Web Excursions 2022-01-09
[Note: Do read the original post for its full glory.]
Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing.
A decade ago, the city was a lively place. One can find no shortage of people reminiscing about visiting art shows and fun bars in hutongs, then grabbing roadside barbecue just outside.
Today, it is a concrete no-fun zone and the most restrictive city in the country.
Although Shenzhen is less fun than Shanghai, its region is probably the most dynamic and forward-looking part of the country today.
Business executive types tell me that New York is the only city that rivals [Shanghai’s] dynamism.
I agree that both cities have a special energy: both are on major waterways, invest a great deal in greenery, and have a thriving business environment to support excellent leisure activities.
A huge number of people moved from Beijing to Shanghai after the start of the pandemic, including me.
Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in.
Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades.
That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile.
Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules out of a sense of pride.
On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way.
Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city.
I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity:
“governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption.
Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”
Therefore I think there is little excuse for young people to live in Hong Kong.
They should hop over to Shenzhen, which is an hour away by subway and decades younger by spirit.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai.
But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture.
There’s a little joke that the ideal company is
led by a Beijinger, who would provide the vision, leadership, and government-relations savvy;
its finances would be led by someone from Shanghai, and
its operations managed by someone from Shenzhen (who would hire people from Sichuan and Anhui to do the actual work).
Entrepreneurial friends say that doing business is most straightforward in Shenzhen:
people there get together over dinner, discuss how to allocate the workload, and then do things the next day.
Dinner in Beijing features lots of drinking, bluffs about one’s connections in high places, and then little follow up.
Beijing locals have adapted to the proliferation of rules
not with complete obedience,
but discernment of which can be safely ignored.
Northerners are thus often unruly.
Beijing isn’t satisfied with greater national wealth.
It is also seeking socialist modernization and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”
That is a messianic drive, complete with sacred texts, elaborate rituals, and the occasional purge.
Shenzhen might stand in for the purest form of the Chinese moneymaking spirit.
Many people, including northerners, move to Shenzhen for its relaxed political climate.
Shanghai is a bit more of a middle ground between Shenzhen and Beijing.
Although there is substantial economic dynamism in Shanghai,
the data shows that the state sector makes up around the same share of the city’s economy as Beijing’s.
Many of Shanghai’s favorite sons have moved up to Beijing to run the Politburo
The tightening on every front has led the economist Barry Naughton to refer to the regulatory squeeze as a “summer storm” fit for the history books.
While Beijing has restrained internet companies, it has done nothing to hurt more science-based industries like semiconductors and renewables.
Far from being a generalized “tech” crackdown, the leadership continues to talk tirelessly about the value of science and technology.
Thus one of the effects of Beijing’s squeeze has been prioritization of science-based technologies over the consumer internet industry.
I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities.
Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms.
Beijing’s attitude marks a difference with capitalism as it’s practiced in the US.
Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other.
The Chinese leadership looks more longingly at Germany, with its high level of manufacturing backed by industry-leading Mittelstand firms.
Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance.
We might in retrospect see this summer as China’s high point in reining in the excesses of its own Gilded Age,
which has produced ebullience as well as hucksterism.
In this best case, Beijing would succeed at taming its robber barons without extinguishing dynamism in the following century.
If Beijing were only brutal or unpredictable, then people wouldn’t be so on edge.
But it is both. No one is sure how far the state will prosecute its values-based agenda.
A lot of things happened this year that remain too bizarre for belief.
For example, the end of the summer was the time when everyone’s nerves were most short, as they wondered what “common prosperity” will herald and whether the state will ravage other industries with the ferocity it brought to bear on online tutoring.
The organs of state media chose that moment to publicize the ultra-left ravings of an obscure blogger.
To the author’s own astonishment, he found his celebration of the crackdown splashed onto the homepages of state media and pushed into newsfeeds.
The rest of us were left feeling bewildered that the propaganda officials selected such fringe view for a news push.
The country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. Even these demand qualifications.
I submit that Chinese local government functions today would look fairly ordinary in any other advanced country.
Outside of the security and propaganda apparatuses, government departments work as they would in the US or Europe, only with greater digitization.
We can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy.
Figures must be reconciled with observations on the ground.
During my time in Hong Kong, I found it absolutely hilarious to see annual rankings by think tanks giving the city-state the highest marks on economic freedom,
while its business landscape has been static for decades.
I submit that observers are making a mistake in the opposite direction when they use macro indicators to underrate dynamism in China.
We have to avoid the triptych that outside observers perfected through the course of the pandemic.
“There’s no way that China can control this problem at the start of the crisis;
“These numbers aren’t real” during the crisis; and
“It wasn’t that big of an accomplishment, and anyway authoritarian systems are perfectly suited to managing these situations” by the end of the crisis.
A skim through the Wikipedia pages of provincial party secretaries would reveal a diverse range of technocratic experiences.
If the Metaverse will exist in China, I expect it will be an extremely lame creation heavily policed by the Propaganda Department.
The Metaverse, which represents yet another escape of American elites from the physical world, can only exacerbate social differences.
It is too much of a fun game, like cryptocurrencies, played by a small segment of the population,
while the middle class dwells on more material concerns like paying for energy bills.
It might make sense for San Franciscans to retreat even further into a digital phantasm, given how grim it is to go outside there.
But Xi will want Chinese to live in the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.
If the US wants to win a decades-long challenge against a peer competitor, it needs to be able to improve state capacity.
China by contrast has invested a lot more in domestic competitiveness and to make its economy more resilient.
Since the US government is incapable of structural reform,
companies now employ algorithm geniuses to help people navigate the healthcare system.
This sort of seventh-best solution is typical of a vetocracy.
The US critique that “China stole the jobs” looks instead like a critique of its own economic system.
China’s main activity was to invest in domestic competitiveness, thus becoming attractive to American firms, which relocated operations there.
Meanwhile, the federal government did little to help disaffected workers at home.
US is right to react to China’s predatory practices; but it has done so with methods that are mostly hurting itself.
US multinationals tend to cite with approval the Five-Year Plans,
which make clear targets for say renewable energy deployment, which companies can match to their expansion plans.
Policy continuity is less certain in the US, where economic incentives might disappear after the next election.
For the most part, American firms are unwilling to think too hard about the moral issues of doing business in China,
choosing instead to say that Beijing’s actions are outside their scope of control.
Their strategy is to keep out of the headlines while figuring out how to make more sales.
One of the smart things that Beijing has done is not to retaliate against American companies for the actions of the US government;
for the most part, Beijing has hugged them even closer by loosening restrictions in manufacturing and finance.
China is like the thinking ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris:
a vast entity that produces observations personalized for every observer.
These visions may be a self-defense mechanism, allowing leftists to see socialism and investors to see capitalism;
or, as Lem’s ocean might be doing, China is vastly indifferent to foreign observers and generates visions to play with them.
Whatever the case, we need a better understanding of this country.
Too many commentators have been interested in the story of China’s collapse. When the collapse doesn’t come, they lose interest and move on.
The modal piece of commentary on China focuses mostly on the country’s mistakes and weaknesses.
Much of this type of opinion is both useless and dangerous.
It’s useless because it doesn’t make a serious attempt to engage with the country’s strengths;
and dangerous because it implies that the west can do nothing since China will fail on its own.
The good and/or bad thing about China is that everything changes every 18 months.
So it’s all the more important to observe reality on the ground.
Graham Webster has a good line that the reality of China includes “a mix of brutality and vitality and mundanity.”
It’s important to recognize the entire medley.
For newsrooms, that entails spending time away from Beijing.
For the good of readers, papers should deploy journalists in places where politics is not the only concern,
instead of devoting still more reporters in the capital to obsess over Xi Jinping Thought.
Not only will China fail to create successful cultural exports, its speech restrictions and detentions of minority groups en masse will invite further global condemnation.
But global hostility won’t be quite enough to derail its economic success.
Therefore China will not have any sort of a compassionate return to grace; but it might be enough, perhaps, for a hegemonic return to greatness.
The rest of the world won’t be able to avoid that through continued condemnation.
It demands a more serious effort to compete.
Opera buffa (or the Italian tradition of comic opera) is an intense distillation of Italian virtues and flaws.
Buffa conventions are easy to summarize.
The stock of characters usually consists of a miserly old man, whose propensity for ludicrous bouts of youthful lust tends to move the plot;
a pair of young lovers who are brought together by the resourcefulness of a servant who is equal to any task; and
a serving maid who exhibits both worldly and innocent charm.
The outstanding representatives of buffa are Mozart’s Figaro, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, and Verdi’s Falstaff.
2021 was one of my best reading years.
Covid was the cause. Virus controls have made it difficult to travel even inside China, therefore I have been forced to seek adventure on the page.
I find that I can’t retain anything when I read on Kindle, so I’m only able to read physical books, which I used to purchase when I was making regular trips to the US.
Since that’s no longer an option, my folks have been sending me books by post.
Never have I looked forward to deliveries with such eagerness.
There’s something about having rate-limited access—
in 20 kilogram batches, with the uncertainty of not knowing which might be confiscated by Chinese customs—
that heightens the physical ecstasy of holding a book in one’s hands.
Marshall found that US interagency efforts to study the Soviet Union were more about settling bureaucratic scores than to produce good reports.
He wanted to do better.
Marshall took the view that every research project must resemble an open-ended dissertation rather than something that can be susceptible to cookie-cutter formulas.
His assessments were purely diagnostic, and thus not cheapened by policy recommendations. That doesn’t mean that they were equivocal.
A good analyst possesses the boldness to offer conclusions.
One cannot be confined simply to descriptive analysis and then insist that there are too many unknowns to make predictions.
The point of every exercise must be to produce a judgment. These are good lessons for any analyst.
I’ve managed to make a good habit out of cycling.
I tend to do 100km a week, split into three rides, along the river in Shanghai.
As the city has gotten cold, I’ve switched to cycling indoors by removing the back wheel and attaching a Garmin trainer.
I’m highly suspicious of the Metaverse. But I have to confess my heresy.
I enjoy cycling at home, which is a temperature-controlled space with an air filter, as I ride through Italy, Spain, and Switzerland on an iPad.
Exercise is now so safe and easy that I’m not sure I want to cycle mostly outside the Metaverse again.
It’s getting annoying that I wish I could take a break from Christmas and New Year’s.
Therefore I’m trying to terminate this annual burden.
I think I will write these again, but not more than one or two.
[Note: The review of iMac G4 was originally published on the Feb 2002 issue of MacWorld. End Note]
For all but the most palette-intensive applications, [the iMac G4's 15 inch display is] a perfectly acceptable amount of screen real estate.
For $19, the price of an adapter, you can attach a VGA monitor to the iMac-but the monitor can only mir ror the iMac's display.
The big difference between the G3 processor and the G4 is that
the G4 has an additional, high-speed subprocessor that Apple calls Velocity Engine.
Software optimized for Velocity Engine multimedia apps such as iTunes, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Photoshop, for example-can realize hefty speed gains.
Mac OS X itself is Velocity Engine savvy and therefore runs much better on G4 chips than on G3s.
Software that hasn't been optimized for Velocity Engine runs at roughly the same speeds on G3 and G4 chips with the same megahertz rating.
The neck lets you raise or lower the monitor across a 7-inch range, swivel it 180 degrees, and pivot it to point from 5 degrees downward to 30 degrees upward.
All this power and style comes at a price-the $1,799 iMac is a far cry from a sub-$1,000 consumer Mac for the masses.
iMac still does not offer the performance of a Power Mac G4. Equipped with a faster system bus, the entry level 800MHz Power Mac G4 was faster than the iMac in all our tests
These days, every Mac processor has Level 2 (L2) cache built in, putting 256K of ultrafast memory at the processor's disposal.
But the 933MHz and dual-processor 1 GHz Power Mac G4s go one better by also offering Level 3 (L3) cache-an additional 2MB of RAM
The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda
Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened.
The military guests and celebrations of the U.S. military on game shows and cooking shows are no more spontaneous or civilian in origin than the ceremonies glorifying members of the U.S. military at professional sports games — ceremonies that have been paid for and choreographed by U.S. tax dollars and the U.S. military.
[In a recent film,] Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood,
researchers making use of the Freedom of Information Act [to] obtain[] many thousands of pages of memos, notes, and script re-writes.
Film producers sign contracts with the U.S. military or CIA.
They agree to “weave in key talking points.”
While unknown quantities of this sort of thing remain unknown,
we do know that nearly 3,000 films and many thousands of TV episodes have been given the Pentagon treatment,
and many others have been handled by the CIA.
In many film productions, the military effectively becomes a co-producer with veto power,
in exchange for allowing the use of military bases, weapons, experts, and troops.
The alternative is the denial of those things.
[The military also] actively pitches new story ideas to movie and TV producers.
It seeks out new ideas and new collaborators who might bring them to a theater or laptop near you.
e.g., Act of Valor actually began life as a recruitment advertisement.
Scripts explicitly tell audiences that it doesn’t matter who started a war for what, that the only thing that matters is the heroism of troops trying to survive or to rescue a soldier.
The military has written policies on what it approves and disapproves.
It disapproves depictions of failures and crimes, which eliminates much of reality.
It rejects films about veteran suicide, racism in the military, sexual harassment and assault in the military.
But it pretends to refuse to collaborate on films because they’re not “realistic.”
Yet, actual U.S. military veterans are often shut out and not consulted.