Friday I Ching Blogging: China's Chernobyl?

    The horrific chemical spill in the Songhua River in China is an environmental disaster of gigantic scale.  Harbin, a city of 3.8 million people, has had to cut all of its public water supplies.  An untold number of people who live along the river have already faced contamination with extraordinarily high levels of Benzene.  Many more people and farms could be exposed. 

    What is most maddening about the whole affair is how Jilin provincial officials waited ten days after a fire in a chemical plant down river from Harbin to inform the public about the unfolding disaster.   This is old-fashioned Leninist secrecy at its worst, and it kills people.  The same impulse was at work in the Soviet Union in 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear crisis occurred.   In that case, the secrecy was exposed and the attempted cover-up became one more symbol of a declining regime, another reminder that the authoritarian order had to be changed.  Does the Harbin/Songhua disaster portend something similar in China?

    I asked the I Ching: What does this mean for Chinese politics?  And the oracle answered that it could lead to something good.  And that good could be a reduction in the self-defeating secrecy that has long plagued the PRC.

     The details of the divination: Hexagram 11, "Peace," with a moving line in the fifth position, thus tending toward Hexagram 5, "Waiting."

     I take this as a generally positive augury.   "Peace" has a certain balance to it:

In the world of man it is a time of social harmony; those in high places show favor to the lowly, and the lowly and inferior in their turn are well disposed toward the highly placed. There is an end to all feuds.

     This does not sound like an imminent political crisis born of massive public disgust with a dishonest government.  Indeed, the oracle seems to be telling China's political leadership that, in order to maintain social harmony, they must limit and control industrial development to avoid such environmental crises:

Heaven and Earth unite: the image of Peace.
Thus a ruler divides and completes the course of
heaven and earth;
He furthers and regulates the gifts of
heaven and earth,
And so aids the people.

    People have to work with nature to benefit from nature's gifts.  This suggests that pell-mell industrialization, which has been going on for decades in China, should be managed more carefully to ensure the social good.  I am skeptical that this will really happen any time soon - the economic incentives to let the polluters pollute are still too high - but the I Ching is suggesting that it will occur.  And who am I to contradict the I Ching.

    The moving line in the fifth position is a bit vague for this question:

The sovereign I
Gives his daughter in marriage.
This brings blessing
  And supreme good fortune.

     I take this to mean that China's leadership ("sovereign I") should take an important step ("gives his daughter in marriage"), in order to achieve a good outcome.  Prime Minister Wen Jaibo has already started to involve himself the crisis.  Perhaps this will lead to the realization that the old Leninist secrecy just has to be dumped if the regime it to have an credibility whatsoever.

   The move toward Hexagram 5 also seems good.  One key image here is rain - water in heaven - and this is precisely what is needed to wash the pollution away.   But the hexagram also has a message for those Chinese leaders looking to do the right thing after this disaster:

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.

    Clearly it is time for governmental lying and deception to stop.  And the I Ching is signaling that it will, and things will get better.  Good.  Now, about that bird flu problem....

Comments

[Other Lisa]

Thanks for the trackback on the Peking Duck entry I posted (I pinch-blog for Richard, the site owner, at times). I wanted to take this opportunity to mention that an article you published a few years back in the Los Angeles Times, about Daoism, your son and becoming Chinese, was so meaningful to me that I clipped it and saved it and still have it. Used it for an oral presentation in my Chinese class, in fact.

Thanks for that!

[The Rambling Taoist]

You stated about the tragedy in China, "This is old-fashioned Leninist secrecy at its worst, and it kills people."

I beg to disagree with your analysis. Secrecy is the domain of government -- whether that government be Leninist, a dictatorship, a monarchy OR a democracy.

Think of 3 Mile Island. Though the threat was serious, for several days OUR government downplayed the severity. OUR government didn't tell the people downwind from Hanford (in Washington) of releases of radioactive materials for over a decade!

In fact, US history is littered with similar incidents.

In my estimation, the problem is power. Those in power (whatever the political system) don't want the public to question their legitimacy. If people KNEW the risks a government placed its people under, it would place that legitimacy in question.

Therefore, the tendency is to leave people in the dark. It's far easier AND cheaper (in the short-term).

[Sam]

Rambling,
I agree with you partially. It is true that deception and secrecy are to be found in any governmnet, and they must be eternally struggled against by citizens. But that struggle is harder, much harder, in a Leninist political system than in the US. Bush and Co. have taken deception to new levels, but I can write about them, condemn them, organize against them. My Chinese friends cannot do that in their own country. Indeed, this blog, as politically innocuous as it is, cannot be read in China; it is blocked. So, yes, secrecy is a problem for every people; but it is a bigger problem for people facing harsher political repression.

[The Rambling Taoist]

Point taken.