Showing posts with label Beijing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beijing. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

America: A One Party State?

China is a one party communist state. America is a one party capitalist state. China has become so much more capitalist. If Bernie has his way America might make major strides towards socialism.

In China the Chinese Communist Party sits above the state, it sits atop the Chinese court system, for example. What is the Chinese Communist Party? It used to be about communism. That has changed. But what has not changed is its total commitment to Chinese nationalism. A billion people belong to the same ethnicity and speak the same language. The Chinese built a Chinese melting pot Chinese identity over thousands of years like Americans have been building a white melting pot identity over the past few hundred years. It is the exact same concept. And the two, despite the false military tension, unabashedly like each other. Look at the trade volume. White is not a language, white is not a culture, white is not a religion, white is not a country, white is no identity, white is just lack of pigments, which makes it very animal and pro gun rights. If you ask me a billion people belonging to one ethnic identity is unnatural.

It is not any commitment to classlessness but a total commitment to Chinese nationalism that sits atop the Chinese state. There it is official. In America it is unspoken. But there is something similar. There is that melting pot white identity that sits atop the American state. There is this magnetic field. If you can speak the language, that can open some doors, but not quite.

If a people speaking just one language is what is best for everybody, then why not just hope for English as the only language on the planet? Why not clear up the Amazon forest and plant paddy along that entire stretch? English is the leading language of commerce, science and technology on the planet. And that's great. But we are at the cusp of turning the top 10 most spoken languages covering over 90% of the planet all becoming equally good languages of commerce, science and technology, thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

The mirror image of the melting pot white identity is that it reduces the black identity to skin color. A cultural identity can not be about skin color. A healthy cultural identity has to be about positive and rich things like art, language, culture, festivals, rituals, mythology, music, religion. America has to become more accepting of diversity. The Amazon forest is indispensable to our very existence. It is not just something to look at. Cultural diversity is as natural and desirable as biodiversity. Say no to the Donald Trump hate speech.

People come to America with much hope. It is not just about being able to earn a living. It is also about wanting to feel cultural diversity is as natural as fingerprints. That's what makes us interesting. Hostility to diversity is downright stupid. They say the cure for cancer might be in the Amazon. In a robust knowledge economy the onus is on out of the box thinking, on thinking different. Guess what diversity is!

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Xi Jinping: Movie Star

Xi Jinping 习近平
Xi Jinping 习近平 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have seen a few pictures of Xi Jinping where he does this subtle body language thing. In one picture Barack Obama is slightly off balance. In another Narendra Modi is caught a little off balance.

Someone analyzed and said he is trying to suggest China is number one. Maybe so.

My analysis is different. This guy is a frustrated movie star. He came into politics because his father was a major communist figure. He is called a prince, for that reason. His father was a comrade of Mao. The family pressure was a bit too much. There was legacy.

He did marry the most famous singer in his country, did he not?

He is really into literature. He is a huge fan of Hemingway, for example. He has sensibilities. You can't become a movie star unless you have deep sensibilities. Al Pacino calls himself an "emotional athlete."

In a freer China, a more comfortable China, Xi Jinping would have been a movie star.

Sunday, January 03, 2016

Padmasree Warrior: Indian Female Chinese Asian Elon Musk?

Padmasree Warrior: Indian Female Chinese Asian Elon Musk?

Padmasree Warrior New U.S. CEO of Chinese Firm Challenging Tesla
Indian American Padmasree Warrior, one of Silicon Valley's high-profile women executives, has been appointed as the U.S.-based chief executive officer of a Chinese firm which is building an electric car to compete with American electric car manufacturer Tesla....... Warrior, 55, will be the chief development officer and CEO of the U.S. start-up NextEV.......A technology industry veteran, Warrior was most recently Cisco's chief technology and strategy officer, and had stepped down from the position in June this year....... Warrior's track record as a technology visionary is “undisputed,” and her knowledge of the global markets and business acumen are “surpassed only by her ability to lead distributed teams of engineers and developers toward a common goal,” NextEV's founder and chairman William Li said in a statement...... Warrior has previously been named by Forbes among the world's 100 most powerful women. She is an alumnus of the IIT Delhi and Cornell University ...... In addition to her appointment to the NextEV board, Warrior currently serves on the boards of American clothing giant Gap and Microsoft.


I was blindsided by this when it showed up as a news story on TechCrunch. As in, I did not see it coming. I used to follow Warrior in the news a few years ago. Here was an Indian Female running the tech show at none other than Cisco. Many people think Cisco birthed the Internet. No routers no internet. But unlike Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai, she did not rise to the very top. She had a claim before the other two did. Enter China.

And now, it looks like, just like there is no Facebook or Google or Twitter or Amazon in China, there will be no Tesla. In China they don’t let the “private sector” into space, so I don’t believe they are trying to create a rocket company. They feel like they already have one. It is amazing, the speed at which they have created a Chinese Tesla. Photocopied. Xeroxed. Innovated. Birthed. Masterminded. Downloaded from the Internet. Hustled by cyber spies. However they did it, the deed is done.

I feel for the people in Beijing. I like it that China has lifted more people out of poverty than any power in history, but I wish the air in Beijing were clear. It is a great city. It deserves clean air. Enter the Chinese Tesla. You can’t ask Indians and Chinese to not buy cars. But you can get them to buy electric cars. Perhaps solar powered electric cars. Who needs a sun roof?

China has 5,000 years of recorded, continuous history. There’s a slight blip from British/Japanese colonialism. I mean, you should read the letter the Chinese emperor sent to the British monarch. To him it felt like the President of the United States was talking to the President of Venezuela.

If the Homo Sapiens started in Africa and went to China by way of India, it can’t be that the Indus civilization is more recent than the Chinese one. But the Chinese try to downplay the Indian myths. You talk about the Mahabharata? A Chinese traveler does mention seeing stacks of bones in an open field. But that was only 500 years ago. Not 100,000 years ago like you claim.

Because the Chinese have lifted more people out of poverty than any power in history, I do try to look at them with an open mind. Maybe they are an alternate political system. To them becoming president is like becoming an astronaut. Maybe. As in, NASA. The Chinese Communist Party is like NASA. Running a country is like an astronaut going to the moon, perhaps tougher, and a much bigger responsibility. With NASA, you have to be a top grade engineer before you can get in. But any Chinese may join the Chinese Communist Party. Just like any American can try and become a top class engineer. But once you get in, there is a way to become NASA Director. Xi Jinping rose through the ranks. It is a pretty meritocratic process. You have to pay your dues, do the work, get committee approval, rise up the ranks, things like that. Although, in his particular case, I hear it helped that he was a prince, whatever that is supposed to mean in a decidedly non-feudal, formally atheistic country. In China the party stands above the state apparatus. As in, the Chinese court system is not above the Chinese Communist Party. I guess they fear that is how you make sure class prejudices don’t seep in. The CCP is like NASA, but it is also like the NAACP. As in, the Chinese feel wronged. Just like black folks do. How many NAACPs are there? Until they get their lost glory, until that is regained, they already know what do do, what is there to debate? That is how they feel. The good news is they are almost there. When I say almost, it is a Chinese perspective. 20 years is forever in America but almost in China. Time, like Einstein said, is relative.

At some point I see the Chinese political system relaxing a bit. Maybe the system needs some meditation. I am a big proponent of letting the Dalai Lama go on an all China tour. Let him go wherever he wants to go.

In China the party stands above the state apparatus. As in, the Chinese court system is not above the Chinese Communist Party. But then a lot of people don’t realize how weak the two parties in America are. The state is not weak, but the two parties are almost casual. In America the state stands above the parties, and the private sector stands above everything else. You don’t believe? The American tax code has been written for the express service of entrepreneurs. Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary. When people like Ralph Nader say the two parties are indistinguishable to the corporations, they have a point. Look at Donald Trump. He came out of nowhere to take over the Republican Party because he is a billionaire. There is no Central Committee he had to go through. He has just had to show up on TV.

How would China relax? Relaxing the India China border would be a good move. Personally I don’t see what the issue is there. It’s just rocks. China is not about to stop being a one party state. But what it could do is offer two party candidates for each major office, like president, governor, mayor, and let the people vote for and pick one. The two would get equal amounts of money to run a campaign. That could be step one. You do that enough and China could willfully become a two party state like America. A China where there are no more poor people and the per capita income is perhaps 25,000 dollars might end up a two party system not because the Chinese Communist Party got overthrown, but because it evolved. There was no upheaval. There were no street demonstrations. There was party decision. Or maybe it will stay a one party state that offers two candidates to the people for all three major positions. It could work. Like it works in America that it is just one state.

My agenda is I want a billion Buddhists in China. I want there to be more Buddhists than CCP members. I am a Madhesi Imperialist. Buddha was born a Madhesi.


Friday, October 09, 2015

Europe's Conquest

How Europe Conquered the World
a Single-Minded Focus on War .... between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe .... Why and how did Europe rise to the top, even when societies in Asia and the Middle East were far more advanced? ..... the Europeans were the first to industrialize, and they were immune to the diseases, such as smallpox, that devastated indigenous populations ..... fails to explain Europe’s colonization of India, since the Indians had similar immunity. Industrialization also falls short as an explanation: the Europeans had taken control of more than 35 percent of the planet even before they began to industrialize ....... the incentives that political leaders faced in Europe—incentives that drove them not just to make war, but also to spend huge sums on it .... In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to attend to people’s livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed European kings. ...... The huge sums of money showered on fighting in Europe gave military leaders the flexibility to buy new weapons and battleships and try out new tactics, fortifications, and methods of supply. In the process, they learned from their mistakes and improved their technologies. ......

Without a single-minded focus on war and the extraordinary ability to tax, there may never have been any European empires.

.... In the late eighteenth century, per-capita taxes were 15 times higher in France than in China, and 40 times higher in England ..... Europe’s military lead continued into the nineteenth century. Tax revenues rose as Europe industrialized, and the innovations from the Industrial Revolution—applied science and engineering—made it possible for Europeans to improve their technology not just by waging war, but also by conducting research, which magnified what the Europeans learned on the battlefield. ..... Europe’s ability to tax was no small achievement. China could not raise equivalent tax revenues, even in the nineteenth century. And countries in sub-Saharan Africa today still lack the basic capacity to tax, which keeps them from providing security and other basic public goods to their citizens. ..... the Dutch East India Company .. the first business to issue tradable shares of stock. ..... Western Europe .. centuries of warfare by bands of warriors whose leaders resembled modern-day warlords. .... “no object, thought, or profession but war.”

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The State And Its Several Forms

English: The Ethnic composition of Muslims in ...
English: The Ethnic composition of Muslims in the United States, according to the United States Department of State based on the publication of Being Muslim in America as of March 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In China, the communist party stands above everything, above the courts, the government, everything. Islamists want states where the religious authority and organization supersedes everything. Both are worldviews seeking recognition.

The American/Western/Indian model of democracy is suspicious of those arrangements. But then the Chinese and Muslims have not ascended to the highest levels in America, Europe and India.

Even if eventually everyone ends up in countries that look politically like America, Britain and India today, some of these fermentations might be societies on the move. These might be phases as they get their footing. A rich China is going to be less intolerant of dissent. One hopes.

Islam wants to be treated on par with Christianity. Not getting that, it internalizes itself, and goes inward. Would you say?

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Politician Number One: Modi



East Asia & G-20 Summits: PM Narendra Modi most sought-after leader at Brisbane meet
It is not Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Shinzo Abe or Angela Merkel - leaders of the five most powerful countries of the world - who are most sought after at the East Asia and G-20 Summits. Instead it is Narendra Modi, elected to the high office only six months back, who has received maximum requests for bilateral meetings from his counterparts and heads of state on the sidelines of East Asia, ASEAN and G-20 Summits in Myanmar and Australia later this week. ..... the emphasis is on meeting leaders such as German Chancellor Merkel and former British PM Gordon Brown (in Brisbane) whom the PM has not met yet ..... Besides, Modi could meet leaders of France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina and Nigeria in Brisbane on the sidelines of the G20 meet. Meeting with the Canadian PM, South Korean President and European Union leaders are also on the cards.

Saturday, June 07, 2014

Connecting China And India By Train

China’s expanding rail network in Tibet nears Sikkim
Qinghai–Tibet Railway
Extension to bring Tibet railway line closer to India
Tibet Train Map
China plans taking Tibet rail network near Sikkim
Extend Tibet railway line to Kathmandu, Nepal tells China
India could take out Qinghai-Tibet Railway to cripple PLA







This is the Asian Century and China is taking the lead. Between them China and India are looking good. And the number one fallout of this new development has to be that hundreds of millions of new people get to get out of poverty. To that end railways connections between the two countries would go a long way. One would go through Sikkim, another would go through Nepal, through Kathmandu, the capital city, and on south to India.

Beijing has plans to become the capital city of the world by forging railway connections to all continents except Antarctica. There is talk of a train route to the continental US through Alaska. Another route to Africa. There is already one to Germany.

You can't go to America, and Africa and ignore India.

There is a huge peace dividend to such railway extensions. Every billion you spend on such railways is a billion you do not have to spend on defense, something like that. Defense expenditures are a one way street, whereas trains make you money.
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