Civil Society in China

I made a presentation today on the “Historical Origins of European and American Civil Society” to a conference at the university on civil society today. The discussion was tremendously stimulating and taught me a great deal about the development of civil society in China.

Visit to the LiBang Village and the Beijing Fuping (Equal Prosperity) Vocational School

LiBang Village for Migrant Workers*

Beijing Fuping Vocational School Students from Rural Western China

(*A complex issue in China, as the household registration system — a holdover from the fully collectivist period — restricts the right to migrate internally. LiBang allows people from rural areas to seek higher paying jobs in industrial regions and to enjoy residential rights while working; it is a part of the generally more liberal attitude of Fenghua to accept migration from other parts of China.)

A Full Day

I had a full day of meetings today. I will give a lecture tomorrow on the historical origins of European civil society. More photos soon, I hope.

And here are some photos!

University of Peking History Department

More to follow, if I get back and the internet connection is better….

China

I’m having difficulty uploading photos, but I may try later. I’ve had some very good meetings, including at the Li Bang Community in Fenghua (a residential area for immigrant workers, which allows them to travel from rural areas to work in better paid industrial jobs), at the Beijing Fuping (“Equal Prosperity”) Vocational School, and lectures and seminars at the University of Ningbo Law School and the University of Peking History Department. I also visited with a number of people in Hangzhou (former capital city of the Southern Sung Dynasty) and saw the famous West Lake, which is justly considered one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. (Beijing is also quite a sight, or it would be, if you could see much of it through the astonishing air pollution.)

Beijing

What a difference a decade can make! It’s been ten years since I was last in Beijing and — like most of the rest of China — it has changed enormously. I’m convinced that, with time and a number of pressing reforms, China can become one of the most free, progressive, and wealthy societies on the planet. It’s a very exciting place.

A Few China Snippets

I’ve learned one way to distinguish big cities in China from smaller towns. The big cities have canned coffee available in vending machines, but in the smaller towns coffee is very hard to find, indeed. I’m glad I got a stash of cans of Chinese coffee (“Mr Brown’s Coffee,” “36 Francs Heavy Latte,” and “Bernachon,” which features the slogan “I get used to roam by myself, and freely enjoy another world with my favorite coffee….”) in Ningbo. (I did find some at a supermarket in Xi Kou, but finding the supermarket was not easy.)

(The other delicious canned coffee features “Mr. Bond,” an Edwardian European gentleman with an upturned mustache and a pipe, accompanied by the slogan, “”I’m young..I’m coffee.”)

I also managed to get up very early to take my shower and shave, as the water for the city will be shut off today at 6 am to install some new equipment. (I suppose that has to happen occasionally, and 6 am on Sunday morning is probably the best time to do it.)

A Visit to China's Present and Past

A Supermarket in Ningbo

Chaing Kai Shek’s Family Shrine in Xi Kou

Off to China

I will have a busy schedule traveling throughout China. I hope to be able to blog occasionally about my travels.

Home and Away

I’m at home long enough to get reacquainted with my girls (felines, both), do laundry, take care of lots of business, and then hit the road for Denver and then China, for a very full schedule. In the meantime, over a year of work will be unveiled on Wednesday, December 12. Watch Cato.org and this space!

(The conference on legal history and jurisprudence was great. A really nice break from all my other work.)

A Short Break

I got in last night and went straight to a conference on Hayek’s thought and the common law in Alexandria, Virginia. After a 2 hour taxi ride through the awful traffic, I got there as the dinner was starting. Today’s been a very enlightening discussion of various works in jurisprudence and legal history. Tomorrow will be more of the same, based on discussion of a number of classic works in legal theory by Jerome Frank, Karl Llewellyn, Felix Cohen, and Lon Fuller. (In between sessions, I’ve been on the phone with colleagues who are working on some very exciting new programs that we’ll unveil next week.)

Conference on Bruno Leoni

My presentation at the Istituto Bruno Leoni
conference on Leoni’s thought

The conference hall at the Collegio Carlo Alberto - Moncalieri (Torino)

(I addressed four topics in my presentation: 1) Leoni’s formative influence on the early developments of law and economics and public choice economics; 2) Leoni’s anticipation of some later developments in those fields; 3) Leoni’s on-going influence in current research topics; 4) areas of institutional development (and design) where Leoni’s insights and thinking are sorely missed. Here is a comment I co-authored on Leoni’s thought some years ago.)

Off to Torino

After unconscionably sleeping in, I have to rush to pack, check out, and go through the Moscow traffic to the airport for my AlItalia flight to Milan.

Moscow Presentation

L-R: Andrei Illarionov, Tom G. Palmer, Anya Krasinskaya

Pics from our presentation to the Club 2015 meeting in Moscow this evening.

From Milwaukee to Moscow

After some really enjoyable meetings and lectures in Milwaukee, I made the long trip to Moscow. After a long trip through the terrible Moscow traffic, I got to my hotel with 30 minutes to shave, shower, and clean up before going out to dinner at Flat 44 (a very nice and cozy cafe, bar, and restaurant where a lot of the classical liberal intellectuals meet) with graduates of the Cato.ru 2007 Summer School. I’m rushing to finish my Powerpoint presentation for a group this evening. Then I’m off tomorrow to Milan.

A Few African Photos

The Cato Team Before the African Resource
Bank Meeting in Tanzania

Franklin Cudjoe, Editor of the forthcoming
AfricanLiberty.org, addressing the African Resource Bank meeting

My Presentation at the African Resource
Bank on “Globalization and Cultural Identity”

A Training Session on Media Strategies
for the CPHR Team at the Tembo Hotel in
Zanzibar

On the Road Again

Milwaukee, Moscow, Milan, London.

I’ll be on the road a bit for a variety of presentations, lectures, conferences, and meetings. (I’ll spend much of December in China.)

The Old Poland and the New

This corresponds to my own memories of visiting Communist Poland:

I remember a bleak time in Poland when the economy was so maddeningly out of touch with the needs of its people that anyone lucky enough to own a car would remove their windshield wipers at night and take them inside. In their command economy — oblivious to the laws of supply and demand — some official forgot to order wipers and consequently, they weren’t for sale anywhere. Inspired by a hungry black market, thieves would work late into the night snapping them up.

Many Americans remember Poland as bleak and rundown — full of rusting factories and smoggy cities. I remember a time when the air was so polluted it turned my hanky black the day I entered the country. Glum locals used to stand patiently in line at a soda stand to sip a drink from the same tin cup tethered to the stand by a rusty chain.

I can’t vouch for the comments on the visit to a milk bar, but I can say that Poland has certainly changed!

Years ago I gave a lecture at the University of Lublin and invited the participants out to dinner. Over 40 people came, so we went to “the nicest restaurant in town,” at the state-owned Urania hotel, mainly famous among foreigners as a place where the state pimped Polish girls to visitors who could pay in hard currency. Dinner came to a little over a dollar a person (not counting the five dollars I gave the terrible “rock band” to stop playing and go home, so we could talk). Each participant was introduced and stood up and bowed. Many of the introductions were like this: “Professor So-and-So teaches linguistics/history/philosophy/etc. and was for 17 years in prison, first under the Nazis, then three times under the Communists.” When I asked the chair of the faculty if she came to the restaurant often, she blanched and informed me that, no, it was really very, very expensive and people like her would only go for special events, like weddings and fiftieth wedding anniversaries.

(I can’t help adding that on my first visit to Prague, I was offered a great treat — a glass of Coca Cola! I was not that enthusiastic, but I told my host, “Sure, that would be nice.” In the pub they dunked a dirty glass into much dirtier water, so it came out nasty and greasy, and then poured in the coke, which had little spots of oil floating on the surface. I somehow managed not to drink it. That was quite mild compared to Communist Albania, where I managed to throw up after almost every meal, an experience I had in some other socialist countries, as well, where the food was sometimes actually slippery from the bacteria.)

Tanzania, Hamburg, "Freedom Properly Understood," and Back

I am in Hamburg and quite exhausted, partially because I seem to have gotten something rather nasty in Tanzania. (The hospital here was noncommital, but they said to keep taking the medications and I should be ok.)

My talk to the Liberal International meeting here was, I think, well received and I enjoyed the comments from the panelists. Here is the full version, which I finished while suffering from the heat and humidity in Tanzania (I only got them to fix the AC in the room on the third night) after sessions of the African Resource Bank: “Freedom Properly Understood.”

Our Africa trip was very inspiring in a number of ways. It was our first meeting of Cato’s Africa team and I am optimistic that we will be able to have a positive impact in the continent. I have known and worked with all but one of them before, and I had a chance to meet for the first time one of our new colleagues from Ghana. All are serious, impressive, and very sharp. In addition to our two Ghanian colleagues, members of Cato’s Portuguese, French, and Arabic teams were also there, as well as my colleagues David Archer and Nicole Kurokawa, and all are pulling together to create a sound continent-wide libertarian program. (We hope to include a Swahili element, as well.)

After the African Resource Bank meeting (where I spoke on “Globalization and Cultural Identity”), we had a team meeting for Cato’s Center for Promotion of Human Rights in Zanzibar . At that meeting, we went over strategies and had a very valuable presentation and training session on media outreach and publication strategies and techniques led by our Arabic team members, Fadi Haddadin and Ghaleb Hijazi. It was followed by a walk through Stone Town and dinner at the waterside restaurant dedicated to the late singer Freddy Mercury, who, it turns out, was born in Zanzibar.

The trip to Zanzibar was on the fast boat, which was reasonably tolerable. The two television screens in the economy class section showed a really dreadful movie about “Lake Placid,” Maine, in which a GIANT crocodile was overturning boats and eating people, including biting them very graphically in half, with body parts all over, etc., etc. Not really a great movie for a boat ride, but it was one of the few stable objects on which I could focus to avoid getting sick, so I saw most of it.

Well, the same movie was playing on the way back. I had figured it was a broadcast of some sort, but no, it was what the crew had chosen as appropriate entertainment for the trip. The trip back was truly awful and almost everyone was terribly sick. Only David, our cheerful English participant, seemed unfazed by it. The rest of us were miserable — really miserable. (The full-screen pictures of human entrails being eaten by crocodiles did not help.) One of our team members (not to be named) staggered out and sprawled on the deck in misery, only to find himself propped on the coffin (occupied) that was being sent back to the mainland for burial. That evidently didn’t help his spirits. It seems that all (except, again, for David) were sick for a long time after.

We have big plans for publishing, broadcasting, webcasting, and teaching about liberty in Africa. 2008 should be a big year for African libertarianism.

On the Road for a Bit

Tanzania and Germany….

Back from Brussels

I’ve had a series of useful meetings in Brussels with our European friends and partners. The Capitalist Ball (sponsored by the Centre for the New Europe) was fun and a good chance to see old friends (some I hadn’t seen in 10 years) from Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany, and other countries. The Adriatic Institute’s programs were quite interesting and led to some useful meetings with people from the European parliament.

The Capitalist Ball last night was picketed by a group of wacky communists who announced that the ball contained “Europe’s richest people.” The claim was bizarre, as the room was full of advocates of free market capitalism, but as far as I could tell, no or almost no “capitalists” at all. Everyone I met was a think tank staffer, member of a liberal youth or student group, member of parliament, staff member for a member of parliament, a professor, or a journalist. I doubt that many people in the room were “poor” (it did cost fifty euros to attend, after all), but I also didn’t meet any “rich” people, either (except in the sense that everyone in an advanced market economy is rich in comparison to people in non-market economies).

I’m off to the US shortly. No more fantastic Belgian beer for while……(except for the special bottles of Trappisten beer I was given by friends)…..

Back in DC and Busy, Busy, Busy

I’m back in DC, where I’ve been love-bombed by my two feline friends (after a bit of lecturing for being away so long) and busy with meetings galore.

Photos from the Opening Dinner at the Cato.ru Summer School*

Cato.ru Editor Anya Krasinskaya

The Proprietor of this Website

And here are some of the most important participants, who represent the future of freedom:

*More available here. (Anyone interested in helping to ensure that we can run a similar summer school next year, please drop me a note! You could sponsor a student for a modest sum.)

Budapest, Beautiful City

The Hungarian Parliament, on the Pest side of Budapest

I’ve had some good meetings, including dinner with Dr. Lajos Bokros, former finance minister of Hungary and now professor of economics and chief operating officer at Central European University. (Lajos spoke brilliantly at the October 2006 Cato conference on “Freedom, Commerce, and Peace: A Regional Agenda.”)

Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that it has been so long since I was last in Budapest, which is one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world. (The food is also great, especially when eaten surrounded by the sounds of one of the most wonderful languages spoken anywhere.)

Back in Buda*

I traveled today from Alushta to Budapest and have had a wonderful reunion with old friends I had not seen since 1995. Ivan is now advisor to the mayor of Budapest; Katalin is a practicing doctor; and their son, whom I last saw when he was very little, is now a very intelligent and promising young man. And….Budapest, a city of which I am very fond, has become much, much, much wealthier than I remember it.

Just as I was getting used to the special sounds of Russian and Ukrainian, I heard again the beautiful tones of Hungarian. (I tried to learn it years ago and made a little progress; I found it not as hard as Russian, but quite challenging, nonetheless.)

*Regarding the title, I am staying on the Buda side of Budapest, with — thanks to the great deals on Priceline — a grand view of the parliament from the front and of the citadel from the back.

Norberg in Crimea

Johan Norberg did, as always, a wonderful job (with translation) in his presentation to the Cato.ru Russian-language summer school on “Global Capitalism and Personal Freedom.” He autographed the Russian edition of his book and he’ll give another talk at the banquet tonight, when we will present diplomas to the participants, give prizes to the writers of the best essays in the Cato.ru 2007 essay contest, and then — a surprise to the participants — fireworks over the Black Sea. We’ve had several faculty meetings to plan how to build on this successful seminar and adapt and improve it for 2008.

Cato.ru Pics

I ain’t much of a photographer, but here are a few pics I snapped from the Cato.ru seminar in Crimea:

Piotr Kaznacheev explaining the case for drug legalization

A Student Posing a Question to Kaznacheev

Kakha Bendukidze Exploring the Frontiers of Libertarianism

Students Defending Their Views During Kakha’s Lively Presentation*

*Kakha is, as I learned, a wonderful teacher. He challenged, cajoled, joked, and got the students to think about why they believe one thing or another. It was remarkable to witness.

Ukraine Russian-Language Libertarian Conference

I’ve been working on my talks today for the Cato.ru Summer School that opens tomorrow at the More Resort in Alushta, Crimea. The people at the resort are very, very nice to this generally mute attendee (none of the resort staff have more than a few words of non-Russian, and my spoken Russian is limited to trying to be polite, asking for coffee, etc.), the Black Sea swimming is pleasant, and the food is great. (The prices are generally low, except…..when I tried to buy some clothes to replace the lost luggage I’m hoping someday to get, I found that Crimean-resort-clothing-prices seem more suitable for oligarchs than for normal tourists, with a polo shirt going for over $200, so I settled for some shorts, t-shirts, and sandals I bought along the beach, as well as a light shirt that features an “A” in a circle and the English words, “Punk,” “Disorderli,” and “Anarchy” written vertically on the front; the suit case with my suits and formal shirts happily did arrive.)

I’m no photographer, but I snapped some shots of the view of the Black Sea Promenade from the little restaurant where I had lunch with some of our team yesterday. The coastline is more beautiful than that little shot suggests.

In addition to Russians, we will have good attendance from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, and some attendees from other areas of the post-Soviet space.

Off to Ukraine

I gave my last talk at the Summer University on “Humane Dimensions of Globalization,” which dealt with issues of cultural identity, personal identity, and war and peace. I’m going to crash for a few hours before getting up insanely early to go with my friend Nouh El Harmouzi to the airport to fly to Ukraine.

Summer University of the New Economics

I’m in Provence for meetings, consultations, networking, and the Summer University of the New Economics, before which I will make a presentation on “The Humane Dimensions of Globalization,” which will deal with cultural identity, personal identity, and peace.

Albania's Unusual (and Dying) Tradition

I remember reading about Albania’s rural tradition of women who are accepted socially as men years ago. Women — often in families lacking a patriarch — would take the status of men and would acquire all of the privileges men enjoyed in a rather patriarchal society. The Washington Post had an interesting article on the topic today: “The Sacrifices of Albania’s ‘Sworn Virgins’.”

It’s quite a story. If you’re interested in the folklore of a very interesting and unusual country, I recommend reading two very colorful (if not always scholarly or entirely reliable) books by two rather daring ladies who visited the country early in the 20th century: Edith Durham’s High Albania and Rose Wilder Lane’s The Peaks of Shala. (The latter has been long out of print; I own rather old editions of both and enjoyed them immensely after returning from Albania.)

I’ve not been back to Albania, which I would like to revisit soon. (I flew to Tirana from Budapest as the Albanian Communist state was collapsing and arranged for translation into Albanian and publication of Paul Heyne’s textbook The Economic Way of Thinking and other works. As preparation, I managed to learn a fair amount of conversational Albanian, or “Eagle,” as the language is known; the old communist-era textbook and tapes I used had exchanges such as “Question: Ketu eshte kafeneja? [Is the cafe here?] Answer: Jo, kjo eshte nevojtorja. [No, this is the public lavatory.]” Another bit, which has also stayed with me — and which turned out to be quite useful when I was there, was “Sillmeni mish