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Billionaires Rule the World

The  prestigious Bloomberg News, which provides a barometer for reading the
international business world, has announced that this world of seven billion  people has 1,426 billionaires who owned US$5.4 trillion in 2012, an increase in  wealth of 17% over the previous year. At the same time, about 1.29 billion  people live in poverty (World Bank figure for 2008) unable to have access to  basic human needs like adequate food, health services, sanitation, water and  education. So should they celebrate this with champagne and caviar in luxury  yachts and private planes and avert their eyes from the mass of humanity  struggling for survival? Yes, they would. It is the new world order, so get
used to it.

In  the USA, EU and Japan  which produce the largest number of these superior super-rich humans, the  economies are in a spiral descent since 2008: unemployment is rising, basic
social benefits are being cut by governments while public monies are allocated  to corporations in debt or financial institutions which made bad loans and  risky speculations. In Greece  unemployment is 26% and in Italy  12%, Spain 26%, Portugal 17%, Ireland 14%. In the USA it is 19%  if you wade through the cloud of official misinformation that only counts  temporary unemployment payment recipients.

Almost  everywhere in the world, the spread of neo-liberal economics and the political
doctrine of the Divine Rights of Billionaires increased the gap between the  rich and the poor. In the USA,  the 400 richest people, out of a population of 320 million Americans, own 36%  of the national assets. Yet 46.2 million live in poverty (US Census Reports for
2011) with limited access to basic amenities and 50 million are without access  to health services. Despite this, US corporations made record profits of $11  trillion in 2011, outsourcing much of their work to developing countries and  reaping profits through marketing at home. While the New York stock markets keep rising to  astronomical figures, to the cheers of the complicit mass media, no one cares  to say that this is fuelled by an excess of money in the hands of a privileged  few. And when the markets collapse, the financial houses that lead this charge  can depend on public money to bail them out and keep increasing their millions  of dollars in annual bonuses, salaries and perks.

Neil  Baroffsky, former Special Inspector General of the US Troubled Assets Relief  Program (TARP) intended to save the US financial institutions that created the  2008 world financial crisis through gross speculative dealing and mismanagement,  has exposed the inner workings of a system where government and the super-rich  are allied to maintain their power and financial control of the state (Bailout,  by Neil Baroffsky, published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, July 2012). He states that while  only $1.4 billion was spent of the $50 billion allocation to save troubled homeowners  whose houses were being foreclosed, the funds expended to save the banking and  financial corporations and the people who caused the crisis totaled $4.7  trillion.

The  malaise is evident around the world, even in Communist China and all the major
developing countries. But it is easier to protest these inequities in the  developing countries like India,  Brazil, China, South  Africa, and others in South America,  where leaders are at least publicly acknowledging a massive problem and  promising to limit inequality. In the EU and America, mass protests raging for  the last two years against this inequity were largely being ignored by  governments that merely sent the police to quell the street protests, often  violently. As a palliative, the EU has just passed legislation to limit top
executive bonuses, though it falls short of the recent Swiss Referendum that will  now also place some limit on top executive salaries. Surprise, it is Communist  China at the recently concluded National Congress that regarded income  inequality and poverty as the major problems that are to be addressed by the  government in the coming years. Or is that a surprise at all.

On  the contrary, politicians in the USA justify income inequality as  desirable. They have refused to increase the tax on billionaires and  millionaires from the standard of 35% for all to 39.5% at the highest tax  bracket of a million dollars and above. In most of Europe,  this top income slab is taxed at 75%. The constant refrain is that billionaires  and giant transnational corporations create jobs. The stark reality is that  they create jobs in China
and India and have destroyed  millions of jobs in the USA.

How  is all this possible in “democratic” western countries with the highest living  standards and educational and scientific achievements? When Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France  proclaimed the Divine Right of Kings and acted accordingly, the masses beheaded  them and changed the system. Modern societies have developed more sophisticated  mass thought control methods (backed by sometimes visible, sometimes invisible  terror against dissidents) that enabled J.V. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao
Zedong, Kim Il-Sung and others of that ilk to deceive the masses and stay in  power with wide popular support. So Western billionaires with access to even  more sophisticated scientific resources and a captive mass media can feel  confident that they can continue to safely exploit the hundreds of millions of  their countrymen for years to come. Fooling the public and diverting attention  from national problems over the long term is no big problem for people with  such unlimited resources and access to governments and major international institutions.

For  all the pretense of religiosity, this is an age of widespread immorality. It is  a world with political and economic philosophies that justify meanness.

Kenneth  Abeywickrama

17 March 2013.

The Story of Qiu Ju

Film Review
Most cinema goers who patronise the neighbourhood cinema hall are usually treated to blockbusters with plenty of sex and violence with strong nationalistic overtones where our good guys overcome foreign bad guys. So we miss out on some of the fine films that are being made around the world in countries as diverse as France, Germany, Italy, Iran,
China, Japan and Russia.

The Story of Qui Ju is one such exceptional film made in China in 1992 by famed Chinese Director, Zhang Yimou. It is entertaining, touchingly emotional and carries an absorbing story. The filming is superb. The story is set in a primitive and remote village in China of the 1990s. The heroine, Qui Ju, a farmer’s wife (played by Gong Li, a leading Chinese actress), is outraged that the village chief, Wang Shantang, has assaulted her husband,
Qinglai, hit him in the chest and kicked his testicles. She is already pregnant with a child but fears that the family “crown jewels” are damaged forever. China’s one child policy makes every child, especially a male child, precious. The assault was due to a quarrel where the village chief felt insulted by a remark by the farmer that he was only capable of producing “hens”, referring to his failure to have a male child.

The wife and his sister take the injured man in a push cart to the medical clinic in the nearest town. The clinic is so inadequate and spare that it can barely carry that title. The medical technician provides some medications and gives a report on the injuries. Qui Ju takes the report and vows to punish the chief. The story of the film is about her quest for justice where her aim is to get the chief to apologise for his actions and gain back the family respect.

She takes the case to the local police, where they try to create an amicable settlement by getting the chief to pay compensation. They want peace in the village. But Qui Ju does not want money, she wants an apology for the insult to her family, and the irascible chief will insultingly give money but not an apology. Unhappy with the verdict she takes the case to the next higher level, the District Police headquarters in the big town. The police chief here is sympathetic but also seeks to obtain an amicable settlement and agrees to increase the compensation. But Qui Ju does not want the money: she wants only an apology. She spends more of the family resources seeking justice than any compensation that could be obtained. Every time she sets out to seek officials in town and city she has to sell part of her family’s chillie crop to finance her expeditions. Despite her delicate health in her advance stage of pregnancy and the difficulty of travel during winter, she decides to take the matter to the higher Appeal Court in the main city in the district.

By this time, even her husband, who is now cured of his injuries, is fed up with her craze for justice. But she doggedly continues her quest with the support of her sister-in-law, ignoring her husband’s protests. Before the final ruling of the Appeal Court, she nearly dies at childbirth but is saved by the prompt actions of the village chief with whom she has carried out a vendetta who obtains help during the winter night to take her to a hospital. One month after the birth of a baby boy, the happy Qui Ju hosts a celebration where the village chief would be the chief guest. But by then the Appeal  Court ruling has been given and, unknown to her, the village chief has been sentenced to jail. While she anxiously waits for his arrival at the celebration party as chief guest, a police party carts him to jail amid screaming police sirens. The film ends with her desperate run in the snow to intercept the police vehicles taking the Chief to jail.

Qui Ju is not portrayed as a single minded avenger, but is a complex character with a soft heart. When the Appeal Court summons the District Police Chief, who has been very kind to her, to answer for his decision in the case, Qui Ju is distraught he will be penalised and tries to withdraw her case till the Police Chief assures her that it is only a routine procedure.

The Gong Li’s acting is superb. The country women’s journeys to town and city are done with finesse showing the country bumpkin’s amazement at the sophistication of the city and the dangers the two women face from urban hustlers. The film ends on a dramatic note with the irony of Qui Ju getting her revenge when she does not want it any more.

The film has won several awards: Venice Film Festival’s Golden Globe (1992), Vancouver International Film Festival (1992), French Syndicate of Cinema Critics (1993), Independent Spirits Award (1994), National Society of Film Critics Award (1994), and many others in China itself.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

12 November 2012

Sri Lanka:  Church Missionary Society during early British rule

Book review

Recollections of Ceylon,  after a residence of thirteen years; with an account of the Church Missionary  Society’s Operations in the Island by Reverend James Selkirk, Curate of Middleton TVAS, Yorkshire. First published in 1844. Reprinted by Mrs. Nirmal Singal for NAVARNG booksellers & publishers, RB-7 Inderpuri, New  Delhi 110012, India,  1993.

The early efforts of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to proselytise  in Ceylon (Sri Lanka)  are described in this book, first published in 1844, titled Recollections of  Ceylon by Reverend James Selkirk. The author lived in the country for 13 years  and was involved in setting up the first CMS school in the island in Baddegama,  in the Southern Province. The frustrations of the CMS missionaries, who found  that, despite their sophisticated propaganda and educational and financial  inducements, the natives remained unconvinced and held on to their traditional  religions, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, was expressed by their angry Anglican clergyman,  Bishop Heber, in this bilious complaint.

What though the spicy breezes

Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s  isle

That every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile!

In vain with lavish kindness

The gifts of God are strewn;

The heathen, in his blindness,

Bows down to wood and stone.

Bishop Heber supervised the work in Sri  Lanka from his palace in South India.  Having visited Baddagama (currently spelt Baddegama, where the greenery and the  vegetation entranced him) and Kandy mission stations  with his wife in 1825, he was scheduled to arrive in Ceylon  to visit Nellore in Jaffna the next year but for his unfortunate and inexplicable  death in his bathtub at his residence in Trichinopoly at the age of 42.

The Christian religion was the handmaiden of the European imperial  powers from the 15^th century onwards but their tactics differed. In Sri Lanka, the Portuguese Roman Catholics
(1505-1658) were both cruel and rapacious, like their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts in South America. The Dutch were  more urbane and civilised but those who were not formally baptised and registered  in a church could not inherit land (the natives had no system of registering  births and deaths) and, consequently, nominal Christians abounded. The British  were more sophisticated. They had acquired the Kandyan Sinhala kingdom by  deceiving the gullible Kandyan chieftains, persuading them to betray their own king  and country with promises of a better life under the British monarch. One of
the clauses in the Kandyan Convention was the undertaking of British Crown support
for the Buddhist religion. Yet, under pressure from the Church of England in  the UK, the British administration helped the CMS by providing land and other  facilities, while top administrative officials, including the Governor,  participated in CMS public functions, conveying the message to the public that  this church was backed by the government and therefore had to be respectfully  received.

The policy of the Christian Missionary Society and the British government  was to make Anglicised English speaking natives who were adherents of the  Anglican Church and loyal citizens of the British Crown. The chosen methods  were to establish Christian schools for both native children, church services  for adults, public meetings and distribution of Christian tracts. The main  targets were vulnerable social groups: very young children, prisoners and  indigent people who were provided with alms and religious instruction. Unfortunately  for them, their success in religious conversion was very limited though they
were far more successful in Anglicising the lifestyle of the urban native  population.

Ironically, of the 7% of Sri Lankans who are Christians today, the  majority are Roman Catholics whose ancestors were converted through terror.

Rev. James Selkirk was no simple religious ideologue: he was also an  intelligent man with a wide intellectual curiosity and his book, despite some  jaundiced views, is a goldmine of information on Ceylon and its inhabitants in the  early 19^th century. The first chapter deals with a very accurate  description of the country’s harbours, cities and towns, their populations,  landmarks and history. The detail is astonishing and must have involved a lot
of study and research. Chapter 2 deals with a description of the former Sinhala  and the then British administrative structures. It also describes the fauna and  flora of the country. Chapter 3 describes the different races, their social  structures and their lifestyles. The unflattering descriptions of the Portuguese  and Dutch descendents in Sri  Lanka are sometimes very perceptive. Chapters  4, 5 and 6 describe the Buddhist religion in Sri Lanka and its history,  religious practices and books. Chapter 7, the longest chapter, deals with the
work of the Church Missionary Society in Kandy,  Baddagama (Baddegama), Nellore  and Cotta (Kotte). Chapters 9 to 13 give stories from the journal that he kept  and contains descriptions of the activities of the various missionaries, some revealing  encounters with the local people and the travails and the frustrations endured  by the CMS because of its very limited success.

This was not an age of political correctness. It was still the era when  Europeans openly flaunted the view that all non-European peoples and cultures  were inferior and their religions were an abomination that was the work of the  Devil. Rev. Selkirk does not hide his anger and contempt of Buddhism, Hinduism,  Islam and also the Roman Catholic Christians.

The first four CMS missionaries left Britain in December 1917, two years  after the British occupation of the Kandyan kingdom. They worked closely with  the British administrations of Governor Sir Robert Brownrigg and later his  successor, Sir Edward Barnes. The missionaries quickly set about establishing  several schools for boys and girls to teach them English to learn the  catechism, recite the scriptures and learn to pray. Local teachers were
recruited and they were paid according to the performance of the students when  tested monthly. They visited Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples to lecture  the priests and also preached to the sick in hospitals and prisoners in jails. Yet  the result of all this labour was pitifully small.

It is not that the missionaries found the environment hostile. Being  seen as agents of the colonial government, they had to be respected. The people  treated them with kindness because of their endeavours and departing  missionaries were given presents and fond farewells. The Buddhist monks showed a  genuine curiosity about their teachings though they remained unconvinced. This  is one of the encounters with Buddhist monks in Kandy that he writes about.

“During this year (1832) Mr. B. (Rev. Brownrigg) had several long  discussions with the Buddhist priests. They sometimes requested religious books,  asked for a copy of the Bible, and from the questions they asked on  Christianity, showed that in some measure they were casting aside the contempt  which they had always shown to other religions besides their own. Though on  these occasions they proposed such questions as the following:- When was God  born? How long was it after the creation of the world that Christ came? Has God  no body? Did God know before he created Adam that man would sin? Who made the  Devil? If God made all things, why is there so much diversity of rich and poor,
black and white, sick and well? &c. What is the Holy Spirit? Why have men  divers languages, if they all came from one family? Why did God distress the  man whom he had made, by robbing him of one of his ribs?”

The frustrations of the missionaries in Kandy are noted, despite the formation of  many congregations and the expressed willingness of the people (Buddhists) to  come and listen to Christian sermons. The author complains:

“These labours, owing to the carelessness of the people, were nearly  useless, as, after having visited them regularly every week for three or four  months, and taught them some of the simplest truths of Christianity, such as, “Jesus  Christ is the Son of God – Jesus Christ came into this world many years ago –  Jesus Christ is now in heaven – Jesus Christ came into the world to save  sinners – We are all sinners, but if we trust in him he will forgive us our  sins – If we now believe in him and trust in him to save us, when we die we  shall be very happy;” …  Many of them  can scarcely tell me who Jesus Christ is, or the purpose for which he came into  the world, though I have never yet spoken to them on any other subject.”

In the Galle district, the mission was  given to a Mr. Robert Mayor and he chose the village
of Baddagama, 12 miles from Galle, as the most  suitable site for his church and school. He was encouraged because he felt  Buddhism was in decline here as the people were given to devil worship to cure  their sicknesses and problems in contravention of Buddhist teachings. He says  that this area had the most extensive devil worship in the island and had as  many kapuwas (exorcists) as Buddhist monks. Here “the first  Protestant Episcopal Church built by the English for the native population was  laid on the 14^th of February, 1821, and consecrated by Bishop Heber.”  The original school, called Christ  Church, still exists and  the present writer himself attended it from 1941-1944. It is recorded that his  great great grandfather, Don Dionis De Silva Abeywickrama, was a teacher in the  school from 1828 before he became Thomboo Aarachchi (Land Registrar) for the area in 1836.

By 1829, five new schools had been established. In 1830, even Maj.  Colebrooke, Chairman of the Royal Commission on constitutional reform for the  country, visited the students at their monthly examination and was pleased with  what he saw. There were now in excess of five hundred pupils and around a dozen  seminarians. But despite the education that enabled students to read and write  in English, listen daily to the Lord’s Prayer and religious instruction, there  were hardly any real converts. Mr. Trimnell, who was in charge in 1833, is  quoted:

“… though the greater part of the population were nominally Christian,  in consequence of the law made by the Dutch government that none should inherit  property but those who were baptised and registered, the grossest darkness and  ignorance prevailed.”

But despite the more determined and painstaking efforts of the CMS  missionaries, and the attendance at school and the regular prayer meetings, they  were not much more successful. The author explains:

“He (Mr. Trimnell) then notices at length the three following causes of  discouragement:- 1. There is scarcely any evidence of anyone being really  converted; 2. The disregard of the Lord’s day among the natives; 3. The disinclination  of the people to assemble to hear the Word of God.”

In Nellore in Jaffna, the CMS had a little more success.  Mr. Joseph Knight who came to Jaffna  in 1818 learnt the Tamil and language and by 1820 was conducting services in
Tamil. Together with Rev. Joseph Bailey, they obtained a former Dutch church  from the government to establish a printing press. Christian tracts were  printed and widely distributed and read in the bazaars and even the Hindu temples.  By 1839 there were 22 male teachers, 17 schools, 761 students, 30 seminary  youths and 77 communicants.

Cotta (Kotte), being in the vicinity of Colombo, received special attention. The  school system was established here three years after Baddagama and Kandy. Facilities were
provided by the government to set up a printing press to publish religious  tracts in Sinhalese for mass distribution. A Christian Institution was set up  here in 1827/28 under the patronage of the British Governor, Sir Edward Barnes,  the purpose of which was to provide “a superior education” for selected  students based on “abilities, good conduct and piety”. By 1839 Cotta had 43  schools, 72 teachers and 1629 students. By 1834 two natives had also been  ordained as Anglican priests, a Tamilian and a Portuguese.

There was a positive side to the work of these missionaries. On the new  missionary, Mr. Powell, taking over in Baddagama in 1839, the Modaliar (a  local government official) of the area gives him these words of encouragement.

“Those who have been educated among you, even though they do not turn  out religious, yet build better homes, know better manners, are more  industrious, and are more respected by the people around them than those who  have not; while, with respect to girls, they almost all of them get better  husbands, and are treated much more kindly ….”

This is the real CMS contribution. Contact with Europeans and exposure  to their education and culture introduced a more dynamic element into Ceylonese  society that had seen centuries of stagnation.

All religions have acquired fanciful legends over the millennia. The  book describes many of the Buddhist Jataka stories from the many lives of the  Buddha and the numerous myths connected with the lives of Hindu gods to  illustrate their implausibility. But the author cannot quite understand why the  Sri Lankan people, with religious, educational and cultural traditions that  pre-dated Christian Europe by several millennia, would find the Christian myths  about creation, virgin birth and a God that considered all humanity sinners and  demanded constant obeisance, much too fanciful to be credible.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

03 March 2013.

Australia in Transition:  A Traveller’s Impressions in 2013

Overcoming racial bias

Having travelled and lived in 52  countries, both as a business traveller and a tourist, I was always conscious  that I had missed visiting Australia.  This lapse was rectified in December 2012-January 2013 during a month-long tour  covering Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne,  Port Douglas (to cover the Great Barrier Reef)  and Ayer’s Rock resort (to see the central semi-desert regions and some  Aboriginal people). Our impressions were also formed by talking to Australians,  watching Australian TV, visiting the markets and attending social events  (including a New Year’s Eve dinner-dance).

Australia now is one of the most democratic countries in the  world. This must seem strange to Asians who were denied entry on the basis of  racial discrimination till regulations were relaxed after 1973. Thereafter,  even though Australia  still gives preferential treatment to white-skinned British settlers (50% quota  reservation plus settlement benefits) and allows non-white people mainly on the  basis of locally required skills, it is in many ways a society transformed.  Most people will hold in abhorrence the systematic genocide practiced against  the Australian and Tasmanian Aboriginal people in order to occupy their lands  and resources during the 18th and 19th centuries. But this was an accepted  practice in all the British and the European settler colonies: the North and
South Americas, West Indies, Southern Africa.

But Australia has emerged from this era  much better than the others. Australian courts have now declared the legal  fiction of terra nullius as no longer  binding and special rights have been given to Aboriginal people to have access  to some of their traditional lands, sacred sites and revive some of their  religious and cultural practices. But it is not an easy project after so many millennia.  The Aborigines, isolated from the rest of the world for about 40,000 years, did  not advance beyond the Stone Age till Europeans arrived. To make this very  basic Stone Age culture relevant in this 21st century is a formidable task.
Without a means for gradual transition, the Aborigines themselves are largely a  confused people who find it very difficult to live in a modern environment and  are often prone to laziness and alcoholism.

Advancing democracy

Let us not forget that Australia was  among the first countries in the world to allow women to vote in national  elections (1911), ahead of all the widely acclaimed Western democracies. But  the issue today in the Western world is not the advance of democracy the franchise
but the progressive creation of authoritarian states controlled by giant  corporation controlled oligarchies that are withdrawing personal freedoms under  the guise of protecting the people from external terrorism based in remote  Third World nations where people can barely feed themselves, let alone invade  the West with missiles. Red flags of danger have been raised over Cuba, North Korea,  Venezuela, Bolivia, Afghanistan,  Iran, Syria, among others, while a more subtle  campaign has been waged against China  to prevent it from advancing economically and challenging Western economic  hegemony. The Western media, owned by the same giant corporations, which  largely controls international opinion due to its widespread reach, has  persuaded people that secret surveillance of telephone, internet and social  media is good for national security. It has sanctioned arrests without legal  warrants and secret torture of prisoners. It has allowed Western nations to run  enormous military budgets despite huge public debts and wage overt and covert  wars in the Middle East, Africa and South America.

In contrast, Australia has  retained its sanity. The noisy and tainted propaganda that characterises the  mainstream mass media in the USA  is not a factor in Australia.  The main TV sites like ABC and Sunrise  are enjoyable to watch as they contain balanced views on world affairs and also  have many interesting programmes on science, history and the environment.  Unlike the often noisy and raucous US TV political news presenters, the
Australians are refined and dignified. Australian politicians are not  subordinated by big corporate funders: corporate funding is illegal. When gun  violence appeared in Australia,
they were able, unlike in the USA,  to pass vigorous gun control laws that have removed the threat of extreme gun  violence.

The first evidence of a  democratic society is felt by the visitor from America as he enters an Australian  airport. Unlike the rough and often humiliating treatment of passengers by
security personnel and Customs officers in America, Australian officials are  courteous and efficient. To an American, it is an astonishing sight to see  airport security personnel greeting visitors and helping them go though the  searches. There are no full body scanners and people are not required to remove  shoes. The police and public officials everywhere are friendly.

I would aver that this decency  and efficiency is due to the concern for social justice which prevails in Australia. In America, many  public services have been contracted out to private corporations whose main  concern is not service but ever increasing profits. They employ the least  qualified workers, often minorities from poor backgrounds, and pay minimum
wages. The US  minimum wage of $8.0 per hour contrasts with the Australian minimum wage of  $18. A person cannot survive on a salary based on $8.0 per hour and the result
is often frustrated employees with a chip on their shoulders. A cowed public in  America
seems to accept this kind of poor treatment as a part of normal life.

In contrast, even jobs considered  menial in America  are not done by under-privileged people. Riding is an early morning taxi to the  airport in Cairns from Port Douglas, I was
surprised to see the vehicle driver listening on the radio to the Vienna waltzes by  Strauss. Even toilet cleaning is done by well paid workers.

Australian politics is free from  the highly divisive and inane political debates in America on gay rights, abortion,  creationism myths and the corporation-funded campaigns designed to transfer the  national wealth to a miniscule wealthy minority.

The best indication of a  democracy is not the mere holding of periodic general elections to choose the  government, it is also the commitment to social justice that allows all  citizens to lead a decent life, even if they are handicapped. Unlike in the US, where politicians have been busy cutting  social benefits while keeping taxes for the very rich at historic low levels
and big corporations are often subsidised, Australia has an extensive social  welfare system that prevents absolute poverty. You do not see beggars on the streets  of big cities, like you do in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Washington.

Australian dilemma

Australian politicians have been  faced with a dilemma. Traditionally, white-skinned Australia  regarded itself as a purely European nation located south of Asia and far from Europe. They prided themselves on being British, even  though the earliest settlers were the poor who had been punished and condemned  by a harsh British legal system to exile in a difficult land. Australians have  paid a heavy price for their unquestioning loyalty to Britain: a huge loss of Australian lives in the  First and Second World Wars fighting for Britain. The Australians revere the  British crown and follow most of the archaic British traditions that are a  hangover from its feudal past.

But they felt leaderless when the  Great Britain  lost its empire and became just another European state. When US President Dwight Eisenhower announced that  the USA was the leader of  the Western world by harshly denouncing Britain,  France and Israel for their 1952 Suez  invasion and forced their humiliating withdrawal from Egypt, Australian politicians realised that they  needed a new leader and that this was the USA. Australians still feel,  unjustifiably, that they need a Western power to protect themselves from the
huge heavily populated countries of Asia, a  fear reinforced by Japanese imperialism in World War 2.

Australia has also paid a heavy price for its unflinching  loyalty to the US-UK alliance on foreign policy. They lost large numbers of  servicemen in Korea and Vietnam. They  acted as the US-UK proxy in the East Timor crisis and sent their armed forces  to support this imperial alliance in Iraq  and Afghanistan.  And right now Australia has  agreed to be the US partner  in President Obama’s grand vision to increase the US armed presence in East
Asia to intimidate the rising power of China in international politics and  economics.

Can Australia shed its blind allegiance  to hegemonic Western powers and become a truly independent nation? In the  longer term, with its now heavy dependence on Asia  for its economic prosperity, this seems inevitable.

Australian economy

The Australian economy is not  exactly robust, as none of the “Western” nations that dominated the  world economy in the past can be characterised as such. Yet Australia is in much better shape than any of  the Western economies of Europe and North America.
It endured the US originated world financial crisis of 2008 much better than  the Western nations. It has a healthy balance of payments and manageable public  debt. The financial system is in good shape and the Australian dollar is  stronger now than the US dollar in value.

All this is due to a dramatic  economic shift in focus from Europe and North America towards Asia.  The Australian economy was based in the past on agriculture and modest levels  of industry and mining. But agricultural subsidies in the EU and in the USA curtailed  Australian agricultural exports. Australian industries, like the industries in
the EU and North America, suffered from the dramatic expansion of low-cost high
quality industrial exports from Asia, mainly from Japan,  China, South Korea and India,
but also from Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand  and Singapore.  Even more importantly, this was counteracted by the strong demand for  Australian minerals and coal to power the huge manufacturing industries in Asia. So China  is now Australia’s  biggest trading partner, with 26% of its trade. Almost 75% of Australia’s exports are now taken by four  Asians: China, Japan, South Korea  and India.  China  is also its main import partner. Equally, despite some resistance, Japanese and  Korean motor vehicles have pushed out the Australian Holden from its once  dominant position in the market.

There is still lingering evidence  of the White Man’s reluctance to see non-White Asians take over major  industries in Australia.  Chinese efforts to take over Australian mining interests have been viewed with  alarm. After all, for centuries it was the Europeans who took over the  economies of Asia. Adjustment to this new  world order is not easy for the once dominant nations.

But Australia  is more pragmatic and less easily prejudiced by vested interests than America. The  widespread China bashing  that was seen during the last US  presidential election cannot happen here. All Australian national leaders seen  on television acknowledged that their economic interests are now increasingly  tied to trade and cooperation with Asia. In  turn, many Asian countries are making use of Australian excellence in higher  education and some areas of technology for their own development.

The Asian economic boom that has  no end in sight will be a cornerstone of Australian economic development.  Cooperation for mutual benefit will keep the Australian economy strong for many  decades to come. But Australia  can also substantially help Asian politics through closer cooperation.  Throughout most of Asia, even in countries  today considered “democratic”, the rights of ordinary people are circumscribed  by authoritarian leaders, ruling family dynasties, corruption and nepotism.  There is often a thin edge to the Rule of Law. Asia can benefit from Australia’s  example of a sturdy democracy with a concern for peoples’ rights and welfare.

Kenneth Abeywickraama

25 January 2012

Sydney, Australia.

USA: Have guns, will shoot!

Amendment 2: USA Constitution

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Another gruesome mass murder in the USA last week (14 December 2012), 26 dead, of whom pathetically 20 are little children! Politicians weep in public, call upon God’s grace and say that the tragedy will make America stronger. We have heard it before, we will hear it again and again, but nothing will really change. Nothing can change because the interested corporations that manufacture or import and sell guns and their powerful gun lobby have most politicians in their pockets with their political donations, marketing and public relations campaigns. This is politics in America and it does not change. After all, America is the greatest country on earth that ever was, so why should it change.

How exceptional America is in this respect is succinctly revealed in a table put out by the UK Daily Mail of 18^th December 2012.

Arms in the US: Figures  that add up to tragedy

94,388 people shot in the US so far this year. 300 million privately owned firearms in US.

39 people killed by firearms in England and Wales over 12 months in 2008/9.

40% of gun purchases in the US do not need background check.

190 people shot in the US on Saturday alone (22^nd December 2012).

11 is the minimum age in Minnesota to be eligible for a firearms certificate.

42 of the 50 states of the US do not ban or regulate assault rifles.

50 shots fired by a lone gunmen at a shopping mall in California the day after the massacre (no one injured).

70,000 women aged 51 to 65 gained a concealed –weapons permit in May 2012 alone.

50% of guns worldwide are in US – but just 5% of global population.

1 is the number of mass murders that have been carried out by a woman.

231 people killed in mass shootings (4 or more dead) in the US since May 2009.

35 people killed by firearms in Australia in a single year.

95 shots used by German police in 2011 (including 49 warning shots)

90 shots used by LA police to kill 19 year old man after high speed chase.

60 people were killed by firearms in Spain in a single year.

9,484 were killed by firearms in US in same 12 months.

The familiar argument is that it is not guns but people that kill. But the stupidity of that argument was proved again on the same day as this latest massacre when a man in China went on a similar murderous spree in a school in China. But since he had no access to guns and used a knife, 20 children were injured but none died and the man was apprehended.

The reliance on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, approved 300 years ago, provides a specious argument and a fig leaf for the gun lobby and its supporters whose influence is national. It clearly talks of a well regulated militia to protect the state
because the US lacked both a proper Standing Army and a national police force. Today, the US has the most powerful military the world has ever seen and a huge police force covering federal, state and county entities. They are both equipped with the most sophisticated technologies. And yet the US Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia, the US capital, had contravened the law by banning persons from carrying concealed weapons in public and forced the revocation of the law.

The sanctity of this Second Amendment is strange. Constitutions are not written in stone by God like the Ten Commandments. Consider the Fourth Amendment: Search and arrest warrants.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This particular amendment has been repeatedly amended in practice, with Congressional approval and the administration’s rulings, citing the security of the state and dangers of
terrorism. There is no argument that the country has to be protected from terrorists and the constitution’s amendments need to be accordingly modified. But why cannot the same be done with the Second Amendment, even granting the doubtful interpretation of the courts?

Gun lobbyists claim that the only way to protect oneself from gun violence is to be armed sufficiently to retaliate. Should we arm all the little children to protect themselves from
crazed murderers?

Primitive savages who lived in pre-historic times were always armed to protect themselves and their families. But in civilised societies it is the function of the police to protect ordinary citizens. But not in America, which will always seek to be an exception.

A concerned Congresswoman is expected to propose a law banning military assault weapons. But the law has 900 exceptions!

People will always get aggravated over issues which they will later forget and regret. In a more normal society, people might vent their anger by breaking some household object or even beating a person. But if a gun is at hand and the man (it is usually a man) is a
weakling and coward, he will use the gun. Most of the mass murderers have been young White males and are weaklings with a grievance against society who would run away from a bout of fisticuffs but feel powerful when using guns to kill others. That is why societies around the civilised world restricts gun ownership and only allow hunting weapons for licensed persons with no criminal records or diminished minds. But in free America one can not only own powerful military assault weapons, you could even possess old artillery pieces and battle tanks!

Kenneth Abeywickrama

14 December 2012

Mo Yan, winner of Nobel Prize  for Literature in 2012.

“Through a  mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has  created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of  William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a  departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

From citation made with the award by  the Swedish Academy.

“In writing about the darker aspects of society  there is a danger that emotions and anger allow politics to suppress  literature. A novelist must take a humanist stance as literature originates  from events but transcends them.”

From Mo Yan’s acceptance speech in Stockholm at the Nobel  Awards ceremony (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-12/09/content_15999293.htm).

His real name is Guan Moye, and his  pen name, Mo Yan, means “don’t speak”. Coming from a family of poor farmers in a  village in Northeast Gaomi Township, Shandong province, China, where most of  his novels are set, he endured the hardships of the Cultural Revolution  (1966-1976) working in a factory in a poor village and saw the chaotic rise of
China to a world power. His literary skills blossomed out while he was a  soldier in the Peoples’ Liberation Army. These were recognized by the Chinese  Army and he became a teacher of literature at the Army  Cultural Academy  and he later joined Beijing  Normal University  for formal education and obtained a Master’s in Literature. The most famous of
his 11 novels are: Falling Rain on a Spring Night (1981), Red Sorghum Clan  (1987), The Garlic Ballads (1988), The Republic of Wine (1992), Big Breasts and  Wide Hips (1996), Sandalwood Death (2004), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out  (2006), Change (2010) and Pow (2013). He has produced hundreds of short stories.

China has an ancient  historical tradition of producing great classic novels that are absorbing  stories of everyday life and adventure, long before that of any other nation,
Eastern or Western. The modern novel as we know it can be seen in Chinese  novels of the 13^th century and later. Other nations, like ancient Greece, Rome and India have  their grand mythical stories but these are not real life stories that a reader  can readily relate to. In English literature we have a modern novel in  Chaucer’s Pilgrims Progress of the 13^th century. But none of these  are comparable with the exciting story-telling found in the voluminous Chinese  novels of the 13^th – 19th centuries: Outlaws of the Marsh (by Luo
Guanzhong), Plum in the Golden Vase (?), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (by Luo
Guanzhong), Journey to the West (by Wu Chengen), Chronicle of the West Wing (by
Wang Shifu), In Search of Gods (by Gan Bao).

The Swedish Academy that chooses the Nobel Prize  awards for literature has a long history of political bias, awarding many of  its prizes to anti-communist activists in Eastern Europe
in the Soviet era and to two Chinese political agitators, one of whom is a  refugee in France and the other in a Chinese prison. This is its first  recognition of an outstanding Chinese literary giant of our times who is part  of the Chinese establishment. However, Mo Yan’s writings are anything but what  the Chinese establishment has wanted to project of life in China and his elevation to Vice President of the  Chinese Writers’ Union reflects the new open society in China.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

This is one of his great epic novels. Mo Yan is  one of the most skilful story tellers of modern times and every page of this  book holds the reader in suspense. Before the reader concludes that an episode  is settled a new development alters the picture in a continuing flow of dramatic  events of gains and reverses and changing fortunes.

The story is set in a village in North East Gaomi Township  in Shandong Province, China, where the author himself was  born. The story revolves around the life of a poverty-stricken peasant family  living a primitive life in one of the most dramatic periods of Chinese history,  from 1900 during the time of the Manchu emperors to around 1965, going through  the periods of the upheavals of the Japanese invasions, the  Nationalist-Communist wars, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. It  is a chaotic period of enormous tragedy, enormous sacrifice and suffering till  the incubation period of present day China. Elements of these contending  powers wash through Gaomi village leaving its tragic impact on the lives of the  poor peasants whose traditional way of life is turned upside down. They live in  alternating periods of murder and starvation and periods of some normalcy while  the outsiders take control over their lives. The suffering reaches a height by  1965 when the insanity and the brutality of the Red Guards terrorises the
population with mass propaganda, mock trials and severe punishments. Then there
is a break of 15 years in the main story as the story teller, Jintong  Shangguan, is sent to a prison labour camp where he toils in a salt production  facility under harsh conditions. When he returns in 1980, the Chinese world has  changed beyond recognition. Instead of being punished or even executed for  being a rich peasant or a business owner, making money and becoming rich is now  a virtue. Those who seize the opportunities and become rich have all the  frailties of human beings: they live extravagantly with all the latest imported  Western goods and social manners, they bribe officials for favours and
generally exploit the system for their personal benefit. The poor are still  left behind while the conflicts within society for power and position continues  under new rules. The story continues till 1992.

The long story is told through the experiences  of the Shangguan family over this entire period. The heroine of the story is  “Mother”, Shangguan Lu, born in 1900 and the other principal characters are her  eight daughters. The Shangguan family is a matriarchal unit. At the beginning,  the physically tough mother-in-law rules the family with violence against her  husband, son and daughter-law-law. When Japanese forces kill the two men and
permanently cripple her, “Mother” becomes the head of the family. Mother is not
concerned with morality in the traditional sense or in politics or any other  idealism. She is quintessentially human and her mission in life is to raise and  preserve her family at all costs during these chaotic times while displaying a  decency and kindness to others in defiance of the demands of the new political  movements and the moral hazards they have created. Her suffering is life long. There  are no other heroes: the real heroes are Mother and her daughters, all of whom  eventually suffer after initial gains.

The technique used is the narration of the main  story through the eyes of Mother’s only son, Jintong Shangguan. Jintong is a  very weak and imperfect male with a fetish for female breasts and milk and an  inability to eat normal food. He never grows up to be a man. He is physically  weak, lacks mental stamina, is cowardly, sexually impotent and often survives  through the help of the women he encounters who are somehow attracted to him  for a while. He is an eternal loser and he often admits he is “useless”. He is  an anti-hero, floating with the forces around him without participating in  them, unlike his sisters, and suffering greatly from the mental and physical  abuse he is subjected to. His sisters, on the other hand, are tough women who  become involved in the political movements that sweep through the village and  form liaisons with political leaders and the wider political spectrum is  revealed through the fortunes and misfortunes of the family sisters and their
offspring.

It must take great courage to tell such a tale  in China  or for that matter in any country in the world. While official histories  document the heroic movements that marked the birth of a new nation, this long  episodic tale reveals the tragedy and the dark side of such movements. It  encompasses the periods of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution  when millions lost their lives out of starvation and brutality and finally the
new China  with its economic success and the shortcomings that accompany this success. As  seen by the villagers, the story makes no mention of any political leader or  any political programme, only their tragic impact on the people’s lives. Without  moralising, it illustrates that good and bad are a part of human societies.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

13 December 2012

18th Congress of the Communist Party of China

The constitutions of governments of all  countries that seek to be representative of their people have evolved over  centuries with both home grown and imported characteristics. In Britain, the  first country to experiment with representative government, the system evolved from  the time of the Magna Carta (1215). Yet it still retains elements of the past
authoritarian regimes like a monarchy and a House of Lords, dressed in the garb  of harmless tradition. The United  States evolved with the US Constitution (1787)  and the Bill of Rights (1789), developed first by a land-owning aristocracy  with no special interest in popular democracy, into a more representative form  of government as a result of mass agitations. But it still retains the  tradition of political patronage now in the form of giant corporations that  have replaced large landowners. It seems that a continuation of some aspects of  tradition gives strength to a constitution. China is no exception.

The 18th Congress of the Communist Party of  China was held this month and the event was followed by thousands of foreign  journalists and observers who came to Beijing  to study the new projections planned for the country. At the same time, despite  China being the world’s  second largest economy and a major trading partner and the largest creditor of
the USA’s foreign debt,  there was little attention to the event in the USA media except to fault Chinese  economic policies and ridicule its politics (BBC, New York Times, Economist,
Wall Street Journal). This was in stark contrast to the run up to the USA Presidential election a fortnight earlier  when both candidates inveighed against China  and vowed to punish the country for the US economic problems.

There was a recent Chinese TV clip where  post-graduate students of international relations at a prestigious US university were asked about their knowledge of the Chinese political  system and they confessed they knew very little if at all. In contrast, USA and other Western news magazines and  economic and political journals have over the last four decades being  predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy and the implosion of  the system of government, notwithstanding that China has maintained the fastest
economic and social growth rates in the history of mankind during that time.  Unfortunately, it is in the West that we now see economic collapse and social
upheaval, despite unending optimistic forecasts.

China  is a one party state governed by the Communist Party of China (CPC). This is
well known to Westerners and is a major point of criticism. But the CPC is not  your run of the mill political party found in Western democracies that was  created by privileged classes to contend for the right to govern. It is a  revolutionary party that was created by oppressed workers and peasants in 1923  which won control of the country through political campaigns and armed force in  a country where democracy did not exist.

It is incomprehensible to Americans who have  very little knowledge of Chinese history but not to those living in China. Since  the overthrow of the last Manchu (also known as the Qing dynasty) emperor in  1911, China  had not had a unified national government and endured ceaseless internal  conflicts between government at the centre, feudal warlords, bandit armies,  Western imperial powers that occupied the main port cities and rapacious
Japanese invaders. It was the Chinese Communist Party, formed in 1923 originally  with 30 members that organised the oppressed workers and peasants, fought  against the other contending forces, and finally gained supreme power in 1949  through military victories. It was this party that once again unified the whole  of China, except for Taiwan which was protected by the US naval fleet  against attack by mainland forces. The triumph of the Communist Party caused  widespread anger in the USA  at the time and there were political debates on “Who lost China?”

Against this background, the overwhelming  majority of Chinese regard the Communist Party of China as the legitimate  vehicle for the governance of China.  It would be incomprehensible to the Chinese to have a two party system as in  the USA  where both parties are beholden to corporate donors and the 35,000 odd  lobbyists who are perpetually advancing the cause of vested interests.

The Communist Party of China has evolved over  the last six decades of power from a party with a primitive ideological vision  with obsolete economic theories into one that is more sophisticated and highly  management oriented. In the first decade of rule in the 1950s, under the  authoritarian leadership of Mao Zedong, “The Great Leap Forward”  sought to industrialise using primitive technologies and rigid performance  targets, all under centralised planning and control. The resulting economic  disasters and human suffering was worsened when Mao introduced the  “Cultural Revolution” when the youth of this vast country was  mobilised to turn society on its head by destroying all institutions and past
history to create a mythical pure communism where there were no formal social  structures.

With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng  Xiaoping reformed the party which had suffered abuses under Mao’s authoritarian  rule with the “Cult of the Personality” built around him by his sycophants.  He began the process of dismantling the rigid ideological Marxist economic and  political theories and quietly introduced open market economic reforms, creating  a more democratic party structure. His mission was carried forward by his  successor as General Secretary of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin. So much  that the Communist Party under his successor, Hu Jintao, grew to an active  membership of close to 88 million, which included workers, peasant farmers,  public and private sector employees and now even twenty  billionaires/millionaires. This makes it the largest party in the world, which  is a record, even considering that China has a population of 1.3  billion comprising one fifth of the world.

After Mao’s death, it was Deng Xiaoping, who was  also abused and suffered physical and mental punishment during the Cultural  Revolution, who strongly advocated measures to avoid adoration and deification  of leaders in future. It is now written into the Chinese constitution that the  “cult of the personality” is illegal. He resisted calls to continue office
after serving his time and introduced the current practice of top leaders  serving only two terms of five years each.

One feature emerges throughout this period of  party evolution: at no time was the party controlled by privileged vested  interests as in the case of political parties in the Western democracies. The  victory of the communist revolution ensured that. In fact, it went to the other  extreme for many decades, with the ideology of communism which sought to  establish “a dictatorship of the proletariat”. In pursuit of this objective, as  in the early Soviet Union, it sought to persecute and marginalise all families  that were affluent or held high positions in the past, thus destroying the  intelligentsia and managerial classes in the process.

The Constitution of China retains its loyalty to  its ideological roots for continuity. The introductory paragraphs in the  document carry this message.

“The Communist Party of China is the vanguard both of the  Chinese working class and of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. It is  the core of leadership for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics  and represents the development trend of China’s
advanced productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture and the
fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The  realization of communism is the highest ideal and ultimate goal of the Party.

The Communist Party of China takes Marxism-Leninism, Mao  Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three  Represents as its guide to action.”

The “Three Represents” are Jiang Zemin’s contribution to Chinese  political theory.

The power structure in China is based on the Communist  Party. Party cadres fill all the top positions as leading provincial officials, and are also found in every government department and public enterprise. They  ensure that the guiding principles of the party line and policies are followed.  The authority of the Communist Party is unchallenged. Any dissent or changes  must come from within the party and emanates from party leaders depending on  their support within the Standing Committee and the Political Bureau (Politbureau).

The highest leadership position is that of the  General Secretary of the party. The principal political officers of the country  are selected and voted into office by the CPC Congress of delegates which meets  every 5 years. The recently concluded 18^th Congress was attended by
2,307 delegates from all party regional offices. The Congress elected the  Central Committee which now consists of 205 members and 171 alternate members.  It also elected the smaller Political Bureau of the Central Committee (25 members) from  among them and the even smaller (7 members) Standing Committee of the Politbureau  responsible for the highest level of day to day decision making. In addition,  as eradication of corruption was a major issue at this Congress, it created a  Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of 130 members. The Congress also  elects the members of the Central Military Commission which supervises the  country’s military and consists of some of the highest ranking civilian and  military officers.

The CPC consists of proven technocrats who are  concerned with the practical problems unlike politicians in many Western  countries that need to take populist positions on matters like abortion, gay  rights, religious values, creating democracy in foreign lands, policing the  world, etc. The aim for the next 5 years was defined as “building a moderately
prosperous society in all respects, we must, with greater political courage and  vision, lose no time in deepening reform in key sectors and resolutely discard  all notions and systems that hinder efforts to pursue development in a  scientific way.” In summary, the primary goals were defined as follows: 1)  Sustainable economic development; 2) Extension of country’s cultural soft  power’ 3) Improvement of living standards; 4) Building a resource conserving  and environmentally friendly society.

No wonder most of the top leadership elected  consists of highly educated engineers, scientists and economists, some educated  in the USA,  and not lawyers as in many Western countries. Unlike in Western democracies,  they do not canvass for positions through mass media and bitterly fought  elections and make numerous promises which are generally left unfulfilled when  they attain office. The top leaders are chosen from within after discussions  and ratified by the CPC Congress. These tend to be people with long service
both in industry and government office who have ended successfully governing  large provinces (provinces in China  are more populated than any European nation) and tend to have a median age of  around 60 years.

The Congress made the following amendments to  the constitution, given here in summary.

1. Guide to action should be based on a scientific outlook on  development.
2. Path and theories to be based on the socialist system with Chinese
   characteristics.
3. Need to promote ecological progress.
4. Reform and opening up to the world will be a path to a stronger China.

The constitution of China is not considered sacrosanct  as in the West and is routinely amended at the CPC Congresses to meet new  demands in a changing world.

Corruption was a major issue at this Congress.  Retiring General Secretary Hu Jintao warned that rising corruption could  threaten the party and even the state. Between 2007-2012, 660,000 cases of  corruption were prosecuted, which included 60 top level officials from the  provinces. The high-level Central Commission for Discipline was created for
this reason to give more powers to investigators. Despite this, the highest  level of party officials at the centre are generally incorruptible and live  very modest lives while most cases of corruption are from the provinces. The  increase in corruption is traced to economic expansion coupled with very low  salaries for public officials compared with much higher earnings by private  business people and corporate managers.

Now that many regions of China are  gaining a new prosperity, the CPC has to evolve to give more voice in  government to those who are not within the party and are not tied to its
ideology. There are now 350 million internet users in China (the  largest for any country in the world) and 250 million social media network  users who would criticise local administrations and force officials to correct  abuses and often act as independent watchdogs. The growth of the Chinese social  media networks (such as Sina Weibo, Renren, Tencent, Douban and Wichat) has  made a difference to politics. The answer is not to restrict access to mass  media, as has often happened, but to encourage criticism even if it is  sometimes a nuisance. The Chinese public is now mostly mature enough to be  trusted and deliberate malcontents will be marginalised by them.

The major lines of conflict within the communist  party are between the conservatives and the progressives calling for change. The  conservatives in China,  unlike elsewhere, are those who are more committed to doctrinaire communism who  would be called leftists in the West, and progressives are those strongly  advocating open market reforms who would be called rightists elsewhere.

The other major drawback in China today is  the weakness of the judicial system in implementing the Rule of Law. While  crimes of violence are surprisingly low compared to Western countries which  have urban areas that law-abiding people have to avoid, there are fewer  safeguards for citizens against official harassment. Yet the Chinese police forces are in marked contrast to those in the USA where all police personnel are  armed and yet hundreds of them lose their lives annually in the line of duty.  Chinese police personnel do not carry routinely carry guns or even batons but  citizens would not dare to confront them in the performance of their duties.  Let us illustrate this with a first hand experience.

Our family was touring China in April  2009. We had arrived in Kunming airport from Guilin and were looking  out for our guide who would be with a placard with our name. There were 4 young  men with bags fidgeting near the exit point. After a little while they started  to leave. At the exit, two men in casual dress confronted them and showed them  their identity cards. The young men froze. Within a few minutes a large open  police truck with a big dog pulled up and the men were placed inside. The truck  went off. Not a single word was spoken during this encounter. It all took  barely five minutes and people around did not even notice what was taking  place. In contrast, if such an arrest was done in the USA, the place  would have been surrounded by heavily armed police and SWAT teams. The suspects  would have been wrestled to the ground and manacled and led into police cars  with screaming sirens. Bystanders would look on in terror.

US President Ronald Reagan theatrically intoned  that “government is not the solution, government is the problem”. The  neo-conservatives who hold the ideological high ground in the USA have since  demanded the dismantling of government and the substitution of large private  corporations to handle business usually done by governments (except to increase  the military to unprecedented levels). If this were to be practiced, the CPC
which governs China  is the closest to this model. It has all the trappings of a large corporation,  the largest in human history, but with all citizens as shareholders and not a
privileged few.

This leads us to conclude that China should  not blindly copy from the West but should evolve its own institutions and  structures at its own pace. It could ignore the patronising advice and  hectoring of Western analysts and critics. The CPC has demonstrated unrivalled  successes in the last four decades and it can be left to continue their
mission.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

15 November 2012.

The Story of Qiu Ju

Film Review
Most cinema goers who patronise the neighbourhood cinema hall are usually treated to blockbusters with plenty of sex and violence with strong nationalistic overtones where our good guys overcome foreign bad guys. So we miss out on some of the fine films that are being made around the world in countries as diverse as France, Germany, Italy, Iran,
China, Japan and Russia.

The Story of Qui Ju is one such exceptional film made in China in 1992 by famed Chinese Director, Zhang Yimou. It is entertaining, touchingly emotional and carries an absorbing story. The filming is superb. The story is set in a primitive and remote village in China of the 1990s. The heroine, Qui Ju, a farmer’s wife (played by Gong Li, a leading Chinese actress), is outraged that the village chief, Wang Shantang, has assaulted her husband,
Qinglai, hit him in the chest and kicked his testicles. She is already pregnant with a child but fears that the family “crown jewels” are damaged forever. China’s one child policy makes every child, especially a male child, precious. The assault was due to a quarrel where the village chief felt insulted by a remark by the farmer that he was only capable of producing “hens”, referring to his failure to have a male child.

The wife and his sister take the injured man in a push cart to the medical clinic in the nearest town. The clinic is so inadequate and spare that it can barely carry that title. The medical technician provides some medications and gives a report on the injuries. Qui Ju takes the report and vows to punish the chief. The story of the film is about her quest for justice where her aim is to get the chief to apologise for his actions and gain back the family respect.

She takes the case to the local police, where they try to create an amicable settlement by getting the chief to pay compensation. They want peace in the village. But Qui Ju does not want money, she wants an apology for the insult to her family, and the irascible chief will insultingly give money but not an apology. Unhappy with the verdict she takes the case to the next higher level, the District Police headquarters in the big town. The police chief here is sympathetic but also seeks to obtain an amicable settlement and agrees to increase the compensation. But Qui Ju does not want the money: she wants only an apology. She spends more of the family resources seeking justice than any compensation that could be obtained. Every time she sets out to seek officials in town and city she has to sell part of her family’s chillie crop to finance her expeditions. Despite her delicate health in her advance stage of pregnancy and the difficulty of travel during winter, she decides to take the matter to the higher Appeal Court in the main city in the district.

By this time, even her husband, who is now cured of his injuries, is fed up with her craze for justice. But she doggedly continues her quest with the support of her sister-in-law, ignoring her husband’s protests. Before the final ruling of the Appeal Court, she nearly dies at childbirth but is saved by the prompt actions of the village chief with whom she has carried out a vendetta who obtains help during the winter night to take her to a hospital. One month after the birth of a baby boy, the happy Qui Ju hosts a celebration where the village chief would be the chief guest. But by then the Appeal  Court ruling has been given and, unknown to her, the village chief has been sentenced to jail. While she anxiously waits for his arrival at the celebration party as chief guest, a police party carts him to jail amid screaming police sirens. The film ends with her desperate run in the snow to intercept the police vehicles taking the Chief to jail.

Qui Ju is not portrayed as a single minded avenger, but is a complex character with a soft heart. When the Appeal Court summons the District Police Chief, who has been very kind to her, to answer for his decision in the case, Qui Ju is distraught he will be penalised and tries to withdraw her case till the Police Chief assures her that it is only a routine procedure.

The Gong Li’s acting is superb. The country women’s journeys to town and city are done with finesse showing the country bumpkin’s amazement at the sophistication of the city and the dangers the two women face from urban hustlers. The film ends on a dramatic note with the irony of Qui Ju getting her revenge when she does not want it any more.

The film has won several awards: Venice Film Festival’s Golden Globe (1992), Vancouver International Film Festival (1992), French Syndicate of Cinema Critics (1993), Independent Spirits Award (1994), National Society of Film Critics Award (1994), and many others in China itself.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

12 November 2012

John Carlos Story, by John Carlos and Dave Zirin

Published by Haymarket Books, Chicago,  Illinois. 2012.

Book Review

The only reason I bought this book about a now forgotten episode in the American Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s was because I heard the protagonist being interviewed on the small independent radio news channel “Democracy Now!” Two black American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, committed an American sacrilege at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City when they gave the Black Power salute on the victory stand after winning the 200 metre race to highlight racial discrimination in the USA. For this act of treason against White supremacist policies and racial discrimination, they were harassed for about four decades and their careers were destroyed. Though it is now four decades after the event, it is still an important side show to the centuries-long struggle of the Afro-American community to gain equal rights and respect in a country plagued with racism
since its very foundation.

What is revealing in this book is not just a story of one man’s struggle for freedom in a racially besotted society. That by itself is noteworthy because while the US administration takes upon itself the role of the world’s moral guardian and launches human rights crusades against nations unwilling to be subservient to it, it was considered unacceptable for Afro-Americans to highlight their plight till recent years. The campaigns and the sufferings of the NAACP and the Black Muslims in bringing about change are now scarcely remembered. What is more disturbing to those unfamiliar with US society is the tragedy of Afro-American society as a whole as revealed by the autobiography of John Carlos: a demoralized people with few opportunities to improve their lives except through sports or music. Poverty exists throughout the world and poverty in India, for example, is far more acute and pervasive than in the USA. Yet it is not as tragic or demoralising as in the Afro-American neighbourhood. The Afro-American life described here is not directed towards escaping poverty but stagnation in misery: street violence, crime, narcotics, rejection of educational opportunities, breakdown of families, etc.

International sport, including the Olympic Games, is highly politicised with the Americans and Europeans dominating these organisations. Avery Brundage, then head of the Olympic Committee in 1968, had awarded the Games to Nazi Germany in 1936 and balked at expelling Aparthied South Africa till world opinion forced a decision. In 1980 the US and 60 allies boycotted the Moscow Olympic Games (its major West European allies
did not join the boycott) because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of its beleaguered government fighting Islamic fundamentalists. No such boycotts followed US invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and interventions in numerous smaller nations in Africa and South America. In 2008, the award of the Olympic Games to China caused so much anger in the West that Olympic torch bearers were constantly harassed passing through European capitals. Two obscure black athletes, taking upon themselves to
highlight the sad plight of people of colour in America with a simple act in the 1968 Olympics, were taking on a formidable opposition of White Supremacists around the world.

By 1968, despite the Civil Rights Act (1964) of President Johnson in response to the NAACP Civil Rights campaigns, coloured people in America saw few gains immediately afterwards. By the time, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been gunned down by racists and the Black Panthers had been eliminated in FBI raids. In 1967 Mohamed Ali was banned from boxing and his heavyweight championship title was withdrawn due to his
opposition to the Vietnam War and resistance to the draft.  There was still a sense of hopelessness in the Black community.

Despite these, there were small groups of White people both in America and elsewhere who were revolted by the treatment of coloured people and lent their support to the struggles. During the brief protest on the Olympic stand in 1968, the two black athletes were supported by the runner up in their 200 metres race, Australian second place winner, Peter Norman, who also suffered for his action in later life.

In 2005 the students at San Jose State  University, where Tommie Smith and John Carlos were alumni, raised $380,000 to create memorial statues for this act of defiance on behalf of human rights by these three athletes. In some small way, they had been rehabilitated by mainstream America, while Mohamed Ali, who suffered much more for his actions as a Black Muslim activist, is now internationally celebrated as one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

12 October 2012

The Man Who Changed China, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Crown Publishers, New York, 2004

Book review and commentary

This is not just the biography of an important modern Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, who became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of the country (1989-2002), but the inside story of China in recent decades as seen through the eyes of an insider. The author, an American who lived and worked in China as a businessman for many years, is uniquely qualified to do this due to his access to the inner workings of politics of China. He uses the life story of Jiang Zemin to illustrate the transition of modern China from the madness of the post-revolutionary Mao Zedong years – the Anti-Rightist witch hunts, the economic stupidity of the Great Leap Forward and the murderous Cultural Revolution. In all these insane communist experiments, tens of
millions of Chinese died and hundreds of millions were scarred for life. The astonishing thing is that China came out of these awful tragedies and reconstructed itself to become a powerful nation with a fairly advanced quality of life for many of its people, surpassing the achievements of all other developing nations. That is the story of this book.

When I visited China in 2009 and wanted to visit Mao’s mausoleum while in Tiananmen
Square, my young fashionably dressed and well educated Chinese guide made excuses and when pressed, said it was better to remember Chou En Lai. While China is now on the rise as a modern society, the memory of those dark years still lurks, as it lurked even in the mind of Jiang Zemin, according to this book. At the same time, it is not easy for Westerners to take a dispassionate view of these events in modern China as they find the transformation of China inexplicable in relation to their own experience and history. China, with a continuous civilisation of five millennia while being the largest nation on earth, is an enigma to them. It takes a person like the author who lived in China to
understand the psyche of the nation that underwent so many changes in such a short period of historical time, a transformation that took Western nations over 500 years. Western economists have been annually and ritually predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy whereas, ironically, it is the economies of the West that are now in collapse. Most American experts have almost always been proved wrong in their prognosis of Chinese events, making America’s China policy often faulty and counter-productive to US interests.

Mao, “the Great Helmsman”, united China after centuries of chaos caused by Western and Japanese imperialism, warring regional warlords, bandit armies and a corrupt and rapacious Kuomintang regime. His experiments creating a pure communist society while he held onto absolute power as a divine figure was broken only with his death. Deng Xiaoping was ordained as “Paramount Leader” and cleverly guided the country away from ultra-leftwing madness using his immense prestige as a revolutionary fighter since Mao had already eliminated the more famous Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi as possible successors.

The modernisation of China was unquestionably initiated by Deng Xiaoping who used carefully contrived euphemisms (such as “Socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”) and clever aphorisms (“A cat may be black or white but it is a good cat if it catches rats”) to gain public approval for the creation of an open market economy in a country where Mao’s communist ideas were ingrained in the minds of large sections of the population. Jiang Zemin who was sponsored by him as his successor was among the first of the new generation of leaders (the Third Generation in modern China) who had not been in the revolutionary wars and were technocrats.

The story of Jiang Zemin illustrates the working of the modern Communist Party of China which was no longer dominated by an all-powerful leader but has different factions with differing views on the management and future of China. In this sense it is a very democratic party where ideas can be debated and leaders need to network with different groups and make compromises to obtain power and climb up the hierarchy. With 85 million politically committed members, about 10% of the adult population, it is also fairly representative. While critics in the West claim that their own multi-party system (in practice, only two parties almost everywhere, both representing the same powerful economic interests) is the true test of democracy, they cannot explain why their system has produced stagnant economies and growing social inequality while the single party China
advances economically, socially and culturally.

The modern Communist Party of China defies the traditional description of a communist party. It is not concerned with a class struggle but is focussed on economic, social and cultural development. It makes national plans like corporate operating plans. Unlike the democratic multi-party state where politicians are concerned with gaining power by short-term measures, broken promises and diversions into retrograde populist racial, religious and moral issues, the Chinese Communist Party survives through its commitment to
carefully planned, executed and monitored long-term development. For example, in 1998 the party even leads a campaign to introduce good manners in society (I have personally found that many ordinary Chinese citizens are notoriously uncivil in manners) and publishes “The Civilised Citizen’s Study Book” for public teaching.

The author illustrates the inevitable pitfalls of the communist system. The system required that all public ministries, departments and enterprises should have communist party officials to guide decision making and ensure conformity to party policies. This huge cadre of party loyalists were often the main source of corruption that hampered progress and the fight against official corruption is an ongoing national project with the penalty for high level corruption being execution. Some of the highest members of the party have fallen victim to this.

The movement towards a modern market-based economy would not have succeeded if not for the resolute efforts of the aged Deng Xiaoping who undertakes a “Southern Imperial Tour” of China in 1990 to voice his views on modernisation and force the national leadership to act swiftly. Jiang Zemin, still apprehensive about his position and beholden to the older left-wing leaders in the Politburo would not have acted decisively if not for this
forceful campaign by Deng Xiaoping who is in every sense the real architect of modern China.

But it was Jiang Zemin who was left to guide the critical phase of economic modernisation with the emphasis on science and technology and the opening of the market to foreign investors. His selfless dedication, political and managerial skills and personal charm helped to guide the country nationally and in gaining international acceptance and support, despite an ingrained aversion to China (and a continuing fear of China’s
ascendancy) in the Western capitals.

Jiang Zemin, like all the third generation of Chinese leaders, was an educated and cultured technocrat. The strong managerial skills that have propelled the Chinese economy in recent decades are seen in Jiang Zemin’s own work. He has a huge cadre of experts to guide him on all economic, social and political topics. Before foreign trips are undertaken, advance parties research the locations to determine the itineraries and activities to be undertaken. Armies of experts analyse possible questions at meetings and prepare suitable
responses. Little is left to chance. Jiang also, unlike his predecessors, is able to sing and ham in public to charm his foreign hosts and lessen their hostility. He is both an extraordinary leader and personality.

The communist party remains the solid foundation of China’s success and development. The peaceful transfer of leadership from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002 through elections within the central committee illustrates this and it ensures that the development policies will continue.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

23 September 2012.