Sheridan: Con-Law

CHINESE PROCESS LESS THAN DUE

Why provide due process if you're the only game in town and don't have to.

China announced the sentencing of 55 Tibetan protesters.

Nothing about the charges, the terms of imprisonment, whether any were to be taken out and shot, Chinese style, where they send the bill for the bullet to your family to rub salt in the wound, and like that.

Nor provide information to the news media, you know, the people who keep you honest, more or less, when you're in government.

The article is below.

Count your blessings.

CHINA MILK RECALLED

The issue isn't just that crooked operators contaminated China's milk supply, poisoning thousands of babies, killing four, but that the government has been unable to restore confidence in its efforts to assure the world, which buys a lot of Chinese milk derivatives such as powdered milk, baby formula, evaporated or condensed milk, ice cream, candy products (see Cadbury's recall) etc.

Repeatedly the government has arrested crooked businessmen and assured the public that the milk is now okay.  The melamine level in the milk is said to be only a tiny bit.  As though there should be any melamine in milk.  That seems like saying that the arsenic or rat poison in milk is only very tiny.  Not reassuring at all.

The bigger question is whether this scandal can be laid at the feet of China's one party authoritarian Communist Party governing system.

I say that it can.

Let me give you a few examples of how the system works in China, from Leslie T. Chang's "Factory Girls (Spiegel & Grau of Doubleday of Random House, 2008):

Is Dongguan more corrupt than your hometown? [the author asks her informant, Chunming, a girl from a small farm village in the provinces who has come to one of the new boom-cities, this one an hour or so from Shenzen (where my son is on a work project pending graduate school come January) which is in Guandong Province (formerly Canton) near Hong Kong in southern China].

"It's about the same.  It's just that there are more opportunities here."

Another day she told me a friend's brother had scored well on the city's civil service exam.  I asked her what kind of person aspired to be an official.  "The big bosses need the help of officials with the right connections," she explained.  "And the officials work together with the companies.  It's a form of cooperation.  So deciding to be a government official is just another way to go into business.  She didn't mention job security, or prestige, or the desire to serve one's country:  Being an official was just an alternate route to hte market economy.  It was the best explaination I ever heard of why anyone in China entered government service.  P. 340

The author, many of whose family members fled China after 1949, was a Wall Street Journal reporter in China for years since 2001.

It seemed that everything in Dongguan could be reduced to numbers:  sales, kickbacks, language ability.  The height of a potential boyfriend. [Taller is better, indicating security and success.  No one shorter than 1.7 meters need apply.]  You started with numbers -- What year are you [birth year, age]? How much a month [do you earn]?  How much for overtime? -- and then other numbers charted your progress:  salary, the square-footage of an apartment, the price of a new car.  Emphasis in original. P. 346 

[People broke their necks to learn a bit of English; of course they had to learn Mandarin, the national language.  This was a problem, since their native tongue was that of the village and province.  They wound up speaking a difficult to understand, heavily accented, Mandarin.  Imagine a hundred million young people leaving their villages for a chance to get ahead in the coastal cities where the foreign investment created factory towns which grew into cities over the past 30 years. The pressure to get a toe-hold assured all sorts of deception and pretending to be more able than you were.  You learned on the job after you landed the job.

Describing how Chunming managed to quit her job and set herself up in business while still collecting her paycheck, Chang describes how the boss cut the employee's commission (ouitside sales) without explanation, so she determined to extricate herself.

"It was classic Chinese behavior on all sides.  He didn't tell her why he cut her commissions.  She didn't tell him that she had quit his company.... The new business began with deception... [printed business cards proclaiming a non-existent corporation because it looks better that   way.]  P. 347

"In a place where people lied reflexively for work, deception naturally seeped into personal relationships.  Lying was often the pragmatic choice because it got you what you wanted.  Eventually your lies might catch up with you, but few people thought that far ahead.  See the online dating routines.  P. 350 et. seq.

It is common in factory work for the employer to with-hold the first two months work, so that if you quit without permission (and you're always looking around, talking with friends from your village in other factories], you don't get paid.  Don't expect the local, county, provincial, or authority over foreign corporations with local factories, to help.  The bureaucratic run-around will have you bouncing from one office to the next for two months, at least.  P. 355.

"Suppliers typically paid 10 percent of a purchase in kickbacks. Min (the buyer for her company, one of them) met them away from the factory to collect their payments, in cash.  P. 370

The bank where she opened her account was far from the factory, so she wouldn't run into anyone she knew when making a deposit.  People in purchasing were often resented inside a factory because their jobs were so lucrative.  When Min ran into her colleagues outside, she would say hello and pick up their restaurant tabs to stay on their good side.  P. 370

Suffice it to say that in China, everyone uses everyone else:  parents and chidren, employers and employees, government and people.  In order to do so, deception, lies, half-truths, forged documents (diplomas, birth certificates) and outright thievery (boss, partners run off with the money).  It works both ways. Chang a gift of an expensive Coach leather bag she received from one of her friendly informants.  It would cost hundreds of dollars in the U.S.  It walked out of the factory.  As long as the order was filled, the assembly line could make a few more bags out of the leftover supplies. All you needed to do was to pay off the security guard to let you leave the premises with it.  No prob.

I think I can see why the Chinese people have learned not to believe their government when it assures them that it is now all right to feed their children the milk.  It's a little like accepting the assurance of the Rev. Jim Jones that the Kool-Ade is now perfectly safe to drink, provided only that you disregard the 962 bodies lying bloated on the ground.

In a multi-party system, at least you have the opportunity to vote the blackguards out.

See the current political campaign in the U.S., what with each candidate offering prescriptions against another financial meltdown.

In China, there's no hope of reform as the CCP will never voluntarily give up any of its power.  They're in your pocket for keeps.  Too many of them depend on it to live.

CHINA'S FARMERS TO OWN THEIR LAND?

That seems to be what the Party has in mind.

Chairman Mao must be spinning in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

He used to shoot farmers for owning their own land.  About two-and-a-half million, at least.

Now it's going to be all right.  Those farmers must be spinning in their graves.

The Chinese worm has turned, it seems.

Nice thing about China is that every so-called "reform movement," such as the Communist Revolution, the land communization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, eventually flattens out and dies after it comes up against its own internal contradictions, traditional Chinese values of Dao, Confucianism, etc.

Chinese people, from what I've read, and I've been doing a fair amount of reading reports out of, and about, China lately, value the old verities of tradition, harmony, getting along, etc.  Light a fire under them, however, and they go crazy, inflicting punishment that is severe, lingering, calculated, and likely to lead to death of the target and his entire family, for good measure.  Almost like the Japanese during the war, come to think of it.

Unlike us, who will flatten your cities if you cross us.

MILK SCANDAL, CON'T

The question continues to be not only whether excess greed caused China to adulterate its milk and kill its babies (four, with over 50,000 in the hospital with melamine poisoning), but whether the one-party system perpetuates the conditions without which the milk poisoning could not have recurred after first warnings.

That and the suppression of a free press, which has difficulty blowing the whistle on corporate, governmental, and Party malfeasance, which go hand in hand.

Comment from Wall Street Journal Asia editor Joseph Sternberg is below.

CHINA'S REPUTATION: MILK SCANDAL

China has been poisoning its children in its effort to squeeze more profit out of its dairy cows.  First it waters the milk and then it adds the poison melamine, a plastic, to enable the watered milk to pass the inspection.  Melamine fools the test, making the milk to appear to contain more protein than it does. The consumer is unaware until her baby becomes sick, and perhaps dies.  That's just inside China.  Milk products are also exported around the world.  Cadbury's chocolate candy company, of Britain, has just recalled its product for containing the poison melamine, from China.

Okay, so some greedy crooked milk product producers cheated.  This shouldn't harm our impression of the one-party authoritarian government of China, should it?

It should, here's why.

China is run by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party.  This is the party of Chairman Mao Tsedung, the communist who defeated Chiang Kai-shek, forcing him to flee to Formosa, now Taiwan, in 1949.

From 1949 until his death in 1976, Chairman Mao ruled China with an iron fist.  He is responsible for the death of from anywhere from 30-40 million Chinese during his terrible campaigns, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, from starvation.  His policies, forced on the party, were forced on the people.  Farming stopped while everyone ran around, crazy, smelting iron in the back yard.  Hills were denuded of trees to fuel the fire.  Crops went unplanted or unharvested while peasants rounded up iron utensils and dug ore, which may or may not have contained iron.  While the food producing population went after iron, people starved.  Some were reduced to cannibalism.  See the Jung & Halliday biography of Mao.

Mao hasa been dead for a long time, but his party retains its death grip on power.  Does the Party encourage democracy?  See the Tiananmen Square Massacre, June 4, 1989.  The Student Democracy Movement has been sleeping for two decades.

Does the Party permit non-governmental organizations to exist?  See the Falun Gong movement.  This is a faith-based exercise group which is stamped out unmercifully.  Why?  Because it attempts to overthrow the Party?  No.  Because it represents a threat to one party rule.  How?  By being able to produce the attendance of thousands of people at a rally in the capital on very short notice, a rally that the government has not approved.

China is run by a government, but the government is run by a single party.

One party rule is the source of all corruption in China.

Oh, yes, corruption would exist without the one party, but single party rule makes it particularly impossible for anyone to do anything to eliminate it.

Why?

Because corruption cannot exist without the complicity of the watchdog, the government inspectors in charge of rooting out corruption.

There is plenty of corruption in the United States.  We're famous for it.  Chicago.  Al Capone.  Boss Prendergast, who produced Honest Harry Truman, no irony intended.  Boss Tweed.  Boston local politics.  The Barbary Coast in San Francisco following the Gold Rush.

We, in America, know from corruption.

The thing that saves us is that eventually we are able to throw the rascals out.

China cannot do this.

China knew of the tainted milk long before a scandal arose.

Then why did it not do anything about it?

Because the party members were in on the deal.  They got their cut.  All they had to do was to turn a blind-eye, look the other way, not enforce perfectly good laws.

This is why the world will never trust China.

China may arrest ten, twenty, thirty miscreants.  But it will never shoot it party members, any more than we will take out a few bankers on Wall Street and shoot them to encourage the others to quit skimming off the cream and leaving the water for the rest of us.

At least, though, we have a fighting chance.

China doesn't.

There is no risk of rousting the rascals in China, for they are entrenched, and will not go away so long as they get their cut.  And then there are the children of the pary bosses at every level.  To get rid of a corrupt party boss means to cut off a chain of gold extending to his children, their spouses and families, and their friends.   There isn't a party boss in China who isn't part of the problem, otherwise he'd be a problem and wouldn't be a party boss.  After all, its the bosses who pick their colleagues and successors.

So when China announces, as it just did, that its milk products are now pure, we say prove it.  And of course China can prove nothing because its inspectors are all creatures of the party.  Of course China will say its products are pure, just as it did before the scandal.

The inspectors have only one thing to fear and that is the wrath of the party.  Why should an inspector blow the whistle on the Party of a party member?  Wouldn't that be like cutting its own throat?

This is why you need a credible competing party, one that has an interest in unseating the incumbent party, and then risk being unseated itself.  For only then can you be sure that even if you don't believe the partisan opposition, you don't have to believe the partisan power-holder.

You have a fighting chance of finding out something approaching the truth.

More about China's reputation below:

CHINA MILK SCANDAL: PRODUCT OF A ONE-PARTY AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEM

One of my favorite, but laconic, correspondents is residing in Shenzen, China on a work project.  A young man, he questions whether the tainted milk scandal, in which the plastic melamine, and other adulterants, have been added to milk as a way of artificially boosting the apparent protein content during testing after the milk has been watered to increase profit.  When melamine is not available, other extenders such as starch have been substituted.  In the case of melamine poisoning, babies have died or become sick, as well as suffered from malnutrition.  Over 50,000 Chinese babies have been sickened and four have died.  Poisoning babies for profit seems somehow to be wrong.

The question is whether if in the U.S. milk producers did this we would blame the government, as well as the businessmen, or not, whereas in the case of China we do.  What's the difference?

The article below, from the New York Times, suggests the ways in which the government is involved in allowing the scandal to occur, not just once, but repeatedly, as this is not the first such experience.

Think in terms of government oversight, government enforcement of government regulations, conflict of interest by government, hence Party, officials, and whether or not there's a free press to hold government, and business interests, to account.

Suggestion:  In China, all faults are traceable to the one party authoritarian system, hence to the CCP itself.

Suggestion #2:  China is on a self-destructive path the longer it continues to stifle all possibility of democratic reform, as the contradictions revealed by scandals such as the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the tearing down of the hutongs in Beijing in favor of building Olympic 2008 venues, the SARS epidemic coverup, and now the poisoned baby milk scandal, continue to show that China is on a collision course with itself.  It's only a matter of time and whether the reform process will be fast or slow, evolutionary or violent.

If history shows anything about China, it is that while they may not be able to do much about the misgovernemnt they've suffered over the past 160 years, the Chinese people are neither stupid nor insensitive to the system which makes their lives so fraught with recurring difficulty, no matter how hot their economy may have been over the past decade or three since Reform and Openng began in 1978 under the encouragement of Premier Wen Xiao-ping who also gave us June 4, Tiananmen.  This killed the student democracy movement for the time being, China having traded apparent stability for knowledgeable control over their governing structures.

It seems to me that so long as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to resist allowing power to the people of the People's Republic, we'll continue to see such scandals erupt. 

One of China's government induced scandals has been its one-child policy in a society where a strong value is placed on having more than one child in order to support the parents in their old age.  Daughters traditionally move away into the home of their husband's family, where the bride becomes a servant to her mother-in-law.  She's no longer in position to help her own parents.  Thus female children are not as highly desired as boys.  Sometimes they are given a bath, which is a Chinese euphemism for being drowned by the mother.

Under the One-Child Policy, if you can only have one child, it had better be a boy.  Boys can work on the farm and support their parents.  The result of this policy has been that the one-child is spoiled.  The term for it is "Little Emperor" syndrome. Another result is that the male-to-female relationship in China is now 119 to 100.  For every hundred men able to find wives, nineteen cannot.

These are the sorts of things that China's system accomplishes which drives people to distraction, contributing to mental health problems as well as political problems.

When you grow up being assured that all is hunky-dory and that the Party is your father and your mother combined, and you find out it isn't, you have two choices:  go nuts or rebel.  You can try to survive, of course, without doing either, but many good people have been driven to self-destruction for lack of ability to influence change in the system in which they live.  Without hope, people are driven to extremes.

Hope in China for reform was dashed in the bloodbath at Tiananmen.

The trade-off, stability and economic progress at the expense of encouraging people to become responsible for their own fate, as in the world's democracies, is unrealistic and fraught with the seeds of its own destruction.

The NYT article follows.

GUILTY OF SPEAKING HIS MIND

China is trying to show the world that everything is hunky-dory in the PRC.

It isn't, of course.

There is such a thing as human rights, social justice, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment.

Things aren't perfect in the U.S. either, but we at least have a mechanism to correct ourselves, which China doesn't.  I'm thinking of our detentions of enemy combatants (anyone we so designate) who are being kept at our Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, supposedly beyond the long-arm reach of American law.  The Supreme Court this summer in Boumedienne, disabused the Administration and the military of this short-sighted thinking by allowing such prisoners access to the federal courts in the U.S.

China just throws you in jail.  The CCP controls the courts.  Get picked up protesting and your duck is cooked, Beijing style, not too rare.

The story is below.

The book, China Road, referred to in the articlel by Rob Gifford is excellent.

GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA

Poor China!

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which runs the place, is like a river, thousands of miles wide and an inch deep.  Like the emperors of old, the Party waves its scepter, expecting the people in the distant provinces to fall in line, but a funny thing happens between the headwaters and the mouth.  No one listens.

Well, they listen, but do not always obey.

The saying in Mandarin is to the effect that  no matter how fearsome the Dragon in Beijing, it can be, and often is, subverted by the local Snake(s).  Local corruption is the game in China.

Right now China is hosting the Olympic Summer games, focusing world attention on the Middle Kingdom.  This means a lot of reporters will be talking to people and sending home reports.  It also means that rebel separatists will be plotting acts of terror.  Yesterday two Uigher (pron. Wee-gur) terrorists drove their vehicle, loaded with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) into a group of border patrol who were out in a group performing a running exercise, killing sixteen.  That occurred in Kashgar, 3,000 miles east of Beijing.  Security is tight on the ground in Beijing.  Red arm-banded citizens have been deputized to report anything amiss in the streets and hutongs of the capital. 

Security is good.

Too much is bad.

China is sensitive, too sensitive, to perceived slights, the failure of foreign devils and Ocean People to give proper respect, to criticism over human rights, and to issues over provinces having a tendency to go their own way, such as Xinjiang and Taiwan.  The Uighurs, Muslims in Central Asia, seek independence.  A few resort to terrorism, as in the Kashgar border patrol massacre.  The result is a crackdown on all.  China goes nuts over rumblings out of Taiwan that it might not like to be considered a province of the People's Republic of China.  Missiles point.  Codes are dialled.  Buttons are pressed.  Rockets fly north of the Island.  The U.S. Seventh Fleet, which patrols the strait between the Island and the Mainland goes on higher alert.

China has been at peace.

The Revolution of 1912, which brought in first the warlord, Yuan Shi-kai, and then Sun Yat-sen, overthrew the last of the imperial dynasties, the corrupt and inefficient Manchu (called the Ching), which in turn had overthrown the corrupt and inefficient dynasty of the Ming.  The Manchu were foreigners from the north, over the border, in Manchuria.  They had picked up the pieces in 1644 when the Manchu were collapsing and being overthrown.  China is 91% Han, not Manchurian.

When a country collapses, the people starve.  Landlords extort.  Local officials extort more.  Peasants are angry.  One spark can ignite a prairie fire.  The spark after 1912 was provided by the firebrand Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), who took his inspiration from the successful Communist Revolution in Russia, which in 1917, overthrew the Czar.

Mao began his revolution and fought the government headed by Chiang Kai-shek.  Mao was in grave danger of losing when Japan invaded, diverting the attention of Chiang.  Mao and Chiang fought the Japanese, but not very effectively or cooperatively.  When Japan lost the war to the U.S., Mao and Chiang were free to resume hostilities against each other.  Chiang fled to Taiwan.  Mao controlled the Mainland.

Mao was mad.

His Great Leap Forward (1958-196?) ruined China, killing tens of millions in famine.  Beijing policies actually do count for a lot, especially when popular and enforced at the local level, as sometimes they are.  His Cultural Revolution 1966-1976) sent intellectuals from the city to the pig farm and iron mine to be re-educated.  Teachers were beaten and murdered by students.  Parents were denounced by children.  Totalitarian China had gone crazy.

The plan of Mao and his generation of iconoclastic leaders was to free China of the weakness of the past which allowed European nations such as Britain, France, Germany and America to carve up China into separate spheres of influence.  Britain ruined a generation of Chinese by introducing opium.  China resisted and lost, and was forced to give a little island called Hong Kong to Britain as a result.

The carving up of China didn't just dismember China.  The disgrace humiliated Chinese thinkers, which covers a lot of people.  China had been accustomed to thinking of itself as quite self-sufficient, thank you, and not in need of outside interference, including trade.  The Qianlung Emperor, when the U.S. was in its first decade, rebuffed the British emissary, Lord McCartney, telling him, and his principal, the king, that China was pleased at the honor of a visit and the tribute and submissiveness, but please, we really don't need your mechanical devices.  Sent him home, allegedly humiliated.

The problem China was experiencing was that it looked backward on an alleged golden age of harmony, as exemplified by the Confucian system of doing honor to one's parents and ancestors, and the harmonious court paintings that depict a wondrous world of mountains, trees, and birds, with very little of the human.  China looked back while the West looked to the future.  The West saw China as a future of trade.  The lamps of China became the watchword for free-traders in the Adam Smith tradition of aggressive mercantilism.  Just think, they reasoned, if China has hundreds of millions of people needing light, we can make lamps and sell them all over China.  Not only that, but we can sell them the kerosene to make them glow.  We'll be rich.  This was how Rockefeller's Standard Oil (now Chevron), got its foothold in China. Rockefeller money founded any number of Chinese universities and hospitals.

Mao tried to eliminate the iron-cage of Confucianism, and to a considerable extent, succeeded.

Mao died in 1976.  China was in bad shape.  Deng Xiao-Ping, whose son was thrown out a window and crippled by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, led next.  What difference does it make whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice, he famously asked, in 1978, suggesting that if the Socialist (Communist) experiment had failed, why not let the people work and trade for themselves, so long as you don't call it Capitalist? 

Thirty years have now elapsed with the government largely off the backs of energetic entrepreneurs.  A hundred-fifty million people have migrated from farms and small villages in the interior to the coastal cities where they now manufacture my pots, pans, and electronic equipment.  A new generation has arisen which did not live through the carve-up, the overthrow of the dynasty, the Japanese invasion, the war, the Communist Revolution, and Mao.  Confucianism has been relegated.  Communism has been relegated.  Chasing the dollar, or yen, is the goal.  China is now manufacturing its own lamps.  They're importing the oil.

Deng started new economic zones.  Shenzen, abutting Hong Kong, was among the first.  Thirty years later, this farm village is bigger than New York City, complete with skyscrapers.

If  you'd like to read about modern China and its relation to its past, there are a number of current volumes I can recommend.

China Road (Random House, 2007, paperback) by Rob Gifford, a National Public Radio (NPR) correspondent, who is British and h as spent much of the last twenty years in China as language student and reporter, traces his recent journey from Shanghai on the east coast to Korgaz on the western border of Xinjiang, along National Highway 312.  Gifford stops and talks to people along the way.  He sees not only today but yesterday and has a clear eye on the future.  He's not so sure that the Party can keep the circus together.  It can try, but there is always the risk of an explosion in China, or a prairie fire in the words of Mao, when the peasants are angry.  And they are angry, as he shows.  It's just a question of who gets there first with a solution, the angry, poor, rural people who can't make it on their own, or the CCP, throwing them a sop to keep them quiet while another day rolls on.

China has contradictions.  It wants to be modern but it doesn't want the people to think, much less talk, of what it means to be modern.  In the West, this means to be able to do what I'm doing, thinking and writing, speaking to others, about which values are worth advancing.  That would include the freedom to think creatively without fear of government intervention, something that doesn't exist in China.  People are forced to resort to subterfuge to communicate news and its hoped-for consequences. 

The Internet is controlled in China.  At least the CCP hopes it is controlling the Internet.  Unfortunately for the Party, Internet savvy users have devised ways of getting around government restrictions on Web access.  See the SFGATE.COM article, below.

John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China; Henry Holt, 2006.

Simon Winchester's The Man Who Walked Through China, about John Needham, the Cambridge don sent by Winston Churchill to China during WWII to provide aid to academics who fled the Japanese.  Needham then wrote a series of volumes studying China's development of technology such as movable type, gunpowder and many other technologies.  His question is now known as the Needham question, which asks why, if China was capable of doing all this, long before Europe awakened, did it stop and become the world symbol for a backward nation, at least until now.  There are many answers offered by observers with varying standpoints and perspectives, but at bottom the blame seems always to be places on the Confucian straightjacket of the mind, the looking back instead of forward, the disdaining of not-invented-here improvements to science and technology, and a complacent, self-satisfied "we've arrived" mentality such as that displayed by the Qianlong Emperor to Lord McCartney during his 1797 embassy.

When living in China and using the Internet, you have to use proxy servers in order to work around the government firewall.  Some call doing this using a fire-ladder.  SFGate.com had an article listing workarounds which interested parties offer to contest the CCPs effort to restrict access to information and ideas.

Which do you think is the more challenging task, for a resident of China to find a way around the censor, or that of the censor, trying to keep 1.3 billion Chinese in an information cage?

I'd place my bet on the creativity of the 1.3 billion rather than the million consisting of the party.

Meanwhile, I'd keep a sharp eye peeled for the authorities.  They may not be everywhere, but betrayal has long been a big game in China.

Remember, you cannot get betrayed unless and until you trust in someone or something.

You could ask Jesus, if you have any doubt, so watch your step.  They don't have any law in China, remember, at least not anything you'd recognize as due process.

I've got it!

Let's sell Due Process to the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them.  Here, try this little package.

If that sells, we could try Equal Protection.

And the First Amendment, that should go over big, don't you think?  In a little red envelope?

Human Rights, that should be a big seller.

Kits.  We'll sell kits. 

Let's see, at a buck a pop, times 1.3 billion?

We're set for life!

From the lamps of China to the law of China, in one easy leap forward.

Chairman Mao would love it, if he loved liberty.

He did, didn't he?

ORACLE BONES

To say that Peter Hessler writes about China is like saying that Mark Twain wrote about steamboats, true as far as it goes, but Twain's steamboat goes a lot farther than the Mississippi, no matter how great.

"Oracle Bones, A Journey Through Time in China,"  (Harper/Perennial, 2006), is the weaving together of the stories created by a young man who first observes China as a Peace Corps volunteer, then a teacher, and then as a freelance writer for the Wall Street Journal, National Graphic, and ultimately as the reporter for the New Yorker in Beijing.

Hessler comes to know and tell the story of many Chinese, from students to aged scholars who barely survived the struggles, meaning torture, of Mao's Red Guard during Cultural Revolution.

Considerable attention is devoted to Chinese writing.  Efforts to simplify the picture-writing have failed.  Lacking an alphabet of symbols denoting sound, the Chinese use a system of ideographs in which many strokes are required to render one symbol.  The learning effort to be able to use the basic three thousand pictograms is intense, requires time and practice that takes years.

Hessler recounts a discussion of language with Imre Galambos, in Beijing, who refers to Ernst Cassirer, whose "Language and Myth" had a great influence on him.

"Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality.  For example in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts.  When you form concepts, that's when you're creating stuff -- it's a creative process.  You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you.  When you're a kid, you're learing how to perceive a reality.  It's almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think.

From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don't believe it.  But I think it's probably to some degree true.  Perhaps if you don't have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don't notice it.  It doesn't stick out from the background.  That's what words do: they make things stick out.  Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data.  In a computer language, you'd call it uninterpreted data.  So a language is your browser."  Pp. 444, 445.

"For the Chinese, writing seemed to be the root of their cultural identity, but many of his American students were unfamiliar with their nation's literary classics.  I ask him if anything in American culture  might be the rough equivalent of writing in China."

"Maybe it's the movies," he says.  "...That's how people acquire information about the world...I think the movies create this web that texts traditionally created in China.  Within the Chinese texts, there was a view of reality, which was a view of other texts.  The scholars who lived in this world, they saw their culture as a web.  They didn't live in this physical world; they didn't talk about the physical world.  It was all about history and writing.  And America is the same way about movies.  People in the movies talk about other movies all the time.  There's an enormous reality, like 'movie space' or something, in America.  By this time, it's really built up, and it's a world that exists on its own...I feel like reality is American movies....You have this feeling, this deja vu feeling about everything.

"The movies are writing.  They serve the same purpose; it's just a different language.  In China, they wrote the most in the times when they most needed to redefine themselves.  It's not passivity, it's creativity.  It's not taking notes.  It's about rethinking the past and creating the present.  It's about justifying the present, creating the ideology.  So in America they have these movies that make people feel American.  Like Pearl Harbor.  It's similar to writing, to books.  But the movies stay in the mind longer, maybe because it's a more visual language.  And it becomes a way that people determine their values.  You have these models and patterns that are ready to use [I'm thinking John Wayne, and Patton.]  They give you a language, just like books do.  They give you a language to parse out your personality, to understand it, or display it, or express it.  P. 446.

Interesting.

I represented a very young Laotian man who was accused of assault with intent to commit rape on a young Laotian woman.  He'd admitted assaulting the young woman on whom he'd developed a crush at work.   Why did you jump her like that, I asked.  Because that's the way I saw it done in the movies, he replied.  No, I don't know which movie.  At any rate, he'd overinterpreted what he'd seen.  You know how in the movies the hero looks into the girls eyes and they kiss about twenty minutes into the movie.  I guess he figured this is the way it works in real life.  Maybe I've been watching the wrong movies.  Or he was.  It worked out.  The DA was screaming for a prison sentence and this tough judge was telling the DA, "But it didn't go far enough."  It hadn't gone very far at all.  Just enough to get the youth arrested, prosecuted, and some time in durance vile.  They all lived happily ever after.  Except, perhaps, the DA.  Justice denied, you know.

I've long taught that Conlaw is the operating system, controlling all of the application programs such as crimes, torts, contracts, taxation, etc.

Beneath the operating system is the culture, the ingrained attitudes by which we operate on automatic, without the need to invest a great deal of thought at the moment, although we do that, too.

One of the challenges in teaching Conlaw is encouraging the students to realize that they're trodding a new continent.  They need words for the new giants they encounter.  Due process.  Equal protection.  Federalism.  Separation of powers.  Instrumentalities and channels of interstate commerce.

What are these things?

Just words, in the beginning.

Later, they've mountains, rivers and valleys.  First we have the confrontation with a new reality, like what does it mean for thirteen former colonies, now independent states, to combine to form a union, and in doing so to create an independent third party (called the nation)?  How do they relate to one another?  We call this category federalism and it's a bear.

What about dividing power three ways, so one person, or party, cannot for long exert too much power and control?  Separation of powers.  Another bear of a problem

Equal protection.  You mean for people we don't like?  How does this happen?

And freedom of speech?  You mean for naughty language and people calling each other names?  And people with crazy political views?  Surely you can't mean that these people are allowed to speak freely, do you?

Yes, when you study Conlaw, you enter new terrain.  You're Columbus dealing with savage seeming natives of this brave new world.  He didn't make out so well either, as I recall.  But it was a start.

In exploring Conlaw-land, the guide points out the large features, like the mountain ranges.  Then you get down to the foothills, and the rocks, trees, branches, and leaves.

But at first you can hardly see the trees for forest, and vice versa.

This is why it takes time to learn, like learning Chinese, I presume.

***

A personal note.

I've been reading about China since I was a pup.  Digging holes in the dirt, we knew who we were going to meet on the other side if we dug deep enough.  It wasn't a Frenchman.

There was the war, and the revolution, and the Cold War, and Mao, and the Great Leap Backward and the Cultural Revolution.  We didn't recognize China (how could we have missed it?) and then we did.  And then Deng Xiaoping opened the place up a bit, and we read of foreign investors trying to make a buck there.

There were the books.

My son married an American-born woman of Chinese parentage.  The parents were university students in the U.S.  My daughter-in-law teaches Cantonese to my grand-daughters.  But, she says, she really doesn't know that much about China, having grown up here.  So I'll deliver some of the books.  The one above and a similar personal account by John Pomfret called, "Chinese Lessons, Five Classmates and the Story of the New China" (Holt Paperback, 2007), and Simon Winchester's "The Man Who Loved China," about Joseph Needham, a British scholar sent to China during the war to encourage the academics who had fled the Japanese and who wound up writing the history of Chinese technology, science, and invention.

You can jump into a river at any spot and suddenly you're in the river.  A new reality.  You don't have to start at the beginning, middle, or end.  Same with Conlaw.  Once you jump, you're all wet.  Better start swimming.  Keep your head near the surface.  Take a breath once in a while.  Try to enjoy the experience, since you're in it, anywy.  And don't forget to teach the kids to swim.

Gotta go.

Need to swim a few laps to keep the joints lubricated.