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      What Ice Cube's collaboration with Trump – and critique of Democrats – reveals | Malaika Jabali

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      Throughout this election season, the rapper Ice Cube has assumed a self-bestowed mantle as spokesperson for Black politics. He has urged that Black Americans make demands before guaranteeing anyone their vote. “Be skeptical of anybody telling you to just vote … and not get anything for your vote,” he said on Instagram in September. “You vote because your community is getting something.”Last week, Donald Trump’s senior adviser Katrina Pierson announced that Ice Cube worked with the Trump campaign to develop their “Platinum Plan” for Black America, unleashing a furious wave of public criticism and accusations. At the core of the backlash is the suspicion that Cube’s commentary and his chief political initiative, the Contract with Black America, is less about promoting a Black agenda and more about suppressing Black voter turnout for the Democratic party, which Black Americans overwhelmingly support.The accusation compelled Ice Cube to appear on a number of media outlets to clarify his position. “I’m willing to work with both teams, but I’m just working with whoever is willing to work with me,” Ice Cube said on CNN. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin, Cube said “for us not to engage with both sides of the aisle to fix what I think is an American problem … is not going to help us in the end.”’Small government’ won’t fix the mess that neoliberal public policies have created for Black peopleThis controversy reveals several things about American politics, and specifically the sad state of political affairs for Black people. For starters, the political environment is so fraught – and voters are so antsy about another four years of a Trump presidency – that any appearance of impropriety will raise alarm bells for many Black Americans. But that instinct has the effect of silencing even mild criticism of Joe Biden or the Democratic party. We’re closer and closer to the election, and two-party tribalism is in overdrive, nuance is mostly absent, and commentators are falling into their expected camps. Conservatives gleefully use Cube’s message to prop up Trump. Liberals largely dismiss Ice Cube as a race traitor without sitting with his concerns. And Ice Cube defenders reflect little on Cube’s botched political strategy or the market-based, libertarian-esque philosophy he’s proposing for problems that require radical solutions and wholesale government intervention.The fact of the matter is, Black Americans defending and criticizing Ice Cube both have valid concerns. Neither major political party is working for Black Americans economically. The Black-white wealth gap is alarming, with white households holding 11.5 times more wealth than Black ones, and the gap continues to widen. Black homeownership is at a record low. More Black people are being imprisoned than in the 1960s. And both parties have contributed to these policy failures while letting big business off the hook for practices that exploit and harm our communities. This includes encouraging manufacturing jobs to leave for cheaper, deunionized labor in sectors that were disproportionately occupied by Black men; failing to adequately regulate big banks who profited from subprime mortgages targeted to Black communities; failing to assist Black Americans when the economy crashed on their backs; and enabling corporations to make astronomical profits off the disproportionately Black and Latino workers working in essential jobs during Covid.As long as we’re stuck in a two-party system backed by big corporations, big money donors and financial institutions, Black people will never find a reprieve. We’ll simply jump from one party to the next, or out of the ballot booths altogether. We’ll frame our political power solely on the terms of what party leaders promise and consistently fail to provide. We’ll seek whatever meager concessions we can muster – taskforces, committee leadership promotions, and an assortment of patronage jobs – that ultimately leave many Black people disappointed and disillusioned.It’s the disappointment I saw in multiple Ice Cube interviews. It’s the resignation I’ve heard from working-class Black Americans all over the country in my reporting. Thus, given the acute economic crisis for Black Americans, it behooves anyone speaking on their behalf to have their shit together, to put it bluntly. We cannot afford anything less. Anyone with basic political instincts should know that any association with a white nationalist-sympathizing president could and should significantly turn off Black voters. Cube’s strategy has heaved sound policy ideas into a tribalist, corporate media meat grinder, rendering the original message unrecognizable. It reduces the 22 pages of (mostly) impressive and sweeping policy prescriptions in Cube’s Contract with Black America – proposals such as baby bonds, a jobs guarantee, and freeing people imprisoned for marijuana possession – to a two-page “platinum” talking point for Trump’s lackeys.If Ice Cube wants to reduce the Black agenda to a mere election-season transaction – without considering the more fundamental relation between Black liberation and anticapitalism – he should at least get his basic business sense right. There are some parties you just don’t negotiate with, because the starting terms are too far apart. Donald Trump comes from a party that promotes small government and normalizes white supremacy. A transformative economic agenda requires large, government investments in low-income and working-class communities. This runs counter to the entire Republican trickle-down economic platform of the past several decades. The present Republican administration has yet to provide basic economic programs en masse in an election year for millions of Americans suffering from the financial fallout of Covid-19, many of whom are Trump supporters themselves. It is beyond fantastical to believe Trump, or any Republican president, will advance programs to Black Americans that he doesn’t provide his own followers.But most of Ice Cube’s liberal critics fail to acknowledge that the Democratic party has fared little better. Though his strategy and conclusions are miscalculated, his description of the problems are not. The Republican party has moved right and dragged Democrats with them; the result is that Democrats have spent much of the past several decades working overtime to outflank Republicans on tough-on-crime policies, austerity politics, deregulation and privatization, and it’s that school of thought of which Biden has been a longtime instructor.“Small government” won’t fix the mess which exploitative business practices and neoliberal public policies have created for Black people. What it will likely take are independent voters, a mass movement and progressive organized labor – which cannot be corralled a few months before an election – to make demands for radical, systemic change. This is serious work that, at the least, requires consistent commitment and being in community with organizers and policy experts who have been thinking and working towards those demands for more than a season. Anything less will fail the very communities people like Ice Cube claim to represent.Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More

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      in US Politics

      Demi Lovato has made the most damning protest song of the Trump era

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      How do you solve a problem like Donald? Like Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher before him, President Trump has been a great catalyst for protest in the arts but his villainy is so absurd and flamboyant that it is hard to attack him without stating the obvious. Assaulting him head-on is like staring into the sun. It is no surprise that his most effective satirist is the comedian Sarah Cooper, who lip-syncs to his own words rather than writing her own.In music, to sing about the US these past four years is to allude to the elephant in the White House. Trump’s influence is often oblique: his presence seeps into records like poison gas. In songs such as Childish Gambino’s This Is America, Kendrick Lamar’s XXX, the 1975’s Love It If We Made It or Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Pa’lante, he is mentioned briefly or not at all. So who would have predicted that one of the most powerful songs about Trump – Demi Lovato’s Commander in Chief – would come so late in the day, and be so direct?It’s not that it’s unusual for a mainstream pop artist to speak out at the risk of losing fans. The likes of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have been moved to take political positions and even channel them into songs, such as Swift’s Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince or Lana Del Rey’s Looking for America. Lovato, who describes herself as “a queer, Hispanic woman”, has previously been vocal about issues such as mental health and body image: her most recent hit was called OK Not to Be OK. Still, there is something wonderfully unexpected and bold about the moral clarity of her latest song that she debuted at the Billboard music awards last night. I’ve listened to nothing else since.Produced by Eren Cannata and Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas, the song sounds like a heartbreak ballad. In a sense that’s what it is, as it expresses the emotional pain of the Trump era, and 2020 in particular. While it’s not without lyrical flourishes (“Fighting fires with flyers and praying for rain”), it is largely plain-spoken and direct, conveying grief, resilience and disgust. Lovato has said that she has often thought of writing Trump a letter, or sitting down with him to ask him why he behaves the way he does, but that a song opens these questions up to everybody: “I’m not the only one / That’s been affected and resented every story you’ve spun / And I’m a lucky one / ’Cause there are people worse off that have suffered enough.” In the arrestingly stark video, a diverse range of Americans lip-sync the song before Lovato takes over for the final minute.Commander in Chief opens with a wholesome, relatable line about the values that we are supposedly taught (unless our father is Fred Trump) when we are young. It’s not really partisan. Lovato the protest singer is an exasperated everywoman, interrogating Trump’s failings as a human being as much as a politician: his corruption, his vanity, his carelessness, his sadism. The line, “Do you get off on pain?” reminds me of Adam Serwer’s classic 2018 Atlantic essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. She gets to the fundamental incomprehensibility of Trump’s callousness: “Honestly, if I did the things you do, I couldn’t sleep, seriously.” The gospel-elevated bridge rises above the president’s toxic headspace and turns to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: “We’ll be in the streets while you’re bunkering down.” The final line of the chorus (“How does it feel to still be able to breathe?”) references both Covid-19, which has killed more than 215,000 Americans on Trump’s watch, and the BLM slogan “I can’t breathe”. More

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      in UK Politics

      Liam Gallagher, Ian Rankin, Sue Perkins and more condemn Rishi Sunak for appearing to suggest arts workers ‘find other jobs’

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      A number of prominent musicians, actors, TV presenters and authors have condemned Rishi Sunak for appearing to suggest unemployed arts workers should retrain and find other jobs.The chancellor of the exchequer caused uproar for his vague remarks about what people working in the arts should do as the industry struggles amid the coronavirus pandemic. “I can’t pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were doing at the beginning of this crisis,” he said.”That’s why we’ve put a lot of resource into trying to create new opportunities.”He told ITV News that the government is “trying to do everything we can to protect as many jobs as possible” but admitted unemployment was “likely to increase”.Read moreAsked whether he was suggesting some of the UK’s “fabulous musicians and artists and actors” should get another job, Sunak said “as in all walks of life everyone’s having to adapt”.“Can things happen in exactly the way they did? No. But everyone is having to find ways to adapt and adjust to the new reality,” he said.The ITV article was later updated to state: “This article has changed to reflect that the Chancellor’s comments were about employment generally and not specifically about the music or arts sector.”However, Sunak’s comments still caused anger from those working in the struggling arts sector.“There you have it. Govt throws culture – an area where the U.K. has real global influence – under the bus,” tweeted Labour MP Pat McFadden.Musician and political activist Jermain Jackman echoed his comments, writing: “This Conservative Government has just thrown, not just musicians but every single person that works in the creative industry, under the bus.”Blur drummer and Labour councillor Dave Rowntree tweeted: “What a stupid thing to say. The ‘arts’ earn over £100bn for the UK each year. £13 million an hour. It’s one area where we really are world beating.”“Nothing changes. Haha. F*** you too then,” said post-punk band Sleaford Mods in a typically succinct tweet.Liam Gallagher posted his own expletive-filled rant, writing: “So the dopes in gov telling musicians and people in arts to retrain and get another job what and become massive c***s like you nah yer alright c’mon you know LG x.”He added: “This country would be beyond w*** if it wasn’t for the arts and the music and football show a bit of respect you little TURD cmon you know LG x.”TV presenter Sue Perkins wrote: “The arts contributes in the region of 10 billion a year to our economy. The people who work in it have already trained long and hard, thank you. This is shameful.”Solo artist and Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess suggested: “Maybe some MPs should retrain, as they aren’t really doing their job anyway.”“Without the arts, our lives are impoverished. This is nuts,” said Scottish author Ian Rankin.Architects frontman Sam Carter wrote: “Hey Rishi F*** off! yours sincerely the entire music industry.”Writer and journalist Dawn Foster said: “Absolutely spiteful, ruinous stuff from Rishi Sunak. He’s been endlessly trying to avoid a promised rescue deal for theatres and performers. It’ll be working class, BME, and disabled people pushed out of the arts, but also priced out of seeing performances.”“I suggest Rishi shoves my records up his arse!” said musician Badly Drawn Boy.During the interview, Sunak pointed to the government’s £1.5bn “cultural recovery programme” for the arts sector, which was announced three months ago, and added that self-employed arts workers have also been eligible for wage support this year.He adds that the “Kickstart” scheme will help younger people find new opportunities, and cited a move to putting arts and theatre lessons online.However, many in the culture sector feel the industry has been largely left to fend for itself. Over the past six months, several popular independent music venues have been forced to close, while other arts venues have launched fundraises in a desperate bid to stay afloat amid the pandemic.  More

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      in US Politics

      'I have a sense of urgency': Sufjan Stevens wakes from the American dream

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      The Oscars were an ordeal for Sufjan Stevens. “Honestly, one of the most traumatising experiences of my entire life,” the songwriter half-laughs, half-groans. The event was, he says, “a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom” representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture”.He had never paid much attention to them before being nominated in 2018. Mystery of Love – his bittersweet folk ballad, written for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name – was up for best original song and Stevens had been invited to perform. His devoted fans celebrated this appearance as a moment of long-overdue mainstream recognition for the spotlight-shy then-42-year-old; 26 million viewers were watching at home, after all. But for the artist himself, shrinking into his pink-and-black striped blazer as Hollywood A-listers schmoozed around him, there was not much to celebrate. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.”Stevens has spent his career adjusting his work to help avoid such rooms. The Detroit-born composer is an indie household name, with St Vincent, Moses Sumney (both of whom joined him onstage at the Oscars) and the National among his peers. He has fans in hip-hop, too: Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller have both sampled him, while in 2011, Donald Glover proclaimed himself “the only black kid at the Sufjan concert” in a verse from Fire Fly telegraphing his sensitivity. More

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      in US Politics

      Rock & Roll President: how musicians helped Jimmy Carter to the White House

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      It’s hard to think of a public figure with an image further removed from rock’n’roll than the former US president Jimmy Carter. “With his cardigan sweaters and devout Christian faith, he doesn’t come off as a particularly cool or hip guy,” said Mary Wharton, director of a new film titled Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, to the Guardian. “He wasn’t even a part of the rock generation. But he was curious about it.”Enough, in fact, to inspire him to take a deep dive into his son Chip’s Bob Dylan albums, absorbing both the honesty of the sound and the meanings behind the songs. It helped that Carter already had a significant knowledge of every genre that influenced stars of the rock generation, including blues, R&B, folk and most profoundly, gospel. His belief in both the beauty and the sociological impact of all those styles helped Carter forge an improbable bond with the biggest rock stars of the 70s, a connection that became central to his ascent to power.The core of Wharton’s film argues that stars like the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills & Nash, as well as outlaw country artists like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, played a crucial role in getting Carter into the White House in 1976. The Allmans took the lead, performing concerts to raise money for his run for the Democratic nomination when he had scant funds and no national name recognition. “I was practically a non-entity,” Carter says in the film. “But everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.”Even so, the power of the youth vote was just being tested at that point. The previous presidential election, in 1972, in which Republican incumbent Richard Nixon squared off against Democrat George McGovern, was the first national election that saw the voting age drop from 21 to 18. Yet, Nixon won in a landslide. Four years later, in a country weary from Watergate and Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford, there was a far clearer mandate for change. “The youth vote that time was massive,” said Chris Farrell, the movie’s producer. “Eighteen- and 19-year-olds voted for Carter. Then it spread way beyond that.”Though Carter wasn’t especially young at the time, at 52, his team were, led by head press secretary Jody Powell, who was 23, and chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, then 32. After Carter won the White House, Rolling Stone put the two staff members on their cover, calling them “The White House Whiz Kids”. “They were young people, speaking to young people,” said Farrell.Still, the level of support the rock stars gave Carter represented something new. In the late 1960s, when rock became the cutting-edge force in pop culture, its stars were more likely to support a vague notion of revolution, while lobbing the occasional epithet at Nixon. “For them to associate with a politician wasn’t seen as cool,” said Wharton.But by the mid-70s, rock had become more mainstream, and magazines like Rolling Stone were eager to flex their growing power by backing candidates more aggressively. While many politicians were eager to court the icons of the rock generation, Carter had a distinct advantage. “The fact that he was an independent thinker appealed to these musicians,” Farrell said. “He wasn’t just following the party line for politicians for the last 30 years.”More importantly, Carter’s connection to music’s top names far pre-dated his presidential run. As governor of Georgia, he invited Dylan to the state mansion. “When I met Jimmy, the first thing he did was quote my songs back to me,” Dylan says in the documentary. “It was the first time I realized my songs had reached into the mainstream. It made me a little uneasy. But he put my mind at ease by showing me he had a sincere appreciation. He was a kindred spirit – the kind of man you don’t meet every day and that you’re lucky to meet if you do.”Around the same time, Carter befriended Gregg Allman, whose band had shepherded the huge “southern rock” movement, along with acts like the Marshall Tucker Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Together, the bands presented a fresh image for the south, a wave that paralleled the ascent of politicians like Carter, who, in the early ‘70s were heralded as part of the “new south”. In one of Gregg Allman’s final interviews before his death in 2018, he talked about first meeting Carter in Georgia, describing him as “this guy with an old pair of Levi’s with holes in them, no shirt, no shoes,” he said. “I thought, ‘Who’s this bum hanging out at the governor’s mansion?’ That was Jim.” More

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      in US Politics

      Anohni on her new track R.N.C. 2020: 'It's me, screaming in the past, for the present'

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      I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Thursday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got. More

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      in World Politics

      Xi Jinping’s Tibetan Summer of Love

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      As reported by Al Jazeera, China’s President Xi Jinping is seeking to realize the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony within the borders of Tibet. He has a threefold goal: Xi wants to “build an ‘impregnable fortress’ to maintain stability in Tibet, protect national unity and educate the masses in the struggle against ‘splittism.’”

      Anyone familiar with Chinese culture knows the central, practically sacred place that the value of harmony holds. It has both a spiritual and social dimension. It accounts for the ability of Chinese emperors in the past — as well as today’s Communist Party — to hold in tow a large and diverse population over a vast expanse of territory. It works by inducing attitudes of conformity and disciplined behavior that serve to maintain public order. Most Chinese accept this as a rational principle and an essential feature of their culture. People hailing from the individualistic cultures of the West still have trouble grasping this fact.

      The concept derives from the dynamics of music that in ancient times infused Chinese culture. Harmony is not unison. It always implies the combining of divergent elements whose different principles of resonance produce sounds that converge in an agreeable or intriguing way. Dissonance that points to resolution within the dynamics of music is a necessary ingredient. This is true of every musical tradition. Elizabethan poet and composer Thomas Campion expressed this in the simplest terms in his poem, “Rose-Cheeked Laura”: “These dull notes we sing/ Discords need for helps to grace them.”

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      Xi appears not to be too fond of discord, even when it is needed for the sake of true harmony. The Chinese government has even invented a barbarous word that English translators appear to have accepted because a more conventional translation, such as “separatist,” fails to convey its deeper meaning. That word is “splitism.” Unlike separatism, which supposes two potentially autonomous entities, splitism designates something akin to a violation of the integrity of a territory, a people or a culture. It is an attack on unison voicings.

      Concerning the status of Tibet, a territory, like Xinjiang, potentially guilty of splitism, Xi offered a practical suggestion demonstrating his unorthodox conception of harmony. Al Jazeera summarizes Xi’s message: “Political and ideological education needed to be strengthened in Tibet’s schools in order to ‘plant the seeds of loving China in the depths of the hearts of every youth.’”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Seeds of loving:

      Active principles of emotional orientation that can be based either on the authentic concern for the good of the other or on a policy of intimidation sufficiently strong in its negative force to appear superficially to resemble deep and spontaneous affection for the object of one’s fear.

      Contextual Note

      Xi’s concerns with the hearts of young Tibetans and his idea that they may be fertile ground for “seeds of loving” radically distorts the traditional notions of both harmony and love he seeks to promote. The questions every society must ask itself are, “What is harmony?” and “What is love?”

      In both Chinese and Western music, harmony implies the physical notion and even cosmological notion of sympathetic resonance. One student of Chinese musical culture describes harmony as an “inner dialectic between the creation and resolution of tension and, by extension, a similarly nuanced relationship.” Thomas Campion would undoubtedly agree. In other words, harmony is not the effect of unison or forced imitation, but of the coming together or the resolution of diverse discords.

      Xi’s idea of love appears to radically differ from that of Lao Tzu, who famously said: “Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have.” If it resonates with anything, rather than with Lao Tzu, Xi’s concept recalls the traditional right-wing slogan cast in the face of protesters against the US war in Vietnam: “Love America or leave it.” Xi wants Tibetan youth to love China, but, in contrast with Lao Tzu, he is unwilling to learn from them. They must learn from him.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Perhaps Xi is seeking to distinguish China from the decidedly superficial and jaded West that no longer pays attention to its youth. US politicians have clearly become indifferent to “the depths” within the hearts of the younger generations. China at least thinks about its youth. 

      US President Donald Trump has dismissed this generation’s young protesters as “anarchists and agitators” who must be reined in by a strict policy of “law and order.” He has shown some love for the 17-year-old vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse who killed two protesters, but the president is doing everything within his power to prevent young people from voting. The Democratic National Convention underscored the startling fact that it has consciously abandoned the youth-oriented movement led by Bernie Sanders, a movement that was clamoring for health care, social justice, reduced military engagement and relief from oppressive debt. The Democrats consider all these issues, which are truly “at the depths” of young voters’ hearts, as irrelevant to their overriding mission of electing a man with no vision for the future, who will turn 80 in his first term.

      Al Jazeera reports on Xi’s vision of the future: “Pledging to build a ‘united, prosperous, civilised, harmonious and beautiful new, modern, socialist Tibet,’ Xi said China needed to strengthen the role of the Communist Party in the territory and better integrate its ethnic groups.” And it will all be done in the name of harmony.

      Chinese political analysts and apologists claim that “China’s long tradition of thinking about harmony makes it uniquely able and disposed to exercise soft power in world politics.” In the realm of geopolitics, Xi claims to understand the value of the concept of soft power, an idea initially proposed by Joseph Nye to contrast with the hard power of military might.

      That may or may not be true. But internally, Xi mobilizes the same soft-power rhetoric, including the appeal to harmony, to justify a policy of hard power designed to enforce something more like conformity than harmony. On the international front, Xi understands that since the United States, under the past three presidents, has allowed military power and economic sanctions to define its foreign policy, by doing the opposite — notably thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative — China could emulate the success the US had with its Marshall Plan for Europe following World War II.  But can China achieve this goal in harmony with the nations it is bringing on board? That is a moot question.

      Historical Note

      Xi’s conception of the concept of harmony is innovative in the sense that it diverges from tradition. In her book, “Music Cosmology and the Politics of Harmony in Early China,” Erica Fox Brindley places the origins of the Chinese concept of harmony in ancient times, when “conceptions of music became important culturally and politically.” Xi’s musical tastes as demonstrated in this official government rap song appear to have little in common with the contemplative character of traditional Chinese music. Xi’s wife is a famous singer, but the harmony of her music on display in this patriotic song demonstrates greater respect for conventional Western harmony than it does for the Chinese musical tradition.

      While explaining the roots of the concept in Chinese spirituality and “protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos,” Brindley reminds her readers that the “rhetoric of harmony in the People’s Republic … is complicated.” The author identifies the Zuo Zhuan — one of the earliest works of Chinese history composed before 500 BC — as the “locus classicus for defining the term ‘harmony’ in ancient China.” Harmony refers “not merely to the conformity of similar items but to an appealing admixture of many diverse ones.” Xi’s current admixture reflects little more than the combination of stale Western trends with Chinese pop vocal style.

      There is a traditional saying in Chinese, lǐ yuè bēng huài, which literally means “rites and music are in ruins.” As Jamie Fisher explains on his website dedicated to learning Mandarin, the idiom “refers to a society in disarray.” Xi would claim that his new rites and music are solidly built and are a protection against the prospect of ruin that the entire world is facing. Lao Tzu might disagree, at least concerning the methods employed.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More