quarta-feira, 31 de agosto de 2022

Morte de Gorbachev, 31 anos depois da morte da União Soviética- BBC

 Um personagem relevante do fim da Guerra Fria, mas que terminou odiado em seu próprio império...

Morre Gorbachev: como foram as últimas horas antes da dissolução da poderosa União Soviética

  • Norberto Paredes - @norbertparedes
  • BBC News Mundo
Mikhail Gorbachev consultando seu relógio antes do discurso televisionado em que anunciou sua renúncia em 25 de dezembro de 1991

CRÉDITO, GETTY IMAGES

Legenda da foto, 

Mikhail Gorbachev, que morreu nesta terça-feira, consultando seu relógio antes do discurso televisionado em que anunciou sua renúncia em 25 de dezembro de 1991

Esta reportagem foi publicada originalmente em 26 de dezembro de 2021 e atualizada em 30 de agosto de 2022.

Foi durante décadas a única potência que poderia rivalizar com os Estados Unidos, até que na noite de 25 de dezembro de 1991, deixou de existir. "Com isso interrompo minhas atividades como presidente da União das Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas (URSS)", anunciou Mikhail Gorbachev, no Kremlin, em discurso que rodou o mundo.

Símbolo da derrocada do bloco, Gorbachev era o líder do Partido Comunista e presidente da URSS naquela data. Nesta terça-feira (30/8) foi anunciada sua morte, causada por uma prolongada doença, segundo o Hospital Clínico Central de Moscou. Ele tinha 91 anos. 

Para muitos, aquele momento marcou o fim do poder comunista e da Guerra Fria, mas para outros a União Soviética já havia morrido semanas antes com o Tratado de Belavezha.

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terça-feira, 30 de agosto de 2022

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

Study Gods


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.

More by this author

 

 

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segunda-feira, 29 de agosto de 2022

Tratado do Reconhecimento da Independência do Brasil por Portugal, 29/08/1825

 Nesta data, 203 anos atrás, nossa emergência para o mundo, embora os americanos tenham feito antes.



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Great-Power War Is Coming? - Matthew Kroenig, Atlantic Council (Foreign Policy)

Que os generais do Pentágono sejam paranóicos, isso é normal. Eles são pagos para serem paranóicos. Que eles estejam se preparando para uma guerra contra um império competitivo, que eles consideram ser um adversário mortal, é burro e estúpido, mas é o esperado de generais paranoicos. 
Mas, que acadêmicos brilhantes tenham se rendido a essa paranoia e, mais do que isso, que eles estejam se preparando, até desejando, e de certa forma incitando um embate direto entre os dois impérios, isso não é apenas preocupante, mas é assustador.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to send you my latest article, "International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming," in Foreign Policy. For decades international relations theory gave us reason to believe there would be peace among the great powers. Now, nearly all the sources of stability are unraveling.

For my academic colleagues, this could make a good addition to your Introduction to IR syllabus. I rushed to finish before the start of the semester. I hope you find it useful. 

Best,

Mat

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/27/international-relations-theory-suggests-great-power-war-is-coming/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

 

International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War is Coming 

August 27, 2022 

By Matthew Kroenig

 

This week, thousands of university students around the world will begin their introduction to international relations courses for the first time. If their professors are attuned to the ways the world has changed in recent years, they will be teaching them that the major theories of international relations warn that great-power conflict is coming.

For decades, international relations theory provided reasons for optimism—that the major powers could enjoy mostly cooperative relations and resolve their differences short of armed conflict.

Realist IR theories focus on power, and for decades, they maintained that the bipolar world of the Cold War and the unipolar post-Cold War world dominated by the United States were relatively simple systems not prone to wars of miscalculation. They also held that nuclear weapons raised the cost of conflict and made war among the major powers unthinkable.

Meanwhile, liberal theorists argued that a triumvirate of causal variables (institutions, interdependence, and democracy) facilitated cooperation and mitigated conflict. The dense set of international institutions and agreements (the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, etc.) established after World War II—and expanded and depended on since the end of the Cold War—provided forums for major powers to work out their differences peacefully.

Moreover, economic globalization made armed conflict too costly. Why quarrel when business is good and everyone is getting rich? Finally, according to this theory, democracies are less likely to fight and more likely to cooperate, and the major waves of democratization around the world over the past 70 years have made the globe a more peaceful place.

At the same time, constructivist scholars explained how new ideas, norms, and identities have transformed international politics in a more positive direction. In the past, piracy, slavery, torture, and wars of aggression were common practices. Over the years, however, strengthening human rights norms and taboos against the use of weapons of mass destruction placed guardrails on international conflict.

Unfortunately, nearly all of these pacifying forces appear to be unraveling before our eyes. The major driving forces of international politics, according to IR theory, suggest that the new Cold War among the United States, China, and Russia is unlikely to be peaceful.

Let us begin with power politics. We are entering a more multipolar world. To be sure, the United States is still the world’s leading power, according to nearly all objective measures, but China has risen to occupy a strong second-place position in military and economic might. Europe is an economic and regulatory superpower in its own right. A more aggressive Russia maintains the largest nuclear weapons stockpile on Earth. And major powers in the developing world—such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil—are choosing a nonaligned path.

Realists argue that multipolar systems are unstable and prone to major wars of miscalculation. World War I is a classic example.

Multipolar systems are unstable in part because each country must worry about multiple potential adversaries. Indeed, at present, the U.S. Defense Department frets about possible simultaneous conflicts with Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, U.S. President Joe Biden has stated that the use of military force remains on the table as a last resort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. A three-front war is not out of the question.

Wars of miscalculation often result when states underestimate their adversary. States doubt their opponent’s power or resolve to fight, so they test them. Sometimes, the enemy is bluffing, and the challenge pays off. If the enemy is determined to defend its interests, however, major war can result. Russian President Vladimir Putin likely miscalculated in launching an invasion of Ukraine, incorrectly assuming that war would be easy. Some realist scholars warned for some time that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was coming, and there is still the possibility that the war in Ukraine could spill across NATO’s borders, turning this conflict into a direct U.S.-Russia conflagration.

In addition, there is the danger that Chinese President Xi Jinping might miscalculate over Taiwan. Washington’s confusing “strategic ambiguity” policy as to whether it would defend the island only adds to the instability. Biden has said he would defend Taiwan, but his own White House contradicted him. Many leaders are confused, including possibly Xi. He might mistakenly believe he could get away with an attack on Taiwan—only to have the United States intervene violently to stop him.

Moreover, after several U.S. presidents have threatened “all options on the table” for the Iranian nuclear program without backing it up, Tehran might assume that it can make a dash for the bomb without a U.S. response. If Iran is mistaken in doubting Biden’s resolve, war could result.

Realists also focus on shifts in the balance of power and worry about the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States. Power transition theory says that the fall of a dominant great power and the rise of an ascendant challenger often results in war. Some experts worry that Washington and Beijing may be falling into this “Thucydides Trap.”

Their dysfunctional autocratic systems make it unlikely that Beijing or Moscow will usurp global leadership from the United States anytime soon, but a closer look at the historical record shows that challengers sometimes start wars of aggression when their expansive ambitions are thwarted. Like Germany in World War I and Japan in World War II, Russia may be lashing out to reverse its decline, and China may also be weak and dangerous.

Some people might argue that nuclear deterrence will still work, but military technology is changing. The world is experiencing a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as new technologies—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and communications, additive manufacturing, robotics, hypersonic missiles, directed energy, and others—promise to transform the global economy, societies, and the battlefield.

Many defense experts believe we are on the eve of a new revolution in military affairs. It is possible that these new technologies could, like tanks and aircraft on the eve of World War II, give an advantage to militaries that go on the offense, making war more likely. At a minimum, these new weapons systems could confuse assessments of the balance of power, contributing to the above risks of miscalculation.

China, for example, is leading in several of these technologies, including hypersonic missiles, certain applications for artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. These advantages—or even the false perception in Beijing that these advantages might exist—could tempt China to invade Taiwan.

Even liberalism, a more optimistic theory in general, provides a reason for pessimism. To be sure, liberals are right that institutions, economic interdependence, and democracy have facilitated cooperation within the liberal world order. The United States and its democratic allies in North America, Europe, and East Asia are more united than ever before. But these same factors are increasingly sparking conflict on the fault lines between the liberal and illiberal world orders.

In the new Cold War, international institutions have simply become new arenas for competition. Russia and China are infiltrating these institutions and turning them against their intended purposes. Who can forget Russia chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council as its armies invaded Ukraine in February? Similarly, China used its influence in the World Health Organization to stymie an effective investigation into COVID-19’s origins. And dictators vie for seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council to ensure their egregious human rights abuses escape scrutiny. Instead of facilitating cooperation, international institutions are increasingly exacerbating conflict.

Liberal scholars also argue that economic interdependence mitigates conflict. But this theory always had a chicken-and-egg problem. Is trade driving good relations, or are good relations driving trade? We are seeing the answer play out in real time.

The free world is recognizing that it is too economically dependent on its enemies in Moscow and Beijing, and it is decoupling as fast as it can. Western corporations pulled out of Russia overnight. New legislation and regulations in the United States, Europe, and Japan are restricting trade and investment in China. It is simply irrational for Wall Street to invest in Chinese technology companies that are working with China’s People’s Liberation Army to develop weapons intended to kill Americans.

But China is also decoupling from the free world. Xi is prohibiting Chinese tech firms from listing on Wall Street, for example, because he doesn’t want to share proprietary information with Western powers. The economic interdependence between the liberal and illiberal worlds that has served as a ballast against conflict is now eroding.

Democratic peace theory says democracies cooperate with other democracies. But the central fault line in the international system today, as Biden explains, is “the battle between democracy and autocracy.”

To be sure, the United States still maintains cordial relations with some nondemocracies, such as Saudi Arabia. But the world order is increasingly divided with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other. One does not need a stethoscope to detect the echoes of the free world’s conflict against Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan.

Finally, constructivist arguments about the pacifying effects of global norms were always plagued with doubts about whether these norms were truly universal. As China engages in genocide in Xinjiang and Russia issues bloodcurdling nuclear threats and castrates prisoners of war in Ukraine, we now have our gruesome answer.

Moreover, constructivists might note that the democracy versus autocracy cleavage in international politics is not simply an issue of governance but of ways of life. The speeches and writings of Xi and Putin are often ideological rants about the superiority of autocratic systems and the failings of democracy. Like it or not—we are back in a 20th-century contest over whether democratic or autocratic governments can better deliver for their people, adding a more dangerous ideological element to this competition.

Fortunately, there is some good news. The best understanding of international politics may be found in a combination of theories. Much of humanity prefers a liberal international order, and this order is only made possible by the realist military power of the United States and its democratic allies. Moreover, 2,500 years of theory and history suggest that democracies tend to win these hard-power competitions and autocracies flame out disastrously in the end.

Unfortunately, the clarifying moments that bend history in an arc toward justice often only emerge after major-power wars.

Let’s hope that today’s incoming students are not reminiscing at their graduation ceremonies about where they were when World War III began. But IR theory gives us plenty of reasons to be concerned.

 

Matthew Kroenig is acting director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His latest book is The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy From the Ancient World to the U.S. and China

 

 

 

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