Category Archives: economics

by | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

…

These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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Filed under Angola, Brazil, Britain, Congo, economics, Equatorial Guinea, labor, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, war

by | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

…

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

…

The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, labor, migration, military, slavery, Virginia, war

by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

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by | 11 August 2024 · 3:41 pm

Sugarcane on the Atlantic Islands

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 77-80:

From the mid-15th century, the Portuguese took slaves to work on Madeira: Moroccans and Berbers, black Africans, and Canary Islanders. The number of slaves who could be profitably employed was limited because the Madeiran sugar establishments were still relatively small in comparison to the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Because of population growth in Portugal itself in the 16th century, many free Portuguese laborers migrated to Madeira, further lessening the demand for slaves. There were even proposals to export some of the slaves already there. In the 15th century, Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas, but by the early 16th century its development had transformed it into a replica of metropolitan Portugal.

The Portuguese established sugar production on other Atlantic islands, but none rivaled the early profits of Madeira. In the Azores sugar production met with little success because of the unfavorable climate; there grain and dyestuffs were always more important, and slaves were few in number. Portuguese agriculture in the arid Cape Verde Islands concentrated on cereals and fruits and was complemented by cattle raising. São Tomê, which became a crucial entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade, experienced a sugar boom in the 16th century and can also be seen as a prototype of the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

With sugar production and trade prospering, shiploads of sugar were delivered to the large European markets: Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and cities of the Mediterranean. Although most of the plantations and mills were in the hands of Portuguese, the bulk of the export trade was controlled by foreigners, many of them Italians resident in Portugal. Columbus traded in Madeiran sugar early in his career and lived on the neighboring island of Porto Santo for a time in the 1470s. The European demand for sugar was strong, and the lower costs of Madeiran sugar caused heavy competition for the longer-established Mediterranean producers.

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans who were developing the Atlantic islands during this time. In the early 15th century, Castile began sponsoring conquests in the Canaries, and by the end of the century it had secured control of all the islands. Unlike the other Atlantic islands, the Canaries had a native population who were likely akin to the Berbers. Foreshadowing events in the Americas, the Spaniards subdued the islanders and enslaved those who resisted. Of these, a number were exported to Europe or Madeira, while others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations.

The island population was relatively small to begin with, and its numbers fell due to epidemic disease after the European incursion. Members of indigenous groups whose leaders had signed treaties could not be enslaved legally, unlike members of the non-treaty groups, and those who were enslaved frequently attained manumission. In the early years of the 16th century, the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Since native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries, the islands witnessed an influx of other workers, including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers. Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula. Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa, and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans, Berbers, and other slaves. Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas, a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries, but the Spanish crown soon outlawed the slave trade in Indians.

These sugar establishments on Madeira and in the Canary Islands turned out to have some important features of the Caribbean plantations that would emerge in the 16th century, including elements both agricultural (growing the cane) and industrial (refining the sugar), the use of slave labor, and the export of a product to be sold in the growing markets of Europe. The significant difference between the sugar establishments on the Atlantic islands and the later plantations of the Caribbean was size; the former had smaller plots of land and fewer laborers. Those Atlantic islands provided a link between Mediterranean sugar production and the plantation system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the 19th century.

Madeira and the Canaries formed the staging area from which sugar cultivation and refining would reach Hispaniola, the island where sugarcane was first planted in the Caribbean. Columbus, knowledgeable in the Portuguese sugar trade, had ships of his second transatlantic voyage stop in Madeira for additional supplies. These included refined sugar as a medicinal store and cuttings of sugarcane, which were later planted at Columbus’s ill-fated settlement of La Isabela on the north shore of Hispaniola. The first canes grew but failed to establish permanent sugar production. Only in the first decade and-a-half of the 16th century did successful sugar plantings and newly introduced sugar mills on Hispaniola establish the foundations for the fateful beginning of the colonial plantation complex in the Americas.

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by | 9 August 2024 · 6:20 am

Europe’s Oldest Overseas Colonies

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 7-8:

Because of this long history of colonial domination, the Caribbean is rightly considered the oldest theater of overseas European expansion. The extended duration of the region’s colonial experiences and the depth of the colonial imprint on its society and culture dwarf those forged in African or Asian colonies during the age of high imperialism (ca. 1850–1914). Whereas in those latter regions, with very few exceptions, colonial arrangements lasted less than a century, in the Caribbean most societies were built from scratch at least 350 years ago (and some more than 500 years ago), all within strictures dictated by a mercantile, colonial capitalism. Put in even starker terms, except for Haiti, which violently overthrew French colonial rule after little more than a century, all of the Caribbean nations that gained independence in the course of the 19th or 20th centuries had endured at least three centuries of colonial domination.

Moreover, few other colonial settings were as dramatically affected by European agency—demographically, politically, and culturally—as the insular Caribbean. The drama of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca states notwithstanding, the success of Iberian colonialism on the American mainland rested heavily on the mobilization of large indigenous populations, often with the significant collaboration of subjugated native elites. Though mainland Spanish America received its share of European settlers and African slaves, Amerindians (and, increasingly, mestizos) predominated demographically throughout the colonial era. Likewise, Europeans rarely managed to gain more than coastal footholds in Asia until the late 18th century, and in Africa not until the second half of the 19th.

In the Caribbean, however, the demographic collapse of the indigenous population led to the near-complete repopulation of the islands by enslaved Africans transported to the region as a rightless and degraded workforce for emerging plantation enterprises, which increasingly provided the raison d’être for colonies in which sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, cocoa, or other tropical staples shaped the course of political and economic development. To be sure, communities of Native Caribbean descent persist today in Dominica, St. Vincent, and other islands, and in Puerto Rico and its diaspora a neo-Taino movement that aims to attain federal recognition has recently taken hold. Likewise, as Aisha Khan points out in chapter 27, the size of populations locally identified as “white” (or “Asian”) varies greatly from island to island. Yet there is no question that the Caribbean region as a whole is demographically the most highly “Africanized” part of the New World.

Contemporary historians of the transatlantic slave trade tend to agree that the Antilles absorbed about 45% of the upwards of 10 million enslaved Africans who survived the violence of capture in Africa and the ordeal of the Middle Passage (Eltis 2001). But the sheer extent of the moral catastrophe entailed in the transplantation of Africans to the Caribbean becomes clearer in comparative terms. The French Windward Islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, and Grenada), whose combined landmass of 1,483 square miles is about equal to that of the state of Rhode Island, imported more than 300,000 slaves between the early 17th century and the ending of the trade in the mid-19th century, while the entire British mainland of North America imported some 389,000 over a comparable period. Even more dramatically, French Saint-Domingue, slightly larger than Maryland, is estimated to have received upwards of 770,000 enslaved Africans between its formal cession to France in 1697 and the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, a vast majority of them arriving in the decades immediately preceding this event—yet no more than 450,000 of them were still alive when the revolution put a decisive end to slave importation into the colony. Still, the French islands were far from exceptional in this regard. British Jamaica imported more than a million enslaved Africans between 1655 and 1807, yet released a mere 310,000 of them and their descendants into freedom once emancipation arrived in the 1830s.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, France, labor, Latin America, migration, Netherlands, slavery, Spain

by | 6 August 2024 · 5:58 am

Reporting Corruption: All Sides Bad

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 196-198:

There are many different lessons to be learned from everything that happened in Chongqing. I learned mine. In reporting on what seemed like an isolated case of land auction manipulation, I’d failed to discover its deeper roots, which only became clear to me later.

I should have reached back all the way to the 1950s, when the planned economic system was established in China, purging capitalism and centering economic control with the state. Private property rights were soon abolished, all resources were nationalized, and the Chongqing Cosmetics Factory was founded under collective property rules rather than private ownership for the sake of idealistic utopian ideals.

The experiment failed; the factory encountered operational difficulties. After the reform of the market economy had begun, factory leadership established a new brand, Olive, in a joint venture with a Hong Kong company in 1991. Olive grew rapidly to become the only enterprise in China that could compete with Procter & Gamble, but collective property rights hobbled the company. External market competition was fierce, and everyone’s decision being counted at Olive equaled no one’s decision being enacted. It was yet another failure of the government-monopoly style of managing supply, as well as the marketing model on which it relied. Despite strong performance in the nineties, the company eventually ended up on the verge of bankruptcy due to internal leadership struggles. The government had no reform program for companies with this type of ownership.

The owners in Hong Kong finally left the enterprise. They wanted to sell the land they had bought for the factory, so as to recoup what was owed to them by the leadership in Chongqing, but because the land had been registered collectively in the factory’s name, there was a long dispute over whether they had the right to do this. The former manager from the Hong Kong company told Mr. Wu, one of their debtors, to find a buyer who would purchase the land cheaply, then resell it at market value, so as to generate proceeds that would be passed along to the Hong Kong leadership in the form of agency fees that would repay the outstanding debts.

Wu had to take this route, because he had already been borrowing money just to maintain Olive, and he couldn’t get another loan from the bank. Private companies, which contribute over 50 percent of Chongqing’s tax revenue and support over 80 percent of its employment, can use only one-third of the credit resources available to them. So Wu ended up borrowing money from Chen Kunzhi, whose loan shark resources exceeded four hundred million yuan. With an enormous amount of money coming to him from state-owned institutions as well as black market enterprises involving court presidents, police officers, and government officials, he could get loans at very low interest rates.

In short, unclear property rights and unfair financial policies gave Chen Kunzhi room to manipulate the eventual land auction through underground operations. With his connections to those in power, the big fish ate the small fish in a continuous cycle. In countries that have transitioned from a traditional planned economy to a market economy, there is often serious organized criminal activity. The absence of the rule of law stems from a government that is failing to fulfill its role as the guardian of a functional market economy.

But without sufficient analysis of these root causes, pathos and righteous indignation encourage people to pursue simple solutions with a black-or-white moralistic mentality: removing all the “bad guys” at the expense of the justice system and demonizing the privatization process in favor of a state-owned economy is a nostalgia for utopia, to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

In Chongqing, during the ten years between 1997 and 2007, the private economy rose from 22.64 percent of GDP to 45.5 percent, an average annual increase of over two percentage points; but in the four years between 2008 and 2011, when the “crackdown” was at its worst, the private economy grew by less than 1 percent per year. Many private enterprises began to flee Chongqing, taking capital along with them.

Bo [Xilai] and Wang [Lijun] were punished as “bad guys.” But it did not solve the problem. Among their successors, another Chongqing municipal party secretary and two police chiefs were jailed, all involved in corruption. If the world is divided into only two camps, black and white, moral and immoral, it becomes like a cube. Once you roll it over, it’s still the same, just with a different side facing up.

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by | 5 August 2024 · 6:07 am

The Gangster Boss of Chongqing

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 181-182:

“He had a gun,” said Mr. Wu, a key witness in the investigation of Chen Kunzhi. “He put it to my head and made me sign a contract.”

After Wu had borrowed ten million yuan from Chen and couldn’t repay it, Chen had locked Wu up in a hotel for twenty days, then seized the company’s official seal and used it to sign a collusive auction contract with COFCO, a large state-owned enterprise in China. Mr. Wu said he had been in hiding for the two years since the incident. He warned me that interviewing Chen would put everyone in danger. “He would have killed me. I don’t know if CCTV can handle this.”

The judge who’d overseen the land auction also refused to show his face on camera, fearing for his safety. When more companies had tried to bid, some men had stopped them from entering the auction site and dragged them away. The judge brought in six police officers, but Chen Kunzhi countered with six times as many, and each one had a knife. These gangsters called the judge’s superiors in front of him to put on the pressure. “You’re just a minor figure,” they told him. “Who do you think you are?”

In a last-ditch attempt to save his integrity, the judge called off the auction. But his superiors demanded that he start it again ten days later. When he acquiesced, it was the same situation as before: the other companies set to participate in the bidding didn’t show up, because they were afraid of the “complications.” The only two companies that took part in the auction were Chen’s company and COFCO. After four bids, the land was finally sold to COFCO for 37.1 million yuan. A year later COFCO announced it would offer the land up for 140 million.

I wanted to interview Chen myself. But my boss knew it would be dangerous. He asked me and each member of my team to use disposable phone cards to avoid being followed in retaliation. He said, “If you don’t interview Chen, will the story still stand?”

“The basic evidence is already there,” our producer, Jian Feng, said. “Then the interview might not be necessary. We have to think about security first,” the boss said.

I worried that security would be the least of our problems. If the interview went poorly, the whole show might be endangered. Chen Kunzhi was not a traditional street thug. He’d been a police officer for fifteen years, and after being removed from the force for assault, he’d started running a casino. After escaping a homicide charge, he went into the loan shark business. As China’s urbanization continued to speed up, Chongqing’s real estate industry was desperate for capital, financing some 90 percent of its expansion with funds borrowed from loan sharks. Chen Kunzhi had already made over a million yuan in profits, according to Mr. Wu.

Unlike any gangsters I had interviewed before, Chen was one of those men who controlled the economic lifeline of the city through the underground economy, armed with ties to the entire judicial system, which allowed him to escape justice despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking.

My fear was that once I interviewed Chen, the huge forces behind him would stop the episode from airing. It would be like a cigarette dropped into a toilet—a soft hiss and the flame would go out, only to be flushed away, worthless. So we decided to leave without the interview.

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by | 30 July 2024 · 9:15 am

Mind Control Under Khmer Rouge

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 507-508:

Living among the general population is quite different from living in the society of young people. The youth are not very heavily influenced by the corruption of the old society. They are purer and more in harmony with one another. In general-population society, everything that used to happen in the old society still happens, and it is vicious. The youth engage in the Revolution for the sake of the Revolution, while the general population engage in the Revolution to get away with things. Oppression, extortion, and exploitation, the soul of a corrupt regime, occur in the general population from the top down to the bottom. The cadres don’t just exercise their influence over us to fulfill our revolutionary work; they dominate us even in the petty things of this rice-by-the-can life, and we live without freedom. Although, as for those who have little fear of death; who are willing to react, willing to object and resist; who are stubborn and defiant of procedure: they don’t dare to oppress or compel them as much.

Comrade Mol is a young-man-in-hiding, like me. He is older and more knowledgeable than me. He is a man of few words, and always accepts every task the group leader gives him without question, complaint, or objection. We are on Comrade Dy’s team together. Comrade Mol once tells me, “Anybody who doesn’t steal from me can live with me.”

We have similar sentiments, but I have a different philosophy from Comrade Mol’s: I can live with any type of person, but it is rare to find a person who can live with me.

Because we talk little and carry out our tasks diligently, Comrade Mol and I are instructed by the team leader to mind the oxen nearly every day, whether it is our turn or not. The others spend only an hour or two fishing and foraging for frogs, crabs, and edible plants, and then return to camp to take a nap. We cowherds, on the other hand, can only sit or walk around collecting and counting the oxen, protecting them from getting lost, and preventing them from mixing with other herds or eating cooperative crops—without ever daring to take a rest or lie down for a nap or even close our eyes a moment, from noon until near sunset, when we have to collect the oxen and herd them back into camp.

While it’s true that I am a man of few words like Comrade Mol, unlike him I am a person who tends to react. I try to control myself and suppress my emotions to avoid pain, turmoil, and a preoccupation with the worthlessness of living.

Oh, my eyes! Don’t see anything that is crudeness or exploitation or oppression!

Oh, my ears! Don’t hear anything that is disdain, contempt, or reproach.

Oh, my heart! Remain neutral and don’t give in to feelings of hatred, love, sorrow, or joy. If you can’t restrain yourself, if you can’t take it, if your chest is too tight, then go head and explode; explode now, while out herding the oxen, while far away from everyone else. Explode in the fields, under the sky. No matter how upset you feel, however agitated by hatred toward this person, or in love with that person, you are completely free to unfurl it and release it from your head and your chest. All of nature will never condemn you, nor hold these things against you, nor use them to stir up trouble with anybody else.

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by | 27 July 2024 · 3:47 pm

Khmer Rouge Cadres

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 511-512, 514-515:

My unit is a brigade with unusual structure and characteristics among all the brigades of the men’s regional mobile units. This brigade is commanded by Comrade Ron, a young man, along with Mea Pov and Mea Chout, who are middle-aged men. These three cadres are base people from Paoy Char subdistrict. This brigade is divided into two regiments: the young men’s regiment and the general-population regiment. (Other brigades do not have these sub-units.)

Mea Pov is the former head of Phnom Srok district’s special unit, which was the strongest unit during the Trapeang Thmor Reservoir offensive. This was a unit of middle-aged men and women with robust health, distilled from the mobile units of all the subdistricts in Phnom Srok district. In late 1977, the regional Organization permitted the special unit to break ranks and return to live with their families in the cooperatives. Unwilling to relinquish his position or his influence, Mea Pov would not allow the middle-aged men from Paoy Char subdistrict to return to their villages, but instead combined them with the young men’s mobile unit of Paoy Char subdistrict to create the Fourth Brigade, a.k.a. Bong Ron’s and Mea Pov’s Brigade.

In his leadership of the special unit, Mea Pov was very mean and strict, which made that unit the most productive unit in terms of both labor and of killing people. The unit members feared Mea Pov, not daring to look him in the face or displease him. If anyone dared to say that the rice was sour or too raw, they would certainly end up stinking themselves, as a vulture played the flute [a metaphor for death].

These days, Mea Pov is not as mean or strict as he once was, but he is still feared by the members of his unit. Mea Pov uses his old influence to create a manner of living that I would call exploitative, oppressive, and a betrayal of the people. Life for the valueless class (the evacuees) [the “new people”] both in the cooperatives as well as the mobile units, must remain under the dominion of the base people, who are the class of Life Masters. These base people, especially those who were born to be cadres, exploit us and oppress us until we scarcely have room to move, like slaves and masters.

After the revolutionary cadres from the Southwestern and Western Zones came to take control and lead the work here in the Northwestern Zone, they largely reined in and put an end to the excessive killings. This was a wake-up call for those cadres who survived, and they made some changes to their behavior. When that happened, life for us was like a dead leaf being exposed to morning dew, and things got a little bit better. In most cooperatives and mobile units there was now a cadre from the Southwestern or the Western Zone serving as either a counselor or a direct leader. Unfortunately, my brigade remained an unaffected unit, without any of those cadres in positions of leadership. So the things that had happened before began to happen again, and worse than before, like a sickness that was treated with the wrong medicine.

…

The general-population regiment contains 125 men, who eat separately from the young men’s unit. In this general-population unit there are ten Big Brothers. Not only do they support themselves, but their families, wives, and children back at the cooperative must also grow fat. A portion of the rations of food, uncooked rice, fish, meat, salt, prahok [fermented fish paste], and kerosene find their way to the cooperative through these men. They divide up the spoils and take turns visiting their families: one Big Brother comes, and another goes.

Because of this, the rations for the rest of us are short, much different from the rations given to members of other brigades. On days when we eat our midday meal in a rice paddy near the young women transplanting rice, or other young men units, we nudge each other and watch their rice rations, which are more abundant than ours. Even the food is different: smoked fish, dried fish, duck eggs, and oil are given only to the Big Brothers and consumed only by the Big Brothers, while the rest of us only sip boiled prahok or cloud soup to which is added some sour flavoring and some slightly wormy prahok.

When we are given clothing rations from time to time, we receive either a shirt with no trousers or trousers with no shirt. They write down our names to remember to complete the outfit next time. As for the Big Brothers, each of them gets one or two complete outfits, and they select the nicest ones. There is no mistaking them: if you see someone with a black shirt, black pants, and a silk krama around his neck, it must be one of the Big Brothers. The economy team belongs to the Big Brothers and supplies the Big Brothers. The rest of us have a saying: “If it’s small, it’s for the people. If it’s heavy, it’s for the cooks. And if it’s as big as your thigh [considered the largest part of the body], it’s for the Big Brothers.”

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by | 21 July 2024 · 5:26 am

Khmer Rouge Division of Labor

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 330-332:

We may have finished our tasks at one worksite, but the work of the Revolution has no end, and there is no time for rest. To rest from revolutionary labor is to rest from eating; that is, to die. So long as we still live, there is revolutionary labor for us to perform at all times. The people in the cooperative villages are no different from those of us in the mobile units. When one assignment ends, another assignment begins: plowing; transplanting; harvesting; threshing; clearing land to make fields; planting tubers, taro, sugar cane, corn, and beans; building paddy dikes; digging canals; sowing; transplanting…

The old men who cannot walk far, lacking in strength, plant tobacco and vegetables; raise chickens, ducks, and pigs; watch fields; weave kanhchraeng, kanhcheu, chang’er, l’ey, and bangky baskets; and repair and make oxcarts, plows, and harrows. The old women watch small children, raise silkworms, weed and care for mulberry orchards, weave silk, card silk, spin silk, weave kramas [a traditional cottage industry in the area], etc. Everywhere is like everywhere else: there is no end to activities, and nobody ever complains that there is not enough work or that they have nothing to do.

…

1976 was a period of harsh oppression in terms of revolutionary work and discipline. The Revolutionary Army was busily engaged in activity at the worksites. The chhlop [informer] units would collect intelligence at nighttime to get a feel for the mentality, stance, and viewpoint of the young men and young women toward the Revolution. Many young men and women from the mobile units were taken away to be clubbed to death at night, near the base of the causeway, just for reminiscing about songs from the old society, being perceived as resistant to revolutionary labor, not respecting the Organization’s appointments, etc.

It was also in 1976 that my next younger brother Samat was taken from the hospital and killed. Friends who used to work with him think, some of them, that my brother was killed because of viewpoints incompatible with the cadres in charge, while others think that my brother was killed for taking something that belonged to somebody else. Which of these opinions is true? It’s all very unclear, all speculation. The truth, the plain reality, is that my brother was arrested, his arms tied behind him, and marched away to be killed. These circumstances, dying by being taken away and clubbed to death, is the legacy of all Life Slaves. Nobody laughs at anyone, and nobody sneers at anyone. Each person thinks only of working to redeem his own life.

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