đ first Derivative [99]
China's malaise era â Iran threats â Polish politics â Ecuador's young president
đș A TV update, I rewatched Band of Brothers and was reminded of how moving and masterfully crafted it is. The production design, casting, and acting are fantastic, but its core strength is its writing which starts with its reliance on excellent source material and Stephen Ambroseâs decision in the first place to write about a company in the war that had such a saga from D-Day to Austria.
I alternated episodes with The Pacific which I was watching for the first time. The miniseries is much darker and the warfare more brutal. Although the production quality is about as good, itâs missing the same emotional core because unlike BoB it doesnât start out with an initial episode at boot camp that lets you bond with the characters. Thatâs partially because itâs based on two different memoirs (Helmet for my Pillow, With the Old Breed) which donât set out to tell the kind of central story that Ambrose composed.
I also recently finished an Israeli miniseries, Our Boys (on HBO/Max). Itâd been on my list for a while and I was reminded about it because of current events. Itâs perhaps too topical but if you can stomach it, itâs an excellent show. I agree with one review I read: âIt's like if Michael Mann directed a season of The Wire in Israelâ. Based on true events in 2014, the series is a compelling crime procedural and legal drama but itâs fundamentally a personal drama that explores so many facets of the different spheres and competing interests in both Israeli and Palestinian communities.
đŹ On the film side, I got to see a bunch of movies at this yearâs New York Film Festival (shoutout to my friend and fD reader Keyon for help with the tickets). Highlights were Bradley Cooperâs Maestro (surprise, heâs a pretty good director too) and Hayao Miyazakiâs first movie in 10 years, The Boy and the Heron.
I also got to see Martin Scorseseâs new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, last week. Itâs based on David Grannâs acclaimed book about the Osage Indian murders, a fascinating piece of American history I knew nothing about before I heard of the movie. Killers comes in at a very long 3.5 hours and while it didnât lose me I wouldnât say it flies by here either. Scorsese isnât trying to entertain so much as communicate something quite serious and sober about sick souls witnessing profound moral depravityâenduring it, being culpable for or complicit in it, and having to live with the memories through the stories we tell.
People have noted these shared themes in Scorseseâs late âquartetâ of films (The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon). Relative to his entire filmography, I wouldnât say Iâve loved his latest work, including Killers. I think these themes are important and rich but I donât think his latest movie activates a live contemplation about them so much as it deadens you with the same lesson over and over. On the other hand, my friend and fD reader Gabriel has a piece highlighting some of the movieâs merits.
đ Some spooky Halloween movie recs:
The Vanishing (1988)
Rosemaryâs Baby (1968)
The Exorcist (1973)
Raw (2016)
It Comes At Night (2017)
X (2022)
Good reading,
-Teddy
đšđłđ Evan Osnos has a very long and comprehensive piece in The New Yorker about âChinaâs age of malaiseâ, detailing the social, economic, and political disquiet in the Xi Jinping era.
Measuring a nationâs mood can be difficultâespecially in China, which doesnât allow independent pollingâbut there are indicators. In America, when the nineteen-seventies brought inflation, gas lines, and turmoil in the Middle East, the public mood could be read on the roadways; the car industry still calls the sluggish, boxy aesthetic of those days the Malaise Era. Ask Chinese citizens about their mood nowadays and some of the words you hear most are mimang and jusangââbewilderedâ and âfrustrated.â
On Chinaâs social compact pre-Xi:
[The Communist Party] survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era; he called for âcourageous experimentsâ to insure that China would not be like âa woman with bound feetââŠ
For two decades after Deng made his deal with the people, the Party largely held to it. The private sector generated fortunes; intellectuals aired dissent on campuses and social media
âŠwhich is cracking as the Party fails on both parts of the deal in exchange for political obedience, providing robust economic growth and a reasonable sphere of personal and social freedom:
But the downturn has shaken citizens who have never experienced anything but improvements in their standard of living. People who shunted their life savings into contracts for new apartments are contending with unfinished concrete blocks in overgrown lots, because the developers ran out of money. Civil treasuries are similarly depleted, by the shutdowns required by Chinaâs âzero-covidâ policy; there are reports of teachers and civil servants going unpaid.
The space for pop culture, high culture, and spontaneous interaction has narrowed to a pinhole. Chinese social media, which once was a chaotic hive, has been tamed, as powerful voices are silenced and discussions closed. Pop concerts and other performances have been cancelled for reasons described only as âforce majeure.â Even standup comics are forced to submit videos of jokes for advance approval. This spring, a comedian was investigated for improvising a riff on a Chinese military slogan (âFight well, win the battleâ) in a joke about his dogs going crazy over a squirrel. His representatives were fined two million dollars and barred from hosting events.
Into the cultural void, the Party has injected a torrent of publishing under Xiâs nameâeleven new books in the first five months of this year, far more than any predecessor ever purported to writeâcollecting his comments on every topic from economics and history to the lives of women. Geremie BarmĂ©, a prominent historian and translator, calls it âXi Jinpingâs Empire of Tedium.â
On the deeping reach of Party ideology into daily lives:
In addition to the disappearances, the deepening reach of politics is felt throughout daily life. Early this year, the Party launched a campaign to educate citizens on what Party literature habitually refers to as âXi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.â All manner of institutionsâlaboratories, asset-management firms, banks, think tanksâare expected to make time for regular lectures, followed by the writing of essays and the taking of tests. Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on âthought work,â including reading an average of four books a month. A microchip engineer at a university lab told a friend, âGoing to meetings every day literally eats away at the time for scientific discoveries.â
On youth disillusionment, unemployment, and âlying flatâ:
In 2021, a thirty-one-year-old former factory worker named Luo Huazhong posted a photo of himself in bed, with the caption âLying flat is my sophistic act,â he said, professing solidarity with the philosopher Diogenes, who is said to have protested the excesses of Athenian aristocrats by living in a barrel. The post spread, and âlie flattistsâ formed online groups to commiserate. The censors closed the discussions, but the phrase has lingered, especially among urbanites, some of whom liken themselves to the Beat generation, which originally took the name to mean âwearyâ in the face of materialism and conformity.
In July, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that youth unemployment had hit a record high of twenty-one per cent, nearly twice the rate four years earlier. Then the bureau stopped releasing the numbers. Zhang Dandan, an economics professor at Peking University, published an article arguing that the true rate might be as high as forty-six per centâŠ
A decade after Xi told young people to âdare to dream,â he now admonishes them to curtail their expectations; in recent speeches, he has said that disgruntled youth should âabandon arrogance and pamperingâ and âeat bitternessââbasically, Mandarin for âsuck it up.â The exhortations land poorly. Young people mock the implication that they are little more than a renkuangâa âhuman mineââfor the nationâs exploitation. As a subtle protest during college-commencement season, graduates took to posting pictures of themselves sprawled face down, or draped over railings, in a manner they named âzombie style.â
On the rising flight of Chinese people, rich and poor:
In 2018, online discussions in China started to feature a Mandarin neologism: runxueââthe art of running.â When Shanghai went into lockdown, the saying took off⊠Authorities were displeased; the immigration department announced plans to âstrictly restrict the nonessential exit activities of Chinese citizensââŠ
More than three hundred thousand Chinese moved away last year, more than double the pace of migration a decade ago, according to the United NationsâŠSome take advantage of Ecuadorâs visa-free travel to enter South America, and then join the trek north through the jungle of the DariĂ©n Gap. This summer, authorities at Americaâs southern border reported a record 17,894 encounters with Chinese migrants in the previous ten monthsâa thirteenfold increase from a year earlier.
On the authoritarian scleroticism of the Chinese bureaucracy under Xi:
But, over time, the zero-covid strategy combined with the politics of fear to produce extraordinary suffering. Local apparatchiks, fearing punishment for even tiny outbreaks, became rigid and unresponsive. In Shanghai, most of the twenty-five million residents were confined to their homes for two months, even as food and medicine ran low. A woman whose father was locked down so long that he nearly ran out of heart medication told me, âWe donât have to imagine a bleak future with robots controlling us. Weâve lived that life already.â After citizens took to their balconies to sing or to demand supplies, a video circulated of a drone hovering above a compound in Shanghai, broadcasting a dystopian directive: âControl your soulâs desire for freedom. Do not open the window to singââŠ
In the darker scenario, China faces âJapanificationââa shrinking workforce, lost decades of growth. It might avoid that with quick, decisive policy changes, but Cai Xia, who was a professor at the Ă©lite Central Party School until she broke ranks and moved abroad, in 2020, told me that mid-level administrators have grown paralyzed by fears of a misstep. âOfficials are âlying flat,â â she said. âIf there is no instruction from the top, there will be no action from the bottom.â
On accelerationism with Chinese characteristics:
By choking off private life and business, it is hastening a confrontationâwhich Jun sees as painful but necessary. âThe more pressure there is, the sooner it will open up,â he said. âIn five years, China will be diminished. In ten years, it will be in conflict. But in fifteen years it might be better.â Versions of this view circulate widely enough that some Chinese have given Xi the nickname the Great Accelerator, in the belief that he is pushing China toward a reckoning.
đźđ·đźđ± Iran says it will intervene if Israelâs military operation in Gaza continues, especially if it develops into a ground war.
Niall Ferguson, in The Sunday Times, looks back at the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to analyze the second-order risks as the present Israel-Hamas war takes on more global dimensions:
What does the US do now? It is hard to believe that Team Biden will be as effective as Kissinger was in 1973. By sending the two carrier groups, they are seeking to deter Hezbollah â in other words, Iran â from opening a second front against Israel from Lebanon. But it is not clear that American deterrence will succeed, any more than it succeeded against Russia in February 2022. Iranâs proxies in Yemen and Iraq have already threatened to target American military bases in the Middle East if the United States intervenes.
đ”đ±đȘđș Despite winning a plurality of the vote, Polandâs ruling conservative Law and Justice Party will likely lose power to the center-left opposition coalition, led by Civic Platform and former European Council President Donald Tusk, which won enough seats to form the next government.
Sundayâs vote was widely regarded as Europeâs most important election this yearâone in which a smaller upstart party has pulled the debate to the right and questioned how much longer Poland can throw its full support behind its neighbor Ukraine.
Confederation, or Konfederacja in Polish, had no realistic prospect of gaining power, nor did it say it wanted to participate in a new government. It secured 6.4% of the vote. But its willingness to break the taboo of unquestioning support for Ukraine has shifted the playing field, driving the ruling Law and Justice to compete for votes by taking a notably more hostile approach to providing indefinite backing for its neighbor.
đȘđšđ Ecuador elected banana heir, Daniel Noboa, 35, as its youngest ever president as the country battles against a surge in drug trafficking and gang-related violence.
Ecuadorâs youngest elected president on Monday faced the practically impossible task of reducing a terrifying, drug-driven crime wave within a greatly shortened 1 1/2 years in office.
Daniel Noboa, 35, is an heir to one of Ecuadorâs largest fortunes thanks to a global empire built on bananas â the countryâs main crop.
His voters were, among other things, frightened by the escalation of drug violence over the past three years. Killings, kidnappings, robberies and other criminal activities have become part of everyday life, leaving Ecuadorians wondering when, not if, they will be victims.