Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.

Literary Corner: Everything on the Field

Piet Mondrian, Dune Landscape, 1909, via Piet-Mondrian.org.

By unpopular demand, the versification of some of President Trump's valedictory address at Joint Base Andrews on 20 January:

The History of Sitting Presidents

by Donald J. Trump

I

You're going to see, you're going
to see incredible numbers start
coming in, if everything is sort of
left alone. Be careful, very complex,
be careful, but you're going to see
some incredible things happening.

II

And remember us when you see these
things happening, if you would,
remember us because I'm looking at--
I'm looking at elements of our economy
that are said to be a rocket ship up.

Today Donald Trump Became Anti-President

 

Ali Mohammed Hafedh Kinani at 9, in 2007, when he was murdered by the Blackwater goons Trump pardoned last night, via The Nation.

No, really, it's as if he's not even part of the executive branch any more, after Congress passed that "stimulus" with overwhelming, veto-proof majorities, and he responded:

"I'm asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2000, or $4000 per couple," Trump said in a video released on Twitter. "I'm also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items in this legislation or to send me a suitable bill."

He refused to have anything to do with the job for seven months, turning negotiations over to Steven Mnuchin, and now that the job is done he doesn't like how it came out. Not that he's threatening to veto the monster omnibus bill and shut down the government next week (this is actually possible, even though Congress has the votes to overturn a veto, because so many members have already gone home for Christmas). He may just allow it to become law without him, in ten days, delaying the checks, or he may end up signing it after all.

(Or conceivably Democrats could try to coopt the idea and force consideration of a revised bill upping the "stimulus" payments as he suggested, which is a level they'd wanted from the start, though I'd hope they won't obey his other demands on those "wasteful and unnecessary items", to zero out the foreign aid budget and to cancel funding for a couple of museum projects that fail to be centered around white men, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum; and even if Trump was willing to accept the result, it's not likely the Senate would be, and given the existence of, you know, Christmas and a shutdown deadline, it's not a great moment for this kind of game.)

But he's just denying he's involved in it in any way. As Steve M notes, Stephen Bannon is showing up in the Oval Office, along with Peter Navarro, and Mike Flynn, and Sydney Powell, and the inevitable Stephen Miller, and all these nihilists are telling him he's not the government. He's asking the waiter to take it back, as if he's only a customer in this crappy restaurant, or demanding to speak to the manager. He's not the manager.