How much is an album worth these days? On CD, surprisingly little, given that I haven't bought a CD since, erm, 2002. You can pick up a physical copy of the marvellous new Pet Shop Boys album for only £7.95 at HMV. Online, if you care to make a donation to the ailing record companies, you can get it track by track for merely 79p a pop. But why pay for a physical product? Music is now in the air, floating around for free. And according to Bob Dylan, it's not worth paying for:
"It was like, 'everybody's gettin' music for free'. I was like, 'well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway'."
There is of course a marked difference between price and value. I'm sure Dylan didn't feel the same way about the folk and blues discs he treasured when he was growing up. Tom Stoppard's new(ish) play 'Rock n' Roll' is on one level an elegy to rock music as preserved on vinyl. In one of the most memorable scenes the main character returns to his flat in Prague to find that all of his beloved records have been smashed to pieces by the Communist secret police. His immediate reaction is to go to the bathroom and violently throw up.
Anyone who grew up with 12 inch LPs will immediately be able to sympathise. As someone recently wrote:
Entire lifestyles built up around albums, smoking dope to albums, having sex to albums. You lent your favourite albums out with trepidation; you ruefully replaced them, on CD, when they didn't come back. Getting hitched paled into insignificance next to merging record collections with your loved one. Getting rid of the doubles made divorce unthinkable. Elastica once sang, of waking: 'Make a cup of tea, put a record on.' That's how generations of hip young (and not so young) people have lived.
People's relationship with their physical albums - and singles too - was an intensely personal and jealously guarded one. Tom Stoppard chose several of his favourite tunes to be interspersed throughout the performance. His choices are fairly predictable ones, covering the broad canon of late-sixties early-seventies rock music, but then he is getting on for sixty or so; I would have made quite a different selection, with maybe more Motorhead and Momus and less Pink fucking Floyd and no Guns n' bleedin' Roses, but then I am only twenty-seven years old. In my mind, anyway. But I digress.
There's no doubt that the songs he chose are those that have been most important to him, and the titles and names of the performers are displayed on a screen between each scene, emphasising just how much these little details are or were so important in the fetishing of each individual record. But if nostalgia for the days when rock music assumed such critical importance in our lives is one theme, the main one is the role of rock music in the ideological struggle against the repressive Czech regime. The characters argue bitterly and passionately about music and about politics. The polarisation of the debates about materialism, about sex, about human happiness, and about what could be endured (in the name of freedom) and what must be resisted (in the name of freedom) is very clear. There is an appetite for ideas and a willingness to explore the implications of a particular stance; just as a vinyl disc had two sides, every idea must have its counterpart, both in the mind and in the 'real world'. ( Read more... )
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He's laughing at you, you prick
Flicking gamely as I was through a predictably-difficult-to-read edition of 'Le Monde' the other day, I came across the following headline:
'Comment les Rolling Stones et U2 s'arrangent pour payer un minimum d'impôts'
La presse néerlandaise a révélé, lundi 31 juillet, que le groupe U2 avait, depuis quelques semaines, lui déménagé U2 Limited, la société qui détient les droits musicaux du chanteur Bono et de ses trois comparses, de Dublin vers les quais d'Amsterdam.
En conflit avec le gouvernement irlandais, qui a lancé une réforme fiscale et veut désormais taxer les artistes, U2 a décidé de confier ses intérêts à Jan Favié, directeur général de Promobridge, Promotone et Musidor, les sociétés néerlandaises des Rolling Stones.
Comme ses prédécesseurs, U2, le groupe le plus riche du monde - 201 millions d'euros de revenus en 2005, pour 120 millions à Jagger et sa bande -, entend bénéficier des largesses offertes par la législation des Pays-Bas, qui n'impose les droits musicaux qu'à hauteur de 1,6 %. Cette exception européenne a été dénoncée à de nombreuses reprises par la Commission de Bruxelles et l'Organisation pour la coopération et le développement en Europe (OCDE) mais le gouvernement de La Haye résiste vaillamment aux pressions.
Hmm, let's see. The richest rock group in the world, which made €201 million of revenue in 2005, which is more than I earn in two years, have moved their financial affairs to Holland, in order to take advantage of a somewhat overgenerous tax regime which has been condemned by the European Commission. You can find an interesting account (in English) of the groups's stance on paying their taxes here. In the meantime, I decided to find out what my old French friend Monsieur Petit-Choufleur, who was born in Wales to Parisean parents but learnt French from a free CD he got with the Daily Mail in 2004, thought of it all:
"Alors, U2, Bono, le nome me semble quelque chose...ça ne sera pas le petit nain qui toujours nous dit que les problèmes du monde seulement seront résolus si nous, erm, donnons(?!) notre argent a la charité? Le superbranleur qui a dit que ce n'est pas une question politique, qui est tres bonne ami de George Bush, tellement que lui a donné un cadeau d'un ipod et une Bible?! Qui a declare que 'Blair et Brown sont comme les Lennon et Mc Cartney de la lutte contre la pauvreté'? Qui nous urge que nous achetions une téléphone portable rouge et un carte de credite de la même couleur de son autres grandes amis de Motorola et American Express?
C'est incroyable, n'est pas? Bien sur, si les hommes riches du monde paierai ses impôts, nous aurions l'argent pour resolver tous les problèmes du monde, n'est pas?"( Read more... )
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Another profoundly idiotic, craven and predictable article by Martin Jacques in the Guardian about the inevitable and glorious rise of China gave birth to an interesting thought.
In contrast to five years ago, the likely identity of the next superpower has become crystal clear. It is no longer just a possibility that it will be China; on the contrary, the probability is extremely high, if not yet a racing certainty. Nor does the timescale of this change have us peering into the distant future as it did five years ago. China is already beginning to acquire some of the interests and motivations of a superpower, and even a little of the demeanour. Beijing feels like a parallel universe to the US, and certainly Europe. There is an expansive mood about the place. China is growing in self-confidence by the day.
And with good reason. There is no sign of China's economic growth abating, and it is this that lies behind its growing confidence. The massive contrasts between China and the US, both socially and economically, are enjoined in the argument over America's trade deficit with the China. The latter is deeply aware that its future prospects depend on the continuation of its economic growth and this remains its priority. But no longer to the exclusion of all else: China is beginning to widen its range of concerns and interests.
So far so predictable: China is growing at an exponential rate and is beginning to challenge the global power of the US. My idea concerns this parallel between Chinese and American power, but at the level of culture.
It's clear that the US as a global cultural superpower foments opposition to itself by crushing or buying off any attempts at cultural independence, so that you increasingly see the same films advertised at the same time in the centres of cities all around the globe, for example, and so many people's free time is spent watching films from Blockbuster video, not to mention eating at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart and so on. This makes the United States a very obvious target for anger against injustice and inequality.
China, on the other hand, has almost no cultural influence on this level, give or take the occasional martial arts epic, which is itself effectively a product of the Hollywood system. There are no global Chinese music stars, and very few if any recent global household names in any field. There is, thankfully, no global Chinese equivalent to McDonalds or Pizza Hut; in fact, the brands most beloved of young Chinese people seem to be American or European ones - NBA, KFC, the Champions' League etc. Aside from a few satellite Chinese speaking parts of the world, China has little or virtually no cultural influence to match its growing economic clout.
Doesn't this mean, then, that its increasing international economic power will attract less notice and therefore less opposition? I'm thinking in terms of other developing countries, specifically Africa, the Middle East and South America, where the locally damaging effects of China's involvement are becoming more and more unavoidable (I wrote about some aspects of this here), as well as the catastrophic effects on the environment if every Chinese peasant did ever get to live the Chinese Dream. What China lacks, though, is anything like the very clear focus for opprobrium that US cultural products and brands represent.( Read more... )
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Imagine a war between Somalia and Iraq. How bad would that be? Imagine if Sri Lanka joined in! It's ... inconceivable. Except it's not, I conceived of it the other day, in class.
I imagined it just after each of my two students had finished speaking, reasonably eloquently for a low-level class, on the subject of how tragically, totally and infamously had their respective countries collapsed into barbarism, and about how they could, in almost all certainty, never go home again.
We sat in silent reflection for a moment or so. I had to try to lift the gloom that had descended. I had to try and cheer us all up. I thought, what's a way in which things, in the absence of hope, could possibly be worse. A simple answer came to me. So I suggested it. They looked at me blankly. They hadn't understood. I repeated it slowly. They looked confused. We did 'between' and 'invaded'. And 'war'. They smiled. We laughed! What an idea! Gayness returned to the classroom. What a relief!
One of my students is an interesting character; he comes from Basra and speaks Aramaic, which they! told me was a dead language, but means that speaking to him is a bit like speaking to Jesus, or something. He used to play football for the Iraqi reserve team, and hasn't been to the cinema since 1974. As his surname is Baki, and he introduces himself to people with his surname, and he has a slight problem with his 'ps' and 'bs', he spent the first few months of his life here calling himself 'Paki'.
The other student (or 'customer', as they infuriatingly refer to them in my, fuck it, school) used to be Somali, but is now French, and I when I came back from my break the other day she actually appeared to be reading a book, and the book was in French, so, you know, she must be very clever.
We moved on to talk of other matters, and to tackle together a simple worksheet I had assembled on the difference between 'jack up' and 'jack off'. But throughout the rest of the lesson my outlandish notion, that two of the world's most beleaguered nations might for no reason at all turn on one another in warfare, came to be mentioned more than once, so much in fact that by the end of the lesson I was beginning to regret ever having made - purely in jest - such a suggestion. I began to feel a little ... apprehensive. Had I, with my glib remark, somehow unleashed forces that it would ultimately prove difficult to contain?( Read more... )
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You know, from a certain perspective, you could be forgiven for thinking that all is well with the world at present. Bill Gates, formerly one of the most avaricious capitalists on the planet, is giving away his fortune as quickly as he can and is now is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, spreading his munificence to fight malaria and Aids and to provide education for all those people who so desperately need a chance in life. Bongo off of U2, one of the most famous and admired (although not in my house) global celebrities, a man with an undoubtedly sincere commitment to social justice and equality, has persuaded some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to donate significant portions of their wealth to progressive causes, and furthermore is on such good terms with the our present global overseers that he recently presented his friend George with gifts of an ipod and a Bible, as well as getting his buddy Condoleeza to write about her top ten musical favourites in the edition of the Independent he guest-edited this week.
Is it even conceivable that anyone might have a problem with any of this? The rich and powerful have been converted to social justice and equality, the struggle is over, all that is being asked of us is that we spend spend spend our way to freedom, equality and prosperity!!!
Well, I for one have a bias to confess which is that I cannot fucking stand the Independent; a wretched and desperate attempt to find or create a newspaper readership among those people too clever for the Times but who for some inexplicable reason feel unable to read the Guardian. I find it as gimmicky, dull and inconsequential as a copy of Que! or Metro. But that is just my own probably-at-the-end-of-the-day-a-little-extreme-Richard p.o.v. I do on the other hand love a good read of the London Review of Books, which is where the Wisest Man Alive Today, Slavoj Žižek, recently wrote the following words:
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.( Read more... )
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Well I’m ashamed to admit it but my career as a habitual shoplifter never really got off the ground, or even down the aisle. That doesn’t mean that I no longer need to steal things; while I now earn approximately sixteen times what I got paid for teaching English in Madrid, I’d be horrified to think that I’d reached the peak of my earning potential.
My short-lived interest in retail thievery was inevitably inspired more by political sentiment than by any deep-rooted criminal instincts. What the good people at yomango get up to is of course entirely laudable, and I was quite excited to read in the Guardian about the activities of ‘Germany's real-life Robin Hood gang’, who have taken to charging en masse into luxury goods stores, taking whatever they like and then distributing it among ‘Germany’s new underclass’:
… interns who worked for months in glamorous publishing houses without being paid, low-wage nursery assistants, mums forced to take part-time jobs as cleaning ladies and "one-euro jobbers", performing menial tasks under a German government welfare scheme. The gang said it didn't merely object to capitalism. Instead it was making a stand against Prekarisierung or "precariousness" - the uncertainty facing 20- and lower 30somethings as they try to navigate their way through Europe's gloomy neo-liberal jobs market.
Although I’ve fortunately never been a victim of it myself, I’ve long found it nauseating that young graduates are often expected to work for a year or more for nichts in the hope that there may at the end of it be a professional job which will afford them the lifestyle which their parents took for granted:
”We are talking about young, relatively well-educated people whose parents easily attained secure jobs and middle-class status. The situation now is far more insecure. For the first time in many generations, young people in Europe have bleaker prospects than their parents did. They are not as optimistic or utopian as people were in the 60s, or as pessimistic and depressed as they were in the 80s. Instead they find themselves having to walk a tightrope.”
If they aren’t working for free, a lot of highly qualified young people are working for casi nada. An article in El País last year highlighted the ‘La generación de los mil euros’, graduates in their late twenties and early thirties who may have diplomas coming out of their culos and speak various foreign languages but just can’t find a job which pays more than a thousand euros a month and who are stuck paying more than a third of their income on rent, living grudgingly in shared apartments, with no savings and no chance of buying a house or sustaining a family, living a hand-to-mouth existence and gradually ‘realising that the future is not where they believed it to be’. ( Read more... )
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I have nothing whatsoever against Polish people; although I can't claim that any of my best friends are Polish, I have met some charming Poles over the years. In fact at the moment I have a couple in my class who I like enormously. And years ago, in my very first teaching job, on a glorious summer's day in Dublin, I was given a class of 14 Polish au pairs, who seemed very sweet, outgoing and broadminded. Or at least they did until I happened to mention the word 'gypsy'.
From that moment, as they skies outside the classroom suddenly filled with dark clouds the atmosphere in the classroom quickly turned to one of unadulterated racial hatred. Everybody had a bitter tale to tell about the filthy, lazy, scrounging scum plaguing their land. I was genuinely shocked as noone seemed to have the slightest reservation about advocating violence against an evidently fairly beleaguered community - 70% of Poland's gypsies were murdered in the Holocaust.
Of course it would have been churlish of me to point out that six of the main extermination camps were located in Poland, especially as so far as the Nazis were concerned it was all part of Germany anyway. But it just so happened that at the time I was reading a book about alcohol consumption around Eastern Europe, which mentioned that there is a very potent myth about the number of Jewish people living in Poland. Around three million died in the death camps, it said, and although official statistics state that there are now only about 15,000 remaining, most Polish people would apparently state with confidence that the real number is more like a good couple of million. So in the midst of this firestorm of racist attitudes I decided to find out if this was really the case, and my students, who before had seemed perfectly good-natured and tolerant, obliged by letting me know in detail about the scandal of Poland's hidden jews. I don't think they were talking about Anne Frank.( Read more... )
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The Portuguese generally take a lot of pride in the fact that Brazil, a country they discovered, has become one of the most vibrant and varied countries on earth and a true cultural superpower. That diversity, of course, came into being largely because of the slave trade. But slavery is a word seldom mentioned in discussions of Portugal’s glorious age of expansion and empire.
A current exhibition in the museum in Lagos makes a laudable attempt to promote Portugal’s own multicultural heritage, talking at length about how successive migrations of humanity have culturally enriched European societies and made them much more ethnically diverse, but fails to mention how forced migrations of people created economic riches, or even the remarkable fact that Lagos itself would give its name to the capital of Africa’s most populous nation, as many of the slaves traded in the Algarve originated in that part of Africa.
Portugal first arrived in what would become its largest African colony, Angola, in 1483, and they would stay there for almost 500 years. Like any colonial relationship it was one of brutality and forced obedience:
Until the late 1900's Portugal used the area as a "slave pool" for its far more lucrative colony in Brazil and to benefit from the occasional discovery of precious gemstones and metals. Angola suffered from one of the most backward forms of colonialist rule. (from www.africanet.com)
According to an article by Helena Matos in Público, it always held a special significance for the Portuguese:
(There is a) word which, in Portugal, throughout the entire twentieth century was murmured in times of crisis and in the inevitable periods of euphoria that followed. That word is Angola.( Read more... )
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I don’t quite know how we managed to get onto the subject of smashing up houses the other day, but something one of my flatmates said sparked my memory of an entirely embarrassing incident about 14 years ago when in a fit of very drunken high spirited hilarity we trashed the living room of the student house we were living in. There was a lot of bizarre behaviour involving a great deal of screeching as plants, books, any furniture to hand and a fair amount of messy food got repeatedly danced into the carpet. A surprising amount of destruction was carried out, considering there were only three of us. The following day I was woken up around ten by the sound of someone I surmised to be our fellow house dweller, someone who was by chance not himself a student (which may explain why this long-forgotten event suddenly turned up in my brain so very recently), bumping the hoover down the stairs. I must have conked back out, because the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of him dragging the hoover back up the stairs about six pm. He never spoke to us of that which he had seen.
My current flatmate, oddly enough himself a student, responded with a tale of a party he’d held where the Police were called out five times to try and calm down a very small terraced house packed to bursting with around 200 extremely excitable young people. After repeated attempts to find out from people who a) may genuinely have had no idea who the host was and b) were being very very friendly and not making any sense whatsoever, the Police just went back to the station and presumably waited for their shift to end.
Because what could they really do, in that situation? They could try and batter their way into the house while trying their hardest not to actually kill anyone, or they could, I dunno, just burn the fucking house down. Both of which would, without prior clearance from above, result in a fuck of a lot of paperwork and, in that worst of all possible nightmare scenarios for police persons the world over, an early retirement on a hefty pension.
Sometimes of course that’s exactly what they do do. And when they have special permission or instructions from above, things can get really messy and bloody. Not just when young people are enjoying themselves and potentially upsetting their neighbour’s plant pots and sleep patterns, but particularly when their very objective is to cause trouble and draw attention to themselves. There are countless examples of unrestrained police riots in recent British, European and world history – Orgreave, the Poll Tax riots, the Criminal Justice Bill protests, Genoa, the Candelaria and Carandiru massacres etc, etc, etc – not to mention of course very high-profile episodes like, well, the Tiananmen Square massacre springs strangely to mind. Somebody high up obviously decides that the maintenance of public order is worth a few cracked heads, broken bodies, piles of burning juvenile corpses and all that tiresome paperwork.
In the same way that parties and demonstrations can get catastrophically out of hand, of course, countries can too. Brazil became a significantly less fun place to be after the CIA decided to juntar-se à festa, and although I don't know much about the nightlife in Indonesia, the British and Americans brought more than a bottle of wine and a big bag of honey-roasted peanuts to the party. There are of course countless depressing examples, and it's not like they've suddenly decided that it's wrong and they need to stop poking their noses into other countries' affairs or anything - stai attento, Romano Prodi.
The US saves time and effort on paperwork by simply not filling in the requisite forms and posting them off to the appropriate international bodies, either before or after an invasion, unlawful bombing campaign, coup attempt etc, etc, etc. Now, there is an unyielding amount of paperwork to be completed in the relatively simple task of helping foreigners – many ironically enough displaced by ongoing imperial intervention in their countries of birth – learn the language and settle in a new country, so I can’t imagine the quantity of sheer bureaucracy involved in getting approval for a death squad to go around and slaughter peasant women in a bound-to-succeed strategy of installing a climate of insecurity and fear among the local population of some godforsaken central American country. All politicians claim to abhor red tape these days, don’t they?
Speaking of Latin America, what are the chances of another of the world’s Most Dastardly Oil-producing Countries (Venezuela) becoming the focus of a campaign of global media opprobrium, scare mongering and mass misinformation? I have a sneaking suspicion that after whatever disastrous Armageddon-unleashing campaign Bush & Co are planning for Iran has ended in, er, disaster for everyone but its somewhat opinionated new leader and anyone else who actually likes wars, the US might revert to its more traditional post-Vietnam policy of covertly making it very clear just what the consequences of choosing a different path from other compliant nations might be, through their time-honoured strategy of training and paying the country’s most criminally insane thugs to go on a unrestrained superviolent frenzy of causing pain and death to the poor.
Ahem. I may have rambled a bit from my original point but actually, now I come to think of it, if the burghers of our global village get anything like as much glee and fulfilment from their wholesale pillaging, slashing and burning of our planet and our common future as we did when we were ripping our own house to shreds all those years ago, we’d better hope that there’s some kind selfless non-student type to hoover it all up in the morning. Do you think they might be pissed?!?
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Many of the comments on this thread in relation to what I wrote about China yesterday have revealed a less-than-surprising but still extremely discomforting ignorance about the future of our planet, especially in ..one of the world's more powerful countries, let's say. Impressively blinkered ideas like this:
As the article shows, many places are showing increases in a variety of alternatives as well as technologies that decrease oil-dependency. It's slow, but I don't see any reason to speed things up. Unless there's some hard numbers that you're aware of that you could show me? As far as I know, we have plenty of oil for the time being. By the time we start running out, I've little doubt that other technologies will have matured enough to take its place.
...reminded me of what our beloved George Monbiot had to say a couple of years ago what the declining supply of oil will mean for the lives of every one of us in the not-at-all-distant future:
The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.
Bottom of the barrel
The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk about it?
If you multiply the growth of India and China by the declining stocks of oil and natural gas, you get...a very small or large number, depending on how maths works. It's beyond me. But especially if you factor in the glib complacency which seems to be endemic in that country I mentioned earlier, it all gets very very frightening.
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I did not meet one student in China who did not want to live what might be termed the 'Chinese Dream' - to work hard for a multinational company, live in a brand-new apartment in a big city and own their own car. Death of a Salesman anyone? Very few people who aspire to that lifestyle are going to be able to achieve it - and if they do, the consequences for China and the world are almost too horrendous to contemplate. I mean, I have tried to think about what it means for our environmental resources, but thankfully this guy has gone several steps further and actually done the maths. And while I find Maths itself pretty traumatic to deal with, his conclusions may make you want to pack up and head for Mars:
The western economic model - the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy - is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream".
The key point though, which a lot of people writing about the consequences of China's massive industrial growth rate seem shy to confront, is that it's not just a question of how the Chinese do things, but about the unsustainability of our own model of development, which developing countries are simply encouraged to emulate:
In an increasingly integrated global economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain and iron ore, the existing economic model will no longer work for industrial countries either.
It's a very refreshing and not entirely dispiriting article - if you happen to live in China you might not be able to find it via Google:
After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.
According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party.
I reckon I could do that job!
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Any pretensions I may have entertained of Learning Chinese Through FootballTM would have quickly been doomed to failure. Although I had a good grasp of the basic numbers, the names of the world's leading clubs and players are often unrecognisable and hellish to pronounce. I wouldn't imagine that Paul Gascoigne found it particularly easy.
I did, briefly, try: in my first or second week I played my first game of football in quite a while. Disappointed to see the fruitless-yet-predictable results of my time-honoured technique of chasing-the-ball-all-over-the-pitch-and-then-kicking-it-straight-to-the-other-team, I turned to our goalkeeper and asked him how the Chinese say 'Fuuuuck!!!' He told me, I repeated it about ten times and then never used it again.
Chinese kids (male kids, that is to say, which is most of them) love playing football, especially in a curious 20-a-side variety. Nor is it unusual to have to share your tennis court with two or three other pairs. There are just so many young people with so much energy to expend. Now personally, as I may have mentioned somewhere around here, my own preference would be for them to devote their efforts to storming the bastions of power and making their country into a decent place to live, but what the hey. They prefer to direct their youthful frustrations elsewhere.
One of my students, faced with the question of which people he would least like to meet, surprised me by not offering the standard response of a Taiwanese politician or 'anyone from Japan'. His answer was that he would hate to meet the football players of AC Milan, given that he was a fan of their city rivals Inter.
How had this 20-year-old boy (as the Chinese like to say), no more from the north of Italy than I'm from Shanghai (I'm not), developed such a strong emotional attachment to Inter Milan? Well, he'd read about the team in officially approved articles in state-controlled newspapers and on the government-sponsored internet. These days, if Michael Owen fails to score for Newcastle of a weekend, or if the Chelsea manager suggests he may need to strengthen his right-back position, it is back-page news around the world - and in China (and probably in Japan, although for different reasons) it makes the front page.
This contrasts with a genuine lack of interest in home-grown football. In early 2005 the start of the soccer season was delayed for several weeks because a number of clubs didn't have the funds to field a full team and to travel to matches. When I went to see China's number 1 team Dalian Shide I saw a sparsely populated stadium witness the most desultory performance I'd seen since, well, my own a few months earlier. After what I think was the fifth goal ((I wasn't sure as we arrived late, the result of a fairly unnecessary argument with my slightly irrational then-girlfriend over my paying almost three euros for two tickets), the players left the pitch five minutes early, presumably because they simply couldn't be bothered to run around in the cold to such a lukewarm reaction any more.
In European football and American baseball, though, there is a huge amount of interest. The Government don't mind; they seem quite happy to see their young people doped up to the eyeballs on this particular foreign opiate. And football and basketball are foreign imports - it is a form of cultural imperialism just as profound as Hollywood movies or McDonalds.
This Guardian article from two days ago, about the aspirations of a certain British football club to cash in on this new 'goal rush', reads like a grotesque and hilarious satire of the original Age of Expansion:
Sheffield United's manager could become a household name in Chengdu after his club revealed at their AGM yesterday that contracts have been exchanged on a deal to buy the Chinese second division club Chengdu Five Bull FC for a "minimal" sum with completion anticipated early in the new year.
"We are taking the Blades global," enthused Kevin McCabe, the chairman of Sheffield United's plc, who already has extensive real estate development interests in China. "Chengdu city has a population of 11m and is the capital of Sichuan province which has a population of 100m. Although I don't expect them all to become Sheffield United fans, this does represent a potential fan base which we can use to develop both the Five Bull and Sheffield United brands."
Five Bull boast a 40,000-capacity stadium, but it represents virgin marketing and merchandising territory. Previously effectively under government ownership - the club was run by a collective of state enterprises - the Chinese government's recent decree that the country's soccer clubs can no longer be even indirectly state-owned dictates that Five requires outside investment. "We intend to establish a club shop at the stadium for the first time as well as a Blades Bar in the city and to sell branded merchandise, also for the first time," McCabe explained.
The idea is that Five Bull fans will develop a twin affection for the Blades, their enthusiasm fuelled by the internet and satellite television transmissions of English football.
Now speaking as someone from Sheffield, there is little more absurd to me than the thought of someone from Sichuan province dreaming of visiting Bramall Lane. I'm aware that what might appear mundane to me could seem exotic to someone from China and vice-versa, but I can assure anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to see it for themselves that there is very little of the exotic or charming about that part of the city. There are, of course, many positive benefits of globalisation - the internet and being able to buy pesto in Dalian spring to mind - but this, while certainly not the worst thing about our brave new world, is definitely not the best.
The article put me in mind of William Gibson's article about Singapore: a place where the past has ceased to exist. Forget about silk dresses, Mao suits and charming Sichuan tea shops - what the future has to offer China is a replica Sheffield United football top - made, in China, natch - and a Blades theme bar.
To me, it sounds uncannily like my particular vision of hell.
The F Word part 5
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I have to provide a link to a tremendous William Gibson article from Wired, which is from 1993 and about Singapore but rings so many bells in terms the kind of place that the authorities currently want to build where China used to stand - a 'single-party capitalist technocracy', 'a place where the physical past has ceased to exist':
Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a festive party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese Theater. Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with multi-level shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the local Gap clone, they're a handsome populace; they look good in their shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.
There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style in Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black - jeans and T-shirts and waist-length hair. One's T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian colors, causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for overt boho style. (I didn't see a single "bad" girl in Singapore. And I missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon missionaries.
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
The article, which is well worth reading right through to the end, could so easily in some places be talking about Beijing, Shanghai, or indeed Dalian, particularly when it compares the sterility of ahistorical Singapore with the spice and teeming variety of life in Hong Kong, which seemed to be, with the coming of the handover, under threat:
In Hong Kong I'd seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I'd caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, the Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.
Interesting too that in Singapore they have realised that a city with no history is not just marketable but also something that can be franchised - to the Chinese:
In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But Mr. Lee's Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.
It's one thing setting up brand new privatised developments for the new rich; on the other hand, the process of quickly turning cities with millions of people and thousands of years of history into sparkling imitations of the world's cleanest and most boring city is neither a straightforward nor painless one, especially for the people who happen to have spent their whole lives there, and especially when tens of thousands of hopefully high-spending VIPs will be spending up to three weeks in the city in, er, three years' time. Part one of this excellent BBC documentary gives a very precise account of what is going on.
Of course it's not something unprecedented in the modern world; the comments from the old man talking about the prospect of being shipped 20 or 30 kilometres away from his home in the centre to a place with no public transport or facilities reminded me of what someone told me years ago about being moved from the centre of Dublin to Crumlin in the south of the city in the 1950s - he compared it to going to live on the moon. The last number of years in Europe have seen a gradual hollowing out of the centre of our cities, making them more resemble cities in the US, destroying any civic sense and making us more dependent on private transport. The difference in China, I think, is to do with both the speed and the violence of the destruction.
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I've got this possibly slight mad theory about boring things, specifically that it's useful in life to learn how to embrace them; eating bananas for breakfast, for example, is boring as hell, but undoubtedly good for you, and going jogging is one of the most tedious things you can do with your time, but nevertheless leaves you feeling nicely healthy and smug. And in relation to work, you will always be faced with tasks that bore the hell out of you, but which you have no choice whatsoever whether to do them or not.
Which, combined with something to do with a slightly irrational ex-girlfriend and an unfortunate misunderstanding about money, goes some way towards explaining why for the moment I have ended up teaching Business English. Not something I'm proud of, inevitably, particularly when I read something like this, which makes me wonder how, in the admittedly unlikely event of eventually having to explain what I've done with my life to some sort of omniscient being, I will defend myself from accusations of totally wasting my life.
So, I spend all my working hours visiting companies and talking to people about their jobs. Which, although it often pushes my boredom tolerance to the limit, gives me some ideas about the way that people are expected to work these days, particularly in large multinational companies. And it's a truism to say that people are generally stressed and feel that they have too much to do.
Let's say for the sake of argument that there are two basic kinds of jobs. One is typified by working on a checkout in a supermarket, behind the counter or in the kitchen of a food or drink chain or in any kind of warehouse or factory environment. Inevitably it is monotonous and poorly-rewarded, has no social status whatsoever, and consists in doing exactly what you are told in return for a generally diminishing hourly wage. Nobody can make jobs like this seem exciting or life-enhancing, and on the whole I think companies have given up trying to do so.
Of course this is not the kind of work that I spend most of my time talking about. The other kind of job is one where people are given are given a certain amount of autonomy and control about how they divide up their time; they are expected to have a detailed understanding of the problems they encounter within their sphere of responsibilities and to spend a lot of their time thinking up creative 'solutions'. In return for this they receive higher financial rewards and a relatively high level of social status. The structure of their jobs is not about the amount of hours that they spend at work, but how they deal with the range of tasks that they are given. Because their work involves a certain amount of creativity, people often see these jobs as means of achieving some measure of personal fulfillment as it allows them to adopt company challenges as personal ones. Which is why so many people all over the world will do anything to get into these positions, efforts exemplified by graduates who are prepared to work for a year or so for free in order to get their foot in the door.
As I say, the first type of work is clearly being downgraded, while in the second case companies are increasingly keen to make their employees feel an important part of their collective project. Which is one of the reasons why they are keen to furnish them with all manner of convenient devices like Blackberry mobile phones and the like.
It is flattering to think that your particular talents are so important to a company that you must be connected at all times. But the real point I want to make is that the impression I get when visiting people and talking to them in detail about their jobs is that what is happening is that, through the use of mobile devices and the active promotion of a working lifestyle which is based around tasks and not time, the division between work and free time is steadily and deliberately being eroded.
Take the example of a business traveler. When he or she is not asleep in the hotel, every single waking moment is company time. And the nature of so many jobs is such that, whether or not travel is a major part of the job, people feel that thinking about work is a responsibility which accompanies them wherever they go. Being 'empowered' to do your job in airports, hotels and from home implies not having much of an alternative to seeing yourself as always in the office, and being connected to your workplace via a sexy wireless device can feel like being chained to your desk.
Many companies are increasingly conscious of the pressures staff feel and the potential bitter reaction or burnout that can ensue, which is why they are keen to make them feel that paid work is a source of ultimate personal fulfillment and that the office is a fun place to be. Hence, of course, all the pizzas and paint-balling and so on.
Former-pop-star-turned-intellectual Pat Kane wrote brilliantly about the current work climate in the Observer:
This we know: we're stressed-out, debt-ridden, exhausted. We have less time for our families than we feel we should have. We take fewer pleasures from our entertainments and consumptions than we expected to take. We feel less connected to our communities than we ever did. In our workplaces, we subject ourselves to routines and duties which at best seem pointless, at worst unethical or immoral. Yet we also feel like hollow citizens, too weary to respond to any political entreaty with anything other than a shrug. In short, we are workers.
And then went on to explain his concept of The Play Ethic:
Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don't take 'play' to mean anything idle, wasteful or frivolous. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is 'play' as the great philosophers understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.
The play ethic is about having the confidence to be spontaneous, creative and empathetic across every area of you life - in relationships, in the community, in your cultural life, as well as paid employment. It's about placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world.
By clearing space for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - you'll have better memory, sharper reasoning and more optimism about the future. As Brian Sutton-Smith, the dean of Play Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says, 'The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects.'
So to call yourself a 'player', rather than a 'worker', is to immediately widen your conception of who you are and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realising your full human potential; to be active, not passive.
The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.
In addition to writing a very positively reviewed book, his consultancy offers itself to organisations like the Prime Minister's Office and companies such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty to give what they call 'playshops' in which they promote the idea that play is fundamental to both society and the individual, and that 'the work ethic that has dominated the last three centuries is ill-equipped to deal with' the way we live and work today. As one detailed review of the book says:
Play has since been viewed as antithetical to the rational and efficient management and control of organisations. Under the forms of mass-production that the ideas of Taylor and the practices of Ford made possible the role of play was variously seen as something that might well be good for working people to engage in, but ‘in their own time’. Playing in the works time was seen as subversive, as wrong, as resistance to the natural order, as misbehaviour, by both sides of the labour process.
The idea, then, is to encourage companies and organizations to realise the 'interdependence of play, purpose and profit' and to incorporate 'play' in their working processes. An extended but enlightening example of what this might mean is given in the same review:
An excellent example can be gained by viewing a television documentary series called Slave Nation, made by Darcus Howe and shown on Channel 4 in the UK in 2000. In one episode, Howe spends time in a call-centre in Derby, the home of the online bank egg:¦. What follows is a brief description of the opening scenes.
In a building that resembles a warehouse or a factory hundreds of people are gathered into several collective ‘work’ stations, i.e. a number of desks, with computer terminals and tables and chairs, there are also a number of pool tables and table football games in the spaces between. Around the walls of this vast warehouse- like building, are posted league tables, the teams have names that represent sports teams e.g. Team Juventus head the league. There are posters containing figures and statistics, the posters are big they need to enable people from across the floor to see them and see if their team is climbing the league.
The ‘work’ stations themselves appear bedecked in balloons and various brightly coloured posters. The people themselves are dressed casually some in jeans and poloshirts (not a suit in sight), some are in fancy dress, many are wearing funny hats.
‘The places we work in are kitted out with designated chill out areas. So if you need to get away from the grindstone, there’s always somewhere to go and sit. You can even take in a game of pool or table football. On top of that, we have a relaxed, informal dress code – we want to get to get to work feeling comfortable.’ (An employee)
This is the home, or workplace of ‘egg-people’, a term used by staff to describe themselves. Some are ‘egg-couples’, that is ‘egg-people’ who are in a relationship where both work for egg:¦. They spend their days at the call-centre and their evenings at the nearby sports centre, playing football for an ‘egg-team’, or running as members of the egg: running club. Monday to Friday, they spend their time as ‘egg-people’: most hours in a day are spent together, ‘working hard, playing hard’, as they like to put it.
While at work during the day they may be in competition with each other, as members of different teams within the call centre striving to win the monthly sales league (as members of Team Juventus, for example), simultaneously they may be competing against each other at pool or table football, again representing their team, as the company web site states: “You see, it’s not all about work, there’s lots of opportunity to relax as well. So when you start, you’re almost bound to find the kind of fun you like.”
Perhaps a little bit...wacky, no? And if someone, God forbid, doesn't like football, sees their relationship as nothing to do with the company, or basically does not want to regard themselves as an egg, they might just prefer to have a...job.
Another example they give is nothing to do with the Play Ethic people, but an organisation called the Xplicit Porn School:
We finally offer what might be seen as our most extreme example. In the UK Sunday Times ‘Style’ supplement of 9th January, 2005 was an article entitled, ‘Xplicit Executive Relief’. This article reported on a new team building exercise that involves a team of colleagues working together to produce a pornographic movie scene. The consultancy, a partnership between Impetus Training and The Xplicit Porn School charges corporations up to £5,000 per day, for this the clients are provided with actors and equipment. The ideas and directions come from the individual team members, aided by the consultants.
It's...difficult for me to see the people I go and teach around Madrid going for that kind of thing. But as they say, it is an extreme example.
All the theory behind this is undoubtedly very interesting and it does offer a useful means of thinking hard about what we mean by work and how it is changing. However, anybody who has worked in an environment like the one at Egg will acknowledge that such a workplace is profoundly irritating to have to spend every day in.
But my problem is not really with the forced and wacky way in which any of these laudable suggestions will inevitably be enacted in actual workplaces. My problem, like I said, is about the disappearing division between work and free time.
The impression that I get is not that people want their work to be more fun. It is simply that they want to work less. And regardless of whatever initiatives companies introduce to make their workers feel part of a team or to encourage them to kick balloons around the office when they're not too busy or to share pizzas and beer after the working day has finished, the fact remains that the aim of the company is to get their workers to work as hard as possible as much of their time as possible for as little financial reward as possible.
On the metro the other day I saw a woman with a bag from a mobile phone company which said that it offered telephone and Internet 'solutions' for you and for 'your company'. Which left me thinking that we are, in the way that we think about our relationship with our employers, overlooking something very important. Namely, that for all the time and effort that you put in, for all the hours that you lie awake worrying about problems at work, the company that you work for is not yours, it is theirs. And the moment that you walk out of the office at the end of the working day, the time before you is not included in the deal you have made with your employer; it belongs exclusively to you.
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Hopefully a final comment on the subject of pobreza for a while: one of my favourite quotes of the moment is from another of my new heroes - along with Buckminster Fuller and Mr Potatohead, natch - George Monbiot, the campaigning journalist (and how quaint that phrase has been made to sound, particularly in the country of George Orwell), who wrote recently that '"If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by", o sea if in one year you manage to earn that much money, with all the sacrifices and compromises that that entails, you will be under a huge amount of pressure to earn the same sum the following year, which also implies that an ability to hold on to your earnings, your savings and any putative future income in the face of that relentless and omnipresent pressure to spend money on things you in no sense need, a pressure which has come to dominate virtually every single aspect of our public lives and has gradually been allowed to subsume more and more of what used to be public space, has to constitute some sort of holy grail for present and future generations of working people.
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The eyes of the world are being opened to a tragedy far, far greater than that in Sudan, and with more disturbing implications for our planet than the war on terrorism or global climate change: the tragedy of the 40 million jumpers, 50 million pairs of trousers and one billion bras being piled up in European warehouses and ports as a result of the restrictions on Chinese clothes imports into the EU.
All over Europe shoppers are terrified of the very real possibility of the shelves of Zara, Mango and H & M having slightly less cheap Chinese-made garments. Says recently laid-off factory operative Edna Typical, 22, a woman who already owns more clothes than the entire population of Jiangsu Province, "Am I to wander the cavernous empty shopping centres of my land unshod, with nary a stitch of clothing, bereft of accesories? Can not the Governments of the world see a way to resolving this catastrophe to the benefit of consumers?!"
The crisis is being watched anxiously in the clothes' home villages in China. The China Daily quotes one woman as saying, "I work 12 hours a day in basically inhumane conditions for the equivalent of three dollars a day to produce those clothes, and it breaks my heart to think that those poor Western consumers might soon only be able to make four as opposed to twelve separate clothes purchases on a single Saturday afternoon. Long live Chairman Mao."
Pressure is indeed mounting on those governments to take immediate action to Free The Chinese Clothes. According to one real person on the radio who I have honestly not just made up, "the priority now is to find some way to get those garments onto the shelves in time for the Winter Collection".
One solution that has been mooted is to move forward next year's quota of Chinese clothes imports. However, this will inevitably lead to problems next year, when the 2007 quota will have to be brought forward to 2006, and so on, and so on, until the world ends, or Peter Mandelson dies, whichever happens first.
In the meantime millions and millions of human beings who are happy to do nothing whatsoever with their free time apart from eating junk food, watching home improvement shows and shopping for that perfect £6.99 spangly green top are in for an uncertain weekend.
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The Chinese are not known for giving a straight answer to a difficult question. Partly this is to do with saving face; maybe it is a national trait, but maybe they learnt it from their leaders.
In a fascinating account of a visit to the recording of a CCTV talk show, Ann Condi makes the following point:
There is a very basic aspect of the Sino-foreign media dialogue that is so obvious that it is seldom commented on. It involves a common dynamic in human interactions where hypocrisy, deception, and issues of “saving face” intersect. It is this: If I find myself in disagreement with another person about something, and yet I sincerely believe in the correctness of my own position, I will seek to highlight our differences and show decisively why my position is sound and that of the other person is flawed. If, on the other hand, I am painfully aware that the other person has a point, and I am in the wrong, I will change the subject.
The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject. When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim "Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security." Instead they change the subject to "No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country." When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say "You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why." Rather, they change the subject: "What about your human rights problem?"
Where the question of democracy is concerned, it's very easy for them to muddy the waters. Is democracy right for China? If so, what kind of democracy? And most importantly, whose kind of democracy? I think by posing this question they are exploiting a sore point in the West at the moment, and maybe taking advantage of a basic schism in how we regard our own societies.
Oddly enough, this is not the case in China itself. Recently in class we were doing a quiz about life in Britain, and one of the questions was about the voting age. Most of them knew it was 18 - the same, they said, as in China. It turns out that they all believe that they live in a democratic country, where at the age of 18 they get to participate in elections, which are held at regular intervals. If anyone who's not a member of the CCP could explain this to me, I'd be very grateful.
As I say, in Europe and the US many people are not so confident about the democratic credentials of their own societies. Despite the massive opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their subsequent occupation, both went ahead regardless. People are understandably uncertain about the whole question of the West imposing democracy on other, poorer, countries, and about the legitimacy of the resulting political systems. As is, presumably, Hamid Karzai, whose recent request to the Americans that they give his Government some information about the military operations they are carrying out in his country was roundly turned down. Not to mention the 99% of Iraqis in the survey quoted by Noam Chomsky who do not believe that the Americans are in their country to bring democracy.
Back home, a lot of Americans' confidence in their political system took quite a blow after the 2000 election farce, when the Supreme Court imposed the losing candidate as President. And despair really set in last year, when all the efforts to elect absolutely anybody not quite as dangerous as Bush came to nothing. In addition, the EU is currently in crisis because when people were given a chance to have a say in the future of their continent, they irresponsibly made what we're repeatedly told was the Wrong Choice. After all, everyone within the political system in Europe agrees with the consensus over the need to make constant cutbacks because of the pressing demands of the Brave New World - anyone who questions this is torn to pieces and ridiculed in the press (George Galloway) or explicitly told, in the case of the French voters, that they don't understand the future.
So does the West really believe in giving people a genuine democratic choice? If not, who are we to lecture the Chinese, who after all have had 5,000 years of history to learn from?
Well, the choice between the Republicans and the Democrats is not the widest choice in the world, it's true. However, what people in the United States and many other countries do enjoy is democratic rights. And in the US they are under attack - laws on censorship, gay rights, positive discrimination and equality legislation, to name but a few, are in the sights of the group of fanatical bigots in the US administration, and absolutely must be defended.
But neither can we allow George W. Bush to define what we mean by democracy. He seems to believe in top-down democracy, with a small ruling elite managing the country on behalf of large commercial interests. In theory he believes that these large commercial interests best represent the core interests of citizens, although in reality it's hard to see how anyone could sincerely defend this point of view.
I and many others believe in a grassroots participative democracy in which instantly recallable delegates are elected locally into positions which do not give them access to special privileges, and in which all major decisions are preceded by an extensive and open debate and then resolved through the active participation of ordinary citizens through voting.
This is my own democratic ideal. I don't believe that this kind of democracy is likely to break out anywhere in the world any time soon, and least of all in China. Amongst the people I've had contact with over the last few months, multi-party democracy has never been mentioned. At the top end of society, nobody is keen to be seen as China's Gorbachev, and the man least likely to is Hu Jintao, who recently announced that he wants China to closer resemble North Korea in political terms.
Nevertheless I don't think China will continue in this direction for too long. Essentially I believe in what Jung Chang says at the end of 600 harrowing and bloody pages of recent Chinese history - that the momentum of liberalisation is unstoppable. Just as China will not attack Taiwan because of the mutual commercial interests, I think that some distant day there will be on offer some form of democracy, acceptable both to foreign corporations and to the most advanced sections of the CCP. In the same way, I think that one day much sooner we will see news items on the first McDonalds to open in Pyongyang, followed by the first Subway and the first Blockbuster video, until it starts to resemble every other city in the world, as the IMF and the World Bank send in legions of foreign companies to grab anything that isn't nailed down...I could easily be completely wrong about both of these things, though, and one thing we do not have democratic control over is our environment, and that may start to finally give way before either Kim Il Jong or the CCP does. Certainly in the case of North Korea, economic change will arrive much, much quicker than any moves towards political openness.
(However, before I get too pessimistic about the direction the whole world is heading in, there is always the encouraging example of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian peasants - I'd encourage anyone interested to take the time to listen to the interview with the American investigative reporter Greg Palast on this edition of the Democracy Now! radio show. In fact the whole show is a fascinating listen – towards the end there is a lengthy and very disturbing interview with a former CIA ‘Economic Hit Man’.)
In the meantime, then, there is the entirely unresolved question of democratic rights in China. To me it is indisputable that those democratic demands raised, possibly naively and with not much understanding of the costs they would entail, in Tiananmen Square in 1989 relate to real inalienable democratic rights that are currently enjoyed by real people all over the world, and which do not exist in China. The most important of those right now is the right to a genuinely independent free press. Only in this way can the Chinese people learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from them who not to trust.
Is it ethnocentric and culturally insensitive to demand a free press? Only if we believe that countries such as China, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea have some deep cultural connection which means that their people, unlike ourselves, must be permanently kept in the dark about what has happened, what is happening and what could happen in their own and in other countries.
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How many Chinese people does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, if their Government has anything to do with it, it could be quite a few. The other day in the small supermarket in Dalian's state-run Friendship Store, I counted 50 uniformed staff. If I look out of my window I can see two elderly men sweeping the dust up and down the same bit of the same road. And it's also not unusual to find three people staffing a small public bathroom in a public park.
It's not just public places, though. An average large-sized restaurant typically has up to four women stationed permanently at the door to squawk welcomes and goodbyes at the diners. Big hotels have, in addition to a couple of porters and bell-boys, someone whose job seems to be to 'help' people use the revolving doors, which creates obvious difficulties for anyone wanting to get in or out.
Neither is it just Chinese-run businesses. The German-owned wholesaler Metro has literally dozens and dozens of floor staff standing around looking very very bored, while the lucky ones get to whizz around in forklift trucks. They also employ one poor guy to stamp your recept immediately after the checkout staff have given it to you.
I don't know how the system works. Maybe businesses of a certain size are obliged to employ a certain ratio of people. But the smell from the average Chinese public toilet is enough to tell you that employing all these staff does not result in higher efficiency and a better service - quite the opposite, in fact.
In the supermarket, for example, there are often three or four people in the aisle pointing things out to you and encouraging you to buy them instead of whatever you've chosen. However, if you try to find out what the difference is, they can only claim that it is 'better'. They don't know why. It's the same if you try and buy a DVD player, or anything related to your computer. I find that I know more about it than they do. And I've been convinced many times that I would do a better job of driving a taxi or a bus than the person employed to do so, despite the fact that I've only ever had one driving lesson in my life, and that was a disaster. Even more worrying is coming across articles like this. There is a strong sense that any given person doing any given job in China only has a limited understanding of what they're supposed to be doing.
Why is this so? I don't believe any racist nonsense about how the Chinese are any more or less inventive or incompetent than anyone else. My own pet theory is this: After Mao and his henchmen and women had driven anyone with any expertise to madness or suicide, or just plain beaten them to death, there wasn't that much know-how and learning to go around amongst such a rapidly growing population - and the tradition of passing expertise and wisdom on to future generations had itself received quite a beating.
You can see this clearly in the realms of cultural 'products' - although China is the 'factory of the world', what cultural exports has it produced in the last few years, apart from those tourist-friendly films celebrating China's glorious past?
Another enduring legacy of that time is that people don't seem inclined to challenge anyone in a position of responsibility, even if it's obvious that they don't know what they're doing. Maybe this is an ongoing reaction to a time when nobody's position was secure, apart obviously from that of the Great Helmsman. The Government soon recovered its authority, and people nowadays tend to regard any form of authority with craven face-saving respect.
So, the Government is desperate to keep people busy, to give them a stake in China's future and make them believe in the Chinese dream. At least, that's the charitable point of view. However, in China today those who aren't lucky enough to find jobs in foreign-owned factories producing inferior-quality goods for export, or unfortunate enough to labour day and night building the unaffordable apartment blocks and hotels that crowd out the skyline of China's cities, are paid subsistence wages to perform utterly meaningless tasks.
Whatever about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I'm sure this wasn't what Marx and Engels had in mind. And Margaret Thatcher would sleep even less at night at the thought of a public toilet staffed by three salaried employees!
As we all know, low wages are the reason for China's economic 'miracle'. And those low wages are the subject of a very interesting article by Andy Xie (it's the second article on the page), in which he points out that in other fast-developing economies in the past (he talks mostly about South Korea) there was a point at which a labour shortage developed, and wages had to rise.
The crucial point about China, though, is its size. China is starting to run out of land and natural resources - hence the drive to send migrant labourers to Africa to work in Chinese-owned factories. But it will be a very long time before it runs out of peasants prepared to work for very low wages in unskilled jobs. This means that wages will not rise in a country where the supply of labour is basically unlimited and workers are prevented from making demands.
What this means for China, I think, is two things. One is that those new apartment blocks will not rise in price as expected, and there will be some sort of crisis when speculators realise this and stop investing. I think this will lead to big problems for Chinese banks. Andy Xie puts it better than I can:
The fact that Chinese workers benefit little from their productivity gains has profound implications for China’s property market and commodity prices. Property values tend to rise in line with labor income in the long term. Property speculators assume that China’s economic growth will deliver rapid wage growth, and, hence, that they are just front-running Chinese workers in pushing up the prices first, i.e., Chinese workers will buy from them at higher prices with their higher wages in the future. I believe this is an illusion.
The second thing is at some point there will be social unrest related to the failure of wages to keep up with commodity prices. Andy Xie again:
The prices that China can afford depend on wage levels more than the overall size of the economy. The Chinese economy has been expanding rapidly on employment rather than wage growth. In the end, the burden for bearing the costs of raw materials comes down to the income of each consumer. Chinese consumers are just not becoming rich fast enough to catch up with the rapid increase in commodity prices.
But I also believe that all of this has dramatic implications not just for China. China is the 'factory of the world' - as we can see right now with the worldwide crisis in the textile industry, companies from other countries will continue to face stiffer and stiffer competition from Chinese exports. And who is going to pay? I think Andy Xie may have just hit the nail on the head with his final point:
In summary, the global financial markets are speculating in China-related assets, in the belief that Chinese prices will rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD prices are more likely to fall towards Chinese levels.
My own point is this: I don't think that it's just commodity prices that are going to fall across the world. Chinese wages are not going to rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD wages are going to fall torwards Chinese levels.
You know, from a certain perspective, I think that might just be what Globalisation is all about.
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