“Cultural Terrorism” or Media Madness?

The news agency IANS carried an anonymous article on 31 January with the headline “Cultural terrorism: Idea of India threatened.”

“Shah Rukh Khan one day and Kamal Haasan the next" it began. "Is it mere coincidence or a sign of an increasingly knee-jerk, reactionary India that two of its most loved film icons are forced to go public to painstakingly reassert their secular identity and insist, in case the message is lost, that they are proud Indians?”

The next paragraph noted the predicaments of Ashis Nandy and Salman Rushdie and declared the query in the lead merely rhetorical.

In print and television, our “elite” English media commentators have been on a similar binge of shrill and confused hysteria, tarring with the same brush cases that have nothing in common.

Consider the facts:

Salman Rushdie is a Brown Sahib resident in Britain who for four decades has vilified his two putative homelands and ancestral faith. He is now engaged in promoting a low watt film version of Midnight's Children, the comprehensive dump on independent India that first brought him fame.

Television channels have been carrying endless replays of his indignation at the "cultural terrorism" that has kept him from attending the Calcutta Book Fair to which, he claimed, he had been invited.

Media have given little play to the statement by organizers of that event denying they ever invited him and that he is lying in claiming they paid for his plane ticket.

Quite clearly, Rushdie merely lost his nerve after learning that some Muslims were still outraged at his dump on the Prophet of Islam in Satanic Verses. His false claims repeated a pattern set last year when he was a no-show at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Ashis Nandy is a sociologist in his dotage who said something really stupid as a panelist at the Jaipur Literary Festival: that the lowest castes were responsible for most of the corruption in India.

When someone outraged by that calumny initiated legal action under a law meant to maintain social order, Nandy backed away from his untenable proposition saying he was misunderstood and misquoted. What he actually meant was that the lower castes were caught in their corruptions more often. That too is arrant nonsense, but no one in the media dwelt on it.

Shah Rukh “it’s lonely at the top” Khan is an actor with an outsize ego who seems to believe his own media hype. He had a badly ghostwritten piece in a special “global issues” edition of Outlook magazine about his post 9/11 travails in America.

Airport authorities in the United States have detained him on several occasions for hours at a time, ostensibly because they mistook him for a terrorist.

A dimwit minister in Pakistan thought the article was about the star’s difficulties in India, and called on the Indian government to provide him greater protection. That led the actor to make a televised statement telling the Pakistani to mind his own business and declaring that he was quite safe and happy in India.

Kamal Hasaan is an actor/film maker whose movie Viswaroopam was banned in his home state of Tamil Nadu, supposedly because some Muslims were offended by its depiction of terrorists motivated by their religion.

As the film is innocuous and has a Muslim hero, it is likely that it offended Chief Minister Jayalalitha and not a fringe group of Muslims. She has reason to find offense in the film’s derogatory references to Brahmin women (of which she is a powerful example, particularly so at the head of a political party rooted in the anti-Brahmin movement let loose under British auspices).

In his initial hurt response at the ban, Hasaan told reporters that Tamil Nadu authorities wanted him out of the state, and perhaps he would have to flee the country to a more secular one.

In less emotional statements since then he has tried hard to downplay that response, dismissing one interviewer’s concerns about his artistic freedom by declaring, “my country comes first.”

Quite obviously, the four cases have nothing in common.

If the hysteria they have generated underlines a common theme, it is that “elite” Indian media have become so politically obtuse as to pose a clear and present danger to the country.

Intimations of Immortality

One of my classmates at Columbia Journalism School died recently after a long illness. He was the second to go in the space of a few weeks.

Although we are still in our sixties (“the new 40s”), our cohort is at a stage when it must begin to face the fact that death has become a personal rather than a philosophical interest.

Shored up as I am by the Indian expectation that the soul will go from one discarded body to another, this issue is somewhat easier for me than for most Westerners who, if they believe in the reality set out by their religions, face Judgment Day. If they do not believe, death can only be a final extinction, an equally imponderable end.

But how real is my expectation of many more lives to come (my spiritual status being far from the dispassionate stillness required for moksha)?

It’s very real, and not because I have blind faith in what the Bhagavad Gita says: Science has crept in all around the concept of an eternal soul and now makes it impossible to believe in anything else.

Two scientific advances in particular have validated the concept of the soul. One is the recognition of the matter-energy continuum set out in Einstein’s E=MC2. Matter and Energy are indestructible; they can only be converted into each other.

The discovery of the genetic code is the other major step Science took towards the soul. Its importance lies in the recognition that each of us is a piece of code: complex and only dimly understood as yet, but essentially, each individual is a piece of software that takes material form at the moment of conception.

Put the two concepts together, and we have an individualized code destructible in its material manifestation as DNA but not in its Energy persona. When the material body dies, our individual wave pattern survives, and as with the human voice carried by radio waves, it can vibrate another receptor: a new body at the moment of conception.

As with the radio wave, our individualized genetic pattern will only vibrate a receptor tuned to the right frequency. That’s where the concept of karma comes in. Every action, every thought we have affects our DNA, which contains information coded at the molecular level. At death, the code that floats free of the body is a permanent record of the sum total of our actions. It can only take a new material form consonant with that code.

So, those with good karma find bodies that resonate with virtue, others degenerate into lower forms of life.

QED.

Did China or India "Win" the Development Race?

Who has “won” the development race, China or India?

Steven Rattner, a Wall Streeter with a Washington revolving door background, declared in an opinion piece in the New York Times last Sunday (20 January) that it was China. 

Tyler Roylance of the Heritage Foundation weighed in with an opposing viewpoint three days later on the HF website.

“When a New York Times columnist feels the need to tell his readers, ‘Don’t get me wrong—I am hardly advocating totalitarian government,’ something has probably gone badly awry in his analysis,” he noted in a rebuttal that cited all the by now familiar points in favor of democratic India.

What was missing from both articles was the smoke and mirrors quality of Chinese success. (“Smoke and Mirrors,” by the way, is a must-read book about China by Pallavi Aiyar.)

I have noted in earlier posts the real estate and banking mess in China, both hidden by  statistical fraud but evident in the continuing rise of housing prices even as unsold and unoccupied buildings accumulate into brand new ghost cities.

There is also the officially reported fact that 50 percent of Chinese GDP is investment, foreign and domestic. That is an entirely unsustainable phenomenon, without precedent in economic history: like Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories, China’s spectacular growth rates are the result of artificially pumped-up muscle.

When that rate of investment slows – as it must – it will bring down the whole house of cards. That is because the mandarins of the Communist Party have chosen the appearance of growth over healthy development. They have hidden weaknesses and problems to support the pretense of success.

Corporate debt, for instance, is 180 percent of GDP. (India’s is 49 percent.) Despite that huge debt overhang, there has not been a single default on a Chinese corporate bond issue. That is because even one might start an unstoppable run on the house. So, when a corporation cannot pay back its loans and is in danger of default, local governments step in with public money.

Tyler Durden of Zerohedge.com summed up the situation yesterday: “China is proceeding with bail out after bail out of any company that threatens to expose the reality that Chinese corporations are massively undercapitalized and that absent Chinese state support this particular 180 percent debt/GDP bubble would pop immediately and have dire consequences around the world.”

The corporate bubble will not burst in isolation. It will take the banks with it, and the real estate market. Bank loans, much of it unrealizable and “hidden” in blatantly dishonest ways, are estimated to be 300 percent of GDP. 

The expectation that the Chinese economy has made a “soft landing” because its manufacturing index has shown a slight rise in the last few weeks is whistling in the dark. What has been happening is that the government has been paying ruined merchants to stay open. A few weeks ago The New Yorker reported on a new mall filled with shops carrying the identical range of products, all on the dole; there was not a shopper in sight.

Warehouses at ports and even decommissioned office buildings are reportedly storing imported commodities for which domestic demand has dropped radically.The regime has elected to hid the slowdown in demand.

How long can Beijing continue this charade? No one knows; but it cannot be for very long. A timeline might be suggested by China's huge increase in food imports -- reportedly four times its annual amount.

That is in line with the certainty that a crash in China will bring down the entire world economy. The financial system the IMF presides over with such aplomb is as insolvent as China’s. The trillions of notional dollars Western Central Banks pumped into national economies to prop up demand after the 2008 fall of Lehman Brothers must meet up with reality at some level, and when that happens, the results could be dire indeed.

To answer the question at the beginning of this piece: India has won; but that might not mean much if we do not survive China’s failure.

Background to the Nuke Warning in Kashmir

The Indian government has told Kashmiris to prepare for a nuclear attack. The paragraphs below, from the concluding chapter of my book "1001 Things Every Indian Should Know," explain the background to that startling development.

The chapter sets out a number of specific recommendations for action, then adds the following:

"These measures should effectively roll up the international black market, reduce crime and corruption globally, and provide funding for the most urgent anti-poverty and environmental action. However, there is acute danger that before any of this can happen the British elite will plunge us into another major war with assassinations and false flag operations.

Another World Conflict?

It would also be prudent to spread awareness that we can expect strong opposition from Britain and its allies and proxies. An extrapolation of the British record suggests that it will be violent, perhaps involving war. Previous chapters have noted in detail the breathtaking variety of treacheries that led to the acquisition and retention of the British Empire. They have also made clear how the British elite has, from early days, considered the blood of its own people and those of other nations a cheap currency to trade for power. Massive death tolls accompanied the forcible trade of slaves out of Africa and opium into China, the genocides that drove to near extinction the American Indian, the Australian Aborigine and the Maori of New Zealand, and the great man-made famines of India. Britain fought two ruinous wars with Germany in defense of its imperial interests, killing several million of its own people and forcing the loss of some 100 million lives on other nations. Chapter 6 looked at how Britain maneuvered the world into the Cold War and engineered the great communal killings in India that led to Partition. Other parts of the text have reviewed how Britain gave itself room for strategic maneuver in the Middle East and South Asia by deliberately creating the conflicts over Kashmir and Palestine. In post-colonial Africa it has played a merciless game that has claimed the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people on earth.

Looking back on that record it would be silly to expect that a few billion-dollar fines on its banks and the prospect of the economic collapse of China, its most lucrative source of criminal loot, will force Britain to mend its ways. It is an almost certain bet that London will try to provoke international conflict, most likely in South Asia where its geopolitical interests are concentrated. At this writing, the sudden deterioration in the India-Pakistan situation in January 2013, the staggering hate speech of an Indian Muslim politician, and the warnings of Hafeez Syed that things will hot up again in Kashmir are firm indications that it is trying. If there is inadequate temperance on both sides the situation could escalate in tit for tat violence and get completely out of hand. As with the beheading and mutilation of two Indian soldiers that led to the current deepening of tensions, it might not be easy to fix responsibility if “terrorists” get some of Pakistan’snuclear weapons. Another emergency Britain could set off easily is global hyperinflation. That would destabilize its nemesis, the United States, and ease all pressure to abandon its empire of crime. The only thing it cannot count on in undertaking such actions is its usual shroud of secrecy and persiflage. Too many people now are aware of its role and watchful of its actions. Despite that, the situation is extremely dangerous."

Keep your fingers crossed!

1001 Things Every Indian Should Know

"1001 Things Every Indian Should Know"  is the title of the e-version of my book just published on Amazon's Kindle.

The book is priced at $3.99 (approx Rs.270) and can be read on any computer or tablet.  I believe there are several promotional days to come on which the book can be downloaded free. I will let you know when they are scheduled.

As a print version is in the works would be grateful for all feedback!

Here is the book description as it appears on the Amazon web site:

********************

1001 Things Every Indian Should Know is a book about India and its place in the world. Written by a veteran journalist with a lifetime of experience covering international affairs, it tells of the country's millennial history and how our understanding of it was distorted during the period of British colonial rule. It also provides an Indian view of Britain and tells how the largest of colonial empires segued into a new career as the center of a global black market that is now estimated to be twice the GDP of the United States.

Britain and India are polar opposites. One invented the industrial revolution and the modern corporate apparatus of the market economy; the other has a rich material culture but its traditional approach to reality is essentially spiritual. Despite the end of colonial rule the interaction of the profoundly different approaches to reality of the two nations has continued into the 21st Century and it will decide the fate of the world. The book tells of that interaction in terms of Mahatma Gandhi's life and legacy, and Britain's deeply negative response.

The globalization of industrial civilization has brought the world into a situation of deep interlocked crises that have grown steadily worse despite all efforts by governments for over four decades. The book explains why that is so and reprises the case that Gandhi first made in 1910: industrial civilization is too violent and corrupting to be redeemed; it must be replaced.

However, India sans Mahatma is now on an ill-considered course to integrate with the industrial world: The repercussions for Indian society and for the world will be dismal. The rising tide of violence and crime in India is the direct result of its so-called "development" in recent decades. For the world, an industrialized India will be disastrous in terms of ecological impact.

How do we deal with this situation? Governments have shown they cannot do so. The book recommends how ordinary Indians can correct their country's course through civil action. It sets out a plan for a nonviolent Gandhian revolution that can transform not just India but the world.


END

Not Cricket - 2

Please circulate and repost the following item wherever you can.


In 2011, when the Indian cricket team on a tour of Britain a few weeks after winning the World Cup lost every single match, I expressed the fear that the hosts were not playing fair.

Events since then, and research into what dark arts might have been used, have strengthened that belief.

I think the Brits are cheating in sports in a big way, using infrasound to disable opponents.

Infrasound has a wavelength too low to be heard by the human ear. It occurs naturally (sea surf, thunder and earthquakes all generate it), and many species of animals, elephants and whales most spectacularly, use it for long range communications.

Whales also use it to stun prey, including giant squid: at lower amplitudes infrasound can vibrate and even explode matter.

Human beings subjected to even mild exposure to those frequencies suffer a range of negative effects, including elevated heart rate and blood pressure, the release of endorphins and the adrenaline surge that triggers the "flight or fight" response.

Initial exposure can make a person feel energized and happy but within a few minutes there is loss of physical coordination that can last for hours or even days. For a champion athlete that means complete loss of form. Remember how the 2011 Indian World Cup team in Britain seemed suddenly unable to bowl, field or bat? By the fourth test Gautam Gambhir was so bereft of basic skills he sustained a concussion trying to take a catch.

The most dangerous effects are caused by infrasound between 1 and 10 Hz (a Hertz is a one-second wave cycle). People exposed to those levels suffer "complete neurological interference" and have difficulty breathing, start coughing, suffer muscle cramps, and feel nauseated. They are disoriented, lose their sense of balance, have blurred vision and slur speech; they experience fear and panic, and have difficulty making decisions.

At 7 Hz, said to be the natural resonant frequency of human organs, infrasound can have life-threatening effects.

Scientists in several developed countries have reportedly weaponized infrasound. A rifle that fires "sonic bullets" is said to exist.

Experimenters at Cambridge University in 2003 successfully generated fear and panic in crowds by broadcasting infrasound; there is said to be technology to disorient and disable enemy soldiers.

Whether infrasound can cause cancer is not known. Yuvraj Singh did develop a very rare form of it after the 2011 World Cup. He might actually have become a target several years earlier, after smashing an unprecedented six sizers in one over against Britain in the 2007 T-20 World Cup.

There is reason to suspect that infrasound has been used in other sports as well.

Andy Murray's path to the Men's Singles gold medal at the London Olympics and to victory at the US Open championship was probably smoothed by weakening key opponents.

The Guardian said in reporting Murray's straight sets Olympic victory over Roger Federer that the Swiss champion, who had easily won their face-off a month earlier at Wimbledon, seemed "strangely anxious" and committed an unusual number of unforced errors, including a very rare double fault.

At the United States Open a few weeks later Murray defeated number one seed Novak Djokovic, who suffered wholly uncharacteristic leg cramps during the match. (The authors of his misfortune might have taken oblique credit by arranging to have Sean Connery, the original James Bond, in Murray's box during the match. The two had never met before but the Press were told they had a natural affinity as Scots.)

Why on earth would MI6 be interested in match fixing?

The flag-waving talk of a "new Britain" after the country ranked third in the Olympic gold medal tally points to the answer. There is a desperate need to rally a nation depressed not only by austerities brought on by the greed and mismanagement of the political elite but by the slime trails of their notorious corruptions.

The use of sports to divert people from elite corruption goes back famously to Caligula, and there is no denying that the British need diversion now.

They have been skunked by an almost unimaginable string of outrageous scandals. A short list includes:

• Parliamentarians stealing from the public till; 
• Politically well connected media big wigs in league with the London Police to hack private phone conversations, even those of bereaved families; 
• The country's most trusted bankers exploiting widows, orphans and old people by manipulating interest rates (charities were the prime victims of the LIBOR scandal); 
• Massive laundering of drug-money by HSBC, the country's largest bank; and 
• A long reign of pederasts at the BBC.

MI6 skulduggery to cheat at sports is, of course, more evidence of moral rot, but the ends are probably seen as justifying the means. Fallen media mogul Conrad Black in a published piece summed up the political end, hailing the record haul of Olympic gold as proof that Britain was still a "serious country."

The obverse of that belief is that a country failed by its top athletes is not serious. As I have noted a good many times in this blog, that has been the long-standing theme of British propaganda about India. It began in colonial times and has continued unbroken for over six decades after Indian independence.

The Indian failure in the test series in Britain was followed immediately by a reversal of roles in the subsequent British tour of India and we have gone on to perform well elsewhere. But Sachin Tendulkar has continued to struggle.

As the most outstanding cricketer of his generation Tendulkar is an icon the British have envied and targeted for a long time. British sportswriters coined the "Little Master" title when he was a 16-year old but its continued use now is an obvious racist reference to his height (which is exactly the same as that of Don Bradman). British proxies in the Indian media have participated in the anti-Tendulkar campaign and are now making unseemly calls for his retirement.

Tendulkar might not be alone in James Bond's sonic gunsights.

Judging from their sudden loss of form at the London Olympics several outstanding Indian sports stars were also targets of infrasound attack:

• Beijing Olympic gold medal sharpshooter Abhinav Bindra crashed out in the qualifying round with a miserable 594 total and finished 16 of 47.
• The world's top ranking woman archer, Deepika Kumari, lost in the first knockout round to her unknown British opponent. "I don't know what happened" she told journalists in a state of shock over a score that did not include a single ten pointer.
• Asian Games gold medalist Sushil Kumar made it to the finals but was "hit by a stomach bug" that had him running to the bathroom six times before his bout. He had ranked top in the qualifying process.
• Ronjan Sodhi, who holds the World Cup in trap shooting did well in the first round at the Olympics but his scores tumbled inexplicably in the second and third rounds.

Is there is any defense against infrasound attack?

There seems to be none, at least on the basis of what I could unearth. The sound waves are unaffected by material barriers.

But at least it should be possible to detect and monitor their existence. The web site at http://www.infiltec.com/Infrasound@home/ tells how that can be done.

The BCCI should also urgently establish hormonal base levels for all members of the Indian team and monitor them before and after games.

The International Olympic Committee should be approached to do the same for all athletes competing in its events. Obviously, chemical doping is no longer the only means to cheat at sports.

China: Impending Disaster or Hope of the World?

China has the world’s oldest written record of national governance.

Unfortunately, its leaders also have the longest record of inability to learn from the past.

Consider the abuse of intellectuals.

It began with Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor who united the warring kingdoms at the north-eastern edge of what is now China. He had 800 Confucian scholars buried alive. Those he did not kill he drove into exile. Their books he burned.

Fast forward more than two millennia to the last of the monarchic dynasties, the Manchu: it too burned books, jailed intellectuals, tortured and executed them.

The dynasty Mao Zedong established in 1949 has burned more books and tortured/oppressed/murdered more intellectuals than all others over two millennia.

Three decades of Westernizing post-Mao “reforms” have not ended that record of oppression. Intellectuals who dare to oppose the regime are still being buried alive (in prisons instead of graves), tortured, killed on the sly and driven out of the country.

The rulers of China have been unable to see in all their long history that dissent has a valuable role in society, that those who combine intellect, integrity and courage are the treasures of their race.

Another issue on which experience has made no dent on the attitudes of Chinese rulers is national security.

From early days the Han people, who constitute about 90 percent of the Chinese population, have spent enormous treasure and labor to build walls to keep out marauding Mongol nomads. The walls never stopped the invasions but successive generations continued to build them until there was a single enormous structure stretching some 1500 kilometers. That did not stop the Mongols either; in the 17th Century they not only conquered the whole Han heartland but continued far beyond it to Taiwan in the south and Tibet in the west. (Tibet was made to pay tribute, which it did for less than 50 years; on that flimsy ground Mao claimed sovereignty over a land Beijing had never ruled directly.)

Despite the overwhelming evidence that walls do not ensure security China’s rulers still continue to build them: today they have the Great Chinese Firewall to keep out the Internet and the Worldwide Web.

Another critically important lesson repeatedly borne in by experience is that Chinese society needs a procedure for orderly political change; but it has not made a dent in the thinking of the country’s ruling elites. Fearful of the alien, idolizing the imagined gold standard of Confucian stability, every Chinese dynasty has ruled until unseated with brutal violence.

The country’s response to Western dominance and oppression was typically unreflective. Unlike India, where there has been a continuing effort to understand the nature of the Western challenge and meet it through imitation, adaptation, reform and peaceful opposition, China has never understood that it must mobilize its own genius. The mandarins of the Manchu dynasty hoped to transplant Europe's superior technology into an unchanged Chinese society; they considered social reform both unnecessary and dangerous. When that failed, Mao Zedong went to the opposite extreme and tried to rebuild Chinese society according to the ideology of a long dead German ideologue.

That long record of boneheaded elite attitudes to change played out again last week as China’s Communist Party transferred power to a new set of leaders. After a year of murky horse-trading, paranoia and intrigue, amidst the lurid fall from grace of Bo Xilai, the top “Leftist” contender for a share of power, Xi Jinping, replaced Hu Jintao as the head of the Party’s apex Standing Committee.

Despite strident calls for political reform from the departing Hu the new composition of the Standing Committee was solidly stick-in-the-mud. Four of its members, including Xi, are privileged “Princelings,” sons of Mao’s close cohort. One is a propagandist who helped shape the Great Chinese Firewall. Another brings to governance an economics degree from North Korea. A third is best known for not acknowledging an outbreak of SARS that killed thousands. Another worthy, considered a reformer, led the campaign to hide the spread of HIV infection to a million people by official blood banks.

This sorry team is now in charge of a country increasingly incensed by the corruption and arrogant anti-people policies of a Party that has little popular support. Land grabs by government functionaries, imposition of poisonous industries on populous areas, the impunity of corrupt officials and rampant abuse of power have provoked even the stoic steel of China’s people to mounting protest. The number of “mass incidents” (as the regime terms public protests) has increased rapidly in recent years; in 2010 there were 180,000. China Daily, an official paper, has reported that environmental protests are increasing 29 percent yearly.

To prevent any of this outrage from becoming visible during the carefully stage-managed political transition the Beijing regime went to great lengths. Stores were ordered to put away kitchen knives. Ping pong balls that could be imprinted with anti-Party slogans also became hard to buy. Cab drivers were told to remove the roll-down handles of rear windows to prevent passengers from throwing out protest pamphlets. Access to the Internet slowed glacially in Beijing. Hundreds of foreign reporters who congregated in Beijing for the event found themselves in a strange limbo, prevented from asking questions at many Press conferences and often left with no official guidance about events. A thousand of them who gathered to witness the formal introduction of the new Standing Committee were kept waiting in a long corridor until the whole function was over. Multiple security cordons stalled access to the official celebrations in Tiananmen Square; ordinary Chinese were told to go back home and watch on television.

President Hu Jintao in his farewell speeches identified corruption as the primary danger to the State and Party but did not say how exactly they should be addressed. There is little chance of effective action for things are too far gone, and the entire system now facilitates corruption. The Banking sector is an example. Interest rates are kept much lower than the real cost of credit, ostensibly to promote domestic consumption; but all it has done is allow those with privileged access, including bank staff, to take out cheap loans and either lend out the money themselves at market rates or speculate in real estate. The result is an entirely unregulated alternative banking system that undermines the formal sector; it has inflated apartment prices far beyond the reach of most ordinary Chinese and millions of units now lie unoccupied.

Undetermined billions of Yuan embezzled from public institutions are also being used by corrupt officials for real estate speculation, so any sharp fall in prices will throw many local governments into crisis and wreck pension funds and insurance companies. The rapidly slowing economy is making the mess increasingly difficult to hide.

The new Standing Committee has few options to revive the economy. The banks have gone through two rounds of massive recapitalization to optically reduce their holdings of non-performing loans, and no one knows what their real situation is. China’s massive foreign reserves could be used to further shore up its banks but that would ignite an unwelcome level of inflation. Chinese manufacturers are suffering from a deadly combination of recession in their main foreign markets and growing labour militancy. Millions of migrant workers without residential permits in major cities are facing unemployment and have no social security. Educated unemployed youth are now again a major problem after years of booming economic growth, and there is intense competition among over-qualified candidates for low level but secure government jobs.

Foreign investment continues to be high (over $100 billion in 2012), but is down from last year. The continued high level of investment, both foreign and domestic, is not a positive factor when it is too high a proportion of GDP and at a time of falling manufacturing and exports; the result is inescapably inflationary. A broad effort to increase domestic consumption by increasing the minimum wage has also been inflationary and any large-scale government spending now, no matter what the aim, could send the cost of living into an irretrievable danger zone.

China has faced hard economic crises before. Mao initiated the Great Leap in an effort to cope with one. It caused a famine that killed between 30 and 46 million Chinese. There was no breakdown in political order then because the People’s Liberation Army, which serves the CPC not the nation, was firmly under Mao’s control. That control is long gone. Hu reportedly faced overt discontent at some meetings of the Military Commission, and the Party leadership now cannot take the PLA for granted. Reports say there is talk within the officer cadre of the need to “nationalize” the PLA – i.e. remove it from the authority of the Party and put it under the umbrella of the State. A move in that direction would be a political coup and signify the end of the current regime in all but name.

Complicating the picture within China is the grossly warped economic relationship the country has developed with the world since the 1997 “two systems one country” deal for the return of Hong Kong after its 99 year development under the British. With that deal China’s leaders bought into the empire of corruption Britain has built as its formal imperial structures were dismantled. Having Hong Kong as a sluice for the proceeds of corruption has gutted the Chinese regime in a weird replay of what happened in the 19th Century as Britain foisted the opium trade on the country. According to Washington-based Global Financial Integrity the country has lost an estimated $3.7 trillion in outflows to the global black market since 2001. That staggering figure indicates more than economic loss; it means key players in the Chinese power structure are in league with the most unscrupulous and manipulative of foreign interests.

The level of their cooperation can perhaps be seen in the murky downfall of Bo Xilai, a “Princeling” whose vocal campaign against corruption had made him a popular candidate for inclusion in the Standing Committee. The timing of his fall and its cause – the murder of a “British businessman” who was both an MI6 operative and a money-launderer – suggest a set up. Was the murder provoked by a blatant effort to cheat Bo and his wife of their foreign holdings? What led the local Police Chief (now given amnesty) to advertise the murder internationally by fleeing for asylum to the American consulate in Chengdu?

Such questions will surely be exercising the minds of the 25 members of political Bureau to which Xi’s 7-member Standing Committee reports. Unlike its apex body the Bureau is not dominated by conservatives and it could rehabilitate Bo Xilai much as it did Deng Xiaoping, who Mao tried to discredit and destroy. We can read that possibility into the unexplained decision to select only seven of the nine members of the Standing Committee. If Bo’s supposed show-trial exonerates him the cat would be among the pigeons, especially if he is inducted into the Standing Committee along with another reform candidate who was excluded. Xi himself could easily swing into the reform camp, for he has shown himself to be pragmatist. (It is possible his mysterious two-week disappearance from public view in September was spent reassuring last-minute doubters in the conservative camp and ensuring that he could take over chairmanship of the Military Commission at the same time as the top Party job.)

No matter how these circumstances play out, the anti-reform cast of the Standing Committee might be short-lived, for five members will reach the mandatory retirement age of 70 in the next few years; it is unlikely that 86-year old former president Jiang Zemin, who marshaled the conservatives this time around, will be able to decide on replacements. However, such prognostications could be immaterial, for the Chinese economy faces a disastrous prospect. If it suffers a crash the effects will be global and could easily tip the region, and indeed, the world, into war.

If ever there was a time for Chinese leaders to internalize the lessons of their national history it is now. Those lessons are clear. Security lies not in walls but in promoting the creativity and genius of their own valiant people. Dissent is not a weakness but an invaluable good in any society. The strength of a nation is not in the oppression of the weak but in their happiness and wellbeing. The corruption and criminality of the outside world are indeed dangerous but they are counterbalanced by a great fund of goodwill that China can mobilize if it changes policies founded in arrogance and dishonesty.

The normal run of State policies will not allow such a change in mindset; it will require a fundamental reassessment of the country’s existential situation and a decision to change it. Fortunately, the rich spiritual tradition of Chinese Buddhism offers the basis for such a change. To suggest that the regime allow the revival of that tradition might seem unrealistic but it is no more than a reversal of the ugly change that Mao Zedong engineered. It would transform the scene within the country and recast all problems in a hopeful light. It could save not just China but the world from disaster.