Musings Report #24 6-11-16 China's Great Divide: A New Cultural Revolution?
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China's Great Divide: A New Cultural Revolution?
There are two great pastimes shared by most of the world: football (soccer) and criticizing the U.S. Americans share this pastime, of course, but many of those outside the U.S. who are free with their criticism of America are much more circumspect about criticizing their own country.
It's often seen as unpatriotic to criticize one's country, even if you disagree with its direction and leadership; in much of Asia, it's generally felt that one should maintain the "face" of one's country by hiding its ills from outsiders.
In my personal experience, this is especially true in China, which suffers from the memory of being subjugated by the Western imperialist powers in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
As a general rule, you will rarely hear any real criticism of China unless you are considered a trusted friend; giving China a black eye in public is frowned upon, even by its domestic critics.
For this reason, the majority of the Western media has very little grasp of what worries Chinese people. Recently, I have heard fears of a Second Cultural Revolution being expressed in private.
There is a Great Divide between generations: on the one side is the older generation that remembers the Maoist era with some nostalgia and the terrible adversities of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976). On the other side is the young educated generation which has only known consumerist prosperity and personal advancement.
The ideals of the old communes are an abstraction to the young generation, as are the terrible costs of the first Cultural Revolution.
A resurgence of devotion to Mao has caught authorities off-guard; they can't very well suppress public displays of secular worship of the Party's founder, but raising Mao's revolutionary ideals from the dustbin of history implicitly challenges the Party's current leadership.
Some in the older generation resent the young consumer-obsessed generation, and some would like to purge China of the excesses of wealth and consumerism, which are viewed as negative Western influences.
It's not too difficult to see how rising unemployment (China's Hidden Unemployment Rate) and China's enormous wealth inequality could spark a new Cultural Revolution that would target Party leaders who have benefited from the state-managed neoliberal capitalism that has greatly enriched the leaders and their family dynasties.
In effect, an explicitly anti-Western return to the party's Maoist roots would necessarily tear the Party and the nation apart. Farfetched? Perhaps not as much as the conventional sugar-coated media representation would suggest.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Why Nothing Progresses (Except Dissatisfaction): Institutionalized Powerlessness 6/10/16
Pity Poor China: There's No Easy Fix to the S-Curve 6/9/16
Good News for Bulls: All Those Open Gaps Below Will Never Get Filled 6/8/16
Bernanke Blew It Big-Time: He Should Have Raised Rates Three Years Ago 6/7/16
Is the Market Rational After All? 6/6/16
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Made a salad from our garden--arugula, butter lettuce, a red-leaf lettuce, kale leaves and wild purslane. Great!
Market Musings: The Peculiar Charts of Gold and Oil
That gold and oil are both in new Bull markets has become practically received wisdom. I am not so sure.
The charts of gold and oil are mixed bags. To be sure, there are bullish indicators, but there are also signs that the rallies are over-extended and momentum is weakening.
It wouldn't surprise me to see oil return to the congestion level around $42, and even retest its lows as global demand falters. It also wouldn't surprise me if gold took a breather, or retested the 50-week moving average around $1,160.
When volume is high on down days/weeks, that's worrisome, as "volume is the weapon of the Bull." I also see the potential for an epic tightening of the Bollinger bands in the weekly chart of gold, which would presage a major move up or down.
Those confident of a new Bull market in gold are sure it will be higher. Tom McClellen and others see the potential for a big drop in fall. Rather than assume new Bull markets are firmly in place, let's keep a close watch on the charts.
From Left Field
Noam Chomsky: Our Universities Are Basically Just Churning Out Obedient Employees
Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers.
The Most Schooled Generation in History Is Miserable: Millennials are stressed out because they're bored
Everyone is born creative, but it is educated out of us at school
The Increasingly Unstable United States (Wallerstein, world-systems)
How to Grow a Weetabix: James Meek on farms and farmers -- farming in England...
How a summer of shocks threatens to bring mayhem to the markets -- warning signals abound...
The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It -- decentralize more than the servers...
Here's Why Blockchains Will Change the World
World faces pensions crisis, warns OECD -- promises made cannot be kept...
Meaningful work not created, only destroyed, by bosses, study finds (via Lew G.)
The Families That Can’t Afford Summer (via Joel M.)
"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen." Robert Bresson
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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