Book Review: O Brasil Contra a Democracia, de Roberto Simon - Mundorama

Introdução — Roundtable Book Review — “O Brasil contra a democracia”, de Roberto Simon

Carlo Patti

Fonte: Companhia das Letras.

A partir de hoje, a Revista Mundorama apresenta aos seus leitores uma série de aprofundadas resenhas acadêmicas sobre o último livro de Roberto Simon, “O Brasil contra a democracia: a ditadura o golpe no Chile e a Guerra Fria na América do Sul”, publicado em 2021 pela Companhia das Letras. O volume representa uma obra fundamental no processo de revisão e de maior compreensão da política externa brasileira durante a fase mais dura do regime militar.

De maneira específica, Simon trata do posicionamento brasileiro em relação ao governo de Salvador Allende no Chile de 1970 até o golpe que derrubou o presidente socialista. Paralelamente, o livro revela o grau de envolvimento do estado brasileiro no golpe de estado de 1973, assim como as relações entre o regime liderado pelo general Augusto Pinochet e o governo de Brasília nos primeiros anos de existência da ditadura chilena.

Todos os autores das resenhas, importantes especialistas da área de história das relações internacionais ou da política externa brasileira, destacam a importância da pesquisa de Roberto Simon e o impacto dela para uma nova interpretação do papel do Brasil no sistema internacional da época e daquela que a pesquisadora britânica Tanya Harmer batizou de “Guerra Fria interamericana”.

Os ensaios apresentam diferentes perspectivas sobre aspectos diversos do livro. Para Sebastián Hurtado-Torres, renomado especialista sobre a história internacional do Chile durante a Guerra Fria e professor da Universidad de San Sebastián, o livro permite uma maior compreensão da autonomia brasileira na atuação da própria política externa em relação a Washington.

Vitor Sion, doutorando em Relações Internacionais pelo programa San Tiago Dantas, enfatiza a importância da obra para o desenvolvimento de uma teoria de promoção autoritária.

Rogério de Souza Farias, docente permanente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais da Universidade de Brasília, realiza uma análise meticulosa do trabalho de Simon, apontando os grandes méritos da pesquisa, mas também alguns limites metodológicos na interpretação das fontes efetuada pelo autor.

Para Alessandra Castilho, doutora em Relações Internacionais pela Universidade de São Paulo, Simon é capaz de preencher importantes e “incômodas” lacunas da história diplomática brasileira.

Finalmente, Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomata de carreira e pesquisador associado ao Instituto de Relações Internacionais da Universidade de Brasília, sublinha a relevância do livro por jogar luz sobre um dos mais significativos episódios de ingerência brasileira na política interna de outro país latinoamericano.

A série é eventualmente enriquecida pela resposta que Roberto Simon apresenta aos vários autores das resenhas, permitindo um proveitoso diálogo científico.

Sobre o autor

Carlo Patti: Professor Adjunto do Curso de Relações Internacionais e Coordenador do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência Política da Universidade Federal de Goiás.

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Artigos e notícias publicadas na Revista Mundorama, Divulgação Científica em Relações Internacionais Take a look.

Book Review: Wallace J. Thies. Why Containment Works: Power, Proliferation, and Preventive War - Dorle Hellmuth (H-Diplo)

A contenção funciona? Talvez de um país grande a um país pequeno. Entre os EUA e a China dificilmente funcionará.

H-Diplo Review Essay 455, Hellmuth on Thies, Why Containment Works

by christopher ball

H-Diplo REVIEW ESSAY 455

27 October 2022

Wallace J. Thies. Why Containment Works: Power, Proliferation, and Preventive War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020  ISBN13: 9781501749483

https://hdiplo.org/to/E455
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Andrew Szarejko | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Dorle Hellmuth, The Catholic University of America

In Why Containment Works, Wallace Thies convincingly shows that there was never a need for the 2003 invasion of Iraq had Bush administration policymakers stuck to the containment and deterrence concepts that had been utilized during much of the Cold War. But this powerfully argued book is not merely about the contentious Iraq invasion that has been much debated elsewhere; Thies makes a compelling case for containment as an invaluable policy tool, and one that is easier to craft and sustain than commonly thought. 

In a world where states’ military assets rely on finite resources, Thies contrasts two vastly different strategic outlooks—theories of victory—of how these military resources are best utilized strategically: The Bush Doctrine which centered on action-oriented preventive use of force versus the more nuanced, long-term application of containment. 

Thies defines containment strategy “as a form of managed conflict that seeks to prevent the target state from overturning the local, regional, or global distribution of power” (vii). It is a long-term approach which is often slow and requires a lot of patience, and in true George Kennan fashion, the containing state will focus on defending vital interests and tailor its responses accordingly. In short, it is best understood as a game of “move and countermove” (10). Containment also defies more traditional, clearcut measures of success aimed at the immediate elimination of a threat: A containment policy is deemed successful as long as the target state does not manage to do anything that the container state would consider unacceptable. But that’s precisely what might make it less appealing to policymakers or the public, and a seeming relict of the Cold War: It is grey as opposed to black and white; drawn out instead of quick; often more passive rather than about initiative. It is not designed to win conclusively, but rather to live with problem states. 

As the contest is fluid and the various moves and countermoves are often staged simultaneously, a containment strategy may “seem disjointed, reactive, overtaken by events,” (10) improvised, or even worse, the containing state may appear in over its head and outplayed by the target state. There is room for error and failure, to be sure: Containing states might become exasperated and randomly rush on to the next tactic(s); upcoming elections might create pressures for action; or containment policies might resemble too much of a watered-down compromise to be effective. Most of the time, however, there is much potential, vast room for creativity, and remarkable versatility: “A containment policy is bounded only by the imagination and the resourcefulness of those who set it in motion and then carry it out,” (18) Thies explains. What is more, policy options available to the container state usually increase when containment works. Generally involving a mix of “threats (verbal and nonverbal), sanctions or rewards, and if need be, forceful actions,” containment resembles “the art of thwarting an adversary’s plots and schemes, and not just once but again and again” (7). In the case of pre-2003 invasion Iraq, the US containment toolbox came with no less than five different options: United Nations WMD inspections of Iraqi offices and suspected WMD facilities; UN control of oil revenues and imports; multinational naval interdictions of WMDs and ballistic missile technology; and the enforcement of no-fly zones over Northern and Southern Iraq which, starting in 2001, also featured US and British airstrikes against Iraqi command-and-control centers near the capital as well as numerous other military targets. 

Chapter 1 (fittingly titled Preventive War vs. Containment) develops the conceptual framework of the book. What policy prescriptions flow from the 2002 Bush Doctrine when viewed as a theory of victory, and how do they compare to an alternative theory of victory based on containment and deterrence? According to the Bush Doctrine, containment and deterrence had run its course in a world with “unbalanced dictators” (2), “outlaw regimes” (3), rogue states in possession or pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and “shadowy terrorist networks” (3) without country allegiances, putting a high prize on the proactive, unilateral, and preventive use of swift and decisive force.  

Having examined the claims that make up the Bush Doctrine, Thies argues the opposite: Containment and deterrence are neither outdated, weakened, nor unsustainable concepts; buying time and wait-and-see approaches are often preferable to (rushing into) action; defense is the preferable, often superior choice to offense (precisely because superpowers like the US can rely on seemingly infinite supplies of resources against often smaller states and wear them down over time, usually without the use of military force); and preventive wars do not hold answers for the many unresolved issues and uncertainties that follow military strikes and invasions. Thies’s ‘anti-Bush Doctrine’ thus boils down to four essential factors: the willingness to 1., engage in a long-term contest against a target state via constant moves and countermoves; 2., relinquish the initiative as it often reduces the need for fighting in the first place; 3., identify potential allies and build coalitions; while being able to 4., rely on the innovative and tenacious nature of democracies (Thies is especially partial to the US separation of powers system, whose features, he argues, bring about such vetted policymaking that only the best policy ideas can survive). In fact, creating and sustaining a long-term containment strategy is not as difficult as conventional wisdom might suggest because relinquishing the initiative to the target state is “an effective way of thwarting an opponent’s plots and schemes”; regional allies increasingly threatened by the target state will opt to assist the US; and democratic containing states are especially well equipped to negate the “rise of would-be hegemons” (19) due to their resourcefulness and staying power. 

Chapters 2 to 6 are devoted to testing these claims as part of five case studies from the Cold and post-Cold War world, each spanning at least two decades: the containment of Libya (1979-2003), the dual containment of Iraq and Iran (1981-2003), the containment of Iraq (1980-2003), the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing containment of Iran (since 1979). Thies measures containment success by whether the US was able to block aggressive actions by Libya, Iraq, and Iran, including “support for terrorist or other military operations,” (46) or whether those countries’ quest for nuclear weapons ceased or significantly decreased. Because the United States can rely on such a massive array of resources, there usually is no need to resort to blunt force let alone preventive war, allowing for a more cost-effective and variable approach when dealing with smaller states. 

Based on evidence obtained in the five case studies, Chapter 7 reappraises containment by revisiting Thies’s alternative claims – the powerful value of ‘move and countermove’ amid constant bargaining; the willingness to relinquish the initiative because it forces the dreadful responsibility of having to fire the first shot and start a war upon the target state; the importance of attracting regional allies; and the sustaining strengths and ingenuity of (especially presidential) democracies – further reiterating that containment works best under the aforementioned conditions. Like chapter 1, the final chapter is peppered with examples, anecdotes, and debates from the Cold War, essentially tying the Cold War and post-Cold War lessons of containment together. 

Why Containment Works offers rigorous analysis, meticulously researched case studies, and a crisp, succinct structure. Thies pays close attention to the many fascinating nuances, or ‘nooks and crannies,’ that have made up US containment strategy during the Cold War and after, against especially smaller regional states, Iraq, Iran, and Libya, but also vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and China. Another major strength of the book is that Thies explores the different arguments presented by containment optimists and pessimists from all possible angles. 

Above all, Thies’s findings come with crucial policy implications and should give US decisionmakers pause. When contemplating the next preventive war, containment should be considered first – because, under the right circumstances, it can work and has worked so many times. This has particular relevance for the ongoing Iranian nuclear dilemma, which continues to haunt the United States and the international community. Thies’s analysis of US containment of Iran ends in 2016, and President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018. While the US and Iran have returned to the negotiation table under President Biden, the future of the Iran nuclear deal remains unclear, and the Iranian nuclear program is arguably further along than ever. Preventive military action is likely bound to become a hot button issue once again in the foreseeable future. 

Even if Thies portrays the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate of the Iranian nuclear program or the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in too much of a positive light, the bottom line remains: Fifteen years later, there is no Iranian bomb, and Iran was willing to restrain its ambitions by conceding to the 2015 nuclear deal. Furthermore, containment does not have to end even if Iran were to go nuclear. While Thies does associate containment success with Iran’s not having produced a nuclear weapon, the historical record, according to Thies, still suggests a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred like the Soviet Union and others before.

As the scope of any book is naturally limited, this excellent work comes with only few potential weaknesses that may best be considered avenues for further research. Since the Bush Doctrine placed such importance on preventing the next terrorist attack by striking first, such future research might examine under which circumstances terrorist networks and/or insurgent groups can be contained. Even more, what would an assessment of contemporary US policies involving larger adversaries, such as a resurgent, bellicose Russia and an increasingly assertive China, tell us about the potency of containment?  Even if the United States has a larger containment arsenal, and therefore more policy options, than any other opponent, presidential democracy in the US has been in decline in recent years; this leads to questions as to whether US democracy is still robust enough – and still allowing for only the best ideas to become policy despite significant political polarization -- to weather drawn-out cat-and-mouse-games that make up containment contests with large states?

Having said that, the book fills a crucial gap precisely because it demonstrates the overall value of containing smaller states, both during and after the Cold War, as well as containment during the Cold War (against a fellow superpower, the Soviet Union, and major regional player, China). In other words, this is an invaluable contribution to the literature on containment theory. I have no doubt that this exquisite book will become a must-read standard work, alongside John Lewis Gaddis’ Strategies of Containment^[1] (2005) widely considered the seminal work on the Cold War containment of the Soviet Union. While several other noteworthy works since 9/11 have concentrated on the global war on terror, ^[2] Thies’s book offers a refreshing take on containment against traditional state opponents and challenges pre- and post-9/11. Thies’s comprehensive account of U.S. containment practices involving five different countries also goes beyond other recent books with a more limited focus on Iran.^[3]

On a more personal note, I consider this book Wallace Thies’s final masterpiece. A leading NATO specialist and scholar (Why NATO Endures and Friendly Rivals: Bargaining and Burden-Shifting in NATO),^[4] Thies sadly passed away in July 2020. When he told me about the manuscript that would turn into Why Containment Works a few months before his retirement, Thies humbly referred to his book project as a compilation of lecture notes (accumulated during decades of teaching international relations classes at The Catholic University of America). This book clearly goes above and beyond that. As a former doctoral student and colleague of Wallace Thies, I am incredibly grateful that his critical analysis will continue to inspire and assist current and future policymakers and students of IR theory. I highly recommend this book to any decisionmaker involved in the crafting or implementation of containment policies, as well as any serious student of containment strategy. 

Dorle Hellmuth is Associate Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America and the author of Counterterrorism and the State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Her research and teaching interests include (counter)terrorism and -radicalization; political violence; NATO; transatlantic security; and US foreign policy. 

  

---

[1] John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[2] Ian Shapiro, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008; Jonathan Stevenson, Counter-terrorism: Containment and Beyond, Adelphi Paper 367 (London: Routledge: 2005).

[3] Kenneth Pollack, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy (London: Schuster & Schuster, 2013); Ehud Eilam, Containment in the Middle East (Sterling, VA: Potomac Books, 2019). 

[4] Wallace Thies, Why NATO Endures (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2009); Friendly Rivals: Bargaining and Burden-Shifting in NATO (London: Routledge: 2015).

Who was George Canning? - Richard Luckett's book review of Wendy Hinde (The Spectator)

Um diplomata brasileiro, Caio de Freitas, compôs um livro, enquanto servia em Londres, na segunda metade dos anos 1950, intitulado Canning e o Brasil, sobre o papel desse ministro inglês na independência do Brasil. 

Who was George Canning? (1973)

The Spectator, 20 October 2022, 12:18pm

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-was-george-canning-1973-

Credit: Getty Images

Until Liz Truss, George Canning was the shortest-serving prime minister. He needn’t be forgotten by pub quizzers, general knowledge collectors and historians alike. In 1973, Richard Luckett reviewed a major biography of Canning’s life for The Spectator.

Wendy Hinde: 

George Canning

London: HarperCollins, 1973

Every schoolboy knows about the duel with Castlereagh; students of that neglected subject, abusive language, remember Brougham's description of his behaviour over the Catholic question (‘the most incredible specimen of monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office which the whole history of political tergiversation could furnish’); historians recall his reputation as an orator, his part in the decision to bombard Copenhagen, his divisive effect on Tory ministries, his forceful conduct of foreign policy and the trouble caused by his early death after only a few months as Prime Minister. Anyone with a serious interest in the earlier nineteenth century knows, of necessity, a good deal more than this, but it is certainly true that Canning's career has neither been greatly studied nor greatly appreciated.

Part of the reason is to be found in a certain ambivalence in the man himself. The duel with Castlereagh illustrates this clearly enough; when he came to take his place his second cocked his weapon for him, saying: ‘I cannot trust him to do it himself; he has never fired a pistol in his life.’ Afterwards Canning, wounded, wrote to friends that if they wanted to get a ball through the fleshy part of the thigh, ‘I would recommend Lord Castlereagh as the operator.’ The whole incident — two of the King's ministers in a duel — which promises so well as material for the historical novelist is rendered slightly absurd and at the same time almost innocuous; it does not even become farcical. 

Canning's courage is evident, but what is equally apparent is his refusal to indulge in heroics; consequently the incident is defused of both its tragic and its comic potential. Something similar occurs with his oratory: this made an enormous impression on all his contemporaries, and after the death of Pitt he was widely regarded as the most brilliant speaker in the house, yet a picture of him as a man of passionate convictions would be misleading. Perhaps Coleridge was near the mark when he observed that Canning's speeches ‘flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.’ His political opponents, noting the same phenomenon, had no difficulty in explaining it; to them Canning was a man of little principle, interested above all in personal position, in short an actor. The more reactionary members of the Tory party would never have agreed in public, for Canning was after all — in name — a Tory. But in private they expressed the same doubts. Both groups knew that early in life, and apparently for the sake of a seat in Parliament, Canning had deserted the Whig connection in which he had been brought up, and with it the friends who had helped him in his youth; both groups also knew that Canning's mother was a professional actress. It seemed to them an adequate reason to doubt his sincerity, since the circumstance not only conveniently suggested an hereditary taint, but also demonstrated a lack of background that would necessarily be reflected in his political behaviour.

Wendy Hinde has put everybody with the slightest interest in the period in her debt by writing a biography of Canning that sorts out the formidable complexities or the political manoeuvring that complicated so much of his career, and provides a sympathetic but not unduly partisan account of his beliefs and actions. 

Two factors should recommend her book to a wider public: the ease and clarity of her style, which makes it an exceptional pleasure to read, and Canning's peculiar position as the first British Prime Minister to have been a career politician in the modern sense. For, as Miss Hinde makes clear, he started from nothing; his father, who came from an Ulster family, had been disinherited, and when he died a year after Canning's birth his widow turned to the stage in an endeavour to earn a living. True, at the age of eight Canning was sent to a respectable school, but the arrangement which provided him with an education and a middle-class home deprived him of the opportunity of living with his mother, and ensured him, in his later life, no more than a very modest income. He was to suffer both from the separation from his mother entailed by his new life, and from the embarrassment that her attempted incursions into this new life would cause him.

Education at Eton and Christ Church has since become an accepted pattern for the aspiring Tory leader, but it was not so well worn a path when Canning trod it. He had to make the most of his opportunities, and he did so brilliantly, editing a magazine at Eton which was read with approval by the Royal family and was perhaps even more noteworthy in that it showed a reasonable financial return. At Eton and Oxford he revealed a remarkable talent for making friends, and when, on leaving Oxford to read for the bar, he offered his services to Pitt, he demonstrated an even more remarkable talent for keeping them. In due course the ultras of both parties would regard this capacity to remain on terms of affection with men of different political loyalties as evidence of innate hypocrisy. It was a quality which his friends interpreted rather differently. 

In any case his most valuable associates were those who shared his new political creed, and they were to form a caucus to be reckoned with in any political struggle. Their loyalty to their leader — for that was the position which Canning swiftly and effortlessly came to occupy amongst them — was matched only by his loyalty to Pitt. Canning's adherence provides another instance of his capacity to go through the motions of high drama and yet to remain unscathed, since by following Pitt out of office in 1801 he made a gesture that was at once extravagant and extremely hazardous to his own career, and at the same time managed to survive his period in the wilderness. It was not enough, however, to convince his enemies of his loyalty and until his death the charge of deviousness was at the root of many of their criticisms.

Canning rose because of his brilliance and his capacity for hard work, but the actual mechanics of the rise were those of influence and patronage. His marriage, to a girl in whom devotion and good sense were almost miraculously allied to a considerable fortune, eventually enabled him to buy his own way into parliamentary seats, if he wished, but not until the death of Pitt was he entirely free from obligations which influenced his political behaviour. The problem, then, is to identify those causes about which he felt passionately, and to mark the point at which his concern ceased to be the implementation of policy and became its formulation. 

From the start he was opposed to discrimination against Roman Catholics, to the slave trade and to despotism. On issues concerning freedom of individual conscience, that is, he was liberal, and this almost induced the Whigs to believe that he was one of them. At the same time he entirely rejected what he regarded as the pusillanimous Whig line on foreign policy, and his pre-emptive strike against the Danes reduced the Whigs to fury. High Tories were equally—though more circumspectly displeased with his rejection of Metternich's ' holy league,' his championship of the cause of South American independence and a number of his economic measures. 

But on the central issue, parliamentary reform, he was firmly Tory, and this indicates a further paradox. For Canning rose through a system which it was impossible to reconcile with the ideas of the reformers, without possessing any of the hereditary interests which the anti-reformers sought to defend. If on one level he lacked — and still today seems to lack — credibility, it was because of this. Like Burke and Sheridan he seemed to exist to speak, yet his speaking was limited by that fact; unlike his fellow countrymen he reached high office. 

Late in his career he discovered, in the people of Britain, a new audience and a new political base which could serve as a bastion against a king who began by cordially disliking him (George IV thought that he had been one of Queen Caroline's lovers) and an unconvinced Parliament. His speeches to corporations became as important as any that he delivered in the house. Yet he never reconciled his political creed with his dependence on his new allies, and it is difficult to imagine what would have happened had he lived on. 

Perhaps the truth is merely that the events of 1832 would have been postponed. It emerges from this that the difficulties faced by Canning were very much those of the modern politician, who seldom emerges from the class whose interests he seeks to defend (e.g. Mr Heath) and who professes, on the one hand, a belief in the ineffable rightness of public opinion and, on the other, confidence in his own rectitude and the ineffable rightness of his private judgement. A further similarity emerges from something which Canning said, but to which Miss Hinde does not refer. I owe the reference to Coleridge, who put it like this: ‘The stock-jobbing and moneyed interest is so strong in this country, that it has more than once prevailed in our foreign councils over national honour and national justice.’ Canning felt this very keenly, and said that he was unable to contend against the city trained-bands. 

Extend the reference to the trained-bands of organised labour and the parallels become even more striking. Miss Hinde's achievement is to have given us a picture of Canning in which the elements of personal ambition and of principle are held in a believable balance; further than this, she has something to tell us about our own times.

Written byRichard Luckett

Richard Luckett was a lecturer in seventeenth-century literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He died in 2020.

China's True Elite, Book Review of Study Gods by Yi-Lin Chiang - Law and Liberty

 O autor da resenha aponta muitos erros neste livro. Ele não contou seus próprios erros na avaliação do sistema chinês. A China copia os mais avançados? Pode ser, mas qual país não o fez?

Book Review: 

China's True Elite

Reviewed

Study Gods

by Yi-Lin Chiang

 

Connection to the Communist Party is more important to success in China than test scores.

Law and Liberty, August 30, 2022

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/chinas-true-elite/?utm_source=LAL+Updates&utm_campaign=67823dfa34-LAL+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_53ee3e1605-67823dfa34-72437129

 

The Chinese elite is a fascinating subject of increasing relevance to the West. It is the window on China’s power center. A probe into this secret group that is largely out of the limelight will, however, shed a bright light on the party leadership and internal factions. Alas! The book Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition does not offer a wealth of insights but contains an abundance of errors. Worse still, the “elite” the author spent years observing and interacting with are not the actual Chinese elite.

A bird’s eye view of the book will lead us to the first major error of the book: a misjudgment of the Chinese study gods. We will then unveil the real elite that should be of concern to the West, especially at the time when China under Xi Jinping’s reign no longer hides its ambition for global dominance.

The author identified the young Chinese elite essentially as a group of “exceptionally high-performing students” dubbed “study gods” in Chinese. In the course of seven years or so, the author followed 28 study gods in Beijing, China’s capital city that possesses the best resources of all kinds. Beijing resident students have the best teachers and are required the lowest grade for admissions to the most prestigious universities in the country. The ubiquitous institutionalized inequalities in the “communist” country confer unabashed privileges and preferential treatments on rich cities. 

The author gave a detailed account of how Chinese students, especially the study gods, were treated by peers, superiors, inferiors, parents, and teachers based on their status positions. As the epithet “gods” clearly implies, those study gods assume a status very similar to that of celebrities. They are revered by classmates with lower scores, enjoy indulgence and unlimited support from parents and the school, and could even disregard or actively defy teachers who were usually uncontested authority figures for the mere “mortals” who shared their classes. In addition to study gods’ interaction with their environment, the author emphasized their guaranteed prospects to attend the most prestigious universities at home or overseas.

However, note that what the author called “the exceptionally high-performing” or “academically high achieving” Chinese study gods are merely ones who score the highest possible number on standardized examinations. What the author meant in describing how “elite students…immersed themselves in status competition” is merely a competition for the highest test score. Thus, those top scorers are not necessarily versatile students who are creative and well-read. In fact, many of them read nothing but textbooks and supplementary materials. The hierarchy system of the Chinese high school the author portrayed with wonderment is only a hollow construction built upon flimsy standardized-test scores.

I kept wondering when reading through the book why American readers would particularly be motivated to learn how privileged Chinese students play their games in their little ecosystem. Do the readers really want to know the different ways in which “(Chinese) students in different status positions navigated the status system”? Or how the status positions they acquired in high schools keep playing a role in their future lives? For instance, the author noted some study gods who later went to Western universities “considered themselves as having top status in American university” when they “continued to uphold a status system determined by test scores (or GPAs).”

I can easily imagine ordinary Chinese wouldn’t bother to learn the number of American high-school cliques, what the popular groups are, or how cheerleaders and jocks interact with the rest. So, what is the point of writing the book for Western readers?

The author repeated the point in multiple places. For instance, “I propose that elite Chinese youth are systematically successfully in the competition for global elite status by becoming ‘study gods.’” Or, “I show that by the end of high school these young men and women have learned an assortment of skills that compose a recognizable repertoire of behaviors expedient to the reproduction of elite status in global society.”

However, reality begs to differ.

There is no “an assortment of skills” to learn in order to become study gods in high schools. The one and only skill is how to achieve high marks on examinations. But academic excellence of parochial nature carries very little substantive value in the real world.

Chinese students are known for outperforming others in international academic competitions such as math. But perhaps not many people know the recipe for success is that Chinese students spend 10 years in the classroom doing nothing but being trained to perform well on standardized tests. Still, fewer know that they are trained in well-tested, extremely efficacious formulas for high scores on all sorts of tests, including GRE, TOEFL, IELTS, SAT, and the rest. However, the significance of high scores does not go too far beyond the test itself. My GRE verbal score put me in the ninety-sixth percentile but a week later after the test, I could barely recall those grandiloquent words of the lofty GRE vocabulary.

It is open knowledge, at least within China, that the Chinese education system excels in producing top scorers but not innovators or inventors. Those top scorers will be very good at learning (i.e., copying) existing technologies when entering the real world, just as their predecessors have been doing since the late sixteenth century. The young generation probably has no memory of the late Ming dynasty importing military technology from the Portuguese, the late Qing dynasty purchasing military and industrial technologies from the Western powers, or China completely depending on Soviet Russa to develop its industry from the 1940s to the 1950s. But they know very well that twenty-first-century technologies such as WeChat, Weibo, or Baidu, among many others are copies of American originals, albeit they are advanced versions.   

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel wrote, “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.” China will keep copying Western originals because they believe that horizontal progress alone will sustain their prosperity.

Here is a warning to dumbfounded Westerns who are so enamored of China’s economic miracle that they are convinced of the efficacy of the so-called “China model.” The Chinese formula will indeed boost SAT scores that the American elite need to go to Harvard, but it does not nurture versatile, creative, and innovative minds. The fact that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are Westerners, not Chinese, means they grew up in Western civilization and are beneficiaries of the liberal arts education (in its traditional sense), not standardized tests.

The beating heart of education is wonder, something that the China model has already suffocated in its cradle.

In America, money purchases political power, whereas in China, it is political power that begets wealth.

The Princelings

Not only are the lives and games of the Chinese top scorers insignificant to Western readers, but they are not even the real elite.

Who are the real elite recognized by the Chinese people? The young Chinese “elite” portrayed in the book—for example, the one whose parent is a physician with a PhD—is by no means a member of the elite in the eyes of their fellow Chinese. Mao’s death put an end to ideology politics that had raged in China for almost three decades since his enthronement. Deng Xiaoping’s coming into power turned a new chapter that says “becoming rich is glorious.” Money has since become the only yardstick against which an individual is valued.

So ordinary Chinese will not consider the top global university graduates or multinational corporation employees with a starting salary of $100k as Chinese elites. Indeed, those young adults who “grew up wealthy, received a world-class education, live comfortably, and are expected to lead luxurious lifestyle” can easily travel the world with their Louis Vuitton suitcases. But what separates the rich from their neighbors is mere money. They are of the same status in front of the real elite—the Red elite.

The Chinese elite is a group of people called Princelings. They are children, grandchildren, and in-laws and relatives of high-ranking senior CCP leaders. They are the ones who wield absolute political power over the people, which makes them the proprietors of the means of production of the country. The princelings are behind every sector of Chinese economy: energy, finance, real estate, technology, healthcare, stock exchange, and manufacturing. 

In America, money purchases political power, whereas in China, it is political power that begets wealth. But wealth alone does not make one powerful. What could be a better example than Jack Ma—one of the richest men in China who controls Ant Group, the second largest financial services provider in the world—disappearing from public eyes after the government abruptly suspended the IPO of Ant Group in November 2020?

Jack Ma is a member of the richest club in China whose “membership” requires a minimum of $10 billion. They are in general businessmen, owners of the largest listed companies in the country. It seems that they are China’s capitalists. That would be a misperception. Their identity and function are—and perhaps fate will be—very similar to those of нэпман.

нэпман is a Russian term meaning zealots of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In 1921, the Soviet government had to tentatively reform the war communist economic policy, partially recovering the market economy, at the time Russians were continuously dying of starvation. Small businesses quickly reemerged along with free exchanges. By 1927, нэпманconstituted about 2.3 percent of the whole population and 7% of the urban population. Note that just like China’s Jack Ma and his club buddies, they were not capitalists as Westerners understand the word. They were the state’s expedient solution to critical commodity deficiency and severe unemployment. Most importantly, they contributed 21% of the income tax revenue of the urban population and half of the corporate revenue nationwide. They fueled Soviet Russia’s heavy and military industries. Later when Stalin believed those (state-controlled) “capitalists” were no longer of use to him, as planned economy alone could sustain Soviet Russia, нэпман were expunged from their Motherland in the 1930s.

The Chinese нэпман must attach themselves to one or the other members of the elite to become a giant. For example, Jack Ma maintains a close relationship with Jiang Zhicheng, the grandson of Jiang Zemin who is Xi’s predecessor from 1989 to 2002 and his primary political nemesis. Jiang Zhicheng is a founding partner of Boyu Capital, a private equity firm whose portfolio features China’s major tech companies, pharmaceutical and medical equipment firms, and AI companies. It attracts worldwide investors such as U.S. Pension Funds or Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds.

Jiang Zhicheng’s father Jiang Mianheng has an even more stunning resume. Jiang Mianheng, called the “king of telecommunication” and “father of the internet,” built China’s modern-day information and communication sector and internet networks from the 1990s to the 2000s when his father was the “king” of China. What happened to Jack Ma and other similar targets in recent years is a reflection of the increasingly intense and conspicuous factional fight within the Red elite.

Mark Twain notes, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.” Deng’s 1978 Reform and Opening-up policy is in essence the Chinese version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The circumstance of the country at the time was similar to that of Soviet Russia in the 1920s. And in the 2020s, Xi seems to do what Stalin did in the 1930s.

In 2021, Xi announced a campaign called “common prosperity” with the slogan “reasonably adjusting excess incomes,” encouraging the rich and businesses to “give back more to society.” In the meantime, almost all tech giants were fined an astronomical figure, citing anti-monopoly laws. The commerce titan Alibaba, for example, was fined a record $2.8 billion.

When Jack Ma and the like, with all the money they have, can be squashed at the whim of “Emperor Xi,” I don’t believe the Chinese study gods and the future upper class “are en route to dominating the global economy. But the industrious Chinese top scorers might gain an upper hand if American universities keep tearing up Western civilization, cooking up pseudo-social sciences such as gender studies, and training the snowflake generation in nothing but hatred for America.

Habi Zhang

 

Habi Zhang is a doctoral student in political science at Purdue University.

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Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short - book review - Angus Macqueen (The Guardian)

 Uma biografia que tenta capturar Putin nos seus próprios termos. Só que estes são os do Império czarista, não os de uma democracia liberal. O Império americano tem muita culpa em sua hipocrisia, mas em última instância defende tais valores e princípios liberais, ainda que por vezes brutalmente.

Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). 

Philip Short’s meticulous new biography forces us to look at Vladimir Putin’s most appalling acts from a Russian perspective

Angus Macqueen

Sun 3 Jul 2022 07.00 BST

In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new biography should be compulsory reading.

As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. While his people may have been as surprised as the rest of the world at the timing, the invasion hardly came out of the blue and many Russians, not all blinded by propaganda, support it. For as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented a couple of weeks later: “This is not actually, or at least primarily… about Ukraine. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the west will lead everyone with impunity and without question?”

Running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia

Refreshingly, Short, in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former BBC correspondent is at his best when pushing us to see the world from a Russian perspective. The importance of this is neatly illustrated in the publisher’s own claims for the book: “What forces and experiences shaped him [Putin]? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war?” Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution. As Putin commented in one of his acid asides that pepper Short’s account, when it came to concocting fables “those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”. No wonder Xi Jinping of China and much of the world demur at the west’s claim to have done nothing to provoke the nightmare that has descended on Ukraine.

For all his recent whitewashing of Stalinism and Soviet history, in the early 1990s Putin understood the 1917 revolution had taken the country to an economic and political dead end. In his words, “the only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart.” Yet running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that the break-up of the Union in 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia; what was lost was not the Soviet dream but a country that physically stretched from Poland to the Pacific and historically back to Peter the Great and before. Putin mourned: “It was precisely those people in December 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice… which was called Russia… they endowed these territories with governments and parliaments. And now we have what we have.” Except we do not. For Putin and many of his fellow Russians have never understood how a country they believe saved the world from fascism at staggering personal cost just 50 years before dissolved in a matter of weeks.

‘Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.

Critics point to Putin’s work for the KGB as revealing the core of the man, as so often investing its members with inhuman powers of control, deception, amorality and evil. Short, instead, places the real shaping of the man both before and after his KGB years. Born in the harsh courtyards of postwar Leningrad, he emerged a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality. Working for the city’s famously liberal mayor through the whirlwind of chaos and violence that swept his city and Russia in the early 1990s, he forged lasting bonds with everyone from the new business elite to leading mafia bosses and senior players in the Kremlin. He labelled himself a bureaucrat, not a politician. Avoiding conspicuous consumption and not known for swimming in the oceans of corruption around him, he was at the same time not above buying himself a dissertation towards a Candidate of Sciences degree, whose subject was “Strategic Planning for the Rehabilitation of the Mineral Resources Base in the Leningrad Oblast”. Its true author, according to Short, would later receive “several hundred million dollars’ worth of shares”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years, as the puritan has spectacularly lost his inhibitions. His subsequent rise was public yet shadowy, a sequence of well-chosen battles engaged when he knew he could win.

Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world?

Ironies haunt the book: “Those who believe that [military force] is the most efficient instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again… One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor,” he said after one US military adventure. Equally haunting are the lost opportunities to avoid rubbing a proud nation’s nose in their defeat at every turn: expanding Nato to Russia’s very borders, breaking at the very least the spirit of clear promises; or not taking seriously Putin’s coherent attempt to create a joint front against radical Islam after 9/11, when he defied his own military’s cold war warriors to help Bush. Torture in Chechnya, it seems, can never be the same as torture in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib to the victors. “We won, they didn’t,” trumped Bush senior in 1991; Clinton said “Yeltsin could eat his spinach”, while Obama more recently dismissed Russia as simply a “regional” power.

Short is too astute to indulge in easy post-event speculation about different outcomes. Instead, he charts the inexorable march away from the genuine more liberal aspirations of Putin’s early days to the harsh autocratic isolated tsar of recent years, from a Russia culturally and mentally in Putin’s words “an inalienable part of Europe” to the present rupture, which will surely separate it for at least a generation. Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world? Now, he talks of the end of the “so-called liberal idea” while promoting traditional Russian spiritual values, the collective over the individual, rejecting the west in tones redolent of Soviet propaganda. But will a younger generation who have grown up feeding on internet social media, able to travel freely and getting information how and when they like, really admire an authoritarian regime that is rotten to its core? That was the challenge laid down by the anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, and he had to be locked away. Can the ageing tsar, whose acolytes still seem keen to educate their offspring in Britain and the US when not out sailing on ever-larger yachts, really believe himself a persuasive model for those ancient values?

Putin compares himself to Peter the Great in Russian territorial push – video

There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject. He calls Putin a liar, regularly, but again and again he pulls back from laying direct responsibility on him for some of the more egregious acts. “Hard to judge” or “Nothing concrete suggests” and other such qualifiers litter his accounts of critical moments. Sometimes, they usefully temper the more extreme personal charges against Putin. Overall, however, they let him escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future.

The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.

Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia On Film

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