Category Archives: Books

..reforming the banking system is thus fraught with danger

In 2005, Chinese banks began a series of reforms to bring their practices gradually into line with Western standards. .. The question is whether Chinese banks are reformable. The subject may appear technical, but it lies at the heart of the Communist system.

The central government needs better-managed banks that can finance rational activities, because if the banks went bankrupt and the investors lost their money, the Party would collapse. But if banks functioned rationally, they would no longer be at the beck and call of the local Party bosses to whom no bank can currently refuse a loan. The loans prop up unproductive local firms that provide jobs and perks. Without the loans, the cadres would lose their influence and public-sector jobs would dry up. Students would suffer, too: banks would stop giving them loans, knowing that they would never return the money. As things stand, they dare not ask these future cadres to honor their debts. Reforming the banking system is thus fraught with danger. There could be a student revolt, thousands of loss-making enterprises could close down, and the local bosses could become toothless.

How will the Party reconcile these conflicting pulls and pressures? Will it be able to avoid bankruptcy by adopting more rational policies, and at the same time guarantee social stability by maintaining the local chiefs’ power to grant loans? Who will be hit first: local cadres, students, the new unemployed, or the financial system?  Chinese leaders and foreign investors keep their fingers crossed.

- Guy Sorman, The Empire of Lies (2006)

..the most repressive city in China

China is certainly large enough to accommodate two financial cities, Hong Kong and Shanghai, just as Frankfurt and London coexist in Europe. What Shanghai lacks, though, is a stable legal and business climate, the comfort factor identified by the HSBC chairman. And there is no indication that things are about to change in the near future.In fact, change seems less likely in Shanghai than in other Chinese cities because it is even more closely watched by security agents and the Propaganda Department. In Beijing and Guangzhou, some journalists, writers and lawyers manage to get past the police net and have their say, but in Shanghai, the merest hint of dissident behavior is enough to put one behind bars. Shanghai is the most repressive city in China. Several student and worker movements, some democratic, others not, started here. It was here that the Communist Party took root in 1925. For this reason, the current leaders do not permit any freedom of expression. [..] Shanghai is nothing but a facade of modernity erected by the Party, which pursues its vision of what the China of tomorrow should look like. Foreigners on a hurried visit tend to lose their critical faculties the moment they land in China. They gaze, wonderstruck, at the facade erected for their benefit.

- Guy Sorman, The Empire of Lies (2006)

..the new law has not provided for such an eventuality

One-third of Shanghai’s 17 million inhabitants are migrants, yet it is virtually impossible for them to become citizens with their identity cards, which in principle give them access to public services.  In Shanghai, as in all other Chinese cities, there is a sort of local nationality by blood. With the winds of reform blowing over the city in the Year of the Rooster, the municipality has decided to issue local identity cards on the basis of marriage, but the conditions are so restrictive that they appear ridiculous. A non-Shanghai woman married to a Shanghai man can get nationality after fifteen years of her marriage, which means the couple’s children will automatically become citizens of Shanghai, as nationality is handed down by the mother. The authors of this daring innovation told me, though, that a man from Shanghai would have to be very “poor or handicapped” to marry a “foreigner”. What happens if a non-Shanghai man marries a Shanghai woman? I asked. The new law has not provided for such an eventuality, they told me at the mayor’s office, because it was unthinkable that a Shanghai woman would marry an “outsider”.

Town-hall officials said that if all immigrants were granted citizenship, by marriage or otherwise, they would flood schools nad hospitals and demand public housing. The city’s infrastructure wouldn’t be able to take the load. Were the news to spread to the countryside, millions would flock to Shanghai, creating huge ghettos around the city.

- Guy Sorman, The Empire of Lies (2006)

Book roundup: Asle Toje, Gösta Hammarlund, A. N. Wilson, Okakura Kakuzō

Asle Toje - The European Union as a Small Power - After the Post-Cold War (2010)

Asle Toje – The European Union as a Small Power – After the Post-Cold War (2010)

The EU talks and dreams big, but is too unfocused to act on the global stage as a genuine great power.  Toje argues that it is best understood as a small power, the middle layer of the international arena, an entity whose interests must be reckoned with by others, but has limited influence on its own outside its immediate neighbourhood.

Recommended: Yes.

Gösta Hammarlund – Hammarlund ’44

These cartoons from Dagbladet in 1944 are the worst newspaper cartoons I have ever seen.  There is nothing interesting about them, not a hint of talent.  This may in fact be the most useless second-hand book purchase I have ever made.

Recommended: Can I burn it?  Can I?  Can I?

A. N. Wilson - After the Victorians - The decline of Britain in the world

A. N. Wilson – After the Victorians – The Decline of Britain in the World (2005)

I don’t mind at all an intuitive and opinionated approach to history, where one tries to get a feel for the age beyond what a list of events will provide, as long as the head in the skies is matched by feet on the ground.  That seems to be the case here.

Recommended: Yes.

Okakura Kakuzō – The Book of Tea (1906)

Eplains the tea ceremony as a Zen/Taoism-inspired attempt at creating beauty out of the mundane.

Recommended: Yes, but mostly for the even more interesting details it hints at.

..the comparative cheapness of air power

The comparative cheapness of air power, versus manpower, had been demonstrated first in Somaliland, then in Afghanistan. In Somaliland, Mullah Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, inspired by memories of the Mahdi’s holy war with the British in the times of General Gordon, excited a huge following. He claimed magical powers. His followers believed that he could push whole towns into the sea with his feet. No fewer than four British expeditions were mounted against him between 1904 and 1918, killing thousands of the mullah’s men and expensively engaging thousands of British troops. On 21 January 1920 the first RAF bombing raid was sent against him at Medishe. A mere 36 officers, with 189 enlisted men and one flight of six DH9 bombers, visited the mullah’s fort twice daily. Within a month, the mullah had escaped to Abyssinia and the RAF men were back in Britain. The total of British casualties was two native soldiers. Churchill told the House of Commons that it would have cost £6 million to mount a conventional land assault on the mullah; the RAF campaign had cost £70,000.

The emir of Afghanistan was the next to be subjected to RAF bombing raids. In 1919 he had declared jihad against British troops in the North West Frontier of India. The RAF shipped one Handley Page V/1500 bomber to Kabul, where it dropped four 112-pound and sixteen 20-pound bombs. ‘Napoleon’s presence was said to be worth an army corps, but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did,’ wrote Basil Liddell Hart.

- A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians (2005)

..hideously in tune with his times

When an artist dies young there is a tendency to overpraise. Pound, however, was not given to that tendency. He saw in Gaudier ‘the most absolute case of genius I’ve ever run into’. What makes this death so continuingly haunting is that Gaudier-Brzeska’s vision of Europe, its art, its culture, and the moment it had reached, was not at variance with the war which killed him. Quite the contrary. The anti-war poets and artists of this period tended either to be of poor artistic capability or to be retrospetive in their hatreds – or both. Gaudier-Brzeska, hideously in tune with his times, embraced the struggle and saluted the violence. The huge numbers being slaughtered reduced the sense of each and every person being of unique value. As in modernist sculptures, men became almost indistinguishable from the tanks or submarines in which they set out to destroy one another, bringing about deaths in numbers which had hitherto only been known in slaughterhouses. From the nameless cannon-fodder arose an inevitable of vision of humanity as something less than what it had once been – of people as ‘the masses’, scarcely distinguishable from one another. They awaited men of genius to lead or inspire them.

- A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians (2005)

..something had died in the night, and no one had noticed

The etiolated lyrics of the English Edwardian poets, followed by the feeble poetic productions of the years which followed, should sound a warning note; something has gone out of the mixture. We are drinking a martini cocktail in which someone has forgotten to put the spirits. Yeats, speaking of the high horse in whose saddle Homer rode, found it in his day to be ‘riderless’.

It was this fact which the young Ezra Pound, however tiresome he might seem to us, could feel. It was something much more than the mere coincidence, which happens every few decades in any literary culture, that apart from the Irishman Yeats and the old Thomas Hardy there were so few poets of any stature writing in Britain in 1908. It was something much deeper than that. Something had died in the night, and no one had noticed.  We are told that the Edwardian period was some kind of glory age, the last summer afternoon before the storm, the brightly lit house party before they all went to die in the mud. Of course on sees how such a perception can be formed. But it might be truer to say that the culture which could allow itself to move into the First World War was one which was already moribund, morbid.

- A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians (2005)

Book roundup: Robert Paarlberg, Fa’iz El-Ghusein, Det hendte 75

Robert Paarlberg - Food Politics - What Everyone Needs to Know

Robert Paarlberg – Food Politics – What Everyone Needs to Know (2010)

All the big issues in food politics, such as international food prices, food scarcity, genetic modification, subsidies, and obesity.  Surveys the current state of things, and what the different sides believe.  Seems even-handed, though the left won’t like his siding with agricultural science and economics, and I find it shocking how easily he dismisses individual choice as a factor in healthy eating.

Recommended: Yes.

Fa’iz El-Ghusein – Martyred Armenia (1917)

A genocide is just an abstract number until you’ve read the eyewitness account of someone who has stood and cried over the corpses of raped women, lying forgotten by the road.

Recommended: Yes, but the translator has decided to leave out the most gruesome details, (hard as this may be to believe).  Why is there no new translation?

Det hendte 75

All the events of 1975 that you can remember, and some that you can’t, such as the wonderful news that the troubles in Cambodia are over at last.

Recommended: Yes.  Such summaries are almost worthless at the time when they’re published, but when you read them four decades later they illuminate all the concerns and blind spots of their age.

..so I shall make you an example to all who see you

On the arrival of a batch of Armenians at Deir-el-Zûr from Ras-el-Ain, the Mutesarrif desired to choose a servant-girl from amongst the women. His eye fell on a handsome girl, and he went up to her, but on his approach she turned white and was about to fall. He told her not to be afraid, and ordered his servant to take her to his house. On returning thither he asked the reason for her terror of him, and she told him that she and her mother had been sent from Ras-el-Ain in charge of a Circassian gendarme, many other Armenian women being with them. On the way, the gendarme called her mother, and told her to give him her money, or he would kill her; she said she had none, so he tortured her till she gave him six liras. He said to her: “You liar! You [Armenians] never cease lying. You have seen what has befallen, and will befall, all Armenians, but you will not take warning, so I shall make you an example to all who see you.” Then he cut off her hands with his dagger, one after the other, then both her feet, all in sight of her daughter, whom he then took aside and violated, whilst her mother, in a dying state, witnessed the act. “And when I saw you approach, I remembered my mother’s fate and dreaded you, thinking that you would treat me as the gendarme treated my mother and myself, before each other’s eyes.”

- Fa’iz El-Ghusein, Martyred Armenia (1917)

Book roundup: Mikael Jalving, George Sutherland, Jo Benkow

Mikael Jalving - Absolut Sverige

Mikael Jalving – Absolut Sverige (2011)

When it seems that the Norwegian multiculturalism debate is stuck in an unproductive track, flirting nervously with a reality we fear does not respect our ideals, trying to see how few concessions to it we can get away with accepting, I do as the sport fans do, and take comfort in knowing that at least we’re better off than the Swedes.

Recommended: Yes.

George Sutherland – Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast (1901)

You do know that all predictions are worthless, right?  I see you nodding, and yet afterwards you go off and predict stuff.  Ah well.  Behold George Sutherland, ye haughty, and despair.

Recommended: Some of it, while other parts are too technical. The chapters on road and rail and warfare alone should suffice to prove that you’re being an idiot by even trying to forecast the future.  (Again I see you nodding, and then you think “well, he doesn’t mean the kind of predictions I make”.  But I do.  I do.)

Jo Benkow – Fra synagogen til Løvebakken (1985)

An account of Benkow’s life in the Norwegian Jewish community before and after the Holocaust.

Recommended: Weakly, for its perspective, not for its writing.