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It's from a ways back but since I'm behind on this thread and catching up I wanted to comment on the Amish chapter. This part was interesting because I think it had tells about some of the CCP's internal insecurities about its policies. Obviously modernizing China had been an overriding concern. I don't know that much about Chinese history but I know in many places where leaders felt their country to be backward, there was often concern that the people would not accept modernization and react against it. With the Amish however Huning sees a "backward" ethnicity or whatever you want to call it, but instead of embarrassing other Americans, Americans instead see it as another embodiment of their ideals. I feel like he is criticizing some of his comrades who feel they must use force to compel the Chinese peasants into the modern era, and is using their example to argue that in some cases it may be easier to learn to tolerate groups that resist modernization, while continuing to develop around them. China's kaleidoscopic array of ethnic minorities must be forefront in his mind here. Historically modernization programs in both capitalist and socialist states often involved a great deal violence and resistance, and I bet how to advance "progress" as Huning conceptualizes while avoiding that kind of chaos was why he was interested in the Amish.
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Jan 28, 2020 05:20
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:"soldier and the state" had a lot of influence on the U.S. cold war military structure, and the most important thing was making distictions between "objective" and "subjective" control systems (i think) in terms of how the civil authority relates to or interfaces with the military and controls it so the military doesn't control the civil, contrasting the U.S. system with marxist-leninist ones (in which the military is politically indoctrinated in marxist-leninist ideology and is treated as a political weapon in a sense... although the objective western systems do this in a different way with the military being a political weapon to the extent that it stays out of politics but is used by the civil authority / politicians to carry out national-level political objectives. note that both systems ultimately derive from clausewitz who viewed warfare as politics by other means). wang huning doesn't seem to talk much about the military but might glance at it in chapter 11 with the role of national security institutions and think tanks, which i'm particularly interested in because i think a marxist-leninist would critique the U.S. military control system as not being as "objective" as huntington would've described it. Huntington's framework is almost a standard point of reference for any discussion of civil-military relations, but it doesn't really sit well in this case. Considering the role of the Chinese Communist Party, we could say this is a question of party-military relations, as their professional army is subject to political control, with an occasional intervention into internal party conflicts. Huntington suggests that there is an inherent tension between state and armed forces, and the greatest danger is in military intervention into politics through coups. This tended not to happen in communist countries, as the military very often sides with the party-state's own hegemony. In their 1982 paper, "The Party in Uniform: Toward a Theory of Civil-Military Relations in Communist Political Systems", Amos Perlmutter and William M. Leogrande put forth an alternative explanation for civil-military relations in communist states. Because of the dominance of the "vanguard" party, all non-party institutions are subordinate to the party. The party does this through various means, such as staffing elite organizations and command positions with party members. The party grants enough freedom to the military for it to be autonomous, but as technology progresses and knowledge more specialized, militaries are likely to enjoy greater autonomy to achieve more difficult tasks. Yet, military participation in politics is the norm - as military staff can act as party members. But the military can intervene in cases where the party is disunited, to back one faction over the other, and avoid threatening the hegemony of the party. But how effective is this in looking at the outside world, looking at its own capabilities, and deciding what to do? Risa Brooks, in her book Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment, says that states can produce the best assessments with civil and military leadership have similar preferences and the armed forces are politically dominant. This can happen with countries with a party-state relationship, provided that there is broad agreement in party leadership. In periods of extreme party disunity -- say, the Cultural Revolution -- this doesn't happen. The military may be forced to provide basic law and order functions, or it may become a target of political infighting. This can be a problem even in cases of external threats - the party and military were still divided in the case of the Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969.
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Jan 28, 2020 05:20
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One thing that's crazy I just noticed looking at economic statistics. Back when this book was first published, India and China had almost identical GDP per capita. As of 2017, China's per capita GDP was more than 4x larger than India's. Dang, why hasn't India been able to achieve the kind of economic success China has?
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Jan 28, 2020 06:27
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Squalid posted:One thing that's crazy I just noticed looking at economic statistics. Back when this book was first published, India and China had almost identical GDP per capita. As of 2017, China's per capita GDP was more than 4x larger than India's. Dang, why hasn't India been able to achieve the kind of economic success China has? Obviously because it's fighting it's Maoist rebels rather than putting them in control of the state (and then becoming state-capitalist anyway).
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Jan 28, 2020 10:05
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Squalid posted:One thing that's crazy I just noticed looking at economic statistics. Back when this book was first published, India and China had almost identical GDP per capita. As of 2017, China's per capita GDP was more than 4x larger than India's. Dang, why hasn't India been able to achieve the kind of economic success China has? Well, in addition to China's rapid industrialization, part of that is because of China's population control measures (and India's lack thereof). China used to have a significantly larger population than India, now they are about even.
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Jan 28, 2020 19:05
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How does having a larger population or population growth act as an inhibitor to economic/industrial development?
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Feb 17, 2020 00:37
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AgentF posted:How does having a larger population or population growth act as an inhibitor to economic/industrial development? A population growth dip creates a short-term window in which a greater portion of the populace is engaged in industrial production and a lesser portion in social reproduction. To use exaggerated theoretical numbers, if there are 80 80-year-olds being cared for fulltime, 100 60-year-olds, 120 40-year-olds, 140 20-year-olds, but only 100 infants being cared for fulltime, you have 180 workers, compared to 100 of each generation yielding 100 or 80/100/120/140/160 yielding 120. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Feb 17, 2020 |
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Feb 17, 2020 01:09
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Apologies for the delay. Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 4: Equality or Freedom? Wang begins this chapter by stating that every society has its "core values", which shape the development of a society and are the standards by which individuals judge their actions and public events. He then goes on to ask what the "core values" of American society are. He continues to a time where he asks a senior professor of political science at a university in Ohio, who thinks about it for a short time and says "The Republicans focus on freedom, and the Democrats focus on equality." Wang says that more people in American society are willing to emphasize personal freedom as a "core value", owing to it being a broader term by definition and being easier to adapt to different goals, and that "equality" is less expansive a term. He then turns to a discussion of the life of Alexander de Tocqueville and his book, "Democracy in America", which he summarizes as follows: quote:An important point of Tocqueville is that the most important fact is a comprehensive "equality of conditions". This conception has an invaluable effect on the entire process of society. All other values in society come from this basic fact. [...] As it stood then, after the War of Independence, the Constitution officially recognized the principle that all men were created equal. The United States has no tradition of feudal aristocracy, so it is easier to establish an equal environment after the overthrow of colonial rule. There is no wealth accumulated throughout the year, no political arrogance, and equality of conditions is easier to form. It is not difficult in a society with a long feudal history, such as Britain and France. Although the law can provide for equality for all, the inequality created in reality cannot be destroyed by force. It may destroy material inequality, but it cannot destroy spiritual and cultural inequality. There are no extremely favorable conditions for this. Tocqueville is from the European continent with a strong feudal tradition, and it feels natural that there are better conditions here. Wang disagrees, noting that what Tocqueville describes was only relative equality, and certainly not equal by contemporary definitions. Women did not have equal rights, and certainly, the Native Americans did not. Tocqueville was only writing from the point of view of a society that was even more unequal. Equality was an ideal to be pursued but not achieved. Following this is a rather abstract discussion between equality of conditions and equality of outcomes that draws from John Locke and Auguste Comte that I have a lot of trouble parsing. But in the end, he draws the distinction between political equality, social equality, and economic equality, and that the conditions of political equality may exist without necessarily providing for the others. From this comes a rather standard Marxist discussion of "false consciousness", where institutions mislead the working class, and where class dictates interests, although Wang does not use those terms specifically. quote:One hundred and fifty years later, at least this time, the situation in the United States is very different from that of Tocqueville's time. The issue of political equality has been greatly improved after the post-war civil rights movement and the feminist movement. However, the issue of economic equality has not been substantially promoted. The United States once pursued poverty eradication, welfare policies, and progressive taxes to promote equality, but later it became a source of grievances. Keynesian welfare policies have resulted in stagflation. Since then Keynesianism has slumped. Large-scale social welfare programs cause bad reactions. The Democratic Party's failed elections on several occasions can also explain this point.
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Mar 6, 2020 20:12
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It is interesting to see the discussion of equality of conditions and welfare. It makes me wonder where Wang stood on the issue of cutting government benefits when it became a major topic later in the nineties. In the nineties the previously relatively generous system of communist benefits was slashed in a ruthless program of cost cutting in the name of government efficiency and competitiveness. It's the kind of policy that's very hard to justify from a philosophical position that emphasizes equality of outcomes. Partly inspired by this thread i recently picked up two books about the recent history of China and the Communist party. The first was The party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor. I picked it specifically because it was published in 2010, before Xi Jinping became President. The second book, which I am still only a few chapters into at the moment, is The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State by Elizabeth Economy, which was published in 2019. McGregor's book was an excellent overview of how the Chinese government runs and the CCP's role in it and business. It really helped contextualize recent controversies over issues like Huawei's relationship with the Chinese government. I was at times still left feeling a bit bewildered during talk of the endless committees and party hierarchies and departments that run everything in China, and continue to bemoan the absence of any introductory texts or reference material on the subject. Still I feel like it was a relevant and engaging discussion of modern China and its government. While I'm only a few chapters into Economy's book I'd say it feels less focused than McGregor's and more superficial. I picked it up because there's been a lot of talk about how China is changing under Xi, but even though Economy's whole thesis is that Xi has ushered in a third revolution ( the first being under Mao and the second under Deng), from her own description it really doesn't sound very revolutionary. Almost everything she describes as characterizing politics under Xi's leadership sound about the same as what McGregor describes under Hu Jintao, only maybe exaggerated a bit? Still, her book still seems like a fine introduction to the subject of modern China, even if it doesn't cover much new ground. Unfortunately neither book seems able to answer my most pressing question, which is how the modern CCP squares its adherence to Marxist doctrine and economics with economic liberalism. I have so many questions, like how can you claim to represent a dictatorship of the proletariat when the party includes multimillionaire businessmen? It's hard to judge either author too harshly for this, since I'm not sure anyone, maybe even anyone within the CCP, really knows for sure.
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Mar 6, 2020 23:53
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I was going to start off with a long discussion of how Deng Xiaoping justified the early stages of his reforms. You can find a lot of that in Vogel's biography of Deng Xiaoping to start. The CCP was in a state of deep crisis after 1976. Early reforms were judged on how the party might survive, and moving away from the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. One idea that stuck was articulated by Chinese Marxist economists such as Xue Muqiao, was the "primary stage of socialism" -- where, in some branches of Marxist economics, there were several stages of development of "productive forces", and China had not yet even reached capitalism before it could have reached the next step of socialism. So the reasoning goes for the early stages of reform is that China would first need to move up to capitalism before it could reach socialism. Bukharin and the NEP (a more market-oriented policy after the Civil War period in the Soviet Union) were discussed. In terms of political legitimacy, Deng hit upon the idea of the 'Four Cardinal Principles' -- outlining what was allowed to be discussed, and allowing everything else to be questioned openly. Other economic reforms in the 1980s were incrementalist and experimental - searching for all kinds of models that could be applied to China. There was some interest in the Warsaw Pact countries and the models of self-management as seen in Yugoslavia, and some were interested in learning from Japan. But to answer your question, I could ask it like this. How do people deal with the dissonance between their values and the party's state in China or between their ideals and reality anywhere else? I can't claim to know what every person in China thinks, or what the party members think. I don't think it's all cynicism, although there is a lot of it, much as you find people in leadership elsewhere who still have some belief in their own value systems. I can pull some specific quotes from top leadership to see how they justify it to the rank and file -- through nationalism or viewing aspects of Marxism and "historical materialism" as a tool of analysis, or having the party be viewed in opposition to whatever foreign countries do. There's also a lot of talk in party speeches and documents about "historical nihilism" and how it must be prevented - in short, anything that denies the supremacy of the party or its value system.
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Mar 16, 2020 01:19
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One interesting contrast McGregor drew between the United States and modern China, is the way their leaders each talk about the military. In the United States it is deemed of utmost priority that the military be apolitical, and this is equated with "professional." The PRC utterly rejects this notion, and instead talks about how it is essential that the army BE political, and that it goes hand in hand with the Communist Party. At times official publications can almost sound hysterical about this point. This strikes me as an interesting ideological difference between the two states, and there seems like a similar division is present in how both states deal with important institutions. In practice when the CCP emphasizes that institutions like the army should be politically active I'm not sure if this actually means anything other than "loyal to the party." Frankly I'm not sure what if anything besides loyalty to the CCP is its politics. Other than a continued insistence on using Marxist jargon, a belief that the CCP must rule China seems to be the only thing its members must agree on. Besides the blaah blaah about stages of development and how oh eventually we're going to institute real socialism in the distant future somehow, I really wonder what they want China to look like. Do they just imagine China in 50 years like it is now, but richer? That I really don't understand. When I think of America's leadership I fell pretty confident that they would say yes to this question, but with China I don't know. I'll be interested if Wang has anything to say about nationalism. Elizabeth Economy talks a lot about Chinese nationalism and how the current batch of leadership have emphasized the "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." This is another significant deviation from traditional strains of Marxist thought. It sounds positively Romantic even. With Wang writing just at the time when the shift to nationalism was beginning I wonder if his thinking will be more old school or new school. If he does talk about it, I wonder who his influences are. Broadly I'm really curious about the intellectual underpinnings of modern Chinese nationalism and how its proponents with socialist ideas of solidarity.
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Mar 16, 2020 05:14
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Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 5: A Constitution's Bicentennial quote:There is some degree of historical connection between the two cities of Philadelphia and Washington. Philadelphia was an important location during the American Revolutionary War. A constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. This constitution continues to this day, and it can be called the oldest written constitution in the world. Washington is the capital of the day and is the embodiment of the Constitution. 1988 was the bicentennial of the constitution. The government once held celebrations under the Statue of Liberty, and Reagan also spoke at the scene. Americans are most proud of their constitution. When I was in Philadelphia, I had been to a constitutional building that year, but because the visitors were too crowded together, I could only see from a distance. When I was in Annapolis, I saw a manuscript copy of the US Constitution of that time. How many yellowed pieces of paper could play such a major role? The basis is absolutely beyond these yellow papers.  Wang is likely referring to either Independence Hall or the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. quote:The United States Constitution is a product of the War of Independence. The evolution took about two decades: 1770-1790, when the United States had thirteen separate colonies under the jurisdiction of the British government. In 1774, the first Continental Conference was held, and 55 representatives from 13 colonies met in Philadelphia: discussing issues of common interest. In 1775, there was a war between the colony and Britain, a fierce battle in present-day Massachusetts. In 1776, Thomas Paine, an American political thinker, published "Common Sense" and demanded independence. In 1782, the War of Independence was drawing to a close, peace talks were held in Paris, and a treaty was signed. In 1787, the constitution was drafted. In 1788, a sufficient number of draft quasi-state constitutions entered into force. In 1789, George Washington was elected the first president of the United States. In 1791, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. This was the main milestone of political development at that time. It can be seen that the United States Constitution arises from the struggle for independence and its basic provisions, of course, to protect certain interests. It's interesting to note that while Wang does talk about the standard Marxist view of the 'base supporting the superstructure', or political ideas masking some underlying economic interest, he's taking the developing of liberal ideas seriously. quote:It was with this intent that the Constitution was made. At that time, 13 states sent 55 representatives to Philadelphia. Drafting the constitution was a daunting task, but they did it in a single summer. It may be that the political, social and cultural relations at that time were not as developed as later. If we change to today, we will not be able to make a constitution within two years. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin are all involved in this effort. These people are deeply influenced by European Enlightenment thinkers, and they are familiar with Locke's "An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government", Harrington's "The Commonwealth of Oceana", and Montesquieu's "On the Spirit of the Law". At the same time, they also have rich practical experience. Twenty of them are said to have participated in the drafting of the constitutions of the states and are well versed in this. Thirty people participated in the legislatures of the states. Familiarity with the pros and cons of public life has also laid the foundation for constitutional formulation. John Locke (1632-1704) was one of the most important writers of the English Enlightenment. His Two Treatises on Government was a critique of the absolute power of the monarchy and a description of an alternative based on the ideas of natural rights and the theory of social contract. James Harrington (1611-1677) was a classical republicanist theorist who, in his work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, described the constitution of an ideal state which limited the rights of the executive, guaranteed individual rights and property rights, and the rotation of the legislature by standard elections. The first attempt at its publication was blocked by Oliver Cromwell. Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a French philosopher who is best known today for his publication of De l'esprit des lois or "The Spirit of the Laws", which outlined the separation of powers theories of government and coined the term "despotism". quote:When formulating the constitution, it is worth noting that it encountered historical conditions. That is, this is a continuation of the same system, but with a different organizational form. In the United States and the War of Independence, Britain had completed the "Glorious Revolution" for a hundred years, and the British rulers were no longer traditional feudal aristocracy. Therefore, for the United States, a new system was basically modeled on British political principles. In other words, the ruled wants to study the life of the ruler. The problem faced by the revolutions in many countries is to change political principles, which is much more difficult, because no one knows the practice of the new principles, such as the British bourgeois revolution, French bourgeois revolution, Russian revolution, and the Chinese revolution. Of course, in Britain, France, Russia, and middle countries, because the old system had too much influence, it also caused difficulties in establishing a new system. In economics, this idea of the past structures influencing present decisions is called 'path dependency'; in political theory, it is more along the lines of 'historical institutionalism'. quote:The British strategy of "divide and rule" of their colonies also created conditions for the formation of a political system. This separation makes it impossible for one state to dominate another. Political affairs must be negotiated. Those who formulate the constitution are backed by the individual states and have great bargaining power. No state wants to give a state more power than it already has. It will, therefore, be noted that a mechanism is created in the Constitution to prevent a state from gaining such power. Kenneth Prewitt and Sidney Verba point out in their book Introduction to the American Government that the Constitution reflects a philosophical perspective. They quote from John Adams: The quotation is from John Adams' letter to Samuel Adams, dated October 18, 1790. Kenneth Prewitt is a Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and he was director of the Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001. Sidney Verba, who passed away in March 2019, was the director of the library system at Harvard University. quote:According to Prewitt and Verba, people cannot be trusted without political restrictions. Therefore, human nature as reflected in the Constitution is pessimistic, not optimistic. This is a big difference between western culture and eastern culture. Perhaps this can explain the differences in political development between the East and the West in some ways. Very skeptical about this last bit. Older Chinese political philosophers could be deeply pessimistic. quote:In light of these ideas, the Constitution defines the following three basic principles:
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Mar 21, 2020 18:34
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Kangxi posted:
that is interesting and I hope he will expand on the subject. I wonder how the leaders in China see the purpose of their party in light of standard Marxist views. Clearly they've taken the role of the CCP well beyond Lenin's concept of a vanguard, there has to be some concept of ideology trumping material interest for it to make sense. Also I hope Wang will contrast American constitutionalism with how the Chinese government operates, as my impression is that it is almost the exact opposite. That is to say the letter of the law is relatively unimportant, while informal arrangements, especially relating to the CCP, trump everything. I'd really like to see that tendency justified from a Chinese perspective.
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Mar 22, 2020 04:38
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I've just caught up with the thread, thank you Kangxi it's a very interesting read. It actually gave me the inspiration to go back to translating some stuff I'd sat on for a long time.
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Mar 30, 2020 14:24
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Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 6: Political Genes quote:Next to Boston is a quiet town called Belmont. It is said that the political system of the early United States is more completely preserved here. The management of the town has a strong autonomy and is the source of an American political system, or a reflection of political tradition. Let's call it a "political gene". The so-called political gene is to explore the basic factors on which the political system and political culture developed. Professor Lucian Pye, president of the American Political Science Association in 1988, also recommended this town, and accompanied by him, we visited this special little town.  Lucian Pye (1921-2008), was a political scientist who taught at MIT for over thirty years. He was born in rural Shanxi, the child of American missionaries. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1951 after writing a dissertation on the Warlord Era in Chinese politics and served as an advisor to Democratic presidential candidates such as John F. Kennedy and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. He also advised the State Department on various China-related matters and served as acting chair of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. He became a proponent of the concepts of "political culture" and "political psychology", which proposed psychological and cultural factors as main influences in a country's development. quote:Belmont is a small town, about half an hour's journey from Boston by car. The town has a total of 26,000 residents. The first person who came out to receive us was the secretary. She is an elected official. First, she said that the management organization of Belmont Town is an organization where friends and neighbors manage their own, that is, an autonomous organization. Her second statement was that this organization and its spirit originated in Britain. When the earliest immigrants arrived on the American continent, they brought this tradition with them, and they have survived to this day. In the eastern region, especially Massachusetts, many places still maintain this political feature, which has become a noteworthy phenomenon in political life.  The Belmont Town Hall, built in 1881, as Wang likely would have seen it. quote:You can simply look at the organizational structure of this town. The town has a fundamental law called General by-laws, which is actually equivalent to the town's constitution. According to the town's Organic Law, all citizens enjoy the highest power, as long as they are residents Translators' Note: Across the 1980s and early 1990s, village elections were introduced across China, where individuals could run for local seats in village-level government after the promulgation of the Organic Law of Village Committees which was implemented on a trial basis in 1987 and adopted nationwide in 1998. The debates that led to the introduction of these elections were documented, and often considered the poor performance of local Chinese Communist Party officials, who were often appointed from distant provincial capitals and did not have substantial knowledge of the villages they were supposed to be running. Local officials were responsible for implementing national policy, such as the One-Child Policy, but also in the provisions of public goods such as schools. These local village elections were encouraged from the Deng Xiaoping administration and through the mid-1990s, not least because Deng was interested in pragmatism and local experimentation to find more effective local control. One possible explanation for this series of reforms, at least in political science literature, is that the PRC government was too poor to strengthen local control in the 1980s, and so devolving control to local governments could establish a government that was more responsive to local needs. The result was that local governments did yield more popular policies such as infrastructure, health care provision, and educational investment, they tended to ignore less popular policies such as the one-child policy. Subsequently, when provincial and central governments had the money and capability to establish control over local government, these village elections were sidelined. It was not just a means of political control or management, but a stop-gap measure where the central government could not possibly control such a large and populated region. This could be why Wang was so interested in the questions of local government in the United States - it was something that the PRC was experimenting with at this time; not necessarily from an ideological commitment to liberalism, but as a means of addressing local issues where it lacked the state capacity to do so. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Mar 30, 2020 |
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Mar 30, 2020 17:19
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Kangxi posted:This could be why Wang was so interested in the questions of local government in the United States - it was something that the PRC was experimenting with at this time; not necessarily from an ideological commitment to liberalism, but as a means of addressing local issues where it lacked the state capacity to do so. There's something I am curious about, political science-wise; if you hold local elections just to make things responsive enough to avoid revolt, doesn't suborning local elections when you have enough power carry a greater risk? Or is that just factored into the cost?
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Mar 31, 2020 04:53
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Glazius posted:There's something I am curious about, political science-wise; if you hold local elections just to make things responsive enough to avoid revolt, doesn't suborning local elections when you have enough power carry a greater risk? Or is that just factored into the cost? local authorities are also very useful means to direct anger away from the central authority, if properly managed - c.f. david cameron's strategy with austerity in britain, where the big cuts weren't made in big governmental programmes but in transfers of wealth to local authorities, effectively forcing them to cut back and raise local taxes, directing the rage there. of course, you run into the issue of local bigwigs getting in power and potentially leveraging that against the centre, but if you can ensure that the local political levels are going to be unpopular anyway... this is a good thread kangxi i am trying to catch up. big kudos for it!
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Apr 8, 2020 14:44
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You saw exactly that in the central party's handling of COVID-19. It was the local party cadre that messed it all up, forcing Beijing to swoop in.
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Apr 8, 2020 17:51
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Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 7: Political Standards  quote:January 20, 1989, was the inauguration day of Bush as the forty-first president. On this day, Bush and Vice President-elect Quayle will be sworn in on Capitol Hill. All political figures, leaders of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court must attend the swearing-in ceremony. This ceremony will show that Bush officially became president and Reagan officially left office. This is a major event in political life and a political rule. This rule actually becomes a constraint on the outgoing president and the incumbent president, and at the same time shows the people the basic operation of this political system. The new president will deliver a speech at the inauguration ceremony to show the basic viewpoints of his policy, which is also a declaration to the people. quote:On the morning of January 20, the oath was ready in front of the Capitol. Officials from all walks of life and distinguished officials and dignitaries entered the venue in succession. The venue is open-air, with a raised platform the site for the oath. Quite a while ago, Reagan and the dignitaries left the White House by car and went to the Capitol. Before the oath, all parties entered the rostrum in accordance with a fixed ceremony. A door behind the rostrum connected to the Capitol is decorated with a large red curtain. A red carpet leads to the rostrum. There is a microphone and podium. The first is the admission of judges of the Supreme Court, and there are guides introduced to the rostrum. Then the women's family members, including the respective wives of Reagan, Bush, and Quayle, were led by a guide from another corridor. Then Reagan took his seat. After Reagan was Quayle. The last is Bush. Each person or group of people has a dedicated personal guide, 1-2 minutes apart.  The singer was then Staff-Sergeant Alvy Powell, a bass-baritone from the U.S. Army Chorus. He retired from the army in 2017, at age 62, and has had a distinguished operatic career. quote:After the national anthem was sung, Bush gave a speech and announced his basic national policy: Wang then goes to the end of the ceremony, the plane taking the Reagans back to California, and then the walk back to the Capitol building and H.W. Bush getting to work. quote:This process is highly stylized and the expenditure is staggering. The approximate statistic is that the entire inaugural ceremony (almost a week) requires 30 million US dollars, including national spending and private expenditure. Tickets for a full set of events (including various banquets, ceremonies, etc.) are $25,000. The official celebration is estimated at 20 million US dollars. In 1981, Reagan spent $16 million when he took office. This money is all private donations. The government also spent a lot of money, and Congress ’budget for the inauguration ceremony was $775,000. The Washington DC government allocated US $ 2.3 million to provide police services, fire protection, and medical services. The Defense Department spent about 2.5 million US dollars to provide troops, honor guards, etc. The expenditure for the entire activity is staggering, and this is also a feature of the American system. Most of the sub-expenses come from the private sector. Although it shows that there is no political obligation, it is difficult to say whether this is the case. However, as an established procedure to alternate power, these costs are not expensive compared to chaotic or even a bloody transfer of power. I can't find verification for these figures offhand. I do know that Trump's inauguration has raised $107 million from undisclosed organizations, and what's happened to that money has become a cause of several journalists' investigations. Wang again emphasizes the difficulty of any political system of the transfer of power. quote:In this process, you can see the role of political rules and political traditions. This set of ceremonies is ancient, and the oaths were used by the first president two hundred years ago: The Bible is also the Bible used by George Washington two hundred years ago. Not every President uses the Washington Bible - Obama used Abraham Lincoln's bible in 2009 for example - but it is often used. quote:The American nation is a nation that attaches great importance to tradition. This situation seems a little strange: Americans pursue innovation, individualism and so on, but how can they value tradition like this? In fact, the more authority there is in the place where no one has the final say. Tradition has become the only thing that modern people can rely on, but modern people cannot come up with something to convince everyone. In national or state or local political life, rules and traditions are forces that cannot be ignored. On the sensitive issue of power replacement, rules and traditions are more restrictive. In a society where modern political changes are large without forming political rules and political traditions, the transfer of power has some difficulties and is still looking for a suitable path. Translators' Note: Wang's preoccupation here is the transfer of power. This is not exclusively an issue with the People's Republic of China, of course, but I'm adding it as this is the most relevant example from Wang Huning's own experience. From the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 until his death in 1976, Mao had appointed, and then set aside, multiple different successors.  Liu Shaoqi (left) was a veteran of the Chinese Civil War, theoretician, and party organizer, and was at first an enthusiastic supporter of Maoist policies including the Great Leap Forward, but he spoke out publicly about his doubts in 1959. He was sidelined after 1962 and he was purged in the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and died in prison in 1969.  Lin Biao (left), one of Mao's most prominent military commanders and notable for his victory in the siege of Changchun, died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash over Mongolia in 1971 after a suspected coup attempt.  Then the Gang of Four soon took precedence. The Gang of Four included Wang Hongwen, a theorist that Mao favored, as well as Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. Mao favored the Gang, then Deng Xiaoping before demoting him, and then Hua Guofeng (pictured), party secretary of Hunan Province. Hua held multiple senior positions, and he purged the Gang of Four, and Jiang Qing, committed suicide in jail in 1991. However, his moderate and piecemeal approach to reforms led to serious opposition from those who were more concerned after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the Party's own survival was in doubt. He was mocked as having a "Two Whatevers" policy of saying whatever Mao said and doing whatever Mao did. It was this lack of confidence that led Deng Xiaoping to seize power. By January 1989, Deng would be 84 years old. While those interparty conflicts between factions continued, Deng still held undisputed power from 1978 to his death in 1997, and even though he did not hold any official titles from 1989 until his death. He had two appointed successors himself, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang. But Hu was forced to resign after making sympathetic statements towards student protestors in 1987. Hu remained popular among student movements, and his death in 1989 sparked a series of nationwide protests which culminated with the tragic events of June of that year. Zhao Ziyang was ousted just before the crackdown. Deng would later impose a system of 'collective leadership' and term limitations to replace life-long service for leadership at the top, and leadership changes were determined at party meetings and with inter-party consensus. This system survived through the administrations of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao - despite later conflicts between the two - but did not last with Xi Jinping's abolition of term limits in 2018.
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Apr 12, 2020 19:30
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Kangxi posted:Translators' Note: Wang's preoccupation here is the transfer of power. This is not exclusively an issue with the People's Republic of China, of course, but I'm adding it as this is the most relevant example from Wang Huning's own experience. Yeah, that's the trick, isn't it? Finding someone who's both willing to use that power and willing to give it up. It'll be a good day when someone works that one out. Searching "takes off his armor and returns to the farm" brings up the Anabasis. Is that the source of it? It's a simple but evocative phrase.
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May 28, 2020 22:41
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Glazius posted:Yeah, that's the trick, isn't it? Finding someone who's both willing to use that power and willing to give it up. It'll be a good day when someone works that one out. No, generally speaking it refers to the concept of a "citizen-soldier" and is associated with the Republican Rome. More specifically it could be taken as a reference to the Roman dictator Cincinnatus, who resigned from the dictatorship and returned to private life as soon as the crisis which brought him to office was over. Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:23 on May 29, 2020 |
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May 29, 2020 00:04
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I am deeply sorry for the delay - I'm having to make some life adjustments. That was a literal translation of the set phrase 解甲归田 and my dictionary only gives more recent examples of its use - either in a work by Sun Yat-sen, "The Duty of a Revolutionary Army", or from the novelist Yao Xueyin, who wrote a historical novel on the life of Li Zicheng, the rebel around the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
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May 29, 2020 00:44
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quote:[3) It must not be assumed that those who make constitutions think of all working people and are making constitutions for them. The people who enacted the constitution at the time thought primarily about maintaining their interests, a new ruling group. The popularization of the spirit of the constitution was a long time later. Until the 1960s, black Americans were still fighting hard for their rights. To this day, black people are still fighting, although they do not shed blood as often. Three decades later and not much has changed in that regard.
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May 29, 2020 01:59
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Hello. I came here from /lit/ and translated 3.7. This book is interesting to me and as an wannabe sinologist I think I'll keep translating chapters as a means of deeply reading the text. I'll try to consolidate my and Kangxi's translation into a google doc. I also really appreciate Kangxi's commentary on the text and see it as just as valuable as the translation. Maybe we can work together and with others to make a comprehensive translation and commentary over the next months and years. I'm using the pdf and OCR'd markdown file in this github repo to translate this. The markdown file has some OCR errors but I'm mainly using that combined with the pdf. quote:3.7 Sexual Liberation Next I plan to translate 11.7 given the recent BLM protests.
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Jun 10, 2020 08:49
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Thanks, its an interesting section. "homosexuality is legal and homosexual couples can be formally married and live together" The marriage part is of course incorrect, but I believe he's talking about registered cohabitation, which Gay rights activists had been pushing for and some county's and city governments had passed in the 80s. It gave limited protection from eviction if the landlord was homophobic. And it became a hot button issue when conservative groups like Save Our Children and Anit Bryant began trying to overturn them. https://libcom.org/history/1977-80-gay-activists-boycott-orange-juice I'm curious how the Chinese audience reacted to this section, both government and public. I understand there was a very, very slow thaw and attitude adjustment to homosexuality in this period, that slowly opened up in the 1990s. I've read that the first book about homosexuality to receive official publication in the PRC was restricted to a small printing and had to be requested with the article saying a request had to be approved by their employer. It didn't specify if this was purely for civil servants or applied to all workplaces.
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Jun 10, 2020 12:24
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Baka-nin posted:I'm curious how the Chinese audience reacted to this section, both government and public. I understand there was a very, very slow thaw and attitude adjustment to homosexuality in this period, that slowly opened up in the 1990s. I've read that the first book about homosexuality to receive official publication in the PRC was restricted to a small printing and had to be requested with the article saying a request had to be approved by their employer. It didn't specify if this was purely for civil servants or applied to all workplaces. this sounds almost as convoluted as the process for getting the Victorian English article on gay penguin sex. At least they didn't exclusively release the official publication in ancient Greek!
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Jun 11, 2020 03:44
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In light of the BLM movement, I have translated 11.7: The Black Challenge. There were some hard parts to translate correctly to English, so let me know if something is translated incorrectly or doesn't make sense.quote:When talking about the “Black Challenge” or “Black Storm”, I am referring to black people problems. The social and political problems caused by black people have become a headache and are a serious challenge to society. Some people consider the black problem as the largest societal problem, and say that it will become a fatal problem. In the US, it can be deeply felt that there is some truth to this statement.
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Jun 14, 2020 19:17
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So, uh, I owe everyone an apology for the absurd delays. But now I can get back to translating. My sincere thanks to chezhead, who has translated some chapters on their own. After this, I'm still interested in jumping around if there are any chapters of interest, or if I might keep going in sequence. Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 8: The Third Republic quote:To many people, the term "Third American Republic" is an unfamiliar concept. Many people may have heard of the Fourth and the Fifth French Republic, but they have never heard of the concept of "Third United States of America", which was first introduced in 1969. Of course, it was just a scholar, Theodore J. Lowi, who proposed the concept in a book. The book was called The End of Liberalism: The Second United States of America. In the book, Lowi analyzes the evolution of mainstream thought in the United States and points out the trends of social development. These analyses are valuable for understanding the United States.  Theodore 'Ted' J. Lowi (1931-2017) was a professor of political science and government at Cornell. His focus was on the role of the American presidency, which he viewed as a 'plebiscitary' office as the president continues to communicate their plans and goals directly with the American public. He also wrote on the dangerous cycle of American presidents being unable to fulfill all of their promises at once, forcing their predecessor to use even more of a rhetorical flourish and promise even more to be able to compete. Rather cynically, he also wrote of the "Law of Succession" - each American president enhances the reputation of their predecessors.  Seymour Martin Lipsett (1922-2006) was an American sociologist who held various positions in think tanks and universities. He started off in life as a militant socialist but later drifted towards neoconservatism. He wrote primarily on American exceptionalism and some of his more famous work speculated on why or how a socialist party never developed in the United States to the extent that they did in Europe. quote:The demise of liberalism is related to Keynesianism. The classic tenets of capitalism are "the invisible hand" and "laissez-faire". These are the basic rules of capitalism as laid out by Adam Smith. However, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production, or the regulatory requirements resulting from socialized mass production, form the basis for some of the ills of the social structure of capitalist societies. The evolution of these contradictions, by the beginning of the twentieth century, had intensified and seriously threatened Western society and the capitalist system. At this time, many Western scholars realized that they should revise the traditional Western concepts and find a way out of the dilemma. As a result, the doctrines of British economist John Maynard Keynes came into being, forming what became known as Keynesianism. The core idea of Keynesianism was very different from traditional liberalism. He emphasized government regulation, and that the government should promote full employment, regulate consumer tendency and the economy through its "visible hand". "the intention to invest", and public works. When the capitalist world encountered a general crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, Keynesianism became mainstream. If capitalism had not faced such a huge crisis, Keynesianism would not have been able to gain a foothold in the West. Human nature has always been such that one does not go ahead until your back is against the wall, and this is often the case with government policies as well. It will soon be seen how Keynesianism itself went down this road. Lowi brings together a lot of economics terms with his political science so I'll try and slow down here. Pluralism in political science refers to the idea that politics and decision making are located mostly in the framework of government, but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence on government, and the government can act as a mediator between different interest groups. Imperfect competition is the condition where any kind of market does not fulfill all of the conditions of a 'perfectly competitive' market - that is, in most cases of market systems. So what he's arguing here is that where the state does not control all aspects of the economy in a market system, non-governmental entities have an active role and influence on the state. quote:Interest group liberalism, in Lowi's terminology, is the Second Republic of the United States. He says it has been practiced by every Congress and every administration since 1961. Interest group libertarianism has led to serious consequences: government agencies have been freed from the control of the people, new privileges have been maintained and created, and so on. More importantly, this new form of liberalism does not cope with the basic contradictions of capitalist society in the long term. I'm not going to go over all of his ideas in detail, but I can add some context - at this time, the People's Republic of China was going through its own process of economic and social reform. At this point, the government was stepping away from a centrally planned economy, and more state-owned enterprises were turned over to the local party, town, or village control. What Wang emphasizes - at least what he views as the incompatibility of Keynesianism with liberalism - may parallel how some of the hardliner leaders in the government at the time viewed the market reforms - anything even remotely resembling a market economy would be incompatible with socialism. On the other hand, Wang does not reject the idea of "coordination" 协调 in and of itself - he still asserts that it is necessary for "development", and that technological advances make it possible. I might venture to guess is that he might argue for a 'selective' relaxation of certain government functions or the ownership of things like state-owned enterprises or letting villages run their own business, but not out of any ideological commitment to liberalism but with the premise that the PRC is simply so large and complex that some functions have to be delegated until later. Anyway, thanks for being patient. Hopefully the next update won't take months. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Nov 30, 2020 |
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Nov 30, 2020 04:31
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Thank you for continuing to update this! Always a pleasure to read.
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Nov 30, 2020 11:06
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As far as I'm concerned there might be interesting stuff anywhere in this book, so why not go straight through, but the translation's all on you so go where your heart leads. Does the book have anything to say about the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system, as far as impacts to the economy go? The Great Depression was a demand crisis, largely caused by economies operating on the gold standard not wanting to issue the currency they were entitled to in case they needed to trade for something later. The US malaise of the 70s was a supply crisis, caused first by an abrupt withdrawal from the Bretton Woods system, which resulted in a rapid fall of the dollar against other currencies (protip: don't become the world's central banker under the assumption everyone else's economies will be devastated by war forever, also protip: WHY ARE YOU STILL ON THE GOLD STANDARD THAT poo poo CAUSED THE GREAT DEPRESSION) and second by OPEC increasing its prices in the wake of the Bretton Woods collapse, which wreaked further havoc with the oil-dependent production chains in most economies. In both cases it wasn't necessarily the action of the United States on its own that managed things, but rather how the United States was able or unable to react to the operation of international systems.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:29
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Jeoh posted:Thank you for continuing to update this! Always a pleasure to read. Thank you for reading this! Glazius posted:As far as I'm concerned there might be interesting stuff anywhere in this book, so why not go straight through, but the translation's all on you so go where your heart leads. I'll keep going in order. Unless there is a massive overwhelming consensus for a different chapter. Glazius posted:Does the book have anything to say about the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system, as far as impacts to the economy go? The Great Depression was a demand crisis, largely caused by economies operating on the gold standard not wanting to issue the currency they were entitled to in case they needed to trade for something later. He does mention the Bretton Woods system briefly in the 'Manhattan and Chinatown' chapter, which I've already translated. It comes after a long segment on economic development and the continued primacy of the dollar in foreign exchange and as a global reserve currency after the second world war, and largely in the context of free trade versus protectionism.
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Dec 2, 2020 05:33
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Chapter 3: A Colorful National Character Part 1: International People quote:Americans may be called an international people. Although most of them do not have a sense of active participation in the world, their social and economic mechanisms have forced them into this diverse world. Compared to those who are considered backward and ignorant by Americans or Westerners, Americans' global consciousness is, on the whole, much weaker. In recent years, American scholars have repeatedly called out that the young generation's knowledge of the world to be pitifully low, incompatible with the status of a great nation. People in developing or backward countries, on the other hand, because they aspire to prosperity and development and to the outside world, have strong feelings about the world and possess more knowledge. Lots of general statements here. That said, it's not really a surprise to see the image of Americans not knowing very much of the outside world persisting in the 1980s. quote:In the United States, the masses were passively cosmopolitan, and social, economic, and cosmopolitan interactions forced Americans to globalize. The Monroe Doctrine that prevailed earlier is difficult to reproduce unless there are specific historical conditions. The straw-hatted, horseback-riding, dirt-faced Americans depicted in Western films have now been transformed into people traveling around the world in Boeing 747s, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines. Quite a few knowledgeable people are very concerned about the development of the world today/the globalization of people. A great deal of effort has gone into teaching and research to promote the internationalization of the American people. Americans can be said to be experienced, the general public does not have much interest in the outside world, and a considerable number of Americans, who cling to their own doorstep, recognize this problem and vigorously pursue international research and international education to cultivate talent. I'm very surprised he's not talking about economic globalization to start off with. That said, he's not talking about international trade here or corporate administration, although he does discuss that in later chapters. quote:In summary, some of the characteristics of such institutions can be found as follows. At this point, he goes on to list several departments and programs from universities - not just the big-name private schools but he's impressed with area studies programs from some of the big state schools. quote:Educational goals are clear. Here, he goes on to discuss how multiple schools on the west coast are focusing on Asia-Pacific issues, and schools on the east coast tend to have 'Eastern' (that is, European) area studies programs. He goes on to contrast this with education in central or non-coastal China, where international affairs programs were not so popularized. quote:The government is focused on promoting them. [...] Ultimately, the development of a society depends on the quality of its people. A nation's status in the international arena and its ability to compete in the national community depends on the quality of its people. Policymakers know this. This is a federal state, and state governments have decision-making authority over state universities. He then goes on to discuss UC San Diego's establishment of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, now called the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, with a mass hiring of new professors with high salaries, having even poached some faculty members from UC Berkeley. He also briefly discusses the UC system, which at the time had nine campuses. quote:The school's description is clear: The primary goals of the college are to train students interested in Pacific countries and prepare them for leadership positions in business, diplomacy, public institutions, and other fields, and to serve as a center for the study of economic, political, social, technological, and security issues in the region. This is just one example of the many universities in the United States. Naturally, the government's intent is not just to train students, but to pursue political, economic, and cultural development. But without the preceding step, the latter step would be difficult to achieve. quote:Emphasis on international exchange. Educational or research institutions that deal with international issues are not only concerned with promoting research on foreign issues by their own professors, but also with expanding academic exchange and cooperation with scholars in the countries they study. Americans are probably the most inclined to use foreign experts, and in this regard, this nation is the most pragmatic. It is a nation of pragmatists. Visiting scholars from many countries, sometimes in large groups, can be found in many international research and educational institutions. At the same time, Americans tend to hire people from a certain country as professors, if they are qualified. Therefore, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Canadian, French, and Hungarian professors are often seen in universities, which is probably not a common phenomenon in the world. Mainland China would have had very few foreign guest instructors or lecturers until after the reform era - during the Maoist period there was a substantial number of Soviet guest lecturers and academics but these were expelled by the late 1950s due to Sino-Soviet tensions. More foreign exchange students would attend Chinese schools starting in the 1980s, and the total would rise to nearly 500,000 by 2018.  Robert Scalapino (1919-2011) was a political scientist and scholar of East Asian politics. He founded the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and was a professor there for over 40 years. He wrote books on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese politics, and visited China over 60 times. He described Japan as a "one-and-a-half" party system in describing the dominance of the Liberal Democrats there for decades, and he wrote on China as an "authoritarian-pluralist" society. He was in favor of Nixon improving relations with China and criticized the Taiwanese government's human rights abuses of the time. He was also an advocate for intervention in Vietnam. There is a story told by the late Richard Baum that, during Baum's own thesis defense, Scalapino got in a shouting match with Chalmers Johnson during the thesis defense and Baum could only sit and watch. Baum passed. quote:Much of the internationalization of Americans, at the popular level, is passive, as they are drawn into the world by the process of world economic integration, and the economic challenges of Europe, Japan, and Asia make it impossible for them not to become involved in international economic life. On the other hand, the direction of government policies has also contributed to their involvement in international life, such as the problems of the Middle East, Central America, and so on. However, from the point of view of the government and the knowledgeable people, they have targeted and strategic intentions in internationalization. Educational and research institutions also have long-term goals. These are conscious, organized, and planned processes. The past, present, and future of the United States cannot be separated from this process. What worries politicians and educated people is that the younger generation is becoming less and less international. The essence of their concern is, how long can the United States remain a world power? Do they really understand the world? Do you have the ability to compete on the international stage in a crowded field? In short, he doesn't sound all that critical here, does he? Considering that Chinese education was still pulling itself out of the rut left after the Cultural Revolution and that university exams had reopened only in 1977, it's a small wonder he finds much to like in the US. Besides the university system, China has some centralized academic/research institutions which are the legacy of a Soviet model - the Chinese Academy of Sciences was founded in 1949, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, though founded much later, may still be considered along the same central model of government support. Over the past few decades, there were a number of plans for developing the university system within China itself - some of them overlap and the terminology is in fact confusing. Besides Project 211, Project 985, and now the Double First-Class Plan, the CCP has invested a substantial amount of time and effort in building up domestic higher education in research output and developing specific programs. There are also a number of dual-degree programs established with Chinese and foreign schools and schools with campuses in China itself. As for area studies, multiple schools would receive funding and support for that in the late 1990s, with different departments across the country getting funding. Wang Huning's own Fudan University, of course, would get funding for American studies. All this is not without international attention or controversy - there is also the ongoing Thousand Talents program to recruit foreign scholars for positions and work within China. However, this program has been marred by foreign scholars heading back, as well as allegations of international property theft.
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Dec 8, 2020 06:11
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Attracting international professors is probably one of those unequal advantages - an already wealthy country is willing to pay well and part ways on amicable terms.
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Dec 10, 2020 02:03
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Chapter 3: A Colorful National Character Part 2: Making a Show of Being Original quote:It can be said that Americans are still a rather conservative people in terms of values, such as sexual liberation, rock and roll, hippies, homosexuality, decadence, and racial equality, which are still not accepted by all Americans. Many people hold on to old-fashioned values. This is especially true in politics, where traditional values still dominate. The Republican Party's consecutive presidential election victories can also be considered a manifestation of this tendency. The people still hold very traditional standards when evaluating political leaders. Hart, the backbone of the Democratic Party, had to withdraw from the presidential race because of a peach incident, and Quayle was elected vice president because of Bush's own glory. Many people shake their heads when they talk about Quayle, saying that he did not do well in his school exams, served in the military only in the National Guard, had no experience, and was popular because of his rich father. Many Easterners take for granted that in a sexually liberated country like the United States, relationships between men and women do not pose any problems, but often pose major problems in the political arena. This is true in the Western world. Americans follow the ideas of their founding fathers in politics and remain largely unchanged. The entire system maintains this set of ideas to the exclusion of others, and in this respect, Americans tend to be conservative.  Gary Hart (1936-) was a Democratic Senator for Colorado from 1975 to 1987. He became known as an "Atari Democrat", along with Al Gore and Paul Tsongas for his advocacy of high technology policy. He ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 but narrowly lost to Walter Mondale, who subsequently lost all but one state and the District of Columbia. Hart ran again, but his campaign ended when rumors of an extramarital affair broke in the press. Hart suspended his campaign in May of 1987, then returned to the campaign in December of that year, where he fared poorly and lost the New Hampshire primary. Hart later went on to chair a committee on national security for the Clinton administration, and serve as Special Envoy to Northern Ireland under the Obama Administration.  The president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, also was a candidate in the 1988 Democratic primary; he withdrew in September of 1987 after allegations of plagiarizing a speech from British Labour MP Neil Kinnock and exaggerating aspects of his early life. It turned out to be a lucky break; after persistent episodes of neck pain, he underwent surgery in February 1988 to repair a leaking saccular aneurysm. He suffered a pulmonary embolism, but later survived and went on to serve in the Senate for twenty more years. Michael Dukakis won the Democratic Primary for 1988; he went on to face George H. W. Bush and lose by a margin of 426-111 in the electoral college. But Wang will get to this in further detail in later chapters. quote:Paradoxically, Americans are also the most innovative people in the world. There is a peculiar phenomenon in this nation: the public accepts the oldest and most ancient things but is also open to the newest and strangest things. This society has more inventions, bolder, and more courageous visions than any other society. In recent years, Americans have launched the space shuttle, proposed the Star Wars program, and in late 1988 exhibited the ingeniously styled B2 bomber. When it comes to small inventions, Americans are also quite good. When you walk into a big department store, you can find all kinds of goods for all kinds of different purposes.  The Space Shuttle was a reusable low-earth orbital spacecraft that began operation in 1981, although test flights were undertaken using the shuttle Enterprise as early as 1976. By the end of 1989, when this book was published, the shuttles had a total of 33 combined missions, with the use of robotic arms to manipulate objects, conduct experiments in microgravity, and deploy communications satellites. At the start of deployment, there were four different space shuttles, although one of them, the Challenger, was destroyed in an explosion in 1986, and the Columbia was destroyed in an accident in 2003. The Shuttle program ended in 2011, and for a span between 2011 and 2020, American astronauts relied on the Soyuz rockets to visit the International Space Station.  The Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, was announced in a nationally televised speech in 1983 by then-President Ronald Reagan. The SDI was a missile-defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic missiles, both those launched from ground sites as well as submarine-based nuclear missiles. Massive amounts of funding went to the defense sector, defense industry, and academic research sectors, which focused on computing, advanced materials, laser technology, and high-energy physics. The program was controversial upon its inception; Congressional Democrats said that form of military spending was reckless and irresponsible. The Soviet Union, in response, continued to develop its own advanced technology.  The Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit Bomber began development in the 1970s but only took its first flight in 1989. It is a strategic bomber with the intent of being able to penetrate anti-air systems and can deploy conventional and nuclear weapons. Some 130 bombers were planned on being procured, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was reduced to 21. They are planned on being operated until the 2030s. quote:This contradiction manifests itself in different domains. Americans tend to be conservative in the realm of values. But in the field of technology, they seek to be new and different. The most daring ideas in the technology field are approved. Some Americans built a mock space city in a remote area, ready to recruit volunteers to live in it closed for two years, and it was completed surprisingly quickly. If tomorrow someone proposed to build a highway on the Atlantic Ocean from America to Europe, or on the Pacific Ocean from America to Asia, it would not be considered crazy, but rather a remarkable idea.  The mock space city Wang is referring to is probably Biosphere 2, and construction began on that project in 1987. It was a grand experiment to create a closed ecological system that could provide for human life on off-earth conditions - the result was a bizarre and compelling story that I couldn't summarize here. It involves sabotage, conflict, and somehow Steve Bannon is involved. A New York Times article does a good job of telling what might have gone wrong. I haven't heard anything serious about a trans-Atlantic bridge, but various plans for a Bering strait crossing have been floated for years. quote:Using human abilities to conquer nature is one of the traditional American values, and so here innovation and tradition are not contradictory. The process of innovation follows most closely the wrestling process of traditional values. The whimsical nature of this process is often limited to the material and technological realm. In the material and technological realm, Americans are ready to accept anything. America's historical development and technological advances have created this state of mind.  quote:The Arch of St. Louis is one of the world's greatest, some 630 feet high, nearly two hundred meters, and made entirely of stainless steel. It stands tall and shines majestically in the silvery light of the sun and blue sky. The span of the arch is also more than two hundred meters away, the entire arch is like an oversized silver rainbow appears on the banks of the Mississippi River. Below the arch is the Jefferson Territorial Extension Memorial, which commemorates President Thomas Jefferson's campaign to advance the development of the West in the first half of the 19th century in the United States. Inside the arch is an elevator that takes visitors from below all the way to the top of the arch, where there is a ten-meter walkway with some windows that provide a bird's eye view of the city of St. Louis. The elevator goes up or down through the two legs of the arch. It's a curious idea. It was designed by Eero Saarinen, an American architect of Finnish origin, whose design won a national call for proposals in 1947. Construction was later started by technical and engineering staff in 1963 and completed in 1965. quote:Another building in Missouri that embodies the American spirit of innovation is the Fulton College Chapel, a small but unassuming place that is world-famous. It is famous for the famous speech delivered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill here in 1946, shortly after the smoke of World War II had cleared, saying that the "Iron Curtain" had fallen, separating the East and the West. The Cold War between the East and West began from then on. The "Iron Curtain" became a common Western term to describe the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. There is a church in this place; from the outside, it is quite unassuming, nothing special compared to the countless churches in the United States. But it is a church with a distinctive flavor. The main reason for this is that the stones used to build the church were brought from England. It was originally an English church, built in the 12th century and completely remodeled in 1677. During World War II, it was severely destroyed by artillery fire, and all that remained were the ruins, stones, and twelve pillars. The church remained in ruins after World War II when the Westminster College Memorial Committee proposed moving the stones to Missouri to build the college's chapel and the Winston Churchill Memorial. 1965 saw the start of the work, with seven hundred tons of stones crossing the Atlantic Ocean at a total cost of $3 million. President Harry S. Truman laid the cornerstone of the church, which was completed in 1969. This is indeed a typical expression of the American spirit of novelty and innovation. Will anyone ask: Why not use local materials? How much more money would it have cost? Where are the stones not available and why do they have to be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean?  Fulton College, in Missouri, has been renamed Westminster College. The speech that he alludes to is Churchill's "Iron Curtain speech", which continues: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.' The speech is often considered a landmark moment defining the start of the Cold War. The Westminster Church, formally titled the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, built, rebuilt, and transported across the Atlantic as Wang describes, although part of the church has now been renovated to house a Churchill museum. Wang continues on in this fashion, describing various small consumer goods, and then briefly touching on science fiction movies such as Star Wars, ET, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. quote:In any case, the pursuit of a new and different spirit in the technical and material fields is an important driving force for the development of this society. Technological advancement and economic development are driven by this spirit. If Americans are said to be more conservative in their values, why have they successfully protected and promoted this spirit of innovation?
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Jan 3, 2021 21:58
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Just to reaffirm, it was a going concern at the time in China to ground the administrative changes of Communism in the national tradition, right? Because it seems a lot like the author is seeing what he wants to see here. It's not like Americans don't make extensive appeals to the national tradition at pretty much all times, that much tracks completely. It's just that despite what Mr. Lincoln had to say, America actually has endured as half slave and half free, from the beginning times all up to the present day, if you just qualify "half slave" as "half aspirational slaveholders". The "national tradition" is so vast that you can ground anything in it and have that resonate because the perception of the national tradition is unfairly narrow. For a practical example of this, look at noted wasp hive/tub of butter hybrid Ted Cruz attempting to ground the objection to the electoral vote in the American national tradition, conveniently omitting "you know, that one year where Southern militias massacred black voters in the streets and traded lasting disenfranchisement of them for a temporary electoral setback".
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Jan 4, 2021 18:52
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Now that’s interesting and reminds me of something in the socialist decision. “Between the origin and the present stands tradition.” So capitalism / modernity is always breaking myths of origin. But capitalism also needs myths of origin understood through tradition to support itself. So there is a fight between the between the bourgeoisie, the romantics (the conservatives) and the revolutionary romantics ( fascists) over tradition. One of arguments Tillich made was that socialism should also support itself through unbroken myths of origin by what eventually becomes his method of correlation (which is this applied to Christian theology). Anyway it’s super interesting to see another tradition reaching the conclusion they should do that.
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Jan 5, 2021 03:08
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Glazius posted:Just to reaffirm, it was a going concern at the time in China to ground the administrative changes of Communism in the national tradition, right? Because it seems a lot like the author is seeing what he wants to see here. First, I feel like I should add that there was a lot of pushback against the economic reforms over the 1980s at top levels. So if you want to talk about 'conservative' figures at the top levels of party leadership, this would lead to people such as Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Li Peng who were cautious or openly skeptical about economic reforms. This resulted in such campaigns as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign of late 1983, and the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization campaign of 1986. So one meaning of 'conservative' might refer to this wing of the party. But if we're talking about traditional culture, that's different. The Chinese Communist Party in the later Mao era had a combative relationship with much of traditional Chinese culture, and the extreme example is the Four Olds campaign. But by the 1980s, in the Deng era, you start to see more topics from the pre-Communist era allowed to be discussed. The publication of more scholarly works on Confucius began in the 1980s, the rehabilitation of various figures in non-Communist regimes started in the 1980s. But a lot of this really accelerated after 1989, after the student protests and the horrible tragedy of June 4th. Excuse the brief answer without any citations, it's late and I've been F5'ing the results of the Georgia election constantly.
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Jan 6, 2021 04:41
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Kangxi posted:First, I feel like I should add that there was a lot of pushback against the economic reforms over the 1980s at top levels. So if you want to talk about 'conservative' figures at the top levels of party leadership, this would lead to people such as Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Li Peng who were cautious or openly skeptical about economic reforms. This resulted in such campaigns as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign of late 1983, and the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization campaign of 1986. So one meaning of 'conservative' might refer to this wing of the party. This is good information, thank you! I probably shouldn't suppose there's that motivation, then; as I've said earlier, a running theme through this book is that the author is analyzing more how America presents its history than the actual American history.
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Jan 6, 2021 23:33
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this book is making the rounds https://twitter.com/shen_shiwei/status/1348533449825546240
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Jan 12, 2021 23:20
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I have been utterly exhausted these past weeks; so this chapter only has some short commentary at the end and no interstitial commentary. Chapter 3: A Colorful National Character Part 3: Demystification 非神秘化 quote:American society has the least mystery within it. People grow up in a society where there is little mystery about anything. This is an inseparable part of the American culture. Many peoples have a strong sense of mystery, such as some peoples of Africa, some peoples of Latin America, including some components of Western European culture. It is worth exploring what role mystery plays in the development of a society, or at least it can be a wall around many traditional ideas and traditional institutions. The same is true for nature. The progress of science and technology lies in the continuous conquest and victory over nature, and if one is full of mystery about nature or some aspects of nature, one cannot take a big step into the temple of nature to see what it is all about; but will linger outside and pray for divine blessing. Americans have few taboos in this regard, or rather taboos do not become taboos. On the other hand, the development of society is the development of human beings themselves, and it is difficult to develop the culture and social institutions of human society if they are full of mystery about people themselves. Short thoughts: -This looks a bit too rosy compared to how many people believe in mystical conspiracy theories and QAnon bullshit these days; but Wang is perhaps being overoptimistic here to illustrate the points he wants to make. -Wang definitely shows his strong influence from Marxist historical materialism; where material factors are the causal factors of ideas; or possibly the early Soviet or Maoist ideas of conquest over nature. -The quote about demystification making people or institutions lack authority reminds me of the CCP term of 'historical nihilism' (历史虚无主义) - which is used as a blanket term to refer to works or individuals who are too strongly critical of the role of the party, or of historical materialism, or the party's top leadership. I could go on about that later. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jan 13, 2021 |
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Jan 13, 2021 04:31
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