SACW - 12 June 2017 | Afghanistan: Women's exclusion from Peace Talks / Bangladesh: Protect Sultana Kamal / Pakistan: Divided workers / India: The Mob is coming for you / Myanmar’s wars / Nations and Citizens Post-Yugoslav States / China: Religious Revival

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 June 2017 - No. 2939 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: In Defence of Sultana Kamal Who Has Been Threatened By Islamists - Newsreports and statements from human rights groups
2. Women Excluded Again from Afghanistan’s Peace Talks | Heather Barr
3. Bangladesh: In the crosshairs of radical uprising | Ziauddin Choudhury
4. Pakistan: Dividing workers along party lines has a negative impact on the unions.” Karamat Ali
5. Hyper sexualised Mujra in Post Zia Pakistan: Working class women performers and their male working class audiences | Saad Khan
6. India: The struggle to punish the killers of Pansare, Kalburgi and Dabholkar is linked to the struggle to preserve democracy
7. India: Disturbing Developments in The Military - Civil Relations | Apoorvanand, Pratap Bhanu Mehta
8. India: The inheritors of Naxalism should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution | Dilip Simeon
9. India - Rajasthan textbooks: Stick to facts, don’t rewrite history - Editorial in Hindustan Times
10. India: The Politics and Undercurrents of the 1939 Strike in Tatanagar |Dilip Simeon
11. Alarming Decline in India’s sex ratio projected
12. India: Public Statement by PADS on Continuing Caste Violence in Saharanpur, UP
13. India: Sweeping Victory of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh [assembly elections 2017] – Is it an outcome of the Modi Wave? Its implications | Uday Mehta
14. India: Statement by Khedut Samaj-Gujarat regarding police firing on agitating farmers in Madhya Pradesh
15. India: There’s no need to be alarmed | Jawed Naqvi
16. India: SAHMAT Statement Condemning CBI raids on the media group NDTV
17. India: Who ‘loves’ Mob Violence ? Unfolding Hindu Rashtra in Slow Motion | Subhash Gatade
18. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - UK: Stop fretting over religious sensitivities. We must push hard against Islamists | Sara Khan
 - India: For 25 days between May 15 and June 8, the Hedgewar Smarak Samiti in Reshimbagh was home to 914 men — in the 18-to-40 age  - India: The battle for Hindu Rashtra is raging inside the Hindu mind – and it is no longer a fringe fantasy (Samar Halarnkar)
 - India: Hindutva’s Tweaking of Ambedkarite Iconography Versus Declining Politics of Social Justice (Abhay Kumar Dubey)
 - India: The cow and Savarkar (Vaibhav Purandare)
 - India: Three facts about BJP founder SP Mookerjee that a recent exhibition in Delhi did not show (Shoaib Daniyal)
 - India: How Sabotage By Indira Gandhi’s Advisors Paved the Way for Operation Blue Star (G.S. Chawla)
 - India - Uttar Pradesh: Adityanath visit to disputed site in Ayodhya sends out communal signals (Edit, Times of India)
 - India: With framing of criminal charges against minister Uma Bharti in Babri Masjid demolition case, Modi govt show show her the door - editorial in The Hindu (1 June 2017)
 - India: IIT Bombay students march against “Hindutva vigilantism” on IIT campuses
 - India: Cow Cow Cow cartoon by hemant morparia‏
 - Vigilante Justice in India - The New York Times Editorial, May 28 2017
 - India: Growing religiosity is an economic challenge (Pramit Bhattacharya)
 - India: The politics of funeral in Kashmir | Aarti Tikoo Singh

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
19. Pakistan - India: Morparia's cartoon on un-coventional warfare
20. Get up, stand up: Extreme nationalists, racists and bigots enjoy a renaissance across the world | Gautam Adhikari
21. The new mob - State and non-State actors are attacking liberal values together | Manini Chatterjee
22. Shadowy rebels extend Myanmar’s wars | David Scott Mathieson
23. Bebber on Basu's For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front
24. China’s Astounding Religious Revival | Roderick MacFarquhar
25. Malesevic on Stiks. Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States
26. Donald Trump and the surrendering of US leadership | Martin Wolf

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1. BANGLADESH: IN DEFENCE OF SULTANA KAMAL WHO HAS BEEN THREATENED BY ISLAMISTS - NEWSREPORTS AND STATEMENTS FROM HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
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A select compilation of news reports and statements by human rights groups regarding the threat by Islamists to Sultana Kamal the prominent public intellectual and human rights activist in Bangladesh
http://sacw.net/article13303.html

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2. WOMEN EXCLUDED AGAIN FROM AFGHANISTAN’S PEACE TALKS | Heather Barr
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The Kabul Process aims to bring together regional actors to support peace, and to put the Afghan government more clearly in charge than in prior efforts. But in the marginalization of women, the Kabul Process is already a continuation of earlier, unsuccessful, efforts.
http://sacw.net/article13305.html

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3. BANGLADESH: IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF RADICAL UPRISING | Ziauddin Choudhury
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In March 2001, six months before September 11, the Taliban destroyed the famous Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, calling them idols and therefore unIslamic. They cared little about the heritage or culture of Afghanistan. In 2015, the soldiers of the so-called Islamic State in Syria destroyed hundreds of invaluable sculptures from Roman times in the ancient city of Palmyra, because they found them unIslamic. The world was aghast at such savagery. Is Bangladesh on the way to becoming such a country?
http://sacw.net/article13304.html

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4. PAKISTAN: DIVIDING WORKERS ALONG PARTY LINES HAS A NEGATIVE IMPACT ON THE UNIONS.” KARAMAT ALI
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Interview with Karamat Ali conducted by Deneb Sumbul for Newsline Magazine [Pakistan]
http://sacw.net/article13286.html

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5. HYPER SEXUALISED MUJRA IN POST ZIA PAKISTAN: WORKING CLASS WOMEN PERFORMERS AND THEIR MALE WORKING CLASS AUDIENCES | SAAD KHAN
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Over the last two decades, a new form of mujra has come out of the shadows and taken center stage in Punjab, Pakistan. It has evolved into a hyper-sexualized form of dance to suit the demands of its new clientele, working class males. Mujras are now performed in commercial theaters and halls. Seating prices range from 80c–$30 depending on how close you can get to the mujra dancers.
http://sacw.net/article13298.html

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6. INDIA: THE STRUGGLE TO PUNISH THE KILLERS OF PANSARE, KALBURGI AND DABHOLKAR IS LINKED TO THE STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY
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The situation in India is growing more complex by the day. The space for free expression and freedom is shrinking rapidly. The fascist forces are trying to shut voices of freedom and we are compelled to fight the battle in the available space.
http://sacw.net/article13287.html

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7. INDIA: DISTURBING DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MILITARY - CIVIL RELATIONS | Apoorvanand, Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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The relationship between the Indian Army and Indian democracy might be entering new and unchartered waters. . . . The army . . .has even more to fear in the long run from the mob behind it, egging it on.
http://sacw.net/article13289.html

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8. INDIA: THE INHERITORS OF NAXALISM SHOULD LAY DOWN THEIR ARMS AND CHALLENGE THE RULING CLASS TO ABIDE BY THE CONSTITUTION
by Dilip Simeon
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It is time for the establishment to shift its gaze briefly from the stock-market and ask itself what it objects to in Naxalite activity.
http://sacw.net/article13300.html

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9. RAJASTHAN TEXTBOOKS: STICK TO FACTS, DON’T REWRITE HISTORY - Editorial in Hindustan Times
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 While it is understandable that each political party has its own ideology that it would like to propagate, there must be checks and balances in the system to ensure that the facts of history are not changed in school text books with every change of government.
http://sacw.net/article13306.html

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10. INDIA: THE POLITICS AND UNDERCURRENTS OF THE 1939 STRIKE IN TATANAGAR |Dilip Simeon
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Dilip Simeon’s essay takes us back to the tumultuous period in Indian Labour History i.e 1937-­1939 when for the first time Congress acquired power at the Provincial level under the Government of Indian Act of 1935. This crucial period saw an upsurge in popular movements of peasants, workers and other groups whose diverse aspirations were to be represented by the newly formed Congress Governments. Following on the prolonged effects of the Great Depression and waves of rationalisation, there was a spate of labour protests which affected industries all over India, especially in the provinces where Congress was in power. Dr. Simeon takes up the case of alleged strike breaking activity by adivasi workers in a Tatanagar Foundry and weaves in the story of the labour movement of the region where nationalists of various shades, radicals and regional leaders competed for the labour constituency.
http://sacw.net/article13301.html

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11. ALARMING DECLINE IN INDIA’S SEX RATIO PROJECTED
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sex ratio of youth in India has come down to 939 in 2011 from 961 in 1971 and is projected to decline further to 904 in 2021 and to 898 by 2031
http://sacw.net/article13299.html

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12. INDIA: PUBLIC STATEMENT BY PADS ON CONTINUING CASTE VIOLENCE IN SAHARANPUR, UP
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Fifty five Dalit houses were burnt down during the afternoon of May 5 in Shabbirpur village of Saharanpur in northern UP. Attackers belonged to the dominant Rajput community of the area. They were armed with swords, spears, and lathis, and numbered about three thousand.
http://sacw.net/article13297.html
 
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13. INDIA: SWEEPING VICTORY OF THE BJP IN UTTAR PRADESH [ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS 2017] – IS IT AN OUTCOME OF THE MODI WAVE? ITS IMPLICATIONS | Uday Mehta
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http://sacw.net/article13296.html

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14. INDIA: STATEMENT BY KHEDUT SAMAJ-GUJARAT REGARDING POLICE FIRING ON AGITATING FARMERS IN MADHYA PRADESH
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Farmers across Gujarat express shock and grief over police brutality on farmers in Madhya Pradesh; Resolve to strengthen farmers’ movement here and nationally
http://sacw.net/article13294.html

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15. INDIA: THERE’S NO NEED TO BE ALARMED
by Jawed Naqvi
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THERE are not too many media houses left in India that will stand up to Prime Minister Modi’s insidious dismantling of freedoms. Universities are being destroyed by pseudo nationalist bigots, the judiciary is being subverted — how else would a high court judge feel emboldened to pontificate that peacocks are India’s national birds because they live a celibate life and have asexual reproduction? Parliament is being undermined and ordinary people are getting pitted against each other in the name of religion and caste, where Dalits are being torn away from each other to be co-opted as Hindutva’s useful fodder against their own.
http://sacw.net/article13293.html

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16. INDIA: SAHMAT STATEMENT CONDEMNING CBI RAIDS ON THE MEDIA GROUP NDTV
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By attacking the media, the present government is undermining freedom of the press, so essential for a democratic polity.
http://sacw.net/article13295.html

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17. INDIA: WHO ‘LOVES’ MOB VIOLENCE ? UNFOLDING HINDU RASHTRA IN SLOW MOTION
by Subhash Gatade
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In this gloomy situation when majoritarianism is masquerading as democracy and a defacto Hindu Rashtra seems to be coming into existence - albeit in slow motion - question of resistance becomes important. How to envisage it in such a context and how to break new grounds in strategising it remains a key question
http://sacw.net/article13288.html

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18. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - UK: Stop fretting over religious sensitivities. We must push hard against Islamists | Sara Khan
 - India: For 25 days between May 15 and June 8, the Hedgewar Smarak Samiti in Reshimbagh was home to 914 men — in the 18-to-40 age  - India: The battle for Hindu Rashtra is raging inside the Hindu mind – and it is no longer a fringe fantasy (Samar Halarnkar)
 - India: Hindutva’s Tweaking of Ambedkarite Iconography Versus Declining Politics of Social Justice (Abhay Kumar Dubey)
 - India: Why on earth is the Idea of India Collective setting a wrong precedent by organising an Iftar celebration, does this mean they will do celebrations on Diwali, Christmas, Buddha Jayanti etc etc ?
 - India: On Caste violence in Saharanpur - A statement by PADS
 - India: The cow and Savarkar (Vaibhav Purandare)
 - India: Three facts about BJP founder SP Mookerjee that a recent exhibition in Delhi did not show (Shoaib Daniyal)
 - India: How Sabotage By Indira Gandhi’s Advisors Paved the Way for Operation Blue Star (G.S. Chawla)
 - India - Uttar Pradesh: Adityanath visit to disputed site in Ayodhya sends out communal signals (Edit, Times of India)
 - India: With framing of criminal charges against minister Uma Bharti in Babri Masjid demolition case, Modi govt show show her the door - editorial in The Hindu (1 June 2017)
 - India: IIT Bombay students march against “Hindutva vigilantism” on IIT campuses
 - India: Unfolding Hindu Rashtra in Slow Motion (Subhash Gatade)
 - India: Cow Cow Cow cartoon by hemant morparia‏
 - Vigilante Justice in India - The New York Times Editorial, May 28 2017
 - India: Growing religiosity is an economic challenge (Pramit Bhattacharya)
 - India: The politics of funeral in Kashmir | Aarti Tikoo Singh
 - India has the world's worst middle class | Palash Krishna Mehrotra
 - Dalits Embracing Buddhism-Islam to escape caste atrocities
 - India: Hindutva's leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar - collaborated with British rulers & had a role in Gandhi's assassination

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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19. PAKISTAN - INDIA: MORPARIA'S CARTOON ON UN-COVENTIONAL WARFARE
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBDQz4TU0AErgIE.jpg

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20. GET UP, STAND UP: EXTREME NATIONALISTS, RACISTS AND BIGOTS ENJOY A RENAISSANCE ACROSS THE WORLD
by Gautam Adhikari
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(The Times of India - 10 June 2017)

Washington: Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights, sang the late Jamaican reggae master Bob Marley. Would he sing with the same verve if he were around today? He probably would since he’d have star power. But for ordinary folk everywhere, standing up can be a risky move.

Take what happened recently in Portland, Oregon, where two teen girls of colour, one wearing a hijab, were humiliated and asked to leave this country by a white nationalist aboard a local train. Three other passengers, who happened also to be white, got up, stood up, not for their own rights as much as the right of the threatened teenagers to respect and freedom. The nationalist man drew out a knife, killed two protesters and wounded the third. Standing up can cost lives.

You might ask, wasn’t it always so? Yes, but violent hatred in civil society outside the battlefield is, by all accounts, bursting out more and more frequently, most disturbingly in democratic societies. Democracy is civilisation’s best, if imperfect, foil to brute force. But when it’s untethered to the rule of law within a constitutional system devised and managed by pragmatic minds, it can degenerate into mob rule or tyranny, as Plato had feared. In a degenerate democracy, random or organised violence becomes the norm. Citizens cower in resignation.

I, along with my wife and two daughters, have been fortunate to live in a rather extraordinary segment of space-time. And we have been luckier still in spending these interesting times in the two largest democracies in the world, India and the United States. The second half of the 20th century has by and large been a period of peace and prosperity. Sure, there have been hot wars as well as a major cold war but no worldwide conflagration. Nuclear annihilation has so far been averted. Pestilence is under control and no major pandemic like bubonic plague or deadly influenza or small pox has broken out.

Medical breakthroughs unprecedented in history have lengthened lifespans across humanity. Famines have broken out in this period, mass murders of ethnic groups have happened. At the same time, scientific and technological advances have erupted at an unprecedented pace altering the way we live our lives for mostly the better though, in some cases, not so much.

The 21st century thus far has been less promising about our future. The rapid advance of liberal democracy evident in the last decade of the last century suddenly appears to be in retreat. I don’t want to sound alarmist but, in one respect at least, democracy is back to the wall in several countries. It’s the imperilled right to stand up for rights through the right of free speech.

Free speech is not without its downside, particularly in its hold-your-nose tolerance of verbal hatred and its consequent incitement to violence. As Voltaire said, perhaps apocryphally: “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Marley urged us to stand up for our rights taking for granted that crucial right of democracy: the right to free speech.

Extreme nationalists, racists, bigots of all shades are having a renaissance across the world. They are encouraged by a type of leader who makes intolerance a legitimate political platform. Such leaders have always been there but on the fringes. They have now emerged in power around the world. Liberals, much reviled by the far right and far left, are on the defensive.

The right is currently leading the charge against free speech. But the extreme left is complicit. In campuses across the US, speakers are not being allowed to speak because they espouse causes that go against the narrative of the left. Worse, there is an alarming demand for ‘safe spaces’ for those who see themselves as victims of society and a growing movement against ‘cultural appropriation’, by which members of a minority culture should have sole rights to express themselves about their grievances and no one else should be allowed to do so.

Gandhi, King, and Mandela would have been aghast. But they are so 20th century, aren’t they?


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21. THE NEW MOB - STATE AND NON-STATE ACTORS ARE ATTACKING LIBERAL VALUES TOGETHER | Manini Chatterjee
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(The Telegraph - 12 June 2017)

It is not often that you come across, on the same day and in the same space, two voices from diametrically opposite ends of the ideological spectrum saying much the same thing.

The first was that of Arundhati Roy, the feisty writer who has for over two decades now relentlessly dissected the depredations of the Indian State and the festering fault lines of Indian society.

In an interview that was published on June 4 in The Indian Express, Roy said, "There are two ways of curbing speech. One, as we know, is legally, formally; the other is outsourcing the violence to the mob and creating a climate in which people start censoring themselves."

On the same day, the newspaper carried a report on an interaction that had taken place between the Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman, Sambit Patra, and the chief minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar, in Panaji on June 3. In the discussion, Parrikar was asked why the Modi government was not taking action against anti-nationals. He replied, "Let me tell you. This government and Modi's biggest achievement is the change that has been brought in the way the country thinks." The "change in people's mindset," he said, will "go against [the] anti-nationals," and added for good measure, "[t]hose who are against the nation. People will stop them."

Parrikar's words were an eerie echo of Roy's dark prognosis. The Modi regime, he confirmed, was indeed outsourcing the violence to the mob. The mob, in their scheme of things, were nationalist citizens who went after 'anti-nationals' - a term left deliberately vague to include anyone who said anything against the government, against the concept of Hindutva and its holy cows, literally and figuratively.

Almost in tandem, both Roy and Parrikar drew attention to India's chilling new reality. Critics of the regime have come out in the open to compare today's climate with that during Indira Gandhi's infamous Emergency.

But there is a difference. The Emergency, to be sure, was much more overtly repressive with blanket press censorship and jail terms for Opposition leaders and activists. But at that time, both readers and writers knew that what appeared in the media was government propaganda - not to be taken seriously. And the battle lines were drawn between an authoritarian State and a hapless people, who took their revenge as soon as they got the chance when Indira Gandhi chose to go in for elections even without formally lifting the Emergency.

The situation today is qualitatively different. On the surface, there are no restrictions on the media or the Opposition. But what we are witnessing is, arguably, more insidious and sinister, more damaging in the long run than the formal lapse of democracy in those 21 months of Emergency.

For today, unlike then, both State and non-State actors are carrying out a pincer attack on secular and liberal values, on free speech and free thought, on ways of seeing and living, on a daily basis. While the State can and does use its immense powers to crack down on opponents, it is left to the mob to impose the new code of conduct - in the garb of a righteous hyper nationalism - on fellow citizens who dare to err or refuse to fall in line.

It is a perfect division of labour. So the government can use the Central Bureau of Investigation to get after a seemingly hostile television channel, announce new rules to bring a virtual end to cattle trade and the meat and leather industries, tighten the screws against all kinds of non-governmental organizations by starving them of funds. But the day-to-day intimidation - the nasty abuse, the menacing threats, the shrill diatribes, and the physical violence - is, as Roy says, outsourced to the mob, or what Parrikar and his ideological brethren regard as right-spirited nationalist citizens.

What makes the contemporary situation scary is the metamorphosis of the mob. India is no stranger to violence, and anyone who has witnessed a riot would know how perfectly normal people could turn into bloodthirsty beasts, looting and killing with mindless abandon in the space of a few hours or a few days. But once the madness was over, the situation invariably - to use the stock newspaper phrase, "limped back to normalcy", and people resumed their old selves and returned to their quotidian concerns.

The Modi government prides itself on the fact that there has been no bloody riot under its watch. But the truth is that the temporary cleavage in society during a riot is fast becoming a permanent fault line in our collective psyche. The hate and violence that used to be episodic eruptions are now part of everyday discourse.

The second aspect of the metamorphosis is that the mob is no longer faceless groups of men who can be sneeringly dismissed as the 'lumpen'. The vigilantes on the streets may meet that description. Usually affiliated to one or the other front of the amorphous sangh parivar, bands of young men with their saffron bandannas can switch from being 'ghar wapsi' crusaders to 'anti-Romeo' squads to ' gau rakshaks' to 'Rana Pratap warriors' with practised ease - loyal foot soldiers to whatever cause the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chooses to highlight for the moment.

But the real strength of the new mob is that it is no longer confined to thugs on the streets who lynch to death a Pehlu Khan or enter the home of a Mohammad Akhlaque to kill him.

The new mob is part of our very own middle class - men and women who are 'educated', hold professional jobs, were beneficiaries of the old order and have now become aggressive advocates of the macho "new" India. This middle class aggression can be seen and felt every day on television channels and social media. Recently, for instance, the renowned scholar, Partha Chatterjee, was pilloried for his nuanced article on how the defence of the army chief, Bipin Rawat, of the use of a 'human shield' carried echoes of General Dyer's justification of the firing at Jallianwala Bagh. Without bothering to read the article or respond to it with an equally reasoned critique, TV anchors were baying for his blood and social media warriors declaring him a paid agent of Pakistan.

Since Chatterjee does not live in a BJP-ruled state and is not beholden to the State even tangentially, he escaped more stringent 'punishment'. But others, less brave or less free, will not dare to express a contrary opinion, for that would mean summary dismissal or worse.

That's what happened to Keyur Joshi, the co-founder and strategic adviser of the travel portal, Make My Trip. On May 31, Joshi posted two tweets that said, "I am a strong supporter of Narendra Modi and a vegetarian for life. But I will now eat beef only in India to support freedom for food," and "If Hinduism takes away right to choice of food, I rather not be a Hindu..."

The backlash was swift. A social media campaign was launched to uninstall the app and downgrade the travel site and it was so effective that Joshi had to issue an abject apology and delete his tweets as well as his Twitter account. This was not the first time that the social media had effectively flexed their muscle. Snapdeal was forced to drop Aamir Khan as its brand ambassador after he fell foul of the 'nationalists' for his comments on growing intolerance.

These public instances apart, the mentality of the mob is now omnipresent. We can see it in family WhatsApp groups, in Facebook shares - a fond uncle expressing a bigoted view about Kashmiris you never expected him to harbour, an old schoolmate sharing 'jokes' that are laced with prejudice. And the worst part of the coarsening discourse is that everyone - no matter which side of the fence they stand - is becoming that much more bitter and shrill.

The mob is no longer at the gate. It has entered our homes, it has invaded our minds, it has expanded its grip over family and friends, it threatens to engulf both you and me...

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22. SHADOWY REBELS EXTEND MYANMAR’S WARS | David Scott Mathieson
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(Asia Times, June 11, 2017)

The little-known Arakan Army, one of the country's newest insurgent outfits, is responsible for rising violence in the country's remote western regions

The stirring soundtrack of the video ‘Dream in Our Heart’ is accompanied by statements of defiance by ethnic Rakhine soldiers, male and female, of the Arakan Army (AA) from their mountain redoubt in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State.

Army commander Major General Twan Mrat Naing (aka Tun Myat Naing) speaks to the camera: “Our message to Naypyidaw and Burmese army is we will never ever give up, we will fight until we achieve our objective.”

That objective, articulated in the video widely distributed online, is the total liberation of Myanmar’s Rakhine State from “Burmese fascism” and the Myanmar army which has long occupied Rakhine State and oppressed its people.

The little known Arakan Army is unique in that as one of Myanmar’s smallest ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) still fighting the central government, it operates in four ethnic states at either end of this large country: far from ‘home’ in Kachin and northern Shan States, and in the west in the borderlands of Chin and Rakhine State, where many of the groups fighters hail from.

Formed in April 2009, the AA’s central aims are self-determination for the Arakan people, to safeguard national identity and cultural heritage and promote ‘national’ dignity. Its political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), was formed soon after the militant wing.

The army partly formed as a response to widespread frustration amongst young Rakhine with the largely moribund Arakan Liberation Party/Army (ALP/A) and its political wing based on the Thailand-Myanmar border, which only ever operated alongside the large Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and not for many years in Rakhine State.

The ALP signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement in October 2015, and some of its members have voiced support for the AA and condemned allegations of Myanmar army abuses against its supporters.

Most international understanding of ethnic Rakhine grievances stem from the long persecution of Rohingya Muslims and communal violence which rocked the state in 2012. But this obscures long-standing resentment of decades-long of neglect by the Myanmar state which has made Rakhine State one of Myanmar’s least developed and poverty wracked areas.
Migrants collect rainwater at a temporary refugee camp near Kanyin Chaung jetty, in Myanmar June 4, 2015. Soe Zeya Tun: This group of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were rescued from a boat carrying 734 people off Myanmar's southern coast. Those on board had been at sea for more than two months - at the end with little food or water. The men in this photo were part of a group of 400 crammed into a warehouse by Myanmar police. They had arrived the day before, but while the women, children and some men had already been moved, these men were left behind. There was no sign of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR or foreign aid agencies. Just moments before this shot, the sky opened and the monsoon rains started coming down. The men were jostling with each other for space to catch water in their bottles and plates. The authorities were hesitant to grant us access at first, but as the morning wore on and the rains started, we were able to enter and start photographing and speaking to migrants. Just after taking this photo, the men were loaded into buses and trucks and driven to a camp where international aid agencies were waiting. I have worked on long and difficult assignments where I have gone days without a proper shower. But for these people it had been months without enough water. Everyone was dirty and had likely washed little while at sea. I could see just how meaningful it was for them to suddenly have a chance to drink and clean themselves with whatever small amount of water they could capture. 

Migrants collect rainwater at a temporary refugee camp near Kanyin Chaung jetty, in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, June 4, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

The AA explicitly uses the colonial era Arakan terminology, rejecting ‘Rakhine’ as a Myanmar term that implicitly sees the Rakhine as second class citizens, and that fuels broader Myanmar ridicule of the Rakhine as yokels who speak a tortured dialect of the Burmese language, akin to the dismissal of people from the Deep South in the United States.

The Kingdom of Arakan was sacked by the Myanmar kings in the 15th Century, and evidence of this rich cultural heritage is preserved in the ancient ruins of Mrauk-U.

Drawing on disaffected migrant workers from the Hpakant jade mines, the AA was hosted and trained by the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s oldest and most sophisticated insurgent groups. Within two years, the AA was on the frontline alongside its Kachin allies, after the 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin and government collapsed in 2011, leading to heavy fighting which displaced over 100,000 civilians, hundreds of civilian casualties and destroyed villages, and combatant casualties numbering in the several thousand.

The AA operates in Northern Shan State as part of the Northern Alliance, which includes the Kokang-Chinese Myanmar Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta-ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and Brigades 4 and 6 of the Kachin Independence Army. Underscoring the bewildering relationships of the Myanmar civil war, the Arakan Army also operated alongside ethnic-Myanmar soldiers of the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF) until that group signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in October 2015.

The alliance has markedly stepped up operations against government targets, including the November 20, 2016 attack on the China-Myanmar border trade city of Muse, in which several civilians were killed and injured, bridges blown up, and the subsequent seizing of the border town of Mong Ko, before alliance fighters were driven from the town by the Tatmadaw’s use of heavy artillery and air-strikes.

The Northern Shan State fighting has been largely eclipsed by international attention on the repression of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, but it seizes domestic attention far more because of its marked intensification in recent years.

The Alliance assault on the former MNDAA stronghold of Laukkai in March, in which AA troops took part, included attacks on the main hotel and casino in which civilians and policemen alike were targeted, and allegedly scores of men and women were abducted as human shields during the insurgents retreat into the hills.
Miners search for jade stones at a mine dump at a Hpakant jade mine in Kachin state, Myanmar November 25, 2015. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX1VQOM
Miners search for jade stones at a mine dump at a Hpakant jade mine in Kachin state, Myanmar November 25, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

The AA’s participation in these northern operations for the past several years is predicated on the expansion of their trained and battle-tested fighters to open a front in their home state. As early as 2013, Rakhine political leaders were lobbying the previous government of U Thein Sein to open an area for AA fighters to relocate from Kachin State to Rakhine State, although with little support from the government.

In 2015, the AA opened a new area of operations in the borderlands of Buthidaung, Kyauktaw, and Mrauk-U townships of Rakhine State, and Paletwa township of Chin State close to the Bangladesh border. In several bouts of fighting between the AA and the Tatmadaw, the military admitted to losing several troops, including officers to Arakanese sniper fire.

The Tatmadaw reported 15 clashes between December 28, 2015 to January 4, 2016 in which large amounts of weapons and ammunition were captured. Fighting flared again in April and May, and in December 2016 in Paletwa, as Tatmadaw troops continued to sweep the area to interdict AA movements along the borderlands.

According to AA sources, the Tatmadaw have deployed ten battalions from their Western Command and Military Operations Command 15 based in Buthidaung to pacify their movements in three townships (Infantry battalions 374, 375, 376, 539 in Kyauktaw, 377, 378, 540 in Mrauk U, and 379, 380 and 540 in Min Bya).

The current size of the AA is difficult to measure. Some estimates place their total numbers at 1,500, which is fairly standard size for many smaller ethnic insurgent groups, while training in the north continues to attract large numbers of male and female recruits. (The KIA numbers around 7,000, while the United Wa State Army has over 25,000 under arms.)

The fighting has generated a cycle of dynamic civilian displacement necessitating international and national relief operations to supplement large humanitarian operations that exist for civilians displaced by communal violence in 2012 and responses to natural disasters.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported 1,100 IDP’s in eight temporary sites in Kyauktaw, Rathedaung and Buthidaung, and worked with Rakhine relief agencies and the state government to assist civilians.
Policemen stand guard as firemen work to extinguish fire during fighting between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities in Sittwe June 10, 2012. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has voiced deep concern over sectarian violence in Myanmar, unrest that threatens to endanger democratic and economic reforms in the country after decades of military-ruled isolation. Picture taken June 10, 2012. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun (MYANMAR - Tags: SOCIETY CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW) - RTR33H1N
Policemen stand guard as firemen work to extinguish fire during fighting between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities in Sittwe June 10, 2012. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

Reports of extortion, ill-treatment and forced recruitment by the AA have increased, which are often countered by allegations of Tatmadaw brutality, including in one statement “witnesses and victims described how the armed forces forcedly (sic) displaced entire villages and destroyed, beatings with the barrel of a gun, executions, gun rape, looting and the burning of their homes.”

The fighting has exacerbated tensions between the AA and ethnic Chin civilians in Paletwa, and has sparked public criticism by Chin leaders and reports from the Chin Human Rights Organization that AA soldiers have been abducting Chin civilians, using others as forced labor, and planting landmines around civilian areas.

Chin political parties have condemned both sides of using of landmines without apportioning specific blame for reports of widespread human rights violations. Just days ago, Indian media reported that an estimated 300 Chin civilians, predominantly women and children, had fled Myanmar to seek sanctuary in Mizoram in northeast India, claiming that the AA had detained the men from Ralie village inside Chin State.

The AA dismissed these allegations in a statement posted to Facebook, and alleged that renegade Arakan Liberation Army soldiers were masquerading as AA forces to extort money from civilians and discredit the insurgent outfit. In such isolated settings, verifying various allegations of abuses is almost impossible.

The Myanmar military has responded to the the AA’s increased operations in Rakhine State with a wave of arrests of civilians suspected of providing material support to the insurgents. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma, 58 Rakhine civilians have been sentenced under Section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act, with eight more facing trial while in detention in Sittwe Prison.

Bonds between Rakhine politicians, activists and the AA are tight: Maj-Gen Twan Mrat Naing’s father-in-law is the Rakhine State parliamentary Speaker of the House, U Saw Kyaw Hla.
Tun Myat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army (AA), attends a meeting of leaders of Myanmar's ethnic armed groups at the United Wa State Army (UWSA) headquarters in Pansang in Myanmar's northern Shan State, May 6, 2015. Rebel leaders in Myanmar on Wednesday urged the government to amend the military-drafted constitution to give more autonomy to ethnic minorities, a step they said would make it easier to sign a national ceasefire agreement. REUTERS/Stringer - RTX1BTVZ
Tun Myat Naing, aka Twan Mrat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army (AA), attends a meeting of ethnic armed group leaders at the United Wa State Army (UWSA) headquarters on May 6, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

In early April, the authorities stopped a fund-raising football match in Mrauk-U, dubbed the ‘Arakan Army Cup’ during the annual Thingyan water festival, and arrested a Buddhist abbot Nanda Thara and a lay supporter Khaing Ni Min charging them under Section 505 of the Penal Code related to causing public alarm or inciting people to violence.

These arrests have evinced widespread protests throughout Rakhine State and contribute to a sense of persistent Burman persecution of the Rakhine, the dismissal of their political aspirations, the continued plunder of their natural resources with only perfunctory development projects from the central state to assuage them.

Further antagonizing Rakhine political leaders, in May 2016 the national parliamentary speaker U Win Myint blocked a proposal by ANP MP Daw Khin Saw Wai for an urgent discussion on aid for civilians displaced by fighting between the AA and Myanmar army, because, the speaker said, the proposal was predicated more on raising the issue to push for inclusion of the AA in the nationwide ceasefire process.

The AA attended the Union Peacemaking Conference in Naypyidaw, having been invited as part of the Northern Alliance, facilitated by the Chinese special envoy to the peace talks. But the AA’s attendance comes after two years of official denunciations of their activities, with statements from both the military and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi being all but identical, demanding the group disarm and then seek peace.
Myanmar's General Min Aung Hlaing takes part during a parade to mark the 72nd Armed Forces Day in the capital Naypyitaw, Myanmar March 27, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX32TZF
Myanmar’s General Min Aung Hlaing takes part during a parade to mark the 72nd Armed Forces Day in the capital Naypyitaw, Myanmar March 27, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

Defense Minister Lieutenant General Sein Win told the national parliament the AA had to cease its activities and sign the controversial nationwide ceasefire agreement. In a statement from Suu Kyi in March, she warned the non-signatories to the ceasefire that the only way to achieve peace was to sign, and to be ‘extremely careful’ in how they respond to that condition.

Exactly how does the AA pay for all this expanding activity? Given their popularity in Rakhine State, tax collection not just amongst supporters in their home state, but the many thousands of migrant workers in peri-urban factories of Yangon and the jade mines of Kachin State and Sagaing Region would be lucrative.

Involvement in the drug trade cannot be ruled out. In one of the most evocative front pages of the state-run newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar, in February 2016, the headline boldly proclaimed ‘How to Fund a War’, outlining a series of raids and arrests of AA officers in Yangon in which large numbers of arms and ammunition were seized, and reportedly 330,800 methamphetamine pills, or yaba.

The AA issued a ‘condemnation letter’ on the same day refuting the allegations as “childish and undignified” and blamed the Myanmar military for being the main player in the drug trade. Reporting on the drug trade in Rakhine State is perilous: last March the Sittwe home of the online editor of the Root Investigation Agency, Min Min, was bombed and the journalist forced to flee to Yangon.

International analysts reporting on restive Rakhine State guardedly claim that the AA has rarely publicly articulated anti-Rohingya or anti-Muslim sentiments, even though many AA officers will privately declare that Rohingya are all Bengali illegal immigrants and should leave: a position identical to the Myanmar army and many ultra-nationalist activists in the country.
People and Buddhist monks protest while Malaysian NGO's aid ship carrying food and emergency supplies for Rohingya Muslims arrives at the port in Yangon, Myanmar February 9, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun
People and Buddhist monks protest against ethnic Rohingya Muslims many claim are illegal migrants in Yangon, Myanmar February 9, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

This changed recently, however. Following the coordinated attacks on Myanmar Border Guard Police outposts in Maungtaw by suspected Rohingya militants of the Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement, later renamed as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army), the ULA/AA issued a press release which called the militants “savage Bengali Muslim terrorists” and the violence a “rampage of the Bengali Islamic fundamentalist militants in Northern Arakan.”

The statement furthermore said “(T)he bordered area (sic) of the Northern Arakan and other cities such as Rangoon (Yangon) are now suffering adverse effects as a result of Arakan’s bordering with the population explosion of Bangladesh, the excessive entering of illegal Bengali immigrants into Arakan for decades and the neglect of the successive Burmese regimes to the Bengali’s intrusion and territorial expansion.”

There is little likelihood that the AA’s attendance at the largely symbolic Panglong 21st Century will make any real headway in addressing Rakhine grievances, and the expansion of their armed operations looks set to continue.

The intense nationalist messages expressed by Maj Gen Twan Mrat Naing and the AA troops under his command are widely held in Rakhine State, where resentment against the Myanmar state and military is widespread, and often misunderstood by the outside world which identifies Rakhine political grievances as being primarily driven by anti-Rohingya sentiment.

This lack of understanding of the AA’s armed revolt will only further postpone the resolution of the conflict and prolong the communal divisions that have generated conflict in Rakhine State for years. This is a dimension of the civil war in Myanmar that is only getting worse, not better, and is dangerously misunderstood.

David Scott Mathieson is a Yangon-based independent analyst

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23. BEBBER ON BASU'S FOR KING AND ANOTHER COUNTRY: INDIAN SOLDIERS ON THE WESTERN FRONT
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 Shrabani Basu. For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 256 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-93-8405291-1.

Reviewed by Brett Bebber (Old Dominion University)
Published on H-War (March, 2017)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Shrabani Basu’s recent addition to the emerging literature on the British Indian Army in the First World War is full of the sentimentalism that has long characterized popular histories of military engagement. The book weaves together several stories of individual soldiers in a mostly coherent narrative that begins with the German ship bombing of Madras in September 1914 and ends with the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.  Basu’s central contribution is tracing the lives of twelve Indians across a wide range of social ranks—from a sweeper to a rifleman to a maharaja—throughout the war years. Throughout, Basu attempts to include the experiences of disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration Indian recruits suffered, but her emphasis on sacrifice and mutual appreciation between British and Indian participants often washes out these other threads.  

Especially in the early chapters, Basu endlessly praises Indian soldiers’ bravery in battle and loyalty to Britain. Indeed, her characters rarely display any emotions besides their despair of the war and their fealty to the empire’s cause. The frames of this story are well known: Indian soldiers enthusiastically signed up for war, suffered the poor weather and terrible conditions of the trenches, experienced massive death and destruction, and within weeks wanted to return home. The opening chapters cover her characters’ departure from Bombay and Karachi in August 1914 and their first action defending Ypres in October. She is keen to point out their valiant and indispensable contribution to defending the western front. “The Germans would have reached the ports, were it not for them,” she declares (p. xxi), and points out that the 1.5 million soldiers that British India sent to the front lines outnumbered the combined armies of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. In each descriptive chapter—of the trenches, of the long winters, of Indian aviators—she underscores the reciprocal feeling of admiration between Indian soldiers and British officers, and uses their words to highlight this profound respect. But one cannot help noticing that this dominant impression has been selected by an author keen to play on well-tested mechanisms that can inspire an audience, but render much of the struggles and desperation about war and identity in the margins.

Basu’s most enlightening additions come from her finely detailed descriptions of the accommodations the British made for the Indians at the front and in Britain to allow soldiers to maintain their religious practices and diet. The third chapter on the Comfort Kameti, a group of high-society Britons with interests in India, discusses the construction of two hospitals for ailing Indian men. Despite providing respite and care for the wounded, the Kameti (Committee) established a network of gift-giving and provision specifically for Indian soldiers. It graciously distributed teas, spices, sweets, foods, board games, coconut oil, Indian tobaccos, and copies of religious texts across Britain and France. Basu acutely details how the Kameti acquired funds, took requests, and delivered specialized items to meet Indian entreaties. Basu suggests that the British volunteers “learnt the lessons from the Mutiny” and attempted to ensure good relations while Indians were far away from their homes (p. 40).

Another series of interesting insights comes from the letters written by Indian soldiers collated by the War Office under new censorship guidelines that attempted to minimize the ability of sepoys to inadvertently reveal strategic operations and prevent them from proactively fomenting resistance to the war effort. The British clearly feared Indians in their midst, and constantly monitored their activities as they carried out their duties. Outside of the censored files, Basu does not discuss her other sources specifically. The notes and bibliography suggest that she pulled much of her information from early published histories of the war, diaries and journals of soldiers, and interviews with their descendants. The author has put in some time at the National Archives and the British Library as well to elicit British officers’ views of their Indian charges. This research has led to the book’s lasting achievement. The volume effectively makes the stories of twelve Indian men accessible to a wide audience in plain language. Basu’s book is sure to be devoured by those who would like to understand Indian participation from a personal perspective. It also allows the reader to see the war through multiple sets of Indian eyes, and Basu should be applauded for following the stories of a wide cast of characters. Chapter 6 on the first winter in Europe does this well, tracing how Indians of various backgrounds felt about the extension of the war beyond Christmas.

Other sections of the book briefly explore more troublesome and conflictual narratives of Indian participation. Sections on topics like Indian desertion, and specifically on British fears of Indian defectors, become more frequent as the book progresses. But these accounts are truncated, and lack the analytical thrust to dislodge Basu’s insistence on the twin themes of loyalty and mutual respect with the British. Indian frustrations with British racisms and fears of miscegenation in Brighton in chapter 10, for example, are outlined well but eventually elided as the result of Indian soldiers—like all soldiers—wanting to return home. Interrogating the origins and importance of overt racisms and gendered medical discourses about Indian “hysteria” during the war must await further attention elsewhere. More focus on the strategic contributions of Indian regiments, as well as on the recruitment of soldiers in India, would also help satisfy military historians’ desire to understand their contribution beyond the perspective of the subjective individual. Nonetheless, in the end, the book hopefully stirs more interest in colonial troops, and especially Indian volunteers, to the British war effort. Basu demonstrates that seeing the war through Indian eyes can be both frightening and inspirational.

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24. CHINA’S ASTOUNDING RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
Roderick MacFarquhar
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(The New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017 Issue)

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao	
by Ian Johnson
Pantheon, 455 pp., $30.00
Sim Chi Yin/VII/Redux
Worshipers at the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple in central Beijing, March 2014

If there were just one Chinese in the world, he could be the lonely sage contemplating life and nature whom we come across on the misty mountains of Chinese scrolls. If there were two Chinese in the world, a man and a woman, lo, the family system is born. And if there were three Chinese, they would form a tight-knit, hierarchically organized bureaucracy.

But how many Chinese would there have to be to generate a religion? It could be just one—that Daoist sage in the mountains—but in reality it takes a village, according to Ian Johnson in his wonderful new book, The Souls of China. Chinese religion, Johnson writes, had little to do with adherence to a particular faith. Instead, it was primarily “part of belonging to your community. A village had its temples, its gods, and they were honored on certain holy days.” Or, traditionally, it could also take a workplace: “Almost every profession venerated a god…. The list is inexhaustible….” Chinese religion “was spread over every aspect of life like a fine membrane that held society together.”

At the outset of this account of China’s astounding religious revival since the end of the Mao era in the 1970s, Johnson explains the differences between Chinese religious traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—and the “Abrahamic” faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: “Chinese religion had little theology, almost no clergy, and few fixed places of worship.” Confucianism was largely a moral code of what the upright person should aim to achieve by self-cultivation. In the Analects, Confucius famously advised: “Respect ghosts and spirits, but keep them at a distance.” For the Master, it was enough if he or one of his disciples could gain the ear of a Chinese ruler and sort out the problems of the visible world.

Daoists were freer spirits who refused to be bound by Confucian rules of propriety, and they had their own religious rituals. Only Buddhists used their faith, imported from India around the first century AD under the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), to build up a sizable monastic establishment with considerable political power, but it was reduced in size and influence in the later Tang (618–907). By then Buddhism had long been accepted as a Chinese religion.

Thereafter, for Chinese it was not really a matter of choosing: the three traditional “teachings” were a smorgasbord on offer to all and sundry in the community, and representatives of each would perform on demand, and for a price, their particular rituals on appropriate occasions such as funerals. According to Johnson, “for most of Chinese history, people believed in an amalgam of these faiths that is best described as ‘Chinese Religion.’”

Over the centuries, the Abrahamic faiths began to spread into China. Nestorian Christians arrived from Asia Minor in 635 after disputes over doctrine with both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches. They flourished under the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty and again under Mongol rule but then effectively disappeared. Muslim traders also arrived under the Tang, but in far larger numbers under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) when Islam was spreading throughout Central Asia. Jews settled in Kaifeng when it was the capital of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), and flourished for a while, but gradually the community seems to have faded. Under the Ming (1368–1644), considerable pressure was put on the adherents of non-Chinese religions to assimilate.

Of all those professing foreign faiths, it was the Jesuits who had the greatest impact in premodern China. Arriving in the late sixteenth century, Matteo Ricci emerged as their most prominent leader. He and his colleagues impressed the Confucian elite with their knowledge of science in general and astronomy in particular, for the emperor had to demonstrate to his people a satisfactory relationship with heaven.

The Jesuits flourished particularly after the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) supplanted the Ming. The emperor Kang Xi (r. 1661–1722) put the Jesuits in charge of the royal observatory, and even more significantly issued an edict permitting the practice of Christianity throughout the empire:

    The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition…. We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practised according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition. 

Unfortunately for the Jesuits they became embroiled in a decades-long dispute with the Dominican and Franciscan orders, which accused them of doctrinal sins for their permissiveness about Confucianism. Despite Kang Xi’s support, the pope backed the Jesuits’ critics in what became known as the “Rites controversy,” and in 1742, the church definitively declared Chinese rites incompatible with Christianity. In 1724, Kang Xi’s successor proscribed Christianity as heterodoxy: Christianity thereby lost its best chance of emulating Buddhism and becoming accepted as a Chinese religion.

Christian missionaries returned, however, if not under auspicious circumstances. John Fairbank, the great expert on nineteenth-century Western trade along the China coast, used to regale his Harvard students with tales of merchants selling opium from one side of their boat while missionaries were handing out Bibles on the other side. Missionaries were not welcomed at court any longer; their most prominent nineteenth-century “convert” was Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and led the midcentury Taiping rebellion, which lasted fourteen years, cost an estimated 20 million lives, and almost brought down the Qing empire.

Missionaries persisted, and though the rate of conversion was disappointing, their influence grew through the establishment of schools, colleges, and hospitals. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who led the struggle that brought down the Qing dynasty in 1912, was converted, as was his successor Chiang Kai-shek. But they were infused with a modernizing zeal that held that traditional Chinese faiths, particularly folk religions, were superstitions and had to be suppressed; hundreds of thousands of folk temples were destroyed. Only the most important Buddhist and Daoist temples survived.

When the Communists took over China in 1949, they organized the five religions they acknowledged—Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—into associations, part of their United Front with non-Communists. Temples and churches remained open. But foreigners could not be members of the United Front, and Christianity suffered what the writer David Aikman has called its “third vanishing.” Around ten thousand Protestant and Catholic missionaries were thrown out of China, some after being brainwashed. They left behind an estimated three million Catholics and one million Protestants, to be strictly guided by the Party.

Even this relatively mild dispensation did not last as Mao embraced ever more radical policies, culminating in the Cultural Revolution, during which virtually every place of worship, traditional and foreign, was shuttered and its priests humiliated and driven out. It is against this background of many decades of hostility and persecution by modernizers and Communists that Ian Johnson recounts the amazing revival that has taken place over the past forty years among all faiths in China.

Opinion surveys are notoriously unreliable, but when the question concerns ties to a religious faith in a country ruled by an atheistic Communist Party, then extreme caution and perhaps prevarication on the part of those interviewed would be understandable. In view of this the numbers emerging from successive surveys are remarkable: some 200 million Buddhists and Daoists, 50–60 million Protestants, 10 million Catholics, and 20–25 million Muslims. In addition, there may be 175 million who practice some form of folk religion or belong to small sects. Official surveys have revealed that there are half a million Buddhist monks and nuns in 33,000 temples, and 48,000 Daoist priests and nuns affiliated with 9,000 Daoist temples. The great majority of Protestants are members of underground or “house churches.” Assuming these are at least approximately accurate figures, around a third of the country’s 1.3 billion people admit to a need for a faith to sustain them.

Of course, all religious organizations operate under the watchful eyes of local police, and not all adherents are treated with benign neglect. Tibetan Buddhists are tightly controlled, because most are still loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama, and some have committed suicide. In Xinjiang, there is regular unrest partly because Muslim Uighurs have had restrictions placed upon the practice of their faith. Both Tibetans and Uighurs are suspected to be national “splittists” by the Han Chinese authorities in Beijing.

The faith that has been the most brutally treated is Falun Gong, a sect that started as part of the popular revival in the 1980s of traditional qigong practices involving exercises and meditation. At one point, it was said to have had 100 million followers. But in April 1999, some ten thousand petitioners turned up unannounced outside the Zhongnanhai leadership complex in Beijing to ask the central government to halt a newspaper campaign against Falun Gong. The degree to which the sect was secretly organized was clearly alarming to the authorities, and General Secretary Jiang Zemin ordered a full-scale crackdown, which resulted in the deaths of many adherents, often from abuse in custody. In this case, it was the deep roots of Falun Gong in traditional Chinese practices and its widespread following, including within the Party, rather than any foreign connections that frightened the Communist leaders.
Calum MacLeod/USA Today
Wang Yi, the founder and pastor of the Protestant Early Rain Reformed Church, Chengdu, circa 2014

Johnson takes us through the Chinese lunar year, which is associated with many traditional religious and community activities, as the backdrop to telling us of contemporary faith as practiced mainly by three groups of people: a family that makes an annual pilgrimage to a particular temple in Beijing; a Daoist family in Shanxi; and a group of Protestant Christians in Chengdu.

On the first day of the lunar year, you stay at home with your family. On the second day, you pay visits. In Beijing Johnson paid his respects to the “elders and betters” of the Ni family, the eighty-one-year-old patriarch, Ni Zhenshan, and his fifty-six-year-old son, Ni Jincheng. “Betters” because “they understood infinitely more”:

    They knew all the holidays on the traditional calendar, the right way to kowtow before a statue, how to recite sutras, which cigarettes to smoke and which grain alcohol to drink. They knew which fruits to eat in April and why you never make a gift of a knife or a plum. 

In the 1990s, after old Mr. Ni had recovered from kidney cancer, he fulfilled a vow to make a pilgrimage to the temple of Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, one of the most popular goddesses in northern China, on a mountain forty miles from the center of Beijing. On the way back he told his son he would like to set up his own pilgrimage association. Such organizations involve much hard work, expense, and time. Mr. Ni wanted his to serve pilgrims free tea and steamed buns, and thus the Whole Heart Philanthropic Salvation Tea Association was established. It required a shrine and an altar, expensive crockery, and a lot of green tea. The family stele by the temple would ensure that the memory of the Nis’ charity would live on.

Johnson becomes so entwined with the Ni family that, three months later, on the thirtieth day of the third lunar month, the eve of the annual pilgrimage to the temple of Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, he drives supplies up the mountain for the Ni’s Tea Association. During the festival, Wang Defeng, the Communist official who oversaw the rebuilding of the temple in the 1980s and now runs the festival, explains to Johnson that, though a materialist himself, he does his job “for Our Lady. That’s my service, to make sure she is respected properly.” He was not a believer, but like Confucians down the ages, his duty was his faith. Johnson’s account of the festival and his encounters there is a masterpiece of observation and empathy; he seems to disarm most Chinese he meets into thinking he is one of them (though there are hints that some of them might not be averse to publicity).

After two weeks, the Chinese New Year festivities end with a “Lantern Festival.” Johnson spends it with another clan, the Li family, who have been yinyang men—providers of religious services—for nine generations. Johnson describes yinyang men as “a cross between a geomancer, a fortune-teller, and a funeral director.” They carry out “a form of family-based Daoism that was how the religion was originally practiced…yinyang priests are masters of the yin world—the dark world of death—but also the yang world of brightness and life.” He describes in detail one of their funeral services, run by a father and son. But the son, Li Bin, is more than just a funeral director. Johnson had first met him at Carnegie Hall, where he was a member of a group performing traditional music.

Johnson had been inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as chinoiserie, but back in China found out that, through a set of chance encounters, the Li family had become one of 1,200 groups assigned the task of preserving China’s “intangible cultural heritage” (a UNESCO term) by passing on their musical knowledge and skills to future generations. In that capacity, they had traveled to Holland and Italy as well as New York. But the Li family were really Daoist priests and they earned their living by performing their priestly functions with the precision of nine generations resting on their shoulders.

Why does China’s current leader, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, tolerate worshipers of Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, Daoist yinyang men, and folk religion generally? This is the kind of “superstition” that Mao and his colleagues attempted to stamp out in the early post-revolution years. In many of his actions and pronouncements, Xi seems to want to return to the 1950s, which many of Mao’s colleagues who survived the Cultural Revolution regarded as a golden age: the Party’s morale was high, its purposes clear, and corruption had not eaten into its soul. Johnson writes:

    Old Mr. Ni made a point of telling me that the great pilgrimage associations are independent of the government. This is true, as are the spiritual lives of most of the people we followed over the past year. And yet the state played an overwhelming role in their lives seeking to contain and co-opt them. 

Xi’s concept of making China great again provides space for traditional religions because historically they were deeply woven into popular culture. Early in his political career, Xi served as Party secretary in Zhengding in Hebei province, a place described in official reports as “chaotic, dirty, and backward.” There he had presided over the reconstruction of a famous Zen Buddhist temple and installed as abbot a famous monk, Shi Youming, who had just spent thirty years as a farm laborer, courtesy of the state. Xi ensured that the temple was recognized as a legal place of worship. Other temples there were also rebuilt. According to Shi’s successor as abbot:

    Xi did a great service for Buddhism…. Even when he was working in the south, when he went to Beijing, he would stop by and visit…. He showed respect. I’m not sure he was a believer, but he respected it. He knew more about it than most people. 

Johnson met an old woman, one of Shi’s earliest disciples, who insisted that Xi believed in Buddhism. When reminded that he was a Communist leader, she responded:

    Well, of course he would not have lit incense…. But when you look at what happened during his term, how this temple was rebuilt and how he kept coming back to see the old master, how else can I express it? Actions speak louder than words. 

Whatever his knowledge and commitment, Xi would probably agree with Johnson’s contention that the government can control such religious centers, for they have no foreign ties, and that it will encourage “acceptable forms of faith as a way to strengthen its position as the arbiter of the nation’s moral and spiritual values.”

This may explain why there seems to be greater tolerance for Protestantism than Catholicism, with its central hierarchy in Rome. The Vatican clearly wants to reenter China, perhaps seeing it as the one country left—as Protestants have demonstrated—where large-scale conversions can be envisaged, but its closed-door negotiations with Beijing seem to have ended after the Vatican insisted that only it could appoint bishops, which have been appointed by the Chinese government since 1957. By contrast, Protestantism, with no foreign leader seeking such extraterritorial rights, is growing exponentially in China. Some Chinese will tell you that this is because it is the religion of the majority in the world’s most powerful nation.

For Johnson, who was brought up as a Protestant, the Early Rain Reformed Church on the nineteenth floor of a “seedy office tower” in Chengdu, the capital of the vast western province of Sichuan, was familiar but different in both Chinese and Western terms. It was unregistered, what is often called an “underground” or “house” church, but it was big and public. Members had to agree to give their names and addresses and be willing to share them with the authorities. Every week a policeman would call to get the list of those attending the services. The congregants were devout, but having been cut off from the outside world since the expulsion of the missionaries, they were largely ignorant about most of the church calendar. Nor did they cling to Chinese traditional festivals, rejecting them as pagan.

Wang Yi had founded the Early Rain Reformed Church in 2005, and is now one of China’s best-known preachers. Videos of his sermons (normally forty-five minutes) circulate on social media. Johnson heard him giving one about Auntie Wei:

    Auntie Wei was someone I think it would be fair to call a simple woman. She was a mother and had a hard life. She raised two daughters mostly on her own. Her husband had died young…. 

    She was not someone who heard the word wansui [long live] too often. If she heard it, she would have thought it applied to China, or the Communist Party, or Chairman Mao. Wansui: that’s almost always reserved for them. This is wrong. Wansui, this word, if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to Auntie Wei…. 

    I tell you that she can hear wansui now because she is wansui; she is immortal because of Jesus. It’s not the government that can confer this word. It’s God, and it’s by how we live our daily lives. It’s the choices we make despite the immoral society we live in. This is what real wansui is. It’s nothing that the Communist Party can provide. It’s something that we can make ourselves…. 

    Auntie Wei was one of our sisters. We loved her. But it’s she who possesses eternal life, not the government. She created it for herself by living a good life, by being our sister in the church, and resisting the immorality around her. 

After listening to the sermon, Johnson understood why Wang Yi had forsaken a career as a human rights lawyer and well-regarded public intellectual. Then, most of what he said was censored. He risked house arrest and a blocked Internet connection; he could issue an appeal to free a political prisoner, but who would hear it? Here with an audience of a hundred people, he could help a grieving family and teach the congregation how to lead a different life, telling them that it was ordinary people who possessed real power in the authoritarian state. As a pastor he could directly influence hundreds, and indirectly thousands through his videos.

Wang’s boldness in openly exalting the individual as more worthy than the party worries Johnson. Wang has recently opened a seminary in which Friday classes are devoted to the difficult study of Greek so that Christians can read the gospels in the original language. This directly defies the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which is in charge not only of all churches, temples, and mosques but also of seminaries. Another class was on “church planting”—the process of setting up satellite churches when the mother church becomes too crowded.

Early on in The Souls of China, Johnson quotes from two Western historians who have described China as “a Middle Kingdom that has lost its Middle.” It is an epigram that reflects what many Western observers of China have discerned since the end of the Maoist era. Behind the amazing economic surge that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, there is no civic morality or national dream that unites Party and people. This is why Xi Jinping seeks to revive a popular pride in China’s culture and history, while simultaneously trying to root out corruption—in order to restore the Party’s morale and dynamism.

But what Johnson brilliantly describes in this book is how ordinary people, seeking faith to give meaning to their lives, are not waiting for Xi to lead them to his version of the promised land. Daoists, Buddhists, and Confucians are allowed to rebuild temples and memories of past practices persist, enabling believers to return to them.

Protestants, however, are evolving in unexpected ways. Johnson describes the two early indigenous models of China’s reform era. In the bustling east coast city of Wenzhou, where dynamic family businesses are the norm, workers usually belonged to the church favored by their boss. In Henan province, charismatic leaders ran rural churches and clashed with the authorities. These models were weakened as family firms morphed into larger enterprises and as rural Henan became more urban.

The new big city churches are different. Chinese are no longer isolated from the outside world and Protestants “seek global norms, not local forms of their faith.” As Johnson wisely remarks, perhaps this lesson applies not only to Christians but to China as a whole; international norms and standards are seeping into the country. There are certainly striking examples of this: the People’s Daily journalists who got on their bicycles during the Tiananmen events and rode through the square demanding to be allowed to report and print the truth; the lawyers, now vanished into prison or under house arrest, who have risked so much in trying to defend prisoners on the basis of the rights enshrined in the Chinese constitution.

Johnson suggests that the congregation of Early Rain would love to participate in global discussions of moral issues, and that it also yearns for a country truly committed to the rule of law and human rights. But “like Wang Yi’s congregation, we should take what has been accomplished—incomplete and inadequate as it is—as a miracle.”

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25. MALESEVIC ON STIKS. NATIONS AND CITIZENS IN YUGOSLAVIA AND THE POST-YUGOSLAV STATES
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Igor Štiks. Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 240 pp. $108.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4742-2152-8.

Reviewed by Siniša Malešević (University College Dublin)
Published on H-Nationalism (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

Citizenship is a concept ordinarily associated with one’s legal membership in a sovereign state. Having citizenship in a particular nation-state implies that one is entitled to a specific set of rights, from full participation in the political life to welfare protection. Being a citizen also entails particular obligations: from paying taxes at source to being conscripted to fight in times of war. Nevertheless, citizenship is much more than a legal category. Since it frames and institutionalizes sharp distinctions between those who are included and those who are excluded, it is also a potent mechanism for fashioning the social order. In this context, as Michael Mann demonstrated convincingly, the extension of citizenship rights was historically determined by changing geopolitics as well as the specific interests of the ruling groups focused on attaining internal cohesion and managing class conflicts. Hence, instead of establishing identical citizenship strategies, European nation-states, and then the rest of the world, developed quite diverse models of citizenship, from the constitutional models in the US and UK to the contested types in continental Europe to the merged versions in the Mediterranean states and the negotiated models in Scandinavia.[1] Bryan Turner has extended this analysis further by pointing to the different cultural traditions associated with the distinct citizenship regimes, examining the role Protestantism played in the development of state-suspicious and privately focused US citizenship in contrast to the French collectivist secularism that privileged the public over the private sphere.[2] 

Igor Štiks’s new book is, to some extent, written in a similar vein as its principal aim is to show the multifaceted and ever changing character of citizenship. More specifically, he analyzes how the transformation of citizenship models was crucial in the making and unmaking of different political communities in southeast Europe. By exploring the dynamics of changing conceptions and practices of citizenship over the past one hundred years, Štiks demonstrates how various citizenship regimes were instrumental in molding distinct ethno-national and civic identities. The book traces these organizational and ideological transformations from the first, monarchist, unitary Yugoslav state (1918-41) through its communist, federal, counterpart (1945-91) to the establishment of the new independent states on the ruins of the federal Yugoslavia (1992-99) and the reorganization of the new, post-Yugoslav states in the context of the actual, or aspirational, membership in the EU (2000-present). Thus Štiks shows how the rulers of the monarchist Yugoslavia introduced the first citizenship law only in 1928. This law established a single, unitary, state citizenship which corresponded with the then dominant idea that the new state consisted of a single nation composed of the three "tribes"--Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

In sharp contrast, the citizenship regimes in the communist Yugoslavia were centered on recognizing and accommodating the ethno-cultural differences. After the Second World War, Yugoslav state citizenship was defined at two levels: the federal and the level of each individual republic. As Štiks argues, the parallel existence of these two layers of citizenship, where the relationship between the two was ill defined and constantly changing, generated continual tensions, leading towards what he terms a bifurcated citizenship. To deal with these polarizing tensions the Yugoslav communists introduced a series of constitutional changes aimed at accommodating competing interests of the leaders representing different federal units. Hence, from the 1960s until the mid-1970s Yugoslav federation was gradually decentralized, leading towards what Štiks calls "centrifugal federalism"--"a process of gradual but irreversible empowerment of the subunits at the expense of the centre" (p. 19). The enactment of the 1974 federal constitution was the ultimate sign of this process leading towards a confederal state structure in which republican citizenship would ultimately trump many of the federal laws. Štiks argues that the bifurcated citizenship regimes contributed significantly to the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. In his own words, "competing visions of citizenship, I would argue, were one of the crucial factors that pushed the country towards disintegration and conflict" (p. 129). He goes on to argue that "the ethno-national conception of citizenship finally prevailed and fuelled conflicts over the redefinition of borders within which the ethno-national states were to be formed on the basis of absolute majorities of the core ethno-national groups" (p. 131). This legacy of ethno-nationalist citizenship was particularly pronounced in the 1990s, when the new post-Yugoslav states utilized their respective citizenship laws as the mechanism for ethnic engineering. Although the last fifteen years have witnessed less discrimination and various attempts to accommodate minority claims (in the context of the EU membership aspirations), Štiks insists that in southeast Europe citizenship still operates as a tool of ethnic nation building.

This is a very interesting and valuable book. By looking at the historical transformations of this region through the lens of shifting citizenship regimes, Štiks offers us an original and insightful analysis. The major strength of this work is its ability to successfully combine an in-depth, longue durée study of the legal history of southeast Europe with a nuanced, more generalized analysis of changing citizenship strategies. Štiks is particularly good at unraveling the sheer complexities and inconsistencies of socialist citizenship regimes. He is absolutely right that citizenship has been and remains a historically variable phenomenon that cannot be reduced to its singular, liberal incarnation. It is a pity that the book does not pursue this point further by linking it with the comparative historical sociology of citizenship in the manner of Mann, Turner, Miguel Centeno, and others.

One could also challenge several claims advanced in the book. For example, Štiks embraces the Gramscian perspective in his analysis (p. 188) but some of his key arguments, such as that the competing visions of citizenship were a crucial factor in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, seem closer to epistemological idealism than to neo-Marxist, Gramscian materialism. If the rival ethno-national conceptions of citizenship were ultimately responsible for war, then where is the place for the political and military organizations or the economic factors in this process? One could argue that the competing citizenship visions were less the cause for the conflict and more the consequence of dramatically changing geopolitical, economic, and ideological environments. In this context the focus is less on the rival conceptions of citizenship and much more on the power politics of competing social organizations (i.e., the republican branches of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the military establishment, the higher echelons of bureaucracy, nationalist intellectuals, etc.). 

One could also question Štiks’s view that nationalism was weak in socialist Yugoslavia and that the Yugoslav idea was not built on shared Slavic roots but on the common interest in social progress (pp. 93, 113). As I have argued previously, while non-national, self-management socialism was a dominant normative ideology of the Yugoslav state, its operative ideology was always deeply rooted in a nationalist rhetoric and practice that drew heavily on shared Slavic roots and a peculiar amalgamation of ethnic and civic nationalist discourses.[3]

Leaving these criticisms aside, it is clear that Šiks has produced a novel and important contribution which allows us to rethink the political transformations of southeast Europe through the prism of citizenship regimes while also adding to the existing knowledge on the comparative historical dynamics of citizenship. The book is also well written and highly accessible and as such should appeal to a wide audience.

Notes

[1]. Michael Mann, States,War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

[2]. Bryan Turner, "Outline of a Theory of Citizenship," in Citizenship, ed. Bryan Turner and Peter Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1994).

[3]. Siniša Malešević, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 99-102; Siniša Malešević, Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State: Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia (London: Routledge), 123-171.

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26. DONALD TRUMP AND THE SURRENDERING OF US LEADERSHIP
by Martin Wolf
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https://www.ft.com/content/f0b9fba6-4241-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2

The American president seems to have little interest in preserving the postwar order

Donald Trump has been the American president for just over four months. It is still impossible to predict what his presidency will mean. But it is already a transformative event: Mr Trump has revolutionised our ideas of what the US stands for. We live in the world the US made. Now it is unmaking it. We cannot ignore that grim reality.

Mr Trump’s domestic programme is in accord with the agenda of the Republican party. Its aim is to cut taxes on the rich by lowering spending on the poor.

The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the American Health Care Act, recently passed by the House of Representatives and the replacement of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, is startling. Over the 2017-26 period, the act would reduce tax revenues by $992bn, paid for by a $1.1tn reduction in expenditures on Medicaid and other subsidies. According to the CBO, the number of uninsured might have increased by 23m by 2026.

Proposals for tax reform and spending go in the same direction. Discretionary spending proposals for next year include a $52bn increase in defence spending, paid for by big cuts in other areas. These include a $13bn (16 per cent) cut to health and human services; $12bn (29 per cent) to the budgets of the state department and the international development agency; and $9bn (14 per cent) to education. The diplomatic capacity of the US would be devastated.

Hard power and lower taxes: these are the US priorities under Mr Trump. They are also traditionally Republican. Waging what amounts to an economic war on one’s supporters might seem perverse. But there is method in the madness. As the programmes poor whites depend upon are slashed, those who voted for Mr Trump will become more desperate. This will make politics even more polarised. That has been the all-too successful ploy of pluto-populism.

So what is new at home? The answer is Mr Trump’s personality. He is in a permanent war with reality and so with the media and his intelligence services. The press and the bureaucracy have both held up well. So has the legal system. But these are early days. The president is undisciplined and his administration chaotic. Under Mr Trump, a terrorist outrage might produce a lurch into authoritarianism.

Mr Trump’s impact on the very idea of the west is already significant. The western alliance is still the world’s biggest economic bloc and largest repository of scientific and business knowledge. But it is disintegrating. As Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, admitted, Europe can no longer rely on the US. It might have been unwise to say so, but she was surely right.

Mr Trump seems to prefer autocrats to today’s western Europeans. He is warm towards Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, not to mention Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He appears to care not at all about democracy or human rights. Neither does he seem committed to the mutual defence principles of Nato.

Mr Trump’s “alt- right” supporters see not a divide between the democracies and the despotisms; but rather between social progressives and globalists, whom they despise, and social traditionalists and nationalists, whom they support. For them, western Europeans are on the wrong side: they are enemies, not friends.

Deep down, Mr Trump might agree. He is surrounded by orthodox advisers, such as James Mattis, defence secretary. Yet the president’s heart seems not to be in it. The west may not be dead. But as a set of countries with shared interests and values, it is moribund.

Now consider the west and, above all, the US in the world. The rise of China has reduced its economic and political weight. A recent history of failed wars and financial crises has savaged its leaders’ credibility. The choice of Mr Trump, a man so signally lacking in the virtues, abilities, knowledge and experience to be expected of a president, has further damaged the attractions of the democratic system.

Now the west seems deeply divided internally too. Across the world, people question the future role of the US. Would it not be wiser, they wonder, to move closer to China?

Mr Trump would not appear to mind if this did happen. He voluntarily withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at being an alternative to Chinese leadership. Under him, the US seems to be abandoning the notion of soft power. Indeed, the proposed budget tells us that the administration sees the idea as largely empty: guns matter, diplomacy does not.

The soft power of democracy is not what it was. It has produced Mr Trump as leader of the world’s most important country. It is not an advertisement.

Yet much is at stake in the world. Three big challenges exist: prosperity, peace and protection of the commons.

On the first, Mr Trump’s administration is still tempted by the idea of restricting imports — or at least by bilateralism. So far its protectionist bark seems worse than its bite. Nevertheless, globalisation is stalled. Without US support it could well remain so.

On peace, the question remains whether Mr Trump’s instinct for conflict can be contained. The biggest challenge is the relationship with China. Mr Trump seems to thinks he can do business with Xi Jinping, China’s president. Maybe he likes the autocracy.

Perhaps the most depressing consequence of Mr Trump’s ascent to power emerged at the G7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily, at the weekend. The Paris climate change agreement of December 2015 was not an answer to the challenge, but it was at least a recognition that climate change is a real and pressing danger. Now may well be the last chance to head off the worst of it.

In agreement with many Republicans, Mr Trump refuses to recognise the threat. He finds it impossible to admit that strong and concerted government action might be required. So he rejects the very notion of environmental limits. An optimistic and self-confident US would embrace the challenge of overcoming such limits. Alas, Mr Trump does not speak for that US. If the US withdrew from the Paris accord, the rest of the world must consider sanctions.

It is possible to look at the first four months of this presidency as a story of successful containment. It is also possible to view Mr Trump as a normal Republican. Unfortunately, regular Republicans have damaging ideas and Mr Trump may not be contained. This still looks like the end of the US-led world order.

martin.wolf at ft.com



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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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