A few years ago I wrote about the Chinese tradition of deception. This week Janka Oertel writes about China's cultural ability to deceive.

The worst deception, however, is not that of another, but that of one's own local, regional and (supra-) national government, as it pretends to act in the interest of its subjects.

Worrying too much about deceptions by others distracts from dealing clarifyingly with the lies in the immediate vicinity.

As Chogyam Trungpa once wrote: a nation is never destroyed by an external enemy, but from within.

As our once local ecosystems and habitats turn under the pressures of climate change and biodiversity collapse into a global ecosystem and a global habitat, China’s role on the African continent should be a subject of tremendous interest to anybody seriously concerned with the sustainable management of natural and human resources. Howard W. French wrote in 2012 a must-read account on how China’s global ambitions transform the continent in pretty much every aspect of economic, political and social life … and it is a story of how Chinese state-capitalism is instrumental in the destruction of African nature and people.

To stop short any allegation of China bashing, lets start with the clear statement: there has been done much damage to Africa by Europeans. Mr. French is very outspoken about Africa’s colonial past and the mistakes during four centuries of colonial imperialism. This book is however not about the past, it is about Africa’s present and future, in which Europeans and Americans play a minor, if any role at all. It questions if China’s engagement in Africa is different from European colonialism, and Mr. French goes at great length to show differences and similarities through the interviews with dozens of people in twelve sub-Saharan countries.

Howard French is one of the few truly cosmopolitan journalists, I know. His writing on Africa is backed up by his outstanding career as New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China. He has African ancestry and spent in the 1980s several years in Ivory Coast as interpreter and university lector before returning to the US to join the Times. His last book “Born in Blackness” examines how the exploitation of African human resources fueled the miracle of the new world economies.
 
China’s Second Continent is divided in three parts and ten chapters. I was not able to detect any meaningful structure behind the three parts. Each of the chapters is however dedicated to one or two visited countries, and for people like me who know little about sub-Saharan Africa, French provides a readable introduction to colonial and recent history in small bits and pieces strewn in between the interviews with local politicians, NGO professionals, Chinese embassy delegates, state owned company managers and Chinese self-made millionaires.
 
Despite changing locations, the interviews reveal repeating messages which French resists to summarize in his epilogue, where he focuses on a single question: is China’s engagement in Africa and with Africans different from the colonial imperialism of the past? He comes to the conclusion that it is not and elaborates on three features of imperialism which he confirms with the research on this book.
 

• Imperialism involves some form of foreign domination, which results in substantially altering the target population or polity; either gradually or suddenly it loses the ability to resist.
• A consistent feature of imperialism is the linkage between political and economic competition among contending powers. And China, for all its denials of any global ambition, is clearly competing with someone and for something – global preeminence.
• Migration is the human activity that provides the most striking parallels with imperial patterns of the past. No one knows how many Chinese have set themselves up on African soil in recent years, but if anything, the widely used figure of 1 million seems quite conservative. The arrival of these newcomers on this scale is arguably the lasts chapter in a very long narrative of empire construction through emigration.

 
All of the above reminds me strikingly of Niall Ferguson’s trilogy on imperialism, which he wrote between 2003 and 2011. It started with the British Empire, continued with the United States as Colossus and ended with an outlook on China’s hegemony in “Civilization: the West and the Rest”. The last book was turned by BBC into a six-episode documentary in which Ferguson shows the imperial transition compellingly by visiting a British built club house in Angola, which is now owned by Chinese. Howard French brings more detail to this Chinese embrace of Africa and creates an unspoken bottom line to global dominance: whoever rules Africa, rules the world.
 
The dynamics of this nascent pax sinica in Africa and its relevance for issues of global concern like climate change or wildlife biodiversity can be better understood by reviewing and clustering the statements of the author’s interviewees into main takeaways. The question which remains, and which neither French nor I can answer, is how Chinese will respond to their growing responsibility of protecting the world’s most important biodiversity reserves and how they will wield their increasing power over the fastest growing population of any continent. Powers always come with responsibilities; and without doubt, imperial powers contain different responsibilities in the 21st century than they did in the 19th.

1. China’s Impact on Africa is not only driven by Beijing

 
French interviews two groups of Chinese in Africa: One the one hand those employed by the state and state-owned companies who are dispatched to Africa on a collective mission (aka China Dream) of developing foreign markets and gaining access to natural resources, both needed to fuel the home economy. On the other hand, self-employed adventurers who arrive in Africa rather as economic and political fugitives seeking a territory to advance their individual luck outside of the oppressive and overpopulated home society which gives little or no room for social mobility.
 
French writes about immigrant farmer Hao Shengli: “From spending time with migrants like Hao I learned whether Chinese newcomers had come to Africa to stay, and what their impact would be in transforming African economies, how willing they were to integrate with the locals, and what other impact their massive presence around Africa would have. Unexpectedly, I gained a much deeper understanding of China itself. […] “To be sure, a desire for better economic opportunities was the biggest driver behind their exodus. Still, contributing to the decision for many to take a great leap into the unknown and move to Africa was a weariness with omnipresent official corruption back home, fear of the impact of a badly polluted environment on their health, and a variety of constraints on freedoms, including religion and speech. Many migrants also invoked a sheer lack of space.”
 
These two groups could also be described as two elements of imperialism. Chinese state-owned companies including Chinese embassies, mirror what the Dutch and British did with their respective East India Companies. Individual migrants however resemble rather the early exodus of British settlers to the United States or Spanish immigrants to South America. Imperialism requires both, a ruling class in the target countries which shares the culture and language with the home country and a political ambition of the home country to dominate the economy of the target country.

2. Racism and Development
 
Overall, the interviews convey a deeply racist attitude of Chinese towards Africans which I was able to observe also on many occasions in China. If respect and empathy for local cultures and people is the number one precondition to support genuine development and progress, then it is rather unlikely that China’s engagement in Africa serves any other purpose than advancing one’s own interests. French cites a Guinean interviewee: “The Chinese come and they want your iron, your bauxite, your petroleum. In return, they’ll deliver you turnkey projects, where they supply the materials, the technology, and the labor, with salaries that are mostly not paid in the country and do not contribute to the economy.”
 
It is moreover clear - however one might think about Western development aid to Africa -that there is no interest to genuinely help Africans build their nations into sustainable, self-supporting economies. The statement of Li Jicai, a kind of informal leader of the Chinese community in Senegal is repeated by others in a similar manner: “There is no future in Africa; no future for development,” he said, giving vent to a surprisingly dim worldview. “How will they develop with the kind of education they have here? Look at China. We are putting people into space. We are developing our technologies. We are inventing things and competing with the rich countries. But these people, they are impossible to teach, whether it is how to run a business, or how to build a building, or how to make a road. They just don’t learn.”
 

3. State Capitalism and the Practice of Underbidding
 
China’s Second Continent, although written already in 2012, is a missing element in the much later announced One Road one Belt Strategy and the more subtle dynamics of state-capitalism. Chinese state-owned companies go into target countries, supercharged with manufacturing equipment and skilled labor in order to compete for large infrastructure projects. The practice of underbidding is described in all of the visited countries as a result of China’s economic imperialism.
 
French cites Zou Manyang, a project manager for the China Railway Corporation, one of the major road builders in the country. “Underbidding wasn’t just about beating the competition, Zou said, especially the foreign competition. It was about bigger issues, like amortizing heavy equipment costs, and especially about keeping the pumps of China’s enormous public works sector primed. If you have your equipment and your people in place and there is no business, that is very bad. If you bid low, though, even if you have a tiny margin, you are better off. That’s the reason Chinese companies bid low. It’s not because we want more market share. The number of companies and people working in this sector [in China] is very large. We need more and more markets to keep people employed. Most of the companies like mine are state-owned, and if you start laying off workers, it will create huge problems for the country.”
 
One needs to understand the scale of this systemic imperialism which basically boils down to temptingly easy loans which are mostly pocketed by Chinese state-owned companies. The recipient nations might get football stadiums, roads, bridges and hospitals, but they are deeply indebted, have sold their natural resources for a pittance and created no jobs. Quite on the contrary jobs for the native population are reduced because the deals usually also involve large scale immigration from China destroying local industries like textiles or petty trade.
 
Another problem which is not explicitly discussed by French is the fact that state capitalism of such global dimension is like a planned economy in which Beijing decides which growth numbers it needs to maintain social stability and sound employment at home. Social stability in China becomes a major benefit of granting shoddy loans to African countries, where corrupt elites get rich fast at the expense of planet and people. China exports an economic system which is highly wasteful, because it does not respond to the needs of the people, but to the needs of China’s industrial machinery and its still largely uneducated consumers.
 
African leaders, however, are clueless on how to respond to these challenges as Edward Brown, a former employee at the World Bank explains: “I don’t know if the finance ministry has the capacity to assess this kind of deal. And in the office of the president, there is one fellow in charge of the China package.” He amended himself later, to say one or two. “I am not sure there have been any strong analyses of risk management, of finance, of the cost-benefit, of integration into some strategic vision. We really must reach the stage where we can say, You say you want to help us? Let’s talk about what that means, and how we want you to help us. The Chinese, meanwhile, are planning everything down to the letter. They will take whatever they can get from you …
 
“Will investment [like this] lead to growth that is transformative? Will it lift productivity in your country? Will it halt the decline in important industries, like textiles? Will it launch African production in areas where we have true competitive advantage? How will African countries use it to diversify and transform? Unfortunately, this is a serious intellectual challenge that is not being met.”

4. Corruption & Environmental Destruction
 
The inseparable connection between corruption and environmental destruction is without question the very top takeaway from this book. Interestingly, many Chinese move to Africa because of too much corruption in their home country: “In their new lands of adoption, Chinese people frequently spoke to me with unaccustomed openness about their hopes for their country and about its problems and failings. I was struck by how Africa, to so many of them, by contrast, seemed remarkably free, and brimming with opportunity unlike home, which they often described as cramped, grudging, and hypercompetitive. For many of them, Africa also seemed relatively lacking in corruption.”
 
Rather than being corrupt themselves, the Chinese are riding high in Africa because they know how to play corrupt local elites. They buy the ruling class in each and every country whether with scholarships for their children to Chinese elite universities or kickback payments in large public tenders. Effectively, it is the African ruling class, which sells out everything Africa has to offer, mineral wealth, forests, agricultural land, fishing rights, and deprives its people of the opportunity to improve their lots if only modestly. French offers striking examples of the environmental consequences:

• Liberia: “… all of this wealth, all of this good land that they cannot use, all of this forest, these big trees, redwood trees,” he specified, laughing as if in wonderment. “Chinese people would die for this wood. What [the Liberians] need to do is hitch their fate to people who know how to exploit these things, and that will pull this country out of poverty. This region’s forests, when you see them from the air, appear to be as thick on the ground as heads of broccoli. “Do you realize that if you cut down all the trees here there will be no more rain?” I asked him. “Did you know that the countries to the north of Liberia are all arid?”

 

• Mali: “One could draw many inferences from his remark. One is that Beijing is choosing winners among its state companies at work in Africa. One assumes there are rational policy reasons behind these sorts of decisions, but Chinese businesspeople and senior African officials told me that corruption played a big part. The firms that were most favored by Beijing were paying kickbacks in China for their privileges. Corruption like this is, of course, a mirror of patterns of industrial corruption in China, in much the same way that Chinese labor abuses in Africa reflected the poor labor environment and lack of independent unions back home.”

 

• Ghana: “Ghanaians complained that Chinese investors and migrants came to the country with one declared purpose, but quickly involved themselves in other pursuits, legal or not so legal. Ghana is Africa’s second largest gold producer, after South Africa, and the stories about illegal mining by Chinese, who cut down forests and despoiled the land with mercury to produce their gold, were legion. Many spoke in broad terms about a Chinese propensity for bribery and corruption, for shoddy goods and for cutting corners. The Chinese-built National Theater, in particular, came up often. It was a gorgeously sensuous, modernist structure with a white roof of sweeping curves. The problem, Ghanaians told me, was that only a few years after being built, it leaked, its tiles were dropping off, and the building seemed to be falling apart.”

 

• Mozambique: “As it happened, my visit coincided with an extraordinary spate of reports in the local press about Chinese depredations in the north. These ran from an epidemic of major bribery cases involving customs agents to the seizure of illegal fishing boats from Chinese operators. The most spectacular item, though, was an investigative report in the Mozambican newspaper O País, about the impounding of six hundred containers of illegally logged old-growth mahogany and other hardwoods by Chinese operating in the northern forests. Following their initial scoop, journalists were not allowed to inspect the seized wood, and people in the know in Maputo told me that this probably meant that all but a symbolic quantity of the timber was probably quietly sold back to the Chinese loggers, or else auctioned off to other exporters by officials who then pocketed the profits.”
  

In conclusion, and as a very unrefined proposal for a solution to China’s unsustainable grip on African nature and people, I suggest thinking about what Lin Yutang wrote on Chinese family mindedness, which he described as a form of magnified egoism. It will take also in China and with the Chinese a realization that we are part of one superorganism, which will not survive if we continue to behave like predators on others and the planet. The concept of family and home must transform in particular within Chinese culture to human race and planet.

Further reading and sources:

• The China Global South Project: a US based, member financed non profit dedicated to exploring every aspect of China’s engagement with Africa.
• https://www.howardwfrench.com/
• Tom Miller, China’s Asia Dream
• One Belt one Road Initiative
• Niall Ferguson, Empire
• Niall Ferguson, Colossus
• Niall Ferguson, Civilization
• BBC documentary Civilization: Is the West History?
• The Guardian, Black man is washed whiter in China’s racist detergent advert
• Sebastian Heilmann, China’s Political System
• Lin Yutang, My Country and My People
  

Recognizing any similarities?

Above: Leaders of the early German workers movement: August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Carl Wilhelm Tölcke and Ferdinand Lassalle surrounding Karl Marx


Below:

Leader and icons of the Chinese peasant movement: Karl Marx, Viktor Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping

Around the world, the numbers of workers are dwindling as their jobs get automated. Around the world, the number of peasants are dwindling as urbanization progresses.

What remains is class struggle.

Important introduction to a research volume on China's adaptive governance mechanisms which helped the nation to develop despite all odds. While not a recent publication, its historical research method provides timeless insights which are highly interesting under the light of recent Zero Covid policies.

This is part of analysis of the 19th Party Congress in 2017. The full text was published as Fish, Energy and XJP: is he the captain planet the world has been waiting for?

In my early China days more than 20 years ago, I was enthralled by average Chinese having a deep understanding of how food impacts our health. 以食为疗 | let food be medicine - soon became a guiding proverb for a new found lifestyle which abandoned Western industrial food for a varied Chinese cuisine. I turned vegetarian barely two years after my arrival to the country and remained so ever since.
 
While I was bored in my Chinese classes which I soon abandoned, I was inspired in our neighborhood restaurants, where I copied laminated menus and quizzed the owners of small food stalls about the ingredients and the meaning of each dish. Food was without doubt my entry ticket to a culture which is now closer to me than what I used to call home.

The Shanghai born physician Adeline Yen Mah explained in her 2001 book 守株待兔 | Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare - which I devoured in my Kunming days over peanut sauce filled erkuais | 饵快 (see above picture) -  how the healthy diet of Chinese peasants outperformed already in the pre-CCP era the diet of wealthy urbanites; and how the variety of Chinese vegetables offers itself to a balanced as well as vegetarian diet.

Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare became the entry point to a much larger topic of how food, culture, individual and societal health are interconnected. I readily learned from my Chinese relatives which 'cold' food like bitter gourd (see picture below 苦瓜烧鸡蛋) should be eaten during hot summer days, and which 'hot' food like ginger should be eaten during cold winter months.

China has experienced during the last two decades an enormous transformation of its cuisine. While traditional cooking remains to be a cultural stronghold, going out for a decent lunch or dinner is not anymore, a bargain like it once was. The recent lockdown of Shanghai has moreover shown that access to healthy and fresh food is everything else but a certainty.
 
A surge in diabetes, obesity and many other nutrition related diseases reveals that Chinese society follows despite its rather recent agrarian roots a similar trajectory as affluent Western economies. The findings of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project, which was conducted in the 1980s and turned by biochemist Colin Campbell into a bestselling book on nutrition have been largely ignored.
 
Campbell concludes that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, vegan diet and reduce their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. Who would have thought that the science of health and nutrition receives tailwind from a Chinese government which has set its sails towards Sakoku, the island of isolationist policies?

The 14th Five-Year Plan of China sets forth a national strategy towards lab-grown meat and plant-based eggs among food production technologies that will be supported to cut reliance on overseas know-how and imports. This is overall great news, considering that China has turned into the world’s largest single market for meat and thus a major contributor of food caused climate change.
 
The shift towards plant-based foods might also impact the epidemiological future of animal born and human contracted viruses like Covid-19, since there are indications that the intensive and economy of scale husbandry farming techniques practiced in China are a direct cause for the increase in pandemic diseases.

Quite few years back, I attended an interesting course about China’s food security under the title “Can China Feed Itself?“ (see above research chart) and now wonder if the Chinese government’s interest in food independence is not a best practice for other nations and regions to follow. Reducing the reliance on global trade and industrial food corporations is in line with sustainable farming techniques and the Permaculture method.
 
Whether plant-based high-tech foods reduce the dependence on large corporations remains to be seen. A world in which industrial agriculture produces ingredients which are healthy for planet and people is however to be preferred over the system which we have inherited from US capitalism and which has been the subject of numerous documentaries like Forks over Knives, Planeat, Food Inc. or Fed Up.  

So, go CCP, go! 加油共产党！

Source documents:

• Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare
• China-Cornell-Oxford Project
• The China Study
• Ministry of Agriculture on 14th Five Year Plan
• South China Morning Post on 14th Five Year Plan
• China’s 5 Year Plan Includes Plant-Based Eggs, Cultured Meat. Why that’s a big deal?
• On the Metaphysics of a Plague: Why intensive live stock farming is the source of Covid-19
• Can China feed itself? Study
• Forks Over Knives documentary
• Planeat documentary
• Food Inc. documentary
• Fed Up documentary
• UN Global Land Outlook Report 2017
  

Friday afternoon, Feb 4. I return from a meeting at the Vienna Natural History Museum and encounter a situation similar like back in 2018 when the telly showed the Worldcup 2018 finals in our Shanghai apartment. The opening ceremony of the winter Olympics is broadcasted from Beijing’s nest stadium into our living room and my family is glued to the screen. National anthems, national flags, national winter tricots, national tricolore painted into the faces of athletes and participants – and new in 2022: on covid-19 masks.
  
What I wrote then is still valid today: large international sporting events which celebrate nationalism are ecological and social anachronisms which must not be any longer tolerated. I argued that we live again in a panem et circenses world which gives us dopamine and mass event driven oxytocin kicks to make up for the community disruption which we increasingly experience in the course of the industrial revolution.
 
The neurology of mass sports events was early recognized by psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich who wrote with ‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’ a seminal book to explain why Worldcups and Olympics are not just athletic competitions (as it was the idea in ancient Greece)  but dangerous international events which build Herrenmensch idols and homo deus images to drive the agenda of the power elites which organize them. Following the laws of decentralization and sustainability formulated by Nobel laureate F. Schumacher, their size indicates the progression of decay in a society.

What is different between the two events? The 2018 Worldcup was celebrated in an already declining Western world just a year before our latest pandemic hit the ground. The 2022 Olympics are organized in the country where covid-19 erupted and which has convinced most of the rest of the world (ROW) that a totalitarian regime found a solution to the disease: large scale ghetto like quarantines and compulsory vaccinations, if necessary, enforced with police and military.  
 
As a side note, ROW is an abbreviation which Western industry started to use to describe two different technical standards for the same product: one for China, i.e. enforced by the absolutist technocrats, and one for the rest of the world. We can observe that this separation of the world in China and ROW extends increasingly to non-technological aspects of everyday life. It reflects China’s traditional self-understanding of being the center of the world and is driven by its increasingly seclusionist policies.   
 
Let’s take a closer look at the power elites which orchestrate such large-scale events. The Worldcup is the flagship event of FIFA, the United Nations Organization of the soccer sect. FIFA’s annual revenue stands at approx. USD 1 billion – the tip of an iceberg of infrastructure investment, tourism turnover, and sales in various industries from F&B to advertisement, etc. The Worldcup is big business and confirms what historian Yuval Harari summarized eloquently:
 
Modernity has turned ‘more stuff’ into a panacea. […] Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. The Soviet Union, with its megalomaniac Five Year Plans, was as obsessed with growth as the most cut-throat American robber baron. Just as Christians and Muslim both believed in heaven, and disagreed only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.
 
The International Olympic Committee or short IOC is of a similar revenue dimension as FIFA. Statistica writes that the revenue for IOC from TV rights and ticket sales fluctuated since Nagano 1998 until Pyeongchang 2018 between USD 0.6 and USD 1.6 billion. That seems to be a moderate revenue considering the dimensions of the games. The IOC website reveals that the organizations budget is similar like FIFA’s only the tip of an enormous capitalist iceberg.

IOC made between 2013-2016 USD 5 billion in “funding” and kept 10% that is a staggering USD 100 million per anno for its operations. It’s safe to assume that responsible functionaries receive high six-digit salaries for fostering nationalism, competition and environmental degradation. What is more important to note is the new speak terminology of funding. IOC’s funding is bluntly spoken corporate revenue and can with a polemic tinge be seen as capitalist lobbying which aims at infrastructure investments and many other multibillion-dollar deals.

Why is that? Because the Olympics are the world’s largest franchise: an applicant-city has to convince the IOC that is has already prepared, or will prepare in time, what is necessary for the Games. Bearing all associated costs. ‘What's necessary’ is at the sole discretion of the IOC. In exchange the successful bidder gets the right to call its competition ‘the Olympic Games’. The lion’s share of expenses is always borne by the organizers, including, but not limited to, building sport facilities, organizing lodgings and transportation for athletes and officials, feeding them during the games.

One might think that because the financial burden on the organizing city / country is enormous, IOC shares the revenue fairly. Wrong. The IOC retains and controls almost all the marketing rights associated with the Games. Profits from on-site Olympic paraphernalia and venue tickets sales are shared – but those are minor compared to the main sources of income: TV rights. The main profits from those marketing rights always go straight to the IOC.

Now, you might ask yourself (I did) why any nation would be interested to host Olympic Games if they are financially rather unsustainable. The answer is somewhat not straight forward. Fame? Vanity? Pride? Do such concepts exist in a collective dimension as it is the case with 1.4 billion Chinese? This is the point where Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2008 converge as historical events which gave a rising political power the opportunity to show to the world through a large-scale public event that it needs to be taken seriously; and to its own citizens that his has reached what it has promised: a lead position within the international community.

The boycott of the US government and its allies to not send any diplomats to the Beijing Games confirms this analogy. A war brews behind the scenes and prompts the defining question about global order for this generation: Will China and the United States escape the Thucydides’s Trap? The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part of not just the challenger but also the challenged.

The mass psychology of fascism doesn’t know cultural borders. The human being and nationalism are everywhere the same. The competition of individual athletes is embedded in a larger competition between nations states, the largest entities of a capitalist economic system. The athletes turn into ambassadors for the achievements of a society, an economy, a civilization and their accumulated won medals into the PISA ranking of physical not intellectual prowess. Statistics confirm that won medals in relation to the total population of a nation are a clear indicator of economic development in GDP terms.

The power elites which orchestrate large events like the Olympic Games follow the same principles which drive our ecological system into havoc. They are motivated by power and profit. While corporate interests are the main driver of Olympic Games in the decaying West, state capitalism motivates the Olympic Games in China where capitalism and communism have blended into an ideology which comes straight from hell. Its again Yuval Harari who has found an eloquent metaphor of how a sporting event and the instilled admiration of athletes reflects the competitive rat race which humanity can no longer afford if it wants to survive.

When it comes to climate change, many growth true-believers do not just hope for miracles – they take it for granted that the miracles will happen. […] Even if we go on running fast enough and manage to fend off both economic collapse and ecological meltdown, the race itself creates huge problems. On the individual level it results in high levels of stress and tension. […] We blame ourselves, our boss, the mortgage, the government, the school system. But its not really their fault. It's the modern deal, which we have all signed up to on the day we were born.  

Olympic Games are an elite version of the everyday rat race our knowledge economies engage in. They come at an extremely high social and environmental cost – and there is no green washing or nice talking possible. The medal tables mentioned earlier confirm that only GPD strong nations which invest lots of resources into the training of their cadres can participate or even succeed in the games. The games are therefore made for the rich to participate and for the poor to watch. They are the most prominent example of how a global and inclusive society must not work.

When it comes to the environmental impact of Olympic Games, I think lately only of the European policy during Covid-19 peak infection periods of shutting down all social activities which are not system relevant. Let’s ask this question in all seriousness: are Olympic Games in the face of a climate crisis systemically relevant? Or should we rather consider spending CO2 emissions caused by 2800 participating athletes, and additional trainers and medical teams in other more meaningful ways?

How about decentralized Olympic Games which are held in small regional events during the same two weeks every four years? Or how about cancelling them all together for the sake of initiating a shift from competition towards collaboration? Or how about letting athletes only participate under their name and not a flag? Humanity needs to be unified by events which cause such tremendous environmental costs and do not promote a fair distribution of global wealth but aggravate the already existing inequalities.

Biathletes with awkwardly black band aids in their faces to avoid skin rupture discuss on Austrian national TV that the arid climate and the strong wind make the competition particularly difficult. Listening to their serious concerns raises in my mind only one question: how will this planet’s athletes compete against each other when increasing precipitation and more frequent storms disrupt the atmosphere and what has been dubbed goldilocks conditions?

What are goldilocks conditions? you might ask. They are the climate conditions which the world experiences since about the start of the Neolithic revolution, that is approx. 10000 years. And how are they characterized? Goldilocks conditions are a set of rather stable parameters which define our current climate zones and probably even more significant: the current sea levels. Climate change and global warming most simply defined will result in 7% more water in the atmosphere for every 1˚C warming.
 
The future (and as a matter of fact the present day) will bring more storms and heavier rains in areas which had less precipitation and in different periods of the year. it will be less predictable whether skiing resorts will have snow and many events will be cancelled due to storms. Imagine ski jumping or ski acrobatics with storms breaking in. Imagine biathletes shooting at their aims when snow hurricanes flatten the landscapes.

What disturbs me most in this spectacle is the bigotry of Western media which does on the one hand not see how capitalist greed plays in the hands of a nationalist demagogue; and on the other how capitalist greed undermines sincere efforts to initiate a turnaround in regard to climate change – maybe even with the support of China. The Austrian national TV reported on Jan 27 that the 2022 Olympic Games are a fake snow event of hitherto not seen dimensions and quoted an international study which projects that only 10 of the 21 locations which have hosted Winter Olympics since 1924 will be able to do so in future.
 
The Austrian trade commission in China promotes national winter technology since years as one of the hottest export products. Doppelmayr cable cars and national team trainers, products and services are exported to fuel the Chinese boom in recreational sports as well as the national economy. The dilemma of unsustainable Alpine tourism which was the subject of a well known 1980s TV production is exported to Far East Asia 40 years later. How can we request from China more environmental empathy if we do not start at home?
 
How can we complain about Alpine slopes in brown landscapes and downhill races without spectators at the Beijing Olympics when we do the same here? Shortly after I returned to Austria in fall 2020, Worldcup races were executed during Covid-19 lockdowns. TV moderators commented on the races as if no frame condition had changed. No spectators watched the race and the slopes looked exactly like the one above north of Beijing this winter. Chinese nationalism and Western bigotry must stop for the sake of global sustainability.

The size of the participating teams is good indicator for the importance of winter sports, economic development and Western bigotry. While most of the climate change impact is caused by wealthy nations, they send huge teams to participate in games which celebrate their athletic achievements at the expense of the poor south. It is in particular the winter Olympics which shows a group picture of those nations with the largest carbon foot engaging in non-system relevant games when the impact of their selfish attitude depletes resources and destroys the planet.
 
The Austrian team doesn’t make it into the top 10, but with 106 members it represents an extraordinarily large share of the global population. Just as an exercise in carbon footprint justice: 2874 athletes participating on behalf of a human race which now counts about 8 billion people. One athlete represents 2.8 million people and a small country like Austria uses the carbon footprint share of 295 mio people, i.e. almost the population size of the US and more than Indonesia. 
 
Writing these lines from Innsbruck, a small Alpine city which hosted the winter Olympics in 1964 and 1976, I remember my youth as enthusiastic Alpine snowboard instructor and the joy which I got from practicing the sports. Thinking about the past, I know that we need to decouple sports from capitalism and thus from mass sports events. The sustainable future of winter sports lies like with almost everything in small, community-based activities like ski touring. Nationalism and capitalism are poisonous ingredients, which turn the purest forms of recreation into planet and people devouring phenomena.
 
Further reading:
 

• On Football and Oxytocin
• Fritz Schumacher, Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered
• Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
• On Nippon Sakoku – A Blueprint for China?
• The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
• How FIFA makes money
• Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
• The World’s biggest franchise: who profits from the Olympic Games?
• Medals at the Olympic Games: The Relationship Between Won Medals, Gross Domestic Product, Population Size, and the Weight of Sportive Practice
• All times Olympic Games medal table
• Fake Winter bei Spielen in Peking
• How many athletes participate in the Winter Olympics, and other key numbers from the Games
• Piefke Saga
• Highest medal bonuses
• https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-countries-award-the-highest-olympic-medal-bonus/
• https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078227530/winter-olympics-largest-teams?t=1644221396031
  

Its rare that I find somebody who writes on China in similar interdisciplinary manner I do. Dan Wang is such a philosopher who takes on every subject and thinks about it deeply. We might not agree on what we see, but it is essentially the same object to which we devote so much affection.

I read his annual review for the first time last year and felt compelled to provide a glossed review to his 2021 observations reading them today. Dan, I hope you excuse that I quote some paragraphs of your ruminations directly - it puts my comments into context. And thank you for doing this - I have given up on my annual reviews already a few years ago.

Having lived myself in Shanghai for eleven years until a short while ago and being a frequent guest in Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Hongkong over the last decade, I share most of what Dan Wang wrote on the three Chinese metropolis areas. Beijing is mordor, sucking its hinterland dry in both ecological and metaphorical manner. It is a showcase for urban dystopia and what Schumacher called economics as if people didn't matter.

[...] The aura of state power is overbearing in Beijing. By power I mean the physical infrastructure, which is meant to intimidate. Beijing’s boulevards are so unwalkable because they are designed less for pedestrians than for army parades. [...]

[...] Beijing isn’t satisfied with greater national wealth. It is also seeking socialist modernization and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” That is a messianic drive, complete with sacred texts, elaborate rituals, and the occasional purge. [...]

More sober and less outspoken China watchers call this messianic drive a renewed cultural revolution and an aspiration for world dominion with similar results: what can’t be remembered must repeat itself. highly recommended to read The Landscape of Chinese Souls on this subject.

[...] In spite of my physical dislike of Beijing as a city, I find myself sympathetic to its spirit. There is a use for the hard men of the north. I appreciate this line from Amia Srinivasan in Tyler’s interview this year: “One thing history might show us is that it is the prophets, and not the mere pragmatists, who are the most powerful world makers.” [...]

I have understood the word prophet always with a positive connotation. A prophet tries to help people out of misery and into utopia. Beijing's prophecy is double speak, because its prophecy is directed at a new in group which excludes in this religious nation myth 4/5th of humanity. Beijing lacks prophets unless Hitler was one. Dan cannot write this because he is still in China.

[...] Beijing’s goal is to channel entrepreneurial spirit towards useful goals. Profit cannot be the final standard of value, and the country’s best and brightest must work towards national salvation. I see that dynamic playing out in the regulatory campaigns this year. [...]

The most shocking event of 2021 was the national youth parade on July 1. Dan does not even mention it. It was a clear sign that Beijing goes down Berlin’s path with a century of delay. Whoever does not see this, is either blind or applies Chamberlain’s appeasement politics.

Shanghai is probably best as far as city life can go, but recent policies aiming at removing migrant workers and the insane clamp down since 2018 starting every year six months (!) before the Import Export Fair in Qingpu have made my home town pay such a heavy toll that I decided to leave for good. I share Dan's observation that Hong Kong is largely obsolete - how is that possible considering the marvelous setting of that city? A lesson for the non believers: the wrong from of government can turn Madeira into Alactraz.

Contrary to Dan, i did not change my residence much in China. I lived in Qiqihar, Kunming and Shanghai. I chose the periphery over the epicenters until i came in touch with Shanghai's gravity which is indeed 21st century New York, unless further tightening cuts it off from the rest of the world.

[...] While Beijing has restrained internet companies, it has done nothing to hurt more science-based industries like semiconductors and renewables. In fact, it has offered these industries tax breaks and other forms of political support. The 14th Five-Year Plan, for example, places far greater emphasis on science-based technologies than the internet. Thus one of the effects of Beijing’s squeeze has been prioritization of science-based technologies over the consumer internet industry. Far from being a generalized “tech” crackdown, the leadership continues to talk tirelessly about the value of science and technology. [...]

And there is a good reason to do so. Yuval Harari eloquently pointed at the intrinsic connection between science, technology and state power since the scientific revolution by showing how both religion and science get corrupted under power seeking institutional influence: In fact, neither science nor religion cares that much about the truth, hence they can easily compromise, coexist and even cooperate. Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. It aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars and produce food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but  as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.

[...] I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms. [...]

That’s blatant euphemism. Beijing is itself a state capitalist enterprise and its motivation in cracking down on platforms is strengthening its own sphere of influence. As the saying goes, 一山不容二虎 | there can’t be two tigers on one mountain. Beijing centralizes wherever possible and therefore turns into what Fritz Schumacher called big and ugly. Beijing is as a matter of fact the last stage in an organizational evolution which celebrates in the scheme of General Motors’ centralized decision making and was described by authors like Ken Wilber or Frederic Laloux as being obsolete.

[...] But there is also an ideological element that rejects consumer internet as the peak of technology. Beijing recognizes that internet platforms make not only a great deal of money, but also many social problems. Consider online tutoring. The Ministry of Education claims to have surveyed 700,000 parents before it declared that the sector can no longer make profit.

What was the industry profiting from? In the government’s view, education companies have become adept at monetizing the status anxieties of parents: the Zhang family keeps feeling outspent by the Li family, and vice versa. In a similar theme, the leadership considers the peer-to-peer lending industry as well as Ant Financial to be sources of financial risks; and video games to be a source of social harm. These companies may be profitable, but entrepreneurial dynamism here is not a good thing. [...]

Every move that Beijing makes is ideological. Dan wrote himself a few paragraphs earlier that Beijing has a messianic drive, complete with sacred texts, elaborate rituals, and the occasional purge. The ideology which cyberleninist Beijing is enamored with is one of Chinese cultural superiority fueled by 百年国治 | 100 years of humiliation. It manifests itself domestically in the resurrection of Chinese religion and internationally through the 一带一路 | One Belt One Road policy.

It is important to recognize however that an orange leader perceives himself as last instance in anthropocentric hierarchy. Power supersedes truth. This is the reason why a potential decentralization and breakdown of the state education monopoly is viewed by Beijing as a direct threat which must be eliminated. What if students all over the country could decide where they get their brains washed and even worse with which detergent? A nightmare for Beijing‘s elite which needs enemies like the West or Japan to rally its troops.

[...] The Chinese leadership looks more longingly at Germany, with its high level of manufacturing backed by industry-leading Mittelstand firms. Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley. The problem is not that these opportunities pay so well, rather it is because manufacturing has offered dismal career prospects. I see the Chinese leadership as being relatively unconcerned with talent flow into consumer internet and finance; instead it is trying to fashion an economy in which the physics PhD can do physics, the marine biology student can do marine biology, and so on. [...]

Not everybody in a society of 1.4 billion can get a STEM PhD. A power-driven regime leaves behind 700 million rural Chinese who don’t have a part in the Chinese Dream and there is another narrative about China’s stellar rise which is told by people like Scott Rozelle, a Stanford economist who researches China’s health and education sector since more than two decades. Dan's observations are highly biased towards urban centers which are in Deng Xiaoping's words the places which need to get rich first | 一部分先富起来。

[...] It’s too early to tell if in a decade China will have fewer founders of Jack Ma’s daring. So far at least, entrepreneurial types around me have found his example too removed to be worth bother. [...] In this best case, Beijing would succeed at taming its robber barons without extinguishing dynamism in the following century. [...]

com’on. Beijing is the robber baron. political scientist Sebastian Heilmann made a good point in showing that there is only a thin line between organized crime and Far East Asian style state capitalism which instrumentalizes corporations for its own power goals.

[...] I expect that China will grow rich but remain culturally stunted. By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. Even these demand qualifications. Three-Body is a work of genius, but it is still a niche product most confined to science-fiction lovers; and TikTok is in part an American product and doesn’t necessarily convey Chinese content. Even if we wave nuances aside, China’s cultural offering to the world has been meager. Never has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports. Contrast that with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have made new forms of art, music, movies, and TV shows that the rest of the world loves. [...]

This too is an interesting statement: does a civilization like China really have to produce any of the superficial cultural kitsch we know from the US? there is so much about Chinese culture which keeps the world in East and West enthralled. Tea rituals, Daoist philosophy, TCM, just to name a few. The Chinese have as social psychologist Lin Yutang once noted a penchant for pragmatism which most likely is the result of early overpopulation and a constant fight for survival. The fact that there was little space for fantasies and utopias is most prominently embodied in the teachings of Master Kongzi himself, who found no interest in transcendence as long as social life was disorganized and ravaged by war.

[...]  The Metaverse, which represents yet another escape of American elites from the physical world, can only exacerbate social differences. It is too much of a fun game, like cryptocurrencies, played by a small segment of the population, while the middle class dwells on more material concerns like paying for energy bills. It might make sense for San Franciscans to retreat even further into a digital phantasm, given how grim it is to go outside there. But Xi will want Chinese to live in the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors. [...] 

Fully agree on this paragraph and also with a government which endorses life in the physical world – the question is though if life is just a means to an end if yes, which end we spend it for. Another paranoid terracotta army potter does however not get my support.

[...] China is like the thinking ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris: a vast entity that produces observations personalized for every observer. These visions may be a self-defense mechanism, allowing leftists to see socialism and investors to see capitalism; or, as Lem’s ocean might be doing, China is vastly indifferent to foreign observers and generates visions to play with them. Whatever the case, we need a better understanding of this country. Too many commentators have been interested in the story of China’s collapse. When the collapse doesn’t come, they lose interest and move on. It’s a more important and more subtle skill to figure out how this country can succeed, because that is the exercise the Chinese leadership is engaged in. [...]

In an interconnected and globalized world that we live on, in an era that is called Anthropocene, if one country the size of China succeeds alone, it means that we fail as a species. The same might be true for China’s failure. The question is thus how we can succeed together.

[...] In 2018, I started to say to people that China would close its doors in 40 years, by the centenary of the country’s founding. At that point, the Celestial Empire would be secluded once more, while its people can be serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians outside. Everyone reacted with disbelief, saying that there’s no way to shut down a country. But it looks like I was off only by the wrong centenary: China has been mostly shut in 2021, a hundred years after the party’s founding. I think that the government has no real exit plan for this pandemic. Any time it looks like it might relax, another variant shows up. The leadership probably has no firm aspiration to open the border at any date, and instead will assess the situation of variants and medical treatments every so often. If things don’t look good, then it won’t open up. [...]

Agreement here as well. I have been observing the Sakoku tendencies for a while and explained its ecological effects in a review of Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition. That was about a year ago, when I first read and mostly disagreed with Dan’s annual review. Our affection for commenting on China is however such a broad common ground that I appreciate every disagreement as an invitation to contemplate a different perspective.

4 years ago i wrote here in depth about how China greenwashes its policies and argued that an economy, which labels nuclear power as climate neutral, displays ultimate ecological aggression. Yesterday, I learn that the EU Commission under former EU Defense Commissioner Ursula van der Leyen plans to do the same in Europe. This intention confirms the convergence of political systems, in which the people on the top try to maintain their power and ignore the ecological consequences of their acts.

Enlightened Aldous Huxley explained in 1962 in his lucid essay On the Politics of Ecology, that the need for power is the single root cause for the futility of politics and runaway ecological devastation. Decisions about energy security are the most lasting and impactful decisions any economy can make. They are taken up to 50 years in advance and set the very basics of peaceful and sustainable development.

European history is grounded on the European Steel and Coal Treaty from 1951. European future must not be grounded on an EU Taxonomy regulation which labels nuclear power as sustainable. If this happens, then the convergence of political systems under the pressure of market forces is completed and Europeans have accepted to play according to the rules of Beijing's unsustainable power game. A game in which we all - in particular our children - will loose.

Read my in depth analysis of why China - despite its massive investments in green technologies - is not on track to become an ecological civilization. This essay reveals in a logical manner how the power driven need to rule top down destroys the planet, depletes resources in an unprecedented scale and drives infinite energy consumption for the sake of military dominance.

The catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1989 is still fresh in my memory. What many have forgotten is the fact that ecological disasters like Chernobyl have fueled a bottom up green movement in the West since the 1960s. There are few topics more sensitive than nuclear power which has the potential to realign the social and political left against a technocrat and increasingly totalitarian EU government. Leyen is in other words working on her political demise. And that is after all good news.

There is however much to be discussed and made up for. The European Union was in the unique position to form an alliance with Maghreb nations for much of the last 50 years but failed to do so. Instead of fulfilling its duty of making courageous political long term decisions Brussels has lazily wasted time and money of the EU citizenry in self complacency.

It is a government's first responsibility to secure the resources for the survival of its citizens. Brussels has failed in fulfilling this responsibility in so many ways, most importantly in planning ahead for a transition to sustainable power security. There would have been so much time to forge fair agreements between North African nations where sun is abundant and rather sun deprived Europe. There would have been so much time to make solar power the primary source in the European energy mix and by doing so, create a larger political entity based on a common ground of sustainable development which encompasses at least the reaches of the Roman Empire.

Instead, European nations are depending on Russian gas, making any negotiation with Russia over its Crimean aggression a joke to Putin who knows that he can let Europeans freeze in a long and cold winter. A government like the European Commission which has failed for decades to fulfill its most basic duties, i.e. planning for long term energy security and sustainability, needs to be removed.  

In the light of the EU taxonomy regulation, which is the major driver of Leyen wanting to label nuclear power green, this failure becomes even more problematic. While Beijing's motivation for labeling nuclear power as green energy is mainly grounded in the nation's security, Brussels' motivation is the protection of the finance and investment industry. In other words: Brussels sells the security and sustainable future of Europe to bankers.

Further reading:

• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341264612_Captain_Planet_and_the_Planeteers_What_could_Xi_Jinping_do_to_avoid_climate_change
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/21/eu-in-row-over-inclusion-of-gas-and-nuclear-in-sustainability-guidance
• http://www.mingong.org/blog/the-politics-of-ecology
• https://www.economist.com/briefing/2013/08/10/the-east-is-grey
• https://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-big-winners-and-losers-of-low-oil-prices-2014-10
• http://tekmormonitor.blogspot.com/2017/08/russian-gas-pipelines-to-go-ahead.html
• https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/nuclear-generation-increases-wna/