The China syndrome

My undergraduate adviser in history (I had one for French, too), was a specialist in East Asian history, particularly 20th century Chinese history, with an emphasis on China's nationalities policy.* In some ways, this professor was one of the best I ever had. He introduced me to Chinese history (he taught all periods of Chinese history, not merely the 20th century) and his writing assignments were quite challenging and forced me to hone my thoughts.

In other ways, however, his teaching left something to be desired. His lectures at times, but only occasionally, contained apologias for some truly questionable practices that were done in Chinese history, such as the practice of footbinding, which resulted in the mutilation of countless numbers of women, and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the deaths of millions. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that he gainsaid the Tiananmin Square massacre, in which "only" hundreds of people were killed.

His goal wasn't malicious, and in some ways he was only trying to introduce us to seeing things from the perspective of those in power and those in the Chinese culture, on the very plausible assumption that someone growing up in that culture might have different conceptions of the state and human rights from those that Westerners might have. He also aimed at challenging some of the snobbery that, allegedly, has for a long time been inherent in Western scholarship on China.

Yet, he elided some serious problems. I now realize that he was a committed Marxist, although I wasn't quite aware of that at the time. Surely, Marxism had evolved by the mid-1990s to include serious discussions of "counter-hegemonic" cultural practices by the lower classes. What I mean is, even if Chinese culture encourages people to have a deferential attitude toward the state, that does not mean they do not "resist" this power in some ways.

That "problem," which I have undoubtedly oversimplified and only roughly explained, is only theoretical. There were specific items that in retrospect are questionable. On the subject of footbinding, the professor insisted that we ought not judge another culture by Western standards. After all, didn't the social norms of Victorian England virtually require upper-class and upper-bourgeoisie women to wear body-damaging corsets? In this case, he didn't particularly note the irony of comparing Chinese culture with Western culture in order to argue that we shouldn't compare Chinese culture with Western culture.

To this professor's credit, he did assign two textbooks from different perspectives. One was by Jacques Gernet (who, I believe, was a Marxist); the other was by John King Fairbank (who, I wager, could be considered an American liberal academic who had once been more left-leaning). The professor, however, made very clear which historian he agreed with. He derided Fairbank as an "elderly man" (indeed, Fairbank had written that book shortly before his death), as if the professor would have agreed with Fairbank if he had been younger. (My guess is that Gernet, in the 1990s, was no spring chicken either.)

Fairbank's crime? In a chapter section on footbinding, he criticized the tendency of mostly Western, non-Chinese historians (my professor was French) to adopt a "second nationalism" and write about China as if it could do no wrong. As an example, Fairbank humbly cited an article he himself had written decades earlier, in which he contended that the Glorious Revolution was one of the greatest things that ever happened to China.

I took four classes with the professor in question. I confess that I, too, developed a sort of second nationalism toward Chinese history, but on a more modest scale than my adviser had. In short, I ignored what should have been my better intellectual judgment and refused to challenge what even then I should have seen as holes in his statements.

This post is not meant as a diatribe against China or against my adviser. Perhaps my adviser's teaching style was defensible in many ways. It just gives me pause.





*China is approximately 90% ethnically "Han" Chinese, but the other 10%, while present in almost every province, are concentrated in strategic, sparsely populated areas that China would like to control, such as Tibet, northwestern China (the Xingjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region) and the land north central border (the Mongolian Autonomous Region.) China therefore had to develop a "nationalities" policy to prevent these people from revolting. Authoritarian regimes, no matter how brutal, cannot live on force alone.

Personalized business, or where to buy junk food

Sometimes, I prefer to patronize local businesses in part because I feel something tending toward a "moral" obligation that I want to support locally owned businesses. For example, there is a convenience store near where I live that appears to be owned by a family who, I assume, live in the neighborhood. Right across the street, a corporate gas-station/convenience store has opened up as well. The main difference between the two is that the latter offers gasoline and can induce a greater number of customers with slightly cheaper prices and loss leaders. Whenever, on rare occasions, I wish to patronize a local convenience store, I try to use the locally owned one (I don't have a car, so gasoline is a moot point). The reason: they're always nice to me and I don't want to see them lose their business.

Now, nothing I buy there is important, and there is a grocery store

A world without children

I have pretty much firmly decided that I do not want to raise children. I won't go into all, or any, the reasons, but I have thought long and hard about it, and I believe them to be good reasons. Still, I suspect that there is something lost in opting for this course. There is something gained, too, but also something lost.

What that "something lost" is, is to a large degree unknown by me, as someone who has never had children or played a significant role in raising children (I'm the youngest in my family and played no big role in my nieces' and nephews' upbringings). To a large, perhaps extravagant, degree, I don't know what I'm missing. As D. A. Ridgley said in a blog post on parenthood (click here to read; in fact, I recommend reading his entire blog; even though, to my knowledge he does not contribute to it anymore, I find it enjoyable reading):

The parent / child relationship is asymmetrical: you cannot understand what it is to be a parent merely by having been a child. I want all my children to be healthy and happy and harmless people who are loved and share love freely. Beyond that I am mostly indifferent about the particulars of how they choose to spend their lives and even less concerned about how they make a living.

And much of what I hear from parents is that they find being a parent, to paraphrase what a friend of mine once said, "both easier and harder than you can imagine."

One thing I've learned from reading C. S. Lewis, even though I'm not sure he phrased it in exactly these terms, is that almost everything, except perhaps, for him, the grace of God, comes with its corresponding dangers and corresponding virtues. Deciding not to have children comes with certain "virtues"--if one may call them that--but it also comes with the danger of being locked increasingly into oneself, making oneself as a God, or as an island entire unto itself. Raising children can, I imagine, be a strong antidote to that.

I imagine that deciding to raise children entails potential dangers that, like the virtues, I cannot, perhaps, fully imagine or appreciate, although in the news we see frequent (although perhaps anomalous?) instances of parents neglecting their children or abusing them. And my reasons for not wanting to have children relate, at least partially, to fears that these dangers would be realized; however, I promised not to go into my reasons.

But I should say that in most of the parents I know, I see loving people who have given, and who continue to give, love and nurturing to another being that, at least at first, is completely dependent on them. Perhaps such a role, for the parent, is heartbreaking. A friend of mine once said that you never love your parents as much as they love you. I don't know if that's true, but she had children and could at least speak from experience.

Now that Mother's day has passed and that Father's day is approaching, I guess I'd just like to give a shout-out to my friends who are parents.

Why support the Green Party?

For the by-elections in Illinois, I am endorsing the Green Party ticket. (Right now, I expect to hear a collective *sigh* of apathy from my readers, who number perhaps in the high single digits and who probably don't depend on me to tell them how to vote.) Any endorsement of the Green Party, or any third party, comes up with some very commonsense and reasonable exceptions:

1. Third parties have a notoriously hard time actually winning elections. This is true historically, even at the state and local levels. Even apparent examples of "successful" third parties are either not really that successful or not that "third": the Republicans, in the 1850s, might arguably be thought to have been a "third party" of sorts, but in actuality, the prior third party system (Whigs versus Democrats) was falling apart, and the new Republican party was taking on some of the trappings of the Whigs and Free Soil Democrats; the Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt was somewhat "successful" (TR placed second in electoral votes to Woodrow Wilson), but to the degree it enjoyed any success was due to that fact that it represented one wing of the Republican party that had broken off from the alleged "Old Guard"; the Populist Party, for a time, enjoyed some electoral success at the state level, but it, too, fell by the wayside.
   
2. This is also true structurally: our "first past the post" system of voting for "single member districts" (basically: only one person can serve as representative for a geographically bound territory, and that person needs to get at least one more vote than her or his competitors) militates against a victory from someone who does not belong to one of the two parties.
3. This is also true in terms of hardball politics. Frankly, third parties almost never have money or legal resources to deal with the inevitable challenges (more often than not, from the Democratic Party) to their right to be on the ballot.
   
4. Third party campaigns usually hurt the electoral chances of the candidate who is most likely to represent the interests of those who vote for the third party. It is probably too trite to say, for example, that Nader voters in 2000 all would have voted for Al Gore if Nader hadn't been on the ticket (I, for one, would have probably voted for another third party, and I really do think some others might have voted for Bush), but it seems pretty clear that Green voters probably played the critical role in battleground states like Florida and that Gore would have been much more friendly to the types of policies espoused by the Greenites than Bush was on most issues.
   

Given these objections, why on earth would I support the Green Party? Here are a few reasons, and I confess that they do not answer all the above objections completely:

1. At the state level, and especially at the local level (by which I mean, Cook County), the Greens have a marginally better chance at winning than they do at national-level elections. I stress that this chance is, indeed, only marginally better. But it is better.
2. The stakes, at the local level, are not necessarily as stark as at the statewide and national levels. The Greens are running someone for Cook County President, and the Democrats, who dominate the board, are so corrupt, that it might be hard to distinguish much from the Republicans. (There is a danger that a tax-lowering Republican base might dismantle county health aid and other forms of public assistance, so I don't claim that the partisan differences mean nothing.)
3. The Democratic party in Illinois, and especially in Chicago and Cook County, is so institutionalized and so unabashedly dictatorial that almost any change seems better. I even briefly considered supporting local Republicans, until I went to the GOP's Illinois website and found, on its opening page, a big advertisement against the "Obama/Pelosi Takeover of Healthcare." Now, there are very good reasons to oppose the new health insurance reform bill, but such rhetoric does nothing except to foster open discussion of the issues. (Not that the Democrats are any better; that's one of the reasons I do not wish to support them.)
   

Oh yeah, I also agree with much of the Green Party platform

Two possible objections to my banking reform plan

In a prior blog post (click here to see it), I advocated certain reforms or new ways of running accounts for banks that, in my opinion, would help resolve the problems people face with overdraft fees. I can imagine two more possible objections:

• If my plan were made compulsory among banks--something which I would not insist on but which I don't dismiss out of hand--perhaps this type of plan would lead to stricter requirements for checking accounts and the end of what is known as "free checking." (In order for banks to advertise a checking account as a "free checking" account, such accounts need to meet certain requirements under the law, such as no minimum balance fees or annual fees.) I'm not sure if such would be a consequence, but it could plausibly result.
• In that blog post, I also discussed the possibility of equipping ATM's with the ability to disperse pre-approved money orders. I'm not sure if there is the technology to do so, especially if these money orders are to be linked to a customer's account. The reason: such monetary instruments would probably have to be MICR encoded (MICR refers to "Magnetic Ink Character Recognition," which is a way to make account numbers easily routable by machines), and while (I presume) ATM's could be equipped with their own MICR encoders, such machines would present a huge potential liability, even more than the amount of cash that might be stolen. As it stands, ATM's have a certain amount of cash, and it's possible (I don't know how easy it is, but it is possible) for a thief to steal the money. Stealing a MICR encoder might be one more item you wouldn't want a would-be thief to have.
  

Anyway, those are two additional objections. I'm sure there are more.

A new approach to overdraft fees

In the recent clamor for the reform of finance regulation--a process I have not followed very closely--there is much ado about the bank overdraft fees* and about ways to use government regulation to curtail what are considered the more extreme fees. I think this is a real problem that admits of no easy solution, but one reform that might help would be a policy to encourage banks to develop what I'd like to call "money order plus" accounts.

On the significance of blog rolls

Not that anyone asked, or even cares, but here are my reasons for including sites on my blog rolls:

• To give a shout-out to my friends--both my "real" friends and my internet friends--who have blogs or websites they run. I don't always or necessarily endorse the views of these people. For example, I probably see things a lot differently from Laura(southernxyl), but I appreciate her thoughtful commentary that offers a different perspective from one I am used to reading.
  
• To use as a convenient way to "bookmark" sites I like and that I have a hard time remembering the URL for. For example, I read the Volokh Conspiracy a lot, but its URL is so familiar to me, that I don't include it. On the other hand, the URL for Paul Campos's "Daily Beast" articles are harder for me to remember.
  
• To endorse a particular viewpoint represented by the blog in question. This is true of the "green party" sites I include for the people who are running for Cook County Board president, for Illinois governor, and for the U.S. Senate for Illinois. (I might blog later on why I intend to vote for these folks instead of for the major party candidates, but as an aside I'll say right now that yes, I realize they have little chance of being elected, and yes, I believe elections have consequences, and no, I don't believe the Democratic and Republican parties are "essentially the same.")
  

Occasionally, I'll decline to put an item on the blog roll, or decide to remove it from the roll, when its point of view or, more often, tone is so confrontational and extreme that it closes off (for me) any thoughtful discussion.