Month: January 2008

China Media Project’s David Bandurski points out that Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th Party Congress placed some emphasis on increasing China’s “cultural soft power”. China’s soft power pundits, apparently, believe that culture is a tool in “international struggles” and that America uses its music and movies to promote its strategic interests. Hu Jintao proclaimed:

“[we must] create more excellent, popular works that reflect the people’s principal position in the country and their real life… vigorously develop the cultural industry, launch major projects to lead the industry as a whole, speed up development of cultural industry bases and clusters of cultural industries with regional features, nurture key enterprises and strategic investors, create a thriving cultural market and enhance the industry’s international competitiveness.”

Of course, this all must be done under “correct guidance” – nothing “very yellow, very violent”, I presume, would be one of those things. Bandurski ends by saying:

Suppression, macro-meddling, nationalism and cultural snobbery. Now there’s a recipe for a cultural renaissance.

But the proof, as Hu would tell you himself, is in the business. And the question is now set: when the flowers of China’s “soft power” are brought to market, will the free world care to buy them?

The simple answer is no. And to provide the answer, I turn to the philosopher-poet Will I Am, producer and member of the Black Eyed Peas, who have turned out “some of the catchiest, most shamelessly commercial, unapologetically stupid hit songs of the 21st century”, when asked about why his band isn’t compared to more high-brow groups like the Roots anymore:

People always want to say you’ve lost your mission, but you can’t let that distract from what you love to do. I love to make music. If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies—I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, “I’m not going to paint this woman’s neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?” Please! That’s not what art is about. Some people could say “My Humps” isn’t art, and I’d say, cool. But I think it is. Also, our biggest hit ever was “Where Is the Love,” which is a very political song…

No one really thinks of the Black Eyed Peas as a political band (at least I don’t), but I’ll say one thing for them: in the summer of 2005, I heard the song “Let’s Get Retarded” in Urumqi (where all my Russian and Central Asian friends played it endlessly), Shanghai, Vienna, Budapest, Hvar, Mostar (nice clubs next to the new bridge), Belgrade (where I also saw on Euro MTV that they were performing it in Ibiza), and then finally the radio edit version “Let’s Get It Started” on American television for the NBA. The entire Western hemisphere. And it’s about being “retarded” (under the influence). And one of their other songs was lip-synched by the Backdorm Boys.

If China wants to make some big bucks spread their cultural products around the world, pop music and movies are where its at (and comic books, but they totally botched the 5155 Project, which just proves how doomed these campaigns are). And globally, nothing sells like booty shaking and giant robots. But all that is going to be too low brow for the Chinese state-dominated media. China’s not going to have much cultural soft power until the State Council loosens up. Which ought to be some time around, oh, never. And a nations turns its lonely eyes to Hong Kong…

Before 9-11, China was expected to be more of a front burner issue with the Bush Administration than it turned out. But one might get a glimpse of what some of the more extreme voices might be saying if they weren’t so busy flogging threats like so-called “islamofascism” by checking out Lev Navrozov, regular columnist at NewsMax. Is the China Threat an expanded navy? Economic blackmail? Armies of hackers? No, no, it’s grey goo:

As I have written repeatedly before, the dictators of China face a dilemma. Either lose their slave-state power (which can yield its owners more than any wealth can), as they nearly lost it to the Tiananmen peaceful uprising and as the Soviet dictatorship did lose its power in 1991, or establish world domination via post-nuclear (such as nano) super weapons.

Few Westerners know that today, about 100,000 Tiananmens of all forms and sizes occur annually in China. The Chinese people are not dainty figurines as one might find on old Chinese vases, and to keep them enslaved is not as easy as it may seem to the Western owners of such vases.

Wow, this is going to be entertaining:

The dictatorship of China has unlimited possibilities for channeling all their resources into the development of post-nuclear super weapons, which do not entail Mutual Assured Destruction, as did nuclear weapons developed in the United States, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and some other countries…

Here is an example from my personal observations. When in 1986 Eric Drexler published his book about nanotechnology, I was fascinated by its Chapter 11 about molecular nano weapons. Let me explain why. “Atomic bombs” required over four years of development — and were developed ahead of Nazi Germany partly because European scientists, including Einstein, fled from Europe into the United States to escape anti-Semitism. Now the U.S. was saved — not by those European scientists, but by Drexler!

Drexler’s weapons (never developed in the United States, but still existing only on paper) are based on molecules. A molecule can be converted into a tiny computer (“nano” means one-billionth of a meter), an artificial virus, etc.

Imagine billions of such molecules flying as a vast and growing cloud (since molecules multiply) capable of, for example, finding atomic weapons and destroying them.

And what does Navrozov say must be done to combat this threat?

How to enlighten the majority of the Western electorate?

I believe there is only one way. We, who are aware of the geopolitical situation in the world today, must create a film, based on documentary evidence, but showing the annihilation of the West by post-nuclear super weapons, now developed by the dictatorship of China…

I am enlisting volunteers. As for myself, I am recalling that reviewers of my book “The Education of Lev Navrozov” (Harper & Row) compared me to Orwell and Dostoyevsky, that I am an Einstein Prize laureate as well as the winner of the Andrew Jackson “Champion of Liberty” award. I hope to contribute to the script of the film in order to save the Western civilization and its liberty.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your chance to break into Hollywood. Who the hell is Navrozov, though, and why would anyone take this man seriously? Well, it seems that few people do, but the few that do aren’t exactly living in cabins in Montana writing long diatribes about how things that start with the suffix “uni-” are bad. Lev is one of many people on the board of the Lifeboat Foundation, dedicated to “encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.”

His bio there explains a bit about him: a Russian translator of literature, he pulled a Solzhenitsyn in 1972 and “told The New York Times and a CIA senior analyst (who came with his two assistants to speak with Lev) that the dictatorship of Russia had been developing post-nuclear superweapons, to be able to destroy the Western means of retaliation in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and thus to circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction on which the defense of the West had been based. Neither The New York Times, nor the CIA, believed him, but Ronald Reagan did, met him, and publicly announced the tragic news, which the CIA declared to be “evil empiricism”, that is, his mania.”

“Evil Empiricism”?

The Lifeboat Foundation sports a few interesting members, such as Ray Kurzweil, he of the Singularity, Pam “Atlas” Oshry of the blog Atlas Shrugged, Wole Soyinka and the newly appointed Huckabee campaign consultant Jim Pinkerton. Sadly No! points out Lev was an inspirational figure for the infamous Team B, the neocon hawks of the seventies who gave a second opinion on CIA figures for Russian economic and military strength as a rationalization for a military build-up – thinking that came up again with the Cox report on China in the nineties, and again seems eerily familiar in the build-up to the war on Iraq.

Lev takes sides in the debate between the coiner of the terms “nanotechnology” and “grey goo”, K. Eric Drexler, and the late Richard Smalley, Novel Laureate for the discovery of Buckminsterfullerene, stating that if one discounts the possibility of Chinese supernanoweapons, “What would be the danger? That the West, including Dr. Smalley and his carbon nanotubes, would be reduced to dust or would surrender unconditionally to become a vast Hong Kong.” Indeed.

The Drexler-Smalley debate basically involved redefining the term “nanotechnology”. While Drexler had talked about self-replicating nanomachines in his book Engines of Creation, leading to the threat vast clouds of tiny robots gone AWOL devouring the Earth for raw materials to reproduce themselves (see the Michael Crichton book Prey for the movie version), Smalley was a chemist and he defined “nanotechnology” as really any work being done at a nanoscale – like the nanotubes he discovered. He argued in his 2001 Scientific American article “Of Chemistry, Love and Nanobots” (PDF) that “there isn’t that much room” for a molecular assembler to work, essentially trashing Drexler’s idea.

Drexler eventually lost that battle and the accepted version of “nanotechnology” became the more mundane one. Drexler also stated that fears of “grey goo” were overblown, though the Lifeboat Foundation considers it one of their key worries. Most predictions about future nanotech have to do with drug delivery, smart materials and sensors, not swarms of killer nanobots. Most Chinese press, despite some of Navrozov’s claims, is mostly full of references to nanoweeds, nanomaps and the dangers of using ultrafine particles (technically a nanotech product in the Smalley sense) in textile manufacturing. Of course there are military applications to nanotechnology. Field responsive particles for increased material strength, quantum dot sensors, energy absorbing nanomaterials, and the like are being researched by DARPA and similar agencies. With the exception of molecular motors, all the projects are material and chemistry science projects. Nothing about tiny bots. Its worth noting these are American nanodefense projects, so Lev’s claims that the U.S. is doing nothing is hysterical and false. Also, none of these are remotely close yet to any sort of “superweapons”.

But Lev Navrozov knows. He predicts Chinese super nano weapons, and he can back it up:

…some of my readers ask me in their e-mails — respectfully and good-naturedly — whether I can adduce the proofs of that apocalypse of the West I envisage.

I have been told by a Chinese that the Chinese “Manhattan Projects,” developing post-nuclear super weapons, are located deep in the rocky mountains so that nobody could drill a hole in the walls, in the floor and/or the ceiling to get a glimpse into what is being done within.

So a special mobile drill should be constructed for me (at the cost of $100 billion?) to move into those rocky mountains, drill a hole in them, sufficient to get out a half-ready nano super weapon and bring it before Western TV cameras as proof of development of nano super weapons in China.

Buy that man a drill!

Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy and Square Word Calligraphy Classroom. Britta Erickson: “Square Word Calligraphy is a new kind of writing, almost a code, designed by Xu Bing. At first glance it appears to be Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read it but cannot. Western viewers, however, are surprised to find that they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.”



A Book From the Sky by Xu Bing (徐冰), 1987-1991. “An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ”false” Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.”

United Nations – China Monument: Temple of Heaven, 1998, by Gu Wenda (谷文达). “a site-specific installation commissioned by the asia society for “inside out“, PS1 contemporary art center, new york city, usa, 1998 . an entirely human hair made temple of pseudo-chinese, english, hindi, arabic and synthesized english-chinese, chinese ming dynasty’s furniture tv monitors, a video film heaven.”

DD, Confucius (2005) and O, Lao Tzu (2004) by Roman Verostko, from the Pearl Park Scriptures. Sections of the Legge translations of The Analects and the Tao Te Ching. “Each work presents a colorful drawing accompanied with lines of glyphs that read from left to right. An “alphabet” of glyphs was generated for each text in this exhibition.” The texts are converted into algorithms and a computer guided pen plotter draws the image and glyphs.

Tsang Tsou-Chio (曾灶财) died last July. He spread calligraphy graffiti across Hong Kong, and was dubbed the “King of Kowloon”.

A grubby man who looked like a tramp and who many thought barking mad, Tsang spent five decades roaming the metropolis — often shirtless and on crutches — scrawling his idiosyncratic calligraphy on lamp-posts, walls, phone boxes, pedestrian underpasses and electrical boxes.

“To some extent he’s quite cuckoo,” said leading Hong Kong fashion designer William Tang, a longtime admirer of Tsang who used the graffiti as a motif for several clothing ranges.

“I started to look at the calligraphy carefully and found it’s not just a joke. It has some kind of power, which is very raw, very original,” Tang added

Some say Tsang’s Chinese-style calligraphy, peppered with obscenities and abuse toward Britain’s Queen Elizabeth — is naive and an eyesore. But its quintessential Hong Kong symbolism has inspired other artists, including local film-maker Fruit Chan, and has drawn international acclaim.

Tsang was often at odds with police, and most of his city work has been erased. But by 2003 he was at the Venice Biennale.

Laura Ling’s profile and work at Current TV.

The Financial Times reports on a Chinese executive skipping bail and returning to his home in Hunan province:

The City of Westminster magistrates’ court said it had issued a warrant for the arrest of Yuan Hongwei, chairman of Chinese glue-maker MagPow Adhesive Industries, and seized his £100,000 ($196,000, €133,000) bail after he failed to appear for his extradition hearing.

MagPow (also known as Hunan Magic in a different translation of 湖南神力公司) has been fighting an international legal battle with American ABRO Industries for a few years now. MagPow has allegedly been selling counterfeit ABRO products, down to identical packaging and design, in various countries. According to the Wall Street Journal in 2004:

The Chinese company, based in the city of Liuyang in Hunan province, now advertises and ships around the world more than 40 “Abro” products, from super glue to silicon sealant, in exact replicas of Abro’s packaging. Hunan Magic’s owner, Yuan Hongwei, has Abro’s logo on his business card. He touts his firm as the real Abro, and warns customers away from impostors.

Abro Industries, with just 24 employees and no U.S. sales, has shown more mettle than many other U.S. companies that have railed about piracy in China. It has hired dozens of lawyers and investigators, sued Hunan Magic, and gotten raids conducted in the United Arab Emirates and other countries, at a cost to Abro so far this year of more than $600,000, Mr. Baranay says. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office has been championing Abro’s cause in Beijing. Yet its Chinese nemesis keeps on selling Abro products.

In October 2003, Mr. Maranais flew to China to poke around the Canton Trade Fair. “So I walk up to Hunan Magic’s booth and my eyes bug out,” he recalls. There was a huge sign overhead that said “Abro,” and stacks of catalogs filled with Abro products. Dozens of buyers crowded around, “including many of my own customers,” he says.

Mr. Maranais complained to the fair’s trademark police. A group of local officials, several in uniform, charged up to Hunan Magic’s booth, led by Mr. Maranais. “I went right up and said, ‘The party’s over — meet Mr. Abro,’ ” he says.

Undaunted, a Hunan Magic salesman produced a catalog displaying Abro products he said the company had a right to sell. One was an epoxy whose packaging for years had featured a photo of Mr. Maranais’s wife fixing a bicycle. Hunan Magic’s version was identical. “There I was staring at my wife’s face,” Mr. Maranais says. “And this guy claimed to own her.”

In the following couple of years, though, ABRO felt it was well treated in China. In February of 2007, Mr. Baranay testified:

ABRO has received fair hearings in China at the Trademark Office, and on the Federal level we are prevailing in China. We have conducted a series of raids against Hunan Magic’s manufacturing operations, during which ABRO’s counterfeit products were seized. We aggressively pursued Hunan Magic within China’s legal system, and the case was ultimately decided in our favor in December of 2006 with damages of $64,000 awarded to ABRO, a small fraction, of course, but a start.

Again, at the Federal level, ABRO registered the ABRO mark with Chinese customs, and a significant number of export containers from Hunan Magic and others have been seized, with the goods ultimately destroyed and fines levied against the exporters and Hunan Magic. We have been extremely satisfied with the cooperation we received from Chinese customs.

Regrettably, business is ultimately local in nature, and Hunan Magic operates openly within Hunan Province as they employ individuals and pay taxes.

In China, most people know the words to that song: “but local officials arrest people in other places/openly beat people/otherwise defy the law and behave like petty warlords”. Seems like ABRO might find Chinese courtrooms a bit chillier after this, though.

But this case gets kinda weird. First off, the nature of Yuan’s arrest makes me want to consult a lawyer on exactly what constitutes entrapment:

CARPENTER: “From what I gather, the majority of the stuff he was selling overseas was sold on the overseas market and through undercover methods we were able to get him to ship stuff here to us, trying to expand his market to come into the United States and not just being in the European market or other places around the world.”

RODGERS: “So in effect you conducted a sting?”

CARPENTER: “Yes, sir, basically so. That’s pretty much what it was. It was something to get him to send his product over here, because he was trying to get into the U.S. market.”

Carpenter said the case was referred to the U.S. Justice Department to seek Yuan’s extradition. He said when U.S. federal authorities learned Yuan was traveling to London, they asked British authorities to arrest him.

OK, maybe that’s an above the board move. I’m no lawyer. But consider this:

Brad Huther, who handles intellectual property issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says extraditing Yuan would be significant. “The fact that you can manufacture, export and distribute to countries everywhere, and now face the risk that you won’t be treated within your own system of law but rather in more advanced systems that really apply the rule of law, I think could very well have at least a near term, not a chilling, but certainly a dampening effect on counterfeiters’ bravado.”

Ooookay… just out of curiosity, what would happen if the roles were reversed? Let’s say Uzbek officials arrest a Chinese dissident with a foreign passport for extradition back to China based on a warrant issued in Kashgar? Oh wait, that’s been done. It seems to me that once you open the door to saying “we’re gonna arrest your guy in any country we can, cuz our legal system is more just than yours”, you’re asking for a fight. It’s also interesting in light of the World Customs Organizations recent announcement that they will press charges against any Olympic tourists returning to their home nations with counterfeit Olympics goods.

And then there’s the little tidbits the FT throws in, namely that “Although the court confiscated two passports from him, Chinese media quoted Mr Yuan as saying he had escaped from Britain using another passport. Yuan Suzhen, his sister and an executive at MagPow, told the FT the Chinese government was very helpful in getting him out of the country.”

FT says Yuan is being hailed as a hero in state media. I found an article headline that says he was “ensnared” by British authorities, but not much in the way of fanfare. Interestingly enough, in the open letter reputedly released by Yuan just days before his flight back to China, he argues that th
e British warrant was issued for a “Yaun Hongwei”. I wonder if FT asked about that.

Last week I made a mock Mitt Romney campaign poster substituting him for Mao. I did it mainly because Mitt’s statement that our most important civil liberty is to be kept alive, just the sort of justification one hears from autocratic nations, particularly in the whole “Asian Values” debate of the nineties. But as far as personality cults go, Romney ain’t got nuthin’ on Obama. Don’t get me wrong; I like Obama. But just look at this cover image from Salon.com, where Gary Kamiya writes of Obama’s Double Magic. My poster was meant as a joke, though to make a point. This is apparently in earnest. It’s doubly ironic, considering Spike Lee’s term for the healing nice black man, the “super-duper magical negro” (A term Rush Limbaugh then gleefully used for a song), and that such imagery is precisely the sort of thing we find so abhorrent and mindless about the propaganda of Kim Jong Il, Mao and others.

Wired brings us a new word: Solastalgia.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastalgia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'”

Solastalgia is brand new idea, and Albrecht seems to be the only pioneer at the moment. He’s applying it to climate change (he seems a bit of a crusader on his blog), but it makes alot of sense for China. After all, cities have been transformed “overnight”, as we so often hear. Gone are the one story homes and courtyards, replaced by skyscrapers. The skies have darkened with pollution. And a couple of decades before that started, all the birds and insects disappeared.

It would certainly explain this study finding one in five adults in Shenzhen have, albeit vaguely, “mental problems”. Shenzhen was a fishing village twenty years ago – now its nearly a megacity. This is often explained as being a result of Chinese culture, such as face saving, suppressing or not communicating emotions, the pressures of collective obligations, etc. But isn’t Beijing psychologist Tian Guoyan describing something like solastalgia when he says “The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and that leaves a lot of people totally confused”?