Category Archives: publishing

by | 7 March 2025 · 11:23 am

George Kennan’s Siberian Adventures

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 3-5:

George Kennan is a little-known American whose achievements have been overshadowed by a much younger, distant cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, who was the chief architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The George Kennan of this story was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.

Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.

Kennan and Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, and sleighs and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance. Worst of all was the nervous strain caused by their unrelenting exposure to human suffering because the exile system, as Kennan discovered, in fact was a brutal instrument of the Russian Empire’s exploitation of Siberia’s vast natural resources and a means of suppressing and punishing dissent.

Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States, his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews had all changed. “What I saw heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul—opened to me a new world of human experience, and raised, in some respects, all my moral standards.”

And Kennan’s investigation changed America. Today it is nearly impossible to conceive of the close diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States and the affection of Americans for Russia at the time of Kennan’s investigation. Many Americans held the benign perception of Russia as a “distant friend” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters. Kennan’s investigative reporting put an end to that. His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.

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by | 12 February 2025 · 11:13 pm

GDR Illusions in 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 704-705:

Gorbachev was not alone in admiring the apparent East German economic strength. In 1987, Western economists, looking primarily at numerical data, placed East Germany ahead of the United Kingdom in per capita income, a major index of development. As late as 1988, even sober Western newspapers were describing the GDR as a powerhouse. Its deep debt, similar to that of other countries (in per capita terms) was known but was not considered an impediment to growth and continued “success.” The times when East Germany’s economy was lame were “long past,” wrote journalist Peter Merseburger in 1987. He imagined the GDR lasting far into the unspecified future, thriving as a state that had solved the problem of unemployment and social insecurity, and he praised it for low rents, ignoring the fact that they reflected low investment in housing. The data existed to draw more sobering conclusions, but few did so. The GDR was so much wealthier than Poland that no one believed it, too, might have deep problems. Per capita East German gross national product was 40 percent higher than that of the Soviet Union.

The success of the GDR’s economy was an illusion. The state carried an unsustainable debt and tore down centuries-old buildings in world-class architectural gems (like Greifswald, Weimar, and Brandenburg), because it was too poor renovate them. The GDR could not compete even in areas where the state made its heaviest investments, like microelectronic technology, a major focus from the late 1970s. By September 1988, some 250,000 workers at seventeen Kombinate and 14 billion marks of investment had yielded the production of the GDR’s own 1-megabyte microchip, much celebrated in the party press, but already years behind the standard in the West. Toshiba had been mass-producing a 1-megabyte chip for two years at that point and was at work on a 4-megabyte chip.

The relatively high living standards were made possible by fortuitous circumstances: a strong preexisting industrial base; heavy investments in the 1950s; rational organizational reforms in the 1970s and 1980s (Kombinate); and the fact that West Germany considered the GDR a part of united Germany and gave it full access to the markets of the European Union, as well as several massive loans. Still, East Germany’s leaders felt that no reform was needed. Kurt Hager, East German ideology chief, said his land did not need Gorbachev’s plans for greater openness and restructuring. Simply because your neighbor puts up new wallpaper does not mean that you should do the same. The GDR leader Erich Honecker even mocked Gorbachev. “The young man has been making policy for only a year, and already he wants to take on more than he can chew.”

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by | 6 February 2025 · 1:59 am

Rise of Debt Peonage in Mexico

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 238-240:

The trappings of debt peonage were in place in Mexico as early as 1587, when an Indian from Michoacán recounted how some Spaniards had advanced him money “at a far higher price than it was worth and then seized my possessions and took me and my wife and children, and they have kept us locked up for twelve years, moving us from one textile factory to another.” The Indian did not know the amount he still owed or how much money he and his family had earned during their twelve years of forced servitude. But he was certain that peonage was worse than slavery because unlike the Africans with whom he toiled, he was not allowed to wander the streets freely even on Sundays. Over the centuries, debt peonage spread. As the Spanish crown abolished Indian slavery in 1542, prohibited the granting of new encomiendas in 1673, and phased out repartimientos after 1777, debt peonage gained ground.

After Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the process gained momentum. States throughout the country enacted servitude and vagrancy laws. The state of Yucatán, for example, regulated the movement of servants through a certificate system. No servant could abandon his master without having fulfilled the terms of his contract and could not be hired by another employer without first presenting a certificate showing that he owed “absolutely nothing” to his previous employer. In Chiapas the state legislature introduced a servitude code in 1827 allowing owners to retain their workers by force if necessary until they had fulfilled the terms of their contracts. Lashes, lockdowns, and shackles were commonly used. The same was true in Coahuila. In 1851 the state legislature there allowed owners to flog their peons. Interestingly, the governor opposed the measure because it would affect more than one-third of all the people of Coahuila, according to his calculations. Peonage in neighboring Nuevo León may have been just as common and was especially galling because it was customary to transfer debts from fathers to sons, thus perpetuating a system of inherited bondage. In these ways, servitude for the liquidation of debts spread all over Mexico. Although Mexico’s faltering economy kept the demand for workers in check in the early decades after independence, once economic growth resumed later in the century, employers went to great lengths to procure and retain coerced laborers.

A muckraking American journalist named John Kenneth Turner had unique access to this expanding world of servitude and provided the most detailed portrait of its workings. Posing as a millionaire investor, Turner traveled to Yucatán in 1908. He made his way to Mérida, a town that boasted extravagant mansions and was surrounded by about 150 henequen haciendas. The planters there received the American warmly. These “little Rockefellers,” as Turner called them, had grown rich by selling rope and twine made from the henequen plant. In the early years of the century, Yucatán’s total exports of henequen had reached nearly 250 million pounds a year. But a panic in 1907 had cut severely into their profits, “so they needed ready cash, and they were willing to take it from anyone who came,” Turner explained. “Hence my imaginary money was the open sesame to their club, and to their farms.”

Turner’s disguise as a prospective investor also allowed him to ask freely about how workers were hired. “Slavery is against the law; we do not call it slavery,” the planters told him again and again. They generally referred to the Mayas, Yaquis, and even Koreans working at their haciendas as “people” or “laborers,” never as slaves. The “henequen kings” were quite forthcoming about how debt served as a tool of coercion. “We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider they are in debt to us,” the president of the Agricultural Chamber of Yucatán told Turner. “And we do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt.” In spite of this verbal obfuscation, the fact was that an Indian worker could be acquired for $400 (400 pesos) in Yucatán. “If you buy now, you buy at a very good time,” Turner was told. “The panic has put the price down. One year ago the price of each man was $1,000.” Obviously, the reason the going rate was uniform was not that all peons were equally in debt, but that there was a market for them irrespective of their debt. “We don’t keep much account of the debt,” clarified one planter, “because it doesn’t matter after you’ve got possession of the man.” After paying the price, Turner was told, he would get the worker along with a photograph and identification papers. “And if your man runs away,” another planter added reassuringly, “the papers are all the authorities require for you to get him back again.”

Turner asked candidly about how to treat his workers. “It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary,” opined Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Agricultural Chamber, “for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing.” The American journalist witnessed a formal beating, with all the workers assembled, during one of his hacienda visits. The young man received fifteen lashes across his back with a heavy, wet rope. All henequen plantations had capataces, or foremen, who carried canes to prod and whack the Indians. Turner wrote, “I do not remember visiting a single field in which I did not see some of this punching and prodding and whacking going on.”

Slavery in Mexico in the twentieth century? “Yes, I found it,” wrote Turner in his extraordinary exposé, published on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. “I found it first in Yucatan.” According to him, the slave population of Yucatán consisted of 8,000 Yaqui Indians forcibly transported from Sonora; 3,000 Koreans, who had departed from the port of Inchon and were on four- or five-year labor contracts; and between 100,000 and 125,000 Mayas, “who formerly owned the lands that the henequen kings now own.” Turner estimated that in all of Mexico, there may have been 750,000 slaves, a figure that is almost certainly exaggerated but that underscores the expansion of the other slavery during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

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by | 11 December 2024 · 2:15 pm

Yugoslav Heresies in the 1950s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 563-565:

In 1953, the question of what socialism would be after Stalin was not purely theoretical because Yugoslavia’s Communists had been experimenting with new models since Stalin’s break with them in 1948. The rupture was not about ideology (that is, about how to build socialism or to structure the party): it was about obedience to Stalin personally. Tito and his comrades had enraged the Soviet leader by failing to seek permission, for example, for their policies toward the other Balkan states. For the time being, references to Tito were anathema in the Soviet Bloc; as recently as December 1952, top Czech Communist leaders had gone to the gallows for association with Titoist heresies. But now Stalin’s successors sought peace with Yugoslavia, leading to full restoration of relations by the summer of 1955. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin the following winter in a secret speech, many Hungarian and Polish Communists, as well as workers, thought the Yugoslav way might become their way.

The best-known component of this Yugoslav path to socialism was worker self-management, enshrined in law in 1951. It grew out of a struggle of leading Yugoslav Communists for orientation after their expulsion from the Cominform. Tito had been so tightly bound to the Soviet party that he later recalled the first days of estrangement as a “nightmare.” Yet Yugoslav Communists had no doubt that they were in the right; their victory in the Partisan struggle, with little Soviet help, showed that history was on their side. The question was where the Soviets had gone wrong.

Yugoslav Communists located the causes of the Soviet deviation in the Communist Party itself and its untrammeled power. Tito’s lieutenants Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj reasoned that power in the Soviet Union lay not with workers and peasants but with bureaucrats. For example, managers and not workers controlled Soviet factories. Like capitalists, they determined what men and women on the factory floor produced, and like capitalists, they had the privileges of higher salaries. In effect, exploitation of the working class continued. This was a vital recognition and critique for a political order that claimed to embody emancipation of all human beings. Soviet reality was not socialism but “state capitalism.”

Somehow Soviet leaders had failed to heed Marx’s warnings about “usurpers” who might derail the revolution. Indeed, the very idea of a strong state, as the Soviet one undoubtedly was, had seemed anathema to Marx.

…

Djilas and Kardelj, along with the Slovene Boris Kidrič, reread these lines from Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and during a chat in a limousine outside their villas in 1949, decided that this vision of workers’ power held a solution to Yugoslavia’s predicament of being a socialist state cut off from the socialist motherland. They suggested it to Tito, and he quickly recognized the promise, exclaiming: “Factories belonging to the workers, something that has never been achieved!”

…

The party elite now took central planning out of its straight jacket and introduced some flexibility, for instance, giving firms tax breaks for better production. Though Yugoslavia was far from being a market economy, it became possible for managers to seek marketplace advantages and make higher profits. At the same time, firms were not required to act according to market rules, and bank credits became available to cushion them against budget shortfalls (that is, noncompetitive performance). After 1953, partly aided by Western credits, the Yugoslav economy—and living standards—improved markedly. One sign of this was growth in personal consumption, which went up by 45.8 percent between 1957 and 1961.

A transformation took place from a “distributive model” of the early postwar years, whose aim had been to remedy deprivation, to one in which the needs and preferences of consumers guided the production of the country’s enterprises. From the late 1950s, Yugoslavia thus embarked on the path to a “consumer society,” and the Yugoslav economic reforms of 1965 would be the most ambitious market-oriented changes seen anywhere in the Communist world before 1989.

Yet for all the heady experimentation in the economic realm, the Yugoslav way soon gave evidence of its limitations, and oddly, that involved its founding thinker, Milovan Djilas. Marx had been radical in his belief that the state must die under socialism, and so was Djilas. From October 1953 to January 1954, Djilas published articles in the party daily Borba attacking the power of the Yugoslav Communist bureaucracy. His views had evolved…. The more the party succeeded in building socialism, the less it was needed. Yet in reality, the party-state in Yugoslavia was becoming ever more entrenched.

In one of the last articles he was able to publish in socialist Yugoslavia, Djilas doubted whether that country was still in the throes of a “class struggle.” The bourgeoisie had been destroyed. What then was the need for a Communist organization of any kind, no matter what it called itself? Already alarmed, Tito moved to silence his former lieutenant, proclaiming that, yes, there would be a withering of the League, but the process would be protracted, because there were still many class enemies afoot. Djilas himself was evidence of this fact.

Djilas was now removed from the Central Committee and denied permission to publish. But he continued to give interviews with Western journalists, and in 1956, he published a book arguing that the party had become a new class. For the crime of “conducting propaganda hostile to Yugoslavia,” Djilas was sent to prison.

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by | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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by | 6 September 2024 · 1:43 pm

Capt. Cook’s Family

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 347-348:

ELIZABETH COOK NEVER remarried and remained a widow for fifty-six years. Sadly, she outlived all of her children, none of whom had children of their own. In October of 1780, the same month the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England, Nathaniel Cook, a midshipman serving on the HMS Thunderer, went down with more than six hundred other souls in a massive hurricane off Jamaica. He was only sixteen. Thirteen years later, in 1793, Hugh Cook perished from scarlet fever while at Cambridge, where he was studying to be an Anglican minister. Only a month after that, the eldest of the Cook boys, James, drowned near the Isle of Wight. The shock of losing her last two sons in such rapid succession proved too much for Elizabeth—it was said she spent almost three years confined to her bed.

At least, thanks to Lord Sandwich, she received a pension of £200 each year from the Admiralty, which, together with her husband’s share of the royalties from the publication of his voyage accounts, saw her into old age. “She kept her faculties to the end,” wrote Elizabeth’s cousin Canon Bennett, describing her as “a handsome and venerable lady, her white hair rolled back in ancient fashion, always dressed in black satin. She wore a ring with her husband’s hair in it, and she entertained the highest respect for his memory, measuring everything by his standard of honor and morality. Her keenest expression of disapprobation was that ‘Mr. Cook’—to her he was always Mr. Cook, not Captain—‘would never have done so.’ Like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea.”

Elizabeth Cook died in 1835, aged ninety-three.

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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 | 2 August 2024 · 6:04 am

Replanting Uprooted Memories

I’ve quoted many passages from Matthew Madden’s painstaking translation of Chan Samoeun’s uniquely detailed memoir of an especially horrible era in Cambodian history, for reasons that echo the translator’s poignant Afterword quoted below.

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. 637-640:

I still have a special affinity for the early chapters of Prisoners of Class, which capture so many details of 1975 Phnom Penh at the moment of Khmer Rouge victory. I feel almost greedy for those details; I collect any photograph, map, or description from the city’s past that I can find. I feel a deeply personal connection with and nostalgia for what I am now coming to think of as “Old Phnom Penh,” and very fortunate that I got to know it well in the last years before it began to change dramatically. With the breakneck pace of economic investment and development, seemingly devoid of coherent urban planning, increasingly little of Old Phnom Penh remains now, at least on the surface. I have been taken completely off guard by the speed and scope of the transformation in recent years, which is hard to overstate. (This has been a common topic of conversation with Samoeun, as he feels a similar disorientation.) The city had changed so little during my first several years there, and still looked so much like it had in pictures and film from before the revolution, like an insect trapped in amber, that I never imagined I wouldn’t be able to just continue revisiting old haunts or exploring landmarks whenever I liked, finding them much as they had always been, or that everything was about to become so different, so quickly.

It is truly the passing of an era.

Passing, too, is the generation of people who lived through the most turbulent, defining, and transformational eras of modern Cambodian history in the twentieth century—the post-colonial “golden age” of Sihanouk and the Sangkum (1954–70); the Khmer Republic and civil war (1970–75); and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). It is a generation now grown unexpectedly gray-haired and frail. In my early years in Cambodia, including when I first discovered Prisoners of Class, this generation constituted the backbone of Cambodian society. They were the parents, the shopkeepers, the maids, the farmers, the doctors and nurses, the taxi and cyclo drivers, the policemen, the politicians—all of the aunties and uncles of Cambodia. At that time, only the youngest Cambodians, those about my age and younger (I was born in 1977), had no memories of Khmer Rouge rule. For everyone else, virtually the entire adult population of the country, the Khmer Rouge era was fairly recent memory, and the effects of it were pervasive. (And in rural areas, especially, a sizable percentage of that population had themselves once been Khmer Rouge in some form or other.) I somehow don’t know that I ever truly appreciated that this would change.

But now, the vast majority of people in Cambodia have no memory of those events. Nobody younger than about their late forties or so—and current demographics skew overwhelmingly young—has even so much as an early childhood memory of the realities of Democratic Kampuchea, and nobody under their late fifties or so has any memory of life in pre-war Cambodia. And those numbers keep going up every year from this writing. And now many of those who do remember, especially those who were grown when the Khmer Rouge captured power, are dying out slowly, soon to be quickly. Samoeun’s thick black mop of black hair has now turned silver. Before long there will be nobody at all left who remembers what happened, and the country that they knew will have finally passed, transformed, to an entirely different cohort of forward-looking Cambodians. It will all belong to the past, to the history books.

Thus Prisoners of Class is and will remain a precious link to history, a priceless document to remind later generations of the now almost unthinkable things that occurred, to memorialize the heroic travails and losses (and crimes, lest we forget) of the now-passing generation. In the preface to Prisoners of Class, the author laments that “in Cambodian society we have very few articles or books describing the real lives of people who lived in any era of our history.” How fortunate indeed that that young man felt compelled to write down everything that he and his family saw and experienced while the memories were so fresh. How fortunate that he thought to include so many details! And how fortunate that he had the heart of both a chronicler and a poet. Though he almost certainly did not appreciate it at the time, that labor of personal writing would become a historical treasure memorializing, for all time, not just him and his family, but his entire generation, a whole era, a whole country, for future generations of Cambodians—and now for the world outside of Cambodia as well.

So now, with this translation, it is my hope and aspiration to give this important historical document an even wider distribution, a stronger foothold, a larger audience, to preserve and propagate a witness of a not-so-distant but rapidly receding past, for many more people in many more generations to come. May it become an essential and immortal resource for all those who seek to understand Cambodia’s turbulent twentieth-century past.

Matthew Madden, 17 September 2023

Mekong River Press has also made several chapters freely available online, as well as photos and maps of people and places cited in the book.

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Filed under Cambodia, democracy, education, literature, migration, publishing, war

by | 11 July 2024 · 11:09 am

Domestic Abuse Law in China, 2011

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. 88-90:

In 2011, Kim Lee, an American citizen, posted a picture on the Internet in China. In it, her ninety-kilogram husband rode on her back, pulling on her hair and smashing her head into the ground. After he’d struck her over ten times, she sustained injuries to her head, knees, ears, and more. Her husband was Li Yang, a Chinese celebrity who’d founded a famous English-language education brand. They used to work together.

The day the assault occurred, Kim needed her husband’s help with paperwork. She wanted to take their three children to the United States to visit her mother, but her driver’s license and teacher’s certificate were expired. Li Yang said he didn’t have time to provide the assistance she needed because he was only at home two days a month, otherwise occupied with touring the country. After arguing for several hours, he screamed, “Shut your mouth.”

Kim said, “Everything in my life is under your control, you can’t tell me to shut my mouth.”

When he held her hair and pinned her head to the ground, he shouted, “I will end this once and for all.”

Had it gotten any more serious, he later admitted, “I might have killed her.”

For the first time, it made the violence in elite urban families public and caused a strong social reaction. Kim refused to give any interviews, but when Old Fan sent her the footage we’d shot at the women’s prison, she agreed to talk to us. “I did not know that there were so many women living like this in China. If I stay silent, who will be there to protect my daughters?”

In the footage, I asked the female inmates, “When you testified in court, did you talk about the domestic abuse you suffered?”

They all said no.

No one bothered to ask them. The murder of a husband by an abused woman was considered ordinary murder, not “self-defense,” because it did not occur while the abuse was “ongoing” and the “abuse” was not considered a long-term process. During questioning, when an inmate wanted to talk about how her years of marriage had been, the prosecutor would interrupt her: “Are we here to listen to your life story? Get to the part where you murdered someone!”

After being assaulted, Kim Lee reported it to the police. A police officer tried to dissuade her: “You know, this isn’t America.” She said, “Of course, but there must be a law in China that says men can’t go around beating up women.” He said, “You’re right, men can’t beat up women, but husbands can beat up wives.”

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Filed under China, family, philosophy, publishing, U.S.