Saturday 4 September 2010

China and Korea

As time goes by I'll organise this blog into something with a structure, with pages regarding China and North Asia. There are a few very good reference books that I know of about China; ones that dont just provide a geo-political view but rather something more interesting and personal; including the ties that bind and the remarkable tensile stregth of families. I've travelled to various points well across China by plane and train three times and I know that isn't much but at the same time it is something and worth relating. I think you'll find that I do go on a bit about the scale of humanity when talking about China. It really is The People's Republic of People.
The way the top-down rule system works, a well thought through policy can lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into a much better life faster than these things have ever happened before in the world. At the same time a bad policy can do enormous harm. It is this point in particular that really does astound me.
A nation that is building a new city of 20 million people every year and has been doing so for about 2 decades and will continue on this track. That's China. To me it really is mind-boggling. I'll also include some re-edited the articles on China that I had published in the Bangkok Post over the past few years.
Last year China began the relocation of 200 million people from rural areas into new and existing cities...I think the annual rate is about 20 million people per year, so the plan for the next ten years is established, in place, and operating now.
A big change will come with the hand-over of power from the current Chairman Hu to the next Chairman in 2012. Both Hu and Wen are social-engineers whereas the new guys I think come from stronger political roots with closer ties to the Peoples Liberation Army and that will mean a lot in terms of re-structuring defense systems and providing everything from a brand new full sized modern navy to anti-satellite missiles and some form of nuclear shield. So the future is very interesting and so much depends upon China, the soft-power re-unification of Taiwan, and the sway of power across the Koreas. There is no North or South Korea, really; it is a divided country much the same as Vietnam was divided, but is now unified. How this happens with the Koreas will be quite devastatingly important to world peace.
The Middle East is always unsolved simply because it is not really worth the effort of the 'great powers' to solve. There's just not the human density nor resources there that can really make much difference no matter who has what weapon. If peace mattered there, it would have happened by now. Whereas in North Asia the combination of huge populations, massive resources, clashing ideology and strategic world power is right there, right on a 'tectonic plate' of humanity where if one thing goes wrong, everything can change very quickly; and if something does go wrong then everything, for all of us, will change very quickly.

The Facts

‎"Every one of us comes up from time to time with an idea that is enormous in its impact and meaning. I dont believe that it is in the province of politicians, priests or businessmen, marketeers or publishers, or any of the lesser forms of human flotsam, to proclaim propriety rights over world understanding or direction.... What is meaningful does not have an address and does not accept cash or Visa cards."JF2010

Friday 3 September 2010

The Works of Yukio Mishima

My Reading List: Thirst for Love, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, & Spring Snow (the first of the cycle of novels titled Sea of Fertility) all written by Yukio Mishima. I love the Kinokinuya Bookshop chain. You can get any book there, either off the shelf or by fast mail. Any book. Michel de Montaigne's 1580 "Apology for Raymond Sebord'...in French, English, Hindi, or Mandarin...anything. The facility-base is astounding and has nothing to do with the crass limitations of new technology, or of borders.
What Mishima did, with his Sea of Fertility 'tetralogy', was set in place a 'cycle of novels' so that when you've read through the bunch, you can approach the first one, Spring Snow, with an informed knowledge that can take you through it all again, and the rest, at the next level of understanding.

This is why he said when he started the work that the day he finished it all, he would kill himself; and he was true to that, and did that. Fuck, I'm not going to do that, but I appreciate the fact that he did do that.

It's only when faced by such people I realise I am not a very good writer at all; but it doesn't diminish the joy one iota. I am becoming, again, as between years 12 and 30, a great and passionate reader, which is where the joy begins and belongs and endures as real knowledge.

Kim Jong Un

There's not much info about him, but he's in his mid 20s, at the oldest, went to an international school in switzerland, and likes to drink and smoke and fight and have sex, just like Dad. He loves weapons, likes Mercedes Benzs, and hates Japan, so he's the obvious choice. The fact that his mum was a Japanese citizen, yet of Korean descent, adds to the complexity. China would prefer North Korea be ruled by a committee but Un, just now, is the annointed one; if he can stay alive. NK is a hard 'system of ascent'. You never know when your trusted Deputy is going to knife you in the Forum, just like in Rome, or in Australia; it's just that in North Korean royalty they use, like in Rome, real knives.


He'll have the same authentic legitimacy as the King of Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, or Dubai, or the Emirates etc so is already a 'world leader' in that real-power sense, with the 4th largest land army, even if poorly equipped, in the world. A million soldiers is a lot. A paramilitary of an extra 2 million is a lot too.It will be interesting to see what he does, being so young, quite bright, and fearing no one.It will be important for all of us to know what he does when 'the blowtorch is applied to the belly' of resource rich, densely populated, ideologically tectonic, North Asia. China will stand by him, if he survives. China and North Korea really are Bloody Brothers in Arms always. You can bank on that.

Asia

Asia is young. Cultures are indeed as ancient and direct as the Egyptians, and as bifurcated and reformed and mis-made as anything in the West, but the thing I notice most is the youth of people and the rapid and escalating modernity of all the cities, especially Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and every city, every place, in China. These are just full of young people who have grown up with an appreciation of education and are going at it with great gusto in profoundly competitive systems that we western folk have never had to experience. From an outside perspective, its like the massive 'intellectualisation' of a giant region of the world.

Surviving the City

Yesterday was spent in the city, after trying to get into it for a few hours, then finally finding a way via a sideroute to a Skytrain station and from there into the centre. The roads were rot-thik with traffice for hours. It was a good day in town in that I knew my way around and zipped from sky-train station to skytrain station and down into the streets and round about, then met Wanyi and in the late afternoon we cruised the giant Kinokinuya Bookshop in Siam Paragon and I picked up some Yukio Mishima books to read: Thirst for Love, the Golden Pavilion, and also the first book of his big series The Sea of Fertility. Some deep and somewhat dark text. 50 years after being written, his works are still fresh, beautiful, and still as profoundly disturbing as well. Kinokinuya Bookshop is great and like other bookshops in SE Asia and in China, they seem to take up some of the roles of a public library -not that you can borrow books, but its quite the norm to sit on a comfy seat in the shop and read all day, study, make notes etc. I recall seeing this in a Beijing bookshop -full of after-school kids, cramped on every step of the stairway between the floors, reading reading reading. Its great, the silence of that studious intensity. I was thinking of the term: 'they're reading and reading as if there is no tomorrow' but really, they're reading and reading because there is a tomorrow, many tomorrows.