Communism – Page 12 – artdiamondblog.com

“Innovation and Invention Don’t Grow Out of the Government’s Orders”

“”You can have democracy no matter what level of development. Just look at the Arab Spring.”- Zhou Youguang” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) BEIJING. EVEN at 106 years old, Zhou Youguang is the kind of creative thinker that Chinese leaders regularly command the government to cultivate in their bid to raise their nation from the world’s factory floor.
So it is curious that he embodies a contradiction at the heart of their premise: the notion that free thinkers are to be venerated unless and until they challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party.
Mr. Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system that linked China’s ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1980s. He has written about 40 books, the most recent published last year.
. . .
His blog entries range from the modernization of Confucianism to Silk Road history and China’s new middle class. Computer screens hurt his eyes, but he devours foreign newspapers and magazines. A well-known Chinese artist nicknamed him “Trendy Old Guy.”
. . .
THE decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 wiped out Mr. Zhou’s lingering belief in communism. He was publicly humiliated and sent to toil for two years in the wilderness.
. . .
About Mao, he said in an interview: “I deny he did any good.” About the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: “I am sure one day justice will be done.” About popular support for the Communist Party: “The people have no freedom to express themselves, so we cannot know.”
As for fostering creativity in the Communist system, Mr. Zhou had this to say, in a 2010 book of essays: “Inventions are flowers that grow out of the soil of freedom. Innovation and invention don’t grow out of the government’s orders.”
No sooner had the first batch of copies been printed than the book was banned in China.

For the full story, see:
SHARON LaFRANIERE. “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; A Chinese Voice of Dissent That Took Its Time.” The New York Times (Sat., March 3, 2012): A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 2, 2012.)

“Human Progress Is Built on Man’s Desire to Correct His Mistakes”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) Yu Hua is one of China’s most acclaimed novelists, hugely popular in his own country and the recipient of several international literary prizes. He brings a novelist’s sensibility to “China in Ten Words,” his first work of nonfiction to be published in English. This short book is part personal memoir about the Cultural Revolution and part meditation on ordinary life in China today. It is also a wake-up call about widespread social discontent that has the potential to explode in an ugly way.
. . .
Mr. Yu argues that corruption infects every aspect of modern Chinese society, including the legal system. Historically, Chinese peasants with grievances could go to the capital and petition the emperor for redress. Today, Mr. Yu writes, millions–yes, millions–of desperate citizens flock to Beijing each year hoping to find an honest official who will dispense justice where the law has failed them at home. What will happen when they discover that their leaders at the national level are just as corrupt as those at the local level?
The violence and deprivations of the Cultural Revolution are by now well known, but Mr. Yu’s reminiscences add color and texture to what the world has learned in recent years about that lost decade. The youthful Yu Hua is something of a wise guy and a schemer, pitting himself against bureaucratic inanities. It is sometimes impossible to know whether to laugh or cry.
. . .
As awful as the Cultural Revolution was, in Mr. Yu’s telling its horrors sometimes pale next to those of the present day. The chapter on “bamboozle” describes how trickery, fraud and deceit have become a way of life in modern China. “There is a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system of China today,” he states. He writes, for example, about householders around the country who are evicted from their homes on the orders of unscrupulous, all-powerful local officials.
Mr. Yu’s portrait of contemporary Chinese society is deeply pessimistic. The competition is so intense that, for most people, he says, survival is “like war.” He has few hopeful words to offer, other than to quote the ancient philosopher Mencius, who taught that human progress is built on man’s desire to correct his mistakes. Meanwhile, he writes, “China’s pain is mine.”

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; Cultural Lexicon; People, leader, reading, revolution, disparity, copycat and bamboozle–some words that serve as a springboard for critiques of China.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., December 7, 2011): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Yu, Hua. China in Ten Words. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Marco Rubio’s Parents Worked Hard so He Could Do Something He Loves

Marco Rubio. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 10) Your parents came to Miami from Cuba in the 1950s. Your dad became a bartender, and your mom worked as a hotel maid, among other jobs. Was it always clear that you wouldn’t follow them into a service job?

The service industry is hard, honorable work, but early on my parents drove it into us that a job is what you do to make a living; a career is when you get paid to do something that you love. They had jobs so I could have a career.
. . .
Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among your top career campaign contributors. What do you say to people who believe that they’re investing in you so that you’ll push to overhaul the tax code to their benefit?
People buy into my agenda. I don’t buy into anyone’s agenda. I tell people what I stand for, and the things I’ve stood for were the same at the very beginning, when none of those people were giving me money.

For the full interview, see:
ANDREW GOLDMAN, interviewer. “TALK; Marco Rubio Won’t Be V.P.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., January 29, 2012): 10.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date January 26, 2012.)

Vaclav Havel Fought for Freedom

“Mourning; Thousands gathered on Sunday in Wenceslas Square in Prague, some under a Czech national flag, to marke the death of Vaclav Havel.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below. Source of photo: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PGUPpCvWzRQ/Tu9C59lXdJI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/0lcI7EfO8P4/s1600/Vaclav%2BHavel%2B3.jpg [The photo appeared on p. A10 of the print version of the obituary, but was not included with the online version.]

(p. A1) Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was 75.
. . .
A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers.
All the while, Mr. Havel came to personify the soul of the Czech nation.
His moral authority and his moving use of the Czech language cast him as the dominant figure during Prague street demonstrations in 1989 and as the chief behind-the-scenes negotiator who brought about the end of more than 40 years of Communist rule and the peaceful transfer of power known as the Velvet Revolution, a revolt so smooth that it took just weeks to complete, (p. A10) without a single shot fired.
. . .
He never stopped preaching that the fight for political freedom needed to outlive the end of the cold war. He praised the American invasion of Iraq for deposing a dictator, Saddam Hussein.
He continued to worry about what he called “the old European disease” — “the tendency to make compromises with evil, to close one’s eyes to dictatorship, to practice a politics of appeasement.”

For the full obituary, see:
DAN BILEFSKY and JANE PERLEZ. “VACLAV HAVEL, 1936-2011; Czechs’ Dissident Conscience, Turned President.” The New York Times (Mon., December 19, 2011): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated December 18, 2011, and had the title “VACLAV HAVEL, 1936-2011; Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President, Dies at 75.”)

Karl Marx “Had Engels Embezzle Money for Him from His Father’s Firm”

(p. 419) One of the few figures who actively sympathized with the plight of the poor was also one of the most interestingly improbable. Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufac-(p. 420)tured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman – eventually
he became a partner – he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.
It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as Communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club – in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.
Engels’s patient support for Marx was little short of wondrous. In that milestone year of 1851, Marx accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but with no intention of actually writing any articles. His English wasn’t good enough, for one thing. His idea was that Engels would write them for him and he would collect the fee, and that is precisely what happened. Even then, the income wasn’t enough to support his carelessly extravagant lifestyle, so he had Engels embezzle money for him from his father’s firm. Engels did so for years, at considerable risk to himself.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Reagan Fought “Tyranny” of Big Government

Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and London statue of Ronald Reagan. Source of photo: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/7/4/1309780763409/London-statue-of-Reagan-u-001.jpg

The McCarthy mentioned in the passage quoted below is a California representative who also serves as majority whip.

(p. A9) The statue of a smiling Reagan, dressed in a crisp suit, was paid for by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation as part of a worldwide effort to promote his legacy, according to the organization’s executive director.
. . .
Though Mrs. Thatcher is in poor health and did not attend, she provided a statement that was read by Mr. Hague. “Through his strength and conviction,” she wrote, “he brought millions of people to freedom as the Iron Curtain finally came down.”
In a speech, Mr. McCarthy described Mr. Reagan’s fight not only against the forces of Communism, but against the “tyranny” of debt and big government. He and Mrs. Thatcher, he said, “did not move to the center to gather votes, they moved the center to them.”

For the full story, see:
RAVI SOMAIYA. “Finding a New Perch, Americana Takes a Stand in London.” The New York Times (Tues., July 5, 2011): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 4, 2011 and has the title “Statue of Reagan Is Unveiled in London.”)

Chinese Boom Financed by Government Debt and “Clever Accounting”

“An empty lot in Wuhan, China, where developers intend to build a tower taller than the Empire State Building in New York.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) . . . the Wuhan Metro is only one piece of a $120 billion municipal master plan that includes two new airport terminals, a new financial district, a cultural district and a riverfront promenade with an office tower half again as high as the Empire State Building.
. . .
The plans for Wuhan, a provincial capital about 425 miles west of Shanghai, might seem extravagant. But they are not unusual. Dozens of other Chinese cities are racing to complete infrastructure projects just as expensive and ambitious, or more (p. A8) so, as they play their roles in this nation’s celebrated economic miracle.
In the last few years, cities’ efforts have helped government infrastructure and real estate spending surpass foreign trade as the biggest contributor to China’s growth. Subways and skyscrapers, in other words, are replacing exports of furniture and iPhones as the symbols of this nation’s prowess.
But there are growing signs that China’s long-running economic boom could be undermined by these building binges, which are financed through heavy borrowing by local governments and clever accounting that masks the true size of the debt.
The danger, experts say, is that China’s municipal governments could already be sitting on huge mountains of hidden debt — a lurking liability that threatens to stunt the nation’s economic growth for years or even decades to come. Just last week China’s national auditor, who reports to the cabinet, warned of the perils of local government borrowing. And on Tuesday the Beijing office of Moody’s Investors Service issued a report saying the national auditor might have understated Chinese banks’ actual risks from loans to local governments.
Because Chinese growth has been one of the few steady engines in the global economy in recent years, any significant slowdown in this country would have international repercussions.

For the full story, see:
DAVID BARBOZA. “Building Boom in China Stirs Fears of Debt Overload.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 7, 2011): C8.
(Note: online version of the article is dated July 6, 2011 and has the title “Building Boom in China Stirs Fears of Debt Overload.”)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Castro’s Communist Goons Impound Cuba Libre

“Her writing, said Yoani Sánchez, above in her Havana apartment, describes “the sentiments of one person but sums up the reality of many people.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) Like any other first-time author, Yoani Sánchez was looking forward to receiving copies of her book, “Cuba Libre,” after it was published last year. But when the package sent from Buenos Aires by her publisher arrived in Havana, the Cuban customs service impounded the parcel and, after she complained, sent her a notice explaining its action.

“The content of the book entitled ‘Free Cuba’ transgresses against the general interests of the nation, in that it argues that certain political and economic changes are necessary in Cuba in order for its citizens to enjoy greater material well-being and attain personal fulfillment,” stated the document, which Ms. Sánchez posted on her Web site. Such positions “are extremes totally contrary to the principles of our society.”

Outside her homeland, though, Ms. Sánchez’s writing is free of such censorship, and she has emerged as an important new voice, both literary and political. Published in the United States in May under the title “Havana Real” (Melville House), her book draws on the same collection of sketches of daily life in Cuba — a dreary, enervating routine of food shortages, transportation troubles and narrowed opportunity — that she has been posting on her Web site, Generation Y (desdecuba.com/generationy), since 2007.
. . .
(p. C6) Recently Ms. Sánchez completed a second book, a manual whose title translates as “WordPress: A Blog for Speaking to the World.” A new fiber-optic cable connecting Cuba with South America has just been laid, and when it begins fully operating later this summer, it is likely to increase opportunities not just for her, but for other dissident bloggers and writers, many of whom have attended the seminars she conducted that led to the writing of the second book.
“It’s interesting that we’re talking not about a bearded 80-year-old man, but a sharp, fearless, skinny 35-year-old mother,” said Ted Henken, an expert on Cuba and the Internet who teaches at the City University of New York and visited Ms. Sánchez in April. “That’s new, and in some ways, by spreading the virus of blogging and tweeting to others, she has displaced Che and Fidel among young, progressive people.”

For the full story, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “In Cuba, the Voice of a Blog Generation.” The New York Times (Weds., July 6, 2011): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 5, 2011.)

500 Kinds of Hammers: Even Marx Knew that Capitalism Produces Variety

The diversity of hammers, part 1. Source of graphic: page 4 of the Basalla book quoted and cited aways down below.

(p. 21 of Bryson) Suddenly, for the first time In history, there was in most people’s lives a lot of everything. Karl Marx, living in London, noted with a tone of wonder, and just a hint of helpless admiration, that it was possible to buy five hundred kinds of hammer In Britain. Everywhere was activity, Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through It, so to speak. In twelve years eight railway termini opened In London. The scale of disruption–the trenches, the tunnels, the muddy excavations, the congestion of wagons and other vehicles, the smoke, the din, the clutter–that came from filling the city with railways, bridges, sewers, pumping stations, power stations, subway lines, and all the rest meant that Victorian London was not just the biggest city in the world but the noisiest, foulest, muddiest, busiest, most choked and dug-over place the world had ever seen.

The 1851 census also showed that more people in Britain now lived in cities than in the countryside–the first time that this had happened anywhere in the world–and the most visible consequence of this was crowds on a scale never before experienced. People now worked en masse, traveled en masse, were schooled, imprisoned, and hospitalized en masse. When they went out to enjoy themselves, they did that en masse, and nowhere did they go with greater enthusiasm and rapture than to the Crystal Palace.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

On Marx and hammers, Bryson references p. 156 of Petroski:
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts–from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers–Came to Be as They Are. New York: A. Knopf, 1992.

Actually, Petroski’s source on Marx on hammers clearly is Basalla who he quotes on pp. 23-24:

(p. 23 of Petroski) George Basalla, in The Evolution of Technology, suggests the great “diversity of things made by human hands” over the past two hundred years by pointing out that five million patents have been issued in America alone. . . . (p. 24) He then introduces the fundamental questions of his study:

The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumb-tacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn . . . that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts. What forces led to the proliferation of so many variations of this ancient and common tool? Or more generally, why are there so many different kinds of things?

Basalla dismisses the “traditional wisdom” that attributes technological diversity to necessity and utility, and looks for other explanations, “especially ones that can incorporate the most general assumptions about the meaning and goals of life.”

(Note: italics in original; first ellipsis added; second ellipsis in original.)

Petroski then again mentions Marx on hammers on the p. 156 that is referenced by Bryson:

(p. 156 of Petroski) In spite of Marx’s astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was to not make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day, but seldom if ever in a formal social context. I have often reflected on the value of special hammers while using the two ordinary ones from my tool chest: a familiar carpenter’s hammer with a claw, and a smaller version that fits in places the larger one does not. The tasks I’ve applied them to have included driving and removing nails, of course, but also opening and closing paint cans, pounding on chisels, tacking down carpets, straightening dented bicycle fenders, breaking bricks, driving wooden stakes, and on and on.

The Basalla book is:
Basalla, George. The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge Studies in the History of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

On p. 2 of Basalla, he writes:

(p. 2 of Basalla) The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumbtacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn, as well he might have been, that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts . . .

(Note: ellipsis added.)

In Basalla’s notes to this chapter, the only Marx he mentions is the first volume of Capital. Searching volume one of Capital in Google Books for “hammer,” one discovers the relevant passage on p. 375:

(p. 374 of Marx) Manufacture is characterized by the differentiation of (p. 375) the instruments of labour–a differentiation whereby implements of a given sort acquire fixed shapes, adapted to each particular application, and by the specialisation (sic) of those instruments, giving to each special instrument its full play only in the hands of a specific detail labourer. In Birmingham alone 500 varieties of hammers are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations in one and the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer.

The Marx book is:
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. New York: Modern Library, 1906 [first German edition in 1867].

The diversity of hammers, part 2. Source of graphic: page 5 of the Basalla book quoted and cited somewhere above.

Chinese College Graduates Are Underemployed “Ant Tribe” in Big Cities

(p. A1) BEIJING — Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.

Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.
Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced (p. A12) 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.
It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.
“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”
. . .
Chinese sociologists have come up with a new term for educated young people who move in search of work like Ms. Liu: the ant tribe. It is a reference to their immense numbers — at least 100,000 in Beijing alone — and to the fact that they often settle into crowded neighborhoods, toiling for wages that would give even low-paid factory workers pause.
“Like ants, they gather in colonies, sometimes underground in basements, and work long and hard,” said Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
. . .
A fellow Datong University graduate, Yuan Lei, threw the first wet blanket over the exuberance of Ms. Liu, Mr. Li and three friends not long after their July arrival in Beijing. Mr. Yuan had arrived several months earlier for an internship but was still jobless.
“If you’re not the son of an official or you don’t come from money, life is going to be bitter,” he told them over bowls of 90-cent noodles, their first meal in the capital.
. . .
In the end, Mr. Li and his friends settled for sales jobs with an instant noodle company. The starting salary, a low $180 a month, turned out to be partly contingent on meeting ambitious sales figures. Wearing purple golf shirts with the words “Lao Yun Pickled Vegetable Beef Noodles,” they worked 12-hour days, returning home after dark to a meal of instant noodles.
. . .
Mr. Li worried aloud whether he would be able to marry his high school sweetheart, who had accompanied him here, if he could not earn enough money to buy a home. Such concerns are rampant among young Chinese men, who have been squeezed by skyrocketing real estate prices and a culture that demands that a groom provide an apartment for his bride. “I’m giving myself two years,” he said, his voice trailing off.
By November, the pressure had taken its toll on two of the others, including the irrepressible Liu Yang. After quitting the noodle company and finding no other job, she gave up and returned home.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “China’s Army of Graduates Is Struggling.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., December 12, 2010): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 11, 2010 and has the title “China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs.”)