Book Review: China's Silent Army

China's Silent Army:  The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing's Image.  By Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Arajúo. Translated by Catherine Mansfield.  New York: Crown Publishers, 2013. $26.00.

China's Silent Army is a tour de force.  Cardenal and Arajúo have written, and Catherine Mansfield has translated, an exceptional book based on around-the-world journalism from Beijing to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Costa Rica.  Their vivid, beautifully panoramic descriptions of their journeys to suffering third world countries, to Burma's jade mines and to Peru's iron mines, will fascinate any reader, but their great contribution is in their book's on-the-spot reportage about the complex role that the Chinese have played with respect to resource-and-human exploitation in mining, logging, construction, other extractive industries, and, in a few instances, vice.
 

There are at least three levels of implications of the rapid expansion of China's silent army, i.e., the increasing involvement of the Chinese state, Chinese nationals, and foreign citizens of Chinese extraction, with the economies of third world countries.   

First, the silent army is involved in distribution as well as resource exploitation.   The Chinese diaspora-- businessmen and businesswomen who have, since the 19th century, left China but retained links to their homeland--serves as a distribution system for Chinese merchandise and development of Chinese retail investments. These can be seen in massive distribution centers that have been built in places like Dubai.

Second, the Chinese have developed a formula for exploiting third world human-and-natural resources; the book carefully recounts it.  The Chinese formula is this:  offer infrastructure and financial subsidies, as well as graft, to third world politicians and dictators in exchange for much more valuable natural resource rights.  The infrastructure subsidies include Chinese construction of stadiums, roads, and public works.  In exchange for, say, $5 or $10 billion in such projects, which are presented to the host countries' rulers as completed or turnkey ones--which they can use to garner public support--the governments sign away resources worth, say, $50 or $60 billion.

Put another way, third world rulers who have short time horizons, who are corrupt, and who are unconcerned about future generations, are willing to trade $5 billion in football stadiums and roads for $50 billion in natural resources.  Moreover, there is frequently a cognitive issue: the third world rulers are not adept negotiators and may not do the math, as seems to have been the case with respect to Hugo Chavez's oil deal with the Chinese.   

Moreover,  in the third world countries some Chinese firms often maintain racially based pay differentials between Chinese and indigenous workers that they justify (in accordance with simple free market models)  in terms of signaling or compensating differentials: Chinese workers are more reliable, in the view of some Chinese firms.   This kind of pay differential is illegal in most of the world for obvious social equity reasons. It is remarkable that the economic endeavors of a socialist state frequently witness racial and ethnic discrimination.

 

According to the Chinese imperialist formula, indigenous workers are underpaid and subjected to serious health-and-safety risks, often for a small increment in profit to Chinese firms.  The authors point out that the Chinese themselves, even within China, are also typically underpaid and subjected to health-and-safety risks. Indeed, there are cases, recounted in the book, where Chinese nationals are duped to take jobs in Africa and then treated as little more than slaves.   This pattern raises a question as to the real meaning of the Chinese economic miracle:  Is it a primitive, unsustainable form of mercantilism based on human and environmental exploitation?  The authors present a balanced view, and there is no doubt that the buyers of cheap Chinese merchandise around the world, including the third world as well as the United States and Europe, benefit.  But is the benefit of cheap manufactured goods going to last forever?  If it does, will the low wages to Chinese and third world workers continue forever?  

One of the downsides to mercantilism is that it does not emphasize innovation.  In The Power of Productivity William Lewis emphasizes the importance of the organization of work and free market innovation to increasing productivity.  The Chinese invited the world's best manufacturing firms to open up shop in China, but it seems that the Chinese have continued along the path of what Lewis calls resource-intensive development, which cannot sustainably elevate the world's standards of living.   Because the Chinese mercantilist model rests on cheap labor and natural resources and not technological innovation, it may not lead to progress.   In the US, 40 years of wage stagnation has run parallel to the Chinese economic miracle, and the incentive for breakthrough innovation seems to have been reduced (but not eliminated) by the ease of moving factories to low-wage China.

The third level of implications is that when it comes to military and social issues, there is a long-term versus short-term paradox.  While the Chinese claim to think long-term with respect to investments in third-world countries' infrastructure in exchange for longer term payouts in the form of oil, iron, jade, and other resources, when it comes to adopting risky strategies with respect to transfer of nuclear technology to Iran or threatening Taiwan and other countries located near the South China Sea or on the Mekong River, the Chinese seem to think short-term.  The same is true of their attitudes toward labor relations and the environment.  They are remorseless polluters;  for example, they are willing to defoliate the Siberian forests without concern for replanting or sustainable harvesting.  The West learned these lessons a century ago; China's short-term thinking about pointless risk taking with respect to transfer of nuclear materials and technology, labor relations, and the environment,  should benefit from the West's recent errors, but it does not.   

China's Silent Army  is first and foremost a human drama that hearkens back to Dickens and even  further back to the era of mercantilism in Spain, Britain, Holland, and France and to the imperialism that is concomitant with the mercantilist, resource-based model of economic development.  An irony that runs throughout the book is that the Chinese state, which adopted socialism, an ideology based on rectifying human exploitation, has become exploitative on the level of the most rapacious periods of European state capitalism.  

 In the end, I wondered whether the Chinese economic miracle is not about, more than anything else, the narcissism of the Chinese communist leaders.  The Chinese people suffer and the third world workers suffer.  In exchange, the world gets cheap consumer goods, the profit from which the Chinese state uses primarily to enhance its own--and its leaders'-- power. The world seems to have struck a bargain with Chinese socialism to unsustainably ravage the environment in illogical deals that provide us with cheap t shirts and watches.

Just Say No to King Hussein's Crank Environmental Policies

King Hussein's administration doesn't know sh*t from shinola about climate change, but his army of scientists on the take don't shy from making politically motivated predictions.

I just sent this email to King Hussein:

Dear King Hussein:

You should fire Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, and, because you are factually wrong, you might  reconsider your claim that global warming is accelerating.  Going around saying  “the science is settled” confirms that you, Moniz, and Vilsak are badly educated.  Science is never settled; ignorant people think that it can be.

Claims of extremely rapid global warming are  nonsense.  The dust bowl in the 1930s was a worse storm period than now.  Someone recently compared the models used by your ideologically motivated "scientists" with observed mean temperature increases. The reality is one fourth of the projections, so the models are wrong.  

Your scientists' models are 75% off target.  In economics that is excusable (although no competent economist would claim to be able to predict the future), but in physics a 75% error is junk.  You sound ignorant, bub, when you go around making predictions based on junk models.  

King Hussein, you aim to cripple our economy based on scientific newspeak.  Your administration is a destructive maelstrom.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Political Editor, Lincoln Eagle

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

Ubi libertas, ibi patria

When You Voted for Obama You Thought You'd Get Something for Nothing...Instead You Got Nothing for Something

I just sent this email to Congressman Chris Gibson:

My wife’s dental surgeon in Kingston just told me about the Obama administration’s confiscation of phone records of the Associated Press. I think of AP as a pro-Obama propaganda enterprise, so this was akin to a Stalinist purge. It comes on the heels of revelations of illegal IRS harassment of Tea Parties.  The Institute for Justice (see below) is now saying that the abuses go to higher levels than have been revealed in the pro-Obama media (including AP).  Mike Huckabee has called for an impeachment hearing with respect to Obama’s Benghazi embassy cover-up.  The targeting of dissenters for IRS harassment strikes me to have been as serious as the administration's cover-up of Obama's allowing our ambassador and his staff to be killed.

It is time for a Congressional call for an investigation and an impeachment hearing.  Obama’s ongoing abuses are akin to the early stages of Hitler’s Nazi regime.  

After years of the media's demonization of the Tea Party, it turns out that the real terrorist is in the White House.  For instance, a few years ago Mike Bloomberg claimed that a bomb found in the Times Square area had been placed by a Tea Party member.  It turned out that it hadn't been.  Similarly, a colleague who comes from the left recently said that he had heard that the Boston Marathon bombing had been done by a Tea Party member. The lies about and demonization of the Tea Party in the American media are evidence that the Tea Party was threatening to the Wall Street-big government establishment in a way that only the most extreme left-wing movements are.  Nevertheless, the Tea Party was never an extremist movement.  Unlike the lies in the HBO show The Newsroom, it was never funded by wealthy donors, including the Koch family. It was always a moderate, middle class movement whose ranks included ordinary homeowners and taxpayers. We live in a nation where moderate protest is viewed as an extremist threat, and an extremist, narcissistic president who uses the IRS to target the protestors is called a savior.  

The media has lied consistently and thoroughly about both Obama and the Tea Party. The media is serving as a Wall Street-big government propaganda agency, not as an information source. Focusing on current events is a waste of time because impartial, accurate information is impossible to acquire.

Recently, I was in Nashville, where I feel much more at home than in the North.  When I hang out in a bar in Port Authority on the way home from Brooklyn to upstate New York, I disagree with three quarters of the crowd.  When I hung out in a bar in Nashville,  I agreed with three quarters of the crowd.  If I could do it over again, I would have gone to college and relocated in Tennessee.  Because of northern prejudices, though, I wouldn't have considered doing that in the 1970s and '80s. Pretty much everything I learned as a child has been wrong. 

While conversing with a few guys at the bar, someone agreed almost completely with the libertarian point of view, but he said, "I don't want to be an extremist like John Stossel; I want to be a moderate like Bill O'Reilly."   The individual has been brainwashed. O'Reilly is not a moderate. Just because he says he wants to find a middle path between the Democrats and Republicans doesn't make him a moderate.  He's a big government extremist. The Democrats and Republicans are two fascist-style, big government parties that support America's vampire economy.

Stossel is the moderate. He is in support of a level of government spending that was characteristic of the United States during the halcyon 1950s.  The country started collapsing and the real hourly wage started stagnating in the late 1960s, almost immediately following LBJ's expansion of government.

From the Institute for Justice

 >We have documented how severe the IRS abuse of power is – making unconstitutionally invasive demands of citizen-led groups.

We have detailed how this intentional targeting of conservative groups is still ongoing – 10 of our clients are still tied up in admittedly improper, onerous IRS inquiries.

Congress, and now the Justice Department, are investigating the draconian actions of the Obama Administration's IRS.

Join tens of thousands of Americans in demanding the IRS end its unconstitutional abuse today. Add your name before Friday's congressional hearing.

Sharad Karkhanis Book Fund

John Drobnicki sent me the following announcement:

The Office of College Advancement at Kingsborough Community College has established the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund in memory of its namesake, Sharad Karkhanis, who was a library faculty member there from 1964 until his retirement in 2003.  He passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78. Dr. Karkhanis, who also taught Political Science classes, was President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969.  He was also one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, serving as that organization's very first President from 1980-1982.

Contributors should make their checks payable to the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund and send to:

Office for College Advancement

Kingsborough  Community College Foundation, Inc.

2001 Oriental Boulevard

Brooklyn, NY 11235-9978

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, Professor Emeritus at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, who served as President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969, passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78.  Sharad was born in Khopoli, India, on March 8, 1935, and came to the US in 1959.  He worked as a librarian trainee in NJ while attending Rutgers (MLS, 1962), and then worked briefly at Brooklyn College/CUNY (1963-64) before being hired in 1964 by Kingsborough, where he remained as a librarian until his retirement in 2003.  Aside from his duties as a librarian, Karkhanis also taught political science classes at Kingsborough, holding both an M.A. in Political Science & International Relations (Brooklyn College/CUNY, 1967) and a Ph.D. in Political Science & American Government (NYU, 1978).  He was one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and was that organization's first president from 1980-1982.

Karkhanis was the author/editor of:  New Directions for the City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1968); A New College Student: The Challenge to City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1969); Open Admissions: A Bibliography, 1968-1973 (CUNY, 1974); Indian Politics and the Role of the Press (Asia Book Corp., 1981); A Select Bibliography on Retention (CUNY, 1981); Jewish Heritage in America: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1988); How to Avoid Dead End in Your Career, an Asian American Perspective; and, Library Services for the Asian American Community: Papers of the 1987 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, June 1987, San Francisco, California (APALA, 1988); and Educational Excellence of Asian Americans, Myth or Reality?: Papers of the 1988 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, July 1988, New Orleans, Louisiana (APALA, 1989).  Karkhanis served for many years as a university-wide officer in the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, when Irwin Polishook was President.  Much of his time in his later years was devoted to publishing a newsletter, first in print and then online - called The Patriot Returns.  In 2008, Karkhanis was honored as the Educator of the Year by the Queens Village Republican Club.