Is China Working At All?

Let's Talk China For A (Minsky) Moment

For over a decade now, there's been this talk about China being too indebted, and how its economy was built around real estate speculation, and how the property bubble was going to burst, and once that happened the entire Chinese economy was going to come down like a house of cards. For over ten years, I've been writing about how the wealth disparity, the education disparity, the income disparity, opaque and misleading government datas on its economy, and so on would eventually bring about a crisis. If the solution was evermore debt, there had to be a moment when China, with all its misapplied industrial might and ghost cities and multi-generational mortgages for unbuilt housing, and all the excess of their developers, would have to have its Minsky moment. 

I blogged about it a lot. And then some. In 2016 the share market bubble in China burst. Somehow the CCP government managed to stave off the inevitable once again and quarantined the fallout from bursting the property bubble. Nobody talks about it, but that's what they did. Otherwise world markets would have felt it. It worked so well and smoothly it made us all look like idiots for calling the China Bubble as having burst. And for over ten years, that Minsky moment that collapses debt-fuelled bubbles never seemed to arrive. Until earlier this year when over 300 regional banks faced bank runs. 

Now that it has, we've all got to be wondering the same thing: will Xi Jinping reverse course and let the free money flow? Because that's what they had done for most of the last decade; and after all, that's what they always do. It is possible they won't do so, and they let the whole shebang go? But then the social turmoil that would follow would become revolutionary. So if they want to stave off a revolution, they need to going back to delivering economic growth for everybody. 

Will they or won't they? Does anybody care? The weird thing is they look to be in policy paralysis when it comes to the economy. 

Not Your Daddy's China Now

The world needs a massive readjustment to China. Some parts of the world are re-orienting their stance faster than others. Certainly any time that Paul Keating pops his head up to tell us Asia is our future and China is our friend, he looks well and truly out of date. He was right between 1978 and 2012. Even with the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, we all collectively held our noses at the the Chinese Communist Party's predilection for violent control and did business with the Chinese because it was so clearly the greater good (if by 'greater good' you mean globalised greater profits). Somehow China went from a nation where everybody was wearing heir strange national uniforms to a country where designer goods and luxury items are consumed by a fully modernised populace. We languidly thought if everybody in China became consumers, democracy would follow. I don't know why we chose to tell ourselves that, but that's exactly what we did and we couldn't have been more wrong. 

All the same, China could be counted on to be a good participant in the global trade stakes, and it behaved like an economy-first developing nation. You could charge China as having been an economic animal under  Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, forever seeking export markets and flooding the world with cheap goods. Across that time they exported so much deflation, it allowed Central Banks around the world to run low interest rate regimes. China plugged itself into global markets for the first time in history - I don't say this lightly - and reaped the tremendous benefits of globalisation like no other nation. 

And having succeeded in doing so, Xi's China has decided it wants to be a political animal instead. In the last decade under Xi Jinping, Chinese labour has gone up. It has started to prosecute territorial claims aggressively. It has devised a strange policy of 'wolf warrior diplomacy" where their diplomats say undiplomatic things. It has left a lot of people wondering if they are even friendly. The most you could say about Xi's China is perhaps John Lennon's refrain about revolutions, "but when you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow". Xi Jinping's China is a very different animal to the China that existed before his leadership. 

Back To The Future?

The world is taking stock right now in the wake of Xi Jinping being made the lifetime dictator of China. Arguably, this was not supposed to happen. The rising living standards of China were supposed to bring about a gradual change where China would transition from a military Junta of communists towards a democracy. Of course this kind of transition happened in Taiwan, but Taiwan is not shackled with the curse of considering itself a great power. Just as Russia failed in its transition from the Politburo to democracy and ended up with Vladimir Putin, China too has utterly failed to make a transition out of its Politburo system. Laughably the CCP even argued the Politburo was democratic and therefor China had its own version of democracy - which just goes to show how little they understand of democracy. 

The strangeness of our times is such that we now have a leader of Russia with a view to turn back borders to 1955, paired with a Chinese leader who wants to go back to the leadership style of 1955. With both countries using their resources as bargaining chips, it's strange to watch these leaders try to bargain their way back to an imaginary glory in the past. The uneasy alliance between Russia and China certainly looks like a re-run of the uneasy alliance between Stalin and Mao. I imagine there are a lot of people waking up to a world with a cold war and belligerent Maoists, and feeling a bit of deja vu.  

The future of China led by Xi is distinctly unappealing. You wouldn't want to invest more capital there, and you wouldn't want to hire the labour there with its rapidly rising cost. The sovereign risk is no joke. The demographics are aligned in the direction of an ageing population with shrinking economy so it's not like there's much scope for the domestic demand to take over. The country is sliding towards an awkward 20th Century style of nationalism that may well get them into armed conflict with its neighbours and it's still a country with over a billion people with 37% food security. Now is not the time to ignore economics for their leadership, but here we are witnessing how they ditch economics in favour of nationalist ideology. 

It does make you wonder.

Social Media Turned Us Into Rats

Hungry Rats at That

I think the Great Pause of the pandemic gave us enough time to digest what just happened last decade. It's rare that you get to reflect on things in such a leisurely manner. The experience had some parts Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and some parts 'The Plague' by Camus.

One of the things that really struck a cord was how social media effectively turns us into hungry rats, addicted to the stimulus of other people's posts and news items. Indeed, there was a certain level of irony in all the doom-scrolling we did during lockdown. Now that the pandemic is in the "let's-just-ignore-it-and-it-might-go-away" phase, it's weird to reflect on the things we thought and did as we took cover from the unseen foe. As Genesis once pointed out in their songs, how does one fight a o deadly when you don't even know it's there? That in a nutshell is how dinosaurs went extinct. 

Anyway, here is a song decrying the horror that was the betrayal inherent in the Cambridge Analytica episode that gave us Brexit and Trump in 2016. 

 

Thor: Love and Thunder

The Haters Are Loud

Largely thanks to Covid I've stopped going to cinemas since December 2019. Almost 3 years on, I do miss it, but I have my subscriptions and I'm okay with watching these things on my TV at home. It's not because I have some fantastic home cinema (I don't) but because I've stopped caring too deeply about movies for a long while now. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn't. 

I watched 'The Batman' on the teev and fell asleep. I struggled to watch all 3 hours of that thing the first time; the second time, I fell asleep faster than you can say "Gotham sucks". Compared to that, the new Thor movie kept me watching right to the end. And I felt quite rewarded. I understand there's a cottage industry out there decrying the tone of the film and the mixed mimesis of the narrative. It appears there's a very set idea on how some people think these movies should go. 

For my time-and-money, I'm a lot more interested in the weirder ideas to do with these comic book characters, and if the character is also a Norse god, then maybe we should be looking at this through a wider prism than whether Marvel is handling this character well or not. Once upon a millennium ago, Thor was a mighty god to Vikings. Maybe there's an argument to be made that Marvel has never handled somebody else's cultural baggage all that well to begin with, so complaining about it is a bit daft. In that light we should be asking the naysayers just exactly what do they think lends legitimacy to the portrayal of a Norse god as a comic book character in film.

So... Spoiler alert. Don't read on if you're the sort that complains about spoilers. It has been out for months now. Seems crazy that somebody would complain about it today, but ... we live in that kind of world. 

What's Good About It

What's very good about the film is that it builds on the trauma Thor has sustained in the previous films across the 3 stand alone and the all the Avengers moments. Somewhere along the way he's had to abandon Dr Jane Foster - largely for reasons of Natalie Portman's unwillingness to keep playing Dr Jane Foster. But the film takes that absence and turns it into Thor's own trauma about a love that came to an end. At the core of the breakup is the vast difference in the scale of time between a God who lives thousands of years and the mere ephemeral human woman. A bit like what should have plagued Aragorn and Arwen's relationship.

And this problem casts Thor's problem as intrinsic to his own being as this Thunder God. The film then raises Jane to the same functional status as Thor himself. She now wields Mjolnir the hammer and does Thor-like things to help people. When placed on equal footing, Thor is very open to the relationship resuming. Except Jane only becomes Mighty Thor as an extension of the power from Mjolnir. She is still very much mortal, and this keeps the drama fully engaged with emotional turmoil for these characters.  

What's Bad About It

The early part of the movie is almost too silly. In order to extend the laughs from Ragnarok, Thor appears as a very dopy kind of wayward soul in search of himself. With Thanos defeated twice in time, and the universe saved, Thos is able to live in an idyl. The idyl is cut short by the arrival of Gorr, but not before a whole bunch of unfunny gags fly by. 

Some of the jokes and sequences are really dumb... 

What's Interesting About It

... But that's all okay because the film actually changes its presentation through out. What's remarkable is how it goes from a low mimetic comedy to a higher mimetic drama, then a romance, then an epic and ultimately a myth. It progresses in the opposite direction not Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism' where the history of fiction moves down from myth into epic, then romance and then high mimesis realism and ultimately the bathos of low mimetic comedy. I'll go into more detail on that later. For now, just keep it in your mind that this movie has literary interest - and that's unexpected from 'content' that comes out of comic book fare. 

What's also interesting about it is, that the film is not all about Thor. It's about Dr. Jane Foster becoming the Mighty Thor as a reaction to having terminal cancer. This is mirrored against the ostensible villain Gorr the God Butcher who is possessed by a cosmic and evil sword that is determined to slay gods. Jane is facing her own demise and chooses - in a very existentialist way - to go out fighting. Gorr, loses his volition to become this god butcher but when the sword is broken and he is freed from its influence he is able to choose life instead of more death. It is against this dire emotional landscape that Thor is given his stage. 

As a result, it gets emotionally stark towards the end. It's downright existentialist and like something out of a Camus book.

Beyond Trauma

The film is very open about the nature of trauma. The early part of the film has both Jane and Thor in denial of the reality in front of them. Jane is destined to die of cancer and she is in denial about it. Thor is in denial he will lose Jane no matter what because he is a long lived god, and she is an ephemeral mortal. Gorr is utterly traumatised by the ordeal of losing his daughter to the harsh elements, only to meet his deity who refuses to help and laughs at his plight. If you have any empathy, it's more than any mortal ought to bear. You meet your god and he laughs at your life circumstances! One way or another, all three sleep walk into their trauma. 

The film takes place in a space that happens in the aftermath of trauma as the three characters try to make sense of what exactly is ailing their sense of well-being. A lot of critics have complained that Thor comes across as an oblivious idiot in the early part of the film, but it overlooks the very trauma he seeks to overcome. Even as a god, he is helpless but to let the process play out. In equal parts, the miraculous transformation of Jane into the Mighty Thor with Mjolnir is desperate attempt to deny the reality that she has stage 4 cancer. Together with Gorr's immense burden, the main characters of the film flail about under the weight of the trauma that they have sustained. 

Faith in Gods

The film then gets very ironic as it rises out of the early bathos and takes us to Omnipotence City where gods dwell. The party of characters go to Omnipotence City to plead their case with the gods who dwell there. The film is entirely aware of the irony of having Thor, Norse god of thunder meet Zeus, Greek god of lightning. It's funny because Thor steals Zeus's lightning which is like a conceptual pun of stealing his thunder, but he doesn't have to because he's already the god of thunder (haha). It also evokes Prometheus, and so the text veers in the direction of denouncing gods. 

This is interesting because Thor is angry that Zeus would not listen to his entreaties. Zeus even privately admits he is scared of the Necrosword. The gods are either indifferent to pleas, or they are otherwise preoccupied. And while we may share in Thor's disgust, it can easily be argued Thor himself is too busy to be listening to anybody's prayers to him. Just as all the gods are absentee deities to their peoples, arguably Thor is as well. The gods in the MCU at least, are neither omniscient, omnipotent or omnipresent. But we do get to witness Thor at least strives to be good. 

What the film does is quite Nietzche-an in that it kills the gods' credibility as gods - at least in the MCU - well and good for the audience. In the MCU at least, the gods are good as dead. Once the faith in gods is destroyed and there is nothing but the third act to play out, Thor is to all intents and proposes an existentialist entity. Contrary to the criticism levelled at the film that it doesn't go anywhere new, actually, it lands in a very weird  unique spot in the annals of comic book movies.  

Faith of Gods

And this leads us to the very thought provoking climax.

Let me re-iterate the spoiler alert here. Can't discuss this bit without the spoiler. 

In pursuit of Gorr, Thor and Jane/Mighty Thor arrive at the doorstep of Eternity. Eternity can grant a wish to the first person who turns up, which happens to be Gorr, but the Necrosword has been destroyed in the process. He is no longer under its control. He has two choices: He can wish all the gods dead as per the programme he set upon with the Necrosword, or he can wish for his daughter to be brought back. 

Thor, as a god that he is, has no power in this situation. He can only prevail upon Gorr to choose love over hate. That he has a choice to choose to bring back the one life that can make a difference, or fulfil his mission to slay all gods, which condemns Thor. At that moment, Thor make a leap of faith unseen anywhere else in the MCU. Maybe it's not seen anywhere this decade in cinema. This is remarkable because we don't know what exactly it is that Thor places his faith. Double more so because we spent the middle part of the film establishing how useless the gods are when it comes to listening to prayers and doing something.

At that moment, it's not about his godhood or wielding mighty weapons or summing thunder and lightning, or smashing his foes or any of the things we might attribute to MCU Thor. It's the transcendental faith he has in love and his acceptance of mortality. I mean, how profound is that? This isn't any old superhero character. This is the re-imagined Norse god of thunder at the end of the universe facing Eternity. And at that existential moment, Thor chooses love and accepts mortality. I'm telling you, I was deeply moved. 

Mimesis

Which brings me to this point about this profundity this film almost stumbles upon, and with which it ambushes us. The film travels backwards through the history of narratives as laid out by Northrop Frye in 'The Anatomy of Criticism'. Historically narratives have gone from myths to epic, then to romance to realism and then comedy. At each step, the protagonist takes on more human dimensions and leaves behind god-like powers and superhero status and our heroes become more human in dimension until we reach figures like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four who are heroic only in a defiant sense. Ultimately you end up with low mimesis where you can have comedy and the narrative deals with people with seemingly minimal power. 

What's curious about Thor: Love and Thunder is how it places a god at the centre of the text and travels back up the mimesis levels. At each step of the way, we follow the character of Thor, Marvel Superhero, trudge back into his ontology towards Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, and ultimately back to his mythic origins. As the narrative unfolds, the Thor from the Marvel Cinema Universe gives way to a contemplation as to the meaning of having a Norse God as a protagonist.  

The film starts off with a buffoon-like Thor. This low mimetic comedy gently gives way to a higher mimesis of Thor as the all-too-human failed romantic partner. Then the film edges up the mimesis ladder once more and addresses the romanticism inherent in the story of Dr Jane Foster and Thor, the Norse god of thunder, as both characters take on heightened powers. The text moves up another level of mimesis once more to edge higher than romance into epic. At the end, Thor ends up in a mimesis of myth where he is placed in front of an abstraction called Eternity and oblivion. It's the one true moment that I believed I was watching a film about a Norse god, and not the comic book. 

The Fractured Family

These films are in the end, very American. And as is customary, the formation of the family is important. Except Thor's family is him as a single dad, raising Gorr's daughter Love. The mother is absent. It is at once a Gen-X description of how sparse a family can be and still remain a functioning family. It's the sign of our times that the Norse god of thunder is a single dad raising somebody else's daughter when all is said and done. 

Across the films, Thor keeps making families only to have them broken up by fate. Even being part of the Avengers was Thor's need for family. Thor is forgiving of Loki because Loki is family. Thor adopts Korg, and summons back Scrapper 142/Valkyrie back into the fold essentially to continue filial roles in his life. 

The assemblage reminds us of the Gen-X upbringing where kids were left to piece things together on their own, making connections as they come. It may be the most Gen-X aspect of the entire MCU where characters come together in almost filial union to compensate for the absence of family in their upbringing. Distant fathers and absent mothers of the Gen-X creators seem to cast a long shadow over the impulse of these characters. 

Beyond The Twilight of the Gods

The complaint has been in each movie Thor seems to have this need to find out who he is and what his role is within the universe. That somehow Thor is being mishandled by the film makers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thor necessarily has to reorient his identity in every film he has appeared. This is because the Thor of myth is immobile and fixed when it comes to psychological dynamic, but a movie character needs to be dynamic. A character 4 movies into their franchise and 7 movies in will have to embrace change within and without or be boring. 

All of the action in this movie takes place after the Twilight of the Gods, Ragnarok. To be sure, the events after 'Thor: Ragnarok' within the MCU include the events of Infinity Wars and End Game. In some ways it shares a lot with the myth of Ragnarok as told by the Scandinavians of yore. The living who endure the ordeal must make a new world and nurture it. This iteration of Thor has indeed endured the twilight of his realm and is close to being the orphaned heir to a lost people. 

In this film, more than any other previous movie featuring the Norse god of thunder, Thor has to process his trauma. To process the trauma, Thor himself has to change, and allow himself human vulnerabilities. He has to be willing to relinquish his godhood and life to embrace the experience of love. It's not a transformation we see through special effects, but a transformation we understand through words and deeds. It is most unexpected in a film full of special effects. 

When you flip that over, you come to see that the character of Thor comes down to us from the myths from the darkest depths of the dark ages. Somehow the myth has endured and even survived the suppression of paganism by the church. In a very strange way, the worship and veneration of Thor continues in our times. It would be passingly foolish to dismiss this film on the basis that Thor is portrayed a buffoon in the first act. Where the film arrives at is surprisingly existentialist and deeply profound.