THE TEMASEK REVIEW

This is written by the Think Tank of the  Brotherhood – the ASDF: Why did China spend around 50-60 Billion US Dollars staging the Olympics? How is this linked to the whole business of engineering consent on a national scale?

No one can deny staging the Olympics on such a Byzantine scale is the equivalent of a mega ego trip – besides we all know the historical accounts need to squared off against China’s painful and humiliating past history – the defeat of the Manchu’s by the world powers in the 18th century – the tumult of the Japanese occupation of China. The ceding of Hong Kong to the British – all these are painful narratives are sheered into the psyche of every Chinese.

China has certainly come a long way – she’s the world’s fastest growing economy – outstripping even the EU and US put together – the leading manufacturer of laptop computers to Teflon coated woks – she has even managed to sent a men into space and by all accounts, as far as appearances goes, all these endless big shows is simply an extension of this new found nationalistic pride to celebrate it’s arrival in the world stage.

But look again! Carefully this time with the brotherhood magnifying glass, what’s really behind China’s preoccupation with success icons that simply say, “we have arrived?” Why is China exhibiting all the maturity of a testosterone pumped teenager just before the graduation prom? Does it have something to do with engineering consent? How is this accomplished? And more importantly why?

(1) THE EVER INCREASING DIVIDE BETWEEN PEOPLE AND THE CCP

One clue according to our resident China expert Cerebus lies in the psyche of the ruling communist party (CCP). China’s leaders face a troubling paradox: the more developed, educated and prosperous the country, the more the party elite run the risk of being marginalized and sidelined by the masses. They are justifiably insecure and even threatened by this turn of events. Men like President Hu Jintao and former President Jiang Zemin have always struggled with two diametrically opposed realities every since China opened her doors in the early 80’s; how to sustain economic growth and yet preserve the fragile communist regime. Indeed at times, it seems keeping to one’s balance on the razor’s edge has been touch and go, in 1989, the Tiananmen Square incident was a stark reminder things can go very wrong in a blink of an eye. And the disintegration of the Soviet Union serves only to sharpen the paranoia, the Chinese leaders harbor; the days of the communist party are numbered.

As Cerebus, our China expert noted:

“Now if you ask me why China is so obsessed with the Olympics? It’s the same reason why people who suffer from osteoporosis frequently consume large doses of calcium – the need is driven by the deficiency psychology, but lets be crystal clear; it’s powered by one underlying impulse; fear – To understand the divide better one needs to appreciate certain realities. Firstly, while the rest of China has changed by leaps and bounds – the Communist party has remained virtually unchanged and this naturally accounts for a lag between the China that is and the China that simply must be.

In this changing landscape the communist party is very brittle, as she is the one with the least capacity to effect change– this fossilized state is very much reflected not only in China’s blend of foreign policy but also how the communist party carries itself.

Let me just give you a few visual motifs to illustrate my point; every year there is one event in the calendar which marks the starting line, the China Congress; what do we see? Old men in dark suits laying out in Soviet style centrally planned policies in a huge cavernous hall to a sea of choreographed clapping bureaucrats; Question: how plausible does that image measure up to reality of the modern world? Not very convincing is it, not even by a long shot. I’ve mentioned this only because it’s a fitting metaphor that effectively conveys how little has actually changed in the political psyche of the communist party.

When I use the term communist party – it’s nothing short of the personification of the state. That’s the vital difference between political parties in the West and the party political reality in China. In effect, the state is considered the “People’s Party” (although the CCP is an oligarchy of only 5% of the population). To paraphrase it’s often marketed as the proxy of the people and so there is a certain degree of reciprocity here; most Chinese cannot divorce the state from life and culture, it’s very different from the Western psyche of how most of us typically view our own political oligarchies; you stay there and I stay here, see the line!

In China this mental borderline doesn’t exist –State and citizenry are one of the same reality – if the state says, you should have only one child, then you will have only one child – all further dialogues starts and ends there. This in essence is the very bedrock on which the Communist party seeks a justificatory beach head in the minds of most Chinese. The assumption here; that a non-elected minority knows what’s best for the masses.

The problem with that assumption is it’s giving way progressively to a new compact between people and state; this is not a new development, it’s an ongoing story and we see this very clearly at various waypoints in Chinese social and political history, let me just run through these stages briefly; in 1950’s, the politics of wrath featured as the cohesive force i.e if you are not with us, you are against us; in the 1970’s this gave way to the mantra; the party knows best; leave it all to the great helmsman; in the 80’s, an economic component featured for the very first time and it was defined as, we will run the country, you just focus on getting rich; Today, the belief isn’t so clear, it’s very fuzzy – and that I believe that accounts for much of the anxiety and nervous energy we currently see in the CCP – this is evidenced in why the Communist party is franctically trying it’s best to reinventing their MSM and even connecting with the online community – if one looks at the new mandate given to the 新闻出版总署 to streamline the new media in 2010 it beggars the imagination – change hardly captures the enormity of the task – if you want a mental picture of what’s in the pipeline for the state media in China: just imagining levelling every single building 10 km square of Raffles Place and rebuilding the whole district from ground zero again – that should give you an approximation of the magnitude of the task – this unfortunately also gives us a rough indication of the length and breadth of the cognitive dissonance.

(2) THE ASSAULT ON THE LEVERS OF POWERS

No doubt break neck economic growth was partly responsible for this re-definition - increasingly the divide with the traditional communist party ethos and what’s going on in China is reaching a point when it is so stressed that it’s no longer a cohesive force any longer; what the communist party is being increasingly confronted with these days is a new creed of intellectuals who openly challenge not only their authority but also the rationale which makes possible the current politics – I need to qualify myself here; we are not talking about democracy vs communism here! This is jugular – if you miss this part, the rest of this ASDF report will not make any sense.

Most people in the West, I feel don’t realize how united the Chinese are as a people; believe it or not they actually trust the communist party more than the Western media gives them credit for – however, what’s less certain is whether this is a healthy type of trust or something closer to the engineered trust that Hitler and Stalin once propagated. Nonetheless, leaving that detail aside, if you trawl the internet, you will soon pick out how many Chinese netizens see the coverage of CNN and the BBC in the recent Tibetan uprising as a double standard reportage – So let me emphasize this again, this not an ideological divide, it’s not even a difference of opinion as it is remains a methodological divide; where people may hold a different view from the State. In other words “I believe that the pollution problem could be solved this way, but I also believe it would be good, and not wrong, to do it the States way.”

The shift here is very subtle. Here what we see is an accommodative stance, that on one hand challenges the assumptions, yet preserves the status quo of “’Six’ of one, ‘half a dozen’ of the other.” As the Chinese would like to say. This is very much Deng Xio Peng’s “black cat, white cat what does it matter as long as it catches the mouse” ghost being revived again – only this time, it’s directed squarely at the communist party like artillery – usually, its the internet that leads this movement!

My point is this; the CCP has never been stressed to this point before. Never. This is why the communist party feels the heat and this goes back to what I said earlier - about inflexibililty and stasis - in short, it’s coming back to bite them big time: as the CCP does not have the means to response to this new interactive dynamic game – it’s really a war of attrition and if you want a graphic picture; its a bit like an aeroplane in a wind tunnel - under normal conditions - it can deal with the turbulence, but as it increases exponentially, a critical point will come when its inherent weakness will show up only too clearly and the wings run the danger of snapping like twigs - we are already beginning to see these rumblings in the underground internet community – cells are already organizing themselves to tunnel through the Great Chinese firewall in earnest - the authorities so far remain powerless to stop them; so what they do instead is reminiscent of what we would normally term standard cold war interdiction & containment response - classical Richardson arms racing: “I built one rocket, you build two” and so on and so forth – i.e increase the manpower, funding along with probably survelliance – but at some point even whole stadiums of cyber policemen will reach a point of diminishing returns – today China has the world’s biggest cyber counter insurgency squad – even the PLA is thinking of getting into the act – we still need some time to study this development, so we have planted an internet liaison officer there to liaise with these underground elements – we need to understand their chain of command; networks, modus operandi etc - we will be in a better position to report back to the ASDF sometime in mid Sept 2009. All I will say for the moment is a very disturbing picture is building up – the CCP is losing the war.

This may explain why the CCP needs to continually reinforce the trite belief, they are the gold standard of governance and the best hope for the Chinese people – staging mega events like the Olympics may be political pyrotechnics, like blasting Chinese into orbit feasting on desiccated bird nest soup fulfills the necessary function of feeding the justificatory mythos – you can even say, it’s a strategic precondition, if the imperative is to remain in power! – as Darkness would say, “The Great Lie must be perserved intact at every cost – anything that goes against it must be crushed!”

This is one of the main motivations why staging mega national events is so important as coliseums and the games were once key to managing consent in ancient Rome – the whole idea is to create the soft minstrel illusion; we have never had it so good, we are living in the golden age – it’s nothing short of a mental bridge to close the great Chinese divide between govt and people”

Against this back drop of shifting sands what’s increasingly happening is one by one the levers which were once effective in controlling thought are fast frittering way. Zoo keeping the intellectual class through programs such as the “Patriotic Education Campaign’ (mandatory for all college students), which relies implicitly on nurturing ‘popular resentments against Japan and America and the Mickey Mouse club and fueling the expectation that Taiwan would soon be reunified is beginning to reach the point of diminishing returns – the communist party realizes this only too well.” Cerebus writes.

Cerebus continues, “if one looks carefully at how the Chinese communist party replies to the Tibetan crisis or even something as mundane as shoddy products complaints from US consumer groups: Instead of acknowledging the cogent issues concerning the “autonomy” vs “independence” or quality control in Chinese manufacturing practices – the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda organs have goes into full scale defensive mode. The problem, as Cerebus observes, “that old battle wagon doesn’t work any longer – most Chinese intellectuals these days have the benefit of a first class Western education, others have been integrated into the MNC culture of how to define personal and organizational success – so they know things are not so simple. They can connect the dots and make informed decisions. This naturally limits the effectiveness of relying on the traditional lever of nationalism that it has fomented to deliver the goods.”

(3) THE LIMITS OF CENSORSHIP

Another lever of power that’s rotting way is state censorship. As Cerebus observes: “Most Chinese have very little idea of what is actually happening in their own country, if you don’t believe me; go and ask any Chinese whether he agrees with China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979; but don’t be surprised if the reaction is ‘did we have a war over there?’ This merely showcases the pervasive extent of censorship. The communist party nurtures this state of selective amnesia very carefully, till most Chinese are left with the twilight understanding that everything China does is always for the greater good. In a sense this accounts for why skepticism, denial, and infuriation usually accompany Western revelations about the truth.

To overcome this state of infuriation, its expedient for them to make the source of their frustration disappear, than to subject it to critical analysis for fear that it may expose the ineptitude of the Communist party. Once again what we see here is censorship is not just a way of controlling people in the Western sense. In the Chinese context, you can even say it’s a necessary lie and without it life will simply cease to have any meaning. What we see here is not only the whole sale assassination of the truth in censorship, but also how it remains a very effective way to maintain the façade that the party is always right. Here what we see is a strain of Joseph Heller’s catch 22 crisis management 101 at work, ‘don’t recognize the symptoms and the disease automatically disappears.’

In this regard the Beijing Olympics, the space program and other such state inspired mega eye candy shows are simply an extension of the justificatory causes to further legitimize and mythologize the communist party in the eyes of most Chinese – In Beijing and Shanghai today, the famous rhetorical question once posed by a British textile tycoons as they sipped cardomon tea was—what if every Chinese added just one inch of fabric to their clothing?—has found new meaning as a whole new generation of Communist cadres now begin to ask: what if we can put a policeman in the head of every Chinese?

It seems these days with more and more people buying into the ideal of China as the new age utopia, this not only a possibility, but for some, its already a reality worth emulating and learning from. We all know PAP is toying with the idea of a single party like North Korea so this may or may not explain why Teo Ser Luck recently led a 5 man delegation to Beijing.

What is clear is like third world generals who regularly visit defense fairs in the hope of finding that one wonder weapon that will give them the magic bullet. YP may also be searching for new thoughtware to perpetuate their hegemony – for lack of a better word; they may very well be trying to learn the art of engineering consent from the Chinese Communist Party.

That’s OK, if it’s a good software, but as Darkness rightly said, it’s “a shitty way to move forward by going backwards.”

This article should be read in conjunction with this: Why is PAP going to China to look for the mythical dead end?

Cerebus.

[Harphoon & Scholarboy / Cerebus / ASDF – The Brotherhood Press 2009 – this paper is written in collaboration with the Totenkopft a gaming channel of the confederation of underground gamers)

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