Tag: United States

Movies as a Part of Remedial Education

It’s almost “un-American” to be honest about the nightmare side of life when you cannot “walk on the sunny side of the street” and operate under all those facile Americanisms about “I’ve got the world on a string…” in all the songs and movie lines.

Film noir is supposed to be an antidote to this “false sunniness” and there’s one classic example that exemplifies this undiscussable nightmare side of life, namely, Detour (1945), directed by Edgar Ulmer.

Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish–Moravian, Austrian–American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet “The King of PRC,” due to his extremely prolific output on the said Poverty Row studio.

Wikipedia

As a refugee/expat, he understood that life isn’t always “a bowl of cherries” and set out to show this in his films.

In this underrated Ulmer masterpiece, Tom Neal plays a musician, Al Roberts, who gets into a labyrinthian mess via bad luck and some mindless impulsiveness combined. Detour is a kind of “road movie” in hell. With life and the world a kind of hellish school, the protagonist Al Roberts captures the enforced money-madness in everything:

“Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it.”

To this nightmarishness, there’s to be added the irrationality of fate or destiny or karma or luck:

“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

He adds:

“But one thing I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

[as narrator] “Until then I had done things my way, but from then on something stepped in and shunted me off to a different destination than the one I’d picked for myself.”

Vera comments:

“Life’s like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it’s the ninth inning.”

Hitchhiking, say, is often hellish and not romantic and usually not a Jack Kerouac On the Road poetic or rhapsodic adventure at all, as Al Roberts explains:

“Ever done any hitchhiking? It’s not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it’s an education, and how you get to meet a lot of people, and all that. But me, from now on I’ll take my education in college, or in PS-62, or I’ll send $1.98 in stamps for ten easy lessons.”

Nightclubs too are not always heavenly escapes:

[voiceover] “It wasn’t much of a club, really. You know the kind. A joint where you could have a sandwich and a few drinks and run interference for your girl on the dance floor.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

Women might not be the salvation you were told to expect in songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.

“Vera was just as rotten in the morning as she’d been the night before.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

There’s a genre of American films called “lowlife stories” such as The Hustler with Paul Newman.

Ulmer’s Detour is not exactly a “lowlife movie” but rather an undiscussed dark side to life movie, nor is it “stylishly pessimistic” (like the French “poetical pessimism” movies) but rather a truth-telling exercise that shows stability and permanence and happiness as “living” on thin ice. American “cock-eyed optimism” isn’t always appropriate.

In that sense, Detour is a part of remedial education.

“De-Globalization?”

The classic study of the “swirl of processes and events” that ended previous globalization episodes is the theme of Princeton Professor Harold James’ 2002 book, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression.

“Globalization” is here. Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change worldwide, the process seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.

James examines one of the great historical nightmares of the twentieth century: the collapse of globalism in the Great Depression. Analyzing this collapse in terms of three main components of global economics—capital flows, trade and international migration—James argues that it was not simply a consequence of the strains of World War I, but resulted from the interplay of resentments against all these elements of mobility, as well as from the policies and institutions designed to assuage the threats of globalism.

Could it happen again? There are significant parallels today: highly integrated systems are inherently vulnerable to collapse, and world financial markets are vulnerable and unstable.

While James does not foresee another Great Depression, his book provides a cautionary tale in which institutions meant to save the world from the consequences of globalization—think WTO and IMF, in our own time—ended by destroying both prosperity and peace.

Legitimate fears about “globalization reversal” have been well put by Zakaria:

Davos, Switzerland —

President Trump’s speech here at the World Economic Forum went over relatively well. That’s partly because Davos is a conclave of business executives, and they like Trump’s pro-business message. But mostly, the president’s reception was a testament to the fact that he and what he represents are no longer unusual or exceptional. Look around the world and you will see: Trump and Trumpism have become normalized.

Davos was once the place where countries clamored to demonstrate their commitment to opening up their economies and societies. After all, these forces were producing global growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Every year, a different nation would become the star of the forum, usually with a celebrated finance minister who was seen as the architect of a boom. The United States was the most energetic promoter of these twin ideas of economic openness and political freedom.

Today, Davos feels very different. Despite the fact that, throughout the world, growth remains solid and countries are moving ahead, the tenor of the times has changed. Where globalization was once the main topic, today it is the populist backlash to it. Where once there was a firm conviction about the way of the future, today there is uncertainty and unease.

This is not simply atmospherics and rhetoric. Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management points out that since 2008, we have entered a phase of “deglobalization.” Global trade, which rose almost uninterruptedly since the 1970s, has stagnated, while capital flows have fallen. Net migration flows from poor countries to rich ones have also dropped. In 2018, net migration to the United States hit its lowest point in a decade.

The shift in approach can best be seen in the case of India. In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to Davos to decry the fact that “many countries are becoming inward focused and globalization is shrinking.” Since then, his government has increased tariffs on hundreds of items and taken steps to shield India’s farmers, shopkeepers, digital companies and many others from the dangers of international competition. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative recently called out India for having the highest tariffs of any major economy in the world.

Indian officials used to aggressively court foreign investment, which was much needed to spur growth. Last week, with India’s economy slowing badly, Jeff Bezos announced a $1 billion investment in the country. (Bezos owns The Post.) But the minister of commerce and industry scoffed at the move, saying Amazon wasn’t “doing a great favor to India” and besides was probably engaging in anti-competitive, “predatory” practices. Often, protectionist policies help favored local producers. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad recently criticized some of Modi’s policies toward Muslims. The Indian government effectively cut off imports of Malaysian palm oil. In a familiar pattern, one of the chief beneficiaries was a local billionaire long associated with Modi.

The Economist notes that Europe, once one of the chief motors for openness in economics and politics, is also rediscovering state intervention to prop up domestic industries. And if you think the Internet is exempt from these tendencies, think again. The European Center for International Political Economy tracks the number of protectionist measures put in place to “localize” the digital economy in 64 countries. It has been surging for years, especially since 2008.

It’s important not to exaggerate the backlash to globalization.

As a 2019 report by DHL demonstrates, globalization is still strong and, by some measures, continues to expand. People still want to trade, travel and transact across the world. But in government policy, where economic logic once trumped politics, today it is often the reverse. Economist Nouriel Roubini argues that the cumulative result of all these measures — protecting local industries, subsidizing national champions, restricting immigration — is to sap growth. “It means slower growth, fewer jobs, less efficient economies,” he told me recently. We’ve seen it happen many times in the past, not least in India, which suffered decades of stagnation as a result of protectionist policies, and we will see the impact in years to come.

Nevertheless, today, nationalism and protectionism prevail.

This phase of deglobalization is being steered from the top. The world’s leading nations are, as always, the agenda-setters. The example of China, which has shielded some of its markets and still grown rapidly, has made a deep impression on much of the world. Probably deeper still is the example of the planet’s greatest champion of liberty and openness, the United States, which now has a president who calls for managed trade, more limited immigration and protectionist measures. At Davos, Trump invited every nation to follow his example. More and more are complying.

“The world is de-globalizing. Trump set the example.” The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria

Students should sense that while history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes and this is a major danger. It also might imply that coping with climate change will be all the harder because American-led unilateralism everywhere would mean world policy paralysis.

Looking Around Is Educational

Julian Fellowes (the writer who gave us Downton Abbey) followed up with a 2018 movie called The Chaperone about a girl named Louise Brooks who became a global superstar, especially in Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany:

Louise Brooks is a rebellious 15-year-old schoolgirl who dreams of fame and fortune in the early 1920s. She soon gets her chance when she travels to New York to study with a leading dance troupe for the summer—accompanied by a watchful chaperone.

Louise Brooks starts as a would-be dancer, “inducted” into an avant-garde dance school. This is the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts (founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California), which helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.

Upon Louise’s “induction” into the school, one of the founders says to the girls, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you.”

The listener wonders: What could this possibly mean?

The answer is this: In one sense you have a body, but in another, you are your body. The first body is the “thing” you weigh on the bathroom scale. This is your interaction with gravity, as measured in conventions like pounds. On the other hand, you are also “somebody” (i.e., some body). To have and to be are entwined here. In philosophy, say in the writings of Gabriel Marcel during the fifties, the body you weigh is “corporeal” and the body you are is “existential.”

Very roughly, the first body is objectively weighed, the second subjectively sensed as your experience of yourself.

Physics and Dance (by Emily Coates and Sarah Demers), a recent book from Yale University Press, gives you the dancing body as a biomechanical problem. Dancing itself is the expression through biomechanics and movement based on physics, but apart from this, it’s also an art form.

The student will see that a moment in a movie—in this case The Chaperone—can open a door to a whole set of domains, realms and phenomena. Education at its best comes from learning how to go from such instantaneous accidents on the street or screen to a larger canvas.

Thus the declaration, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you” explains that biomechanics is an infrastructure, while the artistry of the dance is an art form (i.e., a kind of “communicative action,” to use a Habermas phrase).

Science-Watching: New Insights into Polyamorphism Could Influence How Drugs Are Formulated

[from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World, by Patrick de Jongh]

Results from a study combining experiments and simulations could overturn the assumption that amorphous forms of the same compound have the same molecular arrangement. The team behind the work claims to have prepared three amorphous forms of the diuretic drug hydrochlorothiazide and determined that they have distinct properties and distinct types of disorder. ‘If polyamorphism is proved in the future to be a universal—or at least not a very rare—phenomenon, then the pharmaceutical industry will need to make screens for polyamorphism and this will also be an opportunity for patenting,’ comments Inês Martins, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who led the work with Thomas Rades.

Crystalline active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) often suffer from poor solubility. A common strategy to circumvent this problem is converting APIs into their amorphous form. This has been demonstrated for various APIs, including hydrochlorothiazide. However, the physical properties of polyamorphs are dependent on how they were prepared. Given there are no straightforward techniques to study how molecules interact and organise themselves in amorphous materials, the area is poorly understood.

Nevertheless, a team surrounding Rades and Martins set out to identify how amorphous forms of the same API, presenting different physicochemical properties, differ from each other. They decided to study hydrochlorothiazide as it was previously shown to have polyamorphs with glass transition temperatures above room temperature, which facilitates the preparation, isolation and analysis of its different polyamorphs. Starting from crystalline hydrochlorothiazide, they produced three polyamorphs: polyamorph I via spray-drying, polyamorph II via quench-cooling and polyamorph III by ball-milling. Thermal analysis revealed a significantly lower glass-transition temperature for polyamorph I (88.7°C), whereas polyamorphs II and III had similar glass-transition temperatures (117.5°C and 119.7°C, respectively). The polyamorphs also demonstrated very different shelf-life stabilities against crystallisation.

Subsequently, they studied polyamorphic interconversions by submitting the polyamorphs to the preparation conditions used for other polyamorphs. For example, polyamorph I (obtained by spray-drying) was subjected to quench–cooling or ball-milling. Identifying temperature as a critical parameter, they observed that polyamorph II could be obtained from polyamorphs I and III, but the reverse pathway was not possible. Meanwhile, they observed polyamorph I and polyamorph III interconvert. These results demonstrate polyamorph II is the most stable amorphous form.

Source: © Thomas Rades/University of Copenhagen
Researchers used a variety of techniques to elucidate the different polyamorphs that can be produced from crystalline hydrochlorothiazide and the polyamorphic interconversions that occur when a specific amorphous form is submitted to temperature or milling treatments

‘The problem out of the gate with polyamorphism as a concept is how to tell the difference between a well-defined metastable amorphous structure and an unrelaxed one that simply results from kinetically trapped defects introduced during processing. This is hard to define since the amorphous structure is statistical in any case,’ comments Simon Billinge, who studies the structure of disordered materials at Columbia University in the US. ‘They process the samples very differently. We know—from our own work—that this results in amorphous phases with very different stabilities against recrystallisation, for example, but is this polyamorphism? On the other hand, they find that the pair distribution functions of each of their “forms” are identical. There is no experimental evidence for a distinct structure. Taken together, the results do little to advance my understanding of polyamorphism.’

Distinct dihedral angle distributions

To get further information on how the polyamorphs are different on a molecular level, Martins and Rades turned to molecular dynamics simulations, comparing the dihedral angles around the sulfonamide groups in polyamorphs I and II. ‘Polyamorph I, which has a large number of the molecules with a dihedral angle similar to the one reported for crystalline hydrochlorothiazide, has a lower physical stability and faster structural relaxation time than polyamorph II, which has a broader dihedral angle distribution. Our findings indicate that a broader dihedral angle distribution seems to contribute to a better physical stability and slower structural relaxation,’ says Martins. They therefore hypothesise that having half the molecules with a conformation closer to crystalline hydrochlorothiazide and half of the molecules with a different conformation could help in establishing specific molecular arrangements that would favour the stability of the amorphous form.

The team also says the simulations corroborated its experimental results that polyamorph I can transform into polyamorph II, while the opposite conversion did not take place.

However, Billinge does not believe the computational studies provide conclusive evidence: ‘There is a detailed molecular dynamics analysis where different annealing conditions in the simulations give some slightly different statistics on the molecular conformations, but despite their claim, the resulting computed pair distribution functions do not look like the measured ones, so we have no way of knowing if the molecular dynamics is capturing what is happening in the real material. For amorphous materials, it is very difficult to equilibrate them in a molecular dynamics simulation, so you will be looking at artefacts of how the ensemble was created. Any claims to have found polyamorphism from molecular dynamics simulations by themselves are therefore questionable.’

Rades says their results can change the field of pharmaceutics: ‘We expect that other drug molecules may exhibit polyamorphism and the question would be which structural parameters would be different. In the case of hydrochlorothiazide, the dihedral angle distribution was found to be a parameter contributing for the formation of different polyamorphs. In other drugs, maybe the dihedral angle distribution (molecular conformations) could be different as well, but also maybe the type of intermolecular interactions can play a more important role in the formation of polyamorphs.’

The team now hope the pharmaceutical industry will look at amorphous systems differently and not assume that all amorphous forms of the same compound are the same. ‘Knowing this and considering that a certain polyamorph will have better physical stability, solubility or dissolution properties than another polyamorph, this will be an opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry to prepare tablets of a drug where the dose could be lower than tablets containing the crystalline form,’ concludes Rades.

Economics-Watching: Money Transmitter Regulation: Key to Payments Modernization

[from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, by Claire Greene, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum]

In October, I wrote about the potential for standards to make business-to-business payments more efficient. Today, let’s talk about standards again, this time for money transfer businesses and the state regulations covering them.

We all know these businesses: Venmo, Western Union, MoneyGram, PayPal, CashApp. The roster seemingly grows by the day. Many crypto firms also are registered money transfer businesses. Money transfer businesses typically are nationwide and global in scope. Nevertheless, these multi-state and multi-national businesses are regulated under the separate licensing rules of individual states and US territories. Federal laws, including the Bank Secrecy Act and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, also apply to money transfer businesses.

For new and established money transfer businesses and for state regulators, the hodgepodge of state regulations creates headaches. To do business everywhere in the United States, money transfer businesses must register separately in each state and US territory and meet license requirements that can vary from state to state. They can face multiple state examinations, also with different requirements, simultaneously (and annually). During examinations, regulators review operations, financial condition, management, and compliance with anti-money laundering laws.

Fortunately, many states have acted to address this confusing and inefficient situation by adopting the Model Money Transmission Modernization Act (MTMA) [archived PDF], sample legislation developed by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors to establish nationwide standards and requirements for licensed money transmitters. Fourteen states have adopted some version of the MTMA: Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. In my home state of Massachusetts, the legislature’s Joint Committee on Financial Services heard testimony on a version of this bill just last month. For traditional money transmitters and new fintech entrants, the MTMA aims to reduce the substantive and technical differences among the various state laws and regulations. This kind of change has the potential to reduce compliance burdens, encourage innovation, and remove barriers to entry for new market participants.

The MTMA is important given the prodigious growth in person-to-person, or P2P, payments via apps. Among all US consumers, half of P2P payments were sent using noncash methods in 2022, up from less than 30 percent in 2020 (see the chart). From Massachusetts alone, money transmitters sent $31 billion in 2022, according to the state’s Division of Banks.

Half of P2P payments were made electronically in 2022.

The MTMA also has the potential to create efficiencies for state supervisors. For example, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) has facilitated a collaborative exam program for nationwide payments and cryptocurrency firms to undergo one exam, each facilitated by one state overseeing a group of examiners sourced from across the country. According to the CSBS, transmitters in more than 40 states that have laws addressing core precepts can benefit from the streamlined exams.

The MTMA is another example showing that standards create efficiencies that are good for businesses, good for regulators and, by extension, good for consumers.

Economics-Watching: Global Data Tracks Decade-Long Decline in Check Payments

[by Claire Greene, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta]

From around the world, we have more evidence that people are shifting from checks to other means of non-cash payments. Using data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), my Atlanta Fed colleagues Antar Diallo and Oz Shy found that from 2012 to 2021, in all 20 countries they examined, the number of checks declined as the number of cashless payments increased. Since checks are cashless payment instruments, it’s notable that the total of cashless payments increased even as a component of this calculation declined.

Among the 20 countries that reported the number and value of these payments to the BIS, the United States had by far the highest per capita use of checks per year in 2021: 30 checks. Only six countries reported more than two per capita (chart below), another 12 between zero and two. Belgium and South Africa reported zero.

Yikes, you say, 30 checks per person per year in 2021! How is that possible? Most checks in the United States—about two-thirds—are estimated to be written by businesses, according to the Atlanta Fed’s Check Sample Survey. That would put the average number of checks that U.S. consumers write at about 10 per year on average, which is in line with the findings of the 2021 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice.

Given the high per capita use in the United States, it makes sense that our year-over-year decline from 2012 has been slower than that for other countries. The per-year decline in the number of U.S. checks from 2012 to 2021 was slower than the decline for all the other high-use countries listed in the chart. The United States was down 6.7 percent per year from 2012 to 2021, compared to down 8.8 percent per year for Canada at the slow end and down 17.4 percent per year for Austria at the quick end.

No way around it: we love our checks, and our response to innovation has been tepid compared to that of other countries.

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.”

Zheng Yongnian (郑永年) on How to Address Western Public Opinion on China: Facts, Science and Reason

[from Pekingology at the Center for China and Globalization (CCG)]

“Be open, open, and more open,” especially to businesses, investors, media, universities, and research institutions. And tit-for-tat doesn’t work, the professor says.

by Zichen Wang, Shuyuan Han, and Li Huiyan

Professor Zheng Yongnian (郑永年), the Founding Director of the Institute for International Affairs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, on January 28 published an article on how China should address Western public opinion on China. His advice is in the last part of the article, and below is a translation.

(Emphasis by Pekingnology.)

First, we need to understand how such narratives are formed. Historically, China held a bias due to its self-isolation and limited knowledge of the West. Despite losing the two Opium Wars, Chinese intellectuals at that time still saw Westerners as uncivilized. It was not until China was defeated by Japan, a neighboring country once considered as China’s student, that they realized their ignorance and a need for reform. Before China’s Reform and Opening up, Chinese people barely knew anything about the West. They always assumed Westerners were in deep distress, repeating the same lack of understanding of the West.

Similarly, the West’s uncertainty and fear towards China’s rise stem from a lack of understanding and even fear of the country, and their ingrained ideology would lead to misconceptions.

China is the world’s second-largest economy. The externalities and influence of its economy on the West are obvious. Upon joining the WTO, some Chinese people also felt unsettled by the externalities of the West. Some said, “the wolf is coming.” Now it is the West that is experiencing such worries.

It is crucial to recognize the significant impact of the Western hypocritical narratives against China, even if they are based on ideology rather than facts. We must also acknowledge that ideology-based public opinion from the West can exert a powerful influence on their policies toward China.

Historically, the West tended to demonize others while presenting themselves as morally superior, which enabled them to apply Social Darwinism to international politics easily and thus legitimizing conflicts and even wars with other nations. Given the Soviet Union’s failure in the ideological arena during the Cold War, we should by no means ignore any ideology-based public opinion toward China from the West.

Second, to make rational responses to the Western ideology-based criticisms, we should draw lessons from the history of the world economy, such as the lessons of the Soviet Union, as well as our practices, such as the rhetorical battle with the West in the past few years. Coming up with an externally-facing public opinion based on a different ideology is not the most effective in addressing public opinion attacks based on an ideology. Empirically, tit-for-tat is ineffective and can worsen the situation. Again, the failure of the Soviet Union is a prime example, as its battle with a Western ideology failed. When faced with China-demonizing based on ideology from the West, we need to do the simplest thing, namely resorting to facts, science, and reason.

Third, and most importantly, China needs to prioritize its sustainable development, which ultimately benefits the country itself. It is important to recognize that the foundation of the government’s governance lies in its citizens, not Western praise. The support from its people is crucial for both the nation’s longevity and stability., China’s sustainable development also benefits the world economy by boosting its growth. As mentioned above, China has been the largest contributor to the growth of the world economy since it joined the WTO.

It is crucial to prioritize the building of a knowledge system based on China’s practical experiences. Regarding global soft power, we need a knowledge system based on our experiences rather than a certain ideology. While there has been a proposal for an autonomous knowledge system, continuous effort is still required.

Fourth, given the substantial externalities of our economy, we must further communicate and coordinate with other countries on economic policies, regardless of their respective sizes. Our duty is to fulfill the responsibility as a major player in the international community, which also benefits China.

After the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, China promised not to devalue its currency, and that commitment became an international public good in Asia. Similarly, after the global financial crisis from 2007 to 2008, China made similar contributions. As China re-opens its economy after the pandemic, it is important not only to take note of the hypocritical comments from certain quarters in the Western world but also to recognize the positive evaluations and high expectations from many international organizations.

Fifth, we must be open, open, and more open. Despite China’s efforts, there remains a persistent ideological camp in the West that views China through an ideological lens, a situation made worse by the past three years of the pandemic. The pandemic was so severe that it hindered travel across borders; as a result, some Western media and scholars tend to assess China through ideology since they couldn’t come here to see the facts with their own eyes.

The assessment of China through a uniform ideological lens appears to have strengthened the original Western ideological camp. However, the United States and the West have more than one ideology, and not all people believe in the prevailing ideology in the public opinion sphere. China’s openness provides a “seeing is believing” opportunity for different groups in the West. China should increase its openness to Western groups, including businesses, investors, media, universities, and research institutions. The changes in their understanding could render those ideological-based public opinions less effective.

Facing the Global South: Building a New International System by Yang Ping

“If you raise [the development of the BRI] to the strategic level, there are countries where … you will have to lose money and there are countries where you will be free to make money.”

by Thomas des Garets Geddes, Sinification

Dear Everyone,

How to respond to the growing political divide between China and the West marked by partial decoupling, security alliances, and the risk of sanctions, amongst other things, continues to be a major topic of discussion among China’s intellectual elite. As already evidenced in previous editions of this newsletter, opinions vary considerably. Those presented here so far have ranged from Da Wei (达巍) stressing the importance of preserving if not strengthening ties with the West and Shen Wei (沈伟) arguing in favor of reforming the WTO and building up a network of free trade agreements to Ye Hailin (叶海林) emphasizing the need for China to demonstrate its military might to demobilize U.S. allies and Lu Feng (路风) calling for self-reliance and greater assertiveness in the field of tech. A certain amount of overlap certainly exists among these perspectives but the differences are nonetheless striking.

Today’s edition of Sinification looks at a speech made last month by Yang Ping (杨平), head and editor-in-chief of the highly regarded Beijing Cultural Review (文化纵横, hereafter BCR). Yang is also director of the Longway Foundation (修远基金会) which publishes BCR. The foundation describes its publication as “the most influential magazine of intellectual thought and commentary in China” and sees itself as having a key role in helping shape the direction of intellectual debates in China (“议题的设置就是意识形态斗争成功的一半”). Indeed, BCR often republishes old articles at key junctures as so often highlighted by David Ownby’s wonderful Reading the China Dream.

The following are excerpts from an edited transcript of a speech by Yang made at an event hosted by Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, which was attended by China’s Vice-minister of foreign affairs Xie Feng (谢锋). In his speech, Yang advocates building a new international system led by countries in the Global South (which, of course, includes China) rather than the West. His ideas are not particularly novel but are nevertheless noteworthy in that they represent yet another viewpoint in the ongoing debate over how China should respond to the increasing tensions that characterize its relations with the U.S. and other Western countries. Next week, I will be sharing a somewhat longer piece that proposes a way of protecting China from the growing threat of Western sanctions.

Yang’s speech in a nutshell:

  • “Capitalist politics” are no longer in line with “capitalist economics.” The former now undermines globalization, while the latter supports it.
  • Sanctions, export controls, friend-shoring and alliance-building are damaging the world economy and further alienating China from the current U.S.-led international order.
  • China must respond to this growing trend by building a “new type of international system” with other countries in the Global South.
  • BRI projects should be increasingly focused on achieving this goal and thus allow more room for loss-making endeavors.

Capitalist politics ≠ Capitalist economics

“Since 2022 and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, our main focus and topic of discussion has been China’s construction of a new type of international system.

“The most important feature of today’s world is the beginning of a separation between capitalist politics and capitalist economics. The capitalist political order and the capitalist economic order do not support each other [any longer].

“We have witnessed two typical manifestations of the separation of politics and the economy and the impact of politics on the economy:

  1. The first is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and the West have reached unthinkable, abominable [令人发指] and unimaginable proportions. Under established international rules, it was understood that such sanctions could not possibly occur, but now they have. These include the fracturing of the financial system, the expropriation and seizure of Russian private assets and the freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves. These are all abominable and unimaginable forms of confrontation. At the same time, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has led to serious disruptions in global food and energy systems and supply chains, with massive food ‘shortages’ and soaring food prices, particularly in developing countries. Sanctions and political repression [政治打压] have severely disrupted the [world’s] economic order.
  2. The second is the conflict between the U.S. and China. Since the Trump era, the U.S. has been engaged in a trade war against China, mainly by raising tariffs. Basically, this was simply about balancing trade [with China] and used mainly economic means. But under Biden, it [has become] a war that mixes politics with economics. Biden’s strategy towards China can basically be summed up in just a few words: one, friend-shoring, [i.e.] only allowing friendly countries into [parts of] its supply chains; two, alliance politics, [i.e.] continuously forging an alliance system involving NATO, the European Union, Japan, AUKUS and the four Asia-Pacific countries [I assume he is referring to South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia taking part for the first time in a NATO summit last year] and constantly opposing China [不断应对中国]; three, its so-called ‘precision strikes’, [i.e.] its radical crackdown on China’s high tech [industry], especially our chip industry.”

China is being pushed out of the U.S.-led international system

“The information I have seen so far is that the number of Chinese companies included in the U.S.’s ‘entity list’ has risen from 132 under Trump to over 530 now. The scope of such point-to-point [点对点] precision strikes is constantly expanding. With such a political impact on the economy, we can feel the [world’s] economic order being disrupted across the board. The world is moving inexorably in the direction of decoupling. The phenomenon of politics affecting the economy and the capitalist political order no longer upholding the capitalist economic order are extremely striking.

“In such a context, the challenges now facing China are extremely serious and varied. We have the pressures of dealing both with containment in the Indo-Pacific and with the U.S.-led politics of alliances across the world. More importantly and fundamentally China faces the strategic task of building a new type of international system [新型国际体系] … The existing Western-dominated international system used to be one in which we tried hard to blend [so as] to become one with it. During this process, we [sought to] absorb the West’s advanced technologies and management [practices] and thus complete our mission of industrialisation and modernization.

“But once you enter the existing international system, he [who is already inside] does not want to play with you, and even wants to drive you back out. He wants to divide both supply chains and the economic system into two parts [搞成两套] and desperately wants to contain and suppress you. This is not something that can be determined by your own subjective preferences. He has made up his mind: you have already become his ‘fated opponent’ [命定的对手]. He has to suppress you and drive you out of the existing system.”

Building a new international system with the Global South

“It is at this point that China is faced with the task of constructing a new type of international system that is not dominated by the West. In today’s so-called strategic quadrangle consisting of the U.S., Europe, Russia and China, how to construct such an international system appears particularly difficult [逼庂 literally means ‘narrow’ or ‘cramped’ rather than ‘difficult’].

“But if we look a little further south, we will find a vast number of developing countries, the Third World and the countries of the global South. They should be our strategy’s depth [我们的战略纵深]. That is to say, [we should] build a new type of international relations and a new type of international system that has strategic depth and in which China and the countries of the global South are jointly integrated. [This] is, in my view, an important strategic task for China’s international relations in the coming decades.”

BRI projects: Strategy trumps profitability

“For China today, especially for businesses and governments at all levels [within China] that are currently working hard to develop BRI trade, there is a very important point to which they should be alerted or reminded about: the development of the BRI has to go beyond mere business, beyond the general export of [China’s excess] production capacity, beyond the partial thinking of industry and the partial thinking at the regional level, or the simple economic way of thinking of business. The development of the BRI should be considered at the strategic level. That is, it should be included into China’s strategy when thinking about Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Central Asia.

“If you raise [the development of the BRI] to the strategic level, there are countries where you won’t be able to make money and will have to lose money, and there are countries where you will be free to make money. You have to unite the two within your organic strategy.

“The strategic task of building a new type of international system is, in my view, a strategic proposition that Chinese think tanks and research institutes should pay very close attention to with regards to international relations.

“Time is limited today. I just wanted to make a start here. I hope to receive your corrections and criticisms. Thank you!”

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The recessive importance of the Global South was previously explored by Richard and his partner Larry, with input from Supratik Bose, many decades ago as shown here.