Whiteness in Liberalism: Down With Tyranny! on Natural Corruption in Asia

Generally, my posts about whiteness tend to address people we'd typically refer to as conservative, white and Christian. Sad fact that may be for some readers, it's true that this demographic loves, more than any other, to speak from the corrupt heart of whiteness.

I have a treat for you, today. A Change of Pace Post. I was reading my news feeds when I came across a post on Down With Tyranny! A little left of liberal, this blog is a daily reader for me. Some of the political analysis is very sharp and I generally agree with the cynical wit in its tone.

Today, one of its bloggers published a piece entitled "Is it safe to eat or drink anything in China?" The title was enough to make me cringe. Turns out, the stupid title is the best part of the post. Framing the body of text about the Chinese government wanting the judicial system to crack down on food safety regulations violators, even suggesting the death penalty be applied to some violators, and a quick summary of famous food problems, is a very problematic intro and conclusion. The post is below my commentary in its entirety.

Look, I loathe the Republican Party. I hate American Conservativism. I'm a strident anti-capitalist. But the post is bad even though it's directed at Republicans I love to hate. In my opinion, the author wants to convey three things: 1) He or She will be as vegan as can be, whatever that means; 2) He or She is frightened to eat or drink anything in China; 3) He or She doesn't like Republicans. That's fine, I suppose. It's not necessarily interesting, but nothing wrong with the desire to convey these truths. Unless, you decide to convey them with a claim that Asia is so fundamentally corrupt that the Republicans who want to emulate Chinese business models must be worse.

You should not do this. It's a racist claim. In this post, the Republicans aren't bad because the US economy is corrupt and our government is corrupt, too. In this post, the Republicans are bad because all of Asia is corrupt. Here's how I'd summarize the blog: "Chinese business is very corrupt; well, Asian business is naturally corrupt, don't you know. We've already proved that in other posts. Trust us. Anyway, you might be served dog meat at any moment in place of other meat in China, and you can't be sure the bottled water is safe. Oh, well, I'm a vegan so at least I don't have to worry about the dog meat part of the problem over there. Anyway, because the Chinese are handing out the death penalty, maybe in the future some time, for food safety regulation violations and the Republicans want to snuff out most regulation in the US, the Republicans are super bad because Chinese business practices are, as we've already shown, naturally corrupt." That's the fucking post. I'm not kidding. The tags for the blog are: China and Regulation. No mention of Republicans, the immensity and immediacy of US food problems. Instead, the author rolls out the infamous stories we already know about Chinese food poisoning and lax regulation.

I'm really pissed about two things:

• So, it's not corrupt capitalist practice in Asia that is at fault for the horrifying business practices in China. No, it's the "nature of commerce" in all of Asia that is corrupt. What a claim! It's the nature of commerce. If you don't see the problem, let me explain. The point of the blog is to shame Republicans. All the stories about food safety in the middle of the post can be dumped because the blog is about the first several paragraphs and the last line. The real concern for the author is that commerce in North America is corrupt and becoming more corrupt and in China it's already very corrupt. Therefore, it's a problem that Republicans want to emulate Chinese business and regulatory practices. OK. We get it. But the nature comment is way out of line. It offers our corrupt commerce then, now and in the future a pass, in that a reader can infer by the initial claim that we have a different commerce in nature. Namely, one that is not naturally corrupt. As in, we are better than them. It's a fucking nationalist, exceptionalist swipe at Republicans by a progressive blogger. This, more than anything else in the post, deserves condemnation. They are bad because they are like The Chinese, the people who do naturally corrupt things.
• Dog meat references. What point do they serve? It's a racist dog whistle. Mix it with the smug reference to the author's veganism and we have proof that the post is nothing more than a hysterical and neurotic grunt: a half-assed attack on Republicans. It's lazy stuff. And it's smug.

The post follows with all emboldened text my added emphasis:

This morning we tried to make the point that the very nature of commerce in China-- in Asia really-- is built on fraud and corruption. Reactionary American politicians like Pat Toomey (R-PA), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and John Boehner (R-OH) admire China so much-- Communism or not-- because their financial and commercial system embodies the very depths of caveat emptor taken to the extreme. In two weeks I'll be back in China and, I have to admit, I know I have to be warier than in most places about what I consume. What's in the bottled water? How safe is it to eat in a restaurant, even a highly rated one?

So it was with some interest that I noted yesterday that China will be handing out the death penalty for food safety violators. An announcement like that presupposes some real problems that need to be addressed. Their highest court has ordered lower court judges to toughen up the sentences for people violating food safety standards "amid deepening public concerns over the country's food safety following a wave of recent scandals." If someone dies because of food safety violations, the death penalty is now in order-- and government officials taking bribes to protect the criminals will also be facing harsher penalties.

From milk laced with melamine, pigs fed with performance-enhancing drugs to watermelons juiced up with growth-stimulating chemicals, a series of recent scandals have outraged Chinese consumers, despite ramped-up government crackdown and state media campaign against food safety violations.

From last September to April this year, Chinese courts have tried and convicted 106 people accused of violating food safety, including two who received life imprisonment last month in a "melamine milk" case, Xinhua reported.

As vegan as I can be-- especially when traveling in dodgy countries-- I'm not worried about being fed dog meat disguised as something else. But I am interested in the new organic food movement started to sprout up in China's cities. Can it be trusted? Maybe...

In recent years China has been hit by a number of food scandals and fears about safety have lingered. In 2008, 300,000 babies became seriously ill and six babies died after being given formula contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. In April this year, police seized 40 tons of beansprouts which had been treated with dangerous growth promoting chemicals and hormones, while this month, watermelons started exploding in the fields because they had been treated with too much accelerant.

In March health officials discovered pork that glowed and iridescent blue in the dark because it had been contaminated by a bacteria.

Amid the scares it was reported that China's government departments were running their own organic farms to feed staff, sparking criticism that officials were putting their own safety before that of the people. ... [O]rganic farmers and a host of co-operative schemes that lease small parcels of land to urbanites who want to feel the soil under their fingernails-- not unlike British allotment schemes-- report business is suddenly booming.

Peng Xunan, the founder of the "Farmlander" allotment scheme that has 200 sites across China said the plots were being rented in ever-growing numbers, and no longer just be pensioners looking to occupy their time.

"I'd say it was split three ways between families who want to teach their children where food comes from, older people in their retirement, but in recent months definitely a growing number worried about food safety concerns after all these reports of lax food safety," he said.

Interestingly, the other China-- Taiwan-- is having a similar situation, with legislators urging tougher penalties for tainted food and better regulations for factories manufacturing food products, particularly sports drinks, juices, tea drinks, fruit jam or syrups, tablets or powders, all of which have been found to be poisoned with plasticizers.

A legislator of the ruling Kuomintang proposed yesterday to revise regulations to levy stiffer penalties on suppliers of food products that threaten consumers' health, establish an information system for all products, and change the listing of plasticizers in the second category of toxic chemical products.

...Chang pointed out that the current law only stipulates fines between NT$60,000 and NT$300,000 for using plasticizers like carcinogen di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) or other toxic substances in food and beverages, not enough to deter unconscionable food processors and suppliers from harming consumers.

An integrated registration mechanism should be set up to record all information concerning raw materials, components, additives, manufacturing and packaging to help manage every step of the food and beverage supply chain, Chang said.

Such a product identity system will also help to track products, he added.

Oh-- and the crackdown and regulations... that's not what Toomey, Johnson and Boehner admire about China.

 (source: Down With Tyranny! Here's the post on their site.)

dagNotes: On The Perverted Foreigner in Capitalist Culture (Korean Edition)

Gusts of Popular Feelings blogger, Matt, recently posted about a story in the Gyeongin Ilbo newspaper. I quickly commented on his blog. My notes here are a slightly different version of those comments.

Matt keeps a good blog. It's worth visiting. To understand some of my points in this post, you should read his post first.

Matt often posts about the grotesquely anti-foreigner popular press on Gusts. This form of journalism directed towards immigrants and immigrant labor/laborers is similar to much of what you find in Europe and the United States--the article's headline addresses the laborers rather than the institutions and business owners. Considering Matt's analysis of the Gyeongin Ilbo article, it's clear that foreigner teachers are used as a warrant for the claim that reform from business owners is necessary.

I'd like to see a study of journalism that examines the use of foreign labor corrupting local culture as a warrant for calls to increase national security. In addition, the research could illustrate how national security in capitalist culture is equivalent to the well-being of consumers.

As Matt notes, the Korean government is exploring means to improve the standards and practices of hagwon owners. Why does the popular media focus on the employees of hagwons? To some extent, it would make no difference if foreigners were prohibited from teaching at hagwons altogether. The media, I'd predict, would shift its focus from perverted foreign teachers to unqualified and inexperienced Korean teachers. My claim is that the popular media shelters business owners from criticism in spite of the government's acknowledgement that the business owners' practices are, in fact, the problem.

I'm confident the global study of popular journalism I have proposed would find similarities in the culture(s) of readership in spite of different ideological attitudes/directions of nations, governments and markets. The critique of foreign employees, like the critique of Native Speaking English Teachers, is not distinctly Korean, rather a global capitalist construct that elite culture permits and cultivates in bargain with popular discourse to shield its unethical and illegal behavior. The wild stories about perverted foreigners is market derived and nurtured and directly related to what capitalist politicians and theoreticians like to call the liberal social order of the market. It's part of the mess that prevents market action from being transparent. (See Hayek and Mises on market transparency for classical capitalist discussion regarding the opaque nature of the market.)

There's something to profit from the exploitation of immigrants and their labor. Such exploitation permits regulation of the market in useless ways that can satiate the desire for reform from the public discourse, from voters, from consumers, while sheltering the capitalist from the effects of reform. We might want to consider, once again, we're being presented with a strong critique of the usefulness of capitalism itself because this demonization and perversion of the foreigner directly contradicts a keystone claim about the catallactic economic activity in a free capitalist market--that business between strangers creates friends rather than enemies. The business in capitalist markets clearly has trouble creating friends, in spite of trade agreements and opening borders. I'd argue it's best at creating arguments for enforced homogeneous nations that, as they grow more prosperous, grow more authoritarian and xenophobic.

It's not too difficult to understand that the claim all foreigners will become perverts suits a narrative that supports the consumer economy as well as the government that regulates it. What does this mean in Korea? Nobody wants education reform because education reform would require fundamentally altering hagwon culture, which would represent a national cultural transformation, likely a radical alteration.

We see this daily in North America where the right wing resurgence in recent elections in the US and Canada, the movement to the right of liberal politics, as well as the wholesale acceptance without much struggle of neoliberal and American libertarian principles, can be understood as an attempt to maintain a concrete idea of what it means to be American or Canadian. The regression for North America involves the fantasy of white, Christian, masculine identity. In Korea, it's an identification with fantastic Korean identity that, like the American identity, has never actually existed. Consumers want to buy their identification. Studying at hagwons is compulsory for most Koreans. Well, so now is the presence of perverted foreign teachers who want to corrupt the national purity.

As I argued above, this is not a Korean characteristic. It is the result of capitalism.

Kicking Against the Pricks

Reports: SKorean Internet addicts let baby starve - Boston.com

Posted using ShareThis

When something awful happens in Korea, awful enough to make the news--police killing protesters, sexual predation, parents killing their children, a President committing suicide--the entire culture seems to participate in a collective and public embarrassment and dread regarding answering what it means that something that awful could happen in Korea. They don't want to talk about it; it puts everyone into a real funk. It's an entirely different response to similar and more common incidents in the United States, where I feel Americans expect such spectacles and especially on the evening news. I was about to ask a Korean colleague about the Internet Addict story the other day and found myself pausing suddenly and changing the subject. I realized that I was only asking because I wanted to make her uncomfortable. I was a little shocked at my motivation.

When considering the seedy United States, Koreans hear old and new stories about lynchings, rapes, fathers killing their families then killing themselves, an increasing number of convicted sex offenders, and rampant drug addiction. Anything spectacular happens in the US, and I will be asked about it over lunch. My interviewer will study my response with a subtle yet shocked expression as if to say, Really, you seem all right but what's wrong with you guys? (Lately, the questions have been about health care. Why don't you want everybody to have health care?)

Not that I'm bothered for a moment that Koreans believe Americans are perverts. So much of this is based on naive acceptance of gossip as fact, and I'm kind of the example that proves otherwise. On the other hand, the history of Americans in Asia, and Korea in particular, is far from exemplary. Sure many of us are doing good work here, but that's not enough to change the overall perception of the US and American culture. And judging from the activity I've witnessed here, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that my Korean friends think we're childish and self-centered snobs. I've heard as much, but with an apology because I'm not that way but America seems like it is. Add to the suspicions that we are, in fact, the most militaristic nation, consistently driven to protect economic interest through participation in foreign wars and maintaining a militarized presence in many countries, and you know it's safe to say that you'd have to be a jingoistic prick to not sympathize with their lack of trust and faith.

Anyway, I have to admit that Americans are often treated like the perverted 14 year old down the street who the parents tolerate but keep at a distance because they think he's been humping their dogs while they work. Or, at least that's how I sometimes feel about the stares I get from women, grandmas, and old men while I'm walking around town. Many of my friends complain about how we're perceived, but it's going to take a long time for Koreans to collectively decide there's true value in global multiculturalism and to learn to reform the nationalist spirit with which it shelters its racism and racists.

I would be a little more interested in my fellow expats' complaints if included in them were, for example, any compassion for other workers, other immigrant laborers who live here and are truly oppressed, like say the thousands of Chinese who live in close to abject poverty in my Gu, who slave away in Seoul's restaurants. But this is representative of a general disconnect white Americans have from the reality of oppression. White folks love to complain about how they are treated while ignoring the horrible oppression of others. Throw them an orphan to cuddle or an old comfort woman to cry about on weekends and they're back to complaining about racism at Monday night dinner. The excuse for complaining ad nauseam being that nobody should be treated this way. I hate the "least of all me" mentality most: the notion that we are to be treated well because we are here habit.

I don't buy it. I think it's easy to look at Koreans in Korea and criticize their failures at understanding what multiculturalism is all about. It's easy, not because Korean society is so monolithic, but because Americans fail at achieving the benefits true multiculturalism can provide a diverse society. We fail at it, yet we expect Korea to open it arms to us and provide with access to its culture without expecting us to assimilate and while permitting us to appropriate.

This story about the baby who starved while her parents were playing a video game where they were raising a virtual child has scandalized Korea and Koreans. They abhor stories like this and are extremely embarrassed by them. I was in a devilish mood the other day and thought about going around asking folks about it, teasing them I guess, like they ask me about American embarrassments. But I checked that little devil and let the temptation pass. Who needs another white guy telling them that their country has problems? Especially when I am one their problems.