How to understand the recent spate of impassioned protests in China, officially against the Japanese ownership of some small islands, but clearly signifying more than just that? It is turmoil at least as significant as what’s occurring in the Muslim world, as it has political machinations behind it connected to political infighting and jockeying within the Chinese Communist Party.
So to truly understand it, you’d need to a) know about that inside party baseball, and b) everything relevant about Chinese society. That is, we can’t understand it properly. The following post WILL contain misunderstandings. Guaranteed.
But in the West, with us often fed bloodless Economist-style international reporting, you need an angle to even understand how wild things have been in recent weeks and days. You need to begin somewhere.
You need something like Ampontan, a pro-Japanese American ex-pat’s blog (a guy even wordier on Japan than I am on Rock), to really begin to see the story’s significance. If readers want to offer up good “China-hand” blogs as a counterweight, fine, but Ampontan’s posts on the recent crisis reveals so much more than you will find in the typical reporting.
Again, actual war is unlikely, but if there’s any incident in the next few days at sea, or in either Japan or China (or even here), where a Japanese official or citizen seems to have killed a Chinese one, China could seriously explode.
To get a taste of how impassioned the anti-Japan protests in China have gotten, thankfully so far without any Japanese getting killed, try this Ampontan post. It’s particularly interesting for showing how, with less volume and participation, there have simultaneously been anti-regime protests, such as one with a banner calling for “Constitutionalism.” Or the one with “30 Grievances.”
Everything seems to be up in the air over there!
His most recent post shows the truly massive (and Cultural Revolution recalling) deployments of the Army and Police, to restrain the protests, and contains two statements of his that as far as I can tell sum things up pretty well:
They [the Chinese now denouncing the protests] know the demonstrations were organized in advance, and they’ve developed a composite portrait of the people those were most actively involved: Males in their 20s with close cropped hair, speaking regional dialects, who are disciplined, ruthless, brainless, and arrived in groups simultaneously on buses. That suggests either the military or the armed police.
So you see why the inside-baseball stuff is key:
In short, this has been a patriot game played at the home stadium using the Japanese as the ball. The organizers’ idea seems to have been to create a greater wave of patriotism throughout the nation, which would give the conservatives (the Jiang faction) a chance to recover their status.
Some in China think they might have overplayed their hand by bringing back memories of the Cultural Revolution and presenting the country in a bad light overseas. This, they think (hope) will encourage reformers.
Read the whole thing. Okay, if you want official media, here’s the NYT: note the fact that some of the “protesters” are asking the Western male reporters present if they have “Chinese girlfriends.” I hope they all know the correct answer to that one.
And I can’t resist duplicating here one of Ampontan’s images:
That’s what you see as a Chinese shopper these days! A Saran-wrap canon. And you thought “freedom fries” were ridiculous, did you?
Yeah, as we pray that no Japanese manager at any of the hundreds of factories they have in China gets killed, and especially that there is no incident in which they kill a Chinese person, you can throw out those ideas about commerce between nations naturally developing friendship and making war between them unthinkable, right along with yesterday’s plastic wrap.
Let’s give Polystyrene the last words:
I dreamt that I was Hitler!
The ruler of the sea! …the ruler of the universe! …the ruler of the Supermarket? And even, fatalistic me.
X-Ray Specs,“Plastic Bag”
September 19th, 2012 | 7:44 pm
Pretty cool and it catches your attention as a shopper. I mean there was actually a cannon or more accurately a “howitzer” that was made from toothpaste at the Fort Sill PX. (home of the fire center and field artillery..probably a shot you could have gotten with an american flag background).
In the background there looks to be a western european woman, no doubt selling some sort of “Oprah” approved product.
If Japan and China want to butt heads over nationalistic exceptionalism then so be it…Go Jiang faction!(It also seems in accord with Chung) But at least here it seems the picture is worth 1000 english words, but one Japanese term: Muda.
Everything about the picture from the tile floor to the interior warehouse style heating/cooling ducts to the neon lights speaks to a sort of stuck in a Wal-Mart, world is flat, end of history. (everything about the products offered for sale, and their intended function/ utility, seems peaceful).
That all these products seem to exist in a sort of sterile market, where no shoppers are seen lends a different aspect to the picture, one where perhaps western branding of modernity and its indicia has been impossed upon China, by its desire to manufacture and produce for the west. (Where are the chineese who are buying it?) So China equals tons of inventory…low consumer demand? (mismatched products?)
“To get a taste of how impassioned the anti-Japan protests in China have gotten, thankfully so far without any Japanese getting killed.”
So now it is okay to use words like “Impassioned” and other exagerations without an actual body count?
End of History.
The “I dreamt that I was Hitler” is just plain strange…It only makes sense as an effort to extend rhetorical exageration of relatively peaceful conditions. It is also the sort of “poetry” that would be banned in Germany(against provisitions of the German Constitution, bright line eternal rule against dreaming you are Hitler.).
Of course Germany, Japan and China are 2/3rds of the Axis and 2/3rds of world manufacturing. The wars they are most likely to engage in according to the economists would be trade wars, especially given the fact that all three to varying degree “suffer” from government stimulated productivity/overproduction. (Thus the key part of the picture, lack of chinese consumers…too much indicia of the western ideal/consumer demand). Tons of products not enough customers or “dollars”. Which makes sense in a way because Germany, Japan and China to a lesser extent are really grand projects of american exceptionalism(monetary system) post world war II.
The Cannon I suppose is important to China the more nationalistic version…but it might soon object to american style stores too full of products and inventory (so much inventory that you can build permanent monuments out of it…the real reason american stores have fewer cannons, it is just an inneficient use of shelf space+inventory(partial agreement with the Japanese on Muda.)
Also the chinese hate the Japanese because the Chinese have “huge advantages” in inventory and production. But the Japanese denigrate all of this as Muda. While Japanese Muda is at least somewhat arguable, China hasn’t figured a way to make this exceptionalism argument. So all of China’s virtues are mocked as examples of Muda.
Basically “production” without a consumer, parts without a product, things designed without a proper spec… But the Japanese and here Toyota, Honda et al, don’t really let the Chinese compete, and the new models they come out with aren’t designed to use Chinese inventory (which was often times produced via corporate espionage). China equals millions of parts, no unified vision as to how to put them together. China =warehouses full of inventory that is almost the “right stuff” in a line of manufacturing business where precision counts for more than it does in Aristotle.
China is thus the anti-lean manufacturing model, and thus the Japanese in addition to being regional export competitors are also propigators of a general philosophy of technical precision that denigrates every aspect of the Chinese economy as Muda.
Of more importance than the cannon is the fact that all those products are sitting on a shelf and exist in such a quantity that a cannon could be made of them. Overproduction, waiting, unnecessary inventory…three aspects of Muda condensed into a single picuture in a store without customers! An epic failure which brings shame to the Chineese people and its flag, compounded by the presence of european models presumably selling goods designed for China? (no in fact, all the goods are designed for Japan, or the U.S. or Germany.. export economy goods insulting to Li and Chung, This is alienated Muda, that strangely enough is non-alienable(sellable).
So in a trade war type of way one could say that the Japanese concept of Muda is very much in tension with China’s economic reality and the principle of Li and Chung. So china hasn’t found its angle, its exceptionalism, its pricing power, and so much of Japanese exceptionalism is Chinese weakness.