China news and notes, views and voices:

While watching the Colbert Report last night I was struck by a comment by Governor Mike Huckabee. He said, and I unfortunately paraphrase, that when you are in debt, you spend less. His phrasing seemed to imply that this was common sense, and indeed, it is. But I worry that it is the same common sense which, in other circumstances, seems to fail so blissfully.

Take, for instance, stock trading. Acting ‘rationally’ and acting with ‘common sense’ seem to be two entirely different beasts. The rational investor will buy low and sell high. The ‘common sense’ investor will be the person who buys a stock when it is doing well, and sells it when it is doing poorly. In other words, it sounds perfectly sensible, aka follows ‘common sense,’ but in fact is the worst possible investing strategy.

I wonder if what seems like common sense, in this case, is not in fact sensible. Governor Huckabee’s point, that we should spend less when the economy is doing poorly seems to have a corollary: we should spend more when the economy is doing well. This certainly seems false: if the economy is doing well, citizens can buy services privately, and should have less need of public services, such as medicare/aid, food stamps, and heating subsidies.

If the corollary is false, the optimal situation seems clear: during times of plenty we should reduce government spending, and then use excess government capacity to spend during the rough times. This seems politically untenable, though, not least because policy makers rarely plan over time periods that long, but future economic troughs are almost never, ever predicted accurately. One can imagine the day to day political turmoil that must emerge during times of plenty, when tax revenues are high, as various interests jockey for a piece of the pie. The discipline required to do the difficult thing, and create and maintain savings and funds and capacity to deal with downturns seems quite beyond that of most of our political class.

So, in sum, without going into the direct theoretical merits of Keynes, he does seem to be right, from a rational standpoint. We should invest more public money when the economy is soft, and less when things are growing. Simple rational principles, but, unfortunately, not ‘commonly sensible.’

ne frequent debate amongst western scholars and economists is the distribution of talent in the public and private arenas, as ludicrous bank bonuses are justified as being required to ‘retain talent.’A frequent lament is the question why our mot talented college graduates do not heed any kind of call to public service, leading to an unfortunate imbalance in the intellectual arsenals of government and corporations, to the advantage of corporations. One cannot blame each individual for the decision to go private, certainly, but the result is not one which leads to either good or well-run government.

In China, there is a deep and persistent confidence amongst the people I’ve talked with that the most talented people in the country are carefully and wilfully shepherded into public service. This may be for several reasons.

The first is that mainland China does not have an extensive corporate history. While Rockefeller and Carnegie were making their modern equivalent of billions, the Chinese were still grappling with Imperial institution. Because of this, political power and financial success (or at least financial stability, considered more important during the turmoils of the first seven decades of the last century) were almost indistinguishable. For this reason, going private does not hold a culturally ingrained place of superiority for the young person looking for maximum personal financial gain.

Second, the top schools in China serve as recruiting hubs for a well-oiled promotional ladder for communist party leaders. While in the US political success can be derived from economic success, it is impossible for a business leader to insert himself into the political process, requiring all politicians to have always been politicians. Indeed, it has been proposed that trying to become involved in Chinese politics can be very risky, even when a successful businessman. Political power creates protection from political and economic enemies, while economic power has limited protection, especially in a legal environment in which wealth can be seized by the state at will.

For these and other reasons, talent gravitates toward public service. It is into this situation that a friend of mine’s observation applies: he believes that while public service attracts talent, it atrophies and dies there. the private sector, on the other hand, gets the second-rate talents, but competition forces them to improve. The implications of this simply point out an inefficiency: there should be a mechanism by which competent persons in private companies can join and leave government if they should choose to do so, something, according to my current understanding, is not possible at present.

I just heard the scariest quote I’ve ever heard from an NPR broadcast about the incoming class of freshmen congresspersons: “If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got,” to justify his position that we need to go back to how we did things before the current administration’s reforms.

This is a fellow who will now be tasked with writing our laws, who seems to thinks that there is no reason to do things any differently than they have ever been done before. Human history, ignored by one folksy piece of alliterative idiocy.

Rather like the special relationship the United States and United Kingdom enjoy (and that many of my British friends disparaged), there are special relationships in Asia, too. I’ve been enjoying Jonathan Fenby’s massive Modern China: The fall and rise of a great power, 1850 to the present. One thing I found enlightening is his explanation of the practical reasons for the renewal of relations between China and the United States in the 1970s. (I don’t remember anything about this, which is proof that I had absolutely no interest in politics as a kid, much as I loved global things, and read many books about and set in Asia.) Weapon sales to Taiwan, and U.S. support for Tibet, was an issue then, but as Jimmy Carter explained in 2007, “Beijing privately acknowledged that the US would continue to sell arms to Taiwan.” Fenby gives the full story.

By the way, the jacket copy of Modern China is as good a summary as I’ve seen of China’s recent history and the extraordinary disasters (some self-imposed) came before its breathtaking rise.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the appearance in Chinese publications of faked interviews with Western China scholars, so I’m going to read any quotations from Westerners more carefully now. Here’s an extract from an interview I happened across some months ago, which had some details that amused me. It sounded authentic, but I wouldn’t refer to it in a book without checking with Tony Saich (I am more casual on the blog, and trying to be clear about the provenance):

As an Englishman, Saich does not have a typical British accent; while as a foreigner, he speaks ‘Mandarin with tune’ (The tune in Mandarin is the most difficult part for Westerners when learning oral Chinese). This interview was conducted in English according to this reporter’s request, however, during the conversation Chinese special terms such as ‘ bao chan dao hu’ and ‘xiu zheng ji hui zhu yi lu xian’ kept running out from his lips. (Note: ‘Bao chang dao hu’ means ‘contracting output quotas to households with the production team’, and ‘xiu zheng ji hui zhu yi lu xian’ means ‘revise the political course of opportunism’).

From “Interview with Harvard Professor Anthony Saich: Optimistic and Pessimistic about China.”

A friend of mine is a school administrator in a wealthy suburban district. We had dinner in New York not long ago and she asked, “We don’t really need to learn Chinese, do we? They’re all learning English after all.” She knew I was going to disgree, I’m sure. The issue turned out to be that she, and the district, had tried to introduce Chinese and failed, and she was hoping that this wasn’t as bad as it looked. I’m now writing an article about why it’s essential that we learn Chinese, and feeling particularly conscious of how much I need to walk the talk, so to speak! I’ve been arranging meetings for and with a Chinese publishing delegation and know how much more I could help - and how much more fun I would have - if I could speak Chinese myself.

In the meantime this morning I’ve been updating the Chinese fonts and tools on my PC, something that I need to get someone here to write up so we can post our recommendations online.

After the May 2009 publication of Berkshire Encyclopedia of China, and with other China projects in development, we’re welcoming authors who want to share their work to write about it here at BAO Blogs. This group welcomes new voices, and at Berkshire we’re looking forward to finding ways to create fresh interchange of ideas, and especially to connect scholars in China with those in other parts of the world. As you can see from this map, it’s a farflung group! Contributors to the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China (2009)

The Encyclopedia was officially launched at a luncheon in New York graciously hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relationss. where our friend Simon Winchester, another Berkshire Hills resident, enthralled the audience of China experts with a lively account of the life and work of Joseph Needham, whose Science and Civilisation in China series provided us with much inspiration. We look forward to being inspired in our future endeavors by the work of scientists, philosophers, political scientists, historians, art experts, and all who share our determination to build better understanding and more productive relationships with China and across the world.