Pen/Insular_Notes

Another one of my round-up posts, otherwise known as an exercise in lazy bloggery.

I’m not going to pretend to go too deeply into what has actually been going on inside the talks in Hong Kong - there are plenty of places you can find that stuff if you wish. Rather, I’ll focus mainly on the protests outside the talks, which, to be honest interest me a lot more.

As we all expected, Korean farmers were at the forefront of protests and made a name for themselves pretty instantly with their lively actions on Tuesday. The most eyecatching of these was perhaps the attempt by a number of farmers to swim across the harbour to the convention centre where the talks were taking place. I suppose this was marginally less effort than pushing shipping containers into the sea. I couldn’t help noticing, though, the fact that the farmers were wearing life jackets - a very admirable attention to matters of health and safety ^^

The Korean-American blog I mentioned before, No to WTO, has been posting continuously - so much stuff that I’ll admit I haven’t kept up. Their blog is also the motherlode for photos of the protests which they’ve collected from various sources. Feast your eyes.

Ch’am sesang has a nice picture story about a women farmers’ drumming group in Hong Kong.

Two Koreas has had two informative pieces on the Hong Kong protests, one on the lead up and the inevitable attempts by the police and local authorities to stir things up a bit in advance and the other rounding up some sources on what has been going on there in the last few days.

Lo and behold Lenin’s Tomb also has two posts on the anticapitalist protests at the WTO: The first goes pretty deep into some of the issues behind what is being discussed inside the ministerial meetings, and obviously why we should be against this organisation and what it stands for. The second is a nice set of pictures taken by a British activist who is over there (mostly of Korean demonstrators as it happens).

Meanwhile, as Antti pointed out a couple of days ago, Larry Elliot has an article in the Guardian this week where he makes much use of the work of Cambridge-based economist Ha-joon Chang, who puts paid to the neo-liberal nonsense about how free trade is the answer to developing countries’ problems, pointing to the highly instructive example of South Korean development. It may not be very fashionable to say this now, but North Korea should also be a case in point - a highly protective, state-led development model that produced astonishing levels of growth and industrialisation until the late 70s early 80s when everything started to go badly wrong. It’s something people forget now, but it would probably be no exaggeration to say that the first Korean miracle was the miracle on the Taedong River.

Anyway, I obviously viewing things from a distance, but the anti-WTO protests have looked like an excellent example of worldwide anticapitalist solidarity and particularly of solidarity between different groups in Asia fighting against poverty and neoliberalisation and for dignity, livelihoods, food sovereignty and real development. So much for the myth of the ‘anarchist travelling circus’ full of middle class white kids from ‘the rich West’ wearing hoodtops and playing at being rebels for a few days.