what i like about him is his ability to talk optimistically about these issues without oversimplifying, going so far as to even near the poetic in drawing out the complexities… when i just felt paralysed…
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:38:09 +0100
From: Brian Holmes
Subject: Re: <nettime> Brits in hock–or, Atlas shrugged again
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Message-ID: <200803290138.10202.brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″
On Friday 28 March 2008 22:06:41 Dan S. Wang wrote:
The reform era could also be called the Era of Devolution, meaning, while the central govern-
ment maintains controls over national economic levers, the on-the-ground autonomy of the
provincial, prefectural, and municipal governments has never been greater. It is not really a
surprise that the greatest explosion of industry and commerce happened in the south, faraway
from the oversight and political baggage of Beijing, where local layers of government can act
with independence. Though the usual political machinations figured into his ascension, it is
not suprising that the period of great acceleration corresponded with the rise of Jiang
former mayor of Shanghai, a man who learned to govern a city by always looking
out for its own local interests.
This is getting good! When Dan uses his lived experience to bring in the micro-political play of influence and constraint on both sides of the US/China divide, then the discussion becomes truly interesting — because we’re finally getting beyond the massiveness of the global division of labor. The big trap is to consider nations or regions as unitary subjects, arrayed against each other in the global ring, when in fact they are seething molecular cauldrons of differences and strategies and needs and aspirations whose dynamics then enter into reciprocal (though usually unconscious) relations, via trade and money but also through immigration, media, communication, cultural motifs, educational processes, vastly complex and specific realities that never stop intersecting. What we have been trying to get at with Continental Drift is precisely the imbrication of scales: intimate, urban, national, continental, global. It’s characteristic of contemporary societies to find all them all intermeshing simultaneously in every possible combination of intensities, and though it’s dauntingly complex at times, it’s also just world society, the everyday experience. To make sense of the patterns is to anticipate the possibility of a new democratic politics, even across the huge gaps that are set up by the global divisions.
Something really interesting in Dan’s post, that people might not understand right off the bat, is this idea that the Reform era has been an age of Devolution, i.e. delegation of central government power to localities. The Chinese state appears monolithic, because it has kept the control of mediated appearance, i.e. CCTV and the People’s Daily and the Great Firewall. But that plus the army and the police are the major functions that made the neoliberal cut. The thing is that reform-style development was not carried out in a centralized way, through the discipline of planning, but instead by ceding the rights to lease out property to local collectivities (villages, cities, provinces), and then requiring them to meet certain targets with the resources at their disposal. This, as Friedrich Hayek taught, was a much more quick and efficient way generate and apply information, and thereby, to move straight into the classic capitalist contradictions! What this means once again is that the very motor of development — in this case, local initiative — makes geographical and social harmony impossible to simply legislate from the center. It can’t be done, because the government has simply given up authority, in exchange for unlocking the local productivity. And that is very much the trap of the neoliberal governance model, not only in China.
What that means is that the molecular processes of capitalism — on the one hand, those fiercely competitive battles among all the individual “China prices,” and on the other, the repercussions of all those individual reticences to consume that are about to be felt in the West — cannot be very easily controlled or compensated for under the neoliberal model. And as soon as the “self-organized” Hayekian initiatives of structured finance cease to ensure trans-continental coordination, what you’re gonna have is plain old chaos, almost random pressures and aleatory interplays of influences. What can be done, by those of us involved in culture and communication, is to provoke a little more awareness of this chaotic molecularity, to retrace more paths of the kind that Dan has taken the care to point out, and in this way, to make more people realize that on the other end of the commodity-chains there are also human beings in difficult situations. To the extent that long-term perturbations really are set off by the housing crash and its repercussions I think this kind of micro-narrative can be a positive contribution, one entirely within the powers of relatively ordinary people, particularly if they speak a couple languages and have a networked camera or keyboard. Let’s all try to make the chaos a bit more interesting!
best, BH
时间 posted on: 16 April 2008 | 
发布者 author: 
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April 17th, 2008 - 01:55
looking through the archives i also found some really nice thoughts from Dan Wang, whom Brian was responding to above:
The current arrangement between the US and China hinges greatly on how each domestic populace pressures its own government. In China, this is a huge a question, not simply having to do with the age-old challenge of how a people moves an undemocratic system, but even more specifically, how to move a system which is authoritarian in nature, but super-localized? The central government doesn’t have much direct control over why this or that village is being razed for a factory expansion or new luxury townhomes. The occasional execution of an egregiously corrupt local official doesn’t do much to deter or rectify, but that and editorials in the People’s Daily is about all they can do. Grassroots initiatives are emerging, but they are miniscule in effect, and haven’t achieved any sort of secure position of visibility. Democratic experiments are happening at a very local level, too, but so far have not been allowed to be implemented at any level of real authority. There may be things going on, there probably are, that a foreigner like me cannot recognize, but my Chinese friends in China aren’t seeing much, either. The art projects of the kind Brian wrote about in his blog post hint at a different kind of discourse and action, one that may skirt the officialdom of the Chinese political sphere, but with who knows what kind of effect (if any).
The unrest in Tibet is a real test, not just for the central government, but also for all who share the discontent. Will the struggle be re-articulated as one against the forces of neoliberal reform, or will enough prominent voices, no doubt helped along by politically-correct Western backers, continue to frame the struggle primarily in ethno-nationalist terms? How is the migration to Tibet of the Han Chinese (and lesser known, but also contributing to the dilution of Tibetan culture and the flooding of the local labor markets, the Hui Muslims) being driven by the neoliberal imperatives–on the one hand, the expansion into new spaces, for markets, natural resources, etc, and, on the other, the huge reserves that now need to be invested somehow? In other words, how can the Tibetan struggle be related to the discontent and desperation experienced by others in China? Economics have trumped identity, and have done so in a familiar sphere of struggle. Maybe they always have. But how long will it take for the fine Buddhist city folk of my town, Madison, Wisconsin, as near a recession-proof American locale as can be, to see it?
The long-awaited bifurcation to which Brian alludes does indeed seem imminent, more so now than at any time in my almost forty-year life, that is for sure. But how those massive fissures begin, and what we are left to work with after the cataclysmic fallout, I want to believe (right: minimally hopeful!) that they do depend somehow on the small-scale, specific and/or local struggles we engage in, how they do or do not translate themselves, and how they do or not get locked into discursive traps. For the hippie Buddhists of Madison to first address how the China Investment Corporation, for one, is linked to our own force-feeding of the dollar on the rest of the world, and, second, the threats to the Tibetan language (which, ironically, is being taught in the schools of Dharmsala mostly by teachers who were trained in China), and third, how the two are related, would be a huge step forward, in the direction of recognizing what it is that really unites all of us in this moment.