Democracy can’t Buy People

I have no strong doubts that America will “only” be the second or third largest economy within two to four decades. In the meantime, while the trends will be suggesting that, many people elsewhere in the world, including Westerners who are focused on economic power alone, will start placing their political bets on China, too. In the views of many, a society where human rights only rank second or third and where democracy is deemed an unnecessary luxury will appear to be more efficient than a democratic model. Many will easily forget or push aside all evidence that democracy may be an essential human right, or an important practise to avoid untenable living conditions of the “ordinary people”, and therefore, in the end, a stablilizing rather than a destabilizing factor in the life of a country. Many people won’t see either that even under an undemocratic – i. e. inefficient – form of government, peoples’ livelihoods can still hardly drop in China. Quite naturally, the only likely direction is upwards anyway, at least for some time to come, as long as most Chinese citizens are living close to the bottom of their individual potentials.

Radio Canada International QSL, 1988

I got this feeling when I looked at the German press online yesterday. An article by Niall Ferguson, first published by Britain’s Financial Times (now only accessible for registered readers) on December 27, has since been published in German by the weekly Stern, the weekly Der Spiegel, the daily Die Welt, and probably a number of regional newspapers, too.

Niall Ferguson’s article doesn’t look wrong to me, but it can encourage short-sighted views of the future when it comes to the benefits that political concepts, rather than civilizations, can offer, or the drawbacks they can cause. The main factors which play a role in Ferguson’s article are money (American current account accounts, public expenditure and revenue) and military power (Afghanistan and Iraq). Even if democracy never becomes something most Chinese people would appreciate and fight for – and among many of them, national power may be viewed as a sufficient substitute for leading a full life individually -, China won’t be an attractive model for most other nations. A country or empire may be powerful – but it won’t be attractive elsewhere unless the citizens can live their lives to their full potentials.

That said, Taiwan before all other countries will be in a difficult position, unless a majority of its people actually like the idea of being “re-united” with China. Their window of opportunity to have their sovereignty internationally recognized – if the opportunity still exists at all -, has begun to shrink. Will the Taiwanese test their opportunities and risk to codify their sovereignty internationally? And how far will the rest of the world – most crucially America – be willing to support and help to defend them?

For those of us who live in democratic countries, China’s growing weight poses questions which would have seemed unimportant only a few years ago. It is unlikely that the average Chinese citizen will enjoy our standards of living in the foreseeable future. And besides, it is unlikely that our standards of living will remain as high as they are. We will need to save more, and to spend less – not only in America. There are ecological reasons for that, and economical reasons. Rises in productivity can’t be endless, as long as we are confined to this planet. Democracy stabilizes society when its promises are sustainable. But democracy may stop doing so if the promises made by its political class – in order to secure their election or reelection – become unsustainable. This question about sustainability has always been an issue, but it must become a central issue in our societies. Democracy isn’t here because Westerners were better people than the Chinese. And the matter of sustainability isn’t at all lofty. While China’s social insurance programs are facing huge challenges, they are only promising comparatively small benefits to the Chinese people. Our welfare systems are much less challenged than theirs, but the promises of our welfare systems to their clientele have become a great burden for every regular employee. If democracy shall stay, we must ask ourselves who we want to be, rather than what we want to own. Democracy can’t buy people. Democracy is either wanted, or it will go away.

Freedom is not a matter of where we live, and it is no matter of nationality or race. But it is, of course, a question about who governs us, which economic and political system we have, and into which direction we want to develop. As China is a totalitarian country, led by a “Communist” party which wants to stay in power (no matter if that will require Communist, Socialist or Confucian colors), its growing influence will require us to be vigorous competitors in terms of political concepts, and to some extent, in terms of power.

It doesn’t really matter how powerful the West’s position will be in the future. But there need to be democratic societies which are able to defend themselves, and which can convince the global public that people only live full rights in the light of human rights.

Once China is a country with a p0litical class that works to heal, rather than to cultivate the mortifications of its people, it can – and maybe should – lead the world. Otherwise, it shouldn’t get into that position.

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Related:
How to Corrupt an Open Society, Aug. 29, 2009
The American Era isn’t over, October 30, 2008

No Global Governance as “Old Pain” lingers

“One World” – instead of “first, second, and third world” – used to be an unalienable piece of vocabulary in every do-gooder’s wordpool, at least from Western countries. German weekly Die Zeit, not really a bunch of treehuggers, but a paper usually giving responsible opinion and unhurried advice, is re-assessing the one-world concept in an online article. Yes, in London and Pittsburgh, the governments of the world did write new rules for the financial markets. In Geneva, they held another round of  negotiations about a new trade system. They will be back in Davos again soon, to perambulate all the global problems in their totality. They tried to save global climate in Copenhagen. But they are forgetting the financial crisis, the further we seem to leave it behind us. The more remote the memory, the smaller chances are to write global rules that would be globally effective.

And they failed in Copenhagen – “Every country has its own dirty taboo”. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder liked the idea of global governance, writes Die Zeit. In the end, they hoped, negotiated agreements and international organizations – NGO’s and corporations included – would lead to some kind of substitute for a desirable, but still unachievable global government. Liberals and left-leaning people in general seemed to support the concept.

But global emergency management has proved to be the maximum of what global governance could achieve together. There is no common concept of tomorrow’s world, writes Die Zeit. Both Europeans and Asians had gained a new self-confidence vis-à-vis America. Europe’s economic and social systems had shown a remarkable resistance against the effects of the economic crisis, and India and China put economic development before climate protection. “In India, you can’t see the climate problem eye-to-eye with Europe or the USA”, the paper quotes Shyam Saran, an advisor to India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh. On a global scale, Europe’s concept of political integration appears to be a  rather singular one.

Europe should get prepared for a world with a patchwork of powers which go it alone, like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, and clusters of global governance like ASEAN or the EU, Die Zeit quotes a study by the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

Die Zeit lists liberals and left-leaning people who actually start to like the idea of such a world – and of nationalists who had always been skeptical of any kind of global governance anyway.

The article’s author actually confuses China’s party and state chairman Hu Jintao with the country’s chief councillor Wen Jiabao. And in other ways, the author also still seems to underestimate the distance between East (arguably excluding several countries such as India, Vietnam, and possibly Japan and South Korea) on the one hand, and Western countries on the other. There isn’t really much reason to believe that a common view of the world will emerge any time soon. Jonathan Spence, in a Reith Lecture in Liverpool, broadcast by the BBC on June 10th 2009 June 10th 2008,  suggested that the issue of the Opium Wars

is now no longer a real one in any important sense and to harp on it now is not something the Chinese have to do. It’s something they can do if they wish to keep an old pain alive.

You can be pretty sure that China’s government does want to keep the old pain alive. “To remember the bitter past to cherish the happy present tense” is a tradition that either came into being or was revived by the CCP during the Chinese Communists’ early days in power – and it is still an efficient way to keep the Chinese public sufficiently afraid or distrustful of foreigners to disapprove of “foreign concepts”. Even otherwise highly open-minded Chinese people often cling to these “open accounts from history”.

At hindsight, at the end of the 20th century or at the end of the 21rst century’s first decade, one may probably say that it was naive to believe that world governance could be an option. You can’t do business with a totalitarian regime, unless you are ready to do business at its terms.

The Zeit article, as flawed as I believe it to be in one or another detail, caught me by surprise. I’m left-leaning myself, and until today, I have felt that my re-orientation towards regional solutions, rather than global ones, was something not too many others of my political color would share. But there seems to be a general trend towards regional action. Elinor Ostrom, an American economist, argues that people may actually commit to the common, rather than the individual use of resources, so long as they succeed in organizing the use and maintenance of such resources. A single system of rules for rather large international fishing zones was likely to fail, she suggests. Polycentric solutions – or regional ones – might work. Experimenting with different ideas in different places could amount to a competition of different ideas., which would either convince bystanders, or leave them unenthused.

And even steps deemed small by its actual practitioners might convince visitors from overseas.

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Related:
Mark Lynas: “How China wrecked the Copenhagen Deal”, December 24, 2009

JR´s Little (German) Press Review

The European Union and the United States must do more to support those countries which suffer most from climate change and added least to it, writes Dorothea Steiner in the Green Party´s gazette Schrägstrich of December 2009. Globally, the need for combatting global warming is estimated to be 100 billion Euros from 2020, she writes.

It is absurd to build walls and fences against “boat people” who have lost their livelihood to climate change, rather than supporting their countries in coping with the consequences of climate change for their societies. [...] More than “two degrees plus” hurt us all. Latest scientific calculations show that from now to 2050, we can only emit 750 billion tons more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if we want to keep global warming at less than an additional two degrees. Any further rise is said to be neither technically nor financially controllable.

To learn from the Netherlands means to learn victory

In the long run, our carbon dioxide emissions needed to be reduced by 80 per cent, according to Steiner. The surprising bit: what Steiner, herself one of the two chairwomen of Lower Saxony´s Green Party, doesn´t demand much more than the older political parties, or the EU, or – in terms of money needed to be pledged to poor countries to cope with global warming – not all that far from Hilary Clinton´s qualified offer in Copenhagen. Ms Steiner does however remind her readers that the German government must tell the citizens in detail how they will need to help to achieve the stated goals.

Giesbert Wiltfang, a dykemaster in Krummhörn, Ostfriesland, is not so worried, reports the Ostfriesen-Zeitung (East Frisian Times) of Tuesday. Wiltfang refers to the Lower Saxony Water Management, Coastal Defence and Nature Conservation Agency´s data: the  agency´s tide gauge on Norderney has recorded no tidal rise in addition to the 25 centimeters per century which had long been known. Therefore, the sea level was certainly rising, but its rise wasn´t accelerating. Wiltfang doesn´t want to play the issue down, but carbon dioxide wasn´t simply poisonous: “After all, the flora needs carbon dioxide. One shouldn´t vilify it.” East Frisians had little to fear from rising temperatures: “After all, we are profiting from it – tourism, farming, lower heating costs. When lowlands (like the Netherlands or Ostfriesland) are threatened, “they must build dykes”.

Dumpstuff ‘09

Before the are leaving this decade (the 2000s, that’s the timespan from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009), let’s do away with some unnecessary things here in Germany.

• the German-Chinese “Dialog on the Rule of Law” (Rechtsstaatsdialog), initiated by former chancellor Gerhard Schröder and then Chinese chief state councillor Zhu Rongji, in 1999. It’s a waste of money and time.
• some aspects of our country’s family policies, especially the litter bonuses. We don’t need to encourage parents to have more children. We “only” need to take better care of the kids who are already here. That may even lead to higher birthrates. And if not, let’s think hard: won’t low birthrates offer opportunities, too?
• the Non-Smokers’ Protecton Law (Nichtraucherschutzgesetz). Smokers may stink up the air, but conferences which turned their venues into heavy industrial zones usually achieved more, than all the treehugger events of these days. We may live shorter, but we may also accomplish more in our lives.

Further suggestions from home and abroad are welcome, but hurry up. This decade is rapidly drawing to a close. And before anyone comes up with dumb ideas, lemme tell you that this beautiful blog is here to stay.

Excerpts from Hermit’s Memoirs: “My first Chinese American Pizza”

Bremen – As we all know, China was subjected to a century-and-a-half of humiliation and cruelty at the hands of the Western imperialist forces. There are many small stories of Chinese individual fates which add up to the big historical picture, and Hermit, a well-known Taoist scientist and expert on Western imperialism and its everlasting snaky schemes, has some stories to share, concerning the more recent history. The following are excerpts from his memoirs (to be published in 2010), and in the following episode, he remembers his years of hardship as a student in Northern Germany, probably somewhere around 1990.

click here for the BIG picture

Unce Upon a Time in Bremen-Hemelingen: Hermit's Chinese American Pizza

Once upon a time in Bremen-Hemelingen, when I was a student of natural sciences in Germany, I opened a pizza parlor with some compatriot classmates. We called our pizza the Chinese American Pizza, but those stupid German passer-bys only looked at our big billboard and laughed in a silly way. When our market research team asked them why they were laughing, they said that American Pizza was just American Pizza, and that it was as simple as that.

We made the earnest representation to them that pizza was Italian before it was American, and that the Americans only stole it, and that it was silly to say that American pizza was hotter than Italian pizza or the original Chinese Pizza (invented in 2749 before 1949). It was only because of America’s so-called soft power that they, the Germans, found American pizza cooler than Italian or Chinese American pizza. But despite our patience and endurance, our representations didn’t really sink in. *)

So after a while, we started selling noodle soup and fried rice instead, which worked much better. For the time being, we had to live with that typically German bias. Their limits on our products were also typical examples for their slave mentality which became rampant after the Americans had won the war against them. As there are also some racist restrictions on Chinese students who want to run a business in Germany, we used a Germany-born Chinese dummy, and it worked alright.

But once the soft power of our motherland has grown to its due strength, we will come back to Bremen-Hemelingen and open a Chinese American Pizza parlor there.

Or a Chinese American Italian Pizza Parlor. Or a Chinese Italian Pizza Parlor, because America won’t count anymore. Or a Chinese Pizza Parlor. It will depend on our market research.

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*) The background behind their narrow-mindedness was of course obvious. If they had admitted that American Pizza is really Chinese American Pizza, they would have had to admit that Taipei is really Chinese Taipei, too! Germans are very logical people, but they are particularly “logical” (in a perverted way) when they are trying to maintain their anti-Chinese bias!

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Hermit’s Memoirs (Working Title: A Patriotic Student Travels the World) will be published by the Central Government Document Publishing House late next year. In accordance with the CCP’s Historical Resolution, the publishing will be done in accordance with The Historical Resolution, they won’t be published overseas, and these excerpts will appear exclusively on JR’s Beautiful Blog.

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Related:
Hermit’s Childhood and the Beautiful Stone, July 27, 2009

CRI: Developed Countries’ Copenhagen Positions Inconsistent with Previous Agreements

The Copenhagen Accord is not the end, and the whole world should take responsibilities on a long road to come, writes Chen Tian (陈天), a commenter with China Radio International (CRI). Although all countries acknowledged the existence of climate change and the urgency of reacting to it, the duties of burden-sharing had remained an unbridged gap between developed and developing countries. In that sense, Copenhagen should be seen as a starting point. Chen points out that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had called on the developed countries to take the lead, while developing countries should follow in taking appropriate action (“我呼吁出席本次会议的所有发达国家领导人率先采取行动，这样的话，其他国家也将随之采取相应的行动”).

China had, as the world’s largest developing country and emerging economy, made practical contributions, he writes. China’s state and party chairman Hu Jintao (胡锦涛), during the UN Climate Summit, had said that China took responsibility to its own people and the people of the world to make concrete efforts. Chen quotes the chairman: “China has defined a national climate program and has clearly stated that it would reduce energy consumption and emissions per GDP unit, and that it would increase forest cover, and the share of renewable energy, as binding national targets. In the future, China will, step by step, include measures against climate change into its economic and social development plans, and continue to take effective measures.” On November 26, China’s government had also declared that by 2020 the national carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP than in 2005 dropped 40% to 45%. These efforts had earned international acclaim, writes Chen -  Danish prime minister Lars Rasmussen had expressed his admiration.

Chen on the other hand expresses disappointment that the developed countries had been lacking sincerity in reducing emissions, even though they were mainly responsible for climate change:

America announced ahead of Copenhagen that until 2020, it would reduce greenhouse emissions by 17 per cent, compared with 2005, compared with 1990s, this would only be a reduction of four per cent. Although Japan had announced a reduction by 25 per cent, it demanded that all major emitting countries should take part in the reduction, which was clearly not in line with The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and with the Kyoto Protocol, which had established common, but differentiated, responsibilities^*), and even the European Union, which was most active in the negotiations, only committed to a 20 per cent or 30 per cent reduction target – while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by 25 to 40 per cent, based on 1990 as a reference year to avoid a devastating global impact.

Chen ends his article by quoting some words of encouragement, from a statement by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon after the conclusion of the Copenhagen Summit. In short: a success, and a beginning.

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*) The paragraph about differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities can be found on the UNFCCC’s website, within the Framework Convention’s prelude:

Acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible  cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate  international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated   responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions, [...]

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Related:
Copenhagen Summit: Make it, or Fuck it Up, but Stop Bitching, December 18, 2009
“International Law Traded in for Big-Power politics”, Earth Institute, Dec 22, 2009

Becoming Yourself Again

mask off

Somewhere, I read this year that teaching minors in a comprehensive school is as demanding as an air traffic controller’s job. I can’t judge that, because I’ve never been an air traffic controller, and I don’t remember if the author of the article was himself a teacher or an air traffic controller, but it’s true that permanent readiness of mind is an essential. Given that a lot of parents are very opinionated and very defensive when it comes to their childrens’ ratings and discipline, and given that politics has highly empasized parents volition (Elternwille) in recent years, a teacher needs to be both tough and diplomatic. As students’ performance levels are generally going down rather than up, many parents fear for their childrens’ future, and at the same time, not just a few of them seem to think of good ratings as some kind of human right, with or without their childrens’ own endeavors. Teachers can be easy lightning arresters. Parents’ volition applies in every classroom situation, too – can I sell my decisions, statements and conduct if they lead to conflicts with parents?

Sometimes, after having performed one hour after another, I’m sitting down in a pub, just on my own, have a coffee and a cigarette, try to relax and to become myself again.

Anyway, the christmas holidays are here now.

It’s nice to take that chronically optimistic educationalist mask off for a while. I’ve been teaching for more than five years now, and I’m usually enjoying it – but I do still know what stage-fright is.

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Related:
What it takes to learn and to teach, Febr 3, 2009

Commodities: Chinese Custom Duties

China is going to lower import customs duties on some 600 products next year, as agreed with the WTO, reports Liechtenstein’s Volksblatt, among them naphta and coal. Currently reduced rates on gasoline and diesel, and windmill components will go back up, thus leaving public revenue basically unchanged. After completion of a number of new refineries, China is now probably a net exporter of gasoline and diesel. Export duties on natural resources such as crude oil, cellulose, ferrous alloys and some steel products, so far said to be temporary, are to remain in effect.

Meantime, China’s steel industry is reportedly calling for unified global opposition against a proposal by Rio Tinto Ltd. and BHP Billiton Ltd. to combine their iron ore operations, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Coal is to be given priority over iron ore, as a seasonal jump in heating is expected, according to The Australian.

Iron ore also remains in high demand. Being substantial iron ore exporters, BHP Billiton Ltd’s and Rio Tinto’s operation plans are subject to EU and possibly Chinese anti-trust procedures.

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Update:
China raises customs duties on American, Russian technical steel, VoR, December 21, 2009
Remark:
Technical steel (technischer Stahl) or transformer sheets are apparently used in production processes which involve high temperatures and – normally – fatigue of material, according to SSAB, a Swedish company’s website, as technical steel keeps its form and qualities during use.

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Related:
China’s Steel Industry: The Grey Area, July 18, 2009
Negotiations unfinished, July 18, 2009
Mr Premier, are you ready, December 20, 2009