Anju Links for 24 February 2009
SOUTH KOREANS BLAME THE NORTH for the current downturn in inter-Korean relations by 63 to 27, according to a new poll. A solid majority supports aid to the North only on the condition that it gives up its nuclear weapons. Assuming this poll is accurate, it suggests that North Korea’s recent behavior has created a backlash in South Korean public opinion, creating support for Lee’s North Korea policy that didn’t exist when he was elected.
MORE RESHUFFLING OF GENERALS in North Korea.
THE NEW YORK TIMES PROFILES THE ANONYMOUS NORTH KOREAN ARTIST who has shaken up Seoul’s art scene with his parodies of North Korean propaganda art. Unfortunately, South Koreans are not famed for their appreciation of satire. Still, this is another small step forward for the development of defectors’ impact on South Korean culture. One can hope that eventually, it will be felt in their homeland.
HOW MANY DIVISIONS DOES BAN KI MOON HAVE? North Korea rejects the visit of a U.N. envoy to talk missiles.
UH OH:
As the global economic crisis deepens and the demand for Chinese exports slackens, manufacturing jobs in the Pearl River Delta and all along the once-booming coast are disappearing at a stunning pace. Over the last few months, more than 20 million migrant workers have been cast into the ranks of the unemployed ….
This week, more than 3,000 public security directors from across the country are gathering in the capital to learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called mass incidents. At a meeting of the Chinese cabinet last month, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government leaders they should prepare for rough times ahead. “The country’s employment situation is extremely grim,” he said.[N.Y. Times]
That last note on China sparked my interest…I haven’t thought about this in a long while…
During the 1990s, when there was so much about the Rise of China to world prominence and talk of the next superpower — I always had a wait and see attitude.
From what little I read about contemporary China, it seemed that they had great pockets of prosperity within seas of often dire poverty.
That sounded at least a little familiar with other parts of China’s past — Isn’t that one of the recurring themes in Chinese history? Periods of growth and prosperity followed by periods of upheaval as the pressure between haves and have nots got too big?
I could remember reading a book critical of American-style capitalism and materialism that said that the reason the United States did not witness a popular revolution or major popular economic unrest between socialists/communists and capitalists was that the US managed to spread the wealth around enough to keep the have nots docile.
I thought the book downplayed the lives and environment of the American have nots, but I thought the idea was worth considering.
And when I kept hearing about China’s future as a world leader — I kept wondering if they would be able to spread the wealth around enough as they grew or whether the massive population would prove too big a strain on growth and limit its potential….???
Now that the whole world’s economy is on a steep downturn for a period of some years…
….it will be interesting to watch how China and Chinese society fares….
Whenever you see everyone saying the same thing at once, think “bubble.” The herd predicting that China’s growth would go on for decades until it surpassed America reminds me very much of the herd that predicted Japan’s inevitable supremacy in the 80’s.
Part of this is the other side of the same phenomenon that makes the prediction of America’s imminent demise so popular with masochists and people who haven’t unlearned their college professors’ crisis theory dialectics. A steady stream of predictions like these flows from publishing houses. I’ve never seen one come true yet, current circumstances included. The Joads aren’t clogging our highways, and we have plenty of peaceful avenues to ventilate our grievances that China lacks.
Of course, it won’t help that we’ve spent more than the cost of the entire Iraq war in just a month, and that could do to our economy what it did to Japan’s in the 90’s, but Japan eventually recovered. Economies rise and fall according to the capacity of their people to invent, produce, innovate, and react flexibly to changes in markets. Those things in turn require free markets in goods, services, and labor; honest government; the rule of law; and an educated population with decent civic virtues and the critical thinking skills to govern itself rationally. We’re certainly not a perfect society in all those ways, but our fundamentals make us much stronger and more stable than China on all counts.
China’s leaders have a divide-and-rule strategy that relies on isolating restive rural regions from each other, exploiting ethnic divisions, and whipping up angry nationalism among urban only-child netizens who dwell near the centers of power. Anger, however, is a very unpredictable thing. Policed chatrooms and state-sanctioned mobs are a skewed sample of public opinion. It’s much harder to gauge the sentiments of the urban and rural poor, or of those who prefer to keep their views to themselves for various reasons. Just because the xenophobic anger is real among the new Boxers (this is also true of North Koreans) doesn’t make it a representative or complete picture of public opinion, nor does it mean that the angry mobs won’t turn on the state after some perceived provocation. I expect they will turn on the state in due course, and plenty of historical precedent supports this prediction.
The bigger questions are whether the state can save its basic structure and pacify the mobs by acceding to some of their demands, or whether the mobs will let themselves be pacified at all. Nor does it mean that we will necessarily like the post-CCP China; after all, the CCP is the one thing that has prevented China from becoming a world power.