8ball
Decolonise colons!
<swipes through a few more Tiktoks and orders more crab rangoon...>
Let's talk about China
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Some good articles about Wang Huning, the intellectual of the Central Committee and thought to be the main ideological driving force behind the Xi era.
I think I will try to get a hold of his books on America and Sovereignty as what is discussed in them does seem to fit in with the behaviour of the Chinese state in recent years.
In short, he is very influenced by Huntington "Clash of Civilisations" style of thinking and views the influence of foreign culture and entertainment as a threat, and considers a strong and culturally unified state as essential to China's success.
IMO his influence on China's politics is poison and he fails to understand how culture is malleable and not zero sum. For example, neither South Korea nor Japan have closed themselves off to foreign cultural imports, yet nobody could say that they have lost their own cultural distinctiveness, and are still lightyears ahead of China in terms of global cultural influence - China's has probably diminished in recent years as a consequence of Wang Huning's influence.
I think it is important to understand and engage with these ideas so that they can be critiqued. Criticisms of the Chinese Government over human rights fall on death ears because the Chinese government is looking at things through a wildly different lens. A critique should be focused on why a "Clash of Civilisations" is a false paradigm, and on how cultural exchange need not be zero sum.
The 3 articles below are highly recommended if you want to understand the thinking of the Chinese top leaders:
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
palladiummag.com
Who is the real Wang Huning? – The China Project
Wang Huning is the most important political theorist in Xi Jinping's China. But what kind of ideology does this man, who ascended to the Politburo Standing Committee after decades of advising different CCP leaders, actually believe in?supchina.com
Wang Huning, The Culture Revolution and Reform of China's Political System
Wang Huning, “Reflections on the Cultural Revolution and the Reform of China's Political System"[1] Introduction by Matthew D. Johnson and Translation by David Ownby Introduction Wang Huning (b....www.readingthechinadream.com
Yup.
And I love your introduction of the concept of "death ears".
Falling on "dead ears", would *perhaps be a better idiom even than "deaf ears".
The "west" has no clue of what is happening. Trying to apprehend the CCP through that lens is doomed to failure
"Fair play" means different things in English and Chinese. A massive, cultural and geopolitical miscalculation.
And, worse, those that do have half a clue are endemically corrupt and merely grifting-the-cow for their own short term financial gain.
You can surmise someone's character by observing the company they keep.
Wake up peeps.
Fascism is raising its ugly head, yet again. And we are sleepwalking towards another global apocalypse.
Wake up. Please. Quickly.
Why are the Uber-Rich so interested in finding new environments in the solar system to live in, as they try to abandon the planet they poisoned?
As an astute insider within the US administration recently pointed out ... Elon Musk is, essentially single-handedly, writing "the laws of space" in his own image, as he makes it up, as he goes along.
I'm aware of the psychopathic nature of pure, unadulterated, unfettered, Randist, neo-liberal capitalism.
Unfortunately, given the power and reach of coordinated disinformation campaigns in the era of social media, magnified exponentially through micro-targeted, dark money funded, psycho-graphically profiled disinformation directed towards, specifically selected, vulnerable, suggestible people across the globe ... we live in an era that permits unfettered data-mining and subsequent social manipulation by state-sponsored actors to covertly deceive, disrupt, manipulate, undermine and subvert, any kind of acceptable democratic norm.
SCL/Cambridge Analytica/various spinoffs - all derived from British psy-ops - over the last 15+ years have been deeply involved in more than 80 elections, in 24 countries. Initially in African countries and the Caribbean, then Central/S. American countries, the Russian Federation and beyond ...
Then we move on to Brexit, Duturte, Bolsanaro, Trump, Johnson. Kurz. Orban. All across Eastern Europe ...
And on and on and on. A 40-year in-the-making, veritable wank-fest of the conflation of the worst of right wing political ideologies, turbocharged by the algorithmic exploitation - and AI driven - manipulation of hundreds of millions of people.
It's already too late.
Unfettered capitalism in a digital age is not your friend peeps.
There are very dark times coming over the next couple of decades.
And climate change is off the agenda.
But that's okay, right? Watching people dance on telly is what the public care about, right?
What a fucking, fucking mess.
G'luck peeps.
Be nice to each other.
(Bed Bells!)
(Edit: To delete a, randomly-fat-paw-typed, additional, superfluous "*perhaps be" - in order to try and help peeps make any kind of sense of the rest of it! Sorry. Useless fucking paws; useless fucking brain!)
Rest well peeps. Be nice to each other.
Come Bella. Bed.
Woof
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Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
You can also see it in their land and yacht purchases. What better place to wait out the apocalypse than on your own floating city.
I'm afraid we're shaping up for both a world-wide depression, followed by a world-wide war. Or, perhaps a world-wide war followed by a world-wide depression. It probably depends on what the world's global elites, across a range of countries, figure they can make more money on.
Aye!
Water is the next "commodity", already being sold into multiple of derivatives of derivatives.
Winter is coming.
Rest, Yuwipi. Rest.
Night.
Come Bell.
Woof
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
Aye!
Winter is coming.
Rest, Yuwipi. Rest.
Night.
Come Bell.
Woof
I close my eyes
Only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind
All they are is dust in the wind
Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
Now don't hang on
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won't another minute buy
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
(All we are is dust in the wind)
Dust in the wind
(Everything is dust in the wind)
Everything is dust in the wind
(In the wind)
China has its own challenges internally it needs to overcome before it becomes the master of some new world order. I think we can tone down the hyperbolic fear somewhat.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Have you read Jessiedog's posts?
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Big difference between being sinister and being able to take on the biggest military in the world.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
Are you sure the "biggest military in the world" isn't a paper tiger? I think a lot of our military budget is siphoned off on a combination of outright corruption and economic stimulus for red states in disguise.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
The Chinese military has a lot of soldiers (all of which need paying and feeding and training, which effectively becomes a weakness on the modern battlefield), and a massive navy, but pretty much nil battle experience. And if you think the US military budget is getting creamed by corruption (and I’ve no doubt that it is), what is happening to the Chinese budget is going to be far, far worse.
The Chinese military also doesn’t have allies with anything like the military capability of US allies.
They could do a hell of a lot of damage, but they’re not going to win a global conflict in anything like their current state.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
There's no guarantee of the US stopping Chinese expansion. Military or otherwise.
I agree with this - but the real risk is the leadership is being told only what they want to hear and is not accurately judging their capabilites.
There is evidence that they were really taken aback by their unpopularity in Taiwan and Hong Kong because their people on the ground were feeding back what they wanted to hear, they were also unaware of how bad relations had got with the US and considered Trump's rhetoric to be meaningless electioneering which won't come to anything.
In the current environment of people trying to out-patriot each other, I could well imagine taking a pessimistic view on invading Taiwan becoming almost a faux pas.
Their chance of success is likely low, but if they did attempt to, it could very well spiral into WW3 - not only would it likely draw in the US, Japan and India, but it could also trigger conflict between the 2 Koreas and even between India and Pakistan.
It really doesn't bear thinking about...
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Don't look at what xi says about getting the armed forces ready to defeat America by 2049 then.
Actually the internal challenges are probably what is fuelling external aggression. They see their window of opportunity to seize global leadership shrinking which could lead to belligerence and willingness to take risks.
By the 2030s their relative economic influence in Asia will have reduced significantly - the gap with India would have shrank and ASEAN countries would have developed more, with Indonesia a potential regional power.
This means that the 2020s are a really dangerous period. 2024-5 is the really dangerous period with elections in Taiwan. If the KMT do badly again they might decide that war is their only option.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Yeh 2025 as I've been saying for some years
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Just got done reading that Palladium article. So they wanna try Cultural Revolution 2.0, remind me how well the last version went? I wonder what the modern Chinese socio-cultural equivalent of killing all the sparrows and then getting overrun by a population explosion of bugs would look like?
Also, I had to roll my fucking eyes at the idea that the Soviet Union fell because of pop culture(?), rather than the actual material reasons it collapsed. I'm seeing a distressing number of parallels between this Chinese state-led cultural clampdown and the bullshit "Culture Wars" in the US. The championing of nationalist "masculinity" is just so awfully familiar.
Also, I had to roll my fucking eyes at the idea that the Soviet Union fell because of pop culture(?), rather than the actual material reasons it collapsed. I'm seeing a distressing number of parallels between this Chinese state-led cultural clampdown and the bullshit "Culture Wars" in the US. The championing of nationalist "masculinity" is just so awfully familiar.
A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
One of the other disasters of the Iraq invasion was. That up to that point China had a doctrine of massive amounts of effectively dumb kit to soak up the Wests technological advantages on the battlefield.When they saw the fourth largest army in the world not just beaten but destroyed in what was effectively a long weekend they went back to the drawing board and are desperately modernising their armed forces. How they have done only time will tell.
In our western centric way we think this is mostly for our benefit, and our proxy Taiwan, but a massive part of their doctrine is how to beat or neutralise India.
In our western centric way we think this is mostly for our benefit, and our proxy Taiwan, but a massive part of their doctrine is how to beat or neutralise India.
There is a kind of pipeline between the two actually - the influence of Huntington is an early example, but a lot of the Chinese elites educated at Harvard etc do not like the woke liberal stuff at all and relay a lot of alt-right rhetoric back to China. It is also useful for the government to promote the idea of a weak and divided west overran by migrants and terrorists.
There's an article about it here:
Alt-right finds new partners in hate on China’s internet
Populists and nationalists are spreading anti-Muslim, anti-feminist messages – but also backing the Communist party line
Edit - An English translation of Fang Kecheng's article referred to in the Guardian piece can be found here, also essential reading to understand Xi's China.
“Social Darwinism and the stigmatization of ‘white left’”: a translation of a talk by Fang Kecheng
All the traffic my Medium profile receives goes to one place: a translation of The Road to Spiritual Plague: The History of the Evolution…
medium.com
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IMO the Iraq war also discredited democracy in China. It made it harder for democracy supporters (e.g. Liu Xiaobo defending the Iraq war shows the awkward rhetorical position they were put into) and bolstered the Huntingdon Clash of Civilisations people. So Xi Jinping is arguably as much a product of it as ISIS.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
Military numbers aren't always the determining factor of who wins a war. If you look at the last 150 years, it's been who has the largest industrial base that tends to win wars. Whille the US is still in the running, especially on things like heavy equipment, the US industrial base has been draining away elsewhere--often to China--for decades. China is following a well-worn path here by first becoming an industrial power and then using the industrial/economic power to become a military power. I don't know who would win in a China/US conflict and no one with sense wants to find out.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
There is a kind of pipeline between the two actually - the influence of Huntington is an early example, but a lot of the Chinese elites educated at Harvard etc do not like the woke liberal stuff at all and relay a lot of alt-right rhetoric back to China. It is also useful for the government to promote the idea of a weak and divided west overran by migrants and terrorists.
There's an article about it here:
Alt-right finds new partners in hate on China’s internet
Populists and nationalists are spreading anti-Muslim, anti-feminist messages – but also backing the Communist party linewww.theguardian.com
Edit - An English translation of Fang Kecheng's article referred to in the Guardian piece can be found here, also essential reading to understand Xi's China.
“Social Darwinism and the stigmatization of ‘white left’”: a translation of a talk by Fang Kecheng
All the traffic my Medium profile receives goes to one place: a translation of The Road to Spiritual Plague: The History of the Evolution…
I remember reading the latter article a while back. I actually first encountered the term baizuo when some alt-right dickhead called me that on Twitter. So I could easily believe that there's a pipeline there.
It really is disgusting to see this kind of fascist shitpiggery have a global reach. It seems like it could get especially nasty in China, because of twats like Wang in high places pushing that poison with the blessing of an aggressively authoritarian state.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Their industrial base is heavily dependant on imports of materials, and they are in no position to defend the supply chains, not to mention that the materials often come from US allies.
Things could change in a decade or so, but as things stand I think they know that a conflict with the US would be the end of CCP China.
China suffers from a massive amount of bad debt. Evergrande may be only the tip of the iceberg
If you have good Party connections you get a loan from a state owned bank regardless of whether the enterprise makes commercial sense. Result is that China is full of bad debt. Fascism leads to massive corruption.
If you have good Party connections you get a loan from a state owned bank regardless of whether the enterprise makes commercial sense. Result is that China is full of bad debt. Fascism leads to massive corruption.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Interesting choice of word.
TBF it isn't a million miles away. They're missing the amalgamation of church and state but the former is probably banned anyway.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
I think in a few ways you have a point. I don’t like the habit of making Fascism the North Star of political evil, though.
There are many possible permutations.
It's a bit like North Korea who keep their subjects under the thumb of promised Socialism whilst being a hereditary Monarchy with Ultra Nationalist leanings. China has the mixed economy though.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Yeah, the way that “mixed economy” works is a very odd thing to me. Basically running a big franchise called “Communism” as a mixture of a mega-corporation and an organised crime syndicate (some may dispute the difference).
Much like how National Socialists like to run an economy. But I digress.
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