Pranab Bardhan, Sonia Gandhi & China's rise

 Pranab Bardhan writes in 3 Quarks

I remember reading the 1992 book by the historian W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History, where he describes one of the basic tenets of Chinese civilization as “that uniformity is inherently desirable, that there should be only one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition.”

Yet China has frequently had two or more empires, cultures,  scripts,  traditions etc. But this is true of most civilisations. Some uniformity is inherently desirable. But so is some diversity. The Chinese, like everybody else, want to strike the right balance between the two. 

It is obvious that something like Chichilnisky's result re. a Goldilocks condition on preference, endowment, and other diversity must hold for coordination games involving language, markets, scripts etc to have focal solutions based on common knowledge uncorrelated asymmetries. 

I have previously pointed out that Bardhan is the Yakov Smirnoff of Economics whose shtick wass 'in America you do x. In Soviet Russia, x does you.' This time he is going to foolishly assert that China is very different from India. 

This is where I believe lies a basic difference in the historical legacy of the Chinese and the Indian civilizations.

China wasn't conquered by Muslims. India was. European powers had coastal enclaves in China. The Brits ruled the entire subcontinent and preserved Afghanistan, Tibet and Thailand as buffer states. The Chinese ruled themselves and sometimes did it quite well. The Indians lost that knack long ago. Independent India just did more of what the Brits were already doing but declined relative to everybody save its neighbors because Oxbridge Indians were lazier and stupider than Oxbridge non-Indians. 

India celebrates diversity

Indians celebrate their own religious holidays which are linked to the agricultural calendar. The Government also celebrates its own existence. But diversity is not celebrated in India. Instead, Indians struggle to emigrate- as Bardhan has- to where they can claim to contribute to 'diversity' rather than remaining at home without the means to escape a homogenous and hegemonic boredom. 

in spite of all the messiness, fragmentation and chaos this entails.

Very true. Indians are continually jumping with joy as the walk or drive down streets strewn with shit and punctuated by various aaandolans or baraats or political protests or religious processions. It never happens that violence breaks out because 'diverse' celebrants start battering each other's brains out when their processions collide. 

Indians are like other people. They don't like messiness or fragmentation or chaos. But what they are powerless to change, they have to put up with- unless they can emigrate.  

My Chinese friends when they go to India are often shocked by the near-anarchic disorder of everyday civic life in India.

Why? If they are friends of Bardhan, they should know that Indians can be as stupid as shit.  

Throughout history the Chinese have had a dread of disorder (wěnluàn),

Which society didn't or doesn't?  

which has been used to legitimize repression.

Repression which makes a profit may pay a little for 'legitimization'. Once it starts losing money, it doesn't bother. Killing people changes outcomes. Talking bollocks does not.  

The idea of checks and balances, separation of powers or independence of judiciary is quite alien to Chinese political culture.

But Chinese literary culture as embodied in the 'eight-legged essay', celebrated scholar-bureaucrats who protested against extravagance or corruption which placed a bigger burden on the peasant.

(A Chinese professor told me that even when liberal scholars in China think about governance reform, independence of judiciary is almost never uppermost in their mind).

If there is no independent Legislature making laws and approving policies, then there is nothing for an independent judiciary to check. The executive might decide to appoint independent judges for some specific purpose- e.g. adjudicating transnational contracts- but since enforcement lies with it, we can't say there is an independent judiciary.

In 2010 Wang Hui was invited to the same conference in Delhi on Social Democracy as I was.

Sadly, no penguins were invited. They would have been just as useless.  

I have mentioned before about this conference organized by Sonia Gandhi at Nehru Museum. At this conference I gave a talk on Universal Basic Income (UBI) for India, where I showed that, unlike in rich countries where this may be too expensive, it is possible for the Indian government to afford a decent basic income supplement for all citizens, if it has the political courage to reallocate some of the existing subsidies that are currently enjoyed by the better-off people.

In which case tax revenue falls and there is an entitlement collapse. Worse, domestic food production and distribution contracts. The country may not be able to import enough food if there are exogenous shocks- e.g. Ukraine. Bardhan- being Bengali- tried to plant the seed of a bigger-than-Bengal famine. Sadly, a Punjabi was Prime Minister. Sikhs, for some unknown reason, don't like starving and surrendering to any and every foreign invader.

This is not to say that State Governments can't try to do something like UBI. Indeed, you have to 'sterilize' the income effect of sudden rises in the relative prices of food, energy etc. But these should be phased out otherwise you go off a fiscal cliff. 

I originally got the idea of UBI from my discussions with my Belgian political philosopher friend, Philippe van Parijs, who had been its major advocate for many decades.

A Bengali economist may be stupid enough to listen to a Belgium philosopher. But Belgians will listen to neither which is why their country isn't a shithole.  

He recently told me after listening to my arguments that just as Marx expected the socialist revolution to come to advanced countries of Western Europe (Germany, England), instead it came to relatively poor countries (Russia, China),

because the industrial proletariat- i.e. the urban poor- could use the railways to terrorize the peasants and extract their agricultural surplus- or, indeed, deficit. Russia and China exported food at the height of their respective man-made famines. Oddly, this isn't what Marx had in mind when he dreamed of revolution.  

similarly maybe UBI which he thought about for rich countries, may first be feasible in poor countries after all.

It could certainly make a country poor. A 'resource curse' may permit UBI. Then the price of the resource crashes and there is entitlement collapse and the country turns to shit. Money income is meaningless if there is 'repressed inflation'- i.e. nothing in the shops to buy.  

Sonia Gandhi was seated at the conference round table just next to the person after me. All through the conference she was taking copious notes, but was mostly silent.

Governing India gave her a chance to get an education. Good for her. Bad for the country. Manmohan was perfectly sensible. He wanted to use the Moody downgrading as an excuse to do further reform. Obviously, Sonia- having listened to these cretins- thought it wasn't necessary.  

Wang seemed to like my talk,

ah! those inscrutable Orientals! 

but what struck him particularly, as he told me later, was my intervention at a different session. Someone at that session asked me to give my views on decentralization.

China had shown that one can do decentralization- indeed even have multiple regimes and internal passports- without loss of political control. Sonia was a Catholic from Italy. She knew that the EU had adopted the Catholic idea of 'subsidiarity'. On her regular trips home, Sonia- like other Europeans- saw how a centralizing bureaucracy was perfectly compatible with increased devolution of power within member states- though, in Italy's case, this resulted in corruption and administrative paralysis. Still, Sonia might have thought Italy would continue to do well. After all, Germany  might have bailed out the PIGS. 

In view of Sonia’s proximity at the table, I decided to take that opportunity to provoke her.

He said 'Mamma Mia! Your figlio is totes imbecile!' 

I said, somewhat exaggeratedly, that decentralization had very little chance in India–none of the political parties, starting with Sonia Gandhi’s own Congress party (then ruling India), seemed to believe in decentralization of power even within their own party, everything was decided by the top party leadership in Delhi —how could you then expect them to implement genuine decentralization in the country’s governance structure?

Though that's exactly what China did. In any case, there is zero correlation between whether a ruling party has a top-down chain of command and the type of economic model it favors. The Tory party was more 'centralized' than Atlee's Labor. But the latter did Nationalization and centralized economic decision making. 

(Sonia did not respond to that in the meeting, but in the next coffee break she was rushing somewhere, but stopped near me, silently shook my hands, and went away, presumably indicating that she was not completely disapproving of what I said).

Or that she hadn't understood a word he'd said and had mistaken him for the Bangladeshi Ambassador.

In the next session Yogendra Yadav, an important political scientist in India (now also a practitioner)

a laughing stock. Kejriwal took his pants down but good.  

took up the same theme in even stronger language.

Was that stronger language Italian? If not, these guys were wasting their fucking time. Academics were useful to Sonia to undermine Manmohan who was the real thing, not a fucking pedant.  

Wang Hui was startled by such straight talk and criticism in front of a top political leader.

He'd have been even more startled by the stupidity of such straight talk had he known economics.  

I told him that this was nothing extra-ordinary in India.

Very true. Any Congressman is welcome to tell Sonia her son is a cretin without fearing ejection from the party and the loss of sinecures of various types.  

(That was more than ten years back. I wish I could say that with equal confidence about India today!)

Thankfully, nothing Bardhan now says will influence Indian policy making.  

In their search for an alternative non-Western modernity, the so-called New Left people in China have sometimes been accused by their liberal critics for complicity with the repressive state.

Hilarious! Bardhan thinks Chinese peeps worry about accusations made by 'liberal critics'. What happens if Gay people suggest that Chairman Xi is lacking in reverence to the Dalai Lama? Do the Chinese shit themselves? Of course they do.  

Wang, for example, told me that he was not very keen on the activities of Chinese dissidents (he did not name them but the most famous dissidents in recent history included the late Liu Xiaobo,

 A cretin. He thought the War on Terror was totes cool. Come to think of it, it did help China and Russia and Iran and the Taliban. But Liu was fanatical supporter of the West and denigrator of his own people and their great achievements. 

who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and was imprisoned until death, and Ai Weiwei, the artist who was imprisoned in 2011 and now in exile).

Weiwei has talent. Maybe that is why the Chinese didn't kill him.  

He thought the dissidents mainly played up to a western audience, but were not in tune with what was really going on inside China and the real problems that afflicted the lives of common people.

D'uh! 

Some Chinese literature has also reflected opposition to market reform and the resultant inequality and venality among people, and to the kind of moral wasteland that the frenetic capitalist development has brought about along with a consumerist society run amok. This can be seen, for example, in a best-selling novel like Brothers by the writer Yu Hua, a close friend of Wang Hui, where the protagonist is a town scoundrel turning into a top national entrepreneur.

This is silly. Yu Hua's oeuvre extrapolates the absurdity and senseless violence of the Cultural Revolution. Speculative bubbles or fads, however, don't have similarly lethal consequences. On the contrary, they permit 'shake-outs' and thus more rapid reallocation of resources so a better growth path is achieved. 

This kind of theme is, of course, not unfamiliar in India—for a rather strident depiction of this in the literature in English one can cite the Booker Prize-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger.

Nonsense! Yu Hua's characters are inventive and productive. Adiga's are corrupt and parasitic.  

But the pace of capitalist development having been much faster in China, one can see why the depiction in Yu Hua’s novel comes across as even bleaker, more brutal and grotesque.

Because Bardhan does not understand Rabelaisian farce. Yu Hua wrote a gigantic novel to represent a gigantic transformation. Adiga wrote a short novel, reflecting a stagnant society, which qualified him for 'aesthetic affirmative action'.  

In general my personal preference in literature is usually more for sad novels rather than angry ones. (Recently I had an occasion to tell Aravind Adiga that I much prefer his earlier, less well-known, piece of fiction Between the Assassinations, where the fury is less strident, instead there is more nuance and aching sympathy, along with an all-enveloping sadness).

Bardhan likes boring shite. He is Bengali after all.  

In a different and more general context the well-known Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid said in a recent interview, “We live, we die, this infuriates us—but far better that it saddens us, and that we find ways to honor and transcend our sadness”.

Unlike Hamid, who chose to settle in England, Adiga returned to and lives in India. But they are not good writers nor have they any special insight into their countries. They did attend prestigious Western universities where they found literary mentors. They have made money for themselves by their writing for a particular niche market. But that market has no linkage to anything in India or Pakistan. It seems, non-STEM subject study at Ivy League or Oxbridge shrinks the imagination enough to supply a Western market for ignorance. If your comfort depends on being blind to your decline, subsidize, even celebrate. 'native informants' who are neither native nor have any information to impart.