Nightcap

Hopefully you caught Joel Kotkin’s thoughtful essay on China’s looming class struggle (it was in a nightcap from a few days back). Kotkin is a geographer at the University of Chapman.

I think he’s wrong, of course. He’s not wrong about China’s continuing troubles (I agree with him that things will only get worse), but on how these troubles will really begin to flare up. I don’t see class as the major issue, I see nationalism as China’s biggest fault line (and have since at least 2013).

Here’s how I’ve laid it out in my head. Think of Hong Kong and Taiwan, two places that are Chinese but not part of the People’s Republic. Beijing has lots of problems with both polities. Is class or nation a better gauge to use here? Nation! Nobody in Beijing is harping on the riches accrued by democratic Chinese polities. The Communists are drumming up nationalistic furor instead. Nationalism is the better tool to use to understand contemporary China.

Here’s the kicker, though. In order to drum up nationalistic furor, you’ve got have a nation, correct? The problem for China is that it has several dozen nations within its borders (here’s that 2013 post again), and nationalism in China favors the Han ethnic group over the others. The harder Beijing leans on nationalism, then, the more it squeezes out non-Han ethnic groups from its coalition of the willing. And Beijing is leaning hard on nationalism. It’s going to have to lean harder, too, since liberty is apparently not on the table.

Nightcap

10/31/2019 Brandon Christensen Links British politics, Catholic Church, Christine Lagarde, revolutions

The spirits of 1989 Daniel McCarthy, Modern Age
Trust cycles in politics Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
A profile of Christine Lagarde Hujer & Sauga, Spiegel
Catholicism and its critics Tim Stanley, History Today

More Arabs in the US? Yes, please!

10/31/201910/30/2019 Brandon Christensen Culture, History academia, Arab culture, cosmopolitanism, immigration, Middle East, Ottoman Empire

I hope y’all had a chance to check out Ussama Makdisi’s essay on Ottoman cosmopolitanism from one of the nightcaps a few days back. It was excellent, and serves as good complement to Barry’s work on the Ottoman Empire here at NOL.

It’s especially good for a few reasons. First, it has a useful explanation of the mandate system that London and Paris experimented with. Second, it’s comparative and brings in lots of different modes of governance. Third, there is an interesting discussing about citizenship (consult NOL for more on citizenship, too). Lastly, it explains well why the Arab world continues to wallow in extreme inequality and authoritarianism.

Makdisi represents a shift in thinking in Arab circles away from victimization and towards self-determination and responsibility: no longer are the French and British (and Jews) to be reviled and blamed for everything that’s wrong with the Middle East. There is a shift towards internationalist thinking. The Americans now play a positive role in what could have been (and still might be) a freer Middle East. The British and French have factions now and some of them were supportive of Arab voices, some of them not. Arab scholars are finally benefiting from the American university educational system, probably because there are so many Arabs studying in the US now.

Makdisi’s piece is not a libertarian interpretation, but it’s a start.

Nightcap

10/30/201910/30/2019 Brandon Christensen Links pornography, public schools, religious liberty, socialism

Spaghetti monsters and free exercise Ethan Blevins, NOL
Social warfare (government schools) Mary Lucia Darst, NOL
Vulvæ in pornography and culture Bill Rein, NOL
Early childhood memories of a Cambodian refugee camp Chhay Lin Lim, NOL

Be Our Guest: “Liberty, Government, and Technology: 2019”

10/30/201911/03/2019 Brandon Christensen Current Events Be Our Guest, China, government, Jack Curtis, liberty, Russia, technology, United States

Jack Curtis is the latest to submit a piece for NOL‘s “Be Our Guest” feature. A slice:

We will compare China, Russia and the United States. China is a post-communist police state that has never experienced democracy. Russia is a post-communist, quasi democratic republic devolving back into a police state. And the United States is a traditionally democratic republic. Excepting the vagaries of disparate cultures, their three governments seem increasingly similar, revising themselves to adopt the new technology. However, these revisions have not originated only within governments; they also reflect the gradual confluence of the underlying societies.

Do read the rest, and I must point out that Jack has been a long time reader of NOL. For that I am personally grateful. It’s nice to be able to link up and collaborate like this.

Submit your own thoughts to us. Be our guest. Tell your friends, too.