The March of Progress
I’m not necessarily in favor of American cultural or political hegemony, or ideological limitations on public discourse, but I don’t really understand why the Times is running an op-ed by a venture capitalist arguing that America’s government should be more like China’s, and that it’s a good thing the Tiananmen Square protests were violently put down, because the alternative — political liberalization and increased popular participation in governance — would have been so much worse. Were Tiananmen not handled as it was, argues Mr. Li, who wrote the awful thing, then China would likely not be in the economic position it is today: coming off a long run of massive economic growth and newly installed as the second largest economy in the world.
Never mind that China still does not have an independent judiciary or due process, has the one-child policy, executes more people than the rest of the world combined (tax fraud, for example, is punishable by death), and promotes virulent racism, particularly towards Africans, Tibetans and Uyghurs. Never mind that nearly 500 million Chinese live on less than $2.00 per day, that income inequality in China is on the rise with no signs of stopping, that government officials use beatings, torture and the “black jail” system to forcibly vacate property holders from land so they can resell it to real estate prospectors, that, on average, 60% of the cost of a hospitalization will come out of the patient’s pocket, that graft, bribery and nepotism are endemic within the government, with misspending of public funds totaling at least 3% of China’s GDP annually, or that China spends more money on its police forces and internal security measures than they do on their military. One would imagine that the case of Chen Xiaofeng, for example, might be illustrative of some greater societal ills, or that of Wang Yue, or the incident in 2008 when dairy products were found to contain high levels of melamine, or the incident in 2009 when inspectors in Wuhan discovered that most blood pudding in China contains little if any actual blood, but is instead made of formaldehye, corn starch, and industrial grade salt, or the stinky tofu producers who were found to be using sewage in their production process, or the deaths of 40 people last year in a train crash which resulted from design flaws and mismanagement in China’s new bullet train infrastructure. You would think that these things might cast some doubt on the long-term viability of the current Chinese political and economic systems.
It’s difficult to consider the work of the late Barry Hannah a sentence at a time, piecemeal. The individual Hannah sentence is the very amalgam of sound and image, yet it simultaneously derives so much of its art from its position within the writhing, snapping entirety. Removed from its brethren, a Hannah sentence seems a somewhat hollower version of its former (gigantic) self. For all of the flash of Hannah’s style, his most fundamental interest was in people, and their exploration, and celebration. This is evident in his sentences, and also why these sentences, when taken out of the context of their empeopled environments, lose a lick of their flame. Take, for example, this sentence from “Our Secret Home.”
