Years of Poems and Spirits

Read 驻京办主任 (1 and 2) after Steve C recommended it. He asked me whether I can still “handle” China but I was interested in the central-local relationship.

The book is similar to a pretty stylized mini TV series: bad guys are bad all around and good guys are good inside out, “邪不压正”, etc. And there isn’t as much discussion of central-local tensions till the 2nd series, which, when it comes to that, is very revealing:

 驻京办的迅猛增长，正好契合了中央和地方分权的历史演变，其中尤以1994年中央与地方分税制改革之后为甚，自1994年的分税制改革以来，我国政府财政的集中程度不断提高。分税制的确立为中央政府的财政提供了制度性保障，也改变了中央政府在财政方面高度依赖于地方政府的局面。在财政不足的情况下，地方政府经济发展的任务和公共管理的职能却不断加重，财政支出的压力增大，这就使中央政府的财政转移支付，成了地方政府重要的收入来源。因此，驻京办兴盛的背后，是各部委资源配置权力太大，财政转移支付程序欠透明是一个重要原因，我认为驻京办不可能一撤了之。

Also, according to the book, the central transfers are often NOT included in local’s budgets! No wonder 驻京办事处 become so prominent and prevalent.

Two years ago, I’d thought this is abnormal and is something that can be amended by policy or institutional design. Now, I don’t think so any more: the central-local tension is part of China political economy that is beyond regime or even civilization (薄一波在他的《回顾》中说自建国以来，中国的经济一直是：一放就乱，一乱就紧，一紧就死，一死就叫，一叫又放。)

There is certainly an institutional design component: one may argue that focus on GDP, including the bias toward growth in cadre evaluation, calls for locals to game the system. Therefore, however hard the center tries, it still can’t make 全国一盘棋–even when provincial heads are centrally appointed.

But defects in institutional design do not explain prevalent corruption. Not even the misaligned center-local interests can explain that. In other words, you can have very clean local officials who still undermine national economy in pursuit of local interests.

Corruption seems to be best explained by property rights (and its principal-agent implication). A national economy has a certain amount of endowed assets–land, natural resources or labor that can only be mobilized politically. The marketization of those assets is often a monopolized process (because the assets are considered public), particularly when there is a pretty strong government (i.e. an agent of public interests).

The natural conclusion is that it is an ill that cannot be solved by political reform alone (e.g. corrupt but democratic countries like India). It may solve the agency problem but certainly not the rights ill.

But how can one privatize public assets and keep them efficiently deployed without creating injustice? I think this is the real question. Is Norway a possible exception to this? I really need to study the Scandinavian countries more …

Jon Lee Anderson: Fidel’s Heir

Just after I finished Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I came upon Anderson’s “extremely short” essay about Hugo Chávez. Convinced me more of my criticism of Arendt: in pursuit of an answer to the Holocaust, she stretched extreme instances of popular demagogy into “Totalitarianism”.

Chávez’s Venezuela is arguably at a midway point in the spectrum of demagogy: Chávez is not a total despot, for he does tolerate some opposition, submit himself to fair elections and accepts the results. Yet he is also very manipulative and inflamatory (e.g. how he humiliated Uribe in the Latin America summit meeting). In addition, he has two other traits Arendt would find interesting: appearing selfishless and has an international agenda.

Then there was Augusto Pinochet: who was not very popular (in a liberal sense) but very brutal. He is probably also somewhere on the spectrum. It is just very hard to demarcate what is true “Totalitarianism”. I don’t think Arendt found the right answer to Holocaust. If anything, she should have looked at the Continent during 1968 and find some solace in an emerging liberal civic culture.

To propose an alternative answer, I’d say that: for the Germans, there is always an element (however faint now) of collective romanticism and fanaticism in their cultural tradition. For the Russians, it is the Hobbesian distrust of each other and the longing for a powerful patriarch that led them to Stalin. Therefore, whether there is a countervailing force growing in each civic society is perhaps a much better indicator of how likely the past predicament will repeat itself.

A quick comment: very very painful to write again after school. But I am glad I tried.

Judith Thurman: First Impressions

Just a beautiful article. There is one paragraph talking about the short and possible interactions between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that is so very moving:

“They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn’t known from whom or from what they were retreating (if “retreat” describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship-the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence-nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.”

Book: The Origins of Totalitarianism

To put it harshly, The Origins of Totalitarianism is more like a political manifesto than a scientific thesis. The locus of Arendt’s work is the Holocaust hence the applicability and reasoning are rather questionable.

Arendt is not just any Jewish survivor. A student and a lover of the preeminent 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Arendt had rightfully consider herself a member of the upper echelon of the the Western civilization before, suddenly, she was nearly cannibalized by it. Therefore, for Arendt, the most pressing question for her was “what has gone so wrong”?

In pursuit of an answer to this question, Arendt chooses to forgo the cultural and historical peculiarity of the German nation but to extrapolate a general condition which she argues could forster a monsterous extremist regime.

A central character in her definition of Totalitarianism is the movement’s global aspiration. The existence of an ideology aiming for world domination (quotes needed) is a prerequisit. Although such a framework explains well Nazism and Communism, it fails to explain racial or ethnic triggered mass hysteria. Even today, as what used to be unthinkable in America (p 420 a country least exposed to mass psychology) becomes legal (e.g. warrantless surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, etc.), what the silent majority buy into is not a desire of world domination or salvation but “homeland” security.

Does Totalitarianism exist as one of the “-ism” of the 20th century? Or even, is there a “sin test”–I know it when I see it–of Totalitarianism? If mass murder of the innocent is a inevitable outcome of a Totalitarian regime, as Arendt suggests, the evidence in the late 20th century offers little support–one can hardly say that what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia were perpetrated by totalitarian regimes.

In other words, mass murder cannot happen unless the entire society goes along with a few fanatics. In her book, the chapter on “the classless society” is the one that I can relate to the most: fanaticism is possible when there is a breakdown of social orders (class not in the traditional Marxist sense). But even a chaotic social order is a necessary condition, it is clearly not a sufficient one. For Industrialization and Republicanization (French style) were both traumatic events in history yet not all societies lived through them became radical as did the German, Russian and Chinese nations. In France, the Dreyfus case–as extensively discussed by Arendt–is a case in point: there was clearly a suffocating antisemitic sentiment at the beginning, but it fizzled as quickly as it started (quotes needed).

Therefore, given similar social conditions, given that political and psychological manipulation is innate to human beings as there are demagogues in every historical period in every society, why some nations degerated into totalitarianism, but some did not?

Or, to put the question differently, if there exists a transcendent Totalitarian model, why did it not manifest itself every where, every time? Arendt herself in the 1950 preface says that she wrote the book “out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration”. Yet even after she seems to have identified many, if not all, of those mechanics, she has yet to convince me that the existence of those mechanics along is enough to breed Totalitarianism.

After the Holocaust, man finds itself still capable of watching massacres unfold in Rwanda and Balkan, and mass hysteria reign in North Korea and, most recently, South Africa. It appears that if history is of any guidance, what Arendt labels as “hidden mechanics” are not that “hidden” compared to something deeper underlying every holocaust.

My observation is that the likelihood of Totalitarianism is negatively related to the liberal tradition of a society. The liberal tradition refers to not only the depth but also the breadth of its societal penatration. In other words, a society that features a clan of intelligentsia and a huge disparity is as illiberal as one that features an undereducated mass.