Joseph Fouché recently quipped that Fascism is the new hotness, and I followed up that brown with a touch of green is the new black.
Fouché runs with this idea — and keeps running:
The events of the last thirty years have only provided evidence for one truism of statecraft: capitalism provides better material incentives as a spur to individual initiative than central planning. The other supposed truism of the age, that the advance of liberal democracy is inevitable, has not been demonstrated to the same extent. Many populations overwhelmingly support some version of capitalism but shy away from democracy. Many more governing elites, including many in this country, would agree.
The hip new thing, whether you call it state capitalism, the China Model, corporatism, or, more accurately, Fascism, is sweeping the globe. It’s all the rage. Given Bueno De Mesquita’s choice of being Leopold II, constitutional king of the Belgians, or Leopold II, sole proprietor of the Congo Free State, most oligarchs choose to be Leopold II, sole proprietor of the Congo Free State.
Nations have a choice: why bow to the erratic dictates and hypocrisies of Washington when you can have a more profitable and less threatening relationship with a non-judgemental Moscow or Peiping? It’s even better when the change from Red to Brown is highlighted by a strategically placed touch of Green. When you hear Tom Friedman and others useful idiots come back from China breathless about their wind power, solar power, and other “green industries”, they’re two breaths away from saying, “I have seen the future and it works.” As Isegoria observed, “Brown with a touch of green is the new black.”
Rather than reaching out and touching our contemporary brownshirts, a better approach to Peiping is massive de-linkage.
Peiping, by the way, is one of the many names for China’s northern capital of Beijing, which many of us remember as Peking:
“Beijing” means “Northern Capital”, in line with the common East Asian tradition whereby capital cities are explicitly named as such. Other cities that are similarly named include Nanjing, China, meaning “southern capital”; Tokyo, Japan, and Dong Kinh, now Hanoi, Vietnam, both meaning “eastern capital”; as well as Kyoto, Japan, and Gyeongseong, now Seoul, Korea, both meaning simply “capital”.
Peking is the name of the city according to Chinese Postal Map Romanization, and the traditional customary name for Beijing in English. The term Peking originated with French missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a subsequent sound change in Mandarin from k to j. It is still used in many languages.
The pronunciation “Peking” is also closer to the Fujianese dialect of Amoy or Min Nan spoken in the city of Xiamen, a port where European traders first landed in the 16th century, while “Beijing” more closely approximates the Mandarin dialect’s pronunciation.
The city has been renamed several times. During the Jin Dynasty, the city was known as Zhongdu, and then later under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty as Dadu in Chinese and Daidu to Mongols (also recorded as Cambuluc by Marco Polo). Twice in the city’s history, the name of the city was changed from Beijing (Peking) to Beiping (Peiping), literally “Northern Peace”. This occurred first under the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and again in 1928 with the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China. On each occasion, the name change removed the element meaning “capital” to reflect the fact the national capital had changed to Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province. Such renaming was reverted twice; this occurred first under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who moved the capital from Nanjing back to Beijing, and again in 1949, when the Communist Party of China restored Beijing as its capital after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The abbreviation of the municipality is its second character and is used on licence plates, among other things.
Yanjing is and has been another popular informal name for Beijing, a reference to the ancient State of Yan that existed here during the Zhou Dynasty. This name is reflected in the locally brewed Yanjing Beer as well as Yenching University, an institution of higher learning that was merged into Peking University.
The Committee of Public Safety adheres to a One China Policy and does not recognize the legitimacy of the Peiping regime or its proffered system of representing the Chinese language in Romanized characters.