荒诞者共和

Dr. Enzio von Pfei
Asia Sentinel
07 August 2007

For a long time we have been telling our clients that The Economic Time™ in America is worsening. We thus have been wrong for a long time in telling them to not invest in America, but rather in other places where The Economic Clock™ is signaling good buying opportunities.

Therefore, the recent shakeout in America is of no surprise to us. As an American squawk box commentator magnanimously observed about himself, he has called six of the last two US market crashes. So have I. Let's hope that I am right this time around.

What is different this time is how deeply the sub-prime news has embedded itself into investors’ consciousness. A lemming-like effect is taking place. Sadly, once the lemmings are shaken and turn, and the longer they turn, the more momentum picks up in that direction. Thus, a bear market in America has just begun.

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Dr. Enzio von Pfeil
Asia Sentinel
20 August 2007

Reality has set in and panic will run for a while. But remember that every asset is being tarred with the same brush. As one wise owl just put it, the fire sale is occurring because fund managers have to raise money in order to finance clients' redemptions.

One asset class that is undergoing the fire sale is commodities. And this, along with various Asian markets, will rebound sharply once value has been created. Subscribers know when we feel - yes, feel, not think! - that this will occur. It is tough to put a time frame on panicky emotions, back to Prof. Kindleberger's marvelous anatomy of a crash.

China has not stopped growing because of sub-prime, CDO, SIV or ABCP strudels in Texas and Frankfurt, Germany. Nor have her Olympics been canceled. Nor has her 17th Party Congress. Nor has growth in India been stopped because of America's Countrywide Financial Corpse. The Economic Time™ in Korea will not worsen because of US and European financial convulsions, either!

This implies that the commodity sell-off is more about fire sales than about growth concerns. All of which implies that this asset class will do particularly well in the rebound.

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Wenran Jiang
The China Brief Volume 7, Issue 16
Jamestown Foundation
2007-08-08

“Green GDP” has been the new catchphrase in the Chinese media and political discourse in the past few years. China’s State Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) jointly released China’s first Green GDP report in 2006, which measures the country’s GDP performance against the cost of resources and the impact on the environment. It concludes that a limited calculation of pollution alone cost 3.05 percent of China’s GDP in 2004 [1]. The widely reported new method of assessing China’s growth, however, will be relegated to simply an exciting start; Beijing recently announced that the much-anticipated Green GDP report for 2005, completed last year, would now be shelved indefinitely.

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Henry Zhao
New Left Review 44
March-April 2007

Henry Zhao on Jean-François Billeter, Contre François Jullien. France’s celebrity popularizer of Chinese philosophy assailed for his political occlusions, amid Confucian crossfire in the PRC itself.

Western scholarship on Chinese philosophy has long remained within its own small specialized ambit: a few scholars teaching a few students, so that the latter in turn may teach a few more students later on. They have constituted a rare species, which respectable universities have chosen to preserve. The subject appeared to have little wider relevance within these institutions, let alone outside. So it comes as quite a surprise to find a debate over traditional philosophy that has been raging in China for nearly a century suddenly blazing out within Western sinological circles, hitherto characterized by library quietness. It is even more astonishing to find the most famous sinologist in France so resoundingly condemned by a more senior fellow-sinologist, and in an eponymously titled pamphlet. If I were François Jullien, I should consider it an honour.

The passionate intensities that arguments over Confucian philosophy have generated in China had seemed unimaginable among those foreign scholars accustomed to watching the conflict with a marveling gaze, but always from a safe distance. Until now. Jean-François Billeter’s pamphlet, Contre François Jullien, burns with the fire of indignation on almost every page. Billeter himself, born in 1939, is a French-Swiss scholar best known for his sociological study of the sixteenth-century rebel thinker, Li Zhi, in the context of the late Ming mandarinate, and for his works on the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. Billeter was responsible for establishing the Sinology Department at the University of Geneva, where he taught until his retirement in 1999. Judging from this blistering text, however, he has not retired from intellectual life. Billeter’s target, François Jullien, has had a more spectacular career. Currently professor of Chinese Philosophy at Paris University vii, Jullien is also a familiar figure in French public intellectual life: interviewed on his work by Le Monde and Le Débat; much in demand by businessmen and investors seeking ‘an understanding’ of China’s multi-millennial culture—without which, they have been assured, it will be harder to turn a profit in the People’s Republic of Confucius, Sunzi and Laozi.

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RICHARD WALKER & DANIEL BUCK
New Left Review 46
July-August 2007

The PRC’s breakneck transition to capitalism seen through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America, as its cities rehearse the processes analysed by Marx: commodification of land and labour, formation of markets and capitalist elites. What lessons might the West’s past hold for China’s future?

Cities in the Transition to Capitalism

Modern China is undergoing a relentless process of transformation, from the forests of construction cranes in its coastal cities to the gargantuan infrastructure projects in its interior. Its economic trajectory has been equally dramatic: China is now ranked 4th in the world by gdp, rising from 11th in 1990. A range of developments testify to its rapid progress along the path to a capitalist economy: the commodification of land and labour, emergence of private firms, formation of finance capital, among many others. [1] Yet China scholars have been curiously reluctant to apply the classic Marxist idea of a transition to capitalism—and its corollary, primitive accumulation—to the Chinese case. Instead, they quite loosely use terms such as globalization, marketization, post-socialism, reform era and market socialism, seemingly unaware of how closely the transformations under way in China compare with the development of capitalism in Europe and North America—not to mention many other ‘late developers’ in Asia and Latin America.

Comparison with historical experience of the rise of capitalism in the West can act as a useful counterbalance to three shortcomings of contemporary China studies. The first common error is to exaggerate China’s uniqueness vis-à-vis the general process of capitalist transition. This does not mean adopting the flat-earth neoliberalism of Thomas Friedman or a unilinear Marxism in which the rest of the world must recapitulate the economic history of Britain or the United States. While capitalism has universal elements, the road to capitalism follows many routes, depending on history, geographic circumstance and politics. Like a virus, capitalism cannot survive without living hosts, whose dna it alters in order to reproduce. Therefore, one can certainly refer to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’.

A second pitfall for China watchers is an obsession with the socialist past. Certainly, the Maoist era shaped the country’s present course to an important degree, and China shares characteristics with other ex-socialist countries. But it differs profoundly from most post-Soviet and East European countries in that it did not undergo a sudden implosion of state, party and economy. Instead, an autocratic state has maintained a close hold on economic policy and the Communist Party continues to monopolize political life. Nonetheless, China in the twenty-first century can no longer sensibly be called ‘late’ or ‘market’ socialist.

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