China News Thread
- Thread starter KYli
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No, I'm a nationalist, realist, opportunist, market economy believer (albeit I do support SOEs functioning for a number of strategic sectors), and a Confucian social conservative. I am too right-wing to be a liberal.
Somehow, from your past posts, thinking style, lack of understanding of certain innate cultural elements, and english speaking style, I always get the feeling that you're a white person that's spent a fairly significant time in China, enough to get the more outward aspects of Chinese life but still a foreigner to what really makes China tick.
I might be wrong though.
Lol I’m not white. I just had my Master’s from the UK and spent several months travelling across the US talking to dozens of IR and political science scholars. That had a profound impact on me, as I came to embrace social conservatism and rationalism in the West. Honestly, there are actually quite a lot of overlaps between conservatism in the Anglo-Saxon sphere and Confucian conservatism with the latter emphasising more about loyalty to one’s parents and country in relative terms. Keep in mind that America was the strongest (1950s) when there was a social cohesiveness where everyone knows his or her place and play his or her part to make the country more productive and sustain its status as the world’s superpower. As JFK said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. This idea was instilled in the vast majority of Americans through churches and social interactions BRFORE the rise of drugs, sex, and rock n roll (wokism), or feminism of the 70s that destroyed any resemblance of families.
This is exactly why I fear contemporary wokism and political liberal correctness in the West could have a negative impact on China’s social cohesion and national unity. Because of the introduction of supposed political correctness, liberal western media outlets and domestic Chinese intellectuals are hyping the issues of racism, minority rights, workers’ rights, social issues, even drugs, when every China should focus on what JFK said, which is to ask what you can to make your country stronger and healthier. This a sense of what I can do for my community. In fact, another example of the corrupt influence of liberal West is feminism, which is exactly who led to China’s demographic crisis. Post-1960s Western feminism, when combined with the persistent Maoist ideology of so-called women holding up half of the sky, has let to contemporary Chinese young women demanding sky-high bride prices, refusing to have kids, and refusing to accept any social responsibilities. Young people in China are unemployed not because of lack of jobs, but because those of college degrees refuse to work hard in a factory floor. But blue-collar jobs are exactly those that makes China strong, especially heavy industries. Just look at the US, it was the neoliberals and changing social attitudes since the 60s that lead to De-industrialisation. People no longer want to work hard because there is not longer a sense of community encouraging them to do so.
I am afraid this corrupt liberal individualism of rights over responsibility is in the process of corrupting China as well. I praise Xi for having the balls to crackdown against the separatist movements in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, he should have done more against the feminists (the real perpetrators of China’s demographic crash). He should also reject any advocates of post-1958 Maoism not only because the Cultural Revolution was proven to have been disastrous to China, but there many parallels between the Red Guards and the wokes in the West.
Finally I do wholeheartedly reject neoliberal economics. It is one thing for boxers and pantyhose to be offshored to SE Asia and Jai Hindland, but offshoring heavy industries and dual-use manufacturing seem suicidal to me for any great power. Not sure if China could learn from America and UK’s painful lessons of De-industrialisation.
When I said and asked if you're a Liberal, I didn't mean to be the Lemming Liberal the imbues and stand for the things you enumerated on your post, rather, I likened you to the CLASSICAL LIBERAL of say John Locke or Thomas Sowell.
Locke and Sowell to a certain extend and degree, particularly with regards to using market incentives to drive up people's productivity. However, rather than a completely unregulated market, I believe that state should use policies and laws (industrial policies) to guide capital investments/incentives toward industrial sectors (Huawei, SMIC, Space Pioneer, etc.) critical to the nation's long-term security and competitiveness. In doing so, it should protect the private property rights of entrepreneurs/workers/scientists whose innovations have long-term benefits to national security and state survival. For sectors that have little benefits to national security but happen to provide massive employment opportunities, these sectors are critical to social stability (like China's private tutoring sector, real estate, Alibaba), so entrepreneurs in these sectors should also be protected from arbitrary seizures. However, for sectors detrimental to national security (like shadow banking, unlawful P2P, pyramid schemes, private media outlets propagating adversaries' values, or even companies that promote values in direct opposition to national security and social cohesion), the government SHOULD have to power to forcefully seize the properties of these businesses and drive them toward bankruptcy. Tyranny of the majority should be the norm (against disruptive minority groups/interests like ethnic separatists, feminists, cults, scammers, etc.), but critical minorities/social groups (say people like Ren Zhengfei, Pony Ma, Ad. Ma Weimin, etc.) with the skills and knowledge critical to national security should be given certain social privileges and protection against potential mob rule (just like Chinese nuclear scientists were protected from the Red Guards during the 60s). Thus, I support certain Lockean rights to ordinary people and folks who contribute to the community's overall wellbeing, but not those who seek to disrupt the interests of the majority for their own selfish gains.
However, here is whereI disagree with classical liberalism. The Federalist Paper emphasized too much on protection against the tyranny of the majority, so what you have in the US right now is the literally the tyranny of privileged minority groups at the expense of the general public.
Essentially, you are a “Economic-Statist”.
Yes, I was one of the most vocal about recovering lost outer Manchuria, but even I recognize the Russian-China strategic partnership against Western hegemony takes precedence right now.... Only fake nationalists bring up this shit at this critical juncture to divide Russia and China. We Chinese will determine recovery on our own time table, not determined by divide-and-conquering Westerners, who are simply shit stirrers.
Unless a black swan event has occured (the Russo-Ukraine war definitely isn't), nobody in their right mind in Beijing would ever entertain the idea of invading and taking over the Russian Far East from Moscow.
Conquering a region is the easy part. Governing it and making sure it functions again is the hard part. Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan.
China has Taiwan (and perhaps the Ryukyus too) to worry enough already. Why bother adding yet more vast, frigid, sparsely-populated and largely under-developed territories for Beijing to have more headaches about?
Conquering a region is the easy part. Governing it and making sure it functions again is the hard part. Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan.
China has Taiwan (and perhaps the Ryukyus too) to worry enough already. Why bother adding yet more vast, frigid, sparsely-populated and largely under-developed territories for Beijing to have more headaches about?
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Aren't there a lot of Chinese people moving away from their norther border with Russia to the more sunnier southern provinces. Better weather and more jobs down south i guess.