By Matthew Yglesias

This morning I’m leaving Dalian for Beijing. Of course you can’t really understand a place in the few days I’ve spent here, but what you can say based on three nights in this city is that it’s a very pleasant place. Quite prosperous and not nearly as much of a madhouse as Shanghai. It’s a modest-sized city with I think about 1.2 million people in the urban area proper and has a much higher air quality than the other two Chinese cities I’ve seen or what one generally hears about China. The traffic is also reasonably well-behaved. In a sort of interesting twist for a westerner, it’s a very prosperous and very internationalized city, but its main business links are with Japan and South Korea so it’s also very Asian.

This is also, I believe, the only part of China that was really colonized in the recent past. The essential basis of the city is the old Russian port of Port Arthur (actually a ways to the south of where the modern city is) that Japan took over after the Russo-Japanese War and then the Soviets took back after World War II and then handed back over to China in the mid-fifties. Consequently, some of the older stuff in the city has cyrillic signage and there’s a “Russian Street” near the core of downtown. They say that during the summer a substantial number of tourists from the Russian Far East still come to the beaches here and the cuisine is a bit Japan-esque to my eye/tongue.

What sort of doubly-distinguishes Dalian’s economic development from the rest of coastal China is for one thing a much heavier emphasis on IT as opposed to manufacturing and also a greater emphasis from city officials on environmental protection and “livability.” This is attributed in the city’s narrative about itself to the vision of former local party boss Bo Xilai who’s considered a big rising star in Chinese politics (apparently in China a 60 year-old politician can qualify) and has since been dispatched to run Chongqing the largest and most important city of western China and one that I gather is considerably less prosperous and functional than the coastal areas. That in turn is an interesting aspect of the Chinese system, sort of as if doing a really good job as governor of Massachusetts would get you dispatched to go try to clean up Illinois state government. That seems like a good idea in many ways, and the switcheroo reflects the next phase of where the Chinese government is trying to go with its development—more “spreading the wealth around” to non-coastal areas, and more emphasis on the coast in improving quality of life rather than building factories everywhere.

By Dara Lind

Jamelle’s post about Arizona SB 1070 and “colorblindness” is spot-on, but I wanted to draw one of his points out a bit. Unlike, say, Jim Crow laws — which had no purpose other than targeting African-Americans — my take on SB 1070 has been that it really is intended to target undocumented immigrants, but will inevitably target Latinos. Jamelle and Adam Serwer, in his original post, both touched on this, as did Monica Potts at TAPPED earlier in the week: racial profiling is sometimes codified in policy, but it can also be, as I put it earlier in the week, a “habit of mind” — a heuristic. A police officer doesn’t need to be told to target someone who looks likely to be a criminal; the problem is what mental shortcuts they’re going through in order to determine what “looking likely” means. I don’t think of SB 1070 as a racial-profiling law; I think of it as a law that will cause widespread racial profiling.

The Arizona politicians who passed the bill don’t agree with this interpretation, but when asked by the New York Times, a majority of the American public did. But — as Matt pointed out at the time — they support the law anyway. This, to my mind, might even be scarier than the willful ignorance of Arizona Republicans; the public understands that SB 1070 will impose on the civil rights of Arizona’s Latinos, but they think that’s less important than the fact that it “does something” about illegal immigration. (A majority of Americans continue to support immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, incidentally, so it really is a question of doing “something” — anything — rather than enacting a more restrictionist immigration policy.)

This is a problem. Believe me, I understand the American public’s frustration with government inaction in general, and inaction in fixing the immigration system in particular. But there are some things more important than government “getting things done,” and protecting the dignity of its people is one of those. Red tape exists for a reason sometimes.

Sometimes I worry that this point isn’t getting made frequently enough in political discourse, on either side. Conservatives have long said that government needs to be more efficient, like the private sector. But the same habits of mind and “prioritization techniques” that drive private-sector efficiency can lead to, say, racial profiling when used by government. Meanwhile, both of the signature domestic issues of the liberal movement — health care and climate change — have led liberals to endorse centralized, technocratic solutions to problems too big for anyone but the federal government to solve. Call it the Daft Punk theory of governance. But it’s hard to focus on government Doing Things to address these problem, and still get the message across that in some cases — like when civil rights are at stake — government shouldn’t necessarily be as brutally “efficient” as it theoretically could be.

Permadisclaimer: my positions on immigration politics and policy are entirely my own, and are in no way associated with my employer or any other organization.

By Matthew Yglesias

Trouble in droneland:

The American military released a scathing report on Saturday on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an inadvertent airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children.

Obviously killing civilians is horrible, as well as strategically counterproductive, and killing civilians by the dozens is just awful stuff. But the relevant authorities do seem to me to be quite earnest and at least somewhat successful in their determination to mitigate the extent to which these things happen. The problematic aspect of the drone attacks that I haven’t seen discussed as much as it deserves is really on the Pakistan side of the border and concerns the National Security Strategy’s stated aspiration to create a rules-based global order.

Simply put, having the CIA conduct a secret undeclared de facto war in Pakistan is kind of the reverse of rules-based activity. There’s a colorable rationale under existing rules for unilateral military action in Pakistan under the UN Charter’s absolute recognition of a right to individual and collective self-defense. But this isn’t military action, it’s CIA action. And by definition covert use of force is not rules-based. Now I think you could fairly say that a world of “liberty under law” is a regulative ideal rather than an actual reality, so it’s not per se a violation of the relevant principle to engage in activities outside the rules. Simply pretending that an airtight rules-based global order exists doesn’t make it so. At the same time, to say “the rules-based global order is an aspiration rather than a reality, therefore we can operate outside the rules whenever it’s convenient” actually makes a mockery of the aspiration. And the covert actions in question are some of the worst-kept secrets in the world. So I think there’s a real problem here that’s worthy of more critical thinking.

Ultimately the United States is judged more by what actually happens than by what policy documents say, and I think it’s important to do more to align what we’re actually doing in this regard with our big-picture policy aims.

By Matthew Yglesias

China’s growth has been accompanied by some stark increases in inequality, but it seems noteworthy to me that one area in which the People’s Republic is a real laggard is the development of mega-rich individuals. For example, according to Forbes’ authoritative list the world’s top 100 richest individuals includes zero citizens of mainland China. The richest man in the country, Zong Qinghou, clocks in at number 103. Probably given Chinese growth and the continued economic weakness in the developed world he’ll be able to crack the top 100 soon. But his $7 billion fortune is dwarfed by other developing world tycoons like Carlos Slim (Mexico, $54 billion) Mukesh Ambani (India, $29 billion) or Eike Batista (Brazil, $27 billion).

Part of the issue here is the existence of Hong Kong as a separate jurisdiction which contains a number of mega-billionaires. But the basic reality is that China’s state-led model of economic growth has created huge increases in per capita income and led the PRC to surpass Japan as the #2 economy in the world without creating much in the way of really big really successful new firms. Instead China’s largest companies are basically controlled by the state.

As a bonus fun counterpoint fact, egalitarian Sweden has a wildly disproportionate number of mega-rich citizens. With only 9 million people and an overall GDP less than ten percent the size of China’s, Sweden boast two of the fifteen richest people on the planet—the heads of Ikea and H&M. That’s in part just a coincidence, but I also think it reflects the reality that high taxes and high public spending aside the modern-day Nordic countries actually have a very neoliberal underlying economic structure whereas China is very much the reverse.

By Matthew Yglesias

On the morning of May 29 my group was taken to see the village of Cha’an outside Dalian. Or perhaps I should say the former village. What happened, essentially, is that back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures. You see some stories of Chinese people being serious dispossessed in this kind of process, but in the case of Cha’an the local authorities seem to have decided (wisely, in my view, as well as fairly) that it doesn’t make sense to treat people poorly. So people who lost homes in the reconstruction were compensated with multiple homes in the new Cha’an.

We spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.

This all naturally raises the question of how the village government was able to finance all this. The answer is that they used the rising price of land near prosperous Chinese cities to do it. Transforming Cha’an into a more modern, more compact, less agricultural area freed up plenty of land to sell to developers on which to build factories and offices and that gave them the money they needed to update the infrastructure and give everyone one or more free apartments. In principle, this is exactly what governing authorities in a rapidly growing country ought to do. Indeed, this is precisely the strategy Paul Romer recommends for his “charter cities” concept.

It does however put the apparent real estate boom in China in a somewhat different light. I was told earlier in the trip that Chinese banks are actually not particularly exposed to the real estate market with regulators mandating that mortgages compose no more than seven percent of the total assets of any bank. But insofar as Chinese land is also experiencing a price bubble, this means that Chinese municipalities may actually be quite exposed to a potential sudden crash in revenues. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening since a bubble in land prices and a bubble in housing prices are different things (Robert Shiller lays this out nicely in The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It by the way—you can’t build more land, so land prices really should escalate over time as long as GDP grows, whereas increased demand for physical structures should just spur construction and not sustained price increases) but the psychological predicates of the two seem similar enough that they probably go in tandem.

Which is really too bad, because in a lot of ways a look into the modest homes of today’s Cha’an really does drive home the extent to which the improvements in human welfare that China has achieved over the past 20-30 years have been absolutely enormous.

By Ali Frick

This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Dr. George Tiller’s murder, a terrorist act committed to stop him for providing women with safe, legal abortions. The murder was only the most obvious sign that the anti-abortion movement is winning, steadily shaving away women’s constitutional rights. Jezebel notes a study showing that fewer and fewer medical professionals are going into the field of reproductive health and services. And yesterday, the New York Times discussed the latest method right-wing forces use to intimidate women seeking abortions:

Over the last decade, ultrasound has quietly become a new front in the grinding state-by-state battle over abortion. With backing from anti-abortion groups, which argue that sonograms can help persuade women to preserve pregnancies, 20 states have enacted laws that encourage or require the use of ultrasound.
[...]

Late last month, Oklahoma went a step further. Overriding a veto by Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law mandating that women be presented with an ultrasound image and with a detailed oral description of the embryo or fetus.

21 states have introduced ultrasound laws in 2010 alone. It has become increasingly clear that the Democratic Party isn’t interested in being the backbone of a pro-choice movement. Now, I’m not one to say we should have scrapped health care because it reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment, but did you notice how during that debate, the Democrats’ defense was that it perpetuated Hyde? There was hardly a single voice stating that Hyde is bad policy, that it punishes poor women for trying to exercise constitutional rights, that it sets up tiered access to fundamental rights.

Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller for eight years, implores the pro-choice community not to abandon women: “The time has come for us, as a movement, in our own collective ways, whether it’s through education or activism or political engagement, to meet the anti-woman forces on their ‘own’ turf. We must not cede any section of this country.”

We need to reaffirm Tiller’s motto: “Trust women.” These ultrasound laws are such an insult to women because they presume that women have no idea what they’re doing. Again, the Times:

Like other patients, Laura, who has a 17-year-old son, said she took offense at the state’s implicit suggestion that she had not fully considered her choice.

“You don’t just walk into one of these places like you’re getting your nails done,” she said. “I think we’re armed with enough information to make adult decisions without being emotionally tortured.”

This weekend, let’s include Dr. Tiller among those we remember for fighting to defend the rights of all Americans.