Crackdown on bitcoin mining: not only because of coal – Winston Wenyan Ma

 

Winston Wenyan Ma

Provincial governments in Sichuan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan have been cracking down on bitcoin mining, but it is not alone because of the usage of coal to generate cheap electricity, says strategic advisor Winston Wenyan Ma to Reuters.

Reuters:

The notice ordered state electricity companies in Sichuan to conduct inspections, make corrections and report their results by Friday. They are to immediately stop supplying electricity to crypto mining projects they have detected.

The authorities urged local governments in Sichuan to start combing for crypto mining projects and shut them down.

Other regional mining centres, including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan, have also ordered crackdowns on Bitcoin mining.

Friday’s notice appears to indicate that Beijing’s displeasure with cryptocurrency mining extends beyond cases where it uses electricity generated by burning coal.

“Renewable power does not help,” said adjunct professor Winston Ma of NYU School of Law.

“The four largest mining regions – Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Yunnan and Sichuan – have implemented similar crackdown measures, even though mining in the latter two are mostly based on hydropower, whereas the first two are on coal,” he said.

More in Reuters.

Winston Wenyan Ma is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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The 2008 Sichuan earthquake is still sending aftershocks - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

The devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake is still sending tremors into China's society, writes journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, in the NY Review of Books."China’s supreme rulers today also have a strong hold over their citizens, but their edifice might not be immune from seismic change in society."

Ian Johnson:

Today’s state—as, in centuries past, dominated by ethnic Chinese—offered a modern version of historic patterns of displacement. First, Qiang cultural practices were recorded and turned into ethnographic objects as “intangible cultural heritage.” This was then packaged as a tourist destination for Chengdu’s inhabitants. Slogans were tossed about, such as turning the stretch from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou scenic area into a “Tibetan-Qiang cultural corridor.” 

Probably the most dubious example of this was in the town of Beichuan, which was one of the centers of the earthquake. Its ruins were not torn down or rebuilt but reinforced and left as an aestheticized freak show for visitors—a town in what scholars have called a “fixed stage of collapse.” One of its special features is the Earthquake Science Experience Center, where movies of earthquakes are shown. Opened in 2016, it is located directly beneath the site of the ruined Beichuan High School—a graveyard of hundreds of children. 

Besides entertainment, visitors are encouraged to “work energetically for the country’s prosperity and glory.” The government’s heroism is emphasized, with Communist Party officials praised for working for the public good despite their personal losses. 

The state’s dominance is reflected in Beichuan’s memorials. Over the years, locals have tried to put up their own small places of remembrance, but only government memorials are allowed. Most locals refuse to visit them because they get so much tourist traffic. Instead, the bereaved burn incense or put flowers at the site of their loved ones’ demise—but these are quickly cleaned away by the authorities. It is little wonder that a local teenage girl told a team of visiting Chinese and foreign researchers that “the city is rebuilt, we are finally settled and life takes up its course again, and yet people haven’t found peace and serenity.” 

In China, the state’s presence is overwhelming—and often dictatorial. It locked up Tan Zuoren and beat up Ai Weiwei. It closed down the Chinese journalists’ trying to report on corruption. It bulldozed the Qiangs’ culture and means to turn them into minstrels for Chinese tourists. And yet, from the state’s perspective, these are perhaps regrettable side-effects of a larger good: its ability to rule. 

This is what the political theorist Richard Löwenthal called a “development dictatorship”: it develops, therefore it is. It has impoverished mountain people and so, while mouthing pieties about participation and sending out teams of academics to conduct field surveys, it builds highways and hotels up into the mountains to rescue them from their own culture and history. 

As for the do-gooders in Chengdu, the authorities understand that people need something to believe in—after all, in the past, people actually believed in Communism, too. So they pass NGO and charity laws that allow these bleeding hearts to band together—under government supervision, of course—to donate their time and money. 

This is all very well—after the fashion of a harried parent who allows a child to cut the grass with a plastic mower. Except that, in reality, the child is a co-owner of the house and has ideas about how to manage the yard, while the parent obsessively demands control and recognition. Thus, when China’s then leader, Hu Jintao, left power in 2012, one of the scenes shown at his farewell video tribute was of him visiting the site of the earthquake. Later, when Xi Jinping took office and issued his slogan of creating a “China Dream,” his propagandists included images of soldiers rescuing people from an earthquake. Good Samaritans are well and good, was their message, but it’s the big boys who do the real work. 

Just as people were naïve to assume that the activism of 2008 would become the norm, though, it is also premature to conclude that today’s retrenched state dominance is the final word. When the surplus capital created by the Dujiangyan waterworks helped Qin Shihuangdi unite China for the first time more than two millennia ago, his empire seemed unassailable. And yet his zeal to unify and control was his undoing—he was deposed after just a decade in power. 

China’s supreme rulers today also have a strong hold over their citizens, but their edifice might not be immune from seismic change in society.

Much more in the New York Review of Books.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Why a drag queen at a funeral? - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Strippers are invited at funerals in Taiwan, drag queens in Sichuan. Author Ian Johnson of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao discusses at ChinaFile how those drag queens are rooted into society.

Ian Johnson:

How about this sociological answer: funerals are a reflection of a person's status in society. In some parts of Chinese society, status has been achieved through the centuries—whether at a funeral or a fair or a wedding—by having a big raucous party: something renao, or hot and noisy, in Chinese. What’s more renao than a stage full of drag queens belting out songs or wailing for the dead person? 

Unprecedented? No. Since the 1980s, many rural Taiwanese have had strippers at their funerals. The dead like to have fun. They liked strippers while alive and so they get strippers after they’ve died—with a hole cut in the coffin so they can peek out at the girls as they doff their clothes. In 2011, the documentary filmmaker Marc L. Moskowitz made the film “Dancing for the Dead” about the phenomenon. He noted that highers-up—like officials over the millennia—were embarrassed about the practice, seeing it as bad publicity for Taiwan, while locals carried it on as, in their views, part of “tradition.” 

What tradition? The ethnomusicologist Chiung-Chi Chen wrote about this in a 2006 doctoral thesis, “From the Sublime to the Obscene.” She wrote that half the temple fairs she observed in Taiwan and many funerals included strippers as a kind of super renao catalyst. She posits that ghosts are kinds of hooligans. Hooligans like strippers so ghosts must too. Another idea is that funerals are places where social constraints are loosened and people can do what they usually can’t.

More (including pictures) at ChinaFile.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.