Germany, Meta Intelligence

Henry Huiyao Wang: A Xi-Trump-Putin summit in Shenzhen could kick-start peace in Ukraine

CCG’s President says there will be no diplomatic masterstroke in Ukraine’s absence, but serious consideration of a ceasefire can lay the groundwork for peace

[from the Center for China & Globalization, 31 October 2026]

Below is the latest opinion column by Henry Huiyao Wang, founder and President, Center for China and Globalization, published in the South China Morning Post.

At the recent Valdai Discussion Club, I asked Russian President Vladimir Putin if he would be open to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Shenzhen. I also asked, more broadly, what role China could play in promoting peace in Ukraine, mediating and contributing to peacekeeping.

Putin was receptive, warmly welcoming the idea of a China-hosted meeting. Trump, too, has expressed a willingness to meet Xi and Putin. These expressions of openness offer an opportunity we must seize in pursuit of peace.

Some in the United States and Europe question the value of such a summit. They may fear restoring Putin’s standing or normalising the conflict without yielding any real progress towards an end to the war. That risk is still real but these largely Western fears must be tempered by the very real, very human cost of letting the war continue unabated.

From the very beginning of the war, I have been arguing that China has a constructive role to play. In March 2022, less than three weeks into Russia’s invasion, I wrote an article in The New York Times titled “It’s Time to Offer Russia an Offramp. China Can Help With That.”

In August last year, I extended that train of logic in Foreign Policy, where I proposed a seven-party format for peace negotiations and suggested that a peacekeeping force include troops from European and BRICS countries. A meeting of the three leaders in Shenzhen could help lay the groundwork for these broader diplomatic and peacekeeping efforts.

Without Ukraine’s participation, such a meeting is unlikely to produce a diplomatic masterstroke that ends the war. But the three leaders need not put the war to rest at a table in Shenzhen to make progress. Serious consideration of a ceasefire along the current line of contact—an approach Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has supported—could give peace efforts fresh momentum, leaving the final status of disputed territories for subsequent negotiations.

Further agreement could be sought on the protection of nuclear facilities, or a mutual end to strikes on energy infrastructure, new prisoner exchanges or improved humanitarian access. Of course, issues of sovereignty, security guarantees, Russia’s security concerns and Europe’s security commitments would remain. But these need not all be resolved at once before a ceasefire can begin.

Already, years of war have inflicted immense suffering on both Russia and Ukraine. Neither side achieved its objectives, and both need a dignified way out that protects their core interests. Thus, we must open a path towards peace without requiring either side to concede defeat. China could help bridge this gap by bringing Xi, Trump and Putin together in Shenzhen to explore how a ceasefire and wider negotiations involving Ukraine might work.

The United Nations could stand at the core of such an arrangement by monitoring any ceasefire and preventing a return to fighting by physical peacekeeping if the parties are so inclined.

For a broader negotiation on settlement, I find myself returning to a seven-party format that would bring together the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S.—alongside Ukraine and the European Union. An understanding reached in Shenzhen could give momentum to this broader negotiating process and free up the Security Council for action.

A peacekeeping force composed entirely of NATO or European troops might be unacceptable to Russia. Yet a mission without European participation would struggle to reassure Ukraine and its neighbours. Any workable arrangement would need to address both concerns.

In my Foreign Policy article, I proposed a peacekeeping force drawing troops from five European countries—Germany, France, Britain, Poland and Italy—and five members of the BRICS grouping, such as China, India and Brazil. And while the exact formulation, from the composition and mandate to the terms of deployment, would need to be negotiated with the consent of Russia and Ukraine, and the agreement of the contributing countries, the core idea remains sound.

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the largest contributor of peacekeeping personnel among the five permanent members, China is well positioned to help. Its distinctive role in the global economy and dialogue with Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe, give it channels through which to coax the parties towards peace. But this process must begin somewhere, and that somewhere could be Shenzhen.

Nor should APEC be the end of the diplomatic effort. With an understanding reached by the leaders in Shenzhen, the Security Council may pick up the momentum by advancing ceasefire and peacekeeping proposals. The Group of 20 could then join the effort to rally support from major economies with an interest in maintaining the deal. Each would play a different role and would not be tasked with settling the entire conflict.

China’s role in the Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement in 2023 showed Beijing’s ability to open a door after years of enmity. The Ukraine war is different, and there can be no guarantee of a similar outcome. But diplomacy must begin somewhere, particularly when fighting has brought such destruction.

The central question is whether such a meeting could help bring the war to an end. In that light, any gain in prestige for an individual leader is almost irrelevant. And if the three leaders could agree on practical steps towards peace, they would give the United Nations and the wider international community a material basis upon which peace could be built.

Modernity and its Nightmares

Scholars console themselves with the notion that calamitous acts of death and destruction such as The Holocaust, the Bengal famine, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are freak, singular aberrations. Psychologically, it’s reassuring to pigeonhole these as exotic historical events for academic study and push them away.

In 1989, Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he argues the opposite: that these events are intrinsically linked to modernity. A symptom of the nightmare of modernity can be seen in Shlomo Sternberg’s Dynamical Systems, where he includes a photo of Felix Hausdorff, with a caption explaining the latter’s suicide (to avoid an extermination camp) amid his brilliant mathematical analysis.

At the end of World War II, Allied forces agents detained ten leading German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. When one of these men, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Otto Hahn, heard about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he is said to have had a nervous breakdown, feeling guilt for his discovery and its use in this tragedy.

The Harvard Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focused on the Bengal famine. In Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, he explained that the Bengal famine was not the result of food shortages due to flooding, locusts or crop failures, but rather resulted from income shortages and lack of political clout.

The rise of bureaucracy, entwined with modernity, has removed any sense of culpability, as technological breakthroughs can be used to cause horrific events. You may have seen the 2023 film Oppenheimer, which depicts the American theoretical physicist’s guilt over developing atomic weapons amid Congressional hearings. In this framework, Fritz Haber was instrumental in developing the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives and is considered the “father of chemical warfare” in contrast to the advances he gave us in agriculture.

To quote Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Can a Movie Excite an Unexpected Intellectual Adventure?

Consider the political thriller The Eagle Has Landed. There’s a scene where Col. Radl discusses Jung’s concept of synchronicity. For example, a man checking out drops a coin near the register and searches for it momentarily before giving up. Years later, he is at the same store and finds a similar coin. He rationalizes this with a mundane story, not some cosmic notion of fairness.

…Jung was working, in collaboration with Pauli, on his treatise on Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, which was published together with Pauli’s essay on Kepler in one volume. This was evidently meant as a symbolic act: one of the greatest physicists of the century joining forces with one of its greatest psychologists. The result was a stimulating exercise in unorthodox speculation, but at the same time sadly disappointing. It did not amount to a theory in the proper sense, but rather to a universal schema, both very bold and very vague.

Jung’s treatise hinges on his concept of “Synchronicity”. He defines it as “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events”;¹ or alternatively as “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning²…equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation”.³ This is an almost verbatim repetition of Kammerer’s definition of “Seriality” as “a recurrence of the same or similar things or events in time or space”—events which, as far as can be ascertained; “are not connected by the same acting cause”. The main difference appears to be that Kammerer emphasises serial happenings in time (though, of course, he includes contemporaneous coincidences in space), whereas Jung’s concept of synchronicity seems to refer only to simultaneous events—although he includes precognitive dreams which occurred sometimes several days before the events. He tried to get around the time paradox by saying that the unconscious mind functions outside of the physical framework of space-time; thus precognitive experiences are “evidently not synchronous but are synchronistic since they are experienced as psychic images in the present as though the objective event already existed”.⁴ One wonders why Jung created these unnecessary complications by coining a term which implies simultaneity, and then explaining that it does not mean what it means. But this kind of obscurity combined with verbosity runs through much of Jung’s writing.

Although Kammerer’s “Seriality” and Jung’s “Synchronicity” are as similar as a pair of gloves, each fits one hand only. Kammerer confined himself to analogies in naive physical terms, rejecting ESP and mentalistic explanations. Jung went to the opposite extreme and tried to explain all phenomena which could not be accounted for in terms of physical causality, as manifestations of the unconscious mind: “Synchronicity is a phenomenon that seems to be primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.”⁵ Its deepest strata, according to Jungian terminology, are formed by the “collective unconscious”, potentially shared by all members of the race. The “decisive factors” in the collective unconscious are the archetypes which “constitute its structure”.⁶ They are, as it were, the distilled memories of the human species, but cannot be represented in verbal terms, only in elusive symbols, shared by all mythologies. They also provide “patterns of behaviour”⁷ for all human beings in archetypal situations—confrontations with death, danger, love, conflict, etc. In such situations the unconscious archetypes invade consciousness, carrying strong emotions and—owing perhaps to the archetype’s indifference to physical space and time—facilitate the occurrence of “synchronistic” events. The appearance of the scarab while the patient was telling her archetypal dream is considered by Jung as an illustration of this nexus. The same applies to the detonations in Freud’s bookcase during Jung’s visit, indicating the explosive nature of their father-son relationship: “Meaningful coincidences which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance-groupings—therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation. At least all the cases in my experience and there is a large number of them—show this characteristic?”⁸

Elsewhere in the essay he writes:

Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first. In the case of sudden death, the critical experience cannot be recognised immediately as “extra-sensory perception” but can only be verified as such afterwards. …In all these cases, whether it is a question of spatial or of temporal ESP, we find a simultaneity of the normal or ordinary state with another state or experience which is not causally derivable from it, and whose objective existence can only be verified afterwards. …An unexpected [mental] content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective external event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity.”⁹

Jung (1960), p. 441 [ref]

Jung (1960), p.551 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 435 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 445 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 511 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 436 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 438 [ref]

Jung (1960), p. 440 [ref]

Jung (1960), pp. 444-5 [ref]

Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence, Picador, 1974 (first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1972), pgs. 94-97.

Can a movie trigger an unexpected intellectual adventure?

Usually, when considering this question, you might see a film on a specific subject, then perhaps read an article or try to find a book about it.

In his essay on Synchronicity (Jung’s term for meaningful coincidences of events separated in space and/or in time,¹ Jung examined some of the beliefs surrounding apparently related incidents which seem to have no causal connection. These incidents could be, for example, the coinciding of a patient’s dream with an actual event corresponding to its occurring at the same time some distance away, it could be ESP phenomena—response to some event that does not become known through any sense; it could be a horoscope reading which corresponds to the observed character of the individual or his self-image, or an astrological prediction which seems to be borne out in subsequent events. The possibility of finding meaning in these correspondences had tantalized Jung for many years. The beginning of his serious study goes back to the days when Albert Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity. During this time he was a guest on several occasions for dinner in Jung’s home. In a letter on Einstein and synchronicity, Jung wrote: “It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic synchronicity.”²

In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, C. W. 8, pp. 417-531. [ref]

Letter to Dr. Selig dated 25 February, 1953, in Spring, 1971, p. 127. [ref]

June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, Anchor Books edition, 1973, p. 398.

The Eagle Has Landed begins with newsreel footage depicting Mussolini’s rescue by the Germans during the Gran Sasso raid. This probably inspires the plot to abduct Churchill. Come to the present. Did the operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, stem from this, or is there no causal connection? All of this is the intellectual adventure of Jung’s synchronicity.

Poly-Awareness, Checks & Commercial History

In an era moving towards electronic payment systems and replacing physical currency, it can be educational to look back at checks and how we arrived here. As Winston Churchill observed, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

In looking at history, it is just as important to study commercial practices as well as government leaders and military conquests.

…In the ten years following 1850, the world production of gold was ten times greater than in the ten preceding years. As is well known, the French had always preferred metal currency, and welcomed the gold with a special enthusiasm; the state struck an impressive quantity of coins, striking five hundred million in 1845, for the world’s gold found its way more readily to France where it fetched the highest price. The circulation of gold increased in other European countries also, and the banks of issue, in particular, filed their vaults. In this gold rush the English were more cautious after their long acquaintance with problems of values, and the upheaval in the gold market brought hardly any changes in the prices of the metal there. It is true England also minted new coins, but took advantage of it chiefly to establish her banking system more firmly. The influx of gold, which was exclusively Australian, had at first little effect on the prices of goods, but it developed credit with a paper currency. The minting of this money increased England’s metallic circulation by almost fifty percent, but the use of the banknote and especially of the cheque increased by a far higher proportion. The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds. Even if he had an income of only fifty pounds a year, the Englishman immediately opened a bank account. In 1885, payments in metal currency represented only one per cent of the London Bank payments and six per cent of those in Manchester.

The Act of 1826 granted complete freedom of issue, except in an area of twenty-six miles around London, where the privilege of the Bank was absolute. There was a good deal of argument about the exact meaning of this privilege; for example the question arose as to whether provincial banks could open an office in London, the main centre of business, without losing their rights of issue.

When it was ruled that they could not, many banks nevertheless settled in London and forfeited their privilege of printing. Only the Scottish banks put up a firmer resistance to this extension of the privileges of the Bank of England. On the other hand, the right of issue was losing much of its significance, since the remarkable development of payment by cheque meant that there was less resort to the note. Settlements between the great deposit banks were made neither in metal nor in notes, but were transacted in the accounts of a clearing house, which dealt with transactions amounting to several hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

The London and Westminster Bank, one of the most important of the English private deposit banks, soon became a model for every bank in Europe, for it had a reserve capital of less than three million pounds, and held approximately twenty-two million in deposits. Such influential private banks, established as joint stock companies, had to resort to the Bank of England only rarely, so the latter did not need to be unduly anxious about its insignificant gold reserves which were barely one-third of those held by the Banque de France. The privilege of issuing paper money, a relic of the royal right of minting money, was therefore bypassed to all intents and purposes by the gradual improvement of English banking procedure. At the same time the Bank of England enjoyed a monopoly of issue which it was in process of acquiring without the intervention of the state, since the development of banking led all the provincial banks to settle in London, near the clearing house. It was a masterpiece of liberalism to coordinate the free activity of the English economy in the capital without any pressure from the political power. In this way financial centralization was achieved purely by private initiative once the need for it had become apparent.

French banking evolved on very different lines. In order to meet the credit crisis, the provisional government had recommended the establishment of departmental banks and of trade credit societies when it was reforming the Banque de France. Most of these establishments, whose capital was to be provided partly by the state and the departments, were stillborn, while others lingered on for a month or two before wasting away. On the other hand, the Comptoir d’Escompte de la Seine became a private concern, and flourished under the name of the Comptoir National d’Escompte de Paris. The Banque du Département du Nord, which became the Crédit du Nord, was equally fortunate, as were several trade banks, particularly that of the Entrepreneurs de Travaux Publics. The unusual feature about the composition of the Comptoir National d’Escompte was that the Council of State had allowed it to set up as a joint stock company. Within a few years the Crédit Mobilier, the Crédit Industriel et Commercial, the Société Générale, the Société des Dépôtes et Comptes Courants, and other companies were established to benefit from this new way of accumulating capital.

Not all these new banks were as prudent as their English counterparts by any means and this point is worth dwelling on. After 1848 the Banque de France had the monopoly of issuing notes for the whole of France, because the local issuing banks created by Napoleon I and Louis-Philippe had been absorbed by the Banque de France, whose notes were the only ones in circulation. It was the state which had made this decision and had settled the problem of monetary unity by authoritarian measures. A few bankers, under the Second Empire, protested against the right of monopoly exercised by the Banque de France, which had been imposed on the whole of the country by the state. Very little use was made of payment by cheque, and compensation was meagre. The wide circulation of metal currency was a sign of a restricted paper currency, but this meant that credit was scarce and was based entirely on the Banque de France. The latter, taking no risks, consequently piled up in its coffers considerable reserves of precious metals, proud of the fact that it could now maintain a steady discount rate more easily than England. It also gained great satisfaction from being the gold-controller of Europe. Whenever a sudden drastic rise in the English bank rate sent businessmen, and even the Bank of England itself, as we have seen, hastening to Paris in search of precious metals, it was to the Banque de France that they turned. Although it was attacked by those who accused it of stifling credit, on the other hand it was defended by those who found its caution reassuring. It was a difference of opinion which further enlivened the quarrel between the Pereires and the Rothschilds.

As we know, Jewish bankers played a vital part in the building of the railways. Pereire, a railway enthusiast, and Rothschild, the largest holder of free capital in France, had at first been prepared to undertake the great task in complete agreement. Rothschild, content with holding the Nord and the English connections, was one of the directors whose word carried most weight in the Banque de France, while the Pereire brothers, their heads still full of Saint-Simonist projects, were interested in vast plans covering Austria, Spain and the Mediterranean. They financed the great development of the economy of the south although even so they were obliged to open a credit institution, the well-known Crédit Mobilier. But because they could not use it for the issue of paper notes, and had tied up the funds entrusted to them too quickly, the Pereires embarked on a struggle to deprive the Bank of its privilege of issue. They believed that the mere right of minting money would enable them to possess the wide credit necessary for the bold financial policy on which they were launching out. It so happened that when Savoy was annexed to France, the Banque de Chambéry brought its banknotes and its privileges within French frontiers. The Pereires and their friends seized the shares of this bank and tried to turn its notes into rivals of those of the central bank. The Banque de France then asserted its rights, Chambéry lost its rights of issue, and soon afterwards the Crédit Mobilier went into liquidation.

This incident occasioned a great quarrel between theorists for or against privilege; it was above all a demonstration of the solidity of the rights the Bank had acquired, while no-one doubted the right of the state to confirm its privileges any longer. This situation was all the more paradoxical since the state was in the hands of Napoleon III who was a firm supporter of the Pereires and the Crédit Mobilier. The underlying cause of this paradox lay in French scepticism about cheques, for the development of bank money lagged more than half a century behind England. It was to be chiefly the work of Henri Germain, founder of the Crédit Lyonnais. His patron of 1863 was mainly anxious to attract large deposits by guaranteeing them against theft and fire so that he insisted on the effective help the Bank could give industrialists and merchants by insuring their cash service itself. By making wise use of these deposits and by a cautious policy, the Crédit Lyonnais was able to open branches in Paris and Marseilles, so that it was soon as powerful as the Crédit Industriel et Commercial and then outstripped it. It even surpassed the Comptoir d’Escompte, and soon the Crédit Lyonnais became the leading French deposit bank. From 1860 it was the major bank to introduce cheques.

But there is little reason for surprise in the difficulties encountered by the cheque between 1860 and 1870.

The Banque de France was regarded as the most reliable of all issuing authorities, and French specie reserves as the most powerful stock of gold in the world; between notes and gold as the two methods of payment, there was very little room for the cheque. It is difficult to believe that France’s reserves could not have kept the deposit banks generously supplied, perhaps as much as, and even more than, the English reserves. But it kept a good part of its cash-balance in gold, which held up the full development of French credit institutions until the closing years of the nineteenth century.

In England there was security and in France hesitation, but in Germany there was an irresistible wave of enthusiasm which led to the rapid growth of credit institutions from 1840. There were a great many note-issuing banks in the Germany of the confederation, because each prince had his own currency. Hamburg had one of the soundest banks of issue, whose marc banco was esteemed throughout Europe and served as a standard for the whole of Germany. Nuremberg still had its old seventeenth-century bank and its florin, while a large number of private establishments were also manufacturing notes with a restricted circulation. In this scheme of things the Bank of Prussia held a pre-eminent position which was strengthened by the place Prussia had assumed in the Zollverein, but it still could not contest the superiority of Hamburg. In short, the legal position of the German banks was similar to that of the English, in that there was plurality of issue.

Bank money, and banknotes, increased in competition with each other, and the future of the four great and famous banks which were to dominate the destiny of capitalist Germany after 1880 had already begun to take shape.

The Dresner Bank was connected with the progress of the iron industry in the Rhineland, and particularly of Essen and Krupps. The Deutsche Bank operated in the countries of central Europe. The Darmstädter Bank and the Disconto Gesellschaft carved out a place for themselves; indeed bills on the latter increased from six to forty million marks between 1855 and 1862.
Charles Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes: A Political and Social History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Anchor Books, 1968, pages 291-297.

Notice that in the discussion above, events are never monocausal. They are always part of a swirling tornado of change. If you become accustomed to this, the way the world works and the way the world changes will become more accessible to you.

For example, “The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds.”

Also notice, “…soon the Crédit Lyonnais became the leading French deposit bank. From 1860 it was the major bank to introduce cheques.”

This is an example of poly-awareness, the core of meta-intelligence.

[Max Weber, in his book General Economic History, points out that the words “cheque” and “exchequer” derive from the same root.]

History of Global Antagonisms: China

The famous Yale historian, Paul Kennedy, is well-known for two major works, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860–1914. The former starts with a very powerful line:

“Rome fell. Scarsdale will fall.”

This gives us the theme of anxiety over national destiny and trajectory, which currently preoccupies the American mind.

In the second book, this antagonism question involves real and imaginary threats, and all of these anxieties and antagonisms are related. The masterpiece series, Downton Abbey, depicts a scene that takes place in the garden, where the Lord announces that they are at war with Germany, and his audience is perplexed, thinking, “How can we be at war? Germany is our biggest trading partner.” This teaches us that wars and the antagonisms that precede them are not solely based on rational factors like trade volumes.

Let us turn our attention to China. We are all aware, however vaguely, of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the recent PBS television series, American Masters, the episode “Tyrus” (season 31, episode 7, aired September 8, 2017) has the artist Tyrus Wong recounting the story of his father, with whom he immigrated to California in 1920 at the age of 9. It is hard for us to believe that, as people of Chinese descent, they were forbidden from owning property outside of Chinatown. He describes his struggle with the hassles of overt racism. He did not gain his American citizenship until 1946, after the act was repealed. He came to fame with Disney’s Bambi, where he was the film’s lead artist.

This anti-China xenophobia was just as virulent in Europe, going back to the 19th century. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II popularized the phrase “yellow peril” to demonize the Chinese and encourage the European empires to invade, conquer and colonize China. Another instance of this sentiment in its European guise was the writing of Theodor Fontane. His classic novel, Effi Briest, can be thematically compared to other novels on 19th-century marriage from a female perspective, such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which are also adultery tragedies. In the novel, there are discussions of people from all ethnicities crowding into German cities and towns.

“…But all the people who live in the little shipping and trading towns along the coast are immigrants from far away, who care little about the Kashubian hinterland because there’s nothing there for them, their concerns are elsewhere. What concerns them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all corners of the globe. Which goes for Kessin too, backwater though it is.”

“But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwater, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new world. All sorts of exotic things. Isn’t that right? That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“A whole world, I say, with perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.”

“A Chinaman too. What a good guess. We may still have one, we certainly did have; he’s dead now, buried in a little plot with a railing round it next to the churchyard. If you’re not afraid I’ll show you his grave sometime. It’s in the dunes with just some marram grass round it and a little immortelle here and there, and the sound of the sea all the time. It’s very beautiful and very eerie.”

“Yes, eerie — I would like to know more about it. Or maybe rather not, I invariably start imagining things and then I have dreams, and I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.”

“Well, he won’t.”

“Well, he won’t. Listen to that. How odd it sounds, as if it were somehow possible. You’re trying to make Kessin interesting for me, but you’re rather overdoing it. Are there many foreigners like that in Kessin?”

“A great many. The whole town consists of foreigners like that, people whose parents or grandparents lived somewhere else altogether.”

“How very peculiar. Tell me more, please. But nothing sinister. A Chinaman, I think, is always a bit sinister.”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 33.

Notice the quote, “…I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.” This character echoes similar sentiments several more times above.

This “othering” of the Chinese in the novel continues:

Innstetten laughed. “We’re seventy miles further north than Hohen-Cremmen here and you have to wait a while for the first polar bear. I think you’re feeling the strain of the long journey, what with the St. Privat panorama and the story of the Chinaman and everything?”

“You didn’t tell me any story.”

“No, I just referred to him. But the mere mention of a Chinaman is a story in itself…”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 35.

“What was it all about?”

“Oh, some nonsense: an old ship’s captain with a granddaughter or a niece who disappeared one fine day, and then a Chinaman, who may have been her lover, and in the hallway there was a little shark and a crocodile, both suspended on strings and always in motion. Makes a marvellous story, but not now. There are all kinds of other things flitting through my mind.”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 177.

All of this global antagonism-watching and paranoia is disconcertingly related to our current situation. Donald Trump and the Republicans are essentially entrepreneurs of hatred. As is widely misattributed to Mark Twain, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Newspapers and the “Manufacture of Consent”

When we think about newspapers, various associations come to mind. Examples include Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post or William Randolph Hearst inspiring Citizen Kane. Newspapers have, to some extent, devolved into a vehicle for propaganda, as described in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion.

Lippmann is famously quoted for advocating the “manufacture of consent.”

Max Weber describes the economic function of newspapers:

The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date.

The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the journal which for a century was the first in the world, the “Times.” Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; originally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century, business depended on the organized exchange of letters. Rational trading between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters. This was accomplished partly by the merchant guilds and in part by butchers, wheelwrights, etc. The final stage in the rationalization of transmission of letters was brought about by the post, which collected letters and in connection therewith made tariff agreements with commercial houses. In Germany, the family of Thurn and Taxis, who held the postal concession, made notable advances in the rationalization of communication by letter. Yet the volume of correspondence is in the beginning surprisingly small. In 1633, a million letters were posted in all England while today a place of 4,000 population will equal the number.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, 1966 (Third Printing), page 220.

Herbert Hunt provides a useful overview of the newspaper as a political tool in his introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (French: Illusions perdues).

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active — though dangerous to those engaged in it — during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Li b erals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.

The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press — precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot — the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income — acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaume (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Li b eral), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind one of the present-day Canard Enchaîné.

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found La Caricature. Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq — La Presse and Le Siècle. But by the time he was writing A Great Man in Embryo he had left the petits journaux far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought La Chronique de Paris in 1836 and founded La Revue Parisienne in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in The Skin. And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his Monograph of the Paris Press (1842).
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, translated and introduced by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Books, 1971, pages xiv-xvi.

Balzac’s novel is very concerned with all aspects of journalism. For example, chapter 17 is titled “How a news-sheet is edited” and chapter 18 is a symposium on newspapers. Chapter 18 quotes a German guest who states, “I thank god there are no newspapers in my country.” (page 312). Another participant states, “In corporate crimes no one is implicated.” “A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.” (page 314).

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

We should heed Vignon’s warning. Nazi Germany’s three main newspapers confirm this danger.

Why Is the World So Nightmarish?

The phrase, “La Belle Époque” (French: “The Beautiful Era”) refers to the atmosphere in Europe and especially France, the high point of which lasted from 1900 to 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. The whole era was characterized by the phrase, “la douceur de la vie” (French: “the sweetness of life”). People of the time would say that if you weren’t alive then, they could not communicate how charming life was at the time.

The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is the symbolic catastrophe that heralded the end of the era. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would perhaps remember the opening scene, which depicts the newspaper announcing it with a screaming headline.

The great masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932), describes the whole world around World War I as a nightmarish battlefield of previously unseen scope. Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand, travels the world, from battles in Europe to Africa, then to New York and Detroit’s Ford assembly line before returning to France, finding that the nightmare is global and inescapable.

Céline died within 24 hours of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is famous for the quote from The Sun Also Rises (set in the 1920s), “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

The question is how could we ever explain complete evaporation of the sweetness of life and transformation into such a nightmare, culminating into the world of today.

Lastly, think of the point made in Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, how Hitler fit into this nightmarization of the world. Haffner writes:

It is impossible for a serious historian to maintain that without Hitler world history in the twentieth century would have taken the course it has taken. It is by no means certain that without Hitler a second world war would even have taken place; it is quite certain that if it had taken place it would have taken a different course — possibly even with different alliances, fronts and outcomes. Today’s world, whether we like it or not, is the work of Hitler. Without Hitler there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; without Hitler there would be no Americans and no Russians in Berlin; without Hitler there would be no Israel; without Hitler there would be no de-colonization, at least not such a rapid one; there would be no Asian, Arab or Black African emancipation, and no diminution of European preeminence. Or, more accurately, there would be none of this without Hitler’s mistakes. He certainly did not want any of it.

(The Meaning of Hitler, Harvard University Press, 1979, page 100)

No-one has yet captured how the nightmarish feeling of 2025 is itself downstream from the preceding era.

Economics-Watching: Kuwait’s Banking Sector Posts Solid Credit Growth in October

[from NBK Group’s Economic Research Department, 21 November, 2024]

Kuwait: Solid credit growth in October driven by household credit. Domestic credit increased by a solid 0.4% in October, driving up YTD growth to 2.9% (3.2% y/y). The recovery in household credit continued, with growth in October at a solid 0.5%, resulting in a YTD increase of 2.4%. While y/y growth in household credit remains a limited 2.3%, annualized growth over the past four months is a stronger 4.7%. Business credit inched up by 0.2% in October, pushing YTD growth to 3.6% (2.9% y/y). Industry and trade drove business credit growth in October while construction and trade are the fastest growing YTD at 17% and 8%, respectively. In contrast, the oil/gas sector continued its downtrend, deepening the YTD decrease to 13%. Excluding the oil/gas sector, growth in business credit would increase to a relatively good 5% YTD. Looking ahead, the last couple of months of the year (especially December) are usually the weakest for business credit, likely due to increased repayments and write-offs, but it will not be surprising if the recovery in household credit is generally sustained, especially given the commencement of the interest rate-cutting cycle. Meanwhile, driven by a plunge in the volatile public-institution deposits, resident deposits decreased in October, resulting in YTD growth of 2.4% (4.2% y/y). Private-sector deposits inched up in October driving up YTD growth to 4.5% compared with 10% for government deposits while public-institution deposits are a big drag (-14%). Within private-sector KD deposits, CASA showed further signs of stabilization as there was no decrease for the third straight month while the YTD drawdown is a limited 1%.

Chart 1: Kuwait credit growth

(% y/y)

Chart 2: UK inflation

(%)

Egypt: IMF concludes mission for fourth review, sees external risks. The IMF concluded its visit to Egypt after spending close to 2 weeks, holding several in-person meetings with the Egyptian authorities, private sector, and other stakeholders. The IMF released a statement mentioning that the current ongoing geopolitical tensions in the region in addition to an increasing number of refugees have affected the external sector (Suez Canal receipts down by 70%) and put severe pressure on the fiscal front. The Fund acknowledged the Central Bank of Egypt’s commitment to unify the exchange rate, maintain the flexible exchange rate regime, and keep inflation on a firm downward trend over the medium term by substantially tightening monetary policy. It also highlighted that continued policy discipline was also a key to containing fiscal risks, especially those related to the energy sector. The Fund, as always, re-iterated the need for promoting the private sector mainly through an enhanced tax system and accelerating divestment plans of the state firms. Finally, it also said that the discussions would continue over the coming days to finalize the agreement on the remaining policies and reform plans. However, the release did not provide any clear hints about the conclusion on the government’s earlier request to push the timeline of some of the subsidy moves.

Oman: IMF completes article IV with a strong outlook for the economy in 2025. Oman’s economy continued to expand with growth reaching 1.9% in the first half of 2024 (versus 1.2% in 2023), despite being weighed down by OPEC+ mandated oil production cuts as non-oil GDP grew a stronger 3.8% y/y in H1 (versus 1.8% in 2023). The fiscal and current account balances remain in a comfortable situation evident by a decline in public sector debt and the recent rating upgrade to investment grade. The Fund expects Oman’s economic growth to see a strong rebound in 2025, supported by higher oil production. It also believes that fiscal and current account balances will remain in surplus but at lower levels. Key risks to the outlook stem from oil price volatility and intensifying geopolitical tensions. The IMF also mentioned that further efforts are needed to raise nonhydrocarbon revenues through more tax policy measures and the phasing out of untargeted subsidies which should help in freeing up resources to finance growth under the government’s diversification agenda.

UK: Inflation rises more than forecast, reinforcing BoE’s caution on rate cuts. UK CPI inflation increased to 2.3% y/y in October from 1.7% the previous month, slightly above the market and the Bank of England’s forecast of 2.2%. On a monthly basis too, inflation rose to 0.6%, a seven-month high, from September’s no change. The steep rise was mainly driven by an almost 10% rise in the household energy price cap effective from October. Core inflation also accelerated to 3.3% y/y (0.4% m/m) from 3.2% (0.1% m/m). While goods prices continued to fall (-0.3% y/y), service prices rose at a faster rate of 5% from 4.9%. Recently, the Bank of England had cautioned about inflation quickening next year (projecting a peak rate of 2.8% in Q3 2025), citing the impact of higher insurance contributions and rising minimum wages as outlined in the latest government budget. Therefore, with inflation rising above forecast, the bank will likely slow the pace of monetary easing after delivering two interest rate cuts of 25 bps earlier, with markets now seeing only two additional cuts by the end of 2025.

Eurozone: ECB warns of fiscal and growth risks in its latest Financial Stability Review [archived PDF]. In its most recent Financial Stability Review (November) [archived PDF], the European Central Bank warned that elevated debt and fiscal deficit levels and anemic long-term growth could expose sovereign debt vulnerabilities in the region, stoking concerns of a repeat of the 2011 sovereign debt crisis. Maturing debt being rolled over at much higher borrowing rates raising debt service costs poses risks to countries with little fiscal space and leaves certain governments exposed to market fluctuations. The bank also emphasized the risks of high equity valuations, low liquidity and a greater concentration of exposure among non-banks. Moreover, it sees current geopolitical uncertainties and the possibility of more trade tensions as heightening risks. The Eurozone’s current government debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 88%, but the underlying data suggest a much more precarious situation with Greece, Italy, and France’s ratios at 164%, 137% and 112%. Recently, concerns about France’s high fiscal deficit (around 5.9% of GDP) and elevated debt levels saw yields on the country’s bonds rise steeply, widening the spread gap with German bonds to the highest level in over a decade.

Stock markets	Index	Daily Change (%)	YTD Change (%)
Regional
Abu Dhabi (ADI)	9,405	-0.23	-1.80
Bahrain (ASI)	2,043	-0.37	3.62
Dubai (DFMGI)	4,761	0.61	17.26
Egypt (EGX 30)	30,588	-0.33	23.18
GCC (S&P GCC 40)	709	0.09	-0.52
Kuwait (All Share)	7,353	-0.08	7.86
KSA (TASI)	11,868	-0.07	-0.83
Oman (MSM 30)	4,609	0.00	2.10
Qatar (QE Index)	10,438	0.12	-3.62
International
CSI 300	3,986	0.22	16.17
DAX	19,005	-0.29	13.45
DJIA	43,408	0.32	15.17
Eurostoxx 50	4,730	-0.45	4.60
FTSE 100	8,085	-0.17	4.55
Nikkei 225	38,352	-0.16	14.61
S&P 500	5,917	0.00	24.05

3m interbank rates	%	Daily Change (bps)	YTD Change (bps)
Bahrain	5.86	-1.29	-66.34
Kuwait	3.94	0.00	-37.50
Qatar	6.00	0.00	-25.00
UAE	4.43	3.81	-89.96
Saudi	5.50	-4.75	-73.14
SOFR	4.52	-0.09	-81.13

Bond yields	%	Daily Change (bps)	YTD Change (bps)
Regional
Abu Dhabi 2027	4.66	5.00	33.9
Oman 2027	5.49	6.00	33.0
Qatar 2026	4.68	6.00	16.1
Kuwait 2027	4.69	3.00	35.0
Saudi 2028	4.96	1.00	43.9
International 10-year
US Treasury	4.41	1.77	55.3
German Bund	2.34	0.35	31.2
UK Gilt	4.47	2.60	93.0
Japanese Gov’t Bond	1.07	1.0	45.4

Exchange rates	Rate	Daily Change (%)	YTD Change (%)
KWD per USD	0.31	0.04	-0.05
KWD per EUR	0.32	-0.46	-1.98
USD per EUR	1.05	-0.49	-4.47
JPY per USD	155.43	0.50	10.19
USD per GBP	1.27	-0.25	-0.62
EGP per USD	49.67	0.34	61.00

Commodities	$/unit	Daily Change (%)	YTD Change (%)
Brent crude	72.81	-0.68	-5.49
KEC	73.78	0.74	-7.26
WTI	68.87	-0.75	-3.88
Gold	2,648.2	0.80	28.40

Disclaimer: While every care has been taken in preparing this publication, National Bank of Kuwait accepts no liability whatsoever for any direct or consequential losses arising from its use. Daily Economic Update is distributed on a complimentary and discretionary basis to NBK clients and associates. This report and previous issues can be found in the “News & Insight / Economic Reports” section of the National Bank of Kuwait’s web site. Please visit their web site, nbk.com, for other bank publications.

World-Watching: German Industry: Structural Change Underway

[from Deutsche Bank Research]

Production in major industrial sectors in Germany has developed very differently in recent years under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and energy price shock. For example, manufacturing in electrical engineering rose by 18% compared with the start of 2015. In the chemical industry, there has been a 20% decline over the same period. The differences are not only cyclical, but also structural. In the future, it will be more important to distinguish between Germany as an industrial location and the German industry.

Read the Germany blog [archived PDF].

Movies and Chemistry: Keeping the Enchantment of Education

Several movies give you an “enchanting” back door or window into chemistry so that you can “beat” the tediousness of regular education and come into the field and its topics via these movies:

I.

The Man in the White Suit is a 1951 British comedy classic with Alec Guinness as a genius research chemist. He fiddles with his flasks and polymer and textile chemistry experiments until he invents a fabric that shows no wear and tear “forever.” This would seem like a great boon to humanity in its clothing needs but the chemist (“Sidney Stratton”) finds that both labor and management reject his discovery violently as it threatens jobs and profits. Textile or fabric polymer chemistry is at the heart of the plot.

Cry Terror! is a taut 1958 crime thriller movie with James Mason and Rod Steiger. The plot involves the terrorist threat of exploding a domestic airliner with a hidden RDX cache (a TNT successor) unless the demanded payment is made.

RDX was used by both sides in World War II. The U.S. produced about 15,000 long tons per month during WWII and Germany about 7,000 long tons per month. RDX had the major advantages of possessing greater explosive force than TNT, used in World War I and requiring no additional raw materials for its manufacture.

Semtex is a general-purpose plastic explosive containing RDX and PETN. It is used in commercial blasting, demolition, and in certain military applications.

A Semtex bomb was used in the Pan Am Flight 103 (known also as the Lockerbie) bombing in 1988. A belt laden with 700 g (1.5 lb) of RDX explosives tucked under the dress of the assassin was used in the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The 1993 Bombay bombings used RDX placed into several vehicles as bombs. RDX was the main component used for the 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the Jaipur bombings in 2008. It also is believed to be the explosive used in the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings.

Traces of RDX were found on pieces of wreckage from 1999 Russian apartment bombings and 2004 Russian aircraft bombings. Further reports on the bombs used in the 1999 apartment bombings indicated that while RDX was not a part of the main charge, each bomb contained plastic explosive used as a booster charge.

Ahmed Ressam, the al-Qaeda Millennium Bomber, used a small quantity of RDX as one of the components in the bomb that he prepared to detonate in Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999-2000; the bomb could have produced a blast forty times greater than that of a devastating car bomb.

In July 2012, the Kenyan government arrested two Iranian nationals and charged them with illegal possession of 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of RDX. According to the Kenyan Police, the Iranians planned to use the RDX for “attacks on Israeli, U.S., UK and Saudi Arabian targets.”

RDX was used in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri on February 14, 2005.

In the 2019 Pulwama attack in India, 250 kg of high-grade RDX was used by Jaish-e-Mohammed. The attack resulted in the deaths of 44 Central Reserve Police Force personnel as well as the attacker.

Semtex was developed and manufactured in Czechoslovakia, originally under the name B 1 and then under the “Semtex” designation since 1964, labeled as SEMTEX 1A, since 1967 as SEMTEX H, and since 1987 as SEMTEX 10. Originally developed for Czechoslovak military use and export, Semtex eventually became popular with paramilitary groups and rebels or terrorists because prior to 2000 it was extremely difficult to detect, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 103.

The Russian apartment bombings were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1,000, and spreading fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Invasion of Dagestan, triggered the Second Chechen War. The handling of the crisis by Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency within a few months.

The blasts hit Buynaksk on 4 September and in Moscow on 9 and 13 September. On 13 September, Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov made an announcement in the Duma about receiving a report that another bombing had just happened in the city of Volgodonsk. A bombing did indeed happen in Volgodonsk, but only three days later, on 16 September. Chechen militants were blamed for the bombings, but denied responsibility, along with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.

A suspicious device resembling those used in the bombings was found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan on 22 September. On 23 September, Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the inhabitants of Ryazan and ordered the air bombing of Grozny, which marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War. Three FSB agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police, with the devices containing a sugar-like substance resembling RDX.

II.

The movie Khartoum (1966) has General Charles Gordon traveling to Sudan in 1884 to quell the “mad mullah” the Mahdi. (Osama bin Laden of his day).
At the train station where General Gordon starts his trip, there’s a railway ad sign that promotes the use of “Wright’s Coal Tar Soap.”

This gives us a sign of the rise of the modern chemical industry.

III.

Think of “Sherlock Holmes” in terms of all the movies and TV series or the original stories and books:

Holmes has to explain to Watson how he survived the assassination attempt on him by Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime” who threw him off the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes explains that he faked Moriarty out and clung to a bush or something and was (obviously) not killed.

Holmes tells Watson what he does when he returns to civilization and travels and studies for some three years:

“I then passed through Persia, looking in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”

The context implies the year 1894.

There is clear evidence that Mr. Holmes was deeply involved in the research of coal-tar derivatives as early as 1889 when the events of the Copper Beeches matter were transpiring.

We are told that on an evening in 1889, Mr. Holmes was seated in 221B Baker Street at the deal table loaded with retorts and test tubes. He was settling down to one of those all-night chemical researches in which he frequently indulged.

The research work was interrupted by a message of distress from Violet Hunter. Watson found that there was a train the next morning, and Holmes tells Watson:

“That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my analysis of the acetones as we may need to be at our best in the morning.”

It is clear that Holmes was engaged in coal-tar research long before his visit to Montpellier in the south of France.

The quotation from the Copper Beeches story refers to acetones, not to coal-tar derivatives.

“In the fractional distillation of coal-tar, the distillate separates into five distinct groups or layers, depending upon the stage of the process and the amount of heat applied. Category-one of the five includes benzene, toluene, xylenes and cumenes.

Acetones [dimethelketone-CH₃COCH₃] may be derived from the oxidation of cumene. And cumene [isopropylbenzene-C₆H₅C(CH₃)₂] is derived by distillation from the coal-tar naphtha fractions.”

Cumenes are derived from coal-tar, and acetones are derived from cumenes. Thus, a study of the acetones is, necessarily, research into coal-tar derivatives.

The rise of chemical engineering and organic chemistry are at the heart of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Thus we can “climb” into chemistry via these books and movies and keep a feeling of enchantment as a kind of educational “shoehorn.”