- CAPS LOCK BROKEN
- Feb 1, 2006
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by Fluffdaddy
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Ace job translating for us man, one small thing, in your passage here:
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 cute, 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:
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"
quote:
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.
It was even worse than that. To make a telephone call was a big loving deal, and you either had to be on time at the china post office with public telephones to wait for a call (and pay out the nose), or use one at work for non work purposes. Important communications were better and more cheaply sent via telegram, which again was subject to a PSB goon reading your private correspondence. The absurdity of it was a big part of the movie black cannon incident:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8j--RJMtqs
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Nov 22, 2019 01:55
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May 10, 2024 12:16
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- CAPS LOCK BROKEN
- Feb 1, 2006
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by Fluffdaddy
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Chapter 1: An Imbalanced Land
Part 4: The Heights of Commodification
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Rationing didn't end until 1986 and life was still pretty tough by cushy American standards. For example, my grandpa returned from the US with a color TV and a Toshiba refrigerator sometime in the early 1980s and people from the entire building were camped out at his apartment waiting to see a color TV for the first time.
Either as a result of youth or because young people simply had their basics met most people who were born in the 60s and educated in their 80s preferred the state run rationing vs. the market economy. I will try and see if I can dig up some pictures of 粮票 that my mom's family have hoarding ever since rationing ended-- apparently they are now sought after collector's items.
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Nov 26, 2019 03:42
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- CAPS LOCK BROKEN
- Feb 1, 2006
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by Fluffdaddy
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Yeah when I listen to the audiobook my mind swing back and fore between Amish and Armenians. I was going to cross reference the town he mentioned and comfirm it was really Amish. But I have a 2 year old toddler and never enough time.
Do you have a link to the audiobook? Would like to listen on the plane/train.
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Dec 1, 2019 02:18
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- CAPS LOCK BROKEN
- Feb 1, 2006
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by Fluffdaddy
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There are still rural populations that hunt with firearms. There are even places that aren't connected to the rest of the country by roads, power lines, water, etc. that still dress in Qing era Hanfu, at least according to my family.
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Dec 12, 2019 00:06
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May 10, 2024 12:16
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- CAPS LOCK BROKEN
- Feb 1, 2006
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by Fluffdaddy
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How is the translating going? I will probably stop by 前流书店 when I'm in beijing to pick up some CCP classics on the way back next week.
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Jan 14, 2020 01:17
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Nov 22, 2019 01:55
