Obama and US Military in Australia

Nobel Peace Prize winner US President Obama continues to rival former US President Bush in maintaining and expanding US Empire. The US will be committing it's military presence to Australia. According to the news agency Reuters:

The U.S. deployment to Australia, the largest since World War Two, will start next year with a company of 200-250 marines in Darwin...

A total of 2,500 U.S. troops would eventually rotate through the port city. The United States will bring in ships, aircraft and vehicles, as well as increase military training.

For what purpose? The Chinese see this as a provocation. What is certain is that the US views itself as the necessary leader to be involved in economic and political affairs throughout the region. The same article continues:

China claims the entire maritime region, a vital commercial shipping route rich in oil, minerals and fishery resources. It insists that any disputes be resolved through bilateral talks and says Washington has no business getting involved.

"The United States is also trying to get involved in a number of regional maritime disputes, some of which concern China's sovereignty and territorial integrity," a commentary from China's official Xinhua news agency said.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei hold rivals claims to at least parts of the sea and tension occasionally flares up into maritime stand-offs.

Obama will make an "anchor speech" outlining the U.S. vision for the Asia-Pacific to the Australian parliament on Thursday before a whistle stop in Darwin. He then flies to the Indonesian island of Bali for the East Asia summit.

So here we have it, the US is overtly the official policeman of the world. While the US economy sinks there will be plenty of US Navy ships keeping float: less bread for more iron and steel. I thought this kind of distorted sense of priorities is what the North Korean government has been accused of doing. I forgot, Kim Jong-il never got the Nobel Peace Prize.

"All Arrighians Now"

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published a review essay by Joshua Clover, entitled "Autumn of Empire," which considers the relatively recent work of Giovanni Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing and the recent edition of The Long Twentieth Century), Robert Brenner (The Economics of Global Turbulence), and Richard Duncan (The Dollar Crisis). I must say, in the company of Arrighi and Brenner, it is difficult to see why Duncan's book is featured in the essay, aside from the way it functions within the rhetorical structure of Clover's essay (or, perhaps, it's there to balance the three books from Verso), but otherwise it's an interesting article that has the merit of dodging a lot of jargon.

Here's the general idea:

Like democracy itself, this official thought [within the predominant strains of economics] presents itself as having subtleties, wings, parties. But the oppositions on offer — NYT vs. WSJ, Krugman vs. Cochrane, saltwater vs. freshwater schools of economics — can’t begin to grasp the fullness of the situation. Whether discovering “green shoots” or hand-wringing over a “jobless recovery,” they think unquestioningly in terms of a return to normalcy, debating only the rate and method: the crisis a mere blink in the long stare of empire.

But the scandalous lesson we learn from heterodox thinkers like Brenner, Duncan, and Arrighi is quite a different one: that the American experience is grand, outsized, but not entirely novel. Industrial growth is bound to undo itself as a profit center, to be replaced by a regime of finance; this regime’s profit mechanism is always the bubble and its total crisis inescapable; and this is how empires end. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s book on the delusions that accompany bubbles is called, with a wink, This Time It’s Different. Meaning, it never is. We must admit the same about the course of empire, and the current conjuncture. Empires rise and fall.

We live in an epoch in which the great question is how to bid farewell to the U.S.-centered empire, and what the transition to another global arrangement might look like. Whether we know it or not, we are all Arrighians now.

As the title Adam Smith in Beijing conveys, Arrighi paints a picture of a market alternative to capitalism that is too optimistic in its considerations of Adam Smith's work and the Chinese economy (we've talked about David Harvey's take on China here). He doesn't consider extensively (nor does Clover in this article) that alternatives to capitalism that could arise in a place other than the likely site of the next hegemonic power (although to be fair, Arrighi does mention India). This possibility of an alternative is why Latin America and more recently North Africa have received so much Left-leaning critical attention lately.

The Struggle for Tibet

Getting good information about Tibet can be difficult: one the one hand, there's Chinese media censorship to get around, but on the other, we also have to avoid the Western tendency to exoticize and to fetishize Tibet and the Dalai Lama. As Joshua pointed out earlier this month, the Dalai Lama is seen as a "hero and saintly man," but he is also the spiritual leader of a society that was, under his rule, both feudalistic and theocratic.

In The Struggle in Tibet (Verso, 2009), Wang Lixiong (a Chinese dissident intellectual) and Tsering Shakya (a Tibetan exile now teaching at the University of British Colombia) attempt to analyze Tibetan struggle without falling into either what they call a Chinese colonialist line or a Western exoticization line. Their opening two essays reproduce a debate between them (turning on the legacy of the Cultural Revolution) first published in the New Left Review in 2002, and the additional contributions analyze various facets of Tibetan religion (although some of the arguments are left wanting...) and Chinese imperialism, up through the Tibetan demonstrations that began in March 2008.

The goal of the book is to assess the Tibetan struggle 'on the ground.' While neither reside in Tibet (Wang travels there intermittently) they both strive to address concerns indigenous to the larger region. In this regard their collection of essays is successful and informative; I recommend it (as a non-expert myself) to anyone looking to challenge their views on the relationship between Tibet and China. There are three things of note:

First, Wang's essays can be frustrating at points, especially the first, which betrays, as Shakya calls it, a colonialist's attitude toward Tibet; his interpretations of religious need  are often oversimplified.  Nevertheless, Wang's contributions document his radicalization, as he comes to call for Tibetan cultural autonomy and to argue that the Chinese bureaucracy's mismanagement of the region puts its independence on the agenda because Tibetans have realized that China will be unable to resolve the 'Tibet Question.' Note, however, that this argument isn't directly framed as a call for complete independence, rather it's a call for democratic reform in China if the government wishes to implement 'national unity.'

Second, while both authors address Chinese economic interest in the Tibet region, their analyses could have been developed further. Both note the improved infrastructure in Tibet and 'accumulation by dispossession' that is occurring there, especially, as Shakya notes, with the discovery of large mineral deposits (p. 198), but neither does more than sketch how this could be self-managed by Tibetans to avoid extra-regional expropriation (see also Wang's discussion of ecology on pp 160-168).

Finally, while both acknowledge the Dalai Lama as the spiritual leader of Tibet, neither expressly calls for him to return as a political leader. In fact, Shakya argues that there is a "huge social and cultural gap" between Tibetans in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the exile community in India and the West (p. 215). It's also important to note that the exile groups in India receive funding from the National Endowment of Democracy, which, despite Shakya's claim that this "does not translate into an ability to mobilize" in the People's Republic of China, has a long record of meddling in the politics of what the US considers to be hostile or rogue states. Certainly, being a border region between China and India, and then an interest with national resources between two imperial powers can't help the local struggle for autonomy. Nevertheless, The Struggle in Tibet provides a solid foundation to build subsequent responses to these issues.

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism," Chapter 5

While Chapter 4 of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism outlines the uneven geographical implementation of neoliberalism, Chapter 5 analyzes the "peculiar path" of China's entry, via  the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, into an increasingly neoliberalized and globalized economy (although it is more proper to say 're-entry' regarding the longue durée of China's relationship to global political economy). [1] Whether the outcome is socialism 'with Chinese characteristics' or privatization 'with Chinese characteristics,' the transformation of China's economy over the last thirty years has led to high growth, a rising standard of living, but also dramatic inequalities of wealth between urban and rural populations, with the resulting unrest and instability that such inequalities produce. [2] Much of this growth has been export led, and as such, China has benefited from the international frameworks for trade and finance that have promoted neoliberalism.

Unsurprisingly, especially for those who have been following our discussion, the central question for Harvey is whether the transformation of China's economy has led to the reconstitution of upper class power. His analysis is focused and does not lapse into shock and awe that the more popular punditry has produced while discussing China (some of these tendencies are described in Perry Anderson's review for the London Review of Books entitled "Sinomania"). Harvey argues that China has constructed "a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control" (p. 120). In this regard, the salient features of China's political economy are:

• Accumulation by dispossession. Privatization of communal property and steps toward the financialization of the economy has created speculative bubbles in real estate. Corporatization of state owned enterprises followed by buyouts of worker shareholding (sometimes through coercive means) and state bailouts of non-performing loans have transferred large amounts of wealth to the elite. Yet class formation, Harvey argues, has been a complicated affair; while reforms have prevented "the formation of any coherent capitalist class power bloc within China," they have not prevented, through a combination of corruption, clientelism, and opportunism, a "growing integration of party and business elites in ways that are all too common in the US" (pp. 123, 150).
• Steep inequalities produced by uneven geographical development. Economic reform has reinforced social inequality between urban and rural areas. Not only is there a large disparity in income, there are reductions in social services and the implementation of user fees for public services. Residency restrictions (separating town and country) have led to a labor force of peasants (especially young women) that-- lacking legal protection-- is "vunerable to super-exploitation" not only through low wages, but also through non-payment of wages and pension obligations (p. 148).
• Proletarianization. The working class has nearly tripled between 1978 and 2000, increasing from 120 million to 350 million (270 million workers plus 70 million peasants who have found wage work). Greater flexibility (that is, precariousness) in the labor market, and uneven geographical development has produced large labor surpluses that the Chinese state has confronted through public deficit spending, on dam projects, and massive projects in infrastructure and public transportation. [3]

Nevertheless, China cannot just deficit spend its way out of political upheaval. As Giovanni Arrighi notes in Adam Smith in Beijing, "public order disruptions" (protests, riots, and other forms of unrest) have increased from around 10,000 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005. [4] Harvey concludes with remarks on the possibilities for political subjectivity and mass movements in China. Rather than paraphrase, this passage is worth quoting at length:

Both state and migrant workers, [S.K. Lee] suggests, reject the term working class and refuse 'class as the discursive frame to constitute their collective experience'. Nor do they see themselves as 'the contractual, juridical, and abstract labour subject normally assumed in theories of capitalist modernity', bearing individual legal rights. They typically appeal instead to the traditional Maoist notion of the masses constituted by 'workers, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the national bourgeoisie whose interests were harmonious with each other and also with the state'. In this way workers 'can make moral claims for state protection, reinforcing the leadership and responsibility of the state to those it rules'. The aim of any mass movement, therefore, would be to make the central state live up to its revolutionary mandate against foreign capitalists, private interests, and local authorities (pp. 149-150).

Whether the Chinese state responds to these challenges through outright repression, opportunist intervention, class compromise, or through a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth remains to be seen.

Next week, we will conclude with Chapters Six and Seven.

Notes

[1] Recall, of course, Mao's well-known remark that Deng was a secret 'capitalist roader.'

[2] Not to mention large scale and rapid environmental degradation.
[3] Deficit spending, and Chinese state control of capital flow run counter to the "global rules of the IMF, the WTO, and the US Treasury." While Harvey notes that these kind of economic practices cannot continue "in perpetuity" due to China's agreements with the WTO (for example), it's not difficult to notice that China uses its large holdings in US debt for political leverage.
[4] See Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso, 2007), 377.

Stolen Art and the Epistemes of Imperialism

Recently, on December 16th 2009, in the New York Times an article by Andrew Jacobs entitled China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums repeatedly bashed the Chinese government for their assertion that certain cultural relics held in western museums were in fact stolen from the Summer Palace in 1860. In the article a professor of Chinese Studies at Duke University referred to China as “An adolescent who took too many steroids” and made other culturally insensitive and provocative statements. Kang’s statements are misguided at best. James L. Hevia’s English Lessons: the Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, published by Duke University Press in 2003, tells the story of the reterritorialization of China and the brutal rampaging and burning of the Chinese Summer Palace in 1860, largely for the purpose of insuring that China would be forced to accept the importation of Opium against the Emperor’s wishes in 1860, at the hands of western imperial powers. Intricately related to this process, both military exhibitions and the production of knowledge aided western powers in their remapping of China in an image suitable to western interests.

With the second Opium War’s conclusion in 1860 China was forced to change. After seeing first hand the power of western military technology the Qing government sought to acquire similar weapons and hire Westerners to train their armies to use them. China clearly wanted these technologies to protect themselves from the changes which the English sought to introduce. A stipulation of a tariff conference in the Tianjin Treaty led directly to the Shanghai Tariff Conference, which Hevia explained for westerns meant they could reorder the thinking of Qing officials in terms of how westerners preferred to be dealt with in future delegations. The very manner in which the negotiations took place reordered the manner of Chinese official dealings with outside sovereigns and international traders. Westerners keenly sought to train the Chinese in how to approach western powers: on the terms that western powers wanted.

Among other arguments that Hevia makes, he claims that western domination in Asia was maintained through the development of comprehensive knowledge about peoples under imperial rule. The production of knowledge about China had a significant impact beyond the humiliation by military conquest and its accompanying looting, which obviously played a significant role as well. The process of epistemological development participated in the remapping of China into the image of a western nation. China was forced to learn the interstate game by western rules of protocol and etiquette; for China this meant interacting with other sovereigns at all.

Through the standardization of information and the creation of new and novel ways of knowing China and indeed its inhabitants that western writers, cartographers, and other participants were able to contribute to the cause of remapping China into the international community. These producers of knowledge narrated the western agent as a victim of Chinese aggression, while it was the European who was an unwelcome force in China. The settlements allotted by the treaties signed in 1860 gave westerners the right to appropriate space for themselves. This space provided for further educational opportunities for the Europeans to teach the Qing court of their interests, namely that they ought to be those of Britain. Hevia’s is a thick book, which is immensely quotable. Along with military might the production of novel epistemes also remapped, literally also, the geography of China.

Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer was quoted in Jacob’s article as saying the “The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” with reference to the stolen art held in German, American, British, and French museums, all of these powers having actively participated in the looting of the palace and following lessons in western diplomatic etiquette. Michael Conforti, president of the Association of the Art Museum Director, recently made the claim that we now live in what he calls a “post-repatriation environment.” In spite of his claim to the contrary repatriation of stolen art and artifacts is still actively ongoing. Whereas he and other possessors of stolen art would like to hold onto these pieces, perhaps their rightful place is in the hands of those to whom they belong. In a way the possession of these pillaged art pieces represents the whole brutal mentality of colonialism. Maybe with their return some of the wounds of the imperial project could begin to mend.