There are a lot of varieties of rice out there, but the key divide we want to make early is between dry-rice and wet-rice. When we’re talking about “rice cultures” or “rice agriculture”, generally, we mean wet-rice farming, where the rice is partially submerged during its growing. Wild rice, as far as we can tell, began as a swamp-grass and thus likes to have quite a lot of water around, although precisely controlling the water availability can lead the rice to be a lot more productive than it would be in its natural habitat. While there are varieties of rice which can be (and are) farmed “dry” (that is, in unflooded fields much like wheat and barley are farmed), the vast majority of rice farming is “wet”. As with grains, this is not merely a matter of different methods of farming, but of different varieties of rice that have been adapted to that farming; varieties of dry-rice and wet-rice have been selectively bred over millennia to perform best in those environments.
Wet-rice is farmed in paddies, small fields (often very small – some Chinese agronomists write that the ideal size for an individual rice field is around 0.1 hectare, which is just 0.24 acres) surrounded by low “bunds” (small earthwork walls or dykes) to keep in the water, typically around two feet high. Because controlling the water level is crucial, rice paddies must be very precisely flat, leading to even relatively gentle slopes often being terraced to create a series of flat fields. Each of these rice paddies (and there will be many because they are so small) are then connected by irrigation canals which channel and control the water in what is often a quite complex system.
The exact timing of rice production is more complex than wheat because a single paddy often sees two crops in a year and the exact planting times vary between areas; one common cycle on the Yangtze is for a February planting (with a June harvest) followed by a June planting (with a November harvest). In other areas, paddies planted with rice during the first planting might be drained and sown with a different plant entirely (sometimes including wheat) in the intervening time.
The cycle runs thusly: after the heavy rains of the monsoons (if available), the field is tilled (or plowed, but as we’ll see, manual tillage is often more common). The seed is then sown (or transplanted) and the field is, using the irrigation system, lightly flooded, so that the young seedlings grow in standing water. Sometimes the seed is initially planted in a dedicated seed-bed and then transferred to the field, rather than being sown there directly; doing so has a positive impact on yields, but is substantially more labor intensive. The water level is raised as the plant grows; agian this is labor intensive, but increases yields. Just before the harvest the fields are drained out and allowed to dry out, before the crop is harvested and then goes into processing.
Rice is threshed much like grain (more often manually threshed and generally not threshed with flails) to release the seeds, the individual rice grains, from the plant. That is going to free the endosperm of the speed, along with a hull around it and a layer of bran between the two. Hulling was traditionally done by hand-pounding, which frees the seed from the hull, leaving just the endosperm and some of the bran; this is how you get brown rice, which is essentially “whole-grain” rice. While it is generally less tasty, the bran actually has quite a lot of nutrients not present in the calorie-rich endosperm. Whereas white rice is produced by then milling or polishing away the bran to produce a pure, white kernal of the endosperm; it is very tasty, but lacks many of the vitamins that brown rice has.
Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-04.
January 23, 2023
QotD: Rice farming
December 11, 2022
An Amphibious Landing to take Rome? – 224 – December 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Dec 2022There are plans afoot to hit the enemy from behind in Italy. Allied leaders are meeting again in Cairo to go over other plans, notably what to do about China and Burma. There is active fighting on two fronts in Italy too, though this week it doesn’t go particularly well for the Allies. Attacks in the USSR are unsuccessful for the Soviets, but do go well for the Germans, and there are Allied attacks by air in the Marshall Islands and over France.
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December 10, 2022
The “Dark” Ages were fine, actually — History Hijinks
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 Aug 2022Curb your Crusading – the artwork, literature, and scholarship are far more interesting.
SOURCES & Further Reading: China: A History by John Keay, Byzantium & Sicily & Venice by John Julius Norwich, Great Courses Lecture series Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble lectures 27 through 38: “The Emergence of the Catholic Church”, “Christian Culture in Late Antiquity”, “Muhammad and Islam”, “The Birth of Byzantium”, “Barbarian Kingdoms in the West”, “The World of Charlemagne”, “The Carolingian Renaissance”, “The Expansion of Europe”, “The Chivalrous Society”, “Medieval Political Traditions I”, “Medieval Political Traditions II”, and “Scholastic Culture”.
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December 6, 2022
The coming of the Korean War
In Quillette, Niranjan Shankar outlines the world situation that led to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950:
Initial phase of the Korean War, 25 June through 5 August, 1950.
Map from the West Point Military Atlas — https://www.westpoint.edu/academics/academic-departments/history/korean-war
The Korean War was among the deadliest of the Cold War’s battlegrounds. Yet despite yielding millions of civilian deaths, over 40,000 US casualties, and destruction that left scars which persist on the peninsula today, the conflict has never received the attention (aside from being featured in the sitcom M*A*S*H) devoted to World War II, Vietnam, and other 20th-century clashes.
But like other neglected Cold War front-lines, the “Forgotten War” has fallen victim to several politicized and one-sided “anti-imperialist” narratives that focus almost exclusively on the atrocities of the United States and its allies. The most recent example of this tendency was a Jacobin column by James Greig, who omits the brutal conduct of North Korean and Chinese forces, misrepresents the underlying cause of the war, justifies North Korea’s belligerence as an “anti-colonial” enterprise, and even praises the regime’s “revolutionary” initiatives. Greig’s article was preceded by several others, which also framed the war as an instance of US imperialism and North Korea’s anti-Americanism as a rational response to Washington’s prosecution of the war. Left-wing foreign-policy thinker Daniel Bessner also alluded to the Korean War as one of many “American-led fiascos” in his essay for Harper’s magazine earlier this summer. Even (somewhat) more balanced assessments of the war, such as those by Owen Miller, tend to overemphasize American and South Korean transgressions, and don’t do justice to the long-term consequences of Washington’s decision to send troops to the peninsula in the summer of 1950. By giving short shrift to — or simply failing to mention — the communist powers’ leading role in instigating the conflict, and the violence and suffering they unleashed throughout it, these depictions of the Korean tragedy distort its legacy and do a disservice to the millions who suffered, and continue to suffer, under the North Korean regime.
Determining “who started” a military confrontation, especially an “internal” conflict that became entangled in great-power politics, can be a herculean task. Nevertheless, post-revisionist scholarship (such as John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History) that draws upon Soviet archives declassified in 1991 has made it clear that the communist leaders, principally Joseph Stalin and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, were primarily to blame for the outbreak of the war.
After Korea, a Japanese imperial holding, was jointly occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945, Washington and Moscow agreed to divide the peninsula at the 38th parallel. In the North, the Soviets worked with the Korean communist and former Red Army officer Kim Il-Sung to form a provisional “People’s Committee”, while the Americans turned to the well-known Korean nationalist and independence activist Syngman Rhee to establish a military government in the South. Neither the US nor the USSR intended the division to be permanent, and until 1947, both experimented with proposals for a united Korean government under an international trusteeship. But Kim and Rhee’s mutual rejection of any plan that didn’t leave the entire peninsula under their control hindered these efforts. When Rhee declared the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1948, and Kim declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) later that year, the division was cemented. Each nation threatened to invade the other and began preparing to do so.
What initially prevented a full-scale attack by either side was Washington’s and Moscow’s refusal to provide their respective partners with support for the military reunification of the peninsula. Both superpowers had withdrawn their troops by 1949 to avoid being dragged into an unnecessary war, and the Americans deliberately withheld weapons from the ROK that could be used to launch an invasion.
However, Stalin began to have other ideas. Emboldened by Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese Civil War and frustrated by strategic setbacks in Europe, the Soviet premier saw an opportunity to open a “second-front” for communist expansion in East Asia with Beijing’s help. Convinced that Washington was unlikely to respond, Stalin gave Kim Il-Sung his long-sought “green-light” to reunify the Korean peninsula under communist rule in April 1950, provided that Mao agreed to support the operation. After Mao convinced his advisers (despite some initial difficulty) of the need to back their Korean counterparts, Red Army military advisers began working extensively with the Korean People’s Army (KPA) to prepare for an attack on the South. When Kim’s forces invaded on June 25th, 1950, the US and the international community were caught completely off-guard.
Commentators like Greig, who contest the communists’ culpability in starting the war, often rely on the work of revisionist historian Bruce Cumings, who highlights the perpetual state of conflict between the two Korean states before 1950. It is certainly true that there were several border skirmishes over the 38th parallel after the Soviet and American occupation governments were established in 1945. But this in no way absolves Kim and his foreign patrons for their role in unleashing an all-out assault on the South. Firstly, despite Rhee’s threats and aggressive posturing, the North clearly had the upper hand militarily, and was much better positioned than the South to launch an invasion. Whereas Washington stripped Rhee’s forces of much of their offensive capabilities, Moscow was more than happy to arm its Korean partners with heavy tanks, artillery, and aircraft. Many KPA soldiers also had prior military experience from fighting alongside the Chinese communists during the Chinese Civil War.
Moreover, as scholar William Stueck eloquently maintains, the “civil” aspect of the Korean War fails to obviate the conflict’s underlying international dimensions. Of course, Rhee’s and Kim’s stubborn desire to see the country fully “liberated” thwarted numerous efforts to establish a unified Korean government, and played a role in prolonging the war after it started. It is unlikely that Stalin would have agreed to support Pyongyang’s campaign to reunify Korea had it not been for Kim’s persistent requests and repeated assurances that the war would be won quickly. Nevertheless, the extensive economic and military assistance provided to the North Koreans by the Soviets and Chinese (the latter of which later entered the war directly), the subsequent expansion of Sino-Soviet cooperation, the Stalinist nature of the regime in Pyongyang, Kim’s role in both the CCP and the Red Army, and the close relationship between the Chinese and Korean communists all strongly suggest that without the blessing of his ideological inspirators and military supporters, Kim could not have embarked on his crusade to “liberate” the South.
Likewise, Rhee’s education in the US and desire to emulate the American capitalist model in Korea were important international components of the conflict. More to the point, all the participants saw the war as a confrontation between communism and its opponents worldwide, which led to the intensification of the Cold War in other theaters as well. The broader, global context of the buildup to the war, along with the UN’s authorization for military action, legitimized America’s intervention as a struggle against international communist expansionism, rather than an unwelcome intrusion into a civil dispute among Koreans.
QotD: Mao Zedong’s theory of “Protracted War”
The situation for the Chinese Communists in 1938 was a difficult one. The Chinese Red Army has set up a base of power in the early 1930s in Jiangxi province in South-Eastern China, but in 1934 had been forced by Kuomintang Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek to retreat, eventually rebasing over 5,000 miles away (they’re not able to straight-line the march) in Shaanxi in China’s mountainous north in what became known as The Long March. Consequently, no one could be under any illusions of the relative power of the Chiang’s nationalist forces and the Chinese Red Army. And then, to make things worse, in 1937, Japan had invaded China (the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was a major part of WWII), beating back the Nationalist armies which had already shown themselves to be stronger than the Communists. So now Mao has to beat two armies, both of which have shown themselves to be much stronger than he is (though in the immediate term, Mao and Chiang formed a “United Front” against Japan, though tensions remained high and both sides expected to resume hostilities the moment the Japanese threat was gone). Moreover, Mao’s side lacks not only the tools of war, but the industrial capacity to build the tools of war – and the previous century of Chinese history had shown in stark terms how difficult a situation a non-industrial force faced in squaring off against industrial firepower.
That’s the context for the theory.
What Mao observed was that a “war of quick decision” would be one that the Red Army would simply lose. Because he was weaker, there was no way to win fast, so trying to fight a “fast” war would just mean losing. Consequently, a slow war – a protracted war – was necessary. But that imposes problems – in a “war of quick decision” the route to victory was fairly clear: destroy enemy armed forces and seize territory to deny them the resources to raise new forces. Classic Clausewitzian (drink!) stuff. But of course the Red Army couldn’t do that in 1938 (they’d just lose), so they needed to plan another potential route to victory to coordinate their actions. That is, they need a strategic framework – remember that strategy is the level of military analysis where we think about what our end goals should be and what methods we can employ to actually reach those goals (so that we are not just blindly lashing out but in fact making concrete progress towards a desired end-state).
Mao understands this route as consisting of three distinct phases, which he imagines will happen in order as a progression and also consisting of three types of warfare, all of which happen in different degrees and for different purposes in each phase. We can deal with the types of warfare first:
- Positional Warfare is traditional conventional warfare, attempting to take and hold territory. This is going to be done generally by the regular forces of the Red Army.
- Mobile Warfare consists of fast-moving attacks, “hit-and-run”, performed by the regular forces of the Red Army, typically on the flanks of advancing enemy forces.
- Guerrilla Warfare consists of operations of sabotage, assassination and raids on poorly defended targets, performed by irregular forces (that is, not the Red Army), organized in the area of enemy “control”.
The first phase of this strategy is the enemy strategic offensive (or the “strategic defensive” from the perspective of Mao). Because the enemy is stronger and pursuing a conventional victory through territorial control, they will attack, advancing through territory. In this first phase, trying to match the enemy in positional warfare is foolish – again, you just lose. Instead, the Red Army trades space for time, falling back to buy time for the enemy offensive to weaken rather than meeting it at its strongest, a concept you may recall from our discussions of defense in depth. The focus in this phase is on mobile warfare, striking at the enemy’s flanks but falling back before their main advances. Positional warfare is only used in defense of the mountain bases (where terrain is favorable) and only after the difficulties of long advances (and stretched logistics) have weakened the attacker. Mobile warfare is supplemented by guerrilla operations in rear areas in this phase, but falling back is also a key opportunity to leave behind organizers for guerrillas in the occupied zones that, in theory at least, support the retreating Red Army (we’ll come back to this).
Eventually, due to friction (drink!) any attack is going to run out of steam and bog down; the mobile warfare of the first phase is meant to accelerate this, of course. That creates a second phase, “strategic stalemate” where the enemy, having taken a lot of territory, is trying to secure their control of it and build new forces for new offensives, but is also stretched thin trying to hold and control all of that newly seized territory. Guerrilla attacks in this phase take much greater importance, preventing the enemy from securing their rear areas and gradually weakening them, while at the same time sustaining support by testifying to the continued existence of the Red Army. Crucially, even as the enemy gets weaker, one of the things Mao imagines for this phase is that guerrilla operations create opportunities to steal military materiel from the enemy so that the factories of the industrialized foe serve to supply the Red Army – safely secure in its mountain bases – so that it becomes stronger. At the same time (we’ll come back to this), in this phase capable recruits are also be filtered out of the occupied areas to join the Red Army, growing its strength.
Finally in the third stage, the counter-offensive, when the process of weakening the enemy through guerrilla attacks and strengthening the Red Army through stolen supplies, new recruits and international support (Mao imagines the last element to be crucial and in the event it very much was), the Red Army can shift to positional warfare again, pushing forward to recapture lost territory in conventional campaigns.
Through all of this, Mao stresses the importance of the political struggle as well. For the guerrillas to succeed, they must “live among the people as fish in the sea”. That is, the population – and in the China of this era that meant generally the rural population – becomes the covering terrain that allows the guerrillas to operate in enemy controlled areas. In order for that to work, popular support – or at least popular acquiescence (a village that doesn’t report you because it supports you works the same way as a village that doesn’t report you because it hates Chiang or a village that doesn’t report you because it knows that it will face violence reprisals if it does; the key is that you aren’t reported) – is required. As a result both retreating Red Army forces in Phase I need to prepare lost areas politically as they retreat and then once they are gone the guerrilla forces need to engage in political action. Because Mao is working with a technological base in which regular people have relatively little access to radio or television, a lot of the agitation here is imagined to be pretty face-to-face, or based on print technology (leaflets, etc), so the guerrillas need to be in the communities in order to do the political work.
Guerrilla actions in the second phase also serve a crucial political purpose: they testify to the continued existence and effectiveness of the Red Army. After all, it is very important, during the period when the main body of Communist forces are essentially avoiding direct contact with the enemy that they not give the impression that they are defeated or have given up in order to sustain will and give everyone the hope of eventual victory. Everyone there of course also includes the main body of the army holed up in its mountain bases – they too need to know that the cause is still active and that there is a route to eventual victory.
Fundamentally, the goal here is to make the war about mobilizing people rather than about mobilizing industry, thus transforming a war focused on firepower (which you lose) into a war about will – in the Clausewitzian (drink! – folks, I hope you all brought more than one drink for this …) sense – which can be won, albeit only slowly, as the slow trickle of casualties and defeats in Phase II steadily degrades enemy will, leading to their weakness and eventual collapse in Phase III.
I should note that Mao is very open that this protracted way of war would be likely to inflict a lot of damage on the country and a lot of suffering on the people. Casualties, especially among the guerrillas, are likely to be high and the guerrillas own activities would be likely to produce repressive policies from the occupiers (not that either Chiang’s Nationalists of the Imperial Japanese Army – or Mao’s Communists – needed much inducement to engage in brutal repression). Mao acknowledges those costs but is largely unconcerned by them, as indeed he would later as the ruler of a unified China be unconcerned about his man-made famine and repression killing millions. But it is important to note that this is a strategic framework which is forced to accept, by virtue of accepting a long war, that there will be a lot of collateral damage.
Now there is a historical irony here: in the event, Mao’s Red Army ended up not doing a whole lot of this. The great majority of the fighting against Japan in China was positional warfare by Chiang’s Nationalists; Mao’s Red Army achieved very little (except preparing the ground for their eventual resumption of war against Chiang) and in the event, Japan was defeated not in China but by the United States. Japanese forces in China, even at the end of the war, were still in a relatively strong position compared to Chinese forces (Nationalist or Communist) despite the substantial degradation of the Japanese war economy under the pressure of American bombing and submarine warfare. But the war with Japan left Chiang’s Nationalists fatally weakened and demoralized, so when Mao and Chiang resumed hostilities, the former with Soviet support, Mao was able to shift almost immediately to Phase III, skipping much of the theory and still win.
Nevertheless, Mao’s apparent tremendous success gave his theory of protracted war incredible cachet, leading it to be adapted with modifications (and variations in success) to all sorts of similar wars, particularly but not exclusively by communist-aligned groups.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-03.
December 3, 2022
QotD: Mantetsu and the Kwantung Army
Thus the South Manchuria Railway Corporation, originally contracted to develop a defunct line in a disputed territory, soon developed into a full-spectrum enterprise. Pretty much all heavy industry in the Japanese areas of Manchuria were divisions of Mantetsu. But since all the heavy industry depended on mines, and transportation, and food and housing for workers, and banks, and schools for the workers’ children, etc., pretty soon Mantetsu ran all of that, too. By the late 1920s, you could argue that Mantetsu was almost its own country.
It even had its own army, and that’s where things get really interesting.
The Kwantung Army was the security force assigned to the South Manchuria Railway Zone. The Japanese weren’t stupid; they knew the perils of independent commands far from home, and they rotated units through with some regularity. Nonetheless, the command staff remained fairly stable over the years … and so did Mantetsu’s.
The Japanese weren’t stupid, but they were people, and people being people, soon enough the lines between the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu began to blur. And since the lines between Mantetsu, the Imperial Army, and the government were already pretty blurry, pretty soon the concerns of one became the concern of all. (Nor was the Navy left out, though I’m not discussing them in order to keep it simple. They were up to their eyeballs in Mantetsu, too, because warships need lots of steel and steel comes from Manchuria).
A small but highly committed and totally ideologized faction developed inside the Kwantung Army. Several, in fact, and one of them (the Imperial Way faction) attempted an actual coup d’etat in 1936. It was put down, and the Imperial Way faction dissolved (in theory), but the problem of an intensely ideologized officer corps remained. Long story short, you had a small group of highly ideologized officers garrisoning a remote province pulling the entire Empire into big, unwinnable wars.
One could make the case that World War II in the Pacific was ultimately caused by about fifteen or twenty guys in the Kwantung Army.
That’s overly reductionist, but it highlights the huge problem with organizations slipping the leash. In theory, there was a clear chain of command, and even the head of the Kwantung Army was a down it a ways — he was subordinate to the Army Council, which was subordinate to the War Minister, who was subordinate to the Parliament, who were subordinate to the Emperor. In theory, lots of people could’ve sacked Gen. Araki, or his mini-me Ishiwara Kanji (a lieutenant colonel through most of it). Equally in theory, Mantetsu had no say in any of it — the Kwantung Army was a formation of the Imperial Japanese Army, not Mantetsu’s private security force.
But in reality, Mantetsu was so wired in to the Japanese government that in a lot of cases, it was the government. But not always, because the same could be said about the Army, and the Navy, both of which were also wired into Mantetsu up to the very top (or vice versa, your choice). And Mantetsu had their Media arm, of course, as did the Army and Navy …
What all this boiled down to, then, was a power vacuum. I know, that seems weird, but a skilled bureaucratic infighter like Ishiwara never lacked for groups to play against each other. The Army and Navy would oppose on principle any move that seemed to aggrandize the other, neither could go against Mantetsu (and neither could control it), and all had to pay at least lip service to the civilian government. Because of this, real power fell to whomever had the balls to grab it …
… which was the officer corps of the Kwantung Army. They assassinated at least two Manchurian warlords, staged a number of false flag attacks on their own positions, and generally got up to however you say “standard issue Juggalo fuckery” in Japanese, up to and including a full-scale war with China.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
November 30, 2022
The widespread anti-lockdown protests in China … and how Apple is helping suppress them
N.S. Lyons admires what can only be described as potentially revolutionary protests across many of China’s big cities and resisting further lockdowns by the government:
Something extraordinary happened in China over the weekend. Not long ago I wrote at length, if in a rather different context, about the vital importance of courage in the defense of the true and the human against the cold, mechanistic evil that is nihilistic technocracy, the machine whose Conditioners forever lust after total control – not only over men, but ultimately over reality itself. Well, now we have just seen a stunning example of such courage in the streets of China, where people rose up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-Covid” terror-state.
For three years now, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing and biomedical surveillance, digital Covid-passes that arbitrarily govern every aspect of daily life, vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks (or longer) at a time, and, more recently, such innovations as “closed-loop” factories, where workers are forced to work, sleep, and “live” completely isolated from the outside world so that they can continue to produce your iPhones.
But now over the past several days protests have erupted in at least a dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations – often begun by only a handful of people, or even a single individual – quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the zero-Covid nightmare.
In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighborhoods:
[…]
All across the country, many thousands of these protesters spontaneously echoed many of the same lines:
We don’t want PCR tests. We want to eat.
We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reform.
We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.
We don’t want a Great Leader. We want the vote.
We don’t want lies. We want dignity.
We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.
These are conspicuously the same lines as those of a banner hung from a Beijing bridge by a lone (since disappeared) protester, Peng Lifa, on the 13th of October, just ahead of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s re-coronation as Chinese leader for life.
Now, as recordings of the anti-lockdown protests are swiftly censored online, Chinese netizens have often simply been replying with “We saw it” – a phrase referring not just to the protests, but to Peng Lifa’s message.
His final and most striking line, on a second banner, happens to have been:
“Refuse to go to class. Go on strike. Remove the traitor Xi Jinping.”
And indeed in many protests over the last few days the people’s frustration with zero-Covid tyranny translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi.
Of course, China’s ruling Communist regime isn’t without its loyal supporters and useful idiots like Apple:
Maybe something will come of the COVID lockdown protests in China. Maybe not, if you’re old enough to remember the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, and who was never identified nor ever seen again. More likely, the Chinese Communist Party will crack down again, and the people of China will become compliant again.
And the West will turn a blind eye. Again.
Here’s what was in the latest iPhone update, according to Zachary M. Seward of Quartz:
Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.
In other words, Chinese iPhone users can’t do or say anything without the CCP knowing about it. Dissent can be quashed before it even starts. The Chinese people can be kept under the CCP’s thumb. And Apple is helping.
November 28, 2022
Near Peer: China (Understanding the Chinese Military)
Army University Press
Published 29 Jul 2022This film examines the Chinese military. Subject matter experts discuss Chinese history, current affairs, and military doctrine. Topics range from Mao, to the PLA, to current advances in military technologies. “Near Peer: China” is the first film in a four-part series exploring America’s global competitors.
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November 27, 2022
The Costliest Day in US Marine History – WW2 – 222 – November 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 26 Nov 2022The Americans attack the Gilbert Islands this week, and though they successfully take Tarawa and Makin Atolls, it is VERY costly in lives, and show that the Japanese are not going to be defeated easily. They also have a naval battle in the Solomons. Fighting continues in the Soviet Union and Italy, and an Allied conference takes place in Cairo, a prelude for a major one in Teheran next week.
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November 25, 2022
Our old, comfortable geopolitical certainties are becoming less comfortable and less certain
In The Line, Matt Gurney discusses a few of the things he heard at the recent Halifax International Security Forum:
First, though, I wanted to explore that grim feeling that swept over me as Forum president Peter Van Praagh stepped up to the lectern and opened the formal proceedings with a review of the geopolitical situation, and how we got here.
From his prepared remarks (slightly trimmed):
Last year … we marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It was not an auspicious anniversary. Just months earlier, the United States and its allies withdrew their troops from Afghanistan and discarded the hopes and dreams of so many Afghans … [it] was a low point for Afghanistan and indeed, for all of us. … It was the culmination of 20 years of good intentions. And bad results:
The decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, North Korea going nuclear, Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the Great Recession, Iran, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, the surge of refugees — more than at any time in human history, the successful rise of populist politics, the higher than necessary death toll from coronavirus, Hong Kong losing its freedoms, January 6 and its wake, climate-change disasters, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan …
It was a tragic end to a 20-year tragic era.
That’s a pretty depressing list. Right?
As a student of history, I always strive to avoid too much recency bias. Most of the things you hear described as “unprecedented” aren’t anything remotely close to that. The general public has a memory of a few years — maybe a generation. We definitely do face some novel challenges today, but we are still better off than most generations in human history, and it’s not even close.
Still. Van Praagh offered a bleak if concise catalogue of tragedy and struggle. And there are some notable absences. The Iraq War, for instance, is probably worth noting as a specific event, not just part of the Sept. 11th fallout. Perhaps the Libyan intervention as well. Some of China’s more aggressive actions, especially at home, also come to mind.
But as I mulled over that terse version of early-21st-century history, something else jumped out at me: most of those threats were things that happened far away and to other people.
I mentioned recency bias above, so it’s only fair to note a different bias: “far away” and “other people” depends on the vantage point, doesn’t it? Every event listed above was a direct and local tragedy for the people caught in the middle of it, who don’t have the luxury of viewing these events at a comfortable remove, the way the West generally has.
The pandemic, of course, did not spare the West. Nor did the Great Recession, the toll of a changing climate and the populist upheavals roiling the democracies. Those are local problems for us all.
The military challenges, though, are getting more and more local, aren’t they? North Korea seemed far away once; today it’s using the Pacific Ocean’s vital sealanes for target practice and providing some of the munitions being used against civilians in Europe. Libya, Syria and the other migration crises posed real societal and political challenges for Europe, but nothing like what the continent has been bracing for in the event of either crippling energy shortages or an outright escalation into a military conflict, potentially nuclear conflict, with Russia. China’s growing ambitions and willingness to use force pose direct challenges to the West and its prosperity; American financier Ken Griffin recently made the headlines when he observed that if Chinese military action were to cut off or disrupt American access to Taiwanese semiconductor chips, the immediate impact on the U.S. economy would be between five and 10 per cent of GDP. That would be a Great Depression-sized bodyblow, and it could happen almost instantly and without much warning.
Pondering Van Praagh’s list later on, it occurred to me that the more remote threats to core Western security and economic interests were also more remote in time. The closer Van Praagh’s summation of crises came to the present, the more immediate and near to us they became.
November 20, 2022
Printing books in China is economical, but also allows China to censor what you print
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains why some of Sutherland House’s books are now being printed in China … and illustrates some of the risks of having them printed there:
We decided last spring to offshore some of our book printing to China (see “The Crisis in Book Publishing”, SHuSH 138). It was not a difficult decision. The difference in price is enormous.
For instance. Next week we’re releasing a book called The Prison Lady: True Stories and Life Lessons from Both Sides of the Bars by Phyllis Taylor. Presales have been strong. We need to print more copies. We can’t go back to the original Chinese printer, which charged us $2.08/copy, because it takes months to get books from Guangzhou to Toronto. We need the books now. So we shopped around. The best North American price we could find is $4.39/copy.
Why is that a problem? The book is a paperback priced at $22.95. The retailer takes half that, leaving us $11.50. After our distributor and sales agent take their fees and we pay the author her royalty, we’re left with $6.32 out of which we pay for editing, cover art, design, overhead, and shipping. And printing. If the printing bill comes to $4.39 a copy, we make no money.
Those of the economics of a straightforward paperback. A friend of mine recently called about a quote from a Canadian printer for a full-color illustrated book that came in at $15.31/copy. It seemed steep, so I sent the exact same specs to a Chinese printer who quoted $5.27/copy.
[…]
Our initial plan was to print four of our spring books in China (we’re also using printers in Turkey and India). The files for the first two of the four were delivered last month. On Nov. 7, we received the following email from the printer:
After more detailed review of some of the written content of these two books, there are some significant censorship concerns related to certain references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.
As you may be aware, China vehemently enforces a “one China” principle in which Hong Kong and Taiwan are part of the “one China”. Therefore, China censorship will not allow any reference to either Hong Kong or Taiwan as its own country.
With this in mind, there is some “sensitive wording” on page 46 of The Big Exit that would not be possible to print in China due to it implying that Hong Kong and Taiwan are “countries”.
The Big Exit isn’t about politics. It’s a book about end-of-life choices or, more particularly, how we can dispose of the remains of a billion boomers over the next several decades without wrecking the planet (conventional burial and cremation are both environmentally reckless). The censorship issue arose in this paragraph, which the printer helpfully circled in bright red:
I grant that while Hong Kong still shows up in a lot of data as its own country, it is technically an administrative region of China. Taiwan’s independence is also disputed by China. Against China’s claims, we have the Frank Zappa rules of diplomacy which recognize as “a real country” any place with its own beer and its own airline. Taiwan and Hong Kong both qualify.
In any event, we are now printing The Big Exit in India.
November 19, 2022
Prelude to Victory: Burma, 1942
Army University Press
Published 11 Feb 2022In late 1941 and early 1942 the Imperial Japanese Army swept through the Asia-Pacific region like a wildfire. The Allies appeared powerless to stop them. With the British Army in Asia reeling, and pushed back to the frontier of India, something had to be done to stem the tide. “Prelude to Victory: Burma, 1942” provides context for Field Marshal William J. Slim and the 14th Army’s struggle to retake Burma from the Japanese.
November 17, 2022
TikTok (aka “Digital Fentanyl”)
Geoffrey Cain at Common Sense on the malign influence of the massively popular Chinese social media platform on US politics and culture:
The midterm elections of 2022 were many things — a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of Donald Trump, a win for centrist Democrats. Overlooked is the fact that they were also a big turning point for TikTok, the Chinese social-media platform.
TikTok is not only the most trafficked news app for Americans under 30. It was also a major political force this year. Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response. Other candidates who took to TikTok this cycle include Tim Ryan, who ran for Senate in Ohio, and Val Demmings, who ran for Senate in Florida. (Both are Democrats.) The Democratic National Committee, early this year, launched its own TikTok channel.
Now, there are calls to shut it down. Just yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau has “national-security concerns” about TikTok. Last Friday, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, called TikTok “China’s digital fentanyl”. The day before, Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, introduced legislation banning the social-media platform, noting that the data of millions of Americans is “effectively controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier in the month, Carr also said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.
It’s about time.
Ever since TikTok began expanding into the United States, more than four years ago, we’ve known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long to get serious political attention.
I know all about this. I used to be an investigative reporter in China. In December 2017, I first heard from friends on social media that a Chinese tech unicorn called ByteDance was planning on entering the American market with a new app. It was called TikTok.
Alongside its sibling app, Douyin, which operates only in China, TikTok was poised to sweep up the Gen Z audience in America, with its preference for video snippets of dancing celebrities, DIY projects, cooking demonstrations, skincare routines and other Gen Z’ers singing and dancing in their parents’ kitchens. As the fastest growing social media app ever, it rankled American competitors Facebook and YouTube, which were banned in China.
By October 2018, ByteDance was the world’s most valuable startup, with a valuation of $75 billion.
Four years later, ByteDance is worth $300 billion. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users globally by the end of the year. And a quarter of American adults under 30 get their news from the social-media app.
There’s a good reason for this success. TikTok has developed one of the most powerful machine-learning algorithms ever — one that is able to reveal people’s unknown desires to themselves.
Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users — their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice. Ostensibly, all this is meant to provide a better product. It should also be noted that this information can be used for spying, influencing millions of users — even waging war. Every time we swipe for the next video, every time we post videos of our own, we are helping the world’s most sophisticated police state learn more about us.
November 12, 2022
The Final Bloody Chapter of Operation Reinhard – War Against Humanity 085
World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2022The genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe concludes with Operation Harvest Festival — Aktion Erntefest when 42,000 are murdered in the Lublin district.
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November 9, 2022
The Big Mac’s “peacekeeping magic” is gone
In The Critic, Christopher McCallion illustrates the irrational optimism that countries having McDonald’s restaurants wouldn’t go to war with one another:
“Toledo, McDonald’s, 1967” by DBduo Photography is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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In 1910, Norman Angell wrote his famous book The Great Illusion, which argued that it would be irrational for the European great powers to go to war with one another when their prosperity was so interconnected by mutual trade and investment. The subsequent outbreak of WWI confirmed for many observers that competition for relative power and security trumped the pacific pursuit of reciprocal gains in wealth.
Following the Cold War, however, the sheer scope and intensity of globalization convinced many that a new era of capitalist peace had arrived. Thomas Friedman famously proposed a “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, which claimed that no two countries with a McDonalds had ever gone to war. There were many propitious augurs for a new era of peace: the lines stretched for blocks when McDonalds first opened in Moscow, and even still-nominally Communist China proclaimed, “to get rich is glorious.”
Simply put, the “capitalist peace theory” says that mutual gains from trade reduce incentives for conflict between economically engaged states, making the prosperity of each dependent on the other and producing high opportunity costs for war.
Realists have long countered this theory by claiming that states prioritize relative gains over absolute gains. State X and State Y may both be made wealthier in absolute terms by trading with one another, but if Y’s wealth grows at a faster pace than X, X may fear that Y’s rapidly growing wealth could be translated into a surplus of military power putting X’s security at risk. Realists contend that states will ultimately prioritize security over all other goals for the simple reason that without security, no other goals can be assured, including the pursuit of prosperity. Realists tend to reverse the logic of interdependence, claiming that low barriers to the cross-border flow of goods and capital are effects, rather than causes, of peace.
It appears that the realists are being proven right. On the eve of the unveiling of the Nordstream-2 pipeline between Russia and Europe, Moscow decided to invade Ukraine, which (literally) blew up the multi-billion-dollar project and all its future returns. Even McDonald’s, the golden harbinger of perpetual peace, shuttered its operations in Russia.
An even more important example is provided in East Asia. The US and China, the two largest economies in the world, are engaged in a rapidly escalating economic, technological, and military rivalry. Not only did the US initiate a trade war against China, it has also launched an increasingly severe series of export restrictions on advanced technology to China, clearly designed to halt China’s economic growth and limit its growing military power. America’s attempts to cut China off at the knees are reminiscent of the measures taken early in the Cold War to contain the Soviet Union and isolate it from the other industrial centers of the world.
