Month / September 2018

by Andrew

A novelist’s view of China’s rise, from 1983

Walter Tevis’ 1983 science-fiction novel The Steps of the Sun is mostly not a very good book; unlike some of his other books (the excellent chess novel The Queen’s Gambit, or The Color of Money) it has not aged well. The one thing about the book that does seem ahead of its time is the worldbuilding: it is set in a future world in which China has unquestionably risen. Here is one background passage:

Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city.

But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life.

New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world.

The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.

Some of these details are remarkably prescient: the Chinese tourists crowding the streets of New York, and the way the city serves as a kind of living museum of a certain type and period of culture. The bit about China being ahead of the US in electric vehicles also has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. In another passage, a billionaire shows off his ability to speak Chinese (remind you of anyone?).

This is pretty unusual stuff for 1983, when Americans were obsessed with the rise of Japan and had barely begun to notice China. William Gibson’s much more famous Neuromancer, from 1984, chose Japan as the natural setting for its hyper-technological fantasies. So I am curious what might have inspired this aspect of the book; there is little in Tevis’ biography to suggest a particular interest in or knowledge of Asia.

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by Andrew

Are giant factories a symptom of labor repression?

That is the suggestion made in Deborah Cohen’s interesting review of Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.

Giant factories were a feature of both the US and Soviet economies in the 1930s, which led some observers at the time to speculate that capitalism and socialism were converging toward a single economic form. But this convergence turned out to be quite temporary, as giant factories lasted much longer in the USSR:

By the late 1940s, the era of the showcase factory was over in the United States. The strength of unionization, particularly demonstrated by the formidable strike wave of 1945–1946, made clear to industrialists the danger of concentrating workers in a few plants.

More than simply a means of controlling costs or rationalizing distribution, the drive to open smaller and decentralized plants, especially in the low-wage, nonunionized South, was also a strategy to ensure that a company’s entire operation couldn’t be hamstrung by a strike.

At the same time, by contrast, industrial gigantism continued apace across the Eastern Bloc. The East Germans built the steel town of Stalinstadt (now Eisenhüttenstadt); in Poland, there rose Nowa Huta, with a workforce of nearly 30,000 by 1967. Crippling labor unrest wasn’t a problem that particularly worried leaders in the Eastern Bloc, who could count on a network of spies as well as a cadre of factory workers who were fervent believers in socialism.

The current world champion of industrial gigantism is, of course, China. The “Foxconn City” facility in Shenzhen is generally thought to be the world’s largest manufacturing facility, employing something over 200,000 workers. Strikes in China are not uncommon but tend to be short-term events related to specific disputes, rather than an organized strategy as part of collective bargaining. This of course is because China does not have independent unions; the state-controlled union tends to side with management. So the risk to a company’s operations from an individual strike is still low–though it is worth noting that Foxconn does not depend on one single large facility but instead has lots of large facilities, in China and many other countries.

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The Volgograd Tractor Factory in the 1930s

 

by Andrew

The Newcastle shipyards in world history

I recently paid my first visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England, which is a worthwhile stop for anyone interested in the history of the Industrial Revolution. If you follow the promenade along the river to the west, outside the city center you come to a low-rise brick office park. There is no particular reason for a tourist to hang out there, but I was intrigued by the fact that several of the buildings had what appeared to be Japanese names. Looking around, sure enough there was an explanatory placard: the office park sits on the site of the old Newcastle shipyards, and one of their major customers in the late 19th century was the Japanese navy. The buildings were named after the ships.

I had not known until then that the UK had supplied much of the hardware that enabled Japan’s famous military victory over Russia in their war of 1904-5. British shipyards had built all six of the Japanese navy’s battleships, four of its eight cruisers (other European powers supplied the rest), and 16 of its 24 destroyers (the other eight were domestic).

Japan of course was busy building up its own shipbuilding industry, but being able to purchase leading-edge military technology on the open market was essential. Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who commanded the navy in the battle in which Russia’s Baltic fleet was destroyed, had studied in England as a young man, and in 1911 visited Newcastle to express his thanks for its role in arming the navy.

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Japan’s military victory over Russia was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European one in modern times. It was shocking to European and American observers at the time, as it overturned what had been assumed to be an established order. The Russo-Japanese War was a clear turning point in what was to become the century-long rise of Asia and the quest of non-European countries to achieve parity with the European imperial powers. But what does it mean that Japan’s victory was in fact aided and encouraged by some of those same European imperial powers?

Perhaps one point is that rivalry among existing great powers is one of the forces that helps produce new powers: an existing power can seek advantage over its adversaries by encouraging the rise of new powers. The US decision to engage with Communist China in the 1970s cannot, of course, be understood in isolation from its rivalry with the Soviet Union: the US wanted to make sure that China was, if not exactly on its side, at least not on the USSR’s side.

Another possible interpretation is that commercial interests (or, if you prefer, capitalism) can be disruptive to hierarchies in international relations. Would Japan’s aggressive drive to bring its navy up to European standards have been as successful if it did not also boost the sales and profits of Armstrong Whitwork & Co in Newcastle? Similarly, it is hard to imagine that the US would have been so accommodating of China’s “peaceful rise” over the past few decades if it had not also presented big opportunities for American companies.

by Andrew

What I’ve been listening to lately

 
  • Benny Goodman – The Complete RCA Victor Small Group Recordings. Small-group swing is one of the best sounds in jazz in my book, much more listenable today than most big-band music from the same era. The sound that Goodman’s quartet with Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hamptom on vibes generates is just lovely.
  • Kitsos Harisiadis – Lament in a Deep Style 1929-1931. I discovered this recording thanks to Andrew Katzenstein’s fascinating article in the New York Review of Books on the music produced in Epirus in the 1920s and 1930s. Harisiadis is a clarinetist and near-contemporary of Goodman but his sound ventures into territory jazz would not explore until the 1960s.
  • John Coltrane – Both Directions At Once. This will probably outsell any jazz recording by a living musician, so I don’t need to give it more publicity. But who could pass up more recordings from the Coltrane quarter’s classic period? While it did not surprise me, I certainly enjoyed this, especially the untitled original compositions.
  • Herbie Hancock – Sextant. Another one of those records I just didn’t hear right the first time: the goofy cover and synthesizer bleeps were apparently not serious enough for this young jazz fan. But with this passage of time, I find I do really like it: an excellent extension of the moody, complex Bitches Brew sound.
  • Ergo – If Not Inertia. The prepared piano pieces of John Cage are some of my favorite music outside the jazz idiom, mostly because of the lovely spooky sound. So I really enjoyed the incorporation of the prepared piano, along with electronics and other noises, into a more jazz-like context on this recording.