For your weekend browsing

Here are links to articles that I thought were interesting and that I hope you might find interesting as well.

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Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed As Mentally Ill

Bruce Levine, a psychologist, wrote that many people are diagnosed as mentally ill simply because they question and rebel against authority.   He thought one reason Americans are politically passive is that we are medicated out of our rebellious impulses.

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How to get along for nine months alone together

Explorer Deborah Shapiro wrote about how she and her husband Rolf Bjelke got along for 15 months at an Antarctic research station, nine of them alone together, without driving each other crazy.  She said they learned to be sensitive to each others’ moods and needs and to give each other elbow room, but also to show affection and empathy frequently.

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Why China prefers its own political model

Zhang Weiwei, professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote that China is a successful meritocracy with little to learn from the U.S. model.  Almost all the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest governing body, have proved themselves as governors of Chinese provinces, many of which are larger than European nations.  Nobody as incompetent as George W. Bush or Japan’s Yoshihoko Noda could rise to the top in China, he wrote.

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Is democracy dead?

Henry Farrell wrote that Europe’s politics is as dysfunctional as U.S. politics, and for the same reason.   Governments and corporations are so entangled that governments don’t respond to voters and business is not subject to the discipline of the market.  Any hope of change comes from protest movements operating outside what he called the “formal” democratic process.

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If this was a pill, you’d do anything to get it

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post described Health Quality Partners, an experimental program under Medicare for helping elderly people with acute illnesses.  It has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent, simply by having a nurse go around on a regular basis and check up on how patients are doing and whether they are following doctors’ orders.  But there is a problem:  It reduces the profitability of hospitals.

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Are the French in over their heads in Mali?

A writer for Vice magazine found a new example of a familiar pattern as he reported on efforts of French troops and their Nigerian allies to pacify the African nation of Mali.  They can win battles, but they can’t compel the obedience of the population, and so the local version of Al Qaeda grows strong.

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If you find any of these articles of interest, you might want to click on the links in my Interesting reading menu.

Foxconn: the face of world manufacturing

Foxconn, the giant Chinese manufacturing company, is expanding worldwide, not only into poorer regions of China but also into Brazil, India, Mexico, Malaysia, central Europe and, in the not-too-distant future, the United States.   With 1.4 million workers in China alone, it is the world’s second largest employer, behind Walmart.

Foxconn suicide nets (Bloomberg News)

The company, whose headquarters are in Taiwan and largest operations are in China, is famous for asking its stressed-out workers to sign pledges to not commit suicide and for putting up suicide nets to catch workers jump out of the windows of its tall dormitories.

Ross Perlin, writing in the current issue of Dissent magazine, says there are good reasons for this.   Work schedules of 12 hours a day and 50 hours a week are common, he said, with up to 100 hours a week during peak production.  He said that wages average $1 to $2 an hour.

Although the company continues to be plagued by wildcat strikes and suicide threats, working conditions have improved slightly, as a result of audits by Apple Computer, a major customer, and a tight labor market in China, Perlin wrote.

But there is a limit to possible improvement.  He quoted an analysis that said only 1.8 percent of the price of an iPhone goes to manufacturers in China, while Apple gets 58.5 percent and the rest goes to manufacturers of high-end components.  He didn’t quote the source of these figures, and I suspect they are exaggerated, but I agree with his overall point.  Profit margins of companies such as Foxconn and other Chinese suppliers are razor-thin, and they can succeed only by operating on a huge scale while keeping costs, including wages, to a minimum.

Perlin said that Foxconn and Apple symbolize the long-standing relationship between the United States and the economies of eastern Asia, including Japan and South Korea as well as China.

[It is based on] a series of dyads: American consumption and Asian labor, American innovation and Asian manufacturing, American debt and Asian savings, American power and Asian acquiescence. In its latest form—the co-evolution of Silicon Valley and China’s Special Economic Zones, particularly in information technology and alternative energy—it can be summed up in the words, engraved on nearly every Apple product: “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China.”

via Dissent Magazine.

This economic relationship has existed for a long time, but it can’t go on forever.  It depends on us Americans being relatively rich, and over time it makes us relatively poorer.

There are at least two ways it can come to an end.  One is that the United States government stands up for U.S. workers and does what the Japanese, South Korean, Chinese and many other governments do, which is to allow access to the nation’s market only on condition that the company make a positive contribution to the nation’s productivity.  Currently the U.S. government is on the opposite course.   From Reagan through Clinton to Obama, successive administrations have sought to lock the United States into international trade treaties precisely intended to prevent member governments from asserting national interests against global corporations.

The most likely ending is that we Americans eventually cease to be able to earn enough or borrow enough to be a worthwhile market for Chinese goods.  If and when that happens, the question becomes whether the USA will take down the economies of eastern Asia with us.  Maybe by that time they will have developed a middle class large enough to be a market for their own goods, after having moved their manufacturing operations to Africa or some other poorer part of the world.   Or maybe they or we will have found a better path, in a way I can’t presently imagine.

Click on Chinese Workers Foxconned for Ross Perlin’s full article in Dissent Magazine, which has other articles on China in the Spring 2013 issue.

TTP trade deal would override American law

Right-wing opponents of President Obama say that his policies are a threat to American democracy.  I think that’s true—but not in the way they think.   He claims the right to sign death warrants based on secret criteria.  He has brought government secrecy to unprecedented levels.  His administration protects wrongdoers and prosecutes whistle-blowers.   But all these things will be possible for a future President to roll back.

Not so the TransPacific Partnership agreement, a treaty now being negotiated in secret.  The TPP treaty will be submitted to the Senate under the Fast Track system under which it can be voted up or down but not modified.   It is very possible that it will be enacted before the majority of the American public has a chance to learn what it is all about.

The full extent of the TPP is not known, but some provisions have been leaked.  They are all favorable to global corporations and unfavorable to the public.  The worst provision is the agreement to submit to special courts with authority to overrule U.S. law and U.S. court decisions when they are deemed unfair to “investors.”

Investors will be the only class of people protected by the TPP.   They will be allowed to ask for damages not only loss of business due to labor, health or environmental laws, but for hypothetical losses of future profits.

One purpose of the TPP is to create an 11-nation Pacific bloc in which there are no national boundaries for global corporations, but China is locked out.  But there is no minimum number of nations that have to sign for the TPP to go into effect.  Even if only a handful of nations besides the United States sign on, it will have achieved another purpose, which is to create a body with power to override U.S. laws that are objectionable to corporations.

Under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land.  That is a necessary provision.  If it were otherwise, treaties would not be binding.  Unfortunately, this opens the door to treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which set up courts superior to national courts, to which corporations can appeal to overturn national and local laws.  For example, a NAFTA court recently ordered the Province of Ontario to pay damages to a national gas company for future profits lost because of Ontario’s restrictions on hydraulic fracturing.  TPP is NAFTA on steroids.

There are many other pernicious provisions in the TPP.  Click on TransPacific Partnership Will Undermine Democracy, Empower Transnational Corporations for details.

Click on US secretly negotiating NAFTA-like TPP treaty for an earlier post of mine on TPP.

Click on Trans-Pacific Partnership: NAFTA on Steroids for another earlier post.

Click on Barack Obama’s economic legacy: His four must-have items for comment on how TPP fits in with Obama’s overall economic agenda.

The geography of pipelineistan

Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times in Hong Kong writes about what he calls “Pipelineistan”—the region in the heartland of the Eurasian continent where China, Russia, the USA and other powers are jockeying for control of oil and gas resources and pipeline routes.   I like maps, and spent a couple of hours yesterday doing Google Image searches of maps of the region, and here is what I found.

The first map shows the recently-opened 5,400-mile natural gas pipeline, connecting China’s resource-rich, majority-Muslim Xinjiang western region with its manufacturing centers in the east.  It is the longest natural gas pipeline in the world.

Click to enlarge.

Next is a map of China’s oil and gas pipelines reaching into Central Asia.   The longest is 1,100 miles, and their combined reach is 2,000 miles.  Notice the extension to the border of Iran.

Click to enlarge.

While China’s economic expansion in the post-Mao era has been mostly peaceful, the Chinese in Central Asia work with some of the most vicious tyrannies on the planet, as do the governments of Russia and the USA.  Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, for example, is a killer and torturer on a scale exceeding Saddam Hussein.

Next is a map showing China’s land and sea access to energy resources, which shows why the Chinese government prefers pipelines to vulnerable sea routes.

The changing world economic balance of power

The BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—are in the process of organizing a new economic bloc that could rival the European Union and the North American free trade area.   They are holding a summit meeting which began yesterday in Durban, South Africa.

Financial Times 2010. Double click to enlarge.

Pepe Escobar, the intrepid foreign correspondent of Asia Times in Hong KongSingapore, explained the significance of the BRICS summit meeting.

The BRICS push is part of an irresistible global trend. Most of it is decoded here, in a new United Nations Development Programme report. The bottom line; the North is being overtaken in the economic race by the global South at a dizzying speed.

According to the report, “for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies – Brazil, China and India – is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North”.

The obvious conclusion is that, “the rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class.”

via Asia Times Online.

The Economist. Click to enlarge.

The BRICS economies are diverse but complementary.  China and India are important and growing manufacturing nations.  Brazil, Russia and South Africa are important producers of raw materials.

If present trends continue (which may not happen) they could dominate the world economy in a few decades.   RT News reported that the governments of Egypt, Mexico and Indonesia have expressed interest in joining the BRICS bloc.

BRICS representatives at the South African summit discussed creating a new Bank of the South that would give Third World nations an alternative to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and pledged $10 billion to the new BRICS bank.   They also discussed creating their own credit rating agency, so that their finances won’t be subject to the opinions of Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s.

China and Brazil signed an $80 billion trade agreement in which they’ll trade in their own currencies rather than dollars.  China recently replaced the United States as Brazil’s largest trading partner.

President Obama’s secret negotiations to create a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which would lock governments in to current rules concerning corporations and finance, can be seen as an attempt to head off the emergence of a new bloc in which the United States would play no part.

I don’t see that I, as a middle-class American, am threatened in any way by the emergence of BRICS.   I don’t think that the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization operate in my interest or the interests of American working people.  We Americans can thrive if we as a nation turn away from military dominance and devote ourselves to creating a productive economy.

The key BRICS relationship is the one between China and Russia.  It brings to mind my reading about geopolitics years ago—whether world power came from dominating the Eurasian Heartland or from dominating the world’s sea lanes.  The nuclear-powered U.S. Navy commands the seas, but doesn’t affect the present-day equivalents of China’s overland Silk Road.

China is turning to Russia for the oil and natural gas it needs to fuel its economic growth.  Since Russia’s own reserves of oil and gas are dwindling, this means Russia must develop new supplies in the warming Arctic in the long run and control the oil and gas of Central Asia—what Pepe Escobar calls Pipelineistan—in the short run.

Last week Chinese President Xi Jinpin met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.  Escobar reported that the result is an agreement by China to pay in advance for Russian oil, in return for a share in Russian oil development projects in Siberia and offshore.  Pipelines across Central Asia will give China access to Iranian oil by land, which would negate any U.S. naval blockade of Iran.  Pepe Escobar explained the significance.

The geopolitical ramifications are immense; importing more gas from Russia helps Beijing to gradually escape its Malacca and Hormuz dilemma – not to mention industrialize the immense, highly populated and heavily dependent on agriculture interior provinces left behind in the economic boom.

That’s how Russian gas fits into the Chinese Communist Party’s master plan; configuring the internal provinces as a supply base for the increasingly wealthy, urban, based in the east coast, 400 million-strong Chinese middle class.

When Putin stressed that he does not see the BRICS as a “geopolitical competitor” to the West, it was the clincher; the official denial that confirms it’s true.

via Asia Times Online.

World’s tallest skycraper to go up in 90 days?

China’s Broad Sustainable Building Corp., which uses prefabrication technology to erect buildings with incredible speed, has announced plans to build a 220-story building, more than half a mile high.   It would be the world’s tallest skyscraper, just slightly taller than the current tallest, Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Current world’s tallest

Construction was scheduled to start this month (January 2013) and the timetable was completion in 90 days, with 95 percent of the construction work being assembly of components off-site.

But I haven’t found any indication that construction actually has started or whether the timetable is still 90 days, or extended to 210 days, which still would be amazingly fast.

Erecting such a building would be an amazing feat, although some question whether the project is feasible or useful.

Click on the following for background.

Sky City One Postponed?

Chinese prefab skyscraper builder sets sights higher … much, much higher

China’s ‘Instant Buildings’: Just Add Labor, Fireworks and a Cow

Why China’s Sky City One Is a Bad Idea

Chinese firm erects 30-story hotel in 15 days

Chinese firm erects 30-story hotel in 15 days

A Chinese construction firm, Broad Sustainable Buildings, erected a 30-story hotel in 15 days—working around the clock for 360 hours.  The secret is prefabricated parts, assembled like the Erector sets of my boyhood.

Hat tip to Bill Elwell

China: epicenter of global labor unrest?

Eli Friedman, an expert on international labor at Cornell University, wrote in Jacobin magazine that Chinese workers are rebelling against low wages and bad conditions, sometimes successfully.

More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest.  While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year.   All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China.   So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.

More importantly, workers are winning, with many strikers capturing large wage increases above and beyond any legal requirements.  Worker resistance has been a serious problem for the Chinese state and capital and, as in the United States in the 1930s, the central government has found itself forced to pass a raft of labor legislation.  Minimum wages are going up by double digits in cities around the country and many workers are receiving social insurance payments for the first time.

To the extent that what Friedman describes is widespread, it is good news, both for Chinese working people and the world at large, because every success of Chinese workers makes it a little bit harder to drive down wages worldwide.

Friedman’s article reminded me of what I’ve read about American labor unrest in the 1870s and 1880s, when there was no recognized right of collective bargaining, company police were backed up by deputy sheriffs, state militias and federal troops, and yet workers struck against pay cuts and bad conditions at the risk of their livelihoods and lives.

Click on China in Revolt to read the whole article.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Why a Jeremy Lin couldn’t emerge in China

Jeremy Shu-How Lin, the Taiwanese-American basketball star now playing for the New York Knicks, has a great following in China.  But if he had grown up in China, he wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to become a top basketball player.

Time’s Hannah Beech tells why.

In the U.S., Lin was underrated by pro and college scouts because he is Asian-American.  Chinese fans are indignant about a stereotyping in the States that assumes Americans of Chinese descent can be good engineers or software designers, but not brash NBA stars. 

The criticism is absolutely fair.  But in China, Lin may not have been picked for stardom either.  Firstly, at a mere 6 feet 3 inches—relatively short by basketball standards—Lin might not have registered with Chinese basketball scouts, who in their quest for suitable kids to funnel into the state sports system are obsessed with height over any individual passion for hoops.  That’s why the Chinese basketball league has had a history of producing strong centers—big men like 7 foot 6 inch Yao [Ming, who played for the Houston Rockets,] or 6 foot 11 inch Mengke Bateer, the ethnic Mongolian who played briefly in the NBA—but does poorly when it comes to developing point guards like Lin.

The Economist’s Gady Epstein explains that lack of height wouldn’t have been Lin’s only problem.

What of Mr Lin’s faith?  If by chance Mr Lin were to have gained entry into the sport system, he would not have emerged a Christian, at least not openly so.  China has tens of millions of Christians, and officially tolerates Christianity; but the Communist Party bars religion from its membership and institutions, and religion has no place in its sport model.  One does not see Chinese athletes thanking God for their gifts; their coach and Communist Party leaders, yes, but Jesus Christ the Saviour? No.

Then there is the fact that Mr Lin’s parents probably never would have allowed him anywhere near the Chinese sport system in the first place.  This is because to put one’s child and in China, usually an only child at that, in the sport system is to surrender that child’s upbringing and education to a bureaucracy that cares for little but whether he or she will win medals someday.  If Mr Lin were ultimately to be injured or wash out as an athlete, he would have given up his only chance at an elite education, and been separated from his parents for lengthy stretches, for nothing.

One must add to this the problem of endemic corruption in Chinese sport that also scares away parents—Chinese football referee Lu Jun, once heralded as the “golden whistle” for his probity, was sentenced to jail last week as part of a massive match-fixing scandal.  Most Chinese parents, understandably, prefer to see their children focus on schooling and exams.

In America, meanwhile, athletic excellence actually can open doors to an elite education, through scholarships and recruitment. Harvard does not provide athletic scholarships, but it does recruit players who also happen to be academic stars. There is no real equivalent in China.

I admire all forms of human excellence.  I have posted a number of videos on the amazing feats of Chinese acrobats.  But maybe this excellence is achieved at too high a price.  If you take some child away from their parents, and intensively train them in just one thing, whether it be basketball, gymnastics, ballet or chess, and then discard them if they fall short of perfection, isn’t that the equivalent of the Chinese electronics sweatshops we complain about so much?  What you have sounds like a mixture of Chinese sweatshop manufacturing companies such as Foxconn, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which people are bred and nurtured for their specialist roles in society.

Click on Why Jeremy Lin Can’t Be Made in China for Hannah Beech’s full article in Time.

Click on China’s new sports problem: Stop the Linsanity? for Gady Epstein’s full Banyan column in The Economist.

Click on Jeremy Lin wiki for Wikipedia’s review of his career.

Hat tip to Daniel W. Drezner.

Siri, sweatshops and suicide

[Added 3/19/12.  Mike Daisey is not a reliable source of information about Apple Computer and its Chinese suppliers.  Click on Retracting "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" to understand why.]

Apple Computer’s new iPhone 4S has an artificial intelligence program called Siri that responds to the spoken word.  If you asked Siri Software where it was manufactured, you’d get an answer something like this.

Siri, where do you come from?

I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.

Where were you manufactured?

I’m not allowed to say.

Why?

Good question.  Anything else I can do for you?

Actually there is no mystery.  Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in Shenzen, China, by Foxconn, in a huge complex employing 430,000 people, surrounded by huge nets to prevent employees from committing suicide by jumping off buildings.  Foxconn employs 1 million people worldwide, and makes about a third of the components used by Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and other electronics companies.

Shenzen was a small fishing village three decades ago when Deng Xiaoping designated it a special economic zone, where corporate enterprise would enjoy free rein.  Today it is a city of 14 million people, larger than New York City.

Mike Daisey

Mike Daisey, a stage performer, visited Foxconn last year.  He stood outside the factory gate and talked to workers, and then gained admittance by posing as a would-be purchaser of Foxconn products.  He talked to a young woman who turned out to be 13 years old.  She said she had many friends age 12, 13 and 14.  Child labor is illegal in China, but according to Daisey she said Foxconn doesn’t check ages, and makes sure that older workers are on duty whenever auditors come.

He saw factory floors with 20,000 to 30,000 workers in a single space.  They worked in absolute silence.  Not only was there no talking, there was no machinery noise because there was no machinery.  Everything was done by hand, including manipulation of components thinner than a single human hair.

Shifts were supposedly 12 hours a day, but he said workers told him 16-hour days were common when there was a rush order.  That is without a lavatory break, a coffee break or any other kind of break.  While Daisey was there in 2010, a Foxconn worker died from exhaustion working 34 hours without a break.  Everybody in the plant is under video surveillance on the factory floor, in the hallways and cafeterias and in their 12-by-12-foot dorm cubicles in which 12 to 15 bunks are stacked.

He saw workers in their mid-20s whose hands were disintegrated from making the same repetitive motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of time—like carpal tunnel syndrome, but orders of magnitude worse.  This could easily be fixed by rotating the job assignments each month, but this is not done.

Workers who are injured in industrial accidents receive no compensation.  He said he talked to a man whose hand was crushed in a machine.  The man was fortunate enough to find a job in a woodworking shop, where the employers are friendly and he only has to work a 70-hour week.

Steve Jobs is regarded as a kind of secular saint, but it was his decision that the wondrous new products he designed would be made not by Americans, but by stressed-out, low-paid workers in a company town.  Henry Ford paid Ford Motor Co. workers enough to afford to buy Ford cars.  None of the Foxconn workers in Shenzen can afford an iPhone or any of the other technological marvels they put together.  Of course Steve Jobs was no worse than Bill Gates, the great philanthropist, or any of the other electronics CEOs who use Third World sweatshop labor.