Category Archives: economics

by | 3 August 2009 · 10:50 pm

Foreign Policy on Indonesia vs. Burma

In Foreign Policy‘s Shadow Government, Dan Twining compares recent positive developments in Indonesia with negative developments in Burma.

Indonesia’s political revolution was also spurred by a regional wave of democratization that spread from the Philippines in 1986 to South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and beyond over the following decade. After free parliamentary elections, Indonesia held its first direct elections for president in 2004, followed by those which have just given President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a decisive mandate for a second term.

The popular and performance legitimacy required by a system of democratic accountability has led SBY, as he is popularly known, to aspire to lead Indonesia to new heights. With the country’s respected former central bank governor as his new vice president, the leadership team has set a target of matching China’s economic growth rate and attacking entrenched corruption, a corrosive legacy of Suharto‘s clientelistic rule. Democratic Indonesia is finally beginning to punch its weight geopolitically: international newspaper headlines celebrate “Indonesia Rising” and suggest Indonesia as “Another ‘I’ in the BRIC Story.” The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts that Indonesia will have an economy larger than those of most European nations by the 2020s. Leading Indonesian public intellectuals like Rizal Sukma ambitiously propose “a post-ASEAN foreign policy” of “strategic partnerships with global powers” grounded in Indonesia’s values as a democracy. Yudhoyono speaks proudly of Indonesia’s democracy as a source of soft power in the world and wants to leverage it to expand respect for human dignity and government accountability as sources of regional security, including through new institutions like the Bali Democracy Forum.

Burma is a different story. Its widespread poverty and brutal autocracy are a cancer in the heart of ASEAN, the club led by Asia’s “tiger” economies that inducted Burma in 1997 in the hope that doing so would spur the kind of opening of Burma’s economic and political system that has transformed the fortunes of its neighbors. It hasn’t. Leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and elsewhere are embarrassed by the Burmese junta’s misrule and have been increasingly outspoken in saying so — including during the debate over ASEAN’s new charter, which creates a regional human rights body and is grounded in a framework of political and economic modernity that is anathema to the generals in Naypyidaw (Burma’s new capital, built deep in the jungle and featuring plush underground bunkers for the country’s paranoid leadership).

Since the junta rejected the results of the country’s last elections in 1990, Burma’s people have grown poorer as its ruling elite have grown richer from trade in gems, timber, narcotics, and other commodities, as well as the development of offshore natural gas fields that will deliver billions of dollars in revenues to Burma’s governing elite over the coming decade. Civil conflict stemming from the junta’s rule has produced millions of internally displaced people and refugees. Forced and child labor are rampant. The regime’s security forces fired on peacefully demonstrating monks and rounded up large numbers of innocent civilians following non-violent protests in 2007. The country’s political opposition has been eviscerated. The junta may be cooperating with North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

In short, the pathologies that afflict Burma’s failing state, all either derived or exacerbated by political misrule, make its regime a threat to its people, its neighbors, and the wider world. Burma’s descent is in many respects a mirror-image of the success of Indonesia’s vibrant democracy next door.

via Oxblog

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by | 13 July 2009 · 9:51 pm

China-Korea-Japan Trade Boom, 1100s

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 94-96:

Commerce grew to become a vibrant sector, primarily because Japan was located next to the most dynamic economy on earth: that of Sung China. Sung Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, and mass printing. The country also had advanced carbon-stoked iron furnaces producing high-grade ferrous products and a cotton industry producing everything from ships’ sails to military uniforms. The population grew by leaps and bounds during the Sung period, as the “rice bowl” of southern China was more intensively cultivated and regional craft and trade specialization took place as never before.

Trade between China and Japan, exclusively for the archipelago’s elite, was already underway in the tenth century. By the late eleventh and twelfth centuries huge Chinese junks called even more regularly at Hakata, Kamizaki, and other Kyushu ports. By 1100, a community of overseas Chinese took up residence in northern Kyushu cities such as Hakata. They held rank at the Japanese court and some even attended the funeral of an important official in northern Kyushu in 1097. In 1151, two samurai attacked the overseas Chinese there, and the fleeing merchant families numbered more than sixteen hundred. Archaeological evidence also points to a dramatic increase in commerce with China during the twelfth century, as the number of sites in Japan containing shards of Chinese porcelains grew exponentially. Besides Kyushu, Chinese traders also called on ports along the northwestern coast of Honshu. By 1180, some daring Japanese captains attempted the passage to southern China as well.

Chinese merchants traded their silk, spices, and porcelain for northeastern Japan’s furs and gold. The Chinese especially coveted gold; a Chinese trader wrote in 1118 “the country of Japan … in its earth has a wealth of precious products.” Perhaps for this reason, the dynamic Sung state, populated by wealthy consumers, ran a balance of trade deficit with Japan. Piles of Sung cash were soon helping to remonetize the Japanese economy. By 1150 there were signs that the outflow of Sung cash was causing the economic giant problems. In 1199, the Chinese government tried to ban the use of its coins in trade with Korea and Japan. A significant increase in the amount of Sung coins in Japanese sites took place beginning in the 1170s. People wrote of a “cash sickness” in 1179, and then the court banned the counterfeiting of Sung coppers. These proscriptions were apparently ineffective, because the court repeated them in 1187, 1189, and 1192. Along with the cash came an inflationary price spiral, beginning in the 1170s, helping to further destabilize an already teetering social pyramid.

The Ise Taira built a trading empire in western Japan during their tenure as the military arm of the court from 1159 to 1180. They controlled bases such as Fukuhara in modern Kobe, Itsukushima along the Inland Sea, and Kamizaki in northern Kyushu. The Taira made allies of the seafaring families in western Japan. They were so involved in the Sung trade that in 1180 ex-emperor Takakura, born of a Taira mother, was induced by Kiyomori to sail from Fukuhara to Itsukushima aboard a Sung junk.

In addition, the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1258) exchanged goods frequently with Japanese merchants. Following the collapse of the Silla kingdom, relations between the Japanese court and Korea improved. Between 1050 and 1090, Japanese merchants visited Korea in sixteen trade missions, bearing weapons, screens, and precious metals for the Koryŏ court.

This strong external stimulus, combined with the modest demographic recovery, led to a rebound in Japanese domestic commerce between 1050 and 1180. As had occurred during the eighth century, the capital and Kinai constituted the core of commercial activity, because that region had a large number of consumers and the remnants of an advanced transportation system. Commerce was more dynamic in western Japan and probably less important in eastern Honshu. Long-distance exchange, however, enabled the elite to acquire the marvelous products of northern Japan, such as gold and wild horses. The elites also still received most commodities in kind from their on-site landlords and tax farmers, and peasants bought and sold at markets only occasionally, yet demographic and economic recovery supported and was assisted by the return of a more vital market system.

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by | 2 July 2009 · 8:09 pm

Japan’s Puppet States in China

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 481-483:

Japanese atrocities may have played some part in the refusal of Chiang’s government to contemplate a negotiated peace after 1937, despite German efforts to broker a truce. Of more importance was probably the manifest inability of the Japanese to inflict a decisive defeat on Guomindang forces, despite the poor leadership, low morale and appalling under-equipment that afflicted the latter.* Although the Japanese armies continued to advance steadily westwards in the course of 1938, capturing Canton, Wuhan and Xuzhou, they suffered increasingly heavy casualties as their lines of communication became overextended. At Taierhchuang [sic] in March 1938, for example, the 10th Division found itself all but surrounded and ended up losing 16,000 men in days of intense house-to-house fighting. Eighteen months later the 11th Army was heavily defeated at Changsha (Hunan). The invasion of Guangxi at the end of 1939 was short-lived; by the end of the following year the Japanese had been forced to abandon Chinhsien, Nanning and Pinyang. By 1940 they had more or less reached their limits in China and the location of the front line did not significantly change again until 1944. The effect of all this was to strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements within the Japanese military, the so-called ‘Control Faction’, who advocated ignoring the existing Chinese authorities and dealing with puppet regimes, as they had done in Manchuria.

Here, it might be thought, the Japanese had miscalculated. Who in China would want to lend his support to invaders capable of such terrible atrocities? As in other theatres of war, however, the key to securing collaboration turned out to have little, if anything, to do with the cruelty or kindness of the invading forces. The decisive factor was the extent to which the invaded people were divided among themselves. The Japanese invasion did not elicit national unity, as some Chinese Nationalists had hoped it might. It boosted support for the Communist Party, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership now committed itself to a campaign of protracted guerrilla warfare. At the same time, Japanese incursions tended to widen divisions within the Guomindang. The more recruits the Communists were able to find among impoverished and disillusioned peasants, the more tempted some Nationalists were to compromise with the Japanese. The further Chiang retreated to the west – and he did not stop until he reached Chongqing in the province of Sichuan, 800 miles from his starting point, Nanking – the greater the incentive for those left behind to make their peace with the Japanese.

Already by 1937 the Japanese had established three puppet regimes, in Chinese territory: the ‘Empire of Manchukuo’, the supposedly autonomous Mongolian regime of Prine Te [sic; = Prince Te(h), De Wang, Demchugdongrub/Dam-chukdangrub) and the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Council. By the middle of the following year, two more had been added: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China set up in Peiping by the North China Area Army, and the Reorganized Government of the Republic of China established in Nanking by the Central China Area Army. In March 1940 the Japanese pulled off a major diplomatic coup when they succeeded in persuading the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei to become the figurehead in charge of the latter. After renewed attempts to negotiate some kind of peace with Chiang had foundered, Wang’s regime was officially recognized as the legitimate government of China. Wang himself had been duped; he had been led to expect concessions like a definite date for Japanese troop withdrawals and a unification of the various puppet regimes under his authority. He ended up having to recognize the independence of Manchukuo, to allow the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops in China and to accept joint control of the maritime customs and other tax agencies. This meant that by 1940 the Japanese and their puppets controlled virtually the entire Chinese coast and a large proportion of the country’s eastern provinces. These were by far China’s most prosperous regions. Wang alone was nominally in charge of half a million square miles of territory and around 200 million people. Many Chinese agreed with the economist T’ao His-sheng [sic; = T’ao Hsi-sheng, Tao Xisheng], a leading collaborator in Wang’s regime: ‘China is a weak nation. In adopting a policy of being “friendly to distant countries and hostile to neighbours” [she] will inevitably bring about a situation which is summed up in the proverb: “Water from afar cannot extinguish a fire nearby.”’ Collaborationist slogans such as Tong Sheng Ghong Si [sic] (‘Live or Die Together’) were not wholly empty of meaning.

*The fighting strength of the Chinese army was around 2.9 million, divided into 146 divisions and 44 independent brigades. However, each division had just 324 machine-guns between nine and a half thousand men. In all, the Chinese army had little more than one million rifles and just 800 pieces of artillery.

Ferguson’s handling of Chinese names and terms seems very sloppy. If the slogan he mentioned is 同生共死 (lit. ‘same live both die’), a closer rendering might be Tong sheng gong si ‘Live together, die together’.

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by | 30 June 2009 · 10:27 pm

Aristocrats Corrupt the Clergy, 800-1050

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 74-75:

The Buddhist clergy continued to serve as an adjunct to the aristocracy, not only performing state rituals but also helping the privileged gain salvation. During these centuries, however, several changes overtook this class and Japanese religion in general. Buddhism and the native cult, already starting to meld in the 600s, became amalgamated and local gods and goddesses turned into protectors of the Buddhist law and then manifestations of Buddhist deities. Buddhist temples and shrines combined into powerful religious complexes, such as Kasuga Shrine and Kōfukuji, and helped the religious class acquire even more wealth and power.

The gender and class composition of Buddhist devotees also began to change. The state all but stopped ordaining women and banned them from some sacred sites because they might be a temptation to sin. Still, some women, especially of aristocratic birth, continued to accept unofficial ordination. The class origins of powerful monks began to shift as rank holders with many sons and no other outlets for them started to place them in high positions at famous temples. For example, between 782 and 990, ninety-seven percent of these powerful monks were of commoner background, studying for and attaining ordination. Between 990 and 1069, however, that proportion slipped to fifty-two percent. In other words, the crowded aristocratic class began to seek religious appointment as a way to produce an income for their children. Temples no longer followed rules of seniority but instead rewarded their aristocratic patrons, despite loud protests from well-qualified ordinands.

The increased role of aristocratic offspring in administering the daily affairs and extensive estate lands of these temple complexes helped to politicize these institutions and increase factionalism. By the mid-tenth century, violence occasionally broke out among factions within and between religious complexes. These confrontations could cause considerable damage, as when more than forty buildings were destroyed on Mount Hiei in a factional dispute in 993. Many monks of minimal education were there merely for the tax exemption—and readily took part in scuffles. These same clerics engaged in all sorts of behavior once banned by monastic rules, including eating meat, drinking rice wine, and engaging in homosexual and heterosexual liaisons. Some abbots such as Ennin (794–864) condemned these violations of religious conduct, but until 1050 the anticlericalism implied in terms like “evil monk” (akusō) [悪僧] was not yet widespread.

Ryōgen (912–985) was a powerful monk of this time. Born to a poor commoner family, he ascended Mount Hiei at the age of eleven, found a suitable teacher, and was ordained in the Tendai sect at sixteen. Lacking a powerful sponsor and ambitious for a career that included more than just performing everyday ceremonies, Ryōgen succeeded in attaching himself to more powerful monks and showing off his knowledge in a series of religious debates. This attracted the attention of court aristocrats, especially members of the northern branch of the Fujiwara. In exchange for his expertise at various esoteric rituals employed when Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira died, Ryōgen became a protege of Tadahira’s son Morosuke. Morosuke obtained a series of important appointments for Ryōgen and cemented his alliance with the monk. Eventually, Ryōgen was appointed to the headship of the Tendai sect. In that post, he strengthened monastic discipline and helped rebuild many structures on Mount Hiei after the disastrous fire of 966. He also expanded Tendai power into the provinces and aided in the ordination of women. He remained the head of the Tendai sect until his death.

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by | 22 June 2009 · 6:06 am

WW2: National Armies vs. Imperial Armies

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 516-518:

The Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer’s reconnaissance platoon in The Naked and the Dead includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war….

The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French* and Polish forces, Yugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower – that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1.

*It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africans constituted the main elements of the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even as late as September 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle’s force in North-West Europe.

I did not quote the immediately preceding section that compares the mismatch in purely economic terms, but I cannot resist quoting the footnote appended to the end of it (on p. 516):

‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quarters of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

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by | 19 June 2009 · 6:45 am

Japan’s Worst Century, the 700s

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 36-37:

Between 698 and 800, there were at least thirty-six years of plagues in Japan, or about one every three years. The most well-documented epidemic—and to judge by the mortality and its social, economic, and political effects, the most significant—was a smallpox outbreak during 735–737. It started in northern Kyushu, a certain sign of its foreign origin, but by 737 the virus had spread up the Inland Sea and on to eastern Honshu, aided, ironically enough, by the improved network of roads linking the capital and provinces. To its credit, the court tried to apply pragmatic principles to treat the symptoms of the disease, but to little effect. Statistics from various provinces scattered from northern Kyushu to eastern Honshu suggest that mortality was about twenty-five percent, meaning that a million or more persons may have succumbed. As a result of the depopulation, an entire layer of village administration was abolished. Another irony was that the death rate among the exalted aristocracy—living crowded together in the capital at Nara—was even higher, a full thirty-nine percent. At the end of 737, chroniclers wrote,”Through the summer and fall, people … from aristocrats on down have died one after another in countless numbers. In recent times, there has been nothing like this.” In the wake of the epidemic, government revenues plunged by more than twenty percent, even more draconian measures were implemented to stem cultivator flight from the land, and a guilt-ridden [Emperor] Shōmu approved large expenditures for Buddhist temples, statues, and other religious icons.

Epidemics certainly helped to reverse the long demographic expansion of the last several centuries, but two other factors contributed to population stasis. The first was crop failure and widespread famine, occurring about every third year between the late seventh and eighth centuries. Causes for bad harvests were complex, but various climate data indicate that the eighth century was one of the hottest and driest in Japanese history. In Western Europe, where there was a “medieval warm” at this time, the effect was to dry out water-logged soils and encourage the expansion of agriculture; in Japan, where farmers often depended upon rainfall as the only way to irrigate their paddies, the result was frequent crop failure and hunger. At ten to fifteen percent, mortality from a severe famine was lower than an epidemic, but, like pestilence, malnutrition also reduced fertility. Even in years when the harvest seemed adequate, the populace frequently went hungry in the spring when their supplies of grain were exhausted. More sophisticated means of watering rice paddies may have remedied the problem, but they were either unavailable or not applied.

A second factor leading to population stasis was the ecological degradation besetting the Kinai, the richest and most financially important region in the eighth century. Altogether, the government sponsored the construction of six capital cities and countless temples, shrines, and aristocratic mansions from 690 to 805. All these structures were built from timber harvested in the Kinai and adjacent provinces, and most had roof tiles requiring baking with charcoal in a kiln. During the second half of the eighth century, the shortage of lumber became so critical that planners began to recycle used timbers and roof tiles from older capitals, such as Fujiwara and Naniwa. When the court left Nara for Nagaoka in 784, for example, they used recycled lumber and tiles almost exclusively.

By the late eighth century, tile bakers were relying upon red pine to fire their kilns, a secondary forest cover that typically grows in nutrient-poor soil. Furthermore, the government began to note that the bald mountains in the Kinai and vicinity produced less rain and more erosion. In essence, the stripping of the forests throughout central Japan exacerbated the effects of the hot, dry climate and encouraged farmers to give up cropping altogether and flee to the seashores and mountains to forage as of old.

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Filed under disease, economics, energy, food, Japan

by | 15 June 2009 · 5:57 pm

Effect of Economic Sanctions on Japan, 1941

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 487-488:

The sole obstacle to Japanese hegemony in South-East Asia was America. On the one hand, it was clear that the United States had scant appetite for war, in Asia or anywhere else. On the other, Americans had little desire to see Japan as sole master of China, let alone the whole of East Asia. But those who ran US policy in the Pacific believed they did not need to take up arms to prevent this, because of Japan’s dependence on trade with the United States and hence its vulnerability to economic pressure. Around a third of Japan’s imports came from the United States, including copious quantities of cotton, scrap iron and oil. Her dependence on American heavy machinery and machine tools was greater still. Even if the Americans did not intervene militarily, they had the option to choke the Japanese war machine to death, especially if they cut off oil exports. This was precisely what made it so hard for American diplomats and politicians to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor. As normally risk-averse people, they could not imagine the Japanese being so rash as to gamble on a very swift victory when the economic odds were stacked so heavily against them. They assumed that the partial sanctions imposed after the Japanese invasion of Indo-China would send a clear enough signal to deter the Japanese. The effect was precisely the opposite.

The path to war in the Pacific was paved with economic sanctions. The Japanese-American Commercial Treaty of 1911 was abrogated in July 1939. By the end of the year Japan (along with other combatants) was affected by Roosevelt’s ‘moral embargo’ on the export of ‘materials essential to airplane manufacture’, which meant in practice aluminium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten and vanadium. At the same time, the State Department applied pressure on American firms to stop exporting technology to Japan that would facilitate the production of aviation fuel. With the National Defense Act of July 1940 the President was empowered to impose real prohibitions on the exports of strategic commodities and manufactures. By the end of the month, after a protracted wrangle between the State Department and the Treasury, it was agreed to ban the export of high-grade scrap iron and steel, aviation fuel, lubricating oil and the fuel blending agent tetraethyl lead. On September 26 the ban was extended to all scrap; two months later the export of iron and steel themselves became subject to licence. No one knew for sure what the effect of these restrictions would be. Some, like the State Department’s Advisor on Far Eastern Affairs Stanley Hornbeck, said they would hobble the Japanese military; others, like the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, that they would provoke it. Neither view was correct. The sanctions were too late to deter Japan from contemplating war, since the Japanese had been importing and stockpiling American raw materials since the outbreak of war in China. Only one economic sanction was regarded in Tokyo as a casus belli and that was an embargo on oil. That came in July 1941, along with a freeze on all Japanese assets in the United States – a response to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China. From this point, war in the Pacific was more or less inevitable.

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by | 4 June 2009 · 7:52 am

Early Japan’s Peaceful Foragers, Violent Farmers

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 13-14:

Yayoi society was constantly at war, as historians have known from brief citations about the islands in Chinese annals. For example, of the five thousand skeletons surviving from the Jōmon era, practically none suggests a violent death, whereas among the one thousand skeletons preserved from Yayoi times, about one hundred betray signs of gruesome ends, including beheading and piercing with a dozen or more arrowheads. Iron and stone arrowheads are among the most common finds in Yayoi sites, and by the middle and late Yayoi, iron arrowheads were heavier and more deadly than ever.

Settlement location and structure also imply that Yayoi society was violent. Scattered throughout upland areas, highland settlements for just a few people probably served as lookouts for attackers. Some of these hamlets have pits containing ash, which suggests a system of smoke signals. On the flatlands, one and sometimes two moats with a V-shaped cross section encircle large settlements; as of 1998, about eighty moated villages have been found for the Yayoi period. At Ōtsuka in the Kanto, a trench measured twenty by one hundred thirty meters and was two meters deep. At Ōgidani near Kyoto, there were two ditches one kilometer in length; it is estimated that it would have taken one thousand ten-ton dump trucks to haul away the earth. Many moated settlements also used stakes, twisted branches, and earthen walls as barricades.

Why did the Yayoi resort to war so frequently? The reason is probably related to the importation of agriculture, which, even though it diffused slowly over the archipelago, soon produced classes of haves and have-nots. Villagers resorted to violence when their harvest was inadequate or when they wanted to take over a neighbor’s surplus grain and the lands that had produced them. The discovery of similar moated and walled settlements around the world from an analogous period, when agriculture was just underway, also supports such a view.

The invention of war went along with famine to comprise new ways for agrarian peoples to die. Malnutrition had been a problem under forager regimes, of course, but with the advent of agriculture and the consequent population growth, many more people were dependent on a new subsistence system and liable to starve to death. Known as the “spring hungers,” famine usually beset a family or village whose crop had failed or whose reserves of grain had been exhausted by the late winter. Along with the greater chance of extensive famine came war, which was really just theft organized on a village-wide scale. Every system of subsistence has its advantages and disadvantages.

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by | 3 June 2009 · 5:23 pm

Peking Duck’s Interview with a 1989 Demonstrator

To mark the 20th anniversary of the PRC government crackdown on the democracy movement in 1989, Peking Duck has reposted an interview from 2003 with a former student who was caught up in the demonstrations in Shanghai, not Beijing. It’s quite a nuanced retrospective, mixing cynicism about government with (too much, IMHO) respect for Chinese leaders, lost idealism with rising optimism. Here are a few excerpts:

In the 1970s, if you said anything disrespectful of Mao, you’d be executed. In 1989, if you said something negative about Deng in public you could still be in serious trouble.

It was the students who were most sensitive to this. Our parents all worked for the state, and there was still little or no private enterprise. They were not as concerned about ideology and change. They only had to worry about feeding their families. But as students we were more liberal, more free-spirited and more engaged in ideologies. We weren’t concerned about raising a family. We were not necessarily practical; we were very idealistic….

I don’t have regrets and I don’t think what we did was in vain…. But I have to admit I am no longer interested in politics, especially now that China is undergoing a natural transition toward democracy, with the economy being the core and the catalyst for that change. And nothing can stop that change, no matter how much the Communists want to preserve their old values….

There was nothing like the martial law that took place in Beijing. The Mayor of Shanghai at the time was extremely competent, and he made an appeal to the city on TV and he calmed everyone down. I’ll never forget, he said something that was ambiguous and politically brilliant: “Down the road, truth will prevail.” That could have meant he was sympathetic to the students or totally with the government. But it was very calming to hear him say it.

The mayor organized factory workers to clear the roads, not the army. These workers were the parents and uncles and aunts of the students. Some members of the student body tried to stir up these factory workers, and I think that was a very dangerous thing to do. Students demonstrating was one thing, but if it was factory workers – that would need to be stopped, and there would have been a riot. That’s why Beijing was much more tense.

Bringing in the factory workers truly showed the leadership and tact and common sense of Shanghai’s mayor – Zhu Rongji. Beijing is the political center, but Shanghai is the financial center, and it could absolutely not fall into chaos, no matter what. That’s why you saw factory workers and not the army….

That was part of being 20 years old in China when you haven’t seen the world, no Hollywood movies, you’ve only read Stalin-style textbooks. I matured ten years overnight, and I also became a little cynical.

For so many years China had a stringently controlled educational system. From kindergarten to college, we all read the exact same books and took the exact same exams. We always believed everything that the government told us, and they told us it was an honor for ‘the people without property’ to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for the cause of communism, fighting against the two great enemies, the Nationalists [KMT] and the Capitalists. We were brainwashed….

You have to realize that Deng changed my life – everybody’s life. He opened new doors for all of us. In 1982, my mother was among the first batch of scholars who were sent abroad to study, and she went to Harvard. She returned to become the director of a major Shanghai hospital. So we are grateful. And soon so many other changes happened.

I feel a great respect for our leaders. There are some, like Li Peng, who I still have no respect for. But Deng – soon we felt as though he had torn down the Berlin Wall. I wondered, if Deng had not handled the demonstrations the way he did would China be the country it is today? The whole nation is changing and people are more affluent, and I feel proud of being Chinese. People once looked down at us, and now they have respect for us….

I believe that one day, China will have Taiwan-style democracy, but it has to be built on a strong economy.

via the Korea Blog Aggregator at The Marmot’s Hole

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Filed under China, democracy, economics, nationalism

by | 2 June 2009 · 8:06 pm

Ferguson vs. Krugman, Recession vs. Depression

In the Financial Times of 29 May, Niall Ferguson offers a History lesson for economists in thrall to Keynes.

I think perhaps Mr Krugman would benefit from a refresher course about [the] historical context [of Keynes’s (1937) General Theory]. Having reissued his book The Return of Depression Economics, he clearly has an interest in representing the current crisis as a repeat of the 1930s. But it is not. US real GDP is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to fall by 2.8 per cent this year and to stagnate next year. This is a far cry from the early 1930s, when real output collapsed by 30 per cent. So far this is a big recession, comparable in scale with 1973-1975. Nor has globalisation collapsed the way it did in the 1930s.

Credit for averting a second Great Depression should principally go to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, whose knowledge of the early 1930s banking crisis is second to none, and whose double dose of near-zero short-term rates and quantitative easing – a doubling of the Fed’s balance sheet since September – has averted a pandemic of bank failures. No doubt, too, the $787bn stimulus package is also boosting US GDP this quarter.

But the stimulus package only accounts for a part of the massive deficit the US federal government is projected to run this year. Borrowing is forecast to be $1,840bn – equivalent to around half of all federal outlays and 13 per cent of GDP. A deficit this size has not been seen in the US since the second world war. A further $10,000bn will need to be borrowed in the decade ahead, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even if the White House’s over-optimistic growth forecasts are correct, that will still take the gross federal debt above 100 per cent of GDP by 2017. And this ignores the vast off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the bond market is quailing. For only on Planet Econ-101 (the standard macroeconomics course drummed into every US undergraduate) could such a tidal wave of debt issuance exert “no upward pressure on interest rates”….

The policy mistake has already been made – to adopt the fiscal policy of a world war to fight a recession. In the absence of credible commitments to end the chronic US structural deficit, there will be further upward pressure on interest rates, despite the glut of global savings. It was Keynes who noted that “even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist”. Today the long-dead economist is Keynes, and it is professors of economics, not practical men, who are in thrall to his ideas.

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Filed under economics, education, U.S.