Monthly Archives: May 2008

by | 14 May 2008 · 5:37 pm

Gorky: ‘We need more camps like Solovetsky’

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 192-194:

In August 1933, a ‘brigade’ of 120 leading Soviet writers went on a boat tour of the White Sea Canal organized by Semyon Firin, the OGPU commander of the labour camps at the canal. The idea of the trip had its origins in a meeting that took place in Maksim Gorky‘s Moscow house in October 1932, at which a number of the country’s leading writers discussed the tasks of literature with several Politburo members, including Stalin, and other Party functionaries. In one of the earliest statements of the Socialist Realist doctrine, Gorky called for a heroic literature to match the ‘grand achievements’ of the Five Year Plans, and Stalin, who compared the Soviet writers to ‘engineers of the human soul’, proposed a tour of the canal to inspire them. Everything was organized by OGPU. ‘From the minute we became the guests of the Chekists, complete Communism began for us,’ the writer Aleksandr Avdeyenko later commented ironically. ‘We were given food and drink on demand. We paid nothing. Smoked sausage, cheeses, caviar, fruit, chocolate, wines and cognac – all was in plentiful supply. And this was a year of famine.’…

The writers had different reasons for colluding in this legitimation of the Gulag. No doubt there were some who believed in the Stalinist ideal of perekovka, the remoulding of the human soul through penal labour….

Gorky was also a believer. He never visited the White Sea Canal. But this was no obstacle to his glowing praise of it in the book commissioned by OGPU (just as ignorance was no obstacle to foreign socialists, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who also praised the canal as ‘a great engineering feat … a triumph in human regeneration’ in 1935). Having spent the 1920s in the West, Gorky had returned to the Soviet Union on the first of several summer trips in 1928 and had settled there for good in 1931. The ‘great Soviet writer’ was showered with honours; he was given as his residence the famous Riabushinsky mansion in Moscow; two large dachas; private servants (who turned out to be OGPU spies); and supplies of special foods from the same police department that catered for Stalin. So perhaps it is not surprising that Gorky failed to see the immense human suffering that lay behind the ‘grand achievements’ of the Five Year Plan. In the summer of 1929, Gorky had visited the Solovetsky labour camp. The writer was so impressed by what he was shown by his OGPU guides that he wrote an article in which he claimed that many of the prisoners had been reformed by their labour in the camp and loved their work so much that they wanted to remain on the island after the completion of their sentences. ‘The conclusion is obvious to me,’ Gorky wrote: ‘we need more camps like Solovetsky.’

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by | 11 May 2008 · 6:09 pm

Linguists Bearing Orthographies, 3: Dempwolff vs. Labialized Labials

One of the things I’ve discovered in puttering about lately in my Sprachbundesgarten of little-known languages in Papua New Guinea is that Otto Dempwolff, the granddaddy of historical and comparative Austronesian linguistics, did not recognize the possibility of labialized labial phonemes (/pʷ/, /bʷ/, /mʷ/), despite how common they are among Oceanic languages. Since Dempwolff was the chief linguistic adviser of most of the German Lutheran missionaries in New Guinea, his theoretical insights as well as limitations influenced many of the new writing systems devised by those missionaries for evangelical and teaching purposes.

I had long been aware of his influence on Jabêm, a Lutheran mission and school lingua franca in Morobe Province, PNG, where I did fieldwork in 1976. (My host father had been a teacher in Jabêm schools.) Dempwolff spent the last months of his life completing a grammatical description of Jabêm, working with a missionary, Heinrich Zahn, who was no mean linguist himself. Dempwolff died in 1938 and the grammar appeared in 1939, a rather inauspicious year that helped condemn that work to undeserved obscurity.

In Jabêm orthography, labialized velars, that is, velar consonants with secondary rounding, are written as kw, gw, ŋgw, but labialized labials are written with an intermediate round vowel before the vowel that forms the nucleus of the syllable. So [mʷa] is written moa, [pʷa] is written poa, [bʷa] is written boa, and [mbʷa] is written mboa. This seems inconsistent to me, but presents no major hurdle for people writing Jabêm. (A much greater nuisance stems from the decision to distinguish the two sets of mid vowels by marking the much more frequent member of each pair with a circumflex: upper-mid ô, ê are far more ubiquitous than lower-mid e, o.)

Jabêm’s closest relative is Bukawa, which has been so long overshadowed by Jabêm’s prestige that its literate speakers wrote in Jabêm rather than in their own far more varied and numerous village dialects. Now, however, a linguist from SIL International has published a grammar of Bukawa, based on a dozen years residing among its speakers. In Bukawa orthography, labialization is uniformly indicated by -w-, whether it follows a labial, velar, or even alveolar consonant (/dʷ/). (Bukawa also has a voiceless lateral, written lh, and voiceless semivowels, written yh and wh. Fascinating, and rather exotic within its Sprachbund.) In other respects, the new Bukawa orthography follows its Jabêm predecessor.

I’ve only recently discovered that the Sio language on the north coast of the Huon Peninsula suffered a far worse orthographic fate. The Sio community should have been assigned to the Jabêm church circuit, which included mostly Austronesian-speaking communities along the southern half of the Huon Peninsula and along the south side of the Huon Gulf. Instead, Sio was assigned to the Kâte circuit, which used a Papuan lingua franca. Worse yet, the orthography of Siâ (as it is written) was based on that of Kâte, which was also greatly influenced by Dempwolff. The dedication page of the Lutheran missionary Pilhofer’s 1933 grammar of Kâte reads Herrn Professor Dr. Otto Dempwolff / in Dankbarheit und Verehrung / Ehrerbietigst Gewidmet.

Both Kâte and Sio have a set of “labiovelar” stops that are written as (voiceless) q and (voiced) q. (My boldfaced q stands for a curly q with hooked serifs that I cannot properly render here.) Each language also has a prenasalized “labiovelar” that is written ŋq in Kâte and mq in Sio. Sio also has a “labiovelar” nasal, written ɱ. Most of the German-era orthographies represent the velar nasal with ŋ and people still seem quite comfortable with it, calling it the ‘long en’.

Michael Stolz, the missionary who first reduced Sio to writing, translated and compiled a book of Bible stories, catechisms, and hymns in the language, which was edited and published posthumously by his successor, Hans Wagner. After Stolz died in 1931 (after 20 years in the field), Dempwolff used his materials to write up a very rough sketch of Sio grammar, which was never published, but was transcribed by “L. Wagner” (perhaps the wife of Hans) in 1936. Dempwolff retained the “labiovelar” class of consonants.

In 1985, an SIL couple, Stephen and Dawn Clark, arrived to work among the Sio people, who soon asked about reforming their orthography to better match the conventions of Tok Pisin and English, with which most villagers were now more familiar. The Clarks discovered that the “labiovelars” were all pronounced as labialized labials ([pʷ], [bʷ], [mbʷ], [mʷ]), even by the oldest villagers they could find. (Judging from his fieldnotes, a colleague of mine discovered the same thing when he collected survey data on Sio in 1976.) The word for ‘snake’, for instance, was spelled ɱâta and pronounced [mʷɔta]. Its cognates are pretty widespread in Oceanic languages.

So the Sio people readily abandoned their old symbols for the labiovelars (the two varieties of q and the long ɱ) in favor of the usual labial consonants with a superscript ʷ. Feeling strongly that the labialized labials were unit phonemes, they at first insisted on writing the labialization with a superscript, but after several years they got used to writing pw, bw, mbw, and mw instead of troubling with superscripts.

So now I’m wondering, could the “labiovelars” in Kâte also be reanalyzed as labialized bilabials? Pilhofer (1933) says quite clearly that his q and curly q are both labiovelar stops, in which kp and gb are coarticulated and simultaneously released. But now I’m suspicious. I wouldn’t question Pilhofer if Kâte were an African language, but I haven’t encountered such coarticulated stops in New Guinea. Then again, I haven’t looked at the phonologies of many Papuan languages.

References and further details on the above are now available in Wikipedia. Earlier disgruntled musings on linguists and Oceanic orthographies can be found here and here.

UPDATE: According to the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, Eastern New Guinea is one of only two areas of the world with labiovelar stops. The other is Central and West Africa. Kâte is included in their very small sample of such languages, based on a Kâte dictionary published in 1977 (which I have never seen). So Pilhofer appears to have been correct, and Sio appears to have been doubly ill served, first by adopting a mismatched Papuan language for its orthographic model, and second by Dempwolff’s failure to recognize labialized labials.

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by | 11 May 2008 · 8:25 am

Martyrs of the Beer Hall Putsch

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 114-115:

Martyrs were an essential element of all three totalitarian political religions. Düsseldorf tried to get in on the act by creating a cult of relics connected with Albert Leo Schlageter, who had been shot by the French in the occupied Ruhr. His bed was reconstructed, and Hitler received a silver reliquary, allegedly containing the bullet with which he had been killed. This cult never took hold. The most solemn Nazi festival of martyrs was ‘Memorial Day for the Fallen of 9 November’, whereby the Nazi party commemorated the sixteen men killed in the abortive 9 November 1923 putsch. This was a very subtle blending of wartime remembrance days with Corpus Christi processions, whose purpose was to transform a squalid fiasco into one of the most significant events in German history. The defeat of the putsch became a victory because the dead men’s ‘sacrifice’ heralded the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ a decade later. The shots fired by Munich policemen had only succeeded, as Hitler unfortunately put it, in ‘stirring the river of blood that has flowed ever since’. Their blood, he explained in 1934, was ‘the baptismal water’ of the new Reich. That year, he merely laid a wreath at the Feldherrnhalle. By 1935 altogether more elaborate arrangements had been made, which never changed thereafter, whenever Hitler had to commune with his sixteen’ Apostles’ – for naturally he had to go four better than the original Messiah.

The religious parallels began on the evening of 8 November, when Hider and his ‘old guard’ had a ‘Last Supper’ in the historic Burgerbräukeller. The next day, a silent procession snaked through the streets of Munich, a procession literally signifying the Movement, with only drumbeats marking its progress. The procession passed 255 portentous-looking pylons or stelae supporting urns from which smoke rose, and on which the names of all the Party dead were inscribed. The lower floors and shop fronts were covered by red cloth to mask distractions, while banners hung from the upper floors and criss-crossed the streets. After pausing to honour the dead at the first cult site, the Feldherrnhalle, the procession turned into a triumphal march to the Königsplatz, the march symbolising the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933. Paul Ludwig Troost had constructed two mausoleums, each with a sunken chamber containing eight of the iron sarcophagi in which the sixteen martyrs were buried. These were exposed to the elements, so that both God and ‘the Reich’ could see them. Dedicating these temples in 1935, Hitler plumbed uncharted depths of bathos:

Because they were no longer allowed to personally witness and see this Reich, we will make certain that this Reich sees them. And that is the reason why I have neither laid them in a vault nor banned them to some tomb. No, just as we marched back then with our chest free so shall they now lie in wind and weather, in rain and snow, under God’s open skies, as a reminder to the German nation. Yet for us they are not dead. These pantheons are not vaults but an eternal guardhouse. Here they stand guard for Germany and watch over our Volk. Here they lie as true witnesses of our Movement.

A roll-call of the martyrs’ names was taken, with the Hitler Youth responding ‘Present!’ Hitler walked up the steps of the mausoleums to commune silently with the not-really-dead, who became figuratively present in the SS guards who took up stations after Hitler had left.

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by | 10 May 2008 · 10:16 pm

St Vladimir of the October Revolution

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 53-54:

Krupskaya’s wish that her husband [V. I. Lenin] be interred with other old comrades was ignored in favour of mummifying his corpse, a step apparently inspired by worldwide fascination with he contemporary excavation of Luxor and discover of the tomb of the pharoah Tutankhamen, although the intention was to preserve for eternity what Robert Service has dubbed ‘Saint Vladimir of the October Revolution’. Lenin’s mummified corpse was displayed in a temporary timber mausoleum in the Wall of the Kremlin before this was replaced in 1930 by a permanent stone structure. The design reminded one Russian commentator of the tomb of King Cyrus near Murgaba in Persia, although the model was actually the mausoleum of Tamerlane. The prime movers in the preservation of Lenin’s body were Bonch-Bruevich, Leonid Krasin and Lunacharsky, ironically all erstwhile God-builders who had clashed with Lenin on this very issue. They formed an ‘Immortalisation Commission’. The reasons for Lenin’s mummification were several. His early death, probably brought about by chronic bureaucratic overwork that he had been unaccustomed to in the earlier decades of his life, was a metaphor for the years of revolutionary elan and enthusiasm that were ineluctably passing away. Mummification meant that the moment would exist in this curious symbolic form throughout time. His spirit would also endure in the Party: ‘Lenin lives in the heart of every member of our Party. Every member of our Party is a small part of Lenin. Our whole communist family is a collective embodiment of Lenin.’ The aura of this dead St Vladimir would spread to his lesser successors, who henceforth were in control of what he had or had not said or written during his lifetime. Significantly, Stalin managed to gain influence over the fledgling Lenin Institute at the Party’s Sverdlov university, and through The Foundations of Leninism, in which he explained Lenin’s ideology to the new Party intake, thereby establishing himself as guardian of the canonical texts.

And what was the net result of this vicious campaign against religion? The Party-state could certainly deploy more force, and did so against the Orthodox clergy. But the ranks of the militant godless waned as quickly as they had waxed, and they were usually filled with the intellectually low grade in the first place. Peasants, whether on the land or newly transplanted to the cities, found ways of resisting this assault on their beliefs, perhaps by sending grannies to obstruct four-eyed student atheists or using loopholes in the law to retain use of a church. Committed religious believers became more entrenched in their faith, while the more casually secure fell away, probably without turning to the dominant secular creed.

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by | 7 May 2008 · 6:22 pm

Reshaping the Vatican State, 1929

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 68-71:

The road to the 1929 Concordat and Lateran Treaties was paved by small but significant gestures whose ulterior motive was to render the PPI [Partito Popolare Italiano] irrelevant long before it was abolished. The librarian pope [Pius XI] was presented with the Chigi collection of books and manuscripts, purchased by the Italian government in 1918. The Vatican removed its interdict upon a chapel in the Quirinal Palace, enabling the king’s eldest daughter to marry there a few days later. Crucifixes reappeared on the walls of classrooms and lecture theatres, with an imposing wooden cross in the middle of the pagan Colosseum. Holy Week in 1925 went smoothly, due in no small part, as Pius XI acknowledged, to the co-operation of the Fascist government. Since not even Mussolini had the effrontery to grace the seven centuries’ anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, secretary of state Merry del Val had to make do with the education minister. But in 1925 Mussolini made a point of marrying Donna Rachele in church, a decade after their civil union. Totally ignoring their own Party programme, the Fascists restored properties once confiscated from religious orders, bailed out the ailing Bank of Rome, increased clerical salaries and modified the law in directions that benefited the Church. The regime closed fifty-three brothels and suppressed the freemasons – widely regarded within the Church as the dark power behind liberal anticlericalism – notwithstanding the fact that the masons had contributed generously to Fascist Party coffers, while several Fascist hierarchs, including Acerbo, Balbo, Farinacci and Rossi, were of the apron-and-trowel persuasion. In 1931 the regime banned abortion and beauty contests, measures that were welcomed by the Church.

The first formal initiative in solving the perennial Roman Question began in 1925 with the appointment of a commission designed to soothe certain neuralgic sensitivities in relations between Church and state. Despite the fact that Pius XI disowned the commission, changes in the government – the dismissal of the anticlerical Roberto Farinacci as Party secretary and the appointment of the Nationalist lawyer Alfredo Rocco as minister of justice – facilitated contacts. Two lawyers handled the talks, Francesco Pacelli, brother of Eugenio, at that point nuncio to Germany, and Domenico Barone, a senior civil servant in Rocco’s Justice Ministry. These men resolved such issues as the sovereign status of the Vatican City and the extraterritoriality of papal basilicas and palaces; a compensation package that the papacy was to receive in lieu of its lost revenues from the former Papal States; and guarantees of unimpeded communications between the Vatican and the wider Catholic world. These measures formed the basis of the 1929 Lateran Treaties. Thenceforth the temporal patrimony of the papacy has consisted of a 109-acre territory, roughly comparable in size with London’s St James’s Park or about a tenth of the area of New York’s Central Park. It had its own coinage, garage, postal system, radio transmitter, newspaper and printing press, a jail and a school, a mini-railway line and, of course, separate diplomatic accreditation and the famed Swiss Guard. Vatican Radio (whose transmitter rather than broadcasting station is within the enclave) was intended to underline the Church’s role in the wider world.

The miniscule size of the Vatican State was designed to contrast advantageously with the limitlessness of the claim to spiritual power. The wealth of the Vatican was also mythic, as can be seen from the related financial convention. The grant of 750 million lire in cash and a billion in consolidated government stock was urgently needed, even though the papacy agreed to take the cash in instalments and not to sell the stock. During the First World War, pope Benedict XV had given away his own fortune and then the Holy See’s ordinary revenue to repatriate prisoners of war and to afford succour to civilian refugees, so that by 1922 the Vatican Treasury consisted of the lire equivalent of £10,000 or roughly US$19,000. Unable to pawn a Bernini, Michelangelo or Raphael, his successor managed to deplete the financial resources still further, with generous donations to those ruined by inflation in Weimar Germany and gifts to the starving multitudes in the Soviet Union. Only the generosity and financial acumen of North American Catholics, who contributed half the papacy’s income in the 1920s, staved off financial ruination.

Unlike the Treaty, the Concordat between the Vatican and the Italian state took two years to negotiate. For Pius XI it was a significant step in the re-Christianisation of Italian society, in the re-establishment of a ‘Res publica Christiana’. It ended the unified Italian state’s usurpation of the right of defunct Italian principalities to veto nominations to bishoprics and many other ecclesiastical offices and to appropriate the revenues of vacant benefices. The state now accorded civil recognition to the sacrament of marriage, which remained indissoluble as it had been under the civil code. The Roman Segnatura, the supreme ecclesiastical court, would henceforth deal with dispensations or nullifications. In other respects, the Church’s antipathy to artificial birth-control harmonised with the Fascist state’s militant quest for births. Fascism also wanted women on the maternity bed or in the kitchen in ways that conformed with Catholic models. Religious instruction was reintroduced into secondary as well as primary schools, thus negating the wish of the first Fascist education minister to teach older children philosophy rather than religion. The state also agreed to recognise diplomas awarded by pontifical universities. Most importantly, in article 43, the state conceded an autonomous space to Catholic Action: ‘The Italian state recognises the organisations affiliated to the Italian Catholic Action in so far as these shall, as has been laid down by the Holy See, develop their activities outside all political parties and in immediate dependence on the hierarchy of the Church for the diffusion and realisation of Catholic principles.’ In other words, a state that in May 1929 formally styled itself ‘totalitarian’ had conceded the Church’s right to operate a variety of associations independently of such Fascist organisations as the Balilla youth movement, which had to desist from scheduling its activities to subvert Catholic holidays. Of course, the general climate created by Fascism stealthily leached into the Italian Church itself through something resembling osmosis. Even as it resisted Fascism, the Church tried to keep up with its heroic version of modernity. Under a regime that was ostentatiously virile, the Church endeavoured to ‘de-feminise’ its own image in favour of a more muscular tone. Clerical novels celebrated priests who were war veterans and athletically built devotees of ‘extreme sports’ -Pius XI himself being a keen climber.

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by | 6 May 2008 · 8:56 pm

Stakhanovites as the New (Leisure) Class

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 89-91 (reviewed here and here):

The Soviet Union was not immune to what was emerging as a global cult of celebrity, or notoriety, focused on athletes, aviators, boxers, film-stars, gangsters, mountaineers and, as we have seen, dictators. Already, the commissar for heavy industry, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had launched the search for ‘new people’, saying, ‘In capitalist countries, nothing can compare with the popularity of gangsters like Al Capone. In our country, under socialism, heroes of labour, our Izotovites, must become the most famous,’ a reference to Nikita Izotov, a miner whom colleagues described rather sourly as ‘the human cutting machine’. But Izotov was destined to be eclipsed, along with the new hybrid Marx, Aristotle and Goethe.

In 1931 Pravda ran features under the slogan ‘The Country Needs to Know its Heroes’, consisting of photographs of aviators, collective farmers, shock-workers and the like. The concept of the exemplary elite was primarily associated with Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old Donbass coalminer, who in August 1935 managed to cut 102 tons of coal (or fourteen times his norm) in a single shift—moreover, with the aid of a trusty Soviet-produced pneumatic pick. Stakhanov had migrated from a village in Orel, working his way up from pony-brakeman to manual pick operative, before getting his hands on the air-powered pick that brought him fame and fortune. Of course the work was done at night, enabling Stakhanov to maximise his labours as compressed air went to his pick alone, and his six-hour continuous stint was facilitated by a lengthy logistical chain beginning with the men installing timber props behind him. Nonetheless, the anonymous battalions of shock-workers were thenceforth superseded by a Soviet Hercules with a human face. ‘Recordmania’ spread like a feverish sickness, with managers and foremen sweating too lest they be denounced as ‘bigwigs’, ‘windbags’, ‘routiners’, ‘wreckers’, or ‘saboteurs’ for failing to make these ‘Stakhanovite’ feats feasible, rendering them liable to what the Kremlin’s own Al Capone sinisterly called ‘straightening out’ or ‘a tap on the jaw’. It mattered not that these epic episodes tended to deplete machinery and leave ‘Stakhanovites’ spent, or that some workers resented the diversion of resources, the subsequent lifting of their own norms, or the rich rewards such Promethean heroics brought. Schadenfreude best describes those who said of a young female Stakhanovite, who had been rewarded (one hopes she was grateful) with the selected works of Lenin: ‘That’s what the whore deserves!’ Resentment towards Stakhanovites bestriding the factory floors ‘like gods’ was compounded when they became fixtures of the factory ‘production courts’.

Much of the time of stellar Stakhanovites was increasingly spent on tour, whether visiting the Kremlin, addressing other workers or venturing confidently into places—such as the opera or theatre—where workers already did not comfortably go. Even society pages in the newspapers included such gems as ‘The brigadier-welder Vl. Baranov (28), the best Stakhanovite at Elektrozavod, glided across the floor in a slow tango with Shura Ovchinnovka (20), the best Stakhanovite at TsAGI. He was dressed in a black Boston suit that fully accentuated his solidly built figure; she was in a crepe de chine dress and black shoes with white trimming.’

In other words, although they talked incessantly about work, Stakhanovites did less and less of it, recalling it, like millionaire footballers or pop stars from humble origins, as something that took on roseate hues in memory of things past. Of course, Stakhanovites had a role to play within a wider myth-in-the-making. As an explicitly hierarchical society replaced one allegedly based on fraternity, they had to acknowledge the crucial guiding role of the nation’s father-figure, whose speeches had allegedly originally inspired them to break through artificial barriers while using technology almost as an extension of their own brain. Stakhanovites, who were often not members of the Party, were also model citizens in respects other than dutiful sons and daughters of the ultimate patriarch. Their lifestyle was supposed to exemplify the theme that ‘life is joyous, comrades’, and since they were showered with official munificence while simultaneously enjoying very high wages, the joyous life seemed like an idyllic shopping spree, for clothes, clocks, furniture, motorbikes, perfume, phonographs and so forth. Thus adorned and kitted out, Stakhanovites appeared having their leisurely breakfasts, reading the papers, lunching with friends, playing a little volleyball, tea and a game of checkers, while their wives undertook charitable work as ‘housewife-activists’ and their children were exhorted to their own heroics at school.

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Filed under economics, industry, Russia, USSR

by | 1 May 2008 · 9:36 pm

Fukuyama on China’s Localized Human Rights Abuses

I’ve been busy lately working on linguistics projects and puttering about in my Sprachbundesgarten between bouts of Wikipediatrics, but I did want to blog Francis Fukuyama’s latest opinion piece about where most of China’s human rights abuses originate: at the local level, out of sight and mostly out of mind of the central government until everything blows up. It’s subtitle is Beijing’s reach isn’t big enough to stop local governments from abusing the rights of ordinary citizens.

Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship and that abuses occur because a strong, centralized state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today’s China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese state is in certain ways too weak to defend the rights of its people.

The vast majority of abuses against the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens — peasants who have their land taken away without just compensation, workers forced to labor under sweatshop conditions or villagers poisoned by illegal dumping of pollutants — occur at a level far below that of the government in Beijing.

China’s peculiar road toward modernization after 1978 was powered by “township and village enterprises” — local government bodies given the freedom to establish businesses and enter into the emerging market economy. These entities were enormously successful, and many have become extraordinarily rich and powerful. In cahoots with private developers and companies, it is they that are producing conditions resembling the satanic mills of early industrial England.

The central government, by all accounts, would like to crack down on these local government bodies but is unable to do so. It both lacks the capacity to do this and depends on local governments and the private sector to produce jobs and revenue.

The Chinese Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year, there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest.

The rest of the essay is actually more interesting, inasmuch as it compares similar tensions between central and local authorities in various Western governments at crucial historical transition points.

via A&L Daily

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