Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea

At the airport in Phnom Penh they have a set of shelves just full of awful histories of Cambodia in the bad times (I mean good books about awful history). I've read quite a few of them and, having visited the country in late 1979 when it was all too recently over with, I have little desire to explore the theme further. There was one, however, that looked more promising and so it turned out. Milton Osborne was a junior diplomat in the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh during 1959-61 and he returned as a Cornell PhD student in 1966. The book, Before Kampuchea, is basically a memoir, drawing on his journal of that year, which also dips back and forth to what the place was like during his earlier stay and how it was on a subsequent visit in 1971, during the Lon Nol years. He argues that 1966 was a turning point that led inexorably to the catastrophes of 1970-79, though I would say it's more a case that he could see, in 1966, that things were not going to turn out as he'd earlier expected. (I don't really believe in turning points). Still, a lot happened in 1966 that was a significant part of the downward spiral to disaster.

I found it fascinating reading. There is so much about the city that has changed and also not changed. The elite back then was no less venal than it is now, the corruption was no less rampant, the gambling no less prominent, the culture of impunity no less deeply entrenched. There were some interesting details on the dealings of Sihanouk's second wife, Monique, and her family that I didn't know about. There were also four interesting portraits of Cambodians he knew - an army officer, a Catholic priest, a Communist and a prince (from the Sisowath family) - all dead or disappeared by 1979 (the book was last updated in 1984, so there is little chance that the disappeared would not have reappeared by then if still alive). His conversations with all of them throw interesting light on the deep problems facing the country. Of course, the one segment of society to which Osborne had no access was the peasantry and, as he admits, he can throw no light on what made so many of them follow the French-educated intellectual Communists in the end. The sheer incompetence of successive elite regimes (Sihanouk, Lon Nol) and the genocidal US bombing of 1973 must have something to do with it.

My main disagreement with Osborne's line of thought is that he persists in seeing Sihanouk as a nationalist rather than a dynast. I think that Sihanouk's consistent goal was to preserve the Cambodian state in the form of the monarchy and he just took it for granted that his subjects would see things the same way. He assumed, rather than worked to gain, loyalty from the masses. It isn't that he was unpopular, he just had no idea and didn't much care what was going on down at the grass roots. He played statehood in the same way his ancestors had - as a series of deals with more powerful states that, while forcing him to pay tribute, also allowed him a degree of autonomy. He also clung to the French who, in the 19th century had preserved the state (ruled by his grandfather Norodom) from being gobbled up by Thailand and Vietnam. Sihanouk had a good grasp of the past, but he just had no real concept of the nation-state.

Reprinted by Orchid Books, Bangkok in 2004.

Bigger than Ben Hur

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007

This book is a real tour de force (466 pages of text) and at the same time highly problematical. I found myself deeply absorbed in the detail of Klein's narratives and having to pull myself back and say 'hey, wait a minute!' all the time. In one way it tells nothing new - the theme is that free markets are incompatible with democracy (one passing reference to Polanyi on p. 23) and that crises and disasters represent opportunities for capital and indeed are necessary to keep the system going (no references at all to Marx's economic theory, frequent use of the term "creative destruction" but not one reference to Schumpeter). In another way it leaves out some important parts of the story - the Asian crisis of the late '90s was apparently based on nothing more than a rumour. No, actually there was a material disaster - an unsustainable economy that was going to crash anyway. China is made to fit the story, though I don't really think it does. The lacunae or misinterpretations of some of the cases made me wonder how strong her case was for places I know little about (Bolivia and Argentina, for example). Mind you, this is likely to be a problem for any work as ambitious as this one is - going from the Pinochet coup in Chile to the Asian tsunami, Katrina and Iraq.

Bits I liked or just found interesting:

"Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing." (p. 47)

Friedman as the architect of 'shock therapy', his enthusiasm for Nixon's election (and disappointment with his domestic economic policy though - cf Krugman). "Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit." (p. 63)

The Chicago Boys... believed in a form of capitalism that is purist by its very nature. Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in 'balance' and 'order' and the need to be free of interferences and 'distortions' in order to succeed. Because of these traits, a regime committed to the faithful appplication of this ideal cannot accept the presence of competing or tempering worldviews. In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology; otherwise, according to the central theory, the economic signals become distorted and the entire system is thrown out of balance. (pp. 102-03)

Torture as 'curing' (pp. 111-14). Idea of society as having gangrene or cancer which must be excised.

The decoupling of 'human rights' from the systematic reasons for these abuses which was the need to 'cure' the cancer of democratic ideals in order to serve the interests of capital better.

Simone de Beauvoir quoted: "There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all pervasive system." Klein says: "there is no humane way to rule people against their will" (p. 126)

Thatcher showed that it could be done in a 'democracy' by creating a crisis. Crisis as opportunity.
Friedman 1982: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." Or Allan Meltzer: "Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst of change. Friedman's model of influence was to legitimize ideas, to make them bearable, and worth trying when the opportunity comes." Klein adds: "Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones - gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply." (p. 140)

The hollowing out of the state through sub-contracting and privatization of the state itself. Klein argues that this was the real Rumsfeld-Cheney program from the start and they chose Iraq for their most thoroughgoing experiment because it was in an already-weakened condition through sanctions.

"Political cleansing" (p. 330) and "disaster apartheid" - the discarding of 25 to 60 per cent of the population, the creation of Green Zones all over the world - gated communities that leave the masses to survive as best they can in the Red Zones. The Israeli Apartheid Wall as just the latest and most sophisticated of these, creating a whole "gated country."

New reasons for the breakdown of Oslo. While most sources attribute the sheer viciousness of Israeli policy in recent years to a continuation of aggression that began in 1948 together with unremitting US support, Klein argues that the destruction of Oslo was made possible by the application of the 'shock doctine' to the FSU, leading to a mass emigration of Jews and, indeed, many with the most tenuous of claims to Jewishness trying to escape from the sudden, sharp increase in poverty. Former Soviet Jews now account for 14% of the Israeli population and many of them have not only fuelled the settlement movement in the West Bank, but also replaced Palestinian cheap labour within Israel - thus facilitating the "closure". The dramatic rise of "security exports" as the mainstay of the Israeli economy - they trebled between 1992 and 2006 (p. 436).

In general, the depressing idea that 'security' has replaced 'peace' as the desirable state of affairs.

The dramatic widening of inequality (together with increasing poverty) in Argentina, Israel and the US in the past 20 years (p. 444). Overseas parallels with Krugman's data on the US. Same in the new ex-Soviet kleptocracy of Boris Yeltsin (where some people went from zero to billionaire in the space of a decade and average life expectancy fell by 10 years). Speaking of which, she produces the stunning (to me) statistic that 46 per cent of the population of New Mexico is functionally illiterate.

Book review

Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China. Sydney, UNSW Press, 2007

One of the more interesting and fun history books I've ever read, it covers Chinese fashion from the late Qing dynasty to the present. There are really fascinating sections on queues, foot-binding, hemlines that (not surprisingly) go up and down, women's underwear, Sun Yatsen (or Mao or cadre) suits, hats and hairdos. Most, if not all, of these are linked to politics in some way - whether it is nationalism, gender, modernization, militarization, etc. A good deal of Finnane's argument is concerned with debunking the common western notion of stagnant China before the late 20th century (when people began to say "fashion arrives in China").

One chapter covers the emerging fashion industry in Shanghai in the 1910s-30s, from spinning and weaving to tailoring, retailing, advertising, fashion shows and design. Most of the fashions were reflected in the cloth rather than the garment. Finnane covers only one major change in women's garments - from a short jacket-blouse and skirt or trousers, to the qipao (better known in the West by the Cantonese cheongsam), the latter gaining true dominance from the mid-1920s. The qipao seems to have been based on the Manchu gown worn by both men and women under the Qing. It was gradually modified from a rather simple A-line to the body-hugging form associated with Suzie Wong, while the hem went up and down, collars became higher, sleeves longer and shorter, and the side splits became higher or were covered or disappeared altogether. The complications of women's fashions (exposure or not of arms, bust, legs, feet; hair cut long, short, permed or not) caused the poet Lu Xun to comment in 1927 that "A woman has so many parts to her body that life is very hard indeed." (p. 157)

The book has masses of wonderful pictures. To me, one of the most striking features exhibited in these pictures is the flat-chestedness of the women. In the late '20s there was a Short Hair, Natural Breast and Natural Feet Movement, but flat chests obviously remained popular for a long time after that. Boobs are not really evident in the illustrations, except for the advertisements (this one from Wikipedia),

until the 1950s, though Finnane argues that a distinguishing feature of a Chinese 'flapper' was that her bust was visible. That's odd because my mother was telling me just the other day about my aunt who was an Australian flapper and how breast-binding was a feature of that style. Global influences are evident in both countries (especially in the bobbed hair), but the bra didn't reach China until 1927 (I need to find out when it reached Australia!), so it seems unlikely that a 'modern' woman (active, outdoors, etc) would have given up breast-binding earlier than that. For others, the expense of the bra was likely a consideration, while there are hints that the flat-chested look was naughtier!

The other striking feature is the androgynous nature of clothing - as Finnane points out you couldn't really describe people as 'cross-dressing' because there wasn't much of an established distinction between male and female clothing styles. When girls started going to school, they donned the school uniforms worn by the boys (the western suit) - seen to be not so much boys' clothing as school clothing. When women joined the army, they wore military uniform. But androgyny was controversial and seems to be associated with women's desire to be emancipated and 'modern'. There is a whole chapter on women wearing their "brothers' clothes."

The period of the Republic was a period of turmoil, to which Finnane attributes the lack of certainty about what people should wear.

The fact remained that when a national crisis erupted, women were sure to be wearing the wrong clothes. So it happened that when Japan invaded China in 1937, women's dress was immediately at issue. "For the rise and fall of the country, [one newspaper proclaimed] women's adornment bears responsibility."' (p. 174)

Men did, however, share some responsibility for the country's reputation, if not its actual rise and fall. They had basically a choice between the Manchu gown (changpao) from which the qipao had been adapted, the Sun Yatsen suit or the western suit. Should a western suit be chosen, it was important that it was neat and clean, and the trousers properly creased, otherwise the lice would surely be lurking underneath and China would lose face. But the Sun Yatsen suit was the true nationalist statement to the outside world (even though Sun himself might have adapted it from Japanese school uniforms). What women wore when meeting foreigners didn't matter since they did not represent the national identity.

In the domestic sphere, however, what women wore was much more important and therefore controversial. After the 1949 revolution a lot of attention was devoted to what women should wear in a happy, socialist society. As Finnane says, emancipation was no longer a right it was a duty! From the outsider's standpoint, the revolutionary period in China probably represents the height of androgyny in dress (most obviously in the Cultural Revolution when young people went for military uniform - the genuine article conveying so much more kudos than the imitation version run up by mum - in much the same way that western youth of the same era were adopting blue jeans). But there was also a movement to establish a distinct feminine identity in clothing in the 1950s - a sort of Dior-ized version of the qipao and the earlier jacket-blouse and skirt. Interestingly, quite different styles were prescribed for urban professional and rural (peasant) women - a reflection of class distinctions in 'socialist' fashions. One of the factors that killed this movement off is that a Dior skirt required more cloth than was available in China, but the Cultural Revolution was clearly another one: when Mao launched it, he wore military gear.

After Mao's death and the advent of economic reforms fashion in China underwent another series of changes. As in the 1920s and '30s, capitalism and consumerism played a role, but Chinese history has a far less prominent one. While Chinese fashion designers have concepts like 'Chineseness', 'national culture' and 'cultural heritage' hanging over their heads, consumers are living in and for the present. In the marketplace some kind of decoupling has taken place in which there is no Chinese history of fashion. Nobody wants to wear a qipao anymore (unless as formalwear) and only foreigners are keen on designs that are Chinese retro. Finnane cites a Chinese designer who complains that his qipao-based designs were ignored, while a couple of years later French designers with similar designs 'made fashion headlines around the world.' (p. 283). This story is about the politics of the global fashion industry. For the Chinese themselves, retro means some earlier Western fashion, not an earlier Chinese one. I'm not familiar with the literature on the politics of western fashion so I don't know if there's a similar nihilism towards the past in other countries. But this decoupling also reminds me of the current Chinese attitude towards the built environment - crudely summarized as new = good, old = bad - that contrasts with western attitudes towards adapting and restoring antiquity to meet modern needs.

Nonetheless, Chinese are very conscious of their place as the Middle Kingdom in the world and what the world thinks of them. Early post-Mao fashion influence came from Japan and Taiwan - both seen as affirming a lack of dependence on Westerners. In the 2000s Korean fashion has had a big influence. Finnane argues that the Japanese and Koreans are actually mediating influences from the West anyway. If this is so, it is an interesting parallel with the garment manufacturing chain in which East Asian intermediaries have also played a crucial role. It is disappointing too because Japan and South Korea have very inequitable societies. Older Chinese women who refuse to adopt new fashions (still wearing the cadre suit) have explicity linked their dress to the emancipation of women, although the actual correlation between dress and emancipation isn't well established. There's a photo in the book (p. 199) of a military woman, a soldier for two decades who had 'frankly stated that she was "not much interested in women's problems," [yet] was put to work in the Children's Welfare Department of the Women's Federation' (p. 202) after 1949. Her husband, needless to say, remained a soldier. There is no sign that this reassignment of gender roles which, even in the 1950s, reflected global influences, is about to disappear.

Poverty

Poverty is disempowerment. I heard this, or something very close, a couple of months ago on the radio and thought it was a good, very succinct, definition.* It is reminiscent of Amartya Sen, Robert Chambers and others and, most importantly, gets away from the notion that poverty is simply a lack of money.

For the development economist, however, a problem is that power is difficult to measure, while money income is at least in principle easy to measure. The United Nations Development Program has come up with a lot of alternative measures, such as the Human Development Index, the Gender Development Index, the Gender Empowerment Index (how many women are in parliament, etc), the Human Poverty Index and so on. Each of these tackles poverty from a different angle without being able to provide a composite picture. Even the Gender Empowerment Index cannot tell much because it only gives the ratio of the average female to the average male. What if the average male is seriously powerless?

In classical political economy poverty was considered in relation to a minimum physical subsistence level. Both Malthus and Ricardo agreed that the standard of living of wage earners would be constantly driven down to the physical minimum by the combined pressures of population growth and scarce resources. Marx, on the other hand, had a more optimistic view that productivity could grow fast enough to enable working class living standards to rise over time - provided that workers could bargain an improvement through class struggle. Marx's version of the classical theory therefore leaves us with a view of poverty as at or below a 'socially acceptable minimum.' In a rich society, a poor person could be much more alive and kicking than a person in a similar situation in a much poorer society. If, for example, we take the poorest 10% of the population in Indonesia and Australia - on whichever measure (income, expenditure, educational attainment, health outcomes) - it is doubtful that the Indonesian group would agree that their Australian counterparts deserved the term 'poor'. Yet, in relation to other Australians they would surely be poor.

On the other hand, many people have observed the phenomenon of the 'smiling poor'. People can, it seems, be poor but happy. They might define poverty in relation to something other than their material circumstances. If they feel accepted and empowered by their community they are less likely to feel impoverished than if they feel rejected, neglected or otherwise unvalued.

If we were to define poverty as disempowerment rather than as an absence of material goods or money, or even of less tangible benefits such as education and health, I think we would be able to resolve some of these difficulties. A disempowerment definition would say, for example, that a person is poor if she is unable to exercise control over her access to a certain bundle of resources. The character of the bundle might vary from one society to another, but the key element of a definition of poverty is not so much the size or quality of the bundle itself (such bundles have different meanings and economic values for different people), but the power of individuals to access and to use it. Access that is contingent upon the agreement of another confers less control than independent access.

This view of poverty is very different from what you get in mainstream economics where the solution to poverty is usually seen in terms of increasing the size of the bundle available to a given individual and then encouraging that individual to make 'development-oriented choices'. If, for example, we increase a poor person's cash holdings, we'd hope they would invest in further income-generating activities rather than on buying an iPod. The person who chooses the iPod is supposed to have a high rate of discounting the future. Ultimately, then, development (or poverty) boils down to a series of individual choices based on given individual discount rates.

What if, instead, the increase in cash holding gave the person a choice between eating or starving. If she 'chose' to eat, would we then say she had a high rate of discounting the future? Actually a sensible person would say that there was simply no choice. Suppose now that the iPod purchaser was faced with a similar lack of choice, simply because she knew that no amount of investment would enable her to escape the poverty of her existence. There are plenty of real world reasons why this might happen - more powerful individuals could prevent her from conducting a business, for example. In some social contexts, the investment "choice" desired by the development economist could leave an individual worse off than before and the consumption "choice" would leave her better off. Choice them becomes a rather meaningless concept - apples versus oranges rather than poverty versus affluence.

There's a lot more to say about this problem, but this post is already long enough.

* Possibly it was in an interview with Jared Diamond who was otherwise talking twaddle.

Burma v China - the case of disaster response

It is quite interesting to consider the differences between these two countries (or rather their regimes) as highlighted by the recent catastrophes. In the normal course of events, minus cyclones and earthquakes, they tend to get lumped together as regimes that abuse human rights. One could argue, however, that when disaster happens Burma has more in common with the United States than it does with China. I'm thinking, of course, about Katrina and the response that was so delayed - not to mention the failure to invest in the maintenance of levees that could have averted most of the worst effects - as well as the bland refusal of either government to really recognize the extent of human loss at the time. By contrast, the Chinese had at least 50,000 troops in the disaster area by the next day and the scale of the rescue effort increased from there.

The criminality of the Burmese regime is accentuated by the fact that the cyclone wasn't even a Category 5. It was a 4 when it initially hit the Irrawaddy delta coast and it was a 2 by the time it reached Rangoon. Yet it killed about 100,000 people. I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago when they had the worst typhoon in a decade. It was a 4 or 5. The Army rushed to the affected areas to build defences and evacuate people before it hit. A handful of people died. Nobody was left to fend for themselves in the aftermath.

Even if you think the Vietnamese Communists have a bad record on human rights, you can hardly fault them for valuing the lives of ordinary people when disaster strikes. The Vietnamese armed forces do not exist primarily for regime maintenance, as in Burma, but for national defence. I think the situation in China is similar to that in Vietnam. Although the latter has never had anything resembling the Tien An Men violence of 1989, there is a similarity in that the armed forces do not threaten ordinary people, while they do step in to provide support in times of real danger. Moreover, despite its brutal repression in 1989, the Chinese regime did respond. In the aftermath of the protests a number of policy changes were put into place that effectively tackled the causes of discontent.

Let them eat cake!
In Burma, by contrast, the armed forces are a constant threat and they show no sign of recognizing any problem. While various aid agencies estimate that a million people have so far received no aid at all, the regime insists that the emergency is over and reconstruction has begun. In a statement reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, a Burmese leader was quoted today saying that people in the Irrawaddy delta did not need supplies because they could eat frogs.

Dua Khalil - teenage girl stoned to death

Here you can find links to this story - complete with chilling eye-witness video of a teenage girl being stoned to death. The girl, it seems, was suspected of abandoning her family's religion by being seen with, possibly marrying or otherwise consorting with a Sunni muslim (or, I should say, the son of a Sunni muslim since we know nothing about the young man apart the fact that he possibly exists and has a Sunni family background). For a woman, abandoning your family's religious ideals, is a crime punishable by public execution (while the cops do nothing, despite witnessing a murder - there is also a Kurdish law against the oxymoronic "honour killing" since 2001 - and being openly filmed witnessing a murder).

Apart from the sheer barbarity of what happened (fortunately the film quality is not good), I was struck by the unanimity of reportage:
CNN website: "Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi"
CNN broadcast: "Dua Khalil, a 17 year-old member of the Yazidi sect"
Katha Pollitt: "Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi" (she was plagiarized by CNN!)
Joss Whedon: "Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith"

Granted, Joss Whedon might be right, in the sense that she was born of people of the Yazidi faith, but what do we actually know about Ms Khalil's religious beliefs. Nothing at all based on these reports. All we know is that she was suspected of not subscribing to the Yazidi faith.

We are never going to know what Ms Khalil thought about anything at all. We may end up knowing what her brothers and other relatives thought she should think and what the wider community of Kurdish men thinks of what her male relatives thought she should think, and what our media thinks about what the wider community of Kurdish men thinks of what her male relatives thought about what she should think.

The good, the bad and the powerful

Dani Rodrik recently opened a blog entry with the following:

Increasingly, economists are moving away from the Washington-Consensus, rules-of-thumb approach to country-specific strategies based on diagnosing locally-binding constraints. The difficulty is that designing such strategies is more of a craft than a science.

The latest contribution to the literature comes from Wendy Carlin and Paul Seabright.

My initial take was 'what's new here'? But there's an interesting footnote on the first page of the paper that made me giggle:

Gregory Clark (2007 forthcoming) challenges institutionalist explanations of the industrial revolution, on the grounds that a number of medieval economies (such as England from the thirteenth century onwards) had institutions (such as systems of secure property rights in land) that, he claims, would have earned them high marks in any World Bank policy review. Of course, not all researchers who claim that good institutions are important for development would claim that they were either necessary or sufficient. (emphasis added)

This really begs the question of what is a 'good' institution if it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Most economists would, for example, argue that China's massive expansion of the past 3 decades was based on 'bad' institutions. 'Good' institutions clearly were not necessary in this case. Milton Friedman, on the other hand, was famed for pooh-poohing the idea that theory is important - if it works then it must be right. Friedman, of course, was wrong. His understanding of the relationship between money supply and inflation was based on a simple correlation and, without understanding the transmission mechanism, his prescription of reducing the money supply would (and did) wreak havoc on any economy to which it was applied. For the authors of the above paper on the other hand, 'good' institutions clearly come from somewhere in the realm of World Bank thinking which, for half a century now, hasn't worked (at least in terms of its stated - as distinct from possible non-overt - intentions). Where is the difference from the Washington consensus here?