The Bewilderness

CSR - Chinese Sycophancy Review?

China's investments in renewable energy and announcements of targeted reductions in CO2 emissions has flattered environmentalist NGOs. To such an extent that they have praised China for its endeavours overlooking the injustices and suffering meted out to those who oppose the CPC. They must be on a par with climate deniers!

The key word in this discourse is sustainability. China, unbeholden to argument, compromise or special interest groups, can mobilise social resources, tax its captive population, jack up investment and direct communitarian resources as appropriate, regardless of how people may feel (and those who dissent disappear).

People like Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is more optimistic. He told me that China is the only country that’s cut its energy intensity over 5 percent a year for a quarter of a century. They are the world leader in distributed renewable sources of power and the only country that has energy efficiency as its top development priority.

To be sure, implementation is at an early stage. But, Lovins said, China has better leaders than we do, and they are more highly motivated and work harder.

“For all these reasons, I think we can rely on China to lead the world out of the climate mess.”

William McDonough, co-author of Cradle to Cradle, shares these sentiments. He told me that while “they’re not going to become an eco-paradise overnight, at the senior level, they’ve recognised the idea of closing cycles as being a critical part of any long-term plan.”

It is alarming that the corporate sustainability movement takes China's utterances and statistics at face value; admires its system of governance for long-term stability and planning; and pays lip service to the values of the West. To be watched and fought...

North Korea bays to the moon

North Korea has played a strong defence from a position of weakness depending upon threats, bluster and the covert deployment of weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation to obtain aid from the West. Without such assistance, it is not clear that the existing regime: a revolutionary regime ossifying into a hereditary kleptocracy would have survived without reform. (One looks to the red princelings of its big brother, China, to see how one party states follow this path, even without personality cults). 

North Korea has recently conducted another nuclear test and stated that it has a ballistic missile almost ready for intercontinental attacks. The new leader, Kim Jong Un, has proved even more aggressive than his father (who is rumoured to have died in a fit of angry apoplexy). The rhetoric, the grooves, the moves have become shriller as the regime ups the ante.

This becomes a concern since it mirrors an increasingly assertive China. Foreign policy is partially restructured by the People's Liberation Army, which appears to wag the Communist party, not vice versa. Is it too far-fetched to think that North Korea's own repudiation of the armistice and bellicose threats to attack the US mirror those of its patron? 

With treaty conditions, Chinese assertions, increased tensions on the Korean peninsula and the freedom of manoevre for radicals and hotheads to aggressively threaten the status quo, is it not a concern that war could break out in the Far East? Will the Glosters again defend Imjin?

Who can forget the Fat Years?

Imagine a world where the People's Republic of China had entered 'the prosperous time' and autocracy continued to maintain its grip against the background of global unrest and pharmacological control. This is the plot of a recent science fiction novel in China, popularised due to its concentration on the social and political future of the country. Its author has enthusiastically supported its spread from Hong Kong to the mainland, where it has become a viral success.

Chen Guanzhong's work has proved a successful distillation of the moral vacuities that grip the Chinese audience. Just as we in the West often perceive their political contract as an unspoken surrender of civil and political freedoms for economic prosperity, so the same harsh trade-off forms part of this examination of liberty. Yet, this is not the dominant theme of this self-described 'realist' novel.

For what pervades China and stalks its citizens is the very opposite of the jurisprudential politics of the United States. Ever since 1949, the republic has been subjected to a series of purgings so that the collective memory can no longer muster shared evocations of past crises. In this way, has the communist autocracy survived. The latest example was Tianmen Square. In the novel, the Chinese authorities undertake another violent crackdown and with the aid of drugs bring back a stable order. Again, they are aided in this by the collective forgetting of the population, as seen in the past.

China 2013 may invoke science-fictional elements but it is focused readily on the past: envisioning another round of violence and forgetfulness as the price for the Fat Years.