A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster raises the possibility of bringing an asteroid into lunar orbit, for scientific and space-settlement purposes both.
• Daniel Drezner is pleasantly surprised that the situation of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng hasn’t led to anything like a breakdown of Sino-American relations.
• Eastern Approaches notes the Polish holiday of “Flag Day” on the 2nd of May, commemorating the substantial Polish participation in the conquest of Berlin in 1945.
• Far Outliers’ Joel discusses the Canary Islands and the role they played in the emerging imperium, both vis-a-vis Portugal and the later imperial strategies of unified Spain.
• Geocurrents describes the Sino-Soviet border disputes in eastern Siberia in 1969 that killed hundreds of people, nearly led to a Sino-Soviet war, and played a critical role in deciding the future of the world.
• Language Hat starts a discussion about the depressing plight of non-Russian languages inside Russia that quickly expands to include discussions of Turkish immigrants in Russia, the situation of Gaelic in Ireland, and Canada’s own language situation.
• Laywers, Guns and Money reviews a book describing how environmentalism in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen helps to legitimate anti-immigrant sentiment.
• At NewAPPSBlog, Mohan Matthen makes the contrarian argument–compelling, but I think ultimately incorrect–that a “Oui” outcome in the 1995 Québec referendum would have been good for Québec and rump Canada both.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell discusses the consequences of Bo Xilai’s wiretapping of other officials in China, in the context of ubiquitous state surveillance generally.

The Toronto Star‘s article describing how Toronto’s trying to attract Chinese tourists by sponsoring the visit of Chinese talk show host Chen Luyu to the city does three things.

1. It describes a promotional campaign I knew nothing about.
2. It involves a pop-culture personality I’d never heard of.
3. It reminds me that I should know more about these things.

When popular television host Chen Luyu came to Toronto last fall, she brought her 140 million viewers with her.

Considered China’s Oprah Winfrey and popularly known as Luyu, she also brought a half-dozen young people who tried out everything from EdgeWalk, or standing outside the CN Tower more than 350 metres above the ground, to kayaking by Centre Island and a helicopter ride over the Niagara gorge.

To help sell the city in China, Tourism Toronto paid about $250,000 to cover the costs of flight, hotels and other activities to film the TV show, which just aired.

[. . .]

Tourism Toronto officials have long focused on the China market — hiring a dedicated China marketing specialist back in 2008, when travel restrictions still existed, partly because sheer demographics indicated these visitors would becoming a growing and a coveted group.

Estimated at 142,800 last year, they are dwarfed by the more than 2 million Americans who visited this region. But Chinese visits are up more than 40 per cent from 2009, and 25 per cent from 2010.

“It is the No. 3 international market for us, behind the U.S. and the U.K,” said Weir. “But it won’t be long before it is No. 2.”

That’s in part because the growing Chinese middle class, estimated at 300 million, is discovering international travel. In 2010, Canada was designated as an approved destination status, long after many other countries. It makes leisure travel possible for Chinese citizens; previously, it was limited to business travel.

Because visitors from China spend so much time getting here, they are more likely to stay longer, and spend more.

According to Tourism Toronto, the average stay for a tourist from China is eight nights — and the average amount spent is $1,341, not including airfare.

Business travellers from China, usually stay 6.5 nights. Visitors here to see family and friends stay on average 17 nights and spend $918.

All visitors to Toronto, mostly Canadians and Americans, stay on average 3.5 nights and spend $474.

“When people get on a plane and fly 13 hours here, they’re not just coming to Toronto,” Weir said. “They’re going to go Niagara Falls, often Ottawa or Montreal, or to Muskoka to see Norman Bethune’s house in Gravenhurst.”

Jamie Kenny’s analysis at New Left Review of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai’s career, what it meant in a Chinese context, and why his career was ultimately destroyed, is a must-read. Alexander Harrowell? If Bo really was developing a public persona that would have risked destabilizing the post-Mao system in China, it’s no wonder he was crushed.

[W]hat Bo might actually have done is not necessarily central to his removal. What the seriousness of the charges, against Gu Kailai in particular, tells us is that the Communist Party very badly wanted to dispose of him. The question is therefore why.

For some, it’s a matter of policy. In a conversation with journalists shortly after Bo’s March dismissal, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao warned of the prospect of a new Cultural Revolution. This was seen widely as an attack on Bo and his leftist tendencies and a warning that if he had been allowed to stay in power the whole course of China’s political and economic reforms would be rolled back. Some reports even said that Wen had himself orchestrated Bo’s fall, partly as revenge for the purging in the 1980s of his old patron Hu Yaobang in which Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, played a prominent part, and partly to clear the way for greater political and economic freedom – the latter being understood in the classical free market sense.

[. . . W]en’s remarks about the Cultural Revolution are significant. Their implication is not so much that Bo’s leftism threatened reform, but that his pseudo-Maoism and demagoguery threatened to unravel the basic structure the Communist Party had adopted in the post Mao era. In other words, Bo’s departure was necessary not to ensure change but to maintain the status quo.

It’s difficult to over-state the psychological effect the Cultural Revolution had on the CPC. Many members still alive now were targeted for punishment, torture and humiliation during that time. Most of the actual ruling group were Red Guards, later sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’. In political science terms, China has shifted from tyranny to oligarchy and it is plausible to explain this shift as an attempt to ensure that nothing like the ‘ten years of chaos’ ever happens again.

[. . .]

All of this requires a constant balancing of various factions and interests within the Party. Jiang Zemin and his Premier Zhu Rongji were both part of the ‘Shanghai gang’ brought in by Deng to stabilise the country after the suppression of the 1989 uprisings. Hu Jintao rose through the Party’s China Youth League or ‘populist’ faction. His accession to the top job came at the price of accepting Wen Jiabao, a protégé of Zhu, as premier. Hu’s anointed successor Xi Jinping is not from his faction, but the next premier, Li Keqiang, is. This process goes on at all levels within the Chinese power structure, a stately waltz intended to ensure that everything is predictable and that no one, as they used to say on the quiz shows, goes away empty handed.

The threat Bo’s antics posed to such arrangements can be shown by the story of the gingko trees, as related by Chongqing native Xujun Eberlein on her blog. Bo had once said that he liked gingko trees, so his underlings decided to make him a present of them while he was away on business. In the space of a couple of days, they scoured southern China for the variety and planted thousands of them all over the city. Bo approved of the gesture when he returned: “Planting trees never makes mistakes” he said. “Using the rhetoric reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s, when “you committed mistakes” were the most terrifying words in frequent political campaigns” added Eberlein.

Even if Bo hadn’t intended to play the boss here, he had triggered a kind of lust for servility among his officials that, if replicated elsewhere, threatened to radically destabilize the post-Mao Party consensus, just as his supporters among the neo-Maoists resembled the personal claque of a tyrant-in-waiting rather than the supporters of the Party as a communal enterprise.

• Daniel Drezner outlines what’s known to have happened and what’s likely to have happened with Bo Xilai. Brief version? Bo Xilai’s Maoism nearly disrupted the decade’s-end transition in power in China.
• The Global Sociology Blog answers the question of where sociologists’ commentary on the global economic crisis is by pointing out that a lot of the groundwork on economic inequity has already been done. That, and institutional biases militating against in-depth examination in the context of tenure exists.
• This Lawyers, Guns and Money post arguing that there’s no radical Latin American left because Chavez et al aren’t engaged in complete revolutionary transformations of their societies is silly.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín defines the different segments of the sex industry in Spain.
• Patrick Cain maps the location of marijuana grow-ops in Toronto.
• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir makes the depressing case that Assad is likely to stay in power in Syria for the next while.
• Steve Munro considers the question of what is to be down with the eastern waterfront of Toronto.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little categorizes the different ways in which historians have analyzed the history of China.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters linking to some interesting posts, one on Brazilian migration to the United States, the other on the stable and relatively high sex ratio of Siberia, the last on the sex trade and migration in Spain. Go, read.

At Torontoist, Kelli Korducki has an interesting interview with a Toronto writer, Jonathan Campbell, whose new book Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll takes a look at the history and import of rock music in modern China.

Torontoist: Your book mentions a “golden period” of Chinese rock music. Would you say there was one, and that it’s now over?

Jonathan Campbell: When Chinese people talk about that time—and they use the word “platinum,” like a platinum era—they generally mean this 1992 to 1996 period, where a Taiwanese record label called Rock Records came into China and they saw the potential to sell rock and roll. They produced albums from the biggest names in Chinese rock and roll for the general public—bands like Tang Dynasty, which was a metal band that had a very Chinese flavour, and this other band called Black Panther that was sort of Bon Jovi—esque. Though they really liked Wham! as well.

For me, and for a lot of people that I talk to in the book, a golden period would be when there was a lot of cool stuff happening, when there were a lot of bands playing and places to play and more and more people watching. But, definitely over the course of the last 10 years, there’s been an explosion. When you talk about Chinese rock beginning in 1986, compressing our 60 years (of rock and roll) into barely 30—

Wait, sorry to interrupt, but Chinese rock began in 1986?

There’s a birthday. May 9, 1986, is the day that Cui Jian sings a song on national television called “Nothing to My Name,” and that’s the moment where Yaogun—the word I use to talk about Chinese rock and roll—is born.

Obviously, [Cui Jian] played before then. He practiced enough to be on TV, and there were a few gigs in the years previous. But there was nothing real, beyond a few gigs [for a mostly foreign population], until 1986, when he sings this song and sort of changes the way popular music sounds.

So, there was this compression of our 60 years [of rock and roll], but in the last 10 years—because that’s when the Internet took off—it’s been just exponential.

[. . .]

There’s a quote that I use in the book from Brian Eno, the producer [and musician]. He was talking about the Czech resistance movement in the late ’60s, and he said, “The difference between the Communists and us is that they believe in the power of art, and we don’t anymore.” When you say “rock and roll can change the world,” people laugh. And I get it—it does sound cheesy to me. But at the same time, I know what it did for people like the woman in Subs, and particularly for people older than her who grew up through that post-Mao period where suddenly everything they knew about their country was completely not happening in real life. Rock and roll was a way for people to navigate [their world] and it gave them hope, and it asked questions. Suddenly the music isn’t just something you listen to anymore.

Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” is a great song. It’s a song that famously works on multiple levels, both as an address by a man in love to his beloved and a response to the uncertainties of post-Mao China. Good music.

• Anders Sandberg at Andart approves of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s desire to use space travel to create offworld backups for our biosphere.
• Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston–driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts’ education institutes–could serve Boston quite well.
• Two links from Centauri Dreams today, one describing the planetary system of HD 10180, a Sun-like star that supports nine planets to our eight, and the other describing hypothetical laser-based defenses for starships against interstellar dust.
• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo describes the difficulties tourism planners in destination cities have with getting people to visit sites that aren’t the most heavily trafficked.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn’t much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in Siberia.
• The Global Sociology Blog discusses what happens when celebrity culture and social networking sites like Twitter insect. The answer? It’s easier to get social capital than ever before.
• At GNXP, Razib Khan notes that Argentina–unlike English-speaking countries also products of mass European immigration–still evidences the genetic trace of indigenous populations.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio points out that, at long last, global climate change is kicking off (as expected as early as 1981).
• Registan features a guest post from Uzbekistan commentator Azamat Seitov, who discusses the possibility that the Eurasian Economic Community–a Russia-centered bloc also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–will take off. He’s skeptical.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason writes about how the CBC’s innovative programming let him learn and enjoy things he’d otherwise not have. The cutbacks will not do good things for the national broadcaster.
• Jeff Jedras at A BCer in Toronto pins the blame for the massive cost overruns in Canada’s share of the vastly overexpensive F-35 fighter program squarely on the Conservative Party and its ministers.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster shares the good news that the United States will resume producing the radioactive isotope plutonium-238 so as to provide the necessary fuel for outer-system space probes.
• Crasstalk’s Mean Ol’ Liberal reflects on the meaning of the bulls of Wall Street, not only the statue but the speculators.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that if China’s leadership really does see global geopolitics as a zero-sum phenomenon, China’s relationship with the United States may face substantially more risks than previously thought.
• At Geocurrents, Martin Lewis notes that the northern half of Mali claimed by Tuareg rebels for their national homeland actually has very large non-Tuareg populations.
• The Global Sociology Blog notes the incentives to sociopathy in the global economy.
• Noel Maurer, at The Power and the Money, notes that the Mexican city of Monterrey has a rather high population density by American standards, and a high density of police, too. Thus, its crime rate has little if anything to do with the city’s sprawl.
• Registan notes the ongoing solidification and intensification of ethnic divisions between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in southern Kyrgyzstan in the years after the deadly Osh riots.
• Torontoist’s Todd Aalgard notes that plans to immediately rebuild a platground in Toronto’s High Park are stymied by the need to meet city safety and building codes.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason despairs on the occasion of Earth Hour. Broader recognition of the critical problems facing the environment of Earth is so badly needed.
• Bruce Sterling quotes at length from Michel de Montaigne, pioneering essayist and critical futurist.
• At Crasstalk, LaZiguezon describes, in pictures and words, five haunting abandoned places: a mine in California’s Death Valley, Cyprus’ abandoned international airport, and more.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Janis Prince Inniss comments on the way that the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida is polarizing people into two audiences, once seeing his shooter as an inveterate racist and the other blaming the victim. Intermediate situations are possible: class might be more of a factor than race, for instance.
• Eastern approaches notes that after having been stripped of his doctorate for plagiarism, Hungarian president Pál Schmitt has resigned.
• Geocurrents notes South Korea’s significant presence in post-Communist Central Asia.
• The Language Log’s Victor Mair calls for the use of more pinyin in Chinese classes to help boost education.
• At the Naked Anthropology, Laura Agustín comments on the recent ruling on prostitution in Ontario, noting that the ban on public solicitation hits relatively disadvantaged prostitutes worse than their more advantaged peers who can better take advantage of the new liberalization.
• Registan is unimpressed by Mitt Romney’s identification of Russia as the United States’ main enemy.
• Yorkshire ranter Alex Harrowell notes that great efforts are being made to keep new Chinese soldiers depoliticized.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters that lays out the possibility of a sudden political transition in China and wonders what impact it would have on demographic trends there.

Ideas, anyone?