Category: Communism

Under Communism, Guests Accepted “Terrible” Service “Because the State Was Paying”

(p. A4) The service, even the management admits, is terrible. “We would not even qualify for two stars,” said Yuri Kurtaba, the sanitarium’s director of maintenance. There is no room service and no Wi-Fi outside a tiny area near the lobby, and the swimming pool has been empty since the war.
. . .
(p. A10) Ms. Gaivoronskaya ‘s sanitarium is no longer closed to the public, as it was in the old days, but otherwise everything is left pretty much as it was. It offers a pebbly beach on the Black Sea, a statue of Lenin in the lobby, high-ceilinged rooms with chandeliers, bad plumbing and rotary telephones, as well as glorious sunshine well into late fall.
. . .
Sergey Rogulov, a 39-year-old driver from St. Petersburg, said he liked the shabby Stalin-era interiors — “it is like time travel back to the U.S.S.R.” — . . .
. . .
Ms. Gaivoronskaya , the veteran sanitarium worker, said she missed the old days, when guests tended not to complain much because the state was paying.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “GAGRA JOURNAL: Bad Pipes, Stunning Views and a Tourism Renaissance.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 13, 2016): A4 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 12, 2016, and has the title “Bad Pipes, Worse Service: A Soviet Riviera Jewel Is Reborn and Booking Up.”)

Censored and Walled-Off Internet Hurts Chinese Start-Ups

(p. B1) Two decades after Beijing began walling off its homegrown internet from the rest of the planet, the digital world has split between China and everybody else. That has prevented American technology companies like Facebook and Uber, which recently agreed to sell its China operations, from independently being able to tap the Chinese market.
For China’s web companies, the divide may have even more significant implications.
It has penned in the country’s biggest and most innovative internet companies. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have grown to be some of the world’s largest internet companies, but they rely almost entirely on domestic businesses. Their ventures abroad have been mostly desultory, and prognostications that they will challenge American giants internationally have (p. B2) not materialized.
. . .
In many ways, the split is like 19th century railroads in the United States, when rails of different sizes hindered a train’s ability to go from one place to another.
“The barrier to entering the U.S. or China market is becoming higher and higher,” said Kai-fu Lee, a venture investor from Taiwan and former head of Google China.
The difficulties that China’s internet companies face in expanding their success abroad are epitomized by WeChat, the messaging app owned by Tencent.
. . .
Critics pointed to Tencent’s lack of distinctive marketing, a record of censorship and surveillance in China and its late arrival to foreign markets. Yet the biggest problem was that outside of China, WeChat was just not the same. Within China, WeChat can be used to do almost everything, like pay bills, hail a taxi, book a doctor’s appointment, share photos and chat. Yet its ability to do that is dependent on other Chinese internet services that are limited outside the country.

For the full story, see:
PAUL MOZUR. “Internet’s Great Wall.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 10, 2016): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 9, 2016, and has the title “Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else.”)

“My Fate Lies with Me, Not with Heaven”

(p. A7) . . . Dr. Unschuld, who is as blunt as he is outspoken, stands at the center of a long and contentious debate in the West over Chinese medicine. For many, it is the ur-alternative to what they see as the industrialized and chemicalized medicine that dominates in the West. For others, it is little more than charlatanism, with its successes attributed to the placebo effect and the odd folk remedy.
Dr. Unschuld is a challenge to both ways of thinking. He has just finished a 28-year English translation of the three principal parts of the foundational work of Chinese medicine: the Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, published by the University of California Press. But unlike many of the textbooks used in Chinese medicine schools in the West, Dr. Unschuld’s works are monuments to the art of serious translation; he avoids New Age jargon like “energy” or familiar Western medical terms like “pathogens,” seeing both as unfair to the ancient writers and their worldviews.
But this reflects a deep respect for the ancient authors the detractors of Chinese medicine sometimes lack. Dr. Unschuld hunts down obscure terms and devises consistent terminologies that are sometimes not easy to read, but are faithful to the original text. Almost universally, his translations are regarded as trailblazing — making available, for the first time in a Western language, the complete foundational works of Chinese medicine from up to 2,000 years ago.
. . .
. . . then there is the issue of efficacy. With his extremely dry humor, Dr. Unschuld likens Chinese medicine to the herbal formulas of the medieval Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. If people want to try it, they should be free to do so, he said, but not at taxpayer expense. As for himself, Dr. Unschuld says he has never tried Chinese medicine.
. . .
His purely academic approach, . . . , makes him a difficult figure for China to embrace. While widely respected for his knowledge and translations, he has done little to advance the government’s agenda of promoting Chinese medicine as soft power. Echoing other critics, he describes China’s translations of the classics as “complete swindles,” saying they are done with little care and only a political goal in mind.
For Dr. Unschuld, Chinese medicine is far more interesting as an allegory for China’s mental state. His most famous book is a history of Chinese medical ideas, in which he sees classic figures, such as the Yellow Emperor, as a reflection of the Chinese people’s deep-seated pragmatism. At a time when demons and ghosts were blamed for illness, these Chinese works from 2,000 years ago ascribed it to behavior or disease that could be corrected or cured.
“It is a metaphor for enlightenment,” he says.
Especially striking, Dr. Unschuld says, is that the Chinese approach puts responsibility on the individual, as reflected in the statement “wo ming zai wo, bu zai tian” — “my fate lies with me, not with heaven.” This mentality was reflected on a national level in the 19th and 20th centuries, when China was being attacked by outsiders. The Chinese largely blamed themselves and sought concrete answers by studying foreign ideas, industrializing and building a modern economy.

For the full story, see:
IAN JOHNSON. “The Saturday Profile; An Expert on Chinese Medicine, but No New Age Healer.” The New York Times (Sat., SEPT. 24, 2016): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 23, 2016, and has the title “Gandhi the Imperialist – Book Review.”)

The recently finished book mentioned above, is:
Unschuld, Paul U. Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

Proletariat Protests Communist Dictator

(p. A4) CARACAS, Venezuela — Thousands took to the streets here on Thursday [September 1, 2016] to demand the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in what appeared to be the year’s largest display of frustration with Venezuela’s economic collapse and leadership.
The march, which protesters called “the taking of Caracas,” was organized by political opponents of the country’s ruling leftists. The marchers took over a major highway and several avenues in Caracas, the nation’s capital, and poured into the city’s plazas in an effort to gain momentum for a referendum to recall Mr. Maduro.
. . .
Ivonne Mejías, 42, who wore a headband of yellow, blue and red, the colors of the Venezuelan flag, said the situation had become so difficult that she had not been able to bake birthday cakes for her children this year. Her family of four gets by on just $25 a week, Ms. Mejías said, and she has taken to making piñatas to earn extra money.
“Sometimes I want to kill myself,” she said. “I am frustrated, I am out of control, I am fighting with this world. This isn’t my life. My soul splits in two when my kids beg for something — for an ice cream, for a cookie — and I can’t give it to them. The most difficult thing is getting food.”
Víctor Guilarte, 45, a mechanic from a Caracas suburb, said his work had vanished because his neighbors had become so poor they could not afford car repairs. Two weeks ago, he said, he visited his family in another state and found the situation even worse.
“I came back feeling destroyed — they had no food,” he said. “I am tired of Maduro and his government, tired of crime, of hunger, of them telling us we have plenty to eat.
. . .
Marly Torrealba, 37, a single mother, came by bus from Barlovento, a city once known for its cacao production. Ms. Torrealba complained that the government had abandoned the city to organized crime, and it was now rocked by killings, extortions and kidnappings.
“Farm workers have abandoned the crop because of crime,” she said, “and the criminals charge us protection money and rob everything in sight.”

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS CASEY and PATRICIA TORRES. “Thousands of Venezuelans March for President’s Ouster.” The New York Times (Fri., Sept. 2, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 1, 2016, and has the title “Thousands March in Venezuela to Demand President’s Ouster.”)

Maduro Counts on Marxist Professor to Be Miraculous “Jesus Christ of Economics”

(p. B1) CARACAS, Venezuela–President Nicolás Maduro, hoping for an economic miracle to salvage his country, has placed his trust in an obscure Marxist professor from Spain who holds so much sway the president calls him “the Jesus Christ of economics.”
Alfredo Serrano–a 40-year-old economist whose long hair and beard have also elicited the president’s comparison to Jesus–has become the central economic adviser to Mr. Maduro, according to a number of officials in the ruling United Socialist Party and other government consultants.
. . .
Most international and domestic economists blame Venezuela’s food shortages, which have triggered riots, on price controls and expropriations. Mr. Serrano, though, attributes an “inefficient distribution system in the hands of speculative capitalism,” which he says allows companies to hoard products. He also says foreign and local reactionary forces are waging an economic war against Venezuela.
The adviser has championed urban agriculture in a country where about 40% of fertile land is left fallow by price controls and seed shortages. Mr. Maduro created the Ministry of Urban Agriculture, headed by a 33-year-old member researcher at Mr. Serrano’s think tank, Lorena Freitez. A senior adviser at the think tank, Ricardo Menéndez, heads the planning ministry.
“Serrano is a typical European leftist who came to Latin America to experiment with things no one wants at home: state domination, price controls and fixed exchange rates,” said José Guerra, a Venezuelan opposition lawmaker and former chief economist at the central bank.

For the full story, see:
ANATOLY KURMANAEV and MAYELA ARMAS. “Maduro Turns to Spanish Marxist for a Miracle.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Aug. 9, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 8, 2016, and has the title “Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Looks to a Marxist Spaniard for an Economic Miracle.”)

Venezuelans Revel in Socialist Paradise of Plenty

SearchForFoodInLootedCumanaGroceryStore2016-07-11.jpg“A man searched for food last week at a grocery store in Cumaná that had been looted.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.
In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
. . .
(p. A3) It has not always been clear what provokes the riots. Is it hunger alone? Or is it some larger anger that has built up in a country that has crumbled?
Inés Rodríguez was not sure. She remembered calling out to the crowd of people who had come to sack her restaurant on Tuesday night [June 14, 2016], offering them all the chicken and rice the restaurant had if they would only leave the furniture and cash register behind. They balked at the offer and simply pushed her aside, Ms. Rodríguez said.
“It is the meeting of hunger and crime now,” she said.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS CASEY. “Pillaging by Venezuelans Reveals Depth of Hunger.” The New York Times (Mon., JUNE 20, 2016): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 19, 2016, and has the title “Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.”)

The Most Popular Kremlin Line

(p. A4) In an interview, Mr. Gorbachev shrugged off the fact that 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he remains among the most reviled men in Russia. “It is freedom of expression,” he said.
. . .
Some adore him for introducing perestroika, or restructuring, combined with glasnost, or openness, which together helped to jettison the worst repressions of the Communist system. Mr. Gorbachev led the way, albeit haltingly, toward free speech, free enterprise and open borders.
“Some love him for bringing freedom, and others loathe him for bringing freedom,” said Dmitri Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, one of the few remaining independent newspapers and one in which Mr. Gorbachev holds a 10 percent stake.
. . .
Mr. Muratov said they often recounted the same joke, based on Mr. Gorbachev’s infamous campaign to lower alcohol consumption:
Two men are standing in a long, long vodka line prompted by the limited supply. One asks the other to keep his place in line, because he wants to go over the Kremlin to punch Gorbachev in the face for his anti-alcohol policy. He comes back many hours later and his friend asks him if he had indeed punched Gorbachev. “No,” the man answered despondently. “The line at the Kremlin was even longer.”

For the full story, see:
NEIL MacFARQUHAR. “Reviled, Revered, and Still Challenging Russia to Evolve.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 2, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 1, 2016, and has the title “Reviled by Many Russians, Mikhail Gorbachev Still Has Lots to Say.”)

“Hong Kongers Will Not Bow Down to Brute Force”

(p. A1) HONG KONG — Blindfolded and handcuffed, the bookseller was abducted from Hong Kong’s border with mainland China and taken to a cell, where he would spend five months in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day by a battery of Chinese guards.
Even the simple act of brushing his teeth was monitored by minders, who tied a string to his toothbrush for fear he might try to use it to harm himself. They wanted him to identify anonymous authors and turn over data on customers.
“I couldn’t call my family,” the man, Lam Wing-kee, said on Thursday. “I could only look up to the sky, all alone.”
Months after he and four other booksellers disappeared from Hong Kong and Thailand, prompting international concern over what critics called a brazen act of extralegal abduction, Mr. Lam stood before a bank of television cameras in Hong Kong and revealed the harrowing details of his time in detention.
“It can happen to you, too,” said Mr. Lam, 61, who was the manager of Causeway Bay Books, a store that sold juicy potboilers about the mainland’s Communist Party leadership. “I want to tell the whole world: Hong Kongers will not bow down to brute force.”
. . .
(p. A14) In the months since Mr. Lam and his colleagues disappeared, the industry has fallen on hard times. Causeway Bay Books has closed, and many Hong Kong bookstores have pulled titles about Chinese politics from their shelves.
The disappearances shocked people in Hong Kong and reverberated internationally. Many saw the episode as an expansion of China’s authoritarian legal system beyond its borders, in clear violation of the “one country, two systems” framework that allows Hong Kong to maintain a high degree of autonomy from Beijing.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong to demand the booksellers’ release. Diplomats from Britain, the European Union and the United States also registered concern.

For the full story, see:
ALAN WONG, MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ANDREW JACOBS. “Defying China, Hong Kong Bookseller Describes Detention.” The New York Times (Fri., JUNE 17, 2016): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 16, 2016, and has the title “Defying China, Hong Kong Bookseller Describes Detention.”)

In Cultural Revolution, Chinese “Tried to Turn Their Homes into Fragile Islands of Freedom”

(p. C8) Mr. Dikötter’s greatest contribution with “The Cultural Revolution,” which is the third in a trilogy on China during the Mao era, is his undermining of the conventional view of the period following Mao’s death in 1976. The prevailing narrative, much encouraged by the Communist Party, is that the Chinese state began “lifting” hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through its sage adoption of capitalist-style policies officially called “reform and opening,” beginning with an end to systemwide economic planning and the restoration of markets.
Drawing on a growing body of existing research, Mr. Dikötter argues that China’s markets were not born of the official reforms of the late-1970s and early 1980s but rather got their start before the Cultural Revolution had ended in 1976. He writes of peasants and city dwellers who had completely lost faith in the system and began improvised acts of survival and resistance, like the private trading of goods and labor, which was banned, and even small-scale industrial output.
“Senseless and unpredictable purges were designed to cow the population and rip apart entire communities, producing docile, atomized individuals loyal to no one but the Chairman,” Mr. Dikötter writes. The outcome, as with so many extreme, top-down uses of power, was almost the exact opposite. As surreptitious markets began to flourish in response to scarcity, “people from all walks of life tried to turn their homes into fragile islands of freedom.”​

For the full review, see:
HOWARD W. FRENCH. “‘Bombard the Headquarters’; The twin pillars of Mao’s campaign were uprooting supposed reactionaries and the promotion of sycophancy.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 28, 2016): C8.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 27, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Dikötter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016.

Rudderless Russians Admire Stalin, Jobs, Gates and Gandhi

(p. A13) What makes Chelyabinsk compelling is its people. They are largely decent and undeniably intelligent, protective of what they have achieved, wary of the unknown, and, above all, clever and flexible at adapting to changing times. In a word, they are . . . wily men (and women) . . .
. . .
Perhaps most telling is Alexander, who lives in a village five hours from the city. He admires Mr. Putin and the system the president has built, even as he complains that corruption is rife, governance is poor, and the local economy is held back by an overbearing and rapacious state. Alexander’s criticisms mirror those of the citizens in the book who consider themselves dissidents and activists, though Alexander would never consider himself either one. “He is proud of Putin,” Ms. Garrels writes, “and between him and those who dread their country’s current course, there is an unbridgeable divide.”
This sort of internal contradiction isn’t unique to Alexander. Many of the Russians Ms. Garrels meets hold views that seem impossible to reconcile. She cites polls that show that two-thirds of ethnic Russians call themselves Orthodox believers, but many of those very same people say that they do not believe in God. At one point, the author visits a prestigious state secondary school where the students offer a curious mix of heroes: Joseph Stalin, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Gandhi. The search for a post-Soviet ideology has, in Chelyabinsk and across Russia, led to a strange mishmash, at once faithful and mystical, distrustful and fatalistic.

For the full review, see:
JOSHUA YAFFA. “BOOKSHELF; Russia’s Wily Men and Women; Russians hold views that seem impossible to reconcile. Students at a reputable school offer a curious mix of heroes: Stalin and Steve Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 18, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 17, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Garrels, Anne. Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.