Anyway, back to classic Chinese fiction. During my Internet searches, I found a website called the Chinese Lore Podcast produced by a man named John Zhu. As he states on his website, his mission is to bring classic ancient Chinese literature to Western audiences who don't speak Chinese. The classic works he covers are very long, so that re-telling the story contained in one book takes between three and four years' worth of episodes. However, Mr. Zhu's re-telling is done with humor, fresh perspectives, and helpful insights into various historical aspects of Chinese culture. I listened to his re-telling of the Water Margin (水滸傳), and am working my way through his re-telling of Investiture of the Gods (封神演義). One characteristic of both stories is that each tells of an imperial center that is in decline due to internal corruption, and each shows the effect of that decline and corruption in the lives of the ordinary people of the land. In the case of the heroes of Water Margin, the corruption and decline was partially and temporarily reversed, although some of the chief heroes were at the end cheated out of the enjoyment of that reversal. I haven't yet finished Investiture of the Gods, yet I know from the historical events on which the story is based that in that story the decline could not be reversed, since the corrupting cause of that decline lay with the emperor himself.
Stories of imperial decline have held a growing fascination for me since the days of the corrupt U.S. presidency of Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020. I fervently hope that we don't get another taste of Trump starting in 2025, yet the possibility of such an outcome has once again stimulated my interest in reading (or in my case, listening to) stories of corruption and the resulting societal decline resulting from that corruption. Thus I have been listening with interest to Investiture of the Gods. Note: in Investiture, Jiang Ziya is a cool character. He's the brains behind the good guys... However, while Investiture does focus somewhat on the corruption and resulting decline at the center of the Shang dynasty during the reign of its final emperor, it also spends a lot of time in describing epic battles between massive armies who are sometimes helped and at other times hindered by the intervention of superhuman creatures with special powers. If that sort of thing is your main interest and you've worn out all your Star Wars DVD's (for those who still own DVD's), then Investiture of the Gods should be right up your alley.
Now I can enjoy a really good sword fight scene about as much as any other U.S. male, yet my interest in listening to Investiture lay more in tracing how the outworkings of corruption at the top of a society lead to the fracture of that society and the fracture of the power base on which the people at the top rely. So I was motivated to search for nonfiction accounts of that sort of fracture. And I chose to search particularly for examples of recent corporate decline and collapse. This choice was partly motivated by my recent exposure to a book about the ethical failures at the Boeing Company which led to serious and sometimes fatal problems with the 737 MAX airplane. As I previously mentioned on this blog, the problems within the Boeing Company are symptomatic of almost all of American late capitalism in the first half of the 21st century. Thus it is fairly easy to find examples of once mighty and dominant U.S. corporations which have crashed and burned within the last twenty years.
One such corporation is General Electric. From my perusal of the book Obliquity by John Kay, as well as a brief examination of the history of GE, I had some idea of what to expect when examining GE. I knew I would find a company which started out by trying to make itself an industry leader in the manufacture of artifacts of beautifully good work that meets necessary needs, yet which lost its way once it made its primary goal the continuous growth of shareholder dividends and stock price. According to many sources, this shift was most strongly exemplified in the reign of former GE CEO Jack Welch, who boasted 40 straight quarters (or ten years) of exceeding Wall Street projections of GE stock earnings growth. Unfortunately, he did it by means of "creative earnings manipulation" according to a number of sources. That manipulation included firing or laying off massive numbers of people in order to cut costs, as well as speculation in real estate and other debt markets through the subsidiary GE Capital.
I sought to learn more about the finer details of the decisions that derailed GE, so several days ago I bought an audiobook copy of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan. I was particularly hoping to learn the role of Jack Welch's leadership in the demise of GE. As far as Cohan's book, I can only say that while there were good points, there were also bad (or weak) points. The book's good points include a fairly accurate history of GE's early days. For instance, Cohan rightly points out that GE was not actually founded by Thomas Edison, but was founded against Edison's wishes. This is contrary to the mythology which has sprung up around GE. However, Cohan fails to mention that neither Edison nor GE actually invented the world's first commercially available incandescent light bulbs. (That honor actually goes to William E. Sawyer.) Cohan also implies that GE was materially involved in the invention and development of the world's first turbojet engine. That also is not true. The first jet engine for aircraft was actually invented by a British air force officer and engineer named Frank Whittle.
The book's bad or weak points include the fact that Cohan glosses over the fact that Jack Welch's "rank and yank" system of firing those at the bottom ten percent of his staff in annual performance reviews actually created a toxic culture in which people strove to be in the mediocre middle because that was the safest place to be in the organizational culture. Cohan also glosses over the impact of Welch's massive layoffs and other downsizing initiatives on both GE's products and on the workers who were let go. And Cohan glosses over the impact of Welch's "creative earnings manipulation" on the future of GE - especially with regard to the reliance on the GE Capital subsidiary to make quarterly earnings targets. The book goes on to lay the vast majority of the blame for the decline and fall of GE on Jeff Immelt, the CEO who succeeded Welch in 2001. (While Immelt had some serious managerial weaknesses and GE under Immelt certainly made some serious errors (see this for instance), from other sources I get the impression that it was Jack who sailed the ship of GE into treacherous shoals. Jeff was simply not equal to the task of getting GE away from the rocks.) Meanwhile, Jack Welch is portrayed as a Really Swell Guy overall. Indeed, at times the book reads like a secular hagiography of Jack Welch and of GE. Cohan's book in some ways reminds me of another book I listened to last winter: Family Reins: The Extraordinary Rise and Epic Fall of an American Dynasty by Billy Busch. The publisher's blurb for this book touts it as an expose of the factors which led the Busch family to lose the Anheuser-Busch beer company to a foreign conglomerate. Yet it actually reads as a self-indulgent portrait of the Busch family - almost an auto-hagiography of Billy Busch himself.
Books like these make me wonder not only about the future of capitalism in the United States, but also about the future of serious scholarly study of the failures of American capitalism. There is a crying need for such serious, rigorous, objective, well-informed study - especially in light of the number of formerly large American companies which have either been bought up by foreign investors in the 21st century or which have gone bankrupt and disappeared. Otherwise people of the future may well be forced to look with perplexity at the monumental wreckage left behind by such companies, unable to discern the clues to their crashing end except that they were run by Really Swell Guys who somehow bear no culpability for the mess that has been left behind. Meanwhile I am left wondering a few things myself, namely, whether the unrealistically optimistic group expectations fostered by a steady run of unrealistically good news actually doom organizations when those organizations are suddenly forced to face really bad news. Also, how completely do the characteristics of corporate decline match the characteristics of imperial or societal decline? Good questions, no?
And now back to the next epic battles of Investiture of the Gods!
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