Butterflies--in Beijing? No Shamrocks–in Shanghai?

(Today’s post is dedicated to the memory of James Clark, my high school World History teacher. Mr. Clark, a proud Irish-American, married to a Polish-American, had a definite POV (point of view)–always on the side of the underdogs of history. In those days World History was still quite Eurocentric, but Mr. Clark was moving away from that model. He taught us about the Opium War from a Chinese POV–perhaps more accurately the anti-British POV of a "green" Irishman. The focus of his take on the Scramble for Africa, though anti-imperialist, was the Berlin Conference rather than events on the ground in Africa, yet it served me well when, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I learned about it from the African perspective. Finally, since March Madness basketball is upon us, I must tell you that Jim Clark was also a very fine basketball coach. Thank you, Mr. Clark, for sharing with us your insight and love of history.)
　
The "Butterfly Effect" is almost a cliche. It’s the notion that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing it will change the weather in, let’s say Beirut, in ways we can’t easily predict. Here’s a more technical definition: "the idea in meteorology that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast" (1). That’s not really too technical--we really don’t need to consider the nonlinear equations so essential to chaos.

It is the "fantastically complex and chaotic behavior" of those equations that attracted me to chaos theory when I first heard about it years ago. I thought to myself: Hey, this is what we historians have always imagined: small differences, over time, eventually, may result in very different outcomes. This is also referred to as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" (2).

When Edward Lorenz of MIT, who discovered this effect, first wrote about it he used a seagull metaphor, but most of us are glad he changed it to a butterfly (3). That makes for a more colorful metaphor.

Well, I don’t know how many real butterflies are flapping today in Beijing–though spring is coming soon to Beijing, too. It is another kind of spring that the Chinese Communist Party fears–a spring such as Prague had in 1968–or Cairo in 2011. What I do know is that Chinese officials have plenty of butterflies in their tummies right now. And those flutterings are partly due to the wind of change blowing from Tunisia and Egypt (4).

The Chinese have clamped down on foreign journalists, who might just observe a few protesting Chinese dissidents. Those protesters, even if few in number, might serve as domestic "butterflies" affecting the atmosphere across China (as far west as Xinjian and Tibet). China’s dissidents are mostly cyber-savvy and, being denizens of a society with a high degree of Internet penetration, could stir up a ruckus. Despite the authorities’ many attempts to rein in the Internet, dissidents using social media have managed anonymously to call for what might be labeled "walk-by" demonstrations. The government response? Remove those posts from the Internet and, for good measure, monitor the cellphones of Beijing residents–all 20 million of them! In any case, it’s the possibility of protest that is behind the Chinese government’s decisions to further restrict speech and assembly–and to the arrests and disappearances of political activists (5).

Now for the shamrocks, since its St. Patrick’s day. Every year Irish organizations in Shanghai sponsor a St. Patrick’s Day parade--but this year there was no parade in Shanghai. The Chinese authorities didn’t want the parade (scheduled for March 12^th) to draw a crowd along a major thoroughfare in an area targeted by Internet activists. So the Irish organizers nixed it. Instead, one of the Irish organizations held an indoor-celebration, invited-guests only (6). Shamrocks, I suppose, but sequestered and probably subject to surveillance.

Here’s another mind-boggling connection to keep us sober on St. Patrick’s Day. It fits right in with one of today’s top stories, the conflict in Libya. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s support for terrorism is well-known, but did you know that Libya was one of the two main sources of weapons used by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Northern Ireland? It seems that Libya deserves a lot of credit for the IRA’s capacity for violence if, as some would claim "the IRA’s acquisition of arms through Libya in the 1980s helped transform the organisation into one that could fight a devastating and sustained campaign" (7). In addition to conventional arms, Libya was the source of the IRA’s "most significant and infamous weapon," the plastic, odorless and thus difficult to detect, explosive known as Semtex. Responding to the release of the man imprisoned for the Lockerbie bombing, relatives of those killed with Libyan weapons–in terrorist incidents perpetrated by IRA–renewed their efforts to wring compensation from the Libyan government (8).

And what country do you suppose was the other major source of IRA weapons? Read Sean Boyle’s article in Jane’s Intelligence Review to find out (see note 7).

ACTIVITIES

WATCH the Frontline video "Behind the Mask" (if you can find it in a library) or READ the transcript (online). There are many excellent additional items on this program’s web site. This could be homework or a project for an interested student–in a social studies or history class. Concerns about how weapons liberated during the Libyan conflict might flow into the "wrong" hand makes this relevant today–rather than just a topic of interest to historians.

READ/DEBATE/WRITE: Send students to the Room for Debate section of the New York Times to read the six short essays in "Why Is China Nervous About the Arab Uprising?" Lead a discussion or ask students to debate the reasons for China’s jitters in this "world historical context." Follow-up with short in-class essays to assess students attention during the debate.

RESOURCES

"Behind the Mask: The IRA & Sinn Fein." Frontline (Aired October 21, 1997) on PBS. Companion web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/. Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/etc/script.html

"Why Is China Nervous about the Arab Uprisings?" Room for Debate. New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/28/why-is-china-nervous-about-the-arab-uprisings

• In six short essays six experts consider this question: "Is a growing economy sufficient to keep broader discontent among the Chinese at bay?"

NOTES

1) Michael Cross, "The Butterfly Effect": http://crossgroup.calteach.edu/chaos_new/Lorenz.html
　
2) "The Butterfly Effect": http://www.stsci.edu/ lbradley/seminar/butterfly.html. I read James Gleich, Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking, 1987). Later I was pleased to discover that Janet L. Abu-Lughod was thinking along the same lines; see Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford University Press: New York, 1989), pp. 368-69.

3) For a bit of history about how Lorenz came up with the notion see source in note 2. For the seagull (1963) to butterfly (1972), see source in note 1.

4) Chinese activists calling for their own "Jasmine Revolution" make the link with Tunisia explicit. See Tom Lasseter, "China Cracks Down on Protest Threats, Rounds Up Dissidents," Truthout (February 20, 2011): http://www.truth-out.org/67924; Andrew Jacobs, "Chinese Government Responds to Call for Protests," New York Times (February 21, 2011); Ian Johnson, "Despite Intimidation, Calls for a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China Persist," New York Times (February 24, 2011).

5) Sharon LaFraniere, "China Tightens Controls on Foreign Press," New York Times (March 3, 2011).

6) See note 5.

7) Sean Boyne, "Uncovering the Irish Republican Army," Jane’s Intelligence Review (August 1, 1996): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/inside/weapons.html
This article supports content in the Frontline documentary, "Behind the Mask" (see RESOURCES) . For the quotation and supporting details see "The IRA’s Store of Weaponry," BBC News (August 14, 2001): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/1482426.html.

8) "Call for Libya to Pay IRA Victims," BBC News (August 25, 2009): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8219433.