BBC4 Analysis: Who Runs that Place?

Increasingly, Western governments see China as a problem to deal with because, as it has grown more powerful, it has re-committed to being a Leninist state.

But under President Xi Jinping, how far does it still conform to the Leninist model and how far does it reflect much more traditional forms of Chinese statecraft? Is a country with a massive bureaucracy run by its nominal leaders or by other actors? And why do senior government figures - who in Russia and Western countries carry clout and influence - seem in China to have little to say about the policies Beijing is following?

As the rest of the world continues to grapple with the consequences of Covid-19, these questions have never been more pertinent or more urgent. In this timely edition of "Analysis", Isabel Hilton, the eminent student of Chinese politics, considers who makes the decisions in Beijing and how they are reached.

Speaking to China-watchers both internationally and in the UK, she explodes some myths about Chinese politics - including that it is a seamless polity with a single unchanging party line - and explores how power struggles take place and what happens to the losers of them. With the 14th Five Year Programme finally due to be unveiled next year, she assesses how far state planning still drives decision-making. And she considers how and when Xi Jinping's successor is likely to emerge - and what lessons that figure may draw from Xi's leadership since 2012.

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Freakonomics: Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears (Ep. 439)

 The modern world overwhelms us with sounds we didn’t ask for, like car alarms and cell-phone “halfalogues.” What does all this noise cost us in terms of productivity, health, and basic sanity? [...]

It seems to have worked, attracting lots of fish, who stayed on. Here’s how the researchers put it: “Acoustic enrichment shows promise as a novel tool for the active management of degraded coral reefs.” So, there are beneficial ocean sounds and the opposite. [...]

Most guidelines say that sounds above 85 decibels are physically harmful. But think of all the baseline sounds we barely notice. Normal breathing is around 10 decibels; a computer fan, 20. The hum of a refrigerator is around 40 decibels. A dishwasher, 75; a window air-conditioner: more than 80. Then there’s the drive-by D.J.’s, the renegade fireworks that punctuated New York City during the pandemic this summer, usually late at night. And of course the quintessential 21st-century sound: the one-sided cell-phone call.

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The Guardian: The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust (8 Dec 2015, modified 4 Nov 2020)

 Jersey did very well out of the strategy that Powell mapped out for it, and the 1970s continued where the 1960s left off. Many of the big North American, European and British banks opened branches in St Helier. They brought the money in and sent it out again, often on the same day. But that allowed them to, in essence, stamp “Made in Jersey” on it, rather than “Made in Britain”, which lowered the tax burden. Jersey’s officials began to describe the island as a “specialist offshoot of the City”: London without the rules, or the taxes. [...]

“They know that Jersey has political stability, doesn’t have political parties. It’s not going to be faced with a sudden swing to the left, or swing to the right, or whatever direction, a change of tax arrangements. It’s also got fiscal stability,” Powell explained, during a long evening interview in his surprisingly modest office in St Helier. [...]

Technically, officials had a choice: they could either raise taxes for foreigners, or cut them for locals, providing everyone ended up being treated the same way. In reality, however, Jersey had no choice at all – not if it wanted to keep its finance industry. Dozens of other small jurisdictions had followed its lead into financial services and, if it raised taxes for everyone to 20%, all the lucrative trade would evaporate from its computer screens, only to condense in places with lower levies: the Isle of Man, Dublin, Singapore or Hong Kong. [...]

On 17 February 2008, Britain said it would nationalise Northern Rock (which had its own Jersey trust named Granite), the first in a series of banks brought into public ownership. The final cost of picking up the pieces of these exploded banks was in the hundreds of billions of pounds. Jersey did not contribute a penny to cleaning up the mess it had made.

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The Guardian: The fatal hike that became a Nazi propaganda coup ( 6 Jul 2016, modified 2 Nov 2020)

 The day after the survivors’ return, a special railway van that had been adapted to resemble a small chapel and attached to the mail train from Harwich, arrived in London at 8.21am. It contained the bodies of the dead boys, in coffins of Black Forest timber – “from the very woods in which they perished”, as one reporter put it. They were met by relatives and schoolmates as well as officials from the education department, all of whom removed their hats and stood silent on the platform of Liverpool Street station. So many people gathered on the upper walkways overlooking the platform that extra police had to be called in to control the crowds. [...]

The idea of erecting a memorial to the events of 17 April were first raised publicly around a month later in the official Nazi newspaper the Alemannen, as well as in the British press. The people of Hofsgrund had mooted the idea early on, communicating to Freiburg’s tourism director their desire for an inscription carved into the rock, which would have recalled the incident and acknowledged that without the locals’ help, many more would have died. After much vacillating, the Hitler Youth took over management of the project. [...]

The memorial was due to be inaugurated on 12 October, in the presence of a member of the British royal family, the head of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and the British ambassador, in a ceremony which once again was supposed to affirm the German-British friendship. The inscription concluded: “The youth of Adolf Hitler honours the memory of these English sporting comrades with this memorial.” [...]

Eaton had wanted the inscription to conclude with the line: “Their teacher failed them in the hour of trial.” But the German authorities forbade the last sentence. A blank space shows where it would have been inserted. In the entrance to the village church, the parents also erected their own memorial, the only one in which the villagers are thanked for coming to the schoolboys’ aid.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Misrule of law: Ukraine’s constitutional crisis

 Instead of just replacing the prime minister, Zelensky progressively removed all reformers from the cabinet, state-owned enterprises, and government agencies. His timing could not have been worse. The new prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, was competent enough in his response to the coronavirus crisis. Yet Ukraine is one of several countries in which bad actors have used the crises of the moment as an opportunity to covertly dismantle reforms, betting that there would be no pushback from a European Union focused on the pandemic and a United States preoccupied by its presidential election.

Zelensky did nothing while revanchist oligarchs and Russian propagandists attacked EU agreements as “external governance” and domestic reformers as Sorosyata ([George] Soros’s piglets). Worse, some of Zelensky’s new appointments – such as that of the chief prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova – fanned the flames. As Zelensky was elected to fight corruption, his Servant of the People party fared poorly in the October local elections. The party’s once-impressive majority in the national parliament seems certain to disintegrate. Smelling blood in the water, judges on the Constitutional Court have thrown out every vestige of reform they can find.[...]

The crisis partly results from the efforts that Ukrainian oligarchs and other anti-reform forces have made to rebuild their influence in the judiciary in 2019 and 2020. When Poroshenko was president, they were largely on the defensive, intent on resisting legal reforms at every stage. Zelensky’s first chief prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, initially led a campaign against such resistance. He was not prepared to selectively prosecute leading figures of the Poroshenko era or the enemies of the oligarchs who backed Zelensky. In contrast, Venediktova appears to have shot the messenger – by harassing and laying charges against reformers, including Ryaboshapka.

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VICE: How France Became the Muslim World's Most Hated Country in the West

 While 70 percent of French Muslims think Charlie Hebdo was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, 60 percent of all French people support the publication, and say they don’t understand the offence that the cartoons cause Muslims. [...]

“In 2003-2004, France was the most popular Western country in the Muslim world. Today, it is the least popular Western country. Something went wrong,” says Pascal Boniface, director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). [...]

He argues that – on top of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – there’s a lot of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the French media. Headlines published in political magazines like “Shameless Islam” or “The Mosque Invasion” are not anti-Islamist, he says – they’re anti-Muslim. [...]

There’s poverty and joblessness, she says. “The absence of prospects – of job prospects, of career prospects – that's what these people, the extremists, that's what they thrive upon.”

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