Chinese Pioneers [KT]

The Wall Street Journal has put together a less-than-6 minute video, at the link above, on the use of artificial intelligence to boost the performance of children in school. I find it creepy just that the kids are in "young pioneer" neck scarves. That's not my idea of a pioneer. You would think that symbol would have lost some credibility with the fall of the USSR. Even if they are in denial about Mao.

"Likely no privacy protection at all" in the program for monitoring the brain waves of children. There is also some information on other developments in surveillance of the population in China.

More on the 70th Anniversary of the People's Republic

Well, the NBA/Chinese censorship uproar came right on the heels of President Xi's big anniversary celebration. Here's a piece to remind us what he was celebrating:

The People's Republic of China was born in chains. This piece provides a brief history of the People's Republic from the Communist insurgency (supported by Stalin) through today. A few excerpts:

China today, for any visitor who remembers the country from 20 or 30 years ago, seems hardly recognizable. One of the government's greatest accomplishments is to have distanced itself so successfully from the Mao era that it seems almost erased. Instead of collective poverty and marching Red Guards, there are skyscrapers, new airports, highways, railway stations, and bullet trains. Yet scratch the glimmering surface and the iron underpinnings of the one-party state become apparent. They have barely changed since 1949, despite all the talk about "reform and opening up." The legacy of liberation is a country still in chains. . . .

Over the following years, a newly conquered public had to turn themselves into what the Communists called "New People." They went to reeducation centers to learn the right answers, the right ideas, and the right slogans. Many of those deemed beyond redemption were slaughtered in an initial Great Terror that claimed some 2 million lives between 1949 and 1952, as victims were shot in public rallies held in stadiums or executed far away from the public eye, along rivers and ravines. In a meticulously drafted report preserved in the vaults of the Communist Party archives, Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing proudly announced in August 1952 to Mao that 301,800 people had been executed in one year in a mere six provinces. . . .

You know, I don't think I ever really learned much about the initial Great Terror in China. Brings to mind the piece on "Leninthink" that has been discussed in the comments here recently. (There's a link here, with one to another essay, largely on Russian communism, by the same author). You might note some similarities to the Great Terror in China. Wonder how much more damage Lenin could have done if he had lived longer:

By the time Mao died in 1976, living standards for the population were lower than in 1949.

Hundreds of millions of people, it has often been claimed, were lifted out of poverty by the Chinese Communist Party after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979. But it is the people who lifted themselves out of poverty after having been stripped of their land and property, deprived of their most basic freedoms, impoverished, beaten, and starved during three decades of forced collectivization. The Cultural Revolution severely battered the ranks of the Communist Party, and villagers everywhere used the opportunity to quietly reconnect with the past, as they opened black markets, shared out collective assets, took back the land, and opened underground factories. Well before Deng came to power, large parts of the countryside had already abandoned the planned economy.

But the limited economic freedoms wrenched from the state by ordinary villagers came without significant political reform. . . .

You might want to read the whole thing. President Xi seems to be changing things. Some of these bold new initiatives don't really seem particularly innovative to me, in comparison to the actions of past tyrants. Though technology is providing new ways to accomplish tyranny. (h/t Sarah Hoyt)

Related developments in other nations

Think the Confucius Institutes are problematic in the USA? How about in New Zealand and Australia?

China's penetration of our educational system is a serious matter. However, its penetration in Australian and New Zealand is even more unsettling.

According to this report in the Washington Post, Chinese students have poured into these two countries by the hundreds of thousands over the past 20 years. Paying the full price for their education, they make higher education a top "export" earner for both nations.

Now, according to the same report, Chinese students are interfering with anti-Beijing protests and stifling free speech on campuses in Australia and New Zealand. . .

The Guardian has a piece up on facial recognition technology and the surveillance state in the UK.

Via J.J. Sefton, Daniel Greenfield outlines ways that the left is pushing conservative ideas off the internet:

While conservatives have taken shots at easy targets, a growing alliance between the media, dot com monopolies, and lefty non-profits is contriving to transform the internet into one giant safe space.

Much like the Chinese internet, their vision is of a unipolar community where only one point of view is acceptable and all others are treated as a crime. But, unlike the People's Republic, they don't seek to keep the rest of the world out with a Great Firewall, but to force the opposition off the internet with a comprehensive program of political censorship, transforming social media itself into a social credit scheme, and cutting off traffic and funds to conservatives by redefining speech as "disinformation".

"Free Speech is Killing Us," the new lefty paradigm insists.

But it wasn't speech that killed millions of people under Communism and Nazis. It was totalitarian socialist regimes determined to stamp out free speech. . .

So, is the Chinese Communist Party exporting its values, or are there people in the West ready to accept their values? Or both?

One positive note: The Trump Administration managed to get business at the Port of Long Beach out of Chinese hands (and into Australian hands) earlier this year. Quietly. Before the recent protests in Hong Kong. (h/t Maggie's Farm)

The Houston Rockets, James Harden and a Healthy Economy?

Somehow, James Harden has become sort of prominent as a kind of vague corporate voice in the NBA/Chinese censorship brouhaha. Ace wondered if the corporate world knew what it was doing with regard to Chinese censorship. So far, I don't see that James Harden has been a particularly effective spokesman. He first apologized for the horrifying (to China) tweet supporting democracy in Hong Kong.

It's no coincidence that Harden would be among the first players to offer an olive branch. It was Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey who started the controversy with a since-deleted tweet supporting protesters in Hong Kong, and the Rockets were already in Asia as part of the NBA's international preseason series.

But Harden is also one of the most popular players in mainland China, partly due to his talent and partly due to the Rockets' massive following in Asia, which dates back to Yao Ming's time with the team. It's one of the reasons Adidas AG lured him away from rival Nike Inc. with a 13-year deal worth a reported $200 million, making him the face of Adidas Basketball.

Later, a journalist was shut down when she tried to ask James Harden and Russel Westbrook a question about whether or not they would refrain from speaking out on politics/social justice in the future.

John Hayward:

She's lucky she wasn't dragged out of the press conference by Chinese troops with a black bag over her head.

Coincidentally, before all this happened, City Journal published a piece called Our James Harden Economy.

Professional sports offer a rules-based system for competition, within which players are free to pursue whatever strategies and tactics they believe will yield victory. In this sense, sports resemble the market economy, which guarantees participants the freedom to pursue success by the means that they deem most effective, within a regulated system. Sports and markets provide a degree of creative free play--a kind of contained chaos--that generates often-surprising outcomes. Just as competition among technically superb athletes can be uniquely exciting, market economies--in rewarding brilliance, diligence, and innovation--have proved uniquely capable of generating broad societal benefits, especially when compared with centrally planned economies that try to script results, in the manner of, say, WrestleMania.

Yet sports and markets also share a common vulnerability: a general tendency exists for competitive strategy, through continual refinement, to evolve in ways unpredictable to the game's creators and fundamentally inconsistent with the game's structure and objectives. . .

In basketball, the Houston Rockets have led a parallel revolution by focusing on three-point shots and free throws, which tend to offer the highest expected value. The Rockets' best player, James Harden, has risen to superstardom with a skill set suited perfectly to this strategy--herky-jerky drives to the basket that cause opponents to foul him constantly and a signature "step-back three," in which he fakes a drive and then jumps backward, creating just enough space to launch a three-point shot over a lunging defender. This has proved extraordinarily effective--Harden was the NBA's Most Valuable Player last year--but it can also be terribly repetitive, even ugly, to watch. Fouls slow the game down, and the ensuing free throws are the least interesting way to score. Step-back threes require no passing or movement but only four players standing to the side while their teammate dribbles and dribbles, and then shoots--and misses more often than not.

More serious than the decline in base hits in baseball or elegant passing in basketball is the frayed connection, in our market economy, between optimal competitive behaviors and the social goods that they are supposed to support. . .

When competition fails to yield desired benefits, we modify the rules. . .

After all, the game is for the fans, not the other way around. For the public to continue participating in the game--and to believe in it and benefit from it--those who make the rules must govern with creativity and adaptability.

So, what do you think, sports fans? Market fans? Fans of freedom? Do we have a valid analogy in here somewhere? A better direction for the future?

Notes on last week's post:

You might notice that the history of the People's Republic near the top of today's post is quite a bit darker than the brief one in the BBC piece on the celebration of the 70th anniversary last week. The BBC managed to find an old guy who had lived through the whole history of the Republic and had nothing negative to say about it.

There was a link last week on pioneering Chinese developments in recognition of faces in large crowds, too.

For BurtTC, who had an adverse reaction to the Sue Thompson version of Bonaparte's Retreat, here's one by Glen Campbell. Hope it works out better for you. Bonus: Song is followed by instructions for the line dance in English and Chinese.

Hope you have a good weekend.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:25 AM

| Access Comments