Mashnote
A 28 Febrary 2010 article in the Washington Post commmenting on the flux of opinion on China
There's a new Red Scare. But is China really so scary? - washingtonpost.com. The worry and fear bordering on irrationality. The open admiration of China's order and efficiency. The Mufson Pomfret article kept its eyes on the facts and kept a ledger on the new China's pluses and minuses. A skeptical sympathy with China. The others not so much : in the links the Post article contains (and unusually the online version contains several external links) there is a certain abandonment of critical distance. It reads as a collection of Fan boys of decisiveness and schoolgirl crushes on authoritarianism. It is true those who accord the greatest capabilities to China are generally looking to China as a straw man. They use this to ask for greater power and greater aggressive posture, essentially they desire to become more like what they view as the more successful state. None of this detracts from the actual and considerable accomplishments of the Chinese in both culture and economy of the last several decades. My focus is really elsewhere, a reflection on the open society and its relation to a sustainable culture of human well-being.
Generally this is a continuation of a previous post's line of thinking casting China as one of the new breed of hyper-successful start-Up Nations. Unencumbered economies having our lunch and eating it too. Then I was considering what might keep a ideological authoritarian state from falling down the well of Lysenko-ism. I imagine as an interim solution China steers toward the practical side of authoritarianism.
Admiration of success oriented authoritarianism seems to stand some frankly many on their heads. China is a country organized to get things done they say to themselves. Those as unlikely as Lindsey Graham and Thomas Friedman among them. Though since the Tea Party wing named Sen. Graham as a mere "rino" (republican-in-name-only) I can't tell those two apart. Through the looking glass they see a totalitarian industrial policy of unabashed corporatism, but not regulation. There is a great appeal in action. Movement and manufacture is the ideology of the modern state that is going places. Such men of action have nothing to fear from authoritarian rule. Their accumulation of wealth is protected, Their freedom paid up and licensed, if borrowed. As long as they remain useful and loyal. In modern China many see the enviable perfection of can-do America. a unitary one-party state committed to wealth and wealth holders, privatized (more or less - hidden at least) into the right hands, dismissive of regulation on industry or any thing, utilizing the power of the state to sweep aside obstacles, like rights of the non elite.
There is an enduring attraction of authoritarianism: Outside, the trains don't run on time so they say (Mussolini's apologists and the Gang of Four) Are there unifying elements to Authoritarianism? Marxism (Maoism) however now tempered by Confucism and capitalism? A pan-cultural availability of a fascism and other forms of police state despotism? Elements that make it more than just enviable, that make it emulatable? A will towards order and efficiency power as the only value. I thought of Umberto Eco's essay Eternal Fascism written originally for the New York Review of Books in 1995; reprinted in different places since particularly effectively in Chris Hedges Book
American fascists the Christian Right and the war on America. [WorldCat.org]. I spent my spring Break -- two delayed federal holidays, two unpaid furlough days -- reading this book written by Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent, who also wrote "War is a force that gives us meaning". Hedges prefaces the book with Eco's 14 elements before demonstrating the adaptability of ideological despotism, how the subset of the Christian Right, adhering to dominionist precepts is utterly fascist to its core. Ur-Fascism is entirely cross-cultural. It is an ideology of response to modern mass culture. It may be seen as existing in a set of closely related reactions that prize unity and supplied purpose over the unsettling freedom of autonomy and self determination. To take choice away and supply a series of straw antagonists internal and external is an enduring solution to feeling of powerlessness, uncertainty and contradiction.
The incomplete rationality of modernism and bureaucratic government leaves holes in the social fabric. Years ago I read part of a book by Max Weber
The rational and social foundations of music. [WorldCat.org] he drew a metaphor between modern societies and composed music (high brow music) for the purpose of demonstrating that any attempt to inflict rationality on music - through any arrangement of a scale, division of vibration and a system of harmonics built upon it. Or through any bureaucratic division of administration, contracts and a systems of representative government could never form a comprehensive fully realized seamless whole. It would always be necessary to close the gaps through instinct and art and iterated trial and error. Toleration and compassion. This; though, provides a opportunity for a subtly deceitful nostalgia, and call to lost purity to claim what was formerly held and that the right leaders could return for the price of unquestioned obedience. Fascism trades in nostalgia, towards black and white clarity where grey shades, ambivalence, doubt and questions are disparaged and disallowed. As a last point. Google is currently in talks with Chinese government
Google says it's in talks with China - Los Angeles Times. Trying to find a way to keep portions of it varied enterprise still online in the middle kingdom
February set deficit record; Google says China feud may be resolved soon - washingtonpost.com. For academic and tech China an internet indexer that will return search results for the necessary web and not just some committee's preferred web, for Google a market of incomparable vastness, one that if they're not Microsoft will be
Microsoft plants Bing on Google-free Chinese Androids - The Register. They can be counted on to find some way to keep that train rolling on, and running on time. I expect to hear any day that Google now agrees to only hand up the heads of dissidents to Chinese state police authorities on melamine platters, rather than silver gold or porcelain platters as don't be evil gives way to don't not make money.
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