Fahrenheit 2009 and rising

rogue-poster-crocodileGoogle and China:
wrapping up the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009

Response to the three posts on the Frankfurt Book Fair was good. The digital debate was less a debate and more of a statement of claims. Digital reading got thumbs up for being less burdensome than lugging around lots of books and because it simply is the way things are moving along. Though I suspect that it’s not so much the weight of the books than the posture of the reader that has an effect on the back. Goethe, in his “Garden House” in Weimar, had a strange contraption built with a saddle that allowed him to work in an upright position…

But the digital content issue was mostly avoided, and that is a big one, because it means control of the gateway and distribution. I cannot help notice an incredible confidence in the fair-mindedness of behemoths like Google. Yet, the “in” and “out” problem has not been resolved or even noticed apparently. So let me put out one more question: When has anyone been able to argue with the EULAs and still get service from, say, a software company? And who reads the EULAs thoroughly? Once you’re “in”, you have the bennies as long as Google allows them to be fed to you. When you are out, you are, in Brave New World lingo, a savage.  And my experience with many large companies, especially in the USA, has been that once you are out, you are a nonperson, though this term comes from another famous dystopia. You either accept and sign, or be damned.

(Google tends to ignore privacy and rights, including copyright, until getting rapped on its many fingers: In Switzerland, finally, Google View has run into a brick wall named the Officer for Data Protection, who demanded that the company be more careful with its anonymizing of photos. The Swiss are taking their privacy seriously, which is a good thing, even with the cute little Google).

The big cheese

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“Be there and shut up”: Regina Berlinghof with dissident journalist Dai Qing. (Thanks to Regina Berlinghof)

As for China: Again, the growth figures make economists clap their hands and foam at the mouth. Better growth than ever before, heavens, if only the west could do the same… Regina Berlinghof, who was mentioned in Part III Chinese Checkers, received a very high-level visit, namely a remarkable Chinese dissident, journalist Dai Qing. Her extraordinary career is a profile in courage and outspokenness. Of course, one of her main thrusts is environmental – she opposed the megalomaniac Three Gorges Dam project –  which is not terribly sexy these days. “She was first invited, then uninvited, and ultimately was not allowed to speak,“ writes Berlinghof. “She came by my booth and was delighted to see the action, and she thanked me.” Dai Qing was one of the writers to make a statement at the pre-Fair meeting that irritated China’s powers-that-be

It seems the Lilliputians managed at best to tickle the giant.
The online edition of the New York Times ran an article on China at the Book Fair. Here is a grand statement from that source: “Unlike the exquisitely choreographed ceremonies during the Beijing Olympics, the fair presented a messier and more ambiguous portrait of China on the rise — a country still deeply uncomfortable with its own discordant voices, yet eager to become more competitive with the West in the realm of ideas.”

Let us be a little more precise: exquisitely choreographed with a truncheon. And one can only delight at the euphemistic “uncomfortable with its own discordant voices.” The article mentions several prominent dissidents, notably Dai Qing and Liao Yiwu. Liao is an author and musician who was not only prohibited from traveling to Frankfurt, but was also asked to not shoot off his mouth. Apparently, the article closes, Liao Yiwu is optimistic: “Only by going through these incidents, it seems, can we become known to the outside world,” he told the New York Times. There was a time, when any dissident bogus or genuine was celebrated and put on the front page of every newspaper, as long as he or she came from a Communist country. Today, things have changed. If an obvious hoax with a hot-air balloon can occupy so many column inches for so long, how long does Liao think his name or his depressing book about the Capitalo-Communist revolution in China will be news, if it ever is. What Mr. Liao does not understand — and what the China’s media managers understand full well: The Cold War has been declared over, criticism and containment is out. Business models have taken over, and if the bottom line is good, no one will complain. We are experiencing what Marx rightly called the “fetishism of commodities.”

(That closes Frankfurt for now. Thanks for reading)

Fahrenheit 2009: Chinese Checkers

Chinese checkers

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Entrance to the Chinese hall at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Digital content creation is not the only elephant being talked about at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The other was guest of honor China. But the conversation is lopsided.  China has its own room near the entrance with a delightfully meditative installation, a pond nestled in white sand with the big logo of ideograms carved into wooden blocks.  One company has a line of small laptops all showing pages with gaudy pictures and Chinese texts. A young woman, extremely young for my tired old eyes, comes up to me without bidding. We speak a mixture of German and English. It seems to me they are looking for content. They buy copyrights. “Thrillers?” I ask. Yes, yes, people like thrillers in China. And it is a huge market, I muse. Yes, she says, a big market. Something to note, a huge and eager market…. Maybe finishing that thriller I started 5 years ago might be a good idea. Maybe there are better things to do…

China-01

 

Metamorphosis
Is this the same China that pumped out all those manifestoes on poor paper just a few decades ago? The country where everyone wore blue jackets and rode bicycles? The nation of great leaps forward and cultural revolutions with millions of deaths? Tiananmen Square?  I cannot recall regime change, but everyone can go there, one airline is offering special discounts: € 499. And the business sector is in awe, even freedom-loving Jack Welch. Arte is blasting a program on Chinese writers, a young authoress talks about the country being a China Town, no longer in touch with its tradition. The ubiquitous books revering its economic energy are beginning to feel like a waste of trees. A week earlier, Nelson Schwartz and Matthew Saltmarsh from the New York Times were decrying some mysterious illness called “Eurosclerosis,” Europe’s somewhat plodding economy, and noting one should speak of a G-2,  the United States and China. “Ideally, it would be the G-3, but Europe doesn’t speak with a single voice and they can’t coordinate and function the same way the U.S. and China can,” the authors quote C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. But these two distinguished, oft-published journalists apparently have not noticed the human costs of the boom. It seems unimportant in Mammon’s great maw.

Human matters
For a dissenting view, you have to march all the way to the cubbyhole booths in Hall 3.0 and 3.1, for example.  lr-China-Charter08 Regina Berlinghof, IT specialist by day, authoress and publisher of ancient spiritual and lyrical texts for YinYang Media by night, has hung texts of the Charter 08, a free speech manifesto for the people and artists of China. “Human rights are not given by the state,” one page states boldly, “rather, they are rights that each individual possesses at birth.” At birth is an interesting concept. And possession, too. Possessions are eminently fragile. They can be bought, taken, or even embezzled away. “A Chinese couple came by and nodded approvingly,” she points out. “You are the only one who actually stopped to find out more. Other journalists came by, but they didn’t take notice,” she points out sadly. We eat a few macadamia nuts and talk of the great Chinese thinkers, the artists, they are always the true value of a nation. And behind its army of bureaucrats, China has a grand culture that stretches back to the days of Gog and Magog. Alas, it has no clout.

One storey higher, I find Amnesty International with a big yellow poster announcing a round table about dissident writer Liao Yiwu (his “Public-Toilet Managerwill brighten your day, no doubt), who was not allowed to travel. The event is also being organized by the S. Fischer publishing house, a big one in Germany, but the print is small. Fischer brought out a complete collection of books on the Nazi concentration camps a while ago, so they know what they are talking about.

Not far is a tiny stand with a single book on display called Laogai, from agenda Verlag & Gallerie. It has a picture of men in police uniform pointing guns. Laogai, which derives from the word for reeducation camps. A concentration camp. (Laogai…. Sounds spookily similar to Lager, and shares three letters with Gulag). I open it, a sentence springs up at me: 68 non-violent crimes are punishable by death in China, one of them tax evasion. I turn a page, gruesome pictures of executions, in the background are white vans, presumably – says the caption – mobile labs to harvest the fresh organs. Dr. Bernhard Schneeberger has a good sense of humor, but here his demeanor is filled with anger: That is what you get when you combine hard-nosed capitalism with hard-line communism, he says.

lr-laogai-01Six Sigma meets the Gulag, essentially. China’s motto at the fair is “Tradition and Innovation,” (two buzz-terms used ad nauseam by anyone from distinguished watch makers to tourist offices around the world). Traditional law meets innovative means to mete it out and profit. The law of supply and demand applied to human beings, who are in large supply in China, and always have been; the supply always a little larger than demand, so it is cheap. Organ harvesting at the killing field, a case for just-in-time delivery. A literal understanding of the term human resources. The result: fantastic growth. Great idea for Europe’s sclerotic economy, Mr. Schwartz, no? It was tried here, didn’t work out that well, but maybe now it could be tried again. After all, who really cares as long as the toys are cheap.

Schneeberger pulls out another book, this one on cheap paper, with a paper cover featuring a youngish man with an ernest look on his face. He is lawyer Gao Zhisheng and is book is called A China More Just. This high-powered figure started defending human rights groups, but disappeared off the face of the earth. I cannot help but recall the story of Raoul Wallenberg. The Chinese did not publish his book, of course, they outsourced the job to  South Korea, which had it printed … in China. There will always be a Kafka.

Down the aisle I see a woman in a cage. She hands me bookmarks featuring authors such as Tsering Woeser, whose Notes on Tibet was prohibited for “serious political errors.” Another bookmark announces a round table with Chinese authoress Xu Pei, the Uigur writer Sidik Haji Rouzi, and the Tibetan journalist Tsewang Norbu. And the man at www. savetibet.de hands me brochures, two bumper stickers and a cloth bag bearing the Tibetan flag. He suggests I pass by the Chinese hall on the way out. That will make no difference at all, since the powers-that-be are in fact absent. They are laughing all the way to the nearest bank.lr-China-prison

Yes, some trouble did erupt at a pre-Fair symposium. The official Chinese, worthy heirs to Chairman Mao, were very upset at hearing public displays of real criticism, and Jürgen Boos, head of the Fair, actually apologized. And so, on the first evening, the Wednesday, Angela Merkel visited the Book Fair. She was accompanied by Xi Jinping, China’s Vice President. They did not wander through Hall 3.1.  They did not hear of the demo against China in the streets. They avoided the Amnesty International/Fischer round table. Don’t want to rock any boats. Angela Merkel, like most political figures, is just a kind of PR manager at this point. What are a few silenced authors versus billions in high-speed trains and other technology; what are the hundreds of thousands of poorly paid, at times imprisoned workers against cheap shoes, shirts, bicycles and other wares. I cannot help think of Sarah Palin’s recent visit to Hong Kong to talk to Chinese businessmen. She took time to criticize the Obama administration, she calls him a Socialist, she hallucinates about death panels, and that  in the land of laogai.

A cartoon from the 80s comes to mind: Reagan with a quizzical expression on his face holding a document marked “China briefing.” George Shultz then Secretary of State is captioned saying: “Yes, 1 billion Communists, I thought you knew!” Apparently we conveniently forgot and still forget while staring down official bogeymen, smaller ones without quite the clout of the Chinese Communist Party and its gigantic economy. Keep smiling, don’t be so negative, move on. That is the rhetorical soma of the age, the prozac slogans.

 

That gets student Ludvìk Jahn into some serious trouble. It’s something to think about.

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