The Sort of Triumph of the Sort of Will!

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: December 19, 2015 Last modified: December 15, 2015

There are shades of euphoria from supporters of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change announced so triumphantly at the beginning of this month. “Universal” and “legally binding” are epithets brandished in its favour. Well, up to a point.

The mere fact that there is an agreement, of any kind, understandably warms the hearts of the many committed people who have for years tried to effect a change. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has made it a major issue since he took office – and he and Gordon Brown played a major part in turning the previous Copenhagen talks into a holding operation rather than a complete disaster. So trying to count the ways in which Paris is a more limited success than the headlines suggest, let us accentuate the positive.

The mere existence of a global agreement accepting the reality of man-made climate change is a big step forward. It rebuts untold millions of dollars poured into public relations by oil and coal producers with direct mercenary interests, not to mention conservative kooks who have decided that the whole idea of global warming is a communist plot to subvert entrepreneurial activities.

If the Shadow Chancellor can quote Mao, so can I. One of the lines in the Chairman’s Little Red Book was that ideas can become a material force, and without endorsing the rest of the Maoist oeuvre, that is very true. In that sense, the Paris Agreement is a turning point in international sentiment for combating the unfolding ecological disaster, ideological leverage in the coming struggle.

The right have become experts at having their will triumph, both positively and negatively over the years, which is why they have fought this outcome so hard and so long. Even relatively rational politicians in America and elsewhere, faced with the wrath of the carbon fuel lobby have temporised about the reality of global warming. Saudi Arabia, continuing the constructive role that it plays in so many spheres, has spent enough hiring the mercenary PR companies to fight its oil-soaked corner globally for it to have resettled several threatened low lying atolls by now.

That is why the Paris agreement at the beginning of December was such a landmark event, despite all the compromises and weaselling that went into it. The simple fact of acceptance of reality, no matter how belated, is a great leap forward in the face of the industry lobbyists.

Gaining recognition of that premise made other forms of progress possible – like the Pacific mini-state of the Marshall Islands who campaigned to ensure that there would a review of the targets within five years instead of 15. However, the review is desperately needed. The targets are hopelessly inadequate and it is a small consolation that the signatory countries recognise when the agreement effectively postpones the reaction needed now until the second half of the century. It is as if we stood in a burning city and congratulated ourselves for noticing the flames and temperature, but decided not to set the fire brigades on the case for a while longer.

In that sense, the Paris agreement is an egregious example of the fun and frivolity that the city was once so famous for. Having evaded the targets set in Kyoto, Bali and other resorts, the nations of the world have now set a non-binding set of targets that they will probably ignore and evade again.

While considering the triumph of the will, one can see in this agreement how the faith-based solutions of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era still haunt us. A carbon tax, on the fuel used could be one of the most effective inducements to encourage investment in more efficient energy use and generation, and thus emissions. However, reflexive right wing (and now “centre”) recoil from the very idea of taxation – which would put cash in the hands of governments for the public good –- has been subsumed by the idea of alleged market mechanisms and trading emissions.

The agreement is deeply flawed, weak and ineffectual. But it lays down what should be done – at a minimum. It is up to the rest of us to risk a few virtual carbon-emissions by holding the feet of governments to the burning coals, making sure they keep their promises.

East and West, meeting in twain?

Can Obama, Xi find common ground?
Special to The BRICS Post
June 7, 2013, 3:34 am

In 1907, US President Teddy Roosevelt signaled the arrival of the US as as world power by sending the “Great White Fleet” in  a grand gesture to the globe it circumnavigated. It was a little premature: the ships were obsolescent and relied on the kindness of strangers to refuel but it did mark Washington’s aspirations to put truth in the rumours about the Monroe Doctrine.
Similarly, Xi Jinping’s grand tour, which begins in California and a meeting with US President Barack Obama on June 7, is a debut rather than a consolidation.
It is, perhaps wisely, more economic in its theme, brandishing investments rather than waving big sticks.
While modern financial and trading networks need not follow the consolidated marine and land boundaries of previous rising empires, Xi’s triumphal progress through America’s backyard – the Caribbean and Mexico – demonstrates how much more effectively powerful China’s economic success is than the Soviet weaponry had been. “The China Dream,” is Xi’s rallying cry of a China with a seat at the top table.
It will be interesting to note the progress, with small indicators like the almost certain relaxation of Chinese regulations that restrict imports of Mexico’s Tequila because of methanol levels. A few extra Chinese hangovers is a small price to pay for an economic beachhead right on the Rio Grande.
It is fascinating to watch the interplay between the aspirant and receding superpowers and it is reassuring that both sides are obviously thinking seriously, and not necessarily reflexively about it.
When Richard Nixon went to China, apart from recognition of the previous pariah state’s future potential, at least part of  the White House motive was counterbalancing the Soviet Union. President Xi’s tour of the America epitomizes a renewed appreciation on both sides, but above all of China as a potential counterweight to the US itself. A less confident US is relinquishing the xenophobia, or more specifically Sinophobia, that previously greeted Chinese investment interests.
Across the US, job-hungry local governments yearn for the Yuan to come in and do what their own bankers are refusing to do – invest locally.
The times, they’re a-changing
Previous ups and downs of the great powers have been marked by major conflagrations, and we can be grateful that the demotion of the Soviet Union was relatively peaceful. Two decades ago, it would have been difficult to believe that the US of Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars and the New American Century fame would have been quite so polite to its most likely supplanter.
Two decades ago, even Japan was viewed with a jaundiced eye as it surged close to overtaking the US economically, even though militarily it was no threat, and indeed, was almost a US protectorate. The costs of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taxed US power even as it outspends the rest of the world militarily.
But the relationship between China and the US is unique. While there is very real rivalry as they both compete for the same space at the top of the table, it is like a Puerto Rican knife fight with the combatants tied by the wrists to each other. The US needs China, which, after all, has financed Washington’s wars with its purchase of US dollars. Conversely, China needs the US. Beijing can neither forgo those reserves deposited in its rivals’ Treasury vaults and needs its markets to fuel the growth of its economy.
Xi knows that the secret of continuing Communist Party of China (CPC) power in the face of potential domestic dissatisfaction is the growing prosperity that keeping US consumers happy brings.
However, China is developing military potential along with its economic success and the friction over disputed islands around the China Sea is worrying. The scenario of a rising uppity power confronting one that is relatively getting weaker, is all the more worrying when we consider that network of alliances and defence commitments that the US has across the region. China has interests and claims in an area where the US is far from home but has ties made in former days of glory.
Pulling treaty triggers

There has been rising tension over disputed islands in the China Sea [Xinhua]

In 1914, we saw what happened as a result of those treaty triggers being pulled, and in the South China Sea, US commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines could drag the US into a local conflict with China where the latter has its forces concentrated. The US, of course, is still in imperial overstretch mode, with bases and commitments worldwide. At home, the American public has strictly limited enthusiasm for wars for far-away countries of which, after all, it knows amazingly little.
Conservatives have set up a shopping lists of what Obama should demand of Xi, on economic reforms, currency policy, government etc. Obama is more sophisticated than many of his predecessors – and of course economic circumstances have weakened his hand. He is, one hopes, not going to be crass in his demands of China.
One assumes that Obama would realize just how counterproductive it would be for the US, whose economic model has never looked so dodgy, to lecture China, for whom a growth rate four or five times the US’s, seems to be overstretched in its own right. He will also understand that Xi has his own domestic politics to worry about.
The Communist Party has pretty much abandoned the dialectic of the class struggle, and the glue that holds it together is the nationalism of an oft-humiliated civilization.
So the talks are an opportunity for quiet dialogue and a development of rapport between the two leaders. Beijing might offer magnanimous compromises or exit routes on many of the maritime border issues, for example, but would certainly bridle at any ultimata. But the US is hardly in a position to brandish ultimata.
Room for compromise
In the case of Taiwan, for example, the administration’s efforts are more about stopping Taipei tickling the dragon than building up a prickly defence. The long obfuscation of Congressional efforts to sell F-16s to Taipei shows successive presidents’ deference to Beijing’s sensibilities, which on the face of it is illogical appeasement. The planes are only of use if China attacks – no one seriously expects Taiwan to attack the mainland, after all. But Washington has to take account of the importance of the island in China’s inner party rivalries.
There is room for compromise. If we consider, for example, North Korea as China’s Israel, an embarrassing but ineradicable ally, it would frame the limits of what Washington could reasonably expect China to do in a low key way. Xi can no more disown Kim Jong-un publicly than Obama can repudiate Netanyahu, but there are important gestures available.
Obama could pledge, for example, that US forces would withdraw from the Korean Peninsula in the wake of any re-unification, thus avoiding the triumphalistic mistakes in Europe that still fuel Russian resentment.
In fact, there is another model the two might adopt. Britain and the US were similar rivals and partners, tied as much by financial chains as any alleged common bonds of culture and language.
The US facilitated the decline of its erstwhile rival, moving from debtor to creditor – and, it might be added, doing its best to stab its ally in the back financially even as they fought together. But it has not approached military tensions since the British burnt the White House in 1814.
Of course, unless the Tea Party triumphs and splits the US into autonomous fragments, the US is never going to decline as precipitately as Britain shorn of empire, but it is possible for a rising China to be partners with a still powerful, although relatively declining America.
It would appear that Xi and the Chinese are prepared for this.
In terms of domestic politics, Japan is the foreign scapegoat up front while the US is relatively benign in China’s image.
Similarly, China benefits in the US from not being the Soviet Union and also the  main trading partner, an object of admiration and emulation.
Xi and Obama might be the two right people in the right place to make the mutually respectful links needed – and these talks will demonstrate that, one way or another.

Antithesis Incarnate

http://logosjournal.com/2012/winter_williams/

Antithesis Incarnate: Christopher Hitchens, A Retrospective Glance

by Ian Williams Logos Winter 2012

As a “public intellectual,” Christopher Hitchens’ eminently readable writings helped cast people and events from a different perspective – mostly, it must be said, one based on reality rather than received “wisdom” and prejudice. While his work was certainly refreshing in this age of competing groupthink and duckspeak across the political spectrum, unlike his hero George Orwell, one has to doubt whether his currently impressive work will still be read in seventy years time.
It is useful to compare the two.  While Orwell sought to write a prose that is like a pane of glass and gave his famous list of does and don’ts, Hitchens played with words and often broke many of his mentor’s rules. The uncharitable might conclude that he was often trying to draw attention to the writer rather than the message, and they would often be right.
While Orwell tends to state his theses magisterially, if occasionally cantankerously, Hitchens’ preferred style always came as the polemic. He functioned best when he was arguing with an opponent, to the extent that by the time of the Iraq war he made his own windmill to tilt at – a collective left that did not actually exist.
Even so, re-reading Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory and reflective person than Hitchen’s often intemperate outbursts would suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability for which he was overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as his own “most marked characteristic,” “insecurity,” which I suspect derives from his British upbringing. Like Orwell, from the Lower Upper Middle Classes, his public (that is private)-school and Oxford background had given him a sense of entitlement without the income, and so he had become an inveterate freelancer – who I suspect turned down a commission as rarely as a cocktail invite.
As well being a rung or two down the caste ladder from Orwell, Hitchens came of age when the charm of an upper class accent was wilting in the face of working class heroes like the Beatles. And unlike in Orwell’s day when even working class socialists might defer to a “toff” who was on their side, by the 1960s even the universities were filled with students of working class origin who were more likely to see a posh accent as the mark of Cain, while the residual deference of the proles themselves had long gone. To his credit Hitchens did not attempt the nasalized pastiche plebeian accent to which his Merseyside origins might have given him some claim.
In contrast, as he and others noted, educated British arrivals in the US, particularly English ones, escape the social insecurities of home and land as honorary WASPs with almost instant deference guaranteed. An accent that in Britain would have fathers locking up their daughters and wallets is considered high class in the US! It is no accident that Hollywood chooses that Oxbridge accent for Roman colonialists and Gestapo officers. But the combined effect of his accent and his over-reaction to insecurity enhanced the appearance of almost reflexive arrogance – certainly compared with Orwell, who let the ideas speak for themselves. Better sounding cantankerous than supercilious.
To be fair, the Socialist Workers Party, originally the International Socialist Group, to which he adhered, was more open minded and attractive intellectually than the other quantum particles splitting from the various Fourth Internationals, and its guru, Tony Cliff, although revered and influential, was not as rabbinically omnipotent as his rivals in other sects. Amusingly he anticipated Hitchens’ omniscience in his works by citing other great thinkers, such as A. N. Israel and Ygael Gluckstein, without mentioning that these were some of his pen names.
While Orwell excelled at weighing courses of action in the balance and factoring desirability against feasibility, sects such as the one to which Hitchens subscribed tended to take the full prerogatives of the harlot and assume power without responsibility. That tendency was accentuated even more when he arrived in the US and drifted away from his native home where there is a spectrum of the left from ultra through to centrist with channels of communication and sometimes shared political purpose and action. In Britain even the ultra-left can talk to socialists in Parliament. In the US, many of them regard Bernie Sanders as a reformist sell-out!
Hitchens’ decades in the US accustomed him to the self-denying ordinances of  some of the sectarian American left, who can condemn shrilly while never having to offer practical alternatives.  Particularly in relation to Iraq he should have remembered his own book on Orwell, in which he praises his hero for his realization that there was no facile analogy with appeasement when he opposed calls for a quick war against Stalin’s Russia. With Animal Farm already out, and 1984 in preparation, Orwell opposed what could have been a successful—if bloody—attempt to overthrow a tyrannical evil regime guilty of monstrous crimes against its own people and its neighbors. Orwell thought about the consequences: Hitchens sixty years later did not, until afterwards.
All people, and all writers change over time.  Some can admit to previous follies, but Hitchens found that difficult, hence the temporal consistency in his outlook since he never admitted he had been wrong before. Whatever new apercu he presented fitted over his previous  views like a badly erased palimpsest, which was not always conducive to clarity and impeded a consistent and coherent worldview from his contemporary essays.
The World according to Hitchens is all too often a pointillist picture where the dots are the holes from the darts he had flung and rarely retracted.  He shared with his disgruntled former comrades the same ad-hominem approach that they later used to bell book and candle him out of the “movement,” for the perceived instances where he broke “the line.”  Sounding almost wounded, he writes in Hitch 22, “I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.”
What he says is quite true and perspicacious. But it describes exactly his own style and that of the old left from Lenin and possibly before.  He shared with his detractors on the American Left the Manichaean tendency to  divide the world into black and white, cowboys and Indians, goodies and bad and a consequent proclivity to hate more well than wisely. Along with Saul Alinsky’s organizational schemata it has certainly been adopted enthusiastically by the new right, with far more devastating effect. More people see this type of bile on Fox News in one program than have read Socialist Worker from its inception!
However, one reason Hitchens wrote with a renewed animosity, even at a time when his politics were aligning to reality – he began to support the Labour Party in the UK – was the bile on the left that had begun after NATO’s belated intervention in Balkans – events which eventually led both Hitchens and myself to terminal breaks with the Nation, for example.  Even if there was a certain sense of taking ones own medicine, one needs a refined sense of irony when assaulted by groups whose cardinal principles simultaneously encompassed the absolute innocence of Mumia and the wrongness of the death penalty with the infallibility of Milosevic and an apologia for the mass murder of Bosnian and Kosovar civilians.
However, after he supported the war on Iraq, the steady drip of bile became a tsunami. Above all it was the Comintern view that once someone had been outlawed, their past and future were equally excoriated. Sadly, that was a pattern he followed himself. One manifestation perhaps of his atheism is that he rarely shows signs of believing in redemption and indeed shows few signs of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian. Orwell made O’Brien in 1984, almost likable, and we almost feel for the apparatchiks who do Big Brother’s work.
In his biography of Orwell he shows that his subject went out of his way to defend and maintain friendly relations with people he disagreed with, sometimes profoundly.  However, Hitchens range of enemies was wide, and his atheism took a Calvinist tilt, in which those not of the elect, his personal friends, had no chance of redemption for a perceived deviation.  He did antipathy and rarely empathy or sympathy. He retained the Leninist binary politics that eschewed any in-betweens and fuzzy logic. In fact, he never really got social democracy even when he joined the British Labour Party in the USA!
If he could write hagiographies of Thomas Jefferson, the slave-owner and raper, why did he preserve a life long animus against his overtly Trotskyite student-era foe Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister who kept Britain out the Vietnam War in the face of relentless political and economic pressure from LBJ? Or indeed Michael Foot, a cultured and principled radical who led the Labour Party – and incidentally eloquently supported the same principles as Hitchens in the Kosovo and Falklands War?
Above all, I shared his revulsion for Bill Clinton and remember fondly when Murray Kempton shouted across a crowded UN cafeteria that he had enrolled Hitchens and myself as charter members of “Revolutionary Socialists for Bob Dole.”  But Hitchens churlishly refrains from giving the rubber-spined President any credit at all, even though, belatedly he was dragged into supporting intervention on behalf of the Kosovars.
Indeed, later at the time of Iraq, he even achieved the rare feat of making Clinton seem hard done to. His newly adopted friends around the White House,  the “tougher thinkers in defense department “ and the “Pentagon Intellectuals,” as he called them, had harried Clinton into military ineffectiveness in Kosovo and Rwanda because he had opposed the war in Vietnam but was not called up. In contrast, many of the most sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the Vietnam war – but dodged the draft and then went on to wage war in Iraq. Hitchens’ response was to attack those who used the well-deserved epithet “Chicken Hawk”  against the Bush coterie since the “Pentagon intellectuals” were not of age or health to qualify in the new volunteer army. Heredity triumphs. Few if any of their offspring ran to the colors.
Once can only put down these jejune excuses to a relapse into the polemical mode of the sects, in which once the enemy has been identified, you throw everything you can at him while fiercely defending your own side. The problem is, of course, that someone of his genuine intellectual acuity should have been able to weigh the relatives masses of beams and motes in the eyes on either side.
Even so, re-reading Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory and reflective person than the author’s occasionally intemperate outbursts would suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability and insecurity for which he was overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as his own “most marked characteristic,” “insecurity,” which as I said earlier reflects his British upbringing.
He compensated for this with strong relationships with friends – sometimes enough to evoke scabrous rumors from observers. His account of his disagreements with, for example Edward Said, has more than a hint of a feeling of personal betrayal.  In this, I too argued with Said about the Balkan Wars and his Chomskyite view of the US as the only permitted target, but certainly agreed with him about most of the targets he did pick!
Hitchens made the Iraq War his own equivalent of the Leftist loyalty oath, and preemptively put the mark of Cain on all  who disagreed. In the shrill and un-nuanced “A Long Short War,” about the war he tried to maintain all the old positions he held on the Left, while uncritically embracing his new friends “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougher thinkers in the Defense Department.”  For a time he had become a free floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accepted as such his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration.
It is also true that many Leftists, whoring after strange gods as is their wont, were putting Saddam Hussein along with Slobodan Milosevic and later Gaddafi and Assad in the Pantheon of progressive heroes. However, contrary to the customized windmill he had built to tilt at, many others were not, but were disturbed by a militarist lynch mob that disregarded international law, manufactured evidence and carried out the intervention so clumsily that more Iraqis died than at the hands of the tyrant’s forces.
“First do no harm,” was the old Hippocratic advice to surgeons, and the coterie around Bush might indeed have removed a malignant tumor when they excised the Ba’athist regime, but they also eviscerated and lobotomized Iraqi society in the process. On a national scale, “it was destroying the village to save it,” which was an entirely predictable consequence of a war fought by the ignorant, malignant and ideologically driven, who before the first shot had cast aside the lamentably few people in the State Department who knew anything about the country and the region.
It was pleasant to see that before he died, even if he had no doubts about godlessness, he did have those second thoughts about the conduct of the war.  Uncharacteristically he had, if not withdrawn from his positions, at least, shall we say, ceased to state them so emphatically. He admits “I probably now know more about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left Iraq in the hands of Saddam,” and adds in possibly the nearest thing to admission that “even though they don’t alter the case against Ba’athism, (they) have permanently disfigured the record of those of us who made that case.”
It is typical Hitchens to claim that he is better informed about the arguments against cheering the White House to war than many on the Left he reviled had pointed out at the time that he was cheering on a mad-axeman to carry out brain surgery. I drank with him shortly after his meetings with Paul Wolfowitz, which clearly flattered and intrigued him. Without succumbing to Hitchens’ unfettered admiration, it is indeed possible that if Wolfowitz had had more influence on the conduct of the war many of its more disastrous outcomes would have been avoided. It is true, for example, that Wolfowitz had the chutzpah and foresight to tell AIPAC that the Palestinians had genuine issues that needed resolution. But once it was clear that the tenuous rational element in the administration had been sidelines, why did he not at least scale down to merely two cheers for the war effort? Why act as a champion of Bush while casting Clinton into outer darkness? Was it because as Kissinger said of the latter “he does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal?” Or was he just as “loyal,” in his own way, to his enemies as he was to his friends?  On the loyalty front, while Britishers are rarely “loyal” to their native land in the American sense of tub thumping, one wonders what the quietly patriotic Orwell would have made of Hitchen’s un-British enthusiastic professions of loyalty to his new American home when he took his oath?
Hitchens left the left by means of redefining it, to exclude a humanitarian and democratic socialist view to which he was hewing by the end. However, he was right (and Left) far more than he was wrong, because he derived his positions from opposition to all forms of tyranny and barbaric governments without making expedient tribal or geopolitical exceptions.
Now that he is dead, proving if it needed it that there are indeed atheists in hospices,  it seems almost churlish to consider tone and attitude so important. After all, most of his targets deserved some, at least, of the winged arrows of outraged morality. However, one cannot help feeling that such unbalanced denunciation can lead philosophically to the totalitarianism that he otherwise fought against strenuously and sincerely.
In the end, that is why, much as I enjoyed talking and drinking with him, like a bar chat, his works are stimulating  and enjoyable, but on a longer scale ephemeral. Like the plaster casts from Pompeii, future readers would have to fill in the centre to determine what he was for by reference to those whom he was so clearly against. And they are hardly great turning reference points. Hitchens is cursed with an age where even bad guys are eminently forgettable.  In future years Mother Theresa will be one of those minor saints in the RC calendar and  Bill Clinton will be down there with Millard Filmore as an historical footnote, the blow-job forgotten as the DNA sample on Monica’s frock breaks down.  There are probably more people know Dr Strangelove from TV re-runs than know Henry Kissinger.
But aberrations of intemperance aside, the sins of totalitarianism, hypocrisy and complaisance in the face of evil against which he railed are still rampant. It is sad to see his voice silenced, now.

Ian Williams was born in Liverpool about the same time as Christopher Hitchens to an upper lower working class family, was expelled from Liverpool University, worked on the railroad and in the union before becoming a writer and journalist in the USA. He was always surprised at how often a teenage Maoist like him and a teenage Trotskyist like Hitchens agreed on things. He drinks but does not smoke. His collected works tend to appear in deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.

Happy Birthday Dear China.

Greater China
Oct 2, 2009 Asia Times


The night Zhou was drunk under the table
By Ian Williams (the one with the long hair and beard)

As we approached the 60th anniversary on Thursday of Mao Zedong's declaration that the "Chinese people have stood up," I trawled through the memories of my time in China straddling 1970 and 1971, and found, with all the accuracy of retrospective prophesy, that there were more auguries of the current China than one might suspect.

Although my putative memoirs would be called "I was a Teenage Maoist", by the time I landed in Beijing I was a callow 21-year-old, a month older than the People's Republic. In fact, Zhou Enlai, the first premier, from 1949 until his death in 1976, repeated to us his dictum that it was too early to tell whether or not the French Revolution had been a success, let alone China's. Forty years later, I wonder what Zhou, one of the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan of the Chinese leaders, but nonetheless a devoted communist, would have made of present-day China.



I was part of a delegation from an obscure British party that enjoyed unprecedented access to the Chinese leadership, including a drinking competition with Zhou - and a very risky argument about literature with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who had, after all, instituted the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) by demonizing all but a tiny group of writers and artists. It was so long ago that even the Chinese used the old Wade-Giles Romanization system for the Mandarin language. We were in Peking (Beijing), and read the Peking Review every week. In fact, our visit featured in it.

Our sessions with the Chinese cadres were often like negotiations, conducted over innumerable cigarettes and a constant flow of tea. The idea was that whoever called for a bathroom break was conceding the field of battle. Sadly for Chinese pride, our side had been brought up on a diet of gallons of tea and bitter beer and had formidable resistance to such diuretics.

Even at the time, I had a sense of bewilderment at the relative isolation from the world outside, of the top leadership. They provided us with a daily English press summary of world affairs and the difficulties of a binary view of the world became apparent. For example, Pakistan was an ally of China, therefore it was socialist and progressive - which the Pakistanis themselves would hardly claim, while social-democratic governments, like the British Labour Party, were reactionary and capitalist to the core.

As for our visit: I suspect that Zhou had hoped that it would provide information and encouragement for his planned opening to the West. We were there before British premier Edward Heath, or former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon from the United States. Indeed, as almost the only gweilos (foreigners) in town, we could attract crowds just by peering in a shop window. In those far-off days, my hair was red, which was almost like having eyes on green stalks for some people. However, enlisting us as a resource for global realpolitik confirms the naivety of their approach.

We were a sectarian groupuscule with fewer members nationally than the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee. Our contact with the working political system in Britain was minimal and our knowledge of other countries tended to be based on contacts with equally out-of-touch groups. It would be nice to think that we changed the course of history, but there is absolutely no basis for thinking so. Our input probably pointed in the opposite direction to what they did. When we asked why they did not walk in and take Hong Kong, which was then ruled by Britain, Zhou suggested it was better to lessen the economic disparities between the two sides first.

Despite their own sectarian squabbles, despite the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were at least dealing with some aspects of the real world. For example, they had built a state-of-the-art metro system in Beijing. Even though it was as yet unopened, Zhou took us for a ride on it, which tangentially introduced yet another paradox.

They told us, with almost schoolboyish glee at their boldness, that they were calling the metro station for Tiananmen Square "Zhuxi [Chairman] Station." It was a paradox even then, that in the midst of history's biggest-ever personality cult, no physical location was named after Mao, let alone any of the other revolutionary personalities. I can only presume that it was intended as a gesture of superiority to the Soviet proclivity for churning out city names in honor of top people.

This saved a lot of sign-painting during the various rectification campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Not many of the leadership stayed in power throughout.

Apart from Zhou, we met the full Gang of Four - Jiang Qing and her close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen - but we noticed the omissions. Lin Biao, the powerful military commander who rose to political prominence in the Cultural Revolution and whose picture and introduction was at the front of hundreds of millions of Little Red Books, was absent in name and person. In a seamen's club in Shanghai, I noticed a book on sale by Chen Boda, Mao's personal secretary. Our minders immediately took it out the case and said it was too old and faded to sell.

Our party chairman, Reg Birch, an old communist trade unionist, asked to meet his old chum, Kang Sheng. They brought along his wife instead, explaining that the head of the security and intelligence apparatus was indisposed. In fact, along with Chen Boda, it now seems as if he, and indeed Lin Biao, were at that time in the process of being purged.

Lin shortly afterwards died in a plane crash. Kang resurfaced long enough to ensure that the People's Republic put its weight behind Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In retrospect, I am glad I never had to shake his hand. Kang was posthumously accused of sharing responsibility (with the Gang of Four) for the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.

In contrast with all the mass campaigns and circus antics of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in widespread social and political upheaval and and economic disarray, these purges were being conducted in secrecy with no word of them leaking out from the leadership.

A case in point was a bizarre Christmas feast with an elderly American couple, old-style communists who had moved to China and taken up citizenship and party membership. They were brought out because they knew several of the delegation, who had asked about them.

The turkey dinner was odd in several ways. The couple were Jewish for a start, and although our Chinese hosts were trying to be hospitable with the seasonal bird, they obviously found something alien about the idea of cooking an intact animal: it came as a sort of turkey construction kit, disassembled, cooked and then reassembled. As for the couple, it was only many years later that I heard that their goose had been well and truly cooked. They were languishing in prison, brought out and dusted off for us, and then returned afterwards. But nothing they said gave any of us any grounds for suspicion.

The full Gang of Four came along to join Zhou for talks and a banquet on New Year's Eve. Jiang Qing stood out in a sea of nondescript cotton Mao suits. The still striking woman, who had reduced the repertoire of a huge nation to a handful of revolutionary Beijing operas, one ballet, the Red Detachment of Women, and pretty much one classical sonata, flounced in, every inch the imperial consort. The former actress' cotton greatcoat was draped around her shoulders like a cape, and she carried herself like an imperial consort.

When she discovered that I had been studying English literature, she immediately pronounced that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Hard Times were the only two English proletarian novels. Even as I blurted out a negative, I was thinking hard. I saw the rest of the senior leadership of the party withdraw a little in expectation of the thunderbolt to come. Jane Eyre was clearly a bit too close to home. A governess who marries the boss had too much resonance with the career of a Shanghai starlet who married the chairman. I concentrated on Hard Times, pointing out that its hero was in fact a strikebreaker - a traitor to his class in Marxist terms.

Through narrowed eyes, Jiang delivered her ultimate riposte, "You have long hair. It makes you look like a girl." There was a barely concealed sigh of relief around the table. At least it was not "Off with his head!" or "Counter-revolutionary scum".

The evening, after a banquet fit for an emperor, ended with drinks for us and Zhou and his entourage. The Gang of Four did not, as I remember, hang around. It became a drinking match, with shots of mao tai, the ferocious-smelling sorghum-based overproof liquor that had become the official drink of the party.

As the youngest there, but already with a reputation as a determined drinker, I was moved forward as the champion on going glass-for-glass with Zhou, a man with an iron constitution. But I saw how he stayed ahead. He only drank half his, while I was drinking the lot. Even so, he gave up first, as I remember - allowing for the fact that after large amounts of the stuff, memories can be unreliable.

Despite the Moscow-style purges going on behind the wainscoting, economically, China's development was more balanced than that of the Soviets. We could go on a pub crawl through the streets of Beijing, pijui - beer, being one of the early accessions to our Mandarin vocabulary and although, for example, cotton was rationed, consumer goods seemed in adequate supply. In the covered market, locals looked superior as Aeroflot pilots came rushing through stocking up on things from soap to razor blades to tomatoes that the Soviets' heavy industrial base couldn't provide.

The variety of cigarettes, from coffin nails to the crush-proof packs of the most expensive brands, has always made me wonder about the role of tobacco in industrialization - selling the peasants highly profitable cigarettes was a financially painless way of raising state funds compared with expropriation. The other aspect was the amount of collective entrepreneurial activity that was taking place, even after years of disruption from the Cultural Revolution, which had not officially finished by then.

For example, in the countryside, communes were making cement boats for sale, while in Shanghai we visited a back-street factory that was etching silicon chips - almost state-of-the-art at the time. Even then, I remember wondering about the flue that vented the hydrofluoric acid fumes from the process onto the street. In a microchip, it encapsulated the future environmental problems of reckless development, even as it demonstrated the entrepreneurial urges that Deng Xiaoping was later to unleash.

I returned to Britain puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had not visibly destroyed the economy, as was sometimes claimed. But it was difficult to know what it was all about. It was bad enough when party leaders were denounced for esoteric sins of culture and ideology during the Cultural Revolution, but these silent purges and behind-the-scenes disappearances reduced the struggles to personalities and power-plays. Mao himself seems to have been playing off the leaders against each other.

So perhaps that was the twin legacy of the first 20 years. It developed the ground for the upsurge of economic activity in which China seems not only to have stood up but appears to be racing ahead. But it also has left the Communist Party totally committed to clinging onto power, without much in the way of ideology, while its leadership changes behind closed doors, with only the faintest pretence of consulting the masses. And by all accounts, party leaders at every level are still fond of banquets and mao tai.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

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When the Reign Goes

the full text of last Guardian post - which for some reason barred comment!

The chairman's reign
Chiang is on the way out in Taipei. Maybe now would be a good time to exorcise Mao in Beijing.

Ian Williams
One of the few occasions on which Jun Chang and Jon Halliday show Mao Tse Tung with any deep human feelings in their biography is when they describe how he went into mourning following the death of his old partner and rival, Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek. Their biography also showed how much Mao owed Chiang for giving him a free pass for much of the legendary Long March. Chiang and Mao had other areas of agreement as well, notably their common determination that Taiwan was part of one China, with one legitimate government, even though they begged to differ about which of their governments that was. So it will be interesting to see Beijing's reaction to the news that the Taiwanese government is downgrading the massive Mausoleum to Chiang Kai Shek in Taipei, and evicting the old Generalissimo's mortal remains from it. Taiwan's pro-independence government have already de-Chianged Taiwan's airport, the presidential palace and moved his omnipresent statue from military barracks. They have also begun to rename the old agencies, deleting the vestigial "China" in the title. The next move is to commemorate the massacre, which took place sixty years ago this week (February 28 1947) of some 28,000 Taiwanese that Chiang staged as a "welcome-back to the motherland" for the brief period in modern history when Taiwan and the mainland shared the same government. Back in Beijing, crowds still queue to see the pickled chairman in the mausoleum while his head still adorns the appreciating Yuan. And his successors still maintain the peculiar protocols of the People's Democracy, one of which is pointing more than 900 missiles at Taiwan and threatening to unleash them if the Taiwanese people should ever renounce their vestigial claim to the mainland and declare the island an independent entity. In fact, the mainland would be better off inviting Taiwan to take over. Since Chiang's death, the island has built a prosperous and vibrant, albeit boisterous, democracy, which in the social democratic sense - of unions, labour regulation and a national health service - is actually more socialist than the mainland. Taiwan's elected rulers are actively engaged in exorcising the tyrannical past, in contrast to the comrades in Beijing, who try to avoid mentioning Mao the way that John Cleese tried to avoid mentioning the war. The chairman keeps cropping up anyway. In contrast, the People's Republic still adheres to the old principle that the way to win hearts and minds is either to twist testicles or put bullets in brains. Those 900 missiles are hardly a Valentine's Day card to the broad masses of compatriots in Taiwan. In the modern world, as the British discovered in Ireland, and indeed earlier with the 13 ex-colonies, it is difficult to win love and respect at the point of a bayonet. China's threats are more than a little counterproductive in building a spirit of Chinese patriotism among Taiwanese. China spent decades supporting the right to self-determination for its chums in the non-aligned. It could try being consistent. Indeed one additional charge that pro-independence Taiwanese may bring against Chiang is that when the mainland won the China seat at the UN in 1974, he withdrew his delegation. In the nature of the UN, Taiwan, as the Republic of China, could have relied on sheer inertia to retain a seat in the general assembly. Now of course, Beijing bullies and the rest of the world kow-tows. There is only one China, agreed Richard Nixon in the Shanghai Communique. And the rest of the world is prepared, for example, to leave a diplomatic and global governance vacuum in the epicentre of the SARS and Avian Flu global potential pandemics because Taiwan can't join the WHO. China keeps growling in the UN about the peacekeeping force in Haiti because the Haitians still recognise Taiwan. It is past time for other countries to stop the kow-towing and bring the PRC up to speed with historical progress. The Middle Kingdom is, like Monty Python's parrot, "dead, passed on ... no more ... a stiff ...b ereft of life", and should be left "to rest in peace". The PRC's claim to Taiwan has all the legal and moral stature of a revanchist British claim to Ireland or New Zealand. In fact, less. The British ruled those places far longer than the mainland had any effective power in Taiwan. Even if one were to accept the PRC's claims, the Chinese delegation, along with the rest of the world, accepted the new doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect at the 2005 UN heads of state summit. Legally, Beijing can no longer croon "'t ain't nobody's business if I do", if they drop 900 missiles on Taiwan. The rest of the world has a responsibility to intervene - and a large self- interest. It also has a big incentive to start thinking about this. Perhaps most disturbingly for the future is the US guarantee to Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, which in turn, the Chinese have promised if the Taiwanese "declare independence". A promise from Tricky Dicky is not the most negotiable currency in the world, and looking at the amount of money made in the US from buying Chinese goods cheap and selling them dear, it would be natural for Taiwanese to wonder about the protective umbrella. It was in return for those guarantees that they gave up on nuclear weapons. If the guarantees begin to look shaky then maybe the nuclear self-denial will be as well. If Taiwan is not a state it cannot join the non-proliferation treaty. and if it is part of China, then it benefits from the existing nuclear powers' exemption in the treaty. Whether it builds or buys them (North Korea may have some on offer) there are few nuclear powers in the world with half the justification that Taiwan has. There should be some serious negotiations with China about ending this impasse, not from the usual prone posture before the throne. They should be told: you can woo, but you cannot rape. And they have to take no for an answer if that's what the Taiwanese want. Beijing's rulers can keep Mao on the banknotes, but should get him out of their heads.

Chiang is on the way out in Taipei. Time to exorcise Mao in Beijing

Latest Guardian Comment is Free - another attempt to upset Beijing's complacency.


Chiang is on the way out in Taipei. Time to exorcise Mao in Beijing

Demon du jour

Here is the full text of the Comment is Free piece Demon du jour
The comments, for which you have to check the Guardian site, are fun, mostly taking the blindly binary approach that I was questioning. In this mirror universe, calling someone a mass murderer is apparently revisionist whitewashing if you do not admit they kicked the dog and robbed kid's piggy banks as well.

Are Ahmadinejad, Cheney, Mao and Chavez really as evil as everyone says?
Ian Williams


February 21, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version

The allegation that George W Bush has read and enjoyed the 814 page Mao: The Unknown Story, is on the face of, amazing. I have just finished reading it - and, for a start, it does not have many pictures. But on another level - once you have overcome a natural scepticism about his reading prowess - you can see why both the subject and treatment of the massive biography would appeal to the president, even if he only received an executive summary.

On the one hand, Bush has taken Mao's aphorism that political power comes from the barrel of a gun to levels way beyond the puny weaponry of Mao's army, not to mention emulated Mao's idiosyncratic uses of the word "democracy".

And on the other hand, the president has previously said that he does not "do nuance", and neither does this book - which is so relentlessly negative that it almost provokes sympathy for a man who was, as the authors exhaustively document, responsible for the deaths of millions. Likewise, demonization is the weapon of choice in this administration. They practiced it on Saddam Hussein, on Fidel Castro, and on Yasser Arafat, and are currently honing it for use on Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Most Americans probably assume that these people kick their dogs, abuse their children and are totally faithless to their friends and spouses. But it doesn't work that way. Dick Cheney can be a sinister force for evil - and still love his lesbian daughter.

Even the worst rulers are complex. Think of a leader who died, faithful to one woman for many years, who was a vegetarian, a pet-lover, a non-smoking teetotaler and a sincere believer in all the causes he had espoused for thirty years. One worries whether to name him, in case Adolf Hitler is mistaken for some evangelical saint.

In fact, Milton had a more complex picture of Satan than much of the contemporary western media does of its enemies. Once people are tainted with evil, it is assumed that, like some figure from Marlowe or Webster, everything they do is evil.

I should warn that if ever I grow up, the title of my memoirs will be "I was a Teenage Maoist". I was in China during the Cultural Revolution, had a drinking competition with Chou En Lai and had the temerity to argue about English Literature with Chiang China, aka Mme Mao. The period was a useful prophylactic against the temptations of rigid political lines in later life.

Yet the new Mao book is over the top. Certainly Mao had enough hagiographies written about him in his time. But demonographies are equally uninstructive and this one fails to explain how he mesmerized a nation. The authors show him as having a monstrous ego - but do not mention, let alone explain, why he refused to allow any places to be named after him. When I was there, they had just built the Beijing metro, and party officials chuckled at their own temerity to say that the station by the Forbidden City was called "Chairman station". The Mao book presents no such complexity.

According to the book, naked self-interest motivated every decision Mao made, and the Chinese economy was a shambles when he died. But that does not explain the foundations from which the Chinese economic miracle sprang. As with Stalin's terror, there were many beneficiaries, and millions who believed along with Mao that they were building a better world. The book, and demonography in general, finds it easier to load all the sins and responsibilities on the designated demon - which abandons the responsibility to think about motivations and backgrounds, let alone the context that made such terror possible.

While it may work for whipping up war fever, this form of writing actually disarms us against real totalitarianism - against what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. A binary, black and white, cowboys-and-Indians depiction of political figures does not equip us to deal with the real world.

In fact, the most dangerous tyrants are totally sincere. They are romantics, and think they're advancing humanity and civilization. On account of their monstrous egos, they tend to see themselves as the means of such advance. (The old aphorism about the road to hell applies here.) From the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks, it's people with "good" and even selfless intentions whose efforts to make a better world have created hell on it.

They know best, regardless of the fickle and fragile human material they have had to work with. But far from being the work of one evil tyrant, the successful demons have always known how to appeal to masses of people. It takes more than one man, or woman, to conduct a purge, a holocaust or a Great Leap Forward - or even a jihad or crusade.

To take a recent example, by loading all the evil on Osama Bin Laden as an individual, we do not have to think about his political origins, the role played by Washington in nurturing him and his ilk as proxy warriors in Afghanistan, let alone the genuine grievances that he has been able to play upon in the Arab and Muslim World.

Such one dimensional depictions are also easy to drop on demand. Just as Saddam Hussein changed overnight from the West's man in the Middle East - when he was rocketing Tehran - to the devil incarnate after Kuwait, you will have noted an almost complete silence about what's-his-name-with-the-turban, who inconveniently hid in Afghanistan rather than Iraq or Iran when wars were wanted in Washington.

Down with demonization! We should be trying to understand these people - not in the hand-wringing way of the stereotypical liberal social worker - but to understand what motivates them so that we can dissipate the romantic illusions of those who always know what is best for others, whether it is Hugo Chavez - or the Project for a New American Century.