The Globalist: O fim do papel na civilização que o inventou - Branko Milanovic and the Paperless country, China

Global Diary

Paperless China?

January 7, 2024

Dear reader, The abolition of paper is in full swing in the country that invented it – China. As our contributor Branko Milanovic discovered, what is striking in today’s China is the complete disappearance of paper as a means to convey information. And while similar developments are observable elsewhere, China is ahead. This begs the question: Is placing all of modern knowledge in the electronic format a good idea? After all, it has already revealed its weaknesses – many websites, links and blogs where information was stored are already by now broken, deleted or have been moved elsewhere. Viewed in a global context, does this mean that when our civilization vanishes, the new researchers, perhaps thousands of years away, will eventually be faced by the conundrum: Did literacy simply disappear? Enjoy this fascinating read. Cheers, Stephan Richter Publisher and Editor-in Chief Global Diary January 7, 2024 Paperless China?  By Branko Milanovic  The abolition of paper is in full swing in the country that invented it.  https://www.theglobalist.com/paperless-china/  China is considered to have been the first country (civilization) to have created the modern version of paper. Paper is listed as one among the four big Chinese inventions (the other three are the compass, gun powder and printing). Perhaps it will be the first country to “dis-invent” paper, too. Coming full circle? What is striking in today’s China, compared to even as recently as five years ago, is the complete disappearance of paper. I mean paper as a means to convey information – not paper as in paper napkins in cafés. Some of this disappearance is perhaps justifiably celebrated. Instead of metro cards that can be easily displaced, there are electronic tickets on cell phones. Instead of plastic credit cards, there are Alipay and similar systems available on your phone. Instead of crumpled banknotes, there are touchless screens to use for payments. Slightly ahead of the rest of the world It would be wrong to take this as an ideological feature linked to the current system of electronic surveillance in China. Very similar developments are observable elsewhere, in all modern societies. China is just slightly ahead of the rest of the world. But, even the very ideological dimension of political propaganda is affected by this. In the past, Chinese museums linked with various CPC events had on display a variety of officially-approved publications – speeches, resolutions and biographies. Almost nothing of that remains. In the excellent Shanghai museum dedicated to the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party, there is just one book that can be bought in the museum store. The store sells pens, badges, umbrellas, toys, bags and pandas – but no written documents. One would search in vain for such elementary publications as the Founding Act of the CPC, its first resolutions etc. Moreover, looking at the rich exhibits that deal with the New Culture movement of the 1920s and numerous publications that are displayed in the museum, one wonders what could in the future be shown from similar cultural movements of today? Copies of emails? Laptops where the texts are stored? The dematerialization of information Such dematerialization of information can be celebrated, perhaps at times excessively given the relatively modest gains in efficiency that are achieved compared to the older system. But the paeans disregard one important feature. People’s interactions are not solely based on the present. Our interactions and opinions are so many “bottles thrown into the sea” in the hope of explaining our current thinking and conveying to the future what we feel and what we have learned. This is the advantage of a written system compared to the oral. The oral system could neither transmit information over time, nor do it accurately. We have Homer’s verses today because somebody eventually was able to write them down. Things would not have come to us had they not been preserved on scripts made of papyrus. Or, even better, as the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did, preservation of certain facts was entrusted to the stone. It was more durable than paper – but it was hard to carve and carry longer and more complex messages. Goodbye newspapers In the three weeks I spent in China, I saw two desultory copies of a Chinese-language newspaper in a Beijing hotel and “China Daily” displayed in a bar not touched by anyone, one person reading what appeared to be a newspaper in a Shanghai museum and a father reading a comic book to his child on a train. I saw no other piece of information recorded on paper. Surely, I went to a big bookstore in Shanghai with six floors of books, or have seen a beautiful new library at the Zhejiang University. There are plenty of books there. So paper as a means of conveyance or storage of information has not completely disappeared. But its function to convey today’s information into the future has apparently ceased. This is not a trivial issue. Whether information about a subway trip is encrusted on a piece of paper or stored within your cell phone does not matter to future generations. But placing the entire modern knowledge in the electronic format is dangerous. The danger We can already see the first effects of it. The electronic system of storage is old enough for us to have noticed that many websites, links and blogs where information was stored are already by now broken, deleted or have been moved elsewhere. Information on household income or people’s characteristics that was collected in the past is in many cases lost because the software systems used to read and process such information have changed. Ironically, but not at all surprisingly, all the information that we can get regarding some past surveys of population (and I am not talking here about ancient data, but information that is twenty years old) comes from the printed summaries of such sources. I have seen this very clearly with Soviet household surveys whose data have all been irretrievably lost because already by the early 1990s the technology had entirely changed, and short of enormous and expensive effort, the Soviet-made computer cards could no longer be read. But the problem is the same everywhere. U.S. micro data from the 1950s and early 1960s are impossible to access any more. Conclusion With full transfer to electronic-only information, we are moving to an ever-ruling “presentism.” Information can be seemingly efficiently and costlessly transmitted today or over a very short time period, but is afterwards lost forever. When our civilization vanishes, the new researchers, perhaps thousands of years away, will be faced by the conundrum: Did literacy disappear? How to explain that a civilization from which there are millions of written records (that would be saved the way that the Dead Sea Scrolls were saved) had suddenly abandoned literacy and gone back to oral communication and barbarism? In fact this very post, for whatever it is worth, will be forever gone as soon as the website you read it on folds and another format of dissemination takes over. Until then, try to carve it in stone…

O novo Hitler europeu: Putin, o psicopata russo - Uwe Bott, Stephan Richter (The Globalist)

Europe’s New Hitler: Another Psychopath at Work

 Vladimir Putin is a murderous despot: Why the West’s response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine matters. And why we must deal firmly with his European enablers.

By Stephan Richter and Uwe Bott 

The Globalist, February 24, 2022 

https://www.theglobalist.com/europes-new-hitler-putin-invades-ukraine/

Let there be no doubt, Putin is cunning and brutal. He is an abuser, a killer, an assassin. He completely lacks any shred of human decency. He is Europe’s new Hitler.

A bad leader, even by Soviet standards

Under his reign, the fatal Dutch disease has only spread further, piling hardship over hardship on the Russian people. Putin’s only skill has been consolidating power by eliminating all those opposed, all the while offering a steady diet of making empty promises population at large.

There is a darkness to Putin’s personality that is unsettling even to many Russians who certainly had their share of leaders with dark souls.

A sociopath in a clinical sense

Now, it is critical to understand the underlying pathology of Vladimir Putin. Putin is a sociopath in a clinical sense, with strong tendencies towards paranoia and narcissism.

His actions are driven by the deep insecurities of his own personality, by his constant need for external affirmation.

Putin constantly has to publicly prove his own virility, which – in his mind – is done by displaying violence and cruelty (and getting away with it).

In this vein, Putin is a very simple man. He is also, if one is willing to understand his personal profile, a very predictable man.

Of course, he craves the opposite. He craves to be admired for his smarts and for his vision, but deep inside he knows that he possesses neither.

Enter Western enablers

For more than ten years after the “end” of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the American part of the Western world was inebriated by its sense of complete and utter superiority.

And the European – especially German – part of the Western world deluded itself that there was no more reason to have an army.

Germany’s pro-Russian fifth brigade

Initially, all the rage was talk about a “peace dividend.” Subsequently, Germany’s pro-Russian fifth brigade (including a significant segment of the SPD, now the majority party in the German government) shifted its empty-headed rhetoric.

Ever eager to please Putin, the SPD’s demand was that, any time Putin’s Russia acted in a despotic fashion, the West should not engage in “escalation”.

The big error

Falsely assuming that the Russian Bear had been put to sleep at the burial of communism, Western leaders took their eyes of the growing, incrementally mounting threat that Vladimir Putin built.

Western leaders closed their eyes to Russian attempts to intimidate Georgia and the Baltic states and other former states of the Soviet Union.

Western money hustlers

Instead of keeping the eye on the ball, the Western world got all enamored by the – almost always illicitly gained – riches of Russian oligarchs.

London, in particular, became a major money laundering center for their dirty profits, with Germany being a close second aider and abetter.

Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder top aide-de-camp

That Angela Merkel ever dared to claim that the North Stream 2 pipeline was strictly a “private sector project” is the height of conceit.

It leads one to wonder which side, the Russian or the Western one, the long-time German Chancellor was actually working on.

After the beginning of the (continued, now massive) invasion of Ukraine, her legacy is forever tarnished.

Self-prostituting sports teams

Sports teams got lucrative sponsorships especially from Russian fossil fuel giants to cement their own legacies, particularly on the European soccer stage.

European soccer stadiums are soiled by Russian oligarchs who occupy the owners’ suites. Europe’s soccer pitches are soiled by players running around in Gazprom jerseys, all in pursuit of grabbing a piece of that deeply human-despising Russian cake of criminal wealth.

Mere spinelessness – or active collaboration?

All of this normalized continuous Russian abuses to such extent that the reactions to Russian “overreach” such as Putin’s annexation of the Crimea region or murders or attempted murders of dissidents on foreign soil received little more than a shrug of the shoulders.

This stance was so engraved in the lazy heads of Western electorates that they voted or kept in power the forces that idly stood by the mounting atrocities of the serial killer, Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump, Russia’s very active, ex-sleeper agent

Putin-puppet, Donald Trump, was even elected President of the United States with the help of Russian intelligence.

While none of this has gone unnoticed and some of it has been – at least temporarily – reversed through the “unelection” of Donald Trump, who just a couple of days ago praised Putin as a “genius” for his Ukraine actions, it is mystifying, to a degree, how it was and is possible.

But is it too late now?

The invasion of Ukraine is in full effect. It is difficult to imagine that it will be reversed or stopped because only a NATO military response could bring that about. The risks of a nuclear war would seem too great for that to happen.

But by understanding the key takeaways from how we got here and why, we ought to be able to design the kind of actions that would contain Putin’s westward drive.

Four main principles

Without delving into a detailed list of sanctions/actions that the West must take (the list is long), these sanctions/actions should be guided by a set of four main principles.

1. The long-term goal of these actions must be to contain Russia beyond Putin. This implies, for example, that Europe must develop a detailed long-term plan to completely and permanently end energy dependence on Russia.

Obviously, an aggressive (and credible, meaning executable) move towards renewable, clean energy sources would not only meet that goal but also help saving the planet.

2. Europe must understand that self-defense, credible self-defense is the most effective weapon in preventing war.

To discard ill-advised pacifism or to overcome reasonable historic guilt does not equate imperialism. Rather, it is in full recognition of all historical lessons ever learned. It’s the best guarantee for peace, we have.

3. While fully aware of the unlikelihood of Russian adoption of democratic values anytime soon, Europeans and Americans must launch a full-fledged effort to highlight that Putin’s aggression, or the aggression of future Russian leaders will only further impoverish the Russian people.

And they must directly address the Russian people to drive this point home. Social media are an excellent medium to promote such campaign. Radio Free Europe played a role during the Cold War, but it was a bit player when compared to today’s social media.

4. Everything has a price. Nothing comes for free. These are not catch-phrases. These are “unconventional truths”.

Conclusion

We are all creatures of comfort. The recent pandemic should have steeled us though, teaching us that the unexpected does happen and that we must take sometimes controversial and always painful actions in order to protect the greater good.

In following these principles, the actions/sanctions against Putin and – yes, Russia itself – become fairly self-evident.

Our response will determine not only how Russia’s flappy wings will effectively be clipped, but also how we are going to address the looming threat of China.

More on this topic

• The Transatlantic World is Falling Apart 
• Ukraine and the Return of Geopolitics 
• Russia and Globalization

About Stephan Richter

Director of the Global Ideas Center, a global network of authors and analysts, and Editor-in-Chief of The Globalist.

Full bio → | View all posts by Stephan Richter →

Chineses na Africa: democracia e mercados - Stephan Richter

Valor Econômico, 09/08/2012 às 00h00 1

China na África: mercado x democracia

As formas e meios pelos quais os chineses estão penetrando no continente africano são tema de debates acalorados em todo o mundo - e em nenhum lugar mais do que nos EUA. A visita de 10 dias de Hillary Clinton, secretária de Estado dos EUA, a toda a África colocou o debate em foco detalhado.

De um lado, os que afirmam que os chineses estão comportando-se como neocolonialists (ocidentais), ansiosos por explorar as vastas riquezas de matérias-primas e minerais do continente. Eles veem a China como interessada em ocupar cada espaço não coberto por empresas multinacionais ocidentais.

Do outro lado, principalmente fora dos EUA e predominantemente na África e nos mercados emergentes, estão os que aplaudem a ascensão da China e apontam para os seus sucessos como uma forma tardia de justiça econômica. Estes acreditam que finalmente é hora de uma potência não ocidental rica e mirando horizontes de tempo de longo prazo emergir como parceira viável para o continente.

Melhor ainda, argumentam essas vozes, os chineses - com a sua proposta de construção de infraestrutura em t roca da exploração de matérias-primas - estão apenas cumprindo o que acabaram revelando-se promessas vazias, feitas há um século pelas potências ocidentais.

Construção de ferrovias ligando áreas do interior à costa? A eventual perspectiva de formar uma rede cobrindo a África Subsaariana? Formação de redes de rodovias e autoestradas de quatro pistas a preços acessíveis em todo o continente? Disponibilizar moderníssimos complexos de escritórios, construídos dentro de orçamentos que as nações africanas têm condições de custear?

Concentrem-se primeiro em acabar com a fome; depois, disseminem-se os benefícios não tão materiais da democracia. Esse foco assegura a formação de um eleitorado com melhor formação educacional e autoconfiante, não suscetível à compra barata de votos.

Essas são, certamente, metas que os líderes africanos vêm perseguindo há muito tempo. Mas, no passado, uma combinação tóxica de sua própria corruptibilidade, laços obscuros entre ex-países colonizadores (e suas elites empresariais) e os novos governantes, bem como estruturas de planejamento excessivamente complexas, muito frequentemente resultaram em projetos proibitivamente caros.

Considerando que o crescimento econômico da África tem sido retardado pela inexistência de infraestrutura de transportes confiável - nos países e entre eles - essa é uma oferta mais que tentadora. Ela representa uma oportunidade de proporções históricas.

Sim, o continente tem uma abundância de aeroportos e de telefones celulares, mas devido à infraestrutura totalmente insuficiente, o comércio continua sendo dificultado de uma maneira reminiscente da Europa pré-1820.

Nesse sentido, as iniciativas empreendidas pelos chineses na África são, agora, o equivalente histórico do que as guerras napoleônicas trouxeram para um país como a Alemanha. Representam um há muito tempo necessário brado de alerta para o abandono de tradições ultrapassadas, para um avanço à era de intercâmbio e comércio modernos.

Sem ignorar os problemas inerentes à maneira como os chineses operam, inclusive o fato de que empregam predominantemente mão de obra de suas próprias empresas de construção civil, mesmo para projetos no interior da África subsaariana, a visão chinesa é muito distinta da abordagem ocidental nos últimos 50 anos.

A fórmula do Ocidente aplicada à África pós-independência, pós-1960, é priorizar a construção da democracia em detrimento da construção de mercados. Os chineses, como se sabe, optam exatamente pelo oposto.

Em tese, é sempre preferível concentrar-se em estruturas democráticas. E a secretária Clinton certamente referiu-se enfaticamente a isso durante sua visita. Mas em países onde a pobreza continua excessiva, um contra-argumento desconfortável pode ser sustentado, apoiado no histórico dos últimos 50 anos.

E se uma democracia atrofiada constituiu-se em obstáculo ao surgimento de um verdadeiro mercado para as economias nacionais? Nessas circunstâncias, não será preferível privilegiar a construção de um mercado para produzir uma estrutura mercantil suficientemente distribuída?

Esse é, sem dúvida, um dilema bastante desconfortável para ser analisado pelos ocidentais. Mas, claramente, são os africanos que precisam optar por seguir ou não o conceito ocidental de "democracia primeiro".

Melhor ainda, os defensores da estratégia chinesa para a África podem apontar para o fato de que a África não é a China. A preservação do poder em um Estado de partido único não está em causa na maior parte da África.

Em outras palavras, concentrem-se primeiro em acabar com a fome; depois, disseminem-se os benefícios não tão materiais da democracia. Esse foco assegura a formação de um eleitorado com melhor formação educacional e autoconfiante, não suscetível à compra barata de votos.

Essa abordagem também implica que o desenvolvimento econômico produza desenvolvimento político. Coincidentemente, isso é bastante semelhante ao que ocorreu na história da Europa. Lá, a tomada das rédeas da economia catalisou a demanda por mais direitos políticos por parte das classes mercantis, que terminou por colocar a Europa no rumo de democracia plena.

Por enquanto, em grande parte da África, a evolução política permanece tão atrofiada quanto o desenvolvimento econômico. Dito de outro modo, mas em última análise no mesmo sentido, a maturidade política - no sentido de democracia suficientemente robusta para que as eleições resultem em mudança efetiva no poder - só funciona praticamente em países como Gana, onde o desenvolvimento econômico é suficientemente avançado e amplo.

Ponderar esse tipo de sequenciamento é certamente desconfortável para os ocidentais que têm uma preferência instintiva pela democracia. Apesar disso, essa preferência é também desconcertante - especialmente tendo em vista a forte ênfase dos americanos em economia de mercado em seu país. Os americanos, como sabemos, foram afortunados em seu caso histórico especial, onde os desenvolvimentos econômico e político caminharam de mãos dadas.

É muito desconcertante observar nesse debate sobre construção de mercado versus construção de democracia - que são os chineses, e não os americanos - que podem argumentar persuasivamente que seu foco na África é a criação de futuros clientes e parceiros comerciais.

Esse foco em clientes parece contrário à doutrina marxista. E, de fato, os chineses podem citar ninguém menos que o admirável Adam Smith como sua testemunha principal. Ao avaliar estratégias econômicas de grandes impérios, escreveu ele: "Fundar um grande império com o propósito único de criar um povo de clientes pode, à primeira vista, parecer um projeto capaz de servir a uma nação de lojistas. Trata-se, porém, de um projeto totalmente impróprio para uma nação de lojistas. Mas extremamente adequado a uma nação cujo governo é influenciado por lojistas".

Embora os direitos ao voto não possam ser considerados um luxo, na realidade africana, ao menos, o foco central na construção da democracia, em vez da construção de mercados, tem tido o efeito perverso de asfixiar, e não de promover, o crescimento econômico. (Tradução de Sergio Blum)

Stephan Richter é editor chefe do "The Globalist".

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