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China's All-Seeing Eye
krou writes "Naomi Klein writes in Rolling Stone Magazine about China's Panopticon-like experiment called 'Golden Shield' taking place in Shenzhen using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric. Klein writes: 'Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data.' According to Klein, this is more than just a Chinese experiment, it's also one that holds ramifications for America and elsewhere: '...the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state... The global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.'"
Anonymous Coward? Not for long...
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
"using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric."
IBM making money at the expense of morality; nothing new here.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/articles/auschwitz.html
My lasers trace / everything you do,
You think you've private lives / think nothing of the kind,
There is no true escape / I'm watching all the time!
CHORUS:
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean.
I'm elected, electric spy,
I'm protected, electric eye.
Always in focus / you can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you / you dont know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing / all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes / pictures that can prove...
(Chorus)
Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it, develop and expose,
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!
(Chorus)
I'm Elected -
Protected -
Detective -
Electric -
Eye.
- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.
Orwell's 1984 isn't the only functional specification out there, after all.
Germany was the proof-of-concept. Stalin's Russia and the Cold War Warsaw Pact countries were the alpha, which failed due to scaling concerns. China is the beta test site and release-candidate. Unistat goes live in 2009.
"that modern China represents a form of authoritarian capitalism whose efficiency is quite remarkable"
I think its open to debate if China is remarkable for its "efficiency". It mostly just has lots of cheap labor, no labor unions and very weak pollution and safety regulation which means its a cheap place to do things like manufacturing. There are quite a few things working against its economic efficiency.
A. The party officials that run the place are extremely corrupt. Corruption is good for business only if it swings your way. If it swings against you, or for your competition it is quite bad for business, and the unpredictability of corruption is especially bad for business.
B. The legal frameworks in the country are extremely poor. This is a plus if you ware a bootlegger ripping off your competition's product, its not so good if your IP and products are the ones being ripped off.
C. Not sure exactly why but China did apparently pass new labor laws around the first of the year and they undid some of the slave labor aspects of being a worker in China. Workers did actually get some rights under the new laws and it appears they are going to cause a significant spike in the cost of labor, along with the simple fact labor isn't as abundant in China as it once was. This along with a number of other factors is causing wage inflation and making China less and less attractive to Capitalism. The factors that made China boom can also work against it and lead to a bust and for the boom to move elsewhere.
D. China's one child policy is starting to cause a severe shortage of young workers since it began in 1979. Their population is going to start become senior citizen heavy like Japan and the U.S. which has a lot of negative economic consequences. Most older workers can't stand the dormitories and 6-7 day work weeks in China's factories so as the young labor pool drops its going to hammer their sweat shop manufacturing industries.
E. Censorship might have its positives in that it helps eliminate dissent but it also means you can do some incredibly stupid stuff and get away with it because you can suppress knowledge of your stupidity. A free press and a free Internet can server a useful purpose in that it can eventually expose corruption, incompetence and stupidity and led to corrective action if the press and freedom of speech works. For example in the U.S. the free press went dysfunctional after 9/11 and untold stupidity was perpetrated by the Bush administration like the war in Iraq, torture and domestic spying. The press still isn't very healthy but America has started to throw the Republican's out of power for their incompetence, though the Democrats are much of an improvement. In China is if the ruling party turns bad, there are no alternatives except for changing one set of Communist party leaders for another in an internal power struggle.
F. The spiking cost of oil is suddenly starting to work against globalization. Not sure how accurate it is but someone on CNBC said the cost to ship a container from China to the U.S. has quadrupled recently from $2K to $8K and if oil prices continue to spike its going to be less and less attractive to ship goods half way around the world. Its already working against heavy goods with a low labor component like steel. The more expensive fuel gets the less likely you are going to offshore manufacturing for the U.S. and Europe to China. Mexico may become increasingly attractive again for the U.S. labor pool.
@de_machina
I mentioned 1984 to a friend that lives in China and she has never heard of that book, or Orwell. So, yes, it is banned.
Wow, somebody give this guy a Nobel Prize for his exhaustive research and well-reasoned conclusion.
A key point about canecubo's list is that many of these regimes were at least condoned by the U.S. while many were puppet regimes out right installed by the U.S. just because they were anti communist, anti union and pro big business. Nazi Germany was openly embraced by the elites in the U.S. right up to 1939 and sometimes after. George W. Bush's grandfather, for example, was the American banker for the Thiessen family who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power.
If the United States is the guiding light to Capitalism and Freedom around the world, how come the U.S. is so closely aligned with so many repressive regimes. The answer is because capitalism has no real correlation to freedom. Capitalism is just as much at home in repressive right wing states as it is in liberal democracies. There is no real correlation between economic system and governmental model.
Capitalism does in fact flourish in right wing states, often very oppressive ones. Unbridled Capitalism has a nasty tendency towards wealth concentration in the hands of an elite few and the people with all the money almost inevitably seek to control all the levers of political power because it protects, supports and nourishes their economic interests. This is a cocktail which often leads to right wing dictatorial governments which are no friends to freedom. In particular they often are extremely fond of breaking up labor unions, because labor unions are good for workers but bad for profitability. They are also fond of rigging elections or getting rid of them all together because ruling elites are small and easily outvoted if you let all the poor unwashed masses have an actual say in their government. In the U.S. this has been accomplished by a two party system where both parties are controlled by the ruling elites and which never offer an actual choice to ordinary people.
The U.S. being a free society can mostly be attributed to the immense wisdom of our founding fathers who did create a remarkable framework for a free society. Unfortunately, its been slowly unraveling ever since. I think if the founding fathers saw the horror that is the Federal government, the state of civil liberties, and our two party system today, they would no doubt launch a second revolution to topple it and restore the government outlined in the Constitution which has been almost completely obliterated by our two political parties and the corporations and ruling elites which own them.
Capitalism is about profit, pure and simple. Freedom doesn't really have anything at all to do with profitability and often gets in its way. Capitalism and Freedom can coexist, in fact Capitalism is a helpful ingredient for freedom since it is extremely beneficial to control your own wealth rather than letting a bureaucratic state do it for you. Unfortunately Capitalism can and does flourish in repressive right wing states, always has and probably always will.
@de_machina