China Redux

What does China think about about the Jews? They’re great! — or, at the very least, they’re useful for teaching you how to make lots and lots of money.

That’s the conclusion of a recent story by Ariana Eunjung Cha, which highlights the strange and worrisome proliferation of self-help “success” books that purport to tell Chinese people how to make money, the Jewish way. Classic titles in this genre include:

- “The Legend of Jewish Wealth”

- Jewish Entrepreneurial Experience and Business Wisdom”

- “The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish”

This is all rather humorous, all the more so in a country that just recently banned the image of the pig from appearing in state advertising campaigns in an effort to avoid offending Muslims (via Sinocidal).

Unfortunately, it’s only a short step from here to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being peddled on the streets of Shanghai. It’s not the relative factualness or quality of the message in the self-help business books that counts: it’s that the Chinese public seems ready and willing to buy into a mass generalization about such a diverse group. Today it’s “the Legend of Jewish Wealth;” tomorrow, it’s “Secrets to Jumping High in Basketball Like African-Americans.” People have been fired for saying that sort of thing in this country (let alone publishing books on it)–and rightfully so.

Today these self-help books praise the Jews; tomorrow, who knows what could happen. I, for one, hope the message of Jewish success continues to resonate in China and jive with the Party line, etc. Because this is clearly a superficial relationship. In the words of Wang Zhen, a researcher at the Center for Jewish Studies (!!??) who was quoted for the article, “even if people in China have the wrong impression of of Jewish people, the Chinese are very kind to them.”

Now that’s rich.

UPDATE: Dan at ChinaLawBlog has compiled a number of posts on this subject, which is a hot topic in the blogosphere.

Esteemed economists Seema Jaychandran and Michael Kremer have proposed an elegant solution to the problem of funding going to rogue or illegitimate regimes (via the Washington Post). Their answer: loan sanctions, in which illegimate regimes are cut off from receiving loans or other forms of credit through an explicit increase in the likelihood that the borrowed funds will not be repaid to creditors.

Let’s take Iran. As I write this post, US diplomats are pressuring international banks and foreign governments to stop providing loans to Iran, which enables it to expand oil production (which provides the revenues to fund its nascent nuclear program). But this is an imperfect approach: it is time-intensive and taxing on US diplomatic resources, and it is unenforceable — the US has no decisive legal recourse against the banks or a country like France beyond bargaining. The bottom line is the bottom line: since loaning Iran money can be a profitable business, international banks are not likely to stop–unless everyone else does.

Jaychandran and Kremer figured out that the best way to get creditors to stop providing credit is to remove the profit motive from the equation. How? In the author’s scheme, the US and other western donor nations would discourage repayment of illegitimate debt — debt incurred by countries under the control of illegitimate regimes (such as Iran, or Burma). Legitimate successor governments–the next government of Iran (democratic, of course)–would be told not to pay back the loans, and their assets would be protected from any seizures. The authors even suggest that the US, UN, UK, etc. could threaten to withold aid to legimitate governments that pay back illegitimate debt. That would take care of that problem quickly. Read the rest of this entry »