Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books Blog, June 26, 2012
Excerpt:
This was in 2005. And your family was still so poor?
Ahh, maybe you don’t know my village. When I went to school I’d be happy if I just got enough to eat. At the grassroots a lot of people want to be involved and want to do things but they can’t. They are just too poor. There’s such inflation now but no one’s income has gone up. Most people’s situation is like this: you can just survive on what you plant so people have to go out and labor. If you don’t go out and labor, you are just barely on a subsistence level. That wasn’t just true for my family but for many, many farming families in China.
Do you think urbanization is beneficial to people? They can move to the city and earn more money.
No, I don’t think it’s beneficial. Right now it’s a blind urbanization. Cities grow up naturally over time. Now they’re trying to do it all at once. The main thing about urbanization now is to make the economic statistics look good—to build and pump up economic activity.
There’s nothing positive about urbanization?
I think for those who go to the city and work there’s a benefit. But the current way of villages being turned into towns—I don’t think there’s an advantage to that. People in the village often rely on ordinary kinds of labor to earn a living, like working in the fields, or raising geese or fish and things like that. So now what happens? They turn a village into one high-rise apartment building and that’s all that’s left of the village. Then the land is used for real estate projects controlled by the officials. Where are the people supposed to work? How is that supposed to function?
People abroad look at China’s human rights situation and they mainly see the situation of better-known people. But they don’t know about all the violations of ordinary people. You know my situation but you don’t know the situation of the huge number of the disabled in China, or the women who are bullied and abused, or the orphans in China. You probably don’t know much about them or just about a few of them. But this is why the officials are so afraid—because they know the true extent of the problem. They are terribly afraid of people organizing. It’s very delicate in the countryside now. This is why they constantly resort to detentions and so on. They don’t even try to find an excuse, they just do it—they are that scared.
Comments
Chen's comment about the brutality of Tiananmen Square being very immediate in everybody's mind is interesting (along with the rest of the interview):
Chen makes it sound like the government there usually wins all of the minor dis-information battles but has already lost the most important one.
by moat on Sat, 06/30/2012 - 1:53pm
Good to hear that someone of your caliber found it as intriguing as I did, moat! Sincerely; sometimes I wonder if I am reading things into an article that aren't there. Of course everything from an exiled dissident must be taken with a grain or two of salt, but I was getting a narrative there that seemed not so much grievances as just descriptions, and what he ends up getting across for me is many in the west are fearing the wrong things about China. For example, the excerpt I used he mentions in passing (not his main point,) the kind of poverty in the country that conventional wisdom here claims doesn't exist any more in China.
As for his main crusade, it's almost creepy that his complaints are like those about the later Soviets, dejas vus allover again. Not the nastiest of Soviet rule, not Stalin, but just the classic Orwell/Kafka bureaucracy, the frustration of dealing with a huge state that is in denial about reality, that almost everything about seems to insure denial of reality.
by artappraiser on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 12:11am