Coming across Chinese prison fetish videos through social media posts claiming them to be legitimate documentary footage, I scanned through them one night, and contemplated spinning out a thousand words about fetishism of the power of the state itself. Maybe it's there. They are stranger than I expected. I'm not sure "fetish video" is correct. Most, despite featuring shackles and confinement, don't linger on that aspect, or at least fail, as far as I can tell, to eroticize it. They are heavy on plots intended to produce emotional responses.

This is an old piece of industrial boosterism from Wang Xiaodong 王小东, who is identified with what has been called the Industrial Party 工业党. What he advocates is development at any cost, with state resources and direction leading high-tech industrialization. The essay,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Competitiveness in an industrial age relies on these factors: making things that others cannot, making things better, and making things cheaper. To do those things relies on skilled technicians, scientists, and workers. China has a good supply of all of them. There are many… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

A 2021 survey in Taiwan found the majority of respondents believed that the Japan Self-Defense Forces would be deployed to save them from the People's Liberation Army. It's possible. However, in this poll, only eleven percent of Japanese respondents agreed with the idea. Fifty-six percent suggested that logistical support should be the extent of SDF aid. Twenty-seven percent said it would be wrong to work with the American military. Seventy percent suggested that the solution to the Taiwan issue was deepening relations with China.

On the subsistence of the Japanese on apples, North America is not the right comparison. China loves fruit. These markets are nowhere to be found in Japan. No ladies selling mulberries or rambutan on the street, trucks loaded with pineapple (stuck on a nail, skinned, and bagged). Look at those peaches! The consumption numbers bear out the conclusion. But, again, China is a continental agricultural superpower. You can't compare it to a temperate, mountainous island chain. That's the final answer: this is life on a string of islands in the North Pacific.

I was distracted from my research into the 1995 Ministry of Public Security Notice on Rectification of Drug Rehabilitation Facilities and Kunming heroin markets when this somehow came up in the results: local state monopoly on prostitution, Kunming, 1912-1949. The system was early on attacked by Confucian societies, merchants, residents, and patriotic women's groups, who demanded that women in the quarter be denied certain hairstyles, as well as unbound feet (they didn't want their daughters mistaken for working girls).

Tonight, I enjoyed reading Lin Chengxiang's thesis, "An Epic Poet in the Information Age: Revisiting Haizi at the Intersection of Literature and Science in Postsocialist China." When writing about legal systems engineering and Qian Xuesen, I had not realized he was a key thinker. Lin lays out Haizi's engagement with Jin Guantao, Alvin Toffler, Hegel, and posthumanism in his academic work, as well as his epic poems. Like Qian, Haizi was interested also in the possibility of qigong and somatic science as more than a metaphor for information theory.

The story of Kodama Yoshio failing to deliver tungsten to the CIA belies his reputation as the rare metal king of Northeast Asia. He built an empire that stretched from wartime to peacetime, empire to empire, trading heroin for tungsten. The Americans and Japanese were involved in getting tungsten out of China before Kodama arrived (see: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War, Marshall). It is a essential to waging industrialized warfare. The Japanese came to monopolize the trade...

Little has been written in English on hiroyuki as public intellectual. The recent Times piece still focused on his 4chan ownership. Context is lacking. I won't endorse Ito Masaaki's conclusions, but his recent article on "hiroyuki theory" is one place to begin. This article seems to be popular as a scholarly, leftist take-down of a figure scorned by scholarly, leftist types. It is that, but Ito, who writes frequently on the online right, attempts also to figure out why and to who hiroyuki appeals. I will explain it as best as I can...

I would rather take pictures of blight and housing projects and remnants of Japanese socialist civilization, but maybe I can get it together and market a coffee table book of alleyway microgardens (this needs a set name). I like the attention to theme here (ducks and frogs). This one is less whimsical. It looks like the types of gardens kept on balconies. It looks like my garden balcony, where seeds from produce are dropped haphazardly. Yuzu is the only thing I have found that produces viable seeds and survives the colder months.

Leftist post-mortems on protest movements usually highlight the same issues: if there is a leadership, it is in the hands of liberals, rather than the workers (the same, from JASIC to Xuzhou), and it's the same with this examination of anti-lockdown demonstrations. They did not take advantage of the intensification of class conflict (or contradiction). This is taken as proof that mobilization of workers, rather than students and the urban petty bourgeois, is necessary for struggle to succeed. This is not without justification.

Smart city concepts, digital urban governance, or even health status applications and cashless payment appear in Japan only in conceptual or degraded form. Demographics, the closed economy, financial distress, and a peculiar tech ecosystem are brakes. This is a rival dystopia. A hybrid dystopia. The same technological sheen (or language), not evenly distributed beyond a few square miles. Vaccination and testing regimes cannot be enforced with applications. It's impractical. Rakuten's limited vaccine pilot program, for example, is unworkable at scale.

Last year, I translated Alibaba executive Tu Zipei's latest book on data civilization. He's a smart city evangelist, very much in the mainstream, where there is not much dissenting opinion. I enjoyed this section of Lu Xinghua's book in which he argues with another Ali executive. We get several statements from Wang Jian of Aliyun, the Alibaba cloud service. The first says, basically, urban problems do not develop by themselves but rather come about by design because no planner can listen attentively to the voice of every person in the city.

Someone I respect suggested that The Heart of the Dragon, filmed in 1983, might be the best documentary on the country shot by outsiders, or at least beating out its predecessors. I tend to agree. One of the twelve episodes focuses on artists. This is Shen Congwen. Many Chinese documentaries of this time focus on the avant-garde, but we only get a glimpse of it here. Perhaps it is still to early. Perhaps it has not yet broken into more mainstream consciousness. Perhaps Peter Montagnon is too conservative. So, we get to hear from Shen.

The washed out colors from an entry-level Huawei phone camera in low light suggest monochrome. You will have to imagine the primary reds and greens of the ornamented bamboo rakes at this festival at Otori-jinja and the formerly more closely affiliated Chokoku-ji. When a local business buys one of the extravagant showpiece rakes, chanting and clapping breaks out. If you pay five thousand yen, as I did, you will only be invited to select custom charms to stick into it. After that, there is nothing left to do but walk the side streets.

Indigenous conceptions of cybernetics, or systems engineering, as Qian Xuesen called his marriage of information, control, and systems theory, came to shape state policy in nearly every sphere. As politics receded, cybernetics promised an alternative.
palladiummag.com/2022/10/17/the… Ejected from the United States, Qian Xuesen quietly established a team of brilliant cyberneticists within the defense research community, who, facing falling budgets for missiles and bombs, justified themselves with scientific solutions to social problems.

Two centuries ago, fifty years ago, perhaps especially now—the southern frontier must be tamed. This is not described in imperial or revolutionary terms anymore, but framed in more familiar and conventional national security terms. Secure the border. Build the wall. That's the Red River, where the border war was fought in 1979. Before then, and maybe before trade was officially re-opened, goods and people moved back and forth without much supervision. Yuk Wah Chan's Vietnamese-Chinese Relationships at the Borderlands has an account...

Edwin O. Reischauer was among the few experts on Japan available to the American government. As early as 1942, he was plotting out the postwar order. "...Japan itself has created the best possible puppet for our purposes... I mean, of course, the Japanese Emperor." Japanese militarism necessarily sidelined the Emperor as anything but a figurehead, so there was no reason to upset the order. He speculates that the Showa Emperor is likely a "liberal and a man of peace at heart." Reischauer warns: do not vilify him. We need him.

"I hope to see you on the frontier someday, too," Cao Fengze concludes this story of his time working as an engineer in Tanzania. It's a story about the meaning of international development, but also about the importance of finding frontiers. This is a rough translation. For Cao Fengze, international development is about building alternatives to Western modernity and hegemony. The dam project is also personal. He has found a place to act on his ideals. He is looking for frontiers. He wants to build things that will outlast his own civilization.

He's a different type of figure than either Kalashnikov or Stoner (and a generation younger), but Duo Yingxian might be the closest China produced to either one. So, this is his story, as best as I can tell it. In the 1950s, while he was in his twenties, Duo Yingxian was drafted to work under Soviet advisors, turning out copies of their weapons. At first, there wasn't much effort put into design; they had the plans. The problem was developing industrial infrastructure and expertise.

The shogunate recognized that there were people and places that they could not govern. They turned to Danzaemon. That's not one person but a name successively taken up by the dozen or so men that ran a parallel government and economy in Edo until 1871. The shogunate needed to maintain order, including over people—beggars and butchers, mule skinners and monkey trainers, hangmen and cobblers—that were separate from the classes of samurai and commoners. They began to be officially and unofficially categorized and organized.

As the twenty-first century began, Japan was entering its second Lost Decade, Europe was culturally moribund, and much of the rest of the world was hostile, so young Americans went to China. They found an authoritarian country freer than their own. I heard that said frequently. They felt free, whatever that means. This was a time of limited enthusiasm for the American project, especially among people in their early twenties. For the dropouts burning a year teaching English, one of the alternatives to going to China was going to Afghanistan.