Political Economy of Relative Gains

Realist IR scholars reject the possibility of meaningful international cooperation on the idea that not all states can benefit from such cooperation. That's wrong, liberal institutionalists retort, because classic trade theory demonstrates that cooperation can promote mutual "absolute" gain.

Realists counter with the point that mutual gains rarely result in equal distribution. Some states will benefit more from cooperation and these relative advantages mitigate against cooperation. Why would a state partake in an agreement that helps competitors more than it helps itself? Essentially, because realists see international politics as a struggle for power, states can prevent a redistribution of power by refusing to partake in meaningful cooperation.

Plus, on many truly difficult issues, there are going to be costs to cooperation -- similar to the dues union members pay for the benefit of membership. States have an incentive to free ride, rather than to pay costs to create gains. Thus, on many global issues that require genuine multilateral cooperation -- Kenneth Waltz mentioned “poverty, population, pollution, and proliferation” (209) -- states won't work together because they lack incentives.

Realists do not think much of existing international cooperation. Believe it or not, a prominent realist view of past trade practices suggests that they reflect typical interstate competition rather than real cooperation. Realists recognize that states form alliances when confronted by potential hegemons, but this is basically because their survival is potentially at stake. In lesser circumstances, a strong state might set up sham institutions to promote forms of cooperation that are in their individual interest and essentially coerce others to participate. This could include institutions that serve multiple purposes, promoting selfish security cooperation with small economic bribes.

Some empirical evidence supports the pessimistic view of international economic cooperation.

This is a quick and simplified account of a complex debate, of course, but I mention it because of this study result I read in The Atlantic last October.** Individual Americans apparently embrace this vision and reject the prospect of mutual benefit if the benefits provides relative gains to "competitors." IOW, people see other people as competitors:

In a survey of faculty, students, and staff at the Harvard School of Public Health, nearly half of the respondents said they’d prefer to live in a world where the average salary was $25,000 and they earned $50,000 than one where they earned $100,000 but the average was $200,000. Similarly, a majority favored relative over absolute advantage when it came to their own intelligence and attractiveness, their child’s intelligence and attractiveness, or praise from a superior. Apparently the survey respondents would rather the planet be filled with stupid, ugly children than have their own child left behind [1].

There are apparent lessons in this about the rise of Donald Trump and the populist/nationalist concerns of his supporters. Trump wants to build a wall along the southern US border, deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and impose new tariffs on major trading partners such as China and Mexico. Many economists predict that his policies would hurt the white working class more than others. However, their analysis is generally framed in terms of utility theory.

What if his voters don't care about utility as much as they do about perceived relative gains -- for them personally as well as for the US? Perhaps they are willing to be additionally impoverished so long as their competitors do worse -- whether that is undocumented Mexican workers or China.

The danger, of course, is that Trump voters are likely very wrong in how his presidency might influence the outcomes they desire. His tax policies, for example, basically continue long-term Republican plans to benefit the richest Americans -- and this link is from The Economist, not some lefty politician or organization. Would the U.S. win a trade war with China?


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** Yes, I'm cleaning out my office and have a stack of clippings.

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Inequality Watch: China's Billionaires

Peter Kwong, professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College, had an interesting piece about corruption and economic inequality in China in The Nation, April 22, 2013. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. In any case, this is the most striking data referenced by Kwong:

Party officials and their family members have reaped the spoils of China’s prosperity and amassed unbelievable riches, creating a deeply polarized China. There are 251 billionaires in the country today, compared with only fifteen six years ago; 0.4 percent of China’s families own over 70 percent of its wealth.

In China, the economic elite are also the political elite. While political elites are wealthy in many nation-states -- even in democracies -- the concentration of wealth by Chinese national leaders is striking:

In 2012, there were more than 500 corporate CEOs in the National People’s Congress out of a total of 2,987 delegates. The top seventy members of this body are worth $89.8 billion. In contrast, the worth of all 535 members of the US Congress, the president, his cabinet and the nine Supreme Court Justices is only $7.5 billion.

As Kwong notes, the twin problems of inequality and corruption in China could prove destabilizing:

The mere fact that the Chinese are discussing their problems in terms of the French Revolution is momentous: it seems to imply that they see China today as resembling France in 1789, when public disgust with the regime’s corruption and decay led to revolution. Chinese people from all walks of life—intellectuals, professionals, laborers and farmers—have been agitating for political reform and demanding, at the very least, a constitutional government and the rule of law. Yet this is exactly what the one-party system cannot accede to, even though without real reform, the Communist Party’s future looks bleak. If it eventually collapses—which now seems a real possibility—China faces a daunting challenge: without a viable opposition group, trained and ready to take power and govern, the country will almost certainly slip into anarchy. 

I've previously noted that China's political legitimacy is built upon its sustained record of economic growth. That success has brought hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. However, as China becomes wealthier and more overtly corrupt, more-and-more people are likely to notice the misbegotten concentration of political and economic power at the very top. And that could be explosive.


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America's Enemies

This weekend, I'm spending some time preparing for my graduate seminar on international politics. As many IR scholars do, I typically begin with realism in order for the students to wrap their minds around some of the discipline's core ideas: states, interests, power, threats, security, etc.

Many IR theories position themselves vis-à-vis realism in order to critique, deconstruct, etc.

One obvious problem: realists tend to focus on great power competition and we seem to be in an age that lacks that feature of international politics. In any case, the American public certainly seems to think so. Last February, Mother Jones reported these interesting results of a recent Gallup survey:

Less than a quarter of respondents think that China is America's greatest enemy. The general public is not alone, of course, as John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent academic realist, has long lamented the fact that policymakers fail to treat China as a serious foe.

I'm using the label "threat inflation" for this post because I'm far from convinced that the realists are correct. China and the US have some competing interests, but it also seems pretty clear that they also share many interests and are essentially partners in many endeavors.



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Mearsheimer Profile

Back in 1990, in the Atlantic Monthly, prominent neorealist IR theorist John Mearsheimer published a popular version of one of his best-known academic arguments: "Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War."

The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years, the era that we may someday look back upon not as the Cold War but as the Long Peace, in John Lewis Gaddis's phrase.

This pessimistic conclusion rests on the general argument that the distribution and character of military power among states are the root causes of war and peace.

His argument was based on the difficulty of assuring stability among a larger number of great powers -- and the higher chance that states would have different amounts of military power. Of course, Mearsheimer was also quite skeptical about the role democracy and economic interdependence might play in assuring peace, though he was also pessimistic that realist prescriptions could avoid war.

In short, the essay reflected most of the important ideas associated with Mearsheimer -- a pessimistic (if not tragic) realist emphasis on great power competition and the enduring prospects for war.

In the January/February 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Mearsheimer is profiled by the magazine's frequent contributor Robert Kaplan: "Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)." Kaplan highlights the University of Chicago scholar's ongoing interest in the threat of major power war. The essay gives a great deal of attention to the potential rising threat from China, a point Mearsheimer has been emphasizing for over a decade.

If you follow IR theory, none of the political science discussed by Kaplan is new. The piece does include several photos.

Because of my interests in political communication and deliberation, I'm including this quote from one of Mearsheimer's ex- students:

As Ashley J. Tellis, Mearsheimer’s former student and now, after a stint in the Bush administration, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, later tells me: “Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”

Here, Tellis is echoing a point Mearsheimer has frequently made.

Again, for scholars, the article is filled with redundancies like that. If you've read several pieces by Mearsheimer, chances are you did not learn anything from this article.

Yet, it is kind of interesting that a national magazine profiled Mearsheimer at this time. If the U.S. soon enters into a long cold war with China, he'll be credited (or blamed) with framing the logic behind the competition. Alternatively, if the U.S. or Israel launches war against Iran out of concerns about nuclear proliferation, then Mearsheimer will likely emerge as a vocal critic (as he was in the Iraq war case) and so this article helps to establish his credentials to a wider audience outside the academy.

In short, the article is (mostly) an effort to rehabilitate Mearsheimer after he and Steve Walt published their article and book about the role of the Israeli lobby in American foreign policy. Kaplan says that work is polemical and not objective, so the piece does not serve as a complete rehabilitation. Indeed, within the media Kaplan says that The Israeli Lobby has "delegitimized" Mearsheimer.

Kaplan is occasionally described as a neocon and apparently served in the Israeli armed forces, so he may not be the most objective observer of Mearsheimer. Notably, neocons have long shared Mearsheimer's worries about China.

In short, the subtext makes for an interesting read.


Note: I updated the post March 1 to provide a real conclusion.

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China & Cars

Photo credit = kalevkevad via Flickr.

In 2006, the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers reported  that "China became the world’s third-largest car market." That was thanks to a nearly 40% increase in sales over the prior year. By 2009, Chinese sources noted that China was the #1 car buyer -- a status partly based on 44% growth in China's market and a 21% plunge in US sales that same year.

China's passenger vehicle market ended last year with a 59 percent year-on-year sales increase to surpass the United States as the world's largest auto market for the first year, thanks to the central government's stimulus package.

Journalist Richard McGregor noted at the end of 2010 that China's auto market had exploded from 1 million domestic vehicles sold in 2002 to about 10 million in 2010. McGregor quoted consultant Michael Dunne to simplify the numbers with a comparison: "China has added the equivalent of two Japan markets in less than a decade." One-half million of those 10 million new vehicles are luxury cars like Porsches.

In any event, the implications of this change are profound. World oil demand will continue to increase as the Chinese buy more cars. In coming decades, Chinese petroleum demand will apparently match US demand. CIA data currently reveal that American oil imports are nearly double China's -- meaning that new demand for millions of barrels of oil per day will put huge pressure on international oil markets. Obviously, increased competition for oil, a potentially scarce resource, could have profound implications for geopolitical rivalry -- and energy prices. Michael Klare reports that "the conservative National Defense Council Foundation" found that "the 'protection' of Persian Gulf oil alone costs the U.S. Treasury $138 billion per year." 

The climate implications are also potentially disastrous. In the US, more greenhouse gases are emitted from cars than from burning coal. China is now on a dangerous pathway:

The vehicle boom is also pushing up China’s greenhouse gas emissions. Transport emissions of carbon dioxide, the major warming gas, have at least quadrupled since 1990, to more than 350 million tons per year.

This means the transport sector is now about 5% of China's greenhouse gas emissions.

Some analysts suggest that China's rising demand for oil could make the state more likely to cooperate with the international community:

"China is learning that owning equity oil in risky regions may not be as effective an energy security strategy as it had previously imagined," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an author of the study and the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute. "China is now finding itself mired in more energy-related foreign diplomacy than it bargained for.

"But this could be good news for the United States," Jaffe said. "It may mean China will be more inclined to act in concert with other members of the international community in conflict-prone regions."

Can the world really count on that happening?

Unfortunately, at least from an environmental perspective, recent growth in Chinese car sales is likely just the tip of the iceberg. China's vehicle ownership rates now stand at US levels from 1916. In 2008, people in China owned 37 cars per 1000 people. Some scholars predict that the rate will surge to 269 per 1000 by 2030, an eight-fold increase.

The US rate is about 825 vehicles per 1000 people.

Incidentally, here's more cause for concern in new markets -- India's car ownership rate is about 6 per 1000 people...



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Around the web

Sorry for the silence lately. We traveled for Thanksgiving and I'm really making a push on the book project since the current sabbatical ends in four weeks.

Meanwhile, over at Duck of Minerva, you can read my post from November 30 on "Comprehending Gingrich." Does he have a Belgian pro-colonial worldview?

November 7 on the Duck, I posted "Hans Beinholtz: Europe For Sale." That post is basically a funny Stephen Colbert video about the Euro-crisis.

At the e-IR Climate Politics: IR and the Environment blog, I posted "The US is Not a Climate Outlaw?" on November 21. It is part 2 about my October talk at Cardiff University in Wales.


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China and Green Energy Alternatives

While environmentalists are rightly very worried about the effects of mining and burning the world's remaining coal reserves, many are now just as concerned in the post-Fukushima world about the safety of nuclear energy. Prior to this year, nuclear power was increasingly viewed as the most feasible near-term alternative to coal-fired electricity.

It is well-known that China's vast coal reserves are of special concern to environmentalists. As the NYT reported two years ago, "China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined." China opens two or three new coal-fired plants every week! As for the nuclear alternative, China suspended nuclear construction plans after the Fukushima accidents in March. However, recent news reports suggest that China will resume its ambitious nuclear plans after it releases a new safety program in August.

Lucia Green-Weiskel, project manager of the climate change program at the Beijing-based Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, thinks that China could use the current moment to slow its nuclear plans and invest more heavily in other "greener" energy technologies. After all, China is officially committed to finding sustainable solutions:

China passed into law its Twelfth Five Year Plan, which will serve as the country’s economic blueprint until 2015. The primary theme of the plan is sustainable development, with a high priority on securing nonfossil fuel energy sources. New policies include reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent by 2015. That means manufacturing entities would need to emit at least 17 percent less carbon in 2015 than they emitted in 2010 for the same amount of economic output. The plan also mandates ambitious energy-cutting targets, implementation of market mechanisms like cap and trade, and generation of 11.4 percent of total energy from nonfossil fuels by 2015, up from the current 8 percent. Pre-Fukushima, a sizable portion of that 11.4 percent was to come from nuclear sources. That target is being reconsidered.

I've previously noted that China is becoming a major player in "green" energy technology. It's a small bit of good news in a future that otherwise looks clouded by coal soot.

Green-Weiskel emphasizes the stakes in these decisions. A bold move by China would have profound global implications -- for the future of the technologies as well as for the environment:

it is possible that one consequence of the horrific meltdown in Japan will be China’s accelerated development of clean and safe energy. With its huge economy, driven by central planning and aggressive government investment, China is the only country building a green-technology industry on a scale that could bring down global prices of solar panels and wind turbines, making them affordable in the developing world. This should be a key part of the global strategy to keep emissions under 350 parts per million, the maximum threshold recommended by climate scientists. For this to happen, solar and wind energy must become cost-competitive not only with nuclear but with fossil fuels. Given China’s size and unique role as world manufacturer and exporter, it is fair to say that it is the best hope for giving solar and wind energy that boost.

Is China really the best hope for a sustainable future? If so, what does that imply about the prospects for such a future?

Inevitably, this discussion ties into old debates about democratic versus centralized decision-making about the environment. Does the world need green leadership with dictatorial authority?

Democratic states certainly seem more accountable to the costs of pollution -- and responsive to the wishes of their constituents. Like China, a number of democracies have suspended their nuclear plans in the wake of Fukushima. However, both Germany and Switzerland have announced that they intend to phase-out their reactors altogether. China's brief moratorium seems unlikely to lead to that kind of decision. A stronger declaration about a safe nuclear future seems far more likely. Thus, I remain skeptical that the future of environmentalism rests with leadership from non-democratic regimes.


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Other writing

Sorry that this blog has been silent for more than a week.

If you want to read my most recent blog posts, then check out these links:

On August 14, I posted about "China's energy future" on the e-ir blog, Climate Politics: IR and the Environment.

At Duck of Minerva on August 5, I blogged "Another Iran Data Point." A former CIA Director (under W) says a strike on Iran "seems inexorable."

July 28, I posted "Identifying Groupthink," which pointed out some additional hypocrisy exhibited by Journolist critics.

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China and Kissinger Associates

Awhile ago, I meant to blog about a April 19, 2010, piece in Time about China written by Joshua Cooper Ramo of Kissinger Associates. Specifically, I was struck by these sentences:

...many Chinese worry about what they see as the aimlessness of a weakened U.S. The Chinese want to like Obama, but they regard even his most prized initiatives, like the new U.S. posture on the use of nuclear arms, as a sign of weakness. (No Chinese leader would dial back the country's option for unlimited nuclear response in self-defense.) Mao's old line has become a trope in China: It's better to deal with Republicans.

Where to begin?

Let's start with "the new U.S. posture on the use of nuclear arms." As I noted more than two months ago, the United States simply noted that it "will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations." It could, however, employ a "devastating conventional military response."

These kinds of "negative security assurances" have been sought by non-nuclear states since the negotiation of the NPT and are employed by other nuclear-armed states. The U.S. exempted non-compliant states like Iran and North Korea and even made explicit counterproliferation threats against them. Thus, the U.S. arguably dialed-up some threats in the new nuclear posture even as it made a limited "no first use" promise.

Next, what about Ramo's sentence in parentheses? "No Chinese leader would dial back the country's option for unlimited nuclear response in self-defense." In point of fact, China's nuclear posture is far "weaker" by Ramo's standard. As Nina Tannenwald points out in her work on the nuclear taboo, China first offered an unconditional "no first use" declaration in 1964. The state has maintained this policy for nearly 50 years -- and frequently renews the pledge.

Contra to Ramo's thesis, China has actually urged the U.S. to sign a sweeping "no first use" pact, which would yield an even "weaker" posture (by Ramo's standard).

I'm not really familiar with Ramo, but his uncle Simon Ramo provided the "R" in TRW. That might make him somewhat sympathetic to the military industrial complex, which worries (presumably) about any weakening of American militarism.

Ramo boss Henry Kissinger is a long-time advocate for China. Reporter Bill Gertz of The Washington Times calls Kissinger the leading former bureaucrat for marshaling China policies that are "undermining America." Then again, Kissinger was a loyal Republican party servant long before he was a China hack. So, I'd read Ramo's conclusion with that caveat in mind.


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The Ecological Costs of Low Prices

This is from Jefferson Decker's review of Nelson Lichtenstein's The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business in The Nation on October 5:

Today, Wal-Mart's world buying headquarters is in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city along the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. In 1979 the Chinese government designated Shenzhen a "special economic zone" with low corporate taxes and few environmental regulations. Guangdong now produces a third of China's exports, 10 percent of which end up on a Wal-Mart shelf somewhere in the United States.

While I've previously mentioned the large economic bond between Wal-Mart and China, the numbers still surprise me.

This particular quote emphasizes the way that Wal-Mart, like many other businesses, manages to evade environmental standards imposed in the United States (and in other affluent western nations).

Shenzhen is a very large city these days, with over 10 million residents. The people there are relatively wealthy as the per capita GDP exceeds US $8500 -- one fruit of 20% growth rates for 20 years.

However, the UNEP's 2007 report Shenzhen Environment Outlook emphasized the growing environmental burden of unsustainable development. Under the "business as usual" model, which the report calls "Scenario A," disaster looms in the next two decades (p. 157 of Chapter V):

In a short term, the economy will retain a fast growth pace but in a long run the resources and energy can hardly meet the demand of the influx of population and surging industrial development, and water and land resources are in tight supply. Massive sea filling projects have great impacts on coastal ecology and urban expansion has reached the extremity. Pollutant discharge is more than doubled and serious pollution is threatening urban ecology. As the impact of resource depletion and environmental destruction loom large, the economy falls into recession after experiencing fast speed development. Various contradictions emerge as a result. In a word, Scenario A presents a picture of a deteriorating society.

This is a very high cost of "Always Low Prices."


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Threatdown: The Heat is on China

China recently passed the US and became the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases. According to US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Chinese emissions are poised to explode.

If China’s emissions of global warming gases keep growing at the pace of the last 30 years, the country will emit more such gases in the next three decades than the United States has in its entire history, said Mr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics.

Chu was speaking at Tsinghua University, apparently viewed as China’s top science university.

On US soil, US officials seem even more worried about China's long-term role, implying that the world may view China as a threat to ecological security:

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce that China shared a special responsibility with the United States to address global warming. China passed the United States two years ago as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the two countries together account for 42 percent of humanity’s emissions of these gases.

“Fifty years from now, we do not want the world to lay the blame for environmental catastrophe at the feet of China,” Mr. Locke said.

In 2007, by the way, European officials annoyed American diplomats by reminding the world that US emissions had increased 60% over 1990 Kyoto baseline levels. As recently as 2005, China claimed that it was reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.


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Quick quacks

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Can recession cause regime change?" This piece, exploring whether regimes in autocratic states like Russia and China can survive the recession, continues my blogging on the alleged "upside of the downturn."

Sunday, I posted "Iraq: The Undead and the Dead," which concerns the reduced media scrutiny of the Iraq war and the apparently large (and overlooked) number of suicides (and acts of family violence) by returning veterans.


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Trade with China

You probably already know that China is one of the United States's largest trading partners. Likewise, you probably also know that the US has an enormous trade deficit with China, annually importing hundreds of billions of dollars more worth of goods than it exports.

Do you know what the US imports from China and what it exports?

I ask because the standard answer does not provide the full picture.

Yes, the US imports lots of toys, clothes, and shoes from China. If you don't believe me, just check the labels on these products.

However, by doing business with China, "American" companies are also required to comply with many Chinese political practices that would be unacceptable in the US. Companies like Google, Cisco, and Microsoft essentially help China monitor and censor information. Clyde Prestowitz:

In fact, the global corporation acts as a conveyor belt to carry non-democratic values into democratic societies. This is not to say it can't work the other way around, but the power relationships are such that it's more natural for a Google to yield to China's Internet police than to defy them.

The US exports machine, appliance and airplane parts, seeds, and plastics to China.

However, the US also exports its inequality. Twenty-five years of integration into the global economy has made the distribution of wealth in China increasingly unequal. The World Bank recently reported on this topic, but the fact is obvious to anyone watching the Olympics. Consider all those empty seats in sold out sports venues:

Officials and observers offered several explanations for the empty seats. Some speculated that tickets reserved for sponsors and VIPs might be going unused in preliminary or qualifying rounds as officials with a claim to them wait for the finals.

I face the same problem every time I attend a AAA baseball game in Louisville. The overwhelming majority of box seats are empty -- sold before the season begins to local corporations and elites -- but the outfield area is often packed with fans like me who hold tickets only to that day's game.


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China Hotline

President Bush was in China when Russia and Georgia went to war over the weekend; thus, he could talk to Chinese leaders directly if he needed to discuss the developing crisis.

However, if Bush had been in Washington, he could have used the new hotline linking Washington and Beijing. Reuters, February 29, 2008:

China and the United States formally agreed on Friday a long-planned hotline to improve communication between their two militaries.

Leaders of both countries agreed to establish a direct telephone link for quick communication in times of crisis during the APEC summit last September,

The article refers to the new hotline as a defense telephone link (DTL), so perhaps Secretary Robert Gates used the phone this past weekend. It was operational by April, according to the AP, as Gates participated in the first test.

The hotline has been in the works since at least 1998 and is said to be modeled after the one linking the US and former Soviet Union since 1963 (just after the Cuban Missile Crisis).


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Russia declares war on China & its NBC allies

OK, so the 2008 Olympics were supposed to be China's big "coming out" party. Twenty-five plus years of nearly double digit economic growth has made the Chinese a lot wealthier than they used to be. The Olympics provided a venue for demonstrating their cumulative success -- even if it is merely an inch deep.

Now, thanks to an increasingly horrifying war, Russia has spoiled China's party. Much worldwide media attention, which from China's perspective should be devoted to coverage of their Games, is now going to Russia and its war in South Ossetia and elsewhere in Georgia.

NBC will also like suffer as they committed $850 million to broadcast the games. NBC won't have all that much airtime to show war footage and will likey lose eyeballs to other 24 hour news stations.

The battle for "prestige politics" is thus between Russia (and its presumed allies in CNN/Fox/BBC) and China (with its NBC allies). China's moves are all played out in advance (the TV schedules were announced weeks ago), but Russia has a lot of latitude to make news.

Already, various parties are throwing around the terms "genocide" and "terrorist" to describe events on the ground.

What are you going to watch? Terrorism, or volleyball? (Well, maybe you'd say "volleyball," with the visuals in that story).

Genocide, or synchronized swimming?

By the way, my Duck of Minerva colleagues Dan Nexon and Charli Carpenter are doing a great job discussing the war (see also this and this, for other good perspectives on the conflict).


Note 1/4/12: Edited to remove a direct photo link at a reader's request.

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Bad News Alert: Climate Change

Did you miss this item from last week?

This is from The Guardian, May 13, on global climate change:

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm - the fourth year in the last six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be reabsorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic.

About half of the latest surge is said to be caused by China's increased participation in the global economy.

Of course, over the past century, western states (topped by the U.S.) have contributed far more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than China.




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Climate news

Recently, I wrote a couple of manuscripts about the politics of climate change. Most of the analysis for both pieces centered upon post-Kyoto developments.

Here's an example of one interesting development, from the BBC, February 20, 2007:

EU environment ministers have agreed in principle to cut greenhouse emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020.

The ministers, meeting in Brussels, also agreed to seek a 30% cut worldwide if matched by other developed nations.

That means at least 27 affluent countries, with a combined GNP larger than the US economy, are moving forward.

Germany is prepared to reduce by 40%.

Over at the Duck of Minerva, I recently blogged about the unique problem of China and greenhouse gas emissions growth.


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Hypocrisy watch: 2007

What does it say about a country if Russia and China criticize your human rights record?

And you concede their argument?

From The Moscow Times, March 12:

"Washington has long practiced double standards in the sphere of human rights, depending on whether one state or another acts in accordance with [U.S.] political interests," the statement said.

These standards are particularly clearly visible against the background of what is happening now in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the military base in Guantanamo with the participation of the U.S. armed forces," the statement said.

At home, the statement said, "the United States, under various pretexts, limits democratic freedoms, interferes in the personal lives of its own people, effectively carries out censorship of the media and sends minors to the electric chair."

Russia was firing back at the US for its 2006 State Department Report.

The Shanghai Daily, March 10, included a discussion of China's retort: Human Rights Record of US 2006:

The document says the United States has a flagrant record of violating the Geneva Convention in systematically abusing prisoners during the Iraqi War and the War in Afghanistan.

In the United States, human rights violations committed by law enforcement and judicial departments are also common.

...In recent years, American citizens have suffered increasing civil rights infringements, as the US government has put average Americans under intense surveillance as part of terrorism investigations since the 9-11 attack

It goes on like that.

One thing the US has over Russia and China: self criticism. The BBC, March 9:

The FBI has been illegally obtaining information on the US public, a report by the justice department's inspector general has said.

The FBI used the Patriot Act, passed after the 11 September 2001 attacks, to compel the release of information illegally or improperly, it said...

"We believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities," it concluded.

Then again, this admission more-or-less confirms one of the Russian and Chinese criticisms.

The FBI has filed about 45,000 national security letter requests annually since 2003.


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Sujiatun

Does the Chinese government operate a death camp called Sujiatun, where thousands of Falun Gong followers are taken to be tortured and killed? China banned Falun Gong as a cult in 1999. Allegedly, prisoner organs are "harvested" at Sujiatun and sold by the Chinese government. I recently received an email making these allegations -- complete with disturbing photographs. Most of the charges are made by two eyewitnesses, said to be the wife of a doctor who worked at the facility and an investigative journalist.

Reuters had this report on March 31:

THE United Nations is looking into allegations by the Falun Gong group that thousands of its followers are being held at a Chinese "concentration camp" and some had been killed.
The spiritual movement banned in China has alleged that up to 6000 people at a time were being kept at a state-run camp in the Sujiatun district of the northern city of Shenyang, where it said some had been killed and their organs sold.

"The allegation is Falun Gong practitioners are being used for the sale of organs and human tissues ... According to the allegation nobody has so far left this concentration camp," said Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

"I am presently in the process of investigating as far as I can these allegations ... If I come to the conclusion that it is a serious and well-founded allegation, then I will officially submit it to attention of the Chinese government," he told a news briefing in Geneva today.

China denies the allegations. Nowak is a law professor from Austria.

The U.S. State Department says it does not know whether the charges or accurate or not. This is from a press briefing with State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli, March 31:

QUESTION: About the recent revealed Sujiatun concentration camp where it is said thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs, what is the State Department's comment about that?

MR. ERELI: Well, obviously, any such reports are taken very seriously by us. We haven't been able to confirm them. We have contacted the Government of China about them. The Chinese have publicly denied the allegations. We've made the point that a further investigation would be helpful. We urge that it be done. So at this point, they are basically unconfirmed reports and we've raised them and we've urged a full investigation.

QUESTION: Did you suggest any international investigation or a third party --

MR. ERELI: No. We've raised it with the Chinese and urged them to investigate.

Amnesty International frequently criticizes China for its use of the death penalty -- the Chinese state kills more people than the rest of the world's governments combined -- and notes that there have long been allegations of "organ harvesting" in this "strike hard" context. Those about to be killed are forced to surrender organs without their consent.

U.S. exports to China totaled nearly $42 billion in 2005, while imports topped $243 billion. That $200 billion deficit likely has economic implications, but U.S. government officials have essentially stopped talking about the human rights dimensions of trade since China was admitted to the WTO and granted permanent normal trade relations.

Perhaps the U.S. should think of that $200 billion trade deficit with China as a very large amount of negotiating leverage -- to demand a thorough investigation of Sujiatun by international human rights authorities.


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Filed as: Sujiatun

Outsourcing censorship

Microsoft has shut down the website of a well-known Chinese blogger, in order to facilitate that government's censorship policies. The IHT has the original NYT story:

The site pulled down this past week was a popular one created by Zhao Jing, a well-known blogger with an online pen name, An Ti. Zhao, 30, also works as a research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.

The blog was removed last week from a Microsoft service called MSN Spaces after the blog discussed the firing of the independent-minded editor of The Beijing News, which prompted about 100 journalists at the paper to go on strike on Dec. 29. It was an unusual show of solidarity for a Chinese news organization in an industry that has long complied with tight restrictions on what can be published.

The move by Microsoft came at a time when the Chinese government is stepping up its own efforts to crack down on press freedom. Several prominent editors and journalists have been jailed in China over the past few years and charged with everything from espionage to revealing state secrets.

The blog's information is maintained on computers in the US, so Microsoft is arguably censoring speech in America, ostensibly to comply with Chinese law. For more on that angel, see Rebecca MacKinnon.

The newspaper story notes that Yahoo revealed information about a personal email account some months ago that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist.

China now leads the world in imprisoning journalists, though Stephen Colbert figured out a way for the US to catch up:

the USA is currently ranked sixth in jailing journalists worldwide. China is far ahead. To make up for lost time, Stephen proposes that we throw the entire New York Times editorial department, the anchors of 60 Minutes, Tim Russert, and anyone else who's been hired since the departures of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Ted Koppel into jail.

The US imprisons a handful of foreign journalists in its jails in Iraq and Gitmo.



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