Category: Communism

“Red Tape Is Good for the Government but Not for Us Chinese People”

(p. A8) China’s seven million public servants have long been a target of scorn by citizens who accuse them of endemic laziness and corruption. Last year, a municipal water official in Hebei Province with a history of turning off the taps of customers who refused to pay kickbacks — including an entire village — was detained after investigators found $20 million hidden in his home.
In the southwestern province of Yunnan, officials at a local land reclamation bureau often leave for lunch around 10:30 a.m., returning after 3 p.m. “It simply gets too hot to do any work,” Pan Yuwen, an agricultural adviser, said one rainy day last month when the temperature was a less-than-sultry 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
But more than lackadaisical bureaucrats, it is the head-spinning tangle of regulations that infuriates many ordinary Chinese. At the heart of their ire is the hukou, or family registration, an onerous system akin to an internal passport that often tethers services like public education, subsidized health care and pensions to a Chinese citizen’s parents’ birthplace — even if he or she never lived there.
. . .
One recent afternoon, Li Ying, 39, sat in a fluorescent-lit Beijing government office, waiting for her number to be called so she could apply for a temporary residence permit that would allow her 6-year-old son to enroll in school.
Although Ms. Li moved to Beijing with her parents as a child in 1981, her hukou is registered in a distant town, meaning her son will be shut out of the city’s public schools without the permit.
Among the 14 required documents, Ms. Li must provide her hukou certificate, proof of residence, a diploma, a job contract, a marriage license, her husband’s identity card, his hukou, a certificate proving that she has only one child and a company document detailing her work performance and tax payments.
“What a headache,” she said, a pile of paperwork balanced on her lap. “Red tape is good for the government but not for us Chinese people.”

For the full story, see:
DAN LEVIN. “China’s Middle Class Chafes Against Maze of Red Tape.” The New York Times (Sat., MARCH 14, 2015): A4 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 13, 2015.)

Chinese Communists Crush Innovative Entrepreneurs by Banning Open Internet

(p. A1) BEIJING — Jing Yuechen, the founder of an Internet start-up here in the Chinese capital, has no interest in overthrowing the Communist Party. But these days she finds herself cursing the nation’s smothering cyberpolice as she tries — and fails — to browse photo-sharing websites like Flickr and struggles to stay in touch with the Facebook friends she has made during trips to France, India and Singapore.
Gmail has become almost impossible to use here, and in recent weeks the authorities have gummed up Astrill, the software Ms. Jing and countless others depended on to circumvent the Internet restrictions that Western security analysts refer to as the Great Firewall.
By interfering with Astrill and several other popular virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, the government has complicated the lives of Chinese astronomers seeking the latest scientific data from abroad, graphic designers shopping for clip art on Shutterstock and students submitting online applications to American universities.
If it was legal to protest and throw rotten eggs on the street, I’d definitely be up for that,” Ms. Jing, 25, said.
China has long had some of the world’s most onerous Internet restrictions. But until now, the authorities had effectively tolerated the proliferation of V.P.N.s as a lifeline for millions of people, from archaeologists to foreign investors, who rely heavily on less-fettered access to the Internet.
But earlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chi-(p. A6)nese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.
The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors who complain that in its quest for so-called cybersovereignty — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.
“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow American broadcasters. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”
. . .
The vast majority of Chinese Internet users, especially those not fluent in English and other foreign languages, have little interest in vaulting the digital firewall. But those who require access to an unfiltered Internet are the very people Beijing has been counting on to transform the nation’s low-end manufacturing economy into one fueled by entrepreneurial innovation.
. . .
Avery Goldstein, a professor of contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said the growing online constraints would not only dissuade expatriates from relocating here, but could also compel ambitious young Chinese studying abroad to look elsewhere for jobs.
“If they aren’t able to get the information to do their jobs, the best of the best might simply decide not to go home,” he said.
For those who have already returned to China and who crave membership in an increasingly globalized world, the prospect of making do with a circumscribed Internet is dispiriting. Coupled with the unrelenting air pollution and the crackdown on political dissent, a number of Chinese said the blocking of V.P.N.s could push them over the edge.
“It’s as if we’re shutting down half our brains,” said Chin-Chin Wu, an artist who spent almost a decade in Paris and who promotes her work online. “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet.” The New York Times (Fri., JAN. 30, 2015): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 29, 2015.)

Castro to Writers and Artists: “Against the Revolution, No Rights at All”

(p. A13) Ricardo Porro, an architect who gave lyrical expression to a hopeful young Cuban revolution in the early 1960s before he himself fell victim to its ideological hardening, died on Thursday [December 25, 2014] in Paris, where he had spent nearly half a century in exile.
. . .
Mr. Porro’s two schools have voluptuous brick domes and vaults, built by hand in the Catalan style reminiscent of Antoni Gaudí, that are almost bodily in their gentle embrace. Supporting them, and contrasting with their soft curves, are angular columns and buttresses that speak of the shattering force of revolution.
. . .
Before the schools were completed, however, artistic expression was stifled as Cuba moved into the Soviet orbit. Mr. Castro had famously answered his own rhetorical question in 1961 about the rights of writers and artists: “Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, no rights at all.”
Almost overnight, the art schools’ distinctive style was officially anathema. “You realize that you’ve been accused of something,” Mr. Porro recalled in “Unfinished Spaces,” a 2011 documentary directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray. “And then you realize that you have been judged. And then you realize you are guilty. And nobody tells you.”

For the full obituary, see:
DAVID W. DUNLAP. “Ricardo Porro, 89, Exiled Cuban Architect.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 30, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, are added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 29, 2014, and has the title “Ricardo Porro, Exiled Cuban Architect, Dies at 89.”)

Stalin Showed that a Single Individual’s Decisions Can Matter

(p. C29) . . . , [Stephen Kotkin] is not shy about assailing what he regards as false interpretations by other historians. His Stalin is not a disciple who deviates from Lenin; he is Lenin’s true disciple, in pitiless class warfare, in the inability to compromise, and, above all, in unshakable ideological conviction.
. . .
There is little equivocation in Mr. Kotkin’s judgments. Scholars who argue collectivization was necessary to force Russian peasants into a modern state are “dead wrong.” The conclusion by the British historian E. H. Carr that Stalin was a product of circumstances, and not the other way around, is “utterly, eternally wrong.” On the contrary, it is one of Mr. Kotkin’s major theses that Stalin “reveals how, on extremely rare occasions, a single individual’s decisions can radically transform an entire country’s political and socioeconomic structures, with global repercussions.” Or, as he puts it in a more graphic passage: “The Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets” — one for Lenin and one for Stalin.
. . .
This reader, for one, still hopes for more evidence that Stalin was indeed singular, a historical malignancy, and not a product of circumstances of the kind that might already be shaping the next chapter of Russian history. And that only whets the appetite for the next installment, in which Stalin decides to starve Russia almost to death to bring peasants under state control. That, Mr. Kotkin has already declared, was an assault on the peasantry for which there was no political or social logic, and that only Stalin could have done. It is a testament to Mr. Kotkin’s skill that even after almost a thousand pages, one wants more.

For the full review, see:
SERGE SCHMEMANN. “From Czarist Rubble, a Russian Autocrat Rises.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 8, 2015): C29.
(Note: ellipses, and book author’s name in brackets, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 8, 2015.)

The book under review is:
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

Balducci Wants a Sequel Where Winston Smith “Actually Triumphs Over Big Brother”

(p. 10) The author, most recently, of “The Escape” was a library rat growing up: “Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas.”
. . .
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
A sequel to “1984” where Winston Smith regains his senses and his independence and actually triumphs over Big Brother. Right now we could all use a little more hope about the world.

For the full interview, see:
“By the Book: David Baldacci.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., NOV. 30, 2014): 10.
(Note: italics, and bold, in original; ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date NOV. 26, 2014, and has the title “David Baldacci: By the Book.” The name of the interviewer, presumably the author of the italicized passage above, is not given in either the online or print versions.)

The book for which Balducci wishes a sequel is:
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: The New American Library, 1961 [1949].

Marxist Chinese Education Minister Bans “Western Values” from Textbooks and Lectures

(p. D8) This week [the week starting Sun. January 25, 2015], China’s ideological drive against Western liberal ideas broadened to take in a new target: foreign textbooks.
Meeting in Beijing with the leaders of several prominent universities, Education Minister Yuan Guiren laid out new rules restricting the use of Western textbooks and banning those sowing “Western values.”
“Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials,” Mr. Yuan said at a meeting with university officials, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. “By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”
The strictures on textbooks are the latest of a succession of measures to strengthen the Communist Party’s control of intellectual life and eradicate avenues for spreading ideas about rule of law, liberal democracy and civil society that it regards as dangerous contagions, which could undermine its hold on power.
On Jan. 19, the leadership issued guidelines demanding that universities make a priority of ideological loyalty to the party, Marxism and Mr. Xi’s ideas.
Mr. Yuan’s message this week spelled out how universities should do that.
“Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms,” he said, according to the Xinhua report. “Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students.”

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “China Warns Against ‘Western Values’ in Imported Textbooks.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 31, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed words, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 30, 2015.)

Václav Havel Viewed America as the Natural Foe of Evil in the World

(p. C7) Havel’s personal and political philosophy can be summed up in a phrase from his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”: “living within the truth.” The world imposes great burdens on men, Havel argued, the first of which is a collective responsibility to be honest about the society they inhabit. In Havel’s political context, “living within the truth” meant speaking plainly about an inhuman political system–communism–and the lies and humiliating routines it forced its subjects to tell and endure. The bravest testament to this credo was Charter 77, a public appeal to the regime to respect the human rights it claimed to uphold. Havel was one of several co-authors and its main spokesman.
What drove Havel and others to sign the document was the persecution of a rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose members were accused of “disturbing the peace.” Havel, who would cheekily adopt that malediction as the title for one of his books, soon followed the band to jail for similar offenses against the state. Imprisoned from 1979 to 1983, Havel was denied medical attention and endured great physical pain for his thought crimes. But the communists could not break him, and he refused an offer of early release in exchange for leaving the country. The greatest anguish the future president suffered at the hands of the sclerotic regime, which, in Mr. Zantovsky’s apt phrasing, “elevated oblivion to a method,” was the suppression of his ability to publish and speak freely.
. . .
As Czech president, Havel was a supporter of Western military intervention both in the Balkans and then, more controversially, against Saddam Hussein in 2003. At home and abroad, Havel was moved by the same humanitarian impulse: “Our indifference toward others can after all result in only one thing: the indifference of others towards us,” he said in 1993. This is what Mr. Zantovsky dubs the “Havel Doctrine” and it is rooted in Czechoslovakia’s history of being the victim of foreign invasion and occupation. “Our own historical experience,” Havel said in 1999 on the eve of NATO intervention in Kosovo, “has taught us that evil must be confronted rather than appeased.” The author hesitates to label Havel’s worldview “neoconservative,” and, at least as far as domestic politics are concerned, he is right: On most social and economic issues Havel was decidedly left of center. But Havel personally understood the role of evil in international relations and looked to America as its natural foe.

For the full review, see:
JAMES KIRCHICK. “Disturber of the Peace; Havel wrote passionately about evil, yet he abhorred confrontation.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 5, 2014, and has the title “Václav Havel: Disturber of the Peace; The dissident wrote passionately about evil, yet he abhorred confrontation.”)

The book under review is:
Zantovsky, Michael. Havel: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 2014.

Stalin Was “a People Person”

(p. 12) In “Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” a masterly account that is the first of a projected three-volume study, Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, “a people person” with “surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SIEGEL. “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., NOV. 30, 2014): 12.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 26, 2014, and has the title “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.”)

The book under review is:
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

“It’s Better to Die on Your Feet than Live on Your Knees”

(p. A1) MIAMI — In an unexpected echo of the refugee crisis from two decades ago, a rising tide of Cubans in rickety, cobbled-together boats is fleeing the island and showing up in the waters off Florida.
Leonardo Heredia, a 24-year-old Cuban baker, for example, tried and failed to reach the shores of Florida eight times.
Last week, he and 21 friends from his Havana neighborhood gathered the combined know-how from their respective botched migrations and made a boat using a Toyota motor, scrap stainless steel and plastic foam. Guided by a pocket-size Garmin GPS, they finally made it to Florida on Mr. Heredia’s ninth attempt.
“Things that were bad in Cuba are now worse,” Mr. Heredia said. “If there was more money in Cuba to pay for the trips, everyone would go.”
. . .
(p. A18) . . . Yannio La O, 31, [is] an elementary school wrestling coach who arrived in Miami last week after a shipwreck landed him in Mexico.
He and 31 others departed from Manzanillo, in southern Cuba, in late August on a boat they built over the course of three months. They ran into engine trouble, and the food they brought was contaminated by a sealant they carried aboard to patch holes in the hull. They spent 24 days lost at sea.
“Every day at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m., somebody died,” Mr. La O said.
Nine people, including a pregnant woman, died and were thrown overboard, and six more got on inner tubes and disappeared before the Mexican Navy rescued the survivors, Mr. Sánchez said. Two more died at shore. Mr. La O said he survived by drinking urine and spearing fish.
. . .
“Even if half the people who leave from Cuba do not survive, that means half of them did,” Mr. La O said, speaking from his grandmother’s house in Miami, where he arrived last week. “I would tell anyone in Cuba to come. It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

For the full story, see:
FRANCES ROBLES. “In Rickety Boats, Cuban Migrants Again Flee to U.S.” The New York Times (Fri., OCT. 10, 2014): A1 & A18.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 9, 2014.”)

“Milestone of Dubious Distinction:” Venezuela Joins North Korea and Cuba in Food Rationing

(p. A15) MARACAIBO, Venezuela–Amid worsening shortages, Venezuela recently reached a milestone of dubious distinction: It has joined the ranks of North Korea and Cuba in rationing food for its citizens.
On a recent, muggy morning, Maria Varge stood in line outside a Centro 99 grocery store, ready to scour the shelves for scarce items like cooking oil and milk. But before entering, Ms. Varge had to scan her fingerprint to ensure she wouldn’t buy more than her share.
Despite its technological twist on the old allotment booklet, Venezuela’s new program of rationing is infuriating consumers who say it creates tiresome waits, doesn’t relieve shortages and overlooks the far-reaching economic overhauls the country needs to resolve the problem.
“These machines make longer lines,” said Ms. Varge, 50, as she was jostled by people in line, “but you get inside, and they still don’t have what you want.”

For the full story, see:
SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ. “WORLD NEWS; Despite Riches, Venezuela Starts Food Rationing; Government Rolls Out Fingerprint Scanners to Limit Purchases of Basic Goods; ‘How Is it Possible We’ve Gotten to This Extreme’.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 23, 2014): A15.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 22, 2014.)

Economic Hope Cures Terrorism

(p. C1) As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers–which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.
But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.
I know something about this. A generation ago, much of Latin America was in turmoil. By 1990, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had seized control of most of my home country, Peru, where I served as the president’s principal adviser. Fashionable opinion held that the people rebelling were the impoverished or underemployed wage slaves of Latin America, that capitalism couldn’t work outside the West and that Latin cultures didn’t really understand market economics.
The conventional wisdom proved to be wrong, however. Reforms in Peru gave indigenous entrepreneurs and farmers control over their assets and a new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow–spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.

For the full commentary, see:
HERNANDO DE SOTO. “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism; Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment and entrepreneurship to give the Arab world another path.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 11, 2014): C1-C2.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 10, 2014, and the title “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism; Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment.”)

Soto’s masterpiece is:
Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 1989.