The Social World

Tag: Communism

  • In Cuba, a revolution is over

    In Cuba, a revolution is over

    If you’ve ever thought of visiting the crocodile-shaped island of Cuba, or run into someone recently returned from sultry nights in the country’s salsa halls, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard the phrase “See it before it changes.” And I don’t mean because of Hurricane Melissa.

    The idea is that the centrally planned communist state, one of the last on Earth, will soon morph into America and a balmy Brigadoon full of people unencumbered by money, modern cars or Alexa will evaporate.

    I think most people, if they knew what Cubans have endured, wouldn’t use that phrase, which is up there in its lack of tact with “they’re poor but they’re happy.”

    But shortly after I arrived on the Caribbean island almost eight years ago, the same idea was put to me by a Cuban, although in a different way. She asked: “When does a revolution end?” That’s a question that has stayed with me. I remember my sweaty journey in from Havana’s José Martí International Airport that January 2018 evening. Having visited the island regularly before, on the cusp of turning 50 I’d come for a three-month break. I’m still here, married, with a four-year-old son.

    The roadside billboards advertised nothing other than the government’s answer to my friend’s question: “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” (An imperfect translation: “Until the eternal victory.”)

    At the time, the country was still enjoying a great burst of hope that had begun in 2016, when then-US president Barack Obama flew in to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War.” The Rolling Stones played and Chanel used Havana as a catwalk.

    Yet, the city still had rebel undercurrents that I remembered from earlier visits, a population of offbeat expats, some on the run from the US authorities. There were fraudsters and rogue CIA agents, Black Panthers and South and Central American liberation fighters – or terrorists, depending on your point of view.

    It was still easy to meet Cubans who, if critical of the day-to-day work of the government, supported the Castro brothers’ grand project. The young intellectuals, the artists and musicians, were often offended by the abuse being thrown across the Florida Straits by the exile community in Miami.

    The older generation were even more bonded to the revolution. Having answered Che Guevara’s call to subsume personal ambition to the common good, they were living on the promised reward of free healthcare and food.

    The government, however, which controlled everything including the importation of food, was low on funds, a situation soon worsened by the Covid pandemic. Shortages cut in, with days-long lines for essentials. Botched economic reforms then saw inflation take hold and pensions and wages reduced, in real terms, to what is now less than $10 a month.

    Soon many people were pondering when a revolution ends. In July 2021, protests erupted and were put down with force. Private entrepreneurs were given permission to import food, sold at prices far beyond what most people could pay. The rations of rice, sugar and beans distributed by state bodegas faltered.

    While there have always been people who go through the street-corner rubbish bins, their numbers blossomed. Older people, their dignity still showing in their neat if frayed clothes, began to ask for money from other Cubans on the street. The fumigators who used to demand access to your house to spray for mosquitoes disappeared.

    A grand exodus began, with estimates of up to 18 percent of the population leaving for the US, Latin America, Spain and oddly – due to a lack of visa restrictions – Serbia. Some fools even went to Russia to fight against Ukraine. The obsolescent electricity grid collapsed, again and again, and the water system with it. Power cuts have become a fact of life.

    I live a far more privileged life than most of my neighbors, but I find the water shortages hard. Nothing spells “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” like glancing up to see your child pooping on the floor when you haven’t had running water for two days. But, like the frog in boiling water (lucky him), somehow we seem to get used to it.

    It’s not easy. As I write, the awful Hurricane Melissa, which caused chaos in Jamaica, carried on through Cuba’s east, bringing landslides, flooding and misery. Meanwhile, there is an outbreak of chikungunya fever, spread by the mosquitos that the state can no longer afford to spray against. (Chikungunya means “contortion” in Tanzanian Makonde, and is as much fun as it sounds.)

    Yet, to my surprise, I still feel that same thrill as I take the sweaty journey in from the airport, past the increasingly faded slogans on the billboards, through this city of crumbling grandeur, to what’s become my home, looking forward to being among the Cubans once more. This is what I hope to write about in this column as we move forward.

    So, when does a revolution end? I was talking to my Cuban friend again, blathering on about how her question could currently be asked of the American Revolution. But she remained focused on Cuba’s own, saying: “Maybe it’s already over, and we just haven’t noticed it.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself for honoring Angela Davis

    Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself for honoring Angela Davis

    Remember Angela Davis? Few people under fifty do. Was Cambridge University counting on that historical ignorance when it decided to honor Angela Davis with an honorary degree?  

    In case you, Dear Reader, are a little fuzzy about Davis, I note for the record that the former Black Panther and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall is the recipient of many honors, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize. 

    Cambridge University, of course, has long demonstrated a certain fondness for Commies, as the names “Kim Philby,” “Guy Burgess” and “Anthony Blunt” remind us. But as far as I have been able to discover, Angela Davis is the first person who appeared on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list to have been honored by Cambridge.

    After a middle-class upbringing that included college at Brandeis (where she fell under the spell of the Frankfurt School Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse) and postgraduate work in Europe, Ms. Davis emerged as a doyenne of the violent, revolutionary fringe of 1960s radicalism. In 1970 she became romantically involved with George Jackson, a career criminal and Black Panther serving time in Soledad Prison for armed robbery.

    In 1970, Jackson was one of several prisoners implicated in the murder of a prison guard. That August, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan burst into a Marin County courthouse during a trial. He distributed arms to the defendants and took the judge, the prosecutor and at least one juror hostage. Some of the weapons, as later testimony at her trial revealed, had been bought by Davis two days before. Jonathan intended to trade the hostages for the release of his brother and then flee to Cuba.

    In what became a shootout, Jonathan and two of the defendants were killed. The judge’s head was blown off by a shotgun taped under his chin. Another hostage was paralyzed for life. In 1971, in a detail omitted by “Free Angela,” a documentary about Davis’s life, George Jackson and several other inmates murdered three prison guards and two white inmates, before being shot himself.

    After the bloody courthouse melee, Davis fled and went underground. The FBI apprehended her in New York some months later. “Free Angela” argues that she was prosecuted because she was a Communist and black. In fact, she was prosecuted as a material accessory to murder.

    How did she get off? In part, for the same reason that O. J. Simpson got off: celebrity, edged with racial grievance mongering. There was also the temper of the times. When she was apprehended, a hue and cry went around the world – especially in precincts hostile to American interests.

    The spectacle of Angela Davis being honored at one of England’s most storied universities is partly ironical, partly contemptible. The irony emerged from the discrepancy between the now-rancid radical rhetoric and comfy bourgeois reality, underwritten by capitalist enterprise. Things are “really, really rotten” in the United States, Davis insists.

    But not, of course, for her. When she was in prison awaiting trial, an unidentified farmer pledged his property to raise the $100,000 bail to secure Ms. Davis’s release. 

    Angela Davis travels the world these days collecting honors. She once supported the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan while refusing to speak up for political prisoners in socialist countries. Naturally, she championed the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements and regularly derides the police and capitalist West, mouthing radical slogans that, if acted upon, would destroy the civilization that coddles her. Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself, but of course the sense of shame is an early casualty of wokeness, a toxic ideology to which Britain is surrendering just as America is waking up from wokeness.

  • Zohran Mamdani’s radical parents

    Zohran Mamdani’s radical parents

    Voters often pay a premium for socialism. It’s the modern-day equivalent of free-range eggs or an electric car.

    Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist,” embodies that premium. In New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, he got blown out of the water with lower-income voters – but won overwhelmingly with young, white, college-educated idealists desperate for the revolution.

    He would be the furthest left mayor New York City has ever seen if elected in November. While his policy prescriptions – city-run grocery stores, higher taxes on the wealthy and a diminished police presence – are radical proposals, it is his deep devotion to socialism that truly defies convention.

    There is no question that Mamdani loathes the West. Its history, its customs, its people. Online, you can watch him flip his middle finger to a Christopher Columbus statue and whine about white people trying to talk to him.

    But no man is an island unto himself.

    Zohran’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an academic. The radical sort who makes Saul Alinsky look blasé. An Indian by birth, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard only to emigrate to Uganda in the 1970s and face expulsion. At the time, the Idi Amin regime sought to exile the Indian minority – an immensely influential event for the elder Mamdani, fueling his lifelong crusade against colonialism and capitalism. This has led Mahmood to adopt some very radical, fringe views.

    In his 2009 book Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani actually decried humanitarian intervention during the Darfur genocide, where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Northeast Africa: “Humanitarian intervention is not a neutral act but a political project that often serves to extend Western power under the guise of moral righteousness.” To Mamdani, Western missions providing food, water, medical care and shelter to millions of displaced refugees were just another costume for empire – an imperial smokescreen.

    Mahmood laments America while enjoying its fruits. This comes in the form of bizarre, ahistorical assertions, such as his recent claim that the Allied governments in World War Two shared the Nazis’ goal of wiping out minority populations from Europe.

    Such absurdity could only be believed by a university professor. The Allies fought to defeat the Nazi regime precisely because it was exterminating Europe’s minorities. After all, they were next.

    He went even further, asserting that Hitler’s rampage was inspired by the American model of “settler colonialism.” In Mein Kampf, the young, psychopathic Austrian takes a single sentence to admire the displacement of Native American populations as a successful example of replacing “an inferior race.” But Hitler’s expansionist goals were not, of course, derived from the American creed. He was a devotee of a twisted Social Darwinism. The strong devour the weak.

    In a 2021 Georgetown University review of Mahmood Mamdani’s book on genocide and ethnic violence, the author details how Mamdani is skeptical of the very idea of a nationhood. Mahmood laments that after the Holocaust, Germany only pursued punishment for Nazis instead of completely dismantling the society and beginning anew. The conclusion must be, therefore, that the nation-state itself begets violence. To live peaceably means to live borderless.

    In the world Mahmood inhabits, not only was Nazism influenced by America, but Jewish self-determination is the purest expression of Nazism. The aforementioned reviewer of Mamdani’s book expounds, “Zionism, then, can be understood as the logical conclusion of Nazism, the Final Solution as Mamdani puts it, where the tragic violence of the nation-state is being reprised. This time with Jewish Zionists as the perpetrators and Palestinians as the victims.” Viewing the world through Mahmood Mamdani’s lens, Hitler reveres America and Jews are the perfect Nazis.

    You can’t help but see Mahmood’s shadow drifting through his son’s. Just recently, Zohran refused to denounce the slogan “globalize the intifada” – another point scored for the pro-Palestine movement, I guess.

    And while Zohran cosplays as a working-class revolutionary, he’s anything but. The Mamdani family is loaded. Most of the family fortune comes by way of Zohran’s mother, Mira Nair, who has earned millions as a successful filmmaker.

    When landlords charge exorbitant rents, it’s theft, but not, apparently, when Ms. Nair collected $6,500 a month renting out a spare loft in Chelsea. As Zohran Mamdani pretends to stand with the tenant class, he and his family get to drift from Delhi to Kampala to New York City. The hypocrisy doesn’t shock so much as it clarifies: properties for he, not for thee.

    It’s all there with the Mamdanis: a hatred of the nation that welcomed and showered them with wealth, the comfortable conviction that under every rock lies Western oppression. That a rich millennial is championing socialism is wholly unsurprising. His commitment to cultural Marxism, however, should raise alarms.

    Only a few years ago did Zohran Mamdani instruct young socialists to embrace their inner Marx by “seizing the means of production” and embracing class consciousness. Ms. Nair affirms that her son “very much absorbed” the views of his parents. Upon inspecting the apple that fell not far from the tree, you can see plainly: it is red.

  • The specter of communism still looms over the Balkans

    The specter of communism still looms over the Balkans

    Our Serbian guide Zoran is a jovial fellow and as we rumble through the streets of Belgrade in our minibus he regales us with a joke about the difference between the various nationalities of the former Yugoslavia, all now with countries of their own. “We Serbs are rude,” he says, “but the Croatians are self-centered, the Bosnians are thick, the Montenegrins are lazy and the Macedonians are just Serbs with a speech defect. As for the Slovenians, they are so polite they must be gay!” Joking about each other is a definite improvement on fighting each other, as per so much of their history. The countries on my Balkan tour – Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria – have been struggling for more than three decades with their post-communist problems. But they do like a laugh.

    The Serb capital Belgrade sits at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. These rivers marked the boundary between the southern part of Serbia, ruled by the Ottomans for 400 years, and the northern part, which was controlled by the Habsburg empire. If Belgrade looks shabbier than other European capitals, Zoran believes it’s because “the legacy of the Turks is the Eastern mentality of many Serbs, rather than the more organized, efficient Austrian attitude. We just let things go.”

    But perhaps the true problematic legacy is that of the communist era, with its endemic corruption and lack of transparency. One recent example of this is the collapse of the poorly constructed canopy at Novi Sad railway station, which killed 15 people. Unregulated contractors had apparently prioritized profit over safety. There were widespread public protests.  

    Passing a ruined building, Zoran explains that it was wrecked during NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999. That bombing had been prompted by President Slobodan Milošević’s massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and the failure of diplomatic efforts to halt it. Zoran doesn’t mention this. But he speaks in a slightly wounded tone, as though there was no need for such cruel destruction. The Serbs are hostile to NATO, just like their supporters, the Russians. These two Slav peoples have long been united politically, and culturally through their shared Eastern Orthodox religion and Cyrillic alphabet. Vladimir Putin proposed Serbia as a country he would accept in a post-war peacekeeping role in Ukraine. (Although even he must have seen the absurdity of that.) Along busy pedestrianized Knez Mihailova Street, Belgrade’s premier spot for shops, restaurants and cafés, souvenir stalls sell Putin mugs and Putin socks. They seem unduly fond of him.   

    More positively, there is a rare sense of social cohesion among the Serbs. All generations routinely attend church services, and on leaving the building turn back towards its icon-filled, incense-infused interior and make the sign of the cross. Youngsters are no exception. “They’re not necessarily religious,” notes Zoran, “but we all respect our national Church.”

    That Romania is doing much better, with higher salaries, a relatively strong economy and better national infrastructure, is due to its being a major net recipient of European Union funds. The capital Bucharest, established by Vlad the Impaler in 1459, is today one of the world’s most congested cities, with non-stop traffic jams and an ugly profusion of graffiti. But our native guide Marius is upbeat. “Just as joining NATO has given us security, joining the EU has helped us gradually to escape from the long shadow of communism, with its many injustices. We have acquired a better understanding of democracy, good governance and the rule of law. There is still corruption, but it’s decreasing.”

    With a grin he adds: “And we are a safe country – less crime on our streets since our pickpockets left, thanks to freedom of movement.” As for mass migration into Europe, Romania is unaffected. The ex-communist states are not the migrants’ destinations of choice. “Some years ago the police found two African stowaways in the back of a truck,” recalls Marius. “On discovering they were in Romania they cried out in horror: ‘No, we want to go to Germany!’” On the other hand, Romania currently hosts about 200,000 Ukrainians who had fled Putin’s war, and there’s been growing resentment towards them, especially as many drive better cars than the Romanians do.

    ‘Romania is a safe country – less crime on our streets since our pickpockets left, thanks to freedom of movement’

    With last week’s victory of the centrist, quietly competent candidate Nicușor Dan in the presidential elections, Romania can continue on its pro-European path. But it was a close run thing. The campaign of his rival, the hard-right, pro-Kremlin ultranationalist George Simion, had received a big boost through a Russian-engineered TikTok campaign, which won him support in the Romanian diaspora. In a move which will prolong political instability, Simion is disputing the election result.

    The Danube marks the border between Romania and Bulgaria, and we enter the latter by crossing on the rusty Friendship Bridge, built in 1954. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU. As the natives put it: “We are at the bottom of the barrel, but at least the barrel is on the first floor of the house and not in the basement.”

    The country’s political class is a leftover from communist times; a new untainted generation of leaders is yet to emerge. As it obviously lacked the necessary preconditions for membership, why was it accepted into the EU? Our cheery middle-aged guide Elena claims, as we stroll through the capital Sofia, that the EU bureaucrats probably decided it was better to have Bulgaria in the union than under the sway of Russia.

    Aspirational young people, especially those who’ve managed to learn English despite the sub-standard education system, have mostly moved abroad. Those who remain are infected by apathy. As nothing ever changes, they’ve given up on their “democracy” – voter turnout at last year’s parliamentary elections was 34 percent, the lowest since the end of communist rule in 1989. And criminality is rife. Elena quotes a saying: every country has a mafia but Bulgaria is a mafia with a country.

    In the ancient city of Plovdiv, a cultural hub and architectural gem, local man Milos says that despite its failings, he won’t abandon his country because he cares about it. “We’ve given up on politics,” he says, “so we turn to satire.” He describes the Marvel-inspired comic strip in Plovdiv in which the baddies are thinly disguised local politicians and the heroes are popular local characters, such as Milyo, the town drunk renowned for chatting up passing females. Just as in the darkest days of communism, it’s humor which keeps you hanging on.

  • The Americans who defected to North Korea

    The Americans who defected to North Korea

    Last summer, US Army soldier Travis King ran across the Korean Demilitarized Zone into the arms of the North Koreans. It wasn’t because of some mental break or as part of a spy operation. North Korean state media claims he was motivated by racism and mistreatment — of course they would. The DPRK’s outlets have previously criticized the US for its treatment of African Americans, around the same time they compared former president Barack Obama to a “wicked black monkey.”

    Like the six American servicemen who crossed the DMZ before him, King probably had a mixture of reasons for his flight. Unlike in the previous cases, however, King’s detention was a short one. Those before him spent years or even decades in North Korea with the expectation that they would be permanent prisoners, but King’s usefulness as a propaganda tool — demonstrating the superiority of communist DPRK society over the capitalist evils of America and its western allies — was apparently outweighed by being a troublesome house guest. He was kicked out after just three months, and has returned to the States, where he faces a number of charges for crimes he is alleged to have committed while stationed in South Korea.

    Even so, this briefest defector may be the luckiest.

    The earliest recorded instance of an American’s willingly defecting to North Korea is Anna Wallis, who later became a Tokyo Rose-like radio propagandist. A Methodist missionary who traveled to Asia, Wallis found herself on the Korean Peninsula when it was still under Japanese colonial control in the 1930s. The Japanese soon cracked down on Christian proselytizing, which led her to relocate to China.

    There she met a Korean man named Suh Kyoon-chul; they married in 1939. It was an unusual union — at the time it was highly uncommon for Caucasian women to marry East Asian men — and deeply consequential. US law regarding international marriage meant she lost her American citizenship. Unable to secure an American passport for Suh, the couple found themselves trapped in the chaotic wartime politics of East Asia. Despite being considered a Japanese national (as all Korean citizens were at the time), Wallis was imprisoned with other westerners in a Shanghai civilian internment camp for the duration of World War Two. She resumed teaching following the war’s conclusion but relocated to Seoul with her husband to earn a better living. Suh was an avowed leftist, and Wallis expressed sympathy with his views. As a result, both pledged their loyalty to the North Korean communists after Kim Il-sung’s forces invaded South Korea and temporarily took the capital in 1950.

    Now firmly on the side of North Korea, Wallis appeared to be willingly assisting the communists with their radio propaganda. She conducted her broadcasts in a monotone, reporting on captured American POWs or taunting UN soldiers to break their morale. Her listeners dubbed her “Seoul City Sue,” but it’s still unclear whether she was forced to broadcast or was a committed communist. Regardless, these radio programs had little effect on the outcome of the Korean War, which halted when an armistice was signed in 1953.

    Following the ceasefire, all prisoners of war on both sides were given the opportunity to choose whether to go home or remain. Only twenty-one Americans and one Briton chose to stay with the communists, while thousands of Chinese and North Korean soldiers decided that life south of the DMZ was preferable. The twenty-two defectors did not actually go to North Korea, however, and instead were given new lives in China. The vast majority ultimately ended up returning home after growing disillusioned with communism, though two, James Veneris and John Dunn, remained in the Eastern Bloc for the rest of their lives.

    The next wave of defections to North Korea occurred in the 1960s when the Cold War was in full swing and the ideological lines in the sand were firmly drawn. This era marked a series of heightened tensions and skirmishes along the DMZ between North and South Korea, with thousands of American soldiers stationed as a permanent garrison to defend the south. Unlike the cases of Seoul City Sue and the Korean War POWs, however, the handful of Americans who chose to go to North Korea clearly did not do so for ideological reasons.

    On May 28, 1962, nineteen-year-old Private First Class Larry Abshier slipped away from his post and crossed into North Korea. DPRK state media claimed two weeks later that Abshier had made his decision because he could no longer tolerate his “humiliating life” in the US military. The truth was far simpler. According to those who knew him, the private was a regular smoker of marijuana and faced a court-martial for repeated disciplinary problems.

    James Joseph Dresnok followed his lead just a few months later, on August 15, running across the border in the middle of the day and ignoring calls to turn back. Like Abshier, Dresnok faced a court-martial for disobeying orders. He regularly forged signatures to leave his station and visit a Korean girlfriend at a nearby village. Jerry Wayne Parrish became the third American soldier defector on December 6, 1963, but his motivations have never been clear. Charles Robert Jenkins, who was older than the other men and a sergeant, defected on January 5, 1965, after abandoning a late-night patrol he oversaw. He would later claim he was making sure he wasn’t sent to Vietnam.

    All four men came from extremely poor rural backgrounds; most had had difficult early lives. They seem to have viewed enlistment as the only way to have a better life, rather than subscribing to high-minded, Hollywood-movie patriotism. Similarly, it wasn’t glorious communist ideology that brought them to the “hermit kingdom”; it was legal trouble and cowardice. They probably didn’t know much about their new home, other than it was “the enemy.” None professed any allegiance to communism, and given their lack of formal education, it’s questionable whether they had much political thought anyway.

    The North Koreans, however, had a propaganda gold mine on their hands. While it quickly became clear that the four soldiers had little useful intel to divulge, they could still be used to promote the Kim regime’s communist ideology against the American imperialists. DPRK state media attempted to pitch reports of Abshier, Dresnok, Parrish and Jenkins enjoying their new lives in Kim Il-sung’s paradise, having renounced capitalism and the West forever. Even if these statements did little to convince anyone on the outside, four defections in a relatively short amount of time were a profound embarrassment for the US Army.

    But life for the four Americans in the DPRK was a different story. In 1966, the group attempted to broker an escape via the Chinese and Soviet embassies in Pyongyang, only to be quickly turned away and apprehended by the authorities. Propaganda appearances immediately ceased and the North Koreans subjected the men to constant study of the country’s ideology, forcing them to phonetically memorize Korean propaganda slogans before they even learned the language. While they had a quality of life far better than the average North Korean, living conditions were even worse than what they had grown up with in poverty-stricken rural America.

    The Kim regime chose to award the defectors DPRK citizenship in 1972, believing that their ideological education was complete. In his memoir The Reluctant Communist, Jenkins claimed that none of them ever actually believed in what they were taught. Dresnok displays complete allegiance to his adopted country in the 2006 documentary Crossing the Line, but he was likely reading a prepared statement, as is customary for DPRK media appearances.

    The four Americans had limited value for Korean state propaganda. They initially attempted to use the men as English teachers, but their heavy Southern accents and lack of education proved insurmountable barriers. The most notable was their appearance as evil American villains in the 1978 North Korean film series Unsung Heroes, released the same year Kim Il-sung’s son and successor Kim Jong-il abducted South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his estranged actress wife Choi Eun-hee in hopes of bringing new life to staid DPRK movies.

    The Americans became overnight celebrities in North Korea — with audiences affectionately referring to Dresnok by his character name “Arthur” — and, to cement their place in the DPRK, the men were introduced to foreign women who would become their wives. During the 1970s, Pyongyang was notorious for abducting foreign nationals or tricking them into traveling to the DPRK. Jenkins’s wife Hitomi Soga was one of the dozens abducted along the Japanese coast by North Korean spies. Dresnok married a Romanian woman named Doina Bumbea who had also been kidnapped, while Parrish and Abshier wed Lebanese and Thai abductees, respectively. The hope seems to have been that their children would be racially ambiguous spies, loyal to their country of birth and fully indoctrinated into the system.

    Until 2002, the only information about the defectors was Unsung Heroes (which the US government acquired in 1996, as proof they had survived). However, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi brokered a summit with Kim Jong-il that year in which Kim acknowledged that North Korea had abducted Japanese nationals, allowing five of them including Hitomi Soga to return to Japan. The uproar was immediate, and Tokyo put intense pressure on Pyongyang to reveal more information about who had been abducted, who was dead and who was still alive.

    By this point, Abshier and Parrish had both died of natural causes, leaving only Jenkins and Dresnok. The two men had a complicated relationship, friendly some years and hostile others. While Dresnok had spent his whole life hoping to have a stable family and was growing content with life in North Korea, Jenkins and his two daughters were desperate to be back with Soga, who had chosen to stay in Japan.

    After a couple of years of negotiations, the family were reunited in Indonesia and later relocated to Soga’s hometown of Sado Island. Jenkins had spent nearly forty years in North Korea and his subsequent court-martial proceedings for desertion attracted intense media coverage. Ultimately, he only served twenty-five days in the brig. Many in America called Jenkins a traitor, but his reception in Japan was more sympathetic, not least because of the valuable information he provided authorities about other Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea.

    I met Jenkins on August 28, 2017 while visiting Sado Island. Well accustomed to life in Japan, he was working as an employee of the island’s history museum, posing for pictures with tourists and selling them senbei rice crackers. It is often said that living in North Korea for many years can rapidly age a person due to the stressful conditions and abundance of cigarettes and alcohol to pass the time. While Jenkins looked better than he did upon his repatriation in 2004, his tired expression and many wrinkles were reminders that most of his adult life had been spent in the DPRK.

    Though a bit sheepish at first, he slowly opened up as I stuck around to talk with him. His North Carolina drawl was stronger than ever — amusingly, he claimed that he was more comfortable speaking Korean than English. He reaffirmed much of what he had already stated in his book, and it seemed that he still considered the other Americans his friends, even Dresnok, who DPRK state media reports claimed had passed away the previous year. Of them all, Jenkins was the only one to have left North Korea and lived to tell his story to the world.

    This was at the height of 2017’s volatile “fire and fury” rhetoric when Donald Trump and present DPRK head Kim Jong-un traded insults for much of the year. Jenkins expressed doubts to me that Trump would even finish his first term and believed that direct military confrontation would be the only way for North Korea to change. Less than four months after our meeting, he passed away at seventy-seven due to cardiovascular disease, likely the final result of many years of poor health in North Korea.

    As for other US soldiers who went to the DPRK, Roy Chung, a Korean American, defected from West Germany in 1979, while Joseph T. White followed in 1982. Little is known about Chung (not even Jenkins had heard of him when I asked), while White was reportedly kept separate from the other Americans. As usual, Pyongyang claimed that White had defected for ideological reasons, but those who knew him claimed that he had shown no prior interest in communism. His death is also a point of contention. State media later reported that White drowned while swimming in a river, while Jenkins wrote that he suffered from an epileptic seizure. Jenkins also alleges that Seoul City Sue was executed in 1969 on charges of being a double agent for South Korea, but his claims cannot be independently verified.

    With the apparently quixotic exception of Travis King last year, defection to North Korea has all but ended. The Cold War ended the viability of communism (and its few US adherents are unlikely to join the military), and the internet has somewhat lifted the veil of ignorance surrounding North Korea. The abduction and death of American student Otto Warmbier in 2017 reminded Americans who might have forgotten just how rigid and implacable the DPRK’s regime can be. Early in 2023, a 2019 YouTube video from travel vlogger Simon Wilson went viral on social media, featuring one of Pyongyang’s water parks and praising its cleanliness and modern features. The people looked healthy and happy, but nobody bought it. For North Korea, the propaganda doesn’t really work anymore.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2024 World edition.

  • The useful influencers of Shein

    The useful influencers of Shein

    The Soviets had a problem. On March 5, 1940, Stalin had given the order to massacre 14,700 Polish officers, which his vicious secret police NKVD happily did. Job well done; until they lost Poland to the Nazis, who discovered some mass graves in the Katyn forest. Goebbels began using this to paint Britain’s ally as monsters (which, in hindsight, was fair).  This was a disastrous public relations problem! And so, they turned to the press, and those like Ralph Parker of the Times of London, who traveled by caviar-supplied trains to Katyn, bedded Soviet honeypots and came back repeating the Soviet line.  

    This is the topic of Alan Philps’s new book, The Red Hotel; and as I watch TikTok influencers walk through Shein’s polished up sweatshops, attesting to how wonderful they are, despite the false and mean rumors of the West, I hear an eerie echo of that depressing, pathetic past. The reality — that Shein is the bleakest end of sweatshop-fueled fast-fashion, whose budget online offerings are made by workers paid less than four cents per item, working eighteen-hour days with no weekends — is an inconvenient marketing problem, to be polished out by our generation’s positive Parkers. 

    Many things have changed in the eighty years since the Katyn massacre. Communist Russia is dead, and dying further by the day, with our new Evil Empire being Communist China; Parker would be too boring, heteronormative and beauty-standard conforming for this moment. We need positivity! ✨Diversity! ✨ Plus, the Times is a far less effective funnel for propaganda than a Chinese video-feed/data sponge targeted at children. Fast fashion falls apart within but a few wears, but useful idiots are forever. 

    The chief example in Shein’s now-infamous TikTok campaign is a body-positive “confidence activist” from Los Angeles, who goes by the name Dani DMC. With half a million Instagram and YouTube followers, her styling videos include the usual Yeezy sneakers, $495 Balenciaga trucker hat, and $2,550 Balenciaga Le Cagole shoulder bag — she’s not a pleb, you know — but the clothes are an endless series of Amazon Fashion, Asos, Zara and, of course, Shein. With each new shipment, she releases yet another styling video, constantly keeping viewers appraised of the minute’s microtrend, and where to buy it. She makes dressing badly look effortless — were she not a “confidence activist,” she’d need one — and sweatshop fashion conglomerates are happy to throw money at her to support that effort.  

    This unrestrained shopping appetite, complete lack of taste, and endless vacuousness made Dani DMC the perfect “partner” for this new social media marketing campaign. For it, they invited a diverse cast of LA influencers to visit their most polished facilities, traveling by premium flights, fed with great catering, and sleeping in top Chinese hotels. On returning to the States, she said that “the China trip was one of the most life changing trips of her life,” totally reframing her understanding of the country. 

    In a sweet-talking gish-gallop, she relays how Shein showed them the whole process of making their clothes, “from beginning to end with my own two eyes;” that she was “really excited and impressed to see the working conditions” at the factory for Shein’s largest supplier; that she asked questions, like “an investigative journalist,” of an employee at Shein’s fabric cutting department; and got to visit the glass-covered “Shein Innovation Center”, which “blew. my. mind.” — and what a mind!  She ends the video by saying: 

    I think my biggest takeaway from this trip is to be an independent thinker, get the facts, and see it with my own two eyes. There’s a narrative fed to us in the US and I am one who always likes to be open minded and seek the truth so I’m grateful for that about myself, and I hope the same for you guys.

    A fellow influencer on the trip, @itsdestene_, said that the workers “weren’t even sweating.” The sweatshop joke in last year’s comedy Glass Onion wasn’t that good. 

    Aside from a few defenders (according to Mashable, the influencers were the real victims), most Western Twitter users remained stubbornly closed-minded, and weren’t receptive to the white-washing of CCP-linked fast-fashion propaganda. Rather, they mocked its shameless, cynical absurdity and made parody versions to this effect. 

    Nobody is under the illusion that your Nike sneakers or iPhone were made by happy monks; but nor do those companies release videos spinning their torturous manufacturing facilities as pleasant, polished playgrounds. Much like Parker, the video is so outrageous, not simply because of how shameless and flagrant these lies were, but how little they were bought for. Parker needed tail and some fish eggs; Dani needed catering and bad clothes.  

    In the aftermath, Dani has released three perfect videos. The first was a quick reaction video in a hotel, responding to the backlash. She’s fiery and stands up for herself against the moralistic masses. “I know exactly who I am, I know exactly what the fuck I’m doing,” she says, before stating that she “could never, will ever be a sell-out ever in my life.” And she’s not wrong; to “sell out” requires having values to forfeit. 

    She deleted this video, replacing it with a more polished affair, in which she reads a script of Shein PR points, held off-camera. She says that she’s helping Shein “debunk a lot of these rumors” and starts with the more ethically vital: 

    The first thing I wanna note is they take care of their creators and especially as a Plus Size Creator, I am about 60 percent of the time underpaid. And they have definitely not underpaid me. 

    This video was also deleted. 

    The third, dramatic response video is on Instagram. She starts with a staple of the influencer-apology-video genre — a deep sigh into camera, and quiet, less polished delivery — before progressing to address the concerns. She speaks about how much she wants to support plus-sized clothing, and is going to hold herself accountable. But she never apologizes. There’s no mention of sweatshops and abused workers and endorsing a company whose clothes disintegrate into landfill with a touch of a breeze or that it was fairly obvious that a brand selling $4 dresses couldn’t be paragons of ethical labor. But many comments were supportive. And though Dani has cut her ties with Shein, the free sweat-shop clothes will flow (just from other similarly disreputable sources) and life will move on. 

    Parker was pushed out of respectable journalism for his bootlicking, but fashion influencers love their boots, and there is no bar too low. The lack of apology is almost admirable, because she’s not going to change. Her entire personal business and public personality depends on these brands, and their cycle of constant, rabid overconsumption. 

    Through her styling videos, Dani advertises an endless amount of cheap affiliate-linked garbage, and tells you that, no matter your size, you’ll look fabulous in it. If you’re young, and sensitive about the way you look —particularly due to your weight — you’re the perfect prey for that. She’s not a “confidence activist,” but a tasteless marketer, getting rich off the insecurity of her followers, paid in dirty money.  

    By contrast, one of our greatest working fashion designers, Rick Owens, wrote that the second of “10 Rules for Style” reads:   

    Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead. 

    Dani DMC and her representatives did not respond to interview requests; nor did Shein to my request to join their next factory-touring trip. If the good folks at Shein read this; I would still happily go. I’ll give a full and fair account, filled up on caviar, reading The Red Hotel on your first-class flight. 

  • The Polish miracle

    The Polish miracle

    Poland’s Third Republic entered the world in 1989, after a dark period of occupation and oppression at the hands first of the Nazis and then the Soviets. As democracy was taking its first tentative steps in Warsaw, the USSR still had two years left to live and Germany was not yet unified. Yet somehow, over the next thirty-four years, Poland went from a poor post-communist state to a rapidly rising economic powerhouse and serious geopolitical force.

    Nothing about this rise was inevitable. Human agency, unforeseen events and providence play into every historical development — and Poland’s remarkable progress is no exception. It took leadership, will and luck.

    A central desire of the Polish people since long before 1989 has been to become a part of the West’s vision of Europe. “Let me explain to you how important it was — how it has always been — for Poland to aspire to be a part of Europe,” Polish ambassador to the United States Marek Magierowski tells me. “I am using that term deliberately, not part of the EU or NATO, the two organizations we joined afterwards, but part of Europe, a political and economic entity with its own values, with its own free-market foundations.”

    But the Poles knew simply becoming Westernized would not secure their future — they had to join the organizations that underpin Western power. “They were on the fastest track they possibly could be to both EU and NATO membership, and they conveyed that directly to Western leaders,” says Dan Hamilton of the Brookings Institution.

    Before Warsaw could enter either organization, however, it needed to engage in massive political and economic reform. Luckily for Poland, a robust civil society already existed, underpinned by the Catholic Church and the Solidarity movement. This proved to be an immense help in enacting the necessary changes. “Among the Central and Eastern European countries, Poland and Hungary were basically relatively open societies already prior to the transition,” says Michael Landesmann of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “So, in terms of the political atmosphere,” he continues, “it was more ready than many of the other communist countries.”

    Through the 1990s the country underwent “shock therapy,” via the rapid liberalization of its economy to jumpstart growth. “There was an almost immediate liberalization of prices, and an opening of the economy to trade, and to some extent financial flows,” says Landesmann. “At the beginning of the 1990s there was an eruption of that particular spirit of entrepreneurship,” Ambassador Magierowski tells me, “So many businesses set up, mushrooming all over Poland.”

    A fairly well-educated and skilled industrial workforce combined with low labor costs to make Poland an attractive place to invest. Foreign companies, particularly from Germany, flooded in, taking advantage of both the availability of workers and Poland’s location, right next to Europe’s economic powerhouse and at the juncture of East-West trade on the Continent. “Almost all of the manufacturing here [in Europe] is concentrated in… the Central European manufacturing core,” notes Landesmann. Car parts are a particularly large industry. Ambassador Magierowski comments that Poles “used to joke that the best German cars are manufactured, actually, in Poland.” Poland is also a center for furniture manufacturing — much of it goes to IKEA —and has a massive (and politically powerful) agricultural industry. Member of the European Parliament Radosław Sikorski puts it bluntly: “It is still an industrial economy: we don’t just do financial hanky-panky. We still make things.” The progress has been impressive. According to the World Bank, Poland’s gross domestic product in 2021 was over 300 percent larger (in constant 2015 US dollars) than it was in 1990, compared to 155 percent for the EU as a whole.

    Though it happened later than in many post-communist states, Poland’s privatization efforts were managed particularly well. “In Poland, it happened more transparently and with less contestation than some of the other places where cronies got hold of massive assets,” says Dalibor Roháč of the American Enterprise Institute. To avoid cronyism, Poland made sure to take on corruption directly. “Poland was ruthless in terms of going after people who had collaborated or profited off of structures,” Landesmann comments.

    Another important economic development was the evolution of the banking system. Facing a banking crisis in the early 2000s, Poland underwent what Landesmann calls a “cleansing process,” resulting in greater banking regulation and a more resilient banking system by the time the Great Recession came around in 2008. Remarkably, Poland managed to escape a recession during that crisis, bucking the European trend. The banks’ resilience was helped also by the Polish population’s aversion to the sort of financial wizardry of many Western banks. Wojciech Przybylski of Visegrad Insight attributes some of this to a “farmer’s mentality.” Still with a deep connection to rural, small-town traditions, Poles are no nonsense and value clarity, he says.

    Arguably the most critical development of the past two decades has been Poland’s accession to the EU. Since Poland joined in 2004, the EU has offered access both to the single market and to structural funds equivalent to 3 to 4 percent of GDP. Compared to other new entrants, Poland used the money with particular foresight and success, for example to modernize the country’s infrastructure — from roads, to railways, to public transport — which Przybylski says was critical to Poland’s continued economic growth, helping to draw investment and grease the wheels of the economy. The Polish economy continues to benefit from its strong foundation and established practices, with growth in 2022 hitting 4.9 percent, though it is expected to fall to 0.7 percent in 2023 and 2.6 percent in 2024. But even in in strained times, Poland is set to perform better than most Western European economies.

    However, the solidity of the rule of law is an increasing concern; it has been a contentious issue since the ruling coalition embarked on judicial reforms after its 2015 election victory: questions about the stability of a legal system lead to jittery investors. Making matters worse, the government recently passed a law that would, as Przybylski says in a recent article, “set up a politically controlled administrative procedure to eliminate people it accuses of conspiring with Russia from the electoral race, namely Donald Tusk — the opposition leader.”

    The rapid growth of the state has also raised some red flags. “The role that the state plays in the economy is certainly larger than it was before 2015 in terms of sheer state ownership and involvement,” says Roháč. “They even bought back stakes in some of the utility companies and energy firms.”

    A country’s power is not predicated on economic strength alone, however. Poland’s most publicly visible progress since the transition to democracy has been its rapidly growing role in geopolitics. Poland’s historical position under the boot of powerful foreign foes is key. “We have been neighbors of Russia for 500 years, and there is a lot of history,” says Sikorski, “and being closer and weaker we pick up intimations of danger much earlier than Westerners.”

    Warsaw recognized Russia’s post-USSR threat long before most other Western powers took it seriously. “We are the country that consistently warned the West about Putin, about the lack of NATO military readiness on the Eastern Flank,” says Sikorski. “We argued for writing the contingency plans, that was under Obama, and we argued for a physical American presence for exercises. And we protested the Nord Stream investment and warned about what would happen in Crimea and Donbas.”

    Where France, Germany and even America dithered, Poland acted. Around the time of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, Sikorski, then minister of foreign affairs, notes that he “set up a Polish consulate in Sevastopol — it was the only NATO/EU consulate in that city — to monitor developments there, because I expected it to be the Gdansk of the twenty-first century, and so it proved.” Preemptive action also has tangible benefits: “When the Russians started the Anschluss of Crimea,” Sikorski goes on, “we had up to the minute information, which, of course, I shared with allies.”

    Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, Poland has been at the forefront of support for Kyiv. “When we saw pictures from Bucha and Irpin, all of those unspeakable atrocities committed by Russians in Ukraine,” says Ambassador Magierowski, “we always recall Russian occupation in Poland.” More concretely, Poland knows that it could face the same fate as Ukraine. “The sense that they are next on Russia’s list is very strong in Poland,” says Roháč.

    Millions of Ukrainian refugees have since poured into Poland, welcomed with open arms. “Poland had this reputation that [it] was averse to migration… and then you had 3, 4 million people come within the scope of a couple of weeks or months,” comments Roháč. “And they all found accommodation with Polish families; everybody had somebody from Ukraine living with them at some point.”

    Warsaw has also provided among the most significant quantities of military aid to Ukraine, including hundreds of main battle tanks, both of Soviet-vintage and modern manufacture, self-propelled howitzers, and MiG-29 fighter jets. It has consistently pushed for other nations to supply more and better weaponry, and has been clear-eyed about the need for a complete Ukrainian victory. “We not only believe in ultimate Ukrainian victory — we think that we should define Ukraine’s victory as the disappearance of all Russian troops from Ukraine’s territory, and the entire territory that belonged to Ukraine before 2014, including Crimea,” says Ambassador Magierowski.

    Unlike many of its Western European partners, Poland has taken some of the most dramatic steps on the Continent in modernizing and expanding its military over the past few years. Indeed, Warsaw is set to spend about 4.3 percent of its GDP on defense in 2023 — about one percentage point ahead of the United States.

    There are obstacles ahead, however. Poland has had a rough relationship with the EU since the governing coalition began reforming the judiciary, lessening the influence Warsaw could otherwise have. “I think the Polish voice would have been much stronger, including in this current war, if Poland hadn’t been involved in this ongoing fight with Brussels over the court system,” Roháč asserts.

    The judicial changes and the new law potentially excluding opposition politicians from elections, along with some of the government’s other actions, have many worried about the strength of Polish institutions. As Przybylski says, Warsaw might turn “from being a linchpin of NATO to another problematic member — a non-democracy that fast-tracks militarism.” “State-controlled companies are already conducting campaigns with their money for the ruling party,” says Sikorski, and “state resources are used to fund those areas of the country which favor the government.” This is bad for democracy, and will continue to harm Poland’s relations with its allies.

    Poles will vote this year — with much at stake — but there is one policy area that is unlikely to feel much turbulence: security and defense. Both the ruling Law and Justice Party and the opposition Civic Platform have very similar (though not identical) views regarding Polish security vis-à-vis NATO, the US and Russia.

    With strong economic and security foundations, Poland’s rise is unlikely to stop anytime soon, but it faces challenges, including in relation to the rule of law and the strength of democratic institutions more generally. How these issues are handled will determine the country’s prospects. Warsaw’s ascendancy since the collapse of communism, however, is nothing short of extraordinary — and for that the credit goes to the Polish people.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2023 World edition. 

  • Xi Jinping copies the Stalin playbook

    Xi Jinping copies the Stalin playbook

    The general secretary of China’s Communist Party is a different kind of leader. Now in his third five-year term, Xi Jinping believes that time is running out for him to secure his legacy as Mao Zedong’s true successor. He spent a decade dismantling the technocracy and politburo consensus government ushered in by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, rolled back the authority of local party nomenklatura in favor of more centralized control from Beijing, and worked to subordinate China’s economy to the Communist Party’s (meaning Xi’s) political priorities.

    In abandoning the “to get rich is glorious” social contract of the post-Tiananmen Square era, Xi has come to bury Deng and not to praise him. Or, perhaps, to transcend him, as appeared to be the outcome of the sixth plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in November 2021. For only the third time in the party’s hundred-year history — the first in 1945 before Mao’s victory in China’s Civil War and the second in 1981 under Deng that rejected certain excesses of the Cultural Revolution — the Committee passed a resolution “on certain historical questions” related to Communist Chinese socialism.

    The 2021 resolution not only elevated Xi’s vision for the Communist Party and state to a level with Mao and Deng, but also replaced Deng’s conception of Communist China’s history and approach to the transfer of power. The party’s official position became that China under Xi is undergoing its third great development phase — the first, under Mao’s original socialist theory, brought the Communists to power and the second, under Deng and his modifications to Mao’s theory, made the country richer. Xi’s ideas, in turn, seek to make China strong. Deng was, in effect, a bridge between Mao and Xi. And in a nod to Xi’s personal dictatorship, the resolution omitted references to power transfers among succeeding generations of Party leaders after Mao. 

    Xi’s new course would be less concerning if it looked like he was consolidating power for its own sake or merely hoping to enjoy his position at the top of the Communist Party’s greasy pole. Unfortunately, far from being China’s own Brezhnev, Xi is coming to more closely resemble Stalin in the lead-up to World War Two. Starting from a momentous strategic shift in 1928 and culminating in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin put a draconian policy program in motion to facilitate a major European war that would serve as a catalyst for the Soviet Union to impose its will across the continent. Xi, in pursuing Communist China’s hegemony in Eurasia, is following a similar path.

    For Stalin, the road to war began almost as soon as he became general secretary after Lenin’s death. Bruised by the Red Army’s military defeat in Poland and failure to bring the socialist revolution to the heart of Europe, Stalin was alarmed by the inability of Soviet-allied communist parties (which took orders from the Communist International, or Comintern in Moscow) to gain power on their own through democratic means. So, in July 1928, the Comintern’s Sixth Congress adopted a landmark resolution that designated Europe’s social democrats as “social fascists” against whom communists were to wage all-out war. A month after the Congress, Stalin announced the start of the first Five-Year Plan — collectivization of agriculture and a ruthless class war against the Soviet Union’s more productive peasants would yield grain to export for hard currency, which Moscow would spend on developing heavy industry and mass producing dual-use machinery. Postulating that an army’s main strength lies not in its weaponry or commanders, but rather in the rightness of its government’s political direction, Stalin then proceeded to thoroughly purge the Red Army as events moved closer to war.

    Many at the time did not see Stalin’s moves as intertwined, when in fact they were tied up with his burning desire to succeed where Lenin failed and win the war that Lenin lost. By forbidding Germany’s Communist Party, then Europe’s strongest, from politically allying with its Social Democrats, Stalin helped pave Hitler’s path to power as someone who could (and promptly did) upend the post-World War One Versailles peace settlement. The Five-Year Plan was a screen to hide a massive rearmament drive to get the Red Army ready for war and the purges turned that army into Stalin’s political instrument unable to block his militarist designs. Political consolidation at home, destabilization abroad and the subordination of the economy to ideological objectives: Stalin’s administrative inheritance passed on to Mao and embraced by Xi with adjustment for the twenty-first century.

    Xi’s domestic position is secure, but he is doubtless concerned about mounting structural problems that could weaken his ability to achieve his political goals. China’s population is falling and its growth slowing, so Xi has increased the Communist Party’s direct control over the economy, and upped its campaign of destabilization abroad — prematurely ending one country/two systems in Hong Kong, provoking border clashes with India, accelerating the militarization of the South China Sea, escalating against Taiwan and filling power vacuums left by the United States — while continuing to expand and modernize what is already the world’s largest army and world’s largest navy. America remains institutionally unable to compete with China’s overseas infrastructure development and direct investment initiatives, and Xi has worked to weaken America’s diplomatic soft power with his brokering of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement and floating mediation of the Ukraine War.

    Stalin resolved to foist his regime on Europe at gunpoint after his allies failed to do it peacefully. If, short of war, America can be maneuvered into accepting China’s hegemony in Eurasia and is bereft of local partners willing to militarily confront or economically resist Beijing, then so much the better for Xi. In that sense, he is not only following in Stalin’s footsteps and looking to overtake Mao, but is operating in the best traditions of Sun Tzu.

    That Xi is an ideologue committed to moving heaven and earth to achieve his ends, and willing to subordinate economy, society, state and the Chinese Communist Party to those ends, makes the threat to America and its allies especially acute. A technocrat who prioritizes a social contract or a kleptocrat who relishes the perks of power is easier to manage. Just as the western powers eighty years ago reacted to, but could not derail, Hitler’s and Stalin’s drive toward war, Washington finds itself waiting to see where the history-altering blow from China will fall. America can either react to the crisis when it comes or adopt a new and much more proactive strategy to get ahead of Xi and succeed where our forebears in earlier times failed. Xi’s window of opportunity is closing.

    This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

  • Nightmares of the Cultural Revolution

    Nightmares of the Cultural Revolution

    This year is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. The spring festival began on January 22, and in Chinese culture the rabbit represents the Moon. Some say it is because the shadows in the moon resemble the animal, but it also reflects its characteristics. The rabbit’s quiet personality hides its confidence and strength: it is moving, steadily moving, towards its goal, whatever the obstacles. Some also say that it lives in fear all the time, finds it difficult to open up to others and often turns to escapism.

    I never really thought about the meaning of a “rabbit’s pure characteristics” in Chinese daily life until I read these two books about the Cultural Revolution. Formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this sociopolitical movement in the People’s Republic of China ran from 1966 to 1976, the year of Mao’s death.

    Since I moved to the UK in 1997, I have read about thirty books in English on the subject, most of them written by western authors and only a few by Chinese. When I read westerners’ work about it I feel like a tourist following a travel-guide walk on one side of a river, with the Cultural Revolution on the other side. When I read Chinese authors, I can feel the stories by my skin. But neither of these books are travel guides to Chinese history, or window-shopping approaches to the Cultural Revolution. They are people’s books. Both present a record of those who experienced and bore witness to the events of that time.

    Tania Branigan, who has part-Thai roots, was sent to China as a correspondent for the Guardian in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, or “Golden Year” for the Chinese. She discovered this neighbor of her grandmother’s homeland pushing towards the future in a whirlwind of reform. Her notebooks soon filled with details about factory workers and farmers streaming towards cities, and corruption scandals, activists and social change. She reported on China’s first gay beauty pageant. Everyone was on the move, for survival and in spirit. People would abandon the fields, change jobs, find religion and lose old friends; they worked hard to pin hope on anything in the future. Marriage, family and community disappeared in an instant.

    Branigan also found that the Chinese have no time to look back on recent history. The older generation, who were witnesses to the violence, are carrying their painful memories into another world. Their offspring do not care to listen to their legend, or let dark memories cloud their future blue sky. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution have been compressed into a single phrase.

    But Branigan, who worked in China for seven years, came to believe that the Cultural Revolution is still a part of today’s China. Red Memory gathers the personal stories she heard when she was living there, as well as her own exploration and analysis of the period:

    One-fifth of the world’s population; a place of staggering social, cultural and ethnic diversity, spread across territory almost forty times larger than my homeland. Each day taught me how little I knew and how much I needed to excavate. There was a joke that after a month you could write a book on the country (and there were a few of those); after a year you could write an essay; after five, perhaps a sentence. I interviewed lawyers and novelists and workers; survivors damaged by their experiences, and others who yearned for the return of the era. I heard excruciating accounts of loss, happy reminiscences and painstaking dissections of abstruse political rifts. Eventually I arrived home to Britain with a suitcase of notes and books and pictures, and a sense of defeat. When I had begun, it seemed I might be witnessing a change: that hard, grassroots effort might be clawing out room for discussion. Now I knew that the space was shrinking instead.

    I wondered whether the success of Red Memory might owe something to Branigan’s “Chinese looks” — whether her Thai heritage had helped her gain the trust of her interviewees, and had avoided the “western face-checking” of the national security agency. But when we spoke last month she told me she didn’t think that was so, and that many western-looking journalists had successfully dug out previously hidden stories.

    Wang Youqin, an international professor in Chinese language at the University of Chicago, has been methodically collecting material from victims of the Cultural Revolution since 1980. She has interviewed more than 1,000 students or teachers individually, from 200 schools or more in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Xinjiang and other cities. Following the investigative stage, she spent several more years compiling information on all the 659 victims who appear in this long, seven-part book.

    The accounts felt very familiar. Many of the interviewees are in their sixties, like me, or of the older generation. We are the ones who have been making the effort to be “normal” by day, in front of our families and others, but who fail to be normal at night, when it is impossible to control memories. In sleep, those deep, painful recollections are unwilling to be silenced. The Cultural Revolution has blackened our dreams forever. I, too, have spent more than forty years trying to interview Chinese people about it; to collect stories of the Cultural Revolution in my own books, such as The Good Women of China, China Witness and The Promise; and to find out how those who experienced it deal with their nightmares.

    In today’s China, where it is not permissible to talk about it, and there is no chance of sharing its memory with your children, this period has been sealed. I live with the fear that the young now won’t have any chance of understanding their family histories, or how their traditional home towns were destroyed. When a Chinese student from Leeds University came to stay with me for Chinese New Year, she saw me in tears, and asked why. I let her read some pages from these two books and she was shocked and saddened. Her knowledge of the Cultural Revolution was almost zero.

    She couldn’t understand why there was no mention of it in China’s own history textbooks. She wondered how many people of her generation would know that the death toll was more than 1.72 million; and she could hardly accept that her parents and grand-parents had lived through such times. I asked her whether she thought it would be an important step in uncovering the truth if her contemporaries could read these books, and she said, yes.

    She then asked me about my own memories. I told her that one of my recurring nightmares began in the late fall of 1966. I was at elementary school. In the space of a week my parents were taken away by the Red Guards, one after the other. My children’s books and the lovely doll I slept with, as well as my parents’ own books and our furniture, were all thrown on a bonfire in our yard. That fire was lit in the afternoon and lasted until midnight — and with it ended my happy childhood and my right to play and talk with other children. I became a political orphan.

    For the next six-and-a-half years, along with other children taken into the custody of the Red Guards, I lived with daily starvation and abuse. It seemed that everyone had the right to beat us because we were “black kids,” from American and British enemy-related families. In the night, the Red Guards came to our dormitory to choose a child as their “violent game player.” Those dark shadows were walking towards us with their ghost voices: which one would you like to choose tonight?

    The dream came again last month, on Chinese New Year’s Eve:

    Will it be me this time? They want to choose me to punish in the next room tonight? What might they do to me there? Oh dear, they are coming… I can see those dark shadows are coming up to me…

    I woke up sweating, and, as always, it took me a while to register where I was. Every night I lay out some objects around me in bed before I sleep which can help me walk out of that horrible dreamland and realize: I am not in my childhood in China. I live in London now.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

  • A Transylvanian nightmare

    A Transylvanian nightmare

    My first taste of proper street violence came in a Transylvanian town square thirty years ago. Ethnic Romanian and Hungarian villagers were going at each other with pitchforks, knives and strips of wood they had ripped from park benches. In an attempt to separate the two sides, the Romanian army had driven half a dozen armored vehicles into the middle of the square. Just as things seemed to calm down, a group of villagers came running out of a hotel, pursued by fired-up Hungarians. As I ran to avoid the melée, a man appeared holding a chunk of wood and hit me over the head. For a second I was stunned. Then my survival instinct kicked in. “I’m English,” I shouted in my best Hungarian. “English!” He stopped mid-swing. His intention had been to crack a Romanian skull, not bruise a British one. But soon his compatriots had gathered around, weapons raised, and they weren’t in the mood to listen. Protest as I might, the noise of the armored vehicles drowned out my shouts of neutrality. Then I had a stroke of luck. A local Hungarian TV journalist, well known to my assailants as that-guy-on-the-telly, recognized me and began clapping and cheering. “Hero!” he shouted. “He’s an English hero.” The mob froze. “Now’s your moment,” the journalist said into my ear. “For God’s sake, don’t run.”

    The spell held. A half hour later I watched as the mob caught another man — this one a real Romanian — and beat his head with rods. Eventually the beatings began to sound like a boot stepping into soft mud. The fight, the first violent story I covered as a journalist, took place in a town called Targu Mures. I was one of the few foreigners present and the next morning my account, delivered down a scratchy telephone line, ran at the top of the BBC news.

    Looking back to that violent night in 1990, I realize that I was lucky. Three hundred people were injured and six were killed. But Transylvania was also lucky. This northwestern third of Romania, enclosed to the east and south by the sweep of the Carpathian Mountains, has been contested for centuries. Somehow, even as its far more advanced neighbor Yugoslavia began its bloody disintegration, Romania avoided civil war. With a flurry of nationalist flag-waving, bickering and plenty of EU money, the country emerged from its violent post-communist adolescence to become, if not a leading European citizen, then at least a reasonably balanced adult.

    This month I spent a few days visiting Cluj, the unofficial capital of Transylvania, and its rural surroundings. My American companion and I arrived on the night train from Budapest and spent three days riding through the hills with a group of Hungarian horsemen. Two were modern-day hussars and had received an EU grant to preserve the traditions and uniforms of their forbears. A third looked more like a cowboy from the American West. We cantered over hills, past shepherds tending their flocks and trotted through villages where Romanians, Hungarians and gypsies still live cheek-by-jowl. For lunch we ate onions, radishes and hard slabs of pig fat on bread.

    As we rode along an icy river bed and through a forest one morning, I asked the horsemen how relations were between the different nationalities three decades after they had come so close to civil war. “Most of the tension has gone,” said the twentysomething who breeds his own horses. “But if you are asking me who my friends are, they are all Hungarian. I have Romanians I get on with — they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them — but none I would call a friend.” All said they speak a bit of Romanian but mostly stick to their own. When it comes to political leadership, they look to Budapest rather than Bucharest. “We are all for Viktor Orbán,” the cowboy said over a glass of homemade wine. “I’m not saying he is perfect but he is ours and he helps us.” Several of them cited local Hungarian buildings that have been restored with money from Budapest. “That is an Arpad-era church,” one of the hussars told me with pride, pointing to a building from the time of the founder of modern Hungary, who arrived in the Carpathian basin a thousand years ago.

    Cluj was clearly struggling when I lived there in the 1990s. The municipal buses had holes in the floor through which you could watch the road go by. There were miles-long lines for petrol. Even the traffic lights were unpredictable, sometimes turning from red to amber and then settling back to red again. Today the city is bustling. Most high-end western brands have outlets in the two new shopping malls.

    Why did Yugoslavia erupt in the early 1990s and Transylvania did not? The ingredients appeared to be there. The nationalist mobs were hot-headed enough and I remember being approached by a Hungarian firebrand politician asking me to help him secure weapons and military training for his people. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that there was no Slobodan Milošević, who drip-fed guns, funding and power to ultra-nationalist Serbian goons willing to pursue his mono-ethnic vision. The math in Transylvania was different too. Cluj was one of the most important Hungarian towns for centuries and when I was living there, about a third of the population was Hungarian. Today, with widespread emigration to Hungary proper and a roaring economy that has sucked in thousands of Romanians from elsewhere in the country, that number has probably fallen to 10 percent. “Conflict is just not an option for us,” a local Hungarian academic told me. “We have to defend our rights and we have to look after our culture, but without creating animosity among the Romanians. If we do that, we can only lose.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.