The Coming Collapse of China

by James Reed

Australia's ruling elites treat Australia like a whore, and they themselves act like pimps out of a Hollywood movie. But is China the right master to deliver the bound and gagged Australia to, for economic exploitation? In the short term, there seems to be good dollar reasons for the criminals, who control the fate of the ordinary man, to do so. But what about in the longer term? Is China really the new imperial master of the 21st Century to whom all traitorous, profit-centred elites must bow?

Gordon G. Chang in his book, "The Coming Collapse of China," (Random House, New York 2001) predicts a breakdown of China due to a collapse of the Communist government's finances. Although the West is fixated upon the image of China as an economy on steroids and growth hormones, like a perverse Asiatic body builder, China's economy has severe weaknesses. The Communist Party still clings to a multitude of uncompetitive state-owned enterprises and the Party forces the banks to lend to these enterprises to keep them afloat. The Party itself is corrupt and ill equipped to lead China into the free trading world of the World Trade Organisation rules. China has done well by playing a game of economic hypocrisy - exploiting free trade when it suits it, but being selectively protectionist - but according to Chang, China is "unprepared for unforgiving globalisation."

John J. Reilly (www.johnreilly.info/tccc.htm) also a defender of Chang's thesis has said: "China has not only a sick industrial sector, which it dare not downsize for fear of exacerbating the already difficult 'unemployment' problem. It also has an insolvent banking system. How insolvent no one knows. The accounting system is worse than Enron's, and beyond that there are systemic problems. At least in America, 'creative' accounting eventually catches up with you. In China there is no effective bankruptcy system to clarify the situation. Indeed, modern China as a whole seems to have a 'culture of non-payment'. A third of all home mortgages are in arrears."

Chang observes that business in China largely consists of brides and protection money paid to Party cadres rather than operating on legally enforceable contracts. Economic mismanagement on a grand scale has resulted in 70 to 130 million unemployed roaming China for work. A real army of the unemployed. Workers in China often go for months without pay - not a wise recipe for social harmony.

Chang concludes that all the signs of a collapse of China are present.
China's debt-to-GDP ratio, which China claims is only 18 per cent, is, according to Chang 81 per cent. To the 18 per cent needs to be added debt to multilateral institutions and other governments, central government debt incurred for lower-tier governments, unrecorded debt of lower-tier governments as well as debt arising from non-performing bank loans that are uncollectible. There are also bad debts of State-owned enterprises. A major financial crisis is looming. Like the road runner in the cartoons China's forward momentum has kept it from the realisation that it is already over the abyss and in mid-air.

Along with all of this are the long term demographic problems noted by Phillip Longman in "The Empty Cradle" (New America Books, New York 2004) and Tyrene White, "China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic 1949-2005," (Cornell University Press 2006). China has an ageing population, so much so that the median age will be older than the US by 2020. Its labour supply will be rapidly contracting so that every 10 Chinese workers will have to support, by 2050, seven younger or older Chinese. China will become, given its fertility rate of 1.5-1.65, a "4-2-1" society where one child supports two parents and four grandparents. This to be sure, is a fate facing other countries, but they developed before the demographic crash.

How sensible is it for a country such as Australia to play at being a bootlicking puppy around the feet of an ageing giant when it is only a matter of time before the giant falls and crushes all in its path? Y. Yamamoto, reviewing "The Coming Collapse of China" for the Tokyo Free Press concluded: "But to tell the truth I don't care too much about the fate of China. Essentially it's a matter of when, not whether, that we see the self-deceptive regime tumbling." Watch out Australia!

Reflections on a Critique of Shakespeare's Shylock

by Betty Luks
Jacob G. Rosenberg's article "Reflections on Shakespeare and Shylock," (Australian Jewish News, 1/12/06) would be of interest to both Jew and gentile alike. The writer comes to the conclusion that it is "fallacious" to characterise The Merchant of Venice "as antisemitic" and thought, "There is no body of writing, with the exception of the Bible, that deals with the fundamentals of human life as do the works of William Shakespeare."

In fact, he insisted to his Jewish readers, it is time "we accepted the fact that Shylock as portrayed by Shakespeare is an upright man - a man of strength and of human weakness - who towers above a hypocritical, corrupted society, a society that can compel a helpless Jew to convert, largely in order to deprive him of his wealth."

It is to be sure his Jewish readers would understand where he is coming from, but not necessarily a gentile reader. I had hoped the writer would have gone on to examine the reasons why he thought that Shylock was being compelled "to convert, largely in order to deprive him of his wealth," instead he went on to examine "the very origins of its (the play's) creator. I was much disappointed.

The core of the matter is centred in "the fundamentals of human life" as Mr. Rosenberg clearly recognises; and the viewpoint Shakespeare presented is from his own community, with the interests of his own community at heart. Hence when in the trial scene, just as Shylock is advancing towards Antonio with a sharpened knife in one hand and a pair of scales in the other Portia declares:

Tarry a little, there is something else,
This bond doth give thee no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh'.
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,
But in the cutting it if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood,
thy land and thy goods
Are by the law of Venice confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

Shakespeare understood and sympathised with Shylock's situation, the quarrel as he represents it in the play, is not personal and private but national and elemental, a clash between two separate self-contained moral systems, each with its own sense of right and wrong and its own keenly felt sense of personal honour. The reader who wishes to come to grips with the origins of, the fundamental causes of the troubled relations, which are national and elemental, could do no better than study the chapter 'Shakespeare and the Law of Equity' which centres on The Merchant of Venice in Ivor Benson's "The Zionist Factor".

In a brilliant explanation he wrote:
"What we are shown in The Merchant of Venice is an enmity in nature, involving two nations, each with its own legal and moral code, which cannot be resolved by any mutually acceptable law; the only question to be determined is which side must win and which lose."

He quotes from W. Moelwyn Merchant's introduction to a Penguin edition of the play:
"It is clear that The Merchant of Venice is much preoccupied with two matters of Elizabethan concern: Jewry and usury… and "any suggestion The Merchant of Venice was meant only as entertainment flatly contradicted our deepest intuitions".
The legal structure of the play is fallacious. The legal framework of the drama is no more real than so much stage furniture and painted scenery. What is profoundly real is "Shakespeare's most elaborate statement of the relation of positive law to equity in the dealings of man and man" wrote Merchant.

Benson appreciated that "Shakespeare had read and thought deeply about the troubled relations of Jew and gentile, and that long before his play was entered in the Stationer's Register in 1598 there had been in progress a ferment of debate on this subject all over the Western world."

He refers to Raphael Holinshed's History of England, Sir Thomas Wilson's Discourse Upon Usury and Francis Bacon's "deeper and more restrained comments on the same subject as sources from which Shakespeare would have drawn copiously" in the writing of his play.

English common law and equity
To offend and judge are distinct offices,
And of opposed natures.
-- William Shakespeare.

In England it was early realised that under common law, grave injury could go unredressed to the detriment of civil order and national unity. Aggrieved persons who found themselves denied a remedy in the common law courts petitioned the king in council for redress, and the petitions were remitted by the council to the Lord Chancellor as 'keeper of the king's conscience' for investigation.
"The divine duty of doing Justice that lay upon the conscience of the King is re-affirmed by Henry of Bracton, the Father of the Common Law: And in his Coronation oath, the King must swear: first that he will do what in him lies to secure that the Church and all Christian people may have peace in his time; secondly that he will forbid rapine and wrong-doing among all classes of the people; thirdly that in all his judgements he will ordain equity and mercy as he hopes for mercy from God," Richard O'Sullivan KC informs us in "Christian Philosophy in the Common Law".

It is the relation of common law to equity which, more than any other aspect of law, comes into question in the quarrel between the money lender and the merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare used the example of Jacob and his craftiness against his uncle Laban (Genesis 30) to make his point: Jacob, you will find upon investigation, when grazing his uncle's sheep, inflicted an injury against his uncle in violation of moral law but not of common law.

"This form of evil explains the evolution of equity law as a concept and juridical practice in all civilised nations. Legality without equity is clearly identifiable as an ingenious form of warfare in which moral violence is cunningly substituted for physical violence without incurring any risk of retribution under common law," Benson saw.

In the play, Portia having been invited to examine Shylock's suit and pass judgement according to the law, makes a plea for equity in one of the most famous and moving speeches in English drama: "The quality of mercy is not strained…"

Mercy in this sense is not the softening and undermining of the law, but an exercise of sympathetic understanding which enhances the power of the law by freeing it of defects which must attend a written law that cannot take into account an infinite variety of circumstances.

Jacob Rosenberg, as I guess all Jews, shows he is aware of this antagonism between the two systems when he writes of Shylock as "an upright man - a man of strength and of human weakness" but also helpless in… a society that can compel a helpless Jew to convert, largely in order to deprive him of his wealth".
He sympathises with Shylock, who was then a helpless Jew in a dominant alien society. But now that Jewish elements in most nations have risen to such prominence and power, he is at liberty to openly question Shakespeare's anti-Semitism. It is an age-old human drama.

What we are shown in The Merchant of Venice is an enmity in nature, involving two nations, each with its own legal and moral code - which cannot be resolved by any mutually acceptable law. The matter is as yet unresolved.

Further reading:
"The Zionist Factor," by Ivor Benson. Price: $16.00 posted.

"Culture of Critique," by Professor Kevin MacDonald. Price: $58.00 posted An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in Twentieth-Century intellectual and political movements. Prof. MacDonald discusses the 'politically incorrect' issues of the day and the strategy of the Jews in helping change western society for their own ends.

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