Hearing Cuban Voices in a Time of Crisis--Bildner Cneter Event 17 September 2024

Delighted to pass along information about an interesting upcoming event which is also available via ZOOM:

 

Hearing Cuban Voices  in a Time of Crisis

Tuesday, September 17, 6 PM Skylight Room The Graduate Center, CUNY For those unable to attend in person, the event will also be available via Zoom

The late historian Elizabeth Dore spent the last 20 years directing “Cuban Voices,” a Ford Foundation-sponsored oral history project collecting memories of the Cuban Revolution. In 2023, Duke University Press published her posthumous book, How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution, which tells modern Cuba’s story through the lives of seven islanders from the post-Soviet generation. The 15-year project, which involved a large team of Cuban interviewers and over 100 interviewees, faced many challenges, including difficulty finding a publisher for Dore’s controversial findings. “The ghost of Oscar Lewis kept me awake at night,” she notes wryly in the book’s opening pages. Following Dore’s death in 2022, her children donated the project archive to Columbia University, where it is now digitally available to the public. A lifelong socialist and principled scholar, Dore was dedicated to hearing diverse, critical, and often contradictory Cuban voices describing the Revolution’s challenges, rewards, and dilemmas. Her book captures the voices of those who built, supported, opposed, and even fled the Revolution. This initial panel, the first of three inspired by Dore’s work, will focus on Dore’s personal and political history and intellectual legacy (Brooke Larson), an analysis of How Things Fall Apart (Ted A. Henken), and an introduction to Columbia’s “Cuban Voices” oral history collection by the archivist who prepared it for public access (Flor Barceló).

Brooke Larson is a Professor of History (Emerita) at Stony Brook University, SUNY. She co-founded the Latin American Caribbean Center and has taught a wide range of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, including Colonial Latin America, Race and Nation, European/Indian Encounters, and Comparative Frontiers. Her research spans five centuries of colonial and modern history, focusing on the Andes. Her latest book, The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and the Indigenous Education in 20th-century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), is an ethnographic history exploring the epic battle over indigenous education, its implications for Bolivian nation-building projects, and the contested meanings of race and citizenship throughout the 20th century.

Ted A. Henken (Ph.D., Tulane University) is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY. He has conducted sociological research in Cuba and interviewed numerous Cubans over the past 25 years. Based on this extensive research, he has published several books, articles, and profiles, including Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy(2021, co-edited with Sara García Santamaría) and Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape(2015, co-authored with Archibald Ritter). He is currently working on an oral history of Cuban independent journalism, tentatively titled Saturn’s Children: The 60-Year Struggle to Reestablish a Free Press in Cuba (under contract with the University of Florida Press).

Flor Barceló is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. They hold a Licenciatura in Letras (BA) from the University of Buenos Aires, where they concentrated on Literary Theory. Since 2015, Flor has worked as a high school teacher and a community college professor. Their research interests include the construction of queer archives, DIY publications (magazines and fanzines) produced by LGBT+ activists from Latin America and Spain, subjectivity and grievable lives under neoliberalism, and literature written during the AIDS epidemics. Flor interned at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library during the Summer of 2023, where she processed the interviews that led to Elizabeth Dore’s book How Things Fall Apart. Discussant: Maria A. Cabrera Arus studies the impact of fashion and domestic material culture on regime stability and legitimation, with a focus on state socialist regimes and the Caribbean region during the Cold War. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Theory & Society, Visual Studies, and Cuban Studies, and in anthologies, including The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Revolution from Within (Duke University Press, 2019). She is the author of the multi-awarded project Cuba Material, a digital archive of Cuban material culture from the Cold War era, and is curator or co-curator of the exhibitions Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood(Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, 2015); Cuban Finotype and Its Materiality (Cabinet Magazine, 2015), and Cuban Revolutionary Fashion (Brown University, 2019).

TO REGISTER, send e-mail bildner@gc.cuny.edu UPDATES: http://www.bildner.org

"BRICS can discipline strategic interventions in intl. organs": Text of my Interview with Payman Yazdani for Mehr News Agency

 

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I was delighted to have been able to  "sit" for a short interview with Payman Yazdani for the Mehr News Agency.  The topic was BRICS and the potential for its emerging role in whatever emerges as the contemporary world order. This is the way that Payman Yazdani framed the conversation:

BRICS is an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Originally identified to highlight investment opportunities, the grouping evolved into an actual geopolitical bloc, with their governments meeting annually at formal summits and coordinating multilateral policies since 2009. Bilateral relations among BRICS are conducted mainly based on non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit.

The founding countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009, with South Africa joining the bloc a year later. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates joined the organisation on 1 January 2024. Saudi Arabia is yet to officially join, but participates in the organisation's activities as an invited nation. Recently, Turkey one of the big economies in the world has reportedly submitted its request to join the bloc.

To know more about the bloc and the role that it can play in the future of the world orders, we reached out to Larry Cata Backer Professor of Law and International Affairs at Penn State University, USA. He is also a member of the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute. (Payman Yazdani, Interview)

The discussion was framed around three key questions, each of which served as a doorway to a perhaps more profound

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NATO member, Turkey has recently applied for BRICS membership. Earlier some other big economies like Saudi Arabia and UAE had joined the BRICS. Why is the desire to join the bloc increasing among world countries, especially among Asian and African countries?

How did the US and its European allies' policy in using the dollar and global banking system as a political weapon against their rivals motivate the world countries to look for alternatives like BRICS?

How do you see the future of BRICS in the long term? Can we expect a new order?

The text of the interview may be accessed from the Mehr News Agency website HERE.  It also follows below in English. Please check with the website for translations into Farsi and other languages.  Visit the BRICS webpage HERE.

CALL FOR PAPERS international conference Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law – Global Perspectives

Delighted to pass along this call for papers.

 
Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law – Global Perspectives

Santiago de Chile, 5-6 December 2024

The Instituto de Estudios Internacionales (International Studies Institute) at the University of Chile, in association with the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), kindly Invites you to submit an Abstract for an International Conference. This interdisciplinary conference is part of the Jean Monnet Network EU-VALUES (EU Research and Education Network on Foreign Policy Issues: Values and Democracy) and seeks to explore strategies to promote democracy and the rule of law within various institutional frameworks and policy environments from a comparative perspective.

Zoom Link for First Krasno Global Event: Dr SUNG-YOON LEE--"How Dangerous is North Korea? Five Myths About the Ultra-Strange Despotic State"

 

Delighted to pass along notice of ths quite interesting event.

 The first Krasno Global Event for this semester will take place TODAY - THURSDAY, Sept. 12, 5.30pm, in the Mandela auditorium at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Dr SUNG-YOON LEE will talk about "HOW DANGEROUS is NORTH KOREA? Five Myths about the Ultra-Strange Despotic State" in conversation with Prof. Klaus Larres

Please join us in person at the Mandela auditorium (Fed Ex General Education Building, 301 Pittsboro St., Chapel Hill) (Parking after 5pm in the parking deck beneath the Fed Ex building).

You can also watch us online on Zoom -Zoom link for accessing the event:
https://zoom.us/j/98072415115

NO RSVP necessary - just join us at 5.30pm TODAY
Please see our website.

More about Dr. Sung-Yoon Lee (taken from the website) below.

Honoring the Memory of 11 September: Text of president Biden's Statement

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Psalms 11 (KJV)

1 In the LORD put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?
2 For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily* shoot at the upright in heart.
3 If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
4 The LORD is in his holy temple, the LORD'S throne is in heaven: his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men.
5 The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.
6 Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.
7 For the righteous LORD loveth righteousness; his countenance doth behold the upright.

It has been my practice to post on the Anniversary of the 11 September Attacks (eg, here, here, here ). This year my offering is Psalm 11 set out above in its Kong James English version.

The Statement of President Biden on this Anniversary follows below. Mr. Biden chose to focus on the biblical imagery of the crucible. The allusion evokes Proverbs 27:21-22 ("The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and a man is tested by his praise. ²² Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, yet his folly will not depart from him."). One looks to what came; the other, perhaps, to what may come.

 

Text of Interview: The States of US-China Relations on Dynamic Pathways of Global (Re)Ordering [访谈文本：全球秩序重塑中的中美关系现状]

© Larry Catá Backer, Village new Yiwu, China (September 2024)

 

 I was recently asked to participate interview with a Chinese press organ.  They were kind enough to provide the questions in advance.  The questions were quite interesting and touched on important current issues in a sensitive way.

I have provided the text  of my written responses below in the original ENGLISH and in a crude CHINESE translation.

 

The United Nations Summit for the Future--On the Phenomenology of Progress and its Platforms

 

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1. We, the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world, have gathered at United Nations Headquarters to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations through the actions in this Pact for the Future. (Pact for the Future, 27 August Draft Version 3 Preamble ¶ 1).

Future planning has always been a fascinating project.  It is  fascinating in its old or original sense "from Latin fascinatus, past participle of fascinare "bewitch, enchant, fascinate," from fascinus "a charm, enchantment, spell, witchcraft," which is of uncertain origin. Earliest used of witches and of serpents, who were said to be able to cast a spell by a look that rendered one unable to move or resist. Sense of "delight, attract and hold the attention of" is first recorded 1815." (Etymology Online , Fascinate). 

These enchantments, this witchcraft, has taken on the pall of science as appropriate to the linguistic-cultural turn from the 18th century and mixed it up nicely with the secularizing Enlightenment project of human directed perfectionism through the guiding forces of social leading forces which, when combined with a Leninism attached to and through arxist theory produces a combination of scientific and political power in the hands of a dedicated organized and institutionalized party which serve as the counterpoint to its analogues in the religious magisteria and in secular  though more diffused "lading forced" well marbled within the leading institutions of education, science, politics and economics.

All of this to say that the 21st century may be witnessing a sort of apotheosis of the inclination of aggregated humans to tell people what is good for them, and what to do--not merely because they can, but also because they have been vested with the authority to tel others what is good for them.  This inclination is now so well embedded in human social relations (especially in its positive elements--contrast traditional societies in which its leading forces were meant to serve to cultivate and protect customs and norms and work them at their edges (eg Aristotle's Politics). 

None of this is bad--or good. But it is important to remember, especially because these underlying structures and the premises which give them authority and legitimacy, tend to be so well embedded in the product of presumption that it is easy to forget that what appears natural and inevitable are neither; just powerfully important choices.  

In this century, the impulse toward the perfect has been founded not just on science, but also on the presumptions of "social" science, and with it its hybrid expressions in data based technologies that are meant to leverage both through tools that are both virtual and inevitably self-conscious. Those tools require workers to tend to them, and overseers to direct them. The first form the legions of well trained producers of the inputs necessary for the forward march of progress. The later form the techno-administrators who both define the pathways toward progress and direct and deploy the production of the worker castes.  In a sense the interactions between techno-produces and their directorial consumers  are undertaken within platforms in which those exchanges can be ordered and rationalized and then exported to the objects of all of this--human mass organizations. That projection and those platforms are constituted in ways that suit the cultural context and historical conditions in which they are applied--to those ends ideological ordering structures are useful.  The result is that one can better understand ideological frameworks not as the generative but the consequential forms of  the current state of the basic human impulse toward progress as it is currently manifested through the interaction of consumers and producers of "progress."

Until the later part f the last century, these trajectories were embedded in social relations constituted as states.  After 1945, and slowly thereafter, the collectives of states  developed sometimes more robust  institutions in which their authority could be leveraged through sort of joint action.  The problem has been that in order to achieve its states have to abandon to some extent, the locally contextually relevant and ideologically driven cloaks over the manifestation of the operation of this progress platforms in localities. That remains a work in progress; progress, as they understand it, though, appears to be unrelenting, in accordance with the basic premise of the contemporary organization of human social relations. And thus the loop.

 

And thus we come to the United Nations--as the formally constituted state driven platform for progress--and its long gestating Summit for the Future, its future; our future it seems. 

The high-level event will bring together UN Member States, UN agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), academic institutions, the private sector, and youth under the theme, ‘Summit of the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’. The Summit aims to forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like, and what we can do today to secure it. * * * Guterres has characterized the Summit of the Future as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate global action, recommit to fundamental principles, and further develop the frameworks of multilateralism so they are fit for the future”. (Summit for the Future).

The spectacle that marks the end of the construction of the vision for the future and the start of the process for its realization, such as it will be, is scheduled for 22-23 September 2024 in the UN  New York office. The full text of the Press Release follows below (with links to generative documents).  And yet it is in the underlying documents that create the platform for progress, including its managerial and guidance structures, that ought to be of great interest to those with an interest in peering into the heart of this particular Enlightenment-Leninist -Magisterial vision of a platform through which a specific vision of progress is sketched and the course of compliance mapped.

In the style that has become standard in this stage of historical development, That platform will be visualized through a framework "Pact for the Future," the several revisions of which to date have been posted online, the 3rd version of which, released 27 August 2024, also follows below.  That is the heart, the textual core, around which the platform for progress is created and its course charted (or rather its pathway constructed. And like most human hearts, it is bound up in its past, now reorganized, rearranged and projected into a future. In some sense, the Pact is a coordinating and aggregating document--a master framework suitable for coding. Pact, supra, 5, ¶ 67 ("A transformation in global governance is essential to ensure that the positive progress we have seen across all three pillars of the United Nations’ work in recent decades does not unravel. We will not allow this to happen."); Acton 41-60). But it is also inherently narcissistic; a document fundamentally concerned with placing the United Nations at the center of power relations (Pact, chp. 5 ¶ 69). ) (That is no criticism but rather a conformation of the semiotics of power relations; one in which the objectivity of the core is a necessary foundational element in its signification; thus signified it can then order the community around and through which it is constituted. Every directed future requires a shepherd. 

16. We reaffirm our pledge, made on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations, to reinvigorate global action to ensure the future we want and to effectively respond to current and future challenges, in partnership with all relevant stakeholders. We recognize that the well-being of current and future generations and the sustainability of our planet rests on our willingness to take action. To that end, in this Pact we commit to sixty actions in the areas of sustainable development and financing for development, international peace and security, science, technology and innovation and digital cooperation, youth and future generations, and transforming global governance. (Pact, Preamble ¶ 16).

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Nonetheless, as is common with these sorts of enterprises, the project of moving forward appears more embedded in the past and the present than in what lies ahead.  Like a crab that can see forward but walks sideways, the project of futurity tends to project the past forward.  In this case, though, it adds value by rationalizing the entirety of the past projects, largely unsatisfied, into something like a coherent form.  Indeed, from a certain vantage point, the Pact appears to be a quite rich cocktail of rejected, resisted, or historically potent efforts that speak more to the differences among leading forces among states than it might about any future that is itself something that goes beyond these past and present squabbles about what, decades from now, will be of interest only to historians.  Strategic housecleaning may satisfy the impulse toward futurity among those who might profit from it; but one might be excused for wondering who that might be.

Whatever its direction, the glamour of progress is irresistible and returns one to the element of fascination in its construction.   And so is its presumptions of linearity and morals. That concoction of premises distinguishes the human and forms an essential part of  what orients human consciousness. A signal, a direction, a purpose,an orientation, a basis of comparison and judgment, a goal.  These worthy objects, basic to the constitution of the human will, when sufficiently distilled, also form the basis of the generative intelligence that humanity will create to serve these purposes; and perhaps its own. But that is a story for later.  For the moment, one adds another platform of progress into a formidable universe of such platforms. In solidarity there is reality.

CfPI International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (IJSL) 2025 Annual Conference--Legal Evidence in the Age of Techno-Societies and Visual Jurisprudence (7-9 May 2025)

 

I am delighted to pass along the CfP for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 2025 Annual Conference--Legal Evidence in the Age of Techno-Societies and Visual Jurisprudence. It will be held 7-9 May 2025 and hosted by the University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research of the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. The organizing committee--J M Aroso Linhares, Maria João Antunes, Maria José Capelo, Ana M. Gaudêncio, Luís M. Meneses do Vale, Brisa Paim Duarte--now invite submission of proposals.

Submit abstracts of up to 300 words by January 31st, 2025, to: J M Aroso Linhares (jmarolinhATgmail.com) and Anne Wagner (valwagnerfrATyahoo.com). Decisions on participation will be communicated by February 20th, 2025. Registration Period is from March 2nd to April 10th, 2025. Selected papers may be published in a special issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law or included in an edited volume: Law and Visual Jurisprudence series and/or Living Signs of Law series. The roundtable languages will be English and French.

The CfP follows below.

The Faculty Ombuds Role in Universities: An Orientation on the Mechanisms of Informalities in Self-Correcting Formal Systems

 

 

I have been serving since 2022 as the University Faculty Ombuds for Penn State University.  The role of Ombuds, like that of virtually every office in the modern university has changed dramatically since the turn of this century.  In some ways the contemporary university would be unrecognizable by the generation of students entering higher education after 1945, though the fundamental basis of the model, at least formally, has remained unchanged. Those changes, of course, reflect the times and the tastes--for education and compliance based risk based management management especially--not just in the university but generally within the political, social, and economic cultures of contemporary life. Faculty have also changed--both in character and function. A generation ago the default academic position was tenured, now it is increasingly contract based. The role of faculty in university decision making, once quite deeply intertwined with administrative functions in areas such as admissions, curriculum and the like, have increasingly given way to systems of decision making in which an administrative superstructure, exercising discretionary decision making within an increasingly complex web of regulations, standing rules and operations, distributed among functionally differentiated administrative bureaucracies which are in turn dependent in some respect with interlinked public administrative organs and public regulation.

For faculty, the contemporary context in which they work, then, can be a bewildering place, and the extent of autonomy in making choices and interacting with other university stakeholders much more complex, nuanced, and subject to sometimes multiple layers of regulation, decision making structures, and policies.  Navigating this space can be a challenge; and challenging abuse of discretionary decisionmaking all the more challenging.  At the same time delivery level administrators face equally complex challenges and often need guidance nt just with respect to the rules, but also with the most effective use and deployment of the discretionary authority with which they have been vested to serve the interests of the university. 

It is in this environment that the university ombuds function has evolved.  Once, starting in the 1970s as a an optional mechanism attached to then emerging faculty grievance procedures, the role of the university faculty ombuds has evolved to mirror the challenges that are faced  within the decision making structures of the modern university. They have also acquired something of an institutional structure.  Since the 1990s, for example, universities like the one in which I am employed, have established a university wide Ombuds to serve a coordinating and liaison role, as well as to monitor and ensure a more optimal performance of an ombuds role.  And that role has expanded:

In some ways the ombuds function has come to reflect changes in governance generally. The movement toward regulatory models of governance grounded in compliance and managed through complex systems of discretionary decision making  inevitably produce a need  to mediate discretionary action and the regulatory structures meant to contain it and to direct that discretion towards particular ends.  The semiotics--here is the form of a dialectical mimesis, suggests the repeating structures of compliance based systems grounded in text and applied through combinations of discretionary systems and disciplinary functions. A techno-bureaucratic system of this sort requires, effectively, not merely a quality control function but also a mimetic set of actors that serve the aggregate institutional interest by effectively holding a mirror up to its actors. Yet that is where the mimesis becomes interesting.  One sees in the structure, sensibilities, and practices of the ombuds an informality that is not mimesis but inversion of the formal processes and rule systems to which it is attached for for which it is meant to serve as a sort of  check.  

In Freudian terms, perhaps a superego, against the id impulses that can hijack the ego of the institution, the proper functioning of its administrative-regulatory structures.  The object is clarity, the reminder of the supremacy of process, and the management of emotion within rationalized systems of rule application. Yet these objectives are undertaken under conditions of influence, to the extent that is tolerated, rather than authority. Nonetheless there is a certain authority, in the core premise of presence. In its semiotic sense, presence can be understood in its three fundamental aspects.  First it references the objectivity of the ombuds--that is the physical presence of a body that also is permitted within the space of regulatory governance among institutional stakeholders in power relations. This is the ombuds as a manifestation of semiotic firstness. Second, it references the ombuds as a signifier--the manifestation of fairness, process and expectation that then is inserted in and shapes the actions around which it is present. This might be understood as the secondness of the ombuds role--the abstracted signification of  physical presence. And the third is an "activated" secondness in the form of interpretation and meaning making.  Here the signified object is expressed as the clarifying force of the meaning and application fo the rule structures within which the discretionary decision of university functionaries, and the actions of other stakeholders may be exposed in relation to the rule system and its now manifested expectation. The power of the role comes precisely from the lack of power of the ombuds. The ombuds stands outside the dialectics of power and discretion into which they are called and against whose role the actions of those engaged may be judged producing (eventually and sometimes) reactions of systemic cor contextual correction. A very abstract way of suggesting the power dynamics of presence  as a manifestation of a presumption of a striving toward an ideal in behaviors and relationships. 

At least at the university this is evidenced by the emerging forms of contemporary ombuds work--one with no authority but a certain influence to contribute to the function of preventing, mitigating and facilitating the remediation of "decisions, actions, or inactions concerning a faculty member's conditions of employment that are believed to violate University policy or are otherwise manifestly unfair." (Penn State AC 76). 

The nature and scope of the ombud' functions at Penn State provide a good example of this work. I include below the PowerPoint of the orientation materials I prepare for Ombuds who are elected to provide ombuds services for their respective academic units. Always grateful for comments and suggestions--from application to theory.

Text of Remarks: “A Question on Chinese Modernization and the Vanguard Party” [“关于中国现代化和先锋党的问题”] Delivered at Renmin University of China, Beijing 3 September 2024

 

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As part of the Mingde Strategic Dialogue 2024, hosted by Renmin University of China and organized by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies under the leadership of its Dean Wang Wen, a number of events were organized (see here; and here).

The recently concluded Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held at a crucial juncture, was of great significance. It focused on implementing the strategy outlined at the 20th National Congress of the CPC to advance Chinese modernization and turning the blueprint into realty. The Communique and Decision issued after the Third Plenary Session have garnered widespread attention from the international community. Renmin University of China promptly invited experts and scholars form the international strategic and academic communities to visit China. Through local visits, in-depth dialogues, and extensive discussions, the delegates aim to explore the opportunities and challenges facing China and the world, build consensus, and seek solutions.

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On 3 September 2024, Renmin University invited a number of academics and officials to consider aspects of the theme: "Chinese Modernization and the Future of the World." I was asked to deliver remarks in Strategic Dialogue 1: "Chinese Modernization and the world: New Challenges and Opportunities." The session was built around three questions: (1) How do scholars perceive Chinese modernization and China's development prospects?; (2) What is the global significance of Chinese modernization, and what lessons  can be learned for global modernization?; and (3) How can we address global issues and challenges faced in each country's modernization process and improve national governance? The questions provided a basis for interesting contributions and lively questions. 

The text of my remarks, entitled, "A Question on Chinese Modernization and the Vanguard Party” [“关于中国现代化和先锋党的问题”] follows below in the original English and in a crude Chinese translation. It focused on the constitution of socialist modernization and its relationship to the new important concept of new quality development of productive forces. With that as a framework, the remarks focused on a consideration of  the ramifications of this form of development theory for governance.  The posted version includes a final paragraph that summarizes and responds to the thrust of discussion after the original presentation.  

The text of the Remarks may also be downloaded here.