Summertime, and the livin' is bloody hard.

“Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” So observes Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, in William Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gentle punning (sun/ son), historical accuracy and careful literary analysis aside, the swan of Avon had it all wrong. Summer is not glorious and winter is not a time of discontent. It is precisely the other way round.

Winter is in fact a time of great contentment for me. Luxuriating in the autumnal hangover of crisp leaves, bracing winds and mist-infused mornings, winter represents the delighted apogee of my normally misanthropic, perennially confused, darkly comic bellendry. Who here has not felt some form of fraternal love for one’s fellow man as one stalks the streets for a spell of late-night shopping, safely bathed in the warm, embracing glow of Christmas lights? No, me neither. But I certainly feel good ambling amid the bustling hordes as they try to secure that half-price olisbos for aunt Karen. Winter has my birthday, a time of shared national celebration. Winter has Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah and Saturnalia. Winter has days off work because a thirty-year-old train carriage buckled and crumpled under the weight of a single snowflake. Winter has hysterical and often hilarious coverage of the snow, safely and easily ignored. Winter has real ale and mulled wine and mulled cider and good food. I’ll stop now, at the risk of coming across as John Major, all warm beer, cricket and heavy-breasted milkmaids cycling over cobblestones in the Cotswolds with a copy of the Daily Telegraph ensconced in their plump décolletage.  

Summer cannot hold a candle to winter. It is the season when humanity crashes and reverse metamorphoses into its very worst incarnation. The terasecond a solitary sunbeam ekes its way through the clouds, chino wankers are out in force, as if there were a whining, nasally alarm system audible only to them, altering their neurological pathways and forcing them into chino shorts, dreadful shoes, and the only Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt their unemployment benefit allows them to buy. An equally resonant second alarm then rings, bringing the older generations out in force too, deepthroating their ice lollies like they were trying to teach the rest of us an important life lesson, as my eyes feverishly try to escape the eaves of loose body flesh over-spilling the rims of their trousers.

You probably – and correctly – deduced that these sentiments are born from a healthy dollop of envy. As a heavy asthmatic chronically prone to hay fever, I am able to become so infected with various ailments and allergies that Bashar al-Assad turned down the opportunity to weaponise me into a biological WMD for fear it would be too powerful once unleashed. The sun simultaneously stops me getting to sleep in the night and exhausts me in the day. I do not tan; I do not burn. I merely remain the same. Whereas it is simplicity itself to warm myself up in the cold, cooling myself down in the heat is a Sisyphean task. Stupid, pointless insects which exist at no other point in time come into being during the summer and mercilessly attack my Hollywood good looks. I become even more irritable than usual. And if the human race will often strike up a conversation about a bit of a wind or a light drizzle, then they’ll sure as hell make a comment about the sunshine, lovely being the adjective of choice. (I realise I’m operating at some level of meta-, unconscious, hypocritical irony here, but, well, shut up).

Autumn, winter and spring are perfectly fine. Some sunshine is acceptable, too, as long as it doesn’t go above, ooh, 15 degrees. Forgive me: I live in Buxton. It is the highest market town in England. Any amount of rain less than monsoon conditions, and any wind blowing at less than 8 on the Beaufort scale is sure to frighten and confuse me. I don’t have to wait until summer to get intoxicated in some overcrowded beer garden: it is a year-round necessity independent of season. I have consistency on my side: I have always disliked it, and much preferred other seasons and weather systems. Perhaps I am destined to follow the path of Richard in Shakespeare’s imagining of him:

“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Barack Obama and the bending arc of gay marriage.

Seemingly from nowhere, the issue of gay marriage was raised last week in the United States when Joe Biden, the loose-tongued Vice President, declared he was “absolutely comfortable” granting same-sex couples the rights and benefits of marriage hitherto enjoyed only by heterosexuals. When it rains it pours: soon afterwards, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, also expressed his support for gay marriage. The president’s famously “evolving” views on gay marriage – the subject of many cubic metres of journalistic scorn – reached their terminus. He became the first president in history to formally endorse allowing same-sex couples to marry, telling ABC that “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

A historic and important and laudable stance most of us would agree, but it all needs to be unpacked. First of all, Obama reiterated his belief that, though he believes same-sex couples should be able to marry, at no point can I remember (though I will happily be proven wrong) did he say his administration would take the steps necessary to confer such a right. This is because the president has taken an unusually federalist stance on the issue, believing it to be a state-by-state matter. A cancer patient smoking medicinal marijuana would quickly discover the overriding supremacy of the federal government, and likely find himself incarcerated in one of America’s overcrowded prisons. But the establishment and distribution of marital benefits is a state-by-state issue for the president. A bizarrely incongruous position, then.

In no fewer than 44 U.S. states are same-sex couples prohibited from marrying. As many have pointed out, there is a compelling case to be made under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that, as the federal government actively prohibits same-sex couples from marrying solely based on whether or not the state they reside in recognises such marriages, gay people are being actively discriminated against. In short, the president’s position is all of a bit of a dodge. While he has endorsed gay marriage (again, a stance that is welcomed) he supports the right of marriage to be applied arbitrarily depending on which state someone lives in and a person’s sexual orientation. And I shouldn’t even have to point out that slavery and abortion were both formerly state-by-state issues.

Gay rights has admittedly come quite some way under president Obama, chiefly through the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, and the Justice Department’s refusal to enforce the Defence of Marriage Act (though this has not been repealed as yet). In 1996, just over a quarter of Americans supported gay marriage; today this figure stands at around 50 per cent. The views of the American people have been evolving alongside those of their commander-in-chief. But this leads me to my second point.

Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” At just the moment when the right of same-sex marriage is becoming increasingly accepted in the wider body politic, it may have to endure a setback. Previously you wouldn’t have been able to get an anorexic cigarette paper between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s substantive views on homosexuality and gay marriage. Things may now change, the ideological waters parting. Romney and senior Republicans have now reaffirmed their opposition. Thoughtful (or at least disinterested) Republicans and libertarians will likely now have to adhere to the party line this election year, as gay marriage goes from a moderately divisive issue to yet another weapon in the long-fought culture wars. North Carolina voted strongly in favour of a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to between a man and a woman; a bill legalising civil unions in Colorado never even made it out of committee.

I could well be wrong. Those who met the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage with the most opprobrium were never going to be in the blue camp anyway; very few Democrats will decline the president their vote in November after his announcement, and certainly none on the left of the party over this issue. It is also not, let us be honest, an issue of great importance for the majority of American people right now. There’s perhaps a case to be made that Obama’s announcement helped rekindle the cultural divide, forcing Romney on the back foot – the former governor of Massachusetts is notoriously bad at lobbing out great chunks of red meat for his party’s partisans to devour. Any back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis would likely conclude this announcement won’t have hurt Obama’s re-election chances much. Yes it was a half-assed endorsement, and about bloody time too, but it was nonetheless an important moment. Voter turnout will almost certainly increase; the political bases will be full of ideological beans. We just need an election to sort it all out.

Book review: Tiger Head, Snake Tails

Tiger Head, Snake Tails - China today, how it got there and where it is heading
Simon & Schuster UK
2012
432 pages


In his 1776 work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous, countries in the world.” At the time of his writing this, it was an apposite summary of one of the great civilisations of mankind. Smith went on to write that “It seems, however, to have been long stationary.” Not so now. Today, the rise of China has become perhaps the dominant narrative of our time. In his superb new book, Tiger Head, Snake Tails, Jonathan Fenby has given us an intelligent and informative handbook on contemporary China, ably explaining its political, economic, social and geopolitical intricacies.

Such a panoramic and all-encompassing work might risk drowning in superlatives, but in Fenby’s hands they help bring this complex country to life. Many we are already familiar with. At 1.37 billion people, the People’s Republic comprises a fifth of humanity. The People’s Liberation Army has 2.28 million active troops, easily surpassing the 1.58 million of the United States. Half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty as a result of significant economic reforms first initiated in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, the largest increase in material gain history has ever seen. It is the world’s third largest country and second largest economy, with almost all predicting it will surpass the United States by roughly 2020; some think even earlier. It is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. In 2009 the PRC contributed to more than half of the world’s total economic growth. It sits on monetary reserves amounting to some $3.2 trillion. It is the largest emitter on greenhouse gases.

This book is bursting with other such statistics, ones that begin to tease out a different yet equally compelling portrait of China. 35 million Chinese people are learning to play the piano. China produces 6 billion condoms a year, and state media report there are around 13 million abortions. There are more blind people in the PRC than there are people in Denmark. 54.6 million are illiterate. China executes more people every year than any other, with 68 crimes punishable by death. And so on.

One of the great merits of Mr. Fenby’s book, however, is to go a very great way in challenging – or at least helping us re-evaluate – some of the lazy assumptions about, and attitudes towards, modern China. Unquestionably it is an economic powerhouse and driver of global growth, but it faces unprecedented short- and long-term challenges, be they social, political or economic. While we can acknowledge that hundreds of millions have seen their personal incomes grow and economic opportunities expand, 100 million still remain in grinding poverty; this figure grows to 250 million if we apply the UN standard of $1.25 a day. The author relates that the wealth gap in China is more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. China’s Gini coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is 0.47, “a level generally taken as the point at which social unrest becomes a threat.” This explains in part the 150,000 popular protests China experiences every year, many of them drawing thousands of people, taking to the streets against endemic corruption and pronounced inequality.

This book also gives a far more substantial portrait of the Chinese economy than contemporary accounts of a seemingly unstoppable economic juggernaut might attest. Granted, per-capita GDP in China about thirty years ago was roughly 4 per cent that of the United States; now it is just under 20 per cent. GDP has grown by a factor of ten. But, for one, the U.S. and China have been locked in something of a currency war, with the former frequently raising concerns – or great annoyance – at the latter’s apparent manipulation of their currency. The economic (and, for that matter, the political) system is uncompetitive; growth to a large extent is built on a dependence on property construction, investment and exports; Mr. Fenby documents great swathes of unused property across the country. Any sort of boom and bust could leave the Chinese with zombie banks. Graver still, the economy as a whole is deleteriously unbalanced, a reality conceded by many CCP bigwigs in their interminably long speeches. Corruption, bribery, fraud, graft and smuggling are entrenched and endemic. Corner-cutting on grand infrastructure projects invites danger. Mr. Fenby alarmingly suggests that, when a high-speed train crashed in July 2011, the reported death toll of 39 was chosen by state media quite deliberately – investigations only apply to those accidents resulting in forty or more casualties.

Another great challenge facing China in the future is demographic. Slamming the brakes on natural population growth through the wheeze of a one child policy has resulted in an unbalanced demography in China. The average fertility rate for mothers in the United States is two children per family; in China it is roughly 1.5., but in some areas, such as Shanghai, that number collapses to just 0.5. This then reverberates through the system. The balance between the generations has become unstable (and perhaps even unsustainable); this is coupled in many areas with a marked gender imbalance. Such demographic problems will likely mean both social unrest and hamstrung economic and financial growth in the future.

Though no such work can truly capture the diversity and complexity of such a multifaceted country as China, Tiger Head, Snake Tails is as good a primer as one could hope for. Sweeping statements and generalisations from other commentators have proved unhelpful in helping us analyse contemporary China. No such narratives – whether they are China v America, China as the new Japan, China as the rising red dragon, and so on – are really borne out by the facts, or are quickly made redundant because of their timescales. Better then, as Mr. Fenby advises, to properly observe the many snake tails below the great head of the tiger.