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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
read about China’s national amnesia!
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Yan Lianke believes China is remembering to forget.
In a new piece in The Dial, Lianke writes, “Is it not the case that those Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s — and who now are in their twenties and thirties — have truly become a generation without memory? Who is it that forced them to forget? How were they made to forget? What responsibility do those of us who are older, and who still retain our memories, have for this younger generation?” The whole country, Lianke asserts, is adhering to a policy of selective memory — which is to say, a policy of forgetting.
Lianke takes the reader through historical reasons for forgetting — like a series of revolutionary movements — but ultimately decides, “Amnesia is not a special characteristic of everyone’s symptoms and ideology; rather, it is a necessary outcome of a national strategy and a social structure. Its most effective vector is through regulations and other methods covering an ideological restriction of speech and the use of power to cut off all conduits through which memory can be preserved — including history books, textbooks, literary works, and other forms of cultural expression.”
This is not specific to a single nation, but rather can apply to any nation under a dictator or centralized state power. Lianke ends by thinking of how the nation might begin to remember again.
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If a Tree Falls
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Freelance essayist Astra Lincoln writes for Noema about the discovery of a tree that could change how we think about forests and climate change.
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In 2016, ecologist Catharine White discovered what she thought was a whitebark pine in British Columbia, 400 miles away from their closest known habitat. “To find one here would be the scientific equivalent of a miracle. It would mean the species had found a way to evade the blister rust and beetles; maybe it had a fighting chance to survive,” Lincoln writes. But “With no cell reception or guidebook, it was impossible to know whether the mystery trees were whitebark pines. All White could say for certain was that these trees were unlike the others.”
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It wasn’t until 2023 that a group, armed with White’s recollection and one photo of the tree, set out to find it again. They couldn’t. And the pinecones in the photo weren’t quite right. Today, “Whether someone still thinks there are whitebark pines on Red Mountain is less a matter of science than one of personal faith … For some, there may be comfort in imagining that we are on the cusp of mapping out every possible variable. But for others, it is preferable to think that an abundance of confounding, mysterious factors remains beyond our comprehension.”
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Voting Rights and Wrongs
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In Hyphen Online, Samir Jeraj writes about the United Kingdom’s upcoming local elections — and potentially troubling voter identification rules that went into place last year.
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“Muslim pressure and pro-democracy groups have warned that thousands of voters across England and Wales could find themselves disenfranchised from May’s local elections owing to a lack of public awareness about the requirement to bring photo ID to ballot stations,” writes Jeraj, adding that, per the group The Muslim Vote, ethnic minorities and the working class are likelier be turned away because of new voter ID laws.
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This has been borne out by studies. “Research published last November by the Department for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities found that those most likely to have heard nothing about the requirement were people who rarely or never vote at local elections (18%), ethnic minorities (12%,) and younger adults (11% of those aged 18-34),” Jeraj writes. Campaigners also say that the rules discriminate against the young, who have fewer options for identification (the 60+ London Oyster Photocard is accepted as proof, but the 18+ Student Oyster card is not).
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Quick Vacation … from Democracy
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Democratic backsliding changes many things in a person’s life — including, maybe, how they vacation. In a new paper, David R. Miller and Serena D. Smith, “(Small D-democratic) vacation, all I ever wanted? The effect of democratic backsliding on leisure travel in the American states,” published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, sought to examine exactly that.
Vacationing, the authors explain, is transitory. That means that, in looking at domestic leisure travel destinations, they are able to isolate individuals’ values in preference formation from the impact the policies would have on their lives if they actually had to live under those policies.
The authors used pre-registered conjoint and vignette survey experiments. The former allowed them “to observe how respondents utilize information about backsliding when embedded in a multidimensional decision-making context alongside other factors relevant to tourism.”
For the latter, they had respondents look specifically at Florida, which had recently made it more difficult to vote by mail, and highlighted the backsliding, to “assess how emphasizing backsliding in the real-world political milieu affects behavior.”
Effects in the second study were more modest than in the first, though, on the other hand, the second study added in a “real-world political milieu,” and thus constituted a harder test of expectations.
The two studies, taken together, led them to the conclusion that Americans — and Democrats in particular — “express less interest in vacationing in states that recently adopted backsliding policies” (other recent studies have found that a state’s adoption of backsliding policies will make Democrats, but not Republicans, less likely to relocate there).
This means that individuals will make decisions based on backsliding not only when it impacts their lives, but also when it impacts the lives of others. “States,” the authors write, “should be conscious that backsliding not only discourages organizations from holding events in their jurisdictions but also deters individuals from traveling there.”
The authors describe this as a modest sanction, and one that may not actually deter backsliding behavior, as it makes up less than 1% of backsliding states’ gross domestic product. Additionally, and in a way that is, as the authors put it, “normatively troubling,” their research found that concern about democratic backsliding fell along partisan lines.
The authors speculate that this may be because these policies are mostly driven by Republican elites, or because Democrats and Republicans have different understandings of democracy. In any case, they write, “Uncovering the sources of these dissimilar responses and discerning how to encourage all Americans to uphold core institutions and norms are essential for preserving democracy.”
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Hanan Zaffar and Shaheen Abdulla wrote about Bollywood films that align with the politics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Such films are surging as Indians head to the polls. They cited experts who believe that the films are part of a strategic effort to boost support for the prime minister and his right-wing party. As the authors put it, “These movies present polarizing narratives. Many include Islamophobic themes and anti-leftist sentiments and frequently deploy historical revisionism, distorting events and personalities to align with Hindu nationalist narratives.” Additionally, many of the films are “helmed or financed” by figures associated with Modi’s ruling party, the BJP.
Jessica Sciarone argued that extreme misogyny encourages mass violence, and that the development could worsen. Earlier this month, a man stabbed and killed six people, five of whom were women, in Sydney, Australia. The police commissioner said that this was not an act of terror or ideologically motivated. But, Sciarone asks, if the killer “only sought out women and attacked them based on their gender, why shouldn’t we call it a terrorist attack? And why shouldn’t we say it is indeed ideologically motivated?” Violence against women needs to be taken more seriously, she argued — and, yes, needs to be considered a toxic and dangerous ideology.
Jeff Lunden wrote about “Patriots,” a new play on Broadway about the 1990s in Russia, at the center of which is Boris Berzovsky, the man who helped make, and was unmade by, Russia as it is today. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Berezovsky. The play was created by the maker of The Crown, Peter Morgan, and is directed by Rupert Goold, who likened the play to Shakespeare: “Maybe the central theme of the whole play is loyalty and betrayal and different ideas of that; betrayal in some way being the opposite of patriotism.”
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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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