Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 480

Saudi Arabia Dispatches Fighter Jets to Turkey

Following on the recent news about a Syrian ceasefire deal reached by the U.S, Russia, and other powers, Saudi Arabia is sending fighter planes and troops to join the anti-ISIS fight in Syria. The planes will stage out of neighboring Turkey, as the AFP reports:

The planes are to be stationed at the Incirlik base, which is already hosting US, British and French war planes taking part in the strikes against IS fighters in Syria.

Private NTV television said four Saudi F-15 jets would arrive at Incirlik on Friday. It said that 30 ground personnel and equipment had already arrived aboard C-130 Hercules military transport planes on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey have had an often-undisguised rivalry over the last half-decade for leadership of the Sunni world. However, the menace of the Syrian Civil War—and the failure of America, an ally to each, to intervene as expected—has drawn them closer together. In this case, though, that isn’t necessarily a good thing: It adds yet another strand to a complicated web of alliances and rivalries that criss-cross the Syrian Civil War. If, for instance, Turkey’s rivalry with Russia heats up, could Saudi Arabia now get drawn in?

This is a symptom of the lack of U.S. leadership, as Washington would traditionally have taken the lead in providing security to both countries. Furthermore, untested and under-prepared leaders have emerged in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere—making the possibility of a misjudgement in time of crisis more acute.TAI Editor Adam Garfinkle recently diagnosed the situation Saudi Arabia and Turkey find themselves in—one that may give context to the latest Saudi move:

All U.S.-aligned Sunni states are in near panic as a result of American self-deterrence. The wriggling about of the Saudi government, one day seeming to resolve to send troops into Syria, the next backing off when the intended diplomatic tripwire fails to ensnare the Americans, is one case in point. The Turks are in an even deeper pickle. They desperately need to staunch the refugee flow from the south, but the Obama Administration refuses the idea of a humanitarian zone on the Syrian side of the border. If the Turks try to create that zone by themselves, and get into a fight over it with the Russians, they have no expectation now that the United States will have Turkey’s back. That completely deflates the credibility of Turkish threats, and everyone knows it: Erdogan cannot do anything. He can’t even turn to ISIS for help, because ISIS and a variety of Kurdish groups are now busy setting off bombs inside Turkey.

Even if—perhaps especially if—the Saudis are just trying to lay another tripwire by sending this planes, the move is therefore disturbing. It’s as easy to start a wider war by accident as by design and America is tolerating a lot of tripwires that are being laid around the regional dynamite keg right now.

Burundi Gets Uglier

The situation in Burundi has been getting uglier, the NYT reports—and the paper is openly talking about the ethnic dimension of the violence:

Like neighboring Rwanda, Burundi has been haunted by a history of bloodshed between its two largest ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutus.

Recently, the violence has become more ethnic-based and potentially explosive, witnesses said.

Burundi’s government is led primarily by Hutus. Many of the recent victims, who even include cadets at the government military academy, have been Tutsis.

We’ve been watching for some time as the media tiptoed around the possibility that the violence in Burundi might have an ethnic basis. It’s the “Voldemort approach”: The fear that by speaking about the ethnic component, you’ll somehow only make it more of a reality. Yet while everyone has tried to downplay or avoid this dimension, things have continued to get worse, and the wall of denial has started to crack. Is the global community as a whole starting to wake up to the ugliness of what’s stirred in Burundi?

The Widening Gyre

More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015. The migrants have caused discord among European states and divisions within the European Union. The European Commission guesses that 1.3 million migrants will arrive in 2016. The flat-line scenario is a low-ball estimate, given that the number of asylum seekers doubled from 2013 to 2014 and doubled again from 2014 to 2015. According to new data from the International Organization for Migration, the numbers of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe has already passed more than 100,000 this year. By contrast, in 2015, migrant arrivals reached 100,000 in June.

In 2015 the European migration debate centered on two issues: the distribution of asylum seekers and border controls. The European Union focused almost exclusively on the former. Brussels tried to force increased willingness to accept asylum immigrants, especially among the 17 out of 28 member states that have restrictive asylum policies. Officials thus dispensed 160,000 asylum seekers in the face of intense opposition. But the numbers of migrants did not subside; it rose sharply. Strange as it may sound, it did not occur to Europe’s political elites that increasingly supply of asylum might increase demand for the same.This smothered the all-in-it-together-spirit. As autumn turned to winter Europe wallowed in acrimony. As autumn turned to winter focus shifted towards tightening border security, but with little discernable effect. Unlike in previous years the flow of migrants has continued unabated through the winter months. Where will it end? The politically correct answer is, “in a European solution.” But the EU response to the migration crisis has resembled a drunk attempting to open canned food with a spoon: an almost touching faith that a lack of conviction is the only obstacle on the path to success. Late night summits, byzantine compromises and megaphone diplomacy have failed to bring the situation under control. The EUs preferred means have not done the trick.The mood in Brussels has soured. Recent summits have been marred by recriminations and hostility. National-conservative “Orbanites” stand against socially liberal “Merkelians.” EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker summarized the challenge in his most famous quip: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” European leaders’ willingness to compromise is diminished by the certainty that they sooner or later will have to face voters angry about their seeming inability to prevent the Arab world from empting its population surplus into Europe. Eager for a quick fix, the EU has given itself to the diplomatic equivalent of alchemy, in which they hope to bribe Turkey to stop the migrants departing from its shores. The cunning plan hinges on the Turks willingly denying themselves the free money the EU is likely to rain down on them if they fail to do so.The only way to feel good about the EU’s handling of the migrant crisis is to set it beside the nation states of Europe. Who can forget Sweden’s sobbing leaders at the press conference when they announced that they had reintroduced border controls; or when the Daily Mail published cartoons equating refugees with rats; or German authorities’ advice to women on how to avoid being violated by the “Willkommenskultur”? Neither xenophobia, nor idealism or comparing each other to Nazis has brought the situation under control.Germany finds itself in a particular fix, having received more than a million asylum applications in 2015 and with an increasingly panicked public opinion fretting over who will protect them against the outfall from this sociological experiment. Germany unilaterally suspended the Dublin treaty, which would have made it possible to return migrants to their first port of arrival to be processed. Most east European countries have rejected Germany’s proposed mechanism for redistributing these migrants, preferring instead to build border fences. As the migrants keep flooding in Angela Merkel seems caught in the headlights. The word «Merkeln» was chosen as the «youth word of the year» in Germany for 2015. The word is not flattering, meaning being indecisive, or failing to have an opinion– traits that Germans often attribute to their Chancellor.When the story of Europe’s migrant crisis is to be written, Europe’s mainstream media will warrant a chapter of its own. In this chapter the liberal house organ The Economist will have a central place. The London-based publication is many ways the only genuine pan-European news-source. The magazine remains influential among Europe’s elites. According to the magazine’s former editor: “Merkel listens to the Economist’s audio app in the car.” Under its new editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes the newspaper has lurched to the left, advocating utopian immigration policies as the only alternative. At times its leaders seemed almost to be a personal plea directed at the German chancellor, imploring her to trump the “politics of fear” with “the politics of dignity.” It must have come as a rude awakening when confronted with the predictable outfalls of the policies it had advocated The Economist in 2016, made an about face. After having praised Merkel’s open liberal policies as politically, morally, and economically astute, the newspaper now has concluded that much the opposite is the case.So are there any solutions in sight? Even a moderate ambition of bringing the number of migrants down to the high levels from before 2015 seems to be beyond the reach of Europe’s policy elites. Few in Brussels believe that the mechanisms coming on-stream will be enough to bring migrant numbers down. The EU’s new “border force” is unlikely to be given the resources, personnel, or robust mandate needed to make a difference, if past experience is anything to go by. The threats to suspend Greece from the Schengen zone, effectively turning the country into Europe’s refugee camp seem similarly unworkable. Even EU leaders now recognize that the EUs Schengen system of border-free travel is growing unsustainable. Several states have introduced “temporary” border controls. The new border fences zigzagging Europe indicate that Schengen has entered the same ‘permanent state of emergency’ as Europe’s common currency, where few actually observe the rules.European countries are now engaging in an undignified race to make themselves less attractive asylum destinations. Danish lawmakers voted in favor of controversial legislation empowering authorities to seize cash and valuables from asylum seekers to help cover their expenses. Eager not to have the most liberal policies the German parliament now considers proposals to delay most family reunification for two years and swipe Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia off the list. Yet less generous treatment of asylum seekers has so far proved surprisingly ineffective. This is, in part, because everyone knows that many of those who are rejected in reality will be allowed to stay in Europe. The increasing proportion of asylum seekers coming from peaceful countries tells the same story: to many, life as an undocumented migrant in Europe is better than staying at home. Paradoxically the migrant crisis is less a result of poverty, than a byproduct of development: ever more people in Africa and Asia have the money and aspirations to embark on the perilous journey.Baseless asylum seekers make up 60 percent of the total, according to EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans. Many of these come from countries that do not respect human rights. This makes them difficult to repatriate. Referring to the UN Refugee Convention European courts bar states from sending anyone back to countries where they run a danger of false imprisonment, torture, and the like. Estimates vary, but mainstream estimates suggest that around forty per cent of groundless asylum seekers stay in Europe. This is due to a standard practice in which rejected asylum seekers are allowed go underground. Many will enter Europe’s five to eight million-strong communities of illegal migrants, concentrated in places like Belgian Molenbeek: A subclass of marginalized non-citizens with an obvious potential for radicalization.1The sheer weight of asylum seekers put Europe’s welfare states under strain, or more precisely, they put further pressure on already underfinanced welfare schemes. Due to low birth rates ever fever Europeans pay into the collective schemes and ever more benefit from them. Needless to say Europeans are more eager to blame migrants for exposing these shortfalls than they are to blame themselves for creating them. This means that the area of conflict in 2016 is set to expand from distribution and borders and towards international laws and welfare rights. This brings supranational institutions and the universal welfare state to the fore. Many states now look to limit migrants’ access to welfare benefits. The assumption that Europe will prove significantly better at integrating more undereducated immigrants with fewer resources per head is a tale of how a set of assumptions were elevated to the level of self-evident truths and pursued to a point where the internal contradictions are blatantly obvious.One way to break out of this spiral, the President of Finland Sauli Niinistö pointed out in his speech to parliament on February 03, is “to abrogate the right of asylum.” The debate is currently raging between those who see “the right to asylum” as a core European value and those who argue that asylum was never meant to be a migration mechanism. The challenge is that European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has handed down judgments that are seen as perpetuating the current asylum regime. European states are obliged to comply with these judgments, but resentment is growing.The dispute is between “legalism” and “parliamentarianism.” The parliamentarian primacy assumes that power lies with the people, through its elected representatives. The EU is founded on a different idea: a political space that is guarded by judges to protect people from arbitrary authority and against their own illiberal inclinations. Tensions between national governments, on the one hand, and the Council of Europe and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, on the other, point to an intensified struggle between lawyers and politicians over supremacy over asylum. President of the Belgian Constitutional Court Marc Bossuyt has criticized ECHR in strong words:

The European Court of Human Rights is exceedingly transgressing its competence in asylum matters. The Court takes decisions on behalf of the national authorities, it enforces provisional measures despite not having the competence to do so and demands their immediate execution. It has granted property rights on unemployment benefits and has thus realized something that Karl Marx never could. The Court is being buried under new cases, partially caused by the fact that it has sneakily broadened its own competences.

European institutions and states have not been able to gain control of their borders, nor have they arrived at an equitable division of labor. As the numbers of migrants seem set to reach new record numbers in 2016 the political focus seems to be shifting towards states seeking to make themselves less attractive asylum destinations by curbing welfare rights and a backlash against “legalism.” In sum: The inclination to muddle through has brought Europe to the point that all options seem ineffective, drastic, or unethical—or conversely a combination of all three.

1Molenbeek is considered a hotbed of Euro-Jihadism and a staging ground for the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015.

U.S. and China Agree to North Korea Sanctions

American and Chinese officials agreed to a draft of sanctions on North Korea this morning, and they plan to submit them to the United Nations Security Council. The New York Times:

The draft resolution, which United States officials said they intended to circulate Thursday among the 15 members of the Security Council, marks a diplomatic pivot for the Chinese. It seems to have been sparked by North Korea’s claim in early January that it had tested its first hydrogen bomb.

American and Chinese diplomats have spent the past two months negotiating the text and pushing for ways to better enforce existing sanctions. That has been the principal challenge with this and other sanctions.

The proposal is likely to come up for a vote in the coming days.

Other developments that likely got Beijing’s attention: South Korea and Japan looking to the U.S. and moving ahead on countermeasures without Chinese cooperation. As we’ve been saying, when North Korea misbehaves, China loses. It looks like officials in Beijing have decided it’s best to compromise and minimize the damage to their international standing. Now the measures go to the UN Security Council where they may still face resistance from Moscow.

Tempering Expectations on Prison Reform

Prison reformers have won major victories over the last several years, successfully persuading legislatures or voters (in red and blue states alike) to soften penalties for some nonviolent offenses, especially drug crimes. And last year, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced legislation giving judges more discretion in sentencing in certain cases. But even if these reforms retain political support, and even if they spread to other states, they won’t be enough to reverse the phenomenon we now call “mass incarceration,” according to research recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Kate Wheeling summarizes some of the findings for the Pacific Standard:

If you look closely at recent progressive reforms—and at the media’s framing of those reforms—as the researchers did here, you’ll notice that the policy changes afoot have not been comprehensive. Their analysis revealed that progressive sentencing reforms have mostly been limited to non-violent and drug offenses. When it comes to violent or repeat offenders, policymakers calling for reform tended to endorse the current policies or call for even more punitive measures. But research suggests that, to truly make a dent in the tremendous prison population in the United States, broad sentencing reforms—for all types of offenses—will be necessary.

One of the great misconceptions of the criminal justice reform movement is that mass incarceration is first and foremost a consequence of the war on drugs. The American prison population has gone up sevenfold since the 1970s, and drug offenders make up less than a fifth of people currently behind bars. The origins of America’s prison boom lie in the devastating violent crime wave that started in the 1960s and only began to abate in the mid-1990s. Prison reformers could try to build on their momentum by arguing for reductions in sentences for violent offenders (this isn’t always so unreasonable: After all, why should a con artist who defrauded the elderly be a candidate for sentencing reductions rather than someone who punches someone in a bar fight?), but that is likely to be politically toxic, and understandably so.

A more promising avenue for reform involves changing the ways prosecutors exercise their discretion. Since the peak of the crime wave, prosecutors (for both political and institutional reasons) have grown more aggressive about throwing the book at defendants, and sometimes using overwhelming leverage to extract coercive plea bargains. This phenomenon has had a bigger effect on the rise of the prison population than many reformers seem to understand, and tweaking sentencing guidelines—even for violent offenses—won’t do much about it. Prison reformers sometimes get ahead of themselves, but they are probably right that there is at least some room for states carefully to cut their prison populations without seriously increasing crime rates. The best way to go about that would be to reform the plea bargaining system, and to change the incentives and culture in district attorneys’ offices.

The Pension Crisis, Philadelphia Edition

The state of Philadelphia’s pension system is dire and Ron Dubow, the city’s Director of Finance, is sounding the alarm. CNBC reports:

Appearing on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Wednesday, Rob Dubow, director of finance of the City of Philadelphia and chairman of the city’s pension fund board, said the situation is “very bad.”

“The health of the municipal pension fund is one of the greatest financial challenges facing our city. One particular challenge is that the number of retirees exceeds the number of current employees paying into the fund, and that is a huge drain on our budget,” said Dubow.

In his interview, Dubow notes that pension payouts have grown from 5 to 16 percent of the city budget, taking away money from providing key services (“it really means less of everything,” he said). This is a crisis hitting cities across the country as bills racked up come due. How American cities dig themselves out of this multi-trillion dollar disaster will be one of the great questions of our time.

America’s First LNG Exports Are Headed to Brazil

America’s very first shipment of liquified shale gas exports set out from Louisiana yesterday, after a departure planned for January was delayed. The LNG is headed for Brazil. Bloomberg reports:

The first U.S. export couldn’t have come at a worse time for the country’s gas suppliers. Low crude prices are weighing on the global LNG market, as contracts for the fuel are often linked to oil. A supply glut is also emerging as other countries including Australia ramp up export capacity while demand growth elsewhere slows. The worldwide surplus threatens to keep U.S. supplies swelling and domestic gas prices below $2 per million British thermal units.

Low LNG prices are a problem for U.S. producers hoping to liquify and ship their gas, because despite staggeringly low domestic natural gas spot prices (today trading well under $1.80 per mmBTU), the process of chilling that gas into liquid form and then sending it halfway around the world can add about $5 per mmBTU. In the past, foreign LNG markets were paying enough of a premium to American prices to justify the construction of these massive LNG export facilities, but that incentive has been all but erased over the past 14 months.

Still, thanks to fracking, the U.S. is sitting on a glut of natural gas, and this week it is demonstrating its ability to sell that important resource to buyers abroad. For years countries have tried to imitate the American shale revolution, but so far their efforts haven’t been rewarded. Now, thanks to LNG exports, U.S. shale gas is finally going global. According to the EIA, America should become a net natural gas exporter sometime next year. That’s the power of shale.

What’s Been Censored from the Chinese Edition of Political Order and Political Decay

For readers of the Chinese edition of Political Order and Political Decay, I thought you might like to know what parts were altered from the original text. The passages below are the English language originals, followed by the Chinese versions.  If you don’t read Chinese, there is an English-only version after the Chinese text.

 

Hence the People’s Republic of China has a strong and well-developed state but a weak rule of law and no democracy.

中国拥有强大发达的国家和软弱的法治，但民主有待加强。(p. 21)

中国拥有强大发达的国家，但法治薄弱，民主缺失。


This explains why what he labels “externally organized” parties like revolutionary Communist parties in Russia and China initially displayed much lower levels of patronage and corruption; they needed to be tightly disciplined and had no benefits to distribute before they came to power.

这解释了他所谓的“外围”的政党，如俄共等共产主义政党，一开始仅有非常少的庇护和腐败。它们需要严格的纪律，上台之前确实也没有好处可以分发 (p. 82)

这解释了他所谓的“外围”的政党，如俄国和中国的共产主义革命政党，一开始仅有非常少的庇护和腐败。它们需要严格的纪律，上台之前确实也没有好处可以分发


Under Mao Zedong, law virtually disappeared and the country became an arbitrary despotism.

…… (p. 325)

在毛泽东治下，法律几乎消失殆尽，举国陷入恣意专制。


MAO’S ASSAULT ON LAW

对法律的破坏 (p. 329)

毛泽东对法律的破坏


Mao Zedong had by this point acquired such stature as “the Great Helmsman” that he was able to embark on a personal dictatorship so extreme that it completely dismantled all semblance of law. Even though emperors in dynastic China were in theory absolute sovereigns, their power was in fact limited by the bureaucracy and the myriad rules, procedures, and rituals by which the court operated. One would have to go back to Qin Shi Huangdi, unifier of China in the third century B.C., Wu Zhao, the “evil empress Wu” of the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century, or the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuangzhang, in the fourteenth, to find precedents for Mao’s personal exercise of power. It is no accident that Mao celebrated Shang Yang, the Legalist mastermind of the dictatorial state of Qin that unified China, as a protototalitarian predecessor.

…… (p. 329)

毛泽东此时已然享有“伟大舵手”之尊，因而得以行极端个人独裁之道，以至全然抛弃对法律的矫饰。尽管理论上中国历代帝王皆为绝对君主，其权力却依然受官僚体系及宫廷庞杂规章礼仪所限。 纵览历史，一己之权可同毛泽东相提并论者，除公元前三世纪统一中华的秦始皇、七世纪唐朝“毒侔蛇虺”的女皇武曌，及十四世纪明朝开国皇帝朱元璋外，再无他人。暴秦日后一统中原，毛泽东以秦之法家商鞅为集权先驱而大加推崇，实非偶然。


As Premier Zhou Enlai was to explain in 1958, “Why should we proletarians be restrained by laws?!… Our law should be developed in pace with the changes of the economic base. Institutions, rules and regulations should not be fixed. We should not be afraid of changes. We have advocated uninterrupted revolutions and the law should be in the service of the continuing revolution … It does not matter if we make a law today and change it tomorrow.

周恩来总理在1958年解释：“……我们的法律制定应该跟上经济基础的变化。制度、规章和条令不应该是固定不变的，我们不要怕变。我们主张不断革命，法律应为继续革命服务……” (p. 330)

周恩来总理在1958年解释：“我们无产阶级，为什么叫法律来约束自己呢！…… 我们的法，应当随着经济基础的不断发展而发展。不能把规章制度都固定下来，我们不能怕变。我们是不断革命的，我们的发必须为不断革命服务。 …… 即使今天制定的法而明天就改了，也没有什么不可以。” (original quote from 周总理1958年9月16日参观国务院规章制度展览会时对我国革命法制建设问题的意见, p. 200—201, 法学基础理论 学习资料选编 上. 北京大学法律学系, 1982.04.)


The [Great Leap Forward] was an ideologically driven campaign whose goal was to mobilize mass support for industrialization but instead brought about a famine estimated to have killed thirty-six million people.

“大跃进”是一场受意识形态驱动的运动，目标是动员群众支持工业化，结果却带来大饥荒…… (p. 330)

“大跃进”是一场受意识形态驱动的运动，目标是动员群众支持工业化，结果却带来了一场据估造成3600万人死亡的大饥荒。


The evolution of constitutions since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) tells a story about the failure of the Communist Party to create a true rule of law.

…… (p. 330)

中华人民共和国成立后宪法的发展彰显了共产党在真正建立法治方面的失败。


Virtually all Communist countries followed the lead of the former Soviet Union in adopting formal constitutions that were essentially worthless pieces of paper in terms of any real constraints on political power.

几乎所有的共产主义国家都跟随苏联采用了正式宪法…… (p. 331)

几乎所有的共产主义国家都跟随苏联采用了形式主义的宪法，在真正限制政治权力方面形同虚设。


On the other hand, the Four Fundamental Principles with which the constitution begins enshrine the domination of the political system by the Communist Party, which in practice exercises strict control over the government and legislature. No one has authority to modify the constitution other than the party, and all existing constitutional documents were rubber-stamped by NPCs with little discussion. Prior to the 2004 constitutional revisions, it appeared that the party was permitting some open discussion of them by academics and other commentators, but these were quickly shut down and the final changes were essentially dictated to the NPC for ratification. The party clearly operates above and not under the law. As in dynastic China, law remains an instrument of rule, and not an intrinsic source of legitimacy.

另一方面，宪法序言中的四项基本原则，使共产党在整个政治体制中的支配地位神圣不可侵犯。在实践中，共产党对政府和立法机构实行严格控制……法律仍然更多地是统治的工具，而不是合法性的内在源泉。(p. 331)

另一方面，宪法序言中的四项基本原则，使共产党在整个政治体制中的支配地位神圣不可侵犯。在实践中，共产党对政府和立法机构实行严格控制。唯有共产党得以修改宪法，而现存的所有宪制文件都几乎未经讨论就由全国代表大会的橡皮图章批准。2004年修改宪法前，党似乎开始允许学者和其它评论员公开讨论其中的部分内容，但这些讨论随后遭到迅速压制，而最终的更改则是在实质上的强行规定之下，提交全国人民代表大会正式批准。显然，党在法之上，而非之下。与中国帝制王朝的情况相同，法律仍然更多地是统治的工具，而不是合法性的内在源泉。


Moreover, it is only the government and not the party that can be sued in this fashion.

…… (p. 332)

此外，与政府不同，党不可成为此类诉讼的对象。


One of the speculations concerning the sacking of Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai in 2012 was that he was building precisely such a charismatic political base, making use of both populist appeals and Maoist-era nostalgia in a bid to become a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee. The Bo Xilai affair illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of rule-based decision making in the contemporary Chinese system.

…… (p. 335)

重庆市委书记薄熙来于2012年遭到解职，外界的一种揣测认为，其原因在于薄熙来恰恰正试图组建这样一种具有非凡人格魅力的政治基础，通过诉诸民粹主义的趋势和对毛泽东时期的怀念，谋求成为政治局常委会的一员。薄熙来事件同时体现了当代中国基于规则的决策体系的优势和不足。


It is for this reason that attacks by China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, on the principle of constitutionalism itself are highly regressive.

…… (p. 335)

因此，中国现任领导人习近平对宪政原则本身的破坏，无异于一项重大退步。


Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy.

…… (p. 339)

只不过，如今扮演皇帝这一角色的是共产党，其宦官干部监管者庞杂的官僚机构。


The killing of student protesters undermined hopes for an early democratic transition and was widely condemned around the world. It also gave comfort to leftists in the party who hoped for a return to greater Communist orthodoxy. Deng himself, however, realized that the party’s survival would be undermined by such a conservative reaction.

…… (p. 341)

对学生抗议者的杀戮打击了早期民主转型的希望，遭受举世谴责，而寻求在更大程度上恢复共产主义正统的党内左派则感到安慰。但是，邓小平本人意识到，这一保守势力的反动将阻碍党的存续 。


Many of the complaints of the student protesters in Tiananmen Square were against corruption on the part of government and party officials.

…… (p. 343)

天安门广场上的许多学生抗议者所抱怨的，正是反对政府和党官的腐败。


The emerging Chinese middle class that had provided the social basis for the Tiananmen protests was thus increasingly co-opted into supporting the continuation of Communist Party rule.

新兴的中产阶级越来越多地选择合作，支持共产党统治的延续。(p. 343)

因此，曾经为天安门抗议提供社会基础的新兴中产阶级，已越来越多地选择合作，支持共产党统治的延续。


All authoritarian regimes encounter resistance to their rule in one form or another, and all respond with a mixture of repression and co-optation. When compared to a totalitarian state like North Korea, or the Arab dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, the Chinese balance has tended to lean much more in the direction of cooptation.

…… (p. 381)

所有的威权政权都不免遭受对其统治的抵抗，同时也都以镇压与吸纳并举的方式回应这一抵抗。同朝鲜的集权政权，或是诸如埃及胡斯尼·穆巴拉克（Hosni Mubarak）和利比亚穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲（Muammar Qaddafi）的独裁统治相比，中国的天平远更倾向于吸纳的方向。


But it is not really clear whether the higher levels are in fact less corrupt than the lower ones.

…… (p. 346)

我们并不清楚，高层官员是否真的比低层腐败程度更低。


The party’s authority is substantially diminished in any event since the days of Mao and Deng, and as its performance weakens, as it inevitably must given China’s difficult path from being a middle-income to a high-income country, authority will weaken further. Under Hu Jintao, political reform was largely suspended and economic policy turned in a less liberal direction.

…… (p. 348)

总之，自毛泽东、邓小平时代之后，党的权威在相当程度上遭到了削弱。在中国由中等收入国家迈向高收入国家的艰难征程中，随着党的政绩不可避免地发生弱化，而其权威也会进一步削弱。在胡锦涛治下，政治改革近乎停滞，而经济政策的自由化程度也不如以往。


If that [economic] growth slows or goes into reverse, the CCP will not have a coherent story to tell about why it deserves a monopoly of power.

…… (p. 348)

如果经济增长减缓，甚至陷入衰退，共产党将无法清晰阐述为何垄断的权力为其所应得。


[The spread of the rule of law or democratic accountability] will not happen as a result of top-down mandates by the current leadership, which is brimming with self-confidence and shows little inclination to move on the political front.

不会，因为不能指望自上而下的命令。…… (p. 348)

这一过程（法治和民主问责的扩展）不会因本届领导层自上而下的命令而发生，因为当前的领导层极为自信，没有展现出任何政治进步的意愿。


The party leadership itself has fallen into patterns of corruption that make reform personally dangerous for many of them. The party continues to cling to Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, despite the fact that most Chinese ceased to believe in it many years ago.

…… (p. 496)

党的领导层本身已经深陷腐败之中，因而改革可能给不少高官带来个人层面上的危险。尽管大多数中国人早已在多年之前就不再信仰马列主义，党依然坚守着这一意识形态。

Below are the changes made to the text, for English readers:

“Hence the People’s Republic of China has a strong and well-developed state but a weak rule of law and no democracy [rephrased as “a democracy that needs enhancement”] .”

•

“This explains why what he labels “externally organized” parties like revolutionary Communist parties in Russia and China [deleted] initially displayed much lower levels of patronage and corruption; they needed to be tightly disciplined and had no benefits to distribute before they came to power.”

•

“Under Mao Zedong, law virtually disappeared and the country became an arbitrary despotism. [deleted]”

•

“MAO’S [deleted] ASSAULT ON LAW”

•

“Mao Zedong had by this point acquired such stature as “the Great Helmsman” that he was able to embark on a personal dictatorship so extreme that it completely dismantled all semblance of law. Even though emperors in dynastic China were in theory absolute sovereigns, their power was in fact limited by the bureaucracy and the myriad rules, procedures, and rituals by which the court operated. One would have to go back to Qin Shi Huangdi, unifier of China in the third century B.C., Wu Zhao, the “evil empress Wu” of the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century, or the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuangzhang, in the fourteenth, to find precedents for Mao’s personal exercise of power. It is no accident that Mao celebrated Shang Yang, the Legalist mastermind of the dictatorial state of Qin that unified China, as a protototalitarian predecessor. [deleted]” 

•

“As Premier Zhou Enlai was to explain in 1958, “ Why should we proletarians be restrained by laws?!… [deleted]  Our law should be developed in pace with the changes of the economic base. Institutions, rules and regulations should not be fixed. We should not be afraid of changes. We have advocated uninterrupted revolutions and the law should be in the service of the continuing revolution … It does not matter if we make a law today and change it tomorrow. [deleted] ”

•

“The [Great Leap Forward] was an ideologically driven campaign whose goal was to mobilize mass support for industrialization but instead brought about a famine estimated to have killed thirty-six million people [deleted] .”

•

“The evolution of constitutions since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) tells a story about the failure of the Communist Party to create a true rule of law. [deleted]”

•

“Virtually all Communist countries followed the lead of the former Soviet Union in adopting formal constitutions that were essentially worthless pieces of paper in terms of any real constraints on political power [deleted] .”

•

“On the other hand, the Four Fundamental Principles with which the constitution begins enshrine the domination of the political system by the Communist Party, which in practice exercises strict control over the government and legislature. No one has authority to modify the constitution other than the party, and all existing constitutional documents were rubber-stamped by NPCs with little discussion. Prior to the 2004 constitutional revisions, it appeared that the party was permitting some open discussion of them by academics and other commentators, but these were quickly shut down and the final changes were essentially dictated to the NPC for ratification. The party clearly operates above and not under the law. As in dynastic China, [deleted] law remains an instrument of rule, and not an intrinsic source of legitimacy.”

•

“Moreover, it is only the government and not the party that can be sued in this fashion [deleted].”

•

“One of the speculations concerning the sacking of Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai in 2012 was that he was building precisely such a charismatic political base, making use of both populist appeals and Maoist-era nostalgia in a bid to become a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee. The Bo Xilai affair illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of rule-based decision making in the contemporary Chinese system. [deleted]”

•

“It is for this reason that attacks by China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, on the principle of constitutionalism itself are highly regressive. [deleted]”

•

“Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy. [deleted]”

•

“The killing of student protesters undermined hopes for an early democratic transition and was widely condemned around the world. It also gave comfort to leftists in the party who hoped for a return to greater Communist orthodoxy. Deng himself, however, realized that the party’s survival would be undermined by such a conservative reaction. [deleted]”

•

“Many of the complaints of the student protesters in Tiananmen Square were against corruption on the part of government and party officials. [deleted]”

•

“The emerging Chinese middle class that had provided the social basis for the Tiananmen protests [deleted]  was thus increasingly co-opted into supporting the continuation of Communist Party rule.”

•

“All authoritarian regimes encounter resistance to their rule in one form or another, and all respond with a mixture of repression and co-optation. When compared to a totalitarian state like North Korea, or the Arab dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, the Chinese balance has tended to lean much more in the direction of cooptation. [deleted]”

•

“But it is not really clear whether the higher levels are in fact less corrupt than the lower ones. [deleted]”

•

“The party’s authority is substantially diminished in any event since the days of Mao and Deng, and as its performance weakens, as it inevitably must given China’s difficult path from being a middle-income to a high-income country, authority will weaken further. Under Hu Jintao, political reform was largely suspended and economic policy turned in a less liberal direction. [deleted]”

•

“If that [economic] growth slows or goes into reverse, the CCP will not have a coherent story to tell about why it deserves a monopoly of power. [deleted]”

•

“This will not happen as a result of top-down mandates by the current leadership, which is brimming with self-confidence and shows little inclination to move on the political front [deleted] .”

•

“The party leadership itself has fallen into patterns of corruption that make reform personally dangerous for many of them. The party continues to cling to Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, despite the fact that most Chinese ceased to believe in it many years ago. [deleted]”

Standing Athwart the Balkans, Yelling Stop

Are the wheels falling off the European bus? Operating outside the EU’s structures and in defiance of the supposedly comprehensive plan embraced by Brussels and Berlin, ministers from ten nations met in Vienna yesterday and voted to restrict migrant flows through the Balkans. The New York Times reports:

Among the measures was an agreement to grant entry to the 10 countries only to those “in proven need of protection,” which would essentially limit passage to Iraqis and Syrians and exclude Afghans and people from countries where the main problems are economic.

The ministers also agreed to set standards for what kind of information migrants would need to provide to be registered in their countries, to recognize formally that each state was responsible for protecting its borders, and to offer support to Macedonia, whose border with Greece has become the latest focal point for migrants trying to make their way to Germany and other prosperous Northern European nations.

This all sounds pretty reasonable—except that stopping the migrant flows by cutting off the route through the Balkans will leave one EU member-state out in the cold: Greece, which would then be on the hook for dealing with migrant influxes. So Athens—which didn’t receive an invitation—recalled its ambassador to Austria, a diplomatic move that is usually reserved for expressing real anger.

Meanwhile, President Viktor Orban of Hungary announced that his government would hold a national referendum on the EU’s refugee redistribution quotas. These quotas are supposedly mandatory under EU law, but increasingly the spirit of the day is “so how are you gonna make me?” The referendum question is reportedly going to be, “Do you want the European Union to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary even without the consent of parliament?”These developments seem at first brush substantially to raise the stakes of the EU’s internal debate on migrant policy. The entire point of the European Union is to coordinate Continent-wide responses to problems that cannot be handled just at the state level, to avoid the kind of intra-European acrimony on display here, and to make sure everyone plays by the same set of rules. But it’s been clear for some time now that Brussels—and Berlin, as Germany is clearly the top dog in the EU right now—has not been up to the challenge posed by the migrant crisis. Worse, many member states see the threat that crisis poses as so existential as to be worth contradicting the rules of the club. What happens next will be vitally important for the EU’s long-term future.

Treasury Dept. Plays Tricks with Puerto Rico Debt

Obama administration Treasury officials want to discriminate against holders of Puerto Rico’s general obligation bonds and give retired public employees a better deal as the island’s debt mountain collapses. Mary Williams Walsh reports at the New York Times:

A broad plan being put forward by the Treasury Department to ease Puerto Rico’s financial crisis would put pension payments to retirees ahead of payments to bondholders — a move that some experts fear could rattle the larger municipal bond market.

The proposal was being driven by evidence that Puerto Rico’s pension system is nearly out of money, leaving retirees who are dependent on it financially vulnerable.

The impulse to aid Puerto Rico’s civil servants is understandable and the idea is well-intentioned, but this plan is seriously misguided. General obligation bondholders bought Puerto Rico debt under a clear and transparent set of rules—that these were senior obligations taking priority over everything else. Meanwhile, grotesquely incompetent and venal politicians promised generous pensions to civil service employees without making sufficient provision to cover those pensions when the bills came due. Now, sure enough, the territory doesn’t have the money to cover its pension obligations, or to pay back the money it borrowed from bondholders.

The Treasury seems to have decided that the best way to handle this mess is to play tricks—to decide which group of debt holders is most “morally worthy,” and to give that group the first claim on the island government’s resources regardless of contractual obligations. There’s a good argument for helping out pensioners, many of whom are now too old to go back to work, and who in any case played by the rules and did their jobs. But, as Walsh notes, it isn’t so simple. Many of the people who own Puerto Rico general obligation bonds are themselves old, retired people on limited incomes who bought these investments on the promise that they would be the first debts to be repaid. So who has the better claim: The retired teacher in New York who bought Puerto Rico bonds or the retired teacher in Puerto Rico who has a pension from the system?Worse still, as investors everywhere realize that the U.S. government no longer thinks that enforcing the law of contract is a sacred trust and obligation—choosing instead to privilege some groups of debt holders and punishing others based on the perceived moral or political standing of each group—the value of all municipal debt in this country will fall. Cities and states will have to pay more to borrow money once bondholders realize that they can’t trust the fine print. That means fewer new schools, fewer public services, fewer repairs to bridges and tunnels, fewer mass transit projects, dirtier parks, and less safe streets all over the country.The right course of action in this case is crystal clear: The debts should be paid (or not paid) in accordance with the terms under which they were incurred. If Congress decides that pensioners need and deserve additional relief, and there is a good case that they do, let it appropriate funds directly to help these people. Hiding the cost of pension fund relief by giving money that belongs to one group of claimants to another group based on arbitrary moral considerations is shady, dishonest, and ultimately futile.Moreover, in dealing with this situation, Congress needs to understand that Puerto Rico, while unique in some respects due to its legal status as a territory, isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last of the major blue bankruptcies coming down the pike. We cannot bail out the “nice” claimants and punish the “bad” ones without damaging the national credit and eroding the rule of law. The U.S. government may well have to step in and offer relief to retirees, on both humanitarian and pragmatic grounds. And we must bear in mind that however these debt issues are settled, the citizens of these cities, states, and territories have legitimate claims on government services. We can’t close the schools to pay pensions to retired teachers.But at the same time, we can’t permit the reckless incompetence of decadent blue model governance to rage on unchecked, piling up more unpayable debts, putting communities at risk, and placing escalating demands on the federal budget. Relief, yes, and generous relief where warranted—but the price of bailout must be real reform.In the meantime, Congress needs to hold hearings on fiscal mismanagement by local governments, not only in Puerto Rico but also in U.S. cities like Stockton and Flint. It should also be looking into public pension programs in states like New York and cities like Chicago, and developing, among other things, legislation that subjects public pension systems to tough regulation to make sure that, come what may, the claims of retirees will be protected.