The Gulag Archipelago no more

A place of slavery, degradation and death no more, the Siberia of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's rendition is but a shadow of the past.

Today, the Siberian landmass comprising Russia's Asian hinterland, and the size of the U.S.A. and India put together, is coveted by China.   

Siberia is oil and mineral rich, and very under populated for its size, while China is overpopulated, and being the world's factory, as it were, needs raw materials available aplenty in neighboring Siberia.

Most importantly, the border between the Sino-Russian border that allocates Siberia to Russia, was arbitrarily drawn during the Peking Convention of 1860 when China was significantly weakened by the Second Opium War.

Borders, as put eloquently by Frank Jacobs, are like love and are real only both sides believe in it. China's belief in the immanence of the border is wavering as its fortunes in geopolitics has been tremendously reversed since 1860.

Maps of the world were largely drawn by the Western powers; they are up for redrawing. China could very well bugger Russia with the logic of the same pointy stick that Russia has buggered Crimea with.

The new imperialist in town

China!

And the new imperialist has no civilizing mission at stake unlike previous colonizers from Europe, and their American progenies. China only lends capital, invests and buys up, without imposing values of democracy or freedom or human rights.

While the emperor wears new clothes, the victims of imperialism pretty much remains the same--Africa.

China Shining

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence in "The Shining" 

You can't forget the scene in Stanley Kubrick's psychological thriller, The Shining. Jack Torrence would stick his face from behind drawn curtains and utter, "Heerrrrr's Johnny!" to scare the brains out of his son Danny.

Imagine Jack in a different setting, let's say an abstract global setting, perched atop a vantage point somewhere between the global North and the South and announcing "Heerrrrr's China! !" Would he spook people out?

Contending powers like America, might be nervous to know that China is indeed "here", as a superpower, as is evidenced by this blurb of its influence in the world today:

To fuel its export engine China, has scoured the world to acquire energy, minerals and other natural resources and has emerged as the biggest donor of aid to Africa. By 2035, China will be consuming a fifth of all global energy; it already buys 22 percent of Australian raw material exports, 12 percent of Brazil's and 10 percent of South Africa's exports. China’s own export clout has been translated to a record reserve of 3 trillion dollars, some 900 billion dollars of which consists of US debt. A wealthy China has emerged as a helper in a financial crisis. Chinese purchase of Greek government bonds helped to diffuse the country’s recent crisis. If additional proof was needed for China’s rise as a global economic superpower it came in December 2010 when Portuguese officials traveled to China to seek its help in averting a Greek-style default.

Titanic To Be Cloned By Chinese

The Chinese, I feel, have an interesting take on everything. 

This is what they have taken from James Cameron's 1998 blockbuster, Titanic: That the film is not just a love story, but a celebration of the noblest aspects of human nature.

Thus for 1 billion renminbi the Chinese will clone the Titanic and name it Titanic II. Titanic II will be permanently berthed as the main attraction in a Chinese theme park in the Province of Sichuan. Theme park visitors can experience not only the pleasure of being inside a fabulous luxury liner, but also the pleasure of being part of history.

The goal is to teach people a lesson of responsibility in the face of a monumental catastrophe. 

A spokesperson for Seven Star, a shipbuilding corporation in China, claims that the Titanic represents the "pinnacle of the spirit of human responsibility" and could teach Easterners the value of "responsibility". There is a implied nationalistic message in this.

In the parlance of Chinese nationalism, being "responsible" could mean putting the larger interest of the nation before the selfish interests of the a individual.

The one Western thought that stands out in my mind about the sinking of the Titanic is that of memory and death. Western intellectuals, in love more often than not with the aesthetics of an experience over the moral lessons of it, have said that we remember the Titanic precisely because it died at the moment, as it were, of its inception. Had the Titanic lived on to become one of the many luxury liners that have sailed the seas, we would simply have regarded it as yet another engineering marvel.

But to the Chinese the lesson of the titanic is not in aesthetics; it's another occasion to call upon the people to develop their nationalistic muscles.

Black is the coolest color: Tale of a Chinese lesbian

Following in the footsteps of the French exploration of lesbian sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Color, is a Chinese American one, called Saving Face.

Chinese Farce?

The Chinese government is planning to engineer yet another migration of its population. Within the next few years, China intends to "move" around 250 million people from the countryside to the cities. The idea is to push farmers from self-sustenance to an economy of consumerism.

China hopes that this will give its economy a humungous boost.

Not too long ago, the Chinese, under Mao Ze Dong, were forced to migrate from the cities to the countryside, so as to teach the urban intelligentsia the "lesson" of self-sustenance, because the Mao regime thought of them to be "parasites" living off the labor of the producer-class, including farmers.

As Marx is said to have said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

A Chinese corpse bride

"The Cremator" directed by the Chinese Peng Tao 

Censorship, in some form or the other, exists in all countries, with perhaps the exception of culturally progressive nations of Europe and Scandinavia.

Chinese authorities censor films on grounds of violence, sex and nudity. However, films like Peng Tao's "The Cremator" also risk being censored and/or banned because of its subject matter.

"The Cremator" explores the real-life Chinese custom of “ghost marriages — matchmaking for the dead to ward off loneliness in the afterlife, a practice that still occurs in some parts of rural China. The movie follows an unassuming undertaker who helps facilitate ghost marriages for cash in his poor town. When he faces a terminal illness, the undertaker makes his own ghost bride from a pretty young woman’s unclaimed corpse. But real life interjects in the form of his dead bride-to-be’s living sister, and the undertaker has a strange relationship with the sister.

It's love at first sight for me personally when I read of such stories. But for Chinese authorities, the film may be foregrounding superstition that has always been a particular anathema of the Communist establishment in China.

Here is a review of the film, and here is a list of films banned over the years, for a variety of reasons, in the United States.

Subwordsion

I recall reading something on censorship and artistic expression by J.M. Coetzee. He was using a poem where an African National Congress member couldn't directly report on the death from torture, suffered by a fellow ANC activist, during South Africa's regime of Apartheid. 

Ingeniously, he composed a poem on how the prisoner, repeatedly slipped and fell on a bar of soap, till he fell and broke into smithereens, inside his prison cell.

Words, Coetzee says, can help bypass censorship and yet evoke the truth that the writer wishes to convey.

Popular Chinese novelist, Yu Hua, uses a similar linguistic tactic in China in Ten Words, his nonfiction accounting of modern day China.

The ten words are as follows: people, leader, reading, writing, revolution,disparity, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer). None of these words are banned in China, but they are used subversively by the writer. 

Here is an instance of that indirect journey of subversion that a word like "people" makes in Hua's book: It's a positive word used by the Chinese state very frequently to suggest complete democracy and "people's power." Hua, co opts the word from the bureaucratic lexicon and creates an occasion to discuss the Tienanmen Square incident of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese army opened fire on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators.

Chinese ambiguity

While two of James Joyce's most difficult of novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, have enjoyed near-best-selling status (sale of Finnegans exceeded 8000, while Ulyssees sold 85,000 copies upon publication in 1994), the Chinese ministry of culture refuses a show of Andy Warhol's famous 10 paintings of Mao.

Is this an evidence of Chinese ambiguity?

Conversely,

What the Chinese read is Joyce in translation--can't imagine the quirky Joyceisms retaining their unique lexical flavor in translation--and my hunch is maybe what the Chinese read are watered down to what they can digest, i.e. censored in any which way. 

While words can be tinkered with in translation, a painting can't be altered, let alone 10 paintings.

Below is the 10th; it's the Mao drawn in the darkest of tones.

The importance of being finished

Karl Marx had once said of the impermanence of systems that all that is solid will one day melt.

The reverse may be true as well, in a manner of speaking.

Finishing schools have all but "melted" into irrelevance in their birthplace--Europe. With a rising trend in egalitarianism, finishing schools are scoffed at in Switzerland as well.

However, what has melted away in Europe and America is solidifying in emergent economies like China, India and Saudi Arabia.

As Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, an editor at Time Out Beijing, says, learning how to slice bananas into thin slivers with knives and forks, is a hot trend among women of noveau riche families in China.

This skill can be acquired at $61. 

India and freedom: oxymoron?

I had wished "happy birthday" to a cousin of mine on Facebook.

I noticed that others had posted the same on his "wall".

But the birthday boy never thanked anybody back till very recently.

He said he had been in China and he wasn't able to access Facebook because "Facebook is banned in China."

The tone in which my cousin mentioned the fact of banning was normal, as though he were reporting the absence of bananas in Alaska.

My cousin's nonchalance in this matter didn't perturb me in and of itself. After all Indians are phlegmatic where the question of human rights violation, or threats to autonomy and freedom--abstract stuff like that--is concerned. But threaten the urban middle class with a ban on malls, then Indians would be up in arms.

What perturbed me was what the cousin said in conjunction with the "ban". He said that "China is a magnificent country."

How could a member of thriving democracy (then again, India is a poster child for democracy without being really democratic in any meaningful sense of the term) commit the sin of such a blatant oxymoron?

"Facebook is banned in China. China is a magnificent country." The utterance has two separate parts not joined by a "but" or "however" to highlight a contradiction. It's as though the observer were looking at two different parts in the same thing and is deaf and blind to the contradiction.

I'm not saying that my cousin is politically obtuse; it's just that he is being characteristically Indian in his observation of China. He notices the presence of Beijing's beauty--the gorgeous malls, the clean roads, the overall architectural splendor, cleanliness and efficiency. In this aesthetic and infrastructural sense, China is the obverse of India.

The beauty of China has obviously mesmerized the Indian visitor, as it had mesmerized the American visitors back in the day of the 2007 Beijing Olympics.

But the absence of freedom did not register as a significant lacunae in China's apparent perfection. He didn't express shock at the fact that Facebook is banned in China. Nay, he overrode the concern for freedom and democracy and a lack of both in China as frivolous and went on to tub thump about the nation's "magnificence."

I believe that Indians in general are comfortable living with violation. There are low and high level violations of all kinds everyday in India. Take freedom or rights away from Indians--they won't mind is my guess. But take the guarantee of a monthly wage away from them, they'll faint in horror. Trade security (of a monetary kind) with freedom and Indians will be un-protesting to the hilt.

In light of the recent power blackouts in large parts of India I noticed a queer sentiment among my Indian brethren (and sisterhood) on Facebook. Many were "fed up" with living under Indian governance, marked as it is by inefficiency and grave corruption. Some yearned for a recolonization of India. The argument was that Indians fared "better" under the British Raj.

Perhaps Indians don't quite care for freedom-"shreedom" and such non-material garbage.

What do they care for? I don't know; maybe a flat far removed from the stench and squalor of everyday Indian reality? To attain that they might be willing to forego freedom and many rights.

As my favorite fictional servant Balram Halwai had noted in The White Tiger, Indians are born to be ruled and if ever they are in the market looking for an invader/ruler, China would be the nation of choice.

Apple Ushering In iSlavery?

Digging into the archives, one finds a strange yet impacting commercial that launched Apple as gateway to the future of a world that is not like George Orwell's dystopia.

“We are looking at a 1984 that’s the opposite of what George Orwell predicted”, was roughly the message broadcast by the iconic Apple commercial. It was aired during the Superbowl.

In 1984, Apple had claimed to be the harbinger of a new world, liberated from the shackles of a Soviet-style autocracy.

In hindsight, it seems like Apple was showing us a future where technology has the power to rescind the Berlin Wall.

While the Berlin Wall was subsequently rescinded, more by the will and aspiration of the masses, than by the advent of the Macintosh, the commercial still reverberated with the potential of liberation.

But what path has Apple, a company that has strong counter-cultural roots, traveled, since the airing of the commercial in 1984.

Some say that Apple itself has paved the way for a new kind of 1984, where technology does liberate—the iphone is said to have been a catalyst for many anti-autocratic movements in the Middle East, for instance—but it also re-shackles or escorts us back to conditions reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia.

I agree with the reader who writes in his letter to the Editor in The New York Times that Apple has, over the years, become an agent of oppression.

The letter is in response to a Times story on why iPhones are assembled and manufactured in China and not the U.S.

According to the story it's not cheap labor that motivates the outsourcing of almost all iPhone labor to China (especially the province of Shenzhen). It's the ability of Chinese workers to work 12+ hours a day shifts at minimal pay.

The factories in Shenzhen are modern but the labor laws are antebellum. Workers live in dormitories inside the factory premises and are woken up at odd hours (like in a military boot camp) if a call from Apple bosses in America and their local Chinese vendors require their services.

Indeed as is pointed out by many, China has become the equivalent of the cotton and tobacco fields of the pre-civil war era American South. 

Just as it is said that America would not have experienced a surplus economy during the time of slavery had it not been for free labor got from the slaves, so it could be said that Apple would not have become the most "valued" company of the globe, had it not been for the eerie amenability of the Chinese to working under atavistic labor laws.

The difference though is that the Chinese get paid—somewhat. But I'm sure that today's $7/week for 12 hour day shift is the same as yesterday's unpaid labor.

Slavery is a place holder for regressive laws or the absence of laws that encode respect for workers and their labor worldwide. In this sense Apple and slavery can be uttered in the same breath.

Has Apple set into motion an age of iSlavery?