Liu Xiaobo, the angry Nobel Peace laureate

NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED 
Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo,
ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, with foreword by Vaclav Havel 
Belknap Harvard Press, 355pp. 

Nobel Peace Prize laureates can be angry people.  Nobel himself spent a lifetime making explosives and selling armaments, then funded an annual prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Laureates have had warlike histories: Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger among a good few others. Most have had nothing to do with armies or peace congresses, but contributed to “fraternity between nations” by demonstrating moral confrontation against political power. Jose Ramos Horta, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama come to mind.

In 2010 the Peace Prize Committee infuriated the Chinese government by selecting Liu Xiaobo, then as now in a Chinese prison, charged with “incitement to subvert state power”. His “crimes” were purely literary, but enough to enrage the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

This book selects essays and commentaries published by Liu, at personal risk, in magazines and online from around the time of the 1989 Tian An Men incident through to Liu's final statement at his Beijing trial in December 2009.

Liu asserted then that he has “No enemies, no hatred”, but he spares nobody with his trenchant criticism of contemporary China. The Communist Party is his main target, but he also attacks less-radical Chinese intellectuals, dissidents, and those foreign fellow-travellers who make excuses for the Communist Party's refusal to grant fundamental human rights. You can't speak out like this without creating powerful enemies, and you won't persist with it unless you bear substantial reserves of anger. The line between anger and hatred is hard to define.

 The Chinese scholar-hero who dares to speak truth to power is an ancient tradition. But Liu writes off Confucius as a failure at politics who was only endorsed as a sage by later generations of dictators and emperors because he insisted on obedience to authority. Liu blames this for the “slave mentality” of modern Chinese toward their government.

Mostly, he argues for the establishment of individual rights within China. The Charter 08 document, drafted with other liberal intellectuals, attracted more than 12,000 signatories and embarrassed China's leadership in the year of the Beijing Olympics.  This provoked Liu's arrest and imprisonment for sedition.

Liu remind us what rights are currently denied to citizens of China. The separation of powers between constitution, government and judiciary, and the protection of private property including title to land, are things we have come to take for granted.

Charter 08 also calls for China to devolve its centralized system into a  “federation of democratic communities of China”. This would have sent China's right-wing neo-nationalists hopping mad, as well as the Communist Party centralists.

Liu despises the self-glorifying rhetoric that infects popular Chinese culture, the mythologizing of Chinese achievement far beyond reality, and the “bellicose and thuggish” attitudes to China's place in the world as it grows in economic strength. He angrily dismisses those Western commentators who over-praise and over-estimate China's past, its progress and its future, accusing them of naivety, patronizing fantasy, or self-serving attempts to ingratiate themselves with masters of the China growth gravy-train.

There's a lot of anger, for someone who professes to have "no hatred, no enemies".  He provokes reflections on Western society as well as on China's.

Richard Thwaites witnessed China's first modern movement for human rights in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1979, while Liu Xiaobo was a student.

Read my full review

How Short can be Western Thought?

A SHORT HISTORY OF WESTERN THOUGHT
By Stephen Trombley
Atlantic Books, 277pp

I'd like to master the history of Western thought in under 300 pages, but it seems a pretty steep challenge.

Stephen Trombley's publisher offered him the challenge, and he seems to have risen to it pretty well.

By "Thought" he means philosophy, and by "Western" he means the shared lineage from Greek and Judeo-Christian cultures.  By "history" he seems to mean a chronicle, setting aside as many personal prejudices as possible.

He does a pretty good job, considering the scope of the task.  I got a picture of who said what and when along the 2500-year timeline of  "Western Thought". This delivers an overview of what you might be taught in a formal study of Western philosophy, in some Western university.  We begin before Socrates when "philosophy" embraced all disciplines, from speculation on the physical world to religion and ethics.  We end with Philosophy as a relatively dry academic discipline concerned with the language-based processes of the human mind, and even there challenged for authority by the neurosciences and the persistence of faith-based teleologies.

Should we be surprised that the history is Eurocentric? I quarrel with his assertion “Judaism was the first monotheistic belief system”. The Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten is known to have promoted monotheism centuries before the Hebrews wrote a history asserting that they were the chosen people of the only valid God. We Westerners have been amplifying that political convenience ever since we embraced Judeo-Christianity, and wondering why others don't like us.

I would have liked to find reference to the influence of Indian philosophy on the West via Persia, Egypt and the Buddhist missions sent by Asoka (3rd century BC) to Syria, Egypt and Greece. There is good evidence for the influence of Buddhism on Plato and, indeed, on the teachings of Jesus.

Trombley's philosophical canon is limited to those who sought to discover system in the apparent chaos of human consciousness.  The closer we come to the present, the more diverse and complex is the range of philosophical positions to be summarized.  Are “how we behave” and “how we think” closely connected? Many philosophers have thought so, and some still do. How do we know what is real? A glance at any news page reminds us that belief is as remote from reason as ever, and no less powerful for the accumulated knowledge and philosophy of the centuries.

This is not hard to read. If you like the idea of wisdom, you will probably find this quick tour through centuries of hard thinking a pleasure and, at times, a challenge.

Read the full review

Intelligence crippled by ideology

INTEL WARS: The secret history of the fight against terror.

By Matthew M Aid,

Bloomsbury Press, 262pp.  

America spends $75billion per year on intelligence functions. It sounds a lot, but that is only about $250 per citizen.  The question for outsiders, and for questioning Americans, is why such a vast investment in intelligence seems to produce such patchy results.  We hear of the occasional coup such as the discovery of Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, but then we must ask why did it take ten years, given the resources put to it?

It's not as if the value of intelligence is a new idea. People who fight with sticks and stones rely on knowing where the enemy is and what he (or it) is likely to do next.  Arguably, modern technology gives governments greater capacity than they have ever had to keep tabs on people at home and abroad.

This book describes the disconnect between America’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.

It turns out the problems are, as usual, the human factors.  Agencies compete with and sabotage each other.  The flow of information overwhelms the ability to analyze it.

Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the US intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. 

He is most critical of the political messes bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.

This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.

Read the full review here..

Is political hatred the product or the tool?

THE NEW HATE:
A history of fear and loathing on the populist right.  

By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.

It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right.  Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.

Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city.  In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.

Thinking people of all persuasions share a broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists.  It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes.  Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs.  Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.

So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy?  Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity.  Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate.  The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying.  He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about America’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.

Deng Xiaoping's life story - a true modern epic

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA.

By Ezra Vogel, Belknap Harvard, 876pp. 

In China, they play politics seriously.  We need to know how things work there, and this book will help.

From one man’s navigation through six decades of Chinese politics, we can learn much about the choices we humans make about how our societies are to be governed. Blow away the fog of ideology, and Deng Xiaoping’s choices, loyalties and betrayals could as well take place in ancient Rome or modern Washington as in Beijing. Deng’s personal saga of the acquisition, application and retention of power might attract a future Shakespeare, but for contemporary readers it's instructive to understand how this particular man,  more than any other, delivered 20^th Century China from its Maoist hell into the vital, but still turbulent, economic powerhouse we see today.

All the evidence suggests that Deng, since his days as a 16-year old Communist student in France in the 1920s, Deng never budged on the one principle that all power in China must be centralized through the Communist Party.  Communist ideology provided some core principles and objectives for the Communist program, but its main function was to define discipline and solidarity to maintain the Party's grip on power.

After the death of Chairman Mao, Deng fought bitter battles within the Communist Party leadership to promote economic liberalization, but did not hesitate to crack down hard, whether on life-long Communist colleagues or on Western-influenced student dissidents, whenever he sensed any serious challenge to the absolute power and authority of the Party.

Deng's Leninist conviction on the central role of the Party never wavered even when nepotism and corruption among the Party elite caused deep resentment among the population.  A few junior crooks could be shot, and senior ones humiliated, but the Party’s hold on power must not be challenged.

Deng’s survival through savage intra-Party struggles and ultimate rise to the top is an epic in itself.  This could be compared to surviving at the court of King Henry VIII.  Deng’s reputation for effectiveness and Party loyalty meant he always had protectors when he needed them, whereas many equally loyal but less judicious Communists were destroyed utterly by Mao, or in his name.

Any organization that sets itself above the law, as the Chinese Communist Party has always done, may fall to subversion by dominant individuals.  By the late 1960s Mao Zedong had established a virtual monarchy.  After Mao, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the one figure with the deep personal support base, and the tactical skill, to bring bitterly divided Party factions together into a viable, common program that bypassed the leftist conservatives. 

Deng in later years enjoyed recognition as “paramount leader” or “supreme leader”, but he never held or claimed Mao’s absolute authority, and he largely avoided the dangers of a personality cult.  Deng would cautiously place chosen people in key positions and wait for an alignment of events that favoured his next challenge to opponents within the Party.

There’s no evidence that Deng Xiaoping had any interest in broadening democracy for China, although there were times when he acted and spoke to mobilize liberal intellectuals, at home and abroad, so as to put heat on more conservative Communist colleagues.  Deng had promoted the capable and popular liberal Party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for their reforming vigour and openness, but when Hu and later Zhao provoked strong reactions from conservatives, whose support Deng needed at the time, he ended both their careers with very public humiliations - sacrifices on the altar of Party unity.

Vogel is a veteran sinologist who has accessed a wide range of Chinese and foreign sources, including some personal interviews with surviving key players or those close to them.  He assembles insights never available to those of us who were trying to cover these events as they occurred. 

Because of the Party’s vigilance, sinologists are often reluctant to jeopardize future access to their privileged sources. Vogel abstains from challenging the Communist Party’s central claim that China can have only Leninist one-party rule, or chaos.  He notes, however, that memoirs of key figures, including former liberal Premier Zhao Ziyang and conservative politician Deng Liqun, could not be published in China, but were published in Hong Kong.

Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in Beijing in the years Deng Xiaoping achieved pre-eminence in China’s leadership, 1978-83.

Read the full review here..

How Humans made Words, and Words made us Human

PLANET WORD:

The story of language from the earliest grunts to Twitter and beyond.  

By J.P. Davidson, Michael Joseph, 445pp.

As books become easier to write and easier to sell, each book becomes harder to sell. Publishers are finding one of the most reliable strategies is the tie-in between a book and another medium, especially TV.  Public broadcasters can't rely so much on the celebrity endorsement power of TV book clubs and the like, but they can anticipate that audience that watches public TV overlaps pretty strongly with habitual book-buyers.

It also overlaps pretty well with those people who enjoy language as an art, and may toy with questions about the philosophy and history of language.  

John Davidson, is an anthropologist and long-time BBC documentary producer of travel and exploration programs hosted by personalities like Michael Palin and Stephen Fry. This book is the “companion” to accompany a new BBC TV documentary series, presented by the over-eloquent Stephen Fry.

Like a TV show, the book sets out to be serious in an entertaining way. It tries not to be boring and doesn't demand too much extended concentration. It is packed with little gee-whizz facts and personal anecdotes that hold attention. As a book, this takes us back to the days before television or radio, when families used to read encyclopaedias and non-fiction miscellanies for entertainment and self-improvement.  Now we can get lost in a maze of hyperlinks on Wikipedia, launched from any conceivable Internet query.

Davidson and Fry fossick like gentlemen explorers across a vast terrain of human language,  beginning with the most primitive indications of language in animals, and the extent to which the human body and brain are shaped for language.

They examine how language is used to build our identities as individuals and as members of communities, and how language is harnessed for purposes of political nationalism. 

This book is itself a solid object you can hold in your hand and admire on a shelf, nicely designed and built to last, as a classy hardback on good quality paper, generously illustrated and with an attractive slip-cover.  An entertaining and handsome book about words not the last place you would expect to find the name of the printer Gutenberg misspelt as "Gutenburg", among other proofing errors.

Read the full review here..

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...