Ruminations 100(5) (The Year of Olokun; Rage is Written on the Body): Looking Back on 2021 in Epigrams and Aphorisms

 

Pix Credit HERE

Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Eyo Festival in Lagos, Nigeria

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); and 2020 (for those see here).   

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Olokun (The Orishas Speak: The 2021 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2021 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).

Olokun is effectively ungendered, or multi-gendered--Olokun is male or female or male-female, or not male or female or male-female. Olokun "is." He can be revered as the head of all of the manifestations of divinity connected with water and is thought to guard vast wealth at the bottom of the seas where Olokun takes residence. But that is the essence of Olokun--dark, submerged, the holder of treasure, androgynous or gender multiple.  The Patakis speak to Olukun's sense of mutual respect but also of his temper in the face of affront.

"Awa ntoro ilosiwaju lowo Olokun" (We seek prosperity from Olokun); and this year it is not coming. 

And, indeed, the year proved to be just that, a year of longing for things that could not be, of of rage for the things that had befallen. This was a year of submerged and violent temper, of the breaking of things, and people, and of the fluidity of people, places, things, and events. That rage proceeded from the top as well as form the bottom. It was a year of confinement--and of passion. It is the spirit of the oceans and the subconscious--and also the year that plague became institutionalized and its practices deeply embedded in the consciousness and practices of social ordering. That that produced rage--submerged for the most part, but rage all the same --chained and unchained, and of storms and tempests.  But it was also a year of binding. Populations confined, economies bound, and for those willing to bear its chains, the great wealth of the oceans, expressed not just in the fabulously expensive boats of those who managed to profit through global confinement, but those as well who forge and maintain the chains that now bind those who produce their wealth (material wealth, as well as the wealth flowing to those weave the narratives that bind collectives). And around all of it--rage.  

And it is in that spirit, the spirits of 2021, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. In this part5 one looks at the way that the body has become the incarnation of the symbolic. It is an interesting inversion--in the name of purity mostly.  Human bodies have ceased to be themselves, but they have become a physical object on which symbols are inscribed.  The body is a collection of data; but it is also its own symbolic language--of faith, of belonging, of community, of rebellion, of conformity and of productivity. The year 2021 was especially notable for the way that meaning was extracted form the bodies of people; in this sense there was a certain element of the cult worship.  Where peole are defioned as the measure of all things, then their bodies are the instruments of that measure.  And instruments must be protected form corruption. But the reverse is true as well--in a world culture in which bodies are the measure of all things, and all things become bodies. We reach here, at the end of 2021, the core of the semiotics of 2021. 

Ruminations 100(4) (The Year of Olokun; The Object is Not Itself): Looking Back on 2021 in Epigrams and Aphorisms

Pix Credit: Adam Klasfeld, "Derek Chauvin and Three Other Ex-Officers Plead Not Guilty to Civil Rights Charges in George Floyd's Death," Law & Crime (14 Sept 2021)

 

Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Eyo Festival in Lagos, Nigeria

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); and 2020 (for those see here).   

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Olokun (The Orishas Speak: The 2021 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2021 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).

Olokun is effectively ungendered, or multi-gendered--Olokun is male or female or male-female, or not male or female or male-female. Olokun "is." He can be revered as the head of all of the manifestations of divinity connected with water and is thought to guard vast wealth at the bottom of the seas where Olokun takes residence. But that is the essence of Olokun--dark, submerged, the holder of treasure, androgynous or gender multiple.  The Patakis speak to Olukun's sense of mutual respect but also of his temper in the face of affront.

"Awa ntoro ilosiwaju lowo Olokun" (We seek prosperity from Olokun); and this year it is not coming. 

And, indeed, the year proved to be just that, a year of longing for things that could not be, of of rage for the things that had befallen. This was a year of submerged and violent temper, of the breaking of things, and people, and of the fluidity of people, places, things, and events. That rage proceeded from the top as well as form the bottom. It was a year of confinement--and of passion. It is the spirit of the oceans and the subconscious--and also the year that plague became institutionalized and its practices deeply embedded in the consciousness and practices of social ordering. That that produced rage--submerged for the most part, but rage all the same --chained and unchained, and of storms and tempests.  But it was also a year of binding. Populations confined, economies bound, and for those willing to bear its chains, the great wealth of the oceans, expressed not just in the fabulously expensive boats of those who managed to profit through global confinement, but those as well who forge and maintain the chains that now bind those who produce their wealth (material wealth, as well as the wealth flowing to those weave the narratives that bind collectives). And around all of it--rage.  

And it is in that spirit, the spirits of 2021, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. In this part 4 we look at the way the the year revealed the way that things are not themselves. That is, 2021 and its pandemic foundation made it easier to note that objects and their meaning are neither intimately connected, not nondetachable. Objects provide the basis for signification, which then makes it possible to invest object signified with meaning.  Yet the object has no connection either with its signification or meaning other than as its predicate.  It can be detached and repurposed.  When that is undertaken for single objects with simultaneous multiple significs and meanings, then one enters the world of 2021.  Take common words--democracy, currency--and observe the way that the object (democracy as a thing or a collection of actions; currency as paper with peculiar symbols, etc.), its signification (paper is the representation of currency, etc.) and its meaning (value, process, legitimacy, norms, etc.) are each connected and yet detached from each other, The resulting complications of communications, and conflicts of meaning, provide the terrains and the tools which rage, desire, or strategy can utilize to its own ends.  And yet rage itself is also an object, a sign, and a meaning, it is an act and also its underlying cause.  It is its own justification and the boundary markers within which it may be expressed. That, in a few words, was 2021.

Ruminations 100(3) (The Year of Olokun; The Virus in and as Object, Symbol and Meaning): Looking Back on 2021 in Epigrams and Aphorisms

 

Pix Credit HERE

 

Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Eyo Festival in Lagos, Nigeria

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); and 2020 (for those see here).   

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Olokun (The Orishas Speak: The 2021 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2021 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).

Olokun is effectively ungendered, or multi-gendered--Olokun is male or female or male-female, or not male or female or male-female. Olokun "is." He can be revered as the head of all of the manifestations of divinity connected with water and is thought to guard vast wealth at the bottom of the seas where Olokun takes residence. But that is the essence of Olokun--dark, submerged, the holder of treasure, androgynous or gender multiple.  The Patakis speak to Olukun's sense of mutual respect but also of his temper in the face of affront.

"Awa ntoro ilosiwaju lowo Olokun" (We seek prosperity from Olokun); and this year it is not coming. 

And, indeed, the year proved to be just that, a year of longing for things that could not be, of of rage for the things that had befallen. This was a year of submerged and violent temper, of the breaking of things, and people, and of the fluidity of people, places, things, and events. That rage proceeded from the top as well as form the bottom. It was a year of confinement--and of passion. It is the spirit of the oceans and the subconscious--and also the year that plague became institutionalized and its practices deeply embedded in the consciousness and practices of social ordering. That that produced rage--submerged for the most part, but rage all the same --chained and unchained, and of storms and tempests.  But it was also a year of binding. Populations confined, economies bound, and for those willing to bear its chains, the great wealth of the oceans, expressed not just in the fabulously expensive boats of those who managed to profit through global confinement, but those as well who forge and maintain the chains that now bind those who produce their wealth (material wealth, as well as the wealth flowing to those weave the narratives that bind collectives). And around all of it--rage.  

And it is in that spirit, the spirits of 2021, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. In this part 3 we look at 2021 from the perspective of virus. One speaks here not merely of the microorganism that  makes its home in the cells of its hosts, sometimes causing great discomfort or death of the host. They are parasites that are not considered alive except when they couple with their hosts and yet they have an extraordinary ability to live with and through their hosts (sometimes), and to live out their lives by consuming their hosts (at other time). But a virus is also the ephemera it produces in its host, and it is an unconscious and uncontrolled passion--for replication, for life. The year 2021 saw much that went viral--it  multiplied its essence at an astonishing rate--and sometimes it overwhelmed. That was 2021, a viral infection in every sense.  But it is possible that the virus is not the "other." and that what is a host in one case can be a virus in another.  And, indeed, the virus, the pathology of human parasitism--one that could complete itself only through insertion of its replicating fluids in a host, was also much in evidence in 2021. In all these senses, this was indeed the year of the virus, of infection, and of succumbing to viral infection or resistance. It was also the year of viral mutation and of the development of new livable synergies between classes of viruses and their hosts. The world emerges from these viral encounters. The object--virus--has erupted from out of its physical vessel to become the instrument of signification for the age.  Virus signifies the uncontrollable, the fatally fruitful, the chaotic, but also the dissipation of energy directed only toward a base desire, of the fatality of survival instincts, and of its detritus. It touches social relations, the human body, and its relationship to the world around it. Humans are the virus that may kill the planet the way that COVID-19 is the virus that killed the post 1945 global social order. Ideology is the virus transmitted through humans the way that mosquitos transmit disease onto the bodies politic that then produce the phlegm of political response.  As symbol it invites an imposition of meaning that contextualizes its forms and behaviors into the descriptor of the age--corruption, the uncontrollable, the id.  And the irony, of course, is that people and their collectives have become each other's virus, producing an all (self) consuming viral orgy in which everyone and everything is both virus and host.

Ruminations 100(2) (The Year of Olokun; the Body as Thing and Idea and as Body): Looking Back on 2021 in Epigrams and Aphorisms

 

Pix Credit; Mr. Putin HERE; Mr. Obama HERE

 

Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Eyo Festival in Lagos, Nigeria

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); and 2020 (for those see here).   

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Olokun (The Orishas Speak: The 2021 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2021 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).

Olokun is effectively ungendered, or multi-gendered--Olokun is male or female or male-female, or not male or female or male-female. Olokun "is." He can be revered as the head of all of the manifestations of divinity connected with water and is thought to guard vast wealth at the bottom of the seas where Olokun takes residence. But that is the essence of Olokun--dark, submerged, the holder of treasure, androgynous or gender multiple.  The Patakis speak to Olukun's sense of mutual respect but also of his temper in the face of affront.

"Awa ntoro ilosiwaju lowo Olokun" (We seek prosperity from Olokun); and this year it is not coming. 

And, indeed, the year proved to be just that, a year of longing for things that could not be, of of rage for the things that had befallen. This was a year of submerged and violent temper, of the breaking of things, and people, and of the fluidity of people, places, things, and events. That rage proceeded from the top as well as form the bottom. It was a year of confinement--and of passion. It is the spirit of the oceans and the subconscious--and also the year that plague became institutionalized and its practices deeply embedded in the consciousness and practices of social ordering. That that produced rage--submerged for the most part, but rage all the same --chained and unchained, and of storms and tempests.  But it was also a year of binding. Populations confined, economies bound, and for those willing to bear its chains, the great wealth of the oceans, expressed not just in the fabulously expensive boats of those who managed to profit through global confinement, but those as well who forge and maintain the chains that now bind those who produce their wealth (material wealth, as well as the wealth flowing to those weave the narratives that bind collectives). And around all of it--rage. 

And it is in that spirit, the spirits of 2021, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. In this part 2 we look to the bodies filled with rage or causing it. We consider 2021 through the lens of bodies abstract and incarnate. This year was one in which the collective body was made more solid by AI, and in which ideas and principles became more likely to be buried in the bodies of those who used them; it was a year in which one continued to see abstractions made flesh and flesh made abstract. It was also a year of the body as ventriloquist dummy, and of the dummy as the fetish through which rage could be channeled, or life distilled. Lastly, it is the body as decorative object surrounded by ideas as enhancing decor and death and memory as itself decorative as well.

Ruminations 100(1) (The year of Olokun): Looking Back on 2021 in Epigrams and Aphorisms

 

Eyo Olokun masquerades at the Eyo Festival in Lagos, Nigeria

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); and 2020 (for those see here).   

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Olokun (The Orishas Speak: The 2021 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2021 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).

Olokun is effectively ungendered, or multi-gendered--Olokun is male or female or male-female, or not male or female or male-female. Olokun "is." He can be revered as the head of all of the manifestations of divinity connected with water and is thought to guard vast wealth at the bottom of the seas where Olokun takes residence. But that is the essence of Olokun--dark, submerged, the holder of treasure, androgynous or gender multiple.  The Patakis speak to Olukun's sense of mutual respect but also of his temper in the face of affront.

"Awa ntoro ilosiwaju lowo Olokun" (We seek prosperity from Olokun); and this year it is not coming. 

And, indeed, the year proved to be just that, a year of longing for things that could not be, of of rage for the things that had befallen. This was a year of submerged and violent temper, of the breaking of things, and people, and of the fluidity of people, places, things, and events. That rage proceeded from the top as well as form the bottom. It was a year of confinement--and of passion. It is the spirit of the oceans and the subconscious--and also the year that plague became institutionalized and its practices deeply embedded in the consciousness and practices of social ordering. That that produced rage--submerged for the most part, but rage all the same --chained and unchained, and of storms and tempests.  But it was also a year of binding. Populations confined, economies bound, and for those willing to bear its chains, the great wealth of the oceans, expressed not just in the fabulously expensive boats of those who managed to profit through global confinement, but those as well who forge and maintain the chains that now bind those who produce their wealth (material wealth, as well as the wealth flowing to those weave the narratives that bind collectives). And around all of it--rage. 

And it is in that spirit, the spirits of 2021, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered.

Norwegian Pension Fund Global and its Environmental Nudging: Two Sustainability Decisions and a Question

 

Pix Credit HERE

Today, Norges Bank made public its decision to exclude Yunnan Baiyao Group Co Ltd from the GPFG and to place Marfrig Global Foods SA under observation, following recommendations by the Council on Ethics.

Yunnan Baiyao is a Chinese pharmaceutical company which produces ingredients used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The company uses and sells body parts from pangolins which is a globally endangered species. The use of threatened animal species in TCM products may contribute to illegal wildlife trade and increases the risk to of these species becoming extinct.  Please find the Council's recommendation to exclude Yunnan Baiyao from the Fund here. 

The Council has recommended that Marfrig Global Foods SA be placed under observation due to the risk that the company is contributing to severe environmental damage.

Marfrig is one of Brazil’s largest producers of beef. The company purchases beef cattle, which it slaughters and processes for sale in the national and international market. Marfrig buys cattle in several regions, the most important of which are the Amazon and the Cerrado. Cattle ranching is the main reason for the loss of forest cover and biodiversity in these regions and is linked to conversion of forest to pastureland. In 2020, Marfrig announced that the company would eliminate deforestation throughout its entire supply chain and in all regions by 2030. Even though the Council finds that the timeframe for when this will be achieved is too long and it is unclear how Marfrig’s system will work in practice, the Council considers that these initiatives can reduce the risk of Marfrig contributing to deforestation in the future. Please find the Council's recommendation to place Marfrig Global Foods under observation here.

The two actions are not remarkable from the perspective of the work of either the Ethics Council or Norges Bank.  What is of interest is the way in which the decisions nicely expose the regulatory thrust of the sustainability focus of the decisions. 

Pix Credit HERE

The first suggests pressure on private enterprises to fill a regulatory gap--or better put to substitute themselves in the face of state failure--in the challenges of preserving bio-diversity.  A good cause, there is no question.  The focus, however, underlines the extent to which international bodies continue to abandon states (except of course those at the center of imperial projects and their dependencies from or through which greater public responsibility is expected). It is to enterprises that the operationalization of international public policy appears more congenially placed in this post-global age. The context is regulatory and the object is to ensure that in the face of the failures of state power, that those managing global production chains fill the regulatory void under the leadership of vanguard states and the international community, properly interpreted. 

The second suggests a more administrative thrust.  Here the Ethics Council and Norges Bank fill the role of judge the exercise of administrative discretion by a governmentalized private economic collective.  In this case, the object is the chiding over the timeline for eliminating deforesting practices in cattle production in Brazil. Here the object is accountability as well as a reminder that acts of administrative discretion (in this case the time frame for ending deforesting practices) can be the subject of review through the application of properly interpreted international norms (sieved through the lens of Norwegian public policy). Accountability requires surveillance, in this case through the markets driven mechanisms of finance and investment. This is not a case of state failure but rather one of administrative discipline within the territories of global production subject to the overarching principles of international accountability based measures.

Lastly, it ought to be remembered, deal with probability based decision making. In that respect they differ substantially from what, from the perspective of the management of human rights and sustainability  driven economic decision making, would be excruciating post facto for the most part. But probability based decision making requires data--a source of decision making that tends to make what euphemistically might be characterized as an area of great challenge to Ethics Council decision making (see, in this case the Letter from the Ethics Council to Norges Bank).  It has become something of a trope, and indeed almost part of the Ethics Council's jurisprudence, to base decisions on a lack of information and to build up a system of inferences on that basis. And yet, it is precisely data that is needed to better--and more comprehensively--apply the normative principles that the Ethics Council has been taking some great effort to build up. Such decision making also requires models--the development of simulated spaces within which it is possible to more robustly predict, and therefore judge, the conduct of enterprises under review.  But that does not seem to be the way the Ethics Council is going.  With fidelity to a geriatric approach to the subject, one that is itself belied by the very modalities of its own decision making, the Ethics Council and Norges Bank (and there is irony here) remain committed to a qualitative old-fashioned quasi-judicial approach to its work.  And that is the great pity.  In an age that has come tyo understand the core quantitative nature of accountability, and especially of an accountability system based on principles of prevention-mitigation.and remedy, it appears somewhat quaint, to see the Ethics Council continue to struggle using the approaches of an era now past to endeavor to manage in a new era. 


The Summary provided by the Pension Fund Global for both cases, with additional documents follow below.

Michael Bohlander: Code Commentaries – A German Technique in Chinese Criminal Law? (European Chinese Law Research Hub)

The folks over at the European Chinese Law Research Hub (with thanks to Marianne von Blomberg, Editor ECLR Hub, Research Associate, Chair for Chinese Legal Culture, University of Cologne) have posted  a marvelous discussion of a new paper by Michael Bohlander (Durham University now on leave serving as the International Co-Investigating Judge in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia) on Code Commentaries – A German Technique in Chinese Criminal Law?

Marianne von Bloomberg explains:

China is currently carefully reconsidering its previous stance with regard to substantive criminal law, in that reliance on the old Soviet-based criminal code is gradually being replaced by a concept that is owned by Chinese legal scholars, practitioners and law-makers, and shaped to the indigenous principles influencing and guiding modern Chinese culture and society. But what role for international and comparative engagement? It is to the value of that engagement in the crafting of commentaries on the law that is the subject of Professor Bohlander's paper.

One of the most interesting aspects of the paper touches on the international and comparative project in an age of decoupling.  Like many of us, the author now understands that nothing received comes without its cultural-ideological baggage.  In a world driven by convergence principles, distillation is possible even when laced with the ideologies of the sources of transplants.  But where systems decouple, such ideological baggage can be felt as a corrupting and ultimately a subversive instrument.  Yet it is impossible to produce the sort f ideological isolation that might have been possible as late as the 219th century now. Bohlander argues that "Using a “Western” tool does not eo ipso equate to crafting Western things with it, in other words: process does not equal substance." On that basis there may utility in the consideration of Western models for legal commentary in the construction of a revised criminal law in China. That is a potentially powerful argument worth serious consideration--but it is also one that works in both directions.

I am cross posting the essay below. The original ECLRH post may be accessed HERE. And as a plug for the marvelous work at the European Chinese Law Research Hub: if you have observations, analyses or pieces of research that are not publishable as a paper but should get out there, or want to spread event information, calls for papers or job openings, or have a paper forthcoming- do not hesitate to contact Marianne von Bloomberg.

 

中央统战部网站 《互联网宗教信息服务管理办法》公布 (Central United Front Work Department Website Announcement: "Administrative Measures for Internet Religious Information Services")

 

Pix Credit HERE

With the Vanguard at the center of the nation's life, it ought not to be expected that alternative centers of mass mobilization would continue draw attention. That attention is focused on an increasingly tight supervision of religious activity, and an increasing sensitivity to the use of religion and religious institutions to project messages, sentiments or practices that challenge or at least diverge from the official line of the state authorities under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. That oversight now extends to emerging tech based media., and to the use of tech based media by religious individuals or organizaitons

Chinese President Xi Jinping has flagged a further tightening of control on religion, in a speech at a national religious work conference held in Beijing late last week. Xi said China would further promote “sinicisation of religion”, with a focus on strengthening control of online religious affairs. He emphasised that religious activities must be conducted within the boundary of the law, according to official Xinhua news agency. “Religious activities should be carried out within the scope stipulated by laws and regulations … and should not interfere with educational, judicial and administrative affairs as well as social life,” Xi said. (China tightens control of religion, with focus on national security)

 This move aligns with policy initiatives in other areas that seek to put the CPC in the center and to ensure that deviation from the ideological baseline of state and Party are more effectively policed.  That applies with some force recent to the efforts to tighten control of celebrity culture, and now with the more comprehensive management of religious activity online.

During the conference in Beijing on Dec. 3-4, Xi emphasized the importance of “upholding the principle of developing religions in the Chinese context and providing active guidance for the adaptation of religions to socialist society,” according to a statement from the CCP. Xi said China would further promote the Sinicization of religion, with a focus on strengthening control of online religious affairs, and insisted that all religious activities must be conducted within the boundary of the law, reports Xinhua news agency. . . He called for more surveillance and for punishing believers who use social networks for religious proselytization or criticism of the government’s religious policy. (China stresses more Marxism, tightening control of religion).

It was also reported that "Xi urged more nationalism, collectivism, socialism, and an improved understanding of history in the religious sector. He also emphasized the importance of the overall national security" (Xi Stresses Sinicization and Regulation of Religious Activities). This policy initiative has now been solidified in the form of 《互联网宗教信息服务管理办法 》("Administrative Measures for Internet Religious Information Services") circulated by 中央统战部网站 (Central United Front Work Department) website. The CUFWD release described the new measures this way:

The "Measures" insist on the unity of safeguarding citizens’ freedom of religious belief and safeguarding national ideological security, maintaining the unity of safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of religious citizens and practicing the core values ​​of socialism, uniting the standardization of Internet religious information services and promoting the healthy inheritance of religions, and upholding rights Integrate with obligations and embody the principles of protecting legality, curbing illegality, curbing extremism, resisting infiltration, and fighting crime. (《互联网宗教信息服务管理办法》公布)

The system is permit oriented. 

 The measures stipulated that online preaching should be organized and carried out by religious groups, temples and churches and religious colleges that have obtained the Internet Religious Information Service Permit. With the Permit, they could preach religious doctrines online that are conducive to social harmony and civilization, and guide religious people to be patriotic to the country and abide by the law, only via their own specialized internet websites, applications or forums that are approved by law. Participants shall register using their real names. With the Permit, religious colleges are able to train their students and religious people on their specialized internet websites, applications or forums approved according to law. Their specialized internet sites, applications and forums must use a virtual specialized network to connect to the outside world, and verify the identity of personnel participating in the training, the measures said. (Overseas organizations, individuals not allowed to operate online religious info services within the Chinese territory: regulations).

The Measures make it clear that foreign organizations and individuals would find it vcirtually impossible to project their missions into China. Of particular interest is Article 27:

 Article 27: National security agencies shall guard against and deal with foreign institutions, organizations, and individuals in accordance with the law, as well as domestic institutions, organizations, and individuals colluding with foreign institutions, organizations, and individuals to use religion to conduct activities that endanger national security on the Internet. [第二十七条 国家安全机关应当依法防范和处置境外机构、组织、个人，以及境内机构、组织、个人与境外机构、组织、个人相勾结在互联网上利用宗教进行的危害国家安全活动。]

This provision appears to extend a substantial scope of discretionary authority in officials to harden barriers between domestic religious collectives and their connection with the rest of the communities of the faithful elsewhere.  It is meant, it appears to detach Chinese communities of believers from the rest of belief communities elsewhere,  It substitutes national solidarity within territorial borders for religious solitary across borders. In these respects it expands and refines current policies rather than creates new ones. The operative policy here is supervision and approval. The policy goal is convergence of religious and political lines and the constitution of dependent national religious communities.Religious practice, and the expression of religion, is permitted, as long as both individual and expression are approved by the state and are compatible with state policy. Religious practice and expression that is incompatible with state ideology and policy may be managed or suppressed, and those engaging in such practices punished.

These measures are not new to Chinese tradition, though their current expression is more advanced.  As that policy trajectory evolves, however, it more and more directly comes into conflict with the trajectories of religious freedom development in  liberal democratic states, and the ancient traditions of transnational religious communities--not just the Abrahamic faiths, but others as well. "Last month, China was among several nations designated by the US as “countries of particular concern” for violations of religious freedom." (China to promote 'sinicization of religion', says Xi Jinping: He said that religious groups should stand as a bridge and a bond connecting the party and the government with people).

 The Measures also suggest the growing space between the core principles and sensibilities that drive the dialogue around the legal relationship between public authorities and religious communities outside of China, and Chinese approaches to the relationship of state and religion.  Outside of China remains grounded in individual rights and autonomy, but rights also collectivized within the religious communities in which individuals express belief through ritual performance.  There is also a wide area of space available (at least in liberal democratic orders, mirrored in the jurisprudence of regional human rights authorities) of an expressive space for religious belief that may acquire a political dimension int he form of challenges to state policies. That is highly contested, of course, especially in traditional societies where laws against apostasy and insults to religion have substantial regulatory effect and tend to marginalize the voices of religious minorities--assuming they are tolerated at all. But it is also contested, at least at its borders in states that embrace policies of laïcité. The dialogue about religion and its exercise are now more clearly built on quite different core principles in China and elsewhere. And like so many other areas that were once at the core of global principles of convergence, religion and religious communities are now part of the movement advancing principles of national detachment and management. 

Pix Credit HERE

As one considers the emerging Chinese position, it might be useful to have in mind another Asian state in another time, a historical moment exquisitely rendered by Martin Scorsese in Silence (2016). There is a scene between the missionary priest (Rodrigues), now captured, and the Japanese the Governor of Chikugo and Inquisitor (Inoue) enforcing a national regime in which foreign religions (variations of Christianity) have been suppressed. The scene suggests not a clash of regimes but a clash of fundamental ways of understanding the world ought to be ordered--along with the tragedies that result when two ways of looking at the world, fundamentally incompatible, meet as one projects itself into the other.

INOUE: (laughs lightly) Don't you think it would be better for the man to forget about foreign women and choose one of his own?
RODRIGUES: Nationality is not so important in a marriage. What matters is love and fidelity.
INOUE: Love? Padre, there are men who are plagued by the persistent love of an ugly woman.
RODRIGUES: That’s what you think missionary work is?
INOUE: Well, from my point of view...our point of view...yes. What is the word for a woman who cannot bear children? INTERPRETER: Barren.
INOUE: A barren woman cannot be a true wife.
RODRIGUES: If the Gospel has lost its way here, it’s not the fault of the church. It’s the fault of those who tear the faithful from their faith like a husband from a wife.
INOUE: (Quietly) You mean me. . . Padre, you missionaries do not seem to know Japan.
RODRIGUES: And you, honorable Inquisitor, do not seem to know Christianity.
Silence. They have checkmated one another. For the moment.
INOUE: Padre, there are those...there are many...who think of your religion as a curse. I do not. I see it in another way. But still dangerous. (he rises) I’d like you to think about the persistent love of an ugly woman. And about how a barren woman should never be a wife. (Silence (2016), Script pp. 85-86).

Globalization and the fundamental premise of convergence, of toleration and unity in diversity, was meant ot make this sort of clash obsolete, or at least benign.  But that moment seems to have passed.  And place of a fundamental commitment to convergence, we appear to find ourselves in a global order that ir ordered on a core principle of decoupling, and no more so in the realm of religion.  This is not a uniquely "Chinese" problem, but one that appears now in different parts of the world but in different forms, each in their own way undermining that effort to naturalize a way of looking at the relationship between the state and religion that finds its home most comfortably in liberal democratic states and in the documentary discourse of international instruments first empowered in the shadow of the Jewish European Holocaust.

The full text of 《互联网宗教信息服务管理办法 》("Administrative Measures for Internet Religious Information Services") circulated by 中央统战部网站 (Central United Front Work Department) website appears below in the original Chinese and in a crude English translation. 

 

25. The Principal Contradiction of Hong Kong is the "One Country Two Systems Principle": Conversations About the Book "Hong Kong Between 'One Country' and 'Two Systems': Chapter 24 (Saturday 23 May 2020) On Resolutely Resolving Contradiction 《全国人民代表大会关于建立健全香港特别行政区维护国家安全的法律制度和执行机制的决定（草案）》 ("Decision of the National People's Congress on Establishing and Improving the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's Legal System and Implementation Mechanism for Maintaining National Security (Draft)").

 

 “言有尽而意无穷” [Words and meanings are endless]. 

In the run up to the book launch scheduled for 13 July 2021 (registration required but free HERE), the folks at Little Sir Press have organized a series of short conversations about my new book, "Hong Kong Between 'One Country' and 'Two Systems'." 

About the Book: Hong Kong Between “One Country” and “Two Systems” examines the battle of ideas that started with the June 2019 anti-extradition law protests and ended with the enactment of the National Security and National Anthem Laws a year later. At the center of these battles was the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. By June 2020, the meaning of that principle was highly contested, with Chinese authorities taking decisive steps to implement their own understanding of the principle and its normative foundations , and the international community taking countermeasures. All of this occurred well before the 2047 end of the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration (中英联合声明) that had been the blueprint for the return of Hong Kong to China. Between these events, global actors battled for control of the narrative and of the meaning of the governing principles that were meant to frame the scope and character of Hong Kong’s autonomy within China. The book critically examines the conflict of words between Hong Kong protesters, the Chinese central and local authorities, and important elements of the international community. This decisive discursive contest paralleled the fighting for control of the streets and that pitted protesters and the international community that supported them against the central authorities of China and Hong Kong local authorities. In the end the Chinese central authorities largely prevailed in the discursive realm as well as on the streets. Their victory was aided, in part by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. But their triumph also produced the seeds of a new and potentially stronger international constitutional discourse that may reduce the magnitude and scope of that success. These essays were written as the events unfolded. Together the essays analytically chronicle the discursive battles that were fought, won and lost, between June 2019 and June 2020. Without an underlying political or polemical agenda, the essays retain the freshness of the moment, reflecting the uncertainties of the time as events unfolded. What was won on the streets of Hong Kong from June to December 2019, the public and physical manifestation of a principled internationalist and liberal democratic narrative of self-determination, and of civil and political rights, was lost by June 2020 within a cage of authoritative legality legitimated through the resurgence of the normative authority of the state and the application of a strong and coherent expression of the principled narrative of its Marxist-Leninist constitutional order. Ironically enough, both political ideologies emerged stronger and more coherent from the conflict, each now better prepared for the next.

The book may be purchased through AMAZON (kindle and paperback), book information including free chapters and the access to all video conversations HERE.

I am delighted, then, to make available the next in the series of video recordings of conversations about the book with my former research assistant Matthew McQuilla (Penn State International Affairs MIA 2021). Today we discuss Chapter 24 (Saturday 23 May 2020) On Resolutely Resolving Contradiction《全国人民代表大会关于建立健全香港特别行政区维护国家安全的法律制度和执行机制的决定（草案）》 (""Decision of the National People's Congress on Establishing and Improving the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's Legal System and Implementation Mechanism for Maintaining National Security (Draft)").

In this Chapter things are coming to a head. What started out in June 2019 as a fight over the “One Country-Two Systems” principle first effectively split the principle in two, and then devolved into a contest over which--One Country OR Two Systems principle--would serve as the primary constitutional basis for ordering Hong Kong’s political system. Either way, what appeared lost was the initial and once critical factor in the analysis. That factor--the scope, character, and consequences of the 2047 term end of the Sino-British Joint Declaration appears to have quietly become irrelevant in the calculus of every stakeholder. The "One Country" camp would necessarily see in international engagement a foreign interference. The "black hand" perspective remains strong among the "One Country" camp. For the "Two Systems" camp, on the other hand, foreign interference (at least before 2047) is turned around. Here the “black hand” of foreign interference is that of China

Indeed, by May 2020 it had become clear that both the One Country Two Systems" principle was the central contradiction of the relationship between Hong Kong, the Chinese central authorities and the international community. With the declaration of an intention to produce a National Security Law for Hong Kong, however, it also became clear that the central authorities were now bent on resolving that contradiction in line with New Era Chinese Marxist Leninist principles. and consistent with the vanguard's basic line. The Chapter, then, reflected an effort to consider the determination by the central authorities to enact a National Security Law for Hong Kong, and to justify that enactment, through the lens of Mao Zedong's 1937 essay "On Contradiction" (矛盾论).

The lens of contradiction provided a basis for more clearly understanding the arc of events from the start of the protests in June 2019. That, in turn, does much to shed light on the character of what had emerged as political culture--and the idealized aspirations of its fiercest adherents--of an autonomous Hong Kong under One Country Two Systems principles. This represents, in a way, the apotheosis of the "Two Systems" part of the international framework for the governance of Hong Kong. At the same time, the protests forced Chinese officials to confront the very same questions of the character of the political culture of Hong Kong, and its place within the greater Pearl River area and China generally from the idealized perspective of the Marxist-Leninist and national political-economic model of the Chinese state.

The two positions produced a contradiction that required resolution. This is contradiction  in the Maoist sense of the “law of the unity of opposites.” Within Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory, the vanguard is tasked with identifying the principal contradiction for each era of Chinese historical development. During the period of the leadership of Mao Zedong, the principal contradiction was class struggle. The development of productive forces assumed the role of principal contradiction from the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his immediate successors. From the time of the leadership of Xi Jinping, the principal contradiction shifted to the balance between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s need for a better life. Within the historical context of Hong Kong, though, since 1998, the principal contradiction has been the “One Country-Two Systems” principle itself.

The dispute was academic until the protests began in 2019. Its use as the opening through which the contradiction between One Country and Two Systems can be resolved is the essence of 全国人民代表大会关于建立健全香港特别行政区维护国家安全的法律制度和执行机制的决定（草案）》("National People's Congress on the Establishment and Improvement of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to Maintain National Security") and the anticipated actions of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee to come. It represents a quite robust action that is likely meant to change the entire landscape of the current impasse between local authorities and Hong Kong protesters. With the national security law for Hong Kong, the old contradiction at the heart of the post-World War Two global order--national diversity unified by the international order --is overcome by a triumph of a socialist basis for internationalism. For the protesters, and especially for the objectives that they have cultivated since the beginning of June 2019, this cannot be good news.

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 The video of the conversation about Chapter 24 may be accessed HERE.

All conversations are posted to the Coalition for Peace & Ethics YouTube page and may be found on its Playlist: Talking About the Book: "Hong Kong Between 'One Country' and 'Two Systems'." All conversation videos are hosted by Little Sir Press. I hope you find the conversation of some use. 

 

A pre-publication version of some of the book chapters may be accessed (free) on the Book's webpage (here). All videos may also be accessed through the Little Sir Press Book Website HERE.

Hannah Harris, Justine Nolan: "Outsourcing the enforcement of modern slavery: Overcoming the limitations of a market-based disclosure model" J. Industrial Relations Online First (December 2021)

 

Pix Credit HERE

Data driven governance is becoming ubiquitous (Backer 2018) and with it the problems central to rule of law based regulatory systems: predictability, clarity, and replicability. Also like other traditional regulatory systems, data driven systems now encounter core issues of coherence and fidelity to the normative objectives for which they are developed and applied. But unlike traditional systems, data driven governance, as a markets (rather than as a politically) driven system produces regulatory challenges that are distinct from those of orthodox state based law systems. 

Rating systems as mechanisms for disciplining behavior have become important instruments of regulatory governance in the non-state sector in the West. They have become especially useful in the context of the management of a framework for enterprise corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this context, non-state actors have begun to develop and implement private systems of rating the CSR performance of large enterprises. The effect is meant to be the same as in other social credit systems—to induce the objects of rating to change their operation and their governance structures to ensure a higher rating. In other systems, that inducement to comportment includes avoidance of criminal charges or access to financial markets. (Backer, Next Generation Law, 158))

As these systems have proliferated the issues have become more acute.  Moreover, the increasing connection between traditional law systems and data based systems, ratings based to a large degree, poses challenges not just for the integrity of such systems, and the coherence across different ratings regimes operating in the same environment, but for the integrity and role of law as well.  This is emerging more clearly in the context of national efforts to more robustly incorporate human rights in economic activity across production chains with respect to which some portion fo which touches the national territory of the regulating state. 

But markets based systems, manifested through national mandatory disclosure regimes that are themselves grounded in the indirect application of international norms, now have begun to dominate the public-private modalities of regulation. The state provides the mandate to report, the content of the report is directed by the state but derived normatively from international norms, and compliance is delegated to the enterprise subject to the reporting mandate.  That entity then hardens international norms through the incentives that mandatory reporting might produce. That, at least is the theory (see, eg here).

These are some of the issues that Hannah Harris and Justine Nolan tackle in their outstanding new article, "Outsourcing the enforcement of modern slavery: Overcoming the limitations of a market-based disclosure model" which appears in the Journal of Industrial Relations  Online First (December 2021). The specific context is the interdiction of modern slavery. The authors argue in the abstract as follows:

Abstract: Recent legislative efforts to address modern slavery emphasise corporate disclosure as the primary regulatory tool. New modern slavery disclosure laws harden the expectation that business will conduct itself responsibly; however, they are founded on a soft approach to enforcement which is essentially outsourced to the market. This paper questions the effectiveness of this disclosure-based enforcement mechanism, which primarily relies on a narrowly defined concept of ‘the market’ as the basis for its regulatory strategy. Drawing on comparisons with alternative legislative enforcement frameworks to counter foreign bribery and illegal logging, this paper highlights the opportunities and limitations of reliance on market forces for regulation and suggests a path forward for enhancing the modern slavery enforcement approach.

Harris and Nolan critique the markets driven disclosure-based model. They note that such an indirect regulatory model--which relies on the institution of private law based reporting systems (and therefore of the monitoring and surveillance systems on which these reports are based), the reporting of which is based on compliance with governmental legal mandates but enforced by the responses of market actors who must somehow respond to these reports, That response is sometimes guides by the construction of (also private) intermediaries who offer their services as providers of analysis and judgment--about the meaning of the reports in the wider reporting context). And thus a self-reflexive markets based accountability compliance eco-system (considered here). 

Yet as Harris and Nolan astutely note, this is an eco-system with substantial gaps built into its conceptual possibilities. More importantly, as the it is one that might profit from the insights of other regulatory approaches. Harris and Nolan do an excellent job of framing those insights in ways that are important for the business of data driven markets based nudging of corporate cultures in respect of modern slavery. Their investigation forefronts as well the great difficulties posed both by markets in regulation, and markets in analytics for the coherence of an approach to the eradication of modern slavery where the problem is global and the solutions remain fractured. 

Harris and Nolan "highlight the importance of clearly and narrowly defining the ‘problem’ that is the focus of the enforcement framework, note opportunities and limitations of reliance on market forces to address modern slavery, and examine whether the modern slavery disclosure model achieves the appropriate balance between collaboration and coercion and between soft and hard enforcement mechanisms." (Harris & Nolan, supra, Introduction). Again, the problem is the market.  But this time one looks at the incoherence in regulation brought by markets for law as well as markets for compliance.  Harris and Nolan show how the definitional issues among disclosure regulatory jurisdictions produces a variation in compliance standards that are augmented by the interpretive flexibility that may be exercised by complying enterprises, much less in the production of markets directed analytics and assessments of the disclosure for the purpose of inducing markets based reactions (and thus of indirect enforcement).

The modern slavery framework relies heavily on regulatory intermediaries, while other frameworks we explore engage intermediaries to varying degrees, in combination with more direct forms of enforcement. We assert that the regulatory framework to counter modern slavery would benefit from adopting some of the structures and tools used in other regulatory efforts. We argue in favour of enhancing the opportunity for a diverse range of stakeholders to act as regulatory intermediaries, while at the same time strengthening the role of the traditional State regulator as an enforcement actor. (Ibid).

I cannot do justice to the richness of the analysis here. The paper is well worth reading for its ability not merely to connect dots among regulatory approaches, but for the way it suggests  that markets appear to serve as the veil behind which states continue to avoid regulatory coherence.  The fracture at the regulatory level is within the state's power to manage.  That they do not suggests either a lack of vision, a lack of political will, or something else.  That something else may well be a product of the continuing power of siloing, that is of considering legal regimes as confined by functional differences in regulatory objects.  The state, and its political drivers, continue to fail to overcome what drove John Ruggie, in part, to the 3 Pillar framework of the UN Guiding Principles--the need to find a way of filling governance gaps in the face of state failure to overcome the consequences of their choices among regulatory alternatives. Harris and Nolan point us in the right direction.  It is the greater pity that states tend to hold close to the principle that there is dishonor in asking for direction. 

 The Introduction follows below.