I've got nothing against America, any American I've ever met was very friendly, open and honest. The Government is the problem, as Regan once said. Oh, and go ahead and flame me all you want, but you can't deny history or the facts.
I don't really doubt the ability of the US government to pay back my loan to them. The economy would have to be about 1000x worse before I would start worrying about that.
On the other hand, inflation could increase faster than the yields on those bonds, in which case you are out of luck. (And some yield curves look pretty strange these days, although not the USD yield curve.)
Yes they are, and all three major bond rating agencies have recently publicly stated that treasuries are in danger of being downrated due to the massive increase in federal debt.
If the USA reneged on its debts, then unless there was clear, serious, and obvious provocation from China, I suspect they would have difficulty borrowing more money.
We're talking politics, what your side does doesn't matter. Notice that the reason stated that the US can't ratify it is because China is essentially exempt under the current protocol. The current US reasoning plays well into the aforementioned reasons.
e.g. We have to stop paying them so they'll ratify a non-exempt agreement so that we can ratify it. :)
Here's mine -- though it's only one way of looking at it:
If the US "owes" China $1 trillion, it means that the US received $1 trillion in physical goods, and in return China got $1 trillion in little pieces of paper. Another way of describing it is the US receives actual money, which can be spent now, in exchange for only giving "promises" back, which may or may not actually have to be replaced with money in the future.
So yeah. While debt for individuals, or in smaller amounts is often "not good", debt starts to get weird and quantum-meta-paradoxical when it is between countries and involves huge sums. Also, ultimately, China can't make the US "repay" them or cough up cash. They could threaten to start a war, but a war between the China and US would arguably be just as bad for them as for US. Potentially worse for them.
It's complex, so I won't claim this is a black-or-white truth. But these are some of the factors involved, I think.
The worst they can do is dump it on the market, whereupon banks and money managers across the globe will devour it like money-flavored hotcakes. There will be a brief market burp, and some change in USD value and interest rates, but at great fiscal expense to China.
Their government wealth fund holds one of the largest USD reserves in the world, if not the largest. Theoretically, they could threaten to quickly unload it and send the USD tumbling if they don't get their way with some policy. Realistically, that won't happen, as the yuan is still pegged to the USD and the US is one of the largest importers of chinese stuff. It's not that far-fetched to think of some other worrying scenarios, though.
Pulling it out would be M.A.D., it effectively won't happen. And given that the rest of the world would pretty much tumble with it, there'd be a mad scramble to protect the USA from bankrupting, and a mad attack on China for doing so. As evidence, just look how USA's economic downturns are reflected by others shortly after.
They are likely to try to use the debt to pressure the USA though, which is still a fairly real threat. If they're not already, that is, I wouldn't be surprised (and it wouldn't be illogical for them to do so, it is in their best interest to have as much control as they can get).
Yeah, I think China would avoid doing anything that looked like an outright hostile act, like dumping all its reserves simultaneously. If they did so, and the U.S. considers it a hostile act rather than merely commercial maneuvering, there are a pretty wide range of options to retaliate, which makes it something of a M.A.D. scenario. Among other things, the U.S. could void the $1t of outstanding Treasury bonds held by China, seize the assets of Chinese companies in the US, and/or ban imports from China. I think both countries would fare pretty poorly from an all-out economic/trade war, even if it didn't spill over into actual hostilities (there are edge scenarios where you can imagine e.g. an angry U.S. recognizing Taiwan's independence in retaliation).
Worrying about this was one of the primary reasons for creating the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, so these topics are being adressed at the highest levels of both governments.
As Peter Schiff has noted, if US dollar tumbles, holders of the dollar will be hurt, but the US itself will be wiped out. The situation is analogous to a stock market bubble. Holders of stocks with inflated values are hurt when the stocks lose their value, but the over-valued companies themselves go bankrupt.
Furthermore, China would be better off if it consumed more of what it produces rather than sell it to Americans for American dollars and government bonds.
Except when the company is cashflow negative and needs to continue issuing debt to operate. Once confidence in them is shot, and they can't find money to borrow, they file for bankruptcy. See the parallel?
I wish you had just replaced Peter Schiff with, "Ron Paul's economic advisor" to save me some time.
What you assert is simply untrue. It would be a good thing, currently, for the dollar to be devalued somewhat. Our exports would be cheaper to others and thus more attractive.
Please cite credible people when you attempt to make extraordinary claims like 'the US itself will be wiped out'.
Look up "peter schiff was right" and "peter schiff mortgage bankers speech" on youtube. At the time when "credible" people were predicting no recession and prosperity in perpetuity, Schiff was a contrarian voice predicting recession and a fall in housing prices. For example: see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7879752717244782545# which shows side-by-side prognoses from Schiff and bullish pundits on CNBC and Fox News before the recession.
You can't get to prosperity by devaluing your currency because prosperity depends on savings and investment and a falling currency encourages the opposite.
Oh please, Peter Schiff has been trumpeting the fall of the US economy since 1999 at least. If you cry wolf enough times eventually there's actually going to be a wolf.
Schiff was a contrarian voice
That's at least correct. Schiff is part of the same anti-regulation crusade that got discredited two years ago.
Dean Baker is an actual economist and he called the housing bubble.
I find your last sentence bizarre as it asserts as a truism something that is not really true at all. You believe people who are on the on the fringe of economics and seem to enjoy it so more power to you.
It does and I'm not above making that move with certain positions. If you don't have a problem with bullish pundits then I wonder where you were in the late 90s. Regardless, predicting the future is a bit of a silly exercise and not many people come away from in being right.
Appeal to authority is the way to stay sane against crazy ideological camps: Ron Paulites, 911 truthers, creationists, etc. I am not going to take the time to rebut all the nonsense they manufacture. It is important to point out where these people are coming from.
Appeal to authority is the way to stay sane against crazy ideological camps: Ron Paulites, 911 truthers, creationists, etc
As if libertarians are some crazy right-wing nutcases who wants drugs, believe in every single conspiracy theory about the government, and as well think free markets can perform miracles.
Yes, there are probably tons of crazy and wrong ideas out there, ranging from anarcho-commiunism, labor theory of values, and the paradox of thrift.
But, there are also ideas out that are right or just worth exploring. Black Swan theory, the problem of economic calculation, the broken window fallacy, etc, are examples.
This is not physics or biology where everyone agree with each other and they'll be right 99.99% of the time(except the cutting edge of their field). We're discussing economics here, where politics intervenes, the subject matters difficult to study, and whole mathematical models can be invalidated because humans are positive feedback loops. You can't make shorthand judgement in that field.(With the exception of free trades. Every economists say it is a good thing and they'll be right)
And where I was in the 90s? I was in elementary school.
This is really sad. Did you see libertarian in there? Ron Paul is not the only libertarian and is despised by many libertarians. I'll go into that further if you so desire.
>Black Swan theory, the problem of economic calculation, the broken window fallacy, etc, are examples.
These have nothing to do with what I was talking about. I'm quite familiar will some of these topics and they are interesting to consider.
As I said before I'm down with econ not being a precise science. However, some opinions just aren't that serious.
Edit: Downvoting, seriously? If China has 2.4 trillion foreign currency reserves, 50-70% of which are USD, and Japan has 1.0 trillion foreign currency reserves totally, how can Japan ever be ahead of China?
You are right of course, which is why I talked about USD reserves, not debt. Speaking about debt, China also holds ~400 billion of Fannie/Freddie bonds, which is not included in the official figure, neither for debt calculation, nor for foreign ownership, I guess.
There's still bunch of countries which run their affairs like that and over 20 years ago there were lots of them.
I live now in a post-communist country. I was only 15 during a transition, still I remember lots from before, like martial law, parents telling me a true version of history contrary to what grand school offered, and quite absurd information that I probably will be able to visit only a few of other countries in my life -- good it changed! I discovered later how some of my family members were really harassed for some quite minor anti-gov activities.
No wonder that Sergey Brin remembers it very clearly and refers to it.
I can't read the "original" text in Chinese, but it is also very short. However, it could be shortened on purpose, so that the leak would be harder to track.
This certainly speaks for itself and is a drastic measure. Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media, though. James Fallows (spent some years in China as senior editor for The Atlantic and has written lots of articles about China) has often argued that it's not as extreme of a picture as is often presented in the mainstream media. The Chinese government has relaxed quite a topics of regulation in the last years (e.g. introduced some kind of property laws for farmers, for the first time ever) and it can be argued that they have indeed helped several hundred million people rise out of extreme poverty, the most in the world. China is just really intend on tightly controlling a few important parts of society, public opinion being one of them. Chinese society in general can probably be said to place more importance on getting out of poverty and growing into materialism than fighting for individual rights with a 'dubious material value' to them.
>Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media
That's what's valuable about this leak. It's not just a Western journalist's subjective, emotional assessment of the state of Chinese politics. It's Chinese politics written by Chinese politicians in their own words, and the leak was made by the Chinese not Westerners. Bias doesn't enter into the reporting.
You could applaud them for helping several hundred million people get out of extreme poverty, a grand social experiment if there ever was one. I know it's easy to take the moral high ground here, just think about if any other country recently has accomplished something remotely similar. You probably cannot accomplish such a feat by going from socialism to capitalism in a day (simplified).
All humans everywhere. It takes rather a lot of work to get out of it; it takes a lot more for newborns to be somewhat reliably not-in-it. I suppose the same would go for silence, too, but the road from silence -> sound is a lot shorter than the one from hunter-gatherer -> first world industrial economy.
I think the big difference here between hunter-gatherer and 3rd world poverty is that your stone-age people weren't living in the toxic waste dumps of an industrializing nation that doesn't care about the environment.
Typical hunter gatherers would have had better nutrition and better access to clean water and the ability to relocate/move without the government forcing them into only certain areas.
no! Poverty is not an absolute state\scale, it is one relative to everyone else at a given time. When their government sabotaged its economy with horrendous policy in the past, it created poverty.
What you assert is hard to square with things like this:
>China’s remarkable economic development has gone hand in hand with the rise in nepotism which has powerfully distorted the distribution of its benefits. As a result, China’s wealth is concentrated in only a very small share of the population. In fact, despite enormous GDP growth, a large share of the population is not much better off from a decade ago. The book “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” by Huang Yasheng demonstrates using detailed quantitative analysis that China’s state-directed economic policies since the 1990s are essentially anti-poor. Huang’s book attributes Shanghai’s strong GDP performance not to indigenous private enterprise but rather to state-controlled (and subsidized) corporations and their foreign partners, with the gains flowing to the state – and their favored business people – and overseas rather than to the general population. In fact, Huang documents how Shanghai actively discriminates against private enterprise to protect well-connected state-owned enterprises. When the state plays a bigger role in the process of development, politicians are inclined to rent-seeking. As a result, corruption in China is pervasive. With unethical business practices so common at home, it is unsurprising that such behavior would carry over to its companies’ operations overseas.
China's growth has been extraordinary put don't imagine that it is some sort of massive poverty reduction program. The party controls massive amounts of the economy and is profoundly corrupt.
"In 1981, 84% of China’s population was below the poverty line of $1.25 a day (in 2005 prices); in 2005 the share was just 16% (see chart). This amounted to a 6.6% proportionate annual rate of poverty reduction-the difference between the growth rates of the number of poor and the total population.
I wish that article wasn't behind a paywall, but I don't think I'm disputing people have come out of poverty. You are not addressing any of the issues I was raising though.
You're quoting the statement that a large share of the population is not much better off from a decade ago.
The Economist provides facts that a very large part of the population is much better of (not in poverty anymore), as per the statistic I quoted. Also, it's rather unconvincing to argue that the Chinese government is effectively anti-poor, given the same statistic.
Sure, there is widespread corruption and they are stiffling private enterprises. That's not the same as being anti-poor, IMHO.
First, your quote from the economist covers 24 years. During that period a lot of people came out of extreme poverty. That does not mean that a huge portion of them are not poor.
It'd be interesting to be able to look at the original papers and break down what you think is not anti-poor. You've conceded that the corruption is widespread, so please stop acting like this is some sort of charity.
"3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event."
"4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy."
-- attacking government perceived as dirty, so must be cleaned up. So too is cheering Google, and must likewise be cleaned up. How sick.
Those instructions read eerily like a passage of 1984, namely the parts where workers are getting instructions on how to rewrite history to portray the State in an infallible, beneficial light.
What struck me was the opposite, like raquo pointed out elsewhere: this is eerily non-Orwellian.
Virtually no euphemisation, no wink-wink double-think. No figure it out yourself using your subtle semi-conscious understanding of the party philosophy. This is strangely conscious and straightforward, cold.
I wonder what Orwell would have had to say about this.
I've seen things like that in the west... for example, in the corporate world, they're often straight to the point about disciplined damage control. Which might not sound so bad, except that corporations are so omnipresent that the media is dominated by them. (Like with this Washington Post article; both the advertisers and the media company are corpoate.) So by an analogy, I guess it feels kind of like working for a really big corporation, where everyone knows you're basically supposed to say what the bosses want, refined by specialized PR organs. (One where they don't merely control the government; they ARE the government.)
Maybe China's censors get to work in pleasant offices, and have incentives like climbing the job ladder, more luxuries and status, greater pay if they move to the private sector, etc. Some might be ideologues, others cynical; maybe most just treat it like a job and they're just cogs who kind of know better but are too comfortable where they are, like the people I know about working on facial recognition for CCTV systems.
But yeah, the Chinese system is a lot cruder. The cost of disobedience isn't just losing your job and healthcare; it can be jail, maybe worse.
I wasn't commenting so much on the content as on the, for lack of a better word, style.
In Orwell's world, which I believe correctly describes many real corporate, religious and government worlds, such things are emphasised, alluded to. Never directly acknowledged. People still respond as if they were given a clear, directive, but it's never said.
"News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites."
should be
"News recommendations should refer to accurate official sources"
"Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden."
should be
"Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must be recognised authorities in their field. Verify the reputation of such individuals with the appropriate sources ahead of time."
If not for their content, such clear directives might be construed as the rule of law.
It's entirely possible to support one's government overall while disagreeing with many of the things it does. I support the US government as a whole, but I think many of it's policies concerning Iraq, Guantanamo, the "War on Drugs," immigration, etc. are despicable.
I think the same holds true for most of China's citizens. Most certainly realize that the government does bad things but this is far outweighed by the good things that it has done for the country in terms of economics development and stability.
Remember that a majority of China's population remembers a time when starvation was a very real risk and most were resigned to a future as subsistence farmer's living in a commune. Then realize that for someone who has lived through that to where China is now in terms of economic opportunity, free speech is just not that big of an issue.
Edit:
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that there's a necessary trade-off between economic development and free speech. My point is that most of China's population is too busy celebrating the miracle of development to care about free speech. Instead of taking for granted that economic development happened, they still remember the very real prospect that it might not have happened and still see improvement's that can be had there.
My impression is that the "nationalists" (as in blind patriotism, the word has a different meaning in Chinese) are a vocal minority among the priviledged urban youths who grew up during the economic boom. The older generations who lived through Mao's days, the less priviedged middle-class kids, and the rural population tend to have very mixed opinions.
Also, Chinese opinions tend to be very mixed to begin with, which can give off the wrong impression to someone from a society that is used to partisanism.
This artwork portrays "opinions" among German and Chinese very well:
Because the rest of the world doesn't like free speech? Americans may throw the term around more often, but I wouldn't equate holding it important to nationalism. If anything, American nationalism has forced free speech on America, not the other way around (and yes, I'm aware of the many failures. Not saying it's perfect).
In America there is not any particular issue that is so contentious that free speech is actually curtailed. But there is tremendous social pressure for people to voluntarily curtail certain forms of speech.
If the US had a less stable society, chances are certain kinds of speech would be considered more dangerous, and we'd progress from certain forms being considered socially inappropriate to being banned outright.
This has happened in our past... and the usual framing of it is that we've progressed past such mistakes. In reality the pressures that force such things have abated.
I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days... I really don't know, no class has covered it and k-12 grade school has made me sick of US-history (flat-out fabrications and ridiculous exaggerations in tons of cases, and super super super dry info with few connections for the remaining). It'd be a good measuring point for this, though, as that's about as unstable as you can get. Yeah, slave-free-speech was blocked, but that's arguably mostly because they weren't really viewed as people, thus didn't have that right in the first place.
Lincoln certainly did unconstitutionally suspend habeas corpus. But the tens of thousands of Northern citizens who were imprisoned without due process by the Lincoln administration (as many as 38,000 by one estimate in the Columbia Law Journal) were overwhelmingly plain citizens from all walks of life who simply expressed doubt over the administration’s unconstitutional and despotic policies, including the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers and the mass arrest of political dissenters by the military. Tens of thousands of Northern political prisoners spent months in a series of gulags, such as Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, which came to be known as "the American Bastille."
I think you ask an interesting question... But it's important to consider that during the civil war the US was still largely pre-industrial and there was very little Federal power.
I think a good example of the general trend I mention is from WW2 when the US decided to set up internment camps for peaceful Americans of Japanese descent.
We did the same thing immediately after 9/11 but this time the victims were mostly immigrants who were minor immigration law violators.... but the spirit was the same.
In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.
Many of the criticisms of China that I've read seem to entail that Chinese citizens are dully unaware of the benefits of free speech, or that they are hapless victims of their government. Neither is a particularly flattering picture of the Chinese as human beings... and I'd argue such criticisms amount to dehumanization and early beating of the war drums -- we never go to war against people who are our moral equals after all, and thus we must first dehumanize our enemy by reducing him to the status of a morally deficient, diminished pawn of an evil state.
In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.
I've always had a problem with this line of reasoning. While I understand that flexibility is given to the executive during times of war, I haven't seen total tyranny by any means. The founders understood that one of the roles of the executive was to take temporary extraordinary powers in time of war. That's one of the reasons for the office. This internment camp example seems especially flawed.
I want to see if I understand it.
During wartime, the national government has the ability (and uses it) to forcefully conscript people and send them off to fight and die. In addition, warring powers have the ability to (and do) use explosives, fire, and all sorts of other means to kill civilians. Furthermore, the government has the ability (and the obligation) to move parts of the population around depending on national need.
Given this, you think going to live in an internment camp seems like tossing our values out the window? Like to tell that to some poor grunt storming the beach at Iwo Jima? The next war where the world loses 60 million people or more, can I go live in a camp without harm for a few years? Hell I won't even complain about it.
EDIT: I'd like to add that I consider Lincoln to be an American tyrant. Having said that, there is simply no comparison with the Chinese examples in this thread.
Since we have had relatively few wars, war powers provisions are among the most naive and ill-tested of any part of the constitution. In fact the need for the recent supreme court cases on Habeas Corpus (one of the oldest concepts in our common law) shows just how untested they are... and even when there is fairly clear legal doctrine, technologies such as rendition to other jurisdictions often renders the courts powerless to check presidential whims.
I would also not agree that just because something is considered (or found after the fact) to be constitutional that it is necessarily right or just.
To respond to your actual point... consider the sanctity of an individual's private, productive life. If soldiers are going to come through the door and put you in prison, they had better have a pretty good reason. In law, those reasons are very clearly articulated. Most Americans would claim that they consider things like due process to be exceptionally important aspects of our legal system... yet we are shockingly capable of ignoring them when the subgroup being violated is a small minority, and we succumb to the weakest arguments in favor of excesses.
Your argument could easily be used to justify any excessive use of power on the grounds that it's better than being blown up. By that logic, short of blowing up the citizenry, the president should have no checks on wartime powers (and calling something like post-911 a "war" gives rise to the question of what exactly constitutes one).
To zoom back out briefly and conclude, I think the letter of the law and legal justification is largely secondary... we can judge ourselves morally by how we acted in various situations, regardless of whether or not it was currently legal.
War, war propaganda, etc., cloud human judgment. Nobody other than a casualty ever really understands war, and so we are all doomed to reason poorly about it always. I'd argue that the pre-war aspect of much of US behavior on China (from Obama's trade war salvos to Krugman's rants) is one reason why Americans are so willing to embrace propaganda again so soon after the Iraq fiasco.
I don't think that's an accurate representation. We've had a short history compared to European states, but we've packed a lot of fighting into that time: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30172.htm
He was elected -- though yes a significant percentage went to a third candidate so it wasn't a strong mandate.
He did not end up doing Evil Things like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc -- though he did have the misfortune to become President when half the country tried to secede and therefore a civil war broke out over it, and had the misfortune of being in that situation when a rather imperfectly & ambiguously written document was the official rulebook on what he was and was not allowed to do. A document which, to this day, is still debated by thousands of so-called experts as to it's exact meaning.
Also, being a tyrant is not necessarily a bad thing. One could be a wise, benevolent tyrant. Though reality is shades of grey, I'd argue that Lincoln was _at worst_ a benevolent tyrant.
Anyway, the definition or common usage of tyrant has shifted many times. I don't think he qualifies for the one that equates to Evil Dictator.
We agree. "Tyrant" and "Evil Dictator" are two different things. I'm using "tyrant" in the original sense -- a person who takes most of the power of the state on themselves.
"I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days."
Lincoln greatly expanded the power of the Presidency in the name of War time expediency, but there were people within the Union who fiercely criticized Lincoln and his government and its policies till the very end of the war. Very different from the situation in China. (Just try criticizing the Party 60+ years after the Revolution!).
Besides, any flirtations with restrciting Freedom Of Speech lasted hardly 4 years, not half a century as in China. But then the USA had a very strong tradition of Freedom OF Speech wheras such a concept was alien to China. That said, Hong Kong seems to be relatively politically vibrant, in spite of being ruled by the MAinland. I suspect once people get used to thinking for themselves and having the freedom to express their thoughts for a generation or two, it is hard to eradicate completely.
"the full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that's because the administration made sure it didn't. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.
Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy "would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury," and would do more good to the rebels "than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained."
Bates said he would support a test case if he thought it had a chance of success. "I confess to you frankly, that, knowing as we do, the antecedents and present proclivities of the majority of that Court (and I speak of them with entire respect) I can anticipate no such results." This was after Lincoln had appointed three justices to the bench. Bates had intimate contact with the justices, and his judgment of their likely verdicts was well informed.
"Many loyal men deny this power to the President," he wrote to the Secretary of War, "and, however confident we may be that he possesses it, it is no imputation on the loyalty of the majority of the Court to presume that on this point they agree with their political school."
George W. Bush suspended Habeas Corpus simply by putting detainees on a plane and "renditioning" them to a jurisdiction where the constitution didn't apply.
Do you think it's a coincidence that they decided to build a prison at Gitmo (conveniently close to the US but outside of US constitutional jurisdiction).
Detainees were taken renditioned to yet another jurisdiction when their captors wished to do things to them that were forbidden by laws that do apply to Gitmo.
From talking to people born in China that live\study in the U.S. One would predict they wouldn't support the PRC as highly on virtue of having left it and perhaps being better educated. But everyone I've met seems to.
Why don't all their high speed hackers turn against the gov, then? They have a lot of the gov's power, plus anonymity afforded by the medium of attack.
I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival. It was an exercise in frustration and ultimately I didn't finish. Chomsky, on the rare occasions when he does back up his assertions with references, almost invariably references only himself. Combine that with a bombastic style that yet still manages to be obtuse, boring, and repetitive, and it's a recipe for a disastrous book that can convince only those who are already convinced and angry and looking for an argument from authority.
It sounds like Manufacturing Consent has an interesting thesis. I would like to read more about it but preferably from someone more readable, more scholarly, and less prone to hyperbole and unsupported claims.
While I'm neither a Marxist nor a Chomskyite-anarcho-syndicalist, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I'd say it's a pretty straight-forward application of Gramsci's theory of hegemony to the United States. Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote his theory while in jail, outlining two forms of domination: direct coercion, and rule through civil society. Hegemony is the latter—the production of seemingly spontaneous consent for the policies of the (capitalist-controlled) state. The capitalist ruling class accomplishes this through the production of an intellectual class and related institution that support and justify the current order. The public absorbs these ideas and narratives and thus consents to the exploitative capitalist order.
Chomsky just applied that idea to the United States during the Cold War (although I'm sure he would say it's still applicable). The capitalists control the corporate media, they set up foundations that fund think tanks, they lobby the government. All reporting is dependent on advertising from corporations that won't brook deviations from the current order. So an overall discourse is created in the U.S. by corporate control which makes sure the debate stays within certain bounds of dissent, but never goes so far as to be dangerous to the capitalist system.
If you don't buy Gramscianism and don't see capitalists as capable of running society's discourse in a coordinated and conspiratorial manner, you probably won't buy Manufacturing Consent's argument.
On a side note, I was reading it in a Starbucks in London in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War. A Canadian reporter approached me for the purpose of interviewing me about the Iraq War, simply because I was reading Chomsky. She was hoping to get an anti-war quote from an angry young Brit, but was surprised that I was American. An interesting selection bias on the part of the reporter.
I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival.
Big mistake. Note the difference in publishing dates. References in Manufacturing Consent are backed up by things like "column inches per unit time in the New York Times." Also note that he is not the only author of _Manufacturing Consent_.
You remind me of an old USENET poster who used the logic: "I didn't read X by author, but I read Y, and it sucked, therefore X must suck."
Sorry, but that only has a passing resemblance to real logic.
Yeah, because he's writing a comment on a message board. Read some Chomsky. He's a brilliant linguist, but his political screeds are ridiculous, he takes a set of somewhat reasonable assumptions and then builds layer upon layer on top of them as if they were bedrock or something, then winds up with a ludicrous, self-serving conclusion. (and this is coming from someone on the left side of the aisle)
I've read his political work, but I don't think any of what the OP said is really true. For example, the claim that Chomsky only (or mostly) cites himself is simply false. You can check this for yourself by looking at the notes for Hegemony or Survival on books.google.com:
There are only a handful of references to work by Chomsky, and all are perfectly legitimate (i.e. they're not being used as a substitute for citing independent sources). The vast majority of the references are to newspaper articles and books by other authors.
On the contrary, the freedom is something very new and fragile in our civilization, and always people had to fight it quite hard. It's our ignorance that we take freedom for granted in western societies, and staying in this comfort zone may unfortunately lead us to loosing it.
Sometimes people ask me: why do you support China? My answer is this: Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death. In Africa, South America, India, etc. When you stop shaking hands with the upper class business men and go live with the poor, you'll understand suffering.
I prefer that the people lose a bit of freedom, but they have to suffer less. Those who disagree - at least be sure you have once actually been in that situation. Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets.
You are the people that would have said in Rwanda: don't block the radio stations calling for people to be murdered - speech should be free.
I've been in Africa, I've been in China, I've been in South America, in the U.S and in Europe. I've seen the dead people, I've hung around with freedom loving geeks, I've talked to favela children. And after all that, I have chosen that I prefer that the people get educated and rich at the expense of free speech.
I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child.
"I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child."
False Dichotomy.
The Chinese Communist party came to and maintained power over millions of people killed for ideological reasons. Dissidents are still killed for daring to think differently. Every dictatorship and autocracy warns of chaos and unpeakable bad things that will happen if its benevolent "guidance" and secret police and gulags are set aside and people could believe and speak as their consciences dictate . And some fools buy into this sophistry and support them to avoid a hypothetical violent future. It helps when you are profiting off such oppression somehow (say, by feeding off artificially depressed wages and currency and being chummy with the opressors)
The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda.
Talk about the present day (2000+) party, not about the past. Because if we're talking about the past, the EU killed millions of people in gas chambers, and the US divided people by the color of their skin and condemmed those with the wrong color to permanent slavery.
I have SEEN the chaos that the freedom you want has caused. The chinese mode of non-freedom has not caused that.
Let me give you just a little example: In India people are burnt to death for being witches or for theft. This does not happen in china.
There is real violence in most developing countries of the world. In china, there is very little violence. If the country were loosened up, there WILL be violence.
So, just observing the present, the chinese system is the system that has the least violence. And that's why I support it.
If you want that freedom, are YOU going to go live in the midst of the violence? Or do you just want to condemn people to it, while you sit at your computer?
"The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that."
You are saying there are no reports of the Chinese Government killing people, so therefore, obviously, they do not kill people. If they did, they would surely report on it. But regardless... it's all justified, right, because otherwise it would be chaos. Big brother knows best.
What an absurd thought.
The end you seek (peace) does not justify the means you condone (oppression). I'm sure North Korea is a peaceful place. And Taiwan? Have you been there? Total friggin free-speech chaos! Also, I'm confident the Tibetans who live in Indian and Nepalese refugee camps are perfectly happy that their religion was outlawed and their home overrun by outsiders. But, I guess, if you're reading Chinese media, you wouldn't know... Ignorance is bliss, as the Chinese say.
> "The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda."
I really didn't want to get into politics today, but this single line contains so much ignorance it's impossible to ignore.
I have family, close friends, and other people close to my life who've lost family members to the CCP - dragged out into the street and shot, in extreme cases. I think they would take extreme issue with your fluffy portrayal of the CCP.
Even disregarding large scale policy fubars that resulted in the deaths of millions, the CCP has directly killed (e.g., shot, beaten, stabbed, etc etc) millions of its own people.
Mao (founder of the Party in China) is pretty generally accepted to have knocked off 10M's of his own people through his Great Revolution. (E.g., check wikipedia.)
"The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda."
And where there is no free press to report any killings where would such reports come from? By this logic there were no gulags in the Soviet union because the Soviet press didn't report it and there were only a few dissidents claiming that these hellholes exist.
If you think the Party is so benevolent why don't you try criticising them openly? You'd see the secret police turn up soon enough (as the Tibetans found out , but that is propaganda by enemies too and the Tibetans really love Chinese rule? ) and you would be "re educated")
"In china, there is very little violence. If the country were loosened up, there WILL be violence."
When the mafia are the rulers, there is little street level violence. That is one way to cut down the violence. Just make thugs your overlords.
You have an infallible crystal ball? The "WILL" sounded very emphatic. Germany seemed to break down the wall with little violence. As someone said above Taiwan is your counter example. Democracy, a free press, a flourishing economy, elections and all without the Communist Thought Police.
"If you want that freedom, are YOU going to go live in the midst of the violence? Or do you just want to condemn people to it, while you sit at your computer?"
India has a lot of violence (as does the United States).I do live in India. So either India is a very violent place and I am living in the midst of it or you are just blowing smoke and violence is rare and India is largely peaceful, with very nasty things occasionally happening (and reported by a free press and television network, even to people, even foreigners who would use this to condemn the government).
You can't have it both ways.
India is very imperfect. There is violence. But, India today is much better than 60 years ago under the British Raj. It will be better in the future. And all this with elections happening every 5 years, with governments having to listen to people and try to better their lot, no matter how politicians may dream of being dictators and doing what they feel like and liquidating their opponents.
That said, I would never live in a dictatorship where some thugs with a defunct ideology tried to dictate how I would think and speak. When the government does the wrong thing I condemn it. I have newspapers report it. Courts rule against the government. People vote out governments and parties. I have the freedom to do so. Do the Chinese?
I would never ever trade security for a dictatorship. It seems you would. Fine. Just don't get so righteous about it and insist we go along with you.
"the EU killed millions of people in gas chambers, "
Wrong analogy. The right analogy would be if the Nazis won WW2, carried out the cleansing of dissidents and Jews (and gypsies and intellectuals and homosexuals ) 50 years ago, established a "pure" germany and their successors cleaned up their act and wore business suits and focussed on economic growth while still killing/sentencing to life imprisonment/"re educating" anyone who resists them and the Germans lived under a constant barrage of propaganda about how the evil outsiders were trying to derail the glorious Nazi Reich.
In that alternate world there would still be people who profit off the Nazi system and argue that all the violence happened in "those days, long agi " and the present day Nazis were very benevolent and unspeakable chaos would result if democracy came to Germany (just look at the violence in the democratic United States compared with the Peace and Stability in the Third Reich, Oh Horror!).
Unlike the fascists who lost WW2 and the Russian dictators who fell 50 years later, the Chinese Communists are the nasties who won. I admire their resilience while not blinding myself with any delusions about the purity of their intentions or their supposed benevolence. Thugs with guns are the same everywhere.
That could be quite true (an enlightened dictatorship might be good for the economy). The question is if sacrificing civic freedom for more economic "freedom" is worth it.
"Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets."
[citation needed]
Free speech doesn't kill people. Government propped up by unfree speech kill people.
Your attempt to casually link free speech to being poor boggles my mind. The country with the strongest free speech protections in the world (historically, anyhow) is also the richest. In an increasingly information-driven economy, free speech is going to be an inextricable part of being a wealthy country.
Blocking free speech is the path to serfdom, not wealth.
Radio stations broadcasting exhortations to kill are a terrible example. I'd bet $10 that was government speech. I'd bet another $10 that the government would not permit anybody from the class they want to kill to rebut, either. Free speech is not a government-mandated message; free speech is a robust debate. Come reply to me and tell me that you heard a robust debate and I'll admit I was wrong, but if all you heard was one side, that's a classic example of unfree speech.
And you are being sold a line which others will happily use to hang you, if you are so willing to sacrifice liberty for security.
In Singapore you get caned for smoking weed and gum chewing is illegal. Sounds like a friggin blast!
Besides, it's not a counter-example. In order for it to be a counter example, you would have to prove that Singapore would be "chaos" if it wasn't for it's big-brother government.
Only 2 of the top 10 countries on this list are autocratic. In both Singapore and Hong Kong, most of the economic freedoms are for colonialists and not for the local Chinese. Hong Kong has some of the greatest economic disparity of any city in the world. Finally, both cities are open markets with cultural ties, special relationships, and proximity to the largest closed market on the planet, China. They are both port cities, essentially gateways to the hinterland. My point is I think autocracy has less to do it than this article would have you believe.
In both Singapore and Hong Kong, most of the economic freedoms are for colonialists and not for the local Chinese.
As a Singaporean Chinese, I must say, wtf? There are practically no colonialists here, and I've never experienced a lack of economic freedom. I probably agree more with you than maxklein in terms of ideology, but please, get your facts right.
I know where Singapore is, I dun need to look it up... Singapore is in a great spot for a port--lots of easy-to-travel water to the east and to the west and big trading partners in all directions. But, besides Hong Kong and maybe Keelong (in Taiwan) I'm not aware of any closer "Chinese" ports.
Anyway, this is a digression. Your remark does nothing for your original point.
Geographical locality matters somewhat less than the fact that any ship sailing from China to India, the Middle East, Africa, or Europe passes trough Singapore.
While I cannot forgive the Chinese regime for their methods, there is a point here that shouldn't be so quickly downvoted. China has raised 400 Million people out of poverty in the last several decades.
I'm still yet to see a convincing reason why those people could not have been brought out of poverty while there was freedom of speech at the same time.
I am able to support billions of cells inside me. Everyone who lives can be proud of that.
Doing what one must do is not something that's worth bragging about. Especially when they didn't quite do that: free speech is more a must have than optional.
> Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death.
From Peru here. The country used to be extremely poor, we're now doing ok, not great but ok with 9.2% of GDP growth (2008 est.) and freedom of speech is pretty great (totally uncensored internet and press) and we're still alive!
wait for the Chinese Communist Party apologists to turn up and argue that "China is not yet ready for democracy" and "The Communist party is doing this to help protect the Chinese people from evil Western imperialists" any moment now :-P .
More seriously, I think the coming years maybe the first time in the last century or so that an iron fisted autocracy becomes the dominant economic power in the world. Interesting times ahead.
The Wall Street Journal's front page interview of Sergey Brin is a must-read if you haven't already seen it.
China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr. Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."
that Google's departure will be bad for Baidu advocating that with Google's departure Baidu will have less competition and hence will not evolve properly.
I picked up the links above randomly from my wife's computer (she is Chinese).
I do not support any repressive regime, but I also have reservations for Google. There is a huge propaganda machine in China and a more subtle one in the USA, either we like it or not.
It seems as if this Google-China row is indicative of a larger trend taking shape: the divorce of Western capitalist enterprises and the Chinese government. There was an article saying as much in yesterday's Wapo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...). It will be interesting to see how this affects other Western companies suffering under censorship issues there--I heard something about Godaddy possibly pulling out of there as well.
I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...