What's in a name?

Quite a bit, when the name is that of an important government policy document, and when that name is missing a phrase near and dear to the former prime minister's heart.

So suggests the Asahi Shimbun in its editorial on the Abe government's recently announced 2007 fiscal policy plan.

Unlike the title of the annual fiscal policy plans produced under Koizumi's watch — "Basic policies for economic and fiscal management and structural reform" — the Abe's Cabinet's program is called simply "Basic policies for economic and fiscal management." And so, concludes Asahi, "the flag of 'structural reform' has vanished."

To Asahi, this is yet another sign, perhaps the clearest yet, that the Abe Cabinet has discarded the Koizumi Cabinet's "no growth without reform" motto and the policy perspective behind it. The policies in this program timid — a hodgepodge of vague "pro-growth" policies including more funding for universities, "investigating" economic partnership agreements with the EU and the US, "drastic [but unspecified] tax reform," and a ludicrous promise to double Japan's OECD-worst productivity in five years (see Ken Worsley on this point in particular), packed into fifty-two pages, the longest such report since the government first began drafting them. Not only is there no overall vision beyond the Abe program, but the lack of detail leaves room for bureaucrats to muscle back in, as Asahi noted when a first draft was issued to the public.

Yomiuri, for its part, also noted the lack of details in the program — and a lack of priorities. At the same time, however, Yomiuri seems to give the prime minister the benefit of the doubt, gently chiding Abe for not giving enough details now, but assuming he'll get around to it eventually.

Considering the point I raised in this post earlier today, this damp squib of a document is not just another dull, useless policy report issued by the government — it is a sign of the utter failure of imagination that characterizes policy making throughout the developed world.

Does Abe have nothing to worry about come July?

From the English-language blogosphere's resident Abe apologist comes another post arguing that all is well in Abe's beautiful Japan.

Hey, Ampontan, do you do this pro bono, or is there some kind of secret yarase blogger program run out of the Kantei? If the latter, is it too late to sign up?

I think, if the price was right, I could write posts with titles like "Let us all thank our Dear Leader for making Japan so beautiful," "Never stop being so gorgeous Japan," and "How did you get so gosh darn beautiful in the first place?"

Scratch that. I would rather ask pointed questions than make excuses, even if it doesn't pay nearly as well.

Seriously though, does Ampontan really think that this whole sordid Matsuoka affair is going to vanish overnight? This is unprecedented in the political history of modern Japan: a sitting cabinet minister committing suicide, as investigators began to uncover gross misuse of his ministry to favor political supporters. While it remains too soon to tell what impact it will have on July's elections, it is also too soon to wave it off by suggesting that Matsuoka's death will "close the book" on the seiji to kane issue of which he was emblematic.

I love Ampontan's alternative: pocketbook issues are what matter, so let's all stop paying attention to the massive corruption — and the government's alleged role in covering it up — and talk about how Japan's economy is growing again. No mention, of course, about the lingering doubts about the depth and breadth of the recovery (Ken Worsley's Japan Economy News blog has documented the bevy of mixed signals on the "longest sustained expansion" in the postwar period). This just doesn't hold water. And Ampontan doesn't even ask the obvious question of whether the Japanese people, the people who will, you know, be voting in July, are actually benefiting from The Longest Sustained Expansion in Postwar Japan. [Ed. - Laying it on a bit thick, aren't we?]

Arguably that's why the pensions scandal — which Ampontan also seems to dismiss — is important. When people are economically insecure, they tend to worry about reports that their source of income may be disrupted due to government incompetence. Is it really appropriate to doubt that the pensions scandal might be important in a country in which the percentage of over-65s in the population is set to rise sharply?

All of which goes to say that it's impossible to say at this point what issue will move this election. In Japan, more than in the US, all politics is local (to use a quote from American politics that it's even more appropriate for Japan than the quote used by Ampontan for the title of his post), making it difficult to tell which issues that seem important at the national level will filter down to the local level and affect voter behavior.

But that is no excuse for saying that all is well because the economy is growing: there are plenty of reasons for Japan's voters to "throw the bums out," even if it is unclear whether they will opt to do so (another topic of discussion entirely).

Two looks at modern China

Two recent articles provide an excellent look at the bundle of contradictions that is modern China.

First, the Atlantic's James Fallows, currently residing in China, presents his "Four Cautions and Two Mysteries" about rapidly changing China. His look is largely limited to urban China, but it is still worthwhile, because Fallows also was on hand when Japan emerged in the 1980s as a contender, and has a number of useful comparisons with Japan's period of explosive growth. The picture that Fallows paints is of a China that has more in common with the United States than any other country -- a point I made in my contribution to this book. China, like the US, is a continental country, and like the US in the heady days of its industrialization in the late nineteenth century, its rise is profoundly impacting its own society, the surrounding region, and the world. A continental power has unleashed its boundless energy, and the world is being remade. That is why I defy anyone to predict what China will look like in the near-future.

Accordingly, in time the US and China may look across the Pacific and see a close friend in the other. At present, beyond the Taiwan Straits, there is no issue in US-China relations that could result in war between the two. There are points of friction, certainly, but nothing that would unleash the "guns of August," so to speak. In fact, as Fallows implies, culturally speaking the US and China may be far more natural allies than the US and Japan:

One reason why Americans typically find China less “foreign” than Japan is that in Japan the social controls are internalized, through years of training in one’s proper role in a group, whereas China seems like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they think they might get caught. As I took an airport bus from downtown Tokyo to the distant Narita International Airport for the trip to Shanghai, the squadron of luggage handlers who had loaded the bus lined up, bowed in unison, and chanted safe-travel wishes to the bus as it departed. When I arrived in Shanghai, I saw teenaged airport baggage handlers playfully slapping each other and then being told by the foreman to get back to work. In Japan, the controls are built in; in China, they appear to be bolted on.

There's a lot to unpack in this quote, but, to be brief, Fallows points to a fundamental cultural divide between Japan on the one hand, and China and the US on the other. Japanese institutions have been shaped by limits -- of land, of resources, of people. While this argument is perhaps overexaggerated, not least by the Japanese (an example of Nihonjinron), it is significant when comparing the Japanese experience to that of China and the US, both of whom have been shaped by bigness and plenty (Maoism aside, which for China was a masochistic ideology that essentially entailed renouncing China's continental advantages). The Chinese people, in general, strike me as more entrepreneurial than the Japanese, which is hardly surprising because to me entrepreneurialism is a natural reaction to seemingly limitless possibilities.

As such, the more the Communist Party steps out of the way, the easier China and the US will be able to cooperate, a scenario that has kept many in Kasumigaseki up at night ever since Nixon and Kissinger sprang the opening to China on Tokyo without prior warning.

The second essay worth reading is from the London Review of Books, by Indian writer Pankaj Mishra (hat tip to a correspondent in Beijing). Mishra's view is more nuanced than Fallows', and in many ways more grim. For example:

The old heart of the city has been razed to meet the needs and desires of this new elite. Luxury villas have sprung up to accommodate expatriate businessmen, senior Party officials and the nouveaux riches. With their bewilderingly mixed facades – American colonial-style decking, neoclassical columns, baroque plasterwork, Tudor beams –they symbolise a city under fresh occupation by the transnational elite of the rich and powerful.

Others make do with what they have. One afternoon, soon after arriving in Shanghai, I travelled on one of the elevated expressways that lead from downtown to the clusters of high-rise housing estates built for those expelled from their neighbourhoods of longtang alleys and lanes. Rust and grime have already tainted these buildings, the lifts don’t work, there is no water pressure, the residents walk up and down the gloomy stairs carrying plastic buckets, but the inhabitants of this premature decay still seemed privileged, compared to the residents of the remoter suburbs, crammed in subdivided houses with enclosed balconies and a view of oil-blackened dust lanes and exposed drains.

Much of the essay comes from a conversation Mishra had with liberal Chinese intellectual Zhu Xueqin, and the picture that emerges is of a China that, loosed from the moorings of Maoism, is now adrift on a (polluted) sea of ideological rootlessness, with a number of pretenders to intellectual "hegemony" (to use a favorite word of one of my Cambridge chums) but no clear winner, meaning that soulless consumerism has filled the void. Arguably, this is not all that different from Japan, which turned to world-beating economic growth and consumerism after emerging from its own romance with a murderous ideology (although, to split hairs, Maoism was much more coherent as an ideology than that of Japan's militarist government). But it is not pretty, and its consequences for the world are far greater than those of Japan's postwar modernization ever were.