Old China Hands - Rogues or Heroes of the Revolution?

SHANGHAI FURY

Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China

By Peter Thompson, Heinemann, 530pp.

Plenty of  foreigners write plenty about China every day, from the fawning to the ferocious.  Many write with the best of intentions, doing their best to seem impartial and to "explain" China to readers. I've done that myself.  Others write for an audience that is inherently hostile to China, playing up the perceived threats and inferiorities of  a strengthening, but still alien, modern China.

Not many who write popular histories of China acknowledge that they are taking a specifically "foreign" point of view.

In  this book,  journalist and author Peter Thompson has sifted through the public records, autobiographies and newspaper files of  Australia, Britain and the English-speaking Treaty Ports of China prior to 1949, to remind the current generation of Australians about how many Australians played notable roles in Chinese affairs through the last years the Manchu Dynasty, through the 1911 birth, decline and fall of the Republic of China, and into the 1949 establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China under the iron control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Australians were among the earliest 19th Century opium traders, gunboat “free trade” opportunists, missionaries, scholars and adventurers of Canton, Shanghai and the Yangtze valley.   Some, like  G E Morrison and William Donald, combined influential journalistic careers with powerful inside advisory roles to important players in Chinese republican politics, from the Boxer Rebellion onward.

There were also a disreputable cast of opportunists, including some who collaborated with the Japanese regime occupying Shanghai 1939-45.

  

Numbers of Australian-Chinese took aspects of their Australian experience back to China.  The biggest Shanghai department stores, Sincere and Wing On, were founded by Australian-Chinese on Australian models, as were numerous progressive newspapers, trading houses and fledgling democratic movements.  The Australian links are generally ignored by American or European writers of Chinese histories.

Thompson's anecdotal history mainly reflects the views and recollections of non-Communist and anti-Communist particpants in Chinese affairs, as well as being an unapologetic chronicle of foreign interventions, big and small, in China. It may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect to modern sinophiles, but it is a good read for the non-specialist with an interest in modern China, or for the jaded specialist interested in a fresh overview. Having reported from China myself for five years in the past, I recognise that when it comes to Chinese history, the alien perspective may be as valid as the local.

Read my published review here...

Afghanistan - the West's Tar Baby?

Most Americans and many Australians (of a certain age) know the folksy tales of Brer Rabbit, read to us as children from the popular books by "Uncle Remus", in the style of African-American story-telling.

Most memorable to me was the tale of the Tar Baby, wherein one of Brer Rabbit's many enemies made a doll out of sticky tar and sat it in the road where Brer Rabbit was to pass by. The irascible Brer Rabbit, as expected, picked a fight with this mute, inanimate Tar Baby, and began strike it in anger, because the Tar Baby would not reply to his impertinent questions.  Brer Rabbit hit the Tar Baby with his right fist, and it stuck in the tar. Then he hit it with his left fist, which also stuck. Then he kicked it with left and right feet, becoming firmly stuck and helpless.  I forget how he lived to embarass himself another day.

The story came strongly to mind in reading Karen Middleton's new chronicle of how Australia, seeing its strategic advantages as bound tightly to the US government, has become further and further enmeshed in the conflict in Afghanistan, from which no exit is visible even when no credible good outcome can be predicted.

I've read and reviewed several books dealing generally with this conflict, but Middleton's is unique. She is a long-serving bureau chief in the political Press Gallery of the Australian Parliament in Canberra.  She was visiting Washington DC with Australia's then Prime Minister, the conservative John Howard, on 9 September 2001, and has followed every twist and turn of Australian policy and political debate on Australia's strategic engagements since then.

Sadly, Australia seems to be trapped in the same colonial mentality we have suffered since the first British colonies were established in 1788.  Governments of quite different political colours have rushed to answer the call for token support from whichever hegemon we were dependent upon, lest we be considered ungrateful for the supposed umbrella of protection we might, in future, wish to call upon.

Earlier colonial leaders used to get royal favours and knighthoods for their public loyalty to the British crown. Now the most they can expect is the occasional stroll in the White House rose garden,  a brief photo-opportunity on a White House portico for the Australian evening TV news, and a patronising affirmation that the USA "has no closer or more trusted ally" than Australia.  If invited to a White House karoke night, I recommend any Australian politician to rehearse that great American cultural export, Carole King's splendidly honest song "Will you still love me tomorrow?"

Karen Middleton's book is:

An Unwinnable War: Australia in Aghanistan
published by Melbourne University Press, September 2011.

Read my published review of Karen's book here...

Extreme Money - how financiers play us for fools on risk and debt

EXTREME MONEY: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk.
by Satyajit Das,
Penguin, 514pp.
Reviewed: 17 September 2011

The best economists are the not the best mathematicians. They are those with the most realistic appreciation of human nature. Too often, its the mathematicians and algorithm apostles who have garnered the Nobel Prizes for their construction of dizzying theses and techniques for the management of "risk".

Satyajit Das is an economist who worked decades in risk management for banks and investment houses, but he is also humane and no fundamentalist. He recognises a truth glaringly obvious to all but the economic fundamentalists and their self-serving acolytes. "The Market" is never pure, correct, or inevitable, except in hindsight. The unseen hand that guides the market, so beloved of those who fatten themselves on speculation with funds they have not earned, is no more than the sum of unequal interests.

The "market" will never be fair when knowledge is unequal. Every practical adult knows that and has experienced it in daily life. "Buyer Beware" may be an adequate baseline for barbarians, but when human societies try to be better than barbaric, we construct agreements and rules about how we will do business with each other.

Money is the way we measure exchange of goods and services. Finance is the tactics and technologies for directing the circulation of money, for any private or public purpose. Economics is the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services.

Styajit Das's book delivers a horrifying picture of how Extreme Money (under-regulated, manipulative finance) has corrupted both the world of money and the world of academic and government economics.

Masters of the Universe are the class of financial operators in Wall Street, London and their equivalents, who build, operate and protect a financial system based upon fake valuation of assets and the concealment of risks, so as to turn other people’s real savings into real losses, while the Masters pocket stupendous fees and “performance” bonuses for themselves.

Rarely do we understand the extent to which our personal risks can be manipulated by the financial Masters of the Universe, essentially to their own private benefit. Risk is abstracted, repackaged and traded by the financiers, using derivatives and hedging techniques, to the point that neither buyer nor seller really knows the risk (and therefore the value) of the instruments being transacted. Ultimately, buyers exchange cash for false expectations of security. The smarter financiers take their bonuses in cash.

Das exposes the shambles of a system characterized by bogus and failed economic market theory, a shamelessly rapacious finance industry, and a broad failure by governments to protect either their citizens or their productive industries from a finance industry driven by the most perverse incentives.

The Chicago School of Economics was espoused and funded enthusiastically from Wall Street, and has garnered several Nobel Prizes for economic theories that, when put into practice by financial institutions, have proved shallow and bankrupt. The fundamental flaw has been failure to account for the greed, fear, dishonesty and ignorance that drive opportunistic human behaviour in the real world.

Alan Greenspan, long-time Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had a lifelong ideological commitment to Ayn Rand extreme individualism, which blinded him and his like to all evidence of failure in de-regulationist neo-liberal finance policy. A whole generation of politically-favoured economists were essentially fundamentalists, who dismissed any contrary interpretations or inconvenient facts that did not suit their ideology.

The Masters of the Universe exploited these flawed policies to make personal billions from useless or destructive market manipulations, and the global economy still pays for that. Behind the financiers’ marble façade is a flimsy wooden shack riddled with termites.

Das's book is packed with facts, case studies and incidents to support its harsh polemic.

He quotes widely from ancient historians, industry insiders and even post-modern cultural critics to show that underlying issues of trust, governance and human market behaviour are as old as history and as present as the sun. Don’t believe anyone who says, “It’s different this time”.

Ultimately, the challenge is to the credibility of governments. Today, while financiers in Wall Street, London and Sydney resume their well-resourced rent-seeking campaigns, governments in all the capitalist democracies face a crisis of public confidence in their ability to manage their economies.

Read my published review here ..

Playing Games with the News - for good reasons

NEWSGAMES: Journalism at Play

by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Shweizer

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 235pp.

The role of journalism in shaping public opinion is always contentious. As information media proliferate, the traditional ethics and rationales are challenged by any number of media that draw upon current events as the basis for entertainment and propaganda. If this is not traditional "news" or "journalism", it is none the less a powerful influence shaping the world views, decisions, and behaviours of huge sections of populations.

In democracies, this matters.  Who could deny the power of media "personalities" to make, or more often to break, the public standing of a politician or opinion-leader?

Newsgames is the product of Ian Bogost - graduate of the MIT new media stream and now professor at Georgia Tech, together with two of his grad students (let's assume the grad students did most of the grunt work in collecting and collating examples and case studies).

The point of the book is to examine how "games" interact with the practice of journalism. Here the scope of "games" is extended to cover all forms of interactive simulations and graphics that are now available to the online world.  So it embraces quite a lot that might earlier have been described as "educational" material - but who wants education if you can call it games in stead?

It's any interesting read for anyone who cares about the role of information in our advanced democracies, and where future generations may go with the information media. Bogost  himself is a participant in this, not just an academic observer. His company "Persuasive Games" has been active in producing interactive news-based games that have enjoyed a degree of online success.  So you could read a bit of cross-promotion into the selection of numerous examples from Persuasive Games. I don't have a problem with that.

Read my published review here..

Insiders and experts tell us why Afghan engagement is futile

THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT AND AUSTRALIA'S ROLE
Edited by Amin Saikal.
Melbourne University Press. 210pp.
Reviewed: 30 July 2011
  
CABLES FROM KABUL
The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign.
By Sherard Cowper-Coles.
Harper Press.312pp.
Reviewed:  5 August 2011

INFERNAL TRIANGLE
Conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and The Levant – Eyewitness reports from the September 11 decade. By Paul McGeough.
Allen and Unwin. 338pp.
Reviewed: 5 August 2011

It was the burden of the prophetess Cassandra to see future doom, but her curse was that nobody would believe her warnings.

The bloody embrace of Western nations with Afghanistan is a situations in which everybody who knows what they are talking about realises that almost the entire Western engagement has been futile and even counter-productive.

The first of these books is a symposium of experts from a conference at the Centre for Islamic and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University.  All of them are area experts, several of them are Afghans, others are distinguished military strategists or social development activists.

Several contributors refer to the great needs for social development in Afghanistan - but none of these could convince me that the Western alliance could deliver such development in any way that would survive the imminent withdrawal of western military forces on the ground.

Most depressingly, the strategy experts (such as Prof Hugh White) question whether the missions, and particularly Australia's tag-along mission, were ever undertaken for good reasons.  We all remain hostage to the hegemonistic fantasies of the neo-con Bush administration.

Sadly, it seems that our own democratic societies are part of the problem. Our leaders can be overthrown by media-driven perceptions that they are "weak", so they struggle to avoid the appearance of anything that can be described as "defeat".  Military establishments and government advisers all try to avoid association with defeat, and so continue to pretend that "victory" is possible. It reminds me of stockbrokers and real estate agents constantly assuring investors that they will be OK "in the long run".

Cables from Kabul is a personal memoir of a classic kind. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is a classic kind of English establishment product, talented as well as privileged, who served as British Ambassador in Kabul and as the UK's Special Representative on Afghanistan during 2010.

His perspective is that the western alliance should have learned more from the accumulated history of failed imperial engagements with Afghanistan, particularly the experience of the British Empire a century or two ago. He is probably right. But making these points too often and too cheekily for Washington's taste eventaully caused embarassment in London, and thus put an end to his diplomatic career. We can be grateful for this - his memoir is a classic and fun to read, though the man himself might be difficult to get along with and shows a rather patronising attitude toward Australians (as well as Americans).

Infernal Triangle is a journalistic collection by distinguished war correpondent, Paul McGeough.  The collected despatches cover not only Afghanistan but also Iraq and Palestine (thus the Triangle).  He provides many useful perspectives - one being the interconnection between these different war zones.  Another is  that the chronological sequence of his reports shows his growing disillusion with the Western "project" to democratise Islam.  Western indulgence of Israel's expansionism is the common factor linking it all together,  because it defines the entire West as an enemy of Islam and, worse, as hypocritical.

It is sheer madness that our governments turn a willful blind eye to that obvious canker and obstacle to peace and development. Perhaps this is another artifact of our democractic subjection to determined propaganda. Let's never forget that Hitler came to power in Germany by democratic elections.   In our era, the real saboteurs of global peace are not Islamists, and not Zionists, but madcap Christian fundamentalists who terrorise American electoral politics (and some ill-informed elements of the Australian electorate as well).

Read the reviews for a rant-free evaluation of these three worthwhile books.

This blog may become less polite..

Two things have indicated it is time for a change of direction in The Lost Colophon.

First, I've upgraded my personal book reviews site at Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews so that the full text of reviews is easier to find.  The new pages present concise summaries and a dated list of links to all past reviews, which is easier to navigate than this public blog's format that hides everything in dated archives.  Who ever browses by dates???

So there's no more need to post extensive texts of my published reviews here.

Second, there are certain constraints and conventions in writing reviews for an established print medium such as The Canberra Times, the newspaper of Australia's national capital.  An a priori respect for the author, and  an attempt to be fair to the  written work, are reasonable premises from which to write a non-fiction review.  A reviewer should avoid grandstanding and self-promotion, while providing readers with the best possible understanding of the qualities and limitations of the work under review.

But this virtuous commitment to balance leaves little room for the reviewer to share, with his own readers, the essence of the reading experience: how did this book affect me?

So, as of now, The Lost Colophon will record the personal aspects of the book-review task as I experience it, stepping through current non-fiction works of authors who are trying to say something that is worth taking seriously.

I'll be talking about all the books I review, and referring interested readers to the reviews themselves at  Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews.

Is Victory worth the Price?

THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY: 
The True Costs of War. By Ian Bickerton. 
Melbourne University Press.241pp. 

Reviewed 14 May 2011

Our era of unresolved conflicts, between state and non-state antagonists with ill-defined or unstated goals, seems ripe for a review of the idea of victory.

Ian Bickerton is a senior historian at the University of New South Wales who has specialized in the study of US foreign policy and of conflict in the Middle East. He takes a dim view of war in general, and in this book, he tackles the problem of war backwards - rather than questioning the causes, he questions the results. The book hangs on his proposition that, in war, victory is an illusion, and in our current era has lost all meaning.

It's a fine topic for a vigorous debate, but first you have to define “victory”. Bickerton doesn't offer a concise definition, but he refers to “strategic victory” as imparting the ability to impose peace and stability, including within the politics of the defeated nations. That sets the bar quite high. My Oxford Dictionary defines victory more simply, at two levels: “the position or state of having overcome an enemy or adversary in battle, combat or war”; then “supremacy or superiority achieved as the result of armed conflict”. Bickerton's case is that victory of the first kind (overcoming an enemy in combat) does not guarantee any lasting strategic supremacy, superiority, or even peace for the nominal victors.

His analytical method is systematic but blunt. He takes a series of wars that involved Europe and/or America, from the Napoleonic to the "War on Terror", and lists what the “winners” demanded as their terms of victory.  He then checks the situation after twenty-five years. By his reckoning, almost never have the terms of victory turned out as the victors intended. In most cases, the “losers” have done at least as well as the winners. German and Japanese post-war industrial reconstruction are the classic examples.

On the other side of the ledger, he collates the vast human and material costs of war, which are as likely to have crippled generations of the winning side as of the losing side.

The horrors and costs of war have been recognized from the beginning of human history, but wars keep happening.  So is the idea of Victory really worth attacking in this day and age, or is it something of a straw man? Expectations of victory not be fulfilled, but does that prove that no war should never be fought?

The historical method ignores the counter-factual - what would have happened if there were no response, and no threat of response, to the temptation for a strong or angry party to use aggressive force? Bickerton quotes Ambrose Bierce that “peace is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting”, but his best alternative to war is “consideration of more creative political approaches to resolving differences between states, and between states and non-state groups”.

The human propensity for war seems intransigent, but not entirely beyond moderation.  Modern weaponry has vastly increased the rate of civilian casualties as "collateral damage" to combat - Bickerton says 90% of casualties in the Iraq conflict have been civilian. But the threat of mutually assured destruction, together with the greater accountability of governments to the governed, provides increasing restraint on the resort to warfare. On average, more democracy should mean less war.

So how is aggression is to be resisted or even discouraged?  Bickerton quotes Sun Tzu on the tactic of “defeating the enemy's strategy” by offering to meet the enemy's objectives by peaceful, mainly economic, inducements. He does not quote another part of Sun Tzu's Art of War, that the greatest general is he who wins the war without having to fight a battle - by isolating, encircling, bribing and intimidating a weakened adversary.

This is an interesting polemic that deserves to provoke debate.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites has reported on wars and politics, and participated in policy wars, but has so far avoided personal engagement in mortal combat.