Last week Brad DeLong quoted BHUSHAN BAHREE, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: "China's exploding demand for oil -- one factor that helped drive petroleum prices above $40 a barrel this week -- has put energy markets at increased risk of disruptive price spikes and crashes, according to a study by an influential forecasting group...."

Cecil on the Death Touch. He's dubious, but admits there may be something. I've read about people who believe their beatings by the Chinese secret police have caused such damage, but I'm still skeptical.

Bill Hinton, the author of Fanshen, and other books praising the Communist Chinese land reform in the late 40's and 50's, died. On the MCLC LIST, someone posted an obituary by John Mage of Monthly Review:

Hinton again and again challenged the one-sided negative account of the Cultural Revolution that is now official dogma in China, no less than in the global imperium of the United States. His belief in the revolutionary transformative power of the peasantry, of ordinary people, cannot be shaken because it has been based on what he had himself experienced.

Straightforward and passionate, farmer and revolutionary, Bill Hinton's life demonstrates the universal core of Marxist revolutionary practice. Neither cultural nor generational differences proved barriers to his learning and teaching. Live like him.

Michael S. Duke took issue with this, referring to the

"time warp" factor in Monthly Review discourse. Also, I think very few of them know Chinese. The one abiding legacy of Marxism is sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, but capitalism plus liberal democracy has done more for the poor, laboring, huddled masses than any form of socialism or communism ever has.

In response to a defense of his ethics, he writes,

As for the ethics of anyone who espoused Maoism to the world and enjoyed special treatment from Zhou Enlai et al., especially from within the protection of the liberal democratic societies Marxism and Maoism were trying to destroy at the time, I find them to be a perfect example of what Michael Polanyi called "moral inversion" -- sanctioning the most immoral actions (Maoist style anything) for passionately moral reasons. (Polanyi's Personal Knowledge). National Socialism and Communism were always shot through with moral inversion.

Here's the NYT obit, which says his books

offered an authentic — if, some critics said, an occasionally overromantic — peek at the patterns of life for the peasants...

Booming China Devouring Raw Materials: Producers and Suppliers Struggle to Feed a Voracious Appetite By Peter S. Goodman. That pretty much says it all. Of course if there's a crash, they won't be needing those raw materials for awhile.

I'm trying to figure out what the hard-core Taiwanese independistas think of Chen Shui-bian's slavish caving in to the US. I suppose they blame the Americans for forcing him to speak.

Comments enabled.

Brewitt-Taylor's translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义 by Luo Guanzhong 罗贯中 online.

There's praise for you. Porous China Border Tempts North Korean Refugees:"It's like China under Mao Zedong," according to a 31-year-old Chinese fisherman.

I am not at all impressed by the way the sidewalks along Si wei Road 四維路 in Kaohsiung 高雄 have been revamped to facilitate access by motorcycles and automobiles, the better to run me down.

This is cute: back-to-back stories about U.S. Job Creation in April Gives Strength to Recovery and Outsourcing Delivers Hope to India. Outscourcing is not incompatible with job growth. A good thing for Kerry he can beat on Bush about the Iraqi prison.

A. O. SCOTT writes on the relationship between legal consumables and public health and the question of responsibility:

Does it rest with those of us who eat, drink and inhale the products that clog our arteries and corrode our livers and lungs, or with the companies who sell and advertise them?

But then he comes down on the side of passive dummies:

There is a heartbreaking moment when an overweight girl worries that she will never lose weight because she can't afford to eat two sandwiches a day from Subway, the diet that made Jared Fogle into the chain's favorite spokesman.

How about making your own sandwich, fattie? I eat home made sandwiches (on whole wheat) every work day that I bring to school: cheese, tomato, onion, lettuce and mayo; tuna salad; egg salad; peanut butter & celery; avocado, tomato and lettuce; roast beef occasionally; and home made hummus when I'm feeling energetic.

Meanwhile, while the Bush administration doesn't care what you eat, they're playing nanny government, trying to keep morning-after Plan B pills out of our grubby little hands.

In My Life as a Guard, TED CONOVER writes:

In the prison where I worked (and in most prisons, I suspect), there are two sets of rules. There are the official rules, which you learn during training and carry in a booklet in your pocket. And then there are the real rules-- the knowing what you can and cannot get away with.

Prison officers, in charge of people who are usually not nice, are bound to overstep the rules occasionally. The infractions may be relatively minor, like forgetting to unlock the cell of a difficult inmate when it's recreation time, or more serious, like participating in an 'adjustment' of an abusive inmate. And when and if the incidents are made public, the test is always: will your superiors back you up? Is the boss a good guy or a jerk? Which rule book does he follow?

JOHN SCHWARTZ writes about the banality of evil:

In 1971 researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.

Within days the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts...

"It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."

So what are people so surprised about? And I find a lot of the outrage somewhat suspect: domestically, much of it is anti-Bush rhetoric, and internationally anti-American. As Fouad Ajami said on a broadcast, where's the outrage against Arab abuses?

Beijing Warns HK Democracy Politicians on Criticism

Beijing has warned pro-democracy lawmakers in Hong Kong against criticizing the Chinese parliament, saying doing so was unlawful and would challenge the authority of the country's top legislature.

I hereby criticize the so-called Chinese parliament as a bunch of lackeys of the communist dictatorship, pushing for hegemony over East Asia.

We saw Deliverance (1972). I never saw it, but I still remember my high school classmates laughing about "Squeal like a pig". The movie was OK, but kind of fell apart towards the end. My mother taught high school English back then and used the novel in her class. Quite a shocker for some of her students, I imagine. We also saw The Lacemaker (La Dentellière; 1977). A little long (there seems to have been a run on bare-bones love stories in the 70's French movies), but the last take of the woman driven mad by a broken heart almost made it worth it.

I prefer Carrington (1995), about the artist Dora de Houghton Carrington (1893-1932), played by Emma Thompson, who looked much younger than she was, and her love affair with author Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), played by Jonathan Pryce, and directed by Christopher Hampton. Strachey was full of bon mots, many of which they used in the movie, and the irony of a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman not only being in love but also making it work. Much better than Total Eclipse (1995), which Hampton wrote to be directed by Agnieszka Holland. I just couldn't get over the churlishness of Rimbaud or Verlaine.

Another Leap by China, With Steel Leading Again:

Concerns are growing from Beijing to Pittsburgh about this breathtaking ramp-up of Chinese steel making, but not because anyone thinks the 1950's disaster will be repeated. Instead, executives and industry analysts are worried that the world will be stuck with an enormous glut of steel that could wreck profits and touch off mass layoffs at steel mills around the world, including those in the United States.

JOSEPH KAHN reports how Taiwan Casts U.S. as China Intermediary, which is where we don't want to be:

President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan is pressing the Bush administration to approve his plans to change the island's Constitution, casting the United States as an intermediary in the most delicate issue dividing China and Taiwan, Taiwanese officials said Tuesday...

Mr. Chen sent Chiou I-Jen, the secretary general of the presidential office, to Washington this week to outline changes he plans to make to the Constitution during his second term in office, the officials said. If Taiwan gets the blessing it seeks, Mr. Chen may make constitutional change a centerpiece of his inaugural address on May 20, they said.

...Taiwan's supporters in Congress and some neoconservative thinkers in Washington are also urging the administration to offer greater support to the island, which they view as a democracy under threat from China's Communist Party-controlled military....

Mr. Chen hopes to persuade the United States that his proposal for changing the Constitution will focus on the legal framework of Taiwan's central government and its legislature, which he argues must be overhauled because it is irrelevant and ineffective in present-day Taiwan.

But Taiwanese officials said Mr. Chen will pledge not to change Taiwan's official name, the Republic of China. He will also promise to keep the red-and-blue flag of the Republic of China and refrain from rewriting references to the territory Taiwan claims as its own. Those are among the most sensitive issues that China sees as symbolizing Taiwan's national status and maintaining its links to the mainland....

While Taiwanese officials present Mr. Chen's plans as conciliatory, Chinese analysts say they fear that any constitutional reform in Taiwan could easily lead to a direct challenge to the mainland. They say Mr. Chen has not lived up to pledges he has made in the past to improve ties with China.

Moreover, Mr. Chen is not expected to detail how he wants to overhaul the Constitution until after legislative elections in December.

There's the rub. While Taiwan's constitution is overdue for change, the fact that Chen loves to go back on his word makes it very likely that once he gets some sign of support, he'll be tempted to please his hardcore by pushing for something that may very well push the commies over edge. So that's why Armitage pressed Chen to reaffirm his 'five noes' pledge, which Chen Shui-bian indicated during his first inaugural speech in 2000, saying, as long as the Chinese communist regime does not intend to use force against Taiwan, he promised what he would not do during his term:

• I will not declare independence,


• will not change the name of the country,


• will not push for the incorporation of a special state-to-state model of cross-strait relations into the Constitution and


• will not push for a referendum on the independence-unification issue that will change the status quo.


• Nor will there be any question of abolishing the National Unification Guidelines and the National Unification Council.

Still, as Gerrit van der Wees wrote

The fact is that the "five noes" were never popular among his core followers.

They saw the "five noes" as unnecessary roadblocks on the road to full democracy in Taiwan and full acceptance of the nation in the international community.

Then Mr. van der Wees goes on to excoriate the Americans for not supporting Taiwanese independence. Not a word about how this might drive the commies ballistic. Elsewhere he writes,

From the European perspective, we congratulate Chen and the DPP on his re-election, and for making democracy work in Taiwan spite of mountainous challenges.

(Those are the same Europeans who want to sell weapons to China, and are far less supportive of Taiwan than the US.) In the same article, he claims

Anyone who loves Taiwan is considered Taiwanese, irrespective of ethnic origin. The present leadership in the KMT/PFP, on the other hand, has whipped up ethnic discord by twisting and distorting Chen's position.

I suppose it's all in your definition of loving Taiwan. There's plenty of prejudice against people whose families came over from the mainland with the KMT.

China Races to Reverse Falling Grain Production:

The rapid urbanization of China is eating up the land of millions of farmers. Millions more have stopped growing grain because it is not profitable. The resulting shift in the Chinese countryside has left government leaders worried about China's ability to feed itself and prompted an emergency campaign to curb land losses and increase grain output.

In an era of global trade, many economists find the political fixation on grain outdated. But it underscores the historic resonance of food security in China, where 30 million people died in the famines of the Great Leap Forward and where 1.3 billion people must be fed with only 7 percent of the world's arable land....

China has been increasing its imports and tapping into grain reserves. It is already the leading buyer of American soybeans. This year, for the first time in five years, China will import wheat. The political ramifications clearly worry China's nondemocratic leadership, even if many economists say imports are logical in a global economy.

"This isn't only an economic issue," said Robert Ash, a University of London economics professor with a specialty in Chinese agriculture. "China in a general sense doesn't want to be dependent for such a fundamental good. But, really, China doesn't want to be dependent on the United States."

(Emphasis mine). So in other words, all that blather about how much arable land China has is just blather.

Chris Strohm writes in Drugged:

It's hard to unpack the extent to which the war on drugs detracted directly from the war on terrorism before 9/11. Government spending, after all, is complex, and it's hard to prove that drugs and terrorism were locked directly in a zero-sum game. But the Commission's staff report argued that government officials who wanted to prioritize counterterrorism faced choices about whether to divert experienced agents and scarce resources from criminal or drug cases.

(via Hit & Run)

I just heard Scott Simon unctuously pontificating. I know I'm being tautologic, but I have to explain to others why I find him so annoying. According to the subscriber-only OED Online, unction implies "that the feeling or manner is superficial or assumed, or is tinged with obvious self-complacency". M-w.com says unctuous is "revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, and false earnestness or spirituality". OED says to "pontificate" is to "act the pontiff, assume the airs of a pontiff (a chief or high priest); to behave or speak in a pompous or dogmatic manner." So I guess I'm being doubly tautautologic. Anyway, he was pontificating about the selling of Ferdinand for horse meat. A couple of years ago, in Americans squeamish over horse meat Bill Maxwell wrote,

Many horse owners who cannot or are unwilling to pay for caring for injured or old mounts.... These owners do not want to pay hundreds of dollars for traditional disposal, which involves injection, perhaps burial or transport to a dump.

Another surprising supporter is Dr. Tom Lenz, president-elect of the 7,000-member American Association of Equine Practitioners. "The issue is what do you do with unwanted horses," he said. "Some people can't afford to keep them."

Lenz, who has witnessed slaughters at Beltex, said the industry kills horses "humanely." The companies use the same method used to kill cows and other live stock that we eat: a quick killing blow of a stun gun to the head. Veterinarians worry that if the Texas network succeeds in banning horse meat processing in this country, our unwanted animals will be sent to the busy killing floors of Canada and Mexico.

A mystified Kemseke believes that Americans' sentimentality has made the horse a sacred cow. Further, the closing of U.S. plants would result in the needlessly expensive, unintended consequence of euthanizing and burying tens of thousands of horses annually. Kemseke reasons that if we are going to kill horses anyway, why not use the meat as food? In reality, he said, Americans cannot stop horse slaughtering everywhere in the world.

In A.Q. KHAN'S CHINA CONNECTION, writing on China's role in nuclear weapons proliferation in violation of their Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments, Mohan Malik concludes,

Many U.S. officials believe that embarrassing revelations about the transfer of Chinese nuclear weapon designs to Libya and possibly other countries by a Pakistani proliferation network would force Beijing to reevaluate the strategic costs of its proliferation activities in the larger interests of stability in the Middle East and China's desire to project its image as a responsible great power. Beijing's recent decision to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group is cited as another indication of China's desire for full participation in the nonproliferation regime and a move away from the balance-of-power approach that has hitherto characterized its proliferation policy.

However, many long time China-watchers see no evidence of Beijing abandoning its national security strategy based on the principle of "containment through surrogates" that requires proliferation to countries that can countervail its perceived rivals and enemies. Believing that proliferation is inevitable, the Chinese military has long practiced what John Mearsheimer calls "managed proliferation" it calls for providing nuclear or missile technology to China's friends and allies (Pakistan, Iran, North Korea) so as to contain its rivals through proxies (India in South Asia, the United States in the Middle East and Japan in East Asia). Beijing has also engaged in proliferation to pressure Washington to curb its arms sales to Taiwan.

Many proliferation-watchers believe that China will not stop playing "the proliferation card," as it is the most powerful bargaining chip Beijing possesses, leaving "the China shop" open for business to a select few. Given the Pakistani nuclear program's heavy dependence on external suppliers, a complete shutting down of the Khan nuclear bazaar could lead to the progressive degradation of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent - an outcome that Beijing cannot accept because China's geostrategic interests require a nuclear-armed Pakistan to pin down India. In other words, having made huge strategic investments in Pakistan over the last four decades, China will not remain a mute spectator to the gradual denuclearization of Pakistan. Therefore, Islamabad's dependence on Beijing for both missiles and nukes will increase, not decrease, if it is to keep up with India.

And yet,

The Chinese, who launched their first astronaut into space last year, are "shocked" the United States has not welcomed them into the tight-knit community of space-faring nations, a leading U.S. expert said on Tuesday.

(via gweilodiaries)