|
 Wait what is this? America against America 《美国反对美国》 is a 1991 book published by Wang Huning, then a professor of International Relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, one of the most pre-eminent schools in the country. Wang turned out to be a bit of a political wunderkind - he gained the attention of some close allies of the then-head of state Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. He has headed the Central Policy Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party since 2002. He has been part of the Politburo Standing Committee since 2017, and he was appointed as the head of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization that same year. He has been a part of the administrations of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao before Xi Jinping came to power, and it is unusual he would hold that office for so long given the expected turnover of personnel at that level. He is regarded by outside observers as one of the most influential theorists in the country.  From left to right: Paramount Leader, Chairman of the CCP, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission Xi Jinping, Wang Huning, and Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang. Before all that, however, he was just a young professor who was able to visit the United States on a six-month extended stay. He spent much of his time with the University of Iowa, which gave him a front-row seat to the state primaries and the vicious 1988 election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. When this book was first published in 1990, it accompanied a period of renewed tension with the United States after the tragic events of summer 1989. His harsh criticisms were novel after a period of detente. As far as I am aware, no English translation exists, except for a few brief paragraph-length summaries that exist in academic papers. So I will be providing a word for word translation of the most interesting bits, and then content summaries of the rest. So why read this? I mean I think this is interesting. China is big and it's interesting and people should know more about it. If there is interest, I may add some 'compare and contrast' posts about scholarly research about China. There are several ways this could be useful: -To see what a true-believer party ideologue thinks about the United States, to try and figure out what he's citing in addition to the expected Marxist works. -To try and figure out where the party's later campaigns had their roots -To have a look back at the United States in the same time period, which I think we all can agree had issues Didn't he write anything more up to date? Sure. As a senior member of the government, he's very likely had influence in multiple policy directives and campaigns, although only so much has been directly attributed to him - some speeches and policy circulars. As for published books, his output only goes up to 1995. I picked this book because people said they were interested in it. I'm going to make a more detailed biographical post later. How are you doing this? I will be posting quotations in quote boxes, summaries of the text unformatted, and my own commentary in italic. I will not be posting long blocks of Chinese unless somebody really is concerned with the translation. Mandarin is my third language, so I may slip up on some of the more technical details. Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1, Part 1- Doubt, Made in America Chapter 1, Part 2 - Manhattan and Chinatown Chapter 1, Part 3 - The Four Cs Chapter 1, Part 4 - The Heights of Commodification Chapter 1, Part 5 - Frontiers Chapter 1, Part 6 - The Amana Colonies Chapter 1, Part 7 - Native Landscapes Chapter 1, Part 8: The Decline of the Farm Chapter 2: An Ancient Political Spirit Chapter 2, Part 1 - The American Mind Chapter 2, Part 2 - The Mayflower Chapter 2, Part 3 - A Political Creed Chapter 2, Part 4 - Equality or Freedom? Chapter 2, Part 5 - A Constitution's Bicentennial Chapter 2, Part 6 - Political Genes Chapter 2, Part 7 - Political Standards Chapter 2, Part 8 - "The Third Republic" Chapter 3: A Colorful National Character Chapter 3, Part 1 - International People Chapter 3, Part 2 - Making a Show of Being Original Chapter 3, Part 3 - Demystification Chapter 3, Part 4 - Sacralization Chapter 3, Part 5 - A Misleading Space Shuttle Chapter 3, Part 6 - The "Work Ethic" Chapter 3, Part 7 - Sexual Liberation (by chezhead) Chapter 3, Part 8 - Lonely Spirits Chapter 3, Part 9 - Future World Chapter 3, Part 10 - People are always People Chapter 4: Multileveled Societal Control Chapter 4, Part 1: The Invisible Hand Chapter 4, Part 2: Money-Managed Society Chapter 4, Part 3: Human Standardization Chapter 4, Part 4: Legal Culture Chapter 4, Part 5: Taxation System Chapter 4, Part 6: Scientific Administrators Chapter 4, Part 7: Cats and Dogs are not Free Chapter 5: Interwoven Political Power Chapter 5, Part 1: Rule of Donkey and Elephant Chapter 5, Part 2: Parties Share the Spoils Chapter 5, Part 3: Interest Groups Chapter 5, Part 4: Lobbyists Chapter 5, Part 5: Radical Organizations Chapter 5, Part 6: Pluralism or Meritocracy? Chapter 5, Part 7: Participative Democracy Chapter 6: Incomplete Elections Chapter 6, Part 1: Battle for the White House Chapter 6, Part 2: Road to the Presidency Chapter 6, Part 3: A Tri-County Democratic Party Luncheon Chapter 6, Part 4: TV Debate Chapter 6, Part 5: A Representative's Dream Chapter 6, Part 6: Election Day Chapter 6, Part 7: Who rises and falls? Chapter 7: Political Pyramid Chapter 7, Part 1: Capitol Hill Chapter 7, Part 2: Fifty States Chapter 7, Part 3: County Politics Chapter 7, Part 4: Politics in the Cities Chapter 7, Part 5: Grassroots Politics Chapter 7, Part 6: Transparency Chapter 7, Part 7: Selection of Officials Chapter 7, Part 8: Contacting Representatives Chapter 8: Soft Governance Chapter 8, Part 1: Drivers Licenses Chapter 8, Part 2: Factory Principles Chapter 8, Part 3: A Company is Not a Democracy Chapter 8, Part 4: Human Services Chapter 8, Part 5: Coca-Cola Headquarters Chapter 8, Part 6: God on Earth Chapter 9: Reproducing the System Chapter 9, Part 1: The Educational System Chapter 9, Part 2: MIT Chapter 9, Part 3: The Kennedy School of Government Chapter 9, Part 4: Talent Factories Chapter 9, Part 5: The US Naval Academy Chapter 9, Part 6: Educational Exports Chapter 9, Part 7: A Furnace of Technology Chapter 10: Active Intelligence Chapter 10, Part 1: 'Knowledge Factories' Chapter 10, Part 2: The Brookings Institute Chapter 10, Part 3: The Carter Center Chapter 10, Part 4: The Secretary of Defense's Talk Chapter 10, Part 5: Regional Affairs Centers Chapter 10, Part 6: Think Tanks Chapter 10, Part 7: City Libraries Chapter 11: Hidden Crises Chapter 11, Part 1: Family Values Chapter 11, Part 2: An Ignorant Generation? Chapter 11, Part 3: Wandering Youths Chapter 11, Part 4: America has its own Poisons Chapter 11, Part 5: Criminal Underworld Chapter 11, Part 6: A Beggar Nation Chapter 11, Part 7: Black Crisis (by chezhead) Chapter 11, Part 8: The Natives' Situation Chapter 11, Part 9: A Mental Crisis Chapter 11, Part 10: Empire of the Sun Kangxi fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jan 16, 2021 |
#
¿
Nov 15, 2019 02:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:25 |
|
|
So who is this Wang Huning guy? Wang's ancestry is from Shandong province on the coast, but he was born in Shanghai in 1955, to a family of committed party members. His father, a military officer, was persecuted in Mao's campaign against Marshal Peng Dehuai in 1959. Wang graduated from high school in 1972 but was not sent to a rural area with other urban educated youth as part of the "Down to the Countryside" campaign in 1972, because of his poor health. He attended a vocational training school near Shanghai and learned the French language. In 1978, after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping established himself as ruler of the country. As part of his reforms, Deng reopened the country's institutes of higher education, which had been closed as outposts of bourgeois thinking. Although Wang lacked the qualifications to attend a master's degree program, his scores on the standardized higher examination test were so good that he was immediately admitted into the master's in international relations program at the elite Fudan University in Shanghai. His advisor was Chen Qiren, an authority on Marx's works and Das Kapital. Wang wrote a thesis, "From Bodin to Maritain: On Sovereignty Theories Developed by the Western Bourgeoisie." He stayed at Fudan for several years and worked as a teacher and writer. By 1985, before he turned 30, he was promoted to Associate Professor, the youngest in the school's history. He wrote several books, including National Sovereignty (1987), Comparative Political Analysis (1987), An Analysis of Contemporary Western Political Science (1987), Fighting Corruption: China's Experiment (1990), and co-edited books such as Logic of Politics: Marxist Principles of Political Science (1989). After all this, he had time to write magazine articles, translate books by the political scientists Raymond Aron and Robert Dahl, and even coach the university's award-winning debate team. Oh yes, and he was eventually promoted to full professor and head of the Law School. All this was getting people's attention. Officials in the Shanghai municipal government, such as Zeng Qinghong and Wu Bangguo kept a close eye on him. They, in turn, were close associates with Jiang Zemin, who was mayor of Shanghai in the 1980s. Jiang Zemin was eventually handpicked by Deng Xiaoping to be his successor, and Jiang brought with him many of his close associates from Shanghai, who were in turn called the Shanghai clique. By 1995, when Jiang had consolidated his position at the top, he eventually cajoled Wang to join the government. His time as a public intellectual was over, and his time as a party employee begun. He started off in the Central Policy Research Office, which wrote on policy analysis, ideological matters, and even wrote speeches for Central Committee members. Wang was soon promoted to lead that, too. By 2002, with the start of the Hu Jintao administration, he was a member of the Central Committee. By 2007, he was part of the Central Secretariat. By 2012, he was in the Politburo, or the top 25 members of the Chinese Communist Party. You get the picture. {Continued}
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2019 04:32
|
|
|
So what does this guy even do? What did he think anyway? The role of intellectuals and writers has been a major part of the Marxist critical tradition - the contrast is between the romanticized ideal of the proletariat liberating themselves, and of intellectuals taking a leading role. In the Chinese Communist Party, the role of intellectuals has veered between extremes. On the one hand, one of the terms for party education is still 'thought work' 思想工作 , with implications on the role of ideology in personal education. At their nadir, Mao is said to have regarded intellectuals and writers as the ‘stinking old ninth' 臭老九, borrowing a term from the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, where he regarded intellectuals as the very lowest class, even worse than reactionaries and landlords. Their position has improved after the Deng reforms, but successive heads of state noted that the party faced a legitimacy crisis after the domestic turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, with doubts over the future of socialism, a crisis of belief in Marxism, and a lack of trust in the party. Afterward, subsequent leaders of the party continued to emphasize the importance of social sciences as part of the process of 'socialist modernization'. College students to this day still have required classes on policy issues and the fundamentals of Marxism. There are some recurring trends in Wang Huning's work, and it is possible these concepts are a reason for why the party leadership took such an interest in him personally. His first book, State Sovereignty 《国家主权》, traces the importance and evolution of the concept of sovereignty in political science. He contrasts it with the older Chinese concept of zhuquan, which uses the same characters and was borrowed by a nineteenth-century translator in his edition of the works of Montesquieu. He starts with a historical survey of the concept and then ties it to Marxist-Leninist concepts of national equality and self-determination, and with the specific example of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, a stated doctrine in foreign policy. His other famous book, Comparative Political Analysis 《比较政治分析》 introduced concepts of comparative politics to a Chinese audience, and defines the 20th century as being so 'political' that such issues as transportation and ecology are now 'political'. Aside from discussions of historical, cultural, and social elements in political analysis, he still draws upon the Marxist ideal of the 'withering away of the state' as still a useful concept because it still provides a long-term goal for which to draw historical comparisons. While Orthodox Marxism is well known for emphasizing the relationship between economic forces in determining social development in certain circumstances, Wang still emphasizes that the Marxist concept of historical materialism does not deny the role of politics in certain circumstances. He cites the Cultural Revolution as an example of where this went wrong, where unchecked class warfare led to mass destruction and societal breakdown. His essays also cover an eclectic range of topics. He often tends to his broad trend of borrowing from historical examples, but he does caution against "grafting flowers onto trees" 移花接木 or the belief that Western-style democracy is not compatible with the People's Republic at its current stage of development. To continue along with his gardening metaphors, he says that would be "pulling saplings to make them grow taller" 拔苗助长. He has often been labeled with the phrase 'neo-authoritarian'. While he does reject the label, he has advocated for strengthening the power of the central government on multiple occasions, as seen in an interview in the journal "Socialist Studies". So what's the point of reading about this dude again? He rose up to power very quickly and stayed there, even after starting his career in academia. This is unprecedented in contemporary Chinese politics so far. It's very likely he's played a role in shaping the policy initiatives at the highest level. Articles crediting him with developing or influencing several ideological banners are allowed in state media and academic journals, and they have not been censored. While Chinese elite politics is opaque and a lot of outside observers can only guess at how the top committees make decisions and who's the boss and who reports to who, the fact that the top leadership hasn't thrown him out suggests that he has played a role in these ideas. The "three represents" 三个代表 campaign of Jiang Zemin aimed at the further growth of the economy and working with private entrepreneurs and other beneficiaries of the Deng-era reforms - organizations that would have been denounced in the previous years. Hu Jintao's "scientific outlook on development" 科学发展观 by contrast, focused on gaps between regions and within populations and represented a retrenchment from the previous policies of market reform, and a focus on issues that would destabilize a 'harmonious' society. Xi Jinping's "China Dream" 中国梦 ties into a speech given in 2012, where Xi talks about the 'great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" 伟大复兴的中国. It's not the same as Mao's mass mobilization campaigns, and they're not really policy summaries either; they're narratives given to frame policies at the very top level or trying to solve a national identity crisis after a period of disorder. Wang Huning doesn't hold a specific ministry like the Foreign Ministry; he doesn't have control over the military, he doesn't have political power. But he's a 'hidden leader' and policy advisor, and that's why successive administrations have kept him along. On to the book. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2019 22:25
|
|
|
This is the first part I'm actually doing. So please let me know if I'm going over it in too much detail, too little, if there is anything I should explain or provide context for, etc. I apologize in advance for the faults in the translation. Preface Wang was invited to the US in late August 1988 and stayed there for about six months. He is aware that he is not a specialist in American society, he knows he cannot describe everything in the United States with one book. But he hopes to use a variety of analyses to produce something useful for his own people and for the development of China - again drawing from his experience in writing Comparative Political Analysis. Wang Huning, pg. 1 posted:
The approach of this book is to consider American society through frameworks of historical, social, or cultural conditions; and he won't consider each factor in isolation. If anything else, I suspect he's read or heard of complexity theory or the use of complex systems analysis in the field of strategic management. Julian Gewirtz has written a paper on how complex systems theory and the 1980s theories of futurism gained readership among CCP officials in the 1980s. While Wang considers himself a theorist by training, he hopes to at least base the bulk of this book off of what he sees and to give people enough to think about. While he is a specialist in Chinese policy, he feels obligated to study the "America phenomenon" because he'd need to know how a country with such a comparatively short history becomes the world's leading developed country. Likewise, he feels compelled to answer how China could have declined in the modern era. He then explains the title, which he says some readers will find strange. He claims that we can't dogmatically rely on terms like "exploiting surplus value" and "bourgeois" alone, nor should observers go to the other positive extreme. With more careful study, he hopes to discard a superficial look at the country and uncover the hidden contradictions. The obvious example he gives of this is seeing the "People's Park" in Berkeley California, which was filled with homeless people in miserable conditions. Sad to say that the People's Park in Berkeley has so many homeless people in it still. Dialectical materialists do love discussing contradictions - or Marxist dialectical materialists do it, they refer to the opposition of various social forces. Mao was devoted to the concept, devoting an entire essay to it, and saying that all of reality was composed of 'contradictions'. There is also a People's Park in Shanghai, built on the grounds of a former racing track. It neighbors several museums, the Shanghai Grand Theatre, and a major shopping center. In the 70s and 80s, university students practiced their English here. Though by the late 1980s it was the site of student protests. By the mid-2000s, the People's Park in Shanghai was also the site of a 'marriage market', where parents attempted to find suitable matches for their children. Page 5 posted:The average person also believes that the United States is a Western democracy; indeed a model Western democracy. Americans are also proud of this. The Constitution, taking part in elections, separation of powers, citizen participation in politics, and so on, show one aspect of this system, but from another perspective, can every civilian population really dominate the politics of this country? My analysis in this book shows that the dominant political power group is above the civilian population. Under the capitalist system of the United States, the restrictions of private property on democracy cannot be ignored. Even American scholars have said that the difference in economic power is so large that a group can use non-political means to determine the misfortune of another group and that democracy cannot function properly. Therefore, true political democracy must include the right of the ruled to control economic policy through their representatives. (Sydney Hook: "Reason, Social Myths and Democracy", p. 286) The economic decision-making power of the United States is mainly controlled by private consortia. Is this democracy? Is this undemocratic? I fear it cannot be answered so simply. Sidney Hook was an American political philosopher who studied under John Dewey. He started off as a Marxist, writing enthusiastic articles about the Soviet Union and supporting the CPUSA candidate in the 1932 elections, then he shifted to social democracy and then anti-Communism and 'anti-totalitarianism' after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He grew opposed to the 'New Left' over the course of his life, supporting Governor Reagan's removal of Angela Davis from her professorship at UCLA and he defended US involvement in the Vietnam War. Hook also advocated a ban of 'democratic centralist', i.e. Marxist-Leninist, parties from political office. Wang goes on and on about further contradictions, and how the 'real' United States opposes the 'ideal' of the United States. It is only one capitalist country and cannot represent them all, but again he hammers on this point there can be lessons for socialist countries from this study. Page 6 posted:One hundred and fifty years ago, Marx and Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto: "The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." Lenin declared that imperialism is "degrading" and "corrupted". One only wonders what he thought after 2008. Page 7 posted:There are eleven chapters in this book. I want to emphasize the following points: (1) social inequality and its characteristics; (2) the values of the dominant political life and its changes; (3) the diversity of the nation and its social effects; (4) formal and informal mechanisms of regulating people's social activities; (5) political forces and their relationships that are active in society; (6) democratic and non-democratic factors in electoral campaigns; (7) Top-down political operations and their characteristics; (8) non-political coordination mechanisms and socialized control; (9) the association between culture, values and the reproduction of the system through education; (10) the idea of social development and management (11) The hidden currents that threaten future development. This last chapter, he says, will be short and incomplete. He apologizes for what he views as the books' shortcomings - that it's too short and won't be as detailed as he'd like. He thanks the many people and organizations who helped him in writing this book, including the many Chinese friends he made in America. Many of the guys he talks to are China specialists. Douglas Madsen is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Iowa, but he was primarily a comparativist. Benjamin Stavis was a China specialist and moved to Temple. Lucian Pye, of MIT, advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was president of the American Political Science Association from 88-89. He also wrote a pretty off the wall Mao biography. Michel Oksenberg of Michigan was a Scoop Jackson Democrat who worked for National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration, and also played a major advocate for normalizing relations with China in 1979. Ken Lieberthal, also of Michigan, served in the Clinton administration and was a senior fellow at Brookings. David H. Rosenbloom was a scholar at Syracuse and is now a professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Robert Scalapino, at Berkeley, was a founder of the National Committee on US-China relations. He also met with Professor Kokubun Ryosei at Keio University in Japan, among others. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Nov 18, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2019 23:19
|
|
|
WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Turn to page 56 OP 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2019 23:19
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 1: Doubts Made in the USA Page 1 posted:Air China Flight CA985 passed through Tokyo Japan, over the rough and turbulent waters of the Pacific to San Francisco. Due to a flight delay, planes from Europe, Asia, and North America were all crowded together. On weekdays, the spacious luggage and customs halls are full and crowded with people, a boiling cauldron of voices. No matter where you come from, there is a feeling of excitement when arriving in the United States. A plane might have come from France and many people around speak French. After waiting in line for more than an hour, everyone complained that it was like China and the wait took too long. Many people think that there are no lines in the West. How could anyone think it would be so crowded? The customs counters at the San Francisco Airport Immigration Office fall into three categories: first, US citizens, second, non-US citizens, and third, new immigrants. The first two entrances on the left are the entrances of American citizens, sparsely populated, showing the advantage of being a US citizen. Non-US citizens suddenly have a feeling of inferiority. A whole lot of airport journalism, which is a funny parallel to how many people write stories about China based on how nice the airport in Shanghai is. Thankfully this section is very short. Page 1-2 posted:Groups of Japanese people passed through customs. Nowadays, Japanese people travel everywhere in the world to go on tours and carry out business in large crowds, showing the strength of a wealthy country and wealthy people. Although many foreigners feel that the Japanese are not lovable, this economic power has made people sit up and take notice. Reportedly, due to too many Japanese people, the US government is considering giving the Japanese visa-free treatment: Japan, like most of Europe, Chile, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand, all have a visa waiver with the United States. A reminder that this book was written in the late 1980s, before the asset price bubble crash of 1991-1992. Japan at this time was the world's second-largest economy, and conspicuous purchases of US-based companies, Japanese investment in modern technology, high levels of Japanese exports contributed to fears of American decline. Page 2 posted:The United States is a society that is quite developed in many aspects. Anyone who arrives in the United States will feel a "future shock." Then Wang talks a lot about tradition, the origins of traditions, and innovation, noting that 'today's tradition were nothing more than innovations thirty or fifty years ago'. Page 3 posted:Today, when people flood into the United States, we cannot but think deeply. A few days before I came here, domestic theoretical circles were discussing a theoretical new understanding of socialism and capitalism. The reason why this issue is currently causing people's discussion in China is that socialism has been engaged for decades and is not as economical as capitalism. Is the social development program that Marx demonstrated 150 years ago in line with the development of human history? Can socialism finally defeat capitalism? This causes one doubt. I remembered the movie "Red Guards on Honghu Lake" on the Boeing 747 that flew to the United States. The Chinese have overthrown the three mountains that have long been a burden on them, but does this have a direction to ensure the development of Chinese society? What kind of impact will a revolution like the Chinese revolution, which is dominated by rural areas and with the rural population as the main force, on the development of a society? It is indeed worth thinking about. The 'three mountains' are a reference to Mao's essay On New Democracy, which argues for a distinct Chinese path to socialism. The three mountains are imperialism, feudalism, and comprador capitalism/crony capitalism. Red Guards on Honghu Lake is a 1961 movie based on a 1956 opera, where a rebel band of warriors fights an evil feudal lord who is allied to the Kuomintang. Page 3 posted:Today's development in the United States, with its economic prosperity, its political process, its way of life, and its international status, has created great doubt in the world today. People in developed countries have this suspicion about how human science and material life have developed up to this point. Does it violate human nature? Will it lead to the earth's capital: the exhaustion of the source? Will it eventually lead to the destruction of mankind? The colleagues in the club of Rome are worried about this, and they sigh in worry. People in developing countries have very different doubts: What forces have created such a dazzling material civilization? What system has created good conditions for this development in management and intelligence? Is such a state accidental or inevitable? People began to doubt this system, and so people began to doubt their own system. In any case, the United States has created doubt. The Club of Rome, founded in 1968, is a non-profit NGO loosely defined by its interest in humanitarian and environmental issues. It first came in the public eye with its 1968 report, "The Limits to Growth", which raised concern over finite stocks of natural resources and the dangers of overconsumption and came up with figures for peak production followed by rapid decline. quote:When I entered the United States, I entered into this doubt. If you don't enter the United States, you will sink into this doubt. It's a strange feeling: it's easy to start feeling doubt; it's harder to get out of it. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2019 04:38
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 2: Manhattan and Chinatown Wang lands in New York. He's a bit scared waiting for his friend to pick him up. New York, like most cities across the US at the time, was in the middle of an extreme crime wave. He feels relieved when his ride finally arrives. Violent crime was truly awful in the 1980s. I think New York City alone has experienced a 90% decline in the total number of murders since 1990. The causes for this decline are contested, although declines in air and water pollution are often discussed as a cause. Then he goes to the United Nations, where he marvels at all the artifacts and has his picture taken at the PRC delegation's desk. quote:This [the display of gifts] shows that the citizens of the world want to improve their reputations at the United Nations, but how many countries in real life believe in the UN's principles? It's like people in an organization where everyone wants to join it and say how much they love it, but actually go against it. In today's world, interests are diverse, yet the barriers between ideology are sharply divided, and the world's conflicts continue in endless succession. However, the UN has played a role that cannot be underestimated, especially in terms of social and economic development. In terms of eliminating conflicts, the ceasefire between Iran and Iraq is an outstanding example. Another case where the book shows its age, considering the infamous counterexamples of the UN's failure in Rwanda and impotence in the leadup to the 2003 Iraq War. The UN issued three security council resolutions on the Iran-Iraq War, the latest being UNSCR 598, which called for a ceasefire. It was passed unanimously and came into effect in August 1988. UN peacekeepers under the UNIIMOG mission were deployed to the Iran-Iraq border to ensure the ceasefire was kept. The last of these peacekeepers were withdrawn in 1991. There are some good posts on the Iran-Iraq War by Polyakov in the Milhist thread in A/T. quote:The world today is still a world that needs human control. Looking at the statue in front of the United Nations building, I thought over how a sword can be turned into a plowshare. Past history shows that many still believe war is a means to an end and that the sword is the result.  The statue he is referring to is Evgeniy Vuchetich's Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares, a quotation from the Book of Isaiah. Vuchetich (1908-1974) was a Soviet sculptor, most notable for his gigantic statue at the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad memorial complex, The Motherland Calls. After this, he heads to Chinatown. quote:In New York's Chinatown, I feel the style is quite familiar. It looks a bit messy compared to other places in the city. It is said that Chinatown is a complex area and that the specific characteristics of Chinese people are here. It makes one recall Bo Yang's "The Ugly Chinaman." I'm rather surprised to see him bring this up. Bo Yang (1920-2008) was the pen name of a Taiwanese dissident and writer. He was arrested in Taiwan in 1967 for translating a Popeye the Sailor comic in a way that was said to defame the country's then-dictator, Chiang Kai-Shek. (Bo said he had no intention of doing anything like that.) After his release from prison in 1977, he published a book of harshly satirical essays called "The Ugly Chinaman" where he vents his spleen at Chinese culture and political beliefs. An English translation is available. quote:I didn’t go much into Chinatown, I looked at it from the outside and did my business very cheaply. In this bustling area, looking at the street full of Chinese characters, it is reminiscent of distant China. This is in stark contrast to other parts of Manhattan. Wang then segues into the relationship between China and the United States, and the relationship between economic development and political democracy. quote:The economic achievements and scientific and technological progress that the United States has achieved in this century are obvious to all. No country in the world today can surpass it. Although the Japanese are menacing and ferocious, and pupil has surpassed the master, but in addition to their economic competitiveness, they cannot be compared with the United States in the fields of military affairs, culture, and natural resources. What needs to be analyzed is exactly what role the US economic development has played in its political development. In both respects, the United States has attracted worldwide attention. China has too much debt in these two areas. Therefore, these two aspects have become an eternal topic of discussion in the process of modernization. At this point, I should add that the text version of the book that is online has some errors - probably due to human error - so I had to rely on the paper copy. quote:How is China's economic modernization to be realized? The most fundamental problem is that is there a process to complete economic modernization under the conditions of public ownership? Most developed countries in the world today are not public ownership. This reality gives people the biggest challenge to think over. The second is how political democracy develops. Does this keep in step with the economy, or not? These two major issues have become hot topics of discussion this year. One argument is that without political democracy, economic modernization cannot be achieved; one refutation is that Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea have no political democracy during the economic take-off phase, Hong Kong is colonial, and Taiwan is a one-party dictatorship. South Korea is led by a military official. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea were referred to as the 'Four Asian Tigers' for their rapid industrialization and economic growth in the latter half of the twentieth century. Taiwan is a liberal democracy now, but in the 1980s it was only in the middle of political reforms, and the 'temporary provisions' of martial law were not yet lifted. South Korea had its first free and fair presidential elections in 1987, shortly before this book was published. Hong Kong's elections were only introduced a few years before the handover to China in 1997. Singapore still has elections but the People's Action Party has held a dominant position since 1959. quote:Another way of saying this is that the economy has developed and political democracy has conditions. The examples are the democratization movements of emerging industrial regions and countries. The rebuttals are also very strong: after the bourgeois revolutions in western developed countries, their economy was not developed. It is far from being comparable to the economic strength of some developing countries today, but the system of democratic republicanism has basically been established. This issue is deeply considered by the Chinese intellectual community. By bourgeois revolutions he refers to national independence movements; liberal revolutions in the 19th and early 20th century, etc. quote:Economic development is only a phenomenon. [Political] concentration or democracy has the potential to promote or inhibit economic development. The matter of concern is what societal changes after economic development will be conducive to the development of political democracy. Because their economy does not develop, developing countries have no choice but to economically rely on developed countries, mainly in high-tech equipment, precision instruments and so on. However, depending on the stage of development of each country, such as African countries, they mainly need food to maintain basic living conditions. Whatever the need, the result is a special exchange mechanism: developing countries need to come up with the best things to exchange with developed countries. Therefore, the people of developing countries cannot enjoy the best products produced in the country, and even the second-class products cannot enjoy them, because the second-class products are to be consumed by foreigners who come to these countries. He seems to be describing the resource curse, if not the use of cash crops for export. quote:Products in various regions of the United States are available in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Jamaica, and Mexico. The best products from all over the world are flocking to the US market in exchange for the US dollar. Since everyone wants to get the US dollar and form a strong competition, the quality of the products is very high and the price is very low. This situation has caused unprecedented prosperity in the US market. Note the last bit - he's discussing the US' massive imports of goods, whereas American pundits then and now, to various extents, were concerned about the trade deficit. It's an accounting identity that refers to how many foreign-produced goods the US consumes. quote:This is the result of the market mechanism, and it is also the benefit of the United States dollar status determined by the Bretton Woods Conference after the Second World War. Of course, foreign products have entered the United States in large numbers, impacting the industry of the United States itself, causing factories to close down and increasing unemployment. This cannot be seen, so the two forces of free trade and protectionism have been fighting endlessly. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates collapsed after 1971, but the international economic institutions and agreements that resulted after the conference are still around for now. The US dollar was and is still the world's foremost reserve currency, used to denominate transactions between central banks. Even after the 2008 economic crisis, it is still held as a safe-haven currency. US trade policy has been disputed between free trade and protectionism for years. See Irvin's book on the history of US trade policy for more detail.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2019 00:01
|
|
|
ewiley posted:This is fascinating, thanks for doing this! Interesting that he talks about the doubt that the Americans inspire. What kind of doubt is he talking about? He went into this a little in the parts of the chapter I've added already. Doubt, or misapprehension that a country still this rich and powerful still had such pervasive structural issues, and (I could be reading into this too much?) if China could develop or how it would develop.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2019 00:03
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 3: The Four Cs Wang hopes to parse out some trends about the organization of American society due to the distribution and use of technologies and various consumer goods. 1) Cars. There are many of them, in various models, and transportation between and within cities is impossible without them. There is fierce competition between US and Japanese brands. Yes, he's explaining the obvious to us, but it would be alien to the average Chinese reader. As late as 1985, the People's Republic of China had only produced 5,000 passenger cars per year, with the majority of their cars being imported from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Imports of cars rose rapidly by the later 1980s, with taxi companies importing massive amounts of Japanese cars. The cash outflow was so great that the central government had imposed a two-year moratorium on car imports in 1985. 2) Calls. This part is charmingly outdated, with how many public payphones there are, and how international phone calls are paid for with credit cards. Telephones were largely reserved for military and government use in most of the Mao era - subscriptions and phone line installations only really took off after the mid-1980s and early 1990s. 3) Computers. Wang marvels at how both government institutions and private corporations have computers, making referencing data faster and more efficient. He cites his brief visit to the National Security Council(?!) and to Yale Library, where the head of the library showed him they have both of his books. Again, another industry that was scarce before, but grew rapidly in the 80s and 90s. Although the PRC did develop transistor-based computers independently, the PRC remained far behind in computer technology into the late 1980s The first Chinese supercomputer was built in 1983, and the first personal computer, the Great Wall 0520CH, was on the market by 1985. They were still in use in the mid-1990s. 4) Cards. By these, he's referring to all the plastic cards with magnetic stripes on the back. Bank cards, drivers' licenses, business loyalty cards, facility access cards. Although identity cards were issued, I can't find anything about magnetic stripe cards in use in the PRC at this time. quote:The important thing is their role in social organization and social management: These four technologies are a means and a channel for political socialization and political communication, making it easier to communicate principles and ideas more effectively, to communicate to the people more effectively with less paperwork, and to make society stronger. Of course, these four technologies have their own downsides (pollution, wiretapping, hacking, identity forgery, etc.), which he views as necessary problems that come with strengthening societal organizations and political systems. quote:How societies can strengthen their institutions is a major issue. It is difficult to develop strong institutions and systems from the beginning. Only when institutions are truly a part of the people's lives is there real societal strength. This was a short chapter and I don't have very much to add.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2019 19:42
|
|
|
Silver2195 posted:A couple interesting things I noticed. First, and least importantly, despite the book being (I assume) primarily a critique of America, at the start of the first chapter he essentially criticizes Japan from an American perspective. Of course, there are obvious reasons why a Chinese person in the 20th century would have a bone to pick with Japan. The CCP has to find itself in a careful balancing act with appeals to nationalism; tolerating or encouraging nationalist protest can be used to signal resolve in foreign negotiations, but it also limits its own actions and wouldn't want to be perceived as appeasing or giving up too much for too little gain. In the next chapter, Wang will reference more of Marx, specifically a discussion on commodities. He doesn't discard Marx completely. Vivian Darkbloom posted:China thread is lately about HK drama and fishmech drama, so I'm going to leave this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/dhjhck/what_are_the_chances_and_possible_consequences_of/f3p48op/ /r/geopolitics is really hit and miss but this series of posts raised multiple informed points; it is not impossible the person who posted them was who he said he was. Jude Blanchette wrote a book, The New Red Guards, on the resurgence of Maoist and nationalist rhetoric and how much of that was coopted by later administrations.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2019 04:48
|
|
|
Yadoppsi posted:Can you tease out any thoughts or musings from the car section that would imply a connection to the PRC's heavy focus on connecting housing, employment and recreation in their high-speed rail networks? You're anticipating his argument a little bit - the next section talks about 'commodification', real estate, and transportation. It's the first chapter I've seen where he's more explicitly drawing from Marxist analysis - that is, Marxist 'commodity'.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2019 01:54
|
|
|
CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Cute is probably not the best word you could use, my guess is that the original characters for this passage is 可爱, which could mean cute but in this context is better translated as "loveable," as in the Korean war-era essay 谁是最可爱的人民, which is not who are the cutest people but who are the most loveable. It's a strange word to translate, loveable is just shorthand imo for "the quality of being liked and admired by others" You are right. The full sentence, near the bottom of page 1, is 尽管不少外国人觉得日本人不可爱，但这种经济力量使人不得不刮目相看。 Again remember that Mandarin is my third language, and we've got some Marxist terminology coming up... I knew about the telegraphs but I didn't remember phones were that scarce. Edit: She, btw Kangxi fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2019 02:31
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 4: The Heights of Commodification quote:Another feature of American society or American culture is its high degree of commodification. It can be said that this is a model capitalist world with its myriad temptations. Entering every kind of store, you find a glimmering lineup of products on display inside, with all one can think of on hand, and it dazzles the eyes. In this typical capitalist society, almost anything can be a commodity, from the physical body to the air, to abstract concepts; all become commodities without exception. Therefore, when Marx analyzed capitalist society, it was a penetrating insight to regard commodities as the cells of society with this mode of production. In today's capitalist society, this feature develops more fully, although there are many differences in this form of expression. Marx starts his 'critique of political economy', Das Kapital, with commodities; he treats them as the 'the economic cell-form of bourgeois society'. Commodities, in his definition, are any 'products' or 'activities' produced by human labor and offered as a product for sale on the market. In mainstream economics, commodities are fungible; that is, they are 'goods' and 'services' are treated as nearly equivalent without any regard to who produced them. quote:Commodities are still the basic elements of this society. The most representative manifestation of this is that human beings become commodities. This extensive, total commercialization is the fundamental tendency of capitalist production methods that dominates, and it is not the subjective will of people. This is all Marx. Marx's discussion of commodities and 'commodity fetishism' begins with the idea that people perceive that the value of commodities is objective; the result of relationships between money and other commodities, whereas they are actually the result of relationships between people who make commodities, or at least between producers and other peoples' labor they're using. This is one of his ideas that really draws people's attention. Partly because 1) he is approaching a big question about how societies changed after industrialization, and 2) Anybody who talks about pulling back the curtain on how things work has its own mystique. quote:The question that needs to be raised is not how the commodification of this kind came about, nor is it just how this degree of commodification is achieved. To study the management process of a society, what we need to study is: What effect does commodification have on the intricate and complicated management process of a society? Is the governance of such a modern society with complicated systems and more advanced technology possible? Wang notes that other countries that have been held up as models, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have a much smaller geographic area and population than China. quote:For larger countries, especially those with a population of hundreds of millions of people, the government is not likely to manage all aspects of society directly and comprehensively. History has shown that societies that have embarked on this path through institutional planning do not solve many basic needs and accumulate a heap of problems. This looks to me like a criticism of command economies, with a central administrative structure determining the allocation of resources Therefore, Wang says, efforts to make segments of society organize themselves, and motivated to meet their own needs so that political or administrative structures only act as indirect supervisors, are an effective means of government. This dovetails with the reforms made in the first years Deng Xiaoping era. The first and perhaps most famous of these was the household responsibility system. After the formation of agricultural communes in the 1950s, the central government bought agricultural produce from the communes at low prices but did not allow communes or the farmers in them to sell the surplus. With no incentive to produce anything beyond the quota, local workers only bothered to produce what was assigned to them. By the 1980s, peasants were given drastically reduced quotas and then allowed to sell their surplus at local markets for a profit. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, the per-capita income of rural residents had increased five-fold between 1978 and 1988, and the output of grains increased by almost a third in the same period. The story goes that this policy was inspired by a group of farmers in the more impoverished province of Anhui, who had begun to ignore the quotas and swore an oath to feed each others' families if one of them was arrested. This also feeds into the development of town and village enterprises (TVEs), which were allowed to independently produce their own goods or establish services. With labor freed from farming due to increased output, local enterprises were able to produce more, establish a broader income base for the population, and local governments had a greater income themselves from the proceeds. Some were run by local government, while others were more independent and adopted the 'collective' title to avoid scrutiny. They also provided considerable competition for state-owned enterprises and drove further reform. By 1996, 135 million people were employed in TVEs. quote:Commodification is the catalyst for this transformative process. The problems of housing, food, transportation, employment, and education are the basic problems that plague every society. Many governments are troubled by these issues and cannot free themselves from them. They can neither advance nor retreat. The high degree of commercialization has led to a distinctive structure in the domain of American society. Wang gives four major examples: 1) Real Estate/Housing; which is bought and sold on private markets, and where housing prices vary by location; where government housing only provides a modest amount of the total housing stock. (The sad thing here is that prices, even before accounting for inflation, were better than they are now.) 2) Food; which produced to excess here and even wasteful; where producers what the market needs and sell it to consumers through the market system 3) Transportation; airplanes, bus systems; people are free to go wherever so long as they can pay for it. Wang even has nice things to say about Greyhound (before the 1993 bankruptcy). 4) Employment; another series of contradictions where technology reduces employment in the name of efficiency and higher output, and where individuals are left to search for employment. All of these were pressing issues by the late 1970s, although my impression was that they had improved considerably by the mid-1980s. To list one example: Dramatic housing shortages and deteriorating conditions in housing stock were some of the severe problems left behind in the Maoist era; as housing construction was simply not a priority compared to the competing demands of heavy industry, resource outputs, or national defense and could not keep track with population growth - not to mention the violence in urban areas between different factions during the Cultural Revolution. Housing was already overcrowded by the 1950s and became worse in urban areas by the 1970s. A 1986 book estimated that housing stocks shrank to an average of 3.6 square meters (or 38.7 square feet!) per resident and that waiting lists for apartments were years long. By the late 1970s, about 1/3rd of urban residents lived in apartments assigned to them by their work units, or 'danwei'. Many of the larger and more important work units such as government agencies and armaments factories became communities with employees living near or on-site and staying there after retirement. The better work units had their own free medical clinics, daycare, libraries, cinemas, vacation tours, intramural sports teams, etc. Those assigned to work units with lower priority for resource allocation had to barter or use connections for better living conditions or consumer goods. By the late 1970s, food production had stagnated for so long that some officials feared a repeat of the late 1950s - that is, famine conditions. quote:The development of a commodity economy has formed a dual structure of social governance: the system social self-organization is responsible for all kinds of specific affairs, and the political system is responsible for coordinating various self-organizing systems. This is a major feature of this society's macro-management. These are just a few examples, but one can't think that commodification will make things perfect. This simply means that commodification offers the possibility of reducing the government's administrative burden. If the government is involved in all of the affairs of the society, it will not work effectively. However, after the government is lightly loaded, it still has to control activities in various fields, but it has changed from direct to indirect control.  The thought of a future communist party politburo member knowing about or maybe seeing the porno theatres of 1980s New York makes for a very funny mental image. quote:Therefore, commodification can lessen the burden on political and administrative systems, but there are two important prerequisites: political and administrative systems must regulate commodification. The real essence of commodification is not that everything is a commodity, but that the commodity is in a rationally operated mechanism. Economic leverage is what coordinates this mechanism, and the political and administrative systems work in concert. When many basic areas of society become self-organizing systems, political and administrative systems will be conditionally separated from them, with conditions ranging from direct management to indirect management. The process of commercialization is the process by which these areas become self-organizing systems. This process can not be formed in a short period of time. Even after a long period of development, the contradictions, conflicts, obstacles, and chaos are still unavoidable. However, political and administrative systems managing tens of large self-organizing systems will be more powerful and effective than managing thousands of specific operations. I wonder where he read about this idea of self-organizing systems 自组织系统. Market economics tends to consider itself self-organizing but the phrasing here reminds me of sociologists. Has he been reading Niklas Luhmann? Or an economist?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2019 23:38
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 5: Frontiers There is a pretty glaring error in this chapter, I don't know if this is Wang's fault or his editors. He's obviously talking about the Amish people in extensive detail, but instead, the text talks about 亚美尼亚人 or Armenians. This has been corrected in the translation. quote:I am borrowing the word 'frontier' for this chapter, but these are places not so distant nor are they border regions. They are near modern cities. By 'frontiers' I mean areas where Amish people live. The Amish are a strange group. Their mean feature is the rejection of modernization, which is incompatible with advanced and developed science and technology, and they still maintain the traditional lifestyle of the 17th and 18 centuries. This is an interesting historical phenomenon. The modernization of western society has attracted and impacted the whole world, but it has not impacted the Amish people in front of us.  If you've ever passed through or near Amish country, you've probably seen those orange reflective signs on the back of their horse-drawn buggies.  Kalona, with a population of 1,942 in the 1990 census, is about 30 minutes away from Iowa City on State Highway 1. As it turns out, the Kolona Amish of the area are among the most accepting of modern technology, with the use of mechanical tractors, mechanical milkers, propane gas, and running water. The most 'conservative' Amish don't even use running water or kerosene lamps. Wang then briefly outlines the history of the Amish, their geographical distribution, the number of settlements, and their origins in European religious disputes. He goes on to describe their "simplicity, naturality, and self-sufficiency", and notes their patriarchal society and how some retain a German dialect. Any Amish specialists are free to add on to this. quote:Over the years, despite the different changes in Amish society, the basic spirit of this group has not changed much. It is strange: why have such a powerful modern civilization failed to influence and transform them? Didn't Western civilization impact many very distant peoples? I haven't found much about Mr. Zielinski, but Amazon lists him as having written several books on Amish history and culture as well as the history of the state of Iowa and one on the Meskwaki. quote:This is a social phenomenon that is really worth considering. In the heartland of global modernization, there are so many people who refuse to modernize. Their remoteness is not geographical, but psychological. They voluntarily separated themselves from modernization. From this we can draw a conclusion: if people refuse to internalize modernization, then modernization is difficult to intrude upon them. This phenomenon can be seen in different societies. The real power of modernization lies in a person's inner world.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2019 18:53
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 6: The Amana Colonies quote:The Amana Colonies are a special place in Iowa. Americans call it "socialism" or "collectivism." How can such a place survive in a capitalist society like the United States? What kind of organization is it? It aroused great curiosity from me, a Chinese person. How do Americans engage in "collectivism"?  The 'Amana Colonies' term today refers to seven villages in Iowa County, IA, clustered around the Iowa River and about 10-20 minutes drive east of the county seat of Marengo. As of the 2010 census, all of the villages combined have a population of less than 1,700. To be more specific, the two founders of Amana, Eberhard L. Gruber, and Johann F. Rock, were dissatisfied with the strict dogmatism of the Lutheran Church and were inspired by a religious school called Pietism, founded by the German theologian Philipp Spener. quote:Earlier Amana's charter stated that the goal of the community was: "The goal of a community as a religious group is not worldly or selfish, but it is a love for God who blesses us, working together to serve God, and obeying God's laws and requirements ... … To achieve this goal, our collective promise here is to accept and sign this charter together." It can be seen that the initial collectivism of this group was indeed inspired by a religious spirit. Collectivism must be led by a certain spirit, otherwise, it will be difficult to maintain. Is that the case? Worth pondering. I'm going off of his translation of the charter here, and I couldn't find the original. quote:Inspired by this spirit, all property in Amana is collectively owned, including land, grain, livestock, housing, and farm tools. Amana has various characteristics of collectivism. In addition to collective ownership, the collective is also responsible for educating children, publishing, and caring for the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. Song of Songs, Chapter 4, Verse 8. quote:In 1932, the largest historic change occurred in Amana. By voting, Amana gave up the system of living together and strode into the system of free enterprise that surrounded them. Church and state separated, and the church elders are no longer responsible for all the affairs of the leadership. This transition is well worth exploring. What factors have caused Amana to abandon the system of living together? Is this system faulty? Or are other external systems too strong? Or did people lose their basic religious beliefs for the new year? The co-living system still faces severe challenges, and why? My first impulse is to say it had something to do with the Great Depression. quote:The responses from the officials who hosted us were very familiar to us: a basic shortcoming of the communal living system was that individuals did not have the initiative to work diligently; there were many lazy people at the time. Another reason is that the younger generation is skeptical of Amana's spiritual principles. They are tempted by outside life and are unwilling to do mass eight times a week. Each year, the elders of Amana send young people to higher education, such as doctors, teachers, and businessmen. The wishes of young people cannot be fulfilled. Boys don't have good jobs, and girls can only work in the canteen in Amana. Another reason is political. Elders are always the same people and have a hereditary tendency. This hierarchy destroys the spirit of the group. These last two paragraphs, to me, make it clear he's still a true believer, trying to figure out whatever socialism is after the Mao era. He still believes in historical stages, he doesn't believe the party should completely abandon whatever socialism might turn out to be, he's interested in maintaining party discipline. There is also a long history of various utopian communities in the United States; some of which were influenced by religious principles; others by early non-Marxist socialists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Many collapsed after <5 years. The Amana Colonies were some of the longest-lived of these communal experiments, although some live on as tourist attractions. While some of these communities were not long lasted, other 'cooperative enterprises', broadly defined, are still extant today.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2019 22:38
|
|
|
GoluboiOgon posted:It seems really odd to me that he thinks of the amish as ethnic minorities. they certainly don't think of themselves as non-white. they may seem technologically backwards now, but even in the 1930s the average us farmer still used horses for farming instead of tractors; when the amish settled in iowa they wouldn't have been seen as inferior technologically. the only time the amish were ever discriminated against was for speaking german during wwi. I don't think he thinks about them as ethnic minorities. They're distinct, in his mind, but he doesn't describe them in that way. If that was the case, he might have written it down as Amish people using 民族 (min2zu2) or just used 族(zu2), which has more of a meaning of a nationality/ethnic group. But he just uses 人 (ren2). That, to me, makes it sounds like 'people'. Thanks for the context, btw.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2019 01:46
|
|
|
Helsing posted:I also think that we should probably read his comments as being at least in part a reflection of where the Chinese state was at the time he wrote the book. I get the impression he's doing something that authors have done throughout the ages - describing a foreign society as a covert way of safely critiquing your own country. Instead of describing the failures and successes of Chinese governance - a potentially dangerous activity - perhaps Wang uses his discussion of the successes of the United States to subtly make the case for or against reforms within China. It sort of seems like the book is less interested in getting the exact details of the Amish example correct and more focused on using them as a prop in an argument that the author is making about how sometimes the government trying to control every aspect of a situation makes the government itself more vulnerable. That ties into a point I was going to make about the Amana Colonies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the party faced 'three belief crises' 三信危机, as a writer put it and I can't remember off hand who it was. That meant a crisis of faith in Marxism-Leninism, a loss of confidence in Marxism and modernization, and a loss of trust in the Chinese Communist Party. All this came about after the violence and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. After all that, which left the country divided, with weak institutions and a loss of party authority, massive physical destruction, and little else to show for it, there was a feeling of doubt about how the CCP was going to survive, much less come up with a version of the future that would motivate people like it had before. This is probably why he's visiting Amana - this experiment collapsed completely. What lesson did he draw from it? He says it's a loss of faith and an inability to provide. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 3, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2019 01:22
|
|
|
Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 7: Native Landscapes quote:In an average person's whirlwind tour, they get the impression of flourishing big cities, row upon row of skyscrapers, lightning-fast cars, glitzy shopping centers, and diverse crowds. America's prosperity is mainly embodied in its cities and great cities, and it would be easy to equate these impressions with all of America. In fact, America is not just its cities. They play an influential role, but they are not equal to the entire country. Some context: According to the US Census, about 79% of the population of the United States, or about 197.5 million out of 250.1 million people, lived in urban areas in 1990. The rapid urbanization of China has been a major component of its economic transformation, but it still had a long way to go by 1990. According to their National Bureau of Statistics, only some 26.4% of the population lived in cities by 1990. This meant that out of a population of 1.135 billion, some 295 million lived in cities, while almost 840 million lived in rural areas. The urban-rural difference in China was vast by the end of the 1970s; while there was little economic inequality between urban residents and between rural residents, the gap between urban and rural residents was so vast that some researchers have estimated that the country was more unequal than any of the countries in the Warsaw Pact and almost as unequal as the United Kingdom. Wang takes note of the differences in quality of life between urban and rural areas, noting this may have driven rural residents to the cities. This could potentially be explained by the modernization of agriculture, which does not require as many laborers to produce the same or greater output than before. In fact, he claims, the US is the world's largest food importer. He notes that in some states you could take long train rides and never see a farm, whereas driving in farm states means you can travel for hours and see almost continuous farms. Food production and food security are still issues, given China's enormous population, and less arable land than the United States. This link from the China Power Project, a part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, presents some of the more salient statistics and has a useful reading list. As for food imports, China is now the world's largest importer of vegetables, although I would need to find more specific data on food products and other agricultural commodities. In more current news, there's been a rather nasty outbreak of swine flu in China recently that has dramatically reduced the pig population and driven up prices of pork. According to the World organization of Animal Health, nearly half of the country's pig population has died of the disease or has been slaughtered by farmers - approximately 300,000,000 pigs. After this, he lists some impressions of American farmland: -The United States has a large area that is uniquely suited to farming, with flat areas and dark fertile soil, which has not been exhausted of nutrients or eroded. -Rural areas are sparsely populated by his standards. Houses are sparse and far apart, and wild animals like deer roam free. -Towns and villages in rural areas, while more conservative culturally and psychologically, still have a wide degree of goods available. Many roads are set in straight lines, but not all roads are paved. -Some rural houses are in bad condition and have been abandoned. Some small towns have been abandoned completely, for unclear reasons. -There are herds of wild animals, but Wang insists he's seen bigger herds in Inner Mongolia. He compares two methods of animal breeding. quote:The situation in rural areas is the counterpart to large and prosperous cities. Compared with some developing and underdeveloped countries, the American countryside is among the most developed. This comparison tells people, in actuality, urban-rural differences inevitably exist in any society, but this difference has different meanings for different societies. For American society, more than 90% of the population lives in cities, and it is difficult for rural areas to pose tensions. Although no good solution has been found to solve this problem, this problem will persist for a long time and will tend to worsen. However, the rural issue can't set off big waves temporarily or under certain conditions. But for Chinese society, more than 80% of the population is in rural areas, and its political and social significance is very different. Excuse my lack of informed commentary. Rural areas are not my specialty, but a lot of people have made their careers studying Chinese agriculture and rural areas, and I could point you to them, in Chinese or English... Kangxi fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Dec 5, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2019 23:17
|
|
|
I mean, Wang is from Shanghai, so it's possible he doesn't spend as much time in the countryside at all. I know there are many deer species on the mainland as well as Taiwan, but I had the impression many would live in Inner Mongolia or more sparsely populated regions.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2019 23:37
|
|
|
Please excuse the delay; I've had a lot on my plate recently. Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land Part 8: The Decline of the Farm quote:Farms have always interested me. The simplest reason is that the United States has only about three or four percent of the agricultural population, but in addition to ensuring the consumption of 200 million people, there is still a large quantity of exports. I remember the Soviet Union imported a large amount of American food. In many countries, the urban and rural population is smaller than the former, but they are incapable of self-sufficiency. Solving this problem is the key to a country's modernization. China has a population of almost 1.1 billion and more than 80% are in rural areas, but the supply of grain and various non-staple foods is not so generous. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the United States was a substantial supplier of grain to the Soviet Union owing to the latter's shortfalls in production; there was a scandal in the Nixon administration where the Soviets had purchased so much grain at subsidized prices and spent all of their available credit on purchases that the United States soon experienced a spike in prices; this was known as the Great grain robbery. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration had announced an embargo on Soviet purchases of wheat after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response, the Soviets were forced to purchase their grain from other sources such as Argentina. quote:The problem of food has plagued humanity for countless years, and it has been around since the beginning of humanity. So far humans have not solved this problem. The food shortage in Africa has reached alarming levels, and how many people are menaced with death from starvation. In the 1980s, there were famine conditions in Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Sudan. In the late 1970s, closer to China, Bangladesh and Cambodia also experienced famine. Some of these famines were exacerbated by ongoing civil war, as is the case in Yemen. quote:I remember "The Winds of War" once recalled that in Berlin just after the end of the Second World War, because there was no food, young girls had to use their bodies to get food. The persistence of human life is a basic human need. When this problem is so difficult, it is difficult to talk about dignity and authority. Wang is probably referring to Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War", a best-selling novel of the period. A TV adaptation was produced in the late 1980s; both were translated into Chinese. quote:The farm I visited is one of many farms and it is a model farm. The farm owner's family has only two people, himself and his wife. After his son went away to college, he worked in another state. In a large expanse of wilderness, they have a very beautiful house, which is almost the same as the house seen in the city. There are all kinds of modern equipment in the city, such as telephone, electricity, running water, etc. Extremely large family-owned farms still contribute a share of US agriculture output; the USDA reports that some 90% of all US farms were 'small family operations', with <$350,000 in annual gross cash farm income (GCFI); but they only accounted for 24% of the value of production. Large-scale family farms with $1 million+ in GCFI contributed to 42% of total farm production. quote:Let's look at some specific information to understand the differences between American agriculture. This farmer is called Oberman. He introduced to me that he has a total of 800 acres of land, which is equivalent to 4,857 mu. He was responsible for the cultivation himself, and he hired a long-time worker, plus his elderly father sometimes helped. Labor productivity is high. In addition to cultivating his 800 acres of land, he also raises pigs, and the numbers given are frightening: he raises 1,200 pigs by himself. This is the number in pens plus a yield of 2,400 pigs each year. In addition to these, he is also a director of an agricultural bank, and he also manages bank affairs during the off-season. In addition, we must deal with social activities and develop plans to promote social development. It is very obvious how much energy he exerts. Heilongjiang province is known as one of the 'grain baskets' of modern China today, with a large output though hindered by a largely subarctic climate. quote:A mechanical harvester can cultivate 80 acres a day, so 800 acres is not difficult for him. He mainly grows corn and soybeans. After harvesting, there is artificial air-drying equipment with a high degree of automation. In addition, the American farm is a large plain, which is unique to the United States' geography. Large machinery opens without barriers. With these conditions, mechanization is easy to implement. In the rural areas of Zhejiang, China, there are too many ditches, rivers, and hills, and large machinery is difficult to use. Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai, is one of the wealthiest in China today; it exports textiles, chemicals, and is a major electronics manufacturer. Alibaba is headquartered in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. quote:Of course, farmers also have various difficulties, which is a challenge for agriculture. One is the economic problem. The economic income of the farmer is not high, and there is a lot of labor. The farm earns between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, but a combine bought on loan is worth $120,000, regardless of other equipment. Of course, some farms are larger, better, and have a considerable income. This year, the United States is generally dry, and farmers' incomes have dropped. With only about half of their usual income, the economic situation is very bad. We see in farmland that corn grows only half the height as usual, and the fruit is small. Using an inflation calculator, this converts to about $43,000-$65,000, with the combine costing about $260,000. quote:The second is high labor intensity. The labor intensity of the farmer is very high, which is incomparable to a city office or air-conditioned factory. Farmland is mainly field operations. In any case, the changes in nature cannot be avoided. Pig farming can be said to be dirty and smelly. Although this farm has a high degree of automation, it is grungy and cannot be ruled out. Pigs don't know how to clean, there is no way. We went to visit the pigpen, which was foul and makes one want to leave. But the farmer must do the work. He said that after working every day, he had to take several baths to wash off the smell. In the United States, I am afraid that few people can accept it. That's Chapter 1.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2019 03:24
|
|
|
Thanks for all the comments! I will have more delays again, but the least I can do is translate the Table of Contents so you all have some idea of what will happen next. Given how compacted my schedule will be over the coming months, I may just ask you all to pick which ones you'd prefer to have translated. Chapter 1: An Unequal Land Chapter 1, Part 1- Doubt, Made in America Chapter 1, Part 2 - Manhattan and Chinatown Chapter 1, Part 3 - The Four Cs Chapter 1, Part 4 - The Heights of Commodification Chapter 1, Part 5 - Frontiers Chapter 1, Part 6 - The Amana Colonies Chapter 1, Part 7 - Native Landscapes Chapter 2: An Ancient Political Spirit Chapter 2, Part 1 - The American Mind Chapter 2, Part 2 - The Mayflower Chapter 2, Part 3 - Political Creed Chapter 2, Part 4 - Equality or Freedom? Chapter 2, Part 5 - A Constitution of Two Centuries Chapter 2, Part 6 - Political Genes Chapter 2, Part 7 - Political Standards Chapter 2, Part 8 - "The Third Republic" Chapter 3: A Colorful National Character Chapter 3, Part 1 - Internationals Chapter 3, Part 2 - Unconventional Displays Chapter 3, Part 3 - Demystification Chapter 3, Part 4 - Sacralization Chapter 3, Part 5 - A Misleading Space Shuttle Chapter 3, Part 6 - The "Work Ethic" Chapter 3, Part 7 - Sexual Liberation Chapter 3, Part 8 - Lonely Spirits Chapter 3, Part 9 - Future World Chapter 3, Part 10 - People are always People Chapter 4: Multileveled Societal Control Chapter 4, Part 1: The Invisible Hand Chapter 4, Part 2: Money-Managed Society Chapter 4, Part 3: Human Standardization Chapter 4, Part 4: Legal Culture Chapter 4, Part 5: Taxation System Chapter 4, Part 6: Scientific Administrators Chapter 4, Part 7: Cats and Dogs are not Free Chapter 5: Interwoven Political Power Chapter 5, Part 1: Rule of Donkey and Elephant Chapter 5, Part 2: Parties Share the Spoils Chapter 5, Part 3: Interest Groups Chapter 5, Part 4: Lobbyists Chapter 5, Part 5: Radical Organizations Chapter 5, Part 6: Pluralism or Meritocracy? Chapter 5, Part 7: Participative Democracy Chapter 6: Incomplete Elections Chapter 6, Part 1: Battle for the White House Chapter 6, Part 2: Road to the Presidency Chapter 6, Part 3: A Tri-County Democratic Party Luncheon Chapter 6, Part 4: TV Debate Chapter 6, Part 5: A Representative's Dream Chapter 6, Part 6: Election Day Chapter 6, Part 7: Who rises and falls? Chapter 7: Political Pyramid Chapter 7, Part 1: Capitol Hill Chapter 7, Part 2: Fifty States Chapter 7, Part 3: County Politics Chapter 7, Part 4: Politics in the Cities Chapter 7, Part 5: Grassroots Politics Chapter 7, Part 6: Transparency Chapter 7, Part 7: Selection of Officials Chapter 7, Part 8: Contacting Representatives Chapter 8: Soft Governance Chapter 8, Part 1: Drivers Licenses Chapter 8, Part 2: Factory Principles Chapter 8, Part 3: A Company is Not a Democracy Chapter 8, Part 4: Human Services Chapter 8, Part 5: Coca-Cola Headquarters Chapter 8, Part 6: God on Earth Chapter 9: Reproducing the System Chapter 9, Part 1: The Educational System Chapter 9, Part 2: MIT Chapter 9, Part 3: The Kennedy School of Government Chapter 9, Part 4: Talent Factories Chapter 9, Part 5: The US Naval Academy Chapter 9, Part 6: Educational Exports Chapter 9, Part 7: A Furnace of Technology Chapter 10: Active Intelligence Chapter 10, Part 1: 'Knowledge Factories' Chapter 10, Part 2: The Brookings Institute Chapter 10, Part 3: The Carter Center Chapter 10, Part 4: The Secretary of Defense's Talk Chapter 10, Part 5: Regional Affairs Centers Chapter 10, Part 6: Think Tanks Chapter 10, Part 7: City Libraries Chapter 11: Hidden Crises Chapter 11, Part 1: Family Values Chapter 11, Part 2: An Ignorant Generation? Chapter 11, Part 3: Wandering Youths Chapter 11, Part 4: America has its own Poisons Chapter 11, Part 5: Criminal Underworld Chapter 11, Part 6: A Beggar Nation Chapter 11, Part 7: Black Crisis Chapter 11, Part 8: The Natives' Situation Chapter 11, Part 9: A Mental Crisis Chapter 11, Part 10: Empire of the Sun
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2019 17:36
|
|
|
I do apologize for the delays. I've had notes for Chapter 2 Part 1 sitting on my desktop. I've had a lot of responsibilities pile up over the past few weeks, and I've had barely any time for anything else. I can try to start up again this month?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2020 21:50
|
|
|
NEVER MIND I HAVE A COMPLETE PART OF A CHAPTER 2 ALREADY Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 1: The American Mind Now we're not talking about farms anymore I can get back to more substantial commentary. Wang is using the word 精神 in the title of this chapter, and it means a lot depending on the context. It can refer to spirits, essence, consciousness, the human mind. It's used to translate the word spirit, and it's sometimes a part of more medical terms, like 'psychiatry' 精神科 or 'schizophrenia' 精神分裂症. And before I looked up the book title Wang is referring to, I thought it would be 'the spirit of America'. I'll explain why I'm going on about all this by the end of the chapter. quote:H.S. Commager is an eminent historian and critic. The shelves in American university libraries have copies of his work, and he is considered a master of American studies. His book, "The Growth of the American Republic", has an important status in Chinese academic circles. "The American Mind" was published in 1950, and it was warmly received on publication. I have seen a Chinese edition translated by Nan Mu, et al. It is a long distance from the United States to Shanghai, and this book is indeed a must-have for understanding the spirit of the United States.  Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was indeed an eminent American historian. He taught at NYU, Columbia, and Amherst, and he wrote multiple textbooks, collections of essays, and collections of primary source documents for use in high schools and colleges. He was the Ph.D. advisor for several major historians such as Leonard Levy, who was notable for more sharper criticisms of Thomas Jefferson on freedom of speech, and William Leuchtenberg, who is a major scholar of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was a standard-bearer for mid-century liberalism and was a prominent critic of McCarthyism, the overreach of executive power in the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, and was an opponent of the Vietnam War and the CIA's classified budget on constitutional grounds. His earliest books were curiously sparse on the topic of Reconstruction, and he was said to be pessimistic about civil rights advancing through the Supreme Court. However, he was said to have fought for John Hope Franklin to present papers at the American Historical Association. quote:Commager's writings are experienced and careful, he puts pen to paper with force, he observes problems deeply, he is adept at summing things up. Commager recounts that he is not going to write a history book, but an explanation. He struggles to discover the "American spirit", a uniquely American way of thinking, character, and behavior. He chose the period from the 1880s to the 1940s as a watershed in American history and thought. "The American Mind" is a dense book, with some 500,000 characters, and one marvels. The American Mind was probably Commager's most famous book. The first edition was published in 1950, though it would be republished several times as late as the early 1980s. From my brief skimming, it's an exceptionally broad intellectual history of late 19th century and early 20th-century progressivism, law, political theory, literature, economics, and architecture. But underlying the whole thing is a broad sketch of 'American character', and reveals the author's convictions of American exceptionalism, and how the past can serve as an inspiration for the present -- his present, that is. Most of all, he is an exponent of the philosophical school of pragmatism. quote:What does Commager think comprises the "the spirit of America"? The first premise is that Americans have their own nature and their own philosophy. The American character is the product of the interaction between inheritance and the environment. The origins of American culture and institutions go back to ancient Greece, Rome, and Palestine, such as church and family systems and values. However, Commager believes that this inheritance is highly selective, shaped by environments and choices. The political system and judicial system have changed little in the past two hundred years, but social organizations have undergone dramatic changes, and psychological changes have undergone revolutionary changes. The American environment has melted down the differences between people of different kinds and cultural backgrounds who came here. I'm surprised to see Wang, a Marxist political scientist, praise an American liberal historian and before I read the rest, I tried to figure out his angle here. Is it his interest in nationalism vs. localism? His broad reach in historical references and subjects covered? Commager's political activism...? A very funny typo from the online text: 于是 (as a result; then) was replaced by 浴室 (bathroom). quote:What does Commager think are the main characteristics of the American spirit? I have outlined the following: [i]From Wang's summary, he really hit upon Commager's fondness for pragmatism and American exceptionalism. quote:And so on. Commager's conclusion is that these beliefs cannot but have practical consequences and must be reflected in the daily behavior of the American people. The chapter in which Commager summarized these features was titled "19th Century Americans." In fact, some conclusions still apply today. Naturally, for any abstraction of real life, one can cite examples for and against. There are quite a few examples that can be used to refute Commager. In any case, as an American scholar, let us listen for the time being. Commager does have his merits but inevitably he blows his own horn. In fact, the American nation has many shortcomings. [i]The 'absolute spirit', or to use Wang's translation, 绝对精神, is from Hegel.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2020 23:16
|
|
|
He absolutely is more critical of the US in later chapters, especially in chapters on the election. But he finds some things worth imitating, and he's willing to say so. The very next section has some ideas which I might throw out a wild guess were implemented at his suggestion but without any primary sources, I have no idea if this is his doing.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 23:44
|
|
|
Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 2: The Mayflower quote:It can be said that Massachusetts is a state of political and historical interest. American historical sites, while they are not so old, are still crucial in explaining political and historical developments. Europeans often mock the United States' lack of history, but this in fact reveals a worthwhile question. The modern society of the United States has only two hundred years of history, so why has it developed into the world's first-class power? This is an important phenomenon in today's society. "Material textbook" is my translation of 实物教科书. quote:According to these material textbooks, American people are well-versed in such affairs. It is often suspected that there is no 'political education' in American society. But a traditional spirit is deeply rooted. Here, "material textbooks" play many roles. Places such as libraries set up after the end of presidential administrations are also material textbooks. I won't go into detail about what is or isn't 'political education' in the US today, but in the PRC, there is coursework in schools up through the college level. Undergrads still take mandatory courses on politics, 'situations and policies', and basic theoretical Marxism. A short period of mandatory military training in colleges was also introduced in 1984. quote:The first chapters of the material textbook were in Massachusetts. The Mayflower sent the earliest European settlers to the continent in 1620. This is said to be the beginning of modern America. The "Mayflower" is a large wooden sailing vessel. An imitation is on display, but it is said to be very similar to the original. Everything on the ship is still the same, and some people dressed in the clothes of the time receive the passengers.  The Mayflower II is currently undergoing a long restoration, but will be seaworthy and sent back to Plymouth by 2020, in time for the 400th anniversary of the landings.  Plymouth Rock broke in 1774 after somebody tried to move it to the Plymouth Town Square. It's been chipped at for souvenirs over the years. Parts are in various museums across the country, but a segment, only a portion of the size of the original, is at sea level and under a large granite monument. quote:Americans generally trace the spirit of America to the Mayflower and believe that the basic principles of American society were established when the Mayflower sailed to the mainland. The sixty people on board established society's foundations. This explanation may make sense, but it must not be overstated. One thing is more certain, when people went from Europe to the Americas they were for the most part religiously persecuted or politically sidelined. In 1620, this was the period when the autocracy of the British Stuart dynasty reached its peak, and a British bourgeois revolution broke out in the next two decades. He is, of course, referring to the English Civil War, although I wonder if he is conflating the idea of increased parliamentary power with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. quote:It can be seen who was willing to leave Europe and Britain at that time, and what kind of state of mind they were. They came to this desolate place to be rid of autocracy, escape persecution, and find freedom and wealth. This spirit encouraged them to come to the New World. They arrived at a vast mound of earth without a complete political order, so they could fulfill their wishes. If they come to a place where a complete political system has long been established, these dozens of people can only accept reality no matter how they turn their ideas into action. As many immigrants from all over the world come to the United States today, no one can change the system here. The spirit of the "Mayflower" can grow and develop precisely because this land is politically barren. "Civilized" 文明 and "Indians" 印第安人 are his words. I blanch when I see somebody in 1989 write so bluntly but there is a cold logic to his thinking. If he was a doctrinaire Marxist and historical materialist, he would say that modes of production are the determinant of all other factors of society -- hence a society with more advanced means of production being able to displace a different society so quickly. quote:This leads to the well-known argument put forth by my academic advisor, Dr. Chen Qiren on the difference between agricultural colonies and slave colonies. The former refers to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand; and the second type refers to many African countries, India, Indochina, and so on. I had a lot of trouble with this one so I'm posting the original text below: 这就是我在研究生期间的导师陈其人教授提出的著名论点。移民垦殖的殖民地和奴役土著的殖民地的差别。移民垦殖指宗主国的一部分居民移民到一块土地上，进行劳作，如美国、新西兰、澳大利亚等。奴役土著指的是一小部分宗主国的统者统治殖民地当地的人民，如非洲许多国家、印度、印度支那等地。这两种不同类型的殖民地形成了完全不同的政治解度二十世纪的历史指明了这一点。奴役土著有一个前提：土著能否被奴役？亚洲社会在殖民者来到之前，已经发展到相当的水平，为欧洲殖民者的奴役提供了条件。美国人在新大陆没有这样有利的条件。印第安人很久一直被视为野人，文明人只奴役文明人，而不太愿意奴役他们认为的“野兽”。 Chen Qiren (1924-2017) was a professor of social science at Fudan University, with a focus on Marxist economic theory. He was primarily known for his work on the role of corporations in American politics, although he wrote on such topics as the development of 'bourgeois economics' and colonialism. For a more detailed example of Chen's writing, see David Shambaugh's "Beautiful Imperialist", which provides a summary of Chinese policymakers' and intellectuals' views on the United States. quote:The spirit of the "Mayflower" survived, not because anyone intended to maintain it, but that social life must be controlled by it. I also looked at the Plymouth Plantation, where a seventeenth-century settlement was preserved, and it is said that the earliest immigrants lived here. This village is close to the sea, looking far into the distance, thousands of miles. The wooden houses and various appliances in the village are typical of old rural villages. It can be described in two words - "poor" and "backward". This is natural. European immigrants came from afar, had nothing, and started from scratch, only in this environment. Villages like this are as numerous as an ox has hairs in the world today, so what do they mean? He is referring to the failure of the German Revolutions of 1848-1849. The explanation here makes me think of 'path dependency' in economics or other social sciences but he has no citations. quote:The United States values the preservation and protection of these material textbooks. In these places, there are full-time personnel to manage and provide the convenient measures needed for public visits, such as parking, shops, restaurants, and various instructions. The facilities of the exhibition are also standardized, and there are studios in almost every place, and visitors can see specially produced films and slides. Some things that are not considered to be Chinese by the Chinese are carefully protected. So, Americans will have a history in the future, because it is going all out to protect it. They know that they have no history, and they value treasures that have historical value. In a country with too much history, things that are much more valuable are abandoned. I think Wang got his wish. In 1991, the CCP started a "Patriotic Education Campaign" as part of its education curriculum, which emphasized China's victimization before 1949. The campaign formally started with two documents titled "Notice about Conducting Education of Patriotism and Revolutionary Tradition by Exploiting Extensively Cultural Relics’’ and ‘‘General Outline on Strengthening Education on Chinese Modern and Contemporary History and National Conditions.", and notably credited from an internal document sent from then Chairman Jiang Zemin to the Secretary of Education. In 1994, the CCP would issue an "Outline on Implementing Patriotic Education", which reads, in part: "The objectives of conducting patriotic education campaign are to boost the nation’s spirit, enhance cohesion, foster national self-esteem and pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united front to the broadest extent possible, and direct and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the great cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics." (the Translation is not mine, that is from Prof. Zheng Wang's National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Education Campaign in China. International Studies Quarterly (2008) 52, 783–806.) As a result, the historical curriculum changed from having primarily a Marxist element, which emphasized class struggle, to a narrative more focused on nationalism and patriotism. Various figures were rehabilitated or cast in a different light. The CCP also designated about a hundred different sites across China as "patriotic education bases", and about 2/3rds of these were from past wars or battle sites, such as those from the Civil War, the second Sino-Japanese War, and many from the imperial era. At various times, the Central Committee and State Council have encouraged periods of "red tourism" to visit these battle sites, historical museums, and other similar locations.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2020 22:00
|
|
|
plvlry posted:Yes, definitely! I only registered my account to follow this thread and I'm very sure I'll be following it until we get to the end of the book. Also I am really looking forward to the chapter about American politics! Thank you. That means a lot. just another posted:Have you considered reposting this off-site for a wider audience? I've been considering setting up a Wordpress or something similar for my incidental writing and to archive some other things I've made. TibetLP is a fun side product of mine, but that might have to sit cheek-by-jowl with more serious work I'm doing.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2020 22:19
|
|
|
Chapter 2: An Ancient Political System Part 3: A Political Creed quote:One of the main reasons why Europeans to look down on Americans is that Europeans think that Americans have no long cultural traditions and no great figures. They are like a group of “hillbillies” who got rich quick in the domain of politics. This view is reflected in Europeans' belief that Americans do not have a rich legacy of political justice. Europe contributed to Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Hegel and other ideas. An important aspect of their achievements is that they have provided a wonderful account of human political life. Many of the basic tenets of today's European and even Western politics are derived from these ideas. American political thought is not so developed. The United States has only two hundred years of history. The American veterans chose the ideology that already exists in Europe, and they did not make many new contributions. American political scholars are also blunt on the matter.  Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) was a Harvard-trained political scientist who obtained his Ph.D. at age 23 and began teaching at Harvard almost immediately after. His first major book was "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations", published in 1957. He was denied tenure there and moved to Columbia in 1959, where he became friends with another new hire, Zbigniew Brzezinski. In 1977, he was invited by Brzezinski to serve on the staff of the National Security Council during the Carter administration, which he did until the end of 1978. His major works include "Political Order in Changing Societies", which was a critique of W. W. Rostow's developmental theory, suggesting that as societies 'modernize' and grow more complex, they may grow more violent without institutional developments to keep that violence in check. In 1991, he wrote "The Third Wave", which chronicled the waves of democratization among authoritarian states since the mid-1970s, starting with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and continuing through to ex-Warsaw Pact states, the 'East Asian Tigers', and some states in sub-Saharan Africa. More controversially, he wrote a Foreign Affairs article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" which cast doubt on the "end of history" thesis of Francis Fukuyama and said that further violence in world history would likely be between "Western" civilization and Islam. His thesis has provoked much controversy in the years ahead among academics and policymakers, although his ideas found a kind of cachet after the events of September 11, 2001. His advisory role to the apartheid government in South Africa has also led to criticism. quote:According to Huntington, "American Creed" has been formed since the time of the War of Independence. From the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States has formed some fundamental political values. This is the American creed. The core content of the American Creed came from the thinkers of the European bourgeois revolution, but it also has a more ancient origin, which can be traced back to ancient Greece. These creeds not only exist but are accepted by most members of society. These creeds have evolved one way or another over the course of two hundred years, but their core has remained the same. These creeds form part of the "self" of the American nation. Many people in society are not promoting these creeds all day, but people are practicing them. Universities, courts, governments, and the mass media are spreading these tenets. To some extent, these creeds dominate society. One of the main topics of the Dukakis and Bush campaigns was to discuss what is the mainstream of the United States and who has left the mainstream of the United States. Neither side is willing to leave the mainstream of the United States or they will lose their votes. I don't have Huntington's book so I don't know if this is his argument or Wang Huning's. quote:One hundred and forty years ago, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville said that Americans generally believe that people are the source of power. People respect freedom and equality, most citizens have political power and so on. These are the elements of the American Creed. James Bryce's summary is: (1) the individual has sacred power; (2) the source of power lies in the people; (3) all governments are restricted by laws and people; (4) local governments take precedence over the federal government; (5) Most people are wiser than a few; (6) The smallest government is the best government, and these beliefs can explain the left and right. In general, Americans don't feel the need for explanations, and everyone thinks they know the true story. However, in times of crisis, people will interpret these tenets differently.  Alexis de Tocqueville, of course, was a classical liberal, political scientist, and historian. His Democracy in America is one of the most commonly assigned texts to young undergraduate students in political science.  James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, was a historian, political scientist, and British Ambassador to the United States from 1907-1913. He was known for his three-volume work, The American Commonwealth, which followed the journeys of Tocqueville. He believed the United States to be much more unequal than Tocqueville had described, yet he held some optimism for the future of the United States, noting its extreme economic growth and high standards of living compared to European countries. He might also be termed a 'Whig historian'. quote:Huntington believes that this happened in four periods: the revolutionary period, the Jefferson period, the Civil War, and the unrest in the 1960s. What happened during these periods were mainly general dissatisfaction, political ideology played an important role in the debate, political turmoil, strong anti-regime sentiment, an intensified mentality for change, and expanded political participation. The more important reason is that actual politics did not realize these creeds, potential conflicts continued to accumulate and finally erupted like a volcano, thereby finding new structures. Because most people believe in these creeds, the first thing that people think of at the outbreak is to better embody them, rather than change them. The society has been realizing the same creed, and society is constantly changing its beliefs. The continuity of its social development cannot be ignored in its social development.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2020 23:32
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2020 05:20
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2020 20:12
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2020 01:19
|
|
|
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:
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2020 18:34
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2020 17:19
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 19:30
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2020 00:44
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2020 04:31
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2020 05:33
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 06:11
|
|
|
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?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2021 21:58
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2021 04:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:25 |
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2021 04:31
|
|